The stench of rot at the DoJ and FBI must be unflinchingly faced

 An editorial at National Review lays out in comprehensible fashion the sum total of what daily news reports have been dribbling out with lots of arcane details but little in the way of a coherent narrative. I'll be excerpting generously from it here. 

The introductory paragraphs spell out the three conclusions we must unavoidably draw from what we know so far:

The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.

First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.

The whistleblowers' frustration was palpable to the House committee they've been working with:

The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.

The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.

And let's head off at the pass any notion that Weiss being a Trump appointee bears any weight:

Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.

Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.

After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).

Wolf told the agents that issuing a warrant based on the laptop evidence would be bad optics, doncha know:

In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.

Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.

There was much evading about where charges could be filed, based on where the tax-evading occurred. Conveniently, it outlasted the statute of limitiations. 

And the money being hidden from the IRS came from bribes:

The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.

And consider the Attorney General's role in all this. I'd say this country dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell took a pass on the Senate advising and consenting on this guy when Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court:

Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.

And funny business seems to follow Hunter Biden wherever he goes, even though he's supposed to be well along in his recovery and immersed in his painting activities. I still think it's damn odd that the Secret Service couldn't determine where the White House cocaine came from. 

And what kind of guy safeguarding his precarious recovery hires a lawyer like this?

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

The First Son took a trip from his Malibu pad to the Pacific Palisades on Thursday to visit his attorney, after agreeing to plead guilty to federal tax crimes last month.

While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

And who is the babe in the yellow floral dress Hunter is photographed hugging as he arrives?

The 60-year-old Hollywood attorney is known for his hard-driving tactics and high-profile cases, but appeared relaxed on the sunny balcony in a purple short-sleeved shirt.

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father. He was greeted at the Los Angeles home by a woman in a yellow floral dress.

Now, as is always necessary in 2023 post-America, LITD must addresses any questions of a whataboutism. 

The Very Stable Genius has already been indicted twice and more indictments are coming, and they're all entirely justified. 

Now, does anybody still want to get behind the look-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-of-them argument at this late date?

True, the law-enforcement apparatus has done itself no favors, given the obvious corruption outlined above. But Donald Trump's unfitness for office is now unavoidably clear. Even those who began to drool uncontrollably and quake with adulation when he descended the escalator in 2015 have not even the flimsiest of reasons why we should usher this charlatan back in.

So what's to be done?

The first step is to ask how we as a country became so spiritually sick as to give ourselves this choice.

This will be the subject of a Precipice post I intend to write today. 

 

 

 

 

Several things can be true at once - today's edition

To wit:

The Durham report shows confirmation bias in US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies during the 2016 - 2020 period, but delivers no bombshells.

Per New York Times analysis:

Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.

It's basically an unexciting rehash, replete with mentions of figures we're familiar with: John Brennan, Carter Page, Peter Strzok, John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, etc. 

The basic story remains the same. Two things came to the FBI's attention around the same time: the matter of Hillary Clinton's email server, and the Steele Dossier. The FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails was considered preliminary, but the one into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was full throttle from the get-go. There was a lot of poor judgement all around, but very little that constituted prosecutable offense.

Trump and the Trumpists are already nonetheless howling that this is the "crime of the century" and that some kind of "long knives of the deep state" is the country's most pressing problem. 

Of course, the Very Stable Genius is trying to tie to, or at least draw parallels to, the whole matter with which the Durham investigation dealt, the supposedly rigged 2020 election, which was not rigged.

The post-American press also has confirmation bias and is using the report's prevalence in the current news cycle to deflect from very real questions about the Biden family.

Per Holman Jenkins's column today in the Wall Street Journal:

Even so, the news blackout can’t conceal the suspicious details unearthed by congressional investigators about Biden family bank accounts, shell companies and transfers from shady foreign actors. It can’t conceal that Mr. Biden may owe his presidency to a de facto U.S. intelligence agency operation to bamboozle voters about his son’s laptop.

That said, Trump's call to Ukrainian president Zelensky was clearly extortion - a conveyance of the message that already-Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine was contingent upon Zelensky helping to dig up Biden dirt - and it was right for Congress to impeach Trump over it.

The proliferation of special counsels and Congressional investigations over the past few years does not speak well for how we value integrity as a country.

Most Republicans either still drool over Donald Trump, are afraid of him, or are going to be willing to vote for him for president again because they can't see beyond the binary-choice framework.

Democrats show no sign of even easing up on their priorities: climate alarmism, identity politics militancy and wealth redistribution.

