Thursday Reads: James Comey’s FBI Tries to Steal 2016 Election for Donald Trump
Posted: November 3, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Donald Trump, FBI, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Rudy Giuliani 37 Comments
100-year-old Gertrude Gottschalk of Carson City, NV, casts her ballot. for Hillary.
Good Afternoon!!
This post is illustrated with photos of women who were born before women’s suffrage and are voting for Hillary Clinton.
Just 5 more days until November 8. Then another day of waiting for the votes to be counted. After Hillary wins and we celebrate our first woman President and the ignominious defeat of the authoritarian fascist psychopath, there is going to have to be a major housecleaning at the FBI.
Before I get into the FBI news, some wisdom from 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina.
The Election Polls That Matter. You need to read the whole thing at the NYT, but here’s are some excerpts:
The best campaigns don’t bother with national polls — I’ve come to hate public polling, period. In the 2012 race we focused on a “golden report,” which included 62,000 simulations to determine Mr. Obama’s chances of winning battleground states. It included state tracking polls and nightly calls from volunteers, but no national tracking polls….
Today, campaigns can target voters so well that they can personalize conversations. That is the only way, when any candidate asks about the state of the race, to offer a true assessment.
Hillary Clinton can do that. To my knowledge, Donald J. Trump, who has bragged that he doesn’t care about data in campaigns, can’t….
in recent days, Mr. Trump has campaigned in New Mexico, a state he has no chance of winning. Candidates can get more money and adjust their message, but the one thing they can’t do is make more time; every wasted hour in a noncompetitive state is a grave error. Mrs. Clinton continues to go on the offensive in states like Arizona, where the race is close.
“Big data” is a buzzword, but that concept is outdated. Campaigns have entered the era of “little data.” Huge data sets are often less helpful in understanding an electorate than one or two key data points — for instance, what issue is most important to a particular undecided voter.
With “little data,” campaigns can have direct, highly personalized conversations with voters both on- and offline, like an ad on a voter’s Facebook page addressing an issue the voter is passionate about. In 2016, we see that online political engagement rates (especially for young voters) are at a historic high.
This is why campaigns no longer pay much attention to public polls, which often use conversations with just a few hundred people to make predictions about the entire electorate.
Now please go read the rest and have faith in Hillary’s sophisticated GOTV operation and the Obama coalition!
Conway, MA resident Helen Reed
Positive news for Hillary from Latino Decisions: Latino Electorate On Track For Historic Turnout In 2016.
According to the latest data from our national tracking poll, Latino Decisions projects that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos will vote in 2016. This estimate represents a three percent to five percent increase over the 2012 Latino turnout rate which, coupled with the dramatic growth of the age-eligible Latino population, will yield between 1.9 million and 3.5 million additional Latinos voters in 2016 compared to the 11.2 million who voted four years ago.
Latino Decisions also projects that 79 percent of Latinos will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, 18 percent for Republican nominee Donald Trump, and the remaining three percent voting for other candidates. Clinton’s projected share is higher than both Latino Decisions’ estimated 75 percent Latino vote share and 71 percent exit poll share Democrat Barack Obama received during his 2012 re-election bid.
Over the past seven weeks, the Latino Decisions weekly tracking poll has demonstrated heightened enthusiasm for voting in 2016 and record-high levels of support for Hillary Clinton. Each week, the released poll has captured a rolling cross-section of 500 bilingual interviews conducted nationwide with Latino registered voters and has found little fluctuation either with respect to likely turnout or the proportion of the Latino electorate anticipated to vote for each presidential candidate. From a statistical modeling perspective, this stability is good and suggests more confidence in our model estimates for Election Day.
More details at the link.
Now for some reads about James Comey’s FBI and their efforts to elect Donald Trump.
Andrew Rosenthal at the NYT: James Comey’s Self-Righteous Meddling.
