Hey, it worked for Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds with all the #ObamaGate stuff because it’s so incredibly complex with so many different facets and so many players involved. This community has been far more involved and on top of this scandal than most have, but I’m sure there are still plenty of people who aren’t quite sure what to make of all of this because there’s so much information flying at us constantly, that it’s hard to drill down to the fundamentals. So if you’re looking for a crash course on the basics of #ObamaGate, I put this summary together.

The first thing I’ll say is that if you want a basic rundown of what this is all about, I highly recommend first reading this tweetstorm:

https://twitter.com/drawandstrike/status/976683916244455426?s=21

That series of tweets is over 2 years old yet it remains remarkably accurate today.

It summarizes the very basics of the scandal, the involvement of Hillary and the DNC, and where the past 3 years of “Russia Russia Russia!” came from.

Of course, that’s only one piece of the puzzle and we’ve learned so much more since then. If you’d like a summary of some of the other important pieces of this massive scandal, who some of the major players are, what it’s all about, and why it’s referred to as #ObamaGate, read on:

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Why is this scandal referred to as “ObamaGate”?

In short, Obama ran the whole thing.

That Twitter thread I linked isn’t exhaustive at all. I posted it because it’s a simple way to get your head around what this is all about without getting sidetracked by the many different details and facets of that scandal. And there are A LOT. But that basic summary I linked is what helped me understand what this is all about when I first learned about it in early 2018, and from there I started to learn a whole lot more about the many different aspects of this scandal.

To answer the question, this all goes back to Obama. There are four main people associated with Trump who were targeted by the Obama administration in various ways:

1. George Papadopoulos

2. Michael Flynn

3. Carter Page

4. Paul Manafort

With each one of them, there’s an entire complex story regarding how they were targeted. Powerful government agencies were weaponized to go after these people and it was all at Obama’s behest.

1) For example, John Brennan and his CIA mobilized various assets to target George Papadopoulos. They used push/pull techniques where they would send one spy to feed him Russia-related information, and then a second spy to casually meet him in a bar, pull that information from him and use that to say “See, Papadolpoulos has Russian information! He must be colluding with Russia! And he’s associated with the Trump campaign, ergo we have legitimate reason to investigate Trump!” That’s where you’ll hear names like Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and Stefan Halper. John Brennan coordinated with foreign agents to go after Papadopoulos so that he could get to Trump. They even used honeypots as well as wads of cash to try to entrap Papadopoulos. This was like something out of a spy thriller, and it was being run by Obama’s CIA Chief.

2) Then there’s the FBI, which went after Michael Flynn. That’s what we’ve heard the most about recently. Flynn was on the Trump transition team and was set to become National Security Advisor. Obama wanted to take him out because apparently Flynn had a lot of knowledge about “where Obama hid the bodies”, so to speak (ie. Obama’s corrupt behavior). So what did Obama do? He spoke to his head of the FBI (James Comey) and his Deputy Attorney General (Sally Yates) about finding a way to get rid of Flynn.

They wanted to start an investigation into Flynn to entrap him, but they had no legal way to begin this investigation. That’s when Sally Yates had the bright idea to use the Logan Act as an excuse. Flynn spoke to Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak on the phone, which was 100% legal and there was nothing illegitimate or illegal about their phone call, as Flynn was on Trump’s transition team. But Yates decides to claim that he violated the Logan Act (a law from the 1790s which has never been used to convict a single person in US history and is likely unconstitutional). By claiming Flynn violated the Logan Act, Yates then had an excuse to investigate Flynn.

So Comey then sent two of his agents to investigate Flynn (Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok). They played it casual and told Flynn it was just a casual conversation and that he didn’t need a lawyer because it was just a lighthearted chat, not an investigation. Flynn had met them previously, so he didn’t think anything of it, as they were acquaintances. At that point, they started asking him questions about his conversation with Kislyak, and since they had a transcript of his conversation, any detail he got wrong due to a memory lapse or the nature of trying to summarize a phone call - was portrayed as a lie. It’s a classic perjury trap. Strzok and Pientka didn’t actually believe he was lying (they explicitly said so), but they used this to later hand it off to Robert Mueller, who then charged Flynn with lying. That saga put Flynn and his family through hell for 3 years, bankrupted him, forced him to sell his house to cover the legal fees, and FINALLY he was cleared this past week when the evidence came out.

