That Ship Already Sailed

On Monday, The Daily Caller posted an article about some concerns in the intelligence community.

The article reports:

The intelligence community is warning that key agencies may be politicized under a second Trump administration as the 2024 election approaches after it tried to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story and pushed a now-debunked dossier about the former president, Politico reported on Monday.

Former President Donald Trump could politicize the intelligence community through who he appoints and removes as well as demanding adherence to his agenda, the 18 former Trump officials and analysts claimed to Politico. The FBI welcomed the now-discredited Steele Dossier alleging Trump had ties to Russia and 51 former intelligence officials signed onto a letter saying Hunter Biden’s now-authenticated laptop was Russian disinformation shortly before the 2020 presidential election.

I think a more accurate story would be that the intelligence community is concerned that a second term of President Trump might force them to be neutral and obey the Constitution. He might also hold them accountable for the times they broke the law. I suspect he might even change the personnel to make the agencies politically neutral. Oh horrors.

The article concludes:

However, Trump’s campaign cited the examples of the Steele Dossier and Hunter Biden laptop letter among examples of intelligence community weaponization against the former president.

“President Trump has been under assault ever since he announced his campaign in 2016,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told the DCNF. “From spying on his campaign, Russiagate, the Russia collusion hoax, the debunked Steele dossier, and the 51 intelligence officials wrongly ignoring Hunter Biden’s laptop from Hell, the establishment has been trying to meddle in elections because they simply can’t stand voters choosing a candidate who puts America First.”

Trump is currently leading Biden by 2.1 points in a RealClearPolitics national average of polls.

The FBI insisted that the intelligence community incorporate the Steele Dossier in a report of foreign meddling in the 2016 election, according to Politico.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio hinted Wednesday that the Department of Justice is operating under a double standard after it indicted an FBI informant who allegedly provided false evidence of corruption involving Biden, while letting Christopher Steele, a former operative of the Secret Intelligence Service, off the hook for his dossier that was used to try and remove Trump from office.

The FBI “dug their own grave” by promoting the Steele Dossier, one former intelligence official told Politico.

I pray for an honest election without interference from the intelligence community or the deep state.

Revealing The Problems In America’s Justice System

On Tuesday, The New York Post posted an article about the verdict in the trial of Igor Danchenko.

The article reports:

A key source for the salacious and discredited Trump-Russia dossier was acquitted by a federal jury Tuesday, in a case that nevertheless produced several bombshells about the FBI’s handling of its probe into the 45th president’s 2016 campaign.

The Virginia panel cleared Igor Danchenko of four counts of lying to the bureau following approximately 10 hours of deliberation across two days after the case judge dropped a fifth count against him last week.

The verdict was the second acquittal at trial in a case brought by special counsel John Durham in connection with the conduct of the FBI counterintelligence probe nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Despite Danchenko’s acquittal, the trial produced a series of revelations about the FBI — including testimony from a bureau analyst that it had offered Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the dossier, $1 million in October 2016 to make its outrageous claims against Trump stick.

Court documents filed by Durham last month also indicated the FBI employed Danchenko as a paid confidential source for more than three-and-a-half years — hiring him even as he was being investigated for his role in compiling the dossier.

If he was the source for dossier and the dossier was discredited, how is he not guilty of lying?

The article notes:

The trial also revealed that Helson and other agents did no due diligence on Danchenko’s background when a simple check would have revealed suspicions of his role in Steele’s project.

“Don’t feel bad for the FBI agents,” Durham told the jury on Monday during closing arguments. “There are things that they didn’t do that they quite clearly should have done.”

Trump White House veterans lamented the verdict, with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer calling it “unbelievably disappointing.”

“We’ve been waiting and waiting and told to hold our breath, there’s more coming — just be patient, be patient,” Spicer said on his Newsmax show “Spicer & Co.” “This is — I don’t even think disappointing does justice to how bad this is.”

Ric Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, argued in a tweet that the verdict doesn’t exonerate the government officials who pushed falsehoods about alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

“Danchenko and the FBI both lied in and about the Steele dossier,” Grenell wrote. “They made outlandish claims that never materialized. A jury saying that Danchenko didn’t lie doesn’t clear up how the lies were pushed by our government.”

The article explains the charge and the acquittal:

The case against Danchenko turned on a phone call he claimed to receive from someone he believed was Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman, who was purportedly in touch with people connected to Trump and told Danchenko about a false conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Prosecutors said phone records showed no evidence of a call between Danchenko and Millian and that Danchenko had no reason to believe Millian, a Trump supporter he’d never met, was suddenly going to be willing to provide disparaging information about Trump to a stranger.

Is there anyone honest in Washington?

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article explaining why the Durham investigation is not going to find anyone guilty of anything–the investigation is simply there to cover for the previous misdeeds of the deep state.

The Truth Matters

On Thursday, The Washington Times posted an article about the federal trial of Igor Danchenko.

The article reports:

Democratic operative Charles Dolan Jr. testified Thursday that he lied to Igor Danchenko in 2016 when he claimed to have information from a GOP insider about why Paul Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign.

The false claim actually had been pulled from a cable news talking head, Mr. Dolan said at the federal trial of Mr. Danchenko, a Russian analyst who was the primary subsource for the so-called Steele dossier.

The accusation ultimately found its way into that salacious unverified dossier of anti-Trump accusations compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele and attributed to “an American political figure associated with Donald Trump.”

Let’s look at the consequences of this whole mess. The Steele dossier, which we now know was lies, resulted in the Mueller investigation. That investigation cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Paul Manafort got caught up in that investigation and wound up in prison in solitary confinement charged with bad business practices related to events long before the Trump campaign and mortgage fraud. Not a lot of people charged with bad business practices and mortgage fraud wind up in solitary confinement. That was one of many examples of the politicization of our justice system that had begun under the Obama administration.

The article concludes:

Kevin Helson, an FBI special agent who was Mr. Danchenko’s handler while he was a confidential human source for the bureau, testified that he was struck by the similarities between the Dolan email and what ended up in the Steele dossier.

“It would imply that Chuck Dolan was the source of that information,” he said, adding that he believed Mr. Danchenko provided 80% of the raw intelligence and half of the analysis in the dossier.

On cross-examination, Mr. Helson said Mr. Danchenko didn’t know the information would show up in the Steele dossier until it was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. Mr. Helson said that Mr. Danchenko was angry that the material was used in the dossier.  

The Steele dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. FBI agents used the dossier to help obtain a warrant to wiretap Trump campaign aide Carter Page, who was suspected of working with Russia.

Mr. Page was never charged with a crime, and no evidence emerged to support claims against him. The dossier was referenced three times when the FBI sought to reauthorize the surveillance warrant.

In 2020, the Justice Department acknowledged that those warrant applications did not meet their necessary legal standards.

This trial is important and has received very little coverage in the mainstream media. Please find alternative news sources and follow what is happening. It illustrates how the Washington establishment attacks anyone who is not part of their club and manages to be elected.

Just When I Thought John Durham’s Picture Belonged On A Milk Carton

The New York Post is reporting today that Igor Danchenko has been arrested and accused of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The article reports:

A Russian analyst who was the key source behind the shady “Steele dossier” about former President Donald Trump was arrested in Virginia on Thursday as part of an ongoing special counsel investigation, the Justice Department said.

Igor Danchenko, 43, is accused of lying to the FBI when questioned about his work compiling the wild allegations about Russia and Trump ahead of his victorious 2016 presidential election, according to a grand jury indictment unsealed Thursday.

The shady analyst is now the third person to face charges in special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, which Trump has long insisted was a witch hunt.

The problem is that many Americans believe the Steele dossier was factual and many mainstream media outlets have not yet admitted it wasn’t.

The article notes:

Many of his other allegations, such as the claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian intel operatives, have been subsequently disproven.

According to the indictment, the FBI interviewed Danchenko several times between January and November 2017 to determine if information contained in the dossier was true.

Danchenko allegedly lied to federal investigators about his sources for the dubious intel on at least five different dates during that time, the court document states.

For instance, the feds say Danchenko falsely claimed never to have spoken to a certain unnamed PR executive — who was also a longtime Democratic party operative — about any of the allegations in the report. 

But Danchenko actually used the exec as an anonymous source for one or more of the claims contained in the dossier, according to the indictment.

It will be interesting to see how far this investigation goes before it is shut down for one reason or another. The people most in danger from the investigation are the Clintons, and the fact that Terry McAuliffe lost the election in Virginia this week may be a sign that the power the Clintons wield in the Democrat party is waning. I suspect that the Bidens have no love for the Clintons, but they may want to see the investigation shut down before it does serious damage to the Democrat party.

Stay tuned.

Rewriting History To Prevent A Second Trump Presidency

Today The Federalist posted an article about the media’s renewed interest in the Steele Dossier. What is happening right now with the Dossier is a shot across the bow in an effort to prevent President Trump from running for President in 2024.

The article lists four things the author learned from the Hulu documentary about the Steele Dossier.

These are the four things:

1. At Least the Media Came Out of the Shadows

2. Steele Selected Stephanopoulos For a Reason

3. Christopher Steele Stands By His Dossier

4. He’s Crazy Like a Fox

Please follow the link to read the entire article, but here are a few excerpts:

Raddatz (ABC reporter Martha Raddatz) was not the only ABC personality interviewed during the program, and in this respect the media’s penchant for becoming the story reached a pinnacle, so much so that Hulu followed Stephanopoulos from his New York apartment en route to the airport and then to England. Once there, Steele’s screen time paled in comparison to the time Stephanopoulos devoted to interviewing his colleagues.

…Of course, Steele couldn’t have really taken the lead in the story because he remains in legal jeopardy and subject to potential civil liability. Steele needed to thread a needle: saying enough to create sympathy and shore up a legal defense while ensuring he stayed silent on anything of substance. Stephanopoulos served his purpose.

President Clinton’s former White House communications director promised the publicity Steele needed and provided a surface of seriousness to sell the story as a true piece of journalism. And Stephanopoulos was willing to travel to England, most definitely a requirement for Steele to avoid the subpoena power of the John Durham special counsel’s office.

…While Stephanopoulos’ painting of Steele as a patriotic and sympathetic character did not quite descend to the Jane Mayer level of propaganda, the generous profile of Steele nonetheless laid the groundwork necessary to soften the more serious questions that would end the show. The Hulu special’s biographical focus also served to elevate Steele, suggesting a more substantial role in British intelligence than likely and bolstering his credibility by highlighting his connection to the FBI’s investigation into the World Cup soccer bribery scandal.

Against this backdrop, a viewer unacquainted with the depth of the Spygate scandal, such as Stephanopoulos and ABC’s regular audience, might find Steele’s assurances that his sources and their stories are credible, even against the backdrop of the U.S. inspector general’s “devastating” report that “eviscerated” Steele’s reporting, according to one of the few non-ABC figures interviewed, former New York Times reporter Barry Meier.

“With respect to your work,” Stephanopoulos noted, the IG report concluded that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, place and title information, much of which was publicly available.”

The article concludes:

Those well-versed in the entire Russia-collusion hoax likely watched Steele in disbelief, wondering how delusional he must be to sit calmly before a worldwide audience and defend the unbelievable. But the interview served a purpose, because the few times Stephanopoulos challenged Steele, it works to his own benefit as it provided the dossier author the opportunity to counter claims that he peddled knowingly false information to the FBI

While Steele professed in the interview that he had done nothing wrong and did not fear being charged and extradited to the United States, sometimes the best defense is an offense. What better way to counter a potential charge of making false statements to the FBI than to profess you believe the information passed on was true? Well, that, and the defense colloquially known as Orange Man Bad, which Steele seemed to also hide behind, speaking of Trump as a continuing threat to the United States and United Kingdom’s national security.

Steele may be right about one thing, though, when he said in the final minutes of the interview that he “think[s] this book is not finished by a longshot.” Hopefully, however, it will be Durham writing the final chapter.

The Hulu version of events is pure propaganda, but those who get their news via the mainstream media and watch the ‘documentary’ will  see it as truth. That is part of the reason for the divide in America, and the media bears much of the responsibility for that divide.

The Networks Involved

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse about the lawfare trail surrounding the surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. The Oxford Dictionary defines lawfare as follows: noun Legal action undertaken as part of a hostile campaign against a country or group. In this case it was used against a political campaign.

The opening sentence in the article states:

The content of the story is less important than the network within it.

The article continues:

The New York Times writes a story about John Durham issuing subpoenas to the Brookings Institute for records of Igor Danchenko’s work there. Danchenko was Chris Steele’s primary sub-source for the infamous Steele Dossier.

The material provided by Danchenko to Steele was described as unsubstantiated “gossip”, “rumor”, “hearsay” and innuendo by Danchenko himself after he was questioned by the FBI.

The article then quotes The New York Times story noting that John Durham has keyed in on the Steele Dossier. Somehow I am skeptical as to anyone involved in violating the civil rights of Americans involved in the Trump campaign will ever be held accountable.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The Conservative Treehouse does amazing, detailed research, and this article is an example of that.

All you really need to know is stated at the end of the article:

China is Funding the Brookings Institute.

The Brookings Institute is funding Lawfare.

Lawfare is a group of current and former DOJ and FBI officials.

As a consequence, China funded the attack position of Lawfare and the DOJ/FBI against the Trump administration.

…. And no, I do not expect John Durham to expose any of this.

Unfortunately, that is where we are.

This May Be The Beginning Of Accountability

Just the News is reporting today that Bruce Ohr is retiring

The article reports:

Bruce Ohr, the senior Justice Department official whose conduct in the Russia case spurred significant controversy, has retired after being informed that a decision on disciplinary action was imminent, the department announced Wednesday.

Ohr’s decision will spare him any potential punishment for his role in providing information to the FBI about Christopher Steele’s dossier at the same time his wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for the same firm as Steele — Fusion GPS, run by Glenn Simpson.

Congressional Republicans complained that the connection created a conflict of interest. Ohr said his bosses approved of the arrangement.

The article continues:

The announcement came the same day that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman, released slightly less redacted versions of previously released interview reports showing the role Ohr played in connecting Steele, a former British MI6 agent he had befriended, with the FBI.

…”For far too long information regarding the Democrats’ attempt to sabotage the Trump administration has remained hidden from the public,” the senator said. “Today, in an effort to be fully transparent, I am releasing these DOJ and FBI documents I recently received because the American people deserve to know the truth and have a right to see this information.”

To read the documents in question, follow the link to the article above. The link to the documents is at the bottom of the article.

A Newly Declassified Summary Report Has Been Released By The Senate Judiciary Committee

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has declassified and released its summary report in a Press Release. Please follow the link and read the entire summary.

Here are a few of the highlights:

  • The Crossfire Hurricane team knew in December 2016 that Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-source was an individual who the FBI had indicated in 2009 “could be a threat to national security.”
  • In May 2009, Steele’s source reportedly attempted to recruit two individuals connected to an influential foreign policy advisor connected to President Obama, offering that if the two individuals “‘did get a job in the government and had access to classified information’ and wanted ‘to make a little extra money,’ [Steele’s source] knew some people to whom they could speak.”
  • FBI databases revealed Steele’s source “had contact in 2006 with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers, [including contacting a known Russian intelligence officer] ‘so the documents can be placed in tomorrow’s diplomatic pouch.’”
  • One individual interviewed by the FBI noted that “the Primary Sub-source persistently asked about the interviewee’s knowledge of a particular military vessel.”
  • Significantly, the “record documenting the closing of the investigation [of the Primary Sub-source] stated that consideration would be given to re-opening the investigation in the event that the Primary Sub-source returned to the United States.”

The Press Release continues:

Graham on Totality of FBI Crossfire Hurricane Failures:

“In light of this newly declassified information, I will be sending the FISA Court the information provided to inform them how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information regarding the Carter Page warrant application was in 2016 and 2017.

“A small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court.  I do not believe they represent the overwhelming majority of patriotic men and women who work at the Department of Justice and FBI.

“The now famous email Susan Rice sent to herself on Inauguration Day where she states that President Obama said that everything has to be done ‘by the book’ has become highly suspect.  If this investigation is ‘by the book,’ then the book we’re using is the Kremlin playbook.

“It is up to the committee and Congress to reform the system so it never happens again.  It’s stunning to be told that the single individual who provided information to Christopher Steele for the Russian dossier used by the FBI on four occasions to obtain a warrant on Carter Page, an American citizen, was a suspected Russian agent years before the preparation of the dossier.

“The committee will press on and get to the bottom of what happened, and we will try to work together to make sure this never happens again.”   

The misuse of the government for political purposes has been investigated and prosecuted in the past. It needs to be dealt with harshly this time. It is unbelievable that those responsible have evaded punishment for this long.

The Cover-Up Continues

John Solomon has been one of the most reliable voices reporting on the misuse of federal government agencies to spy on the Trump campaign and transition teams. He now writes at  “Just the News” because his reporting did not fit the political narrative at “The Hill.”

Yesterday John Solomon posted an article at Just the News detailing the ongoing cover-up of the spying on President Trump.

The article reports:

Earlier this year, the infamous dossier author Christopher Steele revealed he had destroyed nearly all the records detailing his dirt-digging on Donald Trump and Russia.

“They no longer exist,” Steele told a British court.

Now comes word that Steele’s primary and longtime contact inside the Obama State Department, Jonathan Winer, also destroyed records of the former British MI6 agent’s contacts inside that federal agency, including many of the 100-plus unsolicited intelligence reports Steele provided the Obama administration.

…Winer apparently destroyed the records at Steele’s request, the report said.

“After Steele’s memos were published in the press in January 2017, Steele asked Winer to make note of having them, then either destroy all the earlier reports Steele had sent the Department of State or return them to Steele, out of concern that someone would be able to reconstruct his source network,” the committee’s report released last month stated.

The consequence of the document destruction appears to have been real. “Department of State was able to produce for the Committee, from their archives, many Steele memos from 2015 and some from 2016, but most of his reports from 2014 are missing,” the committee noted.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The question that comes to mind is, “Why did they destroy the records if they weren’t doing anything wrong?”

The article concludes:

Destroyed documents. Faulty memories. Foreign influence. The State Department continues to grow as a more important part of the investigation into the Russia investigators.

You can read Steele’s British testimony here.

You can read the Senate intelligence report account on Winer here.

This entire operation makes Watergate look like kindergarten.

This Raises More Questions Than Answers

Yesterday Real Clear Investigations posted the following:

Jonathan Winer, a former top aide to Secretary of State John Kerry who was a key conduit for disseminating the discredited Steele dossier in the U.S. government, worked as a lobbyist for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in years preceding the Russiagate affair. This revelation raises new questions about Russian efforts to influence American foreign policy — far afield from any Kremlin efforts to favor Donald Trump.

Winer’s connection to Deripaska came to light through last week’s release of the fifth and final volume of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. The Senate report also found that at different times ex-British spy Christopher Steele had worked for the powerful oligarch with ties to President Vladimir Putin, and sent scores of reports from his intelligence firm on to Winer, who admitted to the panel destroying many of them before leaving the State Department. Further, the Senate developed evidence that Glenn Simpson – whose company Fusion GPS contracted with Steele for the dossier – also did work for Deripaska. Simpson denied that, telling senators, “I don’t think I’ve knowingly had any contact with his organization.”

In his initial interview with the Senate committee, Winer claimed never to have met the oligarch. In a second interview Winer revised this answer. He conceded that, beginning in 2003, Deripaska had hired the law firm Alston & Bird, where Winer was a partner. He worked on the Deripaska account but, asserting attorney-client privilege, refused to say what exactly he had done on Deripaska’s behalf. RealClearInvestigations sent questions to Alston & Bird’s spokesman but received no reply.

The article notes:

While at the State Department during President Barack Obama’s second term, Winer disseminated to his colleagues over 100 memos written by Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. Among them were memos apparently intended to help influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Steele’s Russian client, billionaire Putin loyalist Deripaska.

The Senate revelations establish that Winer was a key but little-known figure in Russiagate. He, along with former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr – whose wife worked for Fusion GPS – have emerged as prime vehicles for the dissemination of the Steele dossier to the highest reaches of the U.S. government.

It gets worse. The article concludes:

During his first stint, Winer worked with Namsrai representing a Russian nuclear power company called Techsnabexport. Or at least they did their best to make it appear they were primarily working for that company when they were actually working for the Russian government.

APCO’s 2011 Foreign Agents Representation Act filing names Techsnabexport as the “foreign principal” for which it was working. The firm described their client as “an open joint stock company wholly owned by the JSC Atomenergoprom.” In the fine print one discovers that that company in turn is “wholly owned by State corporation for Atomic Energy, ‘Rosatom,’ which is wholly owned by the Russian government.”

A “Contract for Lobbying Services and Consulting Services” was drawn up by APCO in April 2010, a copy of which was attached as a secondary appendix to the FARA filing. The “Scope of Work” includes “Creating and promoting a new image of State Atomic Energy corporation ‘Rosatom,” supporting “the interests of Rosatom in the USA,” and overcoming “existing political and trade barriers.

In October 2010, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved Rosatom’s controversial acquisition of Uranium One, a Canadian company with extensive mining projects in the US.

Namsrai did not respond to emails from RealClearInvestigations asking why APCO listed Techsnabexport as its “foreign principal” client and not the official Russian state nuclear power enterprise, Rosatom, and whether Steele performed any work for the company.

As Winer’s connections with Russia and the Steele dossier emerge, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson says he wants to hear more from him. But, Johnson said, the committee’s ranking Democratic member, Gary Peters, is trying to derail his efforts to enforce the committee’s subpoena and interview Winer under oath. Peters’ spokesperson did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations.

“Among other issues, Mr. Winer’s admitted destruction of his records related to his contacts with Christopher Steele is concerning and deserves an explanation,” Johnson said. “I am looking forward to learning more from Mr. Winer in spite of Democrat attempts to further delay our investigation.”

Please follow the link and read the entire article. The fact that someone who obviously did not have America’s best interests at heart was in such a high government position is frightening.

Slowly Things Are Unraveling

Just the News has been one of the leading sources for information on the Flynn case and for tracking misreporting of the Mueller investigation. Today the site posted an article listing some of the things that need to be investigated in the Mueller investigation.

The article notes:

Despite a February 2018 order from the judge in the Flynn case Emmett G. Sullivan to prosecutors to turn over all material exculpatory evidence to the defense — including information impeaching the credibility of witnesses against him — prosecutor Brandon van Grack never turned over any of the recently released information showing:

    • FBI agents investigating Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak  had recommended closing the case after turning up “no derogatory information.”
    • Agents were blocked from closing the case by fired, anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok, who in text messages attributed his move to intervention from the bureau’s “7th floor” leaders.
    • A senior FBI official confessed qualms — in notes recorded after a 2017 senior strategy meeting on the Flynn investigation — about whether the bureau’s purpose was to discover the truth or, instead, entrap Flynn in a lie that would lead to his dismissal or prosecution.

The recent revelations raising questions of prosecutorial misconduct in the Flynn case fit an emerging, more general pattern of questionable tactics employed by the Mueller probe, including withholding relevant exculpatory evidence and misrepresenting the government’s interactions with investigative targets.

The article lists nine problems with the Mueller probe:

  1. Misrepresentation of Papadopoulos cooperation
  2. Silence about Trump Tower meeting exculpatory evidence
  3. Court filings with deceptively edited email
  4. Scope memo used debunked Steele Dossier to set investigative parameters
  5. Mueller final testimony ignores Steele Dossier
  6. Deceptive editing of Dowd voicemail
  7. The secret side deal
  8. Improper acquisition of transition email
  9. Misleading Trump’s lawyers about his status

General Flynn is not the person who should be facing a prison term. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is chilling that this abuse of our legal system has been allowed to continue as long as it has.

What The Transcripts Tell Us

Just the News posted an article yesterday listing the top six revelations from House Russia probe’s newly declassified witness interviews. Please follow the link to the article to read the details, but here is the list of the six revelations:

  1. No Collusion: The U.S. intelligence community never had any evidence of collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
  2. FBI didn’t have a case: Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe admitted during his testimony that the agency knew from the start that Trump associate George Papadopoulos wasn’t in contact with Moscow, thereby undermining the agency’s entire basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane, i.e., the Russia investigation. “Papadopoulos, didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person that was interacting with the Russians,” McCabe told the House Intelligence panel.
  3. Podesta and Clinton knew about funding for Steele Dossier: John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, testified that he and Clinton were aware in general terms that the campaign was paying for opposition research to link Donald Trump to Russia, but he said neither of them knew specifically who had been hired to conduct the effort.
  4. Clapper, Comey, and McCabe provide conflicting narratives: Clapper testified that he did not brief then-President Obama on former Michael Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador in January 2017. However, both former FBI Director Comey and McCabe say otherwise.
  5. CrowdStrike says evidence of DNC hack was “not conclusive”: The president of CrowdStrike, a data security company retained by the DNC after it was hacked, testified to the House panel that there were “indications” of a hack into the DNC servers, but not concrete, irrefutable evidence.
  6. DNC lawyer ordered to tip off the CIA: Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer who represented both the Clinton campaign and the DNC in their response to presumed Russian hacking, testified that in February 2017, he went to the CIA, on behalf of a client whom he did not name, in an attempt to tip them off about the Trump organization’s ties to Russia.

The more we learn, the more this looks like a coup.

The Details Of The Soft Coup Against President Trump Are Slowing Emerging

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article connecting a lot of the dots in the soft coup attempt against President Trump. It is a long article with a lot of screen shots to support the claims it is making. I suggest that you follow the link to the article as it would be impossible to summarize it here. However, there are a few noteworthy points I would like to share.

The article reports:

Former HPSCI Chairman, and current HPSCI ranking member, Devin Nunes appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo to discuss several matters of importance.  One of the critical topics touched is the ongoing investigations of Obama era intelligence and political surveillance via the DOJ-NSD FBI, CIA, DNI and State Dept.

Representative Nunes hits the key point when he highlights current redactions and current decisions to classify ongoing investigative documents.  It is critically important to accept this reality. There are current intelligence officers and career officials in place hiding material by labeling evidence as classified.  A recent example was the December 9, 2019, inspector general report about the manipulation of FISA.

There is a video embedded in the article that gives an example of the actions being taken to prevent the truth from coming out.

The article concludes:

Politico, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and The Washington Post are all implicated in the James Wolfe leak to Ali Watkins. They had the FISA information since March 2017, yet those media outlets were disingenuously falsifying their reporting on the actual content of the FISA application despite their actual knowledge.

Remember all of the media denials about what Devin Nunes wrote in the “Nunes memo”? Remember the media proclaiming the Steele Dossier was not part of the FISA application?

How was the media fifteen months later (July 2018) going to report on the Wolfe leak to Watkins without admitting they had been manufacturing stories about its content for the past year-and-a-half?

It was in the media’s interest NOT to cover, or dig into, the Wolfe story.

Additionally, from both the DOJ and Media perspective, coverage of the Wolfe leak would prove the senate intel committee (SSCI) was, at a minimum, a participating entity in the coup effort. That same SSCI is responsible for oversight over the CIA, FBI, DOJ-NSD, ODNI, DNI, and all intelligence agencies.

Worse yet, all officers within those agencies require confirmation from the SSCI (including Chair and Vice-Chair); and any discussion of the Wolfe leak would highlight the motive for ongoing corruption within the SSCI in blocking those nominations (see John Ratcliffe).

Stunning ramifications.

There was a clear fork in the road and the DOJ took the path toward a cover-up; which, considering what the DOJ was simultaneously doing with Mueller and the EDVA regarding Assange, is not entirely surprising.

Was that decision wrong? Oh hell yes, it was corrupt as heck. .

Were the decisions done with forethought to coverup gross abuses of government? Yes.

Where the DOJ is today is directly connected to the decisions the DOJ made in 2017 and 2018 to protect themselves and internally corrupt actors from discovery.

It is often said: “the coverup is always worse than the crime.” This is never more true than with these examples, because where we are today… now miles down the path of consequence from those corrupt decisions… is seemingly disconnected from the ability of any institutional recovery. That’s now the issue for Bill Barr.

If Bill Barr wanted to deal with the issue he would not be telling President Trump to stop talking about the corruption; instead he would be holding a large press conference to explain to the American people about that fork in the road.

That type of honest sunlight delivery means taking people back into the background of the larger story and explaining what decisions were made; with brutal honesty and without trepidation for the consequences, regardless of their severity and regardless of the friends of Bill Barr compromised by the truth.

Here’s a big reason why Bill Barr should take that approach: We Know.

We know; the DOJ trying to hide it doesn’t change our level of information.

Regardless of whether Bill Barr actually admits what surrounds him, there are people who know…

We know….

You know….

AG Bill Barr shouting at President Trump ‘don’t tweet‘ like the Wizard of Oz doesn’t change the fact the curtain has been removed.

Turn around Bill, it’s time to come clean.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. There are many in the government who are still working hard to cover up the truth.

How Convenient

Yesterday Hot Air posted an article reporting the following:

Christopher Steele’s lawyers claimed last year that he had “meticulously documented” his interactions with the main source for the various memos that became known as the Steele dossier. But last month in court, Steele admitted he no longer has any of that documentation. He claims all of it was deleted three years ago.

The article concludes:

Earlier this month, declassified footnotes from IG Horowitz’ report revealed that the FBI believed in 2017 that Steele’s dossier was at least partly based on Russian disinformation. At the time I wrote about it, the exact dates of some of the events in question were still redacted. However, those redactions were later removed. They show that despite evidence the dossier was compromised with misinformation it was used as a key part of a FISA warrant application renewal targeting Trump campaign aide Carter Page. In fact, the FBI never mentioned the potential compromise to the court.

The FBI accused an American citizen of being a foreign agent based on a document which likely contained Russian disinformation. And now we know that any effort to double-check Steele’s work appears to be lost because he deleted all of his own notes and recordings.

Is anyone surprised that Christopher Steele’s notes were deleted? Do you suppose we could find them in a stack under Hillary Clinton’s emails and President Obama’s college records?

How To Write A Report Without Actually Saying Anything

When I heard about the article in The New York Times that proclaimed that a Republican-led Senate panel has issued a report that “undercuts claims by President Trump and his allies that Obama-era officials sought to undermine his candidacy by investigating Russia’s 2016 election meddling,” I wondered how that was possible considering the recently declassified information relating to Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Well Andrew McCarthy posted an article at The National Review yesterday that cleared that up for me. First of all I would like to state that I believe that the Senate Intelligence Committee is one of the most corrupt and leaky groups in Washington. They have been caught leaking fake news on more than one occasion. At any rate, Andrew McCarthy explained in his article exactly what was said in the report and what was not said in the report.

The article notes:

In truth, the story is a nothing-burger. We learn that one of the most useless committees on Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has issued a 158-page report — festooned with the usual “there are things we can’t tell you” redactions — as a capper to its three-year investigation into a question no one is asking: Did the intelligence community competently conclude that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign?

No one is asking that question because, for the vast majority of people closely following the collusion caper, that would be like asking whether the Chiefs won the Super Bowl.

We know Russia interfered in our campaign. Given Moscow’s long history of meddling in American politics, it would only have been a story if Russia did not meddle. The principal argument by President Trump and other intelligence agency critics has not been that Obama officials undermined Trump’s candidacy and presidency “by investigating Russia’s 2016 election meddling.” The argument is that they undermined Trump’s campaign and presidency by claiming that Trump and his campaign were complicit in Russia’s 2016 election meddling.

On that key question the Useless Committee is, as is its custom, mum.

They also punted on another key question:

The real question is whether the Obama administration and its officials held over by the new administration fabricated a tale about the Trump campaign’s complicity in Russia’s hacking. Did they peddle that tale to the FISA court while willfully concealing key exculpatory evidence? Did they continue the investigation under the guise of counterintelligence after Trump was elected, in the hope of finding a crime over which he could be impeached? Did they consciously mislead an American president about whether he was under investigation? Did they purposefully suggest in public testimony that the president was a criminal suspect, while privately assuring him that he was not one? And finally, when the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense was collapsing in a heap, did they open a criminal obstruction case — based on an untenable legal theory and facilitated by a leak of investigative information that was orchestrated by the just-fired FBI director — in order to justify continuing the probe under the auspices of a special counsel?

On these questions, the Useless Committee’s report is silent. Indeed, the report says right up front, in the findings section, that the intelligence agencies, over the FBI’s objection, did not include information from the infamous Steele dossier in its December 30, 2016, assessment on Russian interference — though, “as a compromise to the FBI insistence,” dossier allegations were included in an annex to the assessment. The Senate-report findings do not get into why the FBI was pushing so hard on the preposterous dossier. Nor do they mention that, by the time of the assessment, the bureau had already heavily relied on the dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant from the FISA court, and was even then preparing a submission to get yet another warrant — telling the federal judges the bureau believed that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Andrew McCarthy explains how a 158-page report can say absolutely nothing. It is not a coincidence that this report was released just as declassified documents are showing illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign and administration and we are awaiting the Dunbar report. This report is a pre-emptive strike put out by the political class in Washington.

Bucket Five Is Released

Those of us who have followed the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane closely have been waiting for the information in Bucket Five to be released. That is the information that investigative reporters have cited from the beginning as having the real story behind the surveillance on the Trump campaign and the early days of the Trump presidency. The Conservative Treehouse posted an article today about the documents the Senate Judiciary Committee has released today. The article includes links and screenshots of information and is very detailed. I recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article, but I will includes some of the highlights here.

The article reports:

The documents include more Papadopoulos transcripts from wired conversations with FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper; and also for the first time less redacted version of all three Carter Page FISA applications.  It’s going to take some time to go through this.

The declassification and release includes some seriously interesting documents the DOJ submitted to the FISA court, as far back as July 2018, which completely destroy the prior claims made by Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, James Baker, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and their very vocal media and Lawfare defenders.   Here’s one example:

Lisa Page testified to congress, and claimed in media, that the FBI never had any contact with the Steele dossier material until September 2016.  However, the DOJ directly tells the FISA court that Chris Steele was funneling his information to the FBI in June 2016.

Obviously those involved in the surveillance never expected the truth to come out. They assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected and their illegal activities would be buried in a sea of classified information. All Americans need to understand that if the Democrat party gains power in Washington, no one involved in this illegal surveillance will ever be held accountable and similar activities will continue in the future. Until the people involved in these activities are held accountable, there will be no guarantee that the civil rights of Americans will not be violated by our government in the future.

How Do You Undo The Damage Done By Dishonest People And A Dishonest Media?

There is a new website in town. It is called “Just The News.” One of its contributors will be investigative reporter John Solomon. Recently they posted a preview of what is to come.

Just The News recently posted an article titled, “Key witness told Team Mueller that Russia collusion evidence found in Ukraine was fabricated” written by John Solomon.

The article reports:

One of Robert Mueller’s pivotal trial witnesses told the special prosecutor’s team in spring 2018 that a key piece of Russia collusion evidence found in Ukraine known as the “black ledger” was fabricated, according to interviews and testimony.

The ledger document, which suddenly appeared in Kiev during the 2016 U.S. election, showed alleged cash payments from Russian-backed politicians in Ukraine to ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

“The ledger was completely made up,” cooperating witness and Manafort business partner Rick Gates told prosecutors and FBI agents, according to a written summary of an April 2018 special counsel’s interview.

In a brief interview with Just the News, Gates confirmed the information in the summary. “The black ledger was a fabrication,” Gates said. “It was never real, and this fact has since been proven true.”

Gates’ account is backed by several Ukrainian officials who stated in interviews dating to 2018 that the ledger was of suspicious origins and could not be corroborated.

If true, Gates’ account means the two key pieces of documentary evidence used by the media and FBI to drive the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative — the Steele dossier and the black ledger — were at best uncorroborated and at worst disinformation. His account also raises the possibility that someone fabricated the document in Ukraine in an effort to restart investigative efforts on Manafort’s consulting work or to meddle in the U.S. presidential election.

Much mystery has surrounded the black ledger, which was publicized by the New York Times and other U.S. news outlets in the summer of 2016 and forced Manafort out as one of Trump’s top campaign officials.

I suspect that Paul Manafort is not necessarily a saint, but there is no excuse for the way out ‘justice’ system has treated him–particularly when we know that the evidence used to start the ball rolling against him was fake. Once he knew the evidence was fake, why did Robert Mueller continue the investigation?

The article concludes:

In an interview last summer, Leschenko said he first received part of the black ledger when it was sent to him anonymously in February 2016, but it made no mention of Manafort. Months later, in August 2016, more of the ledger became public, including the alleged Manafort payments.

Leschenko said he decided to publicize the information after confirming a few of the transactions likely occurred or matched known payments.

But Leschenko told me he never believed the black ledger could be used as court evidence because it couldn’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that it was authentic, given its mysterious appearance during the 2016 election.

“The black ledger is an unofficial document,” Leschenko told me. “And the black ledger was not used as official evidence in criminal investigations because you know in criminal investigations all proof has to be beyond a reasonable doubt. And the black ledger is not a sample of such proof because we don’t know the nature of such document.”

In the end, the black ledger did prompt the discovery of real financial transactions and real crimes by Manafort, which ultimately led to his conviction.

But its uncertain origins raise troubling questions about election meddling and what constitutes real evidence worthy of starting an American investigation.

How may people charged with financial misdeeds have been put in solitary confinement for long periods of time? His treatment was not equal justice under the law.

An Attempt At Justice

Yesterday John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article about lawsuits brought by Carter Page. It seems to be common knowledge that before being targeted by the Obama administration as a back door to spy on the Trump campaign, Carter Page had done a lot of work for three-letter government agencies and was regarded as a reliable source of information.

The article reports:

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court against the Democratic National Committee, law firm Perkins Coie and its partners tied to the funding of the unverified dossier that served as the basis for highly controversial surveillance warrants against him.

…“This is a first step to ensure that the full extent of the FISA abuse that has occurred during the last few years is exposed and remedied,” attorney John Pierce said Thursday. “Defendants and those they worked with inside the federal government did not and will not succeed in making America a surveillance state.”

He added: “This is only the first salvo. We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how high. … The rule of law will prevail.”

The lawsuit will be heard in the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.

The article concludes:

Page could sue Steele, except that Steele is in England and has made it clear that he doesn’t plan to visit the U.S., ever again. Nearly all potential defendants other than Steele–Comey, Clapper, McCabe and the like–would try to erect a firewall by denying any knowledge that the Steele dossier was a fraud.

Whether such guilty knowledge could be proved is doubtful. At a minimum, Page will have to get far enough to conduct meaningful discovery against the existing defendants. Do the DNC’s or Perkins Coie’s emails contain evidence of a conspiracy to lie about Carter Page, for the purpose of damaging Donald Trump? Who knows? If the participants were careful, they don’t; then again, those who were talking to each other in 2016 and 2017 probably didn’t foresee that their actions might one day be exposed in court. So perhaps they were careless. Maybe, too, any such communications were deleted or destroyed long ago.

There is at least one obvious exception to the above analysis–the DOJ lawyer who misrepresented a CIA email to the FISA court. The email said that Carter Page was a CIA asset. The lawyer changed it to say that Page was not a CIA asset. That guy, who has been fired and I assume will be criminally prosecuted, has no defense other than causation. He likely would argue that he was just a cog in a giant wheel of lies, and that Page would have been equally defamed, surveilled and harassed even if he hadn’t lied about the CIA email. Which undoubtedly is true, although it is questionable as a defense.

What Carter Page is doing is noble. Let’s hope he succeeds in shedding light on the biggest political scandal, by far, in American history.

Finally, a fun fact: Page is represented by the same lawyers who are representing Tulsi Gabbard in her defamation case against Hillary Clinton, who called Gabbard a Russian asset. Which, of course, is what she and her minions also called Carter Page, an equally absurd lie.

Stay tuned.

When The Truth Is Stretched So Thin You Can See Through It

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article that included an amazing comment by one of the House Impeachment Managers.

The article notes:

Impeachment manager Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) on Thursday was asked whether the Clinton campaign’s use of the Steele Dossier in 2016 would be considered impeachable under the Dems’ standard.

Hakeem Jeffries said no because the Steele dossier was opposition research that “was purchased.”

What a disaster for the Democrats!

So if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, the legitimacy of her victory would not be in question by the Democrats even though she paid a former British spy to compile a dossier using Russian intel sources.

In other words, foreign interference in US elections is fine as long as you are a Democrat and you pay for it.

Wow. So according to Representative Jeffries, it is okay to use foreign sources to influence and election as long as you pay those sources.

What is interesting about this is that the Democrats are no longer contesting the fact that the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele Dossier. Are they also willing to admit that the Dossier was passed on to government agencies for nefarious purposes? Will they be willing to admit that their opposition research was used by the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign? Will the Democrats ever take responsibility for the use of government agencies for political purposes that occurred during the Obama administration?

I am not worried about foreign influence supporting Republicans in the 2020 election. I have no reason to believe that the Democrats will again choose to break any law they think they need to in order to win. If you haven’t seen the Politico article about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, please read it (I strongly disagree with the opening statement, but there is a lot of good information in the article).

I Suspect We May Hear More About This In The Future

There were a lot of really squirrelly moments in the 2016 presidential campaign. Some of them are beginning to come to light–(Politico reporting on the Ukraine involvement in support of Hillary Clinton, the Steele Dossier, making sure Bernie Sanders was denied the nomination, and the fact that the FBI was never allowed to look at the DNC computers that the Democrats claimed were hacked). I suspect that over the coming months we may learn things about these events that will be totally different to what the mainstream media has told us. One item that comes up periodically is the murder of Seth Rich and the investigation that followed. The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about the investigation into that murder.

The article reports:

Christopher Wray’s FBI lied again.  His FBI claimed that Seth Rich’s DNC computer and emails were investigated upon his death but then his FBI backtracked and claimed no related docs were available in a FOIA request.

Now we know it was just another Deep State lie!

We reported on September 19th

that Texas businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit where he outed reporter Ellen Ratner as his source for information on Seth Rich. The DNC operative [Rich] was murdered in the summer of 2016 in Washington DC. His murder was never solved. According to Butowsky’s lawsuit, Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks the DNC emails before the 2016 election, not Russia.

This totally destroys the FBI and Mueller’s claims that Russians hacked the DNC to obtain these emails.

Butowsky claims in his lawsuit:

Ms. Rattner said Mr. Assange told her that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron, were responsible for releasing the DNC emails to Wikileaks. Ms. Rattner said Mr. Assange wanted the information relayed to Seth’s parents, as it might explain the motive for Seth’s murder.

On November 9, 2016 Ellen Ratner admitted publicly that she met with Julian Assange for three hours the Saturday before the 2016 election. According to Ratner, Julian Assange told her the leaks were not from the Russians, they were from an internal source from the Hillary Campaign.

The article reports today:

After previously claiming no FBI records could be found related to Seth Rich, emails have been uncovered.  These emails weren’t just from anybody.  These emails were between FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two most corrupt individuals involved in the Russia Collusion Hoax.

In a set of emails released by Judicial Watch on January 22, 2020, provided by a FOIA request on Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two pages on emails refer to Seth Rich:

The article includes a screenshot of the redacted emails given to Judicial Watch.

Stay tuned. There are some good guys in Washington. It is my hope that they will continue their investigation into this matter.

The Political Impact Of The Long Fight To Remove President Trump

On Tuesday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at National Review about the impact of impeachment on President Trump.

The article includes a number of observations about the impact of the endless investigations of the President:

Quietly, the approval ratings of Trump have been rising to pre-impeachment levels and are nearing a RealClearPolitics average of 45. Support for impeaching Trump and/or removing him is not increasing as the House Democrats expected. It is essentially static, or slowly eroding, depending on how polls phrase such questions.

Apparently, an exhausted public did not see “Ukrainian” impeachment as a one-off national crisis akin to the Nixon inquiry and the Clinton impeachment and trial that merited national attention. The impeachment vote instead is being confirmed in the public mind as part of a now boring three-year impeachment psychodrama (from impeachment 1.0, the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, and Michael Avenatti/Stormy Daniels comedies to Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-stars”). The progressive logic of the current jump-the-shark monotony is to become even more monotonous, the way that a driller leans ever harder on his dull and chipping bit as his bore becomes static.

The Democrats believed that all of these efforts would be like small cuts, each one perhaps minor but all combining to bleed Trump out. But now we know, given polling data and the strong Trump economy, that the long odyssey to impeachment has had almost no effect on Trump’s popularity, other than losing him 3–4 points for a few weeks as periodic media “bombshells” went off.

The reality may be the very opposite of what Democrats planned. The more the Left tries to abort the Trump presidency before the election, the more it bleeds from each of its own inflicted nicks. As an example, Rachel Maddow’s reputation has not been enhanced by her neurotic assertions that Trump’s tax returns would soon appear, or that the Steele dossier was steadily gaining credibility, or that yet another tell-tale Russian colluder had emerged from under another American bed.

The constant drumbeat of accusations is simply not resonating. Yet, the Democrats continue with a playbook that is not working.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It includes a lot of information that has been overlooked amidst the hype.

The article concludes:

Instead, voters are exhausted by his haters and their crazy agendas. They grow enraged over how the Mueller and Horowitz investigatory reports have disproved all the daily media, celebrity, and political assertions. And they are upset about the larger culture of the anti-Trump Left, from the fundamentals of open borders and identity politics to the trivia of transgendered athletes, Colin Kaepernickism, and the open-border, Green New Deal socialism. An auto worker who votes as a true-blue union Democrat but likes Trump’s trade policies, a no-nonsense farmer who worries about farm exports but likes deregulation, and a teacher who votes a liberal slate but has no way to control his classroom may not seem like Trump voters, but some such voters are terrified by the cultural trajectory of what the Trump-hating Left has in store for them all.

For a majority, refined and arrogant progressive mendaciousness voiced in condescending nasal tones has become far more repugnant than all-American hype in a Queens accent.

What is happening in America may be an indication that representative government may be making a comeback. We may be entering a time when elected officials will actually be required to represent the people who elected them.

Slowly Getting To The Truth

Fox News posted an article today about a recent comment by James Comey. In an interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, James Comey stated that the recently released Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the launch of the FBI’s Russia investigation and their use of the surveillance process showed that he was “overconfident” when he defended his former agency’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). I don’t mean to be difficult, but I think you could fertilize your garden with that statement. Remember, it was James Comey who leaked information to his friend to leak to The New York Times in order to promote the idea that a Special Prosecutor was needed. It was James Comey who listed all the crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and then said they weren’t really crimes because she didn’t mean to commit them. It was James Comey who briefed the President on the Steele Dossier so that it could be leaked to the press. It was James Comey who paved the way for the entire phony Russia investigation that cost taxpayers millions and prevented Congress from actually accomplishing anything for the good of the country. Keep that in mind as he proclaims he had no idea what was going on.

The article notes:

“He’s right, I was wrong,” Comey said about how the FBI used the FISA process, adding, “I was overconfident as director in our procedures,” and that what happened “was not acceptable.”

Horowitz did make it clear that he believes the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference and possible connections with the Trump campaign was properly initiated, but he did note that this is based on a “low threshold.” He also concluded that there was no testimonial or documentary evidence to show that the investigation started due to any political bias, but said the issue of bias “gets murkier” when it comes to the various issues with the FISA process.

That process included the reliance on information gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele as part of opposition research conducted by Fusion GPS for the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign. Horowitz’s report stated that government attorneys were hesitant to approve a FISA warrant application until they relied on unverified information from Steele. That information also was used in subsequent renewals for the FISA warrant.

Comey downplayed the role of Steele’s information in obtaining the FISA warrant against Page, claiming Sunday that it was “not a huge part of the presentation to the court,” just part of the information included in the warrant application.

It will be interesting to see if James Comey is included when indictments are handed out. My bet is that he will be. He should at least be held accountable for leaking information.

Even Rolling Stone Has Figured It Out!

Yesterday Rolling Stone posted an article about the Inspector General’s Report. Please follow the link to read the entire article–it is well written and informative. I will try to highlight some of it, but you really do need to read the whole thing.

The article notes:

The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.

Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.

Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.

Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.

However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).

The article comments on the role the news media played in this drama:

Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”

There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:

The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.

Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear: 

We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.  

The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”

The article notes:

Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.

Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.

The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.

As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two yearsEven the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”

The article has a fantastic conclusion:

No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.

Rolling Stone doesn’t always get it right, but this time they nailed it!

Watch The Talking Points

There is no general source cited for this article. It is simply some observations I have made in the past few days. Has anyone else noticed that the current talking point of those who want to impeach the President is that he asked for a foreign country to investigate a political rival? There is a total avoidance of the fact that transcripts of two telephone calls does not validate that charge. There is also a total avoidance of the fact that the Christopher Steele dossier was an illustration of that charge. If you have doubts, read the transcript.

Another talking point is that if someone is running for office, they cannot be investigated for any past actions. This idea somehow has never applied to President Trump–they are still trying to get his tax returns in the hope of finding out that he deducted something he shouldn’t have. Have they forgotten the Clinton’s charity deductions for used underwear? Yuck.

The next talking point is that Ukraine did not interfere in the 2016 election. Again, you have to ignore a lot of basic facts to believe that. Politico wrote about Ukrainian interference in 2017. This is the link (if the article has not been taken down). There were also other articles written at the time noting that the corrupt Ukraine government had egg on its face when President Trump won the 2016 election.

All of these talking points are being spun daily–even on the supposedly conservative news programs. As voters, all of us need to pay attention when supposed experts are telling us things that are simply not true.

I’m Not Sure If This Will Be The End Of This Story

Yesterday Mark Hemingway posted an article at Real Clear Investigations about an investigation into a scheme involving Hillary Clinton’s pal Sidney Blumenthal and his associates to profit from the deposing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The article reports:

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011.

The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier.

The bureau’s different responses to these documents also came during the same period when FBI Director James B. Comey controversially cleared Clinton, in his first of two exonerations, of criminal wrongdoing in the bureau’s probe of her unauthorized and insecure email setup.\

The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?

The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a “quid pro quo” to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers’ cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

The private Libya inquiry leaves important issues unsettled. The documents do not include emails or other original source material to support the allegations within. While claiming to possess evidence that Blumenthal and his associates had contracts and offshore accounts to repatriate the money, the documents say “no concrete evidence” was found suggesting Clinton acted to support the effort.

Yet if verified, the files might shed light on why Clinton kept her emails, tens of thousands of which have gone missing, out of normal government communication channels.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It asks many questions about why the FBI followed up on an investigation on Russian collusion when they knew that some of the leads they had were false and didn’t follow up on this investigation.

Hopefully, as the FBI becomes less political (which may or may not be happening), some of the loose ends left loose by the Obama administration will be revisited.