Bargaining is the Third Step

The five steps of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The order of the first two in response to Trump's election - highly traumatic to liberals, neocons, and deep-state bureaucrats - seems to have been flipped. First was anger. They're still quite angry, but the magnitude has abated significantly. Recall what your social media feeds looked like on Nov 9, 2016. Absolute fury. Second came denial, so widespread amongst the Trump haters that it gave cover for the Mueller Dragnet. Surely he could not have legitimately won, cries the Never Trumper. It is our duty to investigate how he cheated! Denial has come in other forms, like their clinging to a "Blue Wave" which will set up Congress to begin an impeachment process in 2018. They forget that 2016 wasn't just a miraculous victory for Trump, but a huge night for Republicans across the country. They'd also rather ignore that Trump's support numbers are inching up to about 50%, despite 90% negative coverage from the media and the never-ending Mueller Dragnet.

Today, the New York Times signaled the beginning of the next phase - bargaining - in an article titled Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation [covered by Sundance here, which is always a must-read.] The purpose of the article is clear: to get in front of the story in an act of pre-emptive damage control. The article takes pains to portray James Comey and many high-level DOJ officials as out-of-the-loop in all this, which means that the sources are almost certainly James Comey and those high-level DOJ officials. Despite spin so strong that the article is almost upside-down, there are significant factual concessions made: that the Trump campaign was spied on electronically and through covert agents. The admission of electronic surveillance is written in the context of the whole Trump campaign, and should put to rest any claims the FBI surveillance was limited in scope, such as only to Carter Page. The admission to human intel is a bombshell confession that substantiates Kimberley Strassel's reporting of just five days ago - which suggested that a London-based US intelligence asset invited George Papadopoulos for a meeting, posed questions about Russian hacking, then reported back to the FBI small group via an Australian diplomatic channel with the depiction of a loose-lipped Papadopoulos making an inadvertent drunken confession. It was that piece of intel that the FBI claimed as its probable cause for initiating the Trump campaign investigation. The Times piece does us one better by stating the claims of multiple officials that the "FBI informant" met several times with both Papadopoulos and Carter Page. By meeting several times with both junior aids, the informant was clearly working with the investigation, yet his conversation may also have been the impetus for investigation.

 The article is strategic, no doubt, but it reveals a shift in attitude. Okay, we admit there was spying on the Trump campaign, and that it turned up no evidence of collusion with Russia, but it was "cautious intelligence gathering" that was reasonable given the evidence at hand." Given their insistence on isolating the activities to a small group within the DOJ and FBI, it seems they are preparing us for the coming OIG report. The article happens to have come out the same day that Horowitz sent out his draft report for review. The spying seemed reasonable from our perspective, and any crimes reported by the IG were limited to that small group. That's the bargain. Whether the Trump administration will accept that bargain is an open question, the outcome of which will determine the depth of the next phase - which we've long waited for - depression. Maybe it will come just in time for the midterm elections.