Category Archives: General Interest

November 19, 2019 · 1:23 am

Week Two of the Impeachment Drama Begins

As week two of the public impeachment hearings begin, here’s my impressions of last week’s hearings and the testimony of the three witnesses, career diplomats, George Kent, Bill Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch.

The hearings remind me of the Benghazi hearings and many of the other high-profile hearings during the Obama administration, where the majority side in power tries to present the hearing as a dignified process, while the minority side devotes its energy to delegitimizing the hearing as … yep, a “witch hunt.”  Although Republicans latched onto casting this as a “coup” too, but nevertheless, every effort goes into discrediting the proceeding as, to use Senator Lindsey Graham’s spin word of choice – a “sham.”    The hyper-partisan antics came as no surprise, the personal animus between Schiff and Nunes though seems off-the-charts, making it obvious these two leaders in this committee are more dedicated to trying to destroy each other than they are to doing the nation’s business.

George Kent’s testimony came across as a seasoned career diplomat, offering excellent foreign policy analysis.  He acted reticent to give more than the most cursory explanation when asked about Hunter Biden’s cushy Burisma deal and Vice President Biden demanding Ukraine fire a prosecutor, who had opened corruption investigations into several Ukrainian companies, including Burisma  (but I’m still not clear on the Biden family- Ukraine dealings timeline of events).  Kent reported the perceived Biden conflict of interest, end of explanation.  Kent didn’t add any first-hand evidence or knowledge going toward proving the charge of bribery against President Trump.

Bill Taylor came across, just as I expected from reading his testimony from the private hearing.  He came across as a serious, straight-shooter on following proper procedures and sticking to the rule book.  He offered only second-hand accounts of the president’s phone call and the meetings and events swirling about Trump’s call with the new president of Ukraine, President Zelensky.  What struck me as odd and inexplicable is Taylor testified that he met with aides to President Zelensky twice to urge them to stop Zelensky from making a public announcement, as requested/demanded (depending on your partisan viewpoint) by President Trump.  Trump wanted Zelensky to announce Ukraine was opening investigations into, I think, the Bidens was the main issue for Trump.

Taylor described hearing through the rumor mill that Zelensky was planning to make the announcement to the media, per Trump’s request/demand, on a trip to the UN.  Taylor’s actions seem odd to me.  Why did he feel like he had to stop Zelensky from making that announcement and how did a straight-shooter, by-the-book diplomat square directly undermining the POTUS?   Did Taylor, also through the rumor mill, know about an effort to report Trump’s quid pro quo phone call to Congress was afoot?  Did Taylor discuss meeting with Zelensky with other people within the embassy in Ukraine, the State Department or other US government channels?  Obviously, there were a lot of discussions within the US embassy in Ukraine and State/Intel channels going on about Trump’s phone call and the military aid.

Taylor offered another witness, his aide who had told him about a conversation he overheard of Ambassador Sondland talking to President Trump, so Taylor feeling compelled to stop Zelensky from announcing investigations without talking to other people seems improbable to me.  It just sounds like there was a group effort going on to stop Trump’s request from being carried out.

The other odd part about this to me, is neither Kent nor Taylor felt morally compelled to contact Congress themselves and report it, instead the “collective concerns” of some of the professional foreign policy people were encapsulated in an orchestrated “whistleblower complaint” that sounds like it was written by a team of sharp Dem lawyers and then pushed to the IG.  I wondered if Kent and Taylor were aware there was a complaint and plan being worked out to voice concerns.

Ambassador Yovanovitch was a poised, impressive witness on the professionalism of the Foreign Service, but she did not add a thing to proving Trump committed bribery.  And yet, what happened to her with the Giuliani whispering campaign among Ukraine officials to undermine her ability to do her job and then the media smear campaign against her in the US media, to my mind is way worse (even if not “criminal”) than Trump asking Zelensky to open investigations into 2016 corruption, Burisma, Bidens, Crowdstrike and some server.

Listening to Yovanovitch testify how she was being told to watch her back and hearing murmurings about Giuliani’s meetings in Ukraine and watching the media smear campaign on social media and Fox News unfold, she didn’t really know for sure what was going on, but she knew it was something unsettling.  Perhaps, I feel so outraged about Yovanovitch, because I’ve been in a very similar situation.  When Yovanovitch stated she could never have imagined what happened to her, I knew exactly how she felt.  She felt alarmed, scared and powerless.  Feeling yourself the target of an attack coming from the White House is terrifying, especially when you know you’re being attacked, yet have no means to prove any of it or defend yourself.

Despite the witnesses having no first-hand evidence and my suspicions that how the whistleblower complaint came about was orchestrated with former Obama intel peeps and some Congressional Dems, Trump’s own phone call record shows a quid pro quo and by Trump asking for an investigation into the Bidens added with president of Zelensky assuring Trump he’s on board with trying to meet Trump’s conditions for the quid pro quo, the quid pro quo seems irrefutable:

President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-transcript-call/index.html

What Zelensky says in the beginning of this call speaks volumes more than anything Trump says.  Zelensky acknowledges his assistants met with Giuliani and understands the deal.  That Zelensky believes Giuliani is the go-to guy for this U.S. foreign aid deal speaks to how Trump corrupted the entire process.  It’s one thing for a president to send a personal envoy, it’s another thing for the president to send his personal attorney.  Giuliani represents his actions as he was working in the capacity as Trump’s personal attorney  and that speaks to the corrupt melding of Trump’s personal and official actions in a way that undermined the U.S. embassy in Ukraine and also Trump’s own official foreign policy, as understood by the Trump State Department.

One of the main things Trump supporters revere about Trump is their belief that Trump is “a fighter” and ergo Trump, unlike other Republican leaders will “drain the swamp” in Washington.  They see Trump as a superhero who will finally slay corrupt Dems and push back against the unchecked advances of the liberal culture war.  By giving Trump superhero status, in the process, they’ve bestowed on Trump a cape of infallibility and given him a sword of unaccountability.  Trump’s spinners among the media punditry touted “Trump doesn’t play by rules!”   In reality our elected leaders should not only play by the rules, they should be exemplars, uphold the highest standards and serve as role models.  Somehow, Trump has totally corrupted his followers moral compass, as they twist themselves in knots to excuse more and more egregious and inexcusable behavior.

