The Robert Mueller Investigation

[HenryJames 67466]

Regime.

[EMAWesome 101]

Here's a sentence I never thought I would type two years ago.  Matt Taibbi expresses my thoughts better than I can.

Bold parts are my emphasis.

 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the Kislyak calls to leverage a case into existence.

In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”

“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”

A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.

Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front.

Flynn’s case fit the pattern. We were told his plea was just the “tip of the iceberg” that would “take the trail of Russian collusion” to the “center of the plot,” i.e. Trump. It turned out he had no deeper story to tell. In fact, none of the people prosecutors tossed in jail to get at the Russian “plot” – some little more than bystanders – had anything to share.

Remember George Papadopoulos, whose alleged conversation about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton with an Australian diplomat created the pretext for the FBI’s entire Trump-Russia investigation? We just found out in newly-released testimony by McCabe that the FBI felt as early as the summer of 2016 that the evidence “didn’t particularly indicate” that Papadopoulos was “interacting with the Russians.”

If you’re in the media and keeping score, that’s about six months before our industry lost its mind and scrambled to make Watergate comparisons over Jim Comey’s March, 2017 “bombshell” revelation of the existence of an FBI Trump-Russia investigation. Nobody bothered to wonder if they actually had any evidence. Similarly Chelsea Manning insisted she’d already answered all pertinent questions about Julian Assange, but prosecutors didn’t find that answer satisfactory, and threw her in jail for year anyway, only releasing her when she tried to kill herself. She owed $256,000 in fines upon release, not that her many supporters from the Bush days seemed to care much.

The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

After Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about mass data collection, a series of internal investigations began showing officials were breaking rules against spying on specific Americans via this NSA program. Searches were conducted too often and without proper justification, and the results were shared with too many people, including private contractors. By October, 2016, the FISA court was declaring that systematic overuse of so-called “702” searches were a “very serious fourth Amendment issue.”

In later court documents it came out that the FBI conducted 3.1 million such searches in 2017 alone. As the Brennan Center put it, “almost certainly… the total number of U.S. person queries run by the FBI each year is well into the millions.”

Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.  This is a long way from using surveillance to defuse terror plots or break up human trafficking rings.

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism.

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

My family is in quarantine, I worry about a premature return to work, and sure, I laughed at that Shaun of the Dead photo of Ohio protesters protesting state lockdown laws. But I also recognize the crisis is also raising serious civil liberties issues, from prisoners trapped in deadly conditions to profound questions about speech and assembly, the limits to surveillance and snitching, etc. If this disease is going to be in our lives for the foreseeable future, that makes it more urgent that we talk about what these rules will be, not less — yet the party I grew up supporting seems to have lost the ability to do so, and I don’t understand why.

[David Dennison 19570]

Why was Mike Flynn talking to the Russians?

[Poolflood 845]

1 hour ago, David Dennison said:

Why was Mike Flynn talking to the Russians?

Was it illegal to speak with them?  Was he unmasked and investigated?   What did the WFO conclude from their investigation? 

[notre dame joe 205]

7 hours ago, EMAWesome said:

Here's a sentence I never thought I would type two years ago.  Matt Taibbi expresses my thoughts better than I can.

Bold parts are my emphasis.

 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

 

 

I normally frown upon pasting the entire damn article.  But this is one is exceptional and I upvoted you for it. 

[EMAWesome 101]

13 hours ago, David Dennison said:

Why was Mike Flynn talking to the Russians?

Because he was the incoming National Security Advisor and the Russian he was talking to was their ambassador to the U.S.

[EMAWesome 101]

I'm just waiting for the Cloak Room's think tank to make their case for how Matt Taibbi is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Fox News.

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13637]

We're waiting for you to post another photoshop and pretend it never happened.

[David Dennison 19570]

58 minutes ago, EMAWesome said:

Because he was the incoming National Security Advisor and the Russian he was talking to was their ambassador to the U.S.

Why didn't he clear it with the administration?

[Anastasis 23718]

4 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Why didn't he clear it with the administration?

Did surrogates for prior administrations clear all  their coms with foreign leaders during the transition?

