Negative Thereness

In Everybody's Autobiography (1937) Gertrude Stein complained about her native Oakland “...what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” But somebody finally supplied one—photo by Joe Sciarillo.

I need to make a confession: I'm the one who started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. I mean, alongside Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, CIA director John O. Brennan, and our handlers in Russian intelligence and, frankly, a whole lot of other people, most of whom aren't even aware that we had Russian handlers. If current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe knows what he's talking about. 

I don't know what he's talking about, but just saying: Krugman's New York Times column ("Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate") of 22 July 2016, Josh Marshall's blogpost ("Trump & Putin: Yes, It's Really a Thing") of the following day—

Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

—and my own post on the 24th ("As a Notorious Billionaire Once Said, Just What in the Hell Is Going On") 

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:

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:

Keep your eye on the timeline, redux

Via boundary2.

Christopher Christie, in contrast, is not being wholly candid in his own superbly subtitled memoir, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, as reported by Maggie Haberman:

On Feb. 14, 2017, Mr. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, had lunch scheduled with the president. It happened to be the day after Mr. Flynn — whom Mr. Christie did not back for the national security adviser role — was dismissed for lying to the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Mr. Kushner decided to attend.

As Mr. Kushner tucked into his “typical salad,” Mr. Christie wrote, the president said to him, “This Russia thing is all over now, because I fired Flynn.” Mr. Christie said that he started laughing, and the president asked why.

“‘Sir,’ I said, ‘this Russia thing is far from over,’” Mr. Christie wrote. Mr. Trump responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.” Mr. Kushner added, “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

Which looks at first sight like evidence of Trump's attempts to obstruct the investigation, but that's not at all what the ex-governor meant to suggest, heavens no:

Goodlatte lies so baldly you'd expect his hair to fall out

An encouraging squeeze from the Padrone, from the chairman's Facebook page.

Bob Goodlatte addresses the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on the occasion of Peter Strzok's testimony, 12 July 2018:

"For those who think we are wasting time in this committee, suppose all of this had been said about candidate Obama before he was elected, or even more topical, about Hillary Clinton while she was running in the same election. Would we be where we are today? The only honest answer is an absolute affirmative, "YES"! Of course we would be here because every single Democrat would be protesting bias and discrimination against their preferred candidates by an out-of-control FBI and DOJ. So please stop saying this doesn't matter and is only the product of conspiracy theory," Goodlatte told the committee.

Former attorney general Loretta Lynch testifies for the FBI inspector general on her meeting with former FBI director James Comey, 31 October 2016, as the phony investigation of the Huma Abidin laptop was getting leaked to the public a week before the 2016 election:

And then I said, "Now, we’ve got to talk about the New York office in general." And he said, "Yes." And I said, "We both work with them. We both know them. We both, you know, think highly of them," I said, "but this has become a problem." And he said, and he said to me that it had become clear to him, he didn’t say over the course of what investigation or whatever, he said, "It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton." And he said,  "It is, it is deep. It’s..." and he said, he said it was surprising to him or stunning to him.

You know, I didn’t get the impression he was agreeing with [the New York office's Clinton hatred] at all, by the way. But he was saying it did exist, and it was hard to manage because these were agents that were very, very senior, or had even had timed out and were staying on, and therefore did not really feel under pressure from headquarters or anything to that effect. And I said, "You know, I’m aware of that...."

Is every Democrat protesting bias and discrimination against their preferred candidate by an out-of-control FBI as witnessed by the attorney general and FBI director in sworn testimony that is now public? As information that those very same New York FBI had sat on for a month, failing to act, suddenly became public through a leak that seems to have been engineered by them and Jason Chaffetz, the then chairman of the House Oversight Committee, in an October surprise that almost certainly played a principal part in Hillary Clinton's unexpected defeat in the election?

I'm not hearing a whole lot of that, frankly. Certainly not as much as is merited. There's some hope that the inspector general is looking at it.

Is the House Judiciary Committee on it? How many subpoenas has Goodlatte issued? Give me a fucking break. "The only honest answer"? NO, as Goodlatte might put it. These liars need to be driven out of office and made to work for a living. They are really bad people.

More from Bethesda1971.

