Politics: January 2018 Archives
Eighteen-minute gap?
"The FBI mysteriously 'failed to preserve' five months of text messages between a senior FBI agent who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation and his mistress, an FBI lawyer.
"The Department of Justice made the disclosure in a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, according to the Daily Caller. The letter states that FBI systems didn't preserve text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
"'The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI's technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,' the letter states. Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, penned the letter.
"Citing 'misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities,' Boyd explained that 'data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected.'"
The Clash Between Donald Trump and Steve Bannon Was Inevitable | National Review
Jim Geraghty writes: "I hope you don't have any toxic personalities in your life; if you do, I hope you can separate yourself from them soon and with minimal pain and aggravation. There are certain people in life who are miserable and can only find pleasure in making other people miserable. Roughly ninety percent of these people's difficult behavior is completely unnecessary, but they've convinced themselves that their snarling is toughness, that their petty grievances are about an all-important code of respect, that their bluster genuinely impresses others, and that their narcissism is because they are doing or are destined to do great things. Their lies are a tool for leverage, their explosive temper a weapon, their refusal to treat others with respect a sign of their 'authenticity.'
"You may or may not think this description applies to the president of the United States. I don't think there's much dispute that this applies to Steve Bannon, who has managed to alienate just about every potential ally along the way in his career in politics....
"In this light, it is not surprising that Bannon would eventually lash out at the president for being yet another person who disappointed him, another person who failed to recognize and appreciate his genius, another person who wasn't enough of a fighter and who didn't have the guts to fight the 'war.' It's not surprising that Bannon would trash Trump's family. Because Steve Bannon's disappointments and problems can never be his own fault; they can never be a consequence for the way he treats people and the methods he uses to achieve his goals...
"Very few of us will ever get the opportunity to shape a presidency and the country's laws like Steve Bannon had in January 2017. And it's hard to imagine that anyone else will fumble away that opportunity the way he did."
