Durham’s Nugget: An intelligence tale

In a quick-look treatment on 16 May, Lee Smith unerringly identified a central data point from John Durham’s special counsel report on the FBI’s conduct of Crossfire Hurricane.

That point is John Brennan’s handwritten record of having briefed President Obama and a group of administration seniors, on 3 August 2016, about “Russian intelligence” on Hillary Clinton’s operation to generate a fake narrative in which Russia colluded with Donald Trump.

Smith points out that James Comey was reportedly in attendance at that meeting.  That would mean Comey knew throughout the execution of Crossfire Hurricane that it was entirely possible much if not all of the supposed “evidence” of Russia-Trump collusion was coming from a campaign “oppo” effort mounted by Clinton.

Yet with this implication in throbbing neon in the special counsel investigation, Durham ultimately let Comey off the hook

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The bait and switch of election “security”: Timeline nuggets from a colluding cabal

A great deal has come out from the “Twitter files” about the collusion of federal government agencies, Big Tech and social media, legacy/left-wing media, and “civil society” organizations (think-tanks, self-appointed “watchdog” groups) to silence legitimate speech, and to do so on a thoroughly biased basis.

Although the pattern demonstrated in Twitter correspondence has related to several topics, one of the most important is suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden, his laptop, and the Biden family ties to foreign governments and companies.  The files, and testimony prompted by their revelations, have clarified that systematic collusion was behind suppression of information about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks just before the November 2020 election.

In fact, there’s good reason to posit a connection between suppression of the laptop story on social media,

TOC Ready Room 2 May 2023: YU-UGE SCOTUS case; Another balloon (yes, we reacted); Tucker Carlson and Fox

Some brief drive-bys as we advance into May – if not slouching toward Jerusalem, at least schlumping toward East Bugsplat.

The first set of reflections is on a case that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear, involving the power of regulatory agencies to basically – in a vernacular rendering – interpret federal regulatory statutes any old way they want to.

The federal courts’ friendliness to this principle is called “Chevron deference.”  It’s named for a 1980s case in which Chevron was a party, but Chevron has nothing to do with the contemporary case the court has agreed to hear.  Chevron is also not the party being deferred to in the “Chevron deference” shorthand; that role belongs to whatever federal agency is imposing mandates in the case, based on its interpretation of law.

Lessons from the new century: What government must not have the power to do

It will be my endeavor to keep this brief and focused, because my main purpose is to introduce a way of thinking that is antithetical to what many people now assume government must be and do.  This is necessary because those assumptions fatally hinder us in all our attempts to throw off the juggernaut of the administrative state.

The central reason for proposing this way of thinking is to construct a framework for a new constitutional convention.  I have zero interest in using anyone’s current buzzwords or specific definitions for this process: I mean by it that a convention like the one that began in 1787 occurs again, and modifications are made to the existing U.S. Constitution.  The purpose of such modifications would be to impose restraints on government that have been gutted since 1789, or whose necessity was not foreseen when the Constitution was first written.

I don’t have specifically-crafted amendments to propose.  That would be putting the cart before the horse.

TOC Ready Room 30 March 2023: Trump; Saving Twitter; Missing piece from J6

Ham sandwich on the Manhattan court docket

The indictment for Donald Trump, which came down on Thursday 30 March, interrupts our regularly scheduled programming.

Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley on indictment of President Donald J. Trump:

“It’s rather outrageous. It’s legally pathetic.” pic.twitter.com/PwbpvV6Y7h

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 30, 2023

At the moment we’re hearing the number “34 counts,”