Since the British and Australian intelligence and diplomatic services are known to have been involved, likely those are the governments that called President Trump directly to talk about the declassification process. They are probably a bit worried.

Wall Street Journal

Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.

So much for the vaunted unbiased algorithm.

Ace of Spades quoting New York Times

The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.

Why is this leaking now? Obviously, it's in the declassification request -- probably the text messages. It's going to come out, so Rosenstein or his friends are leaking it first for damage control purposes on a Friday afternoon.

Rosenstein denies it -- for now. He'll probably claim he was misunderstood by Page or StrzokMcCabe or something. But he wants to be able to say "Old news, already debunked" when the declassification happens.

This is grounds for recusal. It's grounds for revoking his security clearance. It's grounds for firing. Hell, it's probably grounds for prosecution, if he actually did it.

UPDATE: Actually, it seems to be in Andrew McCabe's memos to himself.

The Hill

President Trump's former longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen has reportedly been questioned about Trump's dealings with Russia by special counsel Robert Mueller's team in a series of interviews in recent weeks.

ABC News reported Thursday that Cohen has sat for hours of interviews with Mueller's team, saying they have mainly focused on Trump's financial and business dealings with Russia and Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election.

Why is this being leaked now? It's obviously a very weak and panicked response to Trump's public threat to declassify the FISA warrant. But Mueller doesn't really have anything left up his sleeve to negotiate with.

Why do I think this is weak? Well, look: the leak doesn't say a damn thing about Cohen's answers, and the "hours and hours of interviews" could (and almost certainly does) cover Trump's "financial and business dealings with Russia".

Or, in other words, Trump has done business in Russia and Cohen knows about it since Cohen has been Trump's lawyer. Normally that would fall under attorney-client privilege, but it's not like Mueller's team cares about that. Those discussions could cover hours of interviews even with nothing criminal and nothing related to Russian election meddling.

You know what else is interesting here?

They aren't talking about the campaign finance issues. Sure, they appear in the article, but Mueller isn't asking Cohen about them. Those are, apparently, dead, at least with respect to Trump. What is also interesting is that Trump has previously warned Mueller that investigating his business interests would be a red line indicating that Mueller had abandoned his problematic mandate to investigate Russian collusion and simply targeted the President personally.

It will be interesting to see how the President reacts.

I continue to see the interactions between Congress, the President, and Mueller as a complex negotiation conducted in publicly coded actions. One that, I think, the President has been winning, but which will not truly be finalized until Mueller shuts down his probe and the midterm elections generate the score.

Mueller needs to threaten the President enough to keep things under wraps. He needs to protect the FBI, the intel community, the Deep State, the Clintons. He does that by threatening Trump with impeachment if Trump removes the people in DOJ and FBI running the coverup.

And of course Trump wants the probe shut down, the Deep State ejected from his administration, and to move forward with his agenda and hopefully enough support in the House and Senate to enact it.

Sara Carter

Rep. Devin Nunes stopped by ‘Hannity’ Wednesday night to weigh-in on the DOJ’s unwillingness to declassify documents flagged by President Trump; saying it’s “unacceptable” to defy the Commander-in-Chief’s demands.

“It’s quite clear Sean, this is not complicated. We have seen most of this information. In terms of FISA, it’s only twenty pages. All you have to do is make a copy and put it out on the internet,” said Nunes.

“At this point, I do not understand why this hasn’t been declassified. The President said, ‘Declassify immediately without redactions.’ We’ve heard this same story over and over again,” he added.

This is an ultimatum as much as a simple instruction. Do this -- which Congress and the President have been pressuring DOJ and FBI to do for some time -- or be fired. The words "immediately" and "without redaction" are not used casually.

It is very likely Trump has a deadline in his head. Friday (today) wouldn't be a bad bet. At some point, he's going to decide time is up and start firing people. And however they protest, however they claim obstruction, however they try to sue, he will be able to point to this: a clear and legitimate Presidential directive they failed to comply with.

