Tag Archives: collusion

The Real Purpose Of The Raid At Mar-a-Lago?

Posted on by

If you don’t have your conspiracy hat on, you are probably going to need it for this article.

An animal is most dangerous when it is cornered. On Tuesday, The New York Post posted an article about the illegal spying on President Trump during the presidential campaign of 2016 and afterward. Obviously, that was illegal, but it seems as if Democrats are not required to abide by laws.

The article reports:

The US Intelligence Community asked foreign spy agencies to surveil 26 associates of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, which triggered the allegations that the former president’s campaign had been colluding with Russia, according to a report. 

Former CIA Director John Brennan identified and presented the targets to the US’s intelligence-sharing partners in the so-called “Five Eyes” agencies – the intelligence-gathering organizations in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – according to a report published Monday on Michael Shellenberger’s Public Substack. 

The report by independent journalists Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag has not been confirmed by The Post.

They cite multiple unnamed sources, including ones close to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio). 

The article concludes:

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to probation in 2021 after admitting that he falsified an e-mail to renew a wiretap against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. 

​​Page had been wiretapped after intelligence sources suspected he might have been targeted by Russian spies. The wiretap, which was approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was renewed several times after it was first granted.

Last March, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI investigation of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia was “seriously flawed” and had no basis in evidence, after a four-year review of the probe. 

In response, the FBI said it had “implemented dozens of corrective actions” since the improper Trump probe and that “the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented” had the reforms been in place in 2016. 

In 2022, Taibbi and Shellenberger were involved in the publishing of the Twitter Files expose, which detailed how the social media giant’s previous management team sought to silence controversial voices and suppress news items such as The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Do you really believe all necessary corrective actions have been taken? What if there is more to this than meets the eye? What if documents detailing exactly who was involved in this illegal activity exist and the FBI does not know where they are? Would they logically be at Mar-a-Lago or in President Trump’s possession? Is it possible that was what the raid at Mar-a-Lago was really about since other Presidents have never been treated that way?

President Trump is a smart man. I suspect (and I would also suggest that the parties who broke the law spying suspect) that somewhere in a very secret place the documents showing the abuse of our justice system are in President Trump’s possession. I also think that those who engaged in the illegal spying will be brought to justice if President Trump is re-elected. That is why the deep state is working so hard to prevent President Trump from being our next President.

Hopefully This Will Uncover The Truth

Posted on by

On July 10, 2016, Seth Rich was murdered in Washington, D.C. He was shot twice in the back. The police dismissed it as a botched robbery, but there are some legitimate questions regarding his death.

On Wednesday, The Gateway Pundit posted the following headline:

BIG NEWS: Federal Judge Orders FBI to Hand Over Evidence in Former DNC Employee Seth Rich’s Murder Case within 14 Days

It was rumored at the time that Seth Rich was the source for the information about the Democrat Party posted at Wikileaks. Julian Paul Assange, the founder of Wikileaks has been in prison for four years after being removed from Ecuador’s London embassy and arrested by British police.

The article reports:

Clevenger (Attorney Ty Clevenger) has been attempting to get to the bottom of who supplied the DNC and Podesta emails to the DNC for several years now.  This was always the key to the Russia collusion nightmare.  If Russia didn’t supply emails to WikiLeaks (the FBI has never asked WikiLeaks who supplied the emails by the way) then the Russia collusion story was built on a lie.

After years of denying they had anything related to Seth Rich, the FBI and DOJ were caught lying over and over again.  In September, a judge finally demanded the FBI and DOJ provide all they had in regard to Seth Rich and the FBI responded requesting another 66 years before releasing the information.

Now, a Federal Judge has just ruled the FBI must hand over evidence regarding former DNC employee Seth Rich’s murder.
The article concludes:

The lack of details regarding Rich’s death has left many people puzzled.

According to authorities, Rich died from a “botched” robbery attempt, and his murderer has never been found.

In recent years, it has been reported by outlets that Rich made himself a target after he allegedly leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks before his sudden death.

Previously, the FBI prevented a FOIA request relating to Rich’s death.

 

 

Why It Matters

Posted on by

On Wednesday Real Clear Politics posted an article titled, “What the ‘Obamagate’ Scandals Mean and Why They Matter.” The article lists and details the scandals and why they matter. I will list them and then share the conclusion. Please follow the link to the article for further details.

