At the request of Fox News, Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to declassify both a series of documents related to the FISA warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, and a raft of tweets from current and former employees of both the FBI and DOJ. Though Trump claims that he hasn’t read the documents he’s ordering released, it’s clear that someone has, and Republicans are planning to generate a stack of last minute scandals and conspiracy theories that will save them from the Blue Wave that seems set to crash down on the midterm elections.
As Politico reports, expectations are that the Republicans will mine the released texts and documents for phrases and isolated statements that they can use to “taint special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe” and provide Trump’s base with a fresh infusion of Pizzagate, QAnon, ReleaseTheMemo, etc. to drive them to the polls in an anti-”Deep State” frenzy. The plan is to release the information in fits and starts, making sure that October headlines are filled with the latest revelations and Fox News hosts never run out of fuel for attacking Mueller, the FBI, the DOJ, and supposed connections to Democrats.
To Democrats, the situation has eerie similarities to 2016, when WikiLeaks’ slow-drip daily release of internal Clinton campaign emails hobbled Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and offered regular fodder for Republicans.
It’s obvious that the carefully curated selections they’ve requested from Carter Page’s FISA warrant are exactly those most likely to contain hints connected to the memos produced by Christopher Steele and to avoid the mountains of other evidence that went into Page’s warrant. It’s also clear that Republicans, aided by Fox News and the conspiracy theory-right, will sift the tweets from James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr not with an intent to find genuine issues, but looking for those “insurance policy” statements they can pull out to convince Trump’s fans that Democrats were trading still more child sex slaves through a network of pizza-scented tunnels.
But there’s a basic problem for the tactics of the alt-reich Fox State. The focus of the 2018 election isn’t a national effort to generate concern over Hillary Clinton’s emails. It’s Donald Trump. It’s not clear at this point that anyone other than Sean Hannity and a traveling cheering section at Trump rallies cares whether Hillary Clinton is “locked up” or even mentioned. But her emails … are not the focus of this election. Donald Trump is the focus of this election. That’s by design of both Democrats and Republicans, who have hung every ounce of their hopes on Trump’s pumpkin head.
The bigger problem for Trump is no one liked this show the first time, or the second time, and this is going way too many times to a very shallow well.
more:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/20/1797219/-Republicans-plan-an-October-Surprise-in-the-form-of-a-document-dump-and-conspiracy-theories