,
10 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Attorney General Barr puts former intel bosses on notice thehill.com/opinion/judici…
We’ve seen a rush to comment by the former directors of national intel and CIA. The FBI’s former general counsel has chimed in publicly and, of course, @Comey has been on a media offensive, practicing character assassination as a strategy with Barr among those in his crosshairs.
Each appears to be anxious about his own role in handling the controversial Steele dossier from the Trump-Russia investigation, and so there is some elbowing under the basket to get optimum positioning.
And who can blame them? The attorney general has stated that he is going to focus particularly on the dossier’s exploitation, and specifically on the actions of the leadership of those agencies.
Interestingly, this establishes these leaders as principal witnesses in Durham’s inquiry. In essence they are using their easy access to public media platforms to coordinate and communicate their stories among themselves.
Ordinarily, this type of witness activity is troubling, if not borderline obstructive when done privately. In this case, Durham may be licking his chops as a prosecutor since a certain element of finger-pointing among the principals has emerged.
Each also is dealing with an elephant that’s not just in the room but sitting uncomfortably in their laps. Christopher Steele’s dossier is clearly a Russian intelligence operation that took advantage of a cooperative outreach by the @HillaryClinton campaign.
If these IC leaders didn’t recognize it as such, then it truly was amateur hour at the top. The more troubling scenario would be if each made a conscious decision to ignore the obvious Russian interference attempt and, instead, wring political value out of the dossier.
IC leaders aren’t used to being held to account by the Justice Department, and their oversight by Congress generally is mild. Theirs is a comfortable world, obfuscated and kept mysterious by the liberal use of their classified-information shield.
The demonization of Attorney General Barr has begun — a sign that he is probably on the right track. And the IC leaders are on notice.
