The memo's findings have raised concerns about the legitimacy of certain interactions between the US Department of Justice and the FBI, pointing to the violation of surveillance laws in the investigation into the Trump presidential campaign.
Radio Sputnik discussed this with Doug Wead, an American political analyst and New York Times bestselling author, who has also served as an adviser to two American presidents.
Sputnik: Trump has stated that the memo released on Friday has vindicated him in the investigation of alleged [Russian meddling in 2016 US elections]. What is your take on this memo? Is it really that significant?
Doug Wead: I don't know if those were the right words that he chose, but it certainly shows that the basis of the whole investigation into Russian meddling was based on theories created and provided by the political opposition.
Sputnik: Some Republican lawmakers have stated that the memo showed the sloppiness of investigators, what are your thoughts on this?
Doug Wead: This is beyond the pale. We don't want to have a country where we are spying on each other and where the government is seized by one political party to be used to spy and undermine and create this false information about the others. And we certainly don't want a country where the American people elect the president, but the person who didn't get elected controls the Justice Department. The Justice Department is not a separate branch of government like the judiciary and the legislative, it should answer to the president of the United States, who was elected by the American people, and we didn't elect the Democrats, we elected the Republican president.
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Sputnik: Do you believe that the FBI has an…ideology that is Democratically focused?
Doug Wead: There is no question that leaders in the FBI anticipated that Hillary Clinton would be elected president and so they… moved in position so they would be politically strong with her, and it backfired when Donald Trump got elected president instead. So there is no question that it has been politically compromised.
Sputnik: What consequences could this have on Trump's relations with the FBI?
Doug Wead: Trump has always had a problem with the so-called deep state. First, there is a philosophical problem: liberal and conservative. Liberals believe that government has the solution to people's problems, so they're more likely to seat government jobs. No matter who is elected president, the vast majority of people in the bureaucracy tend to be what we call in America liberals who favor stronger government. That's to begin with, then you compound the problem because you have an amateur politician. He has never been a governor or senator, so he has no team, he doesn't have thousands of people who worked with him when he ran the state or the city, so [no team is] able to go into power with him and to take those key positions, so that puts [him] into a great disadvantage.
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Sputnik: Do you think that there will ever be an alignment of the Trump administration and the Senate, which seems to be having the same ideology as the Democratic Party?
Doug Wead: [Trump] has accomplished some remarkable things in spite of these deadlocks, yet the national media will keep up the drum beat. The corporate media benefits from a rigged system, so they are not going to ever acknowledge anything good is happening. But the start market broke records, we created 1.8 million jobs, we have had the first tax reform since [former US President] Ronald Reagan. It took Reagan six years to do it, Trump has done it in his first year… There is an awful lot that Trump has accomplished, we have seen not only the increase in jobs but the increase of income for the first time in 17 years. We have the lowest unemployment among women, among Hispanics, among African Americans, ever in all of American history, so things are being accomplished. You are just not going to read about it in corporate-controlled newspapers.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
