The Intelligence Community of the United States of America has been weaponized against the incumbent leader’s political opposition, having even turned the spy agencies of our closest allies against the leading Republican candidate.

This is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn if a bombshell report released last week is accurate.

Relying on “multiple credible witnesses,” independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag revealed that in the lead-up to the 2016 election, the CIA enlisted the help of foreign nations to surveil associates of Donald Trump in a plot to frame him as a Russian asset.

Released by Public, the report alleges that, before Trump took office, Obama-appointed CIA Director John Brennan identified 26 of Trump’s contacts and misleadingly presented them as espionage targets to the spy agencies of the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (also known as the “Five Eyes” alliance).

According to the report, the CIA then used the intelligence gathered by its Five Eyes allies to convince the FBI to open its infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Donald Trump.

Though since discredited by the Mueller Report and the subsequent Durham Report, Crossfire Hurricane was a thorn in Trump’s side throughout his time in the Oval Office.

Agents working on the investigation leaked key details to a Trump-hostile press, prompting wall-to-wall accusations from the media that Trump had colluded with Russia to win the White House.

When Trump denied these accusations and voiced suspicions that his campaign had been spied on, the corporate press doubled down, framing him as paranoid and dishonest.

But he was right all along.

That Trump’s campaign was spied on was already well known. What Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutenberg uncovered was the trickery allegedly employed by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to circumvent United States law.

“US law prohibits such intelligence gathering unless authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant,” the authors explain. Moreover, “the weaponization of the IC for political purposes constitutes election interference.”

But if foreign spies could gather dirt on Trump on behalf of the IC, the problem would be solved—and that is apparently just what they did.

“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” one of the sources cited in the report explains.

(In spy talk, “bumping” means to make contact with a target in a way that appears casual or coincidental when the real purpose is to gather intelligence without raising the target’s suspicion).

These revelations stand in stark contrast to persistent claims by the U.S. government that Crossfire Hurricane was triggered by unsolicited intel from an Australian diplomat.

According to the report, the reverse is the case: The Australian diplomat’s allegations were only made possible by the CIA first enlisting help from Australian spy agencies to “bump” Trump’s associates ahead of 2016.

In a subsequent Fox News interview, Michael Shellenberger even suggested that the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August 2022 was executed in an effort to recover a binder that contained details of the IC’s illegal espionage against Trump from the American pubic.

“There has been widespread speculation that this binder was the reason or a reason for the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago,” he explained.

For anyone following these events, it is clear that the scandal unravelling this week towers over Watergate—and may in fact represent the single greatest abuse of power by American intelligence in the history of the Union.

Events unfolding in Washington, D.C. can feel very distant and intangible, but their implications must not be lost on everyday Americans.

If the U.S. government can weaponize its spy apparatus and manipulate foreign allies against a man as powerful and popular as Donald Trump, what can it do to regular citizens who disapprove of the incumbent leader?

What is it already doing?

The voices of ordinary people have never been more important in ensuring that this republic remains one of the people, by the people and for the people.

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