Day 774 Tuesday February 19, 2019
622 Days to the 2020 election and 700 Days to Inauguration Day
Yesterday the news shows were repeating parts of Andrew McCabe’s interview on 60 Minutes. They dissected it and looked at it from many different angles. Please if you haven’t listened to the interview I urge you to find it and listen. It is stunning. A buddy of mine sent me Seth Abramson’s seventy odd tweet thread on this topic. Abramson is a lawyer and person who says what seem to be some rather “different” views on things. Oftentimes they in retrospect turn out to be true. I say “in retrospect” because often at the time he is first saying them they appear to be crazy. We however are living in crazy times.
Abramson’s through line on McCabe’s interview is this: remember all the talk about rouge FBI agents in New York leaking stuff to the press about Clinton? Yeah, well if that’s true then put that together with the pressure Comey and then McCabe were under because of this and yeah there was chaos at the FBI and it was caused by Trump’s cronies, not the other way around.
Here’s the link to the Abramson tweet thread:
I don’t know if that will work for you all, but give it a try, I have to move on.
There are new shenanigans in the Roger Stone and Paul Manafort stuff. In the case of Roger Stone to say that this man lives in an alternate reality gives a bad name to alternate reality. Fantasy yes. Dark fantasy – even better. I’m beginning to suspect that Stone is angling to get off on an insanity plea. That would make sense. What did Roger Dodger do? He posted a picture of the judge that is going to hear his case with crosshairs near her head. Then he took it down and reposted the picture cropped without the crosshairs. And yes, there was a bunch of Roger incendiary babble next to it about the judge. Maybe, he’s trying to get a change of venue by later arguing that this judge can’t possibly be fair to him because of all the garbage Stone has said about her?
Meanwhile in the Manafort sentencing, which is only for the crimes he was found guilty of in his first case and that the sentencing guidelines suggest 19 1/2 to 24 1/2 years but because there are aggravating circumstances (and no mitigating ones) the judge should consider more severe penalties we have this same judge from the Stone case weighing in. This has to do with the fact that Manafort was not living in a fantasy world but instead constructed a huge lie or set of lies relating to his client Konstantin Kilimnick. Kilimnick is linked directly to Russian military intelligence. Manafort apparently, according to the judge, constructed an elaborate story to try and shield Kilimnick from any wrongdoing and to try and explain away his own criminal actions. The judge said in open court, to his face, that he is hiding something. That something is the heart of the Mueller probe and he, Manafort, isn’t being truthful.
What is it that Manafort is hiding that is so damning that he is willing to shield a Russian GRU agent, and spend the rest of his life in prison? (I leave it to the avid reader at cogitation time to reflect and arrive at an answer.) We don’t have much time. It’s already past seven am and Barnes and Noble opens at nine. I’ll be at the door.
Andrew McCabe 60 Minute interview – Part II:
(AMC is Andrew McCabe)
(SP is Scott Pelley)
… from Part I …
AMC: “But anyway that night in the Oval Office was not reality.
“The version of events that I quickly realized he wished me to adopt.
… Part II …
“Hum, as he went on talking how happy people in the FBI were he said to me, ‘I heard you were part of the resistance.’ “
SP: “What did he mean by that?”
AMC: “Well, I didn’t know. So I asked him. ‘I heard that you were one of the people that did not support Jim Comey. You didn’t agree with him, and the decision he made in the Clinton case. And is that true?’
“And I said, ‘No sir, that’s not true. Um, I worked very closely with Jim Comey. I was part of that team and a part of those decisions.’ ”
SP: “You had the sense that you had given him the wrong answer.”
AMC: (immediate reaction) “Oh, I knew I had given him the wrong answer.”
SP: “You weren’t trying to hang onto this job?”
AMC: “I wasn’t willing to lie to keep it.
“I didn’t know when I be out of a job. I thought it would be pretty soon. I just put my head down and got to work trying to stabilize the people around me and doing things I felt we needed to do with the Russia investigation: getting cases opened, and getting a special counsel appointed.”
SP: (Aside) After Comey was fired McCabe said he ordered two investigations of the president himself*. They asked two questions.
One) Did Trump fire Comey to impede the investigation into whether Russia interfered with the elections?
and
Two) If so, was Mr. Trump acting on behalf of the Russian government?
AMC: “I was just speaking to the man who had run for the Presidency and won the election for the Presidency. Who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, ourr most formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly.”
SP: “How long was it after that that you decided to start the obstruction of justice and the counter intelligence investigation of the president?”
AMC: “ I think, the next day.”
622 Days to the 2020 election and 700 Days to Inauguration Day
*The “himself” refers to the president, not McCabe. ie it wasn’t McCabe himself that ordered the investigations but rather McCabe that ordered the investigations of the president himself.
PS Andrew McCabe and CBS’ Scott Pelley
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