Coffee and Covid–CONTAMINATED ☙ Friday, March 20, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS:
The RussiaGate boomerang lands in South Fla with 130+ subpoenas
"Yesterday, Axios broke an unintentionally wonderful story headlined, “Comey subpoenaed in alleged “grand conspiracy” against Trump.” At long last, and with Trump’s hyperactive Year of Action serving as a useful distraction, the RussiaGate Scandal is finally starting to consume itself.
In 2018, as the star-crossed 2020 election loomed, former FBI Director James Comey published a grotesque, narcissistic elegy to self-promotion and whitewashing titled A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. By “higher loyalty,” Comey was trying to justify his disloyalty during his brief tenure as President Trump’s FBI Director (after serving Obama), because of his alleged devotion to the Constitution.
But now, Comey’s grandiose two-word phrase evokes a whole different meaning. In light of what we know now, to whom did Comey really owe that higher loyalty? Was it the Constitution? Or was it President Xi? Space brothers? The Supreme Chupacabra? Karl Marx?
He’s no constitutional hero. Comey is just another deep-state bureaucratic cockroach. Late last year, DOJ prosecutor Lindsey Halligan (a former Trump attorney) actually indicted Comey over false statements to Congress. But the case blew up on the launch pad.
In November, a liberal District of Eastern Virginia judge, Cameron Currie (Clinton appointee), dismissed Comey’s case and tossed the indictment, not because Comey was innocent, but by ruling that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed to her DOJ position and lacked authority to bring the indictment in the first place. According to judge Currie, Lindsey was “unlawfully appointed.”
It was a stretch. Lindsey was only “unlawfully appointed” because the Senate refused to confirm her under its “blue slip” courtesy tradition, which lets any Senator from the home state veto a nominee with a post-it note. After getting “blue-slipped,” a nominee never even receives a confirmation vote.
Trump’s nominees for attorney general are more likely to make snow angels in Miami than be confirmed in blue states. But set that aside.
đŸ”¥ This new Comey subpoena, in what Axios called a “grand conspiracy” probe, is Round Two. The DOJ returned, this time in South Florida, erected a properly confirmed prosecutor, Jason Quiñones, the SDFL U.S. Attorney, and thrust forward a whole new grand jury.
The new case is assigned to terrific South Florida Judge Aileen Cannon who, back during the bad old days, was the only judge to dismiss one of the Trump prosecutions— ironically, because Biden’s Special Prosecutor Jack Smith had himself was never confirmed and was “unlawfully appointed.” You can’t make this stuff up. Round and round it goes.
The DOJ started all over from scratch, and the fruit is finally beginning to flower. It just launched 130+ subpoenas that cast a much wider net than the now-dismissed Comey indictment. They’re not just coming after Comey for false statements to Congress anymore. They’re trying to build a broad conspiracy case against the whole team for the entire RussiaGate scandal.
By contrast, the RussiaGate actors issued around 2,800 subpoenas in total, many of them secret, including against sitting U.S. senators, conservative groups like TPUSA, and civilians connected to Trump, like Kash Patel (long before he re-entered government) and Suzie Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff.
More interestingly, the criminal referral that launched the new South Florida case was signed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Words fail to describe the lasagna-like layers of irony. In October 2019, Hillary Clinton oozed onto a podcast and said the Russians were “grooming” someone in the Democratic primary as a third-party spoiler candidate. She didn’t name Gabbard explicitly, but said: “She’s a Russian asset.” Gabbard fired back, calling Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” Tulsi sued Hillary for $50 million in defamation, but later dropped the case.
When she referred this case for criminal prosecution, Tulsi didn’t merely make an accusation. She declassified and released the underlying documents. The criminal referral came with the receipts attached. It was a pre-packaged prosecution. The DOJ’s prosecutor responded by promptly requesting 12 more categories of documents from the DNI, which Gabbard’s office was positioned to hand over immediately.
So, first of all, Hillary started the whole ball rolling by buying the “RussiaGate Dossier” on Trump in 2015 from disgraced British ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele. Next, the woman Clinton publicly smeared as a “Russian asset” —using the exact same Russia-smear playbook that Comey and Brennan’s ICA enabled— is now the woman who launched the criminal investigation into the people who built that playbook.