Partisans of both the Left and the Trumpist right will get all wonky about particulars of the Durham report's conclusions in order to play gotcha and keep us from seeing the spiritual-level root of our unhealthiness as a nation.

The Mar-a-Lago FBI raid - initial thoughts

 Not a lot, really, because anything anybody is currently saying is a silly hot take at best and more likely dangerously inflammatory provocation.

So not much from LITD until we have some notion of what the FBI was able to gather from this action.

I will point out that FBI chief Christopher Wray was appointed by Trump and every Republican Senator who voted on his confirmation voted in the affirmative.

But Fox News, Newsmax, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump look equal parts childish with their whataboutism (Hunter Biden's laptop! Bengazi!) and reckless in the extreme with their civil war intimations. One also sees a lot of America-is-now-a-banana-republic talk this morning as well.

Deep breath, everybody. Wait until something solid is known so you don't squander your credibility.

Putting Deep-State-ism in perspective

One of the most unnerving aspects of polemical discourse is when it's approached on the level of latching onto arcane bits of behavior by public figures in an attempt to point out some supposedly pivotal moment in national history. Players in web-of-intrigue scenarios are reduced to villain and hero stick figures whose nefariousness or nobility can be discerned from some phone calls they made, or emails they sent, or meetings they took.

This is why I have not had much to say about the whole bag of snakes that comprises the Mueller report and subsequent revelations such as Susan Rice's January 17, 2017 email to herself.

If one has to go to such lengths as proclaiming, "Tonight I will show you that this newly unearthed chain of emails is a bombshell the likes of which American history has never seen!," it casts a great deal of doubt on the depth of one's basic convictions about the life of the nation generally.

In other words, let's not get all shook about this, okay?

Look, it doesn't take someone with extraordinary powers of perceptivity to see that Hillary Clinton was a power-mad presidential aspirant for decades, driven by a sort of feminist determination to prove she had at least the chops for the job that her husband, whom she has always disliked intensely, had, as well as more basic motives such as greed and getting a kick out of having as many people under her thumb as possible. She's also always been quite arrogant, which is why she continued to conduct official correspondence on her private server even after she'd become Secretary of State.

It's also obvious that the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch was fishy as hell, especially given the timing.

There's probably a lot in all of it that should send some folks to the hoosegow, but is it really worth tying up the resources of the current iteration of the Justice Department to keep pursuing it all?

Now, the July 5, 2016 presser that Comey gave continues to perplex me. He spent fifteen minutes outlining why the DoJ ought to prosecute Madame Bleachbit, only to wrap things up by recommending that they not.

Comey's perplexing generally. Prior to all this, he'd had a reputation as an uncontroversial straight shooter. He helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. He stood by severely weakened John Ashcroft, who was in an intensive care unit with gall bladder surgery complications and was being pressured to continue the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Bush himself was impressed enough by this display of integrity and loyalty to make changes to the program. Comey was a registered Republican until recently.

And then came all the events looked at by the Mueller investigative team.

It's pretty clear that there was a clique within the DoJ / FBI that had it in for Donald Trump once he became the Republican presidential nominee. You don't have to do too deep of a dive to see that Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe thought it would be horrible if Donald Trump became president, and conducted themselves professionally driven by that sentiment. The FISA warrants, the Steele dossier and the role of Fusion GPS - all shady as hell.

Then there's the role of Michael Flynn. Was he set up? A pretty solid case can be made that he was. Of course, the overheated types would chime in with, "Hell, yes, he was! They ruined the life of a distinguished civil servant!"

Now, let us remember that he did tell a falsehood about his Russia contacts, and he was a paid foreign agent of both Turkey and Russia. In the hand-off-the-baton meeting Obama and Trump had in January 2017, Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn as national security adviser:

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

The overall point here is that palace-intrigue scenarios are the wrong places to go looking for answers to the question of whether someone is fit to be us president or not.

My reasons for vehemently opposing Barack Obama did not have much to do with the scandals that arose during his time in office, even the "scandal" Trump calls Obamagate. My problem with Obama, my moniker for whom here at LITD during his time as a figure of central focus was The Most Equal Comrade, was that he'd been a hard-core leftist pretty much all his life. His mentors were the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. He thought America was fundamentally unfair and needed to be transformed. I'm far more disturbed by the plain old policy-level stuff he was able to get enacted - think the "Affordable" Care act, EPA regulations, the JCPOA - than scandal-type matters.

