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The Black PSYOP X: The Senate Becomes An Information Laundry

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Since the President’s acquittal in the Senate back in January, several key senators have been working to turn their committee’s oversight functions into both an information laundry as part of the Black PSYOP against Vice President Biden and an oppo research and distribution arm of the President’s reelection campaign. These efforts are being led by Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee; Senator Charles Grassley, who chairs the Finance Committee; and Senator Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee and are intended to do one thing and one thing only: dirty up Vice President Biden ahead of his election, as well as a number of his senior advisors who would be expect to have senior appointments in a Biden administration should he win in November. Should he indeed win, expect the Senate Republicans to use these hearings to either deny, should they hold their majority, or try to derail and deny, should they be in the minority, the Senate confirmation for these senior Biden aides and advisors. In this way the Black PSYOP campaign against VP Biden has metastasized in a new ugly way: to not just try to make him unelectable, but to damage many of his most senior and trusted aides and advisors so that they would be unconfirmable should he be elected and appoint them to the most senior positions in his administration.

Senator Graham kicked off the next phase of the Black PSYOP today with hearings into how the counterintelligence investigation into the connections between the President’s 2016 campaign and a variety of Russian nationals who all link back to Vladimir Putin, which is being referred to by Republicans and conservatives as Obamagate, was started and conducted. The focus of today’s hearing was on former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. You can see this whole hearing at the video below:

As you can imagine, Senator Graham, as well as the other Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee were functioning in the closed epistemological bubble of conspiracies about the 2016 election.

The short version of these conspiracies are that it was not Russia interfering in the election, nor was it the President’s campaign, campaign officials, members of the President’s family, and official and unofficial surrogates all either conspiring to and working with various elements of Russian intelligence or trying to, but being so inept they failed to actually do so. Rather, the Clinton campaign successfully conspired with both the Obama administration, especially senior Department of Justice and FBI officials like Director Comey, and the Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko to subvert the will of the American people and rig the 2016 election and by creating a false flag that Russia was in fact interfering in the election on behalf of the President’s campaign.

The key logical flaw in all of this, not that there aren’t several of them, is that Secretary Clinton did in fact lose the election in the only way that mattered: the Electoral College. And that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has definitively concluded that not only did Russia through a variety of actors, at the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, interfere in the 2016 US election, but that these Russian or Russian backed actors tried to conspire with the President’s campaign, campaign officials, family members, and surrogates. And that the President’s campaign, campaign officials, family members, and surrogates failed to make it work because the President’s campaign, campaign officials, family members, and surrogates were, with the exception of Roger Stone’s conspiring with Wikileakes, too inept to actually conspire with Russia. The logical flaw also ignores that Vladimir Putin had a clear preference for the President and did everything he could to see him elected in 2016, including acting to harm the candidacies of the other Republican primary candidates like Senators Graham and Cruz.

The origin of the conspiracy theory that the Senate Republicans, the President, other Republicans, and conservatives are pushing was actually created by Konstantin Kilimnik and pushed to Paul Manafort who then laundered it through his criminal defense. It was also laundered through Politico by a discredited Ukrainian junior foreign service officer. And before you ask, yes the Politico reporter was Ken Vogel who has continued to try to peddle this made up garbage at The New York Times.

Former Acting Attorney General Yates did a very effective job of pushing back and knocking down the conspiracies that the Republican senators on the committee kept asking her about or suggesting happened.

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What I Think Is Going On With the Leaks Regarding the Russians Placing Bounties On US & Coalition Forces

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AL put the signal up earlier for some analysis on what is going on with the leaks regarding the Russians placing bounties on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Here’s what I think is going on:

First, someone or several people who are significantly senior enough to have access to the information that is being leaked, meaning that they have access to the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) are leaking. And they’re leaking A LOT! Most likely because they either have had enough or because they’re worried something even worse is coming, likely because they are read onto that compartment or special access program, and these leaks are their version of the Bat-Signal. What they are doing is not without significant personal and professional risk. They have not gone through regular channels. They are not whistleblowers in the legal sense of the term. So they have no legal protections should they be caught. But they appear to have a strategy and they are following it. Every time the President, the White House Spokesperson, a Republican member of Congress, and/or one of the President’s senior national security appointees releases a new explanation or excuse or tries to spin the reporting, a new and more damaging leak is fed out to one of several reporters who cover national security.

This brings us to the response of the President, his senior appointees, Republican members of Congress, and his surrogates in the media, which is basically that everyone knows the President doesn’t read anything, so if it was really important someone would have told him. Senator Johnson tried his hand at this, but he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the plastic chop stick drawer, so…

Despite Senator Johnson failing to stick the landing, the play, for now, is “he doesn’t read, whatcha gonna do?” Among the president’s base, reading is something elites do. Real people, and especially real men, make decisions based on gut instinct. This leaves them with something along the lines of “the President wasn’t told, everyone knows he doesn’t read, if it was important someone should have said something, and that’s why he had to get rid of Coates and MacGuire at DNI and Bolton, etc because they know if something is really important they have to tell it to him. The President didn’t let down the troops, they did.”

The second response is what we saw from the Republicans briefed yesterday. According to Congressman Banks, and other Republican members of Congress, the real crime is that someone highly ranked has anonymously leaked to The New York Times and a number of other reporters. Now that the info is out, the leaker has screwed up the intelligence, as well as the intel process, harmed sources and methods, and really put Americans at risk.

I expect the third response will be AG Barr announcing a federal investigation to find the leakers. This will flow into the fourth response, which will be an attempt to link the leaker or leakers to Vice President Biden. This will be a replay of what the President, the Republican members of Congress, and the President’s surrogates tried to do with the IC whistleblower all the way through the impeachment trial in the Senate. Here too they will try to link whomever they identify as the leaker or leakers back to Vice President Biden.

This seems to be the playbook they are using now. I expect that they will eventually roll the search for whomever leaked to CNN about the President’s phone calls with foreign heads of state into their response.

I don’t think this is going to go away any time soon. What I don’t know is whether it will be overtaken by the next scandal and just become part of the background noise of the President and his administration.

Open thread!

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Updating the Analysis On the Russian Bounties On US & Coalition Forces Reporting & the New Reporting On the President’s Calls With Foreign Leaders

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The administration has been all over the map today in their attempts to explain and explain away the unfolding and evolving reporting on how Russian military intelligence, the GRU, has been offering bounties to the Taliban and Taliban affiliated officials to entice them to kill US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The White House Press Secretary kicked things off by asserting that the US Intelligence Community (IC) had differing opinions regarding this intelligence and because there was no consensus, it was not briefed to the President. The Press Secretary also stated that the President has still not been briefed on this matter!!!!

She made her statements shortly after it was reported that the US Congress would be given a briefing on this intelligence, reading them onto what the IC knows and is reporting. The briefing was done at the White House. This reporting was clarified about an hour later: the briefing would only be for Republicans. And while we now know that the Democrats in Congress will get a briefing on this tomorrow, doing it this way is a SERIOUS PROBLEM!!!! The reason we have a Gang of 8 – the Speaker and Minority Leader in the House, the Majority and Minority Leaders in the Senate, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees in each chamber – is to ensure that everyone gets briefed on this stuff at the same time. This is also the reason we are supposed to have a bipartisan intelligence oversight process within both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) where everyone gets briefed at the same time. And the reason that the Gang of 8 or the members of both parties on the intelligence committees get briefed at the same time is to prevent accusations that one side is being told something the other side isn’t. To avoid the politicization of intelligence. And to prevent one side from being told something the other side isn’t.