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:

Consider the Lilies of the Field Office

Can't come up with a great credit for this, but it's indoors in the New York Field Office,  via. 

I'm still trying to understand why the IG basically ignored evidence of anti-Clinton bias in the NYC FBI field office. Also leaks to Giuliani. If it's not true, that's important to know. But just ignored it.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 15, 2018

Not quite: there is a single mention, sort of, making it clear that the New York office was where they expected the leak of the Weiner laptop investigation to be leaked from, on p. 359 (h/t Tim Dickinson/Rolling Stone):

But no followup, and that's why Josh's frustration is justified. What made them confident the New York office would leak it?

Literary Corner: Ring Around the Comeys

Kurt Schwitters, Blauer Vogel (Blue Bird), ca.1922, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Murray A. Gribin, Beverly Hills, CA, via Arftchive.

Donald Trump is really a spoken word artist, with the flash and spontaneity that implies, and one almost always feels in his written work a certain stylistic cramping, an inhibition, an overworked quality (you even see this in the time stamps, which allow you to calculate the time he's taken to compose his 280 characters, often 30 or 40 minutes apiece even when they're in a tight sequence, even, as in the first piece below, broken in the middle of an adjective phrase), but once in a while, as we've seen before, a fresh emotion lifts his tweet into lyricality, and this seems to have happened last week with the arrival in bookstores of James Comey's A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, with its narrative of Trump attempting to get the FBI director to halt investigations of Trump's friends, divulge the secret of whether Trump himself was under investigation, or simply swear personal fealty to the president, and Comey's presence all over the television ably defending his motivations (though not so able when it came to explaining why he had twice, at critical moments of the campaign, divulged secret information about the Bureau's pointless ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton).

Or maybe it was just spring in the air. These new songs have a peculiar lightness, skippy, almost like children's rhymes, except for not rhyming. Below the fold:

Trumps Fall Apart

Drawing by John Darkow, 1./28/16, via George H.'s Pinterest.

At the end of an anxious post Friday, Digby wrote:

Trump is getting stronger every day. Don't let the chaos fool you. 

Which is somewhat the opposite of what I've been thinking, that he's starting at last to really fall apart, which is pretty daunting. I'm diametrically disagreeing about something with Digby! A friend was shocked enough to ask about it, by email, but it's going to take me a while to get around to the point, so bear with me.

A lot of people, Digby included, think we can't know much about the official grounds for the firing of Andrew McCabe until an official report is issued—

It is certainly true that we don't know all the facts underlying the firing of Andrew McCabe. Maybe he was leaking damaging information to the press about Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump and then blatantly lied about it. From what we understand his crimes so far, they are much more vague than that but we'll have to wait and see. 

—but that's not quite correct. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman for The New York Times seem to have found out a good deal, though they also don't seem to think it's a very important part of the story, and don't get there until paragraphs 22-23, and it turns out to be about an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation:

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—

Dumbstrzok

BREAKING: Peter Strzok, the FBI agent accused by GOP of having "treasonous" anti-Trump bias, supported re-opening the Clinton email investigation in fall 2016 and helped write the letter (signed by Comey) that was released days before the election. https://t.co/RkOIkZ2x6W

— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) January 31, 2018

This is really too much.  This was kind of my first hypothesis about the case of extremely senior agent Strzok last August, after he became a mini-Trumprussia celebrity when he was taken off the Trump-Russia investigation and exiled to the FBI's personnel department, either as punishment for some blunder or to separate him from some security issue, and I began learning that Strzok had played some kind of central role in Rudy Giuliani's October Surprise of 2016.

Strzok by surprise (October Surprise, that is)

Update December 3 2017:

We now know why Peter Strzok was pulled off the TrumpRussia investigation in August, and it isn't really prefigured in any of the hypotheses offered here or in the comments. A bunch of people have been looking at this old piece, presumably because I managed to spell Strzok right more than twice, and that's always a plus with Dr. Google, so I thought I should add a word and let it rerun.

Strzok was removed, The New York Times reports, because of

 the discovery of text messages in which Mr. Strzok and a colleague reacted to news events, like presidential debates, in ways that could appear critical of Mr. Trump.

“Immediately upon learning of the allegations, the special counsel’s office removed Peter Strzok from the investigation,” said a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, Peter Carr.

The Fox News universe is now undergoing floods of excitement over the possibility that "the Mueller investigation may be biased, under the heroic leadership of 2nd Lieutenant (Intellectual) Ben Shapiro.
My Twitter response follows:

Peter Strzok was actually sent to NYC to take charge of the idiots who thought they'd found a smoking gun in Huma Abedin's laptop, leading to Comey's stupid Halloween announcement and Trump's victory. Wish he'd shown some anti-Trump bias then.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) December 3, 2017

Mueller was no doubt right to pull Strzok off the case in August, though he's one of the department's most senior and valuable investigators. Far from indicating bias it shows Mueller will go any length to avoid bias.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) December 3, 2017

It strikes me that Strzok may actually be feeling guilty for the role he played in the Giuliani-Stone October Surprise, with the thought that he had it briefly in his power to stop the clown psychopath from getting elected. Anyhow, the old post is below the fold:

How Emperors Decide

François Flameng (1856-1923), After Waterloo, via Wikimedia Commons.

So it's like that story, which I assume is false, about Napoleon's hemorrhoids being responsible for the French loss at Waterloo—Trump decided to fire James Comey as FBI director because of the bad weather in New Jersey on the weekend of May 6.

It was keeping him indoors at the Bedminster club, with no breaks from the Fox News broadcast other than occasional furtive switching to CNN, where one of the big stories was presumably Comey's testimony to the Senate of the previous Wednesday in which the director said he was "mildly nauseous" at the suggestion that his actions of late October and early November might be the decisive factor that got Trump elected. Meaning, I think, at the shadow on his reputation (he'd been blundering into the situation of influencing the election for months, and it made him look like a bad director), not at the horror of Trump becoming president, but the latter is what Trump heard, of course, because everything's always about him.

Quantum Trump: In Sekulow Saeculorum

I had to use that before somebody else did.

T-Shirt by Northbound Christian Apparel.

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017

The generally accepted interpretation being, I believe, that it's a complaint against deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who wrote that memo in an all-nighter from May 8 to 9 after (according to Rosenstein) Trump informed him that he was planning to fire the FBI director James Comey and asked Rosenstein for "advice and input". That is, he didn't tell Trump to fire the FBI director ("I accepted their recommendation"), unless of course he did ("I was going to fire regardless of recommendation"). Thus, if Rosenstein were to be investigating Trump now (which he isn't, he is at most responsible for greenlighting special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, if there is one) for firing Comey (which would be a less important fact in the question of Trump's possible obstruction of justice than his repeated requests to Comey to go easy on Flynn, to make a public announcement that he wasn't investigating Trump, and to make the "cloud" go away), that would be pretty ironic, huh?

To which Jay Sekulow, a new member of the Trump personal legal team, now explains on Fox News, no, that wasn't what the Tweet was about:

That tweet, Chris, was in response to The Washington Post story that alleged that five unnamed sources, anonymous sources, leaked to The Washington Post that the president was, in fact, under investigation. So that tweet was in response to that. There’s been no notification of an investigation. Nothing’s changed since James Comey said the president was not a target or subject of investigation. Nothing’s changed.

So Trump was being sarcastic maybe? "Sure, Washington Post, pull the other one!" He was simply producing an inaccurate summary of the Post story to show how inaccurate it would have been if that had indeed been the story they ran, which it wasn't?

It rhymes

Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, Manhattan. The FBI Field Office is on the 23rd floor. Photo via Zimbio.

On James Comey and the Russian-produced Wasserman Schultz letter—

The Russian intelligence material related to a purported email exchange between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a Clinton campaign operative who suggested then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch would help quash the FBI’s investigation.

