Reading Between The Lines

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025

A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true.

My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's nothing in them that hurts Trump:

“He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this, and that he believed if there had been anything pertaining to President Trump with respect to the Epstein list, that he felt like the Biden administration would probably have leaked it out,” [Oversight Committee Chair James] Comer told reporters while Bill Barr was still behind close doors testifying.

Bongino caused a completely unnecessary crisis when the kerfuffle created an implicit suggestion that things might be otherwise. This confirmed my own suspicion that the guy is a grandstander and a lightweight; Trump had to waste whatever time it took to calm the guy down and get him to come back to work, at least temporarily. But the guy is clearly untrustworthy and unstable, and they can't keep him where he is long term, especially if they can put someone who's actually qualified into that job.

Another story gives glimpses of what must be going on behind the scenes at the Bureau:

Michael Feinberg, who was recently the assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s Norfolk field office in Virginia, left the FBI at the end of May after he claims his direct superior told him that FBI deputy director Dan Bongino was scrutinizing his longtime friendship with [Peter] Strzok, the disgraced FBI special agent who played a key role in the Trump-Russia investigation[.}

. . . Rather than take a polygraph test about his relationship with Strzok, Feinberg says he quit the FBI instead of risking the possible demotion he says he was facing in place of the big promotion to FBI headquarters which he had been expecting.

The FBI’s website says that “although we have used polygraphs to screen new employees for many years, since the 2001 Robert Hanssen spy case, we have also been requiring regular polygraph examinations of FBI employees with access to sensitive compartmented information.”

Feinberg's resignation in May came before the more publicized ouster of Brian Driscoll on August 7. Driscoll had briefly been Acting FBI Director immediately after Trump's second inauguration in January:

On January 31, 2025, as part of a planned mass termination of federal law enforcement officials under the second Trump administration, the FBI under Driscoll was ordered to fire eight senior executives and compile a list of potentially thousands of other employees involved in investigations stemming from the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Driscoll said that the list of such employees included himself and acting deputy director Kissane.] The order came from Emil Bove, a former criminal defense attorney for Trump who became the Trump administration's acting Deputy Attorney General. Driscoll refused to endorse the effort to purge agents as part of a political retribution and pushed back. He was fired by President Trump on August 7, 2025.

Along with Driscoll, two other FBI figures were fired the same day:

Former acting director Brian Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the Washington Field Office Steven Jensen, and Washington-based Special Agent Walter Giardina were informed they are being fired, according to the two people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter. Formal paperwork is expected to be issued Friday.

. . . After Trump returned to office in January, some officials who worked on or supervised aspects of the Jan. 6 probe were allowed to stay in their posts or even promoted, but pressure from MAGA activists eventually led to many of those agents being dismissed.

That appeared to be the case with Jensen, who was installed by Director Kash Patel as head of the FBI’s critical Washington Field Office just four months ago.

. . . Jensen had been expected to attend a press conference Thursday with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington. But Jensen did not show up. Pirro was flanked instead by FBI official Reid Davis, the special-agent-in-charge in Washington for criminal matters.

. . . Giardina worked on aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He was also involved in the arrest of Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro for refusing to testify before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot. Navarro’s lawyers and a federal judge called the arrest unnecessary and questioned why he was not simply allowed to turn himself in. Navarro himself branded Giardina and the other agent involved in the arrest as “kind Nazis.”

The length of time between Driscoll's brief stint as Acting Director in January and his eventual firing in August suggests there was extensive investigation and some sort of deliberation that took place in his case, and likely the cases of Jensen and Giardina as well. Feinberg's dilemma over being polygraphed suggests this could also have been a factor in the August 7 firings. As of this past April,

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday it has started using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.

“We can confirm the FBI has begun administering polygraph tests to identify the source of information leaks within the bureau,” the bureau’s public affairs office told Reuters in a statement.

. . . Donald Trump’s administration has been cracking down on people who leak information to journalists since he returned to office in January.

