The Virginian

Yeah, it’s as fascinating a case study as almost everything is these days with the Drive-By Media, the media left, the media-Democrat complex. The Notre Dame Cathedral fire. It is simply unacceptable. It is not tolerable. You must not even breathe the possibility of arson because if it’s arson then fingers will point in one direction, and we’re not gonna point in that direction. We’re not gonna permit fingers to point. We’re not gonna even allow thoughts in that direction. No, no, no, no, my friends.

But let’s play the game just to start for just a second here. Even if the Notre Dame fire was not arson, there is no denying that attacks on churches, churches throughout France, throughout Europe, are on the upswing. I’m gonna tell you something, folks. This is just me. But watching those pictures yesterday as that cathedral was burning throughout the afternoon into the evening, watching all that I thought I was looking at what may well be a symbolism for all of Europe going up in flames.

This doesn't mean the Notre Dame fire was arson.

But people have been vandalizing churches, desecrating crucifixes with human excrement, and smashing stained glass.

And setting ancient churches on fire.

This might not explain the fire -- but it does explain the suspicions about the fire, and I won't join the media in embargoing newsworthy facts that illuminate why some are very suspicious about this fire....For what it's worth, while my mind is open and I don't have any facts, I lean against the intentional arson theory. The fire seems to me to have been such a perfect storm of bad circumstances that it was unlikely to have been intentional.

Consider: The fire was burning (or at least smoldering) for a half an hour before alarms went off, and then it took firefighters an hour to begin putting water on it.

Ninety minutes of burning before any firefighters intervened -- could an arsonist have planned on his slow-starting fire to have ninety minutes to get up to speed before firefighters began dousing it?

I don't think humans -- especially terrorists -- tend to be that patient and that willing to leave things to chance. I think they want to see that their plan has worked right away -- which is why I'd imagine a terrorist arson case would involve a firebomb that goes off, not some concealed slow-fuse fire that takes its time to become an inferno....

What bothers me -- and bothers a lot of people -- is the unseemly speed with which western law enforcement eliminates any Politically Incorrect theory from the realm of possibility.

That's worrisome, because it's sending the message that the French police (and American police) fundamentally do not want to find any deliberate terrorist actor behind any crime, and thus makes the public suspicious that very obvious investigative trails are being deliberately closed off due to political/media relations considerations....

But I do not like the idea that the authorities charged with protecting us say two things almost in the same breath: that they have ruled out the possibility of any "voluntary" cause behind this and also that they have no idea what the cause was.

That makes no sense. We already know, as a fact, that police are actively searching for suspects in the deliberate arson of Saint Suplice cathedral, the second-biggest church in Paris.

Does it make sense to eliminate arson as a possibility in this latest church fire?

Before a single fireman even entered the structure?!!

No, it doesn't make sense.

And it's not supposed to make sense. It's a politicized claim and it's a step towards a politicized investigation.

Yet, here we are, seeing things we thought impossible not so long ago. This is a clip from a television show aired on one of the legacy networks. The video is a naked call for violence against whites. Even after all of the outrageous behavior we have seen from the ruling class the last few years, no reasonable person would have thought this was possible even a year ago. Even the Soviets at the worst were not exhorting people to commit acts of violence against enemies of the revolution.

This cycle where the Left commits outrages against civility and the white middle-class accommodates it, has led to where we are now. The people calling themselves the defenders of democracy tried to subvert the last Presidential election. The so-called social justice warriors celebrate a black movie star walking free after perpetrating a blood libel against white people. The defenders of open debate on the college campus, rush to suppress any opinion not on the increasingly narrow list of approved opinions.

That is an important clue. Spend time on social media and you see the people claiming to be the vanguard of the proletariat celebrating trillion dollar corporations stomping on poor guys holding the wrong opinions. The pampered Progressives in the ruling class imagine themselves to be the resistance against oppression. This justifies them using any means necessary to defeat their enemy. That video is a justification of preemptive violence, because they believe people like you are a threat to their well-being.

It’s why it is time think about what is impossible today, in terms of social breakdown, as it will most likely happen tomorrow. The blood lust of the ruling class for whites not obediently walking into the void, is now undeniable. Their response to the 2016 election was to declare war on white America. In their minds, it is a defensive war and they are fully justified to use any means necessary to win. There will be no point where they pull back, fearing they have gone too far. Instead they will always seek to go further.

Again, America is a land where books are banned, people are given long prison terms for holding unpopular opinions and the livelihoods of contrarians are destroyed. This is a land where gangs of roving mobs, financed by billionaires, commit violence against citizens without consequence. Now we have a major television network calling for violence against whites and celebrating violent acts against a specific person. All of this was thought to be impossible ten years ago. What impossible thing will tomorrow bring?

Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg's public calls for pluralism do not apply to religious small business owners.

South Bend Mayor Buttigieg has made his Episcopalian faith and tolerance a centerpiece of his campaign, but the policies he champions would force religious small business owners to participate in ceremonies they find objectionable under penalty of law. Buttigieg, who is married to a man, will keynote the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner. The nation's largest LGBT lobbying group credited his support for the Equality Act for the invitation.

"Buttigieg is an outspoken advocate of the Equality Act—critically important, bipartisan legislation that would finally provide clear protections against discrimination for LGBTQ people across the country," HRC said in a Tuesday release.

House Democrats introduced the Equality Act in March. It would strike down religious freedom protections for private citizens if they exercised their consciences in running their own businesses. It is designed to trump Religious Freedom Restoration Acts at the state and federal level, according to critics. Greg Baylor, director of the Center for Religious Schools at the non-profit Alliance Defending Freedom, said he agrees that "our laws should respect the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of every citizen," but said the legislation "fails to meet this basic standard."

"This federal law would force Americans to participate in events and speak messages that violate their core beliefs," he said. "We should reject laws that single out and punish citizens on the basis of their peacefully expressed beliefs."

"They were both Democrats, Bernie supporters," said Janice Hughson, a barista at the Java Lounge. "Then the guy he was talking to said he had some issues with abortion and thinks there should at least be a few limitations put on the practice. That's when the man seized up and began foaming at the mouth. It was terrible."

Four other bystanders were also emotionally injured by the moderately divergent opinion but were not hospitalized.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After Attorney General Barr suggested that the FBI and other agencies spied on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, former FBI director James Comey fired back.

"We did not spy," he told reporters as he stretched for his morning yoga class. "We just observed and reported secretly without the subject's knowledge or consent."

U.S.—The left has urged people to stop quoting stupid things Representative Ilhan Omar has said and to stop accurately pointing out that she’s a bigot because Omar has received death threats. It was revealed, though, that President Donald Trump has also received death threats.

“Yes, it’s hard to believe, since I’m the greatest president ever,” Trump told the press. “My death would be the worst tragedy this country has ever seen -- I’d expect mass suicides if it happens.” Still, he confirmed that the Secret Service has intercepted numerous death threats.

If there is one thing the American left is known for, it’s being extremely consistent and never only espousing certain principles in a partisan or self-serving way. Thus when they heard President Trump had received death threats, they immediately went after those who would criticize the president.

“There is a lot of extreme rhetoric out there about the president, and it has to stop immediately,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Twitter. “All this talk about him being a ‘unique danger to this country’ and that he’s ‘separating families’ is just encouraging the threats against him. It doesn’t matter if you think they’re true; they need to stop, as they all represent dangerous incitement to violence.”

And yet the next time in Paris I shall visit again those magnificent rose windows and feel something akin to the connection Keats did to the figures on that Greek urn. Civilization is always a paradox: deep roots and yet a thin veneer. To raze Notre Dame to the ground would have been a grand victory for barbarism. If not a "wake-up call", the sight that arises this Tuesday on the Île de la Cité is a kind of pre-Easter resurrection, or at least a reprieve.

When the iconic house of worship at the heart of French Christianity decides to mark Holy Week by going up in flames, it's too obviously symbolic of something ...but of what exactly? Two thousand churches have been vandalized in the last two years: Valérie Boyer, who represents Bouches-du-Rhône in the National Assembly, said earlier this month that "every day at least two churches are profaned" - by which she means arson, smashed statutes of Jesus and Mary, and protestors who leave human fecal matter in the shape of a cross. This is a fact of life in modern France.

