This follow up links to the PDF that partially unredacts IG Horowitz’s foot notes that expose FBI deception in its presentation to a FISA Court to get secret warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The follow is entitled, “FBI failed to review Steele’s ties to Russians, warned some of dossier was Moscow disinformation”.
JRH 4/11/20
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Key FBI officials failed to review an intelligence file identifying Christopher Steele’s ties to Russian oligarchs and were later advised some of the information he provided agents in his dossier appeared to be misinformation planted by Russian intelligence, according to declassified information made public Friday.
The explosive revelations were contained in footnotes that had been originally redacted from Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s December report on FBI failures in the Russia case. The information was provided to two Senate committees in recent days.
One of the newly declassified footnotes highlights a glaring misstep early in the Russia case, when key officials failed to review the intelligence control file for Steele, a former MI6 agent who approached the FBI with unverified allegations about Trump after he was hired to do opposition research by the firm working for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Checking such files is a basic procedure in a counterintelligence probe when an informant is involved, officials told Just the News.
The footnote states that an FBI intelligence analyst and a supervisory special agent working on the Crossfire Hurricane probe admitted they “did not recall reviewing information in Steele’s Delta file documenting Steele’s frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs in 2015.”
“In addition to the information in Steele’s Delta file documenting Steele’s frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarch, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received [redacted] indicating the potential for Russia disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting,” a second footnote revealed.
Specifically, that footnote added: “A [redacted] 2017 report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of (former Trump lawyer) Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”
That same footnote reveals a separate report to the FBI, dated 2017, “contained information … that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.” RIS is an acronym for Russian intelligence services.
The new information provides the most explosive information to date that FBI officials had serious reason to doubt Steele’s dossier when it first arrived and during the time it was used to support FISA surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign in late 2016 and 2017.
Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who worked to get the footnotes declassified, said Friday the information withheld from the American public for two years confirms the FBI collusion probe that dogged the Trump administration was flawed from start to finish and covered up by a false narrative driven by news media leaks.
“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation,” the senators said. “The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative.
“The mounting evidence undercutting this narrative should have stopped the investigation early in its tracks. Instead, it took several years and millions in taxpayer dollars to conclude that the allegations were baseless.”
You can read the newly declassified documents here.
JusttheNews.com is committed to just reporting facts from journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where opinion and supposition are too often substituted for fact and where journalists rush to get things first and hope their stories are correct, JusttheNews.com tries to stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of getting news first, but first getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive news you can trust.
JusttheNews.com is a back-to-the-future initiative where old-fashioned, honest and exclusive reporting is delivered in a neutral voice, but delivered through the modern channels of YouTube, podcasting, e-books and social media. And in a twist of old and new, JusttheNews.com journalists deliver unprecedented transparency by offering a Dig Deeper tool on their Web site that …READ THE REST
Declassified case notes referring to Christopher Steele deception and FBI knowledge of that deception demonstrates just how infested and invested the FBI is as a Deep State agent to take down a sitting President. NO ONE past or present in the FBI to date has been accountable! WHY THE HELL NOT?!
JRH 4/10/20
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Russia case footnotes to be declassified, exposing FBI concerns about Steele disinformation
Previously redacted footnotes from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report expected to raise questions about prior FBI assessment of key informant.
FBI to face new scrutiny with declassified Russia case notes.
U.S. intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI’s investigation into President Trump’s campaign, including that agents possessed evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian disinformation, Just the News has learned.
The previously redacted footnotes are likely to raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials supplied to Congress.
The declassified sections from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December review of FBI FISA abuse could be made available to key Senate and House committees as early as the end of this week, according to people familiar with the effort.
The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected, that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.
The new information “will make clear the FBI possessed information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to sustain a collusion investigation” and will be specific enough to renew a debate in Washington over “whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly,” one source with direct knowledge said.
The evidence could also raise new questions about whether statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading, and whether the intelligence community’s official assessment that Vladimir Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence in FBI files, the sources said.
