Summary: Here is a brief and well-written summary by James Howard Kunstler of the latest attempt to overthrow the 2016 election, apparently led (like previous rounds) by a member of the intelligence community. Like the previous attempts, digging reveals numerous oddities in the official story – mostly ignored by the major news media (news not fit for you to know). Also, see the amazing supporting information that follows Kunstler’s essay.
A Dumpster Fire on a Garbage Barge
James Howard Kunstler at his website, 27 September 2019
Reposted with his generous permission.
UkraineGate, son of RussiaGate, raises an interesting question: is our Central Intelligence Agency really this crude that they would loan out a CIA officer to the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) and use him as a weapon to shiv the occupant of the oval office? Or was The New York Times’s unmasking of the “whistleblower” just another ruse by the Deep State Disinfo Division?
Let’s face it, there were not so many CIA spooks working in that White House office, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who it was. A leading candidate is veteran CIA officer Michael Barry, an assassination expert, as it happens, who was loaned out during Mike Pompeo’s brief stint as CIA chief. Barry acted as the NSC’s chief intelligence officer. Barry or otherwise, I predict the whistleblower’s identity will be known for sure in pretty short order.
So much material in this tale doesn’t add up that it looks like the results of a math test in a Baltimore middle school. For one thing, the now-public whistleblower complaint makes it clear that the whistleblower’s information is second-hand. The Intel Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) explicitly prohibits complaints based on second-hand news: “In order to find an urgent concern credible, the IGIC [Intel Community Inspector General] must be in possession of reliable, first-hand information. The IGIC cannot transmit information via the ICWPA based on an employee’s second-knowledge of wrongdoing. This includes information received from another person, such as when a fellow employee informs you that he/she has witnessed some type of wrongdoing.” See for yourself in the ICWPA Form 401. {Full form here.}
Did Director of National Intelligence Joseph McGuire know that when he testified that the whistleblower’s complaint was “credible” and made in “good faith.” Did ICIG Michael Horowitz know that when he sent the whistleblower complaint to Admiral McGuire? Did House Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff know that when he led a grandstanding exercise in his committee on Thursday?
Others have pointed out that the whistleblower’s complaint was composed as a legal brief, leading to the inference that it was constructed by lawyers and perhaps a team of lawyers. The whistleblower’s lawyer is Andrew Bakaj, a former CIA employee who got his start interning for Senator Chuck Schumer and then Hillary Clinton. The Washingtonian said Bakaj “actually wrote the CIA’s internal rules on whistleblowing.” Is that so? Did he write Form 401 then? His client’s complaint states: “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.” In other words, second-hand information. Dismissed.
Everyone and his uncle remembers the infamous threat issued to Mr. Trump by Senator Schumer during the transition period, on 3 January 2017: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community – they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,”
Perhaps Senator Schumer should have kept his pie-hole shut on that. He made it official that the Intel Community would act as an adversary and antagonist to the President, and that appears to be exactly what has happened. One suspects that this rogue agency has captured The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and several TV cable news networks as well. And now they are metamorphosing into an enemy of the people.
The moment approaches when Mr. Trump will have to carry out a severe housecleaning of the CIA and perhaps many other agencies under the executive branch of the government. Their ongoing campaign to undo the 2016 election is igniting a civil war. Clearly a part of the whistleblower gambit was an attempt to discredit Attorney General William Barr and set up a device that would force him to recuse himself from any further inquiry into shenanigans carried out in and around Ukraine since 2014, when the CIA and the Obama State Department overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovych. Mr. Barr is a sturdy fellow. He may have seven ways from Sunday for countering their seditious monkeyshines. Wait for it.
In the meantime, is there any question that UkraineGate has put the schnitz on Joe Biden’s political career. The notorious video of Mr. Biden bragging on his shakedown of then-president Poroshenko has been seen by everybody over age five in the USA.
Hillary must be lovin’ it as she makes the rounds on her latest listening tour. Listen to this, Hillary, lost in your wicked daydreams of riding to the Democratic Party’s rescue for yet another shot at the White House: your reputation will never survive the blizzard of indictments coming down on your partisans. And one of these bills might have your name on it.
————————- End of the article. ————————
If you didn’t see Biden’s boasting …
By Erielle Davidson at The Federalist. If you prefer, see the transcript or watch the video. I will bet that this destroys his campaign. No surprise, since Elizabeth Warren is the designated candidate (Hillary 2.0).
“Joe Biden was so proud of his role in the prosecutor’s removal from investigating the company paying his son $50,000 per month merely to serve on its board that he actually bragged about it in a 2018 speech at an event for the publication Foreign Affairs. In this speech, Biden boasts his threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loans from Ukraine if they did not agree to fire the prosecutor who happened to be investigating the company giving his son a cushy sinecure. The prosecutor was fired, and the investigation was dropped six months later.”
An op-ed in The Hill by John Solomon contradict’s Biden’s convenient (for him) claims: “These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story.”