Also in this call and not part of the impeachment debate is an exchange that speaks to Trump’s total moral unfitness to be President of the United States more than any sort of impeachment crime and until Americans regain some sense of a common moral code again, Americans will end up with more and more immoral and thoroughly corrupt elected officials, on both sides of the political aisle.  Here’s the exchange:

President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.
The President: Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It’s a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, their incredible people.
The new president of Ukraine is trying to assure Trump that he will work hard to meet the demands Giuliani laid out.  It’s also obvious this foreign president felt free to trash the former US ambassador, whom Giuliani orchestrated a whispering campaign against among Ukrainian officials.  It’s breathtakingly appalling that any American president would send his personal attorney to orchestrate a whispering campaign among foreign officials  against the US ambassador in that very country.   But that’s what happened.  Trump’s response:  “Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.” speaks to an American leader playing his own team against each other in a foreign country.  I stick to my original assessment that Trump is a serious threat to national security.
Trump managed to throw Yovanovitch’s Congressional hearing into disarray last week by tweeting the following during her testimony:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/trump-tweeted-marie-yovanovitch-testified-was-it-witness-tampering-n1084176

Beyond the insanity of blaming a US ambassador for the demise of Somalia, he’s bragging about the Ukrainian president speaking badly of her (which was due to Trump’s own attorney’s whispering campaign against her).  Now, I do believe Trump’s “mean tweets” are witness intimidation efforts, despite the effort to dismiss Trump’s tweet antics as just “Trump being Trump” or harmless “mean tweets”.  I also realize my view is not a prevailing view.  Trump’s personal Twitter account highlights Trump’s shrewd way of always operating by his own rules, which are whatever he feels like doing.  He uses his personal Twitter account for personal tweets and for official presidential business and by doing so he maintains zero accountability for any official business carried out on that account.  If his official business carried out via tweets comes under fire, Trump and his minions dismiss it as Trump letting off steam, Trump expressing his opinion, Trump being Trump, but no one around Trump ever defends those outrageous tweets as “That is an official statement by the President of the United States.  If Trump issued most of these outrageous tweets on official letterhead, I doubt the reaction would be the same.

 

The larger part of assessing this impeachment effort rests on the scorched earth spin war, of course, because Washington politicians, on both sides, live and breathe polling.  The latest polls being hyped today, after the weekend’s non-stop spin hysterics seems to indicate Dems and the mainstream media are gaining a bit in their push for impeachment, but the momentum could still change with the growing slate of witnesses testifying this week.

The way spin cycles rise and fall so quickly, the problem for Dems is the American attention span won’t stay focused on a drawn out impeachment sideshow filled with endless hours of testimony.  Republicans’ dilemma will be finding ways to spin away the building array of witnesses backing the same chain of events and if Sondland and Volker revise their testimony this week.  The real lethal blow to Trump would be if Bolton and Mulvaney testified, but that seems highly unlikely.

The most likely outcome seems to be Trump will be impeached in the House and acquitted in the Senate.

 

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Politics, Trump Impeachment Saga

November 13, 2019 · 5:26 am

Political hacks all around

The rabidly partisan, completely corrupt political moment America is at didn’t begin with Donald J. Trump, even though he looms large in the American psyche since he rode down that golden escalator to enter the 2016 race.  The public impeachment hearings will begin later this morning,so I’ve jotted down a few thoughts.

Yes, the Democrats and some of their intel friends orchestrated this case against Trump and yes, President Obama did plenty of way more corrupt things than this bribe in this phone call with the president of Ukraine.  In fact, we are awaiting the release of the IG report Michael Horowitz has completed and the DOJ still has John Durham investigating 2016 corruption within the Obama administration.

Still from the information I’ve read, I do believe Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine was a quid pro quo and yes, as Andrew McCarthy has made the point repeatedly, often in foreign policy deals involve a quid pro quo.  Where I part company with McCarthy’s view is I do believe Trump’s quid pro quo went way beyond trying to make a deal for the benefit of America.  When Trump mentioned the Bidens he wanted dirt on the Bidens to help him politically, just like he and the Clinton campaign were searching for Russian dirt on each other in 2016.  The other part of the call that bothered me was the president of Ukraine mentioned Giuliani believing he was the point man for the investigation Trump was demanding.  This speaks to how Trump had Giuliani running around Ukraine as his personal attorney, yet Giuliani was perceived by the Ukrainians as an American government official.

American presidents can’t cut personal deals with foreign leaders while using the Office of the President.  There is no way Trump, who lies more than he tells the truth and whose first idea for action as president invariably veers into the extremely corrupt range, was concerned about fighting corruption in Ukraine.  Trump is the man whose “great” strategy for dealing with ISIS was to send the U.S. military to murder ISIS family members, believing that would scare ISIS fighters into surrender.  Trump sending his personal attorney to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is over the line, in my book.

Since impeachment is a political process, not a criminal trial, I’d like to see what unfolds in these hearings, what crazy spin antics both Dems and Republicans engage in before deciding 100%, but from what I’ve read so far, yes, I would probably vote to impeach and I never expected to write those words. I will also support criminal prosecutions if Horowitz and Durham find criminal wrongdoing among Obama administration officials.

I’ve been disgusted and extremely disappointed in so many Republicans jumping on board with stupid spin antics, that sink to the level of the typical Dem spin sleaze.  It started with Congressman Gaetz and the angry Republican mob storming the hearing room in the basement and it’s progressed to a pathetic display of spewing, vicious smear campaigns against the witnesses and nauseating groveling to Trump.

Lindsey Graham declared the hearing is all a sham and announced he wasn’t reading any of the transcripts the House Intelligence Committee released.  This came after two weeks ago Republicans were ranting about Schiff was hiding the transcripts and demands that Dems release the transcripts.  Last night Graham went one step further and announced he isn’t going to watch any of the sham hearings.  Graham heads the Senate Judiciary Committee and will play a key role, if there is a Senate impeachment trial, but he’s announcing upfront he’s not going to take it seriously.  Assuredly, many Dems in 1998 felt the Clinton impeachment was a sham too and they behaved in this same sort of spin theatrics that Republicans are staging… except in 1998, Graham was demanding that impeachment was a serious process.

Several of the FOX Trump spin team were pushing this mantra urging people not to watch the hearings.  In what kind of world do you engage in a massive spin effort,  telling Americans, “Don’t even listen to anything the other side says!’  The correct American form of civil political debate is to put your best case forward, not to spread smears and tell other citizens not to listen to the other side of an argument.  Sickening!!!

Despite good intentions, I haven’t read through all of the House Intelligence Committee transcripts of the impeachment inquiry hearings.  Tomorrow Ambassador William Taylor will testify in an open hearing, so I’ll be able to form a better opinion of his veracity.

What I’ve read so far of his testimony, he comes across as a straight-shooter type person – very much a by-the-rules guy.  It’s understandable that Trump’s making things up as he goes style and total disregard for rules, ethical conduct or even following the law, would be alien to someone like Taylor.

In his opening statement (page 28, lines 7-8) Taylor states:

“The irregular policy channel was running contrary to goals of longstanding U.S. policy.”

On page 30, lines 2-3) he states:

“I began to sense that the two decisionmaking channels, regular and irregular, were separate and at odds.”

This problem of Trump working against his own administration official policy has been a consistent feature of how Trump governs, creating endless turmoil, undercutting his own team at every turn, then blaming them for the chaos his erratic behavior causes.  No matter what chaos he causes, in the end, his administration officials, try to save him from disaster, often ending up being fired or publicly humiliated as their thanks.

This impeachment will likely end up with Trump being impeached in the House, acquitted in the Senate and more erratic and emboldened at the end of this process.  The real problem I see from this Ukraine mess is one that at some point Trump may create a national security crisis that should have been avoided.

Taylor hits on this problem.  Trump plays his own team members against each other and is more concerned about cutting secret deals with despots than he is about building a strong functioning White House team.  In Trump’s world, the only player on the team that matters is Trump.  He’s a one-man show and everyone else on his team is just an expendable stage prop.

In this Ukraine situation, Trump assuredly had the right to send his personal attorney to investigate and report back to him.  The problem was his attorney was undercutting Trump’s official foreign policy team in Ukraine and engaged in foreign policy matters, which the U.S. embassy had no knowledge of.  Even that might get a pass, although it’s best that in foreign countries America’s foreign policy team speaks with one voice, but the totally unforgivable part was Giuliani smearing the ambassador to Ukraine on TV and Twitter, undermining her credibility and damaging her reputation.  She had no means to defend herself.  If Trump wanted to fire her, he should have done that through State Department channels, so the State Department could assure the functioning and safety of the embassy were not negatively impacted.  That Giuliani media smear campaign is despicable.

Trump engaged in this same sort of erratic decisionmaking many times in the past two and half years, where the Pentagon or other agencies found out about a complete policy change via a Trump tweet or comment on TV.  He doesn’t even have the courtesy or common sense to talk to his top officials privately.  He makes an erratic decision,  then just tweets it out, often at odd hours of the late night or early morning.  When Trump decided to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, after a phone call with Erdogan, he did not discuss this with top Pentagon officials before announcing the decision publicly.

Taylor saw the problem with Trump’s “irregular channel operating at odds with the regular channel, ” because that behavior is thoroughly corrupt and will lead to mission failure, but it can also cost lives when that sort of playing your own team members against each other occurs in a military operation.  It could also have jeopardize the safety and security of the ambassador and the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, which is a very dangerous, corrupt country.

Americans, especially many who should know better in the government, pundits, former government officials, all see that Trump doesn’t bother to study any of the issues he’s making consequential decisions about, they know his erratic decisionmaking leads to constant chaos, they also know it’s reckless and usually gets in the way of the policies Trump’s administration state are the policy objectives, but they refuse to ever speak up and most keep making excuses for Trump, usually blaming the Democrats who hate Trump for all the problems or reminding that Trump is a businessman, not a politician.  Well, he’s been on the job for almost 3 years and one wonders at what point Trump can be judged, based on his performance as President of the United States.

When Democrats turned a blind-eye to the Clinton corruption and the Obama corruption, Republicans railed about how amoral they were for never condemning corrupt behavior.  Now that the shoes’ on the other foot, Republicans who make endless excuses for Trump, demonstrate that they are just as amoral as those Democrats whom they berated for years.

All I know now is that watching this pathetic display, on both sides, I have no use for any of these spineless swamp dwellers in Washington.  What a bunch of sickening political hacks all around.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption, Trump Impeachment Saga

November 8, 2019 · 6:38 am

Yovanovitch’s hostile work nightmare

Back in the Fall of 2016, when the FBI released the notes on the interviews in the Clinton email investigation, I read through all of the notes released and wrote some blog posts about them.  With the just released transcripts of the “impeachment inquiry” closed hearings, reading these transcripts seemed a good way for me to form my own opinion about the testimony and the hearing process, which has been much complained about by Republicans and Trump pundits.

I read through the former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch transcript  (317 pages).  Based on the transcript, the Democrats seemed to have a lot more time than the Republicans, Schiff seemed very heavy-handed in this hearing, but I didn’t get the impression the process was anything remotely “Soviet-style”.  Yovanovitch made an opening statement, then the hearing progressed in blocks of time given to Dems and Republicans to ask questions.  As one who has read a lot of Congressional hearing transcripts over the years and watched way more Congressional hearings than I care to admit (okay,  years ago I was addicted to C-Span and even watched British and other foreign government goings on, along with the US Congress), so I’ve seen some really rancorous governmental proceedings over the years and while this one was heavy-handed, it wasn’t the worst U.S Congressional hearing I’ve seen.  Schiff would have gained more credibility if he had not tried so hard to stage and control the hearing with the intent to control the spin narrative.

When I start reading a transcript I try to get a feel for facts that are undisputed, timelines of events and the veracity of the testimony.  The media, pundits and politicians like to affix the term “credible” to witnesses that feed their partisan agenda and spin narrative, regardless if the testimony leaves huge gaping holes, is contradictory, lacks any corroboration and conflicts with other testimony or is even contradictory throughout the testimony, so I hesitate to use the term “credible” lightly.  Yovanovitch’s testimony sounded credible to me and her answers, particularly the ones where she expanded on how she viewed US foreign policy objectives, how she evaluated events in a foreign country and laying out the conflicting issues that a US embassy deals with in complicated countries, like Ukraine, struck me as insightful, honest and coming from a seasoned foreign service professional.

She expressed complete support for the Trump official foreign policy, including the military aid, to Ukraine (pages 144-150 of the transcript).  I’ve read the Yovanovitch transcript at NPR – HERE.

Marie Yovanovitch served in the US Foreign Service at the US State Department for 33 years, under 5 different US  presidents and has served as an ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine.   The Trump State Department asked Yovanovitch to extend her stay in Ukraine for another year and she was told by her superiors that they were happy with the job she was doing.  Then Rudy Giuliani, Don Jr., Hannity and other Trump pundits escalated a media smear campaign against Yovanovitch on social media and on FOX News to destroy her reputation.  Trump then fired her.

Trump appears to have been running two competing Ukraine policies, the official one, run through his State Department and which Yovanovitch worked to advance and a personal Ukraine policy, run through a back channel by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani and son, Don Jr.  In the phone call with the president of Ukraine, Trump appears to me to have been advancing his own personal political objectives, not the official foreign policy objectives of his own State Department.

I’ll just cite some pages and lines in the transcript and comments, because I can’t just copy and paste them from that transcript and it will take me forever to figure out the screenshot stuff.

Pages 126-132, Yovanovitch explains how she was notified about being fired by President Trump and how her superiors told her she had to leave immediately out of security concerns that Trump might tweet something that could jeopardize her safety.

Pages 173-174, Schiff questions Yovanovitch about her knowledge of President Trump trashing her in his phone call with the President of Ukraine, saying she was a bad ambassador.  This behavior of Trump’s is the most disloyal behavior of any American president, that I can recall and it’s not the first time Trump has engaged in trashing American officials while talking to foreign leaders.  In our hyper-partisan political environment, it’s easy to just dismiss this as “Trump being Trump”, but around the world, every leader reads this as Trump has no loyalty to his own team.  He is all about his own ego – that’s it.  At some point, I fear, this “Trump being Trump” will lead to some serious national security crisis.

Pages 192-193, Trump while trashing Yovanovitch in his call with Zelensky  went one step further than just trashing.  On page 193, lines 9-15 is where Trump commits the ultimate betrayal of an American citizen as President of the United States, he issues a veiled threat against an American citizen talking to a foreign leader.

9     Q  At the bottom of that same page, President Trump
10    says, "Well, she's going to go through some things."
11    Q  What did you understand that to mean?
12    A  I didn't know what it meant. I was very concerned.
13    I still am.
14    Q  Did you feel threatened?
15    A Yes.

Pages 267-268, Yovanovitch asked the Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, for advice on how to handle this media smear campaign against her and his advice was to tell her she should “go big or go home” and he suggested she tweet out support for Trump and say all the smears were lies.  He was advising a senior US diplomat to engage in overt political activity…  That was his best advice…

This career Foreign Service officer, was asked to extend her tour as ambassador in a difficult country, with a lot of internal strife, by top officials in the US State Department – Trump’s State Department – and then she was left with no legal means to protect herself from a media smear campaign being led by the president’s personal attorney and his son.  This is the most egregious abuse of power I’ve seen and no employee in America should be trapped in a hostile workplace environment where there’s absolutely no legal avenue to protect or defend against a media smear campaign coming from the chief executive’s office.  All the partisan politics aside, what happened to Marie Yovanovitch is totally outrageous.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption, Trump Impeachment Saga

November 5, 2019 · 2:04 am

Some impeachment links

This post is just some links dealing with the impeachment inquiry and a book recommendation.

Here are two episodes of The John Batchelor show, with Andrew C. McCarthy as the guest:

https://audioboom.com/posts/7414714-the-motive-of-the-whistleblower-who-isn-t-a-whistleblower-andrewcmccarthy-nro-thadmccotter-wjr

https://audioboom.com/posts/7414712-expecting-a-ukrainegate-surprise-from-schiff-and-pelosi-andrewcmccarthy-nro-thadmccotter-wjr?playlist_direction=reversed

 

Dems on the House Intelligence Committee began releasing transcripts of hearings yesterday, so here are links to the first two:

Transcript of former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich: https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=6538626-Marie-Yovanovitch-Testimony

Transcript of Ex-State Department Aide, Michael McKinley: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776075712/read-ex-state-department-adviser-michael-mckinleys-testimony-to-congress

A few months ago, I mentioned getting a new library card at my local public library and beginning to use two free digital book services, Hoopla and RB Digital, which offer many selections of audiobooks and e-books.   These digital book services are available at many public libraries across America.

At Hoopla, I found Andrew C. McCarthy’s latest book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, in audiobook and am currently listening to it.  This book offers details of the backstory to how Ukraine is entwined in the 2016 Russian Collusion Dem smear campaign, working to paint Trump as a Russian agent, and also details on the Obama administration policy in Ukraine, the corrupt money connections and the Clinton connections to Ukraine, long before 2016.  It’s become part of the mainstream media mythmaking in the Trump era to present everything that happened during the Obama years was above reproach and pretend the Obama executive branch operated totally committed to doing all things professionally, transparently and without a hint of scandal.  McCarthy smacks down that concerted spin effort to rewrite the Obama years into the most halcyon presidency in American history with facts about the messy foreign policy, big money dealings and, let me whisper the word… corruption that occurred on Obama’s watch.

Ball of Collusion:The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency is also available at bookstores.  Here’s the amazon link.  I will likely buy this books too, so that I can refer to it for information, especially about the foreign players bios and dealings with Washington politicians,  as this impeachment mess rolls ahead.

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October 31, 2019 · 3:09 am

Trump’s impeachment problems grow

Initially, the story of Trump’s call with the President of Ukraine and the entire quid pro quo impeachment argument Dems were making sounded overblown.  The whistleblower, with only second and third hand accounts of the call, bolstered my opinion that the Dem allegations were totally hyped out of proportion, especially when Trump released a transcript of the call he asserted  was a verbatim transcript of his “perfect call” and insisting he was being unfairly accused.

Over the past week my view has shifted and I suspect that Giuliani’s questionable actions operating as Trump’s personal sleuth in Ukraine will bring to light more damaging information that will aid the Democrats impeachment push.  The way Adam Schiff has conducted these “impeachment inquiry” hearings in secret, avoiding  producing the whistleblower and revelations that Schiff’s staff met with the whistleblower and likely helped in the production of the whistleblower’s complaint still work to discredit the process, but it’s also becoming increasingly clear there’s probably a good deal more damaging information that’s going to pour out in this impeachment effort.

The hearing witnesses who received the heaviest spin smear hits by Trump and his spin commandos, Bill Taylor, Trump’s chargé d’affaires for Ukraine/former ambassador to Ukraine and LTC Alexander Vindman, also seem to be the witnesses whose testimony blew massive holes in Trump’s “perfect call” assertion.  The Trumper attacks on Taylor were awful, but the attacks on Vindman, accusing him of dual loyalty crossed a line for me.  Trump and his minions are as vile as the worst Clinton spin monsters and Adam Schiff, one of the most dishonest characters in Congress.

Andrew McCarthy at National Review stated the obvious:

“President Trump and his defenders have insisted that there was no quid pro quo. Since there is virtually always a quid pro quo, we must assume that, generally, they mean there was no improper quid pro quo. I say “generally” because some actually do posit a legal claim that there was no quid pro quo at all. Ukraine, these Trump supporters say, was unaware that defense aid was being withheld; such awareness, they reason, is the sine qua non of a “quo,” without which there can be no corrupt “quid.” This argument is factually infirm and, in any event, misconstrues impeachment. I will come to that momentarily.

First, though, the critical point: The winning argument on behalf of the president is that what happened here is not an impeachable offense. It is untenable to insist that there was no quid pro quo — just as it is outlandish for the president to claim that his July 25 conversation with President Zelensky was “perfect,” an impossible standard to meet in human endeavors. To stake out an untenable position is a self-defeating strategy in public controversies.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/stop-claiming-no-quid-pro-quo/

Jonah Goldberg, a conservative pundit on the Trump-pundit’s “most reviled Never Trumper human scum” list, stated a growing realization that’s becoming obvious too:

“Trump and his defenders are still pounding on outdated, unpersuasive, or irrelevant talking points. They rail about the identity and motives of the whistleblower who first aired these allegations, even though the whistleblower’s report has been largely corroborated by others. They claim that the process of the Democratic inquiry in the House is unconstitutional, which is ridiculous. They insist that hearings where Republicans can cross-examine witnesses are a “star chamber” or reminiscent of secret Soviet trials. Also ridiculous.

Republican complaints about the heavy-handed tactics of the Democrats have some merit, but they’ll be rendered moot when the Democrats move to public hearings or to a Senate trial. And when that happens, claims that the call was “perfect” and that there was no quid pro quo will evaporate in the face of the facts.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/trump-best-option-for-avoiding-impeachment-an-apology

Goldberg mentioned that the apology is what helped Bill Clinton survive impeachment without being removed from office and it allowed Democrats a path to credibility convince the American people that the president regretted his misdeeds and it was time for the country to move on.

At some point the original whistleblower’s motives and credibility and Schiff’s corrupt machinations become irrelevant in the face of growing witness testimony and evidence that Trump is lying about his “perfect call” transcript, which now appears to be neither “perfect” nor “verbatim,” but is a sanitized version of the call produced by some White House staffers, not by great stenographers.

The little bit of the Vindman testimony that we know about mentions some meeting with other Trump officials like Rick Perry, Ambassador Sondland, and other prominent Trump officials, which assures there’s going to be more damaging information, beyond the Trump phone call, yet Congressional Republicans and Trump pundits want to remain stuck on spinning about the corrupt “process” and “no quid pro” in the phone call “transcript”, which isn’t even really a transcript at all, but a Trump-friendly version of the phone call.  Trump lied and spun this “perfect call” nonsense and “no quid pro transcript” for a month now, but that spin antic won’t see Trump through impeachment, as more witnesses testify.

At 25:54, in Ambassador John Sullivan’s testimony yesterday, he explains the role of Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to smear and get Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich, fired.  While the president assuredly has the power to fire ambassadors, my gut instinct seems that Trump’s loss of confidence in the ambassador might have had more to do with her unwillingness to go along with Giuliani’s private dirt-digging expedition in Ukraine rather than her conduct carrying out the president’s official policies in Ukraine.

As more witnesses testify, my gut instinct is Trump and Giuliani’s Ukraine escapades are going to leave Republicans humiliating themselves trying to defend Trump and once again having to sacrifice every vestige of self-respect to prop up this corrupt and dishonest man, who is just as bad as the Clintons, Schiff and the Dem spin water-carrying media.

Trump isn’t an innocent victim of the Dems trying to do him in here.  Trump and Giuliani’s Ukraine escapades reek of the same sort of corrupt  Clintonesque dirt-digging operations, using private, totally unaccountable investigators.

Life for Congressional Republicans defending the corrupt “GOP Insurgent” will get much more uncomfortable, but then there’s the Durham/Horowitz investigations, which might deflect some of the media glare to the corrupt Clinton/Obama private dirt-digging operations too.

America will be much better off when the Clinton and Trump corruption is long past and becomes only an object lesson on the perils of public corruption taught to  schoolchildren in U.S. history classes.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption

October 24, 2019 · 1:21 am

Thoughts on America’s looming corruption crisis

Jonathan Turley, penned an interesting op-ed, Repulsed by the ‘lynching’ scandal? Just wait for the impeachment trial, highlighting what a trial in the Senate would be like if Trump is impeached for using his public office for personal gain.  Turley writes:

“The Senate may be the worst jury in world. As someone who has tried a case before that body, I would move to strike half of them for cause in a real courtroom. In that impeachment trial of a judge, I had jury figures like Republican Senator David Vitter, who had escaped criminal charges over his admitted use of prostitutes in Washington. Indeed, he sat there in judgment of a judge accused of improper conduct involving gambling and other acts, such as the payment of a stripper by a lawyer.

Trump would be judged on self-dealing by a jury that would include Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, charged with corruption for exchanging official acts for gifts from a wealthy doctor. All politicians are self-dealers who use their offices to advance their ambitions. It is in their blood. The fact is that “public service” often means “self-service” to those in political power. Watching a trial on self-dealing with this jury is like having Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman sit on a college admissions board. They certainly have experience, just not the right kind.”

The Dem impeachment effort timing seems tied to the Barr/Durham investigation expansion and the completed Horowitz FISA abuse report that’s being being slow-walked to being released.  Since last month, I’ve believed that the Clinton political machine is the driving force in this Trump-Ukraine whistleblower revelation and the ramped up “impeachment inquiry” effort.

Along with the Dem impeachment hysteria came Hillary and Chelsea Clinton hitting the media circuit touting their new book, “Gutsy Women,” which looks like nothing more than a convenient stage prop for Hillary to use as a media hook to interject herself into the media’s Trump impeachment drama and position herself for a 2020 run.

Since Hillary lost in 2016, my belief has been that there’s no way Hillary would sit back and let another Dem woman become positioned to be elected as the first female U.S. president in history, but with the ramped up Barr/Durham investigation, my sense is several prominent high officials in the Obama administration might be in serious legal jeopardy.  There is no way the Clintons or the Democratic Party bigwigs will ever allow top Obama officials to be indicted over 2016 corruption, aiding the Clintons’ scorched earth efforts to destroy Trump.

If Hillary does jump into the 2020 race, although some of the far-left factions will loudly complain, Obama, Biden, all their cronies and the entire mainstream media, which runs Dem spin 24/7, without any hesitation, will all unite quickly.  The Clinton corruption spread throughout the Democratic Party many years ago, so it’s a vast corrupt political machine, run almost like an organized crime syndicate, that will “resist” every effort at having any top Obama officials being indicted or held accountable in any way.

Yesterday, the mainstream media went into hysterics about an ill-advised Republican spin stunt of barging into Adam Schiff’s private House Intelligence Committee hearing in a House SCIF.  And granted it was a total affront to House rules.  The problem though is Adam Schiff’s secret hearings, where he and the Dems selectively leak sensational tidbits to the mainstream media to damage Trump is a thoroughly corrupt process too.

The Democrats long ago decided that they will only follow rules they like and they invent new ones based on political expediency and whenever they sense a media advantage to stage some new political spin theater.  For instance, the grotesque Kavanaugh scorched earth smear campaign was orchestrated to hijack the vote on a completed Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing.  Schumer and the other Dems jumped right on-board that orchestrated smear campaign.  Top Dem senators mindlessly repeated the spin that in alleged sexual assault cases the accused is guilty until proven innocent, a complete and total corruption of one of our American basic foundational principles.  Democrats did the same thing in 1998, making excuses for Bill Clinton lying under oath. Their party’s abdication of defending the rule of law has led to widespread corruption and a total collapse of any standards. The Dem embrace of mass media spin information warfare, a corrupt form of repetitive messaging used to manipulate and deceive the American people, fuels and enables the widespread Dem corruption.

While the House GOP barging into Schiff’s hearing today seemed outrageous to me, I’m finding it hard to get worked up when only a few days ago, Dems and the mainstream media were breezily brushing off the State Dept report on security violations in the Hillary Clinton run State Department, where they found 588 valid security violations and out of those in 497 of them, no one was found culpable, so I guess ghosts mishandled that classified information…  The report findings were a total whitewash and the mainstream media leaped into action to brush it under the carpet.

I expect the Horowitz report to be the same type of whitewash effort, because the high and mighty in Washington must be protected at all costs rather than being held to the highest standards, which would really protect our governmental institutions.  Instead, the powers that be in Washington protect the powerful and connected, especially within the Democratic Party.

If Durham and Barr attempt to indict any former Obama top officials, the mainstream media smear machine will likely spin into outer space to destroy them.

Some people really are above the law in America, especially the Clinton machine and powerful Dems in Washington.

Trump and his “GOP Insurgency” was a Clinton/Dem/mainstream media driven spin nightmare to wreak havoc on the GOP primary, but Trump was duly elected and the Clinton machine will never rest until Trump is destroyed.  Without a doubt Trump is a very corrupt man, who rivals the Clintons in willingness to break any rules that get in the way of his ambitions.  He even rivals the Clintons when it comes to mendacity and that assuredly is quite a feat.

The relentless and extremely corrupt Dem spin effort to drive Trump out of office coupled with Trump’s equally corrupt effort to thwart the Dem effort to destroy him, assures our American governmental institutions will continue to implode under the weight of this endless scorched earth spin information warfare, the wholesale public corruption and rapidly fraying commitment to the rule of law in Washington, where partisans have one set of rules for their side and another set for the other side.

It’s only going to get much worse.