There are two possible explanations for James Comey’s decision to announce last week that he was examining emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
One explanation, which I tend to believe, is that Comey, the director of the F.B.I., set out to interfere in the campaign on behalf of the Republican Party, a shocking act that would render him unfit for his powerful office.
(In that scenario, the aim may have not primarily been to help Donald Trump, but to preserve the Republican majorities in Congress, which suddenly seemed in danger this fall. Can you imagine how intense the pressure on Comey from the Hill must have been following his announcement this summer that the investigation was being closed?)
The other possible explanation is that he acted out of what you might charitably call a sense of moral rectitude. I think it’s better described as self-righteousness — a dangerous current in modern right-wing politics that has its roots in the rise of the Moral Majority, which aimed to make politics a choice between good values (the right’s) and bad values (the left’s) rather than a competition of ideas.
Certainly, Comey was not acting out of respect for protocol, ethics and procedure….
The idea that he wanted to help his political party is pretty terrifying. But the idea that he acted out of moral self-righteousness is not much more reassuring, given the immense powers of his office.
Read the rest at the NYT link.
Adele Stan at The National Memo: Is Reckless Comey Seeking Revenge On Critics Via FBI Twitter Account?
Something very dangerous is happening in the Federal Bureau of Investigation: The nation’s foremost law enforcement agency appears to be at war both within itself and with the Department of Justice, to which it belongs. The disagreements all involve our national politics and the FBI’s appropriate role in them, leaving the American people with yet another major institution on their do-not-trust list. The government is coming ever more undone, so much so that a recent Twitter post from an FBI account is raising questions about who’s behind it—the director of the FBI, or agents seemingly beyond his control….
Now comes word, via Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal, that agents who were investigating allegations of influence-peddling involving the Clinton Foundation were incensed when higher-ups at the Justice Department urged them to tread carefully so as to adhere to department guidelines against taking action that could influence an election, and that members of the Department’s anti-corruption unit didn’t think the FBI had a strong case.
No kidding. The “investigation” was based on right-wing news articles and the anti-Clinton propaganda tome “Clinton Cash.”
It seems as if whoever controls a Bureau Twitter account called @FBIRecordsVault has struck back against all those Clinton surrogates who are calling foul on Comey. The account, whose purpose is the posting of documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests, appears to have been dead for a year—no postings since Oct. 7, 2015. Suddenly, on Tuesday, it sprang to life with a handful of posts, one a nothing-burger on Fred Trump, father of the Republican standard-bearer; and another on an old investigation of the Clinton Foundation and President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, then a fugitive hedge-fund manager whose wife had donated to the DNC and the Clinton Foundation. It was Comey who brought the criminal case against Rich, Bloomberg News reports, and is said to have been “stunned” by Clinton’s pardon of the financier. The documents linked in the tweet don’t say much of anything (they’re heavily redacted), but the tweet itself does reinforce in the public mind the controversies advanced by Clinton’s enemies about the foundation. It’s not the fact of the tweet that’s at issue—the material was released via FOIA—but the timing of it from an account that was only reactivated Sunday.
Read many more details at the link.
Stellajoe Staebler, 100, Centralia, Washington
Judd Legum at Think Progress: FBI launches internal investigation into its own Twitter account.
The account at issue, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year. Then on October 30 at 4 a.m., the account released a flood of documents, including one describing Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump as a “philanthropist.” ….
But it wasn’t until two days later, when the account tweeted documents regarding President Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich that the account began to attract significant attention….
Candice Will, Assistant Director for the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, said she was referring the matter to the FBI’s Inspection Division for an “investigation.” Upon completion of the investigation, the Office of Professional Responsibility will be referred back to the Office of Professional Responsibility for “adjudication.”
Federal law and FBI policy prohibit employees from using the power of the department to attempt to influence elections.
Will was responding to a complaint from Jonathan Hutson, a former investigative reporter who now works in communication in Washington, DC.
Read more, and see the tweets at Think Progress.
Estelle Liebow Schultz, 98, of Rockville, Maryland
Eli Lake at Bloomberg: The FBI Wants to Make America Great Again.
As Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman and Trump supporter, told me Wednesday, “The Marc Rich tweet is evidence of open warfare between the Justice Department and the FBI.” Corallo said this is largely because frustrated field agents believe the Justice Department has stymied the bureau’s investigations into Clinton’s e-mails and the Clinton Foundation.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, told me it was true that records requested from multiple people are supposed to be added to the government agency’s electronic reading room. “What undermines that explanation is that they were not just added to the reading room, they were broadcast on this rarely used Twitter account,” he said. What’s more, Aftergood said government agencies have great discretion when they respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. “There is always a bottleneck, because the resources to review FOIA requests are inadequate to the demand,” he said.The move certainly appeared political. After all, former Attorney General Eric Holder was one of the first former officials to criticizeComey’s decision to update Congress on the e-mail investigation. Perhaps the tweet was a shot across the bow to Holder, who recommended the Rich pardon in 2000 as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
So what’s going on here? As the New York Times and the Washington Post are now reporting, and as my own sources confirm, many rank-and-file FBI officials are frustrated about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation and the way the e-mail probe was handled. Republicans too have wanted to see the FBI more robustly investigate the Clintons. So Comey has tried his best to split the baby.
Wayne Barrett at The Daily Beast: Meet Donald Trump’s Top FBI Fanboy.
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.”
Pressed for specifics, he said: “We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.”
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.
Hours after Comey’s letter about the renewed probe was leaked on Friday, Giuliani went on a radio show and attributed the director’s surprise action to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically.”
“The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity,” said Giuliani. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.”
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.”
Also check out this piece by Barrett at The New York Daily News: Peas in a pod: The long and twisted relationship between Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani.
As I wrote on Tuesday, Hillary is running against the Donald Trump, the GOP, the FBI, Wikileaks, and Vladimir Putin. And she’s still winning!
Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below and have a terrific Thursday. Hillary will be our next POTUS!
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
One more link
Think Progress: Look to Europe to understand why Ivanka Trump is more dangerous than her father
https://thinkprogress.org/europe-far-right-trump-57abd55a8a30#.vlkxqbh36
Pretty terrifying – I just hope demographics will prove this to be the last gasp of these white supremacists.
I suspect Ivanka is pissed off bigly about her business tanking thanks to daddy. Donnie Jr. is the one I despise and think could follow in daddy’s footsteps.
Think Progress:
The chilling implications of the FBI’s latest attack on Hillary Clinton Innocent until proven guilty, unless someone in the FBI doesn’t like you.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-chilling-implications-of-the-fbis-latest-attack-on-hillary-clinton-b91994c30659#.tba38cssl
I just watched bits and pieces of Donald Trump lying his ass off with the teleprompter basically spewing all kinds of shit based on the Comey links. Why does the press broadcast this when they all couch it with well, that should be fact checked and Hillary isn’t under criminal investigation. Haven’t they figured out they need to close down liar’s highway yet?
The FBI is Trump land.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/fbi-leaks-hillary-clinton-james-comey-donald-trump
I desperately hope that President Obama cleans house at the FBI to the extent he legally can once the election is over. This is the most terrifying thing I have learned about corruption in law enforcement in this country. The FB-fucking-I has become an arm of the right wing. We are all in danger if that is the case and it’s looking more and more like it is. We are a half step away from tyranny and I am really worried. I hope this can be fixed because I can barely process that we have rogue FBI agents operating with impunity to do the bidding of their masters. Holy shit.
Back in the ’60s, we called it the F’n BI.
The FBI was all over the Civil Rights Movement. They were all over the Anti-War Movement. They were all over the culture of hippies. They were all over the Women’s Rights movement. Closet case Hoover and the Bureau was even more out of control than they are today.
BB, thank you for all the photos of those “sweet little ladies”………….I couldn’t help thinking about several that I talked to back in 2008, how they came up to me, and wanting to shake my hand for standing with Hillary Clinton. And I wonder, are they still with us, because I see them BB, they are at the polls, voting early, and all dressed up to vote. Tears are streaming down my eyes, because finally, at last, we have arrived.