The story gets even stranger
After Kunstler posted his analysis, several people discovered that the Whistleblower form 410 had been revised either shortly before or after the whistleblower reported about Trump’s call to Ukraine. Conveniently, the requirement for first-hand knowledge was eliminated. For details, see this article at The Federalist. They also show that several of the statements in the whistleblower’s cover letter are false.
When asked about this astounding coincidence …
“Reached by phone on Friday afternoon, a Director of National Intelligence official refused to comment on any questions about the secret revision to the whistleblower form, including when it was revised to eliminate the requirement of first-hand knowledge and for what reason.”
Move on. Nothing suspicious here. You have been told what to think.
Update from the Office of the IG.
A letter from the Office of the IG provided more information. The whistleblower claimed first-hand knowledge, although none was mentioned in his or her letter to Congress (claims were either hearsay or from public media). Also, the forms and procedures were changed as a result of this incident – so that first-hand information is no longer needed.
Update – there is a blackout in the news media about this.
This is the first of thousands of tweets about this. Fox is the only news media I see to have mentioned it. While not clearly exculpatory, it provides a legal basis for Trump’s requests to Ukraine’s President.
United States Treaty With Ukraine On Mutual Legal Assistance In Criminal Matters (thread) #UkraineBiden #CrowdstrikeUkraine #UkraineTranscript
President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky are bound by law to assist one another in legal matters.
PDF> https://t.co/UBrUna0JKZ pic.twitter.com/RbrYzPhuke
— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) September 26, 2019
Editor’s afterword
(1) See the whistleblower’s letter to Congress describing his claims. Also, see the “unredacted transcript” released by the White House of Trump’s telephone conversation on 25 July 2019 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As noted in the document, the call was neither recorded or transcribed. The document gives a reconstruction from notes and memories of the staff who listened to the call.
(2) Update: The Zelenskyy-Trump conversation seems quite cordial, with no mention of the vital funds being withheld. The NYT’s Kenneth Vogel explains. This refutes allegations that Trump in effect offered a quid pro quo.
The Ukrainians weren’t made aware that the assistance was being delayed/reviewed until more than one month after the call. https://t.co/qDJ3FT261a
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 25, 2019
(3) Update: about Trump “hiding” the telephone call transcript on a secure server.
From The Federalist. Also, see the video of Rice’s statement. Keeping confidential conversations with other heads of State is just good sense.
“Former national security adviser Susan Rice acknowledged last night that the Obama administration moved transcripts of conversations with foreign leaders onto the same top-secret server where the Trump administration stored his recent phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
(4) Journalists hyperventilating about this story seldom mention the Office of Legal Counsel (who has jurisdiction) ruling on the whistleblower’s filing. See the full copy here.
“A complaint from an intelligence-community employee about statements made by the President during a telephone call with a foreign leader does not involve an “urgent concern,” as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5)(G), because the alleged conduct does not relate to ‘the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity’ under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. As a result, the statute does not require the Director to transmit the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees.”
(5) This is another example of a seldom-mentioned theme in the attempts to get Trump: spooks at every key step. Do not see this!
(6) Elizabeth Warren is, imo, the designated Democratic nominee to run against Trump. It is another fortuitous coincidence that this story draws attention to the Biden’s, the front-runner, impossible to justify actions supporting his son’s corrupt deal with Ukraine.
(7) This episode is more evidence that America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been highly politicized. Any new president is a fool that does not purge their senior ranks of anyone with possible links to the opposition.
(8) I disagree with Kunstler about the likely ending of this story. Being in the Deep State means never having to say you’re sorry. Accountability is for the little people.
(9) See Jim Geraghty’s brief recap of the Democrat’s attempts to impeach Trump. Many never accepted the 2016 election, and on Inauguration Day began efforts to remove him. During the 2018 election, few Dems talked about impeachment (it polled poorly). Journalists said that GOP claims that the Dems would impeach Trump were baseless. Dems beat the drums hard before release of the Mueller report, which was a damp squib. Now they seek to remove him and preempt the 2020 election – because the people might choose wrong, again.
About Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, before working as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he began writing books on a full-time basis. Kunstler is the author of 12 novels and has been a regular contributor to many major media, writing about environmental and economic issues. He is a leading supporter of the movement known as “New Urbanism.”
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges. He has written five non-fiction books.
- The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
- Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
- The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition
- The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent
- Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation
For More Information
Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
See a Twitter thread about this story from Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and former senior NSC official. He edited transcripts of POTUS phone calls with foreign leaders. Interesting observations. Also see “No, the Biden-Ukraine Story Is Not a ‘Conspiracy Theory’” by Matthew Bose.
Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about the Deep State, about our intel agencies, about the CIA, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these …
- The Democratic Party goes to war. We’re all its casualties.
- Times they are a-changin’ for the Democratic Party!
- Democrats betray their principles & embrace the Deep State.
- William Lind: the Deep State reveals itself.
- In 2018 the Deep State went public & the Democrats betrayed us.
Books revealing the Deep State
I recommend reading The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government
The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy
