Friday, February 22, 2019

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. 


 
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.



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