Media Prepare Massive Public Relations Campaign to Spin Spygate

Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Commentary

On Aug. 23, it was announced that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had just been hired to be a contributor on CNN.

While surprising to many, the development is hardly out of character for the current news industry, which already has more than a handful of former law enforcement and intelligence community officials from the Obama and Clinton eras appearing on air as contributors.

John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden are only the biggest names currently working as television news analysts; there’s an army of lesser-known former spooks and agency apparatchiks who appear regularly to opine on current events.

What’s unusual about the McCabe hiring is that CNN intentionally overlooked why McCabe is no longer at the FBI, and instead sold an alternative version of what happened there.

In CNN’s version of how his firing went down, McCabe is a heroic law enforcement official who was just doing his important job, when he became the target of a presidential vendetta.

That’s not what happened, actually.

McCabe was fired in March 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions from his top position at the FBI at the recommendation of Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz. The IG’s office had demonstrated after an exhaustive investigation that McCabe had repeatedly lied about leaking information from active investigations to the news media, even going so far as to blame some of his own colleagues for the leaks he was responsible for.

Horowitz’s report on the matter was completely damning for McCabe, and you can read it for yourself, if you so desire.

So McCabe and CNN’s media hosts will attempt to spin his hiring as a noble endeavor: A man wrongly fired is being given a national news platform to defend himself and others who are also supposedly the targets of this vindictive president exacting revenge through federal agencies. This is a sham.

McCabe is being given this platform now for one reason only: It’s an attempt to control the national consensus as the Spygate scandal is soon to gain more visibility, with the coming release of the IG’s FISA abuse report and as more documentary evidence supporting the scandal is declassified.

A basic outline of what occurred is already known—that federal officials laundered fake information being fed to them by political operatives employed by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to make it appear as if it was from legitimate intelligence sources, as a way to start investigations of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

This activity included top officials in both the Justice Department (DOJ) and the FBI perjuring themselves to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court in order to obtain warrants allowing them to legally spy on key Trump campaign personnel.

The final steps in preparing the launch of a massive public relations campaign are being taken. This is a campaign that’s designed to convince the public that the Spygate plotters are heroic whistleblowers being persecuted by a dictator-in-chief.

McCabe’s hiring by CNN is just the most obvious move in the preparation for this forthcoming PR campaign.

CNN wants to pretend that it’s bringing in some heroic truth-teller with a perspective that the public needs to hear. The reality is far different. They are bringing in a key Spygate figure with a vested interest in lying about what he and his fellow coup plotters attempted to do to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

Contrary to what CNN and other news media would have you believe, the Spygate plotters aren’t heroic whistleblowers. Far from it.

As I wrote in this column in April, these former federal officials who abused their offices and powers to turn them to partisan political ends are criminals. And they are going to be fully exposed and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

At this point, it’s too late for McCabe to save himself. Going on TV to try to sway public opinion by lying about what he, Comey, Strzok, and anyone else did in this whole sordid affair won’t stop anything that’s about to happen.

Horowitz, Attorney General William Barr, and U.S. Attorneys John Durham and John Huber will be telling you these Spygate plotters are criminals who committed offenses that dwarf Watergate. Meanwhile, media personalities such as Brian Stelter, Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, and Anderson Cooper will insist they are innocent victims of a vendetta being waged by an imperial presidency.

The crucial difference is that it will be Barr, Horowitz, Durham, and Huber who have all the evidence on their side to back up their claims, while the Fake News Media PR campaign relies on anonymous leaks and outright propaganda to sell a narrative of political persecution.

One side of this is going to have mountains of meticulously collected and cataloged documentary evidence that is going to be conclusive and absolutely damning; the other is going to have ... well, nothing, really, but I'll bet they’re going to get an A-plus for effort in trying to get the public to buy into the narrative that these crooks are innocent.

I’m constantly told the targets of the Spygate investigation by Barr, Durham, Horowitz, and Huber are the elite class, the special ones, that they’re all protected, above the law.

Well, of course they are. Or as you’re all about to see, they were. Things are about to change. More than two years of careful investigation and preparation are about to pay off for those determined to re-institute the rule of law in this country. Meanwhile, the other side, now that their years of fake leaks and fake news have accomplished nothing, are making their final desperate moves in a futile attempt to keep justice at bay.

Those who thought President Donald Trump and his people needed to pull the trigger on this in 2017 understood neither the complexity nor the process of going after “The Protected Class.” Plenty of people think they know how this sort of thing should be done and are quite confident they could have managed this far better than Trump & Co. have over the past two and a half years.

I suspect those people are wrong. And events over the next few months will demonstrate that.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.