America has nothing to be proud of in its perpetual surveillance state

Whittaker Chambers’ book, “Witness,” opens with a letter to his children in which he explains the tyranny of communism that he had once embraced. He quoted a young German woman trying to explain how her father, a German diplomat who had been an enlightened pro-communist, became an implacable foe of communism. She said, embarrassed, “one night — in Moscow — he heard screams.”

Chambers wrote, “She did not know that she had swept away … the myth of the 20th Century with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”

Chambers went on to ask, “What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests … They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police.

{mosads}“Those are not the screams of a man in agony,” Chambers wrote. “Those are the screams of a soul in agony.”

In the pre-dawn hours of July 26, the United States government invaded Paul Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. They didn’t knock on the door. They didn’t ring the doorbell. They picked the lock and armed government agents barged in with a search warrant to confiscate documents that had already been voluntarily turned over to congressional committees.

Nothing whatever was accomplished in that raid. Nothing that is, other than stomping the heavy foot of government on the throat of an American citizen to instill the fear of the gulag.

What would Whittaker Chambers say about the United States government today?

In 2010 our attorney general swore in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a spy in order to snoop on his communications and discover his sources. No one was fired.

At the same time the IRS began to use its fearsome power to intimidate conservative organizations and deny them the same IRS nonprofit status that others have been using for decades. President Obama promised a thorough investigation. It was never begun.

Republicans soon had the majority in the Congress and held hearings to great fanfare. The IRS destroyed evidence and its commissioner misled Congress while he was under oath. Seven years later not one person has paid for those crimes. Indeed, the IRS commissioner remains in his job.

In 2013, CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson was working on a story about a government gun-running operation called Fast and Furious. Her computers were hacked with a software tool proprietary to our intelligence agencies. Four years later, she is still battling the Department of Justice in a lawsuit over the matter.

The same year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that the NSA did not “wittingly” collect communications from Americans. In March 2017, he explicitly denied to NBC that there was a FISA warrant against Trump and his associates. He is now explaining how that FISA warrant might have captured Trump conversations. Nothing has been done.

Several top officials in the Obama administration abused their power to snoop on private communications between Trump associates. It began with his nomination and continued after he was elected. They leaked information to the media crippling the president’s ability to govern. Nothing has been done.

FBI Director Jim Comey gave notes about his conversations with the president to a pal to leak to the media.

A special counsel was appointed to find out if Russia impacted the election. The principle charge is that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers. Considering Special Counsel Robert Mueller has yet to examine the servers, it is fair to conclude that his role is not to find answers about Russian involvement in the election, but to take down the president.

In 2015, an investigation of Manafort’s work with foreign governments was dropped for lack of evidence of a crime. After Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, authorities obtained a new FISA warrant. That new warrant made candidate Trump’s communications with his campaign manager available to the Obama administration and, it must be assumed, their candidate, Hillary Clinton.

The raid on Manafort’s home was arguably intended only to intimidate him in hopes that he would help bring down the president. The special counsel now is trying to bring New York’s attorney general into the investigation. If Manafort is charged at the state level, the president would not be able to pardon him. If Manafort refuses to flip against the president he may not go to the “execution cellars of the secret police,” but he will go to jail.

The establishment must take down this president because he is a threat to the temple they have so meticulously constructed over the last 60 years. They have abused the power of the IRS. They have co-opted the intelligence community. They have lied to Congress and the American people.

Tyranny thrives under many “isms.” Totalitarianism, communism, Nazism, fascism, progressivism and now establishmentarianism. Those five words keep haunting: “One night he heard screams.”

John Linder (@Linderje) was a member of Congress from Georgia from 1993 to 2011.