Democrats get away with a much worse crime than Watergate.

Since Watergate, the Washington wisdom has always held that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup that sinks a politician. But that’s only the case when the coverup fails.

But what if the coverup succeeds?

It’s horribly simple. The crimes are never uncovered and the perpetrators are never brought to justice no matter how serious their crimes may be. That is precisely what has happened because of the FBI and Justice Department’s coverup of their abuses of power and illegal actions during the 2016 election.

In this case, the FBI and the Justice Department have succeeded in the most significant coverup in American political history. The abuses of power and crimes they have succeeded in covering up are not only against the law: they are crimes against our system of law and government. They were perpetrated by employees of the government, under color of law, with the intention of affecting the outcome of an election.

For almost two years an investigation into the abuses of power — and probable crimes — committed by the FBI and Justice Department during the election has been conducted by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal).  Rep. Bob Goodlatte — chairman of the Judiciary Committee — and Trey Gowdy — chairman of the Oversight and government reform committee — tried to investigate other aspects of the FBI and DoJ actions.

These investigations have been stonewalled by the refusal of the FBI and Justice Department to produce the documents and provide access to witnesses that would, in all likelihood, prove that the major abuses of power and crimes had been committed.

Nunes, Goodlatte, and Gowdy had effectively split their inquiries: Nunes investigating possible crimes and abuses of power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Goodlatte and Gowdy jointly investigating the FBI’s mishandling and improper actions in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, insecure email system for conversations with her staff — and Obama — on top secret information, including special access programs and satellite intelligence.

The two important products of those investigations were the 18 January 2017 memo declassified by President Trump and released by Nunes and the newly released 28 December 2018 letter from Goodlatte and Gowdy addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

If this is the first you’ve heard of the 28 December letter, that’s because it’s been studiously ignored by the media.

The key facts revealed by the Nunes memo were:

(1) that the FBI used, as the factual basis for the Foreign Intelligence Act Surveillance Court warrant applications, information from the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified. The FBI nevertheless swore to the truth of that information to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that in the process of obtaining the search warrants the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

As I wrote at the time of the memo’s release, and on several occasions since, the Nunes memo showed that the actions of the FBI and Justice Department, sometimes in conjunction with the Obama White House, were worse than Watergate.

The Nunes investigation is over, but myriad questions remain. Among them:

• What other FISA warrants were obtained to surveil the communications of Americans, particularly those of the Trump campaign advisors and Trump himself?
• Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, was asking for and obtaining hundreds of “unmaskings,” revealing of U.S. citizens’ identities when their communications were intercepted by the FBI and NSA as part of intelligence operations. Whose names were unmasked, was this information used to Trump’s disadvantage in the campaign, why did the unmaskings occur, and what information was shared by Rice with Obama and/or Clinton?
• What direction did the FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies receive from Obama, Rice, and Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, with respect to the monitoring of Trump-related communications?

Most, if not all, of that information could be gleaned from documents and testimony the FBI and DoJ have withheld from congressional investigators.

The latest, and almost certainly last, effort to expose the facts of this scandal are contained in the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter. They are the last exposé because the Democrats have stopped these investigations cold. There will be no more hearings, no more testimony, and no further attempts to get the documents and testimony from the FBI and Justice Department that have been withheld.

The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter is as revealing as was the Nunes memo. The two outgoing committee chairmen chose to focus on the importance of decisions made and not made by the FBI and DoJ, the bias of some agents and attorneys involved, and the evidently disparate treatment of the Clinton email investigation and the counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

Under 18 US Code Section 793(f) it is a felony to handle classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner. The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter flatly says that the FBI and DoJ read elements into the “gross negligence” law that do not exist. In then-FBI director James Comey’s 5 July 2016 televised statement exonerating Clinton, the FBI read into the law a higher level of scienter — intent and knowledge of the unlawfulness of conduct — than the law required.

Moreover, the letter says, there is little or no evidence investigators made any effort to identify evidence that could have satisfied the FBI-devised scienter element that is not in the law.

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