A couple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decided that Governor Ron DeSantis was a public menace who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax response to the coronavirus crisis.
In an interview with National Review, DeSantis says he was surprised at “how knee-jerk” the hostile coverage was, but he “also knew that none of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying.”…
DeSantis and his team have followed the science closely from the beginning, which is why they forged a nuanced approach, but one that focused like a laser on the most vulnerable population, those in nursing homes.
Good for him. Smart man, as well as brave.
In contrast:
…[A}t the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
The media didn’t exactly have their eyes on the ball. “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,” DeSantis recalls, “which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.”
DeSantis is bemused by the obsession with Florida’s beaches. When they opened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone. “Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing-home context,” he says. “Their hospitalizations are down, ICU down since the beaches opened a month ago. And yet, nobody talks about it. It’s just like, ‘Okay, we just move on to the next target.’”
The MSM now reminds me of fortune-tellers and astrologers, as well as those guys with “end of the world is nigh” placards who used to be the butt of this sort of joke. Their predictions are repeatedly false, and yet they just ignore that and go on to make new (false) predictions.
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.
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.”]
Last night I had trouble sleeping, thinking about what’s going on. It’s not just the Russiagate/Obamagate events, or COVID. It’s the brazen duplicity of the reporting around them, and my despair at the fact that so many people are influenced by that. Can they ever be reached, or have their opinions so solidified that no evidence could convince them? I fear the latter.
So here’s something completely different, utterly non-political. This is a guy who has a series on YouTube, discussing singing and playing popular (as opposed to classical) music, mostly from the past.
He’s long-winded, and you don’t have to listen to the whole thing. In fact, I can’t say I understand everything he’s saying. But I think he’s fascinating nevertheless, and I like his genial personality. I never knew that singing had so many complexities to it. Singing isn’t something at which I’m at all skilled, so it’s easy to impress me, and I’m ignorant about technique.
Here’s an example of one of his videos. He’s analyzing Frankie Valli’s performance:
I cannot state strongly enough how unmoored these actions are from the ordinary safeguards our legal system has attempted to provide defendants:
In the case against Michael Flynn the court appointed amicus curiae, essentially a court appointed outside lawyer enlisted to prosecute the case despite the DOJ withdrawal motion, John Gleeson has now filed a motion requesting: (1) a briefing schedule, (2) oral arguments; and (3) the possibility of interviewing witnesses.
It is true that, as described there, John Gleeson is indeed acting as a “court appointed outside lawyer enlisted to prosecute the case despite the DOJ withdrawal motion.” But that is the “unprecedented” part. An amicus curiae does not have that function. You can read this article by Andrew C. McCarthy on how odd it was that Sullivan would ask for amicus briefs in this case, and that was before Gleeson was appointed and it became clear the plan was that he was going to act as a sort of junior judge in a new trial, or at least new discovery for a new trial under new charges (perjury for withdrawing a plea, another previously unheard-of charge). Also please take a look at this article about a recent unanimous SCOTUS ruling that Sullivan is flouting here:
In a nutshell, this concept dictates that judges must decide the case as presented by the parties before them. They are not to go out questing for dragons to slay (or issues to tackle) that the parties have not brought before them. As J. Ginsburg put it: “[C]ourts are essentially passive instruments of government … They ‘do not, or should not, sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right. [They] wait for cases to come to [them], and when [cases arise, courts] normally decide only questions presented by the parties.”
The Conservative Treehouse author of that first article I linked, “sundance,” starts out by saying “This is so far outside the bounds of traditional judicial activity it is unprecedented.” Indeed. But although I also looked at a number of “straight” news articles on the move by Sullivan and Gleeson (the latter of whom had already signaled his anti-Flynn stance in an op-ed written before his appointment), none of them even mentioned the unusual nature of the proceedings.
Meanwhile, Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell had this announcement:
Someone compared this to the Dreyfus case. Just now, looking for who it might have been, I Googled “Michael Flynn is the new Dreyfus,” and got nothing whatsoever that’s relevant. DuckDuckGo gave me this article in fairly short order. It’s from May 8, so the author Gary Spina wasn’t yet aware of Judge Sullivan’s “creative” way of dealing with the DOJ’s decision not to continue with the action, but he says this:
As in the Dreyfus Affair, the prosecutors themselves were the treacherous villains. In the Flynn Affair, Deep State traitors attempted to overthrown a lawfully elected United States president and his administration…
Similarly, Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 was falsely accused and a court martial found him guilty of treason. Perhaps his real crime was being a Jew in antisemitic France. Dreyfus was found guilty based on the tenuous evidenced of a handwriting comparison on scraps of paper (the bordereau) and a letter addressed to a German military attaché in Paris promising to furnish secret documents. In 1896, evidence was discovered that a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the real traitor, but the authorities suppressed the evidence. Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s brother discovered exculpatory evidence, and public outcry resulted in a second military trial. But in 1899, the second military court found Dreyfus guilty. Emile Zola’s famous article “J’accuse” accused the authorities of framing Dreyfus. Zola was found guilty of libel and sentenced to prison but escaped to England. The public outcry was such that French President Loubet pardoned Dreyfus, but only after Dreyfus was broken in body and spirit by the harsh treatment he received at the infamous Devil’s Island prison.
Both the Flynn Affair and the Dreyfus Affair exposed the deep corruption that will forever stain the history of the Washington establishment and France’s Third Republic. Still, some good may result from exposing this tyranny. Hopefully the FBI will be disbanded, the FISA Court stripped of its autonomy and strictly regulated, the IRS declawed and defanged, entrenched bureaucrats subject to firing for malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance, and the Intelligence Agencies swept clean of schemers and traitors.
Ha, ha; dream on. I suppose I shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but that’s where I’m at right now, and unfortunately I think my pessimism is fully justified.
You might also say that Flynn’s legal experience has been Kafkaesque. But there’s also the competing narrative – Alice in Wonderland:
`But what did the Dormouse say?’ one of the jury asked.
`That I can’t remember,’ said the Hatter.
`You must remember,’ remarked the King, `or I’ll have you executed.’
`No, they’re not,’ said the White Rabbit, `and that’s the queerest thing about it.’ (The jury all looked puzzled.)
`He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)
`Please your Majesty,’ said the Knave, `I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’
`If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’
There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.
Right up to the morning of Inauguration Day 2017. So dedicated!
Most people are not even aware of this, because the MSM doesn’t cover it for the most part, and when they do it’s to act as though such behavior is normal. It’s not even remotely normal, and in fact I’d wager nothing like it has ever happened before. Surveilling the incoming first family? Surveilling the new administration in the waning minutes of the old administration? It should shock and outrage everyone.
But even if it were to be made crystal clear that it was completely abnormal, the MSM will continue to pretend it’s either normal, or justified in this case because the Trumps are all in league with Russia.
That’s how lies work – they feed on each other to form a seamless whole that offers an excuse for every offense.
The next thing I’m going to mention might seem to be a side issue, but it’s not. Last night I had heard something about the Obama administration unmasking people on Inauguration Day, and also about unmasking the Trump family (not clear when that happened), but I didn’t know the details. So I tried to Google it today, in an effort to get more information. I did a search just now for “obama unmasked trump family inauguration day.” The first article listed was this one from Fox, a very general announcement from five days ago about the release of the basic unmasking information, and expressing a neutral attitude and the idea that only Republicans are interested in this (and I guess, in a way, that’s the case).
The second article in the Google search was this one from NBC entitled “Trump allies push ‘Obamagate,’ but record fails to back them up: Trump and his supporters have charged that Barack Obama and Joe Biden conspired against Michael Flynn, but there’s no hard evidence to support the claims.” Not exactly responsive to my query, to say the least. But apparently it’s the sort of thing Google wishes readers to see. In fact, the entire first two pages of Google’s listings in that search are the tales told by the left, and it isn’t till I got to the bottom of page 2 that I found the first pro-Trump source (this).
And none of the Googled articles were actually responsive to my query, whether they were anti-Trump (the vast majority) or pro.
The list makes clear that Google’s algorithm yields the stories the left wishes to push. Google will say, of course, that the algorithm is based on something entirely different than that goal. But it clearly works that way and there is no reason to imagine it is not intentional, as well as useful for the left. It also is much less specific than it used to be in pointing the reader to articles relevant to his/her search, whether they be from left or right.
In contrast, DuckDuckGo is spot on. Here’s the search I did there. You can see for yourself (although of course it will change over time) that the list is specific to my quest. I only have looked at the first 10 articles, but that’s enough. They are all about Trey Gowdy’s interview or about things connected with what was revealed, and highly relevant. There were plenty of sources on the right – of course, because the story is only being reported on the right, as far as I can tell.
That’s no surprise either. The coverage of this one little fact stands as a good example of the coverage as a whole. I talk a lot about the press here, and there’s a reason for that – and the search engine Google has become part of the press. In terms of numbers, the influence of the MSM and things like Google’s algorithm have an enormous effect on public perceptions.
The polls might say that people don’t trust the press, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like advertising – the propaganda influences people whether they are aware of it or not. And if they don’t hear about a story, if it can’t even be found on Google despite pointed effort, it’s like that tree falling in an uninhabited forest.
In March, as Cuomo and his braintrust were running about like beheaded chickens shouting about models and Italy, his administration issued an order that required nursing homes to accept hospital patients recovering from Wuhan virus even if those patients were still contagious. The ostensible reason was moving recovering patients to nursing homes freed up hospital beds to treat the Wuhan created carnage. The problem, of course, was that a) there was no great influx of patients, b) nursing homes, already struggling with problems related to infections, were monumentally unsuited to caring for possibly contagious patients, and c) nursing homes are packed with the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. When challenged, this is how Cuomo responded:
“They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that”…
It was not hard to have predicted the outcome. In fact, it was simplicity itself. Nursing home patients were already known to be especially vulnerable to dying from COVID.
…I have those conversations all day long, with people who’ve lost people, right? We lost 139 people yesterday in hospitals. Who is accountable for those 139 deaths? How do we get justice for those families who had 139 deaths? What is justice? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Nobody. Mother Nature? God? Where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth. Best hospital system on the globe, I believe we have. Best doctors, best nurses, who have responded like heroes. Every medication, ventilators, the health system wants for nothing. We worked it out so we always had available beds. No one was deprived of a medical bed or coverage in any way. And still people died. Still people died. Older people, vulnerable people, are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen. Despite whatever you do. Because with all of our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive. Despite everything you do. And older people are more vulnerable. And that is a fact and that is not going to change…Why do people die? Who is accountable?
Party of science, folks.
Let me explain it to Governor Cuomo: Yes, some people in nursing homes would have died anyway. But your actions – yours – caused more of them to die than otherwise would have succumbed. Are you seriously saying that purposely placing COVID patients in nursing homes, forcing the nursing homes to accept them whether they felt protections were or were not adequate, did not increase the number of deaths by a significant amount? Are you stark raving mad, stupid, merely self-serving, or all of the above?
And here’s a song in honor of Cuomo, who also said: “you’re gonna lose people, that’s life…We did everything we could.” Everything you could to what? Hasten their deaths?
It’s not easy to write clearly and succinctly about the outrages that have been going on for the past couple of years that have been given various inadequate nicknames: “Russiagate,” “Spygate,” and now – with an emphasis on the role of the previous administration – “Obamagate” or the more comprehensive “ObamaBidengate.”
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I’m not saying that to get sympathy, it’s just a statement of fact. It takes many hours to even follow the news each day, much less write about it and write about it clearly. The entire story so far is both horrifying and fascinating. So learning about it engenders several competing emotions at once: extreme interest and strong repulsion and outrage, a sort of approach-avoidance dilemma at reading about it at all.
Amidst the turmoil, I especially admire those who can write about it in a way that’s easy to understand, compact, and yet relatively comprehensive, knowing that it would take a several-volume book to cover it all. And it’s even better if that person is not just parroting the party line he or she wishes were true.
One of those rare people is Jonathan Turley – not a Trump fan, not a conservative, but someone who seems to be more than willing to face the truth. This piece by Turley points out how rare a trait that is. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts:
For three years, many in the media have expressed horror at the notion of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. We know there was never credible evidence of such collusion. In recently released transcripts, a long list of Obama administration officials admitted they never saw any evidence of such Russian collusion. That included the testimony of Evelyn Farkas, a former White House adviser who was widely quoted by the media with her public plea for Congress to gather all of the evidence that she learned of as part of the Obama administration.
The media covered her concern that this evidence would be lost “if they found out how we knew what we knew” about Trump campaign officials “dealing with Russians.” Yet in her classified testimony under oath, she said she did not know anything. Farkas is now running for Congress in New York and highlighting her role in raising “alarm” over collusion. As much of the media blindly pushed this story, a worrying story unfolded over the use of federal power to investigate political opponents.
There is very little question that the response by the media to such a story would have been overwhelming if George Bush and his administration had targeted the Obama campaign figures with secret surveillance. That story would have been encompassing if it was learned that there was no direct evidence to justify the investigation and that the underlying allegation of Russian collusion was ultimately found to lack a credible basis.
But the motives of Obama administration officials are apparently not to be questioned. Indeed, back when candidate Donald Trump said the Obama administration placed his campaign officials under surveillance, the media universally mocked him. That statement was later proven to be true. The Obama administration used the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to conduct surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
Yet none of this matters as the media remains fully invested in the original false allegations of collusion. If Obama administration officials were to be questioned now, the coverage and judgment of the media may be placed into question, as even this latest disclosure from the investigation of the unmasking request of Biden will not alter the media narrative.
First they say that masks are worthless. Don’t wear them, even though medical personnel do.
Then they say that masks might be at at least somewhat helpful, but not all that helpful unless they are of the N95 type that only health care professionals have access to because there are not enough for the general population, too.
Then many local tyrants officials require us to wear the relatively inadequate cloth masks when outside the home, or suffer arrest and/or fines.
And through all these recommendation changes, it doesn’t appear that the empirical evidence regarding mask-wearing and COVID has changed all that much.
NOTE: Have you noticed that the word “mask” is featured heavily in the news lately, in two guises? The first is the medical mask, as in this post. And the second has to do with unmaskings, a term of art in government spying.
…[The left adheres to] the idea that, as our knowledge and capabilities have grown, our human nature has also changed–evolved–and that over the last 250 or so years our basic human nature has undergone some kind of “fundamental transformation,” one which requires that we be governed by new principles and a vastly modified and expanded Constitution; one more suited to our new enlightened views, needs, and behaviors.
I, on the other hand, would argue that while the means to achieve our ends have changed, expanded, and grown—as have some of those ends—our basic needs, drives, and motives, what directs us, our basic human nature, has not changed, nor can it (absent some ill-considered and catastrophic “fundamental transformation” of the genetic basis of our nature as human beings), and that the Constitution that was crafted to govern us then, is the same Constitution that we need to govern us now, because our basic nature and fundamental needs, motives, and behaviors have not changed.
That made me think of this older post, featuring some quotes from Allan Bloom that I had written down after listening to a recording of a Bloom lecture from the mid-80s. I lost the link to the recording and couldn’t provide it then, and I can’t provide it now, either. But here’s the relevant portion of the post:
I had tried to transcribe [Bloom’s words] faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:
“You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know ‘that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,’ but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.
“Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.”
Bloom nailed it, about thirty-five years ago.
And meanwhile, progressives are blind to, or adamantly in favor of, the evil they themselves commit.
That satchel that Acting DNI Ric Grenell personally delivered to the Department of Justice on May 7, 2020 was far too big for just a list of the 39 Obama administration officials, including his chief of staff and ambassador to Italy. Those higher ups have been exposed as requesting the unmasking of General Flynn. But there must have been a lot more inside, and that material was voluminous to require a briefcase-sized container, and that is the key to exposing the real extent of the spy operation that President Obama carried out on his political enemies, and the unmasking of General Michael Fynn is just the tip of the iceberg.
That is the basic message of this long and fascinating post by retired naval officer J.E. Dyer at Liberty Unyielding. I urge those who take a keen interest in the subject to read the whole thing, for it is full of technical points and complexities…
The key message is that for years the Obama administration was mining the incomparable database of the National Security Agency (NSA), which captured virtually all electronic communications – emails, text messages, everything – launched into the ether. The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon. And now it looks like staggering numbers of intercepts were monitored…
The principals who directed the spying never on their own logged requests for unmasking, at least until the very end of the Obama administration, when 39 names urgently needed access to the means to discredit and get rid of Flynn, who alone among the incoming Trump crew, had the knowledge of the intelligence community to blow up the conspiracy and reform the gargantuan spy apparatus. They were protecting the much larger spy operation that lasted for years under Obama.
I don’t know whether the above is true, but I suspect and fear it is. I think it’s possible we may find out some day. If so, I hope that happens soon, because it’s very important to know.
I have no doubt, though, that with the advances in eavesdropping and information-gathering in the last twenty years or so, these things can be done. And as often happens, if it can be done it will be done by unscrupulous people. Power is enticing and seductive, and it takes people of integrity to resist. Those who go into politics probably cannot resist that temptation unless they have strong principles against it, which is not common (especially on the left, where the ends justify the means), and they probably have no trouble at all enlisting confederates with access to the material who are ready and willing to hand it off.
I believe that this recent article by Andrew C. McCarthy, not a man ordinarily given to large conspiracy theories, may tie into the same phenomenon:
…[T]here remains a gaping hole in the story: Where is the record showing who unmasked Flynn in connection with his fateful conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak?
There isn’t one…
I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.
“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies.
Curiouser and curiouser.
In this next paragraph, McCarthy explains much the same things that Francey Hakes discussed in the Tucker Carlson video I included in an earlier post today:
If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests.
That’s more or less what Hakes was saying.
McCarthy continues:
For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored…
I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call…
…[W]e know that participants in that [January 5] meeting already knew about Flynn’s identity as Kislyak’s interlocutor. The exhibits attached to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case relate that Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, knew about it no later than January 3, the day he briefed Mary McCord, who ran the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Plus, Yates recalled being surprised that Obama already knew about the Flynn–Kislyak call (and, in fact, is the one who told Yates about it). Clearly, the news had been percolating at the highest levels of the Obama administration for at least a couple of days…
McCarthy points out another interesting fact, which is that subsequently on May 8, 2017, when Lindsay Graham was questioning Clapper and Yates in the Senate, Strzok wrote to Lisa Page:
F*CK! Clapper and Yates through Graham questions are all playing into the “there should be an unmasking request/record” for incidental collection incorrect narrative.
Now, why would “incidental collection” be an incorrect narrative? McCarthy’s explanation is long and I’m only going to excerpt a little of it, but I suggest you read the whole thing. What it amounts to, though, is that the surveillance of Trump and people connected with him was massive, and began long before the waning days of the Obama administration, and was not the least bit inadvertent or incidental:
I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail…
This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.
I believe McCarthy may be referring to the same sort of thing to which J. E. Dyer is referring. Just now, looking at some of the comments to the McCarthy article, I see this one, which expresses my own reaction pretty well:
This stuff makes my head swim…there is no flipping way that this was done because they were concerned for “what was best for the country”. At least not the country you and I are talking about. This was all about self interest, power, control, hate and hubris.
That’s also what Victor Davis Hanson is talking about here, I believe:
I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that the Democrats, including Joe Biden, were very concerned and upset in 2005 when John Bolton had requested unmasking 10 times within the four years he’d been Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. This is a number of requests which pales compared to the unmaskings of a single person, General Flynn, during the last few weeks of the Obama administration. And yet the latter is something that the Democrats are now trying to treat as completely normal and not even worthy of notice, curiosity, or possible investigation.
The following clip from 2005 shows none other than Joe Biden, then in the Senate, asking to know the reasons these people had been unmasked, something the present day Democrats (including Biden, of course) are pretending is an outrage to even ask, now that Republicans are asking it of them in a situation involving far more extreme use of the tactic. The hypocrisy of the Democrats would be stunning if we didn’t expect it at this point. But what is more stunning is the contrast between Biden’s demeanor, alertness, and speech patterns then and now.
This clip also contains commentary by Francey Hakes, who happens to answer some of the questions I asked about unmasking in this post from yesterday, queries about how unmasking is usually done and whether requests from political figures (such as Biden) rather than intelligence officers during the waning days of an administration, seeking to unmask conversations that happen to involve the incoming administration, are standard. No, they are most certainly not:
