With Paul Manafort’s explosive new book, Political Prisoner, we finally have a full and honest detailed account of how the U.S. government, the not-so-special Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and particularly the FBI treated anyone and everyone connected to Donald Trump. The plain truth is they were after him—and would stop at nothing in their quest of subversion.

I would know, because I, too, was in their sights.

Detained at Boston’s Logan Airport, the FBI grilled me about the 2016 campaign, specific persons involved, Wikileaks, Roger Stone, Nigel Farage, and Russia. It was evident that while they had a very thick file on me, and two warrants to confiscate my iPhone and laptop—which meant they had been surveilling me for some time—they knew I knew nothing of real value. This was an act of intimidation of a patriotic U.S. citizen, one with a former Top Secret and Codeword security clearance, who had held senior positions in the government and served informally and without payment on the Trump presidential election campaign. I was an advisor, policy wonk, and surrogate and appeared on British (BBC and ITV) news a lot. But my groundbreaking and explosive book, The Plot to Destroy Trump, which shattered the entire Russia hoax and the fabricated, DNC-Clinton funded Steele dossier, was about to be published and they did not want anyone to read it. It totally exposed them.

On their side of the long table, inside the secret, secure interrogation unit, was a gang of lawyers and yet a few more FBI agents. The lead was Aaron Zelinsky, a Yalie who had worked for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. The other inquisitor was Jeannie Rhee, also a double Yalie, who had been Hillary Clinton’s lawyer at the Clinton Foundation. They called in the notorious Andrew Weissmann whenever there was a serious question or to sign off on their doings. He appeared to be their real boss. Robert Mueller was nowhere to be found.

The interrogation went on for some three days from early morning until late afternoon. They wanted to wear me down and repeatedly asked the same questions in various versions, time and again, wanting to fool or coerce me. They had in their procession all my emails, texts, tweets, phone conversations, and social media. Since I had graduated from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute class on intelligence, negotiations, and countermeasures, I suppose I was a hard witness for them, and my lawyers were especially good at challenging and rephrasing some of their ramblings. I was not the target they said. And I had never visited Ecuador’s embassy in London and all the closed-circuit television cameras proved that. I didn’t know Julian Assange and had never met him. Besides that, they knew that Seth Rich, a DNC staffer (murdered in cold blood) had downloaded a thumb drive to steal John Podesta’s emails. I had met the Republican operative Roger Stone just twice and they knew that, too. I did email him some photos from Rhodes House and a pub in Oxford where, in an earlier era, Bill Clinton had been accused of raping a co-ed and left the Rhodes Scholars program months before his term was up, escorted by an official from the U.S. embassy. The FBI laid those photos on the table and asked if I had sent them. I said, yes, is it untrue?

They seemed particularly perturbed that, as a former Yale professor myself, and someone who had also served on two Yale boards for a total of 12 years, I could be involved and support someone like Trump. Zelinsky even confessed to me that he had called the Yale provost to “discuss” me. I told him, and this took him by total surprise, that his younger brother, Nathaniel, had been a student of mine while at Yale and a Buckley Society member, and that I was involved in writing a letter of recommendation for him to attend Cambridge University for graduate school. He was dead in his tracks and treated me totally differently after that exchange. In fact, he bent over backwards to try and resolve things, be nicer, and apologized the morning, months later, when I was brought back yet again, to testify before their flimsy grand jury.

Ironically, they couldn’t get a quorum and at around noon said they were calling people, substitutes, and I was free to go. Finally, at the last minute, they got the lucky number, and I was hauled in sans lawyers and asked to read a short, proffered statement my lawyers had concocted. Zelinsky asked if there were any questions, and the sleepy jurors had none——well, one was aired in the end by the chairperson: would I agree to come back, if needed? I said, yes, of course, and it was over.

My time in the tank and a boatload of legal bills had yielded nothing and I couldn’t implicate anyone or any of their grand theories of collusion. But it was clear that the deep state was all-powerful, and they wanted Roger Stone at any cost so as to get to the bigger target—Donald J. Trump. The FBI has continued to harass me, read my emails and texts, listen to my calls, and has gone out of their way to damage my reputation. I suppose that is the price you pay for being a thinking conservative in divided America today.

