Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) on Fox News just now says he has seen every word of the documents Trump is being asked to declassify and release to the public, the FISA materials, and there is no sources and methods info, just very embarrassing to FBI et al.

The President is expected to release them this week.

sdy: “Something really smells here.” You can say that again!

The video of the Fox News interview with Rep. Chris Stewart I referred to above is here.

Seen at CT

Rep Mark Meadows sent a letter today to Rosenstein





infuriating. That prick Strzok testified and constantly said "The FBI won't let me answer".

While he had said to Lisa Page:

"I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DoJ"

I hate typos. PUBLIC march to justice, ya idjeet!

back to Papadopoulos

He is firing off tweets today:

I introduced candidate Trump to the Egyptian president during the campaign. A president who's country I actually had deep connections to, and the campaign accepted. I failed to introduce him to Putin.

Furthermore, to put things in context, even with my real contact in Egypt, it was only AFTER I introduced Trump-Sisi that the Egyptian Ambassador hosted me to congratulate me. On the other hand, Alexander Downer, wanted to meet under incredibly suspicious circumstances.

I found it so odd that Downer, who gained notoriety in Australia for wearing women's fish nets, invited me to "order" me to stop "bothering" his good friend David Cameron. And told me my views were hostile to British interests.

So basically, for those paying attention, we have a Clinton friend, connected to the MI6, and private intelligence organizations in London, probing me about my ties to the energy business offshore Israel. Nothing about the US-Australia relationship.

Yet I supposedly told THAT individual about emails. Something I have no recollection ever discussing.


https://twitter.com/georgepapa19?lang=en

This whole thing is falling apart. And Mueller just keeps marching along.

Nothing from Rosenstein.
Nothing from Christopher Wray.

Fate put them on the center stage w opportunity to serve their country as men of honor. And they remain silent.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

some background of Papadopoulos comment about David Cameron

On May 4, 2016 the London Times printed an article

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art...meron-told-h6ng0r7xj

"David Cameron should apologise for calling Donald Trump “divisive, stupid and wrong”, a foreign policy adviser to the Republican frontrunner has said.

The billionaire’s team was shocked to be attacked by the prime minister, George Papadopoulos told The Times. The lawyer, who is advising Mr Trump on Europe and the Middle East, revealed that the likely Republican candidate was considering a tour of both regions but that he had yet to be invited to Britain by the government."


then on 10 May 2016, Alexander Downer met w Papadopoulos

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

maybe Downer did a political hit job on the Trump campaign

Reminder: from Strzok text messages, we know Bill Priestap (Strzok's boss) just happened to be in London when Downer met w Papadopoulos

Following up to SDY's post above re: the Mark Meadows letter, here's a great read at The Conservative Treehouse on this topic.
__________

It’s showing up in the MSM:

“A top Republican congressman claims there was a 'coordinated effort' among high-level FBI and Justice Department officials to leak 'harmful' material about Donald Trump to the media.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Monday, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., highlighted a text message exchange between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

'I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go,' Strzok texted Page on April 10, 2017, according to new documents from the Justice Department…”

https://dailym.ai/2oWqtBB

Hopefully we will soon see a less redacted version of the Carter Page FISA warrant.

Before that comes out and we get caught up in thinking about it, here is a James Comey interview w Brett Baier back in April 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dycp2x_hWbA

Comey says some things that are just bizarre. He was the FBI Director that signed 3 of the 4 warrant applications. The last one he signed was in April 2017.

And yet in April 2018, Comey says:

- The FBI learned of the Papadopoulos information in late July 2016 and opened a counterintelligence operation at that point

- The Steele dossier was not a critical part of the FISA warrant

- "To this day" Comey doesn't know that Clinton paid for the dossier

- He didn't investigate who leaked that Donald Trump had been briefed about the sex tapes in Jan 2017, because why would he worry about an "unclassified public document"

- In Jan 2017, Comey didn't know that Steele had been fired. He didn't know that Steele had lied.

- Comey didn't tell Donald Trump in Jan 2017 that Carter Page was under FISA warrant. He didn't tell the President elect that a former member of his campaign was considered to be a Russian foreign agent

So in Jan 2017, Comey had already signed 2 of the 4 warrants, but he says he didn't know that Steele had been fired by the FBI.

