"Beyond The Scope Of This Review"

For the past day or two I’ve been wrestling with the aftermath of the Sussmann trial. The outcome was no surprise, so I haven’t devoted much time to that. However, two other aspects have arisen which are, in a sense, far more troubling than biased DC juries. Not that I’m making light of the joke of a judicial system in the Imperial City on the Potomac. Nevertheless, consider …

• The revelation by Reps Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan that Michael Sussmann and/or Perkins Coie have been in some form of special relationship with the FBI since 2012.

• That means this special relationship began during the runup to Obama’s reelection campaign and coincided with an information sharing MOU signed by the CIA and FBI.

• This special relationship began under the Directorship of Robert “Bob” Mueller, continued through the tenure of disgraced former Director Jim Comey, and continues to this day under the Directorship of waste of space Director Chris Wray.

• Consider also Chris Wray’s patently deceptive deflections of simple questions regarding Michael Sussmann’s relations with the FBI posed to him by Sen. John Kennedy at the time of the trial.

• Finally, there is the matter of Bluto Barr, disgraced former AG, and his public comments regarding Hillary and the Durham investigation generally. Barr has received a fair amount of positive comment from conservatives, even while couching his comments within the utterly irrelevant framework of the standard “whatever you think of Trump” caveat.

Even such a confirmed skeptic of all things Deep State as Sundance at CTH has professed himself to be “stunned” by the Sussmann/FBI/Perkins Coie revelations. I second that emotion. The whole thing remains somewhat opaque, since we don’t have the back and forth of the letters between the two Congressmen and Perkins Coie/FBIHQ (I think it’s proper here to connect the two entities with a simple slash). The fact remains that the appearances are appalling and that Chris Wray deflected the opportunity that Sen. Kennedy’s questions afforded him to provide—before these revelations were made public—some benign explanation of this special relationship.

Given the enormous powers the FBI has had since the Patriot Act and its extensions to surveil We The People—meaning not only ordinary citizens but officials, legislators, judges, you name ‘em—the mere hint that the FBI was sharing this power onesidedly with partisan political operatives for 10 years is frankly appalling (and of course I’m not suggesting that a more evenhanded sharing of that power would have been a remedy). It suggests what Bluto Barr might, upon due reflection, term a “constitutional crisis.” The implications of this go well beyond appalling in the context of the FBI’s known flagrant abuses of these powers, dating back as far as, uh, 2012. Yes, that date does keep popping up and does suggest some sort of water shed in the relationship of the Deep State and the Dem party.

I and many others await further details. The exact administrative handling of this is still not known, along with much else.

Next, we’ve just received documentation (and, here, a hat tip to commenter Ray-SoCa) that suggests just how far we can trust or accept Barr’s new found religion—his supposed determination to get to the bottom of things that happened as part of the four year coup effort against Trump, his belief that Hillary headed a seditious conspiracy that can’t be proven (he says), that that was all a “constitutional crisis”:

Michael Flynn’s Identity Was Not Improperly Revealed By Obama Officials, A Secret DOJ Report Has Found

The title is absolutely correct, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The title reflects the fact that Bluto Barr directed USA John Bash and a team of lawyers and FBI agents to determine whether some Obama Official had “unmasked” the identity of Michael Flynn speaking to the Russian ambassador and then made Flynn’s identity public, via the WaPo. Bash answers that charge forthrightly—that never happened:

“My review has uncovered no evidence that senior Executive Branch officials sought the disclosure of” the identities of US individuals “in disseminated intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 presidential-election period or the ensuing presidential-transition period,” Bash’s report says.

End of story? Not exactly. Bash did discover something interesting. It turns out that it was “the FBI”—meaning, some specific official or officials at the FBI—that was responsible for making Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador public.

There’s a catch in this revelation. Bash was charged with investigating abuses of the “unmasking” process, not of the leak specifically. Nobody at the FBI “unmasked” Flynn’s name—as I’ve repeated many times, that conversation would have been written up as a matter of course in an FBI “tech cut” under its FISA authorizations. What happened was a simple “leak” rather than an “unmasking”, and thus, says Bash, was beyond the scope of his investigation:

A central focus of the probe was the leak showing that Flynn had been in communication with then–Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration, and whether Flynn’s involvement was revealed through an unmasking request from a government official.

But Bash’s review of unmasked intelligence reports about the calls found that the FBI did not in fact disseminate any that contained Flynn’s information, and that a single unmasked report that did contain Flynn’s information did not describe the calls between him and Kislyak. “For that reason, the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request,” Bash’s report concludes.

It was just a leak, not an unmasking. So that’s OK, right? Well …

Intriguingly, the prosecutor did find that “the FBI shared transcripts of the relevant communications outside the Bureau without masking General Flynn’s name,” but notes that he did not investigate those incidents any further because “evaluating that dissemination, and determining how the information was provided to the media, is beyond the scope of this review.” Bash's report contains no information about who shared those transcripts and who received them.

What’s intriguing is that, as far as we can tell, no action was taken with regard to a clear felony violation that was just as clearly part of a “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow a duly elected president and his administration. Riddle me this: If Bash is able to flatly state, in effect, that “the FBI did the leak”, is it possible that Bash is unable to identify who in the FBI “shared” the transcripts and who outside the FBI received them? It doesn’t seem possible, does it?

And here’s another one: Why would the prissy Bash not include that information in his report? He says he gathered that information in the course of his investigation but then—apparently, out of an abundance of prissiness—decided that reporting a related felony that was basically at the heart of the investigation yet remained “beyond the scope” of his review. And Bluto Barr? What did he make of that? Well, he hasn’t told us, has he?

Here’s another conundrum:

"I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis," Barr said of his interest in taking the job as AG under Trump.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask Barr where he thinks America stands today with regard to constitutional crises. Does Barr think—in spite of all evidence to the contrary—that he somehow steered the republic out of a constitutional crisis? And what part of ignoring the results of the “unmasking” inquiry, of the entire Flynn episode, helped us to avoid or helped us out of a constitutional crisis?

For my part, I maintained from the start that this nonsense about an “unmasking” investigation was missing the point. This should have been a straight up leak investigation of the FBI, because it was the FBI that would have written up the transcripts. The investigation would include any other parts of the government with which the FBI shared its transcripts, but it would start with the FBI. Restricting the scope of the review in the way Barr did looks very much like--how shall I say this?—a coverup? In the Brit series Yes, Prime Minister a leak inquiry is always undertaken in order to cover up the true source of a leak.

Is Barr a fan of that excellent series? Does this episode suggest how far he can be trusted? Did he know about the special relationship between the FBI/Perkins Coie?

Inquiring minds want to know. Meanwhile, the constitutional crisis continues apace.