The article lists the scandals:

Scandal No. 1: Massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens, using the database of the National Security Agency

Scandal No. 2: Spying on the Trump campaign

Scandal No. 3: Covering up this spying, continuing it during the new administration, charging that Trump was not legitimately elected, and impeding his presidency with major investigations, based on false charges

The article concludes:

Obama officials worked especially hard to remove incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Because Gen. Flynn was an experienced intelligence officer, he would surely uncover the surveillance of Trump’s campaign and transition and stop its continuation against the new administration. He had to go. Now we know just how low the Obama administration and Comey FBI sunk to make that happen: spying, unmasking, leaking classified phone calls, discarding FBI protocols to set up an entrapment interview based on a meaningless “legal violation,” and telling Trump directly, as Obama did, not to hire Flynn.

Beyond this destructive mission, Brennan loyalists at the CIA burrowed into Trump’s National Security Council while the FBI tried to plant agents in the White House itself. Most important of all, the Obama team and their congressional allies helped launch multiple, full-scale investigations of “Russian collusion” with no solid basis, plenty of contrived “evidence,” and breathless media headlines. It all failed, but not before it damaged Trump’s presidency and the basic tenets of liberal democracy.

It’s an ugly picture, one that goes beyond dirty tricks and the normal bounds of “loyal opposition.” We still have a lot to learn, but we already know a great deal. We know how grave the three scandals were. We know they fit together, forming something much larger. With each new tranche of declassified documents, we see something big and hideous emerging from the Swamp, a political scandal of profound import.

This information needs to be shouted to the American people. There are many Americans who still believe that President Trump did collude with the Russians, and they need to be told the truth. No one likes to admit that they believed a lie, but it is time to educate the American citizens on what the truth actually is.

Those Pesky Transcripts

Posted on by

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today that illustrates another problem with what witnesses told Congress under oath and what those same witnesses told the media.

The article reports:

The attorney for a star witness of the Mueller sham just happens to be a colleague of former Mueller gang leader Andrew Weissmann.  Who would have thought?

A week ago, the transcripts from House hearings a couple years ago, involving the fraudulent Trump – Russia collusion sham, were finally released.  One individual who spoke before the House Committee was Matt Tait.

Tait wrote a post at the notoriously far left entity Lawfare on June 30, 2017.  This was at the same time the media was all over the Trump-Russia fraudulent sham and so Tait’s post received some attention from the liberal media.

The article shares an excerpt from the Mr Tait’s post:

… right around the time the DNC emails were dumped by Wikileaks—and curiously, around the same time Trump called for the Russians to get Hillary Clinton’s missing emails—I was contacted out the blue by a man named Peter Smith, who had seen my work going through these emails. Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative.

Initially, I assumed the query must have been about my work on the DNC hack; after all, few people followed my account prior to the DNC breach, whereas my analysis of the break-in at the DNC had received considerably more coverage. I assumed his query about the “Clinton emails” was therefore a mistake and that he meant instead to talk to me about the emails stolen from the DNC. So I agreed to talk to him, thinking that, whatever my views on then-candidate Trump, if a national campaign wanted an independent non-partisan view on the facts surrounding the case, I should provide it to the best of my ability.

Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked—in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too—and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

Unfortunately, Peter Smith died in May 2017 in an apparent suicide.

Well, it was an interesting story, but the released transcripts tell a different story.

The following tweet appears in the article:

Please follow the link to the article. It includes further details that show how the media was totally mislead while the truth was told under oath.

How To Write A Report Without Actually Saying Anything

Posted on by

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.

Further Proof That The Russians Did Not Hack The DNC’s Computers

Posted on by

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article with the following headline, “BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Joe Biden’s Former IT Director, Warren Flood, Implicated in ‘Russia Hacked the DNC Email’ Narrative.” Periodically I post an article that I do not technically understand. This is one of those articles, so if you are a computer person, please forgive my feeble attempts at explaining this.

The article reports:

On June 16, 2019, we presented arguments against the Mueller gang’s assertion that the DNC was hacked by Russians. Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum posted an incredible report with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians.

Today we have support implicating an IT Direct0r, Warren Flood, connected to Joe Biden.  Flood is linked to the ‘Russia hacked the DNC hoax’.

Last year we reported a series of arguments proving that there is no proof that Russians hacked the DNC. These arguments came from cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum whose first argument was this –

According to the WaPo (using CrowdStrike, DOJ, and their other usual hush-hush government sources in the know), the attack was perpetrated by a Russian unit lead by Lieutenant Captain Nikolay Kozachek who allegedly crafted a malware called X-Agent and used it to get into the network and install keystroke loggers on several PCs. This allowed them to see what the employees were typing and take screenshots of the employees’ computer.

This is pretty detailed information, but if this was the case, then how did the DOJ learn all of these ‘details’ and use them in the indictments without the FBI ever forensically evaluating the DNC/HRC computers? And since when does the DOJ, an organization that only speaks the language of indictments use hearsay and 3rd parties like the British national Matt Tait (a former GCHQ collector and a connoisseur of all things related to Russian collusion), CrowdStrike, or any other evidence lacking chain of custody certification as a primary source for prosecution?