The warrant of Jan 2017 says that the FBI had suspended its relationship with Christopher Steele. Comey signed it, but says he didn't know Steele had been fired.



xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

diff topic. The former FBI General Counsel James Baker was interviewed in August. We haven't heard anything about that interview. Not from REPs or from DEMs. Odd.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
It’s showing up in the MSM:

“A top Republican congressman claims there was a 'coordinated effort' among high-level FBI and Justice Department officials to leak 'harmful' material about Donald Trump to the media.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Monday, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., highlighted a text message exchange between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

'I had literally just gone to find this phone to tell you I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go,' Strzok texted Page on April 10, 2017, according to new documents from the Justice Department…”

https://dailym.ai/2oWqtBB

The official 'Swamp spin' is that Strzok and Page were concerned about all of the leaks regarding PDJT coming out of said Swamp, and were actually planning on a strategy to stop them!

Yep! That's their story and they're sticking to it!

ROTFLMAO!!
__________

Oh, we can only hope this truckload of shoes drops soon...


HUGE! Joe DiGenova: Yates, Rice, Biden, Comey and Obama Met in White House to Discuss Targeting Mike Flynn (AUDIO)

Former US Attorney Joe DiGenova went on WMAL radio on Monday to discuss the latest developments in the Obama Spygate scandal.

DiGenova dropped this bomb during the interview

During the infamous January 5, 2017 White House meeting Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Joe Biden, James Comey and Barack Obama discussed how they would target General Michael Flynn. This is a huge development!

1. Mueller has told close confidants he was handed “a piece of crap on collusion.” But investigated it further with no fruits.

2. DiGenova mentions, “James Baker, former FBI General Counsel, is a cooperating witness in a case against James Comey.”

3. DiGenova says there will be one more indictment related to Lying to the FBI. However “the Mueller Probe is coming to an end with NO indictments about collusion whatsoever.”

4. DiGenova: “This is going to be a bad next 30 days for a bunch of people in the FBI and DOJ under Obama.” This is in relation to the declassification of the FISA documents for Carter Page which is in processs.

5. DiGenova also brings up the January 5th, 2017 meeting with Rice, Yates, Biden, Comey, and Obama. He says “[It] was a meeting to discuss how Sally Yates was going to get Michael Flynn. And the President of the United States, Barack Obama, was directly involved in these discussions.” This is another bombshell itself, and deserves a whole article.

Suffice to say, I don’t have the time to suss out all the legal and ethical contradictions there are compared to the treatment of President Trump. This whole interview just blew me away. Listen for yourself.



https://www.thegatewaypundit.c...ng-mike-flynn-audio/

Cliff posts the audio of DiGenova’s WRAL spot every Monday morning in the Trump II thread.

Thanks, Cliff!

Since I don't listen to Cliff's audio link to DiGenova's broadcasts, let me ask: how accurate have DiGenova's sources been up until now? In other words, what are the chances that details of this 1/5/17 meeting will become public?

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
Since I don't listen to Cliff's audio link to DiGenova's broadcasts, let me ask: how accurate have DiGenova's sources been up until now? In other words, what are the chances that details of this 1/5/17 meeting will become public?

I haven’t kept score, but like Yogi Berra, his forecasting isn’t that great, particularly when it pertains to the future.

Same with Sundance on The Conservative Treehouse with the theories on who was doing what when.

Heck, the same for nearly everyone whose speculating gets too far ahead of the known facts.

An interesting set of coincidences

Papadopoulos now saying he doesn't remember telling the Australian Downer about the Russians having neg info on Clinton

recent Papadopoulos tweet:

“The notion that Downer randomly reached out to me just to have a gin and tonic is laughable. Some organization or entity sent him to meet me,” Papadopoulos wrote on Twitter.

And a reminder: from Strzok texts, we know Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, was visiting London on 10 May 2016 when Downer met w Papadopoulos.

Sarah A. Carter

A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures.

On Monday the Justice Department released a handful of texts and other documents that included two former officials known for their anti-Trump bias – Peter Strzok and Lisa Page of the FBI – discussing the DOJ’s “media leak strategy.” Strzok now says, through his lawyer, that that strategy was aimed at preventing leaks. Nevertheless, days later he and Page approvingly mention forthcoming news articles critical of Trump associates.

