Thursday, November 03, 2016

HILLARY VS. THE UNDEAD

A few months ago, we were told by FBI director James Comey that Hillary Clinton would not face charges as a result of her handling of emails as secretary of state. She seemed to be in the clear. But some current and former law enforcement officialsnever accepted that conclusion. At the Daily Beast, Wayne Barrett names some of the names:
Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” ...

The man who now leads “lock-her-up” chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress....

Along with Giuliani’s other connections to New York FBI agents, his former law firm, then called Bracewell Giuliani, has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group, born in the New York office in the early ’80s, was headed until Monday by Rey Tariche, an agent still working in that office. Tariche’s resignation letter from the bureau mentioned the Clinton probe, noting that “we find our work -- our integrity questioned” because of it, adding “we will not be used for political gains.” ...

[James] Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” ...
Go read the story -- there's more. A cabal of current and former law enforcement operatives has made this a live issue again. We think the likes of Giuliani and Kallstrom have been banished to cigar lounges and cable news greenrooms, where they can strut their supposed expertise while recalling the good old days when they had power. But they have power. They're the undead, and they're working with some of the living to undermine Amrican democracy and either install a psychopath as president or hobble the psychopath's opponent if she manages to win.

And they're spreading disinformation via Fox News -- which a lot of smart people told us was on its last legs. Roger Ailes is gone, Bill O'Reilly might retire, Sean Hannity might soon leave for Trump TV, Megyn Kelly might jump ship, and Rupert Murdoch might finally cede full control to his less ideological sons. And yet when this cabal wanted to spread its story, Fox was still the obvious venue:
In a November 2 report, [Fox's Bret] Baier cited “two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation” to claim that the investigation “into possible pay-for-play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation” is a “‘very high priority'” and that “agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case.” Baier said FBI agents “had collected a great deal of evidence” to suggest wrongdoing -- though his reporting did not indicate what the alleged evidence concerned or who it suggested committed a crime....

Baier’s reporting on the Clinton Foundation investigation is taking one side of a two-front battle, and thus leaving out critical context that senior DOJ and FBI officials believe there to be no case in the Clinton Foundation investigation.... His reporting also ignores context reported by the [Wall Street] Journal that FBI agents have repeatedly been told to drop the investigation specifically because information gathered was “weak” and unimpressive....

His claim that FBI officials are “99 percent” sure that the server “had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies” flies in the face of the FBI’s public statements that there is “no evidence” Clinton’s server was hacked....
We wanted to believe that the old order was dying -- that were Republicans about to face their third straight presidential drubbing and Ailes and Murdoch were about to give way to a defanged Fox, with all the rage rechanneled to an upstart news channel named after a guy whose businesses routinely fail.

But beware of the living dead. They're hard to kill.

7 comments:

Tom Hilton said...

But beware of the living dead. They're hard to kill.

And they're eating lots of people's brains.

Victor said...

This election is like a bad slasher movie.

Republicans who - and we all knew they were and are fucking lying - said that they couldn't endorse or vote for t-RUMP, are now walking a fence saying that while they don't endorse him, they already did or will vote for him.*

These zombies/serial killers, are back for the final chapter!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

*I'd love to see these fence straddlers slip, and land on their not-pussies on the bar on the fence - the parts that are covered with razor-wire!!!

CF2K said...

The He-Man-Woman-Haters at the FBI are acting out again.

Anonymous said...

... They're eating lots of people's brains...

Not unreasonable, no one wants to eat eyes.

Ten Bears

Feud Turgidson said...

One of the lines of "reporting" on the multiple-edged FBI / HRC Leaks front that derives from spin out of Devlin Barrett's lengthy piece in WSJ over the weekend is that the "venue shopping" concern DoJ officals ["DoJos" I like to call them] involved in that meeting among DoJos and the actively-leaking group of FBI anti-Clinton agents, "really" involved the supposed pro-Clinton DoJos concern to keep control, of the "now newly re-animated" investigation into HRC's emails & resort to the Clinton's private server, out of the office of Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District of NY.

That's a tell on how Devlin Barrett & the WSJ are willing tools of the FBI group actively leaking to him. Preet Bharara isn't the source of the concern among DoJ line prosecutors in the Public Integrity section. Their concern is with these very freaky deaky FBI leakers who've been "investigating" off Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash, and who were the group that managed to talk the publisher of the NYTimes into "buying" the "exclusives", and conned that publisher by dangling in front of his nose an asserted ability and an implied willingness to feed the NYT some of the key source material" underlying some of Schweizer's inventions.

What the FBI leakers really were shopping for was a change to THEIR venue, where they could exploit the trap they'd laid in conning the NYT. They had lots of reasons from the past that the Times publisher, as well as his favorite columnist Maureen Dowd, would be a sucker for this grift, so the currency they used in sucking in the NYT to actually pay large money to be lied to was a GUARANTEE that the leaks would go first to the Times, along with a heads-up on what buttons to push at the FBI to obtain precisely the classic Nixon non-denial denials to support the NYT conduit's story-telling.

In essence, this has been not at all different from how the Times was played so thoroughly by Cheney's people during the lead-in to US invasion of Iraq, resulting in months and months of breathless exclusives from the since disgraced NYT reporter Judy Miller. Sulzberger Jr. in about as credulous a major news outlet owner as it's possible to be, and leaps at Republican cons like a hungry trout at a mayfly.

Is Comey an innocent to all this? Ffffffffffno way: Comey WORKED in that USA SDNY office for years. It's how he came to know Patrick Fitzgerald, who he later was so pointed in assigning to the special prosecution into CIA LeakGate, otherwise known as PlameGate.

But Comey still has his feet stuck in the same NYC FBI swamp out of which these leakers are operating. It's COMEY who's in conflict, and despite his PollyAnnaish efforts to work thru it, he's finding he can't escape it.

The tell on this? He's lost his buddy Chuck Schumer over this.

Unknown said...

Thanks, Steve and Feud.

Grung_e_Gene said...

This is nothing less than a plot against the country to steal the election and failing that to give cover to attempts to undo HRC'S victory.