BREAKING: DC Legal Circles Rumor Says Member of Mueller’s Prosecution Team Has “Flipped” for Durham
Something has happened in the Durham investigation of the origins of
the Russia rumor hoax, and a rumor circulating among Washington, D.C.,
federal criminal defense att0rneys is that a former member of Robert
Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) has “flipped” and is providing
information to the investigators regarding the work of the SCO.
This is the earliest Tweet I can find on the subject:
RUMINT: Talk From Many DC Lawyers Saying One Of Special Counsel Robert #Mueller's Prosecutors Has "FLIPPED" & Is Now Cooperating With US Attorney John #Durham's Investigation Into The Origins Of #RussiaCollusion Investigation. A Single Name Is Being Repeated...Developing... pic.twitter.com/2ulUVGAlHU
This kind of “rumor” very often turns out to be true, because it is
nearly impossible for the legal staffs involved — the Gov’t and the
cooperator — to keep a lid on everything.
Earlier today, before the Basham Tweet, there was this:
Can’t say why without betraying a confidence, but I just had a BIG restoration of faith moment in AG Barr and Durham.
Cardillo is former NYPD and has 200k+ followers on Twitter. He has
pretty decent connections in New York law enforcement circles.
This
rumor follows on the heels of the release last week of records showing
several members of the Special Counsel’s Office “wiped” their SCO-issued
cell phones clean on one or more occasions.
In his book, which
was released two days ago, Andrew Weissmann covers this question,
writing that Jeannie Rhee cautioned everyone that everything they
committed to writing during their work for the SCO would be subject to a
later “investigation of the investigators” that was sure to follow,
based on her years of experience working in Washington, D.C.
JUST
SPECULATING, but Weissmann has been agitated almost from the moment he
took to Twitter a few months ago over the investigation being conducted
by Durham and AG Barr. But his agitation went into overdrive when U.S.
Attorney Jensen began looking at the SCO’s handling of the prosecution
of General Flynn.
It cannot be overlooked that, while most of the
more senior DOJ “veterans” on the SCO went to lucrative careers in
private practice after departing, several of the younger members of the
SCO returned to positions in the Department of Justice. That means they
have been subject to potential investigation by internal DOJ
disciplinary offices like the Inspector General or Office of
Professional Responsibility. Issues like “wiping” their SCO- issued
phones without authorization, likely in violation of DOJ policy, might
not mean much to Andrew Weissmann and Jeannie Rhee, but for younger
attorneys still in DOJ like Brandon Van Grack, Aaron Zelinsky, and Adam
Jed, their DOJ careers might hang in the balance — and potentially their
licenses to practice law. It is possible they were directed or
encouraged to take some actions they now regret, or for which they are
now vulnerable to leverage by Durham or other government investigators.
I will update this story or post something new as developments warrant.
IT'S ON: Sandmann's Lawyer to Sue Joe Biden for Calling Kyle Rittenhouse a White Supremacist
On Wednesday, Lin Wood announced he would sue Democratic nominee Joe
Biden for libel after the candidate released an ad suggesting that his
client, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, is a “white supremacist”
responsible for violence in Kenosha, Wisc. Wood has represented Nick
Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School graduate repeatedly defamed
by the legacy media after the March for Life last year. Wood has
represented Sandmann in wresting money from CNN and The Washington Post in defamation lawsuits. Wood took on Rittenhouse as a client after the 17-year-old was smeared as a white supremacist following shootings in Kenosha.
“On behalf of Kyle Rittenhouse, I shall sue [Joe Biden] &
Biden/Harris Campaign for libel,” Wood tweeted on Wednesday. “Put in
your hearing aid, Joe. You will hear footsteps.”
On behalf of Kyle Rittenhouse, I shall sue @JoeBiden & Biden/Harris Campaign for libel.
Earlier on Wednesday, Wood announced that a “formal demand for public
retraction is being prepared for Biden/Harris Campaign on behalf of Kyle
Rittenhouse. I also hereby demand that [Joe Biden] immediately retract
his false accusation that Kyle is a white supremacist & militia
member responsible for violence in Kenosha.”
Formal demand for public retraction is being prepared for Biden/Harris Campaign on behalf of Kyle Rittenhouse.
I also hereby demand that @JoeBiden immediately retract his false accusation that Kyle is a white supremacist & militia member responsible for violence in Kenosha. pic.twitter.com/GrZyE8nI7Z
Todd McMurtry, Wood’s colleague, argued that Biden “had defamed Kyle
Rittenhouse by suggesting on this video that he is a White Supremacist.
