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Kash’s “lockbox in a vault…in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files”

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There were two competing letters published yesterday designed to frame Kash Patel’s efforts to frame Democrats with being mean to Donald Trump, for which (the NYT reports) Trump wants to be paid $230 million. They are:

I’m a well-established critic of Lanny Breuer, but the letter is substantive and direct. After mocking Josh Hawley’s claim that he was “tapped,” the letter shows how toll records have been used in various other investigations:

  • The Robert Hur investigation of Joe Biden.
  • Charging documents in five different investigations charged since Kash has become FBI Director.
  • In leak investigations, targeting Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and staffers (including Kash Patel).
  • The Robert Menendez investigation.

But all that’s just set up for this passage, mocking Kash for his claim, made on Sean Hannity’s show while he was wearing a ridiculous jacket, that Jack Smith was trying to hide his use of toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”

[T]here is simply no support for FBI Director Patel’s recent assertion that Mr. Smith hid the toll records information so that “no one would find it,” or that Mr. Smith put the toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”9 It is not clear what cyber place in a vault in a lockbox Director Patel is describing, but Mr. Smith’s use of these records is inconsistent with someone who was trying to conceal them. Paragraph 119 of the August 1, 2023 indictment describes some of the calls that were made to U.S. Senators on January 6, 2021, and footnote 132 of Volume 1 of the Special Counsel Report refers to the use of toll records in the investigation. Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice.

9 HANNITY: Patel: “We’re Just Warming Up” in Investigation of Alleged Tracking of GOP Senators, Fox News (Oct. 7, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/video/6382234662112.

Even without this letter, sentient beings were able to point to the place in the indictment and the Jack Smith report where these toll records were described. And, as the letter notes, Trump’s attorneys — including Todd Blanche — got discovery on those toll records years ago, but did not challenge their use in a criminal case.

All this was quite clear to sentient beings. But not the staffers exploiting Chuck Grassley’s diminished capacities to make a stink about something very ordinary.

By comparison, the Jordan letter is shoddy even by his standards.

The ostensible purpose is to refer John Brennan to DOJ (but, significantly, not FBI) for testimony Brennan gave — in a hearing about the letter truthfully saying a bunch of spooks thought the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information op — that mentioned the Steele dossier in passing. This may be an effort to predicate a case in DC after the case in Philly has stalled, but anyone aware of the law would question how comments about the Steele dossier were material to a hearing about the Hunter Biden letter, a point that Brennan even made at the time: “I don’t see any relevance to the Hunter Biden laptop issue now,” as quoted in Jordan’s letter.

More importantly, the letter appears to be an effort to launder debunked propaganda Kash Patel did years ago through Congress back into an investigation led by Kash Patel, something I’ve addressed in the past.

The key paragraph makes a number of claims, some of which are fabrications (and therefore commit the crime that Jim Jordan is referring), others of which are misrepresentations of prior reports that were themselves propaganda.

On January 6, 2017, the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency published a declassified version of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. 3 The ICA stated, among other things, that Russia “developed a clear preference” for President Trump and “aspired to help” him win the election.4 This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”5 The Steele dossier was a series of reports containing baseless accusations concerning President Trump’s ties to Russia compiled and delivered to the FBI in 2016 by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.6 Subsequent investigations confirmed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Steele via the law firm Perkins Coie and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to provide derogatory information about Trump’s purported ties to Russia, which resulted in the discredited dossier.7 In July 2025, the Trump Administration declassified numerous documents showing that the ICA’s main findings were false and that the Obama Administration knowingly fabricated the findings for the purpose of undermining the Trump Administration.8

3 OFF. OF THE DIR. OF NAT’L INTEL., ASSESSING RUSSIAN ACTIVITIES AND INTENTIONS IN RECENT US ELECTIONS (Jan. 6, 2017) [hereinafter “Russian Interference ICA”].

4 Id. at 1.

5 MAJORITY STAFF REPORT, H. PERM. SELECT COMM. ON INTEL., 116TH CONG., OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATION & REFERRAL: THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT (ICA) “RUSSIA’S INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN TARGETING THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” at 23 (2020) [hereinafter “HPSCI Report”].

6 See JOHN H. DURHAM, U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF SPECIAL COUNS., REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS, at 11-12, 109-117 (2023) [hereinafter “Durham Report”].

7 See id. at 109-117; HPSCI Report, supra note 5, at 22-32; U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF THE INSPECTOR GEN., REVIEW OF FOUR FISA APPLICATIONS AND OTHER ASPECTS OF THE FBI’S CROSSFIRE HURRICANE INVESTIGATION, at v-xii (2019); Memorandum from HPSCI Majority Staff to HPSCI Majority Members, Re: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Jan. 18, 2018).

8 Sarah Bedford & Kaelan Deese, Russiagate definitive timeline: How new intelligence documents fit in, WASH. EXAM’R (July 26, 2025). [my emphasis]

The key claim in here — that what Jordan falsely says is the key claim of 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which he describes as, “that Russia ‘developed a clear preference’ for President Trump and ‘aspired to help’ him win the election,” is based on the Steele dossier — is based off two reports Kash substantially wrote (marked in blue). Never mind that it is only the key claim of the Intelligence Community Assessment if you have the thin skin of a Narcissist, never mind that any dispute is about how much evidence there was before discovering the June 9 meetings or Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign information with Russian spies. That key claim had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation of Trump, which investigation had already been set into motion by Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec.

But as I wrote extensively,  the one dated 2020, showing that Congressional Republicans packaged up older claims and Russian spycraft after the Mueller Report definitively showed the Russia did prefer Trump and Trump did welcome that help, is an attempt to create a time machine to go back to the halcyon time before we knew all that.

Jordan, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to lay out how all this fits together. He outsources it to a right wing propaganda outlet, outsourcing to them their credulity about the time machine effect going on.

Jim Jordan lied, shamelessly, when he alleged that that claim was shown to be false. And he lied, shamelessly, when he said that a report that affirmatively did not incorporate intelligence from the Steele dossier, choosing instead to only link it and specifically say it was not incorporated into analytical work (which backs Brennan, not Jordan), instead relied on the dossier.

This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”

If the intimation that Kash Patel’s hand-picked investigators breached Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege in service of this conspiracy bears out, it only adds to the list of corrupt and possibly illegal things Kash has done in pursuit of this witch hunt. And that’s before you consider all the cops and prosecutors that get fired along the way.

Kash Patel may well be in a race against time. He needs to package up things before Comey gets them all thrown out before Andrew Bailey becomes eligible to act as FBI Director bypassing confirmation, in mid-December.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

 

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Mike Rogers Doesn’t Exculpate Trump on “Collusion” Like Trump Once Thought

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On Monday, House Judiciary Committee made available two sets of documents I’ve already covered:

On Tuesday, Tulsi Gabbard announced she was stripping the clearance of 37 current and former spooks, in a thinly veiled political purge. NYT provides background on some of the people Tulsi purged, including Vinh Nguyen, who was purged because he allegedly pressured Tulsi’s so-called whistleblower to affirm conclusions in the 2017 ICA, but who had remained in active service as a crucial contributor to NSA’s quantum computing efforts until this purge. This purge clearly places loyalty to Trump over America’s most crucial intelligence efforts.

Add these 37 people to the long list of those who been purged in service of Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election:

I’ll return to the way that Tulsi continues to use the hoax about Russia as an excuse to purge those who might contest Russia. The degree to which Russia has milked Trump’s grievances to destroy US capabilities against it is one of the reasons I view the 2016 operation as the most successful intelligence operation of recent history.

But for now, I want to show how these two efforts work in tandem, but also show that Tulsi’s purge actually helps to confirm that Trump “colluded” with Russia in 2016.

Back in 2023, I did a post on the releases to Judicial Watch (release 1, release 2) of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, which led me to conclude it was one dumbass binder. In that post, I developed a rough list of what was included in the binder, what was withheld from JW under FOIA, and what was listed as pending when Trump created the binder in 2020. We can compare my earlier list with what has been currently released, which I put into a table here.

These are close to but not quite matching documents. There were 270 pages omitted entirely from the JW FOIA (I noted only the larger chunks of withheld documents in my list). The current release omits the June 29, 2017 Carter Page FISA application, which is 121 pages.

That leaves roughly 16 pages that were in the original Crossfire Hurricane binder (as reflected in the JW FOIA) not reflected in the current release, though most if not all of those pages reflect the tracking of requests Trump made to DOJ, some of which appear in the current release as Tab numbers, some of which had not been fulfilled by the time Trump’s team put together the binder in January 2021. Two are identified: Request 14, for materials on Michael Sussmann or other Perkins Coie lawyers, and Request 17, for a meeting between Bruce Ohr and Andrew Weissmann about money laundering. Three, Requests 1, 5, and 6, are not identified.

