The Danchenko trial: on framing Trump, on exonerating Hunter
There is a lot of reportage (on the right, anyway) about some of the revelations in the Danchenko trial. I’ve been meaning to write a post about that. But one of the problems is that the legal issues in the trial are a bit difficult to understand, and not many of the explanations offer sufficient clarification of what’s going on.
The other thing that has me dragging my heels is that I strongly suspect this trial will not matter. The half of the country on the Democrat side, and most of the MSM, will ignore the shocking parts and/or emphasize the parts that can be spun in a way more favorable to the FBI and the Democrats.
And a conviction probably won’t happen. Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy on why a conviction will be difficult:
A witness cannot properly be accused of lying if he has not been asked a question that would necessarily have elicited the information the government claims has been withheld. It is objectionable for a prosecutor to ask me, “Isn’t it a fact that you never told the FBI you robbed the bank?” if there is no evidence that the FBI ever asked me whether I robbed the bank. It is not my job to volunteer information (let alone incriminating information); it is the investigators’ job to ask.
It is entirely possible — I’d be willing to bet that it’s likely — that Danchenko was disingenuous in his some of his discussions with the FBI about the sources of information that he fed to Steele. But to prove that he intentionally made false statements, the prosecution will have to establish that he was asked sharp questions and gave clear answers that were plainly untrue.
In other words, here’s my understanding of what’s going on: with Russiagate and the Steele dossier: the FBI clearly did not want to know the truth and in fact actively avoided seeking it. They instead appear to have been intent on implicating Trump and therefore did not pursue the obvious holes in the stories being told. Therefore convicting someone like Danchenko will be difficult (as it was with Sussman). Because the FBI was guilty of essentially framing the president, being lied to or misled was accomplished with the FBI’s willing participation, and prosecuting someone under a law about lying to the FBI becomes an uphill battle.
Earlier, McCarthy wrote this:
It remains to be seen whether Durham can prove these charges…
What is not in doubt, though, is that the trial is highlighting the FBI’s shocking malfeasance in the Trump-Russia “collusion” probe, which it codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
The first witness in the case was FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, of whom Durham himself conducted the prosecution’s questioning. Auten conceded the FBI had offered Steele $1 million if he could prove his sensational allegations that Trump was in cahoots with the regime of Vladimir Putin and that the Kremlin was positioned to blackmail the then-candidate because it supposedly possessed a video recording of Trump engaging in sexual hijinks.
Ultimately, the bureau never had to pay the $1 million because neither Steele nor Danchenko could prove the dossier allegations. In fact, according to court filings, Durham’s investigation has concluded the so-called pee tape was a complete fabrication. Further, when the FBI finally got around to interviewing Danchenko, months after it first received Steele’s reporting, Danchenko debunked it as a screed of rumor and innuendo, much of it exaggerated and gussied up to look like professional intelligence analysis…
More to the point, though, that the FBI offered to pay such an exorbitant sum in hopes Steele’s anti-Trump claims could be backed up is proof positive that the bureau knew these claims were not verified.
That is key. The rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Justice Department mandate the FBI must verify information before submitting it to the court in applying for surveillance warrants. Even though it could not prove the Steele allegations and had every reason to know they were exaggerated if not out-and-out false, the FBI relied on the Steele claims in sworn applications.
It gets worse. The FBI obtained FISC surveillance warrants to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in October 2016 and mid-January 2017, representing to the court that Trump appeared to be in a corrupt conspiracy with the Kremlin. Finally, in late January, the FBI interviewed Danchenko, who debunked Steele’s reporting. Nevertheless, even after speaking with Danchenko, the bureau continued relying on Steele’s allegations when — again under oath — it persuaded the court to extend the surveillance in April and June 2017…
Indeed, not only did the FBI fail to disclose to the Justice Department and the court that Danchenko had contradicted Steele’s claims. The bureau told the court it had interviewed Danchenko to “further corroborate” Steele’s reporting (which actually had not been corroborated). In so doing, the bureau elaborated, it found Danchenko to be “truthful and cooperative.”
Of course, what the FBI didn’t mention was that what Danchenko had been “truthful and cooperative” about was the fact that Steele’s claims were sheer nonsense. Thus, FISC judges were led to believe Danchenko had verified Steele’s reporting when the truth was just the opposite.
There’s also, of course, the fact that some of the agents involved in pushing lies to implicate Trump were the same people involved in pushing lies to exonerate Hunter Biden. That, more than anything else, starkly highlights the FBI’s pro-Democrat bias. They lied to hurt Trump’s chance of re-election and they lied to prop up Biden’s chances (more on that here).
You can find more details about recent testimony in the trial in this piece, which is long but well worth reading. Here’s an excerpt (in the following, Durham asks the questions, and an FBI agent named Helson is answering):
Q. All right. Well, what about looking at what [Danchenko] had said as compared to what the records showed? Did you do that going backward?
A. Not going backwards, no.
Q. Did they make a specific recommendation to you that the Bureau behavioral assessment group conduct an examination to determine what Mr. Danchenko’s actual motives, allegiances and vulnerabilities were?
A. Yes.
Q. And did you do that?
A. No…
Q. Were you — was it recommended that you do an assessment or to look at the financial nature of Mr. Danchenko’s employment because of the concern that he may be prone to shopping around his information in search of work and pre-composing reporting containing unsolicited material, which may indicate the FBI is not the primary audience for his information?
A. Yeah, I saw that in the report.
Q. Did you do that?
A. No.
Q. Was it recommended that the Washington Field Office determine whether Mr. Danchenko committed any unauthorized illegal activity for the apparent falsehoods and inaccuracies contained in his visa and immigration documents?
A. Yes, they recommended that.
Q. Did you do that?
A. No.
Then Durham asked Helson about the Washington Field Office recommendation to polygraph Danchenko, apparently concerned with Danchenko’s loyalties:
Q. Did they specifically recommend to the Washington Field Office and you that you considered administering a polygraph of Mr. Danchenko to determine if he has ever been tasked by a foreign individual, entity or government to collect information or to perform actions adverse to the U.S. interest?
A. They recommended that, yes.
Q. Did you do that?
A. No.
Inflation, recession: “unexpectedly”
The economic news is grim, and often described as worse than expected. But for anyone who spends time purchasing groceries – just to take one near-universal example – it’s not really a surprise of any sort.
Prices consumers pay for a wide variety of goods and services rose more than expected in September as inflation pressures continued to weigh on the U.S. economy.
The consumer price index increased 0.4% for the month, more than the 0.3% Dow Jones estimate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On a 12-month basis, so-called headline inflation was up 8.2%, off its peak around 9% in June but still hovering near the highest levels since the early 1980s.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core CPI was even higher for the month, accelerating 0.6% against the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.4% increase. Core inflation was up 6.6% from a year ago, the biggest 12-month gain since August 1982.
And then there’s this:
Headline PPI inflation showed prices increasing 0.4 percent in September, double the 0.2 percent economists predicted for a 12-month increase of 8.5 percent, a rate that also surpassed Wall Street estimates. What’s more, the month-over-month number shows that cost increases are accelerating for producers, with final demand services advancing 0.4 percent in September after increasing 0.3 percent in August.
If you need a crib sheet for those acronyms, here it is:
Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) data measure costs for consumer goods and services. In contrast, Producer Price Index (PPI) measure costs for producers, such as businesses. The PPI was once called the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) which may be a simpler description of what it’s measuring – whole prices rather than consumer prices.
Here’s a pessimistic overview and prediction about the situation:
We are in a recession and we are going into a deep one. I don’t see anything changing until at a bare minimum 2026…
Why do I say 2026 before anything trending now changes?
We have an election in 26 days. Even if the Republicans sweep and take over Congress, there still is an administration running the massive Executive Branch of government that will push inflationary policies. They will continue their war on fossil fuels because of “global warming” which is one of the biggest charlatan canards ever put on humanity. Hence, even with a Republican Congress things only slow down
You assume Republicans will cut spending and do the right things. That’s a big assumption. There is a new crop of Republicans that are running that seem to “get it” and hopefully will be a strong voice in the conversation. They will be better than the Democrats but there are plenty of stupid Republicans. See Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham.
The next President will assume office in 2025. Assuming he/she is an accomplished executive from the Republican Party, it will take them a year to get their administration up to speed.
Energy underpins the economy. Steady cheap energy helps moderate prices. Manufacturing needs cheap energy. People need cheap energy to get to their place of business. Trucking and shipping need cheap energy to deliver goods.
Are we having fun yet?
Is this the Democrats’ next move in their pro-transgender, anti-parent crusade?
A Virginia Democrat lawmaker says she will introduce legislation to have parents criminally prosecuted if they do not “affirm” their child as transgender. Teachers and social workers would report parents to Child Protective Services under the bill envisioned by state Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D-Fauquier).
Guzman told WJLA that “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
Guzman, a social worker, went public with her plans to introduce the bill a week after The Daily Wire reported that a National Association Of School Psychologists official named Amy Cannava boasted that she was working with an unnamed state delegate matching Guzman’s description to craft such legislation. “I want to see a kid in a home with food and shelter and insurance and support, but I also don’t want to lose kids to death,” Cannava said, adding that “I will not deny the fact that I have put parents in their place in my office or at school.”
The talk of losing kids to “death” is a reference to the idea that untreated trans kids will be committing suicide in significant numbers, and that treating them medically by transitioning them will stop this from occurring. This is a very common argument of pro-child transition advocates (and in fact, online pro-trans groups often counsel minors to say they are suicidal even when they’re not, because then transition will happen), although it’s based on faulty data (see this as well as this).
The Virginia bill won’t be passed. But that’s because the House of Delegates in Virginia is presently controlled by Republicans. I can well imagine that in a blue state, such a bill might succeed in the future. And most social workers – who are largely on the left – would probably have no objection to carrying it out.
Got a late start today
And among other things, earlier today there was a server problem. Did anyone experience difficulties getting to the blog this morning? Just curious; all seems well now.
Open thread 10/14/22
The only one of these I don’t recall is Burdines, which apparently was located solely in Florida:
Money magazine has an interesting way to rate the best places in the US to live
Apparently, “diversity” ranks high, which makes Atlanta the best place to live in the US:
Money Magazine recently released its list of the best places to live in the U.S. It is riddled with pompous virtue-signaling and plagued by diversity-induced myopia that skews rankings to fit a progressive, multicultural agenda. Indeed, the magazine admits that it “gave preference toward places with populations that were less than 80% white.” Many places probably are, but why propagate such bias instead of applying the criteria (education, jobs, housing, quality of life, etc.) objectively?
Because we all know that way too many white people make a place less desirable live in.
More:
Constrained by its contrived diversity data, Money Magazine proclaims crime-infested Atlanta, Georgia as the best place to live in the U.S. in 2022. The reason: its booming jobs market and “eye on equality.” Unfortunately, the politicians in Atlanta, and other liberal enclaves, often conflate equality with equity, going beyond equal opportunity to ensure equal outcomes.
Pollsters may include crime and safety as one metric to measure voter concerns, but the perverted ranking methods used by Money Magazine use “health and safety” as a criterion, perhaps in an effort to dilute the weighting of crime. And yet, the magazine speciously claims that “we look at the things that matter most to people.”
It makes more sense that health — including access to clinics and hospitals — be considered separately from safety, which is more related to crime stats. And according to those numbers, Atlanta is a very unsafe place. “With a crime rate of 45 per one thousand residents, Atlanta has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes.”
And remember, this is in Money magazine, not the Social Justice Warror Weekly (yes, I made that second periodical up, but I think it has a certain euphonious ring). It’s also an interesting example of how “diversity” has been elevated as a transcendent good in and of itself, and how the word is now defined almost solely as being racial. Not even ethnic diversity matters – for example, if a city was over 80% white but those white groups were very ethnically diverse, that wouldn’t qualify for the label. And diversity of thought, as in political thought? Not desirable or perhaps even undesirable, I guess.
NOTE: Here’s a link to the Money article.
Roundup!
(1) Seven times supposed “disinformation” was the truth.
(2) The Saudis say that Biden tried to pressure them to delay cutting oil production for a month, till after the midterms.
The statement comes a day after Biden threatened Saudi Arabia on CNN, telling anchor Jake Tapper that the Kingdom will face “consequences” if it moves to cut oil production…
The bad blood between Biden and the kingdom go back to the 2020 presidential election, when the then-Democrat candidate vowed to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” state because of its alleged involvement in Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.
It worked against Corn Pop, didn’t it?
(3) It should come as no surprise that Mayorkas was knowingly misleading about the “whipping” by the border agents:
The media screamed that the men on horseback were “whipping” the poor defenseless undocumented future welfare recipients. ..Mayorkas repeated after Jen Psaki (remember her?) and said he found the pictures “horrifying.”
“Horrifying!”
The trouble was, however, there were no whips. What might have looked like whips to people innocent of the art of horseback riding were actually reins, items to control horses, not wayward aliens attempting to cross our southern border illegally…
And here’s the cherry on top: Mayorkas knew that the media narrative was, if I may so put it, horseshit. This just out from Fox News’s Bill Melugin: “Mayorkas was alerted by DHS’s top public affairs official that the ‘whipping’ narrative behind horseback BP photos wasn’t true, but at a WH press conference 2.5 hours later, he didn’t refute that narrative, instead calling the images ‘horrifying.’”
Notice that I didn’t write that Mayorkas lied. That’s because, as with so many creative liars, he didn’t exactly lie but said something that was designed to lead the listener to an incorrect conclusion. Apparently, many ignorant people had found the photos “horrifying” because they had no idea what was being pictured, and the Democrats and the MSM were leading them by the use of propaganda to incorrect conclusions. Mayorkas was doing his bit to do the same.
(4) Nury Martinez’s exit from the LA City Council doesn’t contain much of an apology.
Martinez bad-mouthed so many groups in her secretly-recorded remarks that one thing you can say for her is that she’s an equal-opportunity bigot.
(5) On the recent Ken Burns documentary about America and the Holocaust:
Jewish parents should be aware, for example, that those are not proto-Nazis making college life hell for their children from Berkeley to NYU. In the U.S. Congress, those are not proto-Nazis fomenting hatred of Israel. In the State Department, it is not neo-Nazis who are urging treaties and amity with an Iranian regime that has vowed to exterminate the Jewish state and its people. Nor is it neo-Nazis assaulting Jews in Brooklyn, or neo-Nazis at the New York Times maligning the Jews and their homeland. Yet sadly among those last-mentioned maligners are, to repeat, American Jews and even some who pride themselves on repairing the world.
All of this is known to the filmmakers to PBS, which is why they and others have taken such care to redirect any potential anxiety about the precipitous rise in anti-Jewish politics away from such threats toward the more convenient and already disparaged far-right.
Russia the humiliated
Commenter “Bauxite” has some interesting things to say:
Russia is what it is. It’s a big mess, and it has been a big mess more often than not for most of its history.
I have no argument with that.
Next:
But, at least because of its natural resources and its nuclear arsenal, Russia is still a major power.
I agree as well. However, the Ukraine war has so far given evidence that Russia’s conventional military forces are not as good as originally thought, although its nuclear arsenal still gives it enormous power to threaten.
More:
Russia also found itself in a situation after the Cold War where many long-time regions of the Russian empire became independent neighbor states. This includes Georgia and especially the Ukraine.
“Found itself”? I don’t think that phrasing quite covers the fact that the USSR collapsed internally after many years of corruption, tyranny, and aggression, and lost some of its empire, as has happened from time immemorial to once-powerful nations.
By the way, Crimea was only annexed in 1783 into the Russian Empire, when the Ottoman Empire of which Crimea had been a part since the mid-1400s was defeated. As far as Ukraine goes, I wrote about its history in this post as well as this.
Bauxite goes on to add:
You can talk about NATO or the EU, but the bottom line is that western policy over the last 20+ years has been to pull former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit and into the western orbit.
I would amend that this way: “…the bottom line is that Russian policy over the last 100 or so years has been to push former long-time pieces of greater Russia out of the Russian orbit, and later they leapt at the chance to voluntarily become part of the far more attractive the western orbit.”
More:
It is virtually impossible to do that without humiliating Russia.
Russia has humiliated itself. And it goes on doing so.
Furthermore:
That’s not to say that the Ukrainians wouldn’t be better off in a western oriented country. I have no doubt that they would. That’s not to defend Russian action in any way at any point in history. There are myriad reasons to criticize Russian policy going all the way back to the Czars.
Agreed.
And then:
What I’m saying is this – Humiliating a major power is very risky. If one decides to pursue a policy that involves humiliating a major power, one had better have a very good plan. A humiliated major power is an immensely dangerous thing.
Indeed, a humiliated major power is an immensely dangerous thing. But there are really only two choices in dealing with an aggressive and tyrannical power – appeasement or opposition. Russia’s own internal horrors as the USSR helped lead to its defeat and dissolution, and its external aggression and tyranny helped lead many of its former possessions to not want to be part of it.
Russia actually was welcomed into the economic sphere as a friend when western Europe became dependent on it for fuel. But Russia – led by Putin – has responded by reverting to aggression and tyranny towards its now-sovereign neighbors. The west’s helping Ukraine to oppose that successfully might indeed result in more “humiliation” for Russia, but the alternative to that is to allow Russia to swallow up other sovereign nations in Europe. That is also immensely dangerous, as appeasement usually is – and as a failure to stand up to nuclear blackmail also is.
The situation is intrinsically dangerous.
Open thread 10/13/22
RIP Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury has died just a few days shy of her 97th birthday. The linked article goes into a long list of her many accomplishments and roles, but it leaves out my personal favorite, in one of my favorite movies. In case you haven’t seen “The Court Jester,” here Danny Kaye is under a hypnotic spell that transforms him from meek into bold, and the trigger for the changeover is snapped fingers. Lansbury plays his royal love interest, when he’s in the bold state:
Women in academia and their effect on the university
This is a fascinating article that discusses the effect of high numbers of women in academia. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit, and I had already come to some reluctant conclusions that are in line with the conclusions of the authors.
It’s not that only women exhibit the described tendencies, but they are setting the tone and driving the woke revolution. I first noticed it myself when I was in graduate school in the 1990s, and it got more noticeable when Larry Summers was forced to leave Harvard (I wrote about that in many posts, for example this ancient one). It’s only gotten more extreme since.
Some excerpts from the Quillette article:
Today, an institution once led and populated almost entirely by men, is increasingly led and populated by women. Because men and women (on average) have different traits, tendencies, and priorities, this change in sex ratios has changed and will continue to change the nature of the modern university…
…It is increasingly evident that men and women view the purpose of higher education and science differently, and that many emerging trends in academia can be attributed, at least in part, to the feminization of academic priorities…
A 2017 YouGov survey of 2,300 US adults on issues related to free speech and tolerance on college campuses (weighted to be nationally representative) found that:
56 percent of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas; 64 percent of women said that they should.
When presented with a variety of controversial claims made by speakers (e.g., men are better at math, all white people are racist, police are justified at stopping African Americans at higher rates), a majority of men supported nine of the 11 speakers’ right to speak on campus, and a majority of women opposed all 11 speakers’ right to do so.
51 percent of men said colleges should not disinvite speakers if students threaten violent protest; 67 percent of women said they should.
58 percent of men opposed a confidential reporting system at colleges which students could use to report offensive comments; 54 percent of women supported it…A 2021 survey of 3,772 academics and PhD students at universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada conducted by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that:
66–76 percent of men support intellectually foundational texts above diversity quotas on reading lists; 44–66 percent of women support diversity quotas above foundational texts.
Female academics report a greater willingness than their male counterparts to support dismissal campaigns against a colleague who has conducted research that reached a controversial conclusion.
The article goes on to cite similar research and many similar findings, and summarizes them this way:
The overall theme of these differences is that men are more committed than women to the pursuit of truth as the raison d’être of science, while women are more committed to various moral goals, such as equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups. Consequently, men are more tolerant of controversial and potentially offensive scientific findings being pursued, disseminated, and discussed, and women are more willing to obstruct or suppress science perceived to be potentially harmful or offensive. Put more simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.
That’s being kind. Actually, the function of a university is not to proselytize or to make people feel good, or to suppress the truth, it is to seek the truth. The idea is that this is a good in and of itself, a sort of secular “the truth shall make you free” philosophy. Other institutions – the church, the family, the therapy profession – are the ones to deal with the rest. But apparently more women than men wish to remake the university in order to have it take on those tasks, and for the most part it’s already happened.
I am a woman, but I certainly do not agree. And if you look at the figures, it’s hardly a straight man/woman split. But it is just as obvious that the tendency to want such a transformation is more pronounced in women, or certainly in women who pursue careers in universities.
More from the article:
Women evolved, as Anne Campbell memorably put it, to survive so they could nurture their vulnerable offspring. Thus, women are more likely to experience self-protective emotions such as anxiety and fear, to be more harm- and risk-averse, and to have more empathy and desire to protect the vulnerable. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to take risks and to endorse hierarchy and support for conflict.
Yes, but. I’m a fairly risk-averse and pretty consistent worrier myself, but I’ve never made the error of thinking a university should either share or support those qualities. How hard is it to separate one’s own emotions from the agenda you think an institution ought to have? I don’t think it should be hard at all – but apparently it is, for many people. And the more people (women or men) who have decided these are perfectly valid functions for universities, the more people they will hire who feel the same way, and the more they will teach their students that this is the way it should be. Therefore the phenomenon will grow and grow, until perhaps some backlash causes it to reverse itself.
NOTE: Of course, leftism and post-modernism enter into this a great deal, in particular the idea that there is no objective truth. Once a person believes that, then of course it would follow that there’s no point in seeking it.