Obsession

 President Trump gave an address on election security.  Why?  He made two points.  First, that China had "interfered" in the 2020 election and had obtained voter information but he presented no evidence that China had actually manipulated voting.  No big surprise there.  And did he announce any new actions against China in response?  No.

Secondly, that the intelligence community suppressed that information and prevented it from reaching President Trump as part of its collusion against his administration.  Certainly possible given the IC's involvement in the Russia Collusion Hoax.  However, a few excerpts from emails aren't the proof.  After all, former DNI Tulsi Gabbard (thank goodness, she's gone) released a report and emails purporting to show IC collusion from the first Trump administration but, on close examination, the report and the documents were overhyped. 

The speech was a waste.  If the President was going to speak to the American people it should be on whatever we are up to with Iran.  We seem to have entered yet another phase in the Iran War, which started in 1979 with the regime's declaration of war on the United States.  We deserve some clarification about what the goals are here, instead of speculation.  It could have also possibly helped him with the mid-terms coming up if he could effectively make the case for what he is doing.

What this shows is Trump's continued obsession with the 2020 election.  The truth is the Democrats outmaneuvered the Trump administration.  They may have played dirty, but not illegally. 

"The Deep State and Democrats colluded to sabotage Trump, spread disinformation, and loosen voting laws so that Dems could mass harvest ballots and engage in various legal but unprecedented methods of collecting votes" is a valid argument.

"10 million votes were fake" is not.

— Everybody is Insane (@colorblindk1d) July 17, 2026

And the truth is that in 2020 Donald Trump "spit the bit" as George Steinbrenner once said of Ken Clay, a moment later to be immortalized on Seinfeld.

He was played for a fool with the Covid relief bill that allowed changes to the election process for 2020 that were taken full advantage of by the Democrats.  Meanwhile his campaign was completely unprepared to capitalize on those changes or to monitor what the Democrats were up to.  Maybe it would not have made a difference because his entire campaign was a shambles.  

At the beginning of the year it was widely accepted that Trump would win reelection, but starting with Covid everything fell apart as it highlighted Trump's weaknesses, beginning with his daily press conferences where he was out of control, easily baited by the press, and allowed himself to be manipulated by Anthony Fauci, the 21st century version of J Edgar Hoover.

Then came his pathetic response to the George Floyd riots when his response amounted to tweeting "law and order" on a daily basis but doing nothing to try to halt the orgy of violence and destruction. 

What happened after the election was worse.  Despite the fact that his campaign's own polling accurately predicted the outcome in the battleground states, with the exception of Georgia they thought would go for Trump, the president immediately claimed the election was rigged, tossing out an ever changing crop of allegations to keep his most fervent supporters at fever pitch.

I thought Trump would give it up after the electoral college met on December 14, and confirmed Biden's victory.  I was wrong. Instead he doubled down, leading to the disgraceful events of January 6.  No, he did not plan an insurrection; Donald Trump does not do planning.  Instead he is always improvising to see what happens and then makes his next move.  But his rhetoric and actions are responsible for stirring up his supporters to the point that they got out of control on the 6th.

Those events also showed that Trump's top priority is always Trump.  On January 5, Georgia held its runoff election for its two senate seats.  Winning those seats was critical to the Republicans controlling the Senate.  Trump spoke at multiple rallies, ostensibly to support the Republican candidates.  But after briefly telling audiences they should vote for the R's he would go on extended rants about how the election was rigged and how his supporters votes wouldn't count.  He successfully suppressed R turnout and the Democrats won both seats.  It's not hard to see how Trump knew, whether consciously or unconsciously, that if the Republican candidates won it would undercut his claim that the November election was stolen.  He needed the R's to lose.

Trump's neediness and ego nearly resulted in the end of democracy, from which we were only spared by Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to whom we owe thanks. 

Trump's priorities can also be seen in the fate of the J6 defendants, most of whom entered the Capitol through open doors, committed no violence or acts of destruction, and after wandering around peaceably left the building, yet were prosecuted nonetheless.(1)  Trump raised somewhere between $150 million and $250 million based on the plight of the J6 defendants and his "stop the steal" campaign, yet none of that was spend on providing legal or other assistance to the defendants.  The result is many of the defendants had to rely on unsympathetic public defenders or fell prey to inexperienced grifter lawyers who did not know what they were doing.  Its quite a contrast with how the Democrats effectively provided support to their violent supporters during the George Floyd summer.

Trump's destructive obsessions can be seen in the damage he's done in Arizona where I live.  Trump and his MAGA supporters in the state insist the 2020 election was stolen in Maricopa County.  It wasn't stolen.  If you compare the 2020 results with 2016 on a precinct by precinct basis, you discover that Trump picked up some votes in Hispanic and poorer White precincts while losing more in the wealthier White areas.  Yet Trump's claims led to the ridiculous Cyber Ninja audit and the descent into insanity of many of the state's Republicans. 

It also likely had some knock on effects nationally.  Arizona's governor in 2020 was Doug Ducey, the very popular (he won reelection in 2018 by 15 points) and capable Republican who defied Trump's instructions not to certify the state's election results as valid, enraging the president. The term limited Ducey left office in 2022, with the lunatic MAGA acolyte Kari Lake losing the governor's race.  There was speculation Ducey would run for Senate in 2022 but he decided not to.  The reason many informed observers gave is that while Ducey would have easily won in the general election against Mark Kelly, he would have had to go through a grueling primary battle in which he would run against a MAGA candidate supported by Trump, who called Ducey a "weak RINO" who he would never endorse, and that "MAGA would never accept" him running.  Instead we had the bizarre candidacy of Blake Masters who got stomped by Kelly.  Yet another Senate seat lost to the Democrats in order to satisfy Trump's ego.  Thanks a lot.

MAGA is simply whatever Donald Trump does at any point in time.  It is not a philosophy, it is not a movement, it is not an organization. When he leaves office in January 2029 he will leave a shambles behind.  I pity whoever is the R candidate in 2028 because they will have to live with Trump incessantly commenting on the campaign, unwilling to leave the scene and the starring role in his reality show.

-------------------------------------------------------

(1)  I supported the pardon of those who peaceably entered and left the building and did not engage in violence or destruction.  I opposed the pardon of those who did engage in violent acts. 

Not All Disrupters Are The Same

It's said at the end of this post from Assistant Village Idiot, one of the few long time bloggers who has not gone off the rails over the past decade. AVP also makes an astute observation about what might explain the findings he refers to.

RFKJr, among many other myths that he believes*, thinks psychiatric meds are contributing to the high-profile shootings we've been seeing, and thinks we should "look into it." Well, this is only one study in Sweden, but it does have an N=247,420 with robust results. Prescribing ADHD medication resulted in lower adverse "real world outcomes" such as self harm, traffic crashes, and crime. Interestingly, the effect seems to be weakening over time as the number of prescriptions increases. 

In this longitudinal population-based study of 247 420 individuals using ADHD medication between 2006 and 2020, we consistently found ADHD medication to be associated with lower rates of self-harm, unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime across all analyzed time periods, age groups, and sexes. However, magnitude of associations between ADHD medication use and lower risk of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime appear to have attenuated over time, coinciding with an increase in prescription prevalence during the same period. The weakening trends for unintentional injury and traffic crashes were not fully explained by changes in age and sex distribution of the medication users, whereas the trend for crime was no longer statistically significant. These findings suggest that the declining strength of the associations of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes could be attributed to the expansion of prescriptions to a broader group of individuals having fewer symptoms or impairments.

My guess on this reveals one of my biases, but it may turn out to be true in this case. A broad range of interventions pick off the low hanging fruit at first, whether this be in medicine, education, economics, or crime. As this success is experienced by the doctors, politicians, or teachers, they try the solution on a wider group that less-obviously fits the the category and surprise! It doesn't work as well on every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Law of Diminishing Returns. I used to see this in mental health, where an intervention like ECT's would work spectacularly well on some people with depression, but treatment-refractory patients of many diagnoses would eventually end up at the "shock treatment" door, because patient, family, and prescribers were all frustrated and willing to try less-likely interventions.

*The current fallback argument by his supporters are that the CDC and the medical establishment badly needs disruption and he is supplying disruption, so shut up, you liberal weenie. I find this unconvincing. Just because an institution needs to be disrupted does not mean that any particular disruptor is on the right track. Not all disruptions are equally valuable. Saruman wanted to disrupt Mordor, after all.  

RFK Jr is very glib, a plaintiffs personal injury lawyer, and a believer that conspiracies underlay every aspect of society.  There are no honest disagreements.  You are either good or evil.  Observing his technique in interviews over the decades you see him deploying the same approach against interviewers who don't know the details about which he is speaking.  He overwhelms the interviewer by spewing out a long list of studies and findings.  The problem is he starts by fairly accurately referring to two studies, then cites 3 more where he misstates the conclusions, and wraps it up with 4 studies summarized accurately but where there are a dozen other studies with better methodology that reach opposite conclusions none of which he cites.  He does this over and over again. 

The agency he oversees needs disruption and reform but he is the wrong person to do it.  He is not about open scientific inquiry.  When appointing committee members or authorizing studies they are designed to reach the conclusion he wants.

UPDATE:  In a September 5 piece in the Wall St Journal, former CDC Director Susan Monarez (hand-picked for the role by RFK Jr, who fired her after 29 days), writes that at a August 25 meeting with the HHS Secretary:

 I was told to pre-approve the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled
with people who have publicly ex-pressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is

scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t
rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted

or rejected.

A Congressional committee should ask Monarez to testify under oath in more detail about her assertion. 

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. 

-----------------------------------

(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.

He's Not Your Bro

Looking further at the debacle of the Zelensky-Trump-Vance White House meeting, something that originally escaped my notice needs some attention, as it gets to the heart of President Trump's views of Vladimir Putin.

Trump has always been susceptible to flattery, particularly from those he considers his equals.  In his 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen stated the only discussion he ever had with Trump about Russia was when Trump said to him one day in the office prior to the 2016 campaign, "Did you see that President Putin said some really nice things about me?"  After his disastrous 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, I wrote that Trump seemed like a star-struck teenage girl in his presence.  At the same time, when acting at a distance, during his first administration Trump was much more aggressive with Russia than either Obama or Biden.

Nonetheless, it seems Trump feels some type of special bond with Putin and that bond was created by the Russia Collusion Hoax.  During the recent White House meeting, Trump said to Zelensky: 

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?”

A very revealing comment as the President makes clear he thinks the Russia Collusion matter was something that both he and Putin were put through together, making them "bros" of a sort, a kind of bonding experience.  He thinks they have a common enemy in the Democrats and their sycophants in the media who put them through this ordeal.  It explains why Putin was his first call to an international leader after the Mueller Report was released.

Having thoroughly investigated the Russia Collusion allegations, I know it is, by far, the biggest American political scandal of my lifetime.  But Vladimir Putin is not one of the victims, he is one of the perpetrators, and he has played American politicians, including Trump, and media across the political spectrum for fools.

Putin's goal for years has been to weaken America by creating division.  Prior to 2016, the Kremlin supported Occupy Wall Street and the American environmental groups seeking to block energy development, particularly fracking.  Through social media, his minions have supported Black Lives Matter and those opposed to the organization.  A Facebook executive testified that after the 2016 election, the Russian bots immediately switched to agitation against the incoming Trump administration. Disruption, chaos, and distrust is Putin's goal.  In this effort he has been successful and Russia Collusion was his crowning achievement.  In perpetrating this hoax, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to trust in our institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.

While we've had many other scandals since, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump's Stop the Steal garbage, and four years of pretending Joe Biden was at the top of his game, so full of energy he was running rings around younger staffers (the NY Times actually wrote a story promoting this nonsense), along with a swarm of fake narratives on other matters, Russia Collusion was the big poison injected into our system; the starting point. 

Putin was playing all sides against each other.

It astonished me that those who took the Steele Dossier allegations that Trump and his campaign were collaborating with the Russians on face value, never stopped to ask themselves why that information was coming from what the dossier itself described as Russian sources, including intelligence sources.

Let's look at the players involved in those allegations:

FusionGPS, the company hired in April 2016 to investigate Trump's Russia ties, by a Clinton Campaign desperate to divert attention from Hillary's email fiasco, was at the same time working for Denis Katys, a Russian oligarch, helping him to lobby the Federal government to lift the Magnitsky sanctions, sanctions imposed by the US, after Magnitsky, a Russia journalist exposing Putin's corruption, was jailed and beaten to death by Putin's thugs. Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion, was working closely on this project with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Fredo Trump Jr.  Simpson met with her the day before and the day after the Trump Tower event.

Fusion hired Christopher Steele to conduct the investigation.  Steele had worked on the Russia desk for MI6 in the UK, before retiring a decade earlier.  At the time he was hired by Fusion, Steele was also working for Oleg Deripaska, another Russia oligarch, currently under indictment by the U.S.  Deripaska was cast by the media as a "bad guy" because of his connection with Paul Manafort, but the same people, including the Clinton Mob Lawyers working for Mueller, stayed mum about his connection with Steele.

Steele hired as his "major sub-source" Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, who had illegally remained in the U.S. and was being paid, through a cut-out, a monthly retainer by Steele.  Danchenko was the subject of a FBI counter-intelligence investigation after allegations made by fellow employees at the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, that he told them if they got jobs in the Obama administration he would pay them for information.  Upon investigation, the FBI determined that Danchenko had been in contact with known FSB (Russian intelligence) officers in the U.S. (1)

Given this background, in his final report, Special Counsel John Durham wrote:

"It appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele - which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports - was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation."

He goes on:

"The failure of the FBI to assess properly the prior counterespionage investigation of Danchenko is incomprehensible."

Another of Steele's sources for the allegations in the dossier, in particular, the most scandalous and one that got much of the initial press attention when the dossier became public, that on a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump insisted on having the same suite at the Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and then had prostitutes come to that room and piss on the bed, turned out not to be a Russian, but an American.  Charles Dolan was a DC lobbyist and public relations guy who was representing Russia in the United States.  Dolan was in close contact with Putin's press secretary and Russia's ambassador to the U.S.  He was also an advisor to the Valdai Club, a Moscow organization which organized events for Westerners and seen as a propaganda outlet for Putin.  Along with his Russia connections, Dolan was also the former executive director for the Democratic Governor's Association, had chaired the Virginia campaigns for Clinton-Gore in both 1992 and 1996, been appointed by President Clinton to two four-year terms on the State Department's U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and a supporter in her 2016 presidential bid.  And, in January 2017, Dolan emailed an acquaintance describing Igor Danchenko as a "Russian agent". (2)

One of the bombshells contained in the Durham Report is that an FBI review conducted in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report".  The Review team was then told "no more memorandum were to be written" and a further meeting held in which "the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny". 

Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Dina Corsi then directed the Review team not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum.  Team members described this as "highly unusual" because analysis is what analysts do.  An Office of General Counsel Attorney at the briefing "remembered being shocked" by Corsi, stating "it was the most inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at the FBI".  As of last year, Corsi was still at the FBI.

As a reminder, the Durham Report concluded:

"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated"

So who was playing who? 

Trump's failure to recognize Putin's long-term goals is potentially a disaster.  Because Trump personalizes everything he cannot see the bigger picture.  What happens next in the Ukraine-Russia war will be a test of whether Trump can drop his illusions about Putin. (3)

Trump's second administration is shaping up much differently than his first.  The first time around he was surprised to win and unprepared for the office, floundering around for quite a while, not being astute enough to know much about his own appointees and willing to take advice from DC Republicans.

Russia Collusion took a gullible and conspiratorial Trump and constructed an actual conspiracy against him, leading to a daily media beating for years and reducing his ability to run his administration.  They actually were all plotting against him!  Including Putin.  

The hoax also contributed to the destruction of his relationship with DC Republicans.  His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was a good senator and a decent man, but his naivete led him to recuse himself on flimsy grounds from Russia collusion matters, leaving Trump unprotected.  Eric Holder and Merrick Garland never would have recused themselves in the same situation, because they viewed themselves, as Holder once described it, as the "wingman" for their presidents.

That left the Justice Department on Russia matters under the weak reed of Rod Rosenstein, who Trump was assured would be just fine by DC Republicans.  Rosenstein quickly crumbled under the pressure and appointed Mueller as Special Counsel and then stood aside.  Rosenstein would later testify that if he'd known the truth about the Steele Dossier he never would have appointed Special Counsel, and that Mueller knew by September 2017 there was nothing to the allegations, yet the investigation went on for another year and a half.

Finally, when Mueller was appointed, Trump had to retain his own lawyers, who were good litigators, but traditional DC Republicans.  They assured Trump that Mueller would be a "straight-shooter" and once he saw the evidence he'd quickly close up shop, so they advised full cooperation with the Special Counsel.  Trump agreed, and over one million documents were provided with no claims of Executive Privilege made and he allowed, in an unprecedented move, his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about his discussions with President.  All to no avail, as Mueller and his Clinton Mob Lawyers kept going, though they knew they had nothing, it was essential for political purposes and continuing media coverage to keep the pretense up as long as possible.  If Bob Barr hadn't come in as AG and forced Mueller to close shop, the farce would have continued until Trump was out of office.

Trump had enough of "honorable" men who played by the rules of DC. That's why he now only wants those whose top priority is personal loyalty to The Boss; their competency and real agendas are of less concern.  It's also why, as I predicted three years ago, this is his Revenge Tour.  Will the tour bus be driven off the cliff, like he did in 2020?  I did not vote on the presidential line in 2024 because of that prospect on the one hand, and the insane and divisive policies and growing authoritarian streak of the Democrats on the other.

The bottom line is that however we got here, and however unfair it was to Trump, at the end of the day Donald Trump is fully responsible for his own actions and decisions.  He's the President of the United States, after all.

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(1) The full Danchenko story is even more damning.  The allegations against him arose in the first Obama administration.  When the FBI learned that Danchenko had returned to Russia in 2011 it suspended the investigation.  In December 2016, FBI analysts identified Danchenko as Steele's major sub-source and then learned that while his wife boarded the flight to Moscow five years earlier, Danchenko had not, remaining in the U.S.  Durham discovered the rest of the story.  Danchenko was desperate to find employment after losing his Brookings job because if he failed his visa would no longer be valid.  An arrangement was made that he would be hired by a Russian operating an IT company in Virginia, but he would actually be paid by Christopher Steele who would funnel the funds through the IT company.  In other words, breaking American immigration law by committing a fraud.  According to Durham, "Danchenko Employer was merely a front to allow Danchenko to continue his work on behalf of Orbis [Steele's firm], while at the same time allowing him to secure a work visa through alleged employment with a U.S. based company".  His employer, an ethnic Russian, described Danchenko as "boastful . . . having low credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts with the Kremlin". In January 2017 Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI and explained he was just passing on gossip and bar talk regarding the allegations and was not aware how Steele would use it.  Danchenko said he could not corroborate any of the allegations.  That interview concluded the day before FBI Director Comey led President Trump to believe the FBI was not investigating the credibility of the Steele Dossier; Comey was responding to the President telling him that he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the dossier.

Realizing it had a problem on its hands with Danchenko, the FBI and later the Mueller investigation, decided to try to make it difficult for anyone to identify him as the major source for the dossier, making the Russian a Confidential Human Source (CHS) and paying him $220,000 over the next two years. 

Interestingly, Danchenko was hired at Brookings at the instigation of Fiona Hill, later to be an opponent of Trump's and involved in the attempted impeachment of the President over Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings in Ukraine.  In a September 2017 FBI debriefing, Christopher Steele stated he was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill in 2011.  Steele described Hill as a "close friend" and told the FBI she "has a very high opinion" of Danchenko.

(2)  In March 2017 FBI analysts identified Dolan as the source of the Ritz Carlton and other allegations in the Steele Dossier.  Two months later those same analysts were transferred to Mueller's team and assigned to the unit working on corroborating the allegations in the Steele Dossier.  But wait, you might think, didn't Robert Mueller repeatedly state in his Congressional testimony that the dossier was "outside my purview" with his report omitting any mention of the dossier in the discussion of possible collusion?  Yes, he did state that, but he lied to Congress, which is criminal conduct.  The FBI agents not only told Special Counsel Durham about the dossier team under Mueller, they testified to it in open court during the trial of Igor Danchenko.  

The analysts continued to work on Dolan and in August 2017 briefed several senior people on the Mueller team on their work, and drafted a case opening document on Dolan, including a request he be interviewed.  However, on September 7 they were instructed "to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan",   According to Dolan the analysts' contemporaneous notes "explicitly state that Mueller investigation leadership directed [them] to dedicate no resources" to Dolan.  Their request to open a case on Dolan was denied with them being told it was a "higher level decision" and the document was to be deleted from the Special Counsel's computer system.

The shocked analysts "discussed whether the decision not to open on Dolan was politically motivated, given Dolan's extensive connections to the Democratic party", with one of the analysts speculating that "the information on Dolan ran counter to the narrative that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating".  The analyst believed the decision would eventually be reviewed by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and, after deleting the report from the Mueller system, uploaded memorandum to three other separate case files on the FBI system to make sure OIG would have access.  That is where the Durham team located it several years later.

Later that month, the analysts were instructed to "cease [all] work on attempting to corroborate the Steele reports" and the unit was disbanded, with members transferred to other teams in the Special Counsel's office.

Durham notes that while the Special Counsel interviewed hundreds of witnesses during his investigation, Charles Dolan was never interviewed.

It is obvious that Dolan was never interviewed, and the investigation halted, because Mueller's Clinton Mob Lawyers did not want to document what he knew because his connections would expose the relationship between the Clinton Campaign and the Kremlin, destroying the narrative they had so carefully constructed.

Though Mueller knew by September 2017 that nothing in the dossier could be collaborated, he never said anything at the time or in the final report, even denying that his office ever investigated it.  You can read more about the Mueller team's obstruction of justice here.

(3)  The expiration of the Tik Tok ban extension in early April will be another test for the president's ability to see the bigger picture.  His extension in January was actually illegal, but no one has the legal standing to challenge it.  However, the president has an independent obligation to ensure the legality of his actions.

