Really Reaching for Russiagate

Not a lot happening as the year winds down. Daniel Chaitin, WaEx, Jerome Corsi claims FBI, Mueller 'harassing' my family

During an interview on Fox Business on Wednesday, Corsi said federal agents are needlessly surveilling his family while he is being scrutinized as part of the Russia investigation.

"Right now I've got evidence that the FBI and Mueller's team are now harassing my family," Corsi said during an interview on "Trish Regan Primetime." "They are doing door knocks on my stepson. They are parking surveillance vans with two agents in it outside the places where various members of my family work."

"My children have done nothing wrong," He added. "My wife, I've been married to her for 27 years, and now they're gonna try to make them criminals? I mean this is harassing my family, it's beyond bounds, and I won't stand for it."

Even paranoids can have real enemies. We know from Gen. Flynn that Mueller is not above such tactics. John Solomon at Da Hill: Giuliani calls for Mueller to be investigated for destruction of FBI evidence You know those 18 minutes 19,000 texts between Strzok and Page that were "inadvertently" not saved after they were forced off the Mueller team, for, get this, swapping a whole bunch of anti-Trump texts before they joined the Mueller team. Yeah, that's pretty fishy, but not in a good way.

The report said a technical glitch was to blame for the FBI’s failure to save those text messages, but the IG was able to recover more than 19,000 from the early part of the Russia probe before Mueller was named special prosecutor.

However, the IG said it was unable to recover messages from the time Strzok and Page worked for Mueller’s office in spring and summer 2017 because the memories of both FBI officials’ government phones were wiped clean by technicians.

That erasure occurred after Strzok and Page left Mueller’s team over revelations they exchanged anti-Trump text messages, including one string in which they talked about stopping Trump from becoming president.

“That should be investigated, damn it, that should be investigated fully. You want a special counsel, get one for that,” Giuliani said.

The narrative thst collusion was somehow isolated to whatever Mueller is investigating is clearly wrong. It was also present in politically liberal institutions because, to paraphrase Willy Sutton, "that's where the data was".

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 27, 2018

Politico: Michael Cohen still denies report alleging his cellphone was traced near Prague in 2016. Tom Maguire at One More Minute: Prague Summer Yet Again

Trump fixer Michael Cohen's cell phone was pinging cell towers in Prague in the summer of 2016? Lock 'em up!

This is interesting:

McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller had obtained evidence Cohen traveled to Prague from Germany in late August or early September of 2016, but it could not be learned how that information was gleaned.

We can flashback to that report and this Jake Tapper follow-up:

CNN’s Jake Tapper reported Wednesday morning that intelligence officials looked into allegations from an explosive unsubstantiated memo that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in late August to meet with Russian officials, and found that it was a different Michael Cohen who visited the city.
Cohen strongly denied the charges Tuesday, saying that he had never been to Prague. The Washingtonian reported that two sources at the University of Southern California confirmed that Cohen was in Los Angeles at the time he was supposed to have been in Europe.
Tapper seemingly confirmed Cohen’s story. “People tried to run that down and concluded it was a different Michael Cohen. It was a Michael Cohen with a passport from another country, same birth year, different birth date,” he said.

Eventually Cohen showed his passport to Buzzfeed with no relevant entries to Europe, prompting me to wonder whether he has two passports (not unheard of!).

And here we go again.

Jonathon Toin, Da Federalist, If Russian Bot Tactics Didn’t Defeat Roy Moore, They Didn’t Defeat Hillary Clinton

What is most interesting about this “experiment” is that among its architects was the head of a firm that “wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.” The Times obtained a report on the effort led by Jonathon Morgan of the New Knowledge cyber security firm. It detailed their efforts to mislead Alabama voters and thus aid Jones.

Both the Times and supporters of Jones are correct when they assert that this plot didn’t influence the outcome of the Alabama election even though the Democrat wound up winning by less than 22,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million votes cast. But there are two significant conclusions that can be drawn from the newspaper’s exhaustive account of the Democrats’ attempt to mimic Russian tactics.

First, the attempt to minimize the Alabama experiment’s effects while claiming that the larger-scale version of the plot was a major factor in allowing President Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton simply falls flat.

The other is that the narrative being spread by the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, about Republicans being uniquely hostile to democracy and engaged in a consistent pattern of behavior involving elections cheating of one sort or another, is false. What happened in Alabama demonstrates that both parties are equally willing to do anything to unfairly hobble their opponents.

The Senate Republicans should refuse to seat Doug Jones because of the fraud.

CNN, House Democrats scooping up staff, lawyers to power Trump investigations. Mueller's slowly laying off staff. Maybe they'll end up working for open Democrats.