Who Wins The Narrative?

Michael Goodwin has a nice article today: The president is going nuclear. I can quibble with part of his premise--I think Pelosi intended her "coverup" statement as a sop to her crazy crazies rather than an open embrace of impeachment, but Goodwin has it right: With that, Trump had had enough. He was ready, his nukes were primed and ready to go, and he pressed the button.

I suspect that Left/Progs are spending this Memorial Day weeked contemplating past glories of The Movement and trying to come to grips with what just hit them. I say this because Trump's grant of declass authority to Bill Barr was so sweeping--placing him over the entire Executive Branch, from DoJ/FBI to the IC to State--that the epithet nuclear is entirely merited. Bear in mind, Barr is no newbie to Washington and its ways and, in particular, he has deep experience with the IC as well as the legal levers of the Executive Branch. I think the Deep State knows Barr will get his way, and not just "in the end": he'll get it on his terms and in his time--or else. Is Chris Wray sleeping easily these last few days--or any other formerly major players? I doubt it. Trump has full confidence in Barr. Barr knows it and everyone else knows it, thus: ou Won’t Believe What Happened When Attorney General Bill Barr Went To The White House Cabinet Meeting:

A little color from the President's cabinet meeting today. Sources tell John Roberts from FOX News that Attorney General William Barr walked into the room to a standing ovation. Barr said he was surprised and then smiled.

And so Goodwin writes:

With his memo giving Attorney General Bill Barr the authority to declassify any documents related to the investigation of the 2016 campaign, Trump made good on a longstanding promise. Most important, his decision signaled that the War of Washington is entering a crucial new phase. 

The president is going nuclear. 

Democrats who thought control of the House gave them control of the agenda now will face stiff competition. Their expressions of outrage will seem tired next to the sensational revelations about the actions of Jim Comey, John Brennan and ­others. 

Based on what we already know, it is highly likely those revelations will prove the White House, FBI and CIA engineered the greatest scandal in American political history by unjustified spying on Trump and by trying to tip the election to Hillary Clinton.

And they had no one to blame but themselves. Trump had given them fair warning back in November:

“I will hit them so hard, they’ve never seen a hit like that,” the president warned. “If they want to play tough, I will do it. And they will see how devastating those pages are.”

Which tells us that the far reaching grant of authority to Barr was not the whim of a moment--it was thoroughly thought out and calculated to strike terror into Deep State hearts.

Notable is how quickly, with the declass of Kathleen Kavalec's scribblings and brief remarks by Barr in an interview, that the focus has shifted from the likes of Comey, Clapper, and Brennan to the Oval Office. Few now doubt the true answer to the double question: What did Obama know and when did he know it? O has gone silent.

Declass hasn't even begun in earnest and we've come this far. Wait till the fallout starts covering the ground inside the Beltway. Fallout? Yes. For anyone who doubts that there will be indictments and convictions, rest assured that, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, the coup plot has left "a paper trail as wide as Interstate-95." And Roger Kimball is starting to come around, too:

There are still many details we do not know. Some we may never know. And dogged though Barr may be, many of the principal actors in this attempted coup will probably never be held to account. Will Hillary Clinton? Will Barack Obama? I doubt it. 

In fact, it was not so long ago that I was resigned to the eventuality that no one would be held to account, not John Brennan or James Comey, not Peter Strzok or Lisa Page, not James Clapper or Sally Yates or Samantha Power. 

Barr’s arrival on the scene has made me rethink my resignation.

Thus the scrambling among the DC rats:

Not long ago, few Americans of the thinking persuasion might have imagined that such a well-engineered republic, with its exquisite checks and balances, sturdy institutions, and time-tested traditions would end up as so much smoldering goop in a national dumpster fire, but such is the sad state-of-the-union moving into the fateful summer of 2019. The castle of the permanent bureaucracy is about to be torched by an uprising of deplorable peasants led by a Golden Golem made furious by relentless litigation. It’s Game of Thrones meets the Thermidorian Reaction with a Weimar-flavored cherry on top — really one for the ages!… 

The plot they concocted to get rid of him failed. And, yes, it was a plot, even a coup. And they f***ed it up magnificently, leaving a paper trail as wide as Interstate-95. Now all that paper is about to fall over the District of Columbia like radioactive ash, turning many current and former denizens of rogue agencies into the walking dead as they embark on the dismal journey between the grand juries and the federal prisons. 

Hence, the desperate rage of the impeachment faction, in direct proportion to their secret shameful knowledge that the entire RussiaGate melodrama was, in fact, a seditious subterfuge between the Hillary Clinton campaign and a great many key figures in government up-to-and-including former president Barack Obama, who could not have failed to be clued-in on all the action.

And there's something else to bear in mind. When you start pulling on an end projecting from a ball of yarn you tend to just keep pulling until the whole thing unravels. We have every reason in the world to believe that this coup plot was a globalist venture, with the US Deep State under Obama spying on Euro populist movements and the Euros reciprocating for the benefit of Hillary and Obama. There's much more out there waiting to be uncovered, and Trump and Barr have every reason to uncover it.

Interesting days. I'll leave off with some gleanings from a typically must read blog by Don Surber, It's not just America they hate.

This is your FBI under Obama. 

Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok: “Yep, out to lunch with Sally [Moyer]. We both hate everyone and everything.” 

Eric Felten at RealClearInvestigations has good news. 

He wrote, "There are a growing number of indicators that the leading players in the 2016 election drama are turning on one another, making a mad dash for the lifeboats to escape being dragged under with the political Titanic that is Christopher Steele and his dossier. These are many of the same people who had been eager to exploit the dossier, that collection of memos paid for by the Clinton campaign and supposedly sourced from Russia. Once treated like the Rosetta stone of collusion, the Steele documents now seem even to Trump antagonists more like the Howard Hughes diaries." 

Felten plowed through the emails, texts, and testimony of the people who did the grunt work for Obama in his spying on political rivals. He found a lot of very sick people, just the the sort who would turn on one another.

And, of course, turning on one another is just the advice that they'll be getting as they lawyer up. Something the smart ones did long ago. In legal battles as in winning that mad dash for the lifeboats, the key is to be the first in line to make a deal.