Was there ever a swamp thing more celebrated in the press for her "integrity" than former Obama administration defense official Evelyn Farkas?  The former Hillary Clinton adviser, now running for retiring Rep. Nita Lowey's congressional seat from Chappaqua, New York, home of the Clintons, was one of the very first to declare, on MSNBC and elsewhere, that she knew all about Donald Trump's collusion with the Russians. 

Now that the director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, has released the transcripts of her congressional testimony in 2017, we get this, as reported by The Federalist:

Former Obama administration defense official Evelyn Farkas testified under oath that she lied during an MSNBC interview when she claimed to have evidence of alleged collusion, a newly declassified congressional transcript of her testimony shows. Farkas testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on June 26, 2017, as part of the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Lawmakers keyed in on an appearance Farkas made on MSNBC on March 2, 2017, in which she urged intelligence community bureaucrats to disseminate within the government and potentially even leak to media any incriminating information they had about Trump or his aides.

"I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama administration] people who left…[that] it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy," Farkas said.

This was why she encouraged so many Intelligence Community leaks.  Andrew McCarthy wrote this about her activities back in April 2017:

The most telling remark that former Obama deputy defense secretary Evelyn Farkas made in her now-infamous MSNBC interview was the throw-away line at the end: "That's why you have all the leaking."

Put this in context: Farkas had left the Obama administration in 2015, subsequently joining the presidential campaign of, yes, Hillary Clinton — Trump's opponent. She told MSNBC that she had been encouraging her former Obama-administration colleagues and members of Congress to seek "as much information as you can" from the intelligence community.

"That's why you have the leaking."

To summarize: At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information.

As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are. Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.

Yet she got celebrated time and again in the press, which was the recipient of the leaks she encouraged.

But maybe the biggest outrage of this whole thing is that she claimed she knew for sure that Trump was in bed with the Russians, even though she left her post in 2015.  However, when Congress put her under oath about such claims, she admitted she had lied.  Here's her testimony in response to questions from then-rep. Trey Gowdy in 2017:

"Why don't we go back to that sentence that I just asked you about. It says 'the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their staff dealing with Russians," Gowdy said. "Well, how would you know what the U.S. government knew at that point? You didn't work for it, did you?"

"I didn't," said Farkas, a former mid-level Russia analyst who left the federal government in 2015.

"Then how did you know?" Gowdy responded.

"I didn't know anything," Farkas said.

"Did you have information connecting the Trump campaign to the hack of the DNC?" Gowdy asked.

"No," Farkas admitted.

"So when you say, 'We knew,' the reality is you knew nothing," Gowdy asked later during the deposition.

"Correct," Farkas responded.

Gowdy didn't stop there.

"So when you say 'knew,' what you really meant was felt?" he asked.

"Correct," Farkas answered.

"You didn't know anything?" Gowdy continued.

"That's correct," Farkas responded.

Being smart enough to stay away from a potential perjury charge, it's safe to say she told Congress the truth.  But to the public, it was a different story.  She lied through her teeth in her media appearances, to whip up suspicion about President Trump, and not one word of it was true.

Here's the disgusting part: she's a former Hillary Clinton adviser.  She lives in Chappaqua, same as the Clinton pair does.  The Russian collusion myth came about entirely fictionally, the result of an embittered Hillary Clinton sending out her flying monkeys to spread the first lies that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election from her.  Farkas's lies had to have had some connection to her old patron, who's undoubtedly helping her run for Congress, given the number of Clinton operatives who have endorsed her.  Farkas, if she wins, will be representing Chappaqua and the rest of that 17th Congressional District, and probably the Clinton political interests, the little cat's paw of the still embittered crone who lost to Trump in 2016.

Yet it was her lies that helped get all of the phony collusion investigations rolling, every one of which failed.  She was fine lying to the public, yet she was self-protective enough not to lie to Congress, meaning she'll lie to the little guy every time.  The public, to her, is there for the manipulating, truth not required.  Does this sound like someone who ought to be in Congress?

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of official and Pixabay public domain sources.