Trump and his inner circle must be livid now, as the exposure of Flynn's plot to nuclearize Saudi Arabia by destroying US nuclear policy—exposed in books like Proof of Conspiracy and elsewhere—forced Trump to abandon his end of his 2016 Saudi quid pro quo. wsj.com/articles/saudi…
PS/ I suspect most U.S.-Saudi analysts would agree that Pompeo's elimination of the DoS IG—who was investigating a new, secretive Saudi arms deal—was tied to the Trump team's growing realization that after Flynn's plot failed it "owed" MBS, MBZ, and the entire Saudi-Emirati bloc.
PS2/ MBS must now be wondering why (apparently) he paid Israeli cyberintelligence expert Joel Zamel to produce a pre-election disinformation campaign that dovetailed with the Kremlin's campaign, and why (apparently) it paid to "catch and kill" Trump-mistress stories pre-election.
PS3/ Trump has less and less capital to make good on his debts to MBS—and there's less and less reason, therefore, for MBS to intercede for Trump in 2020—so a new, secretive arms deal was about all he could muster. That's why the DoS IG had to go. The deal *couldn't* get held up.
PS4/ Meanwhile Mike Flynn—whose betrayal of America is at the heart of all of this—is getting a massive birthday party thrown for him by GOP senators in Congress, even as America is still reeling from his treachery, venality, perfidy, crimes, and threats to our national security.
PS5/ And I haven't even touched on what Flynn did with Turkey and Israel. Ekim Alptekin, Joel Zamel and Psy-Group should be household names in America, as Michael Flynn is the villain in *that* story of Trump's pre-election foreign collusion as much as the Russia and Saudi cases.
PS6/ So when Sally Yates says that Flynn was under a counterintelligence investigation, take it not as a meek reply to accusations of FBI malfeasance—but perhaps the greatest understatement made before the United States Congress this year. The truth would make your hair stick up.
PS7/ Nor can I go over all the reasons the FBI and CIA had to suspect Carter Page of being a counterintelligence threat that had nothing to do with former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele's raw intelligence—I'd have to rewrite my 2018 book, Proof of Collusion, to do that.
PS8/ But I'll summarize: Page went past the first stage in an SVR recruitment (handling public docs to SVR agents); even after being caught, claimed to be a "Kremlin adviser"; lied to the public about his Kremlin meetings in 2016 *and* what he told the Trump campaign about them.
PS9/ He also met a Russian in Europe during the campaign—making him almost certainly one of the "Trump advisers meeting in European capitals with Russian intelligence agents" disclosed to the US by 7 allied intel agencies—and was not honest with federal officials about any of it.
PS10/ Moreover, the *most* accurate parts of the Steele dossier *have to do with Page*, which is why it's a bit incredible that we've spent all this time focusing on how it's outrageous that raw, unprocessed intelligence was included in a FISA-warrant renewal application on Page.
PS11/ The number of lies coming from Graham at this hearing may be record-breaking. No Steele subsource derided Steele's intel as "just bar talk"—what happened was one source met Steele in a bar. It was a *description of the location of the meeting*, that's all. Graham is a liar.
PS12/ There were errors in the Page FISA apps. On review, DOJ IG Horowitz found errors in *every single FISA app he reviewed*—and that includes more than two dozen that had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump or Russia or any Trump advisers. The error issue is a red herring, too.
PS13/ Yates is quite right to say she wouldn't sign those FISA apps today, *knowing what she knows now*. No FBI official would say under oath that they'd knowingly sign *anything* with an error in it. In other words, Yates wouldn't sign *any* of the apps Horowitz found errors in.
PS14/ The search for soundbites here is desperate beyond words. Graham gets Yates to say she wouldn't sign the Page apps now, and it gets peddled to the Right as an admission of wrongdoing—not a simple statement that you don't *ever* want to sign docs at work with errors in them.
PS15/ Steele passed intel to the USIC with provisos: this is *raw* intel; at most, 70% of it is correct; I'm available for any followup; I did the best I could in the time I had, but suggest you follow these leads. The way his dossier is being presented by the GOP now is a farce.
CONCLUSION/ I'm distressed by this because these events happened under four years ago, yet we've already fallen so far from the actual recorded history of what occurred that the GOP might as well be discussing dragons and goblins and sprites. They're destroying reality—willfully.
NOTE/ Graham's recitation of what the Logan Act says and prohibits bears no relationship to the text of the Act or what it prohibits. It prohibits unauthorized negotiations under false color of authority—as every American would want it to—not "discussions of policy differences."
NOTE2/ That Graham thinks *United States senators* are similarly positioned by law, under the Logan Act, as civilians working on a transition—who've *no* color of authority whatsoever, and in Flynn's case haven't even been elected to anything—is stunning ignorance from a senator.
NOTE3/ That Graham thinks Flynn *asking the Kremlin to do or not do something* is a mere "discussion of policy differences* and not, like, the very *definition* of "negotiation" is not—however—stunning ignorance. It's the level beyond that: willful dissembling to American voters.
NOTE4/ Graham moves into straight-up lies when he says "no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act." Graham is a former prosecutor—he knows what his words mean. In fact, *multiple* people have been "prosecuted"; what Graham knows is none have proceeded to "conviction."
NOTE5/ For a U.S. senator to—on the record, in the Senate, on TV, while chairing a hearing—(a) lie about what a federal criminal statute says, (b) lie about who it applies to, (c) lie about its history and prior use, and (d) misstate all the facts of a case, suggests desperation.