The effort to eliminate leakers and potential deep state moles from the FBI also suggests the Bureau is making serious moves in its investigations. It doesn't seem like too big a step to infer that Feinberg, Driscoll, Jensen, and Giardino were all fingered as potential leakers who could compromise investigations, and apparently like Feinberg, they may have been given the choice of taking a polygraph or leaving.

The A&E show Lie Detector: Truth or Deception features George Olivo, a retired FBI polygrapher. In a recent interview, he said he did a lot of counterintelligence work with the Bureau, but he wasn't more spectiic than that. He did say,

I love to interview people. And FBI investigations are very long. They can be two-to-four year investigations. And you don’t interview the main subjects until the end of the investigation. Usually it’s months of collecting information.

But the polygraph goes hand-in-hand with interviewing people every day.

. . . It can’t be stressed enough that what you see on TV or in the movies—that’s not the real polygraph. The whole protocol that’s used is different. The pre-test interview before the test is usually 45 minutes to an hour. You talk to the person, get their side of the story, construct questions in a way that’s fair to that person. We don’t use ‘gotcha’ questions; every question is scoped.

All I can think is that something like this is going on in the FBI now.

Comey's Incongruity

So the weekend's big news is that James Comey has outed hinself as a Swiftie, which is to say a fan of Taylor Swift. I just haven't been following this phenomenon, and I did some quick research to bring myself up to date. Accoreding to Wikipedia,

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions have made her a cultural icon of the 21st century. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

I watched a couple of her routines on YouTube, and on one hand, they seem like something recycled from the last century, maybe Joni Mitchell meets Madonna, but on the other, although she's 35, an age when the musical greats of my generation were already dead, her persona is more like an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old. This incongruity seems to be the key to why James Comey is a Swiftie, he's from an older age group affecting the attitudes of people much younger.

James Comey, born December 14, 1960, is a baby boomer, a generation usually defined as born in the years between 1946 and 1964. If you check the Taylor Swift demographics chart at the top of this post (click on the image for a larger copy), baby boomers are onlyh 23% of Swift's audience. Heck, if you grew up with Janis Joplin, Cass Elliot, or Grace Slick, Taylor Swift is going to look like a borrowed AI creation of some sort. So that's anotherr incongruity with Comey.

Another incongruity is household income. We don't know much about Comey's current net worth, but according to Wikipedia,

In August 2005, it was announced that Comey would enter the private sector, becoming the general counsel and senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Department of Defense's largest contractor. Comey's tenure took effect on October 1, 2005, serving in that capacity until June 2, 2010, when he announced he would leave Lockheed Martin to join the senior management committee at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment management firm. Comey received a three million dollar payout from Bridgewater. His net worth was estimated at 14 million dollars in 2013.

As FBI Director after 2013, he appears to have earned something between $180,000 and $199,000 per year, less than he would have earned at Lockheed Martin or Bridgewater, but still well into the $100,000+ bracket, which makes up only 25% of Swiftie demographics. In other categories, though, he's a good Swiftie: Democrat, white, and apparently suburban, living in northern Virginia.

The really odd thing is that he's all dressed up in yesterday's video, suit and tie, recent haircut, clean-shaven -- and although he complains about "our elderly, makeup-covered President", it's hard to avoid thinking Comey's wearing makeup for this appearance as well. And his expression is strangely glib.

This is yet another incongruity: he's dressed as a fully responsible and mature adult, presumably addressing a like-minded audience, but he's using an eight-year-old's vocabularty:

Like a lot of you, I struggle with how to stand up to bullies without letting their meanness infect me and change me. . . . There are far more decent, honest, kind people in America than there are mean jerks.

. . . Don’t get me wrong—we have our jerks, millions of them, you may have noticed. In particular, there’s a stunning coarseness and ugliness in the Republican Party today.

. . . Of course, we need to stand up to jerks and defend what matters.

. . . Taylor Swift . . . sang a song about this topic, asking: Why you gotta be so mean? And she spoke directly to the nasty people: I bet you got pushed around. Somebody made you cold. But the cycle ends right now, because you can’t lead me down that road.

