The House has voted to release the infamous four page memo that many think outlines the broad contours of how the FBI and Department of Justice abused their powers to aid Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Some responsible people, who have read it, have indicated it is important. Other responsible people, who have read it, are working hard to prevent its release, presumably because it is important. Democrats have refused to read it, so they can go to their favorites media outlet and lie about its contents.
That is one of the back stories to this whole affair. If you are permitted to read a top secret document, you are not permitted to say anything about it. In some cases, you are not even permitted to say it exists. On the other hand, if you get wind of some top secret document squirreled away in the security apparatus, you are allowed to say anything you like about what is in it. That is why guys like Adam Schiff refuse to read this stuff. That way, they are free to make up whatever whoppers they think are best, on media chat shows.
The funny thing about this is the memo probably has no new information. Lots of people have been following the news and piecing together the broad outlines of what happened during the Obama years. Conservative Tree House has been doing long essays connecting the dots for a while now. Doug Ross has been maintaining a timeline of events using media stories, most of which were likely sourced to people involved. For example, it is clear that Devlin Barrett has been getting his scoops from Strzok and Page.
Public information suggests senior people in the FBI decided to help the cause by providing the White House, through the Department of Justice, with surveillance information on Americans connected to the Republican candidates. The DOJ would then ask for the names of these people, what is known as unmasking, knowing that this would get out to the broad circle of political people with access to the security briefings. They would in turn leak this stuff to their favorite media people or to the Clinton campaign.
This has all the fingerprints of a Clinton caper. Their game has always been to relax all of the rules, so it was hard to spot their malfeasance. At State, Hillary was obviously selling influence and possibly state secrets. In order to avoid anyone noticing it, her correspondence and all of the secret material her people accessed was left unguarded in a dozen places. That way, if counter-intelligence people noticed something, they had a million rabbit holes to inspect, looking for the source. It is called hiding in plain sight.
It appears to have been the game played by Team Obama. Crooked FBI men would find some excuse to listen to foreigners, who regularly talked to American officials. This would be included in the daily briefings sent to the White House. Susan Rice would ask for the names of the US citizen to “get a better understanding of the material.” This is the sort of shenanigans that is hard to find, as long as it never gets out of hand. A leak here or there to the media to embarrass someone is not going to draw too much attention.
The guess is that things did get out of hand. Like a movie crime thriller, the conspirators found themselves in the third act of the five act structure. Events overtook them and they made some bad choices. We are now into the fourth act where things have turned bad for many of the actors. Odds are some well intended people tried to shield the FBI from embarrassment and lied or covered up things from investigators. Others succumbed to hubris and thought they could bring down the President on behalf of their cause.
It is all speculation at this point, but what is not speculation is the two serious threats this poses to the constitutional order. The first and most serious is we have a Praetorian Guard problem in Washington. By allowing the security agencies to spy on Americans, on behalf of political factions, they are being setup as king makers. Imagine if they were able to frame up one of Trump’s kids, or even Trump, with phony intelligence. From that point forward, every politician would have to kiss the ring of the intelligence community.
Similarly, the massive holes in the intelligence system open pathways for foreign governments to subvert the nation and subvert the political order. It has been forgotten, but there is some possibility that MI6 had some involvement in this caper. Fake intelligence was fed to British intelligence, who then laundered it and sent it back to US intel agencies for use in FISA warrants. That could explain why Trump has gone out of his way to give Theresa May the cold shoulder, while treating Macron like a son.
The question at this stage is whether the political class can take the necessary steps to fix these problems. The Democrats have descended into madness, incapable of carrying out their basic functions. This is due to Progressivism morphing into a mystical suicide cult. At the same time, Republicans are afraid of their own shadow. Digging into the corruption of the Obama administration means they could be accused of racism by the Left. They would rather see the nation burn to a crisp than suffer that indignity.
There is another thing that is probably spooking the political class. How long has this been going on? One of the great unsolved riddles of the Obama years was the sudden, overnight transformation of Judge Roberts from opponent of the individual mandate to defender of it. There are serious people in Washington who worry about the consequences of revealing a wide ranging political scandal involving the nation’s top intelligence officials. Despite it all, there are still some patriots left in Washington.
The Rickchurian Mortydate is real. Ooooweeeee!
