Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Cillizza, who will never be asked to bring the noodle salad to the mensa picnic…

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Everybody saw this coming.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

“But what about the lurkers?”

I’m going back to the respite thread.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

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MLK: from Dreaming to Reality

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Among the most painful bits of Dr. King’s legacy is how so much of it’s reduced to “I Have a Dream.” It’s true that it’s a landmark speech, powerful and moving…

…and always heard out of context of the other, more direct speeches that graced the March on Washington (a March organized by an openly Gay Man, no less – go look up the badass Bayard Rustin, please and thank you!). As if  the marchers just wanted to spend all day on their feet, listening to platitudes and winsome ideas!

I’m not going to dive into that context, I assume your Google button ain’t broke. :) What I will do, is talk about a couple of other works by Dr. King, works that ground him in the realities he fought to overcome, and that echo into these times.

The text for the afternoon will be taken from two works from near Dr. King’s passing:

  • “The Drum Major Instinct,” (hereafter DRUM), which you can listen to here, and read here, and
  • “A New Sense of Direction,” (hereafter SENSE), which you can read here.

I post all this to encourage you to read/listen to the above in full. To underline that Dr. King was far richer a thinker and even rabble-rouser than gets noticed — that the Hoover FBI feared him for damned good reasons. If you chose to read the above docs, and skip the rest of this? HELL YA!

But for those who want more? Follow…

See, Dr. King did not buy into a color-blind society. That wasn’t the context he gave his “Dream” speech under. The context, the fuller context of his work and life’s mission, is made plain by this remarkable passage in DRUM:

 

[…]when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You’re just as poor as Negroes.”

And I said, “You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.

And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.”

Now that’s a fact. That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, (Make it plain) he is forced to support his oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can’t hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.

And there’s so much more.

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A Sunday Night True Story

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Once upon a time, between 2016 and 2018, I got it wrong. On the front page and in the comments. Over and over and over again. While I recognized that Trump had around a 30% chance of winning in 2016, I thought it unlikely to happen. Unfortunately, the antiquated relic know as the Electoral College went off as it is occasionally wont to do.

What I really got wrong, however, is just how little resiliency our political systems and structures actually had to withstand what we all lived through. I made that mistake because I fell back on what I learned in my education and training as a political scientist, as well as my experience with career civil servants during my time serving on civilian mobilization orders with the Army and DOD. Specifically, that it is exceedingly difficult to overcome then inertia that is a career civil servant.

As a result, I convinced myself that our system was stronger than it was and would hold more firmly against Trump, his appointees, and their agenda. I overestimated what Robert Mueller would do, underestimated what Trump’s appointees, employees, family members, campaign officials, Republican elected and party officials, and surrogates would do to undermine Mueller’s investigation. And I told that to all of you in front page posts and in the comments. I was wrong. And a lot of you suffered as a result of my incorrect assurances.

I won’t make the same mistake twice.

I failed as a front pager between 20-6 and 2018. Instead of helping to make you all better informed and smarter, I made you dumber. I gave you false hope. I helped to make things worse.

Maybe we’ll get really, really lucky and everything will break just right and we’ll thread the needle again in November 2022 and November 2024 the way we did in November 2020. But right n0w Republican controlled state legislatures are doing everything they can to ensure that does not happen. That it doesn’t matter how many voters are registered or mobilized through changing the law to suppress the votes or make them irrelevant by allowing state legislatures to substitute their preferences for the actual will of the voters. That through even more extreme gerrymanders, these elected officials will even more precisely pick their voters rather than allowing the voters to pick their elected representatives. We are quickly regressing to how the US functioned at the state level prior to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed and the Supreme Court took the Reconstruction amendments seriously.

I was not sufficiently skeptical and paranoid in 2016, 2017, and into 2018. I won’t make that mistake again.

I have no idea how this story ends, though as you all know, I’m not particularly bullish about the potential outcomes, so to be continued…

Open thread!

