Tag Archives: FBI

We Still Don’t Know What Happened in October 2016

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Two of the last six presidential elections gave us Republican presidents who lost the popular vote. The institution most responsible for those results was our ridiculous, minority-rule Electoral College. But other institutions played important roles. In 2000, it was the Republican majority on the Supreme Court. In 2016, it was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, assisted by the press.

Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer shows that we still don’t know how America got screwed in October 2020:

It was arguably the most consequential “October Surprise” in the history of American presidential elections. In the waning days of the 2016 race, with polls showing Hillary Clinton clinging to a lead over D____ T____, two last-minute stories broke that rekindled on-the-fence voters’ ethical doubts about Democrat Clinton and quashed a budding scandal around her GOP rival.

Except the “October Surprise” was no surprise to one key player: Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor and T____ insider who later became the 45th president’s attorney. Late that month, Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Just two days later, then-FBI director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from the New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story — and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton’s prospects.

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It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had “a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, Giuliani bragged immediately after that he had sources in the FBI, including current agents.

The supposed bombshell — it turned out there was nothing incriminating or particularly new on the laptop — wasn’t the only FBI-related story that boosted T____ in the homestretch of the 2016 campaign. On Oct. 31, citing unnamed “intelligence sources,” the Times reported, “Investigating D____ T____, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That article defused a budding scandal about the GOP White House hopeful — at least until after T____’s shock election on Nov. 8, 2016. In the coming days and weeks, the basis of that Times article would melt, but by then the most unlikely POTUS in U.S. history was ensconced in the Oval Office.

There are many reasons for T____s victory, but experts have argued the FBI disclosures were decisive. In 2017, polling guru Nate Silver argued that the Comey probe disclosure cost Clinton as many as 3-4 percentage points and at least 1 percentage point, which would have flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and handed her the Electoral College.

This week’s stunning corruption charges against a top FBI spymaster [whose assignment to the New York office was announced in October 2016] — an agent who by 2018 was known to be working for a Vladimir Putin-tied Russian oligarch — should cause America to rethink everything we think we know about the T____-Russia scandal and how it really happened that T____ won that election.

The government allegations against the former G-man Charles McGonigal (also accused of taking a large foreign payment while still on the FBI payroll) and the outsized American influence of the sanctioned-and-later-indicted Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska — also tied to U.S. politicians from T____ campaign manager Paul Manafort to Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell — should make us also look again at what was really up with the FBI in 2016.

How coordinated was the effort in that New York field office to pump up the ultimate nothingburger about Clinton’s emails while pooh-poohing the very real evidence of Russian interference on T____’s behalf, and who were the agents behind it? What was the role, if any, of McGonigal and his international web of intrigue? Was the now-tainted McGonigal a source who told the New York Times that fateful October that Russia was not trying to help Trump win the election — before the U.S. intelligence community determined the exact opposite? If not McGonigal, just who was intentionally misleading America’s most influential news org, and why?

…To be sure, the 2016 FBI leaks weren’t the first time a major news organization has been burned by anonymous law enforcement sources, and regrettably, it probably won’t be the last. Media critics have been talking for years about the Times’ flawed coverage, and how its near certainty that Clinton would win and a desire to show its aggressiveness toward a future president seemed to have skewed its coverage.

It’s not only that America’s so-called paper of record has never apologized for its over-the-top coverage of the Clinton emails or the deeply flawed story about the FBI Trump-Russia probe. It’s that the Times has shown a stunning lack of curiosity about finding out what went wrong….

Last week’s indictment of McGonigal is a classic case of raising more questions than were answered. The evidence presented by prosecutors suggests the FBI counterintelligence expert wasn’t introduced to Deripaska until his waning days with the bureau in 2018, aided by a pair of Russian diplomats. In 2019, after he’d retired, the indictment says McGonigal went to work for the oligarch to help him evade U.S. sanctions and to investigate a rival. But the Times also reported that U.S. counterintelligence — in which McGonigal had been a key player — had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Deripaska as an asset in the years around the 2016 election.

