Friday Musical Interlude for #ReleaseTheMemo Day (2)

Take A Letter To Maria by R.B. Greaves from 1969 is the closest song to a memo meme I could find. But it's a good song.

Conservative Insurgent Thursday delayed 1 week because THE MEMO

I had planned on starting my Conservative Insurgent Thursdays segment today, but the THE MEMO is supposed to be coming out today and it's going to overshadow everything, so  - bad timing.  Instead Conservative Insurgent Thursdays will start next week.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for memo news.

In case you missed it, you're not alone

The media it seems is missing a really big story that Mollie Hemingway did not fail to notice:

Don't Lock Her Up

I'm just spit-balling here, but it makes sense: What if the best course of action for president Trump, and for Republicans is to make sure Hillary Clinton, as corrupt and probably felonious as she is, does not get charged for all of the nefarious activity surrounding her campaign for the presidency?  Further, what if the smart thing to do is to not have a special investigator go after her?

The look of supreme confidence.

Hear me out.  

It does not make sense for Donald Trump to prosecute Hillary Clinton for a number of reasons.  Obviously coming across as a sore winner is never good, but it goes deeper.  If the #ReleaseTheMemo memo is as explosive as is expected (I refer you to the permanently haunted visage of Democrat FBI/DOJ-excuser Adam Schiff),  then the correct target should be the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI and not the Clintons or former president Obama for that matter, regardless of the level of their involvement.  Even if it turns out to be really, really bad.

The laser focus of draining the swamp on the DOJ and the FBI.  With the backing of sunlight of the crimes and/or deliberate lack of due diligence with respect to all things dossier and Clinton email scandal there will be plenty to uncover and it could take years.

That allows the on-going narrative of "look what the Democrats were hiding" and "look at all these things we still need to fix" and "look at all the unresolved corruption issues". That's a political plus but it's not even the biggest one.

The real win in keeping Hillary Clinton hanging in the wind is that it pressures those in the FBI and DOJ to be more forthcoming in hopes of getting a prosecutorial deal.  And it still gets better.  There has been an underlying theme among Democrats that the Clintons had a stranglehold on the institutions surrounding the Democratic party as well as deeply rooted connections to the bureaucracy of government.  The Democrats, many of them at least, have been trying to shed that yoke on the party.  So far there has not been any great ice breaking on that effort. 

Why would the president help the Democrats resolve that by giving them cover to distance themselves from the Clintons?  There's no gain in that.  It helps drain the Democrats' swamp but does nothing to chip away at the deep state.  The deep state needs cleaning, but the Republicans need the Democrats to remain mired in an intra-party fight, right through 2020 and certainly at a minimum the remainder of 2018.

It's a cynical view, but control the investigation timing and you control the mood of the country. You control an eagerness on the right to see prosecutions with a Clinton facing charges as the carrot to dangle.  Conversely on the left, you keep them unbalanced in their desire to free themselves from Clinton fealty versus a real fear of not wanting to be on the wrong side of the Clinton machine.  My advice is simple: even if you have the goods on Hillary Clinton, don't lock her up, at least not until after 2021.

Andrew McCabe "resigns"

Don't let the door hit you...

Via CBS, Andrew McCabe has resigned:

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is stepping down from the FBI, CBS News' Pat Milton has confirmed. According to Milton, a source familiar with the matter confirmed that McCabe was urged to step down. However, sources at the FBI said that this was largely his decision, CBS News' Andres Triay reports. He is currently on what's known as "terminal leave," that is, McCabe had accumulated enough leave time to depart the FBI now. His official retirement is in March.

The White House had no comment on the matter, although White House press secretary told reporters Monday that "the president wasn't part of this decision-making process."

McCabe was under considerable scrutiny from Republicans, as special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and any ties to Trump associates continued. McCabe took temporary charge of the FBI after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey earlier this year, and some skeptics viewed McCabe as too close to his former boss.

The obvious question is why now? If he was uncomfortable with Trump as president why did he wait until the day before the State of the Union where it is rumored president Trump would reveal the contents of the #ReleaseTheMemo memo?

It's clear that there's something more to this than just bad feelings between the president and McCabe.

#ReleaseTheMemo suffers it's own diversionary tactics claims

The background is apparently black and white: either president Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, or Hillary Clinton, former president Obama and the FBI and Justice Department colluded to discredit then candidate Donald Trump from having a chance to win the 2016 presidential election.

The memo in question is explained pretty well by the NeverTrump (and formerly august publication) The National Review:

Over the last several days, online debate has centered around a memorandum drafted by Devin Nunes and House Intelligence Committee staff that allegedly details surveillance abuses in the American intelligence community. When the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo trended on Twitter, Democrats suspected possible help from Russian bots, but preliminary reports on Twitter’s internal analysis, according to the Daily Beast, suggest that the “groundswell . . . appears thus far to be organically American — not Russian propaganda.” More than 200 members of Congress, nearly all of them Republican, have seen the four-page memo, but Republicans are reportedly refusing to share it with the Department of Justice.

The diversionary tactic regarding the memo (which is claimed to be a diversionary tactic), is that Russian bots are behind the trending hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. They're not Russian bots and to say so is the very diversionary tactic they are accusing the memo to be.

On Tuesday, two Democratic leaders urged Facebook and Twitter to conduct an “in-depth forensic examination” of #ReleaseTheMemo to determine the extent of Russian propaganda promoting the hashtag. They relied on a report from the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy claiming that #ReleaseTheMemo was had become the favorite hashtag of Russian-sponsored Twitter accounts. (The report did not make any judgements about such activity on Facebook.)

“If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, two California Democrats, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

But a knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

All of this would be solved by releasing the memo, after all, the details are so explosive as to be a bigger deal and worse than Watergate. Ironically, the Democrats turning Russia into a bogeyman, may indeed be helping Russia as it continues to paralyze Washington.