Say Anything
Graduate
In college, before I dedicated myself to full-time Toga partying, I was elected Chairman of the College Republicans. At one of the weekly meetings I met this super smart, and very eccentric cat, named Mike Anton, who recruited me to join him in starting a conservative campus newspaper. I love to write, and he assured me that if we simply wrote about anything we were passionate about, that everybody on campus would go absolutely bonkers. When he started talking about that, I tuned him out at about 90% because I really thought he was spewing some weird UFO-landing-paranoid-geek-conspiracy-theory stuff and that it was a waste of my ear-space to listen to this. Plus, I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Mike was right, though. We lit the campus on fire, and then some. We were an odd couple. Mike taking a single glass of red wine with dinner and me with a beer bong wrapped around my neck like a boa constrictor. Mike wearing a bowtie and me in a “wife beater” tank top. Mike listed to Chopin from a turntable while I blasted Slayer from a boombox. He used to call my friends – all recreational bar fighters, and professional beer drinkers – “The Hun.”
A gifted writer and polar ideologue, Mike’s profession is exactly his passion. He went on the be a speechwriter for Mayor Giuliani, and then a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and finally NSA assistant for communications under Trump. I dropped politics and went to Wall Street because there wasn’t enough money in public service (this was well before Hunter and Joe revealed how elected office can be a road to riches).
A decade after graduation, I moved to Hong Kong in 2004. That was just after Colin Powel spoofed the daylights out of the UN, duping them into authorizing the Iraq war. In doing so, Powell floated some of the most transparent whoppers I have ever heard a grown man say with a straight face. Americans became deeply unpopular, abroad, after that. I remember, for the first time in my life, being unable to rationalize my government’s behavior in any way. We had lied to start a war, by which we were risking American lives and squandering American taxes, all for the purpose of killing people in a far away land, who, really, themselves personally, didn’t hurt us in any way, and without the lie, there was no reason at all to do it. That was the precise moment when the crummy “just tell them whatever you need to tell them” nature of modern politics sucked every last youthful glint of patriotic spirit out of my soul. Six-thousand miles away from home, I was left to watch —feeling uneasy, shameful and powerless — as America clumsily prosecuted wrongdoing on a scale so large that only the US government could be capable of doing it.
A proud Republican before that, I grew up in the “It’s Morning Again In America” era, when Reagan accomplished bold things, akin to moving mountains, with just his mind and mouth. Behind in the vote count for the Economic Recovery Act, the cornerstone of his campaign, Reagan hit the airwaves in 1981 from behind his desk in the Oval Office. In one 30-minute live slot, broadcast the night before roll call, he flipped a dead loser into a Bill he would sign into law.
A year after he was out of office, the Soviet Union collapsed. I will never forget my amazement upon witnessing that. This impervious and ascetic juggernaut that we all feared would some day crush our American candy-asses, instead imploded from the stress of its own body weight, on live TV, hence bringing an end of the Cold War without a single America bomb being dropped. That was Reagan’s legacy. He had cracked open Mikhail Gorbachev head some years earlier, taking him to an American supermarket, whereupon he saw we have more food on the shelves of one single store than one could have found in all of Moscow. Reagan asked him, ‘don’t your people deserve this too?’ A B-list actor turned TV pitchman, Reagan wasn’t a scholar but he was a genius salesman.
And then, suddenly, by that one single act of invading Iraq, America had made the best idea ever hatched – i.e. freedom – about as unpopular as cancer. I sent Mike an email — he was still writing speeches for W. at the time — asking my onetime midnight column-writing soulmate: “Really, Mike, are you still believing this?” He wrote me back: “Chris, he has been very good for my career.” I realized, right then, that what had seemed like such different paths we had taken, were really just two sides of the same coin.
Ain’t Nothing Going On But The Rent
I haven’t missed much since I quit politics. Actually, I haven’t missed a darned thing. It has been over a decade since Congress passed its last law (as in, landmark legislation, like Obamacare in 2010).