Daily Caller

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, is refusing to appear before Congress for a closed-door hearing that was scheduled to take place this Friday, sources tell The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS, the firm behind the Steele dossier, was scheduled to appear for interviews during a joint session with the House Judiciary and House Oversight & Government Reform committees. But two congressional sources said that she is not cooperating with the requests and will have to be subpoenaed to compel her appearance.

The sources also said that former FBI general counsel James Baker is not cooperating with the committees’ request for an interview.

“The Committee continues to seek the testimony of Nellie Ohr and Jim Baker and will compel their testimony if necessary,” an aide to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte told TheDCNF.

It appears these individuals have something to hide.

Breitbart

Nearly half of residents in America’s top five largest cities speak a foreign language at home, a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals.

Researchers Steven Camarotta and Karen Zeigler analyzed data from the Census Bureau, finding that more than 48 percent of residents in America’s largest cities — New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Phoenix — speak a foreign language in the home instead of speaking English.

When 50% of the population in an urban area with literally millions of people do not even share a common language, you're no longer talking about a nation. You're talking about utter chaos, and civil war becomes inevitable.

Washington Times

The FBI pushed in 2016 to include the discredited dossier into the official intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, two former senior officials said.

The officials told The Washington Times that as the historic ICA, as it is known, was being drafted, the FBI wanted to fold in allegations and observations from dossier writer Christopher Steele.

I wonder what's in the soon to be declassified material about this that is prompting this leak?

Washington Times

One source said then-FBI Director James B. Comey directly advocated inclusion. A second source said FBI officials definitely wanted Mr. Steele’s charges on Kremlin behavior included but could not single out Mr. Comey as the main driver.

The sources said James R. Clapper, then director of national intelligence, and John O. Brennan, then director of the CIA, objected on grounds that the dossier remained largely unconfirmed information from a former British spy, not vetted U.S. intelligence.

So the sources for this story are named Brennan and Clapper then, I take it?

While Comey is the one with the most public exposure for this, Clapper was instrumental in getting the media to discuss the dossier (he encouraged Comey to brief Trump on it, thus providing a news hook) and Brennan was shopping the dossier to Reid. They are all pointing fingers at each other and trying to shift the blame...

Free Beacon

The National Science Foundation is spending over $1 million to train two-dozen "social justice" math teachers in Philadelphia.

The Drexel University project will promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) high school curriculums that are "steeped in the context of social justice."

We can expect to see a lot more of this.

Judicial Watch

The U.S. government has blown almost $90 million on a doomed project to help Afghan women enter the workforce with a big chunk of the money going to a Clinton-aligned “development” company that reaped big bucks from Uncle Sam while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state... Someone must be pocketing the cash because the costly program has helped between zero and 60 women. This isn’t a joke, though it sounds like a bad one.

It's not like either party is even pretending to care about fiscal responsibility anymore, but with that much money gone missing for that little result, it must have disappeared into someone's purse.

They are doing the investigative journalism that the professional investigative journalists with huge budgets and huge audiences won't do.

Project Veritas

DOJ: “These allegations are deeply concerning…referred to Inspector General.”
Leaks at Department of Health and Human Services: “It’s kind of like the Nixon, ‘deep throat’ type of thing.”
Department of Justice Paralegal Allison Hrabar: “what’s kind of lucky is at the DOJ, we can’t really get fired.”
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Actively Resisting Inside Government: “We have a member who works for the people who distribute food stamps…they’re slowing down what they do.”
Apparent Abuse of DOJ Resources for DSA: “she uses it probably on her work computer… that’s the kind of thing that you would get fired for if people knew about it.”
Targets Political Enemies: “And so we ran the license plate… we cannot do it officially”

These millenenial socialist idiots are about to get a taste of something they have never had before: consequences.

And one of the people featured in the video was given an award after she famously protested Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a restaurant.

Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote, in a decision about racial bias in college admissions policies, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Colleges clearly feel differently, and are now subjecting all incoming students to racial segregation and identity politics indoctrination.

I'm tempted to ask whether they want a civil war, or if they would be satisfied with simply splitting up into different states along racial lines... but I'm afraid they would answer.

Washington Examiner

If Mr. Trump and the White House does not relent, well then I think they have some decisions to make, whether or not they are going to just not follow that direction and be fired, or to resign," Brennan said, name-checking FBI Director Christopher Wray, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Not the first place I would have looked to for confirmation, but hey...

Undoubtedly Brennan hopes they will resign instead of releasing the documents. That would create a distraction from the content of the documents.

Ironically, at the end of the article:

Washington Examiner

Brennan was stripped of his security clearance by Trump in August for "erratic" behavior. Brennan, an MSNBC commentator, has used his public platform to criticize Trump as being "abnormal. He has served a bipartisan collection of presidents over the course of his career.

"Abnormal" is a coverup. He claimed Trump committed treason.

New York Post

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s plea deal with Paul Manafort took unusual steps to undercut President Trump’s ability to pardon his one-time campaign chairman, a report said Tuesday.

The deal contains language that appears intended to discourage Manafort from seeking a pardon and to limit the impact of a pardon if Trump were to grant one, Politico reported, citing a former Justice Department official who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and other sources.

“What is most concerning to me is that Mr. Mueller, who is a part of the executive branch and is supposed to follow all of DOJ’s policies and procedures, is specifically seeking to impede the ability of the president to exercise his constitutional pardon authority,” the former GOP official, David Rivkin, told the website.

That Mueller would even try to do this is a huge red flag. He has no authority to interfere with the President's pardon power; that power is absolute, rooted in the Constitution, and any legal agreement that purports to prevent or discourage Manafort from being pardoned or from seeking a pardon is null and void.

The Federalist

Sources say the Ohr story is evidence that the leak campaign is continuing, even as it is being exposed. And a precedent has been established with this joining together of political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials to prosecute a campaign based on illegal leaks of classified intelligence. It’s not hard to imagine it happening again, regardless of who the next president is, and regardless of party.

The precedent has been set, indeed. The only way to counter that precedent is to set another: that the people who did this are publicly exposed, fired, have their clearances stripped, and are then tried, convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned.

PJMedia

Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said many of his Republican colleagues are “afraid” to vote for an immigration reform bill that includes a permanent fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the only way to get it passed is “jamming this on people.”

“They are afraid of ultimately being pegged as ‘you support amnesty’ and that’s going to kill you in a Republican primary, right?” Hurd said during the discussion "Shaping Bipartisan Immigration Policy: What's Next?" at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) Leadership Conference on Wednesday.

Hurd introduced the Uniting and Securing America Act, or USA Act, with Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) at the beginning of the year that would “provide relief from removal and adjustment of status of certain individuals who are long-term United States residents and who entered the United States before reaching the age of 18” as well as “improve border security.”

If you don't want to be pegged as supporting amnesty, perhaps you should consider not supporting amnesty.

Immediately following President Trump's direct orders to his subordinates to declassify documents related to the FBI's spying on his own campaign and their attempt to frame him for colluding with Russia to influence the election, the Democrats on the Gang of Eight -- a joint intelligence subcommittee -- write to the recipients of the presidential order to remind them not to share certain information with the president.

Why would the recipients -- Deputy AG Rosenstein, FBI Director Wray, National Intelligence Director Coats -- offer any such assurance to Congress? Trump is the President. He is cleared for anything he wants to see.

The letter is pretty blunt. They demand a briefing. They need to know what's going to happen. They need assurances their secrets, whatever secrets are in that redacted space, will remain secret. And if they can't get that, they need time to do damage control.

Apparently, the specific recipients of this letter earlier gave assurances to these four Democratic senators and representatives that they would keep information from the President. That was improper. But it confirms my speculation earlier: they are on the wrong side of the President, they have been hiding information from him and resisting orders to declassify, and now the President has put out a public order to declassify the documents. The or else is implied.

The letter is signed by Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and Warner.

There's another tidbit here. The letter refers to things that Wray, Rosenstein, and Coats allegedly agreed to keep secret from the President. In an interview with John Solomon, Trump claims he has not read the documents he just ordered declassified.

The Hill

Trump said he had not read the documents he ordered declassified but said he expected to show they would prove the FBI case started as a political “hoax.”

“I have had many people ask me to release them. Not that I didn’t like the idea but I wanted to wait, I wanted to see where it was all going,” he said.

In the end, he said, his goal was to let the public decide by seeing the documents that have been kept secret for more than two years. “All I want to do is be transparent,” he said.

Asked what he thought the outcome of his long-running fight with the FBI, the president said: “I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.”

I take that to mean that the letter is correct, and the FBI, DOJ, even DNI Coats have been keeping this information from the President.

Daily Caller

A former contractor for Fusion GPS claims the opposition research firm got its investigation of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort “almost completely wrong.”

Graham Stack, who was hired by Fusion GPS in July 2016, writes in the Kyiv Post that he “share[s] the blame” for creating what he now says is a false narrative that Manafort worked for the Ukrainian government to advance a pro-Russia agenda.

Funny how this never came out until Manafort was tried and convicted in one court (some counts had a hung jury) and pled guilty in another. Do you think maybe this employee's statements might have been helpful to Manafort's defense?

I lived through the 90s, including the presidency of William "BJ" Clinton. I considered myself a pro-gun Libertarian at the time (and still do, though I have shifted to the right on some issues due in large part to 9-11 and terrorism). I supported the attempt to impeach Clinton, though not so much on the grounds that he engaged in (arguably) consensual (but harassment and power differential!) sex with an intern. I wanted Clinton impeached for the Clipper chip attempt to violate the 4th amendment, for the unnecessarily fiery end of the Waco siege and subsequent cover up, for the use of the FBI to spy on political opponents (and gosh doesn't that one sound familiar?), for starting wars without Congressional authorization... (frankly, in my living memory only Trump has managed not to commit impeachable offenses while in office, and the jury is still out on him; perhaps literally, if Mueller has his way).

I remember a controversy about TWA 800, but not any of the details. It made no impression on me. Perhaps it needs a second look, since we're digging into the FBI's dirty laundry already. I wouldn't mind another look at Waco, either.

It seems unlikely there will be any surviving evidence of a cover up, but you never know. They did seem to do cover ups better back then, when text messages were in their infancy and cell phone cameras were not ubiquitous.

Fox News

Schiff claims that the current FBI Director, Robert Wray, and Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, have proclaimed that the president’s declassification order “crossed a red line.”

While Schiff is notorious for hyperbole, his assertion of a “red line” is rather stunning. Does it mean Rosenstein and Wray will defy the president’s direct order and continue to obstruct lawful subpoenas issued by congress? If so, they should be fired for rank insubordination.

The public order to declassify without redaction is Trump's red line. A publicly issued order makes it impossible to delay, to obstruct, to #resist, without being exposed and giving the President cause to fire you for defying the direct order.

Fox News

In the alternative, they may endeavor to delay or “slow roll” the release of documents hoping that the political winds may shift or that control of Congress itself will change hands in the upcoming election.

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?

Fox News

Rosenstein has every reason to suppress the records. They may incriminate him. He affixed his signature to the final renewal of the FISA warrant application to continue spying on Carter Page. He vouched for the authenticity and veracity of the information contained therein. But if it was largely based on a “dossier” that was unverified and uncorroborated, Rosenstein may have been complicit in misusing his position of power in pursuit of a president who was wrongfully targeted by the FBI and DOJ.

Either way, the future does not bode well for Rod Rosenstein. He appointed a special counsel without proper authority.

He then refused to recuse himself as a key witness in the very case he oversees.

All along the way, he has been obstructing Congress by withholding records they are entitled to have.

He surely knows what the declassified documents portend for himself.

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.

PJMedia

No doubt the FBI/DOJ will do their best to slow-walk the release just as they have before. The solution is simple. Trump should give them a deadline. If they still delay, he should fire them. If they use the oh-so-tired-and-ridiculous "sources and methods" excuse, he should fire them nine ways to Brooklyn and shoot them through a cannon. That's the biggest piece of self-serving bull around. Enough of this Stasi-NKVD behavior.

Roger Simon also agrees that the public order to declassify is a prelude to necessary firings.

PJMedia

The greatest fear is that the actual provenance of this attempted coup will be revealed. Just how high did it go? There's a reason Susan Rice wrote that odd ex-post facto email saying Obama told the other officials to do things "by the book."

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.

Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are insisting on hearing from Kavanaugh's accuser... and both are also retiring from the Senate. As far as I am concerned, that means they are looking to feather their nests after the election, and this pair of threatened votes is an open invitation to bribery. Who will offer the best sinecure?

As for what they are demanding -- more hearings, more delay -- it is entirely pointless except in raising the price of the bribes they are demanding to allow Kavanaugh to be confirmed. Think about it. Feinstein had the accusation for months and didn't bring it up until after all of her meetings, all of the normal scheduled hearings, etc, etc, had been held. Even the press had the accusation and didn't leak it until the coordinated moment. Why? Obviously to prevent it being investigated (and properly dismissed as unprovable).

What will more hearings and more delay do to either prove the accusations or disprove them?

We have Kavanaugh's strong denial, which he said he will repeat under oath. His friend in the room also strongly denies anything like it ever happened. The accuser is a leftist with both personal and political motives to lie and offers no evidence. No one else was in the room, at least no one who has been identified and come forward to talk. By the accuser's own account there's no possible evidence at this late date. No DNA on a dress or sitting in a police rape kit. Just a bad experience being locked into a room with two guys while everyone involved were being drunken teenagers. And that's assuming her account was entirely accurate.

More delay and more hearings and more investigation will prove nothing. It can't prove anything. Nothing that happened could conceivably have left any evidence. It's he-said-he-said-she-said, and apparently, a woman's word is worth that of two men before the Senate -- the exact opposite of Islam, and something anyone who persists in claiming we live in a patriarchy should take careful note of.

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump has demanded the “immediate declassification” of sensitive materials about the Russia investigation, but the agencies responsible are expected to propose redactions that would keep some information secret, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are going through a methodical review and can’t offer a timeline for finishing, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive matter.

I told you yesterday that there was a reason Trump issued this order in a very public fashion. It appears at least some of the officials at the FBI, DOJ, and intel communities have chosen to fall upon their swords, and are looking for the least painful way to do so. The thing they seem to want most to hide is this:

Bloomberg

The Justice Department is interpreting that request to mean information about the use of a confidential informant during the early parts of the investigation, one person said. The department had previously briefed the “Gang of Eight,” Republican and Democratic congressional leaders and heads of the Intelligence committees, on the informant.

The excuse for hiding this is sources and methods. In this case we're obviously talking about a source, and one the Democrats in the Gang of Eight are desperate to keep hidden even from President Trump himself. So who was it? Steele himself? Unlikely, his name is out there. A Russian billionaire with links to Putin? There are already at least two of those in play. Wouldn't it be embarrassing to get a specific name for a Russian colluding with Hillary's campaign and the Obama administration to influence the election... AGAINST Trump?

Even Feinstein does not believe the Kavanaugh accuser she was instrumental in publicizing. And the accuser is insisting the FBI investigate before she testifies under oath. Obviously she wants to avoid saying anything under oath that would later lead to perjury charges, but an FBI investigation -- even leaving aside the potential bias within that agency -- would conveniently delay the confirmation past the midterm elections.

And delaying past the midterm elections is exactly what the Democrats want at this point; they are betting everything on a Blue Wave that will give them control of Congress to stop the investigations of their intelligence abuses and the ability to stop Trump confirming appointees through the Senate at all.

Of course, the FBI has nothing to investigate on this matter. It's not within their jurisdiction except as a background check matter (and the accusation, without evidence, has already been added to the appropriate file). There's no practical investigation that can be done for an event like this 35 years after the fact.

This entire accusation was a despicable political stunt engineered to delay, and even the accuser is unwilling to make her accusation under oath.

Kavanaugh should be confirmed without further delay.