For the Record: Obstruction by Obfuscation

Drawing by Barry Blitt from The New Yorker, September 2018.

A little applied narratology:

Just to make it entirely clear, that is not quite what the Times story https://t.co/8JkKbda0uo does. That is, it does name Stephen Somma as the figure known as Case Agent 1 in the Horowitz report on Crossfire Hurricane, but it does not say anyone was assigned to "fabricate dirt".

— Brand New Preexisting (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2020

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.

You Can't Douthat

Cypress-Tupelo Swamp, via Tulane University.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street (who seems to have quietly replaced David Brooks in the Tuesday slot—last time Brooks produced a Tuesday column was 2 September) writes a piece on "The Corruption Before Trump" with the sole purpose, as far as I can tell, of equating the fortune Dick Cheney earned running the war machine at Halliburton between his two stints as defense secretary (estimated between $19 million and $86 million) to "the extraordinary post-presidential buckraking of the Clinton family and their foundation’s global funding stream", meaning making a comparable amount of cash on the paid-speech circuit, writing best-selling books, and establishing a really pretty successful charitable organization with their earnings, in paragraph 5; and mentioning in paragraph 9 that "Hunter Biden’s sinecure at a Ukrainian energy conglomerate represents the crassest form of this mentality".

Adding in paragraph 11 that

the strongest defense of Trump’s possibly impeachable conduct vis-à-vis Hunter Biden and his father isn’t some sort of careful “no quid pro quo!” parsing of the president’s words. It’s the more straightforward argument that, as Dan McCarthy wrote for The National Interest over the weekend, this was what Trump was elected to do — to “use all legal means at his disposal to strike at business-as-usual among the political elite,” even if that requires trampling over norms that would normally prevent a U.S. president from encouraging a foreign investigation into his rival and his rival’s family.

Although young Biden is in fact the only business-as-usual practitioner Trump has actually attempted to strike at, and isn't even especially rich by today's Hypergilded Age standards, so I don't think that amounts to a lot of evidence that this is Trump's plan (shaking off the dew pooled in a water lily leaf on the surface of the swamp is not draining the latter).

Unleashed Kraken

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor's Gaslight, 1944, via Vox.

If you were startled to hear Big Donald tossing out dark hints of an unusually vast international conspiracy against him—

“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.

“[Attorney General Barr] can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine.

“I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”

—I may be able to help. We're actually contemplating two different and equally idiotic conspiracy theories, one for UK and Australia and one for Ukraine.

The latter is Rudolph Giuliani's developing hypothesis that Ukrainian authorities after the Euromaidan revolution didn't have any reason to investigate how Paul Manafort got himself a $66-million cut of the pillaging of Ukraine by the pro-Russia Yanukovych regime—why on earth would they want to know anything about that?—but only did it because the sneaky Democratic National Committee tricked them into it, to harm the Trump campaign (as we briefly noted a couple of weeks ago).

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:

George Papadopoulos, Birther Fan Fiction Artist

From the original covfefe boy:

Publishhed February 2014, 8 pages, 99 cents on Kindle.

The preview:

Simple racism? Check. Anti-miscegenation fervor? Check. Little hint of anti-Semitism? Check. It's no wonder Trump was eager to get this crack hand on his foreign policy team in April 2016.

Found this while investigating the book young George announced last week, emerging from his 336-hour prison ordeal, springing back like the resilient lad you knew he was:

The Crime. I

I'll get to the crime (the crime Donald Trump is most anxious to conceal) presently, in an update on what I've been maintaining, since last October or so, but I'm going to take my time. Don't @ me, as the Twitter kids say.

So there's this thing floating around tweeted by Aleksandr Torshin, Russian gun enthusiast and oligarch and mentor to our newly indicted lady spy and graduate student Mariya (her preferred spelling, "Mariia", looks like a typo and I refuse to use it) Butina, from February 2016, looking almost like an announcement on Twitter that the secret cabal of Russian gun enthusiasts have finished recruiting their US presidential candidate:

Which I have to say does not seem exactly right to me. I mean, that is, if you are running this incredibly audacious conspiracy from within Russian criminal-governmental circles to take over the US elections and install your own candidate, don't you have some more secure method of communication? Twitter FFS?

What's not being noted adequately among the tweeps is what kind of tweet this is, a link to a Russian newspaper article, from the very popular Putinist Lenta.ru, reporting on the Republican debate of 13 February, where JEB! sternly proclaimed that the United States and Russia could never be allies and Trump said they could:

And Something, You Know

The Trumpster Bunny.

What Easter Means to Me

by Donald J. Trump

Well, it really means something very special.
I'm going to church in an hour from now
and it's going to be—it's a beautiful church.
I'm in Florida. And it's just a very special—
time for me. And it really represents family
and get-together and—and something, you know,
if you're a—a Christian, it's just a very important day.

Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

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:

Which Hunt

Kensington Wine Rooms, Notting Hill. Via Britain Magazine.

Here we are again, trying to figure out which emails we're talking about.

The new Papadopoulos episode in The New York Times, in which young George, in the Kensington Wine Rooms with Australian High Commissioner to Great Britain (which is the Commonwealth equivalent of ambassador, that's bonus info that even Matty didn't have) Alexander Downer, drunkenly informs his excellency that Russians are in possession of thousands of emails that could sink Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, in May 2016, which the high commissioner then shares with the FBI after an interesting delay, launching the FBI's investigation of a possible conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, raises some questions for people with a better understanding of the big picture than I have, like Marcy at Emptywheel:

the few GOPers who have responded to this news raise another question: did the Aussies even know what emails Papadopoulos was talking about?

As I noted in October, we actually don’t know what emails Joseph Misfud [recte Mifsud] was talking about when he told Papadopoulos had dirt on Hillary. Trumpsters are now suggesting these emails might be those Guccifer 1.0 stole from Hillary, but they could be a range of other emails.

This story would be far more damning if the NYT knew for sure that the emails were ones freshly stolen from DNC, John Podesta, or the Hillary campaign itself, but they don’t.

But I think from the standpoint of my own little patch in the garden it's not all that complicated. Not that I've got a story that meets the evidentiary standards you'd want the Times to apply, but we do know enough for a reasonable person to speculate with.