What Is There To Say About Gorbachev?

I didn't intend to spend any time on Mikhail Gorbachev's passing, but the dog days of summer being what they are, and the whole range of opinion on any subject being as obtuse as it's been, Gorbachev is one of the most interesting subjects around -- which I guess says something. The first observation to make is that the Ukraine invasion has proven to be a last, desperate, feckless gesture of Soviet revanchism. The tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February carried Soviet flags in addition to their Zs for victory, neither of which has worn well. This was the system Gorbachev intended to preserve and reinvigorate.

The conventional obituaries have missed the point. Here's The Guardian:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration.

Somebody quoted a tweet that said Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Robert E Lee ended the American Civil War. I suppose this goes to one part of the story, but let's recognize that if the Cold War began with the Berlin Airlift in 1948, Stalin died in 1953, so the Cold War took place at the very end of his regime. There had to be explanations for it beyond nukes or Stalin himself.

Important discussions of Soviet Marxism-Leninism had already been written in To the Finland Station (1940) and Witness (1952). They predate Solzhenitsyn, are intellectually more robust, and cover a great deal more ground. Indeed, one effect of the botched Ukraine invasion has been a vigorous revision of both Dostoevsky's and Solzhenitsyn's reputations from the Ukrainian perspective -- Ukraine, with some justice, has seen itself as something of a literary victim of their mindset.

Marxism, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in detail, was a crisis for the West that predated Lenin, although Lenin was the critical figure who understood and could mobilize the level of ruthlessness needed to implement it. Nevertheless, the threat of revolution was a project for the elites throughout much of the 19th century. Fabian socialism and the programs it advocated, like social insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care, were as a practical matter intended to avert proletarian revolution decades before 1917.

On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an important event in that no equivalent ideologically-based regime succeeded it, and most of the regimes in Europe and elsewhere that had been nominally similar repudiated Marxism-Leninism. It brings me back to a passage from William James:

A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.

At some point, and in fact that point was probably prior to Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985, Marxism-Leninism ceased to become a live hypothesis in the West, when in fact it had been one since the 19th century. To Whittaker Chambers, for instance, when he saw the devastation of Europe after the Great War, Marxism clearly made an electric connection. But by the 1980s, it had become an intellectual plaything of the privileged gentry in the faculty lounge, to the point that few of them recognized that they themselves would be among the first to be exterminated in an actual Marxist revolution.

In effect, Marxism reverted to the sort of vain parlor exercise it had been before Lenin, and those tasked with actually building a functional society didn't bother with it. This happened without Gorbachev's assistance. I'm not sure if he even noticed.

The intriguing question is what replaced it, and that question continues. My sense of things after the Soviet collapse was initially that former Soviet client states like Iraq were no longer subject to policy restraint from Moscow, but even before the collapse, tension had arisen between Soviet Marxism and Islamism. The end of the Soviet Union gave Islamists the idea that they could attempt to fill the political vacuum this left, at least in the Islamic world.

After 9/11, I think it was a worthwhile and necessary task to prevent Islamism from gaining that sort of foothold, and the expenditure in Iraq was probably worth it. Islamist terror, at least as of now, is not a high-priority issue in the US, and even in places like France, the UK, and Germany, the "truck of peace" is much less common. This may well be due to the US-originated strategy of disabling international funding of this movement.

But if not Marxism, and if not Islamism, then what? The current fashion is the Great Reset, which is a loose combination of neo-Malthusianism expressed in the global warming hypothesis, extreme sexual egalitarianism beyond anything envisioned among 19th-century Fabian progressives, and an alliance between the gentry class and the Lumpenproletariat expressed in the Black Lives Matter movement. The one thing that can be said about this combination is that none of it is remotely Marxist; in fact, it's bourgeois fantasy, self-contradictory and self-defeating. My prognosis for it is grave.

I currently think that loose combination of separate and somewhat nutty individual ideologies doesn't have the potential for attracting a Lenin ruthless enough to implement them in any serious way. The one guy who's actually trying to do this is Joe Biden. There's more thinking for me to do along that path.

Thibault Is A Little Guy

FBI agent Timothy Thibault was reported late Monday to have been escorted out of his FBI office in Washington Friday afternoon and to have "abruptly resigned". Thibault had been a public target of allegations by Iowa Sen Charles Grassley that FBI agents have shown political bias in their investigations.

"The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI's receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI's false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation," GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland on July 25. "The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter."

. . . In October 2020, one month before the election, "an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed" by a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office. An earlier letter from Grassley identified the agent as Timothy Thibault.

. . . In that May 31 letter, Grassley also accused Thibault of likely violations of "[f]ederal laws, regulations and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) guidelines."

"Whistleblowers have reported to me, that although the FBI and Justice Department maintain policies dictating specific standards requiring substantial factual predication to initiate an investigation, Thibault and other Justice Department and FBI employees failed to comply with these requirements."

However,

Thibault, a 25-year-veteran, had already been on leave for a month after the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), started raising concerns about whistleblower claims that the FBI had obstructed its own investigations into the first son.

Beyond that, on August 4,

FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday that allegations of an FBI agent’s partisan social media posts and efforts to suppress information in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s business activities were “deeply troubling.”

Speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Wray appeared to condemn the alleged actions of Timothy Thibault, who he said was an FBI assistant special agent in charge at the Washington field office until “relatively recently.”

Well, Director Wray was clearly shocked, shocked to hear of this on August 4. It sounds like he got right on it (cough, cough), notwithstanding Grassley had written him about Thibault and others at least as early as May 31. In fact, it sounds as if the FBI is belatedly covering itself. Here's what sounds like background from them in this Fox report:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray called the whistleblowers' allegations "deeply troubling." He promised that the whistleblowers would be protected and removed Thibault from his supervisory role.

Thibault was one of 13 assistant special agents in charge at the Washington field office. He was not involved in the FBI raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month at any level.

This raises more questions than it answers. The specific allegations against Thibault go back to October 2020 and the FBI's work to characterize the Hunter Biden laptop story as "Russian disinformation", so Thibault had been up to no good for nearly two years, based only on what's been made public so far. But Wray learned about this only this summer? And Grassley's letters clearly allege that Thibault isn't the only case -- and by the FBI's own account, Thibault was one of 13 assistant special agents in charge at the Washington field office.

Which, by the way, ran the Mar-a-Lago raid. Doesn't this affect the credibility of that raid as well?

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.

. . . Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.

. . . "It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau," said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. "I would substitute other analysts and agents."

So Thibault is only one of several problem agents identified by Sen Grassley and enumerated at the link, including Alan Kohler, the head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, who was also key to the Crossfire Hurricane operation and now supervises the Mar-a-Lago investigation. In addition,

In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.

So it sounds as though other FBI agents besides Thibault had stayed with the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review -- and the action taken against Thibault, while belated, should not be the end of the story. We'll have to see what develops. . . .

Victor Davis Hanson, The Poor, And Live PD

Victor Davis Hanson published an essay Friday in the New York Post, Elites’ divide & conquer failure: How middle class now view their rulers with rightly earned disdain. Hanson emerged with a new set of commentators like the late Angelo Codevilla around the time of 9/11. From the start, I always thought there was more he could have done with any of his themes than he ever actually delivered, but in recent times, I think the problem has grown.

In this piece, he's specifically addressing class, which means he really needs at least to nod his head to Marx, but he doesn't. He writes either as if Marx didn't exist, or Marx is completely irrelevant to the subject, or (possibly more likely), he thinks he underatands Marx and expects the reader to assume he does, so he won't mention him. However, he doesn't understand Marx. We have to back up and see how this matters.

It's important to recognize that Marx had a point, and his basic taxonomy of class and class interests is accurate, something the American populist writer Ferdinand Lundberg instinctively understood. Where Marx and his ideological successors erred was in the question of what is to be done. Marxism suffered an irrecoverable defeat in the late 20th century when its methods collapsed, while capitalism managed to expand world prosperity to the point that India and China generated what might be called large middle classes, but which a populist like Lundberg would call a prosperous working class, which I think is more faithful to Marx's original idea.

This is the point Hanson misses. He divides US society into the "elites", the "masses", and the "truly poor":

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.

. . . The elite found in the truly poor — neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base — an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes and romance of the far distant underclass.

This ignores Marx, and while historical and economic circumstances have changed, Marx has a clearer view of the classes.

Marxist Theory maintains that poverty, like wealth, is an inevitable consequence of a capitalist society. Marxists argue that poverty benefits the ruling class, as it ensures that there is always a workforce willing to accept low wages. Similarly, the existence of unemployment and job insecurity means that there is always a ‘reserve army of labour’ able and willing (or, unable to be unwilling!) to take their place if they are not happy. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie therefore benefit from the existence of poverty. It is not simply that there are rich and poor. It is rather that some are rich because some are poor.

In other words, poverty is an alternate state of the working class. In good times, workers will be slightly better off; in bad times, they'll be unemployed, poor, and anxious to find any work at all, which benefits capital. For the past 75 years or so, there's been a phase of capitalist prosperity that's discredited the Leninist strategy of revolution, but that doesn't change Marx's insight that the poor are an alternate state of the workers; the interests of the poor and the workers are aligned, and they are in fact the same class.

Hanson also conflates the poor with a group Marx recognized was a separate class, the Lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

The poor are part of the proletariat, the working class. The Lumpenproletariat are a different group, opposed to the interests of the working class, which of course includes the poor. We've seen this vividly illustrated daily in two fairly recont TV series, A&E's The First 48, and Live PD, which was also on A&E until it was canceled there during the BLM panic (it's now been cloned in its original form as On Patrol: Live on the Reelz channel.) Both are the best sort of reality programming, unscripted, with camera crews simply following homicide detectives (The First 48) or uniformed patrol officers (Live PD/On Patrol: Live) in their daily routines.

The homicide detectives are the best illustration of Marx's insight into the Lumpenproletariat. It's well known that most homicides occur in poor inner-city areas, but what's not understood (including by Hanson) is that they're most frequently fratricidal killings among the Lumpenproletariat, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and other petty criminals. And many of these are by no means poor in the conventional sense; they dress extravagantly with flashy jewelry and drive fancy cars, for which they may well kill each other. Their money comes in large measure from exploiting their poor working-class neighbors, something Marx understood.

Hanson accuses the eltes of fetishizing "the poor", but they're actually fetishizing the Lumpenproletariat, the inner-city street criminals who exploit the poor working class. George Floyd was a member of this group, and the BLM riots and the "defund the police" movement were utterly misleading in conflating the interests of the poor working class and the street criminals. Rap artists who get rich and famous adopting the personas of successful street criminals are another part of this phenomenon.

Thus one of the first victims of the BLM panic was the Live PD show, which was accused of glorifying the police. It was certainly the most-watched show on weekend cable, as its revival On Patrol: Live has instantly become as well. Those who watch it see an unmediated portrayal of routine social disorder, DUIs, domestic violence, addiction, homelessness, and petty crime. The police, aware that their conduct is on film, are models of courtesy and restraint, although there are also unavoidable situations where they must use appropriate force. The result is an increased understanding among viewers of the actual nature of law enforcement. Why anyone thought this should be canceled, especially at a time when this understanding should be promoted, is a mystery.

Hanson also disinguishes the "masses" from the "poor", and while the "masses" are opposed to the "elites", the "elites" fetishize the "poor". This is about as un-Marxist as you can get. Marx thought the Lumpenproletariat were an unreliable ally for anyone, much less the workers, but they'll steal from the elites as well if they get the chance. I'm inclined, on the other hand, to extend the definition of "middle class" to include the former working class; the interests of both are in opposition to the "elites", which I think are actually made up of two groups, the truly rich, the rentiers, who amount to much less than 1%, and the "gentry", academics, artists, politicians, high-level bureaucrats, corporate decisionmakers, and media figures who align themselves with the rentiers and associate with them in Ivy schools and similar institutions.

Two recent media figures illustrate the differences. Scott Adams got rich with the Dilbert comic strip that portrays the struggles of the white-collar tech working class -- but once he got rich, he aligned himself with the gentry. Mike Rowe, oddly enough, began as an artist, an opera singer, and gradually identified with the working class. He now spends much of his free time promoting the idea that it's possible to have a rewarding career without a college degree. He continues to be unabashedly pro-Trump, unlike Adams.

I think the contribution Trump has made to the political scene, aided to some extent by thinkers like Codevilla, has been to recognize this expanded definition of the "middle class" to include everything from those in upper-middle white collar jobs down actually to the urban poor, and this is reflected especially in increasing numbers of Latins who now identify as Republican. By the same token, the increasing bitterness of the elites toward such signs shows they're aware of it and will do anything they can to stop it.

Hanson's problem is that he comes to a conclusion -- the "masses" now hold the "elites" in disdain -- that isn't specific enough to be very useful, and the route he takes to get there doesn't add much insight. Bloviation gets us noplace.

Looking At The Other Side

On Friday, I looked at what seems to be the best case for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, that there was ample evidence of highly classified material stored there willy-nilly in rooms that, while they were under locks with video surveillance and controlled by the US Secret Service, had not been formally designated facilities eligible to receive classified material. This is a violation of bop-de-bop. Both Andrew McCarthy and Alan Dershowitz argue that this meets the probable cause standard for both an indictment and a search warrant.

On Saturday, I pointed out that in well-publicized prior cases, Hillary Clinton received no penalty for an equivalent violation under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard, while John Deutch. having run afoul of the Clintons as CIA Director and being eased out of that job, went though several years of investigation in which neither the Justice Department nor the CIA would prosecute for similar violations. His case, clearly a political grudge by the Clintons, was ultimately resolved with a misdemeanor guilty plea the day before Bill Clinton left office, followed by a presidential pardon for that misdemeanor the following day.

I would say that Andrew McCarthy's conclusion is based on confirmation bias; as a former federal prosecutor, he would tend to view the existing system and his former colleagues favorably, while as a never Trumper, he's inclined to believe the worst of Trump. Dershowitz has been in the penalty box with legacy media ever since his defense of Trump in the first impeachment, and his interview with Newsweek was a chance to return to the game. Both McCarthy and Dershowitz make the bizarre assertion that the Justice Department, even though it had probable cause for the search warrant, won't indict based on the exact same probable cause. This if nothing else should be reason to question their view.

There's another problem with their assessment. It assumes that the boxes of White House documents in one or possibly other storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago were the sole object of the search, and the violation of bop-de-bop that this implies was the only crime, or element of the crime, being investigated. But much more of the affadavit was redacted than not, and we have no assurance that this is the case. We know at minimum that the FBI also searched the home office and had a safecracker open the safe in it, which suggests old secret documents mixed in with family miscellany cleaned out of the White House residence weren't the only objects of the search.

A federal judge's decision yesterday reinforces this view.

Trump and his legal team filed a motion Monday evening seeking an independent review of the records seized by the FBI during its raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, saying the decision to search his private residence just months before the 2022 midterm elections "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump."

U.S. District Judge from the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Saturday afternoon said that the decision was made upon the review of Trump’s submissions and "the exceptional circumstances presented."

"Pursuant to Rule 53(b) (1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court’s inherent authority, and without prejudice to the parties’ objections, the Court hereby provides notice of its preliminary intent to appoint a special master in this case," Cannon wrote in a filing Saturday.

A hearing is set for Sept. 1 at 1:00 p.m. in West Palm Beach, Fla. Cannon also ordered the Justice Department to file a response by Aug. 30 and provide, "under seal," a "more detailed Receipt for Property specifying all property seized pursuant to the search warrant executed on August 8, 2022."

This, if nothing else, strongly implies that the FBI was looking for much more than presumably declassified documents left over in the residence and packed into boxes, and given the redactions in the affadavit, we (along with Trump and his legal team) have no idea what it was. He and his attorneys have been able to convince a judge that this is a problem, which in itself should suggest McCarthy's and Dershowitz's view that the Justice Department probably won't indict is remarkably naive. (I don't think Trump should hire Dershowitz to defend him this time, by the way.)

While the McCarthy-Dershowitz line has dominated what news we've had about the case over the weekend, there's been at least one informed dissenting voice:

The FBI's former intelligence chief declared Friday the agency should not have criminalized the records dispute between Donald Trump and the National Archives and that the bureau appears to have failed to meet the probable cause standard for the invasive search of the former president's Florida estate.

"I think they're going to regret this," retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show after reviewing a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to persuade a judge to allow the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago.

Brock, ordinarily an ardent defender of his former agency, has raised concerns for several days that the bureau did not exhaust other means to resolve the dispute over presidential and alleged classified records Trump kept. He said he did not believe the FBI adequately considered the possibility that Trump had wide latitude to declassify records and declare them personal.

He said Friday his concerns were only heightened by the court-ordered release of the search warrant affidavit, which he noted was still heavily redacted.

. . . Brock said if the redacted sections of the affidavit don't lay out evidence that Trump's possession of the documents was clearly illegal, then "basically we have a search of the man's residence without cause being stated as to why something illegal happened."

As a true crime fan, I often watch A&E's The First 48, which documents homicide investigations that can include arrests and search warrants based on the probable cause standard that McCarthy and Dershowitz discuss. In a typical case, detectives find surveillance video that confirms witness accounts of the perp's appearance and clothing. Using tools like phone records, they narrow down where the perp was, whom he was with, and where he went after the crime. That all establishes probable cause for a judge to sign both an arrest and a search warrant using the same standard. Often they raid the perp's home and conduct the search at the same time as they put him in cuffs -- and in the search, they find the murder weapon and bloody clothing they specified in the search warrant.

We have no indication that any such specific evidence was gathered at Mar-a-Lago, nor any indication of what they may have been looking for. Even though McCarthy and Dershowitz think it's a silver lining that Justice maybe won't indict, I actually think it's troubling. If what they were looking for was so deadly serious, criminal espionage activity by a former president, why on earth didn't they indict? If they don't indict, then this whole thing is trivial, no?

The retired FBI counterintelligence head puts it pretty clearly,

"This is not anything that rises, or passes the no smile test, that rises to the level where you would actually do a search with armed agents of almost any other federal employee, let alone the former president of the United States," he said.

In other words, the FBI is being dragged in to give credibility to a political dispute, which is effectively Trump's argument that the raid "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump." I think at best, the government's case is going to die the death of a thousand cuts -- at best. More likely, there'll have to be resignations.

James Comey And The "No Reasonable Prosecutor" Standard

I'm astonished at how little analysis, smart or dumb, there's been in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago affadavit's limited unsealing -- but the situation is comparable to how poor the analysis has been of the Russo-Ukraine War. Journalists just aren't smart people, but when the news actually takes some work to report, they don't even show up.

Here's how I see it. Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek the same thing Andrew McCarthy said at National Review Online yesterday,

Donald Trump's former attorney Alan Dershowitz said that the unsealed affidavit supporting the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago gives the Justice Department enough evidence to indict the former president.

In an interview with Newsweek, Dershowitz said, "It sounds like there would be enough for an indictment, but like probable cause, an indictment is easy to get," explaining that prosecutors could simply point to the materials found at Trump's residence that he had unlawful access to.

This is no diferent from what Andrew McCarthy said in yesterday's link:

The Justice Department cannot properly get a search warrant unless it has probable cause that crimes were committed. If it has such probable cause, that almost always means it has a basis to make arrests[.]

As McCarthy put it, the standard for a search warrant and the standard for an indictment are the same, and in fact, a search warrant normally takes place simultaneously with an indictment or an arrest. The fact that they didn't coincide in this case may or may not mean something, but I don't agree with either Dershowitz or McCarthy that it might mean the Department of Justice won't indict Trump.

The redacted version contains on page 8 what I think is the main public evidence against Trump:

The NARA Referral stated that according to NARA's White House Liaison Division Director, a preliminary review of the FIFTEEN BOXES indicated that they contained "newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and postpresidential records, and 'a lot of classified records.' Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified."

This supports the view I've had all along that the materials in the boxes were random items that remained in the White House residence in the early morning of January 20, 2021 and were hurriedly picked up and placed in boxes by White House housekeeping staff. (Accounts suggest that the boxes weren't full, reflecting the haste of the procedure, so there is likely far less material in them than would be suggested by numbers like "15 boxes".) Again, Trump was authorized to take classified materials into the residence from the office areas, and as best I understand the legalities of the matter, he automatically declassified them in the act of doing this. As outlined in this analysis from John Solomon,

Trump's office issued a statement saying the records found in Mar-a-Lago were originally taken by the president from the Oval Office to his White House residence under a "standing" declassification order. . . . [All observers] agree every president has wide latitude to declassify what they want, when they want while they are in office. Some legal observers also noted a careful choice of language in the National Archives May 8, 2022 letter sent to Trump's legal team. Rather than call the documents found at Mar-a-Lago "classified" they described the recovered papers as "documents with classification markings," language that leaves open the possibility that declassification may be disputed in the future.

The problem that jumps out at me, which as far as I can tell nobody has yet mentioned in the context of the partly unsealed affadavit, is that former FBI Director James Comey recommended regarding Hillary Clinton's transmission of classified materials on an unsecured e-mail server, a very similar case, that

Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

In other words, there have been cases like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, respectively FBI and CIA agents, who deliberately obtained classiified information and sold it to hostile countries. On the other hand, there have been government officials who did not observe the full set of protocols in handling classified materials -- indeed, they may even have been reckless or careless -- but did not do it with criminal intent. Comey went on to say,

All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

And of course, Hillary Clinton's case is now a clear example of, as Comey puts it, "how similar situations have been handled in the past". Another "similar situation" is CIA Director John Deutch:

Deutch left the CIA on December 15, 1996, and soon after it was revealed that several of his laptop computers contained classified information wrongfully labeled as unclassified. In January 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management at CIA declined to pursue fully the security breach. Over two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Janet Reno declined prosecution. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance. Deutch had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling government secrets on January 19, 2001, but President Clinton pardoned him in his last day in office, two days before the Justice Department could file the case against him.

Neither Clinton nor Deutch, however, was president, and neither had the president's authority to declassify. Both mishandled classified information, but Clinton received no penalty, while Deutch's penalty was quite mild. Neither Clinton nor Deutch was raided by the FBI. Note once again that the criterion for a raid is precisely the same as that for an arrest or indictment -- it's no good to suggest, like both Dershowitz and McCarthy do, that maybe Justice won't indict; they've already made Trump's case much more serious by opening the door, which they didn't do for Clinton or Deutch.

As far as we can tell from what's been unsealed and other accounts, the materials at Mar-a-Lago were gathered up from the White House residence at the end of Trump's term and placed willy-nilly into boxes which were sealed, loaded into moving trucks, and placed into locked storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago under video surveillance, with the premises under US Secret Service protection, where they either remained until Trump returned them voluntarily in January 2022, or they were seized in the FBI raid on August 8. They do not appear to have been accessed otherwise, as far as we currently know.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the conduct that James Comey excused under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard as it applied either to Hillary Clinton in 2016 or John Deutch in 1997 was actually more serious than Trump's with the documents found a Mar-a-Lago. I think it will be very difficult for the current administration and the FBI as an institution to avoid the inference that the FBI is routinely used as a partisan political police force.

Here's What I Don't Understand About Never Trump

It's hard to imagine anyone in modern history, and by that I mean back to maybe 1517, who's been investigated as much as Donald Trump. The man is human, certainly not blameless, but so far, despite multiple congressional investigations, two impeachments, and some number of grand jury proceedings, he remains unindicted and unremoved from office. If critics claim he's a narcissist, it nevertheless remains that narcissism is not against the law. Instead, as president, he presided over prosperity and kept us out of wars.

I would enjoy hearing of some historical figure who's been investigated nearly as much, if not more. As I reflect on this, it occurs to me that regimes are normally much more efficient at disposing of those whom they find inconvenient, which may say something about the capabilities of Trump's enemies, and that may lead me to my eventual point here. The reaction of never Trumpers to the Mar-a-Lago raid may actually be illustrative of the overall problem.

Let's take a piece by Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog. I would characterize Allahpundit as something of a pertpetual Nervous Nellie, or maybe even a Hysterical Henrietta, on just about any topic -- over the course of COVID, he's repeatedly warned of progressively more lethal new surges, for instance. Yesterday, he asked, Why didn't Trump give the documents back when the Archives first asked for them last year?

