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?

Governor Blackface McKlanhat tries to take credit for peaceful nature of Virginia gun rights march. I'm not letting Northam off the hook for this either.

YouTube admits censoring livestreams and videos of the gun rights protests in Richmond, Virginia today. This is important news and political speech content where no violence occurred.

I've previously pointed out that when Democrats take power in recent elections, they take immediate steps to rig the next election by changing the rules. Mostly, I was pointing to laws that would allow felons to vote (Florida, Virginia, Kentucky). But it's worse than that. Virginia has many more election-rigging changes. The gun control laws proposed actually also count as election-rigging; they want gun owners to leave the state because they can't exercise their rights.

Reason discusses the FBI's FISA reform proposal, along with the FISC's advisor comments. Both of them fall short.

First, the FISC advisor has been heavily criticized for arguing that the FBI did nothing wrong here. His advice to the FICS about reform proposals is critical, suggesting even more reforms and safeguards. That either surprising given his past opinions... or not surprising, given that he wants to preempt criticism while his appointment is under scrutiny. Put simply, he's likely not an honest player and can't be trusted; this play is the opening bid where he tries to claim he's not a Deep State stooge.

Remember when Mueller was described as a paragon of virtue and apolitical competence? Yeah, I'm betting it's like that.

Second problem.

Reason

Kris does not defend the FBI's actions surveilling Page in his response, saying bluntly that nobody is disputing that "basic, fundamental, and serious errors" were found in the Page warrant requests. Kris worries that Wray's plan doesn't really account for what procedures will be used with surveillance requests that intersect with political campaigns. And while Kris does support the improvements that Wray has listed, he says the FBI needs to go further. He is calling for better communication between the FBI and Justice Department attorneys, which in this case partly contributed to the information gaps in the warrant applications. Kris also suggests the possibility of having field agents, not just agents working at FBI headquarters, signing onto warrant applications or at least requiring them to attest to the court to the facts that are in the warrant application. Field agents might be more likely to notice an important omission.

Kris also says the court should require that the FBI regularly submit reports on training participation rates and test scores. The court could, in turn, prohibit FBI agents who haven't successfully completed FISA warrant from signing on as declarants; at the very least, the court would know to bring an extra level of skepticism.

After providing a number of similar suggestions, Kris concludes: "The FBI must restore—and the Court should insist it restore—a strong organizational culture of accuracy and completeness."

Everyone involved here -- the FISC and their advisor Kris (above), Wray, IG Horowitz -- are all operating on the premise that the FBI and DOJ were acting honestly. They just screwed up. They "forgot" key facts. They failed to verify. And if they had had just one more training program, they would have known to do the right thing.

That's bullshit.

This was malice. And malice will ignore the rules, no matter what they rules are, except for one thing and one thing only: consequences.

The people who did this need to be jailed.

It's interesting to know how they got released, but there are still some questions about timing. This doesn't make Rosenstein into a good guy. He believed their release was inevitable, and this forestalled releasing the complete and unredacted texts which would likely be even more damaging.

Aid for a hurricane in 2017 was recently found in a massive warehouse, possibly being sold on the black market. Note that they got even more aid in 2019 for an earthquake when the emergency supplies from the 2017 hurricane were just sitting in warehouses. Disgusting and corrupt.

National Review

It is worth bearing in mind: Impeachment is not just any trial. It stops the legislative business of the United States cold. There will be no movement of bills, no consideration of appointments, no hearings on vital issues such as Iran and the use of force. The impeachment trial will impede the work of the Supreme Court, since the chief justice must preside. In this instance, the impeachment trial will even wreak havoc on the Democratic nomination campaign, as senators — including top-tier contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — must sit as jurors for six days a week.

That's an aspect I had considered for Supreme Court nominations, but I hadn't thought it through to include the judicial nominations that Trump has been pushing through so rapidly. If the Dems can shut down the Senate's confirmations for the 2020 election year, that's a big win for them if Trump loses, even if the impeachment itself fails. They would have to drag out the impeachment for that, which would annoy their candidates, but it might be worth it. And even if not, six weeks of no more Trump judges is not nothing.

Here's where the money went. Yes, down the drain, but not in the right way. Basketball, daycare, and even a bonus for signing up for more welfare.

Worth noting: of $390M total, $144M was spent on water, $129M on economic and "social" development. That adds up to $273M. Where did the other $117M go?

So... all you need to do is claim to be a man if you are a woman, or a woman if you are a man, and they'll release you? We wouldn't be able to hold any of them. Which is the entire point.

A little-reported guilty plea to a charge of leaking documents from Treasury about the Trump campaign and people of interest in the SpyGate scandal. The guilty plea includes illegally downloading and leaking to the press records on Manafort, Richard Gates, the Russian Embassy, Maria Butina, and Prevezon Alexander... along with thousands of other files containing sensitive government information.

This shit has to stop.

The New York Times says so. Commentary here.

Or rather, filed a motion to do so. It's awkward because it's so late in the process and the judge may be sort of pissed off. But aside from that he has a good case for his innocence, and likely even better once evidence is released.

The problem is that DOJ won't want to release it, and the judge has been sending mixed signals.

The immediate trigger for the motion appears to be a DOJ filing asking for prison time and saying Flynn did not cooperate, which is arguably a violation of their agreement. Of course, DOJ will argue Flynn broke the agreement first.

In my opinion, the malfeasance from DOJ invalidated any plea agreement.

Note that the news isn't that it was terrorism, it's that the government admitted it.

Gulags and burning cities.

This is going to be their excuse for any embarrassing data about the Biden corruption. They will just claim it was faked by the Russians to interfere with the 2020 election. Never mind that Biden's on video bragging about shutting down investigations, it's all going to be called fake news.

A victory. But there is a lot of gun control still on the agenda.

Reports indicate Huber was determined not to find anything, and so he didn't look very hard.

Legislation is being introduced to protect travelers from gun laws in anti-gun states from being punished for just passing through. But we already have this legislation, albeit in an older form. We traded (I think mostly the NRA traded...) new NFA firearms for it. Now we have to "buy" (with lobbying, activism, tradeoffs against other legislation, and all the other things that go along with exercise your free speech rights and engaging in politics, etc...) it again?

Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man has a great post on what to expect when your pro-gun state gets taken over, even temporarily, by the left. Such as recently happened in Virginia.

Not mentioned is that they are also going after the electoral system, by instituting universal mandatory vote-by-mail, allowing felons to vote, issuing driver's licenses to illegals (and registering them to vote at the same time) and generally making it very difficult to take the territory back.

In fact, he may have suggested targeting Page to the FBI. Presumably, Halper was already tasked to dirty up Page along with Flynn and others by whoever was running him. CIA, and Brennan, being the likely candidate.

The Federalist

There is a second significant problem bearing on the Page FISA applications that the IG exposed in his earlier audit of the CHS validation process: “The IG’s audit of confidential human sources reveals that the FBI did not maintain validation reports for sub-sources, defined in the report as individuals ‘who directly acquire[] information that is then provided to the FBI by an FBI CHS.’” Sub-sources, of course, are secondhand sources of information to FBI sources.

According to Horowitz, Delta “does not identify and track extraterritorial sub-sources.” That means that the CHS system “will lack complete and accurate information on its CHS coverage stemming from extraterritorial sub-sources.”
The FBI’s failure to maintain a database to identify and track sub-sources decimates the entire basis for the Carter Page surveillance warrants. According to the IG report, the FISA applications all disclosed that “Steele relied upon a Primary Sub-source who used a network of sub-sources, and that neither Steele nor the Primary Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported.” The FISA applications then “contained a separate footnote on each sub-source with a brief description of his/her position or access to the information he/she was reporting.”

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.

I think the official term for this is chutzpuh.

Worse, the proposes changes amount to more "training" and no accountability. This is not adequate, it's beyond embarrassing, it's insulting.

And the FISA court itself has appointed an advior who is on the record in a amicus brief to the court claiming the FBI did nothing wrong in this case.

So far, we have yet to see any accountability here. Firing or demoting a few people is not sufficient.

New Zealand gun rights activist raided at home by police looking for his .22 fixed-magazine lever-action rifle. Hat tip.

Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch announced it today filed a lawsuit against Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the House Intelligence Committee for the controversial subpoenas issued for phone records, including those of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer. The phone records led to the publication of the private phone records of Giuliani, Congressman Devon Nunes, journalist John Solomon, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, attorney Victoria Toensing, and other American citizens.

Schiff may well have left himself legally exposed here.