Some Random Russiagate

Not too much coherence in this group. Another prominent lawyer declines offer to represent Trump in Russia investigation

Dan K. Webb, a Republican, is a former U.S. attorney for Illinois and a corporate and white-collar-defense lawyer for the firm Winston and Strawn.

In a statement, his firm said the president and his team recently reached out to Webb and D.C.-based partner Tom Buchanan.

“They were unable to take on the representation due to business conflicts. However they consider the opportunity to represent the President to be the highest honor and they sincerely regret that they cannot do so,” the firm said. “They wish the president the best and believe he has excellent representation in Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow,” referring to the two lawyers now handling Trump’s defense.

I wonder if there's a bit of market manipulation going on here. It's customary for big corporations to put good law firms in certain field on retainer to prevent their opponents from using them. Could the various Democrats and never-Trumpers be doing something similar? “A Target< Not a Witness": Will Trump's Legal B-Team Collapse Before Mueller?

The president’s struggle to recruit experienced lawyers could mask more ominous concerns. “As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations,” says one former prosecutor. “The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime.”
. . .
Given the sheer number of lawyers representing clients in Mueller’s probe, it is possible, too, that a small town like Washington is simply running out of white-shoe firms without conflicts. That was, after all, the reason that diGenova and Toensing ostensibly parted ways with Trump. Toensing has been representing Mark Corallo, who represented Trump’s legal team last year, before resigning in the wake of revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer.

Christopher Steele Claimed A Russian Oligarch Had RT Founder Killed In Washington, DC. I thought it might be Seth Rich. But then again, with the Russians, it could be both. The Next Big Revelations About The Steele Dossier Will Come From Courts, Not Congress

. . .the next big information burst will likely come during the course of Aleksej Gubarev’s twin libel lawsuits, one against the dossier’s author, former British MI6 spy Steele, and the second against BuzzFeed, the online media outlet that first ran Steele’s opposition research in its entirety, and its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith.

In his lawsuits, Gubarev, who emigrated from Russia to Cyprus in 2002, claims Steele defamed him by stating that his companies, XBT Holding S.A. and its Florida-based subsidiary, Webzilla, hacked the Democratic Party by “using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations.’” While Gubarev’s lawsuits focus on only a sliver of the Steele dossier, to prove his case—especially against BuzzFeed, which as a U.S. media outlet is protected from liability absent malice—Gubarev needs details.

BuzzFeed needs details as well, because it seeks to avoid liability based on a so-called “Fair Report Privilege” which, according to BuzzFeed, grants “the press (and others) the right to republish allegedly defamatory statements, . . . as long as they were made within the context of government activities.” Accordingly, to (respectively) prosecute and defend the civil claims, Gubarev and BuzzFeed need information from both those responsible for compiling and distributing the Steele dossier and those in the government who used the information.

One can only hope they both lose, and lots of information gets released in the process.

 Ace: FBI Continues to, Get This, Stonewall Production of Andrew McCabe's Texts Despite Judge's Order Compelling Just That Start hauling them off to jail for contempt.

American who escaped al-Qaeda captivity in Syria says the FBI under Mueller and Comey 'betrayed' him and claims the bureau tried to run an intelligence operation instead of rescuing him Mueller let al-Qaeda drain his bank accounts during his captivity, rather than attempt to figure out where he was being held and rescue him. Eggs, omelette.

Jonathan Turley: If Michael Flynn Was Charged For Perjury, Why Is Andrew McCabe Not Being Charged?

He says McCabe's Clinton-like, Comey-approved defense -- he didn't have the intent to lie because he was "confused and distracted" -- applies equally to Flynn, who was also quite a busy man at the time he made his disputed statement.

Are our straight-arrow non-partisan without-fear-or-favor Defenders of Law showing favoritism for their own and antagonism to outsiders?

Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes they are.
. . .
Turley notes that the worst aspect of the making-a-false-charge law isn't that it's overly broad -- it's that its over-broadness permits the FBI to selectively and arbitrarily apply it, or selectively and arbitrarily decide that its FaceBook Friends List is immune.

Partisanship and John Brennan’s Plot: Obama CIA use of foreign spies against the Trump campaign should be cause for alarm, no? While the Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) hyperventilate about a foreign firm possibly (the verdict is still out) using dishonestly collected Facebook data (is there any other kind?) to help Trump's election, they ignore the use of the CIA and foreign intelligence offices against Trump

What we reported is this. A source with a record of proven reliability over many years overheard FBI agents venting about John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, using British intelligence agents to spy on the Trump campaign. American contractors were also used. The British used American equipment. They had an extensive spying network here in America, using the twelfth floor of a building in Crystal City, Virginia and a building in San Antonio. Moreover, Brennan was not the only one who knew about the spying. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was another, and still more senior officials in the Obama Administration were aware of it. I am told that James B. Comey and Andrew McCabe were also aware of the surveillance of Trump. They had tried to get FISA warrants for snooping on Trump’s associates but were turned down, though they would later get a warrant to spy on Carter Page. So Brennan turned to the British. If they wanted to keep their spying a secret they were pretty sloppy, but then they thought they could afford to be sloppy. They knew that Hillary was going to win.

Right up until Trump won.

Umm, No Thanks!

Tiffany Haddish Extols Virtues Of Drinking Poisonous Turpentine

Tiffany Haddish may be hilarious, but she’s apparently not joking about a bizarre new health regimen: drinking turpentine.

In an interview with GQ magazine, the “Girls Trip” star extols the very dubious health benefits of drinking of turpentine, a pungent oil made from pine resin commonly used for mixing paint and varnish.

 You mean gin?

“A teaspoon of turpentine will not kill you,” Haddish tells her skeptical interviewer. “The government doesn’t want you to know that if you have a cold, just take some turpentine with some sugar or castor oil or honey and it’ll go away the next day.”

Paracelsus noted, "The dose makes the poison" as he popularized mercury compounds for the treatment of syphilis.

Haddish discovered the toxic solvent was a supposed health aide a few months ago while watching YouTube. She started taking it a few months ago.

Ha! The internet! You know it's correct if it's on the internet!

She decided to try it because “there are worms inside your body,” and claimed “everything just felt so much better, clarity-wise” after her first dose.

I hear crack has the same effect.

When the journalist suggested Haddish was actually light-headed from drinking poison, the comedienne refused to budge.

“But I was killing the game onstage!” she said. “My thought patterns was coming quick, quick, quick. Girl, you just look it up. Just do the research.”

Or you just felt like it, because you were stoned.

Basic internet research reveals that turpentine is actually toxic if ingested or consumed. Symptoms of poisoning include blood in urine, kidney failure, loss of vision, severe burning in the throat and vomiting blood.

And this is why you don't take medical advice from celebrities.

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Lieutenant Dish" up and running on time.

"Saint Emma" Confesses to Bullying Shooter

At the March, an admission.

Yes, said Parkland student Emma González. She and her fellow students at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School “ostracized” fellow student Nikolas Cruz. Said González when speaking in Washington at the anti-gun “March for Our Lives”:

“Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him, that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him? You didn’t know this kid! OK? We did!”

Which is to say, González just made a startling admission. Parkland students bullied Nikolas Cruz.

It may well be that González is right — the rest of us didn’t know him.

But there are a large number of people — some of whom are celebrities and either marched in and/or supported the March — who have spent years insisting that what González and her friends who “ostracized” Nikolas Cruz did was… bullying.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, in which Cruz took 17 lives, the TC Palm of the USA Todaynetwork headlined this:

Florida school shooting: Student knew Cruz: ‘I could have said something to administrators’

The story reports the following:

Marolo Alvarez remembers students taunting Nikolas Cruz.

“He looked like a school shooter,” Alvarez said students used to say about him.
… Alvarez, who spoke to reporters at a vigil for victims of the area’s second mass shooting in 13 months, said he wishes he had said something earlier. “I could have said something to administrators, that ‘hey this kid gets bullied a lot, please help him, please reach out to him.’ I kind of regret not doing that,” Alvarez said.

So she knew from Middle School he was a school shooter? Boy is she smart. No wonder the democrats want to turn their policy discussions over to children.

Her bullying him, (and I expect we'll also hear that David Hogg was also part of the clique that persecuted him) can never excuse what he did, but they could easily be part of the explanation.

Note, this adds another level to the failure of government that helped this tragedy go forward. School authorities who overlooked the bullying of Nikolas Cruz.

EPA's Plan for Conowingo Dam

The Chesapeake Bay Program has published its "plan" for what to do about Conowingo Dam, the fact that it is full of sediment, and not retaining any more pollution laden sediment. After detailing the history of the problem, a useful effort, but one we've heard before, they finally get around to what they intend to do about it. Study it:

Recently, the Chesapeake Bay Program decided that the best way to address the increased pollution from the Conowingo Dam would be to create a separate Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) for the dam. WIPs detail the steps that each watershed jurisdiction (Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia) will take to meet their pollution-reduction targets.

A separate steering committee will be tasked with writing this new WIP for the Conowingo Dam and developing a financing strategy. The committee will have representatives from each jurisdiction and the assistance of a third party. The Environmental Protection Agency will provide oversight in the development and implementation of the Conowingo WIP, evaluate and track the progress being made to reduce the additional pollution from the dam and provide technical and contractual support.

This approach will give all the jurisdictions in the Chesapeake Bay watershed the chance to participate in this massive undertaking and contribute in putting conservation practices in place to help offset the nutrient and sediment pollution loads from the Conowingo Dam.

Of course, this is no plan at all, except a plan to get a group of like minded people together and decide what's best for the jurisdictions. Of course, the answer will be onerous actions on the current owner of the dam, Exelon, which made the mistake of buying an asset which has saved the Bay for 80 years or so.

Reason #5911 That Trump Was Elected

Nice to know that some conservative in government survived the Obama purges. Article behind WaPo paywall: Unlike those in the resistance, certain career officials’ stars have risen under Trump and the people at WaPo are pissed.

Randal Bowman has toiled 32 years at the Interior Department. A proponent of limited federal regulation, he goes underground during Democratic administrations.

But with the arrival of President Trump, the senior policy analyst has ascended like the insect that is famed for its periodic resurgence. He is helping Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke shrink national monument designations and scrutinizing whether agreements struck with politically active nonprofit groups mesh with Zinke’s priorities.

“He bides his time underground during Democratic administrations, and when Republican administrations come in, he reemerges and very aggressively works to promote their agenda,” said Don Barry, who worked with the career staffer while serving as Interior’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks under President Bill Clinton.

Bowman, now a special assistant to the National Park Service’s deputy director, is one of numerous civil servants throughout the government who are wielding new influence in the Trump administration after years of being out of sync with Barack Obama’s White House. While Trump has brought plenty of outsiders to the federal government, these insiders matter because, as Barry observed, “They understand the way the government works. They know where the power lies and which levers to use.”

At the Department of Homeland Security, a trio of top officials were elevated from within the ranks: Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Francis Cissna; Thomas D. Homan, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner at Customs and Border Protection. All take a law-and-order approach more reflective of Trump’s tough line on people in the country illegally.

That “three career guys” are now in key immigration posts shows the administration is “setting our agencies back to factory settings, of just administering the law,” Cissna said in an interview.

Cissna drew harsh attention last month when he removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from his organization’s mission statement — a reaction he termed “befuddling,” since he aimed to capture what the agency does and who it serves.

“I just started fresh,” he said. He added that he is like plenty of other civil servants who have found a welcome audience for their ideas in the wake of an election: “They get nowhere, then a new president comes in.”

But few backbenchers have experienced as rapid and dramatic a role reversal as Indur Goklany, who during his more than three decades working at Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis also wrote papers for several conservative think tanks and participated in their events and films.

Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Goklany found himself within the department’s inner circle of leadership and was subsequently transferred to work in the deputy secretary’s office.

Emails released under a Freedom of Information Act request and separately obtained by The Washington Post, coupled with interviews with current and former federal officials and academics, chart the ascent of a longtime Interior analyst who established his conservative bona fides outside the department even as he feuded with colleagues within it. Climate change was a core conflict, with Goklany questioning the severity of its impacts, the extent to which humans have contributed to it and the predictions of its future course.

An electrical engineer by training, he initially suggested rewriting Interior’s main climate Web page a week after Trump took office. Three days later, he proposed wiping out the previous administration’s priorities altogether.

“I actually think removing the Priorities page is better and more efficient than just modifying certain pages because climate change is not the only questionable priority on the current Priorities page,” Goklany wrote to Doug Domenech, who now serves as Interior’s assistant secretary of insular areas.

The page went offline for a few days last March and underwent multiple changes during the year, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. It now lists Zinke’s 10 top priorities before providing links to a range of topics such as American energy, regulatory policy, tribal nations and climate change.

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, has worked with Goklany for years in what Ebell described as his “moonlighting job as a one-man think tank.” Ebell sees his longtime ally as empowered in a way he hasn’t been since the Reagan administration.

“Obviously, they kept him in a box during the Obama administration, and now they’ve let him loose,” said Ebell, who headed Trump’s transition team at the EPA and lobbied the president to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. “He’s a national treasure, in my view. He’s a very meticulous analyst of policies, and he knows how to get behind the claims and look at the data.”

I'm starting to think that the "spoils" system of stocking the federal bureaucracy might serve the purpose accountability better. At least you can really throw the true scoundrels out.

Russiagate Lovebird Update

A small but juicy set this morning, leading off with this News from Ace: New Page-Strzok Texts Reveal Couple Smiling Over James Comey's Possible Intervention in Election, on Hillary's Side

July 28, 2016: Text from Lisa Page to Peter Strzok, citing this article (https://t.co/DHYlHa4ehm): “Ha. First line made me smile”

The first line of that article? --“Potentially unpleasant news for Jim Comey: We need you to intervene in the 2016 election again” pic.twitter.com/tHNQGDsdgM

— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) March 25, 2018

The D.C. bubble’s credulous embrace of McCabe is embarrassing

For the longest time, James B. Comey, as director of the FBI, portrayed himself as the world’s tallest Boy Scout, and many in the media viewed him that way. Even when his decisions and actions were under scrutiny during the 2016 presidential campaign, Comey exuded a veneer of professionalism and decorum.

Comey destroyed that image, first through his admission that he orchestrated a leak to the New York Times in hopes that it would lead to the appointment of a special counsel — a signal to the FBI rank and file he once led that if you can’t achieve a result you want through aboveboard means, consider subterfuge. Such actions are expected of politicians. Americans expect the FBI to be better, especially at the top.

Comey later couldn’t resist a Trump-like tweet calling unnamed people “weasels and liars,” revealing more about himself than his intended targets. Now comes the revelation that not only has he apparently written a quickie book, but he’s also planning a media tour next month to promote it — in the midst of an ongoing special counsel investigation in which he is a key witness. We’re still awaiting the across-the-board media outrage.
. . .
McCabe’s alleged misdeeds and self-pitying response to his firing lend credence to notions that a D.C. swamp indeed exists, in immediate need of draining. Despite what so many in the media implied over the weekend, McCabe wasn’t fired by the president. He was fired by the attorney general based on a recommendation from the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, following an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz — an appointee of President Barack Obama.

This is the same Andrew McCabe apparently referenced in a text message from FBI agent Peter Strzok to FBI lawyer Lisa Page during the 2016 campaign, on the topic of a meeting they attended in “Andy’s office” about their fears of a Trump victory.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok wrote to Page, adding, “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

It's going to be a long time before the FBI can shake the notion that they're not playing in national politics.

“Confused and Distracted”: McCabe Uses Flynn Defense Against False Statement Allegation

Once again, it is not a sufficient argument to note that Flynn was facing other charges. Prosecutors are under a sworn duty to apply laws faithfully and fairly. They are not allowed to simply charge any crime that is convenient. They must be able to attest to applying the criminal code in a consistent fashion. Prosecutors are ethically bound to reject criminal charges (even when they can be technically brought) where they reflect “unwarranted disparate treatment of similarly situated persons.”

We do not know how strong the other alleged crimes were against Flynn. We have one crime that the prosecutors maintained was established on the facts in the indictment. Those facts are strikingly similar on that crime to McCabe. Of course, we are still awaiting the release of the IG report but McCabe’s misconduct was sufficient to not only lead career FBI staff to call for his termination but FBI Director Andrew Wray reportedly immediately forced him into a terminal leave upon reading the summary.

I have admittedly been a longtime critic of the use of 18 U.S.C. 1001 and how it has been used by prosecutors to indict for any statement deemed misleading or false. However, the greatest danger is posed not in the broad scope of this law but its arbitrary enforcement. Two officials are accused of misleading statements in interviews. One is bled financially to the point that he must sell his house and then forced into a criminal plea. The other gets a delay in his pension. Both were very very busy people, but only one is looking at prison.

How much is Rick Gates telling Mueller about Trump?

When Rick Gates struck a plea deal last month with special counsel Robert Mueller, the 45-year-old former Trump campaign official likely avoided decades behind bars and salvaged a chance to watch his children grow up.

The question is what Gates offered Mueller in return. Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.

That’s the conclusion of several lawyers involved in the Russia case and more than 15 current and former Trump aides and associates interviewed by POLITICO to determine how much danger Gates’ guilty plea could pose to the president and his inner circle, and how alarmed they might be by his testimony.

While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.

“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.

I'd love to see the same deal made with Huma Abedin. And there's certainly plenty of probable cause.

Midnite Music - "Hey Now!"

The Regrettes:

Lydia Night, guitar and lead vocals

Genessa Gariano, guitar

Sage Nicole - bass

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Lieutenant Dish" up and running on time.

Sorry, But There is no "School Shooting" Epidemic

The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic’

Promising a “revolution” to “change America” by disarming citizens is rather a radical ambition, but ABC News and other liberal media organizations promote this propaganda without offering any critical analysis or providing access to facts that contradicts Hogg’s claims.

The liberal media did not produce news coverage of Saturday’s protests. Instead, they produced one-sided publicity for gun-control activists. The media have uncritically amplified the claim that events like last month’s Parkland massacre represent an “epidemic” of “gun violence.”

Facts contradicting this rhetoric are not difficult to find, and any journalist who ignores these facts has failed his professional duty.

America’s schools are not experiencing an “epidemic” of shootings. In fact, as Northwestern University researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel recently reported, school violence is declining:

Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.
Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant. . . .
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. . . . [O]n average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year [in the United States], and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

If school shootings are a rare phenomenon that is actually declining — that is to say, the opposite of an “epidemic” — why did the February shooting at Parkland High School inspire more than a month of saturation media coverage advocating gun control? The answer can be summarized in two words: Partisan politics.

Donald Trump is president, Democrats are angry, we are a few months away from a midterm election, and the Democrat-controlled liberal media organized a propaganda campaign to demonize Republicans, by blaming them as responsible for the deaths of students in Parkland. A coalition of Democrat-aligned organizations, including Planned Parenthood, spent millions of dollars to fund Saturday’s protest rallies. . .

Those marches materialized awfully quickly:

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Who Runs March for Our Lives? “It’s a strange political fact, but nearly every major anti-gun group has been a front group. The NRA is maligned 24/7 and yet it’s completely obvious whom it represents. Despite the efforts to tie it to everyone from firearms manufacturers to the Russians (if you can’t tie any random Republican thing to the Russians these days, you won’t be working at the Washington Post or CNN for very long), it represents its five million members. Anti-gun groups tend to represent shadowy networks.”

I don't know about you, but at least the kids persuaded me to renew my lapsed NRA membership. I haven't shot any of my guns in years, but I want to preserve the right to own them and use them.

And I'm not alone: Membership in Gun Groups Is Spiking After the Florida Shooting

The National Rifle Association and its allies have found their political influence under fresh scrutiny as gun control advocates push for new restrictions and corporations sever their ties in the wake of the deadly high school shooting last month in Parkland, Florida. But outside the gun control debate in Washington, membership in the NRA and gun rights groups across the country, which includes more than five million Americans, is spiking, according to people familiar with the numbers.

The spike isn’t a surprise, as such increases happen whenever people feel their Second Amendment rights are under threat, and many groups reported similar surges after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. But as gun control groups seek to use the anti-NRA backlash to mobilize their grassroots, recruitment this time seems to have taken on a more urgent tone.

Russiagate Resumed

Byron York: Trump-Russia, by the (misleading) numbers

Lately Democrats have accused Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee of prematurely shutting down the Trump-Russia investigation without interviewing many key witnesses. The committee "obtained either no or incomplete information about 81 percent of the known contacts between Trump officials and Russians, or groups and individuals with strong Russia ties like WikiLeaks," NBC reported

Thursday.. . .NBC relied on a study by something called the Moscow Project, which is part of the lefty think tank Center for American Progress. On Thursday, the Project claimed there were "at least 70 known contacts between Trump's team and Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition," and that "in 81 percent of these cases, the House Intel committee obtained either no or partial information from the relevant Trump representative."
. . .
Is that true? Did the House Intelligence Committee really fail to interview the vast majority of those people? The answer is no, it's not true. Here is the actual story. . .

Will you be shocked to find  NBC, CAP and the Democrats to be playing with numbers and shading the truth, a lot?

DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr Interviewed 12 Times By FBI Investigators…

Senator Chuck Grassley letter to Rod Rosenstein (Page 5, footnote #5) outlines the FBI interviews of twice demoted DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr . . . Notice: DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr was interviewed after the election four times [November 22nd, December: 5th, 12th, 20th, 2016] by the Obama FBI.

Question(s):

Why was the FBI interviewing Bruce Ohr in 2016?
Who was interviewing Bruce Ohr in 2016?

Possibility/Theory: After candidate Donald Trump won the election the “small group” knew Bruce and Nellie Ohr were both big risks, and weak links.

We still have a lot to learn.

Former FBI agent accuses Andy McCabe of blocking her sexual harassment complaint and forcing her out.  Former FBI agent says she was targeted by Andrew McCabe: Former special agent Robyn Gritz speaks out about McCabe on 'Fox & Friends.' (video at link). A former FBI agent battling Deputy Director McCabe said there is a 'cancer' inside the FBI:

“They’ve poisoned the 7th floor,” said Gritz, referring to the actual floor where management is housed in the FBI’s Hoover Building. “There’s a cancer there of a group of people. You’ve seen it with some of the recent reports of leaks, conflicts of interest, you see it in my case. The level of integrity is lacking. I have never seen or heard of the amount of conflicts of interest, or leading by fear.”

McCabe, who is under three separate federal inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.

Gritz, who at the time of her official complaint was on detail to the CIA, did not fight her battle alone. Many senior U.S. government officials who had worked with her throughout her career defended her openly. One of her biggest supporters was Flynn, who then was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as first reported by Circa.

NPR manages to cover the story without mention of McCabe: Former FBI Agent Speaks Out: 'I Was Not Protected'

Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing not joining Trump legal team after all

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said in a statement that Washington lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing have conflicts that won’t allow them to represent the president regarding special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Sekulow had announced diGenova’s appointment last week.

Sunday’s announcement came just hours after Trump used Twitter to push back against reports that he’s having difficulty adding to his legal team, saying he was “very happy” with his current attorneys.

“Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case,” he wrote, adding: “Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.”

The Latest: 2 lawyers not joining Trump legal team after all

Sekulow said diGenova and Toensing, who are married to each other, will be “assisting the President in other legal matters.” Sekulow did not specify the conflict, but the couple’s firm has represented other clients in the special counsel’s investigation, including former Trump campaign adviser Sam Clovis.

Ann Althouse is unsatisfied with Trumps locution:  "Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on."

That one sentence — "Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted" — makes it sound as though he knows he needs to take a legal position that challenges the limits of professional ethics! How is that smart? Whether it's true or not, why say that? Lawyers are just a bunch of money-grubbing fame-seekers! Why say that when he's going to need us to credit his lawyers? Is there some secret "genius" reason? Like... he's really casting aspersions on the lawyers who are out to get him, Mueller and company?

Why won't sharks eat lawyers? Professional courtesty. Badump! I'll be here all week!

A London Meeting Before The Election Aroused George Papadopoulos’s Suspicions Read the whole thing, but it kind of sound to me like the Papadopoulos meetings that triggered his investigation might also have been a "Deep State" set up.

Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.

The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan K. Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.

Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned. . . 

Not yet Russiagate, but I presume Mueller will get there in time for the midterms. A porn star with a heart of gold? Stormy Daniels: I’m Not A ‘#MeToo’ Victim

Daniels was also adamant the alleged encounter between her and the president was consensual when Cooper asked Daniels if she had wanted to have sex with the president.

“No. But I didn’t — I didn’t say no. I’m not a victim, I’m not,” Daniels said, adding, “Oh, yes. Yes,” when Cooper asked if the encounter was consensual.

Shockingly, porn stars aren't always motivated to have sex for love. 

Why the Four'easter?

As you may know, our recent weather has been one nor'easter after another, four in March. Why Are There Suddenly So Many Nor'Easters? Shockingly, the Atlantic didn't blame Global Warming.

Blame the groundhog, perhaps, who predicted six more weeks of winter ... seven weeks ago. But for residents of the region, it’s starting to feel more like a different kind of Groundhog Day. This storm is the fourth nor’easter in three weeks. After a brief warm stretch in late February that led this publication to ask if it was already spring, the country’s densest corridor has gotten pounded by windstorms, snow squalls, and persistently chilly temperatures.

