Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This fight is for everything.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Han shot first.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

What fresh hell is this?

The revolution will be supervised.

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

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

The house always wins.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

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

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Call the National Guard if your insurrection lasts more than four hours.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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An Unexamined Scandal

BOLO: Can You Help The FBI Identify This Domestic Terrorist?

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Do you know this man?

BOLO: Can You Help The FBI Identify This Domestic Terrorist?

Yesterday, some of the extremist insurrectionists that Trump had mobilized to overthrow the US Congress, the Constitution, and the constitutional order, had the goal of taking the Vice President, the Senate and House leadership, and other members of the Senate and the House and their staff hostage to either coerce them by the threat of force or the application of actual force to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and reinstall Trump as president.

That’s what this guy was up to:

Neck Gaiter pulled way up over his nose to obscure his face and make it hard to identify him? Check. Black Rifle Coffee Company Ball Cap pulled way down to obscure his face and make it hard to identify him? Check. Tennessee Blue Line Flag patch? Check. Punisher skull superimposed on the American Flag patch? Check. Flex cuffs? Check. Micro-compact semi-automatic pistol or small taser? Check. Replacement magazines in the pouches on the left side of his plate carrier? Check. Mace in the pouch on the right side of his plate carrier? Check. Smartphone in the middle of his plate carrier streaming his involvement in the attempt to overthrow the Congress of the United States, the US Constitution, and the constitutional order? Check!

Well Bloomberg’s tech reporter William Turton got him on video at the Grand Hyatt DC with his mask off:

Some intrepid folks made stills:

Here he is on video entering the Capitol with the seeming blessing of the Capitol Police:

If you know who this domestic terrorist is, the FBI would like to know:

Details:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Washington Field Office is seeking the public’s assistance in identifying individuals who made unlawful entry into the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

 

Submit a Tip:

Anyone with information regarding these individuals, or anyone who witnessed any unlawful violent actions at the Capitol or near the area, is asked to contact the FBI’s Toll-Free Tipline at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) to verbally report tips. You may also submit any information, photos, or videos that could be relevant online at fbi.gov/USCapitol. You may also contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.

Field Office: Washington D.C.

Submit an anonymous Tip online

Open thread!

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One Of the Major Stories of Today’s Violent, Armed Revolt Is the Willful Failure of the Capitol Police

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I do not know who is in charge of the Capitol Police’s risk and threat assessment, but whomever it is needs to be terminated for their failures. And not just failures today, but the failures in strategic, critical, creative, and historical thinking that did not have sufficient personnel on site to handle what was clearly a possibility happening today: an attempt to breach the Capitol. Back on 8 November 2020 I did a threat assessment regarding the transition for someone and I covered this as a general possibility as part of a larger section.

We know that the Capitol Police are able to do proper threat assessments, forecasting, and then over responding to just peaceful protests. For example, the overreaction to the ADAPT protests at Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s office back in 2017:

Here’s the pictures as stand alones:

One Of the Major Stories of Today's Violent, Armed Revolt Is the Willful Failure of the Capitol Police

One Of the Major Stories of Today's Violent, Armed Revolt Is the Willful Failure of the Capitol Police 1

One Of the Major Stories of Today's Violent, Armed Revolt Is the Willful Failure of the Capitol Police 2

One Of the Major Stories of Today's Violent, Armed Revolt Is the Willful Failure of the Capitol Police 3

The ADAPT protestors were both peaceful and disabled, as you can see from the pictures the Capitol Police had no problem exerting necessary force to remove them. But a bunch of white Trump supporters? RETREAT!!!!!!

This appears to be the initial entry into the Capitol:

I’d also really like to know who in the Capitol unlocked and opened the locked side door on the east side of the complex allowing the armed, violent, extremists to breach into the building. Was it a staffer for one of the GOP members of the House and Senate who helped to inspire and foment this? Was it a member of the Capitol Police? Those doors are always locked because they don’t have manned security. Someone had to unlock it and open it from the inside, so who was it?

