Day 952 Who You Gonna Believe?

When I was coming of age during the Iran Hostage crisis of 1980 there was a fella on TeeVee by the name of Ted Koppel who would kindly mark each passing day that our diplomatic staff in Tehran was being held hostage. I have yet to see anyone do this for Russiagate (or 'L'affaire de Russe' for those preferring a more refined neoliberal term) but I think this can be very easily done as Bob Dylan would put it in "Highway 61". It would help to keep track after now 2.5 years and counting of this and I'm hating on myself for not running a calendar/clock on my blog from the beginning. So we can update a count easily by using the starting point of July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia as the launch point for the narrative that Putin and the Kremlin were hacking the DNC, DCCC in cahoots with Wikileaks to elect Donald Trump. That puts us at Day 952.

Why the Democratic Convention Eve start point? That's the day HRC campaign manager Robbie Mook took an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper above the DNC convention floor and laid out the Russia/Trump/Wikileaks connection as a defense to Jake's original question of why the DNC fucked over Bernie Sanders. This was a seminal moment of the narrative and I do mean seminal:


 

Two days earlier Wikileaks dropped the first batch of DNC documents that explicitly showed how the DNC principals had planned to drag down the Sanders campaign during the primaries. See this WaPo summary of that timeline:


The Russian interference fight was encapsulated in one CNN show in July 2016 

Also over a month earlier on 6/14/16 the WaPo broke the story of the DNC hack itself but the effort to tie Trump or Wikileaks to the alleged hack was not made at that point. Here is that story:


Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump 


So Robbie Mook and his homespun Crowd Strike Putin/Trump/Wikileaks narrative found its stride right as the DNC was imploding over Wikileaks gutting the DNC like a landed shark with the milky stench of its treatment of Bernie Sanders and his voters during the primaries three days before the opening of the DNC convention. "Experts" had all concluded it was RUSSIANS! that hacked the DNC and the background on Mook's and Crowd Strike's  involvement in the narrative early that spring/summer was left unchallenged by Tapper in this explosive charge. Mook repeatedly sloughs off Tapper's questions with his coy "experts say" deployment of RUSSIANS! as if butter wouldn't melt in his scheming mouth - because the scheme of the Steele Dossier was in its mature stage by Perkins Coie, Wendy Ohr and Christopher Steele with the over $9 million Perkins Coie got paid for Russigate by Hillary Clinton Forward. opposition research for that insurance Peter Strzok would later text his FBI lover about.


But that brings us to timeline discrepancies and the factually challenged Michael Cohen, TIME Magazine's Man of the Week.

So deeper down the rabbit hole we go wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Democrats launched RUSSIANS!2.0 (Day 948) this past week in the House Cummings Hearing and Michael Cohen, Trump's convicted tax evader, porn queen hustler and sad sack fixer used most of his mea culpa time on Russiagate TeeVee revealing all the finer details of his confidences with Orange Hairball con artist cum President. One item he tantalized the rogues gallery of Russiagate mavens on the committee was the Roger Stone conference call eaves dropping bit.

As Cohen tells it:

"As I earlier stated, Mr. Trump knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails. In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.’"

Of course we were told beforehand by the preening Democrat majority that RussiaGate wasn't going to be on the menu during this hearing. That farce was quickly dispensed with by the Committee chair and Cohen himself. But I digress which with RUSSIANS and rabbit holes is an occupational hazard.

Cohen attempted to pass this story off as some kind of "BOOM!" revelation or smoking gun. Too bad Cohen didn't go online and check the timeline of Wikileaks' statements online and in the press earlier that summer:

WikiLeaks to publish more Hillary Clinton emails - Julian Assange JUNE 12, 2016

This was over a month before said conference call. The whole world knew Assange and Wikileaks had the goods on Clinton emails by that point because Assange had aleady intimated as much to the Guardian in early June. Once a grifter, always a grifter especially to grovel for public approval after being dragged so badly by Mueller, Trump and that creepy porn lawyer Avenatti for so long Cohen didn't know what side was up or down anymore his public nervous breakdown has been so embarrassing to watch.

Of course every Trump toady online and on talk radio were discussing the matter of Guciffer2.0, DCLeaks and Wikileaks at this point in mid July of 2016. Roger Stone being merely top toady on twitter stirring the pot attempting to ingratiate himself with bluster and con tricks with the Orange Toad that now have him in a shit load of legal troubles with the FEDs and Mueller. Even so, Stone broke his court gag briefly enough to claim he never participated in such a conference call and of course Wikileaks is sticking to its long standing statement that Stone and Assange never had communications about Wikileaks email dumps after Cohen's statements on Wednesday. As this weekend's Politico piece states: "Somebody's lying here. But who"?