I’ve got a feeling that Trump has had some Deep State moles working for him for a long time, feeding him intelligence, probably for a few years before he announced his candidacy. The utter confidence with which he told Hillary “you’d be in jail” and her supposed outbursts about the personal repercussions if he defeated her just seem too coincidental.
I hope he burns it all down.
Way back in the olden thymes after the FBI had broomed the e-mail investigation, NYC detectives found classified material on Weiner’s laptop. That forced Comey to re-open the case. I’ve always suspected that there is some guy somewhere in the system who is talking to the good guys.
Undoubtedly. Wouldn’t it be nice to know years from now that the actual “resistance” (as opposed to the #resistance of the leftist glitterati) was a conservative underground operation within the agencies, dating back to the Obama years?
Personally, I think Mattis and Kelly might have a lot to do with this. It feels like someone with a sure touch of the personalities involved and how to run an actual operation had their hands on this. It doesn’t feel like amateur hour.
Think for a moment how far and wide the network of guys is that served under one or both and where many might be placed. I’ve run in a few ex Mattis guys and they would do anything at his command.
It’s a Marine thing. To a much greater extent, we maintain a loyalty to the Corps and each other than the other services, even after we get out.
Mattis was my division commander in Iraq. He does inspire that kind of devotion among us. It wouldn’t be too far fetched that former Mattis subordinates out of uniform and in the bureaucracy formed a network to do some war by other means.
I do think there are “cultural” issues within the FBI causing some large fissures in the edifice that J. Edgar Hoover erected. The old Fordham Law School types, Democrats to a man, mostly Irish sons-of-cops, have been replaced by snooty SPS Episcopalians like Mueller who’ve never bothered to get their hands dirty in real street level investigations. The only people they seem to be impressing with their integrity are those they went to “school” with.
Zman – I’m not sure if I asked you on Twitter but do you remember when Erik Prince went on Breitbart Radio after Comey reopened the investigation and stated that NYPD found mountains of incriminating evidence on Weiner’s laptop and that they made a copy before turning it into the FBI? It made huge waves on Drudge. I would definitely listen to the interview.
For a long time the FBI was pretty ferocious about keeping their independence from the DOJ. Hoover was famous for his rumored blackmail tactics, but he used that power to keep the FBI independent. Now we’ve had a string of Directors who came from the politicized DOJ – James Baker, James Comey and Robert Mueller. They infected the FBI with their politics and surrendered their independence to the hacks. Can you imagine Hoover’s FBI writing that swishy-washy memo to save a dirty candidate because he liked her politics? If we are going to keep the FBI as a Federal law… Read more »
Imagine losing your career and your reputation over a girl with a gummy smile.
Z Man – I see you linked on the Doug Ross Journal almost every day now. Great job! It is heartening o see people you admire getting a broader circulation and succeeding. We can only hope that some heads will roll. I worked with a guy who had a strong theory that the only way you get into these top positions of power is IF they have something on you. In other words, you practically have to pose for a picture doing something horrible in order to get into the cabal so they can guarantee control over you later, or… Read more »
The way rotten police precincts work is not a lot different from how criminal gangs work. They way in is to be seen committing various crimes. Cops who would refuse to take cash or drugs, would be harassed out of the precinct, or worse. My sense with the FBI is that the management ranks have been subverted the same way the universities were subverted. Progressives slowly over time rewarded their own and punished those not dedicated to the cause. Before long, it is a self-perpetuating system. If you want to move up in the FBI, you better be into Democrat… Read more »
Stupidity is exactly the right description for these clowns, and loyalty in this case serves as an inverse patriotism, because they are being “loyal” to a person, not to their country or to the US Constitution, to which they all took an oath of allegiance!
“or to the US Constitution, ”
Just where in the US Constitution is a national police force authorized?
Victor Davis Hansen has a great piece out today in the National Review. His take is that all of these people were auditioning for bigger and better roles in the future Clinton administration by clearly and prominently breaking the rules in her favor. As VDH points out, if she would have won, there would be no scandals.
The flip side of that is if they don’t jump aboard the Hillary train, and she wins as everyone expected, their career is toast. Not working against her is not good enough, if you’re not actively helping, you’re an enemy. If this eventually does lead to indictments, I won’t be surprised to hear that as a defense.
I have a theory to explain the Chief Justice’s confounding behavior; he’s got something buried in his past that’s being held over his head. We have yet to get the full story on him. This might also explain the actions, or lack thereof, of Jeff Sessions.
