All the President's Minions

My Substack post on the Nunes-Meadows theft of classified documents related to the Russia investigation, with a lot of material you-all have seen before but quite a bit of new stuff and response to the Trump indictment.

For the Record: January 6 Meets Mar-a-Lago

Posted this expansion of the January 1 post as a Twitter thread,  but I've messed up the threading in at least a couple of places. What follows is a more or less unformatted version.

Talking about mishandled classified documents, did I ever tell you about the time Mark Meadows stole a large number of photocopies of classified docs from the White House, some to give to well-known rightwing journalists, some for purposes unknown? On or about January 19 2021?

 **

Actually I did, in a blogpost of January 1 this year http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2023/01/narratology-new-on-mar-lago-documents.html, but that was more for the fun of scooping the real journalists who, I assumed, would be jumping on the story in the next couple of days. Only they didn't.

So I'm pushing it out On Here.

**

The material is basically from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the J6 Committee of 5/17/22, just after she's been talking about Meadows improperly burning documents in his fireplace in 12/21, after discussions with Scott Perry about "election matters". https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041.pdf 

**

Starting p. 44, Cheney turns the discussion to whether Meadows ever took any documents home, and on p. 46, gets more specific:

**

Abolishing Meaning

"Theseus and the Minotaur", with the Athenian hero unspooling the thread from Princess Ariadne, tile design by Edward Burne-Jones, 1861, via Wikipedia.

OK, so as you probably know or at least won't be surprised to hear, after the end of his time as vice president Joe Biden got a gig—all right, Joe Biden got a sinecure—as a something-or-other professor, I think they call it "professor of practice", meaning not in fact an academic, at the University of Pennsylvania, though in fact not in Philadelphia but D.C., where he maintained an office (officially his own think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement) from mid-2017 until he launched his presidential campaign in late April 2019, but it wasn't until early November 2022 that anybody thought to clean up the office and move his stuff out, and when they did (I'm vague about the "they", but they were working for the White House, not Penn, and included a couple of lawyers) they found a locked closet full of files, inspection of which revealed about 10 documents marked as classified; so they immediately called up the National Archives and Records Administration and made arrangements to have them picked up and taken where they belonged.

It sounds like they shouldn't have been there, but it also sounds like Biden didn't particularly know they were there. Classified documents do, apparently, get misplaced from time to time, as WaPo reports—

Legal experts say that it is not uncommon for some people who have security clearances to mishandle classified documents. But these situations are typically handled administratively, not criminally, because the criteria for prosecuting people who mishandle classified documents include proving that the person deliberately flouted rules for how to secure the materials.

—and it's normally not a very serious situation; one reason Donald Trump is under criminal investigation in the Mar-a-Lago case is that there is tons of evidence that he deliberately flouted the rules. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of a number of people who have not understood that:

For the Record: Devin's Farm

Apparently Devin Nunes, scourge of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and special secret emissary of the White House to the Hill, has gotten tired of all those people mocking him for claiming he's a Tulare County family farmer just because the family dairy farm moved to Iowa some years ago without him, where it's generally worked by undocumented immigrants, while he himself stayed in California growing fragrant and multiflowered paranoid fantasies about President Trump and the FBI, so he's bought himself a spread of acres in his district, well, maybe half an acre:

Nunes, R-Tulare, reported on a newly released financial disclosure form that he owns a Tulare County farm that generates no income for him and is worth less than $15,000.

Nunes has never before claimed a farm as one of his assets in annual financial disclosures, according to public records dating back to 2007.

That suggests he either bought a small part in a farm recently or he improperly filed previous financial disclosures, according to Delaney Marsco, legal counsel on ethics for the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.

“Either he had a tiny stake in this farm all along and he’s been improperly filing financial disclosures, or he bought a tiny, tiny farm this year in order to protect his reputation as a farmer in his district,” Marsco said.

Except the reporters couldn't find any records that he or his wife had bought any land in 2018 either, so who knows? Anyway, I just couldn't really resist:

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.

Consider the lilies: Update

From the 1952 Mosfilm production of Nikolai Gogol's Revizor, commonly known in English as The Inspector General.

One good reason why the FBI Inspector General's report has so little to say about the rogue agents in the New York field office who leaked information about the Clinton email investigation to Fox News, Rudolph Giuliani and James Kallstrom, and others and manipulated Comey into his very bad decisions—the investigation is ongoing, as Mother Jones reports:

The FBI leaked like a sieve in 2016, and those disclosures helped Donald Trump, according to a newly released inspector general’s report on former FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The 500-page report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz suggests anti-Clinton leaking from the bureau’s New York office likely influenced Comey’s decision to announce the resumption of the email probe less than two weeks before the presidential election—a step that may have thrown the race to Trump. The FBI could be in for a bloodbath over these leaks: Horowitz says his office plans to report on multiple investigations into extensive “unauthorized media contact by FBI personnel.”

