Top Intel lawmaker says ‘it may be forever’ before origins of COVID are known

BY STEPHEN NEUKAM - 03/05/23 

Greg Nash

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) questions John Ray III, CEO of FTX Group, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing to investigate the collapse of crypto giant FTX on Tuesday, December 13, 2022.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said “it may be forever” before the U.S. government knows for sure where COVID-19 came from, despite some Republicans pointing a new intelligence assessment as proof that the virus leaked from a lab in China.

“We have so few facts that inevitably different agencies are going to arrive at different conclusions,” Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

“It may be forever before we actually know exactly what happened,” he added.

Himes’s comments come after the Department of Energy reportedly concluded with “low confidence” that the source of the virus was a leak from a lab. The “lab leak” theory has been popular in conservative circles since early in the pandemic, and Republicans pounced on the conclusion from the agency.

FBI Director Christopher Wray also confirmed last week that the agency has assessed that the origin of the virus was likely a “lab incident” in Wuhan, China.

But Democrats had a more lukewarm reaction to the news, with the White House pointing out that other government agencies believe the virus has natural origins.

Himes pointed to the opaque nature of the Chinese government to explain why it would be hard for the U.S. government to ever reach a firm answer on what exactly happened.

“We have so few facts because the Chinese regime has obfuscated,” Himes said. “And when an agency slightly adjusts its interpretation as the Department of Energy may have done, that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden the government has a firm view.”

Biden chides GOP for ‘trying to hide the truth’ about Black history in marking Bloody Sunday

BY ALEX GANGITANO - 03/05/23 


President Biden on Sunday called out Republicans for efforts to limit teaching parts of Black history as he marked the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

“History matters,” Biden said at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. “The truth matters, notwithstanding what the other team is trying to hide. They’re trying to hide the truth.”

Biden highlighted the importance of teaching African American studies, which comes amid a growing debate over Republicans pushing to prevent the teaching of certain subject matters such as African American studies in schools.

“No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know but not what we should know. We should learn everything, the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. And everyone should know the truth of Selma,” Biden said.

Republicans have in recent years ratcheted up their attacks on “critical race theory,” and earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a likely 2024 presidential candidate, moved to block a new Advanced Placement (AP) course for high school students on African American studies.

“We know where we’ve been and we know more importantly where we have to go, forward, together,” Biden said on Sunday. “So let’s pray, let’s not rest, let’s keep marching, let’s keep the faith.”

“Together we’re saying loud and clearly that in America hate and extremism will not prevail, although they are roaring their ugly head in significance now,” Biden added. “Silence is complicity and I promise you, my administration will not remain silent.”

Bloody Sunday, when 600 civil rights marchers and white police officers violently clashed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 amid the Civil Rights movement, had served as a catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

To mark the anniversary, Biden then walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge along with Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell (D), Rev. Al Sharpton, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn (D), Martin Luther King III, and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, among others. Americans view China as top foe ahead of Russia: Gallup22-year-old rescued after spending nearly 8 hours in the Gulf of Mexico

Biden greeted those on the bridge and then stood in the middle of the front line to walk across, locking arms with Sewell. And, he evoked the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was beaten by police on the bridge while leading the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Biden on Sunday renewed calls for Congress to pass the voting rights bill named after Lewis, which would update the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). He also called for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, end qualified immunity, and prohibit racial and religious profiling by law enforcement officers.

RIP

Creature From The Black Lagoon actor Ricou Browning dies

5 March 2023

Ricou Browning in his movie costume at Wakulla Springs 15055100304 o. Picture: PA

In addition to acting roles, Browning also collaborated as a writer on the 1963 movie Flipper.

Ricou Browning, best known for his underwater role as the Gill Man in the 1950s monster movie Creature From The Black Lagoon, has died, his family told various media outlets.

Browning died aged 93 on February 27 at his home in Southwest Ranches, Florida.

In addition to acting roles, Browning also collaborated as a writer on the 1963 movie Flipper, and the popular TV series of the same name that followed.

He told the Ocala Star Banner newspaper in 2013 that he came up with the idea after a trip to South America to capture fresh-water dolphins in the Amazon.