I’ve put more analysis below, which addresses how badly cherry picked this binder was. In addition to intentionally burning Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, as well as FBI’s informant confidentiality promises, this binder told a Russian spy story, not the story of the investigation.

But for now, I want to focus on the Mike Rogers 302 which had previously been released in heavily redacted form as part of Jason Leopold’s FOIA in 2020. The comparison of the two releases all but confirms that only Rogers’ 302 was included in the binder, even though Robert Mueller interviewed all of Trump’s top spooks back in 2017. The inclusion of Rogers, but not Rick Ledgett, likely helps to explain why Ledgett was purged along with 36 other people yesterday.

The 302 doesn’t help Trump’s current case all that much.

For example, it records that Rogers was the one who, “suggested the information [from the Steele dossier] be included in an annex or appendix rather than in the nearly one page summary he had seen.” That is one of the alleged crimes at the core of the HPSCI report, here attributed to the guy Trump treated as his most favorable government witness in 2020.

Some of the rest of the interview undercuts claims that Crossfire Hurricane investigators were trying to harm Trump. Notably, Rogers remained ignorant of the Mike Flynn prong; but he also explained that the collection on Flynn would have targeted the people he spoke with.

Much of the rest of the interview — and the reason, I suspect, why Trump included this in his dumbass binder — focuses on a March 26, 2017 conversation that Trump had with Rogers, which was the subject of public reporting in 2017, including a Nakashima/Entous story that was likely of interest to the leak investigation. It includes this language:

According to ADM Rogers’ recollection of the call and the memo, President Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult. ADM Rogers noted that when President Trump speaks, he tends to talk in long strings and it is not immediately clear what he expects to be answered and what is rhetorical. The President often doesn’t pause for an answer before continuing to talk. During the call, President Trump disagreed with definitive assertions that the Russians were responsible for the hacks and said it was impossible to tell who was actually responsible for the hacking. He also said it was making it hard for him to deal with the Russians, and asked ADM Rogers what he thought. ADM Rogers acknowledged it was does make relations difficult, but then explained in detail, but at a high level, the intelligence supporting ADM Rogers’ confidence, and the rest of the community’s, that the Russians were behind the hacks. President Trump stated they would have to “agree to disagree” on the matter. [two lines redacted under Other Government Agency redaction] President Trump then asked ADM Rogers if he would say “that” publicly. ADM Rogers interpreted “that” to mean [one line redacted under Other Government Agency redaction]. ADM Rogers told President Trump he could not do that, as he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings. President Trump did not ask him to “pushback” on the investigation itself, but he clearly did not agreement with the assessment of the Russian involvement.

This passage is not all that helpful to Trump either. The FBI released this even as Tulsi is attempting to undercut claims that Russia did the hack-and-leak, but it reaffirms IC certainty that Russia was behind the hack. It proves Tulsi is lying now!

It also makes it clear that Trump went to great efforts to clear the way to fulfill his commitments to Russia in 2017, with no success.

That Rogers interview took place one day before Rick Ledgett’s interview, the 302 for which remains mostly redacted.

The Mueller Report explains (in a section likely pertinent to Edward Gistaro’s inclusion on Tulsi’s purge list as well) why having just Rogers’ side of this exchange would be of interest.

On March 26, 2017, the day after the President called Coats, the President called NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers.347 The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult.348 The President told Rogers “the thing with the Russians [wa]s messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia.349 The President also said that the news stories linking him with Russia were not true and asked Rogers if he could do anything to refute the stories.350 Deputy Director of the NSA Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it was the most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.351 After the call concluded, Ledgett prepared a memorandum that he and Rogers both signed documenting the content of the conversation and the President’s request, and they placed the memorandum in a safe.352 But Rogers did not perceive the President’s request to be an order, and the President did not ask Rogers to push back on the Russia investigation itself.353 Rogers later testified in a congressional hearing that as NSA Director he had “never been directed to do anything [he] believe[d] to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate” and did “not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.”354

347 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 3-4.

348 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

349 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 1-2; see Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

350 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4-5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

351 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

352 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2-3; Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

353 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

Rogers claimed Trump made no ask of the NSA Director, but he only gets there by claiming that you can never tell when Trump is making an ask. Ledgett claimed that this was the most “unusual” thing he had experienced in 40 years serving the country, which is probably why he chose to document it.

Now consider those two redactions. Per the WaPo story that led to this interview, the ask was a request to deny evidence of “collusion,” which Rogers deferred by saying “he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings.”

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

[snip]

“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.

But Rogers’ answer — and the redaction — only makes sense if they were speaking of specific evidence of “collusion,” not the absence thereof. The quote to WaPo makes it clear that the source believed there was affirmative evidence of “collusion.”

That is, the redaction strongly suggests that Trump asked Rogers not to deny “collusion,” but to deny that the intercepts NSA had implicating Trump’s closest aides (and likely his son and son-in-law, though NSA may not have discovered all of those yet) confirmed “collusion.”

So on Monday, Jim Jordan celebrated the release of a Mike Rogers 302 the redactions to which suggest Trump asked Rogers to lie. And on Tuesday, Tulsi purged the guy who testified he found that disturbing.

Additional analysis

Carter Page FISA: As noted above, one of the main withholdings from the current document set that was in the binder on January 19, 2020 is the final Carter Page FISA, which had already been sequestered by FISC at that point. We have every reason to believe at least one version of the full binder went to Mar-a-Lago. That strongly suggests that a sequestered copy of the Page document was found at Mar-a-Lago in the August 2022 search. That, in turn, may help to explain why Kash Patel had to plead the Fifth when testifying to the Jack Smith grand jury: because if that FISA application did go to Mar-a-Lago, then it reflected material over which the FISA Court had special handling instructions, a separate crime.

George Papadopoulos doth protest materials: The binder’s treatment of George Papadopoulos is rather stunning. First, there’s the inclusion of the Joseph Mifsud 302, which like the Papadopoulos 302s from the same period — which are not included — admits to some of their contact, but obscure other parts. There’s nothing credible about this 302, but it is presented as if it helps Trump’s cause.

Meanwhile, the treatment of the Stefan Halper files is wildly uneven. It includes backup materials and the 302s describing how Halper got asked to reach out to Carter Page and others (it also reveals that Halper and Peter Navarro were buddies). The materials include much, if not all, of Halper’s conversations with Carter Page. But the single solitary scrap of his reporting from conversations with Papadopoulos is a cherry picked fragment declassified for House Republicans. But it leaves out Halper reporting in which, for example, Papadopoulos discussed monetizing his access to Trump, an effort that underlay his relationship with Sergei Millian. In short, there are vast swaths of the investigation into Papadopoulos left out here, with just Mifsud’s 302 included as stand-in, as if that exonerated Papadopoulos.

Christopher Steele materials: At least a hundred pages of Christopher Steele materials were withheld from the JW FOIA:

The latter is the most interesting to me, because it is incomplete. As one example, there’s a section about whether there was corroboration for the claim that Trump had agreed to intervene in Ukraine. It mentioned the platform changes and part of Trump’s July 21 comments about NATO, but does not mention that he publicly stated he would consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And while the date of this report is not marked, it also includes no comment about the discussions between Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik about carving up Ukraine, nor does it mention the floated offer to Michael Cohen.

Similarly, the table is rightly critical about references in the Steele dossier that purport to rely on Millian. But they don’t mention that Millian was saying some of the things about Trump publicly that got recorded in the dossier.

And another timing issue: The table claims there’s no corroboration that the Kremlin was involved in the dissemination of the John Podesta material. There was never a time in 2017 when that was true.

Perhaps the most interesting bit about the Steele material, however, pertains to the John Durham investigation. In many ways, this binder reflects what Durham was asked to investigate. But no Igor Danchenko materials were included in here. That’s fairly stunning, given the extent to which right wingers later incorporated Danchenko’s reporting into their conspiracy theory. All the more so given that the binder makes a big deal that Steele and Stefan Halper were closed for cause, but does not mention Danchenko, who was closed in the same period that Halper was, and for the same reason (that right wingers exposed his tie to the FBI).

David Kendall defensive briefing: One testament of the degree to which this binder was the roadmap for Durham is the defensive briefing given to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, about a Turkish influence operation in October 2015. Defensive briefings make up a big chunk of the Durham report, which attempted but failed to show that Hillary was more favorably treated. The inclusion of it is all the odder given that when Trump and Mike Flynn got a defensive briefing, the FBI did not yet know that Flynn was a willing participant in a parallel Turkish influence campaign.

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BREAKING: Right Wingers Believe Jim Comey Threw the 2016 Election to Trump and Jim Jordan Must Go to Jail

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The Epstein distraction files continue, with a purported whistleblower report (which Tulsi Gabbard now seems to claim was the entire source of her past discredited propaganda) and the Classified Annex to the Durham Appendix.

I’ll return to the substance of the Durham Appendix.

The Tl;dr is that Durham made false claims in the appendix contradicted in the unclassified version, and ignored totally basic details about the 2016 election as well as evidence in his own possession to sustain his Clinton Conspiracy Theory, which I addressed at length here.

But the short version of the story is that in addition to the two SVR documents involving Loretta Lynch I described here, Durham reviewed two more SVR documents. So in sum total, this scandal is about:

  • A January 2016 intelligence memo purporting to describe what Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said about the Clinton email investigation and also stating that Jim Comey intended to keep the scandal running “to jeopardize the chance of the DP to win the presidential race.”
  • A March 2016 intelligence memo claiming that the Hillary’s political director, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives updates from Loretta Lynch and that Hillary was reviewing Trump’s ties with Russian oligarchs (including Aras Agalarov), “with support from special services.”
  • A July 2016 “draft memo” relaying that the Soros Foundation had evidence that on July 26, Hillary approved a plan from her policy advisor, Juliane Smith, “to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.” This was, in part, an effort to get the White House to be more confrontational with Russia. (There’s a reference to “PC” that Durham takes to be “Political Convention” and not “Principals Committee”). It claimed (remember, this purports to be what Smith said) that the FBI lacked irrefutable evidence of Russia’s involvement in the scandal. The July 2016 memo then says that the campaign Hillary purportedly approved on July 26 was launched in June 2016, and also claimed that Hillary lacked direct evidence (which they of course did have). The appendix cites five more somethings of emails (the report redacts the description) purportedly from Leonard Bernardo, dated July 25 to July 27, that say “the FBI will put more oil into the fire,” most of which are in Russian.

Durham obtained records from many of the think tanks involved and he “was unable to locate in the records from the Think Tanks any exact versions of the Bernardo emails obtained” from their source. Instead, he found some real emails, “contain language and references with the exact same verbiage to the materials.” One was a discussion about Thomas Rid’s analysis of the DNC hack. Another was an email Smith actually sent soliciting bipartisan experts to condemn Trump’s attacks on NATO. As noted in my earlier post, Durham focused on Smith’s efforts to get a public statement about the actual hack released, which had no tie to Trump (as also noted, Durham omits a great deal of context to make that look damning).

None of the people involved in the purported emails said they sent them. None of Hillary’s staffers said there was a plan. Durham ultimately concludes that the emails on which he predicated a five year investigation were merely “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking.” The rest of his opinion is stupid for the reasons I laid out in my earlier post, but will return to.

From that, the right wing is treating the things in the Russian intelligence reports as true. And treating the desire to make political hay of an election year hack as a criminal conspiracy.

Curiously, though, none of them are treating as true that Jim Comey would draw out the investigation into Hillary until the end of the election to help Trump win, even though that is what happened.

And none of them are accusing Jim Jordan (or anyone else) of trying to make political hay about the Iran hack of Donald Trump last year — the exact equivalent of the worst insinuations about what Smith did.

Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray requesting an unclassified briefing on the Iranian hack of President Trump’s campaign. According to reporting, Iran emailed the illegally obtained information to at least three advisers on the Democratic presidential campaign and emailed stolen information, including at least three major media outlets—Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The Committee is requesting the briefing to address questions including:

  • What material did Iran obtain from President Trump’s campaign?
  • To whom at the Biden for President or the Harris for President campaigns did the hackers send information and materials?
  • On what date did the FBI learn there had been a hack and exfiltration of nonpublic information from President Trump’s campaign?
  • On what date(s) did Iran provide the stolen documents to the Biden for President campaign or the Harris for President campaign?
  • On what date did the FBI first inform President Trump’s campaign it had been hacked?
  • Did the FBI use any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities to surveil President Trump’s campaign?
Excerpts of the letter to Director Wray: 

“On September 18, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that in ‘late June and early July,’ the Islamic Republic of Iran attempted to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by ‘sen[ding] unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with the Biden-Harris campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign . . . .’  Since then, Iran has continued ‘to send stolen, non-public material’ from President Trump’s campaign to the media.  Iran’s actions raise serious concerns about foreign election interference targeting President Trump’s campaign to support President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s campaigns. We write to request information about this serious matter.

Look, if you really believe that these documents represent the transparent truth, then you believe that Jim Comey threw the election to Donald Trump and Jim Jordan must go to prison.

But if you’re ignoring those bits (as well as John Durham’s silence that the DOJ IG report quoted FBI as saying some of the SVR memos were “objectively false”), then you’re simply chasing conspiracy theories to drown out the Epstein scandal.

Pick. Either send Jim Jordan to prison or shut your yap.

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The Orbanization of US Politics Began Years Ago

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In this post, I posited a way of understanding the election. Where Kamala Harris and down ballot Democrats engaged in traditional politics, it worked (as exhibited by Harris’ better performance in swing states and the retention of at least four of the swing state Senate seats, among other things). But propaganda worked far better across the board (exhibited, in part, by the large numbers of disaffected voters who supported Trump because they believed false claims about his policies or were mobilized by propaganda campaigns stoking fear).

Since I wrote the post, the election results have actually gotten a lot closer. Trump won by a lower percentage of the popular vote than Joe Biden did (and only just cracked 50% of the vote), and like Biden, won by narrow margins in the states that mattered.

If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.

All this builds on Fox News and other institutions of right wing propaganda — though, partly because of the Dominion judgment and partly because Pete Buttigieg had started to crack through that facade, that’s an area where Dems did important work.

It builds on the hollowing out of the traditional press that has been happened for years, as corporate raiders turn news into a profit center. Several things made that worse, this year. As WSJ reported the other day, social media referrals to legacy newspapers cratered last year.

This was a deliberate choice by gatekeepers to dramatically alter their function, from a referral service to a disinformation swamp. But it had an immediate affect on the readership of those legacy outlets and other services relying on them, effectively neutering their power. (One reason I recommend Bluesky over other Xitter alternatives is because Bluesky encourages outlinks.)

At the same time, the oligarchs who own those papers shifted their priorities in ways that would have more subtle impact on the coverage. WSJ, which has flourished in spite of the media environment, nevertheless fired a bunch of journalists in spring, targeting local news and, anecdotally, a certain profile of journalist. Jeff Bezos taunted WaPo’s reporters with their declining influence when he brought in Will Lewis, a Murdoch retread with a history of protecting the boss, and Will Lewis reveled in the kind of ethically problematic both sides journalism that chases manufactured scandals as much as GOP crime. Bezos taunted his journalists again when he declined to endorse Kamala Harris, only to issue a simpering congratulations once Trump won.

There’s still a lot to unpack about the turn of the oligarchs (I’ve left out their embrace of AI because I hope even they will soon have to concede that AI hasn’t replaced human workers but it has enshittified their product). But when a number of these things all happened in spring, I remember wondering whether all the oligarch owners had gotten together in a room and decided to make their product worse in an election year, all in the name of chasing different kinds of influence.

Partly, they’re trying to compete with podcasts. And while there’s a lot to be said for the authenticity of podcasts, it’s another industry driven by algorithms, and some of the key platforms cater to far right politics.

Before we turn to Musk, consider that Trump used manufactured grievances — including the goddamned Hunter Biden hard drive!! — from 2020 to bully Mark Zuckerberg in advance of the election. It’s unclear to what degree Zuckerberg’s efforts to depoliticize Meta stem from fear, from a desire for another tax cut, or from a genuine solidarity with his oligarch brothers. Whatever the motive, Threads was built not to replicate what Twitter used to be, yet it continues to be the destination for journalists exercising no critical thinking of what they need from a new social media platform. And Meta sold at least a million dollars in ad spending that violated Meta guidelines. Something led Zuckerberg to reverse his prior support for democracy, and it had a significant effect on the election.

Ah, Elon Musk. Perhaps his original motivation for buying Xitter was simply the imagined moral injury his ego suffered when Grimes ditched him to (briefly) date Chelsea Manning and his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, transitioned (since the election, Wilson has announced she’s leaving the US for a country more welcoming to trans people). But the plan definitely took shape in the aftermath of January 6. It appears to have taken shape with the kibbitzing of Stephen Miller.

Musk — aided by David Sacks — played a key role in the kind of operation we see in the Viktor Orbán regime, but which happened in order to install Trump for a second term. By giving Substackers who were willing to misrepresent primary documents access to Xitter’s documents, Musk created a false narrative about moderation, pitching voluntary efforts to protect democracy as instead efforts to censor far right speech. That, in turn, gave demagogues in Congress the opportunity to create the appearance of substantiating that narrative with an investigation into the people who formerly moderated social media. This investigation resulted in legal costs and death threats to those involved — but only easily debunked propaganda reports that melt under the least scrutiny.

Nevertheless, those investigations have an enormous chilling effect. Paired with lawsuits against entities like the Stanford Internet Observatory, they disrupted most of the infrastructure attempting to limit disinformation on social media.

When Congressmen like Jordan and James Comer investigate, they aren’t bound by mere facts. They invent wildly. But with the help of process-oriented Congressional beat journalists, they still manage to tell their tales anyway. Such journalists report what Jordan and Comer said and who they’ve subpoenaed with almost no scrutiny of whether any of it makes sense. Those beat journalists are getting played.

This is precisely the kind of persecution of civil society at which Viktor Orbán has excelled. Many people are just beginning to think of what will come, but (as Renee DiResta, one of the targets of Jim Jordan’s wrath, keeps noting on Bluesky), what will come already started, years ago, and accelerated two years ago in earnest.

The election result significantly built on these prior Orbanization efforts. Certainly, Xitter became the cesspool of disinformation that researchers formerly combatted. Musk favored pro-Trump speech and seems to have throttled others (though some of Musk’s Terms of Service and API changes make it far harder to quantify). That favored speech includes his own, from the day he endorsed Trump.

And it wasn’t just the assault on moderation. Congress also targeted state and local prosecutors, the professionalization of the FBI, FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, any pushback on Elon Musk, and even government efforts to protect against Russian influence operations. The lawsuits against media outlets — even the embarrassingly frivolous ones launched by Devin Nunes, and the efforts to co-opt oligarch owners, also played a role. The Hunter Biden witch hunt, with its mythical foundation in the laptop that is not a laptop, its projections of corruption, the constant narrative it fed right wing propaganda (drowning out even Ron DeSantis’ bid to challenge Trump), was undoubtedly a big part of Joe Biden’s terrible approval ratings, and it is precisely what we’ll see all the time going forward.

We can’t assess the election without assessing the degree to which such efforts impacted the race. We sure as hell can’t discuss how to win the next election without thinking of how Republicans will work to further neuter liberal and nonpartisan civil society that protects democracy. Some of the biggest supporters for Kamala Harris will spend the next four years fighting to protect their professional lives and, in some cases, even their freedom.

The same disinformation researchers who’ve been evicted from safe university posts did their job in at least documenting what happened and in real time the press tracked what they were seeing (and what dedicated journalists found themselves). Next time, however, both the disinformation researchers and the press will be under more sustained assault (or, via their oligarch owners, cooptation), both via targeting their funding and creating more scapegoats to chill such work.

So if you want to think about the next election — if you’re optimistic enough to assume there will be a next election — you have to factor in the assault on civil society that has already started and will ratchet up in the next few years.

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Three Ways Jim Jordan and James Comer Made Trump Less Safe

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With the exception of an initial question that attempted, with no success, to pin down Donald Trump’s recent communications with Bibi Netanyahu (Trump instead described the last time he had met Bibi face-to-face, before asserting he had not spoken to him), the questions at last Thursday’s press conference were truly abysmal. Half were horse race questions, many posed from a presumptively pro-Trump position. And that’s before the question about why god miraculously saved Trump’s life.

But there were a few questions yelled out after the Cheerio questions that were more interesting, such as what Trump thought about Ukraine’s incursion into Russia and what he thought about the hack of his campaign (which WaPo has confirmed targeted Susie Wiles).

While I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

Yesterday, the FBI, CISA, and ODNI attributed the hack — and efforts to compromise people close to President Biden — to Iran.

This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the IC attributes to Iran. The IC is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties. Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the U.S. election process. It is important to note that this approach is not new. Iran and Russia have employed these tactics not only in the United States during this and prior federal election cycles but also in other countries around the world.

I find it remarkable that Trump is blaming the government — and not just because he himself begged Russia to hack his opponent in 2016 and the worst recent hack, Solar Winds, happened under his stewardship.

I find it remarkable because key Trump allies like Jim Jordan and James Comer have been working hard to make him less safe.

They’ve done so in several ways (and LOLGOP and I laid out in this bonus episode of Ball of Thread).

First, in their effort to spin government efforts to combat foreign malign influence and election-related dis- and misinformation as an attack on free speech, they’ve demonized the effort to combat such influence operations, particularly efforts of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which in 2020 confirmed the integrity of the election.

Jordan and Comer also championed the views of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, the latter of whom has been obsessed about misrepresenting a report that Stanford’s Internet Observatory offered in 2020 to provide guidelines about what to do with potentially hacked information.

“Since Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers,” wrote the authors, “journalists have generally operated under a single rule: Once information is authenticated, if it is newsworthy, publish it…. In this new era, when foreign adversaries like Russia are hacking into political campaigns and leaking material to disrupt our democracy and favor one candidate, journalists must abandon this principle.”

Stanford’s goal was explicitly to change norms so journalists would not do what they did in 1971 with the Pentagon Papers. “The more news outlets that embrace a new set of norms, the more resilient American media will be against exploitation by malicious actors,” the authors write.

The authors, Grotto and Zacharia, proceed to celebrate news media not reporting on things the national security state doesn’t want them to report.

[snip]

The authors describe how the news media will, in real life, cover the Hunter Biden laptop, in October 2020. “Focus on the why in addition to the what,” they say. Make the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story as the email or hacked information dump. Change the sense of newsworthiness to accord with the current threat.”

Quinta Jurecic cited the Stanford Report when advocating that journalists exercise more caution with the materials believed to derive from an Iranian hack.

But the shame of having been so thoroughly played by foreign intelligence was stark enough that many journalistic institutions reconsidered their approach in advance of the 2020 vote. An influential Stanford report recommended that journalists presented with potentially hacked material “[m]ake the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story as the email or hacked information dump”—focusing on “why it was leaked as opposed to simply what was leaked,” and taking care to establish that the material is authentic and not a malicious forgery.

This appears to be the approach that major news outlets contacted by the mysterious “Robert” are taking so far.

If we had listened to Jordan and Shellenberger, the media would have to publish those stolen documents.

Finally, there are Jordan’s efforts to undermine cooperation between the FBI and tech companies, and his personal targeting of Elvis Chan.

That cooperation appears to have been instrumental in halting the hacking campaign targeting both Biden and Trump’s campaigns. Microsoft and Google may have first identified the hacking attempts. Indeed, in a recent report on Iran’s hacking efforts, Google describes proactively contacting the FBI.

For many years, Google has worked to identify and disrupt malicious activity in the context of democratic elections. During the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle, we disrupted APT42 attempts to target accounts associated with the Biden and Trump presidential campaigns.

In the current U.S. presidential election cycle, TAG detected and disrupted a small but steady cadence of APT42’s Cluster C credential phishing activity. In May and June, APT42 targets included the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and with former President Trump, including current and former officials in the U.S. government and individuals associated with the respective campaigns. We blocked numerous APT42 attempts to log in to the personal email accounts of targeted individuals.

Recent public reporting shows that APT42 has successfully breached accounts across multiple email providers. We observed that the group successfully gained access to the personal Gmail account of a high-profile political consultant. In addition to our standard actions of quickly securing any compromised account and sending government-backed attacker warnings to the targeted accounts, we proactively referred this malicious activity to law enforcement in early July and we are continuing to cooperate with them.

In their effort to undermine initiatives to combat disinformation, Jordan and Comer spent two years demonizing this kind of cooperation. They spent a year targeting Elvis Chan, the FBI agent whose day job is precisely this kind of coordination with Silicon Valley companies to prevent hacks using their infrastructure, based on conspiracy theories Taibbi and Shellenberger spread about the tech companies decision to throttle the original Hunter Biden laptop story, going so far as suing Chan because he wanted to be represented by both FBI and his own counsel for testimony to the House (they dropped the suit Thursday, though I have yet to get an explanation of why).

Trump has spent years demonizing the Deep State. At Trump’s behest, Jordan and Comer have spent two years attacking the Bureau. But on both Iran’s assassination attempt and this hacking attempt, the Deep State saved his ass.

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Jim Jordan Publishes Intelligence Analysis of Trump’s Authoritarian Tendencies

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As I laid out here, I’ve been going through the transcripts from Jim Jordan’s search to find people who politicized intelligence, like his investigation showed John Ratcliffe to have done.

And in addition to the way Jordan exposed new information about Ratcliffe politicizing intelligence, Jordan also helpfully elicited an intelligence analysis of Trump’s dictatorial personality.