 

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Politics, Public Corruption

October 23, 2019 · 2:07 am

Impeachment got a shot of adrenaline

Yesterday, the Dem “impeachment inquiry”, held behind closed doors, and with Adam Schiff controlling everything rolled on with Ambassador Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat to Ukraine testifying.  Schiff released Ambassador Taylor’s opening statement.  If other witness testimony corroborates Taylor’s recounting of the events that transpired, the Trump impeachment effort got a shot of adrenaline out of this testimony.  Of course, it’s best to caveat that with a huge “perhaps”, since we only got the ambassador’s opening statement, not his 10 hours of testimony.

The biggest impediment to the Dems impeachment effort is how they are trying to run it in secret, in order to try to control the media spin by selectively leaking.  At the same time Schiff won’t even allow Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee open access to transcripts:

The Dems sleazy efforts to control the media impeachment spin will undermine the legitimacy of their impeachment effort in the long run… unless Trump inflicts more devastating damage to himself through more impulsive, chaos-inducing decisions.  The fall-out from Trump’s Syria decision seems to have the potential to propel more Congressional Republicans to consider washing their hands of defending Trump than anything pertaining to Schiff’s Ukraine quid pro quo allegation.

Sleazy Schiff and the corrupt Dems deserve the equally sleazy and corrupt Trump as an adversary.  I just wish Trump had remained a loudmouth Dem who spent lots of money buying political influence among Dem politicians and hobnobbing with the likes CNN’s Jeff Zucker, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, and shock jock, Howard Stern…

Here’s a PBS link with Ambassador Taylor’s statement too: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-ambassador-william-taylors-full-opening-statement

 

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October 20, 2019 · 8:20 pm

But, her emails…

On Friday, the letter sent to Senator Chuck Grassley from the State Department Bureau of Legislative Affairs, outlining the finding on the State Department investigation into “Hillary’s emails,” was released.  As expected partisans, especially those in the media leaped on two diametrically opposed conclusions and that’s because the writer of the State Department letter tucked in some weasel words (probably deliberately imo) for Democrats to latch onto.  The letter is short and most of it focuses on the methodology used in their process of investigating the emails.

Here are the findings in a nutshell paragraph in the report:

V. ADJUDICATIVE RESULTS (TOP LINE ROLLUP)
APD’ s administrative review of the HRC emails resulted in the adjudication of 91 valid violations attributable to 38 individuals. Additionally, APD adjudicated 497 valid violations where no individual was found to bear culpability, resulting in a ”valid, but not culpable”determination.

Total Valid Violations Adjudicated: 91
Total VnC: 497

(Paragraph from Page 8)

Most of the liberal media reports I saw, seemed to fixate only on the last sentence, on Page 10 of this report, and offered the Clinton “time to move on” spin, opining that this report should be the end of investigating Hillary’s emails (I could imagine liberals in the media whining about this “witch hunt” and “poor Hillary” amongst themselves).  Here’s the last sentence:

“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

Yep, the media leaped on that no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information and the State Department official who sent this letter intended that sentence to be “The End” on Hillary’s emails.

None of this answers to the almost 600 valid violations found and these investigators failed to even hold anyone responsible for 497 of them.  Yet most of the liberal media thinks Americans should be satisfied with this investigation???  The report itself defines a valid violation as:

“An incident is categorized as a violation when it is “a knowing, willful, or negligent action that could reasonably be expected to result in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

(Page 4)

The Clinton/Dem machine has so many loyal media spinmeisters, who carry their spin messaging without question, that the hopes that truth could ever filter through their spin wall was always highly unlikely.

The FBI investigation into “Hillary’s emails” began with her use of a private email server coming to light and revelations of classified information being stored on that server.  Hillary explained her decision to use that private server as a desire to only have to carry one device, which made no sense, since according to the FBI investigation, she went through 13 blackberries and several laptops. In the FBI Notes Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper, described Hillary using a flip-phone to talk on while using her blackberry at the same time, so she could even multi-task with multiple electronic devices….

The cries from the many on the right insisted that Hillary deliberately set up that private server to avoid federal recordkeeping laws and “hide her emails from FOIA requests.”

I don’t believe either of these explanations gets to the truth of why Hillary decided to use a private server, so before “But, her emails” completely vanishes from public record, here are some facts about that server:

  1.  Hillary never set up a private, homebrew server.
  2.  According to FBI Notes of the interviews with Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper and Hillary’s IT guy, Bryan Pagliano, the original private server in the Clinton’s home was set-up by Cooper, around 2007, to serve as Bill Clinton’s private foundation server.  Got that everyone?  It was Bill Clinton’s private server.
  3.   In late 2008-early 2009 the Clintons decided to use that private server for Hillary’s State Department emails rather than the official government systems.  To that end, Hillary’s campaign IT guy, Pagliano, worked with Bill Clinton’s IT guy, Cooper, to upgrade the server.  Huma Abedin coordinated that server upgrade.  Pagliano told the FBI he believed they were upgrading that server for Bill Clinton’s use.  Hillary was sworn is as Secretary of State on January 21, 2009.  So, the merging of the Clintons’ private foundation server and the US State Department was implemented before Hillary was even sworn in as Secretary of State.
  4. .  According to the FBI Notes, Pagliano and Cooper have differing accounts of who the two email accounts on the original server belonged to.  Pagliano said it was Huma Abedin and BLANK and Cooper said it was Hillary and BLANK.

In 2016 when the FBI Notes were released I wrote a blog post, The Servers, and my thoughts about these email accounts were:

“Pagliano stated that he transferred email from the old system to the new system and there shouldn’t be ANY email content left on the old server.  Pagliano stated to the FBI that he ONLY transferred clintonemail.com email accounts for Huma Abedin and BLANK and that he was unaware of and did not transfer any email account for Hillary.  So, who is BLANK.   Since Pagliano ONLY transferred clintonemail.com email accounts for Huma Abedin and BLANK and this was Bill Clinton’s PERSONAL email server for foundation business, who could BLANK be…..  Now, Clinton’s IT guy, Justin Cooper, recalls the one email account as being Hillary’s email account, not Huma’s, which again brings us back to whose email account was the only other email account on Bill Clinton’s personal server…”

At this point, I’m still curious who BLANK was and why the FBI redacted that name.  It would seem to me that if Bill Clinton went to the trouble to set up a private server in his home around 2007, either he or one of his closest aides set up an email account for Bill Clinton’s business.  Hillary’s device and email account information the FBI released, indicated she was still using her email on her blackberry the first few months she was Secretary of State.

The Clintons used that homebrew server to merge the Office of the Secretary of State’s business onto their private Clinton Foundation server in their home.  Tens of thousands of emails were destroyed, so some of them had to be Bill Clinton’s foundation business.

And that might be why Bill Clinton went so far as to personally arrange that meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in AZ,  weeks before Hillary’s FBI interview.  I believe he was likely strong-arming Lynch about how he wanted that FBI interview handled and that he wanted that email investigation closed ASAP.

Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, all close Hillary staffers, told the FBI they didn’t know anything about the private server until after Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, even though both Cooper and Pagliano told the FBI that Huma Abedin coordinated the server upgrade before Hillary was sworn in as Secretary of State.  And Huma had an email account on the second server for sure and likely even the original server.

