A Federal Grand Jury Indicts a Ham Sandwich: Six Ways to Sunday (Part 1)
"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
Six Ways To Sunday
Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern Europe, bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone, even the innocent. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” was Beria’s infamous boast. He served as deputy premier from 1941 until Stalin’s death in 1953, supervising the expansion of the gulags and other secret detention facilities for political prisoners. He became part of a post-Stalin, short-lived ruling troika until he was executed for treason after Nikita Khrushchev’s coup d’etat in 1953. Beria targeted “the man” first, then proceeded to find or fabricate a crime. Beria’s modus operandi was to presume the man guilty, and fill in the blanks later. By contrast, under the United States Constitution, there’s a presumption of innocence that emanates from the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments, as set forth in Coffin vs. U.S. (1895).
Back in 2017, then-President Donald Trump had tweeted that an intelligence briefing over Russia’s alleged interference into the 2016 election had been delayed because they needed more time “to build a case.” The tweet came after authorities said Russia tried to interfere in the election.
While speaking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC Sen. Majority Leader and Select Committee on Intelligence member, Chuck Schumer predicted, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
“What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated to?” Maddow asked.
“I don’t know,” Schumer said. “But from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them. And we need the intelligence community. Look at the Russian hacking. Without the intelligence community we wouldn’t have discovered it.”
“Do we think he has an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community? I mean this form of taunting hostility.”
“Let me tell you,” Schumer chimed in. “Whether you’re a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community.”
The Latest Indictment
That was then. Now, there is a circus outside in NYC and Miami as the DOJ’s case against Trump has escalated. Former President Donald Trump was indicted and arraigned yet again. This time it comes from a federal grand jury charging him with seven felony counts relating to claims that he mishandled classified information by removing them from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and that he obstructed the DOJ probe by hiding relevant information and obstructing that investigation.
With his indictment, Trump's second after the 34 count set of charges filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April, relating to bookkeeping entries from payments to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, Trump becomes the first ever president or former president in American history to face federal criminal charges. The indictment was just recently unsealed earlier this week, and there is reason to suspect that this is a little more than another instance of the establishment abusing its legal powers with the primary goal of rendering Trump ineligible to run for president in 2024 as almost all polls show him with a wide lead over all GOP challengers as well as leading his direct matchup with Joe Biden in the general election.
The Most Important Mission
When the Biden Administration arrested Donald Trump, they had him arraigned and fingerprinted in a Miami Courthouse like the accused felon he now technically is. These were the first steps in a process that is designed to put Donald Trump behind bars for the rest of his life. Cable news carried every moment of it live. “It's unprecedented,” they told us with what looked like shock. But they weren’t shocked. They knew this was coming. Everyone who's paid attention knew it was. What just happened was always going to happen. It's been inevitable since February 16, 2016. That's the day Donald Trump made a blood enemy of the largest and most powerful organization in human history, which would be the federal government.
Despite what you may remember it wasn't anything that Trump had said about immigration or trade with China or rapists from Mexico. Those are the stories that dominated the headlines that year. “Trump's a racist,” they scream. “Stop him!” But inside Washington that was just noise. None of it rated really. Identity politics doesn't mean much to permanent Washington.
In a recent Tucker on Twitter episode, Tucker Carlson (the recently fired, but not fired Fox News anchor) notes correctly:
What matters then and now is foreign policy - the invasions and occupations and proxy wars, the decisions that determine which global populations will thrive and which will die, the policies that come with trillion dollar price tags, the ones that over time have made the counties around DC, the richest suburbs in the world. In Washington, that's what actually matters and it's obvious when you look carefully when there's a debate about anything else. For example with the debt ceiling, both sides take their assigned positions and they start yelling. But when Congress decides to start a war, no matter how foolish or counterproductive or obviously disconnected from America's core interests that war may be, when that happens the leaders of both parties automatically jump behind it like circus clowns and then they stay there sometimes for decades. They defend that war relentlessly against all evidence until somebody finally rings the all clear bell and they can begin to admit that actually maybe it wasn't such a great idea. We meant well but it just didn't work out. The good news is we've learned a lot of important lessons in the end. They usually do say something like that but only after emotions have cooled and the damning details have begun to fade from collective memory. It's an apology that's not actually an apology, much less repentance and it's years too late to matter in any case but until then that's all you're getting. Until then no dissent is allowed.
That's the first rule of Washington, but somehow Trump didn't bother to follow it. He is from out of town, so maybe he didn't know it was a rule or maybe he just didn't care. Either way, seven and a half years later, we can point to the precise moment that permanent Washington decided to send Donald Trump to prison or render him ineligible or unelectable to run in 2024. Here Trump is from the Republican candidates debate in Greenville, South Carolina: “We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. They lied, okay. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
We should never have been in Iraq. Trump said we destabilized the Middle East. Now by the time Trump said that a lot of Republican primary voters were starting to reach the same conclusion. How could they not? But it was the next line that doomed Trump to this week’s arrest. “They lied,” he said, “there were no weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none.”
Now when he said that a few in the crowd booed. Most just sat there in silence, stunned. Can he say that? Well he said it anyway and by saying that he sealed his fate. That was the one thing you were not allowed to say because it implicated too many people on both sides which on this topic is really just one side. Hillary Clinton was guilty of it but so is Paul Ryan. All of them were guilty. They all knew they all lied and to a person they hated Donald Trump for exposing them.
After that it was pretty clear that even if he did get elected President Trump was going to have a very hard time controlling the federal government he was supposed to be in charge of. Most of permanent Washington decided that thwarting Trump was the single most important mission in their lives. Everything depended on it. Many of them said so publicly, but others didn't say so publicly. In fact, the stealthier ones took another path. They ran toward Trump, not away from him. They sucked up to him. They ingratiated themselves with the man they intuitively understood was susceptible to flattery, which Trump is and they did this in order to subvert his new Administration from the inside.
There were a number of these and you could spot them immediately. They were flatterers. Invariably the ones who flattered Trump the most, hated him the most and disagreed the most strongly with his views. You saw them in the hallways of the White House and at press conferences. They were there slobbering over their boss with elaborate self-abasement as if they were addressing a monarch or a God. It was a scene from the Ottoman Court. It was filthy and decadent and it was false. Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Lindsey Graham in the Congress, they all called Trump a visionary genius up until the moment he lost power and then they unsheathed their real agenda - as always the neocon war agenda and they piled on with maximum force.
Here's Mike Pompeo for example on Fox News this week: “President Trump had classified documents where he shouldn't have had them and then when given the opportunity to return to me he chose not to do that for whatever reason… When somebody identifies that, you have to turn them in so that's just that's inconsistent with protecting America's soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and if the allegations are true, some of these were pretty serious important documents so that's wrong.”
May future historians hoping to unlock the mysteries of late-empire Washington study that quote, because it will reveal everything. That very same Mike Pompeo, the one who's sneering at Donald Trump on TV this week, that guy served Donald Trump as both CIA director and as Secretary of State. Those are the two most powerful jobs in the federal government and as he worked in those jobs, Pompeo promised, in fact he swore, to support the president's agenda. Why? Because that's the way a democracy works. You vote for a candidate in the belief that his appointees will carry out the policies that you voted for. It's not about the president. It's about you, the voter.
But Pompeo didn't do that. He didn't even try to do that. In fact, he undermined Trump's often-stated commitment to peace and non-intervention abroad at every turn. His every waking hour was devoted to fomenting war in some far away foreign country or other - Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, the list goes on. Rather than telling Trump that he disagreed with his ideas as a man would, Pompeo toted up to Trump, a man he despised in the oiliest, most over-the-top way imaginable. Ask anyone who worked in that White House at the time, who is the appointee most likely to tell Donald Trump on a daily basis that he was handsome, virile, sleek, and powerful? Mike Pompeo will be the consensus answer. Those of us who saw firsthand Pompeo's relentless cow-towing will never forget. It was indelibly repulsive. No one with self-respect could do something like that, but Mike Pompeo did it effortlessly with relish and verve.
Now this same person is telling Fox News viewers that he fears for the safety of our military, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in the approved phrase because Donald Trump took some classified documents home and didn't immediately return them to the National Archives.
What a lie that is! Mike Pompeo knows that's a lie. He spent his entire life in Washington. Washington is a city where internal memos about Labor Day are classified because everything is classified. Our government has classified more than a billion Federal documents - most of them boring and pointless and a danger to no one. They lock them away in secret. You can't see them because you may be an American citizen, but not really and therefore you don't have the necessary clearances to know what's going on. By the way none of this is done in order to make America safer any more than COVID restrictions were designed to keep you healthy. It's a caste system. That's the point. Mike Pompeo knows that everybody who works in Washington knows that.
How many secret documents do you think Dick Cheney took home with him while he was running the Iraq War? How many did his wife read? She never had a clearance. We'll never know the answer because there is no chance Dick Cheney will ever be investigated or staffers will be told to wear wires in his presence. He will never be indicted for this of course not. Dick Cheney is a neocon. Donald Trump is not. Dick Cheney supports war with Russia. Trump does not. That's the difference. The rest is just a distraction.
Durham is Too Late
The latest Trump indictment happens on the backs of further investigations into the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine. All the while the US is involved in a hot proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Most of us waited much too long to challenge the Russia collusion hoax, embracing and allowing the hysteria to grow for more than 5 years, until ultimately it served conveniently as an onramp to the Ukraine war. The Never Trumpers on the left and right and in-between continually ignored all the evidence.
In 2019, an Inspector’s General report identified 17 errors and omissions the FBI made in its four applications to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, with the report also finding the FBI was unable to corroborate allegations that Page was a Russian agent. The FBI withheld information about Page and failed to disclose information that raised questions about Christopher Steele’s credibility. Steele, who was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, submitted the Steele Dossier to the FBI alleging Russian interference in the election. Former FBI Director James Comey later admitted the FBI had not verified the dossier prior to obtaining warrants to spy on Page.
The FBI also failed to inform the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that one of Steele’s main dossier sources told agents in 2017 that Steele misrepresented and exaggerated information in the dossier, including about Page.
Last month, John Durham—held as one of the most respected & apolitical prosecutors in the country—just issued his earth-shattering “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,”, documenting with extensive evidence how the FBI radically abused its power to sabotage the 2016 Trump campaign for their own political ends. Durham charged Steele dossier sub-source Igor Danchenko's arrest with five counts of making false statements to the FBI but the indictment also shed light on his ties to Democratic operatives. The Special Counsel report chronicles how intelligence agencies engineered a national hysteria, but its publication comes almost too late to reverse the damage.
As Sue Schmidt’s “Eight Key Takeaways” summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.
There was no valid predicate for the investigation, and the FBI knew it.
‘There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.’
‘It’s thin’; ‘There’s nothing to this.’
Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.
Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.
FBI Director James Comey pushed heavily for an investigation of Carter Page, starting in April 2016 when Page was a government witness in an espionage investigation of Russian diplomats in New York.
At the direction of the FBI, confidential human source Stefan Halper recorded lengthy conversations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in which each denied the campaign had any involvement with Russian officials.
Durham was highly critical of the FBI’s ‘startling and inexplicable failure’ to investigate the so-called ‘Clinton Intelligence Plan.’
I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — peers unironically called us “denialists”, family laughed at our “conspiracy theories” — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.
Especially through March 22, 2019, when the devastating news broke that the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller would be delivered without new indictments, the vehemence of this national wig-out was breathtaking. Jail-Trumpism truly became a religion during this time. I remember hearing Rachel Maddow’s nightly crazy-casts like the Songs of Angkar filling a Cambodian village.
News was an endless Millerite sit-in, with anchors daily preaching the “beginning of the end.” These calls grew in intensity heading into the Christmas season before Mueller’s report dropped. That winter, after a year-plus of waiting for the sounds of judicial hoofbeats on rooftops, grown men and women across the country composed heartfelt wish-lists to the inaccessible Special Counsel who, no kidding at all, became the cosmopolitan adult’s Santa Claus. I hope future historians see it, but in case they don’t, can we take a moment to remember how bananas it was?
Recall the women of Saturday Night Live singing “Mueller, All I Want For Christmas is You”:
Sick of hearing breaking news, and Giuliani’s interviews
Our balls are fully blue! Mueller all I want for Christmas is you..!
We don’t need a long-ass doc, just a single page that shocks
Mueller please come through, ‘cause our only other option IS A COUP!
On CBS, Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show — just beginning its transformation into midnight gulag entertainment as Stalin might have imagined it — celebrated the “holiday collusion season” with “Robert Mueller’s 12 Days of Christmas”:
Not to be outdone in security-state comedy, Jimmy Fallon pumped out “You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not lie to the FBI” in a Springsteen rendition of “Robert Mueller’s Coming to Town.” Sing it loud: It isn’t fake news for goodness’ sake!
Along with the corporate productions came a slew of amateur efforts produced by ardent YouTubers. Each seems more amazing than the next in its childlike earnestness. “Mueller Baby” pleads, “Send in an indictment tonight!” For sheer wine-set cringe, “We Wish You a Mueller Christmas” set the standard. Nothing like bringing your minor children into your digital hanging posse:
The Christmas songs, Mueller votive candles, and $18 “Saint Mueller” prints were comic flip-sides to a miserably serious phenomenon. As the Durham report details, the national hysteria was engineered. Trump was mocked for calling it all a “witch hunt” because he was referring mainly to himself, but a witch hunt is what it was and still is, only the witches weren’t just in the White House. They were everywhere, and it was presumed all needed to be tracked down and exposed.
Early on, CNN pioneered the now-common practice of knocking on the doors of people accused of heretical beliefs, sending reporter Drew Griffin to Florida to confront a clueless elderly Trump supporter about attending a Trump rally purportedly organized by the Internet Research Agency. On TV, people like familiar campaign trail scribe John Heilemann wondered aloud, about California’s Devin Nunes: “Is it possible that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?”
Nunes fell under suspicion because he was the first to start disclosing facts Durham just fleshed out in detail: that the criminal investigation of Donald Trump was based on vapor, a conspiracy theory concocted by actually-colluding confederates in the Clinton campaign, CIA, FBI, and news media. Remember, at one time it was denied that the Clinton campaign was connected at all to the infamous Steele Dossier, which was used to dupe (we hope!) the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) into approving electronic monitoring in the Trump-Russia investigation. As even Maggie Haberman put it, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
Durham shows how much more lying went on even than previously thought. For instance, despite the fact that “Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting,” the FBI paid Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, $220,000 over 3.5 years, and wanted to keep paying him an additional $300,000, despite never producing any actionable intelligence. Think of the implications of one other detail about the FBI’s handling of Danchenko:
In late December 2016, the FBI determined that Igor Danchenko, a U.S.-based Russian national living in Washington, D.C., was Steele’s primary subsource. Notwithstanding this fact, the FBI and the Department did not correct in the final two FISA applications targeting Page the characterization of the primary sub-source as being “Russia-based.”
The “Trump-Russia” investigation was built without Russians. The stated predicate was a conversation an American reportedly had with an Australian about a Maltese professor. The public was told, in breathless tones by papers like the New York Times, that the patient zero of the probe, young aide George Papadopoulos, “opened up” to an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer. We were told he shared with Downer that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” a revelation the Times described:
Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known…
How far would this story have gone if we’d known even the FBI knew Papadopoulos never said anything about “dirt” or “emails,” or that even Downer “did not get the sense Papadopoulos was the middle-man to coordinate with the Russians”?
The same culture that celebrates the bugging of the Watergate as the archetypal corruption story won’t blink at the portrait of political spying painted in the Durham report.
We read about informants over and over prodding people connected to the Trump campaign in search of incriminating statements. One CI “challenged” Papadopoulos with “approximately 200 prompts or baited statements which elicited approximately 174 clearly exculpatory statements from Papadopoulos,” not one of which was relayed to the FISA court, to say nothing of media.
One doubts even Democrats want the FBI feeling free to send informants into political campaigns on “thin” pretexts — that’s an actual quote from an FBI legal attaché the report, “Damn, that’s thin” — to poke low-level functionaries with “prompts,” with the aim of landing them in jail. Or do they? Apparently, they do.
Mueller’s failure to deliver Christmas wishes ought to have been the end of the faith. Like the Great Disappointment, it just reset expectations for new theories of deliverance. People like me took too long to realize this was not rational argument, but religious crusade, one that still lives on the New York City and federal prosecution of Trump, an unapologetic outgrowth of the vaporous Russia probe.
Whether it was the Mueller fiasco or the report of Obama-appointed Inspector General Michael Horowitz (which ought to have vindicated Nunes, who was instead vilified even more) or even the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68 and the scores of phony “Russian bot” stories, we now know nothing punctures the national madness. It’ll be the same with this report. The lunatic is on the grass, and nothing will coax him off.
Still, Maddow, who became the most prominent TV host to push the Russia collusion narrative, addressed the latest developments in the Durham probe - but seemed to dismiss the severity of the new revelations.
"The indictment in this case tells a story beyond just the charges," Maddow told viewers Thursday night. "It, like the other indictment from John Durham, seems designed to try to further this project of making the Russian investigation itself seem like a scandal."
After referring to the prior Durham indictment of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann "weird" and "problematic," Maddow insisted the indictment of Danchenko offers an "unmistakable impression" that it is "designed to smear Christopher Steele's intelligence reports as things that were deliberately made up and concocted by rascally Democrats."
"If the goal here is for this Trump-holdover special prosecutor to try to discredit the whole Russia investigation by arresting various sources for that investigation, to try to discredit the Steele dossier because so many people have been led to think that that's the basis for the whole investigation, to essentially get payback on anyone involved in the Russia investigation no matter how far down the chain, well, what do the actual investigators think about that, the people who actually carried out the Trump Russia investigation itself," Maddow asked.
She then invited former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was famously removed from the Mueller probe after anti-Trump text messages with his lover, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, had surfaced, to weigh in on the Durham indictments.
Strzok began by alleging the targets of the Durham indictments so far are "almost peripheral" to the DOJ's Russia investigation and stressed that lying to the FBI is a "significant, significant crime" but expressed concern of the "backdrop" of the special counsel's investigation.
"So my worry is that as Americans hear this news - they don't really know how the Russian investigation ended, they hear these concerns and they say, ‘Well, there must be a problem.’ And that's being picked up and amplified by people who are seizing on this to say, ‘See the entire effort- everything Mueller did everything the FBI was nonsense, it was bogus. It was based on lies.’ And that just couldn't be further from the truth," Strzok said.
Maddow went on to accuse Durham of making "uncharged, vague allegations" that Alfa Bank-Trump Organization narrative and the Steele dossier were "deliberate fictions that were knowingly cooked up by bad actors who were all Democrats who were making this stuff up knowing that it was false and giving it to the FBI, knowing it was all made up just to basically implicate the FBI in a dirty trick against Trump."
Strzok agreed, saying the indictments have "subtle dog whistles" to "pro-Trump conspiracy theories."
With Maddow’s loony response to the indictment of Igor Danchenko, the MSNBC anchor takes a bold leap off the credibility cliff. Whatever the category below 'disgraced journalist' is, she entered it with gusto.
Russiagate is a sizable boil on the face of American journalism but that the Danchenko revelations only magnify the "embarrassment" of the profession.
Every reporter who touched that allegation should be ashamed, and Maddow is at the front of that huge crowd. Among other things, she emphasized the importance of Steele’s "broader assertions," repeating the claim that the “Russia regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years,” going so far as to praise Steele for keeping his "head down" and listening to his "deep cover sources" like Danchenko. Maddow not only isn’t upset, she’s expressing pride in having been burned, and is digging in for more.
Dan Rather was forced out of television after one error. Still, whole networks openly embrace stories of Russian interference even after they’ve been exposed as fakes. That’s because the networks are nothing but stenographers and propagandists for the state, employing former intelligence officials, defense contractors, and pharmaceutical executives as experts and White House press secretaries as lead anchors. It is because the networks are nothing but useful idiots, which believe and promote every juicy classified leak from WMDs in Iraq to chemical weapons in Syria to Russian “disinfo,” “misinfo,” and “malinfo” agents in the U.S.