The photos are so moving. Just beautiful. I remember how excited my mother was to cast her vote in the nursing home for Hillary in the 2008 primary. I was there with her. She didn’t live long enough to vote for Hillary in this election, but every time I see an elderly woman voting now, I think of my mother.
Now you have me crying, Fannie. Love you. xoxo
Yes, it is truly terrifying. It is evidence of a country moving very close to police state fascism. And the media, with its usual nonchalance or complicity, ignores it in favor of the propaganda which the far right is disseminating. Without an honest and investigative media, without honorable law enforcement, there is no protection for the ordinary citizen.
I don’t even know where to start. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, but this is a cabal of the entire Republican Party, corporate oligarchs.,law enforcement,,large portions of, broadcast media and social media, and even the Russians, to destroy our democracy. You might even add in Trump’s mob friends to that group. How do we possibly get rid of all of these pernnicious influences? I truly believe that if Trump wins, our country is lost forever. If Hillary can win, we have hope, but they’re going to try to impeach her from her first day in office, or before. The Republicans do not even pretend to be interested in anything but their own poiwer, and winning at any cost. Unless voters somehow figure this out, and help the Democrats to get rid of these traitors to democracy, they will gain such power that they will create the new societal norms. And that is how Nazism took over Germany and most of Europe.
I agree. It’s the most disturbing thing I’ve learned in a long time if ever. Quite the test for our democracy. Let’s hope it survives.
William, you write about “a cabal of the entire Republican Party, corporate oligarchs, law enforcement, large portions of broadcast media and social media” who are “pernnicious influences”. Then you stress the need to “get rid of these traitors to democracy”. How do you propose to do that? And exactly who will judge who the traitors are? I find your language oddly reminiscent of another time and place where certain groups of people were accused of insidiously weakening society, so society had to root them out in order to preserve itself. Is that what a democracy looks like to you?
I’m pretty sure that William is referring to defeating American fascists at the ballot box.
If defeating Republicans with the power of our vote is what William was referring to, then I agree. But he describes a larger “cabal” that also includes law enforcement and the media. If they are the enemy as well, then how do we defeat them at the ballot box? A democratic society depends on maintaining the rule of law, although, of course, no one ( including law enforcement ) is above the law. A democracy also depends on a free press, even if we don’t necessarily agree with its views.
If we start discussing how to “get rid of” people we consider “traitors” or “pernicious influences” ( the use of this ugly phrase is particularly troubling since it was so often used by the Nazis to describe all Jews ), I think we need to examine exactly what that means lest we go down the road to fascism as well. JMHO.
Carry on.
It is so very disheartening the police and law enforcement in general are in the tank for Trump – who is the crooked one. What that says to me is they are infected in a serious way with racist, misogynist types. It helps explain why they have so easily been militarized. They are becoming more and more Stasi by the day.
For anyone who is jittery about how the election will turn out, here’s an interesting anecdote. Well, I think it is anyway. lol
Every presidential election my family does an election pool where each entrant picks, state-by-state, which candidate will win. My nephew sent it out yesterday and I started filling mine out. I filled in only the absolute sure things, the states like NY and Alabama that we know are definitely going either Clinton or Trump. I left states with any question at all blank, seven of them. And you know what? Even with those 7 states left blank, Clinton was still comfortably over 270 electoral votes. We got this.
It’s true, as I’ve written many times. Trump has to win every swing state plus one blue state. If Hillary wins either Florida or NC, it’s over but she doesn’t really need them.
Wonkette:
James Comey Strikes Again (And Again And Again And Again)
Read more at http://wonkette.com/608221/james-comey-strikes-again-and-again-and-again-and-again#hJie98Su3RsVcK2q.99
Charlie Pierce has the best photo of Comey – and I do not think it is photoshopped:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50225/fbi-2016-election-out-of-control/
He absolutely looks like a rat.
