Tag Archives: Paul Manafort

Totally Unacceptable Behavior

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Breitbart posted an article yesterday stating that CNN had reported that the Obama Administration had wire tapped Paul Manafort before and after the election.

The article reports:

The report said the secret court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had authorized a surveillance warrant against Manafort for an investigation that began in 2014, looking into his firm, the Podesta Group, and another firm’s lobbying work for Ukraine’s pro-Russian former ruling party.

“The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence,” a source told CNN.

However, the FBI then restarted the surveillance after obtaining a new FISA warrant that extended early into this year. The report notably does not say when the new warrant was obtained. Manafort joined the Trump campaign as its chairman in May 2016.

The article reminds us of how many times this claim was denied (sometimes under oath):

The Justice Department and the FBI denied that Trump was being wiretapped.

Comey later in March disputed Trump’s claims — in testimony that lawmakers could now find misleading.

He told the House intelligence committee, “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI.”

The New York Times also reported that Comey had said Trump’s claim was false, and that he had asked the Justice Department to publicly reject it, according to the BBC.

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, also told Congress that intelligence agencies did not wiretap Trump, nor did the FBI obtain a court order to monitor Trump’s phones, according to the BBC report.

President Trump was mocked when he made this claim. Now we learn that he was right. Where are the apologies? Where are the people talking about the fact that the civil rights of Paul Manafort and Donald Trump were violated? Is anyone going to hold the Justice Department accountable? I guess the only positive in this is that Donald Trump won the election despite the fact that the Obama Administration interfered–it wasn’t the Russians–it was the Obama Administration!

 

Using The Government To Punish Political Opposition

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It seem as if under the Obama Administration that if you held the wrong political opinion you might be wiretapped, charged with a crime you didn’t commit, or harassed in some way.  Unfortunately the ‘deep state’ is continuing that practice. They are organized and prepared to fight. There are some real questions as to whether those who oppose the ‘deep state’ had any idea how extensive it is or and idea of how to fight it.

Yesterday Andrew McCarthy posted an article at National Review about the FBI raid on Paul Manafort‘s home. There are a number of aspects of that raid and of the timing of the reporting of that raid that need to be understood.

First of all, the raid took place in late July, why is the mainstream media suddenly putting it in the headlines? Could it be that the Russia story needs to be revived with all the fuss about North Korea?

Andrew McCarthy has a few observations about the raid:

Here’s the thing to bear in mind about the Washington Post’s report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had the FBI execute a search warrant against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in late July: Prosecutors don’t do pre-dawn raids on the home of a cooperating witness.

…There are two possible rationales for a search warrant under the circumstances. First, the legitimate rationale: Investigators in good faith believed Manafort, who is either a subject of or witness in their investigation, was likely to destroy rather than surrender relevant evidence. Second, the brass-knuckles rationale: The prosecutor is attempting to intimidate the witness or subject — to say nothing of others who are similarly situated — into volunteering everything he may know of an incriminating nature about people the prosecutor is targeting.

The article concludes:

Moreover, in light of the fact that Manafort has ostensibly been cooperating with congressional committees, and that Mueller has a grand jury that would have enabled him to compel Manafort to surrender evidence by subpoena, I wonder if the Justice Department would shed some light on (a) why it was thought necessary to conduct a raid on Manafort’s home and (b) whether the special counsel and the FBI sought permission to conduct the search before 6 a.m. (i.e., in what the Post reports as the pre-dawn hours).

Finally, I wonder whether the deputy attorney general or the special counsel would inform the public whether the president of the United States is a suspect in a criminal investigation.

It has become very obvious that the Washington establishment is willing to do pretty much anything to stage a coup to undo the November election. I wonder if they realize the damage they are doing to America by their efforts, or if they care, or if their goal is to change the very nature of America. It is time to put a stop to this nonsense. We know about the pay-to-play in the last administration that the Justice Department was totally not interested in investigating. It is time to get back to the idea of equal justice under the law. All of the people in the Washington establishment involved in the effort to unseat President Trump need to be fired immediately. They need to find other jobs to do. If they are elected, the voters need to make sure they are unelected at the first opportunity. The American people can preserve their representative republic, but they will need to be looking past the mainstream media headlines in order to do it.

This Really Was Not Unexpected

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Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about the Russian investigation. It seems as if this investigation has been going on forever, and so far nothing has been found. I am waiting for the eventual charge that someone went to a Russian tea room for a cup of tea and therefore should be prosecuted. Unfortunately, because special prosecutors tend to want to charge someone with something, all these lawyers with political leanings may eventually charge someone with a process crime (they forgot something in their testimony and gave an answer on a minor point that did not satisfy the investigators). However, it is becoming rather obvious that the tale the left has been spinning since the election of foreign intrigue tied to the Trump campaign or Trump Administration is pure fiction.

Breitbart reports:

Investor William Browder testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that Fusion GPS, the firm that had been responsible for creating and pushing the so-called “Russia dossier” against Donald Trump, had been paid by the Russian government to push for the repeal of the human rights sanctions in the Magnitsky Act of 2012. In other words, the Russian government may have been paying to smear Trump with false and salacious accusations.

Until now, the media and the Democrats have proceeded under the assumption that Russia intervened in the 2016 election by hacking the email server of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the private email of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and releasing their emails via Wikileaks. They have further claimed — with no evidence — that the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russians in obtaining or releasing the emails.

The entire theory rests on the ridiculous claim that Trump had invited Russia to hack Clinton and the Democrats when he joked last July about the Russians releasing the emails Clinton had deleted from her illicit private server.  (The left-wing HuffPost observed Thursday as the anniversary that Trump “asked for Russian help in the election.”) That joke prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to convene an investigation of alleged Russian interference.

Thursday The Wall Street Journal posted an article by Kimberly Strassel (the article is not linked here because it is subscribers only) noting a connection between Fusion GPS and the Democratic party.

In an interesting move, Congressional Democrats, who were ready to hold public hearings about Russian election interference featuring Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, have decided to hold those hearings in private (where they can’t pontificate instead of asking questions). Why? Because if Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort were questioned in public, then Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson would also be questioned in public. For whatever reason, the Democrats were willing to give up their dog and pony show to avoid Glenn Simpson’s public testimony (where he would have been asked who paid for the false dossier on Donald Trump).

The Wall Street Journal article asks:

What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility.

We know Fusion is a for-hire political outfit, paid to dig up dirt on targets. This column first outed Fusion in 2012, detailing its efforts to tar a Mitt Romney donor. At the time Fusion insisted that the donor was “a legitimate subject of public records research.”

The article at Breitbart concludes:

Or the truth could be that Russia was trying to embarrass both parties, to weaken the eventual winner. Browder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that it is common for Russia to back both sides in elections, simply to create chaos.

Regardless, the Russia conspiracy theory has now collapsed. There is no evidence that Russia was colluding with the Trump campaign. But there is evidence Russia was working against it. And the truth is only beginning to emerge.

The following quote is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The same thing can be said about the investigation into President Trump’s ties to Russia.