This Should Never Have Happened in the United States of America

In a tweet Saturday morning, President Donald Trump said that the memo released the previous day by the House Intelligence Committee should put an end to the investigation into his campaign.

“This memo,” he wrote, “totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe. But the Russian witch hunt goes on and on.”

That it does. Bizarrely, we have seen Democrats like Adam Schiff make the claim that the memo (which they fought so hard to keep out of the public arena) actually bolsters their case against the president and his top advisors. Figure that one out.

We have to assume the average American can see through this political sleight-of-hand, even if they won’t get any help from the mainstream media. The information contained within the memo should give every individual in this country pause, because this goes well beyond the boundaries of partisan politics. The memo itself was a partisan concoction, we understand that. But whether or not it was slanted this way or that, it revealed how the Obama/Lynch Justice Department operated. And it revealed that those officials did things that should have never happened in the United States of America.

First of all, we’ve seen federal judges and prosecutors make the case that one of the central themes of the memo – that the Steele dossier was a political document – should not matter. We saw one of these people telling MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that grand juries and judges were constantly relying on the testimony of criminals and other people of less-than-admirable repute. Okay. That’s great. But guess what? We’re not talking about your average search warrant here. We’re talking about an attempt to use a surveillance warrant meant for foreign nationals to spy on an American citizens. The question is up in the air as to whether this should EVER be done, much less be done on the basis of something as flimsy as the Steele dossier.

Here’s what we’d like to know? Where the hell are all of the liberals who were holding Edward Snowden and Julian Assange up as such heroes a few years ago? Where the hell are the progressives who were so concerned about the Patriot Act and what it meant to have the NSA collecting phone data? Did they all get shipped off to Guantanamo? Or have they simply decided that it’s okay to spy on an American if he has any relationship with Donald Trump?

The information revealed in the memo should be a wake up call for all of us, regardless of which political party we call home. The fact that the Democrats and the media are downplaying it is a real shame. This is bigger than Trump, Russia, Hillary, and Obama. This is about who we are as a country. Maybe if there were some real journalists left in the mainstream media, that narrative could achieve escape velocity.

Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be the case.