I say this with familial love: Comey looks like a mean Irish drunk, and I ought to know.
He looks like a soon to be convict.
Yesterday Bret Baier put out a flawed report that according to an FBI source and “indictment of Hillary was likely”. Today Baier walked it back and basically said he spoke “inartfully”.
I’ve never seen anything like this in my 70+ years of life. The FBI floating lies and rumors to reporters at FOX while the head of the FBI delivers a totally unnecessary letter obviously aimed at undermining our election.
WHEN Hillary wins I hope she cleans house at the FBI. I understand these are career people but obviously they’re too political and that sick culture needs to be wiped out. It’s like J Edgar Hoover Act II and it needs a complete overhaul top to bottom.
After working myself into serious anxiety over this Comey stuff, I am starting to relax as, in speaking to regular people (not obsessed with politics like us), most people don’t care and aren’t really following it. The main impact seems to be that the EMAILS! EMAILS! EMAILS!!! crowd is starting to get hoarse. Yes, housecleaning needs to be done at the FBI, but if Comey really wanted to interfere in the election, he needed to come out with unassailable proof that the story about Bill being upset about Hillary having an affair with an alien from outer space is absolutely true. I don’t think he’s got that.
“he needed to come out with unassailable proof that the story about Bill being upset about Hillary having an affair with an alien from outer space is absolutely true”
Ah, come on, they have pictures
This picture was taken after she killed Vince Foster and before she killed the campaign worker at the DNC.
That’s so well done it’ll probably appear on Drudge as real news any minute now.
There’s some people with floor-level reading comprehension out there, folks. Be careful!
I met my husband when we worked in the same office in DC. His cubicle was identical to mine except that his was pristine. Not a scrap of paper on his desk, not a pen out of place. The only paper he had was a headline clipping from the Weekly World News hanging on the wall of his cubicle. It was something about a space alien but I don’t recall the specifics. Some people in our office would ask him, “Is that true?” and he would say, I don’t know, what do you think? I thought, I have to get to know this guy, he has the same sick sense of humor as me.
That’s such a great story, Janice. It is important to share a sense of humor with the one(s) you love. Otherwise, how do you survive the daily madness?
First of all, whom ever thought that it would be a good idea to write this article including a another article with unrelated photos and mix everything up has a bit to learn about journalism
Next; The previously well respected FBI is now looking more like the KGB. Giuliani is a wild-man and should have NO INFLUENCE or insight to what the FBI is doing – law partner or not. MI6 surely doesn’t operate as loosely as the FBI does. Apparently the FBI has lost a lot of integrity and professionalism in the last few years. You have an agent that represents Giuliani involved in a case about Clinton. Conflict of interest!
This is a blog, and we aren’t journalists. Furthermore, if you think photos of women who were born before women’s suffrage voting for the first woman president are “unrelated” to what is happening in this election, you have a great deal to learn about politics.
Absolutely loved the photos of the older women. (Count my mother amongst them if she had lived a few more years.) They brought tears to my eyes.
Rachel Maddow did one hell of a show tonight, all concrete, and Newsweek will be out tomorrow, going to be selling like hot tators. Shit, I’m dying to see the whole article.
Rachel was brilliant tonight. If people missed the show, I hope they can watch it later.
I just watched it, and it was both brilliant and horrifying. Three stories; one about the renegade FBI trying to throw the election to Trump; then the Eichenwald piece about Russia and Trump; and then the brief story about how Trump people are trying to trick people into “voting online,” making it look as if Hillary is telling them to vote that way, when of course it is not possible, and so those who fall for it would lose their vote. I don’t think I tend to be hyperbolic, but these are really scary stories.
Thanks for that Beata, it reminded me of the many times my hubby stops me in the midst of things to dance, as he is inspired by ‘background’ music that is playing. It’s always a sweet moment.
This is who we are fighting for, contributing to, volunteering for, tweeting for (yes, social media is important), and voting for. This is our next president.