The real threat

McCabe's interview and book: A signed confession!

Joe DiGenova was interviewed on WMAL this morning about last night's 60 Minutes interview of Andrew McCabe. Joe says Scott Pelly and CBS "accidentally performed a public service."

Joe says Bill Barr will be the "worst nightmare" of the people who sought to stage a coup.

Rosenstein is a "thug and the worst example of when career bureaucrats become politically motivated...who engaged in sedition and subversion...pathetic."

"Notice that McCabe never articulates what the basis was for investigating the president, because there was none!"

National emergency on the border, and Republicans like Rubio are afraid to defend their president!

Trump has a pot of about $8 billion before he even gets to the national emergency declaration!

The not-so-silent coup

Has there ever been a Sixty Minutes show more hyped than tonight's interview with Andrew McCabe? Stephen Nemo summarizes what is at stake here.

"Remarkably Arrogant!"

Andy McCarthy wrote yesterday in Fox News,

Ever wonder why people hate lawyers? Consider Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s non-denial denial of his participation in discussions of an attempted coup against the duly elected president of the United States.

The story is being given a second life thanks to the hype surrounding the rollout of a new book by Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI.

McCabe, of course, was fired after an inspector general investigation found that he leaked investigative information and then lied about it. He has been referred to the Justice Department for consideration of a false-statements prosecution.

...There are really no new revelations in this week’s breathless reporting. The story is a retread, trotted out again because CBS is hoping to generate ratings for its “60 Minutes” interview of McCabe on Sunday night, the launch of the McCabe book tour.

...The 25th Amendment was adopted in the years shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination to address the potential problem of a president who is rendered physically or mentally unable to perform his duties – as, for example, President Woodrow Wilson was by a stroke.

The amendment is not a substitute for the Constitution’s impeachment process: If you believe a president is guilty of maladministration – of criminal, abusive, or incompetent behavior – the remedy is for Congress to impeach him, not to declare him physically or psychologically unfit.

Moreover, McCabe and Rosenstein were in no position to invoke the 25th Amendment. By its own terms, it can only be invoked by the president himself, or by the vice president in conjunction with a majority of the Cabinet (or a congressionally authorized committee).

Neither McCabe nor Rosenstein was a Cabinet officer. All they could do was speculate about which Cabinet officials might be amenable to considering a 25th Amendment ploy; and they quickly dismissed the idea because they realized they were nowhere close to a Cabinet majority, let alone to a green light from the vice president.

So yes, it was a serious discussion; but it was also an ill-conceived discussion.

...It is understandable that the deputy attorney general wishes he hadn’t talked about removing the president. Legally, it was a harebrained idea. As a matter of civics – unelected bureaucrats brainstorming about how to reverse a democratic election – it was remarkably arrogant. But it happened, nonetheless. Rod Rosenstein’s lawyerly evasions can’t change that.

Read more here.

Why McCabe was fired

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance brings us an important report from Catherine Herridge at Fox News.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired last month for committing three violations of the bureau’s ethics code, an investigative source told Fox News on Thursday.

The violations initially were uncovered by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and confirmed by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. They included lack of candor under oath, lack of candor when not under oath, and the improper disclosure of non-public information to the media about the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Read more here.

Collusion!

Michael Doran writes in National Review about the real collusion story.

...To block Trump, Clinton ’s supporters bent rules and broke laws. They went to surprising lengths to strengthen her while framing him — both in the sense of depicting him in a particular light and of planting evidence against him.

...Well-intentioned but careless, said the commander in chief. Three months later, the FBI finished its investigation, and James Comey arrived at an identical conclusion. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” he said in his July 5 statement, “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Well-intentioned but careless — Comey was locked in a Vulcan mind-meld with his boss.

...It is impossible to paste a classified document into an unclassified email accidentally, because the three computer systems (Unclassified, Confidential/Secret, and Top Secret) are physically separate networks, each feeding into an independent hard drive on the user’s desk. If a classified document appears in an unclassified email, then someone downloaded it onto a thumb drive and manually uploaded it to the unclassified network — an intentional act if ever there was one.