If he's gonna talk down to us this way, he should be wearing a sweater like Mister Rogers, not wearing a serious daddy suit. His chief objection to Trump is apparently he's gotta be so mean. Mean to whom? Well, apparently to James Comey, who informed observers suggest should be preparing himself to be indicted. But that means he should be talking full time to other guys in serious daddy suits who would be telling him to stay off social media, keep a low profile, and ponder his defense strategy.

This suggests to me that Comey lacks any situational awareness. It reminds me in many ways of true crime shows like Court Cam, where people appear before the judge wearing T-shirts with cuss words on them, and the exasperated judge admonishes them that they have to be conscious of where they are. Something basic is missing here.

There's also the peculiar attitude of entitlement that seems to appear in Taylor Swift as well, the teeny-bopper who suddenly realizes that not all the boys are sincere, and she's over-the-top angry that they aren't -- except it's a 35-year-old woman who's actually making these shrieks of rage. Again, something's missing.

Comey in his serious daddy suit should be in serious daddy meetings in serious daddy meeting rooms at serious daddy law firms right now, and instead he's coming out as a Swiftie like a disillusioned 14-year-old. This doesn't bode well.

Thank Goodness I Was Never A News Writer

Looking back, the few times I was actually paid directly to do writing, it was government statistical reports and corporate policy manuals. But I got out of those jobs and into more interesting technical work as soon as I could. I saw a piece by John Kass at Real Clear Politics this morning that showed me why I'm grateful to the Almighty for steering me away from his kind of work. Kass had a 41-year career as a writer for the Chicago Tribune and now freelances. I'd be ashamed to be him. In today's piece:

It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president.

This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he's also behind the curve in equating what's coming out with the "Russia Collusion Hoax". There was actually a multifaceted effort, in and out of government and across diverse government agencies, to deflect attention from Clinton and Biden scandals and cook up false accusations against Trump, from the pee dossier to the Ukraine impeachment to January 6 to the Mar-a-Lago raid. It's far from certain that Obama was at the center of everything.

Farther down, he namechecks and teases an upcoming column about basically nothing:

I tried out my theory [which he hasn't really outlined] on the great NY Post columnist and best-selling author Miranda Devine. She will appear soon as a guest on the Chicago Way podcast that I co-host with WGN radio executive producer Jeff Carlin and send free as a bonus to subscribers of johnkassnews.com.

Well, what did she say?

“Barack Obama is finding relevance right now, probably not the relevance he’d planned, because he’s now fingered as the ringleader as Donald Trump now calls him, of the whole Russiagate Russia Collusion hoax (I’m linking to a recent column of hers on ‘Bumbling Obama Aides Actually Admit Russiagate was a smear campaign against Trump). Wait a moment. She didn't actually answer anything, he just linked to something she's written in a column days earlier. And note that he doesn't have a close-quote at the end of that link, but in the following paragraph, he's somehow implying that words from Devine, possibly in person now, are anextension of the same conversation:

“It’s very fitting that Mamdani would try to set himself up as some sort of national figure by being ‘mentored’ by Barack Obama and setting himself against Donald Trump because he’s of course “too important” to battle against the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams,” Devine told us.

At minimum, Kass badly needs a copy editor to straighten this mess out. Exactly what did Devine say, and where did she say it? The open-quotes and close-quotes, single quotes and double, are all stirred up in a soup. I guess Kass had an editor who'd fix this at the Tribune, but no longer. He goes on,

Originally I had planned to write a different column about Obama, a light piece with the former president on the psychiatric couch being psychoanalyzed, worrying about the crease in his trousers, complaining about the conservative media, about his wife’s podcast, complaining about disloyal Democrats and the Federal Grand Jury examining his actions and those of his Deep State intelligence dogs and so on.

Who knows? I might return to it.

But I was trained as a newspaperman. And Miranda Devine is a hard news person, though she liked the idea of Obama on my comfy couch.

I think Devine was being polite. This is all fluff, mixed with self-promotion. I don't think I could live with myself knowing I had to do this to make money.

The odd thing was that as an Ivy undergraduate, I got the same feeling reading the opinion pieces in the campus newspaper. In freshman comp, the professors were on my case for things like vagueness, poor puncutation, sweeping generalizations, and all the usual other stuff, but the writers in the campus rag were doing exactly the same things and getting away with it. And since this was an Ivy, within a few years, you'd see those same bylines in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago getting away with esactly the same thing.

Somehow I don't think this was a mistake. The people who ran the planet wanted it this way. They still do. They want writers to be obtuse, lazy, and narcissistic. Just look at John Kass.

John Solomon's Revelations

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News. I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary.

Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out:

I do have a crystal ball about what we probably will be talking about in the next 48 hours. After all the leak stuff that I've done in the last few days, you kind of see two buckets of leaks, you've got Adam Schiff, we'll talk about that, and you've got James Comey and his sort of personal media consigliere that he puts on the taxpayer's dime to sort of burnish his image. One of the other things that I've always wanted to get to, and I think we've found the holy grail documents now, is everybody is focused on Hillary Clinton and the e-mail server, and that's an inmportant story, because it involved classified information being moved through an insecure channel.

But I've always believed that the bigger threat to Hillary Clinton was what the FBI was trying to do to look at whether her foundation was basically a back door for corruption, a Hunter Biden laundered through a c(3) family foundation. In the next 48 hours or so, I think we're going to get to see for the first time just how much political interference FBI agents faced in multiple jurisdictions when they got predicated leads, meaning evidence that warranted criminal investigation. . . concerning the Clinton Foundation. [This is the story that came out yesterday.] We're probably going to be able to name the names of people who ordered these investigations shut down [Yates and McCabe], even though the FBI manual, the US Attorney's manual, suggested those investigations should proceed until determinations were made about criminality.

I think this is the big Hillary scandal that has sort of skated below the radar, and I think it's going to be in the next few weeks a very parallel story to what happened with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, the FBI, the IRS, everybody knew he had a problem. and nobody could get the permission to go and do the case right until these whistleblowers came forward with us two years ago. I think similarly, you're going to see that there was a protection racket around Hillary Clinton, not just on the e-mail, we know what James Comey did with his magic FBI wand. . . . you're going to see who in government was providing that protection.

Solomon sees an overall pattern: a scandal threatens to emerge that could hurt Hillary badly, first the pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation, and then the offsite e-mail server, but in both cases, she's able to enlist the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to shut those invesgations down, and not only that, but to start phony investigations of Trump and his people to create a distraction. Solomon says later in the interview,

. . . Last week, Harmeet Dhillon came on the show, she's the civil rights chief for the [Justice Department], and she said, based on what she's seen, and she's not gonna talk about specific cases, but there's a very good chance that what the Justice Derpartment's gonna look at, is that this process, this "clear Hillary and put a fake scandal on the Trump people", may have been a deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties under color of authority.

It seems like nobody likes John Solomon. I did a web search on "disgraced journalist John Solomon" and got hits from the left like:

Fox News host Sean Hannity has welcomed disgraced conservative journalist and serial misinformer John Solomon back for regular appearances on his prime-time show to rail against the FBI search for classified government documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

In 2019, Solomon appeared over 50 times on Hannity’s show, where he regularly pushed Ukraine-linked conspiracy theories meant to undermine the validity of the Trump-Russia investigation that dominated headlines during the first years of the Trump presidency and was at the center of his first impeachment trial. Solomon was later fired from his position as a Fox News contributor for his role in coordinating a “disinformation campaign” to protect Trump, and his appearances on the network fell off.

But Sundance at Conservative Treehouse accuses Solomon of workng hand-in-glove with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to "leak" nothingburgers to create the appearance of active investigations. Just this past Wednesday:

Apparently, Kash Patel just discovered Daniel Richman, the guy who leaked information on behalf of James Comey; and along with that name from the past, someone in the Kash Patel office decided they wanted to highlight the 8-year-old FBI investigation about the FBI hunting for internal leakers.

Patel sends John Solomon the information on Daniel Richman. Solomon repackages the information and sells it as new bombshells. I’m not sure what these guys are doing, but Richman is a well known name from the past, when James Comey made the unsolicited announcement, a self-admission in 2017 about his use of Richman to leak to the New York Times.

The day before:

FBI Director Kash Patel sends John Solomon a declassified whistleblower report, showing how a prior House Intelligence Committee staffer blew the whistle on then HPSCI ranking member Adam Schiff, who was giving the staff instructions to leak fabricated intelligence reports on Trump-Russia to smear President Donald Trump in 2017 and 2018.

According to the release {SEE HERE}, the FBI eventually received and investigated the whistleblower claims; then in 2023, sent the information to the Merrick Garland/Lisa Monaco DOJ, who took no action because the claim was now beyond the statute of limitations.

. . . As Solomon now notes, … “The alleged leaks fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution on most legal theories, but the revelations nevertheless come at a sensitive time for Schiff“.. At the time of the Whistleblower report, the information to the FBI and DOJ would have been evidence that could have prosecuted Adam Schiff. However, now the information is limited to just providing I-told-you-so’s.

As best I can make out, Solomon's problem is that he was reporting favorably on Trump when that wasn't cool. Now, at least for Sundance, his problem seems to be that Trump people trust him and give him stories they don't give to Sundance, which is confirmation that they're secretly working against Trump, or something like that.

My sense is that Trump people trust Solomon and are giving him important stories, although within traditionally circumscribed guidelines. They won't comment on ongoing investigations and won't leak, but they'll point him to public information they think is important. That's all I can gather from the Spicer interview. But I also have a sense that Sundance is miffed that people like Patel and Dhillon don't trust him, either.

Sally Yates

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia,

In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days.

Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates stated the order was neither defensible in court nor consistent with the Constitution. Although large portions of the order were initially blocked by federal courts, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a revised version.

However, her most visible role so far was in forcing Michael Flynn's removal as National Security Adviser during the brief period when she was Acting Attorney General. According to Wikipedia,

Acting Attorney General Sally Yates made an "urgent" request to meet with newly-appointed White House Counsel Don McGahn. She met with him on January 26 and again on January 27. She informed McGahn that Flynn was "compromised" and possibly open to blackmail by the Russians. Yates told McGahn that Flynn had misled Pence and other administration officials about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. She added that Flynn's "underlying conduct", which she could not describe due to classification, "was problematic in and of itself", saying "it was a whole lot more than one White House official lying to another."

Yates's name has now reappeared in connection with internal divisions within the Obama Justice Department and Comey FBI over whether to investigate Hillary Clinton over a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation.

"Shut it down!" then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates is quoted as demanding in the detailed timeline of political impediments that agents in New York City, Little Rock, Ark., and Washington D.C. reported.

The agents tried to get the help of federal prosecutors to determine whether or what crimes occurred while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, most notably, because at that time, her family foundation solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign and U.S. interests with business before her department.

According to the link, an FBI investigation in Washington

was opened “as a preliminary investigation, because the Case Agent wanted to determine if he could develop additional information to corroborate the allegations in a recently-published book, Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, before seeking to convert the matter to a full investigation.”

. . . the FBI’s Little Rock and New York investigations “included predication based on source reporting that identified foreign governments that had made, or offered to make, contributions to the Foundation in exchange for favorable or preferential treatment from Clinton.”

Despite that evidence, the FBI timeline stated that DOJ “indicated they would not be supportive of an FBI investigation” on February 1, 2016.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the primary figure involved in limiting investigations day-to-day, although he was almost certainly doing the bidding of Yates and Comey.

[T]he FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division reiterated that “all overt investigative steps related to the CF investigation” would “require” McCabe’s approval, “with the exception of speaking to open CHSs” during a February 22, 2016 meeting. The inquiry was further hobbled during the meeting when the FBI offices were “directed not to open or recruit any new CHSs, and no additional overt investigative steps were authorized.”

. . . Paul Abbate, then the assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as "negative," "annoyed," and "angry" about the Clinton Foundation cases, with McCabe saying that "they [the DOJ] say there's nothing here" and with McCabe asking "why are we even doing this?"

The investigations cited at the link from Inspector General Horowitz and Special Counsel Durham seem to conclude that McCabe exceeded his authority, presumably from Comey and Yates, to whom he reportedL:

Horowitz’s report in 2018 detailed multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators, including while under oath, about his authorization to then leak sensitive information to The Wall Street Journal in late October 2016 that revealed the existence of the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation (while not revealing how McCabe had put the inquiry in leg-irons for nearly a year).

The Horowitz report concluded “the evidence is substantial” that McCabe misled investigators “knowingly and intentionally” about leaking to the media. Comey said he did not permit McCabe to tell the media, and Horowitz wrote that McCabe’s actions were “designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and “violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”

Nevertheless, the story is now emerging that Comey himself leaked classified information to the New York Times via his confidant Daniel Richman.

Richman, who became friends with Comey during their time working together in the Southern District of New York, admitted to speaking with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, in particular.

At one point in early 2017, Richman had a discussion with Schmidt, who mentioned unspecified classified information and “knew more about it than he did,” an FBI memo obtained by The Post said.

. . . While the memo, first reported by Just the News, didn’t specify the classified information discussed, it previously said Comey mentioned to Richman that the bureau had “weird classified material related” to then-US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch.

Lynch infamously met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in 2016, just over a week before Comey announced he wasn’t recommending charges against Hillary Clinton.

. . . “Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected.”

The FBI memo in question comes from the bureau’s “Arctic Haze” investigation, a probe into the leaking of classified information that began in August 2017 in response to the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in eight articles published between April and June 2017.”

So whether Andrew McCabe was or wasn't exceeding his own authority, he appears on one hand to have been thwarting investigations consistent with the expressed or unexpressed wishes of both Yates and Comey, while Comey in particular was leaking independently of McCabe. It's hard for me to avoid thinking McCabe's role was to keep Comey's and Yates's fingerprints off the frammis.

Someone, maybe Strzok, maybe McCabe, maybe even Lisa Page, could get a really good deal if they were to flip for the prosecutors.

Who Is Jay Bratt?

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed.

BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents.

Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody.

Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025

I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces:

Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to one individual in this week’s disclosure of records in the FBI’s multi-faceted leak investigations once again demonstrate the double standard in how the establishment Department of Justice approached the mishandling of classified information: Jay Bratt.

While Bratt is not specifically mentioned by name in the latest 266-page document dump, the powerful office he ran for six years, the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES), is cited repeatedly.

Wait a moment. Who is Jay Bratt, and why isn't he mentioned? I had only a vague memory that he was a special prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago classified files case, but he faded from view after the judge dismissed it. Then he briefly popped into view again this past May:

The former special counsel prosecutor Jay Bratt asserted his fifth amendment right not to answer questions during a Wednesday deposition before a Republican-led House committee looking for evidence of politicization in the prosecutions of Donald Trump, a spokesman said.

So, why is he taking the fifth? Back at the link,

Top justice department officials have made clear that they plan to investigate prosecutors who brought charges against Trump during his four years out of office. Two years ago, after Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges related to tampering with its 2020 election result, the now-attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that justice department prosecutors “will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”

So, even though he's hardly been mentioned, and he definitely hasn't been one of the usual suspects, his spidey sense is apparently telling him to be very, very careful. And his spidey sense has been active for some months. On January 6 of this year, just two weeks before Trump returned to office,

A lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecution into President-elect Trump’s mishandling of documents at Mar-a-Lago has retired from the department.

Jay Bratt left the DOJ on Friday after 34 years of working for the department, a spokesperson confirmed.

Bratt was a senior national security prosecutor who worked on the Mar-a-Lago documents case in its earliest stages, later working on detail in special counsel Jack Smith’s office.

According to the Julie Kelly story, prior to the Mar-a-Lago business, Bratt was involved in FBI investigations -- "'Foggy Falls' into the Carter Page FISA leak and 'Genetic Christmas' into Russian election hacking claims" -- that now appear to have focused on then-House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff approving committee staff leaking classified information to the press to damage Trump. Bratt

—under his predecessor and then after he took the reins of the office in October 2018—stonewalled requests by the Washington FBI field office (WFO) for help in the Page FISA inquiry. “Since DOJ CES and [the DC US attorney’s office] were not willing to obtain [sentence redacted], WFO exhausted all logical investigative steps to move the case forward and requested DOJ CES and [DC US attorney’s office] to provide WFO with a declination memorandum,” one memo read.

Buit almost immediately after Trump 45 left office,

As the apparent conduit between the Biden White House and the DOJ in concocting the classified documents case, Bratt aggressively pursued the president and his associates starting in early 2021.

Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 along with three FBI agents on a reconnaissance mission disguised as a legit attempt to help Team Trump locate more classified papers to comply with a subpoena in the matter.

Following the visit, Bratt pushed hard to obtain a warrant to search the president’s residence, resulting in the nine-hour armed raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Bratt was then tasked to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and took the lead in prosecuting Trump following Smith’s June 2023 criminal indictment in the documents case.

Kelly doesn't mention any direct connection between the new disclosure that Adam Schiff approved leaks of classified information from the House Intelligence Committee to the press to damage Trump and Bratt's apparent actions to deny information about the leaks to the FBI's Washington Field Office and subsequent closure of those investigations. According to that link,

A career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a decade repeatedly warned the FBI beginning in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then-President Donald Trump over the now-debunked Russiagate scandal, according to bombshell FBI memos that Director Kash Patel has turned over to Congress.

The FBI 302 interview reports obtained by Just the News state the intelligence staffer — a Democrat by party affiliation who described himself as a friend to both Schiff, now a California senator, and former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes — considered the classified leaking to be "unethical," "illegal," and “treasonous,” but was told not to worry about it because Schiff believed he would be spared prosecution under the Constitution's speech and debate clause.

. . . But officials told Just the News that DOJ officials showed little interest in pursuing Schiff when the allegations were brought to them years ago, citing the very same excuse the lawmaker had offered.

So, was Jay Bratt among the DOJ officials who "showed little interest in pursuing Schiff" when the whistleblower raised the alarm? Where were Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray, for that matter? It can't be much of a surprise, putting these recent developments in context, that Bratt would plead the fifth in an interview with the House Judiciary Committee. Garland and Wray may one day have to do the same.

At minimum, it seems peculiar that the same guy who may have played a role in protecting Adam Schiff from being investigated for leaking classified documents should suddenly develop such a strong interest in whether Trump might have mishandled the same that he wound up being seconded from a high-level DOJ job to being the line prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago case, at least nominally a demotion.

But it's hard not to think these are just small pieces of an intricate machine, and if Bratt found it first convenient to retire and then prudent to plead the fifth, this may in fact say things about Schiff, Wray, and Garland. I very much doubt this has escaped Bondi and Patel. Certainly Bratt's activities after 2020 could involve Schiff in a continuing conspiracy as well.

Jim Crow 2.0

Something occurred to me just this morning: the last summer of Trump's first term was marked by the George Floyd riots. Floyd was hyped for months as a paradigmatic hero-martyr, an implicit counterpoint to a racist Trump. Somehow this summer, the victim narrative has been turned upside-down: the most visible image is a law-abiding white guy, Edward Coristine, the former DOGE staffer who was badly beaten by a gang of black teens as he tried to defend his girlfriend from a carjacking.

In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is:

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0.

. . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser was slightly more diplomatic, describing the move as “unsettling and unprecedented.”

The Nation argued, with reference to the 1960s Home Rule issues:

Washington, DC, already lacks representation in Congress, has no control over its own budget, and cannot pass laws free from congressional interference. Now under the Trump administration, the city is moving toward bantustan status. By invoking bogus emergency powers under the DC Home Rule Act, President Donald Trump has effectively federalized law enforcement within the district, delegating supervision of DC Metro police to Attorney General Pam Bondi and authorizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mobilize National Guard troops in Washington. Drug Enforcement Agency head Terry Cole will have operational control over Washington’s Metro Police Department as its interim federal commissioner.

On one hand, this is a retrospective acknowledgement that Home Rule for the District was a major civil rights agenda item back in the day, and it's also a recognition that Trump, as part of a new agenda, is going to dismantle the implicit 1960s civil rights settlement.

This settlement was effectively brought about by Martin Luther King's implied threat, conveyed through his advocacy of non-violence on one hand, but on the other counterpointed by the reality on the ground of race riots in major US cities throughout the decade. The actual message was surrender power to black brokers in the urban core or risk all-out race war, and the elites took the deal in city after city in subsequent years, especially in Washington.

As the Nation piece at the link makes clear, the deal waa incomplete, and as far as Washington went, it still left a lot to congress. But there was another unspoken carveout: in return for leniency toward the criminal underclass in the ghetto, the new urban elite would continue to keep the criminals out of the wealthy enclaves (in Washington, Georgetown and the strip up Wisconsin Avenue to Chevy Chase) and otherwise favor the existing upper class in policy decisions. The upper class would also look the other way over the urban elite's corruption, again in return for averting the Helter-Skelter race war.

The problem is that the 1960s deal has been falling apart. That deal was, as I've kept saying here, an alliance between the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the criminal underclass and its political brokers in the new urban elite, which left out the working class, who've been the group primarily victimized by the policy of leniency toward the criminal underclass. It's taken the working class 60 years to catch on, but they've finally caught on.

As far as the upper class goes, the new urban elites also haven't kept their part of the deal. A key issue has been homelessness; encampments have spread to affluent neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Mayor Bass has become the figurehead for the city's inability to protect Pacific Palisades and the neighboring unincorporated Malibu, two highly affluent areas, from destructive wildfires or enable the residents' desire to rebuild. Bass is acutely coknscious of what Trump has in mind in taking over Washington, DC law enforcement, as shown in a recent interview with Kasie Hunt on CNN:

KASIE HUNT: The president, Madam Mayor, suggested that this effort that he has undertaken to take over the DC police force to federalize the city may not be limited to Washington, DC. Did you take that as a threat?

KAREN BASS: Well, I mean, the threat was already enacted upon here and we all know that DC is in a very different situation because DC is not a state. . . You remember, we didn't just have 4,000 National Guard members, we also had about, I think it was about 700 U.S. Marines. Completely inappropriate, a political stunt and that was not needed and I believed then and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case and I think DC is a test case as well for the president to say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want and I'm the commander in chief and I can use the troops whenever we want.

Byron York, whom I've often characterized here as a spokesman for the conventional wisdom, sees things this way:

In opposing Trump, will Democrats end up defending crime in the district or defending its right to have a high crime rate? Some are already doing just that. It puts them on the wrong side of another lopsided issue, like they are with the border.

But here is the thing. Trump is imagining a Washington with a far lower crime rate than its residents have become accustomed to. Even though they stand to benefit enormously if he succeeds, many of those residents and their political representatives will oppose Trump for trying. In the process, they will become almost protective of their crime rate now that Trump is threatening it. That is crazy. But it might be where we are headed.

What York doesn't see is that the basic 1960s civil rights consensus has broken down. Whatever the brokers for the urban elite may try to say, they've failed to deliver on their implicit promise, leniency toward the criminal underclass, whose depredations would be aimed at the working class, while the privileges of the upper class would be quietly maintained. Trump, as he's doing with other aspects of the current polity, is insisting on renegotiating the deal.