The classified email issue never caused the Clintons any concern, because Hillary had the power to declassify information.  The Clintons spun so successfully that few people even realize that original server was Bill Clinton’s personal foundation server, which he had set-up around 2007.  The Clinton spin machine always insists that Bill Clinton doesn’t use email, but perhaps by 2007, he wanted to get with the times and decided a “private email server” tucked in his house, guarded by Secret Service agents, would be a secure way for him to begin using email.

Hillary had been online even when Bill Clinton was still president according to various media reports back then.

But, her emails, indeed…

 

Update: October 20, 2019 8:27 pm – I decided to post part of James Comey’s July 5, 2016 statement:

“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.

With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system

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October 3, 2019 · 8:26 pm

Gut Instincts

In my last post  I mentioned my reliance on my gut instinct in formulating what is, admittedly, a conspiracy theory.  Interestingly enough, Trump has stated many times he trusts his gut when making decisions too.  Somehow though I suspect there’s a yuge difference between his process and mine, so I’ll explain a bit about how I make my gut decisions identifying the Clinton/Dem/mainstream media spin operations in the media and how I analyze any news pertaining to the actions or public comments and appearances of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Studying propaganda and military information warfare operations has been an interest of mine starting in 1980, when I became interested in studying the Cold War, while in the Army.  Another hobby, of sorts, has been watching people, because people fascinate me.  I also developed a habit of reading a lot of government reports, starting with a hand-me-down copy of The Warren Commission report my oldest sister had sitting around the house.  I read many reports  after big political controversies and calamities, but I also find military after-action reports fascinating.  Add these interests to my news junkie habit that developed when I was probably around 11 or 12, and these habits help guide my “gut instinct”, which fails badly sometimes, but sometimes it’s way ahead of the media reporting.

I also look for patterns of behavior (how people operate/what their personal signature of actions looks like and work on trying to put together a timeline of events or political activities connected to the situation.

Trump, from what I can glean, bases his gut instinct based on his complete faith in his superior dealmaking skills.

Back in the early 90s, I became very interested in the Clinton “war room” and their spin operations. It was something very different than normal political messaging in American presidential politics.  Bill Clinton’s ability to mask his true meaning behind deceptive language fascinated me, to the point, I would often listen closely to what he said in a speech and then look at quotes from the speech that were reported in the news and marvel at how clever he was at saying one thing and meaning exactly the opposite.  Bill and Hillary Clinton both are extremely mendacious people and so is Donald J. Trump but the differences between the Clinton spin operations and comparing that to Trump’s spin sideshow is like comparing fencing to a WWE wrestling match.

Often in combat, guerilla disruption operations prove very successful.  In this endless scorched earth spin information war, Trump disrupts and often hijacks the carefully constructed Dem talking points messaging, that relies on a large network of political operatives, sympathetic news media conduits and Hollywood celebs.  Trump is a one-man show spin guerilla fighter, who routinely, with just a single tweet or public statement, completely disrupts a carefully constructed Dem spin attack.  It’s a large ponderous network vs. an unpredictable, lone spin guerilla, who attacks at random and without any warning.

Along with following the news, I’ve read many of the books that came out on the Clintons (friendly and unfriendly viewpoints), I read books by Democrat political operatives too, like Carville, Dick Morris, John Podesta, etc.  I recently saw David Axelrod’s book, Believer, which I found in my local Dollar Tree store for a $1, so I bought it. I intend to read Ken Starr’s book, Contempt, too, but I have a long list of books I want to get through before I buy that.  I even have a couple books on Trump too.  Another habit of mine is to read bios online of people and political events, to try to understand where they came from.  This brings me back to trusting “gut instinct” –  some people’s quick decisions might be more reliable than others, based on how they go about analyzing situations.

The caveat to trusting “gut instinct” is no human system based on making fast judgments is ever going to be 100% accurate  and it’s best to keep paying attention to new information that develops and be open to admitting some of your “gut instinct” assessments were incorrect and try to improve.

In 2005, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book, Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking, where he describes this process:

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink (p. 37). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Two situations described in this book interested me.  Retired Marine Corps general, Paul Van Riper is without a doubt one of the most brilliant military strategists in America. Gladwell explains Van Riper was selected to lead the Red Team, playing a rogue military leader in the Persian Gulf, heading a terrorist group in Millenium Challenge ‘o2, a very expensive U.S. military wargaming exercise.  In the exercise Blue Team was meant to test the U.S. military’s new operational system, relying on high-tech systems that provided all the super-duper complex computer assessments and analysis, which would provide vast amounts of information quickly.  The Red Team rogue leader, Van Riper played, didn’t have all those high-tech systems:

“Millennium Challenge, in other words, was not just a battle between two armies. It was a battle between two perfectly opposed military philosophies. Blue Team had their databases and matrixes and methodologies for systematically understanding the intentions and capabilities of the enemy. Red Team was commanded by a man who looked at a long-haired, unkempt, seat-of-the pants commodities trader yelling and pushing and making a thousand instant decisions an hour and saw in him a soul mate.

On the opening day of the war game, Blue Team poured tens of thousands of troops into the Persian Gulf. They parked an aircraft carrier battle group just offshore of Red Team’s home country. There, with the full weight of its military power in evidence, Blue Team issued an eight-point ultimatum to Van Riper, the eighth point being the demand to surrender. They acted with utter confidence, because their Operational Net Assessment matrixes told them where Red Team’s vulnerabilities were, what Red Team’s next move was likely to be, and what Red Team’s range of options was. But Paul Van Riper did not behave as the computers predicted.

Blue Team knocked out his microwave towers and cut his fiber-optics lines on the assumption that Red Team would now have to use satellite communications and cell phones and they could monitor his communications.

“They said that Red Team would be surprised by that,” Van Riper remembers. “Surprised? Any moderately informed person would know enough not to count on those technologies. That’s a Blue Team mind-set. Who would use cell phones and satellites after what happened to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? We communicated with couriers on motorcycles, and messages hidden inside prayers. They said, ‘How did you get your airplanes off the airfield without the normal chatter between pilots and the tower?’ I said, ‘Does anyone remember World War Two? We’ll use lighting systems.’”

Suddenly the enemy that Blue Team thought could be read like an open book was a bit more mysterious. What was Red Team doing? Van Riper was supposed to be cowed and overwhelmed in the face of a larger foe. But he was too much of a gunslinger for that. On the second day of the war, he put a fleet of small boats in the Persian Gulf to track the ships of the invading Blue Team navy. Then, without warning, he bombarded them in an hour-long assault with a fusillade of cruise missiles. When Red Team’s surprise attack was over, sixteen American ships lay at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Had Millennium Challenge been a real war instead of just an exercise, twenty thousand American servicemen and women would have been killed before their own army had even fired a shot. “

As the Red force commander, I’m sitting there and I realize that Blue Team had said that they were going to adopt a strategy of preemption,” Van Riper says. “So I struck first. We’d done all the calculations on how many cruise missiles their ships could handle, so we simply launched more than that, from many different directions, from offshore and onshore, from air, from sea. We probably got half of their ships. We picked the ones we wanted. The aircraft carrier. The biggest cruisers. There were six amphibious ships. We knocked out five of them.””