As one longtime resident recently asked me: Why are we getting all of these nor’easters all of a sudden? What even is a nor’easter? And what is up with that name?

Louis W. Uccellini is the right man to answer those questions. Uccellini knows what a textbook nor’easter, or northeast snow storm, looks like—because he cowrote Northeast Snowstorms, the two-volume textbook about them. “Paul Kocin and I spent about 20 years working on that book,” Uccellini told me Wednesday. “It’s our passion. It’s what brought us to work everyday.” Uccellini, a longtime government meteorologist, is now the director of the National Weather Service.

Big northeast snowstorms simply don’t form very often, Uccellini said: When he and his coauthor studied the half-century of weather between 1949 and 2003, they only found 47 storms that could be classified as nor’easters.

But it does make sense that the eastern U.S. has seen so many nor’easters in the last few weeks, he said. If the atmosphere is in the mood to produce a nor’easter, it doesn’t stop after making just one.

“One of the things we emphasized in the book is the episodic nature of these storms. They come in batches,” Uccellini told me. Northeast snowstorms can only emerge from a very specific set of circumstances. When those circumstances are achieved, storms can follow one after another, walloping the coast week after week.

Just as the Pacific Ocean passes through different stable states over the course of months or years—like El Niño—so too does the Atlantic Ocean. One of the ways that scientists measure the Atlantic’s changes is with an index called the North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO, which compares the air pressure in Iceland with the air pressure in the Azores. In other words, it combines a measurement taken just south of the Arctic with one taken 1,800 miles away, just north of the tropics.

Those may sound like two arbitrary spots in space—how does the weather in Reykjavik affect the weather in Raleigh?—but the NAO matters immensely for the eastern United States. It measures what Columbia University researchers call “a large-scale seesaw” in the atmosphere. In essence, that seesaw works like this: If the NAO is positive, there’s a powerful low-pressure system over Iceland, which draws in storms and helps them cross the northern Atlantic. If the NAO is negative, the Icelandic low-pressure system is weak, making it harder for storms to cross the sea. Storms tend to linger around North America as a result.

How does a negative NAO lead to more big winter storms? It has to do with how nor’easters spin into existence in the first place. Big winter snowstorms form when a high-altitude layer of cold air comes to sit on top of a low-altitude layer of warm air. The contrast between those two air masses generates wind, and the change in pressure between them creates a kind of upward suction, as warm air is drawn into higher altitudes. Combine that wind and that upward drift with the rotation of the Earth and you get a powerful winter storm: an extratropical cyclone.

But remember those two starting ingredients: A low-altitude layer of warm air and a high-altitude layer of cold air. Uccellini told me that there is basically always warm air lingering around the East Coast. “We know we’ll always have warm air, because the Gulf Stream is sitting right there” off the southeastern coast, he said.

“It’s a matter of how you lock in the cold air,” he said.

Enter the negative NAO. The negative NAO basically traps cold air over North America.“With a negative NAO, you get a blocking pattern that creates a trough over southeastern Canada, and that locks in the delivery of cold air into the East Coast states,” he said.
“You need the cold air–warm air contrast, horizontally” to get a nor’easter, he said. “The negative NAO really lends itself to getting that process set up.”

But nor’easters are named for wind direction, not where they strike. During a storm event, it’s the northeast wind that brings the strongest gusts and precipitation to New England.

That doesn’t make the name any less a source of controversy. In 2003, a Boston Globe writer alleged that nor’easter was a fake folksy-ism. “From 1975 to 1980, journalists used the nor’easter spelling only once in five mentions of such storms; in the past year, more than 80 percent of northeasters were spelled nor’easter,” wrote Jan Freeman, the paper’s language columnist. “It’s no more authentic than ‘nucular’ for nuclear or ‘bicep’ for biceps.”

Edgar Comee, an octogenarian Mainer, agreed. “The use of nor’easter to describe a northeast storm is a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation, the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself,” he wrote to The New Yorker in 2005. In the same note, Comee declared himself chairman of the “Ad Hoc Committee for Stamping Out Nor’easter.”

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Lieutenant Dish" up and running on time.

Palm Sunday

Pictorial:

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Lieutenant Dish" up and running on time.

Some Residual Russiagate

The children's crusade against freedom have burned most of the media oxygen, there was very little Russiagate conspiracy mongering to report, but here's what I got:

Jonathan Tobin at NR: When Unfounded Smears Are Treated as Facts

Brennan admitted his charge that the Russians were blackmailing Trump was pure speculation. But that didn’t stop him or anyone else from spreading the smear.

The question was a reasonable one, but the answer was not. When the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program asked why President Trump had congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on being reelected, former CIA director John Brennan pulled no punches. In answering the leading question that implied Trump may be afraid of Putin, Brennan said, “The Russians may have something on him personally.” The Russians, he said, “have had long experience of Mr. Trump, and may have things they could expose.”

Coming from just another foe of Trump — which Brennan, an Obama loyalist, certainly is — the assertion could be dismissed as just a partisan cheap shot. But coming as it did from a career intelligence officer who served for four years as the head of the American intelligence establishment, this had to be more than a baseless conjecture.

Except it wasn’t.

By the end of the day, Brennan admitted his wild charge was not based on any actual information or intelligence revealed to him during the course of his duties but just a willingness to assume the worst about Trump. In a written response to questions from the New York Times, he said, “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail.”
. . .
The point here is not just the decision of the editors of the Times to downplay information that undermined the entire story. Nor is it only that the rest of the mainstream media played it the same way. In particular, the coverage on MSNBC and CNN consisted of highlighting the accusation, treating it as a proven fact, and then following up with panels in which others speculated as to what evidence might substantiate Brennan’s charge, even though he had already admitted he had no such information. This episode encapsulates most of the media’s coverage of the entire Russian-collusion investigation over the last year, in which speculation about Trump’s guilt is always assumed to be true even if proof is never forthcoming.
. . .
It used to be that partisan assumptions fueled by pure speculation and unaccompanied by proof didn’t pass the smell test at any major network or newspaper. The fact that political smears of this sort have now become not only possible but also normal says a lot about the way animus for the Trump administration has distorted much of the media’s judgment and coverage. If liberals want to know why conservatives no longer trust the media about Trump even when the facts are on their side, they need look no further than the way the media covered Brennan’s unfounded accusation.

And for a fine example: Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian Intelligence Officer. Does That Mean Trump Team Colluded?

The link between Russia and the Trump campaign that special counsel Robert Mueller has been looking for may finally have materialized.

On Friday, The Daily Beast reported that the hacker of the Democratic National Committee emails known as “Guccifer 2.0” is, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer. The Daily Beast further reported that Mueller has brought onto his team the FBI investigator who tracked down the intelligence officer. Reportedly, Guccifer 2.0 inadvertently revealed his identity by failing to conceal his use of a Russian computer server on one occasion.
. . .
One individual associated with the Trump campaign was Roger Stone, who served as a campaign advisor. Stone has previously admitted to communicating with Guccifer 2.0, who has claimed to be a native Romanian speaker. If the report is accurate, and Guccifer 2.0 is, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer, this could be the crucial link that allows Mueller to charge Stone and any other members of the campaign who assisted Guccifer 2.0.

Stone has denied having advance knowledge of the publication of the hacked emails, but, in August 2016, before the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were released by Wikileaks in October 2016, Stone tweeted that “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.” His tweet suggested that he knew that Podesta’s emails had been hacked and would be released.

What might this mean for Mueller and his team? The indictment filed against 13 Russians in February provides a clue. That indictment charged the defendants with what is known as a Klein conspiracy, that is, a conspiracy to defraud the United States. A Klein conspiracy is an agreement to impair, obstruct or defeat the lawful functioning of some agency of the federal government. In this case, the affected agency was the Federal Election Commission, among others, in its role to administer federal elections.

I look forward to Jeff Sessions using this interpretation of law to go after mayors and governors of sanctuary jurisdictions, who make no bones about their desire to "impair, obstruct or defeat the lawful functioning of some agency of the federal government." Almost any sort of resistance to any agency that involved more than 1 person could be forced into this rubric.

And in addition to charging Guccifer 2.0, Mueller could also charge anyone who conspired with him or aided and abetted him. One feature of the Klein conspiracy theory is that Mueller need not show that the co-conspirators were involved in the hacking, as long as he can show that they agreed that the emails would be disseminated afterwards, since the crime is not based on the computer intrusion, but on the disruption of the election.

Besides conspiracy, Stone or other members of the Trump campaign could be charged with aiding and abetting if they assisted or even encouraged either the hacking or the publication of the emails. Another potential charge is accessory after the fact for anyone who might have advised how or when to release the emails after they had been hacked.

And this is what really got my attention:

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign member, has recently stated that during questioning by Mueller’s team, he was asked questions about Stone. It seems likely that Mueller is closely examining the relationship between Stone and Guccifer 2.0, which could provide the link he has been seeking to fulfill his mandate.  And if other members of the campaign participated in the decision to release the emails, then they could find themselves named in an indictment along with Guccifer 2.0.

Was "his mandate" to find some poor schlub remotely associated with the Trump campaign and invent a crime that somehow involves the Russians so he can claim victory and go home?

Reason #5910 That Trump Was Elected

Scott Pruitt slammed for spending less on travel than Obama’s EPA chiefs

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is under fire for flying high on the taxpayers’ dime. Fair enough — but why did his Obama-era predecessors escape the same scrutiny?

Almost $90,000 went for food, hotels, airfare and a military jet for his trip with nine staffers for the four-day G-7 environmental summit in Italy last June. Nearly 40 grand more covered a trip to Morocco to promote US exports of environmentally friendly natural gas.

Many critics have hit Pruitt for taking first-class seats when EPA guidelines suggest coach — but he argues that’s called for because he’s been getting death threats from pretty much his first day on the job. (Some greens really, really don’t like him.) Indeed, a quarter of his travel bill was $30,000 for his security detail.

And The Washington Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington dug up some more context: President Obama’s EPA poohbahs traveled just as large.

Lisa Jackson, EPA director from 2009 to 2013, racked up more than $332,000 on four overseas trips. Gina McCarthy, the chief in 2013-17, spent nearly $630,000 on flights and security in her 10 international travels.

None of which made headlines, even on the web — though their yearly average bill was a bit above Pruitt’s one-year total.

More here:  Anybody Recall The Media Looking At Gina McCarthy’s Travel Expenses?

In the WaPo article, they made the “Italy trip” sound like some sort of sightseeing tour. In reality, Pruitt and his staff were attending the G7 summit, but did visit the Vatican, which the Washington Post found absolutely scandalous. But still, the cost of such things should be made available to the public, right? Oddly enough, though, it wasn’t that long ago that somebody else held the same position as Pruitt. (A couple of somebodys actually.) I don’t seem to recall this level of interest, even though Gina McCarthy and Lisa Jackson both did quite a bit of globetrotting on the taxpayer’s dime. Let’s take a short trip down memory lane and see how the two administrations stack up, shall we?

In 2017, Scott Pruitt and his security detail went on two overseas trips. On the G7 trip, they spent $84,000. On a separate trip to Morocco they spent $40,000. Whether or not that bill for two trips all year is excessive can remain in the eye of the beholder. But before you decide, let’s first look at how Gina McCarthy and her security detail did during the Obama administration.

In 2016, Team McCarthy made three trips spending the following amounts:

$68,382 to travel to Ghana
$45,139 to travel to Peru
$74,737 to travel to Tokyo

They were a bit more busy in 2015 it seems. McCarthy and the security team racked up the following bills:

$41,320 to travel to Paris
$90,367 to travel to Dubai
$67,702 to travel to Tokyo
$56,192 to travel to Italy

We need to pause and include a side note about that last entry. When McCarthy went on her own “Italy trip” where do you think she visited? Oh, that’s right.. it was the Vatican. Of course she was there to “discuss climate change” so I’m sure everyone’s cool with that.

I wouldn't mind a law banning overseas trips by cabinet officers not involved directly in overseas activities, with the proviso that the the Congress be permitted to specifically authorize such an expenditure. But lets start it the next time the democrats get into office.

How Did I Miss This?

From June: Adrenaline junkie throws herself off a cliff completely NAKED for her first ever base jump (good job she was wearing a parachute)

A bold adrenaline junkie truly took the plunge when she launched herself off a cliff completely naked.

Annelise Temple, a thrill-seeker who regularly shares videos of her breathtaking exploits with her 21,500 Instagram followers, threw herself off the drop in Lauterbrunnen, in the Swiss Alps, wearing nothing but her parachute.

She threw herself off the cliff with no clothes on after her instructor stressed the importance of feeling the air on her skin.

Annelise took his direction literally. When she arrived at the cliff edge she was set to jump off, she was naked except for the harness which carried her parachute.

The cheeky newbie, wearing sunglasses with her hair tied in pigtail plaits, said: 'Ok, am I good to go?'

More than good. I'd like to see the strap burns from when that came tight.

When not jumping out off mountains naked or similar stunts, she is a model:

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the Sorta "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links.

Let There Be Light!

Tonight is supposed to be the annual celebration of "Earth Hour",  instead of turning off your lights, turn them on to celebrate what electricity has done for mankind

This excellent essay on the Earth Hour event, to be held tonight at 8:30PM in every local time zone, is an eye-opener. Earth Hour is a testament to stupidity, in my opinion, and deserves to be mocked. North Korea reminds us what it is like to like in darkness, both politically, and in energy poverty.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.

Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

As Iain Murray at Instapudit suggests:

. . . you could join us in celebrating Human Achievement Hour. As well as keeping the lights on, you could be:

• Watching your favorite TV show or movie thanks to satellite technology
• Participating in the craft brewing revolution with a cold drink
• Facetiming or Skyping with far-off friends and family
• Traveling home from a night out with a rideshare driver
• Relaxing at home with plenty of food, heat, and hot water for your family

Celebrate just how far we’ve come from the preindustrial age and, if you’d like, use the hashtag #HAH2018 and tweet examples and photos at @ceidotorg.

They're Called "Killer Whales" For a Reason

Scientists witness first reported case of killer-whale infanticide

“We knew right away that this was a remarkable event,” said Jared Towers, a Cetacean researcher with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, of the encounter he and two colleagues witnessed in December 2016.

“We’ve been looking at killer whales for years on this coast and around the world – I study populations in different parts of the world – and witnessing aggressive behaviour between killer whales is almost unheard of.”

Details of the incident were published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.The group had headed out to the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island after reports of strange vocalisations from killer whales in the area. When they arrived, they found a group of whales including one that appeared to be just a few hours old.

They were about to leave when they heard splashing. “So we went over and that’s when we saw that the calf wasn’t surfacing anywhere,” said Towers. They then saw a male swim under their boat holding the newborn calf in his mouth.

Researchers soon realised they were watching two different family groups interact –the family to which the calf belonged was being attacked by an unrelated 32-year-old male and his mother. “We started to realise that this is a chase and these two whales have attacked this group already,” he said. “It was fascinating but we were horrified too.”

The male refused to let go of the newborn. In what researchers described as “infanticidal teamwork,” his mother appeared to be helping him in the attack, manoeuvring to fend off an attempt by the infant’s mother to chase the male.

An underwater hydrophone caught the frantic vocalisations as the scene played out. “Finally the infant’s mother hit the whale so hard, his blubber shook like Jell-o,” said Towers. “And there was a huge splash and blood flying through the air and then that was
it, that was the last hurrah.” The infant had probably drowned by that time, he added.

Scientists in the Canadian province of British Columbia have documented what is believed to be the first reported case of an orca whale killing an infant of the same species.

Human being aren't the only violent species on the planet.

Reason #5909 That Trump Was Elected

Why conservative Christians stick with Trump

As “60 Minutes” prepares to air its interview with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, conservative Christians are being accused of hypocrisy. How can so-called values voters continue to stand with President Trump despite revelations that he allegedly had affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model , and paid them for their silence?
. . .
During the 2016 campaign, Trump pledged to defend religious liberty, stand up for unborn life and appoint conservative jurists to the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts. And he has done exactly what he promised. The pro-abortion lobby NARAL complains that Trump has been “relentless” on these fronts, declaring his administration “the worst . . . that we’ve ever seen.” That is more important to most Christian conservatives than what the president may have done with a porn actress more than 10 years ago.

Trump’s election came as religious liberty was under unprecedented attack. The Obama administration was trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their religious conscience and facilitate payment for abortifacient drugs and other contraceptives. During oral arguments in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, President Barack Obama’s solicitor general told the Supreme Court that churches and universities could lose their tax-exempt status if they opposed same-sex marriage.

Hillary Clinton promised to escalate those attacks. In 2015, she declared at the Women in the World Summit that “religious beliefs . . . have to be changed” — perhaps the most radical threat to religious liberty ever delivered by a major presidential candidate. Had Clinton won, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist, giving the Supreme Court a liberal judicial-activist majority.

Conservative Christians  know that the democratic base, the media, and the academy have declared war on them. I'm not a conservative Christian, and I know it. Whatever pretensions they are making about morality now, it will be entirely forgotten if and when they control the government.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the Sorta "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links.

Resigned to More Russiagate

We'll start with a trifecta from Ace:

McCabe's Mea-Non-Culpa Editorial in the, Get This, Washington Post: I Didn't Intentionally Mislead Anybody. My Answers Weren't "Fully Accurate," But I Was Confused When you've told enough lies, it can be hard to keep them all straight.

Why is it liberals like you and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are always merely "confused" when you give what you admit answers which are not "fully accurate"?

Lying to the FBI is apparently only a sin when Republicans get confused. Free Flynn now. He should rescind his guilty plea and force Stzok, McCabe and Comey to testify in open court. I'll bet the drop the charges before that happens.

Speaking of lying under oath: Sara A. Carter: House Committee Found that James Clapper Leaked Details of Pee-Pee Party Dossier and Briefing to CNN He got away with it last time, why would you expect him not to continue it.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper allegedly leaked information to CNN early last year regarding the classified briefings given to then President-Elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama on the salacious dossier claiming the Russians had compromising information on the president-elect, according to government sources, who noted the evidence of the leak was collected during the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation.

Clapper, who was one of four senior Obama administration officials to attend the briefing with the presidents, also stated his "profound dismay at the leaks" in an official statement issued in January, 2017 and warned that the leaks were "extremely corrosive and damaging" to national security, according to his press release.

Kim Strassel: Fusion GPS Fed an Absurd Story About RUSSIA Infiltrating the NRA to Its Thousand Best Media Friends, And You'll Never Guess What Happened Next...!

Let's just make it all up as we go.

Fusion injected another one of its #FakeNews specials into the media -- this one, a tale of Russian infiltration into the NRA. Various useful idiots in the media were duped into running the story, citing "sources," all anonymous.

Except for one.Well this one wasn't a source -- this was someone the anonymous sources had claimed had spoken of the NRA-RUSSIA connection.

Who denied the quote attributed to her, demanded to know to whom and in what context she had supposedly said the quote to.

