John Durham exposes the whole anti-Trump caper

 ROGER KIMBALL: 

John Durham exposes the whole anti-Trump caper.

The moral is that democracy is all well and good, but only so long as the voters select a candidate we approve of. Somehow, Donald Trump was elected without the permission — indeed, over the strenuous objections — of the permanent bureaucracy. The whole Trump-Russia narrative was concocted to correct that mistake.

At the end of the day, the Durham report contains few real revelations. Anyone who has been paying attention already knew most of what he details. But it does dot some I’s and cross some T’s. And what will happen now? People will pore over the the report and shake their heads and cluck their tongues. James Comey will be busy cashing his royalty checks and nattering on about his “higher loyalty.” Barack Obama will continue to enjoy his palatial residence on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps Joe Biden will be pushed into an adult nursery somewhere so that Michelle Obama can continue the legacy.

Will “those responsible” be “held accountable?” If you think the answer is yes, then I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.

Related:

 Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

More:

The ghost of Walter Duranty flashes a Pinch of a smile.

 

Trump was always the result of the conservative populist coalition, not the cause.

 SALENA ZITO: 

Trump was always the result of the conservative populist coalition, not the cause.

Ever since former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, there has been a flag hanging from a home not far from where I live that reads “Trump 2024” — one of the thousands I have seen across the country in the past two years. But yesterday, when I drove past this home, that sign was gone.

The Trump flag is a phenomenon I have written about for years. I have noted that this wasn’t really about Trump himself — it was mostly about the conservative populist movement, using the name of its only standard-bearer to let people know they were not going anywhere. At that point, no one else had stepped up to fill the void. And so the flag bore the Trump name.

Flashback: “To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”

Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

Their first response is always to call their critics bigots

97Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds   

 DOJ  Unmasking of Gen Flynn  

An other Justice Department Fail: The Flynn Unmasking

Classified information was leaked to the media by several Obama intelligence officials. But no one will be punished. 

By Julie Kelly

June 2, 2022

Barack Obama’s crusade to destroy Lt. General Michael Flynn began months before Election Day in 2016. Flynn resigned as Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director in 2014 amid clashes with his boss at the time, James Clapper, over the administration’s approach to the war on terror. In early 2016, Flynn, who had become an outspoken critic of Obama’s foreign policy, joined the Trump presidential campaign; a few months later, Obama’s FBI opened a counterintelligence probe into Flynn and three other campaign associates.

FBI (Bad Players Unvailed) - Epoch Times)

 FBI (Bad Players Unvailed)

New DOJ Notes Reveal FBI Panic After Trump Tweeted He Knew He Was Being Spied On

By Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke

 

May 9, 2022 Updated: May 10, 2022

biggersmaller 

Print

0:0010:02

News Analysis

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI went to, to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.

Durham Issues Supoenas - Hillary

 Durham Issues Supoenas - Hillary

John Durham Issues Trial Subpoenas to Members of Clinton Campaign, DNC

Paying FEC Fines in an Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel (Clinton/DNC}

 Clinton / DNC Cover-up

Paying FEC Fines in an Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel

By Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek

 

April 2, 2022 Updated: April 3, 2022

biggersmaller 

Print

The lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 probe into the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion, Kash Patel, said the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is paying a penalty to Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an admittance of guilt. Clinton and DNC are doing so to bury the narrative and prevent more media coverage of these illegal activities, said Patel.

Richard Grenell Is the Superhero America Needs Right Now

Richard Grenell is a HERO

How Obama Administration shattered rule of law.

MICHAEL BARONE CALLED IT “GANGSTER GOVERNMENT” FOR A REASON:

 How Obama Administration shattered rule of law.

This week, former President Obama re-emerged from hibernation to lecture Americans about the threat to rule of law posed by the Trump administration. After Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the Department of Justice would be dropping its case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, Obama told his former aides, “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.” He explained, “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. … And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

In reality, of course, Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with lying to the FBI in the course of an investigation, a separate and far lesser offense, particularly given the fact that his alleged lie was immaterial to any underlying crime. In fact, as America found out over the past two weeks, Flynn wasn’t supposed to be the subject of any investigation at all: The FBI had decided to close an investigation into Flynn in January 2017, even after supposedly nefarious calls between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok — the same man who pledged to lover and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that Donald Trump would never be president and suggested an “insurance policy” against that possibility — then intervened to keep the investigation open.
The next day, during an Oval Office meeting, President Obama himself asked then-FBI Director James Comey about the Flynn-Kislyak communications. Next, Comey upped the ante: He avoided following normal FBI-White House protocols in order to interview Flynn, and Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, avoided informing Flynn of his rights. Nonetheless, the FBI agents who conducted the interview suggested that they did not think Flynn was lying during that interview. As it turns out, notes between top FBI officials at the time said, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn would later plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI — at least in part because the FBI was threatening his son with prosecution.

This should be a massive scandal. It should be a massive scandal because, at the very least, it demonstrates the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies, prompted by political actors at the very top of the government, racing to bend the rules in order to pursue a case they were convinced they would make: the case that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government. From the purposefully botched Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to the absurdly conjured prosecution of Flynn, the most powerful institutions in American life violated the protocols meant to restrict abuse, firmly secure in their own feelings of moral rectitude.

That’s the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario is far darker: that by early January, with no evidence of Russian collusion, leaders of the nation’s political and law enforcement agencies decided that guilt was irrelevant, and that the Trump administration had to be strangled in the crib.

Yeah, I’m not buying the best case.

69Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds   

HACKS & THE DNC HACK

The famous hack of the Democratic National Committee email account during the 2016 campaign somehow escaped serious investigation by the FBI, but was nevertheless attributed by American intelligence authorities and others to the Russians in part because of the analysis performed by CrowdStrike for the DNC. Now Aaron Maté reports for RealClearInvestigations on the newly declassified testimony by CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry — testimony that Adam Schiff sought to kept locked down until Acting DNI Grenell forced his hand.

Having reviewed the transcript of Henry’s testimony that is posted here, Maté reports that Henry “privately acknowledged more than two years ago that it had no evidence that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee’s server.” Here are the quotable quotes that Maté plucks from the transcript:

• “There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”

• “There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”

• “There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network… We didn’t have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.”

• “Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn’t see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.”

• Asked directly if he could “unequivocally say” whether “it was or was not exfiltrated out of DNC,” Henry told the committee: “I can’t say based on that.”

Maté concludes: “The revelation that CrowdStrike itself lacked critical evidence surrounding Russiagate’s underlying crime is certain to deepen already abundant concerns about deceptions in the affair. The two private firms that generated the core allegations at the heart of Russiagate — Russian email hacking and Trump-Russia collusion – were both hired by the Democratic Party, suggesting that the federal investigation was compromised from the start.”

How the populist uprising of 2016 will reverberate in 2020.

SALENA ZITO AND BRAD TODD:

The Great Revolt enters a new phase: How the populist uprising of 2016 will reverberate in 2020.

In a country increasingly engaged in national politics and divided, the next 12 months may feel like 12 years. Voters in both trenches are eager to vote, convinced not only of victory but also of vindication. The shocking result in 2016 wasn’t a black swan, an irregular election deviating from normalcy, but instead the indicator of the realignment we describe in The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition, now available in a new a paperback edition in time for the 2020 election season.
The story of America’s evolving political topography is one of tectonic plates, slowly grinding against each other until a break notably alters the landscape with seismic consequences — a sudden lurch long in development. The election of President Trump cemented a realignment of the two political parties rooted in cultural and economic change years in the making. Although he has been the epicenter of all politics since his announcement of candidacy in 2015, Trump is the product of this realignment more than its cause, a fact that becomes clear as you travel the back roads to the places that made him the most unlikely president of our era.
Thirty-year-old dairy farmer Ben Klinkner doesn’t consider himself a member of either political part. “I am a Christian conservative,” he says matter-of-factly.
Sitting at conference table at the Westby Co-op Credit Union, the sixth-generation family farmer has a master’s degree in meat science, Klinkner explains when he left to attend college at the University of Wisconsin River Falls and then North Dakota State University in Fargo for his master’s he vowed he was never going to milk another cow again.
“And I’ve been doing just that every day for the past six years.”
“I chose my life because, not for the money obviously, but because I get to see my family every day. That’s what it’s about. I got to see my parents every day growing up. And my kids get to see that too,” said Klinkner, the father of three with another one on the way.
On Trump, Klinkner is pragmatic, “I am very happy with his policies, I just wish he’d put that Twitter down,” he said of the president’s unorthodox style of communicating. This cuts against the national media’s narrative that farmers will dump the president because of the trade uncertainty.
And yes, Klinkner will vote for him again.

Read the whole thing. But Trump would be crazy to “put Twitter down” in this media environment.

213Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds   

Comey Escaped This Time But His Day Should Come

Comey Escaped This Time But His Day Should Come

 

Thomas Farnan

 

- September 1st, 2019

Lost in the reaction to the news that former FBI Director James Comey will not be prosecuted for being an insufferable jerk is that the inspector general established, once and for all, that yes, James Comey is in fact an insufferable jerk.

Which means, at a minimum, Trump was right to fire him.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not decide whether firing Comey violated federal laws against obstruction of justice. Inspector General Michael Horowitz answered that question with a resounding, “Are you kidding me, Bob?” He wrote:

Comey violated FBI policy and the requirements of his FBI Employment Agreement . . . Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees . . . Comey’s closest advisors used the words “surprised,” “stunned,” “shocked,” and “disappointment” to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.

This is only the leak case, remember: the one where Comey got the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC to report his psycho-fantasies by putting them into an official-looking memo and leaking them through a Columbia law professor.

The reason he was not prosecuted was that it would just cause problems to designate as “classified” the anti-Trump porn he dreamed up and locked in a safe at his house. United States v. Comey in this instance would only elevate his mad ranting to a national secret.

Don’t Forget the Ukraine Angle

 

The real crime is that Comey lent the credibility of the FBI to bolster a ridiculous smear fabricated by the Democratic National Committee to undermine the Trump campaign and then his presidency. If we cannot prosecute that crime, we are a banana republic.

Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. When he looks for who planted the stupid idea that Trump colluded with Russia, he will find, in each instance, that it was DNC working with the Clinton campaign—and Comey was involved up to his neck.

In a January 11, 2017 story headlined “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico reportedthat Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative, began doing opposition research for the DNC about Donald Trump and Russia in late 2015.

The Ukrainian embassy worked closely with Chalupa to undermine Trump’s campaign. As Politico noted, “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”

Chalupa was so successful in fanning the Russian nonsense that on October 24, 2016, reporter Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News portrayed her work as pivotal in a premature victory lap for the Clinton campaign.

A single, uncredentialed agitator, though, was not enough for Hillary and her crew. The Clinton campaign and the DNC commissioned the Steele dossier, to give British spy level credibility to Chalupa’s Chicken Little act.

The Steele dossier was uncorroborated, unverified, and false. That didn’t stop Comey and other political operatives at the FBI from turning it into evidence to support FISA warrants permitting them to spy on the Trump campaign.

Obviously, politicians should never, ever, ever be allowed to use their bought and paid for political opposition research to get their opponent investigated using clandestine measures.

Overly Politicized Federal Law Enforcement

The attorney general has already noted that it is unusual for the FBI to conduct investigations based on opposition research which “on its face had a number of clear mistakes and a somewhat jejune analysis.” That is Watergate times 10,000.

This cannot end upon the FISA investigation, though, no matter how satisfying it will be to see the conspirators start to get prosecuted. There is one additional piece of the puzzle that exceeds FISA abuse in its sheer audacity.

The whole mess began when the DNC sold the phony idea that Putin stole its emails. To this day, though, the FBI has never tested the computers. Instead, the FBI put its head in the sand and allowed the DNC to construct a Russia-did-it excuse to deflect attention from its damaging emails.

Comey ridiculously allowed the DNC to hire CrowdStrike to conduct the crucial autopsy in this murder investigation. Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with a non-Trumpian agenda.

The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a $10 million donor to the Clinton Foundation with additional millions committed. It was CrowdStrike—and not any unbiased law enforcement agency—that purported to connect Putin to the hack of Podesta’s emails.

CrowdStrike’s story raised more questions than it answered. A reputable group of former intelligence officials, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has been critical of CrowdStrike’s workbased on its own forensic analysis.

At the same time, it was being paid by the DNC to inspect its computers, CrowdStrike was caughtfabricating a completely different Russian hack to serve Ukrainian disinformation. It had a dog in this fight.

That is three distinct instances—Chalupa, Steele, and CrowdStrike—where DNC opposition research was used in federal law-enforcement investigations. It doesn’t even include the work the FBI and CIA were doing with foreign intelligence services to get Hillary Clinton elected.

The inspector general has already concluded that the FBI was acting with political bias. Ya think?

There may not be a criminal indictment for Comey (yet). But it is certainly an indictment of the federal bureaucracy that a Mitty-esque figure like him could drag America through his imaginary battle against the Russians.

If he is not someday locked in an iron mask and set adrift in a rudderless skiff upon an edict that he may never again hear news of his country—or whatever the 21st-century equivalent of that is—we might as well just open the borders and end this experiment in democratic governance.

Watergate by Any Other Name

ROGER’S RULES

Watergate by Any Other Name

 

BY ROGER KIMBALL JANUARY 14, 2019

CHAT 379 COMMENTS

 

Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.

Brennan convened a “working group” at CIA headquarters that included Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI agent who was head of counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (now, like Brennan, another mouthpiece for the left-wing media), in order to stymie Trump’s campaign. It was Brennan, too, who first alerted James Comey, the disgraced former director of the F.B.I., to the fantasy of possible “collusion” between the Trump Campaign and “the Russians.”

Then came the infamous “Steele Dossier,” the agglomeration of malicious gossip about Trump that was surreptitiously commissioned by and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. This fantastical piece of “opposition research” was essentially the sole warrant for opening secret FISA investigations against Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign advisor, and others.

All this provided sensational pabulum for the anti-Trump press, who spent countless hours peeling back the complex, hypertrophied onion that the CIA, the FBI, and various figures within the Obama administration had built up to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump without quite seeming to target Trump himself.

Mirabile ditctu, it didn’t work. Still, it was impossible that Trump could actually win the election. Nancy Pelosi told us that we could “take it to the bank” that Donald Trump was not going to be president. Many other politicians and talking heads made fools of themselves emitting similar pseudo-certainties right up to the afternoon and early evening of election day.

But win he did, and that changed everything. Now it was not a candidate who had to be stopped but a duly elected president of the United States who had to be kept from knowing exactly what lengths the government—soon to be his government—had gone to destroy him. From November 9, 2016, to January 20, 2017, the reins of government were still in the hands of Barack Obama. The apparatus to stop Trump the candidate was already in place. Now it would be deployed against Trump the president-elect and, later, Trump the president.

Over the last few days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other anti-Trump outlets have revealed, and reveled in, something that many observers suspected for a long time. That the investigation into various figures associated with the Trump campaign—not only Carter Page, but also George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen—was just a pretext. The main target all along was Trump himself. As Andy McCarthy observed, “following the firing of FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017, the bureau formally opened an investigation of President Trump.”

The Times breathlessly frames its story as the revelation that Trump might have been “secretly working on behalf of Russia.” Right on cue, the anti-Trump fraternity went into full-swivet mode. Probably the most comical contribution to this almanack of rhetorical incontinence was written by Max Boot, who offered “18 Reasons Why Trump Could Be a Russian Asset.” Reason number one: that Trump, the head of a multi-billion dollar real-estate development company with interests all over the world, had business dealings with Russia. Excellent, Max!

In fact, though, what the Times story revealed was simply that, pace repeated assurances by James Comey, Trump was the target of the investigation from the beginning. As McCarthy notes, “the only thing the story shows is that the FBI, after over a year of investigation, simply went overt about something that had been true from the first. The investigation commenced during the 2016 campaign by the Obama administration—the Justice Department and the FBI—was always about Donald Trump.” Moreover,

The FBI and DOJ knew this would be controversial—the incumbent administration spying on the opposition campaign in the absence of corroborated evidence of a crime.

Let’s pause to ponder that last bit: “spying on the opposition campaign in the absence of corroborated evidence of a crime.” “Controversial”? You think? How about nefarious and probably criminal? Richard Nixon is unavailable for comment.

In a way, you have to admire the cunning of the Obama minions. Faced with exposure of their “controversial” tactic, they went to work. “[T]hey designed the investigation,” McCarthy explains,

in a way that allowed them to focus on Trump without saying they were doing so. Before Trump was elected, they papered the files to indicate that they were focusing on the Trump campaign or people connected to it, like Page and Papadopoulos. This way, they could try to collect evidence about Trump without formally documenting that Trump was the target.

In other words, we are staring into the bowels of the biggest political scandal in the history of the United States. Americans pride themselves on living in a republic in which the peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of our political life. But what we have here is an effort by one administration to thwart that process. Remember: there was no crime. There was always only the Steele Dossier, that rancid pile of slander that was paid for by Trump’s political opponents. That was the stated basis for the FISA warrants: uncorroborated rumor instigated and circulated by the Clinton campaign.

Naturally, the anti-Trump chihuahuas are yapping once again that this is—finally, at last—the revelation that will bring down the Trump administration. Chris Matthews, feeling another frisson tingling up his appendage, excitedly announced that the president is “at the end of the rope.” But we’ve been down this street before. From before Donald Trump assumed office, we’ve been repeatedly assured that some “bombshell” had been released that harbingered “the beginning of the end” for the Trump presidency. It’s actually quite amusing to watch a few of these hysterical prognostications back to back.

Back on planet earth, however, two things are happening. First, Donald Trump piles up victory after victory for the America people: jobs, economic growth, a revitalized military, constitutionalist judicial appointments, a more rational regulatory environment, border security and immigration reform -- the list is long and astonishingly impressive. He has also, by the way, stymied his suppose best-buddy Vladimir Putin by aggressively pursuing an energy policy that has made America the world’s largest producer of energy, sending lethal weapons to Putin opponents in the Ukraine, thwarting the Russians in Syria, and many other initiatives.

But in the parallel universe occupied by the John Brennans, James Comeys and Robert Muellers of the world, the effort to unseat the democratically elected leader of the free world continues apace. The entire investigation, conducted at first under cover of a counter-intelligence inquiry, was always deep down a criminal investigation. The great, insuperable problem that the would-be inquisitors have faced from the beginning is that this was never an investigation of a crime. Rather, it has been an exploratory probe that was bent on discovering a crime, much as a deep space probe is deployed in an endless search for intelligent life on the fringes of the galaxy.

Asked recently by Fox News host Jeanine Pirro whether he is or has ever been working for Russia, Trump responded, “I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked.” Quite right, too. For the rest of us, though, it’s more than insulting. It’s been going on so long that we are tempted to forget what this travesty really is. Familiarity has bred indifference. It is time that we woke up to the truth. What we have been witnessing is a blatant and nefarious effort to repeal the results of a lawful election and undermine the integrity of our democratic institutions. The fact that this attempted coup is being undertaken not by wild-eyed revolutionaries but well-accoutered bureaucrats high up the feeding trough of the deep state makes the assault on our freedoms more, not less, frightening.