Some key architects of the softening of the US stance toward Iran

 Talk about a must-read.

This is one I'll be excerpting generously from, both for the facts and for Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood's understanding of their significance.

It's a story, like so many modern investigative pieces are, of emails and meetings:

. . . a handful of Americans and Europeans . . . were, by the looks of their emails, groomed by the Iranian government to promote conciliatory policies toward Tehran. According to reports by Semafor and Iran International, Iranian foreign-policy bigwigs such as Mohammad Javad Zarif identified think-tank staffers of Iranian origin, sponsored meetings with them, and used the group to coordinate and spread messages helpful to Iran. The emails, which date from 2014, suggest that those in their group—the “Iran Experts Initiative”—reacted to Iranian outreach in a range of ways, including cautious engagement and active coordination. The Iranian government then paid expenses related to this group’s internal meetings; cultivated its members with “access to high-ranking officials and extended invitations to visit Tehran,” according to Iran International; and later gloated over how effectively it had used its experts to propagate the Islamic Republic’s positions.

It would be interesting to know why Mr. Malley lost his security clearance:

The government had reason to gloat. It picked excellent prospects, some of whom sucked up to Tehran over email and echoed its negotiating positions publicly. A few of them ended up in and near positions of prominence in the U.S. government through connections to Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand in Democratic administrations. Malley, who led Obama teams focusing on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq, is known to favor negotiation with unfriendly governments in the region and to scorn the “maximum pressure” approach that replaced nuclear negotiation when Donald Trump entered office. Earlier this year, Malley lost his security clearance for reasons still not explained, and he is on leave from government service. (He did not reply to a request for comment.)

Wood then introduces us to two key figures, Ariane Tabatabai and Ali Vaez:

One of Tehran’s targets, Ariane M. Tabatabai, joined the Biden administration’s Iran team with Malley and is now the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Another, Ali Vaez, formerly worked as an aide to Malley on Iran issues. That is the disturbing upshot to the reports: Witting participants in an Iranian influence operation have been close colleagues with those setting the Biden administration’s Iran policy, or have even served in government and set it themselves.

Wood has a few choice words for the Biden administration's attempt to soft-pedal this:

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, dismissed the reports as “an account of things that happened almost a decade ago, most of which involved people that do not currently work for the government.” I assume he meant the U.S. government. Anyway, the accusations are serious and can’t be batted away by the suggestion that 2014 was a long time ago.

One sign of the gravity of these accusations is the unconvincing attempts to minimize them. The commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said opponents of Tehran had smeared the analysts merely because they “maintained dialogue and exchanged views with Iranian officials.” He went on to note Semafor’s links to Qatar and Iran International’s to Iran’s archenemy, Saudi Arabia. The journalist Laura Rozen tweeted that the stories were “McCarthyistic” and targeted blameless analysts “because they try to talk to everybody and because of their Iranian heritage.”

Defending the emails as maintaining “dialogue” so ludicrously misrepresents the accusation that I am forced to conclude that these defenders find the actual accusation indefensible. No one is alarmed that Americans of Iranian descent are talking with Iranian-government officials. What’s alarming is the servile tone of the Iranian American side of that dialogue, and the apparent lack of concern that the Iranian government views them as tools for its political ends. Rozen and Batmanghelidj don’t dispute the emails’ authenticity. Comparing the Iranian influence operation to supposed Qatari and Saudi ones is, in turn, tacit admission that the emails are probably real.

Cultivating a source is fine. But any self-respecting analyst, journalist, or politician wants to be the one cultivating, not the one being cultivated. And mutual back-scratching can erode one’s integrity and independence. That is why the Iranians do it: to turn influential and otherwise smart people into their pets, and eventually condition them to salivate at the issuance of a visa, or an email from Javad Zarif. Responding to these overtures is fine, too. You can butter up an official (“Your Excellency”), maybe grovel a little for a visa. But the writing itself, and the analysis behind it, must be independent to the point that even the most cynical observer could not accuse you of altering your views to please a subject.