The reporters couldn't answer her -- but they ran Fusion's nonsense anyway.
. . .
A McClatchy editor explained to Kim Strassel that it doesn't matter if Cleta Mitchell actually ever said this or not; the important thing is their anonymous "sources" say the FBI is looking into her statement, whether she actually made it or not.

Contining on with the "Deep State" theme Ace established.: DOJ: Inspector General Examining Whether McCabe Was Promised Promotion to FBI Director by Hillary Clinton

Andrew McCabe may have revealed to his inner circle an inside plan to replace his friend James Comey as FBI director if and when Hillary Clinton was elected president of the United States, according to top officials in the Justice Department.

The Inspector General, who is combing McCabe’s communications while he was deputy director of the FBI during the 2016 presidential election, is looking at many parallel revelations from McCabe’s discussions in emails and text messages, DOJ sources said.

There was at least talk of a FBI promotion, one DOJ source said.

It would be funny, to say the least, if McCabe had been planning on stabbing his bestest buddy Comey in the back and taking his job, but I fear he might be too smart to leave that much of a paper digital trail. Molly Hemingway reminds us McCabe’s Bogus Witch Hunt Of Jeff Sessions Confirms Worst Fears About FBI/DOJ Politicization

McCabe didn’t just oversee the investigation into the attorney general, but authorized it after Sens. Leahy and Franken asked the bureau “to investigate ‘all contacts’ Sessions may have had with Russians, and ‘whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred.'”

Such a far-reaching investigation would be an unprecedented attack on Sessions, who had already recused himself from anything Russia-related. As Glenn Reynolds puts it, it makes sense as “an insurance policy.” Just as Comey kept publicly intimating a nefarious Russia collusion narrative at the same time he was privately admitting to Trump he was not under investigation, McCabe had a back-up plan to keep Sessions from finding out too much about FBI leadership’s problematic behavior.

Funny how the DOJ and FBI never seem to jump into investigations of Democrats just because a couple of Republicans ask them to. Was The Mueller “Investigation” Actually Created By The Russians? It’s Starting To Look That Way… Putin laughs.  Giddy Up – DOJ Admits They Have a Grand Jury Empaneled in FBI and DOJ Investigation…

Today chairman Bob Goodlatte sends a formal subpoena to the DOJ (Inspector General Michael Horowitz) for documents regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

However, it’s not the subpoena that should make the news. Pay close attention to the DOJ response.

DoJ on Hse Judiciary Cmte's subpoenas: We are individually reviewing the remaining documents to ensure that they do not include grand jury information, information about ongoing law enforcement actions involving American citizens, or privileged attorney-client communications.

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) March 22, 2018

Oh, what’s that? Yes, the DOJ has to review the demand for evidence because release of those documents might conflict with ongoing Grand Jury information (evidence). Yes, that means a Grand Jury is impaneled, exactly as we expected.

Yes, that also means there are “law enforcement actions” currently ongoing as a result of the prosecutor assigned to reviewing the evidence discovered by Inspector General Horowitz.

House Judiciary subpoenas Justice Department for Hillary Clinton email investigation documents Expect massive delays and redactions. Sessions needs to step up and get control.

In response to the subpoena, a DOJ spokesman said that the agency and the FBI take the inquiry "seriously" and are "committed to accommodating its oversight request in a manner consistent with the Department's law enforcement and national security responsibility."

"Since January, more than two dozen FBI staff have been assisting the Department in producing, on a rolling basis, responsive documents to the Committee's broad request every 10 to 14 days," DOJ spokesperson Ian Prior said in a statement. "The original universe of documents requested was substantial, but there are approximately 30,000 documents thought to be responsive to the Committee's inquiry; of that, we have thus far delivered 3,000 documents to the Committee."

Expect Hillary's yoga routines Chelsea's wedding plans to be among the first released. What Is John Brennan Hiding?

It now seems clear that Barack Obama, in transforming the federal government into a Chicago-style machine, allowed and perhaps encouraged the leadership of the Department of Justice and the FBI to behave in shamefully political and dishonest ways. Loretta Lynch's tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton. Adulterous FBI Agent Peter Strzok's anti-Trump bias and his mysterious "insurance policy" in the event of Trump's election. McCabe's recently uncovered and clearly absurd witch hunt investigation into Jeff Sessions at the instigation of two Democratic senators. Much of this leadership has been, rightly, reassigned or replaced.

But what about the CIA? What were they up to during this time? Why was Brennan so afraid of the election of Donald Trump that he was willing to spread fantastic stories to prevent it, and why does he fear the president so much now that he is making up even more nonsense in order to discredit him. Is he worried the Trump administration will uncover his illegal behavior while he led the CIA? Was Brennan's agency spying on Americans? Doing dirty deals with the Iranians? Betraying the Israelis to their enemies?

Perhaps. Perhaps.

No wonder the  Public is Troubled by ‘Deep State’ according to the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

 Fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%) who say this activity is widespread and another 29% who say such monitoring happens but is not widespread. Just 14% say this monitoring does not happen at all. There are no substantial partisan differences in these results.

In other super big news, WaPost: Trump Campaign Let Papadopoulos Speak To Russian Media. Wow, a scoop. Wannabe political hack talks to news. In another big scoop: "The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica....", politician tries to influence public opinion! It was not a sin until a Republican won. Via Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox: 03.23.18", Trump taps Bolton to be new NSA, Senate Democrats blow head gasket

Washington Wonders Who Dropped the Dime on Trump’s Call to Putin

Who in the tight circle of aides aware of that instruction leaked it to the Washington Post? And what can be done about it?

“If this story is accurate,” an anonymous U.S. official told CNN, “that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal.”

“If you don’t like the guy, quit,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters. He added, “I really hate that there’s someone in his inner circle that’s willing to leak this stuff.”

 Bolton: ‘Completely unacceptable’ for ‘munchkin’ in White House to leak info. Respect the 'stache.

“You cannot conduct diplomacy, you cannot expect other foreign leaders to be candid and open in their conversations with the president if some munchkin in the executive branch decides they’re going to leak the talking points or the transcript or any other aspect of it,” Bolton continued.

“And I think this is really a terrible reflection on the individual or individuals who did this. They should be ashamed of themselves,” he continued. “And I think whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative, there ought to be unity on this point that leaking o that sort is simply unacceptable.”

If you can't figure out who it was pick one at random and fire him. Rinse and repeat as necessary. They'll get the message. As Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

Disgraced Senator Al Franken Returns To Attack AG Sessions Ex funny man, ex-Senator, self admitted sexual harasser trying to stay relevant.