As it is, there is no shortage of excitable young Mohammedans gleefully celebrating on social media. In 2017 some inept hammer-wielding nutter yelling "Allahu Akbar!" had a crack at Notre Dame, and a couple of years before that the historian Dominique Venner blew his brains out on the altar to protest same-sex marriage. I love France but, in recent years, it's hard not to pick up on the sense that it's coming apart - and that, when the center cannot hold, the things at that center, the obsolete embodiments of a once cohesive society, are a natural target.

In addition, the authorities' eagerness to assure us that it was an accident at a time when such a conclusion could not possibly be known - and when their own response to the emergency was, to put it politely, somewhat dilatory - was itself enough to invite suspicion: "Sure, it might be an accident. But, even if it weren't, they'd still tell us it was..."

To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase. ...

In convincing people that they would not benefit, “the Democrats did a very good job,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “They were able to put that into the public perception, and the reality has been unable to break that perception.”

Northam's scheduled appearance drew about 60 people from the NAACP and another 30 from the state's Republican Party, with the two groups assembling on either side of an asphalt walkway on a muggy and gray afternoon. Both groups took Northam to task for his admission to wearing blackface, but Republicans also protested his pro-abortion rights stance....Republicans have seized on comments he made during a January radio interview about a bill that would have reduced restrictions on late-term abortions, arguing that he suggested killing live babies. Northam has called the notion that he had endorsed infanticide "disgusting," but he has refused to clarify his comments. Abortion dominated many of the signs Sunday.

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.” — George Orwell, 1984.

The Democratic argument of “open borders, let everyone in” while proclaiming heavily-blue areas “sanctuary cities” is all about virtue signaling, not reality. If it were about reality, Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle and Senator Spartacus Booker would be throwing their arms open to take in all the illegals they could get. But instead, Trump has exposed them as hypocrites of the basest kind – those willing to exploit the hopes and dreams of one group by throwing the responsibility for it on the backs of those who don’t agree with them.

Jerry was clearly trying to spin this but ultimately why wouldn’t Democrats want illegal immigrants to be safely relocated to sanctuary cities? They’ve been telling us for years how evil Trump is to keep them ‘caged’ at the border, and they’ve also told us how beneficial illegal immigrants are to communities so what’s the big deal?

Over the past week I've learned two important things from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left: 1) Free speech that criticizes a Democrat is tantamount to violence, and 2) Actual violence committed by a Democrat is a form of free speech.....I assume that if I have a problem with the Columbia Broadcasting System putting out an open call for political violence, that means I like Nazis, or I'm a Nazi, or something to do with Nazis.

When Voshon Mills was shot in the leg last week, he didn’t scream or panic. He knew what to do. He’d been shot in the head, narrowly escaping brain injury, just four months earlier.

He took off his shirt, tied it around his leg, and applied pressure while waiting for the ambulance.
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“I’m getting used to getting shot now,” said the 22-year-old from the city’s West Oak Lane neighborhood. “It’s starting to feel like a normal thing.”...

Seeing clusters of gunshot patients is a near daily occurrence in Philadelphia, said Jessica Beard, a co-author of the study and a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital. Doctors call the influx of patients “an everyday mass shooting.”

The case in question, Jessop v. City of Fresno, concerns the alleged theft of $276,000 by City of Fresno police officers while carrying out a raid in search of illegal gambling machines. Pursuant to a warrant authorizing the officers to seize any such machines, as well as any money connected to the sale or control of them, the officers officially seized approximately $50,000.

In reality, according to appellants Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian, the officers stole an additional $276,000 in cash and rare coins for themselves. Jessop and Ashjian sued the officers for violating their right not to face unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment and their right to due process of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. They hoped to find justice, but they were in for a rude awakening.

Both the trial court and the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled that, because “appellants did not have a clearly established Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from the theft of property seized pursuant to a warrant, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, according to the Ninth Circuit, you don’t have a “clearly established” right to not have police steal your property while executing a search warrant (though you may be able to pursue a claim against the offending officers under state tort law, and the state is presumably still free to prosecute them).

Unfortunately, the injustice suffered by Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian in this case is a symptom of a larger disease: the reflexive, blind deference most courts show to government officials even when they are clearly in the wrong.