As I type this, Congressman Schiff, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has just told Chris Hayes that the Republicans on his committee are boycotting the committee hearings. He indicated that despite these hearing being unclassified and on unclassified matters, the Republican members of the committee don’t believe the hearings are secure enough because they’re being done by video-teleconference or include video-teleconferencing, so they’re boycotting them. This is a problem in and of itself, but it also exacerbates the problem of the Democrats and the Republicans being briefed separately on this matter by the White House. Because there will be no way for the Democrats to be sure that what they are told tomorrow morning is the same thing that the Republicans were told this afternoon. Especially because the Republican members of Congress who were briefed this afternoon immediately took steps to frame what they were told so as to reset and reframe the reporting on this issue. Here’s the statement from Republican Congressmen McCaul and Kinzinger:

Updating the Analysis On the Russian Bounties On US & Coalition Forces Reporting & the New Reporting On the President's Calls With Foreign Leaders

Not a terrible statement. Of concern is the fact that both the Director of National Intelligence and the White House Chief of Staff who were involved in the briefing were two of the most divisively partisan members of the Republican caucus in the House until they were tapped this spring to go to work for the administration in positions that neither are qualified for. Another Republican member of the House who was briefed, who, like Congressman Kinzinger, is a veteran, issued a far more detailed statement in a tweet thread. A statement that shows just how the intelligence is going to be framed and who is responsible for all of this:

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The Information About the Russian Bounties On US And Coalition Service Members Evolves

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Since The New York Times broke the news that Russia’s GRU had been placing bounties on US and coalition forces in Afghanistan, bounties that were being pursued by the Taliban and Taliban aligned militias, the reporting has evolved. Within several hours The Washington Post had confirmed the reporting. This was followed by Fox News. Then CNN confirmed and expanded the reporting to include that our EU allies intelligence services had also confirmed the original reporting. The New York Times has now confirmed CNN’s expansion of their reporting. As has Sky News, also a Murdoch property like Fox News. NBC News has also confirmed the reporting. Finally, The NY Times is now reporting that US Special Operations Forces and military intelligence had reported this information up their chains of command as early as January this year.

The President and his administration are, of course, pushing back. The current Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, tweeted out a denial, based on a quick internal review of records, that the President and the Vice President had been briefed. What he did not deny or pushback on was the actual substance of the reporting. Specifically, that Russian military intelligence, the GRU, has been offering bounties for US and coalition forces in Afghanistan to the Taliban and Taliban aligned militias. The Press Secretary also issued a similar denial to DNI Ratcliffe’s. Former Acting DNI Grennell tweeted out a complete denial as a response to Congressman Lieu’s tweeting about this that covered the briefings and the intelligence assessment that the GRU had taken out bounties on US and coalition forces. Grennell was then dragged by Chief Warrant Officer (ret) Jim Wright for not knowing what he’s talking about, which is a fact as Grennell has no intelligence experience, but a lot of experience spilling sensitive and classified information when serving as the US ambassador to Germany. The President also got in on the denials, tweeting out his own denial that he’d been briefed, as well as the Vice President and his new Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, but not denying the reporting about the intelligence assessment. He then went on to assert no one has ever been tougher on Russia and attack The New York Times, VP Biden, and his son Hunter. It also doesn’t help that the President’s tweet came out after the Russian embassy’s that appears to mimic key phrases from the Russian’s twitter denial.

The Russian Bounties On US And Coalition Service Members Evolves

The Russian Bounties On US And Coalition Service Members Evolves 1

Here’s what I think is really going on. I have no doubt the intel is solid and the leak is accurate. It has been confirmed by too many different sources, including our allies, and reported in too many different competing news outlets. Including Fox and Sky, which given their ownership and editorial stance, are sympathetic to the President. The new DNI, John Ratcliffe who also has ABSOLUTELY NO EXPERIENCE WITH INTELLIGENCE, did not deny the underlying truth in the leak in his response – that the GRU had been offering and paying bounties to the Taliban and Taliban affiliated militia to kill US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He just denied that the President had been briefed, which was also the official White House position and that includes the denial the President tweeted out. While former Acting DNI Grennell has now weighed in claiming that all of it is a lie in a tweet responding to Congressman Ted Lieu, frankly Grennell might not have been in the loop. All we know is that this was assessed and then briefed sometime up to the beginning of March. It may have been briefed before Grennell took over, though he was installed in February. The reason for that is that as soon as this got to the theater commander and the US ambassador in Afghanistan from the Special Operations Forces and military intelligence personnel in theater, it would have been sent back as a priority for the National Command Authority’s situational awareness. The President’s denial that his new Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows was not briefed means nothing, because Meadows didn’t become the White House Chief of Staff until March 31st and then didn’t really start on site until mid April because he had to self quarantine for two weeks. So he wouldn’t have even been around based on the timeline being reported.