The latest scoop comes from WaPo, which obtained an email sent by the top lawyer at the National Archives to Trump’s team in *May 2021* requesting the return of two dozen boxes of documents. According to that email, Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, had designated the material in the boxes as government property that properly belonged to the Archives in the final days of Trump’s presidency. Even his own lawyers concluded that he had no right to retain the papers, in other words. And the Archives had been nagging him for fully 15 months to please just hand them over before the FBI showed up at Mar-a-Lago.

. . . Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy is watching this play out with growing unease. MAGA media has been harping on the fact that Steidel Wall, in her letter to Trump’s lawyers in May, acknowledged that the White House has been involved in this process. But the White House had no choice in that, McCarthy notes: Under federal law, once a former president asserts executive privilege over documents, the Archives *must* consult with the current president to see if he wants to honor the privilege claim of his predecessor. In this case, Biden deferred to Steidel Wall to make the decision, evidently not wanting to insert himself into the matter. It was Trump who dragged Biden into this by asserting privilege, says McCarthy.

All well and good, so far. But also, what we hear is that disputes between ex-presidents and the National Archives over who owns what are routine, and the Clintons, for instance, left not just with boxes of memorabilia but with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of furniture. Now, if I were an ex-president, I might well decide that disputing who owns the picture of me shaking hands with the Vice Premier of Elbonia isn't worth my time, and I'd tell the movers just to ship it all back. On the other hand, I'm not an ex-president, and I'll grant that to run for that office takes a very different makeup from mine. Trump didn't get rich by deciding some things didn't matter, and notwithstanding, disputing ownership of cocktail napkins with the National Archives, or even procrastinating an answer to their letters, is not an indictable offense.

Here's where things get wonky. Allahpundit quotes fellow never-Trumper Andrew McCarthy:

For those of us who remain skeptical about whether the drastic measure of a search warrant was really necessary (especially given the FBI and DOJ’s evident lack of urgency in the months after Trump’s surrender of the 15 boxes in January 2022), these revelations require grappling with a hard question: Given that the former president was not responsibly securing the government’s most closely held intelligence, that he was trying to prevent the FBI from examining what he’d returned, that his lawyers were either misinformed about or lying about the classified information still retained at Mar-a-Lago, and that even the issuance of a grand-jury subpoena (with potential criminal penalties for noncompliance) had not succeeded in getting Trump to hand over the remaining classified information, what option short of a search warrant would have sufficed?

This introduces the separate question of classified documents into what McCarthy is stirring into a murky gumbo. The Presidential Records Act, under which the Archives had been pursuing certain documents, is not a criminal statute, and there are actually no penalties specified for its violation. Thus I can tell the Archives with impunity to pound sand over the picture of me shaking hands with the Vice Premier of Elbonia. And yes indeed, if I had been so careless with some top-secret estimate of Chinese nukes as to give it to the grand-niece of a major donor who had no reason to see it, I could be held responsible criminally, but that's a separate issue.

The story as both Allahpundit and McCarthy tell it is that the dispute with the Archives had been going on at the cocktail-napkin level for more than a year, since May 2021. In April 2022, the Archives asserted that there had been classified materials in boxes of cocktail napkin level stuff that Trump returned that January.

The problem continues to be severalfold. One is that the president has ultimate authority to declassify documents. The second is that since George Dubya, presidents have been authorized to remove classified documents to the White House residence area from official office premises for simple convenience. The third is that even if classified documents were found in the residence area, where they were authorized, and hurriedly thrown at random into boxes by housekeeping staff as part of the effort to move the Trumps out, there would have been no criminal intent by Trump to disclose them.

It's hard to avoid thinking a search warrant, with its implication of a grand jury investigation and an impending indictment for espionage, would be an overreaction to the situation. McCarthy himself seems to recognize this at some level in a post at National Review's The Corner:

[T]he government usually waits until the end of the investigation to seek search warrants. The Justice Department cannot properly get a search warrant unless it has probable cause that crimes were committed. If it has such probable cause, that almost always means it has a basis to make arrests — for which probable cause that a crime has been committed is also the standard. In a normal case — and there’s nothing normal about the Mar-a-Lago probe — arrest and search warrants are executed at the end, frequently based on the same probable-cause affidavit.

. . . I find the most interesting part of [Judge Reinhart's order to release the redacted affadavit] the revelation that the Justice Department argued that disclosure would reveal, and thus cause unfair prejudice to, uncharged parties. Of course, the major uncharged party here is former president Donald Trump.

. . . On the other hand, maybe the Justice Department said this because the objective here is not to charge the former president with a crime.

. . . Attorney General Merrick Garland knows this. My belief is that what the DOJ, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the National Archives and Records Administration wanted was to get the documents back and ensure that highly classified information is returned to its proper secure repositories. I don’t think they’re hot to make a criminal case out of this.

Oh, so that's it. The FBI, as McCarthy himself explains, came roaring in with a search warrant, which is the thing they do when indictment and arrest are normally either simultaneous with the raid or very soon to come, but they didn't want to make a big deal out of it? Was there really no way to explain to Trump that the housekeepers had inadvertently thrown Top Secret docs in with the cocktail napkins on the morning of January 20, and they just want to get this straightened out? Yeah, Pete Strzok's old colleagues will be happy to schedule a non-adversarial session to get this all cleared up, just never you mind.

The whole history of Trump's problems with the deep state, starting with the FBI's entrapment of Gen Flynn during his first days in the White House, suggests that would never fly. I can't imagine that McCarthy even believes his whole story here. Does he really think the Justice Department gets search warrants as just a never-mind? Remember that one way the FBI has historically obtained false confessions is to say "just sign here, this is routine, nothing important." The FBI tried to get Richard Jewell to sign a confession by telling him he was taking part in a training film about bomb detection. Both Allahpundit and McCarthy say there's something wrong with Trump if he doesn't just roll over for this kind of hanky-pank.

And if, as McCarthy says, they weren't going to indict Trump, that's silly, er, who were they going to indict? The housekeeper who packed the boxes? Jeffrey Epstein?

The silver lining is that even as McCarthy paints the most favorable picture he can of the government's motives, it goes again to my first point, that at least the government we have isn't very capable at getting rid of people it finds inconvenient. And Allahpundit and McCarthy should have a tenth of Trump's smarts. There's something basically unserious about this whole post-Trump never-Trump effort.

Why Did Big Doc Resign?

Let's examine some data points. Dr Fauci's sidekick, Dr Deborah Birx, was able to retire on generous terms after she was caught violating COVID protocols. (Her job in any case, of course, was simply to stand next to Big Doc and nod while he spoke):

A top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force has said she will retire after it emerged she hosted a holiday gathering.

Dr Deborah Birx, who is 64, cited the criticism she had faced for a family get-together over Thanksgiving in Delaware in her decision to step aside.

. . . Late on Tuesday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted President Donald Trump's good wishes, saying he "has great respect for Dr Birx and likes her very much. We wish her well".

In an interview with US news network Newsy aired on Tuesday, a masked Dr Birx did not specify when she would stand down, but said she would help the incoming Biden administration and "and then I will retire".

So basically, she got to say whoops, my bad, I'll retire, but she was alllowed to do it on her own vague schedule, at age 65, with full benefits and with nice words from the president. A year later, Big Doc's boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, retired on the same terms:

After spending more than 12 years as director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins is retiring this weekend. But he's no less worried about the public health agency's latest pandemic curveball.

As the omicron variant threatens record-breaking rates of infections in the U.S., Collins departs with a warning. If Americans don't take COVID-19 seriously, the country could see 1 million daily infections, he said.

In fact, after his retirement, he was treated quite well, with a new sinecure:

That was quick. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., after exiting the top perch at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the last weeks of 2021, is back in the upper echelons of U.S. scientific leadership as President Joe Biden's science adviser.

He had a unique ability to sidestep criticism while shutting down COVID dissent within the public health establishment:

In addition to leaving the top post at NIAID, he will also step down as chief of NIAID’s immunoregulation lab and leave his post as Biden’s adviser. This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

At the time, Americans would have benefited from a broad debate among scientists about the available policy options for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, and perhaps a bit of compromise. The emails tell us why that isn’t what we got.

One partiicular e-mail from Collins to Fauci, which Collins acknowledged was authentic, effectively ordered Fauci to engineer a "quick and devastating published takedown" of the Great Barrington Declaration. Collins's announcement of his retirement, made in October 2021, predated release of that and other e-mails in December, but I suspect Collins, and more importantly the lizard people, fully understood the direction things were heading and engineered a quiet departure.

Indeed, the circumstances suggest a cozy arrangement; Collins, born in 1950, was 71 at the time he retired and may be assumed to have enjoyed, like Big Doc himself, a de facto lifetime appointment. Instead, he was allowed to retire without controversy before the smoking gun was released, while weeks later, he quietly stepped into a White House sinecure.

Contrast that with the end of Fauci's NIH career:

Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert who rocketed to unexpected fame during the pandemic, will step down at the end of the year.

Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, will wrap up a storied career in which he advised seven presidents. Instead of retiring, he’s leaving his government posts to “pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci, 81, said in a statement released Monday by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

. . . In addition to leaving the top post at NIAID, he will also step down as chief of NIAID’s immunoregulation lab and leave his post as Biden’s adviser.

But only a month ago, this was not the expected outcome:

Fauci, currently serving as Biden’s chief medical adviser, will retire before the end of January 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because details around the retirement plans haven’t been disclosed.

. . . Earlier Monday, Politico reported in a wide-ranging interview that Fauci didn’t expect to remain in government past Biden’s first term in office.

What changed? Last month, he'd retire, maybe in a couple of years or so. A month later, he's resigned as of date certain and pointedly is not retiring. No White House sinecure awaits.

My money is he got a call from Ron Klain or some equivalent figure telling him not all that nicely that the president had decided he should resign, with the implication that otherwise he'd be fired. I think we can pretty safely assume this was a different deal from the ones Drs Birx and Collins were given.

I would also guess that at some point in the not too distant future, we'll be learning more. One motive would likely be the desire of Democrats to airbrush COVID and lockdowns, masks, asnd vaxxing from history as quicky as possible in the runup to November.

The Watergate Pattern Again

I've noted before that once the Watergate scandal got well under way, there was a regular pattern whereby Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would make some assertion that the White House wasn't involved in any sort of coverup, only to have documents surface in subsequent days that showed the opposite was true. Ziegler then became famous for declaring his previous statements "inoperative".

We seem to be returning to the days of inoperative statements.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

. . . The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

. . . The memos provide the most definitive evidence to date of the current White House's effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election and may face again as a challenger in 2024. That involvement included eliminating one of the legal defenses Trump might use to fight the FBI over access to his documents.

The official version of the White House's involvement in the raid remains press secretary Jean-Pierre's statement on August 9:

The White House was not briefed or given advance notice about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday.

“The president was not briefed, was not aware of it, no. No one at the White House was given a heads-up,” Jean-Pierre said.

This is pretty clearly weasel-worded, and it's disingenuous insofar as it omits any specific denial that the White House planned the action, irrespective of its specific date and time. The latest document reveal indicates that as of May, there had been intense planning, with close White House involvement, for the Justice Department and the FBI to seize the remaining disputed documents, although the pretextual reason was the National Archives request, not any security violation.

The focus of this effort was to reclaim a dozen or so boxes of Trump White House records and memorabilia, apparently hurriedly packed at random by housekeepers in the days leading up to January 20, 2021, and demanded by the National Archives. Indeed, as late as June 2022, after the May letter, Trump had been cooperating with the Archives.

Here's the puzzle. Trump did in fact deliver an earlier tranche of such documents to the Archives this past January. But the Archives claimed after the January delivery that the randomly packed boxes contained classified documents, of which little else has been said publicly. The Presidential Records Act, however, is not a criminal statute. so some criminal violation must be found to justify a search warrant and an FBI raid.

