Meanwhile, back in Trumpland

Another shot across the bow at Jeff Sessions:

Maybe Waldo knows

It is quite possible that Ohr is still working at the Justice Department. It's been very quiet on this front lately, especially since Trump said he would declassify all the relevant documentation. I suspect we're going to see some action soon. Getcha popcorn.

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.

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.

Schiff for Brains

He's a beauty:

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was the victim of a prank phone call by Russian comedians who offered to give him 'compromising' dirt on Donald Trump – including nude photos of the president and a Russian reality show star.

DailyMail.com can disclose that after the prank, his staff engaged in correspondence with what they thought was a Ukrainian politician to try to obtain the 'classified' material promised on the call.

On an audio recording of the prank call posted online, Adam Schiff can be heard discussing the committee's Russia investigation and increasingly bizarre allegations about Trump with a man who claimed to be Andriy Parubiy, the chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament.

The call, made a year ago, was actually from two Russian comedians nicknamed 'Vovan' and 'Lexus' who have become notorious for their phony calls to high-ranking American officials and celebrities, including UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Elton John.

Its existence was first reported by The Atlantic but not how a staff member working for the minority on the House Intelligence Committee pursued the information after the call.

Schiff claims he knew all along it was a prank. But if you know it's a prank, why do you stay on the phone for 8 minutes? Wouldn't you hang up immediately? And why would you send your staff back for a follow-up if you knew it was a prank? Listen for yourself -- it's comedy gold, Jerry:

A reminder for you -- if Donald Trump Jr. talks to Russians about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton, it could be a felony and certainly worthy of the attention of Robert Mueller. If Adam Schiff talks to Russians about getting dirt on Donald Trump, it's copacetic.

How was I to know. . .

they were with the Russians, too:

One of several Twin Cities protests four days after the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile 16 months ago may have been organized in part by Russian hackers, according to national media accounts, before skeptical local organizers took over.

The reports by CNN and the Wall Street Journal alleged that Russian agents were behind eight Facebook accounts that publicized or financed at least 60 rallies in the United States, including one in the Twin Cities on July 10, 2016. The Journal said it examined archived versions of now-deleted Facebook posts and interviewed activists familiar with the events.

The locals are "skeptical":

Some local activists said Tuesday they didn’t believe it was Russians promoting the demonstration. Instead, they said, out-of-state protesters were trying to meddle.

One of the Facebook pages, hosted by a group called “Don’t Shoot,” publicized a demonstration scheduled for that day outside St. Paul police headquarters, recalled Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality. She and other organizers were suspicious, saying St. Paul police were not involved in the Castile shooting, and that no one had heard of the group. “This was pretty crazy,” Gross said. “Who was calling this?”

The local General Defense Committee (GDC) of the International Workers of the World (IWW) and Gross’ group worried that protesters might not be safe, and both posted notices urging people not to attend.

The IWW would know. Everyone knows the Wobblies have nothing to do with the Russians.

Get to it

Victor Davis Hanson, with a call to action. The whole piece is brilliant. Two excerpts:

The Republicans should announce far more forcefully to the media that Vladimir Putin may have been funneling via shady third-parties millions of dollars to anti-fracking groups. Such collusion, if proven through investigation, really is treasonous—given that the crashing price of oil, brought about solely due to North American frackers, is about the only check on Putin’s ambitions that the West enjoys. So, to take one example, did the San Francisco-based, family-controlled, and hedge-funded Sea Change Foundation receive laundered Russian money to help enhance its anti-fracking messaging? If so, when, how, and who?

Did you know that? It seems important. One more:

Fourthly, what an Orwellian world it is when progressives allege “obstruction of justice” (which  Mueller’s burgeoning team of lawyers is apparently investigating) in the case of Donald Trump’s sloppy, off-handed, and out-loud wishes to FBI Director James Comey that he hoped “good guy” Michael Flynn did not get ruined by a loose investigation.

Yet obstruction is not much pursued even when no one seems to deny that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met stealthily for private discussions with the spouse of a suspect of a current Justice investigation (subsequently dropped), and when she unapologetically seems to have directed the self-described moralist, Director Comey again, to alter the nomenclature of his ongoing investigation of fellow Democrat and presidential candidate Clinton (and Comey shamelessly acceded to Lynch’s detailed requests).

All told, Hanson identifies six ripe scandals worthy of investigation and exposure. He doesn't even need to go back further, into the perfidy of Lois Lerner and the IRS, or Solyndra, or Fast and Furious, all of which were effectively buried earlier.

And Hanson also identifies the reason this perfidy isn't getting the full airing it deserves:

[I]n contemporary Republican La-La Land, the party in power with control over all three branches of government allows its minority-status opponents to dictate the rules of special investigations and inquiry—a Jeff Sessions recused, a Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) excused from his investigations of unmasking and leaking, a Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel, friend of to-be-investigated James Comey, and employer of partisan attorneys.

Is naiveté the cause of such laxity? Do Republicans unilaterally follow Munich rules because they hope such protocols will create a new “civility” and “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington?

Or is the culprit civil dissension among the ranks, as the congressional leadership secretly has no real incentive to help the despised outsider Trump? When Republicans get re-elected on repealing and replacing Obamacare during the assured Obama veto-presidency, and then flip in the age of surety that Trump would reify their campaign boasts, should we laugh or cry? Is the Republican establishment’s aim to see Trump’s agenda rendered null and void—or does intent even matter when the result is the same anyway?

Republicans told us they should govern. It's time they get to it. More, much more, at the link.

Who really watches RT?

We're supposed to be concerned about Russia Today, the website that that purports to be a news service but really is a Russian propaganda organ. But does it really matter? Damir Marusic at The American Interest is skeptical:

In the current panicked mood about all things Russia, it’s hard to drive this point home hard enough: no one really watches RT. Our own Karina Orlova noted all of this early last year, and pointed out that RT is not just lying to the outside world when it misreports its impact figures; it’s lying to its own government in order to secure funding for itself.

Or, more to the point -- reach does not equal grasp, as the Economist points out:

RT has a clever way with numbers. Its “audience” of 550m refers to the number of people who can access its channel, not those who actually watch it. RT has never released the latter figure, but a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by Nielsen, a research firm, found that RT did not even make it into the rankings. In Britain last month, it captured just 0.04% of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board.

I would wager more people saw the Green RT logo on the latest SNL spoof than have ever seen any RT, ahem, programming. I only hope the Voice of America is more effective.

Golden Griddle

Those nasty Russians hacked the U.S. power grid! I read it various places yesterday. Maybe not:

Computer code connected to Russian cyberattacks by U.S. intelligence agencies has been found hidden in a laptop at a Vermont public utility, a development that emerged a day after the Obama administration hit Russia with sanctions for hacking in this year’s U.S. election.

The laptop wasn’t connected to the power grid at the time, the Burlington Electric Department said in a statement Friday. It said it scanned its computer network and found the malware after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent out an alert about the code to owners and operators of critical infrastructure.

“We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding,” utility spokesman Mike Kanarick said in the statement. “Our team is working with federal officials to trace this malware and prevent any other attempts to infiltrate utility systems. We have briefed state officials and will support the investigation fully.”

A laptop not connected to the grid is not a hack, any more than an attack on the DNC is an attack on the election. There are bad guys everywhere on the web. There's a decent chance you have some nasty Russian code on your computer, too. But are you in danger? I think you know the answer.