Is 'Dr. Doom' the Nexus of the Anti-Trump 'Grand Conspiracy?'

With all eyes focused on the Brennan-Comey-Clapper axis of evil, lesser known figures played a major role in the decade-long pursuit of President Trump. Lisa Monaco is one.

1. This is part one of a two part (or maybe three, who knows) series on Lisa Monaco.

Her nickname inside the Obama White House was “Dr. Doom.”

According to a 2017 Politico profile, Lisa Monaco—who had worked for Barack Obama since the beginning of his presidency, ending as his homeland security advisor—said the president gave her that moniker because when ‘he saw me coming, he knew something bad had happened.’”

That sentiment may represent rare common ground between Obama and President Donald Trump.

As one of Obama’s most trusted henchmen, Monaco used her power in the months before and after the 2016 presidential election to sabotage Trump. She became the public face of so-called “Russian hacking” until Obama’s last moments in office.

But her effort to try to destroy Trump was not over. Monaco continued, both outside and inside the government including most recently as Joe Biden’s deputy attorney general, her anti-Trump campaign for years—resulting in two unprecedented criminal federal indictments against a former U.S. president.

In fact, a trail of Monaco’s dirty fingerprints stretches from the origins of Russiagate to the Biden Justice Department’s early investigations into Trump to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal indictments against the president.

But now the tables are turned and, as the president warned last month, the hunters are the hunted; recent disclosures by the intelligence community and Congress appear to bolster reports of a sprawling investigation underway at Trump’s FBI into the Russiagate hoax—which means Monaco may be in hot water. (She is now a "distinguished scholar” at NYU Law, her alma mater.)

The president called out Monaco twice last month in suggesting she handled Joe Biden’s autopen. Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on June 29 that he wants Monaco and others investigated for what happened in the Biden White House. “These are people I think are very bad people.” Trump said. (He revoked her security clearance in March.)

So if the Trump Department of Justice and FBI indeed are conducting a “grand conspiracy” investigation, as has been reported, into those responsible for the decade-long crusade against the president and everyone around him, no one pops up more consistently than Lisa Monaco.

She is the Where’s Waldo of the Trump lawfare operation.

Brennan’s Protégé Helps Do His Dirty Work

Monaco’s legal exposure may have worsened after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released, among other documents, a bombshell memo disclosing a previously-unknown meeting at the White House on December 9, 2016 with the key Russiagate perpetrators.

Along with fellow so-called “Obama sisters” Susan Rice and Avril Haines—both of whom also held high-ranking positions in the Biden regime— Monaco attended that Dec 2016 meeting. Participants schemed, at the direction of Obama, how to manufacture claims contradicting intelligence analysts who had determined the Kremlin did not “hack” the presidential election.

According to an email in the Gabbard documents, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office moved quickly to produce an outline, “[pursuant] to POTUS tasking at Monday meeting on Russian election meddling for a comprehensive assessment.” That outline resulted in CIA Director John Brennan’s infamous, and now exposed as fully fraudulent, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) published on January 6, 2017.

Gabbard highlighted the Dec 2016 meeting as a turning point in what she called a “treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate.”

Monaco’s involvement, however, preceded that meeting; she played an instrumental role both behind-the-scenes and in the public eye to perpetuate the plot.

In August 2016, Monaco was one of a handful of top Obama advisors assembled by Brennan, Monaco’s predecessor as homeland security advisor, to meet in the Situation Room. The purpose of the secret gatherings, according to a detailed Washington Post timeline, was “to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond.”

The following month, Monaco, along with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI Director James Comey, briefed Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill of the alleged threat. Since Monaco had spent her entire career in the federal government—working as an aide to Biden’s Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, a member of the DOJ’s Enron Task Force, and chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller in the early 2000s—the Obama team likely viewed her as the most credible official to deliver the bad news of potential Russian election hacking, or at least a more serious messenger than Comey, who was still under fire at the time for closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

But their entreaty did not go as planned.

“The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble,” the Post wrote about the September 2016 meeting. “Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims.”