“The leaks that have been coming out of the FBI and DOJ since 2016 are unconscionable,” said retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano. “There’s a difference between whistleblowing and leaking for self-serving or partisan purposes.”

Past and present U.S. officials say the template for the leak campaign can be traced back to the Obama administration’s efforts to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which made the press reliant on background conversations and favorable leaks from government officials. Obama adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times in 2016 that “we created an echo chamber” that “helped retail the administration’s narrative.”

“That same configuration,” said Michael Doran, a senior official in the George W. Bush White House, “the press, political operatives, newly minted experts, social media validators—was repurposed to target Trump, his campaign, transition team, then the presidency.” The echo chamber’s primary instrument in attacking the current White House said Doran, “is the Russia collusion narrative.”

RCI has found that the anti-Trump leaks fall into two broad categories or phases. Initially, the leaking was an offensive operation aimed at disrupting Trump’s agenda, especially through leaks alleging connections between his campaign and the Russians. Its early successes included leaks of highly classified material that led to the firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from overseeing that probe.

The second phase – which began roughly a year into the Trump administration – has been more defensive, pushing back against congressional oversight committees that had uncovered irregularities in the FBI’s investigation of Trump. This phase has been marked by the willingness of press outlets to run stories backing off earlier reported leaks that proved to be deeply misleading – including the roots of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and the relationship between Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr and the opposition research firm that produced a central document of that probe, the largely discredited “Steele dossier.”

This second phase has also included articles and opinion pieces – some written by journalists who have published classified information – dismissing suspicions of an orchestrated campaign against Trump as, to use the phrase invoked in a recent New Yorker article, a “conspiracy theory.”

“Former Obama officials and their press allies can call it a ‘conspiracy theory’ or whatever they want,” a senior U.S. official — familiar with how Obama holdovers and the media jointly targeted Trump figures — told RCI. “But they can’t say it’s not true that former Obama officials were furiously leaking to keep people close to Trump out of the White House.”

The focus of the ongoing anti-Trump campaign became clear in March 2016 when the candidate identified Carter Page and George Papadopoulos as foreign policy advisers. For reasons that remain unclear, FBI officials decided that Page, in particular, was a Russian asset and that others on the team might be as well. Instead of alerting Trump to this possibility, law enforcement set up a sting operation.

As RCI has previously reported, FBI informants and figures associated with Western intelligence approached the Trump team with offers of Russian-sourced dirt on Clinton. Among the seven mysterious approaches, the most significant, as RCI recently reported, was a Russian lawyer’s June 9 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with Donald Trump Jr. and others.

That meeting now appears especially suspicious, but not for reasons cited by Trump critics: it was revealed that the Russian lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, met the day before and the day after the tower meeting with Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was being retained by her as well as the Clinton campaign.

At the same time, Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was working with a former British spy, Christopher Steele, and Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr’s wife, to assemble a series of reports alleging Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.

In late summer the “Steele dossier” — portrayed by media outlets as the work of a conscientious foreign analyst frightened by Trump’s unsavory connections — was circulated to Washington newsrooms. Yahoo News and Mother Jones published articles based on Steele’s briefings. High-profile columnists at other publications – the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and the Weekly Standard – rehashed dossier talking points.

The collusion narrative became fully operational at the end of October when the anti-Trump efforts of the Clinton campaign, the media and the FBI intersected. Even though then-Director James B. Comey considered the dossier “salacious and unverified,” the FBI used it, and a Yahoo News article based on Steele’s reports, to obtain a warrant to spy on Page weeks before the election.

Those efforts might have been lost to history but for a stunning event: Trump’s victory. As Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes reported in their book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign”: “Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chairman John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Still in power in the lame-duck period, members of the Obama administration started to play offense, illegally leaking highly classified information aimed at undermining the new administration’s agenda by raising concerns about Russian interference.



A week before the inauguration, a January 12, 2017 article by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius revealed that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – whom President Obama had fired and warned Trump against hiring – had a phone conversation with the Russian ambassador. That information came from a highly classified NSA intercept.