By this standard, some of the reported exchanges between the Iran Experts and their convenor are mortifying. After the report, Vaez, a deputy to Malley, admitted on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d sent a full draft of an op-ed to the Iranian government. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” his email to the Iranians read. If I sent a source a draft of a story, I would be fired. (I asked The National Interest, where the article appeared, if its policy also forbids sharing drafts. The editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, did not reply.) Sending questions is laudable. Checking facts is standard practice. But a magazine article is not a Wiki whose contributors are also its subjects. Sharing a full draft of an article, whether for approval or just improvement, makes the recipient an unacknowledged co-author.

It keeps getting smellier:

Vaez later pledged to the Iranian foreign minister to “help you in any way,” by proposing “a public campaign” to promote Iran’s views on its nuclear program. He offered these services “as an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty.” Vaez, like his former boss Malley, has written widely about Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, for magazines including this one. (Attempts to reach Vaez through his employer to verify the authenticity of the emails and their context were not answered by the time of publication.)

According to the same reports, Adnan Tabatabai, CEO and founder of the German think tank CARPO, “offered to prepare articles for Iran’s foreign ministry.” “We as a group [could] work on an essay,” he suggested. “It could, for example, be published under a former official’s name.” Tabatabai, the report says, worked as a contractor for Malley’s International Crisis Group. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ariane Tabatabai (who is not related to Adnan) wrote to her contact at the Iranian foreign ministry and asked his advice on whether to work with officials in Saudi Arabia and attend a meeting in Israel. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she asked Mostafa Zahrani of the foreign ministry. She made clear that she personally “had no inclination to go” to a workshop at Ben-Gurion University, but she thought it might be better if she went, rather than “some Israeli,” such as Emily Landau of Tel Aviv University. Zahrani told Tabatabai to look into Saudi Arabia and avoid Israel. She thanked him for the guidance, and she went to Tehran herself in 2014. In another email to the Iranians, she noted that she had recently published an article arguing that Tehran should be given more leeway to spin up centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

Better me than "some Israeli," she was thinking. And now she works at the Defense Department. 

As Wood notes, we must bet careful not to wax hyperbolic about just how close Tabatabai and Malley are to the Iranian government. But as Lee Smith notes at Tablet, she should at least have to answer some questions under oath:

Congress needs to demand the Biden White House make Malley and Tabatabai available to testify immediately. It must also press to interview the security officials who buried evidence of Tabatabai’s covert activities, putting her in a position to endanger the lives of American civilians and special forces operators. It’s time to find out why the interests—and now the personnel—of the Iranian “death to America” regime intersect so frequently with those of America’s own ruling party.

Especially given the fact that Iran, at a meeting a week ago in Beirut, was the party that gave the go-ahead to Hamas to unleash hell on Israel.  

 

 

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

The obligatory indictment post

 Actually, that title up there may not be truly indicative of how I'm approaching this. I actually have a lot to say and feel that some of it ought to be expressed colorfully. 

Bullet points may be and effective way of systematizing my thoughts. Let's start in.