A second point by Apelbaum was –

… that three of the Russian GRU officers on the DOJ wanted list were allegedly working concurrently on multiple non-related projects like interfering with the 2016 United States elections (both HRC and DNC) while at the same time they were also allegedly hacking anti-doping agencies.

Those are the basic questions that need to be asked, but there is more.

There is the issue of the speed of the transfer of information:

Esteemed NSA whistleblower Bill Binney reported in June 2019 that there was no way Russians hacked the DNC based on the speed of the transfer of the data that was hacked. But according to Apelbaum the transfer speeds is a minor issue here. It’s just an indicator that it would have been difficult for Guccifer 2 who was sitting in Romania to access the DNC system remotely.

The article contains a screenshot that also raises suspicions about what really happened along with further information about the hack:

But of course the Mueller gang never interviewed WikiLeaks in an effort to determine how they received the Clinton emails. Of course the Mueller team could not risk WikiLeaks saying the emails were not received from Russia which would destroy their Russia hacked the DNC fairy tale.

Today we identify Warren Flood, a Biden protege who appears to have helped create the ‘Russia Hacked the DNC’ narrative:

Apelbaum obtained a parts of the Word and PDF versions of the purported DNC Opposition research document showing the original English template and the pasted version into a Russian template and resulting subsequent broken hyperlink error messages in Russian

The article then explains the significance of the screenshot:

In the image above, on the left it shows the Word doc properties of the document created at 1:38 PM on June 15, 2016. The Company name is given as GSA. This appears to be the General Services Administration (US gov agency), which shows as the Company for MS Office documents created via GSA-contracted copies of MS Word.

(Note that the DNC server wasn’t supposed to be using a GSA-contracted MS Office suite. A number of Democratic politicians and aides (e.g,, many members of the US House of Representatives) had DNC email accounts, but the DNC is a private entity and should not have hosted GSA-contracted software.)

The supposed author of this document is Warren Flood as is noted at the bottom left of the diagram above.  He was Vice President Joe Biden’s IT Director at the White House (which does use GSA registered software).

The article concludes:

Based on the document metadata there is little doubt that either Warren Flood (who BTW, speaks Russian), or someone using his GSA licensed MS Word software created the Russian fingerprint. Also, it’s important to note that several other documents also show this type of manipulation, but they were created by users named “Blake” and “jbs836”.

In terms of the big picture, it is possible that whoever added the Russian fingerprint did this as part of laying the ground work or for future unmasking. We know that in June 2016 the Obama administration (via people like Susan Rice, John Brennan, and Samantha Power) started unmasking Trump campaign officials on the pretext of ‘Russian interference’.  This June 2016 activity overlaps with dates of the Guccifer 2.0 saga.

So, it is possible that Guccifer 2.0 and MSM outlets like the NYTimes who promoted him were part of a larger campaign to affirm Russian interference with the DNC hacks.

If this is indeed the case, then it means that the DNC email leak could implicate Obama administration officials who were doing all this document manipulation on government time and on GSA registered computers all in an effort to tie Russia to the DNC email heist.

Based on information available today, there is no way Russians hacked the DNC. This was made up from the start.  Now we know that the Obama White House, and specifically Warren Flood, is involved in the Russian hoax.

Hopefully. someone in the Inspector General’s office is honest enough and smart enough to investigate this.

How To Make A Scandal Go Away

Posted on by

Some of our politicians have perfected a strategy to deal with scandals that generally works. I won’t name names here, but you can probably come up with a few. The most successful strategy has been to stonewall, delay, obfuscate, and deny for a period of time, and when the facts actually come out, say, “That’s old news. It’s already been settled.” That is the current strategy being used to delay the Inspector General’s Report on how the Russian investigation began and on the illegal surveillance of American citizens that occurred during the Obama administration.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article that included a conversation that occurred on the Sean Hannity Show on Monday.

This is the conversation:

Sean Hannity: Which brings us to the IG report. Congressman Chaffetz, it’s been taking us a long time. And we heard the end of this week. Now we heard the beginning of next week. I can never get a straight answer. You know, at some point are we going to see premeditated fraud on a FISA Court and people held accountable? Spying on a presidential campaign, transition and president?

Jason Chaffetz: It has been going on for an exceptionally long time. Evidently there’s an intra-agency debate and really a food fight if you will over the classification issues. Remember in the last report put out by Horowitz there were only seven words or so that were redacted. The Democrats threw a fit that they couldn’t see the whole thing. This could have 10-20% of the report redacted…

Sean Hannity: Is that director Wray who has not shown any willingness to clean up the greatest law enforcement agency in the world? Is that him?

