UPDATED: More Re McCabe's Coup Plotting And Blame Shifting

I have to admit that I am, at times, puzzled by sundance at CTH. I give him full credit--he's done yeoman work on the Russia Hoax and other issues that I've taken full advantage of. And I'm certainly not alone in that regard. On the other hand, at other times he seems oddly tone deaf in analysis, and that seems to crop up in particular with regard to legal matters. I assume that reflects on his source(s).

For example, when the first information on McCabe's upcoming 60 Minutes interview was released sundance immediately proclaimed it some sort of legal strategic masterstroke--a view I found baffling, because I thought it was a bonehead move born of desperation:

The McCabe interview is, to me, remarkable. I can only assume that he knows he's going to jail and wants to be sure he won't be the only one. The actual effect of his previous leaks and now this interview is to completely out the Russia Hoax as--a hoax, from beginning to end. That may not be his or 60 Minutes' intent, but it will be the reality. 

By now, we've all seen that McCabe's camp realizes they've screwed up, big time. As I predicted, the general commentariat has quickly realized the enormity of his admissions, and McCabe is desperately attempting to backpedal--a maneuver that usually leads to a fall. In his case, another fall. Monica Showalter at American Thinker captures that:

Kimball On McCabe And The Deep State

For the last few days I've been juggling personal and family business with obsessively reading about McCabe's remarkable admissions--upcoming on 60 Minutes. For my money, a shortish piece--but here's a link to the full article--by Roger Kimball says it all. It really is this simple, once you get past all the subterfuges. Excerpts:


... Andrew McCabe, ... admits that he was at the center of a plot to unseat the President of the United States. The Times put it this way: ‘McCabe Says Justice Dept. Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’

There follows a few hundred words of brow-wrinkled prose about their ‘so alarmed,’ ‘dire concerns’ that the President had just fired their guy, FBI director James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey, that they got together and wondered how they could entice the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to collude (ooo, there’s that word!) to invoke the 25th Amendment and jettison a guy they didn’t approve of.

The Times story is cast in their best anodyne prose, carefully tilted to make it seem as if this was perfectly reasonable, business-as-usual stuff.

But it wasn’t reasonable, and it is business-as-usual only in a banana republic or a polity that is essentially ruled by hyper-bureaucratized administrative apparatus. [Comment: He means Deep State]

...

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Think about it. On May 9. the President fires his employee, James Comey. Panic in Bureau. Scarcely a week later, the Big Boy Scout, Robert Mueller is appointed by Rod Rosenstein to be Special Counsel in charge of the Get Trump battalion. It’s a real flood the zone operation. Pre-dawn raids, full-press intimidation, careers ruined.

Jack Goldsmith On "Barr’s Remarkable Non-Commitments About the Mueller Report"

Jack Goldsmith--

Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003

is on record that he expects Bill Barr to be a "great" Attorney General. For that reason his comments from Wednesday, 2/13/19, on Barr's confirmation hearing remarks as they relate to the release of all or part of the forthcoming Mueller report are well worth reading. Among other things you'll learn lots about what the special counsel regulations require in terms of a final report. But of most interest are his remarks that take off from John Dowd's stated expectation that there may well not be any report--or not one that is released to Congress or the public. And Dowd specifically noted that any Mueller report would have to go through an AG Barr.

Briefly, Goldsmith states:

“I don’t think there’ll be a report,” President Trump’s former attorney, John Dowd, recently told ABC News. “I will be shocked if anything regarding the president is made public, other than ‘We’re done.’” Referring to a possible report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Dowd suggested Mueller won’t release a detailed public accounting of the results of the investigation because he has nothing on Trump. 

Another reason there might not be a public report—or, at least, not much of one—is because William Barr, who will likely be attorney general by the end of the week, might not release one. It is Attorney General Barr’s decision, not Mueller’s, whether to give any information in Mueller’s report to Congress and the public. As we show in this post, Barr in his confirmation hearings committed himself to being transparent, consistent with a strict adherence to applicable laws and regulations. And the applicable laws and regulations require Barr to report very little to Congress or the public.  

