The Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch Tarmac Meeting

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 tour and photo opportunity [the following day] with the Phoenix Police Department over community policing. While the tour and photo op started on time, the news conference that followed started nearly an hour late for reasons that at the time were not explained. It would now appear likely the delay was to give DOJ staff time to go over talking points with Lynch prior to facing the press.

This was because during the tour and photo op the following morning, Justice Department officials were notifed that the TV station had learned about the meeting, which was not intended to be public knowledge. As of June 29, this had become a national story:

"Actually, while I was landing at the airport, I did see President Clinton at the Phoenix airport as I was leaving, and he spoke to myself and my husband on the plane," [Lynch] said. "Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren. It was primarily social and about our travels. He mentioned the golf he played in Phoenix, and he mentioned travels he'd had in West Virginia."

In 2020, promioting his book about the meeting, Christopher sign added other details:

'We knew something had occurred that was a bit unusual. It was a planned meeting. It was not a coincidence.' Sign told Fox and Friends ahead of the release of his new work, 'The Secret on the Tarmac.'

. . . Sign said his source witnessed the rendezvous unfold from the moment Clinton arrived at the airport.

'He then sat and waited in his car with the motorcade, her airstairs come down, most of her staff gets off, he then gets on as the Secret Service and FBI are figuring out "How in the world are we supposed to handle this? What are we supposed to do?"' Sign told Fox.

'She mentioned that Bill Clinton flattered her, talked about Eric Holder, talked about how things were going at Justice, talked about her job performance, not this golf-grandkids, Brexit.'

For Bill to be touching, however delicately, on Lynch's job performance may have been all the hint she needed that if Hillary won, Lynch's reappointment as Attorney General would be on the line. If she could rein in Comey and the FBI over the e-mail server, Hillary would owe her a big favor. If not, well, her job performance might become an issue. In 2022, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report on the 2016 campaign, which included half a dozen pages on the tarmac meeting:

“Lynch said that former President Clinton boarded the plane in a matter of seconds, suggesting that he was in the stairwell near the door to the plane. Lynch said that she was very surprised that he wanted to meet with her because they did not have a social relationship, and she was also surprised to see him ‘right there in the doorway so quickly.'”

. . . Lynch estimated that she talked to former President Clinton for approximately 20 minutes before a member of her staff came back onto the plane, as we describe below. She said that she became increasingly concerned as the meeting ‘went on and on.’ Lynch said that when she thought about it later that evening and discussed it with her staff about in the context of the case, she concluded ‘that it was just too long a conversation to have had. It…went beyond hi, how are you, shake hands, move on sort of thing. It went beyond the discussions I’ve had with other people in public life, even in political life, it went beyond that [in terms of length].’”

“Lynch said that after the Senior Counselor got back on the plane, former President Clinton commented, ‘Oh, she’s mad at me, because I’d been on the plane too long. And she’s come to get you.’ Lynch said that she replied to him, ‘[W]ell, we do have to go. And then he kept talking about something else.’ She said that he kept talking for ‘a good 5 minutes’ after the Senior Counselor got back on the plane. Lynch said that she finally stood up and said, ‘[Y]ou know, it was very nice of you to come. Thank you so much. And just…thank you again for stopping by.’ She said that they said goodbye several times, and her husband shook former President Clinton’s hand again. Former President Clinton then left the plane.”

. . . (as described by Melanie Newman, the director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs): “Newman characterized Lynch as ‘devastated’ about the tarmac meeting. She stated: ‘[Lynch] doesn’t take mistakes lightly, and she felt like she had made…an incredible…mistake in judgment by saying yes instead of no, that he could come on the plane. But also, she’s like the most polite, Southern person alive. I, I don’t know in what circumstances she would have said no, or what would have happened if she had said no…. I would have much preferred a story that the Attorney General turned a former President of the United States away on the tarmac, but…she doesn’t make mistakes, and she was not pleased with herself for making this kind of high-stakes mistake.'”

In response to questions from the press on whether the meeting might influence her decision on whether to prosecute Hillary for the off-site e-mail server, Lynch announced the following Friday, July 1, that she would accept the recommendation from career prosecutors at the FBI over Clinton's use of a private e-mail server. By Tuesday, Jujy 5, Comey made his "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement, claiming, " I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say."

I think on one hand, that Bill Clinton would suddenly invite himself onto Loretta Lynch's plane to banter about grandkids, when she'd had no previous social contact with him, speaks volumes, even if we knew nothing about what was discussed. But inserting just an oh-by-the-way remark about job performance would dangle both a carrot and a stick in front of Lynch that she couldn't ignore. Certainly the perception by both Lynch and her staff during and after the meeting that the whole thing was improper reinforces the impression that it was meant to convey Hillary's ultmatum.

However, we know absolutely nothing about what took place between Lynch and Comey from the tarmac meeting on June 27 to Comey's "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement on July 5, except that even legacy media was drawing the inference that there was a connection of some sort, and even in his announcement, Comey was weasel-wording an insistence that nobody at Justice knew what he wad going to say.

Let's nevertheless keep in mind that the assessment of the intelligence community only weeks earlier, according to the Durham Annex, was that "Comey gravitates toward Republicans, and apparently, intends to prolong the investigation so that the scandal would keep going" until the election. Suddenly this changed.

And it changed in a big, permanent way. Consider that every indication we have is that the FBI had always been skeptical of the idea that the Russians were somehow controlling the Trump campaign or were favorable to it in any way. Yet on July 31, 2016, Strzok opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, whose job was to promote the exact opposite idea. We know just from the links in yesterday's post here that as of 2017, Strzok was still skeptica that there was any "there there", even as he was moving to run the Mueller investigation that was meant to keep the story alive.

Here's what has me puzzled. Hillary lost the election in November. That ended any leverage she had over Loretta Lynch, who would be leaving Justice by January 20, 2017 no matter what Hillary said. Shouldn't that have ended any leverage Hillary and Lynch had over Comey? Comey was confirmed to a ten-year term as FBI Director in 2013. He and his staff, including Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, would be staying on after the election, and they were generally thought to be pro-Republican, at least as of June 2016. If they played their cards right with Trump, they were golden.

Yet Comey and Strok dug in, just when you'd think they'd be heaving sighs of relief that there'd no longer be pressure to ease off on the Hillary e-mail server and hang Russia on Trump. Instead, by January 6, Comey was telling Trump the FBI had the pee dossier on him and had begun making detailed notes -- almost certainly self-serving -- on everything Trump said. So just who was Comey working for? Seems like he had every opportunity to get off on the right foot with Trump and continue a good career, when within months, he'd lost Trump's trust and gotten himself fired.

My bet is that someone was suggesting to Comey that there'd be a move to push Trump out via the 25th Amendment, and Comey, as a good Republican, would come out very well if he got on board. I'll talk more about that in tomorrow's post. But a reward for helping out with a 25th Amendment putsch would be the carrot -- was there a stick? Did they have something big on Comey as well? So far, I can't answer, I can only ask the question.

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 suspicious 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.