Jason Chaffetz: I have not seen any evidence that Director Wray has been cooperative but I think we’re talking about other agencies, perhaps. Perhaps the CIA the NSA, there are others. Mr. Clapper, Mr. Brennan, are behind the scenes fighting as best they can. in front of the camera fighting as best they can. I think you need to look at what Mr. Comey, the director of the FBI and his interaction with Brennan in particular. What sort of collusion was happening in our government and overseas. That’s the deep concern, Sean.

It’s interesting that the IG report is being kept from the American public and the impeachment proceedings are also being done in secret. Have we reached the point where many of those who are supposed to represent us in government have decided that we don’t have the right to know what they are doing?

Going To The Courts

Posted on by

Those of us who have followed the Russian collusion story closely are waiting for someone to actually be held accountable for the violations of civil liberties of Americans that went on during the Obama administration. It seems as if it is nearly impossible to get information on what went on and even when we have the information that things were not done properly, there is no accountability. The Russia hoax is actually following the pattern of many of the Clinton scandals–delay, delay, delay, and when damaging information finally surfaces, you say ‘that’s old news.’ Well, some of the people who actually know the truth are not willing to settle for delay, delay, delay.

The Washington Examiner reported the following yesterday:

Congressman Devin Nunes filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against opposition research firm Fusion GPS, its founder Glenn Simpson, and left-leaning watchdog group Campaign for Accountability, accusing them of “racketeering” and interfering with his congressional Trump-Russia investigation.

Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until Democrats won the majority in 2018, claimed that Simpson, Fusion GPS, and the Campaign for Accountability illegally conspired to “harass” him in an attempt to “hinder, delay, prevent, or dissuade” him from looking into issues surrounding the federal investigation into the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and to scare him off from investigating possible wrongdoing by Simpson and Fusion GPS.

The California Republican is asking the judge to award him $9.9 million in damages.

The 35-page complaint Nunes filed in the Eastern District of Virginia today pointed to a Daily Caller article from early August that revealed the Campaign for Accountability hired Fusion GPS as an “independent contractor” in 2018 and paid the firm close to $140,000 for research. And the Nunes lawsuit alleged the watchdog group and the opposition research firm then colluded to target him and stymie his efforts, pointing to three ethics complaints filed by the Campaign for Accountability allegedly “in concert with” Fusion GPS in an effort to “chill reporting of Fusion GPS and Simpson’s wrongdoing” and to dissuade Nunes from making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

Nunes described Fusion GPS as “a political war room for hire that specializes in dirty tricks and smears” and the Campaign for Accountability as a “dark money, partisan, left-wing” nonprofit that he said targets mainly conservatives.

The article continues:

Nunes said Simpson and Fusion GPS “shared a common goal” with the Clinton campaign of “using the false and defamatory statements in the Steele dossier to poison the minds of voters.”

“Fusion GPS and Simpson harbored spite and ill-will towards [Nunes] and decided to smear [him] as a result of his tenacious efforts in 2017 to expose Fusion GPS’ nefarious activities,” the lawsuit alleges.

Nunes said Fusion GPS retaliated through the Campaign for Accountability because of subpoenas he issued in 2017 to the FBI and DOJ for information on their relationship with Steele, to Simpson and other Fusion GPS partners to compel their testimony, and to the bank Fusion GPS used, which “revealed that the Clinton campaign, the DNC and Perkins Coie paid for Fusion GPS’ anti-Trump research.”

Nunes claimed that “corrupt acts of racketeering are part of [Fusion GPS’] regular way of doing business” and said “that way of doing business must end here and now.”

Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report on the use of Steele’s dossier and alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which started more than a year ago, is expected in September or early October. The DOJ watchdog’s report harshly criticizing former FBI Director James Comey over the mishandling of his memos was released last week.

The deep state is somewhat like an octopus–it has many tentacles. The entire ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ operation was illegal from the start and should be tried under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). There are now stories that James Comey placed spies in the White House in the early days of the Trump administration until Comey was fired in May 2017. More on that when I can confirm it.

Lies That Create Political Unrest

Posted on by

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Joseph Goebbels

Dennis Prager posted an article at Townhall today about the lies the media has consistently repeated about President Trump. Unfortunately, those Americans who rely on the mainstream media believe these lies.

The article notes:

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, never said there were “fine” Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen.

This is one of the two great lies of our time — the other being that all Trump supporters are racists — and perhaps in all of American history. I cannot think of a lie of such significance that was held as truth by so many Americans, by every leading politician of one of the two major political parties and disseminated by virtually the entire media.