And let’s be really honest with ourselves, if the extremist insurrectionists today where visibly identifiable as ethnic minorities – Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian – or from a visible religious minority or visibly LGBTQ maximum force would have been directed back at them, elected and appointed officials and the news media would be calling them terrorists, and new, draconian security legislation would already be written to be passed tonight in an emergency session of Congress. Instead we’ve got video of Capitol Police taking selfies with the insurrectionists:

We are way off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread.

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The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!

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Rudy Giuliani: a noun, a verb, a useless idiot!

At 7:15 PM tonight, The Washington Post reported (emphasis mine):

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The intelligence raised concerns that Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, the former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and conversations.

The warnings to the White House, which have not been previously reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.

The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,” particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.

But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

Giuliani visited the White House on Dec. 13, shortly after the House Judiciary Committee voted to proceed with articles of impeachment, and he met with Trump at the president’s resort in Florida eight days later.

Officials’ warnings about Giuliani underscore the concern in the U.S. intelligence community that Russia not only is seeking to reprise the disinformation campaign it waged in 2016, but also may now be aided, unwittingly or otherwise, by individuals close to the president. Those warnings have gained fresh urgency in recent days. The information that Giuliani sought in Ukraine is similar to what is contained in emails and other correspondence published this week by the New York Post, which the paper said came from the laptop of Hunter Biden and were provided by Giuliani and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former top political adviser at the White House.

The Washington Post was unable to verify the authenticity of the alleged communications, which concern Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China.

The former officials said Giuliani was not a target of U.S. surveillance while in Ukraine but was dealing with suspected Russian assets who were, leading to the capture of some of his communications.

Much more at the link!

I’ve been waiting to post on Giuliani’s latest disinformation and agitprop attempt because it was clear something else was going to break. As I tracked the reporting and looked at the materials, I thought it was simply going to be the shifting stories by both the computer repair store owner and Giuliani. Such as Rudy producing paperwork earlier today with Hunter Biden’s signature indicating that if the laptop or laptops were not picked up within 90 days, then they were forfeit to the repair store because he realized the initial story of how he came into possession of the laptops, laptop, and/or hard drive implicated the computer repair story owner and Giuliani in a number of potential crimes.

Or that Rudy was shopping pdfs with metadata indicating that they were created in September and October 2019 months after the laptop or laptops or hard drive were dropped off for repair, not actual emails with the email metadata, but pdfs of emails that he was promoting in October 2019 that have the same disinformation and agitprop just like he supposedly recovered from the abandoned laptop, laptops, and/or hard drives.

Or the fact that they can’t keep the story straight on it being three laptops or a laptop and a hard drive.

Or maybe that someone fed the chan/reddit boards several days ago that this story was coming and did so to signal to the white supremacists and neo-NAZIs by including “88”* in the nym the person was using.

It has been clear for a long time that Rudy was being used by Russian intelligence officers and assets. I’ve written an entire series of posts delineating this in excruciating details over the past year. But what we did not know, though it was a logical suspicion to have, that the US Intelligence Community had signals intelligence (SIGINT) from communications intercepts of Russian assets that clearly indicated this unfortunate reality. We also did not know that they had done their jobs and pushed their assessment up the chain to the Assistant to the President for National Security (AP-NSA) O’Brien, that O’Brien had briefed the President, and that the President blew him off!

We also did not know that the US Intelligence Community had assessed, had briefed up the chain to O’Brien, and that O’Brien then briefed the President to warn him off of Giuliani and the disinformation and agitprop Rudy was pushing as the centerpiece of the President’s defense in his impeachment trial in the Senate! This was, of course part of the plan to turn both chambers of the US Congress into an information laundry for the Russian disinformation and agitprop Rudy was being used to promote, which was then repeated during the hearings Senators Johnson and Grassley held this past August and September.

Giuliani is the poster child for MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Giuliani has been caught on voicemails by reporters, voicemails that resulted from butt dialing on one phone while talking on another because he’s an OPSEC and INFOSEC disaster, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs for providing various undisclosed services for Deity knows whom. So that checks the Money box. His enormous self regard and desire to be relevant and in the spotlight and important is legendary and checks the Ego box. And these together, combined with his terrible Operational Security and Information Security practices make him a collection target for anyone and everyone trying to collect information on the President, check the Compromise box. Given his well documented infidelities, it would not surprise me at all to find out that there is other compromising material on him out there. No one should be shocked to have their suspicions about Giuliani formally confirmed by the US Intelligence Community.

The result of Giuliani’s stupidity and gullibility and outsized belief that he’s some sort of genius high speed, low drag intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement operator is that he has compromised the President of the United States. He has allowed the Russians to penetrate, via a human asset close to the President, the presidency of the United States. During World War II, the USSR was able to penetrate the presidency of the United States by getting people close to FDR – Harry Dexter White, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and confidant of FDR’s and Laughlin Currie, a friend and legal advisor to FDR – to steal national secrets and pass them along. Their successor agencies in today’s Russia have found their modern Laughlin Currie in Rudy Giuliani, a friend and legal advisor to the current President of the United States.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Updated at 9:35 PM EDT

That didn’t take long and it is exactly what I expected was going to happen. Rudy has finally gotten himself into some serious trouble!

Open thread!

* 88 is widely used by white supremacists and neo-NAZIs as code for Heil Hitler as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. So 88 is HH is Heil Hitler.

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The Bad Effects of One Man’s Good Intentions: Why The US Postal Service’s Board of Governors Is Packed With Senator McConnell Approved Appointees of the President

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Over the past several days a number of people have begun to ask how, exactly, it was possible that the US Postal Service’s bipartisan Board of Governors could be stacked full of partisan appointees that Senator McConnell recommended to the President and then approved once the President nominated them. Such as one of Senator McConnell’s long time catspaws, who now chairs that board, and appointed Republican fundraiser Louis DeJoy Postmaster General. Appointees whose intention is to destroy the US Postal Service, which is a long standing Republican and conservative goal.

Former Bernie Sanders for president 2020 senior campaign official David Sirota expressed his concerns about this yesterday as well:

In the months before the 2020 election, Donald Trump and Washington lawmakers put the postal service under the control of a former Republican National Committee chairman who has also led the Senate GOP’s major super PAC, according to federal and state documents reviewed by TMI.

In the lead up to those developments, Trump nominee Mike Duncan was appointed to the USPS’s board of governors in 2018, and he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in December 2019 to a full seven-year term. Duncan currently chairs the board.

There’s a simple explanation for how this happened because we have a historical record of how and why these nomination were not filled during the Obama administration. One man, a single US senator, was concerned during the Obama administration that President Obama’s appointees to the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors would cut services and take actions that hurt postal workers. That one man, that one US senator placed a hold on the nominations, nominations which would have left no vacancies on the board for Senator McConnell to manipulate to partisan advantage like he has every other vacancy that he was able to find a way to keep President Obama from filling, to create leverage to ensure that services would not be cut and postal workers not hurt by the actions of the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors. That man, that US senator has a name: Bernie Sanders. (emphasis mine)

And then, there were none.

Not a single member remains of the Postal Board of Governors. The board, which is supposed to have 11 members – nine appointed by the president and approved by Congress, as well as the Postmaster General and Deputy Postmaster General – lost its final outside member, James Bilbray, when his term expired at midnight on Dec. 8.

The governors, who advise the Postal Service on management, approve price changes and can fire the Postmaster General, serve staggered 9-year terms, so one member’s term expires each year on Dec. 8. If no replacement is approved, the law permits a governor to serve for an additional year. The board must have six members to achieve quorum.

President Obama has nominated five people to serve on the board – three Democrats and two Republicans. The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Postal Service, has approved all five. But the full Senate has not taken up the matter because a senator – believed to be Bernie Sanders – has placed a hold on their nominations.

