The Peter Strzok fiasco wrecks the GOP’s bogus conspiracy theoryby Paul Waldman
July 13 2018
WA Post
There are times when you watch what’s happening in American politics and come to believe you’ve fallen through the rabbit hole, to a place where everything is upside down. Today was one of those times, as FBI agent Peter Strzok testified in a public hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, the latest chapter in the saga of Republican attempts to prove that any and all investigation into Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s eager cooperation with that effort is a “witch hunt.”
Click to watch: <iframe width='480' height='290' scrolling='no' src='
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As you know, Strzok was one of the key agents involved in investigating Russian interference and, in 2017, he was assigned to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry into the Russia scandal. However, when Justice Department officials saw texts he exchanged with Lisa Page — an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an affair — in which they disparaged Donald Trump, Mueller removed him from the investigation. To Republicans, those text messages are the smoking gun that proves Trump is utterly blameless and the entire investigation into him was tainted from the start and must be shut down.
But there’s one very important fact that we have to keep in mind, one that Strzok made in his prepared statement today:
In the summer of 2016, I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign. This information had the potential to derail, and quite possibly, defeat Mr. Trump. But the thought of exposing that information never crossed my mind.
This is the core of what makes the Republican effort to discredit the Russia investigation so utterly insane. They want us to believe there was an FBI conspiracy to prevent Trump from being elected president, and what did that conspiracy do? First, it mounted a cautious investigation of what nearly everyone now acknowledges was a comprehensive effort by Russia to help Trump get elected, an effort that people on the Trump campaign and even in Trump’s own family tried to cooperate with. But then it kept that investigation completely secret from the public, lest news of it affect the outcome of the investigation in any way.
You will notice that Republicans have not been able to produce any evidence that Strzok or anyone else took any official action that was biased, unfair or inappropriate in their investigation of Russian interference and the Trump campaign.
Even if you were to set aside the fact that the director of the FBI quite possibly threw the election to Trump when he violated FBI protocols and announced 11 days before the election that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, the idea that the bureau attempted to hinder Trump’s election isn’t just unsupported by any evidence, it is contradicted by everything they did.
And that’s what you have to keep in mind as you watch these ludicrous hearings, and everything else the Republicans do with regard to this issue. They’ve proven that Strzok didn’t think highly of Trump. Fair enough. We should note, however, that while we have seen Strzok’s private text messages — because they were released by the Justice Department — we have no idea what other FBI agents were texting each other, say, about Hillary Clinton. We do know, on the other hand, that as one report said just before the election, “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.” As one agent put it at the time, “The FBI is Trumpland.”
So that’s an example in which FBI agents actually did things to help Trump during the election. But that’s not what Republicans are investigating, which might suggest — and hold on while I blow your mind — that the GOP isn’t aren’t actually concerned broadly with the integrity of FBI investigations.
So today we saw, for instance, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) badgering Strzok about the meaning of individual words in his late-night text messages to his girlfriend, using Gowdy’s patented prosecutorial technique of shouting a question at a witness, and then when the witness begins to answer, interrupting and shouting a different question at a louder volume. Unsurprisingly, the hearing quickly devolved into a circus, with members yelling at each other, overlapping points of order, and a general sense of chaos.
At one point, when he was finally allowed to give a complete answer to a question, Strzok somewhat angrily explained why not only didn’t he do anything to unfairly twist the investigation into Russian meddling, he couldn’t have even if he wanted to. He began by referencing a text he sent after Trump had started a fight with a Gold Star family, one of the low points of the campaign predicting that Trump would lose:
You need to understand that was written late at night, off the cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect someone demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States. It was in no way, unequivocally, any suggestion that me, the FBI, would take any action whatsoever to improperly impact the electoral process for any candidate. . . .
