Is the FBI Biased? And Which Way?

Lest anyone think the FBI is biased against Trump…

A year ago, just before the election, the FBI put its big fat thumb on the scale to help Trump get elected by announcing a nothingburger* reopening of its Hillary investigation.

Why did they do this?

Why did they loudly announce unfounded suspicions about Hillary at the same time they were being alerted to genuine evidentiary concerns that Trump was in bed with the Russians?

And why did they keep the Russia worries secret while going public about the bogus worries about Hillary?

Stories from various news sources indicated that the FBI’s NY office had a “white hot” hatred of Hillary Clinton. Trump cheerleader Rudy Giuliani was selling this narrative as if FBI agents' bias against her was a good thing.

Today, a year later, instead of investigating a handful of honest opinions by one FBI agent, shouldn’t we be looking at the likely much larger number of anti-Hillary emails sent around inside the deeply anti-Hillary FBI in the run up to the election?

The week before the 2016 election SLATE reported that the FBI's NY office had a deep hatred of Hillary

The Guardian reported this on November 3, 2016:

"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.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent."

Business Insider backed up the Guardian story, saying:

"Clinton is "the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," they said. "The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

This hatred for Hillary Clinton inside the FBI was the message we got via unreliable news sources like FoxNews. In 2016 Rudy Giuliani was broadcasting his inside dope from his old friends in the FBI’s NY office that all hated Hillary, apparently, and apparently loved Trump as much as Rudy did.

There was also the damning anti-Clinton story that was reported then retracted by FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal that same pre-election week. Both Fox and WSJ are owned by Rupert Murdoch and were not selected by accident to drop this false bombshell. It fed the anti-Hillary feeling that week. Retracted or not, it did its damage. The fuller story about this dirty trick collusion was reported in The Atlantic on Nov 4. The motive of the dirty tricksters was clear: destroy the Clinton presidency before it began. They ended up installing Trump instead.

Everyone blamed Comey for putting his thumb on the scale. Why had he done that? Reuters reported at the time that his hand was forced by the anti-Hillary partisans inside the bureau who planned to accuse Comey of hiding incriminating Clinton emails... which turned out not to be incriminating at all.

Mark Hosenball reported on Comey's dilemma in Reuters “FBI Director James Comey was driven in part by a fear of leaks from within his agency when he decided to tell Congress the FBI was investigating newly discovered emails related to Hillary Clinton, law enforcement sources said on Thursday.” The Atlantic summarized the bizarre twist this way: "There’s a peculiar logic to this course of action—the only way to stop an unauthorized leak interfering with the election is to turn it into an authorized annoucement!—but the suggestion that Comey is running scared is disconcerting."

Let’s see their emails? How biased is the FBI? Which way are they biased? Maybe all that we’re seeing and hearing is that the FBI has finally figured out they were played for chumps last year by the Trump campaign and the Republicans.

And by the Russians, by Putin, and Putin's spy agencies.

Maybe the FBI has discovered evidence of criminality by the Trump campaign and they are simply following it up. It looks like they are being more reticent about Trump than they were last year about Hillary.

*Re the 2016 Crooked Hillary Nothingburger: Because of the “white hot” anti-Hillary feeling in the FBI’s NY office you would expect anything of any substance that was found would have been made public. What they found may have been “irregular” or it may have simply been guarded and fearful of a law enforcement apparatus that disliked her. Perhaps they just didn’t like her attitude of defiance (some men despise that in women) but nothing was found.

In the ensuing year, after they went all out to find anything to nail Hillary with, might some people in the FBI in fact have bent over backwards to avoid nailing Mr. Trump? And mightn’t this bias have emboldened Trump and his officials to defy the law? Their laxity and evasions regarding full and truthful filings and statements seem to indicate a dangerous overconfidence, a sense that they are above the law or immune from it. Maybe the FBI has simply come to dislike the appearance that they are in Trump’s pocket, because they sense that Trump is in Putin’s pocket.

Russiagate Is Like Rosemary's Baby

The Trump presidency, with all of its bizarre manifestations and plot twists, has made Americans feel like we are watching a familiar movie.

A horror movie.