However, it doesn't appear that the existence of classified documents in the January tranche was sufficient grounds for any charge against Trump, even though the Justice Department presumably already had them. But as far as we can tell pending unsealing the affadavit for the warrant, those documents became grounds for the August raid to get additional documents -- although as has been pointed out many times, there seems to have been little urgency in the timing of this whole enterprise.

This leads in turn to the conclusion, hard to avoid, that the raid was never more than a fishing expedition to see what else Trump might have. But there you've got the problem that however many boxes of random household souvenirs, letters, photos, or paperwork there may have been or still remain at Mar-a-Lago, they were basically low-priority detritus left around by the departing Trumps and hastily gathered up by the White House housekeeping staff in the waning hours of the administration.

We must assume that by January 20, 2021, anything of real importance had already been gathered up and taken away by Trump's own retainers and his attorneys, if indeed it had ever been in the White House (if I were smart enough to be president, would I trust anyone there very far at all?). Consider also that Trump from the time of his 2016 election had been suspicious that the Trump Tower was not secure and had moved his transition activities to his Bedminister, NJ facility. Thus I question whether anything Biden would want to find among Trump documents has ever even been in an obvious place if it were that important. In other words, if it was any kind of smoking gun, good or bad for Trump, why would he ever even take it to the White House, where official records can be made of it and inadvertent eyes can see it? He had, and has, too many other options for his personal and business security.

At this point, we may also assume that the correspondence from the White House to Trump's attorneys cited here was provided to the media by Trump's attorneys -- and further, that letter is just a public document, nothing confidential about it. My guess is that whatever Trump has, if it isn't public, it's far better protected than cocktail napkins and letters from Kim in a bunch of storage boxes, and Trump will release it on a schedule that suits him. I'm still trying to see how there's any up side for Biden in all this.

COVID Goes Away, Trump Comes Back, Part Deux

The biggest story yesterday without a doubt was Dr Fauci's announcement of his resignations from his interlocking positions within the deep state, although he stressed this wasn't "retirement".

Fauci is currently the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.

“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci revealed in a statement.

Fauci’s decision significantly moves up the timeline of his retirement, as he said in July he would resign at the end of Biden’s first term.

Just two Saturdays ago, I noted that Dr Fauci had been booed while throwing out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Did this have anything to do with his decision? I wouldn't rule it out, but too much else has been happening. For instance, his former sidekick Dr Birx is starting to adopt the time-tested Albert Speer strategy for rehabilitating her public image, essentially to say she really wasn't 100% on board with the genocidal thugs who were running the show:

Former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should prioritize transparency in reforming the agency after the pandemic.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Dr. Birx said that the CDC should focus on sharing its data with the American people in a way they can understand and work with the private sector to better collect information.

. . . “[I]n March of 2020, all of our data that I used to warn Americans of who was at risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death came from our European colleagues,” she said. “That in itself should be an indictment of our system.”

Wait a moment. The way I remember things, in February of 2020, Fauci was telling us not to wear masks and to go on a cruise. By March, it had changed to the scary expanding red circles on the evening news based on the Imperial College London models, which were models, not data. And Dr Birx at the time was endorsing every scary red circle. "Transparancy" is hardly the cure, the cure is not telling lies to incite panic, but then, she'd have to accept responsibility with Fauci. She goes on,

“Secondly, reporting was coming in extraordinarily slow from hospitals through a system that CDC had created. And I know this created controversy, but for three months, I asked the CDC to fix its system and develop a partnership with clinics and hospitals, and laboratories, and they wouldn’t. And so that’s why I asked all the hospitals to start reporting, and they did. And so I think sometimes we hold ourselves back.”

Translation: "We weren't using data at all, we were just passing on the scary ICL red circles, which led to the predictions of mass graves in public parks and sending hospital ships to New York and LA, which had to sail away unused a couple months later. This destroyed our credibility from the start, but I sorta thought we shouldn't do this." Oh, right. Except she herself had to retire in a hurry once she blew her own credibility by having a family Thanksgiving when she'd told the public not to.

UPDATE: On Fox last night, Dr Fauci first denied he ever locked anything down, but if he did, it was with Dr Birx's agreement. Apparently he's trying to hitchhike on her attempts to rehabilitate herself.

In the wake of his announcement, Dr Fauci isn't even showing Dr Birx's level of insight:

Outgoing National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” that people on the right who were distorting reality to believe that the January 6 Capitol riot didn’t happen were also creating an environment where proper public health responses to pandemics are being impeded.

Well, it wasn't that Dr Birx and I blew our credibility, it was just that the public wouldn't believe us. OK, but whatever the reason, the guy is out, more than two years earlier than he'd promised. That's what I call science. But it looks like even Dr Fauci couldn't ignore a growing informed consensus that the public health establishment, led by Drs Fauci and Birx, couldn't have had things more wrong over a two-year period:

Critics argue that the CDC, the feds broadly and the U.S. public health establishment have erred repeatedly in their assertions related to COVID, ignoring global research clarifying the risk profile of the virus, the tradeoffs of masking, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and the economic, social and educational toll of strict mitigation measures.

. . . The agency issued its ultimate walk-back in revised COVID guidance this month, removing distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups — the only credible legal basis for vaccine mandates — and recognizing that natural immunity by itself confers protection, as White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci's own scientists have documented.

It's hard to avoid thinking there's been a long con going on for more than two years, and whatever the truth or falsity of theories the 2020 election was stolen, the version that Trump was some sort of bumpkin who ignored the sage counsel of Drs Birx and Fauci is dead, dead, dead. Contra Dr Fauci, this goes some way to rehabilitate Trump as a leader with fortitude and foresight, and it shores up the metaphorical meaning of a stolen election and January 6, if not necessarily the factual truth. But it's the metaphor that tells the story, not the footnotes.

So yet again, I don't think it's a coincidence that COVID is going away as Trump returns to the public sphere. By the way, you may not have noticed, but he's seized control of the Republican Party in the process, something he didn't have while in office:

Former President Donald Trump blasted Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as a “broken down hack” just days after the Senate Minority Leader questioned whether the GOP would be able to flip the chamber in November’s midterm elections.

“Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate,” Trump said on his Truth Social media site late Saturday.

. . . McConnell did not name particular candidates, but a group of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates are struggling in the polls.

