I want to note a few columns that supplement previously assigned reading on the Schiff memo.
Andrew McCarthy returns with one more thing — one more thing that is wrong with the Schiff memo — in the NR column “A Foreign Power’s Recruitment Effort Is Not a Basis for a FISA Court Warrant.” The shady Schiff and his Democratic colleagues would prefer that you not know that. They seek to exploit your ignorance.
Over this past weekend, McCarthy took up the new indictments handed up against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates in the NR column “Is ‘Collusion with Russia’ Over?” Among other things, “This brings us to this week’s least well-understood development in Mueller’s investigation, the guilty plea of Alex van der Zwaan….It’s worth a closer look.”
Following up on van der Zwaan, the New York Times’s Ken Vogel and Matthew Goldstein explore “How Skadden, the Giant Law Firm, Got Entangled in the Mueller Investigation.” This is an interesting article. I hoped Vogel and Goldstein might explain why van der Zwaan lied about his work when he chose to talk with the FBI. They acknowledge this is a big question and wonder if anyone else at the law firm knew van der Zwaan was lying. They state: “The answers to those questions are not entirely clear.” Well, thanks.
One point I have made repeatedly in connection with the synthetic collusion scandal is the necessity of reading the relevant documents yourselves. Among the relevant documents are the transcripts of the testimony of Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson to the congressional committees before which he has appeared. I posted the redacted transcripts of Simpson’s testimony upon their release together with my comments on them. Eric Felten draws on these transcripts in the Weekly Standard column “How to dig up dirt from the Russians.” Felten demonstrates that Simpson is not only a sinister player, he is also an extraordinarily disingenuous witness (as I too found him to be).
At the Daily Caller, Chuck Ross reports “DNC Refused To Comply With Dossier-Related Subpoena, So BuzzFeed Sued.” We know the friends of Vladimir Putin (a/k/a “Russia” and “the Russians”) colluded with the Democrats through a series of cutouts that ran from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party to the Perkins Coie law firm to Fusion GPS to Christopher Steele and his alphabetized sources (assuming Steele and his sources are what they purport to be). The Democratic Party, which claims to be a victim of the Russians in the hacking of the DNC’s email during the campaign, holds fast to its hacked server. So far as we know, not even the FBI has had a look. What is going on here? Ross’s story notes an interesting sequel to the hacking story.
To adapt a phrase from the song made famous by Jerry Lee Lewis, whole lotta lyin’ goin’ on.
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