Let it all hang out

Finally:

President Donald Trump has ordered that the information and underlying evidence that led to the Russia investigation be declassified in a move that could alter the political landscape surrounding Democrats' moves to potentially impeach him.

Some detail of how it will go down:

 President Trump has assigned ownership of the Directive to U.S. Attorney General William Barr. This part was predictable because the purpose of declassification would be to facilitate a DOJ review of how the intelligence apparatus was used in the 2016 election.

Additionally, because the DOJ review encompasses intelligence systems potentially weaponized in 2016 for political purposes and intents, President Trump carries: (a) declassification authority; but also: (b) an inherent conflict.  In this DOJ endeavor candidate Trump would have been the target of corrupt agency activity; and therefore would be considered the target/victim if weaponization were affirmed by evidence.

To avoid the conflict President Trump designates the U.S. Attorney General as arbiter and decision-maker for the purposes of declassifying evidence within the investigation:

…”The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information.”

Additionally, AG Bill Barr does not need to assemble the intelligence product for approval by the executive (Trump).  Instead the office of the president is granting the AG full unilateral decision-making as to each product being considered for declassification.

It's a tough job for Barr, especially since the Dems are going to vilify him for every move that he makes. But based on what we've observed, he doesn't care what the Dems say. He cares about what they did, especially in 2016.

What's even more interesting is the scope and departments involved:

Secondly, following protocol, the Memorandum is specific to the agencies carrying the documentation that will be reviewed by the Attorney General: The Secretary of State (Pompeo); the Secretary of Treasury (Mnuchin); the Secretary of Defense (Shanahan); the Secretary of Energy (Perry); the Secretary of Homeland Security (McAleenan); the Director of National Intelligence (Coats); the Director of the CIA (Haspel), and the Attorney General himself (Barr).

The agencies give insight into the intelligence product (ie. evidence) being reviewed.  The Treasury and Energy agency was surprisingly notable:
. . .

Considering the purpose of the Memorandum: “The Attorney General is currently conducting a review of intelligence activities relating to the campaigns in the 2016 Presidential election and certain related matters“…  The appearance of Treasury and Energy would indicate the pre-existence of investigative evidence; that would be subject to ongoing DOJ review; and potentially be part of ongoing proceedings. 

Potential target issues could include: (1) an investigation of Uranium One; (2) an investigation of the Clinton Foundation; and, (3) an investigation of matters related to payments to Iran.

Treasury would come into play with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS); which was part of the Uranium One process and also included the Dept. of Energy.  Additional related matters could include George Papadopoulos $10k (Treasury); and The Clinton Foundation. 

What it does mean for sure -- large swathes of the Obama administration are potentially under the microscope. The "scandal-free administration" canard is likely to be laid bare. That's a good thing.

Ask an expert

The pot calling out the kettle:

It's going to be so sweet when Trump declassifies everything. And I remain convinced he will.

Lessons learned

In a lengthy (but deeply useful) summation of the Kavanaugh aftermath, Victor Davis Hanson deftly explains what I got wrong in 2016:

The preppy Kavanaugh — by class, education, comportment, and prior employment — was about as pure a Bushite as one could imagine. His opinions were doctrinaire conservative and traditionalist, in the sense of interpreting rather than making laws.

To destroy a judge like Kavanaugh reflected that the New Left’s hatred of Trump had always been incidental to its essential loathing of conservatives in general. For a remnant group of Never Trumpers to oppose Kavanaugh, then, reflected the elevation of their own personal hatred for Trump over the critical elevation of a principled jurist to the Supreme Court. Supposedly, Kavanaugh was soiled by a Trump handprint, and therefore it was better to have a more liberal court than see Trump get any credit for taking the court in a direction only previously dreamed of by conservatives.

Never Trumpers had always assured their former conservative colleagues that Trump would either fail or prove liberal. But he has done neither. And as far as his demonstrable crudity and uncouthness, the hearings showed that the Democrats were far crueler and crass in deed than Trump was in word. So perhaps half of the small minority of Republican Never Trumpers, in horror at the Antifa tactics of the Democrats, retreated to the old adage of “hang together or hang separately.” Those who doubled down by joining leftists in opposing the Kavanaugh nomination revealed that they have crossed their Rubicon and now are either orphaned or unabashedly part of the new progressive Democratic party — at least until their useful obsequiousness no longer serves current progressive agendas.

