Let's Revisit Peter Strzok

I was poking around the other day, and I discovered a remarkable item about Peter Strzok, the former high-level FBI official who is best known for his affair with Lisa Page, who at the time was an FBI attorney:

A career employee with the FBI for 22 years before his firing in August 2018, Strzok had been a lead agent in the FBI's "Operation Ghost Stories" against Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova, a Russian spy couple who were part of the Illegals Program, a network of Russian sleeper agents who were arrested in 2010. By July 2015, he was serving as the section chief of the Counterespionage Section, a subordinate section of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

. . . Strzok rose to the rank of Deputy Assistant Director in the Counterintelligence Division and was the number two official within that division for investigations involving Russia. In that capacity, he led the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, and examined both the Steele dossier and the Russian role in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak. He oversaw the bureau's interviews with then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn; Flynn later pled guilty to lying during those interviews.

In July 2017, Strzok became the most senior FBI agent working for Robert Mueller's 2017 Special Counsel investigation looking into any links or coordination between Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government. He served in that position until August 2017, at which time he was moved to the Human Resources Branch. According to The New York Times, Strzok was "considered one of the most experienced and trusted FBI counterintelligence investigators," as well as "one of the Bureau's top experts on Russia" according to CNN.

In other words, although the affair with Page has tended to give him a less-than-serious aura, he was the major player in the FBI's Russian counterintelligence role, a trusted deep state heavyweight. Elsewhere in the Wikipedia link,

Strzok led a team of a dozen investigators during the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server and assisted in the drafting of public statements for then-FBI Director James Comey. He changed the description of Clinton's actions from "grossly negligent", which could be a criminal offense, to "extremely careless". . . . In his statement to Congress, Comey said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges based on available evidence. Later, when additional emails were discovered a few days before the election, Strzok reportedly supported reopening the Clinton investigation. He then co-wrote the letter which Comey used to inform Congress, which "reignited the email controversy in the final days" and "played a key role in a controversial FBI decision that upended Hillary Clinton's campaign."

So Strzok was apparently Comey's go-to guy for all the sensitive topics that came up during the 2016 campaign and subsequent Trump transition. If Comey was the hand, Strzok was the glove, or maybe it was the other way around -- but that included the bungling over reopening the Clinton e-mail invesigation in late October and early November that distracted attention from Trump's Access Hollywood tape and may well have cost Hllary the election. Strzok seems to have been closely involved, to the point of drafting the specific words Comey spoke, in every public controversy surrounding Comey from summer 2016 to Comey's firing in May 2017.

The more I look at Comey, the more I think he was and is an erratic and unstable guy. Recall that the intelligence estimate I discussed in yesterday's post assessed that Comey leaned Republican and "intends to prolong the [Clinton e-mail] investigation so that the scandal would keep going until the presidential election to jeapordize the chances of the DP to win the presidential race". But by July 5, he and Sttzok had issued the "no reasonable prosecutor" statement, except by Octoher, he and Strzok decided to reopen the investigation, except by November 6, they said, "never mind".

Let's also recall from yesterday's post that by January 6, 2017, Comey had by his own account resolved that Trump was a suspeicious enough actor that he began an unprecedented practice of making detailed notes of his meetings with Trump immediately after they ended -- this after Trump at that January 6 meeting apparently suggested (with firsthand knowledge) that the Steele dossier was pure fantasy. Comey nonetheless seems to have begun then to worry about using the 25th Amendment, when he must certainly have known there was no substance to the Steele dossier and no confirmation of any Russian influence in the Trump camp. Strange guy.

And indeed Strzok, the deep state heavyweight who was Comey's close adviser, nonetheless was never a believer in the Steele dossier:

To date, Lisa Page’s infamy has been driven mostly by the anti-Donald Trump text messages she exchanged with fellow FBI agent Peter Strzok as the two engaged in an affair while investigating the president for alleged election collusion with Russia.

. . . Rather, it might be eight simple words she uttered behind closed doors during a congressional interview a few weeks ago [August 2018].

“It’s a reflection of us still not knowing,” Page told Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) when questioned about texts she and Strzok exchanged in May 2017 as Robert Mueller was being named special counsel to take over the Russia investigation.

With that statement, Page acknowledged a momentous fact: After nine months of using some of the most awesome surveillance powers afforded to U.S. intelligence, the FBI still had not made a case connecting Trump or his campaign to Russia’s election meddling.

Page opined further, acknowledging “it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing” to connect Trump and Russia, no matter what Mueller or the FBI did.

“As far as May of 2017, we still couldn’t answer the question,” she said at another point.

After reviewing other statements by Comey, Strzok, and Page, the writer, John Solomon asked (in September 2018),

Which raises the question: If there was no concrete evidence of collusion, why did we need a special counsel [Robert Mueller]?

Page’s comments also mean FBI and Justice officials likely leaked a barrage of media stories just before and after Mueller’s appointment that made the evidence of collusion look far stronger than the frontline investigators knew it to be. Text messages show contacts between key FBI and DOJ players and The Washington Post, The Associated Press and The New York Times during the ramp-up to Mueller’s probe.

What's beginning to emerge is a plot that began in summer 2016 to use allegations of Russian influence in the Trump campaign to distract attention from Hillary Clinton's off-site e-mail server. The FBI, which apparently was never confident in the truth of the Russian allegations, was somnehow dragooned into supporting them, quite possibly following the Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting at the Phoenix airport on June 27, 2016, which I'll talk about in greater detail tomorrow.

A Big Question Nobody's Asking About The Classified Annex

I've been looking at the Durham Report Classified Annex and various interpretations on the web, and nobody so far seems to have mentioned a passage on page 2. As of late spring 2016:

According to [then-Democrat Natinal Committee Chair Debbie] Wasserman-Schulz, FBI, so, far, does not have persuasive evidence against Hillary Clinton because of timely deletion of relevant data from mail servers.

Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidencey and "legacy" by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the DP. To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results.

Comey gravitates toward Republicans, and apparently, intends to prolong the investigation so that the scandal would keep going until the presidential election to jeapordize the chances of the DP to win the presidential race.

These assessments were apparently made before the FBI investigation of the Clinton off-site e-mail server was concluded. According to Wikipedia,

In late June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Officials indicated that the 30 minute meeting took place when Clinton became aware that Lynch's plane was on the same tarmac at the airport. When the meeting became public, Lynch stated that it was "primarily social" and "there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body." Lynch was criticized for her involvement in the meeting and was called on by some critics to recuse herself from involvement in the FBI's investigation of the email case. In response, she stated "The F.B.I. is investigating whether Mrs. Clinton, her aides or anyone else broke the law by setting up a private email server for her to use as secretary of state," but "the case will be resolved by the same team that has been working on it from the beginning" and "I will be accepting their recommendations."

. . . On July 5, 2016, FBI Director Comey announced in a statement he read to press and television reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, that the FBI had completed its investigation and was referring it to the Justice Department with the recommendation "that no charges are appropriate in this case. He added, "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."

For now, all anyone can surmise is that according to the Annex, Comey had been resisting any pressure from Lynch regarding the FBI investigation of the e-mail server. But after the tarmac meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton, Lynch was more successful in influencing Comey to pull investigative punches, which resuited in Comey's July 5 "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement. But this wasn't the end of the story -- back to the Wikipedia link:

In early October 2016, FBI criminal investigators working on a case involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner sending sexually explicit texts to a fifteen-year-old girl discovered emails from Weiner's estranged wife, Huma Abedin, vice chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, that they considered potentially relevant to the Clinton server investigation.

. . . FBI officials reportedly decided to disclose the development despite its potential effect on the pending presidential election to preempt the possibility that it would be leaked in another way.

. . . Comey informed Congress of this additional investigation despite having been advised by Justice Department officials that such an announcement would violate department policies and procedures, including a policy not to comment on investigations close to an election. Comey later explained, in a letter to FBI employees, "We don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed." Law enforcement sources added that he feared he would be accused of concealing relevant information if he did not disclose it.

These developments were characterized at the time as an "October surprise". It's hard to escape a sense that Comey was recalibrating his own position: before July 2016, the estimate of the intelligence community appears to have been that Comey leaned Republican (he'd been Dubya's Deputy Attorney General, after all) and would push back against Lynch's pressure to go easy on the e-mail investigation. But possibly related to the Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting, something happened to change Comey's stance, and he made the "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement.

But then, with new developments in the case, he reopened the e-mail investigation, and he notified Congress that he had done this, only two weeks before the election. The news of this was viewed as changing the outcome of the election:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Monday that ex-FBI Director James Comey was “the single biggest factor” in shifting momentum toward President Trump in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

Christie said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation into then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server reshuffled the race after an “Access Hollywood” recording in which President Trump described groping women had dominated headlines for days.

Belatedly realizing what he had done, Comey seema to have tried to fix things, bvt to no avail. Per the Wikipedia link,

On November 6, in another letter to Congress, Comey stated that, after working "around the clock" to review all of the newly discovered emails, the FBI had not changed the conclusion it reached in July. An unnamed government official added that the newly discovered emails turned out to be either personal or duplicates of emails previously reviewed, and that Comey's letter represents a conclusion of the investigation.

It's plain that Comey had been digging himself a hole, at least with Democrats and the continuing deep state, and he would need to dig his way out of it. The Annex focuses mostly on the Hillary Clinton's campagin strategy of linking Trump to Russia, and it has nothing to say about Comey's conduct during the 2016-17 Trump transition. The key event was Comey's one-on-one meeting with Trump following an intelligence briefing on January 6, 2017. So far, we have only Comey's version, which he gave the Sanate Intelligence Committer on June 8, 2017, after Trump had fired him:

At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President-Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.

. . . The Director of National Intelligence [James Clapper] asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. . . . Although we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I were concerned that the briefing might create a situation where a new President came into office uncertain about whether the FBI was conducting a counter-intelligence investigation of his personal conduct.

Gee, d'ya think? Of course, the contents of the report were the purest moonshine, and Trump more than anyone would recognize this. Comey laid the foundation for his ouster right then. Comey explained farher down:

[P]rior to the January 6 meeting, I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on President-Elect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.

As best I can parse this out, what Comey was saying, and what Trump must have understood, wasn't just that the FBI had dirt on him that they knew to be false, but that they'd use it to damage him if it suited their purpose. But they'd give him the courtesy of letting him know before they did it.

Beyond that, Comey by his account discussed this strategy, at minimum, with Clapper, Comey also ran this by the other FBI top brass (likely Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok), and they all agreed to it. Comey goes on,

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.

Again, what Comey is ssying here is that he has really, really disturbing info on Trump, that he's compromised, that he's a Russian agent. This is material he's been aware of for maybe a year, and at least before July, the intellgence community felt he was skeptical about it, and he leaned Republican. Then Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch, and whether or not that was the cause, everything changed, and he was with the program, until in October, he got all wobbly until somebody got him back with the program.

At which point it looks like maybe Clapper, maybe someone else told him they were gonna play the Russia card at some point and push Trump out, because he's a Russian agent. I'm sure there were other conversations among this group we have yet to hear, but this is starting to look like the outlines of a plan -- first, minimize the e-mail server and get Hillary elected. Then, when she loses (in large part due to Comey's bumbling), spread the worfd that Trump is a Russian agent and push him out, maybe via the 25th Amendment, or maybe just force his resignaion a la Nixon, but definitely with the FBI's connivance.

That phase ended when Trump fired Comey.

Face It, Epstein Has Blown Over

At NPR a week ago:

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California is condemning House Speaker Mike Johnson for sending members home early for a month-long recess to stop a bipartisan push to release records tied to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

"He has stopped Congress and all of the business of this week because he doesn't want to have a vote," Khanna told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday. "He knows he would lose the vote."

The resolution, introduced with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, calls for the release of federal interview memos and evidence identifying "who all was involved in the sex trafficking that Epstein led," Khanna told NPR. It has gained traction in both parties, despite resistance from House GOP leadership.

At Poynter:

The week before last, I told a reporter who is pretty plugged into the Washington political scene that I thought this whole President Donald Trump-Jeffrey Epstein story would eventually peter out. New reporting on Trump-Epstein would be sparse, other stories would dominate the news cycle and the Epstein stuff would fade away just like every controversial story in the Trump universe does.

“I don’t think so,” this reporter told me. “I think this story is going to stick for a while.”

The reporter was right. I was wrong. This Epstein story isn’t going anywhere. And Trump seems extremely bothered by it, which is a story itself.

Nevertheless, Ed Kigore at New York Magazine is correct:

It has become an iron tenet of contemporary politics that developments that would massively affect the standing in public opinion of most politicians have little or no effect, positively or negatively, on Donald Trump. He’s the most galvanizing public figure in living memory, and his vast history of controversy and scandal appear to have made him as impervious to breaking news as a cockroach is impervious to radiation.

He links to Nate Silver, who makes a number of good points:

[Epstein is] an interesting test case precisely because there has been the wall-to-wall coverage of a negative story for Trump that liberals often clamor for. And yet, it’s hard to discern any major impact on his approval numbers.

Maybe that’s because, as Bryan Walsh writes at Vox, the Epstein story crowds out others that are more important and/or also potentially problematic for Trump. The constraints in news coverage aren’t what they used to be when most journalism is consumed online rather than in the print edition. . . . If they’re reading about Epstein, that means they’re not reading as much about other things. Epstein might be a bad story for Trump, but there are lots of bad stories for Trump. What is its value above a replacement-level day in the news cycle?

But over the past weekend, the big story was Trump's Scotland trip. The contrast with Biden's European trips a little over a year ago was unavoidable: European leaders had to shepherd Biden back to the group when he wandered away; for Trump, the leaders had to travel to see him at his personal facility and be told what their tariff rates would be. Trump gave interviews looking upbeat and tanned; Biden didn't give interviews at all. This came precisely as his critics like Bill Maher had to recalibrate on the tariff issue:

Comedian Bill Maher has shockingly admitted he was wrong about US President Donald Trump's use of tariffs.

Maher's admission during an episode of his 'Club Random' podcast on Monday, where he claimed he's "got to own it" as America's economy thrives.

"Just to take an example, tariffs. Now I remember that I, along with probably most people, was saying at the beginning, 'Oh, you know, by the 4th of July… the economy was going to be tanked by then,' and I was kind of like, 'Well, that seems right to me,'" he said.

"But that didn't happen. It could happen tomorrow. I'm just saying, that's reality, so let's work first from the reality of that, not from 'I just hate Donald Trump,' because that's boring and doesn't get us anywhere and leads you to dishonesty."

Ghislaine Maxwell's meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche late last week also seem to have reduced expectations that there would be much new in the case. Over ther past couple of weeks, Alan Dershowitz's views appear to have calmed speculation down:

As for the names in redacted files, Dershowitz says they are not world leaders like many believers of the conspiracies think.

“Because I was the lawyer and I did all the investigations, I know who all these people are. I could figure out, based on everything that I saw, who Mr. X is, Mr. Y is and Mr. Z,” he said.

“I can tell you right now, none of them are public figures who are currently in office. Some of them were previously in office. Some of them are dead, but there is no client list.”

Put another way, none of them is Donald Trump. Dershowitz also strongly implied that Maxwell would, if anything, add more credibility to his own version of the story:

“She knows everything. She is the Rosetta Stone. She knows everything. She arranged every single trip with everybody. She knows everything,” Dershowitz said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added he does not see any harm in offering Maxwell “use immunity” to talk freely about the Epstein case in testimony before Congress.

The lack of further quasi-bombshells like the Epstein birthday book, which seems overall not to have been any sort of game changer, has resulted in the story fading, while there have been continuing suggestions that more will come out over Russiagate, which is where public expectations have shifted.

In addition, the MAGA stalwarts like Mark Dice or Michael Lebron/Lionel who'd been insisting that the "files" be released have largely fallen silent on the issue. And as even left-leaning observers noted in the links above, what would destroy other political figures often just makes Trump stronger. Maybe the media is even starting to figure that out.

Never Trumper Andrew McCarthy Weighs In On Russiagate

One of the most consistent features of recent years has been Andrew McCarthy's underestimation of Trump. From The Huffington Post on August 1, 2023:

Conservative pundit and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is warning Republicans that nominating Donald Trump could backfire in a big way in 2024.

“Trump doesn’t have a prayer of being elected president again,” McCarthy wrote in The National Review in a column posted online before the former president was hit with new indictments connected to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

. . . Despite that, polls show Trump running neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden.

McCarthy said Democrats hope those polls lure GOP voters into nominating Trump.

But he warned that Trump would face some difficult math next year, estimating that about a quarter of Republican voters won’t support him no matter what.

With that sort of solid track record of being wrong, I'm surprised that anyone finds his takes reassuring, especially in light of how, over the past year or two, previously skeptical figures like Alan Dershowitz and Bill Maher have come to see Trump much more favorably. But McCarthy is still as bearish on Trump as ever. Here's his take on the likelihood that the Justice Department's efforts to hold the key figures in Russiagate accountable will succeed:

In July 2016, Obama was briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Clinton campaign’s strategy to “vilify” Trump by accusing him of collaborating with Putin. Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) warrants to monitor the Trump campaign (through its former adviser, Carter Page) by representing to the FISC under oath that Trump’s campaign was in “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” with Putin’s regime.

. . . No sensible person should doubt that Obama was complicit up to his neck in the political smear that Trump collaborated with Russia. But as observed in the damning 306-page report by John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the first Trump Justice Department to probe the origins of Russiagate, political smears and appalling misjudgments are not violations of the criminal law, absent some statutory federal offense. If there were a criminal offense that fit, Gabbard and Trump would cite it, rather than chanting “treason” — the heinous crime of levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to America’s wartime enemies, which clearly does not apply to this situation.

So his argument is basically that, notwithstanding Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey engaged in general skulduggery, skulduggery in and of itself is not a crime, and without a specific statutory violation, they aren't going to get a conviction. Beyond that, when Gabbard and by extension Trump refer to "treason", they're ignoring the constitutional definition in Article III, Section 3, Clause 1. There are two basic problems with this argument.

The first is that, even though McCarthy is an attorney, and indeed a former Assistant US Attorney, his ability to predict the outcomes of cases involving Trump hasn't been good. According to Wikipedia,

During Donald Trump's presidency, McCarthy defended Trump before his first impeachment, but before his second impeachment, wrote that he had "committed an impeachable offense."

After the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, McCarthy wrote that he now considered Trump's presidency "indelibly stained" and wrote, "I do think the president has committed an impeachable offense, making a reckless speech that incited a throng on the mall, which foreseeably included an insurrectionist mob." However, he also believed that Congress mishandled the impeachment both in its timing and charge.

In 2023, McCarthy wrote in National Review about Trump's federal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents, saying that earlier failures to prosecute Hillary Clinton did not mean that Trump is "owed a pass": "I don't believe that Trump's lawyers, who were trying to help him, would testify—as they have very reluctantly testified—that he tried to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice, unless he really did try to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice."

Nobody with a brain seriously believes at this point that Trump 45's presidency was "indelibly stained", nor that anything he did on January 6, 2021 was an "impeachable offense". The federal classified documents case against Trump was dismissed in 2024 on the basis that Jack Smith's appointment as special prosecutor was unconstitutional, something McCarthy seems to have missed in his own review of the case.

Second, while McCarthy cites the constitutional definition of treason, levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, outside this context, it means any betrayal of trust. If either Gabbard or Trump, neither of whom is an attorney, uses the word, they're using it in its common-language context. This is the same error Trump's critics have made in objecting to Trump's claim that the 2020 election was "stolen"; the word is frequently used in the context of "she stole the scene" or "he stole her heart".

And the targets of the new Justice Department Russiagate strike force, like Peter Strzok, seem to be taking the threat more seriously than McCarthy does.

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok deleted all of his posts on the social media site X Monday.

. . . The deletion of the posts comes following Gabbard’s referral of the documents to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, with former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan among those named as potential targets of a Justice Department “strike force.”

My wife, a retired attorney, asked, "Why'd it take him so long?" That may reflect Strzok's poor judgment, but it also suggests that he's belatedly taking his situation seriously and has hired a federal criminal defense attorney. Jonathan Turley, a savvy Washington legal analyst, has referred to John Brennan as "like a 30 point buck out in the open". These cases aren't trivial, whatever McCarthy may insist, and his own track record in saying what's important isn't good.

Observers are beginning to conclude that what's being investigated is a conspiracy that began, on one hand, as an attempt to minimize or conceal criminal behavior related to Hillary Clinton's off-site e-mail server, while on the other promoting a false story involving Trump and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. The Steele dossier with these allegations appears to have been used to secure FISA warrants to allow the FBI to spy on Trump's 20l6 campaign.

McCarthy acknowledges this in the link above by noting "the FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) warrants to monitor the Trump campaign . . . by representing to the FISC under oath that Trump’s campaign was in 'a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' with Putin’s regime". So McCarthy implies, but doesn't otherwise mention, that this means the FBI may well have committed perjury:

Under federal law (18 USC § 1621), for example, the elements of the crime of perjury include:

• Having taken an oath before any competent tribunal (court), officer, or person;
• In any case where U.S. law authorizes an oath for truthful testimony, declaration, deposition, or certification;
• Willfully and contrary to such oath;
• States or subscribes to any material matter which they do not believe to be true

Federal law also outlaws the subornation of perjury, or the procuring of perjury by another person.

For now, it appears there's quite a bit of evidence that Comey and those who reported to him at the FBI knew the Steele dossier was a fabrication, but they swore to the FISA cort that it was true. McCarthy argues that "political smears and appalling misjudgments are not violations of the criminal law", but he omits the very real possibility that perjury before the FISA court, and in other situations like Congressional testimony, is in fact a crime.

He does give a hint at the potential defenses by Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and others, that on one hand, they just made really, really dumb mistakes, and on the other, they were just follwing orders from Obama, who is immune, although after January 20, 2017, Obama had no authority. This all will come out in the wash.

But I think it's a major error to discount what seems to be the developing Justice Department case.

Dumbing Down Universities

If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid.

The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years--massive.

This drop has happened at every level of education. pic.twitter.com/cCLjzvogTt

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) July 27, 2025

I ran intio this post on X the other day, and all I could think of was David Brooks. In his 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, he argued that James B Conant created a true meritocracy via the SATs, which the selective universities used to identify the most promising applicants, when previously they'd tended to favor the scions of the existing upper class. This allowed Jews like Brooks himself to rise in social status, which was altogether a good thing.

By 2024, Btrooks had contradicted these views entirely in an Atlantic essay, How the Ivy league Broke America (this link is not behind a paywall).

Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict.

But this seems to be contradicted by the empirical data in Kevin Bass's post. The 80 years Bass refers to is the time since 1945, when the GI Bill made college financially accessible and the SATs identified those who would benefit most from higher education. But the result is that everyone is dumber, not smarter. Brooks's bobos are dummies! But he summarizes what were at least the good intentions

Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

But Bass's empirical data tells an entirely different story. The whole system of Ivy admissions, if we're to believe it, has been making students dumber, and indeed, it's been dumbing down the professions the universities supply. In a follow-up post, Bass says,

Undergraduates have become much dumber. Graduates have become much dumber. Graduate students have become much dumber. Lawyers have become much dumber. Doctors have become much dumber. PhDs have become much dumber.

But Brooks is trying to understand how, "under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump." He finds the chief fault in the first of "six sins of the meritocracy":

1. The system overrates intelligence. Conant’s sorting mechanism was based primarily on intelligence, a quality that can ostensibly be measured by IQ tests or other standardized metrics.

But if intelligence is what it's looking for, it isn't getting intelligence, if Bass's data is to be believed. Brooks's assumpions about intelligence are also mirrored more generally in elite conventional wisdom, such as the arguments in Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 The Bell Curve as summarized in Wikipedia:

In the first part of the book Herrnstein and Murray chart how American society was transformed in the 20th century. They argue that America evolved from a society where social origin largely determined one's social status to one where cognitive ability is the leading determinant of status. The growth in college attendance, a more efficient recruitment of cognitive ability, and the sorting of cognitive ability by selective colleges are identified as important drivers of this evolution. Herrnstein and Murray propose that the cognitive elite has been produced by a more technological society which offers enough high skill jobs for those with a higher intelligence to fill.

But it seems to be turning out that the cognitive elite isn't actually very cognitive, if Bass's data are to be believed. The replies to his post on that thread offer various theories, but lately I've been coming back to a remark by John Sloan Dickey, who was President of Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate there: "I keep trying to understand why I'm told that our smartest students have grades in the B and C range." I woud guess that one answer is that the admissions offices don't actually screen for intelligence, contra the claims of Brooks, Herrnstein, and Murray. Nor, it would seem, do the professors recognize it when they see it.

Let's go back t one of my favorite topics, the actual screening process of elite universities. As documented in books like Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, applicants are routed into "baskets" that include legacies, recruited athletes, preppies, children of celebrities and major donors, applicants from the plains and Rocky Mountain states, applicants from Northeastern public schools, DEI, and so forth. Many of these "baskets" are intended to limit the numbers of Jews and Asians or to ensure selection for scions of generational wealth.

At various times here, I've looked at available statistics on the makeup of entering classes, and the best I can surmise is that the percentage of Ivy students who are admitted purely on the basis of traditional SATs and high school grades is probably only about 20-30%. I'm sure there are many other explanations, some of which are convincingly argued in the replies to Bass's post, but a key one in my mind continues to be that the Ivies never actually walked the talk -- they never actually selected based on intelligence, or at least, not that anyone could notice.

The Scope Of The Trump-Nunes Strategy Is Coming Into View

Last week, I noted that although he's kept a low profile ever since, Devin Nunes resigned from Congress, where he'd been on the House Intelligence Committee, in late 2021, and Trump, out of office, hired him to be CEO of Trump Media & Technology in January, 2022. After the 2024 election, Trump named him Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. In that post, I speculated that Trump never intended Nunes just to run Truth Social; he was there in effect to run a shadow intelligence operation and plan for that side of Trump's return to office.

In the video above, Nunes finally steps out from behind the curtain and in an interview with Maria Bartiromo, speaks in his voice as Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Below are excerpts from the interview, starting at about 2:00:

The President has asked myself and all the people he's put into these law enforcemeent roles, he just wants it cleaned up. . . . He just wants to clean up the FBI, the Department of Justice, and part of that is having accountability for the people who perpetuated this ongoing hoax. . . . It's kind of important to remember that if one of the presidential candidates is cooking up a scheme, and working with Russians to cook up this scheme, and what you found out now from the report we put out this week is also that the Russians knew about the scheme. So the only people that didn't know about the scheme were Trump and the Republicans. . . and now we're digging this up years later. . . . Probably the biggest thing that still needs to be put out to the American people is this: why was there a raid at Mar-a-Lago? What led to that raid? . . . What the hell were they doing at Mar-a-Lago? What were they looking for?

There are a few takeaways here. First, he's referring to "the report we put out this week" and "we're digging this up years later". I think "we" refers to himself and Director Gabbard, which reinforces my impression that the two are working closely, and Nunes is bringing in his experience with the hoax between 2016 and 2021 when he was on the House Intelligence Committee. Second, he's in effect treating the whole set of activities on the CIA-FBI side as "the scheme", which from a legal standpoint means a single overarching conspiracy, which may at least suggest this is also how the Justice Department is looking at things.

Third, he's connecting the Mar-a-Lago raid to this overall "scheme". This is important from the statute of limitations issue. If specific actions in furtherance of the scheme took place more than five years ago, but they were part of an ongoing conspiracy, they can still be prosecuted. It looks as though at least the White House and the DNI are working under this assumption.

A second interview late last week between Sean Spicer and John Solomon of Just the News responds to the same release by Director Gabbard of a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report that Nunes mentions in his Bartiromo interview linked above.

At about 19:00, Spicer asks Solomon, based on what was contained in Gabbard's criminal referral to the DOJ last week, what he thinks should happen. Solomon replies,

We have proven a political conspiracy occurred, to mislead the American public and hamper Donald Trump. The question now is does it rise to a criminal conspiracy. . . That's for a grand jury to decide. Now, there's a problem. It's nine years later, and many of these crimes are way outside the statute of limitations. So let me tell you what has happened that I think is the most significant event and then how the Justice Department would normally handle this. . . . Let me walk you through it. In April of this year, Kash Patel, who by the way is one of the authors on the House Intelligence [Committee report]. . . He opened what we call a grand conspiracy case. . . . It takes a look at everything from the clearing of Hillary Clinton on July 5, 2016, when James Comey had just gotten new evidence suggesting she shouldn't be cleared, he waves his magic wand and clears her -- that moment, that day, through the Russia collusion investigation, through the Ukraine impeachment, through ignoring the Chinese intervention in the 2020 election, to Jack Smith raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of President Trump, and then bringing charges in Florida, as one ongoing conspiracy, the federal gvernment repeatedly misusing its intelligence and law enforcement powers to help the Democrats and to falsely harm Republicans, often with bogus allegations, as one conspiracy.

When you do that, you get the advantage of what a RICO case against the mob or a drug cartel does. It allows you to go back and charge events outside the statute of limitations and say clearing Hillary Clinton and starting Russia collusion is connected to raiding Mar-a-Lago and indicting President Trump for classified documents. . . . Now, a second problem for people who know how the system really works also goes away. If you bring this case in Washington DC with a 92% Democratic jury pool, you're not getting a conviction. . . . But in this case, you can start with the most current acts, the acts that occurred in Florida . . . and then go back and charge the earlier there. That gives the more neutral jury pool in Florida. . . and gives the potential hope. Now, if that's how this is going to go, Kash Patel has already lit the fuse, the next step that the Justice Department traditionally does when it investigates a racketeering conspiracy . . . you create a federal strike force. . . . My reporting indicates that decision could be made as early as next week.

In fact, this past Wednesday,

Today, the Department of Justice announced the formation of a Strike Force to assess the evidence publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and investigate potential next legal steps which might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures.

This Department takes alleged weaponization of the intelligence community with the utmost seriousness.

Upon the formation of the Strike Force, Attorney General Pamela Bondi stated:

“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people. We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.”

This all confirms my surmise that Trump and Nunes had been putting a strategy together since 2022 -- indeed, even before the Mar-a-Lago raid -- to thwart the overall conspiracy. It's intriguing that Kash Patel, the current FBI Director, had previously worked with Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, and it's easy to suspect he knows where the bodies are buried at the FBI. The overall strategy would be to prosecute a conspiracy dating back to clearing Hillary and extending forward to the Mar-a-Lago raid, with Patel running interference at the FBI. It looks like both Comey and Wray would be major figures. And it looks like this is only the start of the excitement.

They've Got To Have Miore On Comey

There was a New York Times story (behind a paywall) that didn't get much attention two weeks ago, but when I ran across it the other day, it had me saying "hmm". The MSNBC story embedded above carries the gist:

The New York Times is reporting former FBI Director James Comey was tracked by the U.S. Secret Service after his “86 47” Instagram post. They tailed Comey in unmarked cars and tracked his cell phone. The DOJ has also opened criminal probes into both Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan as part of a separate investigation. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian, New York Times Investigative Reporter Michael Schmidt and Staff Writer at The Atlantic Ashley Parker join Chris Jansing to discuss.

At 0:51:

So the night that Comey posted that and took it down, he was interviewed by the Secret Service, and he explained to them that he didn't know that the arrangement of the seashells had a violent connotation, and that he had no intention of harming the president. Former Secret Service officials told us that at that point, given who Comey was and that he had no violent history, he was the former head of the FBI, that that would have been the end of any Secret Service investigation. The following day, the Secret Service had Comey and his wife, Patrice, tailed by undercover law enforement authorities, followed him as he drove home through North Carolina and Virginia to his Washington area home. At the same time that the authorities were doing that, they were traacking electronically his phone to understand exactly where he was. And what former Secret Service officials told us is that these are highly invasive tactics that are used only in the most extraordinary of circumstances when they believe there is an active threat to the President of the United States.

The trouble is that Comey is actually a pretty hinky guy. Born in 1960, he was only 57 when Trump fired him as FBI Director in 2017. Normally someone with that resume at that age might go into lucrative private security consulting like Louis Freeh or investigative work for a white-shoe law firm like Robert Mueller. At best, Comey has done low-pay visiting professor work and ghostwritten book deals, which suggests that even left-leaning corporations think he's too untrustworthy to associate with.

Instead, his second career seems mostly to involve being investigated himself. According to The Hill in 2020,

Justice Department officials are investigating a years-old classified Russian intelligence document leak and whether former F.B.I director James Comey was the person who illegally provided reporters with information, The New York Times reports.

The probe is the second time federal officials have a looked into Comey regarding leaked information. The former FBI head has been frequently labeled a “leaker” by President Trump. What makes this investigation abnormal, though, is that federal prosecutors usually investigate leaks when classified information is reported by the press, not years after the fact, the Times reports.

. . . The document that was mentioned reportedly played a large role in Comey announcing in July 2016 the FBI’s decision to not recommend charges for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding her use of a private email server to conduct government business.

. . . According to the Times’s sources, the investigation began in the last couple of months, but why it was initiated and what stage it’s at remains unclear.

Let's keep in mind that almost before the pee dossier was a glimmer in anyone's eye, he'd gotten crosswise with Hillary Clinton. But here's a 2019 story from NBC:

The Department of Justice will not prosecute former FBI director James Comey for leaking memos detailing his interactions with President Donald Trump.

According an Office of the Inspector General report released Thursday, Comey violated DOJ and FBI policies, as well as the FBI's employment agreement, by keeping copies of four of his memos in a personal safe and asking a law professor friend to make one memo public after Trump fired him in May 2017.

. . . The DOJ's internal watchdog, which probed Comey's handling of the sensitive documents, found that Comey's friend leaked the contents of the memo to a reporter from The New York Times, but that it did not contain classified information. Comey shared all four memos with his private attorneys after his firing without alerting the FBI, the report said — another violation of policy — and one contained information classified at the Confidential level, which is the lowest level.

If you think about it, the FBI's own file on Comey must be something close to the size of its files on Martin Luther King or the Berrigans. So I'm not sure why the "former Secret Service officials" in the New York Times story would suggerst that Comey is some sort of model citizen who would never think of harming the president. To the contrary, he has a pretty clear record of unreliability and breaking the rules, and it looks very much like no reputable employer will touch him in any sort of high-porofile role.

In fact, it almost looks to me as though the tactics the Secret Service apparently used with Comey after the 8647 incident were deliberately intended to give him the impression that he was under serious scrutiny to see who else he contacted. If they were tracking his phone, they were tracking his phone, after all. And I'll bet this paid off. My guess is that among other things, it got him to talk with his daughter Maurene, and together, they cooked up a leak of the Epstein birthday book to the Wall Street Journal.

My guess is there's a lot more to this than meets the eye, and James Comey isn't very smart. I'll stay tuned.

"Name The Person And The Crime" -- II

Gee, d'ya think?

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Thursday former CIA Director John Brennan could face criminal charges in the wake of new documents regarding the “Russiagate” scandal.

. . . “It does appear a couple of these figures may have committed perjury. I think the most vulnerable may be Brennan, who is, like, a 30-point buck in the open,” Turley said. “This stuff goes directly to information that he gave to Congress and seems to be in contradiction, and so there are real questions here.”

During Congressional testimony, Brennan claimed he did not approve including the so-called “Steele dossier” in intelligence assessments about allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“People talk about, well, you can’t charge Obama. That is very likely the case that he is protected,” Turley continued. “But these individuals, whether Comey or Brennan, are not protected from perjury charges if the statue of limitations have not run. They’re more likely to be called again to repeat prior testimony.”

This is all weak tea, but if Jonathan Turley is putting it out, it must be fresh and important, huh? Current CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department on July 8, so this news is over two weeks old, and we know little else about it:

The source familiar with Ratcliffe’s actions said the CIA director referred elements of Brennan’s actions to the FBI for an investigation into potential criminality.

The source, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the sensitive matter, did not provide specificity on which activities Brennan had undertaken which Ratcliffe believed could be criminal.

. . . While the specifics of Ratcliffe’s criminal referral of Brennan to the FBI were not immediately made public, it is likely that it has to do with Brennan’s potentially false statements to Congress about the ICA and the Steele dossier. Brennan spoke with Special Counsel John Durham in August 2020 and testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023. Given a five-year statute of limitations, he could be in the crosshairs of law enforcement action until August of this year or until May 2028, respectively.

This is about the clearest explanation we have of how eligible any of the major Russiagate figures may be for criminal prosecution -- most federal crimes have a five-year statute of limitations. Thus anything anyone did before 2020 can't be prosecuted, which would include creating the Steele dossier in the first place -- except that if any of those acts is part of a conspiracy that went beyond 2020, they can still be prosecuted. But Ratcliffe's July 8 criminal referral named James Comey as well as Brennan:

The two targets are former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in his first term, according to a statement that a Justice Department spokesperson provided to reporters.

Fox News reported the existence of the investigations Tuesday evening. After referring to Comey and Brennan, the spokesperson said the Justice Department does "not comment on ongoing investigations."

A lawyer for Comey had no comment. The FBI declined to comment.

For now, Comey is best known for his Janury 6, 2017 one-on-one meeting with Trump, when he laid out the allegations in the fictitious Steele dossier. Trump fired him five months later, that May, for reasons that have never been made public. Comey then leaked details of other conversations with Trump via an intermediary to the New York Times in hope that this would cause a special prosecutor to be named, which resulted in the Mueller investigation. However, any particular crimes during this time period would not be subject to prosecution, since the five-year statute of limitations would have expired.

The only exception would be if those crimes were part of an ongoing conspiracy that lasted after 2020, and for now, we know nothing more. Except that Greta Van Susteren, in an interview with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Newsmax, embedded at the top of this post, made these remarks at 6:29:

I don't think you can ignore that on October 19, 2020, they cooked up this letter, 51 signatures saying that all the Hunter Biden stuff was part of Russian mischief. And to make matters worse, he origin of this was Antony Blinken, who then went on to become Secretary of State, calling Mike Morell, who wanted to be CIA Director, they get 51 people to put this document together saaying that the laptop thing was a lie, when nine months earlier, the FBI had already seized the laptop, and they knew that was real. And then of course, in the debate between Trump and Biden in late October of 2020, Vice Pesident Biden uses this 51 against Trump. Now, that's in plain sight, which is very suspicious. Now let me tell you one other thing that really bothers and sticks to me. It's hard to tell someone's intent. You know, people can amke mistakes, but I have not gotten over the fact that James Comey had some notes of a conversation with Trump, and what bhe did with them is he didn't hsve the guts or the courage to release them to the New York Times like he wanted them. Instead what he did was he came to one of his pals in New York, a law professor at Columbia, to sneak to the New York Times to publish. Why was he sneaking around like that?

Gabbard, whose demeanor throughout the interview was friendly but highly circumspect, made no direct reply. But the issues Van Susteren raised go to the question of a continuing conspiracy, first extending to the question of the 51 signature letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, which would extend the conspiracy to at least October 2020, and then to the question of Comey's intent in leaking his notes of his conversations with Trump, apparently to bring about the Mueller investigation.

At this point, the most we can surmise is that the Gabbard criminal referral to the Justice Department over the past week also relies on this view of the case:

Several others named in Gabbard’s document could be targeted. They include James Clapper, her predecessor as director of national intelligence; John Brennan, the former CIA director; James Comey, who was FBI director until he was fired by Trump; Comey’s former deputy Andrew McCabe; ex-national security adviser Susan Rice; John Kerry, the former secretary of state; and Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general.

James Clapper has said on CNN that he is "lawyering up":

KAITLAN COLLINS: So what will you do if they come after you? What is your plan?

JAMES CLAPPER: Well, I'll lawyer up, I suppose. I already have.

KAITLAN COLLINS: You've already hired attorneys in anticipation that this Trump Justice Department could try to prosecute you.

JAMES CLAPPER: We've had sort of perpetual attorneys since I left the government in 2017.

This, of course, is only prudent, and we may assume that everyone named just above has had to do the same thing. But whatever the specific charges, I think it's reasonable to surmise that the Justice Department is looking at an ongoing conspiracy from 2016 to at least the 2020 election to manipulate national policy and the media into believing Trump was either a Russian dupe or a Russian agent. So far, we've had no other comment.

The Trump Nobody Seems To Notice

Largely unmentioned in yesterday's news,

President Donald Trump took executive action on July 24 making it easier for cities and states to remove homeless people from the streets.

Trump signed an order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek to reverse federal and state judicial precedents and end consent decrees that limit local and state governments' ability to move homeless people from streets and encampments into treatment centers.

. . . Trump's action comes after the Supreme Court ruled in June [2024] that that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.

The USA Today link is typically slipshod in not mentioning that the case was decided last year, not this past June, and it neglected to cite it by name. Here's more information on CITY OF GRANTS PASS, OREGON v. JOHNSON ET AL.:

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld ordinances in a southwest Oregon city that prohibit people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the city, Grants Pass, that the ordinances simply bar camping on public property by everyone and do not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

. . . In his opinion for the court, [Justice Neil] Gorsuch stressed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment has generally applied only to methods of punishment, rather than to whether the government can criminalize particular conduct. And the fines and jail sentences at issue in this case do not, he insisted, “qualify as cruel and unusual.”

Instead, he continued, the challengers point to the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Robinson v. California, holding that the Eighth Amendment bars a state from making it a crime simply to be a drug addict. But the kinds of public camping ordinances at issue in this case bear no resemblance to the state law in Robinson, Gorsuch wrote, because they criminalize camping on public property rather than a person’s status.

