In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News . I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary. Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out: I do have ...

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia , In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days. Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates st...

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed. BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents. Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody. Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025 I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces: Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to ...

Something occurred to me just this morning: the last summer of Trump's first term was marked by the George Floyd riots. Floyd was hyped for months as a paradigmatic hero-martyr, an implicit counterpoint to a racist Trump. Somehow this summer, the victim narrative has been turned upside-down: the most visible image is a law-abiding white guy, Edward Coristine, the former DOGE staffer who was badly beaten by a gang of black teens as he tried to defend his girlfriend from a carjacking. In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is : South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0. . . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser wa...

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations : According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign. According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result, On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime r...

Last week, Project Veritas broke a two-part story ( here and here ) in which a Brazilian woman, Patrícia Lélis Bolin, alleges that "she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients". At the first link above, Lélis further claims former Attorney General William P. Barr knew of the fraud and used burner phones to communicate and conceal the scheme. . . . Lélis reported the visa fraud scheme to the FBI, which she claims triggered her prosecution while others involved remain uncharged. Indicted in January 2024, Lélis faces 19 charges, including wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, and aggravated identity theft. She is accused of defrauding immigrants by posing as a lawyer and soliciting payments for fraudulent E-2 and EB-5 visa services. Project Veritas reviewed hundreds of text messages, emails, and documents, confirming a September 2022 text from Attorney Clyde Vanel to Patrícia Lélis. In it, V...

This story has been out for months, but Mayor Bass is still working it : Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, saying the raids have put a huge dent in the city's economy. Bass said businesses have seen a drastic reduction in immigrant customers. She's concerned some immigrant families whose breadwinners have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be on the brink of being left destitute. A piece at Red State gives more background: When federal immigration agents began raiding Home Depots and other businesses in the Los Angeles area recently, something strange happened: Foot traffic vanished overnight. Entire blocks shut down. Sales plummeted. And it wasn’t because customers were scared. It was because the workers were. Employees simply stopped showing up. Some owners shuttered their doors. Fear gripped the heart of L.A.’s commercial corridors. The real story? That ...