All Is Phony

 Propaganda, all is phony (1)

- It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Bob Dylan, 1965 

 Sometimes it is the framing and messaging that is the tip-off.

On March 7, NBC News online ran an article with the alarming title (alarming, that is, for their target audience);

"Trump allies launch a bid to take control of a powerful Washington legal group" 

The group is the D.C. Bar, the lawyer association for the District of Columbia, which oversees the licensing of its 120,000 members and recommends members to be on the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, the disciplinary arms of the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The article centers on the efforts of two Republican lawyers attempting to win election as President and Treasurer of the Bar's Board of Governors.  There are 23 members on the Board and having two Republicans join it would be an threat to its integrity according to the NBC article, an article obviously planted by members of that Board.  

NBC goes on to implicitly portray the current Board as non-partisan and every negative mention of lawyers is of Republicans.

Of the 23 current Board members, four are government attorneys, five from NGOs, and five from DC mega firms.  Anyone who knows the mega firms, as I do, know that with one exception they are Democrat strongholds.  The one exception does not have a member on the Board.  The current president is the former CEO of the American Psychiatric Association and former COO of the DC Department of Health.

Allow me to explain how the DC Bar really works.

In the fall of 2016, the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil Carter Page, who was alleged in the Steele Dossier to be serving as a tool of the Kremlin within the Trump campaign.  Meanwhile, Page's name had surfaced in the press in connection with these allegations, which were planted by Christopher Steele.  This prompted Page to reach out to FBI Director Comey at the end of September, volunteering to speak to anyone in the FBI "in the interest of helping them put these outrageous allegations [about him] to rest".  Comey never responded to Page then, or to later requests, instead investigators were "prohibited by FBI senior executives from approaching Page" until authorization was received in March 2017.  Once authorized, Page sat for five voluntary interviews (without having a lawyer present!) and "fully cooperated with the FBI, even going so far as to bring his own PowerPoint presentation to one of the interviews".

Comey had avoided having Page interviewed for as long as possible, because he wanted to avoid learning anything that might interfere with the warrant application or renewal.  In the meantime, Comey and other FBI and DOJ officials certified in the warrant application to the FISA Court that they were confident in the reliability of the information contained therein.

However, in the March interviews, Page claimed that he agreed to be debriefed by the CIA after every visit to Russia and after any contacts with Russians.  In April 2017, the FBI would be seeking a second extension to the FISA warrant, and Kevin Clinesmith, a DOJ lawyer assigned to the FBI, was asked to contact the CIA regarding Page's claim.  Clinesmith was a committed Democrat and strong anti-Trumper, who had, on November 22, 2016 sent an email to friends stating "viva la resistance!".  The CIA informed Clinesmith that indeed, Carter Page was an "approved operational contact" and had been cooperating with the agency.  Clinesmith altered the communication so that it read that Page, was NOT ever a source, and sent it on to his superiors. If Clinesmith had included the real CIA response, the FISA warrant application would not have been renewed. (2)

Clinesmith's alteration of the communication was discovered by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz and referred for criminal investigation.  This was one of 17 material errors and omissions found by Horowitz in the warrant application process, all of which helped support the granting of the application.

On January 29, 2021, nine days into the Biden administration, Clinesmith pled guilty to one felony charge and was sentenced to twelve months probation.  Clinesmith was a member of the DC Bar.  The standard procedure for the DC Bar was to immediately suspend membership for anyone convicted of a felony and, only after their sentence expired could then apply for readmission to the Bar, which was at the discretion of the organization.  It was two months after the conviction that the Bar finally suspended Clinesmith, and then only after an inquiry from a conservation DC publication.  And then, immediately upon the expiration of the probationary sentence, Clinesmith was readmitted to the DC Bar, without having to make an application and go through the normal long review process.  That's because the DC Bar saw Clinesmith as one of the "good guys".  And that is how the DC Bar operates.  And that's why they are terrified of having two Republicans out of 23 Board members.  It poses a risk to their friendly club.  

Naturally, NBC drags the American Bar Association into this as a paragon of integrity and virtue which as anyone who know about the ABA recognizes is a joke.  I was briefly a member before realizing it was a, back then, overwhelmingly liberal organization, and now is completely run by progressive left-wingers.  The leaders are either from government, NGOs, or from large law firms that tilt D.  The bulk of lawyers don't have the time to spend on the association.  We're busy doing stuff.  Like most other American institutions, the ABA has destroyed its credibility in the 21st century.

Since 1952, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (the Council) of the American Bar Association (the ABA) has been approved by the Congress as the recognized national agency for the accreditation of programs leading to the J.D. degree.  It is that accreditation that allows federal funds to flow to approved law schools.  Over recent decades the ABA has transformed the accreditation process from one focused on instructional capabilities for training lawyers into forcing a morass of left wing, mostly recently DEI, programs into the curriculum.  The Trump administration should seek to remove this accreditation authority from the ABA, and review every one of the many similar delegations to other organizations to determine if, like the ABA, they have perverted the process to promote preferred ideologies.

A last word on Carter Page.  The DOJ Inspector General and Special Counsel Durham found no evidence supporting the allegations made against Page.  As mentioned, Page voluntarily sat for numerous interviews with the FBI, and later with Special Counsel Mueller's team, all without having legal counsel present, and came through it all unscathed.  I regard him as the most innocent man in America. 

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(1) The song also contains this lyric: But even the president of the United States/
Sometimes must have to stand naked

There's also a variant with the Soviet term agitprop, which is literature and the arts harnessed in the service of propaganda.  Are Showtime and The History Channel art and therefore producing agitprop?  I explored that topic back in 2012.

(2) Clinesmith was not just a low-level functionary.  On August 30, 2016, he and high level FBI official Peter Strzok approved a summary of FBI official Joe Pientka's August 17 counterintelligence and security briefing to candidate Donald Trump, Chris Christie, and Michael Flynn.  While supposedly a briefing of candidate Trump, it was actually part of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation opened by the FBI on July 31, 2016 regarding allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  In other words, an excuse to investigate Trump.  Pientka highlighted that during the briefings he "actively listened for topics or questions regarding the Russian Federation."  This briefing took place five months before Director Comey's January 27, 2017 meeting with President Trump at which he told the president in response to Trump's statement he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the Steele Dossier, that the FBI was not investigating the president.  Clinesmith was not just a lawyer who deliberately altered a national security email; he was an active participant in the Russia collusion conspiracy.  The FBI managed to hide this document for four years before it was released in 2020.