The resistance appears to be coming together.  In a stunning and historic change of protocol the United States Supreme Court will hold teleconference hearings and will actually live-stream broadcast the oral arguments and questions. Two elements are remarkable.

First, that the Supreme Court would permit a livestream broadcast of any hearing is historic. The purposeful controls of the Court, never allowing video, cameras or live audio broadcasting for their hearings, was always justified around the court never wanting to allow politics and media to shape the serious legal issues being debated.

Secondly, and perhaps not coincidentally, during this live-stream session, the Supreme Court is going to be hearing legal arguments after they consolidated a series of casestargeting the financial and business records of President Donald Trump.  The various lawsuits against President Trump are not only going to be heard, they are going to be broadcast.   It doesn’t get much more political than that.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday it will hold arguments by teleconference in May in key cases, including President Donald Trump’s bid to shield his tax and other financial records.

The court will make live audio of the arguments available for the first time. It had previously postponed courtroom arguments for March and April because of the coronavirus.

The court will hear 10 cases in all between May 4 and May 13. In addition to fights over subpoenas for Trump’s financial records, they include two cases about whether presidential electors are required to cast their Electoral College ballots for the candidate who won their state.

[…] The court has never live-streamed courtroom arguments and only rarely has it made the audio available on the same day. Cameras also are not allowed in the courtroom.

Most federal appeals courts already have moved to allow arguments by phone, though some cases are being postponed or decided without arguments.

The Supreme Court did not indicate when it might decide the cases it will hear in May. The court usually winds up its work for the summer by the end of June, and returns to the bench on the first Monday in October. Another 10 cases that were postponed because of the virus outbreak will be argued in the fall, said Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who will argue one of those cases, involving rapes by members of the military.

The justices last met in public on March 9, and have held private conferences by telephone since then. The court has decided seven cases in the past month, and while the justices customarily read a summary of the decision from the bench, all the opinions have been released online.

The justices all remain healthy, court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg said.  (read more)

In December of last year the Supreme Court granted the petition for a writ of certiorari and said they would hear all cases related to attempts to gain President Trump financial records and tax filings.

The Supreme Court issued a stay upon all lower court action and consolidated the cases into one writ.  The court will hear arguments in May and release a ruling later in the summer of 2020.

President Trump went to the Supreme Court after the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Capital One seeking President Trump’s tax records. In his request to the court [Read Here] Trump asked SCOTUS to block the subpoenas on the ground they go beyond the committees’ powers.

Justice Ginsburg stayed the lower court decision and ordered the House of Representatives to file a response by Wednesday, December 11, 2019.  The cases and issues were then discussed at their private SCOTUS conference.  The court decided to take up all the cases.

The underlying House case has several defects and there is a strong likelihood President Trump would win the case:

House Oversight is one of three committees that 26USC§6103(f) requires the IRS to turn over individual returns “upon request”.

They requested (PDJT taxes for 6 years 2013-2018) long before Pelosi announced her impeachment inquiry, way before the House vote on same, to which Pelosi said Sunday, (paraphrased) “We haven’t decided to impeach. We are only inquiring about it.”

The ‘upon request’ is not as absolute as it seems. The request must still be predicated on a legitimate legislative purpose. SCOTUS has held (I skip the rulings, since previously commented on here many months ago) that there are only two valid purposes, both constrained to legislative powers expressly granted by A1§8.

1. An inquiry into making, repealing, or amending an A1§8 law.
2. Oversight of executive administration of an existing law.

With respect to (1), a legitimate legislative purpose would be reviewing real estate tax law for possible changes. BUT then, the request should have come from Ways and Means (Neal) where tax laws originate. AND, it should have included requests for tax returns from other big real estate developers also. Singling out only PDJT is a fatal defect to this purpose.

With respect to (2), after Nixon/Agnew the tax code was amended to require a special IRS audit of annual POTUS and VPOTUS returns, with the results held in the National Archive. Reviewing those special audits by IRS would be a proper Oversight and Reform legislative purpose, BUT ONLY for 2017-2018 after PDJT was inaugurated. The earlier 4 years demanded are a fatal defect to this purpose.

Both these valid points were raised by President Trump and were already on their way to SCOTUS. Now the committee is trying to ‘cure’ these fatal request defects by claiming the returns are necessary for impeachment. This raises four new issues where PDJT can also win.

