Comey, Cohen, Dershowitz, and Scooter Libby: the rule of law
I’m very very tired of writing about James Comey. And yet there’s something (or many things) morbidly fascinating about him, now that he’s been unleashed on his book promotion tour and now that his memos have seen the light of day. It’s not just his strange affect, but it’s also the substance of what he says that keeps bringing my attention back to him despite myself.
I wonder just how representative Comey is of the psyche and thought processes of people in high places these days in Washington. He’s arrogant without a particle of self-awareness as to how he’s coming across, maximally self-righteous, and seemingly unaware of the basic facts of the legal system or the Constitution.
It’s that last bit that I find most surprising. He’s a lawyer, and a very experienced one at that. Of course, he may be well aware of those basic facts and just think his audience—the American people—is unaware, and that he can successfully play off our ignorance. At any rate, these statements are the sort of thing I’m talking about:
Former FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that President Trump’s pardon of Lewis “Scooter” Libby is an “attack on the rule of law,” and insisted there was no reason to doubt his 2007 conviction.
“There’s a reason George W. Bush, for whom Scooter Libby worked, refused to pardon him after looking at all the facts in the case,” Comey said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“It was an overwhelming case. There’s no reason that’s consistent with justice to pardon him, and so it’s an attack on the rule of law, in my view.”
Comey can criticize Trump’s pardon of Libby all he wants, of course. Among other things, he probably takes it personally, since Comey was the guy who appointed the special counsel who made the case against Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald. There were many irregularities about Libby’s conviction:
There is indeed a reason Bush didn’t pardon him and it had nothing to do with Libby’s prosecution and conviction being fair or just. It had everything to do with politics and Bush simply not wanting to face the backlash. Instead he commuted his sentence entirely…
…[A] key witness against Mr. Libby recanted her testimony recently (2015) after finding out that the persecution had improperly withheld information from her. Never mind that the original leak was found before the special counsel (Fitzgerald) even began his investigation.
Perjury traps are the speciality of special counsels and the predominant way they hang scalps in the absence of any real crime…
But that’s just icing on the pardon cake; they matter, but they don’t matter in terms of whether Trump’s pardon was an attack on “the rule of law.” Comey probably sees it as an attack on himself—at least, indirectly—and perhaps he thinks “the rule of law, c’est moi.”
But the rule of law relevant to presidential pardons is the Constitution of the United States, which grants very broad powers to presidents in pardoning federal offenses other than impeachment, as the courts have consistently held:
The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the President in the Constitution. The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases), and that they cannot affect an impeachment process…
The scope of the pardon power remains quite broad, almost plenary. As Justice Stephen Field wrote in Ex parte Garland (1867), “If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching [thereto]; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities, and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity….A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offence and the guilt of the offender….so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence.” A pardon is valid whether accepted or not, because its purposes are primarily public. It is an official act. According to United States v. Klein (1871), Congress cannot limit the President’s grant of an amnesty or pardon, but it can grant other or further amnesties itself.
Surely lawyer and ex-FBI head Comey is aware of all of this operating rule of law. And if he’s not, he should be. If he doesn’t like Trump’s pardon of Libby, he can criticize it, but in no way does it violate or attack the rule of law—in fact, it follows it. If Comey thinks the presidential pardon power should be more limited, he is free to spearhead a movement to amend the Constitution—according to the rule of law.
In researching this post, I came across a curious article by WaPo columnist Richard Cohen. Cohen is a liberal who can’t stand Trump, but back in July of 2013, when the article was written, he made it clear in discussing Comey’s nomination to be head of the FBI that he wasn’t the least bit keen on Comey either. The reason? The Scooter Libby case. Keep in mind as you read this that Cohen is a liberal, as I said:
…[Comey] authorized his friend, the Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate who leaked the name of Valerie Plame. She was the CIA operative who suggested sending her husband, a diplomat, to Africa to see if Saddam Hussein was really buying uranium there. Plame’s name was originally published in The Washington Post in a column by Robert Novak. It was hardly noticed.
This, though, turned out to be the mother of all leak investigations. A gaggle of reporters were implicated and threatened with contempt. One reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, went to jail for 85 days. ”˜Her jailing was a classic example of a prosecutor running amok. Fitzgerald already knew the source of the original leak. Indeed, much of Washington knew it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Fitzgerald persisted nonetheless.
