Earlier this year Karen discussed the secret nighttime flights that the Biden administration has arranged to bring illegal migrants from the border to other locations around the country, where they are then released into the wild. One spot seeing a lot of this traffic was the airport in Westchester, New York. Planeloads of migrants were arriving on an almost nightly basis. They were given boxes of welcome gifts and loaded onto buses to be dropped off in New York City or other communities around the state. No announcements of these arrivals were given to the communities where it was taking place.
Once the news went public, I foolishly thought that the practice might come to an end, or at least be made public so more oversight could be applied. Neither of those things happened. In fact, the frequency of the flights has expanded to the point where they added a second airport to handle them all. As the New York Post reports, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rob Astorino has been investigating the situation and he personally took video of planeloads of migrants arriving at New York Stewart International Airport, located in the Hudson Valley to the northwest of Gotham.
As illegal migration at the southern border breaks new records, the Biden administration has upped the frequency of its secret flights on an industrial scale.
Migrant flights into New York have ratcheted up in recent weeks to almost one per night, and now a new airport is being utilized to handle the overflow, in an apparent bid by the administration to avoid images of border chaos before the November midterm elections.
New York Stewart International Airport, in the Hudson Valley, is taking up the slack for Westchester County Airport, according to video provided to The Post by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rob Astorino.
Some of the flights are coming from El Paso, Texas, via Jacksonville, Florida. Just as before, the migrants are turned loose at a variety of locations around the state, many without even having a court date to talk to immigration officials. They are simply being dumped out at highway rest stops or public housing locations and the planes return to the border to collect another load.
The majority of the migrants seen in the new videos appear to be Hispanic males in their late teens or early 20s. This flies in the face of the claims of the Biden administration that single males are “mostly” being sent back across the border, while families and children are screened for possible admission. The planes carrying the migrants are not military or government flights. They are from a private charter company, though the company insignia on the side of the planes have been covered over. This further underscores the secrecy of the entire program and the fact that the Biden administration knows they are doing something wrong that people would be upset about.
Stewart airfield is a former Air Force base that is now operated by the Port Authority under the control of Governor Kathy Hochul It is still used as a military airfield for the Air National Guard and the Marine Corps Reserve. Who gave the approval for this base to be used for these purposes? And who is paying for the late-night operations when the base is normally closed? For that matter, who is paying for those charter flights? The answer to the second and third questions is obvious. The taxpayers are footing the bill as usual. We currently have a government that is running a covert illegal immigrant smuggling operation right under our noses. And these are some of the most well-paid coyotes in the country.
Last August a woman was walking down an alley in Los Angeles county pushing a stroller containing her one-year-old infant. A teen driver speeding down down the alley seemed to be heading in her direction and she moved herself and the stroller as far as she could against a block wall. But the driver just sped up and headed straight for her. The incident was caught on a surveillance camera.
The driver paused and then drove away, making this a hit and run. Fortunately, there was a large truck further up the alley who drove toward him to cut off his escape. The car actually collided with the truck and then hit a telephone pole. There were numerous witnesses to the hit and run and people were so angry that the driver is lucky he remained in the car until police arrived.
Luckily, the mother, whose name is Rachel, and the baby were both okay. But in a victim impact statement she described the incident as attempted murder.
“I thought those were the last moments of our lives; we were dead,” the mother, who asked to be identified only as Rachel, wrote in a victim’s impact statement. “That feeling, along with the memory of a car accelerating directly into us, will haunt me forever.”…
Rachel, in her statement, repeatedly called the attack an attempted murder and lambasted Gascon for what she called a policy of seeking juvenile justice with “the lightest touch possible.”
As for the teen driver. Fox News reports he was driving a stolen vehicle and lied to police about what happened:
According to police sources, the driver, 16 at the time of the crime, initially told investigators the victim appeared out of nowhere, and he struck her by accident.
He was charged with two counts of felony assault and one felony count of hit and run but because of his age and because George Gascon is DA, he received a sentence of 5 months probation to be served at a rehabilitation camp, possibly this one in Malibu (the story doesn’t specify). Rachel wasn’t pleased with that sentence.
“George Gascon doesn’t value my life or the life of my child, or any other victim out there, and would rather reward the monsters like [the juvenile suspect] by demonstrating to them that their actions have no consequences,” Rachel wrote.
“DA Gascon is telling him and every other thug in LA County that it doesn’t matter if you try to murder people.”…
“I have never been more surprised or disappointed, and in fact I have never felt so victimized as I have by the system and current policies of LA’s DA, George Gascon,” she said.
She added that she’d been told his record would be “wiped clean” when he turns 18.
“How on earth can that be?” she said. “He tried to murder two innocent pedestrians. Murder. And we have video evidence. My child would be dead if I hadn’t been there to protect him.”