Those 900 FBI files the Clintons stole must be a fraction of the blackmail material they’ve collected from year to year. Of course, that would be piddling compared to what’s available if the intelligence collecting apparatus of the United States is the property of the Left.
I must preface this by saying I have no inside knowledge of Chief Justice Roberts. What I do remember is that when conservatives were outraged by the Supremes ruling on Obamacare one rumor floating around was that O had dirt on Roberts’ adoptions. Apparently the Chief and his wife’s kids are adopted and they seemed to get two apparently hale children in a rather short amount of time. There was a rumor floating around that he may have cut legal corners to get them.
I don’t know if that’s true.
John Roberts adopted Irish children.
In Ireland, foreign adoptions are illegal.
Was that it? I didn’t remember specifics but I’m told in this age of legal abortion orphans are actually in fairly short supply. It was noted that the Chief adopting two healthy white children in a fairly brief time span was fishy.
Used to be that judges/lawyers were often privy to “problems” that people had, like unwanted children for whom the parent(s) could not provide. So. . . they would connect the child with prospective adoptive parents who were eager to have the addition to their family. This was called a “private placement.”
The Mick is about as white as you can get, so he’s got that going for him.
Nice little freckled kids ya got there, Chief Justice.
Shame if they had to be returned to the Old Sod.
Auld.
You drain the swamp by using the tools and rules of the bureaucracy against it. In this case, the House is using its power to declassify information to remove what has long been considered an impenetrable veil behind which the Government Party operations: security classification schemes. Just slap a TS/SCI stamp on it, and it disappears faster than the Lost Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse. The thing that really gave all this life is that text database of joy that Strzok and Page were keeping. First, there’s the dead serious issue of the FBI’s head of counterintelligence engaging… Read more »
The Conservative Treehouse people seem to think this is an orchestrated process by Grassely, Nunez, Goodlatte and Sessions. They get the memo out and then start declassifying its source material. They get a bit too deep in the weeds for my tastes, but I think they are correct that this memo is about setting up something else. My guess is they are building a case for a select committee or possibly a second special prosecutor who would investigate all of it, including Mueller. I think Mueller and Rosenstein are either in on the process or they are part of the… Read more »
In politics, wins go to those who most meticulously set up the desired result and then work to see it through. If Conservative Treehouse is correct, the good guys are doing a hell of a job on this one. CTH also ends up being a combo of the Lewinsky Matt Drudge and the Watergate Woodward and Bernstein, if they are correct about all of this. The bad guys have gotten incredibly sloppy and brazen in their tactics, having served under a sloppy and brazen Obama for all these years. Popcorn and beer time.
Always a bad idea to put the affirmative action hire in charge…
And they truly thought they couldn’t lose. The email rope a dope nearly ran out the clock. Nearly.
They expected all of this to be buried behind all the other skeletons in Pres. Clinton’s closet…
…turns out, not so much!
which keeps leading us back to the question of how this happened? Was it really the people and a stroke of luck…or were some white hats involved, making sure the results were what was needed to stop the 16-year plan?
Mueller is there to defend the Establishment against Trump, and to try to bleed Trump out. His goal is to try and survive the 2018 midterms in hopes that the Democrats won Congress (impeachment). Call it the “Bill Kristol Insurance Plan”. He’s also there to try and restore something resembling public credibility to a Comey-decimated FBI. The problem of course being that the FBI lacks credibility because they deliberately pooched the Clinton investigation, and because they are not investigating Clinton/DNC collaboration with “the Russians” via an MI6 agent…the only actual “Russian collaboration” anybody has completely proved… I think “#releasethememo” is… Read more »
Hok; Re the reported Strzok-Page affair: There was a recent thread over at the CTH where the consensus was that there was no actual affair, it was a cover story for extra-legal, swamp-creature back-channel communication. Their logic: Other than a single leaked story in the press from one of the usual suspects, there was no other confirmation/verification of same; Just no denial. The affair story would have been a convenient swamp-rat cover for establishing a communication and coordination channel between the senior DOJ staffers (Page) and senior FBI political operatives (Strzok) outside of official channels. Some of their tweets seem… Read more »
They’re overthinking it. FBI/DOJ have already acknowledged that many of the texts will not be turned over because they are of an intimate personal nature (or words to that effect). Probably some Anthony Weiner-esque pictures…which would put a nice little bow on the whole “who is watching the watchers?” angle.
No, they thought they had beat the monitoring system.
They didn’t need a cover story.
I’m with you. Within the released texts there were too many from Strzok that read more like a 17 year trying to impress his girlfriend than anything else. Hopefully she had some kind of “talent”, not exactly a looker.
You really have to pinpoint the right location on the Hot/Crazy Matrix (google it) in order to get a squeeze who is attractive enough to go after, but not so hot that you draw obvious attention or she starts leaving rabbits boiling on your stove…
OT, but pertinent. If we do not use the leftist/globalists’ language (“google it” instead of “research it” or “look it up,”) it takes away a huge advantage they have.
DuckDuckGo didn’t do the analytics for HRC’s campaign and does not track and data-mine for the Dims OR have 80% of the world’s searches…I’m sure there are others, as well.
The “google it” thing was brilliant of them, in an evil sort of way. Hope now that their discrimination has been proven, we can start taking some of that power.
I never will understand the male mind. Lisa is downright homely, Strzok’s wife is really nice looking, plus she’s pulling her weight, income-wise, with a super gig at the SEC. I guess there were some shenanigans there, too, for this to take place. I miss the good old days back in the mid-60s when most attractive college grads ended up in New York City, the girls at Time Inc. as researchers and the guys at stock brokerages. Lots of good times before settling down in Greenwich or Short Hills. The homely girls went to D. C. and labored away in… Read more »
Doc; If this is a serious question about the male mind, I’ll give you a semi-serious answer 😉 I think that it was Robin Williams who said something like, ‘God gave men two heads but not enough blood to run both at the same time.’ What he was missing was the modifier ‘young’ in front of ‘men’. That, and the fact that the higher you are born or get up the greasy pole, the longer you can prolong that aspect of adolescence. Most of us had figured out in our ’20s (because we had to) that it was a bad… Read more »
Neither one is! Ew…
Hok;
You may well be right. I’m agnostic myself. But ‘don’t forget the healing power of *and*’.
What with all the texting it was hard to see where there was time for any actual shagging.
Agree about Page with her gummy smile, but really, he was noooo bargain, either. Wonder what the attraction was for HER?
Individual ambition shoved personal honor off the stage decades ago. My guess is that there no more than a few–if that–legislators who don’t have some damaging secret ripe for exposure if they step out of line. CYA: the only rule by which they go.
IMO, I think that’s why General David Petreaus was appointed CIA chief by Obama. Petreaus hadn’t exactly tried to keep his affair with his Army girlfriend-biographer very secret, probably thinking that his poop didn’t stink, and Obama thought he was just perfect for the CIA. Remember how he was sidelined when Benghazi investigations were underway? Guys like that with something to hide make very useful appointees. I think it may be something other than adopting the kids in Roberts’ case. Maybe something more personally compromising, like some sex thing.
Part of the vetting process as they make their way from local to State to Federal is to ensure there’s some control mechanism.
It’s why Washington DC is full of pedophiles.
“……there are still some patriots left in Washington.”
Damn few.
If this were still a serious country, gallows would be under construction at Ft. McNair at this very moment.
Bumper sticker on my truck:
Rope, Lamppost, Politician
Some Assembly Required.
Tip of the iceberg. Clinton’s have been selling out the US for decades, and also blackmailing key people in DC; that is how they got away with literal murder. Obama followed in their footsteps, but was not as talented and hence the current scandal. It’s unlikely DC can clean up this mess on it’s own (more likely a few token patsies will get taken down). It’s the citizens who must right this ship, and it has always been thus. The question is . . . will we get the chance before we’re outnumbered?
“Republicans are afraid of their own shadow” ? , absolutely not. they are as corrupt as the democrats, just to different masters. They have sold out to the cheap labor billionaires (meatpacking, light industrial,chamber of commerce) and the defense contractors . who couldn’t see that the only thing they will go to the wall for is the “dreamers” . and to stop trumps wall. Since trump is not onboard, he is a threat to the agenda they are paid to implement. GOP Senators like Burr,Flake,Mccain, and Graham are actively supporting the democratic efforts to overthrow trump. How does any of… Read more »
The only difference between uniparty members is: there ARE some honest and decent GOPers — the Freedom Caucus. But I can think of NO honest and decent dims. We have Gaetz, Jordan, Gohmert, Nunes….
Patriots? Perhaps some. Many are those with little power looking to increase it. Regardless, this is a good thing.
The greatest benefit for us may merely be the shakeout in the Republican party.
Last year’s Las Vegas shooting will turn out to be part of the unraveling of this massive counterintelligence operation, involving the Saudi Royals, as well as the U.S. Royals (Bushes & Clintons & their respective royal courts); Obama is not a Royal; he’s a plant; a tool of the Royals; the result of years of careful preparation.
“Crooked FBI men” why the redundancy? The FBI is, and has been known to be riddled with corruption from top to bottom for decades, likely forever.
They displayed an amazing combination of incompetence and corruption during the investigation into organized crime in Boston. Whitey Bulger had a bunch of them on the payroll.
The struggle for power between Pentagon, FBI, and CIA is moving toward its inexorable denouement. I’m putting my money on the generals.
I believe Trump sold out his no more aggression foreign policy in order to have the Pentagram at his back against the three letter cabal.
Do not jump to any conclusions. I speak from personal knowledge. There are some things that happened more than 50 years ago that the public still does not know the truth about.
“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” ~ Winston Churchill
Disinformation is the name of the game. I am certain that there are going to be some real surprises when this explodes.
Interesting perspective.
Care to give a hint as to which way the game trends? As in who Triumphs, the Good or the Evil?
I don’t know any more than anybody else. My spidey sense says that there is some grand game afoot. I pray, for the sake of mine and yours, that the good guys win. And that it does not break the back of this great nation.
Its getting spicy out there with the convenient accident of the train full of Republicans
Smells like a deep state threat to me though an accident is possible
Regardless its a risky play. Killing President Trump’s allies might provoke a civil war as our President is an aggressive man by nature
Attempted Deep State Putsch
Martial Law Declared
Civil War
no matter who wins US Is over
but if the rot is deep enough it might be worth the risk since as HRC once famously put it “we’ll all hang”
I’ve got a hunch that if the present civil war moves into a shooting phase the trigger will involve the FBI.
No, this one stays a Government Party civil war. The firings/retirements at the FBI will continue. McCabe and Strzok are just the start of this. Then the IG report comes out, and a few more leave…and the whole thing starts to shift to the DOJ. Trump is riding high, and he has political capital to burn right now. I do think Democrats will double-down on the crazy-talk. All that “comrade” stuff is wearing really, really, thin on the blogs. I’ve been encouraging people to mock it more because the more the Dems say it, the more they reveal how batshit… Read more »
As a retired Army officer, intel dude, and FED LEO….this is top to bottom case of corruption. RICO the shit out of these people. Hangings are in order
I really like the timing of all of this. After the State of the Union Trump should have total control of the media narrative. The three issues will be the infrastructure spending bill, the immigration compromise he’s offered, and the dirty tricks/abuse of power by the FBI and Obama administration. It’s winning, more winning, and even more winning.
On a sadder note following up a big tax cut with a big spending bill is such typical DC bullshit. But whatever, at some level I think Cheney was right that deficits don’t matter.
Until they do.
We’re basically financing about 25-30% of China’s defense budget with our interest payments…
On 26 October of 2016 I was on the /politically incorrect/ board on 4chan when someone made a post about creating a fake intelligence dossier based on pornographic stories made famous elsewhere on 4chan. This person claimed to have passed it on to a British official with access to John McCain. This was of course dismissed as fake and gay and the original poster was advised to kill himself, but I remember thinking it would be hilarious if true. Fast forward to Piss Gate. Thoughts?
The fake dossier had been shopped around the NY/DC media community for some time before Oct 2016.
Wasn’t the p!ss portion of the dossier added to spice things up for the second FISA application, since the first one was rejected by the FISA court? I haven’t followed the timeline all that closely.
Just saw the name Cody Shearer on Drudge, claiming he has a dossier similar to this one. He was a Clinton dirty trickster for years; his twin sister Brooke, deceased from cancer, was married to Strobe Talbott, Deputy Sec’y of State and Russian “expert,” now head of the Brookings Institution, D. C. think tank. Brooke also was tight with Hillary before Huma Abedin was born; Brooke was also a “private investigator,” according to her obit. The older brother of these two (Brooke and Cody) is Derek Shearer, an early Clintonista, who Bill Clinton appointed as Ambassador to Finland. He was… Read more »
“Within the next hundred years nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single global authority”–Strobe Talbot
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