In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 p...

Consider developments for Trump in the less than two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid. The polls: The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump‘s estate bolstered his support among GOP primary voters and widened his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a new poll. The Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 57% of primary voters would back Mr. Trump if he ran and the primary were held now, a 4-point jump from the 53% who backed the ex-president in a mid-July poll. Mr. DeSantis, meanwhile, saw his support slide from 23% to 17%, meaning Mr. Trump saw a 10-point boost over his nearest rival after agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate. The never-Trump Allahpundit at Hot Air senses Maybe the "DeSantasy" really is over: I was, am, and will remain bullish that DeSantis still stands a chance at the 2024 nomination, at least as long as you-know-who isn’t indicted. In the bizarro world of modern-day Republican morality, criminal charges against Trump really ...

Within days this week, Brian Stelter announced his departure from CNN after the cancellation of his show Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart indicated that some parts of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affadivit could be released and ordered the DOJ to submit proposed redactions next week, against its wishes Donald Trump began a highly visible campaign of ironically endorsing far-left Democrat candidates, on the assumption that if his endorsements of Republicans have worked so well, they should for Democrats as well. A federal judge granted an injunction that prohibits the Marine Corps from enforcing the Biden administration’s military vaccine mandate against Marines who filed for religious exemption from the mandate and who were denied Dr Walensky announced plans to overhaul the CDC Wednesday — while admitting to major “mistakes” in handling the pandemic. In particular, the week prior, the CDC reversed many of its public COVID guidelines even before ...

There's an emerging consensus that the Mar-a-Lago raid was a fishing expedition in search of something, maybe anything, that would get Trump once and for all, but one pesky issue as far as I can see is that this was a very high risk operation. Even if the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI were collectively oblivious to this risk in their weeks of deliberation, the actual downside was evident the moment the raid became news. This was high risk that had to be justified by a high reward unless the actors involved were much, much dumber than we thought. So what would have justified the risk? It's hard to envision what it could be -- we can pretty much rule out nuclear secrets at this point, since we've been told the big suits dithered at length over whether to go in. It's also hard to imagine that it was just an open-ended dragnet looking for anything from kiddie porn to a cocaine stash -- and whatever it might have been, it sounds like somebody had to repo...

I've thought all along that COVID was an adventitious development that was seized by the deep state in order to give society at large -- or more accurately, society at large except for the upper and gentry classes -- a time out over of all things, Donald Trump. What I find to be a remarkable confirmation of this is that within days of the CDC radically liberalizing its COVID protocols, and within weeks of the LA County health department backing down on reinstating indoor masking, we had the remarkably counterproductive FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. Exacly contemporary with the raid, Trump has fully reentered the public discourse. Banned by Twitter, he's simply putting out mean tweets on his own platform, which people have given the same attention they gave on Twitter -- except that Twitter, facing allegations from Elon Musk that maybe a third of its accounts are phony, is a diminished thing. The return of Trump has been greeted by consternation, especially among never Trumpers, w...

Let's take a look at the timeline of Passportgate. At 10:22 AM yesterday morning (all times EDT), Trump first posted, “Wow! In the raid by the FBI of Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else” on Truth Social. This was greeted with immediate skepticism : It remains unclear why Trump only spoke out about this a week after the search of his property in the US state of Florida. At 12:45 PM Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich posted on Twitter reiterating Trump's claim. At 3:55 PM. NBC News anchor Norah O'Donnell posted that "according to a DOJ official," the FBI was NOT in possession of Trump's passports. However, at 4:34 PM, Budowich replied to O'Donnell with a screenshot of a message from the FBI's Jay Bratt confirming that the FBI had the passports and would return them. Bratt, by the way, is head of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the DOJ’s National Security Division ; he al...

It seems to me that the visuals from the big guy's family vacay to Kiawah Island are an indication of where his handlers expected things to be: First Crackhead Hunter was along with his wife and the kid in what looks to be an utterly contrived tableau of family harmony. The real situation is reflected in reports last month that Hunter has called his stepmom a “vindictive moron” and “entitled [redacted]”, while his wife Melissa appears to be a jetsetting do-gooder who likely spends little time with either the kid or the crackhead dad. Can you imagine what the real atmosphere in that dysfunctional pseudo-family must be like? What are they paying Melissa to stick around? Hunter's broke, and her meter's running. Where does that money come from? Nevertheless, the visuals say the big agenda for Brandon's handlers last week was to rehabilitate Hunter in the runup to 2024. By then, the grand jury investigation will have gone away, and the First Crackhead will be the pictu...