As for Gascon, his office said the sentence was appropriate given that the baby was unharmed and the mother had minor injuries. But would it have mattered if they’d both wound up in the hospital? I’m not sure it would have. Gascon is committed to not charging juveniles as adults (though he somewhat backtracked on that earlier this year). Still, whatever happened to the victims short of death the driver would probably have been sent to juvenile hall for a couple years. And if this kid goes back to committing more crimes after his 5-month probation, we’ll probably never hear about the connection to this previous incident. All we can really do is hope that by then DA Gascon has been recalled.
In Ukraine, a hundred days of warfare have passed, and the Russians are still there, pounding cities, and not going away. In the east, they appear to be gaining ground in taking control of the Donbas. They still have overwhelming superiority of men and materiel, and the signals from Moscow say no let-up.
Yesterday, the Russians were actually back to shelling Kiev. So much for all that political tourism — from Jill Biden to Bono to Boris Johnson to Nancy Pelosi… The Russians also destroyed a major grain terminal in Mykolaiv. The ports for exports of Ukrainian grain remain blocked and land transport is gummed up by business-as-usual customs practices from the European Union, while the Black Sea ports are blocked and mined.
Yet everywhere we hear, it’s always Ukraine is winning or is going to win.
Since February 24, the United States has provided more than 6.3 billion dollars of security, humanitarian and economic assistance to help Ukraine prevail. As President Biden has said, our goal is straightforward: The United States wants to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.
We again call on President Putin to immediately end this conflict and all the suffering and global upheaval his war of choice has caused. Neither the United States nor our allies and partners seek to prolong the war to inflict pain on Russia. We greatly respect the citizens of Russia, who are not our enemy and who deserve a better future than what continued war and increasing repression will bring.
To the families of Ukraine who have lost loved ones, who have been separated by violence, whose villages, apartments, schools, and hospitals have been hit by bombs, shells and missiles, who have been sent to and survived Russia’s so-called “filtration” camps: The United States stands with you; we will help you defend your sovereignty and territorial integrity, and we will help you rebuild when this war is over.
Ukraine will prevail? That’s the plan?
That kind of optimism reminds me of the Confederates after Fort Sumter and the First Battle of Manassas, in the earliest weeks of the four-year Civil War.
“We’ll whup the Yankees!”
As time told, having motivated and often excellent soldiers was no match for the North’s war of attrition, logistical superiority, and bottomless resources. Four years later, the utterly ruined South surrendered.
It seems there’s been a lot of counting chickens before they have hatched. The U.S., as Blinken said, has already shoveled $6.3 billion to Ukraine, to pay for its economic needs as well as military weapons. Congress easily passed a $40-billion aid package, an amount that dwarfs the State Department budget, and in speed of dispatch, the cash spent in the war on Afghanistan, for arms and post-victory plans such as reconstruction. What becomes of the cash if Ukraine loses? Who gets it? Sen. Rand Paul conducted a valiant effort to make the aid be conditioned on careful auditing but was steamrolled in the Senate. There won’t be any auditor.
It’s victory; it’s baked in the cake. Doesn’t the U.S. always win its wars?
The chickens have been counted. But the eggs have not hatched.
Two thoughtful pieces well worth reading are raising questions about this over-optimism about Ukraine winning its war.
PJMedia columnist David P. Goldman has thoughts about the rush to do victory dances:
After three months of nearly-unanimous media predictions of the collapse of Russia, it now appears that the Russian army is close to controlling the Donbas. Extricating it will be difficult if not impossible. The result, as Henry Kissinger suggested at Davos last week, will be (eventually) a peace in which Ukraine cedes territory to Russia. All the “don’t appease Putin-Hitler” rhetoric will simply make us feel shabbier when we make the deal. We should feel shabby. We screwed this up on the grand scale.
Our bathetic outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine served mainly to obscure the ugly fact that Russia has better strategic weapons than we do (hypervelocity missiles and the S-400/500 air defense systems). No doubt the Russian army is corrupt, as Western commentators aver, but not so corrupt by orders of magnitude as our Pentagon, which pays top dollar for obsolete weapons while Russia and China innovate. The Javelin and Switchblade and Stinger are fine toys, but the West remains in fear of Russian nuclear weapons — as well we should. The Biden Administration won’t sent long-range missiles to Ukraine because it fears, correctly, that Ukraine might use them to attack targets deep inside Russia and start a broader war.
Yet when I read the broader theories of hawkish commentators, their ideas about America’s strategic vision and what kind of endgame we should be seeking in the war, I still find myself baffled by their confidence and absolutism.
For instance, for all their defensive successes, we have not yet established that Ukraine’s military can regain significant amounts of territory in the country’s south and east. Yet we have Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic insisting that only Putin’s defeat and indeed “humiliation” can restore European stability, while elsewhere in the same magazine Casey Michel calls for dismantling the Russian Federation, framed as the “decolonization” of Russia’s remaining empire, as the only policy for lasting peace.
Or again, the United States has currently committed an extraordinary sum to back Ukraine — far more than we spent in foreign aid to Afghanistan in any recent year, for instance — and our support roughly trebles the support offered by the European Union. Yet when this newspaper’s editorial board raised questions about the sustainability of such support, the response from many Ukraine hawks was a furious how dare you — with an emphasis, to quote Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, on Ukraine’s absolute right to fight “until every inch of their territory is free,” America’s strictly “modest” and “advisory” role in Ukrainian decision making and the importance of offering Kyiv, if not a blank check, at least a “very very big check with more checks to follow.”
It figures that Applebaum and the characters at Fiona Hill’s Brookings Institution are leading the rah-rah crowd. Is anybody surprised by that? These are the “American Power” neocons of the left.
Douthat sums up the issue this way:
These theories all seem to confuse what is desirable with what is likely, and what is morally ideal with what is strategically achievable.
He is likely right. Just because everyone likes Ukraine and wants to see Ukraine become the Little Nation That Could doesn’t mean that this is what’s inevitably going to happen. On the contrary, Putin seems as determined as ever to make the opposite happen, to absorb Ukraine and let the chips fall where they may. He doesn’t care what people like Anne Applebaum think.
All of these declarations of victory seem to be what’s driving the actions of the West, leading to the foolish political tourism, big cash-shoveling from the States, questionable promises of quick E.U. membership, memes, Eurovision song contest “victories,” and wimpy offers and withdrawals of offers of fancy weaponry to Ukraine from the West.
Unless the West intends to fight Russia directly as intently as Russia intends to fight to take Ukraine, the claim for easy victory is premature. There’s still a war on, and it remains far from certain, given the odds against it, that Ukraine will be able to win.
Hey, nothing says normalcy like more government marketplace interventions, right? California voters will finish going to the polls tomorrow in the state’s open primaries. Will a new push for mask mandates in the pandemic force those voters to choose between yet another season of pointless performative acts or more rational leadership?
Yeah, yeah, yeah … it’s California, I know. But still:
Suddenly, California officials are moving toward new indoor mask rules as coronavirus cases enter the danger zone in many parts of the state.
The virus has been spreading rapidly across California after a spring of big declines. That is setting up an anxious summer in which officials are now talking about a return to mask wearing to prevent wider spread.
So far, the biggest concerns have been in Northern California. But Los Angeles County officials say mask mandates are possible by the end of the month if conditions continue to deteriorate.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking when a county enters the high COVID-19 community level, the worst in a three-tier system.
Entering the high COVID-19 community level means that new weekly rates of hospitalizations, or hospital capacity, are being affected by coronavirus-positive patients to such an extent that the hospital systems may grow strained.
“Deteriorate” is a loaded word here. Cases may be escalating again thanks to super-transmissive variants, but there isn’t any indication that it’s overtaxing health-care resources. The LA Times reports that hospitalization admissions are up in California, but by how much? Not much at all, even according to the CDC’s own data today:
The seven-day average of hospital admissions has tripled since the mid-April trough, it’s true — but it’s still far below the Omicron peak of January. And that doesn’t account for the fact that almost all of these admissions are correlative to COVID-19 diagnoses, not causative. With Omicron and other super-transmissible variants, people who are admitted for other reasons get counted as admissions for this metric, even if their COVID diagnosis has nothing to do with their treatment.
In other words, this metric is meaningless in an environment where variants are much less likely to cause severe outcomes and where most adults have been vaccinated and/or have access to therapeutics. This metric and the measure of correlated deaths will remain useless until the CDC finally fixes its data to track admissions and deaths that are caused by COVID-19.
Next, let’s remember that many states, especially warm-weather states, haven’t had mask mandates since late 2020. The differences in outcomes in those states has been statistically insignificant from those with mandates in place, meaning that mask mandates do not work in practice to hold down community transmission. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt made that clear last week:
In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks. …
During an acute crisis — such as the early months of Covid, when masks were one of the few available forms of protection — strict guidelines can nonetheless make sense. Public health officials can urge people to wear tightfitting, high-quality masks and almost never take them off in public. If the mandate has even a modest benefit, it can be worth it.
And even without that point, the time has passed on mask mandates for another reason:
The available data also suggests that more than half of Americans have had Covid in the past six months, making many of them unlikely to contract it again now. As Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told Vox: “Many of the people who are not wearing masks have already had Covid, so they’re like, ‘I’ve been vaccinated, I already had it — how much longer do you want me to do this for?’ And it’s kind of hard to say, ‘No, you absolutely must wear it.’”
Policymakers in California may want to force people to comply, but it’s become clear that voters have had enough. Americans have incorporated the measured risks of further COVID-19 exposure, The Hill reports, and they’re done with the government mandates:
Now, almost all masks or vaccine requirements have been deliberately abandoned or overturned in court. The U.S. is averaging about 100,000 new cases every day, but movie studios are releasing summer blockbusters to packed theaters, families are celebrating weddings, and bars and restaurants are full.
Living with the threat of a COVID-19 infection has become the new normal for Americans who are ready to move on.
“People are tired of the changes that they’ve had to make to their lives related to COVID-19 and so eager to get back to normal,” said Mercedes Carnethon, epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“And what they’ve seen with increased experience, two plus years into the pandemic is that, if they know people who’ve had COVID-19, most of them—and this ignores a million people who have died—but most of them have recovered,” Carnethon said.
That is almost certainly true in California, and maybe especially so. For one thing, they’ve endured mandates for much longer than most of the rest of the country. For another, Gavin Newsom turned out to be a masking/social distancing hypocrite on more than one occasion. It’s at least somewhat surprising that the state is making it clear that they will put voters back through more mandates on the eve of the primary, and very surprising given the lack of impact from its previous mandates.
The rest of the country has moved on. Californians will have an opportunity tomorrow to declare whether they’re ready to do the same.
While we have learned much from the Sussmann prosecution, we still don’t know whether Durham intends to hold the Crossfire Hurricane team responsible.
MARGOT CLEVELAND
Less than one week ago, a Washington D.C. jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann of lying to former FBI General Counsel James Baker. Since then, pundits on both the left and the right have painted the verdict as an indictment of Special Counsel John Durham, suggesting his investigation into the perpetrators of Spygate is a bust.
This myopic view of the prosecution, however, ignores the many revelations exposed since the special counsel indicted Sussmann last September. Here are nine significant details learned from the Sussmann prosecution.
1. The Scheming Behind the Crazy Alfa Bank Hoax
The special counsel’s indictment against Sussmann alleged he lied to Baker when presenting Baker data and whitepapers purporting to show a secret communication network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. While the trial focused on whether Sussmann had told Baker he was bringing the FBI that material on his own, when he was really representing the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe, the indictment and various court filings exposed the birth and nature of the Alfa Bank hoax.
The Alfa Bank hoax originated when cybersecurity expert April Lorenzen shared supposedly suspicious data with another tech expert, Joffe. Joffe then told his attorney, Sussmann, about the data, claiming it showed a back-door communications network between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Sussmann shared that information with lead Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias and employees of the investigative firm Fusion GPS.
Joffe then exploited both his relationship with other tech experts and his access to proprietary and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President. Among other things, Joffe pressured an executive at another tech company and a researcher at Georgia Tech to search broadly for data purporting to connect Trump to Russia. Not only was no connection found, but in emails disclosed in the case, Georgia Tech’s Manos Antonakakis told the others they needed to regroup and rethink their theory, noting hatred of Trump was their motivating factor.
Instead, Joffe forged ahead, drafting a whitepaper that hid the fallacies of the theories. Sussmann then peddled that data and whitepaper, along with two others, to the FBI and later the CIA. Meanwhile, Fusion GPS pushed the Alfa Bank hoax to the media, with the assistance of Georgia Tech’s David Dagon, whom Fusion GPS connected with reporters to supposedly authenticate the research and the conclusion.
While Joffe and his crew thought the whitepaper adequately masked the problems with the Alfa Bank theory, trial testimony revealed that the FBI quickly concluded the data did not support the existence of a secret communications network. In fact, after reviewing one whitepaper an agent noted it sounded “5150ish”—crazy. According to prosecutors, one CIA agent went further, believing that the underlying data had been created.
In total, this evidence revealed not just that the Alfa Bank theory was wrong, but that those pushing it knew or should have known it was a hoax. And many individuals were involved in both the crafting and peddling of the hoax.
2. Hillary Clinton Greenlighted Pushing the Alfa Bank Hoax to the Media
Many players took part in crafting and peddling the Alfa Bank hoax, but the bottom line proven during the Sussmann trial was that Hillary Clinton both paid for and personally okayed her campaign minions giving the press the fake story about a Trump-Russia secret communication network. Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Clinton personally greenlighted the pushing of that Alfa-Bank hoax, and Sussmann’s acquittal cannot erase that fact.
Further, given that her campaign team sought Clinton’s personal approval to peddle the Alfa-Bank hoax to the media, logically one would expect that Mook or others close to Hillary likewise sought her permission to push other angles of the Russia collusion conspiracy, such as those emanating from the Christopher Steele dossier.
3. The Clinton Campaign Abused Attorney-Client Privilege
Clinton’s full involvement in the Russia collusion hoax, either directly or through her various Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS agents, remains shrouded from view, in part, because of the former presidential candidate’s abuse of the attorney-client privilege. The Sussmann trial exposed this reality when prosecutors moved for access to 38 documents of some 1,500 withheld from the grand jury based on claims of attorney-client privilege.
The court in the Sussmann case ruled that the Clinton campaign had improperly secreted numerous documents from prosecutors, and ordered Fusion GPS to turn the unprotected material over to the special counsel. But the court’s order only addressed the wrongly withheld documents from the batch of 38 at issue. The court did not rule on how many of the approximately 1,500 remaining documents had likewise been withheld based on a misplaced reliance on attorney-client privilege. Hopefully, the special counsel will force production of those documents soon.
4. The Russian Yota Phone Hoax Was Even Worse
While the Sussmann prosecution focused on the Alfa Bank hoax, the prosecution also revealed a second crazy conspiracy theory pushed by Sussmann and Joffe—this one to the CIA. In court filings, the special counsel detailed how, in February 2017, Sussmann used his connections to obtain a meeting with CIA agents.
During that meeting, in addition to providing the CIA with updated Alfa Bank allegations, the special counsel said “Sussmann provided the agency thumb drives with separate data files for the YotaPhone by the location of the ‘domain name system’ or DNS lookups, including one for Trump’s Central Park apartment, one for the EOP, one for Spectrum Health Care, and one for the Trump Tower.”
Sussmann told the CIA that the DNS data “indicat[ed] that a Russian-made Yota-phone had been seen by [Sussmann’s contacts] connecting to the WiFi from the Trump Tower in New York, as well as a from a location in Michigan, at the same time that then-candidate Trump was believed to be at these locations.”
But the special counsel’s investigation revealed that Joffe and his crew had obtained more complete data about the Yota phones and that data showed “the DNS lookups involving the EOP began at least as early as 2014,” meaning before Trump came on the scene. The data provided to the CIA, however, omitted those DNS lookups from the material given to the CIA, misleading the agency.
Other court filings suggest an even more scandalous reality: that Trump’s enemies were tracking his physical movements. This scenario seems likely given a CIA memorandum included in a filing by the special counsel. That stated Sussmann claimed, “the phone was never noticed in two places at once, only around the President’s Movements.”
Sussmann’s acquittal does nothing to lessen the significance of him peddling to the CIA “fraudulent-by-omission data to prompt an investigation into the sitting president of the United States.”
5. Rodney Joffe’s Super Shady Involvement
The special counsel’s prosecution of Sussmann, by necessity, revealed Joffe’s involvement in curating the Alfa Bank data and crafting the hoax. But the many pre-trial filings and subsequent testimony during the two-week Sussmann trial exposed Joffe’s involvement in several additional suspicious schemes.
First, in addition to working on the Alfa Bank hoax, Joffe took a lead role in devising the Yota phone conspiracy theory. Sussmann purportedly went to the CIA on Joffe’s behalf, albeit without naming Joffe as the client behind the “intel.” To cull the Yota phone data, Joffe also exploited his access to the data of the Executive Office of the President and pressured other cyber-experts to mine proprietary information to frame Trump.
A second significant revelation came during trial, when witnesses testified that Joffe had served as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI during the relevant time period and until 2021, when he was terminated. Although Joffe was a CHS, instead of presenting his handler the supposedly suspicious Alfa Bank data, he used Sussmann to feed it to the upper echelons of the FBI. Simultaneously, Joffe provided another FBI contact—again, not his handler—a similar warning about the supposed Alfa Bank-Trump connection, resulting in circular reporting of the hoax.
Joffe also bypassed his handler a third time, in March 2017. That’s when he used Sussmann to provide the Department of Justice’s inspector general information that “a specific OIG employee’s computer was ‘seen publicly’ in ‘Internet traffic’ and was connecting to a Virtual Private Network in a foreign country.”
Given that Joffe used Sussmann on two prior occasions to directly feed the government misinformation about Trump and those connected to Trump, it would not be shocking to find that Joffe repeated the process when he had Sussmann approach the OIG on his behalf. For now, however, the public knows little more than those basics, although the special counsel also knows that Joffe remains a subject of investigation and there are still crimes for which the statute of limitations has yet to expire.
6. DOJ’s OIG Is Not a Team Player
As noted, little is known about the details of the tip Sussmann conveyed to the DOJ’s OIG in March of 2017 on behalf of Joffe. What is known, however, is that the OIG’s office withheld information from the special counsel about that meeting.
From various filings in the Sussmann case, Durham’s team revealed that the DOJ’s OIG did not inform prosecutors that Sussmann had actually met with the inspector general about Joffe’s tip. The OIG also originally withheld some documents related to Sussmann’s meeting with the IG about Joffe’s tip, only providing the material to the special counsel after Sussmann had told prosecutors of his meeting with the IG.
In addition to withholding information about Sussmann’s meeting with the IG, during the proceedings in the Sussmann case, the special counsel discovered the DOJ’s OIG had two of Baker’s cell phones, as well as other cell phones of individuals connected to the Russia collusion probe, but had not provided those to Durham’s team. From this, the public learned that the DOJ’s OIG is not a team player.
7. The FBI’s Team Is So Swampy
The prosecution of Sussmann also exposed that the FBI is not “our” FBI, but the swamp’s. Baker’s trial testimony made that clear when he was pushed by prosecutors on why he had only recently discovered an old email from Sussmann in which Sussmann texted that he wanted to meet on his own behalf. Baker told the special counsel’s team, “I’m not out to get Michael. This is not my investigation. This is your investigation. If you ask me a question, I answer it. You asked me to look for something, I go look for it.”
That’s a shocking attitude for the former general counsel of the FBI to take, given that Baker also testified he was “100 percent confident” Sussmann said during their September 19, 2016 meeting that he was not representing a client. “Baker also told the jury he likely wouldn’t have taken the meeting if he knew Sussmann represented the Clinton campaign.”
Rather than condemn Sussmann, “Baker blamed himself for throwing Sussmann ‘into a maelstrom’ and expressed outrage at how the congressmen investigating the investigation into Trump and his campaign behaved when they questioned Baker about his meeting with Sussmann. Baker displayed not even a sliver of the same distress over his friend lying to him.”
Bill Priestap, another high-level FBI official during the relevant time frame, seemed similarly reticent in assisting the government in its prosecution of Sussmann.
And these are just those who testified at Sussmann’s trial. The Crossfire Hurricane team, up to and including its leaders—then-FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andy McCabe—as well as many of the FBI agents working for former Special Counsel Robert Mueller likewise proved themselves not out to find the truth, but out to get Trump.
The Sussmann trial revealed that Trump may be gone, but the FBI still belongs to the swamp.
8. The Legacy Media Swims in the Swamp
The Sussmann prosecution also proved that the legacy media swims in the swamp. Emails exchanged between Fusion GPS’s co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch exposed the symbiotic relationship between the Clinton campaign and reporters working for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, ABC News, Reuters, and more.
While anyone paying attention already knew the media was in on the Russia-collusion hoax, seeing the tag-team effort to destroy Trump in the black-and-white of emails provided indisputable proof of the corruption of the supposed standard-bearers of journalism. If those emails weren’t enough, the corrupt media’s failure to cover the Sussmann trial until his acquittal provides a repeat of the lesson, teaching Americans that journalistic integrity no longer exists at major corporate outlets.
9. The FBI Lied to the DOJ
The next revelation discovered as a result of the Sussmann prosecution came unwittingly from the defense team when they disclosed three sets of handwritten notes taken during a March 6, 2017 meeting in which high-ranking FBI officials briefed acting Attorney General Dana Boente. (Boente stood in at the meeting for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recently recused himself from the investigation.)
The FBI’s McCabe, Priestap, and Counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok updated Boente and his staff during that meeting. As part of the discovery in the Sussmann case, the special counsel team provided Sussmann with notes taken by DOJ officials Tashina Gauhar, Mary McCord, and Scott Schools.
As Hans Mahncke and Stephen McIntyre previously detailed at The Federalist, those notes indicate that the FBI lied to the DOJ during the March 6, 2017 meeting in numerous ways. For instance, the notes reference “‘CROWN reporting,’ implying that the dossier was an official United States intelligence product when it was actually made-up stories and gossip and paid for by the Clinton campaign—a fact the FBI knew from their [Igor Danchenko] interview.”
Significantly, as Mahncke and McIntyre stress, the FBI had interviewed Danchenko in January 2017 and at that time Danchenko disavowed much of the intelligence Steele attributed to Danchenko in the dossier under the moniker “Primary Sub-Source.” Yet the March 6, 2017 notes omit any mention of Danchenko, suggesting the FBI concealed the crumbling of Steele’s reporting from the DOJ.
The notes from the March 6, 2017 meeting, while discussing the Alfa Bank data, also omitted any reference to the fact that the FBI’s cyber analysts who investigated the data Sussmann provided had concluded soon after receiving the data that it “did not suggest any covert communications between Trump and Russia.” Instead, the FBI’s analyst concluded the whitepaper pushing the theory sounded delusional.
The FBI agents handling the Crossfire Hurricane investigation withheld these details and others from the DOJ during the March 6, 2017 meeting. The notes further indicate Strzok “lied to DOJ officials about the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” telling them that Trump’s request for Russia to find Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails prompted “the Australian diplomat to provide his tip about Trump aide George Papadopoulos to the U.S. embassy in London.” But the Australian “diplomat provided his tip before Trump made the joke.”
Not only were these details either omitted or misrepresented during the March 6, 2017 briefing to the DOJ, the fourth and final FISA application to surveil Carter Page, dated June 29, 2017, continued to rely on the disavowed portions of the Steele dossier. And from the notes of the March 6, 2017 meeting, it now appears that the FBI agents in charge hold responsibility for the material omissions, as they either lied to, misrepresented, or withheld key facts from the DOJ.
What remains unclear, however, is what Durham intends to do about it. So, while we have learned much from the Sussmann prosecution, we still don’t know whether Durham intends to hold the Crossfire Hurricane team responsible for their role in the scandal. However, with the five-year statute of limitations set to expire later this month on any lies that made their way into the final FISA application, we should know soon if the special counsel sees crimes in play that prosecutors can prove.
If not, justice may still come, just without jail. The Sussmann prosecution proved that, because even an acquittal cannot erase the historic record of the complicity of those involved in the worst political scandal of our country’s history.
The fog of war is thicker than usual here given how far the fighting in northeastern Ukraine is from Kiev. Still, there’s noise today from the Ukrainian side about a surprise counteroffensive in Sievierodonetsk, the Donbas city that’s been pounded by Russia for weeks. Reports emerged a few days ago that the Ukrainians had finally given up and begun to retreat there, not wanting to sacrifice troops for the sake of holding an area that’s not very strategically important. Putin, however, seems to want Sievierodonetsk badly in order to cement Russia’s claim to the larger Donbas region and give his army a shot of morale.
The Russians are so focused on the city that the rest of the front stretching hundreds of miles from the northeast to the southwest has been mostly quiet these last few weeks. Their strategy at the moment seems to be “Take Sievierodonetsk and we’ll figure out the next step from there.” They seemed to have succeeded.
The Ukrainian governor in Luhansk claims that the city is now controlled roughly 50/50 by the two sides. Here’s more from the Institute for the Study of War. For reference, Lysychansk is the sister city of Sievierodonetsk, located just across the river. It’s also built on higher terrain, giving the Ukrainians there an advantage:
Pro-Russian milblogger Voenkor Kotyenok Z claimed that Russian forces are unlikely to break through Ukrainian defenses in Lysychansk from Severodonetsk (through continued frontal assaults and an opposed crossing of the Siverskyi Donetsk River) and will likely need to complete the drive from Popasna if they hope to capture Lysychansk. Voenkor Kotyenok Z claimed that Ukrainian forces could prevent Russian river crossings from Severodonetsk and highlighted that Russian forces have not yet secured access to two key highways to Lysychansk.
The Ukrainian government and military are furthermore discussing the battle of Severodonetsk in increasingly confident terms and are likely successfully blunting the Russian military’s major commitment of reserves to the grinding battle for the city. While Russian forces may still be able to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and Ukrainian forces are likely more degraded than Haidai’s statements imply, Ukrainian defenses remain strong in this pivotal theater. The Russian military has concentrated all of its available resources on this single battle to make only modest gains. The Ukrainian military contrarily retains the flexibility and confidence to not only conduct localized counterattacks elsewhere in Ukraine (such as north of Kherson) but conduct effective counterattacks into the teeth of Russian assaults in Severodonetsk that reportedly retook 20% of the city in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian government’s confidence in directly stating its forces can hold Severodonetsk for more than two weeks and willingness to conduct local counterattacks, rather than strictly remaining on the defensive, is a marked shift from Ukrainian statements as recently as May 28 that Ukrainian forces might withdraw from Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement.
Why would the Ukrainians bother trying to hold Sievierodonetsk? Presumably it’s because they recognize it as their best opportunity at the moment to attrit Russia’s forces. The long-range artillery war has become a turkey shoot thanks to the enormous firepower advantage the Russians enjoy. “If our side shoots one their way, we get 10 or 15 back,” said one Ukrainian commander to WaPo. Ukrainian troops are reportedly dying at a clip of 50 to 100 per day lately and morale has suffered. “The amount of firepower, the number of explosions, the length and duration of the attacks — all of that together, and the fact that you can’t defend against it, you can’t shoot down the rounds, means it’s a lot of casualties and it is also incredibly demoralizing,” Fred Kagan told the Post.
None of that will change until American and British long-range weapons make their way onto the battlefield. Until then, if the goal is to kill as many Russians as possible in preparation for a major counteroffensive this fall, close-quarters urban combat is the Ukrainians’ obvious option. As risky as it is, it neutralizes Russia’s artillery advantage and makes the war a fairer fight. That’s why they’ve taken another stab at Sievierodonetsk, I assume — and why the Russians are reportedly trying to minimize the number of regular army solders in the city. British intelligence claims that separatist reservists from Luhansk with little training and heavy weaponry are being thrown into the fight as cannon fodder to keep Russian troops out of the Ukrainians’ crosshairs.
For all the hype about Russia’s advances over the past month, it’s worth comparing the two maps here for a perspective check. The Russians gained a bit of ground around Sievierodonetsk and the Ukrainians gained a bit of ground around Kharkiv, finally ending the shelling of that city. But that’s about it:
What you can’t see on the map is how the Russians have brutalized Ukrainian towns and cities as part of their offensive. You know about Mariupol but Sievierodonetsk is also mostly rubble now according to reports. Yesterday Politico published a report about other population centers in the Donbas being laid waste. One woman cried that her hometown of Lyman was dying under Russian shelling, prompting her husband to reply that it was already dead. A war that began with Putin dreaming of reconstituting a gleaming empire will end with Russia ruling over a series of ruins, assuming they can hold the territory they’ve already claimed.
For now, whether strategically or out of spite, they’re going to make the war as painful for Ukraine and the world as they can:
I’ll leave you with this clip of Zelensky making what sounds like an outlandish claim, that Russia has abducted and deported some 200,000 Ukrainian children. Ukrainian propaganda? Nope — the Russians admit that 190,000 children from the Donbas have “arrived” in their country. Reports of forcible deportations, i.e. ethnic cleansing, have been streaming in for months now as Moscow tries to Russify the parts of Ukraine it’s hoping to annex. If ever you find yourself wondering “Why do the Ukrainians keep fighting instead of negotiating?”, here’s why.
You probably missed the New York Times column last week exploring the upside of inflation. Understanding what Democrats and their supporters need to hear right now, the Times delivered Annaliese Griffin’s op-ed column “You Want to Buy Meat? In This Economy?”
Like a bad cold contracted by a cigarette smoker, inflation presents a good opportunity to lose a bad habit. Griffin observes: “Meat, poultry, fish and eggs now cost 14.3 percent more than they did a year ago.”
What has gone wrong? Griffin does not want to know how we got here. Rather, Griffin presents the opportunity food inflation presents for you, the reader, to reform your diet in the interest of Gaia:
Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat. While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change — yet.
The Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles translates Griffin: “[I]ncreasingly unaffordable food prices might just be the catalyst climate activists are seeking. Because at the moment one suspects the word ‘some’ vastly overstates the actual number of Americans whom ‘climate change has motivated’ to adjust their diets. Some New York Times readers, perhaps.”
Drawing on American history, Griffin seems to promote the possibilities afforded by coercive government action before she concludes with a preview of coming attractions. Coming soon, according to Griffin, the new freedom:
[O]ur food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.
While poor and food-insecure households are already stretching their grocery budgets as far as they will go, shoppers with more choices have the relative luxury to see inflation as the nudge they need to go meatless at lunch or twice a week — or to simply break out of the slab-of-meat-with-two-sides mold that has composed the American plate for decades.
The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?
Free at last!
If the column hadn’t appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Times, one might suspect that someone is putting us on.
Current Treasury secretary Janet Yellen laid a colossal rotten egg when she floated the trial balloon of imposing a tax on unrealized capital gains. Not only would the gain be subject to possibly losing some of its value after the tax is collected, but the taxpayer still hasn’t collected the actual proceeds usually necessary for paying the tax.
The bad news is that this really bad idea is still slithering around the fetid catacombs of D.C. The lipstick being put on this pig is the tried-and-true exploitation of envy and resentment for the rich. The late, great Walter E. Williams often opined that he wished there was some humane way to just plain get rid of the rich…so we could finally have an honest discussion about tax policy. It so happens that we are already in the throes of the severe consequences coming from years of punishing success and rewarding failure.
That such an evil idea would emanate and continue to be pursued is rather disturbing. Another problem is the overwhelming lack of economic and financial sophistication of the usual media. When Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax return was illegally leaked to the press, a writer for the Associated Press stated that Trump wrote off (oy, vey!) depreciation on his income properties. The writer stated that only billionaires get to do such things. Actually, there are literally millions of Mom-and-Pop landlords in the U.S. who do exactly the same thing.
Before Mr. Trump was unceremoniously escorted out of office, he suggested indexing the tax on capital gains to inflation. After all, a significant portion of the bump up in price between buying and selling an asset is the result of the continuous devaluation of money. The rest is the actual increase in value…typically from increases in demand or decreases in supply.
Bottom line: Inflation is a poison pill in the upcoming midterm election. The politically opportunistic antidote is, as usual, the increased screwing of the taxpayers. After all, they can be expected to be fairly docile in their cooperation. Seems like a good path to pursue in paying off one’s political supporters. (William Hogarth, who may be considered the father of illustrated political satire, is best known for his painting “Canvassing for Votes,” which shows two rival campaigners…both bribing a citizen.)
The twisted logic behind the push to increase taxes as a remedy for inflation relies on reducing the deficit. After all, it supposedly does not add to the increase in the money supply. We fiscal conservatives, however, focus on spending. Not only is spending excessive, but it’s fairly non-productive, except when it comes to getting the votes of targeted constituencies. Can you say “student loan forgiveness”? Absent from the calculation is that having government suck more wealth out of the public milieu further pushes us toward recession.
Taxing capital gains also has subliminal consequences, particularly when it comes to real estate. Elderly long-term landlords face an enormous tax burden after years of inflation and appreciation. Some just let the property decay while expecting their heirs to get the adjustment in the tax basis when they inherit, and they can then sell while paying little if any tax. This is also known as allowing blight to fester.
Now we’re starting to hear forecasts of recession. Paul Volcker stepped in back around 1981 and deliberately triggered a recession, while simultaneously putting the brakes on inflation because Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” lapel button didn’t seem to work.
There’s a pretty good joke about economists: “this guy is such a great economist that he’s predicted twelve of the last three recessions.”
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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