If this were a movie script, the studio would reject it for being too cute. The woman smeared as a Russian spy is now investigating the people who invented Russian spies.
It might be too cute, but the case will be a whole lot different this time in South Florida, and everybody knows it.
đŸ”¥ Let’s refresh the facts for our dear Portland readers. Back in December 2016, the Presidential Daily Brief — America’s most classified intelligence product— assessed that Russia’s cyber activities “did not impact” the 2016 election.
But only a month later, in January 2017, as Trump prepared to take office for his first tour of duty, Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan rushed out a brand new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), reversing the original assessment and this time concluding that Russia had massively interfered to help Trump win.
Same intelligence agencies. Same analysts. Same raw data. The only thing that changed between December and January was the man about to take the oath of office. And the agencies’ standards. A later internal review found the ICA process was “rushed,” riddled with “procedural anomalies,” and that the decision to include Hillary’s infamous Steele Dossier —which the CIA’s own people called an “internet rumor”— “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles.”
In other words, the intelligence community’s own review concluded that Comey and Brennan broke the rules to produce the ICA. That ICA would become the founding scripture of Russiagate. Everything else flowed from that poisoned tree— the secret subpoenas, two impeachments, and four years of breathless CNN panels.
Now, a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida is asking whether that original scripture was fake.
đŸ”¥ Unsurprisingly to anyone but him, former CIA Director Brennan is also in the new case’s crosshairs. His lawyers sent an unprecedented letter to Judge Cannon’s boss, the chief judge of the Southern District, which shrilly protested about “judge shopping” and vindictive political prosecution —ratcheting the irony up another level— and demanded that Judge Cannon be taken off the case.
The scale and scope of what Trump’s prosecutors are attempting is historically unparalleled. The closest comparable might be the Church Committee’s investigation of illegal CIA tactics back in the 1970s, but those were congressional investigations that produced legal reforms, not criminal investigations that produced grand juries.
This subpoena drop might be unrelated to the expanding whirlpool of Trump news —the Iran war, the SAVE America Act debate in the Senate, and the Cuban embargo— or it might be incredibly well-timed, enjoying the media’s distraction, and allowing the Grand Jury to do its work without 24x7 criticism.
Whatever the truth, the rubber is finally hitting the dossier for the RussiaGate conspirators. If the DOJ can’t make progress on these prosecutions in South Florida, then it simply can’t be done right now, not without more structural reforms first.
Lawyer up, James Comey. Get counsel, John Brennan. I hope the GiveSendGos for legal expenses are fruitful for you both. And that your counsels are lawfully appointed, jerks." ........
"... Please remember, there are two distinct and different aspects to the overall conspiracy and timeline.
There was surveillance of the 2016 Republican candidates by contractors working on behalf of the FBI who was institutionally collaborating with the Clinton campaign; that is known as “Spygate.” There was then an FBI operation to target and eliminate the threat represented by the 2016 GOP primary winner, Donald Trump; that is known as “Russiagate.”
‘Spygate’ and ‘Russiagate’ are two distinctly different corrupt pathways that eventually merged due to common interests.
The Mueller investigation, an extension of Crossfire Hurricane (Russiagate) was used by Obama-era politicians and internal government officials as a mechanism to block President Trump from executing a divergent foreign policy. The primary policy of focus was to protect the Iran deal.
Based on mounting evidence, a pattern in other international activities and U.S. participants, the Obama-Clinton-Kerry Iranian deal likely included a mechanism for return payments to U.S. officials following the release of billions in frozen Iranian asset funds and the loosening of sanctions. (ie. pallets of cash) Qatar were the mediator/broker.
However, it is speculated, perhaps being currently evidenced, that return payments to the Obama team contained a timing mechanism and the quid-pro-quo payments were stopped after President Trump withdrew from the Iran deal and re-instituted sanctions.
Thus, a much larger background context exists for why the totality of the U.S. government and Intelligence Community opposed President Donald Trump. Is it all about the money? Time will tell. Current events may not be coincidental." .......