Note the declining trend above. And, further, a couple of outliers should really be excluded, too, which are the Patriot Act and Dodd Frank. Although both were undeniably landmark legislation, neither one was drafted by persuasion, logrolling, and whatever sausage making that is legislation. Rather, both were drafted and enacted as knee-jerk reaction to traumatic events that demanded immediate bipartisan action of some kind (Sep 11 and the 08 crisis). Conversely, health care was the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign, and he struggled, and worked, and pitched for almost his full two terms, but in the end, he got it passed. That’s lawmaking.
The below chart is all of those landmark laws, grouped by administration, excluding those two.
One administration, likewise, sticks out as an outlier that should be excluded too: Carter. He was an unlikely peanut farmer, elected president on the heels of Watergate, to punish the Republican party. Almost immediately after voting him in, American had organ rejection and turned on him.
Carter was elected by circumstance, and he was too weak to lead a Cub Scout troop, so nothing getting done during his watch is not reflective of systemic dysfunction but rather is a function of his own disabling humility.
With those three anomalies – Carter, Patriot Act and Dodd Frank – removed, what’s left is below.
Realistically, Obama was close to the same weight class of Reagan. Said another way, he was definitely better than just one-fifth of Reagan, and yet, all he could get done was one single law. Otherwise Obama ruled by executive order, because that was the only functioning lever of power available to him. Why do you think the Democrats now rule by fear (cancel culture) in cahoots with the real government (Silicon Valley).
Clinton, too, was a political genius. Recall that during his campaign, he and Dick Morris devised the “war room” that conducted endless flash polls everywhere they went around the country for the purpose of “triangulation” (i.e. finding out whatever is popular and embracing it immediately). No doubt Clinton was a stronger leader than Johnson, and yet he got done more than double what he did in terms of the scope and significance of the laws passed. Plus, Clinton took office when his party controlled all three branches of government (for a time). Ans still he only got through two laws.
Abolish Government
In the 34 years since Reagan left office, the succeeding six presidents, who were collectively in office for 7.5 terms, still have not yet passed a number of laws equal what The Gipper pulled off in just eight years, and it has been now two full presidential election cycles since a law was even passed. Twelve years ago, when Obamacare went through, the smartphone was brand-new, and just hitting the tipping point toward brain-locking the entirety of humanity. Think what has changed since thern. Instagram was founded that year. Uber was only one year old. Zoom wasn’t even founded for another year, yet. If you were wondering how a handful of tech zillionaires, and their juggernaut corporate fiefdoms, have subsumed control of the country, and displaced the government to whom we pay taxes, this is how: technology keeps moving faster and faster – so fast now that it is almost humanly impossible to keep up with it – and meanwhile the government has collapsed and died.
Here is an axiomatic fact, now, too: at this point 2 full Senatorial election cycles have passed, and six House reelection cycles, and nothing has gotten done, and that happened without consequence, so we can now be assured that nothing will ever get done again, except for corrupt spending (i.e. waste) and criminal self-enrichment schemes, perpetrated with impunity, by our elected officials. Paralysis has been normalized. This is why the Democratic Party is comfortable to run a thoroughly rigged presidential nomination process that allows party chieftains to anoint their favorites. Their two most recent picks have been among most corrupt, and most unaccomplished, within their flock. For all their hand-wringing and rage, Trump is more their fault than Russia’s. There is no way in hell Joe Biden spent the last 3 to 4 decades running all over DC, guided by his son-turned-pimp, jumping in and out of the back seats of more Towncars to grab money from sleazy businessman than a $20 hooker from Logan Circle without absolutely everybody in town knowing he is willing to meet anybody who might be serious about paying him some money for his votes and influence. Anybody with functioning eyes can see he’s got dementia. I mean, the guy couldn’t even pass an irresponsibly huge pork-barrel spending blockbuster with his party in control of both houses of Congress, and within a population of professional spenders who, across party lines, all love wasting money. That’s like saying Biden couldn’t convince a couple of Skid Row drunks to get stupidly hammered with him.
I have got a theory as to what caused this. First, within a Democracy, as the population grows larger, it gets harder and harder to manage, and harder and harder to harmonize to build consensus for passing laws.
