RUTHFULLY YOURS

The FBI — They’re the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. We rely on them to protect us from every sort of crook and bad guy, not to mention international terrorists. When they’re investigating something important, it’s understandable that they can’t disclose to the public what they’re up to. That would give away the game, and give the bad guys the chance to escape. So we need to trust them, to let them operate mostly in secrecy, and just give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the right thing.

Boy, has that narrative gotten blown to smithereens over the past few years. Starting with the Russia collusion hoax in 2016, it’s been one revelation after another of the thoroughly corrupted FBI meddling in domestic politics to advantage Democrats. They’re the new armed militant wing of the Democratic Party. As far as anyone can tell from the news, the people at the highest levels of the FBI today are completely obsessed with covering up for President Biden while using their law enforcement powers to go after former President Trump on the thinnest of pretexts. Today, nobody in their right mind should give the FBI the benefit of the doubt about anything. If you assume that everything they are doing is corrupt, you are highly likely to be right.

For this post, I’ll forego a review of the FBI’s role in the Russia hoax, and just consider some of the most recent developments.

Hunter Biden laptop

Hunter Biden dropped off his water-damaged laptop at the Delaware repair shop of John Paul Mac Isaac in April 2019. After reviewing some of the files in the effort to recover them, and noticing clear evidence of criminal conduct relating to Ukraine and China, Mac Isaac notified the FBI. Two FBI agents came to Mac Isaac’s shop to pick up the laptop in December 2019. That was about 11 months before the 2020 election. And then nothing further was heard about the laptop. The FBI, it appears, could not have been less interested in investigating crimes of Joe Biden’s son, even crimes directly implicating Joe Biden himself, and even when definitive evidence of the crimes had fallen right into their laps.

Mac Isaac has now written a book about his experiences in this matter. The book is not due out until November, but Mac Isaac is apparently talking to reporters about it, and there are stories in the Daily Mail on August 9 and the New York Post on August 11. (Do you mean to tell me that you did not read about this in the NYT or WaPo?). The Post reports that Mac Isaac received what he interpreted as a direct threat from one of the FBI agents, warning him to keep quiet about the laptop:

The repairman, who had volunteered to hand the laptop over to the feds two months earlier, said the alleged threat came after he made a joke, telling them: “Hey, lads, I’ll remember to change your names when I write the book.” “Agent Wilson kept walking but Agent DeMeo paused and turned to face me,” Paul Mac writes of the encounter. Isaac said the agent then told him: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”

I would say that Mac Isaac was correct in interpreting that as a threat. That’s certainly the way I would have taken it. But it appears that Mac Isaac did not change the agents’ names in the book.

And now two days ago Joe Rogan did an interview of Mark Zuckerberg. In the interview, Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI had come to Facebook shortly before the 2020 election and warned it about “Russian disinformation.” According to Zuckerberg, that warning led Facebook to suppress the distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story. From Zuckerberg’s interview:

I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. . . . Basically the ranking on Newsfeed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.

To this day, there is no indication that the FBI takes the slightest interest in the criminal activity revealed on the laptop.

Mar-a-Lago Raid

On August 8 the the FBI — the same FBI that couldn’t be bothered to look into Hunter Biden taking millions from Ukrainian oligarchs and Chinese government investment funds while his dad was Vice President — rounded up 30 agents to conduct a full-day raid on former President Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. The use of the FBI to conduct an armed incursion into the home of a former President has never previously occurred in the United States, and is reminiscent of the tactics common to third-world dictatorships. Surely, you might think, this would only occur if something extremely serious was afoot.

Bit by bit it emerged that this supposedly had something to do with the handling of classified information. On August 12 the Washington Post had the first story, sourced from the WaPo’s usual anonymous “people familiar with the investigation.” Supposedly the serious people now running the government were terrified that the former President was about to give away secrets involving the country’s nuclear weapons:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation. Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

I guess that paragraph was designed to scare the typical WaPo reader, but did it make any sense? After all, Trump had had access to all the nuclear secrets when he was President, and if he wanted to convey them to the Russkies all he needed to do was pick up the phone. (OK, that’s probably tapped. But he could arrange a meeting in a park somewhere.). Trump also had complete authority when he was President to de-classify anything and everything he wanted, at his whim, and his people promptly took the position that everything he had at Mar-a-Lago had been de-classified. So if Trump actually had some documents at Mar-a-Lago that were somehow still classified, that at most would relate to some slip-up in documenting the de-classification prior to his departure from the White House. You would think, that couldn’t possibly be the basis for an extraordinary thing like this raid on the home of the former President.

But then the search warrant was released by the court on August 15, and, although providing little information, seemed to be based again on this “classified information” theory:

Property to be seized: . . . Any physical documents with classification markings. . . . Information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material. . . .

Could this really be all they have? Trump’s people (along with many in the media) then demanded production of the affidavit that the FBI had used to obtain the search warrant. The Justice Department resisted, but the Magistrate Judge ordered that a redacted version be made public. That happened on Thursday (August 25). And once again we got nothing but this line about supposedly mis-handing classified information:

The government is conduction a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unauthorized concealment or removal of government records.

Somehow the business about nuclear secrets couldn’t be found in the affidavit, at least in the portions that were not redacted. That did not stop the New York Times, which turned on a dime to claim that the issue was instead “compromising human intelligence sources.” Today’s print edition had a banner headline stretching all the way across the top of the front page:

Documents at Mar-a-Lago Could Compromise Human Intelligence Sources, Affidavit Says. The search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home was spurred by the discovery that he had kept classified material related to the use of human sources in intelligence gathering.

You would be forgiven for inferring that this “classified information” thing is a preposterous cover story, and the likely purpose of the search was a fishing expedition to look for anything and everything that might be useful against Trump, whether in a criminal prosecution or a press leak or anything else.

Project Veritas/Ashley Biden Diary

If you are not familiar with the story of the Ashley Biden diary, you can find more than you would ever want to know in a series of more than 25 posts by Scott Johnson at PowerLine. The short version is that a woman named Aimee Harris moved into an apartment in Delray Beach, Florida that was used by people going through drug rehabilitation, and Harris discovered in the apartment a diary that had been left behind by the previous occupant, who turned out to be then presidential candidate Biden’s daughter Ashley. In 2020 Harris offered the diary to Project Veritas. PV paid some $40,000 for the rights to the diary, but after a vetting process decided that it could not sufficiently verify the document, and did not publish it. Excerpts from the diary were subsequently published at a site called National File. Project Veritas has denied any knowledge of where National File got the diary (or a copy).

On November 6, 2021 the FBI conducted one of those early morning raids on the apartment of James O’Keefe, head of Project Veritas, throwing O’Keefe out into the hallway in his pajamas. They are said to have seized at least his cell phone.

The latest news is that Ms. Harris and her companion (a man named Kurlander) pled guilty on Thursday (August 25) in the Southern District of New York to the nefarious crime of “Conspiracy to Commit Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property.” Here is the press release issued by the prosecutors.

I have no doubt that, among the 4000+ federal crimes on the statute books, there is one called “conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property.” On the other hand, the entire business model of the journalism trade consists of getting hold of illegally-obtained information and publishing it. When was the last time a New York Times or Washington Post reporter was subject to having his home raided by the FBI in the early morning hours? Never, as far as I know. The obvious difference here is that Project Veritas is a right-wing news source known to be unfriendly to the administration, and this matter involves the President’s daughter.

On August 19, the Rasmussen poll reported that a majority (53%) of Americans now agree with the proposition that the FBI has become “Biden’s personal Gestapo.” I wonder where they got that idea?