RATFUCKING REDUX: A POLICE COUP, PART II

Summary: Has America been sold out at the highest levels?  

Has the FBI betrayed us?  

Have the protectors of the rule of law become the enemies of liberty? 

Has the FBI decided that next Tuesday’s election might not produce its desired result, and stepped in to substitute its judgment for that of an American public the Bureau has decided cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decision? 

Is a police coup, or worse, a Russian takeover, underway?

Either FBI Director James Comey has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or he has been irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, it’s time for him to get the hell out. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the election next Tuesday, Barack Obama should ask for his resignation next Wednesday, with immediate effect.

Indeed, Comey’s unsuccessful effort to ratfuck the Clinton campaign last week not only places own reputation at risk, but it wrought havoc within the Bureau itself. Now, not content with simultaneously shooting himself in one foot and putting the other foot in his mouth, Comey has attempted to take his ratfucking to a new level, releasing a leak to the New York Times that the FBI sees “nothing, nothing at all” to any relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about which the American public ought to worry its pretty little head, but also dredging up decade-and-a-half old documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

One, two, three strikes, you’re out. Comey’s ham-fisted effort to deliver the election to the head of his own Republican Party represents not only treachery, but a horrible disservice to what was once considered one of the finest, most impartial, crime-fighting operations in the world. Sadly, the FBI has now descended to the level of Russia’s FSB or Augusto Pinochet’s DINA.
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Three developments that have occurred in the week since James Comey’s less-than-successful attempt, last Friday afternoon, to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign have disclosed two things beyond reasonable doubt. The first is that it was in fact an attempted ratfucking, a deliberate and carefully planned political dirty trick designed to cause as much damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign as possible, and second, that James Comey himself either has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or that he, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is in fact irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, the time has come for James Comey to leave the FBI posthaste before he does the Bureau any more damage than he has already contrived to do.

Friday afternoon, when FBI Director James Comey released his innuendo-heavy, fact-light letter to eight Republican Committee Chairman implying (Nudge nudge!wink wink!) that there might possibly be some email in Huma Abedin’s laptop that might possibly lead to some potentially possible evidence of something on the part of Hillary Clinton that might possibly support some vague inference of possible wrongdoing by the quondam Secretary of State, it was possible, though difficult, for Comey’s defenders to say, in effect, that the director had merely exercised questionable judgment.

Yet, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, the Hillary campaign push back hard against Comey’s dirty trick and within two hours what had appeared to be another Hillary Clinton scandal had become what it really was, a scandal involving James Comey and his misuse of the FBI as what one observer of the situation called “an outpost of the Trump campaign.” By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI was in full crisis mode.

In full crisis mode, the Bureau responded much as it was accustomed to respond under the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover; a push back against the pushback with its own series of links and information releases designed to damage the Clinton campaign further while exonerating Donald Trump of any suspicion that might come his way from his relationship to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

First, the Bureau leaked a story to the New York Times that the FBI had seen “no evidence” of anything untoward in the relationship between Donald Trump and the Moskovskiy Kremlin. This leak, plainly intended as a preemptive strike against the Clinton campaign’s evidence-supported narrative of Trump as being tainted by his close associations with the Kremlin, was belied by numerous investigative reports from such sources as Newsweek, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of which contained more than enough evidence to support a probable cause determination that The Donald had indeed been both metaphorically and physically in bed with the Kremlin, and that he had been badly compromised.

The FBI leaks would not have been released without Comey’s direct approval, either by way of an order from the Director himself, or by way of what Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen has called an “emanation;” not in order as such, so much as a “vague signal [pointing] in the direction in which they should be working.” Either way, whether the directive took the form of an order or an “emanation,” the intent was clear, the Bureau should be unofficially officially on record as believing that there was “nothing, nothing to see here,” on the subject of Donald Trump’s dangerously close relationship with the Kremlin. The clear intent of the directive and the leak it engendered was to represent to the public that the FBI had exonerated Donald Trump of any improper entanglements with an unfriendly foreign power seeking to influence the outcome of the American elections.

We may envisage four hypotheses to account for Director Comey’s piss poor judgment in this matter.

The Overworked Director Needs a Break: this hypothesis, which seems to be the one most favored by both Republican and Democratic observers at the moment, is that Comey is simply so overworked that he fell into a pattern of repeated errors in judgment. In this narrative, Comey’s blunt effort to place his thumb and the Bureau’s thumb in the electoral scales is the result of sheer overwork. This narrative postulates that since July, when Comey came under sustained Republican attack for recommending against prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been internalizing and personalizing those attacks.  These attacks, in theory, caused the director to doubt his own judgment and to lack confidence in his own ability to command the Bureau.

