The Deep Throats Explain It All

As I've noted, in the two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid, there's been a chorus of Deep Throats who allegedly have knowledge of the FBI's inner workings feeding backgound info to overcredulous news writers. It's worth tabulating what they've been saying, if only to see if it might fall together into some kind of working hypothesis, although there's a logical problem with any theory that says the search was intended to retrieve a particular document or artifact.

Let's start with the analysis of Peter Strzok himself, who surfaced last week to give his own take:

Please oh please keep asking how you can turn down the temperature in the country.

And why does he have two passports?

The Russian passport, of course, is kept in a vault at Yasenevo and only swapped out at third country meets, so it can't be that one. pic.twitter.com/Hbk8iL39Ax

— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 15, 2022

Clearly Strzok still believes there's a Putin connection, quite possibly via the pee tapes. This at least suggests there's a continuing mindset among people who used to be at a high level in the FBI, if they aren't there now. But it appears that Strzok's former colleagues in the counterintelligence section are still on that case, whether he's with them or not. Via Real Clear Investigations,

The FBI's nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president's Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau's counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia "collusion" investigation of Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane."

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau's disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden's son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian "disinformation," an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

And yet more officials with knowledge of lots of stuff weigh in:

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday was specifically intended to recover Donald Trump's personal "stash" of hidden documents, two high-level U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek.

To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president's residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump's private hoard, agents went into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize.

"They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration," says the source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

Well, it's unnamed guys talking to Newsweek, which gives you an idea of its reliability. But running through all these accounts is the idea that whatever the subject of the search warrant, it was pretextual, and the FBI was after something else. It was either the smoking gun that will send Trump to the supermax (call it the pee tape theory), or it's the smoking gun that will blow the lid off the deep state (call it the Jason Bourne theory). These might both be combined as a "secret stash" theory, it's either something that will vindicate Trump or send him to the slammer.

There's a logical problem either way. Let's grant it's the pee tape, with an accompanying certificate of authenticity signed by Vladimir Putin himself. Why on earth would Trump keep this around? And not just keep it around, but keep it in the Mar-a-Lago home office safe? Which home office safe was apparently the first place the FBI looked? Just for starters, there are numerous Trump properties that aren't on US soil, and there have got to be storage facilities more secure than a mundane office safe. Wouldn't it at least be in Trump's interest to complicate any effort to get that stuff either via a search warrant, or even via multiple intelligence agencies, warrant or no?

On the other hand, let's go with the Jason Bourne theory, it's the one document or set of documents that'll send not just Christopher Wray, not Just Merrick Garland, but Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George Dubya, and Hillary herself to the supermax. I mean, they'll have to build a new wing in Colorado just to handle the wave of new tenants. If this is so hot, again, why would Trump keep it in the first place the FBI looked? And remember, this smoking-gun stash is an extremely valuable item to have, incalculable value. Corporations keep information that's that important -- say, the secret formula for Coca-Cola -- in highly secure environments with multiple backups just as secure.

But Trump, a corporate CEO who must have at least some familiarity with the value of information and how to protect it, leaves it in an office safe? Without a backup? And the FBI thinks if it gets this stash, all it needs to do is spirit it away and shred it?

This leads to the next question. Let's grant that Deep Throat N, the one who spoke to Newsweek, is legit, Newsweek has vetted him, knows who he is, and has reason to think he's giving the straight stuff. To this, my answer is HUH?? This is a high level guy at the FBI, the DOJ, or the CIA, and he believes all the FBI needed to do was get a warrant, send Strzok's replacement in with a safecracker, steal the memo back even if it wasn't in the warrant, and everything's copacetic?

Or let's say Deep Throat N is smarter than that, he knows the FBI is living in a dream world, and he's talking to Newsweek to cover his butt before it all hits the fan. All that does is move the whole problem just one degree of separation farther away, you're still left with the issue that we aren't even in The Bourne Identity, we're just in a rerun of Get Smart. The end game is still that Wray and Garland head for the supermax, at least figuratively just down the hall from Ted Kaczynski -- the outcome is just delayed by a few extra months.

I doubt if any actual outcome will be that apocalyptic. But notice that the consensus of the deep throats, and presumably the newsies who listen to them, is that the FBI raid was pretextual, and the dozen boxes of cocktail napkins, memos, and souvenirs the FBI carried off had nothing to do with the actual target of the search, which wasn't listed on the search warrant. That actually has a certain ring of truth, and it if is, that problem is big enough.

Is Trump A Genius, Or Is Biden Just Really Dumb?

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 would seal the primaries for him.

. . . After all, it was a poll of New Hampshire in June that set the commentariat on fire when it showed DeSantis leading Trump in a hypothetical primary there, 39/37. That survey was conducted by UNH whereas today’s data comes from St. Anselm, so we can’t say definitively based on the two that there’s now been a shift.

. . . From DeSantis +2 to Trump +21. Maybe the “rally ’round the document thief” effect following the search of Mar-a-Lago really has ended the 2024 “DeSantasy,” as one Trump advisor put it.

Let's look at what's happened here. DeSantis has been doing a workmanlike job, running in Florida on a potentially very attractive national platform of anti-woke, anti-COVID overreach, pro-prosperity. It's been so effective that Gavin Newsom ran ads against him. The conventional wisdom would say he's proving himself a sensible guy, as opposed to the unpredictable, narcissistic nut job Trump.

But right now, Trump has surged back into full stature as a national figure based on one issue, Trump himself. Last night he posted,

My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country. Remember, they even spied on my campaign. The greatest Witch Hunt in USA history has been going on for six years, with no consequences to the scammers. It should not be allowed to continue!

Earlier,

When will people realize that the atrocities being perpetrated by the FBI and DOJ having to do with the Raid and Break In of my home, Mar-a-Lago, or after years of other atrocities and unthinkable violations of freedom and the law, this has been going on for years, from the moment I came down the golden escalators in Trump Tower, right up until the present. At some point you have to look at what took place in the past to determine what is going on in the present. . .

At this point, you can't argue with success. DeSantis's handlers have paused their presidential fundraising in light of Trump's complete possession of the floor. It's also at least conventional wisdom that the focus on Trump after the Mar-a-Lago raid contributed to Liz Cheney's margin of defeat in her Wyoming primary. But that was just a bellwether:

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney’s GOP primary defeat this week did more than just end her family’s dominance in U.S. politics dating back to her father’s role as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in 1974.

It also marked the coming end of a long stretch of at least 75 years of somebody from one of America’s modern political dynasties serving in federal elected or appointed office.

Since 1947, when then-Sen. John F. Kennedy came to Washington, there has been either a Kennedy, a Bush, a Cheney, or a Clinton in office.

The one name the never-Trump Examiner doesdn't mention until several paragraphs later is Donald Trump, but it's worth stressing that the Kennedy run ended on its own before Trump's time, but Trump himself ended the political careers of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, and opposition to Trump ended Liz Cheney's career as a Republican. The Examiner took the long way around to say Trump has shaped the modern political landscape. In an alternate universe, after all, you could have sold the idea that Liz Cheney was the sensible, moderate centrist, and likely this is the bubble the remaining Bushies inhabit.

Look no farther than Leader McConnell's assessment of Republican chances to take the Senate this fall:

The Kentucky Republican Senator had said on Thursday, “I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different. They’re statewide. Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

That's a thinly veiled swipe at Trump and a backhanded acknowledgement of Trump's 93% success this year in getting candidates he's endorsed nominated in primaries. I think the problem, though, is that McConnell is also living in a Bush-Cheney era alternate reality.

We'll have to see how things play out, but if I look at Ukraine's President Zelensky and compare him to wartime leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt, I'm increasingly looking at Trump and seeing something more like Queen Victoria, who had an uncanny ability to connect with the British public despite living a life entirely isolated from them, and indeed despite the fact that she spoke German in private.

