Bishop Barron And AI

Bishop Robert Barron posted yesterday on something I've noticed for a while on YouTube: phony videos that represent themselves as being on a particular topic, putatively generated by AI. I spent a career in tech, mostly before the "AI" quasi-phenomenon, but I've always been skeptical of what's now being represented as AI. Certainly it's the case that there are YouTube videos that represent themselves as being about Bp Barron, C S Lewis, and Abp Fulton Sheen, which quickly turn out to be vapid fakes -- but are they in fact AI-generated?

In the video above, Bp Barron notes,

One that just came out recently had me giving recommendations about how to remove demons from your toilet. So my point, everybody, is this is all ridiculous. And I think if you spend just a moment, you can tell the difference between an authentic video from me and one of these fakes.

This is exactly right. What I see in the news over and over is that "they" are gonna have to build new nuclear power plants to feed the massive infrastructure AI computer centers are gonna need, blah blah-- and all of it to generate fake videos of Bp Barron telling us how to remove demons from our toilets? How is this intelligence at all, much less artificial? Bp Barron is correct: this isn't intelligence at all, it's dumb.

Lately I've seen some authentic videos on how certain wild animals like possums can in some cases make satisfying pets, although this certainly requires patience, commitment, appropriate veterinary care, and obedience to applicable state and local laws. The problem is that there seem to be dozens of phony videos on every possibility, with heartwarming stories of lynxes (for instance) adopted by lonely seniors, whose lives are thereby changed.

The problem is that an awful lot of hand work seems to go into these phony videos. The videos need images, and you need to find pictures of lynxes that can be credibly merged into pictures of seniors happily cuddling them or whatever, and somewhere you have to find seniors willing to model for these scenes, which often require others to pose as grandchildren, game wardens, angry neighbors, or whatever to suit the needs of the story. I can't imagine that this is computer generated; it would be too expensive for this sort of marginal stuff.

Next, the writing, while generally grammatical and idiomatic, has all the earmarks of being written by hacks -- human hacks. "Smiling graciously, Liddy scratched the lynx's furry head with her wrinkled hands." If this is AI-generated, someone is spending big bucks to get a cheapo product. You could hire a hack for a lot less.

Isn't this the dilemma of AI? I asked the web, "Can I get AI to write me a Henry James short story?" and got this answer from "AI":

Yes, you can use AI tools to generate a short story in the style of Henry James, but with some key caveats.

. . . AI can analyze and mimic patterns: AI writing tools are trained on vast datasets of existing text, enabling them to identify and replicate stylistic patterns like sentence structure, vocabulary, tone, and common phrases associated with specific authors.

. . . Lack of true creativity and originality: While AI can imitate style, it doesn't possess the same level of human creativity, emotional depth, or understanding of the nuances of human experience that characterized authors like Henry James. It can mimic, but not truly innovate in the way James did.

Risk of superficial imitation: AI might capture the superficial markers of James's style (long sentences, certain vocabulary) without fully grasping their deeper purpose or meaning. The resulting story might feel like a stylistic imitation rather than a genuine work of art.

In other words, whatever AI tries to do in any sort of creative realm, something's going to be missing. But there's nothing new here. I had a dorm neighbor as an undergraduate who was a computer science major working on a project trying to get the computer to write music like Bach. It got as far as producing scores that looked like music, but there was always something missing --and this was 60 years ago.

So on one hand, AI itself gave me an insightful answer to my question, but we're still back to the other question -- I can hire a hack writer for far less than minimum wage. Why spend money to get AI to write uninspired prose? I asked the web, "Why should i spend money getting AI to do work when I can hire a mediocre person to do the same thing for a lot less?" The answer was very different:

There's a prevailing notion that hiring a human for a lower cost might seem like a more budget-friendly approach than investing in AI, especially for tasks perceived as "mediocre". However, a closer look at the actual benefits and long-term implications reveals a more complex picture.

