UPDATED: WOW! Ted Cruz just curbstomped Andy McCabe

Trump did Ted Cruz a favor. Cruz has the chance to be star in the Senate, and he showed it today when he grilled a total POS, Andy McCabe. Cruz totally eviscerates McCabe. I only wish this had been face to face:

Yes, I lifted the subject line from CFP.

UPDATE: Shipwreckedcrew was really funny about this. Earlier today a commenter asked whether I'd be writing about McCabe's testimony. I responded, basically: Were McCabe's lips moving? What's the point?

Well, Shipwreckedcrew decided to pile on a bit, and I luv it because, well, because McCabe:

Disgraced FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Gets Publicly Humiliated In Senate Hearing

It has been such a slow news day I had to spend hours looking around for something to cover, and the best I could find was some information about my old friend Andy McCabe’s testimony via videoconference today before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

...

Enter U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz — and one of the most talented actual trial lawyers (the only one?) in the United States Senate.  He had a couple of questions for McCabe about Joe Biden:

I expect the Capitol Police came along after this and arrested Sen. Cruz for murder because that was a sacrificial removal of McCabe’s heart and showing it to him while it was still beating before he died.

And it proved one other thing that I have long maintained here and on Twitter — Andrew McCabe was an idiot who simply managed to leverage the FBI’s system for promotion by moving from spot to spot as quickly as possible without doing anything substantial or consequential along the way.  “No big cases, no big problems” is the mantra of that crowd in FBI management.

 

Strzok, Page, Baker Emails Re Logan Act

Catherine Herridge has a twitter thread in which she provides images of two internal FBI email exchanges early in the work day of January 4, 2017. Those email exchanges involve Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and James A. Baker. First, here is an image of the emails:

Now, bear in mind that James A. Baker was at the time the top legal guy at the FBI--he was General Counsel, which means that he was disgraced former FBI Director James Comey's personal lawyer for official purposes. Lisa Page's exact position in the organizational pecking order is a bit more ambiguous, but as Counsel to the Deputy Director, Andy McCabe--who was in charge of day to day operations--she would ipso facto have a lot of clout.

The first email is from Lisa Page to James Baker, and is captioned: "code section at question." I wonder whether Page means "code section IN question"? The entire text of the email is simply the United States Code citation to the Logan Act: "18 USC 953".

What's going on here?

Victoria Toensing On Predication--And Me On The Logan Act

Today Victoria Toensing did a five-part series of tweets that expose the fact that the FBI never had any grounds to interview Michael Flynn--no predication for any investigation, and an interview is an investigative act. However, the tweets are in a sort of shorthand. I've take the liberty to expand that shorthand to provide a fuller exposition--which still preserves the tone and substance of the original. To that I've appended my own views on how the whole issue of the Logan Act plays into all this.

Victoria Toensing
@VicToensing

In honor of Law Day I will be Tweeting later today about the legal and procedural issues that violated General Flynn's constitutional rights.

No1: The interview of General Flynn was corrupt because it was contrived. The FBI needs, at the least, an allegation of a crime to interview you. They cannot knock on your door and ask what you had for breakfast. The FBI asked General Flynn what he said in his calls with Ambassador Kislyak. The incoming National Security Adviser can talk to any foreign leader re any issue on behalf of the President-Elect. There is no crime in that for the FBI to investigate.

[Remember what I said above. No investigative step can be taken by the FBI unless they have a good faith belief that they are investigating a crime that falls within their jurisdiction. An interview is an investigative step.]

No2: The FBI purposefully did not tell General Flynn in Jan 2017 that he could be prosecuted if he didn't recall the ENTIRE conversation with Kislyak. They acted like it was a friendly discussion ... just like their previous visits in the days before. The FBI at first said there was “no deception.” Then Mueller was appointed in May.

No3: For a statement to the FBI to be a crime [a 'false statement' for purposes of 18 USC 1001], the statement must be “material,” i.e., your statement must have “impeded an FBI investigation.” If there is no crime to investigate, then nothing "material" has been impeded. You can tell the FBI you had yogurt for breakfast even if you had a jelly donut--if there is no investigation of yogurt or donuts there is no crime.

No4: The lousy Covington lawyers never asked for transcripts of General Flynn's calls with Kislyak. How can a lawyer tell his client to plead guilty to false statements when he hasn't compared the FBI interview notes with the actual words that were recorded? Now the US Government won’t even admit to Sidney Powell that such a tape even exists!

No5: What is the reason for this illegal conduct by the FBI? The FBI needed to eliminate General Flynn, lest he discover and put a stop to Crossfire Hurricane, the hoax investigation of Trump/Russia collusion. General Flynn knew where all the bodies might be buried in the Deep State.

UPDATED: Briefly Noted: Why Did The FBI Keep Getting FISAs Against Carter Page?

Carter Page stepped down from his position as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign in September, 2016--a month before the FBI obtained a FISA warrant against him. Not only that, but the FBI got three renewal warrants against Trump. The FISA coverage of Page--which is incredibly comprehensive and intrusive--continued until Team Mueller allowed it to lapse in August 2017. The question is: Why? Why all this intensive spying on someone who had only briefly been associated with the Trump campaign, which spying was justified on the theory of an "enterprise counterintelligence investigation?" (Mueller's "Enterprise" Witchhunt)

Margot Cleveland ran a blog yesterday that sheds light on this question: Carter Page: Obama’s FBI, DOJ May Have Spied On Trump Admin, Not Just Campaign. What emerges from recent statements by Page is that the FBI appears to have been spying on the inmost counsels of the new Trump administation--not just on the candidate, or the transitional President-Elect, but on the post-inauguration new Trump administration.