Whatever disagreements Trump had with McConnell as president, he kept them relatively quiet. Now McConnell is a broken-down hack, on a par with Crooked Hillary and Low Energy Jeb. Trump is on familiar terrritory, while McConnell, like Hillary and Jeb before him, is not. Out of office, he got rid of Liz Cheney. McConnell is fully aware of this.

Is The Incoherence The Answer?

I continue to be intrigued by the logical incoherence of any attempt to explain the objectives of the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid. The prevailing interpretation is that the FBI was trying to find something that Trump wanted to keep hidden. That might be something damaging to Trump himself, like the pee tape or maybe evidence of a January 6 conspiracy, or it might be something Trump knows will damage the deep state that he's withholding until the proper time. The problem with any version of this is that the FBI is assuming that although it's very high value information, Trump is storing it in a low-value repository, a home office safe where any journeyman safecracker can get at it. Trump is smart enough, and he has the resources, not to do this.

It's also worth recognizing that Trump has been the focus of investigations since before his presidential run in 2015. He's been a reality TV star and a generalist celebrity, thus fair journalistic game, for decades. During his first campaign, his presidential term, and afterward, his business career, his finances, his personal history, his social connections, his personality, his sex life, and his golf game have been subject to years of unprecedented scrutiny, including two impeachments and a third congressional investigation. Nobody has yet come up with a smoking gun that could send him to prison or even just discredit him as a public figure. Contrast that with, for instance, Al Gore, a onetime presidential candidate who's subsequently become just a dirty joke.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner advanced a new theory last night with Mark Levin, the raid was intended as an event in itself.

Trump, Kushner told Levin, 'drives his enemies so crazy, they always over-pursue him and make mistakes in trying to get him, and that's basically what happened here.'

'But what's happening now, it's the same thing, being done by the same people in the same way, they're leaking to the same sources, they're manufacturing fabulous claims that get debunked shortly thereafter,' he added.

In other words, the raid was intended as a media artifact onto which leaks, unattributed allegations, and conspiracy theories could be attached to make Trump look bad, independent of whether they can be specified and proven in any potential indictment and trial. But at best, this has turned out to be a half-baked idea that's backfired, and it's opened the possibility (just as wacky) that Trump is the one who has the smoking gun on the deep state. Well, Jared Kushner is a smart guy.

But also, as I noted yesterday, on one hand, the raid is part of an operation being run by Peter Strzok's old counterintelligence unit, with many of his former colleagues. Beyond that, as of late last night, we learn that the FBI agent who ran the Whitmer kidnapping plot entrapment from Detroit was moved up to the FBI's Washington field office, and it turns out he's now in charge of the whole investigation of which the raid is a part:

The Washington, D.C., FBI field office that raided former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and is investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach is led by Steven D'Antuono, who ran the bureau's Detroit field office when, trial testimony alleges, it instigated, encouraged and facilitated what the government charges was a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

. . . The plot was an "FBI-inspired, organized, and executed scheme to 'kidnap' and 'assassinate' Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election," according to reporter Julie Kelly, who has been covering the trial for American Greatness.

Two of the men charged in the plot were acquitted in April on the grounds that they had been entrapped by the FBI, and the jury could not reach a verdict for Fox and Croft, Kelly told "War Room" TV show host Steve Bannon on Tuesday.

While the DOJ decided to retry Fox and Croft, Kelly said that the department's "timing could not be worse," as the credibility of both the DOJ and FBI is "imploding."

Although two of the former alleged conspirators were acquitted on the basis that the jury concluded they'd been entrapped by the FBI, the retrial is bringing out the same uncertainties in the cases of the others:

FBI informants have been accused of improperly coordinating with the men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, according to lawyers seeking to scrutinize the agency’s conduct in its investigation.

Lawyers for Barry Croft Jr., one of the alleged ringleaders of the kidnapping plot, argue that FBI informants Jenny Plunk and Steve Robeson had an unusual relationship with the defendant that included smoking marijuana with him. . .

FBI special agent Christopher Long testified that the shared room was meant to be a cost-reducing tactic, arguing that neither Croft nor Plunk had much money at the time, according to the Detroit Free Press. However, he acknowledged that he had never monitored a case in which sources of the opposite gender stayed in the same room during his time as an agent.

It's hard to get around a feeling that this particular unit of the FBI has become unhinged, especially when the mastermind of the comical Whitmer kidnap investigation was promoted to take down Trump. I think this could go some way to explain the logical inconsistencies behind media theories of the case. For instance:

A cache of Russiagate documents President Donald Trump wanted released during his final days in office contained information about a pair of former leading FBI officials infamous for their private exchanges disparaging Trump, according to a new report.

Never-before-seen text messages between ex-FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, as well as unreleased information about the FBI's investigative steps, were part of this binder of Crossfire Hurricane investigation materials, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Wait a moment. Strzok and Page at this stage are an old dirty joke, relegated to the same archive as Al Gore and Monica Lewinsky. For Trump to be secreting files of their unreleased text mesages, no matter what they covered, would be a waste of time. This guy understands the US public in the same uncanny way Queen Victoria understood the UK, and the FBI thinks he's about to blow the whistle again on Strzok and Page?? Not only that, but Strzok and Page do no good for the FBI's reputation -- so the New York Times thinks it should bring them up now?

Or how about this?

Did the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago to retrieve letters to Trump from Korean leader Kim Jong-un? Were they looking for the letter written to Trump by Barack Obama and left inside the Resolute desk at the end of Obama’s time in the White House? According to reporting, both of those items are at the top of the list of documents the National Archive wants from Donald Trump.

OK, but if the National Archives wants them as the story says, they're covered by the Presidential Records Act, which isn't a criminal statute, and it can't be enforced with a search warrant. The FBI wouldn't be involved, unless there's extreme misconduct here, and that would be the actual story, not some rinky-dink letters. This is fairly simple stuff that even a bright middle school student should be able to understand, although my position all along has been that the best reporters at any outlet are only at the bright middle-school level. The writer who did this story isn't even at that level.

The bottom line is that the circumstances of the Mar-a-Lago raid as they've come out simply defy attempts at logical explanation. That may be the best route to understanding it.

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.