Appropriately enough, since the president is a sexual predator, it's a horror movie directed by a sexual predator.

It's Rosemary's Baby. We are all living in Rosemary's Baby, all living in creepy apartments at the Dakota, listening for the tiptoeing of witches, or is it Russians?

Here is a useful Who's Who...

The White House is the Dakota Apartment House.

Trump is Guy Woodhouse who sells his wife to Satan for greater fame and financial gain.

Putin is Beelzebub/Satan.

Roman Castevet is either Steve Bannon or Paul Manafort.

Kellyanne Conway is Minnie Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon without the charm.

Jeff Sessions is the absentminded witch played by Patsy Kelly. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders is understudy.)

General Flynn is Dr. Sapirstein.

Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, Omarosa Manigault, Jared Kushner, Melania, Ivanka, Roger Stone, Donald Jr., Carter Page, etc. play all the other devil-worshippers in the room at the end...

Actually the whole Republican Party is in that room. (This new version of Rosemary's Baby really needs to be a cable series, there are so many wonderful parts. I see crowd scenes filled with Nazis carrying tiki torches. And everybody at FoxNews should have cameos. Not sure who should get William Castle's cameo as the guy waiting for the pay phone.)

Ben Carson is Dr. Bombay and is obviously in the wrong story.

Soviet ambassador/spymaster/bullfrog manquée Kislyak is Dr. Shand.

Jeb Bush is Donald Baumgart (the actor who goes blind to advance Guy Woodhouse’s career.)

James Comey is Dr. Hill (the naive "good guy" who unwittingly hands Rosemary back to the Satanists.)

Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook Jr.) is played interchangeably by the major network anchors.

Barack Obama is Rosemary's loyal friend Hutch, who the Satanists are determined to rub out.

Hillary is Rosemary’s friend Terry who gets thrown out of an upstairs window (very Russian.)

Neil Gorsuch, as far as I can tell, is the baby. (What have they done to his eyes?)

We are Rosemary.

Trump Ushers America Into A Late Medieval Period

Charlie Pierce manages to make the grisly affair of this presidency seem almost funny. (A proper heir to Hunter S. Thompson.)

“When we last left Camp Runamuck, and it was only this morning, there was some question as to whether the walls of the East Room ought to be discreetly padded. Since then, and it's only been about six hours, every single element of the most recent account of why the president* iced James Comey had been refuted, much of it by the president* himself, who sat down for a whopper of an interview with Lester Holt of NBC and proceeded to make clowns out of Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Rod Rosenstein, and most conspicuously of all, Vice President Mike Pence, who must wish he were back being the incredibly unpopular governor of Indiana. It is getting very crowded under the bus."

From CBS News we learn how much the White House has been interfering with the Kremlingate investigation. A lot. As in Coverup. As in Obstruction of Justice.

"Within the FBI, the Russia investigation is considered to be "a crisis," the source said, and "there is a whole lot of interfering." The succession of events surrounding Comey's firing is not considered to be a coincidence by the agency. In the week before he was terminated, Comey asked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein for additional resources to pursue the Russia investigation.”

Here's a good Washington Post summary and analysis of Trump’s motives and the lies he’s told to cover up those motives. This is the sort of capricious behavior you see in tinpot dictators but seldom see in elected leaders of advanced western nations. With it’s intrigues and contradictions and whispered betrayals and brazen threats it’s reminiscent of a medieval court. Until now America has not experienced a medieval period.

Juan Cole describes the significant steps Trump is taking in his march to dictatorship. (He has not burned the Reichstag yet. But wait.)

"One of the classic techniques of dictatorship is humiliation, a manifestation of the sadism of the regime. Most people want to avoid being made the butt of ridicule, and authoritarian personalities calculate that they will even surrender some rights and liberties to avoid it… Comey was personally humiliated. He was giving a talk in Los Angeles when the news came across the television screen. Here you have the Director of the FBI appearing in public and having his dignity abruptly stripped away… What is the message here? If you work for the Federal government, you work for Trump. And if you work for Trump, and you cross him or he just decides he doesn’t like the look of you, he will degrade you and make you abject in front of the whole world. Therefore, be afraid, be very afraid.”

And then we have Trump’s Russian friends (or masters) casually humiliating him, making it clear he is their poodle.

CNN reports that the Russians are laughing at Trump and us.

"Russian officials are having a grand old time laughing at the United States -- and at President Donald Trump. The events of the past few days would seem to indicate that their efforts to aid Trump's election may have paid off after all -- and paid off handsomely -- with a United States weakened by division, its government consumed with a crisis rooted in Moscow's 2016 election interference.”

Trump isn’t the only one caught in this. Jefferson Davis Beauregard Sessions is also caught in a trap he built and walked into. He could be disbarred and removed from office.

From the Washington Post: (Remember them? They brought down Nixon.)

"Refusing to recuse oneself from a conflict or breaking the promise to recuse from a conflict is a serious breach of legal ethics. “Someone could file a bar complaint, and/or one with DOJ’s office of professional responsibility, if Sessions had a conflict of interest when it came to the firing decision, and if he did not follow the ethics rules, including those of DOJ by acting when he had a conflict of interest,” legal ethics expert Norman Eisen tells me. “The fact that he broke his recusal commitment, if he did, would be relevant context, and violating an agreement can sometimes in itself be an ethics violation.” In sum, Sessions has risked his law license.”

Commentary from Elizabeth Drew who covered Watergate.

Vox explains what Trump is afraid of and why he’s barricaded himself in the White House with loyal henchmen and henchwomen… if he can be sure of them. (There are a lot of leaked stories coming out.)

Let’s review the score here.

Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warned the White House about Michael Flynn’s compromised position and Russia links… so Trump fires her.

Preet Bharara, US Attorney in New York, is putting together cases touching on Trump’s and Trump’s allies’ relationships with Russian oligarchs and money-launderers… so Trump fires him. (This reprise of Bharara's investigations comes from The Week.)

From The Hill newspaper: FBI Director Comey asks for more funding to increase the size of his investigation into Kremlingate and begins subpoenaing Trump associates… so Trump fires him. He pretends to be following AG Sessions’ advice but he demanded grounds to fire and got it from Sessions (who violated his recusal to do so; see above)

Top legal experts are calling this a dangerous move. Dangerous for Trump to have done it, but mostly dangerous for our democracy and rule of law––because Trump has the Republican Congress trained like poodles. (From Lawfare Blog.)

One or two Republicans in Congress are showing some ability to grow spines and walk upright. Lindsey Graham goes back and forth between admiring Trump’s muscles and asking difficult questions. We learn from Reuters that just before Comey was fired Graham expressed interest in Trump’s business dealings, which no doubt increased Trump’s paranoia.

Like the mobster he is, Trump is now threatening people. He’s always threatened people who threatened him, but usually those were people with little power, people he’d abused or refused to pay. Notice he doesn’t threaten his Russian masters. He does like to threaten people he’s fired in case they disliked being fired. In case they know things and might talk. (From the Guardian)

We Are All In Putin's Pocket Now

In the early 19th century, when Britain ruled much of the world, their king was cuckoo. Maybe it was because he’d lost the American colonies. He was nuts. And his young son was appointed Regent to handle the duties his incompetent father was unable to handle. The Prince Regent was not cuckoo but he was thick as two planks and very irresponsible.

We are in a similar situation now. Britain wasn’t actually ruled by their monarch even then; they had Parliament, and their Parliament was not a houseful of poodles. Our president has awesome powers and an obedient Congress, and he is still not in control. He is cuckoo and irresponsible and impulsive and delusional and corrupt and a liar.

Weirder still: the oddball scenario of Trump huddling with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador (spy master really) in the Oval Office, with the American press barred but the Russian press invited. If it sounded like a script written in Moscow it’s because it was. It was Putin who demanded the press exclusive at the high level meeting. Putin set the guidelines. Trump is not in control. Putin is. I was joking yesterday about how this is all completely normal, how it’s routine for Russian assets to have regular sit downs with their Russian spymasters. Joke, no joke. Our president is being operate by remote control from Moscow. Persuade me this isn’t true. Since we don’t have any American press coverage of the meeting we will not be able to observe the Russian technicians installing the listening devices.

How did we get here? The Washington Post gives us a picture of the president’s latest temper tantrum. How it happened and what it means.

The only thing that Russia’s press exclusive with Trump did not publish was the photo of Trump kneeling to receive commands from his master.

Politico describes the Russian tete a tete yesterday as a Russian victory dance. The Comey firing is only part of this Russian operation. Previous to this president the Russian prpresident did not have the power to fire American FBI directors.

Do we feel diminished yet? Do we feel like a Russian satellite yet? Do we feel as stupid as we look to the rest of the world? A new Quinnipiac poll asked respondents what word they would use to describe President Trump. (Via NY Magazine.)

The number one response by 8 percentage points was IDIOT.

Next in line: INCOMPETENT.

Next: LIAR.

Fourth place was a tie: 25% are still brainwashed and responded with LEADER. But 25% also responded with UNQUALIFIED.

The White House is lying about the Comey firing. Slate counts the ways.

Via Business Insider: A former CIA deputy director explains why it was dangerous to let the Russians bring their news [sic] crew into the Oval Office.

Constitutional Crisis? The New York Review of Books thinks it is.

Charlie Pierce: "Really, unless a fresh crop of spines suddenly sprouts within the Republican congressional majorities, nothing is going to happen. Unless a fresh crop of balls suddenly sprouts within the federal bureaucracy—hey, there are even more parking garages in D.C. now than there were in 1973—the odds are that the White House is going to skate on this.” Pierce also draws parallels with Watergate. But as I've been saying: Nixon at least hired domestic spooks. He didn't hire the KGB to secure power.

From Rolling Stone: Trump’s few Republican critics are not confronting him. Why?

Michael Tomasky goes through the five key players who might checkmate the Russian puppet in the White House

The Republicans are acting strangely. Like a police chief holding back to make sure the bank robbers finish looting the bank and put the money safely offshore before he does anything. As long as the Russians seem to be in control how much strategic information are they collecting? Which did they steal first, the keys to our nuclear arsenal or the keys to our economic infrastructure? Maybe the keys to the Federal Reserve. They may soon have our entire country in their pocket.

Tuesday Night Massacre

This afternoon the president had his personal bodyguard, not a government employee but his longtime henchman, deliver a firing letter to the FBI director who was leading the investigation into Trump's possible collusion with Russia.

Bloomberg is reporting that Trump has promised Senator Lindsay Graham a certified letter avowing Trump's innocence on the Russia allegations. Does this president believe that paying a bit more to send a certified letter somehow certifies the truth of the contents?

Instead it tends to indicate the president's slender grasp on reality.

Live coverage on MSNBC

DailyBeast

From Slate

The Atlantic’s analysis

Toobin, from a few months ago

Trump and the GOP have a record of killing messengers. Note the firing of EPA personnel who were disloyally reporting on climate change.

The Apocalypse––brought to you by Russia and the Republican Party

30 million Americans lost their healthcare in the middle of the night. Cause of death: Republicans. Charlie Pierce explains what happened.

Why put millions of Americans in danger of financial collapse and death? Because Republicans worship at the altar of the Killer Business Model. People who are sick and in pain and afraid of dying will pay any price. This is a Killer Business Model.

From VOX: Analysis by several political experts leads to the conclusion that Comey screwed this election as much as Putin did.

"If it weren't for Comey, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by about 6 points and the Electoral College by 70 or more. And that might have turned into control of the Senate as well, though that's a little more speculative."

Summary from MotherJones

Then there’s the report by a veteran from MI6 who believes Russia has been blackmailing the president elect...

The memo reported by CNN

The Russia expert cited by CNN is being backed up by other reliable sources. One cited in The Week

VOX does a good job of summarizing the story and what it could mean.

The response of Donald Trump is blunt and ugly: I won. You lost. Shut up. Fuck you all. (I’m paraphrasing.) Reported by New York Magazine.

When so many things go so wrong so quickly for all Americans the takeover by a foreign enemy story seems a lot more believable. And the Republican Congress seems in a hurry to make it all happen before we get wise.