Grassley and Johnson are two strong allies of Trump who played a key role in debunking the false collusion allegations the FBI investigated. Johnson’s investigators flagged the redacted passages during a review of the Horowitz report and worked with Grassley’s team to escalate to Attorney General William Barr.
“We are concerned that certain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” Grassley and Johnson wrote Barr. “This classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation.”
Sources said DNI and Justice Department are planning to declassify those four footnotes as well as others in the report that will provide new understanding about failures in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia collusion probe.
One of the key revelations will be the unmasking of footnotes that show specific red flags raised inside the bureau’s intelligence files that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent whose anti-Trump dossier played a key role in the collusion probe, could have been the victim of Russian disinformation through his contacts with Russian oligarchs, the sources said.
Horowitz’s report in December concluded that most of the allegations Steele included in the dossier he gave the FBI were inaccurate, uncorroborated, or internet rumor and that the FBI falsely represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Steele’s intelligence had been verified in securing a FISA warrant to target the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page in fall 2016 in an investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
Horowitz’s report also raised concerns the FBI failed to fully evaluate evidence in its intelligence files that suggested Russian disinformation was flowing to Steele, who was working during the 2016 campaign for the opposition research firm trying to help Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party defeat Trump.
Those concerns were echoed in the report by former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and former Justice Department lawyer Stuart Evans.
“In view of information we found in FBI files we reviewed, and that was available to the Crossfire Hurricane team during the relevant time period, we believe that more should have been done to examine Steele’s contacts with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele’s reporting or, at a minimum, influenced Steele’s understanding of events in Russia that furnished context for the analytical judgments he used to evaluate the reporting,” Horowitz wrote at the time. “We agree with the assessment of Priestap and Evans that this issue warranted more scrutiny than it was afforded.”
While Horowitz raised the issue broadly, a detailed set of footnotes laying out what actually was in the FBI files was completely redacted. That footnote is expected, along with other information, to be declassified.
Persons familiar with the effort said the new declassifications also may raise questions about representations FBI witnesses made in classified briefings and briefing documents to Congress in 2017.
Horowitz’s report flagged one such possible episode, recounting a memo that the FBI provided in December 2017 to congressional leaders that claimed to have dismissed the notion that Steele was the victim of disinformation.
“According to an FBI memorandum prepared in December 2017 for a Congressional briefing, by the time the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was transferred to the Special Counsel in May 2017, the FBI did not assess it likely that the [Steele] [ election reporting] was generated in connection to a Russian disinformation campaign,” Horowitz noted.
Such a claim may have dismissed or overlooked evidence sitting in the FBI’s own files, the report suggested.
When pressed by the IG about the possibility that Steele had been the victim of Russian disinformation, Priestap, the former counterintelligence chief whose supervised the lead case agent Peter Strzok, offered an uncertain answer.
“I’m struggling, with, when you know the Russians, and this I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they’re trying to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don’t know why you’d run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side,” Priestap answered.
Steele broadly defended his work in an interview with the IG. And after Horowitz’s report was issued, the former British spy issued a statement through his lawyers and his company Orbis Business Intelligence disputing many of the IG’s findings, including the allegation that Steele’s primary sub-source had disowned or denied much of the information attributed to him in the dossier.
“Public discussions about a source are always fraught with danger for the source and the source’s sub-source,” the statement said. “Had Orbis been given an opportunity to respond in a private session, the statement by the primary sub-source would be put in a very different light.”
Horowitz isn’t the only government official to raise concerns that Steele may have been victimized by Russian disinformation. One of the Democrats’ star witnesses during President Trump’s impeachment investigation, government Russia expert Fiona Hill, testified about Steele that she had “misgivings and concern that he could have been played” by Russian disinformation. Hill had previously worked with Steele when he was with MI6.
“Their goal was to discredit the presidency,” she testified in an October deposition. “Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what the Russians intended.”
The new evidence from the declassified footnotes will give the American public a first chance to evaluate whether the FBI dropped the ball on evaluating Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier.
