When John Ratcliffe, himself a former federal prosecutor, formally dropped his criminal referral on the desks of the FBI and the Justice Department, he didn’t send over a routine “let’s‑have‑a‑chat” memo. He pulled the pin on a legal grenade. The targets, James Comey and John Brennan, are not a pair of low‑level clipboard carriers; they are the very men who steered America’s two most powerful security services in 2016 while those services were aimed, for the first time in our history, at a presidential candidate who then became a sitting president. That makes this referral an intelligence matter, not mere departmental housekeeping—which is why this extraordinary case will likely set extraordinary legal precedent.
Let’s be blunt: Crossfire Hurricane and its post‑election sequel weren’t botched bank jobs or sloppy document shuffles. They were a coordinated attempt to nullify the will of millions voters by painting the incoming administration as Moscow’s marionette. The Steele dossier—the glitter‑bomb of rumors British spy Christopher Steele handed to Brennan, Comey, and a cheerleading media—was flagged by the FBI’s own counter‑intel pros as hearsay at best and Kremlin disinformation at worst before the first FISA signature dried. Internal memos from Peter Strzok told headquarters there was “no evidence” of campaign figures whispering with Russian intelligence; undercover recordings captured George Papadopoulos calling such collusion “treason,” not strategy. Yet the Bureau renewed surveillance warrants anyway, holding back exculpatory nuggets from the court like a busted car salesman hiding the odometer reading.[3] If that isn’t an abuse of power on a national‑security scale, the term has no meaning.
That is why the clock Congress tacked onto garden‑variety felonies—five years under federal law—cannot shield the architects of this gambit. The very purpose of limitation periods is to balance the public’s interest in finality against stale evidence. But where the crime itself is the corruption of our electoral immune system, the dangers do not fade with time; they compound. Our framers did not fight kings and quartermasters only to watch modern mandarins weaponize secret warrants so they could feed the evening news.
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Call it what you will—seditious conspiracy, espionage by disinformation, or, if a jury is persuaded, treason by “adhering to the enemy” in the middle of a cyber‑war—we are talking about capital‑class misconduct for which Congress has deliberately stripped away any limitation. However, indictments for death‑eligible crimes may be brought “at any time.” The espionage statute’s most serious provision sits in the same category. Yes, a prosecutor must prove intent to injure the United States or help a foreign power, but Brennan’s own analysts warned that parts of Steele’s material smelled of Russian active‑measures. Brennan still shepherded it into the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, thereby laundering Moscow’s handiwork through the imprimatur of U.S. intelligence and briefing the new President with it. If knowingly injecting enemy propaganda into the arteries of American policy isn’t “aid and comfort,” the term is useless.
What about Comey? His public halo slipped the moment he leaked privileged Oval Office memos for the admitted purpose of triggering a special counsel. That orchestration kept the disinformation treadmill humming for two additional years, during which time the government reached into the pockets of Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and a string of Trump aides—and, courtesy of a complicit media, into the public trust itself. That scheme did not end in 2017; it ran straight through Mueller’s report and into today, because the reputational damage to U.S. institutions and foreign policy continues. Prosecutors call that a “continuing conspiracy.” Under black‑letter law the statute doesn’t begin to run until the final overt act—arguably not until the day Ratcliffe dropped his referral. Even if a friendly judge draws the line earlier, grand jurors can still hear espionage counts, each carrying a ten‑year window and subject to tolling while investigators chase evidence abroad. Good luck to defense counsel arguing the government slept on its rights when the defendants themselves buried half the paper trail under classification stamps.
Critics will cry that calling this treason weaponizes a term reserved for wartime shooting conflicts. Very well—let them try that defense in front of twelve citizens who spent the last decade watching Russian hackers raid DNC servers, Chinese operators siphon Office of Personnel Management files, and Iranian bots pitch election memes. Cyberspace is the battlefield, and the American electorate is the target. When senior officials plant foreign‑sourced falsehoods in U.S. intelligence for domestic political effect, they do the enemy’s work for him. The Rosenbergs didn’t detonate the bomb they helped Stalin obtain, yet history calls their crime treasonous all the same.
Nor can we wave this away as “mistakes in judgment.” Peter Strzok’s own February 2017 notes show the FBI leadership knew the New York Times’ banner headline about “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” was bunk within twenty‑four hours of publication. They drafted but never released a rebuttal, choosing silence because the story advanced their objective. Silence in the face of known falsity is not negligence; it is intent. And intent is the fulcrum on which every serious national‑security charge turns.
Here’s the political reality: if Brennan, Comey, and their enablers skate because a calendar page flipped, every future Langley analyst and Hoover Building supervisor will know the playbook. Launch an investigation on shaky tips, leak just enough to get the press chasing rabbits, and, once the narrative takes hold, run out the clock. If caught, settle for a book deal and a six‑figure cable‑news gig. Peter Strzok pocketed millions from a wrongful‑termination settlement under the Biden Justice Department—proof, if any were needed, that bureaucratic martyrdom can be profitable. That incentive structure must be burned to the ground, not papered over with polite letters of censure.
Some ask whether prosecuting former top cops will shatter public faith in government. They have it backward. Faith shatters when ordinary Americans see one set of rules for the ruling class and another for everyone else. Absent accountability, the next agency chief tempted to meddle in an election will weigh the thrill against zero downside risk—and we will have converted our intelligence community from shield to cudgel. A constitutional republic cannot survive that transition. Rome managed it for a while by naming dictators in moments of crisis; the experiment ended in an empire of spies and informers. We can choose better.
That is why limitations defenses cannot stand. Congress has already said that when an offense is capital-class or strikes at the republic’s very security, time does not grant absolution. Benjamin Franklin warned that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The Steele dossier was that trade-off in action—temporary partisan advantage bought at the price of constitutional liberty. Brennan and Comey loaded the weapon with foreign disinformation; the press pulled the trigger. If we let them holster it unpunished, they will undoubtedly draw and fire once more.
So let the grand jury sit. Let it consider whether capital espionage, treason, or a continuing conspiracy to defraud the United States best fits the facts. Let defense counsel raise every procedural dodge in the book; the Constitution affords them that right. But let the republic, too, exercise its right—its obligation—to enforce the guardrails that keep unelected mandarins from overturning elections. Accountability is mandatory, not optional, because without it the phrase “government of the people” is mere parchment. To borrow from Franklin once more, “democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on dinner.” In our time, the wolves carry briefcases and classification stamps. The lamb must bite back, or end up the main course.
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