And does this review of a review need a review?

I'm reading "Obama’s Trump-Russia collusion report was corrupt from start: CIA review" (NY Post): "A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were 'excessively involved' in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a 'chaotic,' 'atypical' and 'markedly unconventional' process that raised questions of a 'potential political motive.' Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, 'undermined the credibility' of the assessment."

"There was message distortion. All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation."

"Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five."

Said former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., quoted by the WaPo fact checker Glenn Kessler in "The Hunter Biden laptop and claims of 'Russian disinfo.'"

The Politico story, published October 16, 2020, just before the last presidential debate, was "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." 

As Glenn Kessler describes it:

"[A] foreign citizen produces a catalog of unverifiable, scandalous accusations against a U.S. presidential candidate, attributed to unnamed Russian officials."

"Paying for this 'opposition research' is the candidate of the party in power. Her confederates, including elected Democrats, conspire to use the FBI's possession of this document to get U.S. media outlets to report allegations from sources who won't identify themselves, who offer no support for their claims, passed along by an operator whose political motives are manifest.... If you are not by now open to the suspicion that the blowhardism of former Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper is aimed at keeping the focus away from their actions during the election, then you haven't been paying attention. In his New York Times op-ed this week after being stripped of his courtesy, postretirement security clearance, the CIA's Mr. Brennan finally put his collusion cards on the table: Mr. Trump's ill-advised remark during the campaign inviting Russia to find the missing Hillary Clinton emails. Really? This is it?... [Trump's] jibe was at least as much aimed at the media, which he correctly noted would eagerly traffic in the stolen emails even as it deplored Russian meddling."

From "The Press Abets a Coverup," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in The Wall Street Journal:

"James Clapper did NOT say what Donald Trump keeps saying he said."

A hilarious headline that expresses the end-of-my-rope frustration of anti-Trumpers, from Chris Cillizza at CNN.

Clapper was on "The View" yesterday and it went like this:

BEHAR: "So I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump's campaign?"

CLAPPER: "No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don't particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence which is what they do."

BEHAR: "Well, why doesn't [Trump] like that? He should be happy."

CLAPPER: "He should be."

Well, Trump seems happy that the word "spying" slipped out of Clapper as he was talking about what the FBI was doing. Clapper obviously knew he slipped, since he immediately tried to (subtly) erase it.

Trump displayed his happiness by tweeting: "'Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign' No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!" And, talking to reporters: "I mean if you look at Clapper ... he sort of admitted that they had spies in the campaign yesterday inadvertently. I hope it's not true, but it looks like it is."

Here's how Cillizza tries to wriggle out of it:

Clapper makes crystal clear that the FBI was not spying on the Trump campaign. And he also makes clear that while he doesn't like the word "spying" -- because we are talking about the use of a confidential source -- that, to the extent there was any information gathering happening in conversations between the FBI's informant and members of the Trump campaign, it was entirely designed to shed light on Russian meddling efforts related to the 2016 election.

Clapper began by saying "no" to the question whether the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, but then concedes that they were spying. He doesn't like the word, because it's politically hot (and maybe illegal/unethical), but he used it. Then the question is where were they spying. They were spying on the Trump campaign.

The qualification "on what the Russians were doing" refers to the Trump campaign, not to the Russians generally. I understand that the motivation may have been to see what was the interaction between the campaign and the Russians, but that is still spying on the campaign. Now, the motivation could also have been to figure out a way to defeat Trump. I don't know.

To my ear, the phrase "on what the Russians were doing" is there as a denial of the political motivation, to say that it was legitimate to spy on the Trump campaign because the reason was to deal with genuine concern about Russians doing things within the Trump campaign. My interpretation is supported by Behar's response, "Well, why doesn't [Trump] like that? He should be happy," which Clapper jumped to ride along with, "He should be."

Cillizza:

Clapper said that the FBI didn't spy on the Trump campaign. He said that the only information gathering that happened with the confidential source was related to Russian interference. 

That just says that the spying on the Trump campaign was limited, not that there wasn't spying on the Trump campaign!

Any honest reading of the entirety of what Clapper said -- and you can read the whole quote in about 15 seconds! -- makes clear that a) Clapper doesn't believe the FBI was spying on Trump's campaign and b) the information gathering being done by the FBI's confidential source was aimed at Russia and designed to protect Trump and his associates, not to mention American democracy more broadly.

Any honest reading...  so, by Cillizza's lights, I'm not being honest.

How could reading what Clapper said make clear that Clapper does't believe something? Clapper could be lying or bullshitting. What's inside somebody's head is rarely clear even when the statements are clear. But looking only at the meaning of the text, Cillizza's interpretation doesn't sound right to me, and his assertion that his view is the only "honest reading" is an affront to our intelligence.

But let's put aside the technicality of what may be an inadvertent mistake in writing about what Clapper believes (as opposed to what he asserts). Cillizza's efforts at calling Trump wrong fail because Cillizza is only talking about the reasons why the FBI spied on the Trump campaign, not whether the FBI spied on the Trump campaign.

ADDED: Since Clapper was on "The View," he should have said "Yeah, it was spying, but it wasn't spying spying."

ALSO:

Four things to understand about SPYGATE: 1) There was no spy in the Trump campaign. 2) The spying that did NOT happen was totally justified. 3) It would be bad for national security to identify the spy who doesn't exist. 4) His name is Stefan. #SPYGATE

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 23, 2018

Reading the Comey interview transcript, I get a "Cat Person" vibe.

From the transcript, here's Comey describing his conflicted, confusing feelings about that encounter on the evening of January 27, 2017:

JAMES COMEY: ... and so I said, "Sir, whatever you-- whatever you like." And he said, "Well, why don't we make it 6:30?" And I said, "Sure." And then I called Patrice, broke our date, and-- as luck had it, I had-- an encounter with Clapper, who had left the government but we were giving him a recognition as honorary F.B.I. agent. And I told him about this invitation and he told-- comforted me by saying, "Yeah, I've heard lots of other people are getting calls to come for dinner." 

He comforted me...

And so then in my head I was-- "Okay, so it's a group thing. He must be having a group thing tonight, a group thing tomorrow night. That's fine." And so I went over there expecting-- a crowd of people.

And so then in my head I was... I feel as though I'm reading a #MeToo story told by a young woman. Why didn't he say "I thought..." like a plain-spoken adult? It's like the inside of his head is an environment with moods and wisps of cognition. He's invited into a private space, he has his trepidations, but other people will be there, and he's hoping he won't be alone with the man.

"US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election..."

"... sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump... The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence, according to one of the sources. The FBI then restarted the surveillance after obtaining a new FISA warrant that extended at least into early this year...."

You may remember a series of Trump tweets last March:

1. "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

2. "Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"

3. "I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"

4. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp* my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

Here's BBC discussing the response to those tweets back in March:

[The tweets] were not backed up by any evidence, and Mr Obama's spokesman and former US intelligence chief James Clapper denied that any wiretap had been ordered.... FBI Director James Comey for the first time on Monday confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that the agency is investigating possible links between Russia and Mr Trump's associates as part of a broader inquiry into Moscow's interference in last year's election. He also disputed Mr Trump's wiretapping claims.

"With respect to the president's tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI," he told the panel....

"Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting."

Eli Lake says Obama got it wrong on "60 Minutes":

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. "Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting," the former official said.

"The director of national intelligence, in March, did directly lie to Congress, which is against the law."

"[James Clapper] said they were not collecting any data on American citizens, and it turns out they're collecting millions of data on phone calls every day."

Rand Paul. Video at the link.

Watch Clapper lie.

He's got a tell:

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"No spy should have that big a tell."

"The top intelligence official in the United States condemned as 'reprehensible' leaks revealing a secret program to collect information from leading Internet companies..."

"... and said a separate disclosure about an effort to sweep up records of telephone calls threatens 'irreversible harm' to the nation’s national security."

The comments by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence,... raise the specter of broad, new investigations into the leaks of secret and classified government documents at a time that Mr. Obama’s administration is already under fire in Washington for aggressively pursuing unauthorized leaks of information by monitoring the activities of journalists.

Questions began about how the documents — marked TOP “SECRET//SI//NOFORN” — emerged even as lawmakers, civil liberties activists, technology executives and members of the public reacted to the scope of the surveillance efforts.

"I am somewhat surprised and frustrated to read reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was responsible..."

"... for removing references to Al-Qaeda from the unclassified talking points about the Benghazi attack that Ambassador Susan Rice and other officials used in the early days after September 11, 2012," says Senator John McCain.

"I participated in hours of hearings in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week regarding the events in Benghazi, where senior intelligence officials were asked this very question, and all of them – including the Director of National Intelligence himself – told us that they did not know who made the changes. Now we have to read the answers to our questions in the media. There are many other questions that remain unanswered. But this latest episode is another reason why many of us are so frustrated with, and suspicious of, the actions of this Administration when it comes to the Benghazi attack."

He's presumably referring to this CBS news story that we were talking about yesterday. How can that news story be true if the Director of National Intelligence didn't know who made the changes? Did the director — James Clapper — dissemble before the committee? Maybe McCain just got it wrong. The cover story is... what? Some faceless entity within the Office of the Director is the scapegoat.

Petraeus fell because of the affair, the drone program, or Benghazi — which is it?

"Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus resigned after a probe into whether someone else was using his email led to the discovery that he was having an extramarital affair," The Wall Street Journal reports, without naming sources. I selected some items from the article that relate to the time line:

It was the second national-security revelation to come to light in the two days after President Barack Obama won re-election. On Wednesday, the Pentagon acknowledged that Iranian fighter planes had fired on an unmanned reconnaissance drone five days before the election....

Mr. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before the Senate intelligence committee next week. Michael Morell, who was named acting director of the CIA after Mr. Petraeus's resignation, will appear instead....

Administration officials said the White House was briefed on the affair Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Obama was informed Thursday by his staff and met with Mr. Petraeus that day. Mr. Petraeus then offered to resign. The announcement came Friday afternoon....

The computer investigation began late this spring, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Mr. Petraeus wasn't interviewed by the FBI until recently....

He presided over a moderation of the CIA's controversial drone program to take into greater account diplomatic sensitivities, a shift that sometimes put him at odds with the head of the agency's Counterterrorism Center.

Let's reorganize those facts:

1. Drones. Petraeus had moderated the drone program to make it more diplomacy-sensitive,  the head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center was not happy with that, and Iran fired on a drone 5 days before the election.

2. Benghazi. Petraeus was about to represent the CIA in testimony before Congress and now he will not.

3. The gmail account. This problem dates back to last spring, but Petraeus was only interviewed about it recently, the White House was briefed on Wednesday and Petraeus was confronted and pushed/fell into resignation in the next 2 days.

Given the timing of these 3 sets of facts, it's hard to believe Petraeus left because of the affair or the problem with his gmail. It seems much more likely to have to do with the drones or Benghazi.

By the way, who is the head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center?