Secret service

Cockburn came across this interesting little tidbit while he was stirring his first apéritif of the early afternoon: a Vox preview of Christopher Whipple’s forthcoming book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House, reports that President Biden is distrustful of his Secret Service team and believes the agency fabricated a story about Biden’s German Shepherd, Major, biting an agent. Major Biden and fellow White House German Shepherd, Champ, were removed to Delaware for a while following the alleged incident. Vox reports how in the book, “Whipple details how Biden was showing a friend around the White House and pointed to the spot where Major allegedly bit a member of Biden’s security team. ‘Look, the Secret Service are never up here.

Cassidy Hutchinson, the young woman who testified recently in front of the January 6 Committee, seems unaware that she violated the six basic rules of being a staff aide. She doesn't even know her career is over; in fact, she thinks her efforts will be kickstarting her into fame. Someone should put her in touch with Monica Lewinsky. To understand Cassie's failure requires one to understand the Washington, DC ecology. There are the top-level predators, like Trump and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, and there are the staff aides like Cassie. So Rule 1 of being a staff aide is knowing your place, followed quickly by Rule 2, never forget you will not be a staff aide forever. The little bird that sits above the rhino's tail seems important, and in a way she is.

The January 6 Committee geared up to deliver a potential bombshell on Tuesday with emergency testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. But like most of the attempts to take down former president Donald Trump — from Russian collusion hoaxes to slimy porn lawyers — Hutchinson's testimony quickly revealed itself as too good to be true. It quickly became clear that one of Hutchinson's most shocking claims was either misremembered or an outright lie. She claimed that Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump's security detail, told her that Trump had attempted to grab the steering wheel of a Secret Service vehicle to redirect it to the Capitol on January 6.

Who shot Ashli Babbitt, the pro-Trump Air Force veteran who was killed by police during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol building? The American people were told that it was a Capitol Police officer who fired the fatal shot. But Cockburn has stumbled across some information that points to a different explanation. Sources close to and within the intelligence community tell Cockburn that Babbitt was actually shot by a member of then-vice president Mike Pence's protective detail. The VP's detail, of course, is provided by US Secret Service, not the Capitol Police. One person asserted to Cockburn over drinks in DC that this is 'basically an open secret' in the intelligence community.