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As noted in (Chapter A) with all the outrage about their texts, you’d love to see the texts of all the many anti Clinton rogue FBI agents during 2016. In addition, even if Strozk and Page were horrified at the prospect of a Trump ‘Presidency’-weren’t you?-there is no evidence that they took any action to engineer their election preferences.
Not to mention the fact that Comey and Andy McCabe bent over backwards to assure Clinton haters they weren’t giving her special treatment to extent that they stole the election from her and yet Trump and his GOP co-conspirators are still accusing them of anti Clinton bias.
But allegedly outrageous and damning texts between Page and Strozk were the kind of worries that millions of us across the country shared. Is expressing negative political views of Trump now a crime? To hear Trump’s GOP co-conspirators tell it, yes.
Again, how about the political views of the many anti Clinton agents over at Trumpland in 2016? In the IG report Comey told them that he had to give speeches before agents assuring them his choice not to convict her was fair-in truth what wasn’t fair was that there was ever an investigation in the first place and then that there were so many leaks and that it was dragged out so long and finally that Comey interjected his own extremely careless press conference into it. In large part, Comey himself had created the false expectation that Hillary was very likely to be indicted, even though he himself would later argue that it was not a close call.
Exactly, it was not-never was-a remotely close call which therefore begs the question why it was ever opened in the first place Chapter A and after it was why it took so long to publicly admit it wasn’t a close call Chapter B. According to the IG report, Comey and friends knew this at the latest by January, 2016-yet they allowed the public perception that she might very soon be ‘locked up’ to fester. When you understand the eytmology of lock her up Comey’s own dithering did a lot to contribute to it.
As for the rogue agents, from the way Comey describes it, it sure sounds like those who hated Clinton at the FBI were not just a large plurality but possibly a majority who thought she got away with something-when the opposite was the case.
As for Page and Strozk, while they desperately feared a Trump ‘Presidency’ they took no action in their own agency role to avoid it. Contrast this with the very aggressive use of their agency roles by the FBI anti Clinton agents to make sure that woman will indeed never be allowed to be President. That was what she had told Robby Mook the moment he gave her the bad news, November 8, 2016: I knew they’d never allow me to be President.
And if by they she meant the overwhelmingly Republican rank and file at the FBI she was-as usual-exactly right.
Indeed, even Page and Strozk seemed to actually harm Clinton’s chances rather than help them with their official actions. Strozk greatly limited those working on Russia which slowed it down. Had it been moving more quickly perhaps more information would have emerged that would have forced the Eamilgate obsessed media to discuss Russiagate before the election.
FN: Although Strozk had advocated for a more aggressive Russia investigation-a fight he lost alas.
As for Lisa Page, she was actually the direct source-at Andy McCabe’s direction-for the story giving to the Wall Street Journal about the Clinton Foundation investigation the FBI had begun-predicated on the yellow journalism of Peter Schweitzer and Steve Bannon-Clinton Cash. Certainly this action served not to help Clinton but in fact to actually kick her when she was already down-from Comey’s letter.
But all of this said, let’s consider what the content of the texts were on its own right. Page and Strozk dreaded the prospects of a Trump ‘win.’ But you have to remember the knowledge they possessed at the time: they knew there was a predicated investigation into Russia’s interference into the election with the expressed purpose of hurting Clinton and helping Trump and that there was probable cause to at least investigate wether with the Trump campaign’s own active participation.. If you knew that wouldn’t you dread Trump’s win for totally nonideological and nonpartisan reasons? Here’s a candidate who’s being helped by Russia, who may be coordinating with Russia-would you be sanguine about the possibility of him winning?
Their reaction is totally logical and understandable. What’s not remotely easy to credit, is how Comey was so sanguine about taking his action on October 28, 2016 that could very possibly swing the election to the candidate he knew was being investigated for colluding with the Russians.
Comey considered that prospect only ‘very bad’-rather than ‘catastrophic.’ In his mind the ‘500 year flood’ scenario was not Russia’s handpicked candidate winning but rather the nothingburger Emailgate investigation.
It so beggars comprehension you have no choice but to take the extremely pejorative judgments of Randol Schoenberg seriously-as I did in fact consider in (Chapter C) that at the end of the day Comey acted like a partisan GOP hack who was certain Clinton was guilty and so honestly believed that the emails on Weiner’s laptop were the golden emails.
Speaking of Schoneberg he asks the contrarian question: is Lisa Page a hero?
“This week, Senator Ron Johnson released an interim report on the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Email Scandal. (See February 6, 2018 at https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/library.) The Report itself isn’t so interesting, mainly a list of facts and allegations that seem salacious to right-wingers, but don’t really amount to anything in particular. The accompanying documents are what interested me. But one thing that irks me about the memo is the careless misinterpretation of the law. The memo includes a whole section on “the law governing the protection of classified information,” which includes both a verbatim text of the law, as well as a misleading summary. For example, the committee says “Section 793(f) prohibits the mishandling of classified material through one’s gross negligence.” Well, no. The word “mishandling” appears nowhere in the law. “Mishandling” is much too vague a term to be used in a criminal statute. Instead, the law at issue (enacted 100 years ago during World War I) makes it illegal to permit the “removal” of documents, or to fail to report their removal. Here’s the big problem for all those trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton committed a violation of this statute. There is no “removal” of documents when you send an e-mail. I’ve explained this before in a previous blog but it deserves repeating. There is simply no law that could make simply sending and receiving e-mails from a private server to authorized recipients into a crime.”
“I am certainly not the first lawyer to realize this. No doubt there were lawyers at the FBI and the DOJ who also understood that nothing that Hillary Clinton did with regard to her e-mails could ever result in a criminal conviction. Sadly, no one ever tried to explain this to the American public. Months before FBI Director James Comey’s public statements in July 2016, he and his staff began preparing for the day when they might have to explain that there was no case. They did this while they were still conducting interviews of witnesses, which Republicans believe is evidence that the investigation was not conducted properly. In fact, all it shows is that the FBI and DOJ were afraid to tell the Republicans that the entire investigation was not worth anyone’s time.”
FN: This point by Schoneberg only makes the argument that there was never probable cause to begin with in Emailgate even stronger-that there’s no way of blowing up the simple fact of “sending and receiving e-mails from a private server to authorized recipient” into a crime-again the MSM utterly failed here-they fomented ‘lock her up’ with all the breathless speculation that she very well might be indicted; but then again it’s even worse than this-how did the FBI not know better? It’s hard to argue against Schoenberg’s thesis: simply GOP partisan hackery.
“For FBI lawyers like Lisa Page, the pointless, obviously political investigation of Hillary Clinton must have been frustrating. She was assigned tasks that she and her colleagues knew were never going to lead to the prosecution of any crimes. It was all politics — and not her politics. Unlike much of the FBI rank and file, Lisa wanted Hillary Clinton to win. And Peter Sztrok, an agent that Lisa worked closely with on counterintelligence cases, felt the same way. The two of them became close — too close. They started an affair, and began texting each other throughout the day.”
“Those texts have now been released by Senator Johnson, giving us some insight into not only Page and Sztrok, but some of the senior management of the FBI.”
To me, the important part of these texts is at the end. “What if we can’t make out PC?” She’s talking about probable cause, the constitutional standard for obtaining a search warrant. As we know, the FBI obtained the warrant just four days later, on Sunday October 30. I and others who have reviewed the warrant application cannot find even the slightest probable cause to believe that the FBI would obtain evidence of a crime. Of course, none was ever found. The big question has always been who thought they would find evidence of a crime and why? It looks like Lisa Page tried to make the argument that there was no probable cause. Obviously, she was overruled by her boss Baker, as well as Comey, who was hell-bent on proving what an aw-shucks stand-up guy he was by reopening the investigation.”
“I’ve long wondered why it took a week for the FBI to determine that there was no new evidence on the laptop. After all, they had already reviewed all of the e-mails. How hard could it be to compare them? Well, apparently there was a problem, maybe due to security clearance issues, that prevented the FBI from comparing the e-mails. Lisa was trying to break the log-jam. It took a week before the FBI admitted that the laptop had nothing new. In that week, the election was lost for Clinton.”
Of course, a week actually seemed short as Comey had suggested it would take many months. How exactly could the FBI Director be so wrong? Is it really believable? Again this is what a future Dem investigation must answer-make it part of the present impeachment inquiry.j
“I’m not sure what to make of this next exchange from November 2. It sounds a bit like Sztrok and Page were trying to wall off the New York office, which may have been the source of press leaks. Page is angry, and frustrated that she cannot get help from Andy McCabe, who has been recused from the whole case. Without McCabe’s help, Page felt powerless to stop the bad actors in the New York office. She didn’t have much faith in Jim Baker either. We’ve all been there. The boss is good at doing lunch but pretty worthless when it comes to understanding the details.”
Comey had banished McCabe from the October 27 meeting under the rather surreal premise that he was too compromised because, while a lifelong Republican, his wife had ran as a Democrat in 2016 and received donations. Meanwhile Comey was a also a lifelong Republican who’d donated to both of Obama’s Presidential opponents-but saw no need to recuse himself as a life long Republican from this decision that would flip the election to the GOP candidate.
“We’re getting closer to understanding what exactly happened that led to the disaster of the Trump presidency. It was a comedy of errors (otherwise known as a tragedy). The people who understood and were capable of stopping the disaster were pushed out and excluded, because of “optics,” leaving only the bad actors and the head-in-the-clouds senior officials pretending to do the right thing, all the while doing exactly the opposite. Lisa Page is looking more and more like a would-be hero, someone who saw what was happening and tried to stop it.”
She is someone Jerrold Nadler whose Democratic Judiciary Committee is going to investigate the leaks of the rogue anti Clinton FBI agents should certainly publicly interview.
UPDATE: I will note as I have in the last few chapters that as of today-Thursday, February 21-the Democrats have failed to even mention that the IG report on the rogue FBI leaks to hurt Clinton and help Trump is long overdue. Nadler had said before November 6, 2018 that the Democrats if they won would investigate the leaks…
UPDATE 2. Today on November 6, 2019 the story remains the song remains the same. In fairness they do have the impeachment inquiry now-so as argued above they should fold the Comeygate inquiry into the larger impeachment inquiry-colluding with the rogue FBI agents is about as impeachable offense as you can get as is Russian Collusion; there’s been yet another bad MSM take that anything from 2016 should be forgotten in favor of 2020-Ukraine Extortion.
This misses the point that Russian Collusion cum Rogue FBI Agent Collusion show the pattern for which Ukraine Extortion is the next logical conclusion-the difference is this time Trump had the awesome power of the Presidency to attempt to rig the election. But more fundamentally there is nothing more foundational than Trump’s Original Sin-that he cheated to win in 2016. With all the-wrongheaded-talk of ‘overturning an election’ what’s missed is Trump didn’t win that election legitimately either. And what can be more impeachable than obtaining the highest Office in the land by illegitimate means in the first place?