“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].” Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)
Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia? Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law. The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny. Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.
Beria and StalinAndrey Vyshinsky
Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang. To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters. If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst). Execrable potentates produce execrable government.
As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.
“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime. Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits. Ask them. Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process. If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them. But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.
But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump. Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.
In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain. In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president. What a thin reed to hang a political rival. Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?
Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity. Hogwash. Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals. Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump. Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety. If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.
The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe. We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices. We should be under international observation, not be the observers. And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.
The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything. Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible. Reprehensible behavior is impeachable. For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary. Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.
The documents indictment similarly has legal legs. But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places. It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia. Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?
Are we a banana republic or something worse? What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us. Is this the best that we can come up with?
Donald TrumpOedipus, King of ThebesMAGA/Trump supporters, 2023Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil
In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.
He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics. Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are. They wanted somebody to “own the libs”. Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr. And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day. According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee. Disgusting. It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration. Is this what it means to be a Republican?
He’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.
The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)
The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act. If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc. The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law. That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.
The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris. I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune. It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen. Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it). In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice. They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury. Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle. Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.
Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right. The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”. Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment. Some of it is silly in the extreme. Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment. His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?” Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it? Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.
He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers. In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code. This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court. The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it. If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang. If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.
One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament. Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.” Ruminate on that rant for a moment. Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law. It’s ludicrous. She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us. She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling. Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance? Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated? Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?
If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders. The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble. That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment. All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.
The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves. They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one. The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble. This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts. That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes. For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.
The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles. They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments. They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse. Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil. So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0
. Frederick Keller’s “The Curse of California”, which appeared in The Wasp on August 19, 1882, is the likely origin of the depiction of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus.Archibald Cox, first Watergate Special Prosecutorames Comey, FBI Director, and Hillary Clinton. Her campaign originated the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax.John Durham, special counsel into the Trump/Russia charade
*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest. My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.
***************
Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly. Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states. This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization. Ours!
One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay. The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens. I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad. It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919. It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.
The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past. Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind). There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled. Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog. Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.
The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture. They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”. It’s an octopus of and for the octopus. Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it. They do well, we don’t.
It is vengeful when challenged. We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s. The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies. Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations. No evidentiary predicate existed to support them. They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.
It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s. What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC. They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx. They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.
On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate. He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement. As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes. On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence. The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.
Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people. A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus. The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam. He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams. Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower. The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life. The DC social Borg at work.
What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox? Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus. From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign. He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up. A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy. Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more. The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.
The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship. For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats. The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations. Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base. Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.
The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern. This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility. Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes. The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.
The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city. If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again. There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.
A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities. Appeals are stymied and so is due process. Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place. Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.
Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome. Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens. It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party. The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors. From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not. The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression. We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life. Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip. Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government. The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one. Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?
Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty. The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up. How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.
* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf
Kyle Smith’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood compared Tarantino’s film with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Tarantino adopted Leone’s technique of a singular story thread set in a panoramic and historical scene. If some future filmmaker wanted to channel Watergate’s All the President’s Men and Leone, the current unraveling of the Russia-collusion-Mueller-Comey-et al saga would provide excellent grist for the mill.
The Setting
All the elements are present. The grand backdrop is present-day DC with 364,000 federal government workers, many at the top of the federal pyramid scheming and plotting for partisan and personal advantage, and a mass of hanger-ons populating K Street and other nodes in the metropolitan area. The administrator water cooler talk must be impregnated with the expectations born of a peculiar universe’s lifestyle and norms that are divorced from the real world’s preoccupation with producing the necessities and wants of life. It’s a world unto its own, all put on steroids by the 44th president’s ideological penchant for big government as a cure-all. It is great for those seeking highly remunerative and secure employment in a highly unproductive sector, coupled with fantastic opportunities for the city’s real estate agents.
Enter stage left, Donald Trump (protagonist or antagonist depending on one’s point of view): crass, boorish, sometimes vulgar, and a champion of the pitchfork brigade. He wasn’t supposed to win. And when he did, the curtain was thrown open as in the The Wizard of Oz.
Woodrow Wilson’s government of “experts” is exposed as a charade. I can only speculate about the extent of the conniving, scheming, and plotting for personal and partisan advantage as a normal facet of life particularly in the administrative suites of the nation’s capital. Regardless, the now-bogus collusion story ripped the smiley face off the Leviathan.
Act One: Pride Before the Fall
Like many scandals, this one has at least two acts or phases: the first one peddled by the left-oriented and self-styled cultural “betters” in the media, academia, and the Democratic Party in our cosmopolitan centers, and the later, more sinister one as the initial story began to unravel.
Phase one seemed implausible from the get-go for anyone with a scintilla of adult skepticism, but it was overwhelmed by volume, both in quantity and decibel levels in our left-dominated media channels. That story is now familiar. A litany of banalities consumed the airwaves: “Russia attacked our democracy”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “The Russians elected Trump”; “Trump conspired with the Russians”; etc., etc., etc. You’ve heard the carnival barking.
The party of more government and big government – the Democratic Party – needs government power, and they failed to get it. Their loss necessitates an explanation, and it can’t be that their vision of the better world isn’t popular enough. The default excuse is malevolence by some unseen and nefarious forces attached to the winner. It just so happens that an expedient was readily available from their own skulduggery in the 2016 campaign. Democrat trolling for dirt – often called “oppo research” – led to the Hillary campaign > Fusion GPS > Christopher Steele > the Steele dossier > FBI/DNI/CIA spying on Trump > leaks to a salivating press. The stage is set for its continuation after Trump’s shocking victory.
A common reaction after shock is rage. Sure, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric acted as an accelerant, but that matters little. George W bent over backwards in a contortionist’s pretzel to accommodate and still earned the rant, “Bush lied and people died”, alongside efforts at his impeachment. Rage is a powerful motivator to do some really bad things, even using falsehoods to repeal an election. Remember, power is far more important to a progressive than to those more conservative since it is needed to overwhelm parents’ concerns about such things as their little daughters sharing a bathroom with boys who believe – or simply make the claim – that they can think themselves into being girls.
The ploy required a predicate. It was found in the jingle, “Russia attacked our democracy.” We don’t have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic … but I digress. How did Putin attack our so-called democracy and purportedly steal the election from her highness? A few trolling farms and $100,000 in Facebook ads, half of which were pro-Hillary and half were after the election?
In fact, the presiding judge in the trial of one of the defendants (Concord Management and Consulting LLC) indicted by Mueller chastised Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama Deputy Attorney General and part of Mueller’s team, and Mueller (and by extension Atty. Gen. Barr) for prejudicing a potential jury by reaching conclusions in the publicly released Mueller report not supported in the indictment, thereby raising doubts about the strength of the evidence linking the firm to the Russian government. Could the mantra “Russia stole the election” be a bait-and-switch maneuver with the mantra being loudly proclaimed by a partisan mob in the media and Congress as the Mueller gang switches to the thin gruel of a far lesser claim in court? Are we, the public, being scammed?
Jeannie Rhee, former Deputy Attorney General under Obama and Special Counsel prosecutor under Mueller.
How could 1/100th ($50,000) of a 30-second Super Bowl ad bend a 63 million-vote election spread over 274, 252 precincts and 113,754 polling paces? Hillary alone was awash in $700 million. Trump fell $300 million short. The charge is preposterous given the minuscule effort, and ignores the history of this kind of thing. Almost every Israeli election results in American campaign operatives tramping over to Tel Aviv to help Labor or Likud. One of Obama’s chief campaign advisers, Jeremy Bird, showed up in the country in 2015 to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ve left our fingerprints in other countries as well. The PRC helped bankroll Bill Clinton’s reelection. Soviet disinformation money seeded street protests in America and Europe throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, a godsend to Teddy Kennedy’s efforts to frustrate Reagan. Soviet efforts didn’t stop there. The Venona disclosures in 1995 and the brief opening of Soviet Communist Party archives in 1991 showed evidence of Soviet espionage and the presence of agents of influence occupying powerful positions under FDR and Truman. And today’s Democrats and their fellow travelers are carping about a few bots and Facebook ads?
Venona Project. Meredith Gardner, at far left, working with cryptanalysts, mid-1940’s.
The predicate is a farce. It’s in the DNA of international relations for nations to influence strategically important countries. In another time it was called statecraft. We would be well-served if we remembered the concept when observing the vicious mullahs in Tehran.
Oh, they squeal that the Russsians “hacked our democracy” when they were alleged to have purloined Hillary’s and the DNC’s emails and began to disseminate them through Wikileaks. Wikileaks is most certainly a pipeline for Russian (and any other nation’s) chicanery. After all, they came out of the same anti-western and anti-US breeding ground that gave us CISPES (advanced the interests of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua), the nuclear freeze movement (supported by Soviet disinformation measures), Code Pink, today’s Antifa, and the perpetual peace-at-literally-any-price crowd. The mission statement of being the guardians of government transparency is a facade for useful idiots. They’ll take information from any source so long as it further their end, which is the embarrassment of only western governments.
What’s missing from the hacked-our-democracy charge is any semblance of context. Of course, in our intensely techie world, cyber crime is as big a thing as mail fraud was in the days before Intel. No doubt, the bumbling Hillary made it easy by concocting her own digital communication system in her basement, bathroom, closet, or what have you. She would be an easy mark for any government with nearly unlimited resources (since all governments skim off as much as they want from their citizens’ private economic activity) to play this game. The 2015 Chinese (PRC) hacking of the federal OPM data base, getting personal information on 20 million persons in the process, is illustrative.
Any system is vulnerable, including Hillary’s garage setup, the DNC, RNC, and anyone else thought to be important. The Iranians remember Stuxnet in 2010, the joint US-Israeli worm to crash the regime’s nuclear program computers. Whether through phishing or incredibly easy passwords in the case of the DNC, cyber warfare is part of statecraft. Make the best safeguards as possible, but it will remain a staple of modern life.
Was it as vice-president Cheney called it, “an act of war”? Hardly. The behavior is so common that we would be in a constant state of war with almost any nation with access to a keyboard. Cheney’s declaration is ludicrous.
But is it even relevant to Hillary’s 2016 loss? Both candidates were held in low esteem going into the election. Hillary’s negatives were 24 points higher than her positives and Trump’s were even worse (41 points). It wasn’t hacked emails that dragged Hillary down. Hillary has left a well-known slimy trail from Arkansas to DC. She’s a known quantity, and it smells. As for Trump, he was stinking up the works with his boorish rhetoric, past sexual escapades, and Access Hollywood. Could it be that a easily dislikeable candidate, 8 years of Obama malaise, a horrible campaign strategy, poor campaign management, and Trump being a fresh face had more to do with the result than Wikileaks and $100,000 in Facebook ads?
However, giving the story heft was our FBI in DC, something euphemistically called the “intel community”, and who knows how many big cheeses in the Obama administration. More than putting a thumb on the scale, they were sitting on it.
First, Comey’s gang “exonerated” Hillary after her clear violations of 18 U.S. Code § 798 et al. Furthermore, and amazingly, Comey and his courtiers somehow reached the conclusion that bleach-bitting her hard drives and servers and smashing devices to smithereens didn’t qualify as obstruction of justice. And to think that Trump had to fight through hell for two and a half over the now-dubious charges of conspiring with Russia and interfering (obstruction) with Mueller’s inquisition into a non-crime.
Go figure. Now that’s the stuff of movies.
As Comey was clearing Hillary, he was conducting a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign since at least summer 2016. A piece of Democrat oppo research – the Steele Dossier – was funneled to the FBI, Obama’s Justice and State Departments, and Obama’s intel chiefs, Clapper and Brennan. The Democrat oppo research was filled with vile falsehoods but was peddled to FISA courts to entrap people connected to Trump, no matter how loose their affiliation. Ironically, the Dossier would turn out to be the only proven instance of collusion: the cooperative arrangement between the Russians, Steele, and the Hillary campaign/DNC.
With sycophants in the media, leaks would keep the pot boiling in an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s victory up to the point when drips and drabs of FBI/Obama mischievousness start to dribble into view, and the release of Mueller’s incoherent report in April of 2019 raised new concerns about the fable.
Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave the House to the Democrats and off into impeachment land we go.
By the time of the release of Mueller’s unintelligible tome, enough was known of the gross misbehavior of Obama’s people and his holdovers in the executive branch. The rogues gallery includes Strok, Page, McCabe, Comey, the Ohrs, Clapper, Brennan, maybe Lynch, and anybody else in the Obama claque now looking to lawyer-up. Include the minor interstellar bodies who are in the orbit of Obama’s intel glob like Halper and Misfud. Also, friendly foreign intel services were more than happy to participate in the scam.