Comey was Fitzgerald’s boss. He should have reined him in. He did nothing of the sort. In fact, there is ample evidence that Fitzgerald was a prosecutor after Comey’s own heart. Comey, too, is a hard-charger. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page compiled an impressive list of Comey’s excesses, including the prosecution of two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the 1917 Espionage Act. The case was dropped, but not before both men lost their jobs, a whole lot of money and, I would suspect, a whole lot of sleep.
Prosecutors have enormous power. A mere inquiry can change a life, even wreck it. FBI directors have even more power…
Comey has exercised his power in disturbing ways.
Of course, now that Comey is pitted against Trump, I doubt Cohen would take Trump’s side, although I can’t find anything he’s written on that subject recently. But fellow-liberal Alan Dershowitz is almost literally sickened by Comey these days, because Dershowitz actually cares about the rule of law:
[Dershowitz] called [Comey’s] book “gossipy,” “scandalous and shameful.”
“This is a man who is revenge-driven, who is prepared to leak through a law professor at Columbia, who is prepared to disclose confidential conversations he had with the president-elect and the president of the United States. He is exactly the wrong person to have headed one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the United States,” Dershowitz said, denouncing the former FBI chief.
“This sends a horrible message to FBI agents and law enforcement people about leaking and about confidences and trying to keep emotion out of law enforcement and politics out of law enforcement,” he added…
“For [Comey] to start speculating on that kind of nonsense and rubbish and not to disclose when he spoke to the president, as you said, that this information was paid for by a political opponent,” he said about the way Comey handled disclosing the infamous ‘Trump dossier’ to the president.
“I used to have a good feeling about Comey,” Dershowitz continued. “I now only have very, very strong negative feelings about him and he just enhances the suspicions that I think so many Americans now have about law enforcement and we ought to be trusting law enforcement.”
It is also somewhat ironic that the prosecution of Scooter Libby was prompted by a leak (by Armitage rather than Libby), but who’s counting? Certainly not Comey, leaker extraordinaire.
Since the Scooter Libby case I have not considered either Mueller or Comey honest, ethical or honorable men. From what I read, Mueller already knew Armitage was the leaker in the Plame case and concluded that no crime had been committed. If Mueller knew that, you can bet he told his buddy Comey. So why did Comey appoint a special counsel to investigate a non crime?
To me, the Scooter Libby debacle has always been symbolic. I am sure it is not the most egregious case of prosecutorial overreach and abuse, but it is a telling example.
More recently we have General Flynn. Likely there will be others before this travesty ends.
Once an overly ambitious, or politicized, prosecutor decides to go after a person, a life is likely to be ruined–regardless of the outcome of any, if any, actual prosecution.
Prosecutorial abuse and misconduct should be prosecutable offenses–and should be applied.
What’s even more bizarre: Novak repeatedly stated that he got Plame’s stuff out of Who’s Who. ( in DC )
Plame had blown her OWN cover.
She’d been listed as CIA in that publication for quite some time.
Novak stated that he ALWAYS reaches for Who’s Who because he’s constantly writing about Washington’s players. Think of it as Google before Google.
Writing about Comey is like picking at a scab — you know you shouldn’t but …
Ran across a Canadian opinion blog that had a couple of interesting pieces. It’s the usual left-of-center kind of place, but not as rabid about US politics (at least what I read). I was most interested in some of the OLD reports, because they show unequivocally that Comey and Mueller are not aberrations in the history of the FBI and criminal investigators (take that both ways) in general.
https://theconversation.com/the-fbi-with-great-power-comes-great-scandal-77606
Writing about Comey is like picking at a scab — you know you shouldn’t but …
Ran across a Canadian opinion blog that had a couple of interesting pieces. It’s the usual left-of-center kind of place, but not as rabid about US politics (at least what I read). I was most interested in some of the OLD reports, because they show unequivocally that Comey and Mueller are not aberrations in the history of the FBI and criminal investigators (take that both ways) in general.
I’ll put up separate comments because of the vagaries of the commenting function.
https://theconversation.com/the-fbi-with-great-power-comes-great-scandal-77606
“Drama at the FBI is nothing new. Given its 109-year history, the FBI has seen many scandals and numerous directors come and go.
Its directors, in fact, have always been the face and driving force of the FBI. Most have retired or moved on to other work, four were forced to offer resignations, but only two, including most recently James Comey, have been fired outright.”
