Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”

Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.

This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."

To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.

This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”

So what did Obama do with this information? Right after the November election, said Nunes, “He got all the intelligence agencies involved and they leaked out to the fake news media that, ‘Oh, the Russians must have done something and they were trying to help Trump.’

Had Nixon blamed Watergate on Cuba -- several Cubans were, in fact, arrested -- he would have been laughed out of office. Unlike Obama, however, Nixon did not have an obsequious media eager to ignore his mischief nor to explain away that which could not be ignored. With the FBI and the intelligence community in his pocket, Obama executed the most elaborate -- and destructive -- political cover-up in American political history.

Peter Strzok, the FBI agent heading “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI investigation into Trump’s apocryphal collusion with Russia, confirmed Obama’s role on August 5, two days after the August 3 meeting. Texting with his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok quoted an unnamed bigwig, likely Brennan, as saying, “The White House is running this.”

Strzok wasn’t happy. He believed the White House was intruding on FBI turf. On August 15, Strzok memorably signaled the shared motive of all the conspirators. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted Page. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” On September 2, Page confirmed Obama’s involvement. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” she texted Strzok.

The insurance policy proved insufficient. Shocked and understandably frightened by Trump’s victory, the conspirators got more methodical in their plotting. As part of the plot, Obama was to keep his hands clean -- or at least appear to. In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, intimate Obama adviser Ben Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:

Of course, we had no idea -- Obama had no idea -- at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.

The “time” in question was two weeks before Election Day 2016, nearly three months after the initial August meeting. In Rhodes, Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.

From the beginning, Brennan served as Obama’s fixer. He came to the job well prepared, having written in his graduate thesis, “The democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”

Brennan met at least one potential fellow traveler in Obama’s inner intelligence circle. In 2013, the same year Brennan was named director of the CIA, Obama chose the seemingly apolitical James Comey to head the FBI. Like Brennan, however, Comey had a past. In 2003, he acknowledged his leftist roots in a New York magazine interview, telling reporter Chris Smith, “I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now.”

A globalist and a cradle progressive, National Security Advisor Susan Rice shared with Brennan and Comey a penchant for situational ethics. She proved her mettle in 2012 telling the same Benghazi lie on five different shows one Sunday morning. She upped her game following a meeting that took place in the White House on January 5, 2017.

In conference with Obama was his national security team including all the usual suspects: Comey, Brennan, Biden, Rice, James Clapper, and acting attorney general Sally Yates. After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and Comey to stick around along with Rice, his trusted scribe and factotum.

Obama had a reason for singling out Comey and Yates. Unlike the others, they were staying on in their jobs. On the very day at the very moment Trump was being inaugurated, the soulless Rice sent to “self” a peculiar email. It read:

President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book.” The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book. 

There is no “book” that justifies what Comey and pals did in the weeks immediately following this meeting while Obama was still president. The next day, January 6, 2017, the conspirators released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was John Brennan’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington. Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

The “Obama dossier,” as Nunes called the ICA, reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date. Although Christopher Steele had conspicuously failed to corroborate any of his alleged evidence against Trump, Comey lobbied to have the Steele dossier included in the body of the text. He settled for the appendix. On January 10, BuzzFeed published the entire dossier.

Given what we know now, the ICA’s bold-faced claims -- “Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election” or the “Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the USA" -- seem laughably crude.  Lacking human intelligence in the Kremlin, the conspirators had no idea what Putin did or did not order, but facts no longer mattered.

By the time he left office on January 20, 2016, Obama had all his cucks in a row -- prominent sycophants in every branch of the government and in every major newsroom prepared to ruin Donald Trump’s presidency in service to a lie. 

“He weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie,” Ben Rhodes writes about Putin, “using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus.”

I imagine Obama reading this and saying, “Vladimir, hold my beer.”

Jack Cashill’s newest book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities, is available for pre-order in all formats.

Image: National Archives