What we’re seeing in these denials are semantic games around the words brief and briefing. The NY Times reporting indicates this intelligence was included in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). We know, from previous reporting, that the President does not and will not read his PDB. And we know from previous reporting that his primary briefers tend to not tell him anything negative about Russia, or anything else that would upset him, because he immediately loses his temper and blows up the briefing. My take is that it was in the PDB, which covered the intelligence community’ butts, but that because the President doesn’t read that and because no one will risk a temper tantrum by briefing him on anything Russia does that is negative, that it was never formally briefed. As in told to him in a session on a calendar with a block of time marked briefing. I would expect, however, that someone did mention it to him some other way. As an aside, in a different setting, what have you. Which is why they are being so precise in denying he was briefed. Notice they’re not denying he was told or notified, just not briefed. It is important to remember that the President had at least a 1/2 dozen phone calls with Putin between March and June. And those are the formal ones we know about because they were official. It does not count him talking to Putin on his private cell phone from the residence at night or early in the morning before he bothers to actually go into the Oval Office.

Mark Zaid, who was of counsel for the whistleblower has publicly offered to represent any and all US intel or nat-sec personnel who have knowledge of this, can confirm it, and wish to formally blow the whistle. Specifically that he and his firm will take the case pro bono and ensure that all the proper forms, formats, and processes are taking to ensure that the whistleblower complies with the law and is protected. We’ll have to wait to see where that goes.

The Washington Post is now reporting that US and coalition forces were, in fact, killed in action in Afghanistan as a result of the bounties offered by the GRU. Given that no one in or around the President, with the exception of Grennell, has even attempted to deny the actual underlying facts of the reporting, this story is only going to get worse. If the principals knew about this because they all get the PDB  – any and/or all of the Director (or acting) of National Intelligence, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Senior Directors for Afghanistan and for Russia on the National Security Staff who work for the National Security Advisor – and they should have and they never actually said anything to the President, then all of them are derelict in their duties and need to be removed from their positions. If it was in the Presidential Daily Brief and neither the President, nor the Vice President read it because they can’t be bothered to read them, then they are derelict in their duties and need to be removed from their positions. What we know now is not the end of this story. I expect more information will come out, it will continue to be damning, and the President and his surrogates will try to ignore the underlying reality while lashing out at those who are reporting it. All while we have US and allied coalition forces in contact with the enemy in Afghanistan. An enemy that is being monetarily incentivized to kill them by the GRU/Russian military intelligence. If this failure to do anything to make Russia stop what they’re doing, from the most basic issuance of a démarche telling Putin to stop, let alone anything resembling real pushback, is not a clear example of a high crime and misdemeanor, then nothing is

Open thread.

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Those Northern Radiation Observations

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Nations to the northwest of Russia reported slightly increased levels of radiation on several days in June. The levels were harmless to human health and the environment.  

The isotopes observed include Cs-134, Cs-137, Ru-103, I-131, and isotopes of cobalt. The possible source region for the June 22 and 23 observations was calculated by the monitoring organization for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBTO), which has isotope monitoring stations around the world. The tweet doesn’t say this, but that region was probably calculated by considering the winds during that period. (Lassina Zerbo is the director of the CTBTO.)

Iodine-131 was observed at more northerly stations and on different days than the other isotopes. It has a half-life of 8 days and is a fission product, as are the other isotopes except for cobalt. Cobalt is an activation product of the steel containment vessel for a reactor. It seems likely that these observations come from a leaking nuclear reactor, but where?

Russia has reactors in the suspect area, but officials there have said that none of them have leaked.

Last week, a test of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile was thought to be planned for the Kapustin Yar test site, north of the Caspian Sea.

Nothing more than a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) was announced by the Russian government, so it’s not clear why this exclusion would have been for Burevestnik in particular. Up until now, Burevestnik tests have been further north. The deadly test of last year was within the area calculated by the CTBTO.

There’s not enough information to conclude anything more than that these emissions were from a reactor. Russia is party to conventions requiring it to provide information on accidents involving the release of radiation. The other nations within the possible source area have been conscientious about their adherence to those conventions. Russia hasn’t.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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What the President and the US National Command Authority Should Have Done In Response To Russia Taking Out Bounties On US & Coalition Military Personnel In Afghanistan

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As Cheryl has noted for us, The NY Times has reported that a Russian military intelligence unit, for those playing along at home, this would be a GRU unit, is taking out bounties on US and coalition military personnel deployed in Afghanistan. According to the reporting, the US Intelligence Community came to this conclusion and briefed it to the President and the principles within the National Command Authority no later than March of this year. At that point the National Security Staff of the National Security Council developed a package of responses ranging from issuing a démarche to the Russian government demanding that they stop to escalating sanctions to “other possible responses”. But, “the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.”

Let me repeat that: THE WHITE HOUSE HAS YET TO AUTHORIZE ANY STEP!!!!!!

I want to be really, really, really, really clear about what Russia, via the GRU, has been doing with these bounties against US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. It has been waging war against the US and our coalition partners, many of whom are our NATO allies, by proxy through Taliban backed or affiliated militia and irregular forces. In short, they have been waging a form of low intensity, irregular, and unconventional war against the US and our partners and allies in Afghanistan. US concept, doctrine, and law regarding how to respond to state directed cyberattacks and subverting influence operations undertaking by Russian military intelligence may not be adequate to formally state that those operations, which have been ongoing against the US and our allies and partners since at least 2014 are, in fact and in law, acts of war. But they are clear about what Russia’s GRU is doing in Afghanistan and what the GRU is doing in Afghanistan is waging war against the US and our allied coalition partners.

The President and the National Command Authority should have pushed back forcefully and hard as soon as this was brought to their attention. A démarche demanding the Russian government immediately desist should have been issued immediately. It should have delineated a very short window of time for Russia to stop its actions against US and coalitions forces, and if/when they didn’t comply, then the US response should have escalated. US Cyber Command, along with the cyber operations components of the CIA, should have been tasked with a swift and harsh response against Russian targets through the cyber domain if the diplomatic pushback failed. At the same time, US Special Operations Command should have been tasked with two overlapping missions if the diplomatic pushback failed. The first was to put SEALs, whose specialty is hunting, capturing, killing, and/or rescuing, into the Afghan theater with a very focused assignment: find the GRU personnel responsible for taking out the bounties and the Taliban affiliated militias and irregular forces who had accepted them, capture them if possible, and kill them if necessary. The second was to put small teams – Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs) – of US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, into the theater to conduct our own unconventional warfare operations against the Russian intelligence units and the Taliban aligned militias and irregulars they were partnering with. The Green Berets primary mission set is unconventional warfare. They are the best at it and should have been deployed, along with the SEALs, as soon as it became clear that responses through diplomatic channels had failed. This sequence of operations: diplomacy via a démarche and, if that failed, then a cyber response and two separate, but related special operations responses would create time and space for the development of plans and sequels to escalate as necessary. None of this has, of course, happened!

One of the primary reasons that Putin either authorizes and approves these types of operations against the US and our allies and partners, or tolerates them as freelancing provided they are successful, is because he has faced no real negative consequences for the war he has been waging against us and our allies and partners for the better part of the last decade! His irredentism in Georgia and then in Ukraine, his cyber war against our Baltic allies, his attempts to destabilize Finland, his ongoing interference in Ukrainian politics to reestablish what he thinks should be Russia’s near abroad, his use of the Wagner Group, a private military company (PMC) against the US, its allies and partners in Syria and other places, is all because he feels that he can get away with it. That the only country that could really stop him is the US and the only coalition that could do so is a US led NATO. And since that never happens, he is free to pursue his goal of leveling the international system so as to provide Russia, as an extension of himself, with greater power and leverage than it would otherwise have based on its relative economic and military power.

Putin’s actions have repeatedly demanded a much stronger response than he has actually received. To be very honest and to mark my beliefs to market, when it was clear that Putin was going to invade Crimea, and then did so, my assessment provided to the US senior military leader I was advising at that time was: “no one is going to risk a war with a nuclear power state over Crimea”. And while this was true, and we did not, the reality was that we should have. I was wrong. Putin’s invasion of Crimea needed to be met with force. The US and NATO should have mobilized to retake it for Ukraine and, while doing so, rolled up Russia’s little green men – whether Russian intelligence and special forces or Wagner Group mercenaries – and the Russian backed separatists in eastern Ukraine at the same time. I am aware now, as I was then, that Russian doctrine is to use nuclear weapons within the theater of operations when confronted with losing in a conventional war. In hindsight, we should have called their bluff. We did not do it then when Obama was president and it is certainly not going to happen with our current president; especially given that while he was being made aware that Russia was targeting our troops, as well as our allies, in Afghanistan, the President was inviting Putin to rejoin the G7 because the G8 just sounds better.

Until Putin is punched in the nose and knocked on his ass, he’s going to keep doing these things. I guarantee that it is only a matter of time until we find out that the GRU has been offering similar bounties against US and coalition forces operating in Syria and Iraq. Until Putin faces some real consequences for his actions and those of his subordinates who are successfully freelancing, he will continue to wage his 21st century form of war against the US, our allies, and our partners. The longer we wait to provide him with real consequences, the more likely it becomes that when we do, we will have limited ourselves to options that are very, very costly.

Open thread!

 

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The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

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The President, Republican members of the House and the Senate, Fox News personalities and talking heads, the President’s surrogates on other broadcast and cable news shows, the conservative social, digital, and news media, and the President’s campaign officials and surrogates have been calling for the release of the email that former Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor (AP-NSA) Susan Rice sent to herself in January 2017 as a memorialization of the meeting about what the FBI’s counterintelligence officials had been discovering about LTG (ret) Flynn and his activities before he joined the President’s 2016 campaign, during the campaign, and during the transition.

This was purposefully conflated with unmasking by Congressman Nunes as part of his agitprop that President  Obama and his senior officials spied on the President’s campaign, including seeking to unmask LTG (ret) Flynn in signals intelligence collected on foreign targets. When the Trump administration declassified and released Rice’s email to herself, they only declassified and released part of it. Which, of course, led to screaming and yelling about coverups and conspiracies. Dr. Rice has long requested they declassify the whole email, as well as the transcripts of LTG (ret) Flynn’s calls with Ambassador Kislyak, as well as other Russian officials, and officials from other countries. Earlier today the Trump administration declassified and released the remainder of Dr. Rice’s email and no surprises at all, there’s nothing untoward at all in it.

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

As can be clearly seen from reading the email, no one involved did anything untoward, unethical, and/or illegal. As was the case with the unmasking conspiracy theory, there is no there there.

Here is Dr. Rice’s statement from this afternoon:

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 1 The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 2

And while Republican elected officials* and their surrogates are trying to spin this as evidence of illegality, it isn’t. And the most amusing part of today is that Senator Graham hung his tuchas way, way, way, way out over the edge this morning expecting to turn this into a scandal that he could weaponize on behalf of the President’s, as well as his own, reelection chances.

Ooopsie!!!!!

To quickly summarize:

  1. Dr. Rice’s email to herself memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting with President Obama, VP Biden, FBI Director Comey, herself, and several others clearly indicates that nothing untoward, unethical, and/or illegal took place. Rather, President Obama made it very clear that everything was to be done by the book.
  2. The release of the entire email further undercuts the Congressman Devin Nunes created agitprop and conspiracy theory that President Obama ordered the FBI to spy on the President’s 2016 campaign and he knows this because the evidence is being covered up in Dr. Rice’s email to herself, which is classified.
  3. That email is now declassified and released and once again Congressman Nunes is unmasked as a none too bright, conspiracy mongering fabulist.
  4. The declassification and release of Dr. Rice’s entire email memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting undercuts Senator Graham’s plans for a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation to get to the bottom of these allegations, because the declassified email shows those allegations to be complete bullshit.

Open thread

* Obligatory:

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