54 Comments

When I was part of a large organization we had several categories for disasters: a mess was either a clusterfuck, a shitshow or a goat rodeo, depending mainly on the scope and nature of the putative supervision (the clusterfuck being the most heavily managed; goat rodeos were usually unmanaged free-for-alls). Based on way more experience than I wish I had, this cock-up is clearly a clusterfuck. This was centrally (mis)managed: all the players made the same mistakes, hid behind the same bullshit excuses and are now racing to tell their carefully barbered stories in an effort to preserve whatever swag they walked away with.

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We could all join Anonoymous, just to confuse the enemy.

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A reminder that it wasn’t just Trump who was a corrupt criminal— the rot penetrated very deep.

May they all rot in prison on their way to rotting in hell.

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Say it loud! As far as the GOP goes, the rot was already there before Trump et al. brought it into the light and started feeding it.

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Remember, Former enrolled this moron festival with his Obama birth certificate nonsense.

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Maybe that hacker group Anonymous could help find all this missing cell phone and cyber-stuff?

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I've got my fingers crossed that at least a few Secret Service employees didn't follow orders and wipe their phones.

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And, or have the integrity and real patriotism to drop a few dimes on those in the SS who voluntarily became a Praetorian Guard to protect an insurrection instead of a President.

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Well, Rep. Cheney said that the dam is breaking and I hope that includes the Secret Service and DHS. Because I'd love to see these people swept into a courtroom.

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What a great suggestion, Judith! They've done the impossible before. I wouldn't be surprised to learn they're already on the case. (During Occupy Wall Street they hung out in Zuccotti Park in Guy Fawkes masks, laptops balanced on their knees. They or Anonymous impersonators—how would anyone know?)

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A team of 13 year olds could crack any Former led security screw up.

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Let us all devoutly hope that is the case!

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founding

It is important to investigate and when appropriate prosecute members of this Trump circus all the way down to some pretty unimportant underlings. Why? Because there are few angels in Washington DC or in politics anywhere else. If anyone in Trump's orbit who committed crimes against the nation gets a pass, newcomers will be emboldened when they get into a subsequent administration. We have to raise the bar back up. Criminal prosecutions where appropriate will send the message.

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From Wednesday, July 27, 2022:

www.lawfareblog.com/how-evaluate-progress-justice-departments-jan-6-investigation

This site has the relevant legal documents that have been made public, in downloadable PDF form, for all sorts of legal issues, and regularly discusses January 6 ongoing questions about investigations and probable indictments in depth. It is generally very accessible to the general educated, interested reader.

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founding

It will require the total suspension of disbelief that the SS, DHS, and probably the FBI all scrubbed their phones on Jan. 20, 2021 for ‘reasons’. There are reasons, of course, but very different ones than might be floated to an investigative body like the J6 Committee. This is in itself a major scandal given that there were orders to save all those communications, which were ignored, IMO, with malice of forethought.There is no coincidence in situations like this. It was obviously an intentional coverup since loyalties had to be protected, and also transferred to the new administration. I deeply hope all those messages still exist somewhere in the cyber ether, and can be recovered.

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No evidence at all the FBI has been doing anything like that, plenty of evidence they are relentlessly making cases against the coup's agents and fomenters, following the evidence and the law. If you have any, by all means, break the story and do it immediately, could be a Pulitzer Prize involved. To loosely paraphrase the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon: "Talk is cheap, relevant evidence is the genuine coin of the realm."

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Sure, there's evidence that they're making cases against the "coup's agents and fomenters," at least the easy-to-reach ones. Let's see the evidence of what they're NOT doing, OK? We don't know yet, and we won't know until someone talks. (Your faith in the FBI is touching, but I fear it's misplaced.)

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www.lawfareblog.com/how-evaluate-progress-justice-departments-jan-6-investigation

Read this and get back to me, I really don't think your request that "we see what they are not doing" is even coherent, and for sure given the rules governing sitting grand juries, we under no circumstances are legally positioned to "see" what's going on while they proceed with their work. Ongoing public inspection of sitting grand juries is a guarantee they can't do their jobs.

I have zero "faith" in anything not grounded in facts and evidence, and that relevant evidence in this instance includes the historical background of repeated work by the FBI to bring the Trump administration under control. I fear your cynicism about the FBI, if that's what it is, is based in some ideas about the bureau as the long gone institution of the days when J. Edgar Hoover ran it, thankfully.

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Last I looked, the FBI was not subject to the same protection as a grand jury. As to the FBI itself -- it remains a conservative-white-male-dominated institution. You might look into the run-up to the 2016 election for evidence of how that can play out.

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I was told when I was 16 that I could never be an FBI agent because I am female.

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founding

Let’s get one thing straight: if I’m complicit in a crime and l hand in my resignation and company cellphone, I’m still responsible for the actions l committed while l was employed by the crime syndicate. Right?

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You're being too logical for the Word Speak gang. They wouldn't understand.

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I'd like to honestly know who was a Trump appointee in DHS and associated agencies when this went down, and have them questioned under oath.

I smell the biggest coverup since before Watergate, and it smells distinctly like the sewer coming from Donald Trump's septic system.

I'd bet my life that most of those missing messages, texts and emails were destroyed by Trump appointees after the Jan 6 insurrection because it would look like they were doing nothing, and it looks like that is exactly what was happening.

I also wonder who is still left after this that was a Trump appointee and I want them fired-no matter who it is, and where they are.

Trumps shit stains smell from here, and he's dragged the entire government through his muck.

Unless we get rid of all of those people, we'll continue to hear these kinds of stories.

Better yet, prosecute all of them, convict them and then throw them in prison.

Because they helped aid and abet an insurrection. Reason enough.

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Re Trump’s sewer: Maybe that’s why he was always complaining about having to flush the toilet several times. Too much sewage, too much shit that refused to flush, too many shit stains. Out, damn spot!

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Throwing them in prison would help the racial imbalance in the prison population.

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A white avalanche!

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Carol Leonnig names names and reports details almost every day, Mary, sometimes a few times a day, in the WaPo, often with a shared byline. New, as I write this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/29/homeland-inspector-general-texts/?itid=hp-top-table-main

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author

She's got people in those agencies coming out of the woodwork calling her with tips on the criminal behavior going on at DHS and SS. Good for her for cultivating those sources for years. I'm incredibly impressed. And this DHS IG worked for Ducey in AZ? Don't even have to read between the lines on that one.

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A Pandora’s box of criminality. DOJ needs to hire even more attorneys and legal researchers. Massive cover up needs to be exposed.

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My money is on the FBI as the next "bombshell" phone scrubbers expose. Might as well make it a trifecta of arrogance and unaccountability.

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These idiots must think we are all stupid.

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Not a bad bet to make, is it? This is what happens when you're surrounded by people who think just like you and who the rest of the time (excuse the cliché) "just follow orders." I also don't think they foresaw the effectiveness of the 1/6 committee -- truth to tell, *none* of us did, because it's pretty well unprecedented -- or the possibility that some of the media, in this case Carol Leonnig and WaPo, would rise to the occasion.

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It doesn’t matter about us. DOJ is the only thing that counts. And DOJ is not stupid, absent evidence to the contrary my take is it’s malevolent.

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Jul 30, 2022·edited Jul 30, 2022

The traitors’ network is vast, and the head of the snakes, like Medusa, needs to be cut off.

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Coverup. That's the word that brought down Nixon.

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Yes, but that was in a different world and a different moral universe.

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This is not on point, but judging from the cascade of emails I've been drenched with from the Trump organizations, I'd say they are sweating bullets. Sure hope I'm right

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Wow!! As always fantastic writing, and great insight.

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Well I guess the trump thingy was right when it said there is a deep state. It's the republican party.

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IMHO these "lost" messages are the tip of the iceberg. One IT expert who has advised the 1/6 Committee, Denver Riggleman a former GOP Congressman from Virginia and expert on Intelligence Gathering, has publicly said many Trump staffers including Mark Meadows used private telephones with encryption instead of the government phones they were issued and many of them used the Signal App designed to hide messages.

Oh, and don't forget the email printouts Meadows burned in the fireplaces and Trump flushed down his toilets. To say these traitors were engaged in disposing heaping piles of incriminating excremental evidence is an understatement. Digital and otherwise.

On the good news front, one of the DOJ toadies who was assisting Jeff Clark in his attempt to become the AG has just started cooperating with the Committee and should provide some context and corroboration to whatever DOJ finds on Clark's recently confiscated cel phones and computers.

The noose is tightening; I just hope they can pick up the pace. The minute after the November elections when the GOP wins control of the House the Committee goes away and the drum beat will be to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. After that all the balls will be in Merrick Garland's court.

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Sounds very much like the Nazis burning documents as they retreated.

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