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It's a heck of a story. I haven't read his book but I may run out to buy it. I have followed the saga in the media as best as I can, and still learned a few things from that video. I know in my heart Mueller's job is a mop-up operation. But Bongino laid out the many connections Mueller has to key players in the scandal that go back to the Enron case. Both Bob Mueller and Rod Rosenstein should have recused from this investigation of Trump.

The GOP and Trump have failed to make exposing this conspiracy a priority and it may have cost them the House. The one fact that blows my mind that Dan did not mention in the video (and the media has been able to ignore because Trump & GOP are not playing this offensively, only defensively) is The Susan Rice email. On her last day on the job, Jan 20, 2017, just before Trump is inaugurated, Susan Rice writes herself an email memorializing a Jan 5 meeting that took place with Rice, President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. She writes:

“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue

is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”

Obviously Rice is trying to create a paper trail that attempts to prove that Obama had nothing to do with any of these illegal activities in the Spygate scandal. Except in so doing, she actually implicates Obama. This admission has many potential implications, but the one thing it absolutely confirms is that the scandal leads right into the Obama Oval Office. As a matter of politics, Presidents don't go after Presidents and they have a whole coterie of people who will take the fall for them when they take heat. So I have zero expectation that Obama would even be accused of anything. Rice's email is meant to be evidence for him to say "I told them to go 'by the book' I had no idea they did all these crimes". But what she has done, and what Carl Bernstein if he were an honest investigative journalist should be tracking down, is that she has handed us the smoking gun showing that the scandal goes right into the White House. This is the type of evidence took Woodward and Bernstein 2 years and 2 months to figure out during Watergate.

Sure Trump's enemies will attempt to portray it, like Watergate, as a bungled burglary, then a rogue operation by independent partisans, then a plot by a few bad apples in a distant agency and so on. Except, Susan Rice has basically given us the genealogical scandal tree - the collusion includes those at the highest levels of the Intelligence community, the Dept of Justice, and in the White House.

One of several things about that email that are very bizarre. Assuming Rice’s story is 100% true and nothing but true, then why would Obama say, twice, that he wanted the heads of the FBI and DOJ to go “by the book”? 1) I think it’s a little condescending that after nearly 8 full years in office he thinks he has to tell these powerful people how to do their jobs. Did he routinely tell people over the 8 years that they should not break the law, and if not then why in this case? 2) What caused him to make this comment? I am sure they will say he reiterated is because it was such a sensitive matter, but doesn’t it suggest that he at least suspects (if not outright knew) that these players sometimes or often play fast and loose with the rules? And that he would need to reel them in. Either way, it seems to me this email backfires multiple times and ways.

Why would he have to state “I am not asking for, initiating or instructing” any part of this investigation? If he was initiating, instructing, being informed of or otherwise following the ins and outs, wouldn’t everyone in that room know that this was a bald faced lie? And if it is true that he really was aloof and not involved in any material way, they would also already know that as well and he would not have to state it. In fact, if he really had nothing to do with it, Rice would have written something like “Obama expressed surprise upon learning some of the information disclosed in this meeting and stated he wished they would have reported this earlier” - something like that. Phrasing it the way she did, to me, suggests that the opposite is true - he did follow it, instruct it, and/or know about it - and that she wrote this purely to give him a defensive card to play if the S eventually hits the fan.

Of course the email is not “the truth and nothing but the truth”, it does not cite in any detail what was discussed. It omits more than it reveals. Given the last minute nature of its composition, of a meeting held weeks earlier, I am of the belief (as would many) that this was done purely to exculpate Obama from any fallout. Which is weird too because as I said, Presidents don’t go after other Presidents. He’s pretty much immune, the evidence that would be incriminating against him is largely protected, and if there were justice in this case many, many other people would be under indictment enough to strike fear should anyone try this kind of abuse of power again. Unfortunately so far, justice has not been served, just like the IRS scandal and many others.

The whole “by the book” phrase reads like TV cop show dialogue. Does the POTUS really speak to the Director of the FBI and DOJ like a character on a sitcom? It’s just so strange, and to me the email is very transparent though in and of itself it proves nothing except that it is proof that the scandal leads right into the Oval Office.