And my reasons for vehemently opposing Donald Trump are that he is solely motivated by self-glorification. He is a phony. He doesn't care about the Republican Party, much less conservatism. He doesn't have the slightest grasp of the foundational principles of Western civilization. He gives lip service to Christianity for entirely self-serving reasons. He doesn't read anything, from briefing papers to novels to works of philosophy or history. He has no depth. He has a track record of sybaritic abandon that I suspect he's till proud of. He's petty and vindictive. He demands loyalty but does not return it.

So I don't consider this whole re-dredging of the web of shenanigans discussed above a front-burner issue. The existence of a so-called Deep State is not among the five most pressing issues on our nation's plate at the moment.

Don't fixate on the shiny object. Reserve most of your focus for the pandemic, the economic situation, the leftist agenda of the Democrats and Donald Trump's obvious unfitness to be president.

"A choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters"

Post-America has been subjected to a sort of rolling news story for nearly four years now. It's morphed from early rumblings of certain Trump campaign associates being involved in shady dealings, to government investigative bodies proceeding on the basis of a patently ridiculous dossier about supposed lurid behavior by Trump on a trip to Moscow to Comey's evolution from a nice, normal career law enforcement guy to an enigmatic figure whose motives were hard to figure out to a flat-out get-Trump zealot, to the Mueller report's firm conclusion that Trump was not in cahoots with Russian snoops, to the revelation shortly after the report's release that Trump was, however, using a shadow Ukraine-policy team to use the instruments of official power to obtain political advantage, to the resultant impeachment trial we're living through today.

The whole thing is quite arcane, as is generally the case in palace-intrigue stories, and I've not mentioned nearly all the players who have shaped the twists and turns along the way.

What's been needed is a succinct-yet-comprehensive overview, and Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake has provided just that in a Commentary article entitled "The FBI Scandal." He calls it that, for that agency's role in the arc of this whole matter, going clear back to that enigmatic James Comey's taking fifteen minutes at a July 2016 presser to outline the reasons why the Department of Justice should indict Hillary Clinton, only to conclude by saying he would not recommend such an indictment.

The whole thing is, in a sense, an inquiry into what motivates people in highly charged environments to conduct themselves as they do.

I'll provide snippets here, but I recommend reading the whole piece.

He starts by using a particular Trump tweet to illustrate the phenomenon of Trump letting loose with a boneheaded utterance that actually has a kernel of truth at its core:

Donald Trump published the most consequential tweet of his presidency on March 4, 2017. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” the chief executive pondered. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The response from Trump’s opposition was outrage. The Washington Post fact checker gave it four Pinocchios. The director of the FBI, James Comey, rebuked Trump and said such a thing had never happened. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, assured NBC’s Meet the Press that no warrants had been issued in 2016 to surveil members of the Trump campaign.

In a narrow sense, the pushback against Trump’s tweet was correct; Trump himself was never personally the target of an FBI wiretap. In any case, the president doesn’t order such a thing; the FBI applies for a warrant to eavesdrop on Americans from a secret court. No such warrant was issued to bug the president’s offices.

But the furious denials were misleading. To paraphrase a cliché from 2016, Trump’s tweet should have been taken seriously, not literally. Obama did not tap Trump’s phones. But his FBI did spy on Trump’s campaign. That fact is no longer in dispute. The question is whether the FBI was justified in treating the Trump campaign itself as a suspect in this crime against the 2016 election.

The answer is messy. A comprehensive survey of all available information about the matter shows there were grounds in the summer of 2016 for American intelligence and law-enforcement officials at the FBI to turn their attention to the peculiar behavior of some Trump campaign advisers. 

But the FBI sullied its own inquiry by imparting credence to this mythical Moscow-hotel-room episode described in the Steele dossier, "information so spurious that even liberal news organizations . . . wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole."

And

[e]ven after the bureau had good reason to doubt its veracity, it didn’t share the exculpatory information it had uncovered—not with the public, not with the courts, and not even with the Justice Department lawyers who were supposed to check its work.

The result was a debacle. What had been teased as the greatest espionage scandal in American history—a U.S. president conspiring with Russia to steal an election—today should be seen as a cautionary tale about the fallibility of our lawmen and spies, the credulity of our press, and the hubris and hysteria of Trump’s resistance.

Lake then divides the main body of his article into four sections representing the phases of this whole matter: Crossfire Hurricane, the Steele dossier, the aftermath of the 2016 election, Schiff and Comey, and Mueller and beyond.

