Sunday, April 15, 2018

A Few Updates

Some minor updates were made to the FISA scandal timeline. These were in response to recents news stories: the raid of Michael Cohen's home and office, and the OIG report on Andy McCabe. The OIG report is more interesting for the circumstantial information it contains than the conclusions it made against McCabe. We aren't really all that concerned that McCabe lied to Comey and investigators, or that he improperly leaked to the media out of self interest. We're more concerned with the coup against the sitting president he helped orchestrate, of which there is no mention in the report. It's not clear to me why the McCabe report was issued early, but IG Horowitz is now giving May as a likely timeframe for the release of the general report.

The raid against Cohen is relevant to the FISA Scandal Timeline because Cohen was specifically mentioned in the infamous dossier, but mistakenly. It was reported that Cohen had traveled to Prague during the election to meet with Russian officials for dubious reasons. In reality, another man traveled to Prague, who just so happened to be named Michael Cohen. In January of this year the Trump-aligned Michael Cohen filed suit against both Buzzfeed and FusionGPS. This is a very interesting lawsuit because it may legally require FusionGPS to disclose the source of their shoddy information. We suspect that the information came from improper FISA-702 searches made by contractors at the FBI-NSD (before the FBI had their Carter Page FISA-1 warrant), which was then channeled to FusionGPS, which was packaged as intelligence collected by Christopher Steele, and then funneled back to the FBI as legitimate independent research. In effect, this was intel laundering. The Cohen mistake & lawsuit risks blowing up the whole operation. In this context, the raid on Cohen's office & home is quite significant. Even more fantastic, they justified it with allegations made by a porn star that turned into a fiasco by the shamelessly depraved mainstream media. This timeline is so entertaining that I really don't know why anyone would watch TV these days.

Second, a comment on last month's post: Real News, Fake News...Either Way It's Russia. In that post I ridiculed the left for their reaction to rumors that Trump's national security advisor would soon be fired. As it turns out, he was shortly fired. Egg on my face? Well, I had nearly included in that post a disclaimer that it might, in fact, be the case that he would be fired, as outlets like Fox News were reporting the same. I didn't though, because the point of the article was that the left can find a Russian thread in any news story, real or fake, whichever way it goes. In this case, we know why McCaster was fired. He was a liberal who resisted the Trump agenda and never should have been hired in the first place. But it wasn't, as the liberal story went, to protect dear Russia.

As a final update, in Trump's Syria Moment, I predicted that Trump's actions in Syria would likely please the neocons more than his base. Fortunately, it seems to have gone more the other way. Many of his alt-right supporters really are irate. Alex Jones has been raging over it, as well as Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich. So I hear, at least. I don't know what Michael Savage is saying, who turned sharply against Trump the last time he lobbed bombs at Assad.

On the other hand, John McCain is hopping mad about it because it doesn't actually move towards regime change. As a rule of thumb: if you've angered John McCain, you've done something right. While I'd prefer to see no action against Syria, sometimes the preferred solution and the pragmatic solution are not the same thing. (Plus, as mentioned in that post, there might actually be good reasons for countering Assad. But they certainly aren't the ones being portrayed to the American public.) Right now I'm thinking Trump played this perfectly. He showed strength, he promptly defended the infamous Red Line that his predecessor established but could not enforce, he did not push for destabilizing regime change in Syria, he acted in a way that did not trigger a larger conflict with Russia, and, most importantly, he neutered the deep state covert ops. I believe the chemical attacks were false flag attacks. Maybe they weren't, so let's say it's an 80-20 split. In the 20% scenario, where Assad is really is a moron who can't stop gassing women and children and causing himself PR nightmares, then he has been punished for his misdeeds, with care taken not to further destabilize the region. In the 80% scenario, where this is all propaganda bullshit meant to further certain geopolitical ambitions, then Trump has responded to the ostensible storyline, without giving the actual instigators the geopolitical outcomes they desire. He has maintained plausible deniability that his actions were not strategic actions against the deep state, because he operated within the false narrative that they constructed. The long-term advantage is that it may frustrate them to stop wasting time on these false-flag attacks.

There are costs associated, of course. One is that the Assad regime has still been attacked. There was still risk of getting into it with Russia. There was the strong "Animal Assad" language, and appearance of a hot-headed leader. (Not necessarily a bad thing.) And, finally, there was the strong display of American imperialism, that the US president can lob bombs at whoever displeases him, without even the pretense of due process. Still, given the details of the event, I struggle to find a better solution to the problem at hand. The political situation made it impossible for Trump to do nothing.

No comments:

Post a Comment