Susan Rice and the memo: the lady doth protest too much, methinks
We’ve known for a long time that Susan Rice wrote a strange CYA memo on Inauguration Day that said President Obama:
…wanted to be sure “every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’”
The “issue” was Russian interference in the 2016 election, the investigation of Michael Flynn, and what to tell the incoming Trump administration about all of this.
Now we have what purports to be the full and unredacted memo, and today Rice is reported to have added this:
#BREAKING: @AmbassadorRice’s team confirms to #FoxNews that she was directed by White House Counsel to write the Jan 20, 2017 memorandum documenting an Oval Office meeting in which President Obama & National Security officials discussed #MichaelFlynn.
— Gillian Turner (@GillianHTurner) May 20, 2020
Everyone knows that note-to-self CYA emails you write at the direction of a lawyer, weeks after the event allegedly being memorialized, is the Gold Standard as regards candor and truthfulness.
Right?
Ace’s sarcasm is highly justified.
My opinion? Guilt or innocence isn’t judged by memos like this, which are the equivalent of someone saying “We did everything just right.” Look at the actions, not the self-serving words. This is true of everyone, right or left or in-between.
The actions of the Obama administration and various agency officials (Comey, etc.) in this matter are highly irregular and extremely suspect in too many ways to list here. Obama, as president, apparently had a fair amount of knowledge of it. Whether or not he directed the finer points, or whether he allowed the lower-downs to do their dirty deeds knowing he could trust them to hurt the Trump administration maximally – but wanted to protect himself from the sort of specific knowledge and involvement that might implicate him too heavily – is unknown. It probably will never be known, because it’s not as though Obama wrote a memo to himself saying “I told Comey to lie to Flynn and to leak to the press…”
And calling something a “conspiracy theory” is merely a description, although it’s a description that carries a lot of baggage. Many conspiracy theories are preposterous. Some are correct, because you know what? Conspiracies do exist.
There is plenty of evidence now that there was a conspiracy – and a mostly successful one, at least until now – to taint Trump falsely as “Putin’s puppet,” to hector and threaten and legally abuse some of his confederates and family in hopes that they will implicate him (falsely, if necessary), to leak classified information to the press in order to harm him, and to set the (false) grounds to impeach him and/or hamper his re-election.
What role Obama played is unclear and may always remain unclear. That is by design.
But I think the “book” Rice was talking about was actually written by Alinsky or perhaps Machiavelli. And it’s only by a series of accidents – in combination with the fact that the GOP is still in charge of the Senate and the AG position – that the plotters have been exposed.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to this passage from “Hamlet.”]
It is curious indeed that those most heavily invested in the “conspiracy to taint Trump falsely as Putin’s puppet” are almost invariably those most completely unwilling to acknowledge the very real subservience of many progressives in this country (from lobbyists in DC to members of Congress to Hollywood to Big Tech to many Fortune 500 companies) to the CCP in Beijing.
She wants to be Biden’s Veep. She’s up there with Stacey Abrams, Gretchen Whitmer, and Kamala Harris. With AOC as his environmental policy head, Biden is sure to be a winner
I’d like to think this is a sign of the first rat, among many, looking for a lifeboat. I’m probably going to be disappointed.
As they say, a rotten fish stinks from the head on down.
The only question is whether they’ll be able to outsmart Lady Justice.
The flak from the MSCM will be deafening.
The House Democrats will be screaming “Impeachment”.
While all the beautiful people will be shrieking “Conspiracy Theory”.
All those fine, intelligent, decent, caring, ethical, lovely, loving people.
Are they on the cusp of experiencing their “Russians-at-the-gates-of-Berlin” moment?
For their sakes and the sake of the country, I certainly hope so.
But I guess we’ll have to wait and see….
And hope.
Obama took the “Chicago way” to DC. In other words a regime of slush funds, every imaginable form of corruption, skulduggery, and ruthlessness.
I so want Susan Rice to go to jail.
I have a list…maybe 8-ish names & she’s #3…Comey, Clapper, Rice, Brennan…and the also-seditious remainders…But I want Rice…smug hateful thing that she is…
The problem here is that, for far too many people who are Conservative and who have been paying attention, the evidence—especially what has been done and revealed over the last dozen, and especially the last four or so years—has been mounting that the Republic we thought we had is all surface, but increasingly little substance–a shell.
And that underneath the illusory surface of that reassuring shell, the Left has been busily eating away at the Republic in all spheres of Life—-at its essence, at its core values, and its standards and procedures.
That the Republic has, in fact, been largely gutted, has been hijacked, has been—bit by bit—in its substance, and in all sorts of it’s aspects, “fundamentally transformed” by the armies of the Left, which now occupy the” high ground,” and virtually all the centers of power in our current social and political system.
While the traditional view of the Right used to be the majority view, the Left has now gained control over the majority of public knowledge and perceptions–over what the majority of people “know” and believe, how they view things; over the “narrative.”
That is why what happens here, whether or not any—and preferably several–of the major actors in this attempted coup against President Trump are able to be “brought to Justice”–to be indicted, tried, and convicted–will be a major signal, one telling us on the Right whether all is lost for us and for the Republic as it traditionally was, or whether there is still some hope of reversing things, of turning the Left’s apparently overwhelming tide of victory into what will ultimately be one of defeat.
Obama took the “Chicago way” to DC. In other words a regime of slush funds, every imaginable form of corruption, skulduggery, and ruthlessness.
Again, Obama is nothing like a Chicago alderman, and had no apprenticeship in ward politics. Obama is a higher ed apparatchik transported to the world of electoral politics.
Obama was definitely not a ward-heeler, kiss-the-babies, get-a-job-for-my-cousin type of politician. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have an appetite for political skulduggery, whether or not carried out by someone else, as long as it was to his benefit.
Art Deco:
“Transported”? Yes, others were involved in promoting (“transporting”?) him. But Obama was a major player in promoting (“transporting”) himself in politics, and that had long been part of his plan (indeed it was one of the reasons he moved to Chicago). See this as well.
Obama was never much into the academics. They were a means to an end. He was an Alinskyite and activist first. He went to Harvard Law at the age of 27, which is late, and graduated at around 30. At Harvard Law he ran for head of the Law Review (an elected office at the time) and never wrote an article for it. But the election there got him fame as the first black to head the law review, and then his memoir shortly after that got him more fame. He had a short job teaching law, but then went into politics fairly quickly.
In the interest of transparency, Ambassador Rice again calls upon the Director of National Intelligence to release the unredacted transcripts of all Kislyak-Flynn calls,” Rice’s spokesperson said in a statement. “The American people deserve the full transcripts so they can judge for themselves Michael Flynn’s conduct.”
I’m with Rice on this. Let’s see the full transcripts.
Also, Neo, criticizing Obama for winning elections and being popular is hardly a criticism. Yes, he had ambition to be a politician. So did Trump with not much experience either. It doesn’t really matter. If you win you win. I’ll give Obama and Trump credit for that – politics aside.
He had a short job teaching law, but then went into politics fairly quickly.
He never landed a clerkship and it took him two years to land a job in a firm after completing his degree. He was a 40% time lecturer at the law school for 12 years. He taught boutique courses and produced no scholarly papers in that time. Sleuths have located a single unsigned case note he composed while he was on the law review. Concurrent with that, he practiced law for about three years as an associate in a 12 lawyer firm. He ran for office about five years after he finished law school, at the age of 35. He actually spent less time as a working lawyer than did Joe Biden (though more time than Bilge Clinton, upChuck Schumer, Barney Frank, Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Harkin spent in that trade).
I think most institutions of higher education have a similar set of administrative cones: academic affairs, student affairs, physical plant and general administration, finance, information technology, personnel, athletics; fundraising, alumni relations, and pr. It’s only in the first of these that people with some history of scholarship is common. Obama doesn’t have any training in business or engineering or IT, nor was he ever a coach. Where you’d see the Obamas of this world would be in student affairs or in fundraising &c. A great many people in student affairs have MEd degrees. Some people with MEd degrees got them because that’s the chickensh!t you have to go through in order to teach school. Then there’s the other kind. Whenever you hear of some scandal of the sort that Betsy deVos is attempting to combat, it’s that other kind which is responsible.
Yes, he had ambition to be a politician. So did Trump with not much experience either.
Nice try. One of these men was a highly accomplished businessman who ran for office in old age. The other is an empty suit whose principal accomplishment in life prior to 2007 was passing the bar exam. He faced just one competitive electoral contest prior to 2007, and that one he lost badly. His performance in 2004 was a function of dirty pool played by the media and moles in the clerk of the court’s office.
Obama was definitely not a ward-heeler, kiss-the-babies, get-a-job-for-my-cousin type of politician.
What Elaine Krewer pointed out: that’s labor-intensive work which requires satisfactory one-on-one people skills and an interest in the daily lives of others. Not like BO at all.
Art Deco:
So you’re making the same point I was making: he was not into academics.
I was responding to your earlier statement : “Obama is a higher ed apparatchik transported to the world of electoral politics.” My point is that he was not interested in academics, he was political, and always interested in politics and that was always his goal. He had help, but he “transported” himself though his own desires, alliances with powerful others, and tactics (some of them dirty, some of them involving his personality and presentation of self).
Montage:
When have I ever not given Obama credit for winning elections? Many of my earlier posts have been in reaction to people not giving him that credit and calling him stupid and a tool of others.
I have always said he’s been a major player and very much involved in his own rise. He is also ruthless and intelligent. No genius, but intelligent, and I’ve always cautioned people not to sell him short or underestimate him.
Your one-size-fits-all critique does not fit me.
Here’s another key document that’s just been partially declassified, the “Electronic Communication (EC) that was used as justification for opening up the “Crossfire- Hurricane” investigation–on its face, “information” even less reliable or specific than something scribbled on some restroom wall by some random drunk, or some rumor passed along among a bunch of giggling grade school girls.
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/05/electronic-communication-used-launch-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-spy-operation-trumps-2016-campaign-finally-declassified-released/
Montage:
Be careful what you wish for. Do you remember another phone transcript that Adam Schiff demanded and was released by President Trump? It didn’t work out too well for your team IMO. Something about U Crane and collusion and whistleblows that no Juan knows (Eric C……). And now there is a tape of V. P. Joe talking to another dude from Ukraine. “Well son of a b…..” Funny, that Joe.
om:
I’m waiting for that Biden audio to be authenticated before I write about it.
The Obama administration’s lawless actions are the smoking gun. Obama administration lawyers directing Rice to create a cover up email is the fire’s smoke.
Neo,
It seemed you were selling Obama short with getting his law degree at age 27. That might have been a route taken to his political aspirations but would it be different if he got it 3 years earlier? That’s all. Just seemed a tough criticism.
Om
The Biden phone call tape [if legit] doesn’t reveal anything we don’t already know and which Biden already discussed – he pressured the Ukrainian President to fire the incompetent prosecutor. Whether he did it because the prosecutor was incompetent or did it because the prosecutor was incompetent – but possibly with Hunter in mind seems to be up to whichever team one is on. At this stage I don’t see any voter anywhere changing their mind over this business unless some new evidence comes to light.
I think it is rather silly to believe Obama did not soak up and embrace the Chicago Way. Look at the skulduggery involved in winning his seat in the Illinois Senate… it was by the Chicago Way. He was able to score the keynote speech at the 2004 convention which parachuted him to a win in the 2008 primary. Beating McCain was child’s play with the msm providing air cover. Clever fellow that Barack.
Montage,
Of course no one on the left will let any revelations about Biden sway their vote. The left would vote for Lizzy Borden to score the first POTUS with ovaries.
Montage:
Funny how much “we” already know about Fingers Joe. He’s your man all the way, until he ain’t. The rest of us know what standards Democrat voters hold their candidates to. You dodged my transcript querrie it seems.
Bless your heart, you seem to be such a sweet child.
Forensic “recovered” memories. Documented!
Because….psychology.
I’d love to find the S.O.B. at Occidental who told Obama that with a little more polish he could be President, and beat the crap out of him (or her)!
BTW, has anybody ever interviewed the Australian diplomat, or the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission, or the Legal Attache (FBI Agent), to find out what was really said by Papadopoulus, or anyone else in the chain?