This one is concerned with the unmasking requests.

Star Tribune

A photographer at the house Thursday morning appeared to stage a shot in the officer’s driveway by encouraging two people to spray “Kill Pig Cops” on the garage door, according to Jennifer Kennetz of St. Paul. She said the woman claimed to be a magazine photographer and tried to persuade Kennetz and others to pose for her near the home.

Kennetz said she later saw the photographer persuade a young couple to spray paint the garage door while recording it with her cellphone. Police confiscated the phone, Kennetz said, and an Oakdale police spokeswoman confirmed the incident was under investigation.

The media are not just lying to you, they are literally inciting people to violence. And then trying to lie to you about the violence not happening.

So just to be clear in how I characterize this: The reporter standing in front of a burning building describes it as "mostly a protest, not generally speaking unruly" while different reporters are egging people on to vandalize police buildings or bring pitchforks and torches to a Trump fundraiser.

Also, reality check: when you burn down someone's home or business, riot in their city, loot the stores they shop in, and then they hate you... that's not racism. That's cause and effect based on your actions.

The veto threat is basically the exact opposite of DOJ's recommendation to veto. Trump wants more protections. DOJ wants less. But they both want the bill vetoed. And if it doesn't get renewed, the surveillance authority goes away and is left in the hands of the President and his national-security discretion. Whether that's better or worse is a complicated debate, but burning down the current FISC and starting over seems like a good idea at this point.

Texas, Michigan, and West Virginia. Of course, Twitter is "fact-checking" the President's tweets about mail in vote fraud. Their fact check is simply wrong, now by their own admission.

UPDATE: And New Jersey.

No need for legislation, apparently.

If true, it looks like Judge Emmet Sullivan has friends in all the right places. Remember, take Gateway Pundit with a grain of salt, and the connection is a little thin even if everything is as alleged.

But using personal and political connections in this case is hardly unprecedented. The judge who accepted Flynn's guilty plea almost immediately had to recuse himself when it became clear he was friendly on a personal level with the infamous Strzok, and the text messages suggest a desire by Strzok to discuss the case with the judge off-the-record using a personal event as cover.

More interesting reading from the comments at Meaning in History, linked above. It's speculation about the why behind this frantic cover up effort. The author thinks it's all about the Iran nuclear deal, and Flynn knows stuff about that that he can't talk about with criminal charges hanging over his head. That's part of it. But the other big thing that's being protected, I think, is the extensive use of the US (and allies) intelligence assets to manipulate elections. That's the prize that the deep state is frantic to protect.

Only time will tell if I am right.

Fox News

U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham has reviewed the bombshell files released earlier this week showing FBI officials discussed whether they wanted to interview Michael Flynn in order to “get him to lie,” sources familiar with his investigation told Fox News, as the document drop renews attention on his probe of the law enforcement community's Russia case.

Sources even said charges could be justified against officials, and that those reviewing the Justice Department and the FBI's actions are building a "serious case." Durham and Attorney General Bill Barr are said to be speaking regularly.

“Durham has seen all of this already,” one source told Fox News, adding that they “could be sufficient for some charges against agents.”

I think we all know this goes a lot higher than just "agents". But agents are where you start, and then you get them to flip on their higher ups.

Two judges in the 9th Circus have purported to suspend the 1st Amendment until there is a cure for the Kung Flu.

This doesn't actually surprise me much; there's historically a lot of latitude for this sort of thing during public emergencies. Courts will let the executive handle the emergency and focus on reviewing it all well after the fact.

The aspect this court is missing -- probably deliberately -- is whether there is actually an emergency that justifies that treatment. There's certainly a panic, but I'm not convinced the data shows an actual emergency. So can the government exaggerate an unusual, but not disastrous, new disease and get a pass from the bill of rights? I suspect not, but I doubt the courts will say so until more time makes the evidence very clear. Particularly courts with a liberal bias.

There's also the question of duration; temporary restrictions can pass muster where permanent ones would not. So, for how long are we supposed to hide from the Kung Flu? What happens if there is never a cure, never a vaccine, and (just like the normal flu or the common cold) we just have to learn to live with it? Does the bill of rights stay suspended then?

