What would the intelligence community's 'insurance policy' against Trump look like?

BY SHARYL ATTKISSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 08/09/18 03:45 PM EDT 1,378

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

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FBI agent Peter Strzok escorted from building amid internal review

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Let’s begin in the realm of the fanciful.

 

Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.

What exactly might an “insurance policy” against Donald Trump look like?

He would have to be marginalized at every turn. Strategies would encompass politics, the courts, opposition research and the media. He’d have to become mired in lawsuits, distracted by allegations, riddled with calls for impeachment, hounded by investigations. His election must be portrayed as the illegitimate result of a criminal or un-American conspiracy.

To accomplish this, bad actors in the intel community could step up use of surveillance tools as a weapon to look for dirt on Trump before his inauguration. They could rely on dubious political opposition research to secretly argue for wiretaps, plant one or more spies in the Trump campaign, then leak to the press a mix of true and false stories to create a sense of chaos.

Once Trump is in office, a good insurance policy would call for neutralizing the advisers seen as most threatening, including his attorney general. The reigning FBI director could privately send the implicit message that as long as Trump minds his own business, he won’t be named as a target. When the president asks the FBI director to lift the cloud and tell the public their president isn’t under investigation, the FBI director could demur and allow a storm of innuendo to build. Idle chatter benefits the plot. There would be rampant media leaks, both true and false, but none of them would benefit Trump.

All would be well unless the president removes the FBI director. Then, a rider on the insurance policy would kick in. After months of assuring Trump he’s not under investigation, he must now become a focus to keep him away from the Justice Department and the FBI; once an investigation opens, all of Trump’s attempts to affect policy or to dig into allegations against the intelligence community could be portrayed as obstruction of justice.

How to open an investigation after all these months? Appoint a special counsel. (Easy to get the right one, with Trump’s attorney general out of the way.) How to get public and congressional support for a special counsel? Through a partnership between the fired FBI director and the media; he could secretly leak to The New York Times anti-Trump versions of memos he wrote, inventing the pretext for a special counsel probe. The chosen special counsel should be an insider with his own legacy to protect. Anti-Trump FBI officials who secretly vowed to “stop” Trump could be assigned to the investigation.

As crazy as it all sounds, it becomes slightly more plausible when we examine the record and find self-described conspiracies to develop “insurance policies.”

On Aug. 15, 2016, after FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page met with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok texted Page that they couldn’t take the risk of Trump getting elected without having “an insurance policy” in place.

Another figure, Benjamin Wittes, chose the same phrase. In October 2016, in his Lawfare blog, Wittes wrote: “What if Trump wins? We need an insurance policy against the unthinkable: Donald Trump’s actually winning the Presidency.” 

As it happens, Wittes has acknowledged being a good friend of fired FBI Director James Comey. It’s not hard to imagine that the two men share some beliefs, and even discussed some of the issues involved. In fact, Wittes spoke to a New York Times reporter about Comey's interactions with President Trump, right after Robert Mueller's appointment as special counsel. 

So, in his 2016 blog post, Wittes wrote that his vision of an “insurance policy” against Trump would rely on a “Coalition of All Democratic Forces” to challenge and obstruct Trump, using the courts as a “tool” and Congress as “a partner or tool.” He even mentioned impeachment — two weeks before Trump was elected.

If this far-fetched idea of an insurance policy were actually true, it also could include tactics memorialized in a memo, written in 2009 by a Democratic strategist working at the time for the liberal smear group Media Matters. It described how to fight a “well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass” targets. Private eyes would probe into their personal lives, courts would be used for lawsuits. “Massive demonstrations” would be organized, Michael Moore would make a negative documentary and “a team of trackers” would stake out targets at events. “Opposition research” would be collected. The targets would be attacked on social media, yard signs posted in their neighborhoods, and a “mole” placed inside their organization.

If there really were an insurance policy against Trump, it might include having ex-intel officials getting hired at national news outlets where they’d monitor and influence news organizations, and be invited to give daily spin on controversies surrounding their own actions. Figures such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Comey aide Josh Campbell and others could get hired by CNN; former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Mueller/Comey aide Chuck Rosenberg could get hired by NBC and MSNBC.

But all that would never really happen. Or if it did, it’s downright silly to think of it as part of an organized insurance policy. 

Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, author of The New York Times bestsellers “The Smear” and “Stonewalled,” and host of Sinclair’s Sunday TV program, “Full Measure.”

As Europe wanes, the distance between it and America grows - VDH

Continental Drift

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

July 26, 2018 9:15 AM

(Roman Genn)

As Europe wanes, the distance between it and America grows

According to Pew International polls, Trump is now intensely disliked in Europe. His endless spats over European trade, the costs of NATO, and differing approaches to Vladimir Putin’s Russia acerbated already tense U.S.–European relations. But Trump neither created European or transatlantic crises nor can be of much help in solving them. In part, they are Western in origin and to a degree shared by all Western allies, but mostly they are innate to Europe and self-induced.

We often refer to the “West” of nearly 1.5 billion people without really defining it or appreciating just how predominant Europe should be in all matters Western. In terms of population, the contemporary West consists of mainland Europe (circa 500 million — depending on how the borders of Europe are defined), the United States (325 million), the Anglosphere of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (130 million), and major Westernized, industrial, and democratic countries in Asia, most notably Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea (200 million), along perhaps with South American nations such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil (265 million).

Of all these kindred regions, Europe logically should be the cornerstone of the West, given its vast population and size. It is home to both NATO and the European Union. The euro was birthed as a rival to the dollar for international primacy. The Mediterranean connects three continents. Rome remains the center of Christianity. Historically, Europe has been the font of international humanitarian work from the Red Cross to the Geneva Conventions. Europe was the birthplace of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution — and the igniter of the two most destructive wars in human history.

Yet the global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.

Some of Europe’s current problems, of course, are ancestral and have never been adequately solved. The great curse — and boon — of Europe has always been traced to its diversity. The continent is about the same size as the United States, but Europe currently is divided among some 44 nations.

While such national rivalries at times spawned innovation, energetic diversity, and innovative technology, the ensuing friction, tribalism, and nationalism resulted in constant warring. Usually the remedy to such chronic strife has been as bad as the disease. The dream of all strongmen, from Julius Caesar and Augustus, Napoleon, and Hitler to the supposedly enlightened European Union, has been to unite and thereby magnify Europe under one government, one culture, and one economy, by an imposed nationalist rule (Roman, French, or German) and, most recently, by a pan-European elite.

The problem, however, with all these one-government schemes is that they have inevitably required a level of coercion to instill among diverse ethnicities and recalcitrant nationalists a shared “Europeanism” that is antithetical to constitutional government. The European Union felt that it could be the first pan-European movement founded and sustained on democratic principles. But it too is now opposed to popular referenda. Brussels makes voluntary withdrawal from the EU nearly impossible, as the United Kingdom is learning. European elites have clearly failed to craft something akin to American federalism. They have learned that even Mississippi and Massachusetts have a more common history, culture, economy, language, and tradition than do Norway and Greece, or the Netherlands and Bulgaria, or Malta and Lithuania.

The European project currently is drawn and quartered: to the south by financial tensions with the north; to the east by furor over illegal immigration; to the north by Brexit and the EU’s efforts either to stall it or to ensure it never happens again; and to the west by its exasperation with the United States on matters of climate change, military readiness, and a preference for equality of opportunity rather than of result. The hub of these factional spokes remains German.

Since 1871, Europe has struggled with the “German problem.” Translated, this has meant that since the unification of Germany, Europe’s largest and most populous nation has created wealth and enjoyed political influence far beyond European norms of per capita industriousness — and used that power to attempt to recalibrate European values as German values.

After three disastrous European wars, in 1871, 1914, and 1939, the solution to the perceived dynamism — and ambitions — of Germany was variously to divide it up for a while, to deny it nuclear weapons while arming its ancient rivals France and Britain, to invite in the United States to impose and oversee a pan-European military alliance against a common enemy of Soviet Communism, to transform a common market and free-trade zone into de facto shared European nationhood, and to allow Germany to manipulate the euro to facilitate its own mercantile ambitions.

Despite all those efforts, Germany today dictates European immigration, financial, trade, and military policy, often against the wishes of its neighbors. It runs the world’s largest account surplus, and a huge trade surplus with the U.S., while spending relatively little on its own defense. Berlin is simply not interested in priming the European economy to reach American-like goals of 3 percent annual GDP growth. That shared prosperity might entail a reduction in its huge trade surpluses or necessitate increases in German consumption of pan-European products.

When the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, one might have expected NATO to stabilize with the loss of its existential enemy. Instead, in an almost artificial sense, NATO radically expanded its membership, ambitions, responsibilities — and vulnerabilities. The agenda was quick to absorb former Soviet clients while Russia was still reeling. But NATO expansion to 29 diverse members oddly attenuated its prior geographical, cultural, and economic commonality, at the very time it lost its unifying common enemy.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most NATO and EU countries assume that the strategic and conventional military superpower of the United States vitiates the need for European military readiness. Because Europe did not invest in its military commensurately with its size and wealth, it adopted the necessary compensatory ideology that war itself was obsolete. Those who were prepared to deter enemies were themselves seen as sort of retrograde and unenlightened. The weaker Europe became militarily, the more it depended on the U.S. Armed Forces — and the more it resented such dependence.

Sometimes the asymmetrical relationship was manifested in an Athens–Rome dichotomy. At best, European Socratic philosophers thought they knew best where to direct the formable legions of their naïve Roman ally. At worst, Europeans redefined America’s investment in NATO almost as if a militaristic America had been pushing missiles, tanks, and jet fighters down their throats, hoping to force them to share their own pessimistic view of human nature. When two powers are of roughly identical size and prosperity and one protects the other, the result is usually not sustainable.

