Deflating a bubble of expectations?

From FBI Trump-Russia investigation shows deep state was worse than we thought by Mark Penn.

Hmmm. I think of Penn as a stalwart Democratic Party insider. Certainly he was a close ally of and confidante to Bill Clinton. He was chief strategist to Hillary Clinton for her Senate run as well as her first presidential campaign in 2008.

With that sort of background I am startled to find that Penn and I are probably in 80% agreement in regards to the post-2016 accusations of Russia-Trump collusion in their various forms. They seemed manifestly absurd to me at the time and as time has passed and evidence not emerged, increasingly improbable from an already low base. You can only go through so many promises of a "bombshell revelation which will bring down the president" only to discover that there was no there there.

If the Mandarin Class and their wholly-owned subsidiary the MSM cry wolf on a weekly basis and the wolf never shows up, it is hard to maintain confidence in the Mandarin Class and MSM claims.

My current thinking is that there never was evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion. That Russia did meddle in the 2016 campaign by social media disinformation to a similar degree to that they always do. And that we do to them. And that Democrats apparently recently did in Alabama. Nothing out of the ordinary.

As to the Deep State, I don't think there is much evidence to support any belief in a coordinated collusion among top federal law enforcement, federal intelligence agencies, and senior civil servants in the octopus agencies of the Federal government. But there is plentiful evidence to show that there were multiple bad actors with shared assumptions and beliefs who did undertake probably uncoordinated but illegal actions that in any other context would likely be deemed subversive and/or traitorous. The details and extent not yet determined but probably to a greater extent than any patriot would countenance.

Those are positions widely derided in most of the circles in which I travel, but it is an assessment which seems increasingly probable.

That is what I have concluded as an independent observer. How, then, could it possibly mesh with a stalwart Democratic insider?

Now, let’s review some of the actions of the FBI director. Many of these actions were clear at the time; others we know only now. What we have learned since underscores that the president’s firing of Comey was more than justified, and the actions of Comey’s staff and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to trigger the most extensive investigation in history of a campaign, an administration and a president appear to be wholly without justification – and were based instead on politically inspired emotion and hysteria.

James Comey initiated his relations with Trump by holding a one-on-one meeting at which he detailed the allegations of the Steele dossier without disclosing its source. Almost immediately the contents of the dossier leaked out to press, also without the source or verification. Comey publicly confirmed there was an investigation of the administration and yet refused to confirm that the president was not a target of the investigation while he repeatedly told the president that was the case.

We then learned through Comey’s congressional testimony that he decided to take it upon himself to clear Hillary Clinton on her email controversy, and that the memo clearing her was drafted months in advance of much of the actual investigating. Once he believed the attorney general was compromised, as he testified, he should have asked for an independent counsel. Instead he exceeded his role and authority, politicizing the FBI in the process.

His testimony was enough to get Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to endorse Comey’s firing in writing, citing his complete lack of professionalism.

Now, in the year since, we have learned new information that buttresses the case for his firing.

First, Comey’s tweets and comments reveal that he despised Trump, and so the self-serving memos he was making and then leaking about his every contact with the president were likely part of an effort to build a case against Trump. We learned that the FBI was wiretapping a number of Trump campaign officials largely on the basis of the Steele dossier. We learned that the dossier was authored by an operative who hated Trump and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign via hidden payments to their law firm. And we learned that Comey sent FBI agents to question General Michael Flynn about perfectly legal conversations they already had transcripts of, without following White House protocol, in a deliberate effort to entrap him.

On top of all of this, the Carter Page warrants flat-out state that the FBI had long before “concluded” the Trump campaign was working with the Russians.

Somehow every clear security breach in the Clinton camp – like an aide’s classified mail on the laptop of a sex offender or huge payments and contributions from Russian-connected sources – was no big deal, while every fourth-hand contact with someone who could possibly be linked to Russia was evidence that Donald Trump was secretly serving as a Russian agent.

How utterly ridiculous. I didn’t support Donald Trump, and there are lots of things he does I don’t support. But the idea that he was the Manchurian candidate working for the Russians when he ran on an America First platform is patently ridiculous.

What this chain of actions supports is that there is a deep state — a group of unelected officials who now wield power far beyond their constitutional authority – who believe, like Comey, that they know best. In this case it was aided by Obama administration holdovers who never accepted the outcome of the election and sought to prevent it and later reverse it.

There is much more at the link.

It is striking to me that a skeptical independent outsider such as myself should arrive at the same conclusion as a Democratic Party insider on something as existential as this. If all that Penn says is true, it is a massive indictment of the Democratic Party and the MSM and their lies and behaviors over the past couple of years in regard to these accusations.

Has Penn become a closet Republican while I have not been looking? - Seems improbable.

Has Penn not been paying attention to the evidence? - Seems improbable.

Has Penn become a bought and paid-for shill for Trump and the Republicans - Seems improbable.

All possible but all seem to me to be improbable.

It is possible that Penn is simply calling it like he sees it. That would be a compliment to his integrity, and I don't intend to insult him, but that seems markedly out of the norm for a field marked by its intense tribalism.

The most complex explanation, most devious, but in some ways the most sense-making, is that Penn is still a credible Democratic Party insider. That the party is now in a very difficult position in that it has made extreme and unsupportable accusations which will be unsupported in a soon-to-be-released Mueller final report and that the Democratic Party, with Deep State allies, along with a complicit mainstream media will be seen to have colluded to attempt the equivalent of a virtual putsch.

That they are anticipating intense blow-back from faithful party foot soldiers who will be seen to have been lied to and manipulated. That they are anticipating widespread collateral damage among the 40% of the electorate who are not aligned with either party. And that they need someone to foreshadow the failure of the accusations.

They need someone to put some cracks in the impermeable belief-system on which they have bet everything. It has to be someone with party credibility (check), wide public recognition (check), and someone who can take a hiding from the enraged base without being destroyed. And that someone is Mark Penn.

That looks way too elaborate and way too sophisticated. But astonishingly, the other scenarios above seem even more improbable.

In the words of Buffalo Spingfield -

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

[snip]

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down