Comey’s ballyhooed testimony contains nothing not already known,
nothing remotely about obstruction of justice, and, in fact, nothing that
matters at all. It’s just a replay of the self-serving tommyrot Comey has
been leaking all along.
Indeed, it’s the Nothingburger that proves Imperial
Washington has become completely unhinged in its groundless RussiaGate
hysteria; and is stumbling toward a lawless defenestration of a sitting
president in the name of a hypocritical obeisance to a tortured version
of “the law”.
It is a smoking gun in only one sense: It proves why the
sanctimonious Comey should have been fired on day one and why the
apparent Wall Street assumption that it can count on “Washington governance as
usual” is so dangerously misguided.
As to the latter, our point is very simple. What we have is an
entirely unstable, unsustainable hothouse economy and financial system that is
completely dependent upon the ministrations of the state and its central
banking branch. The giant bubble that was reflated after the 2008 crisis
will soon violently implode and take the economy down with it—-unless it
is again arrested and bailed-out by extraordinary Washington action.
But this time there is no one home on either end
of Pennsylvania Avenue and no beltway bailout brigade at the
ready. To the contrary, today’s Senate show trial proves that the
Imperial City is descending irretrievably into unprecedented dysfunction and
political fratricide. The very fact of today’s farce is reason itself to run,
not walk, from the feckless insouciance of the casino.
But to get
this all in context, let’s start with the Senate Intelligence
Committee hearing itself and its sad sack chairman, Senator Richard Burr of
North Carolina. When it comes to treacherous betrayal, we’d just as soon
go with Aaron (Burr).
The Senator knows full well that there is nothing to the Russia
meddling story because if there was any kind of documentary proof it would have
leaked long ago. But he is such a spineless deck-hand of the national security
apparatus that he is willingly conducting today’s installment of the
Imperial City’s anti-Russian witchunt.
The sum and substance of RussiaGate, in fact, is the
evidence-free assessments, judgments, surmises, inferences and innuendos of
Deep State operatives who have been dead set against Donald Trump from the very
beginning; and who were given leave during the campaign and transition by
Obama’s top national security advisors—–the despicable duo of Susan Rice and
John Brennan—-to blatantly abuse the Spy State’s tools and machinery to smear
and besmirch the Donald and challenge the fundamental legitimacy of his
election.
That brings us to J. Edgar Comey. From the very beginning
with his backhanded acquittal of Hillary last July, he has
conducted himself as FBI Dictator, not director.
As
the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted about
Comey’s repeated whinny invocations of the FBI’s “traditionally
independent status in the executive branch,”
Independent?
This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.
Mr.. Comey is describing an FBI director who essentially answers to no one. But
the police powers of the government are awesome and often abused, and the only
way to prevent or correct abuses is to report to elected officials who are
accountable to voters. A director must resist intervention to obstruct an
investigation, but he and the agency must be politically accountable or risk
becoming the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.
This whole “independence” meme is a smokescreen for the man’s relentless
self-aggrandizement. That was evident in Comey’s statement about his
first encounter with the President-elect on January 6th at Trump Tower with
respect to the Christopher Steele “dossier”.
There was absolutely no reason of state for that
presentation except to conduct a devious exercise in political
intimidation. Certainly it was not even remotely a valid or
necessary heads-up about a national security matter to the
incoming occupant of the Oval Office.
Taking Trump aside for a private one-on-one, Comey had the gall
to serve up that unvetted and unverified garbage when he knew full well that it
had been paid for by Trump’s political opponents—first the Romney apparatus and
then Hillary Clinton’s operatives.
And he also knew that the “salacious and unverified” document,
as he described it, was not in any way, shape or form a national
security document or product of an FBI investigation. To the contrary, it was
a raw political attack screed that he been handed over to the FBI by one of
Trump’s most vicious opponents—-Senator John McCain.
So the January 6th briefing amounted to
a deliberate hazing of the man who had been elected President by the
American people. It had nothing to do with counter-intelligence or any
other public purpose. Instead, it was a message from the permanent beltway
government that “we rule, not you”.
Indeed, as Alan Dershowitz so brilliantly and cogently
schooled Anderson Cooper last night, the head of the FBI may have a 10-year
term, but he serves at the pleasure of the president, and can be fired by the
latter at will. And the president also has the absolute and unequivocal
power to tell the Attorney General and the head of the FBI—in the same room or
separately—what to investigate and not to investigate.
Furthermore, as Dershowitz also made crystal clear,
he could have told Comey that General Flynn had just been pardoned,
and that the investigation should be dropped immediately. And by
your way, all of that would have been perfectly legal and constitutional.
The proposition that the Attorney General and FBI
director operate in some insulated and antiseptic sphere above
the president’s authority as head of the executive branch has been
an entirely self-serving invention of the Deep State in the years since Watergate.
But that’s
mere custom and practice, not law. It’s the outcome of a rolling putsch under which
the permanent government, and the Washington-based apparatchiks and
K-Street racketeers who feed off it, have gradually usurped control of American
democracy.
In that respect, the three most powerful and destructive
institutions within the beltway are the Federal Reserve, the $75 billion
Intelligence Community and the Pentagon’s permanent military and civilian
bureaucracy. All of them, like Comey, drape themselves in the cover of public
spirited “independence” in order to exercise power unimpeded by the unwashed
masses and their elected representatives.
The Congressional intelligence committee and the likes of
dimwits like Senators Burr and Warner are simply their
subservient handmaids. In that role they have enabled the Comey’s and
Brennan’s of the world to not only rule the roost, but to feign deep
offense and invoke self-created “protocol” if and when they are challenged by
elected officeholders.
The fact that this has all been invented during the last few
decades is evident on every page of America’s recent and distance history book.
J. Edgar Hoover, for example, had amassed
the same “independence” that Comey and his fawning MSM commentariat
now claim. But Hoover was a menace to liberty and his arbitrary campaigns
against citizens like Martin Luther King were a blight on the institutions
of American democracy.
Is the garbage in the Steele dossier any different than Hoover’s
tawdry collection of blackmail?
Likewise, was JFK brought under a cloud of suspicion
for undermining the sacred independence of the Justice Department when he
made his brother Attorney General?
What about when Nixon appointed his law partner to the job? Or
when Ronald Reagan appointed as Attorney General a nice man, William French
Smith, who was the husband of Nancy’s shopping companion?
As
the Wall Street Journal also correctly
observed, the “remarkable presumptuousness of the Comey mindset” and
the false claim of high-minded independence behind it was evident
during the campaign.
When it served his craving for the limelight, Comey broke the
purportedly sacred DOJ “protocol” to absolve Hillary Clinton’s mishandling
of classified material without the involvement of Justice prosecutors or even
telling then Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Mr.
Comey’s disregard for the chain of legal command is why Mr. Trump was right to
fire him, whatever his reasons.
Well, yes, and something more. The January
6th presentation of the Steele “dossier” to Trump was an outright act
of Hoover-style blackmail by the FBI director; and a ringing statement
that the phony “Russian meddling” narrative would be used against the White
House whenever it suited the purposes of Comey and the Deep State he
represented.
And that gets us to the heart of Comey’s big fat
Nothingburger. As we have repeatedly insisted, General Mike Flynn was a
fairly dangerous hawk, nut-job and Islamophobe who should never have been
made director of the national security council. But in trying to open a back
channel to the Kremlin through Ambassador Kislyak at the end of December, he
did absolutely nothing wrong.
In fact, it was small potatoes compared to Kissinger’s use of a
KBG agent as a back channel during the December 1968 transition. And it can’t
hold a candle to the blatant Logan-act violation of Ronald Reagan’s team
when they promised the Iranians a more attractive deal if the released the
hostages on inauguration day (which they did), rather than before the election
(which was Jimmy Carter’s planned “October Surprise”).
Yet in the end, Flynn got fired for trying to make peace with
Russia—-a nation that is no threat to America and which has every reason to
take umbrage at NATO’s encroachment on its very borders.
When Flynn was fired on February 13, in fact, Trumped praised
him fulsomely and offered no plausible reason for his dismissal because there
wasn’t one. The Donald and his greenhorn team had simply panicked in the face
of the RussiaGate hysteria generated by the Deep State and amplified and
propagated by the mainstream media.
So the bottom line was simple. The Donald had a guilty
conscience for firing someone who had loyally supported him during the campaign
when the entire neocon foreign policy establishment was heaping abuse
upon him from every direction.
Accordingly, the Donald made the plaintive
request to the FBI director, who serves at his pleasure, to go easy on the blameless,
short-lived director of the national security council.
The
President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy
and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong
on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then
said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn
go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a
good guy.” . . . I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop
any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his
conversations with the Russian ambassador in December.
This is obstruction of justice?
No, it’s an Imperial City that has become unhinged by the
hysteria of RussiaGate.
And if you are not yet convinced that the whole thing is a
cock-and-bull story, just consider the latest piece of evidence about the
breathless stories of two months ago when the Macron campaign was
allegedly hacked by the Russians, too. His populist opponent, Marine
Le Pen, had also said it was time to have a rapprochement with Putin.
Right on schedule, here was the election-eve story
from the NYT under the ominous title: “Russian Hackers Who
Targeted Clinton Appear to Attack France’s Macron:
The
campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has
been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for
hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential
election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report.
The
report has heightened concerns that Russia may turn its playbook on France in
an effort to harm Mr. Macron’s candidacy and bolster that of Mr. Macron’s
rival, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen, in the final weeks of the
French presidential campaign.
Actually, the whole story was a crock. Here’s
the truth of the matter from the head of France’s own cyber security
agency:
The head
of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from
President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a
notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.
In an
interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard
said the Macron campaign hack “was so generic and simple that it could have
been practically anyone.”
He said
they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for
other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.
As we said, buckle up. There is one bumpy ride ahead.
Reprinted
with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
Former
Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about
in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest book
is The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in
America. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's
Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads
LRC the first thing every morning.
Copyright © 2017 David Stockman
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