Comey isn’t the only one who kept notes — but they are all the only source for some conversations that they memorialized.
https://theconversation.com/comey-memos-follow-tradition-of-j-edgar-hoover-keeping-notes-on-presidents-95401
“The next day, FDR explained to Hull and Hoover that he wanted a “survey” of Communist and Fascist activity in the country. Hull asked if he wanted the State Department to make a written request of the FBI. Roosevelt declined, saying he wanted “the matter to be handled quite confidentially.”
The president promised Hoover he would write his own memo about his request and place it in his White House safe, but such a document has never been located in FDR’s presidential papers. Hoover’s memo about the meeting remains our only historical source about it. The presidential directive to the FBI then remained a verbal one, albeit secretly documented by Hoover, with no White House-generated paper trail.
The meeting and memo were significant because they marked a shift for the FBI. Because of the president’s request and Hoover’s own interests, the FBI began prioritizing noncriminal intelligence investigations over criminal ones. This is the point where the FBI became, primarily, an intelligence agency. Hoover would thereafter collect massive amounts of noncriminal-related intelligence on Americans both prominent and common.”
AND AT LEAST HOOVER WAS BIPARTISAN IN HIS NOTE-TAKING
“Handwritten notes on Hoover’s memo — the only record of the request [by Nixon], sent to Hoover’s top FBI officials — indicate that the FBI compiled the requested information and sent it to the White House in letter format, dated Nov. 27, 1970. To date, this letter has not surfaced either at the FBI or among the Nixon papers. Because we don’t have the letter, we also do not know the exact content of the information Hoover shared, or whether and how Nixon might have used it against reporters.”
This one lodges complaints on Huma Abedin’s behalf in 2016, but it sure sounds familiar.
https://theconversation.com/in-getting-new-clinton-emails-did-the-fbi-violate-the-constitution-67906
“If the laptop was “seized” by the FBI, it’s unlikely that either Weiner or Abedin voluntarily turned over the emails. That means the agency needed to get a search warrant, by swearing to a judge there was probable cause to believe that data on the laptop contained evidence of the suspected “sexting” crime. Under the Constitution, the warrant should have specified exactly the information to be seized and searched, and thereby limited the FBI from looking through the entire contents of the laptop.
As a constitutional scholar, I have studied the FBI’s troubling history of deliberately abusing search warrant powers to go on unconstitutional fishing expeditions through Americans’ email. It seems likely that happened again here.
…
It may seem extreme to suspect that federal agents sworn to uphold the Constitution would deliberately violate it to go on an unauthorized fishing expedition through Weiner’s laptop. However, there is clear evidence that the FBI regularly and deliberately oversteps constitutional boundaries with regard to Americans’ email messages.
In one case now pending in New Jersey, the FBI went completely beyond the limits of a search warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer’s cellphone. Incredibly, federal prosecutors in that case are telling a federal judge they can legally keep and use the downloaded data even if the judge rules it was obtained in violation of the Constitution.”
The “outrage” of Trump pardoning Scooter Libby pales in comparison of Clinton’s pardoning of the Porto Rican bombers and Marc Rich. If I remember correctly, the DOJ tried to dissuade Clinton from those pardons.
The FBI doesn’t care if you are a lawyer or not, they are going to read what they want to read.
Excerpts are lengthy to give background and context, but the substance is certainly “timely” despite the age of the post.
https://theconversation.com/feds-we-can-read-all-your-email-and-youll-never-know-65620
“The federal government is getting access to the contents of entire email accounts by using an ancient procedure — the search warrant — with a new, sinister twist: secret court proceedings.
The earliest search warrants had a very limited purpose — authorizing entry to private premises to find and recover stolen goods. During the era of the American Revolution, British authorities abused this power to conduct dragnet searches of colonial homes and to seize people’s private papers looking for evidence of political resistance.
To prevent the new federal government from engaging in that sort of tyranny, special controls over search warrants were written into the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But these constitutional provisions are failing to protect our personal documents if they are stored in the cloud or on our smartphones.
Fortunately, the government’s efforts are finally being made public, thanks to legal battles taken up by Apple, Microsoft and other major companies. But the feds are fighting back, using even more subversive legal tactics.
…
To get these warrants in the first place, the feds are using the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986 — long before widespread use of cloud-based email and smartphones. That law allows the government to use a warrant to get electronic communications from the company providing the service — rather than the true owner of the email account, the person who uses it.
And the government then usually asks that the warrant be “sealed,” which means it won’t appear in public court records and will be hidden from you. Even worse, the law lets the government get what is called a “gag order,” a court ruling preventing the company from telling you it got a warrant for your email.
You might never know that the government has been reading all of your email — or you might find out when you get charged with a crime based on your messages.”
“If the government were serious about obeying the Constitution, when it asks for an entire email account,<b? at least it would write into the warrant limits on its forensic analysis so only emails that are evidence of a crime could be viewed. But this Microsoft warrant says an unspecified “variety of techniques may be employed to search the seized emails,” including “email by email review.”
The right to read every email. U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
As I explain in a forthcoming paper, there is good reason to suspect this type of warrant is the government’s usual approach, not an exception.
Former federal computer-crimes prosecutor Paul Ohm says almost every federal computer search warrant lacks the required particularity. Another former prosecutor, Orin Kerr, who wrote the first edition of the federal manual on searching computers, agrees: “Everything can be seized. Everything can be searched.” Even some federal judges are calling attention to the problem, putting into print their objections to signing such warrants — but unfortunately most judges seem all too willing to go along.”
“The government has asked the judge in the case to rule that Microsoft has no legal right to raise the Constitutional rights of its customers. Anticipating this move, the American Civil Liberties Union asked to join the lawsuit, saying it uses Outlook and wants notice if Microsoft were served with a warrant for its email.
The government’s response? The ACLU has no right to sue because it can’t prove that there has been or will be a search warrant for its email. Of course the point of the lawsuit is to protect citizens who can’t prove they are subject to a search warrant because of the secrecy of the whole process. The government’s position is that no one in America has the legal right to challenge the way prosecutors are using this law.
The government is taking a similar approach to smartphone data.
For example, in the case of U.S. v. Ravelo, pending in Newark, New Jersey, the government used a search warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer’s personal cellphone — more than 90,000 items including text messages, emails, contact lists and photos. When the phone’s owner complained to a judge, the government argued it could look at everything (except for privileged lawyer-client communications) before the court even issued a ruling.”
This one illustrates the dilemma of the FBI et al. in trying to catch the “bad guys” while not damaging the “good guys” * in the process.
I would be more reassured by the author’s assertions in the conclusion if we hadn’t spent the last 2 years watching how often, and how partisanly, the FBI and others routinely ignore the limits and rules that are supposed to guard us from their excesses and zeal.
https://theconversation.com/dont-let-cybercriminals-hide-from-the-fbi-58693
“This is not a hypothetical problem. Online investigations face this problem all the time, when tracking down fraudsters or those issuing threats using anonymous emails, botmasters who have compromised thousands of computers around the planet or purveyors of drugs or child pornography. The current federal rules of criminal evidence (in particular a section known as Rule 41) require investigators to seek warrants from a magistrate judge in the federal court district where the target computer is located.
But if investigators don’t know where in the country, or indeed the world, the computer is, the existing rules effectively dictate that there is no judge who could approve a warrant to actually find out its specific location. In essence, the rule is, “The investigator can get a warrant to hack these computers to reveal their location only when she knows where they already are.” That rule might have made sense before the digital age, but in today’s digital world it forces an end to promising investigations.
…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent summary of the civil liberties objections. They include the potential for the government to seek warrants from sympathetic judges, who might not closely scrutinize requests, or who might accept more spurious definitions of concealment by “technological means,” thereby undermining the law’s protections. They also fear that the FBI may seek to hack computers outside the U.S., and that searches could reach beyond criminals’ equipment and involve innocent people’s computers that had been taken over by wrongdoers.
I am in the minority among my civil liberties colleagues, but I believe this change is necessary, reasonable and proportional. If a computer search would qualify for a warrant if its whereabouts were known, why should simply hiding its location make it legally unsearchable?
The need for these types of searches is not theoretical.
…
Overall, the change to Rule 41 seems reasonable. It addresses a real-world problem, it comes into play only when a computer’s location is unknown or the targets are too numerous, and does not reduce the key protection and oversight that already limits such hacking: the need for probable cause presented for a judge’s approval and search warrant which specify with particularity what the hacking should search for (with the ability to enforce these restrictions in the code).”
* * *
* — that is, you people who are not yet under investigation because they haven’t decided to look up what laws you undoubtedly are breaking.
