FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok points down the hallway as he arrives for a House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform joint hearing, Thursday, July 12, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, chairmen of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees, respectively, turned the heat up on the Department of Justice last week, asking Attorney General Bill Barr about an apparent plan by disgraced former FBI counterintelligence guru Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, to recruit informants inside Vice President Mike Pence’s transition team (see You’ll Never Believe Who The FBI Thought They Could Recruit As A Spy In The Trump White House). Now they’ve turned their eye upon the Intelligence Community.

There are a lot of stray factoids that indicate that the CIA, directly and by using its Five Eyes partners as cut-outs, was instrumental in creating a narrative that the Trump campaign was under Russian influence and it is a fact that disgraced former director of the CIA, John Brennan, was instrumental in pushing that narrative into the public’s consciousness. Many of the most inflammatory leaks seemed to originate from within the Intelligence Community. And now Grassley and Johnson are exploring those links.

In a letter dated today, May 6, the two senators ask the IC IG for some answers:

(Read the whole letter)

There are two points to pause and consider for a moment.

Why would the CIA leak to the media information they hadn’t shared with the FBI? The answer that immediately comes to mind is that they did it for the same reason that Christopher Steele did a road tour to pitch his dossier to the media. Those media stories then became evidence used to bolster the credibility of the dossier, itself. The media are seemingly credulous and enthralled whenever a spook deigns to speak to them and fall into the stenographer role they usually reserve for interviewing progressive politicians. The public narrative emanating from the IC needs no proof beyond its source. Here you can see that Strzok immediately assumes that the IC has held back information from him rather than this is just the IC peddling unfalsifiable bullsh**. (This is the story he’s referring to.) The fact that these alleged contacts are not mentioned in the Mueller report speaks volumes for the veracity of the account.

And Strzok refers to the CIA and other IC organizations as “political.” It is no secret that the CIA has been a hotbed of Democrat activists since…well…a long, long time. If you recall, during the 2004 election, the CIA gave expedited clearance to a book called ‘Imperial Hubris’ which was written by an active CIA officer that amounted to an in-kind contribution to John Kerry’s campaign. The same agency relentlessly leaked classified “Aardwolf” report series which were hypercritical and pessimistic about the Iraq War. All in all, the CIA seemed hellbent on using its position to sandbag a sitting president. But, Peter Strzok is the insurance policy guy, he’s the guy who says Trump won’t be president on his watch. If he’s calling the CIA political, consider what that means in practical terms. That is like being the British cavalry officer who was so stupid that even the horses had started to notice.