The Patriot Post® · Saturday Miscellaneous

The hits keep coming. Info from the FISA application is continuing to bleed out, making it even more clear that the FISA Court was seriously, if not criminally, misled. It would be great if the actual applications and transcripts of the hearings were made public, but it appears that highly relevant information on the dossier, its author and sources of funding are nowhere to be found. Worse, we recently learned that Hillary Clinton’s State Department was also a source of info for the dossier, provided through cutouts including longtime Hillary confidant Sidney Blumenthal. You can’t make this up.

And then the informant/whistleblower on the Uranium One deal began his congressional testimony. He notes serious issues of how the Obama administration conducted itself and raises questions about motives but saves his heaviest fire for Hillary. He claims that nuclear executives in Russia (implying that they were connected to “Moscow”) retained a U.S. lobbying firm, APCO, to funnel $3 million to the Clinton Global Initiative during the pendency of the deal, while Hillary as secretary of state had a vote on its approval. APCO, Democrats and Hillary associates ran to the microphones and cable TV this week, screaming that the accusation was false; that contributions to the CGI had nothing to do with Uranium One; and that it was all a GOP attempt to distract attention from the Trump/Russia investigation. We’ll see.

There are two interesting op-eds out. One, by Victor Davis Hanson, makes the case that the Memogate government abuse of power by misleading the FISA Court to obtain warrants to spy on Americans dwarfs the government misdeeds in Watergate and Iran Contra. But you’d never know it from mainstream media accounts. Perhaps the media is so invested in the dossier and the Trump collusion narrative that facts no longer matter. He is dead on right with this, and I maintain that it all dates back to that fateful day when the New York Times gave its reporters permission to be op-ed writers when covering Trump because he was a danger to the country and his election could not be permitted. Eventually, the truth will come out, but the potential damage along the way from media conduct is just getting started. To quote a senior government official: “Sad.”

The second is from The Wall Street Journal. It opines that the conduct of the FBI and Justice Department officials in Memogate in the lead up to the election can be attributed to classic bureaucratic career-enhancement steps that pushed the legal/ethical envelope, including in Emailgate, believing that Hillary would be the next president, and those actions would be rewarded. I agree; I’ve been saying that all along. After the election, however, when the same officials doubled down, the Journal attributes that to a sincere belief (ala the NYT) that the incompetent Trump was such a dangerous threat to the country that it was the officials’ civic duty to bring him down. I believe that phase two was much more of a “cover your butt” than a “save the whales” exercise, but that’s maybe a distinction without a difference. It gets you to the same place.

But think about this for a second, particularly those who might be upset about the result of the binary choice in November 2016. What does it tell you that senior FBI and Justice officials believed that cooking the books for Hillary would be rewarded and acted accordingly? That folks in the know would act on the expected ethics and mode of operation of the likely incoming administration tells you everything you need to know about what life in a Hillary presidency would have been all about. We would have had institutionalized corruption as standard operating procedure, and everything that is coming to light now would have been buried forever. Not a pretty picture.

Then there was the reaction of the Left to the text exchange revealed between the two FBI officials which noted that Obama wanted to know everything they were doing, which was in direct contradiction to Obama’s pledge that he would never talk to or interfere with any FBI/Justice official or investigation. I’ll come back to this, but first I’m going to be a broken record. Every time I read these text exchanges, I am flabbergasted that these two put stuff like this in writing.

We are all products of our experience, and my career was as a mergers and acquisitions investment banker for 25 years in the ‘80s and '90s — the heyday of LBOs and hostile tender offers. We all learned very quickly that confidentiality was paramount and to put as little as possible in writing. We also learned that the English language didn’t have around 200,000 words in it when dealing with the media; it had only two — “no,” and “comment.” Even when pressed to react to rumors we knew were false, “no comment” was still the answer, because if you denied the rumor, the next time you said “no comment” to a true rumor, it would be taken as confirmation. As mentioned before, I guess you can attribute the actions of the two FBI folks perhaps to arrogance, stupidity, attempt to impress the boyfriend/girlfriend, or simple overconfidence that they would never be called on it since Hillary was certain to be president. But what they did is utterly foreign to me. Just sayin’.

Just like the Uranium One reaction, Democrats dispatched the B Team to cable TV to literally scream that Obama never interfered with any investigation and that the text was merely referring to Obama’s need to know what was going on in the Russian election meddling investigation in advance of his upcoming meeting with Putin. Any hint of anything else was false and obviously — ready for this? — a GOP attempt to distract from the Trump/Russia collusion investigation. When the soundbites come this quickly and are this coordinated, you know that the odds of the original interpretations being true have just gone through the roof. Stay tuned.