FBI leadership "fired up" to get Trump over Russiagate
Specifically named as "fired up" was FBI Director James Comey. Yes, that weasel. FBI leadership apparently pushed the Alfa Bank hoax very, very hard even after being informed it didn't add up.
This trial specifically is about Sussmann, but I have to wonder if Durham is eyeing the information about FBI leadership's behavior here and contemplating whether he can get to them.
Justice demands accountability for those in government as well as those outside of it.
Sussmann is on trial for allegedly lying to the FBI regarding whether he was working for a client (Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee) when he brought the FBI information (allegedly false and possibly entirely fake) alleging a connection between Trump email servers and Alfa Bank email servers.
The jury, populated with DC residents, donors to Hillary Clinton, and rowing teammates of the accused's family, is currently deliberating. The judge, married to the lawyer defending Lisa Page who is infamous for her role in SpyGate persecuting President Trump, will announce a verdict Tuesday if the jury has reached one.
Sussmann acquitted. I view this as possible only through the biased jury. (See Conflicts of Interest below).
Hillary implicated in Alfa Bank hoax during Sussmann trial
Agreeing to telling a fake story to the media is different from agreeing to tell a fake story to the FBI, of course. But this establishes that Clinton knew and approved of at least some parts of the Russia hoax, and it strains credibility that anyone involved would have gone to the FBI independently with a faked scandal.
We'll just have to watch and see how this trial goes. The real question is whether Sussman can be convinced to flip on others for lenient sentencing after a conviction.
Durham trial to include Hillary donors in juror pool
I'm not sure what standard procedures says here, but it seems like direct donors to a political campaign is reason to assume bias. Direct donor to an opponent is more nebulous, but in this case, I'd really prefer jurors have donated to neither of the two 2016 candidates.
We're already starting to see issues with prosecuting the people involved due to statute of limitations issues on the crimes they have been stonewalling any attempt to obtain information about.
How the intelligence agencies control the government
So Madison (who I don't know and don't endorse, he's just the current victim) talked about being invited to "sex parties", orgies, with drugs, by Congressmen and others. And that led, very quickly, to blackmail material being dropped publically -- the above is just the latest example.
The FBI does background checks on everyone. They have all of that information, or know where to look to get it. And when someone steps out of line, it starts getting leaked to the press. Going through an opposition research PAC is just a fig leaf.
Durham got some of the emails he wqs looking for, and also got a ruling from the judge that some at least might be protected by attorney-client privilege (it wasn't clear to the judge that they were not, and he gave benefit of the doubt to the privilege claim). However, that also benefits Durham, as the claim that Sussman was or was not working for a client is what the whole trial is about.
Basically: Sussman brought the Alfa Bank data (likely fake) to the FBI and said he wasn't doing it on behalf of a client. Durham says he was doing it on behalf of the Clinton Campaign and the DNC by way of Perkins Coie. The Clinton Campaign and the DNC have requested to exclude evidence from the trial on the basis of attorney-client privilege. Oops! Also, some of the individuals involved are pleading the 5th...
Remember, Biden's administration is filled with people from both the Obama administration and some with ties to the Clintons who were involved in Spygate. It's not just a Clinton plot, though for the moment Durham seems to be pursuing that angle. Biden himself, as VP, was in at least some of the high level meetings where this was discussed.
If Durham is an honest man, neither Hillary, Obama, nor Biden himself are safe. Even Democrats are starting to think Durham should investigate Hillary. (He probably is already).
Whether Durham is actually honest remains an open question; but it does appear, for the moment, that he's taking this seriously.
Evidence Fusion GPS got data from the federal government
Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse has hinted at this before, but with limited evidence Fusion was using their access to government data in its efforts targeting Trump. Now it seems we do have actual evidence.
No more excitement without more indictments. But this is like a welfare check. Every so often Durham surfaces in public -- usually by obscure court filings -- so we know Hillary hasn't had him killed yet.
Trump was, and probably remains, our best chance to fix this. He has been personally bitten by all this in a way that no one else in the political class ever has.
Until now, I had been assuming Horowitz was honest in intent but limited in scope and authority. However, if he was withholding information from Durham as it now appears, that casts significant doubt on his motivations as IG investigating SpyGate as well.
No more excitement without more indictments... but at least Durham is still investigating and occasionally we get some journalists summarizing things and reminding us that Durham exists.
This man, a lawyer and FBI employee, pled guilty to falsifying court documents to enable his agency to spy on then-presidential-candidate Trump. He pled guilty to a felony, admitted to committing fraud on the court in support of a violation of civil rights unprecedented in living memory. And the DC Bar reinstates him before he finishes serving his probation.
So let me get this straight. Comey's daughter is in the FBI/DOJ and taking a leadership role in the Epstein/Maxwell cases. Yes, the one where Epstein didn't hang himself and the video cameras did not record him not doing it. And Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's wife is a lawyer for Garland while Garland oversees an investigation that may well target Sullivan.
There's ALWAYS someone with a connection in a position to interfere. That's how DC protects itself.
Intel community refuses to confirm or deny infiltration of Trump Admin
Gateway Pundit puts it a little too strongly. This isn't an "admission", at least not literally. But it's a non-denial when a stringent denial would be entirely proper. So, in effect, it's an admission.
Heads have not yet rolled for this, and they really need to.
A possible Russian spy turns the FBI on the duly elected president, and gets unmonitored bail. While real Americans who may have walked around a public building without official permission are held incommunicado for almost a year.
We also have some further analysis on the indictment. Briefly, it's an arrest and indictment for lying to the FBI, and it may allow Durham to put the squeeze on more people, but we don't know much yet because it's still news.
At this time, Durham seems to be seriously pressing his case against, at least, the criminal actors outside government. That's another indictment, so it's worth more excitement!
And you know what? Garland isn't going to declassify shit. He doesn't have to. The other team ran out the clock on Trump and Biden doesn't want anything released, so Garland won't release anything. Orders Trump gave before leaving office are no longer operative.
It sucks, but Trump should have made this happen personally before the election.
If this article is correct, Durham appears to have something significant he can use to apply leverage that will encourage people to flip on others. However, everyone he appears to be targeting remains outside the government, though some of them have ongoing contracts with likely access to intelligence data on internet traffic similar to that they used to create the alpha bank hoax.
No more excitement until there are more indictments.
Kash Patel knows the topic like almost no one else does, but he's an eternal optimist. He thinks Durham will go after some of the remaining big fish, with indictments against Fusion GPS, Comey, and McCabe. He also thinks Page and Strozk are cooperating.
The mantra has been slightly modified: no more excitement without more indictments.
DOJ settlement awards SpyGate figure McCabe his pension back
There's some speculation about what this means for Durham deciding whether or not McCabe gets criminally charged. I don't really see those things as connected. Main DOJ wants to protect the people involved. That's what this is. It's a settlement of a lawsuit, not any sense of clearing McCabe of wrongdoing. DOJ just wants to do a favor for one of their own by restoring his pension.
Durham will charge, or not, without getting involved one way or the other.
The fact that even the minimal punishment applied to McCabe for attempting to influence an election and then participating in the Mueller coup attempt was wiped out is infuriating, and it may well be meant as some kind of subtle hint to Durham that McCabe is protected. But I also don't think it's really necessary to read that far into it.
Durham may well have been warned off DOJ/FBI people in his investigation, but if so, I don't think that communication is happening by press release and coded settlement offers.
IG report shows FBI continues to abuse FISA process
If you're wondering why nothing will change, Sundance explains it. The same people shuffle around into different positions to protect each other. The entire system is corrupt and must be destroyed.
Another optimist who sees more indictments coming.
I think more indictments are possible, but likely only of figures outside the current administration and FBI/DOJ. All the key figures who abused their power here are either wrist-slapped and retired or still in place. Durham may be hoping for a break from someone on the outside to make a slam-dunk case against bigger fish.
It's worth noting that one of the potential big fish is Jake Sullivan, named in the indictment as Clinton's foreign policy advisor, and current National Security Advisor to Biden.
Let me be one of the first to stay that Sussman did not kill himself.
Dem/Clinton lawyer indicted by Durham for lying to FBI
For some background on what this might mean. I will add that this is, not surprisingly, an effective whitewash for the FBI itself. One agent gets charged for falsifying documents to the court (and only because he was stupid enough to alter them and get caught), everyone else in government gets off scott free while pointing the finger at the people outside of government who "misled" them.
Durham should get his claws into whoever he can, but we all know the FBI themselves are the people who abused their power and tampered with an election, then conducted a running series of coup attempts on the elected president. They should not get away with it, but it seems like they are going to.
My take is less optimistic. While it would be nice if Durham has managed to collect enough evidence to indict a key figure (and thus to pressure him to testify against other key figures, potentially including the clients who hired him to present this hoax to the FBI), Durham still has to ask permission from Biden's DOJ to actually do anything. And both Barr and Durham have repeatedly disappointed the hopes for justice raised by media leaks.
So my policy remains no excitement until an indictment.
Mainly, the lie that they weren't interested in him. Why, exactly, they felt the need to lie about that so much is still unanswered. The answer is likely redacted... but there's really only one thing the FBI would be interested in covering up about Seth.
Note the charges. "Violating foreign lobbying laws" is the catch-all charge that the FBI uses to spy on people they want to spy on. And after that the charges are obstructing justice -- meaning he made the FBI's illegal spying harder somehow -- and making false statements -- meaning he didn't say what the FBI wanted him to say.
These charges are, in other words, completely bullshit, fabricated out of thin air because Barrack (and what a coincidence that name is) wouldn't cooperate in the FBI's witch hunt against Trump.
Oh, I agree we'll likely get a Durham report. But it won't result in prison sentences for anyone. Barr set up several ways for Durham's Special Counsel position to be invalidated, and Biden will do just that if Durham tries to actually put anyone in jail or even actually investigate anything higher than the FBI.
Face it: no one will get punished for this. Not even Clinesmith, who got his wrist slapped for admitting to forging court documents and will likely get his law license back pretty much immediately.
For an investigative agency, the FBI sure has lost a lot of evidence related to the misconduct of the Mueller probe. That sure doesn't seem accidental.
This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it's an admission that rules aren't being followed. And that access from the FBI was supposed to be turned off...
DOJ continues to abuse the law to investigate Trump
Think about it. When going after Trump the FBI abused their authority to violate attorney client privilege repeatedly. They did it with McGhan. They did it with Rudy Giuliani. They did it with Michael Cohen (the only one who actually flipped, but he had nothing on Trump).
A small helping of justice. Emphasis on small. 6 months for leaking thousands of documents, when there was no criminal behavior even charged in any of them?
Democrats aren't even hiding their totalitarian plans
Even the comparison to 9/11 -- when 3,000 people died and buildings worth billions were completely destroyed, affecting many city blocks and injuring thousands more -- is odious.
And to add insult to injury, after the Russia hoax and the Spygate controversy, they are going to unleash the intelligence agencies and their pervasive spying on Americans against their political opponents openly and without shame.
More Seth Rich documents released from FBI under FOIA
The release does not appear to contain much useful information, beyond demonstrating that people at the FBI and on Mueller's special counsel team were paying attention to stories about Seth Rich and having conversations about them. Most of the potentially interesting information is redacted.
The case was ditched by the FEC because it is no longer politically useful with Trump out of office. It was never valid because no campaign money was used.
FBI spying on Giuliani began the day he agreed to represent Trump
The date alone is all the evidence needed to prove political motives. And the use of a special master to review the evidence doesn't provide any actual protection. The data seized is already in the hands of the people who want to make improper use of it, and that use does not rely on any court processes that would reject the information. Once they have it, they can just look at it.
The reasons they cite are worthless, but they don't need to be serious. All they need to do is get their foot in the door, and they will find -- or make up -- anything else they need.
FBI using NSA databases without warrants -- again -- STILL
The legality of these investigations stops at without court orders. There's no exception in the 4th Amendment for terrorism, regardless of motivation or potential for violence. (If international contacts are involved, that is murkier, but even in such situations communications of US persons are supposed to be protected). It's clear that with Trump out of office, the FBI is doubling down on Spygate and political investigations.
And don't forget that the FBI has been trying for decades to smear the right in general, and Donald Trump supporters in particular, as white supremacists. Which makes me think that's who those queries are targeting.
This is not an isolated problem. Seven separate field offices were involved, meaning not just the Washington, DC group.
FISC hires Mary McCord, implicated in SpyGate, as Amici Curiae
I was skeptical about Boasberg since the last person he hired in this role, who also had SpyGate connections. These are much more blatant. I agree with Sundance here; the FISC is now obviously and undeniably compromised. Whether that's willing cooperation or blackmail is irrelevant. I suspect it's willing; you don't get on that court unless you've already been vetted by the Deep State.
CIA operative funded Obama, Clinton before being caught trying to corrupt Trump
Anyone still under the delusion that the CIA stays out of domestic politics just got disabused.
It's important too to take note of the sequence of events.
He fundraised for Obama: nothing happened to him. He fundraised for Clinton: nothing happened to him. He fundraised for Trump: suddenly he's facing criminal charges.
Wouldn't it be remarkably convenient to have a corruption scandal involving Trump from the earliest possible moment after they realized Trump won? ie, Trump's inauguration? The investigation would make a great excuse for surveillance on anyone this guy managed to talk to and involve in his schemes, wouldn't it? And then he could conveniently roll over on higher ups and get off with a wrist-slap and a federal witness protection program.
FBI requests delay in production of Seth Rich records
I'm assuming this information and delay request is related to the recent claim from the same attorney that Durham may need to delete some information he has concerning Seth Rich. Is the FBI delaying in the hopes that Durham will delete it?
Solomon says indictments in 6-8 weeks... if DOJ approves
While Solomon's sources have generally been good about facts, their ability to offer predictions has a much more limited track record.
I predict that the Biden DOJ will flatly refuse to allow charges if they think they can get away with it. The only thing that might make that difficult is if someone inside flipped as Solomon suggests. (And it would have to be more than just Clinesmith I think).
Rosenstein admits to discussing recording the President
Seems to me he denied even discussing this to Congress previously. If justice was equal, this would be used as leverage to get Rosenstein to sing for everything he knows about SpyGate.
Durham resigns as US attorney; may continue as special counsel for now
Durham's resignation as US attorney is part of the normal process (in Democrat administrations) of clearing out political appointees from the other party. How this will affect Durham's role as special counsel for the SpyGate investigation is the real question, but Durham has at this point been pretty much exposed as a paper tiger.
We will just have to see if Durham's special counsel role results in anything, or if he closes up shop.
At this point, I suspect Durham was appointed as special counsel by Barr in order to continue blocking Trump from declassifying the Deep State abuses. Remember, Barr has ties to the first Bush administration -- and so does Stefan Halper, the latter of which engaged in what could well be similar intelligence activities, just without the added FISA wrinkle. (Or for all we know, WITH the added FISA wrinkle).
Garland will not commit to keeping Durham in special counsel role
Of course he won't. Durham will be gone the instant he shows any sign of doing anything other than a coverup operation. Which, judging by results so far, means Durham is probably quite safe.
FBI targeting of Trump campaign far wider than originally thought
Read the whole thing.
Perhaps most telling is the focus on finding information from Russian connections that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton. That suggests that such information exists, is real, and would be very damaging if revealed. It also suggests the purpose of the investigation was political -- to protect Hillary, first, and to damage Trump and discredit any information that did come out, second -- rather than a true counterintelligence investigation.
Comey admitted he couldn't verify Steele on the same day he signed FISA
John Solomon at Just The News terms this a smoking gun, and he's right. It is. It should be enough to put Comey in jail for misleading the FISC. But it won't, because the cover-up lasted just long enough -- which is to say. about two weeks longer than Donald Trump lasted.
Durham, and therefore Barr, were always cover-up agents for the Deep State. Their mission was to look tough and thus delay Trump from doing anything effective while in office. This is merely the final admission of their role.
Government "can neither confirm nor deny" they fabricated Russian fingerprints
As far as I am concerned, this proves the counter-narrative: Seth Rich leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks and was killed for it, after which the US government (FBI, CIA and possibly other agencies) covered it up. The details are foggy, but the coverup is proven.
Senate Judiciary releases 11 transcripts about Crossfire Hurricane
I'm with Bill Quick on this. It's sort of nice to have it released and public, although it likely doesn't cover absolutely everything, but the time when this could have a significant impact or lead to serious reforms is long past. Biden will protect the people who are protecting him.
Durham may still turn up something, but it does seem unlikely at this point.
I originally read this as being all SpyGate documents, but ... it's just what the FBI had. That leaves a lot of room for CIA and other agencies to be hiding even more.
I think this declassification is welcome and necessary. I expect the contents will be very embarrassing to the FBI, and probably says a lot about the confidence Trump has in Special Counsel Durham -- which is to say, very little confidence, an opinion I share.
I can't help but think that even if all of this comes out, it will come out too late.
I suppose there is one small ray of hope: if Seth Rich was actually murdered as a result of his involvement with Wikileaks, that's going to be a viable criminal charge for decades.
Clinesmith sentencing delayed until after inauguration
This seems like a transparent delay to push the event past Biden's inauguration, should it take place. That would enable the Biden administration and DOJ to potentially take steps to interfere in the process, despite Durham's special counsel appointment.
The impression I am getting is that people are frantically throwing up objections to what trump wants done, and Trump is methodically making each objection go away.
This says a lot about the people around Trump, and it doesn't bode well for success when there is a deadline involved. Barr and others appear to have successfully run out the clock on SpyGate, unless Trump somehow manages to sort out the election fraud issue and stay in office.
You can read the actual test messages, along with a more detailed explanation, at Just The News. They demonstrate that FBI official Peter Strzok was made aware that Page denied claims he was associated with a Russian he was accused of colluding with and failed to inform the FISA court of that. Other messages suggested there were open CI investigations into the matter before the FBI claimed to have opened the case, along with information about the Hillary Clinton email case.
This is disgusting. Trump should be free to fire anyone in his administration without facing any legal consequences whatever, and Wray has certainly earned an unpleasant exit from the Trump administration through his inaction and determination to keep a lid on SpyGate matters.
Durham claims he is expanding his team and making progress
Realistically, why is Durham expanding his team NOW? He did lose a few subordinates before the election, so maybe he is just filling those positions out. He's already announced that his investigation was narrowed to just the FBI rather than the other guilty parties in the intelligence community. I think this cynical view of the announcement is warranted.
Ratcliffe calls for Durham to release interim report
An interim report is absolutely necessary at this stage. Biden will absolutely shut down the Special Counsel as soon as he takes office, and the media will decline to exact a price.
This means the FBI has been lying about what they had concerning Seth Rich for years. Not just refusing to answer, actually lying. Under oath.
The implications are huge. This would appear to confirm that Rich was involved in something more than a street robbery, and the only thing we know about that that might be would be the leak to Wikileaks. Durham may be investigating that angle, or may not. If not, why would this information be released now? (Even if Durham is investigating that, why now is still an interesting question).
It's possible the FBI is trying to get ahead of more releases, which would suggest there's more big information to come, and possibly that they know Biden won't be taking office (because if he was, they could continue to lie).
If nothing else, the time between now and January 20th looks to get a lot more exciting.
Barr appoints Durham as Special Counsel for SpyGate
This will make it much more difficult (but not impossible) for Biden to fire Durham to prevent him looking into SpyGate.
Interesting questions...
First, this was done 10/19/20: October, before the election. Why? And why was it kept confidential? And why was it released now?
Second, Durham is confirmed to be looked at Mueller's Special Counsel operation.
Third, why was it released concurrently with Barr's comments to AP on election fraud?
Fourth... notice how all the other prosecutors (Huber, et all) that we've been hearing about are apparently not Special Counsels. Did they get folded up under Durham or closed?
Holy Shit. Military intel guy testifying at Arizona hearing is confirming manipulations in past elections (he named Cruz v Beto and Bevin's race in Ky). He says he observed election day traffic, confirming the systems were on the internet.
Votes can be moved in large batches, whether by administrators or hackers.
Qnatch malware discovered on the servers, which records credentials, enabling remote access with those stolen credentials.
He SAW changes.
He observed traffic going to Frankfurt, one of the sites that has been coming up- in the hammer/scorecard/kraken stuff. The CIA has a known facility in Frankfurt.
It is starting to look like this stuff is real, although details are still lacking.
35,000 fraudulent ballots added to all Democrats in Arizona, as reported by a whistleblower email, and confirmed by observation of an artificial vote spike at the beginning of counting. "Tested and shown to work in judicial retention elections since 2014."
Is Durham folding up his investigation? It wouldn't surprised me; I predicted it would happen if Biden won, and at this moment Biden appears to have won.
It's why I was so furious at the delays pushing everything past election day.
At this point, it's still rumor, and pretty predictable rumor.
I believe he is lying. I believe he knew then what he knows now. I believe he signed the FISA knowing it was misleading and contained false information.
He just thinks he can lie about it without getting caught.
Ex-CIA official who worked under Brennan now running Facebook misinfo censors
The CIA is embedding it's employees in places where they can shut down information they don't want getting out. Say, I wonder if Karen Graham worked on anything related to SpyGate?
Mueller report did not mention evidence Russian collusion was a Hillary plot
That is, Mueller uncovered even more previously unknown evidence of the plot and neglected to mention it in his report. The information exposes what appear to be lies by Alexrandra Chalupa, whose name has come up frequently with respect to Ukraine and the Russian Collusion allegations.
This further discredits the Mueller special counsel's work, as they failed to report on exculpatory evidence they discovered.
