CONSPIRACY CLOWNS

I spoke yesterday of the clownish efforts of the Tin Foil Hat Club, officially know as the Republican Party, to discredit the efforts of the Mueller investigation.  Less than 24 hours later these false attempts to find justice were unmasked for the partisan political fraud that they really are.

The two stars of this clown car parade are the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes (R-CA) and the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ron Johnson (R-WI).

The nonsense on display here is as confusing as it is palpable, so try to follow this convoluted trail of logic.

Nunes claims to have a memo…which he says details information gathered from HIS review of classified documents;…documents which he claims prove…that in the course of their investigation members of the Mueller team…engaged in unethical and illegal acts…for the purpose of proffering false charges against members of the Trump campaign.

Here is where it gets goofy.

Nunes has threatened to release the memo to the public.  However Nunes has inexplicably refused requests to view the memo from the FBI, the Department of Justice and his Republican colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  The only person Nunez has allowed to view the memo is the ranking member his own committee: Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA).  As Vice Chair on the committee, Schiff was the only other committee member cleared to view all the pertaining classified documents.

Having read the memo, Schiff took it upon himself to read the original underlying classified documents on which Nunes based his claims.  Schiff came away from the reading believing that Nunes had intentionally cherry picked certain items out of context upon which he made suppositions with no basis in fact.  Realizing that his fellow committee members might see his criticism of Nunes’ analysis as politically biased; Schiff made a motion that all members of the committee be cleared to read the memo and the classified documents on which it was based.  Led by the Republican majority, the committee voted “No”.  To be clear…rather than read the pertinent underlying classified documents and form their own conclusions; Republicans said “no thanks”…choosing instead to believe Nunes’ summary as fact.

Upon learning of Nunes’ refusal to turn the memo over to the FBI, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, a Trump appointee to the DOJ, wrote Nunes a letter in which he warned the chairman that releasing the memo into the public domain without first allowing a review of its contents by the DOJ and the FBI would be “extremely reckless” and a could pose a “threat to national security.”

Ron Johnson’s role in this comedy stems from public remarks in which he claimed to have an informant that told him that there is a “secret society” within the FBI that meets off campus to plot the overthrow of the Trump administration.  Johnson claimed that this “secret society” was: “evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the FBI. There is lots of smoke there.”

Johnson’s partisan antenna were raised by the now infamous Strozk/Page texts.  In one of the texts the agents are commiserating about Trump’s election and their concerns over what it might portend for their future and who might be checking up on them.    “Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing.  Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.”  Page wrote to Strozk.  What in context appears to be an off hand joke has led to a month long Republican conspiracy campaign and accusations of corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.  Pressed on whether he has corroborated his source Johnson  sheepishly tried to walk the story back and downplay his previous accusations.

And then there are the missing text messages.  A number of the Strozk/Page text messages have gone missing.  Hair on fire Republicans jumped all over the news as further evidence of corruption within the FBI.  24 hours later we learned that the Strozk/Page texts were a small number of a much large batch of unrelated messages that were not saved by the FBI due to a software glitch in thousands of the Samsung phones issued to the agency’s employees.

The missing Strozk/Page messages have since been recovered.  Crisis averted.  Conspiracy quashed.

The Republican Party is engaged in a concerted and mendacious effort to damage the integrity of the Mueller investigation; thereby calling into question its findings.

Thus far, their efforts have veered more into the realm of a clown show rather than a serious effort to unearth the truth.

 

 

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