I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, at no time in any of those texts, did those personal beliefs ever enter into the realm of any action I took. Furthermore, this isn’t just me sitting here telling you. You don’t have to take my word for it. At every step, every investigative decision, there are multiple layers of people above me — the assistant director, executive assistant director, deputy director and director of the FBI — and multiple layers of people below me — section chiefs, supervisors, unit chiefs, case agents and analysts — all of whom were involved in all of these decisions. They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them. That is who we are as the FBI. And the suggestion that I, in some dark chamber somewhere in the FBI, would somehow cast aside all of these procedures, all of these safeguards and somehow be able to do this is astounding to me. It simply couldn’t happen. And the proposition that that is going on, that it might occur anywhere in the FBI deeply corrodes what the FBI is in American society, the effectiveness of their mission, and it is deeply destructive.
You don’t have to like Peter Strzok, or James B. Comey, or Robert Mueller, or anyone else involved in these various investigations. But you have to ask, and you have to keep asking: What do Republicans think the FBI actually did to effectuate this anti-Trump conspiracy they say existed to deny him the presidency? Because the facts, here on Planet Earth, show that they did what they were supposed to do: They began an investigation into this profound threat to American democracy, but kept quiet about it so it wouldn’t affect the election.
Especially in contrast to how Clinton was treated, that was either an extraordinary gift to Trump, or it was them doing their jobs precisely how they should have. But it can’t be anything else.
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GOP consultant Rick Wilson explains how Stzrok hearing blew up in Republican’s facesMartin Cizmar
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 23:40 ET
Peter Strzok was intended to be a punching bag for House Republicans, but instead he hit back writes ex-Republican Rick Wilson in a new column for the Daily Beast.
In the column, Wilson talks about what House Republicans were expecting from today’s hearings, which lasted longer than a full work day and featured no shortage of brutal takedowns from both Democrats and Republicans.
“Donald Trump’s congressional enablers, sycophants, and political suck-ups wanted a punching bag, but Strzok instead delivered one of the rarest of moments: the full Joseph N. Welch,” Wilson wrote.
Welch was the army lawyer who turned the tables on Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy during his Red Scare hearings in 1954.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Welch asked in a scene that has gone on to become part of our national lore.
Wilson went on to explain how things are different now, where the McCarthys of our era have their own facts.
“Because Trump supporters live in a hermetic media echo chamber, these hearings are part of a predictable, hokey Kabuki dance,” he wrote. “They’re a device for generating a new round of hyperbolic base-only stories that will follow the same dumb arc as all the rest.”
But when the clips of Thursdays events are played, Wilson argues, it will not give them what they wanted—because Strozk hit back and got them all on the record.
“He left the Trumpists of the House staggered in their corner, cut and shaky, wondering where Stozok learned to hit back that hard,” he wrote.
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MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch shames ‘pathetic’ GOP ‘dweebs’ for trashing FBI agent Peter StrzokTravis Gettys
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 06:53 ET
MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch was disgusted by the antics of congressional Republicans as they grilled FBI agent Peter Strzok over his politically charged text messages during the 2016 campaign, as he investigated Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
The “Morning Joe” contributor agreed with Strzok, who delivered a passionate speech against Trump’s qualifications for office and GOP attacks on law enforcement, and said Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.
“I was screaming at the television,” Deutsch said. “Every time they game to a Democrat, they would get up and say, we’re having this meeting here, yet we can’t get a committee meeting on anything after kids are killed by guns in schools. we can’t get a committee meeting when kids are being ripped from their parents — yet we can get a committee hearing over these texts.”
“Shame, shame on these pathetic Republicans,” he added. “That’s an FBI agent, who basically also used texts to disparage Hillary Clinton and also Bernie Sanders.”
Deutsch said every American — even public officials — have a right to their own political opinions.
“Every judge, every FBI agent, every police officer, every congressman has a bias,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they bring it to their job, and this man — everybody votes. That doesn’t mean they can’t do their job and this is a man who has dedicated — these little dweebs sitting there, the discourse, the way they present themselves. Trey Gowdy, the way he says, ‘I don’t care what you have to say.'”
Host Mika Brzezinski broke in to remind viewers that Gowdy had led a fruitless, two-and-a-half-year investigation of the Benghazi attack, and she bashed him as a partisan hypocrite.