Whatever the final verdict, the upcoming declassifications are a pointed reminder that the public still has much to learn about what did, and did not, go right in the Russia collusion probe.
JusttheNews.com is committed to just reporting facts from journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where opinion and supposition are too often substituted for fact and where journalists rush to get things first and hope their stories are correct, JusttheNews.com tries to stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of getting news first, but first getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive news you can trust.
JusttheNews.com is a back-to-the-future initiative where old-fashioned, honest and exclusive reporting is delivered in a neutral voice, but delivered through the modern channels of YouTube, podcasting, e-books and social media. And in a twist of old and new, JusttheNews.com journalists deliver unprecedented transparency by offering a Dig Deeper tool on their Web site that … READ THE REST
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
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.
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.
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.
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 formalquestions, 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.
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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BLOG EDITOR: I’ve apparently been placed in restricted Facebook Jail! The restriction was relegated after criticizing Democrats for supporting abortion in one post and criticizing Virginia Dems for gun-grabbing legislation and levying protester restrictions. Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me completely. Conservatives are a huge portion of Facebook. If more or all Conservatives are banned, it will affect the Facebook advertising revenue paradigm. SO FIGHT CENSORSHIP BY SHARE – SHARE – SHARE!!! Facebook notified me in pop-up on 1/20/20: “You’re temporarily restricted from joining and posting to groups that you do not manage until April 18 at 7:04 PM.”
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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.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked Federal U.S. Attorney John Huber (Office in Utah) to investigate FISA abuse allegations in spying on the Trump campaign. The problem with Huber’s investigation: HE DIDN’T DO SQUAT! Huber is either incompetent or a Deep Stater.
Thankfully President Trump now has a competent Attorney General in William Barr. Barr removed Huber whose tasks were assigned to U.S. Attorney John Durham. Story at The Gateway Pundit.
Today on CBS Attorney General William Barr disclosed that the Huber investigation is over.
Huber was assigned to look at FISA applications and the electronic surveillance during the 2016 election and actions by Hillary Clinton.
Huber did not even start his investigation.
He didn’t do a damn thing!
AG Barr said this morning on CBS News that Huber did nothing and his work was taken over by the team he set up under US Attorney John Durham:
JAN CRAWFORD: Um, what’s the status of Huber’s investigation in Utah? I think the former Attorney General Sessions had asked him to look at this.
WILLIAM BARR: Right, so Huber had originally been asked to take a look at the FISA applications and the electronic surveillance but then he stood back and put that on hold while the Office of Inspector General was conducting its review, which would’ve been normal for the department. And he was essentially on standby in case Mr. Horowitz referred a matter to him to be handled criminally. So he has not been active on this front in recent months and so Durham is taking over that role. The other issues he’s been working on relate to Hillary Clinton. Those are winding down and hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring those to fruition.
JAN CRAWFORD: So he won’t be involved in this really at all then?
John Huber was the special prosecutor tapped by former AG Jeff Sessions to investigate FISA abuses by Obama’s DOJ/FBI. Sessions nominated Huber to perform this investigation after numerous calls for a special investigation into the Clinton Foundation and the Deep State.
Mark Meadows (R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Doug Collins (R-GA) sent a letterto special prosecutor John Huber on January 8th demanding answers by a January 21st deadline.
“Your investigation has been ongoing for over nine months. During the course of our extensive investigation we have interviewed more than a dozen current and former DOJ and FBI personnel, and were surprised to hear none of these potentially informative witnesses testified to speaking with you,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.
The Clinton Foundation whistleblowers, Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Doyle told the committee they had to send their evidence to the Huber investigation THREE TIMES because they kept losing it.
In October, Congressman Meadows and Jim Jordan said they wanted to haul John Huber in before Congress to testify because they had not received any updates on Huber’s investigation.
Now we know that it was all a farce. Huber did NOTHING!
Huber and the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, should be brought before a grand jury and investigated for their actions in obstructing justice.
The American people are very angry about all that is going on in DC. We want OUR country back! We DEMAND justice!
The Conservative-Patriot Christian Right 
