☕️ ARTICULATE NITWITS ☙ Thursday, August 6, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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HHS hands the Senate Fauci’s phone and promises millions more pages; declassified memos show the FBI opened a case on whether the sitting President was a Russian asset — and misspelled it; more.

JEFF CHILDERS

AUG 6READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your earth-scorching roundup includes: HHS hands Fauci’s covid-era iPhone to Ron Johnson’s subcommittee, with millions more pages promised behind it; today’s contempt vote, and the DOJ referral Rand Paul intends to send around the full Senate entirely; and the FBI’s newly declassified decision to investigate the President of the United States as a possible foreign asset, on a legal basis so thin they had to include the word “unwittingly” to make it fit.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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Oh, no, Mr. Bill! I mean, oh no, Dr. Fauci! Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Senate Panel Says It Has Obtained Copy of Fauci’s Covid-Era Phone.” Even as the nation —nay, the world— continues uneasily digesting the contents of Fauci’s diaries and Slack messages, another round of pesticide treatment has unexpectedlyarrived along with the exterminator truck.

This, my friends, the effective deployment of a previously underutilized political weapon— disclosure. The incoming administration has access to and control of the federal government’s files, records, and most of all, its technology. As they say, nothing is ever truly deleted, which is why Hillary Clinton used to take her old file servers out behind the barn and beat them to death with baseball bats.

By the time this is over, Fauci might have preferred being one of Hillary’s file servers. It would still have been unpleasant, but at least it would have been over with quickly.

We don’t know much yet. The dramatic headline story can be boiled down into a single sentence: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has given the Senate Oversight Committee a digital copy of Fauci’s covid-era cell phone. It raises a million questions.

How did they get the phone image in the first place? Unknown. Maybe it’s simply because Fauci surrendered his phone when he retired, and his phone was imaged or archived. But if so, how long has HHS known the archive existed? Why wasn’t the phone image turned over immediately?

RFK Jr. said Fauci’s diary entries took about eight months to assemble from 11 separate servers where it had been “sequestered and secreted.” So one suspects there’s more to the Fauci phone story than a turned-in phone or a standard backup. Why is federal information about the most important project in modern history ‘sequestered and secreted?’

One thing seems abundantly clear: even as the government employees in the major U.S. health agencies realized they were about to undertake the most important work of their careers, finding themselves at the center of the response to a once-in-a-lifetime global emergency, an emergency they had spent years preparing for, document preservation should have been aggressive and automatic.

They understood that perfectly. Instead, they deliberately made no material efforts to preserve and protect the critical information needed by historians and for after-action analysis. Instead, top officials like Fauci and his toadie, Morens, casually discussed destroying the historical record in real time. The FOIA lady taught me how to make emails disappear:

The government pandemic response is a vortex of failure that strains the fabric of space-time itself. But never mind.

As to the phone image itself, we must wait for the Committee’s report to find out what is on it. Late yesterday, right after the WSJ story published, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) played it coy, like they don’t already know what’s coming:

We don’t, can’t know. But the mind reelswith possibility. Is there a chat channel on it with each of Fauci’s celebrity buddies, like Bill Gates? Are there saved copies of Fauci’s personal emails that he used to avoid FOIA? Did he try to scrub the phone himself, in violation of records preservation laws? All unknown for now.

So that’s already a bombshell, especially for reporters and for die-hard Fauci allies still reeling from the diaries. But the WSJ’s story contained a buried lede, one that might not be quite as salacious as the phone image, but could be even more devastating. Consider the offhand comment at the end of the Journal’s story that “more public document dumps are on the way”:

‘Millions of additional Fauci-related pages.’ Millions. His phone isn’t the climax of this dystopian movie. It’s only the preview trailer.

🪳 The pandemic investigation was underway years before Biden’s interregnum ended. But Biden’s HHS never gave Congress anything like this volume of information. Before Kennedy, it was like Marg-Moore-The-FOIA-Lady-Who-Hates-FOIA was responding to Congress. We only found three responsive pages, sorry! Plus we redacted them!

But now, the floodgates are open.

I can’t find any historical parallel. Sure, you can cherry-pick previous one-offs, like the Church Committee’s disclosure of a few hundred embarrassing CIA documents, but I can find nothing like this Administration’s obsessive declassification and records transparency. JFK, MLK, Amelia Earhart, grainy UFO pictures, Fauci files, RussiaGate documents— it seems to have no bottom and no endpoint.

To prove how historic this Administration’s approach has been, you need only consider how obviously secure the swamp critters seemed in their internal comms. It’s clear that —never in a million years— did they think their messages would ever see the light of FOIA. They just trundled along, business as usual— if, that is, your business is compulsive Cold War-era paranoiac secrecy.

Put another way, if the “devoted, non-partisan” permanent government had any concept that “everything hits the internet including your phone under the next administration,” their internal chatter would be sterile, legalistic, and very, very short.

They got comfortable. They got lazy. They installed gatekeepers who “hate FOIA” in charge of FOIA responses. They didn’t expect that any change in administration —Democrat to Republican to Democrat to Republican— would make any difference in transparency at all. They never believed the fetid swamp water they paddle around in could ever be drained this low.

Instead, they believed in the permanent government so completely that they left a permanent record.

The Committee will vote today to hold Fauci in contempt, which then requires a further vote by the full Senate (which would fail because it needs 60 votes, sigh), but Senator Paul has promised to make an immediate DOJ referral. But wait. There was more disclosure in today’s news cycle. The filing cabinets of the public-health elite and the national-security elite are both in play.

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Yesterday, Axios reported, “FBI investigated if Trump was a Russian asset after Comey firing, memos show.”Boy howdy. The declass stakes are reaching a fever pitch.

Before I begin, I must first say this: Opening a case on whether the sitting President of the United States is a Russian asset is among the most politically risky and radioactive acts the FBI could take. Even in a movie script for a political thriller, you’d have to handle it super carefully, since the whole idea is so unlikely it could easily shatter viewers’ suspension of disbelief.

Just wait. Wait till I map out the obviousimplications for you, which no media has yet dared to touch. It’s already unbelievable.

But what we can be sure of is that the people who wrote and approved these newly declassified memos operated inside a bubble culture that assumed even political TNT like this would stay compartmented, that labeling it “sensitive investigative matter” and stuffing it in burn bags meant it would stay buried, and no change in administration or control of Congress would never unearth it.

Meet Hubris. Now meet Nemesis.

🔥 Here’s what actually dropped yesterday. We have learned that, days after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, the bureau opened a formal investigation into whether the sitting president was acting as a Russian asset —“wittingly or unwittingly”— and whether his conduct might constitute high federal crimes or an urgent threat to national security.

The leaders of the FBI and DOJ —who ostensibly worked for Trump— called the top-secret investigation of their own boss “the least intrusive method” of handling the situation. One day later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, and the one-day-old operation was handed off in full to his fully compartmented group.

Put plainly, yesterday’s dump exposed the paper record that was once confined to the Swamp’s vault: the FBI’s rushed decision to treat the President of the United States as a possible foreign-controlled node at the apex of the U.S. government.

They titled the operation Oxferd Comma (reportedly rendered with a zero for the ‘o’ in Comma). People are trying to figure out why they misspelled it. Was it to avoid FOIA or database searches if someone accidentally ‘heard’ the name? We don’t know, but I have another, more basic theory: They are incompetent nitwits who can’t spell.

What kind of incompetent nitwits? Well, for one thing, James Comey, who shouldn’t have known about the secret operation in the first place, since Trump had fired him before the op started, dropped this too-clever bon mot on Twitter a few months later:

“I’m all about Oxford commas.” Haha, James, we see what you did there. It’s just like his ‘8647’ seashell art. And the barely-hidden message even translates to the same thing: get rid of Trump.

This new doc dump is brand new. We just got it. The meaning and consequences are still unfolding. But there are two staggering, unbelievable conclusions that immediately surface and need to be part of the conversation starting right now.

🔥 The first astonishing point is legal in nature. According to a declassified 2019 memo, Oxferd Comma began on May 16, 2016— just a few months into Trump 1.0. The 2019 memo described the “predicate” or legal rationale for the unprecedented investigation. It claimed to have an “articulable factual basis the President Trump may be or had been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities on behalf of Russia that may have constituted federal crimes or threats to national security.”

There’s much that could be said about this paragraph. But for now, I would draw your attention just to the word “unwittingly.” In other words, their investigation was predicated on a theory that Trump might not even know the Russians were manipulating him.

First of all, unwitting support of Russia, even if it did happen, is not a crime. Second, what would be the paramount duty of the Intelligence Community if it determined the president was being unwittingly manipulated by a foreign adversary?

Their singular duty was to warn him.Promptly and clearly. But of course, they never even considered that. Instead, the acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and the acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (Jeff Sessions recused himself) —deep staters all— launched a crusade so breathtaking in political brinksmanship that Tom Clancy would have immediately rejected it as a story idea.

The reason they included the word “unwittingly” was that their “articulable factual basis” didn’t even come close to proving Trump had intentionally done anything wrong. So they had to stretch, reaching to non-criminal conduct to support the predicate. It’s an express contradiction, and it destroys any claim the unprecedented investigation could have been in good faith.

In other words, normally, if you’re going to launch a top-secret investigation of the sitting president as a co-opted foreign agent, you’d better have a damned solid basis. Not a merely “articulable” one.

Either way, an unprecedented investigation of a sitting President as a foreign adversary’s possible asset required far more than the garden-variety FBI threshold predicate of an “articulable factual basis.” The phrase may meet a low opening standard for a Medicare fraud case; but it did not, by itself, supply the constitutional-grade justification this kind of case demanded.

And then they had the gall to call Oxferd Comma the “least intrusive method.” Give me a break. It fails both the ‘ha ha’ test and the smell test. That is bad enough. But that’s not even close to the worst part.

🔥 The political implications are a hundred times worse. No— a million times worse. They were setting up a predicate for a bona fide coup, a poisonous Manchurian President-crisis arguably worse than the Civil War itself.

That is not exaggerating. It’s not hysterical. It’s not even a stretch. Not in the least.

Consider the plain implications of their course of conduct. Suppose they had weighed the “articulable facts” and decided it was more likely than not —51% likely— that the President of the United States was being controlled by Russia. What would be their duty then?

The President holds the nuclear football.

If the President were more likely than not co-opted by the Russians, the Intelligence Community could not tolerate him remaining in office for even ten more minutes. The Russians could launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike and the Manchurian President could stand down by refusing to activate the football for a few critical minutes. Oh no, I can’t find my key.

Sure, their formal duty would have been to immediately take the matter to Congress for impeachment or 25th Amendment removal. (Which they also failed to do.) But if they followed the ‘normal’ process, that would still leave the Manchurian President in command of the nuclear response for months.

Given the existential stakes, their duty to national security would require them to take him out. One way or the other. A coup or an assassination.

That sounds extreme. But by April 2017, only two options remained on the board. Either they did not actually believe the catastrophic proposition their “Russian asset” theory implied, or they did believe it and chose an approach wildly inadequate to the claimed existential risk. Neither alternative supports any reassuring theory of good-faith, proportionate institutional judgment.

It wasn’t just Trump. The Artic Frost branch of their investigation surveilled Republican senators, the GOP, Charlie Kirk, and other allies. They clearly didn’t trust Congress or Republicans with this. So what recourse remained to them? Something extra-legal, perhaps?

🔥 As I said, this is just the latest in a steady stream of historic disclosures that are teaching the American public a lot about how our government has really been working. It’s worse than anyone thought, even in the hottest corners of the conservative hot-takes land. We haven’t even seen it all yet. But we have now traveled far beyond any mere political debate.

Between the Fauci files and the McCabe memorandum, America has now shifted beyond ordinary political quarreling and into the dark territory of a real constitutional crisis.

HHS’s transfer of Fauci’s journals, a copy of his government iPhone, and millions more pages from government servers exposed a public-health bureaucracy that treated preservation, transparency, and accountability as irrelevant; the McCabe memo raises the even more fundamental question of how senior law-enforcement officials could secretly open a counterintelligence investigation into the sitting President as a possible Russian asset on a wafer-thin “articulable” basis.

These are not disconnected scandals. Together, they suggest a government-wide culture in which powerful institutions assumed that elections changed political faces but not control of the archives, the investigative machinery, or the rules of disclosure— and in which constitutional limits became procedural inconveniences rather than binding constraints.

And it sure explains a lot about how we reached the unthinkable point of national lockdowns, censorship, and federal vaccine mandates. Just saying.

My friends, this culture of swampy government-by-fiat is the real threat to our democracy. It’s nitwits! The nitwits are killing us. Behold: the ‘October surprise,’ a few months early.

I should have listened to the QAnon kooks a little more closely. The Swamp might not be actual lizard people, but they might as well be. They sure aren’t like us.

The storm of disclosure has finally arrived. Batten the hatches and prepare for inclement weather.

Have a terrific Thursday! You’d better plan to get back here tomorrow morning, for the latest can’t-miss roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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