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For the Record Open Thread: *No* Voting Fraud

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Apart, of course, from the persistent Repub claim of ‘massive voter fraud’…

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A Couple of Things To Keep In Mind as Mark Meadows Just Desserts Are Being Considered and, Perhaps, Prepared For Him

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As Mark Meadows travails continue, I want to focus on a couple of related things. They both deal directly with the memo he was pushing, and which has become a focus of his contempt of Congress hearing, but in different ways.

The memo raises a number of overlapping issues that we need greater clarity on:

  1. Trump and several members of his White House senior staff like Meadows were clearly in on this.
  2. Meadows read an unknown number of GOP members of the House and the Senate on to the strategy delineated in the memo. The only one we know explicitly from the news reporting is Mike Lee. We don’t know, but can guess at some of the rest. We also don’t know if Meadows read in Trump’s lickspittle acting appointees at DOD: Miller, Patel, MacGregor, Cohen-Watnick. I’ve now seen reporting that Meadows or someone else sent the memo to Ratcliffe at ODNI, but he denies ever seeing it. And We don’t know if that Assistant AG Clark got it, but given his behavior we have to assume he did.
  3. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM – Republican members of the House and Senate and/or their staffers, members of the administration, outside surrogates and allies – bothered to actually alert the authorities. Or even leak it it the news media as a way to try to prevent it and cover their own asses. Not that I think the news media would have covered it. They’d have held it for a book to be published later.
  4. The referenced in the reporting as partially responsible for creating the memo, COL (ret) Waldron is a 37A MOS. For the non-military/not veterans that’s a Psychological Operations officer. Allegedly his role in all of this is he’s Mike Flynn’s PSYOPer in whatever it is Flynn is actually doing.
  5. The news media, especially the political reporters that cover the White House, Congress, and what Trump is doing don’t seem too interested in actually reporting this. They comment about it on Twitter. In the case of Costa he refers, via Twitter, to his book. But it hasn’t been on the nightly network broadcasts until tonight’s contempt hearing. It’s certainly not been on FOX. CNN has covered it a bit. MSNBC has and will continue to cover it. It hasn’t on the front page of the NY Times or WaPo and it certainly isn’t in the Wall Street Journal. We now have as close to a smoking gun as possible that senior members of the Trump administration, in coordination with his personal attorneys and people working with them, developed an actual plan to overthrow the Constitution and they read in an unknown number of Republican senators and representatives. And the news media has decided to instead focus on whatever it is they’re focusing on.

Here’s a copy of the memo as a pdf:

voter-fraud

I do want to make one point before getting to the other related item. This contempt hearing is not just intended to hold Meadows in contempt, it is intended to disturb the network around Trump and see what happens without disrupting or taking down that network. Basically, the House Select Committee on the events of 6 January is running an influence operation on Trump and Trump world. How do I know? This is how I know:

Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have now all been exposed as not being fully supportive of Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and overthrow the constitutional order. Donald Trump, Jr. has as well. And Meadows agreed with each of them. Reading those tweets during a live broadcast of the committee hearing is intended to incense Trump setting him up to lash out at Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, and Jr for insufficient fealty and commitment to him. It is also designed to see what Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, Jr, and others do as a result. Panic will be setting in right now about just what, exactly, Meadows turned over to the committee and just who else he implicated before he stopped cooperating. And the results of this will be observable. I don’t know if it will work, but it is an excellent and most unexpected strategy.

The final item I want to discuss as a result of what we’re learning not just about Meadows role in the run up to and on 6 January, but the actual plan itself as delineated in the memo he was circulating is the attempt to create or instigate enough violence to seemingly justify the declaration of a National Security Emergency to stop the electoral vote certification in Congress. I specifically want to focus on this part from Barton Gellman’s excellent long form piece in The Atlantic that was published last week (emphasis mine):

Robert a. pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6.

Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.

“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.

Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.

Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.

Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.

In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”

Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.

Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)

Let’s take Pape’s numbers as the starting point. Based on his survey data that I’ve copied and pasted above from Gellman’s reporting last week, the results indicate 21 million Americans who are thoroughly bought into and locked into Trumpism, MAGA, what Bannon calls the America First agenda, and all the conspiracy theories that go along with them. They’re overwhelmingly white and either evangelical Christian or traditionalist Catholic. When they’re not, they’re orthodox/ultra-orthodox Jews, white hispanics, or not white hispanics who identify as white (think proud boys leader Enrique Tario, who is afro-Cuban and, as such, at the bottom of the highly racialized Cuban-American pecking order in Miami).

