Peter Strzok: one-man band

The New Neo Posted on by

The twistings and turning of what we could call the case against Donald Trump are not easy to follow. But what has been revealed so far is a tangled web of interrelated actions on the part of investigators that indicate bias at the very least and arouse deep suspicion of more than that.

The story so far is one that would take a very lengthy post to explain, and I’m somewhat pressed for time today and won’t be writing that post now. Perhaps in the next few days. For now I’ll just point out one of the most startling things revealed lately: the way the name of Peter Strzok keeps cropping up, over and over.

The Strzok story as we first knew it began with a mysterious firing:

In August, ABC News reported that Strzok was removed from the investigation. The news came one week after agents executed a search warrant on the Virginia home of Trump’s now-indicted former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

The reason he was taken off the probe was unknown at the time, as he was well-respected in the industry as a law enforcement officer working counterintelligence cases. He was deemed to be one of the top investigators in the probe. ABC News reported that Strzok was taken off the Russia investigation and was sent to work in the F.B.I.’s human resource office, deemed a demotion within the agency.

A little over one month after Strzok’s departure, ABC News reported that F.B.I. lawyer Lisa Page also left the special Russia investigation…

While the departure of the two officials was well reported, they weren’t ever linked until now [“now” being the last few days].

The linkage turned out to be that the two were having an affair, and in their text messages they had exchanged anti-Trump statements. So they were relieved of their Trump-investigatory duties back in August, although we just learned that explanation very recently.

That news would have been enough by itself to taint the investigations at least somewhat, although I must say that there are probably many more people involved in these investigations who have political biases against Trump (and some for him, for that matter) and aren’t careless enough to have expressed them in text messages, or at least not in text messages that have been caught up (and therefore revealed) in the web of another investigation, as the texts between Strzok and Page were—a DOJ inspector general had connected them through an investigation of the FBI investigation of the 2016 elections.

So, it was a DOJ investigation of an FBI investigation (are you still with me?) that led to the uncovering of the Strzok/Page texts about Trump.

And now a group of other facts about Strzok’s involvement have been coming out. This guy was everywhere, a regular one-man band.

It turns out that it was Strzok who had interviewed Mike Flynn and thus set up
the basis for the charge that Flynn lied to the FBI, which is the substance of the plea deal Flynn recently made.

It turns out that we have yet to see a transcript of the interview. Does one exist?

It turns out that Strzok was the number 2 person heading up the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, and he was one of several agents who interviewed Hillary Clinton in a three-hour session.

It turns out that Strzok changed and softened Comey’s original description of Hillary’s email set-up from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”

It turns out that “there are reports” that “there was ‘documentary evidence’ that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the [Trump] dossier.”

It turns out the Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton were interviewed by Strzok during the email investigation, are known to have lied in those interviews, and were never charged with lying to the FBI.

There could even be more, but that’s plenty already. All this should rouse suspicion even in the minds of anti-Trump Democrats, although it probably won’t. It certainly rouses suspicion in me. The Strzok story also is interesting in terms of how the FBI works. Apparently the same higher-ups work on a host of interrelated cases, so that if bias exists in some of those people (and I have no doubt it often does, not just with Strzok) then that bias will have maximum effect.

Meghan Markle ♥ Harry

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I missed the latest British royal news: Prince Harry is engaged to a woman named Meghan Markle. And here I thought I kept up with these things. But I see now that I have fallen sadly behind.

It turns out that Markle is an American actress, another thing of which I wasn’t aware. The minute I looked at her it struck me that she markedly resembles her brother-in-law-to-be’s wife, Kate Middleton.

The resemblance is hardly exact (and Markle is part African-American), but they have the same type of slender, long-haired brunette, clean-cut looks. If this doesn’t resemble Kate Middleton…well, you be the judge:

Compare and contrast:

Harry and Meghan met on a blind date. How do you get a blind date with a prince? You gotta know somebody.

Andrew C. McCarthy’s latest (and Alan Dershowitz) on Flynn and Mueller

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope you’ve been reading Andrew C. McCarthy’s take on the Mueller investigation right along. Once again, he offers a must-read analysis.

I’m only going to offer an excerpt, and I urge you to read the whole thing:

Bottom line: If the FBI had a collusion case of some kind, after well over a year of intensive investigation, Flynn and Papadopoulos would have been pressured to plead guilty to very serious charges ”” and those serious offenses would be reflected in the charges lodged against Manafort. Obviously, the pleas and the indictment have nothing to do with collusion because Mueller has no collusion case…

Since there is no collusion case, we can safely assume Mueller is primarily scrutinizing President Trump with an eye toward making a case of obstructing an FBI investigation. This also makes sense in light of the pleas that have been taken…

The theme of such a prosecution is that the investigative process must be protected, not that some terrible underlying crime (like an espionage conspiracy) has been committed. Witnesses such as Flynn and Papadopoulos would therefore not be made to look like they had gotten a pass on serious offenses; they would look like they had owned up to corrupting the process and are now helping the prosecutor against the principal corruption target…

I continue to believe that this is the real danger for President Trump: A report by the special counsel, either through the grand jury or some other vehicle, concluding (a) that the president had obstructed the FBI’s investigation of Flynn and of Trump-campaign collusion with Russia, and (b) recommending that the matter be referred to Congress for consideration of next steps, potentially including impeachment and removal.

I also tend to trust Alan Dershowitz on legal matters, although not on politics. He’s one of those liberal Democrats who often goes against the prevailing party line, particularly when he’s talking about law. So many people on both sides just hop on the meme du jour for their side and then justify it, even if they have to turn themselves into pretzels to do it. That’s much more rare with Dershowitz than with most, and I value that.

So I was not surprised to see his viewpoint on Flynn and Mueller:

As the president-elect, Donald Trump was constitutionally and politically entitled to try to protect his ability to broker a fair peace between the Israelis and Palestinians by urging all members of the Security Council to vote against or delay the enactment of the resolution. The fact that such efforts to do the right thing did not succeed does not diminish the correctness of the effort. I wish it had succeeded. We would be in a better place today.

Some left-wing pundits, who know better, are trotting out the Logan Act, which, if it were the law, would prohibit private citizens (including presidents-elect) from negotiating with foreign governments. But this anachronistic law hasn’t been used for more than 200 years. Under the principle of desuetude ”” a legal doctrine that prohibits the selective resurrection of a statute that has not been used for many decades ”” it is dead-letter. Moreover, the Logan Act is unconstitutional insofar as it prohibits the exercise of free speech.

Dershowitz, who was no Trump supporter and who as far as I know has voted the straight Democratic ticket for most of his life, is just getting warmed up. He continues:

The second question is why did Mueller charge Flynn only with lying? The last thing a prosecutor ever wants to do is to charge a key witness with lying.

A witness such as Flynn who has admitted he lied ”” whether or not to cover up a crime ”” is a tainted witness who is unlikely to be believed by jurors who know he’s made a deal to protect himself and his son. They will suspect that he is not only “singing for his supper” but that he may be “composing” as well ”” that is, telling the prosecutor what he wants to hear, even if it is exaggerated or flat-out false. A “bought” witness knows that the “better” his testimony, the sweeter the deal he will get. That’s why prosecutors postpone the sentencing until after the witness has testified, because experience has taught them that you can’t “buy” a witness; you can only “rent “ them for as long as you have the sword of Damocles hanging over them.

So, despite the banner headlines calling the Flynn guilty plea a “thunderclap,” I think it may be a show of weakness on the part of the special counsel rather than a sign of strength. So far he has had to charge potential witnesses with crimes that bear little or no relationship to any possible crimes committed by current White House incumbents. Mueller would have much preferred to indict Flynn for conspiracy or some other crime directly involving other people, but he apparently lacks the evidence to do so.

Not much more to add on that today, except to say that I agree with McCarthy that the Democrats are determined to impeach and/or remove Donald Trump from office and that’s been clear from the start. That’s one reason the 2018 Congressional elections are so important.

Wunderbar

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday’s post on stage musicals vs. movie musicals led somehow to me watching video after video on YouTube with great pleasure, and one of the greatest of those pleasures was to learn that Patricia Morison is still alive and kicking at 102.

You probably have never heard of Morison. I never saw her perform in person; at least, I don’t think so. But she features greatly in my musical memory because she’s the voice of the lead character (“Lilli”) on the original cast recording of “Kiss Me Kate,” just about every note and lyric of which I remember. She had a deep and rich and vibrantly expressive voice that I found wonderful even as a child, and seeing her on video (there are only a few such offerings on YouTube, although she’s got a huge body of work), I find that she doesn’t disappoint in the acting and beauty departments, either.

Here she is with Alfred Drake (also on my record). In case you’re not aware of the plot of “Kiss Me Kate,” it involves a musical within a musical within a play. These two play an acting couple starring in a touring musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and the overarching musical “Kiss Me Kate” also follows all their (and others’) backstage shenanigans. So they are Kate and Petruchio as well as Lilli and Fred.

Here Morison and Drake are reminiscing about a schlocky show they’d once played in (“something about a bar….”), and then they sing a mocking version of the Germanesque song they’d sung in the show: “Wunderbar.” You can tell a great deal about their relationship through this song—their competitiveness, their mutual hamminess, their frisson of conflict. But towards the end (around 4:37), the pace changes and they sing the song more seriously for a few moments, and you can see their passion and the bond behind it.

It’s not easy to pull off, but they do a great job (despite the ad that’s unfortunately plastered in the center of the video, but it’s possible to ignore it):

Now for another big treat—Morison at 100. This woman is phenomenal—listen to the strength of her voice, and see how beautiful she still is:

It makes me think of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium“:

…An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Saturday afternoon reflections

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve just posted a piece with a length of close to 2400 words.

It occurs to me that that’s the equivalent of the term papers I used to write in school. And it also occurs to me—not for the first time—that for some strange reason I’ve voluntarily taken on the task of disgorging that sort of thing with some regularity.

It took me about three hours to squeeze that particular one out. Well, I can console myself that it used to take me a lot longer to write those term papers—sometimes, anyway; I also had a bad habit of writing them last-minute and under pressure.

But on occasion I wonder why I’m doing this. I’m not saying that to solicit comments like “Oh, we appreciate it so much!” from my readers (although I value such comments, of course, as I value my readers). But I mean something deeper: what drives me to digest and then spit out my own commentary on events so many others are talking about, too? In my—let’s just call them mature years—why do I feel the need to pipe up and add my voice to the larger chorus?

After all, it’s Saturday. I’ve got a lot of other things I could be doing. I’ve got a lot of other things I should be doing. So, why did I just write a term paper?

Well, I’m interested. I’m reading about the story anyway, and as I read I get more and more curious. The more I read, the more thoughts I generate. The more thoughts I generate, the more connections I see.

Sometimes those connections don’t seem to have been made by other people writing on the topic, and so I want to make them.

I want to make them for myself, to clarify my own thoughts on the matter. I find that when I can do that, I can often take future stories that relate to the same event and put them into a framework of knowledge so they make more sense. I guess I’m just a curious person who likes to make as much sense of the world as I can, although I realize I’m never going to achieve the kind of understanding I’d like.

But I’m not just doing it for myself. I’m putting it out there in the world, too. And if I reach people, that’s even better. I don’t reach millions or hundreds of thousands, but I reach more people this way than if I was just mulling it all over in my metaphoric garret (I used to have an actual garret, but now I work in my kitchen, which doubles as an office).

There’s also a slight element of OCD. We’ll leave it at that.

So folks, happy Saturday! Hope your weather is better than mine. Not a whole lot of sun here, although the snows haven’t come yet. And we’re nearing the earliest sunset of the year, which occurs on one of the next few days depending on where you’re located. Then it all starts to turn around again, and I look forward to that day.

A little musical interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

(But lest you think we’re getting away from the subject of workplace harassment—alas, we’re not. Not totally, anyway.)

I was raised on Broadway musicals and their recordings, the lyrics of which I committed to memory, including the introductory patter. And that’s not just the major hits, but many minor ones that most people have never even heard about. To this day, my brother and I still have a little jokey game we play, one that’s probably either obnoxious or obscure (or both) to onlookers, in which we say just a couple of words from the lyric and the other fills in the song.

When I was a child, my parents used to take me to Broadway musicals quite regularly (and one straight play, “The Miracle Worker, which I saw with the brilliant originals Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft), when a ticket cost had a range of something like $2.95 to $7.95. Adjusted for inflation (according to this site, anyway), in 2017 dollars that’s $25.41 to $67.76. Try getting a ticket to a first-run top Broadway show for that these days.

Back then Broadway shows were magical. Later on, they seemed less so to me, and I really don’t think it’s just because I got older and more jaded. I’ve never been keen on the movie versions, either. Though some are better than others, all of them seem inferior to their stage originals. The suspension of disbelief that is relatively easy in the theater is not so easy in a movie musical, which always seems to teeter on the brink of the ludicrous (at least, for me). I say that even for achievements such as “West Side Story,” one of the very best movie renditions of a stage musical.

There’s an energy on the stage, an immediacy that is unavoidably diluted in a filmed musical. I’m pretty sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I don’t think they would say that if they’d seen the originals I was lucky enough to see.

But that’s all a prelude to a clip that came to mind earlier today. Commenter “Mr. Frank” had written:

What is driving much of this is a major shift in the workplace that society has not adjusted to. Until fairly recently the workplace was a male place. There were a few female fields like teaching, nursing, and phone operator. Those jobs were largely dead end and not careers. Men at work were surrounded by men so sex was largely a non issue. Now that women have careers to lose, they can be pressured.

My reply was this:

Women have long been in the workplace with men, just in subordinate roles. The men were the doctors, the women the nurses. Lots of hanky-panky there. The men were the executives, the women the secretaries. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how much sex there was.

I’m virtually certain that Mr. Frank is correct in saying that there are more women working alongside men today, and that in general their jobs now feature a higher percentage that are more career-like with higher relative pay than in the past. But those somewhat sex-segregated jobs he listed—or the ones I mentioned in which the interface with men in the workplace was constant—although not ordinarily a road to an executive position or a position of power and influence, were still jobs those women needed and were loathe to sacrifice. And there were still ways back then in which sex with a man in the workplace could earn advancement—either in the job, or the “advancement” of being promoted to the new position of “wife” (or “mistress,” depending on the level of aspiration).

But on reading Mr. Frank’s comment, what instantly sprung to my mind was this song from the Broadway musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which opened on Broadway in 1961. It was telling that I wasn’t taken to see this particular show at the time, probably because it was considered too racy.

But we had the record, and so I learned the songs. That’s why this song (the clip is, alas, from the 1967 film version and not the stage production) came to mind so quickly. Does it make you cringe a bit now?:

By the way, Robert Morse was the star of that show, and he also starred in the film version. But I never saw him in either. However, I have very strong memories of seeing Morse on stage before that, in a musical practically no one knows called “Take Me Along.” It was a musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah Wilderness,” and I had to look it up to see the year: 1959. Wow. It starred Jackie Gleason, who had been a big TV personality as Ralph Kramden (a show I used to watch), as well as Walter Pidgeon. But to me (and to much of the audience) the real star of the musical was Morse, who lent it tremendous charm, energy, and comic earnestness as he stopped the show several times.

But you know what? The show isn’t even mentioned in Morse’s Wiki link. Go figure.

Kate Steinle’s shooter is acquitted of murder and manslaughter

The New Neo Posted on by

In a verdict that shocked a lot of people, a jury in San Francisco has acquitted Kate Steinle’s shooter of both murder and manslaughter. The only thing they found five-times-deported and five-times-returned illegal immigrant Jose Ines Garcia Zarate guilty of was illegal possession of a firearm as a felon. His immigration status was irrelevant to the proceedings (although it’s been very relevant to the public), but the upshot of the verdict is that he will probably be sentenced for up to three years and then deported (again).

I hadn’t followed the trial although I followed the initial shooting. It’s certainly possible that what we have here is a jury that was predisposed to let Zarate off easy, for political reasons—after all, we’re dealing with San Franciso. But in trying to understand the verdict it’s also important to read articles such as this, and get acquainted with some of the details of a case in which complex and competing testimony was presented about the possibility of an accidental firing of the gun and about what the trajectory of the bullet told us about where the gun was when it was fired.

I’m woefully unequipped to say much about these technical aspects. Perhaps the jury was confused, too. If you read the comments at the link I just gave, you can find a lot more information on which to base an opinion as to whether an accidental shooting would have been possible with this particular weapon (supposedly more prone to such things). The defense’s version of the killing—that the shooter found the gun wrapped in some cloth, picked it up without knowing what it was, and it discharged by accident (lots of testimony about the likelihood of an accidental discharge and the position of the gun when it fired, evidenced by the bullet’s trajectory—see this and this), seems improbable to me. But of course I didn’t sit on the jury and hear the evidence, and all the defense had to do was create reasonable doubt.

There certainly sounds like there probably is reasonable doubt as to first degree murder. But apparently, as described in that linked post from Red State, the prosecution pushed strongly for the higher charge of murder rather than the more readily-provable involuntary manslaughter. The possible crimes in the case were as follows:

According to instructions read to the jury, if Steinle’s killing on July 1, 2015, was willful, deliberate and premeditated, it would justify a first-degree murder conviction. If her killing was the result of a dangerous act likely to cause someone’s death, the jury could find Garcia Zarate guilty of second-degree murder. If he didn’t intend to kill anyone but was criminally negligent in handling a loaded firearm, he could be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

The jury of six men and six women also will consider the separate charges of being a felon in possession of a handgun and assault with a semi-automatic weapon.

If you read the rest of that article, you can see how murder would have been a stretch, but involuntary manslaughter probably could easily have been supported.

This was an exceptionally emotional and tragic case in which a beautiful young woman had her life ended by gunshot, and we know who did it. The jury thinks it was an accident, but much of the rest of the country thinks it was at least manslaughter and possibly murder.

However, one thing seems pretty likely—if Zarate gets deported, he’ll probably be returning.

The Flynn plea

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say about the Flynn plea in the Mueller investigation:

…[W]hen a prosecutor has a cooperator who was an accomplice in a major criminal scheme, the cooperator is made to plead guilty to the scheme. This is critical because it proves the existence of the scheme. In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.

That is not happening in Flynn’s situation. Instead, like Papadopoulos, he is being permitted to plead guilty to a mere process crime. A breaking report from ABC News indicates that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians ”” initially to lay the groundwork for mutual efforts against ISIS in Syria. That, however, is exactly the sort of thing the incoming national-security adviser is supposed to do in a transition phase between administrations. If it were part of the basis for a “collusion” case arising out of Russia’s election meddling, then Flynn would not be pleading guilty to a process crime ”” he’d be pleading guilty to an espionage conspiracy…

Meanwhile, the only major case Mueller has brought, against former Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate, has nothing to do with the 2016 election. It is becoming increasingly palpable that, whatever “collusion” means, there was no actionable, conspiratorial complicity by the Trump campaign in the Kremlin’s machinations.

We’ll see. But McCarthy has been spot on so far in his analyses and prognostications.

Which is more than I can say for most pundits. Of course, McCarthy—former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and prosecutor in the trial of the conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing—also knows a lot more than most writers on the subject of how prosecutors think.