I'd like to focus on the Comey and Schiff section, because it raises this question about the motive's for people's courses of action and how they come by them. Of all the figures in this story, Comey and Schiff may be the most enigmatic. As I say, there was a time when Comey was regarded as a straight-shooting professional, but all the twists and turns of the past few years have reduced him to a book-hawking proselytizer untethered to any institutional support. It's also true of Schiff. What in his background would indicate that he would become the rabid spearhead of the impeachment push?

Schiff was a fairly moderate Democrat until 2017. As the committee’s ranking minority member, he had worked cooperatively with Nunes on the committee on a number of issues—from legislation on the authorization for the War on Terror to oversight of the National Security Agency process for unmasking U.S. citizens caught up in wiretaps of overseas targets. Schiff ended up supporting Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, but he did so with prudent reservations.

After Trump was elected, Schiff turned into a cyber-age Joe McCarthy. The latest example came in November, in a report to Congress on impeachment, when he published phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Nunes himself. He obtained those records through subpoenas of shady Ukrainian Americans and the president’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. Nonetheless, that was an extraordinary breach of a journalist’s privacy, not to mention decorum. The fact that most journalists didn’t rush to Solomon’s defense—because they disliked the pro-Trump thrust of Solomon’s work—was a sign of how deeply the Resistance mindset had penetrated the mainstream.

Back in 2017, Schiff also hyped Steele’s allegations. At a hearing on March 20 of that year, he repeated most of the ex-spy’s allegations in his opening statement. He asked openly whether Page, Flynn, Roger Stone, and others in Trump’s orbit were all part of an elaborate quid pro quo to relax sanctions against Russia in exchange for assistance during the 2016 election. Schiff was careful to say he did not yet know these things to be true—which made raising the question a perfect example of irresponsible innuendo. But because Schiff was the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, his innuendo appeared to be informed by state secrets. Over time, Schiff repeated these charges—particularly against Page—and he has never apologized for issuing them. Indeed, after Mueller’s report found no evidence of this conspiracy, Schiff then suggested that Mueller had never delved into the counterintelligence dimensions of the Trump-Russia investigation. Like all conspiracy theorists, Schiff was suggesting that the failure to find a conspiracy was proof that the investigation must go on.

When Schiff was not working as a prosecutor of the Trump campaign, he was serving as the FBI’s defense counsel. In early 2018, Nunes pressed the Justice Department to declassify a Republican memo that first flagged the FISA abuse that Horowitz’s report detailed in December 2019. In response, Schiff and his staff prepared their own memo. It said FBI officials would have been “remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page.”

After the Horowitz report’s release, Schiff has said that he was unaware of much of the information contained in it. The FBI and Justice Department leadership also objected to the Nunes memo in 2018, saying it painted an inaccurate picture of the investigation. But Schiff’s job on the Intelligence Committee was and is to perform oversight of those institutions. Instead, he went along with a cover-up, even as the chairman of the committee at the time was uncovering abuse that Horowitz would confirm in greater and more alarming detail.

Of course, Trump tribalists are not interested in the question of Schiff's devolution. Myself, I'm just naturally curious about how people come by a recent behavior pattern that their pasts provide little or no indication of. How the level of character and personality can shed light on a person's change of demeanor is just plain interesting to me. Not so the Trumpists. To them, he's just an obstacle to the Very Stable Genius's "plan" for making America great again.

And then we get to the Ukraine phase of this mess. Lake explains why Dems are unlikely to peel off any Republican Senators in the current trial:

Is it any wonder that no Republican voted to impeach Trump in the House on the Ukraine matter? This cannot just be explained away as political and moral cowardice. It’s a response to the failure of the party leading the impeachment to acknowledge the falsehood of its initial conspiracy theory about Russia.

He also summarily handles this business about a monolithic "deep state":

But it also must be said that this debacle is not evidence of a deep-state coup, as so many on the right have alleged. There are two important reasons for this. First, there is no singular “deep state.” Horowitz also showed in his report that there were FBI agents at the New York field office who were rooting for Trump. Certainly the key deep-state figure here would be James Comey—and if he were, why would he have mortally damaged the campaign of Trump’s rival 10 days before the election by briefly reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server? In any case, the “deep-state” theory suggests there is a governmental hive mind, an unelected bureaucracy that runs things while officials like Comey sit on top, clueless and imagining themselves powerful.
You can see how the “deep-state” theory might let the actual saboteurs off the hook. Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and others had a mix of motivations for making the decisions that they did. To say they were acting on behalf of an unelected bureaucracy is to absolve them.