Despite its many falterings and regressions, the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian West over the long and tortuous course of its evolution has produced the most advanced civilization known to history. Characterized by the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention, educational opportunity for the masses, economic prosperity, individual autonomy and relative freedom from the harsh exactions of nature, it is now collapsing under the attack of forces rising from within its own existential frontiers.

Its internal assailants are myriad: domestic Marxism, “social justice,” global warming, Islam in its various avatars, anti-Semitism and hatred of Christianity, anti-white bigotry, educational decline, media malfeasance, and economic illiteracy leading to the willful accumulation of unpayable debt. But perhaps the most sinister and destructive of its homegrown adversaries is radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and the breakdown of the relation between the sexes. It is a plague the Pharaoh was fortunately spared....Never in history, she continues, “have mothers been so willing to kill their children”—3000 per day in the U.S. in an abortion frenzy of more than Herodian proportions. The biblical template of Mother and Son, subsumed in the sacred nexus of Mary and Jesus, has been shattered.

That is more or less where we are, as a society.

The left has had control of education, of means of communication, of intellectual ideiation and narrative for a century. Full control, I mean. Before that they had partial control and toe holds. Also before that they were not as full on communist. All the things we “know” and were taught aren’t necessarily so.

And make no mistake, while the current crop of fog machine leftists are almost transparently inept, this wasn’t always so. Much of your ideas of everything from industrialization to the position of women in society to… well, anything is informed by very smart, very gifted men and women who believed in lying for their cause, and that sufficient lies would bring about utopia.

You realize this when you realize how lies shade differently in other countries, how you get people in Europe who earnestly believe the only alternative to socialism is monarchy, or that people were starving to death in Sweden just before socialists took over.

The lies corrupt everything, including the West’s view of itself. And it’s a fog....

You might even think socialism is nothing to be scared of. After all the soviet union was communist not socialist. (Except that they never called themselves communist. And communist East Germany called itself Democrat. Let those who have ears hear.)

Your history, your literature, your news are covered in fog. It might be pleasant to imagine they’re something other than they are. Certainly if you believe in the power of the government to bring about utopia. But it doesn’t make it less dangerous. Because you can’t see the precipice clearly.

SAN ANTONIO, TX—A local man was apprehended today while trying to smuggle a delicious Chick-fil-A classic chicken sandwich into San Antonio International Airport....Later on, during questioning, the man reportedly claimed he just wanted something to eat on the plane, but investigators weren't buying it. "It was obvious he wanted to bring hate and discrimination into this place in an act of terror," said a member of the San Antonio city council. "It's not ISIS or other extremist groups we need to worry about---it's Christian sandwiches."

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After Attorney General Barr suggested that the FBI and other agencies spied on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, former FBI director James Comey fired back.

"We did not spy," he told reporters as he stretched for his morning yoga class. "We just observed and reported secretly without the subject's knowledge or consent."

"See, I've never considered that spying," he added as he formed the "downward dog" pose. "That's just kind of secret watching. It's definitely not the same thing. When you spy, you watch someone without their knowledge. When you secret-watch, you just kind of secretly watch them."

ARLINGTON, VA—At a press conference on Thursday, American Nazi Party leader Emmett Scoggins told reporters that his group is not trying to instate full-on Nazism, but a much better system called “democratic Nazism.”...Scoggins was questioned about the use of the word “democratic” and how democratic Nazism was any different from plain-old Nazism. “The main difference is we add the word ‘democratic’ on there because people like that word a lot more than just plain ‘Nazi,’” Scoggins said. “We’ve added the word to all of our unpopular practices. Democratic racism, democratic beat-downs, democratic censorship, democratic genocide. All of those things poll much higher if we call them democratic.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Pursue Those Indictments! “As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only. . . . Some people think that it would be best if we put this whole episode behind us, that we sharply limit any investigations into wrongdoing and that, especially, we refrain from punishing the highly placed actors who leaked, lied, and conspired against the president. I am not of their number. What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a ‘higher loyalty’—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a ‘higher’ law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed.”

Once, the FBI fought organized crime. Then the FBI became organized crime.

Foreign entities seek entry at all levels. A 2016 New York Times article described how "as chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti ... despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. ... During Ms. Mills’s tenure at the department, Mr. Kim’s company, Sae-A, became a donor to the Clinton Foundation."

The real takeaway of the Mueller investigation is that Washington is honeycombed with foreign influencers not just in the Trump campaign or Hillary's, but pretty much everywhere. The Free Beacon points out, "China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management" with the end in view of subverting them.


This is conceivably the biggest headline that never was; quite a feat in a period when intelligence disasters included Snowden, WikiLeaks-Manning, the roll-up of the CIA network in China, missing the rise of ISIS and the burning of the U.S. diplomatic stations in Benghazi. When you combine the litany of disasters with what we now know about lobbying for foreign governments in Washington, it’s probable that collusion has been out of control for some time. It’s a design defect. D.C. was meant to be a national capital not the 'capital of the world' which it has now become. The federal bureaucracy, the press corps and its defensive agencies were designed for more homogenous national age. They seem unable to cope with the corrosion of the global world.

Washington's networks of trust are too weak to guarantee adequate integrity or competence by themselves. Katherine Archuleta, the director of OPM, may never have been up to the job. She "previously served as National Political Director for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration as chief of staff to the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Peña." None of this prepared her for Chinese hacking. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest noted she did not have the "particular expertise" for the position to which she had been appointed.

Before Washington became the political capital of the world, the political parties and the newspapers provided adequate levels of safety, issuance, and correctness. Now it needs an upgrade. The upheaval of 2016 and the inquiries into the origins of the failed collusion investigation show that while the political system can still resolve conflicts it can only do so at the cost of a crisis. Washington has to find ways of transparently logging foreign influence, securing data, and using better methods of verifying that political promises are kept. The politicians and media men can't do it any more without some system help.

In a delicious irony, this week Attorney General William Barr implied that a new bar might have been set (pun intended) during the 2016 election cycle when he announced that he believes President Trump’s political campaign was spied upon by the federal government.

Just let that sink in for a moment and noodle around in your brain.

In 1972, Republicans were caught using former CIA operatives to spy on their political rivals. In 2016, Democrats have now been caught using active FBI and senior Department of Justice employees to spy on President Trump. It is no longer debatable whether or not it happened, because A. G. Barr just told us it happened. The only question that remains is whether or not they had any sort of justifiable reason for doing so, except that question seems to have already been resolved by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because his report found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. In fact, the opposite appears to be true -- it looks as if federal agencies conspired with foreign governments to entrap peripheral members of the Trump campaign.

Heads need to roll. Maybe even literally. This appears to the crime of sedition, the act of conspiring to incite rebellion against the authority of our government. If it could be proved that a foreign government had been involved in the conspiracy, the crimes involved might even rise to the level of treason. Sedition is bad enough.

At the heart of the Watergate scandal was a bungled burglary. No one got hurt. If Nixon hadn’t tried to obstruct justice, his presidency might have survived the scandal. Watergate is about to become ancient history because it pales in comparison to what the Obama administration just did. Innocent American citizens have had their lives destroyed in a criminal attempt to topple the Trump administration.

 

“If I could express all of our country’s problems into one word, I’d say that word is sh*t. We’ve got sh*tty schools filling students’ heads full of progressive sh*t, and when the sh*theads graduate, they start voting for sh*tbird politicians who implement sh*t policies that turn their cities and states into sh*tty sh*tholes. And then, after a few years, when their sh*thole cities get so completely filled with sh*t that it flows through the streets, the sh*theads say, ‘hey, I can’t live here any more, it’s a sh*thole.’ So then the sh*theads move to some other part of the country that’s not a sh*thole, but then, because they’re sh*theads, and not well-versed on the whole cause-and-effect thing, they vote for the same sh*tbirds who implement the same sh*t policies that have turned the places they came from into sh*tholes and their new homes gradually turn into sh*tholes that look just like the old sh*tholes, and they never seem to figure out why. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why our country is turning into sh*t.”

Former SPLC employee Bob Moser described "the annual hate-group list" as "a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the 'rising tide of hate' discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups." According to The Progressive's John Egerton, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees "viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals."

And it was a hate crime -- it was intended to incite hate against white people and Trump supporters.

But those lives don't matter, so we don't talk about that. We can only talk about the indirect, unintentional victims of Jussie Smollett's false flag hate crime -- hate crime victims who won't be believed in the future -- and not the directed intended victims of it.

