Devin Nunes – The Conservative-Patriot Christian Right

The Jessie Liu clue: A D.C. cover-up that IS Spygate

A lengthy yet stupendous article written by J.E. Dyer exposes the hypocrisy of the lying Dems when it comes to criminal justice and the U.S. Constitution. The Dems feign (cough Pelosi) love of the rule of law except or unless that law applies to Dem/Leftist/Deep State law violations. READ ON!

JRH 2/14/20

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The Jessie Liu clue: A D.C. cover-up that IS Spygate

By J.E. Dyer

February 13, 2020

Liberty Unyielding

The “Old” (Eisenhower) Executive Office Building across from the White House in Washington, D.C.. (Image: Wikimedia)

Four federal prosecutors resigned from their case on Tuesday when Attorney General William Barr overruled the sentencing recommendation they made for Roger Stone, whom Robert Mueller had forwarded charges against involving “five separate counts of lying to the House Intelligence Committee and two charges of obstructing a congressional investigation and intimidating a witness.”

Notably, the Justice Department’s lead counsel in the Stone case, Jessie Liu – the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia – had recently turned over that role to Timothy Shea, because Ms. Liu had been nominated for a post at the U.S. Treasury. Liu was also the lead counsel for some time on the Michael Flynn case.

On Tuesday, Trump withdrew the Liu nomination for the Treasury job, about the same time the four prosecutors, three of whom were members of the Mueller team, announced they were off the Stone case. Liu was previously scheduled for a Senate hearing on Thursday.

Jessie Liu – center on MSNBC – MSNBC video (screen capture)

In the interest of getting expeditiously to the meat of this post, I won’t rehash the whole story on this. It can be gleaned at the links. One thing is important to note, however, as we survey what looks very much like a major maneuver of some kind between the “swamp” and the Trump administration.

According to a DOJ source, the four prosecutors who left the Stone case on Tuesday changed their sentencing recommendation between the time they briefed it to the Department and their formal filing with the court. The clear implication is that they told their bosses one thing, but then filed with the court for another. The sentence they recommended – seven to nine years – was well outside the sentencing guidelines for the offenses, and the DOJ (according to the source) had not seen or approved it. Rather, the DOJ thought the recommendation would be a different one.

At this initial stage, readers should draw their own conclusions about who is telling the truth here. There is reason, at least, to believe that the formal sentencing recommendation was made without approval from the DOJ higher-ups.

That would be enough reason for the four prosecutors to be off the case. But Jessie Liu wasn’t involved in the sentencing recommendation, so that incident, in itself, doesn’t explain why her nomination was withdrawn.

Enter the March 2017 handoff

This section of the analysis is what we might call a wholly-owned subsidiary of sundance at Conservative Treehouse, to whom the credit goes for the superb sleuthing that revealed a bottom line I’m going to state up-front. It is fully developed by sundance, and for the essential background and documentation, please read the CTH article.

The bottom line is that some media outlets have had a complete copy of at least the first FISA application on Carter Page since March of 2017, when Senate Intelligence Committee official James Wolfe leaked it to four journalists, including his girlfriend Ali Watkins. This is recorded in documents from James Wolfe’s prosecution, which were unsealed in 2018.

CTH points out what that means: that outlets like the New York Times, where Watkins later took a job, have known what was in the FISA application since shortly after the compromising handover by James Wolfe took place. The date was 17 March 2017, two months after Trump took office, and long before the FISA applications were made available in redacted form to the public.

James A. Wolfe. (Image: Fox News, LinkedIn)

Moreover, Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, may have known about the compromise at the time it happened.

And Jessie Liu was the prosecutor who eventually accepted a plea from James Wolfe to a minimal charge, and effectively swept this bombshell leak of incendiary Top Secret material under the rug. As pointed out at CTH, a core motive for this was the determination of Wolfe’s defense to call witnesses who would almost certainly have revealed that members of the Senate knew what Wolfe was doing.

Sundance calls this the “DC cover-up that’s as big as Spygate.” Key aspects must be noted in that regard; e.g., that there are media outlets that must therefore be complicit in selling the pubic a bill of goods on the “FISA applications” narrative. They’ve known all along what those applications contained, yet published as if they didn’t: not to protect national secrets, but to support a narrative that injured real people – through harassment and manufactured prosecutions – based on falsehoods that the FISA applications expose.

Sundance also makes a sound case that Mark Warner, and probably others, knew as well; not only what was in the FISA applications (which Warner had to know, having been authorized to read them unredacted in the SCIF), but that the FISA applications had been leaked to the media.

Again, it is certain that at least one of the first two FISA applications (from October 2016 and January 2017) constituted the material leaked. A sentencing document filed by the DOJ in December 2018 makes that clear. It may have been only the first application that was leaked; I discuss that below.

This is undoubtedly enough of a compromising situation for some in the Senate to not want it coming out in a confirmation hearing for Jessie Liu. Sundance prepared some good, suggested questions for the now-canceled hearing. But I doubt members of the Senate would really want the answers coming out in public – or even just the implications raised by the questions.

This was Spygate

I would go further than sundance, meanwhile, and say that this cover-up isn’t merely as big as Spygate. It is Spygate. It was part and parcel of the effort to gain advantage over Trump and take him down, an effort that started before he was even elected, and one whose full panoply of methods we still haven’t grasped.

To lay it out, I’ll start by noting something that hadn’t clicked into place with me until sundance highlighted it in the post linked above. I had followed the James Wolfe case, knew about Jessie Liu’s role, and even understood that the classified material involved – i.e., leaked by Wolfe – was related to the FISA applications.

But it hadn’t registered meaningfully with me that Wolfe leaked the material on 17 March 2017.

Recognizing the significance of that specific date makes the difference in how we see the event and its motivation. Why? Because during that period, Devin Nunes was working on a set of requests for the executive agencies which included FISA applications, and information about “unmasking” actions taken by federal authorities.

Devin Nunes (Image: Screen grab of Fox News video, YouTube)

Nunes had sent a demand – disclosed to the Washington Post on 15 March – to the NSA, CIA, and FBI for information from them on whose names had been “unmasked” from incidental (non-targeted) electronic surveillance, in the period of the Trump transition (and probably some additional time on either side of it).

But he also sent a separate request to the Justice Department specifically for FISA applications.

In February 2018, the Lawfare blog posted a handy (if hostile) timeline of Nunes’s efforts to figure out what was going on with the unmasking. Most Spygate followers will chiefly remember Nunes’s dramatic press conferences later in March of 2017.

But he had gained sharpened awareness of the unmasking as an issue when it became clear, with the David Ignatius article in the Washington Post on 11 January 2017, that Michael Flynn had been unmasked in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Nunes fully understood the relationship between FISA-authorized surveillance and unmasking. And he knew that it would be necessary to look into the records on both aspects of intelligence processing to determine what had been going on.

VIDEO: Devin Nunes: Trump Communications ‘Incidentally’ Collected By Intelligence Agencies | NBC News

[Posted by NBC News

1.84M subscribers – Mar 22, 2017

Devin Nunes, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee tells press he has been notified that Trump team communications have been “incidentally,” legally collected. He also said more names involved in Trump campaign have been unmasked but … MORE TO READ]

After President Trump sent his famous 4 March 2017 tweets about having been “wiretapped” by Obama, Nunes and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to the acting attorney general (Dana Boente) requesting “copies of any applications the Justice Department submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, any orders that the court released, and any copies of warrants issued by federal judges or magistrates regarding Trump, his campaign surrogates, business associates, employees, family and friends.” The timeframe requested was the year 2016.

That letter was sent 8 March 2017. And note this about it: whatever your opinion of Devin Nunes, one thing no one would say of him is that he was complicit with either anti-Trump media or anti-Trump officials (i.e., “deep staters”) inside the government.

Thus, his letter of 8 March would have been the first communication from such a person – an official outside the anti-Trump circle – posing formal questions, to which the Carter Page FISA applications had to be the answer.

In other words, Nunes was taking aim at the real target. (Something I noted at the time; see my link on his 22 March 2017 press conference, above.)

Don’t get ahead of me here, because understanding this as a Spygate episode requires seeing it whole. Nunes and Schiff gave the DOJ a deadline of 13 March to respond. On 13 March, the DOJ requested more time. Nunes’s office told the media that if there was no response before FBI Director James Comey testified to the House committee the following Monday (20 March), Nunes would request the information during Comey’s hearing, and would subpoena it if necessary.

On 17 March, the day the FISA applications were made available in the SCIF on Capitol Hill, Nunes then provided this very informative statement to the media: “The Committee is satisfied that the Department of Justice has fully complied with our request for information from our March 8 letter on possible surveillance related to Donald Trump or his associates.”

That statement comports perfectly with what we would expect if the DOJ had forwarded copies of its 2016 applications made to the FISA court, including the Carter Page application.

Note two things. One, fulfilling this request from Nunes and Schiff would have been the reason the Carter Page FISA application was sent to the Hill on 17 March 2017.

Mark Warner and the Senate Intelligence staff would have known the request had been made – and known that the documents were coming on the 17th – because Warner was in the Intelligence Gang of Eight, and Schiff would have shared it with him, at a minimum.

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) – Youtube (screen capture)

Two, only the first Carter Page application, from October 2016, would have met the terms of the House Intelligence Committee request, which was for applications made in 2016.

That’s why I think it’s probable that only the first FISA application was leaked to the media on 17 March 2017.

A decision point, identified

But of more importance is the point that Nunes was the catalyst for shaking it out of the DOJ. That means that at the time the FISA application was leaked, and indeed for at least a couple of weeks before, some group of Deep Staters was closely attuned already to the significance of Nunes’s role and what he was trying to do. They knew he was on the hunt for a trail of activity that would lead back to them.

The interval between 13 and 17 March is thus an intriguing one. The DOJ asked for more time on 13 March, but apparently without previewing anything it was committing to. By 17 March, it had delivered the Carter Page FISA application, along with the others from 2016.

That tells me a decision was made between 13 and 17 March to deploy the Carter Page application rather than trying to keep it under wraps. The method of deployment was sending it to Capitol Hill.

This would constitute circumstantial evidence of the collusion that sundance postulates, presumably involving actors other than James Wolfe on Capitol Hill – and suggesting cooperation with the Justice Department, which sent the FISA application, and the media, whose members received the leak from Wolfe.

On Tuesday 21 March, the day after Comey’s 20 March hearing, Nunes made his famous visit to the White House complex and viewed material on the unmasking of U.S. persons, an inspection arranged for him by officials inside the White House. The next day, 22 March, Nunes briefed his concerns to the media, setting off a firestorm.

There were other events in the ensuing timeline; read them at your leisure. I’ll skip ahead to the one on 30 March, when as Lawfare recounts, “The New York Times reports that Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office working on national security issues, provided Nunes the intelligence documents he referenced in his March 22 press conference.”

The events highlighted above, including that last one, are the ones that matter.

The Nunes events make this Spygate

The date 17 March 2017 was not happenstance. Because Devin Nunes was probing for information about surveillance of the Trump team, there were quite a few people on Capitol Hill – and in the media – who would be motivated to set a counter-operation in motion at the first opportunity.

It’s easy to identify 17 March 2017 as that opportunity, because that’s the date stamped on the “official copy” of the Carter Page FISA application that made its way to the Hill.

But can we find the outlines of a Deep State/anti-Trump plan here? Can we justify thinking in terms of collusion, and supposing that multiple people were involved in taking advantage of that opportunity?

There are strong reasons to say yes. They relate to two circumstances. One is the 30 March New York Times article identifying two individuals as Devin Nunes’s contacts in the White House.

The other is the very first event in the Lawfare timeline: 11 November 2016, when Nunes was appointed as an adviser to the Trump transition team.

Trump-transition-Trump-Tower – AFP video, YouTube (screen capture)

That means Nunes himself had been subject to being dragnetted in the Carter Page surveillance, by the two-hop rule, since 11 November 2016.

Nunes probably wasn’t the only one on Capitol Hill, for that matter. But once he was seriously on the hunt for FISA and unmasking information – which would lead to the activity trail of the anti-Trump surveillance – the motive to keep him under surveillance would have been exceptionally strong. He met that definition by mid-February 2017 at the latest.

Remember, it’s not “wiretapping” we’re talking about. It’s not listening in on phone calls. The method would have been retrieving “non-contents” information from telecom providers, using tailored queries that met the criteria authorized by the Carter Page FISA warrant. That kind of surveillance, covering phone calls, texts, and other instant messages, could be done without the subject or anyone connected with him ever knowing.

If Deep State planners were tracking Nunes, they had not only the motive to drop the Carter Page FISA application to the Hill, and thence to the media, on 17 March 2017, but the means to foresee that Nunes’s contacts with the White House would lead very soon to his being afforded a look at what had been going on there. They were alerted, in other words, to the danger to themselves, in time to take planned and deliberate advantage of the FISA application’s arrival on Capitol Hill.

Tracking Nunes (and probably the other two individuals named by the New York Times) was also a likely and accurate way to identify Nunes’s White House contacts(s). It had the merit of not requiring an initial cue from a source who actually witnessed the interactions. Knowing whom Nunes had been in contact with, his monitors could then ask intelligent questions of White House leakers who had only incidental awareness of what others in their vicinity were doing.

Pulling Liu’s nomination

If I were Trump and Barr, and had assembled information pointing in essence to a scenario like this – or were still in the process of assembling it – I wouldn’t want the Jessie Liu confirmation hearing to trip landmines before their time.

Trump wouldn’t withdraw the Liu nomination merely out of misplaced compassion for embarrassed senators or Deep Staters. He’d have good reasons to do it for his own purposes (with or without a dramatic event like the four prosecutors’ departure).

One of those reasons would be that Jessie Liu probably doesn’t belong in the job at Treasury. Whatever else she knew about James Wolfe and the Senate Intelligence Committee in the March 2017 timeframe, she knew that the classified material Wolfe leaked to the media was the Carter Page FISA application. She was apparently willing to cooperate in keeping that explosive information out of the public eye.

It may be that Liu was less culpably complicit than willing to go along, on the sidelines of an ambiguous situation, under pressure from higher echelon. We needn’t have a bloodthirsty attitude about Liu, per se.

But here’s what we do need to have: an accounting to the American people, before even one more official involved in very questionable actions by the government gets another pass.

The people have trusted the system in the blind long enough. No reckoning – no happy-face career progression for the known participants. If you want to object, go sell it to Michael Flynn and his family. (Or sell it to Roger Stone. DOJ let James Wolfe off with a two-month sentence.)

An additional reason for pulling the Liu nomination is simply that it may not be time to detonate the landmine yet. John Durham is doing his job. He, Barr, and Trump will know when it’s time.

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J.E. Dyer is 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.

The Democrats Reach A New Low – The Dan Bongino Show

Dan Bongino exposes idiot Dems and Dem propaganda MSM siding with Iran over death of Iran’s General Soleimani by an American reaper drone. Some would call this Dem coverage treason. I call it treason. I’m an Independent asking voters to vote GOP to stop this treasonous idiocy from the airwaves.

(Endure the Bongino ads, he has bills to pay like us all)

JRH 1/7/20

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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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VIDEO: Ep. 1152 The Democrats Reach A New Low – The Dan Bongino Show.

Posted by Dan Bongino

337K subscribers – Jan 7, 2020

For show notes, visit https://bongino.com/ep-1152-the-democrats-reach-a-new-low/

[Blog Editor: The Show notes:

In this episode, I address the outrageous media response to the killing of one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. I also address a fascinating interview with Devin Nunes where he drops an explosive piece of information. Finally, I address what John Bolton, and the Democrats, are really up to with the impeachment hoax.

News Picks:

New, deeply disturbing, allegations emerge regarding Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Devin Nunes releases some explosive new information about the fake-whistleblower’s allegations, and the subsequent investigation.

The question resurfaces after the IG report’s release, “what the heck was Bob Mueller doing the whole time?”

Who is Michael Atkinson?

What is John Bolton up to?

The liberal media mourns the death of Soleimani.

Soleimani funeral postponed after dozens are killed in a stampede.]

… MORE TO READ at Youtube

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Before Crossfire Hurricane: Devin Nunes asks the essential question…

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.

JRH 12/11/19 (H/T: J.e. Dyer at Facebook Group Patriot Action Network)

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Before Crossfire Hurricane: Devin Nunes asks the essential question after release of DOJ IG report

By J.E. Dyer

December 11, 2019

Liberty Unyielding

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.

Who was running the spy ring? | ⁦@seanhannity⁩ pic.twitter.com/SHaD4tyxep

— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) December 10, 2019

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 Halper at 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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J.E. Dyer is 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.

ABOUT Liberty Unyielding

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.

Hannity Outline of Dossiers & Memos

John R. Houk

© February 6, 2018

Sean Hannity’s show was awesome last night (2/5/18). Hannity’s opening monologue outlines (he even provides lists as he speaks) how the Memo constructed by the GOP members of the House Intel Committee demonstrates how Crooked Hillary’s campaign used the FBI and Christopher Steele creating lies to harm President Trump before and after his election.

The Dems led by liar Adam Schiff have constructed a Minority-Dem Memo claiming the GOP Memo is filled with political duplicity. Although President Trump hasn’t decided to release the Dem Memo, many pundits expect him to do so. Yet rumor has it that the Dem Memo does not contradict the GOP Memo one iota. Rather the Dem agenda is to discredit the GOP Memo by attacking Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and prominent Intel Committee member – Trey Gowdy.

Attacking the messenger to discredit facts and truth is the standard method utilized by Alinsky, Obama and Crooked Hillary.

To drive Hannity’s opening monologue home, the show has who Hannity calls “The Great One” – Mark Levin. Levin corroborates everything Hannity lined out but emphasizes one key feature – Crooked Hillary paid for it all.

Below are the two videos from the same show.

JRH 2/6/18

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VIDEO: Hannity: Second memo exposes deep state corruption

Posted by Fox News

Published on Feb 5, 2018

Former British spy Christopher Steele was working on a second anti-Trump dossier that contained allegations that were fed to him by Clinton associates and the Obama State Department.

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been the most watched television news channel for more than 15 years and according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll, is the most trusted television news source in the country. Owned by 21st Century Fox, FNC is available in more than 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape, routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre.

… READ THE REST

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VIDEO: Mark Levin talks about the memo madness

Posted by Fox News

Published on Feb 5, 2018

Upcoming host of ‘Life, Liberty & Levin’ sounds off on ‘Hannity.’

… READ THE REST

Liberty’s Worth

Justin Smith writes about how FISA warrants violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Justin is absolutely correct. On a personal level, I feel during war that security overrides Rights. Friends we have been in a state of war with Islamic terrorists since September 11, 2001.

NOW! I have found myself modifying my perspective of the Patriot Act and FISA warrants. Once it has become apparent that Executive Administration of President Barack Hussein Obama weaponized FISA warrants in an effort to maintain a Left-Wing government under Crooked Hillary, I have begun to re-think my concept of the usage of FISA warrants used without probable cause against U.S. citizens. Incidentally, FISA Warrants were not designed for U.S. citizens but rather against non-citizens that might pose a terrorist threat against Americans.

In FISA abuses the FBI, Intelligence Agencies, the State Department and probably more from the Executive Branch; used back door unmasking to spy on American citizens as well as potential dangerous foreign entities.

These FISA abuses under Obama (who also weaponized the IRS and what else?) have made America a Leftist police state with the full cooperation of the MSM that pro-Leftist in influencing America.

Well that is enough of me. Read Justin Smith’s take on how the Fourth Amendment has been unconstitutionally annulled.

JRH 2/4/18

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Liberty’s Worth

By Justin O. Smith

Sent 2/3/18 3:34 PM

One’s liberty is the most precious thing next to life itself, and Americans must stop standing in silence, while Presidents, past and present, and Congressmen erode and trample our Fourth Amendment Right, no matter their intentions, through Orwellian legislation that directly contravenes it. Everyone must vociferously and fiercely oppose and counter these so-called “leaders” and their illegal violations of the Constitution, by replacing all those, who recently voted for the FISA Reauthorization Act of 2017, because no one, even in the name of national security, has any right or authority to take our liberty.

The FISA Reauthorization Act passed in the House, 256 to 164, on January 11th, and it passed by 65 – 34 vote [Blog Editor: Justin’s original text said the FISA reauthorization succeeded by only one vote. I did not find that vote, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur. Many votes often occur until a final vote is taken which often appears different than previous votes for constituents who agree with the majority vote.] in the Senate [S. 139], on January 18th; and, through the House vote on Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the House rejected the USA Rights Act, 233 to 183, and its requirement that officials must obtain warrants before searching and reading Americans’ emails, after they are acquired in any surveillance operation.

Bulk surveillance on all Americans without a warrant, heretofore known to be unConstitutional, is now deemed acceptable by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the U.S. Congress, but incredulously, they do make one exception. A warrant is required for the emails of the subject in an open criminal investigation, where no national security concerns exist, thus providing criminals more rights than normal, law-abiding everyday U.S. citizens.

One must also be shocked by House Joint Resolution 76, which was passed by this Congress and signed by President Trump on August 22, 2017. It allows the searches of homes and businesses without any warrant, in areas adjacent to the Washington [D.C.] Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and extending miles outward in all directions, and far into nearby regions of Maryland and Virginia.

All of the aforementioned goes against the Fourth Amendment, which states that Americans’ rights “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.”

In a ninety-nine page opinion for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Judge Rosemary Collyer had many harsh terms for the Obama Administration. She noted that the Obama administration had ignored Section 702 procedures designed to ensure Americans’ civil rights were safeguarded, as any administration performs the necessary work to provide for our national security. Collyer charged that Obama’s administration had violated Section 702’s requirements and created a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The serious nature of these developments is further highlighted by new evidence exposed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who has deep insight through a “top secret” clearance. He charged on January 18th, that seen through the prism of overt pro-Hillary bias and anti-Trump prejudice exhibited by the CIA, FBI and other agencies and their use of National Security Agency secret information for political purposes, they were all untrustworthy with our information and the nation’s intelligence secrets. The many abuses under the Obama Administration exposes the danger of giving too much power to our intelligence agencies, who seem far too willing to use stored metadata for harassment, blackmail and to further their own political agendas.

FBI Director Christopher Wray viewed Nunes’s classified House Intelligence Memo on Sunday January 21st. The next day Deputy Director Andrew McCabe announced his “retirement”. McCabe was named in the memo, as the person who used the unverified Steele Dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant against President Trump.

The House Intelligence Committee Memo released on February 2nd shows that a presidential campaign was spied on. An unverified dossier, that nobody will stand by under oath was used in an illegal manner to obtain a FISA warrant. And yet, with this knowledge in hand seven days before the House vote, Representative Nunes and twenty-one other House committee members kept over five-hundred of their colleagues in the dark, about domestic spying abuses, while the debate on that very issue was ongoing, and they voted to expand the power of those who abused it.

Surely the expansion of FISA would never have passed the Senate, if the damning information contained in the House Intelligence Committee Memo had been released seven days earlier. If just one conscientious senator had known of the NSA and FBI abuses concealed by the House Intelligence Committee, and changed his vote, the expansion would have failed.

Any American paying attention is now asking, “What is going on with our government?” They know that the Fourth Amendment has been abrogated, gutted, by the very representatives and senators who swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend our U.S. Constitution.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had vowed to fight reauthorization of Section 702 without reforms. Just prior to the vote on the USA Rights Act, he stated: “Our Founders gave us the Fourth Amendment to prevent a tyrannical government from invading our privacy, and we are fools to relinquish that hard-won right because of fear. The Founders did not include the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights as a suggestion.”

Significantly, on January 11th, President Trump noted that Section 702 was used to “badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign“, as he expressed skepticism regarding FISA. At the very least, this should have withheld his signature, until FISA was reformed. He would have served America better, if he had followed his initial gut instinct.

After signing the bill, President Trump falsely told America that it only targeted foreigners. Is this another case of Trump being easily manipulated by his advisors, or is it one more instance of his own lack of knowledge and preparation on an issue?

The FISA Reauthorization Act is now in place until 2024. Each day from this point on, all of us must demand it be rescinded, and before we allow its renewal, it must be reformed.

Liberty is the essence of our natural state, so when Congress acts to limit our liberty in favor of greater security, obtained through a FISA operation with highly questionable results in the war on terrorism, they are philosophically, historically and constitutionally wrong. Our liberty is of infinitely greater worth to us, than the security we have instructed Congress to ensure.

Congress’s recent actions are moves to permanently destroy our right to privacy, exalting safety over liberty and providing neither. And in the process, limited government is being undone, right before our eyes.

As Ludwig von Mises reminds us, government is essentially the negation of liberty. If anyone truly believes that monitoring everyone in America is the least restrictive way to keep us safe, let that person surrender his own privacy. The rest of us will retain ours and provide for our own safety.

I did not consent to the abrogation of my Fourth Amendment Right, and I don’t imagine most of America did either. Our rights are inalienable and cannot be separated from us, not by Congress, not by anyone.

By Justin O. Smith

________________

Edited by John R. Houk

Text embraced by brackets and all source links are by the Editor.

© Justin O. Smith

True Election Collusion – THE MEMO:

Dems, FBI Leadership & DOJ Leadership

John R. Houk

© February 2, 2018

Donald on releasing the FISA Memo (though updated to make the FBI happy) for public consumption:

“[A] lot of people should be ashamed of themselves.” (quote from BPR)

VIDEO: TRUMP REACTS TO FISA MEMO: “I Think It’s Terrible. I Think It’s a Disgrace”

Posted by james hoft

Published on Feb 2, 2018

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”.

JRH 2/2/18

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VIDEO: ITS FINALLY HAPPENING!! 4 PAGE FISA MEMO DECLASSIFIED #TRUMP RELEASES 4 PAGE FISA MEMO

Posted by wikileaks tv

Published on Feb 2, 2018

ITS FINALLY HAPPENING!! 4 PAGE FISA MEMO DECLASSIFIED #TRUMP RELEASES 4 PAGE FISA MEMO

SHOCKING revelations

Credits: fox news

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THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON
February 2, 2018

The Honorable Devin Nunes

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

By George Upper
February 2, 2018 at 12:05pm

The Western Journal

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 Luis Miguel

February 2, 2018

BizPac Review

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

Former Trump foreign policy adviser 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.”

ABC VIDEO VIA TWITTER: 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/OfR9pu29Wo pic.twitter.com/wJHEptrGrk

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 2, 2018

“A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump said over the revelations.

The president couldn’t have put it any better.

____________________

True Election Collusion – THE MEMO:

Dems, FBI Leadership & DOJ Leadership

John R. Houk

© February 2, 2018

_______________

ITS FINALLY HAPPENING!! 4 PAGE FISA MEMO DECLASSIFIED #TRUMP RELEASES 4 PAGE FISA MEMO

Youtube Channel wikileaks tv

_______________

Here’s the Full Text of the FISA Memo Written by Rep. Devin Nunes

The Western Journal

________________

7 biggest takeaways from the FISA memo that was just released

Do YOU Trust Benghazi/Bergdahl Liar?

John R. Houk

© April 5, 2017

Susan Rice is a typical lying Dem that unmasked Trump campaign staff names that did NOTHING illegal while using an investigation of Russian collusion/voting interference as a MERE excuse to politically impugn Donald Trump during the 2016 election and during the Obama lame duck period leading President Trump’s inauguration!!!!

AND even more reprehensible is the Left Stream Media either didn’t report on Ly’n Rice or defended her for doing nothing wrong while simultaneously still stick to the UNPROVEN – ergo lie – accusation the President Trump colluded with the Russians to defeat Crooked Hillary in the 2016 election cycle.

Susan Rice Lying to Americans on 5 MSM Networks

For any American to believe Rice’s words that she “leaked nothing to nobody,” were also duped by her lies about Benghazi and her lies the traitor Bergdahl was an upstanding loyal American: “He served the United States with honor and distinction …”

VIDEO: Susan Rice: Bergdahl Served With ‘Honor and Distinction’

Posted by PoliticalTurkey1

Published on Jun 2, 2014

Hmm … IF SUSAN RICE SAYS SHE DIDN’T UNMASK TRUMP SURVEILLANCE FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES, I CAN CONFIDENTLY SAY “I DON’T BELIEVE HER!”

I have found loads of articles that question the veracity of Susan Rice and Barack Obama. The Left Stream Media will not take up the question of reliability because they are essentially a propaganda of Obama, The Dems and the Left in general.

I am cross posting two articles. One from The Federalist posted today and another from Fox News’ Adam Housley post on April third. At the end, I will provide some links (perhaps some excerpts) from other sources that pretty much have the same opinion about Susan Rice but may add some details lacking between each article.

JRH 4/5/17

Please Support NCCR

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Why Susan Rice’s Role In The Obama Spying Story Is A Big Deal

By Mollie Hemingway

April 5, 2017

The Federalist

Susan Rice was one Obama official who requested the unmasking of Trump associates’ information that was widely disseminated. Here’s why that’s significant.

Since Donald Trump won the election for president in November, U.S. media outlets have received and eagerly published selective, damaging leaks about him from anonymous intelligence officials. The general effort, which appeared highly coordinated, was an effort to delegitimize Trump’s election and paint him as a stooge of Russia or otherwise unfit for office.

The media outlets claimed their information came from very highly placed officials in the Obama administration. Even if they hadn’t claimed their anonymous sources were Obama officials, the information they were leaking, such as the name of a U.S. citizen caught up in surveillance by the Obama administration, would have been known only by highly placed intelligence officials.

As the publishers of the information that was illegally disclosed, many media outlets weren’t keen to make a story, much less a big story, about the leak campaign by Obama officials. This despite the fact that the same Obama officials who had run the infamous Iran Echo Chamber operation, in which reporters were duped into reporting the Obama administration’s spin on the Iran deal, had bragged that they’d continue a highly developed communications operation in the Trump era.

In early March, Donald Trump tweeted out a series of unsubstantiated claims:

Trump Tweets on BHO Wiretapping

Two weeks ago, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, revealed that he’d seen dozens of reports featuring unmasked information on Trump and his associates and family members. He said these reports arose out of incidental collection during FISA surveillance, had nothing to do with Russia, were disseminated widely throughout the intelligence agencies, and contained little to no foreign intelligence value.

It should go without saying that the country’s powerful surveillance capabilities are not to be used against American citizens so that such unmasking should be exceedingly rare, be done for only the strongest reasons, and make pains to avoid the appearance of politicization. Nunes said the incidental collection might be legal but the unmasked dissemination of information about political opponents was disconcerting.

Despite the bombshell allegations, many in the media responded by downplaying or denigrating his news, distracting with process complaints, or quickly thrown-together stories from anonymous sources with no evidence claiming more breathless wrongdoing with Russia.

On Monday, Eli Lake of Bloomberg Views reported that sources said “Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.” Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, was conducting a review of unmasking procedures when he “discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities.”

Susan Rice was Obama’s National Security Advisor for his second term.

Again, many in the media are attempting to downplay, denigrate and distract, some are doing so shamelessly. Here are five reasons why this is a story worth covering:

1) Susan Rice’s Story Changed Dramatically From Two Weeks Ago

Two weeks ago, PBS’ Judy Woodruff asked Rice a very general question about Nunes’ claims:

JUDY WOODRUFF: I began by asking about the allegations leveled today by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes that Trump transition officials, including the president, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration.

SUSAN RICE, Former U.S. National Security Adviser: I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.

I know nothing about this, she said.

Yesterday, in a damage control interview with prominent Democratic journalist Andrea Mitchell, Rice admitted her unmasking efforts and said they were routine. Mitchell’s 16-minute interview involved no tough questions. Mitchell asked, “Did you seek to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition?” Rice responded in the Clintonian fashion, “Absolutely not for any political purposes.” A natural follow-up would have been if she requested the unmasking for any other purpose. It didn’t occur to Mitchell. Instead she followed-up with the related question, “Did you leak?” to which Rice responded, somewhat confusingly, “I leaked nothing to nobody.”

Somehow Rice tried to claim later that her initial statement of having no clue about Nunes’ earlier claim was not at odds with her 16-minute answer about her unmasking efforts.

Rice has a reputation for dishonesty, most notably for her claim that a September 11, 2012, attack in Libya that killed four Americans was a spontaneous result of anger at a video critical of Islam. At the time she said this, the State Department knew well that it was a coordinated terrorist attack.

Rice also falsely claimed that Bowe Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction,” when critics began raising questions about why President Obama traded high-value Taliban detainees and a ransom for the Army deserter. Bergdahl is expected to face a court-martial in August for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. His desertion was already known at the time Rice made her comments.

2) The Unmasking Was Related To Political Information

When Nunes first alerted the public about his concerns over the unmasking and dissemination, he noted that the information had nothing to do with Russia and had little to no intelligence value. Lake reported that Rice’s multiple unmasking requests were related to reports on Trump transition activities. She is said to have requested the identities of Americans in reports of monitored conversations between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition and in surveilled contact between the Trump team and monitored foreign officials.

“One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration,” according to Lake.

When Rice gave her interview to the friendly journalist Mitchell, she gave a hypothetical example of when it would be appropriate to request an unmasking of a U.S. citizen’s name that was caught up in foreign surveillance. She said that if two foreigners were talking about a terrorist attack to be committed with a U.S. citizen, she would seek out that name. That’s a great hypothetical. And no one is making the claim that Susan Rice sought to unmask a Trump family member or transition member’s name because she believed they were about to set off a bomb. They are making the claim that the information in the reports was politically valuable and related to the Trump transition.

3) Susan Rice Worked In The White House

Rice was known as Obama’s “right-hand woman,” “like a sister,” and was his National Security Advisor throughout his second term.

Weeks ago, diplomat Richard Grennell said that if Rice were involved, that would implicate President Obama:

‘But within that realm there could have easily been a political calculation to listen in, and then to take those transcripts and the summaries of those transcripts, make sure that those in the NSC and the political people – like Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice – make sure that they have them so they can leak them to reporters.’

‘I think that it would be easy to figure out if Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes knew about this,’ he added, ‘because if they did, clearly President Obama knew about it.’

Even if Rice wasn’t working with Obama on this effort or informing him of her activities, her role as National Security Advisor means her unmasking request in this instance doesn’t make sense, according to Andrew McCarthy. If the identities of U.S. citizens had intelligence value, it would have been unmasked by agencies that conduct investigations, he wrote:

Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence ‘products’ for the rest of the ‘intelligence community,’ they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under ‘minimization’ standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as ‘obsessive’ in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.

Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

It is unclear what President Obama knew about Rice’s successful request to unmask information on Trump transition members.

4) This Substantiates Nunes’ Claim

When Nunes told the public that information about the Trump team had been collected, unmasked, and widely disseminated, many media figures questioned the legitimacy of his claim. With the news that no less than Susan Rice requested unmasking of political operatives, it appears that Nunes was onto something.

Also of note, Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member on the committee, had been very upset with Nunes for telling the public and the White House about the reports he’d seen before briefing the committee. However, after Schiff saw the information, he more or less went quiet. He didn’t say the reports were a distraction or unimportant, unlike other Democratic operatives.

5) Civil Liberties Questions Remain

The most frequent defense of the Obama administration’s unmasking efforts is that incidental information collection on U.S. citizens is routine, and that requests to unmask that information about U.S. citizens is also routine. When we learn more about the widespread dissemination of such information, we can anticipate that the media and other Democrats will say that such dissemination is more than routine.

When Nunes revealed the collection, unmasking, and dissemination news, he specifically referenced the incidental information collection on members of Congress during the Iran deal. The U.S. spies on foreign leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors. As a result, the Obama administration picked up information on politically valuable information:

White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. ‘We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ‘a senior U.S. official said. ‘We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ‘

Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts.

The Bush administration also collected and used information on members of Congress this way.

In some ways, this “routine” defense of collecting and disseminating information on political adversaries is the most disconcerting. The federal government’s surveillance powers are intense, from metadata collection to surveillance of communications. Such information is easily weaponized and exceedingly difficult to oversee for accountability purposes.

As one journalist who used to be worried about such things wrote a few years ago:

Instead, the NSA’s approach of grabbing up every bit of information that it can guarantees that the metadata and sometimes even the content of legislator communications are swept up, and will continue to be available to a secretive class of executive branch employees for years to come. There is obvious potential that this will be exploited with abusive intent–it isn’t like we’ve never had a president try to spy on his political opponents before! But even absent any nefarious motives, incidentally collected data could damage the integrity of our political system.

Members of the media should try to cover, rather than cover up, this aspect of the story. The civil liberties of U.S. citizens are of vital importance and the unmasking of information on them should not be routine, not regular, and not a light matter.

The media have thousands of questions to force answers on regarding this important story. As Ari Fleischer wrote on Twitter:

About Susan Rice: The President’s National Security Advisor has authority to request unmasking of American names from intel agencies.

But in this instance, I am stunned by the lack of curiosity most media have shown about the facts and circumstances present here.

This is a good example of media giving soft coverage to President Obama while they’re hard on the GOP in general & Trump in particular.

Bear in mind, Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his ‘honorable service’ & claimed he was captured ‘on the battlefield.’

She also said two weeks ago in a TV interview that she didn’t know anything about the unmasking.

I would have thought the media would ask tough questions. There is no reason this should be a FOX News and conservative press issue only.

If I were a reporter, I would want to know why Rice sought the unmasking. The FBI is investigating possible Trump collusion, not the WH.

How often did she ask? What reasons did she give? (Each request is tracked and catalogued in writing by the NSA. A procedure exists.)

The info would have been provided ONLY to her as the requester. It is highly classified. Did she share it? With whom? Why?

If she shared it with anyone, why did she do so? What did they do with it? Did they give it to the media or tell media about it?

One of the reasons we live in a polarized era is because too many reporters look the other way at issues like this. Bias is real.

It’s not too late. The press knows how to dig and get answers. I hope they do so.

It’s not just Rice. She wasn’t the only person to request the unmasking of Trump officials regarding politically sensitive operations, and she wasn’t the person who requested that Flynn’s name be unmasked, meaning she requested at least one other Trump associate’s unmasking. We still don’t know who committed the crime of leaking Flynn’s name to the Washington Post. It’s time to start working on covering this story, rather than running interference for anonymous sources.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

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Susan Rice requested to unmask names of Trump transition officials, sources say

By Adam Housley

April 03, 2017

Fox News

Multiple sources tell Fox News that Susan Rice, former national security adviser under then-President Barack Obama, requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.

The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.

The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.

It was not clear how Rice knew to ask for the names to be unmasked, but the question was being posed by the sources late Monday.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Such amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us by @foxandfriends. “Spied on before nomination.” The real story.

5:15 AM – 3 Apr 2017

“What I know is this … If the intelligence community professionals decide that there’s some value, national security, foreign policy or otherwise in unmasking someone, they will grant those requests,” former Obama State Department spokeswoman and Fox News contributor Marie Harf told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum on “The First 100 Days. “And we have seen no evidence … that there was partisan political notice behind this and we can’t say that unless there’s actual evidence to back that up.”

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked about the revelations at Monday’s briefing, declined to comment specifically on what role Rice may have played or officials’ motives.

“I’m not going to comment on this any further until [congressional] committees have come to a conclusion,” he said, while contrasting the media’s alleged “lack” of interest in these revelations with the intense coverage of suspected Trump-Russia links.

When names of Americans are incidentally collected, they are supposed to be masked, meaning the name or names are redacted from reports – whether it is international or domestic collection, unless it is an issue of national security, crime or if their security is threatened in any way. There are loopholes and ways to unmask through backchannels, but Americans are supposed to be protected from incidental collection. Sources told Fox News that in this case, they were not.

This comes in the wake of Evelyn Farkas’ television interview last month in which the former Obama deputy secretary of defense said in part: “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill – it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

Meanwhile, Fox News also is told that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes knew about unmasking and leaking back in January, well before President Trump’s tweet in March alleging wiretapping.

Nunes has faced criticism from Democrats for viewing pertinent documents on White House grounds and announcing their contents to the press. But sources said “the intelligence agencies slow-rolled Nunes. He could have seen the logs at other places besides the White House SCIF [secure facility], but it had already been a few weeks. So he went to the White House because he could protect his sources and he could get to the logs.”

As the Obama administration left office, it also approved new rules that gave the NSA much broader powers by relaxing the rules about sharing intercepted personal communications and the ability to share those with 16 other intelligence agencies.

Rice is no stranger to controversy. As the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, she appeared on several Sunday news shows to defend the adminstration’s [sic] later debunked claim that the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate in Libya was triggered by an Internet video.

Rice also told ABC News in 2014 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction” and that he “wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.”

Bergdahl is currently facing court-martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for allegedly walking off his post in Afghanistan.

Adam Housley joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 2001 and currently serves as a Los Angeles-based senior correspondent.

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SOURCES: SUSAN RICE BEHIND UNMASKING OF TRUMP OFFICIALS

White House counsel reportedly ID’d former national security adviser

By GARTH KANT

Updated: 04/03/2017 at 11:05 PM

WND

WASHINGTON – Multiple reports indicate former National Security Adviser Susan Rice was the Obama administration official who requested the unmasking of incoming Trump administration officials.

Mike Cernovich broke the story in an article in Medium on Sunday that said, “The White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests.”

Unmasking is the revealing of names within the intelligence community of U.S. citizens whose communications were monitored during foreign surveillance.

According to Fox News, the unmasked names of people associated with Donald Trump were sent widely to top officials in the Obama administration.

That is a potential felony.

The unmasked names were reportedly sent to every member of the National Security Council, former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan and some officials at the Defense Department.

The NSA is required to remove the names of Americans incidentally collected during foreign surveillance before sharing intelligence with other agencies unless there is an issue of national security, but Rice reportedly requested the unmasking of the identities of Trump associates.

Sources said …….

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BOMBSHELL REPORT: Obama National Security Advisor SUSAN RICE Behind Unmasking Of Trump Transition Team

By BEN SHAPIRO

APRIL 3, 2017

Daily Wire

In a massive scoop, on Monday morning Eli Lake of Bloomberg reported that Barack Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, repeatedly requested information from the intelligence community on members of the Trump transition team and campaign, unmasking them to an audience beyond the intelligence community in the process. Normally, raw intelligence masks the identity of American citizens caught up in legal surveillance of other targets.

Here’s Lake:

In February [National Security Council senior director for intelligence] Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy. The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations – primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

Rice denied that she knew anything about members of the Trump transition caught up in incidental intelligence gathering last month. As Lake also points out, the revelation that Rice requested the documents would explain House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes’ trip to the White House two weeks ago – he needed to go there to view Rice’s missives. It would also explain why Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the most ardent Trump critic on wiretapping and leaks, suddenly went silent over the weekend after seeing documents the White House presented to him.

This is indeed a huge story for the Trump White House. It doesn’t change the inaccuracy of Trump’s accusations that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration – there is still zero evidence to support that claim. But it demonstrates that the Trump team was not only targeted by members of the Obama intelligence community for unmasking and likely leaking, but that such unmasking went to the very top of the Obama administration.

And here’s another inconvenient fact …

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Benghazi Liar Susan Rice’s Treachery Continues

By Daniel John Sobieski

April 4, 2017

American Thinker

Call it the tale of two National Security Advisers, Michael Flynn and Susan Rice. As much as Flynn has taken fire as being an architect of unspecified “collusion” with the Russians, Susan Rice has been like the iceberg that sank the Titanic — barely visible above water but dangerous enough to threaten the Trump administration’s ship of state.

As reported by Circa News, Rice, while serving as Obama’s National Security Adviser, requested the unmasking of the names of Team Trump officials mentioned in the so-called “incidental” surveillance of the Trump transition team:

Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left behind in the White House indicate his national security adviser Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates, Circa has learned.

Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested Rice’s interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans’ identities, appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated after Trump’s election in November launched a transition that continued through January.

The intelligence reports included some intercepts of Americans talking to foreigners and many more involving foreign leaders talking about the future president, his campaign associates or his transition, the sources said. Most if not all had nothing to do with the Russian election interference scandal, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the materials.

Ordinarily, such references to Americans would be redacted or minimized by the NSA before being shared with outside intelligence sources, but in these cases names were sometimes unmasked at the request of Rice or the intelligence reports were specific enough that the American’s identity was easily ascertained, the sources said.

Well, isn’t that special? While Trump’s pick for this sensitive post was under scrutiny, Obama’s adviser was doing opposition research which involved data mining classified intelligence reports. Rice requested the unmasking of names, something only three people, according to Circa, were authorized to do:

Dozens of times in 2016, those intelligence reports identified Americans who were directly intercepted talking to foreign sources or were the subject of conversations between two or more monitored foreign figures. Sometimes the Americans’ names were officially unmasked; other times they were so specifically described in the reports that their identities were readily discernible. Among those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

If Susan Rice had worked for Richard Nixon, she could have been one of his Watergate “plumbers”, perhaps retiring as plumber emeritus. We are all familiar with Susan Rice’s tour of the Sunday talk shows after the Benghazi terrorist attack. That was no accident, but a calculated part of the Obama administration’s disinformation campaign to protect President Obama’s reelection chances and …

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‘Absolutely false’: Top Obama adviser denies she ‘unmasked’ Trump associates for political purposes

By Natasha Bertrand

April 4, 2017

Business Insider

Former national security adviser Susan Rice told MSNBC on Tuesday that allegations she “unmasked” associates of Donald Trump for political reasons while she served in the Obama administration were “absolutely false.”

Bloomberg and Fox on Monday reported that Rice had tried to unmask, or learn the identities of, officials on Trump’s transition team whose conversations with foreign agents — or conversations those agents were having about the transition officials — were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations. The Daily Caller then reported that Rice had created a “spreadsheet” with the names she had unmasked.

“The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false. [Yeah right, & she never lied about Benghazi either]

“I was the National Security Adviser. My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country. That’s …

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Rand Paul calls for Susan Rice to testify on unmasking Trump officials

By Juliegrace Brufke, DCNF

April 4, 2017

BizPAC Review

GOP Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said he believes former National Security Advisor Susan Rice should testify before Congress on her request to unmask the names of Trump transition officials collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations.

Paul argued the situation should not be downplayed, saying reforms need to be made to prevent individuals from being blackmailed on personal aspects of their lives through unmasking. He noted there was nothing stopping the former administration from looking through Trump officials and national security advisors’ conversations during the transition window.

“If it is allowed, we shouldn’t be allowing it, but I don’t think should just discount how big a deal it is that Susan Rice was looking at these,” he told reporters Monday. “And she needs to be asked, ‘Did President Obama ask her to do this? Was this a directive from President Obama? I think she should testify under oath on this.”

Paul said he has long thought there are too many people with the ability to unmask individuals.

“The law says you can’t reverse target people, but how would you know that once you get inside the brain and the people that are unmasking people,” Paul continued. “So, what if I decided to unmask and I’m there and I only unmask the conversations of my Democrat opponents — shouldn’t there be more restrictions for unmasking people in the political process?”

He said he believes there should be …

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VIDEO: Susan Rice Requested Intel to Unmask Names of Trump Transition Officials

Posted by Lionel Nation

Published on Apr 3, 2017

BloombergView’s Eli Lake reports that White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.” Not this time. It was Suzie, kids.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-03/top-obama-adviser-sought-names-of-trump-associates-in-intel

The Official Lionel … READ THE REST

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FORMER US ATTORNEY JOSEPH DIGENOVA: SUSAN RICE ORDERED SPY AGENCIES TO PRODUCE ‘DETAILED SPREADSHEETS’ INVOLVING TRUMP

By ALICIA

APRIL 4, 2017

Patriot Tribune

I CAN’T SAY I’M REALLY SURPRISED CONSIDERING THIS IS THE SAME LYING FRAUD WHO GOT HER JOB AS NSA ADVISER AS A POLITICAL FAVOR FROM OBAMA/CLINTON FOR BEING THE FRONT-PERSON IN THE BENGHAZI VIDEO LYING SCHEME.

And she did this all on her own, huh? Do you believe that?

Daily Caller:

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election. More

VIDEO: Hannity: Susan Rice has a lot of explaining to do

Posted by Fox News

Published on Apr 3, 2017

Multiple reports reveal the former Obama adviser requested the names of Trump transition team members be unmasked.

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Former US Attorney: Susan Rice Ordered Spy Agencies To Produce ‘Detailed Spreadsheets’ Involving Trump

By Richard Pollock

04/03/2017 10:08 PM

Daily Caller

Update: In response to a question Tuesday from NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, former Obama White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice denied that she “prepared” spreadsheets of surveilled telephone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, however, reported that Rice “ordered” the spreadsheets to be produced.

In addition, former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova, one of TheDCNF’s sources, said Tuesday in response to Rice that her denial “would come as quite a surprise to the government officials who have reviewed dozens of those spreadsheets.”

…

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No Proof of Trump-Russia Collusion but Lots of Evidence of Obama Spying

By Onan Coca

April 4, 2017

Constitution.com

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson ripped the national media to shreds while condemning the Obama era White House for wrongfully spying on American citizens for political purposes.

Carlson argued that while media continues to focus in on some phantom collusion between President Trump and the Russian government, something for which they have NO PROOF, they are actively ignoring the real scandal unfolding before their eyes. Susan Rice, one of President Obama’s closest advisors, has been caught wrongfully unmasking members of the Trump campaign and transition teams for what seem to be nakedly political purposes. How do we know she did it for political purposes? Many of the reports now being produced show that the data that Rice was collecting had nothing to do with Russia or other national security issues, meaning that she unmasked the names of members of the Trump team without cause.

This fact is what Carlson finds most disturbing because it means that civil libertarians were right all along – there really is NOTHING we can do to stop the government from spying on us.

…

VIDEO: Tucker: Susan Rice revelation more disturbing than Russia

Posted by Fox News

Published on Apr 3, 2017

Carlson then transitioned into a conversation with former Obama advisor David Tafuri, a conversation that grew quite heated when Tafuri argued that the Russia story was the real issue here. Carlson pressed, as he has done time and again with liberals and journalists, for Tafuri to present ANY EVIDENCE that there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Or, for that matter, for Tafuri to present any evidence that Russia had any impact on the recent election. Of course, Tafuri could provide none, nor has any liberal politician or liberal member of the media been able to show a tangible connection between Russia and recent events.

…

VIDEO: Rice unmasked as Team Trump unmasker: What it really means

Posted by Fox News

Published on Apr 3, 2017

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FAKE-NEWS GIANTS CLAIM SUSAN RICE SPY SCANDAL IS ‘FAKE’

Chorus of legacy media: Nothing to see here

By ALICIA POWE

April 4, 2017

WND

WASHINGTON – Is it a real story, or is it fake news?

That’s the raging debate about the exploding scandal over Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of incoming Trump administration officials when she served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser.

Despite some likening the White House use of classified leaks for political purposes to a scandal bigger than Watergate, media outlets Tuesday were shooting down – or flat-out ignoring – the blockbuster report that verified the Obama administration surveilled the Trump team.

…

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Susan Rice Responds To Trump Unmasking Allegations: “I Leaked Nothing To Nobody”

By Tyler Durden

Apr 4, 2017 9:47 PM

ZeroHedge

If anyone expected former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the same Susan Rice who “stretched the truth” about Benghazi, to admit in her first public appearance after news that she unmasked members of the Trump team to admit she did something wrong, will be disappointed. Instead, moments ago she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied on members of the Trump transition team.

[Several MSNBC Tweets of Mitchell/Rice interview]

We doubt that anyone’s opinion will change after hearing the above especially considering that, in addition to Benghazi, Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his “honorable service” and claimed he was captured “on the battlefield”, and then just two weeks ago, she told PBS that she didn’t know anything about the unmasking.

Unfortunately, Mitchell’s list of questions did not go so far as to ask about her false claim in the PBS interview, in which she said “I know nothing about unmasking Trump officials.”

It is thus hardly surprising that now that her memory has been “refreshed” about her role in the unmasking, that Rice clearly remembers doing nothing at all wrong.

On Monday night, Rand Paul and other Republicans called for Rice to testify under oath, a request she sidestepped on Tuesday. “Let’s see what comes,” she told Mitchell, when asked if she would testify on …

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Do YOU Trust Benghazi/Bergdahl Liar?

John R. Houk

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Why Susan Rice’s Role In The Obama Spying Story Is A Big Deal

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Susan Rice requested to unmask names of Trump transition officials, sources say

[Blog Editor: FYI, I did not get Fox News permission to cross post. If requested, this cross post will be removed.]

Fox News Censors Judge Andrew Napolitano

John R. Houk

Judge Andrew Napolitano has caused quite a stir amongst the Media, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and officials in the U.S. government when the Judge stipulated that GCHQ surveilled the Trump campaign for the treasonous President Barack Hussein Obama. Here is the segment on Fox & Friends Tuesday March 14 morning:

VIDEO: Obama went to British intelligence to spy on Trump says Judge Napolitano

Posted by HX Video

Published on Mar 14, 2017

Very shortly after the Judge said he had three sources, the Judge mysteriously – without comment – was removed from Fox News air time. Incidentally, if you listened to the segment, the Judge remarked that the GCHQ person who complied with Obama resigned after Trump was inaugurated. Fox’s censorship means Napolitano can neither name the three intelligence sources nor the name of the person who resigned from GCHQ. ALSO, Fox News used later-in-the-day news anchors to walk back Napolitano’s GCHQ/Obama assertion.

OF COURSE, GCHQ denied any connection to wiretapping (i.e. surveilling) the Trump campaign AND the U.S. government has apologized of the implication because the GCHQ story showed up in official channels via Press Secretary Sean Spicer answers to press questions.

Fox censorship, Napolitano silence on suspension, GCHQ public denial and an U.S. apology is a set-up the typically credible Napolitano to look like a tinfoil conspiracist.

AND YET, is Judge Andrew Napolitano a discredited source on Obama surveillance of President Trump’s campaign? Since I have contended that Barack Hussein Obama was a crooked President from day one of his Administration, I am not prepared to throw the Judge under the bus as all others have seeming done.

Below are two articles that should give you pause before you consider throwing Napolitano under the bus. The first article is from today (3/22/17) from Bob Unruh and the second is from Cliff Kinkaid of AIM posted on 3/21/17.

The first is close to breaking news corroborated by Fox News. The second article pretty much elaborates the details that Judge Andrew Napolitano alluded to in his 2-minute 50-second Fox & Friends segment. In fact, there is so much detail in the second article it is a bit lengthy. You may want to come back a few times to complete and digest the information that demonstrates a Crooked Obama and a nefarious Intel community, not to mention an extremely untrustworthy Director James Comey of the FBI.

JRH 3/22/17

Please Support NCCR

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WHISTLEBLOWER’S LAWYER: COMEY ‘FALSELY’ DENIED EVIDENCE OF SURVEILLANCE

By BOB UNRUH

March 22, 2017

WND

Larry Klayman

The lawyer who founded Judicial Watch and later Freedom Watch, Larry Klayman, has sent a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asking him to look at a whistleblower’s evidence of “systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, again including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly.”

That spying was done, Klayman’s letter contends, by the FBI.

It’s become a major issue following President Trump’s assertion that he and Trump Tower were spied upon by the federal government, and the subsequent denials by intelligence and law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director James Comey, who famously cleared Hillary Clinton on accusations she mishandled classified information as secretary of state.

Klayman has been working with Dennis Montgomery, a former NSA and Central Intelligence Agency contractor who “left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified.”

Montgomery then “sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans.”

Explained Klayman: “Working side by side with former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied in congressional testimony, and former Obama Director of the CIA, the equally ethically challenged John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed ‘up close and personal’ this “Orwellian Big Brother’ intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.”

Trust the government? Maybe you shouldn’t. Read the details in “Lies the Government Told You,” by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

But he said the testimony has been essentially ignored.

Now, however, with the issue pending before Congress, there even are media reports that appear to substantiate the general claims that the government has been spying. The New York Times in January referenced wiretapping at Trump Tower, and just this week ABC News documented that the FBI monitored Trump Tower.

The report claimed, “But it was not placed at the behest of Barack Obama, and the target was not the Trump campaign of 2016. For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York.”

It resulted in the indictments of more than 30 people, ABC said.

Explained the report: “The FBI investigation did not implicate Trump. But Trump Tower was under close watch. Some of the Russian mafia figures worked out of unit 63A in the iconic skyscraper – just three floors below Trump’s penthouse residence – running what prosecutors called an ‘international money-laundering, sports gambling and extortion ring.’”

Klayman, a Washington watchdog who repeatedly took on the Clinton political machine to investigate suspicion of wrongdoing, explained in his letter to Nunes, which was copied to other members of Congress, that he previously won a judgment from U.S. District Judge Richard Leon preliminarily halting the “illegal, warrantless, and massive surveillance of U.S. citiznes [sic] and lawful residents” in 2015.

As part of Nunes’ hearing on claims of government spying, he invited “anyone who has information about these topics to come forward.”

Klayman said that is exactly what Montgomery has done.

“There is a myriad of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of the illegal and unconstitutional surveillance disclosed to the FBI by Montgomery,” said Klayman, describing how his client made an on-camera interview with the agency about the misdeeds some time ago.

He said Montgomery “holds much of the roadmap to ‘draining the swamp’ of this corruption of our democracy.”

Montgomery, Klayman said, has information “that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans.”

During Montgomery’s interview with FBI General Counsel James Baker, under grants of immunity, he “laid out how persons like then businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration.”

“He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, where illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.”

But that interview, “conducted and videotaped by Special FBI Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett, occurred almost two years ago, and nothing that I know of has happened since.”

Klayman wrote that it appears to have been “buried” by Comey, possibly because “the FBI itself collaborates with the spy agencies to conduct illegal surveillance.”

He said he previously visited with a staff lawyer, Allen Souza, to inform Nunes of questions that needed to be put to Comey while under oath.

“My expressed purpose: to have Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee ask Comey, under oath, why he and his FBI have seemingly not moved forward with the Montgomery investigation while, on the other hand, the FBI director recently claimed publicly, I believe falsely, that there is ‘no evidence’ of surveillance on President Trump and those around him by the Obama administration.

“Indeed, there is,” he wrote.

He tells members of Congress that Comey needs to be grilled during a subsequent hearing, now set for March 28. He asks Nunes to respond by March 24 to let “the American people, and Mr. Montgomery … know where you and the other members of your committee stand.”

“Do you intend to get at and investigate the full truth, or as has regrettably been the case for many years in government, sweep the truth under the carpet?”

Other recipients of the letter were Reps. Adam Schiff, Mike Conaway, Peter King, Frank LoBiondo, Tom Rooney, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Michael Turner, Brad Wenstrup, Chris Stewart, Rich Crawford, Trey Gowdy, Elise Stefanik, Will Hurd, Jim Hines, Terri Sewell, Andre Carson, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell, Joaquin Castro and Denny Heck.

Trust the government? Maybe you shouldn’t. Read the details in “Lies the Government Told You,” by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

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A Watergate-style Threat to the Democratic Process

By CLIFF KINCAID

March 21, 2017

Family Security Matters

NYT Front Page – Trump Wiretapped

A special report from the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism; Cliff Kincaid, Director.

[AIM CIJ Director’s Note:

UPDATE: Former NSA/CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery has told Accuracy in Media through his attorney Larry Klayman that it is entirely possible that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was used as a back channel to collect and pass information-based on electronic surveillance of Trump associates and Donald J. Trump personally-to officials in the Obama administration. Montgomery said the procedure known as shell-game eavesdropping, in which the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the GCHQ can also deny that they are wiretapping, could have been used in this case. In other words, the NSA, CIA or FBI would ask the British to conduct the surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government so that U.S. officials could deny their own involvement.

Montgomery said that he has provided extensive evidence of illegal wiretapping by U.S. intelligence agencies to the FBI, but that the Bureau has failed to act on the evidence since he provided it almost two years ago.

Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News had said, “The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ – a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms – has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s.” [Bold Text Editor JRH] However, it may be difficult to find Obama’s personal “fingerprints” on what happened, Napolitano warned. Under these circumstances, the House Intelligence Committee should ask FBI Director James Comey about Montgomery’s evidence of illegal wiretapping and then call in Montgomery for his own personal testimony. Klayman says Montgomery can shed important light on how Trump and many other innocent people can be targeted.

Please call the office of Rep. Devin Nunes at 202-225-4121 and urge that Congress question FBI Director Comey about the Dennis Montgomery case.]

(Editor’s Note: Public hearings on this controversy are scheduled for March 20 and 28 by the House Intelligence Committee.)

Senate Intelligence Committee leaders from both parties, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), have issued a disingenuous statement ^[1] that “no element of the United States government” surveilled “Trump Tower.” They dishonestly evade the fact that media reporting ^[2] two days earlier had said that British intelligence operating at U.S. behest had likely been implicated in wiretapping Trump and Trump associates, all at the instigation of the U.S. government.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on March 16 that Fox News ^[2] sources have reported ^[3] through retired Judge Andrew Napolitano that then-President Obama had used two officials to arrange with the British NSA, called GCHQ or Government Communications Headquarters, to carry out the wiretapping of both Trump and Trump associates. (See this AIM ^[4]guest column.) The British now dispute this claim.

This evasive use of British spying is done in order to leave no American “fingerprints ^[5]” on the highly illegal operation, as the White House quoted Judge Napolitano. It is a long-standing practice under treaty-like intelligence agreements that British intelligence can use NSA facilities, and vice versa, for shell-game eavesdropping.

The trick is for the two agencies to swap places so that the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the GCHQ can deny that they are wiretapping. The Brits are trying to escape in between these moves of what a key expert has called the US-UK “wiretapping shell game.”

This is the first time that news sources ^[2] have explicitly stated that Obama personally ordered the wiretapping of Trump himself, through Obama officials going to the British, though it has been implied in the past by the suspicious lack of any circumspect denials, even when The New York Times said on January 19 and 20 that “wiretapped communications” went to the Obama White House. No one in the article said “Obama White House-but not Obama personally.”

Consider how one important person-President Trump-got the clear media message that he was indeed the target of the spying: President Trump told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that he read this New York Times story of January 20 before he tweeted about Obama “wiretapping” him. White House spokesman Spicer quoted from this article.

President Trump told Carlson on Fox ^[6] on March 15 why he tweeted what he did: “Well, I’ve been reading…I think it was January 20…New York Times article where they were talking about wiretapping….I think they used that exact term.”

NEW YORK TIMES (print edition) Jan. 20, 2017, Headline:

“Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides”

“found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing … [but]

“… Wiretapped communications had been provided to the [Obama] White House.” [Emphasis added; bracketed [ ] text added.]

And since the “wiretapped communications” had been given to the Obama “White House,” according to The New York Times ^[7], it naturally leads to the inference that Obama himself knew and approved of the “wiretapping” of the Trump team. Otherwise, the question would indeed be Watergate déjà vu: What did Obama know and when did he know it?

Remember, this is the same New York Times, along with other hostile media, that is attacking President Trump for making what it calls “baseless” and “unsubstantiated” claims of Obama administration wiretapping of Trump. It is its own reporting that President Trump was referring to.

The Times hypocritically suppresses its own front-page headline stories about “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides” which claimed that these “wiretapped communications” reports went to the Obama White House (New York Times ^[7], Jan. 20, 2017).

White House spokesman Spicer forcefully made this point to the press, which viciously dodged his points to continue insisting ^[8] that “there’s no evidence of this” at all, repeatedly and rudely interrupting Spicer in an acrimonious confrontation.

Again, the question is: What did Obama know and when did he know it?

How the “Wiretap Shell Game” Works

Some reports claim that the Obama administration sought and/or obtained FISA Court warrants to tap phone calls and hack emails in Trump Tower.

But FISA warrants are routinely avoided by a little-known intelligence trick of using U.S.-British intelligence “reciprocity agreements” to dodge U.S. laws and vice versa. There are now direct reports ^[5] of this Obama-orchestrated British wiretapping of Trump, cited by the White House to back up President Trump’s statements and tweets.

The British are issuing denials ^[9]. But it is well-known that U.S. intelligence agencies can routinely arrange for British intelligence officers to use NSA facilities to spy on Americans, so that the U.S. agencies can claim that “they” (the U.S.) did no wiretapping or surveillance of Americans. It is a type of “plausible denial” government lie (see more on this in the appendix to this article). [Bold Text Editor JRH]

The strange involvement of an “ex” British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, in conducting “opposition research” during a U.S. election has raised no questions in the left-wing media. It bears consideration, as it could represent in reality a British “reciprocity” covert operation on behalf of Obama’s CIA, one to fabricate discrediting disinformation about Trump, not a mere intelligence-gathering or wiretapping operation.

The exact means and exact agency by which this wiretapping, or much of it, has been done had been left unclear until now, when the claimed British connection surfaced. These types of British surveillance wiretaps are known as operations under “UKUSA” and “BRUSA” intelligence “reciprocity” agreements, which are the functional equivalent of formal treaties in the spy world.

Such “reciprocity” operations are designed to evade the laws of each country, the U.S. and the UK, by having the British spy on Americans who the Americans want spied on, and having the Americans spy on the British who the Brits want spied on. [Bold Text Editor JRH] Each side then exchanges the wiretap and other data the other side wants, thus without directly incriminating themselves. UKUSA reciprocity treaty “requests” have the force of direct orders to the other country’s intelligence agencies.

The wiretap data is exchanged under bogus traditional claims of the “extreme sensitivity” of “foreign liaison” intelligence, in order to obstruct outside oversight and thus in reality conceal surveillance of questionable legality. The UKUSA arrangements go beyond mere data searches and exchanges, by having, for example, British agents use NSA equipment and facilities on a rental lease basis to spy on the Americans that U.S. agencies want surveilled (and vice versa) so that the best equipment in the best position of access is used.

Former Justice Department Nazi-hunter John Loftus has documented how this British-U.S. “wiretap shell game” works, and pointed out how it is used to spy on political candidates in elections, and is covered up from Congress. Loftus reported:

“Over the years the British back-channel inside the NSA was used for a variety of political dirty tricks. A large number of American candidates for public office have been placed under electronic surveillance by British intelligence officers sitting at their ‘temporary listening post’ at [NSA] Fort Meade.” [Loftus ^[10], Secret War Against the Jews^[11], 1997, p. 195]

The media have been saying that their government sources report that the CIA-NSA-FBI intercept targeting of Russians shifted to the targeting of the Trump team by September, 2016-possibly as early as June, 2016. There are reports of rejected FISA court applications in June ^[12] and July ^[13] of 2016 which would indicate that change of focus. (Incidentally, rejections by the FISA court are normally almost unheard-of.)

The BBC’s twist on the third alleged try at a FISA warrant, allegedly granted on October 15, was that it was narrowly drawn against only two Russian banks. But the BBC was at pains to assure us that they had an unnamed source who said that “three of Mr. Trump’s associates were the subject of the inquiry.”

“But it’s clear this is about Trump,” the source told the BBC ^[13].

New York Times Lies About Its Own Reporting

Meanwhile The New York Times ^[14] is doubling down on its lies, pretending it never reported that Trump or his aides had been wiretapped ^[7], and with supreme chutzpah claims, “It is not clear why Mr. Trump thought he was wiretapped or what led him to make the claim.” Again, look at the front-page New York Times headline.

The New York Times has been forced by confused readers to grudgingly admit ^[15] that President Trump’s tweets on Obama’s wiretapping actually do “echo certain aspects of The New York Times’s reporting from recent weeks.” But they try to offer up sorry excuses to explain away the glaring contradiction in their own reporting of Obama administration wiretapping of Trump and/or Trump people-and then their denials of it. The New York Times claims ^[16] that what they originally said was that Obama officials merely investigated past wiretap data in archives of “routine” surveillance already done, but did not wiretap into future data.

But the New York Times stated in January ^[7] that after past recordings of phone calls of Trump people had been checked, that the FBI “asked” the NSA to continue to “collect as much information as possible”-evidently without restraint or limitations-in what were clearly all future wiretapped calls between Russians and Trump people. It’s known as an intelligence “collection requirement.” (New York Times on January 20 ^[7] and February 14 ^[17]; see also the BBC ^[13] on January 12.)

White House spokesman Spicer, days before the Times’ excuse-making, clearly explained ^[16] that President Trump’s tweets on March 4 were based on open-source news media reporting of the wiretaps-thus including The New York Times-over the last few months.

In fact, the news media have been reporting ^[18] since at least September 23, 2016, that U.S. intelligence has been “actively monitoring” the “talks” (conversations), “wiretapping” the phone “calls,” and intercepting other communications of Trump aides or Trump himself-communications allegedly made with the Russians.

“Active monitoring” means wiretapping and surveillance of future phone calls, emails, texts, and other communications on an ongoing basis.

Not a shred of any New York Times or other reporting since September, 2016 on the “wiretapping” of Trump and/or his aides has demonstrated any concern whatsoever for Trump’s civil rights or the sanctity of the election process. No concern was expressed by the CIA, FBI, NSA or other agencies, or by the Obama White House-or by the media doing the reporting. In fact, they have been quite excited and eager about the prospect of illegal snooping on Trump.

As White House spokesman Spicer pointed out, efforts were made by Obama officials during their last days in office to lessen the protections of wiretap data in order to spread more widely any highly-sensitive wiretap data on Trump. The New York Times reported ^[19] on March 1 that the Obama administration’s lowering of “classification levels” of NSA data was done to “spread” the Trump wiretaps around various agencies and even foreign governments (see Obama DNI James Clapper’s orders lowering security protections of raw NSA intercept data, December. 15, 2016).

The New York Times had originally reported ^[20] on January 12 that this massive lowering of NSA wiretap data security was in contrast to Obama’s previous tightening of regulations in 2014, after the Snowden mass leak, to give “privacy protections to foreigners,” like they were Americans. But not for Trump.

The New York Times headline story ^[19] on March 1 that said Obama officials had “Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking” also admitted that officials say that alleged Trump collusion with Russia “has not been confirmed” in any of that intelligence wiretap data.

So what were they “rushing” to “preserve?” It is the purported Trump “conspiracy” with Russia that is utterly unsubstantiated and baseless. Wiretapping one’s political opponents in an election, as Obama or his minions have done, is a classic Watergate-style threat to the democratic process.

The Fake “Trump Dossier”

“As part of the inquiry,” wrote The New York Times, this “wiretapping” was done by the CIA, FBI and/or NSA to try to “investigate” the alleged Trump-Russian connections claimed in what is known as the (fake) “Trump dossier”-within a broader investigation of alleged Russian hacking and other supposed election interference (NY Times, January 20 ^[7], February 14 ^[17], 2017).

This “Trump dossier” is the controversial document composed by ex-British agent Christopher Steele, who had been paid by Hillary Clinton’s still unidentified backers to do election “opposition research” against then-candidate Trump. It is riddled with absurd self-contradictions and vile allegations against President Trump.

The “dossier ^[21]” cannot even make up its mind, so to speak, as to whether the Russians did spend “years” passing political dirt on Hillary Clinton to Trump to help “cultivate” relationship with him-or did not in fact ever pass such info to Trump (Steele report ^[21], June 20, 2016). There are at least eight different origins of the hacked or leaked DNC emails claimed in the “dossier,” including that Trump hacked them, not the Russians, or that they were all just “created” or “made up.”

The one-party opposition media have managed to ignore the ridiculous contents of the bogus “Trump dossier” with its raving lunatic absurdities.

For example, thousands of Russian retirement “pensioners,” according to the “dossier,” did the hacking of the DNC emails and passed them on to Russian officials, apparently in secret meetings at (we infer) park benches and shuffleboard affairs in Miami and elsewhere (Steele reports 095 and 111 ^[21] and Newsweek ^[22], November 4, 2016).