Sanders is said to have placed the holds at the request of postal unions, who particularly object to former Postal Board Chairmen Mickey Cochrane and James C. Miller.

Senator Sanders appears to have been acting with the best of intentions. He was leveraging the power he has as a senator to try to extract the assurances and promises that would ensure that postal services would not be cut and actions would bot be taken to harm postal workers. The problem, of course, is that Senator Sanders made two strategic miscalculations. The first is that President Obama would be succeeded in office by another Democratic president, maybe even by Sanders himself, so it wasn’t a really big deal if the nominees to fill the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors got held up a couple of more months until a new administration came into office in January 2017. The second was failing to notice a pattern of behavior, rooted in a long term strategy, by Senator McConnell. The United States government has a lot of independent or semi-independent boards of governors or directors or commissioners. These boards and commissions, such as the Federal Election Commission (FEC), are considered to be bipartisan. Either the president makes nominations with inputs from the majority and minority leaders of both parties in Congress or the positions are filled by nominations made by the president as well as nominations made by the majority and minority leaders of each party in the Senate. Senator McConnell does not like a lot of these boards and commissions, especially when they have oversight, investigatory, regulatory, and/or enforcement powers over whatever it is that Senator McConnell is trying to achieve. The Federal Election Commission is one of these, the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors is another.

In the case of the former, Senator McConnell appointed his long time catspaw, white shoe Republican law firm partner Don McGahn, to serve on the Federal Election Commission. McGahn’s job – not the official one he was supposed to do as an FEC commissioner, but the one that McConnell actually sent him there to do – was to blow up the FEC and make it impossible to function. McGahn, leading McConnell’s other appointees and working with and through them, accomplished this assignment and the FEC has been somewhere between dysfunctional and non-functional ever since. McGahn did not wind up as the President’s 2016 campaign counsel and then White House Counsel by accident, he was placed there by Senator McConnell based on his successes doing McConnell’s bidding in previous assignments, such as his service on the FEC. McGahn never really worked for the President – not his campaign, not his administration – because he works for McConnell. McGahn’s insertion into the President’s 2016 campaign and then the White House was McConnell’s way of exerting power within both and ensuring that McConnell’s objectives would be achieved. Unlike Speaker Ryan, Senator McConnell was, and still is, actually effective at utilizing the official power he has and the unofficial powers he’s accumulated by manipulating the Senate’s and the US government’s rules and norms. It is why Senator McConnell is the Senate Majority leader and achieving his strategic objectives and goals and Paul Ryan is out of the game after being a spectacular failure as the Speaker of the House, though raking in a lot of money on NewsCorp’s board.

Senator Sanders made two strategic miscalculations. The first was incorrectly assuming how the future would play out, the second was not realizing that the reason that Senator McConnell, as the Senate Majority Leader, was actually recognizing and allowing Senator Sanders’ holds on President Obama’s nominees to the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors because those holds suited McConell’s objectives, not Sanders’. Senator Sanders placed the holds on these nominations at a time when Senator McConnell was refusing to recognize holds and blue slip responses on nominees by Democratic senators. The fact that McConnell was willing to recognize the holds that Sanders had placed, should have clued Senator Sanders into the fact that something strange was going on. Apparently this recognition by Senator Sanders or his senior staff did not happen. To the point that the holds were STILL NOT LIFTED even after the President managed to eke out a narrow Electoral College victory to succeed President Obama in office. The date on the article I quoted from above is from 20 December 2016. That last member of the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors term ended by statute on 8 December 2016. Given that the reality of who would be president come 20 January 2017 was very clear by December of 2016, the holds should have been dropped at that point, which would have been strategically smart as it would have prevented the incoming president, guided by Senator McConnell’s recommendations, from filling a majority of the open seats on the US Postal Service Board of Governors. We do not have to conduct a mental exercise and create a counterfactual, we know just how bad the President’s appointments to the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors are and just how damaging they are to both the US Postal Service – a long standing Republican and conservative goal – and to actual Americans. And this all could have been prevented if one man was a better strategist. had better senior advisors and staffers, and was better at his job.

Open thread!

 

 

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Dog Whistles Are So Passé: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base

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Over the past several weeks, a number of people have noticed that the President’s campaign, as well as the President, seem to be sending some very unique messages using some very unique imagery. On 18 June, Media Matters caught the President tweeting out this alleged Antifa symbol:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 1

 

This is not an Antifa symbol. It is the symbol the NAZIs made political prisoners wear. Here’s the symbology classification system as explained by the US Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia Holocaust:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 2

Here’s the new America First T-Shirt being offered for sale by the President’s campaign store:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 3

Here’s a better screen grab of the logo:

 

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 5

And this is the partieadler, or (NAZI) party eagle and its description from the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) website:

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 6

The Nazi Eagle is a symbol developed originally by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s (also becoming a symbol of the German government after the Nazis took power), based loosely on traditional German coats of arms. Following World War II, the symbol was appropriated by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists worldwide, with many variations. The symbol originally featured an eagle clutching a swastika, but many variations replace the swastika with some other hate symbol, such as SS bolts or a Celtic Cross. Occasionally, extremists will leave the circle blank where the swastika normally would appear; this seems to be more common in countries where the swastika is prohibited.

It should be noted that eagles are a common symbol among nations worldwide, including the United States, and not every image of an eagle is derivative of the Nazi eagle. It is not uncommon, for example, for some Americans to mistake the Blue Eagle logo of the Roosevelt-era National Recovery Administration for a Nazi-derived symbol.

Here’s the National Recover Administration’s crest so you can see for yourself that it looks nothing like the parteiadler or the logo on the America First T-shirts.

Dog Whistles Are So Passe: The President and His Campaign Have Gone To the Bullhorns To Message To His Base 8

But it isn’t just the imagery. The Trump Make America Great Committee purchased 88 Facebook ads that used the NAZI symbols for political prisoners in the screen grab at the top of the post. 88 is the code that neo-NAZIs and white supremacists use for Heil Hitler. Recently the President, in defending monuments and statues to Confederate military leaders and personnel, tweeted out this 14 word tweet, which included two words with capitalized “H”s right next to each other:

The 14 words is the most popular white supremacist slogan and statement. From the ADL:

“14 Words” is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007). The term reflects the primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged “rising tide of color” purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.

Because of its widespread popularity, white supremacists reference this slogan constantly, in its full form as well as in abbreviated versions such as “14 Words”, “Fourteen Words,” or simply the number “14.”

A sober person would say that this is just a coincidence. That argument would have more validity if the President and his campaign and his administration did not have a history of using this type of symbolism. One of the President’s 2016 campaign ads, in July of 2016, was a picture of Secretary Clinton’s face and a Star of David (six pointed star/Jewish star) imposed over piles of cash. Which he tweeted! Another of his campaign’s final ads during the 2016 election included the faces of then Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Holocaust survivor, billionaire, philanthropist George Soros as exemplars of corruption.

The use of this imagery is not an accident. Without having to actually go looking for them, including the T-shirt the President’s campaign just made available for purchase, I was able to come up with a number of examples using clearly anti-Semitic imagery and language. But it goes beyond these campaign ads, merchandise, and tweets by the President. For instance, the initial number of children that HHS was reporting had been lost in the system after being separated at the border was 1,488. This amount of coincidence takes a lot of work!

The dog whistle is clearly passé. Why whisper when you can scream!

Obligatory!

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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Repub Venality Open Thread: FRIST!

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Richard Burr is so crooked that, as used to be said of Nixon, he has to screw his pants on in the morning… but he’s loyal to the Permanent Republican Party, not to Donald Trump, which is why Trump wants his head on a pike right now. Pay close attention to the other Repubs implicated in this scandal, particularly the wife of the chairman of the NY Stock Exchange:

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