The Conservative Treehouse

Recently release FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller reveal the remarkable trail of a 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

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.

... since some judges in Kentucky pre-signed child seizure documents for nights and weekends.

And then, charge workers and judges with violation of civil rights under color of law.

Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

Durham's history of prosecuting national security abuses seems promising. And that bit about FBI ties to a crime boss in Boston? Mueller kept 4 innocent people in jail to protect an FBI informant.

Alan Dershowitz on NewsMax

"He's the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer. Those of us in Boston don't have such a high regard for Mueller because we remember this story. The government had to pay out tens of millions of dollars because Whitey Bulger, a notorious mass murderer, became a government informer against the mafia . . .

"And that's regarded in Boston of one of the great scandals of modern judicial history. And Mueller was right at the center of it. So, he is not without criticism by people who know him in Boston."

So Mueller in particular may have reason to be especially worried.

Unanswered question: What happened to Huber? He was appointed under AG Sessions to look into basically the same thing.

Breitbart

Conservative YouTuber and second amendment activist Antonia Okafor reports that her entire channel was stripped of advertising revenue by the Google-owned video platform after she uploaded an interview about self-defense with a fellow conservative. YouTube restored advertising to Okafor’s account after this article published, claiming in a statement, “sometimes we make the wrong call on content.”

“YouTube went straight to just demonetizing my ENTIRE channel today” wrote Okafor. “Just uploaded an episode where Nina Prevot, a Creole libertarian and I interviewed Amy Robbins about teaching young women to defend themselves.”

Outdoor Life

During the April 12 “Holding Megabanks Accountable: A Review of Global Systemically Important Banks 10 years after the Financial Crisis” hearing, Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat basically said imposing the institution’s ant-gun policy is a higher priority than wisely managing investors’ money.
Corbat acknowledged Citigroup’s policy is to discriminate against firearms manufacturers and retailers who refuse to abide by their policy of instituting age-based gun bans, “deny a right to keep and bear arms by a legal adult,” Keane writes, and that the policy is not a Second Amendment threat but a “good practice.”

We're heading into a new civil rights era, complete with new Jim Crow laws -- except now instead of basing those laws on race, they are being based on holding conservative political opinions. Even if those political opinions are explicitly protected in the bill of rights.

Everyone has the right to free speech and gun ownership for self defense until they abuse it. Publicly owned corporations need to be obliged to respect that, even of the people who nominally represent the shareholders personally prefer not to.

Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system. Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded to the requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed.

We've known for some time that Obama knew personally about Clinton's private email server; we know because they sent emails back and forth. Which means Obama's claims to have found out about it from the news are a transparent lie. But now, we have proof that the Obama White House knew about the FOIA requests for Clinton's emails and was watching those requests closely. That means any violations in the State Dept response to those FOIA requests implicate the White House.

That Obama is a liar is not news. That he may have participated in or even orchestrated the coverup puts members of his administration in legal jeopardy. Probably not at real risk of conviction, but it's definitely going to put some heat on any officials who put anything in writing about the coverup.

Epoch Times

The FBI lost notes from a 2015 meeting with people from the office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), according to newly released FBI records on the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information.

The ICIG-FBI meetings hold special significance because it was allegedly several of these meetings where the ICIG officials passed a lead to the FBI about anomalies in the metadata of the emails indicating that a copy of nearly every email was sent to an agent of a foreign power.

"Lost" is being generous. The person who took the notes claimed they were turned over to the person supposed to enter them into the system. And they would have exposed Hillary's email server as not just being a security risk but an actual security breach, sending literally all her private server email to a foreign power.

So they were not lost.

They were destroyed.

Or, as Hillary puts it, wiped with a cloth.

IJR

There may be 20 different Democrats entering the presidential race, but all the primary candidates are coming together on one issue: restricting the Second Amendment.

Gun control has always been a complicated issue in the United States, with lawmakers on both sides trying to strike the balance between keeping Americans safe and not trampling their right to bear arms and defend themselves from tyrants.

But if recent policies have any indication on Democrats’ intentions, the candidates have stopped their consideration for the rights of gun owners. Here are six ways — big and small — that 2020 Democrats plan to strip gun owners of their access to firearms.

Democrats have never had any consideration for the rights of gun owners; until the Supreme Court forced the issue they preferred to believe the 2nd Amendment was about a militia rather than a right of the people. But until recently, Democrats felt the need to pretend to care; they would create little astroturf "gun rights" groups to give endorsements to their candidates and wait until after the election (and an appropriate crisis appeared) to do their blood dancing and legislating. But it appears that is changing, and many of the current presidential candidates don't even feel the need to pretend.

That may lead them into electoral disaster, but if one of them wins, the disaster will be on us.

Houston Chronicle

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for an end to "surprise medical bills," the astonishingly high charges insured patients can face when a member of a medical team that treats them is not in their insurer's network.

"Not a pleasant surprise," Trump said of bills that arrive in the mail and run to tens of thousands of dollars. "A very unpleasant surprise."

What will this do to the health care industry? Force them to compete on price. As always, much depends on the details of the legislation, but the basic idea -- forcing health care providers to publish their prices in advance, and perhaps getting rid of hugely disproportionate out-of-network costs (especially in emergency situations) -- is very sound and will allow people to choose where they go based on the expected price rather than being at the mercy of a mystery bill they don't know ahead of time and usually can't negotiate.

I've also heard of cases where people go to small, local "urgent care" facilities that are very definitely not hospitals... but charge like you went to the emergency room at a hospital. That's an outright scam that is enabled only by the lack of price transparency.

Will this solve everything? Probably not. But it's a start at applying market forces to the health care market, something that market has long been insulated from.

To see how this might work, look at procedures like Lasik. Such procedures compete on price. And the price has been going down, not up, even while technologies and techniques improved.

... 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.

Sara Carter

Former FBI Director James Comey admitted at a CNN town hall that the text messages between former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and former bureau attorney Lisa Page made the entire agency look bad. It damaged the institution and it tarnished the Russia investigation.

“I think, given the standards that we have,” said Comey, “there should have been, and was, severe discipline around their behavior.”

“Everyone has opinions,” said Comey. “You can’t bring them to work and have them affect your work, there have to be severe consequences.”

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.

Epoch Times

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden said during a campaign stop in California on May 8 that the United States has an “obligation” to give free health care to illegal aliens.

Biden made the comment while responding to a reporter who asked whether “law-abiding” illegals should be given federal benefits.

“I think that anyone who is in a situation where they’re in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for,” Biden said in reply. “That’s why I think we need more clinics around the country.”

You cannot have a welfare state and open borders. The combination will inevitably self-destruct.

Daily Caller

Authorities apprehended a suspect late Wednesday after police discovered over 1,000 guns at a mansion in Los Angeles’s Holmby Hills neighborhood.

The Los Angeles Police Department took Girard Damien Saenz, 57, into custody Wednesday night after a group of local and federal agents seized a stash of more than 1,000 firearms of various sizes, makes and models from the home, according to NBC News.

Police are holding Saenz for suspected selling and lending of assault weapons as well as illegal transport of the weapons, according to a police spokesman, Lt. Chris Ramirez, NBC reported.

“We recovered over a thousand weapons of various makes, models and calibers — rifles, shotguns, pistols,” Ramirez said.

They keep talking about the number of guns they seized. What is the justification for seizing them? "Illegal transport", ie, moving them from place to place in a way the state doesn't like; and "selling and lending" in a way the state doesn't like because of silly and mostly non-functional cosmetic features.

You know what I don't hear? Anything related to violence. As far as I can tell, this man was arrested and had his firearm collection seized because he went shooting with his collection, lent friends firearms from his collection to try at the range, and occasionally sold one without asking the state for permission first.

Real Clear Investigations

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile “investigative reports” and other “information."

The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.

That's a hell of a lot of money for an "unverified, salacious" dossier. Read the whole thing, and then more analysis at Conservative Treehouse.

