Дональд Трамп - Triggered

Then again, my grandkids might find it all hard to believe. I know I do sometimes. For instance, if you had come and told me, say, during my gap year, when I was camping in the woods by day and pouring pints of Coors Light by night, that my father and I would someday become the target of our nation’s top intelligence agencies, I would probably have told you to take it easy on the mushrooms.

But you’re not tripping; it is all too real.

Even now, there are forces deep inside our government trying to bury evidence of wrongdoing against my father. They’re sweeping the phony Steele dossier and the illegal FISA warrants under the rug and trying to pretend that none of it ever happened. If those people have a hand in writing the history of the Russia hoax—and believe me, they will try—they will say that the Mueller investigation was based on real evidence and that Donald Trump and his administration really did commit obstruction of justice. They’ll forget names such as Christopher Steele, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page—as Mr. Mueller of the eponymous report seems to have done during his very own congressional testimony—and they’ll remember made-up Russian oligarchs and the people who supposedly turned us into spies.

If you don’t think something like that could ever happen, consider this: it’s happened before—to, of all people, Martin Luther King Jr.

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI kept a file on Dr. King for years. They cooked up a story that he was—get this—an agent of Russia, sympathetic to Communists, and out to destroy the United States with his speeches and boycotts. (Go ahead and stop me if any of this sounds familiar.) They tapped his phones. They planted evidence in his hotel rooms. They made his life a living hell and then sent him letters saying the only way out of that living hell would be suicide. Then, in what is perhaps the worst part of it all, they covered the whole thing up. For fifty years, the records of the FBI’s many operations against Martin Luther King Jr. were sealed by federal order, accessible only to people at the highest levels of the intel community. Whenever anyone tried to have them unsealed, the request was denied by whatever establishment politician was in charge. Only in 2007, when most of the documents were released—I say “most” because many of them are believed to have been destroyed—did we discover the extent to which our law enforcement institutions had targeted one of our greatest citizens. No one was punished. Many of those responsible are dead, never having been held accountable for the crimes they committed. After living through the past three years, can you honestly say that anything has really changed? Or is it just more of the same?

I don’t know if the FBI has records of the secret operations it conducted against the Trump campaign and administration. But I wouldn’t trust the top brass at the FBI to unseal them if they did. Remember, this is the organization that was led by James Comey, a man who elevated leaking and lying to an art form. As I write this, the DOJ’s inspector general has just released a blistering report saying that Comey leaked to the press official documents describing interactions between the US president and the FBI director, a crime that, according to our friend Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, should have landed Comey in jail. I have no doubt that if he were a Trump supporter, or at least not a member of the permanent political class, he would be in a jail cell right now. But just like Hillary Clinton, just like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe, Comey is given every benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether or not he broke the law. He, like the others who orchestrated the attempted coup, won’t ever be punished. Instead, he’ll probably end up on CNN as a paid contributor! People like him are given hours and hours to prepare for interviews, and then, at the end of it all, when we’re deciding how to punish (or not punish) them, we think about their families, their years of service, and how much it would hurt their feelings to be prosecuted. If you believe that any member of the Trump administration would ever get that kind of leniency, you haven’t been paying attention.

Now, before someone at HuffPost starts typing up a “Don Jr. Hates the FBI” headline (which, no doubt, they’re already doing), I want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the rank-and-file people who work at our intelligence organizations—people who handle the real work and make sure we’re kept safe from domestic and international threats. They are decent, hardworking people, and I would trust most of them with my life. In fact, I do just that. I have no problem with the door kickers, the men and women of our law enforcement agencies whose boots are on the ground. Those amazing men and women do a great job, and many I’ve talked with are disgusted by the Clappers and Comeys of the world—people who would “tarnish their badge.” In my experience, they are overwhelmingly MAGA. But I do have a huge problem with the lawyers and political hacks who make up agencies’ top ranks. They’re just career bureaucrats who’ve been given too much power by the system for too long. Their motives are self-serving. They care little about America and everything about their own interests.

In fact, if you’re reading these words between the hours of about seven and ten in the evening, there’s a pretty good chance you can turn on your television right now and see John Brennan, a former director of the CIA; James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence; or Andrew McCabe, James Comey’s former deputy at the FBI, continuing to spew lies about my father, trying to bury the truth of their crimes in real time in front of a network news audience. Oh, and by the way, they’ve all written books. (Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Well, so did you, Don.” Apples and oranges. They wrote books about the lies they told, and I wrote one because they told them about me.) Obviously, the fake-news media weren’t content to sit back and cover the criminals who were trying to take down my father, so they gave them parking spaces, press passes, and book contracts instead. If you’re on their side, you’re not punished for wrongdoing. In fact, you’re rewarded with lucrative commentator roles on CNN and MSNBC.

That’s why I have absolutely no faith that the real story of what the FBI (in conjunction with the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign) did to my father will ever see the light of day. I’ve simply been through too much to believe it will. I mean, sure, there have been some good reporters and private citizens who’ve uncovered parts of it. We now know that the FISA warrants used to spy on our campaign in Trump Tower were not obtained legally and that several agents at the highest levels of the FBI breached protocol when going after targets in the Trump administration. We know that just about every one of Robert Mueller’s Nineteen Angry Democrats was a Trump-hating hack looking for any reason they could find to nail him and me, and we also know that Mueller himself—a sorry old man well past his prime, who was used like a rented mule by Democrats in Congress—was the author of his report in name only. But is anything going to come of it? Are we ever going to get an apology or see any of the people who pushed the fake conspiracy theory for years punished for the fraud they perpetrated on the American people? Will anyone be held accountable? Ever?

I’m not holding my breath.

Today, as we gear up for the 2020 election, the fake-news media are bigger and more invasive, and their audiences more brainwashed, than ever. Have you ever seen a story—just one story—that broke in favor of Trump instead of the other way around? Of course not. Back when my father first announced he was running for president, the lies the media told about him usually pertained only to the small stuff: our family business, his financial history, his personal life. Few in the media accused him of being a Russian spy or colluding with foreign oligarchs. Today, those unsubstantiated rumors have become the gospel truth of the left and things are only getting worse. The media continue to lie despite definitive proof to the contrary, and they’re not going to stop.