Topic category:  Partisan Politics

Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin,"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" and Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Keeping it is not easy when the political establishment (aka the Swamp) is horrified that eight years of the Age of Obama may be followed by up to eight years of the Age of Trump instead of Hillary Clinton's return to the White House as President instead of First Lady.

On February 3, 2018, Ben Stein tweeted: "Everybody sneered and laughed when @realDonaldTrump said he was being wiretapped - but he was being wiretapped."

The next day Wendy Long responded: "It’s true. No one believed it because it sounded like a far fetched story out of Stalinist USSR or a banana republic. But it happened here — in America — where top government officials abused the law to try to take down @realDonaldTrump."

They are right

"Police departments began tapping phone lines in the 1890s. The placing of a wiretap is relatively easy. A suspect's telephone line is identified at the phone company's switching station and a line, or "tap," is run off the line to a listening device"  (https://legaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Wiretapping).

Surveillance techniques have improved greatly since the 1890's, so President Trump smartly put that w word in quotation marks when he blew the whistle.

The Obama Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have been exquisitely exposed by the Nunez memorandum.

The terrifying claim that publication of the Nunez memorandum would expose sources and methods and put lives as risk was shown to be bogus upon publication.

That claim showed desperation to cover up the truth about weaponization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "take down" President Trump for winning the 2016 presidential election.

To be sure, the liberal media establishment that dismissed the Trump candidacy as doomed to fail and was humiliated on Election Day 2016 remains determined to ignore facts and to promote false charges against President Trump.

Perhaps the biggest problem with that sinister strategy is that a lawyer has a duty to be candid with the court and concealing material facts on an ex parte application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is intolerable.

Trump hater Rachel Maddow's dismissal of the Nunez memorandum with a snide "Is that all you got?" is wishful thinking.

The Nunuz memorandum is both a damning indictment of Federal Bureau of Investigation leadership (NOT rank and file) and an opening salvo in the counterattack on those peddling the nutty notion that President Trump colluded with the Russians in pursuit of the Presidency of the United States.

It is time to investigate the hierarchy in the Federal Bureau of Investigation who supposedly investigated 2016 Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and tried to "take down" President Trump.

I can attest that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is historically allergic to being scrutinized.

When the St. John's Law Review was established, J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the first and only director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation until his death, contributed an article.

In 1972, I became an editor of the St. John's Law Review and suggested that the Review send copies of the Hoover article to prominent police chiefs across the United States and invite them to write articles on Hoover's long service as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The suggestion was popular with editors of diverse personal political views, but it was not approved by Hoover.

Instead of appraisals of Hoover by prominent United States police chiefs, the St. John's Law Review received another article by Hoover on a relatively uncontroversial subject--fingerprinting.

These days articles on the legal and ethical obligations of investigators and prosecutors would be in order.

Perhaps articles of whether the fact that President Barack Obama's first Attorney General, Eric Holder, escaped prosecution after being held in contempt of Congress contributed to the climate that led to the kind of investigation of Hillary Clinton conducted under Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey, famously fired by President Trump, and the surveillance of then presidential candidate Trump that culminated in the appointment of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller by Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein the day after Mueller had unsuccessfully interviewed with President Trump for another term as Federal Bureau of Investigation director.

God bless America!

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.