Players Across The NFL Kneel During The National Anthem To Start The Season
Players across the NFL kneeled during the national anthem Sunday to start the season.
While some teams refused to even leave the locker room, many other players and at least one head coach took a knee during the anthem, according to multiple reports.
#Colts head coach Frank Reich kneeling during the national anthem as his players stand around him with arms linked.
Eight Panthers players knelt for the national anthem and nine raised their fists. All of the Raiders stood for the national anthem. @AP_Top25 pic.twitter.com/lmacg7QfK2
I
hope you were all prepared for this because we all knew it was coming.
We all knew there were going to be massive protests across the league to
start the season.
Well, the first Sunday of the season is here, and the protests were just as bad as I said they would be.
They were protesting left and right.
I really don’t care what your opinion about the national anthem is, but the fact of the matters is that sports aren’t supposed to be about politics.
They’re supposed to be about winning. Instead, we’ve allowed them to get destroyed by politics.
Article by Lewis M. Andrews in The American Conservative
Trading Social Science for Social Intimidation
Amid reports that a good deal of peer-reviewed research is wrong, progressives cross their arms and brook no dissent.
As Americans watch the nightly mayhem in Portland, Seattle, Chicago,
and other cities, their shock comes not just from watching a vicious
segment of the population loot, destroy property, and even physically
assault in the name of social justice. If history has taught us
anything, it is that anarchist and criminal mentalities lie dormant in
every country, just waiting for the opportunity to take control of
legitimate protest—in today’s case, the peaceable demonstrations
inspired by George Floyd’s tragic death. What is far more
distressing about the present chaos is the response of historically
responsible liberals who now seem to condone not only street violence,
but the aggressive “cancellation” of citizens with views well within the
mainstream. Many institutions once at the vanguard of advancing free
speech—including the ACLU, colleges and universities, newspapers like
the New York Times, and several social media companies—now
appear to be working overtime against it. When Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell recently chided the far left as “not interested in
winning debates with better arguments [but preferring] to shut down
debate altogether,” one could be forgiven for thinking he was
referencing the entire Democratic Party. To
the extent that the right has an explanation for this anti-liberal
liberalism, it is that the center-left is suffering from an advanced
case of what many Republicans mockingly call “Trump Derangement
Syndrome” (TDS). In other words, with the election so close, the
president’s opponents will countenance anything that stokes
dissatisfaction with his administration. We know there is some
truth to this, if for no other reason than that those Democrats still
uncomfortable with cancel culture have been warning others in their
party against getting too carried away with their dislike of Trump.
“[They] should forget President Trump for a second,” writes long-time
party activist Ted Van Dyk in a July 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“Democrats are presenting a pro-chaos caricature of themselves, which
will discredit them with the public if they maintain it.” But
to settle for TDS as the explanation for growing liberal intolerance is
to miss a much deeper crisis on the left, one that has been building
for decades and would exist even if President Trump had never been
elected. To understand this crisis, we must remind ourselves of
something so obvious that, like air, it is easily overlooked: namely,
that the underlying rationale for any form of left-wing governance over
the last two centuries has been the presumed ability of educated
officials to use social science for the benefit of the larger society.
From early 18th century Owenism and Saint-Simonianism to Soviet
communism to today’s European social democracies, to be anywhere on the
left has been to believe in some form of technocratic governance. The
American left is no exception. For more than a century, it has created
or shaped a wide range of government programs based more on the wisdom
of credentialed experts (or legislation shaped by experts) than on
market forces. Sometimes referred to collectively as the administrative state,
these include K-12 education, public universities, health and welfare
bureaucracies, departments of urban planning, environmental agencies,
and correctional facilities. The left has also promoted the interests of
trial lawyers, industrial unions, and other groups whose activities,
although outside of government, were still seen as compatible with
technocratic governance. The
power of claiming to represent the wisdom of social science can be seen
in the fact that whenever any liberal program or agenda has failed in
some spectacular way, the left has always been able to fall back on
comparisons to experimental research. In other words, just as
well-intended mistakes are an unfortunate but necessary part of
laboratory investigation, so technological governance will inevitably
take unproductive detours from time to time. Even having to backtrack on
its aggressive promotion of phrenology and blatantly segregationist
policies in the early 20th century never fatally tarnished the left’s
case for expert rule. But as politically effective as assuming the
mantle of social science has been for American liberals, three recent
developments now threaten to end its usefulness. The
first is the growing evidence that much of the research used by the
administrative state over the years has been intentionally falsified by
its academic authors, either to advance their own ideological biases or
to please their government funders. It has been well-documented
since the mid-1990s that any academic study that contradicts left-wing
beliefs has an especially difficult time getting the peer endorsements
needed for publication. This is true even when
the rejected paper appears just as comprehensively researched as the
more liberal papers commonly accepted by prestigious journals. But
in 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s
Meta-Research Innovation Center, went one step further. In a now-famous report,
he showed that even the social science research that does get published
is not nearly as rigorous as it has been made to appear. Much of what
has been taught for decades as “settled science” is, he showed, the
product of unreliable statistical testing, the misleading use of small
sample sizes, unwarranted credence given to small effects, unshared
experimental data, and other scientifically dubious methods. Ever
since Ioannidis’ paper, it has become painfully clear that even many of
the most influential experiments in sociology, political science, social
psychology, economics, climate science, anthropology, education, and
medicine cannot meet the first requirement of science: replication of
results upon retesting. Widely cited studies supposedly confirming the
liberal assertion that discriminatory behavior stems from unconscious
stereotyping, for example, cannot be duplicated. In 2015, Science tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals during 2008 and got significant results for only 36, compared to the significance claimed by 97 of the originals. A similar study one year later in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series of the Federal Reserve could not reproduce the outcomes of a majority of prominent economics articles. Ioannidis himself now believes
that up to half the discoveries ever published in peer-reviewed social
science and medical journals are probably wrong, an opinion he shares with The Lancet’s respected editor-in-chief, Richard Charles Horton. National Association of Scholars (NAS) president Peter Wood has similarly argued
that many of the regulations, laws, and social programs routinely
passed by Congress on the basis of supposedly solid research have no
real scientific justification. Even in the area of environmental
science—where investigations tend to involve more physics and chemistry
than social science—much of the research still cannot be replicated.
Studies related to nuclear power turn out to be especially iffy. The
dangers of accidents like Fukushima (where all the deaths were caused by
the tsunami, not radiation) are grossly exaggerated while hazards posed
by renewables like hydroelectric power are simply ignored. Completely overlooked are the successful development of fast neutron reactors, which eliminate the problem of radioactive waste, and of small modular reactors, whose simplicity of design makes them exceptionally safe. The second development to undermine people’s faith in technocratic governance is their own experience of it. In 1964, polls showed that three of every four Americans trusted the competence of public officials. Today, only one third of respondents feel the same way. Recent surveys reported by City Journal
show that those states that boast the most comprehensive menu of public
services rank lowest for the efficient delivery of any of them. Indeed,
there is a direct connection between how much a state spends on
programs to improve the quality of its citizen’s lives and the
percentage of those same citizens eager to migrate elsewhere. Especially
striking is the declining status of what decades ago was one of
America’s most admired institutions, public education. In the latest annual poll by Harvard’s Education Next magazine, 75 percent of respondents graded the performance of the nation’s schools with a C or less. Republicans
may not be precisely on target when they attribute the decline of
America’s big cities to the failure of Democratic mayors. But they are
close enough to what the public perceives as the real problem—that
government has wasted hundreds of billions over the last half-century to
“engineer” an urban revival. That accusation has become one of the
GOP’s most effective talking points. The third and most recent
threat to public support for technocratic governance is the dawning
awareness that there must soon be a radical restructuring of state and
federal finances. Had politicians listened to the advice of
knowledgeable commentators and used the economic recovery of the last
decade to prudently build a financial cushion, the need might never have
arisen. But from 2010 to 2020, the federal government averaged deficits
of more than $1 trillion per year, more than doubling its liabilities
to $22 trillion. During that same period, the net debt owed by many states ballooned as well: New Jersey to $199 billion, Illinois to $248 billion, and California to $288 billion. Then came the coronavirus, which almost overnight added 5.9 trillion to the U.S. deficit while starving the states
of sales tax revenue. Even before the recently aborted negotiation on a
second stimulus, it was already clear that the country’s cumulative
debt would soon be greater than its annual economic output (GDP), the point where any nation’s creditworthiness is automatically called into question. As
voters contemplate the mix of tax increases and spending cuts that will
eventually be required to balance government books, they know that many
public programs are going to have to be trimmed, combined, or even
eliminated. So large is America’s sovereign debt, as International
Monetary Fund (IMF) economists Fabien Gonguet and Klaus-Peter Hellwig
make clear in their recent working paper on “Public Wealth in the United States,” that no state or federal department will be spared. Taken
together, these three developments—the discrediting of the research
underpinning current social services, the mushrooming mistrust of
institutional elites, and the looming need to significantly downsize
government—have created a crisis for modern liberals that is far more
personal than generally recognized. Once, perhaps as students, they
admired the administrative state from a purely intellectual perspective,
as outsiders. But today, as working adults, liberals are the administrative state. Among public school teachers and administrators, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 87 to 13. Among social workers, it is 93 to 7; for those involved in environmental regulation, 91 to 9; and for public defenders it is 19 to 1. Among college professors and administrators—many of whom work at private institutions but still benefit from government grants and federal student loans—it is 17 to 2. When it comes to federal employees, a good indicator of party affiliation is campaign contributions. In 2016, according to The Hill,
95 percent of the donations from workers in 14 agencies went to
Clinton. At the Department of Justice, 99 percent of the money went to
Clinton; at the State Department, it was also 99 percent. Of the
political contributions from Internal Revenue Service workers, 94
percent went to Clinton. What does the modern liberal do when the
old appeal to credentialed expertise is no longer enough to protect his
or her job from being restructured, downsized, made more accountable,
subject to greater competition, or even abolished? They do what
privileged bureaucrats have always done when the rationale for their
status no longer holds sway: they find a purpose whose ideology combines
“right thinking” with a puritanical intolerance of any criticism of
that thinking. The K-12 public schools that fail miserably in
international comparisons, the universities increasingly blamed for
selfishly putting so many American students into debt, the court systems
and social agencies which have presided over the collapse of America’s
inner cities – all resist the reform they fear by uniting behind a
substitute for social science which leaves their institutions and
authority intact. The goal, as Center of the American Experiment senior
policy analyst Katherine Kersten recently observed, is to go from being “the expert” to being “the elect.” That
liberals would gravitate to wokeness is hardly a surprise. With its
unrelenting racial interpretation of every social encounter, it
preserves the left’s claim to represent all minority and disadvantaged
groups while simultaneously inventing endless reasons for institutional
remedy. Once more, any criticism is easily dismissed as the result of
the critic’s own unconscious privilege—the same way psychoanalysts used
to deflect any challenge to their professional opinion as “a
psychological resistance.” Wokeness also comes with an especially powerful language for social intimidation, honed over decades through its evolution
from deconstructionism to political correctness to identity politics to
today’s cancel culture. It’s so powerful, in fact, that it can now
intimidate the heads of major corporations. Wokeness even appeals to
many clergy who, having failed to stem the declining number of
church-affiliated believers, seek relevance in a biblically forbidden
compromise with those preaching earthly utopia. What all this
means is that liberal intolerance will be with us long after the
election, no matter who wins. At a time when sociological support for
its institutions is no longer a given, when average Americans are
increasingly skeptical of governing elites, and when public debt is
about to force some serious budget adjustments, the last thing anyone on
the left wants is a friendly, rational conversation. There is no
better glimpse into the future than what happened last February, when
the Oakland, California-based Independence Institute decided to sponsor a
conference
on improving the accuracy of social science research. Not only were the
organizers labeled everything from misogynistic white supremacists to
climate change deniers, but two graduate students set to speak at the
gathering were forced to withdraw after threats of career sabotage. Even
the event’s most commonsense recommendations—to do more replication
studies, to prioritize grants to researchers who pre-register their
protocols, and to require experimenters to make their data and research
protocols publicly available—were viciously attacked on social media as
right-wing propaganda. Whatever far-left lunacy today’s liberals
are willing to tolerate in the name of upending white male privilege is
really a measure of what they are prepared to inflict to preserve their
own.
Yeah, I know I sound like a “know-it-all”, but this is one subject where it is necessary to know how the “sausage is made” in this kind of investigation to understand one possible reason that might explain Nora Dannehy’s resignation on Thursday night.
I have no information on the reasons for Dannehy’s departure, but I think the media is peddling what they HOPE the reason might be, not the actual reason itself.
I have a theory, and to understand the theory you need to first understand the significance of Dannehy having joined Durham in March 2019.
She joined DOJ in 1991, and she left DOJ in 2010 when she was selected to be Deputy Attorney General in Connecticut, the No. 2 job in that office.
But while she worked for Durham during the Bush 43 Administration, she worked with him on two high-level sensitive investigations based on Attorney General appointments, and when she was Acting US Attorney in Connecticut she was, herself, tapped to lead another high-level investigation of potential government misconduct.
John Durham was appointed in 2008 by Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations.
In August 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Durham to lead the Justice Department’s investigation of the legality of CIA’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the torture of detainees. Durham’s mandate was to look at only those interrogations that had gone “beyond the officially sanctioned guidelines. ”
Dannehy was Acting US Attorney from 2008 to 2010, but even before that, she was tapped by Attorney General Mukasey in 2006 to investigate whether there was improper political motivation behind the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.
Among various reporting on her departure — and the rumors about why — it was reported that when she agreed to join the Durham “Review” as it was first called by Attorney General Barr in March 2019, she expected her service to last 6-12 months.
I noted on Twitter earlier that when she left DOJ in 2010, she was at the 19-year mark, which meant that her DOJ pension had not yet fully vested. By returning in March 2019, expecting to serve one year, she would reach the 20 year service time for full vesting of her pension benefits.
When Durham’s “Review” turned into a “criminal investigation”, given that it came on the heels of two IG Reports — Mid-Year Exam and Four FISAs — there is a critical feature of such an investigation that is little understood except by people with experience doing police misconduct and public corruption cases. This is because when done correctly, it is never a subject of further inquiry in any court case that follows so the public never hears about the matter or the people who were involved.
When Durham began a substantive criminal inquiry into the official actions of FBI and DOJ personnel, he immediately needed to ensure that his criminal investigators and prosecutors were not “polluted” by evidence that the law precluded them from using against the agents or other officials if a criminal case was later brought.
In Garrity v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court held that police officers under investigation for misconduct could not be compelled to answer questions by investigators, and have their answers used against them in a later criminal prosecution if the officers were told they would be suspended or fired from their jobs if they asserted their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
“The choice given petitioners was either to forfeit their jobs or to incriminate themselves. The option to lose their means of livelihood or to pay the penalty of self-incrimination is the antithesis of free choice to speak out or to remain silent. That practice, like interrogation practices we reviewed in Miranda v. Arizona … is “likely to exert such pressure upon an individual as to disable him from making a free and rational choice.” We think the statements were infected by the coercion inherent in this scheme of questioning and cannot be sustained as voluntary under our prior decisions.”
The first thing a prosecution team must do when initiating this kind of investigation is to insulate the investigators and prosecutors from being exposed to material they should not see because of Garrity. This is done through the creation of a “filter” team — one or more prosecutors and a few investigators whose job it is to go through everything amassed during the IG’s investigation, and “filter out” any compelled statements that might violate Garrity. IG Horowitz’s two investigations involved interviews of dozens of federal agents and other federal employees. Many of them may have been given some form of Garrity warning — similar to a Miranda warning. But it’s possible that some were warned that a failure to answer IG questions could lead to an adverse job action for refusing. The judgment about whether the IG interview amounted to a “compelled” statement or not is a case-by-case determination. So the “filter team” has to go through every interview done by the IG for that purpose, and separate out any interviews which might be a problem. The prosecutors and investigators never see those interviews because doing so would “contaminate” them with information they are not entitled to use against potential defendants in building a criminal case.
Sometimes this process requires “interviewing the interviewers” — meaning the “filter team” would actually sit down with Horowitz’s agents and go over the interviews they did to rule out any issues of whether the statements given fit the definition of being “compelled” under the Garrity. So this is not necessarily a quick process to complete.
The “filter team” then has to determine if any specific evidence collected in the IG investigation was produced solely as a result of information learned from a “compelled” statement. If such evidence is found, that evidence is “fruit of the poisonous tree” and is “filtered out” so the prosecution team never sees it.
It is also the role of the “filter team” to see if there is an “independent source” for that evidence. Is there another route that the prosecutors could follow to come up with that same evidence — a route that does not depend on what was learned in the “compelled statement.” If so, then the evidence can remain in the case file when it is handed to the prosecution team.
This “filter team” has to work independently of the leader of the investigation. Durham can’t know of any of the information filtered out because that would contaminate him as well.
Once the “filter” work is done, the “filter team” is disbanded because they cannot remain with the prosecution — they possess information about compelled statements that the prosecution cannot know. A “Garrity” file is created that has all the information and statements that have been removed from the IG case file, and that is maintained separately in case the need ever arises to document what information was not given to the prosecution team.
These are well established and well-understood practices and procedures in DOJ. Durham would have needed someone he knew and trusted, and someone who had done sensitive work like this in the past to lead that “filter team.” Their decisions on what to provide the prosecution team and what to hold back would be crucial in how the case developed.
If indictments are imminent, this is generally the point
you would expect the “filter team” to depart.
I don’t know if Dannehy was part of the “filter team” or led the “filter team.” But the 6-12 month time frame she was originally given would be consistent with that role. She fits the part of someone whom Durham would have called on to serve in that role, and the time of her departure is consistent with having served in such a capacity.
Imagine for a moment that you are the head of a company that saw its primary product’s popularity sink among Republicans and Independents by 46 and 36 points respectively in the space of a year. I don’t care what the product is. It could be a bar of soap. As a capitalist, you’d have some questions. You’d be open to ideas about what you did wrong. You’d consider all the possibilities. You certainly wouldn’t reject it as out of touch or imply that it’s racist to suggest your affiliation with a radical race-focused agenda was the issue involved.
But then you wouldn’t be billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, famous for Shark Tank, owning the Dallas Mavericks, and as a dude who should probably slow his roll on fillers. Last night he got into it in a lengthy argument with Townhall’s Guy Benson over a new Gallup poll, which illustrates in shocking detail the challenge facing pro sports in the era of the Great Awokening.
As Tristan Justice writes:
According to Gallup, the sports industry now boasts a negative image among U.S. adults: 30 percent see the sports industry positively, compared to 40 percent reporting a negative image. This year’s survey illustrates a 30 percent decline from American views on the sports industry a year ago, when the corporate sports enjoyed a net positive 20 percent rating, with 45 percent of Americans reporting a favorable opinion compared to 25 percent who said otherwise. The data comes at a particularly tumultuous time for the industry facing headwinds on multiple fronts, from rebelling teams and players protesting police use of force on those resisting arrest to schedule irregularities this year as leagues struggle to circumvent challenges presented by the Wuhan coronavirus. Gallup shows sports favorability among Republicans sinking overwhelmingly in comparison to Democrats, with a 46 percent drop in a positive outlook among Republicans whereas Democrats only saw a 5 percent drop in their favorability towards corporate sports in the last year.
Perhaps even more troublesome for owners who feel this is just white conservatives being resistant to change, the drop was even bigger among non-whites – a 35-point negative swing versus 26 points, perhaps indicating that woke white Democrats are totally down with the wokeness.
As I wrote last month, the real problem facing pro sports is that they’re engaging in this behavior not at the behest of their fans, but at the behest of the overwhelmingly leftist (and white) corporate media that covers them.
Most fans watch sports out of allegiance and a desire to be entertained. The more this entertainment is interrupted by political posturing, the more people will tune out and find different entertainment. According to internal analysis shared with me about the NFL’s performance, they found fans don’t typically drop away entirely – they just watch fewer games. Instead of watching their own team and a bunch of other games every Sunday, they shrink back to watching just the team they care the most about.
The NFL’s plan to squelch all of this is to show the National Anthem on the first weekend of games then not show it at all, so the performative kneeling and the like will become moot. But Cuban’s willingness to engage in a blatant public performance which pretends as if a 46-point drop among Republicans and a 36-point drop among Independents is just noise is a sign of how much corporate owners are willing to engage in gaslighting in order to avoid a hard question about the downsides of what they’re doing.
Newsom Signs Bill Removing Automatic Penalty for 'Consensual' Sex Acts Involving Minors
On Friday, Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom
signed a bill into law, passed by the Democrat-controlled state senate
and Democrat-controlled state assembly, that reduces penalties
for certain adults who engage in sex acts with children as young as 14
years of age. The law makes it more likely that parents won't know when a
sex offender has access to their children. SB-145
removes the automatic requirement for a person to register as a sex
offender when "convicted of nonforcible sodomy with a minor, oral
copulation with a minor, or sexual penetration with a minor," so long as
the child is at least 14 years of age and the adult is not older than
the child by more than 10 years when the sex crime took place, according
to Senate Floor Analysis. With the automatic requirement to register as
a sex offender removed, only a judge can impose the requirement as part
of the sentencing. Judges routinely spark outrage for incredibly lenient sentences involving sex crimes against children. The
bill is being touted as pro-LGBT legislation because it ends what
supporters of the legislation are calling long-standing discrimination
against the LGBT community. Supporters of the bill say the automatic
requirement was discriminatory against gay people because a 24-year-old
adult who was convicted of "consensual" oral and anal sex acts with a
15-year-old minor was previously required to register as a sex offender.
But if the same-aged adult and minor had engaged in penile-vaginal sex,
the offending adult would not be automatically required to register. But
if protecting children from predators is somehow discriminatory against
gay people, what does that say about the LGBT community? Rather than impose the automatic requirement on adults who have
penile-vaginal sex with minors, the lawmaker who introduced the bill --
state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco -- chose to reduce the penalty
on sex offenders instead. The automatic requirement was a safety measure
to protect children by mandating sex offenders register on the list,
regardless of whatever judge may be overseeing the case. SB-145 makes it more likely that parents won't know when a sex offender is living next door.
In what’s hopefully a sign there’s more to come, RedState emeritus Stu Cvrk posted a fantastic column today titled, Digging Into the Corpulent Alexander Vindman. I won’t spoil your pleasure and reveal any of the interesting details except to say that I was both shocked and gratified to see this one:
Note that Investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported on Sunday that John Brennan “ran a secret task force out of Langley with its own separate budget to investigate the Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia.”
The reason for my somewhat contradictory reaction to Sperry’s news is that we’ve known about Brennan’s secret taskforce since a June 2017 Washington Post story headlined, Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.
In fact, I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to it since a column from way back in March of last year.
As you can maybe guess from its headline, the point of that Washington Post story is to brush aside the obvious fact that the Russian election interference on which Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats never tire of blaming her humiliating defeat occurred on Obama’s watch. And, of course, they try to absolve Obama by blaming his failure to stop it on Republicans.
If good governance consisted of never taking responsibility for anything except your opponents’ successes, today’s Democrats would be the greatest political leaders in all of history.
This particular exercise in blame-dodging, like most of what passes for political journalism at the Washington Post, is as blatant a piece of propaganda as anything Pravda ever published. A trio of Washington Post “journalists” basically just slapped their name on a story written by a bunch of anonymous high-level Obama administration officials.
The accounts of meetings only attended by a handful of intelligence bureau chiefs and their inner thoughts and objectives had to come from one or more of Hillary Clinton’s three Obama administration stooges; CIA Director, John Brennan (Moe ), FBI Director James Comey (Larry), and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (Curly).
The propaganda is so over the top that it’s actually kind of funny. Though, of course, not nearly as funny as it would be if we could get those three to start poking each other’s eyes out and hitting each other in the head with hammers. But that Washington Post hymn to Obama’s beneficent wisdom is all we’ve got for now, so it’ll have to do.
The Post informs us that “Obama’s approach to national security challenges was deliberate and cautious,” and “often seemed reducible to a single imperative: Don’t make things worse.” We also learn of his “determination to avoid politicizing the Russia issue.”
Don’t you just miss him already?
CIA director John Brennan “move[s] swiftly to schedule private briefings with congressional leaders,” but “getting appointments with certain Republicans proved difficult.”
The fiends!
The White House is “[s]tung by the reaction” of Republicans, having “hoped that a bipartisan appeal to states would be more effective.”
Republican objections to letting Obama’s crooked gang of incompetents muck around in state election systems under the guise of “cybersecurity assistance” are described as “partisan squabble.”
But in the midst of this naked attempt to absolve Obama and his people of any blame, we get a typical example of how unbelievably stupid they all are. You see, whichever stooge or stooges wrote the Washington Post story wound up revealing the existence of Moe’s secret task force when they tried to show how hard Obama’s people were working to stop the Russians.
Moreover, when you add other information we learned later, a pretty good picture of what they were up to emerges along with some interesting facts about other projects the seditious cabal took on.
For example, it turns out they wrote the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment validating that Putin sent the most incompetent agents in all of history on one of its most significant missions when, for some reason, he took it upon himself to balance out all the corporate media’s election interference to make sure America had someone competent at the helm instead of a wretchedly corrupt mentally deteriorating bungler.
I’m talking about Hillary Clinton, not the one they’re running this year.
Even without knowing the January 2017 ICA was a Three Stooges production, the only thing it shows is that, if this is the best they could do, there couldn’t possibly be a shred of evidence that Russia interfered with the election.
Some of the main evidence cited are press reports of public statements Vladimir Putin made. The last 7 of its 12 pages – and I’m not kidding here – consist of a 2013 report on the news outlet Russia Today that is itself just a cut-and-paste job from the internet.
And, besides looking like a homework assignment done at the last minute by a stoned high school student who ran out of his ADHD medication, it actually includes this caveat – again, not kidding:
Judgements are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.
Moreover, we found out a few months ago that the president of the DNC tech firm that was the only entity allowed to examine their servers testified to congress that there was, in fact, no evidence that the Russians stole a single file. And, there’s a lot more that’s wrong with the story he’s telling besides that.
If Hillary Clinton and her acolytes hadn’t shrieked about Russian election interference to deflect all the revelations about her corruption and incompetence WikiLeaks published and undermine Trump’s presidency, we literally would have barely heard anything about it. That’s the only real purpose the story ever served.
There’s a mountain of other conclusive reasons we know that the Russians weren’t responsible for any of the proof WikiLeaks revealed to the American people about Hillary Clinton’s gross unfitness for office.
But, honestly, even if they were, I would take the kind of election interference that reveals the truth over the kind practiced by CNN, the Washington Post, and the rest of the corporate media which deals in propaganda and lies any day of the year no matter who it came from.
Since writing about Moe’s secret task force last year, I’ve been frustrated that so much attention has been paid to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation but almost none to its top-secret shadow.
Both Comey and Peter Strzok were involved in Crossfire Hurricane as well as Brennan’s operation and, as Stu suggests, they were basically just different official hats the seditious cabal put on.
Last month I pointed out that the same is true of Mueller’s Independent Counsel Investigation. It was just “the new, more powerful, identity Crossfire Hurricane took on after it faked its own death.” And the way Congressional Republicans tend to fully recognize that the FBI investigation was corrupt but somehow treat Mueller (aka Shemp) and his team who officially took it over as somehow more legit makes no sense at all.
But even though the seditious cabal’s third incarnation under the guise of Shemp’s investigation hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves, it’s been a source of frustration to me that what may be it’s very first incarnation as lead-stooge Brennan’s top-secret task force has received virtually none.
So it’s nice to hear that investigators are finally paying attention to an issue I reported on last year. And I thought our readers might be interested in learning more about what Brennan was up to now that it’s in the news. So, without further ado, here’s an updated version of my column from last year headlined:
Obama’s OTHER Russian-Election-Interference investigation.
Now if they’ll only start paying attention to that phony Russian hack of the DNC.
***
According to that June, 2017 Washington Post story, sometime in the summer of 2016, Brennan received,
a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.
The Post is cagey about exactly when Brennan received this alleged “intelligence bombshell.” All we know for sure is that it must have been in or before “early August,” since that’s when he sent it to the White House “in an envelope that “carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.”
Brennan couldn’t have wasted much time before apprising Obama. So, he must have received it in late July or early August.
That fits perfectly with Paul Sperry’s tweet posted above that Brennan’s task force started on July 31.
After consulting Obama, the Post tells us that Brennan,
convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI…
They worked exclusively for two groups of “customers,” officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.
Since Crossfire Hurricane began on July 31, Brennan’s investigation must have begun at around exactly the same time. If Sperry is right they began on the very same day.
Some coincidence huh?
And, even apart from some of Brennan’s team coming from the FBI, we know that Comey was fully involved in Brennan’s investigation from its inception since, according to the Post, the evidence produced was initially shown only to Comey, Clapper, Susan Rice, and Loretta Lynch.
Moreover, it appears that Peter Strzok, who ran and, according to Lisa Page’s testimony, even initiated Crossfire Hurricane, was also a member of the team working for Brennan!
You see, the Post reports that the Obama administration’s January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment alleging that the Russians conducted cyber-espionage on Trump’s behalf “was based largely on the work done by” Brennan’s investigators.
That’s confirmed by Clapper’s testimony to the Senate that the ICA was the product of “two dozen” “hand-picked analysts” from the CIA, FBI and NSA. Apart from the Post using the words “several dozen” instead of “two dozen,” that’s exactly how they describe Brennan’s team.
But, according to a May, 2018 piece by Paul Sperry, “[a] source close to the House [of Representatives Intelligence Committee Russia] investigation” reports that Peter Strzok was “was one of the authors of the ICA “ and “the intermediary between Brennan and Comey.”
Independently of Sperry’s source, before he was fired Strzok lead the FBI’s Counterespionage section.
So, it makes sense he would be one of the FBI agents Brennan chose and Comey’s representative on the task force. And Sperry’s source received confirmation from text messages between Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page discussing a meeting between Strzok and Clapper in the weeks before the ICA’s release.
Given that (i) Comey was intimately involved in Brennan’s investigation, (ii) Brennan had agents from the FBI on his team, and (iii) it appears Peter Strzok numbered among them, contra Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes assertion, it’s tough to believe that a hard partition existed around the FBI investigation. Even more so since, whether or not Sperry is right that Brennan’s investigation started up on the same day as Crossfire Hurricane, they couldn’t have begun much more than a week apart.
So the question is raised of exactly what information might have been shared and how much about Crossfire Hurricane made its way to President Obama. Regardless, there’s no question that he knew all about what Brennan was up to.
But what’s just as interesting is the nature of that “intelligence bombshell” Obama’s people used as the predicate for convening Brennan’s task force.
The Steele Dossier
As Margot Cleveland pointed out in March of 2019, despite DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s subsequent finding that the infamous Steele Dossier played no role in opening up Crossfire Hurricane, it’s very implausible to suppose the FBI didn’t know about it when the investigation began.
We know from DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr’s testimony that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, had an FBI handler, Special Agent Mike Gaeta, to whom he gave two of his reports. As Cleveland also notes:
Ohr’s testimony confirms press reports that Steele flew to Rome to meet with an FBI contact and later, with approval of the assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, “on July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele’s firm, Orbis.” Nuland would later appear on “Face the Nation,” acknowledging that Steele passed on “two to four pages of short points,” and that their immediate reaction was “this needs to go to the FBI. . . . That’s something for the FBI to investigate.”
When you add the fact that Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier for Clinton’s campaign, it becomes a bit hard to believe that neither Comey, McCabe, nor Strzok had heard anything about it when Crossfire Hurricane was opened.
But the fact that Brennan’s task force was responsible for the January 2017 ICA raises questions about whether portions of Steele’s completely discredited pile of rubbish might have also comprised the so-called “intelligence bombshell” used to justify Brennan’s shadow investigation.
For, Paul Sperry also reported in May of 2018 that Obama’s National Security Agency Director, Michael Rogers “stated in a classified letter to Congress” that the Steele Dossier played a role in producing the ICA. Indeed, according to Sperry, Adm. Rogers told congress “a two-page summary of the dossier” appears as an appendix to the classified version. And, as Sperry notes, James Clapper has confirmed that Brennan’s task force used the Steele dossier.
But that Washington Post story revealing the existence of Brennan’s secret task force mentions Adm. Rogers too It reports that he was “reluctant to view” the intelligence which Brennan used to justify his investigation “with high confidence” because it came from another country.
The Steele dossier is, of course, named after former British spy, Christopher Steele, who authored the seventeen memos it comprises. And according to a November 2017 story appearing in the Guardian, Brennan received the report used to justify his investigation from none other than British intelligence agency GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, who “flew to the US to personally brief” him.
The Washington Post tells us that the “intelligence bombshell” Brennan received from Britain came from a highly-placed source within the Russian government who alleged that Putin had instigated a cyber-intelligence operation whose aim was to “defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect…Donald Trump.”
And, it just so happens that Steele’s first memo, dated June 20, 2016, alleges the existence of a Russian espionage operation to help Trump that was “supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin” based on information from a “former senior [Russian] intelligence officer.” Indeed, Steele’s August 5 memo describes this operation as designed “to aid Trump and,” using the Post’s exact words, “damage Clinton.”
Steele’s July 19th memo also says that these efforts included “state-sponsored cyber operatives working in Russia.”
In short, everything the Post says was included in the report from British intelligence used to justify Brennan’s investigation happens to have been in the memos already produced by ex-British spy Christopher Steele when Brennan received it.
If the “intelligence bombshell” used to justify Brennan’s investigation wasn’t the first few memo’s of the Steele dossier that’s one hell of a coincidence.
Much attention has been paid to Crossfire Hurricane and rightly so. But it’s well past time that more was given to Obama’s other higher-level shadow investigation into the non-existent Russian efforts to help Trump win the White House to determine what information was shared, if Brennan’s operation also involved any spying on Trump’s campaign, and whether it was justified by the first memos in the completely discredited, Clinton-funded Steele dossier.
Let’s hope Paul Sperry is right and someone is finally looking into what the seditious cabal who ran Crossfire Hurricane were up to while operating in the guise of Brennan’s secret task force.
It couldn’t have possibly been anything wholesome, that’s for sure.
l
