96 Trumpland: The FBI Which Elected Trump Supported His Insurrection
UPDATE:
UPDATE: This chapter is pretty much ready for primetime-concise and substance is on point. Maybe the Trumpland quotes can be deleted just leaving the chapter CF. Other than that it’s there.
UPDATE 2.0: Editing looks pretty tight too.
This should be the opposite of a surprise-that as they elected him in 2016 and many of them wanted to help him stay on despite losing 2020. While the recently released Select Committee report on January 6 has many virtues one clear omission is regarding the failure of a number of our intel and military agencies-the Pentagon, DHS, the FBI itself, to say nothing of the Secret Service-where inexplicably neither Tony Ornato or (now retired) Director James Murray were fired.
FN: To the extent that it was is yet more commentary on how short the memory of the conventional wisdom is-talk about a contradiction in terms…
Indeed, when the story of all those “lost” Secret Service texts came out in 2022 one of the many stunning aspects was that the two men were still at the agency-they’ve since left but not because they were fired.
It was just a routine mass deletion about the most important communications in US history-just a little incompetence https://t.co/eDwMKkYBVy
— Expand the Court (@ProChoiceMike) August 2, 2022
If you think all these different agencies just happened to “lose” the most important communications in US history because-oops mass deletion!-well, what can I say?-you don’t get it and perhaps you never will.
FN: Perhaps because you don’t want to…
Again Nance’s Law: coincidences take a lot of planning and this is simply too great a “coincidence” that all these security agencies planned a mass deletion day for Insurrection Day to believe with a straight face. This is why as I discussed in Why the Comey Letter I don’t subscribe to Hanlon’s Razor-or Occam’s for that matter.
And again, the January Committee did a lot of great work but on the subject of the simply massive cross agency failure of law enforcement on January 6, they simply 9/11 Commission(ed) it.
You can argue we’re pretty lucky we had the January 6 SC at all-Pelosi’s-apparent-preferred option had been a 9/11 styled commission but #MoscowMitch filibustered it. Thank God-the proposed commission would have had the same number of Democrats and Republicans with both parties having subpoena power.
This was a case where the congenital instinct for obstruction of McConnell and Friends worked to the benefit of the public interest-it was a major mistake by McConnell. That commission would have been worse than toothless.
At the outset one problem was the conventional wisdom that the 9/11 Commission was a great success when in fact it had been a monumental failure.
FN: This is not just my view and the view of many Americans but many of the leading 9/11 families themselves.
There are a lot of unanswered questions-the truth is the Commission was set up to fail by Bush-Cheney. Classic example of fox guarding the chicken coop-the Bush-Cheney stooge Zelikow was leading the Commission and you had Dick Cheney calling in to upbraid (Democrat) Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschele that the Commission was a “very dangerous and time-consuming diversion…”
See pg 49
There is certainly good reason to suspect the Commission was potentially very dangerous to Dick Cheney which is why he took the lead in tamping down on it-Cheney guarding the henhouse…
Because with all the very good unanswered questions, the most interesting one by far may be the allegation that Cheney gave a stand down order regarding Flight 93. Of course the conventional wisdom is that Cheney actually ordered a shoot down as this is what Cheney claimed so the Savvy instinct is to simply take his word for it-as to question it would be to question American exceptionalism itself. It’s like how Chris Cuomo dismissed the idea that Bill Barr could have lied out of hand-simply unpossible.
CF. Chapter Cuomo
But even simply presuming that as the conventional (un)wisdom does-despite the (trivial?) fact that in fact the plane wasn’t shot down-begs the pretty embarrassing question of on who’s authority? Once again the conventional answer is that W gave Cheney the authority though once again we’re stuck having to take his word-and W who later claimed he had given it in contradiction of his earlier statement. What’s clear is that there was no legal basis for the Vice President to be involved in this decision-the Veep has no place in the chain of command for such a decision.
End FN
However, the one area that the J6SC dropped the ball was this monumental failure of the law enforcement agencies.
“What the Jan. 6 Committee Report Left Out.”
“The Capitol attack was a massive failure by law enforcement and intelligence. We can’t let it happen again.”
“The House Select Committee’s report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack asks readers to suspend their belief in reality. Fault is found only with former President Donald Trump’s actions — no blame is given to the inactions of federal security officials.”
“But Jan. 6 was not simply the story of a failed politician and his supporters’ willingness to commit violence to keep him in power. It is also the story of the greatest security failure in Washington, D.C., since policeman John Frederick Parker abandoned his post near Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.”
But the J6C does a full on 9/11 Commission.
“In his forward to the report, Chair Bennie Thompson exonerated the intelligence and security agencies for their failures with this sweeping claim: “But the shortfall of communications, intelligence and law enforcement around Jan. 6 was much less about what they did or did not know. … Whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day.” And with that, a mere 11 pages into an 845-page report, the committee looks away from those who should have prevented Jan. 6.”
I say J6C ‘9/11 commisoned’ it as this was literally the narrative of Bush-Cheney-as well as the FBI at the time; so Bush-Cheney-Mueller: nobody could have seen it coming. Despite all the warnings prior-very similar to J6-we’re to believe nobody could have seen it coming. Apparently short of literally predicting the event nothing is specific enough to be actionable. Makes you wonder why we have intelligence at all with this level of ineptitude.
But was it actually ineptitude? Beyond no one could see it coming another stock excuse is ineptitude, incompetence, etc-aka Hanlon’s Razer, Occam’s Razor, etc. That was the mainstream Savvy narrative during the years of Trump’s illegitimate regime-he’s too incompetent to be THAT corrupt.
But once again there’s a lot of reason to doubt. With the recent mass deletions across all these various law enforcement agencies of J6 texts the ineptitude and incompetence card has been played hard-it just so happened that all these agencies decided to erase the J6 texts as it happened to be the day they planned to delete all these texts without copies-as the law calls for and, you know, no one in any of these agencies imagined the J6 texts could be important.
If my “cynicism” is right-and it has proven to be right time and again in recent years regarding our national politics what would be the motive? How about partisan sympathy for Trump?
What partisan sympathy? The same partisan sympathy that elected him. As we saw in Chapter Unprecedented Animus there was a lot of sympathy for Trump-or to use Trey Gowdy’s faux indignant phrase he used during questioning Peter Strozk-unprecedented animus at the FBI in 2016.
UPDATE: Do we need this quote or just CF the Chapter The FBI is a Very Republican Place?
“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.
“This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.”
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
But this was 2016 when the FBI did everything it could to elect Trump. In the next 4 years after they’d successfully elected him you’d assume the pro Trump bias only intensified with the “rogue agents” running the asylum.
FN: Though as we saw above “a large swath of FBI personnel” was anti Clinton-and so by definition-pro Trump which is why there’s some irony in calling them “rogue” as they were a large number if not a plurality.
This was my assumption during the Trump years-despite the counternarrative of the GOP co-conspirators-that in fact the FBI was, ahem, anti Trump. While this claim doesn’t pass the laugh test, the sad fact is that this absurd claim was taken seriously by many Savvy pundits-and, alas, many in the public.
And indeed, the central point of this chapter is that we now have confirmation of that assumption: the same FBI that elected Trump, that had anti Hillary animus-ie was pro Trump-supported his coup.
“A week after the Jan. 6 attack, an email landed in a top FBI official’s inbox expressing concern that some bureau employees might not be particularly motivated to help bring to justice the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives.
“There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol,” and that it was no different than the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, the person wrote in an email to Paul Abbate, who is now the No. 2 official at the bureau. “Several also lamented that the only reason this violent activity is getting more attention is because of ‘political correctness.’”
“The email, recently disclosed publicly in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, reflects an issue that’s been hanging over the Jan. 6 investigation since it began: the notion that there are some in the bureau who weren’t, and aren’t, particularly driven to bring cases against the Capitol rioters.”
The sender was likely a former agent-clearly he was plugged in-Abbate is now second at the FBI behind Christie’s Bridegate lawyer Christopher Wray.
“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the person wrote to Abbate. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”
The person also wrote that an official in one FBI office in a “red state” said that more than 70% of that office’s counterterrorism squad and about three-quarters of its agent population disagreed with the violence, “but could understand where the frustration was coming from.”
In his response, Abbate wrote: “Thank you [redacted] for sharing everything below.”
“When he received the email, Abbate was the associate deputy director in charge of all FBI personnel, budget, administration and infrastructure. The next month, he was named deputy director, the highest-ranking official under FBI Director Christopher Wray.”
However, this very important, not to say stunning piece is the kind of news story that ends up an “orphan”-as it cuts against the Savvy MSM narrative. Indeed, this cuts against a few MSM narratives: most fundamentally, of American exceptionalism; according to AE, leaders can be be stupid or incompetent but not systematically corrupt. To be sure individual high ranked officials can be corrupt-usually in a small bore way, petty graft etc-but this can’t possibly be systemic.
Like at the FBI there can be individual agents who are corrupt but this corruption can’t be widespread-to claim it is amounts to “a conspiracy theory.”
FN: But it also cuts against the narrative that the “Deep State” was out to get Trump; to the contrary it’s pretty clear that any Deep State such as it is is pro Trump-the FBI, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, DHS…
End FN
Regarding the J6 Committee it reminds you of the nasty word they used to use for children born out of wedlock-they completely ignored this story as it didn”t fit their narrative on what amounts to the greatest security failure since maybe Lincoln’s assassination
FN: See above Politico story.
Apparently there were differences on the Committee regarding the failures of law enforcement-some seemed to harbor the mistaken premise that criticizing the failures of the agencies was disrespecting individual police officers who bravely defended the capitol that day. But the criticism is not about the individual rank and file many who performed bravely that day but the leadership-that’s the locus of the failure.
Just recently CSMonitor asked if the security failures revealed on January 6 have been fixed? How could they be as they haven’t been confronted at all?
It can’t be confronted as it conflicts with the conventional wisdom and narrative-the cause was not logistical but the fact that there was-and is-a lot of pro Trump sympathy in the various law enforcement agencies-not just the FBI, but the Secret Service, DHS, the Pentagon, etc.
But the conventional wisdom finds such partisanship at the institutional level as unthinkable, impossible.
One has to at least ask if this is why the most important communications in US history-note that even during the Civil War the capitol was never breached-all just happened to be deleted across these agencies rather than the coinkydink that they all planned to do mass deletions on January 6.
In the case of the Secret Service-with has a lot of the same pro Trump bias as the FBI-it certainly seems the most plausible reason that all those texts were deleted was they were too embarrassing for Trump the SS leadership itself-James Murray, Tony Ornato, etc.
And it’s a pretty reasonable conjecture that this is why the texts at the other agencies-DHS,Pentagon, etc-were also all deleted. In violation of federal records retention law.
In what way would the texts likely embarrass these agencies? They’d likely show how they were all Trump’s hacks and perhaps give us a lot more information on just why they failed so spectacularly on J6. Indeed, a clue might be contained in the story we looked at above of how many FBI agents haven’t investigated J6. Those FBI hacks-Trump’s hacks-who have obstructed the investigation-may well have obstructed it’s effective prevention before the fact.
UPDATE:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/05/03/ex-fbi-agent-arrested/