Second, as the civilian population grows, mathematically speaking, the Federal government will ultimately – and unavoidably – someday become trapped in a “Catch 22”. Either the government’s headcount must grow (at least in some proportion) with the population or it will fall behind, become understaffed, and then be rendered impotent (due to its lack of size and scale versus the population’s) to govern, manage, and supervise its subjects or, if it does maintain proportional size, it will sometime become too big to function because, as is the case with all organizations, when they grow above a certain size, diminishing returns set in. However, within the sphere of government employment, unlike within a corporation, there is absolutely no profit motive whatsoever to create any negative incentive that helps mitigate this (i.e. government employees do not get fired for inadequate performance) and there is every incentive for people to succumb to human instinct (i.e. people will always prefer to perform less work rather than more for the same unit of compensation if that is permissible). Thankfully, our government has gone the route of surrendering responsibility and authority by conceding just to stay small (in terms of headcount), thus rolling shit downhill to the state and local governments, which is where all the obesity has been concentrated, as you can see below.
But don’t worry, our guys are still spending borrowed money like it is their job.
Just Like You
The reality of the matter, putting aside all the personalization and emotions, is that the only real difference between the two parties is that Democrats waste your money while filling their pockets with slippage and bribes very politely, and have effectively established it as a social crime to be anything less than mannerly in doing so (as a design to get over more than their crosstown rivals in this two team kleptocracy competition) while the Republicans, such as Trump at the extreme, simply say “get over it” while they fill their pockets a little less fast and a little more subtlety so that they can still accuse the other guys of being hypocrites to try to slow them down, while they suddenly pretend to care about the First Amendment because the other guys have wrapped their homemade rules of etiquette around their necks like a noose to stop them from stealing so much so they can get more, and to shut them up from making distracting accusations of hypocrisy.
It has been established in the past few weeks, like from 99% up to 100% now, that Hilary Clinton is every bit as shiesty as Donald Trump, and that’s by more evidence than Johnny Depp had on Amber Heard, but it has gotten one-zillionth the media coverage, because the real government in the Silicon Valley prefers – for now – that no one disparage their dates. It has long been apparent to anybody who has been watching that Hillary is fatally unpopular to many, except for to hardcore Democrat insiders and party loyalist, due to her amazingly inflated arrogance and condescending attitudes, neither of which jive, at all, with her total lack of political accomplishments. Nobody likes people who act like that in the workplace. Who could forget her wonderfully smarmy derision of stay-at-home moms back in 1992: “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered in to long before my husband was in public life.” None of that is true, FYI.
Mommy’s Little Monster
Despite all her “hear me roar” feminist bluster, Hilary’s career has been highlighted by only three signature achievements: 1) being so unpopular that she lost an election to Donald Trump; 2) getting her “husband” out of hot water each time that the old dog goes fooling around in the henhouse (I refer you to the words of Mike Anton again: “he’s been very good for my career”); and 3) her Houdini-like escapes from so many scandals. In every one of these them her enormous sense of entitlement, rested atop her elephantine ego, is what got her in trouble. She is just sooo important, that she has just got to have to have a Blackberry, or the entire State Department will shut down, and therefore it was justified that she rig-up a super-hackable server from Best Buy in her garage and connect it to a Yahoo personal account where to conduct the top-secret State Department business.
Here is her career. She has never won a contested election. She has never held a job that wasn’t handed her. And she has accomplished next to nothing in her many years. And going back to the very beginning, in her first job where she taught criminal law, she was considered a tough grader. That makes total sense in the context of her personality. She took her first “real job” though – i.e. not one working on somebody’s campaign, nor one teaching law classes, nore one working at a morally-correct not-for-profit, but a real one, as a professional lawyer – at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1977, one year after Bill was elected Attorney general in 1976. Rose Law does state business, but the Clintons kindly made it clear you can trust them, by reassuring everybody that state fees were walled off by the firm before her profits were calculated. They did a pinkie swear on it. Between 1978 and 1979, while looking to make an obvious buck off her highly detailed knowledge of the esoteric beef products market, she engaged very successfully in cattle futures flipping, turning $1,000 into $100,000 within ten months. And she did it all by herself, without any Arkansas Good Ole Boy hooking her up with a tip.
When Bill got popped for Gennifer Flowers in 1992 she rescued his campaign by going on 60 Minutes saying it’s all good between them but that she’s also a real woman and not no pushover loser like that country singer, and she used a fake Southern drawl to effect extra condescension: “Now, I’m not some little woman sittin’ hrrrrr standin’ by mah man like Tammy Wynette.” After Bill was elected president in 1993, he named her to run point on National Health Care Reform. She authored the Clinton Health Care plan but, failed to gather enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate (although Democrats controlled both chambers), and the proposal was abandoned in September 1994. I guess that makes them even for that whole Gennifer thing.
In 1998 investigations revealed the president had engaged in an extramarital affair with a 22-year-old White House intern. When the allegations were first made public, Hillary Clinton stated that this was all part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." After more evidence mounted, she issued a public statement reaffirming her commitment to their marriage. In 1998 Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired after 20 years holding a Democratic safety-seat. She was anointed his successor by party brass in 1999, whereupon she and Bill bought a home in New York so she could run. She had never resided in the state before. Bill de Blasio was her campaign manager, thus spawning the political life of the biggest disaster ever to hit NYC. In total, she and her opponent Rick Lazio spent a record $90 million on the campaign, which she won easily. In office, she voted for the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006 she faced a nobody (John Spencer, mayor of Yonkers) for reelection and spent $38 million just to win a blowout. In 2008 she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the campaign she made a comment, saying, in effect that MLK talked about the dream but only President Johnson got it done by passing the Civil Rights Act. This did not sit well with Black voters, who she lost en mase thereafter.
In 2009, Obama named her Secretary of State where the email server, Wikileaks email hack, and Benghazi scandals all happened. In 2016, she was anointed as the Democratic nominee, but faced surprising heat from renegade Bernie Sanders in the early primaries. Without her national popularity being vetted by a proper, broader, full-length, national nomination the party seemingly had no idea how unpopular she was, setting up Trump’s surprise victory.
What Difference Does It Make
What’s interesting about both Hilary and Trump is how very similar they both are in so many respects: both shamelessly self-interested and unafraid to take the corrupt road to pots of gold; both are obnoxiously arrogant despite being flops in their chosen field (Trump in real estate and Hillary in politics); both have a bottomless sense of entitlement to office, and the perks thereof; both made their careers, almost entirely, off the coattails of somebody else (Trump off his dad and Hilary off Bill); both allow a fairly wide berth for sexual impropriety toward women; and both cannot help themselves from belittling their critics (Trump does it in the direct, profane playground way and Hillary does it in in the smug, sophisticated cocktail party inside joke way). One is confrontational and crass while the other is bitchy and condescending (which is to say, they are both jerks, only one is a male and the other is a female). Their approval and disapproval numbers are about the same, however the people who like Trump like him a lot more than her people like her and likewise the people who hate Trump hate him way more than the her haters hate her.
Authority Song
The reason Trump angers the left so much is because their conformity machine works like this: to get people to accept what is not understood to them and, importantly, to do so without any requisite explanation, relies on cultivating the presumption of greater cultural sophistication and enlightenment. Nobody wants to admit being a dummy, and if someone who you assume is smarter than you says something you don’t understand, there is a good chance you will just accept that without question so as not to show you’re low-class. One has to be rich to have the time (and resources) for the fine arts, and high culture, and learning the esoteric rules of etiquette for fine dining. The poor eat with their hands, while the rich send their kids to Swiss finishing school to learn which spoon is for amuse-bouche and which is for tea. This entire process of fabricating conformity is based on fear, and begins with the opening statement: “we know something that you don’t know, and you don’t want to seem stupid and low class, do you?” But, just in case some people are too busy working hard at the factory to give a shit about rich people’s salad fork rules, a bigger threat than the risk of looking dumb and uncultured exists.
