The Morning Briefing: Mueller/Comey Mania and Much, Much More

Good Monday morning.

Here is what’s on the president’s agenda today:

The president has lunch with the vice president

RUSSIA collision roundup. Get set, go!

It was a crazy weekend for the media and deranged never-Trumpers because they had to deal with the release of James Comey’s transcripts from his closed-door congressional testimony as well as Mueller’s witch-hunting squad dropping sentencing documents on Manafort and Cohen. Lots to read and spin. Wheeee.

Victoria Toensing has an op-ed over at FNC asking important questions that should not get lost in the sheer volume of anti-Trump spinning over the weekend: who leaked the classified content of the Flynn/Kisylak phone call and who leaked Flynn’s name to the media? These are gross civil liberties violations and it seems like Mueller and the DOJ do not care. Maybe they don’t.

Thus, before Flynn flunked remembering every word of a conversation he was asked to recall weeks later, an Obama administration official had egregiously broken the national security and privacy laws. But only Flynn has been charged with a crime.

Tell me some more how I am a conspiracy theorist and there’s no anti-Trump deep state

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are not supposed to think that there was a deep state plot to keep Trump from winning the presidency and obstructing him once he did. That’s just crazy, right? From former head of the FBI, Holy James Comey, speaking in New York City last night at one of these self-congratulatory media events:

“All of us should use every breath we have to make sure the lies stop on January 20, 2021,” Comey told an audience at the 92nd Street Y on New York City’s Upper East Side. He all but begged Democrats to set aside their ideological differences and nominate the person best suited to defeating Trump in an election.

“I understand the Democrats have important debates now over who their candidate should be,” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, “but they have to win. They have to win.“

Why wouldn’t I think that the intelligence apparatus was/is just an unbiased, non-political, administrative branch of the government, right? Ha! Comey, along with that punk, former CIA spookster Brennan, and his evening anti-Trump howlings on cable news reassure Americans that that federal law enforcement apparatus is on the up and up and not executing some extra-constitutional agenda.

Comey: Yeah bro, the dossier wasn’t verified before or after we used it

Continuing along with our deep state theater, Comey testified to the House committees that the salacious dossier was not verified before or after it was used to snoop on Carter Page. And Comey said it didn’t need to be verified. I think it’s time to shut the snooping process down until we can get some checks and balances. We cannot allow the government to get snooping warrants unless they have some sort of fact-based evidence.

According to a transcript of Comey’s testimony released on Saturday, the former FBI chief also asserted that it was “not necessary” for the FBI to assess the sources that dossier author Christopher Steele used to compile his report, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign.

“I think I’ve dealt with warrants where you just identify that your primary [confidential informant], or primary source, has subsources, and so long as the court is aware of that phenomenon and that you’re speaking to the reliability of the primary source, to my mind, that’s a totally legit warrant application,” he said.

Comey told lawmakers that “work was ongoing” by the time he was fired on May 9, 2017, to “to replicate, either rule in or rule out” as much of the dossier as possible.

He said that by the time he was fired on May 9, 2017, he “still didn’t know whether there was anything to it,” referring to the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Kremlin.

Christopher Steele was not the source of the information in the dossier. He merely aggregated information from RUSSIANS, so this pretend thing where the court is OK with some aggregator reporting information from G-d knows who and that’s enough for a wiretap is hilarious. LORDY!

Related:

Is paying off a blackmailer illegal? Hush money payments could be ‘impeachable offenses,’ top Dem warns

Rubio to Trump: Pardoning Manafort ‘would be a huge political mistake’

Comey reveals he concealed Trump meeting memo from DOJ leaders

Adam Schiff: Trump could ‘face the real prospect of jail time’

Historical picture of the day:

Marines from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, based in Hawaii, go for a late afternoon run in the Saudi Arabian desert, Monday, Dec. 10, 1990 in Saudi Arabia. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Other morsels:

China summons US ambassador over detention of Huawei CFO

Migrant family apprehensions along the border continue to rise in November

Scrooges. Don’t eat raw cookie dough this holiday season, CDC warns

Maduro’s grip on Venezuela tightens, warns of Trump threat

‘I can’t breathe:’ Transcript of audio recording from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder reportedly describes him gasping for air in his last moments

I can’t wait for this guy to go away Flake: Republican Party ‘is a frog slowly boiling in water’

Trump floating Mark Meadows for White House chief of staff: reports

I bet I can guess. Ocasio-Cortez Spox Refuses To Divulge Where She Stands On BDS Movement

Nearly 1,000 people arrested during violent protests in Paris

Uma Thurman posts a photo posing with yellow vest protesters in Paris

Spiritual ‘healer’ featured on Oprah accused of sexual abuse