"By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden."

"It was not clear whether Biden had been examined or just what happened to him in Las Vegas.... 'On Sunday morning,' [a senior official in Washington told me], with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, 'Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, "Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment."... 'It was clear at this point... that she would get the nod.... But Obama also made it clear... that he was not going to immediately endorse her. But the group had decided that her work as a prosecutor would help her deal with Trump in a debate.... [Obama] had an agenda and he wanted to seek [sic] it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.'"

Writes Seymour Hersh, "LEAVING LAS VEGAS/Inside the last tortured days of the Biden campaign" (SubStack).

Hersh suggests that Harris continues to be under Obama's control, and "she had better perform." She's not the nominee yet.

Hersh also writes that Kamala Harris "often showed little interest" in "the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified summary of current intelligence that is prepared overnight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and delivered by hand to the most vital offices in Washington, including the vice president’s." Hersh says that Harris even "asked the agency to stop delivering it to her."

Speaking of Seymour Hersh... his name came up in a NYT obituary published yesterday, "William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in My Lai Massacre, Dies at 80/Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, but Lieutenant Calley was the only one found guilty":

"Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant 'fairy tale' on the word of a single, unnamed source."

"This source fits the profile of nearly all of [Seymour] Hersh’s informants in the national security world: a grizzled veteran of the intelligence sector who, freed from the shackles of government work, has become a withering critic of the national security state and American hubris overseas...," writes James Kirchick, in Slate.

The problem is that Hersh hasn’t moved past 1969: It’s always My Lai, and the government is always composed of people as devious as the denizens of the Nixon White House....

Hersh’s placement of this article in the London Review of Books, a literary journal whose take on international affairs tends toward the Chomskyan... is notable in that it has become the go-to place for Hersh’s exposés of American perfidy in the Obama era.... The first piece Hersh published in the London Review of Books, a fantastical 2013 concoction accusing Syrian rebels of gassing their own civilians and the Obama administration of “cherry-picked intelligence” in its brief against the Assad regime, was passed over by [The New Yorker], as it similarly passed over his fable about the Bin Laden raid... The New Yorker, where Hersh has contributed since 1971, published Hersh’s thinly sourced calumnies when his target was the Bush administration. Yet the magazine suddenly lost interest the minute he started accusing Obama of “lies, misstatements and betrayals.”

"Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto," Seymour Hersh said.

Okaaaay.

What is this madness in The Nation?