Week 93: Cohen Reveals Russia Scandal Gems Amid the Mudslinging 

(Notice they're using 93 weeks instead of the 136 weeks I'm counting by. Politico must be starting at an arbitrary point of Bob Mueller's appointment as special prosecutor)

So somebody's lying here but who, eh? This obvious statement is part of the ploy to confuse anyone casually paying attention. Read the Politico hack job I link to and understand how much the reporting on Russiagate itself has degraded public discourse:

A "jamboree of 'silliness'" indeed. And 'who do you want to believe' at this point in #RUSSIANS!? We started Russiagate when Robbie Mook above wanted us to take it as an article of faith the Russians were behind the DNC hack (or 'break-in' as he refers to it in that video - slying conjuring up Watergate) and that Wikileaks, who revealed DNC corrupting democracy in America, was in league with the Kremlin. Then we quickly went from that foundation myth to accepting the intelligence "community" and its assessment that the Steele Dossier represented verifiable facts about Trump/Putin collusion then BEFORE the election through David Corn and Mother Jones' scoop on Christopher Steele and his explosive intelligence memorandum in late October 2016. Then we devolved into "The Pee Tape is Real" meme and the laughing off on how Carter Page got snared by a FISA warrant, George Papadopolous and his hilariously comic travails with Mueller as a person of interest then an indicted "co-conspirator" in the fake news media etc. etc. etc.

And now flash forward through 2.5 gleeful and affirming years that Donald Trump is a Kremlin plant in the White House and we get "who do you want to believe?" as the output existential question that answers itself for any Russiagate mavens of mass media conspiracy theory. One result of this is that as of this past week, February 24, 2019, 65% of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with our voting tallies to get Trump elected in 2016:


The Economist/YouGov Poll pdf


 

And also this week it has also led 46% of Democrats to believe that Russia is America's greatest enemy:


 

 Majority of Americans Now Consider Russia a Critical Threat


Under the spell of this kind of massive propaganda the question "who do you want to believe?" as the sum total of Russiagate hysteria leads to another disturbing answer: Your government. Which of course this narrative has conveniently promoted as a government in exile. That's the hidden redacted part of the narrative subtly woven into it but just as powerful as the collusion part: That Hillary Clinton never lost the election in 2016 and is the deposed and exiled queen. We are living in a "fake" timeline of sorts as its told where ex-Obama administration officials and embedded intelligence and DoJ bureaucrats are operating a shadow government in the wings of a Deep State. Much of that operation has been rooted out by the IG of late and the revelations of the Strzok/Page affair along with Comey and McCabe and the debunking of the HRC opposition research smear Steele Dossier but the powerful scent of it still very much drives mainstream media centers and Deep State's hold on positions of power inside the SEC industry in DC.
Who are you gonna believe? Them or your own damn eyes?

So the Mueller investigation keeps firing blanks and is near to releasing its report. And the Beltway MSM, just like they did in the aftermath of NO WMD in Iraq, is in full court press to push back on the psyche of the American public and spin the release and its pending but obvious conclusion that there was no apparent collusion with Russia by Trump officials during the 2016 election. But who are you gonna believe? We've gone from slam dunk from "the experts" to a full fledged investigation by the Justice Department and Congress for 2.5 years to a conclusion that Trump will not be connected to a Putin operation to meddle with American Exceptionalism and demockracy. 

Most if not all Democrats will never accept that they've been duped on such an epic scale by the likes of Robbie Mook all the way through Michael Cohen and Robert Mueller. I'll write more about this phenomenon of late stage American democracy and the collapse of the liberal intellect soon. That post mortem will have to wait for now.

To take an extended examination of events of the collapse of our politics might seem to be an obsession for some. To unwind a conspiracy theory like '9/11 Truth', a project to drive a media narrative like the push for war in Iraq or the mass hysteria that our elections are controlled by foreign adversaries (who also happen to be nuclear armed adversaries) is a complex and exhausting task as probably Glenn Greenwald can attest to. Many detractors of those who dissent to the conventional wisdom that Trump colluded with Putin to get elected actually project their conspiracy theory ways onto those who debunk them. We play the record backwards so to speak and find mysterious intuitions on why Trump isn't a Russian plant when concluding there is no evidence of the main thread of collusion. This is an occupational hazard dealing with those online fervently wedded to one result: Trump must go. We must rid ourselves of Trump By Any Means Necessary BAMN and if that's a well framed conspiracy theory by Deep State so be it.

Others just want to move on. Just like when it became politically expedient to complain about the Bill Clinton impeachment over twenty years ago (MoveOn.org anybody?) or when the country needed to "move on" from the devastating historic and criminal foreign policy debacle of the Iraq War we still live with today. Obama anybody? "Nobody cares" others say about the bailout of Wall Street now that the economy is booming...under Trump?... Nobody cares about Russiagate, now that the narrative is tanking under the preponderance of NOTHING. The goal posts shift quickly when the jig is up. Should we just move on to Trumps financial fraud like the whole Russiagate thing was just to prime the outrage for Hillary losing? Or should we just move on into another electoral cycle and do this all over again?

But the fact is we never move on. We never resolve our crisis when we pretend we move on but don't self-examine as a nation what we've done or where we truly are on a civilization scale. All these major events of the past twenty years are interrelated including how America as a security state was foisted with a massive conspiracy theory casting Russia as the bogeyman. One inflection point was the Iraq War but an equally impactful one was the financial crisis of 2007-09. That is where domestic politics inside the US fell apart. So much since has drawn from those events and not all bad but still we never assessed the impact upon our system of self-government. That has led us here with the election of a the orange clown and Michael Moore exclaiming in his latest movie: "How the Fuck Did This Happen?"

It's a very hard but simple question to answer and it doesn't involve "Who you gonna believe?" jazz from hucksters who have skin in this game at the likes of Politico.

I might even make a case that since we cannot face a conclusion of the Mueller Investigation that results in two more years of the Orange Hairball we will never resolve this in a way that might reform our system to get us back to a normal electoral cycle again. We might be looking at the end of American politics as a rational exercise of democracy. A permanent 2016 if you need a scary bed time story. That does not bode well for the election of someone like Bernie or a chance at stemming climate change or even a sane alternative to Trump and the Republicans if America is permanently jacked-up on conspiracy theories.

Did Donald Trump Revise the 2016 Republican Party Platform on Ukraine to Suit Putin?

 

This myth recently got a retelling this past January with the NYT reporting that the FBI opened a second counterintelligence investigation under Andrew McCabe's orders against President Trump. McCabe apparently used this 2016 media myth promoted primarily by Chuck Todd at NBCs Meet The Press that summer as a key probable cause for opening a case of treason against the sitting president in May of 2017.

Here's the original story from that year as presented by Politifact:

Did Trump campaign soften platform language to benefit Russia

Notice the prominence of cable TeeVee personalities that read the news and offer half-baked partisan punditry as a side in this little episode of #RUSSIANS! As it turned out this was all wrong.

Here's a recent piece over at Washington Times debunking it:

  

FBI relied on debunked Ukraine GOP convention story to target Trump 

The short of it was the GOP had an initial draft of the platform with US foreign policy items that included some language on supporting Ukraine against Russian incursions etc with military assistance. A delegate hardliner thought that the language wasn't hard right enough on Russia and wanted much more explicit language on EXACTLY what kinds of military commitments a Republican administration should make to Ukraine against Russia.
The RNC running the convention decided to keep the original more general and open ended commitment to Ukraine of the original draft.
This was used by Chuck Todd as proof that Putin was controlling the GOP through his robot Paul Manafort. All because the GOP elected not to go full on neocon lunatic McCain with their campaign platform intended to help get Donald Trump elected.

It was only good and sane convention politics to block neocon nutters from poisoning the GOP platform with extreme Cold War reenactment LARPing by delegates. Later it was the Democrats and their extensions at NBC, MSNBC that became the Cold War LARPers driving yet one more false narrative concocted during their highly partisan 2016 campaign coverage. A myth that eventually gave McCabe cover to launch yet another counterintelligence investigation against a sitting president as a Kremlin plant.

Many Democrats still believe this nonsense to this day and depend on these last little nuggets to keep up their illusion that Russians had any part of the Trump campaign or meddled with American demockracy. They tend to resurface like flotsam every time some Obama hack does a book tour like Andrew McCabe or Michael McFaul needs speaking engagements lined up on "Democracy and American Exceptional Pocket Billiards".

File this under: #NotThisShitAgain

Pool and  Idiot Wind

"Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..."

The chorus of Meredith Wilson's classic piece that introduces the fictional town of River City, Iowa to the mesmerizing talents of Professor Harold Hill in "The Music Man" is as well suited today on the self-induced hysteria of #RUSSIANS as it was back then at the peak of the Cold War in 1959. Hill uses the new pool hall as his hook so skillfully in public square that Wilson wrote what basically amounts to a rap song built solely on rhythm that builds to a hypnotizing crescendo.

If you've never seen it watch the master work:




Some of my fellow bloggers, Occupados (and former micro-bloggers) in these backwaters of dissent from the conventional wisdom still can't find their way out of vodka drenched pool halls in St. Petersburg let alone off the public square of disappointment that they've been had with a bummed cigarette of "game theory" Russiagate like an issue of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. The simple bold truth was obvious from the beginning of this Russiagate episode: The contamination of the American Way was never from, as Washington media puts it currently, foreign adversaries. It was from within. All you needed to do is ignore the Professor, turn off the TeeVee, cull your social media, and read a book - like Marian does as the town's librarian to discover the truth about this raving, singing huckster Hill. It's much easier not to actually look at the flimsy evidence of a cyber attack coordinated by the Kremlin and Wikileaks and instead make memes out of campaign hanger-ons like Carter Page or George Papadopolous. It's easier to believe the con because it offers an escape, a magical "think system", from the reality of what American Exceptionalism across the planet has conjured up at home all these decades. Fear and loathing + hysteria did not prevent the election of Donald Trump during the 2016 election and it will not be the antidote to Trump in 2020 (that's where we are headed btw, not "IMPEACH THE MOTHER****er", sorry freshwoman from Southwest Detroit). You don't have to play the White Album backwards to figure this out. Just pay attention. Keep track of the narrative that's sold like band uniforms with glossy promises of an exiled Trump daily on cable TeeVee or wherever 'Democracy Dies in the Dark' or whatever scheme Jeff Bezos has cooked up to sell subscription paywalls and sign up the villagers to installments of his periodical #RUSSIANS! over at WaPo.