... and they did it because of red flag laws. They are also refusing to share their bodycam footage, because of course they are. After all, that footage would expose them as liars who shot and killed a man while he slept peacefully in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend, who they also shot.

The police are keeping the survivors under surveillance and threatening them with arrest if they attend protests.

Everyone involved here needs to go on trial for murder and violation of civil rights. But they won't. Because they are police.

The consequences in the November presidential election may be dramatic. And unpleasant. And, yes, this is why the Democrats have been letting felons out of jail during the Kung Flu panic. Let them out, let them vote (by mail if possible) and win elections. That's the plan. Trashing the economy is a nice bonus.

Fox News

There is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.

This may be the "costliest government cover-up of all time," one of the sources said.

The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus – a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there – was bat-to-human and that "patient zero" worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

Just a few weeks ago, the idea that this originated in a Chinese lab was classed as a conspiracy theory. Now it's the known and accepted government theory.

In another few weeks, will the idea that the virus was deliberately modified in that lab become accepted as well? I expect it will, because I think that's exactly what happened.

And as for the bioweapon question, it's not just about whether and why the virus was developed. If China knew enough to close internal borders to Wuhan, but left Wuhan open to international travel, that's a damning measure of intent regardless of origin.

The death rate appears to be 0.26%, a little more than double that of the average flu (0.1%). Stanford researchers pegged that number over a month ago.

This was a political panic job designed to sabotage the economy. Not that the virus isn't real; that seems undeniable. Not that it wasn't manufactured in a lab -- case not proven yet, but it seems likely. But it certainly wasn't the deadly disease it was sold as when the CDC's Dr Fauci shut down the country.

Unanswered questions: So why did China shut down like they did? Maybe deliberately, because they hate Trump and were read in on the plot. Maybe they just panicked in the presence of an unknown disease. Maybe the disease really was as bad as advertised, but mutated to a less deadly strain. Maybe air pollution in China is bad enough to increase vulnerability. I don't know.

But I think the panic is over.

UPDATE: The panic is still over, but there is reason for skepticism about these numbers.

I see two possibilities for why the FBI is finally opening an investigation into the Flynn case. The first is that Wray has had a change of heart, a come-to-Jesus moment, a self-realization that he's the baddie. The second is that every FBI official called before Congress on this matter from now until the election will refuse to answer questions based on the ongoing investigations.

I know which way I'm betting.

Australian researchers see evidence of human intervention.

Just the News

In late September 2018 with a mid-year election approaching, the often bitterly divided House Intelligence Committee forged a rare bipartisan moment: Its Republican and Democratic members voted to make public the transcripts of 53 witnesses in the Russia collusion investigation.

But what was hailed as an act of transparency has not been fulfilled 19 months later, even though U.S intelligence has declassified and cleared the transcripts for release.

The answer why lies in the backroom dealings of Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat and its current chairman, according to interviews and memos obtained by Just the News.

Turns out Schiff has been blocking the process, and now that we have an Acting DNI willing to start exposing things, John Solomon has sued under FOIA to get access to them.

It's unclear whether they were monitoring private communications or only public posts, but either way, it's Orwellian surveillance with political consequences for political speech. And it's not so different from what colleges are using to monitor their students.

Department of Justice

During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. Demuro further admitted that a local political consultant gave him directions and paid him money to add votes for candidates supported by the consultant, including candidates for judicial office whose campaigns actually hired the consultant, and other candidates for various federal, state and local elective offices preferred by that consultant for a variety of reasons. Demuro also admitted that the votes he added in exchange for payments by the political consultant increased the number of votes fraudulently recorded and tallied for the consultant’s clients and preferred candidates, thereby diluting the ballots cast by actual voters.

I'm sure this is not the only place this was happening -- and this guy was generating lots of fake votes.

I take this statement as basically telling Iran "We're busy, don't fuck with us because we have no patience."

It looks like the famous, or perhaps infamous, Dr Fauci is even more intimately involvewd in the Kung Fly debacle than he's admitting. Turns out that in his role at the Center for Disease Control, he funded the Chinese lab where the disease may have originated. Why? He was outsourcing viral gain-of-function research the US had banned after safety issues at CDC labs. What's gain of function research? Exactly what you might expect: adding new function to existing viruses. Like what happened to create the Kung Flu.

It's worth also pointing on when that funding happened. 2015, under Obama.

Jerusalem Post

"The best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point," Pompeo said. When the interviewer pointed out that was not the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies, Pompeo backtracked, saying, "I've seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they've got it wrong."

I'll trust Pompeo's description of what the intel community's best experts think over what a random interviewer thinks they said, given that Pompeo's the one with the official clearances. I don't read Pompeo as backtracking at all.

We're a long ways from understanding everything going on behind the scenes with this virus. But Fauci appears to be central to it, and I don't think he's been asked the right questions yet.

So a lot of people are complaining that government payment policies are incentivizing hospitals and doctors to specify COVID-19 on death certificates because it means they get paid, even if the patient had never tested positive for COVID-19. Aesop says that's bullshit, based mainly on the idea that a diagnosis of COVID-19 is possibly via X-rays without specific testing, combined with the idea that the treatment is expensive and the cost of the treatment is more than what the government is paying so there's no financial incentive.

They are both right, I think.

The thing about costs and incentives is -- the patient is getting treated. The costs are there and already spent. The argument that "they don't want to spend the money to treat a patient for COVID-19 because it's not profitable" ignores that the patient is already there, already treated, and in this argument, already died... the question isn't how they will be treated, it's how any treatment will be reimbursed. As such, there's absolutely a financial incentive to put down COVID-19 on the death certificate and claim some of the government cash. It's better than nothing, and the money to treat the patient at this point is already spent.

The argument that COVID-19 can be diagnosed based on X-rays and symptoms also fails even though it's not actually wrong either. Yes, a doctor can probably look at an X-ray and note things specific to COVID-19 and reach a diagnosis with reasonable accuracy. But, as noted above, they have incentives to weight the scale and, by the time you are talking about a death certificate, a dead patient for whom getting it right is no longer a priority and getting paid is.

Against those incentives, the cost of a test so that we can KNOW is at this point pretty low. We're making millions of test kits. Just run the test and reduce the false-positive rate. There's really no reason not to. That doesn't mean you can't diagnose and treat the living patient based on that X-ray and professional judgement. But the dead guy is patient (pun intended) and the benefits of better statistics and knowledge about this disease are more important than the trivial costs of running another mass-produced test.

In other somewhat unrelated news, Senator Burr is stepping down from the committee over an FBI investigation into insider stock trading around the Kung Flu.

I can't help but think this is merely convenient timing, and he's actually leaving for reasons related to SpyGate. Although the FBI investigation into his trading habits certainly justifies his removal by itself.

It seems unlikely Trump will protect Obama and Holder from this information.

Analysis. Basically Rice says that Comey had concerns about Flynn (as incoming National Security Advisor) speaking frequently to the Russian ambassador; not that classified information was being passed but that "the level of communication was unusual". There's some back and forth between Comey and Obama about whether they should hide information from Flynn.

The previously redacted portion is basically portraying all of this information about Flynn and the suggestions for how to deal with him as coming from Comey. I believe this to be defensively self-serving and untrustworthy.

UPDATE: I have an additional take here, upon reflection. It involves exactly what information the outgoing Obama admin is trying to hide from the incoming Trump administration. It's clearly not just generic sensitive information related to Russia. Such a policy would be impossible to enforce and would raise huge questions immediately. So it's not that. It's something specific.

It's the counterintelligence investigation into Flynn and Trump specifically. In other words -- the cover up.

UPDATE: Rice claims White House Counsel directed her to write the email. This increases the ass-covering factor (which was already obvious) significantly.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to lie to Congress in impeachment proceedings you started.

Including Congress, Manafort, senior staff on the Trump campaign, and Trump family members. At some point it has to become obvious that only the White House could be coordinating all these agencies, and that the targeting must be political. In fact the whistleblower says having a political predicate was routine.

It's now clear that Obama treated the United States exactly as a third-world dictator would.