That is to say, if you chose to remain ignorant, indifferent or defiant with respect to what etiquette we’re talking about here, then some very bad things can happen to you. If you don’t know what you’re saying is racist, then, clearly, you’re just a racist, and we’ll just have to go ahead and induct you into the Ku Klux Klanman right here and right now, but then your wife will leave you, your employer will fire you, and your dog will bite you. You must accept that this man is now a woman, otherwise you are supporting the violent murders of so many millions of thousands of everybody who is transgender that are getting killed every second by people like you. So many bad things can happen to you if you don’t take heed. We know about these things. We’re a little bit smarter than you and a little bit more sophisticated too, so just take it onboard for your enlightenment. And if you don’t, then take it onboard for your safety. Dig it?
In defying this etiquette – loudly and often, and before millions and millions of people – Trump is demonstrating that a lightning bolt does not come from the sky to strike down everyone who does not understand and/or agree with the emperor’s new clothes, which erodes the fear upon which this boogeyman rests. Because of Trump’s inveterate rudeness, he’s immune to the politics of fear/cancelation/conformity, and this is why he makes them so mad. Actually, not only do I think he feels no shame, but I really think he enjoys offending people. Ooh, that makes them so mad when people don’t listen, and even madder when their fans won’t cancel them. Kind of like a sociopath, or a punk rocker. Since the usual tricks don’t work on a guy like that, they have doubled down. That is regular strength Excedrin, but this is double extra-extra-strength Excedrin. It’s the same thing – i.e. a fear strategy – just a lot more of it. Maybe like being on double-secret probation. They have gone all the way to eleven in that regard. He is an existential threat to America, to mankind, to democracy, to everything, they say.
He is Dr. Strangelove who will nuke the whole world if you let him. He is going to use Twitter to lead an insurrection and overthrow the government, installing himself as dictator, if we don’t stop him! A person with a temperament like that, wow, that means every geopolitical negotiation will inevitably end in warfare. If Trump is allowed to speak his mind to America, he will turn them all into zombie Nazis just like Adolf Hitler did to Germany. Trump definitely colluded with Russian agents to win. In fact, he’s probably a double agent, and they have so much dirt on him, they can make him do anything. He must be stopped. At all costs. Now. You see, the people who established this research on these threats Trump represents, they are very smart people. They are whizbang data-scientists who found the server he has that is communicating with Russia. They are M-I6 agents who know he's in deep with Putin to rig the election. Actually, what really happened is, (no kidding) the Democratic party and Hilary used money laundering techniques (layering), to get funds from their coffers, and into the pockets of paid hacks, without it being traced back to them, so as to maximize the illusion of impartiality coming from the source, then took the hatchet job they secretly paid for, knowing all along that is false, and for the purpose of spreading this slander they went to any of the abundant receptive media outlets that will recycle it without conducting any level of verification, which will thereby factualize the lies once they are printed, and enables those people who quietly paid for it, to again amplify it, plus recycle it as if fact, and ultimately weaponize it through the use of their relationships in government by getting sympathetic law enforcement officers to look into these “facts” that are actually lies manufactured by muck-raking paid for by money laundering, and all whipped up with a whole lot of panic-mongering. Yes, you see, the elites always know a lot more than we commoners.
The Left is right about Trump. That he represents an existential threat… to them. If everybody knows that their bullets are rubber than nobody will follow their rules, which is why the gloves are off, and it’s no holds barred, in a relentless effort to kill him. He has been out of office 18 months and May 26, two days after the Uvalde shooting, and still the NYT has three Trump hatchet stories on the front page. This is the same reason that Hunter Biden’s laptop get deliberately stuffed, and the same reason that recent revelations about Hilary’s lying have been ignored, minimized and hidden out of the way.
Been Caught Stealing
There is a first time for everything, and Hilary has never gotten caught dead-to-rights before. She’s always had microscopic wiggle room to say things like, “Well, that email server could have smashed itself to smithereens with a hammer and then put itself in the trash can” But this time she’s finally lost that last little fig leaf she holds on to so she can cling to her false claims of moral superiority. Here is how it went down.
Five and a half years ago the Federal Election Commission received two complaints, one from the Campaign Legal Center and one from the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. Both alleged the Clinton campaign misrepresented some campaign expenditures. According to the complaint, the scheme worked like this:
The DNC and Hilary for America reported dozens of payments totaling millions of dollars to the law firm Perkins Coie with the purpose described as “Legal Services” or “Legal and Compliance Consulting” when in reality, at least some of those payments were earmarked for the firm Fusion GPS, with the purpose of conducting opposition research on Donald Trump.
Perkins Coie would have been a convenient place for the campaign to go shopping for some illicit merchandise, because the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias, was Chairman of the firm at the time. Below is the campaign’s org chart, and on it one oddity appears. For Treasurer, she picked a nobody from San Antonio, Texas who was once assistant attorney general in the Public Finance Division of the Texas Attorney General's office and a deputy campaign manager to Bill in his 1992 run. He was assistant to the assistant manager, or equities in Dallas, before he became her campaign’s treasurer.
But that makes sense if one needs somebody to do stuff they shouldn’t do. If you need a fictional audit, you don’t hire an MD from Deloitte, you go get a haggard accountgant who works out of his garage in the South Bronx but receives all of his mail to a PO Box in Bayonne, New Jersey. Here is what went down, and this has been confirmed by the campaign’s own admission in the findings of the investigation. The DNC and Hillary For America paid her general counsel’s law firm, Perkins Coie, fees in excess of service, which were billed and reported to the public et al under the banner of garden-variety legal work, in order for the overage to be secretly redirected to pay for “opposition research.” This is a violation of campaign accounting and reporting rules, otherwise there would no transparency on the appropriateness of the use of campaign donor money. It was via this “off balance sheet” payment scheme that the “Steele Dossier” was cooked up.
Kiss Them For Me
In April 2016, Marc Elias, through his firm, Perkins Coie, retained Fusion GPS, which had previous conducted opposition research on Mitt Romney for the Obama campaign. In its first pass at the target, Fusion subcontracted a bevy of data-scientist to go find some dirt on Trump in cyber space, and they came back with a theory that he may be communicating with the Kremlin via a server he had in Trump Tower that was linked to Russia’s Alfa Bank, which has Kremlin ties. A speculative report about this alleged activity was then written-up, and leaked to a friendly media source (Slate) which mostly regurgitated it all uncritically.
From there, Clinton campaign Senior Policy Advisor, Jake Sullivan, picked up the unverified dirt they leaked, and amplified it with allegations made in a memo published from the campaign for external distribution.
That memo reads as follows:
This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists.
This line of communication may help explain Trump's bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin and endorsement of so many pro-Kremlin positions throughout this campaign. It raises even more troubling questions in light of Russia's masterminding of hacking efforts that are clearly intended to hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign. We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia's meddling in our elections.
Note the choice of words: “may” (twice), “apparently”, “assume”, “seems”, “certainly” and “clearly.” It may be the case that this is certain, clearly, but only if one assumes that the apparent allegations are facts.
In her efforts to stand up for democracy, self-deprecating “hair icon” Hilary Clinton then Tweeted out the amplified speculation once it was ratified as credible by the Slate publishing the story.
The Wall Street Journal summarized Hilary’s Tweet better than I can:
‘Apparently’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence
Try (A Little Bit Harder)
In their next headshot attempt, Fusion subcontracted Christopher Steele, a retired MI-6 officer with expertise in Russian, to mine for dirt. Written from June to December 2016, the “Steele Dossier,” was produced in the style of an intelligence report and based on unnamed sources, and contained allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia, all prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. This “Steele Dossier” was leaked to Buzzfeed in January 2017.
Vox does a nice job of explaining the sequence of events:
Steele’s dossier circulated in the media during the fall of 2016, but news organizations largely failed to verify any of its key claims. Steele also shared the document with the FBI, where it was apparently taken at least somewhat seriously…
Officials were also reasonably confident that Clinton would win. Once she lost, the calculus changed…
The Steele dossier makes six major collusion claims, none proven…
The irregular payment activity between Hilary For America, the DNC, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS was the specific subject of that Federal Elections Committee’s inquiry triggered by the two complaints. They found “probable cause to believe” that both the campaign and national party “misreport[ed] the purpose of certain disbursements.”
This where the Deep State stuff, and/or the deeply anti-Trump attitudes pervasive throughout a predominantly Democrat town like DC, all kick in to ensure that no one involved in the scheme will face anything but a slap on the wrist. The FEC let Hilary off (and the DNC) with a light fine, presumably by assuming that this was just little bit of an accounting oopsie, rather than a scheme with a purpose.
Sound Of Da Police
After that self-generated, and self-hyped, spin-cycle in the media, they then dumped all the evidence to the FBI and pressured them to investigate. That fact was established by an internal FBI instant message that was revealed to Special prosecutor John Durham during the discovery process. Durham was appointed by William Barr to look into:
…law enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns… of Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane (the FBI’s investigation into links between Russian officials and the Trump campaign) and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller , III
Below is the internal instant message sent to an FBI agent by another one about this case:
People on the 7th floor [Bureau management] to include Director are fired up about this server. Reachout and put tools on it… it’s not an option – we must do it.
The FBI was a receptive audience for these allegations too, as a June 14, 2018 report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, discovered a pattern of anti-Trump bias among high-ranking FBI officials.
We were deeply troubled by text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it” in response to her question “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”, it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.
From all this leaking and reporting of known falsities to the FBI, one agent has already been convicted of doctoring emails during the instigation.
Further an internal investigation of agent Curtis Heide (recipient of the internal message above) is underway, which includes other agents too, looking into allegations that they withheld exculpatory evidence from an application to conduct surveillance.
One of the sources of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko (an American citizen with expertise in Russia) was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI.
Last week the trial of one of Hilary’s campaign staff, accused of misleading the FBI, reached a verdict. A fair bit of unsavory, unethical and likely criminal information was disclosed in the course of the trial. In that trial, Michael Sussman, Hilary’s campaign counsel, who reports to Marc Elias the general counsel, and was also an employee of Perkins Coie, was accused of lying to the FBI about the information he was bringing them about the Trump server talking to the Kremlin via the Alfa Bank server, in that it was alleged that he represented he was bringing this to them out of the goodness of his heart, on his own free time, just because he’s really concerned about America, rather than disclosing he was doing this as an agent of the Clinton campaign, and that they had paid for this muck to be raked up.
Only God Can Judge Me
The trouble with this trial is with the judge, Christopher Cooper, who was an Obama appointee, and therefore might be biased. (*** SPOILER ALERT: I’m, being sarcastic).
He was also a Democratic party donor before he took the bench, in 2011, according to public records.
His wife, who is not a judge, donated to Hilary For America in 2016, according to public records.
The next trouble was jury selection. Washington DC is a largely Democratic place. Heavy metal fans tend to buy Slayer albums, and soldiers and cops tend to be Republicans (because they are the ones who always want to spend more on both), and career government workers (i.e. the entirety of DC) tend to be Democrats (because that’s the party of big government). Washington DC is the ultimate Democrat “company town.” Ninety percent of its residents voted for Hilary in 2016. The judge meanwhile allowed into the jury pool, overruling prosecutor’s objections, an Amazon employee who works in public policy and who had contributed to Hilary’s campaign, trusting him at his word to “strive for impartiality as best as I can.”
Also allowed in were at least two other Clinton donors, an AOC donor, one who works for the Sierra Club and thinks “the police should be defunded,” a juror whose husband worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and a juror whose daughter is on the same high school crew team as Sussman’s daughter.
The judge then set the boundaries of evidence very tightly, restricting evidence about Hilary from scope.
And mandated that the trial would not be a “joint venture” involving Hilary’s presidential campaign.
