Political theater, political meat: impeachment vs. Horowitz

The New Neo Posted on by

There are two big competing political dramas going on at the moment.

One is the impeachment effort. I’m tempted to put the word “impeachment” in scare quotes, because the grounds are absurdly weak. But since a very real impeachment might end up receiving enough “aye” votes to pass, I’ve decided to omit the scare quotes and let the word stand alone for the most part.

The other drama is IG Horowitz’s report and testimony describing the excesses and outrages involved in the pre-impeachment attempt (known in FBI parlance as Crossfire Hurricane) to take down President (originally candidate) Trump.

The first drama is almost wholly run by the Democrats and is surpassingly boring at this point. I speak not just for myself but for much of America, which has tuned it out. It’s not boring in the sense that it’s a political misuse of a grave process. It’s boring because there’s no there there in the charges, but mostly because everyone knows that there is no chance of an actual removal and that it is mere theater, full of sound and fury, and signifying the ill-will and ruthlessness that we already know characterizes the Democrats today. The only real question at this point, as far as I can see, is how many Democrats will be allowed to vote against it – thus making the vote “no” the only bipartisan thing about it.

The Horowitz Report/testimony is a bit different, although the MSM is determined that their spin on both will dominate the airwaves. Horowitz will not cause anyone to go to jail, or maybe even be fired. But his report has described a situation that just a few short years ago would have been almost impossible to believe, the stuff of a far-fetched movie, and yet has now become sadly real and all-too-believable.

If you had said just twenty or so years ago that the following would happen, you’d be considered to be in tinfoil territory: that the FBI would engage in a vast effort to frame a political candidate and then president, with strong impetus from and cooperation by the party opposing that candidate (a party in power when the effort to frame him begins), that this effort would involve many agents and many activities and would catch some innocent people in its web, that the leaders of the FBI and many leaders in that opposition party would lie repeatedly and blatantly about it, that the MSM would fully cooperate in the lie and coverup, and that nearly half of the American people would either be convinced by the lies or would yawn about the whole thing.

Yet here we are.

I believe that the value of Horowitz’s testimony, for those Americans who actually manage to listen to (or read) a significant portion of it, is that it tells us how far this has already gone. As I’ve said before, every single American should be shocked at what has been revealed, and determined to make sure it never happens again and that those who did it will pay. But I have no illusions that those things will come to pass.

What I do think is that some people – perhaps lower-downs such as Clinesmith, who changed an email’s content in order to help frame Carter Page – will be charged and perhaps even convicted. But this will leave the larger problem untouched. It’s a problem that commenter “KyndyllG” described very well in a comment this morning [emphasis mine]:

A vast mass of my school and work acquaintances hold all of the leftist thought about orangemanbad as literal, gospel truth; they would sooner accept that water is not wet than question any part of it. And it’s not just that it’s obvious truth that cannot be questioned by anyone with a functioning brain, they assume that anyone who even considers anything to the contrary, much less believes it, is not just wrong but absolutely evil: stupid, racist, bigoted, sexist, Nazi orangemanbad supporters and defenders…

I saw this really kick into high gear around the beginning of the “Punch a Nazi” era. It was chilling. Some of these people posting social media memes glorifying attacking real or imagined Trump supporters were people I’d known for 20 years. To see chubby, balding middle-age parents who had never been in a physical altercation in their life (I know because I went to school with them) suggesting figuratively or literally that one should go around attacking people who might have voted for a President they don’t like, was down-the-rabbit-hole stuff. I suddenly saw what happened in Germany in the 1930s. These are people who have actively dehumanized political opponents. There is no such thing as rights or due process of the law for us. They are not interested in whether proper process was followed during what was obviously a politically motivated travesty of justice; they honestly couldn’t care less if every rule in the book was broken. It’s all good when you’re going after Trump and his untermenschen.

This is not an accident. Nor is it something they arrived at on their own. It is what the left wants and has encouraged, with the full assistance of the MSM.

Protecting the military on their own bases

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most perplexing, frustrating, and anger-provoking policies of recent years is the apparent disarming of the military while on base and going about their business. With the rise in attacks from terrorists, it makes our military personnel into sitting ducks. Why was it police who ended up stopping the shooting, after several people had been murdered?

After the Pensacola killings, there are calls to reverse this policy, pronto:

A group of U.S. Navy instructor pilots asked top military brass for permission to arm themselves in the wake of the shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Fla., where a Saudi military pilot gunned down three American sailors and wounded eight others.

One of the shooting victims was the captain of the U.S. Naval Academy rifle team, an “excellent marksman,” according to his brother.

“It’s so stupid that on a military base, the shooter was allowed to roam free for so long,” according to one instructor pilot. “In a gun fight, that’s an eternity.” The pilot, like others interviewed by Fox News, did not want his name used because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

One of the pilots said Navy brass denied their request to arm themselves on base…

One pilot called base security at NAS Pensacola and other Navy bases “mall cops,” because protection on the base has been outsourced to private security and many were “fat and out of shape.”

“I have zero confidence the guy I show my ID card to at the gate could save me,” one pilot added. Fox News spoke to three Navy instructor pilots Tuesday.

It’s an opinion shared by many across the military, including the U.S. Army; more than a dozen soldiers and an unborn child were gunned down at Fort Hood in 2009.

“We trust 18-year-old privates in combat with grenades, anti-tank missiles, rifles and machine guns, but we let service members get slaughtered because we don’t trust anyone to be armed back here in the United States,” a senior U.S. Army officer told Fox News.

Insane, it seems to me.

I tried to get a handle on when this policy began, and so far (in what admittedly has been a brief search) I can’t discover the answer. Here’s Snopes’ answer, for what it’s worth. It maintains that Bush I began the policy but it wasn’t really a change from previous policy and it didn’t really disarm the bases because guards and other security personnel were still allowed to be armed.

The real question, I suppose, is why the Navy didn’t have enough armed guards around – and when did such a policy of outsourcing military protection to clearly inadequate private companies begin?

Remember the Schiff memo vs. the Nunes memo?

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember back in the early days of 2018 when there was the clash of the dueling memos on Russiagate and the role of the FBI and the FISA court applications? The Nunes memo was criticized by Democrats even before it was released, and afterwards Adam Schiff released his own memo that contested what Nunes had asserted.

And of course the MSM trashed Nunes (for example: the memo is “a joke and a sham”) and lauded Schiff. Now we have the Horowitz Report that represents an examination of some of the same facts that Nunes and Schiff were duking it out over, and Nunes is completely vindicated and Schiff should slink away in shame along with most of the MSM.

Of course they won’t.

But Mollie Hemingway has done the work of going back and comparing the two memos in the light of the Horowitz Report. Nunes was right and Schiff was wrong, period.

But the bulk of Hemingway’s article is detail after detail of the MSM coverage of Nunes’ memo. It makes for stunning reading – more proof (as though we needed any more) of what the MSM has become, a spin machine and organ of the left.

Horowitz speaks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and my perception of his testimony so far is that it is damaging to the FBI and to the Democrats.

It will be spun otherwise, of course, by the MSM and the Democrats. And the spin will almost certainly be successful with the vast majority of Democratic voters. But I can’t imagine it will convince anyone else.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before.

An observation: one of the most interesting things about this entire process so far has been how energized and sharp so many of the GOP members of both House and Senate have seemed, for the most part.

As I wrote yesterday, the Horowitz Report boils down to the “knaves or fools?” question regarding the FBI. I think the answer is “both, with an accent on ‘knaves.'”

But you really really REALLY don’t want the FBI to be either. And yet the FBI is absolutely and unquestionably at least one of those things and perhaps both.

Then again, if the FBI consists of so many knaves, I’d prefer them to also be fools rather than brilliant and subtly Machiavellian geniuses.

Jonathan Turley on the Horowitz Report

The New Neo Posted on by

Turley’s entire piece is well worth reading, but here are some highlighted details:

…[A]nother agency that appears to be the CIA told the FBI that [Carter] Page was actually working for the agency in Russia as an “operational contact” gathering intelligence. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported that to the FISA court approving the secret investigation of Page. His claim to have worked with the federal government was widely dismissed. Worse yet, Horowitz found that investigators and the Justice Department concluded there was no probable cause on Page to support its FISA investigation. That is when there was an intervention from the top of the FBI, ordering investigators to look at the Steele dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign instead.

Who told investigators to turn to the dossier? Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired over his conduct in the investigation after earlier internal investigations. Horowitz contradicts the media claim that the dossier was just a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was essential to seeking FISA warrants. Horowitz also finds no sharing of information with FISA judges that undermined the credibility of the dossier or Christopher Steele himself.

The report also said that Steele was viewed as reliable and was used as a source in prior cases, yet Horowitz found no support for that and, in fact, found that the past representations of Steele were flagged as unreliable. His veracity was not the only questionable thing unveiled in the report. Steele relied on a character who, Horowitz determined, had a dubious reputation and may have been under investigation as a possible double agent for Russia. Other facts were also clearly misrepresented.

Perhaps my favorite parts – if “favorite” is the appropriate word – are these two:

The source relied on by Steele was presented as conveying damaging information on Trump. When this source was interviewed, he said he had no direct information and was conveying bar talk…

Finally, Horowitz found that an FBI lawyer doctored an email to hide the fact that Page was working for us and not the Russians.

Bar talk and Orwellian lies. Works for me.

[NOTE: When I looked, the comments I saw to Turley’s article seem dominated by anti-Turley trolls. No surprise there.]

Why did the Democrats and the MSM appear to be so happy with the Horowitz Report?

The New Neo Posted on by

Some or all of the following:

(1) They’re pretending; it’s all for show and propaganda.

(2) The report contained a bunch of statements which they believed they could spin successfully to a public unlikely to actually read any of the report or the commentary on it from the right, and therefore will never hear the things in it that implicate the FBI and the Democrats and vindicate Trump and his staff.

(3) After setting the idea in many people’s minds that the Hororwitz Report “exonerated” the FBI from any wrongdoing of any consequence, then – if and when Barr and/or Durham come up with indictments of some of the players – the Democrats will be able to successfully (in the public’s eyes, anyway) claim that Barr and Durham are the ones framing those charged, because of course Horowitz had exonerated all of them.

All of this rests on the probably correct supposition that only the most dedicated of political junkies will read the Horowitz Report or take a look at the right’s discussions of the points in it. I don’t know whether this approach by the Democrats and the MSM will ultimately be successful in electoral terms. But I understand that the foundation of the theory behind it is a reliance on public ignorance combined with the inherent complexity of following the story’s details.

Those articles of impeachment

The New Neo Posted on by

They’ve settled on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Quid pro quo and bribery are out, as is treason.

As this commenter at LI writes:

Article 2 [“obstruction of Congress”] is a disgrace and a direct threat to the balance of the branches and future presidents. The three branches of the government are equal to each other. The legislative branch of course has the right to subpoena stuff from the executive branch BUT the executive branch has the right to say no to subpoena based on executive privilege. Arguments over whether something falls under executive privilege…go to the courts to decide.

#1 Did at anytime the executive branch violate a court order to hand over documentation? NO. There is no instance anywhere during the Trump administration where a court ordered the executive branch to hand over documentation and the executive branch still refused to honor the court ruling.
#2 Did at any time when the executive branch claimed executive privilege did the legislative branch go to the judicial branch to request that the judicial branch make a decision on whether or not the executive branch has to hand over requested data? NO. There are multiple instances of the legislative branch demanding data and the executive branch claiming executive privilege and instead of going to the judicial branch the legislative branch than claimed that the executive branch was obstructing Congress. That is not how it works. You can’t skip the steps in the process. You must go to the judicial branch. The legislative branch is equal to the executive branch. It is not superior to the executive branch. The executive branch has the right to assert it’s rights under the Constitution. Even in the middle of an “impeachment inquiry” the executive branch still has the right assert executive privilege.

Under Article 2 of this farce the Democrats are pushing a theory that could result in the impeachment of every future president regardless of party affiliations. All administrations at one time or another have claimed executive privilege in response to legislative branch inquires…

…Instead of writing Obstruction of Justice they weasel it by saying Obstruction of Congress. They are trying to get around the fact that they, the legislative branch, didn’t even bother to go to the judicial branch to ask for a ruling on which branch of government is correct.

I would say the articles of impeachment are ludicrous but that makes too much light of something that is actually dangerous. As for the “abuse of power” charge, here is just a small taste of all that’s wrong with using it as a standard for impeachment:

Dershowitz talks about the “shoe on the other foot” test

The New Neo Posted on by

I was channel surfing last night and came upon a Mark Levin interview with Alan Dershowitz that was riveting. It takes a lot for me to call an interview “riveting,” but Dershowitz almost always has extremely intelligent things to say and he expresses himself in an unusually lucid and fair manner.

One of his most salient traits, and the one I appreciate the most, is how even-handed he is. He doesn’t let politics influence his opinion about the principles to apply – although of course politics very much influences his personal political voting behavior, which tends to be quite different from mine. But when he talks about law and about current events, he tries to apply what he calls the “shoe on the other foot” rule, which I consider extremely valuable and try to apply myself when I write or when I form my opinons.

Here’s a short clip I’ve cued up of Dershowitz explaining the rule. And I don’t think he should limit it to “serious academics“; the rule should apply to everyone opining. And yet its application is very unusual, which makes Dershowitz (and Turley, who is another good example of a practitioner) a rara avis:

And please, do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing, or at least the first half or so of it:

IG Horowitz’s report has come out

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as I can see (I haven’t read it; it’s very long), the gist is as expected:

The IG found justification to investigate the Russia investigation and did not find any “intentional misconduct or political bias.” However, the investigators discovered many “significant” errors concerning the FISA warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The IG report stated the investigators “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek” the first FISA authority on Page.

Yet the report says the team “found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against” Page described in Christopher Steele’s dossier.

Horowitz provided the “seven significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the first application…

Unless the FBI authorities were stupid enough to write in an email or memo “I am doing this because I hate Donald Trump and for no other reason,” there is no way that Horowitz’s team could have found “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation” caused the chain of events. So that’s the sort of thing that can almost never be proven; it’s hard to imagine a set of circumstances under which such evidence could be found.

But that such bias existed we know full well from the Strzok and Page emails as well as the actual politics of Comey et al. And that the FISA application and the entire Crossfire Hurricane probe was loaded with irregularities and “errors” is also known and detailed in the Horowitz Report. One can infer that the bias led to the irregularities, but one can’t prove it.

The seven “inaccuracies and omissions” can be found at the link as well. In addition, there were ten “additional significant errors” in the renewal applications.

The Horowitz Report seems to go for the “fool” explanation in the old “knave vs. fool” question. Or rather, it goes for the “we can’t prove they are knaves but we can prove they are fools if they are not knaves” explanation, which is a bit more complex. I say “knaves and fools.”

There’s further reaction at Mark Meadows’ Twitter account. For example:

[ADDENDUM: More here. And here’s a link to Durham’s official statement.]