The intent of Trump's executive order is to redirect federal grants and homeless programs to incentivize local governments to get homeless encampments off the streets and move people into treatment. According to thr White House,

• The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health disorder, or both.
• Federal and state governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.
• Shifting these individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment is the most proven way to restore public order.

This is typical Trump 2.0 strategy. Like his approach to the Ivies, which I noted during the battle with Harvard last April, he aims to knock multiple legs from the stool on which a particular problem sits. The homeless problem exists in part because poorly reasoned court decisions have enabled it, but also because an immnensely lucrative network of policies, grants, and NGOs subsicizes it in its current form.

Los Angeles is a good example.

A federal judge issued a blistering ruling Tuesday, finding Los Angeles officials failed in multiple ways to follow a settlement agreement to create more shelter for unhoused people.

Judge David O. Carter also ordered stronger oversight by a court-appointed monitor to “ask the hard questions on behalf of Angelenos,” as well as quarterly hearings to oversee compliance with the city’s commitments to create nearly 13,000 new shelter and housing beds.

. . . He pointed to the difficulty faced by court-appointed reviewers, and LAist, in getting data from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — about how much was being spent for more than 2,000 housing subsidies the city was taking credit for to show compliance.

. . . After LAHSA officials criticized LAist’s reporting of concerns about the data, Carter ordered the city to turn over addresses for each housing site. The city then acknowledged that the data was inflating the true number: 130 subsidies were being wrongfully counted twice.

This money is almost certainly going to members of the urban Democrat machine. But the "housing" such programs provide is little more than hotel rooms; there is no treatment for drug addiction or mental health issues. What Trump-is doing is setting up a multifaceted response to the homeless problem that will, on one hand, enable local authorities actually to clean up encampments, and on the other, restore the ability to place those with serious problems in custodial treatment, while reducing the overall incentive toward vagrancy.

What strikes me here is that this is part of an agenda. The media has been focused on Epstein for the past several weeks, but Trump doesn't appear to have spent much time with it, other than to send his Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. Insread, he's just continuing to sign executive orders.

And then there's the somewhat puzzling trip to Scotland.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week said the trip was intended as a "working visit that will include a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Starmer to refine the historic U.S.-U.K. trade deal."

It also seems to involve ribbon-cutting at another Trump facility, as well as continuing attempts to have the British Open take place at a Trump golf course. But the big thing it suggests to me is that Trump has an agenda, it's something he appears to have settled on during his period out of office, and he's been pursuing it singlemindedly since his return. So far, the Epstein business isn't even a minor distraction. My guess is we don't know mich of anything about what Trump actually means to do in Scotland, but Trump himself has a very good idea, and we'lll learn what it was in due time.

"Name The Person And The Crime"

At 7:45 in the video of Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting show embedded above, he poses a question to his co-host Sean Spicer, "Sean, name the person and the crime that Tulsi Gabbard says might have been committed leading to a Justice Department strike foice." Halperin concludes he can't come up with either, and Spicer is pretty vague in reply as well. In fact, it hasn't been well covered in this morning's news, but as of yesterday:

the Department of Justice announced the formation of a Strike Force to assess the evidence publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and investigate potential next legal steps which might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures.

This Department takes alleged weaponization of the intelligence community with the utmost seriousness.

My view, which I've been explaining over the past week or so, is that the details have been hiding in plain sight since 2016, and a key episode that nobody seems to think is important is the visit then-National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers paid to Trump within days of the November 2016 election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, that it was subject to electronic surveillance. According to Wikipedia,

The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for global intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT).

Rogers, in other words, knew who was bugging whom, and he knew someone was bugging Trump's transition office in Trump Tower who shouldn't have, so he told Trump, and as a result -- quite possibly after consulting Rogers and likely his own corporate security people -- Trump moved his transition office to his Bedminster facility. Intriguingly, I noted a key event in Devin Nunes's tenure as Chair of the House Intelligence Committe in yesterday's post:

In late March 2017, Nunes canceled a public hearing in which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Agency Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify, saying he wanted to hear FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers in a classified setting first. Democrats criticized Nunes's decision and said he was trying to protect the White House from damaging revelations.

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff was apparently able to stop this classified meeting, and within weeks, Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia probe entirely. Clearly what he would have asked Comey and Rogers would have been so explosive, the whole avenue of inquiry had to be closed off. My sense is that it had to have involved what Rogers knew of surveilance on the Trump transition, and that would also have included surveillance of calls that were alleged to have taken place between Michael Flynn and Sergey Kislyak that past December.

On one hand, as I've discussed here, Flynn now claims that any transcript of him discussing sanctions with Kislyak was fabricated, something I can't rule out. But a bigger question is how that surveillance was authorized, and I've been wondering if Devin Nunes had come a little too close to the answer in March 2017 and had to be taken off the scent. Let's move to a press release dated April 15, 2020 from Sen Chuck Grassley:

Despite multiple reports in 2017 warning that claims in an anti-Trump dossier were “false” and “part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” the FBI continued to rely on the Democrat-funded opposition research to spy on a Trump campaign aide. The once-classified details contained in footnotes of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed spying operation were unmasked at the repeated urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

. . . The dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele for political opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic party, was “central and essential” to the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. However, the IG report noted that the application contained numerous errors and omission. The newly-declassified footnotes show that the FBI was aware of significant problems with dossier’s sources while seeking or renewing the spying authority, yet they continued to push forward, failing to update the FISA court with the critical exculpatory information.

Although controversies at the time focused on Carter Page, the question inevitably arises of what other surveillance may have been authorized under the same FISA justification. This could include the surveillance of Michael Flynn, but much more important would be the surveillance on the rest of the Trump transition team. Exactly what was authorized and how has never been clear:

On September 19, 2017 CNN reported that the FBI wiretapped Paul Manafort before and after the presidential election, extending into early 2017, although the report did not make clear whether Manafort was monitored during his tenure with the Trump campaign from March through August 2016.

. . . On November 7, 2016, conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch reported in the right-leaning Heat Street, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had twice sought Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants in connection with its investigation of the myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. According to Mensch, the first request for a warrant which "named Trump" was denied in June 2016 and, a second, more "narrowly drawn" request was granted in October 2016. Mensch wrote that this warrant gave "counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of 'U.S. persons' in Donald Trump's campaign with ties to Russia", and to "look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons". Mensch further claimed that the October warrant was granted in "connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server [in Trump Tower] and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank", and that "it is thought in the intelligence community that the warrant covers any 'US person' connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men".

. . . On March 3, Breitbart News, a far-right website known to publish conspiracy theories, ran an article by Joel Pollak headlined "Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama's 'Silent Coup' vs. Trump." On the previous day, right-wing radio personality Mark Levin alleged that Obama and his allies were conducting a "silent coup" against Trump, and asked: "How many phone calls of Donald Trump, if any, have been intercepted by the administration and recorded by the Obama administration?" . . . Citing Mensch's November article, Breitbart claimed the existence of a June FISA request "to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers", and of an October FISA warrant "focused on a computer server in Trump Tower".

Yet again, there's nothing especially new in the allegations Director Gabbard is making -- but efforts to substantiate or discredit them have been thwarted since they were first raised. Exactly who was surveilled, and under what authority? We just don't know.

But here's how I might try to answer the question Mark Halperin posed to Sean Spicer (whom Trump fired early in 2017 and who seems nice but generally obtuse): it appears that the discredited "pee dossier" was used to secure FISA warrants to surveil unknown members of the Trump transition team, including possibly Trump himself. If the Obama operatives knew the dossier was false, this could be a problem. Certainly the mere fact that Mike Rogers apparently went to Trump to warn him something hinky was afoot would indicate things weren't right.

Just what crime this would represent is now up to the DOJ "strike team". The names of likely persons would certainly include Comey, Clapper, Brennan and others, such as Sally Yates. Mark Halperin posed a good question, but Sean Spicer isn't the guy to answer it.

Trump And Devin Nunes Have Gamed This Out Since 2022

There's little particularly new in what commentators have divined in the past week's revelations in the documents sent to the Justice Department from the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence. In fact, I'm convinced that Trump himself was fully aware of everything contained in those documents at the time they were written, and he'd prepared an agenda to address the situation during his interregnum. For example, he hired former Rep Devin Nunes to become CEO of Trump Media in January 2022.

Nunes had been Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, but according to CBS News, "he was forced to recuse himself from that committee's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election amid an investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics into whether he had leaked classified information." In other words, he was one of the key people who knew everything about the "Russian meddling" when the whole scheme was being cooked up. Nunes resigned from Congress to take that job with Trump. I never thought Trump just wanted him to run Truth Social.

Instead, Trump hired him to keep him nearby during his time out of office, but on the day of his second inauguration, Trump named him Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Wikipedia,

Most of the board's work is classified, but one public investigation involved the loss of U.S. nuclear secrets to China from the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s.

In fact, it sounds as if the Board does pretty much exactly what the president tells it to do. I would not be the least bit surprised to hear that Nunes is currently working closely with Director Gabbard. But let's look a little more at what Nunes may have known during the first days of Trump's first term. According to Wikipedia,

On March 22, 2017, during the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Nunes held a press conference to announce that he had received information that the communications of "some members of Trump's transition team, including potentially the president himself" had been "incidentally collected" by the intelligence community and "widely disseminated" throughout the intelligence community. He added that it was legal FISA surveillance, and unrelated to Russia. It was later revealed that it involved Russia and the Trump transition team. The surveillance was of multiple phone conversations between Michael Flynn, a member of the transition team, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which occurred after Flynn sought advice from the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago[.]

This surveillance led to Michael Flynn's resignation as National Security Adviser on February 13, 2017. CNN outlines the circumstances:

Three days after Trump officially takes office, US officials say investigators are scrutinizing several calls between Flynn and Russia’s ambassador. Spicer, now the White House Press Secretary, reiterates that Flynn told him sanctions were not discussed in the calls.

At some point in January, the Justice Department warns the Trump administration that Flynn misled administration officials regarding his communications with Kislyak and is potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The message is delivered by Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who is fired on January 30 for refusing to enforce Trump’s controversial travel ban barring citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

By Febuary 10, public allegations emerged that Flynn did in fact discuss sanctions with Kislyak, and by February 13,

As the reports emerge, Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway tells MSNBC that Flynn “does enjoy the full confidence of the president,” but around an hour later, Spicer says Trump is “evaluating the situation.”

Flynn resigns a few hours later, admitting he had “inadvertently briefed the Vice President-elect and others with incomplete information” regarding the phone calls with Kislyak and apologizes.

Over the following weeks, a conflict ensued between Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee Chair, and then-Rep Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, that appears to have involved the nature of the surveillance that led to Flynn's resignation. The full details have never been made public, but they appear to be connected with the current criminal referrals of Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. At the Nunes Wikipedia link above,

In late March 2017, Nunes canceled a public hearing in which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Agency Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify, saying he wanted to hear FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers in a classified setting first. Democrats criticized Nunes's decision and said he was trying to protect the White House from damaging revelations.

According to the Atlantic link just above,

About an hour later, Schiff held his own press conference, calling Nunes’s announcement a “serious mistake” and accusing him of bowing to White House pressure.

. . . The dueling press conferences cap an astonishing week in the Russia investigation. On Monday, the committee held hearings with Rogers and Comey, in which Comey confirmed for the first time that the FBI is investigating potential collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia to interfere in the election.

On Wednesday, Nunes made a strange announcement in which he said he had obtained documents about surveillance of Trump team officials. But Nunes’s revelation was extremely vague. . .

Since much of this controversy seems to have involved whatever led to Michael Flynn's resignation, it's intriguing that Flynn himself has been chiming in,

At 3:18 in the clip embedded above, he says,

What Devin Nunes did in the March/April timeframe of 2017, was he came forward to the White House and said, "Hey, this is all fake. This is all fake." And Devin was then sidelined by Speaker Ryan from the House Select Committee on Intelligence, he was the chairman at the time. So there's some GOP dirt here that has got to be looked at, because the American people have lost so much trust in all of the institutions of government.

In a duifferent interview, he gives more details on the circumstances that led to his resignation:

Sally Yates and Mary McCord, who was head of the National Security Division for the Department of Justice—Sally Yates was the acting Attorney General—went over to the White House like two or three days prior to me having to be resigned and me being fired on the 13th of February. I think it was the date.

So Mike Pence, Reince Priebus are in the Situation Room in the White House, and Mary McCord, Andy McCabe is the other name, and Sally Yates was the third name that came and briefed Mike Pence on a document. And Mike Pence—he had Reince Priebus call me up while they were all together. And he said, “I just reviewed this document. The document shows that you talked about sanctions”—something I never talked about, ever.

I never talked to Mike Pence about them. I never talked about them with anybody. Never talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions. Mike Pence told me that he just saw a document where I discussed sanctions. So that document is either—that’s either a lie, or Mike Pence was lying. Somebody, somewhere in between.

What I believe is that Mike Pence—I believe that part of their effort was to try to figure out a way, because later on, we now know from other cases that came out, as well as mine, that there was a 25th Amendment that was going to be put on the table further down the road. So this is an effort to get rid of Donald J. Trump.

Well, under the 25th Amendment, the vice president coordinates any effort to declare the president unfit. All we know right now is that Sally Yates, Mary McCord, and Andy McCabe seem to have been behind an effort that now may look hinky to push Michael Flynn out as Trump's National Security Adviser using transcripts of surveillance that may have been illegal or may have been faked. Devin Nunes at the time appears to have had questions about this very issue, but pressure from Democrats forced him to recuse himself from investigating, and there the matter stayed.

Except that Nunes is now involved in whatever is happening behind the scenes. By the way, all of a sudden now-Sen Schiff has got problems with mortgage fraud. You can't tell me Trump and Nunes haven't gamed this out over a period of years.