The judge then threw out an email from Sussman to FBI employee James Baker in which he wrote that he was coming in on his own, and “not on behalf of any client or company.”
Finally, the testimony got underway, and Marc Elias led with a telling rationalization, assailing Trump for not being a bad person, saying “instead of doing what any decent human being would do, and condemn it, Donald Trump said, 'I hope Russia is listening and will find the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails ... and release them.'" This would be like, if you didn’t like your neighbor, so you burned down the town’s community center, then accused him of arson, and demanded that he be punished, and when it comes to light that you did it, saying, “Yeah, but it’s still his fault. He’s such a bad neighbor that I had to do it”
Asked if Elias, or anyone from the Clinton campaign had directed his subordinate, Mr. Sussman to bring the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI, of course, he said of course not.
Roddy Mook, Hilary’s former campaign manager, when asked who knew about giving these biased and unverified reports that the campaign surreptitiously paid for to the media and who approved it, named campaign chairman John Podesta, policy advisor Jake Sullivan, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, and ultimately Hilary herself.
So, she directly authorized giving this to the press, which means she knew what she was Tweeting was just her own spurious, biased and paid-for nonsense, as did Sullivan who wrote the amplifying external memo that she attached to her Tweet.
This guy is not going to commit perjury so he can throw his favorite political allies under a bus, so I am betting on his testimony being honest. In that case, below is an org chart of Hilary For America, denoting in yellow all of the top brass who were in on the scheme to give this stuff to the press, as though it was real, despite knowing it was not.
Redemption Song
It was within this milieu – amid a DC population of pure partisans (90% Hilary votes), who were collectively consumed by disbelief, rage, rejection and denial about the outcome of the 2016 election, which includes a fair few FBI agents, in which there is a pervasive attitude that it’s no holds barred when against Trump because he himself is dangerous to America, and who are aligned with a press corps that feels exactly the same way in every regard – that fabricated allegations which were knowingly false received significant news coverage as if they were credible, thus allowing Hilary and staff to disseminate manufactured “facts”, that created such perceived risks that some all-too-willing (and biased) law enforcement officers “just had to investigate it.” The Alfa Bank stuff and the Steele Dossier were both quickly dismissed as weak, but they launched a much more broad investigation into Trump conducted by the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane, given the suspicions that they raised. That didn’t find anything either, but from whence came the road to nowhere, i.e. the Mueller investigation. Here is how you can be totally certain that he found absolutely nothing – because it went away. If he had found even a stitch of concrete evidence, it would have never (ever) died.
In sum, this stuff they put forward to the press and then to the FBI, with full foreknowledge of its origin and quality, launched a sweeping but fruitless FBI investigation (Crossfire Hurricane), then launched a sweeping but fruitless Independent Counsel investigation (Robert Mueller, III), plus yielded an impeachment trial, and has now resulted in one FBI agent being convicted of doctoring emails (Kevin Clinesmith), one FBI agent being investigated for withholding exculpatory evidence (Curtis Heidi) and one more trial still pending of a contributor to the Steele Dossier accused of lying to the FBI (Igor Danchenko), plus this trial of Michael Sussman from Perkins Coie. And, in the end, for all that carnage, she lost anyway. Not very smart and not very nice.
The jury who the judge picked, of course, found Sussman not guilty. That’s not how it went down for Michael Flynn, though. The trial was an anything-goes circus of political outrage that was totally sanctioned by the judge. But that’s DC for you. And these are the people who need us to believe they are smarter and more sophisticate than we rubes.
I’m A Loser
Remember this guy, Jake Sullivan?
Who wrote up that external memo about the “new report from Slate showing that the Trump Organization has a secret serve registered to trump Tower that has been covertly communicating with Russia.”
The same memo that Hilary attached to her Tweet about “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to Russia-based bank”
He’s National Security Advisor now. Smart guy. Good at inuendo, social coercion and spurious memos, but not so good, apparently, at national security. I mean, like, if Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Myanmar and Afghanistan are any guide. Maybe he should stick to what he’s good at, though, like telling common people what to think and which spoon to use for the amuse bouche.
