Accusation As Confession

Daddy State Awareness

Rule 1: Every accusation is a confession

Empty Wheel:

WHY DID REBEKAH MERCER AND STEVE BANNON START PREPARING AN ACCUSATION THAT HILLARY HAD CORRUPT TIES WITH RUSSIA STARTING ON MARCH 14, 2016? 

October 30, 2018

Amid a lot of noise regarding the eight month investigation into Roger Stone (including that his assistant Jason Sullivan has been asked for the complete recordings of some conference calls he gave in 2016 and that he has passed two polygraphs that may not be asking the right questions), the WaPo has a detail of real interest. Mueller brought Steve Bannon back in for questioning Friday.

On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief campaign strategist, about alleged claims Stone made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails allegedly hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.

I say that’s particularly interesting because of Bannon’s role in a series of events that come as close as anything to hint that Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi not only had advance knowledge that Wikileaks would release John Podesta’s emails, but may have known and planned for what those emails included.

STONE AND CORSI SEEMED TO EXPECT THAT THERE WOULD BE PODESTA EMAILS RELATING TO JOULE

As I noted in these two posts, Stone’s evolving public stories explaining his knowledge of the stolen documents seem to attempt to do three things:

• Provide non-incriminating explanations for any foreknowledge of WikiLeaks — first pointing to Randy Credico and now to James Rosen
• Offer explanations for discussions about Podesta that he may presume Mueller has that took place around August 14
• Shift the focus away from Joule and the remarkable prescience with which the right wing anticipated that WikiLeaks would be able to advance an attack first rolled out on August 1

Basically, over the course of August, several key events happened: Stone first started publicly claiming foreknowledge of what WikiLeaks would drop, tried to launch a counterattack against public reporting on Paul Manafort’s sleazy ties to Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian oligarchs, and then warned that it would soon be John Podesta’s time on the barrel. Those events came amidst two separate oppo research efforts: An early one initiated by Bannon and (Clinton Cash author) Peter Schweizer that accused Hillary of corrupt ties to Russia, largely through John Podesta’s role a company called Joule Unlimited. And then a later one (starting at 39), written by Corsi, trying to impugn Hillary because her campaign manager’s brother was so corrupt he had worked with Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and at Manafort’s instructions not properly declared the work. Stone seems to have wanted to conflate those two efforts, in part to suggest his August 21 tweet (and an August 15 one that may end up being just as interesting) referred to both brothers, not just John, and therefore not the earlier oppo effort.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that We The People will probably never learn more than about a third of the shit that Bob Mueller is digging up.

If the point of the exercise for Putin is to degrade our democratic processes - to strike at the confidence we have to have in order to proceed with "free and fair elections" - then our government has a built-in incentive not to tell us how deeply effective the Russians have been. Because full disclosure runs the risk of doing Putin's work for him.

And along those lines, I think it's worth considering easing up on the Dems a bit, because (as hard to believe as this may be) they're prob'ly smarter than they seem - they know they have to criticize, but they have to do it without helping us think the elections aren't legit, which is what too many of us think already, which is the goal of Cult45 and the GOP and their Russian allies.