Huge News II

Where it all started, on a Dominican beach. Maybe not this one. Via CNN Travel.

The primary subject of the Yates hearing, of course, was dear old General Flynn, and his panicky series of phone calls when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic at the end of December 2016, after President Obama decreed a new set of Russia sanctions to punish Russian interference in that year's presidential campaign, in which he advised Ambassador Kislyak on how the Russian government should respond, or rather not respond, to facilitate the Trump decision to make sure the Russians wouldn't be punished after Trump entered office; and, as Yates said,

these were not conversations that were just off the top of his head. But rather, he had been coordinating all of this with his Deputy National Security Advisor [K.T. McFarland], who was at Mar-a-Lago with other transition team members. And it was a very deliberate planned set of conversations with the Russian Ambassador to essentially tell them, “Don’t worry about it. Things are going to change what’s... in place.”

Following which, whoever knew about the calls (and it's still not clear who that was, beyond Flynn and McFarland) decided to keep their content a secret from those who didn't (starting, perhaps, with Mike Pence and Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer and going on to everybody else), to the extent of lying about it to the general public and to the FBI, the latter of which is illegal.

I want to talk about how Republicans have tried to turn this story into the story of a crime committed by the FBI against General Flynn, as represented in the rhetorical gyrations of Lindsey Graham's questioning of Sally Yates last week, but first it's a good idea to work through the known facts, of which I keep getting a better idea.

Huge News

President @realDonaldTrump is pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions. pic.twitter.com/dXMJgjmo0w

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 8, 2020

🚨 HUGE NEWS 🚨 @realDonaldTrump announces Executive Order to ensure that health insurance companies cover pre - existing conditions.

MAJOR!

— Boris Epshteyn (@BorisEP) August 7, 2020

I really don't get how they're so bad at this: announcing that he's planning to issue an order advising that something that has been the law for the past 10 years is, in fact, the law (though Trump's Justice Department will be arguing sometime in November, against Trump's Health and Human Services Department, that the law including the pre-existing conditions coverage part of it is unconstitutional, and urging the Supreme Court to strike it down), and expecting I don't know what kind of acclaim.

But the most abysmal example of the week in that unspeakable phony cornpone Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), with his flabby eunuch's face and Grand Ole Opry hair, quizzing the former acting attorney general in the Senate Judiciary hearing on the Russia Hoax, or origins of the deadly FBI conspiracy to take advantage of the pesky Russian effort to install Donald Trump as president as an excuse for uninstalling him:

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:20)
You don’t like Donald Trump, do you?

Sally Yates: (02:18:24)
I don’t respect the manner in which he has carried out the Presidency.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:28)
Okay. You despise Donald Trump, don’t you?

Sally Yates: (02:18:31)
No, I don’t despise anyone, Senator.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:34)
Okay. Isn’t it true that there were a handful of people at the FBI that despised Donald Trump and wanted to do everything they could do to keep him from being president?

Sally Yates: (02:18:51)
I can’t speak as to what other people despised Donald Trump.

Senator Kennedy: (02:18:56)
Were you part of that group?

Sally Yates: (02:18:59)
No, Senator I was not.

Senator Kennedy: (02:19:01)
Isn’t it true that there were a handful of people at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration that despised Donald Trump and did everything in their power to keep him from being president?

Sally Yates: (02:19:14)
I’m not aware of anyone at the Department of Justice doing anything to try to keep Donald Trump from becoming President. That would be have been inconsistent-

Senator Kennedy: (02:19:21)
Were you part of that group? I’m sorry, were you a part of that group?

His interrogation technique is basically: on no account listen to anything the witness says, it will only confuse you.

Kennedy also seems to think the deputy attorney general is obliged to personally duplicate all the FBI's investigative work before signing off on a FISA application, 

Senator Kennedy: 02:21:12
Go ahead. My question was, isn’t it a fact that the Steele dossier’s junk?

Sally Yates: (02:21:17)
I think that there is certainly evidence now, but there was not at the time, that calls into question the reliability of many portions of the Steele dossier. I have [inaudible 00:13:27]-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:26)
Okay. Did you check to see if it was junk before you signed off on the FISA application?

Sally Yates: (02:21:34)
Senator, the affidavit that was provided by the FBI sets forth the factual basis. We rely upon the FBI to be the fact finders in the FISA process-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:45)
[crosstalk 02:21:45] So, you didn’t independently check?

Sally Yates: (02:21:48)
No, sir. I did not independently fact check, and I’m not exactly sure how I would go about doing individual-

Senator Kennedy: (02:21:53)
Let me be sure I understand. You signed off on two of the applications. You’re asking for permission to surveil somebody who is close to a candidacy for the President of the United States in one instance, and in the second instance actually was the President of the United States. You took no independent steps to see if the Steele dossier was accurate? Is that your testimony?

Sally Yates: (02:22:35)
Senator, I’m sorry. I’m not following your question when you talk about who was the subject of the FISA application.

Senator Kennedy: (02:22:40)
Let me try to be clearer. The Steele dossiers was critical to at least several of the FISA applications, one of which you signed off on. You said that to get the … Let me finish my question. You said that the Steele dossier, with hindsight, may not have been completely accurate. You’re investigating a President of the United States and you didn’t check to see if it was accurate?

and to labor under the mistaken belief that the FBI took out FISA orders not only on Carter Page, PhD, but also on Donald Trump, and to believe that this happened after Trump was already president, which means he is so far behind the curve that he really should have stayed home. It's nice how Yates takes her turn to pretend she doesn't hear ("I'm not following your question"), but Kennedy just doubles down. Yates tells him very carefully that Trump was not the object of any surveillance order, only "an individual... who was not a current member of the campaign", i.e. Page, and goes through the Woods process in which every fact in the affidavit is documented by the FBI and the DOJ's National Security Division (all the mistakes in the Page application involved information that had been left out, not information that had been put in), and Kennedy replies

Senator Kennedy: (02:26:21)
Could you just tell me every step you took to verify that the accuracy of the Steele dossier?

Sally Yates: (02:26:2102:26:09) I relied upon the FBI as the fact-finders here, and the lawyers in the National Security Division to vet the accuracy of the FI’s application. My job-

Senator Kennedy: (02:26:21) All of whom hated Trump, right?

I can't even.

There's lots more to say about the Yates hearing, but I'm taking a break.

To be continued. Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Unmask This

Opening of Grenell's list, via Adam L. Silverman/Balloon Juice.

"The fact that Vice President Biden and all of the president's inner circle, President Obama's inner circle, individually requested to unmask Gen. Flynn is very troubling," he said. "Unmasking involves revealing the identity of an American's private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant to eavesdrop on that conversation." (Senator Rand Paul, quoted on Fox News)

Q: Dad, what's unmasking?

A: I thought you'd never ask. I found out around the beginning of the Republican attempt to discredit the case against Michael Flynn, in April 2017, and first wrote about it then. Actually I sort of found out earlier than that, during the days of High Greenwaldianism following the Snowden leaks of 2013, but didn't pay the same kind of attention.

Mueller: The Airport Paperback

Here's some drafting for the airport novel version. Superscript notes identify material that's exclusive to the Mueller Report. Material on Flynn in the previous sketch is not yet known to these characters, although I guess it will be. Sorry I can't seem to get rid of the links and blockquotes.

Justice League of America #1, October 1960, art by Murphy Anderson, via Wikipedia.

Sally Yates, the slender blonde with the soft Southern accent who'd become the acting attorney general three days earlier, as the new president was being inaugurated, swept her hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm really freaked out about it," ^{[M II:30 fn 134]} she told Andy McCabe, the FBI nerd, contemplating her from the other side of the desk, as Mary McCord, DOJ national security specialist, shook her head from side to side next to him.

"This" was General Mike Flynn, fired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the previous administration and now the new chief of the National Security Council. A craggy-faced fanatic from the paranoid wing of his Republican party, he'd become indispensable to his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a pudgy, pasty hotel-keeper and television schmoozer, lending him an air of austerity and toughness, one of the men the candidate called "my generals", but he'd been turning out to have more in his past than just his enmity with the outgoing president.