COTW: A House Divided....

credit: Bob Englehart

Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is too "divisive". US Person thinks that is the lamest excuse a Swamp politician has ever come up with to justify not fulfilling Congress' constitutional duty. The Democratic leadership's political punt to the 2020 election is so obvious it stinks, but then the smells coming out of Washington right now are fairly rancid.

While Don Veto was soaking up pomp with Queenie in the UK, DOJ investigators were grilling the author of the now infamous "Steele Dossier". Christopher Steele, a British security consultant and former MI6 spy, was hired by Fusion GPS, a DC security firm to do opposition research on the 2016 Trump campaign. Fusion GPS was first hired by a conservative opponent of Individual I, but the evidence of collusion Steele gathered was handed off to the DNC and then to the FBI. The dossier became a basis for a surveillance warrant obtained from the secret federal FISA court to allow the FBI to spy on Carter Page, a Trump campaign official.

Taking advantage of media distraction caused by the state visit, DOJ's inspector General office under Michael Horowitz interrogated Steele in London for 16 hours. They finally determined Steele is a credible witness, enough so to justify continuing the investigation that began in 2018 into how the FBI's counter-intelligence operation, "Hurricane Crossfire", got started. Page was noticed by the FBI in 2013 when he interacted with a Russian agent in New York. In 2016 he met with high level officials in Moscow, including the head of investor relations for the state-owned oil company Rosneft. Page denied these contacts until he testified to Congress in 2017.

The regime has been attempting to smear Steele as a partisan motivated to 'take down' Don Veto with lies and innuendos, methods they know only too well. Conservatives have also seized on Mueller’s conclusion that no criminal conspiracy existed between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin as evidence that Steele’s sensational dossier is a fraud.* The DOJ inspector general's finding that Steele is a credible intelligence professional has entirely discredited that meme.

credit: John Darkow

*Jed Sugerman writing at The Daily Beast correctly points out that Congress,  "purposely sought to prevent such narrow  interpretations [the meaning of coordination Mueller used in his report]: in 2002, it passed a statute directing that campaign finance regulations '“shall not require agreement or formal collaboration to establish coordination.' The Federal Election Commission established the defining regulations for the implementation of the statute:  'Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate', with no need to show any kind of agreement."  The Supreme Court upheld these limits in McConnell v. FEC with crucial observations about the functional role of suggestions, rather than agreements: '[E]xpenditures made after a wink or nod often will be as useful to the candidate as cash.'”

The pattern of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents is full of suggestions far more explicit than winks and nods.  In fact there is even an identifiable quid pro quo as a basis for charging a criminal conspiracy: Paul Manafort provided Russian agent Konstantin Kliimnick confidential polling information. US Person believes this information may have included demographic analysis by Cambridge Analytics, a company owned by reactionary mega-donor Robert Mercer, that allowed Russian agents to target their social media campaign to the most susceptible audiences in swing states Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. Trump's suggestion at a press conference that, "he hopes Russia finds Hillary's 30,000 missing emails" was a lot more than a joke, which he admitted himself during an MSNBC interview.  His speech was a public signal that the candidate was interested in whatever damaging information Russian agents could find in their illegal intercepts.  He even ordered his own campaign to find the emails.  Partisan operative Robert Stone was in contact with Julian Assange of Wikileaks at this time; Assange in turn may have been in direct contact with GRU agents operating blogs Gucifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, his source for the intercepted email.  Robert Mueller should be carefully questioned about these aspects of his investigation at his appearance before the House, since it is now apparent he deliberately refrained from making credible allegations of conspiracy against Trump in his report, or he did not correctly apply existing federal campaign law to the facts before him.  See Article I of US Person's suggested Impeachment Articles. {12.06.19} IMPEACHMENT NOW, otherwise the people may begin to suspect yet another collusion is afoot, if they have not already.