1. Impeachment is not a legislative purpose within A1§8.
2. Articles of Impeachment have historically been the the province of Judiciary, NOT Oversight.
3. The demand was made BEFORE the impeachment inquiry unofficially started and cannot be retrospectively cured.
4. No tax ‘high crimes of misdemeanors’ have even been alleged. Impeachment fishing expeditions are unconstitutional.

IMO this case has the potential to set a major constitutional precedent about POTUS harassment via political impeachment. The constitutional convention minutes and Federalist #65 both make it clear why ‘maladministration’ (the original third test after treason and bribery, and which WOULD allow for political impeachment) was replaced by ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors’. The phrase was borrowed from prior British law, has a specific set of meanings, and DOES NOT allow political impeachment. (link)

The quest for President Trump’s financial records is essentially a legislative and political fishing expedition in an attempt to gain opposition research for their Democrat candidate in the 2020 election.  [Joe Biden or other]

Catherine Herridge ponders what could possibly lay behind the remain redactions on footnote #350.  We know the overall subject matter relates to U.K. intelligence, Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, and the overall lack of interest by the FBI to undermine their objective; the investigation of the Trump campaign. [Tweet]

Not to sound overly dismissive to the question, but the remaining redactions, intentionally placed by the CURRENT DOJ, only relate to the specific sources and methods within what we know was an investigative partnership between the FBI and British intelligence.

Who or what the specific agencies are [and I’ll share one possibility below] is essentially irrelevant to the larger story.  Unfortunately, the DC administrative state writ large, is attempting to obfuscate the real story by focusing on “Russian disinformation” within the Steele report that was not identified by the FBI.

That DC narrative is a great deflection from the more uncomfortable reality that U.S. intelligence officials purposefully and willfully worked to create, promote and support a dossier they knew from the outset was garbage.  They all knew the dossier was junk because the U.S. intelligence apparatus and political operatives provided the material to include within it.

So here’s footnote #350 from the Herridge tweet, modified only by size to use as a template for possible redaction discussion:

And… considering what we know about the subject matter that is discussed in fn350; and considering what is already known from prior research and public document production; here is a rough example of what could be behind the redactions.

Again, in the big picture the redacted material is moot.  We know the FBI used U.K. sources to corroborate Christopher Steele’s work product; and we know British agencies informed FBI officials that Steele was unreliable, biased in his views toward Donald Trump as a target, and lacking due diligence as an outcome of his intent.

In reality Chris Steele only used one primary sub-source, in addition to the information he was being fed by Fusion-GPS, Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, democrat allies of Hillary Clinton, U.S. media conscripts, officials of the U.S. intelligence community (FBI, CIA, DOJ-NSD) & finally The U.S. State department.  All of these operators participated in the assembly of a political opposition research document without any verification. {Go Deep}

So the part where we ask questions about U.S. agencies not verifying the material inside a dossier they helped assemble, promote and exploit is, well, a little silly.  Alas, this is the pretend questioning game the DC machine likes to play.

Meanwhile most people avoid asking why Attorney General Bill Barr classified the IG report footnotes in the first place.

The only material behind the classifications is material that exposes U.S. corruption; U.S. intentional wrong-doing; and the use of intelligence surveillance as a political weapon.

♦Footnote 334 Before

♦Footnote 334 After

{Go Deep With Source Material}

Do you see any “sources or methods” in that redaction?

Of course not….

So why was it there?

The only thing the DOJ was hiding was: the reality of a Primary Sub-source who said his contacts were not viewed by him as a network of sources.  That is correct, they were just random people he interacted with as an ordinary part of life…. and they chatted about rumors, gossip, innuendo, theories, and stuff.  [Just like it said in the IG report]

Footnote 334, outlining the PSS who gave Steele the majority of information, was embarrassing to the CURRENT institutional interests of the FBI because it showed the prior FBI officials were on a mission; undeterred by truth.

The FBI is a mess of political targeting operations.

That’s what was redacted in the December 2019 IG report, a mere four months ago.  Embarrassing stuff that makes the CURRENT institutions of the DOJ and FBI look bad.  So they hid it…. again… as they continue to hide damaging and embarrassing material.

Which brings me to the point of AG Bill Barr and his biggest challenge.

The challenge for Attorney General Bill Barr is not investigating what we don’t know, but rather navigating through what ‘We The People’ are already aware of…. And then finding a way to protect the institutions of the DOJ and FBI while getting people to stop demanding action to address the corruption within them.

We are once again stuck in this stupid place where DC pretends the previous CIA, FBI and DOJ officials were duped by “Russian disinformation”, while we roll our eyes at them because we know the truth; and we know that they know the truth; but their pretense is supported by a willfully blind media.

AG Bill Barr has to keep feeding the purveyors of investigative hope-porn as a method to keep the pitchforks at bay, while simultaneously trying to figure out how to do nothing of substance so he can preserve the institutions. Remember, the DC system operates on an entirely different legal principle when it comes to internal investigations within the bubble.

As a result we get AG Barr saying “if John Durham can find evidence of criminal conduct”; where “criminal” in DC is defined around a DC-exclusive legal theory of “intent” that doesn’t apply anywhere else in the country.  [examples: see Hillary Clinton; or see IG Horowitz saying he couldn’t find intent.]

If John Q Public violated a law, the FBI would break down our door in a no-knock raid and use the violation as leverage to get us to break.  The FBI would not sit around debating  whether John intended to violate the law; they’d deal with that aspect after the raid and the pressure on us to fork over $250,000 in a legal effort to defend ourselves.  [example: see Roger Stone]

But in the DC-tier of justice, where administrating the law is subject to the internal rules that don’t apply outside the bubble, everything must be filtered through “intent”. When intent is transparently obvious, the DC legal theory moves to the second filter where collateral damage to the institutions must be weighted. [example: see James Wolfe]

AG Bill Barr has no intention on prosecuting any former individual or entity, regardless of their political hierarchy and/or level of participation, in the matrix of the coup effort against Candidate/President Trump….  unless the DC-exclusive legal hurdles are met.

(1) There must be clear intention that cannot be excused by the coup participant behind obtuse justifications.  If the corrupt participant says they had to follow-up and investigate because the Trump-Russia ramifications were so enormous (ie. the justification trap); and there’s nobody to refute that, then it’s over.

(2) There must be no collateral damage to the institutions of government.  No executive agency or branch of government can be compromised by the truthful prosecution of an individual from within it.  If the consequences are severe enough to damage an entire institution, then it’s over.

The current DOJ redactions and lack of declassification of a host of known material (including the scope memos), is directly related to #2, the need to preserve and protect people (Rosenstein) and the institutions (DOJ/FBI/Congress).

Think about the argument:  Are we debating what lies behind redactions on current DOJ documents from the AG Bill Barr agency; and simultaneously believing that AG Bill Barr is going to deliver some form of justice from inside the institution of the DOJ?

The Bill Barr Dept. of Justice is currently engaged in an ongoing effort to cover/redact  details that are embarrassing to the institutions; but the same Bill Barr Dept. of Justice is going to prosecute those who embarrassed the institutions?…

There’s something akin to a Stockholm Syndrome in the ability of people to rationalize away two mutually exclusive facets of DOJ behavior. And no, the redactions have nothing to do with U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation. Look at them again if needed.

In the fulsome picture, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is trying to navigate.

…The challenge for Attorney General Bill Barr is not investigating what we don’t know, but rather navigating through what ‘We The People’ are already aware of… And finding a way to tamp down the inquisition…

[@4:10 of Video] INGRAHAM – What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the, the final report, on what happened with this, what can you tell us?

BARR – “Well I think a report y’know, may be, and probably will be, a by-product of his activity; but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report, he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on. And, uh, as you know, being a lawyer yourself, building these cases, especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here, uh…, it takes some time, it takes some time to build the case.  So he’s diligently pursuing it.”

“My own view is that, uh, the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness, there was something far more troubling here; and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

INGRAHAM – “The president is very frustrated, I think you, you obviously know that; about Andrew McCabe, uh, he believes that people like McCabe and others just were able to basically flout the laws, and so far with impunity.”

BARR – “I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history.  Without any basis uh, they, uh, they started this investigation of his campaign; and even more concerning actually, is what happened after the campaign; a whole pattern of events while he was President. uh, So I, to sabotage the presidency; and I think that, uh, or at least had the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

INGRAHAM – “Will FISA abuses be prevented going forward given what happened here where FISA judges were not given critical pieces of information; material facts about evidence that informed the governments’ okaying of surveillance on American citizens.”

BARR – “You know I think it’s possible to put in a regime that will make it very hard, either to willfully circumvent FISA, or to do so sloppily without due regard for the rights of the American person involved. And also to make it very clear that any misconduct will be discovered and discovered fairly promptly.”

“So I do think we can put in safeguards that will enable us to go forward with this important tool.. uh.. I think it’s very sad, uh, and the people who abused FISA, have a lot to answer for. Because this was an important tool to protect the American people, they abused it, they undercut public confidence in FISA but also the FBI as an institution: and we have to rebuild that.”