Perspective On The Intel Community Assessment (ICA)--and James Comey

Stephen McIntyre makes a useful observation regarding the new revelations regarding the joint FBI/DoJ interview of Christopher Steele's "Primary Subsource" ("PSS", now known to be a Russian expat, think tank analyst in the US, Igor Danchenko). We now have confirmed that by late January, 2017, just days after the Trump inauguration, Danchenko over a three day period essentially debunked the entire Steele "dossier". And yet the FBI and DoJ--later including Team Mueller--continued to use an active FISA warrant nominally against Carter Page but in reality targeting President Trump. That FISA was originally obtained in October, 2016, by carefully failing to verify the Steele material that Danchenko debunked in January, 2017, but concealing that lack of verification from the FISA court. The same debunked material was used to twice renew that FISA after Danchenko had debunked it. As Andy McCarthy puts it this morning:

In each warrant, the court was told: “The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Trump’s] campaign.” Moreover, the warrant applications painted a picture of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Donald Trump and the Putin regime, with Manafort at the hub, using such underlings as Page and Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as intermediaries.

It was complete nonsense, largely based on the so-called dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Moreover, the FBI knew this was material developed and paid for by the Clinton campaign, but concealed that known fact from the FISA court.

With that in mind, let's pivot to the ICA and its FBI "Annex". That Annex simply amounted to a two page summary of the Steele "dossier". Remember--the FBI knew that the "dossier" was done for and paid for by the Clinton campaign, yet they pushed hard to get the "dossier" material included in the ICA. And that was about three weeks before they even had interviewed Danchenko, the "PSS". Here's how McIntyre paints that (edited to correct spelling and punctuation and to provide a continous read):

Wisdom From GK

Sean Davis Retweeted

G. K. Chesterton
@GKCdaily

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. 

6:07 PM · Jul 20, 2020

UPDATED: The Government Weighs In Against Sullivan's Petition

The Government's response to Sullivan's petition for en banc rehearing of the three judge panel's mandamus to dismiss the Flynn case is, once again, signed by a host of top level DoJ officials--signalling how seriously DoJ takes this business. It is, however, quite different from the Team Flynn response. Instead of raising separation of powers issues once again--which were covered extensively in their previous support of the petition for mandamus--DoJ focuses largely on procedural issues revolving around the propriety of Sullivan's petition to the full Circuit. That may sound dull, but it's actually rather interesting. The argument comes in three parts. In the first two parts DoJ sets out general principles quite tersely and then pretty much just swats aside Sullivan's arguments as erroneous, misguided, incorrect, and so forth.

Here we go:

The Flynn Team's Opposition To Rehearing En Banc Re the Mandamus

As most of you will already be aware, Michael Flynn's legal team, led by Sidney Powell, filed their response to Sullivan's ridiculous petition for an en banc rehearing of the three judge panel's issuance of a mandamus requiring him to dismiss the Flynn case. The whole concept involved in this is absurd under the US Constitution's separation of powers, but with Dem judges there's never any telling when politics touches on the case.

You can read the whole response here. Basically, Powell goes down the line rebutting the absurd claims of Sullivan's petition. For our purposes I'd like to contrast a central contention that Powell advances with a pretty good article by Shipwreckedcrew, written before Powell's response was public.

In addition to the legal argumentation, Powell minces no words in advancing her claim that Sullivan's actions derive from prejudice against Flynn based in totally improper motives:

Two Questions Re Danchenko's FBI/DoJ Interview

As we've recently learned, Christopher Steele claims that he got the "information" in his reports (which were compiled into a "dossier" that was behind so much of the Russia Hoax) from a "Primary Subsource", Igor Danchenko. Danchenko was interviewed by a team of FBI and DoJ investigators, analysts, and lawyers in January, 2017. The interview took place in Washington, DC, over at least three days, and in the interview Danchenko basically debunked any notion that there was a solid basis in fact for anything Steele claimed in his "dossier". In fact, Danchenko specifically disclaimed all knowledge of certain "information" that Steele passed on to his employers, the Clinton campaign, and the FBI. In spite of what Danchenko told the interviewers, the FBI and DoJ proceeded to allow the Carter Page FISA (based virtually 100% on the Steele "dossier") to remain up and running then obtained two additional renewals of the same FISA on the basis of the Steele "dossier" that Danchenko had debunked!

Two pseudonymous lawyers and Twitter commenters have raised questions about that interview.

First, noting that Danchenko had a lawyer present, Undercover Huber asks:

What Are The Voter Expectation Surveys Telling Us?

David Catron at The American Spectator has a very interesting article--Why the Polls Predict Trump Will Win. You may have noticed that included in some of the stories about recent polls, usually buried toward the end, is the information that most voters expect Trump will win reelection in November--despite what the results of the polls actually say. It seems that that expectation has been shown to be highly predictive. More predictive than voter preference polls or models:

Lately, pollsters and pundits have been nervously pondering the following question: “If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?” As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election. Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.” This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions. 

The polls that appear to portend a one-term presidency for Trump actually predict that the president will trounce Biden badly this November. 

According to Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), these citizen forecasts are “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes”:

Across the last 100 days prior to the seven elections from 1988 to 2012, vote expectation surveys provided more accurate forecasts of election winners and vote shares than four established methods (vote intention polls, prediction markets, quantitative models, and expert judgment). Gains in accuracy were particularly large compared to polls. On average, the error of expectation-based vote-share forecasts was 51 percent lower than the error of polls published the same day.

There's more at the link.

Why May Igor Danchenko--Steele's Primary Subsource--Be Important?

This brief tweet (below) by Stephen McIntyre hints at a web of connections involving Christopher Steele's supposed primary source for his fictional "dossier" and a variety of Deep State actors whose history would lead one to suspect that their views would be antithetical to those of Trump. Primary among those actors is Fiona Hill--a former National Security Council staffer under H. R. McMaster who also testified against President Trump's interests in the fake impeachment hearings. Further, Hill worked for George Soros' Open Society Foundation from 2000 - 2006:

not long ago, I saw a tweet that quoted an article in which Fiona Hill had been approached by Steele earlier in 2016 trying to contact a person who now appears to be PSS [Danchenko]. Can anyone give me link to tweet or article.

That Fiona Hill was acquainted with Christopher Steele and held him in high regard is well known, as is the fact that Hill was in touch with Steele during the 2016 election campaign. Hill is also very familiar with Igor Danchenko--they were colleagues at the Brookings Institute. It would therefore be natural enough for Steele to go through Hill to contact Danchenko.

The connections of these various Deep State actors to Steele and Danchenko as well as to Soros is tantalizing. The question is: What has John Durham been able to make of these connections? It seems likely that Danchenko's identity has been hidden this long because Durham has been tracking down all possible leads surrounding him and interviewing everyone with a connection. It's a sprawling investigation, but it could conceivably lead to direct connections between the original Russia Hoax and the later fake impeachment.

Interesting days await us.

Who Is Susan Rosenberg?

Susan Rosenberg, it turns out, helps launder money to BLM as charitable donations--even though BLM isn't actually a charity. Here's how that works, per Tom Fitton:

Black Lives Matter Global Network is NOT yet a recognized IRS charity but raises money under the "fiscal sponsorship" of another group, Thousand Currents. 

ActBlue Charities is the fundraising charity that purports to raise money for other charities, which in this case is "Black Lives Matter Global Network." 

Transparency? So if you want to make a tax-deductible charitable donation directly to Black Lives Matter, you can't. You donate to Act Blue Charities. Act Blue Charities sends this money, allegedly, to another charity, Thousand Currents, which runs BLM as a "fiscal sponsorship."

How does Susan Rosenberg fit into this? She's Vice Chair on the board of Thousand Currents. The result is that tax exempt "charitable" donations are helping to fund the violence and rioting we're seeing.

And who is Susan Rosenberg?

Per Wikipedia, Susan is an "activist." In fact, so active is she that she got 58 years in a federal penitentiary for her "activism." But she got a break--on his last day in office Bill Clinton commuted Susan's sentence to time served, so she was out after 16 years. And you thought there was something controversial about the Roger Stone commutation?

Here's the short version of Rosenberg's "activism" from Wikipedia:

Susan Lisa Rosenberg (born 5 October 1955) is an American activist, writer, and advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. From the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, Rosenberg was active in the far-left revolutionary terrorist May 19th Communist Organization ("M19CO"), which according to a contemporaneous FBI report "openly advocate[d] the overthrow of the U.S. Government through armed struggle and the use of violence". M19CO provided support to an offshoot of the Black Liberation Army, including in armored truck robberies, and later engaged in bombings of government buildings.

After living as a fugitive for two years, Rosenberg was arrested in 1984 while in possession of a large cache of explosives and firearms. She had also been sought as an accomplice in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur and in the 1981 Brink's robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police and a guard, although she was never charged in either case.

Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment on the weapons and explosives charges. She spent 16 years in prison, during which she became a poet, author, and AIDS activist. Her sentence was commuted to time served by President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, his final day in office.

Neat, huh? The Clintons--the gift that keeps on giving.

You can read lots more about this at TGP.

When Strzok Knew There Was No 'There' There

When the Team Mueller witchhunt was formally ramped up by Rod Rosenstein, in mid-May, 2017, disgraced former FBI official Peter Strzok famously anguished over whether to join the witchhunt, texting to another disgraced former FBI official, Lisa Page: We both know there's probably no 'there' there. Meaning, of course: No collusion.

We now know for sure, thanks to the stage managed revelation (by DoJ through Senator Graham) of Strzok's notes critiquing the NYT coverage, that Strzok--and presumably everyone else in his FBI orbit--had come to that conclusion no later than mid-February, 2017. Well before Team Mueller was set up.

Who else thinks Rod Rosenstein has a LOT to answer for? The reason he has a lot to answer for is in plain sight for anyone who reads Strzok's notes. Rosenstein claimed that the witchhunt was simply a continuation of Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation of "four Americans" associated with the Trump campaign that the FBI ginned up in summer of 2016. But Strzok makes it clear that not only was Trump himself clear of such claims, but so, too, were all Trump associates. Even Politico gets that--or has been forced to admit that--finally. With the Carter Page FISA still running--and yet to be renewed two more times!--Strzok wrote re claims being pushed by the NYT:

“We have not seen evidence of any officials associated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [intelligence officers]. We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

In other words, the stuff being peddled as investigative gold by the NYT was, in fact, the purest propagandistic horsesh*t.

Here's how Politico soft peddles Strzok's quite categorical statements:

The documents suggest that even as press reports began to describe connections between Americans in Trump’s orbit and figures in Russia’s shadowy intelligence services, the FBI had gathered little, if any, evidence that such ties existed.

"Suggest." As if one needs to somehow parse Strzok's words to ascertain just what he might be trying to say. Instead, Politico tries to staunch the mortal wound that Strzok's notes are to the Russia Hoax by blaming ... The Orange Man:

Trump supercharged the investigation, however, in May 2017 when he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey and invited senior Russian officials to the Oval Office. Comey went on to provide internal notes, through an intermediary, to The New York Times that described his growing concerns about Trump’s posture toward the Russia probe. Days later, the Justice Department appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation, which continued for two more years.

Problem: Rosenstein appointed Mueller to "take over [a] Russian investigation" which Strzok himself had admitted months previously in categorical terms had no predication. How does firing the FBI Director--based on a justificatory memo that Rosenstein himself wrote--justify continuing an investigation that had no predication? Does the President of the United States inviting with "senior Russian officials" to the Oval Office justify opening an investigation? Rosenstein nowhere suggests that as a basis for any investigation, but for the sake of argument, exactly how would one articulate that as predication for an investigation? It doesn't pass the laugh test.

This, now, is what the NeverTrumps are reduced to.

Heads Will Roll

Yes, I'm lifting this from Andrea Widburg's blog. She begins by quoting Scott Adams' insight that the 2020 election is a potential "extinction event". Adams advances that idea to explain why he believes that Republicans will "outregister" Democrats. Adams maintains that at least half of Democrats don't want what the the current version of the Democrat Party is selling: Open racism, violence in the streets, stripping of police protection from ordinary citizens, open borders, and etc. Yes, there's lots more, and most of it is unpalatable to at least 40% of regular Dem voters. And registration statistics indicate that Adams is right, as we discussed recently: Trends In Voter Thinking. 

Here's what Widburg has to say about Adams' theory:

Republicans know what will happen if Biden wins: They will be facing what Adams calls an “EXTINCTION EVENT.” If the Democrats win this election, between open borders and amnesty, a shift to permanent voting by mail, and the end of American suburbs, the Democrats will ensure that a Republican never wins again. 

Adams is correct, but he doesn’t go far enough. There will be more things extinguished than a mere political party. We’ve already seen how the Jacobins on the left are busy purging their party of people who are insufficiently passionate in their support. The daily firings and forced resignations are, for now, the left’s guillotine.

... 

Pay attention, as well, to how Democrats and their fellow leftists are “other-izing” and “demonizing” whole groups of people. We all thought “Well, that’s just leftist Seattle” when we learned that white city employees were being pushed into a “class” that would tell them how foul their whiteness is. That joke stopped being so funny when we learned that the U.S. Treasury Department used our tax dollars for a different seminar telling whites how vile they are. It became even less funny, if possible, today when Judicial Watch revealed that the Obama administration was already pushing this indoctrination on the American military.

...

So yeah, we’re facing an extinction event. What’s in the path of the oncoming political meteor is bigger than the Republican party. We’ve had a preview of the Marxist / Islamic policies heading our way — violence, racial division, purges, thought crimes, the erasure of our constitutional rights, and the type of dehumanizing anti-whiteness and anti-Semitism that put Nazi Germany on the path to the Holocaust. If you think it can’t happen here, you’re wrong. It can — unless we stop it at the polling place on November 3, 2020.

When I sent this around in an email, I included the following warning:

As you read this, and especially as you reach the final video, bear in mind that "The Jacobin" is the name of "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture."

The Most Powerful Dem Politician In The Country

Today's recommended read is by Thomas Lifson at AmThinker: Huge Illinois utility paying $200 million to settle bribery case implicating the real boss of Illinois politics, House Speaker Michael Madigan. Lifson takes a bit of a deep dive into the documentation behind the ComEd/Mike Madigan case in Illinois, the factual predicate to the deferred prosecution deal in which ComEd agreed to pay $200 million and cooperate with the Feds in further "investigations."

I'll simply quote the beginning and end of the article, to give a flavor:

Anyone who understands politics in the corrupt state government of Illinois realizes that the power of Michael Madigan, Speaker of the state House of Representatives since 1983 except for two years, dwarfs that of the state’s governor.  He’s been called  “the most powerful Democrat politician in the country” with good reason, and over the years AT has covered him (here, here, and here for instance) for his power, and lately for the appearance that federal investigators have been wiretapping associates and maybe, just maybe closing in on him.

Is that just hyperbole? The Speaker of the IL House, the most powerful Dem politician in the country? Perhaps there is some hyperbole there. However, we see parallels to this phenomenon in the reign of Willie Brown in CA. What makes Madigan so powerful is that, even though he runs a state that is in steep decline, his control is so absolute that he can reliably provide electoral votes to a degree that saves the Dems the trouble of campaigning and expending resources in a state that contains what is still the third largest metro area in the US. And his control has extended reliably from 1983 to the present.

Lifson closes by quoting long time Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, and recalling some interesting history from the note so long ago past:

Com Ed has not entered a guilty plea. Instead the feds are using what is called a “deferred prosecution agreement,” in which the company can avoid future prosecution by cooperating with investigators and paying the $200 million fine. They have every reason to spill the beans, as do others named in corruption. As John Kas puts it: 

… there won’t be any deal for Madigan. He’s the target. Targets don’t make deals. Targets see their families on visitors day. 

A historical note: At the time that Barrack Obama was first establishing himself in Chicago, he was reportedly assisted by the father of his friend Bill Ayers in obtaining a summer internship at one of Chicago’s most prestigious law firms. That father was Tom Ayers, the longtime head of Com Ed, and the law firm where Obama got his summer internship was the corporate counsel for Com Ed.

In no way am I minimizing the overriding importance of the Russia Hoax. However, keep cases like this one in Chicago in mind when you hear people questioning whether Barr is doing anything. I very much doubt that, absent Barr's firm hand at the helm of DoJ, cases like this would get anywhere. The importance of it all is seen in the rage against Barr.

More On What The FBI Primary Subsource Debriefing Documents Mean--Going Forward.

First, to be clear, the FBI memo detailing their debriefing of Christopher Steele's "Primary Subsource," the supposed source of most of what appeared in the Steele "dossier," is only part of what DoJ has released--albeit by far the longest part. There's a good account of the highlights of this document dump here: Senate Republicans release files they say 'undercut' Steele dossier.

Included in that article are comments by Senator Graham--a former prosecutor--that are important for assessing the significance of what we are having confirmed:

Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he was “very pleased the investigation in the Senate Judiciary Committee has been able to secure the declassification of these important documents,” and thanked Attorney General Barr. 

“What have we learned from the release of these two documents by the Department of Justice? Number one, it is clear to me that the memo regarding the FBI interview of the primary sub-source in January 2017 should have required the system to stop and reevaluate the case against Mr. Page,” Graham said. “Most importantly after this interview of the sub-source and the subsequent memo detailing the contents of the interview, it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI and the Department of Justice to continue to seek a FISA warrant against Carter Page in April and June of 2017.” 

Recall, I recently pointed out that a FISA can--and should--be terminated before it has run its full course if the FBI learns that the information used to obtain the FISA warrant was, in fact, unreliable. Of course, an entire investigation can--and should--be terminated for the same reason. That's exactly what Graham is getting at when he states that the interview of the primary subsource "should have required the system to stop and reevaluate the case against Mr. Page." That's especially true given that the case against Page was bogus--lacked predication--to begin with. However, there's more to this, because we know that in the real world the true target wasn't Carter Page but Donald Trump. Senator Graham isn't a dummy--he gets that.