Before the first FISA application was signed and submitted mired by the pompous, self-serving serial liar James Comey, who signed three of them, Carter Page wrote Comey a letter telling him he was a government asset working with the CIA and the FBI. If that letter had been presented to the FISA court by Comey, as it should have been, the FISA court never would have approved the Obama administration surveillance of Carter Page and Team Trump. As Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett points out:

“If you don’t have a legal foundation to surveil somebody and you keep doing it, is that bad?” Sen. Graham asked Horowitz.

“Absolutely,” replied Horowitz, adding that “it’s illegal surveillance.”

Beyond Steele’s fictitious document, the FBI hid from the FISA Court exculpatory evidence that Page was not a Russian spy, which is how the initial warrant application boldly described him.

According to the IG, a top FBI attorney (identified by Graham during the hearing as Kevin Clinesmith) doctored an email that falsely portrayed Page as a Russian spy when, in fact, the original email confirmed that he had worked for a U.S. intelligence agency. Page had also helped to prosecute an espionage case against Russian agents.

Comey knew this before the first warrant was ever sought. As I explained in my book “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History,” Page had sent a letter to the director in September 2016 advising that he had assisted the FBI and CIA for many years, acting as a valuable source.

Instead of responding to Page or having the bureau interview him, Comey prepared and executed a warrant application to have him wiretapped and to secretly access all of his electronic communications going forward and backward.

That letter by Page to Comey, hidden and never acknowledged or disputed by Comey, is a deliberate fraud committed by Comey upon the FISA court. This deliberate act by itself is a felony worthy of serious prison time.  Comey lied to the court and the action by FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, another deliberate act, implies both intent and therefore bias. Comey was not misled by underlings, as he told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, nor was the malfeasance seven layers beneath him as he claimed. He was the leader of the pack of lieutenants waging a criminal coup against a duly elected president of the United States.

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, he with multiple criminal referrals against him, was not seven layers down from Comey. According to a House Intelligence Committee memo, written when it was chaired by the now-vindicated Rep. Devin Nunes, McCabe admitted that without the now fully discredited Steele dossier, there would have been no FISA warrants and no subsequent deep state coup against Trump under the guise of a counterintelligence investigation:

The dossier, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and commissioned by Fusion GPS, was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign through law firm Perkins Coie. It included salacious and unverified allegations about Trump's connections to Russia.

The memo, which has been at the center of an intense power struggle between congressional Republicans and the FBI, specifically cites the DOJ and FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, saying the dossier "formed an essential part" of the application to spy on him….

The memo states that in December 2017, then FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” from the FISA court “without the Steele dossier information.”

The memo also says Steele was eventually cut off from the FBI for being chatty with the media. It says he was terminated in October 2016 as an FBI source “for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.”

Now Comey knew all this, or should have known all this. His deputy, McCabe, was at the heart of all the criminal activity and knows where the bodies are buried. The Steele dossier, despite McCabe’s prior obfuscations, was acquired illegally. Money was laundered through a law firm, to a dirt-gathering opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to Russian sources making most of the stuff up. The fact that the transaction went through multiple hands does not make it any more legal. It just makes the coming indictment longer.

McCabe, Comey, and the people who worked under McCabe, such as Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, then took this fruit of foreign interference and used it to commit a fraud upon the FISA court to trigger the illegal surveillance of one political campaign by another with the aid of co-conspirators at the DoJ and FBI.

That McCabe himself was a key architect of this coup is found in the texts of FBI Agent Peter Strozk, who speaks of the plan hatched in “Andy’s office” to stop Trump at all costs, with this end justifying any and all means:

Out of all the damning, politically charged anti-Trump text messages released, one text from Strzok to (Lisa) Page on August 15, 2016, raised the most suspicion. It referred to a conversation and a meeting that had just taken place in "Andy's" (widely believed to be Deputy FBI Dir. Andrew McCabe's) office. According to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Strzok had texted this: "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office [break]... that there's no way he gets elected. I want to believe that... But I'm afraid we can't take that risk... We have to do something about it."

In another text, Page said: "maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace." Strzok replied: "I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps."

"This goes to intent," Jordan said. "We can't take the risk that the people of this great country might elect Donald Trump. We can't take this risk. This is Peter Strzok, head of counterintelligence at the FBI. This is Peter Strzok, who I think had a hand in that dossier that was all dressed up and taken to the FISA court. He's saying, 'we can't take the risk, we have to do something about it.'"

Again, these criminal activities by Comey’s immediate subordinates imply intent and therefore bias. It was not done at some rogue field office but at FBI headquarters by Comey’s immediate underlings. Comey lied when in an earlier interview with Brett Beier on Fox News’ Special Report that the dossier was merely part of a “broad mosaic” of evidence indicating Carter Page was a Russian asset worthy of surveillance. It was the whole enchilada and a lie at that just as Comey’s “recollection” was a lie.

After a meeting with Obama; Comey went to the White House; not to warn Trump about foreign interference, or to give him a heads up or a defensive briefing, but to entrap him just as he bragged about how he entrapped Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who was told not to worry, he didn’t need a lawyer. Comey bragged about taking advantage of the new Trump Administration’s inexperience and just send over a few agents to do the dirty work without going through proper channels.

As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy notes:

The plan on January 6 (i.e., the day after director Comey met with President Obama about next steps in the Russia investigation) was for Comey to hit the president-elect with a Steele-dossier allegation: the salacious and unverified claim that Trump had cavorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel in 2013, and been covertly recorded doing so by Russian intelligence.

That’s not a briefing. It is Criminal Investigations 101: Get the suspect talking so a comfort level is established, then zing him with something that will rock his world. Thus confronted, a suspect will often blurt out either an implicit admission of guilt or a false exculpatory statement. Either one is a home run for the investigator.

And make no mistake: Comey was the investigator. The zing was elaborately planned, and so was the post-mortem. A bureau car equipped with a secure computer would be at the ready. While Trump’s words were still ringing in Comey’s ears, the then-director would begin typing out the then-president-elect’s reaction to the ambush -- his responsive statements, his reasoning if he had tried to justify himself, his demeanor.

It was a trap deliberately set by Comey, one of his many lies. The walls are closing in, not on Trump, but on James Comey.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.