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?
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?
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?
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?
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.
RogerG