A Feb. 9 news story in the Post drew on more illegally leaked material to provide a fuller account of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. They discussed sanctions that had been imposed by the Obama administration before leaving office.

Other news outlets – especially CNN, BuzzFeed and the New York Times – published such material. But the Feb. 9 Post story is especially telling because one of its reporters was Adam Entous – who was also a co-author of the recent New Yorker article dismissing the idea of a leak campaign coordinated between Obama-era officials and the press as a “conspiracy theory.”

Before leaving the Post, Entous co-wrote a series of 2017 pieces regarding Trump associates based on leaks of classified intelligence. A March 1 article about Jeff Sessions’ meetings with the Russian ambassador was sourced to intercepts of the diplomat’s communications. An April 11 article that has now caught the attention of House oversight committees revealed the active FBI investigation on Page.

Entous’ recent New Yorker article dismissing concerns about leaks, co-written with Ronan Farrow, does not mention these stories. When reached by RealClearInvestigations, Entous said he had no immediate comment.

The first phase of the leak campaign was largely successful in raising doubts about whether the Trump administration really did put America first. It normalized charges of treason lodged against the president by Democrats and former Obama officials now working for the media, including former CIA Director John Brennan.

But the landscape began to change near the end of Trump’s first year in the office, forcing his opponents to shift from playing offense to defense. By then, the White House had replaced many Obama-era holdovers and “Never Trump” Republicans. A number of senior officials at the DOJ and FBI, for instance, resigned, were fired or reassigned and no longer in position to feed the news cycle with a steady stream of classified intelligence.

More important, the leakers presumably knew they were being watched. As congressional oversight committees found evidence of irregularities regarding the FBI’s 2016 investigation, anti-Trump operatives inside and outside the government used new leaks in an apparent effort to cover their tracks.

For instance, after pressure from congressional Republicans showed that the Steele dossier was funded by the Democrats, a new origin story for the FBI’s probe was leaked. In December 2017, the New York Times reported that the investigation actually began with a tip from another presumably apolitical foreign national, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. According to the Times, he reported that Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos had informed him that the Russians had political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton during what the Times characterized as “a night of heavy drinking.” Downer never mentioned emails but the Times states that the dirt he referred to was almost certainly the emails stolen from Democrats and published by Wikileaks in 2016.

That version is now in doubt as Papadopoulos – who was just sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about other matters in the Russia probe – says he doesn’t remember saying anything to Downer about Russia; while standing firm on his central allegation about Russian dirt, Downer says they only had a single drink and a brief discussion.

Favored media outlets also began running stories aimed at discrediting congressional oversight committees that challenged their reporting. In the spring, congressional Republicans asked the DOJ for information regarding any FBI informants ordered to follow the Trump campaign. The press quoted anonymous officials warning that oversight committees were endangering national security — but it was they who leaked to the press personal details of an informant’s identity. A May 21 Washington Post article produced the informant’s name — Stefan Halper, a 74-year-old academic researcher with longstanding ties to American and British intelligence.

The leaks were intended to paint Republicans as reckless partisans willing to risk the safety of constituents, a congressional investigator said. The purpose explained the source, “is to warn Trump against declassifying, and to shape public reception against him if he does.”

Now congressional Republicans are urging the president to declassify three sets of documents — 20 pages of the final renewal of the warrant to spy on Carter Page in June 2017; records of the FBI’s 12 interviews with Bruce Ohr; and exculpatory material related to the warrant on Page. And anti-Trump officials continue to dig in, pre-emptively leaking information about CIA and FBI Russia-related operations that appears to combine classified intelligence with some degree of fiction intended to obscure wrongdoings.

Halper’s name popped up again last month in the New York Times. A veteran GOP operative, Halper collected intelligence on Trump associates. But according to unnamed officials quoted in the story, uncovering his identity has “had a chilling effect on intelligence collection” against Russian targets.

“Informants close to President Vladimir V. Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial details” to U.S. intelligence about the 2016 race have gone silent, the Times reported.

A Washington Post article last year, co-written by Entous, made similar claims about U.S. intelligence sources close to Putin. According to the story, the Obama White House knew of “Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race” based on “a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government.”

If the 2017 Post story is true, that would explain why U.S. intelligence is blind on Russia going into the 2018 midterm elections. After American spies leaked classified intelligence regarding informants in Putin’s inner circles, Moscow would have moved quickly to shut down those channels.

But present and former intelligence officials doubt the veracity of both the Times and the Post stories. “Our sources and methods are sacred, and what we do regarding Russia is extraordinarily secret,” former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told RCI.

“The stuff we do on Russia is so highly compartmentalized that only a handful of people in the CIA know anything about it, never mind the intelligence community as a whole,” said Hoffman. “Journalists wouldn’t get to speak with anyone who does know. I guarantee the authors of these stories don’t know anyone who runs our Russian operations.”

U.S. intelligence officials in the know, say former and current officials, are unlikely to inform Putin via the American press that the U.S. previously infiltrated his inner circles. The apparent purpose of the article, say sources, is to deter Trump from declassifying documents damaging to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Another recent Times story that has raised eyebrows is its Sept. 1 account of the FBI’s efforts to recruit Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Putin, as an informant. Published just days after the release of documents showing that the DOJ’s Bruce Ohr was in close contact with Christopher Steele, who was employed by Deripaska’s London lawyer, the Times story reports that the FBI operation included Ohr and Steele. According to the Times, Deripaska was one among half a dozen Putin associates that the FBI attempted to recruit for the purpose of reporting on Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

A congressional Republican source who spoke to RCI on the condition of anonymity is skeptical of the Times’ account. “The takeaway is that in trying to flip a Putin-allied oligarch, the FBI told Putin that they’re investigating his interference in the 2016 elections. That is not a good look. It looks like the story they’re trying to bury is that in the period leading up to the FBI’s using the dossier to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, a senior DOJ official whose wife [Nellie Ohr] worked on the dossier is meeting with the author of the dossier, who works for a Putin ally.”

Sources say the Ohr story is evidence that the leak campaign is continuing, even as it is being exposed.

And a precedent has been established with this joining together of political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials to prosecute a campaign based on illegal leaks of classified intelligence. It’s not hard to imagine it happening again, regardless of who the next president is, and regardless of party.


https://saraacarter.com/how-an...-offense-to-defense/

Here, based on the interviews, is perspective on how and why President Trump is playing things cool for now—and could well burn hot later.

Federalist
Lee Smith
SEPTEMBER 13, 2018


President Trump’s allies in Congress and the media have long wondered why he doesn’t declassify documents withheld by the Department of Justice that could vindicate him in the Russia probe. What’s stopping him from exercising his constitutional authority, they ask? Doesn’t he recognize the growing danger of inaction with the midterm elections at hand, which could spell his impeachment if he loses his Republican congressional majority?

RealClearInvestigations sought insight into the president’s thinking from current and past senior U.S. officials, most of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity. The picture of Trump that emerges plays against type.

On declassification, the president is not the impulsive hothead major media portray, as epitomized by his “witch hunt” bluster on Twitter. Rather, the sources characterized him as a deliberative, strategic executive inclined to keep his powder dry now for possible detonation later. (Because his supporters—some of whom have seen the documents—are pushing for declassification and his opponents are not, the assumption is that the documents would help the president.)

Trump told Fox News last week that while he didn’t want to interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he may have no choice but to declassify. “At the right time, I think I’m going to have to do the documents,” the president said.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, for one, would be pleased with that step. Nunes told Fox recently that false “media narratives” are burying the real story of anti-Trump machinations within the government. “That’s why the sooner the president declassifies the better,” he said, with an eye toward the November midterm elections that—if Democrats win—would likely place Trump nemesis Rep. Adam Schiff as chairman of the committee.

Nunes and others note that Trump benefitted enormously when he did declassify documents withheld by the Department of Justice (DOJ): the memo written by House Intelligence Committee Republican staff showed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant application used to spy on campaign adviser Carter Page relied on unverified opposition research funded by the Democrats.

