I won’t get into my entire Change Story but my change took the better part of ten years. It started with a couple of inconvenient facts. But facts weren’t enough. And it took a lot of time, a lot of cognitive dissonance, a lot of honest soul searching, ‘What do I actually believe?’ type of stuff.

The Progressivism I was raised around was a cult. And breaking that hold is a hefty task on the singular level. On the societal? I shudder.

“If Mifsud is a Western asset, well, that proves Papadopouls was being set up.”

It is worth remembering a recent court filing by the FBI where we discover James Comey documented each “Crossfire Hurricane” intelligence decision. Within the CYA memos Comey included the ID of code-named spies in a journal of sorts, that remains hidden for now. I have a hunch the full Comey journal will soon be released.

A court filing originally scheduled for April 15th, to determine the outcome of the multiple memos, and FBI closed-court discussion therein, was delayed until May 7th, tomorrow:
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The number of Comey memos is why I now describe them collectively as the Comey “journal”. {Go Deep} The reason I suspect the “journal” will soon be released is connected to the recent New York Times release admitting to the use of FBI intelligence assets (Stefan Halper and Azra Turk)) in the Trump operation.

Last week’s NYT “spy” admission followed a report a month earlier (everyone forgot) that DOJ Inspector General was investigating the FBI use of Stefan Halper.

CTH notes a conspicuous similarity where all FBI leaks are positioned to present justifications ahead of document/investigative releases adverse to the group’s interests. These leaks appear to be planned releases from corrupt officials still employed within the FBI, and political allies outside government (Lawfare and MSM).

All of the leaks are justifications. The Comey’s memos, as described by Weissmann and Mueller’s lead FBI Agent, David Archey, are also based around “justification”.

FBI Director James Comey transparently wrote those justification memos in his journal in 2016 and 2017 exactly for a moment when/if questions were raised about what the FBI investigators were doing.

Considering there were already FBI investigators taking notes and documenting the operation, there is no other intellectually honest motive for James Comey writing an independent journal other than justifying the specific activity.

It would make sense for the currently employed corrupt FBI officials to head-off any inquiry, and lead their defense, with documents/leaks that justify their activity.

https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2019/05/another-day-on-conlawprof.html

Professor AAA: To say, therefore, that no one was misled by Barr[’s] [letter] is simply wrong, even if one over generously conceded that there was no intention to do so.

Tillman: Barr’s letter was a summary of principal conclusions. All knew that the full report (less redactions) would come out in a few weeks’ time. The idea that people were too stupid to suspend judgment until the later of the two events or that people who had not suspended their judgment were constitutionally incapable of changing their minds in light of the full report demeans the common sense of everyman. No one was misled. My guess is that no one on this list will admit to being so misled—it is just other people they think were misled. And if a listserv member tells us they were misled but changed their mind in light of the redacted report, why do they think others have not done the same?

The idea that Americans were misled by an Executive Branch letter from a presidential appointee ….

“Interesting in all the discussion of this dossier that went on to infect the Mueller investigation for years is that many of its details almost certainly could have been disproven by the NSA and the CIA in a matter of hours, considering the vast technological reach of those intelligence agencies. Maybe it was. If so, that would make “the entire investigation some kind of twisted American version of Kafka’s The Trial, with the president as a most unlikely Joseph K. “Witch hunt” would be an understatement.”

https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/05/03/barr-vs-mueller-on-obstruction-anatomy-of-an-epic-chess-move/

With Mueller basing his activities on the open-ended interpretation of 1512, there was no way to force an end to his “investigation” – and therefore, someone with higher authority had to make the decision that the Mueller interpretation would not govern the course of events.

As for how Barr was brought into it, Chamberlain’s proposition appears plausible. The important take-away from his treatment is not that we have a set of validated answers, tied up in a bow. It’s that this is a superb illustration of how the confrontation of the “Deep State” with the Trump administration is taking place.

That Trump himself has the capacity to maneuver in this manner – a manner that involves wielding levers, inducing outcomes rather than forcing them frontally, recognizing the pressure points that other people’s expertise identifies for him – has been apparent to me for a while. If Chamberlain is mostly right, it’s also apparent that Trump’s legal team felt empowered as well as motivated to pursue an audacious strategy.

It’s a perfectly legal strategy, and fully justified given that Trump is the duly elected president, and there is no justification whatsoever for a special counsel holding him at open-ended risk for the rest of his term (or, indeed, for the rest of time). The rule-of-law principle militates against open-ended risk, just for starters. But on the narrower point, Chamberlain’s (and “Huber’s”) argument is compelling that 1512 was not designed as a basis for holding subjects at open-ended risk of obstruction charges.

I have no doubt that lawyers can and will argue this in dozens of narrowly-scoped ways, and more power to them. My view here is one of operational maneuver and strategy.

https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/05/06/papadopoulos-joseph-mifsud-said-to-have-attended-dinner-with-hillary-clinton-during-2016-campaign/

The significance of the NYT article this past week is this. We are no longer disputing whether Halper’s outreach to Papadopoulos was related to Russiagate/Spygate. The anti-Trump camp is done with pooh-poohing that idea. The NYT article concedes that Halper’s contact with Papadopoulos was about gaining information on the Trump campaign.

It’s a major and game-changing concession. Reader’s choice as to whether the objective of that contact was a defensive one (as framed in the NYT article), or represented aggressive, unjustified spying on Trump.
Either way, the September 2016 gambit with Papadopoulos was a designed plan, meaning its features weren’t dictated by circumstance. They were chosen at the discretion of the planners. Putting it another way, the plan wasn’t just about following leads. It was about devising scenarios and narratives – including sending people with fake names and credentials to make contact with targeted individuals – in order to gain access to Trump campaign information. The nature of what the NYT wrote up tells us that.

So it was, indeed, an operation to provoke events and outcomes, and not just an investigation looking by forensic methods for existing, passively-available clues.
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The important point for the purpose of this one is that the door has been opened to viewing the U.S. agency probe of the Trump campaign as an operation, in which the agents sought to gain intelligence by inducing behavior in campaign staffers, and not just an investigation.

With that in mind, we are justified in asking whether it is really true that no such operational approach was envisioned prior to late July 2016, when Operation Crossfire Hurricane was reportedly initiated.
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A dinner of that kind wouldn’t be a place for doing back-closet business. But if Simona Mangiante is right, and Mifsud was there with Pittella, it’s a reminder that the circles Mifsud ran in were weighted heavily toward those of European, progressive internationalism – plugged in with the high-profile Western elite, and organizations like the Soros-backed European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), of which so many of the Russiagate/Spygate players are or have been members. The scent on Mifsud is not a Russian one.

As we sort through the avalanche in the coming days, these factors will assume increasing relevance. It has been evident for some time that the “why?” of Spygate doesn’t start with the FBI. A few more data points about Mifsud and Pittella help to shape things up for us.
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Another is the interesting point that Joseph Mifsud was listed as a member of Soros’s ECFR in 2017, apparently still cycling through the typical activities of that world for at least part of the year.

And a third is Mifsud’s appearance with Pittella in June 2017 at an event sponsored by the Democratic (Socialist) Youth organization in Italy. Mifsud had already been interviewed by the FBI at that point, and if there were alarms in Western intelligence agencies about his loyalties and links to Russia, it’s curious – as Devin Nunes says – that he continued to run tame among the same politicians and government officials as before.

Bad men rule us.
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Excellent article; it has not staled after 2 years, but has mostly been vindicated.
Interesting comment at the end:
joeyWo Guest • 2 years ago
Mickey Kaus tweeted this point best…
“We’ve appointed Mueller to decide whether to believe his friend, or the guy who humiliatingly fired his friend.”

Well, JHC, you’re on your way to what actually is the Light Side of the Force.