Complicated business.

We found it. We declassified it.

Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives - and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people. pic.twitter.com/PCpLFLuPmI

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 12, 2025

AI is maddening, but also fascinating. This previously would’ve taken days of work, but Grok just did it in less than three minutes. pic.twitter.com/OH8wSqmrbH

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 12, 2025

"Look how angry the regime gets when you ask simple questions about what it’s doing."

Writes Sean Davis, who'd had the gall/wit to ask, last Monday, "Do we have any evidence that Biden is even alive right now?"

"There are basically four competing narratives or theories about what led to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump."

Writes Sean Davis (at X):

1) Through a combination of incompetence and innocent mistakes and garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude, a gunman was able to penetrate security and take multiple shots at Trump. 

2) The right hand of the Biden security regime deliberately starved Trump’s security detail of resources and assigned a squad of C-team rejects to his detail knowing it would make Trump vulnerable. 

3) Includes all of option 2, but also includes the left hand of the Biden security regime independently but deliberately inciting and weaponizing, and potentially even hand-holding, mentally unwell freaks to take matters into their own hands and eliminate Trump (analogous to what the FBI did when it created and led the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping and murder plot). 

4) The Biden regime itself explicitly attempted to assassinate Trump via its own shooter(s), and the named assassin is all deliberate misinformation and misdirection.

Go to the link to see where Davis says he is, but first take my survey:

Which of the 4 options seems most likely?

1

2

3

4

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt."

Writes Sean Davis in The Federalist.

Very strong words. Read the whole thing. Excerpt:

About those newly declassified Flynn transcripts...

At The Federalist, from Sean Davis: "Declassified Flynn Transcripts Contradict Key Mueller Claims Against Flynn/Newly released declassified transcripts of call transcripts and summaries between Flynn and Kislyak contradict key claims made against Flynn by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller." ("Although Obama officials claimed via leaks to the press that Flynn, a decorated combat veteran and retired three-star Army general, was illegally operating as a secret Russian agent, the transcripts show that Flynn’s primary focus throughout his conversations with Kislyak was ensuring that Russia and the U.S. could work together to defeat Islamist terrorist [sic] and the growing influence of ISIS throughout the Middle East. Obama officials never explained how working with international partners to defeat ISIS constituted a federal crime.")

At NY Magazine, from Jonathan Chait: "New Transcript Shows Trump Adviser Michael Flynn Colluding With Russia in 2016." ("Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak were not part of a criminal conspiracy. They were, however, part of a secret channel of communications, the premise of which was that the two parties had a secret common interest against the United States government. One word that might describe this relationship would be 'collusion.'")

At the NYT, from Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos: "Flynn Discussed Sanctions at Length With Russian Diplomat, Transcripts Show/The former national security adviser now says he does not remember those discussions as he fights a criminal charge he had previously pleaded guilty to" ("Critics of the Trump administration seized on the transcripts’ discussions as evidence that Mr. Flynn was undermining existing Obama administration foreign policy. They argued that the Constitution allows for only one president at a time and that if an incoming administration begins foreign policy negotiations before taking office, it confuses the issue of who holds power.... Conservatives have said that Mr. Flynn did nothing wrong and that it was in the public interest for him to represent the views of the incoming administration.")

Why can't John Bolton's publisher just release the book ahead of schedule so we're not subjected to second-hand reports of what's in it?

Here's the book (in Kindle form), on Amazon, scheduled for release on March 17th. Yes, there are commercial interests here, but there are overriding national interests... unless there are not.

So which is it? Like a lot of other people, I'm trying to extract the real meaning of the NYT article, "Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says/Drafts of the book outline the potential testimony of the former national security adviser if he were called as a witness in the president’s impeachment trial."

We're haggling and agonizing about whether Bolton can testify at the impeachment trial, as if he's a crucial repository of information that can only be delivered through live testimony, but that book exists. It's just being withheld — withheld and teased, through people who are very antagonistic to Trump.

It reminds me of the way Trump antagonists began this impeachment process with inflammatory reports of what Trump said in the Ukraine phone call. But there was a transcript of that phone call, and Trump changed the conversation about it by releasing the transcript.

Release the damned book!

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.... The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

So, the book is already circulating to outsiders as part of the review process, and the White House is being given an opening to assert executive privilege and suppress all or part of the book. Everything will still come out, one way or another. It's already dribbling out, in a distorted form.

The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book’s contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said Sunday night.

Trump had the power to release the transcript of the Ukraine phone call, but it's not so easy to release somebody else's book. There's a big commercial interest here, and it seems that Bolton's cashing in on his intimacy with the President is more important that serving the people as we are subjected to this impeachment ordeal. The manuscript is out there, and many people are reading it, but it's the pre-publication review process, and — big surprise — it's leaking. Well, that's to be expected, and now we're reading the leaks as the NYT chooses to present them, presumably in the hope of opening up the Senate trial. And from Bolton's camp, what we hear is crying over corruption of the process — not the Senate trial process, the pre-publication review process.

If the pre-publication review process is more important than giving us what's in the book while the Senate trial is going on, then I'm guessing what's in the book is nothing we haven't already heard about Trump and Ukraine. And if the White House is the source of the leak — which is the story from the Bolton camp — that's all the more reason to think the book is nothing special.