...On three separate occasions staffers got sloppy and failed to strip the “nonpapers” of all markings that betrayed their classified origins. The FBI recovered one email, for example, that contained a “C” in parenthesis in the margin — an obvious sign that the corresponding paragraph was classified “Confidential.” When an agent personally interviewed Clinton, on July 2, he showed her the document and asked whether she understood what the “C” meant. For anyone who has ever held a security clearance, “C’s” in the margins are more ubiquitous than “C’s” on water faucets — and no more baffling. But Clinton played the ditzy grandmother. She had simply assumed, she said, that the “C” was marking an item in an alphabetized list.

In the 2,500-year life of the alphabet, this was a first: a list that started with the third letter and contained but a single item. The explanation was laughable, but any sensible answer would have constituted an acknowledgement of malicious intent. Her only out was the “well-intentioned but careless” script that Obama had written for her. In other words, she lied to the FBI — a felony offense.

Before she ever told this howler, however, Comey had already prepared a draft of his statement exonerating her. The FBI let Hillary Clinton skate.

But give Comey his due. If he had followed the letter of the law, the trail of guilt may have led all the way to Obama himself. As Andrew C. McCarthy has demonstrated at National Review Online, Obama used a dummy email account to communicate with Clinton via her private server. Did this make Obama complicit in Clinton’s malfeasance? Anyone in Comey’s position would have thought twice before moving to prosecute her — and not only because the case might have ensnared the president himself. The FBI must enforce the law, but it must also be seen to be enforcing it. As a rule, these two imperatives buttress each other. During the 2016 election, Comey faced extraordinary circumstances. If he had followed the law to the letter, he would have toppled the leading candidate for president and decapitated the Democratic party. Clinton’s supporters, more than 50 percent of the electorate, would have erupted in outrage, screaming that a politicized FBI had thrown the election to Donald Trump.

Guarding the bureau’s reputation for impartiality is a serious concern. But it is nevertheless a thoroughly political concern. Comey would have us believe that it was a unique moment in his career, the singular entry into the political arena of an otherwise apolitical servant of the law. Truth be told, Comey loves being in the thick of it, but not because he is a partisan brawler. He is not. It is the drama that he relishes — the grand stage. His favorite role is that of Joe Friday, the no-nonsense lawman, the guardian of legal processes before the encroachments of dirty politicians.

Joe Friday, however, was a simple detective, a confirmed bachelor, content to live quietly with his mother and his parakeet. And, of course, he was a TV fiction. In real life, humble straight shooters get clobbered with a brick before they ever reach the limelight. In real life, snagging the big part often requires the equivalent of leaving a bloody horsehead in the producer’s bed.

...The right stuff did not require strong Democratic credentials, but they certainly helped. Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, led the team. McCabe was not your FBI gumshoe of old. He spent no time in his younger days chasing bank robbers in Des Moines. He was part of a new breed — the post-9/11 FBI leadership, for whom the career fast track was counterterrorism. He came of age at the intersection of law enforcement with national security, shuttling between D.C. and New York. Along the way, he developed a valuable personal network. His wife, Jill, ran as a Democrat for a Virginia state-senate seat in 2015. The political organization of Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Hillary Clinton’s very closest associates, gave her nearly $500,000.

...Like McCabe, Strzok had pursued a career at the nexus of law enforcement and counterterrorism. But he was less overtly political. A John Kasich sympathizer, he was by nature a middle-of-the-roader, and a Republican-leaning one, at that. Clinton left him cold. But Trump left him even colder — and his active personal life helped concentrate his mind on that antipathy. Strzok was having an affair with Page, who was an FBI lawyer on McCabe’s staff. Both were married. Page’s politics were typical of highly educated people in D.C.: She detested Trump and his supporters. He is “a loathsome human being,” she texted to Strzok, who readily agreed. After Trump captured the nomination, hostility to him quickly became part of their private idiom.

...Deploying secrets for political effect — deciding which to keep, which to tell, and how to tell them — was a task that they approached with alacrity. The ultimate goal, of course, was not propping up Hillary Clinton so much as maximizing the power and autonomy of the FBI. In pursuing this goal, McCabe and the two lovers demonstrated the very essence of the right stuff: a breezy comfort with bending the law to the demands of politics.