[StassneyHorn 6790]

Article from 2017 that covers most of what has been asked on this page, sarcastically or not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/flynn-is-said-to-have-talked-to-russians-about-sanctions-before-trump-took-office.html

[David Dennison 19570]

3 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Did surrogates for prior administrations clear all  their coms with foreign leaders during the transition?

If they didn't, they're asking for the FBI to look into it. 

[jimmyjazz 47332]

Flynn was working against US foreign policy.  It doesn't surprise me a bit that Anastasis and others don't seem to see the problem with this.  To me, it's dangerously close to treason, but hey, that's just me.

[David Dennison 19570]

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

Flynn was working against US foreign policy.  It doesn't surprise me a bit that Anastasis and others don't seem to see the problem with this.  To me, it's dangerously close to treason, but hey, that's just me.

The FBI was well within its authority to want to look into what he and the Russians were talking about. Private citizens are prohibited from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes involving the United States.

[Anastasis 23718]

3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Flynn was working against US foreign policy.  It doesn't surprise me a bit that Anastasis and others don't seem to see the problem with this.  To me, it's dangerously close to treason, but hey, that's just me.

My thoughts on Flynn as a grifter are known. However, according to the accounts of the conversation, Flynn was working to prevent a tit for tat escalation between Russia and the United States. It's only in your Russia Russia Russia bizarro land where an individual trying to deescalate a geopolitical confrontation between two nuclear powers is treason.  

[GRHorn 105]

3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Flynn was working against US foreign policy.  It doesn't surprise me a bit that Anastasis and others don't seem to see the problem with this.  To me, it's dangerously close to treason, but hey, that's just me.

Jimmy, you’ve unknowingly hit on the crux of the issue. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut. 
 

Trump, at the time, and Flynn represented a divergent (but duly elected) foreign policy that threatened the unelected Washington establishments ideals. That imo is why he was aggressively targeted above and beyond what many others in the past have experienced. 
 

I’ve never completely gotten up to my ears in every detail of the Flynn affair like a lot of you, but when Never Trumpers say he was targeted and the FBI and prior administration’s behavior was outside the norms, then I think it gives it more credence.
 

And before you ask it was a National Review podcast. They don’t like Trump or Flynn. 
 

So when other posters ask why Samantha Power would suddenly lose recollection of anything before of after Flynn’s unmasking, I’d say it’s because she knows better than people here that it wasn’t standard operating procedure as part of the usual “peaceful transition of power”.

Edited May 16, 2020 by GRHorn

[Anastasis 23718]

In on page 666. 

[Upgrayedd 5916]

16 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

In on page 666. 

and 665 others 😉

[NWBuck 8630]

17 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

In on page 666. 

The mark of the "Be Best" 

[jimmyjazz 47332]

1 hour ago, GRHorn said:

Jimmy, you’ve unknowingly hit on the crux of the issue. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut. 

Hey, Ray Squirrels, you of all people shouldn't be insinuating that someone else struggles to identify facts.

He was acting against US foreign policy.   He should be in prison.  That's the end of the story.  I fucking dare you to put up a cogent argument to the contrary.

[jimmyjazz 47332]

2 hours ago, Anastasis said:

My thoughts on Flynn as a grifter are known. However, according to the accounts of the conversation, Flynn was working to prevent a tit for tat escalation between Russia and the United States. It's only in your Russia Russia Russia bizarro land where an individual trying to deescalate a geopolitical confrontation between two nuclear powers is treason.  

He was working against US foreign policy.  Only in your retarded "I'm not a freak Libertarian" Libertarian pro-Trump world could you make the argument you just made and then also make any similar case had it been the inverse in terms of parties.  Dude, own your fucking Trumpiness.

[GRHorn 105]

5 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Hey, Ray Squirrels, you of all people shouldn't be insinuating that someone else struggles to identify facts.

He was acting against US foreign policy.   He should be in prison.  That's the end of the story.  I fucking dare you to put up a cogent argument to the contrary.

That’s bullshit.

Who dictates foreign policy?

[Anastasis 23718]

2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

He was working against US foreign policy.  Only in your retarded "I'm not a freak Libertarian" Libertarian pro-Trump world could you make the argument you just made and then also make any similar case had it been the inverse in terms of parties. 

Prior administrations made much more overt moves towards appeasing Russia.  But you think it’s treason if an incoming NSA tries to blunt Russian escalation in a tit for tat. Maybe you also think those prior administrations were treasonous.  But I doubt it. Because you have a very selective and inconsistent world view. 

[GRHorn 105]

Just now, Anastasis said:

Prior administrations made much more overt moves towards appeasing Russia.  But you think it’s treason if an incoming NSA tries to blunt Russian escalation in a tit for tat. Maybe you also think those prior administrations were treasonous.  But I doubt it. Because you have a very selective and inconsistent world view. 

I believe every incoming administration since Reagan has done so. 

[GW Hayduke 1957]

Fuck Russia. They attacked our democracy and are still a threat. It’s sad that Annie, grhorn and trump unite and push the same narrative that Russia is not a threat to democracy and the US. A bunch of treasonous fuck sticks.

 

 

[Upgrayedd 5916]

Lulz.  The Regan campaign meddled in foreign policy even before the election.  At least, according to my uncle.

[jimmyjazz 47332]

32 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Prior administrations made much more overt moves towards appeasing Russia.  But you think it’s treason if an incoming NSA tries to blunt Russian escalation in a tit for tat. Maybe you also think those prior administrations were treasonous.  But I doubt it. Because you have a very selective and inconsistent world view. 

No, it's because taking actions to contradict existing foreign policy with an enemy is in my view "treasonous".  Are you really struggling with this?  TRUMP HAD NOT BEEN INAUGURATED.

[jimmyjazz 47332]

8 minutes ago, Upgrayedd said:

Lulz.  The Regan campaign meddled in foreign policy even before the election.  At least, according to my uncle.

They did.  They helped delay the hostage release.  This is not news.

[jimmyjazz 47332]

39 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

That’s bullshit.

Who dictates foreign policy?

I'm sorry, what?  Is that a real question?  

[Anastasis 23718]

24 minutes ago, GW Hayduke said:

Fuck Russia. They attacked our democracy and are still a threat. It’s sad that Annie, grhorn and trump unite and push the same narrative that Russia is not a threat to democracy and the US. A bunch of treasonous fuck sticks.

Oh good.  Here's the part again where y'all claim that anybody who questions the long history of dysfunctional american foreign policy traitors and treasonous fuck sticks, to deflect from the fact that y'all have an incoherent world view that shifts based on the letter behind the name of the head of the adminsitration. Its been a while since we had this one. See @bolverk.  You really can't take this shit seriously. 

[Anastasis 23718]

19 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

No, it's because taking actions to contradict existing foreign policy with an enemy is in my view "treasonous". 

So hard to keep track of American foreign policy friends and foes, especially with the slavics are involved. 

[jimmyjazz 47332]

2 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

So hard to keep track of American foreign policy friends and foes, especially with the slavics are involved. 

Was Obama the POTUS at the time?

[Anastasis 23718]

Just now, jimmyjazz said:

Was Obama the POTUS at the time?

If the crux of your argument is that surrogates for an incoming administration should not try to diffuse tit for tat escalation of hostilities between two super powers when necessary and appropriate, I don't agree. Apparently that makes me a treasonous traitor. 

[Anastasis 23718]

4 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Was Obama the POTUS at the time?

Also Jimmy.  Can you be honest with yourself and just state that you would have lost your fucking mind if Trump did what Obama did in that picture?

[GRHorn 105]

26 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I'm sorry, what?  Is that a real question?  

The President correct?

What if there’s an election at the end of his term and his successor ran explicitly on overturning many of his policy achievements and defeated someone that basically ran on maintaining the status quo? What if one of the most noteworthy policy differences he was proposing was a change in the tone and direction of the foreign policy? 
 

If he had waited a month you’d have been ok with it?

[jimmyjazz 47332]

2 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Also Jimmy.  Can you be honest with yourself and just state that you would have lost your fucking mind if Trump did what Obama did in that picture?

I won't go out of my way to be be honest with you until you're honest with me, which will be damn close to a first.  Go Trump!

[notre dame joe 205]

7 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Flynn was working against US foreign policy.  It doesn't surprise me a bit that Anastasis and others don't seem to see the problem with this.  To me, it's dangerously close to treason, but hey, that's just me.

You know who decides US foreign policy?

[jimmyjazz 47332]

Just now, GRHorn said:

The President correct?

What if there’s an election at the end of his term and his successor ran explicitly on overturning many of his policy achievements and defeated someone that basically ran on maintaining the status quo? What if one of the most noteworthy policy differences he was proposing was a change in the tone and direction of the foreign policy? 
 

If he had waited a month you’d have been ok with it?

Are you fucking serious?  Of course I would have been "OK" with it, disregarding political differences.  Nobody gets a fucking head start you idiot.

[StassneyHorn 6790]

Obama’s team put sanctions on Russia for their election interference, Flynn was telling them not to retaliate as their admin will get rid of the sanctions. I don’t think that is a tit for tat. To me, that’s a reward for a job well done. Unless there is an angle I’m not considering.

Edited May 17, 2020 by StassneyHorn

[HenryJames 67466]

48 minutes ago, Upgrayedd said:

Lulz.  The Regan campaign meddled in foreign policy even before the election.  At least, according to my uncle.

So did Nixon.

[hobbes2702 13509]

1 minute ago, StassneyHorn said:

Obama’s team put sanctions on Russia for their election interference, Flynn was telling them not to retaliate as their admin will get rid of the sanctions. I don’t think that is a tit for tat. To me, that’s a reward for a job well done. Unless there is an angle I glossed over.

Nope you pretty much got it. But Obama or something.

[notre dame joe 205]

Flynn was coming into a top post that would require a great deal of foreign relations.  It would be unethical to not prepare for work by knowing the minds of men he would need to speak with. 

[Anastasis 23718]

9 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I won't go out of my way to be be honest with you until you're honest with me, which will be damn close to a first.  Go Trump!

I’ve always been honest with you jimmy. But this isn’t the first time you have accused me of being otherwise. The last time I recall you face planted yourself because you didn’t actually read the exchange between two other posters and were just so eager to make a fool of yourself that nobody could stop you. Seems to be a habit you have, jumping into things half baked. 

Edited May 17, 2020 by Anastasis

[GRHorn 105]

Have the official transcripts of the calls ever been released?
 

[Anastasis 23718]

4 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

Have the official transcripts of the calls ever been released?
 

No. But thats great because it gives people like @StassneyHorn free range to impute whatever they desire and put it forth as fact. 

[jimmyjazz 47332]

15 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I’ve always been honest with you jimmy. But this isn’t the first time you have accused me of being otherwise. The last time I recall you face planted yourself because you didn’t actually read the exchange between two other posters and were just so eager to make a fool of yourself that nobody could stop you. Seems to be a habit you have, jumping into things half baked. 

I'm sure you have that archived.

Let's try this again:  do you think it's cool for a private citizen to contradict foreign policy?

[GRHorn 105]

13 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

No. But thats great because it gives people like @StassneyHorn free range to impute whatever they desire and put it forth as fact. 

I feel comfortable saying that if anything mind blowing in the Russiagate sense was on a transcript it would’ve be leaked months (years?) ago. 

[tx 3 putt 78759]

i forget, why did trump / pence fire flynn the first time ?

 

look, obamagate !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Doc Sam Beckett 5908]

5 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

i forget, why did trump / pence fire flynn the first time ?

 

look, obamagate !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tit for tat my dude 

[StassneyHorn 6790]

25 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

No. But thats great because it gives people like @StassneyHorn free range to impute whatever they desire and put it forth as fact. 

Weak. I’m quite literally “imputing” what officials said happened. Flynn’s  rebuttal of “couldn’t be certain if the topic never came up” is damning itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/flynn-is-said-to-have-talked-to-russians-about-sanctions-before-trump-took-office.html