Josh Marshall is still inclined to doubt that they've taken it seriously, and I have to say the Mother Jones story seems kind of thin; the multiple investigations promised in the report aren't necessarily the ones that need to be done:

In addition to the significant number of communications between FBI employees and journalists, we identified social interactions between FBI employees and journalists that were, at a minimum, inconsistent with FBI policy and Department ethics rules. For example, we identified instances where FBI employees received tickets to sporting events from journalists, went on golfing outings with media representatives, were treated to drinks and meals after work by reporters, and were the guests of journalists at nonpublic social events. We will separately report on those investigations as they are concluded, consistent with the Inspector General (IG) Act, other applicable federal statutes, and OIG policy.

It certainly wouldn't cover leaking to Congressional bad actors like Devin Nunes, in a really startling story Marshall relates that Nunes told on himself on Laura Ingraham's show:

For the Record: Bannon Song

Hotel Tweet Tweet Nest in Pattaya, Thailand. Via.

Stephen Bannon: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor, because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Steve Bannon to French Far-Right Party: “Let Them Call You Racist” https://t.co/zzhtGzWuKA

— Nicholas Mitchell (@puxxled) March 12, 2018

Let me call you racist
I'm so tired of you
Let me hear you whisper
That you hate me too
Let me see some panic
In your eyes of blue
As you realize you're
Going to drown in poo https://t.co/cbpwT15jeW

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2018

That last line really should have read

When you realize that
 I'm a filthy (((globalist))). 

And odds and ends and some Dinesh below the fold:

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

Nunes Declares War

I really couldn't pass up gentleman farmer Devin Nunes taking time out from his busy schedule fabricating plots by the FBI, the Democratic Party, the retired journalists of the Wall Street Journal and the retired spies of MI6, and I believe the Order of the Templars, to spy on the totally innocent businessman Carter Page in the hope that this would somehow stop Donald Trump from getting elected sometime after he got elected (good cooking takes time!)...

... using his appearance on Fox News to invoke the specter of class war:

.@DevinNunes: "There's been a war on people who actually build things, grow things, work with their hands. They think that if your'e in the D.C. Beltway or NYC... or SF and LA, that this is somehow the people who make this country work. And the fact is: they don't have a clue." pic.twitter.com/pL1fGYGc8F

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2018

Really. I didn't expect to agree with Devin Nunes about anything, but he's got a point, when you think about it. I think about Speaker Paul Ryan and his famous account of who he thinks are the people who make this country work:

Literary Corner: Economy of Abstraction

Asobu (Play), by Japan--Calligraphy (that's a dumb nym, but it's a lovely piece) at DeviantArt.

Two of the endless fascinations of Donald Trump's work are its peculiarly bloodless but potent economy of abstraction, absence of sensuality or thinginess, reduction of experience from sensation to pure value terms; and its use of repetition. They come together for a remarkable effect in the new work, offered to the press in the Oval Office Friday after he signed off on the declassfication of the Nunes memo, which is the poem's subject:

It Was Declassified

by Donald J. Trump

I. I Think It's a Disgrace

I think it's terrible
you want to know the truth
I think it's a disgrace
what's going on in this country 

I think it's a disgrace
the memo was sent to Congress
it was declassified 

Congress will do whatever
they're going to do but
I think it's a disgrace
what's happening in our country

For the Record: Memo Juggalos

Devin Nunes in the Chamber of Secrets. Via Fandom/Harry Potter Wiki.

In the weird situation of sort of agreeing with Glenn Greenwald about something, though I wouldn't put it in such intemperate language:

The FBI, and many Democrats, insisted vehemently that release of the Nunes Memo would endanger national security. Now that we've all read it, is there anyone who believes that this argument was even remotely true or honest?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 3, 2018

I'm certainly wondering about this. Can't see how there's anything in there that could possibly harm national security. https://t.co/E76vC3jkJy

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) February 3, 2018

Nunes started the "this could harm national security" with the whole Chamber of Secrets routine, where this was such a dangerously magical object even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee couldn't be trusted to look at it.

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) February 3, 2018

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:

For the Record: Devin Nunes and the Chamber of Secrets

Supposedly right near the bathroom where Jason Chaffetz caught the mountain troll. Next thing you know Chaffetz dropped out of school! Coincidence? Image via Pottermore.

Or is it Devin Nunes and the Poisoner of Azkaban? It's Mysterygate, the scandal so devastating we're not allowed to know what it is! Locked in a room in the Capitol that only House members can penetrate, a magical memo composed by Devin Nunes, the plucky young wizard and outlaw head of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee who's been running Trumplebore's Secret Army in the halls of Congress, detailing the FBI's campaign to spy on those simple citizens Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn and catch them in their totally innocent activities! Or maybe, as Congressman Schiff said on January 18,