Finally Friday Reads: Fishy business and a Big Rotting Fish

Vladimir KushDeep Sea Project, 1996

Good Day Sky Dancers!

There’s one thing to say about the current Republican party that has so identified with Trump’s mash-up of severe personality disorders.  It’s this.  If they’re investigating something, it’s bound to be a projection of what they’ve been up to.  House Republicans are gearing up a House Select Panel targeting “DOJ and FBI and their ‘ongoing criminal ‘investigations.’  One of the most disgusting things about this panel is that consideration is being given to Republican Representative Scott Perry, who is currently a target of a criminal investigation. This committee will be rife with the craziest of the crazy Freedom Party members and was probably one of the concessions Kevin McCarthy gave to get his very limp and floppy Speaker’s Gavel.

This comes precisely as we learn more about the Barr Department of Justice and the Russian Inquiry and the role of the FBI Agent that was a Russian Asset in the investigation into Trump’s Russian ties. We’ve already heard all the fishy business surrounding the Secret Service and the destruction of evidence during the Trump self-coup. All that stink you smell are fishes rotting at the head.

The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table (1934)

This astounding piece at the New York Times was covered extensively on the news last night. “How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled.” The review by John Durham at one point veered into a criminal investigation related to Donald Trump himself, even as it failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.”  The byline is shared by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner.  It’s a story of how John Durham fell down the Trump Rabbit hole only to find the rabbit was Barr, who took him on a visit to an Italian Wonderland where the only whiff of a crime was a financial one committed by Trump himself.  It has become the giant nothing burger prepared since the Benghazi Committee and the Clinton Email debacle.  This was another one of those projections of Trump’s bad-faith dealings onto Hillary Clinton and the people around her.

You may remember it led to the indictment and trial of two people at the bottom of the ladder that was quickly dismissed. The once esteemed Durham’s career is now one of those dead things killed by Trump.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

The Times investigation uncovered these things about the Barr-Durham collaboration to appease Trump on the charges he colluded with Russia.  Which, of course, he did. There was also a leak of the criminal investigation, which set the Fox News propaganda channel on fire.  No mention was made that it was Trump who was the target of the investigation.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

• Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

• Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

• There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

 The Barbarians, 1937, Max Ernst

Steve Benen of MSNBC writes, “Details expose Barr’s Durham probe as a law enforcement scandal. John Durham’s probe set out to uncover a scandal. New details help prove that Bill Barr’s partisan investigation actually became a scandal.”

The original investigation into Trump’s Russia scandal, led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, led to a series of striking findings: The former president’s political operation in 2016 sought, embraced, capitalized on, and lied about Russian assistance — and then took steps to obstruct the investigation into the foreign interference.

The Trump White House wasn’t pleased with the conclusions, but the Justice Department’s inspector general conducted a lengthy probe of the Mueller investigation, and not surprisingly, the IG’s office found nothing improper.

This, of course, only outraged Trump further, so Barr directed Durham, a federal prosecutor to conduct his own investigation into the investigation. That was more than three years ago.

At this point, Durham’s investigation into the Russia scandal investigation has lasted longer than Mueller’s original probe of the Russia scandal. Indeed, as of this morning, is still ongoing.

On the surface, what matters most is the conclusion: Barr told Durham to prove that the investigation into the Russia scandal was an outrageous abuse. We now know that this aspect of the endeavor was a spectacular failure: Durham apparently found no such evidence, and his prosecutorial efforts were an embarrassing debacle.

Around the Fish, Paul Klee, 1944

In other words, Trump is still the source of each “Crime of the Century”, not Hillary Clinton.  Details from the Times investigation continue to stun.

But just below the surface, the details uncovered by the Times paint an even uglier portrait. Instead of allowing the U.S. attorney to conduct an independent probe, Barr effectively oversaw the details of Durham’s probe, as the two met in the attorney general’s office “for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work.”

The same article uncovered a series of related and dramatic revelations — too many to reference here — including Durham pressuring the Justice Department’s inspector general, Barr pressuring Durham to release an anti-Clinton memo ahead of Election Day, and internal dissent among members of Durham’s team about the integrity of the investigation, including the resignation of the prosecutor’s top aide.