According to CNN, Comey used the purported emails in part to justify his decision to publicly announce that no charges would be brought against Clinton, in a remarkable address [on July 5] that also accused her of being “extremely careless” in how she handled classified information on her private server. Comey did not consult with Lynch beforehand, and the speech broke FBI protocol to never comment on closed cases where no charges are brought.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the purported emails originated from a dubiously sourced Russian intelligence document, the veracity of which was never confirmed by the FBI. Officials aware of Comey’s actions told CNN that he knew that the document was bogus, but still factored it into his handling of the case. (Talking Points Memo)

There's a weird little relationship—history not repeating itself but rhyming as they say—between that story and the one from the end of October where Comey sent a remarkable letter to House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz to inform him "out of an abundance of caution" that the investigation wasn't in fact closed, and that the FBI was looking at some possibly fresh material, which turned out to be Anthony Weiner's laptop and emails to Hillary Clinton that Huma Abedin had downloaded there (apparently to make print copies for the boss because, sadly, Clinton, like Donald J. Trump, prefers paper) (that beloved story is actually false; the emails were on Weiner's computer as an automatic backup arrangement with Abedin's phone; h/t Jesse at NMMNB).

In both cases, Comey is said to be making these unusual public disclosures out of fear for his agency's and his own reputation.

(Longish read below the jump.)

Hi, it's Stupid. Update

Donald Trump and Roy Cohn at the Trump Tower opening in 1983. Via Politico.

Picking up on a long comment from Jordan:

These are deep waters (as Sherlock Holmes would say). I am forced to agree point by point with the analysis — the “insecurity quotes” is particularly good — but I’m still not sure.

Because you just never know what he’s heard; what actual information he’s garbling and blurting out from that cement-mixer mind of his. I agree that the goons who generally supply his surveillance needs haven’t gotten anywhere near the White House, and I agree that the VoIP system isn’t something he remotely understands (we’ve seen him use “digital” to mean “electrical” just this week). But I wouldn’t rule out the existence of recordings of Trump’s conversations. He may have heard about this and assumed it’s all the conversations rather than just the Oval Office, or just the phone calls, or just some of the phone calls.

Hi, it's Stupid. III

Insecurity quotes, via Ben Yagoda for Lingua Franca.

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

Ben Jacobs, for instance, comments at the Guardian

The tweet, which if taken at face value would suggest Trump has been secretly taping White House meetings, came after the New York Times reported that he demanded “loyalty” from Comey in a private dinner held shortly after Trump took office.

The thing is, why on earth would you take it at face value? Trump said it FFS! And he pulled out his insecurity quotes, as with "wiretapping" in March, showing that he isn't himself confident that he's managed to say what he means.

Trump literally doesn't know whether his conversations in the White House are being recorded on tape or some new-fangled method, or rather he knows it wouldn't be tape but doesn't want to get caught not knowing what it is because the servants have been taking care of such things for him for years, so that decades of technological change have simply bypassed his brain. He doesn't know whether they are being recorded by somebody or not.

Hi, it's Stupid. II

Homage of the Estates (nobility, clergy, and commoners) to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, from the 1515 Liber Missarum of Margaret of Austria. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Countess Maggie and the Chevalier de Thrush have a nugget of narratological interest, right in the lede:

After President Trump accused his predecessor in March of wiretapping him, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, was flabbergasted. The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was “outside the realm of normal,” even “crazy.”

They're using it for the titillation value, clash of the titans, oh-no-he-dit-unt, but the really useful information is when Comey was so indiscreet as to say those things, in response to the famous tweet:

Clinton did it, why can't I?

100PercentFedUp asks the tough questions:

Was the suspicious death of Vince Foster and the firing of Republican FBI Director William S. Sessions firing a coincidence? Did President Clinton need an FBI Director who was willing to look the other way when it came to the alleged criminal activities of the Clintons?

Hm, I wonder.

On the basis of an investigation completed by the GHW Bush Justice Department before Clinton's inauguration. With transparent cause. pic.twitter.com/PDFs7TZyG7

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 11, 2017

OK, make that a "probably a coincidence".

Hi, it's Stupid

Drawing by wes and tony of amazingsuperpowers.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we understand with complete clarity why James Comey was fired as FBI director. So hold my beer, as the saying goes.

First:

And, yes: The bizarre, petty narcissism even extends to a letter publicly humiliating and firing an FBI director. pic.twitter.com/qruYGjh59D

— Dan Murphy (@bungdan) May 9, 2017

That's not narcissism. I mean, obviously it's narcissism, in the same way as obviously it's English—I mean it's in the only language Trump speaks—but it has a specific argumentative purpose, which is to tell a lie.