The deep-state theory also leads those who espouse it to overreact. If the institutional rot is this profound, then why not eliminate the FBI and CIA altogether? But that’s a bit like calling for the abolition of a police department after a brutality scandal. The country needs spies and lawmen to protect us against real foreign threats. The problem with the Trump-Russia investigation is that at the moment the investigators were receiving exculpatory evidence, the false collusion theory became the hottest story in the world. And that happened because the most important evidence the FBI leadership believed was true was also briefed to media.

Terms like "deep state" and "swamp" make tidy shorthand for Trumpism sloganeers, but the truth is somewhat more nuanced.

The two-things-can-be-true-at-once principle applies here. Trump was indeed an entirely different kind of president than the nation had ever had, and by no means completely in a good way. But he wasn't a mastermind of a complex web of nefariousness. He's not bright enough to fill a role like that. On the other hand, elements within the FBI were so focused on that fact of his unprecedented nature that they lost sight of the fact that he was elected in a free and fair fashion.

What's it all doing to our nation?

That folly has deformed our politics. Now, in 2020, voters are faced with a choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters. Instead of saving America from Trump, the Resistance may have reelected him.

What's going on in the Beltway is emblematic of the attempts on the part of the various factions (and there are several within the left and right sides of our ideological landscape, as well as the basic polarization between the two sides) to make the case for opposing factions being so evil that no legitimacy must be conferred upon them, that they must be driven from the public square into dark corners where they cannot impede a given faction's agenda.

All this has my thought processes churning. Are there signs one can detect when one first suspects that someone is no longer operating from any set of principles, but rather from a pure lust for power?

A few thoughts about the IG report

First, LITD's broadest conclusion: As is so often the case in this fallen world, there is no unassailable good guy.

The FBI has exhibited squirrelliness going back at least to James Comey's July 2016 presser in which he spent about fifteen minutes enumerating reasons why Hillary Clinton ought to have been indicted for her email-server recklessness, and then concluded by saying he wasn't going to recommend indictment to the DoJ. There are those Peter Stzrok - Lisa Page emails that make it plain that some FBI personnel did indeed have a burning desire to do whatever they could to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.

Now, along comes this IG report (which is going to be followed by Durham's report when he's done with his investigation) that says that there was no political agenda. It concludes that, while there was no nefarious intent on the FBI's part (in fact, the agency had an "authorized purpose"), the Bureau sure was incompetent. 17 errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications. Big-time reliance on the just plain bizarre Steele dossier. Bruce Ohr meeting with Steele without authorization. Ohr's wife Nellie working for Fusion GPS, the firm hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to sniff around and find something fishy about the Trump campaign.

Adam Schiff's February 2018 memo  now looks like a flimsy partisan attempt to portray the FBI as having done a stellar job. And remember that Schiff's memo was a response to a memo by Devin Nunes, who is a tribalist of the opposite stripe (pro-Trump instead of anti).

Bill Barr, who is the one who has sent John Durham on his mission, seems a little too keen to blast the IG report, given that an Attorney General's interest is supposed to be in impartially upholding the law. Then again, Durham is using a wider array of sources, and may truly be able to refute the IG report's portrayal of the FBI as merely bumbling.

Okay, that's it. These ever-mounting layers of investigation may establish certain facts for the record, but they are not going to have significant impact on the unfolding political events of the coming year. With a rocking economy and a field of Democratic presidential candidates consisting entirely of radical yet entirely unexciting leftists, the smart money is on another four years of the Very Stable Genius bringing embarrassment to post-America and making a train wreck of its foreign policy.

Re: the charge of weaponizing government: That shoe seems to better fit the folks currently waxing indignant over the Mueller report aftermath

As Jim Geraghty of National Review says, it's no longer a conspiracy theory when the New York Times is doing a deep dive on Most-Equal-Comrade-period FBI spying on the Very Stable Genius's presidential campaign.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist offers ten takeaways from the NYT story. They are

1. FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign.
2. The NYT and the "mainstream" media in general are terrified about the upcoming Inspector General's report about it and wanted to get out front.
3. There's still no evidence of collusion with Russia/
4. Four Trump affiliates were spied on.
5. There were wiretaps and at least one spy.
6. The government's been leaking information about its own informant.
7. The story has some basic factual errors.
8. The view of certain FBI personnel that an "insurance policy" was needed holds up even though they thought a Trump victory was a remote possibility.
9. The story tried to soft-pedal the spying claim as much as possible.
10. Politicized intelligence is a thing.

I would like to use this occasion to say that there are some more conservatives, who I have respected a great deal, and with whom I share a distaste for much about the Very Stable Genius, that they are starting to sound like the first wave of those who let that assume front-and-center status among their concerns, the ones who cast their bona fides to the wind and became - well, leftists, or at least softies for leftism. Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol. This second wave had not been going that far and had continued to argue against signing on to the Trump cult following from an unreservedly conservative standpoint. But in the last day or so, I've seen a lot of these people on Twitter start to make excuses for spying. "The-FBI-would-have-been-remiss-not-to" and so forth.

No. Without a clearly articulated charge, and enough probable cause to quickly amass some evidence (which, per the Mueller report, they were unable to do), we set a precedent for law-enforcement tactics with regard to presidential campaigns that cannot come to good.

Now, with all that said, it does look like this is something to dig into:

Ukraine's embassy wrote that a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider reached out in 2016 seeking dirt on President Trump's team, according to a bombshell new reportThursday that further fueled Republican allegations that Democrats were the ones improperly colluding with foreign agents during the campaign.

Ambassador Valeriy Chaly said DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa pushed for Ukraine's then-President Petro Poroshenko to mention Paul Manafort's ties to Ukraine publicly during a visit to the U.S., and sought detailed financial information on his dealings in the country, The Hill reported. At the time, Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman.

"The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later," Chaly said in a statement released by the Ukrainian embassy. "We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter."

Chaly continued: "All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C."

As Hemingway and others - the WSJ's Kimberly Strassel comes to mind - have said, that's the reason for the circus in the Senate this week. There's absolute terror about where the real action is regarding collusion.

Memo to the leftists in Congress and the media: enough with the feigned case of the vapors over Barr saying the FBI spied on the Trump campaign

Pelosi, Blumenthal, Schumer and Schiff really need to knock it off. The FBI quite clearly spied:

It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau's application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and "the Russian government's attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election." Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.

Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page's electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page's emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign. 

So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap "spying"? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.

That alone is enough to back up Barr's remark. But it is also known that the FBI engaged at least one informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to penetrate the Trump campaign. The New York Times recently reported, "Agents involved in the Russia investigation asked Mr. Halper, an American academic who teaches in Britain, to gather information on Mr. Page and George Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser."

Halper went beyond Page and Papadopoulos, also contacting and seeking information from Trump campaign aide Sam Clovis. "It was not clear whether Mr. Halper had the FBI's blessing to contact Mr. Clovis," the Times said.

The Halper case is more evidence that "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. At least in the cases of Page and Papadopoulos, the information gathering was done by an informant engaged by the FBI.

Was the FBI justified in spying? Consider that the FISA application was based in part on the Steele dossier.

In a saner world, this would be a huge deal.

Wednesday roundup

Just no. Who in the hell within the Hoosier BMV signed off on this?

Hoosiers will soon have a third option for gender on their driver’s license or state ID card.

The Times of Northwest Indiana reports that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles will be offering a ‘non-specified’ gender option to residents. The ID will be marked as an ‘X’ for those who identify as neither male or female.

Those looking to apply for the designation must provide a birth certificate or a signed physician’s statement confirming a permanent gender change.

At least five other states offer a non-binary option on driver’s licenses.

Richard Fernandez' piece at PJ Media on how grim things have gotten in Venezuela, and how post-American millennials still get excited over socialism even with such an apocalyptic picture of its end product in their faces, is jarring reading.

Great Ben Shapiro tweet:

An electronics company manufactured the microphone into which AOC is speaking. Why shouldn't they be held responsible for the stupid crap she says into the microphone?

Sarah Lawrence College is yet another example of a school administration taking exactly the wrong approach in dealing with a campus group of snot-nosed brats. If these punks with crania full of dog vomit weren't demanding anything beyond detergent pods, it might be possible to write them off as too ridiculous to have any impact. But, as you'll see, they are savages. And the school president is a shameful coward:

And here are the first three demands in their, ahem, laundry list:

 

1. Sarah Lawrence must commit to actualizing the value that housing is a human right.
   The College must provide winter housing to students at no charge. This housing must include a communal kitchen with dry goods from the food pantry available for all students.In the extreme case that housing cannot be provided to students during break due to housing probation, the school must provide a list of local low-cost, free, and/or accessible housing options for students.
2. The College will designate housing with a minimum capacity for thirty students of color that is not contingent on the students expending any work or labor for the college. This housing option will be permanent and increase in space and size based on interest.
3. All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty and staff.