These Russian retirement pensioners living in the U.S. are “hacking…cyberoperatives” according to Newsweek, in its pre-election article ^[22] heavily based on Steele’s “Trump dossier,” oblivious to the patent absurdity of the claim.

You will not hear about that from the anti-Trump media, which so desperately wants the “Trump dossier” to be believed, regardless of whether any of it is true.

Appendix:

Former Justice Department Nazi-hunter, John Loftus, has explained how this US-British reciprocity scheme-or “wiretap shell game,” as he calls it-works. Loftus’ evidence of the top secret trick of US-British, NSA-GCHQ wiretapping of Americans is based on numerous NSA sources and others from many agencies stretching back decades, including censorship of this information from his and another expert’s early book manuscripts because of “classification” (Loftus ^[10], Secret War Against the Jews ^[11], 1997, pp. 188-195, 548-9).

According to Loftus this is how the illegal wiretapping “game” is played:

“… the NSA headquarters [at Fort Meade, Md.] is also the chief British espionage base in the United States. The presence of British wiretappers at the keyboards of American eavesdropping computers is a closely guarded secret….”

“The NSA is a giant vacuum cleaner. It sucks in every form of electronic information, from telephone calls to telegrams, across the United States. The presence of British personnel is essential for the American wiretappers to claim plausible deniability.

“Here’s how the game is played. The British liaison officer at [NSA Hq] Fort Meade types the [NSA-supplied] target list of ‘suspects’ into the American computer. The NSA computer sorts through its wiretaps and gives the British officer the recording of any American citizen he wants.

“Since it is technically a British target of surveillance, no American search warrant is necessary. [Loftus’ italics] The British officer then simply hands the results over to his American liaison officer. Of course, the Americans provide the same service to the British in return….”

“According to our sources, this duplicitous, reciprocal arrangement disguises the most massive, and illegal, domestic espionage apparatus in the world….

“Through this charade, the intelligence services of each country can claim that they are not targeting their own citizens. The targeting is done by an authorized foreign agent, the intelligence liaison resident in Britain or the United States” [Loftus, pp. 189-190; endnotes omitted].

Loftus describes how the courts tried to shut down some of the domestic wiretapping abuses, and how the FBI succeeded in evading the judiciary. Then the Bureau got its dream come true with the FISA law, which only applied to U.S. agencies, not the British:

“In 1978 Congress finally passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) Act [or FISA], a feeble attempt to stamp out some of the worst excesses of domestic espionage…. [But FISA] was restricted only to targeting by American agencies, leaving the British liaison officer with a major loophole. The restrictive language added to the FIS Act [FISA] left unchanged the arrangement under which the British wiretapped American suspects and then passed on the information to the NSA.”

“To this day Congress does not realize that the British liaison officers at the NSA are still free to use American equipment to spy on American citizens. And, in fact, they are doing just that. Congress has been kept in the dark deliberately” [Loftus, pp. 191-2].

Naturally, such dirty-trick U.S.-British spying schemes have led to political abuses. In a comment of eerie timeliness today, with the claims of Obama directing the wiretapping of candidate Trump through British intelligence, Loftus states that:

“Over the years the British back-channel inside the NSA was used for a variety of political dirty tricks. A large number of American candidates for public office have been placed under electronic surveillance by British intelligence officers sitting at their ‘temporary listening post’ at [NSA] Fort Meade.” [Loftus, p. 195]

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[1] statement: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/16/senators-no-indications-trump-tower-subject-surveillance.html

[2] media reporting: http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/03/14/judge-napolitano-three-intel-sources-say-obama-looked-to-brit-agency-to-spy-on-trump/

[3] reported: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/03/14/judge-napolitano-why-there-may-never-be-proof-even-if-obama-spied-trump

[4] AIM: http://www.aim.org/guest-column/obama-british-intel-agency-conspiracy-to-spy-on-trump-exposed-by-nj-judge/

[5] fingerprints: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/14/plot-thickens-in-probe-house-it-contractors.html

[6] Fox: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/03/16/carlson_to_trump_why_not_gather_evidence_confront_intelligence_agencies_if_you_were_wiretapped.html

[7] New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html

[8] insisting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/16/sean-spicers-angry-lonely-defense-of-trumps-wiretapping-claim-annotated/

[9] denials: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39300191

[10] Loftus: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Jews-Espionage/dp/0312156480

[11] Secret War Against the Jews: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0312156480

[12] June: https://heatst.com/world/exclusive-fbi-granted-fisa-warrant-covering-trump-camps-ties-to-russia/

[13] July: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38589427

[14] New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/trump-wiretap-claim-obama-comey-congress.html

[15] admit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/public-editor/trump-obama-wiretap-liz-spayd-public-editor.html

[16] claims: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/us/politics/kellyanne-conway-obama-microwave-surveillance.html

[17] February 14: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html

[18] reporting: https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-officials-probe-ties-between-trump-adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html

[19] reported: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/politics/obama-trump-russia-election-hacking.html

[20] reported: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html

[21] dossier: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia

[22] Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-hillary-clinton-united-states-europe-516895

______________

Fox News Censors Judge Andrew Napolitano

John R. Houk

Further Reading:

https://www.intellihub.com/fox-news-pulls-judge-napolitano-off-air-after-trump-wiretap-claims

http://noisyroom.net/blog/2017/03/21/trump-vs-fox-news-on-wiretapping/

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/03/judge_napolitano_pulled_from_fox_news_airwaves.html

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/silenced-judge-napolitano-reportedly-suspended-by-fox-news-after-claiming-obama-used-british-intel-to-spy-on-trump_03212017

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WHISTLEBLOWER’S LAWYER: COMEY ‘FALSELY’ DENIED EVIDENCE OF SURVEILLANCE

Click here for reuse options!

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A Watergate-style Threat to the Democratic Process

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism. He can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

The views expressed in the articles published in FamilySecurityMatters.org are those of the authors. These views should not be construed as the views of FamilySecurityMatters.org or of the Family Security Foundation, Inc., as an attempt to help or prevent the passage of any legislation, or as an intervention in any political campaign for public office. COPYRIGHT 2016 FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS INC.

BENGHAZI: THE MORE WE HEAR, THE WORSE IT GETS

ACT for America brings up some recent points of interesting pertaining to Benghazigate. You know, that which Obama claims is a phony scandal or should I say one of many phony scandals the President is attempting to persuade Americans are irrelevant.

[Here is a video that has nothing to do with the ACT for America email on Benghazigate, but since I am a Palin fan and she is speaking of Obama’s phony scandals, I couldn’t resist to include it.]

VIDEO: Obama’s Second Term Scandals “Phony?” – Sarah Palin & Michele Bachmann On The Record

JRH 11/20/13

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BENGHAZI: THE MORE WE HEAR, THE WORSE IT GETS

By Lisa Piraneo, Director of Government Relations

Sent: 11/19/2013 1:54 PM

Sent from: ACT for America

The more time that passes since the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador, the more we hear troubling information about it.

For example, just last week the following concerning allegations came to light:

1. Months before the attack, American intelligence knew about a massive al-Qaeda rally during which there were calls for the murder of U.S. diplomats. Further, U.S. intelligence officials circulated not one, but THREE reports within the Departments of Defense, State and multiple intelligence agencies detailing these threats. Click HERE for an article providing more details.

2. The attackers knew the location of Ambassador Stevens’ safe room, beforehand. Click HERE for more details.

In addition, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA/22^nd) recently sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner regarding his concerns about Benghazi. His letter included nine important questions that he feels deserve answers and we couldn’t agree more.

Further, in a recent interview with Chris Wallace, Rep. Nunes spoke about his concerns with “discrepancies” between statements of the survivors of the attack and the Administration.

Our enemies are watching as the Administration and the U.S. Congress continue to demonstrate that the Benghazi attack isn’t a high priority. This makes our nation and our citizens more vulnerable, both at home and abroad.

As of today, 178 members of the U.S. House of Representatives (more than a supermajority) have publicly stated their support for the creation of a special committee by signing on as a cosponsor to Rep. Frank Wolf’s legislation, H. Res. 36. Is YOUR Representative on the bill? And if not, why not?

** Important Benghazi Action Item **

Please contact your legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives TODAY to express support for H. Res. 36, Rep. Frank Wolf’s legislation creating a special congressional committee to investigate the Benghazi attack. Further, please pass this request on to everyone you know.

Click HERE to obtain contact information for your House Representative.

Click HERE for a list of Members that have already cosponsored Rep. Wolf’s bill and if your House legislator is on the list, be sure to thank him/her!

After one year of alternative approaches yielding no positive results, there is no excuse for a Member of Congress to not support a special Benghazi committee at this time.

Two more additional important facts:

1. The special committee would be comprised of members of each of the 5 congressional committees that have Benghazi in their jurisdiction, and could use the information those committees have received to-date (so no “starting over” is necessary).

2. The special committee would not cost the taxpayer one dime.

Please let your Representative know that this is a very important issue to you and that you are a constituent and a voter. Let him/her know that you will be tracking how the U.S. Congress handles the Benghazi issue. As always, please be respectful at all times.

(NOTE: H. Res. 36, Rep. Wolf’s Benghazi bill, is NOT the same as H. R. 36. Please be sure to accurately identify the legislation we are supporting, to avoid confusion.)

Thank you for all that you do. Together we ARE making a difference.

REMEMBER, YOUR VOICE COUNTS! IF EACH OF US DOES JUST A LITTLE, TOGETHER WE CAN ACCOMPLISH A LOT!

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ACT for America is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America, a grassroots network committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam. We are only as strong as our supporters, and your volunteer and financial support is essential to our success. Thank you for helping us make America safer and more secure.

ABOUT ACT FOR AMERICA PAGE

Video: This is ACT! for America, Fall 2012

ACT! for America was founded by Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese immigrant who came to the United States after losing her country of birth to militant Muslim fundamentalists during the Lebanese Civil War.

ACT! for America is a non-partisan, non-sectarian organization whose mission is to give Americans concerned about national security, terrorism, and the threat of radical Islam, a powerful, organized, informed and mobilized voice.

Whether the specific threat is violent jihad, stealth jihad, the advance of sharia law, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, or the scourge of political correctness which is enabling the rise of radical Islam, ACT! for America stands ready to take action as the largest national security grassroots organization in America.

Through informed community action, education, public policy initiatives and grassroots lobbying, ACT! for America is successfully combating the threat of radical Islam.

Our recent successes include:

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