Emphasis mine. The lie I told myself back in 2016, when this feature had a NeverTrump badge, was that Trump was simply pulling a scam and that his lack of scruples would lead to ruin. But nearly two years on, it's become clear that Trump, for all his crudity and uncouthness, has been the man for the moment. He's always going to say things that will make me cringe, but despite it all his heart is in the right place and his instincts are a lot more sound than those of his starboard side critics, myself included.

And right on cue, Hillary Clinton reemerged yesterday and drove the point home:

Civility can only return if Hillary and her cabal gets power back. People are always docile if there's a boot on their throat. And let's not pretend civility, in the Left's construct, is anything other than a boot on the throat.

Can you think of anyone on the Left who has behaved honorably in recent weeks? Is there anyone on that side of the aisle who wouldn't crush people who get in their way, if only afforded the opportunity?

My great concern is that conservatives of all stripes will enjoy the Kavanaugh victory and then stop fighting the Left. It's the default position of many conservatives, who are involved in politics only because they are required to be. The Left never sleeps and never relents. There is an election in less than a month. The Left must be defeated again.

Eleventy

Taking a deep breath here. Trump and Putin. Thoughts? Why yes, I have a few:

• Did anyone think Trump was going to bash Putin from the podium yesterday? Really? How would that have worked?
• Putin doesn't have the strong hand here. He never will, really. The oligarchs who really run Russia will accept his strutting around so long as it is beneficial to them. The minute it isn't, he's gone. Trump certainly knows this.
• Last I checked, we weren't actually at war with Russia. Anyone who is shouting "treason" at this point is assuming facts not in evidence.
• Did the Russians meddle in the 2016 elections? Of course. I'd be more surprised if they hadn't. Governments always prefer to pick the person across the table. Obama never liked Netanyahu and sent his operatives to get involved in the Israeli election. The CIA, apparently back in fashion, had no trouble getting rid of Salvador Allende, and Jacobo Arbenz, and Mohammad Mossadegh. There were others. Hillary Clinton positively gloated about her role in getting rid of Gaddafi in Libya. Given how our government has conducted itself, it would be an upset if other countries weren't trying to put their thumb on the scale of our elections.
• Personally, I would have phrased things differently were I at the podium. I'm not, though. I'm sitting at my dining room table, tapping on a laptop. I am not privy to the information Trump has at his disposal. It's possible Trump is a Russian stooge, but it's not likely. There is no reason to be one if you are President of the United States.

In case you've forgotten, or were confused

The invaluable Andrew McCarthy reminds us why Hillary Clinton's homebrew email server was such a horrible idea:

A detailed description of the grossly improper communications system Clinton established would have illustrated that she knew full well the risk she was running. A large percentage of the secretary of state’s job involves classified matters. We are not talking merely about the exchange of documents marked classified but, more commonly, constant deliberations about sensitive intelligence in classified documents, briefings, and conversations. Clinton’s willful concoction of a home-brew communications network — not a harried official’s occasional, exigent use of private email for official business, but her rogue institution of a private, non-government infrastructure for the systematic conduct of State Department business — made the non-secure transmission and storage of classified information inevitable.

Horowitz’s fleeting conclusion that the decision not to charge Clinton was rational and not necessarily motivated by political considerations hinges on the assumption that the intent evidence truly was as sparse as the FBI and Justice Department described it. Of course the decision to decline prosecution was defensible, if not incontestable, if one accepts that false premise. And Horowitz does not just accept the premise; he treats it as a background assumption, writing as if there’s no other conceivable way to look at the case.

What made Clinton’s conduct outrageous was not that national-defense officials emailed each other frequently. That happens in every government agency that deals with national security. The unique fact here was that Mrs. Clinton willfully set up a system in which those communications would transit through and be retained on a non-secure system, outside the government’s layers of protection. That system was extraordinarily vulnerable to penetration by hostile actors, a fact of which Clinton was undeniably, intimately aware. (See, e.g., Clinton’s banning of State Department employees from using private email for official business due to security concerns; Clinton’s citing of an ambassador’s use of private email for government business in firing him; Clinton’s acknowledgment that she “received a security indoctrination concerning the nature and protection of classified information”; Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices, in which she vividly recounts the thorough training she received about protecting intelligence from the omnipresent threat of espionage, including instruction to leave communications devices on planes with batteries removed during her frequent foreign travel, as well as the need to use an “opaque tent” or “a blanket over our head” when she and her staff read “sensitive material” outside the secure U.S. government setting.)