...Then there’s the little matter of Steele’s personal bias. According to one well-informed associate, Steele was “passionate about” preventing Trump from winning the election. His financial incentives, of course, oriented him in exactly the same direction. He was a paid piper — and he got paid only for collecting information detrimental to Trump. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that his shadowy paymasters in the demimonde of the Clinton campaign were calling the tune?

Read more here.

How popular is Nancy Pelosi among Democrats? About as popular as Ryan and McConnell are among Republicans?

Jesse Watters: McCabe is a liar and a leaker!

The man who killed Kate Steinle is playing the victim, but as Jesse says, he is a convicted felon, and the penalty for a felon using a gun is ten years.

Will Democrats oust Nancy Pelosi? She advocates for shorter grass so we can see illegal immigrants more easily, now she is advocating for a shorter wall. Greg noticed that she is finally accepting the idea of building a wall. Dana Perino says Nancy is a good vote counter. Juan points out that she is a great fund-raiser for Democrats. A lot of people owe her favors. Juan then sarcastically asks how popular Ryan and McConnell are with Republicans.

Is there a backlash against social media among 18-24 year-olds? Greg asks, what if they replace it with something worse?

Why now?

The FBI's Office of Professional Responsibilty has recommended that Attorney General Jeff Sessions fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, even though McCabe is due to retire this weekend and get a sizeable pension after 22 years of service. Why now? I turned to Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse.

On one hand you could make an argument the Office of Professional Responsibility’s disciplinary recommendation is (Good Guys) trying to hit and punish McCabe at the last moment possible. However, on the other hand you can look at this leaked disciplinary recommendation as Machiavellian characters (Bad Guys) within the FBI setting up AG Sessions, painting him into a corner, to create yet another controversial storyline.

My guess as to the FBI OPR motive is the latter, not the former, and here’s why.

First, the OPR recommendation is leaked. We are all too familiar with the IC leaks to the New York Times and Washington Post being 100% constructed by illicit schemers within the intelligence community who are against the Trump administration. This truism is transparent from the history of the leaking. All leaks frame a narrative that only goes in one direction. All leaks are against the people’s president, Donald Trump.

Second, and perhaps more convincingly, the recommendation is coming from the Office of Professional Responsibility inside the FBI. Think about that carefully.

If there was an actual OPR office – containing any semblance of professional watchdog intent – then where the hell were they over the past few years while the entire organization was engaged in brutally corrupt activity.

Now, only RIGHT NOW, the FBI-OPR has issues with McCabe et al?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Where was the OPR while the entire administrative apparatus of the FBI was leaking to the media, constructing false witness, assembling fraudulent investigative materials, conducting sham investigations with predetermined outcomes; blocking congressional oversight, and generally behaving like a rogue political intelligence apparatus?

Seriously, where was the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility then?

No. Sorry. Not even beginning to buy the angle of a decent department watchdog doing their level-best to bring justice upon the head of a corrupt FBI political operative, Andrew McCabe. I’m not buying it.

The motive for this FBI watchdog leaked internal story today, and the OPR recommendation therein, is most likely to create yet another antagonistic controversy. The FBI Machiavelli schemers are still doing their duplicitous crap.

If Attorney General Jeff Sessions fires McCabe, the controversial narrative is that he’s desperately doing the bidding of President Trump who has tweeted about McCabe being corrupt and unaccountable.

If Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t fire McCabe, the controversial narrative is that Session’s is showing more evidence of his own weakness and motive to protect the swamp creatures; which will make Sessions seem like he is in alignment with McCabe and simultaneously anger the President and all his supporters.

The FBI-OPR has painted Sessions into a narrative of controversy either way…. and the leak about it seems to prove the FBI’s internal Machiavellian intent.

See how that works?

Lastly, none of this has anything to do with the future legal position, or indictment for corruption and/or conspiracy, of Andrew McCabe. The potential for charges against McCabe exist regardless of any action taken or not taken by AG Jeff Sessions as a result of this internal FBI – OPR recommendation.

Read more here.