Their latest batch of Strzok-Page emails includes meetings that had to be "recreated", suggesting they were deleted. One of the suggestive meeting titles: "Going Dark Strategy Meeting"
Judicial Watch is STILL suing the FBI over McCabe/Strzok/Page texts
Judging by the FBI's desperate response -- they are claiming text messages are not subject to FOIA at all -- there must be some REALLY bad stuff in those messages.
UPDATE: I'm tagging this Spygate, because who else could have known about and intercepted this package?
UPDATE: Package contents found after Tucker announces theft to 5 million people. I would be curious whether any documents are missing, and note that once it became clear Tucker had copies, the primary value of a document theft would be to find out what Tucker has in order to strategize messaging. So, just finding the contents does not mean they weren't stolen and copies made, to be carefully looked over later.
CIA Director Gina Haspel still resisting SpyGate disclosure
Even after Trump repeated his order to declassify and release documents, she is still resisting disclosure, likely due to personal involvement in the scandal. I will be very surprised if she still has a job should Trump win election, along with Wray at FBI.
I didn't really catch any new news. When questioned by Republicans, Comey knew nothing and if he ever once knew anything he remembered nothing about it after being presented with documentary evidence that he was told about it. When questioned by Democrats, Comey was able to remember enough details and procedures to condemn Republicans and make accusations against Trump. It was a remarkable contrast. But it is very difficult to prosecute someone for "not remembering".
None of the Republicans were really able to tie Comey down and force specific denials or admissions on specific points. This is probably by design. Lindsey just wants to pound the podium and ask everyone if they would sign the FISA again if they knew then what they know now, which may score minor political points but will absolutely not put anyone in jail.
Only Barr can nail these people to the wall. The House is controlled by Democrats and the Senate is controlled by a turtle riding on the back of rinos.
Gina Haskell personally blocking important SpyGate declassifications
I really just have two things to say about this.
1) OF COURSE SHE IS. She was CIA Station Chief in London when these things were going on. Remember, the contacts with Papadopoulous, Flynn, Mifsud, and Halper took place in London. She's implicated up to her neck and knows it. That's why she was pushed so hard as a candidate for higher up intel positions (thankfully, Trump did not nominate her).
2) Didn't Trump give AG Barr full declassification power? And yet we've had delay after delay over declassified documents until we got Grenell and then Ratcliffe as DNI. And now it's Haskell objecting? Well, fuck Haskell. Trump needs to fire anyone who refuses a declassification request related to SpyGate for any reason.
FBI Agent Barnett found CHS accusation about Flynn likely false
The allegation appears to be that Flynn left a dinner event with a Russian expatriate named Svetlana, and implied the two may have been sexually involved. However, the agent found nothing to corroborate the story. This would cast doubt on other information provided by that source (likely Stephan Halper) and strengthens other evidence suggesting Flynn was targeted for false accusations in order to keep him out of the Trump administration.
Bartiromo: No Durham report or indictments before the election
If true, this is a disgrace and a cover-up. It's obvious that, in the event of a Biden win, all of Durham's activities no matter how sprawling will be shut down and we will never hear a peep from any of those involved again.
Graham is promising more declassifications, including some regarding lack of predication for the entire Mueller special counsel. That's nice. But declassifications are no substitute for prosecutions.
When you have to deny that you are the target, you are the target. Notably, Brennan said he was told he was not a target; Comey was not and feels the need to come out and deny it to the media anyway.
Clinton campaign had 2016 investigation of foreign influence
Turns out, the Clinton campaign in 2016 had an FBI investigation involving a foreign influence operation. Instead of taking out a FISA, the FBI gave the campaign a defensive briefing. It's a very direct contrast with how the FBI handled the bogus investigation into the Trump campaign, suggesting even more political bias.
Seems Lindsay Graham actually found something useful?
Mind you, giving a defensive briefing seems like what you would want the FBI to do in this situation. Even if it tips off the candidate who, in Hillary's case, is clearly pretty casual about foreign money flowing into her coffers. It's the contrast with the treatment of the Trump campaign that makes this a serious matter.
Sharyll Attkisson names names in computer intrusion case
And one of the names is well-known: Rod Rosenstein. She has also identified (with the help of whistleblowers) the exact agents who conducted the computer intrusions in her case and others.
The official believes Trump is compromised by Russia, despite that being exposed as a deliberate hoax by the Clinton campaign in collusion with -- believe it or not -- a suspected Russian intelligence agent. Worse, he believes a "bipartisan commission" should be formed to determine who is "allowed" to be President.
It seems to be that the Intel agencies have been effectively picking our presidents since Bush the Elder (with his deep CIA connections). They want to keep doing it and after just one term of a president they can't control, they are tired of it and want to throw aside all pretense of a public choice.
Sure, it's possible a Russian agent came to America with a hard drive full of intimate family-and-hookers pictures of the Bidens and a few fake emails. But it's pretty easy to verify whether you have a real cache of emails. And it's pretty easy to verify the more serious emails once you know what you are looking for, if you are a government agency like the FBI investigating legitimate crimes. Not to mention official White House visitor logs, the signature on the paperwork given to the repair shop, financial records that would match the transactions laid out...
Bruce Ohr resigned ahead of firing for misconduct in IG report
Worth noting that Ohr resigned in July; the news is that he was about to be fired when he resigned. Analysis. Longer analysis. It seems likely Ohr was allowed to resign instead of being fired as a return for his cooperation in the investigation. This is good and bad; the good is it means he likely was cooperating, the bad is that his cooperation is apparently no longer needed and yet we still haven't seen any charges.
The real tantalizing bit about Ohr's cooperation is whether he had to talk about or implicate his wife Nellie Ohr, a Fusion GPS researcher with history at the CIA. It's been speculated that Nellie was a contractor with access to the NSA's databases during the right time period to be researching Trump. (We know she was researching Trump using "open source" information, but if she was also feeding information from the CIA into Fusion's operations, and Ohr knew about that...)
Basically, the event that forced the reopening of the Clinton email investigation was Anthony Weiner's lawyer providing Clinton emails to SDNY (Preet Bharara) as leverage to try to block the sex charges. The FBI knew about this from their field office but DC covered it up for a month. But they couldn't keep it under wraps forever because FBI officials from New York were asking what was happening with the emails, and their existence was starting to leak out.
McCabe was already in trouble for sitting on the laptop for so long. He might have to recuse because of the options, so he was useless in continuing to cover this up.
So Loretta Lynch used the threat of prosecution in the Eric Garner case to force the NYPD to shut up about it.
Four years later and we're still trying to extract information about the coverup from the FBI; never mind the original emails.
However, there are two hopeful points. Durham is apparently investigating the Clinton Foundation, and a federal judge reopened a whistleblower case on the same topic with the IRS.
Details and analysis. The problem I have with this is that it's a high stakes gamble with players whose motives are not fully understood. One possibility is that Barr and Durham are trying to nail down prosecutions for big picture crimes. Another possibility is that Barr and Durham are covering up what they can in order to preserve the institutions of the FBI, DOJ, CIA, FISC, and intelligence agencies and methods. We don't know which. Barr himself is suspect due to his involvement in shutting down prosecutions in the Ruby Ridge case and generally being a government official type. He has presented a good public face on this issue, but he has yet to deliver anything substantial. And it now appears he won't deliver anything substantial before the election.
So now, if Trump wins, maybe we get some actual prosecutions, and maybe we don't.
But if Trump loses we get nothing, and everything Barr and Durham claim to have been working for goes out the window.
FBI doc tracking Steele dossier reveals the FBI knew it was false
JustTheNews has the document. This document is what the FBI is supposed to use to verify information is accurate before presenting it to the FISC as part of an application for surveillance. And we now know for certain that the FBI could verify almost nothing of the allegations Steele presented to them, yet applied for a warrant heavily relying on that information anyway.
It SHOULD be damning evidence of bad faith from everyone involved.
Obama WH Counsel sent email to Comey the night before Trump took office
There are a couple relevant points here. One is that we know a little bit more than just the fact of the email; we know it was considered relevant to ACLJ's FOIA request concerning FBI spies/sources in the White House. And we know a little bit about context now that Susan Rice has admitted her "by the book" email was basically dictated to her by that same White House counsel.
So at a minimum, we know Obama's White House counsel knew about and was somehow involved in the FBI's spying on Trump's presidency. Note: Not his campaign or the transition team, but after Trump took office.
They are good questions, but Comey likely has prepared answers to them. The question is whether Comey can give good public answers without contradicting himself in previous testimony or being exposed as a liar by non-public information known to Durham through documentary evidence or testimony.
Details are slim because they are buried within an article spinning new conspiracy theories about the Alfa Bank debunked hoax conspiracy theory. But let's remember who Dan Jones is. He's a guy who used to work for the FBI, and after that for Senator Feinstein when she was on the Senate Intel Committee, and when Trump won the election, he left government service with $50 million in funding to hire Fusion GPS and continue the attacks on Trump.
I suspect this will make some people in the Senate very uncomfortable.
However, it also means the investigation takes longer, and becomes more vulnerable to Biden winning the election.
Ratcliffe delivers "hundreds of pages" of material to DOJ for Durham
Although taken out of context it's a promising development in the investigation of SpyGate, taken in context it's too little too late. If this was a response to Trump's demand for more declassification, great; but why wasn't it declassified before? Why did Trump need to issue the demand in order to get action from Ratcliffe who is supposed to be on Trump's side? Why didn't Barr use the authority he supposedly has to get this sooner?
Bottom line, just reviewing this information and understanding it in the context of SpyGate events will take weeks. This will ensure absolutely nothing happens before the election, with the possible exception of leaks.
Further, we're not actually seeing declassification here. It's material for DOJ to review on site at the DNI office. That's helpful to DOJ and Durham, but the on-site restrictions will slow things down and they indicate this is not a declassification for public release.
And of course if Biden wins the whole thing goes away.
Former NSA general counsel testifies that Trump was spied on
The revelation comes in an article at Lawfare, which I will not link. See the summary at bongino.com instead. It's interesting that this appears at Lawfare, because that site is generally associated with denying and disputing SpyGate information.
Disappointing, but note the UPDATE 2 where Bash's responsibilities were transferred to Acting US Attorney Greg Sofer. So are those investigations still active under Sofer? Unclear, says my magic 8-ball.
Is Trump prepping the battlespace for firing Barr?
It's hard to read tea leaves, but Trump is definitely not happy. And I think he's right not to be happy. So far, while Barr did a good job wrapping up the Mueller special counsel scam, is helping with the Flynn case, and talks a good fight to Congress, he has yet to deliver ANY prosecutions beyond a single guilty plea to a minimal charge. Almost every time we get announced results, it's no charges. That's a lot of investigations with known and documented wrongdoing to come back with no charges. And it's eaten up almost two years of time, pushing the whole matter past an election which may just shut it all down.
I'm not ready to say that Barr is running a deep state coverup, but it certainly looks like he has failed to delivery justice in a timely fashion. And if Biden wins, justice delayed becomes justice denied.
Biden withheld information from Trump transition team on Ukraine
There has been a leaked transcript of a call between Biden (then VP) and the Ukrainian president. In the call, Biden says he wants to remain involved in diplomacy after leaving office (a potential violation of the Logan Act, the pretext they used to charge Flynn), and also says he withheld information from the incoming transition team related to Ukraine (both a moral and ethical failure of democracy... and a link to the January 5th meeting where Obama suggested withholding information, demonstrating that the suggestion was taken as an instruction and complied with).
Top of the line name is Stefan Halper, but others include Pientka (who we have not heard from before), Somma (Halper's handler), Blumenthal (a Clinton ally rumored to have provided "information" for the dossier), Winer (a State Dept official who allegedly deleted his records of interacting with Steele), Ohr, Samantha Power and Susan Rice (both high-level Obama administration officials), and James Baker (who runs the Office of Net Assessment where Halper was allegedly paid to run a spy operation against the Trump campaign.
The assumption here is that Durham is now done with these individuals. Whether that means they escape any charges or just that he's told the Senate he's about to file them, I don't know. If this is a list of people who won't get charged with anything, it's a little long for my taste.
There are 41 people on the list of subpeonas and 48 days until the election. We could have Senate hearings every day if the Senate is serious.
The flaws in the Russians hacked the DNC narrative
It seems unlikely the Russians actually hacked the DNC. And it seems awfully unlikely the a "Russian hacker" who hacked the DNC would then release... their opposition research on Trump. Really? THAT's what the hacker releases?
McCabe has now refused to testify before the Senate, citing fear of the coronavirus despite the Senate being willing to allow him to testify remotely (as in fact Comey did). It appears McCabe is feeling the heat and noticing that his name is unredacted in recent document releases.
Comey probably thinks he can slime through by claiming not to remember anything. McCabe knows he is a lot more vulnerable due to being closer to the investigation and his wife's campaign funds from Clinton-linked donors being a financial benefit. Getting a conviction on McCabe seems like a bare-minimum standard for Durham and friends.
This is troubling. His reasons for leaving are unclear. I can see this as being only bad news for this part of the investigation; either he's figured that there's nothing there, or there's nothing there he wants to pursue (for whatever reason, political, corrupt, or just a decision), or (perhaps) he's been effectively removed for some reason and isn't making a stink over it.
On the one hand, it's good to see this being looked into by someone who is actually interested in doing something. Huber's silence for years has been unacceptable.
House Democrats call for investigating Durham for election interference
Well, the irony here is indeed rich. Before Durham has done anything publically known besides collect a guilty plea from an FBI agent for literally falsifying a document in an investigation that is alleged to be itself a case of election interference, House Democrats are calling for an investigation into his investigation. They even want it to be an "emergency" investigation. All this before Durham has actually done anything.
I like their fear. It suggests to me that Durham might actually be able to do something big.
Brennan briefed Obama about Hillary's Russian Collusion plot
What's important about this new Spygate bombshell is that Brennan found out about this plot to smear the Trump campaign with false accusations of Russian collusion from Russian sources (demonstrating the Russians knew of it, and thus could "helpfully" supply false accusations) and then briefed Obama (and presumably VP Biden) about it, demonstrating that Obama's decision to order the FBI to continue to investigate those false accusations was made while provably aware that the accusations were groundless.
In fact, the Intelligence Community allegedly referred the allegations about Clinton's Russian Collusion scheme to the FBI for investigation on September 7th, 2016, well before the election.
That's not "Hey, maybe the Trump campaign is colluding with Russia"; it's "Hey, the Clinton campaign is trying to spread false allegations that the Trump campaign is colluding with Russia".
And yet, the FBI already had an investigation open based on those false accusations and continued to pursue it, even well past the election.
If this claim by Brennan and the intel community can be proven, it would seem to put the FBI on the hot seat for knowingly pursuing false allegations against the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration.
UPDATE: Probably also worth noting specifically. When something is "referred to the FBI", the usual context appears to be referring a potentially criminal act for the FBI to investigate. So if Clinton's attempt to falsely link the Trump campaign to Russia is being referred to the FBI, it's not being referred because the FBI should investigate whether Trump is linked to the FBI (as actually happened); what the FBI should be investigating is whether Clinton is trying to frame her political opponent.
Sullivan's goal appears to be to push Flynn's case past the election at any cost to his reputation as an impartial judge. Why is Sullivan so focused on that? What does the Deep State have on him?
Steele's primary source believed to be Russian spy; FBI knew
The investigation into Steele's source dates back to 2011, and had probable cause the man was a Russian agent (FBI planned to get a FISA before the source left the country). When the FBI interviewed the source in 2017, they did not ask about any connections to Russian intelligence despite the previous investigation, and they did not mention that previous investigation in any of the FISAs filed on Carter Page. That seems to tilt the scales heavily towards deliberate deception of the FISC.
It's worth noting that "It was all Russian disinformation" appears to be the FBI's line of defense on this topic, perhaps on the theory that incompetence is rarely criminal. Given the previous investigation into this man, the three FISA renewals that followed his interview, and the avoidance of the topic when interviewing him in 2017, it's hard to spin that as simple incompetence.
To borrow a phrase... they knew or should have known.
Also worth noting: It doesn't matter whether Steele's source and his information was actually a Russian disinformation campaign or not. Failing to disclose the possibility and the evidence for it in the FISA itself is a breach of the FBI's duty of candor to that court. The FBi is not entitled to think it over and make a judgement call about whether to include the information or not. They are required to disclose so that the FISC can make its own judgement call.
Anti-Trump FBI and CIA agents purchased liability insurance?!
Federal law enforcement officials do not need professional liability insurance when they are doing their jobs within the law. They are covered by a judicial doctrine called qualified immunity when they are following the law, the same doctrine that protests local police, prosecutors, and judges. Buying additional liability insurance on top of that should be viewed as an admission that their investigation into Trump was likely improper and lawless.
Read the article; it has newly released FBI text messages. These come from a new court filing by Sidney Powell, and includes the new information that FBI investigators abused the Patriot Act in their surveillance of Flynn by filing "National Security Letters" to obtain information about him. Those letters are never reviewed by courts, and at least one FBI agent admitted they were used as a pretext to find dirt on Flynn.
It's worth noting these messages come from agents who were expressing doubts and concerns about the legality of what they were doing. Some of them may be good folks who didn't ask to be caught up in a political investigation. Just following orders is never a good excuse, but these guys may already be cooperating with Durham or one of the other investigations.
Some developments in Durham's investigative course
There is now an admission by DOJ that all four Carter Page FISAs were deficient, previously only one or two of the applications were considered improper. Durham is requesting permission from the FISC to access the improperly collected information (from the Carter Page FISA) to conduct his investigation and potential prosecution. Read the whole article.
This is a generally positive sign. I'd worry that it could lead to delay, but the decision appears to be dated from June 25th, so Durham has had this information for a while.
More details about Brennan's anti-Trump task force
One member was alleged to be Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a Hillary Clinton donor and colleague of "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella who was later an important figure in the failed plot to impeach Trump.
Brennan allegedly ignored evidence Putin actually favored Clinton. Analysts reported feeling political pressure to back Brennan despite weak underlying intelligence.
Durham is allegedly using a 50 page report produced by the House Intel Committee (before Schiff took over; Schiff promptly buried it) as a roadmap. This should make Brennan nervous despite his lawyer nervously interjecting that Durham promised he wasn't actually a suspect yet.
Worth noting: generally, Durham's team has not leaked. When we see leaks like this mentioning Durham, it's usually from the other side trying to control the narrative or slow-drip damaging revelations.
I fully agree here. I think the mass phone wipe constitutes destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice at worst, and at the least can be charged as destruction of federal records. In my opinion (I'm not a lawyer) the Mueller team committed a grave error that exposes everyone who participated in wiping their phones to criminal prosecution, which should prove very handy as leverage in convincing them to turn on each other chasing a plea deal.
It's also possible this was set up as a kind of mutual defense exercise. If they all wipe their phones and refuse to testify, then it becomes that much harder to prosecute anyone for crimes more serious than deleting government records.
But there's a lot of leverage in even low-level felony charges, especially if you throw in conspiracy against the whole group, and there may well be chargeable crimes within the special counsel's official actions that can be brought to bear as encouragement. And the wipe will certainly count as evidence of consciousness of guilt.
And he's in the media trying to distance himself and the investigation from the Steele dossier. But McCabe testified under penalty of perjury that without the dossier, there would have been no FISA against Page. And we've seen the actual FISA, so we know that it had nothing but the FISA itself for its core claims. .
The activity by Durham behind the scenes appears to be picking up. That's making Mueller and his team nervous to the point of writing misleading opinion pieces attempting to defend their investigation.
Just The News has more information on the released documents. Noteable, Strzok himself (one of the agents on the case, and famously fired for being anti-Trump among other misconduct) fisks an article in the New York Times for extensive incorrect information against Trump.
Amicus filed in Flynn case, assisted by attorney for a material witness
Gleeson filed his amicus brief in the Flynn case. No surprise, he's arguing that the dismissal should be denied and alleges without evidence that it is a pressure campaign by Trump for political purposes. (Clue: Trump is President and doesn't need pressure campaigns; he can validly issue orders if he so chooses. Barr has denied both orders and pressure campaigns.)
Notably, Gleeson was assisted in his brief by colleague David O'Neil, who is representing ex-DOJ official Sally Yates. Yates is a material witness to the events of the Flynn case and clearly has personal interests in how it is resolved.
Why is Strzok claiming that the FBI "did nothing wrong"?
Well, it's perhaps better to ask why he is making that claimnow. It's because there is an FBI rule about making announcements that could influence election results within a 60 day window before the election, and we are just now inside the window. Strzok figures he is safe from being contradicted (or charged!) between now and the election. And he figures that if Biden wins, he's safe permanently.
He's probably right about being safe if Biden wins. But there's a flaw in the other part of the plan.
Almost no one was involved in the Spygate conspiracy is currently running for office. So Strzok and all of his FBI friends may not be as safe as they think. The only one involved who is actually running for anything is Biden, and no one expects Durham to actually try to reach that high. The rest of the conspirators are basically hiding under Biden's umbrella. If Durham is serious, that may not turn out well for them.
Pientka is one of the FBI figures involved in SpyGate who may have been cooperating with Durham. Now he's being interviewed by Senate investigators. This may mean his cooperate with Durham has come to a happy ending.
Trump met with Mueller just one day before Mueller took the Special Counsel position investigating Trump. Trump has stated Mueller was interviewing to be FBI director. Mueller told Congress he was there to talk to Trump about the job not to interview for it. Judicial Watch has uncovered documents confirming Trump's side of the story, which means Mueller could be on the hook for lying to Congress.
The deception is also evidence of deceptive intent for the people involved, which Durham may find helpful.
Flynn case sent back to Judge Sullivan by en banc court
The DC Court of Appeals heard the writ of mandamus case en banc and denied the writ (overturning the 3-judge panel that had granted it). The case is now back in the hands of Judge Sullivan, who has already arranged to delay it past the election.
This has passed into the realm of farce. It appears -- based on new Strzok emails -- that the FBI actually investigated whether Trumps' tweets criticizing them were criminal. The tweets were complaining that the FBI tapped his communications, which we now know they did (via the Carter Page FISA at a minimum, and possibly more).
Page FISA verification material "went missing", had to be recreated
The "Woods file" is an element of the FISA process that records the results of verifying the claims within a FISA. It is intended to be documented proof that the FBI has investigated the claims they are making to the FISC, and that the claims are verified as true. This reporting indicates that the original Woods file for the FBI's verification efforts disappeared (while the FISA was still active!) and had to be recreated for the last renewal of the application by Mueller's team.
This does two things. First, it protects the main FBI personnel who worked on the FISA, because we all know that if there was a Woods file, the only thing it would possibly show is "unverified" next to just about everything. If that's gone missing, though, it's that much harder to prosecute people for those first three FISAs. In effect, the Woods file is evidence of misconduct surrounding those first three FISAs.
As for the last one -- the need to recreate the Woods file would give the FBI on Mueller's witch hunt a chance to do everything over. They knew they wouldn't, couldn't, verify the claims in the FISA based on what they had before. But maybe they could find new information in their records or the records of the campaign and transition team (which, remember, they acquired very early without normal process). They could put that into the recreated Woods file and maybe no one would look too closely at the dates.
It also provides the FBI a do-over about their investigation. They can talk to everybody again if they want to, and ask more or different questions. It's basically an opportunity to cover up any mistakes.
How successful they were can probably be measured by the fact that they got just one renewal from their efforts and then gave up.
But if the file "went missing"... well, that's destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice in light of the current investigation, isn't it?
It's amazing that this is the first we are hearing of it.
Analysis. Bottom line: The interview with Mifsud was friendly and vague, probably deliberately; Mifsud's account appears to invalidate basically all the narratives since attributed to him, including Mifsud's "Russian Connections" (Mifsud says he introduced Papadopolous to just one Russian). Mifsud says he never discussed the DNC hack with Papadopolous, but did discuss cybersecurity in other contexts. And additionally, the interview actually supports Papadopolous's account of his status with the Trump campaign at the time (suggesting Papadopolous was being truthful, despite the FBI's later prosecution of him for false statements on that topic; see the Flynn case for why such guilty pleas should not be considered dispositive).
Both Steele and Jonathan Winer at State had connections to Russian oligarch Deripaska. Were Steele and Winer and others participating (perhaps unwittingly) in a Russian disinformation operation themselves? It's certainly possible. And that would turn the whole Russian collusion narrative upside down. It's bad enough as a political hoax, but this would be worse.
Andy McCarthy describes (part 1, part 2, part 3) the events surrounding Clinesmith's participation in the Carter Page FISA, which led to Clinesmith's recent guilty plea. He's not impressed, and for good reason, with Clinesmith's claim to have not intended to deceive in his guilty plea.
To me the most significant element of that is that Clinesmith probably does not intend to cooperate fully. He's going to work out the best deal he can for himself (obviously), but he's also going to try to minimize his own knowledge and ill intent in order to protect the other conspirators in the hopes that they will assume he's still on their side and acting only under duress. With that in mind, Clinesmith may well refuse to volunteer information he thinks Durham can't otherwise obtain, and may be inclined to try to play games if he is called as a witness in other trials.
Durham would be well advised to keep Clinesmith on a very short leash.
Take with a grain of salt because it is coming from Brennan. If Durham isn't targeting Brennan, that leaves the crowd at the FBI at most risk (because they undeniably knew what was going on and continued to investigate and abuse the FISA process). Clapper and other CIA figures may also still be at risk. Still, Brennan was involved in briefing Congress about the Steele information and possibly in other activities before the FBI took up the baton.
Brennan does not deserve to escape scrutiny here, but if he has, it's an indication that Barr will not be pursuing this matter any higher, I think.
Mind you, it's pretty easy to become a target if you make a mistake and tell a provable lie during the interview, which reportedly took place over 8 hours in... Virginia, rather than DC, which would alter jury selection significantly if Brennan is charged for lying.
News article. Analysis. Full memo. This is the briefing given to then-candidate Trump during the election, which Strzok and Pientka sought to abuse for the purposes of their improper investigation into nonexistent Russian collusion.
Worth noting that one of the FBI officials involved in the briefly is the same one accused by IG Horowitz of altering an email to falsify the Carter Page FISA (ie, to hide that Page had been identified by the CIA as an asset).
In the comments from the analysis link is an interesting suggestion: The precise nature of the notes combined with the fact that they were written by the person giving the briefing suggests that the briefer or someone else at the meeting weas wearing a recording device and working from that recording to generate their notes, which were then filed into the investigative casefiles rather than as Presidential (candidate) briefing material.
The question now is.. who did Clinesmith roll over on? There are hints in Durhams "criminal information" (like an indictment, but without the grand jury) that suggests Clinesmith was central to the Russiagate hoax investigation AND the Mueller special counsel investigation. if Clinesmith is actually cooperating, lots of his colleagues should be sweating, especially as the original, correct version of the email he modified went to Comey, McCabe, and others who had a duty to inform the FISC.
Sally Yates contradicts Strzok's notes about Jan 5th meeting
In her opening statement, she described the January 5th meeting, claiming she did not recall all the details but that the President and Vice President did not give any directions concerning the investigation of Flynn. This is contradicted by Flynn's notes ("make sure the right people are on it" attributed to Obama, and "Logan Act" attributed to Biden). There are additional places where her testimony conflicts with that from others.
The main takeaway from me is that Comey is the designated person who will be offered up to the wolves lead by Durham and Barr. The question is whether Comey will fall on his sword to protect Obama, or whether Comey flips and points the finger upwards.
FBI lawyer pleads guilty to false statement felony
So, it seems likely this plea is an indication that Clinesmith is cooperating. He's the obvious lever (given that he modified an email relied upon by the Carter Page FISA, that makes him an easy target) and assuming Barr and Durham are serious about going after higher ups, Clinesmith has probably already spilled everything he knows and will be expected to testify in court.
He recently wrote an op-ed arguing that FBI and DOJ employees should refuse to cooperate with the Durham probe. Not only would this violate a basic sense of justice and (probably) their employment contracts, it would seem to constitute obstruction of justice by Weissmann's own theories. When he was running the Mueller probe, he sought to advance the idea that Trump's tweets saying Russiagate was a hoax and asserting his innocence were not only obstruction of justice but worthy of impeachment. Luckily, saner heads prevailed, but that was Wiessmann's position when he held the other end of the stick.
Graham wants to know who gave the briefing to SSCI. I'm with Sundance in not believing Graham's outrage here; it's coming way too late to be real. The benefit here, small but real, is that lying to Congress about this is something that can actually be prosecuted. Except it never seems to be. As for Graham, he's promised to write a letter. Not even a strongly-worded one.
Sara Carter is tired of waiting for Durham to indict someone. So am I. The strategy is absolutely transparent: delay as long as possible by whatever means necessary, and when there are no more delays, insist it's too close to the election to release anything because of the political impact, and then hope Trump loses.
Barr doesn't seem to be willing to play along with that, but ... is that itself a delaying tactic? He's declined McCabe and Comey already for leaking, even while DOJ prosecutes ordinary people for leaking.
The last person you interview is usually the target. Of course we don't know if Brennan is the last interview, but he certainly thinks he is in Durham's crosshairs. While we know a fair bit about the role of people at FBI and DOJ, we know a lot less (publicly) about Brennan's role, although we do know he was involved in briefing Congress on the Steele dossier and had access to the Steele information earlier than he has claimed to.
So who is? I don't necessarily trust NPR's anonymous sources, but the lack of indictments so far is damning. A report, no matter how damning, is not sufficient. Crimes were committed.
US Judge requests Assange testimony in Seth Rich case
This could be explosive, if the UK court agrees. Assange could testify where he got the DNC emails, and specifically whether he got them from Seth Rich. Even if Assange merely testifies that he got them from an insider leak rather than a Russian hacker, it would blow up the whole Russiagate story.
The SpyGate plotters at the FBI and DOJ have been trying to keep Assange locked up under legal threat and out of the public eye, likely so he cannot expose this. Likely they will try to interfere if they can.
And ominously, "[Assange] is reportedly in dire health."
Strong doubts from CIA over including Steele dossier in ICA?
It must be emphasized that these claims must be taken with salt. The timeframe is December 2016, after Trump won, while the conspirators were still setting up their plans. Brennan, at CIA, was likely aware of Steele's allegations (but did not need them); Comey and McCabe at FBI, having relied on those allegations, would love to be able to share the blame with the CIA and other agencies.
DC Appeals court to rehear Flynn mandamus case en banc
The decision to rehear en banc is all about delay at this point. The election is three months away. By keeping these charges active, Flynn can be kept quiet, out of the election, and reduce the value of his testimony in Durham's grand jury proceedings. Even when there is zero legal ground to stand on, it only takes a majority vote by the (Dem-controlled) DC Appeals Court to hear the case and from there it will be easy for them to stretch it out past the election, after which, they hope, it will no longer matter.
Judicial Watch forces DOJ to disclose McCabe text messages
This decision comes after the FBI tried to stonewall for four years. It was prompted by a FOIA request that sought McCabe's emails and text messages related to allegations that his wife's congressional campaign received large donations from Clinton figure Terry McAuliffe.
Everything you wanted to know about Steele's primary source
We know who he was now: a Russian living in DC by the name of Danchenko. He was a regular public drunk in Washington DC who was charged, convicted, and served time for same. He has friends who have been involved in the later impeachment efforts (Fiona Hill, who also knows Eric Ciaramella). He was once prosecuted by Rod Rosenstein. His sources for the rumors about Trump were his bar friends (mostly old friends from Russia, not people currently living in Russia or likely to have access to high level information).
Several of these figures are linked to the Brookings Institute, a tax-exempt nonprofit that is supposed to not be involved in politics. But of course for the left, the rules don't matter.
Danchenko himself confessed that he was "clueless" when Steele hired him.
We also have a new name: Brian Auten wrote the FBI interview memo.
Graham is finally producing some results. I am assuming testimony was previously blocked due to Durham's investigation, and witnesses will be allowed to speak publicly like this only once Durham is done with them.
Lindsey Graham has requested declassification of the FBI's report after interviewing Steele's sub-source. That's the guy who told the FBI that what he told Steele was bullshit and rumor. The interview took place in January 2017 -- meaning the FBI knew ever since then that their investigation was invalid. Despite that, they renewed the FISA on page and pressed forward with their investigation, even opening up the Mueller probe.
That interview, and the report based on it, constitutes yet more proof that the FBI acted knowingly and maliciously, and repeatedly lied to the FISC in a criminal conspiracy to depose the president.
Hopefully, the declassification request will be granted, and means Durham has finished making use of the document in his investigation.
Steele notes prove FBI knew he was working for Clinton
Evidence in a British court case strengthens the case against the FBI. Steele himself has been ordered to pay damages to people he defamed in the dossier.
DC Circuit requests brief reply from Flynn, DOJ re hearing en banc
Not sure if there are any tea leaves to read here. Sullivan's petition for en banc hearing was very long (68 pages), these replies (Flynn ordered to reply, DOJ allowed to reply if desired) are only 3800 words.
I am not bothered by this commutation. The justice system failed Stone; he was convicted solely of process crimes related to the Russia Hoax, and both judge and jury in his case displayed strong evidence of bias. While some of his actions were poorly considered, the commutation of his sentence does not clear his record, so a substantial penalty remains. Given Stone's age, the obvious lack of risk to the public, the prevalence of COVID cases in the prison system along with other risks, and the painful comparison to SpyGate conspirators already let off the hook for similar and worse actions, commutation of his prison term seems entirely reasonable.
Trying to read the tea leaves about why it was released is probably futile. So long as the case is open, DOJ has an obligation to release material like this that they find. They might be releasing it as they find it, or they might be making the pointed decision to drip this stuff out to encourage Sullivan to comply with the writ of mandamus issued by the appeals court without showing their full hand.
It will be interesting to see the full documents, not just the summary description. In fact, since the documents were provided Tuesday, I'm a little surprised we haven't seen them already. But as usual, John Solomon has good sources.
Flynn has started talking, it seems. He may not be able to reveal details publicly, but I would be very surprised if he can't find a way to get the information into hands that will be able to use it effectively.
Flynn pretext investigation continued on Obama's orders
So says the just-releasedbombshell of Strzok's notes on the January 5th meeting, intended for Strzok's consumption. They appear to say that the Kisliyak call was legitimate, Biden proposed the Logan Act excuse, and Obama ordered the investigation to continue by saying "These are unusual times". Obama also said "Make sure you look at things" (ie, continue the investigation) and "have the right people on it" (ie, reliable Deep State folks).
At long last, justice is done. With the termination of the case should also come the termination of Judge Sullivan's gag order on Flynn preventing him from talking about the case in the media. If Flynn has anything to say to the public, he's now free to say it. And Trump is now free to put Flynn in a position of authority should he be so inclined.
AG Barr says the Kung Flu has slowed down the Durham investigation
I had already figured out that the virus was being used and overhyped for political purposes. The virus -- or more accurately the excessive hype and panic that induced and extended the economic lockdowns -- has effectively destroyed Trump's massive economic success in his first term. It serves as a very useful media distraction from anything related to Durham's investigation being declassified (in fact, the timing of that is particularly suspicious).
Remember that the Deep State's aim is simply to draw the matter out past the election. If they can beat Trump, they can shut down any investigations or prosecutions easily. That was also the aim of the Mueller investigation and even the impeachment proceedings -- it would be nice if either got Trump out of office, but it was always a long shot. The real goal was delaying any ability to investigate and prosecute past the election.
And a virus which conveniently shuts down court systems, and thus grand juries, for the 5 months or so between now and election day is just what the Deep State ordered.
Sundance noticed an anomaly in the second part of the interview, when discussing Mifsud. Maria asks the question -- wearing glasses. Barr answers. Maria discusses the answer a little and asks the next question -- without glasses. Barr answers, and Maria returns with glasses.
There was an edit made there. Why? If it was trying to hide something Maria said in her initial response, the insertion of a without-glasses response (presumably recorded later, hence the continuity blip) is odd and serves as a very easy to notice and very easy to fix indicator of the edit. So why didn't they get it right?
My guess is that Maria said something that Barr doesn't want to be public yet, but I have no idea why they would make the edit so obvious.
More background on the investigation into Trump's foreign policy team
Sundance lays out the case. Start with this twitter thread. This is a good piece for understanding how the investigations into Page, Papadopolous, Flynn, Manafort, and (recently revealed) Phares all link together, and also form the link from the pre-election illegal surveillance and the post-election Mueller investigation.
Brennan buried evidence Putin favored Hillary in 2016 election
It's not really a big deal which candidate Putin favored; it's a big deal that Brennan suppressed evidence to support his Russia Hoax narrative in the Intelligence Community Assessment.
Rosenstein testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee
Feinstein, who was involved on the Senate Intel Committee when this was going on, is the ranking minority member. Lindsey Graham chairs the committee, a Republican whose bark is louder and more painful than his bite.
So far, my impression is that Rosenstein is not going to do well, and claim to be basically ignorant of anything. With regard to the FISA approval he signed, he claims he relied on what he was told was in the application -- meaning he is claiming he signed it without reading it. He can't identify anything McCabe lied to him about, even in hindsight, though he does admit there were some things that he felt McCabe was not candid about. So far he's trying to defend his decisions based on what he claims to have known at the time (versus what we know now). That's basically claiming ignorance of everything his subordinates were doing.
One sticky point is that he was asked if any of the investigative steps Mueller took relied upon the Steele dossier. Rosenstein says he doesn't know about individual steps. That's a dodge. Mueller got at least one renewal of the Page FISA which was almost entirely based on Steele's "information".
Dana Boente forced to resign from FBI over SpyGate
We get a kind of backwards confirmation that there were multiple FISA warrants on Flynn, because one of the justifications for letting Boente go was that he signed them. I'm not sure if that is accurate or if the story is confusing the warrants on Page with warrants on Flynn. But Boente was definitely involved and is now gone.
I call this progress, but justice will require more than resignations.
Flynn-Kislyak transcripts released, no discussion of sanctions
What this means is that Flynn did not lie to the FBI when they interviewed him about the call; the FBI lied to Flynn, the court and the public about the contents of the call. They made it up.
Steele also testified he was paying his sources, meaning they had a financial incentive to make things up. Steele said he got some of his information from Hillary's lawyers, and names Susan Rice as someone at the high level of the Obama administration who knew or was involved as early as July. That's the first direct information linking this to Obama's inner cycle, aside from occasional Strzok-Page texts referring to the White House.
Steele got Alfa Bank story directly from Clinton, DNC lawyer
So thje FBI knew this story was coming from the DNC and Clinton campaign when Sussman pitched to the James Baker, a top FBI official at the time. The two had worked together previously and so knew each other. The FBI can't claim ignorance of the politics by hiding behind Steele here. Steele was involved to give this frame-job a "credible" front, but it seems it was all made-up bullshit and Clinton lies.
But using personal and political connections in this case is hardly unprecedented. The judge who accepted Flynn's guilty plea almost immediately had to recuse himself when it became clear he was friendly on a personal level with the infamous Strzok, and the text messages suggest a desire by Strzok to discuss the case with the judge off-the-record using a personal event as cover.
More interesting reading from the comments at Meaning in History, linked above. It's speculation about the why behind this frantic cover up effort. The author thinks it's all about the Iran nuclear deal, and Flynn knows stuff about that that he can't talk about with criminal charges hanging over his head. That's part of it. But the other big thing that's being protected, I think, is the extensive use of the US (and allies) intelligence assets to manipulate elections. That's the prize that the deep state is frantic to protect.
I see two possibilities for why the FBI is finally opening an investigation into the Flynn case. The first is that Wray has had a change of heart, a come-to-Jesus moment, a self-realization that he's the baddie. The second is that every FBI official called before Congress on this matter from now until the election will refuse to answer questions based on the ongoing investigations.
Ever wonder why we don't have declassifed documents from House Intel?
Turns out Schiff has been blocking the process, and now that we have an Acting DNI willing to start exposing things, John Solomon has sued under FOIA to get access to them.
In other somewhat unrelated news, Senator Burr is stepping down from the committee over an FBI investigation into insider stock trading around the Kung Flu.
I can't help but think this is merely convenient timing, and he's actually leaving for reasons related to SpyGate. Although the FBI investigation into his trading habits certainly justifies his removal by itself.
Analysis. Basically Rice says that Comey had concerns about Flynn (as incoming National Security Advisor) speaking frequently to the Russian ambassador; not that classified information was being passed but that "the level of communication was unusual". There's some back and forth between Comey and Obama about whether they should hide information from Flynn.
The previously redacted portion is basically portraying all of this information about Flynn and the suggestions for how to deal with him as coming from Comey. I believe this to be defensively self-serving and untrustworthy.
UPDATE: I have an additional take here, upon reflection. It involves exactly what information the outgoing Obama admin is trying to hide from the incoming Trump administration. It's clearly not just generic sensitive information related to Russia. Such a policy would be impossible to enforce and would raise huge questions immediately. So it's not that. It's something specific.
It's the counterintelligence investigation into Flynn and Trump specifically. In other words -- the cover up.
Treasury whistleblower: Obama admin used Treasury to spy on Flynn, others
Including Congress, Manafort, senior staff on the Trump campaign, and Trump family members. At some point it has to become obvious that only the White House could be coordinating all these agencies, and that the targeting must be political. In fact the whistleblower says having a political predicate was routine.
It's now clear that Obama treated the United States exactly as a third-world dictator would.
Barr says he does not expect criminal probe of Obama or Biden
Bill Quick finds this disappointing. I do too, but I think there's a bit of a different perspective. I've commented before that a lot of what happened in 2019 (and really, in 2017 and 2018 too) was a negotiation between the Deep State and Trump. The Mueller investigation threatened impeachment to paralyze the President while the House Intel Committee investigated the Deep State. The negotiation was simple: mutually assured destruction, or drop the investigations. In 2018 the roles swapped; the Dems took the House and threatened impeachment, but Trump and Barr shut down Mueller and begin seriously investigating the Deep State. This made impeachment inevitable, but the details were to-be-determined and essentially irrelevant. It was always going to be some pretext, and so it was. But Trump did not blink, and beat the impeachment. Given the Senate, impeachment was always more of a public relations and reputational threat, and Trump proved stronger than those who sought to intimidate him.
Now Trump, through Barr, is setting the terms. He's saying to the Deep State: I won't go after Obama or Biden criminally. I'll expose them, but not prosecute. I'll beat Biden to a bloody pulp (politically, in the election) but I won't prosecute him and I won't prosecute Obama. Everyone else who participated is fair game.
That's the last peace offer the Deep State gets. They can stop the BS and have a fair 2020 election for all the marbles (and likely lose because Biden is both pathetic and compromised in Obamagate), but have their two major leadership figures left with freedom if not reputations intact... OR, the Deep State can fight dirty, tooth and nail, bring another impeachment right before the election or whatever else they plan to do. And if they choose to fight dirty, Trump withdraws the offer of protection, leaving Obama and Biden to face the legal consequences of their actions if (when) he wins in 2020.
It would be very disappointing for Obama and Biden to escape consequences. But remember that Barr is speaking hypothetically here. He doesn't "expect" either of them to face a criminal investigation or charges. That can change.
It's not necessarily improper to unmask someone, constitutional issues about the collection itself aside, if appropriate procedures are followed for an appropriate purpose. It is exceedingly improper (and, yes, illegal) to leak the unmasking as was done to Flynn. Logically, what should have happened in this case would be simple:
1) Obama kicks out Russian diplomats, creating an incident 2) Flynn, as incoming National Security Advisor, talks to the Russians and requests they do not escalate. 3) For whatever reason the conversation with the Russian ambassador gets intercepted and people ask who is this guy asking them not to escalate? 4) Flynn is unmasked to those individuals and they say "Oh, he's the incoming National Security Advisor. That makes sense." The issue gets dropped.
Instead, someone leaked the information to the press to create a scandal, which the FBI used to conduct an ambush interview and get Flynn fired.
So the question is: who leaked the call? That leak was illegal -- and likely it was one of the people on the unmasking list who did it.
Crowdstrike admits no evidence of network extraction of emails
Their until-recently secret testimony indicates that the emails were "prepared for extraction" but they had no evidence the emails were actually extracted over the network. How else would they be extracted, save by an insider who had physical access to the server?
Grenell declassified the Obama admin officials involved in unmasking
It seems likely this list will be a bombshell when it finally gets out, and possibly expand Durham's investigation. It's worth noting that unmasking by itself isn't necessarily improper, but leaking the results definitely is, and that appears to have happened several times. The real question is whether those unmaskings can be provably linked to leaks, and whether the information reveals more activity than Barr was previously aware of.
In his call with former officials, Obama says that the result of justice here puts the rule of law at risk. That is obviously bullshit; just look at the many Obama officials who lied to Congress and never even got charged with perjury for it. The actual threat to the rule of law comes from the Obama administration using the FBI and intelligence agencies to try to swing the outcome of an election, and then remove the duly-elected President in a political coup. The plot to frame Michael Flynn was only one of many actions taken by Obama that are better suited to a third world dictator than a US president.
Sultan Knish has a length article up saying the Russians had compromised Steele. This may well be true; Steele was friendly with Russians who had intel and government ties, and they may well have been feeding him information. Or more accurately, disinformation. But remember those same sources disclaimed the information, saying either Steele made it up or it was rumors and "bar talk".
"The Russians fooled us" is the FBI's fallback position to get out of trouble for deliberately abusing their counterintelligence powers to influence an election. We shouldn't let them evade responsibility that way.
And the proof of this is that the FBI interviewed Steele's sources and obtained those sources' disclaimer of the information even before the Mueller investigation began.
BOMBSHELL: Yates says Obama initiated the Flynn investigation
This appears to be the January 5th meeting about which Susan Rice wrote her "by the book" memo-to-self. Despite Rice's attempted ass-covering, this puts Obama right in the crosshairs of whoever is investigating the Flynn case.
Remember the timing. This meeting came right after the FBI had already decided to close their Flynn investigation based on other (baseless) allegations. Strzok had to intervene to keep it open, saying his bosses were interested in the case. And his bosses -- Comey and Obama, at a minimum -- were in that meeting.
To be fair, Obama said he didn't want any more information about the case. But to me that sounds more like a mafia don than a President. It has that sort of vibe: I don't know what you are going to do to solve this problem for me, and I don't want to know. I just want it solved. Never speak of it to me again.
If those two are cooperating witnesses we probably won't get those interviews for a while. If we aren't going to see prosecutions, then we will get the interviews probably shortly after the decision not to prosecute is made.
Roger Stone alleges Special Counsel asked him to lie
This is not quite surprising or detailed enough to be a bombshell. Of course the special counsel is going to "ask" Stone to implicate others in the matter he is investigating. Of course the special counsel is not supposed to solicit lies, but he is supposed to apply pressure to get to the truth. Exactly how outrageous this is depends a lot on the details of that pressure and whether Stone was explicitly asked or pressured to lie.
But in the larger context, knowing there was nothing to any of this, the pressure looks particularly suspicious and improper.
So, they looked into Flynn, and asked other agencies for any derogatory information they have on him. (Gosh, do you think that information might also be useful to a political campaign?) They didn't actually get any, so the investigation was closed... except:
So Strzok ordered that the investigation stay open, stating that "the 7th floor" was involved. The top level of the FBI -- meaning Comey, McCabe, etc -- have offices on the 7th floor. That was January 4th. What happened on January 5th?
Getting someone to lie is not how this is supposed to work. That would be entrapment -- creating a crime where none existed.
The notes also indicate the FBI agents discussed whether to provide Flynn a Miranda warning and decided not to. It is becoming more and more clear that this whole case was a setup from beginning to end.
We'll see if the judge is willing to call a spade a spade soon, I suspect. More details here.
Written proof FBI threatened Flynn's son to force a plea
BOOM. Forcing a plea by threatening someone else is ethically questionable to say the least, and this one involves a side deal with terms that were kept secret.
Craig Murray has a Twitter account and a blog wherein he comments on Seth Rich. The obvious logical leap is that he received the emails (or at least some emails) from Seth Rich at American University as mentioned above, or at least was aware of his role in leaking them. Which would sort of put an end to the idea that the Russians hacked the DNC to get them.
I find myself wondering how I missed this at the time. It was published in December of 2016.
To be sure, Craig does not say outright that he got the emails from Seth Rich, but he does say where he got at least some emails and is linked to Wikileaks, and is also commenting on the Seth Rich case.
Best guess? There's more than one leaker, and Wikileaks is keeping quiet to protect the other(s) involved.
Active measures to frame Trump with Alfa Bank allegations?
If, in fact, someone was trying to fake the appearance of traffic between the two systems, it would represent a significant piece of evidence for an actual frame job rather than simply making up rumors. The first question people should be asking here is who controlled those two domains (trump-email.com and contact-client.com) at the time. If it wasn't Trump or Alfa Bank, who was it?
If either side of that transaction is controlled by Fusion GPS or Intel Agency assets, we have a frame job. And there are more ways to do a frame job even if those domains are controlled by some Trump-related org and/or Alfa Bank; DNS is not a very secure protocol).
Boente was involved in SpyGate and thus this is not surprising news there. However, if Wray was also involved (the FBI denies it but who trusts them anymore?) it would be another sign that Wray is aligned with the Deep State rather than justice. If so, it would not be the first such sign, but perhaps the first one with a trail.
Flynn's attorney, Sydney Powell, has indicated that there is more exculpatory information not yet released:
If her claims are true -- and so far she has a better track record than the FBI -- that's quite an explosive collection of material the FBI released, and there's more to come.
Just like when Hillary "wiped, like with a cloth?" her server, this should be taken as an admission of guilt.
UPDATE: Probably also worth noting. He also wiped his communications with Fusion GPS... and did so "in early January 2017". IE, shortly after Trump was elected and the question of how to cover everything up was undoubtedly very active...
UPDATE 2: Bongino points out that the date Steele deleted the emails is the same date as the January 5th meeting at the White House which Susan Rice documented in an email to herself January 20th stating that Obama emphasized everything about the Trump-Russia investigation should be handled "by the book". That is, of course, intended as coverup (as in, "We will all (pretend) we did this by the book, so cover up anything that says otherwise").
Why is the President threatening to adjurn Congress?
It boils down to two linked issues: confirmations and recess appointments. Congress has for years (and probably decades -- the practice started under George W Bush IIRC, but even that was not the first use) used pro-forma sessions to block Presidents from making recess appointments while Congress was not in session. Why? Well, the Senate wants to exercise it's power to advise and consent in important positions, and if they go out of session, the President can appoint someone to the position and they lose their ability to block people they don't like -- at least temporarily.
But generally Presidents appoint a lot of people and the Senate, while often slow on confirming them all, usually manages to keep the important ones flowing and the less important positions are filled by "Acting" people. The people in "Acting" roles don't have full authority but do have enough to keep things moving. In short, normally the Senate doesn't have enough time to confirm everyone, but does confirm enough to keep the issue on the back burner.
This lawsuit may reveal some of the source material behind the Horowitz report. And after seeing what is under some of the footnote redactions, I find it a lot harder to trust Horowitz to be honest or Barr to oversee an unbiased process. Remember, Barr saw what was under those redactions, and approved the redactions despite those redactions being clearly and obviously intended solely to protect the FBI's reputation.
Want to change my mind? Indictments, convictions, prison. Criminal referrals are nice, but so far none of them have gone anywhere.
Court ruling: FBI violated rights, illegally spied in 2017 and 2018
I think the violations of the law are obvious and indeed inherent -- the law being the Fourth Amendment. But the judges are actually talking about the authorizing law Congress passed, which is pretty bad, but at least attempts to provide some protections... which the FBI, CIA, and NSA evidently have been ignoring for at least 7 years (and probably a lot longer than that, but less politically).
Remember, this is after an earlier court ruling just a few years ago that criticized these exact practices (and in doing so, may have exposed SpyGate by forcing the perpetrators to change their methodology). And they are still bold enough to be doing this.
FBI says it didn't review file that tied Steele to Russian oligarchs
That's obviously a headline that will shock and horrify anyone with a decewnt bone in their body. Oh no! The FBI failed to review an intelligence file that would have exposed Steele's ties to Russia! They were negligent! They were incompetent!
Folks, we're well beyond negligent and incompetent here. The game being played is criminal indictments from Durham, and in that context, negligent and incompetent is a lot better than criminal charges -- especially when the reasonable punishments for negligence and incompetence (ie, losing your job) have already been applied.
So, this whole claim here boils down to "It wasn't our fault, we didn't know, we didn't look, we were stupid." But Steele was telling the FBI all about his Russian contacts; that was where he was claiming to get his information.
And what did his contacts say when the Mueller investigation interviewed them? They said it was all bullshit and bar talk that Steele either took out of context or make up completely.
So remember, the line that the Steele dossier was all Russian disinformation validates the claim that Russia interfered in the election (even if not as advertised, that will be glossed over) and remains an FBI defensive narrator to replace criminal culpability with aw-shucks-I-guess-they-got-me bullshit.
Footnotes from IG report on SpyGate to be declassified
It seems likely that Trump's recent actions in firing the ICIG Atkinson (who was clearly a Deep State operative whose involvement in SpyGate and QuidProQuoGate should have been notorious) and installing a new Acting DNI has allowed these actions to move forward. However, the matter is not quite so simple as that.
First, the content of the footnotes. In brief, the footnotes indicate that the FBI knew the Steele information was likely Russia disinformation and used it anyway. That's bad enough... but there is an argument that the classified footnotes themselves represent a Deep State defense, specifically that there really was a "Russian plot", but the plot was disinformation and thus the FBI was acting stupidly but in good faith.
Except of course they knew all along and used the information anyway.
At a minimum there's a point where they provably knew and continued with the Mueller probe anyway.
If you haven't been following why, exactly, Trump and Barr investigating Crowdstrike is such a big deal, this is a good way to catch up. And if that describes you, ask yourself whether the media sources you trust to keep you informed have actually been doing that.
The first two FISAs on Carter Page are still being looked into.
This should, logically, mean everything they found based on that information is fruit of the poisoned tree and inadmissible. But it's not clear they found anything from that warrant that was useful in criminal court. It was political intelligence they were after. If Mueller used it even just to generate leads to look into things (like the Cohen situation), that could rapidly run into problems. But we just don't know what role -- including an intermediate role without being directly submitted to a court -- the information collected from those wiretaps played in later prosecutions. DOJ will be looking into that.
There's potentially a lot of fallout here since it imperils the entire existence of the Mueller special counsel investigation, if that was predicated on anything found in the wiretaps.
IG Horowitz releases scathing review of FISA process
First, I will point out that this is not the Page FISA that has gotten so much attention. It is a supplemental report from the IG on all the OTHER FISAs out there that were not controversial or in the public eye.
For four of the FISA applications, they could not review the Woods file verification because it could not be found or did not exist.
He has basically found substantial flaws in every single application he reviewed. The FBI has demonstrated that this entire process cannot be trusted... that the FBI itself cannot be trusted.
This would be wise, especially as DOJ seems reluctant to clear up this mess despite AG Barr's appointment of a special counsel to look into the matter.
Was Stefan Halper working with the Clinton campaign directly?
There is information to suggest he was, although it could also have been part of the Obama administration's efforts to target Flynn. Either would be improper.
I don't see how requiring the AG to sign off before surveiling government officials will prevent the CIA, NSA, DOJ, and FBI from spying on candidates in order to prevent them from becoming officials. Or protect the privacy rights of ordinary people at all. This may be better than a clean renewal, but not by much. Hopefully the Senate can make it stronger.
Not sure what changes are being proposed yet. But since it is being moved quietly, I suspect it is just a clean renewal, no reforms. Contact your representatives in the House and tell them no renewal without real reforms.
McCarthy: strange to prioritize individual liberty?
It's strange that prioritizing civil liberties of individuals is NOT Andrew McCarthy's first thought after Obama demonstrated repeatedly (starting with IRS abuse of the Tea Party in 2010-2012 and continuing to 2019 with SpyGate) that national security agencies cannot be trusted to resist politicization by at least one side of the debate. Well, perhaps strange is not the best word. McCarthy was only reluctantly brought around to the view that the FBI, CIA, et all, abused their power for political purposes. It's not really surprising that he would prefer to go back to his default position of trusting even agencies proven untrustworthy.
But the rest of us should refuse.
Elements of the FISA law have been abused. Trump has declared he will not sign a renewal of the law that does not contain reforms. We should stand with Trump and demand reforms to protect our rights. Yes, even if that costs some degree of security -- and the track record of the programs at issue here is pathetically bad. You can't find a needle in a haystack, but you can sure find a lot of straw that looks like a needle, especially if it associates with a political campaign you don't like.
Translator at Trump Tower meeting said nothing happened
FBI 302s associated with the Mueller team are starting to come out. One of the latest and most important releases is the interview with the translator at the infamous Trump Tower meeting which was used to paint Trump (via his son who attended) as being in cahoots with the Russians. The meeting was actually almost certainly a setup by Fusion GPS (who met with the Russian representative shortly before and after the meeting).
What's news is that Mueller's team interviewed the translator less than four days after the news of that meeting leaked -- and found out that nothing untoward happened at the meeting, the only topic of discussion was sanctions under the Magnitsky act, and all of that from a man who didn't like Trump and had ties to Hillary and the State Department.
And the Mueller team continued to investigate and allow the Russian Collusion myth to persist for 2 years (and, not coincidentally, a midterm election) before finally releasing a report.
Because we evidently can't trust DOJ and FBI even under a friendly administration and AG, we need to repeal the Patriot ACT to stop abuse of national security and intelligence tactics for political abuse. Legislative reform is absolutely necessary here.
The renewal date is March 15th. Write your Congressmen and tell them not to renew. It's a small step, but a necessary one.
This lawsuit seeking records on Seth Rich may expose a lot of deep state malfeasance. If the DNC emails released by Wikileaks were leaked (for which Seth Rich is pretty much the only publicly known possibility) rather than hacked by the Russians, the entire Russia hoax falls apart.
Trump recently pardoned a few people; less than just about every other President in recent history. The media promptly freaked out about that, and are now claiming that Trump offered to pardon Assange (the man behind Wikileaks, who published the DNC leaked emails, and the Podesta emails) in return for saying where Assange got the DNC emails from. The implication is that Assange would be pardoned in return for a lie, and the pardon is thus a corrupt bargin and obstruction of justice.
Third, the charges against Assange have pretty obviously been false from the beginning. In Europe he was accused of ... accidentally not wearing a condom during consensual sex and thus this is rape. Except those got dropped. The people involved seem likely to be plants, and not the kind you need to water every day. The other US charges are related to the Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning affair, and originate from the Deep State SpyGate team. They are also slim, revolving around helping with "hacking" that never happened.
So why the big stink about the pardon thing, when the Assange part wasn't in the news until the media injected it?
Because the Judicial Watch FOIA suggests more about Seth Rich will be coming out, and the idea of Trump getting Assange to testify somehow is obviously scaring the wits out of the Deep State. If Assange testifies that it wasn't Russia, and it was Seth Rich... all of Russiagate blows up.
Alleged Mifsud recording denies offering dirt on Hillary to Page?
So, let's review.
If it IS Mifsud, he said he doesn't work for any intelligence agencies, and did not say anything to Papadopoulos about dirt on Hillary. This would seem at first glance to be bad news for the SpyGate folks since it goes against the Russian narrative -- but the FBI is not claiming their investigation began with Mifsud and Papadopoulos. They claim it began after that.
If it ISN'T Mifsud... as Mifsud's lawyer says... who is it and what motive do they have for the claims?
Cui Bono? Who benefits?
The US intelligence agencies who desperately want to cover up their own involvement in this farce. Producing a fake Mifsud recording and leaking it to the media seems an easy way to create confusion and doubt over their involvement with the man who seems to remain in hiding or perhaps dead.
Given how the government has handled the Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases, backing off of this case appears on its face to present a double standard. Democrats get a pass, especially if they are named Clinton. Republicans get nailed to the wall with the government asking nearly a decade in jail for similar acts.
If Barr wants Trump to stop tweeting criticism of DOJ, Barr needs to start delivering the prosecutions.
FBI agents violated the law to share secrets with Steele
Allegedly, of course. But the source is the IG report. The FBI receive most of Steele's information, but then meets with him in October. There, according to the IG report, they (several FBI agents from Crossfire Hurricane) shared with Steele the information they had gathered on alleged Trump-Russia links.
We sure had a lot of SpyGate related stuff happen last week
Unfortunately, we didn't get any arrests or indictments. We did get a LOT of other news. Look below the fold for the headlines, in case you missed anything.
"Questionable judgment". For an intel type, that's the kiss of death. They live on their judgment.
In other words, these are probably people named in the assessment, having been given the chance to review it, and are now leaking to friendly reporters to soften the blow.
In other words -- the FBI had the assessment in hand prior to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th FISA renewals, and probably had it before the 1st application but think maybe that isn't provable. And they did not disclose it in the FISA application, but they think maybe they can stretch a vaguely worded footnote they put in to cover it.
James Baker was heavily involved in SpyGate. And he was the one paying Halper in 2016. Game, set, match.
BUT: Horowitz's report may not deal with this aspect since it is under the umbrella of a different IG. And the DoD IG appears to be passing on the political aspects and simply pointing out Halper's expenses are BS. Is someone -- Durham? -- looking into what Halper was really doing?
Last I heard they had actually decided not to charge him... but then the US Attorney for DC was reassigned. Now the new US attorney is "mulling" charges (like you would mull wine?).
Details on the FISA court ruling outlining FBI abuse
In other words, the FBI is not tracking the justifications for searches of US persons. If they aren't tracked, at all, they can't be audited for compliance or punished for non-compliance. And they also aren't applying the rules put in place to protect US citizens from unjustified surveillance.
Papadopoulos expands the scope of the SpyGate abuse
Reading only a little between the lines, it appears Papadopoulos was targeted by the State Department in 2015 when he joined the Ben Carson campaign, and by intelligence officials who already knew all about him when he later joined the Trump campaign. That expands the scope of the campaign targeting to Republican campaigns other than Trump and substantially earlier than the FBI claims their investigation began. This activity is likely not from the FBI, but from intelligence operatives at the CIA and NSA, possibly with foreign intelligence assistance.
John Solomon is a reporter who has been doing excellent work reporting on SpyGate. This work got him fired from The Hill, likely due to political pressure, and he was in the process of setting up a new news agency.
Finally, we may see some justice. Assuming we get to see the discovery, and the DNC doesn't settle quickly to avoid exactly that (and would Page accept a settlement?), the results are likely to lead to Clinton. And there are a LOT of people Page can sue over this.
This is hardly a surprise, but I am curious why it is only coming out now. He was hired to evaluate it in 2017. (Who hired him? A "US Republican law firm") And yet this transparent piece of political fakery was used to spy on the President for years.
FBI hiding information about Seth Rich, and it involves Strzok
Details here. We don't know the exact content (it is mostly redacted), but we know Strzok was somehow involved, and the FBI was concerned about this enough that the person preparing the response declared under penalty of perjury that there were no responsive records... when there clearly were.
Durham investigation expands to Office of Net Assessment
This is the office that was paying Stefan Halper significant money for "research papers" that were overpriced, not to spec, and possibly fraudulent (some of the people reported as coauthors don't remember working on the papers). If Halper was being paid by the US government for his already known activities related to the Trump campaign, Michael Flynn, and others... some of which predate the official start of the FBI investigation.. then who tasked him and authorized the pay?
Steele's dossier sources designed to exploit an FBI flaw?
Strange how Steele's resume and dossier came to the FBI perfectly prepared to exploit this flaw in the FBI's record keeping system. Steele was considered credible (albeit not by his original case handler!) and the FBI's system could only track his own credibility, not that of his foreign subsources.
This approach to the FBI really looks like it was designed by someone who knew the limitations fo the FBI's system and wanted to make it hard to identify and track the actual sources for Steele's information soi their credibility could be measured and potentially consequences applied. Instead Steele became the front man for everything.
Here's the thing. Both Comey and Brennan are claiming the other wanted to include the "crown material" (ie, Steele dossier) in the assessment. They know that being the one left holding that is dangerous. We also know Horowitz has probably already had a look at Comey's emails, and Durham is now reading through Brennan's. One of them is lying, and they both have made statements under oath about this.
Hmm... there's McCabe's name again. Remember, he's the whose wife's first run for political office got donations from Clinton-linked financiers to the tune of $700K or so. And he keeps showing up pushing the dossier. Durham should be scrutinizing McCabe very closely.
