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:

For the Record: Secret Hearings

‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first - verdict afterwards.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. (Via Gates of Vienna)

This was a weird exchange over more than a week that ended up unexpectedly plugging into the released transcript of the Yovanovitch interview:

IANAL but I don't think you can really do that after he's pleaded guilty and been convicted.

— Yas Time Goes By (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2019

Of course inside the Wingosphere nobody pleads guilty just because they're guilty. There must be some occult thing going on. Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to save his obnoxious son Mike Junior from a fate worse than having a dad in prison, though it's never clear what the Feds might have on the lad, other than his being a ratfucking Twitter scandalmongerer and working in Mike Senior's criminal business, involving performing services for the Turkish government that should not be performed and taking unreportable money. "Son, I've decided to take the rap for all the crimes I could have tried to blame on you."

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?

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.

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.