Grave concerns
The crazy is ratcheting up. Even a Republican senator is urging Nunes and his gang not to be in such a hurry to release the memo.
Mr. Thune’s note of caution joined a growing chorus of warnings from national security officials who say that releasing the memo would jeopardize sensitive government information, including how intelligence is gathered, and from Democrats who say it is politically motivated and distorts the actions of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. by omitting crucial context.
President Trump, who has made clear that he wants the memo to be public, was expected to indicate as early as Thursday that despite strong objections by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, he did not intend to block its release — a move that would free the committee to release it.
And the only reason he’s ignoring the F.B.I. and the Justice Department is because he hopes the memo will thwart the investigation into Russia’s role in his election. He’s thinking solely about his own skin and not even a little bit about the broader good.
In a rare statement on Wednesday, the F.B.I. strongly condemned the memo’s release, saying the bureau had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
People familiar with the three-and-a-half page Republican memo say it contends that officials from the F.B.I. and Justice Department may have misled a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge when they sought a warrant to spy on the former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, in October 2016. The people say the officials relied on information handed over by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, without adequately explaining to the judge that Democrats had financed his research.
Using Vince Foster’s bank account which is in a vault in a pizza place off Dupont Circle.
In a sharply worded letter of her own on Thursday morning, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, called on Speaker Paul D. Ryan to remove Representative Devin Nunes of California as the Intelligence Committee’s chairman.
“Congressman Nunes’s deliberately dishonest actions make him unfit to serve as Chairman, and he must be removed immediately from this position,” she wrote, adding, “The integrity of the House is at stake.”
Mr. Nunes gave no indication that he intended to change course.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s earlier request to see the memo was declined.
Nunes, let’s remember, is the guy who pretended to have briefed the White House on matters that in fact the White House had just briefed him on, to the incomprehension of all onlookers.
Forgive me, but what the actual fuck is going on? Apparently House Republicans have a cunning plan to circumvent the FBI rebutting their crazy-ass memo-o’-lies: read it on the floor of the House!
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/gop-plotting-read-secret-memo-house-floor-without-declassifying-limit-fbi-rebuttal-report/
This whole situation seems to be spinning completely out of control and I’m struggling to understand why the nobody in the media seems to grasp the gravity of what the GOP is trying to do, with only token pushback from a few GOP senators or house representatives. I’m no lover of the Republican party but this seems like a new level of crazy, even for them. Has the entire party lost their goddamn minds?
Oh my godddd.
I will say though I think some in the media do grasp it – Maddow was all but lighting warning-torches last night and Anderson Cooper in his more poker-faced way was doing likewise. Maddow talked to some intel bod who said all the intel people he knows are “beside themselves.”
But how the Republicans are justifying this to themselves is beyond me.
It seems like the Republicans are in full on mania. I’m not sure whether it’s because they feel with control (!) of the Presidency, Senate and House, plus so many State Legislatures they feel they can just do anything they like with impunity now. That would almost suggest that they feel they are able to entrench themselves to make a quasi one party state through permanent gerrymandering. The alternative is that they know they have actually blown there chance and all credibility despite having all that control and are just thrashing around in an entirely destructive manner.
I’m not sure which is ultimately worse.
The media has struggled with the Trump dumpster fire from the beginning, because they keep trying to do things the same way. They keep treating it as politics as usual, so they try to figure out what the strategy is, what the end game is, what Plan B might be. None of these things exist. This is a demolition operation, and unless you understand demolition, you can’t get there.
Maddow gets it because she is able to see that this is not business as usual. But most of the pundits are in the mode of doing what they’ve learned to do, and thinking what they’ve learned to think, and acting how they’ve learned to act.
Many of the Republicans are in the same handbasket with Trump. This isn’t the Republican Party of Eisenhower, or even of Nixon, where working within the government system to promote business and lower taxes was the order of the day. This is a group of wildcats (no insult meant to any actual cats who might be reading this) who have no integrity, no conscience, no compassion, no human feeling for people outside their own set, and believe with an almost religious belief that they are a race of superior human beings. They have gorged themselves on Ayn Rand, and are vomiting Rush Limbaugh. They believe in the superman, and they are the superman. The rest of us are, to use a familiar parlance, “losers”.
They may sell themselves as promoting the “American Way”, but in reality, they are seeking to the the rulers of the rest of us. Some of them are motivated by money, some by Christianity, but a horrifying number are motivated by both. The are serving God and Mammon, and mistakenly believe that they are the natural ruling class. They believe fervently that they achieved their exalted place by their own efforts alone, because they are incapable of seeing all the people helping them as they climbed – including healthy doses of the government, which provides so much for so many and is despised by most.
This is what the media isn’t expecting. They have been part of the aristocratic class for a long time, and assume they understand it, but they are not listening anymore. They open their mouths to begin analysis almost the second the politician stops speaking, so they don’t have time to process what was said. And, if I may liken this to sports (my husband is an avid watcher), it is like those announcers who will discuss endlessly whether that ball was really in or out, whether that play was good or not, and will announce with enormous smug satisfaction what the answer is, even though they are perched in a soundproof booth above the field and may not be seeing what the refs are seeing. Just as these announcers are always totally sure that they know, even if the ref doesn’t, the pundits are convinced that they understand what is going on, even though this is nothing they’ve seen before. In short, they lack the flexibility to accommodate the new world where we find ourselves.
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