In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Just this past week, it looks like Trump has put another project on the front burner: he's going to reverse "home rule" for the District of Columbia. This was a major civil rights agenda item when I lived in Bethesda, just across the border in Maryland, with my family in the 1960s. The photo above speaks volumes: the only visible white figure marching with Dr King is Paul Moore Jr, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Washington, scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, later unmasked as a serial sexual predator. What on earth is going on here? Even at the time, Moore fit the type of the Northern philanthropist "helping" Southern blacks depicted in Ralph Ellison's 1947 Invisible Man . What was in it for that rich white guy? We've come to understand this only very slowly, but it looks like Trump has had insight into this, among many other things. President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to have the federal government take control of Wa...

There's a segment of MAGA that thinks much of the Trump administration is just same old-same old, for instance at Conservative Treehouse : Unfortunately, we have a long and painful history with the Trump-era Main Justice system, intentionally leaking information to satiate the MAGA base and tamp-down demands for reform and accountability. For seven years various Trump officials have claimed to be working to bring accountability. None has been delivered. Also unfortunately, the pattern of bread and circuses is repeating. The Dept of Justice leaked a letter to The Federalist, in order to affirm their performance. . . . The DOJ providing this letter directly to The Federalist, indicates the purpose of Pam Bondi’s DOJ action is performative; not substantive. If the DOJ does not want to compromise their grand jury case, then why are they leaking their letters? Simply, think about it. . . . It’s likely the DOJ knows the challenge of the [Russiagate] case is a very high bar ...

There are several continuing questions about the text and e-mail messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that were exchanged on FBI computers as they conducted a torrid affair. For starters, the texts, which were sent over a period between August 2015 abd sometime in mid-2017, weren't released until the affair became public on December 13, 2017 . In hindsight, this revelation, or series of revelations, appears to have been carefully managed. A series of text messages exchanged between top FBI employees referring to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as an “idiot” and “d*uche,” while fearing his potential victory as “terrifying,” were released to lawmakers Tuesday evening on Capitol Hill amid increasing demands to see them, according to documents reviewed by CNN. Earlier this month, reports surfaced that special counsel Robert Mueller had removed Peter Strzok, one of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence experts, from his team after an internal investigatio...

Perhaps the most intriguing text among the thousands of exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page was this one : [I]n a text from August 15, 2016, Strzok tells Page: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office” – an apparent reference to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe – “that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 … . ” Page does not appear to have responded, according to records reviewed by CNN. The standard interpretation of Strzok's language is this : Lots of folks on the right are suggesting that “insurance policy” is some opaque and sinister Deep State code for black ops in the event of a Trump victory. . . . Give me a break. Read the text again. Strzok was reacting to the argument that there was no point getting worked up because Trump was bound to lose. Except that August 15, 2016 was just two weeks after Strzok...

An umderrated story in the whole history of the 2016 presidential campaign is the June 27, 2016 meeting betweeen Bill Clinton and Barack OIbama's then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch as their private jets both sat on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport. Phoenix-based KNXV reporter Christopher Sign broke the story of the tarmac meeting two days later, prompting a chain of events that would include an unprecedented news conference by then-FBI Director James Comey. Documents reveal Department of Justice staffers were given a ‘heads-up’ that KNXV had learned about the meeting, and assisted the Attorney General on how to address any potential questions from reporters. The repoprter, Christopher Sign, died of apparent suicide in 2021. In 2018, he published a book with additional details on the meetiog. According to the link above, the news that the meeeting had been discovered caused great consternation within the Justice Department: Lynch had arrived in Phoenix for a scheduled...

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,...

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 in...