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/20/how-many-federal-crimes-have-you-committed-today/
On the rule of law question, it’s worth looking over here at some of the later comments about how only the peons are expected to just KNOW what the law is, about everything they might be associated with, every minute, every day, every detail.
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/20/how-many-federal-crimes-have-you-committed-today/#comment-2383441
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/20/how-many-federal-crimes-have-you-committed-today/#comment-2383459
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/20/how-many-federal-crimes-have-you-committed-today/#comment-2383471
One for the books — or not in the book, actually.
https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/comey-claims-nobody-asked-about-clinton-obstruction-of-justice-before-today/
“When WTOP’s Joan Jones asked former FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday if the “smashing of cellphones and destruction of thousands of emails” during the investigation into Hillary Clinton was “obstruction of justice,” Comey said that he had never been asked that question before.”
I would note that I believe that Schumer or some Dem is floating an idea to limit Presidential pardons because of Libby. They are afraid that Trump would pardon any of Mueller’s victims.
This Comey guy sounds like there are people who actually think he is important.
A pawn, of a pawn, of another pawn, still under the aegis of even more pawns, controlled by the Deep State. They got millions of puppets like Comey. It won’t matter if he gets purged.
AesopFan Says:
April 21st, 2018 at 6:56 pm
Plenty of horror stories under Hussein’s regime. Milk was classified as some kind of bio toxin, so the tanks needed to be bio warfare proof. Bet that cost a lot.
Farm food not licensed as consumable by the FDA, SWAt death squads were sent to enforce the ruling on a farm that had invited visitors for a wedding. All the food had to be destroyed. No food for you peons.
You don’t get to eat non FDA regulated food, human slaves. Whatcha Americans think you are, free?
American slaves have never been free.
Weeks before Watergate, Nixon sycophant L. Patrick Gray stepped in to replace Hoover as acting director, and was nominated by Nixon to serve as permanent director. He soon withdrew his nomination, however, and resigned as acting director in April 1973, after admitting to destroying Watergate-related files.
-The Conversation website
Why is the article covering up any mention of the Vice Director of the FBI, the one slotted to take over Hoover’s inheritance if not for Nixon’s appointment of Gray to the post?
They don’t think this was important to mention because Gray was a “sycophant”?
The FBI has had Americans on the ropes of deception for awhile now…
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-mormons-make-great-fbi-recruits
The reason why the FBI is known for integrity is because the people at the bottom are not the people in the life appointments of pension at the top.
Of course, I don’t have NSA’s files on Mitt Romney’s clan or all Latter Day Saints. So I can’t say for sure.
So what we have here is a civil war, in more ways than one.
The Latter Day Saints are one of the most conservative religious groups in the USA. Far more conservative and Republican than Evangelicals (Westboro Baptists, come on).
How does this even work? Well, it doesn’t any more.
Sooner or later, the FBI will send a SWAT team to terminate and massacre a Mormon clan, like the Bundy’s. (BLM wasn’t FBI)
Ymar Sakar Says:
April 21st, 2018 at 9:15 pm
You don’t get to eat non FDA regulated food, human slaves. Whatcha Americans think you are, free?
American slaves have never been free.
* * *
Cartoon for you, via PowerLineBlog
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/04/IMG_20180322_001152.jpg
Ymar Sakar Says:
April 21st, 2018 at 9:23 pm
The reason why the FBI is known for integrity is because the people at the bottom are not the people in the life appointments of pension at the top.
Of course, I don’t have NSA’s files on Mitt Romney’s clan or all Latter Day Saints. So I can’t say for sure.
* * *
IIRC, one of the reasons Comey finally had to talk about the Clinton email cases in the first place (and the second) is that lower-echelon-folk were fuming. I wonder if that really is true? Same thing has been said by the honest agents at IRS (back when I was reading HotAir commenters, we had a career auditor on board).
If the NSA had anything on Romney, they would have leaked it in 2012.
Binders of women, dog on the car roof, cut a kids’ hair in HS — not much to show for a 60-something prominent politician.
And everything else they just made up (Bain killed a woman, Reid lies about taxes, etc.).
The Military-Industrial Complex is the JV team compared to the Political-Media Conspiracy.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/04/20/comey-memo-reveals-pressure-cnn-prompted-dossier-briefing/
“Former FBI Director James Comey wrote in a newly released memo that pressure from news outlets – “CNN in particular” – convinced him to brief then-President-Elect Donald Trump on the infamous Steele dossier during a meeting at Trump Tower on Jan. 6, 2017.
“I said media like CNN had [the dossier] and were looking for a news hook,” Comey wrote in a memo just after briefing Trump about the salacious allegations in the dossier.
Four days after that meeting, CNN published a story revealing the existence of a salacious report alleging the Russian government had compromised Trump. The CNN story was referring to what’s now know as the dossier – an unverified 35-page report written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
CNN found its news hook: the very same meeting Comey said was necessary because of pressure from CNN.
…
The leaker of the Comey briefing to Trump has not been identified, though only a small number of government officials would have been aware of the meeting and of what Comey told Trump.
Joining Comey were James Clapper, John Brennan, and Adm. Mike Rogers, the directors of the Office of National Intelligence, the CIA and the National Security Agency, respectively.
Clapper was in contact with CNN journalists at around the time of the briefing, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found. Clapper is currently an analyst at CNN.”
Well, for my money Comey is the G Gordon Liddy of Obamagate. No he is not a stand up villain like Liddy, but he is the loudest virtue signaller of the lot in his own way. Perhaps he will become their Charles Colson when he recounts his jailhouse conversion to Christianity in another tell all volume. I should be spared that book launch by ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’ by the time that happens.
Well, I’m not exactly on the inside of the inside circle of insiders who know the precise circs and exact workings of the inside of Pres. Bush’s head,
but to me there was just no excuse his failure to pardon Scooter Libby.
Bush II commuted Scooter’s sentence, removing him from prison.
That is his excuse.
Binders of women, dog on the car roof
That’s a super weapon though.
I don’t recall many FBI success stories. They did crack some Soviet spies, some Mafia people, and the “Catch Me If You Can” counterfeiter.
But after that there is all the craziness under Hoover, Deputy Director Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” in Watergate, and the FBI black bag jobs in the 80s.
The FBI has a reputation for swooping in to claim credit when local police did the real work.
I haven’t studied it enough to say how the FBI nets out. But some pretty crummy people keep rising to the top and doing weird stuff, like trying to gaslight MLK into suicide or grease the skids for Trump, that I don’t believe that’s a healthy organization.
Most of the terrorist success ops under Bush II was kept secret, since it wasn’t the credit of FBI directors or bureaucrats with pensions, but certain talented small unit sub groups that were hired by the FBI or just joined the FBI.
These people still kept to clearance classification levels and thus had no desire nor reason to leak it to the news propagandists.
The FBI also did a textbook SWAT raid and intel gathering on a Democrat bomb maker that once worked for Democrat campaigns and Congress critters in California.
I bet almost nobody knows that or heard about it, since it was around the Bush ii to Hussein years.
People might have heard the FBI sting raid on a Californian Democrat gun running to terrorists in the Philippines. But if not, don’t worry, we still got Iran Contra in Red vs Blue as a distraction op. Do the same people who know Iran Contra Iran Contra, know that the Democrat elected officials are running guns to AQ and terrorists?
No wonder they want to ban assault weapons and then confiscate them…
Felt needed to keep his identity secret, even for many years, because he was the one responsible for exonerating Ayers and Bernadine with that illegal raid on the Weather underground safe houses.
Felt also had a lot of legacy authority under hoover, and breaking into places to get intel was the least they were guilty of. When Nixon wants the FBI to do something, the FBI is the authority that decides ‘how’ it gets done. Perfect for a setup. If Felt’s identity was leaked too early, then Watergate might have failed. Americans may be slow, but not that slow, somebody would have figured out that that Felt being the source had certain problems with the investigation.
The FBI investigation investigating Watergate break ins by former or current FBI officials, led by leadership loyal to Hoover’s civil rights suppression of MLK and other Americans would have painted a FAR DIFFERENT picture than Watergate did of 2 intrepid Reporters Speaking TRUTH TO POWER.
Just as people fell for Cronkite on Tet, they fell for watergate. It makes perfect sense that the rulebook that worked before, would be tried on Trum now.
Related:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/294895/
America doesn’t have coups or tanks in the street. But a deep state of sorts exists here and it includes national security bureaucrats who use secretly collected information to shape or curb the actions of elected officials. . . .
The Deep State is more closely related to who owns the Federal Reserve.
The secret security and societies, are mostly a smokescreen or Stalking Horse. Pawns, not the puppet masters.
If Trum can survive DC, then he might get my respect.