So housing is a human right and thus, students should be provided free housing (demand #1) without working for it (demand #2). Students should also be given free detergent and fabric softener (demand #3) so maybe this is also a human right? Or maybe it’s an emanation from the penumbra of the right not to smell like marijuana and patchouli oil? They’ll work all of that out later. But for now, it’s simple: Tide pods for the people!

It’s worth mentioning that Sarah Lawrence College is one of the most expensive schools in the country with an annual tuition of $52,600 as of last year (ranking it 20th nationwide).

All of this would be amusing if it weren’t for some more disturbing demands that pop up later in the list. The protesters make it clear they want professors who are in strict ideological agreement with the principles of intersectionality:

• We demand that the College offer classes that embody intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and address the racial diversity of the LGBTQ+ community instead of centering whiteness.
• The aforementioned classes must be taught by professors who are a part of the culture they are teaching about.

Then the group singles out a conservative professor who wrote something they didn’t like. The group demands that he be put up for tenure review before a group made of of their members (despite that fact that he already has tenure) and demands he issue a public apology [Emphasis in the original]:

On October 16, 2018, politics professor Samuel Abrams published an op-ed entitled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators” in The New York Times. The article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams…We demand that Samuel Abrams’ position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color. In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students, whilst apologizing for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women.

As Reason’s Robby Soave has pointed out, professor Abrams office door was vandalized after his article appeared in the NY Times:

Abrams’ office door was vandalized on October 16, hours after the op-ed’s publication. The perpetrators posted a sign on the door that read, “Our right to exist is not ‘ideological,’ asshole,” and was signed “transsexual fag.” Another flyer demanded that he apologize to residence life staff and the director of campus diversity, students of color, queer students, trans students, and other marginalized persons. Multiple messages instructed Abrams to “quit,” and one told him to “go teach somewhere else, maybe Charlottesville.”…

Several of Abrams’ colleagues met with [president Cristle Collins] Judd to discuss the vandalism and express their view that such acts could not be tolerated. Judd agreed, but did not pledge to take any further actions. These professors thought she seemed scared that the students might hold more protests, creating a public relations disaster, according to Abrams.

Professor Abrams spoke with President Judd to discuss the situation during which she told him he had created a “hostile work environment.” When they met in person, Judd suggested Abrams was back in the job market, despite the fact that he is a tenured professor. This is all starting to seem very reminiscent of what happened at Evergreen State College. President Judd may want to look into Evergreen’s subsequent enrollment numbers before she commits fully to backing the protesters.

Still, muckety-muck playpens for the unhinged colleges and universities are seen by some as essential to a worthwhile life. Jim Geraghty at NRO on the scandal involving two TV celebrities and a number of other wealthy west-coasters using outrageously unethical means to get their kids into prestigious schools.

Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?

We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

A line that appears a little further up his piece is as apt here as there:

If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!

His essential point:

Sure, all of those wealthy parents indicted yesterday stand accused of breaking the law. But they were also pretty obviously responding to incentives. If a society turns getting into one of the top 25 schools in the country into the Willie Wonka ticket, the Holy Grail, the alchemical formula — the one thing that parents believe will ensure their children will have a happy, financially comfortable, and successful life — then people will go to absurd and illegal lengths to get it.

Why didn't the FBI go after Madame Bleachbit in 2016?

 

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted under questioning from Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe last summer that "the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information," the congressman alleged in a social media post late Tuesday, citing a newly unearthed transcript of Page's closed-door testimony.

Page and since-fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, who were romantically involved, exchanged numerous anti-Trump text messages in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, and Republicans have long accused the bureau of political bias. But Page's testimony was perhaps the most salient evidence yet that the Justice Department improperly interfered with the FBI's supposedly independent conclusions on Clinton's criminal culpability, Ratcliffe alleged.

"So let me if I can, I know I’m testing your memory," Ratcliffe began as he questioned Page under oath, according to a transcript excerpt he posted on Twitter. "But when you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —"

Page interrupted: "That is correct," as Ratcliffe finished his sentence, " -- bring a case based on that."

