The Story of the Phony Lynch Email Grows Bigger - Josh Marshall

[DonViejo]

By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 26, 2017 1:53 PM

We’ve just had some highly disturbing, vaguely surreal new information reported by CNN. Two days ago The Washington Post reported that James Comey’s decision not to notify the Department of Justice about his July Clinton emails press conference was driven in part by emails or documents describing emails the FBI had found in troves of Russian-hacked emails which appeared to compromise Attorney General Lynch’s independence. The gist of the Post story was that Comey may have relied on what was in fact an exquisitely successful disinformation operation to make what turned out to be a highly consequential decision affecting the 2016 election. This new CNN story contains an important twist.

According to sources who talked to CNN, Comey and the FBI knew the document was a fraud but used it anyway, both to make the decision and justify the decision after the fact.

This isn’t necessarily quite as crazy as it sounds. Comey’s apparent reasoning was that if the document was later released in a Russian/Wikileaks document dump, the fact that it was fake wouldn’t necessarily matter. The Bureau wouldn’t necessarily be able to publicly prove it was a phony without disclosing sources and methods, or perhaps not at all. The point being, whether or not the document was real didn’t really matter. Its release would potentially discredit the integrity of the DOJ/FBI decision making either way.

Two points seem worth noting.

First, we’re dealing with conclusions that are inherently uncertain. You seldom definitively determine that a document is fake. It’s more a preponderance of evidence. It also seems like the consensus opinion on the document’s authenticity evolved over time, with less and less credence being given to it and time went on. The issue here is that it seems like almost everyone involved would have some reason to shade their recollection of events and their relative certainty about key matters to shape the best story possible. That doesn’t even get into knowing deception. It just seems like there’s a lot of gray area and we should keep that in mind.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-story-of-the-phony-lynch-email-grows-bigger

[WhiteTara]

1. May he rot in Hell. nt

[AngryAmish]

2. FBI, CIA , NSA etc have gone to absolute shit.

[haele]

4. Don't quite know what you mean by this.

Is it because they're not doing their job?

Or that the IC was so used to "the old way of doing politics and business" they didn't take into account that an administration so woefully anti-government/pro-oligarch would put moral slackers and idiots in charge of the liaison between the IC and the White House that would do anything to take down the IC of the USA just to drown the U.S. government in a bathtub for their own profit?

Or because there's still a few too many Russian Moles that had embedded themselves in since the Bush cabal seeded the higher levels of the GSA and private business contractors with their fellow travelers - NWO/Bircher/Mafia supporting Evangelical yes-men who would rather turn to a strong-man foreign dictator for leadership than accept a Harvard educated Black Man in the White House? (I'm looking very pointedly at Giuliani's New York FBI network...)

The alphabet soup that is considered the IC has more than a few moral (and Constitutional) issues, but the majority of the employees do want to do what could be a good job of intelligence gathering, analysis, along safeguarding a secure, reliable government infrastructure for the general population for generations to come. Most are not ready to "dirty their own nest" and turn their country over to a bunch of greedy businessmen who will steal everything that isn't nailed down and turn this country into a third world hellhole, even if they could be guaranteed that they would be like Franco or Pinochet's supporter in the interim.

Because most of the IC knows what happens in and to third world dictatorships, and knows they will never be rich enough to flee to New Zealand or someplace when the shit finally goes down, the "government as a business" experiment goes bankrupt and citizens start getting "pink slipped". The IC has a long history of exploiting the hell out of them.

Haele

[wishstar]

3. Explains more as to why in July Comey went around Loretta Lynch to avoid decision being criticized

Comey was criticized by Rod Rosenstein and others for not going through Justice Dept, but announcing the Clinton email decision himself in July.

The intent of this leak is to provide defense of Comey's action by claiming he wanted the FBI's July Clinton email decision (not to prosecute and that she had not lied) to appear impartial without any influence by Loretta Lynch because if he had gone through Loretta Lynch or another Democratic appointee in Justice Dept., the decision would have been even more criticized by Repubs, if the fake document had been publicized and politicized.