Yes, personally. He certified to the court that a FISA warrant was the least intrusive way to get information about Carter Page, despite Page's letter directly to Comey volunteering to be interviewed by the FBI on their investigation. Again, the letter was to Comey directly (and cc'd to the Washington Post) and Comey personally signed a FISA afterwards.
Does the Page FISA fraud invalidate all of the Mueller warrants too?
Remember, all of those warrants were based on the idea that Trump was colluding with Russia. And all of the Trump-Russia collusion was based on the hoax dossier.
Doesn't that invalidate not just the main FISA warrant against Carter Page and the Trump campaign, but also all the Mueller investigation warrants? At a minimum, those applied for after the dossier was known to be a hoax.
This puts McCabe in an even more central position regarding pushing the Clinton material into government investigations, undermines Comey's denials of pushing the Steele material into the ICA, and for the first time suggests Obama held an active rather than passive role in pushing the dossier material.
In my opinion, "dead" and "in hiding" are difficult to distinguish from each other. But, if he really is dead, I feel fairly confident in stating that Mifsud did not kill himself.
Note that, however strongly worded the letter may be, it is effectively demanding new policies and procedures rather than issuing contempt of court orders. Thus, it is unlikely to deter further abuses as none of the people involved have suffered real consequences... at least so far. Durham is still in play.
A good article that lays out what Horowitz should have been able to discern, but ultimately refused to see: The Hidden Hand that explains why many apparently disconnected events took place.
For example: why did a single drunken conversation between a low-level staffer and a foreign diplomat lead to a full blown FBI investigation? It's like someone at the FBI was waiting for it. And they probably were.
And, why did a lawyer on the investigative team falsify a document? It's something that will undoubtedly have hugely negative consequences for him personally. It's not a discretionary thing that can be explained away. It's a very serious matter with little apparent reason to do it.
Read the whole thing. The connections are damning.
As for the larger plan -- DOJ/FBI blaming CIA/NSA -- I think that's been their plan all along. Their argument is basically "We were dupes". That doesn't fly, because they had to swear things to the FISC that simply were not true, including that they had verified the unverifiable (ie, false) information they presented.
There must be accountability for the whole operation. FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, State Dept; all the way up to the White House.
Despite the lack of significant criminal referrals and the refusal to take anything short of a written confession as evidence of bad intent, the Horowitz report does do something significantly positive: it validates the reporting on the SpyGate controversy for one side, and destroys that reporting on the other. Nunes' initial memo outlining the problem is validated, and Schiff's counter-memo is exposed as a tissue of lies. The dossier is demonstrated to be the primary reason for granting the FISA, and is proven false. The FBI is proven to have known it was a pile of lies, yet continued to rely on it before the court, withholding exculpatory information and even falsifying data to the court.
While certain aspects are not proven (eg, the role of the intelligence agencies in creating the investigation using agents such as Mifsud), they are not disproven either.
So while the report is clearly imperfect and fails to bring the conclusions to their proper end with criminal referrals, it does significantly advance the ball for our side. If this was the final play, it would be a tie -- neither side got what they wanted. But it's not. Durham and Barr are clearly still pursuing matters.
So we're in the final quarter and the score is tied. It's up to Durham now.
UPDATE: A comment made late in the Senate hearing that I just noticed. Asked why the report doesn't specify criminal referrals, Horowitz responds that he felt the conduct within was so serious that he simply forwarded the whole report to DOJ/Barr to make those decisions. So, effectively, everyone mentioned in it has been referred for potential criminal prosecution.
UPDATE: Initial conclusions are that Horowitz identifies a lot of errors, mistakes, problems, procedures that were not followed, and so on, but fails to bring it home. It's a hefty black eye for the reputation of the FBI but doesn't really offer consequences other than suggesting a lot of performance reviews. It's not a whitewash, more like a greywash.
As for Horowitz himself, this report combined with the Clinton email report strongly suggests that Horowitz (an Obama appointee, remember) is playing a sacrificial defense game. He's admitting what he has to, doesn't have all the necessary information, and refusing to draw the obvious conclusions.
Unfortunately, as in this case, McCarthy doesn't always get it. There is no conspiracy theory that "Ukraine hacked the DNC email accounts" that Trump bought into. Here are the facts:
There is an argument that the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks by an insider rather than hacked. The likely candidate for the leaker is Seth Rich, a DNC staffer found murdered in DC after the publication of the emails. The only person who likely knows, Wikileaks founder Assange, has said nothing to contradict this and some things that seem to support it, including offering a reward for information leading to Rich's murderer. There is strong evidence that the emails were leaked (copied to a local USB device) rather than hacked (and transferred over the internet).
The involvement of Seth Rich is speculation. The conclusion that the server was hacked comes entirely from Crowdstrike (no one else has examined the server) and is forensically weak. Crowdstrike has a history of forensically mis-attributing things to Russian hackers, and Hillary Clinton was running an operation to tie Trump to Russians and election interference. That's a strong motive for misrepresenting the source of the emails, and preventing examination of the evidence (ie, the server) by neutral parties.
The Ukraine angle also comes from Crowdstrike, which has connections to the Ukraine and may have physical possession of the "hacked" server. Examination of the server would probably (if the evidence has not been destroyed at this point) prove or disprove the hack versus leak theory. Given that companies' links to the Ukraine, it is not unreasonable for Trump to ask Ukraine for help investigating Crowdstrike's involvement in the 2016 elections and possession of evidence related to the DNC hack.
That angle is not proven, but it's not a conspiracy theory either, and asking for evidence to determine the truth is not a characteristic of conspiracy theorists.
Svetlana Lokhova gets into the SpyGate investigation
Her information and details suggest Halper played a central role -- and was paid for it with tax dollars via the Office of Net Assessment. The CIA was likely behind Halper's involvement, seeking to convince the FBI to open an investigation that could be used to keep surveillance on Trump active after the NSA's access got shut down. Steele's claimed Russian sources may well have been filtered through Halper at best -- and just made up by Halper or others at worst.
Over at Meaning In History, they are reading the Schiff report. Among many other bits of horror, the report indicates that Schiff has been obtaining the phone records of his own committee members (specifically Congressman Devin Nunes and aides), the personal attorney to the President Rudy Giuliani, and journalists (specifically John Solomon).
This strikes me as hugely significant. Once more the Democrats are spying on their political opponents for political purposes, and they are doing it brazenly. Either they are in a desperate panic over what is about to come out about SpyGate, or... they have been doing this all along, and somehow it never got exposed previously. Or perhaps both.
The New York Times tries to spin parts of the IG FISA report, but there are some holes in their narrative. Readers, do not believe the leaks, because they are 100% certain to be disinformation and spin. Wait for the report. It may be good, it may be bad, and maybe a wise reader can gain some insight into the contents by reading the leaks. But don't believe the leaks.
Also...
If Barr has any brains, and according to previous reporting, individuals are being shown only those portions of the report that they are personally involved in. That means this leak likely comes from a small group of people around the individual featured most prominently in it. I'd say canary trap, but the report will be released soon anyway.
I'm going to lay this prediction marker down, just in case. I think the Horowitz report on FISA abuse will include one or more criminal referrals for specific improper acts (such as altering an email) while taking the broader position that the FBI (largely, with individual exceptions) believed they were acting in good faith, while Durham prosecutes the CIA players who arranged the setup, and possibly those involved in the Mueller investigation/coverup.
Remember, Horowitz has limited scope, and he was tasked with FISA abuse only. The CIA activities, involving Mifsud, Burina, Halper, and so on, are mostly outside of that scope... but not outside of Durham's scope.
UPDATE: Meaning In History has a similar take. And he also reminds us that that charge against Clinesmith (for altering an email) means Clinesmith is going to get squeezed for info on the Corrupt Organization known as the "resistance". It might even be appropriate to think of Clinesmith as "the first domino".
It seems the work for which Halper was paid $1M in 2016 was not documented. Nor were any records kept of communications with him. The payments went through the Office of Net Assessment, which appears to be basically a CIA money laundry.
The story here is that, as confirmed by John Solomon, Marie Yovanovitch (formerly ambassador to Ukraine) publicly interfered in the internal politics of that nation by calling for the firing of a certain prosecutor; presented a list of individuals to that government that they were instructed not to prosecute, some of which had criticized Manafort; and the State Department confirmed that a list of names was presented and associated with a request not to prosecute.
That certainly seems like the US embassy was exerting pressure on Ukraine to block prosecution of corruption. That seems questionable at best, and corrupt at worst... and it matches up quite well with what Biden bragged about (ie, getting a prosecutor investigating corruption fired by threatening to withhold aid), and combined with Biden's son (not to mention individuals associated with former SecState Kerry and other prominent Democrats) being paid by those under investigation... well, it looks like corruption followed by pressure to cover up the corruption.
There were also allegations Yovanovitch was making comments critical of Trump (which would certainly be grounds for removal, if any were needed, but a President can remove ambassadors at will).
Did Strzok lie in his Special Counsel exit interview?
Undercover Huber makes the case on Twitter. It has to do with the switcheroo over who took notes, who conducted the interview, and who wrote the FD-302. Note also that editing the 302 could also be a serious felony charge depending on the substance of the edits (eg, if it was edited to support a false-statements charge that wasn't supported by the actual interview); this is on top of that exposure.
Former AG says IG report on FISA will be the most consequential in years
Anyone paying attention is already extremely troubled, but Whitaker is in a position to know better than most. Particularly the comment about "How they do business generally" suggests this will be a wide-ranging report rather than a narrowly focused one.
UPDATE: Continuing resolution appears to have the renewal, which certainly seems to suggest Sundance was right. That said, it's a short term reauthorization rather than a long term or permanent one.
"Damning" Horowitz report likely to contain criminal referrals
This is more like it. I'm fed up with reports that it will give people indigestion, bar trouble, bad public relations experience or a limp dick with the illicit FBI lovergirl.
I want criminal referrals, followed by indictments, prosecutions, and convictions.
Did Comey edit some of his memos to create an obstrution trap?
Gateway Pundit speculates. There's an interesting coincidence: four of the memos, those specifically collected by the FBI from Comey, describe conversations with only Comey and Trump participating. And there may be earlier copies delivered to the Senate that could be used for comparison.
If true, this could hang Comey. But for now, it's just interesting speculation, unless someone can get access to the original documents that supposedly exist.
Remember when the Democrats were making a big deal about the alleged Trump tower in Moscow? How Trump's lawyer, Cohen, was supposedly working hard to make some kind of secret deal during the election and that was supposedly proof of Trump's connections to and collusion with Russians?
The man pursuing that deal was FBI informant Felix Sater. At this point, it's well established that the Trump tower meeting with a few Russians was a setup arranged by Fusion GPS; that the mention of Hillary's emails by Papadopulous was incepted by Western intelligence associate Mifsud; that Carter Page, the purported target of the FISA, was a prior FBI informant; that the Russian moving in NRA circles was actually being directed and targeted towards high level politicians by Chris Bryne, CEO and ... yes... FBI informant. And let's not forget the Mike Flynn charges, which were a fraud from beginning to end and twice on Sundays. There's more I'm leaving out, including Halper, who was paid $600,000 in 2015 and 2016 to pretend to write papers while doing very odd things around Trump campaign staff.
People need to go to jail for this. All the way up to the top.
So in other words, Ciaramella likely blew the whistle on a non-issue to protect himself and his activities related to SpyGate and the Russian Collusion Hoax.
And guess what?
Do you think maybe there was a little quid pro quo there? A little cheese in the form of aid for Ukraine, a little wine in the form of made-up information about Trump and/or Manafort?
Intelligence community IG Atkinson may have ties to FISA abuse
They should also be asking how he got the ICIG position and whether that was a planned attempt to pre-position him for their coverup and coup operations.
Read the filing, too. "Evidence of entrapment" may even be understating the case here. I'd argue it's proof of entrapment.
UPDATE: Meaning in History points out that the prosecution of Flynn was conducted by the Mueller special counsel team, containing the same people who had interviewed Flynn and (initially) reported he was telling the truth. In other words, Mueller (or his team) knew and prosecuted him for years anyway.
Durham's SpyGate investigation is now officially a criminal investigation
I'm honestly not sure why this step is only being taken now; it seems likely there was more than enough available evidence before. My guess is that Durham and Barr wanted to keep the investigation a non-criminal one as long as possible for some policy or procedural reason, and this change has some policy or procedural reason to be happening right now.
First, Clapper and Brennan have been making noise in public about Durham wanting to interview them. Why would they make noise about that? The only reason that makes sense is that they think they are targets and would be at risk if they were interviewed. They are probably right about that; they are almost certainly targets, and sitting to an interview would make them sitting ducks for the kind of perjury trap that got Michael Flynn in so much trouble. So, likely they refused to be interviewed voluntarily, and they are no longer employed by the government, so IG Horowitz doesn't have any lever to make them agree. A criminal investigation can compel them to either talk, or plead the 5th.
Glenn Simpson: Steele dossier went directly to Obama
Another bombshell, and this one pretty clearly implicates Obama in everything that was based on the Steele dossier (or any of its component parts).
Be alert for the attempts to tie the beginning of the effort to Republicans, and keep in mind that desperate the feverish efforts of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Mueller, all of the Russian collusion was proven to be nonsense in Mueller's own report.
Boom? Does the FBI have possession of two Mifsud cell phones?
Mifsud is, of course, the "mysterious Russian agent" used to set up SpyGate; it's likely he's actually Western intelligence tasked with ... well, setting up SpyGate. He's been in hiding and seems to feel his life is in danger. Since he literally has information that could implicate both Clinton and Obama in the greatest abuse of government power in our national history, he's probably right. Just look at what happened to Epstein.
Now, Sidney Powell (representing Michael Flynn) files a motion stating that the FBI has two cell phones used by Mifsud to set him up. Potentially these could contain recordings of meetings, or potentially other communications.
This is not really a boom, yet; it's more like lighting the fuse. The boom will come if the FBI is forced to actually produce the phones.
Judicial Watch investigates monitoring of journalists
If this list is even halfway accurate, this is huge news. This list is filled with journalists who have been heavily reporting on the SpyGate scandal. If they were monitored, and the monitoring ordered by the ousted Ambassador to Ukraine (who was likely involved in SpyGate itself)... "BOMBSHELL" has been a bit overused but certainly explosive.
Does this mean the operation of the special counsel itself will come under scrutiny? We can hope so. The special counsel's operation was certainly part of the whole "insurance policy".
Was Journalist John Solomon spied on? How many others?
His sources say yes, and based on his journalism about SpyGate, he has very good sources. He's far from the only person to be inappropriately spied on lately, too. According to a new report from the FISA court, the FBI/CIA/NSA did not stop abusing their surveillance capability in 2016. They continued to abuse it through 2017 and 2018, with illegal searches in the tens of thousands.
I'm reserving judgment on Horowitz until we see his report on FISA abuse. He's generated referrals before, even if they were not actually acted on. His report on the Clinton email investigation did seem tough, but generated little in terms of consequences. (No, "bias training" for all FBI employees is not "consequences").
Disturbingly, the linked article reports Horowitz did not interview Page, which seems a major oversight. And seeing articles like this appear -- with people expressing doubts -- sounds to me like battlespace preparation for a nothingburger. Not because there's no meat, but because the chef was unwilling to fry it.
Did Obama order Democrats to get dirt on Trump from Ukraine?
Asking a foreign government to cooperate with an investigation of credible allegations of corruption with real evidence (even a video recording of an admission!) is legitimate, even if the suspect is running for the nomination to oppose you. You don't get a pass from corruption laws because you run for office -- or rather, you shouldn't, even though it seems to work that way for Democrats. Thatg's what Trump has been doing: asking for cooperation with legitimate investigations.
Giuliani seems to be saying Obama actually ordered Democrats to dig up "dirt" on an opposition candidate.
If true, there's a substantial difference between the two. A legitimate investigation versus a political hit job.
Now, we don't know yet what Giuliani is describing. We'll have to evaluate that when we see the evidence. But we do know what Biden admitted to doing -- conditioning US aid on firing a prosecutor investigating the company his son worked for. That seems corrupt on its face.
Mind you, we know a little about what came out of Ukraine in 2016 about Trump. This was the "black ledger" allegations against Manafort. There is speculation they might be straight up fakes. If that's what Obama ordered and what Ukraine delivered, it's election interference by fraud and abuse of office.
Obama has shown no reluctance to interfere in foreign elections himself, so it wouldn't be surprising to see him soliciting interference to help his party at home.
So far, the FBI, DOJ, and intel community have proven completely incapable of policing their own. They had to lose an election before any of their malfeasance was revealed, only a few people have been fired, no one has actually been charged. The contrast with the charges filed against Michael Flynn and a years-long special counsel investigation into the President himself on trumped-up charges (pun definitely intended) along with surveillance and entrapment schemes conducted against other innocent Americans for political reasons is very sharp.
The first intelligence whistleblower plot failed. Now, it's becoming obvious that AG Barr has been talking to foreign leaders about their interference in our 2016 election: Italy, Australia, Great Britain... Mifsud, Downer, Halper. Probably that's what panicked the Deep State into trying such a rushed ploy to begin with. Now, caught without a plan in the tattered remains of their coup attempt, the Deep State throws up another IG to try to create a roadblock. Will the State Dept IG claim that Barr's legitimate investigation into election interference in 2016 is really an attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections? Will there be desperate attempts to spin real investigations into impeachable offenses? No doubt. Only the details are unknown.
The spin is being cranked up to 11.
Most likely, this means big stuff is about to drop.
A so-called whistleblower claims Trump was speaking with a foreign leader and made some sort of promise the intel guy didn't like, so the intel guy ran to Congress and leaked the information. The Treehouse guys connect breadcrumbs and think the leaker is likely Sue Gordon, and her real motive is likely to get protections under whistleblower laws that would make it harder to fire her. There are also some suggestions that it may be an attempt to protect Biden.
Biden's quid pro quo here, protecting his son from a corruption investigation, was obviously corrupt itself. Undoing it and suggesting Ukraine restart he investigation we demanded them stop under a prior government seems legitimate. But the Democrats will try to spin it as political interference, gambling on no one knowing what Biden and his son were up to.
It's now generally accepted, if not 100% proven, that the Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a mysterious Russian woman was set up by Fusion GPS. Among other evidence, the woman met with Fusion GPS both before and after the meeting. And, of course, Fusion GPS was working with the Hillary campaign and Christopher Steele to convince the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign for Russian collusion that did not exist.
But Judicial Watch appears to have identified another element to the setup operation. They are suing DOJ for documentation about Felix Sater, an informant for the FBI and/or CIA, who was pushing Trump to engage in Russian real estate projects.
As far as I know, this is new information, and it would be devastating to the FBI's narrative if they were directing Sater to encourage deals with the Russians while they were trying to investigate the Trump campaign for Russian connections. And, yes, the Russian building angle has been used in various Democrat attempts to smear Trump, most particularly with respect to Cohen's congressional testimony.
And, conveniently, Sater was mentioned in the Mueller report several times but not his status as an informant. That's not necessarily surprising (it's reasonable to put a high priority on protecting the names of sources) but when those sources are being used to entrap innocent people and conduct a political coup, the public interest outweighs the secrecy.
Who reviewed the classification status of Comey's memos?
How is it that these same people keep cropping up, clearing each other in investigations, and generally running rings around the people supposedly trying to investigate them?
It's not like these two weren't already known to be partisan hacks with heavy conflicts of interest before Comey was fired.
UK disowned Steele before Trump inauguration, FBI likely knew
Before Trump's inauguration also means before Mueller's investigation and before at least one and possibly two of the FISA renewals. There are people who claim Mueller's team interview them about it, meaning Mueller provably knew about it. And yet it's not in his report, and his investigation continued.
We've heard brief mentions of the FBI's "verification log", essentially a spreadsheet laying out the claims that Steele made and what had been found when those claims were looked into. But now, John Solomon is reporting on the details of that spreadsheet, and it's messy. It also proves exactly how much the FBI knew about Steele's credibility when they applied for the warrants.
Bruce Ohr acted as a go-between for the FBI and their "fired" ex-informant Steele. The firing was a sham, part of the coverup process. The FBI continued to use Steele as a source, through Ohr, until two days prior to the Mueller special counsel appointment (!!!!!). Given that I would be very surprised if Mueller's team did not have continuing contact with Steele by some mechanism as well.
Giuliani: Deliberate efforts to cover up wrongdoing
Meaning in History thinks Giuliani is pointing at Wray as the coverup artist. I'm not so sure that's what Giuliani is saying here, necessarily, but I do think Wray is neck-deep in covering up elements of SpyGate. What I think has been happening is that people in Europe (Ukraine, Italy at least, maybe in the UK) have been trying to reach the FBI to tell their side of the story, and the FBI has been ignoring those requests. That could be Wray, it could be underlings. As far as I can tell, it took these people (Mifsud in Italy, some elements of the Ukraine government) going to the media and getting media attention before they got officially noticed.
Hannity thinks so. I think so, and I have for a long time, on a low-key way. Why? Some of the messages between Page and Strzok read, to me, like Page was very much not happy with Strzok towards the end. It sounded like a woman scorned and the end of an affair. (and, you know, having your "I had an affair with my coworker while plotting a coup" text messages published nationally seems likely to end an affair by itself). Not to mention she is still married (NOT to Strzok, but her original husband) which is not compatible with staying loyal to Strzok. And if that's the mindset she is in, cooperating is the logical course. Plus, trying to stay out of jail is a big incentive too.
So, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Lisa is cooperating. But this is the first time we're seeing people talk about it...
BOMBSHELL: Mifsud prepared to testify to setup operation
So here's the deal. Mifsud -- a man with extensive ties to Western intelligence agencies and politicians with documented photographic evidence -- says he was tasked with meeting Papadopoulos and feeling him information on Russian dirt about Hillary. Mifsud then says he was tasked with introducing Papadopoulos to Russians. Again, tasked. Later, Papadopoulos talks with Downer and mentions Russian dirt on Hillary. (No emails mentioned either time -- all three parties agree on this).
It seems certain now that this whole operation was a setup designed to give the FBI a deniable reason to get an investigation opened into the Trump campaign. And the deception continued past the election, past the inauguration, all the way into the Mueller report, which describes Mifsud as a Russian agent.
So who tasked Mifsud with setting up Papadopoulos? Let's follow that up the chain.
So I think I just made an important implied connection here. Let me walk you through it.
Gowdy is urging the release of transcripts of Papadopoulos' meetings with Halper and some sort of agent whose nom-de-plume was "Azra Turk". But why does he have to urge the release of those transcripts? Why can't Barr, to whom Trump just delegated declassification authority, just release them?
Answer: there's a process, and even after Trump or Barr starts the ball rolling, the "owning agency" controls release to some extent. If it was the FBI's agent and the FBI's transcript, the FBI would control release. But the FBI's director (Wray, a Deep State ally) can be overridden by Barr as DOJ. So why are the transcripts still being held up?
They are not being held up by Wray -- they are were being held up by DNI Coates, who Trump just fired. This is probably why Coates got fired. And it's probably why the Deep State is pushing Sue Gordon or someone else who will protect them in the role. They want these transcripts (and other declass issues, too) in safe hands. Safe for them.
But... if Wray doesn't control the transcripts related to Papadopoulos and Halper and the mysterious Azra Turk, and if it's Coates who was controlling them, then which agency was controlling Halper and Azra Turk?
Mark Wauck asks the question. I think the answer is no. The idea that the FBI honestly believed they were spying on Trump because he was a Russian agent is absurd. Remember, as just a few counterpoints among many, that Kavalec debunked at least three elements of Steele's claims before the FISA was applied for the first time: there is no Russian consulate in Miami, Michael Cohen has never been to Prague, there is no secret communications channel between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower; and the FISA application did not pass on any of this derogatory information about Steele and his story to the court. They were told directly it was BS and went ahead with it, swearing under penalty of perjury that the information was "verified" when it was not.
The idea that the FBI was fooled by Steele (and the story will eventually evolve into "and fooled by the intel agencies") is their version of an "Aw, shucks... but I meant well" cover story. It's a defensive posture that, if believed, paints them as good-faith actors who just got duped. And that gets them off scott-free of criminal charges.
McCabe, Strzok sue ... alleging politically motivated firing
It's hard to believe these lawsuits (Strzok, McCabe) will have any merit after what the IG report has said about them and their behavior. McCabe already features prominently in one report that described him as "lacking candor" (ie, lying) to the IG, and both he and Strzok were major players in the Hillary email investigation (yes, another IG report on that topic) plus the currently unreleased report in progress on FISA abuse. These two should feel lucky they aren't in jail; instead they are suing...
But they have a reason, and I think I know what it is. If there are indictments coming down for them, as part of the IG's report, they'll need money for lawyers. Probably they have already found lawyers and have been prepping for this. Suing for unlawful termination is a useful move to prepare the battlefield in the media and invite a future jury to view any prosecutions through a political lens.
More importantly, with the lawsuits comes the ability to open up a gofundme account for "legal expenses" that will probably flow to the same lawyers preparing to defend them from criminal charges. And it's a lot easier to get people to donate to your lawsuit over "unlawful termination" than over your defense against criminal charges of lying, leaking, and spying.
It may also be useful as a shield against media inquiries when the IG report is released (as in "I can't comment on pending litigation").
Sue Gordon is out of her positionafter an Oval Office meeting with Trump. She was Dan Coates deputy who will also be resigning. She was also the choice of many in the intelligence community and Congress to take over the role from Coates after he resigned... notably, though, she was the favorite of Trump's known enemies and weak friends.
So what's really going on?
We have active criminal investigations into the intelligence community's actions to spy on Trump. We have an IG report that is going through the review process before being released. We have a series of leaks in the media trying to frame the events of SpyGate. We have various other efforts to frame the narrative, including Strzok and McCabe suing for unlawful termination. There is, in short, a whole lot of activity by the Russia Hoax conspiracy.
They are the people who get to review and comment on the IG report before it is finalized and released. Dan Coates was the intelligence community member who would be required to authorize declassification of the contents of the report or its supporting documents. When he is removed, Sue Gordon takes that role until a replacement is confirmed.
So what's happening is this: 1) The IG report and related declassification requests go out 2) Coates refuses to declassify enough to satisfy Trump and/or Barr 3) Trump fires Coates and nominates a supporter from Congess 4) Under massive fire from the intel community, the nomination is withdrawn. The intel community practically demands Sue Gordon as the replacement. Given her posting as chief of station for CIA in London during the events in question, Sue is likely involved up to her neck in SpyGate and could be trusted to protect herself and other members of the conspiracy. 5) Trump calls Sue Gordon to a meeting and asks her to declassify. She refuses. 6) Trump fires Gordon based on her refusal.
What happens next? Trump finds out who is next in line after Gordon and asks them the same question until someone says yes. And then the IG report comes out.
Looks like we're going to get declassification starting ... tomorrow?
... according to Joe DiGenova. The catalyst was removing DNI Coats, an Obama holdover. DiGenova also indicated in very strong terms that this is a criminal investigation of an attempted coup, not just an internal review.
What they need is presumably information on Mifsud, and there are rumors Mifsud has suddenly come out of hiding and is willing to be interviewed (perhaps already has been). Reports are also that as the release of the Horowitz FISA report approaches, people are coming to him to be re-interviewed to make sure they tell him all the things they suddenly remembered...
Weissman was desperately looking for dirt on Trump
So desperately, even early in the Mueller investigation, that he was offering plea deals with complete immunity to defendants in cases he had no authority over, and telling them what he wanted them to say. Apparently no one was willing to lie.
Biden threatens to use opposition research on opponents
The real question isn't whether Biden uses opposition research. The real question, given that he spent 8 years as Obama's vice president while Obama abused the FBA, CIA, and NSA as political tools, is: where did Biden get this opposition research?
FBI use of "black ledger" against Manafort suspect
Well, we know the Steele dossier is bunk... wait, two documents?
Once again, the FBI relied upon a document they knew was fake to open an investigation, obtain search warrants, conduct armed SWAT-style raids, and generally abuse their authority to violate civil rights under color of law.
And, in addition, it appears the FBI leaked information to reporters and then cited their stories in court.
Meadows is asking the Justice Department IG to investigate. Good. But the courts need to get involved too, lest the requirement to testify truthfully become a dead letter.
It certainly appears that Rosenstein was giving Mueller free reign to dig up pretty much anything Mueller wanted to dig up. Many of the elements of the additional scope memo(s?) remain redacted, but at least one concerned Manafort colluding with Russian officials to influence the 2016 election. Notably, Manafort was never even charged with that. And that was just in the expanded scope memo we knew about; it now appears a third secret scope memo exists, dated October 20th, 2017.
Remember all those separate individuals at the FBI, CIA, and State Department who keep insisting they were all hearing about Trump and Russia from Steele independently?
Mueller alleges Russian intel ties in a Manafort contact... but the Russian in question is actually a source for the State Department. Sure, still a Russian. But a helpful Russian, apparently. And as an established agent, if Manafort or Trump were actually colluding with Russians, he would probably have mentioned it. And it's certainly foul play to smear Trump by association with a Russian who happens to be one of our informants. Not to mention smearing Trump for receiving a peace plan that Obama also received, but only mentioning the delivery to Trump.
UPDATE: The scope will be limited to his contacts with US intelligence. That means he won't be able to talk about anything he did purely for Fusion GPS or Hillary. It may still provide valuable information, as current US intelligence agencies are run by people who were likely involved. In fact, if Steele talks about operations in London, he might well implicate current CIA Director Gina Haskell.
What was it that made Mueller perfect for the special counsel coverup?
Aside from his own personal connections to everyone already involved, and his own likely corruption (see the Whitey Bulger case), Mueller also happened to be FBI direct from 2001 to 2013. During that time, the FBI and CIA likely entered into a memorandum of understanding allowing CIA to use FBI contractor access to spy on domestic targets. It was that access that, when Admiral Mike Rogers shut it down, likely prompted the Steele dossier and special counsel investigation of Trump as an "insurance policy" to make sure Trump could be read out of the programs and hopefully removed.
Mueller worked with the IRS to target the Tea Party (political spying, not just delaying applications), and was then asked to investigate the Tea Party scandal and found no wrongdoing. Then Mueller set up an arrangement with the CIA around the time the Tea Party scandal started to become a problem; the arrangement started in 2012 and lasted until 2016 and allowed the CIA to use FBI access authority for domestic spying (likely with political motives). When THAT got shut down, Mueller -- who had left the FBI -- was brought back in as special counsel to "investigate" (ie, cover up) what he himself had set up.
Anti-Trump FISA application followed unusual approval path
So what is the takeaway here? Well, first, the FISA application clearly followed an unusual, top-down, very much not "by the book", dare I say political process. By the time it reached Trisha Anderson's desk, who would normally see it first, it had already been approved "informally" by McCabe and Sally Yates had already signed it.
McCabe is infamous for his pro-Hillary involvement in the Hillary email investigation, and for this anti-Trump involvement in the Trump investigation, and also for the $500,000+ in campaign donations his wife received from Hillary-linked donors while all this was going on.
Yates is infamous for getting herself fired over a relatively trivial policy position during the early Trump administration. It suffices to establish her anti-Trump bias.
Anderson clearly admits she didn't do her job to review the FISA because her superiors had already signed off on it.
Second point. Remember Susan Rice's last minute email to herself saying Obama said to do it all "by the book"? This is the last firewall before this scandal reaches Obama. "He said to do it all by the book!" This is clearly not by the book.
Third... whether we believe her that she didn't look at the application or not, she signed off on it. That makes her complicit. It's not the informal approvals that matter. It's her signature.
She tracks the start of the investigations into Trump to spring of 2016 rather than the summer of 2016 when Papadopoulos spoke with Downer. She says it started with Page instead.
"Russian Spy" sues Halper, media orgs for calling her a spy
Important side point: Halper was the one who invited her and seated her next to Flynn. Halper was also the one who reported Flynn's interactions with her as suspicious. That smells like a setup to me.
Weissman knew about Papadopoulos entrapment scheme
The entrapment operation against Papadopoulos has been known for some time now. It was obvious from the first accounts we heard from Papadopoulos that it was an entrapment operation. However, this is the first evidence we have seen that Mueller's team was the one definitively behind it and knew what was going on in advance. This is more than just a tip that Papadopoulos was flying into the US with an undeclared $10,000 cash from some guy in Israel who tried to recruit him -- it's evidence Weissman was preparing the groundwork before the events.
IG Horowitz: final three FISAs obtained illegally, first one still in doubt
... and not in much doubt following the Kavalec email, where the State Dept calls out Steele as a political hack doing opposition research and smear operations, points out that anyone at the State Dept engaging with him is in violation of the Hatch Act (prohibiting campaign activities by government officials with government resources), and notifying the FBI of those concerns before the first FISA was issued.
Note that the report from IG Horowitz has not yet been released; this is a characterization of its current conclusions from DiGenova.
Funny how Comey never applied those consequences when he was in a position to do so. It's only now, when AG Barr looks to be seriously investigating the whole of SpyGate, that Comey starts trying to feel Strzok and Page to the lion hoping he will be eaten last. Comey is hoping that Strzok and Page will act as cutouts -- a term of art in espionage whereby the cutout is caught and exposed as a spy, but doesn't or can't reveal anyone else involved in their operations. Especially not anyone higher up the chain.
But the evidence suggests Comey is not the only one feeding people to the lion. Comey himself is being fed to the lion. His FBI investigation itself -- the FISA warrant, the obstruction of justice, the special counsel, all of it -- is merely smoke and mirrors to cover the spying performed by the Obama administration on political opponents by the CIA and NSA. Not just on Trump and his campaign, either.
This stuff goes all the way back to 2012, which, as you will recall, is roughly when the Tea Party IRS scandal was exposed, which also involved... spying on political opponents.
We have text messages from the Page/Strzok pair saying that the White House was running the investigation, or at least thinks they were. We have meetings between DOJ, FBI, and White House representatives. We have Rice's last minute "by the book" email proving that Obama knew at some point before the transition happened.
And we have allegations that the spying goes all the way back to 2012. Let me remind you that's about the same time the IRS spying stopped because they got caught.
When you start taking flak, you know you're over the target.
What did you know and when did you know it, Ben?
You know, if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind if Barr and Horowitz subpoena all of your emails and phone calls and meeting notes and go through them with a fine toothed comb, right? After all, the Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.
The investigation into SpyGate should be at least as vigorous.
Gosh. A political spying operation going on for more than four years before Donald Trump was elected, targeting Republicans? That would cover... Barack Obama's re-election campaign in 2012 against Mitt Romney.
So, Assange finally wore out his welcome in the Ecuadore embassy in London. This was probably inevitable, but the timing is interesting. Right after Mueller releases his report to Barr, Assange gets kicked out and immediately arrested? Timing does not seem coincidental, especially since the key Russian Collusion allegations are that Assange published the DNC emails which were allegedly obtained by Russian hackers. The alternative explanation -- as Assange tells it -- is that they were leaked to him by an insider within the DNC. Speculation is that the leaker was Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered in what may -- or may not -- be a robbery gone wrong.
So we will have to wait and see what Assange is charged with. If he's charged with the DNC "hack" -- or more likely conspiracy with the DNC "hack" since he probably did not conduct it himself -- it means someone is trying to keep him locked up and under threat so he can't contradict the official story on those events... or else he actually did it.
If he's NOT charged with the DNC hack (and/or conspiracy), Russian Collusion is toast. No Russian hackers, no possible collusion, and Hillary's opposition research fairy tale goes up in smoke.
If he is charged with other hacking, especially Russian-linked espionage type hacking (eg his involvement with Bradley Manning) but not the DNC hacking, it may be a smokescreen to imply he was involved in the DNC hacking. There's another DNC-related hacked -- someone with an account there had their account phished via email -- and that would confuse the situation still further.
But the key thing to keep an eye on is whether Assange is charged with hacking the DNC in a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. If not, then not only is Russian Collusion dead, but so is Russian Hacking. It's all a hoax at that point.
At least so far, Assange has not been charged with hacking or criminal conspiracy with regard to the 2016 election. He's instead being charged with what appears to be a single count of helping Bradley (now calling itself Chelsea) Manning get someone else's password. That was a high profile case, but it has nothing to do with the DNC emails, the Russians, or Trump. And Assange's involvement in it appears trivial.
So unless more indictments appear later on, the idea that the Russians hacked the DNC emails and gave them to Assange can no longer be taken seriously. It, too, was part of the Russia Hoax. A DNC insider leaked them to Assange, probably someone annoyed that Bernie was being cheated out of the nomination.
Dossier based on posts from "random individuals" on CNN website
CNN is so tightly connected to the Clintons that it has been referred to as "Clinton News Network". Many commentators there are Clinton officials or campaign staff. If Steele was drawing "evidence" from random individuals posting to CNN's websites, what are the odds those "random individuals" would be connected to the Clinton campaign and/or researchers like Nellie Ohr or other people with access to intel databases who needed to covertly and deniably communicate their findings?
Of course, such "sources" don't exactly meet criteria for admissibility in court, either.
Of course they didn't care. They were all equally biased, and they knew what they were there to do: keep the heat on Trump and sweep SpyGate under the rug.
Fake News Russian Collusion out, real Ukrainian collusion in
To be fair, the Ukrainian collusion part is still alleged. But there's tape, a court ruling, an active criminal investigation, and contacts with the Obama administration via the US embassy in the Ukraine.
Combine this story with Devin Nunes announcing he is suing twitter about shadowbanning and coordinated harassment campaigns, and you start to see what looks like a planned counteroffensive.
In his investigation, Mueller employed 60 people for 2 years, 3000 subpoenas (!!!!), 500 search warrants, 230 requests for communication records, 50 orders authorizing "pen registers" (wiretaps that only report who you talked to but not the content), 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed 500 people. It's not clear how many of those were focused on the process crimes and unrelated criminal matters Mueller was trying to use as leverage, but it's clear he left no stone unturned and found nothing regarding the central matter of his investigation.
The President and his 2016 campaign are completely vindicated.
The individuals whose prior criminal acts made them vulnerable are not, except to the extent their association with the President brought them under unprecedented and excessive scrutiny.
Mueller chose to examine the facts concerning allegations of obstruction of justice while leaving it to the Attorney General to decide whether those facts amounted to obstruction. The Attorney General determined they did not.
The letter suggests more information will be released when possible (ie, when the material that cannot be released, such as grand jury information, is identified and removed).
It's likely Congress will attempt to seize on the obstruction issue as grounds for impeachment, but this is very plainly a step too far that can only be taken due to political desperation at this point.
And now the tables turn. Prosecute those who abused the national security and law enforcement agencies of our government while seeking to dictate the results of an election. Drain the swamp. Lock Hillary up, and her little cronies too.
UPDATE: Wait a sec. Mueller asked for help from 13 foreign governments? That seems like a dangerous intrusion on the President's power to conduct foreign policy, especially in an investigation effectively (if not formally) targeting the President.
Basically, in her testimony, Lisa Page admitted that both investigations were heavily political, that the Clinton investigation was swept under the rug (she says by DOJ's rules), and that the Trump-Russia investigation was started with no evidence and never managed to actually find any.
Again, the fact that a "friendly" DOJ has to be sued to get answers means they are simply trying to cover up as much as possible. And it calls into question how "friendly" DOJ really is. Hopefully, Barr will change things.
Bill Quick asks if this is real. Pretty sure that's a negative. Telltales are all in the keywords: "Trump's orbit", rather than Trump, and "possible" collusion rather than simply collusion.
If they had anything on Trump directly, they would say that. They did not.
If they had evidence of actual collusion, they would say that. They did not.
In both cases, they used language to imply as much as possible while weaseling out of making the actual accusation. So what do they have?
Cohen, a convicted liar, told Congress that he overheard a phone call between Roger Stone and Trump telling Trump that Wikileaks was about to release something on Clinton. Problems: Wikileaks denies ever talking to Stone, Stone denies ever talking to Wikileaks, and Wikileaks had already publicly teased their release before the phone call allegedly happened. Maybe Cohen is telling the truth and Stone was implying he was in contact with Wikileaks when he was not. Maybe Stone is telling the truth and Cohen is making things up that are impossible to disprove based on publicly admitted allegations. Trump's response: "Wouldn't that be great?" is not the response of a man with insider knowledge engaged in illicit collusion. If he was engaged in such, he would know it was coming.
Cohen, a convicted liar, also told Congress he heard Trump Jr tell Trump Sr that "the meeting is all set up". Cohen assumes and alleges this referred to the Trump Tower meeting. There is, I think, no reason to believe this; how many meetings must both Trumps participate in on a daily basis? Even if the assumption is correct, everyone at the meeting says it went nowhere. The evidence suggests the meeting was set up by Fusion GPS deliberately to give the impression of Russian collusion.
If they had anything else, it would have leaked already.
Should Mueller and Horowitz release their reports simultaneously?
Roger Simon argues yes, in the interests of transparency and fairness. There's one problem with that; Horowitz has apparently not been interviewing witnesses, meaning his report can't possibly be ready at the same time. I believe, based on various reports, that Mueller is probably using his "Don't interfere with my investigation" card to stop IG Horowitz and his colleague prosecutor Huber from actually investigating anything until Mueller is done.
That makes a simultaneous report a non-starter; does anyone believe the Mueller report won't leak long before Horowitz and Huber are done when they haven't even started yet? Hell, I'd bet on the Mueller report leaking within the day.
Judicial Watch uncovered more emails and testimony from DOJ and FBI officials concerning the Clinton emails found on Weiner's laptop. Specifically, that Clinton lawyer David Kendall immediately (within hours) contacted FBI General Counsel James Baker when news of the letter to Congress notifying them of the email search broke.
The email contained "requests" and Baker conveyed a meeting within 24 hours to discuss it. The people Baker notified were: Comey, associate Deputy Director Bowdich, assistant director for national security Steinbach, assistant director for counterintelligence Priestap, Comey's chief of staff Rybicki, analyst Moffa, assistant director (acting) Herring, assistant director for public affairs Kortan, deputy general counsel Trisha Anderson, and of course the two lovebirds Strzok and Page. If I remember correctly, this was the week before the election.
There was in fact a conference call scheduled among those people as a result, and of course, Comey issued another letter two days before the election "clearing" Clinton. There are multiple lies documented, including Strzok lying that no new classified emails were found on the laptop. A lie by omission, as well, as they had only examined approximately 3,000 of the 340,000 emails on the laptop.
The emails obtained also document an offer of a quid pro quo: more funding for FBI positions in return for downgrading the reason for redacting released material to "from classified to something else."
We don't know what happened in that conference call, but we know the results: Comey's second letter falsely claiming to exonerate Clinton two days before the election, the examination of the laptop was halted pretty much immediately (long before the contents could be properly examined), and, of course, the return of Strzok, Page, and the rest of the conspirators to looking desperately for dirt on Trump as an insurance policy.