Buzzfeed

Activists have successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote by shareholders on a proposal which, if passed, could see the company monitoring payments to global far-right political leaders and white supremacist groups.

The proposal aims to see Mastercard establish an internal “human rights committee” that would stop designated white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists, such as Tommy Robinson, from getting access to money sent from donors using the company’s card payment services.

It’s been conceived by US-based political activists SumOfUs, who want to escalate the battle against white supremacists and far-right groups from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Patreon, and PayPal to one of the biggest companies in world finance, in an attempt to choke off donations.

It's funny how these attempts at a financial death penalty are always aimed at the "far right" but never the "far left". Should we try to pressure financial services companies to deny service to Bernie Sanders, an admitted socialist? How about Antifa? How about openly communist political groups? How about the New Black Panther Party, who famously guarded polling stations in military uniforms with billy clubs when Obama was running for President?

The far-right but not far-left is an open admission of bias.

Putting it bluntly, people have the right to their opinions, and they have a right to participate in groups of people that agree with them, and they have a right to participate in the financial system so long as their activities are nonviolent and within the law. Yes, even if the left disagrees with them. Yes, even if the left REALLY REALLY STRONGLY disagrees.

These attempts at imposing a financial death penalty on people for having political views that the left disagrees with amounts to a financial civil war.

Daily Wire

On Wednesday, the Florida state House of Representatives voted 65-47 to pass legislation that would allow teachers to carry firearms in the classroom. The legislation previously passed the state Senate 22-17 in late-April.

Long overdue.

Daily Caller

Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that he suspects the Obama administration spied on other 2016 presidential primary campaigns.

Papadopoulos, whose meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was used to open the FBI’s July 31, 2016 counterintelligence probe, says he believes he was being monitored long before he joined the Trump campaign.

“In November of 2015, upon the same month that I was going to the Ben Carson campaign—because people forget that I was on Carson’s campaign before I joined Trump’s campaign—I was living in London and I had been approached by high-level State Department officials and even the CIA in London,” Papadopoulos said. (RELATED: Stefan Halper’s ‘Assistant’ In Papadopoulos Spy Operation Has Been Outed)

He continued, “They invited me to the U.S. embassy to meet with me and to basically probe me and to get to know why I’m joining the Ben Carson campaign and what the Ben Carson campaign was really all about. And the man who invited me was David Kovatch, who still works at the U.S. embassy in London. I think he’s directing the Energy Department over there. So clearly, by November 2015, I don’t think that Trump’s campaign was the only one that was under surveillance, quite frankly.”

This is just speculation... but it's speculation I have been hearing from more than just Papadopoulos.

Breitbart

According to a April 25-28 poll of 1,007 random adults taken for CNN (a far-left fake news outlet), a full 69 percent “think Congress ought to investigate the origins of the Justice Department’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including 76% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 62% of Republicans.”

And the “origins” of that inquiry means the Obama Justice Department.

Technically, the origins are probably in the CIA. But that's just quibbling over details at this point. The real question is whether it was simply "POTUS wants to know everything we're doing" or whether it was "the White House is running this". Or, you know, both.

The Hill

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

That elements within the FBI are still covering this up by redaction indicates the FBI is still a compromised institution.

Daily Caller

Peter Strzok suspected CIA employees were behind inaccurate leaks to the press regarding possible Trump campaign contacts with Russia, according to an email the former FBI counterintelligence official sent to colleagues in April 2017.

“I’m beginning to think the agency got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn’t shared it completely with us. Might explain all these weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some of the leaks,” Strzok wrote in an email to FBI colleagues on April 13, 2017.

Strzok sure seems to have thought they were in it up to their necks.

Breitbart

1. We are giving the migrants employment authorization right away. ICE has been operating under an Obama Administration policy that started in 2010 of granting the newly-arrived asylum applicants who pass the initial “credible fear” screening “immigration parole,” which gives them temporary lawful presence in the United States. With parole comes the opportunity to obtain a work permit without first waiting the normal 150 days to apply. The immigration regulations of the United States spell that out at 8 C.F.R. 274a.12(c)(11). That work permit enables the alien to obtain employment and compete against U.S. citizens and against those aliens who did it the right way by entering the United States legally. And it’s not short-term work authorization either.

2. The asylum hearing dates are five to six years in the future. It’s not the six-month or one-year period that we’ve seen in the past. Because of the huge backlog in the immigration courts, the migrants are receiving court dates set many years in the future. In the meantime, they get to work legally in the United States. It’s as if they are handed a six-year work visa as soon as they arrive.

3. It appears that we may be giving the migrants EBT cards. Many of the aliens who claim asylum are now applying for free EBT card for SNAP (food stamps) benefits. The cards come pre-charged with money so the migrants can start spending, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Depending on how many are in the group, the card value can range from about $200 a month for an individual to well over $1000 a month for a family unit, depending on its size. And word has gotten out. As a Border Patrol agent told me, one newly arrived migrant came up and asked about the form to fill out so she could get her “free food card.”

Although illegal immigrants are indeed in the country illegally, we give them so many benefits and legal niceties that they may as well be legal when it comes to their chances for being arrested and deported.

The Hill

I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to “connect dots.” Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.

A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to “connect the dots” in the future—especially before an attack occurs.

As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit “honor killing” perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).

We'll spend years -- possibly decades -- recovering from the damage the Obama administration did to our national security and economy.

National Review

Downer’s report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it was already pursuing with a report from a friendly foreign government, as if that report had triggered the Trump-Russia investigation. In order to pull that off, however, it was necessary to distort what Papadopoulos had told Downer.

To repeat, Papadopoulos never told Downer anything about emails. Moreover, the Mueller report provides no basis for Papadopoulos to have known that Russia was planning the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton in order to help Trump; nor does the Mueller report allege that Papadopoulos actually told Downer such a thing.
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The State Department’s report to the FBI claiming that Papadopoulos had “suggested” these things to Downer was manufactured to portray a false connection between (a) what Papadopoulos told Downer and (b) the hacking and publication of the DNC emails. That false connection then became the rationale for formally opening the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation — paper cover for an investigation of the Trump campaign that was already under way.

... that was already underway with no legitimate lawful predicate. In other words, spying, without even the legal figleaf of a warrant.

Gateway Pundit

One simple fact emerges–of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not one.

Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.

Read the whole thing.

Fox News

Text messages between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page indicate they discussed using briefings to the Trump team after the 2016 election to identify people they could "develop for potential relationships," track lines of questioning and "assess" changes in "demeanor" – language one GOP lawmaker called “more evidence” of irregular conduct in the original Russia probe.

Just another abuse in a long chain of abuses at this point.

And yes, it seems likely they had a source inside the campaign.

I don't have any inside information, nor any expertise in the subject matter. I do, however, have opinions. My opinion is that the NRA may be the biggest gun-rights organization out there, but in terms of actually protecting gun rights, it has not been very effective lately. As an organization, it seems to spend a lot of time fighting the wrong battles, or not fighting at all. They seem to prefer endorsing products to their members (eg, selling their mailing list) and funding strangely expensive media projects (NRA TV). Legal challenges to gun control laws have been mostly left to other organizations. And the opinion of gun owners in general is that the organization is too prone to compromise away rights, and has been generally ineffective.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a remarkably casual and loose attitude at the top levels of the NRA. People in positions of power tend to get complacent when they are not challenged, and quite a lot of public evidence for complacency has emerged. I assume their political affiliates have lawyers keeping closer watch on things. Even so, this is not a good time to have the largest gun rights organization sidelined. Politicians on one side of the aisle are pushing hard for gun control, and on the other side, they are taking small nibbles (eg, the bump stock ban) and seeing who objects.

We do seem to have some positive trends in the courts, which is good. But that's one of the areas that traditionally has not been pushed by the NRA, suggesting something about the NRA's effectiveness in pushing pro-gun policies in general.

One thing is for sure; with the Democrats pushing gun control from the House and their 2020 presidential candidates, the blue states are going to get worse and we'll likely be playing defense rather than offense in the Senate.