• Jack Smith has a reputation as a top-notch prosecutor. The seven charges can't be argued as being flimsy, like those brought by Alvin Bragg in New York. Smith's team interviewed everybody who was conceivably in the employ of Mar-a-Lago, and he has alternative jurors lined up for the trial in case any of the first picks starts showing signs of partisanship.
• The audiotape of the Very Stable Genius bragging to dinner guests - a writer and the writer's publisher - about a document he was showing them being classified would need a hell of a lot of context not to be incriminating. Ditto the photos of boxes in out-in-the-open places around the Mar-a-Lago house. 
• The deadly-serious nature of some documents' content - US nuclear capabilities, other countries' nuclear capabilities, a scenario for attacking Iran that Trump had Mark Milley draw up - becoming public knowledge worldwide increases US vulnerability considerably. 
• The Republican Party has confirmed its status as a pathetic and ineffective parody of a major political party, just when we sorely need a viable center-right countervailing force to the Democrats' agenda of identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution. More than ever, the Pubs are the party of cowards, nuts, and sycophants. Mike Pence, Josh Hawley, Nikki Haley, Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio are already on record as having said some variation of "the American people want to move on" or "these politically motivated long knives are the actual threat to our Republic." 
• Mainstream media focus regarding MAGA reaction seems to be focused on the really-out-there nutcase sites and commenters, but more "acceptable" Trumpist sites such as Townhall ("Here's How We Rally Around Donald Trump") and The Federalist ("Latest Trump Indictment Proves Deep State Is Trying To Rig Yet Another Election", "DOJ Declares War on 2024 With Trump Indictment Hours After Biden Bribery News") have already staked out their position. 
• We may well see a situation in which Squirrel-Hair is appearing in a courtroom and then dashing off to rallies of his drool-besotted leg-humpers. 
• His having to deal with this particular legal trouble will surely hurt him in the general election in November 2024. There will not be enough of the drool-besotted leg-humpers, even combined with Republican voters solely motivated by wanting to defeat Democrats, to drag him over the finish line, given what the public will know and have seen by then.

One more thing: Our ability to see two things as true at once (Trump is corrupt; Biden is also corrupt) is badly eroded by oh-look-a-squirrel-ism ("We should solely focus on Biden corruption!"). Those pulling that crap may be able to give themselves talks in the mirror that nearly convince them that they really believe it, but in their unguarded moments when they know their Lord is looking with laser focus at their hearts of hearts, they know they're driven by cynicism. Knowing that, don't fall for what they're peddling. 

Absolutely nothing is more important to Donald Trump than having his ring kissed - and the cost to the nation's spiritual health is dear

 Consider how he's relishing having gotten someone with this name to swear fealty:

Former President Donald Trump calls Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush - the only member of the political dynasty to publicly support him - "My Bush" as a pet name, a Trump adviser told Politico.

While Jeb Bush and former President George W. Bush, as well as their parents, former President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, have been critical of Trump, George P. Bush has publicly shown his support.

George P. Bush, who is Jeb Bush's son, recently said that he spoke Trump about the "future of Texas."

Asked about the photo George P. Bush tweeted showing his conversation with Trump, Jeb Bush told Politico: "I love my son."

Trump has publicly referred to George P. as "the only Bush who got it right," according to Politico.

"I can tell you the president enjoys the prospect of knowing how much it kills Jeb that his son has to bend the knee and kiss the ring," a Trump confidant told Politico. "Who's your daddy? Trump loves that."

Consider how successful he has been at getting several formerly principled conservatives, figures much admired in the movement and the Republican Party, to vomit up every last molecule of their self-respect. Think  the tweet from Ted Cruz  earlier this month reporting on his dinner at Mar-a-Lago, replete with a picture of the two of them beaming. It's a markedly different tone than that which he employed in 2016 to respond to Trump's attack on his wife Heidi or his reaction during the same period to Trump's strong insinuation that Cruz's father was involved in JFK's assassination. 

That one even brought out a strong reaction from another Republican Senator who has since gone all-in on the party becoming the Very Stable Genius's personal fiefdom:

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a fierce opponent of Trump, tweeted, “Any doubt left Trump is completely unhinged? His assertion Ted Cruz’s father was associated with Lee Harvey Oswald should remove ALL doubt.”

Recall that it only took minutes for Trump to say Pence lacked courage in the matter of certifying electoral votes - that is, fulfilling the vice-president's Constitutional obligation to do so:

President Trump on Wednesday slammed Vice President Mike Pence, saying he "didn’t have the courage" to decertify and return the results of the presidential election back to the states.

"Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify," Trump tweeted Wednesday. "USA demands the truth!"