“One day, when I came home, the kids were watching ‘Lassie’ on TV, and it just dawned on me, ‘Why not do a film about a boy and a dolphin?’” he told the newspaper.

Browning directed the 1973 comedy Salty, about a sea lion, and the 1978 drama Mr No Legs, about a mob enforcer who is a double amputee.

He also did stunt work in various films, including serving as Jerry Lewis’s underwater double in the 1959 comedy Don’t Give Up The Ship, according to The New York Times.

But nothing would mark Browning’s Hollywood career like swimming underwater in an elaborately grotesque suit as the Gill Man, a character that would hold its own in horror movie lore along side monsters like King Kong and Godzilla.

Browning did the swimming scenes in two sequels, Revenge Of The Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Other actors played the Gill Man on land.

Browning told the Ocala Star Banner that he could hold his breath for minutes underwater, making him especially adept for the swimming part.

He was discovered when the film’s director visited Silver Springs, where Newt Perry – who performed as a stand-in for Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller, was promoting one of Florida’s first tourist attractions where Browning got a job as a teen swimming in water shows.

Perry asked Browning to take the Hollywood visitors to Wakulla Springs, one of the largest and deepest freshwater springs in the world. They later recruited Browning to appear in the movie, which was partly filmed at the springs.

Ricou Ren Browning was born on February 16, 1930, in Fort Pierce, Florida. He swam on the US Air Force swim team.

Survivors include his four children, Ricou Browning Jr, Renee, Kelly and Kim; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. His wife, Fran, died in March 2020.

His son Ricou Jr is a marine coordinator, actor and stuntman like his father, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

By Press Association

THEORIES THAT CLAIM THE UNIVERSE IS CONSCIOUS HAVE PERSISTED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS

BY RICHARD MILNER/

March 5, 2023 

We're going to say it: treehuggers get a bad rap. What's so wrong with kindness, o' embittered ones? Ecologist Suzanne Simard on NPR describes trees as not only communicative creatures but social and cooperative creatures who share information from generation to generation. Saplings link to the network of roots beneath the surface and receive nutrients from older trees like a mammalian newborn does mother's milk. Trees even link in networks around an older, "mother" tree. Smithsonian Magazine describes the "wood-wide web" of roots sharing nutrients in the soil, and how those roots connect through fungal fibers to make a full, synthesized network that resembles a brain and its neurons. Trees are robustly alive, not just dormant and dumb. 

Go back far enough, and ancient animists ascribe not just life, but soul, to every river, rock, and fragment of the natural world, as Ancient Origins describes. The Conversation explains how ethnic groups such as the Buryat in Siberia are reviving such beliefs as a way to foster respect for nature. Modern-day Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Heathenism, Shinto and more all retain strong elements of animism. Ultimately, animism implies that Earth is a single, giant lifeform, a notion called the Gaia Hypothesis, per Science Direct. 

But life and consciousness are two different things, as Frontiers in Psychology defines. Humans are conscious, as far as we regard ourselves. But is it possible that our definitions are too limited? Is it possible that the entire cosmos is not just alive, but conscious?

LIFE VS. CONSCIOUSNESS

This article concerns itself with millennia-old, ultimately unanswerable questions tackled by ancient philosophers like Zhuang Zhou and Aristotle, enlightenment philosophers like Descartes and Kant, New Age and Yogic traditions, all the way to modern simulation theory  and neuroscience. Each has come to different conclusions about consciousness. But because everyone more or less agrees that consciousness necessitates life, we need to first define life.

An absolute materialist (matter is all that exists) or empiricist (all knowledge derives from the senses) will simply say: life is what we've seen it to be. Life involves cells and complex protein structures, the encoded transmission of genetic information, organisms that respirate, reproduce, etc., and all such criteria you might remember from elementary school and outlined on Biology Online. But to explore the idea of the universe itself being conscious, we've got to adopt a more holistic, systemic, and admittedly vague definition.

Consciousness is even trickier to define. But as Frontiers in Psychology says, consciousness is an emergent property rather than a characteristic of an object. An apple may be green, hard, tart, and so forth — those are characteristics; its deliciousness is an emergent property. Similarly, consciousness in humans arises from the interaction between play, communication, and tool use. Consciousness, in other words, is greater than the sum of its parts. Science and philosophy often look to the smallest things — the atom, the element, the waveform — to describe reality. Maybe, though, the truth lies in the largest, holistic, even universe-sized scale.

THE HYLOZOISTS OF ANCIENT GREECE

Even amongst those inclined towards holism, it may come across as extreme to postulate that the entire universe is one, single, emergent consciousness. Some of the earliest folks to think in such terms, though, were seventh to sixth-century B.C.E. Greek hylozoist philosophers like Thales, Alaximander, and Heraclitus, as Hellenica World explains. While hylozoists didn't think that the universe was conscious in a self-aware way, they did adopt a kind of ultra-animistic belief, whereby everything everywhere is alive together. But rather than each individual thing having a discreet life — a tree, a mountain, a lion — each thing was a facet of a whole, unified, living cosmos. Such a belief was later defined as monism, the belief that the universe comprises an undivided union of matter and spirit, life and God, into an indivisible oneness.

While it might seem incompatible to talk about modern astronomy, neurology, and biological definitions of life and consciousness on one hand, and pre-modern Greeks with zero present-day scientific understanding on the other, the two are far more related than the reader might realize. Hylozoists and other Greek philosophers were early natural scientists who came to their conclusions based on a combination of observation, rationality, deduction, and so forth. In trying to understand the physical, natural world, they acted as precursors to the investigative rigor that defines modern geology, biology, chemistry, physics, etc. "Science," as a method of inquiry, didn't exist until 17th-century Enlightenment Europe, as Wondrium Daily explains.

A CONSCIOUS, PANPSYCHIC UNIVERSE

So how do we go from "The universe is alive" to "The universe is alive and conscious"? We already said that life is considered a precursor to consciousness — all consciousness is alive, but not all life is conscious. That is, unless our definition of consciousness is as restrictive as our definition of life, as articles like that on Quanta Magazine speculate. 

Philosophy Now dives into the notion that the entire universe is conscious — known modernly as panpsychism — and connects it to the Greek hylozoists. Panpsychism doesn't say that individual electrons are circling the nucleus of an atom and thinking, "Man, this sucks." Rather, panpsychism takes cues from the subjectivity of reality, i.e., we can never fully know the inner experience of any other thing, even an electron. 

So rather than envisioning consciousness as a dimmer on your living room lights that starts egotistically bright (humans), gets dimmer (your dog), even more dim (the plant in the corner), and then pop, conscious is gone, panpsychics suggest that the glow of consciousness — however we define that — remains present even in our most constituent, atomic parts. Instead of defining reality as bundles of dumb matter built from dumb, smaller matter, it might be a more accurate to look at the holistic, gestalt object — the universe — and work smaller. Sites like Aeon admit that panpsychism sounds "crazy" in light of particle physics alone, but makes sense when considering the subjectivity of reality. 

NODES IN THE COSMIC WEB

But the universe is just empty space, you might say. How could it be "conscious"? Stars are orbited by rocky and gaseous planets and separated by light years full of nothing but the ambient hum of electromagnetism and gravity. Well, the same could be said of the neurological framework of the human brain, which looks shockingly similar to the distribution of stars and galaxies across the observable universe, aka the cosmic web. Nodes cluster together, strands connect nodes, and there's space in between. Science Alert shows a side-by-side comparison of the two and describes all the supposed emptiness of space (72% dark energy) as equivalent to the emptiness in the brain (77% water). Twelve-year-old Aine on The Conversation posits an interesting question at this point: "The universe looks like a giant brain. If it's the brain, where's the body?"

Structural similarities between the brain and the cosmos don't indicate that the cosmos is thinking, though. Rather, it's more that the form of a network may be the natural shape that systems of greater complexity take. A single person can only do so much, but two can do much more. Enough humans make a community, and communities attach by roads just like passageways in ant colonies, axons in the brain, or filaments in the cosmic web. And rather than neurons communicating using electricity and chemicals, stars have light and heat. In other words, the collective activity of the entire universe may constitute a form of consciousness. 

SPINOZA'S PANTHEISM: EVERYTHING IS GOD

And so we come to the final facet of panpsychism, one which circles around to animism and lends itself well to the "consciousness is in the smallest atom" argument: pantheism. Pantheism is bound to raise some theological hackles. But even modern, monotheistic religions like Christianity have come to the same conclusion, per Christianity.com. Namely, that God is in everything. Put differently, everything is a facet of God. Or simply, everything is God. If consciousness exists in all material objects of all sizes (atoms, dogs, stars), and that material and spiritual are indivisible (monism), then simply swap "consciousness" for "God" and you've revealed the pantheism hidden within panpsychism.  

This was the exact stance adopted by 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza distilled his views on pantheism (and therefore panpsychism) into 15 propositions, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes as, "God is the infinite, necessarily existing (that is, self-caused), unique substance of the universe. There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God." 

If this is true, then we humans do occupy some strange point of self-reflective cosmic consciousness. If an atom doesn't think about itself, and neither does the entire universe (although who can say for sure?), then it falls on us — smallish but not too small nodes in the cosmic web — to do so. And if the past is any indicator, we'll likely continue to do so for quite some time.

THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE

CACTUS BEARER
Photo credit: Cbrescia.

February 27, 2023/

9 Comments/

Left Theory /

by Ed Walker

Related posts

Posts on The Dawn Of Everything: Link
Posts on Pierre Bourdieu and Symbolic Violence: link
Posts trying to cope with the absurd state of political discourse: link
Posts on Freedom and Equality. link

In Chapter 10 of The Dawn Of Everything the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, take up the search for the origins of the state. They discuss current theories of the nature of the state. They provide a different framework for understanding the term in ancient times, and even suggest that the earliest versions of these organizational structures were part-time, just as agriculture was part-time. Then they give examples of how their theory works.

Theories of the State

Today almost everyone lives under the governance of a nation-state. The generally accepted definition was suggested by Rudolph von Ihering in the late 1800s and is now associated with Max Weber: “… any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory….” P. 359. But that’s not the way things worked in the earliest large groups.

Marxists suggested that states emerged to protect the power of an emerging ruling class, but the authors reject this theory.

A third theory is quite common: as the population in any area increases, you need top-down authority to coordinate and plan. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t right, because a large number of ancient polities operated quite well without an autocratic leader endowed with the power of violence.

The authors suggest that at least for ancient societies we should consider three factors:Sovereignty, meaning the control of violence directed at members of the group and the right to authorize other to inflict violence;
Administration, meaning control over information. This can be of two kinds. Frequently it means factual information necessary to keep things operating, for example taxes due and collected, or corvée obligations. Particularly in early societies it means esoteric or cultic knowledge, for example, explanations of the cosmos and the roles of people in it.
Charisma, meaning a personal power of persuasion that enables one to dominate others.

Each of these factors is a form of dominance, which the authors see as the basis of the state. The authors rephrase the search for the origins of the state from their perspective:

How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day? P. 370.

Dominance in early societies

This material takes up most of the chapter. The authors give examples of societies organized under one form of dominance, which they call First-Order Societies, then societies with two of the forms of dominance, Second-Order Societies. The material is fascinating, and the examples support the use of their categories. I’m only going to discuss one illustration, the Chavin Culture, a pre-Inca group located on the western slopes of the Andes down to the sea near what is now Lima Peru.

This culture seems to have arisen around 3000 BCE, and flowered around 1200 BCE. It lasted another 800 years before disappearing. The authors say there is little evidence of the use of violence, no evidence of a formal bureaucracy, and no evidence of a monarch with sovereign or political power.

The archaeological record is dominated by imagery, primarily carved stone. Here’s a description.


Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns. P. 388.

The authors characterize these as “shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.” The society was held together by rituals and cultic knowledge. The people seem to have enjoyed rituals oriented to hallucinogenic substances made from local plants.

This is an example of a First-Order Society.

Discussion

1. I do like the idea of a stoner kingdom.

2. The authors possibly think that societies are held together through domination. Like power, this is a term they don’t discuss. I did a digression on power, link above. I’ve discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s work on domination, link above. And I’ve discussed some current ideas about freedom, which is the complement to the idea of both, link above.

But they give plenty of examples where that isn’t so. In fact, they seem to think we’d be better off if we lived without domination, or at least in a society where decisions are made in a more democratic system. That contradiction is confusing.

3.

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. P. 276.

Large social units may exist in the imagination, but they have roots in reality. I live in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only know a few of my neighbors, but we are bound together by a number of links. We care about local schools, local traffic, local businesses and our parks in a particular way. If these are threatened, say by a local developer trying to replace a park or increase the traffic burden, we cooperate to deal with it.

I’m bound to other Chicagoans by crucial ties: they staff my doctor’s office, my dry cleaner, and my grocery store, and everything else I need. My life is smooth and pleasant because of them. I care that they are safe and healthy. I care that they have paved streets so they can get to work, and so I care about the people who pave those streets, clear off the snow, fill the potholes, and replace the bulbs in the stoplights. I want everybody’s kids to have good schools, just like I want good schools for my grandkids.

We have other ties. We like brats and argue about pizza. We ride public transport and we talk about the best way to get around in our miserable traffic. We go to movies, theater, concerts, and restaurants together. We can always talk about something here that affects us all, the latest corruption story, property taxes, who the Bears should draft, and the weather.

As I read it, the authors think those ties are strong enough to pull us together as a group without a dominating force.

4. Each of the societies described in the book has a mental component that goes deeper than just being neighbors. They share rituals, cosmologies, stories about themselves as a people, cultic practices, and there’s a shared understanding of themselves as a group. These are taught to children and reinforced by ritual and practice throughout the lives of members. They are at least as important to the maintenance of the group as any of the forms of dominance.

The Founders rejected the idea of a state religion, and we’ve mostly abandoned cultic practices. I think we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

This, roughly, is the mental component that up til now has bound us into a nation. I think the authors miss this point.

======

The Avalon Project : Code of Hammurabi (yale.edu)

TWO OF JIM JORDAN’S SO-CALLED WHISTLEBLOWERS ARE UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR IMPROPER TREATMENT OF FBI FILES

March 5, 2023/5 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection /by emptywheel

As a number of outlets have covered (Rolling Stone did a particularly good story), Democrats on the Insurrection Protection Committee released a report on the only three witnesses — whom Jim Jordan dubiously claims are whistleblowers — who have yet to be formally deposed by the committee. Not only does the report seriously question their claims to be whistleblowers (in part because they have little, if any, firsthand knowledge of the issues about which they claim to be reporting), but the report shows that all three are pro-insurrection conspiracy theorists.

I’ve already written about one, Stephen Friend, who balked that some Three Percenters with ties to the Oath Keepers and Kremers were being treated as a domestic terror threat.

The other two are George Hill, a recently retired Supervisory Intelligence Analyst whose embrace of false flag theories around January 6 should invite defendants in the Boston area to ask for discovery on his potential involvement in any cases, and Garret O’Boyle, an anti-vaxer who refused to take an investigative step against two apparent January 6 leads but suffered no consequences as a result.

I’d like to point out two functional details of the report: as the report describes, two witnesses are under investigation for mishandling FBI files, and those same two witnesses received payments from Trump-related funds, funds that are likely part of the larger January 6 investigation.

JIM JORDAN’S WITNESSES ARE ALLEGED TO BE ACCESSING OR SHARING INFORMATION NOT NECESSARY FOR THEIR JOB

First, the substance of this testimony involves records that were either improperly accessed or outside the witnesses’ job description.

Friend, for example, admitted that he was suspended, in part, for improperly removing parts of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide and other internal documents from the FBI system.

Friend has publicly stated that his security clearance was suspended because he improperly accessed material on FBI computer systems, 220 and during his testimony, he admitted that while a Special Agent at the Daytona Beach Resident Agency, he accessed and removed documents marked “For Official Use Only” from a classified FBI system.221 Specifically, he admitted that in September 2022, he accessed the classified system to get “information about the employee handbook and disciplinary processes,” “a flow chart of the way the Inspection Division works and the OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] process works,” and “copies of the last five OPR quarterlies as a go by for precedent for punishment for my situation.”222 He also accessed and removed elements of the then-current version of the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.223

Remember that Intercept source Terry Albury did prison time, in part, for taking and leaking the DIOG; so any complaint that Friend is disciplined for this amounts to a complaint that he’s being subjected to the same standard as Albury was.

Similarly, O’Boyle was suspended  last year based on allegations he was leaking to the press.

He applied for and was accepted to a new unit in Virginia and was scheduled to begin work there on September 26, 2022.90 His security clearance was suspended that day.91

O’Boyle told the Committee that his suspension notice stated that “an unidentified person … made an allegation that [he] had been making unprotected disclosures to the media,” and that because of this he was “no longer deemed fit to hold a security clearance.”92 He denied having made such disclosures, and he explained that instead he believed that he had been retaliated against because he “had been coming to Congress… for nearly a year.”93 He described this as being a “weaponization of the [security] clearance” process.94 He has appealed that suspension and, to his knowledge, the appeal process is still ongoing.95

[snip]

O’Boyle did confirm that he corresponded with staff of both Rep. Ron Estes and then-Ranking Member Jim Jordan probably “more than 20” times in 2022 and produced “maybe around” 50 documents to them.104 O’Boyle’s attorney advised him “not to talk about specifics of any of his disclosures to Congress … because those are confidential” and in fact prohibited him from describing the substance of any of his communications with the offices of Rep. Estes or then-Ranking Member Jordan.105

O’Boyle has some unspecified role in material that got forwarded from an eGuardian tip, possibly via Jim Jordan, to Project Veritas. PV’s coverage falsely claimed that the FBI had labeled a group called American Contingency a Domestic Violent Extremism group. In reality, the FBI investigated the group’s founder, Mike Glover, and concluded he did not present a threat.

Nevertheless, Jordan cited PV’s coverage in a complaint to Christopher Wray.

O’Boyle admitted that, even though he had no role in this investigation, he was involved somehow in the dissemination of information about it.

Q Did you know anything about the investigation or what has been described as an investigation into him [Mike Glover] prior to having this letter put in front of you today?

A I did.

Q And what did you know?

A Pretty much mostly what’s in here.

Q And that – how did you learn that information?

BINNALL: Prior to our previous instructions, you can answer to the extent it’s appropriate.

A This is one of the protected disclosures that I made.

Q Okay. And it involves Mr. Glover?

A Uh-huh.

Q But you … were not personally involved in any matters involving Mr. Glover in your capacity as an FBI employee?

A Right. I never investigated him.

Q Okay. And what about American Contingency?

A Correct. No.

Q Okay. So you don’t have firsthand knowledge of anything that the FBI may have – may or may not have done?

BINNALL: You can answer to the extent that it doesn’t violate my previous instructions.

A I mean, I guess, in accordance with my work and my protected disclosure, I had some knowledge of what the FBI had done.

BINNALL: And don’t go any further than that.135

It’s unclear whether this is the leak investigation that led him to lose his security clearance. When asked about it, O’Boyle claimed he was set up by someone irked that he was feeding information to Congress for the prior year, but he did not take that complaint through proper channels, to the DOJ IG or Inspection Division. He refused to tell Democrats on the committee what the allegations about leaking pertain to.

Instead, he went to Donald Trump’s lawyer, Jesse Binnell.

Among the claimed whistleblower complaints O’Boyle shared (the other involves vaccine denialism) is that a WFO Special Agent sent him two leads, one based on an anonymous tip, apparently of January 6 suspects.

But I received a lead about someone based on an anonymous tip, and in law enforcement anonymous tips don’t hold very much weight, especially without evidence that you can corroborate pretty easily.

I wasn’t able to corroborate anything they said, even after speaking with the person they alleged potential criminal behavior of.

While I’m trying to figure all that out, I get another lead from the same agent who sent me that lead.108

He explained that he decided to call the agent who had sent him the lead:

Q [A]fter talking to her, my mind was blown that she was still trying to get me to do some legal process on the guy that I got the anonymous tip on. … And so I ended up writing that all up and denying it. …

When we got off the phone, I was like, “I’m just going to close this.” She still wanted me to do what she wanted me to do in the lead, and I was like, no. I can’t…

Q So, to your knowledge, that case was closed?

A To my knowledge, yeah.109

To suggest that anonymous tips related to January 6 were particular unreliable does not hold up against the record of the investigation. This exchange makes him sound just like Friend — someone who refused to investigate suspected perpetrators of January 6, and is trying to launch a career as a far right celebrity as a result.

Finally, there’s Hill, the retired Supervisory Intelligence Analyst who adheres to conspiracy theories about Ray Epps. He reported to the committee on matters he was not personally involved — what sounds like a tip or Suspicious Activity Report from a financial institution pertaining to January 6.

Hill claimed that a financial institution provided a self-generated customer list to the FBI of its own volition, that the Boston Field Office had been asked to conduct seven preliminary investigations based on that list, and that FBI field offices around the country were also asked to open preliminary investigations—according to Hill, the “least-intrusive method” of investigation—based on that list. 32

As noted, Hill explained that he himself did not handle any cases, so his knowledge of the investigations was limited by his role. Moreover, he revealed that he had no information about the origins of the list, he did not recall which entity uploaded the list to the FBI’s system, and, while he viewed an electronic communication referencing the list in the FBI’s case management system, he never opened or viewed the actual list itself. 33

To the committee, attempting to weigh whether there’s merit to Hill’s allegations, this simply reeks of someone reporting on an investigation he was not part of. But it raises real questions why he was monitoring an investigation he was not part of.

In all three cases, people tangentially involved with the January 6 investigation balked at pretty minor investigative steps. And all three at least accessed information outside their job to do so — and in two cases, there are allegations of improper access.

TRUMP-RELATED ORGANIZATIONS PAID TWO OF THESE WITNESSES

The allegations that at least some of these men may have improperly accessed investigative information to which they were not privy is all the more alarming given the detail that two of them — Friend and O’Boyle, the two under more formal investigation by the FBI — have received financial benefits from Trump-related organizations.

Witnesses Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend both testified that they have received financial support from Patel, with Friend explaining that Patel sent him $5,000 almost immediately after they connected in November 2022. Patel has also promoted Friend’s forthcoming book on social media.

But Patel’s assistance has not just been financial. He arranged for attorney Jesse Binnall, who served as Donald Trump’s “top election-fraud lawyer” when Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, to serve as counsel for Garret O’Boyle. When Committee Democrats asked O’Boyle about this financial connection, Binnall appeared to surprise his client with an announcement that he was now representing O’Boyle pro bono. Committee Democrats infer that Binnall hoped to distance his connection to Patel and others.

Patel also found Friend his next job. Friend now works as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by former Trump official Russell Vought and is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which itself is run by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Senator Jim DeMint.

This is where the Insurrection Protection Committee more directly ties into Trump’s own defense against charges for his coup attempt.

Jesse Binnall is Trump’s lawyer; he was even interviewed as part of obstruction inquiry related to the stolen document investigation. His firm has been receiving hundreds of thousands in payments from Trump’s two PACs, over $130,000 in both November and December. This is some of the spending that Jack Smith is reportedly investigating for misuse of campaign funds. So there’s the real prospect that O’Boyle, under investigation for leaking details of FBI investigations against January 6 and other right wing figures, is being paid from funds raised by lying about voter fraud.

Similarly, Trump’s Save America PAC gave $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute. Again, that payment is almost certainly part of the Jack Smith investigation. As the Democratic report notes, Vought’s organization has been focusing on precisely this false weaponization claim.

CRA’s President, former Trump administration official Russ Vought, has embraced many of the themes laid out by the witnesses George Hill, Garret O’Boyle, and Stephen Friend, and Vought reportedly pushed Republican leadership to establish the Weaponization Subcommittee at the start of the 118th Congress.397 In the forward to CRA’s 2023 budget proposal for the federal government, entitled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” Vought wrote,

On the heels of this wrenching national experience is the growing awareness that the national security apparatus itself is arrayed against that half of the country not willing to bend the knee to the people, institutions, and elite worldview that make up the current governing regime. Instead of fulfilling their intended purpose of keeping the American people safe, they are hard-wired now to keep the regime in power. And that includes the emergence of political prisoners, a weaponized, SWAT-swaggering FBI, the charges of “domestic terrorism” and “disinformation” in relation to adversaries’ exercise of free speech, and the reality that the NSA is running a surveillance state behind the protective curtain of “national security.” The immediate threat facing the nation is the fact that the people no longer govern the country; instead, the government itself is increasingly weaponized against the people it is meant to serve.398

Committee Democrats find the connections between Patel, CRA, and CPI deeply concerning. Evidence suggests that these entities were not just a driving force for creating the Weaponization Subcommittee, but are actively propelling its efforts to advance baseless, biased claims for political purposes. This evidence seriously discredits the work done by Committee Republicans and casts further doubt on the reliability of the witnesses they have put forth.

That suggests the prospect that Trump-related figures are violation campaign finance law to fund an NGO to, in turn, pay for FBI agents under investigation for improperly accessing FBI files to spread conspiracy theories about the investigation into Trump and his supporters.

JORDAN’S IMAGINARY FRIENDS

The combination of alleged leaks with payments from funds raised using false claims of vote fraud makes me even more worried about the witnesses that Jordan won’t let be questioned by the Democrats on the committee.

As the Democratic report notes, Jordan says he has spoken to — and received materials from — dozens of other people claiming tobe whistleblowers.

This partisan investigation, such as it is, rests in large part on what Chairman Jordan has described as “dozens and dozens of whistleblowers… coming to us, talking about what is going on, the political nature at the Justice Department.”1 To date, the House Judiciary Committee has held transcribed interviews with three of these individuals. Chairman Jordan has, of course, refused to name any of the other “dozens and dozens” who may have spoken with him. He has also refused to share any of the documents which these individuals may have provided to the Committee.

Jordan recently sent Christopher Wray a list of 16 Special Agents he demands to interview.

Our need to obtain testimony from FBI employees is vital for carrying out our oversight and for informing potential legislative reforms to the operations and activities of the FBI. From the documentary and testimonial information that we have obtained to date, we have identified several FBI employees who we believe possess information that is necessary for our oversight. Accordingly, we ask that you initially make the following FBI employees available for transcribed interviews with the Committee in the near future:

[16 names redacted]

We anticipate that we may require testimony from additional FBI employees as our oversight continues, and we expect your cooperation in facilitating these future interviews as well.

We are aware that the Justice Department has preemptively indicated that it intends to limit the scope and nature of information available to the Committee as part of our oversight.3
You should know, however, that despite the Department’s assertions to the contrary, congressional committees have regularly received testimony from non-Senate-confirmed and line-level Justice Department employees, including FBI employes [sic], in the past. We expect this past precedent to apply to our oversight as well.

Jordan’s list includes 17 names, including Jack Smith. Eleven of those — including Lisa Page — appear to be related to Mark Meadows’ own investigation of the Russian investigation. Jordan is effectively saying he has the right to interview line agents because Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr let him do so, to undermine the last investigation into Donald Trump.

Jordan provides no basis for needing to interview these people. He doesn’t provide any explanation about how they might provide evidence of improper FBI activity.

According to Breitbart, which claimed to have seen transcripts of the Jordan witnesses interviews, said the 16 people “had been named by the three witnesses in the closed-door interviews.” In other words, three disgruntled FBI agents, two under investigation for wrong-doing, are leading Jim Jordan by the nose to make life hell for their former colleagues.

But those two other details make this different.

These people are being given financial benefits from Trump-related sources, financial benefits that may themselves be part of the crime under investigation.

And at least two of these people — the same two on the grift train — are under investigation for inappropriately removing or leaking sensitive FBI documents.