The major news media need to understand these are important reasons that half of America considers them frauds. And we get no pleasure from this fact. The reason we don’t recoil when the president labels the mainstream media “fake news” is that we know the charge is true. Has one major media news outlet yet apologized to the American people for preoccupying them for nearly two years with the lie of “Trump collusion” with Russia? Has one Democrat? Of course not. Because with regard to the Trump-Russia collusion issue, the news media were never driven by a pursuit of truth; they were driven by a pursuit of Trump.

…By remarkable coincidence, this week’s PragerU video is titled “The Charlottesville Lie.” It proves the president never said Nazis were fine people. When Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he was referring to people demonstrating in Charlottesville for and against tearing down a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, not to Nazis and antifa.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It illustrates the lies the American people have been told since President Trump came down the elevator.

President Trump is not dividing the country–a left-wing media that fails to tell the truth has fueled the division with its constant attacks. How many Americans believe that the President colluded with Russia to win the election? How many Americans are aware of the roots of the Russia investigation? How many Americans will be shocked by the coming declassification of documents related to that investigation? How much of that declassification will the mainstream media report? The answers to those questions illustrate what is actually going on.

Some Basic Facts

Posted on by

Yesterday Mark Penn posted an article at Fox News about the Mueller investigation. Mark Penn was the chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The article reminds us of some important facts regarding the investigation:

Robert Mueller’s testimony to Congress, by any reasonable standard, should have been the swan song of the impeachment movement.

To state the obvious, there is no evidence that President Trump or any other American probed by the Mueller investigation conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

…So why does a third or more of the public still believe in Russia collusion? Because partisanship by our politicians and some in the media knows no bounds, and to partisans, facts and evidence are simply inconvenient bumps on a road to power.

That brings us back to the Mueller testimony and the Mueller Andrew Weissmann investigation. Mueller turned out to be the classic emperor-has-no-clothes witness. He once again said that he did not indict Trump because of the Justice Department policy against indicting a president only to once again retract the statement hours later.

He may be old, but he surely understood he was playing and retracting that card — he would have practiced that question 10 times as it was the only anti-Trump card remaining in his dwindling hand. He ignored that Attorney General William Barr, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and career Justice Department lawyers all determined that the facts he listed didn’t constitute criminal obstruction of justice.

The president was, as far as the Justice Department was concerned, cleared on obstruction of justice.

Mueller’s weak grasp of the facts, combined with his deputy Weissmann’s documented history of prosecutorial abuse, strongly suggests Weissmann ran the investigation, not Mueller. It also indicates that Weissmann enjoyed free rein to go after not just the facts, but the people associated with the president.

The article concludes with a very important observation:

Targeting political opponents through the legal and subpoena process after a massive investigation revealed no collusion undermines our democracy. It is a far greater threat to our country and its institutions than any ads on Facebook. Whether you think the FBI acted out of political malice (which is now being investigated) or a sense of duty, there is simply no evidence that the president ever committed a crime, or that his top aides were involved in collusion or conspiracy. Nothing of consequence alleged in the Steele dossier was ever proven true.

Mueller’s testimony confirmed these basic facts, and it should put impeachment investigations in the rearview mirror.

The investigation and surveillance of the Trump campaign and the early days of the Trump administration were a violation of the civil rights of a number of Americans. This is unacceptable. Those who violated those civil rights need to be held accountable or our Justice Department will become a political instrument to be used against political opponents. At that point we will have lost our republic.

When The Circus Comes To Town

Posted on by

Yesterday Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, posted an article at The Daily Caller. The title of the article says it all, “FITTON: Congress Should Stop Wasting Time On Mueller — And Investigate Hillary Clinton’s Role In Steel Dossier.”

Here are some highlights from the article:

This hearing will give Mueller and the Democrats an opportunity to once again push the “destroy Trump” narrative and jump-start the impeachment process. Mueller’s testimony will be geared to that end. Democratic questions will seek to fill in the blanks to preserve Mueller’s manufactured reputation for probity. And the mainstream media will be primed — and probably pre-briefed — to drive the point home.

However, unlike at his press statement where he allowed no questions, Mueller will now have to face hard scrutiny from Republicans and honest Democrats about the origins of his investigation, misconduct during the process, and his questionable, sometimes completely erroneous conclusions.

For example, why did Mueller sit on the fact that his team had early-on discovered that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which was the central question of the entire Russiagate hoax? Were the midterm elections a factor in his delay for exonerating President Trump of Russia collusion?

Why did Mueller continue as special counsel after learning that former FBI Director James Comey broke the law to get him appointed by leaking information from President Trump’s FBI files to the New York Times, using a Columbia professor friend of his as a cut-out?

It is truly sad that Congress continues to waste time on attempting to remove a duly-elected President instead of actually investigating some of the facts that have come to light about the 2016 campaign which they have totally ignored.

The article continues:

Why did Mueller hide from the American people for four months Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s outrageous conduct and flagrant anti-Trump bias, which necessitated they be fired from the investigation? And why did his office quietly delete all the text messages they passed while on his team, going so far as to reformat their government-issued phones?

Did Mueller’s office have any contacts with the media, such as leaking information regarding the massive pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone’s home, or the inexplicable guns-drawn action at the home of Paul Manafort?

Why didn’t Mueller investigate the Steele dossier that was the basis for the Russian collusion hoax? Why didn’t Mueller examine contacts between Steele, Fusion GPS employees like Nellie Ohr, and/or members of the Clinton campaign with the sketchy Russian sources who fed the rumors that were the basis of the dossier

The article concludes:

This is rooted in a Clinton campaign operation seeking to create a false narrative that the Russians were conspiring with Donald Trump to rig the 2016 election. But she was the one subverting the American electoral process, with the unprecedented and illicit cooperation of corrupt swamp dwellers in the upper reaches of the Obama administration. And it is important that the sedition be exposed, and Hillary Clinton and the rest be held accountable.

To this end the president should start releasing all the key documents that detail the depth and breadth of the scandal, who was involved in it, and how it unfolded. Attorney General William Barr needs to investigate how the Mueller investigation came about and, in particular, the matter of the manufactured predicate for the unprecedented and troubling mobilization of government resources to spy on the Trump presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Judicial Watch has over 50 lawsuits to uncover more information, of which over a dozen relate to Mueller himself.  The Democrat circus hearing may boomerang as the “investigation of the investigators” accelerates.

The activities of those in government who have tried to remove this President need to be exposed. This should never happen again.

Act II

Posted on by

The Mueller Report fizzled. Donald Trump is still President. The House of Representative is preparing for impeachment on possible charges of a cover-up where there is no crime. Most of the Democrat candidates running for President in 2020 support socialism, killing babies up until the moment when they are actually born, open borders, free healthcare for everyone (including those here illegally), and free college. What could possibly go wrong? Well, now is the time to get out the popcorn.

On Thursday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at The National Review about the collapse of the Russian-collusion narrative.

Mr. Hanson points out a few obvious facts that made the narrative doubtful from the start:

One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.

Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions, and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own reelection bid.

The article concludes by noting that the rats are deserting the sinking ship:

Comey is also in a tiff with his former deputy, Andrew McCabe. Both know that the FBI under Comey illegally leaked classified information to the media. But Comey says McCabe went rogue and did it. Of course, McCabe’s attorney shot back that Comey had authorized it. Comey also claims the Steele dossier was not the chief evidence for a FISA warrant. McCabe insists that it was. It’s possible that one might work with prosecutors against the other to finagle a lesser charge.

Former CIA director John Brennan has on two occasions lied under oath to Congress and gotten away with it. He may not get away with lying again if it’s determined that he distorted the truth about his efforts to spread the Steele dossier smears. A former CIA official claims that Comey put the unverified Steele dossier into an intelligence community report on alleged Russian interference. Comey has contended that Brennan was the one who did.

It’s possible that both did. Doing so would have been unethical if not illegal, given that neither official told President Obama (if he didn’t already know) that the silly Steele dossier was a product of Hillary Clinton’s amateurish efforts to subvert the 2016 Trump campaign.

In sum, the old leaky vessel of collusion is sinking.

The rats are scampering from their once safe refuge — biting and piling on one another in vain efforts to avoid drowning.

The really scary part of this is that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, we would know none of this, and using the government to spy on political opponents would have become a way of life in America. Unless the people responsible for using the government as a political weapon are brought to justice, using the government to spy on political opponents will become a way of life in America.

Some Comments On Today’s Events

Posted on by

The following interview is from Fox Business News:

We are watching the last of an attempted coup. The Deep State, which included the upper echelon of the Department of Justice, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign and aided by the mainstream media attempted (and is continuing to attempt) to unseat a duly-elected President because they don’t like him and they lost. Actually it’s more serious than that. President Trump represents a serious threat to the current status quo that has enriched Washington insiders for generations. Rather than lose the gravy train they are accustomed to, Democrats and some Republicans want him gone. They are not particularly fussy about following the Constitution in accomplishing their goal. Hopefully those who participated in this attempted coup with be dealt with appropriately.

 

The Question That Has Gotten Lost In The Politics

Posted on by

The Mueller Report is out. It is all over the news. The mainstream media is trying to find something in it that they can actually use to discredit President Trump; the Democrats in Congress are trying to find something in it that they can use to impeach President Trump. Unfortunately, the circus continues–the main event has moved on, but the clowns remain.

Yesterday, Byron York posted an article at The Washington Examiner that reminds us what the Mueller investigation was supposed to be about.

The article notes:

…At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.

…And now Mueller has determined there was no collusion. Not that there was no criminal collusion. Or no prove-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt collusion. Just no collusion. Mueller’s report says it over and over and over again. Here are seven examples:

1. “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

2. “The investigation examined whether [contacts between Russia and Trump figures] involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future. Based on the available information, the investigation did not establish such coordination.”

3. “The investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.”

4. “The Office did not identify evidence in those [contacts between Russians and people around Trump after the GOP convention] of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government.”

5. “The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election … [and] the investigation did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts.”

6. “The investigation did not establish that these [contacts between Russians and people around Trump during the transition] reflected or constituted coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia in its election interference activities.”

7. “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons conspired or coordinated with the [Russian disinformation campaign].”

That is definitive. It is not kinda, sorta. It is definitive. As far as Mueller’s conclusions are concerned — and remember, he was long considered the gold standard of Trump investigations — there was no collusion.

Other than dealing with the abuse of power by some former high officials in our government, can we please move on now.

When Your Weapon Backfires

Posted on by

BizPacReview posted an article yesterday about a recent Rasmussen poll.

The article reports:

A new Rasmussen poll shows more voters believe it is Crooked Hillary Clinton rather than President Trump who is guilty of colluding with foreign operatives during the 2016 election campaign. Of likely voters polled, 47% believe the Clinton campaign was involved in collusion, as opposed to 45% who still buy the fraudulent Trump collusion story.

The worm is turning in spite of a non-stop, years-long onslaught of lies from the never-Trump media about it all. The tipping point is now … with the majority finally discerning the truth and slowly more and more rejecting the coordinated MSM disinformation campaign.

…The March 25-26 survey found 50% of voters satisfied with the conclusions reached by Mueller. About one-third, or 36%, are not satisfied and 13% are undecided.

The article also includes the following:

On March 25th, Yahoo News reported the following:

After 16 months of investigation, the cost had ballooned to $25 million, CNBC reported. Based on those figures, that works out to approximately $1.5 million spent per month. And that’s just working from September 2018, the 16-month mark. The cost has very likely gone up since then. If the $1.5 million figure remains static, taxpayers have paid another $7.5 million between October 2018 and February 2019.

In Mueller’s latest filing, released in September 2018, he reported “spending nearly $3 million on compensation, $580,000 on travel and transportation, $1 million on rent and related expenses, and $300,000 on contractual services, primarily related to IT,” according to CNBC.

The Democrats might want to keep all of these numbers in mind as they pursue their subpoenas of the Mueller Report. After the government spent some serious money and the mainstream media claimed that President Trump was a Russian agent, many Americans were not fooled.

The Letter

Posted on by

Below is a copy of Attorney General Barr’s summary letter to Senator Lindsey Graham, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Representative Doug Collins. You can view the letter on Scribd by clicking on the link.

Barr’s Letter by on Scribd

Scott Johnson at Power Line posted an article about the letter today.

He notes a few basic facts about the letter:

This investigation is the product of a Clinton campaign fabrication. That’s why the investigation was a witch hunt. It is also why the finding of no collusion is unsurprising to anyone who has paid attention with a modicum of impartiality and critical intelligence. The finding of no obstruction is made by Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. If there was no collusion, they suggest, there was highly likely no obstruction and in fact they find that Mueller did not identify any actions that in the judgment of Barr and Rosenstein constituted obstructive conduct. See page 3, paragraph 3.

While investigations and prosecutions will continue for the foreseeable future, we can turn out the lights on the Mueller investigation; the party’s over. Mainstream media hardest hit.

One thing to keep in mind is that a team of totally partisan Democrats looking under every rock they could find for two plus years not only could not find evidence of Russian collusion by President Trump, they somehow failed to notice the entanglement of the Clinton campaign in providing a dossier that paved the way for surveillance of a political opponent’s campaign. As the Democrats continue to investigate in the hope of turning public opinion against President Trump before the 2020 election, I hope the American voters begin to realize where the scandal was in this investigation–it wasn’t in the Trump campaign.

Why I Have Concerns About Our Justice System

Posted on by

John Solomon at The Hill posted an article yesterday about some of the information in the Russian investigation that should be made public.

