Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain is demanding that President Trump either produce evidence or retract the allegation his telecommunications system at the Trump Tower was ‘wiretapped’ by someone at the direction of former President Obama.

There are at least two Congressional committees which will apparently be including Trump’s allegations of wiretaps in broader investigations.

OpenCdA wonders:   By what standard would the sufficiency and validity of any Trump-produced evidence be judged?  What would be acceptable evidence in the eyes of John McCain, Charles Schumer,  and the other Capitol Hill Clowns?

Our opinion is that the standard for evaluating Trump’s comments before and during the investigations needs to be based on the broader requirement for probable cause rather than the narrower federal rules of evidence.

Probable cause amounts to more than a mere suspicion but less than evidence that would justify a conviction.  Would a reasonable man considering the information available conclude that some of Trump’s or his associates’ wire and oral communications may have been lawfully or unlawfully intercepted?

OpenCdA very strongly suspects that in the eyes and small minds of establishment rabidista partisans among the Clowns, no evidence submitted by President Trump will be sufficient to do anything other than give them an opportunity for more face time on the network news and talk shows. (more…)

In our OpenCdA post yesterday we expressed hope that President Trump would ask Preet Bharara to remain as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.   Bharara was fearless, absolutely unimpressed with a suspect’s political office, social position, connections, or wealth.  He had a remarkable record of successfully prosecuting some of the worst of the worst criminals in New York, including several prominent corrupt state legislators and other officials as well as financiers.

Bharara had met with President-elect Trump in November and had reportedly been told by Trump and Attorney General nominee Sessions he would be asked to stay on as the US Attorney.

After refusing to submit his resignation, Bharara was formally fired today at President Trump’s direction by acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.

Bharara will do just fine on the outside.  In fact, OpenCdA thinks he would make a pretty good federal district court or appeals court judge.   Hopefully that’s what President Trump has in mind for him.

Unfortunately, the real losers are the people in the southern district of New York who had come to trust Bharara and his very capable Assistant US Attorneys to stand up against corrupt public officials, white collar crime predators, and organized crime families.  Bharara’s office was so successful because he attracted high-quality, experienced lawyers to leave often lucrative private practices and enter the public service.

Unlike Main Justice in Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York didn’t have any swamp water that needed to be drained.  We can only hope that whoever President Trump nominates to replace Preet Bharara will be able to continue to attract and retain the best AUSAs.

The capable career prosecutors, the AUSAs, need a strong US Attorney to keep the political hacks off their backs.   Preet Bharara did that very effectively.  We hope that’s not why President Trump fired him.

An article in the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has requested the resignations of the remaining 46 US Attorneys in their respective federal judicial districts.

Of the 93 US Attorneys heading each of the 94 federal judicial districts, 47 of them had already resigned (districts of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands share a USA).  Each US Attorney is a political appointee who serves at the pleasure of the President.

Idaho’s former US Attorney, Wendy Jo Olson, bailed out on February 25, 2017.  Olson joined the Boise law firm of Stoel Rives LLP.

First Assistant US Attorney Rafael Gonzalez Jr. will serve as the interim US Attorney for the District of Idaho until a permanent replacement is nominated by the President and confirmed by the US Senate.

Some of the US Attorneys may be asked by President Trump to remain.  OpenCdA hopes Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, will be one who is.   In fact, we think it would be fun to watch some of Idaho’s roaches scramble for cover if Bharara were to seek appointment in the District of Idaho.  The reality is Idaho is likely to get some politically-connected local loser who will recuse himself or herself from any case with even a hint of personal political jeopardy and who will be guided not by the law but by certain key political and business figures here.

In their latest efforts to undermine and subvert the presidency of Donald Trump, some national skews media are now asserting that after Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, but before his inauguration on January 20, 2017,  his selected National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have violated the Logan Act.  Bezos’ Bozos at the Washington Post allege that Flynn “…privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office…”.

Here is the Congressional Research Service’s March 11, 2015, report entitled Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority:  The Logan Act.  It explains what the Logan Act is and how it came to be.

OpenCdA suggests that if the skews media are seriously interested in pursuing allegations that Flynn violated the Logan Act, they need to also investigate with equal enthusiasm the conduct of US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) in January 2017.

The issue is whether her supposedly spontaneous meeting in Syria with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been lawfully authorized and had unlawfully interfered in US foreign relations.

The media might want to determine exactly who paid for Representative Gabbard’s trip to Syria.

The media might also want to ask the State Department which passport Representative Gabbard used for the trip.   Did she travel on a diplomatic passport, an official passport, or a regular passport?

As CRS noted in its report, there has never been a criminal prosecution for an alleged violation of the Logan Act.   OpenCdA is pretty sure there won’t be one this time, either.

After reading a new non-fiction book iWar:  War and Peace in the Information Age by newspaperman Bill Gertz, OpenCdA wonders if when it comes to information warfare awareness, President Trump and some of his designated appointees aren’t light years ahead of many of the Clinton-Bush-Obama straphangers that are now finding themselves being spun off the Washington merry-go-round.

Trump and his Tweeter machine are driving the national skews media nuts with his conflicting and ambiguous answers to their failing attempts at gotcha questions.  It was a short drive for the rabidista Hillary Clinton worshippers at ABC, CNN, MSNBC,  and of course Bezos’ Bozos at the Washington Past.

Gertz’s book is a remarkably readable account of the information war to which the United States has been subjected since after World War II.   His book astutely shows how several recent US presidents including Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama haven’t just been ignorant of information warfare;  some of them were seemingly in denial of its existence.  Reagan may have had the best understanding of what the Soviets were doing with it to undermine our national security.

President Trump not only seems to get it, but he also seems to be using it himself to keep the skews media and our international adversaries confounded.

That’s not to suggest that he doesn’t take the existence and continuing threat of information warfare seriously.  Clearly, he does.  In fact, he may take it more seriously and have a more intuitive understanding of it than any of his predecessors.

Gertz’s book is fascinating reading.   It’s no doubt just coincidental that not long after comp’d copies were delivered to Foggy Bottom, Ft. Fumble, Langley, JB Anacostia-Bolling, and Ft. Meade, Rolaids and Prevacid were added to the GSA procurement schedule.

We heard it from candidate, then nominee, then President-elect Trump throughout his candidacy:  “Drain the swamp!”  But in the surreal world of Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac, what does it really mean?  Does the new President hate all “government” employees?  What will the remnants of the swamp look like when President Trump pulls the drain plug?

It will probably look like waterlogged mahogany furniture and even emptier $1000 suits than it has for decades.  It is far less likely to look like unfilled JCPenney slacks and shirts and ties or Ross skirts, slacks and blouses.  Most of the folks whose desks and chairs are gray painted sheet metal rather than mahogany, the folks at GS/GM-15 and below, are likely to be high and dry and still have jobs.

To the aforementioned occupants of the mahogany furniture:  Welcome to the whirlpool.

Some Senior Executive Service officials are likely to be retained in the SES, some will be effectively demoted (though that’s not what it’s called in the SES).

Presidential appointees, the folks who “…serve at the pleasure of the President…,”  should have already submitted their resignations. It is customary for appointees to offer to resign when the President who appointed them leaves office.

Some Obama appointees may be reappointed by President Trump.  For example, President Trump said during the campaign that he intended to reappoint Preet Bharara to be the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Bharara had been appointed to that position in 2009 by President Obama, and he has administered that office without evidence of partisan bias.  That is to say, Bharara has gone after many corrupt public officials without any apparent deference to the offender’s party affiliation.

The US Department of Justice Headquarters, often shortened to Main Justice, is one of the large swamps with subsidiary swamps in many of the federal judicial districts.  Until the Senate gets around to confirming Senator Sessions to be the new US Attorney General, here is a list of the designates who will continue to oversee Main Justice.

The delay by the US Senate to confirm Sessions will result in some legal actions being delayed since the US Attorneys in each of the federal judicial districts needs to know what the new boss at Main Justice wants before making representations to the federal courts on his behalf.

Other federal agencies have likely filed similar memoranda which identify component heads.   It is done for continuity of government operations.

On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)  released its unclassified background report entitled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”.

The (U) background report makes it very clear that the Russian Federation government at the direction of President Vladimir Putin mounted an information campaign intended to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States.

That revelation has provided the breathless headlines for many skewspaper articles and broadcast skews blather which would have us conclude that this has never happened before and that the United States of America has never and would never engage in anything so nefarious as to try and influence who controls other nations’ governments.  Both conclusions are wrong.

Long before the Soviet Union dissolved, it had been using influence campaigns to try and influence western elections.   It hasn’t stopped.  If the incoming cast of Republican clowns think that Putin and his intelligence services (SVR, FSB, GRU) haven’t been laying the groundwork to disrupt the Trump administration using similar and even more aggressive tactics, then those Republicans need to re-read the report and be drug tested regularly. (It’s not only the Russians.  The People’s Republic of China,  the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and several of our allies have the ability and very probably the will to do much worse.)

What the Russians did in the 2016 election campaign was attack the vulnerabilities of several electronic storage media to gather information for their influence campaign.   Those vulnerabilities were known or should have been known to the systems’  administrators.   For the past eight years efforts by the Intelligence Community to beef up counterintelligence (CI), including offensive CI operations, were largely rebuffed by President Obama.

The report offers no evidence the Russians successfully manipulated votes via cyberattacks.

As for any misplaced belief that the United States would never do unto someone else what the Russians did unto us, ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the efforts by President Obama and his henchmen at State Department to get Netanyahu ousted in 2015.   Go back even further to the 1973 support by President Richard Nixon for the Chilean coup ousting President Salvador Allende and to the numerous efforts under President John F. Kennedy to remove and even kill Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro.

The links in the first paragraph provide a pretty good primer for those wanting to know more about how the Intelligence Community assesses threats and how it provides information to decision makers.  It also hints at what worked in preventing the Russians from doing what our skews media wish had happened:  actually manipulating the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.