“I Sent Them”

James Howard Kunstler

“Our utter incompetence actually helps us,” declared Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Peter Strzok to his confidante (10,000 text messages) and paramour, FBI attorney Lisa Page, when he discovered on January 4, 2017, that the agency had omitted to close the barren Crossfire Razor case against General Michael Flynn.

There you have a perfect summary of the fantastic hubris at work in the agency-gone-rogue under then-FBI Director Jim “I sent them” Comey days before the swearing-in of a president somehow mistakenly elected by bamboozled voters — or so the thinking apparently went at the highest level there. Or what passed for thinking.

General Flynn, you see, having been anathematized by Barack Obama, and black-spotted by the so-called Interagency (i.e. the giant hairball of competing spy shops set up after the 9/11 fiasco), was about to assume the pivotal job of White House National Security Advisor, and it was known that he was fixing to change things up with all that. He had been director of one such shop, the Defense Intelligence Agency, for a few years and he had a fair idea just how lawlessly debauched the Intel Community had grown under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, not to mention Mr. Comey, and they all knew that. So, General Flynn had to go, and then get squeezed hard to somehow rat-out his boss, the incoming President Trump, against whom the Interagency had nothing but a dossier of already discredited oppo research baloney courtesy of the Clinton campaign.

The pretext was some conversations General Flynn had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak a few weeks before the inauguration. The FBI cooked up a “narrative” that it was criminal misbehavior for a duly appointed incoming NSA to confab with foreign diplomats ­— a completely specious notion, of course. The Interagency’s errand boys in the press ran with that preposterous story, and the inconsolable cohort of Hillary voters herding up to form “the Resistance” went along with the gag out of sheer, crazed bitterness.

Attorney General William Barr neatly disposed of that yarn Thursday in his remarkable chat with Catherine Herridge of CBS News (transcript here), saying:

     [H]e [General Flynn] was the designated national security adviser for President-Elect Trump, and was part of the transition, which is recognized by the government and funded by the government as an important function to bring in a new administration. And it is very typical, very common, for the national security team of the incoming president to communicate with foreign leaders.”

Could it be plainer? In dismissing the case, Mr. Barr gave such a concise, lucid, and comprehensive account of his action that the enraged cadres of the Resistance immediately set their hair on fire and lit up the cable news channels with thunderous objurgation. The most amusing instance featured the apoplectic homunculus Jerrold Nadler, who threatened to haul Mr. Barr before his House Judiciary Committee to do some ‘splainin’ in the matter. That’s a colloquy I’d pay to watch — the stolid AG laying it out again in calm, straight talk with Mr. Nadler in such a stammering fury that his bariatric surgery adhesions finally give out and the committee chamber gets splattered with  bits of brisket, kugel, and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray tonic.

Another ripe one was the MSNBC session between Resistance errand-boy Chris Hayes and the redoubtably mendacious Congressman Adam Schiff, whose own overloaded garbage barge of seditious perfidy was blown out of the water with one well-aimed torpedo by new Acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, who threatened to immediately release Mr. Schiff’s trove of long-hidden interview transcripts from the House Intelligence Committee 2017 hearings on RussiaGate if the congressman did not do it himself and at once. The transcripts, you see, completely refute Mr. Schiff’s own longstanding edifice of falsehood about having evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and Russia. If the Democratic Party had any dignity, they’d take away his committee chairmanship, at least.

We await additional action from Mr. Grenell over Mr. Schiff’s still-concealed transcript of Intel Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson’s secret testimony in last year’s impeachment hearings. Congresspersons enjoy limited immunity against the fallacious and slanderous things they say on-the-job, but not from felony crimes, and Mr. Schiff may find himself liable for something like seditious conspiracy around his intrigues with so-called “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, and others, in the UkraineGate sting operation.

A great deal of evidence of official criminal malfeasance has spilled into the public arena over the past three years, but recently it has turned into a flood, perhaps due to Mr. Grenell’s efforts, perhaps due to the posse of attorneys around Mr. Barr, including especially Jeffrey Jensen and John Durham. The official narratives of the RussiaGate conspirators are now openly overturned. Too many people know everything. The chronology of their misdeeds is now clearly established ­— for instance, the fact that the highest officials in the FBI and the DOJ knew by January 2017 that their sole asseveration of Russian collusion, the Steele dossier, was an utter, concocted, crock-of-shit.

Which means, of course, that the Mueller Investigation ­— begun months later — was also an adventure in bad faith, malicious falsehood, and official treachery. Everyone connected with it ought to be running scared now. Surely some will be indicted and tried, perhaps many. It will go hard on the whole Resistance, including the millions of rank-and-file Democrats who linked arms to cheerlead countless acts of legal depravity that have undermined American principles of justice and fairness. Accounting for all that in the courts will put extra strains on this society beset by the corona virus crisis and the harshest economic disaster in US history. It’s a hard passage, but it can’t be avoided.

The compliant and complicit news media has a lot to answer for, not only to the public but to their boards of directors — if those boards still have a vestige of decency. But for the moment they are still pretending that there’s nothing to see. Sooner or later, though, it will hit them, all those editors and cable news executives — that in their bubble of arrogant self-righteousness, they parlayed away their self-respect, their professional reputations, and their personal honor.

CLUSTERFUCKNATION