• We learned that the FBI and Justice targeted and took action against Trump.
• We learned that the FBI, according to Priestap, is incapable of securing a FISA warrant with information that isn’t credible, although the judge’s approval of the warrant means by definition that the information is credible.
• We learned that the FBI believes political interference in an investigation can be proper as long as the bureau isn’t acting purely politically.
• We learned that the FBI did send at least one asset to do to the Trump campaign an activity that even the bureau would call “spying” — if it were done by foreign operatives.
• We learned that the origins of the Trump-Russia tale will never be fully understood until the part played by British intelligence is made clear.

That’s an awful lot to take away from one largely neglected transcript. But it suggests just how much remains unknown about the Trump-Russia investigation while providing a glimpse at the people that want to keep it that way.

Shen followed with another broad, all-encompassing question about the propriety of the FBI and DoJ’s behavior: “Are you aware,” she asked Priestap, “of any instances where the FBI or DOJ did not present what constituted credible and sufficient evidence to justify a FISA warrant?”

Priestap’s response is a textbook case of circular logic: “If it's not justified, the court doesn't approve it. So, like, if we're not meeting the standard required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the requests are turned down.”

“So, in other words,” said the Democratic counsel, “by definition, if you presented information and a FISA court approved it, that would constitute credible sufficient information?”

“In my opinion,” said Priestap, “yes.”

Sit back and savor that exchange for a moment. One of the most senior officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation – an organization that regularly refers for prosecution people who don’t tell the full truth – champions this peculiar standard of credibility: If you can snooker a FISA court judge, the information used to traduce the court is rendered by definition “credible sufficient information.” What is the condition of the FBI if its leaders think whatever you can get past a judge is good enough?

Democratic staff counsel Valerie Shen tried to use her questioning of Priestap to put the spying issue to bed. “Does the FBI use spies?” she asked the assistant director for counterintelligence (who would be in a position to know).

“What do you mean?” Priestap responded. “I guess, what is your definition of a spy?”

“Good question,” said Shen. “What is your definition of a spy?”

Before Priestap answered, his lawyer, Mitch Ettinger, intervened. “Just one second,” he said. Then Ettinger – who was one of President Bill Clinton’s attorneys during the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky scandal – conferred with his client.

Back on the record, Priestap presented what smacks of pre-approved testimony: “I've not heard of nor have I referred to FBI personnel or the people we engage with as – meaning who are working in assistance to us – as spies. We do evidence and intelligence collection in furtherance of our investigations.”

Shen was happy with the answer, and so she asked Priestap to confirm it: “So in your experience the FBI doesn't use the term ‘spy’ in any of its investigative techniques?” Priestap assured her the word is never spoken by law-enforcement professionals – except, he said (wandering dangerously off-script), when referring to “foreign spies.”

“But in terms of one of its own techniques,” Shen said, determined to get Priestap back on track, “the FBI does not refer to one of its own techniques as spying?”

“That is correct, yes.”

“With that definition in mind, would the FBI internally ever describe themselves as spying on American citizens?”

“No.”

So there we have it with all the decisive logic of a Socratic dialogue: The FBI could not possibly have spied on the Trump campaign because bureau lingo includes neither the noun “spy” nor the verb “to spy.” Whatever informants may have been employed, whatever tools of surveillance may have been utilized, the FBI did not spy on the Trump campaign – didn’t spy by definition, as the bureau doesn’t use the term (except, of course, to describe the very same activities when undertaken by foreigners).

What’s telling about this line of questioning is that it inadvertently confirms Republican suspicions — and Attorney General Barr’s assertion. If House Democrats believed there had been no spying on the Trump campaign, they could have asked Priestap whether the FBI ever spies on Americans, given the common meaning of the verb “to spy.” They could have flat-out asked whether the FBI had spied on Trump World. Instead, Democratic counsel asked whether, given the FBI’s definition of spying, the bureau would “internally ever describe themselves as spying on American citizens.” It would seem that Democrats were every bit as convinced as Republicans that the FBI spied on Trump’s people.

Questioning Barr’s testimony appeared to be the theme for the network’s evening programming, with anchors and guests offering commentary that supported the position that there is no evidence that the Trump campaign was spied on.