NYTimes: FBI opened investigation into Trump when he fired Comey
So, when Trump fired Comey (an action perfectly within his authority as President), Comey's friends at the FBI opened up a second investigation into whether Trump was an agent of Russia on the basis of that firing and that firing alone. In other words, a coup based on a flimsy pretext.
And why is this coming out now?
Well, transcripts from interviews with Lisa Page and others are starting to leak, and this is an effort to fight back. To... contextualize... information that's going to come out.
We know the FBI already had some sort of investigation into Trump-Russia collusion going back to well before the election. It was bullshit, based on the unverified and now completely discredited Steele dossier, but it got them warrants to spy on Carter Page, likely Mike Flynn, possibly Papadopoulos, and possibly more. But Comey, while at the FBI, was always telling Trump that Trump, personally, was not being investigated.
Until Comey was fired, and suddenly Trump was being investigated personally.
Did the FBI or other intelligence assets -- remember, this is an investigation in whether Trump is acting as an agent of a foreign power, so it's technically counterintelligence -- seek to expand their surveillance and wiretaps to a sitting President personally??
Two Obama officials involved in false-flag campaigns
So, they faked Russian bots to suggest Russian Collusion.
Fake Russian collusion linked to Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele? How surprising. Where have I heard that narrative before?
No one is admitting, as yet, that the sexual assault allegations were false-flagged from the start, but just look at what the Democrats did to Kavanaugh.
Even in Texas, cities think they can get away with this stuff...
... but the failure to impose a full fine suggests why they think they can get away with it.
Next time, if there is a next time, I suggest going after the decisionmakers personally. There's now precedent this is illegal, so good faith is no longer valid.
Air Force failed to share murder's criminal record with FBI for NICS
Even under the unversal background checks demanded by gun control proponents, even if you discount criminals selling guns to each other outside the law, mass shootings would still happen, because people screw up the background check process.
Two of the major revelations from Bruce Ohr's testimony about SpyGate, as recently leaked: Bruce Ohr was working with Steele not just after he had been fired, but months before the 2016 election, and very early in the process, Ohr says he informed the FBI officials he was working with of both Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson's significant antiTrump bias and the nature of their work as paid opposition researchers.
In other words, the FBI knew from the beginning -- the very first FISA request -- that Steele's dossier (which, remember, was the basis of the FISA and without it, no FISA would have been issued) was paid opposition research by extremely biased individuals with financial motives to simply make stuff up.
The FBI did not pass on any of these warnings to the FISC court reviewing their application to spy on an opposition Presidential campaign.
And, as a bonus, Democrat House member Adam Schiff lied about the timing. He's one of the few people with access to the original (unredacted) documents in this case.
The Transportation Security Agency is an agency everyone hates, with good reason. Privatizing airport security would improve efficiency, customer service, and effectiveness. And all Trump needs to do to create thousands of new airport security jobs in the private sector is to declare the entire southern border an airport and put TSA in charge of security screening. They could build massive walls to channel people to TSA screening points.
That would satisfy both camps: we would have a wall protecting our southern border AND completely open borders!
Former Obama general counsel lied to FBI, failed to register under FARA
So, will he face the same standard of justice that has been applied to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and others? Or will he get a pass because he's an Obama Democrat?
And as soon as everyone has forgotten the name of the criminal who got killed, they add him to the list of victims of gun violence to pad their numbers.
Honestly, I'm not sure ransom is the right word. Blackmail maybe? Anyway, they want $50K each to go away. AND a quicker asylum process, which pretty much puts the lie to the going away part.
What color is the sky on the world they live in where they imagine they can make monetary demands like that?
I remember when the New World Order was a conspiracy theory...
They are now making these demands openly. It's an effective conquest by legal and diplomatic means rather than military means. If this continues to escalate, the EU will disintegrate into individual nations again. At this point, that would probably be for the best.
Details here. This one has a single feature test, meaning it will ban any AR-15 type rifle, or anything else with that accepts a magazine and has a pistol grip. And with Maxine Waters running the Commerce Committee, look for financial targeting to get a lot worse.
NYTimes admits FBI opened investigation into Trump personally
The FBI is frantically trying to spin their coup attempt into something that is less criminal. As Mollie Hemingway points out in the quoted section above, it's a pretty flimsy set of reasons for opening up an investigation. Bongino believes they are trying to hide the international element of the anti-Trump investigation, which is probably part of it -- at a minimum, the UK and other foreign governments were involved in trying to prevent his election and possibly sabotage his administration after the election. Both perspectives have validity, but I think there's a subtle element they are missing here. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first admission by the FBI that they actually opened a counterintelligence investigation into the sitting President. For a long time, they were talking about an investigation into Trump's campaign, but after Comey's firing as they have now admitted, they opened a formal investigation into the President personally.
I think that's going to be one of the facts that hangs them.
This is scorched-earth, destroy-your-enemies-with-the-state, third-world shithole stuff. Investigating a person (and his family!) to find a crime, rather than investigating a crime to find out who committed it.
Khashoggi was a foreign propaganda operative working for the Washington Post for years. That doesn't mean he should have been killed, but it certainly undercuts the idea that he was an innocent journalist targeted for no reason.
You don't have to like the President, even if you work for the DOJ or FBI. You do have to respect the office and follow his orders in your professional life, unless you choose to resign your position. You don't have a license to spy on him, investigate him, or try to get him impeached.
His speech at sentencing was made for a news audience. He was ordered to pay nearly $2 million and his admission of guilt mentioned the President repeatedly. But, of that two million, only $100K was for anything related to Trump -- the Meuller lying to Congress charges amounted to $50K and the SDNY campaign finance charges another $50K. The other $1.9M was for his own tax and taxi issues, as far as I can tell.
Mueller has massive leverage on Cohen after raiding his office and violating attorney-client privilege to get to Trump, but still came away with pretty much nothing.