“One of these guys referred to (special counsel) Bob Mueller, can’t pronounce the guy’s name,” Deutsch said. “I cannot wait until Mr. Mueller’s report comes out — once again, we’re at indictments now.”
“I wonder if that gets up to 40 and 60, and if we can come back and any of these congressmen can say, ‘Oh, I guess the reason those happened is because Mr. Strzok sent a text to a friend of his, that’s the reason for the indictments,'” Deutsch continued. “They should be ashamed of themselves, and I do believe if anybody watches this they will understand why there will be a blue wave. People are fed up with these pathetic, sniveling little cowards.”
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jeOUOss0GE******************
Ex-CIA head Brennan: ‘Putin must be very happy’ with Goodlatte and Gowdy ‘protecting Mr. Trump’ in Strzok hearingTom Boggioni
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 14:58 ET
Appearing on MSNBC, former CIA Director John Brennan expressed his disgust with a Republican-led grilling of FBI agent Peter Strzok, calling it “mockery of the oversight function,” adding “Vladimir Putin must be very happy.”
Speaking with host Chris Jansing, Brennan was asked about the overall proceedings, replying, “Vladimir Putin must be very happy, as well as Russian intelligence services because of the discord that’s being shown in the halls of Congress here.”
He then turned to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and hearing chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) for their role in what shaped up to be a show trial of the FBI agent accused of protecting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and attempting to influence an FBI investigation of President Donald Trump’s election campaign.
“Unfortunately, I think Chairman Goodlatte and Chairman Gowdy demonstrated they are more interested in protecting Mr. Trump, and preventing the continued investigation from moving forward, and taking these cheap shots at Strzok were just unconscionable,” he asserted.
Calling the hearing a “new low,” he condemned the whole affair.
“What I saw today was this grandstanding and politicking at the expense of our national security. How it’s going to come to an end, I don’t know,” he lamented. “But unfortunately this polarization is being fostered by Mr. Trump in terms of the types of things he says and what he tweets. This needs to stop because it is having a damaging impact on our national security.”
You can watch the video via MSNBC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgU4138gmqY************
WATCH: Ex-FBI agent Clint Watts explains how GOP lawmakers have been turned into Russian pawnsTravis Gettys
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 08:46 ET
Former FBI counterintelligence agent Clint Watts said President Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans almost acted as if they were carrying out a script from a Russian influence operation.
The cybersecurity expert told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” explained how such an operation would unfold, and he said the president and his GOP allies seemed to be pushing Kremlin propaganda and strategic goals.
“First thing you do is you seed accounts in social media, seed players, operatives, political parties, NGOs, groups like that into the U.S. audience space, you align with them based on interest, financial being a big one, information being another one, common issues, like ‘America first,'” Wattsa said. “That’s great for Russia, because if America puts America first and the world second, Russia can get on the world stage.”
Influence operations seek to nudge their target audience toward certain behaviors, and he said Republican lawmakers who visited Russia this month were a perfect example of this.
“Over time you just cultivate those relationships, and the end goal is a behavior change in your target audience,” Watts said. “We saw this happen last week. We saw senators go to Russia and literally repeat lines that Russia would want them to say — sanctions aren’t working, maybe you shouldn’t pursue these, or everybody does influence and meddling.
“Sen. (Richard) Shelby (R-AL), he essentially repeated a line you will hear come out of the Kremlin,” Watts said, referring to the senator’s description of Russia as a competitor, not an adversary — which Trump has also repeated.
“That’s the behavior change they want,” Watts said. “The thing we don’t realize is that it is boiling the frog. It is very slow and the goal is to nudge the target audience, which is the Republican Party, to take on your agenda.”
He said the House Judiciary Committee hearing with FBI agent Peter Strzok also advanced Russian interests at the expense of American institutions.
“You saw Republicans in Congress attacking another U.S. institution to defend President Trump, who’s under investigation from a Russia collusion and obstruction case,” Watts said. “This is exactly how active measures (play out), which is have your adversary fight with itself so they cannot fight with you and withdraw on the world stage.”
“At every single point, with the exception of one — removal of sanctions — Russia has advanced its goals and foreign policy,” he added.
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPEBvJT3jo**************
Ex-FBI agent: Law enforcement frustration with GOP has ‘escalated to anger’ after Strzok hearingBrad Reed
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 08:52 ET
Josh Campbell, a former FBI supervisory special agent, told CNN on Friday that law enforcement officials are getting completely fed up with the Republican Party’s regular attacks on their work.
While discussing Thursday’s explosive congressional hearing with FBI agent Peter Strzok, Campbell told CNN that many within the FBI are furious watching President Donald Trump and his party trying to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe by impugning the integrity of the FBI.
“I would talk to my colleagues who would say, ‘This is really strange, where you have Republicans, the quote-unquote party of law enforcement, that are turning their wrath on us,'” he said. “That has now escalated into anger. I talked to my former colleagues who say, ‘The nonsense, we’re getting tired of it, how can you have a political party that is out here going after a law enforcement entity for the sole purpose of trying to undermine its credibility in an investigation?’ It’s something that is really starting to get under the skin of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers watching this.”
Campbell also admitted that Strzok’s anti-Trump text messages that he wrote during the 2016 presidential campaign showed “bad judgement,” although he pointed out that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General could find no evidence that Strzok’s views on Trump had impacted his work at the FBI.
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fuBoFQiNdU*************
Trump might finally be starting to scare GOP senators as much as he’s scaring the rest of the planetHeather Digby Parton, Salon
12 Jul 2018 at 10:11 ET
In anticipation of Donald Trump’s Global Chaos Tour a couple of days ago I told everyone to get ready, because it was going to be wild. Upon his arrival in Brussels for the annual NATO meeting, the president opened the show with a fusillade of insults toward America’s allies, a grand display of ignorance on every key issue and a total disregard for history, diplomacy or the national security of the United States. And then it got really crazy.
This article was originally published at Salon
He started off at a morning breakfast photo-op on Wednesday with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and members of their staffs. Trump proceeded to whine, complain and caterwaul once again about how the NATO countries aren’t contributing enough money to what he still portrays as some common NATO piggy bank and implied that they owe the U.S. for overdue payments, which is simply daft. But he made big news when he claimed that Germany is “totally controlled by Russia,” which he apparently believes means that Chancellor Angela Merkel is Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
He based this upon a bogus claim that Germany gives vast sums of money to Russia in exchange for 70 percent of its energy and therefore, they are a “captive of Russia” and are the ones betraying the NATO charter. (As usual, he was wrong on the facts. Germany gets about 9 percent of its energy from natural gas, which is the energy in question. About 70 percent of thatcomes from Russia.)
When Stoltenberg tried to explain that NATO was not about trade, Trump replied:
How can you be together when a country is getting its energy from the person you want protection against or from the group that you want protection against? I think it is a very bad thing for NATO and I don’t think it should have happened and I think we have to talk to Germany about it.
The fact is that of course NATO countries trade with Russia. So does America. But there’s little point in trying to make sense of what he was saying because he clearly had no idea himself.
Later, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders released a statement saying that that instead of the 2 percent of GDP that the NATO countries have agreed to budget for military spending by 2024, Trump is now demanding that they double that to 4 percent. Shortly thereafter, Trump tweeted this, which slightly walked back his imperious demand:
What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy? Why are there only 5 out of 29 countries that have met their commitment? The U.S. is paying for Europe’s protection, then loses billions on Trade. Must pay 2% of GDP IMMEDIATELY, not by 2025.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2018
Before leaving Brussels, Trump held an unscheduled press conference on Thursday, during which he claimed that all NATO member nations had promised to “substantially up their commitment” to defense spending after he had told them he was “extremely unhappy.” As the Washington Post drily reported, “It was not immediately clear what specific new commitments had been made.”
No one quite understands why the president is so intent upon everyone arming themselves to the teeth, but we know it isn’t because he wants America to cut back. He wants to increase U.S. defense spending as well. Evidently, he wants everyone putting vast amounts of resources into a global war machine. What could go wrong?