The primary advantage of being a Clinton, or a Democrat generally, is being given the benefit of the doubt. Even when you destroy evidence, as Ted Cruz reminded us in this parody back in '16:

As usual, there's a ton more at the link. Worth your time.

Lightning Round - 031418

Stuff happens:

• From what I can tell, Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump weren't on the same page for much of Tillerson's tenure as Secretary of State, so giving him the pipe makes sense. Mike Pompeo seems like a sharp enough guy and he's certainly better than, say, John Kerry or Hillary Clinton. Another round of confirmation hearings gives Chuck Schumer a chance to posture, too, so it's a win-win for everybody.
• I can't think of any Packers fan who isn't sad to see Jordy Nelson leave. He gave the Packers a decade of fine play at the wide receiver position and by all accounts was a mensch. It's a tough business, though, and wide receivers who can't run well don't generally deserve 8-figure salaries. I also know finding quality wide receivers is significantly easier than finding talent at other positions, including tight end, so picking up Jimmy Graham makes sense. I also think getting Muhammad Wilkerson for the defensive line on a "prove it" deal is a smart move. If he's motivated, he'll be a monster. If he's not, you get rid of him.
• As for the locals, I am still not sold on Kirk Cousins, but he's apparently coming to town. He throws a nice ball and he's been pretty durable throughout his career, but are you convinced he's a significant upgrade over the guy who led the Purple last season, Case Keenum? Last season the Vikings had the 3rd best quarterback in the division before Aaron Rodgers was injured. When Cousins takes the reins, they still will. Ask yourself, Vikings fans -- would you really take Cousins over Matt Stafford? And if Mitch Trubisky develops for the Bears, Cousins might be the worst quarterback in the division. We'll see if he's good enough to take the Vikings to the promised land. I wouldn't count on it. 
• By the way, the Bears are coming on. Watch and see.
• Most of the political stories we see are bread and circus events. Other stories are more important. Like this one. Click that link.

Charm Offensive

America's sweetheart, reminding us of our sins:

Hillary Clinton on Saturday partly blamed her 2016 presidential loss on white women and said that they voted for Donald Trump because their husbands told them to vote that way.

Clinton spoke at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, India over the weekend, where a journalist introduced her as the "woman who should have been the president of the United States of America."

The event's host, India Today Editor Aroon Purie, asked Clinton how 52 percent of white women could vote for Trump after the "Access Hollywood" tape was released in the final weeks of the campaign, which featured Clinton making crude sexual remarks about women.

"Democrats, going back to my husband and even before, but just in recent times going back to Bill and our candidates and then President Obama, have been losing the vote, including white women. We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married white women," Clinton said.

She went on to say that white women face an "ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should."

That's sure to ingratiate her with potential voters. She wasn't done:

Clinton said that she was on the way to winning the white women vote until then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to leaders in Congress less than two weeks before the election stating that the FBI reopened its investigation into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

"All of a sudden white women, who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She's going to jail. You don't want to vote for her. It's terrible, you can't vote for that.' So, it just stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough because I was ahead. I was winning, and I thought I had fought my way back in the ten days from that letter until the election. I fell a little bit short," Clinton said.

Get your Stepford on, ladies.

This is nonsense. It's 2018. Men and women make up their own minds all the time. I know plenty of married couples whose votes essentially cancel each other's out. I also see a lot of married white women who post left-wing memes and diatribes on social media all day long. I also know conservative women who have left-wing husbands. Mrs. Clinton is a married white woman herself.

She had more to say:

If you want to know the truth, I think the main reason she lost is pretty simple: we all know people like Hillary -- nasty, hectoring, dismissive. You can't avoid all of them, especially if they are relatives, or neighbors, or co-workers. But you don't have to have them in your living room every day if you don't elect them to office. Trump may be a lot of things, but he's not a misanthrope. Hillary Clinton is the worst retail politician I have ever seen.

Dawn breaks

Andrew McCarthy, a former Justice Department official who is the big legal mind at National Review, has spent a lot of time over the past year throwing cold water on claims that there was skulduggery afoot at DOJ under the Obama administration. He couldn't believe or imagine his old pals would be hacks and criminals. They would never abandon integrity, would they? Not them!

Well, he's starting to figure it out:

In May 2017, as I have detailed (here), Steele was required to respond to interrogatories. He emphasized that his dossier allegations were “raw intelligence” that was “unverified” and “warranted investigation.” He further described his reports as “limited intelligence” that described mere “indications” of “possible” coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. He was not in a position to vouch for the accuracy of what he’d been told, he explained; he passed it along because it needed further investigation.

Yet, far from reporting Steele’s retreat to the FISA court, Grassley and Graham report that the FBI and Justice Department continued vouching for the reliability of his allegations.

Beyond all that, we now learn through the senators’ memo, and some follow-up reporting, that two longtime Clinton cronies, Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, fed their own anti-Trump dossier to Steele, through a State Department official, Jonathan Winer. In the fall of 2016, Steele, while working on his Clinton-funded project, reported this Clinton-crony information to the FBI.

Still, the FBI and Justice Department elected not to tell the FISA court that the Clinton campaign was paying for Steele’s unverified, unverifiable anti-Trump research.

I spent many months assuring people that nothing like this could ever happen — that the FBI and Justice Department would not countenance the provision to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations of heinous misconduct. When Trump enthusiasts accused them of rigging the process, I countered that they probably had not even used the Steele dossier. If the Justice Department had used it in writing a FISA warrant application, I insisted that the FBI would independently verify any important facts presented to the court, make any disclosures that ought in fairness be made so the judge could evaluate the credibility of the sources, and compellingly demonstrate probable cause before alleging that an American was a foreign agent.  

I was wrong.

Yes. Yes, you were. I was, too. I'm still not crazy about many things Donald Trump does, but there's no evidence he would sink to the level of his predecessors, levels that are now amply documented, if not yet widely disclosed. To be fair, McCarthy wasn't nearly as much of a NeverTrumper as some of his colleagues at NR, but he made common cause with them. The scales have fallen from his eyes.

I continue to wait for the rest of the NeverTrumpers to understand that, in their zeal to condemn the uncouth orange haired-occupant of the Oval Office, in their bien pensant efforts to signal their own virtue, that they are in the same camp with people who spent the period of 2009-2017 wiping their asses with the Constitution. If you want to pretend you are principled, it is best you don't hang out with vipers like James Comey. They may have been your colleagues, but they were never your friends.

Magnet and Steele

It's getting interesting in D.C. now:

A criminal referral from top Senate investigators confirms explosive charges in last week’s House Intelligence Committee memo regarding abuse of surveillance authorities at the FBI and Department of Justice. It also reveals a host of problems arising from the bureau’s cooperation with foreign investigator Christopher Steele, who was working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The eight-page memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) includes underlying evidence to support the claims.

That's from Mollie Hemingway, writing for the Federalist. The Grassley/Graham referral not only backstops the material Devin Nunes wrote about in his memo, it expands upon what appears to have happened during the campaign. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few highlights:

The letter describes a verification effort before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) so inadequate it resembles a concerted effort to conceal information from the court. However, the senators blame Steele’s “apparent deception” for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) failures by FBI and Justice, and refer Steele for investigation of violating federal law regarding making false statements to the U.S. government. The letter also reveals Clinton associates were feeding Steele allegations that he used in his reports.

Garbage in, garbage out. And who were the garbage merchants? Well, that's redacted, sort of. But how did Yahoo News get the information? From the Grassley/Graham document:

[REDACTED], the application attempts to explain away the inconsistency between Mr. Steele’s assertion to the FBI and the existence of the article, apparently to shield Mr. Steele’s credibility on which it still relied for the renewal request. The application to the FISC said: “Given that the information contained in the September 23rd news article generally matches the information about Page that [Steele] discovered doing his/her research, [REDACTED] The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press” (emphasis added).