AI can significantly boost productivity, reduce errors, and handle repetitive tasks with greater efficiency than humans. AI agents can conduct research, create websites, write content, and cross-reference information across databases, automating entire services and replacing the need for full-time employees in some instances.

Except the "AI" that answered my first question said if you ask AI to be creative, you're just going to get a blah result that anyone can tell isn't creative. The "AI" that answered my second question said well, AI will free up your mediocre employee to be more than mediocre, or something like that, or maybe you won't even need a mediocre employee, except you've spent a lot more money. Which is no answer at all.

Bp Barron concludes,

To those who've been following me for, you know, 25 years, use your common sense, too. When you see these goofy images that are obviously generated by a computer, and you hear me talking about some wild thing, I hope you have the sense to know, look, that's not really Bishop Barron speaking.

But this is just another way of saying AI is overrated, particularly in any area that requires genuine insight or creativity. Just a little bit of common sense can burst that bubble.

Bp Barron also points out that the people who put out the phony AI Barron videos are doing it for ad revenue -- but if they're actually using AI, they can't be making much money at it. That's the real dilimma.

More On Comey And His Substack

It turns out that James Comey's strange video on Taylor Swift is just the tip of an iceberg. Julie Kelly has looked at all his Substack posts. These began in May.

Clad in business attire and wearing some sort of white make up to conceal a persistent puffy-eye problem, Comey gives scripted performances in a cloying uptalk cadence to answer his critics in a carefree way to sound like he isn’t worried about potential legal consequences for what he did. He talks a lot about “love” and “laughter” and finding “peace” in the second era of Trump—quickly leading the viewer to believe Comey actually has very little love, laughter, or peace in his life. (A well-earned miserable existence if that’s indeed the case.)

One big question is how he has the time to do this stuff -- making videos is actually time-consuming work. Keep in mind that he started as an associate at a white-shoe law firm and went on to climb the ranks as an associate US Attorney, a US Attorney, Deputy Attorney General, and then, following some high-level corporate jobs, FBI Director. But Trump fired him at age 56, and since then, it really looks like he's been strolling the beach. No prestigious law firms, and apparently no corporate boards, have picked him up since his firing. Why not?

Getting fired by Trump, Comey insists, was the best thing that happened to him because now he can do yoga and play with chalk (and shells apparently) and “love deeply.” This segment alone should prompt an immediate investigation into every case Comey ever handled—or at least a psych evaluation.

. . . Democrats, despite a brief rendezvous with him during the first Trump term, still blame Comey for Hillary Clinton’s loss. He appears to have few defenders in former fed circles including those recently fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi; his name rarely comes up.

. . . Despite his best attempts to appear humorous, fearless, and cool, Comey instead comes across as a deeply disturbed individual who has bought into his own visions of grandeur for so long that he doesn’t really know what he is.

All I can think is people who know him even a little better than the general public does have also decided he's a deeply disturbed individual. But what did Barack Obama see in him? I can imagine that his resume as a Bush Republican would make Obama seem non-partisan and statesmanlike, but his handling of the Clinton e-mails is an indication that he was unstable and untrustworthy.

But add to it that in the January 6, 2017 meeting in Trump Tower, Comey seems to have thought it would be a good idea quietly to let Trump know he had the pee dossier. Think about this. Comey had to have a pretty good idea, if he didn't understand it outright, that the pee dossier was false. Trump would have understood completely that it was false -- as various people have said, Trump is a germophobe, he wouldn't get remotely close to anything like that.

I can only think Trump's immediate reaction had to have been along the line of, "What's with this guy? He's bonkers! How is he the FBI Director?" This, if nothing else, had to have set Trump to wondering what he'd gotten himself into and what he needed to do about it. But this also goes to what Obama saw in Comey: the guy was bonkers, completely unreliable, not even a truthtelling loose cannon, just untrustworthy at heart. How could Obama ever have found him useful?

But again, think of that January 6, 2017 Trump Tower meeting: Clapper and Brennan were trusting Comey to be the one guy who'd continue to execute their agenda within the government after Obama left office in two weeks. What were they missing? It makes me wonder if they were just as bonkers.

This brings up the question of why Trump actually fired Comey. According to Wikipedia,

The White House initially stated the firing was on the recommendation of United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to both of whom Comey reported. Rosenstein had sent a memorandum to Sessions, forwarded to Trump, in which Rosenstein listed objections to Comey's conduct in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. . . . On May 10, Trump told reporters he had fired Comey because Comey "wasn't doing a good job".

By May 11, however, in a direct contradiction of the earlier statements by the White House, Vice President Mike Pence, and the contents of the dismissal letter itself, President Trump stated to Lester Holt in an NBC News interview that Comey's dismissal was in fact "my decision" and "I was going to fire [Comey] regardless of recommendation [by Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein]." Trump later said of the dismissal "when I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'" In the same televised interview, Trump labelled Comey "a showboat" and "grandstander".

On May 19, The New York Times published excerpts of an official White House document summarizing Trump's private meeting, the day after the firing, with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in the Oval Office. Trump told Kislyak and Lavrov that he "just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job".

It's hard for me to avoid noting that after Trump fired Comey, nobody in the respectable legal, corporate, or academic world seems to have wanted to touch the guy, even though being a Trump victim should have made him attractive, even as just a figurehead. It looks to me as if Trump had real insight into Comey's case, which the elite movers and shakers seem to have recognized as well, however reluctant they were to admit it.

The question that keeps coming back for me is why Brennan, Clapper, and Obama missed this.

Reading Between The Lines

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025

A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true.

My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's nothing in them that hurts Trump:

“He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this, and that he believed if there had been anything pertaining to President Trump with respect to the Epstein list, that he felt like the Biden administration would probably have leaked it out,” [Oversight Committee Chair James] Comer told reporters while Bill Barr was still behind close doors testifying.

Bongino caused a completely unnecessary crisis when the kerfuffle created an implicit suggestion that things might be otherwise. This confirmed my own suspicion that the guy is a grandstander and a lightweight; Trump had to waste whatever time it took to calm the guy down and get him to come back to work, at least temporarily. But the guy is clearly untrustworthy and unstable, and they can't keep him where he is long term, especially if they can put someone who's actually qualified into that job.

Another story gives glimpses of what must be going on behind the scenes at the Bureau:

Michael Feinberg, who was recently the assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s Norfolk field office in Virginia, left the FBI at the end of May after he claims his direct superior told him that FBI deputy director Dan Bongino was scrutinizing his longtime friendship with [Peter] Strzok, the disgraced FBI special agent who played a key role in the Trump-Russia investigation[.}

. . . Rather than take a polygraph test about his relationship with Strzok, Feinberg says he quit the FBI instead of risking the possible demotion he says he was facing in place of the big promotion to FBI headquarters which he had been expecting.

The FBI’s website says that “although we have used polygraphs to screen new employees for many years, since the 2001 Robert Hanssen spy case, we have also been requiring regular polygraph examinations of FBI employees with access to sensitive compartmented information.”

Feinberg's resignation in May came before the more publicized ouster of Brian Driscoll on August 7. Driscoll had briefly been Acting FBI Director immediately after Trump's second inauguration in January:

On January 31, 2025, as part of a planned mass termination of federal law enforcement officials under the second Trump administration, the FBI under Driscoll was ordered to fire eight senior executives and compile a list of potentially thousands of other employees involved in investigations stemming from the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Driscoll said that the list of such employees included himself and acting deputy director Kissane.] The order came from Emil Bove, a former criminal defense attorney for Trump who became the Trump administration's acting Deputy Attorney General. Driscoll refused to endorse the effort to purge agents as part of a political retribution and pushed back. He was fired by President Trump on August 7, 2025.

Along with Driscoll, two other FBI figures were fired the same day:

Former acting director Brian Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office Steven Jensen, and Washington-based Special Agent Walter Giardina were informed they are being fired, according to the two people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter. Formal paperwork is expected to be issued Friday.

. . . After Trump returned to office in January, some officials who worked on or supervised aspects of the Jan. 6 probe were allowed to stay in their posts or even promoted, but pressure from MAGA activists eventually led to many of those agents being dismissed.

That appeared to be the case with Jensen, who was installed by Director Kash Patel as head of the FBI’s critical Washington Field Office just four months ago.

. . . Jensen had been expected to attend a press conference Thursday with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington. But Jensen did not show up. Pirro was flanked instead by FBI official Reid Davis, the special-agent-in-charge in Washington for criminal matters.

. . . Giardina worked on aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He was also involved in the arrest of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to testify before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot. Navarro’s lawyers and a federal judge called the arrest unnecessary and questioned why he was not simply allowed to turn himself in. Navarro himself branded Giardina and the other agent involved in the arrest as “kind Nazis.”

The length of time between Driscoll's brief stint as Acting Director in January and his eventual firing in August suggests there was extensive investigation and some sort of deliberation that took place in his case, and likely the cases of Jensen and Giardina as well. Feinberg's dilemma over being polygraphed suggests this could also have been a factor in the August 7 firings. As of this past April,

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday it has started using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.

“We can confirm the FBI has begun administering polygraph tests to identify the source of information leaks within the bureau,” the bureau’s public affairs office told Reuters in a statement.

. . . Donald Trump’s administration has been cracking down on people who leak information to journalists since he returned to office in January.

The effort to eliminate leakers and potential deep state moles from the FBI also suggests the Bureau is making serious moves in its investigations. It doesn't seem like too big a step to infer that Feinberg, Driscoll, Jensen, and Giardino were all fingered as potential leakers who could compromise investigations, and apparently like Feinberg, they may have been given the choice of taking a polygraph or leaving.

The A&E show Lie Detector: Truth or Deception features George Olivo, a retired FBI polygrapher. In a recent interview, he said he did a lot of counterintelligence work with the Bureau, but he wasn't more spectiic than that. He did say,

I love to interview people. And FBI investigations are very long. They can be two-to-four year investigations. And you don’t interview the main subjects until the end of the investigation. Usually it’s months of collecting information.

But the polygraph goes hand-in-hand with interviewing people every day.

. . . It can’t be stressed enough that what you see on TV or in the movies—that’s not the real polygraph. The whole protocol that’s used is different. The pre-test interview before the test is usually 45 minutes to an hour. You talk to the person, get their side of the story, construct questions in a way that’s fair to that person. We don’t use ‘gotcha’ questions; every question is scoped.

All I can think is that something like this is going on in the FBI now.

Comey's Incongruity

So the weekend's big news is that James Comey has outed hinself as a Swiftie, which is to say a fan of Taylor Swift. I just haven't been following this phenomenon, and I did some quick research to bring myself up to date. Accoreding to Wikipedia,

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions have made her a cultural icon of the 21st century. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

I watched a couple of her routines on YouTube, and on one hand, they seem like something recycled from the last century, maybe Joni Mitchell meets Madonna, but on the other, although she's 35, an age when the musical greats of my generation were already dead, her persona is more like an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old. This incongruity seems to be the key to why James Comey is a Swiftie, he's from an older age group affecting the attitudes of people much younger.

James Comey, born December 14, 1960, is a baby boomer, a generation usually defined as born in the years between 1946 and 1964. If you check the Taylor Swift demographics chart at the top of this post (click on the image for a larger copy), baby boomers are onlyh 23% of Swift's audience. Heck, if you grew up with Janis Joplin, Cass Elliot, or Grace Slick, Taylor Swift is going to look like a borrowed AI creation of some sort. So that's anotherr incongruity with Comey.