Observations

On Tuesday's event:

1. I've seen some comments about the "mysterious" disappearance of 15 million Biden voters from 2020 this time around, with implications about that election being stolen.  Calm down, there are still over ten million votes to be counted, with two-thirds of them in California.  The final total turnout number will be close to 2020, though probably a couple of million short.  Because most of the remaining ballots are in Democratic states I expect that Trump's margin in the popular vote will be 2-3 million rather than the nearly 5 million as it stands now.  The extreme D lean of California, Oregon, and Washington continues.  As of now, Trump leads in the other 47 states by over seven million votes. 

2. Trump gained nationally and it is remarkable how much individual states moved towards him since 2020.  Here are the Top 10 in percentage moves from 2020 to 2024:

California (12.0%)

New York (11.6)

New Jersey (10.9) 

Maryland (10.4)

Florida (9.7)

Massachusetts (8.8)

Illinois (8.6)

Mississippi (8.4)

Texas (8.2)

Rhode Island (7.3)

This is huge movement, much of it in the bluest states.  In terms of overall margin, Trump came closer to winning New York than Harris did to winning Texas or Florida.

3.  The large Hispanic, and smaller Asian gains, by the GOP indicate that the Democrat strategy of increasing racial divisiveness, and making race essentialism a permanent fixture in our society, is failing.  That is a very good thing for this country.

4.  Saw this X post from Matt Yglesias, a Democrat liberal of the old style.  As to his nine points, I agree with all of them.  Problem is they are much closer to the Trump GOP than today's Democratic Party.

What is far more telling is that the Democratic Party has explicitly branded itself AWAY from all nine of these points over the last decade. https://t.co/UvdiidbftO

— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) November 7, 2024

 

 

5.  To the above point, the class of political activists, public employee unions, foundations, NGOs, and billionaires that fund the Democrats will not change course.  They will continue to blame all disagreement on misinformation, racism, and sexism and continue to work hard to suppress opposing viewpoints. They may try to hide their core beliefs more, as Harris did during this campaign, but their authoritarian ideology will not change until such time when they become accountable for their behavior.  Here's an example from Laura Helmuth, editor in chief of Scientific American, which she posted on Bluesky the night of the election:

"I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists"

"Solidarity to everyone whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back."

"Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist.  The moral arc of the universe is not going to bend itself."

Today she deleted those comments and posted this:

I made a series of inappropriate and offensive posts on my personal bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry.  I respect and value people across the political spectrum.  These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and disbelief about the election results.  These posts of course do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues. I am committed to civil communication and scientific objectivity.

Under Helmuth's stewardship, Scientific American has descended into an advocacy rag, losing its once-vaunted credibility.  In Helmuth's world, civil communication means agreeing with her beliefs and scientific objectivity is that which reinforces her beliefs.  She has all the right credentials; before taking on her current post Helmuth was Science Editor of Smithsonian Magazine, Health & Science Editor of the Washington Post, and President of the National Association of Science Writers.  I think it is pretty clear her real sentiments were expressed on election night.

 

6.  Who is going to work for Trump in the White House and federal agencies?  Personnel is policy.  Does he have the personnel with the right talents?  Will he appoint people who actually understand how to effectively manage a hostile bureaucracy?  Will he appoint nutcases like RFK Jr?  It's particularly important because Trump is not an FDR type president.  FDR was a master manipulator, while Trump gets manipulated by the people around him and isn't interested in details.

 

7.  In retrospect the great strategic mistake made by the Democrats in 2016 was their approach towards the Trump candidacy and presidency.  During the campaign they stoked hysteria about The Donald, creating a demonic figure who would end democracy and let loose the brown shirts to march in the street.  For a couple of days after the election Senator Schumer, who knew Trump better than any other national politician, made conciliatory statements about trying to work with the new administration, just prior to the inauguration warning the president-elect that the intelligence community "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you", prescient advice considering the conspiracy launched against Trump by that bureaucracy.  Schumer knew that schmoozing and flattering Trump works best to get what you want.  Trump likes to make deals, but he's not that concerned about the substance of the deal, believing he can publicly sell whatever he agrees to.  Over the thirty years before 2016, Trump had been on every side of every issue, except trade, and been a strong supporter of Democrats.  He had no fixed views other than what he would opportunistically seize on.  Moreover, I believe he was surprised as everyone else that he actually won in 2016 and was unprepared to run a presidential administration.  A perfect situation for a savvy negotiator like Schumer.

 

However, word quickly came from the Democratic establishment that it would go the Resistance path, obstructing every administrative action, refusing to normalize his actions, and launching the Russia collusion hoax.  They created a real conspiracy against a gullible and conspiratorial minded president.  The consequences have proved terrible, not just for the Democrats, but for this country.  Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to the credibility of American institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.  Putin must have delighted in seeing America devour itself.

 

8.  It was encouraging to see voters in deep blue California decisively reject the craziness of the Democrat agenda.  They kicked out of office the pro-crime prosecutors in LA and Alameda counties, and a referendum proposition to reinstate harsher criminal penalties won 70% of the vote (a few days before the election Harris was asked about her position on the referendum; she declined to answer).  In 2020, the same voters defeated by double digits a Democrat ballot proposition to delete the anti-discrimination provisions of the California constitution. 

A strange advantage the Democrats have had in recent years was their agenda on issues like race, gender, censorship, immigration, and crime had become so insane and extreme that older liberals, and younger people who paid less attention to policy, would simply disbelieve anyone who described what the D policies actually were because you sounded crazy talking about it.(1) Its very extremism formed a protective shield.  Maybe that is changing.

 

9.  One positive about the Trump victory is avoiding the Trump/Bannon crowd immediately claiming the election was stolen.  They would have done so regardless of whether there was supporting evidence.  Making stuff up is good enough for them.  It's just what they do.  We are fortunate to have avoided the chaos they would have created.

 

In 2020 Trump lost because of the white suburban vote shift nationally, something that also happened here in Maricopa County.  There is no big mystery to what happened if you look at precinct data.  But Trump and his crowd didn't care. 

 

10.  Having won, will Donald Trump eventually drive the bus off the cliff as he did in 2020?  My betting is yes.  He's the same guy, with the same characteristics and behaviors, and he's now 78.  Trump is not changing his ways.  As an example, if there is a recession on his watch he will respond poorly, lashing out at everyone.  

11.  Though I disagree with him on some issues, there is no question that when it comes to smarts, policy knowledge, and the ability to speak in coherent sentences, JD Vance stood head and shoulders above Trump, Harris, and Walz.  He should be a viable contender for the 2028 nomination.  However, Trump's history provides a cautionary note.  Trump always wants to be the center of attention, the unquestioned boss who demands absolute loyalty.  Should he decide that Vance is getting too much attention, too big for his britches, or wavering in that absolute loyalty, Trump will publicly demean Vance and demand JD kowtow to him.  Chances are he will destroy Vance's future career before 2028.  Anyway, he probably wants Donald "Fredo" Trump Jr to succeed him.

 

12.  What happens after Trump's term?  It is his party now but there is no one on the scene with the same combination of weird charisma, attitude, style, and inattention to the details of policy and governance that has led to his success.  Those who, since 2016, have tried to imitate him, like Kari Lake, have failed.  And, if his administration is a failure, he will leave rubble behind.

 

And for that post-2028 world we must also realize that while we know what Trumpism or MAGA is from a rhetorical and attitude perspective, we have no idea what it means from a policy perspective; nor does Trump.  Its substance remains unknown because it is dependent upon Trump's impulses at any particular place and time.  You can't pull his 2024 campaign statements into any coherent overall picture and even if you could, it is no guarantee of what he will actually do come January.  For instance, you can make a good case that on foreign policy Trump was the best president since the end of the Cold War, though that is said less in praise of him than as an indictment of the foreign policy establishment of both parties over the past three decades.  But the thing is that Trump's 2016-20 performance has no relationship to what he might do in 2024-28 because it's all improvisation and impulse.  I have no ability to predict what he might do; nor do you.  It means no GOP candidate in 2028 has any idea what they might inherit.

 

13.  I leave you with two final observations.  

The first from Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall St Journal in 2019:

Mr Trump is said to upset the norms of our political life, but how exactly?  By lying? By engaging in demagoguery?  By making absurd claims?  His real trick has been to be a one-man satire of our politics.  And so far he has yet to find an opponent or critic - whether Mr Biden, or Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney - who doesn't prove his point.

To show what a liar he is, his enemies entangle themselves in lies.  Democrats have turned themselves into a party of Adam Schiffs, who, whatever his previous virtues, now is wholly defined by his promotion of the collusion canard.  It's an amazing psychological feat to squander their advantage over Mr Trump in this way.

Ditto the media.  In their eagerness to traffic in falsehoods about Mr Trump, his media critics lend him strength.  We face the weird prospect now of a world-class scandal involving the FBI and the intelligence community being aired even while much of the press is committed to being part of the coverup.

The second from Henry Kissinger in 2018:

I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.  It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1)  Try telling someone that Biden's first order of business was revoking a Trump Executive Order that allowed federal employees to be trained about diversity and the benefits of multiculturalism but forbid training based on racial stereotypes and scapegoating.

Try telling someone that Biden issued an Executive Order requiring any AI used by the Federal government incorporate racial and gender bias and stereotyping.

Try telling someone that Biden issued regulations ending women-only sports and facilitating the transing of elementary school children. 

Try telling someone that the Biden administration advised a pro-trans activist medical organization to drop its draft recommendation that puberty blockers and other dangerous medications not be given to those 14 and under because such a recommendation could be damaging politically.  And the organization, WPATH, followed Biden's advice!

Try telling someone about the efforts by Biden to censor opposing viewpoints on social media and about the FBI monitoring, as potential terrorists, parents who objected to the inclusion of race essentialism in public schools.

Here's Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who did not vote for Trump, on the nuttiness:

It matters when the elites decide to re-educate the masses in Neo-Marxism. Young men are sick of being pathologized, as they should be. Urban residents — from San Francisco to New Jersey — are maddened by Democrats’ seeming indifference to violent crime. And one of Trump’s most effective ads — “it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,” according to the NYT — was on Harris’ support for public funding for sex reassignments for illegal aliens and prison inmates. It packed a real punch among black and Latino men and suburban women.

The Democrats’ insistence that women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological men convicted of rape? At some point, as Harris found out, you can’t. But can she and her party extricate themselves from this hole they keep digging ever deeper? I doubt it.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

For a while, it was difficult to get people to accept that the Biden administration opened our borders.  It was a brilliant stroke for governors of border states to start shipping illegal immigrants to sanctuary states and cities, finally waking up more people to what was actually going on.

Sounds About Right

 

"On planet Earth, the right is divided between the supporters of a sub- Berlusconi sociopath, the governor of a multiracial, multiethnic, high growth, high inmigration state, and a bunch of people who think Dubya did nothing wrong."

Peter Spiliakos (March 20, 2023)

I called this back in September 2021, including the Berlusconi part (which I first pointed out in 2016).

Idiocracy

 The GOP organization of my home county, Maricopa, has passed (by a 13-11 vote) a resolution censuring Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, for "specific actions" during the August 2022 Primary Election; "disregard for the irregularities reported in the Arizona Senate audit of the 2020 Election"; and "inaction on election integrity".

Richer is a Republican, who unseated the incumbent Democrat recorder in the 2020 election; the same election supposedly rigged to ensure Trump lost Maricopa County.  In addition, 4 of the 5 county supervisors are Republicans and they are directly responsible for poll management on election days.

You can read Richer's detailed response here and I've done this post as a easily located note to myself  so I, or any reader, can find this compendium of relevant information, as the response contains extensive footnotes and links on the topic.

I closely followed the cyber ninjas "audit", reading their report, the County response, and learning a bit about Arizona election law along the way.  The "audit" was an embarrasing fiasco, which should have been evident to anyone looking at the relevant information without an agenda.  Sadly, that was not the case for many in the Arizona GOP.  And, for that matter, does anyone think Donald Trump spent even five minutes actually objectively evaluating the evidence claiming the election was stolen?

My summary from my post last September (see Grouchy), which contains many relevant links and remains accurate today:

I'm grouchy because after yesterday's report on the Arizona "forensic audit" by the cyber ninjas, there are still those who claim the Arizona election results were not legitimate and still believe the "ninja dust" thrown out by the audit team despite their own results - their hand count matched that of Maricopa County (actually Biden's margin got a bit bigger) and they presented no evidence to support the Dominion software conspiracy theory.

Living in Maricopa County, I have followed this much more closely than any of the other election disputes.  The bottom line is pretty simple if you look at precinct results.  The votes Donald Trump picked up in Hispanic precincts were more than offset by Biden gains in the wealthier white precincts; a pattern consistent across metro areas nationwide.  End of story. 

Of course, if there really had been a conspiracy by Democrats to steal the election, the institutional media would not report it.  Between the Democrats, GOP, and the institutional media that explains why we are in such dire straits now.

Unbarred

Bari Weiss, a progressive purged in 2020 from the New York Times, interviews former Attorney General William Barr.  I've excerpted some of the interview below and added my commentary in bold.  Bari does excellent podcasts with a wide variety of interesting people.  You can find the full podcast here. 

Barr was the Trump administration's indispensable man.  Without his willingness to take on the AG role, the administration's ability to govern would have continued to be impaired (leaving aside the remarkable ability of Trump to get in his own way) and the Mueller investigation would have continued until Biden took office, because the purpose of the investigation was to defeat Donald Trump.  By the time Mueller was appointed, the principles already involved in the investigation knew there was "no big there there" as the FBI's Peter Strozek wrote Lisa Page in May 2017.

It was a difficult and thankless task.  The best Barr could do in trying to undo the politicization of the Department of Justice under Eric Holder, was to work around the edges and control the worst excesses.  I'm glad he did it.(1)

 BW: I want to begin with a quote from your wife, Christine. “The Left and the Press have lost their minds over Trump and Trump is his own worst enemy. Any sacrifice you make will be wasted on this man.”  That’s what she told you in 2019 before you joined the Trump administration. Obviously, you did it anyway, which is why we’re talking. But was she right? 

THC:  Christine Barr is very perceptive.  Trump will eventually turn on everyone who is not 100% with him.(2)  In that way, he's like the progressives who cast into the darkness anyone who does not demonstrate 100% alignment with their mantra.  Like Bari Weiss, for example.

AG BARR: She was, as usual, dead on. The left has lost their mind over Trump. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing. But Trump is his own worst enemy. He’s incorrigible. He doesn’t take advice from people. And you’re not going to teach an old dog new tricks. 

THC: Yes. And that's why I will not vote for him if he is nominated in 2024.  More on this in a comment below.

AG BARR: I hoped that it wasn’t true. I thought there was a chance he would rally to the office and be more disciplined in his behavior. I thought he might recognize that the presidency is a unique office, which is not only a political leader but the head of state, representing the whole nation. I hoped he would rise to the occasion. He didn’t.

I said to him when I first started that I thought he was going to lose the election unless he adjusted a little bit. And if he did adjust, he could go down in history as a great president. He continued to be self-indulgent and petty and turned off key constituencies that ultimately made the difference in the election. 

THC: I agree.  Exhibit 1 is his clown show covid press conferences.  Andrew Cuomo and Trump have very similar personalities.  The only difference is that at least Cuomo could fake empathy.  Also, Trump is a one trick pony - if you attack him, he will attack you.  Once the press realized this, they simply baited him at the covid press conferences and he fell for it every time.  A big contrast with DeSantis, who when I first started watching him in the spring of 2020 always responded on his own terms (along with actually understanding the growing research literature on covid, as well as the related policy issues - another contrast with Trump).

AG BARR: [On Russia collusion] Information has now come out that supports the proposition that these ideas really got going because of a political ploy by the Clinton administration to try to hang Putin around Trump’s neck and claim they were in cahoots. I never thought there was any basis for this. The Russians did apparently hack and dump. They stole emails and they dumped them out in the public. That is really the extent of what happened. And that is their stock and trade—that’s what they do all the time. They don’t have to collude in order to do that. It never made sense to me that they would get Americans involved in that operation. 

Putin also had his own reasons for despising Hillary Clinton. He didn’t need any other motivation to go in and screw around with the 2016 election. The things that Trump was being accused of—the policy positions he took— had a constituency within the Republican Party for a while. Before the 2016 election, Kissinger had talked about the idea of Finland-izing Ukraine and recognizing that Russia had deep interests in Crimea. These were not wacky ideas. And they didn’t necessarily mean that he was in the pocket of the Russians. 

THC: Yes, as far as that goes, but Barr's institutionalism blinds him to the fact there were two threads to the Russia collusion hoax.  The first was the Clinton campaign, the second the intelligence community.  Those interests eventually combined.  As to the policy positions, here is a prime example of how the Democrats, the intelligence community, and the media distorted the GOP position - the Ukraine platform statement at the 2016 GOP convention - read The DC Bubble & The FBI.

. . . That was curious because, after the election, the dossier and the other stuff they had been relying on had collapsed. It was pretty clear not too long after the election that this whole thing was a farce. Yet that’s when both the F.B.I. doubled down on it, and the mainstream media kicked in. I always thought that was very strange. 

THC: Not strange.  The collapse of the dossier was irrelevant.  The goal after the election was to undermine the credibility of the Administration, hamper its operations, force it to constantly respond to Fake News about Russia, and to keep the Mueller investigation going as long as possible to create the mirage that something of substance was being investigated as well as hoping to lure Trump into agreeing to an interview so he could be charged with false statements.  The media, led by the New York Times, publicly announced their goal was to get Trump out of office, so creating a narrative in support of the hoax was their core mission.

AG BARR: I think it ended with Bob Mueller’s testimony over the summer of 2020. It really collapsed at that point. I’ve been surprised that the mainstream media and the people who fanned this to the point of hysteria haven’t come back to say: “Yeah, there was a big lie in 2016 that has hurt the country and distorted our politics and foreign policy throughout the Trump administration. It was unjust. It was wrong. And we made a mistake.” Very few, if any, have come out to say that. 

THC:  Because this is all about the creation and maintenance of a narrative.   Just as the objective truth about the 2020 election does not matter to Donald Trump, the objective truth about Russia does not matter to Democrats and their media allies.  The increasing lack of attachment to reality in American life across the political spectrum spells disaster, if not checked.

BW: If the firing of F.B.I. Director James Comey wasn’t obstruction, how would you describe it? Do you think that it was unwise? 

AG BARR: I would describe it as something that should have happened long before. Everyone I knew in Republican and Justice Department circles, including me, was advising Trump at the very beginning of his administration to fire Comey before we even knew his role in Russiagate. It’s because Comey, in my opinion, has some of the personality characteristics that can lead people, like J. Edgar Hoover, to run the F.B.I. according to their personal whims. I thought it was dangerous and that he should go. 

THC: Agree.  This should have been done on January 20, 2017.  The worst mistake Trump made.  I believe he kept Comey only because he knew of Hillary's dislike of him, another example of his reactive mode and inability to think things through.  She would have fired him on day one.   Trump talked tough, but Hillary is actually much tougher.

BW: Did you underestimate Trump’s disregard for the truth and disregard for the results of the election? 

AG BARR: I underestimated how far he would take it. I thought on December 14, when I tendered my resignation, the states had all certified the votes. To me, that was it. That was the last stop. There was no process beyond that which would allow him to challenge the election. I thought it was safe to leave at that point. I was wrong. I did not expect him to take it as far as he did with these very whacky legal theories that no one gave any credence to. 

THC: I also underestimated how far he would go with this insanity.

AG BARR: [After, in early December, he told an AP reporter that DOJ found no evidence of fraud significant enough to impact the election]  He was in a little dining room that adjoins the Oval Office. He was as furious as I’d ever seen him. He confronted me and said, “Did you say this to the AP?” And I said, “I did. Because it was the truth.” I went over some of the allegations. He said there was plenty of evidence of fraud. I explained in some detail why the allegations didn’t fly. I told him that there were only five or six weeks to challenge a presidential election because the Constitution requires the Electoral College to meet at a certain date and he didn’t have much time. He’d already wasted five of your six weeks with this crazy stuff about the Dominion machines. He’d wheeled out this clown show of lawyers that no reputable lawyer is willing to work with. 

AG BARR: [On his leaving the Administration in late December and being complimentary to Trump in his resignation letter].  I was somewhat demoralized that he was leaving office this way. The left says, “Oh, you said all these nice things about him in your resignation.” But I felt that what he should do was focus on all his achievements and leave with dignity. Whether he thought there was fraud or not, he had his day in court and he lost. 

So I was demoralized that he was going out the way he was. I thought it was very unfair to all the people, especially the younger people, who had worked in the administration. It hurt them getting jobs and it also hurt the Republican Party, which I thought up until then, could take the high ground as the party of law and order. 

BW: So in other words, you were giving him a script for himself, rather than saying what you felt? 

AG BARR: Well, I did feel it. I just want to make it clear that I supported President Trump. I liked his policies. Up until the election, I didn’t have a problem with his policies. I found him very difficult to work with and I think it took a lot of effort from all his cabinet secretaries, not just me, to keep things on track. (He never really listened to his lawyers, so it was hard to keep things on track.) But I thought we got to the election in pretty good shape and I was proud of the record of the administration. 

I think things went off the rails after the election because I think he felt he had nothing to lose at that point. I was trying to say, “Look, you do have to take a bow for what you were able to accomplish.” I said in that letter that what I believe was distinctive about his administration was he was unjustly treated. He was sinned against with Russiagate. That colored the whole administration. I still think that had people responded to his victory speech—which I thought was a very diplomatic speech the night he won in 2016—we would have seen a different Trump. I think once he thought that the F.B.I. was coming after him and trying to throw him out of office, that affected not only Trump but also his hardcore supporters, who were made very suspicious. I think it fundamentally distorted our politics during his administration. I felt that it was important to say that he did fight against this Trump Derangement Syndrome. And he did accomplish a lot. And it was historic. The economic growth and the fact that people who had been left out previously were starting to participate more. It was a tragedy that Covid arrested that progress, but it was a historic accomplishment. 

THC: In one of my Russia collusion posts, I remarked that with Trump you started with someone who was gullible and susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories, and then his opponents actually constructed a real conspiracy with the Russia nonsense, which only made his tendencies worse.  I did not believe something like the collusion hoax was possible back in 2016.  The past few years have reoriented my thinking.

BW: How did you feel watching this? You’re someone who has served this country for decades. You’re also someone that served this administration and tried as best as you could to keep it on the rails. What were you feeling as you watched this scene go down? 

AG BARR: I was disgusted and mortified and feeling very angry. I felt this whole thing had hurt the Republican Party and hurt the reputation of the administration even more than before. I was angry about that. Everyone I knew in the administration was angry about that. I also felt that it was just a Keystone Cops exercise. There wasn’t a genuine threat of overthrowing the government, as far as I was concerned, it was just a circus. That’s true of a lot of things that Trump arranges. I felt that one of the sub themes of the administration was that when the president runs into people who don't agree with him, he tries these little jury-rigged operations with people who are not in government and they are frivolous. So the whole thing, to me, was a big embarrassment. 

THC: "as far as I was concerned, it was just a circus.  That's true of a lot of things Trump arranges" is how Trump has always operated.  He lives in the moment and once the moment passes, he improvises his next action based on the response he generates.  That works for reality TV, not such much as the chief executive of the United States.

AG BARR: I would say that it was a riot that got out of control. People breached the Congress, and were attacking police. Obviously not all the demonstrators were doing this. 

I would say it was an effort to intimidate Congress and the vice president. I haven’t heard words from the president that I would consider incitement under the law. That’s a very high bar because of our First Amendment, and it should be a high bar. But I did feel that he was morally responsible for it because he led these people to believe that something could happen on Capitol Hill that would reverse the election. That there’s something they could do involving pressuring the vice president and Congress that would overturn the election. 

AG BARR: Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the F.B.I. are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the F.B.I. In fact, I don't think the F.B.I. would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The F.B.I. would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the F.B.I. is the problem here is misplaced. 

Number two—and the main reason I’m irritated at the whole episode—is that it actually strengthens Trump and strengthens Biden and hurts the Republican Party going into the midterms. The focus has once again returned to President Trump and his persona and his modus operandi instead of the pocketbook issues that had been the focus before. I think this has been a bad development for the Republicans’ hopes in the midterms. That’s why I find it frustrating, because there’s political fallout.

THC: I partially agree with Barr but his reference to "pocketbook issues" indicates, that like many of the old-line GOP, he doesn't completely get what is going on today.  Institutional reform, in and out of government, and taking on cultural issues, is as high a priority.  The days of Republicans comfortable on economic issues, talking the Chamber of Commerce line, but unwilling to confront the other issues are over.  The Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan types have no national future.

BW: What do you say to conservatives who say: Why should we possibly trust these institutions anymore? You still give them the benefit of the doubt, but many in your party don’t. 

AG BARR: I think the Russiagate thing, to the extent that the F.B.I. was misused, was a series of decisions made by high-level officials in the F.B.I. I don’t think that Chris Wray is that type of leader, nor do I think the people around Chris Wray are those types of leaders. I think there are problems in the F.B.I. but it’s not that Wray is going to wake up and say, “How do I throw the F.B.I.’s weight around and interfere in the political process?” Just the opposite. I think he’s very cautious about that. 

In the department it’s spotty. There are some people in the career ranks that are partisans and can't check it at the door. And there are others that have more respect. 

I always say, “What’s the alternative?” We have these institutions that need reform. The first step is to win an election with a decisive majority that allows you to put a program into effect and fix some of these problems going forward. That is not done by just throwing fuel on the fire of outrage on one side of the equation while the other side does the same thing on their side. I don’t see anything productive coming out of that. I think we should basically try to persuade people. People like Youngkin, the Governor of Virginia, have shown that the Republican Party is a potential majority party.

THC:  I do not have the level of confidence that Barr still has in these institutions, and I certainly do not trust Christopher Wray.  Trump's wrecking ball approach is proven to be ineffective, so he is not the solution.  The rot in our institutions, and not just in government, is deep and will require a disciplined and Herculean effort, intelligently executed, to reverse.  I don't know if anyone, or any group, is capable of doing it, but Trump is definitely not.

AG BARR: I think you’re right that right now is a tremendous opportunity for the Republican Party. The defining dynamic of our period right now is the sharp leftward turn of the Democratic Party. That creates a huge opportunity because they’ve moved so far to the left, which can allow the Republicans to come in, as they did in 1980, and seize a decisive majority. That enabled Reagan to win two terms. It also forced the Democrats to elect a moderate Democrat like Clinton, who ran the country in the center. 

So it's a huge opportunity.  But instead of taking it, we are purging the party and starting civil wars over whether people are RINOs . . . The idea that there are RINOs, people that really don't support Republican principles, is simply not true.  What the president is defining as RINOs are people who are true blue Republicans and conservatives but who just have a problem with Trump personally.  This is all personal to Trump.  Trump is doing something that I can't think of any great leader in the past doing.  He controls, in my view, maybe a third of the Republican Party.  But what makes him powerful is that this is a man who's willing to say that if you don't do things my way and if I'm not the nominee, I'm taking my ball and going home.  I will sabotage anyone you put up.  He not only does that in the presidential election, but he'll also do that in state elections.  It's my person or sabotage. 

THC: I agree with Barr regarding what Trump is doing but, once again, I don't like the term RINOs, but Republicans unwilling to tackle the cultural and institutional issues do not have a future in the party.

AG BARR:  They were wrong, in my opinion, because although we've been sort of harping on the warts of Trumpism, I think the greatest threat to the country is the radical progressive movement and what it's degenerated into.

THC: Absolutely right.  The impulsive, chaotic nature of Trump and his followers can be disruptive and destructive but there is no institutional traction and also provides further rationalization for the Democrats to justify and exercise their authoritarian instincts.  The control of the federal bureaucracy, and of the major institutions in our country outside of government, has set the stage for the interlocking crackdown on dissent we are already seeing.  Moreover, the phony election reform bill, narrowly defeated in the Senate, would have federalized elections, preventing any efforts at state level attempts to control fraud, and would have established the groundwork for a permanent Democrat government at the federal level.  It is this institutional support that marks the difference between the dangerous tendencies in the Republican and Democratic parties.

In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed the Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei.  Based on something Ai had written, Hoover asked if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian.  I think she was surprised at the answer (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):

Ai: If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you.  You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.

He goes on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao.   It reminds me of the interview I saw with the Yeonmi Park, the young woman who escaped North Korea, endured more brutality in China, and eventually made it to the United States.  Reflecting on the political and cultural attitudes she encountered at Columbia University she remarked that "this is a suicidal civilization".

And you can read this piece on which party is an outlier on substance.

BW: In the 2024 election, if we have Joe Biden versus Trump, Kamala Harris versus Trump, or Gavin Newsom versus Trump, you’re voting Trump? 

AG BARR: Right now, I would say yes. 

THC: It's a no for me, under any circumstance.  I will work for, and support, the R candidate with the best chance to beat Trump, if he runs, and will not vote for him in the general, if nominated.  Nor will I vote for the D candidate.  Here are my 7 Theses on the subject:

(1) As Barr says, I think Trump had a clear path to winning in 2020 but his inability to control himself, dug him a deep hole.  He has even less ability to control himself now.

(2)  His post-election behavior was a disgrace and made him unworthy to be an American president.  Here's what I wrote on January 6, 2021.

(3)  From a purely political perspective, his post-election behavior was idiotic.  No sane person would have believed he would still be president on January 21, so what was his plan?  What was his thinking?  The agitation to get his most fervent supporters fired up about January 6 was a dead end.  It was reality show theater, as much of Trump's political career is.  After the rioters entered the Capitol what was supposed to happen?  Was there some rational path that led to another term for Trump?  And, at the same time, he was venting his personal spite in way that depressed R turnout in Georgia, losing control of the Senate.  If, after the electoral college vote on December 14, Trump had simply stated that while he thought there was election fraud, he accepted the results, and was certain, once the American people saw how the Biden administration governed, they'd be yearning for his return, both Trump and the party would be in much better shape today.

(4)  If Trump runs and fails to get the nomination he will sabotage the R nominee.

(5)  If Trump gets the nomination he will send two conflicting messages during his campaign - vote for me and the system is rigged against you, just as he did during the Georgia Senate runoffs - vote for the R's but, by the way, the system is rigged against you.  Trump depressed voter turnout.

(6)  If Trump runs and loses, as he did in 2020,  he will refuse to accept the results as legitimate, but this time he will have primed even more to believe him, and plunge us into an even more serious crisis than in the post-2020 election period.  The last time around he managed to lose R control of the Senate, so that we are left to the whims of Manchin and Sinema, as to whether the country will fall under a Democratic authoritarian regime.  His post-election behavior more broadly damaged R credibility, and a 2024 revenge tour will only add to this disaster.

(7)  If Trump wins in 2024, we will get a lot more of the bad and a lot less of the good.  He is focused on revenge.  He still shows no interest in the nuts and bolts of governance needed to address the serious issues we face.  He still has terrible judgment in the people he hires, and now that he's established a reputation as a terrible and untrustworthy boss, the types of people still willing to work for him are of the worst capability and character.  He'll be a 78 year old guy, set in his ways, with declining mental abilities.  Sound familiar?  The damage he will do to the issues I care about is incalculable.  

Donald Trump is a malignant force in American politics.

AG BARR: I like a lot of these guys, some of them much better than others. I don’t know Ron DeSantis that well, but I’ve been impressed with his record in Florida. I’m going to support whoever has the best chance of pushing Trump aside. 

What we’ve moved to is a bipolar system that’s more typical of revolutionary countries, where you have a party like the Marxists or some other totalitarian party trying to take power. It’s all or nothing and anything goes. It’s war by other means. That’s where we are, and it doesn’t end well. 

THC:  Again, I think Barr is correct. Any corrective course we take entails dangers to this country's founding principles.  Our current dilemma led to this conclusion in my essay on Elihu Root:

America works to the extent the large majority of its citizens, no matter how they may differ, generally accept common process outcomes or "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains" (yes, I'm quoting Bull Durham).  This aspirational belief in neutral processes, supported by freedom of conscience and speech, along with equality under the law and due process rights, is the only way Root's vision can be sustained. 

Can we confront and defeat the enemies of liberal democracy merely by using the traditional Constitutional tools to achieve the aspirations set forth in that document?  Do we now face the scenario written of by Frank Herbert in Children of Dune:

When I am Weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom because that is according to my principles.

Having effectively used our concept of tolerance (as something we owe each other) to seize control of institutions, these forces now seek to destroy the mutuality inherent in that concept and return to the older, medieval meaning of tolerance, as something bestowed by rulers and revocable at their discretion. 

Can we effectively oppose them using these long standing general principles, neutral processes and reliance on the Constitutional protections enunciated by Root or does that strategy lead to inevitable defeat if large portions of society refuse to play by the same rules?  Does it mean adopting the same techniques in order to defeat those who seek to embed these dangerous principles into our government and culture?  If so, how does one ensure that in doing so, we do not become what the enemies of American principles have become?  A decade ago, I never thought this question would arise and would certainly have objected to straying from those principles.  I underestimated what was happening within those institutions and am no longer certain as to the right answer; an answer that will determine if we will govern ourselves or be governed by others.

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(1)  Here's a sampling of what Holder did to destroy the reputation of DOJ:

- Proclaim himself as President Obama's "wingman" whose job it was to protect the president.  Any previous AG making that statement, particularly if a Republican, would have been condemned by the press, and prompt protests within the Justice Department.  Instead we heard crickets from within DOJ.  Interestingly, President Trump understood what Holder was up to.  We learned from the Mueller report that, on at least two occasions, he complained to his staff that he needed an AG like Robert Kennedy or Eric Holder to defend him.  He was right.  Jeff Sessions was an honorable man but he was no Eric Holder.

- When President Obama proclaimed on 60 Minutes that Hillary Clinton was innocent, even as his DOJ was supposedly conducting an investigation of her conduct regarding government emails, his AG, Holder's successor Loretta Lynch, failed to act on the President's improper intervention and appoint Special Counsel.  Once again, we heard no protests from DOJ attorneys.

- In 2014, two thirds of the Inspector Generals in federal agencies signed an open letter to Congress complaining that Holder's DOJ was interfering with their investigations.  The letter was a one-day story in the Washington Post and not covered in the New York Times.

- At the beginning of the Obama administration, Holder hired nearly 100 attorneys for the Civil Rights Division.  An IG report criticized Holder for ignoring highly qualified candidates and only hiring from four activist groups, including the legal funds for the NAACP and La Raza, all of whom take the legal position that the anti-discrimination language in the Civil Rights Act does not apply to white people.  This position is also taken by Kristen Clarke, the lawyer appointed by Biden to lead the Civil Rights Division of DOJ, as well as by Vanita Gupta, the current #3 at DOJ.

- Funneled tens of millions of dollars to activist groups supporting the administration as part of its settlement of lawsuits against major banking and other institutions, a practice ended when AG Sessions took office, though perhaps the GOP would have been smarter to emulate Holder's corrupt practices.

Today, we are saddled with a DOJ led by Democratic partisans and largely staffed by partisan Democrats, having now destroyed its credibility with half of America.

(2)  In footnote 1, I mentioned Jeff Sessions, who is also a perfect example of Trump's insistent on total personal loyalty and its short-sightedness.  Sessions was a very good Senator, knowledgeable about substance and process, an expert on the details of immigration law, and respected by his colleagues.  Like many Senators, he proved a bad fit as a Cabinet officer.  Trump was furious he recused himself on the Russia matter, something AG Holder never would have done, and I think a mistake as it was clearly part of the maneuvering to eventually get Special Counsel Muller appointed.  

In 2020, Sessions attempted to get the GOP Senate nomination in Alabama, and strongly supporting President Trump's policy positions. Trump, still angry about Sessions as AG, instead endorsed Tommy Tubs, or whatever his name is, an inexperienced candidate who knows nothing about policy or how the Senate operates but pledged 100% personal fealty to Trump.  That endorsement was enough for Tommy to get the nomination and win the election, but the GOP lost someone who knew substance and process, was an effective Senator, and was considered one of the Senate's leading experts on immigration, with similar views to Trump.  If Trump had won in 2020 he could have used someone like Sessions in the Senate.  Instead we have Tommy Tubs, a blockhead who will vote the right way, but has no ability to influence the greater outcome or the writing of legislation.

The GOP desperately needs skilled politicians who understand substance and process, and are willing to spend time on the details and understand how to negotiate.  Trump prefers loyal "show horses", who delight in tweeting and being the center of attention, like MTG and the high forehead guy from Florida, but who have no interest in governance or in learning how to do it.  "Owning the libs" is enough for them.  It is precisely why so much of what Trump did domestically was ephemeral and so effortlessly reversed by Biden.