Idiot Wind

As I write (off the top of my head,lol) a wind storm is sweeping the Great Lakes with formidable gusts. The Dylan song "Idiot Wind" from "Blood On the Tracks" comes to mind. Some may call that song a screed - a litany of epic complaint - about how useless it seems to shout at the gales of mass ignorance and willing self-deception that brought us the Vietnam War. Or maybe it's about an ignorance induced by the cult of celebrity that even Bob Dylan felt trapped in at the time. Whatever, the wind sheer can't be an any better companion to "Trouble in River City". We complain that nobody listens to us like self-styled Cassandras on cheap blogs. But it's a wonder that we still know how to breathe bracing against the raging Idiot Wind all around us and the reality of our true condition as a collection of wandering late stage Americans:

"I ran into the fortune teller
Who said beware of lightning that might strike.
I haven't known peace and quiet for so long
I can't remember what its like.

There's a lone soldier on the hill;
Smoke pouring out of a box car door.
You'd never know it just to look at him;
In the final end he won the war
After losing every battle.

I woke up on the roadside
Daydreaming about the way things really are.
Visions of your flaming town shoot through my head
And are making me see stars

You hurt the ones that I love best
And cover up the truth with lies
One day you'll be in the ditch
Flies buzzing around your eyes:

Blood on your saddle.

Idiot Wind
Blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe

Was gravity which pulled us down
And destiny which pulled us apart.
You tamed the lion in my cage
But it just wasn't enough to change my heart.

Now everything's a little upside down;
Matter of fact the wheels have stopped!
What's good is bad, what's bad is good
You'll find out when you reach the top:
You're on the bottom."


On this very blustery day in America take a listen to the epic live version about the Idiot Wind we all find ourselves blown through attempting to figure this shit out:

The King is Dead Long Live the King: The Sham of MuellerTime and the End of its Spell

Robert Mueller has signaled through the usual anonymous suspects on the Beltway wire that he is finally binding together his findings concerning possible collusion with Russia on the part of the Trump people and Russia meddling with our temple of Democracy in Washington D.C. MuellerTime *may* soon be over.

MuellerTime of course refers to not just the Mueller investigation but the media phenomenon that quickly overtook Robert Mueller's mandate. It was enshrined almost immediately with a Twitter hashtag that only a vapid millennial and brew satiated generation would come up with on social media and it was an extension of the bated breath, edge of seat xenophobic hysteria that the dregs of the Clinton/Obama people conjured up in the wake of their epic loss to the Orange Beasty Trump.

And now the next wave of furious spin begins online and inside paid subscription scripts as the spoiler is tipped off for those who've seen the dailies that Robert Mueller essentially got nothing on Trump and people concerning Russia collusion and worse, probably will never get a conviction on any of his indictments aimed at internet trolls and GRU bad boys in St. Petersburg. He has his fistful of indictments of course but the ones that went in front of a judge or jury ended with tepid sentences and concerned crimes of fraud, tax evasion and getting caught with contradictions in their testimony to investigators - lying to Congress. These are serious enough but even James Clapper has been proven to lie to Congress...twice. All in all there was no there there and the American people if they haven't already figured out this truly was a dreadful witch hunt in Congress and with the Obama leftovers at DoJ/Deep State, will finally wake up to the fact they've been had.

A famous meme about NOTHING!

That won't stop the disconnect (and discontent) on Cable TeeVee and on Rachel the Resident MSNBC Conspiracy Theorist. The denial there runs deep and is definitely a text book case in real time live on TeeVee how you should never consume your own propaganda and bullshit for media and journalism majors. The tears will stream in such quantity at MSNBC that even Glenn Beck will blush in embarrassment. She still wails on about DoJ policy of not indicting sitting presidents as if Mueller actually has the goods on Trump and 2016 collusion or worse what Andrew McCabe leveled at Trump this past weekend on TeeVee: that Trump was and is actively working for the Kremlin. (see my pieces below) It's hysterical and I don't mean funny hysterical. It's pathetic hysterical and an indictment itself on how far out in Deep State space teevee we've gotten these past 2.5 light years with this #RUSSIANS! bullshit. 

"It would be timely and appropriate for the Justice Department and Robert Mueller to reconsider the shaky policy regarding indictability of a sitting president first formulated 45 years ago." pic.twitter.com/lSRzaL6Cij

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 22, 2019

 
The real media operations center of MuellerTime though was from the beginning the New York Times through its initial campaign reports on Paul Manafort (sources such as Victoria Nuland in the Obama State Department) and Moscow influence inside the Trump campaign that led to Manafort's resignation that set the scene. And it's the NYTs where today's spin on the internets finds us in an op-ed from who else but by the Solicitor General of the Obama administration, Neal K. Katyal. And it's a fine example of the logic trap Russiagate has circumscribed upon our idea of accusation, investigation and justice within our legal system, its adjunct an untethered national media during election cycles and the impact of and on foreign policy and embedded Deep State:

The Mueller Report is Coming

 

The trap at its core was always in the hyperventilating accusation of collusion with a foreign adversary - namely Russia - during the election cycle of the 2016. That sprung from sensationalist media campaigns - memos that went out with talking points from the rival Clinton campaign. The germ of what became a counterintelligence investigation of a US presidential candidate was a singular source of salacious narrative: The Steele Dossier (see earlier posts below) that gave the media narrative something to latch onto after Michael Isakoff's scoop at Yahoo news that Christopher Steele personally went out of his way to introduce to the national media:

 

Dossier Fails the Test of Time Says Michael Isakoff

 

But here's Neal Katyal in the NYT today with the all too familiar rationalizations of law enforcement and prosecutors on why those accused of crimes, even sensational crime of treason and espionage and "meddling" during election cycles by their rivals for the highest office should submit to one of the most odious and un-American justifications of guilty-till-proven-innocent in the court of media punditry on cable TeeVee:

That Neal Katyal was appointed to server as Solicitor General by a purportedly trained Constitution Law professor, Obama is beyond insulting with this kind of legal reasoning.

"Had Mr. Trump and his coterie done nothing wrong, they would have had little to fear..." 

Indeed. As it turns out Trump had been very wise to be proactive in the face of the media blitzkrieg and coordinated exercise of the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPO, McClatchy their extension of online websites like Buzzfeed in DC and social media in its pursuit to weave a Russian conspiracy out of whole cloth based upon Trump's real estate business dealings and Paul Manafort's ties to Ukraine in 2014. Trump is a lot of things, corrupt no doubt, but he is not a fool about how the modern media and law works and he's not a profile of one who becomes any foreign entities "asset". This was spy pablum from a Tom Clancy novel that was directly injected into the Obama DoJ by Clinton insiders knowing how easily it was at this point after 9/11 and two or three fantastically catastrophic wars to manipulate a giddy Deep State.

Nothing less than "total exoneration" of Trump's assumed crimes against humanity and his personal character will do if I read the above quote correctly.

More from Mr. Katyal:

"Congress cannot be satisfied that impeachable offenses were not committed..."

The Mueller investigation will live on. #MuellerTime is an open ended project, never fear. It will be spread like gospel - Good News - as a new religion in media and legal spheres. It will become the Alpha, the Omega of a kind of domestic American Exceptionalism. It will span geography and jurisdictions and will be difficult if not impossible for even Attorney General Barr to contain its self-evident conclusion: That Donald Trump is a Russian Agent, "wittingly or unwittingly", and stole the election of 2016 like the Grinch of our fevered childhood TeeVee nightmares.

If I were to draw a diagram of the evolution of the Russiagate investigation, and in many ways it looks much more like an Operation, it would start with an outline like this:

1. Talking points on Russian influence into rival campaign. Make sure the hack on campaign servers is NOT reported to the FBI until long after the so-called hack. Hire a private SEC contractor to inspect and file a report on the alleged hack. Never allow Federal investigators to inspect your hacked equipment (your candidate is after all being investigated for her running her own email server and compromising National Security doing so). Declare hack to be a Russian attack.
2. Pre-empt Wikileaks publications of leaked emails of your campaign and party's network as a Russian cyber attack. Offer exclusives to media corps like CNN to showcase your report on being hacked by Russia. Connect Russia (our dreaded adversary in Ukraine and Syria) to Wikileaks. Make sure that you coordinated with MSNBC on the veracity of the ill gotten emails at Wikileaks.
3. In the meantime hire law firm and UK gumshoe former MI6 agent to compile salacious opposition research of rival candidate as Russian asset or even agent.
4. Make sure wife of Obama DoJ special assistant gets the memorandum of the UK gumshoe she compiled to her husband. Arrange a personal meeting. Get that dupe to green light a counter intelligence investigation on your Presidential rival using your own manufactured dirt.
5. Have that memorandum leaked to the press with personal interviews with UK gumshoe so everyone in the media can now privately talk about it as the real deal of US intelligence and give it a name: Steele Dossier (like out of a spy novel).
6. Get counterintelligence operatives inside the FBI to plot out how they will use this information from the Clinton campaign as seed for FISA warrants and wiretaps and call this "insurance" against Orange Hair Ball's election victory. Forget to warn them NOT to text about their plot, extra-marital affair and personal freak-outs on FBI phones.
7. Lineup meet-ups with lower level Trump election advisors with CIA assets in the UK. Make sure plenty of unwitting Kremlin connected contact with Russians is documented for future use.
8. Get So-called "Steele Dossier" to a US Senator (a Cold Warrior who hates Russia and Putin) and get him to hand deliver it to the FBI director through private channels.
9. Lose an election to Orange Hair Ball that you were universally declared to win. Don't go to Wisconsin. Don't collect $200.
10. FISA wiretap election advisor who traveled to Russian on a business trip. Use as central probable cause the Steele Dossier opposition research fed to the DoJ through Clinton channels. Use this wiretap as a possible wire on newly elected Hair Ball himself or advisors that the FBI could possibly entrap and squeeze and flip.
11. Get FBI director to take the open media secret of the Steel Dossier to the newly elected PEOTUS and lay it on his lap as a tacit threat to stay in line.
12. When new POTUS doesn't go for the threats, entrap his National Security Advisor by using NSA SIGINT intercepts against him (Sec. 702 developed to fight terrorism through the Patriot Act and to exonerate former President George W. Bush of illegal surveillance retroactively - thanks Nancy) and exposing him in the media using leaks of the same intercepts as being duplicitous to the Vice President. Thanks Sally.
13. Order a National Intelligence Estimate on Russia meddling in the 2016 election and claim "17 agencies confirmed it a happened" blared by the MSM before the NIA is even read by outgoing POTUS. (only three signed off on it and one with "moderate confidence - the NSA - translation 'no proof')
14. Leak the existence of a "Dossier" and its alarming content. Then get a gossip website trying to burnish its journalism creds to break the water and publish the "unconfirmed" dossier. (like out of House of Cards)
15. When POTUS digs in even deeper against your operation assail him with a tsunami of anonymous leaks mixed in with half truths and stories about the Russians high-jacking America's electrical grid. Completely overwhelm the public with so much false information and hysteria before the PEOTUS is even inaugurated that defending himself against the operation makes him appear even more guilty of conspiracy to steal an election. De-legitimize his Presidency before it even begins.
16. Leak out the existence of an FBI investigation into "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election. Leak the persons of interest in that investigation as tied to the Trump campaign.
17. Get the AG to recuse himself from oversight over the investigation of Russia meddling for his not mentioning meeting up with a Russian diplomat as a US Senator and campaign worker for the POTUS at a cocktail session. Thanks Al Franken for that nice little trick of GOTCHA!
18. Get the POTUS so paranoid he ends up firing the FBI director investigating him (after supposedly informing the POTUS he was not under investigation)
19. Launch a media campaign that declares all but a Constitutional crisis and scare the fuck out of the acting deputy AG to appoint a special prosecutor after having recommended the firing of the FBI director (conflict of interest, no?). Make sure the new SP is professionally and personally linked to fired FBI director in another ridiculous conflict of interest.
20. Add the icing of Obstruction of Justice to get this to a Watergate on crystal meth level and hope and pray that if Trump wasn't really Putin's bitch at least the Democrats and conspiracy theorists can get him in the assumed cover-up.
21. Continue to pretend the Steele Dossier (and its pee tape) have nothing whatsoever to do with the Democrats or even the Clinton campaign. Continue the ruse for another seven months.
22. Have your minions so in a lather online they can barely contain the imminent excitement of watching Orange Hair Ball frog marched in cuffs out of the White House and Carter Page completely humiliated in a stockade in the Rose Garden.

The rest is history. This is all off the top of my head. There is so much more of course (and some things we will never know) but we know the inevitable tale and its unraveling through constant "bombshell" and "BOOM" of every Russiagate grifter online trying to drum up a cheap following on social media and every half-trained journalist with a constant FOMO complex on the next bombshell willing to sleep with men over twice their age to make that epic career scoop and become the next Woodward or Bernstein (or at least sell the rights on their big break for a Netflix original).

But on Capitol Hill one of the undeniable features of how this unspools is that the more the investigations dig in about the conspiracy of collusion and the meddling of Russia in our elections, the more Americans are exposed to facts about the conduct of the DNC and Clinton campaign during 2016. And that has its own tiger traps for a Democratic Party controlled House going forward if they want to throw open the lid that a Special Prosecutor's investigation kept conveniently on. Mueller in fact was very selective in what he investigated per Russia, the Steele Dossier and the DNC/HRC role in how warped 2016 got (see my list above). It's only been the DoJ IG that's done any yeoman's work on what went wrong inside Obama's former FBI and DoJ and Rep Devin Nunes acting as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Neal Katyal complains about how badly abusive Trump was toward the Mueller investigation and how he spins it, it backfired; but completely ignores the fact that Devin Nunes was dragged by the national media for doing his job - and that THAT spectacularly backfired. Nunes was never intimidated by the likes of CNN, MSNBC or the Times. His conclusions and findings on the origins of the Steele Dossier and the FISA wiretaps of Carter Page stand up as exemplary service to the committee. Adam Schiff is now Chair and I shudder at what intoxicated Russsiagate posturing we are in for from him.

If Neal Katyal is wishing more and more cycles of Russiagate to come he best beware of getting what he wishes for. Especially at this stage of a brand new electoral cycle meshing into premature high gear with the Democrats.

10 Reasons Why Bernie Sanders Won't Win The Democratic Party's Nod (Again)

1. Like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders is an artifact from 2016 - voters want to forget 2016's election cycle.

2. Like Hillary Clinton no one cares if it's "His turn".

3. But it is still a woman's turn. That narrative never waned and is taking on more steam by the month after the Year of the Woman of 2018. Old white males will be on a time-out after yet another year of Donald Trump. Sorry old white dudes but time for some golf.
 
4. We absolutely cannot afford to allow Trump to win again we will be told and that perception will prevail on the party not to indulge the socialist independent for a nominee.

5. "He's not a Democrat!" And this time around Democrat rank and file and the super-delegates have will have no patience for any non-Democrats contending for the ticket.

6. Wall Street and Silicon Valley will still determine who is viable as a potential leader of the Capitalist enterprise called America. Their influence has only grown larger in the time since the financial crisis of the final Bush year. He's too damn socialist will be the killer. There is no freaking way America in the early 21st Century will be adopting a boutique socialist agenda or flag outside the White House. Sorry SDAs, but "THIS IS AMERICA" as Childish Gambino would put it.
 
7. Americans are yearning for a stable presidency with no drama or conflict. Major social and political storm change after the Obama/Trump years has been exhausting on the electorate. A female go-along-to-get-along centrist bipartisan bridge building novelty will be on order. It's the American Way.

8. The media. Mass media and social media in particular. Less and less independent news outlets and newspapers mean less opinion, analysis and journalism in general. The homogenized news feeds the electorate will be munching on between binging on 'Game of Thrones' and Netflix will be culled of any "fake news" alternatives, sketchy "state sponsored" content and absolutely ANY meddling attempts to inject unofficial narratives of our voting choices going into 2020. It will be a conformist Paradise (or Hell depending on how you look at it). The Bernie Bro's will wither in the nuclear winter of moderated opinion and meme sharing. DNC Darlicks will roam and annihilate any and all contaminated threads on social media. Accusations of "BOT!" and "Unwitting Agent of Putin!" will abound. Bernie Sanders' candidacy will be swarmed by legions of sock puppets dragging it down into fake controversy over its malicious harboring of misogynists and racists looking to re-elect Trump if it is not handed the nomination on a silver platter. This is already in place and happening.

9. Cable TeeVee. Apart from being just media, cable teevee has emerged as a medium of self-perpetuating and fake news reinforcing punditry in an epic chase for ratings bonanzas. It's created its own corporate alternate reality of shrill nonsense on a scale not imagined even five years ago with MSNBC eclipsing FOX NEWS in sheer partisan schlock - CNN coming up a close third. Voters too busy or exhausted to catch up with policy debates or speeches depend on the cable to get their fix on the horse race and who's in the lead with the Democrats at any given moment even as they shake their collective heads over the shameless skewed  exposure granted to cable TeeVee favorites. Perception is everything even when its willingly consumed and especially when it reinforces preconditioned biases. Bernie will be practically erased on Cable TeeVee BUT will be featured as the useful foil if any of the centrists stray outside their appointed lanes.

10. And finally...Bernie will inevitably be found to have Russian oligarch ties in his past, and maybe a few RT appearances with Susan Sarandon. This will dovetail nicely with the Red baiting already in play. #RUSSIANS! will still have a lot of gas left in the tank post Mueller to take down a fate worse than "meddling" with the DNC.

Andrew McCabe appeared on the Today Show and host Savannah Guthrie gave him a run for his money. It's worth the commercial breaks. She did the best interview with McCabe so far.

 

Watch the whole interview. Savannah susses McCabe out about the the counterintelligence investigation that McCabe ordered once he became acting Director of the FBI after Comey was fired. Just so it's not lost in the mix: The investigation of obstruction of justice that was reported as the pretext to appointing a Special Prosecutor by acting Russiagate boss at the DoJ Rod Rosenstein in the wake of the Comey firing was distinct from this fork of an investigation of President Trump as traitor working with the Kremlin.

The original counterintelligence investigation on candidate Trump and his campaign in the summer of 2016 under the direction of Comey was headed by his deputy Andrew McCabe originally with special agent Peter Strzok and McCabe's legal beagle Lisa Page. This interview and the explosive headlines this past weekend deal with a second counterintelligence investigation that McCabe opened as acting Director of the FBI. I know, it's hard even for me to keep all of these threads straight even after following this story for over two years on the front burner here. So you have these two very risky and unprecedented counterintelligence actions - one during a US general election aimed in a partisan manner against an unpopular candidate with Washington D.C. insiders and the other deployed against a sitting President who defied the odds and those very same insiders.

Watch McCabe's face at min 3:50 go numb over Guthrie's undaunted interrogation he will have to suffer to sell his book on the Today Show:

"What were the predicate facts, lay them out here? What were the facts that suggested that the President may be a national security threat and may in fact be working on behalf of a foreign adversary - Russia?"

McCabe goes on to list the indications of Trump's obstruction of the investigation. Guthrie again tries to get McCabe back onto answering her original question about Trump being under the control of a foreign adversary and the counterintelligence question. McCabe attempting to rationalize using the cover of one element of the investigation - the possible obstruction and the firing of Comey - as a pretext to slip in the narrative that Trump was obviously a national security threat to the United States government.
"You have to ask yourself..." 

And that is how McCabe leans into his selling points. You actually don't "have to ask yourself"; McCabe had to ask himself back then about how he was going to launch a second counterintelligence investigation on a now sitting President in acting quite possibly as a foreign agent looking to compromise the security of our nation and now comes up with this sketchy explanation of 'what would you do?' in this position or in other words, begging the question but not actually giving a credible answer. His answer in its entirety can be summarized by the title of the book he is selling on this TeeVee tour: "The Threat". That's it. Andrew McCabe saw in Donald Trump a threat through the prism of his politics (that he denies adamantly) and through his position as an "unwitting" accomplice of Deep State. Guthrie goes on to mention the fact that the DoJ and Rod Rosenstein in particular take issue with the veracity of McCabe's account of the deliberations over the 25th Amendment removal of the POTUS and Rosenstein possibly entrapping Trump with a wire.

And therein lies the falseness of Andrew McCabe that Savannah Guthrie with careful circumspect exposes on camera. She goes on to address the IG's report on McCabe's firing and an inside investigation by the FBI to his conduct as a leaker to the Washington D.C. press and he sidesteps this with the announcement of a civil suit against his former employer, the US DoJ.

But the fact that this middling career bureaucrat who by the serendipity of the whacked 2016 election/intelligence drama was in position to engineer a counterintelligence operation inside the government against a sitting President based on "what would you do?" rationalizations that depended upon his own role in foisting a false narrative nine months before with the Steele Dossier and the Clinton campaign which he most certainly was aligned with and promoting with opposition research and FISA warrants is beyond anything anyone can recall in modern American history. It really is mind boggling. And it's especially odious to see this former G-Man up there like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth on the TeeVee selling a book called "The Threat". Who really was the threat in the long term?
No wonder this dude got fired.

After reading about Andrew McCabe's latest on TeeVee with his book tour it's time to write a bit about the Russiagate matter in its late stages. It's hard to write about this matter inside the Beltway and inside the internets of social media and on cable TeeVee because once you've made the attempt to concisely clarify what seems to be going on behind the 'bombshell' headlines the breakneck pace of the MSM cycle ratchets-up another bombshell IED completely changing the matrix and extending the open-ended possibilities once again. There seems to be no hope of concluding the affair or the Special Prosecutor's unlimited mandate to nail Trump once and for all. It's almost as if the whole investigation is a self perpetual motion machine with its own set of physics with book tours emerging as repetitive booster rocket for the narrative and for the celebrity and bank accounts of the cast.

I was reading Gareth Porter's piece over @ Consortium News when the news appeared in my "timeline" (a general reference to any and all media that randomly makes its presence known to me) about Andrew McCabe's appearance on 60Minutes and the preview of his "explosive" statements to sell a book and airtime for CBS News. Porter's piece duly breaks down the seeding of what later became known as the Steele Dossier in 2016. He also uses it to make the case of how the NYT and CNN have promoted a version of the narrative that twisted the motives of launching the original investigation of candidate Trump. That both news organizations had plenty of privileged access to committee documents that contradicted their own narratives they printed electing NOT to add the credible doubts over the Steele Dossier inside the DoJ is journalistic malpractice that in America inevitably leads to Pulitzer prizes, alas:

The Real Motive Behind the FBI Plan to Investigate Trump as a Russian Agent
 
You need to read Porter's piece to understand the mendacity of Andrew McCabe in his present statements and his intents as acting director of the FBI nine months later after Comey was fired. Porter points out that Bruce Ohr who introduced Christopher Steele's memorandum to the FBI in August of 2016 through his contact with Steele in late July 2016 (his wife working for Perkins Coie in hiring Steele and compiling his opposition research for Hillary Clinton) tipped off to Lisa Page, McCabe and Peter Strzok (the principles of the counterintelligence operation inside the FBI) of Christopher Steele's motivations against Trump's bid for the presidency with his memorandum.

This is a counterintelligence investigation that quickly morphed into a counterintelligence operation in search of a crime and/or a conspiracy. The motivations of launching it in the middle of a general election which is a season the intelligence services and DoJ are ostentatiously supposed to refrain from interfering in the domestic democratic process has been a critical debate all along the 2+ years of Russiagate. It's critical but most Americans are unaware of its central place inside of Washington media circles and power centers in the Capitol's investigative committees. If the motivations of launching such a risky operation are constantly shifting in explanation as more layers of duplicity and maneuvering against Trump's election to the Presidency what exactly are the implications for Washington DC and the Republic here?

This is much bigger than Trump colluding with Putin to engineer his election as the now very dubious narrative was propelled into low earth orbit in the winter and spring of 2017. These revelations that run concurrent with Mueller's revelations of "Russia meddling" and fraudulent tax filings of Trump henchmen are already impacting basic trust in the DoJ of Obama's responsibility.  They are feeding Trump's attacks upon the credibility of the Mueller investigation itself. They are proving Trump to be an actual victim if not an innocent bystander of the worst of what smug and unaware people online laugh off as Deep State while being the "only grownups in the room" of late night cable infotainment and social media echo chambers.

Here Francey Hakes - a former assistant US Attorney and FISA expert - wrote yesterday on Andrew McCabe's claims about Rod Rosenstein, wiretapping discussions on Trump and the 25th Amendment option:

McCabe's shocking claims prove the bloodless coup rolls on

This is not exaggeration. This is someone who knows just how damaging and alarming this whole affair is on our institutions that since 9/11 the American public have been trained to implicitly trust with ever expanding surveillance powers. And it's just not the surveillance technologies and deployment upon diplomats and elected officials that should frighten Hakes: it's also how it is augmented and amplified by MSM in New York and inside the Beltway that Gareth Porter's piece exposes. 

Here's more Hakes:

Like a laser beam, Hakes zeroes in on the glaring contradiction at the heart of the whole narrative that Trump is a traitor to his own country that from the beginning was the accelerant that kept the narrative going with the media - not only with McCabe's telling of his concerns about the President but the foregone conclusion that Comey's then Mueller's investigation had with the US media of only one outcome: the impeachment of Trump as a traitor. Of course if this were true the services would've had plenty of evidence by the time they finished with the reviews of SIGINT intercepts and FISA wiretaps of Carter Page and other techniques of the 5 Eyes intelligence sharing. There has been no subsequent evidence proving any coordination or collusion with the Kremlin.

Stepping back in the timeline and once again revisiting the origins of the original step-off point of the counterintelligence investigation against a candidate for the US Presidency, the infamous Steele Dossier is proving to be a Rosetta Stone of deciphering the real narrative that Andrew McCabe can't seem to help but confess in his public book tour.