At this point, Trump is singlehandedly defining the US political environment, helped enormously by the grave blunder of Biden's handlers and enablers in staging the Mar-a-Lago raid. What on earth were they thinking?

There Are No Coincidences

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 Dr Walensky's announcement:

The abandoned CDC recommendations include: testing and quarantine for asymptomatic COVID-19 infectees and close contacts, the six-foot rule, and preferential treatment for vaccinated people, especially those who are "up to date" on shots.

One common mitigation is unlikely to come back regardless of the agency revision. While the CDC recommends COVID-positive people wear a "high-quality" mask for 10 days indoors, even at home and regardless of symptoms, few school districts still have mask mandates.

The agency will no longer distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups in its guidance, summarized in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, because "breakthrough infections occur" and those with natural immunity "have some degree of protection against severe illness."

In other words, even the guidelines the CDC has kept, like indoor N95 masks for those who test positive, are likely to be honored only in the breach. And think about all those social distancing signs, floor stickers, and sidewalk calibrations that even now haven't been power washed away, not to mention the double cloth masks Dr Walensky herself wore as some kind of wacky example, notwithstanding it was already known that cloth masks single or doubled up offered no protection from COVID. Dead letters!

I think that just the developments over the past several days are directly or indirectly related to the end of COVID and the vast social experiment in the quasi-therapeutic state that it represented. The CDC, which had been thought to be a well-regarded agency up to late 2019, was ordered to sacrifice its prestige on the altar of that noble endeavor. However, the regard in which it was held was even then by no means unanimous. One of the smartest TV series ever, Fringe, had an oddly prophetic episode that first aired on January 21, 2010:

In Boston, a visibly sick man from the Netherlands arrives at an office building, only to collapse and die. The veins in his body erupt with blood, spraying surrounding witnesses. The Fringe team arrive on site, and while interviewing the witnesses, another man also becomes sick. The sick man attempts to leave the building, only to be stopped by Walter (John Noble), who sees the man spray out blood and realizes there is a contagion. The building is quarantined with Walter's son Peter (Joshua Jackson), FBI agent Olivia (Anna Torv), and the rest of the witnesses still inside.

The CDC arrives and soon clash with Walter, who wants some blood samples to take back to his lab at Harvard.

. . . Walter continues his theory that the virus wants to escape the building, hence the multiple escape attempts by the infected. . . . As a bio-hazard team enters the building to test people for the virus, a CDC official orders the army to prepare for a "level six eradication", because they still do not know how to contain it.

The major plot element, given the McGuffin of the virus, is the effort to circumvent the CDC, which doesn't have a clue but nevertheless thinks the best solution is a level six eradication, which translates into blowing up the whole building and everyone inside it. (Dr Walter Bishop, the brilliant character written to synthesize everything that was ever flaky about Harvard, is the neo-noir truthteller of this story.)

Wikipedia notes at the link, "Andrew Hanson from the Los Angeles Times thought it was a really good episode, and even wished it could have been turned into a movie, were Fringe to get into filmmaking." (I've thought about a Fringe film franchise myself, but by the time it's produced, if ever, many of the original actors will be too old to appear in the film. But you know who'd be a good replacement for John Noble as Walter? Johnny Depp.)

One thing I would say is that if they ever do make a film based on that Fringe episode, the writers wouldn't have to look too far for inspiration to create the head of the CDC. Dr Walensky could almost play herself, but it's a shame Cloris Leachman isn't available.

The deep state has brought the CDC down to the level of neo-noir black comedy, and Dr Walensky, unfortunately, won't be able to fix it.

If It Was A Fishing Expedition, What Were They Fishing For?

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 report, "Well, sir, we didn't get that, but we did find his passports, and we got those!!"