The document dump was part of a major release by House Judiciary Committee Republicans, who on Tuesday released hundreds of pages of transcripts from last year's closed-door interview with Page, revealing new details about the bureau's controversial internal discussions regarding an “insurance policy” against then-candidate Donald Trump. Fox News has previously reviewed portions of Page's testimony.

Timothy P. Carney (whose new book Alienated America is on my want-to-read-soon list) at the Washington Examiner on the upside of Tucker Carlson's remarks when Carlson was a guest on Bubba the Love Sponge years ago:

. . . the upside is that now we’re allowed to discuss the real harms of flippant attitudes towards sex and the sexualization of women.

If you tried to bring up those issues eight years ago, you would have been chased off the stage as a backwards prude dedicated to sexual repression. Consider that very recently — before we had a president who bragged about sexual assault — we had a president whose top asset on the campaign trail was rapper Jay-Z. Somehow, this seemed okay at the time. 

“You know I thug em, f--k em, love em, leave em,” Obama’s favorite fundraiser explained in "Big Pimpin,'" “Cause I don't f--kin need em."

"Put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya,” Obama’s good friend Jay-Z explained on another occasion. 

The Obama White House also elevated vulgar sex columnist Dan Savage to be a crusader against bullying. Savage’s entire shtick was sexual depravity. 

Even today, our press corps accepts as one of its colleagues a White House correspondent from Playboy, literally a smut publication.

Pornographic depravity, reducing sexuality to materialistic hedonism — in a word, debauchery — has been aggressively tolerated by the media elites. Chastise that debauchery and risk getting branded a prude. Hell, social scientists have even promulgated bogus studies arguing that sexual conservatism kills kids.

But now that someone has dragged up Tucker’s old bawdy remarks, we’re allowed, finally, to speak the truth: Modern American culture needs to treat sex more seriously. Our public discourse is far too lewd, and its lewdness is detrimental.

The irony is that much of Tucker’s current critique of today’s elites lead us towards this truth. The Left’s elites are constantly bashing the morality of the 1950s traditional family and small town, and constantly attacking the institutions (most importantly church institutions) that preserve, defend, and build the family and community. Then those same elites go home to Chevy Chase and Park Slope for supper with their intact families and bustling Little Leagues. They retire in the evening to the life they spent their workday undermining for others.

These are the elites Carlson is dedicated to challenging. But it’s not their conservative lifestyles that need challenging. It’s their unconservative assault on the norms and institutions that have historically helped the regular guy make good life decisions.

So here’s a salutary, contrarian, and provocative move for Carlson: Apologize, but not on the Left’s terms. Instead, apologize for appearing to endorse sexual licentiousness that violates moral law. Maybe begin by saying that sex is properly reserved for marriage, and so the jokes he made about a teenager sleeping with his teacher were immoral. Also, grant that the talk he indulged of teenage lesbians was indecent in seeming to endorse a hedonistic concept of sexuality.

Great Ben Shapiro column at the Daily Wire entitled "Government Isn't the Social Fabric." This is something that occasionally comes up in LITD comment threads. It's sometimes asserted that "government" is an interchangeable term with "society" or "the people." It is not. They are distinct critters and that distinction is crucial to always maintain.

 

 

Where the real collusion has been all along

From The Hill today:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.

That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firmFusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.

The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.

The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.

Baker was interviewed by lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday. Sources declined to divulge his testimony, other than to say it confirmed other evidence about the contact between the Perkins Coie law firm and the FBI.

The sources also said Baker’s interview broke new ground both about the FBI’s use of news media in 2016 and 2017 to further the Trump case and about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s conversations in spring 2017 regarding possible use of a body wire to record Trump.

“The interview was one of the most productive we had and it opened up many new investigative leads,” one source said.

Another said Baker could not answer some questions about FBI media contacts, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department inspector general into alleged illegal leaks, during and after the election, about the Trump collusion probe and other matters.

These revelations illustrate anew how much the FBI and Justice Department have withheld from the public about their collaboration and collusion with clearly partisan elements of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Fusion and Steele, that were trying to defeat Trump.

The growing body of evidence that the FBI used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion case.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep documents secret.

Ryan has said he believes the declassification will uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.

And Meadows told The Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump campaign.

“There’s a strong suggestion that confidential human sources actually taped members within the Trump campaign,” Meadows told Hill.TV hosts Krystal Ball and Ned Ryun.

Baker, like Page, Stzrok, McCabe and, of course the enigmatic James Comey, is now gone from the FBI. (He's at the left-of-center Brookings Institution.) But the repair job left to the agency by these people is momentous.