Paul Ryan Is No Longer The Speaker

And Rod Rosenstein is no longer running Team Mueller.

The result of this new lay of the land in the House, and at DoJ, paradoxically--or, not?--is that those GOP members who were formerly leading the investigations into the Russia Hoax, and who are now minority members of the same key committees, seem to feel a renewed energy. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows--they all are demonstrating a sort of fire in the belly that appeared to be lacking under the Speakership of Paul Ryan. And that speaks well of the leadership of Kevin McCarthy.

A good example of what this means was the performance of the GOP representatives in questioning Michael Cohen and referring Cohen to the new AG, Bill Barr, for Cohen's renewed perjury. Many observers noted that the majority Dems appeared unprepared for the new, aggressive tactics of the GOP.

Another example is Devin Nunes' Sunday interview with Maria Bartiromo. CTH renders a signal service in making the entire interview available, in two parts, here. The interview is fairly lengthy and wide ranging. Bartiromo, as usual, seems to be pretty well prepared and asks the right questions. She hones in on the list of witnesses that Nunes wants to interview. Most of these witnesses appear to be FBI and DoJ national security lawyers who would have been involved in the full range of coverups and abuses that characterized the Obama years, and in particular the last years leading up to the 2016 elections--the various Clinton related coverups, as well as the FISA abuse and abusive counterintelligence investigations of the Trump campaign. Among the names on the list are some that may be familiar, names like that of former Assistant AG John Carlin. Other names will probably only be familiar to those who have followed the Russia Hoax closely also appear. A good example would be Tashina ("Tash") Gauhar.

Bartiromo pointed out that Nunes no longer possesses subpoena power and is unlikely to get any subpoenas approved by Adam Schiff--reciprocity is a one way street. Nunes appeared undaunted, responding that, in the event the GOP investigations are stiffed by Schiff, he would seek cooperation from the relevant Senate Committees as well as from AG Barr. He also made a point of stating that the FISA law must be entirely "rewritten" to prevent a recurrence of what happened in the events surrounding the 2016 elections--the Russia Hoax.

UPDATED: Dems Throw Wray And Rosenstein Under The Bus

Make no mistake about it--that's exactly what happened yesterday when the four Democrat members of the Congressional Gang of Eight sent their letter to the three Executive Branch officials who will be primarily responsible for acting on President Trump's declassification order regarding documents related to the Russia Hoax.

In the letter Senators Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner and Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff "request" DNI Dan Coats, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide them "an immediate briefing ... prior to any disclosure of the affected material ... to anyone at the White House." Note the essential outrageousness of the "request." The reasoning behind the "request" is based on the assertion that the Special Counsel investigation (i.e., the Russia Hoax) "implicates the President's own campaign and associates." In effect, the claim is that once a Special Counsel is appointed a President is no longer President--at least not for matters related to the Special Counsel's investigation--which we all know can be virtually unlimited. In other words, the Special Counsel act abrogates the US Constitution with its system of checks and balances: agencies of the Executive Branch that report to the President under the US Constitution should now report to Congress!

Key to this reasoning, however, is the assertion in the letter that these three officials--Coats, Rosenstein, and Wray--have already given verbal assurances that such information would not be provided to the White House:

One June 27, 2018, we wrote again to memorialize the verbal assurance you provided us that DoJ and FBI would not provide the White House or any of the President's attorneys with access to sensitive information briefed to a small group of designated Members.

That the letter may not actually accurately reflect the "verbal assurances" can be seen from DNI Coats' later (7/12/18) written response in which he agreed that "sources and methods" must be protected. That goes without saying, of course, but who thinks that sources and methods are what are really at issue in this declassification? The terms of the order itself expressly exclude large sections of the Carter Page FISA order--precisely those sections which reference sources and methods (for full details see Andy McCarthy's Reading the FISA Redactions). In any event, as McCarthy also makes abundantly clear, the redacting of the previously released FISA order leave precious little to the imagination--except, perhaps, for those who are deficient in that respect.

What's really at issue here is the release--unredacted--of texts relevant to the Russia Hoax that were sent by two fired former FBI officials: former Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andy McCabe. Anyone who thinks that Comey and McCabe spent their time texting about sources and methods simply hasn't thought this through. Clearly the Democrats are in a state of near panic, and that suggests that they know that Comey and McCabe were probably texting regarding matters relevant to the Russia Hoax, and those texts were going to members of Congress and/or officials in the Executive Branch--and to the virulently anti-Trump media.