The War of the Narratives

Dec 09, 2019

Clusterfuck Nation
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Note: Update attached below morning entry at 8:40 pm.

Fighting for its very life, the Resistance rolls out a last-ditch flanking maneuver today in its three-year war against reality as Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee presents findings to Rep. Nadler’s Judiciary Committee for crimes as yet unspecified against Mr. Trump, possibly as grave as treason. Buyer beware. The Resistance always accuses its enemy of the very acts it commits — for instance, colluding with Russia, the primal deed that the guiding spirit of the Resistance, Mrs. Clinton, perpetrated in hiring Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS outfit and its star front-man, Christopher Steele, to consort with Russian disinformation agents injecting some helpful fantasy into the 2016 election.

Therefore, you can be serenely confident that any charges of actual treason will eventually stick to members of Resistance in government service who did indeed plot a coup to overthrow the occupant of the White House. That process of discovery begins today in another part of the battlefield, when the DOJ Inspector General, Mr. Horowitz, rolls out his report on FISA court shenanigans. His inquiry, of course, was limited to current members of the DOJ and FBI, which leaves out many of the principal actors in that scheme: Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Michael Atkinson — all either discharged or moved onto other thickets in the reeking wetland of Washington DC. Anyway, the coup ranged far beyond the bounds of Mr. Horowitz’s scope on FISA abuse.

Among those many others, the IG was not authorized to interrogate former CIA chief John Brennan, the Lone Ranger of RussiaGate, or James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Brennan’s faithful Tonto in the scam. Mr. Horowitz’s report will be necessarily incomplete. At most, it might provide a preview of the comprehensive legal review being carried out by the attorney general, Mr. Barr, and his deputy, the Connecticut federal prosecutor, John Durham. I suspect that Mr. Barr has instructed Mr. Horowitz to be careful with his conclusions, since any further attempts to obfuscate the facts and excuse official misconduct on squishy grounds such as intent will tend to worsen the already gross institutional damage done to federal law enforcement.

One character who has not been heard from lo these many months is former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, who was not fired, but transferred to some harmless backwater of the Justice Department to answer agency parking violations, or something equally harmless. I suspect Mr. Ohr may have played a decisive role in the IG inquiry, and possibly flipped on his colleagues, since Mr. Ohr was in the uniquely uncomfortable position of having a wife, Nellie Ohr, in the direct employ of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton’s oppo research contractor. Mr. Ohr additionally consorted with Fusion’s front man, Mr. Steele, after Steele was officially fired as a paid FBI source. Mr. Ohr will surely play a role on the Durham side of things.

Rep Adam Schiff will be conspicuously absent in today’s hearings, a tactic that enables him to avoid being questioned about his methods, actions, and associations around the UkraineGate chapter of the coup — for instance, his pre-whistle trysts with CIA agent and alleged “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella. Some minority member of the Nadler committee might ask Mr. Schiff, for instance, if he can cite any federal statute that provides Ciaramella with eternal anonymity (hint: there is none). Instead, Mr. Schiff’s findings will be presented by Lawfare attorneys Daniel Sachs Goldman (yes, his actual name), and Barry Berke, renowned for getting Wall Street grifters off the hook for selling janky securities.

The New York Times is the Resistance’s obverse measuring device for divining reality — whatever they report is likely to be the opposite of the facts. So, naturally, the Monday morning edition is playing-up the supposedly nefarious doings of Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine. In fact, Mr. Giuliani has managed to depose (and record on video) two Ukrainian chief prosecutors, Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko who are deeply familiar with the machinations around the inquiries into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that put coke-head Hunter Biden on its board of directors while dad Joe Biden was directing on-the-ground US policy there — and bribed the Ukraine government to back off its investigations. (Shokin video here and Lutsenko video here).

The essence of this colossal radioactive hairball of an historic scandal pulsates in the malicious prosecution of General Michael Flynn. Weeks ago, his new attorney, Sidney Powell, filed requests for DOJ documents containing exculpatory information in the case. The prosecutors, put in by Robert Mueller, stalled on the request, so Ms. Powell asked for an official pause until the Horowitz report is issued, possibly containing information pertinent to the general’s case. Be alert to developments on that front.

So, you see, we have two narratives at war in America: the Resistance story aimed at shoving Mr. Trump out of the White House by any means necessary, including a siege engine of untruth based on bad faith; and Mr. Trump’s story that he has been unfairly and unjustly subject to seditious mutiny by several federal agencies, dedicated to crippling his executive function at least and levering him out of office at most. The two stories can be reconciled in courts of law and the court of public opinion. There’s polling evidence that the Resistance is losing in the latter, as it over-estimated the public’s appetite for official dishonesty. The courts of law await further down the road. Additional comment here to come later today when the IG report is released….

Monday Evening Update:

The Horowitz IG report came out around 1:00 pm, a 430+-page hermeneutic of FBI procedure around warrants granted to spy on the Trump campaign. Buried in its legalistic prolixities and parsings was the admission of many gross misfeasances, errors, and violations by the agency managers involved. Mr. Horowitz dismissed claims of political bias and declined to make any criminal referrals in the matter. Concurrently, Attorney General Barr and prosecutor John Durham issued statements politely but forcefully demurring from Mr. Horowitz’s vapid conclusions.

Messers Barr and Durham have collected a much broader range of evidence from places beyond the narrow scope of the DOJ and FBI, including the Intel agencies, the State Department, and ministries in foreign lands who participated in the RussiaGate ploy that morphed into a coup to disable and oust Mr. Trump.

Durham issued this statement:

I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff. However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

Barr’s also released a statement that he disagreed with the Horowitz conclusion:

Nothing is more important than the credibility and integrity of the FBI and the Department of Justice. That is why we must hold our investigators and prosecutors to the highest ethical and professional standards. The Inspector General’s investigation has provided critical transparency and accountability, and his work is a credit to the Department of Justice. I would like to thank the Inspector General and his team.
The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.
FISA is an essential tool for the protection of the safety of the American people. The Department of Justice and the FBI are committed to taking whatever steps are necessary to rectify the abuses that occurred and to ensure the integrity of the FISA process going forward….
With respect to DOJ personnel discussed in the report, the Department will follow all appropriate processes and procedures, including as to any potential disciplinary action,”

We’ll have to stand by to find out what that really means, but one ought to be impressed by the swiftness of their response. It all seemed to add up to the fact that Barr & Durham simply have better information than the IG could scrounge up, and they have more of it, and they intend to act on it.

I could not read the whole report in the hours since its release, but I digested the executive summary and s0me 0f the meat of the report and I just want to run a few points of interest by you.

Under the heading: The FBI’s Relationship with Christopher Steele, and Its Receipt and Evaluation of His Election Reporting before the First FISA Application:

In June 2016, Steele and his consulting firm were hired by Fusion GPS, a Washington, D.C., investigative firm, to obtain information about whether Russia was trying to achieve a particular outcome in the 2016 U.S. elections, what personal and business ties then candidate Trump had in Russia, and whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign. Steele’s work for Fusion GPS resulted in his producing numerous election-related reports, which have been referred to collectively as the “Steele Dossier.”

Notice that Mr. Horowitz omits to state that Fusion GPS was in the employ of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, an omission sustained throughout the report.

Under the heading: Conclusions Concerning All Four FISA Applications

We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures. These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to OI and failing to flag important issues for discussion. While we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents who assisted OI [Office of Investigation] preparing the applications, or the agents and supervisors who performed the Woods Procedures, we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified.”

Is Mr. Horowitz putting too fine a point on it? What effort did he make to insist on a more satisfactory explanation. Barr & Durham may press that point, by putting the same crew under oath, and arrive at a more satisfactory outcome.

Under the heading: [Special section] Issues Relating to Department Attorney Bruce Ohr

At Steele’s suggestion, Ohr also met in August 2016 with Simpson to discuss Steele’s reports. At the time, Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked at Fusion GPS as an independent contractor….In addition…we concluded that the federal ethics rules did not require Ohr to obtain Department ethics counsel approval before engaging with the FBI in connection with the Crossfire Hurricane matter because of Nellie Ohr’s prior work for Fusion GPS. However, we found that, given the factual circumstances that existed, and the appearance that they created, Ohr displayed a lapse in judgment by not availing himself of the process described in the ethics rules to consult with the Department ethics official about his involvement in the investigation.”

I wrote early this morning that Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr had been eerily absent from the news for months. As expected, his activities cast long shadows in the Horowitz report. However, the IG is extremely coy about the role of his wife, Nellie Ohr, who had been on the payroll of Fusion GPS through the summer of 2016, when the “Crossfire Hurricane” operation kicked off. Notice the reference (above) to Fusion GPS again omits its connection as a hired opponent research subcontractor to the Hillary campaign and the DNC.

From Page 271:

Nellie Ohr stated that she was not told who was funding this project and did not know that Steele was also working for Fusion GPS until July 2016. She said that she stopped working for Fusion GPS on September 24, 2016, when she began a full-time job elsewhere….”

I doubt it is possible that Nellie Ohr did not know who she is working for. Insofar as she was not an employee of the DOJ or FBI, it appears that Mr,. Horowitz did not even interview her. That’s how myopic his inquiry was, and how credulous he must suppose the readers of his report are.

From Page 391:

… On October 18, 2016, three days before the first FISA application was submitted to the FISC, and after speaking with Steele that morning, [Bruce] Ohr requested a meeting with, and that same day met with McCabe to share Steele’s and Simpson’s information with him. Thereafter, Ohr met with members of the Crossfire Hurricane team 13 times between November 21, 2016, and May 15, 2017, concerning his contacts with Steele and Simpson. All 13 meetings occurred after the FBI had closed Steele as a CHS for disclosing information to Mother Jones and, except for the November 21 meeting, each meeting was initiated at Ohr’s request….At two of these meetings, both in December 2016, after Nellie Ohr had left Fusion GPS, Ohr provided the FBI with open source research Nellie Ohr conducted on Manafort while working at Fusion GPS.“

So, Associate Deputy AG Bruce Ohr was trafficking in political opposition research to the FBI. What could possibly not be actionable about that? We’ll stand by to see if Mr., Durham has noticed.

From Page 394:

…we concluded that Ohr committed consequential errors in judgment by failing to advise his direct supervisors or the DAG that he was communicating with Steele, Simpson, and the FBI on matters related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and that this performance failure had a negative impact on the investigation and ODAG’s fulfillment of its own management responsibilities. We are referring our finding to the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility for any action it deems appropriate.“

I suppose they’ll make Bruce Ohr put on a pointed hat and stand in the corner with his face to the walls for an hour on some as-yet-unspecified day in the future. Or. Maybe Mr. Durham has other ideas.

If you’ve gotten this far in the update, note that I may add further updates to the story as the Horowitz report is parsed further in the days to come by people who can cut through the jargon, gaslight, and bullshit in this report.

Great Winter Reading!

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