The Deep Throats Explain It All

As I've noted, in the two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid, there's been a chorus of Deep Throats who allegedly have knowledge of the FBI's inner workings feeding backgound info to overcredulous news writers. It's worth tabulating what they've been saying, if only to see if it might fall together into some kind of working hypothesis, although there's a logical problem with any theory that says the search was intended to retrieve a particular document or artifact.

Let's start with the analysis of Peter Strzok himself, who surfaced last week to give his own take:

Please oh please keep asking how you can turn down the temperature in the country.

And why does he have two passports?

The Russian passport, of course, is kept in a vault at Yasenevo and only swapped out at third country meets, so it can't be that one. pic.twitter.com/Hbk8iL39Ax

— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 15, 2022

Clearly Strzok still believes there's a Putin connection, quite possibly via the pee tapes. This at least suggests there's a continuing mindset among people who used to be at a high level in the FBI, if they aren't there now. But it appears that Strzok's former colleagues in the counterintelligence section are still on that case, whether he's with them or not. Via Real Clear Investigations,

The FBI's nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president's Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau's counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia "collusion" investigation of Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane."

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau's disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden's son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian "disinformation," an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

And yet more officials with knowledge of lots of stuff weigh in:

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday was specifically intended to recover Donald Trump's personal "stash" of hidden documents, two high-level U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek.

To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president's residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump's private hoard, agents went into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize.

"They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration," says the source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

Well, it's unnamed guys talking to Newsweek, which gives you an idea of its reliability. But running through all these accounts is the idea that whatever the subject of the search warrant, it was pretextual, and the FBI was after something else. It was either the smoking gun that will send Trump to the supermax (call it the pee tape theory), or it's the smoking gun that will blow the lid off the deep state (call it the Jason Bourne theory). These might both be combined as a "secret stash" theory, it's either something that will vindicate Trump or send him to the slammer.

There's a logical problem either way. Let's grant it's the pee tape, with an accompanying certificate of authenticity signed by Vladimir Putin himself. Why on earth would Trump keep this around? And not just keep it around, but keep it in the Mar-a-Lago home office safe? Which home office safe was apparently the first place the FBI looked? Just for starters, there are numerous Trump properties that aren't on US soil, and there have got to be storage facilities more secure than a mundane office safe. Wouldn't it at least be in Trump's interest to complicate any effort to get that stuff either via a search warrant, or even via multiple intelligence agencies, warrant or no?

On the other hand, let's go with the Jason Bourne theory, it's the one document or set of documents that'll send not just Christopher Wray, not Just Merrick Garland, but Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George Dubya, and Hillary herself to the supermax. I mean, they'll have to build a new wing in Colorado just to handle the wave of new tenants. If this is so hot, again, why would Trump keep it in the first place the FBI looked? And remember, this smoking-gun stash is an extremely valuable item to have, incalculable value. Corporations keep information that's that important -- say, the secret formula for Coca-Cola -- in highly secure environments with multiple backups just as secure.

But Trump, a corporate CEO who must have at least some familiarity with the value of information and how to protect it, leaves it in an office safe? Without a backup? And the FBI thinks if it gets this stash, all it needs to do is spirit it away and shred it?

This leads to the next question. Let's grant that Deep Throat N, the one who spoke to Newsweek, is legit, Newsweek has vetted him, knows who he is, and has reason to think he's giving the straight stuff. To this, my answer is HUH?? This is a high level guy at the FBI, the DOJ, or the CIA, and he believes all the FBI needed to do was get a warrant, send Strzok's replacement in with a safecracker, steal the memo back even if it wasn't in the warrant, and everything's copacetic?

Or let's say Deep Throat N is smarter than that, he knows the FBI is living in a dream world, and he's talking to Newsweek to cover his butt before it all hits the fan. All that does is move the whole problem just one degree of separation farther away, you're still left with the issue that we aren't even in The Bourne Identity, we're just in a rerun of Get Smart. The end game is still that Wray and Garland head for the supermax, at least figuratively just down the hall from Ted Kaczynski -- the outcome is just delayed by a few extra months.

I doubt if any actual outcome will be that apocalyptic. But notice that the consensus of the deep throats, and presumably the newsies who listen to them, is that the FBI raid was pretextual, and the dozen boxes of cocktail napkins, memos, and souvenirs the FBI carried off had nothing to do with the actual target of the search, which wasn't listed on the search warrant. That actually has a certain ring of truth, and it if is, that problem is big enough.