Another incongruity is household income. We don't know much about Comey's current net worth, but according to Wikipedia,

In August 2005, it was announced that Comey would enter the private sector, becoming the general counsel and senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Department of Defense's largest contractor. Comey's tenure took effect on October 1, 2005, serving in that capacity until June 2, 2010, when he announced he would leave Lockheed Martin to join the senior management committee at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment management firm. Comey received a three million dollar payout from Bridgewater. His net worth was estimated at 14 million dollars in 2013.

As FBI Director after 2013, he appears to have earned something between $180,000 and $199,000 per year, less than he would have earned at Lockheed Martin or Bridgewater, but still well into the $100,000+ bracket, which makes up only 25% of Swiftie demographics. In other categories, though, he's a good Swiftie: Democrat, white, and apparently suburban, living in northern Virginia.

The really odd thing is that he's all dressed up in yesterday's video, suit and tie, recent haircut, clean-shaven -- and although he complains about "our elderly, makeup-covered President", it's hard to avoid thinking Comey's wearing makeup for this appearance as well. And his expression is strangely glib.

This is yet another incongruity: he's dressed as a fully responsible and mature adult, presumably addressing a like-minded audience, but he's using an eight-year-old's vocabularty:

Like a lot of you, I struggle with how to stand up to bullies without letting their meanness infect me and change me. . . . There are far more decent, honest, kind people in America than there are mean jerks.

. . . Don’t get me wrong—we have our jerks, millions of them, you may have noticed. In particular, there’s a stunning coarseness and ugliness in the Republican Party today.

. . . Of course, we need to stand up to jerks and defend what matters.

. . . Taylor Swift . . . sang a song about this topic, asking: Why you gotta be so mean? And she spoke directly to the nasty people: I bet you got pushed around. Somebody made you cold. But the cycle ends right now, because you can’t lead me down that road.

If he's gonna talk down to us this way, he should be wearing a sweater like Mister Rogers, not wearing a serious daddy suit. His chief objection to Trump is apparently he's gotta be so mean. Mean to whom? Well, apparently to James Comey, who informed observers suggest should be preparing himself to be indicted. But that means he should be talking full time to other guys in serious daddy suits who would be telling him to stay off social media, keep a low profile, and ponder his defense strategy.

This suggests to me that Comey lacks any situational awareness. It reminds me in many ways of true crime shows like Court Cam, where people appear before the judge wearing T-shirts with cuss words on them, and the exasperated judge admonishes them that they have to be conscious of where they are. Something basic is missing here.

There's also the peculiar attitude of entitlement that seems to appear in Taylor Swift as well, the teeny-bopper who suddenly realizes that not all the boys are sincere, and she's over-the-top angry that they aren't -- except it's a 35-year-old woman who's actually making these shrieks of rage. Again, something's missing.

Comey in his serious daddy suit should be in serious daddy meetings in serious daddy meeting rooms at serious daddy law firms right now, and instead he's coming out as a Swiftie like a disillusioned 14-year-old. This doesn't bode well.

Thank Goodness I Was Never A News Writer

Looking back, the few times I was actually paid directly to do writing, it was government statistical reports and corporate policy manuals. But I got out of those jobs and into more interesting technical work as soon as I could. I saw a piece by John Kass at Real Clear Politics this morning that showed me why I'm grateful to the Almighty for steering me away from his kind of work. Kass had a 41-year career as a writer for the Chicago Tribune and now freelances. I'd be ashamed to be him. In today's piece:

It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president.

This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he's also behind the curve in equating what's coming out with the "Russia Collusion Hoax". There was actually a multifaceted effort, in and out of government and across diverse government agencies, to deflect attention from Clinton and Biden scandals and cook up false accusations against Trump, from the pee dossier to the Ukraine impeachment to January 6 to the Mar-a-Lago raid. It's far from certain that Obama was at the center of everything.

Farther down, he namechecks and teases an upcoming column about basically nothing:

I tried out my theory [which he hasn't really outlined] on the great NY Post columnist and best-selling author Miranda Devine. She will appear soon as a guest on the Chicago Way podcast that I co-host with WGN radio executive producer Jeff Carlin and send free as a bonus to subscribers of johnkassnews.com.

Well, what did she say?

“Barack Obama is finding relevance right now, probably not the relevance he’d planned, because he’s now fingered as the ringleader as Donald Trump now calls him, of the whole Russiagate Russia Collusion hoax (I’m linking to a recent column of hers on ‘Bumbling Obama Aides Actually Admit Russiagate was a smear campaign against Trump). Wait a moment. She didn't actually answer anything, he just linked to something she's written in a column days earlier. And note that he doesn't have a close-quote at the end of that link, but in the following paragraph, he's somehow implying that words from Devine, possibly in person now, are anextension of the same conversation:

“It’s very fitting that Mamdani would try to set himself up as some sort of national figure by being ‘mentored’ by Barack Obama and setting himself against Donald Trump because he’s of course “too important” to battle against the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams,” Devine told us.

At minimum, Kass badly needs a copy editor to straighten this mess out. Exactly what did Devine say, and where did she say it? The open-quotes and close-quotes, single quotes and double, are all stirred up in a soup. I guess Kass had an editor who'd fix this at the Tribune, but no longer. He goes on,

Originally I had planned to write a different column about Obama, a light piece with the former president on the psychiatric couch being psychoanalyzed, worrying about the crease in his trousers, complaining about the conservative media, about his wife’s podcast, complaining about disloyal Democrats and the Federal Grand Jury examining his actions and those of his Deep State intelligence dogs and so on.

Who knows? I might return to it.

But I was trained as a newspaperman. And Miranda Devine is a hard news person, though she liked the idea of Obama on my comfy couch.

I think Devine was being polite. This is all fluff, mixed with self-promotion. I don't think I could live with myself knowing I had to do this to make money.

The odd thing was that as an Ivy undergraduate, I got the same feeling reading the opinion pieces in the campus newspaper. In freshman comp, the professors were on my case for things like vagueness, poor puncutation, sweeping generalizations, and all the usual other stuff, but the writers in the campus rag were doing exactly the same things and getting away with it. And since this was an Ivy, within a few years, you'd see those same bylines in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago getting away with esactly the same thing.

Somehow I don't think this was a mistake. The people who ran the planet wanted it this way. They still do. They want writers to be obtuse, lazy, and narcissistic. Just look at John Kass.

John Solomon's Revelations

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News. I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary.

Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out:

I do have a crystal ball about what we probably will be talking about in the next 48 hours. After all the leak stuff that I've done in the last few days, you kind of see two buckets of leaks, you've got Adam Schiff, we'll talk about that, and you've got James Comey and his sort of personal media consigliere that he puts on the taxpayer's dime to sort of burnish his image. One of the other things that I've always wanted to get to, and I think we've found the holy grail documents now, is everybody is focused on Hillary Clinton and the e-mail server, and that's an inmportant story, because it involved classified information being moved through an insecure channel.

But I've always believed that the bigger threat to Hillary Clinton was what the FBI was trying to do to look at whether her foundation was basically a back door for corruption, a Hunter Biden laundered through a c(3) family foundation. In the next 48 hours or so, I think we're going to get to see for the first time just how much political interference FBI agents faced in multiple jurisdictions when they got predicated leads, meaning evidence that warranted criminal investigation. . . concerning the Clinton Foundation. [This is the story that came out yesterday.] We're probably going to be able to name the names of people who ordered these investigations shut down [Yates and McCabe], even though the FBI manual, the US Attorney's manual, suggested those investigations should proceed until determinations were made about criminality.

I think this is the big Hillary scandal that has sort of skated below the radar, and I think it's going to be in the next few weeks a very parallel story to what happened with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, the FBI, the IRS, everybody knew he had a problem. and nobody could get the permission to go and do the case right until these whistleblowers came forward with us two years ago. I think similarly, you're going to see that there was a protection racket around Hillary Clinton, not just on the e-mail, we know what James Comey did with his magic FBI wand. . . . you're going to see who in government was providing that protection.

Solomon sees an overall pattern: a scandal threatens to emerge that could hurt Hillary badly, first the pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation, and then the offsite e-mail server, but in both cases, she's able to enlist the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to shut those invesgations down, and not only that, but to start phony investigations of Trump and his people to create a distraction. Solomon says later in the interview,

. . . Last week, Harmeet Dhillon came on the show, she's the civil rights chief for the [Justice Department], and she said, based on what she's seen, and she's not gonna talk about specific cases, but there's a very good chance that what the Justice Derpartment's gonna look at, is that this process, this "clear Hillary and put a fake scandal on the Trump people", may have been a deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties under color of authority.

It seems like nobody likes John Solomon. I did a web search on "disgraced journalist John Solomon" and got hits from the left like:

Fox News host Sean Hannity has welcomed disgraced conservative journalist and serial misinformer John Solomon back for regular appearances on his prime-time show to rail against the FBI search for classified government documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

In 2019, Solomon appeared over 50 times on Hannity’s show, where he regularly pushed Ukraine-linked conspiracy theories meant to undermine the validity of the Trump-Russia investigation that dominated headlines during the first years of the Trump presidency and was at the center of his first impeachment trial. Solomon was later fired from his position as a Fox News contributor for his role in coordinating a “disinformation campaign” to protect Trump, and his appearances on the network fell off.

But Sundance at Conservative Treehouse accuses Solomon of workng hand-in-glove with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to "leak" nothingburgers to create the appearance of active investigations. Just this past Wednesday:

Apparently, Kash Patel just discovered Daniel Richman, the guy who leaked information on behalf of James Comey; and along with that name from the past, someone in the Kash Patel office decided they wanted to highlight the 8-year-old FBI investigation about the FBI hunting for internal leakers.

Patel sends John Solomon the information on Daniel Richman. Solomon repackages the information and sells it as new bombshells. I’m not sure what these guys are doing, but Richman is a well known name from the past, when James Comey made the unsolicited announcement, a self-admission in 2017 about his use of Richman to leak to the New York Times.

The day before:

FBI Director Kash Patel sends John Solomon a declassified whistleblower report, showing how a prior House Intelligence Committee staffer blew the whistle on then HPSCI ranking member Adam Schiff, who was giving the staff instructions to leak fabricated intelligence reports on Trump-Russia to smear President Donald Trump in 2017 and 2018.

According to the release {SEE HERE}, the FBI eventually received and investigated the whistleblower claims; then in 2023, sent the information to the Merrick Garland/Lisa Monaco DOJ, who took no action because the claim was now beyond the statute of limitations.

. . . As Solomon now notes, … “The alleged leaks fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution on most legal theories, but the revelations nevertheless come at a sensitive time for Schiff“.. At the time of the Whistleblower report, the information to the FBI and DOJ would have been evidence that could have prosecuted Adam Schiff. However, now the information is limited to just providing I-told-you-so’s.

As best I can make out, Solomon's problem is that he was reporting favorably on Trump when that wasn't cool. Now, at least for Sundance, his problem seems to be that Trump people trust him and give him stories they don't give to Sundance, which is confirmation that they're secretly working against Trump, or something like that.

My sense is that Trump people trust Solomon and are giving him important stories, although within traditionally circumscribed guidelines. They won't comment on ongoing investigations and won't leak, but they'll point him to public information they think is important. That's all I can gather from the Spicer interview. But I also have a sense that Sundance is miffed that people like Patel and Dhillon don't trust him, either.

Sally Yates

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia,

In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days.

Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates stated the order was neither defensible in court nor consistent with the Constitution. Although large portions of the order were initially blocked by federal courts, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a revised version.

However, her most visible role so far was in forcing Michael Flynn's removal as National Security Adviser during the brief period when she was Acting Attorney General. According to Wikipedia,

Acting Attorney General Sally Yates made an "urgent" request to meet with newly-appointed White House Counsel Don McGahn. She met with him on January 26 and again on January 27. She informed McGahn that Flynn was "compromised" and possibly open to blackmail by the Russians. Yates told McGahn that Flynn had misled Pence and other administration officials about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. She added that Flynn's "underlying conduct", which she could not describe due to classification, "was problematic in and of itself", saying "it was a whole lot more than one White House official lying to another."

Yates's name has now reappeared in connection with internal divisions within the Obama Justice Department and Comey FBI over whether to investigate Hillary Clinton over a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation.

"Shut it down!" then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates is quoted as demanding in the detailed timeline of political impediments that agents in New York City, Little Rock, Ark., and Washington D.C. reported.

The agents tried to get the help of federal prosecutors to determine whether or what crimes occurred while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, most notably, because at that time, her family foundation solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department.

According to the link, an FBI investigation in Washington

was opened “as a preliminary investigation, because the Case Agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate the allegations in a recently-published book, Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation.”

. . . the FBI’s Little Rock and New York investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”

Despite that evidence, the FBI timeline stated that DOJ “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation” on February 1, 2016.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the primary figure involved in limiting investigations day-to-day, although he was almost certainly doing the bidding of Yates and Comey.

[T]he FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division reiterated that “all overt investigative steps related to the CF investigation” would “require” McCabe’s approval, “with the exception of speaking to open CHSs” during a February 22, 2016 meeting. The inquiry was further hobbled during the meeting when the FBI offices were “directed not to open or recruit any new CHSs, and no additional overt investigative steps were authorized.”

. . . Paul Abbate, then the assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as "negative," "annoyed," and "angry" about the Clinton Foundation cases, with McCabe saying that "they [the DOJ] say there's nothing here" and with McCabe asking "why are we even doing this?"

The investigations cited at the link from Inspector General Horowitz and Special Counsel Durham seem to conclude that McCabe exceeded his authority, presumably from Comey and Yates, to whom he reportedL:

Horowitz’s report in 2018 detailed multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators, including while under oath, about his authorization to then leak sensitive information to The Wall Street Journal in late October 2016 that revealed the existence of the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation (while not revealing how McCabe had put the inquiry in leg-irons for nearly a year).

The Horowitz report concluded “the evidence is substantial” that McCabe misled investigators “knowingly and intentionally” about leaking to the media. Comey said he did not permit McCabe to tell the media, and Horowitz wrote that McCabe’s actions were “designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and “violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”

Nevertheless, the story is now emerging that Comey himself leaked classified information to the New York Times via his confidant Daniel Richman.

Richman, who became friends with Comey during their time working together in the Southern District of New York, admitted to speaking with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, in particular.

At one point in early 2017, Richman had a discussion with Schmidt, who mentioned unspecified classified information and “knew more about it than he did,” an FBI memo obtained by The Post said.

. . . While the memo, first reported by Just the News, didn’t specify the classified information discussed, it previously said Comey mentioned to Richman that the bureau had “weird classified material related” to then-US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch.

Lynch infamously met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in 2016, just over a week before Comey announced he wasn’t recommending charges against Hillary Clinton.

. . . “Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected.”

The FBI memo in question comes from the bureau’s “Arctic Haze” investigation, a probe into the leaking of classified information that began in August 2017 in response to the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in eight articles published between April and June 2017.”

So whether Andrew McCabe was or wasn't exceeding his own authority, he appears on one hand to have been thwarting investigations consistent with the expressed or unexpressed wishes of both Yates and Comey, while Comey in particular was leaking independently of McCabe. It's hard for me to avoid thinking McCabe's role was to keep Comey's and Yates's fingerprints off the frammis.

Someone, maybe Strzok, maybe McCabe, maybe even Lisa Page, could get a really good deal if they were to flip for the prosecutors.