A Republican staffer was asking Mike Morell why he sent an email thanking those who signed the 50 spook letter, in which Morell said the 2020 election was the most important since the Civil War. And then, violating the rule that you never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer, the staffer then asked why Morell said that.

Q In an email you sent to signatories thanking them for signing on, you described this as, quote, the most important election since 1860 and 1864 when the very existence of the country was on the ballot.

[snip]

Q Why did you believe that this was the most important election since 1860 and 1864?

So Morell answered, drawing on his training analyzing the personality traits of world leaders.

I have to tell you that, you know, spending 33 years at CIA and watching literally hundreds of world leaders during that time, President Trump’s personality traits deeply concerned me, what I believed to be deep narcissism, what I believed to be deep paranoia, what I believe to be a type of sadism where you — not sexually, of course, but a type of sadism where you, you know, are happy when your opponents have been injured in some way — I’m talking politically — that those were all traits that I saw in foreign leaders who did significant damage to their country and significant damage to the democracies of their country. I’m thinking — you know, I’m thinking of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I’m thinking of Chavez in Venezuela. I’m thinking of Putin in Russia. So I was deeply concerned about the potential impact of President Trump on our democracy.

And, you know, my fear, in my view, was borne out by his failure to act on January 6, 2021. So that’s what I meant when I wrote that. That’s what I was thinking.

Q The public statement —

Chairman Jordan. You couldn’t have been thinking about January 6, 2021, because —

Mr. Morell. No. I wasn’t thinking about January 6th. I was thinking about everything I said up to that point, sir. You’re correct.

To Jordan’s credit, he caught Morell seeing, in January 6, confirmation of his analysis.

Which it was.

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“This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible:” Jim Jordan-Led Investigation Discredits John Ratcliffe

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In his latest effort to use the House Judiciary Committee as a goon squad to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, Jim Jordan actually developed proof that John Ratcliffe — and not the 51 former spooks he was after — inappropriately politicized intelligence to manufacture debate props.

And then Jordan did it himself.

I have the perfectly curated Xitter account to learn when Jim Jordan has released his latest installment of weaponization against democracy.

Last week, he issued his latest attempt to make a scandal out of the true free speech of the 51 former spooks who wrote a letter saying that the release of a Hunter Biden laptop days before the election “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” My replies were overrun with trolls chanting incoherent claims.

Of course the trolls in my Xitter feed didn’t know the most basic details of the letter or known facts about the copy of a hard drive referred to as a Hunter Biden laptop:

  • The former spooks didn’t say this was disinformation, no matter how many times Jordan or Glenn Greenwald lie and say they did. In fact, they specifically caveated that they didn’t know if the emails were genuine and did not have evidence of Russian involvement.
  • Nothing revealed about the laptop or the hard drives purportedly based on the laptop rules out Russian involvement. That’s true, in part, because the FBI never bothered to test the laptop to see if anything had been added, never indexed it, and when introduced at trial, the summary witness specifically said she had not looked for signs of tampering. Plus, there were enough Russian drug and sex workers in close proximity to earlier Hunter Biden laptop compromises to allow for a role, particularly in packaging up the device.
  • As the Democratic rebuttal notes, the 51 spook letter couldn’t have caused the social media companies to throttle the original New York Post story without a time machine, as Twitter and Facebook had stopped throttling the story several days before the letter was published. Linear time. It’s like magic to these trolls.

Even though Jordan’s latest report substantiates absolutely no misconduct, the trolls nevertheless yapped and yapped about it. Jordan showed:

  • While Mike Morrell did target the letter to the last debate (the same one where Trump invited Tony Bobulinski to make claims that have not held up), the other participants were not doing this for the Biden campaign; they were doing it to speak out against Russian interference in the 2020 election
  • The former spooks couldn’t have leaked classified information because none of them were read into pertinent information regarding the Russian spies cultivating Rudy Giuliani
  • The former spooks got preclearance to publish the letter via the normal process
  • After preclearance, the letter was forwarded for Gina Haspel’s attention, but neither she nor anyone else thought it was more important than vaccinating the CIA workforce
  • Some of the people involved were private citizens with contracts that did not strip them of their free speech

In other words, the 51 spooks followed the rules, and Jordan was stuck trying to turn it into a scandal.

The Jordan report was only 31 pages and, like a college freshman composition paper, blew entire pages with big screen caps repeating the complaints of two random spooks complaining about “random signatures” on the letter and some discussion of Mark Polymeropoulos getting something excluded from a follow-up.

Polymeropoulos’ attorney, Mark Zaid, explained that CIA redacted two lines, which had nothing to do with Hunter Biden, from the Polymeropoulos follow-up — but that was precisely how preclearance is supposed to work.

Mr. Polymeropolous submitted to the PCRB a two page talking points memo about the subject matter. Obviously, he knew that there was going to be media attention concerning the issue and he wanted to be properly prepared to address the topic if asked. He followed the standard procedure for review of information intended to be made public. No different than any other individual who has a prepublication review requirement. As part of its review, which was handled in the normal timely fashion for such a short document, CIA redacted two lines of information as being classified. Those two lines had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop specifically and concerned Mr. Polymeropolous’ background experience with Russia and a comment concerning that country’s activities generally. Of course, that information was properly protected by Mr. Polymeropolous and never used. To say that this constituted an attempt to use classified information is farcical and reflects a complete lack of understanding how the prepublication review process works. The system operated exactly how it was supposed to and is being distorted for political purposes.

That’s it. That’s the best Jordan could rush out to give Trump something to complain about in a presidential debate over and over.

To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.

It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.

[snip]

I’ve dealt with politicians all my life. I’ve been on this side of the equation for the last eight years. I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too.

And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.

This was Trump’s prepackaged answer to attempt to projection his own lying onto Biden. It was barely more vigorous than Biden’s rebuttals.

As flimsy as it was, though, Trump’s use of the 51-spook letter was part of a larger effort, one designed to bully those who speak up against Russian disinformation, disinformation generally, or in favor of rule of law. As John Brennan described, it created a furor about the letter that distracted from Russian intervention, which in turn serves to divide the country.

I think the firestorm, the furor has been created responding to the letter as opposed to the letter itself, as I responded to one of the Congressmen earlier. So it’s unfortunate that this is taking up all your time, it’s taking up my time, and it is, again, further dividing the country.

And, by design, it has chilled speech that talks about Russian interference.

One after another of the spooks interviewed confessed they or others would be chilled by the precedent of Jordan investigating private citizens for their free speech. Kristin Wood described how Mike Flynn put out all their names on a Telegram chat, leading to stalking and death threats.

Several ways. First of all, I’ve received death threats. I’ve received vicious calls, texts, emails from all sorts of random people. Mike Flynn — General Flynn posted on Telegram all of our names and said, you know, let them know how we feel. It unleashed this viciousness that had several other folks calling the police, calling the Threat Management Unit at CIA, to let them know what was happening.

And so for the first time ever, I looked at getting a gun and getting a concealed carry permit because it’s not just that people have been mean or say horrific things, but we’ve seen them take action. And so that feeling of vulnerability for speaking, exercising a First Amendment right, and for saying what I thought was as obvious as there’s air in — there’s air. Let’s just let the FBI do their work.

It has a profound effect on health as well. I’ve been to the emergency room for stress because of all of this. And so when you ask would I do this again, I would insist on a little more precision of language. But it has the effect of censoring people who have more than a thousand years of experience in this topic. And I would think the focus would be on stopping Russia and not on what feels like persecution.

Several of the spooks admitted the mob treatment would lead them to decline further involvement in anything political. Most described that it would chill others.

At that level, the spooks are just like the disinformation experts Jordan also targeted, those who tracked efforts to muddy reason and truth. Their lives have been upended because they attempted to track Russian disinformation that served Republican interests, and the personal and financial cost is shutting down those efforts during an election year.

But then something funny happened.

House Republicans kept pushing the spooks, arguing — notwithstanding the public reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to solicit dirt from known Russian agent Andrii Derkach — that the spooks should have known, somehow, that the hard drive called a Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t Russian disinformation (which, as noted, the spooks didn’t claim).

Republicans — often Jordan himself — kept asking whether the spooks knew that John Ratcliffe had claimed the laptop was not disinformation (which, again, was not what the letter claimed).

Chairman Jordan. Were you aware of Mr. Ratcliffe’s statement on the morning of the 19th, prior to the letter being sent, where he said in an interview on FOX News that morning that this is not part of the Russian disinformation campaign?

And that led multiple witnesses to explain why Ratcliffe simply wasn’t credible. Wood described that a proper counterintelligence investigation takes longer than would have transpired (no one knew how long the FBI had had the laptop).

Ms. Wood. So, I think what I would say in response to that is that the letter — the purpose of the letter was to say, Let’s not rush to judgment. Everyone, regardless of who they are as Americans, deserves due process. Let’s let the FBI do their work. And when DNI Ratcliffe said that — so as you have seen from all of these investigations, right, they take a very long time to do, to do the considered judgment of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies, and to come up with that to do the exhaustive search of asking new sources, of pulling in every bit of signals intelligence, there’s just no way that’s possible to have been done in the timeframe in which that statement was made. So our whole point was to say, Be careful here. Let us — we don’t know if this is all real. We don’t know if all the emails are real, and we don’t know if this is tied to the Russians. Let’s let the process work

James Clapper described that, not only didn’t he consider Ratcliffe a reliable source, but that he made the statement before any investigation of the laptop.

Mr. Clapper. Well, if the Department of Justice or the FBI or some other legitimate credible source of — who had done a credible forensic analysis — certainly I would accept that. That’s why I suggested that would be a good — would have been a good fix — a good addition to the letter had we said that.

Mr. Gaetz. Are you aware of Director Ratcliffe, the DNI at the time, contradicting the thrust of this letter you signed?

Mr. Clapper. Well, okay. He said that statement before, I think, an investigation had begun of the laptop. So I don’t know where he’s coming from making a statement like that.

In response to a follow-up question from the Minority, Clapper also agreed that Ratcliffe himself was making public statements in anticipation of the debate.

Q It’s an article reporting on Ratcliffe’s remarks, and it’s dated October 19th, 2020, 1:49 p.m. And we’re just introducing it for the fact of the date. The New York Post story in question was released on October 14th, correct?

A Yes.

Q So that would have been 5 days before Ratcliffe made his remarks?

A Right.

Q And I think you said earlier he couldn’t have even begun an investigation in that time period. Is that correct?

A Correct.

Q And can you explain what you mean by that?

A Well, I don’t know how — what his basis for making that statement is when the laptop itself hasn’t been investigated. The DNI, Office of the Director National Intelligence, has no organic forensic analysis capability at all. So they’re dependent on other components of the intelligence community, in this case the FBI, to render such a judgment, which hadn’t been rendered. So I don’t know how he could make that statement.

Q Okay. And even assuming that Ratcliffe — sorry. Withdraw that. And he made these remarks on October 19th, which was the day before the second debate, correct? The second Presidential debate was the 20th.

A Uh-huh.

Q So isn’t it possible that Ratcliffe also made his remarks in the hope that they would impact the debate?

A Well, one could conclude that, yes.

John Brennan was even more disdainful of Ratcliffe’s actions. He described that Ratcliffe’s release of his briefing notes, for the first 2020 debate, made it clear that Ratcliffe was involved in politics.

Chairman Jordan. Director, were you aware of what Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on the morning of October 19th regarding this Biden laptop story, where he said that it wasn’t a Russian disinformation operation?

Mr. Brennan. I don’t know if I was aware of it at the time, but I would have dismissed it anyway.

Chairman Jordan. Why would you have dismissed it?

Mr. Brennan. Because I don’t think John Ratcliffe was an independent, objective leader of the intelligence community at the time.

Chairman Jordan. So you would dismiss the statement from the Director of National Intelligence — the Acting — the Director of National Intelligence at the time, in the administration, getting intelligence in real-time, you would just dismiss that out of hand?

Mr. Brennan. Not out of hand, but I think it was — a week or two prior to that, there was a selective release of information that included my briefing notes to President Obama in the White House Situation Room that was misrepresenting, in fact, the facts, where it was pushed out in redacted version. And I did think that was a very, very unfortunate, unprofessional, unethical engagement on the part of the Director of National Intelligence in a Presidential election.

Mr. Gaetz. So your dismissing Mr. Ratcliffe was somehow payback for the fact that you thought that your briefing to President Obama had been mischaracterized?

Mr. Brennan. No, that’s not what I said.

Mr. Gaetz. Okay. Well, I’m trying to understand how this event that seems to have aggrieved you regarding the briefing to President Obama impacted your view of the Ratcliffe assessment.

Mr. Brennan. It didn’t aggrieve me. It just indicated to me that John Ratcliffe was not going to be an independent, nonpartisan, apolitical actor.

Brennan is referring to the notes he got about materials found among hacked documents in Russia, which Republicans and John Durham spun up, first of all, as true (rather than suspected Russian disinformation), and then misrepresented to claim that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.

Not only did Brennan see this as an election season stunt (which I observed at the time), but he described that Ratcliffe “misrepresent[ed] the facts” about the materials.

Jim Jordan has been searching for a former spook to accuse of politicizing intelligence in 2020 for years, and he finally found one! Trump’s hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was doing precisely what Jordan falsely accused the former spooks of doing, but did so while still an employee of the Intelligence Community.

Update: Corrected that the “laptop” was not just a “hard drive,” but in fact a copy of another hard drive.

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Lesley Wolf Vindicated by Alexander Smirnov Indictment

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In the wake of the Alexander Smirnov indictment, the 51 former spooks who wrote a letter stating their opinion that the release of Hunter Biden emails to the NY Post is consistent with a Russian information operation have claimed vindication. That has led to this problematic Ken Dilanian report parroting David Weiss filings that deliberately obscured the evidence in the Hunter Biden case. And that, in turn, has led to a flood of people expressing opinions about the laptop turned over by John Paul Mac Isaac (Olivia Nuzzi, Reese Gorman) that exhibit no clue about how precarious that evidence is now.

In other words, that has renewed a debate consisting of misrepresenting the 51-spook letter, then misstating what the public evidence about the laptop shows.

I’ll return to the details about the laptop that these people are missing; hopefully until I get there, they’ll consider whether David Weiss’ claim that a Keith Ablow picture of a picture of a table saw with sawdust was instead Hunter Biden’s cocaine really validates the laptop, as they seem to believe it does.

But there is one person who has been vindicated: Lesley Wolf, the AUSA who aggressively pursued real charges against Hunter Biden, even while attempting to prevent repeated onslaughts of political garbage from tainting the case.

Among the many complaints the two disgruntled IRS agents aired, largely targeting her, one was that, “This investigation has been hampered and artificially slowed by various claims of potential election meddling.” That appeared in a memo submitted within the IRS in December 2020, probably written by Gary Shapley. The IRS agents believed they knew better than Lesley Wolf about efforts to interfere in the election.

The IRS agents and their allies in Congress bitched over and over that Wolf and others had not ingested politicized dirt into the investigation readily enough.

For example, Joseph Ziegler described that investigators asked to reinterview Tony Bobulinski after his October 23, 2020 meeting with the FBI, but were not permitted to do so because he “was not viewed as a credible witness” — and that was before Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, now backed by video, about the sketchy meeting Bobulinski had with Mark Meadows.

I can recall that agents on the investigative team brought up on multiple occasions to the assigned prosecutors that they wanted to do an interview of Bobulinski with the assigned case agents. I can recall being told that they would think about it and then ultimately being told there was no need for the team to interview Bobulinski and that Bobulinski was not viewed as a credible witness.

In his House testimony, Bobulinski backed off all the most inflammatory claims — such as that he attended a key meeting in Miami and witnessed Hunter receive a large diamond as a gift –made to the FBI.

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly complained that Tim Thibault shut down Peter Schweizer as a confidential human source in September 2020. Thibault explained to Congress that the Supervisory Special Agent called him and asked him to stop sending Schweizer’s reporting, because doing so would give Hunter’s attorneys ammunition if the case ever went to trial.

A I understand you don’t need the reporting anymore. I understand that if this goes to trial, Hunter Biden’s attorney —

Q Uh-huh?

A — could have some ammunition.

And Shapley specifically complained that Lesley Wolf withheld a particular email about some anomalies in the the hard drive image obtained from John Paul Mac Isaac.

Prosecutors deliberately withheld that email from agents who might have to testify to avoid making it Jencks production that would have to be shared with Hunter’s lawyers. Thanks to Shapley, it will presumably play a role in any suppression and Brady complaints tied to the laptop.

None of this is particularly noble on Wolf’s part. It’s typical, among prosecutors, in that they watch out for any evidence that would harm a case at trial, and avoid ingesting it in ways that would give defendants access to it. Lesley Wolf was not withholding details about problems with the hard drive JPMI provided the FBI to protect Hunter Biden. She was doing it to protect her case. In fact, her treatment of the laptop may be the one thing that helps bollox the case, if Leo Wise ends up needing any assistance on that front.

But it seems quite clear that efforts Wolf made to preserve a case for trial were instead spun by the disgruntled IRS agents as attempts to thwart the investigation. Their efforts to sell that spin have not only endangered the case, but also resulted in death threats targeting Wolf and her family.

Particularly given the timing of Congress’ focus on the FD-1023, including Bill Barr’s public commentary, Alexander Smirnov’s attempt to frame Biden is an important example of an effort Wolf made to protect a viable case against Hunter.

Gary Shapley released a memo that will be central to Hunter Biden’s bid to obtain discovery on the treatment of the Smirnov tip and the Scott Brady back channel, generally. It shows that the FD-1023, “was ordered to be received by this prosecution team by [Richard Donoghue]. It is happening on 10/23/2020 at 3pm in the Delaware FBI office.” It is proof that days after Trump yelled at Barr about the Hunter Biden investigation, DOJ ordered Wolf to accept this briefing.

Yet in his testimony, Shapley said that “We never discussed the form,” seemingly a reference to the Smirnov allegation.

After Barr ran his mouth to Margot Cleveland, both Ziegler and Shapley submitted supplements complaining that they hadn’t gotten briefed on the allegation. Shapley’s testimony, that neither the IRS agents nor the FBI agents, had checked out the allegation seems inconsistent with his claim never to have spoken about it.

Neither I nor the line IRS-CI agents acting under my supervision, nor the FBI agents working with IRS-CI, were ever provided the CHS information that Attorney General Barr recently referenced was sent to Delaware to have it “checked out.” Prosecutors never provided such information to IRS-CI. As such, neither IRS-CI nor the FBI agents working with him were provided the opportunity to conduct proper investigation into the allegations presented by this CHS. I, long with other IRS-Cl investigators, requested 10 be apart of briefings that the Delaware USAO and DOJ were having with the Pittsburgh USAO during the investigation, but our requests were denied.

Both further elaborated their complaints about not getting access to the FD-1023 in their public July testimony.

Then, even more forthcoming testimony Shapley gave to House Ways and Means served as a cue during Scott Brady’s House Judiciary Committee testimony, in which Brady described Lesley Wolf’s skepticism about the material being funneled from Brady’s office.

Q And were you ever told that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office did not want a briefing from your office?

A I believe I was. I don’t remember. But I know that we had trouble scheduling it.

Q Okay. And then, further down, it states AUSA Wolf’s comments made clear she did not want to cooperate with the Pittsburgh USAO, and that she had already concluded no information from that office could be credible stating her belief that it all came from Rudy Giuliani.

Were you ever made aware of Ms. Wolf’s processing and decisions regarding this briefing, and why she didn’t want the briefing?

A I was not. We did, however, make it clear that some of the information including this 1023 did not come from Mr. Giuliani.

Q And did your team ever tell you that they were receiving comments from Ms. Wolf that she didn’t find the information your office was receiving credible?

A I don’t remember that, no.

Q If those conversations took place, would those have been between a AUSA at your office and Ms. Wolf?

A If they would have shared that with us at all, yes, likely, and had I been made aware, I would have called Mr. Weiss directly.

Q When you would have called Mr. Weiss directly, would you have told him the information the 1023 wasn’t coming from Mr. Giuliani, is that accurate?

A Yes, I would have, and that was already communicated to their office, that the 1023 was from a credible CHS that had a history with the FBI, and that it was not derived from any of the information from Mr. Giuliani.

Side note: The publicly released HJC transcript redacts several references to David Weiss, perhaps in an effort to hide the degree to which he is a witness to and therefore hopelessly conflicted on the Smirnov prosecution.

I’m guessing that neither Smirnov nor Hunter’s attorneys are so stupid that they can’t figure out who is named behind that redaction! But if they have any questions: Yes, Jim Jordan’s people really did redact references that make it clear what David Weiss personally witnessed in this transcript!

Unsurprisingly, in her testimony, Lesley Wolf did a far, far better job than Shapley and Brady adhering to her ethical duty to avoid speaking of an ongoing investigation. She also suggestsed that a lot of the decisions that Shapley and Ziegler complained about were made for ethical reasons, even an unwillingness on her part to risk her law license to take more aggressive steps. “Hey, I like my law license, and I know this person has a lawyer, so we’re going to have to work through counsel to get that interview you want,” she characterized such discussions with the investigators.

As a result of her strict adherence to prohibitions on her speaking about the investigation, her explanation for her reluctance to accept information from Brady’s side channel was very general. In her general explanation for why she might want to keep the existing Hunter Biden investigation separate from whatever Brady was doing, though, she provided the same reason Thibault got explaining why Delaware didn’t want to receive tips involving Peter Schweizer.

Q And during the course of your career, have you ever had a situation where you were reluctant to cooperate with a different U.S. Attorney’s Office? And by cooperate, I mean have meetings, take telephone calls.

[Wolf attorney Jenny] Kramer. I know this is almost too formal for this process, but I’m going to object to form. What does that mean, unwilling to cooperate? I’m just not clear on what exactly you’re trying to ask.

Mr. Castor. Unwilling to take meetings?

Ms. Kramer. Generally?

Mr. Castor. With a different U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Ms. Wolf. I can answer those questions, generally.

BY MR. CASTOR:

Q Sure, sure.

A I think as a general matter, the idea would be that you are coming from a place of cooperation and the common mission of the Department of Justice and what it is you’re trying to accomplish. But there may well be very, very valid means, reasons for a desire and an interest to keep investigations separate and apart. And in those circumstances, you would — and it wouldn’t be unusual to say, you know what, we’re not going to need to share information, we’re not going to do this. And it would just depend, again, on the particulars of an investigation and what the needs and what the various interests were at play.

Q Okay. Are you familiar with Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley’s testimony where he indicated you were unwilling to interact with Scott Brady?

A I’m generally familiar with Special Agent Shapley’s testimony, yes.

Q Okay. Are you familiar with that particular aspect of it?

A I mean, I’ve read his testimony.

Chairman Jordan. Would there be a reason not to interact and meet with Mr. Brady and his team?

Ms. Wolf. As that relates to a particular investigation, I’m not authorized to speak to that.

Chairman Jordan. You said there were some situations that — the general way of doing things is to, you know, “cooperate,” I think, is the word you used. And you said there are times that we’re not going to do that. Why would there be a reason not to do it in this situation?

Ms. Kramer. Chairman, respectfully, I think you had left the room when I had asked Mr. Castor earlier, please allow Ms. Wolf to finish her answers to the questions before —

Chairman Jordan. Okay, sure. I apologize.

Ms. Kramer. — and me as well, number one. And number two, I believe you mischaracterized her very recent answer. I don’t believe you said that there were times that you would refuse to cooperate, unless I misheard. So let’s break that down. I think your first question, Chairman Jordan, is what again, if you don’t mind repeating it?

Chairman Jordan. Would there be a reason not to cooperate with Mr. Brady’s office?

Ms. Wolf. As to this particular case, I’m not authorized to speak to that.

As a general matter, and I think to potentially recast and just reframe, the infusion on the point, there are valid investigative reasons in any given case that would need to be evaluated before joining, overlapping, even taking in information, and that would all be factored in, in any case, to deciding how to move forward in a matter, all in the spirit of advancing and the best interest of the investigation.

[snip]

You know, to the extent that it then subsequently touches on an investigation or a matter in your district, I would expect that would be something that you would be aware of and usually the kind of thing that would probably take place above the line level. And that’s part of, you know, a sort of lack of clarity or understanding on how this sort of what is and isn’t typical. I hesitate to answer. And, quite frankly, I think in answering whether this was typical or atypical, it runs afoul of what I am authorized to discuss, because it essentially acknowledges or will be interpreted as acknowledging or denying or endorsing what may or may not have happened.

Wolf is being coy here.

But she’s also making it clear that she decided sharing information with Brady’s project would harm the investigation.

This is why I posted Leo Wise’s repeated, defensive rebuttals to David Chesnoff’s claim that the Smirnov indictment was “makeweight.”

It seems clear that Lesley Wolf left the Smirnov allegation well enough alone, knowing that the project generally was producing garbage that could only endanger the case.

Leo Wise seemingly used the Smirnov allegation as an excuse to reopen the case against the President’s son, only to discover it opened a nasty can of worms.  It gave Abbe Lowell the evidence to prove that the prosecution of Hunter Biden was infected by an effort by the Attorney General to accommodate the dirt that Trump’s lawyers picked up from Russian spies. And it gave Wise a real headache of a prosecution to deal with.

Lesley Wolf probably didn’t decline all the garbage from Scott Brady for noble reasons. She was just protecting her case. But having made the opposite decision, Wise may end up blowing that case.

You know who is vindicated by the Alexander Smirnov indictment? Lesley Wolf.

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The December Warrant Shows David Weiss Wasn’t Going to Charge Gun Crimes Until Trump Elicited Threats

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Over a week ago, NBC’s Gary Grumbach emailed me to figure out how he could access the then still-sealed warrant dockets I liberated.

To the best of my knowledge, neither he nor anyone else at NBC reported that the dockets revealed that David Weiss first obtained a warrant to search Hunter Biden’s iCloud content and a laptop attributed to him for evidence relating to the gun charges on December 4, 81 days after indicting him. Indeed, besides me, only right wing outlets (Fox, NYPost, Washington Examiner) reported on the warrant.

The existence of the warrant was first disclosed as part of a legal fight (MTD; response; reply) over whether David Weiss charged Hunter Biden only because pressure from Donald Trump and Jim Jordan generated threats that led Weiss to fear for the safety of his family.

Q Do you have concerns for the safety of individuals working in your office?

A Sure. I have safety concerns for everybody who has worked on the case, and we want to make sure that folks — yeah, folks are encouraged to do what they need to do with respect to the pursuit of justice generally and they not be intimidated in any way from performing their responsibilities.

Q Do you have concerns that the threats and harassment employees have received are intended to intimidate them into not doing their jobs?

A I really can’t speak to the intention of any actor in this realm. I just know that these — that certain actions have been taken by individuals, doxing, and, you know, threats that have been made, and that gives rise to concern. We’ve got to be able to do our jobs. And, sure, people shouldn’t be intimidated, threatened, or in any way influenced by others who — again, I don’t know what their motives are, but we’re just trying to do a public service here, so —

Q Have you yourself been the subject of any threats or harassment?

A I’ve certainly received messages, calls, emails from folks who have not been completely enamored of my — with my role in this case.

Q Do you have concerns for your safety or that of your family because of these threats?

A You know, I’m not — for myself, I’m not particularly concerned. Certainly I am concerned, as any parent or spouse would be for — yeah, for family, yep.

The fact that, in five years of investigating Hunter Biden, in the over two years after Hunter Biden’s book came out, David Weiss never obtained a warrant to search the iCloud content that he already had in possession for evidence to support gun charges (and also never sent the gun to the FBI lab for testing) is pretty compelling evidence that he never intended to charge Hunter for gun crimes until Donald Trump elicited threats that led Weiss to fear for the safety of his family. In his response, Weiss claims it is a Hollywood plot that such threats might lead him to renege on his decision to deal with the gun crime as part of a diversion agreement, making light of the same threats that, he told Congress, led him to be “concerned, as any parent or spouse would be for — yeah, for family, yep.”

This is unbelievably scandalous — that in the middle of a presidential campaign, Donald Trump ginned up threats against a prosecutor and then, for the first time, after the statute of limitations expired, that prosecutor sought new evidence to prosecute Joe Biden’s son.

Yet Gary Grumbach doesn’t think that’s newsworthy.

Instead, Grumbach is focused on important things: like whether Joe Biden will visit his son on his birthday.

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A Second Trump Term Would Replace Competent Corrupt People with Incompetent Ones

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Steve Neukam is one of the Messenger scribes who often chases Dick Pics with little care for the actual evidence.

In the middle of a paragraph quoting an anonymous Republican saying that Republicans don’t even need direct financial ties to Joe Biden to impeach him, for example, Neukam treats the factual explanation that Republicans are trying to impeach Joe Biden based on loans he made to his family while a private citizen as a brush-off.

The source close to Trump also said Comer “set the bar too high” for an impeachable offense, attempting to prove a direct payment to Joe Biden in the probe. The investigation spent weeks rolling out payments to Joe Biden from Hunter Biden and James Biden, the president’s son and brother, which the White House and Biden allies brushed off as loan repayments. Proving a direct payment to the president, the source said, was not necessary. [my emphasis]

But by being a committed Dick Pic Sniffer, Neukam has hit paydirt with a story quoting a slew of MAGAts trying to blame James Comer, and James Comer exclusively, that Republicans haven’t even succeeded in the single thing they tried to do with their House majority last year: Impeach Joe Biden.

Comer has led a”clueless investigation” at best and — at worst — “a disaster.”

“It’s been a parade of embarrassments.”

[snip]

“James Comer continues to embarrass himself and House Republicans. He screws up over and over and over,” the source said. “I don’t know how Republicans actually impeach the president based on his clueless investigation and lack of leadership.”

[snip]

“It seems like they got played by Hunter Biden,” one senior House GOP aide said. “It was a disaster. They looked like buffoons.”

Behind these hilarious quotes, however, is a particular power structure, one that is actually far more telling than the quotes.

The same article that claims that Comer’s problem is that he was picked because of his fundraising prowess…

“This is why we shouldn’t pick our chairman based on how much money they raise,” another member told Moskowitz, according to the congressman.

… Has these two deliciously contradictory claims about Mike Johnson’s impotence, a Speaker picked in spite of his non-existing fundraising record.

The Republican lawmaker who took his complaints of Comer to the speaker’s office was told that Johnson is aware of the problem, agrees with the criticism but can’t really do much other than watch and shake his head, the lawmaker told The Messenger.

[snip]

Top House Republicans stand next to Comer amid the intra-party criticism. Johnson told The Messenger that he is “fully supportive” of the chairman’s work.

“I am grateful for the superb efforts of Chairman Comer,” the speaker said in a statement to The Messenger. “Without his and the other investigators’ work, we wouldn’t have uncovered the millions in foreign funds going to the Biden family, the dozens of exchanges between the President and Hunter Biden’s clients, and the litany of lies the White House has told.”

Meanwhile, at least some of the people griping are people close to Trump venting because the House GOP hasn’t delivered on Trump’s demands.

Twice-impeached Trump himself threatened House Republicans in August to impeach Biden “or fade into OBLIVION.”

[snip]

“You have to start producing,” a Trump ally said. “The base is starting to get more and more frustrated with him because they see all this smoke but they don’t see the movement.”

It is virtually certain that many of the Republicans quoted here (with the possible exception of Jim Jordan’s chief counsel Steve Castor) suffer from the very same problems James Comer has faced in this investigation. They’re incompetent. They exist in a Fox/Newsmax bubble that rewards feral loyalty, incompetence, and lies. When exposed to any real scrutiny, those lies crumble.

You won’t find them reflecting on whether their own false claims have contributed to the hilarity of Comer’s failures. Amid increasing concerns that Republicans will lose the House in November, they’re busy passing the blame, even while they ignore an even bigger underlying problem.

One reason this impeachment has failed, thus far, is because they’re pursuing impeachment for the sake of impeachment. One reason this impeachment has failed, thus far, is because the House GOP has dedicated their entire first year to delivering whatever Trump demanded, when he demanded it, irrespective of whether it served their own interests or was justified by anything but Trump’s petulant demands.

Of course, none of the Republicans quoted here (Neukam also relies on Jared Moskowitz’s second-hand claims about what Republicans have told him) would admit they’re no different than Comer. They could do no better.

The Republicans on these committees have, like Comer, gleefully made false claims about smoking guns for which they had no evidence, for example. These Republicans continue to chase every one of Comer’s new diversions, in hope somewhere there’ll be evidence.

This is the persistent problem with claims — renewed today from the NYT team — that Trump will use DOJ to pursue partisan retribution.

[Maggie] He and his allies have also been clear that a big agenda item is eroding the Justice Department’s independence.

Charlie: Yes, Trump has vowed to use his power over the Justice Department to turn it into an instrument of vengeance against his political adversaries. This would end the post-Watergate norm that the department carries out criminal investigations independently of White House political control, and it would be a big deal for American-style democracy.

He already did this!!! No matter how many times NYT claims this would be a new development, none of it can eliminate the evidence that Trump’s focus on retribution began when he ordered investigations into Hillary and John Kerry under Jeff Sessions and accelerated as Bill Barr tried to find ways to charge Hillary and other Democrats for Trump’s efforts to cozy up to Russia. These efforts continue, with wild success, as Trump’s demands for a Hunter Biden investigation finally bore fruit.

As people consider the dangers of a second Trump term — and make no mistake, it could end American democracy — they need to consider whether incompetent corrupt partisans like James Comer will be any more effective than what Bill Barr already tried. Hell, under Barr, DOJ altered evidence to attempt to implicate Joe Biden in Trump’s corruption. John Durham fabricated a claim to impugn Hillary, but still couldn’t make charges against her attorney stick.

The difference — the one place where Comer, and to a much greater degree, Jim Jordan — have succeeded where Barr did not is not in the quasi-legal outcome. Rather, it is in ginning up threats against — seemingly — every single adverse witness.

The incompetent corrupt people that Trump is relying on while disavowing his past competent agents of retribution are really really good at one thing: Sowing political violence. But it’s not clear they’d be any better at politicizing DOJ than Trump already managed.

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