Six Ways From Sunday
New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
Trump said Tuesday evening that an intelligence briefing on Russia’s cyber activities “was delayed until Friday” and suggested that intelligence agencies weren’t prepared. NBC News reported, however, that the briefing was always planned for Friday.
“The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” the president-elect wrote on Twitter.
Intelligence officials have reportedly determined that Russia tried to interfere in the U.S. presidential election to help Trump win the White House.
More than eight years later, we're finally learning what was behimd Trump's tweet and Schumer's implicit threat:
The Obama administration "manufactured and politicized intelligence" to create the narrative that Russia was attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election, despite information from the intelligence community stating otherwise, Fox News Digital has learned.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents revealing "overwhelming evidence" that demonstrates how, after President Donald Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, then-President Barack Obama and his national security team laid the groundwork for what would be the years-long Trump–Russia collusion probe.
Documents revealed that in the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the intelligence community consistently assessed that Russia was "probably not trying…to influence the election by using cyber means."
. . . Fox News Digital obtained declassified, but redacted, communications from the FBI on the Presidential Daily Brief, stating that it "should not go forward until the FBI" had shared its "concerns."
Those communications revealed that the FBI drafted a "dissent" to the original Presidential Daily Brief.
The communications revealed that the brief was expected to be published Dec. 9, 2016, the following day, but later communications revealed that Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "based on some new guidance" decided to "push back publication" of the Presidential Daily Brief.
. . . Later, Obama officials "leaked false statements to media outlets" claiming that "Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election."
By Jan. 6, 2017, a new Intelligence Community Assessment was released that, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months."
This sounds like Trump knew what was happening as it was taking place, and his tweets were completely correct, which must have been making the deep state at least mildly uncomfortable. But now let's move to a 2019 account by Josh Campbell, by then a CNN analyst, but in 2016-17 a special assistant to James Comey, then FBI Director:
It was January 6, 2017, two weeks before Donald J. Trump would take the oath of office and assume the role of commander in chief, responsible for protecting the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Comey had flown to New York to join his counterparts in the national security community to brief the president-elect and his transition team on their findings on actions the Kremlin had taken to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.
. . . For months, a series of memos had been privately circulating among members of the media and across government that contained unverified but explosive charges against then candidate Trump. . . . the “Steele dossier,” as it would become known, also included tawdry alleged details of Trump’s sexual proclivities and illicit acts conducted while in Moscow. At one point, Steele thought the information so potentially damning that he approached the FBI and provided it with his reporting.
. . . Conscious of the personal embarrassment this sensitive brief might cause the president-elect, the FBI director opted to discuss it with Trump separately at the end of the larger briefing on Russian interference.
. . . When Comey got to the tawdry details contained in the dossier, Trump became defensive, cutting him off and denying the allegations. “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” Trump asked. . . . Comey indicated that the intelligence community was aware that the claims in the dossier were unsubstantiated, but that he nevertheless wanted Trump to be aware the information was circulating through government and media circles. Trump thanked Comey for the information, signaling the end of the short one-on-one meeting.
Campbell reports reading Comey's laptop notes on "a meeting that would spell the beginning of the end of his career, and one that would mark the start of a veritable hurricane—a torrent of attacks on the rule of law that would risk threatening the viability of our national institutions of justice." How little he knew. My surmise is that Trump already knew what the meeting with Comey would bring up, as he clearly knew the workings within the deep state that would generate the false assessments of Russian interference in the election.Let's keep in mind that within days of the election, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers met with Trump to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, and as a consequence, Trump moved his transition headquarters to his Bedminster, NJ golf club. He seems to have had well-placed informants within the deep state from the start, but the specific reason or reasons he fired Comey as FBI Director have never been made clear. They may eventually surface now.
Cats can eventually lose all nine of their lives, and it looks like the deep state is running out of the six ways from Sunday it had to get back at Trump. Matt Taibbi said, "All week, Washington buzzed with rumors about imminent document releases," but he meant the releases of the Russiagate documents Tulsi Gabbard declassified, when the real rumors that buzzed all week were about the upcoming Wall Street Journal story that turned out just to cover pube doodles. If anything, this was a sign that the deep state had used up all six ways from Sunday.
One thing we're learning is that the grapevine is always a few days ahead of what's happening. Just before DNI Gabbard released the declassified documents and the report,
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Friday bashed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“Tulsi Gabbard is not competent to be the director of national intelligence,” he told moderator Peter Baker at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “I believe she is trying to politicize the workforce and work product, and that makes America less safe.”
But also in the days leading up to Gabbard's action, the Justice Department fired, of all people, James Comey's daughter Maurene.
Ms. Comey was told of her firing Wednesday in a letter from a Justice Department official in Washington who cited Article II of the Constitution, which broadly describes the powers of the president, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. She said in her email that the letter did not give a reason for her termination.
Nor do we know the specific reason for James Comey's own termination in 2017, but the history we're beginning to revisit suggests Trump was then, and is now, much better informed than we give him credit for. I suspect that Comey's daughter was in fact a means of communication that continued between Comey and the deep state, it's now been eliminated, and the timing is no coincidence. And as I've said, there's good reason to think she was the source of the pube doodles letter, too. It's one more indication they've used up their six ways from Sunday.