Was Boehner Blackmailed by the FBI?

An interesting nugget at Sipsy Street Irregulars:

Well, Boehner’s resignation is far too late for me and especially far too late for the Fast and Furious investigation that he derailed because the FBI was blackmailing him…

In fact, this may have played a role in Boehner’s decision to resign… Boehner, according to this source, was still defiant until someone threatened to “tell what they knew about Fast and Furious and the FBI blackmail.” Boehner, according to this source, “turned ashy white under that fake tan” and “looked stricken.”

I have no idea if the story is true or not, but it is certainly not impossible. Boehner is supposedly an inveterate skirt chaser, and known drunk – and almost all of the DC gang does favors bordering on corruption at some point. I have no doubt once he came to Congress he got coverage of some sort, and I suspect he may have gotten coverage before he got to Congress, and even that he got to Congress because of what that coverage got on him. As Whitey Bulger will tell you, it is good to be an FBI CI.

It would explain why he was so weepy with the Pope. Crying in an individual like Boehner, prone to sadness, is most often a response to a full loss of control over one’s life. When I saw him crying I assumed something else in his life wasn’t going as he wanted it to, though I didn’t know what, and didn’t care enough about him to give it a deep think.

For those who don’t understand how it would work, this might appear as if Boehner would have turned white at the thought of the public finding out he was blackmailed. That is not actually how it would work. If some agency (say the FBI) was playing Boehner as an asset, then Boehner long ago gave up any autonomy on certain things. If specific things come to his attention, he reports to his handler, and does what the handler says on the matters they want to control (presumably LE investigation-related items. But who knows what the machine decides it wants to get a hand on).

I assume most of the time the handler wouldn’t give a fuck what Boehner is doing, and Boehner would know this. This would also give Boehner a certain “Whitey Bulgeresque” bullet-proofness. He would be valuable to the FBI while in his position, and thus they would act, and pressure any other assets they hold (such as media executives about to break a damaging story), to protect him.

But Boehner would also have been informed that since they owned him, nothing would be as important as the Bureau, and thus anything which might have any effect on Bureau operations or reputation would have to be immediately reported to his handler, so he could be given direction, and the Bureau would have full control.

In this case, the moment somebody drops an open threat to out that the Bureau blackmailed him, Boehner would see where that leads. He immediately has to report it. From there the Bureau is going to assess the threat. How much does the threatener know? How much can he prove? Then they will see if they can pressure the threatener. If not, then the question becomes if the threatener does act, can that be reliably contained? Who would he tell? Where would it go? Could the outlet be controlled? That requires more surveillance deployed, and even then it is possible the threatener has someone else deliver the story, or that he eventually finds an outlet that will run it through sheer persistence himself.

There comes a point where the risk of scandal is great enough that it just becomes easier to tell Boehner that his time is up and he needs to resign. I’m sure it comes with a promise that another asset at some lobbying firm will offer him a super-lucrative contract, and maybe some other goodies.

If this story was true, Boehner would have seen this entire chain of events the moment he realized that the threat of exposure was something he had to report back to his handler. Merely uttering the words would cast the die. That would be why he would immediately turn white, go quiet, and give up. At that moment he would have realized everything had been taken out of his hands. The argument, his intransigence, the votes – it all becomes immaterial, because he knows that the forces that be, are going to close out his Speakership.

You can see how knowing the full extent of forces operating around you could confer power upon you. It also shows how if you know these pressure points, you can move the machine with great ease. If this story was true, then nobody ever needed to rally enough votes to oust Boehner. They didn’t need the media on their side. They merely had to make his continued Speakership inconvenient for the FBI in some way. A mere threat to drag the Bureau into the affair could subvert the entire constitutional process, and trump the votes of every other person in the room. You might as well be King for a moment.

But you can’t play that card forever. That Kingship belongs to another who does not like to share. Sooner or later the machine will come for you. As we speak, if this story was true, the person who threatened to out Boehner would be blanketed under surveillance coverage, since obviously they didn’t have enough to control him previously, and that was a mistake since he was a loose cannon who cost them an asset. If they can’t find damaging material on him, they may look for damaging material on his friends and family. If that fails, I would not be surprised if they create damaging material, be it through honeypot, IRS investigations, or computer hacks placing classified docs on his laptop. At the very least, they could keep up on what he was doing.

It is impossible to know if this was true or not, but it is easy to see how it could be a messy world where LE Intelligence meets political oversight, as the Apocalypse cometh™