The truth is that this is completely unrealistic. So the more obvious explanation is that Trump is seeking to break up the NATO alliance the same way he tore up the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. He also plans to abrogate NAFTA, withdraw from the WTO and who knows what else. ( He says right in that tweet: “What good is NATO …?”)
#Russia's state TV:
Tatyana Parkhalina:
"I never thought I’d live to see this—neither the USSR nor Russia, who tried many times to drive the wedge between transatlantic allies, but Washington is doing everything to break down the foundations of transatlantic alliance & unity."©️ pic.twitter.com/AlG3QytN8S
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) July 11, 2018
Perhaps that’s one of Trump’s “deliverables” for his upcoming summit with Putin in Helsinki.
Meanwhile, back at home there was some highly unusual activity in Congress. You may recall that a delegation of Republican senators visited Moscow over the July 4 holiday and were quoted as being extremely accommodating, if not downright servile, to their hosts. The leader of the delegation, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said they were there to “strive for a better relationship, not accuse Russia of this or that or so forth.” Others were even more generous:
Sen. Ron Johnson reportedly said that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election "is not the greatest threat to our Democracy," after a group of Republican lawmakers returned from a trip to Moscow. pic.twitter.com/VXk3rkWHCP
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 12, 2018
Someone must have pointed out that they had come off as useful idiots because according to the Daily Beast, several senators who were there are now saying that the meetings were confrontational and tense, with the Russians leaning heavily on the senators on the issue of sanctions, while insisting that the election interference never happened.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said the Russians had been under the impression that only Democrats believed that Russia had been involved. It’s not hard to understand why they would have made that assumption. This is the first time we’ve seen any Republican elected officials, beyond a handful of retiring senators, give even the slightest indication that they are concerned about it.
Somewhat surprisingly, both the House and the Senate passed nearly unanimous bipartisan resolutions affirming support for NATO. They don’t actually mean anything and they won’t do anything serious to restrain Trump, but it’s possible that Republicans making some slight attempt to tell the world that Trump’s bellicose comments are not endorsed by his party will provide some reassurance.
That wasn’t all. The Senate also voted 88-11 for a non-binding resolution to stop Trump from using national security as a rationale for imposing tariffs willy-nilly when he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning. Analysts are saying it was a test vote to see if they can override a veto. It’s unclear how many Republicans would hang tough if Trump actually bothers to veto the bill.
Finally, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced a resolution condemning the Russian incursion in Crimea and calling on the Trump administration not to recognize Russia’s land grab. That too will not be binding, but its timing just before the summit with Putin is not an accident.
Perhaps this is all just CYA behavior for Republicans who can see the handwriting on the wall in a tough election season. Or maybe they only manage to find their lost intestinal fortitude when the president is out of town. But it’s also possible that Trump is starting to scare some of them as much as he’s scaring the rest of the planet.
This NATO debacle was just the opening act of the Global Chaos Tour. Now he’s off to London, where he’ll meet the queen, encounter large protests and be followed around by a gigantic “Baby Trump” blimp. That should be highly entertaining. It’s when Vladimir Putin joins him on stage for the big finale in Helsinki that we’ll see the real pyrotechnics.
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Judge says Manafort’s new jail is ‘very familiar’ with housing ‘spies and traitors’David Edwards
Raw Story
13 Jul 2018 at 14:43 ET
U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis II on Thursday ordered former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to be moved to a jail in Alexandra, Virginia because it has experience housing “spies and traitors.”
According to Politico, Manafort was booked into the Alexandria facility on Thursday. The transfer comes after Manafort bragged about his “VIP” treatment at Northern Neck Regional Jail.
Manafort’s attorneys opposed the judge’s ruling, saying that it jeopardized their client’s safety and the ability to prepare his defense.
But Judge Ellis denied a motion to head off the transfer.
Ellis pointed out that the staff at the detention center in Alexandria is “very familiar with housing high-profile defendants including foreign and domestic terrorists, spies and traitors.”