The [Left] just will not stop. I am working on the retraction demand now
for Mr. Biden and his campaign.”
McMurtry included the Biden campaign video in his tweet. The video
includes footage of Fox News host and debate moderator Chris Wallace
pressing President Donald Trump to condemn “white supremacists and
militia groups” — to which Trump said, “sure,”
he would. As Wallace asks the question, the Biden ad includes footage
of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and then cuts to
more recent footage, including an image of Rittenhouse.
Marina Medvin, another attorney representing Rittenhouse, drafted a
more lengthy statement responding to Biden’s accusation. She recounted
the events of late August,
when Rittenhouse drove to Kenosha, armed and seemingly intending to
offer medical care and to protect property from rioters who had burned
down businesses. Videos from that fateful night show Rittenhouse giving
medical help to rioters. Other vidoes show rioters chasing Rittenhouse
before he opens fire, shooting three people and killing one.
While Rittenhouse should not have gone to Kenosha that night (and it
seems he broke state laws by openly carrying under the age of 18), it
appears he opened fire in self-defense. There is no evidence to suggest that Rittenhouse was a member of a “far-right militia,” much less an actual white supremacist.
“There is absolutely no evidence, not even a pinch, of this
defamatory accusation that my client Kyle Rittenhouse is a ‘white
supremacist’ — none. My client is a 17 year old patriotic, dutiful
American boy who came to ‘help people,’ that’s in his own words. Those
words are enshrined in videos that have been shared all over social
media from that night in Kenosha,” Medvin wrote.
“Kyle came to Kenosha with his medic kit to help rioters who are
injured,” the lawyer continued. “He talks about this in these videos.
‘If anyone is getting injured, I’m running into harm’s way,’ he says.
There are videos of him screaming to the crow, ‘if you are injured, come
to me.'”
“There is no evidence of him being a ‘white supremacist.’ This
dangerous storyline was concocted by online trolls and then parroted by
mindless politicians and pundits,” Medvin charged. “The flagrant
defamation needs to stop. They can retract and apologize, or they can
deal with Lin Wood in court. It’s their choice.”
Response to Joe Biden's defamatory allegation that my client Kyle Rittenhouse is a "white supremacist" — pic.twitter.com/m2QUJ25rAt
Later on Wednesday, Wood threatened to “rip Joe [Biden] into shreds.”
“When I take [Joe Biden’s] deposition on cross-examination, no wire
or computer contact lenses will save him. I will rip Joe into shreds,”
the lawyer tweeted. “Ask witnesses who have had the misfortune of
sitting across the table from me under oath. You don’t mess with my
children, my pup, or my clients.”
When I take @JoeBiden deposition on cross-examination, no wire or computer contact lenses will save him.
I will rip Joe into shreds. Ask witnesses who have had the misfortune of sitting across the table from me under oath.
You don’t mess with my children, my pup, or my clients.
Oh My: Former CEO of Twitter Tweets About Lining Up and Shooting Capitalists During ‘the Revolution’
Dick
Costolo used to be the CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015 when he was
replaced by Jack Dorsey. Prior to Twitter, he used to work for Google.
In
May, 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Costolo to the National
Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. In 2013, TIME named him
one of the 10 Most Influential U.S. Tech CEOs and he gave a commencement
address to the University of Michigan.
In 2015, he joined the board of directors for Patreon.
In 2015, he allegedly said in an internal memo that Twitter had trouble dealing with abuse and trolls.
Given all that, it makes his comments on Twitter today all the more disturbing.
Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary.
Let’s first note that he seems to be a pretty darn well-off
capitalist so he may want to be careful about what he appears to be
advocating because leftists are not known to be respectful when they’re
getting crazy. They may not accord him any deference simply because he
thinks he qualifies for it.
Secondly, I’ve been suspended for
something as minor as calling an Obama official a liar. Others for
sometimes even more ridiculous things. So why is this apparent cheering
of lining people up against a wall still up? Do we even have to wonder?
This may explain a lot about why Twitter is the way it is.
Who
in the heck would be ‘happily providing commentary’ for what sounds
like a Marxist revolutionary execution? Why would you ever wish that on
anyone? And what a horrible society you are celebrating if you think
that’s good, particularly as opposed to the freedom and Constitutional
liberty that we have in this country. One of the things that has
distinguished us from banana republics is we don’t to this to political
enemies, to the other side with whom we disagree, we have a “peaceful
transition of power.” At least we did until 2016.
REMINDER: Twitter Censored the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES for saying he would Enforce the Law.
Former CEO of Twitter out here tweeting about murdering his political opponents. As you can see, our big tech overlords are totally normal human beings and I feel so safe knowing that they control how information flows in the public square. https://t.co/pjhOoIDiYQ
Founder of Tech Crunch and one of his friends took issue with it:
This is incitement of violence, glorifying violence and it’s the former CEO of Twitter. And, I thought, an old friend. I’m stunned. pic.twitter.com/Oidep3ay6C
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
America is on The Road to Revolution
We have more in common with pre-Nazi Germany and pre-Soviet Russia than we think.
In 1951, six years after the end of World War II, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism,
in an attempt to understand how such radical ideologies of both left
and right had seized the minds of so many in the 20th century. Arendt’s
book used to be a staple in college history and political theory
courses. With the end of the Cold War 30 years behind us, who today
talks about totalitarianism? Almost no one—and if they do, it’s about
Nazism, not communism.
Unsurprisingly,
young Americans suffer from profound ignorance of what communism was,
and is. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit
educational and research organization established by the U.S. Congress,
carries out an annual survey of Americans to determine their attitudes
toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey
found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War
generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57
percent of Millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence
offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than The Communist Manifesto.
Some
émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the
alarm about the West’s dangerous drift into conditions like they once
escaped. They feel it in their bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of
the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and the broader
crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth:
that these refugees from communism may be right.
What
does contemporary America have in common with pre-Nazi Germany and
pre-Soviet Russia? Arendt’s analysis found a number of social,
political, and cultural conditions that tilled the ground for those
nations to welcome poisonous ideas.
Loneliness and Social Atomization
Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” She continues:
What
prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,
is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually
suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become
an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.
The
political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look
back on as a golden age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is
widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical
problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
published Bowling Alone, an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.
Since
Putnam’s book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks
offering a facsimile of “connection.” Yet we grow ever lonelier and more
isolated. It is no coincidence that Millennials and members of
Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than older
Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It’s
as if they aspire to a politics that can replace the community they wish
they had.
Sooner
or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects.
The masses supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew “out of
the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure
and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only
through membership in a class.”
A
polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of
community and purpose, and who lack civic trust, are prime targets for
totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise solidarity and meaning.
Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions
Surveying
the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a
“terrifying negative solidarity” among people from diverse classes,
united in their belief that all political parties were populated by
fools. Likewise, in late imperial Russia, Marxist radicals finally
gained traction with the middle class when the Tsarist government failed
miserably to deal with a catastrophic 1891-92 famine.
Are
we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans’
confidence in their institutions—political, media, religious, legal,
medical, corporate—is at historic lows across the board. Only the
military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong confidence
of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many
industrialized nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left
and right in decline.
In
Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming
totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract
younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider
radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.
A
loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader
instability. As radical individualism has become more pervasive in our
consumerist-driven culture, people have ceased to look outside
themselves to religion or other traditional sources of authoritative
meaning.
But this imposes a
terrible psychological burden on the individual. Many of them may seek
deliverance as the alienated masses of pre-totalitarian Germany and
Russia did: in the certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian
movements.
The Desire to Transgress and Destroy
The
post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their
embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way
of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions,
and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will
to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”
Her
point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable
intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed
themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as
acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who
recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to
those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play,
race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to
equality. Arendt wrote:
The
members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the
destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had
been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
One
thinks of the university presidents and news media executives of our
time who have abandoned professional standards and old-fashioned liberal
values to embrace “antiracism” and other trendy left-wing causes. Some
left-wing politicians and other progressive elites either cheered for
the George Floyd race riots, or, like New York mayor Bill De Blasio,
stood idly by as thuggish mobs looted and burned stores in the name of
social justice.
Regarding
transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the
sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was
also awash in what historian James Billington called “a preoccupation
with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.”
Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism,
celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And
not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with
no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to
shame them, found comfort in sex.
The
end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the
floodgates to erotic literature, a prefiguration of our century’s
technology-driven pornographic revolution. “The sensualism of the age
was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how
the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians.
They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy
one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.
Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies
Heda
Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was
executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people
to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.
It
is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you
relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for
Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and
glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so
convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by
drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed
your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.
You
can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced
idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love
truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable
society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous
forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who,
in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the
memory of mankind.”
For
example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on
history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to
affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.
Consider the lavish praise with which elites have welcomed The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” a vigorously revisionist attempt to make slavery the central fact of the American founding.
Despite
the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American
Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked,
journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer
Prize for her contribution.
Along
those lines, propaganda helps change the world by creating a false
impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed
by totalitarian propaganda … lies in its ability to shut the masses off
from the real world.”
In
2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech,
found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using
progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social
justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is
framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according
to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing
intellectual elites.
A Mania for Ideology
Why
are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation
alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their
lives and tells them what to do explains it. For a man desperate to
believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself.
“He
may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own
death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not
touched,” Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show
trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were
prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.
Similarly,
under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations,
institutions, and even churches are frog-marching their employees
through courses in which whites and other ideologically disfavored
people are compelled to confess their “privilege.” Some do, eagerly.
One
of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is
political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all
aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today
pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer
and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a
sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is
what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.
Early
in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political
officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out
of the game.
“We must
finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must
condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’
like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of
chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for
chess.”
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
“Totalitarianism
in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of
their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect
and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote
Arendt.
All politicians
prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in
government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is
a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above
everything else—more than brains, more than drive, and more than
energy.”
Trump’s exaltation
of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But
how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the
core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of “cancel
culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find
themselves cast into outer darkness.
Beyond
cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within
their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities
within the University of California system, for example, teachers who
want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment
to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even
if it has nothing to do with their field.
De
facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate
America, and have now found their way into STEM faculties and
publications, as well as into medical science.
A
Soviet-born U.S. physician told me—after I agreed not to use his
name—that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to
ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender
health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise
gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a
physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health
interest.
Intellectuals Are the Revolutionary Class
In
our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a
crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies,
intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction.
“[T]he
key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network
and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes
sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might
emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it
is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their
“well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”
This
is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual
discourse. Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian
experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule
over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people
regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy
of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice
warriors.”
This is a
serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social
justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the
Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of
middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and
anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions,
and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a
sense of wholeness and purpose.
For
them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching
but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion.
Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW
ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and
influence. They are marching through the institutions of bourgeois
society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For
example, when the LGBT cause was adopted by corporate America, its
ultimate victory was assured.
Futuristic Fatalism
To
be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But
they do signify that the weaknesses in contemporary American society are
consonant with a pre-totalitarian state. Like the imperial Russians, we
Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own
country’s stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic
depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that
brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question.
As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:
There
is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by
means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a
liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to
totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which
we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense
and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.
If
totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0,
with gulags, secret police, and an all-powerful central state. That
would not be necessary. The power of surveillance technology, woke
capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will
probably be enough to compel conformity by most. At least at first, it
will be a soft totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four one—but totalitarianism all the same.
A Czech immigrant to the U.S. who works in academia told me that this “is not supposed to be happening here”—but it is.
“Any
time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or
acquaintances, I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense,” he
says. His own young adult children, born in America and indoctrinated
into identity-politics ideology by public schooling, think their father
is an alarmist kook. Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding
that Americans are going to have to learn about the evils of
totalitarianism the hard way?
Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited the report that was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016.
Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.
The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.
The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.
RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower” whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.
The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”
The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.
These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.
“They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.
He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment that Putin personally ordered “active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was “weak.”
The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.
The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” which was the interagency analytical group Obama’s top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.
Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Russia’s election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case “based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it’s based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence.”
But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.
It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.
“Some of the FBI source’s [Steele’s] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment,” stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists. “The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’ “
Steele’s reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department’s inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele’s own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.
Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department’s watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the “Crown material,” was incorporated with the ICA because it was “corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment “The IC analysts found it credible on its face,” Comey said.
The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.
“The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election,” said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.
Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence. “To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous,” she recently told NBC News.
Her boss during the ICA’s drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.
They, in turn, worked closely with NIC’s cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike’s president has testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)
Durham’s investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports.
No Input From CIA’s ‘Russia House’
The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.
“It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. “It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.”
The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.
The official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe.
The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.
“It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” as has been widely reported in the media, he said. “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”
Brennan’s tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.
In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”
“The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump,” argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.
“Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported,” Warner added. “There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared.”
However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled “Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election.” Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with “varying substantiation” and with “differing confidence levels.” It also notes “concerns about the use of specific sources.”
Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his “fusion team” at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco’s role in the ICA is unclear.
Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.
Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.
“It’s dynamite,” said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
“There are things in there that people don’t know,” he told RCI. “It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election.”
However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.
He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.
Article by J. Robert Smith in The American Thinker
Democrats: Riots, Racism, Rot, and Rebellion
Democrats
love to claim that their party underwent a metamorphosis in the 1960s,
when they finally washed away the taint of slavery past. The Rebellion,
in which Democrats played principal roles in causing, was a century in
the rearview mirror. Goes the spin: Democrats vanquished their
post-Civil War record of virulent racism, which expressed itself in Jim
Crow (Southern apartheid) and the atrocities of the nightriding KuKlux
Klan -- the party’s white-garbed brownshirts -- who ranged beyond the
South, terrorizing blacks in states where Democrats concentrated.
As we view the Democratic Party from the vantagepoint
of October, 2020, we see that the party’s character is unchanged. The
party of slavery, rebellion, and Jim Crow has found new expressions for
its darker inclinations.
Antifa
and BLM are knockoffs of the KKK. Riots and mob violence in blue
cities are very much the provocations of the party’s new strongarms.
Trashing and terrorizing cities aren’t an end, but a beginning. They’re
demonstration projects of sorts. Roadshows are to follow if the rest
of us don’t knuckle under.
Democrats
have never lost their appetite for oppression. Underclass blacks are
as exploited and kept down today as blacks were in the Jim Crow South.
Now, though, they’re given welfare checks, public housing, and handhelds
in exchange for votes. Democrats’ “Great Society” schemes empowered
white and black overseers and lined their pockets, but decades ago
failed to lift poor blacks out of their circumstances. Black generational poverty is bondage.
Racism
remains the Democratic Party’s franchise. Blaming nonblack Americans
for racism and underclass black failure is audacity borne of
desperation. Politics demand it. So, Democrats offload their
culpability. They’ve run major cities for many decades, yet have
nothing to show but empty promises and miserably bad policies and corrupt governance.
Say Democrats, white Americans – save for woke affluent progressives
and leftists -- must suffer for the sin of racism, current and
historic.
Democrats
aren’t discriminating, however. They want to “plantationize”
Hispanics. Democrats political viability requires capturing Hispanic
constituencies.
Charges
of society-wide racism are a powerful wedge that Democrats are using in
their efforts to upend America. The American experiment in liberty was
illegitimate, per Democrats radicalizing view. Tyranny -- under the
guises of “progressivism” and “democratic socialism” -- is the prescription, perhaps a softer variety, like Xi Jinping’s China, where a social credit system is daily refined, and where oligarchs and leftist apparatchiks thrive. Though ask Hong Kong citizens,
Tibetans, and Uyghurs about what "soft tyranny" means. Today’s
Democrats have more than rebellion on their minds. They have
revolution.
What’s the Green New Deal but a form of economic revolution, a means of drastically reordering society through the ruse of environmental concern? Medicare for All,
which destroys Medicare for seniors, is thinly disguised socialized
medicine. Vilifying and making calls to defund police is nothing more
than an effort to undermine law and order. What is Critical Race Theory other than an insidious attack on bedrock American principles?
Hence,
modern Democrats pose new, and in critical ways, greater threats to the
well-being of the Republic than their forerunners.
Marx,
not God, increasingly informs their worldviews. Faith was once invoked
by Democrats to rationalize slavery and white supremacy. Today,
Marxism in practice is slavery. Marxism is the antithesis of
Judeo-Christian faith. Charity, equality, and brotherhood cannot be
coerced. Marxism is all sham. It has no good intentions. It’s a means
to an end: power.
Among
Democrats, nihilism afflicts. It’s the practical consequence of
godlessness. It’s end-stage rot. The rot -- a consuming hedonism --
began infiltrating society with the 60s counterculture and has been
metastasizing ever since. An outgrowth, in part, is Democrats contempt
for traditional virtues: family, faith, hard work, merit.
But
Democrats, old and new, reconverge in historic fashion. While old
Democrats embraced, defended, and promoted the abomination of slavery,
contemporary Democrats likewise champion abortion. Abortion has been
referred to as the slavery issue of modern times, and it is. The
killing of hundreds of thousands of innocents in wombs annually for
decades is the other great moral stain on the nation. Not incidentally,
unborn black babies are killed at horrifically high numbers.
The
President made the comments during a speech in Atlanta, Georgia on
Friday, where he noted the hypocrisy of the Democrats for affirming
Black Lives Matter while supporting Planned Parenthood, an organization
that President Trump said, was “founded on racism” and that “continues
to target the black community.”
He’s
not wrong. The abortion industry kills as many black people every four
days as the Ku Klux Klan killed in 150 years. Between 1882 and 1968,
there were reportedly 3,446 lynchings of black people in the United
States. Today, more black people are killed by white abortionists every
three days than all who were lynched in those years.
Emboldened Democrats have discarded the pretense of rare and medically necessary abortions. They now unabashedly promote late-term abortion up to birth. Their inhumanity and ghoulishness know no bounds.
The
day will arrive when the mass slaughter of the innocent will be seen
for the great evil that it is, and with that genuine awakening,
Democrats will again be seen as culprits in a colossal evil. Some
things never change.
Years
ago, friends and acquaintances used to think I was being facetious.
“The Democratic Party should have been abolished at the close of the
Civil War,” I’d say with a very straight face. There certainly was
justification. It was the party of slavery, as it had been from its
inception. It’s legislation and policies were catalysts in the ruptures
leading to civil war. Northern Democrats -- many known as “Peace
Democrats” or more accurately, “Copperheads” -- served as a fifth column. They aided and abetted their rebellious southern fellows.
Imagine
at the end of World War II had the Allies permitted the National
Socialist German Workers' Party to continue? Regarding moral
considerations, where does slavery stack up against the persecution and
extermination of the Jews (among others)? Both are, indeed, evils. The
Germans exploited slave labor as well. Extermination, though,
surpasses slavery as an evil, in that when you take a human being’s
life, you take-away any chance of liberty, and the exercise of natural
rights that undergird freedom. Yet, you can argue that any human being
who lives, from birth to death, in bondage, suffers a form of death. Millions of black slaves suffered a form of death.
Millions
of unborn children suffer literal death at the hands of abortionists.
Their rights as human beings discarded with their tortured bodies.
There’s one party that stands squarely for this slaughter, the
Democratic Party… the party of riots, racism, rot, and rebellion.
Here’s a sampling of headlines in major news outlets that purported to capture an exchange on white supremacy between President Trump, Joe Biden, and moderator Chris Wallace during Tuesday night’s debate.
Now compare those headlines to the transcript they claim to describe, and pay particular attention to Trump’s first response, which the bulk of the coverage glosses over.
WALLACE: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups…”
TRUMP: “Sure…”
WALLACE: “And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland”
TRUMP: “Sure, I’m prepared to do it, but I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing not from the right-wing. I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace…”
WALLACE: “Then do it, sir.”
BIDEN: “Do it, say it.”
TRUMP: “What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”
WALLACE: “White supremacists and right-wing militias”
BIDEN: “Proud Boys”
Trump: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.”
It is absolutely accurate that Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” I, like many others, interpret that statement to be insufficiently critical (although personally I think it had to do more with Trump’s sloppy speaking style and hostility towards the question than any nefarious motivations). My interpretation, however, does not constitute a fact.
The fact is that Wallace specifically asked Trump if he was “willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups,” and Trump immediately replied, “Sure.” That is incontrovertible. It is not an interpretation. It is also not reflected whatsoever in the headlines that are currently blaring incorrect information to millions of readers.
The counterargument is that Trump’s statement on the Proud Boys was not a condemnation, thus it’s accurate to say he “refused to condemn white supremacy” on the basis that the Proud Boys are a proxy for it. When asked clearly to condemn white supremacy, however, Trump said “sure.” The coverage, then, should reflect that he condemned white supremacy, even if it also reports on the Proud Boys line.
That line is still murky. Is telling them to “stand back” not a condemnation? If so, did he undercut “stand back” with “stand by”? Trump is not an easy politician to cover because he doesn’t speak like a normal politician. Nevertheless, the fact remains that he said “sure” when asked directly to condemn white supremacists. I’m of the opinion that interpreting it as a “refusal” is wrong, but either way he condemned white supremacists in the first part of his exchange with Wallace.
It’s as simple as that. Maybe you think “sure” is insufficient or indicative of a deeper disinterest in the issue. Maybe you think there’s a difference between being “willing” to do something and actually doing it. (If, like George Conway, that’s your take, you still have to explain whether being “willing” to do something is the same as “refusing.”) Maybe you think Trump’s “stand back and stand by” line was almost encouraging. Some people probably saw it as a condemnation. Others may have been displeased. These are all opinions. They are not facts.
Stating as a fact that Trump did not “condemn” white supremacy during the debate is misinformation, plain and simple. He was asked directly to condemn white supremacists, and he did.
The coverage of this exchange is a depressing case study in why the media deserves growing public distrust. These headlines reflect anti-Trump interpretations of the moment, not the reality of what Trump explicitly said—and on an extremely serious issue about which voters deserve to know the absolute truth.