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink (pp. 185-189). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

While it’s a gross insult to General Van Riper’s strategic brilliance to compare him to Donald J. Trump in any way, I think  a very  general “complicated system vs. a very simple, unpredictable system” analogy  holds up.  General Van Riper was playing a rogue military leader of terrorists with few military assets pitted against the most high-tech military in the world.  Scorched earth spin information warfare, on the other hand is sleazy mass media propaganda games and smear campaigns, so it was the Clinton/Dem/mainstream media manipulative word games/smear campaigns vs. Trump, the crass, loudmouth reality TV star blazing insults across the airwaves and mean tweets on his personal Twitter account.  I just don’t think it takes ‘brilliant” strategists to ruthlessly manipulate people, spread outrageous lies and wage vicious smear campaigns.  It takes total amorality of thousands of slithering snakes in the grass vs. a giant hissing orange-skinned snake.

Gladwell gives numerous examples of how sometimes thin-slices of information can give you enough information to make those, almost “thinking without thinking” determinations based on a pattern, you detect very quickly.  I read a book a long while ago, dealing with some of this “in a glance” concept, which Von Clausewitz, a brilliant military strategist, referred to this ability as Napoleon’s Glance, and used the term coup d’oeil.  William Duggan in his book, Napoleon’s Glance writes:

“Coup d’oeil was the secret of Napoleon’s success.  He made no innovations himself: Instead, he studied in detail the winning campaigns of the great generals who came before him, all the way back to Alexander the Great more than two thousand years before.  Napoleon imitated their tactics but always in a new combination that fit the present situation.  He put his army in motion with no particular destination, until he saw in a glance a coup d’oeil a chance to win a battle.  The place and time were completely unpredictable, and he passed up more battles than he fought.”

Napoleon’s Glance, written by William Duggan, page 4

Gladwell also touched on coup d’oeil in his book, Blink, and described a WWII situation pertaining to British women recruited to listen to German radio broadcasts:

“In the Second World War, the British assembled thousands of so-called interceptors— mostly women— whose job it was to tune in every day and night to the radio broadcasts of the various divisions of the German military. The Germans were, of course, broadcasting in code, so— at least in the early part of the war— the British couldn’t understand what was being said. But that didn’t necessarily matter, because before long, just by listening to the cadence of the transmission, the interceptors began to pick up on the individual fists of the German operators, and by doing so, they knew something nearly as important, which was who was doing the sending. “If you listened to the same call signs over a certain period, you would begin to recognize that there were, say, three or four different operators in that unit, working on a shift system, each with his own characteristics,” says Nigel West, a British military historian. “And invariably, quite apart from the text, there would be the preambles, and the illicit exchanges. How are you today? How’s the girlfriend? What’s the weather like in Munich? So you fill out a little card, on which you write down all that kind of information, and pretty soon you have a kind of relationship with that person.”

The interceptors came up with descriptions of the fists and styles of the operators they were following. They assigned them names and assembled elaborate profiles of their personalities. After they identified the person who was sending the message, the interceptors would then locate their signal. So now they knew something more. They knew who was where. West goes on: “The interceptors had such a good handle on the transmitting characteristics of the German radio operators that they could literally follow them around Europe— wherever they were. That was extraordinarily valuable in constructing an order of battle, which is a diagram of what the individual military units in the field are doing and what their location is. If a particular radio operator was with a particular unit and transmitting from Florence, and then three weeks later you recognized that same operator, only this time he was in Linz, then you could assume that that particular unit had moved from northern Italy to the eastern front. Or you would know that a particular operator was with a tank repair unit and he always came up on the air every day at twelve o’clock. But now, after a big battle, he’s coming up at twelve, four in the afternoon, and seven in the evening, so you can assume that unit has a lot of work going on. And in a moment of crisis, when someone very high up asks, ‘Can you really be absolutely certain that this particular Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps [German air force squadron] is outside of Tobruk and not in Italy?’ you can answer, ‘Yes, that was Oscar, we are absolutely sure.’””

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink (pp. 45-47). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

I don’t know if my “gut instinct” when it comes to identifying the Clinton/Dem spin attacks and smear campaigns launching in the media and their endless corrupt political power plays has more to do with Gladwell’s  “thinking without thinking” concept,  coup d’oeil or is more akin to Gavin DeBecker’s, The Gift of Fear, after surviving  the Clinton’s ruthlessness during impeachment in 1998…

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Military, Uncategorized

September 25, 2019 · 9:13 am

Another Clinton Spin strategy launch?

Decided to write a short blog post on the Trump-Ukraine scandal, which smells like a retread of the Trump-Russia scandal.

The Democrats rushed to relaunch their “impeachment inquiry” in the House yesterday and competing narratives swirl about the allegations against nefarious corruption committed by both Trump and Biden, but here’s the thing – this Trump-Ukraine scandal smells like a boring rewrite of the Trump-Russia scandal.

It smells like another Clinton spin strategy has been launched.

The Trump-Ukraine allegations will leave Trump’s presidency immobilized and his campaign mired in this scandal, but because there are serious questions about Biden’s son and Biden’s actions while vice president, this scandal will make Biden toxic among Dems, who are already concerned about his ability to defeat Trump.

So, the Trump-Ukraine scandal also knocks Biden out of contention and would leave Warren as the Dems frontrunner.  Warren has already staked out positions too far left to win in the general election and beyond talking about her plans, she’s churned out written plans galore.

The Trump-Ukraine debacle will leave a path for Hillary to prance in, like an avenging queen, who had her “1st female president” crown wrongfully stolen from her .  Women might be energized to support her as their last best hope to defeat the villainous Trump.

That’s my hunch so far, because this Trump-Ukraine scandal smells so much like Trump-Russia.

As to the mysterious whistleblower, my hunch so far is Sue Gordon, who Trump did not choose to replace Dan Coats as DNI.  The Trump call with the Ukraine president occurred in late July, Gordon resigned her position August 8th and it was days later, August 12th. when this IG complaint was filed.  That’s my hunch.  The whistleblower reportedly is represented by a lawyer connected to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.  This whistleblower complaint smells like Comey’s firing and his leaked memos.

Guess we’ll all have to stay tuned.

9/25/2019 2:18 p.m. – Decided to add a bit to my thoughts about this latest hysterical media spin launch. The timing for leaking this whistleblower’s complaint seems designed to preempt and derail any of the Horowitz/DOJ/Durham findings from gaining any traction in the mainstream media. It feels like a massive spin storm designed to send the mainstream media, Dems and any NeverTrump mouthpieces still left racing down a Trump Impeachment rabbit hole.

The mainstream media rushes to latch onto any Dem spin attacks, without even asking any questions and by fully buying into the Democrats political framing of the talking points, which land in their lap (or are leaked to them).

Sure, there are Trump-following media who do this same thing, but the Trump spin effort is always chaotic, because it all comes from Trump’s impulsive comments or tweets. Trump doesn’t do elaborate political strategy like Dem operatives and especially not like Bill Clinton and his cadre of loyal operatives. Trump is more a guerilla type spin operator – unpredictable and good at blowing up or disrupting carefully constructed Dem spin narratives.

Anyway, this Trump-Ukraine spin launch was carefully timed and orchestrated.

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption