Destroying American Democracy – An Inside Job

by Pete Hoekstra, GATESTONE  •  January 15, 2023

Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele arrives at the High Court in London on July 24, 2020, to attend a defamation trial brought against him by Russian entrepreneur Alexej Gubarev in connection with the “Steele dossier”. (Photo by Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

• Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election.
• The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are main gateways for information to millions of Americans, is a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.
• Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
• Having… false information — some of which the FBI actually altered — in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump.
• Today we know that the “Russia hoax” was a lie…. the information in the “Steele dossier” was false — and the FBI had known it was from the start.
• For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post: “Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.”
• One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the Twitter files…. Tweet #17 states, “executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.” Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to “handle requests from the bureau.”
• The FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.
• Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?
• Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?
• Has more than one solitary person — former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email — been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?
• Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with twitter?
• Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?
• Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?
• It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.
• There… needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went. Clearly the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop — now — before our democracy is destroyed.

Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted? Have those federal agencies weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.? Today we know that the “Russia hoax” was a lie. The information in the “Steele dossier” was false — and the FBI knew it was from the start.

Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China or other state actors. Government agencies, the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America’s Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.

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