3) The third person is Carter Page. That’s where the FISA issue comes in and that’s what the Twitter thread I linked to is all about. If you’re not familiar with it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows for specific cases of spying on someone. You have to apply for a FISA warrant with a FISA court (FISC) and once you’re granted that FISA warrant, you can surveil the person’s communications.

So what happened is that Hillary and the DNC paid for a phony dossier (they paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele, who put together a baseless dossier via a bunch of unverified, third hand sources). That phony dossier was then used as a means to obtain the FISA warrants. The Obama FBI/DOJ officials like Comey, McCabe, and Strzok had to explicitly lie to the FISC to obtain the warrants, claiming the Steele Dossier had been verified, when it not only hadn’t been verified, but it had actually been disproved via exculpatory evidence that they hid from the FISC. So they lied to the FISC, obtained FISA warrants under false pretenses, and then used that to spy on Carter Page’s communications and thus, the communications of people he spoke to (likely including Trump).

It’s also worth pointing out that with FISA warrants, there’s something called “unmasking”. When you engage in this surveillance, the idea is that you’re spying on foreign agents, not Americans. Any Americans that are inadvertently captured in this surveillance must have their identities “masked”. Americans must be referred to anonymously as “Person #1”, “Person #2”, and so on because it’s illegal to surveil them.

Well, guess what? In the final days of the Obama administration, his UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, went through a massive “unmasking” process, where she and Susan Rice unmasked hundreds of Americans, in an unprecedented way. Quite the coincidence, right? That means that Carter Page and anyone he may have communicated with (ie. Trump) lost their anonymity, meaning they were spied upon.

So basically, it was: Dossier -> FISA -> Unmasking -> Campaign of selective leaking to media in order to demonize Trump via strategic, out-of-context leaks to publications like the Washington Post.

And that’s how we got years of stories in WaPo, in which practically every other day, there was some big “bombshell” about Trump, attributed to “sources familiar with the matter”. These stories always turned out to be false, but in the meantime, there was some big “Trump scandal”, based on a meticulous and deliberate campaign of leaking out-of-context snippets in the most damaging and dishonest way possible. That’s also where the “48 hour rule” among conservatives came from (ie. every time you hear about an alleged Trump scandal, wait 48 hours before you believe it, because it’s almost certainly part of a deliberate disinformation campaign). But it doesn’t matter if the story was later proven false because once it’s out there, the damage is already done and the narrative is set.

4) The fourth person is Paul Manafort. He apparently actually did commit crimes, but more like your typical Washington corruption that you see with virtually every other politician. He committed some typical low level crimes a decade ago (long before he ever joined the Trump team and none of it had anything to do with alleged Trump-Russia collusion or the 2016 election), but he had the book thrown at him and was treated in an insanely harsh fashion by Mueller, in an attempt to try to get him to lie and turn on Trump.

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That’s a basic rundown of what this is all about. Starting to make sense now?

All of the many pieces we’ve heard over the past 3.5 years fit together. This was a massive, coordinated attack on the Trump administration by the Obama administration. They tried to destroy the Trump transition team and once Trump was sworn in, they tried to overthrow the Trump presidency. This is why it’s really not an exaggeration to refer to this as a coup. That’s exactly what it was.

And the final piece of the puzzle I’ll mention is that Adam Schiff was basically the PR firm for all of this. He was the guy who would go out and lie through his teeth to protect all of the above corrupt behavior. He’s the spokesman for the “Deep State”, as they’re known. Barack Obama, John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, James Clapper, Sally Yates, Peter Strzok, Glenn Simpson, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Marc Elias, Bill Priestap, Rudolph Contreras, Bruce and Nelly Ohr, James Baker, Eric Holder, Christopher Steele, and a number of others - tried to sabotage and overthrow the new administration elected in 2016, and Adam Schiff ran PR for these people. And of course, the corrupt mainstream media let him get away with it.

I know how absolutely fucked up this all sounds. It’s like something out of an incredibly complex series of spy novels that you’d never believe. But over the past two years, this has all gone from a crazy theory to an established, documented, proven fact. And I’m sure there’s still more coming. The good news is that Bill Barr and John Durham are dropping the hammer on all of this. I didn’t used to think we’d ever see prosecutions, but now I absolutely believe a whole bunch of these people will be indicted.