One problem with that assertion -- it's not true. Steele gave it all to Michael Isikoff. Back to Hemingway:

Reporter Michael Isikoff recently confirmed that Steele was obviously his source for the article, and that Clinton’s Russia dossier project head Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS was a longtime friend. The FBI stated to the court that Steele had nothing to do with the article. Shopping his unverified allegations to the media was contrary to Steele’s agreement with the FBI. Even after Steele publicly testified about his many media contacts, the FBI hid that part of his dossier operation from the court and continued to rely on his credibility for surveillance reauthorization.

We knew this a long time ago, actually -- there were reports galore that someone had been shopping the dossier around to the news media in the aftermath of the election. What we didn't know then was that Team Clinton was directly involved. Grassley/Graham explain:

One memorandum by Mr. Steele that was not published by Buzzfeed is dated October 19, 2016. The report alleges REDACTED as well as REDACTED Mr. Steele’s memorandum states that his company “received this report from REDACTED US State Department,” that the report was the second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who “is in touch with REDACTED, a contact of REDACTED, a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to REDACTED.” It is troubling enough that the Clinton campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.

The REDACTED folks here are almost certainly longtime Clinton hatchetman Sidney Blumenthal, and the other individual is Cody Shearer, another Clinton hand.

So if we connect the dots, it appears Steele was a partisan, working for a partisan (Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion/GPS), who had the Clintons for a client. It also appears that the Justice Department and the FBI knew this and didn't see fit to explain what it meant when they were pursuing the FISA warrant against Carter Page, a figure mostly on the periphery of the Trump campaign.

Things are getting real.

il miglior fabbro

Maureen Callahan in the New York Post, discussing Hillary Clinton's explanation of why she did bupkis about a sexual harasser on her campaign staff:

Yet Clinton’s essay underscores what a terrible candidate she is and always has been. She offers nothing more than self-serving prevarications under the guise of explanation: She didn’t want to take away a man’s livelihood. The young woman who complained was reassigned (because the victim should be inconvenienced). She liked her new post! We’re in a different era now! How was Hillary to know, way back in 2008, that sexual harassment should never be tolerated?

“For most of my life,” Hillary wrote, “harassment wasn’t something talked about or even acknowledged.”

Except for the bulk of the 1990s, when her husband was accused by multiple women of harassment and by one of rape and Hillary worked to publicly discredit them.

Other than that, no knowledge.

Ouch. And the conclusion:

This has always been the problem with Hillary Clinton: Nothing is ever her fault. She is congenitally incapable of saying the words “I’m sorry” — in fact, they are nowhere to be found in her Facebook post. She is somehow always the victim despite her own poor decision-making. She still blames us for losing the most winnable election ever.

Well, perhaps some day we'll be worthy of choosing Hillary Clinton. We can only hope.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Hey, guess what? Missing documents!

The Justice Department has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump.

But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and retrieve about five months' worth of communications.

Technical reasons. Technically, the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes was a technical problem, too. There's more:

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided [Sen. Ron] Johnson's committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

The explanation for the gap was "misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities."

Of course, Strzok went to work for Robert Mueller. It's mind-boggling, really. But there's more:

In Johnson's letter to Wray, he asks whether the FBI has any records of communications between Strzok and Page during that five-month window and whether the FBI had searched their non-FBI phones for additional messages. He also asks for the "scope and scale" of any other records from the Clinton investigation that have been lost.

This is a crucial question. If all the records are gone, that's bad enough, but if only the Strzok stuff has gone missing, we're talking about a horrific scandal. What's available is bad enough:

One of the messages references a change in language to Comey's statement closing out the email case involving Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent in the 2016 presidential election. While an earlier draft of the statement said Clinton and President Barack Obama had an email exchange while Clinton was "on the territory" of a hostile adversary, the reference to Obama was at first changed to "senior government official" and then omitted entirely in the final version. 

In another exchange, the two express displeasure about the timing of Lynch's announcement that she would defer to the FBI's judgment on the Clinton investigation. That announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix, though both sides said the email investigation was never discussed. 

Strzok said in a July 1 text message that the timing of Lynch's announcement "looks like hell." And Page appears to mockingly refer to Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in the case as a "real profile in courag(e) since she knows no charges will be brought."

These people are the Justice Department. It's a bad joke and the more we learn, the worse it gets.

Keyser Soze Strzok

Yeah, this is a problem:

A former top counterintelligence expert at the FBI, now at the center of a political uproar for exchanging private messages that appeared to mock President Donald Trump, changed a key phrase in former FBI Director James Comey's description of how former secretary of state Hillary Clinton handled classified information, according to US officials familiar with the matter.

Electronic records show Peter Strzok, who led the investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server as the No. 2 official in the counterintelligence division, changed Comey's earlier draft language describing Clinton's actions as "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," the sources said.

The drafting process was a team effort, CNN is told, with a handful of people reviewing the language as edits were made, according to another US official familiar with the matter.

Why does changing the verbiage matter? Back to the report:

The shift from "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," which may appear pedestrian at first glance, reflected a decision by the FBI that could have had potentially significant legal implications, as the federal law governing the mishandling of classified material establishes criminal penalties for "gross negligence."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, raised questions over why the change was made after receiving documents from the FBI last month, but the identity of who was behind the edit has not been reported until now.

Strzok appears to be at the center of a lot of things:

CNN has also learned that Strzok was the FBI official who signed the document officially opening an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to sources familiar with the matter. As the No. 2 official in counterintelligence, Strzok was considered to be one of the bureau's top experts on Russia.

But the news of Strzok's direct role in the statement that ultimately cleared the former Democratic presidential candidate of criminal wrongdoing, now combined with the fact that he was dismissed from special counsel Robert Mueller's team after exchanging private messages with an FBI lawyer that could be seen as favoring Clinton politically, may give ammunition to those seeking ways to discredit Mueller's Russia investigation.

The FBI lawyer in question is Lisa Page. Strzok was also having an affair with her. But there's more:

The FBI agent who was fired from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team for sending anti-Donald Trump text messages conducted the interviews with two Hillary Clinton aides accused of giving false statements about what they knew of the former secretary of state’s private email server.

Neither of the Clinton associates, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, faced legal consequences for their misleading statements, which they made in interviews last year with former FBI section chief Peter Strzok.

And so who was in charge of the interview with Michael Flynn, now in the crosshairs for lying to the FBI? It would be our guy Strzok:

But another Strzok interview subject was not so lucky.

Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pleaded guilty last week to lying during an interview he gave on Jan. 24 to Strzok and another FBI agent. Circa journalist Sara Carter reported on Monday that Strzok took part in that interview with the retired lieutenant general.

And why does that matter?

At the time, Strzok was the FBI’s top investigator on the fledgling investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign. He was appointed to supervise that effort at the end of July 2016, just weeks after the conclusion of the Clinton email probe. CNN reported on Monday that as the FBI’s No. 2 counterintelligence official, Strzok signed the documents that officially opened the collusion inquiry.

The starkly different outcomes from Strzok’s interviews — a felony charge against Flynn and a free pass to Mills and Abedin — are sure to raise questions from Republicans about double-standards in the FBI’s two most prominent political investigations. FBI Director Christopher Wray will likely be pressed on the Strzok scandal on Thursday when he attends an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Either we have a justice system, or we don't. Either we treat everyone in the same way, or we don't. If we don't, we're past the rule of law and fully into something entirely different. When federal agents are simultaneously political operatives and use their powers to absolve their friends and indict their enemies, we are in a truly dangerous place. Mueller and others associated with the FBI have been stonewalling Congress for months now, precisely because proper oversight would reveal such improprieties and lead to a public outcry against the schemes of those who are supposed to serve the cause of justice. And there's more:

Along with Justice Department attorney David Laufman, Strzok interviewed Clinton herself on July 2, 2016. The pair also interviewed Mills, Abedin and two other Clinton aides, Jake Sullivan and Heather Samuelson.

Summaries of the interviews, known as 302s, were released by the FBI last year.

A review of those documents conducted by The Daily Caller shows that Mills and Abedin told Strzok and Laufman that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department.

“Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure,” reads notes from Mills’ May 28, 2016 interview. “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”

Abedin also denied knowing about Clinton’s server until leaving the State Department in 2013.

“Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge,” the summary of Strzok’s interview with Abedin states.

But that wasn't true:

But undercutting those denials are email exchanges in which both Mills and Abedin either directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server.

“hrc email coming back — is server okay?” Mills asked in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton server.

“Ur funny. We are on the same server,” Cooper replied.

So is lying to the FBI a crime, or is it not? Here's James Comey on the matter in 2016:

Former FBI Director James Comey defended the Clinton aides’ inconsistent statements in a House Judiciary Committee hearing held on Sept. 28, 2016.

“Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral,” Comey told Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah congressman who served on the committee last year.

Chaffetz was not buying Comey’s dismissive response.

“I think she lied to everybody,” he said of Mills in an interview on Fox News the night of the Comey hearing.

“There’s direct evidence that she actually did know [about the server],” said Chaffetz, who added that Comey’s defense of Mills “makes no sense.”

If Michael Flynn should be brought to justice for lying to the FBI, then Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills should be, too. Either we have a justice system, or we have something else. It's increasingly clear we have something else.

Youth Movement

Writing for the New York Post, Michael Goodwin explains what Donna Brazile is really doing:

 If it sticks, Brazile’s searing indictment of Hillary’s persona, ethics and political skills could prove fatal to her hopes for a 2020 comeback.

In fact, I believe that is the ultimate point of the book: to clear the Democratic decks for desperately needed new leadership and messages.

And it does need new leadership and messages. That's also the point of the bit on Saturday Night Live that they uncorked later in the show, after they'd done the usual Republican bashing in the cold open:

It's not gonna work for the Democrats if they trot out Hillary yet again, or Joe Biden, especially in the current context where unwanted sexual advances are in the news. I predict Biden will have a formal accuser eventually in order to clear him from the decks. The entire party reminds me of the old classic Sunset Boulevard:

Of course, the comparison to Gloria Swanson hardly seems fair, as she was much more vital in 1950 than Hillary Clinton is today.

The Old Curiosity Shop

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
-- Oscar Wilde

So are you looking for a good laugh? You could read Charles Dickens. Or you could read Donna Brazile:

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

So begins the excerpt from Brazile's book, which purports to explain why Hillary Clinton's campaign and the ineptitude of the Democratic National Committee delivered us Le Grand Orange.

Say amen, somebody:

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

The candle Brazile lit wasn't the only thing burning:

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

And then there was the matter of financing itself:

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

There's more, much more, at the link if you're interested, but a few observations are in order:

• Is anyone who was really paying attention surprised that Barack Obama didn't give a damn about sustaining anything other than his own brand? Or that his campaign was quite good at spending other people's money?
• Is anyone surprised Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a clueless hack? Or that she would prefer to ask for forgiveness over asking for permission?
• Is anyone surprised Hillary Clinton would be more interested in the money than in helping Democrats down the ticket?
• I'm amused, to say the least, that Donna Brazile of all people wants to be the whistleblower. I've been paying attention to politics for over 40 years -- my Dad had my brothers and me helping out the congressional campaign of Harold Froehlich way back in 1976 -- and  from what I've observed, there have been few people in public life who are more hacktastic than Donna Brazile. She was the person who was feeding debate questions to Hillary Clinton in advance. And we are now to believe she wanted to expiate her guilt with ol' Bernie?

Any time a Democrat tells you they ought to be running the country, consider who they actually are and what they actually do.

But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason

Remember those lazy, hazy, crazy, days of summer? Those days of soda, and pretzels, and . . . treason?

 "This is moving into perjury, false statements and even into potentially treason," Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., says of investigations into Team Trump’s adventures among the Russians. “We understand why some are raising issues of treason,” ethics lawyers Norman Eisen and Richard Painter write in The New York Times.

So we were told. Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with Russian operatives. It was treason. Tim Kaine was going to be Hillary Clinton's vice president, you might recall. It was quite the contretemps for a while.

Winter is approaching. And now what?

What’s the difference between the infamous Russian dossier on Donald Trump and that random fake-news story you saw on Facebook last year? The latter was never used by America’s intelligence community to bolster its case for spying on American citizens nor was it the foundation for a year’s worth of media coverage.

Then again, you get what you pay for. We now know Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid as much as $9 million for the discredited dossier on Trump.