Supporters of this hypothesis cite his extraordinary memo to the members of the Bureau whereby he attempted to explain his conduct of the other week. However, as evidence has emerged that the Director was very much “on a frolic of his own” when he disclosed the existence of the possibly, perhaps, maybe, significant unreviewed emails, this hypothesis fails of its own frailty and inconsistency. Even if it is true, Mr. Comey should still be asked to resign at once. If Hillary is the President-elect on November 9, outgoing president Barack Obama should request James Comey’s immediate resignation as FBI Director with immediate effect. The penalty in most public and private sector entities for the kinds of errors in judgment of which Comey has obviously been guilty is termination. As I suggested in my previous blog on the subject, James Comey has managed to shatter the FBI’s mystique and to set at naught the trust the public had had in it.

The Righteous Actor in a Noble Cause: if the hypothesis of the stressed out Director making bad decisions is not ominous, the “righteous actor/noble cause” hypothesis is very much so. In this scenario, given credence by the fact that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of higher-ups in the Justice Department and senior members of his own Bureau, it becomes fairly clear that the Director has succumbed to the blandishments of the same disease that afflicts Julian Assange, that is, righteous actor/noble cause corruption.

Righteous actor/noble cause corruption occurs when a single individual forms an opinion of his or her cause or conduct that it is, if anything, hyper-righteous, and is noble to the extent that the truly believing warrior in the cause is somehow above any form of scrutiny or criticism, and is beyond the need for critical self-awareness. Knowing Comey’s somewhat self-righteous schoolmarmish demeanor as it has been revealed in numerous media outlets, both traditional and digital, we must acknowledge the possibility that he most definitely suffers from this particular pathology. Like Julian Assange, whose self-righteousness manifests itself in a conviction that he, and he alone, has the moral right to act as judge, jury, and, indeed, executioner, Comey, a self-described “Boy Scout,” seems to delight in setting standards for others that are well-nigh impossible to meet, and up to which he himself might find difficulty living.

For the greatest single downfall of righteous actor/noble cause corruption is that it lends itself so easily and readily to charges of hypocrisy. Knowing what we do about James Comey’s  partisan Republican history, it appears safe to hypothesize that in James Comey’s world, the Republicans are necessarily the party of virtue, while the Democrats, particularly their presidential candidate, are the party of vice. And were virtue and vice confront one another, the righteous actor/noble cause actor inevitably begins to see himself as the righteous judge laying down the law and smiting evildoers. If this is how Comey sees himself, and by extension, the Bureau, he needs to be terminated at once. The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot hope to remain a credible, morally authoritative, incorruptible, incorrupt, federal law enforcement agency if it, itself, is tainted at its highest levels by noble cause/righteous actor corruption.
 
Because righteous actor/noble cause corruption leads inevitably to the dangerous conclusion that the means employed by the righteous actor in a noble cause are legitimate because justified by their ends. It is a teleological argument which must be carefully weighed on the particular facts of any given case. The ends may justify the means, but to say that the ends always justify the means, and that only the righteous actor in the noble cause is the judge of whether the ends justify the means is, in our American constitutional system, unacceptable. If this is the corruption into which Comey has fallen, the Attorney General should show his ass the door posthaste.
 
The Cynical Partisan Agent: Still more ominous is the hypothesis that James Comey was acting out of old-fashioned political corruption, not as a righteous actor in a noble cause. In this narrative, which appears to be supported by the facts that have become known since Friday afternoon, James Comey was simply out to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign in the service of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Certainly, the timing of the event is highly suspicious, and indeed raises probable cause to believe that a ratfucking was intended, and that James Comey, himself, personally, carried it out. Coming as it did eleven days out from the election, well within the sixty day window within which such pronouncements are not supposed to be made, per clear Department of Justice policy, there is certainly evidence to believe that Comey was acting deliberately to use the Bureau to serve the purposes of the Trump campaign. If this is indeed the case, not only should Comey be terminated as FBI director posthaste, he could also be the subject of a criminal investigation carried out by and resident in some other agency than in the Federal Bureau of investigation.

Let the Secret Service do the looking; let the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office do the looking –- LASO will be motivated to look very carefully at the conduct of a Bureau responsible for the chaos which is overtaken the Department. If the investigations turn up the evidence that may very well exist to support the view that Comey was acting on behalf of the RNC or the Trump campaign, a true bill should issue from the federal grand jury having jurisdiction of the matter, and instead of being merely terminated, James Comey should be facing extensive federal exposure as a criminal.

 The Russian Agent: the most ominous hypothesis, of course, is that the Bureau has been infiltrated and compromised by one or more agencies of the Russian State. The possibility that Comey’s revelations, so-called, were part of a Russian Kriegßpiel against the West in general and the United States in particular cannot be discounted.

At the acknowledged risk of being dismissed as a conspiracist, I will point out that I have been warning of the dangers of the Russian kriegßpiel against the West for more than a year now. During the run-up to the unsuccessful Scottish independence referendum, I noted the Kremlin’s maladroit attempts to manufacture sentiment for disunion in the Northern Kingdom. During the run-up to Brexit, I noted Moscow’s “emanations” in favor of Brexit, as I also noted what amounted to the treasonable, pro-Muscovite leanings of such Brexit advocates as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump himself.

I also noted The Donald’s very public embrace of Brexit, and embrace which very much mirrors the Kremlin’s favored policy posture, i.e., a weak, disunited Europe at odds with itself and lacking the resolve to resist Russian blandishments. I suggested then, and I suggest again, that the Brexiteers and Donald Trump shared with the Kremlin a common set of anti-Western, pro-Russian policy preferences. It’s also worth recalling how Donald Trump invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to campaign with him in Mississippi, ignoring the long tradition of not dragging foreigners into American presidential campaigns.

Of course, if it’s contrary to American tradition to drag foreigners into our presidential contests, it was, until last Friday, equally contrary to American tradition for the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country to run what amounts to a police coup, attempting to put its thumb on the scales of the presidential election. But as the evidence has accumulated, implicating rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office, we can no longer afford to give the Director or even the Bureau the benefit of even slight doubt. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the FBI in general and the New York field office in particular are commonly referred to as “Trumpland,” and Hillary Clinton is viewed by numerous agents in both Washington City and New York City as an incarnation of Antichrist.

Given the clear proclivity of the FBI for attempting to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by any means available, it doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots to lead from the New York field office to the J. Edgar Hoover building, back to the Kremlin itself. A bunch of Hillary-hating rogue agents in New York tried to throw the election to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s BFF. They are assisted in that regard by the Director himself, apparently motivated by partisan considerations.

The director himself apparently gave an “emanation” to rogue agents in Washington and in New York City to leak information harmful to the Clinton campaign and also information suggesting that the FBI can find no evidence at all of any connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s worth recalling that America’s other sixteen intelligence and counterintelligence agencies all share a consensus that the Russian government is actively attempting either to directly influence the outcome of the American election, or to cause the American public to entertain grave doubts about that election’s legitimacy, all with a view to destabilizing the United States.

Sixteen of seventeen American intelligence or counterintelligence agencies share this consensus. But not James Comey’s FBI.  Instead, the FBI has made a virtual cottage industry of leaks to the media intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the consensus of the rest of the intelligence/ counterintelligence community, and, by extension, on the tradecraft capacities of the other sixteen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that have been investigating the extent of Russia’s penetration of our electoral process.

Given the FBI’s curiously pro-Russian posture, which dovetails well and ominously with its apparent pro-Trump posture, we may legitimately ask whether that curious coincidence of interest has left the FBI wide-open to plundering Russian forays. We may also reasonably ask whether the FBI’s vulnerability to Russian intrusion, presumably by the FSB or by Russian military intelligence, GRU, has resulted in the Director himself having been turned or compromised in some way by Russian operatives concealed or embedded within the Bureau.

Certainly, if Director Comey entertains a strong anti-Clinton proclivity, if he holds both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same obvious disdain that Louis Freeh, a previous FBI director, clearly held for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, it would go a long way toward explaining his, and the Bureau’s, apparent hostility toward Hillary’s campaign. And when a highly placed senior official entertains such antipathies and animosities, it enables rogue agents throughout the Bureau.  Moreover, a calculus of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads by sickening, yet inevitable, degrees to the making of common cause with all manner of enemies national. 

 In short, Comey’s disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and his consequent ill-concealed embrace of Donald Trump, may well have led him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Kremlin, whose disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton parallels that of Donald Trump and James Comey himself. Are we seeing an alliance of secret policemen trying to mount a hostile takeover of the United States Government, to run a police coup?

Because, whether Comey’s attempted police coup was the result of noble cause/righteous actor corruption, or whether he was acting out of crassly cynical partisan motivations, is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that either of these two possible motivations could, and did, cause him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Russian State, to embrace and adopt the same means and methodologies that characterized Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, the tsarist Okhrana, Ilyich’s Cheka, or the Cheka’s successors, the KGB and the FSB.

If Comey and the rogue agents of “Trumpland” have in fact adopted the means and methodologies of the historic Russian secret police services, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation may well have outlived its usefulness, and may well have become not a protector of the American rule of law but a positive threat to the American love of liberty. The ultimate casualty of James Comey’s attempted police coup may be the FBI itself, which an increasing number of skeptical Americans are beginning to say should either be disbanded altogether or subject to a thorough housecleaning from the Director down to the janitors who clean the bathrooms in the sub-basements of the Hoover building.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

A MASTER CLASS IN ATTEMPTED RATFUCKING

Summary: Embattled Republican FBI director James Comey tried to reclaim some of his street cred with his fellow Republicans last Friday by trying to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign and the national media were having none of it. Comey’s announcement, strategically timed to “put out the garbage” on a Friday afternoon, had been mercilessly dissected within hours.

In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.

Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.

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Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy. 

So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.

Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.

Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.

We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.

By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.

Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.

Until Friday afternoon.

Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.

Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”

Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.

Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.

Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?

If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.

As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.