Useful Idiot in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

And the reason they held the meeting was so they could run a photo of the meeting. Duh. From Trump's Twitter account via USA Today.

Live-blogging volume 5—

Of what some have decided to call the Rubio Report, after Senator Marco, who has pulled a Billy Barr in this connection:

Hope you get a chance to read it. You should read everything you sign, you know. You've got some big surprises coming.

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

Marco taking a leaf from Barr's book. If you don't like what the report says, just announce that it says something different, and maybe enough people will believe you. https://t.co/t4b4NQwoAc

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

There is, as you can imagine, evidence of "collusion" in the report, some of it new, as in SSCI's certainty that Manafort's assistant Konstantin Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer, something previously only described as a possibility:

Crossing of the Barr (Also, Jonathan Turley Is Still a Hack)

Don't know whose this is.

A couple of developments in the Justice Department investigation of the prehistory of the Justice Department investigation of Donald Trump: the apparent identification of Christopher Steele's Primary Sub-Source, which I'll get to in a moment, and another surfaced document, this one supplied to Senators Chuckles Grassley and Ron Johnson (same Sherlocks who unmasked the unmasking of General Flynn in the celebrated report of the calls with Ambassador Flynn that turned out not to have been masked in the first place).

The latter is another FBI internal report, which according to Jonathan Turley (guesting in John Solomon's old spot at The Hill),

shows the FBI used a security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

Namely, it's a report of the first Intelligence Community briefing received by candidate Trump, in the FBI's New York field office, accompanied by his national security adviser Mike Flynn (because, WaPo reported, Flynn was "somebody that I believe in") and his body man Governor Chris Christie on 17 August 2016, the day after the FBI opened its Crossfire Razor investigation of Flynn, as it happens,

Hi It's Stupid: The FBI

Via.

Hi, it's Stupid to say the FBI didn't take the Trump-Russia story seriously until Trump fired the FBI director and they finally realized there was enough smoke that they might want to think about looking for the fire.

Nevertheless it's the only takeaway I'm getting from Senator Lindsey Graham (chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee since they took down old Richard Burr with an insider trading allegation) and his release of a couple of peculiar documents from February 2017. I thought he and the comrades wanted us to believe Peter Strzok and Lisa Page mounted a conspiracy to "spy on Trump" and "take him down" back in July 2016 or even earlier, but these releases make it pretty clear that wasn't the case. 

One document is what I think must be the first New York Times story on the investigation (by Schmidt, Mazzetti, and Apuzzo, "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence"), from 14 February 2017, with contemporary annotations said to be by Strzok himself outright denying the story.

WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

No, says Strzok, this isn't true at all:

Horowitzmas

Via.

Glad to see I called it (19 November):

A lot of faithful Trumper paranoids have been looking to this report [Inspector General Horowitz's report] to prove to the world that the Trump-Russia investigation was actually a conspiracy among the "angry Democrats" who are naturally in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence activities to take down Trump's presidency (it had to wait for Trump to become president to go into real action, though you'd think it would be more efficient to just stop him from winning, but apparently the sinister cabal was expecting Hillary to win, like everybody else, and this conspiracy roping together the forces of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services of UK, Italy, and Australia, and possibly the White House, was just an "insurance policy"), and they've been waiting for this thing to come out with increasing excitement.

Not that any of this is going to happen. As with his report on Andrew McCabe, Horowitz will make an attempt to be pissy about some of the people Trump is after but nobody is going to be anywhere near locked up, because they didn't do anything wrong (Marcy Wheeler has suggested there may have been cut corners in the warrant on Dr. Page, but added that whatever they did has been done much more abusively to many, mostly Muslims, in recent years, and it's kind of ridiculous to single out this particular case of somebody who obviously needed to be watched and who had practically no remaining connection with the Trump campaign at this point anyway).

Well, almost. Actually the FBI did 17 things wrong, apparently, by the (just possibly a tad self-serving) account of former director James Comey:

Barr's Zombie Investigation

From the CDC's Zombie Preparedness site.

I think I know what this story—

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

—is about. It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart.

That is: Barr's task, as you'll remember, is to find that there was something wrong with the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which eventually became, after Trump fired the FBI director, an investigation of Trump himself under the direction of Special Counsel Mueller. Trump has been complaining about this since long before it was understood that he had anything to do with it, whether because it was suggesting "bad things" about V.V. Putin, or because it was depriving him of Manafort's services, or after the election because it was suggesting his victory wasn't legitimate, or because it was forcing him to let Flynn go, or because "they were spying on me!" And trying in secret to put a stop to it, as chronicled in Mueller's volume II.

The Paranoid Style, 2019

Experiment in trying to imagine the workings of the minds of the Republican conspiratorialists, now led by Attorney General Barr, with a scene from the FBI investigation as Fox News might imagine it, if they tried to imagine it in any detail, and the consequences of trying to believe simultaneously that (a) FBI agents worked to prepare an "insurance policy" to make sure they could depose Trump in the unlikely event he was elected; (b) everything in Christopher Steele's "dossier" is fake; (c) the FBI conspirators were completely dependent on Steele's work to commence their investigation (though it had already begun); and (d) everybody agreed that the best way to get started was by putting a FISA order on Carter Page, Ph.D.

US Embassy, Rome, photo by DPA.

Early August 2016. Tracking shot follows two men with briefcases and upscale water bottles, Gaeta and Steele, down a corridor in the US Embassy in Rome, Gaeta, FBI’s man in the post, in a rumpled American suit, Steele British, ex-MI6 and now a freelancer, rather more expensively dressed; they enter a small meeting room where two Washington-based agents, McCabe and Strzok, and an FBI lawyer, Page, are concentrated around the middle of a long table, and Gaeta performs the introductions:

GAETA

Andy, Pete, Lisa, this is Chris Steele, who I met in London early July. As I was saying, he’s heard you’re looking for an insurance policy.

STRZOK

Just in case our candidate doesn’t work out and that guy wins the election and we need to overthrow him, like the FBI usually does in these situations, as you know.

STEELE (shaking hands)

Of course, understood. Delighted to meet you.

MCCABE

You’ve been doing some research, we understand?

STEELE

Yes, on behalf of your candidate, I’m told, for Mr. Simpson, who kindly asked me to help out with the Russian government angle.

MCCABE

And you’ve discovered something useful?

STEELE

Heavens no, I just make stuff up. What do you take me for, a spy?

More Than Mere Anarchy

Couldn't find a decent illustration for "mere anarchy", which has been taken over by Woody Allen and Moby (in separate efforts), but here's a fabulous widening gyre, by Hiroshige.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, introduces his version of a take we'll be hearing a lot of, I'm sure, on the Mueller Report ("The Mueller Exposé")

Roughly four thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven Trump-era news cycles ago, there was a rather famous book called “Fire and Fury.” The author, Michael Wolff, used an interesting tactic to gain access to the Trump White House: He allowed his subjects, the president included, to believe that he was going to write a positive account of the Trump administration, and then used that access to produce an account of an administration in constant chaos, and a president who was understood by everyone around him to be unfit for the job.

One way to approach the Mueller report, if your sense of civic duty requires you to approach it, is to see it as a more rigorous, capacious version of “Fire and Fury.” Mueller's exposé was backed by subpoena power rather than just sweet talk, but ultimately it delivers the same general portrait: Donald Trump as an amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness.

Sure he's disgusting, but his quick-witted staff (as opposed to the corrupt staff that "surrounds" him, apparently he's got both) stops him from committing all the crimes he's inclined to commit, so we ought to be able to live with that for another four years. And what an "interesting" unethical slob that Michael Wolff was, allowing Trump to think he was going to tell comforting lies about the president when he was secretly planning to tell the truth the whole time. Now let's get back to the horse race!

Underpants Gnomes in the Russia Investigation

Via IresPuestas.com.

Just to refresh everybody's memory, when Trump howls "They SPIED on me!!!" what he means is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an order of federal surveillance on a former foreign policy adviser to candidate Donald Trump called Carter Page, in October 2016, on evidence that included some raw intelligence gathered by a former MI6 Russia expert called Christopher Steele for a firm called GPS Fusion which had a contract with the Democratic-connected Perkins Coie law firm to do opposition research on Trump, which is incontrovertible proof, according to certain Republicans, that the Democratic Party and the entire leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a plan (an "insurance policy") to remove Trump from office in the unlikely event he got elected, which they would accomplish by recording Carter Page's phone calls.

Let's just lay that out as an Underpants Gnomes scenario:

1. FBI does electronic surveillance on Carter Page
2. Trump wins the presidential election
3. ???
4. IMPEACH!

This schema is what Attorney General Barr was referring to, not without a little healthy skepticism, when he was talking to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. A very little skepticism, so little a lot of people didn't even notice it, which may be what he intended, as we heard Thursday on NPR:

Self-Gaslighting

Sad to see a group of relentlessly dishonest people get tripped up by their habit of deliberately cultivating a base of gullible dupes. https://t.co/NL2IUqaCg7

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 18, 2018

The thing is, they may well believe it themselves.

A good con man always believes the spiel, at some level, as in the thing I wanted to talk about, the plan Trump announced Monday for declassifying a host of Mueller-relevant documents, where I think they've really gaslit not just their followers but themselves—Nunes and Gaetz and Trump himself in particular. Once again, as with the Glenn Simpson testimony and the Peter Strzok testimony and the first unveiling of the Carter Page FISC application, they're going to open up a box without knowing what's in it, because they've gone and persuaded themselves, for at least the fourth, fifth, and six times during this circus, that they do know.

I'll tell you what's in pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the application for the third renewal of the FISA surveillance order on Trump's former "foreign policy" "adviser"  Carter Page, Ph.D., dated June 2017 (starting on p. 392 of the application as published in July), as demanded in Trump's order, if you want.

And/Ohr

Christopher Steele. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; photograph by Victoria Jones / PA Image / Getty via The New Yorker.

What do Christopher Steele and Omarosa have in common? Trump thinks they're both lowlifes:

Starting to be Revealed

by Donald J. Trump

‏The big story that the Fake
News Media refuses to report
is lowlife Christopher Steele’s
many meetings with Deputy A.G.
Bruce Ohr and his beautiful
wife, Nelly. It was Fusion
GPS that hired Steele to write
the phony & discredited Dossier,
paid for by Crooked Hillary & the DNC....
....Do you believe Nelly worked
for Fusion and her husband STILL WORKS
FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF “JUSTICE.”
I have never seen anything so Rigged
in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff
and Missing in Action. It is all
starting to be revealed - not pretty.
IG Report soon? Witch Hunt!

OK, this is not nearly as insane as it looks; that is, the story, coming out of deep Nunes-land, is fairly insane, but what makes this look especially crazy is that Trump doesn't actually understand what's being alleged, only that there are all these names hanging out in it, of people who may for some reason not like him, and he's trying to convey that to us without revealing that he doesn't quite know the story, which is par for the course.

Just so we're all on the same Page

You have to admit, if this is a man who's just made more than a third of a billion dollars for more or less nothing, the hat reads completely differently. Via Mediaite.

This is a completely bizarre story from an investigative journalist called Scott Stedman that showed up on Medium this afternoon. The Great World doesn't seem to be picking it up, so here goes:

An investment company based in Las Vegas, with oil and gas interests in the Middle East claimed that they received a commitment of more than three hundred million dollars from Carter Page’s Global Energy Capital after Page’s involvement in the Trump campaign.

The investment company, RD Heritage Group, claimed on their website that they they secured a capital commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars from Page and his company:

“$350MM capital commitment by Global Energy Capital … an investment management and advisory firm focused on the energy sector primarily in emerging markets. Global Energy Capital was founded by Carter Page, CFA. Carter has spent 7 years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, Moscow and New York…Carter was also a foreign policy advisor to Presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

That was on 24 July. As of 25 July, after Stedman had called the company for comments, to which they did not respond, they pulled Page's name and biography from the text, ascribing the commitment to a nameless "energy focused fund" instead.

For the Record: First Impressions on the Schiff Memo

As you know, the Democratic minority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence prepared a response mostly drafted by Rep. Schiff of California to the Republican majority's memo or Nunes Memo released unredacted and against strong objections from the intelligence community on February 2, but President Trump objected to the publication of the response until an unclassified version could be prepared.

That's out this afternoon, and I found myself live-tweeting some initial reactions, and thought I'd lay that out here in slightly better organized format than the one you'll see on Twitter proper, before smarter people get around to commenting on the thing:

Overwhelming overall how much more professionally produced the whole Schiff memo is than the Nunes memo to which it is a response. https://t.co/Cqr8g2DQNN

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

(1) One of the things redacted seems to be the Australian government, and exactly what the High Commissioner said.

(2) "Thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails" always means emails from Secretary of State's private server. But Russians never had any of them, did they? Weird. pic.twitter.com/ZqJpjAC2J1

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

Or did Steele fire the FBI?

Image via Graeme Shimmin.

According to the Nunes memo, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, hired in summer 2016 to help Fusion GPS out in its (now Democrat-funded) investigation of Trump's Russia connections, after taking his findings to the FBI, lost the Bureau's confidence when he went to various journalistic outlets as well, and they "terminated" him, which sounded pretty odd, because I hadn't heard any suggestion that they'd given him a job in the first place.

But a new story by Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman in the Washington Post quotes Steele as saying he was in fact in "talks" with the FBI about doing some contract work with them, but broke off at the end of October 2016, when James Comey announced on the 28th that he was reviving the investigation of the private email server Hillary Clinton had used as secretary of state, which he had seemed to be publicly ending the previous July, after giving him the impression that every detail of their ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign must be concealed from the public, because

Bureau officials repeatedly told him they were extremely cautious about taking actions that could be viewed publicly as influencing an election, associates said.

In other words, he began thinking, as many of us out here in the audience began thinking, that forces within the FBI might be acting to take it in a pro-Trump direction, as we've already heard from the House Intelligence Committee hearing with Glenn Simpson—

Memo Random

You'll be reading sounder versions of this all weekend, no doubt, but I wanted to organize and shovel out some initial reactions.

Stan Laurel in Pick and Shovel (1923), from gfycat.

Carter Page first attracted the attention of the FBI in 2013 as the subject of a conversation between two Russian agents recorded by US intelligence:

Mr. Podobnyy tells his Russian colleague that Mr. Page frequently flies to Moscow and is interested in earning large sums of money. Mr. Page was apparently interested in striking a deal with Gazprom, the Russian state-run oil firm, according to the transcript. Mr. Podobnyy called Mr. Page an “idiot” but said he was enthusiastic.... “I will feed him empty promises,” he was overheard saying.

The recruitment effort doesn't seem to have gone anywhere; nevertheless, by the summer of 2014, Page was being monitored under a US surveillance warrant (according to an August 3 2017 report from CNN). We don't know what that was about or how it further developed, but it seems he was still under surveillance when he suddenly surfaced in public in March 2016 as first on the list of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers, "Carter Page, PhD", just behind citizen George Papadopoulus, now a convicted though not sentenced criminal in the Mueller investigation.

At the end of June or beginning of July Christopher Steele, who had been studying relations between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russians at the behest of the Fusion GPS research firm, which had been studying Trump's business affairs for a rightwing newspaper, the Free Beacon, from fall 2015, and subsequently for a Democrat-connected law firm, Perkins Coie, increasingly alarmed at the stuff he was hearing from his informants, sent the first memo from the subsequent dossier to contacts in the FBI.

That July, Page traveled to Moscow to deliver a peculiar commencement address to that year's graduates of the New Economic School: