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While we knew that McConnell refused to offer a bipartisan statement on Russia’s interference before the election-threatening to accuse Obama of the thing the last legitimate President abhorred more than anything else: partisanship-and we more recently learned that McConnell accused Obama’s CIA Director of trying to screw the Republican nominee

UPDATE: While Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries keep trying to impress the MSM with their restraint-Jeffries still worries about ‘over investigating’-see Chapter A-Trump and his co-conspirators-Bill Barr, Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Matt Meadows-and Roger Stone-show no such restraint.

He had previously put up Instagram posts that suggested violence against his own judge-Amy Berman Jackson-when will her restraint be at an end? It sure does get old to time and again see the GOP co-conspirators get the benefit of the restraint they themselves don’t show. I mean Freedom of Speech-as opposed to incitement to violence-is being construed very broadly for Stone.

“We’ve known for months that Republicans obstructed the Obama administration’s attempts to warn states and the public about Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Post previously reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular threatened to label “any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.” But a new book from The Post’s Greg Miller contains a chilling McConnell quote that shows just how paranoid the entire GOP has become.

In late summer 2016, Miller writes, then-CIA Director John Brennan hurriedly arranged meetings with senior congressional leaders over intelligence that Putin had authorized “a covert operation aimed at destablizing the American presidential election.” The connections among Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and the Democratic National Committee hack were already public knowledge. But the CIA had two intelligence sources “deep inside the Kremlin” reporting the same finding. Yet when Brennan briefed McConnell, he did more than just play down the findings. He told Brennan, Miller reports, “You’re trying to screw the Republican nominee.”

I haven’t yet read Greg Miller’s book-though it looks like a must read; there are a few of them, Seth Abramson’s Proof of Collusion, as well as the coming book by Andy McCabe-which will hopefully break some actual real ground-Comey’s book was middling. Probably 95% of what he wrote we already knew-the one new bombshell was-as we documented in Chapter A-that Comey admits he knew all along the furor over Bill Clinton’s meeting with Loretta Lynch was much ado about nothing-but that he became concerned after Fox News freaked out over it.

The main reason I haven’t yet read some of these is: I’m kind of trying to finish my own exhaustive tome here… But it turns out it’s even worse than what we heard about Miller’s book in early October; this is the general rule of Watergate 2.0-as bad as it it, it’s always even worse than it looks.

In the latest unpatriotic treachery of Mitch McConnell-who always puts country over party-he’s insisting there’s no need for a law to protect Mueller because somehow he knows for a fact Trump won’t fire Mueller. In truth he’s just protecting ‘the Republican ‘President’ as always as the only thing that matters to him is raw partisan power.

But reading more into Miller’s book tells us how far McConnell was willing to go to protect Trump-before the election-he threatened Brennan with reprisal: he’d smear Brennan. 

“When Sen. Mitch McConnell was told by then–CIA Director John Brennan before the 2016 election that Vladimir Putin and Russia were attempting to interfere with the goal of assisting Donald Trump, McConnell’s response took him aback, according to Greg Miller, a Washington Post reporter who has just released a book about Putin, Trump, and the election. The majority leader said he wouldn’t sign on to any condemnation of Russia’s actions and that if the administration went public with the intelligence, McConnell would in turn call out Brennan as a partisan intervening on behalf of Hillary Clinton, Miller colorfully revealed in a CNN interview Tuesday.”

“While the broad outlines of this story have been known for a long time, Miller’s account adds a new level of detail to McConnell’s political machinations in the run-up to the election. In a Frontline documentary from November, Miller said that the Obama administration was “so concerned about politicizing intelligence” that aides didn’t want Obama himself to publicly denounce the Russians without the support and buy-in of leaders in Congress—including Republicans.”

Still, as outrageous as McConnell’s unpatriotic hyper GOP partisanship is, it’s telling that this was successful in shutting Obama up-for him, accusing him of being a partisan was almost on the level of accusing him of being a child molester-this is how much-too much-his anti partisan brand mattered to him.

UPDATE 2.0: The GOP co-conspirator campaign against Brennan is now on a new level with Coverup AG Barr opening up three different investigations into the investigators themselves-Brennan as Obama’s CIA Director at the time-who has made many strong comments on Trump’s treason-has always been a favored GOP hob goblin.

Recently Greg Sargent had a very interesting interview with Josh Marshall on: the hardball gap between the parties. 

Indeed, the way the Obama Administration reacted to the hyper GOP partisan McConnell’s threats of partisanship does a lot to underscore this asymmetry, this hardball gap. 

Like Joy Reid had tweeted a week before the 2016 election the Democrats are like the true mother in American politics unwilling to split the baby in half. That’s good on a basic moral level, but problematic on a number of other levels-as if you don’t win elections you’re ‘goodness’ and ‘lack of partisanship’ isn’t helping anyone do the things you care so much about-getting Americans healthcare, raising wages, protecting the environment, banking reform, etc.

No one has been more willing to split the baby in American politics than Mitch McConnell but this has been the GOP modus operandi going back to Nixon. Being willing to split the baby may be despicable but it’s also had no little success as noted in previous chapters: they’ve held the WH 38 of 66 years through 2018 after 20 years of FDR-Truman. They’ve essentially held the Supreme Court since 1968-and in many ways dominating the judiciary is more important than the executive or legislature. To be sure, after the Dems had the House for 40 years through 1994, since then the GOP has held the House 20 of 24 years and the Senate 16 of 24-thankfully the Dems just broke the long time recent GOP dominance of the House-remember a few years ago when the conventional wisdom was the Dems weren’t going to win the House again until at least 2030? This points to a recurring theme in political analysis: most make the mistake of assuming the future will be very similar to the present and recent past-this was something Keynes warned about.

Indeed, the core premise of this book is what 2016 really was is less the perversion of the GOP by Trump and the Russians but that the GOP has been perverse going back to Nixon, that the modern GOP has long been intellectually and morally bankrupt. As we saw in the recent Kavanaugh hearings (Chapter B) the GOP knew how to weaponize stolen Dem emails long prior to Russia’s interference in our politics.

As noted in (Part 5) while we feel that Trump-Russia is something brand new this was actually the third time in 48 years the ‘winning’ GOP Presidential campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to rig the election. Just last night Maddow had ag program documenting Nixon’s collusion with South Vietnam-Anna Chennault, etc-to scuttle LBJ’s peace talks to guarantee Nixon’s ‘win.’

FN: To be sure while Nixon-Chennault is now common knowledge Reagan-Iran remans a controversial allegation that has considerable evidence for it but has largely been banished down the memory hole. However it ought to be remembered that this idea had enough reasonable suspicion or probable cause behind it at one time to lead to three separate Congressional investigations and taskforces.

And for that reason Irangate-even the more narrow Iran-Contra for which plausibly was just one episode in the larger Iran collusion scandal-is a cautionary tale the potential GOP co-conspirators with the enthusiastic buy in of the MSM decide to kill a legitimate scandal of monumental proportions. Iran Collusion-certainly not Iran-Contra-was never debunked exactly the MSM just decided they were ‘bored with conspiracy theories.’

You got this same sense in the last few months before the Mueller Report was turned in. You heard talk from Kasie Hunt and Friends that people are tired of Russia and Mueller-much like with Clinton Fatigue in 2014 the Beltway attempted to impute it’s own ‘boredom’ and ‘fatigue’ onto the public.

So it was not surprising when Barr read from his fake exoneration letter the MSM took and ran with it in the immediate aftermath. Even when contrary evidence began to emerge some in the Beltway let their mask slip.

The clear lesson is we can’t assume the truth will out just because it’s the truth. Even now while the MSM has now come to understand how misleading Barr really they still have accepted a lot of false premises from his misleading letter. You still hear pundits sometimes say ‘there was no collusion’ etc.

But the big worry right now is the Dem leaders themselves-will they fail to hold ‘President Trump’ accountable?

End of FN

Interestingly, you had the same basic response by the LBJ Administration as the Obama WH: LBJ had personally threatened Nixon with publicly revealing his treasonous treachery but in the end LBJ’s aides talked him out of it-it was felt that such a bombshell would be too damaging to the country-just like the Obama WH would decide 48 years later. Indeed, after 48 years we finally had smoking gun evidence of Nixon’s collusion via Halderman’s diary. 

Does it really need to be said that a GOP Administration would not have scrupled about that if the shoe were on the other foot-that a Democratic candidate had colluded with a hostile foreign power? Heck, the GOP impeached Bill Clinton on lying about a an extramarital affair. They wanted Clinton in prison over a fake email scandal-fake as everyone uses private email in Trump’s Russia House-and the GOP once investigated the Clintons’ Christmas list for 140 hours.

The GOP’s dogged pursuit of the Democrats on such fraudulent grounds aptly demonstrate that any claim they would not have fully weaponized such genuine grounds doesn’t pass the laugh test.

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