And what was the second sentence out of Pence's mouth two weeks later on the tarmac at Columbus Municipal Airport? 

"Let me also take a moment to thank President Trump and Melania for all they've done to make America great," Pence went on.

And consider these words which will live on in infamy from Mitch McConnell

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday he would "absolutely" support Donald Trump if the former president won the Republican nomination in 2024.

Recall what Trump had to say about Mia Love's loss of her House seat in 2018:

"Mia Love gave me no love. And she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia," Trump said to reporters at the White House on Wednesday. 

And the newly launched investigation into the Trump business organization by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James is only gong to get more interesting as it unfolds:

Vance's office has made the most public progress, securing a Supreme Court victory to subpoena the Trump Organization's tax documents and pushing hard to flip Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer and the Trump family's bookkeeper.

Weisselberg's ex-daughter-in-law has some noteworthy insights into the corporate ethos in the Trump outfit:

Prosecutors already have the cooperation of Jennifer Weisselberg, whose marriage gave her a window into how intertwined the Trump family business is with its employees' lives. Rather than giving employees regular raises, Trump and Allen Weisselberg would offer perks like paying for apartments or children's tuition, she previously told Insider. Vance's office has subpoenaed the private school her children attend, which could allow the office to discover whether the arrangement broke tax laws.

Prosecutors already have the cooperation of Jennifer Weisselberg, whose marriage gave her a window into how intertwined the Trump family business is with its employees' lives. Rather than giving employees regular raises, Trump and Allen Weisselberg would offer perks like paying for apartments or children's tuition, she previously told Insider. Vance's office has subpoenaed the private school her children attend, which could allow the office to discover whether the arrangement broke tax laws.

Consider what kinds of personal traits impress Trump to cultivate someone's rise through the organization:

Trump hired Matthew Calamari, the company's chief operating officer, as a bodyguard in 1981 after seeing him tackle someone at the tennis US Open. Calamari's son also now has a prominent security role in the company. 

At what point do "political realities" pale in consideration to the cost to people's souls, as well as the collective soul of the nation?

Something is very spiritually sick indeed about a nation in which one of the two major political parties is still overwhelmingly in thrall to a person this devoid of admirable traits.  

There is no moving on, not as long as this is the state of affairs. Anybody whose preoccupation at this moment is "gearing up to retake the House and Senate in 2022" without purging the party they want to so retake of its rottenness has nothing to contribute to the possibility of reviving post-America from its flatlined state. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Stone pardon

He was willing to fall on the sword, because he was confident that the VSG would come through before Stone had to set foot in a correctional facility:

Stone was accused of—and convicted of—lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks matter. Since Stone himself would have been in no legal jeopardy had he told the truth, the strong inference is that he lied to protect somebody else. Just today, this very day, Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” You read that, and you blink. As the prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted: “I mean, even Tony Soprano would have used only a pay phone or burner phone to say something like this.” Stone said it on the record to one of the best-known reporters in Washington. In so many words, he seemed to imply: I could have hurt the president if I’d rolled over on him. I kept my mouth shut. He owes me.

And sure enough, Trump did owe him. Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month sentence. Roger Stone will not go to prison. Stone’s former business partner Paul Manafort is likewise keeping silent. And so the American public will likely never know what use the Russians made of the Trump polling information that Manafort shared with them. Manafort has extra reason to keep quiet, for he must feel new confidence that his pardon is coming.

A question looms: Why are Republican members of Congress not standing up and saying, "This is the bridge too far"? 

 

"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?

The obligatory Senate-trial post

This won't be lengthy, as I'm still of the view that the endgame is already etched in stone. Trump will not be convicted, and the odds are better than even that he'll be reelected.

I fully understand how pundits afflicted with Trumpism to varying degrees are continuing the witch-hunt claim, but to see Senators with resumes full of solid conservative bona fides taking the same line is dispiriting. (Ted Cruz, I'm looking at you. In fact, my respect for you took a hit when you never publicly and explicitly said, "Anybody who treats my wife and father like that can go to Hell.")

On the other hand, Democrats have irreparably tainted the case that could have been made for Trump's impeachment, due to their inability to accept the legitimacy of 2016's outcome:

To Democrats, having Trump in office is the problem. Getting him out of office, by any means necessary, is the solution. Be it impeachment, the 25th Amendment, forcing a resignation, or beating him in an election, they simply want him gone. Even crazy talk like Elizabeth Warren’s trashing of the Constitution’s means of electing a president gets a hearing because Democrats will go to any length to achieve a fantasy of not having Trump in the White House.

The phrase “stolen election” still gets plenty of play on Twitter. Democrats have stoked the flames of #Resistance by never accepting President Trump as their president. On one hand, balled into a raised fist, they are serious about removing him through impeachment, but on the other, open palmed hand, they are fundraising like hell on Trump, and letting that dictate their actions on impeachment.

House Democrats never agreed on the means to remove Trump. Speaker Nancy Pelosi always wanted to let Trump hoist himself on his own petard and beat him in 2020. But she was forced to accept impeachment, on a rushed scheduled, engineered by Adam Schiff, who had an impeachment hammer looking for any nail.

The evidence is not flimsy. From the July 25 phone call itself to the testimony that the House heard, to the trove of documents that Lev Parnas has made public, it's clear that Trump leaned on Ukraine to announce investigations into the Bidens and into this Crowdstrike server that only existed in Trump's mind. In other words, to use the power of his office and to exploit policy toward an ally that has Russia breathing down its neck for political gain.

Still, does anyone seriously think Dems can peel off the requisite number of Republican votes?

Now to the question of whether he should be impeached. Here, my bunch - conservatives who find Trump fundamentally unfit - are divided. Some have made "he must be impeached!" their battle cry, and even made the matter of how Republican Senators vote on bringing in additional witnesses, and then the actual conviction of the president, the determinant of whether these Senators are fundamentally people of moral courage or cowardice. Others say, "Let's wrap this up quickly and let the voters decide in November." I can see the merits of both positions.

That's a strange view on my part. I'm generally an absolutist. One rarely finds me blowing hot and cold on anything. (Right, LITD readers?)

I guess it's just that pulling the trigger on the Trump presidency would not have a measurable effect on post-America's spiritual sickness. Trump's base would be more inflamed than ever, and leftists would be emboldened like never before. Pence would have a short time to mount a serious campaign to keep the presidency he gained through impeachment, and he'd have a hornet's nest of disarray to sort through to make that happen.

So we'll get lots of preening and righteous indignation until this thing reaches its foregone conclusion.

I'm not apathetic. I jut understand that we as a nation, as a society, have put ourselves in a dandy of a pickle, and there is not going to be any kind of splendid resolution to that in the short term. The phrase "the way around is through" is disturbingly apt at this moment.

The shadow Ukraine-policy team had it in for Marie Yovanovitch

An eye-opening development if there ever was one:

An associate of Rudy Giuliani appeared to discuss with another man the surveillance of US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch before she was ousted from her post last year, according to a tranche of documents made public Tuesday as part of the House impeachment inquiry. 

The documents introduced a colorful new participant -- Connecticut congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde -- in the push by Giuliani and his allies to remove Yovanovitch, an effort that is at the center of impeachment proceedings in Washington and federal investigations in New York.

In a series of text messages with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas in March 2019, Hyde, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump who has donated thousands of dollars to Republican politics and the Trump campaign, discussed Yovanovitch's whereabouts in Ukraine.

Using coarse language, Hyde suggested to Parnas that Yovanovitch should be removed from her position, and Hyde implied he or his allies were monitoring her.

"F**k that bitch," Hyde told Parnas on March 22, 2019, in response to a series of articles and tweets Parnas sent him. The following day, Hyde continued: "Wow. Can't believe Trump (sic) hasn't fired this bitch. I'll get right in that."

In a cryptic message, Hyde later wrote to Parnas: "They are willing to help if we/you would like a price." Hyde added: "Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money...what I was told."

I'm not under any illusion that this revelation moves the needle. Dems have handled the whole impeachment business so poorly, and the field of Dem presidential candidates is so off-the-charts leftist (and, as it narrows, increasingly old and white) and the economy is relatively healthy and will continue to be so through at least November that the Very Stable Genius's odds look good.

But let's be realistic about what kind of associates he hangs out with.

UPDATE: Just came across this photo:

Um, yes there was quid pro quo

The skinny on Ukraine's response to the VSG's signals about what he wanted to see happen:

One of the central Republican talking points in the Ukraine scandal has been that the Ukrainian aid package was ultimately released without President Trump getting his requested announcement from President Zelensky that Ukraine was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and Burisma. If Ukraine got its aid without submitting to Trump’s demand, the president’s defenders argue, then how could there have been a quid pro quo? The answer was not always readily apparent, but, as more information comes out, the inner workings of the secret deal are becoming known.

For example, at first, it appeared that the quid pro quo for aid might relate solely to the July 25 phone call between the two presidents. After testimony from numerous Trump-appointed State Department officials, however, it now seems that trading aid for political favors had been official Trump Administration policy for weeks, if not months.

Likewise, light is also being shed on the Ukrainian side of the deal. The New York Times reported last week that, after the Ukrainians initially protested to Bill Taylor that they “did not want to be used as a pawn in a U.S. re-election campaign,” they bowed to pressure and became willing to make the announcement to get the US aid they needed to fight Russia-backed rebel forces. Accepting Trump’s demand to make an announcement would have risked jeopardizing future aid by politicizing the Ukrainian war, but the Zelensky government felt that it had no choice.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified to Congress.

Per the Times report, President Trump wanted Zelensky to make the announcement on CNN, but, aware that Trump considered CNN to be “fake news,” the Ukrainians were concerned that an appearance on the network work would further alienate Trump. But Trump had also tweeted in August that Fox News “isn’t working for us anymore.” The Ukrainians finally scheduled an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sept. 13 in which the announcement would have been made.

As Bill Taylor testified last week, “Ambassador Sondland said that this conversation concluded with President Zelensky agreeing to make a public statement in an interview on CNN.”

Zakaria confirmed that an interview agreement was close, saying, “Things picked up around August and September, I went to Kiev to meet with him. It seemed it was confirmed. And then it fell apart.”

But why did the Zelensky interview never happen? On Sept. 9, the inspector general of the intelligence community notified Democrats and Republicans of the House intelligence committee that he had received the whistleblower complaint and found the information credible. The Trump Administration released the aid package two days later on Sept. 11.

Even at that point, it isn’t clear that President Trump authorized release of the aid. Bloomberg reported last week that, because September was the last month of the federal fiscal year, the aid money had to be spent by Sept. 30 or else it would have to be reappropriated by Congress. To spend the money by the end of the month, it had to start moving around the middle of the month because of a two-week notification requirement for Congress.

National Security Advisor John Bolton, an outspoken critic of Trump’s extortion plan, stepped up in early September and authorized the State Department to spend the money. The move reportedly took the White House by surprise. A week later, Bolton resigned.

In the end, the Republican claim of “no harm, no foul” falls apart unless you think that incompetence is an adequate defense for abuse of power. President Trump clearly intended to a quid pro quo that would have benefited his reelection campaign by smearing Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee. That the scheme fell apart before it came to fruition is not a credit to the president’s ethics and morality. Rather, the Republican argument that an unsuccessful crime is not a crime at all is reminiscent of Sideshow Bob’s claim that he was imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit.

More 5-D foreign policy chess from the VSG: put an ally in the most extremely uncomfortable position possible, all because you want some dirt on a political rival.