But aside from these crises of the European Union and NATO, Europe is at odds with the United States on a variety of issues, which will likely continue to make Europe both weaker and less relevant.

Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.

Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.

One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.

Finally, since the French Revolution and the upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the European state has erred on the side of equality of result rather than of opportunity. One consequence of the American emphasis on liberty, individualism, and less government has been greater annual economic growth and lower unemployment — critical criteria for questions of assimilating immigrants, ensuring military readiness, and avoiding population stagnation and shrinkage.

Europe will remain a friend of the United States. Even after the failure of the Obama administration to fundamentally transform the United States into a European social democracy, and the similar inability of the European Union to create robust economic and demographic growth, political federalism, and military readiness, it is simplistic to say that the two centers of Western civilization will merely drift further apart.

COMMENTS

More likely, the power of the United States will grow and the global influence of Europe will continue to wane — reawakening ancient dangers that are all too familiar to Americans.

Editor’s Note: This article has been emended since its initial publication.

What's Going on at the Weekly Standard

POSTED ON AUGUST 3, 2018 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, FBI, MEDIA, RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

CONTRA THE DROSS OF DOSS (4)

The new issue of the Weekly Standard was published today. It carries no editorial explanation for the discrepancy between executive editor Fred Barnes’s excellent profile of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and the disgraceful cover story disparaging Nunes by one April Doss in the previous issue. I wrote at some length about that disgraceful cover story in part 3 of this series.

Although the new issue lacks an explanation for the discrepancy, Fred Barnes expands on his praise of Nunes in “Three leaders are better than one.” Here Fred praises Senators Grassley and Graham for supporting Nunes’s critique of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, specifically including the FISA warrant applications on Carter Page.

According to Doss, there was nothing to see here. According to Fred, Nunes is a hero for exposing the FBI’s malefactions. Contra the dross of Doss, Fred declares that “Nunes and his memo [have been] vindicated.” I’m with Fred.

Fred also pays tribute to his journalistic colleagues who have faithfully reported and explained the FBI’s malefactions. Here is his conclusion naming them:

The five journalists are Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist, Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, and [Andrew} McCarthy of National Review.

McCarthy wonders what the reaction would be if a Republican administration had used a “suspect agent” and a court to spy on the candidate of the other party. “It would be covered as the greatest political scandal of the century,” he says. I couldn’t have put it better.

Indeed. Now if Fred will only tell us what’s going on at the Standard!

The Origins Of Our Second Civil War.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

The Origins Of Our Second Civil War.

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?
Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.
Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.
We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.
What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

Read the whole thing. But I think more than anything it’s the contempt that the political class feels for much of the citizenry, which is now being returned in kind.
Plus, what can be done?

A steady 3 to 4 percent growth in annual GDP would trim a lot of cultural rhetoric. Four percent unemployment will make more Americans valuable and give them advantages with employers. Measured, meritocratic, diverse, and legal immigration would help to restore the melting pot.
Reforming the university would help too, mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for the BA degree (a sort of reverse, back-end SAT or ACT exam), and ending government-subsidized student loans that promote campus fiscal irresponsibility and a curriculum that ensures future unemployment for too many students.
We need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant.
Religious and spiritual reawakening is crucial. The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new-age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do. Trolling, doxing, and phishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion.
Finally, we need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant. Our new racialism must be seen as a reactionary and dangerous return to 19th-century norm of judging our appearance on the outside as more valuable than who we are on the inside.
Whether we all take a deep breath, and understand our present dangerous trajectory, will determine whether 2019 becomes 1861.

As a great man once said, when your heart is filled with patriotism, there is no room for bigotry.

185Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds   

S

Tom Steyer’s $110 million plan to redefine the Democrats.

BIG MONEY:

Tom Steyer’s $110 million plan to redefine the Democrats.

 “The billionaire investor is on a collision course with party leaders.”

Unlike the $80 million being spent by Michael Bloomberg on House Democratic races, Steyer will put his cash toward building out NextGen America and Need to Impeach, his two growing political organizations, as well as funding clean-energy ballot initiatives in Arizona and Nevada. Steyer has already doubled his initial $20 million investment in Need to Impeach to $40 million and has not ruled out adding more.

Steyer already dropped over $5 million into his For Our Future PAC, and he is expecting more outlays on behalf of individual candidates — such as the $1 million he put behind Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum — though likely not in any of the remaining primaries.

Between the two organizations, he’ll have close to 1,000 people on staff, in addition to over 2,000 volunteers. The Need to Impeach email list alone has already topped 5.5 million, which its research — anyone who signs up with the effort has their information run through a series of voter files and other databases — shows includes a very exact 697,780 infrequent voters in the 63 most competitive House districts.

All Democrats have to do is act crazy, and Steyer will back them.
More seriously, that’s a formidable operation, but it can be beaten by genuine grassroots activities open to any Instapundit reader.

58Posted at 7:54 am by Stephen Green