The plot thickens. With one house of our bicameral legislature in hunger pangs for impeachment, getting Trump becomes more than partisan mudslinging. It becomes institutional, partisan mudslinging on the federal dime. Subpoenas fly and the Bolsheviks took over committee chairs. Who’d have thunk it?
Jerry Nadler, chrmn. House Judiciary Comm., and Adam Schiff, chrmn. of the House Intelligence Comm.
Impeachment was juiced up. The Democrats’ electoral success in 2018, though, could possibly end up breeding their own fall. In Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, Ajax proudly asserts that he doesn’t need Zeus’s help. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex boastfully claims the genius to solve a murder mystery. It didn’t end well. From the Book of Proverbs, 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Warnings abounded, but the Dems insisted on pushing the issue.
The April release of the much-anticipated Mueller Report made matters murkier. Trump collusion was put to bed but he was “not exonerated” (?) of obstruction, something Hilary did blatantly. Now that’s an extremely odd concept in a prosecutor’s brief, “not exonerated”. It’s such a loose concept that anybody not charged can be labeled “not exonerated”. That’s not how our system works. Innocence is presumed, not “not exonerated”. Well, it’s enough of a kernel for Democrats blinded with rage for losing in 2016.
Then Mueller reluctantly testified after the Dems threatened him with subpoenas. Mueller’s testimony proved to be the emperor with no clothes. Bumbling, stumbling, incoherent, and ignorant of his own report made the show an embarrassment for both him and the Dems.
The spectacle raises questions about who was running the show in the Office of Special Counsel. Was Mueller merely the man running interference for the likes of Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, both leftovers from Obama’s DOJ?
The Special Counsel and his team.
Mueller’s awkward performance and his lack of familiarity with the report that bears his name would seem to indicate that the partisan inmates were running the partisan asylum. 13 of the 17 prosecutors working under Mueller were registered Democrats – and prominent Democrat apparatchiks in DC – with the remaining four unknown or unaffiliated.
Mark July 24, 2019 on your calendar, the day of Mueller’s testimony. It’s the day for all-things-Russia to exit stage left. Another angle to the story, frothing beneath the surface, is about to spill over the top.
The curtain comes down on Act One.
Act Two: The Fall
The script for Act II has not been written. Yet, key elements are present for a second generation Watergate.
The full story of the lefty nexus of the mainstream media, the Obama holdovers in the executive branch, and the Democratic Party has yet to be written. This place has the potential for a real conspiracy. Attorney General Barr, US Attorney Durham, US Attorney Huber, and IG Horowitz will have something to say in due course, though the general outlines are already present. The investigation of the investigators has just begun, the start of Act Two.
Yes, the rogue’s gallery mentioned earlier should lawyer-up. It’s a great time to be a criminal defense lawyer in DC.
Here’s a possible scenario. The story begins with the effort to remove Trump from the political scene. Comey’s in the middle of it. Comey and his claque in the FBI were eager to use the fraudulent dossier to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency as early as summer 2016, after which they would end up with 4 FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The applications for the warrants to begin the effort were deceptions to the FISA judges. The operation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) continued well into 2017.
The media played along to perpetuate the story. They acted like a megaphone for wild and lurid claims for gross partisan advantage. It was a cooperative venture among a triad of actors: (1) big name/legacy media, (2) the DNC/Hillary campaign, and (3) an executive branch that acted like its namesake, a community organizer – which is nothing but a rabble-rousing community activist.
But surprise, surprise: Trump won. And ….. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
James Comey, the fired FBI director, has for the past 2 years since his firing been making the rounds as a sage while hawking his book, “A Higher Loyalty”. Should he be accorded unquestioned esteem? Rod Rosenstein thinks otherwise. Take a look.
Rosenstein has been muzzled by his official and professional responsibilities as Deputy Attorney General while Comey makes the rubber chicken circuit. A few days ago in a CNN townhall, the dispatched FBI Director, wrapping himself in a messianic aura, smeared the retired Deputy AG as a person lacking in “strong character”. Well, Rosenstein is no longer manacled by his job and can fight back. The self-anointed prophet of God, Comey, may turn out to be a three-card-monte scammer.
Rosenstein presents a Comey who got out in front of his skis, probably due to Comey’s inflated self-regard. With Comey, investigators are prosecutors. He did this twice in the heat of the 2016 presidential election when he announced the non-prosecution of Hillary and then publicly resuscitated the investigation of her. The word “Investigation” after “Federal”, “Bureau”, and “of” will have to be replaced by “Prosecution”. But admittedly FBP doesn’t have the same ring as FBI.
A higher loyalty? Comey’s higher loyalty may not ascend much above the person looking back at him in the mirror. Somehow the ancient Greek story of Narcissus keeps coming to mind.
The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage. Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.
A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story. It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power. Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?
Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control? If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.
Examples abound.
Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake. For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned. Belief cometh before proof. So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.
But what of Eric Holder?
AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.
Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation. 17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder. The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media. That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes. These aren’t “contempt of court”. If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.
And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases. Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).
The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends. How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?
By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want. But they don’t want. They want power and that means Trump’s scalp. This isn’t about the truth. It’s about naked, raw power.
In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information. Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing. Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name. Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters. Go figure.
In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice. Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life. In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.
Attorney General Barr at press conference annoucing the release of the Mueller Report, April 18, 2019.
The Mueller Report is out. Does it really matter? No. Partisans with no “reasonable cause” will still invent cause to pursue their political opponent. They’ll grasp at any straw to continue the inquisition. Burden of proof be damned. The entire course of western civilization is to be turned upside down to get Trump. That’s it in a nutshell.
There’s a reason for those with the power to take your life or freedom to meet the decency of a burden of proof when they make claims against a person. Yet, political and media partisans hang their hat on minor and loosely related evidence and even the absence of evidence.
That’s right, the absence of evidence. The “We cannot reach conclusions” or “We cannot charge” is morphed into “cause” by political partisans to pursue the accused that can’t be accused. Read the last bit of that sentence again. This is ludicrous.
In other words, “innocent till proven guilty” means something … or is supposed to. If you can’t prove a charge, then the actions at the root of the accusation are treated as if they didn’t happen. It’s up to the authorities to prove their case, not the accused to prove they didn’t do it.
The citizen’s right to silence is related. The target of the charge doesn’t have to say anything. He or she can just sit there quiet as the people doing the accusing are expected to make the case. If they can’t, then nothing happened regarding the accused.
That’s our law, and keeps us from exercising Stalin’s show-trial style of justice. It’s how we avoid the last moments of Bukharin, Kamanev, and Zinoviev beginning with a long walk down a lonely basement corridor and ending with a bullet to the back of the head.
Elections have consequences. Yep, they do. So, thanks go to the suburban voters in suburban districts (and a few elsewhere) for handing the House majority to a party intent on raining totalitarian environmentalism (the Green New Deal), various versions of socialism (#1 and #2 are synonymous), and impeachment on the country for the next 2 years. Regardless of what D-candidates said while campaigning, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler were swept into power. Again, thanks for the next couple of years of social/political/economic poison. Assisted suicide appears to be in vogue.
The doctors ready to administer the poison pill: Maxine Waters (D. Ca.) and Jerry Nadler (D, MY).
A public, said to be deeply concerned about “dysfunction” in DC, curiously voted for more of it. The slide into governing incontinence could be accelerated by a much-heralded romp through impeachment land, in addition to the profusion of “investigations” into matters as worrisome as the president’s dental care habits.
I’ve refrained from commenting on Mueller, choosing to wait for his report. Right now, of greater concern is the public’s perceptions about impeachment. There’s a good chance that no matter what Mueller writes it will be culled for articles of impeachment. The Mueller report and their own inquisitions will be the vehicle to hang Trump for his style and policies. Since its coming down, it would be nice to know what the public and even our own politicos know of the subject.
I don’t think that I would be too far off when I say, Not much. It’s a product of poor schooling and pop media. First, impeachment – the indictment phase of the process for removal – is a political act and the grounds for it hinge on “high crimes and misdemeanors” (HCM). What does HCM mean? It doesn’t for the most part refer to statutory crimes, even though they might be included if serious enough. It centers on what Andrew C. McCarthy (and Cass Sunstein) calls “truly egregious instances of maladministration”.
The unease about maladministration goes back to British and colonial experience. Legislatures wanted to control their royally appointed governors and judges. It’s not likely that Trump’s habit of name-calling qualifies (“low IQ Maxine Waters”, even though “foolish” would be more accurate). It’s more probable that the Dems will hang their hat on business/financial dealings and the Trump’s campaign efforts to do what Hillary’s succeeded at doing: namely, get the Russians to give them dirt on their opponent. The Steele dossier anyone?
All the bellowing about “they stole our elections in collusion with Trump” is simply carnival barking. The Dems will use whatever they and Mueller dig up to essentially go after Trump for his coarse style, a tactic which they patented years back – remember, “Bush lied, people died”.
Also, he’s a miscreant for not being politically correct. The Dems would like to censor all immigration policy options outside open borders.
Whether any charges are merited is beside the point. The sole goal is to get Trump. For the Dem caucus, “maladministration” really means to disagree with them.
So, suburban voters who voted to flip actually chose “maladministration” in order to maladministrate – i.e., we’ll be embroiled in impeachment wars for about 700 days. And be prepared for Ocasio-Cortez to be a euphemism for the Dems’ policy preferences coming out of the House.
I have long sought to keep separate the FBI’s Trump/Russia probe and their “MYI” [Mid-year Investigation] into Hillary’s server. The IG report of this past week shattered that assumption. The two are linked by the same personnel, a coterminous but muddled boundary in time, and an obvious unity in partisan bias. All of this is nestled in unbridled DOJ and FBI higher-ups in DC and its satellites. We’ve got a real mess on our hands.
The legacy media oracles responded as if they are on a mission to contradict conservatives and simple common sense. A bias in its own right. They serve to mystify and cloud what is increasingly becoming apparent: powerful organs of our government engaged in crass partisan favoritism in both official queries.
If this doesn’t dispel the progressive dream of the benign, above-the-fray rule of a clerisy of “experts”, nothing will. Progressivism has its roots in upending the understanding of our nature dating back to Genesis. It used to be accepted as axiomatic that humans are corrupted by an imperious selfishness. We were counseled by our traditions to restrain it. The late 19th-century progressives jettisoned this human nature and replaced it with a person cleansed by an expertise born of formal education (the “expert”). In other words, people like themselves.
This has profound societal consequences. The design of our Constitution is predicated on the overriding inclination of people to pursue self-interest, and thus it is true to our traditions. The founders’ structure sought to fight selfish faction with selfish faction by distributing power with separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.
No need for that kind of thing under the progressives’ scheme of rule by a degreed priesthood of technicians. According to Churchill, though, “The French have a saying, ‘Drive Nature away, and she will return at the gallop'”. The episodes in 2016 and 2017 reveal those technicians to be riven by the same weaknesses as our sandaled and later-wigged ancestors. All that we’ve done is insulate the powerful from accountability in a massive bureaucratic pyramid.
The officials with the guns now have a political eco-system to facilitate great damage. Free of popular sovereignty, their base instincts are free to flower.
Recourse to official ombudsmen – like the IG – as a corrective is fruitless. They are too often infected by the same natural defensiveness as the rest of us. Thus we have the IG report’s equivocations, contradictions, and voluminous mind-numbing prose stretching beyond 500 pages. A glaring example from the report: on the one hand there exists coarse bias; on the other, we can’t attach the bias to any actions. What? How does that work?
There’s the rush to exonerate the favorite (Hillary) while they jump at the slightest unproven provocation to bedevil the targeted villain (Trump). It’s laid out in the report’s timeline and public record. But we’re expected to believe that what’s in the head of Strzok, Page, McCabe, and untold others is somehow unrelated to the clearly observable actions adjoining the thoughts. It’s simply Orwellian.
Trump/Russia and Hillary’s server are two investigations that share the same DNA. Questions about Mueller’s probe are similarly warranted. Like the others, Mueller is taking on a flavor akin to the previous machinations. The same or similar people are scouring for Trump people to ensnare.
Has it been happening for years? You know, the underhanded tactics to flip people, empire-building of imaginary cases, the incestuous relationships – some sexual – between big journalism and big law enforcement, the hounding of people into incriminations, and all of it unchecked. A look under the rug at the Carl Icahn-Phil Mickelsen-Chlorox-Tom Davis imbroglio, shepherded by FBI honcho David Chaves and the DA of SDNY, might be instructive.
Yes, we’ve got a mess. The sooner we discard the demigod status of government apparatchiks, the sooner we’ll make sense of it all. Only then will we be empowered to restrain our own government. Accountability need not be something necessitating a 500 page report.
This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.
The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.
Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?
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