Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

You cannot shame the shameless.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

That pie keeps getting more and more forks, reducing anyone’s chance of even a Perot.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Let there be snark.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Israel, don’t be dumb like we were in the US after 9/11!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Former Head of the FBI’s New York Field Office Counterintelligence Arrested

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Federal prosecutors say the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office laundered money, violated sanctions against Russia while working with a Russian oligarch and while still at the FBI took hundreds of thousands of dollars from a foreign national and former foreign intelligence official.

Charles McGonigal, 55, was arrested on Saturday after arriving at JFK airport in New York on a flight from the Middle East.

A case filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleges that while serving as Special Agent in Charge of FBI counterintelligence efforts in the New York office, McGonigal took $225,000 in cash from an individual with business interests in Europe who had been an employee of a foreign intelligence service.

From August 2017 through his retirement in September 2018, McGonigal allegedly concealed his relationship with this former foreign security officer from the FBI. He allegedly requested and received cash from the individual and traveled abroad with the individual…

On Monday afternoon, McGonigal pleaded not guilty to the New York charges and was released on $500,000 bond…

Given McGonigal’s ties to the Washington and New York area offices of the FBI, the Los Angeles field office led the two-year-long investigation, three senior law enforcement officials said. The decision to move the probe to Los Angeles was to ensure there were no conflicts of interest or competing interests among agents who may have known McGonigal. 

McGonigal’s career included a stop as a section chief coordinating the FBI’s cyber and counterintelligence programs at the FBI’s secretive Intelligence Technology and Data Division (ITADD) in Chantilly, Virginia, as well as his position in New York, public records show. 

McGonigal was named special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Field Office in 2016, after serving as the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI headquarters…

So — when Deripaska needed a little inside help, McGonigal had a proven track record (and no doubt plenty more info to sell).

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The Walk-Backs (Open Thread)

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In the morning thread, we briefly discussed some walk-backs from public figures like Matt Taibbi and Edward Snowden, who both pooh-poohed the possibility that Putin would order a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Snowden went silent after events proved him catastrophically wrong and bobbed to the surface briefly to say he was avoiding pontification on the topic now since he was wrong then.

Taibbi owned up to “reverse chauvinism,” saying he was “so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough.” Huh. We’ll see if that insight bears fruit going forward. (Spoiler alert: it won’t.)

TPM’s resident lefty populist, John Judis, is also doing a backwards shuffle. He notes that he got it wrong in part because he reflexively distrusts U.S. intel after the Iraq War debacle. His publisher disagrees.

Anyhoo, “populist” (i.e., anti-immigration) politicians in Europe are also getting in on the Putin walk-back act, according to The Wall Street Journal:

What Europe’s populists saw in Mr. Putin was a kindred spirit, a leader willing to disregard the rules of international cooperation that emerged in the wake of World War II, underpinned by the military might of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They admired Mr. Putin’s unapologetic nationalism and his deep-seated distrust of the U.S.

That admiration is now running up against the reality of Mr. Putin’s forces pouring into Ukraine. Some populists are rushing to distance themselves, branding Mr. Putin’s aggression a setback of historic proportions.

Others are trying to strike a balance, rejecting Mr. Putin’s actions while acknowledging he has a place in their political heart.

“I think that everybody has a form of admiration for Mr. Putin, but frankly, I consider that what he’s done is highly reprehensible,” Ms. Le Pen said Friday.

“No to war, always. Yes to life, always,” Mr. Salvini, leader of Italy’s League party, wrote in a Twitter post Thursday. Mr. Salvini wrote that he “firmly condemns the military aggression” but stopped short of mentioning Mr. Putin by name.

Not to be outdone by anti-immigration foreigners who’ve also been rejected at the polls, the current leader of the GOP is combining Salvini’s mealy-mouthed avoidance of the “P” word with a risible statement on NATO, which he now claims to have saved when he publicly shook member nations down like an oddly a-muscular mob debt collector:

I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me, as President of the United States, that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars. There would be no NATO if I didn’t act strongly and swiftly.

JFC.

By the way, speaking of Putin, Le Pen and Trump, does anyone else remember this grotesque thing a Putin-worshiping zealot displayed at a January 2017 Trump inauguration party in Russia?

STOCKPILE The Walk-Backs (Open Thread)

I remember being disturbed by the image as I was lounging in my cut-rate DC hotel room waiting for the Women’s March to start. It stuck in my mind due to the creepy-combo aesthetic of “Triumph of the Will” meets “The Omen.” I’d bet a small sum a copy is displayed in a private room at Trump’s Disgraceland estate in Florida right now.

Open thread.

 

 

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DJT picks a side…

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Trump gave an interview today to a pair of slobbering sycophants I’ve never heard of who apparently have a radio show? Anyhoo, y’all will be shocked to learn that Trump took the opportunity to lovingly and repeatedly lick Putin’s balls:

BUCK: Mr. President, in the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this White House is stating that this is an “invasion.” That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.

So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.

Emphasis mine, and link to the extremely icky source here.

God, that’s just grotesque. I’m sure Trump said many other stupid and appalling things about many other topics during the “interview,” but I quit reading after confirming that Donald J. Trump is still Vladimir V. Putin’s star-struck cock-holster. What a shameful spectacle.

Open thread.

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Ms. Fiona Hill Spills the Tea (Open Thread)

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I posted this clip in comments in the morning thread because it’s a great explainer of the how and why of the just-concluded Biden-Putin meeting. But it’s also notable because Ms. Hill confirms that she was so desperate to interrupt Trump’s humiliating performance at the Helsinki summit that she looked around for a fire alarm to pull and considered faking a medical emergency to derail the proceedings. That portion of the clip starts at around the 6:10 mark:

Even after all we saw that preposterous orange clown do and say over four interminable years, his behavior toward Putin and his minions, especially in Helsinki, will never not be shocking to me. I guess I’ll always be a Cold War kid. Anyhoo, open thread!

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The Black PSYOP Comes Home To Roost: The National Security Implications of Today’s DOJ Raids on Giuliani and Toensing

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So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing... The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

Now that the news has broken that the DOJ executed search warrants at Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, as well as for Victoria Toensing’s electronic devices from her office in DC, here’s what I think is going under the water line. This is connecting the known, through open source reporting national-security dots. It is not a legal analysis of what the warrants and their execution means in terms of potential criminal prosecutions. For that, I recommend Ken White, who tweets as Popehat. His excellent legal analysis is in this thread. And Ryan Goodman’s excellent analysis in this thread, which has a much more national-security approach to the news.

Back in October 2019, I laid out what Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and her husband Joe DiGenova were doing in Ukraine, especially in terms of where the national security and political implications overlapped. And this context is important to review and keep in mind in regard to today’s news. Pay specific attention to the second and third parts of the operation:

That larger operation, which is a domestically focused Black PSYOP, has three lines of effort, each with multiple parts, and they all are now interconnected.

1) The Ukrainian deliverable.
A) The real deliverable wasn’t manufactured dirt on the Bidens. Rather, it was getting Zelensky to go on CNN to announce the opening of an investigation into the Bidens, because CNN is a mainstream news outlet and is in opposition to the President in its reporting. As soon as that happened, the President’s team would have campaign ads running 24/7 with this. They’d be pushing the reporters they often use, or who are primed for this type of cheap high like Ken Vogel, at mainstream outlets to get all over Zelensky’s announcement, thereby further laundering it and disseminating it through mainstream and legitimate outlets.
B) The fallback, when Zelensky wouldn’t play ball, was to have Hannity interview Shokin – the disgraced, corrupt prosecutor who was forced out under pressure from the US, EU, the IMF, and others. From the reporting over the past two or three days, Parnas and Fruman and Giuliani were all going to Vienna to arrange for this to happen the next night, which would be the night after Parnas and Fruman were arrested. It was also the night after Barr both returned to the US from his “fact finding trip”, met with the SDNY, and then had dinner with Rupert Murdoch.
C) The Romania and China gambits are also fallbacks. The President’s senior advisor for trade issues, Peter Navarro refused to answer CNN’s Jim Sciutto’s questions yesterday about whether the PRC had been told that in order to get a trade deal they had to manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden. I think it is reasonable to conclude that his refusal to answer should be taken as a yes. NBC/MSNBC had new reporting on Hunter Biden and Romania earlier this evening.
D) Barr’s criminal investigation is another fallback here. In this case it turns the DOJ into the propaganda laundry.

2) The Firtash initiative. Firtash wants off house arrest in Vienna and out from under the extradition order to send him to the US to face the Federal crimes he’s been indicted for. The reason Firtash wants this done is because he’s Putin’s man in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. If Firtash can get back to Kyiv he can then once again try to take over Ukraine’s natural gas sector, suck it dry of profits, and fuck up its operations, which will force the Ukrainians to buy natural gas from Russia while removing Ukrainian natural gas as an alternative to Russian natural gas for the rest of the EU market. This all benefits Putin, who is Firtash’s krysha (roof/ceiling) in the Russian mob. Just as he is for every other one of these oligarchs aligned with him.
A) Firtash’s efforts weren’t going very far, so he fired his US attorneys and hired Toensing and DiGenova. They then hired Parnas to do their translation work despite it being reported that Firtash and most of his staff speak fluent and/or functional English.
B) Firtash was laundering manufactured dirt and conspiracy theories about the Bidens, about the Democrats working with Ukraine to steal the 2016 election, etc through Parnas and Fruman and Toensing and DiGenova to Giuliani. Giuliani who was being paid/worked for Parnas, but also somehow also Parnas’s boss.
C) Toensing and DiGenova are also working for free to assist Giuliani with manufacturing dirt on the Bidens.

3) The lift Russian sanctions initiative. Here’s where it all ties together, by laundering these conspiracy theories, especially that the Democrats and the Ukrainians, in conjunction with DNI, CIA, FBI, NSA, and DOJ, conspired to steal the 2016 election by running a false flag (maskirovka) operation to make it look like Russia was actually conspiring with Trump, his campaign, Republicans, and major conservative movement organizations to steal the 2016 election, it provides a fig leaf for Trump to order the lifting of US sanctions against Russia that went on after the seizure of Crimea and the invasion of Donbass and were expanded as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A) Manafort, through his attorney, was feeding Giuliani this conspiracy theory from jail and then prison.
B) This provides cover to pardon Manafort and Flynn and several others.
C) It was reported today that DiGenova and Toensing are the attorneys representing the conspiracist masquerading as an investigative journalist John Solomon who was (finally) just fired from The Hill. And here is where #3 wraps back into #1. Solomon was laundering all of these conspiracy theories, from Uranium 1 to the Democrats conspired with the Ukrainians, the DNI, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the DOJ to frame the Russians for trying to steal the 2016 election in order to steal the 2016 election for the Democrats to the Biden bullshit.

A couple of final points. Giuliani and Toensing and DiGenova are now claiming that Parnas, Fruman, and now, I suppose, Solomon cannot be deposed, questioned, etc by investigators since they were either working for Giuliani and/or Toensing and DiGenova or are represented by them and therefore everything they know is either attorney-client privilege or attorney work product. So you can’t ask Giuliani about what Toensing or DiGenova are doing. Or what Parnas or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova about what Giuliani, Parnas, and/or Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Parnas and Fruman what Giuliani or Toensing or DiGenova are doing. You can’t ask Toensing and DiGenova what Solomon is doing. You can’t ask Soloman what DiGenova and Toensing are doing. You can’t ask Firtash what Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Parnas and Fruman are doing. You can’t ask Giuliani, Toensing, DiGenova, and/or Firtash is doing. And because Giuliani claims all of this is on behalf of his client, the President, you also can’t, because of executive privilege, ask Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman who are working for him and who he is working for, and/or Toensing and DiGenova who are assisting him pro bono and employing Parnas anything because they are all covered from having to divulge anything or answering any questions under executive privilege.

If this sounds familiar, it is similar to how Roy Cohn handled his legal representation of the organized crime families he represented in New York. They’d hold all their business/decision making meetings in his dining room with him present or with him on the phone in case of an emergency, so it was all covered under attorney-client privilege. Nobody, from any angle of inquiry, can say nothing about nothing and no one because everything is privileged.

It is important to note that John Solomon, who was laundering disinformation and agitprop through The Hill and Fox News is referenced in the warrant for Giuliani and Toensing’s phones/electronic devices.

(Do read Goodman’s entire thread)

Now that we’ve refreshed ourselves on the context, here’s what I think is going on:

  1. Parnas, recognizing that his only way out is to give up people more important, more powerful, and more well connected than him, which is basically everyone, agreed to cooperate early on and has given the Feds what they need to work their way up the network.
  2. All of this is going to wind up connected back to Firtash, who, again, is Putin’s guy in Ukraine’s natural gas sector, and, likely, several other pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs.
  3. A Federal magistrate seems to have decided that the Roy Cohn gambit – that every one of these people’s communications regarding Ukraine was covered under attorney-client privilege because they were working for Giuliani who is Trump’s lawyer or for Toensing who is a lawyer and was assisting Giuliani for free as he was assisting her for free while working for Trump for free – is not in play here. Hence, the specific reference to communications regarding John Solomon and others.
  4. Trump world has just an astounding level of connections to pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs. The Philadelphia lawyer they brought into the campaign to advise on Pennsylvania’s recount rules is the attorney for Igor Kolomoiski. So is Bruce Kasowitz, who is one of Trump’s other personal attorneys. Just off the top of my head, Giuliani is tied to Kolomoiski, Derkach, Firtash, and several others. Toensing is tied to Firtash. And there’s plenty more that would take too long to list.
  5. I expect that the Feds will play the bigger fish off of each other as the investigation moves forward. If part of that is playing Toensing off against Giuliani, she’s going to eat him alive to save her, her husband’s, and her son’s tuchases as she’s still very sharp, despite being way through the map, whereas Rudy is Rudy.

If you want in on the “will Rudy Giuliani be able to stay off of Sean Hannity’s show tonight” action, please see Ann Laurie on the mezzanine level between the concession stands and the merchandise shop. While you’re waiting to get in on the action, I recommend the nachos and the Balloon Juicers hockey jersey. Pro tip: spring for the authentic one with the tie down strap, it comes in handy in a fight…

Open thread!

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Breaking News: Nora Dannehy, Senior Deputy to US Attorney John Durham, Has Resigned In Protest Over Politicization of Durham’s Investigation Into the DOJ’s, FBI’s, and US Intel Communities 2016 Russia Investigation

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This is what professionals do!

From The Hartford Courant (emphasis mine):

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned – at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.

Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.

Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, within weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr – who appointed Durham – to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something – perhaps some sort of report – before the presidential election in November.

The thinking of the associates, all Durham allies, is that the Russia investigation group will be disbanded and its work lost if Trump loses.

More at the link.

We already know, from the findings in the fifth and final volume of the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which shares oversight of the US Intelligence Community (IC) with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), has concluded that the US Intelligence Community, the DOJ, and the FBI acted reasonably and responsibly and that there was sufficient predicate to open the investigations into what Russia was doing and whether the President, his campaign, his campaign manager Paul Manafort, his business, members of his family involved in both the campaign and the business, and several outside senior advisors to the President during the campaign were somehow compromised by Russia during the 2016 campaign.

The SSCI’s conclusions tells us, if anyone had a question about it, that AG Barr is on a snipe hunt to try to produce an October Surprise to help the President get reelected. We also know that the conspiracy theory that AG Barr’s basis, his predicate for creating Durham’s investigation, is partially rooted in the debunked conspiracy theory that Secretary Clinton and her campaign, in conjunction with the Obama administration and senior Obama administration officials – VP Biden, APNSA Rice, AG Lynch, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper, DCI Brennan, and others – were conspiring with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the election to harm the President and his campaign and to blame it on Russia by creating a hoax that Putin was interfering on behalf of the President’s campaign. The fifth volume of the SSCI’s investigation report into Russian active measures and the 2016 election states unequivocally that this conspiracy was created by the Russian Intelligence Services and provided to Paul Manafort by his GRU handler, Konstantin Kilimnik, and that Manafort than provided it to the President and many of his senior appointees, aides, and surrogates. Moreover, we now know that the person responsible for pushing this conspiracy theory right now has been designated as a Russian intelligence officer who has been running the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, as usefully idiotic asset!

Now we wait to see what the effect of Deputy US Attorney Dannehy’s resignation has. This is definitely a brush back pitch. Whether it actually changes AG Barr’s behavior is something we’ll have to wait to see. AG Barr has made it clear that he doesn’t feel that the DOJ’s rules regarding releasing information that could affect an election within 60 days of an election. Dannehy’s resignation is a warning shot. Now we have to wait and see if Barr receives the message.

Open thread!

Breaking News: Nora Dannehy, Senior Deputy to US Attorney John Durham, Has Resigned In Protest Over Politicization of Durham’s Investigation Into the DOJ’s, FBI’s, and US Intel Communities 2016 Russia InvestigationPost + Comments (161)

Traitor-in-Chief Open Thread: Another NYTimes Reporter Has A Book to Sell

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And the NYTimes is only too happy to cross-promote the ‘savvy’ of both their reporter and his employer:

… Schmidt, a New York Times correspondent in Washington who was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018, including one for coverage of Trump’s Russian-inflected scandals, portrays an administration in which all aides may as well always have a resignation letter ready as a safeguard against an angry, flailing president detached from commonly accepted reality. This is a meticulously reported volume that clearly benefits from the author’s extraordinary access to many of the relevant characters, but also from his subjects’ tendency to record, in detail, their time around Trump…

The narrative is sometimes cinematic. It opens with Schmidt chasing down McGahn outside the White House’s front gates and eventually getting him to concede, “I damaged the office of the president; I damaged the office.” It’s a breathtakingly revealing admission from the White House’s chief lawyer and the architect of Trump’s effort to appoint as many conservative judges as possible. (Schmidt says, “I thought he was still understating the gravity of what he had done.”)

McGahn, a staunch libertarian, was frequently in over his head with the lawless president he nicknamed “King Kong,” and he struggled with his highly unusual extended contact with Mueller’s team. Still, despite getting close to resigning, McGahn stuck around far longer than his apparent misery and frequent attempts at principled stands would suggest, largely because of his judicial project’s success. It was only after Trump granted a woman clemency at Kim Kardashian’s request that McGahn knew he truly had to leave the White House. He could no longer abide the accumulation of Trump’s actions…

Lawlessness, meh. But Kim Kardashian?!? — ewwww!

… Comey was always deeply interested in maintaining his and his agency’s public credibility — especially after his wildly controversial intrusions into the 2016 campaign over Hillary Clinton’s emails. After he was fired by Trump, he text-messaged a friend: “I’m with my peeps (former peeps). They are broken up and I’m sitting with them like a wake. Trying to figure out how to get back home. May hitchhike.” It’s just one example of the clearly extensive access Schmidt had to Comey and his wife.

“Donald Trump v. the United States” is full of gritty details about what it’s like for a plugged-in journalist to report on Trump’s intrigue, ranging from the time Schmidt shepherded a valued source to and from the airport, to his learning, secondhand, about a Justice Department official soliciting dirt on Comey at a Cinco de Mayo party. At one point, Schmidt writes, he shattered his cellphone and didn’t fix it for a week because there was too much news; he ended up with pieces of glass in his hands.

More interesting, however, is the constant flow of shocking anecdotes: Schmidt writes that Mitch McConnell fell asleep during a classified briefing on Russia, for example…

But the journalistic stigmata! Such a cinematic detail!

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