Thu May 18 08:08:50 EDT 2017

Slept from eleven to seven.

High of eighty-six today. Windy. Chance of thunderstorm, mostly in the evening.

Work:
- Manager meeting
  Done.
- Sign Bullseye contract
  Done.
- Set up LXC on tiger
  More or less, but it looks like the Alpine template might be broken.

Thirty minute walk at lunch.
Nearly as windy as yesterday.
Saw a turkey vulture and a crow.

Home:
- Faux Bat
  Not much.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/18/james-comey-trump-special-prosecutor-robert-mueller-fbi-215154
> Comey knew that Card would have Secret Service protection with him, and he was worried about being forcibly ejected by agents from Ashcroft’s hospital room. Ashcroft, weakened from gallbladder problems, was in no condition to sign off on STELLAR WIND—he’d legally turned the reins over to Comey while he was incapacitated—but, Comey feared, if the White House could isolate Ashcroft, who knew what it would do? Comey thought fast: Ashcroft had his own FBI security detail, and so he asked Mueller to call ahead and tell them not to allow the attorney general to be left alone. It was, in an extraordinary showdown between the White House and Justice Department, perhaps the single most extraordinary moment of the tumultuous Bush years: The FBI director ordering his agents to resist the Secret Service if they tried to remove the deputy attorney general from the attorney general’s bedside. As motorcades converged on the hospital from across Washington, everyone involved wondered: Just how far would this situation escalate?
> To understand what they’re now up against, Trump’s embattled White House aides should spend the day reading Mueller’s 2015 report to the NFL, which recruited him to investigate the league’s culpability in Ray Rice’s domestic violence case. Mueller’s subsequent lengthy report oozes thoroughness and the unique gravitas of an experienced prosecutor—his team, some of whom will now be working alongside him in the Russia investigation, devoured millions of documents, text messages and emails; tracked down nearly every person who had been in the building; and called all 938 telephone numbers that called in and out of the league headquarters during the period in question. His rundown of the NFL headquarters’ procedures for receiving mail and packages alone runs to five pages—he almost surely learned things that the NFL’s own mailroom staff didn’t know about who signs for what packages when.
> When, nearly a decade ago, I started writing a biography of Mueller, one of the director’s associates suggested that I wouldn’t fully understand that hospital showdown until I could answer why Mueller was present at Ashcroft’s bedside that March night. As this colleague said, “I was never able to figure that out—it wasn’t an FBI program and the FBI had nothing to do with the legal advice, so why was Bob Mueller in the hospital room?”
> Comey himself eventually told me the answer, years after he left the Justice Department for the private sector.
> Seated in his office in Bethesda, Maryland, at Lockheed Martin, his lanky 6-foot-8-inch frame draped over a chair, Comey told me he’d enlisted Mueller’s help because of his reputation for integrity and also because of the political power and righteousness inherent in the nonpartisan position Mueller held. “I knew that no one cared about losing a deputy attorney general,” he said, “but no president could weather losing an FBI director.”

Read a few pages of Veins of the Earth before bed.

Breakfast: carrots, tomato, peanut butter toast, coffee
Lunch: nuts
Dinner: pizza