As I discovered firsthand, behind America’s mainstream media is a fluid collective of top intelligence agencies—including the CIA, FBI, and NSA—which we’ve come to know as the deep state. These agencies work in tandem to promote a homogeneous, liberal left-wing agenda—an agenda which they masquerade as democracy and equality, when in fact, it’s purely canned leftist orthodoxy. The public thinks they were part of this decision, as though they executed their own free will and judgment when really, they’ve been told not just what to think but how to think, through a calculated manipulation. In this new prescriptive age of so-called democracy, determinism is disguised as free will.

And in today’s world of rapidly advancing technology and instant-gratification news—where, by the time the newspaper hits your front porch, it’s old news—an unverified bit of information can become cemented as truth, plastered across social media platforms, and just like that, the opinions and agendas of the few become the ethos for the masses.

The most glaring offense of manipulation in recent history was the 2016 election, where the deep state crafted a myth, a one-size-fits-all narrative fit for immediate American consumption. It has not stopped.

Yet the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And left behind was a trail of crumbs riddled with inconsistencies. Using these advanced technologies, we were able to sift through the troves of electronic data, accessing emails and text messages, to reveal a truth so deeply buried: it wasn’t the Russians who attempted to hack the election, it was from within.

As we know now, the deep state, working covertly and closely with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, orchestrated a plot to subvert the 2016 presidential run of Donald Trump. And yet, the unthinkable happened: Clinton lost. Following Trump’s victory, these intelligence agencies and Clinton herself (and much of America) were shocked.

In a volatile mix of embarrassment and revenge, they continued to perpetuate the myth of collusion to delegitimize Trump’s presidency, slander his name, and weaken his character. In the aftermath, much of America—the ones sucking at the teat of the mainstream media, the carnal consumers of CNN and MSNBC—wanted answers: how could this happen? Clinton and the deep state concocted a prescription to remedy their devastating loss—a fabricated panacea for all those wounded Americans. Clinton herself wrote a 512-page book to address the simple question, What Happened?

That’s what happened. End of story.

But no one wants to read that book, do they?

Instead, what they got was a long-winded, overly complicated story of all the ways in which the world conspired against her, most notably those pesky Russians. But it’s pulp fiction—as phony as the very keystone dossier at the center of this ornate lie that begins with Christopher Steele, the master MI-6 fabricator himself.

But Clinton, along with a great majority of the world, was asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering how she had lost, the question should have been, how did Trump win?

Trump’s team didn’t rely on sophisticated professional polling, focus groups, or message testing. And he sure wasn’t going to fork over nearly $1.5 billion in paid broadcast advertising—a reasonable estimate of what the Clinton campaign spent. He was the candidate who operated based on his instinct and based on his gut. And this scared the hell out of Washingtonians, who knew Trump served as a real threat to their operation.

Surely, they’d fight back.

In response to his meteoric rise, using the mainstream media as its voice, the deep state waged a relentless war on this new reality. And yet, Americans, too distracted to notice the knife in the deep state’s hand, were being force-fed a narrative that confirmed what they wanted to hear. Every headline, tweet, and blog post—each acting as another turn of the screw—tightened their foregone conclusion: the Russians did it.

What the mainstream media wants us so desperately to believe is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump because of the Russians, that a select group of internet hackers were able to upend the results so heavily in Trump’s favor, and that now we need to exact revenge through endless, circular investigations.

And yet, the media and the deep state don’t stop there: They want us to believe that Trump and his campaign have had long connections to the Kremlin and that Vladimir Putin, channeling Nostradamus, had the overarching foresight to plant a seed back in 2013 setting Trump up as a Manchurian candidate to undermine America—using Trump like a puppet, his very own Moscow stooge.

With their investigation failing to connect Trump with Russia in any nefarious way, the deep state coordinated another attack to unhinge his presidency. This time, they turned to the 25th Amendment—which relies on a majority of the president’s cabinet and the vice president to agree that the president is no longer mentally capable of carrying out his or her duties. Sounds far-fetched, right? Undoubtedly, this was a tall order to execute. But considering just how easy it is to rile up hysteria in America using the mainstream media, particularly the folks over at CNN, it doesn’t sound so improbable now does it?

My story in this saga is a relatively minor subscript but it is indicative of where this country is going.

So, what are we going to do about it?