Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

 

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt. 

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”   

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

 “When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

Victory Lap

 

Special Counsel John Durham, rear, in his first movie role, Horse Feathers, 1932.

Let's just review why the FBI started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation sometime toward the end of July 2016.

After a long nomination campaign in which foreign relations played an unusually big role, dominated by candidate Trump's interest in "getting along" with Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, he knew "very well" after hanging out with him in the 60 Minutes green room in September 2015

Fact check from my friends at @CBSNews in the row behind me: @60minutes doesn't have a green room, Trump interviewed in NYC, Putin in Russia

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) November 11, 2015

and who was said (also falsely) to think Trump was a "genius", and during which Democratic National Committee computers were hacked by what they claimed (correctly) were Russian intelligence forces, some surprising things happened during the Republican convention in Cleveland, attended by Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; 

Narratology: The Plot Against the King

 

Kash Patel has released his memoir, on how he personally saved "handsome King Donald" from the machinations of Hillary Queenton and Keeper Komey to knock him off the throne, before he even got a chance to mount it! Or as he puts it himself in his own little blurb, "the true story behind the Steele Dossier, and the Russian collusion narrative," only with better costumes, and fewer details. Only $19.99 from Beacon of Freedom Publishing House. I think Kash is the flashy bearded wizard in blue-green, at upper left.

I hate to tell you, this may not be the actual story, not only because Donald wasn't ever actually the king, which we basically don't have in our country, but also because Special Counsel John Durham, hired by former attorney general Barr to investigate the insidious plot in which the Clinton campaign commissioned a British Russia expert to make up a crazy story about candidate Trump conspiring with Russian intelligence in order to, um—get the FBI to find out whether the crazy story was true or not, has so far been unable to find any evidence that it existed. 

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, because as you or I could have told him, it didn't. The FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign was inspired by Georgie Papadopoulos and his prophecy that the Russians had thousands of emails that they could use to sink the Clinton campaign, and it turned out that they actually did have thousands of emails that they used in the hope of sinking the Clinton campaign, and Trump was on TV asking them to please find more and saying "I love WikiLeaks!" And even that wasn't enough to persuade the FBI to investigate Trump himself, which waited until he became president and made himself look ridiculously guilty by firing the FBI director, telling the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador at an unannounced private Oval Office meeting,

Old News vs. Wrong News—Why Not Both?

There's a Marx Brothers movie—maybe Horse Feathers?—with a mook who has this face of invincible rectitude. What a shyster.

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist indicts

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations

Lie no. 1 is the claim that "it's just those crazed right-wingers" who think the Durham investigation uncovered evidence that somebody was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign before the campaign existed to "spy" on Trump Tower and the pinging with the Alfa Bank server thing.

Indeed, several writers are cited as calling this a rightwing "furor", from Charlie Savage at the New York Times through Brian Stelter at CNN to Hillary Clinton herself:

Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it's a day that ends in Y.

The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.

For those interested in reality, here's a good debunking of their latest nonsense.https://t.co/iYY8Uxuogx

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2022

And what makes it a lie? Cleveland doesn't cite any of the alleged liars:

Dud

Mr. Bret Stephens is just such a hack ("The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks"):

This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.

Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.

"Bombshell indictment" is a matter of perspective, but readers would be better prepared to judge for themselves if Stephens would reveal exactly what Danchenko is alleged to have lied about and how many lies he told, but Stephens only says he is

Literary Corner: His Subjects Are Water

David Hockney, "Stage Set, Abstract", fax machine print, November 1988, National Gallery of Australia.

Where's Durham?

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Where's Durham?
Is he a living,
breathing human
being? Will there ever
be a Durham Report?

Short answer to this plaintive text, issued by the Retired Emperor from his Florida redoubt/resort is, not one that will do you any good, pal.

Having retired from his day job as Connecticut US attorney, special counsel John Durham seems to be clinging to this gig, hiding his budget (as Emptywheel notes) and exploring who knows what angle of how to show that it's a crime to suspect Donald Trump of a crime if you do it in an official capacity. Equally-retired imperial consigliere William Barr had promised the boss he'd jail some of the FBI guys who tried to catch him but virtually nothing has happened since Kevin Clinesmith, the lawyer who actually did commit a sort of crime in preparing the application for the third or fourth surveillance order on Carter Page, got away with 12 months' probation and 400 hours of community service, and it looks like nothing ever will. Trump is probably agitating for a cut of whatever Durham's getting paid.

But just pause to enjoy the lapidary concision of the piece—the pain and wistfulness expressed in its 15 words, almost Japanese.

Emperor Takakura, who ascended the throne in 1168 at the age of 7, a prisoner of the wiles of his father and future father-in-law, and and retired in favor of an infant son at 19, in 1180, dying some 10 months later. Via Wikpedia.

 

The Emperor is a ship.

His subjects are water. 

The water enables a ship

to float well, but sometimes

the vessel is capsized by it.

His subjects can sustain an 

Emperor well, but sometimes 

they overthrow him

—Emperor Takakura (attibuted)

A billion tiny October surprises

Image via INKinc.

A week or ten days ago this thing caught my attention: from Fox News's Maria Bartiromo, a story on the counter-counterintelligence investigation being conducted by John Durham at the behest of William Barr to look at the "origins" of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe of the relations between Russian operations in the 2016 election and a select group of Trump associates:

"It is unlikely that we will get a John Durham interim report or any indictments before the election. Now, just 37 days away, a debate has begun within the Department of Justice, as the timing of John Durham's criminal investigation conclusions. I'm being told by sources it is now too close to the election and could be seen as politically motivated," Bartiromo said on "Sunday Morning Futures."

This despite Barr's assurances, going back as far as July, that it would not be politically motivated

“I will be very careful. I know what Justice Department policy is,” Barr said during a long-awaited appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. “Any report will be, in my judgment, not one that is covered by the policy and would disrupt the election.”

My first thought was, well, that's the end of that; Durham can't get what Trump and Barr want him to get (indictments against McCabe, Strzok, and Ohr, and in their steamier fantasies Comey and Mueller, and in Trump's wet dreams Obama and Brennan), and he's throwing in the towel: another October surprise bites the dust: