☕️ LYING LIARS ☙ Thursday, July 10, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

FBI’s Kash Patel opens criminal probes into Comey and Brennan; USAID caught red-handed—again; Ukraine’s collapse accelerates, right on schedule, just like we warned them for four years; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup today includes: FBI Director Kash Patel opens formal criminal investigations into former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Chief John Brennan; you’ll shake your head over what USAID’s sticky fingers were into this time; and Ukraine’s terrible timeline just accelerated again, just like we told them would happen for the last four years.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Now we are finally getting somewhere. Hopefully. Influential independent investigative journalist Matt Taibbi ran a story on his Substack ‘Racket News’ yesterday headlined, “At Last: John Brennan and James Comey Under Criminal Investigation for Russiagate.”

In the rush and tumble of the tsunami of anticlimactic disappointment over the strangely sudden end of the official Epstein investigation, a speck of hope appeared in the waves. It appeared in the form of a Fox News exclusive (i.e., a friendly leak), announcing that FBI Director Kash Patel has opened formal criminal investigations into former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Chief John Brennan, for their roles in manufacturing the RussiaGate hoax, interfering in elections, and for their seditious efforts to overthrow the American government.

Haha! Sorry! I was just kidding. It’s not for that stuff. The two men are under investigation only for lying to Congress. And possibly for conspiring to lie to Congress.

Taibbi did not directly confront that painful shortcoming. But he nodded to it. One of his sources, presumably connected to the House Intelligence Committee, said he was not disappointed the charges only related to perjury. “You have to understand, there’s no statute that really fits what these people did,” the source said. “But there is one against lying to Congress, and given that that’s what they have to work with, (it) makes more sense to me now.”

🔥 The charge has a storied history. Back in the late 1940s, furious Republicans couldn’t prove that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy— at least, not in any way that satisfied strict evidentiary demands. Hiss, a top-ranking State Department official and darling of the New Deal set (he helped draft the UN Charter), denied under oath that he’d ever passed secrets to the Soviets or ever met his accuser and handler, defected Soviet spymaster Whittaker Chambers.

But Chambers delivered the goods: typewritten documents, a dramatic, Hollywood-style courtroom unveiling of a secret cache of microfilm inside a pumpkin, and a slow-burning credibility that ultimately trumped Hiss’s polished, white-shoed denials. In the end, espionage didn’t bring Hiss down. It was perjury— two counts. That’s what the jury latched onto like a submerged mine clamping onto a disguised trawler. Hiss got ten years, and maybe more importantly, his insidious influence was finally neutralized.

The political impact was seismic. The Hiss case detonated the Cold War consensus and helped launch Richard Nixon’s career. More importantly, it set a precedent: when the crime is too vast, too murky, or too institutionally protected to prosecute directly, perjury becomes the precision tool. It is a thin but devastating charge when properly brought; it’s the legal equivalent of slipping a shiv between the ribs.

Though the new investigations into Brennan and Comey might look limited, they draw from that same Alger Hiss energy, which probably explains why Taibbi’s source said ‘no’ when asked if he was disappointed.

Following the Alger Hiss benchmark, perjury has become a sort of default fallback for when the real crime is too untouchable, too complicated, or too inconvenient. Just ask Martha Stewart. The government never proved insider trading— but they pinned misleading federal investigators on her, and down she went.

Or Scooter Libby, not charged for leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity (he didn’t), but for giving conflicting testimony during the hunt for the leaker. Or Barry Bonds, who wasn’t convicted for taking steroids or for illegal gambling, but for denying his steroid use too smoothly under oath.

So, while perjury might sound like a consolation prize, it has a lot to offer. To prove that crime, prosecutors need only show knowingly false statements under oath. That’s it. They don’t need to untangle the entire Russiagate narrative. They don’t need to march into the foggy swamps of subjective motives and “tradecraft principles violations.” They don’t need to wrestle with qualified immunities. They don’t even need to use the words ‘conspiracy’ or ‘coup.’

In other words, perjury is a prosecutorial shortcut, like convicting Al Capone for tax evasion. A shortcut that is exactly what the Administration needs just now. And even as a shortcut, it’s no small deal. Convictions of either Comey or Brennan would make history. No former FBI or CIA Director has ever been criminally charged or convicted for misconduct in office.

Actually, these new investigations are already historic. Comey and Brennan are, ingloriously, the first former directors of their respective agencies to officially fall under formal criminal investigation. They’re also the first to face potential perjury charges for official conduct while in office. Welcome to the record books, gentlemen.

I don’t know who in the Administration needs to hear this: nice work and so forth— but what you absolutely don’t need is another unsigned memo abruptly ending the Comey and Brennan investigations. Just saying.

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It was just the latest “well, well, well,” moment. On Tuesday, local affiliate KUGN-590 ran a startling syndicated story headlined, “USAID Sent 1000s of Viruses to Wuhan Lab Over Decade.” Now they tell us.

I’m sure you remember the dearly departed USAID. The plucky “independent” agency that became the first to fall under Trump’s withering glare and deep-state pruning shears after he took office. The charitable “soft power” outreach arm of the State Department, which Democrats wailed had only existed to protect third-world children from brutal imminent starvation and horrible death from river blindness.

But thanks to a recent FOIA lawsuit, we have now discovered that USAID shipped thousands of “leftover” virus samples to the same Wuhan, China lab that ‘accidentally’ launched the coronavirus pandemic. Wait, it gets better. “The virus samples,” KUGN reported, “were derived from humans, bats, and rodents and were collected over the course of a 10-year period.”

If I am not mistaken, and I do not think that I am, it seems like they claimed for ages that the covid virus came from bats. Oh well. Probably just a coincidence. Probably, people swap bat viruses all the time. Like trading cards. Or monkeypox.

Over the last decade or so, USAID sloshed $250 million in taxpayer grant money to the University of California-Davis under an operation, sorry, I mean a ‘program,’ called PREDICT, which completely failed to predict any pandemics including covid. Thanks for all the dough, though. But I digress.

PREDICT’s job was to collect a treasure trove of pandemic-potential viruses. Then it ended. So what was USAID supposed to do? It sent all the collected samples —for “safe storage”— to, where else, Wuhan, China.

When “humanitarianism” is your mission, you can dabble in just about anything you want, including bioweapons development, apparently.

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the official closure of USAID, saying that years of various factions manipulating its “charity-based” model had created a “globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense.” That’s putting it nicely.

After all this, after everything we now know, was the pandemic actually USAID’s fault? It’s becoming ever clearer why the incoming Trump 2.0 team pulled USAID’s plug first. That agency was a global menace.

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We’ve recently discussed how the Proxy War seems to be headed toward some sort of endgame. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a startling story headlined, “Russia Makes Record Attack on Ukraine as Trump Castigates Putin.” More records! The sub-headline blandly explained, “The number of Russian drones and missiles in the barrage set a single-night record and underscored Ukraine’s need for weapons.”

It’s true that Tuesday night’s attacks set a one-day record. But it is also true that each previous night set a new, relentlessly climbing record. Ukrainian cheerleader and “on the ground” reporter Maria Avdeeva’s tweets are getting grimmer and grimmer:

Russia has a standing cease-fire offer; it publicly released the terms in June, 2024. The Ukrainians still say “nyet,” because it would let the Russians remain in the four easternmost territories currently under Russian control. Instead, Ukraine —in no position to make demands— demands that Russia evacuate the four regions and hand back the Crimean peninsula, which became part of the Russian Federation after a local referendum eleven years ago.

For at least the last two years, corporate media has consistently declared the war was a “stalemate,” insisting the Russians were suffering horrifyingly large losses in men and material with little or nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, we just marked sustained, record-breaking levels of daily aerial attacks (missiles and large drones). USA Today, for example, recently reported drone strikes increased over 500% in June and July versus earlier this year. The BBC reckoned a 10x increase.

Obviously, Russia loses no soldiers or tanks in missile attacks. So much for a stalemate.

🚀 Things could be a lot worse. According to the Times, Russia is carefully targeting military and logistical sites in Western Ukraine, such as places where U.S. war aid is staged when it arrives. The Times admitted that, during the strikes, “injuries but no deaths were reported.” This is consistent with Russia’s approach during the entire war, to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible.

The question the uncurious Times did not ask, the most important question of all —the question that Maria Avdeeva did ask— is how long can Kyiv resist if Russian attacks continue along this increasing trend? The columns and war blogs are packed with discussions of how, even if the U.S. wanted to continue supplying Ukraine with air defenses, the inventories are too low. Both SecDef Hegseth and SecState Rubio have said the same.

We can’t give you what we don’t have.

The latest shipment Pete Hegseth paused earlier this week due to low stockpiles (subsequently resumed, presumably after Zelensky conceded to some behind-the-scenes demand), reportedly included only thirty Patriot missiles. Warbloggers say it generally takes two Patriots to shoot down one incoming missile. Russian fire rates are orders of magnitude greater than what fifteen Patriot missiles can possibly provide protection for.

Time is running out. Ukrainian officials, like ex-Foreign Minister Kuleba and Lt. General Romanenko, have estimated six more months max without dramatic increases in U.S. aid. The Wall Street Journal recently forecast summer 2025 as the “tipping point.” Pro-Russian views —including Kyiv’s own special forces chief Kyrilo Budanov— suggest an even shorter window, perhaps as little as two more months without a fresh air defense injection.

Still, flouting logic, reason, and common sense, Ukraine sticks to its maximalist demands before agreeing to any ceasefire. They want not only the return of the aforementioned Russian-occupied territories, but also other “absurd” conditions like Putin agreeing to submit to war crimes tribunals, NATO membership, and Russian reparations:

In a darkly hilarious way (not so funny for average Ukrainian citizens and frontline soldiers), corporate media spends all its time wringing its hands over Russia’s “maximalist” demands, without considering that Russia’s demands are irrelevant so long as Ukraine’s own peace conditions are impossible.

One supposes that the party in the stronger position is entitled to be more demanding.

Sadly, this tragic situation is —at least partly— the result of the U.S. for so long accepting the role of “world policeman.” Ukraine’s only hopes lie in waiting for Uncle Sam to step in and force the naughty Russians to behave. But Trump doesn’t seem inclined to risk a World War for Ukraine’s sake, and our ability to continue funding and arming Ukraine’s resistance is obviously petering out.

Alas, Ukraine’s biggest problem is its own best friends, who refuse to tell it the painful truth. Instead, the Europeans keep encouraging Zelensky to fight! to the last Ukrainian. Don’t worry, honey, you got this.

As they say, things that can’t continue forever, won’t. The evidence suggests the Proxy War’s untenable situation will soon resolve by itself.

Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning with more essential news and commentary.

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