Like the Woody Allen character Zelig, Deripaska — a 55-year-old aluminum magnate who at one time was the richest man in Putin’s Russia — is turning up in the background everywhere in the ongoing corruption of American democracy. The oligarch’s history of multimillion-dollar business dealings with Paul Manafort — T____’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016 — is central to the theory of Russian interference, after it was confirmed that Manafort shared key campaign data with a suspected Russian intelligence agent also connected to Deripaska.

In 2019, Deripaska did manage to get those U.S. sanctions lifted, in a controversial deal backed not only by Team T____ but critically by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That same year, a Deripaska-linked aluminum company announced it would build a large plant in Kentucky, where McConnell was running for reelection. (It eventually wasn’t built.) This is the same McConnell who, during that critical fall period in 2016, refused to sign a bipartisan statement warning about Russian election interference.

Another coincidence in a scandal that is drowning in so-called coincidences.

It’s becoming clear that the tamping down of the most explosive parts of the Trump-Russia story is the greatest case of gaslighting since the movie [of that name] hit screens in 1944. It’s not just the FBI leaks in New York. We also learned last week — yes, thanks to that same New York Times — about the extraordinary and ethically dubious lengths that T____’s second attorney general, William Barr, and Barr’s handpicked special prosecutor, John Durham, went to to try to prove the FBI was out to sink T____. That’s the exact opposite of what really happened. Indeed, the Times noted the only major criminality turned up in the Durham probe was a potentially explosive new charge of financial impropriety — by D____ T____.

Seven years later, the lack of accountability and justice for the gaslighting of American democracy is appalling. Barr did a remarkable job in blunting the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, including squashing his findings about obstruction of justice by the T____ administration. A much-hyped probe by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz into the FBI’s New York office took four long years and failed to find the leakers. And new revelations — including that tip about T____ financial crimes that Italian intelligence passed on to Barr and Durham — continue to surface.

Why does it matter? T____ is no longer president, after all, and America has a lot of other problems, with police brutality and mass shootings currently on the front burner. Yet when it comes to this all-encompassing T____-Russia scandal, the past isn’t even past. The seemingly untouchable 45th president was in New Hampshire and South Carolina this weekend, campaigning to become the 47th. The man that critics call “Moscow Mitch” McConnell could return as majority leader in that same election. And Putin’s obsession with Ukraine — always a focus of his U.S. interference and T____ dealings — has become a war with dire global implications.

More importantly, this never-ending scandal has demolished our trust in so many institutions — an FBI that seems to have corrupted an election, a Justice Department that covered up those deeds, and, yes, a New York Times that enabled several lies instead of exposing them.

Things Are Not Getting Better

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The news has not been good, leading various journalists to summarize the past few days the way Jamelle Bouie did for Slate:

After months of sustained public criticism from Trump, Andrew McCabe stepped down as deputy director of the FBI. The rationale behind McCabe’s decision is still not entirely known, but there’s little doubt it involves the Russia investigation. In addition to being a verbal target of Trump’s, McCabe had become a bĂŞte noire of conservative media, the subject of baroque conspiracies about a “deep state” that is allegedly conspiring against the president….

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted to release a … memo [that] accuses the FBI of abusing its surveillance powers, using partisan opposition research in order to attack Donald Trump’s campaign and undermine his presidency, and singling out officials like McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and former FBI Director James Comey, all targets of Trump and his allies in the GOP and conservative media… Democrats on the committee have called the document a “misleading set of talking points”, and federal law enforcement officials had warned that releasing the memo would be “extraordinarily reckless”….

In the wake of this vote, Republicans on the Intelligence Committee also opened an inquiry into the FBI and the Justice Department… On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced his support for both moves, calling for a “cleanse” of the FBI….

What began as Trump venting on Twitter has now become official administration policy, carried out with the blessing of White House aides who were at one time seen as bulwarks against such behavior. Bloomberg reported on a phone call between White House chief of staff John Kelly and senior officials in the Justice Department, where the former conveyed the president’s “displeasure” and reminded them of his expectations, albeit adding that the White House doesn’t expect them “to do anything illegal or unethical”.

To all of this, add the fact that—during this same period of time—President Trump declined to sanction Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election [after Congress voted almost unanimously for new sanctions to be imposed].

Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said this about the president’s decision:

Congress voted 517-5 to impose sanctions on Russia. The President decides to ignore that law. Folks, that is a constitutional crisis. There should be outrage in every corner of this country.

There should be, but there hasn’t been. Most of us are suffering from outrage overload.

Earlier in the week, Mr. Bouie wrote about “ICE Unbound”:

[The president has unleashed] the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, giving it broad authority to act at its own discretion. The result? An empowered and authoritarian agency that operates with impunity, whose chief attribute is unapologetic cruelty.

…. The most striking aspect of ICE under this administration has been its refusal to distinguish between law-abiding immigrants, whose undocumented status obscures their integration into American life, and those with active criminal records—the “bad hombres” of the president’s rhetoric.

Erasing that distinction is how we get the arrest and detention of Lukasz Niec, a Polish immigrant and green card holder who was brought to the United States as a young child. Last week, ICE agents arrested Niec …, citing two misdemeanor convictions for offenses committed when he was a teenager… A practicing physician, Niec now sits in a county jail, awaiting possible deportation….

Bouie didn’t mention Amer Othman Adi, a 57-year-old Palestinian who had been in the U.S. since he was 19. A married man with four daughters, he helped revitalize the city of Youngstown by opening several businesses. He was deported to Jordan on Monday night.

It all makes these Twitter thoughts from author G. Willow Wilson worth thinking about:

It may be time to start thinking about how we can effectively push back against authoritarianism once the last of the checks and balances have fallen.

It’s a mistake to think a dictatorship feels intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does. I’ve lived in one dictatorship and visited several others–there are still movies and work and school and shopping and memes and holidays.

The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal”. Certain books vanish from the libraries.

The press picks a side. The military picks a side. The judiciary picks a side. This part should already feel familiar.

The genius of a true, functioning dictatorship is the way it carefully titrates justice. Once in awhile it will allow a sound judicial decision or critical op-ed to bubble up. Rational discourse is never entirely absent. There is plausible deniability.

People still have rights, in theory. The right to vote, to serve on a jury, etc. The difference is that they begin to fear exercising those rights. Voting in an election will get your name put on “a list”.

So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.

Until one day we wake up and discover the regime has decided to postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other. Or until it can ‘ensure’ that the voting process is ‘fair’.

A sizable proportion of the citizenry will support the postponement. Yes, absolutely, we must postpone elections. The opposition is corrupt! Our leader is just trying to protect us! A dictator is never without supporters.

And hey, if we pull ourselves back from the brink and the midterms go ahead and the 2020 election is free and transparent and on time, you are cordially invited to point at me and laugh. Honestly. No one will be happier to be wrong than me.

 

In Reaction to the Reactionary-in-Chief’s Latest Offense

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has only had seven Directors (as opposed to acting Directors) in its 82-year history. From what I can gather, none of the seven have been Democrats or liberals. Even Democratic Presidents have selected conservative Republicans for the job. There have only been three Democratic Presidents who had the chance to select an FBI Director and Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were all known for their “bipartisan” tendencies. No doubt the three of them also wanted to appear “tough on crime”.

So it’s unlikely that our Republican President will nominate a Democrat to lead the law enforcement agency that’s looking into his Russian connection. But he could pick a respected Democrat. It would make the President look less like the criminal that he is.

I can’t think of anything else to say about this crisis that’s not already being said. For instance:

John Cassidy, The New Yorker:

Ever since [DT] took office, many people have worried about his commitment to democratic norms, the Constitution, and the rule of law. From the hasty promulgation of his anti-Muslim travel ban onward, he has done little to salve these concerns. Now he has acted like one of the authoritarian leaders he so admires—a Putin, an Erdoğan, or an El-Sisi.

Congress must restrain him and reassert the principles of American democracy by appointing an independent special prosecutor to take over the Russia investigation. If the legislature won’t act unprompted—and the initial signs are that most of the G.O.P. intends to yield to the President’s abuse of his power—it will be incumbent on the American people to register their protests forcefully, and to put pressure on their elected officials. [DT] is a menace. He must be stopped.

David Cole, The New York Review of Books:

Current investigations in both the House and the Senate are controlled by Republicans, and as House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes has shown, party loyalty can all too easily compromise a meaningful inquiry. In early April, Nunes was forced to step down from his committee’s investigation… That’s why Comey was such a threat to [DT]. He was the only official independent of the administration and its party reviewing the campaign’s ties to Russia….

The vitality of the rule of law in the United States will depend on whether the American people are willing to hold the Trump administration accountable. As Archibald Cox said, shortly after Richard Nixon fired him as Watergate special prosecutor: “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.” We remain a democracy, at least for the time being, and if we the people insist on an independent investigation, we will get one. But only if we insist—including by demanding that our elected representatives take full responsibility for addressing this crisis with every power at their disposal. As Ben Franklin reportedly warned some 240 years ago, the Framers gave us “a republic, if you can keep it.” [DT]’s latest action puts that question once again to the test.

So far, Congressional Republicans are either supporting the President’s obstruction of justice or expressing “concerns”. (If he were to murder a nun in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, the most thoughtful Republicans might be moved to express “deep concerns”.)

It’s not clear, therefore, that putting pressure on Republicans will make much of a difference. If you want to see what members of Congress are saying, however, The New York Times is keeping track.

As of 3:40 p.m. today

138 Democrats (or independents) have called for a special prosecutor 

84 Democrats (etc.) and 5 Republicans have called for an independent investigation.

41 Republicans and 9 Democrats have questions or concerns (the Democrats have deep concerns)

96 Republicans are neutral or support the President’s action

146 Republicans and 12 comatose Democrats haven’t said a thing 

Zero members of Congress have called for the President’s immediate impeachment (I added this category myself. It doesn’t hurt to mention it.)

New Developments in the Mother Russia/Motherf****r Scandal

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I already had a title for a post called “The Big Picture on Health Insurance”, but that topic can wait. The T__p/Putin scandal seems to be growing. The British newspaper The Independent just made the story even more interesting:

(1) The ex-spy Christopher Steele who investigated Trump’s Russian connection eventually concluded that the FBI intentionally ignored solid evidence on the matter. In fact, Mr. Steele decided that there was a cabal in the FBI willing to cover up damaging information about T__p while the Bureau pursed a vendetta against Hillary Clinton;

(2) Back in the summer, when T__p downplayed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and simultaneously called for the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails, and when the Trump campaign later removed a plank from the Republican platform condemning the invasion, it was all done in response to a recent request from Russia. 

If any of this is true, then T__p, people close to him and members of the FBI committed treason. Ideally, they would all end up in prison. There would also be a constitutional amendment allowing for a new election. 

Even if these charges are true, however, it’s unlikely we’ll get a new election. That would require amending the Constitution, which would require cooperation from too many self-serving Republican politicians. T__p’s impeachment, however, followed by a stretch in a Federal prison, could easily happen. When they can’t avoid the truth anymore, the Republican sleazes in Congress will rush to get rid of the bastard.

In Case You Missed It, Let’s Review the Crime That’s Still in Progress

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Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Republican FBI Director James Comey, with help from Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange, are in the process of stealing our election. They’ll do it unless the Electoral College does its constitutional, patriotic duty nine days from now and elects Hillary Clinton or some other qualified person.

The indictment:

According to the CIA, and probably the NSA too, neither of which are generally considered left-wing organizations, Russia hacked both Democrats and Republicans this year, but the Russians only gave the Democrats’ stolen information to Wikileaks. Wikileaks then gave the information, some of which was embarrassing to the Democrats and the Clinton campaign, to the world.

In September, President Obama informed Congressional leaders that the Russians had done this in order to elect the Orange Menace. Obama also requested a bipartisan declaration opposing the Russian interference in our election. But Senator McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader, wouldn’t make a joint statement, arguing that it would interfere with the election.

Instead, on October 7th, the Department Of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued their own watered-down joint statement on Russia’s hacking activity, not pointing out that only information damaging to the Democrats was being revealed:

The U.S. Intelligence Community [which includes the CIA, FBI, NSA and thirteen other agencies] is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations…. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process….We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Furthermore, on October 31st, the Financial Times reported that the Republican Director of the FBI was against making even that announcement:

FBI chief opposed US statement blaming Russia for hacks

Government official says James Comey had election timing concerns

Of course, only three days before, and only eleven days before the election, Director Comey ignored the Department of Justice policy against making such announcements near an election and sent a letter to Congressional leaders announcing a new investigation into emails possibly involving Hillary Clinton.

That letter was immediately leaked to the press and led to a blizzard of news coverage. The Orange Menace immediately declared that “this changes everything”. Although nothing at all came of the investigation, the Clinton and T—p campaigns agree that the FBI’s new suggestion of scandal was the crucial last-minute event that swayed enough voters to change the election. From Politico:

Top officials for both campaigns said the revelation—which turned out to be an inconsequential cache of previously parsed emails kept on the laptop of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner—was a game-changer in a race in which Clinton had little margin for error. Elan Kreigel’s team saw her numbers collapse in the most volatile swing demographic: educated whites who had been repulsed by Trump’s sexual misdeeds.

To sum up: Vladimir Putin releases hacked emails in order to defeat Clinton. Julian Assange makes the emails public. Mitch McConnell and James Comey interfere with voters being told about Russia’s plan on the grounds that it will affect the election, i.e. hurt the Republican candidate. Meanwhile, Comey ignores Department of Justice policy and tells the world that there is more to the supposed Clinton email scandal, not caring that his last-minute “revelation” will affect the election, i.e. hurt the Democratic candidate.

Despite everything, Clinton gets almost 3 million more votes than T—p nationwide. But in three “swing” states that Clinton expected to win, T—p gets 77,000 more votes than Clinton, giving him the Electoral College majority necessary to become President.

As the saying goes, can you spell “coup d’Ă©tat”? How about “treason”? If you think that’s too harsh, how about “putting party ahead of country”?

The solution:

At this late date, the only ones who can prevent this crime from succeeding are the Republican members of the Electoral College. Thirty-seven of them can deny an unqualified, dangerous person the presidency and let the House of Representatives choose someone else. Forty-eight of them can switch to Hillary Clinton and elect the qualified person who got more votes. It’s that simple. 

And yet it’s that unlikely. What are the odds that there are more than a handful of Republicans among the 306 who will vote on December 19th who are sufficiently patriotic and sufficiently respectful of the Constitution to do what Alexander Hamilton said was necessary? Regarding the Electoral College, from The Federalist Papers, number 68:

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?…

But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention. They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment….

All these advantages will happily combine in the plan devised by the convention; which is, that the people of each State shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government, who shall assemble within the State, and vote for some fit person as President. Their votes, thus given, are to be transmitted to the seat of the national government, and the person who may happen to have a majority of the whole number of votes will be the President….

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

I mean, how amazing would it be, if a band of brave citizens, now being referred to as “Hamilton Electors”, rose to the occasion, saved the world and got complimentary tickets to the Broadway smash “Hamilton” too?

PS – Forgot to mention that T—p is going to appoint Senator McConnell’s wife to a cabinet position. Others in T—p’s cabinet, like the head of Exxon who will be Secretary of State, are very pro-Russian. But emails!

PPS – Nate Silver, respected political analyst and statistician, on Twitter: “Clinton lost 4 states (FL, MI, WI, PA) by ~1 point. If not for Comey/Russia, she probably wins them all by ~2 points & strategy looks great.”