So that’s 21 million Americans who are radicalized. The question we need to answer is how many of these folks are really willing to use violence? 10%? 20%? I’ve spent a good chunk of the past week looking through the low intensity warfare literature to see what the estimate is for figuring that out as I didn’t recall their being one off the top of my head. Or, rather, I recall being taught it was 10%, but I’d never actually seen that figure in any of our doctrinal publications. Or anyone else’s for that matter. And I was right. Our doctrine doesn’t have one. Just a formula to estimate how many counterinsurgents you need. So I emailed a former boss who is a retired Green Beret colonel, because I was sure I’d seen or been taught that the estimate was 10% of a radicalized population. He replied that he recalls being taught in his Special Forces officers course in the late 1970s that 10% is the estimator. He cautioned, however, that it is a rough one and will depend on what type of low intensity conflict is going on or possible. So revolutions and rebellions and insurgencies and terror campaigns may not all be estimatable the same way. It also explains where I learned it as I was trained and mentored by retired Green Berets who served in Vietnam.

Regardless, let’s take the 10% estimator. What this means, using Pape’s survey data numbers, is 2,100,000. Which is still a substantial number and problem. Our active duty military, across all branches, is currently 1,489,567. If you throw in the Guard and Reserve, you’ve got about another 600,000 or so. And some of that manpower will be useless. You can’t really use submariners to fight off a domestic rebellion and insurgency.

The real question here is how many of these 2.1 million would actually fight? And that I can’t answer. And I’m not sure anyone else can either. But what we’ve got, to paraphrase Mao, is a 21 million American sea for the actual violent fish to swim in. And that threat environment is more affluent and older that what we’d normally see. And it has deep pocketed, well healed backers. And the bulk of them are not nutbags like Mike Lindell or Patrick Byrne, but very bounded rational actors like the Koch’s, the Mercers, the DeVos/Prince family, the Uhliens, the Murdochs, the Bradleys, etc. And in the case of Bannon, his well heeled benefactor Miles Guo. Guo is alleged to actually be controlled opposition of the Peoples’ Republic of China meaning he is being run by the PRC’s Ministry of State Security to do exactly what he’s doing: infiltrate the Trump movement and help Trump and Bannon further cement control over the GOP and movement conservatism pushing it farther and farther into reactionary authoritarianism.

Open thread!

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My Take On The D.C. National Guard Colonel’s 6 January Memo To Congress

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Earlier John noted the reporting about COL Matthews’ memo to Congress alleging that the Department of the Army is attempting to cover its six (for the non veterans reading this, read six as tuchas) regarding decision making made by LTG Piatt, the Army’s then Director of the Army Staff, and (now) GEN Charles Flynn, then the Army’s Director of Operation and currently the Commanding General of US Army Pacific (USARPAC), in regard to deploying the DC National Guard to relieve the Capitol.

I’ve read the reporting of COL Matthews’ allegations, much of which was previously reported about LTG Piatt’s, GEN Flynn’s, then Army Secretary McCarthy’s, and then Acting Secretary of Defense Miller’s actions and decision making on 6 JAN, and here’s my take. COL Matthews would not have written and submitted this memo without at least the tacit blessing of his former 2 star boss from that day in order to get this information out to rebut the Army IG’s report. The 2 star, MG William Walker, who on 6 JAN was the Commanding General of the DC National Guard, cannot come out and make these allegations himself because of general officer politics and because of his current position as the House Sergeant at Arms. As a result, COL Matthews, who was his Staff Judge Advocate (SJA), has made the allegations to defend both the DC National Guard’s and MG Walker’s reputations. To prevent both from becoming the Army’s official scapegoats.

I can’t prove this. But I’ve served as the senior advisor to a several 2 and 3 star generals and that’s my professional read on the situation. Given that the Staff Judge Advocate is, of course, an attorney and attorney’s memorialize everything of importance, I would expect that COL Matthews has contemporaneous notes. I can’t prove that either, but it would not surprise me.

Beyond that I do not know MG Walker, COL Matthews, LTG Piatt, GEN Flynn, or, as far as I know, anyone at the Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA) Inspector General’s office. I know nothing of them other than what has been reported. But this has all the hallmarks of a general officer to general officer dispute over responsibility for actions or lack thereof taken on 6 JAN.

It will now be up to the House Special Select Committee for 6 JAN to determine who is telling the truth and who is not.

Open thread!

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The Durham Investigation, the Steele Dossier, & Misusing the Department of Justice For Partisan Political Purposes

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Cole asked me to do a post on the Durham investigation and how the usual suspects – Greenwald, Taibbi, the Fox News/OAN/NewsMax/Breitbart/Shapiro/other conservative news and digital news sites, and other Trump world axis of shitbirds – and now CNN with their coverage of it yesterday, are using Durham’s indictments. Specifically, that they are using it to scream and yell that 1) Putin was meddling in US politics in the 2016 election, 2) that the initial meddling eventually became focused on harming HRC and helping Trump, and 3) that Trump, his family members, his senior employees (I know family members and employees are the same category), and his campaign people – senior and junior – were all trying to figure out how to leverage Russia’s ops for Trump’s gain was all completely made up oppo. That this then demonstrates a real conspiracy between the law firm HRC’s campaign and the DNC used. And which is now being used to further try to discredit Marc Elias, the FBI, the Obama administration, especially his DCI and DNI, John McCain, and the mainstream news media to try to prevent a Trump presidency and then destroy it once Trump was elected. NONE OF THAT IS TRUE OR FACTUALLY ACCURATE!!!

The reality is really much simpler. What Durham is doing is exactly what Barr intended him to do when he appointed Durham as a special counsel in addition to his regular duties as a US Attorney. Barr intended Durham and his investigation to discredit every connection that has been made between Trump, his family, his business, his campaign, his administration, and his impeachment defenses with Putin, Russian intelligence, and the Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs working for Putin to achieve his objectives regarding the US. Barr, for all intents and purposes, established Durham as a special counsel so that Durham could run his own active measures campaign of disinformation, misinformation, and agitprop against the US from within the DOJ. Specifically:

  1. Use the investigation to continue to launder the disinformation, misinformation, and agitprop that the entire investigation into and that all the allegations of Trump’s business and financial connections to Russia, Russian oligarchs, and other post-Soviet oligarchs aligned with Russia
  2. Putin’s operation to interfere in the 2016 elections and American politics beyond 2016 first to hurt the chances of anyone who might take a hard line against him as president, then to damage Clinton’s chances, and finally to boost Trump’s
  3. Trump’s, his family member’s, his campaigns, and a number of outside supporters attempts to actually get help from Putin’s assets – both inside and outside of the Russian government
  4. To promote the idea that the real conspiracy against American in the 2016 election – to falsely allege and implicate the Trump-Putin connection – was that of the Democratic Party, the large white shoe law firms that work for them, MI6 via Steele, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and senior appointed and career officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the DOJ, the FBI, select Republican senators like John McCain, and the Ukrainian government

Again; NONE OF THIS IS TRUE OR FACTUALLY ACCURATE!!!!

To do this, Durham has produced three indictments. The first is sort of a throw away. He caught a junior attorney at the FBI who prepared one of the FISA warrants for one of the lower level Trump campaign stooges. The FBI attorney had embellished some of the information included to get the warrant. He ultimately attorney pled out. Everyone reasonably thought that this was a face saver for Durham because he didn’t have anything because there was no way to actually accomplish what he was tasked with doing because what he was tasked with doing was in direct opposition to well documented facts and events. Durham, however, has other ideas.

He has now indicted a very senior attorney – Michael Sussman – who brought the Steele dossier to the attention of senior FBI and DOJ officials. The indictment is for lying to the FBI for not explicitly telling them that the large white shoe law firm he works for was also, through other attorneys, representing the Clinton campaign with the implication that he concealed who else his firm represented – Clinton – in an attempt to induce the FBI to investigate Trump. The indictment is considered to be weak. It is clear from the interview notes that the senior FBI official, James Baker, did not ask him where he worked because he knew where he worked. Here’s Ken White’s, better known as Popehat, take:

/8 However, there are distinctly odd things about this indictment that take it outside the norm. First: it’s based on a face-to-face oral statement with one government witness, Baker. I don’t recall seeing another 1001 case like that.

/9 FBI agents travel in pairs, like Jedi or geese. Baker wasn’t an agent, but it’s super-unusual in my experience for an executive-level law enforcement like this to have a meeting like this with no witnesses for their support and protection. Weirder to hang a charge on it.

/10 On the one hand, Baker has expressed uncertainty about the details of the conversation, on the other hand, there is some corroboration about the conversation. But just the fact of a 1001 based on that scenario isn’t anything I recall seeing before.

/11 Next: the 27-page indictment is, to my reading, performative and seemingly focused on delivering a narrative of Trump-as-victim rather than a necessary exposition about Sussman’s alleged crime. It’s a one-count 1001; that usually doesn’t require so much verbiage.

/12 In evaluating whether my take is reasonable or partisan or a mixture, you could compare it to the indictment of Trump ally and indie cartoon character Roger Stone, 24 pages for obstruction and 5 1001 counts. justice.gov/file/1124706/d

/13 To my read Stone’s is more focused on providing context for his statements and Sussman’s seems more political narrative driven, but that’s why you should read primary documents — to decide for yourself.

/14 If Sussman did what he’s accused of, I think it’s a clear 1001 violation. Whether it would “normally” be charged, whether it’s charged in a way designed to promote a political narrative, and whether it’s politically motived are vastly more complicated questions.

His third indictment is of the researcher – Igor Danchenko – that Steele hired to act as his investigator with a variety of Russian, post Soviet, and Russian aligned actors to get the opposition research for him. Here, again, is Ken White’s take:

A few comments on the Danchenko indictment. /1 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco

/2 First, it’s on firmer footing than Durham’s Sussman indictment, which relies on a single person-to-person conversation. It lacks the questionable evidentiary issues of that charge.

/3 second, to an even greater extent than the Sussman indictment, it reads like a justification for Durham’s investigation. 39 pages of exposition for five simple 1001 counts is not normal. It reads like a vehicle for a narrative.

4 Third, like the Sussman indictment, this indictment is about distorting or withholding information that might have helped the FBI assess the credibility of the claims being made. But that’s enough to meet the materiality standard, which is extremely lax.

The key take aways are point 11 in the first set of tweets and point 3 in the second. Durham is using these indictments to launder the Black PSYOP that we covered from October 2019 through the spring of 2020. It is entirely possible that Durham will be able to make his cases against Sussman, Danchenko, or both. Marcy Wheeler has a full breakdown and deep textual dives of exactly what Durham is doing and how it is being laundered in both the conservative news, digital, and social media and what is called the mainstream media like CNN did yesterday.

The question is whether reality will intrude on what Durham is doing regardless of whether he can get convictions or plea agreements from Sussman and/or Danchenko. We know from both the Mueller investigative report sent to Congress, as well as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) report on the 2016 campaign, election, and allegations of Putin interfering on behalf of Trump that the reason Mueller never brought charges of a direct conspiracy between Trump, his family members, his employees, his campaign officials, select outside campaign advisors and actors like Roger Stone and the Russian governmental and non-governmental actors carrying out Putin’s operation is because Trump, his family members, his employees, his campaign officials, select outside campaign advisors and actors were obstructing the Mueller investigation. The section on obstruction in the Mueller Report starts on p. 191 of the linked pdf and on p. 14 of the fifth volume of the linked SSCI report. In some cases these folks were obstructing the investigation in more than one way. For instance, Rudy Giuliani who was an outside advisor and surrogate for Trump during the campaign worked hard to ensure he’d be Trump’s pro-bono outside legal advisor and counsel during the Mueller investigation.

What the Durham investigation and indictments are doing is what former AG Barr intended them to do: use the DOJ to launder misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop about how Christopher Steele collected his opposition information, the actual information he collected, and how that information was used once it got brought to the attention of elected officials like the late Senator McCain and counterintelligence and law enforcement officials at the DOJ and FBI. Barr started trying to discredit Mueller and his investigation before he was ever appointed attorney general. In fact the lengthy memo he sent Trump delineating why Mueller’s investigation wasn’t properly predicated served as his application for becoming attorney general. Durham is the last part, that we know of, of Barr’s attempts to cover up what happened in 2016.

The usual suspects, such as Greenwald, who are now using what Durham is producing to push their own agendas are largely covering their own asses. Wikileaks has now been fully exposed as what we always knew it to be. Not a truth telling, stalwart, information must be free group seeking to hold governments and the powerful accountable, but an asset of the Russian intelligence services run by a paranoid, megalomaniacal authoritarian with delusions of grandeur. What Greenwald, and Greenwald’s partners in these endeavors – Taibbi, Tracey, Mate, and others – are hoping t0o obscure is just how tightly connected to Assange and Wikileaks Greenwald is. Promoting what Durham is alleging as the real, actual truth is necessary for Greenwald to cover his own ass. Not for being involved in Wikileaks 2016 operations against the US, but in regard to his work with Wikileaks prior to that.

This is different than what the Breitbrats, Ben Shapiro, dim Jim Hoft, OANN, NewsMax, the evening talking heads at Fox, and others on the pro-Trump/MAGA right are promoting. They are promoting it because it is part of their grift.

Bannon and Stone are sort of in the middle. They have connections to Wikileaks from the 2016 campaign, but they also want to promote their grifts.

CNN just wants people to tune in so they have better ratings and can sell more advertising.

Durham’s investigation is using the Department of Justice to provide them with the disinformation, misinformation, and agitprop to provide all of them with what they need.

Open thread!

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At last, Beltway introspection!

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I remember the first time it occurred to me that the mainstream media’s political coverage is hot garbage. I can’t even remember what occasioned the thought, but it was during the single term of the first George Bush. I’m sure it was egregiously bad before that, but that’s when I noticed.

So, as a reader/viewer who’s long believed that a Beltway reckoning for the terrible, awful, no-good political coverage is desperately needed, my eyes were drawn to a linked title from Axios, one of the worst current offenders: Epic Media Fail. Introspection? Please and thank you! Oh wait…

A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI.

Why it matters: It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.

You know what’s been motherfucking tepid — or actually nonexistent in most cases? Any introspection about mainstream media outlets’ collaboration with known right-wing extremists to kneecap Hillary Clinton and elevate a walking collection of untreated personality disorders to the Oval Office. The New York Times was an especially irresponsible party in that shameful enterprise.

For example, it was distinctly unhelpful for that outlet to allow nitwit political reporters to project their personal psychodramas onto candidates and build brands by squirreling away tidbits for books to be published in the catastrophic aftermath. It was and remains nauseating. But back to the current “reckoning.”

Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency that helped drive a narrative of collusion between former President Trump and Russia.

Oh for fuck’s sweet sake, for real? The “narrative of collusion” got a big assist early in the campaign when then-candidate Trump went on national television and asked the Russians to hack Clinton’s email, which they promptly did. It was further established when Trump’s idiot namesake fail-son gushed, “If it’s what you say, I love it!” in response to an offer of oppo dirt from Russia. And it was etched in stone and then plated with gold when Trump busted out the shine box and polished Putin’s wingtips before a worldwide audience in Helsinki. Also:

It also helped drive an even bigger wedge between former President Trump and the press at the very beginning of his presidency.

I’m just a humble reader/viewer, but I think the “wedge between former President Trump and the press” might have first formed when the demagogue directed a Two Minutes Hate at the press pen at every pre-presidential rally. It may have hardened on Trump’s first day in office when his press secretary angrily and aggressively lied to assembled reporters about the poorly attended inauguration.

It’s so perversely in character — when the shittiest Villagers finally embrace introspection, they conclude they were too skeptical of and critical toward Donald Fucking Trump. Open thread.

At last, Beltway introspection!Post + Comments (80)