There was also this amazing tidbit of information:

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

The Times also noted that Durham was ultimately forced to investigate suspected criminal wrongdoing from Trump — a detail that was hidden from the public — which we’ll explore in more detail a little later this morning.

But reading this amazing reporting, I found myself thinking, not of Main Justice, but of Capitol Hill. Among the first priorities of the new House Republican majority was the creation of a special committee that would investigate the political “weaponization” of the federal government.

The wonders of nature, 1953 by Rene Magritte

I’m sure the Republican clown show will continue with their crazy conspiracy theories and not the real thing.  Then, there’s the FBI agent that took money from Oleg Deripaska.  This is the same Russian oligarch connected with Paul Manafort.  This is from Insider.  “Exclusive: Inside the extramarital affair and cash-fueled double life of Charles McGonigal, the FBI spy hunter charged with taking Russian money”. Mattathias Schwartz has the byline.

Federal prosecutors charged McGonigal with money laundering and making false statements in his mandatory employee disclosures to the FBI. He was also charged with taking money from a representative of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who McGonigal had once himself investigated, in violation of US economic sanctions against Russia; the indictment alleges that Deripaska paid him to investigate a rival oligarch. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

McGonigal was not an ordinary FBI agent. He led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning as well as a search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. While working at FBI headquarters in Washington, he played a role in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts that was later dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane.

But it was McGonigal’s final FBI job, special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s New York field office, that was his most important assignment at the bureau. It was his job to find enemy spies and recruit his own.

“New York City is a global center for espionage and counterespionage,” says one senior law-enforcement insider who was closely familiar with the specifics of McGonigal’s role. “You have visits from foreign business elites and politicians. You have the United Nations. You have ethnic populations. Who runs the pitches to recruit spies from all those other countries? The FBI. So the access you get in that job is extraordinary. It’s almost bottomless. So if you’re running FBI counterintelligence in New York, you can get your hands on almost anything you want, and you don’t always have to make excuses for why you’re asking for it.”

The impact of the McGonigal indictments is still rippling out through the law-enforcement world. The charges accuse an official at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation of secretly selling his own access, accepting bundles of cash in surreptitious meetings with someone who had ties to Albanian intelligence. McGonigal, a top-tier member of the city’s law-enforcement community, a man who had fully integrated himself into a powerful circle of trust where favors get swapped and sensitive intelligence gets circulated, is accused of himself being on the take. If the indictments are correct, McGonigal was leading a dangerous double life, right under the noses of some of the sharpest cops in America.

But what might be most striking about the case against McGonigal is how cheaply he is alleged to have rented out his law-enforcement powers. One indictment suggests that for $225,000, McGonigal’s associates got him to lobby the Albanian prime minister about the awarding of oil-field drilling licenses and then open an FBI investigation connected to a US citizen who had lobbied for one of the prime minister’s political opponents. Arranging a meeting for an executive from a Bosnian pharmaceutical company with a US official at the United Nations was said to be a pricier item — $500,000, one indictment claims. It is unclear whether that money ever materialized.

Sparky’s Dream,Vicky Knowles, 2008

You can read more at the link. And of course, the fall out from the Secret Service and the Trump Supporters in their ranks continues to gather headlines. This is from a month ago.  “Joe Biden Reportedly Struggled to ‘Trust’ Some of His Secret Service Detail Who Were Donald Trump Supporters.”

A new book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple, is alleging that Joe Biden has “trust” issues with several members of his security detail. “A bigger problem was Biden’s discomfort with his Secret Service detail; some of them were MAGA sympathizers. He didn’t trust them,” Whipple wrote in an excerpt obtained by The Hill.

Joe Biden was used to a smaller group of Secret Service agents when he was vice president under Barack Obama’s administration and suddenly felt like he was surrounded by people on the Trump train, according to Whipple. The feeling was that “the Secret Service is full of white ex-cops from the South who tend to be deeply conservative.” The author wrote, “Surrounded by a new phalanx of strangers, Biden couldn’t help but wonder, Do these people really want me here?”

I can only imagine what the next few years will be like.  This is especially true now that Trump has been let back on to major Social Media Sites.  I’ll be really surprised if CSPAN doesn’t have trouble getting the righ access to these hearings too.  Welcome to Surreal Dystopia Story Time.  I’ll take Drag queens any time over Fish Tales.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?