According to The Washington Post, a lawyer named Marc Elias, who represented both the 2016 Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, had hired Fusion GPS, a DC firm working on behalf of the Russian government to soften sanctions at the time, to provide opposition research for them. The firm then hired a former British spy named Christopher Steele who reportedly purchased salacious rumors about Trump from the Russians.

Taking a meeting with Russia is treason. Spending $9 million for Russian oppo is not. Has anyone asked Tim Kaine for a clarification? This must be another cause where our lack of nuance is keeping us from a greater truth.

This seems like news

Funny you're not seeing it anywhere beyond The Hill:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

I thought Trump was the one colluding with the Russians. Huh. And there's more:

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe's conduct but rather on whether McCabe's attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.

The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.

Seems convenient, doesn't it? Have the people who should be under investigation investigating something else. If Trump wants to stir the pot, he ought to retweet this story. Other than conservative comment sites, the only newspaper that seems to have the story is the New York Post. I strongly encourage you hit the link and read the piece from The Hill.

Bullets

Not even a lightning round, just random thoughts. It's been busy.

• Hurricane Irma has been largely as advertised. It will be a while before we're able to determine what the aftermath really is, but given the amount of looting that already seems to be taking place, it's likely to be far more disturbing story than what the narrative seemed to be coming out of Houston after Harvey's rampage.
• Spent most of the weekend away from the news, as it was time to send the Benster back for his final year of college. We've made the trip south many times in the past few years and we'll be making a different trip next year, once Fearless Maria picks her school.
• I'm really enjoying the rollout of the Hillary Clinton book. She's not taking things well.
• Packers 17, Seabags 9. Not the score we expected, but a satisfying result.
• I think the NFL has some real issues ahead. Forget the National Anthem, which in the end is really a non-issue. Injuries are a big story this year already. David Johnson may be out multiple weeks for the Cardinals, and Allen Robinson is done for the year already. It's become even more of a war of attrition and in the end, no one really enjoys that.

Dropping dimes in real time

I get up early in the morning so I have time to look at what's happening and write a blog post about it, if possible. As it happens, Donald Trump is simultaneously engaging in a Twitter storm in real time. As always, read 'em from the bottom up:

Naming names

So if you are reading this correctly, you see the Leader of the Free World dropping a dime on two of the most important officials in the Justice Department. So if you want a hot take, here ya go:

• It's blindingly obvious Trump has had enough of Sessions and wants him out. It's a horrible idea to turn the Attorney General into an attack dog, but it's also been done in the past. Eric Holder, who was Barack Obama's AG, was always on the attack. Based on the available evidence, Sessions is either unable or unwilling to serve in this role.
• It's not been widely reported, but it is a matter of public record that Andrew McCabe, who is still at the helm of the FBI, has a problem with his own financial disclosures. McCabe's wife, who ran for office in Virginia in 2015, received a total of $760,000 for her campaign from political action committees controlled by the Democrats, which Andrew McCabe did not initially disclose. To the extent that Hillary Clinton controlled the Democratic Party, Trump is correct.
• Some executives send out memoranda. Trump seems to Tweet. Not how I would do things, but I'm not the Leader of the Free World.

And while I've been writing this, three more Trump Tweets appear:

Carrots, sticks, and a pen

Dang. I thought Trump told us McCain wasn't so good last year. That was then, this is now. Oops, one more!

Are you not entertained?

It may not be the way to run a government, but it's a hell of a show.

Just a thought

If I were Trump, and I hasten to add I am glad I'm not, I'd do the following:

• Pardon everyone potentially connected to the Russian thing
• Pardon everyone potentially connected to Hillary Clinton's serial malfeasance
• Tell Robert Mueller he can write his report any time he'd like, but the show is over
• Tell everyone else to get back to work

The historians can sort it out.

I Ain't Gonna Work on Macedonian Content Farms No More

Are you on the list?

Have you been denounced yet?

I must be one of these. I did assume she would win -- I predicted the results as follows:

Rust is reddish

So I did make the list, I guess. I would apologize, but somehow I think others are a bit more responsible for the demise of Hillary of Arc.

But one reason did intrigue me, at least a little bit -- apparently those content farming weasels in Macedonia are real. Click the link if you're interested.