I gave up on the tinfoil hat blogs like Conservaive Treehouse and Gateway Pundit after Sidney Powell ordered the kraken released, but it wasn't. Nevertheless, Gateway Pundit had at least a faint glimmer of a lead yesterday:

The brazen raid of President Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, likely has its roots in the Russia collusion story with a particular focus on Peter Strzok and his affiliation with the CIA.

The piece goes on to argue that Strzok was never an FBI employee, he was always with the CIA, but he was working under FBI cover to allow the CIA to do domestic spying. Or something. And Trump has a memo that proves it. Well, Strzok is old news if nothing else, but I can't imagine anything having to do with Strzok, a clown with a name nobody would want in junior high school, would be enough of a bombshell that the FBI would need to go in and retrieve it.

Robert Barnes, an attorney and amateur political analyst who appears frequently on the Viva Frei and People's Pundit Daily YouTube channels, has another take as recounted here:

Federal defense attorney and aggressive Con Law advocate, Robert Barnes, has an unexpected take on the Deep State’s further engagement with ex-Prez Trump.

He believes that it wasn’t egregious overreaching. Instead, he argues that indications support his argument that Trump asked heads of Departments what documents they absolutely would not want to see declassified? (This has been mooted elsewhere.)

And then declassified them and secreted them away as insurance over the Deep State.

Thus, Barnes argues that the MAL raid was an aggressive attempt by the Deep State to regain possession of said documents from Trump and keep their wrongful heinous deeds hidden or simply destroyed outright.

The huge size and strategy of going in — hoping to be secretive and hoping that if discovered, it would redound against Trump, smacks of audacious desperation! In other words, incredibly risky.

The big problem I see with this is that if I had a bunch of memos that would blow the lid off the deep state, I'd sure have more than one copy, and I wouldn't keep them all in one place. If the intrepid Agent Starlings of the FBI seize Box 12 with assorted classified material, and that's the big stash, wouldn't Trump be awfully, awfully dumb to have kept just one set of that stuff? I mean, how many copy machines does he have? How many document scanners? How many offsite backups?

I'll even grant that there are probably people in the White House, the DOJ, and the FBI who are dumb enough to think if they get that one copy, they've got the whole thing, but let's face it, Trump isn't that dumb. This whole extended saga, remember, keeps boiling down to a Road Runner cartoon.

A former FBI agent who knows how decisions are made in the Bureau does circle a little closer to the problem:

A search warrant involving a political figure of Trump’s stature would involve a voluminous affidavit, would certainly be controlled at every step by FBI HQ, and would certainly include the electronic signature of the FBI Director. FBI investigations live and breathe in documents called Electronic Communications, or ECs. These documents reside within the secure structure of FBI computer systems. The search warrant process routinely involves copious amounts of documentation via EC that flows not only up and down the FBI management chain, but also horizontally to DOJ attorneys and/or to the Attorney General himself.

. . . It is farcical to assert that the FBI Director, the U.S. Attorney General, and the White House are not hand-in-glove participants throughout the development of an investigation of this import. I have personally been part of investigations, of far less sensitivity, where White House officials observed operational activity. For me, the assertion that Joe Biden didn’t know is laughable.

I think it's possible to get some clue by looking at a principle of signals intellgence: you may not know the code, but the amount of messages alone can tell you something whether you can read them or not. If there's an event of any sort and the quantity of signals spikes just afterward, you've got an idea what the messages are about, and that can tell you something by itself. Let's look at the timeline: the 2022 general election is November 8. The Justice Department and the FBI by policy don't make moves in political cases within 90 days of an election (cough, cough). The August 8 Mar-a-Lago raid was just short of the 90-day deadline.

Beyond that, there's a general expectation that the Republicans will gain control of at least the House in that election, which will give them subpoena power for any number of sensitive investigations like Russiagate and January 6, which could prove highly damaging not just to the administration but to the deep state. There's already talk of abolishing the FBI, for instance.

At this point, it's actually hard for me to imagine what the deep state could potentially gain from either an open-ended fishing expedition to Mar-a-Lago or a targeted document retrieval. The nature of information these days is there's no longer such a thing as a single "smoking gun". If you've got the goods, you've got photocopies and backups, and likely there are backups of copies of backups that nobody even thought of -- and that goes both ways. Secrets are also just as hard to keep hidden.

My bet for now is simply that panic in the deep state has clouded its judgment. The raid was a bad idea, poorly conceived, a high risk operation that actually had no potential corresponding reward.

COVID Goes Away; Trump Comes Back

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, who continue to think that of all people, Liz Cheney should continue to carry the never Trump banner. In recent weeks, I've become concerned about the mental stability of the writers at the never Trump Hot Air blog. This morning:

I think of the Trump-era GOP as a 30/50/20 proposition. Thirty percent are fanatics who’ll support him in whatever he wants to do. If he wins a second term and asks the new Republican Congress to pass an enabling act so that he can rule by decree, the 30 percent will say that it’ll be great not to have to worry about congressional gridlock anymore. At the other pole are the 20 percent, the people like me who find all of this endlessly repulsive and would struggle to think of an unkind word to say about Cheney after she sacrificed her career to hold Trump accountable for trying to stage a coup. She committed an act of civic heroism and demonstrated honor to a downright freakish degree among American politicians. And she knows it, which I imagine is why she’s at peace with losing this race 70/30.

The problem is that the anti-Trump left wing media and the never-Trump right wing media were united in wishful thinking in the runup to yesterday's Wyoming primary that Cheney might either pull it out in a squeaker or at least do significantly better than predicted, but she did neither, losing as Allahpundit puts it 70/30, only a slight exaggeration. But the never-Trumpers now claim to be "at peace" with that. The problem is that the consensus across the board is that the raid and Trump's simultaneous return to the stage energized his base, and Cheney's loss exceeded expectations as a result.

But what's next? It's worth revisiting the man's political career. From a 2019 piece in Politico, Why Trump Will Survive Even This

If you think a phone call to Ukraine can do what Robert Mueller, the 2018 midterms and Stormy Daniels couldn’t, you haven’t been paying attention.

Nobody is going to hold Donald Trump accountable for his alleged Ukrainian shenanigans because—as we’ve seen in his career and the first 32 months of his presidency—he’s too good at deflecting investigators, irate Democrats and pesky reporters.

To begin with, Trump suffers no shame when confronted with the outrages of his personal, professional and political lives. A normal fellow would blush crimson if caught paying a porn actress hush money after purportedly having sex with her. He’d cringe if confronted with the lascivious things he’d repeatedly said about his eldest daughter. He’d wear a mask to avoid being recognized if 17 women had accused him of sexual misbehavior. He would leave politics if captured on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

. . . Like the “trickster” figure in literature, Trump uses his far-ranging skills at guile, treachery and humor to undermine the established order to get what he wants. Each time he shatters the standard rules of behavior and persists, Trump resets what’s considered acceptable. This makes him a bigger villain to his foes. But he also makes him a bigger hero to his fans.

As Brian Bennett wrote in Time last spring, Trump’s dexterity at squeezing out of Robert S. Mueller III’s trap had the weird effect of inoculating the president from future probes. Like the brassy villain in a movie, Trump has taken everything the established rules of order could throw at him and has not just survived but thrived. If Mueller and his $32 million investigation and saturation press coverage couldn’t bring Trump down, can we really expect a Trump telephone conversation with a foreign president in which he urges the investigation of his political rival’s clan to break the hold he has on his supporters?

Well, in comparing Trump to a literary archetype, this guy's onto something. A month ago, I compared Trump to the truth-teller as an American archetype, Ishmael in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, or the noir detectives Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. (I would add one I forgot in that list, Caleb Trask in Steinbeck's East of Eden.) But since then, I've been thinking about a new archetype, the neo-noir action hero like Jason Bourne in that eponymous film franchise or John Wick in his own, very similar series.

And those figures aren't entirely unrelated to Johnny Depp's public persona, the flawed but utimately decent man of integrity wrongly defamed. And of course, the thing about Jason Bourne and John Wick is that they're highly efficient, ruthlessly homicidal guys, but the audience instinctively believes in the justice of every offhand assassination they commit. They're all basically decent men of integrity; we'll root for them every time.

And of course, beaten, shattered, hopelessly weakened, gravely wounded at the end of each episode, they nevertheless come back stronger than ever for the sequel. There's even a bit of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, who plays most of the film with stitches in his nose.

The public badly wants a figure like these. This is what the bien pensants of the media don't underatand. If Mueller couldn't beat Trump, and Liz Cheney couldn't, a hoaxed-up epidemic wasn't going to work any better. What are they going to do, reeducate us to forget about Huckleberry Finn, Jason Bourne, John Wick, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or Jake Gittes?

That Was Quick

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 also signed the DOJ's opposition to the motion to unseal the affadavit for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant.

It is unclear why the DOJ only spoke out about this six hours after Trump's original post at 10:22 AM, having first assured Norah O'Donnell at 3:55 that they didn't have the passports. Took a full six hours to get up to Bratt, the big suit on the case, though he claims in the message that he's traveling. Who, by the way, was the "DOJ offical" who told her they didn't have the passports? Deep Throat A? Deep Throat B? Deep Throat 52? This is truly hinky.

Let me suggest what's been going on behind the scenes here. Anti-Trumpers and never-Trumpers have been asking the same thing:

It took Trump a week to notice that the passports were missing, or at least a week to go public with it.

What a dummy! Somebody in the FBI stole his passports, and it took him a week to figure it out! Boy, we sure are lucky he's no longer in the oval office, huh? My view continues to be that the man is mortal, but he's nevertheless smart. Recall that there was a dispute on August 8 at the start of the raid, when the FBI demanded the Mar-a-Lago staff turn off the surveillance cameras, but they refused, and the cameras kept rolling. This means there had to have been hours and hours of surveillance film for the Trump team to review, and that's just what they've been doing. (I would also venture to say that those cameras are top of the line, not grainy stuff like you see from a McDonald's heist.)

And as a few observers have suggested, people keep their passports in their home safe, as we can be pretty sure Trump does. Do you think there might even have been a security camera aimed right at the Mar-a-Lago office safe? I certainly wouldn't rule it out. I would also think that since Eric Trump announced right after the raid that the FBI had gone into the safe only to find nothing (or presumably nothing but a few passports), he must already have seen that footage, although he hadn't been on site. Took a whole week for Trump to learn about the passports. Yeah, right.

In other words, they went public with the missing passports only when they were good and ready. They'd had the film for a week. I would also guess their legal team is now at least a cut above Sidney Powell of "release the kraken" fame. My surmise is that the real dummies were in the FBI, who were totally blindsided by Trump's accusation they'd stolen his passports, which in fact they had, and it took them six hours to get their story as straight as they could get it. Not only that, but Trump has tapes of the whole search, every room from several angles I'm sure, and his lawyers have been watching those tapes for the past week. Somehow Bratt, the big suit, just figured this out.

So as of this morning, they've changed their tune:

The Justice Department informed Trump's team Monday that agents gathered the former president's passports and are obligated to return them, and that officials are also reviewing seized materials that may be covered by various privileges, multiple sources told Just the News.

DOJ has designated a process for separating materials that could be covered by executive privilege or attorney client privilege and hopes to return such memos to Trump within a couple of weeks, the sources said.

"Occasionally a warrant collection can grab things outside the scope authorized by the court and the department is now following a procedure we would for any person affected this way," one official said Monday night.

Er, which "official" was this? Deep Throat F? Look for this story to change by the day, if not the hour; we can be sure they're suddenly realizing they have to cover themselves in a hurry. What other footage does Trump have? Here's an ominous sign from the Wall Street Journal, apparently citing Deep Throats J and P:

Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.

The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

This further overrides the backgrounder from last week from Deep Throats A and B that Garland didn't even approve the raid, which Garland himself rendered inoperative on Thursday by claiming that in fact he had. Now the story is that he "deliberated for weeks", adding to the impression that this whole thing was carefully staged, which Deep Throats A and B said last week, and even meticulously planned, which we might reasonably assume now. So who planned to seize the passports?

I would go so far as to guess that the weeks of meetings were the result of pressure from higher up in the organization. In a completely unrelated story,

President Joe Biden is planning to extend his vacation this week after ending his time on Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data Cited By The Associated Press, Biden plans to be in Wilmington, Delaware from Tuesday to Friday after leaving Kiawah Island.

. . . He has not answered any questions from reporters since the FBI’s controversial raid on former President Donald Trump.

This is starting to unravel a lot faster than Watergate, if you ask me.

The State Of Play

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 picture of filial probity. Every indication has been that this was a fantasy; right now nobody gives a flip about Hunter or the laptop, but that's always subject to change.

The reason Hunter has faded from the picture is his dad, but his dad is important only as he relates to Trump. Never Trumper Maryland Gov Larry Hogan said yesterday,

This week, it was actually a win for Donald Trump. It seemed to motivate his base, people rushing to his defense, people feeling as if he had been picked on and martyred, but I don’t think we have seen the end of the story yet.

Hogan may be indulging in wishful thinking if he expects the pendulum to swing back against Trump. Let's revisit the Deep Throats' leak last week to Newsweek:

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI's deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump's Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.

In other words, everyone was supposed to be going goopy over little Beau's channeling of John-John Kennedy while the FBI did its dirty work on the QT, but that didn't work out.

"What a spectacular backfire," says [Deep Throat B].

"I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action," the official says. "They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite."

Merrick Garland was caught completely on the wrong foot. Opinion over the weekend centered on his need belatedly to come out and say he'd approved the raid, even though the officials who had "direct knowledge of the FBI's deliberations" had said he hadn't. Presumably this was because the handlers assumed nobody'd pay attention, huh? As Michael Goodwin put it in the New York Post,

Whether he volunteered or was pushed into authorizing the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of former President Donald Trump, he was woefully unprepared for the entirely predictable fallout.

It should not have been a surprise to him that about half the country believes the raid was motivated by politics. Or that Trump’s support, which had been slipping, instantly started rising among Republicans and some independents.

Earlier, Goodwin wrote,

Whatever the FBI was looking for in its raid of Donald Trump’s home, it better be big. Really, really big, and important enough to justify this radical and unprecedented action against a former president.

If this were a murder case, even a smoking gun wouldn’t be enough. There would also need to be a corpse.

Because if Democrats didn’t find enough evidence to send Trump to jail, they’ve probably handed him a return trip to the Oval Office.

Actually, I think Goodwin is a little mild here; there are going to be presidential repercussions before 2024. There are too many unanswered questions:

• What was the FBI actually looking for? That had to be specified to get the warrant.
• So we need to see the affadavit that supported the warrant, which wasn't unsealed last Friday.
• If the National Archives wanted more material from the Mar-a-Lago storage room, why didn't they continue their negotiations without the need for an FBI raid?
• If the FBI was concerned that important classified materials were in the storage room, why did they wait so long to raid it?
• Why did the FBI under James Comey give Hillary Clinton a complete pass on mishandling classified material, but now they're raiding Trump for the same thing?
• By the way, what's the status of Hunter's grand jury case?

Right now, the White House and the Justice Department are doing all they can to make no further comment, but these are questions that won't go away. The longer they take to give credible answers, or indeed if they instead tell untruths, the greater the likelihood that there will be resignations at progressively higher levels. My guess is that the most likely minimum consequence will be that Brandon is forced to announce he won't run in 2024 "for reasons of health", but things may well not stop there.