Now Nunes and other congressional investigators want him to declassify three other items that could show that the FBI and Department of Justice worked to undermine Trump:

Twenty redacted pages from the final renewal of a surveillance court warrant to spy on Page;

Exculpatory evidence regarding Page omitted from DOJ applications to spy on him; and

Records of FBI interviews with Bruce Ohr, the DOJ’s conduit between the FBI and Fusion GPS, the Democrat- and Russian-paid opposition research firm that produced the unverified memos on Trump’s supposed ties to Russia. Nellie Ohr, wife of the senior DOJ official, was employed by Fusion GPS to work on the anti-Trump research.

Here, based on the interviews, is perspective on how and why Trump is playing things cool for now—and could well burn hot later.

Keeping The Info on Ice for Now
Trump’s Twitter broadsides come across as intemperate, but remember Shakespeare on the methods in madness. The tweets are partly intended to galvanize his supporters for a struggle to come. Trump uses the platform to attack “elite” media narratives and reveal to his supporters how a “deep state” operation is directed not only against him but also the people who elected him.

His base is on board. “Enough has emerged of late to give many Americans—certainly most Republicans and a lot of independents—considerable doubts about the legality of what’s been done to Trump, from the election to the appointment of the special counsel,” former DOJ official David Rivkin told RCI. “Trump is being smart. The more they ‘resist,’ the more they look like the bad guys.”

Even as the president stokes his base with strong rhetoric, Rivkin said, he is holding back on actions that would anger the very officials he is attacking. The DOJ and others in U.S. intelligence agencies are jealous of their institutional prerogatives, including the authority to classify documents, and could rebel if he challenged that directly on a large scale. “Trump may be worried that an order to declassify might be disobeyed,” Rivkin told RCI. “It might instead prompt resignations.”

One senior congressional investigator told RCI such a scenario is unlikely. “When the House Intelligence Committee wanted Trump to declassify the intelligence for the Nunes memo, lots of people warned of resignations and worse,” said the source. “But no one resigned. Those who are now threatening to resign know there are no national security implications at all in the material Congress wants declassified.”

One prominent theory holds that Trump is listening to White House legal counsel Donald McGahn, who is reportedly advising caution (but reported to be leaving his job in the fall). Trump allies are split about the wisdom of such advice. One former administration official described McGahn as “weak,” but another said McGahn’s counsel is wise.

“McGahn is worried about the fallout that declassifying those documents might create,” one former senior White House official told RCI. “He is concerned that Mueller might respond with an obstruction charge.”

Given recent reports that McGahn spent 30 hours speaking with Mueller’s team, he almost certainly has an intimate understanding of its strategy. McGahn could not be reached for comment.

These Docs Could Get Hot Later
Trump heeded the White House lawyer’s advice when McGahn threatened to resign last summer if the president ordered him to fire the special counsel for conflicts of interest. But Trump has a pattern of running through stop signs. In addition to declassifying the intelligence underlying the Nunes memo, he decided to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and exit the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accords, despite the opposition of key Cabinet officials.

Behind everything lies one calculation concentrating Trump’s mind: the prospect of a loss in November. If Democrats win the House, all the investigations looking into abuses and possible crimes committed by Obama officials will almost certainly end, and the anti-Trump resistance will be at the height of its power.

A Democratic victory would not only weaken Trump’s defenses but also provide his opponents with a plan of attack. Some congressional Republicans have long suspected that Mueller’s strategy is to build a case for obstruction and hand it to a Democratic-led Congress to pave the way for impeachment proceedings.

For those urging declassification, bad news may be good news. The president seems to have been left on the defensive for now, with impetus to seize the initiative, by the recent guilty verdicts against former Trump campaign adviser Paul Manafort; the plea bargain struck by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen; and immunity deals for high-level Trump figures.

“The president often lets things play out and stays at a distance,” said the official. “When he gets really mad, he acts. I suspect the same thing is likely to happen with declassification.”

Link

Re: “Trump may be worried that an order to declassify might be disobeyed,” Rivkin told RCI. “It might instead prompt resignations.”

I’m cool with resignations.

I disagree. I think it would simply lead to more delays and more distracting hooplah. I wouldn't tell Trump to NOT declassify just because someone threatened to resign, but I can definitely see trying to pick the right time.

Maybe he is giving the God Damned Commie big mouths the chance to be on Sunday TV shows to handwring, weep, and wail over the terrible damage these security details being released will do to the country.

Maybe it will be the “October surprise.”