...

Remember: The DNC Was NOT Hacked By The Russians

The current buzz about the Russia Hoax--which will certainly continue through the weekend and into next week--is about the apparent willingness of the disgraced former FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe to demolish the whole Russia narrative in order to be sure that others will go down with him--and most of all, Rod Rosenstein. Paradoxically as it may seem, this may be a good time to recall a key part of the whole Russia Hoax narrative, one that has largely been ignored: the patently false claim that the DNC was hacked by Russians. This episode has special significance because of the active involvement of the Clinton campaign attorneys from Perkins Coie, who were also intimately involved in contracting with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS for the Steele "dossier" on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

Fortuitously, yesterday The Gateway Pundit had a guest article on the subject by no less an expert than William Binney (with an assist from Larry Johnson). For anyone not familiar with Binney, here is the Wikipedia version of his career:

Binney ... [after joining the Army with a BS in Math] was found to have strong aptitudes for mathematics, analysis, and code breaking, and served from 1965 to 1969 in the Army Security Agency before going to the NSA in 1970. 

Binney was a Russia specialist and worked in the operations side of intelligence, starting as an analyst and ending as a Technical Director prior to becoming a geopolitical world Technical Director. In the 1990s, he co-founded a unit on automating signals intelligence with NSA research chief Dr. John Taggart. Binney's NSA career culminated as Technical Leader for intelligence in 2001. He has expertise in intelligence analysis, traffic analysis, systems analysis, knowledge management, and mathematics (including set theory, number theory, and probability).

After retiring from the NSA, he founded, together with fellow NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe, Entity Mapping, LLC, a private intelligence agency to market their analysis program to government agencies.

The Government took a dim view of Binney's post-retirement whistleblowing. Although Binney has never been arrested, much less tried, for any of his activities, Government efforts to discourage his activities led to incidents such as this:

UPDATED: Woops!

UPDATE: I'm updating to add something I should have said originally. Assuming that Bill Barr is confirmed as AG, as expected, both he and Michael Horowitz at OIG may take a more than casual interest in this matter. It is a question of respecting a core institution of our criminal justice system, the Grand Jury.

MORE: Late yesterday there was word that the DoJ is actively investigating the leak of Michael Cohen's bank records. Those bank records were obtained via a Grand Jury subpoena, so that means the investigation involves a violation of Rule 6(e)(2)(B) -- see below. This pattern of occurrences could be seen as the Special Counsel's modus operandi--leaks of Grand Jury testimony and material.

END UPDATE

Roger Stone's attorneys have filed a motion requesting a "Show Cause Order". What this means is that Stone's attorneys believe that, in the facts that they allege in the motion, they establish a prima facie case that Grand Jury secrecy rules codified in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure have been violated by the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC). Specifically, this refers to the fact that CNN had a "draft" copy of the Stone indictment at the time of Stone's arrest--two and a half hours before the indictment was unsealed by the Court. Not only that, but CNN is stated to have told Stone's attorneys that they received the "draft" from the OSC. The problem with that is that the indictment had been sealed by the Court at the OSC's request, but the "draft" copy was in fact identical to the supposedly sealed indictment--the copy in CNN's possession could only have come from the Government, as per CNN's statement, and is identical to the indictment that the Court ordered sealed.

So, Stone's attorneys are asking that the OSC be required to show cause why they didn't commit contempt of the court order that sealed the indictment. In other words, the OSC should be required to rebut the prima facie case that Stone's attorneys claim they have established. That would involve presenting some reason to believe that the disclosure was made by some person outside the OSC.

The person most affected by this motion is the "AAW" who drafted the indictment: Andrew Weissmann, senior deputy to special counsel Robert S. Mueller. Will this be a case of live by the leak, die by the leak?

John Dowd Speaks Out

ABC News has done a bang up interview with former Trump attorney John Dowd. For anyone who doesn't know who John Dowd is, read his Wikipedia page: John Dowd. Big league player, attorney, big time experience both in the law and in Washington.

I've edited and condensed the transcript of the interview, boiled it down. Read the original for all the detail and the full context, uncondensed, listen to the audio. But it really speaks pretty much for itself. I've bolded what I thought jumps out. Here goes:


ABC NEWS' KYRA PHILLIPS: So, John, word is the Mueller report is going to drop within the next couple of weeks.

JOHN DOWD: I don't think there'll be a report. The rules of the department say, no report.

ABC NEWS' CHRIS VLASTO: So you don't think the public's gonna see anything. You think it's $40 million. Mueller investigated it. And that's it.

DOWD: The idea that you would take that information and make it public, you know, violates the whole concept of the grand jury. What's the grand jury for? To protect the innocent. ... Does that ever get reported? No.

PHILLIPS: Do you respect what Mueller is doing? I know you know Mueller well.

DOWD: Well, I respected it in the beginning. My style is I always trust the other side, until I didn't. In my opinion, on March 5th, we were done. He had everything. He said he had everything. He told me that no one had lied. He told me they had every document we asked for. He told me that it was nothing more. He told me that the president was not a target. That is, he did not have any exposure, that he was a witness subject, which is perfectly normal for someone's conduct you're looking at, but they don't have exposure. What people don't understand about the president is you have too much information in your life. I mean, the amount of information that he intakes every day, gets prepared for, is staggering. And in my questioning him or talking to him--you know, first question, easy. Second question, easy. Third question, he wasn't sure. And he doesn't like being unsure. So he'll guess. There's your trap, right there. It's not whether he lies or not. 

Convergences

A remark I made following the most recent blog post,

What's needed is what amounts to a spiritual makeover of "the American people," one that would allow for a principled remake of the country. 

sparked two comments from differing yet converging perspectives.

Commenter Joe addressed this remark from a specifically Catholic perspective and related it to the upsurge of abortion extremism in the US. Obviously this relates, as well, to politics in the Trump era. Trump's strong support of pro-life policies, including in his judicial appointments, is well known. Further, he is well known to listen closely to the advice of a devout Catholic, Kellyanne Conway--who was also the primary writer of Trump's wildly successful and outspokenly pro-life SOTU address. Joe goes so far as to tentatively relate some of what we're seeing in our public life to possible "End Times" signs. Rod Dreher addresses those darker concerns in light of recent events in a riveting blog: The Age Of Antichrist.

On the other hand, commenter Steven Fine wrote from a specifically Jewish perspective, drawing attention to "Catholic concern over Islamization and other issues as expressed by William Kilpatrick" at Crisis Magazine. The relation of these Catholic concerns (Islamization, abortion, gender politics, etc.) to the politics of both the Trump presidency and the West in general is clear enough. However, Steve also draws attention to the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Benedict XVI (as was, Joseph Ratzinger as is) and his replacement by Jorge Bergoglio, currently known as Francis I (I won't get into the fraught controversies over these events). It's not hard to see that Steve relates Bergoglio's policies regarding immigration as playing very much into "Islamization," both in Europe and in the US. That conservative Jews should share those Catholic concerns is not new. However, coming as they do at a time of the Vatican II Church's growing embrace of Islam, in tandem with the increasingly overt anti-Semitism of the Left--with which the Catholic bishops typically align--must be troubling. Bergoglio's own well known and close ties to Soros operatives can only add to that sense of alarm.

So, the convergence I see in these two commenters is the recognition and concern that the Catholic Church--arguably the central institution of the Western world--should be playing a conservative role (in the broad sense of preserving the cultural principles of the West) but is instead abandoning that traditional role. The moral and spiritual leadership that not only Catholics but also non-Catholics have come to rely upon--in the moral, spiritual, and intellectual arenas--is degenerating into a modernist style Babel and withdrawal from any claims to leadership.

That appearance of collapse was only strengthened last week when Bergoglio traveled to the Dar-al-Islam--the House of Islam, Abu Dhabi--to formally renounce the Catholic faith in favor of a type of Neo-Gnostic syncretism, claiming: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, ... are willed by God in His wisdom.” The symbolism of the event could not have been starker, and it should be raising alarms among all those--Catholic and non-Catholic alike--who share a concern for not merely the health but the very survival of Western civilization.

Here's The Difference.

As you'll recall, back when Devin Nunes was still chairman of the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff launched an 8 month ethics inquiry into Nunes because Nunes had met with a source without informing the committee. This arguably slowed down the GOP investigation into the Russia Hoax.

Today we've learned that Schiff met personally with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS in July at a security conference in Aspen, CO. It now seems certain, based on Bruce Ohr's recently leaked testimony, that Simpson lied in his own testimony to the Intel Committee.

Will GOPers play turnabout and demand an ethics inquiry into Schiff?

They may, but here's the difference.

When Nunes was sidelined the Speaker of the House was NeverTrumper Paul Ryan.

Nancy Pelosi, also a NeverTrumper--same party!--is now the Speaker.

See the difference?

Won't happen.

Trisha Anderson Clarifies

Jeff Carlson has more excerpts from the testimony of a key Russia Hoax player at the Epoch Times today. Previously, in Trisha Anderson: Andy McCabe and Sally Yates Read The FISA Application "Line By Line", we reviewed Gregg Jarrett's summary of Anderson's testimony. In that post we noted that Anderson, as head of the National Security Law Branch (NSLB) at the FBI, was in a key position to know pretty much all there was to know about the Carter Page FISA application: all FISA applications had to be signed off by her for approval. Further, while in the case of "ordinary" FISAs one might have expected the top leadership at DoJ and FBI to rely on people like Anderson to vet the application in detail, in the case of the Carter Page FISA application, Anderson told the House, it was FBI Deputy Director McCabe and Deputy AG Yates who read the application "line by line." In the normal course of approval, Anderson would have vetted the application for "probable cause," and she would have been the final approver to demand to know whether the probable cause had been verified--before the application was sent to the top officials for their signatures.

Today, we learn from Carlson, Senior FBI Lawyer Did Not Read Carter Page FISA Before Signing Off on It: Congressional testimony by Trisha Anderson highlights unusual process used by FBI and DOJ to obtain FISA warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, that Anderson did her best to distance herself even further from the approval process, and in the process of distancing herself did two things:

* She made clear that all the normal FISA approval procedures were essentially reversed for the Carter Page FISA; and

* She thereby threw Andy McCabe and Sally Yates under the wheels of a bus that is moving at top speed with no brakes.

Here's how Anderson's Aug. 31, 2018, testimony went--as far as we have it:

Mr. Breitenbach: You had mentioned earlier that all FISAs have to be signed off, have an approver at an SES [Senior Executive Service] level. In OGC? Or is that anywhere inside the FBI?

Ms. Anderson: In NSLB, in my particular branch. 

Mr. Breitenbach: In NSLB? 

Ms. Anderson: Yeah. Uh-huh. 

Mr. Breitenbach: Okay. Who was that SES approver for the Carter Page FISA?
Ms. Anderson: My best recollection is that I was for the initiation. 

What Anderson is saying is that, for the first or initial authorization of FISA coverage on Carter Page, she was the SES approver. As we know, there were also three renewals of that initial authorization, but the underlying probable cause for those renewals remained essentially the same, relying heavily on the Steele "dossier"--the "crucial" factor, as McCabe stated in his testimony.

However, Anderson was at pains to emphasize that her role as approver was to serve as the last "backstop," meaning that she relied on the previous review by "many people," both in the FBI and at DoJ. Here's how she explains that:

Buzzfeed Source Was Felix Sater--Oh My!

Paul Sperry has tweeted that "career criminal" Felix Sater was Buzzfeed's source for their "narrative" that Trump asked Michael Cohen to lie to Congress--a "narrative" that was renounced by Mueller after thinking it over for a while.

Paul Sperry
‏
@paulsperry_

BREAKING: Buzzfeed's "Deep Throat" source is Felix Sater, the crook-turned-asset/informant groomed by Clinton admin & handled by EDNY Loretta Lynch & Mueller attack dog Weissmann & the Source E of pee tape/other apocrypha for Clinton dossier Mueller using as Russiagate case theory

6:58 PM - 24 Jan 2019

You can read about Sater at the Felix Sater Wikipedia page, or you can read Gateway Pundit's take. Or you could double your pleasure by reading both!

According to Wikipedia:

Felix Henry Sater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky; Russian: Фе́ликс Миха́йлович Шеферовский; March 2, 1966) is an American former mobster, real estate developer and former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate conglomerate based out of New York City. ... 

In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to his involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian Mafia, and became an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and federal prosecutors, assisting with organized crime investigations. In 2017, Sater agreed to cooperate with investigators into international money laundering schemes. 

... 

... According to the FBI, Mikhail Sheferovsky was an underboss for Russian Mafia "boss of bosses" Semion Mogilevich and convicted of extorting money from local restaurants, grocery stores, and a medical clinic. 

Felix Sater is reportedly a childhood friend of Michael Cohen.

The Myth Of Equal Protection

Citizens of these United States are supposed to receive Equal Protection under our laws. Somehow that doesn't always seem to work out, now that we have a Deep State--and if you don't believe there is such a thing, noted legal scholar Jack Goldsmith is here to educate you about the reality of the system we live in. In these United States in the twenty first century, equal protection of the law is--a legal fiction.

Is it equal protection when the prosecutor gets to pick the judge? I don't think so, but that's what has happened in the Roger Stone case. Using the claim that Stone's case is somehow "related" to the Paul Manafort, Team Mueller has bypassed the usual random selection of judges afforded to most defendants and had the Stone case assigned to Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is currently holding Manafort in solitary confinement.

Robert Barnes‏

@Barnes_Law 

How did the SAME federal judge in a district of 21 judges manage to get "randomly assigned" the email case, the Manafort case and the #RogerStone case? By the flagrant misuse of "related case" listing from team #Mueller to make sure their deferential Obama-appointed judge oversaw 

8:16 AM - 1 Feb 2019

The alleged crimes are different and the defendants are different and the evidence is totally different and unrelated, so how are the two cases related? Well, the prosecutor is the same--but that's not what the "related case" rule is about. It seems Team Mueller was pleased with Berman Jackson's handling of Manafort. And now she seems poised to treat Stone in similar fashion:

Brad Heath

@bradheath
A federal judge warned Roger Stone today not to treat the criminal case against him as "a book tour," and said she's considering imposing a gag order to quiet him.

12:08 PM - 1 Feb 2019

Think about that. Stone was arrested in a completely unnecessary and highly public predawn raid by 29 heavily armed FBI agents before CNN cameras, in what  was clearly an abusive and prejudicial operation intended to poison the jury pool. That had nothing to do with Stone--it was strictly the choice of Team Mueller and the FBI. And now the judge is telling Stone that he may no longer be allowed the exercise of his First Amendment rights? According to USAToday, Berman Jackson

said she was concerned that the continued publicity surrounding the case against the 66-year-old political operative could “taint” the jury pool. She gave Stone's lawyers and federal prosecutors until next Friday to tell her whether she should issue an order preventing them all from talking publicly about the case. 

Bill Priestap's Partially Leaked Testimony

Jeff Carlson has the summary of the latest (partially) leaked testimony at the Epoch Times. This time it's the testimony of Bill Priestap, recently retired from the position of Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. There are only a few significant takeaways from his testimony.

First, Priestap flatly contradicts disgraced former FBI Director Comey's frankly non-credible claim that Priestap told him (Comey) not to brief Congress re the Crossfire Hurricane case. Non-credible, because Comey first states that the practice is to brief the Gang of Eight Intelligence group on "sensitive cases," but then claims Crossfire Hurricane was not briefed because it was "a matter of such sensitivity"--its sensitivity is precisely why it should have been briefed. Here's how the questioning of Comey went: