Hannity is my favorite Fox News show. When Hannity speaks of FBI corruption he goes out of his way to say something like 97% (I am not sure of the exact quote. It could be a little more or a little less, but Hannity definitely speaks the 90 percentile range) of the FBI is not corrupt blaming 7th Floor FBI management.
I am beginning to believe the culture of corruption at the FBI is far worse than a mere 7th Floor containment. This Gateway Pundit report on FBI corrupt practices is one example of a larger corruption culture.
JRH 1/24/20
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BLOG EDITOR: I’ve apparently been placed in restricted Facebook Jail! The restriction was relegated after criticizing Democrats for supporting abortion in one post and criticizing Virginia Dems for gun-grabbing legislation and levying protestor restrictions. Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me completely. Conservatives are a huge portion of Facebook. If more or all Conservatives are banned, it will affect the Facebook advertising revenue paradigm. SO FIGHT CENSORSHIP BY SHARE – SHARE – SHARE!!! Facebook notified me in pop-up on 1/20/20: “You’re temporarily restricted from joining and posting to groups that you do not manage until April 18 at 7:04 PM.”
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EXCLUSIVE: FBI Must “Sequester All” Information Related to Fraudulent Carter Page FISA Warrant Indicating Related Indictments May Be Voided
It’s about time. The FISA Court’s communication yesterday indicates that the Deep State’s Carter Page FISA warrants were illegal and the related indictments may be voided.
An individual with the Twitter name of Undercover Huber tweeted out some interesting tweets about the FISA Court’s document regarding handling and disposition of information this week. After the recent DOJ IG report that showed that the four FISA warrants taken out on Carter Page and used to legitimize spying on candidate and then President Trump had numerous material issues, the FISA Court is finally taking action.
Undercover Huber started his account when Jeff Sessions asked US Attorney John Huber to look into the Clinton Foundation’s crimes in 2017. Huber eventually completed his efforts without investigating anything. It was a total head fake by Sessions and Huber to calm demands from conservatives. The only fortunate result from all this is the twitter account of Undercover Huber which often has some outstanding tweets. Yesterday was another example of this from Undercover Huber.
The FISA Court acknowledges that the last two of the four Carter Page FISA warrant applications were fraudulent. This means that the other two most likely are as well:
"The (FISA) Court understands the government to have concluded, in view of the material misstatements and omissions, that the Court's authorizations in [FISA order 3 & 4] WERE NOT VALID" (emphasis added) pic.twitter.com/XN7cV7zrI7
In his next two tweets Undercover Huber notes that the Court is asking the FBI to sequester the data and information related to the Carter Page FISA warrants. Undercover Huber suggests that actions in any cases that relied on any of the ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ could be overturned, including indictments from the corrupt Mueller gang:
Someone should start asking Mueller and his crew (I hear Weissmann is on TV these days) whether any of their cases relied on information gathered or derived from the Page FISAs, either directly from Page or two hops away from him
We really don’t know if the Durham investigation is another head fake like the Huber non-action. What we do know is that members of the Obama administration illegally spied on the Trump team before and after the 2016 election.
Hat tip D. Manny
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BLOG EDITOR: I’ve apparently been placed in restricted Facebook Jail! The restriction was relegated after criticizing Democrats for supporting abortion in one post and criticizing Virginia Dems for gun-grabbing legislation and levying protestor restrictions. Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me completely. Conservatives are a huge portion of Facebook. If more or all Conservatives are banned, it will affect the Facebook advertising revenue paradigm. SO FIGHT CENSORSHIP BY SHARE – SHARE – SHARE!!! Facebook notified me in pop-up on 1/20/20: “You’re temporarily restricted from joining and posting to groups that you do not manage until April 18 at 7:04 PM.”
J.E. Dyer examines Horowitz’s Report on Crossfire Hurricane FISA abuses (a better word – CORRUPTION) in Devin Nunes questioning of pre-operation beginnings by the FBI. VERY IMPORTANT READ and you’ll want to read a few times to digest the info.
The first paragraph has a link to the 480-plus page IG Report.
Blog Editor: Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me. Recently, the Facebook censorship tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group shares then jailed under the false accusation of posting too fast. So I ask those that read this, to combat censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts with your friends or Groups you belong to.
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Before Crossfire Hurricane: Devin Nunes asks the essential question after release of DOJ IG report
Devin Nunes (Image: Screen grab of Fox News video, YouTube)
Analytical revelations from the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the conduct of the “Russia-Trump” investigation won’t end any time soon.
The highlights have come out quickly, such as the startling count of 51 procedural violations by the FBI just in forwarding the FISA applications on Carter Page, and the fact that nine of those 51 involved making false statements to the FISA court. In light of these and other findings, the IG report’s conclusion that all this troubling conduct didn’t amount to “bias” on the part of the FBI seems rather … beside the point. Pick another measuring stick, folks. That one is about as useful to our public purpose as Gloria Steinem’s famous bicycle was to a fish.
Whatever we label it – and “bias” is an unimpressive scare word to begin with – a federal law enforcement undertaking so full of violations and false statements is a problem of the highest priority. So call it Petunia, for all I care. Just don’t have the crust to call it something that frames it to be written off. Real, live Americans have to live every day with what we suffer the FBI to do in the name of law and order.
And if the senior officials at headquarters are allowed to misbehave themselves so badly, it doesn’t much matter how honorable the rank and file are.
In any case, although there is surely a lot more to come as the IG report gets its public walk-through, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) bore-sighted Monday evening on the question that must propel us forward.
The IG report only takes us so far. That’s because it accepts the start date of its investigative charter as the day Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched by the FBI: 31 July 2016.
We’ll learn a lot from looking at the period after that. But the operations of U.S. agencies against (or, if you like, “involving”) members of the Trump campaign were underway well before that. Even if we use the friendlier-sounding term “involving” here, it’s still the case that agencies and personalities that engaged with Trump campaign members after 31 July 2016 were also involved with them before 31 July 2016.
Devin Nunes called that out on Monday. He’s brought this up previously, and didn’t elaborate at length in his segment with Sean Hannity (whose audience wouldn’t need a lengthy explanation). But that’s what he’s referring to here.
And his question is the essential one. The DOJ IG report looked at the conduct of the FBI and DOJ in Crossfire Hurricane.
But who was coordinating what was being done before Crossfire Hurricane started?
That question gets to the fundamental mystery of how the counter-Trump operation was started, and who was behind it. The motive for the operation can only be ascertained fully by answering these questions. The FBI was a late-comer to the game. It wasn’t “the” string-puller (which was probably a small group, rather than a single individual).
If nothing else, Peter Strzok’s affect in 2016 tells us that. He doesn’t text like someone who has known for months – or years – that Stefan Halper was set onto LTG Michael Flynn back in 2014, or that Carter Page has been working with the FBI since 2013 to take down Russian agents in the United States.
And that’s really the point about the IG report too. The report is framed as if it’s kind of no big deal that there was prior engagement by the actors in its own drama with the Crossfire Hurricane targets: Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn.
The IG report accepts at face value the narrative that Crossfire Hurricane was initiated on 31 July 2016, based on the nugget from Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that in May 2016, George Papadopoulos had told him something about the Russians and incriminating information on Hillary Clinton.
Yet within two weeks of 31 July 2016, this new operation had turned unerringly to a confidential source (Stefan Halper) who had known Paul Manafort for years, had engaged with Michael Flynn back in 2014, and had invited Carter Page to a conference at Cambridge in July 2016 (where Halper and Page happened, according to Halper, to discuss the possibility of Halper joining the Trump campaign), before Crossfire Hurricane started.
Meanwhile, the FBI had had Manafort under investigation several years earlier, and had electronic surveillance of him since 2014 (up through probably March of 2016, when reporting suggests the FISA authority for that surveillance expired).
The FBI had been receiving cooperation from Carter Page in interdicting Russian agents in the U.S. who were trying to recruit Americans.
And Stefan Halper, whom the IG report refers to as Source 2 (with a number of allusions that make Halper the only viable candidate for that designation), had been involved in an apparent attempt to pin the appearance of improper Russian connections on Michael Flynn in 2014.
Papadopoulos, on the other hand, while he had not been approached by Halper before 31 July 2016, had been approached in March 2016 by the Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, who was well known to the U.S. State Department and ran tame among the top officials of the British and Italian intelligence organizations. Papadopoulos was subsequently approached by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat with extensive links to the same UK intelligence officials Stefan Halper hosted conferences with at Cambridge multiple times each year.
There are a couple of passages in the IG report that afford an intriguing look at how these remarkable coincidences were accounted for in testimony to the IG.
We are given a little background on Stefan Halper’s (Source 2’s) checkered history as a confidential source (p. 313 as page-numbered in the IG report document):
Source 2 was closed by the FBI in 2011 for “aggressiveness toward handling agents as a result of what [Source 2] perceived as not enough compensation” and “questionable allegiance to the [intelligence] targets” with which Source 2 maintained contact. However, Source 2 was re-opened 2 months later by Case Agent 1, and was handled by Case Agent 1 from 2011 through 2016 as part of Case Agent 1 ‘s regular investigative activities at an FBI field office.
Case Agent 1 remains anonymous in the report and has not been firmly identified by blogosphere analysts. He is referred to as male in the report, however, and was working Crossfire Hurricane in 2016.* He is described as having an extensive history with Source 2 between 2011 and 2016.
Therefore, we get the following characterization a couple of paragraphs later (on p. 314):
Source 2 ‘s involvement in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation arose out of Case Agent 1’s pre-existing relationship with Source 2. Case Agent 1 told the OIG that when he arrived in Washington, D.C. in early August 2016 to join the Crossfire Hurricane team, he had never previously dealt with the “realm” of political campaigns. He said he lacked a basic understanding of simple issues, for example what the role of a “foreign policy advisor” entails, and how that person interacts with the rest of the campaign. Case Agent 1 said he proposed meeting with Source 2 to ask these questions because Case Agent 1 knew that Source 2 had been affiliated with national political campaigns since the early 1970s.
Case Agent 1 seems to have known the source he had been handling since 2011 reasonably well. So this passage in the middle of p. 315 comes across as a bit puzzling:
Source 2 told the Crossfire Hurricane team that Source 2 had known Trump’s then campaign manager, Manafort, for a number of years and that he had been previously acquainted with Michael Flynn. Case Agent 1 told the OIG that “quite honestly … we kind of stumbled upon [Source 2] knowing these folks.” He said that it was “serendipitous” and that the Crossfire Hurricane team “couldn’t believe [their] luck” that Source 2 had contacts with three of their four subjects, including Carter Page.
It strains credulity just a bit, that Case Agent 1, who’d been handling Source 2 since 2011, found it mere “luck” to discover that Source 2 knew Manafort, whom the FBI had investigated intensively since 2011, and had contacted Carter Page, with whom the FBI had worked since 2013, only a couple of weeks before Case Agent 1 joined Crossfire Hurricane.
Perhaps Case Agent 1 had no reason, at least, to know about Source 2’s connection with Michael Flynn. But as for the rest, it sounds for all the world as if Case Agent 1 read a Wikipedia entry on Source 2 to get his background information, and then was disingenuously astonished to find out how relevant to Crossfire Hurricane Source 2’s history would actually be.
Case Agent 1’s protestations sound, in other words, less than credible.
His and the Crossfire Hurricane team’s reported disbelief in their “luck” requires accounting for, given the extensive history of the FBI with everyone that “luck” applied to.
That’s where Devin Nunes’s question comes in. If it wasn’t the FBI that assembled all that “luck” prior to 31 July 2016 – who was it? And was it, as we would reasonably assume, the same maker of “luck” that manufactured a series of contacts in early 2016, and then handed George Papadopoulos to the FBI, tied up with a bow?
Obviously, readers will be waving their hands in the air at this point calling out “Brennan!” But it’s equally obvious John Brennan couldn’t do this alone. Just for starters, the Steele dossier was a key component of the anti-Trump operation, and there is neither need nor evidence for connecting it to Brennan’s instigation (at least not directly).
Moreover, the collaboration that may have come from foreign intelligence agencies (e.g., in Italy and the UK, as well as the notorious grab-bag of other European sources, like Estonia, supposedly plying Brennan with information in early 2016) would have had motives other than merely helping Brennan out with a personal project. For those sources, motives related to their own perceived interests had to be in play.
There are probably reasons the public will never be cleared for why Brennan would have taken a set against Michael Flynn. We know of one reason why senior personnel at the DOJ might have.
Meanwhile, the odd centrality of Ukraine and Paul Manafort to the Russiagate drama seems to have had its origins and motives from other actors: in the State Department, in the Democratic Party, in at least one of the Democrats’ major funders, George Soros. And those origins and motives appear, like the animus against Flynn, to have predated even Donald Trump’s candidacy for president.
Nunes is right. This is what we need to get to the bottom of. All that “luck” the Crossfire Hurricane team stumbled into: who authored it? Will John Durham be able to dig that out? Is he making the attempt?
William Barr’s comments this week, which include a reference to looking at the activities of other agencies (besides the FBI and DOJ), suggest that at least some version of that attempt may be underway. But we don’t know its scope or quality.
If we get a few indictments for things done by DOJ and FBI personnel after 31 July 2016, and if Trump weathers the impeachment frenzy unscathed – and if we complacently accept never knowing the answer to Nunes’s question – we remain at grave risk for something like this happening again. We remain at risk for not understanding the alarming power our government’s intelligence and law enforcement tools can wield over our nation’s future.
That’s why one of the most important things the IG report can do is point us not only to opportunities for indictment, but to discrepancies in testimony and narrative that set channel markers: buoys we can navigate by in chasing down Nunes’s question.
The alarm he raised in early 2017 is what cued both his committee and an interested public to demand the exertions that got us to the DOJ IG report. In his excellent new book The Plot Against the President, journalist Lee Smith recounts much that was previously unreported about Nunes’s efforts and the centrality of his role. Without Nunes, we wouldn’t have the broad public understanding we have today of the truth about Russiagate and Spygate, as opposed to the script written by Fusion GPS and pounded in the media.
I suggest trusting Nunes one more time: that we cannot rest until we know how and with whom this whole business really started.
* Regarding the identity of Case Agent 1, Internet sleuths are lobbying for one of two FBI agents who have spoken at Halper-organized events at Cambridge in the last decade. This tweep suggests one of them (who was an FBI attaché at the U.S. embassy in London from 2012 to early 2016). That agent has been a speaker for Halperat least twice. In an article for The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway had a list of three names – including the one suggested by @TheLegalBrain1 – of FBI agents who appeared at a Halper conference in Cambridge in 2011. Other analysts are partisans of the third name in the 2011 list for Case Agent 1.
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Blog Editor: Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me. Recently, the Facebook censorship tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group shares then jailed under the false accusation of posting too fast. So I ask those that read this, to combat censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts with your friends or Groups you belong to.
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J.E. Dyeris a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.
Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.
Kelly McLaughlin writing for Business Insider has a list to date of Trump Administration Officials who have DENIED being the identity of the anonymous Deep State Trump traitor. I suspect Attorney General Jeff Sessions or some DOJ/FBI upper echelon Obama hold-over is my suspect. Glaringly, Sessions is not on the McLaughlin denial list.
Still, if Sara Carter is correct, declassifying the Carter Page FISA warrant is a good first step of swamp draining and sticking it to the Deep State perpetrating a coup against the duly and Constitutionally elected President Donald Trump.
President Trump is expected to declassify the redacted 20 pages of documents from the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that have still not been made public, which allowed the FBI to spy on short-term campaign volunteer Carter Page, numerous sources told SaraACarter.com. This comes after nearly a year of stonewalling by the Department of Justice at the demand of lawmakers, who claim that the 20 redacted pages will reveal explosive information about the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation, according to sources.
However, President Trump, who has been under pressure from some DOJ officials not to release the classified documents, “could always change his mind and it’s not a guarantee that it will happen, but the indications are that it more than likely will possibly be before the end of this week,” said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject.
In July, the Justice Department released over 400 previously top-secret documents connected to the Page warrant. However, more than 20 pages of the FISA document remained highly classified and have only been viewed by a select group of Congressional members and investigators. The lawmakers are now asking that those documents be made public. Behind the scenes, the battle between Justice Department officials and senior members of Congress intensified over the past year, leading lawmakers to call on President Trump to intervene and declassify the documents.
In a 38 minute interview with the Daily Caller Tuesday, President Trump said the White House is “looking at it very seriously right now because the things that have gone on are so bad, so bad. I mean they were surveilling my campaign. If that happened on the other foot, they would’ve considered that treasonous. They would’ve considered that spying at the highest level. Can you imagine if we were doing that to Obama instead of Obama and his people doing that to us? Everybody would’ve been in jail for the next 500 years. OK? Can you believe it, where they paid this guy millions of dollars, it turned out? If you look at all of the things that are happening.”
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-CA) told Fox New’s [sic] Sean Hannity this month that the remaining classified documents regarding Page need to be declassified because “there is exculpatory evidence that we have seen of classified documents that need to be declassified. The judges should have been presented with this exculpatory evidence that the FBI and DOJ had.”
In July, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R- IA) also requested the declassification of embattled Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie Ohr worked in 2016 as a contractor for the research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to investigate Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.
“All these documents will expose how the FBI handled this investigation and give clarity to the public,” said one congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The American people deserve to know the truth and our country needs to move on.”
The FISA documents, which were heavily redacted by the FBI and Department of Justice are expected to reveal detailed information showing that the bureau withheld exculpatory information from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and the role former British spy Christopher Steele had in getting his unverified anti-Trump dossier to the bureau. Steele was hired by Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, to compile the dossier.
New documentation obtained by Congress are already revealing the deep ties Ohr had to Steele and the bureau. Recent texts, notes and emails obtained by Congress reveal that Ohr worked as a backchannel for the FBI to move information being collected by Steele to the FBI.
The documentation also exposes Ohr’s inter-workings with the FBI and that he was in communication with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour former FBI Attorney Lisa Page. Strzok was recently fired by the FBI and Page has since left the bureau. McCabe was fired earlier this year after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a scathing report showing that McCabe lied on numerous times to investigators and leaked information to the media.
A recent report by Fox New’s [sic] Catherine Herridge also exposes Ohr’s ties in 2016 to Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. Weissmann, who was then chief of the DOJ’s criminal fraud division, was “kept in the loop” by Ohr about his contact with Steele and the FBI, according to the report.
Earlier this year, SaraACarter.com revealed that before Weissmann was appointed to the Special Counsel, he arranged a meeting with AP journalists investigating Paul Manafort and his Ukrainian business dealings. On April 11, 2017 Weissmann, the AP reporters and several FBI officials Weissmann brought into the meeting met with the reporters.
According to sources who spoke with this news outlet, the meeting was attended by three different litigating offices. Two employees from the U.S. Justice Department and the other representative was from the U.S. Attorney’s office, according to the sources. FBI agents also attended the meeting, law enforcement sources confirmed.
At the time Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, and chief Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores also declined to comment.
According to sources, FBI officials at the meeting complained about Weissmann’s failure to follow protocol with journalists. They issued a formal complaint against him to the Justice Department, as they were concerned the meeting with the journalists could harm the ongoing probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Sara A. Carter is a national and international award-winning investigative reporter whose stories have ranged from national security, terrorism, immigration and front line coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sara A. Carter is currently an investigative reporter and Fox News Contributor. Her stories can be found at saraacarter.com. She formerly worked as a senior national security correspondent for Circa News.
She was formerly with the Los Angeles News Group, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner and wrote numerous exclusives for USA Today, US News World Report, and Arutz Sheva in Israel.
Her work along the U.S. Mexico border paved a new path in national security related stories in the region. Her investigations uncovered secret tunnel systems, narcotics-trafficking routes and the involvement of Mexican federal officials in the drug trade.
Sara has made appearances on hundreds of national news and radio shows to discuss her work. She has also made guest appearances on Fox, CNN, BBC International and C-Span. She has interviewed numerous heads of State and foreign officials.
She grew up in Saudi Arabia and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Mexico.
She has spent more than seven months in …READ THE REST
Even as the Mainstream Media (MSM) continues to harangue the Trump Administration over Crooked Hillary’s loss to President Trump, more and more documented information is rising to the top like scum purified out of metal. Emails and memos substantiate just how corrupt the Obama Administration’s FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc. leadership indeed was in creating ex nihilo fake evidence of Trump wrongdoing with Russian help.
Below are three documented stories of where the actual collusion originated and guess what? TRUMP IS NOT THE CULPRIT!
At some point, some rational journalist is going to have to start openly wondering if they’ve been wrong about this FBI/DOJ/Mueller stuff all along, won’t they?
The overwhelming majority of agents working for the FBI/DOJ are wonderful, hard-working professionals, which begs the question, how did so many anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton agents get in on the Clinton investigation, the Russia investigation, and the Mueller investigation?
The material that has leaked out over the last few months has proven that at least 4-5 of the agents had a definite anti-Trump animus and that animus was bad enough that Mueller canned them from his investigation.
Now, we’re learning that there is even more evidence of the intelligence community working against Trump for partisan reasons.
Multiple reviews of whether FBI agents’ political bias affected the Russia-Trump collusion case remain in their infancy, but investigators already have unearthed troubling internal communications long withheld from public view.
We already know from FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok’s now-infamous text messages with his fellow agent and reported lover, Lisa Page, that Strzok — the man driving that Russia collusion investigation — disdained Donald Trump and expressed willingness to use his law enforcement powers to “stop” the Republican from becoming president.
Memos the FBI is now producing to the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general and multiple Senate and House committees offer what sources involved in the production, review or investigation describe to me as “damning” or “troubling” evidence.
They show Strzok and his counterintelligence team rushing in the fall of 2016 to find “derogatory” information from informants or a “pretext” to accelerate the probe and get a surveillance warrant on figures tied to the future president.
The memos prove that Strzok and his team railroaded Trump associate Carter Page (who has still never been accused of any kind of wrongdoing) and used him as a scapegoat to spy on the Trump campaign. Strzok’s own words in the memos damn him for his immoral tactics and obvious partisan behavior.
The memos also indicate that certain FBI officials were knowingly and maliciously leaking information from their investigations to Democrats in Congress and to the media.
These and other documents are still being disseminated to various oversight bodies in Congress, and more revelations are certain to occur.
Yet, now, irrefutable proof exists that agents sought to create pressure to get “derogatory” information and a “pretext” to interview people close to a future president they didn’t like.
Clear evidence also exists that an investigation into still-unproven collusion between a foreign power and a U.S. presidential candidate was driven less by secret information from Moscow and more by politically tainted media leaks.
And that means the dots between expressions of political bias and official actions just got a little more connected.
In response to all of the bad news, Democrat leader Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been trying to obfuscate what is really happening by attacking Republicans for being on Trump’s side.
Schiff has even begun mocking a few GOP Congressional leaders as ‘The Four Horsemen,” but Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) isn’t worried about anything Schiff has to say. In fact, to hear Gowdy talk about it… nobody in the GOP “gives a damn” about what Schiff thinks.
“Let me tell you this about Adam,” Gowdy began. “Adam’s had a terrible last couple of years. He wanted to be the attorney general under Hillary Clinton and no one in the country worked harder to protect her than Adam Schiff.”
“He wanted to be the head of the CIA. He wanted to run for California and the run for Senate and the People’s Republic of California, but he couldn’t win either of those seats. So, now, now, he wants to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking of the apocalypse, Adam Schiff wants to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,” he said.
“If you ever have — I don’t know — a couple of three months with nothing else to do, I want you to go back, Jason, and think of all the things you would not know if you had taken Adam Schiff’s advice. You wouldn’t know the whole — the spontaneous reaction to a video was a hoax in Libya. You would never have read the first Chris Stevens email. You wouldn’t know that Hillary Clinton had this unique email arrangement with herself because Adam Schiff did everything in his power to keep you from finding out,” Gowdy continued.
“You wouldn’t know about the dossier. You wouldn’t know who funded it. You wouldn’t know it was used in a court proceeding. You wouldn’t know about Strzok and Page. In fact, you wouldn’t even be having the show tonight. You wouldn’t be having the show about Strzok and Page if Adam Schiff had had his,” Gowdy finished.
During a closed-door interview on June 27, former FBI official Peter Strzok downplayed his role in obtaining surveillance warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The Daily Beastreported that Strzok, the former deputy chief of counterintelligence, claimed in the interview that he had no substantive input on drafting or securing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants used to spy on Page, an energy consultant who left the Trump team in September 2016.
Strzok also denied providing evidence for the FISAs, the first of which was granted on Oct. 21, 2016.
A Republican in the June 27 interview confirmed that Strzok, who oversaw the Russian investigation, denied having a direct role in the FISA process. But the Republican was also incredulous at Strzok’s suggestion that he had little to do with the spy warrants obtained against Page.
A new report appears to justify the Republican’s skepticism.
John Solomon reported on The Hill that Strzok exchanged emails with FBI attorney Lisa Page regarding the Carter Page surveillance.
Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged numerous anti-Trump text messages during their work on the Russia probe, which was codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” In one Aug. 8, 2016, message, Strzok told Page that “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president.
Strzok, who was the FBI’s top investigator on Crossfire Hurricane, sent an email with the subject line “Crossfire FISA” to Lisa Page discussing a set of talking points aimed at getting then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to push the Department of Justice to approve a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, according to Solomon.
“At a minimum, that keeps the hurry the F up pressure on him,” Strzok emailed Lisa Page on Oct. 14, 2016, according to Solomon.
Strzok also commented on a letter that Lisa Page sent to then-FBI Director Jim Comey offering to meet with the FBI to discuss allegations made against him in a Yahoo News article published on Sept. 23, 2016.
“At a minimum, the letter provides us a pretext to interview,” Strzok wrote to Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair, on Sept. 26, 2016.
The Yahoo News article claimed that U.S. government officials were looking into allegations that Page met secretly in Moscow in July 2016 with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders.
It would later be learned that the article, written by Michael Isikoff, was based on information from Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier.
The dossier claimed that Page was the Trump campaign’s conduit to the Kremlin for the collusion conspiracy. Page has vehemently denied all of the allegations, and no evidence has emerged to support the Steele dossier’s claims about him.
The FBI and DOJ’s spy warrants relied heavily on the Steele dossier, which remains largely unverified and uncorroborated, in order to persuade a federal judge to allow spying against Carter Page. The FISA applications also cited the Isikoff article that relied on the dossier, though without disclosing that the article was derived from Steele.
The applications also did not disclose that the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC had financed the dossier. A law firm for both organizations hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired Steele.
Despite Strzok’s suggestion of an interview with Carter Page, the FBI did not meet with him until March 2017, six months after the email and two months after BuzzFeed News published the dossier. Page has questioned why the FBI waited so long to interview him.
The FBI used other methods to keep tabs on the former Trump aide. As The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported, an FBI informant named Stefan Halper made contact with Page during a conference at the University of Cambridge on July 11, 2016, nearly three weeks before the start of Crossfire Hurricane.
Halper, a veteran of three Republican presidential administrations, maintained contact with Page for over a year, until September 2017. That was the same month that the fourth and final FISA warrant against Carter Page expired.
Halper met with two other Trump campaign advisers, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos. Halper paid Papadopoulos $3,000 in September 2016 to travel to London under the guise of writing a policy paper and Mediterranean energy issues.
Papadopoulos has told associates that during dinner one night in London, Halper asked him about Russian efforts to steal Hillary Clinton emails.
Strzok’s attorney, Aitan Goelman, did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article.
A version of this article appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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Judicial Watch Sues CIA for Documents on Dossier Leak to Senator Harry Reid
Reid Publicized Clinton-DNC Dossier Allegations Following Brennan Briefing
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for records of communications with former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and his staff regarding the anti-Trump dossier funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:18-cv-01502)).
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedlybelieved then-Obama CIA Director Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations.
According to “Russian Roulette,” by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the left-wing Mother Jones magazine, Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.
Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.”
Reid called on Comey to investigate the links “thoroughly and in a timely fashion.”
Reid saw Brennan’s outreach as “a sign of urgency,” Isikoff and Corn wrote in the book.
“Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive. He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.”
According to the book, Brennan told Reid that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian government was behind the hack and leak of Democratic emails and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. Brennan also told Reid that there was evidence that Russian operatives were attempting to tamper with election results.
On August 27, 2016, Reid wrote a letter to Comey accusing President Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government.
The Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the CIA failed to respond to a February 12, 2018, FOIA request for:
All records of communications, including but not limited to letters, emails, text messages, and instant chats, between former CIA Director John Brennan and/or officials in the CIA Director’s Office on the one hand, and Senator Harry Reid and/or members of Senator Reid’s staff on the other hand, regarding, concerning or relating to the Christopher Steele “dossier” and/or alleged “collusion” between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Copies of any reports, memoranda or other materials provided to Senator Reid and/or members of his staff by the CIA relating to alleged Russian “collusion” or cooperation between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
All materials, including briefing reports and memos, audio/video presentations, PowerPoint presentations and any other records, used by CIA Director Brennan and/or other CIA officials to brief Senator Reid and/or members of his staff on alleged “collusion” between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
All notes, minutes, transcripts, and audio and/or visual recordings made of any and all briefings provided by the CIA to Senator Reid and/or members of his staff regarding alleged “collusion” between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Brennan has come under public scrutiny as one of the suspected prime movers of the “Spygate” scandal against then-candidate Trump and his team during 2015 and 2016 and later against President Trump and members of his administration.
Brennan himself has revealed his deep-seated animus toward President Trump and used his media platform as an MSNBC commentator to repeatedly attack the president.
When President Trump tweeted about FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing in March 2018, Brennanretweeted and responded:
When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.
In response to the president’s tweet that former FBI director Comey is a “proven leaker and liar,” Brennan retweeted and responded in April 2018 that President Trump’s administration is a failing “kakistocracy.”
“Obama CIA Director John Brennan’s unhinged attacks on President Trump help explain the Obama administration spying abuses targeting Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The mere fact that we had to file this lawsuit shows the CIA has something to hide on Obama-era abuses and collusion with Democrats in Congress to target then-candidate Trump.”
Judicial Watch filed a separate FOIA lawsuit against the CIA on March 6, 2017, for records related to the investigation of former Trump National Security Advisor and retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency et al.(No.1:17-cv-00397)).
The National Security Agency refused to confirm or deny the existence of intelligence records about communications between Gen. Flynn and Amb. Kislyak.
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Bombshell: Even More Evidence of FBI anti-Trump Bias Uncovered!
Onan Coca is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing and Bravera Holdings. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com, Godfather.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. You can read more of his writing at Eagle Rising.
Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their five wonderful children.
Eagle Rising seeks to share commentary and opinion about culture, media, politics, etc., from a Christian and politically conservative perspective. … READ THE REST
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Emails Appear To Blow a Hole in Strzok’s Statement on Page FISA
The Western Journal is a news company that drives positive cultural change by equipping readers with truth. Every day, WesternJournal.com publishes conservative, libertarian, free market and pro-family writers and broadcasters.
As Americans — and indeed, readers around the world — continue to lose trustin traditional newspapers and broadcast networks and their claims of objectivity and impartiality, The Western Journal is rapidly filling the gap as a trusted source of news and information. The Western Journal is … READ THE REST
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Judicial Watch Sues CIA for Documents on Dossier Leak to Senator Harry Reid
Judicial Watch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.Contributionsare received from individuals, foundations, and corporations and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfills its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach.
The motto of Judicial Watch is “Because no one is above the law”. To this end, Judicial Watch uses the open records or freedom of information laws and …READ THE REST
In this Jewish World Review post, Mark Steyn relates the obvious to readers: There was indeed interference in the 2016 election cycle, BUT it was not Donald Trump colluding with Russians. Rather it was the Dems and their Deep State comrades in the Obama Administration pulling out ALL efforts to make Trump was not elected. OR if elected, to undermine President Trump so malignantly, he’d get impeached or resign.
As I think most persons paying attention now realize, the investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election.
It was run at the highest (or deepest) Deep State levels by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan, whose frantic and hysterical Tweets are like no utterances of any CIA director in history. That also explains one of the puzzling aspects of the last year that I’ve occasionally mentioned here and on TV and radio: If you were truly interested in an “independent” Special Counsel, why would you appoint Robert Mueller? He’s a lifetime insider and the most connected man in Washington – a longtime FBI Director, and Assistant Attorney-General and acting Deputy Attorney-General at the Department of Justice.
Exactly. His most obvious defect as an “independent” counsel is, in fact, his principal value to the likes of Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein: He knows, personally, almost every one in the tight little coterie of discredited upper-echelon officials, and he has a deep institutional loyalty to bodies whose contemporary character he helped create. In other words, he’s the perfect guy to protect those institutions. As for the nominal subject of his investigation, well, he’s indicted a bunch of no-name Russian internet trolls who’ll never set foot in a US courthouse. That’s not even worth the cost of printing the complaint. Rush Limbaugh has been kind enough to quote, several times, my line that “there are no Russians in the Russia investigation”. Which is true. Yet that doesn’t mean there aren’t foreigners. And an inordinate number of them are British subjects – or, to use today’s preferred term, “Commonwealth citizens”. All the action in this case takes place not in Moscow but in southern England.
Let’s start at Cambridge University with a two-day conference called “2016’s Race to Change the World“, held on July 11th and 12th 2016 – or three weeks before the FBI supposedly began its “counterintelligence” operation against Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane”. That’s from the first line of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. The song and its key signature figure in the plot of a ho-hum Cold War thriller of the same name, about a British spy trying to get info from the Russians to an [sic] heroic American woman.
Yes, really. Jonathan Pryce played “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” , and I asked him about it when I moderated a panel on acting at St Catherine’s College, Oxford with him and Patti Lupone a few years later.
If you think that’s a weird event for an Oxbridge college to host, it’s as nothing to this “Race to Change the World” beano. I do my share of international junketing, but the bill of fare for this curious symposium is so bland as to be almost generic – panels titled “Europe and America”, “2016 and the World”, “Global Challenges Facing the Next President”. Compared to the laser-like focus of a typical Cambridge confab (“A Westphalia for the Middle East?“), it’s almost as if someone were trying to create an event so anodyne and torpid no one would notice it. All that distinguished these colorless presentations was the undoubted eminence of the speakers: former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind; and Sir Richard Dearlove, former C (that’s M, for 007 fans) at MI6. The conference appears to have been put together at a couple of weeks’ notice by Steven Schrage, former “Co-Chair of the G8’s Anti-Crime and Terrorism Group” and a well-connected man on the counterterrorism cocktail circuit: Here he is introducing Mitt Romney to the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, and here he is spending election night in the UK at a party with Scotland Yard elite counterterrorist types. Make of that what you will – it’s a somewhat odd background for the convenor of an insipid, vanilla, cookie-cutter foreign-policy seminar – but among the small number of strangely prestigious attendees at Mr Schrage’s conference were:
~Carter Page, a petroleum-industry executive and Trump campaign volunteer;
~Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia house at MI6;
~Stefan Halper, a University of Cambridge professor with dual UK/US citizenship.
Today, Mr Page is better known as the endlessly surveilled “person of interest” whose eternally renewable FISA warrant was the FBI’s gateway into the Trump campaign; Mr Steele is a sometime FBI asset who, a week before the Cambridge conference, had approached the G-men with the now famous “dossier” that provided the pretext for the FISA application; and Professor Halper turns out to be not some tweedy academic but a man with deep connections to MI6 and the CIA, on the payroll of something at the Pentagon called the “Office of Net Assessment”, and (one of) the supposed FBI informant(s) inside the Trump circle.
Carter Page says that in the course of this two-day conference he met Professor Halper for the first time. But I was struck by this aside Mr Page made to Sara Carter:
Madeliene [sic] Albright was always trying to get me to go into public debates. I told her I was there just as a listener, just as an attendee.
Hmm. If you’ll forgive another Patti Lupone-type digression, many years ago our mutual pal Ned Sherrin decided to launch, just for a laugh, a rumor that me and Carol Thatcher (Mrs T’s daughter) were having an affair. Ned told somebody, and somebody told somebody else, and about eight months later it turned up as an item in Nigel Dempster’s highly authoritative Daily Mail gossip column, along with a rather goofy picture of me and Carol at a David Frost shindig at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane. And Ned was stunned – because he assumed the Daily Mail story was true. Because, by the time it circled back to him, he’d clean forgotten he’d started the whole business.
Oddly enough, that’s exactly how James Comey and Andrew McCabe and John Brennan work. At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to corroborate aspects of it – even though, as he subsequently testified under oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges. You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing and you make it a thing: Here, from yesterday’s letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for leaking details about what’s in it.
It’s almost as if that’s what Madeleine Albright is doing here, isn’t it? It’s one thing to invite Carter Page to show up at some tedious yakfest at Cambridge with Halper sitting in front of him and Chris Steele sitting behind. But what if you could get Page to stand up and say something? Then you could find a friendly journo to report it and, instead of just a nobody on the fringes of the campaign, you’d have a “senior Trump advisor” sharing his thoughts on the global scene with Madam Albright and Sir Richard and Sir Malcolm and all the other bigshots, and then you could use that story three weeks later at the FISA court, to demonstrate how deep into the heart of the campaign the Russkies had penetrated.
Instead, Professor Halper has to make do with chit-chatting to Mr Page over the tea and biscuits, and planting the seeds for a friendly relationship.
Herewith a note on the academic circuit: emeritus professors and visiting fellows are popular covers with espionage agencies because there’s minimal work and extensive foreign travel, to international talking shops like the one above. If you make the mistake of being a multinational businessman and go to foreign countries to meet with other businessmen, you’ll be investigated up the wazoo. But, if you’re a professor and you go to foreign countries to meet with other professors, the world is your oyster. You also get to meet young people, who are the easiest to recruit.
Here’s another professor, and from another Commonwealth country: Malta. Joseph Mifsud is (was) a professorial fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland, but is (was) based in London as a principal of the “London Centre of International Law Practice” and a director of the “London Academy of Diplomacy”, both of which sound fancy-schmancy but are essentially hollow entities operating from the same premises – 8, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a tony address (next to the London School of Economics and the Royal College of Surgeons) but the “London Centre/Academy’s” fifth in three years and at which they and a handful of other endeavors are holed up in a minimally furnished back room filled by four interns round a trestle table on fifty quid a week.
Professor Mifsud also has (had) similarly undemanding academic sinecures at the “Euro-Mediterranean University” in Slovenia and “Link Campus University” in Italy. At the beginning of March 2016, a young man called George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign. On March 14th, traveling through Italy, he met with Professor Mifsud. They got together again in Britain, and at some point Papadopoulos became head of the “London Centre of International Law Practice’s” soi-disant “Centre for International Energy and Natural Resources Law & Security”, a post for which he had no obvious qualifications. Happily, like most other jobs at the “London Centre”, it didn’t require work, or showing up at the “London Centre” or even being in London.
Mifsud is said to have ties to high-ranking figures in Moscow, but there seems to be more prima facie evidence of ties to high-ranking figures in London. That’s Professor Mifsud above with my old friend Boris Johnson, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, at some Brexit event last October 19th. On October 31st Joseph Mifsud disappeared and has not been seen since. I know how he feels: The same thing happened to me twelve days after I lunched with Boris at The Spectator in early 2006. Is (was) Mifsud an FSB asset? An MI6 asset? Both? Neither? Well, there’s more circumstantial evidence of Mifsud’s ties to British intelligence, including multiple meetings with, inter alia, Claire Smith of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee.
At any rate, back in London on April 26th 2016, Professor Mifsud told young Papadopoulos that the Russians have all this “dirt” on Hillary, “thousands of emails”. A couple of days later, a friend of George’s at the Israeli Embassy, Christian Cantor, introduced him to Erika Thompson, who worked for Alexander Downer, Canberra’s High Commissioner in the UK, at Australia House. On May 4th, Papadopoulos was quoted in The Times of London denouncing David Cameron for calling Trump “divisive, stupid and wrong“. On May 6th, Ms Thompson called Papadopoulos to say that Mr Downer wanted to meet him. On May 10th they met for drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Young George claims that the High Commissioner told him to “leave David Cameron alone”. Which doesn’t sound quite right to me.
As longtime readers may recall, I have drunk with Alexander Downer and that is not something to be undertaken lightly. Somewhere in the course of the evening a pretty squiffy Papadopoulos lifted his head up from the bowl of cocktail olives and started blabbing about Russian “dirt” on Hillary.
Another digression: Mr Downer was Australia’s longest serving foreign minister and, as I used to say in those days, “my favorite foreign minister”. Since then, he has spent many years on the “advisory board” of Hakluyt, a curiously named body set up by former MI6 chaps. I’m not saying he spends his nights rappelling down the walls of presidential palaces (although I would be tickled to be proved wrong), but I don’t think I’m betraying any confidences when I say that, after tea with Alexander in Adelaide a couple of years back, whence he had just returned from some meeting with some group or other in Lisbon, I remember musing about that select circle of people who can jet around the world in the expectation that doors will open for them and some useful tidbit will drop into their laps. As for Hakluyt, its website is here: I do believe it’s the coolest thing I’ve seen since (another long me-‘n’-Carol-type story) I was given Marlon Brando’s business card, which had the words “Marlon” and “Brando” on it and nothing else.
At any rate Mr Downer relayed the information about young George to Aussie Intelligence back home. Canberra sat on the info for two months and then passed it along to the Yanks in late July, just in time for that FISA application.
And so, as July turned to August, Peter Strzok bade farewell to his “paramour” Lisa Page and flew to London for a sit-down with the High Commissioner at Australia House. When Strzok reported back to Washington, the FBI sicced the omnipresent “professor” Stefan Halper on George Papadopoulos. So the Trump aide woke up one August morning to an email from a Cambridge academic he’d never heard of, inviting him on an all-expenses-paid trip back to Britain to give a speech for $3,000. Once in London, Halper casually inquired of his new friend, “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”
Right. As Rush put it, the day before I guest-hosted last week:
Just so: Papadopoulos was the perfect mark. And the easiest way to reel him in is to get him off his home turf. In your own neighborhood, you have your routine – your usual bars, favorite restaurants; you notice if something’s off. But, flown to London, you have no routine, no old haunts. You go where you’re invited, you’re introduced to important people – like “High Commissioners”, woshever the hell thash ish, hic – [Blog Editor: As an American I think Steyn is expressing a drunken form of “whoever the hell they is, hiccup] and you want them to think you’re important, too, so you reveal that you know all about the Russian “dirt” on Hillary.
So you got that from the Russians, right? Er, no. I got it from a Maltese guy in Italy who’s a Scottish professor and plugged in to MI6, and then I told it to an Australian bloke in London who’s also plugged in to MI6 and told me to lay off David Cameron, and then an American guy in Cambridge who’s plugged in to MI6 reminded me about it to see if I’d deny all knowledge of it, which would be suspicious, wouldn’t it..?
As I said, and as Rush likes to quote, there are no Russians in the Russia investigation. But, like that rumor about me and Carol Thatcher, you just put these things out there and a few months later they come back to you, via Canberra and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing program and suddenly it’s “independently” “corroborated” “evidence” from a respected ally and you can take it to a FISA judge.
There were two investigations into presidential candidates during the 2016 election. But, as Andrew McCarthy reminds us, these two investigations were not the same. The Clinton “matter” was a criminal investigation – because there was credible evidence that Hillary had committed criminal acts. The FBI had no such clear-cut goods on Trump. So they had to find something else:
The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans — Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries.
And the advantage of a “counterintelligence investigation”, unlike a criminal investigation, is that everything in it is “classified”. So that even an obvious set-up at a Cambridge confab or Kensington wine bar is “intelligence” that has to be “protected” for “national security” reasons. It’s a brazen, audacious scheme, and unlikely to have been loosed without the approval, however discreetly stated, of the then President. Occam’s Razor suggests that the man running the operation was the CIA’s John Brennan through the “inter-agency taskforce” that met at Langley. But Brennan isn’t that reckless: Go back to Madeleine Albright urging Carter Page to speak up at a Cambridge conference; Christopher Steele leaking parts of his dossier to the newspapers; a staffer at Australia House inviting George Papadopoulos for a drink… The best way to turn nothing into something is to plant it somewhere far away and wait for it to work its way back to you:
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
Golly, you don’t say! I wonder who “told” The Guardian that. A conference here, a speech there, a cocktail round the corner, and pretty soon you have the simulacrum of “counterintelligence” concerns from America’s closest allies:
According to one account, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at “director level”. After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation.
Er, wait a minute. If it’s “so sensitive” it’s being handled “director-to-director”, why isn’t the head of GCHQ meeting with his opposite number at NSA? Why’s he meeting with Brennan?
Hey, don’t get hung up on details. It all went brilliantly – except for one tiny detail: Hillary managed to do the impossible and lose. On January 23rd 2017, three days after Trump’s inauguration, GCHQ at Cheltenham Tweeted the sad fate of Mr So Sensitive:
We’re sorry to announce that Robert Hannigan, our Director since 2014, has decided to step down as head of GCHQ.
Oh, dear. Well, enjoy your sudden retirement, old boy. Unfortunately, for Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Strzok and the others on this side of the Atlantic in the third week of January, it wasn’t quite that simple. Because, instead of protecting Hillary, they were now protecting themselves – so it was necessary to dig in and double-down on the “Russia investigation”.
Which sounds super-credible except for one small point: there was never a Russia investigation. As Andrew McCarthy sums it up:
Opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.
Which is what they did – Brennan and Clapper and Comey and McCabe. They took tools designed to combat America’s foreign enemies and used them against their own citizens and their political opposition. It was an intentional subversion of the electoral process conducted at the highest level by agencies with almost unlimited power. And, if they get away with it, they will do it again, and again and again. That’s what Brennan’s telling us on Twitter, and Clapper on “The View”:
Yeah? So what? Whatcha gonna do about it?
Good question.
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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. His latest book is “The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned“. (Buy it at a 57% discount by clickinghereor order in KINDLE edition at a 41% discount by clickinghere. Sales help fund JWR)
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Even as the Leftist Mainstream Media and Obama Deep State operatives spin an alternative story, only a fool or a lying spin doctor would not admit Obama inserted his political desires into the 2016 election cycle.
Who is the FBI spy that was trying to glean information on the Trump campaign? Well, reportedly, it’s longtime CIA operative Stefan Halper. And no, it wasn’t leaked. If this is true, and most likely it is, there’s enough public information on him, along with the news media leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that confirmed his identity. They were as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Last week, it was reported that the FBI had spied on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. It was later revealed by Axios that Halper had tried to get a top-level job in the administration after the campaign. Yet, before we get into what The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and others have noted about the timeline of the FBI’s Russia probe, let’s look real quick at the linguistic martial arts the news media is playing here. All of this deep state/Trump was spied on stuff was written off by the news media as conspiratorial garbage. Well, it turns out they were wrong. They’re wrong about everything it seems, especially reports covering this White House. This is how The New York Times covered this development. They also said that this spy is someone well known within D.C. circles.
President Trump accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the “phony Russia hoax.”
In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign. The informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to Russia.
[…]
F.B.I. agents were seeking more details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails, and one month after their Russia investigation began, Mr. Papadopoulos received a curious message. The academic inquired about his interest in writing a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a subject of Mr. Papadopoulos’s expertise.
The informant offered a $3,000 honorarium for the paper and a paid trip to London, where the two could meet and discuss the research project.
“I understand that this is rather sudden but thought that given your expertise it might be of interest to you,” the informant wrote in a message to Mr. Papadopoulos, sent on Sept. 2, 2016.
Mr. Papadopoulos accepted the offer and arrived in London two weeks later, where he met for several days with the academic and one of his assistants, a young woman.
Over drinks and dinner one evening at a high-end London hotel, the F.B.I. informant raised the subject of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails that had spilled into public view earlier that summer, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The source noted how helpful they had been to the Trump campaign, and asked Mr. Papadopoulos whether he knew anything about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Yeah, how is that not spying? It is. And this is the problem with liberalism as of late; they’ve wantonly decided to ignore the definition of what words mean. Spying is now informing. Invasions are now called “uncontested arrivals,” but back to Mr. Halper and the timeline. It seems that his alleged information gathering operation started way before his rendezvous with Papadopoulos. Carter Page and Sam Clovis, two others affiliated with the Trump team, were also approached by Halper as well.
Greenwald noted that Halper has history with this sort of operation; he reportedly did something similar to Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign. Halper with some other former intelligence operatives allegedly funneled information on then-President Carter’s foreign policy to Republican candidate, and future president, Ronald Reagan. This was all revealed in 1983.
Puh-lease. Facts: DOJ/FBI blew their source, by leaking every detail to friendly media to spin. NYT and WaPo stories cite "gov" sources–not Congress. And Daily Caller had that name out months ago, before news of spying. https://t.co/amtIzZpgVc
Greenwald also noted that while the news media knew who the FBI spy was, they refused to reveal his name, though they left so many clues that they might as well have disclosed the source. He also adds that the FBI and members of Congress are being more or less absurd that revealing the source would be damaging to national security; we pretty much already know who it is. And his work was already been reported. The Intercept then details how the Daily Caller was able to discern whom the source was using entirely public information, which brings us to FBI timeline. When did this investigation begin because it seems there were other times that Halper reached out to Trump team members prior to the Papadopoulos meeting that supposedly led to the FBI opening up a counterintelligence investigation in July of 2016. By the way, this theory was publishedby the Times in December of 2017, and it was ripped apart.
…the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.
But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.
Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.
[…]
Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign.
So, there’s the new line of inquiry. The FBI spy was investigating something prior to the official start of the counterintelligence probe. Byron York’s column in The Washington Examiner noted that Trump March meeting with The Washington Post editorial board is where the FBI and DOJ probably got the first batch of names to peruse; Trump has announced that Papadopoulos and Carter Page would be lending a hand:
Trump’s announcement did not go unnoticed at the FBI and Justice Department. The bureau knew Page from a previous episode in which Russian agents had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit him. It’s not clear what the FBI knew about the others. But then-Director James Comey and number-two Andrew McCabe personally briefed Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the list of newly-named Trump foreign policy advisers, including Page, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Lynch told the House Intelligence Committee that she, Comey, and McCabe discussed whether to provide a “defensive briefing” to the Trump campaign. That would entail having an FBI official meet with a senior campaign official “to alert them to the fact that … there may be efforts to compromise someone with their campaign,” Lynch said.
It didn’t happen, even though it was discussed again when Comey briefed the National Security Council principals committee about Page in the “late spring” of 2016, according to Lynch’s testimony. (The principals committee includes some of the highest-ranking officials in the government, including the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, and Homeland Security, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the White House chief of staff, U.N. ambassador, and more.)
So the nation’s top political appointees, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies were watching Trump campaign figures in the spring and early summer of 2016.
And all of this brings us to a figure that has remained under the radar in all of this: President Barack Obama. What did he know and when did he know it because the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. was under his administration, along with the FBI/DOJ. It’s relevant to bring the former president and his team under the microscope again. Until then, what we know via Larry O’Connor is that a) the Trump campaign was spied on; and b) the motive was political pending new developments:
First, let’s hope that all Americans, Left, Right and Never Trump, can agree that this operation was unprecedented and extraordinary. The FBI has never, as far as we know, conducted a clandestine investigation on a presidential campaign complete with electronic surveillance and a spy. The bar to initiate such an investigation would have to be pretty high. The FBI would not, under normal circumstances, authorize this kind of operation unless there was extreme and justifiable reasons to do so.
So, whatever the reason to initiate this operation, one expects that reason to be pretty concrete and conclusive.
Now, let’s examine the underlying political atmosphere surrounding the decision to launch this extraordinary, unprecedented investigation.
Donald Trump was President Obama’s political enemy. He was running, specifically, to undo Obama’s legacy and everything he had instituted through executive actions. He was also running against Obama’s chosen successor.
[…]
We know that the atmosphere surrounding the decision to launch the investigation was highly political. It was political in the most personal sense for President Obama, who held the reigns [sic] of power over the FBI and the DOJ at the time of the investigation.
We know that the political document known as the “Steele dossier” was used, at least in part, to justify many elements of the spying operation against the Trump campaign.
We know that George Popadopoulos’ statement in a bar with an Austrailian [sic] diplomat triggered some element of the investigation as well.
A guy making a statement in a bar and a pile of unverified opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign doesn’t even come close to the very high bar needed to be cleared to initiate a clandestine investigation on any American citizen, let alone a member of a presidential campaign just weeks before election day.
But, it appears, that’s all we have
[…]
Given the politically charged backdrop of the Obama versus Trump death match, coupled with the use of the Steele dossier (by definition a political document paid for by Trump’s political opponent) the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that the FBI spying operation was launched for political purposes.
And now the wait begins—and it could take years.
++++++++++++++++++
Ex-Trump Aide Comes Forward… Says There’s Second Spy, Second Intel Agency
Michael Cavuto on Fox News – Screen Capture of CT Video
One of President Donald Trump’s most explosive claims about the 2016 election — one that was dismissed out of hand until recently — was that his campaign was the subject of extensive surveillance.
Now, a former Trump aide is saying something even more explosive: There wasn’t just a mole inside the Trump campaign, there was a second spy and intelligence agency.
Michael Caputo is pretty much the definition of a political lifer. A media strategist, he worked with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and various other Republicans. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he began doing work with the Russians.
This didn’t get the attention of too many people until he started working for Trump. Much like Carter Page, the low-level Trump campaign staffer whose ties to Russia became the subject of a million conspiracy theories, Caputo’s ties to the Russians became of intense interest to the overzealous FBI people charged with finding some sort of evidence that Trump was the Siberian Candidate.
Caputo appeared on Fox News just hours after Axiosreported “President Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, recommended appointing Stefan Halper, an academic and suspected FBI informant on the Trump campaign, to a senior role in the Trump administration.”
That’s bad. According to Caputo, things were even worse.
“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, this informant, this person that they planted, that they tried to plant into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios — he’s not the only person that came into the campaign!” Caputo said.
“And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came into the campaign,” he added.
“I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning and I’ll tell you, when we finally find out the truth about this, Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna be wearing some orange suits.”
Orange suits are an unlikely outcome, but Caputo’s statement indicates that Obama-era surveillance of the Trump campaign — once dismissed as tinfoil-hattery — might actually be very real.
Of course, Caputo may have a reason to prevaricate about such things. Kimberley Strassel doesn’t. She’s the Wall Street Journal writer whose reporting has indicated that she believes there was an FBI mole inside the campaign.
“The Bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe,” she wrote in an article earlier this month.
“When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.
“This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting,” she added. “It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough.”
During and after the campaign, Trump’s claims that he was surveilled (and that the surveillance was politically-motivated) were dismissed as baseless fantasies, yet another sign this was an unbalanced person who shouldn’t be normalized or believed.
And yet, here we are, weeks away from the inspector general’s report on the Clinton investigation, which doesn’t sound like it’s going to simply be the pro forma postmortem it normally would be, considering it involved a losing campaign. The report is expected to detail a whole host of tactics by the “deep state” that could easily be construed as being in service of the Clinton campaign and to the detriment of the Trump campaign.
If Caputo is telling the truth, this means there’s a whole host of issues here. Who was involved? The DOJ and FBI, obviously, but the CIA too? Other agencies under the aegis of the ODNI?
I can predict just one thing: Things are about to get very interesting for everyone who called Trump crazy when he talked about surveillance.
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Hold On, The FBI Was Spying On The Trump Campaign *Before* The Counterintelligence Probe Officially Started?
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If you only watch or read Lame Stream Media (aka Mainstream Media – MSM), you’d think Shifty Schiff’s Dem Party Minority Memo upstaged and refuted the Nunes GOP Majority Memo. Shifty’s Memo only obfuscates the actual facts found in the Nunes Memo. A close comparison of the two Memos shows that Shifty’s Memo corroborates Nunes but with a classic display look-here-instead-of-here language.
Jason Beale writing for The Federalist demonstrates just how shifty Adam Schiff is.
The Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) finally dropped their Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse rebuttal memo Saturday afternoon, and the reaction is murky.
If you had your money on a comprehensive, point-by-point refutation of the “scurrilous allegations” of evidentiary malfeasance laid out in the majority (Nunes) memo, you’re going to need to cut a check. If your bet was on the construction and destruction of straw-men unassociated with the proceedings, and confirmation the use of raw, unevaluated intelligence to argue probable cause that an American citizen “knowingly acted as an agent of a foreign power,” you can proceed to the cashier window to redeem your ticket.
Some background. The HPSCI majority memo (the Nunes memo), which was released to the public on February 2, contained a number of specific allegations of inappropriate conduct by Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice officials seeking the approval of the FISA court (FISC) to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. These allegations included the introduction into evidence of unconfirmed, uncorroborated sections of the infamous Christopher Steele dossier; the omission of material context in vouching for the reliability of their source (Steele); and the deliberate obfuscation of the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid for the dossier.
The Democrat HPSCI minority, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, fought the release of the Nunes memo on the grounds that it would recklessly expose sources and methods and, according to Schiff, erode public confidence in the FBI’s ability to protect sources to the extent that releasing the memo might enable another Oklahoma City bombing. Schiff and his colleagues composed a rebuttal, and assured us that it would effectively “correct the record” on the Nunes memo—particularly on the reliability of the evidence presented to the FISC, and the Nunes contention that the judge wasn’t fully apprised of the “partisan, political” provenance of the funding behind the dossier.
None of this came to pass with the release of the Schiff memo.
What Actually Happened Inside That Counter-Memo
A close read of the Schiff memo reveals the incredulity of the Nunes memo claim that the Steele dossier initiated the FBI investigation into Trump associates’ engagement with Russians. A close read of the Nunes memo reveals that it makes no such claim. In fact, the Nunes memo clearly states the investigation was initiated after the FBI received information concerning suspicious interactions between Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos and a sketchy professor with alleged ties to Russian officials.
It’s written very clearly in the memo, in plain English. Yet the Schiff memo works hard to undermine that strawman, and effectively confirms the Nunes memo description of the event that triggered the investigation.
Schiff then addresses the issue of source and evidence credibility. This is key to the Nunes memo allegations and to confidence in the FBI and DOJ officials charged with protecting every citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights, even in the course of seeking legal access to citizens’ most private communications.
In lieu of providing a single word of confirmation that any of the Page-related dossier information had been corroborated or validated prior to providing it to the court, the Schiff memo constructs a Page avatar whose past associations and contact with Russian spies, Kremlin officials, shady businessmen, and FBI agents represent an insurmountable trail of suspicion that can only be assumed to be criminally conspiratorial, and likely treasonous.
They do this by noting Page’s 2013-2014 recruitment attempt by Russian spies in New York City, whose approaches inspired the FBI to alert Page and warn him away. Those spies were eventually arrested and convicted of espionage offenses after an investigation aided by information Page willingly provided. They further highlight Page’s three-year residency working for Merrill Lynch in Moscow, separate trips to Russia in July and December of 2016, and numerous interviews with the FBI regarding, presumably, his interactions with Russians suspected of nefarious intentions.
Building a Tower of Suspicion Around Carter Page
All of this builds a tower of suspicion around Page, the idiosyncratic Naval Academy graduate whose quirky and paranoid behavior on nationally televised interviews has inspired the derisive head-shaking of dozens of talking heads. They chortle at the naiveté of this man’s eagerness to repeatedly throw himself into the lion’s den of “The Situation Room” or “All In with Chris Hayes.” They wonder what could possibly compel this man to subject himself to the open mocking of his declarations of innocence, again and again? The Schiff document describes an FBI/DOJ presentation of evidence that appears to draw from these instincts of suspicion and disbelief yet, significantly, offer no proof.
But they must offer proof, as Andrew McCarthy points out in the latest of his series of analytic National Review articles devoted to making sense of the FISA proceedings. McCarthy notes that: “(B)ecause Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his ‘clandestine’ activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.”
The Schiff memo offers that proof, the crucial passage of the Steele dossier undeniably used as the crux of their “criminal activity” contention. They present it as follows: “It is in this specific sub-section of the applications that DOJ refers to Steele’s reporting on Page and his alleged coordination with Russian officials. Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”
“In particular, Steele’s sources reported that Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and ‘an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.’ Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (‘kompromat’) and noted ‘the possibility of its being released to Candidate #l’s campaign.’ (Note: ‘Candidate #1’ refers to candidate Trump.) This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos.”
The problem with this crucial passage is that it contains a fatal flaw, in that it is almost-certainly wrong. Page has testified repeatedly, under oath, that he had no such contact, meetings, or conversations with either Sechin or Divyekin. He did so both to the members of the HPSCI committee and during his numerous interviews with the FBI. He has further testified that he has never met Sechin in his life. He even issued a written denial in a letter he sent to former FBI director James Comey in September 2016, wherein he offered to meet with the FBI to resolve the issue.
If Democrats Are Right, Page Should Be Arrested
The Democrats show little faith in the disputed, yet legally essential, evidence of these “meetings.” In fact, they include in their memo this intriguing passage: “This information contradicts Page’s November 2, 2017 testimony to the Committee, in which he initially denied any such meetings and then was forced to admit speaking with (Arkady) Dvorkovich and meeting with Rosneft’s Sechin-tied investor relations chief Andrey Baranov.”
That’s one way of saying it. Another way to say it would be: “Carter Page’s testimony contradicts the unverified, third-hand hearsay information contained in the dossier, as he expressly denied meeting either of those officials. As to contacts with Russians unrelated to information contained in the Steele dossier, Page confirmed that he spoke with Arkady Dvorkovich and met with Andrey Baranov. “
But we don’t have to take Page’s word for it, nor should we. If there is evidence to the contrary, Page should quite rightly be arrested and charged with, at a minimum, lying to the HPSCI and to the FBI. Were there evidence or corroboration to confirm illicit engagements with Sechin and Divyekin, as reported in the dossier anddeclared to be credible by the FBI/DOJ officials testifying to the FISC judge, Page is dead to rights.
Yet Page walks free. The absence of evidence sufficient to arrest and charge Page with lying about his alleged treasonous and conspiratorial activities, coupled with the critical role those very allegations played in convincing a judge to approve a FISA warrant targeting his communications, leaves Citizen Page in a rather unique state of judicial and political limbo.
Yet for Page to regain his battered reputation and get on with his life, the FBI, DOJ, and HPSCI Democrats will have to admit that the information provided to the court regarding his activities in Russia was wrong. In doing so, they would have to further admit that the rest of the information in the 35-page Steele dossier was tarnished, and inadmissible. That’s not going to happen.
We Refuted Something Republicans Never Said
The Schiff memo confirmed that the Steele dossier was used to obtain the warrant. It added nothing to suggest that the dossier information had been corroborated. The Democrats aren’t talking about this part of their memo on cable news shows, because they would like you to forget it.
What they are talking about—a lot—is their refutation of a phantom Republican claim that the dossier triggered the FBI investigation. The Republicans made no such claim, but Schiff and his colleagues are nonetheless eager to address this straw man at every opportunity. Why? Because their focus isn’t on Page’s civil rights, or even on his possible guilt. They don’t seem to have much of an opinion on these either way.
Their focus is on the future, and the Democrats believe their immediate future depends on a positive (for them) outcome of the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian influence on the election. They fear the slightest acquiescence to doubt about the validity of the Steele dossier will somehow impact that investigation, and their future. Page is just some guy in the way.
In advance of the release of the Schiff memo, I wrote here that the only question it needed to answer was whether the Steele dossier information used against Page had been corroborated and validated prior to its use in the FISA court. That question was answered, albeit not intentionally. The information was not corroborated or validated. Although Schiff and his colleagues will do everything they can to convince you otherwise, it’s the only thing that matters.
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Jason Beale (a pseudonym) is a retired U.S. Army interrogator and strategic debriefer with 30 years experience in military and intelligence interrogation and human intelligence collection operations. He’s on Twitter @jabeale.
TRUMP REACTS TO FISA MEMO: “I Think It’s Terrible. I Think It’s a Disgrace What’s Happening in Our Country”
When you read the FISA Memo you must realize it was sanitized to allegedly protect sources and methods of investigation. Even so, it is not a difficult stretch to understand the nefarious nature that Donald Trump was targeted before and after the November 2016 election by Obama Administration leadership (probably including Obama himself). The weaponized police state of Obama, the Dems AND Crooked Hillary tried to feloniously steal the election and failing that, STILL use false and/or fake data to impeach a duly elected President.
AND the American free press (aka the Leftist MSM) have been full participants in disseminating the falsified/fake data to an American public of which many believe the Mainstream Media is still a credible source of news.
So, this is what I’m going to do for my blog readers. First, I am posting a Fox News’ Catherine Herridge report. Second, the FISA Memo sourced from the Western Journal. WJ leaves out the intro on the original Memo so I am extracting from a pdf downloaded from SCRIBD courtesy of the fake news channel CNBC.com. Last but not least – third, BPR review article entitled, “7 biggest takeaways from the FISA memo that was just released”.
Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Mr. Chairman:
On January 29, 2018, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (hereinafter “the Committee”) voted to disclose publicly a memorandum containing classified information provided to the Committee in connection with its oversight activities (the “Memorandum,” which is attached to this letter). As provided by clause 11(g) of Rule of the House of Representatives, the Committee has forwarded this Memorandum to the President based on its determination that the release of the Memorandum would serve the public interest.
The Constitution vests the President with the authority to protect national security secrets from it disclosure. As the Supreme Court has recognized, it is the President’s responsibility to classify, declassify, and control access to information bearing on our intelligence sources and methods and national defense. See, e.g., Dep’t of Navy v. Egan, 484 US. 518, 527 (1988). In order to facilitate appropriate congressional oversight, the Executive Branch may entrust classified information to the appropriate committees of Congress, as it has done in connection with the Committee’s oversight activities here. The Executive Branch does so on the assumption that the Committee will responsibly protect such classified information, consistent with the laws of the United States.
The Committee has now determined that the release of the Memorandum would be appropriate. The Executive Branch, across Administrations of both parties, has worked to accommodate congressional requests to declassify specific materials in the public interest.1 However, public release of classified information by unilateral action of the Legislative Branch is extremely rare and raises significant separation of powers concerns. Accordingly, the Committee’s request to release the Memorandum is interpreted as a request for declassification pursuant to the President’s authority.
The President understands that the protection of our national security represents his highest obligation. Accordingly, he has directed lawyers and national security staff to assess the
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1 See, e.g. S. Rept. 114-8 at 12 (Administration of Barack Obama) (“On April 3, 2014 . . . the Committee agreed to send the revised Findings and Conclusions, and the updated Executive Summary of the Committee Study, to the President for declassification and public release”); H. Rept. 107-792 (Administration of George W. Bush) (similar); E.O. 12812 (Administration of George H.W. Bush) (noting Senate resolution requesting that President provide for declassification of certain information Via Executive Order).
_________________________________
declassification request, consistent with established standards governing the handling of classified information, including those under Section 3.1(d) of Executive Order 13526. Those standards permit declassification when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any need to protect the information. The White House review process also included input from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice. Consistent with this review and these standards, the President has determined that declassification of the Memorandum is appropriate.
Based on this assessment and in light of the significant public interest in the memorandum, the President has authorized the declassification of the Memorandum. To be clear, the Memorandum reflects the judgments of its congressional authors. The President understands that oversight concerning matters related to the Memorandum may be continuing. Though the circumstances leading to the declassification through this process are extraordinary, the Executive Branch stands ready to work with Congress to accommodate oversight requests consistent with applicable standards and processes, including the need to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Sincerely,
Donald F. McGahn II
Counsel to the President
Here’s the Full Text of the FISA Memo Written by Rep. Devin Nunes
In all cases, any typographical emphasis — whether bold type, italics or underline — is original to the memo. Our goal here was to provide as accurate a representation of the original document as possible while still making it a little easier to read than the facsimile versions currently available online. — Ed. Note
January 18, 2018
To: HPSCI Majority Members
From: HPSCI Majority Staff
Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Purpose
This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.
Investigation Update
On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.
The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ
Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.
1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.
2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News — and several other outlets — in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington D.C. in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.
a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jonesarticle by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September— before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October — but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.
b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling — maintaining confidentiality — and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.
3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” (Emphasis Nunes’.) This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files — but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.
a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.
4) According to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was — according to his June 2017 testimony — “salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.
5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.
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7 biggest takeaways from the FISA memo that was just released
By declassifying the memo, President Trump just blew up Washington, D.C.
The controversial FISA memo, released by the House Intelligence Committee to the public on Friday, contains a number of bombshell revelations related to the FBI’s surveillance on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
At least one Republican, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, concluded that the document shows “clear and convincing evidence of treason.”
Here are the biggest takeaways.
Andrew McCabe admitted the dossier was used as the justification to secure a FISA warrant on Carter Page
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
“Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] without the Steele dossier information.”
The FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign was triggered by aide George Papadopoulos
“The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”
The FBI had no evidence of a connection between Papadopoulos and Page
Former Trump adviser Carter Page. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite).
“The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos.”
The FBI knew the DNC and Clinton campaign were behind the dossier–but didn’t disclose that knowledge to the FISA court
Former FBI Director James Comey. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File).
“Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or. any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”
“The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named US. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a US. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOI at the, time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier).”
The FBI paid Christopher Steele to work on the dossier
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who compiled the Trump dossier. (Photo by Victoria Jones/PA Images via Getty Images).
“The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of – and paid by – the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.”
Top DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele in 2016 and told the FBI the British spy had an anti-Trump bias
Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, which paid for the dossier on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais).
“Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein.
“Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’
“This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files, but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.”
The memo reveals which officials green-lighted surveillance on Carter
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik).
“As required by statute, a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause.
“Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.”
In response to the memo, President Trump said “it’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country” and that “a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves.”
Pres. Trump says GOP memo has been declassified: "Congress will do whatever they're going to do. But I think it's a disgrace what's happening in our country…A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves." https://t.co/OfR9pu29Wopic.twitter.com/wJHEptrGrk
You won’t read or hear this Crooked Hillary/Deep State/FBI collusion on the Leftist Mainstream Media (MSM) devoted to shoot President Trump in the foot at all costs.
A close friend, advisor and confidant of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was allegedly interviewed by the FBI in connection with the controversial dossier that was used ‘in part’ as evidence by the bureau to obtain a warrant to investigate members of President Trump’s campaign team, according to several sources who spoke to this reporter.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist and a close friend of Clinton, was interviewed by the FBI in 2016 regarding the dossier that alleged Trump colluded with Russia, the sources stated. Department of Justice officials, however, declined to comment on Blumenthal or the dossier.
FBI officials declined to comment.
Blumenthal did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Blumenthal worked as a White House aide for Bill Clinton, and later worked with the Clinton Foundation after being denied a role by Obama Administration officials with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to reports. According to Politico he was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation.
In 2015, emails released by the State Department showed the extensive and ongoing working relationship between Clinton and Blumenthal. The emails revealed that then Secretary of State Clinton would seek Blumenthal’s advice on foreign policy issues and his role appeared to be more of an advisor than friend, according to the emails. Blumenthal regularly sent Hillary Clinton “vaguely sourced” “intelligence cable style” briefings while she was Secretary of State.
Earlier this month, members of the House Intelligence Committee went to the Justice Department to review the FBI and DOJ documents requested last August by Chairman Devin Nunes, as reported earlier.
The Washington Post revealed in October that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign the research firm Fusion GPS for the dossier that was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele.
In April, CNN reported that the dossier was used to monitor communications of Carter Page, who volunteered as a national security advisor with the Trump campaign for a short period of time. But by December, another story by the New York Times suggested that the inquiry into the Trump campaign and its alleged ties to Russia began with George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy advisor to Trump campaign.
After the 2016 presidential election, Blumenthal told Dutch TV Nieuwsuur that Clinton’s loss to Trump “was the result of a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani, who was a member of Trump’s campaign.”
“I think it’s not unfair to call it a coup,” said Blumenthal.
Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton confidant and insider, made a visit to the Netherlands. Blumenthal was interviewed by NOS Nieuwsuur, a Dutch Evening News Magazine. The fatal impact on the elections of the DNC, Hillary Clinton and Podesta email publications by WikiLeaks, which were never contested by exposed parties, was of course never mentioned.
(Blog Editor: When Blumenthal says Trump will undo everything that Obama accomplished, you should laugh hysterically. Obama has ruined America more than any Left-Wing President – EVER!]
+++++++++++
SARA CARTER: Clinton Foundation “Hatchet Man” Grilled By FBI In Connection To Steele Dossier
Sara Carter[Blog Editor: Link removed or changed] reports:
A close friend, advisor and confidant of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was allegedly interviewed by the FBI in connection with the controversial dossier that was used ‘in part’ as evidence by the bureau to obtain a warrant to investigate members of President Trump’s campaign team, according to several sources who spoke to this reporter.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist and a close friend of Clinton, was interviewed by the FBI in 2016 regarding the dossier that alleged Trump colluded with Russia, the sources stated. Department of Justice officials, however, declined to comment on Blumenthal or the dossier.
[…]
Blumenthal worked as a White House aide for Bill Clinton, and later worked with the Clinton Foundation after being denied a role by Obama Administration officials with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to reports. According to Politico he was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation.
Commenting on Carter’s story, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton called Blumenthal a Clinton Foundation “hatchet man.”
The Steele dossier saga may take yet another interesting turn tomorrow, as the House Intelligence Committee readies a vote to release the transcriptions of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s interview.
“If vote to release, will add to record already released by Senate Judiciary. The more, the better,” tweeted York.
House Intel set to vote tomorrow on releasing transcript of Fusion GPS Glenn Simpson interview. If vote to release, will add to record already released by Senate Judiciary. The more, the better.
Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the discredited Steele dossier, is still investigating alleged ties between President Trump and Russia, reportedFox News contributor Sara A. Carter this week.
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Hillary Clinton confidant was interviewed by FBI in connection to the salacious dossier
Sara is a thespian who studied with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and practices foreign accents to embarrass her family in public settings.
Her work along the U.S. Mexico border paved a new path in national security related stories in the region. Her investigations uncovered secret tunnel systems, narcotics-trafficking routes and the involvement of Mexican federal officials in the drug trade.
Sara has made appearances on hundreds of national news and radio shows to discuss her work. She has also made guest appearances on Fox, CNN, BBC International and C-Span. She has interviewed numerous heads of State and foreign officials.
She grew up in Saudi Arabia and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Mexico.
She has spent more than seven months in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2008. Her work on Afghan women and children addicted to Opium garnered first place in Washington D.C. SPJ awards. She embedded with troops on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and spent days with them while being mortared and shot at by Taliban insurgents hiding in the hillsides.
She traveled into Pakistan’s lawless border region with the Pakistani Army in North Waziristan and South Waziristan. She has broken numerous stories on ISIS and al-Qaeda in the region, to include a verified ISIS documents that expose the group’s plans for …READ THE REST
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SARA CARTER: Clinton Foundation “Hatchet Man” Grilled By FBI In Connection To Steele Dossier
In late 2004 I started The Gateway Pundit blog after the presidential election. At that time I had my twin brother Joe and my buddy Chris as regular readers. A lot has changed since then.
Today The Gateway Pundit is one of the top political websites. The Gateway Pundit has 15 million visits each month (Stat Counter – Google Analytics). It is consistentlyrankedasone of the top political blogsin the nation. TGP has been cited by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, The Drudge Report, The Blaze, Mark Levin, FOX Nation and by several international news organizations.
Jim Hoft was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013. Jim Hoft received the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from …READ THE REST
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