Monaco also admitted in a 2017 interview that their stunt failed. “We made a specific effort to go to Congress, to say we want bipartisan support for state governments to take us up on our offer to shore up their cybersecurity in their election systems, because there was a tremendous amount of resistance. I think there was a view that we—if we came to state and municipal governments and said, ‘We want to help you shore up your cybersecurity for your election system,’ they viewed it as a big federal takeover.’”

But it wasn’t a totally fruitless exercise; a week or so later, the four Congressional leaders signed a joint letter urging state election directors to “ensure that their network infrastructure is secure from attack.” Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff also issued a public statement on what they described as a “Russian hacking” effort aimed at the election.

“Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” the California Democrats wrote on Sept 22, 2016. The media, of course, eagerly covered the letter as further proof of Russia’s dastardly plans.

Monaco as Key Russiagate Mouthpiece

Fast forward again to December 2016. Monaco spent the transition period conducting numerous interviews and sit-downs to sow more doubt about the election outcome and warn that the incoming Trump administration should prepare for more “cyber attacks.”

In fact, the morning before the Dec 9 White House meeting, Monaco held court at a breakfast attended by Washington’s top political and national security journalists.

As I reported, she fielded what appears to have been a planted question by none other than Michael Isikoff—author of the September 2016 Yahoo News article that first tipped the Steele dossier and was later used in Comey’s FISA application to spy on the Trump campaign—to announce Obama had ordered the Russian hacking assessment.

Her propaganda tour continued until almost her last day in office. Monaco, whose methodic delivery and calm demeanor belies the raging partisan inside, became the media’s go-to to discuss sanctions against Russia in response to “the malicious cyber activities and efforts to interfere in our election process.” Here she is on Dec 29, 2016:

That same day, Monaco appeared on CNN with Jake Tapper. “We are exposing the tactics, the techniques, the procedures that the Russian intelligence services have used to interfere in our election and to probe our systems.”

Release the Monaco Files

Monaco also participated in another pivotal meeting to advance the Russiagate scheme: the January 5, 2017 briefing with President Obama at the White House.

Responses to a 2022 FOIA request by Judicial Watch indicate Monaco attended the meeting along with Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Rice and Vice President Joe Biden. Obama convened the meeting to discuss the intelligence assessment, which would be publicly released the next day—the same day Comey ambushed Trump in New York City to “warn” him about contents of the Steele dossier, more specifically the so-called “pee tape” involving Russian prostitutes.

Monaco appears to have recorded four pages of contemporaneous notes in her stenographer notebook during the January 5 briefing. Those notes—and all the entries in Monaco’s notebook dated Jan 3 to Jan 20, 2017—remain under seal. “Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors,” according to the FOIA response.

Hopefully DNI Gabbard can take a look into what Monaco documented during that crucial period.

Monaco’s Anti-Trump Crusade Never Stopped—Then She Got Back in Power

In his 2018 memoir, Clapper wrote that Monaco stayed “at the White House on the morning of the inauguration, almost right up until noon.” That is a juicy tidbit since shortly after noon on January 20, 2017, Susan Rice sent her “by the book” email related to the Russia investigation and alleged concerns over Gen. Mike Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador. Hard to imagine fellow “Obama sister” Monaco was not involved in helping Rice draft the email.

At that point, Monaco’s extended gig in the federal government came to an end but her targeting of President Trump did not. CNN hired Monaco as a “national security analyst” not to discuss legitimate threats to the homeland but to instead perpetuate the notion that Trump and his team posed a grave danger to the republic.

With her former boss, Robert Mueller, infirmly ensconced in the special counsel’s office—along with her former Enron Task Force pal Andrew Weissmann—by May 2017, Monaco had no shortage of material to work with as her anti-Trump crusade continued on cable news and in op-ed pages for four years. Even as late as December 2018, Monaco was still pushing the “Russian hacking” narrative, claiming in a CNN interview that “the Russians conducted cyber-operations against state election systems” in 2016.

After the 2020 election, Monaco found herself back in power. She once again immediately turned her sights back to Donald Trump—but this time, her goal would to put the former president behind bars.

Part Two on “Dr. Doom” will be published later this week.