90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, April 17, 2022

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1691

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Visage à trois #185

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The same FBI operation that ginned up the phony kidnapping plot in Michigan also tried to coax a Virginia man to participate in a similar scheme against Governor Ralph Northam.

n the spring of 2020, President Donald Trump posted three tweets in a row aimed at Democratic governors continuing to impose draconian lockdowns amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” Trump tweeted on the morning of April 17, 2020. A few moments later, he tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!”

His tweets coincided with anti-lockdown rallies in several states, including a blockade around the Michigan Capitol building in Lansing a few days prior. As usual, the media expressed shock and horror at the innocuous tweets, insisting the president was encouraging violence against his political rivals.

“One shudders to contemplate what sorts of actions right-wing protesters might take if they interpret Trump’s call for them to ‘LIBERATE’ their states seriously,” perpetual drama queen Aaron Rupar wrote at Vox. Over at the Washington Post, Mary McCord, a former top official for Obama’s Justice Department who now serves as a legal advisor to the January 6 Select Committee, claimed Trump advocated “the overthrow of democracy” and “incited insurrection” with his tweets—a stunningly prescient observation considering how the events of January 6 would later be described.

“The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee tweeted on April 17, also foreshadowing terms subsequently applied to the Capitol protest.

Less than six months later, Trump’s critics appeared vindicated when law enforcement authorities arrested several men for conspiring to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a plan now exposed as a case of FBI entrapment. A Michigan jury acquitted two defendants last week and could not reach a verdict on two other defendants in what the government considered one of the largest domestic terrorism investigations ever. (The Justice Department just announced it will retry Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr., who remain in jail.)

Defense attorneys successfully argued that multiple FBI agents and informants attempted to induce the men to commit the crimes and blasted the government in closing arguments.

“That’s unacceptable in America,” Fox’s attorney, Christopher Gibbons, told the jury on April 1. “That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in...

Is it too late to restore our civilizational nerve and morale?

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon. Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists. “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.

This obsession with the “next war” created a “never again” mentality that contributed to the anxiety and low morale of the period, stoked by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who famously said, “The bomber will always get through.” Years later Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would write, “We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare” during the Cold War. All this fear contributed to the mentality of appeasement manifested in Munich.

But the end of times didn’t come. The war that followed was won because the steadfast opponent of appeasement Winston Churchill managed the war, and with his rousing patriotic rhetoric restored confidence and morale by rejecting what he called the “unwarrantable self-abasement” that defined the Thirties.

Another apocalyptic moment occurred in the Seventies. The squandering of the lives of nearly 60,000 American soldiers that followed Congress’s denial of aid to South Vietnam, and the cruel abandonment of our Vietnamese allies, damaged American prestige abroad and emboldened its nuclear rivals like the U.S.S.R. The ginned-up Watergate affair led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, and in a few years the election of Jimmy Carter. Carter’s sermons about America’s “recent mistakes,” his counsel that Americans should not “dwell on remembered glory” but should “recognize its limits,” and his confession that the nation should “simply...

Visage à trois #184

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Durham writes of ‘spoofed’ data, Clinton ‘conspiracy’

U.S. District Court filings reveal a new character in U.S. v. Michael Sussmann

Washington’s best inside look at how determined Hillary Clinton campaign operatives conspired to bring down former President Donald Trump is contained in the expanded writings of John Durham.

Among his U.S. District Court filings, a new character has emerged in the case of U.S. v. former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. David M. Martin is an FBI cyber whiz who knows how the bureau debunked the Democrats’ Russian Alfa Bank-Trump conspiracy story. The question is, as a proposed special counsel trial witness, what will he be allowed to tell us?

One of the researchers on whom Mr. Sussmann relied upon talked in an email about how easy it is to fake internet communications. Another Sussmann-linked computer scientist called Mr. Trump and his friends “thugs.”

We also see that these high-tech spies were able to penetrate one of Mr. Trump’s Wi-Fi routers. In all, the group assembled by tech executive Rodney Joffe snatched proprietary internet traffic from Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and the Trump White House in early 2017.

What is impressive is the sheer effort by Clinton devotees in 2016 to take a mass of inconclusive data and try to convince themselves and the FBI that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent.

Mr. Durham is filing these motions as Mr. Sussmann faces trial next month on a charge of lying to the FBI. On Wednesday, Judge Christopher Cooper denied his request to dismiss the case.

The Durham court papers tell of an intense media/data collection operation involving Mr. Sussmann’s then-law firm, Perkins Coie; Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias; Mr. Joffe, then a senior vice president at Neustar, an IT firm in Northern Virginia; computer scientists at Georgia Tech University and at other colleges; Fusion GPS, the Clinton-hired investigative firm that gave us the wildly inaccurate dossier; and, finally, D.C. journalists who floated the Alfa-Trump entanglement.

Mr. Durham branded the entire group under the heading of “co-conspirators” — a tag he did not apply in the original September 2021 indictment.

At the top, so to speak, was Mr. Sussmann, a former Justice Department cyber attorney who curated all the data to edit and create “white papers” and internet logs. He presented them to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker on Sept. 19, 2016, with the expressed desire to get candidate Trump under investigation.

That part was successful. Mr. Baker prompted the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team to open a probe. The failing, as Mr. Durham sees it, is Mr. Sussmann told Mr. Baker he had no client in the game, when in fact he was doing his anti-Trump work for the Clinton campaign who paid his bills. The second failure is that the FBI concluded there was no Alfa Bank-Trump link.

But back in July-August 2016, the data looked promising as Mr. Joffe directed his team to find connections between Mr. Trump and Moscow using nonpublic internet data such as Domain Name System logs. The internet’s “phone book” can tell cyber sleuths who is communicating with each other. DNS converts a domain name, such as an email or web address, into internet protocol numbers unique to a person’s smartphone or desktop.

Mr. Joffe had been promised the top cyber job in a Hillary Clinton administration, he said in an email.

Mr. Durham released expanded email threads to bolster his case that Mr. Sussmann was working for Mrs. Clinton and thus lied to Mr. Baker. The emails show Mr. Sussmann planned a media campaign to place Alfa conspiracy stories in the press before election day. He made contact with one reporter just days before meeting with...