A reminder: Priestap was head of FBI's counterintelligence during the time this was going on, and he's generally considered to be a cooperating witness with the investigation into SpyGate. But for some reason, he can't talk about some of the trips he took to London during the same timeframe; supposedly they are connected to the Mueller investigation but he claims he didn't meet the known London players. So who did he meet and why was he there? And why can't he tell Congress?
FISC called on Mueller to explain surveillance abuses
In other words... Mueller has a pattern of covering up for FISA abuses, specifically involving omission of relevant information, and he's successfully covered up those abuses for the past 16 years. That likely puts the abuses in 2003 or 2002. And it highlights his involvement now in covering up similar FBI abuses that violated the Woods procedure he promised then would prevent future abuses like those he covered up.
Why, then, aren't the current FISC judges willing to enforce the laws in the way that the earlier ones were? Why aren't FBI and DOJ supervisors?
Nellie Ohr admits investigating travels of Trump family
This is confirmation of a theory long pushed by the Conservative Treehouse: Nellie Ohr, working for Fusion GPS, almost certainly used her access to the NSA databases to investigate Trump and his children. (Where else could she research their travel? She was a contractor and had access.)
This is also significantly -- hugely significant -- because it confirms that the investigation targeted the Trump family all along. She frames her research as being superficial and into the children's travel and Trump's real estate dealings, which are topics suitable for opposition research, but not for a federal contractor using intelligence databases.
It also confirms the timing of the investigation (as contractor access to the NSA databases was cut off before the election, on April 18th, probably by Mike Rogers, which forced the FBI to seek a warrant from the FISC).
It is shocking to me that this admission -- which took place in October, and has only recently been leaked to the press -- did not result in Ohr immediately being arrested for her crimes.
The only thing missing here, as I see it, is that Nellie is not quoted as using her access to NSA and other law enforcement/intelligence databases to do the research. In theory, as these are public figures, she could have used Google. But anyone could do that. You wouldn't need someone like Nellie, with her access, to do Google searches on the public net for press releases and news articles about semi-famous people traveling around.
In all those alleged crimes, not a single one would exist without the Mueller probe. We already know Mueller is willing to basically make up false statements charges from whole cloth (based on interviews where the FBI interviewer didn't think there was any intention to deceive; see the Mike Flynn case). In this case we've seen the basic allegations before. Some of Stone's emails vaguely reference what WikiLeaks will release next, basically guessing what it might be, and Mueller is claiming that was actual foreknowledge that Stone is lying about when he says it was just a guess.
So the factual question is whether Stone was actually communicating with "Guccifer 2.0" or Wikileaks, or whether he was just bragging to puff himself up and give the impression he had inside information. Notably, Mueller has not charged him with hacking or conspiracy to hack, or anything related to hacking, and Wikileaks has denied communicating with Stone. Just to lying and "obstructing" (which probably translates to not cooperating and encouraging other people not to cooperate).
The media (CNN) was informed so they could be present at the arrest, which was a full tactical armed raid. That shows a certain amount of inappropriate public relations thinking on the part of whoever leaked the information. Did this guy really need a pre-dawn raid by a team of tactical FBI agents in armor, aired on CNN? No. The whole thing was staged for media impact.
Given the steady drip drip drip of incredibly damaging quotes from congressional testimony on this topic, and the failed attempt to refocus attention on Trump via the false Buzzfeed story alleging Cohen was ordered to lie, indicting Stone and arresting him in this very visible way feels like an attempt to redirect the narrative.
UPDATE: Conservative Treehouse points out that someone above Mueller would probably be required to approve the raid. Who was that? They think it was Rosenstein, but Whitaker is Acting Attorney General and supposed to be the one supervising Mueller at this point. Finding out who approved a pre-dawn raid on Stone instead of just calling his lawyer, and the process that request took within the DOj and FBI, would tell us a lot about who is on who's side here.
On the one hand, this shows them paying careful attention to what they signed -- a much better professional look than Rod Rosenstein's (paraphrased) "I don't really need to read the things I sign". On the other hand, it puts McCabe and Yates in the uncomfortable position of having still signed at least one FISA application based on Hillary's dossier, despite their careful review, and not including information about Steele's personal and financial partisan motives, despite being warned about them by Ohr.
The relationship is pretty simple. Trump ran as a Republican. De facto, the NRA supports Republicans nationally. (This is because the Democrats demonstrated they could not be trusted, as a whole, but individuals are evaluated as individuals when running for office). The NRA spent a lot of money on this election in particular because there was an open Supreme Court seat at stake, and it was previously held by a very pro-gun Justice. Of course the stakes were high.
But the implication here is insane.
Emphasis mine. This is just an attempt to smear Trump by association with the NRA by association with a single Russian possible agent.
So, an entirely trivial amount of money, no accusations of wrongdoing on the part of the NRA, no crime for Mueller to investigate, and yet he has a budget of millions to spend -- and will force his targets to spend even more defending themselves from baseless political charges.
Given those answers -- especially Barr's long-standing personal and professional relationship with Mueller -- I cannot see how Barr can be expected to provide the restraint Mueller's special counsel role has so far been lacking.
I wonder if Trump knew that when he nominated Barr? Somehow, I doubt it.
Someone should tell him before Barr is confirmed, in case he wants to nominate someone without such conflicted personal relationship.
Huber is being blocked by Mueller's investigation. He can't see or do anything until Mueller is done. And Mueller will make sure that he doesn't end his investigation before he has make sure all evidence is thoroughly cleaned up.
Graham files legislation seeking to protect Mueller
Linsey Graham was a major McCain ally and well-known RINO until very recently -- specifically, he seemed to find his spine during the Kavanaugh hearings. Since then he seems to have lost it again. On Mueller specifically, remember that Graham is closely linked to McCain, and McCain was involved with retrieving a copy of the dossier, giving it to the FBI, and providing it to the media.
In other words, it is likely Graham's public statements are an attempt to get on Trump's good side in public while in official actions and legislation threatening Trump with Mueller to protect the Deep State and possibly his own involvement in SpyGate.
Remember the news about the Russian bot campaign that was supposed to discredit Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race? Turns out, the people who generated that campaign have links to the US military and intelligence community. There are also companies in the UK, also populated by ex-intel people, who are involved with similar efforts and -- yes -- have links to Christopher Steele, infamous dossier author.
Read the whole thing. Follow the links.
It seems to me the intelligence community has been picking winners and losers in the US elections for some time now, and Trump's surprise win has thrown a wrench in their election machine. We get this under control now -- in the next two years, before Trump's re-election campaign in 2020 -- or we lose the chance.
UPDATE: It turns out the 302s from seven months later were an interview of Strzok describing the interview of Flynn. The original 302s were filed under seal. (One marked draft, one not). The timeframe on the original 302s confirm that they were referred to by Strzok and Page in already released text messages discussing approval by McCabe. They are also redacted in significant portions, which makes it hard to evaluate Flynn's honesty closely without the matching transcript of the call.
Let's not forget that leaking the transcript of the call itself was a felony. No one seems to be looking into who leaked that.
The idea is that Cohen's payments to two bimbos were technically campaign contributions intended to influence the election rather than to shut them up to prevent generic reputational damage to Trump's marriage. Looked at objectively, that's somewhat flimsy, and charging a campaign finance violation like that as a felony is almost unprecedented. As potential felony charges, these could be treated as the basis of impeachment by the now-Democrat House. And of course there is huge demand for impeachment, stoked and stroked for two years now by the media and the Deep State on both sides of the political aisle.
But the Senate is extremely unlikely to convict and remove. Democrats would need 20 GOP votes in the Senate, and it seems unlikely they will get that. Any GOP member voting to remove a Republican president can expect enough of his base to stay home in the next election to doom him, even if they have to wait a few years. There would be dramatic losses among those up in the next election, even if they voted against, simply as a matter of getting to who you can get to. Within the Republican party it would mark the transition from a cold war of paperwork and politics for control of the party to an open party split.
If, in fact, Comey was on those email chains, he's on the hook for lying -- or, the most favorable explanation for him, having a very selective memory.
Of course, for this to be prosecuted, the DOJ would have to either go after a past FBI Director, or appoint a special counsel to do it. The odds of that seem low at the moment.
I don't think Comey necessarily lied to Congress here. I think he pushed back on Trump's request to investigate the origin of the dossier because he knew where it came from (and yes, he did probably lie to Congress about that). But his FBI was already trying to verify the dossier ... meaning, find out whether or not it was true.
I think the FBI's efforts to verify the dossier consisted of trying to get warrants on the four people named in the FISA warrant application. That is, instead of presenting the FISA court with verified information containing probable cause of a crime, they presented the FISA court with a line of bullshit and hoped their wiretap would be retroactively self-verifying.
Will Trump be charged with campaign finance violations?
Andy McCarthy thinks so. I don't, but mostly because DOJ policy forbids indicting a sitting president. I think Mueller will write a report saying he would have indicted Trump if Trump was not the president. He will then pass it off to Congress and invite them to consider impeachment.
Will they? The Democrats just took the House. Of course they will at least consider it. They have the votes to do it if everyone votes straight party. They can even afford to lose quite a few weak seats if they want to try to protect them. On the other hand, trying to get Trump removed from the Senate is a political non-starter, needing 67 votes when they have only 47 or so. So, to the extent that they try to impeach, they will use it as a political weapon to damage his reelection chances.
Should they? Using very weak campaign finance charges combined with even weaker lying about sex and/or lying about Moscow hotel deals, all taking place before Trump became president, none of which at this point appears to involve Trump directly but merely his campaign, to try to remove a president is facially absurd. So far there's basically no proven personal nexus to Trump's actions; campaign finance violations are usually cured by fines not felonies; Trump has the "I trusted my lawyer to do it legally" defense; Cohen's cooperation and credibility have been destroyed by his admissions of lying and the violation of attorney-client privilege. You couldn't get a conviction in an ordinary court after the necessary cross-examination and tossing out of the tainted evidence.
Historically, lots of presidents have had various affairs, including payoffs, without facing impeachment. Clinton did face impeachment for lying about it, but not removed... and his impeachment was considered one of the biggest political mistakes in modern history. (I supported it, but mostly because of all the other crap he had done, ie, Waco, etc). Edwards, as a candidate in the primary, was charged with campaign finance violations for paying off his mistress in a similar but not identical scheme. He was not convicted, as I recall.
Mark Levin has convincingly argued that using personal money to make such payoffs is both legal and necessary as they are not "campaign expenses", which would negate any disclosure requirements. (Edwards used money from supporters to make the payoffs; the exact financial structure of Trump's payoffs is unknown).
As a layman, all I can tell you is that campaign finance laws are a legal morass that appears to be impossible to avoid violating. Politicians are regularly caught up in violations and pay fines. I can't recall any of them being removed from office over the matter.
It's short -- two pages -- and practically all of them are redacted. Notably, though, the unredacted portions do not faithfully describe who paid for the dossier. The description is technically accurate, but does not mention the Clintons, the Democrats, or political opposition research. Instead, the funding is described as coming from "private clients" only.
Remember, the FBI and DOJ knew where this was coming from. There is no way to spin this briefing document, being presented to the President, as anything less than deliberately deceptive. It was a weasel move, by a weasel of a man who does weasel things.
This release takes on a certain new significance given that Comey recently testified to Congress that he only knew the funding came from "private clients", not specifically who those clients were. It could even be argued that the release was timed to tell Comey what the documents said, so he could claim not to know anything more than what was in the documents.
State Dept disseminated Russiagate documents hours before Trump took office
We knew there was an effort to do this before, but we didn't know the details. Now we know more. It's noteworthy that Senator Corker, a Republican, is on the list of recipients. I seem to recall Corker was instrumental in getting the Iran deal through the Senate by pretending it wasn't a treaty (which would need a two-thirds vote). It's also noteworthy that this effort took place after Trump had won the election. In other words, rather than treating Trump as the incoming president due (at a minimum) respect, they conspired against him.
Detailed comments below the fold. My overall impression is that we, again, lost out by having this held in a public forum. Comey can hide behind that to avoid answering important questions. He can also hide behind the Mueller investigation. I'd like to see this all public, but getting there requires investigators to be able to ask about classified things so the answers can then be declassified.
Sullivan throws a wrench into the Flynn sentencing, but for the wrong reasons
Because Judge Sullivan has previously seen some political schemes and machinations from the FBI (notably the Ted Stevens case), some people were hopeful that he would see through the FBI bullshit. Instead he seems to have latched on to the failure to register as a foreign agent charges (which Flynn got out of by way of the plea bargain with Mueller) and threatened Flynn into cooperating more. Disappointing.
Gotta wonder if the Deep State got to Sullivan.
UPDATE: For clarity, the failure to register charges involved Turkey, not Russia.
Mueller cannot accept Whitaker as his boss and still complete the tasks he was given as special counsel. The real tasks, that is: keeping the attention on Trump and off of the Clintons' and Obama's malfeasance with our intelligence agencies and other crimes. So, of course he's going to report to Rosenstein first for as long as he can do so.
And that means Rosenstein has to go. Read the whole thing; there are 9 more reasons to fire Rosenstein immediately.
Comey talks to the media following second testimony
Comey testified to Congress for the second time today. He talked to the media afterwards. We should get a transcript sometime soon.
He says he was asked about "which form people filled out". This is either a reference to the 302s about the Flynn interview, or the procedures necessary to initiate a sensitive political investigation (which he previously admitted to not knowing or following).
He admits that he "took a decision away from Sally Yates" to avoid the appearance of political bias, which is the same reasoning he used when announcing that he would not recommend prosecuting Clinton himself (because Lynch was compromised by the tarmac meeting and other, unspecified, information). He says he did this "to make it necessary for Trump to burn down the entire FBI to stop the investigation" and was shocked that Trump was willing to do just that. He seems to think he is acting in a completely non-partisan manner and all his actions, no matter how improper or obviously partisan, are above reproach. It's disgusting.
Asked if he takes any responsibility for the hit the reputation of the FBI has taken, he blames Trump for "lying". That's bullshit; Comey was at the head of the agency while it behaved in a nakedly partisan manner to influence the Presidential election in 2016. Blaming Trump for the actions in which Trump was a victim is absurd, and he wasn't in office for the Clinton investigation.
He blames others and says they should be ashamed for being silent. This is the man who said he couldn't remember or didn't know under oath over 200 times.
He's "proud" of the way the FBI interviewed Flynn, despite admitting previously he "took advantage" of the chaos in the incoming administration.
He won't comment on whether the memos he leaked were classified. Of course not. That would embarrass him.
Guess what, Comey? You are a weasel who does weasel things.
Read the whole thing. But at least part of this answer is explained by the Hillary campaign needing a reason to pay Perkins Coie for legal services rather than opposition research. Casting Steele's dossier as legal services is batshit fucking insane, but that appears to be what they are trying to do. Imagining that they could challenge Trump's election if they lost on the basis of phantom Russian collusion should be even more batshit fucking insane, but it seems to be working so far.
Document here. Power Line analyzes it briefly, and finds that the denials that resulted in Flynn's guilty plea are actually pretty weak. Of the four things he supposedly lied about, two of them were more of a "I don't remember" than a lie, and the remaining two are still less than a firm denial. Given that Flynn was the incoming National Security Advisor and the conversations themselves were perfectly legitimate, I just don't see criminality here. Obviously a person will not remember his conversations with the perfect accuracy of a transcript. That's just how memory works.
If in fact Flynn did not accurately inform his superiors (Trump, Pence, etc) about the content of the conversation, that's a different question and possibly a firing offense regardless of intent. It's awkward, even potentially dangerous, to have your National Security Advisor talking to Russia and asking for things without passing that on. But that's a matter for Trump and Pence to consider, not something that criminal law really embraces. Especially not in a blatant perjury trap like this.
Actually, calling this a perjury trap seems inaccurate. A perjury trap is giving someone the opportunity to lie deliberately, knowing you can catch them in the lie. This was more like going to Flynn with the determination to manufacture a lie.
We're already pretty sure that the dossier on Trump and the Carter Page FISA warrant came from a desperate attempt to get legal authority for spying that Mike Rogers, as NSA Director, had cut off (and initiated an audit of). If Mike Flynn had intended to order an even broader audit, and this became known, and if the abuses were as common and as significant as they seem to be, then this would represent a huge motive for the entire Obama administration to go after him. They could safely fire Flynn to block his audit while the Obama administration was in power, but when Trump hired him, the Obama administration would surely realize the audit was back on the table.
Also -- the 302 on which they are basing the whole Flynn prosecution is an interview of Strzok after Lisa Page was fired and days before Strzok was fired. They were fired because the texts revealing their bias came out. Those texts came out at the same time. Therefore, Mueller know Strzok was compromised when he conducted this interview, and I can only assume Mueller kept Strzok on for a few more days solely or primarily to conduct this interview which he then used to charge Flynn. Why else keep him on for a few more days?
It seems the judge has noticed Flynn is being railroaded and hopefully is going to get the facts. I hope he does get them and throws out the charges. Better justice delayed than justice denied.
New emails reveal FBI knew FISA warrant on Page was fatally flawed
I used "flawed" in the headline to keep it short. We don't know exactly what the emails say, but read the article. It says the emails say the FBI knew pretty much everything we know now: the media contacts, the circular reporting used as evidence, Steele's bias and paid opposition research role, everything.
Andy McCarthy reminds us that Mueller is planning to write a report not file charges. He intends to produce a narrative that implies collusion, even though his witnesses in a trial would have no credibility as convicted liars.
The FBI and DOJ bet the farm they could outlast two years of a Republican House by stonewalling and playing political games. They won that bet. But they made a similar bet with Trump about 2020, and that one is still in play.
Mueller deleted text messages from Page, Strzok phones
These were the phones used by Page and Strzok, now infamous for their thousands of biased text messages while they worked to exonerate Clinton and smear Trump, after the joined Mueller's team but before their texts were exposed. When those texts were exposed, they were forced to leave Mueller's team... and their phones were reset,destroying any text messages they had exchanged while working for Mueller.
The IG report proceeds to whitewash this clear destruction of evidence.
BOMBSHELL: Comey likely knew about the Trump tower meeting in June 2016
Why is this important? The meeting happened June 9th, and the investigation didn't open until the end of July, and Comey says he can't answer because the question touches on Mueller's investigation. But if he didn't know about the meeting he could answer that. If he knew, and can't answer, it's because it was related to the Mueller investigation -- which didn't exist at the time.
So Comey knew about the meeting before the investigation opened in July.
How? Did he get the information from Steele, or Perkins-Coie through Baker, or surveillance on Trump?
BOMBSHELL: Comey stumbles on Baker's contact with Perkins-Coie
Baker, FBI general counsel at the time, has testified that he received information from Perkins-Coie and passed it on to others. He said this was unusual ("unique", even). Comey is claiming to have absolutely no knowledge of this. Would Baker have done that and never mentioned it to Comey? Seems unlikely. My gut tells me Comey is lying here, and that he knew it was going on. Comey is claiming tips like that happened all the time, and he wants to see what Baker testified to before he answers. This is serious stumbling by Comey.
BOMBSHELL: Comey can't hold the end of July timeline!
Comey can't dance fast enough. He first denies any information gathering about Trump at the FBI before the last week of July, then walks it back and admits "it's possible I knew at the time." It was absolutely going on, and he absolutely knew about it (and still does, but he has to claim a memory lapse to avoid talking about it).
BOMBSHELL: Comey's lawyers agreed believing the testimony would be essentially public
I've discussed before that Comey and others are hiding behind classification rules and the fiction of a continuing investigation exception to protect themselves from answering dangerous questions. That's why Congress insisted that this testimony be taken behind closed doors. But Comey's lawyers seem to think that the agreement between Comey and Congress precludes such topics, effectively making the setting public and defeating the point of a closed hearing.
Was this nomination an own-goal by Trump? It's starting to look like it.
Earlier in the transcript, Comey was unwilling to describe Mueller as a friend of his despite working with him for years. But Barr is a friend? He knows Barr better than Mueller?
Manafort's passports do not show trips to meet Assange
So, maybe one stamp in 2016, but it might also be 2010. I imagine the date of that last stamp can probably be proven with other data. Even if Manafort was in London, it doesn't prove he met with Assange, but the lack of stamps relevant to all of the claimed meetings throws serious doubt on the accusations.
Lame-duck Congress subpeonas Comey and Lynch over Hillary probe
The fact that they waited to issue these subpoenas until after they lost the election is an indication that they weren't taking them seriously in the first place.
Comey demanded there be a public hearing -- which would of course prevent him for talking about anything related to classified information, a shield he could and would hide everything behind.
A new tidbit about Alexander Downer, Australian 007
The Australian diplomat who spoke to George Papadopoulus in a wine bar about Russians and may or may not have spoken about emails turns out to be a former Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Australian counterpart to the CIA reports directly to that position.
Gee, that doesn't sound like a setup at all, does it?
Mifsud's lawyer is claiming he was instructed to remain in hiding. Who instructed him? It seems the Senate wants to talk to Mifsud. That seems like good news at first. The Senate is still controlled by Republicans. But he Senate and its Intel Committee Republicans have been less than helpful in investigating SpyGate.
Still, it's probably better than nothing. Now that the House has changed hands, perhaps the Senate will step up.
The Democrats are clearly terrified that replacing AG Sessions with acting-AG Whitaker will have dire consequences for their control and the dual sword and shield role he has played in preventing Trump from draining the national security swamp. They are openly threatening Whitaker should be exercise oversight over Mueller and his witch hunt. Given Mueller's utter lack of results related to the President and his campaign, that terror strongly suggests that Rod was covering for them and they know it. Without Rod and with Mueller neutered, their goose is cooked.
Luckily, Rod himself has already established the precedent for how the DOJ can handle subpoenas from the House of Representatives. Silence and counter-investigations.
What infuriates me is that Republicans held the House for years and held endless hearings without ever seriously taking the issues to court or otherwise seriously challenging the swamp creatures in DOJ and FBI. They had the chance to blow this thing wide open and they wimped out.
But this situation may not play well for the Democrats in 2020. When Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the White House, they were uneasy allies... a mix of true believers and swamp creatures surrounding Trump, a slugger with nothing to punch because they all pretended to be friends. If the Democrats give Trump something to punch for the next two years, they may end up regretting it.
Note: I don't endorse those tactics in general, but the Democrats badly need several large doses of their own medicine.
Over at Conservative Treehouse, there's a good explanation for something that has been puzzling me: the bizarre plea bargain of James Wolfe, which transformed the crime of leaking classified information to the media into a much lesser charge of lying to the FBI. The transition from a full-bore prosecution of leakers to a much reduced plea bargain now makes sense. What happened?
First, Sessions ordered a leak investigation, and that took place. It turned up (presumably among others) James Wolfe, who (as a staffer for the Senate intelligence committee) leaked classified information to (again among others) Ali Watkins. Everything was going swimmingly; he was arrested, charges were in the process, and so on.
Second, James Wolfe said he would go to trial, and that he would call Senators to testify in his defense. Presumably, he would say they ordered him to release the information, so it was not unauthorized. This became publicly known, and functions essentially as a blackmail threat, only in public. Suddenly, Senators are interested in helping with his defense.
Third, details of the indictment against Wolfe are leaked. The details basically prove that Wolfe leaked the unredacted Carter Page FISA warrant to the media.
Fourth, suddenly Wolfe gets a sweet plea deal and no need to call Senators to testify at his trial, which won't happen.
The question is, what happened between steps Three and Four?
The answer appears to be: The revelation that the leaked material was involved in the Russian Collusion investigation shifted supervision of the leak inquiry from AG Sessions to Rod Rosenstein due to Sessions' recusal from Russia matters. Rosenstein promptly plea-bargained with Wolfe to protect the Senators who participated in SpyGate.
That plea bargain demonstrates conclusively which side Rosenstein is on, and it isn't the side of Truth, Justice, and the Trump way.
Rosenstein must be removed from supervision of anything related to SpyGate. Removing Sessions, and his recusal bubble, is the simplest way the President can do that. And preventing a Senate-confirmed non-conflicted AG from taking over Rosenstein's current supervisory role is why Whitaker is under withering attack and the vote counts in Florida and possibly Arizona are being manipulated to keep the Republicans in the Senate from having a strong enough majority to confirm someone willing and able to properly cut this Gordian knot.
Funny how a supposedly non-political investigation had to wait until after the elections to begin writing their final report. I mean, I could understand waiting until after the elections to release it. But if you start writing immediately after the elections, it sort of suggests that you needed to know the outcome of those elections to determine what you would write.
The new acting AG will take over. This is normal. (Sessions was recused from Russian matters because he helped Trump with his campaign; the new acting AG has no such potential conflicts). I don't think anyone has a feel for the Acting AG on this issue yet -- except presumably Trump. So Rosenstein losing his supervision of Mueller is normal.
Rosenstein resigning on the other hand is not.
Did Trump finally accept the resignation Rosenstein had reportedly offered? Did the new acting AG ask for a resignation? Did Trump?
It looks like Trump is moving fast following the elections.
In a sane world, taking a meeting in which nothing of substance was offered and no money changed hands would be less serious than paying myriad unidentified Russian intelligence sources to lie about your political opponent and enable your own government to spy on said opponent.
Apparently we do not live in a sane world.
If the Dems won the House, Mueller was always going to come up with something to keep threatening Trump and avoid the full declassification that would expect the FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc to full sunlight.
I guess this is it. Mueller can effectively threaten Trump Jr with prosecution for that meeting and keep the threat live for another two years while Trump has to run for re-election.
On the other hand, Sessions just resigned, meaning Mueller will have a new boss shortly.
What follows is my own summary of key information from the interview, but I urge you to listen to the whole interview at a minimum.
George was working (unknowingly) for an CIA-FBI front group. His employers set up the meeting with Mifsud (the supposed Russian agent) in a facility in Rome used to train western intelligence agents. The person who set up the meeting is the FBI's chief legal counsel in the UK. The people introducing Mifsud's companion as "Putin's niece" (she's not) were Director-level positions at the center, meaning they are all in the scheme.
George speculates (based on two news sources contacting him to ask about it) that there was a FISA warrant on him. That would be an explosive bombshell revelation, because we have only heard about the FISA warrant on Carter Page so far.
George describes traveling to Israel and being arrested and interrogated about social media campaign influence in the US. "Arrested" is perhaps an understatement; he said he was afraid for his life. (These were the people who gave him $10K intended to entrap him on returning to the US; George also suspects the bills were marked).
George describes a number of people offering him money and introducing him to women ("honeytraps"). One of them offered him $30K/mo and an office in New York... if he worked simultaneously for the Trump administration. That guy set up a lot of behavioral red flags and was recording the conversation. Papadopoulos refused the offer.
One of the honeytraps is named "Azra Turk" (a Turkish national). George suspects she is a CIA or western intelligence asset rather than FBI, which would also expand the scandal.
George describes a number of times when he was probably recorded, at least one in a meeting with Halper, and refuses to cooperate and asks to be left alone.
George describes his meeting with Australian ambassador Downer. It also included Downer's "girlfriend" an Australian intelligence officer. It was not a chance meeting, it was orchestrated. And George thinks that conversation was being recorded, and says emails did not come up during that conversation at all. George says that is false. George also says neither of the participants were drunk (one drink each) and that it was not a friendly meeting.
George says there was someone inside the Trump campaign acting as a confidential source and probably feeding information out to the FBI. Congress knows who they are. Hopefully the rest of the world will find out soon as the truth of this whole operation comes out.
Without the threat of immediate declassification hanging over his head, Rosenstein is feeling his Wheaties. If he went before Congress and testified honestly, it would be a disaster for him and fuel continued leaks to the press about what he said -- leaks that would be very personally damaging. And if he went before Congress and testified falsely, he would face criminal liability. Rosenstein feels like he's worked something out with Trump that will let him thumb his nose at Congress temporarily. Probably only temporarily, because his position still sucks. But long enough, perhaps, to get past the midterms.
Should Rosenstein be removed from Mueller investigation?
I think Rosenstein is clearly conflicted in the investigation, and has mistakes of his own to cover up. At the same time, Trump's threat to declassify material that would reveal Rosenstein's role gives Trump a certain amount of leverage on Rosenstein -- and thus on Mueller. To restrain Mueller, is it worth allowing Rosenstein to manage to exposure and cleanup of the FBI and DOJ corruption?
Maybe.
I don't trust Rosenstein and I don't want him in charge of anything. I don't think Rosenstein is a friend of the President. But I'm suspicious of leaks from McCabe (a known hostile) and testimony from James Baker (not known to be friendly) implying Rosenstein was a part of their operation and should be fired. Why would those two suddenly be talking up the coup unless they are trying to get Rosenstein fired? And why would they be trying to get Rosenstein fired unless they felt he was inimicable to their current interests?
My take is this:
1) The coup discussion was serious. We've had lots of press leaks about 25th amendment being invoked, and the meeting where this all started was right after James Comey got fired and right before Mueller was appointed. The obvious conclusion is that they decided at the meeting to get Mueller in place, meaning they rejected the other options.
2) The "wear a wire" comment was probably sarcastic. Wearing a wire to spy on the president would be suicidally stupid even for a trusted cabinet member. So Rosenstein was probably being sarcastic (not quite the same as joking...) about this but not about the rest.
3) The situation has changed a lot since then. Rosenstein, like Comey, is a weasel. Unlike Comey, Trump knows Rosenstein is a weasel and has a firm grip. Rosenstein has incentives to be a good little weasel until Trump is done with him, which should be as soon as Trump has put Mueller to bed and found a confirmable replacement for Rosenstein.
That might be awkward for her, as people still remember her lies about what happened in Benghazi, and there are outstanding questions regarding her role in SpyGate unmasking.
"Confirmed other evidence", which we haven't seen yet. That's going to be interesting when it comes out.
Those tapes should be interesting to hear, too. They will likely answer the question of whether the spies approaching various Trump campaign staff actually got anything worth opening an investigation. I suspect they did not, and the tapes will offer proof of that.
Who, or what, is the second source and why is it explosive?
We know about foreign intelligence helping out already, but we don't have official confirmation. And "key allies" practically begged Trump not to declassify, so something related to foreign intelligence is probably hiding behind the redactions. But what are the specifics?
That has certainly been the plan up until now. But Trump's order contains the word "immediate". And if they try to redact what they release, it also contains the words "without redaction".
Why would the DOJ defy such a Presidential order?
Rosenstein is toast. He incriminates himself by the public release of these documents, or he resigns in protest and they get released anyway, or he gets fired and they get released anyway. When you play the Game of Coups, you win or you go to jail, and it looks like Rosenstein is going to jail.
I'm afraid we already know this answer. As Lisa Page wrote to Peter Strzok, "potus wants to know everything we are doing". For those who don't know, POTUS is an acronym for President of the United States.
President Trump orders declassification of FISA warrant, texts
This is interesting. Obviously for anyone following SpyGate it's likely to be a gold mine of new information and confirmation of existing suspicions if and when it happens. But the manner in which is may happen seems interesting.
We're not just getting, say, leaks from Congressional staffers describing what they have seen in private, or yet another partial release of slightly less redacted material. The statement says "no redactions".
And we got it as a statement from the White House, not as an actual document release from DOJ. And we know Trump has been publicly (via Twitter and otherwise) pushing for this for some time, and (via less public channels) getting resistance and pushback. So what that tells me is that Trump is, publicly, through White House channels, issuing an order to his subordinates to declassify and release the documents.
Either those subordinates will follow the orders, or they will refuse and resign, or they will be fired.
That's why the order is public. It's to justify the firing if the order is refused.
We'll see what happens. But any of those three options lead to fireworks.
Bob Woodward found no evidence of Russian collusion, despite finding lots of other things people supposedly told him that they now deny telling him. I get the feeling he sold the book on Watergate 2 and then had to make up a lot of thinly sourced quotes when he didn't find shit.
We have confirmation from new Strzok text messages that he wanted to open a case and file charges within 2 hours of Comey being fired "while Andy is acting" (as in, presumably, while Andrew McCabe was acting as FBI director). More evidence the whole thing was planned out to target the President with an internal coup.
Lisa Page's deposition indicates that more than 9 months into their investigation of the Trump campaign, they had found no evidence of collusion, despite their use of national-security wiretap authority and multiple human sources. She frames it as "we still couldn't answer the question." A better characterization seems to be that they didn't like the answer.
It's amazing that it takes pressure from Congress, pressure from the President, and pressure from the legal system via groups like Judicial Watch to get these documents. It's almost like the FBI and DOJ, including the people making the decisions about what to release and what to withhold or redact, have something to hide.
Google openly opposed Trump, supported Hillary during campaign
I'm honestly not sure what the rules are here. This is clearly a lot more campaign-related than paying off a bimbo eruption, and it's not a person but a corporation doing it. And we have email proof not only that it happened, but that it was motivated to help one candidate rather than being non-partisan. Does that matter?
Read the whole article for more, including hints of a smart-phone-based voter record that "aggregates all that is known about them".
I'm skeptical about campaign finance regulation as a matter of principle, but there are all sorts of other potential issues here, including user privacy and abuse of a dominant market position.
Listen to the whole thing, especially if you haven't been keeping up. Dan covers the whole chain of events, from the NSA shutting down FBI contractor access to their database (were some of those contractors Fusion GPS and Nellie Ohr?), to the efforts to get a FISA warrant based on the dossier that likely came from that NSA database (due the Michael Cohen in Prague mistake), to the efforts to set up Page and Popadopoulos, to the Trump Tower meeting setup.
He picks up on a couple new points that I had missed. One is that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS all the way back to 2015. That means she was working at Fusion GPS while the FBI contractors (still unspecified) were abusing the NSA database (85%!!! of the accesses to the database did not comply with the appropriate privacy procedures).
A second is that Andrew Weissman was being kept in the loop by Bruce Ohr during the investigation and was then hired by Mueller for his special counsel investigation. So, Weissman (along with, at least, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page), was effectively investigating events he was involved in and likely has criminal liability in. And Weissman is still on Mueller's team.
Finally, Bongino goes through the links Mueller has to practically every significant figure involved in this case. Mueller is linked to Comey, to Russian oligarchs who helped the FBI investigate, to Hillary lawyers... the list goes on and on. Mueller practically knows every key player personally.
Is he going to rat on his friends? Of course not.
He's going to sweep the whole thing under the rug by keeping the focus on Trump.
Congressman Meadows sends letter demanding Ohr investigation
Not much actual news here; a Congressman sending a letter happens pretty often. But the demand to investigate Bruce Ohr and his involvement in Spygate is significant, as it indicates growing Congressional discontent with AG Sessions and John Huber, the prosecutor Sessions appointed to investigate Spygate. We have heard basically nothing about Huber's investigation so far, which could be good or bad; hearing nothing could mean there are no leaks or it could mean there is no activity to leak. Finding out that Ohr had not yet been interviewed when he testified to Congress on these matters appears to indicate that the needle is pointing more towards no activity to leak.
Apparently, it's because Jerome Corsi is connected to Roger Stone. Stone is an associate of Trump, apparently, and works with the National Enquirer. I assume this is Mueller following up on Cohen's guilty plea to "campaign finance" charges that involved shell corporations and payoffs to bimbo eruptions.
I use the term advisedly. Clinton was credibly alleged to have groped and even raped people, although his most famous affair with Lewinsky was consensual. Trump has been accused of having consensual sex and paying the women to keep quiet about it. When they don't, that's a bimbo eruption. Sorry, Stormy.
In any event, the odds that either Jerome Corsi or Roger Stone have anything to do with Russian collusion to influence the 2016 election -- which is Mueller's only area of authority -- seems very low. Mueller is likely looking for more "campaign finance" crimes he can use to coerce guilty pleas that purport to implicate Trump. And he wants those because he desperately needs leverage.
I have a hunch that this declassification process is what prompted Mueller's public negotiation attempt. Mueller's job (his real job) is to protect Obama, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community, and the Clintons, probably in that order. (There's a non-zero chance Obama is actually just above the Clintons on Mueller's priority list; if that's the case Obama should be very worried). Mueller needs to protect them because they went way, way out on a limb to spy on Trump during the presidential campaign, and if the full extent of their interference is exposed, it could easily lead to outrage or even criminal charges.
Declassifying documents so the general public can see them renders the FBI attempt to protect those documents moot, and plants a massive egg on the face of everyone involved -- including the intelligence community actors who have so far received relatively little scrutiny, and possibly (if not in these documents, then in later batches) on the political actors. If Trump starts declassifying things, that opens a can of worms that probably can't be closed. All the schemes would be exposed and the information out in public.
That's good for Trump, assuming he's innocent of the Russian collusion charge. That's why Mueller has been desperately digging for something else he can use as leverage. He's nailed a few people for tax issues and rarely-used registration laws, flipped Michael Cohen for more tax issues and got him to plead to a probably-invalid campaign finance crime, but it hasn't given him any real leverage on Trump. And it's Trump he needs leverage on to avoid the declassification scenario.
Why didn't the FBI ask Papadopoulos to approach Mifsud?
Of course, they didn't bother because Mifsud was working for western intelligence when he approached Papadopoulus. By that time they were in cover-up-and-shut-up mode.
Rosenstein said it wasn't him. The Federalist makes a good case it was Sally Yates, who resigned rather than defend Trump's travel ban in court. That decision may have made headlines at the time, but it may also have removed her from a position where she could influence ongoing events in the Spygate matter. Oops.
The Obama admin stripped a Trump-supporting Pentagon analyst of his security clearance after the analyst complained about contracts with one Stefan Halper.
We are now pretty sure what Halper was doing for the money. He was trying to rig the election. And the White House stripped his clearances to shut him up -- both in general, and to prevent him accessing anything Halper was doing with his clearances.
Never mind that the other person he complained about was Chelsea Clinton.
White House revokes ex-CIA director Brennan's security clearance
I hope they ran a few canary traps across his desk before they cut off access.
UPDATE: This part reads like the velvet glove over the iron fist.
If that isn't a veiled threat to Obama and Clinton, who are both "former officials" who presumably maintain their prior security clearances, I'll eat a MAGA hat.
One of the other big revelations from this Friday's document dump was the fact that the FBI did in fact pay Steele for his dossier work. This was rumored before, but now we know. This raises some interesting questions (like, was he getting paid twice for the same work?), but the main impact of this fact is that the FBI was funding Clinton's opposition research and smear campaign. Almost certainly knowing about his political motives and source of other funding.
It's one thing to take in information passively about a political figure, and investigate it if there is some merit and the information can be confirmed. It's quite another to pay the opposition research out of FBI coffers while he is no doubt continuing to dig up dirt. By nature of his employment, you can't trust the oppo guy to give you good information, and you certainly can't fund his efforts to get (or make up) more for political purposes.
The fact that Horowitz refused to take calls on this casts his entire report into doubt. His job wasn't to fix the problems, it was yet another modified limited hangout. Drop the information already known, but keep the remedies in-house and out of course by refusing to admit to bias actually influencing anything even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Articles of Impeachment introduced against... Rosenstein?
The only problem with the idea of impeaching Rosenstein is that the Senate will never vote to convict. That said, a vote to impeach in the House would give Trump political cover to remove Rosenstein without being credibly accused of obstruction of justice. ("I don't want anyone in my administration who has been impeached by the House" is an entirely justifiable reason for firing Rosenstein). Similar rules can be applied to lower level officials with a simple majority in the House; the Senate might need some fiddling but putting the rule in a reconciliation bill should let it through with a simple majority. And the principle would be a significant step towards accountability when the President is, unfortunately, politically hamstrung by a conspiracy against him among his own officials.
More Cohen data leaked in violation of attorney-client privilege
Details here. Fox says the tape came from Lanny Davis, Cohen's attorney, rather than the police who raided Cohen. Whether this represents Cohen being cooperative, or Cohen making a desperate cry for help from Trump (financial or otherwise), is unknown. As far as I am concerned, the contents of the tape are a nothingburger; it's Trump discussing whether and/or how to pay off a playboy playmate to keep quiet about an alleged affair from over 10 years ago. If there's a crime here, it's blackmail, and Trump is the victim, and then doubly so for Cohen, his attorney, violating attorney-client privilege to release the tape, never mind taping his client in the first place. I don't give a shit about an alleged consensual affair while Trump was a private citizen.
House Intel committee asks POTUS to declassify part of FISA app
I sure would like to know what the House Intel committee thinks is under the redactions on those pages. You may also be interested in the broader summary of issues with the application. And they are serious issues. Andrew McCarthy, who spent some time defending the FISA application before he actually saw it, said this:
One of the questions that needs to be asked is "Is this the usual evidentiary standard for FISA cases?"
If so, the court needs to be shut down as a rubber stamp and the entire process redesigned and reformed.
If not, the judges who approved this application need to be examined for evidence of bias along with the FBI, DOJ, and intelligence community.
Trump considering revoking clearances of some Obama officials
With the exception of Hayden, whose name I don't recognize offhand, all of these people deserve to lose their clearances.
Comey: leaking to the press in an effort to impeach the president, lying to the president, being a weasel and doing weasel things.
Clapper: Involvement in the FISA abuse against the Trump campaign and administration, and leaking.
Brennan: Involvement in the FISA abuse against the Trump campaign and administration, and leaking. Plus voting for a communist party candidate.
Hayden: Unknown?
Rice: Unmasking and lying about it.
McCabe: Already fired for lying and leaking, participated in the FISA abuse, and his wife took political contributions from Clinton while he was running the investigation into her emails.
UPDATE: Hayden was a CIA director for Bush and has been outspokenly anti-Trump. I'm not sure if frothing at the mouth while calling the current president Hitler is outside the bounds people holding a security clearance, but this one still seems a little questionable to me. Given their involvement in abusing the intelligence agencies against Trump, however, the rest should lose their clearances immediately.
House Judiciary Committee passes resolution demanding docs
Speaker Ryan has been generally squishier than I would like on this, but he appears to be on board for the moment. Presumably the testimony from Wray and Rosenstein Thursday will be their last chance to make excuses.
Trump tower meeting a nothingburger, says translator for Veselnitskaya
We don't have to take just his word for it. Remember, Fusion GPS was taking money from Russians to lobby Trump about the Magnitsky Act even as they were taking money from Hillary to "investigate" Trump. They could kill two birds with one stone by setting up a meeting with Trump Jr under false pretenses of providing dirt on Hillary and using it to try to sell Trump Jr on the Magnitsky act changes they wanted.
McConnell is one of the "gang of eight" Brennan briefed about the operation. Of course he wasn't surprised; he's heard it all before, at least assuming Brennan's individual briefings to each Gang of 8 member actually contained the same information. (I'm skeptical about that; why brief them individually then?)
So I'm not surprised that McConnell isn't surprised. McConnell is a swamp creature. The sooner he circles the drain, the better.
Despite the White House chief of staff showing up before the meeting to state the President's position that all possible information should be shared, the FBI and DOJ are still covering things up.