The article reports:

If President Trump declassifies evidence in the Russia investigation, Carter Page’s summer bike ride to a Virginia farm and George Papadopoulos’s hasty academic jaunt to London may emerge as linchpin proof of FBI surveillance abuses during the 2016 election.

The two trips have received scant attention. But growing evidence suggests both Trump campaign advisers made exculpatory statements — at the very start of the FBI’s investigation — that undercut the Trump-Russia collusion theory peddled to agents by Democratic sources.

The FBI plowed ahead anyway with an unprecedented intrusion into a presidential campaign, while keeping evidence of the two men’s innocence from the courts.

Page and Papadopoulos, who barely knew each other, met separately in August and September 2016 with Stefan Halper, the American-born Cambridge University professor who, the FBI told Congress, worked as an undercover informer in the Russia case.

Papadopoulos was the young aide that the FBI used to justify opening a probe into the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after he allegedly told a foreign diplomat that he knew Russia possessed incriminating emails about Hillary Clinton.

Page, a volunteer campaign adviser, was the American the FBI then targeted on Oct. 21, 2016, for secret surveillance while investigating Democratic Party-funded allegations that he secretly might have coordinated Russia’s election efforts with the Trump campaign during a trip to Moscow.

To appreciate the significance of the two men’s interactions with Halper, one must understand the rules governing the FBI when it seeks a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant such as the one secured against Page.

First, the FBI must present evidence to FISA judges that it has verified and that comes from intelligence sources deemed reliable. Second, it must disclose any information that calls into question the credibility of its sources. Finally, it must disclose any evidence suggesting the innocence of its investigative targets.

Thanks to prior releases of information, we know the FBI fell short on the first two counts. Multiple FBI officials have testified that the Christopher Steele dossier had not been verified when its allegations were submitted as primary evidence supporting the FISA warrant against Page.

Likewise, we know the FBI failed to tell the courts that Steele admitted to a federal official that he was desperate to defeat Trump in the 2016 election and was being paid by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to gather dirt on the GOP candidate. Both pieces of information are the sort of credibility-defining details that should be disclosed about a source.

To put it succinctly, the whole investigation into Russian collusion was based on false premises and was a distraction to avoid looking at the abuses of the Justice Department during the Obama administration. It’s time we put Russia aside and ask why Lois Lerner, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, et al, are not under investigation. Using government bureaucrats to spy on an opposition party candidate is a new low in America. Those responsible need to be held accountable so that it will not happen again.

Are The Shenanigans Ever Going To Be Dealt With?

Posted on by

In the past two years or so, we have learned that a sitting Presidential administration spied on an opposition candidate. We have learned that the apparatus of government was used in an attempt to elect a president from the same party as the sitting President. We have seen lying before Congress go unchallenged, opposition research used as an excuse for violating the civil rights of Americans, and people targeted by a Special Counsel simply because they were friends or worked with a person the Special Counsel was targeting. In plain English, we have seen the Soviet concept of ‘show me the person, and I will show you the crime’ put into practice in America. When does America wake up and realize that while we are looking at an investigation of a shiny object over there, major civil rights violations are being ignored?

Fox News reported the following this morning:

President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen told House investigators this week that staff for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., traveled to New York at least four times to meet with him for over 10 hours immediately before last month’s high-profile public testimony, according to two sources familiar with the matter — as Republicans question whether the meetings amounted to coaching a witness.

…During last month’s seven-hour public hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen hesitantly acknowledged, under questioning from Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”

But, he did not elaborate on the discussions, which Fox News is told extended significantly longer than the seven hours that the public hearing itself lasted.

One by one, during the dramatic hearing, Cohen fielded questions on precisely the same topics that the sources told Fox News he discussed with Schiff’s staff during the sit-downs in New York.

This is a level of corruption in Congress that we have not seen in a long time.

The Never Ending Story

Posted on by

Newsbusters posted an article today about the upcoming end to the Mueller investigation. The investigation is beginning to resemble the story of the man searching for his car keys on the opposite side of the street from where he dropped them because the light is better there. But that hasn’t slowed the mainstream media down a bit.

The article reports:

After news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would be delivering his final Russia investigation report to Attorney General William Barr in the coming days, on Thursday, NBC’s Today show and CBS This Morning promised viewers that the investigation would continue regardless of Mueller’s findings.

Touting how “Several government officials say Robert Mueller is close to wrapping up” during a report for the Today show, correspondent Peter Alexander finished the segment by assuring: “….many legal experts say just because Robert Mueller is winding down does not mean the investigating stops, with federal prosecutors in Manhattan and elsewhere expected to follow up on pieces of the investigation.”

The article details some of the dialog between the news reporters and then concludes:

Co-host Bianna Golodryga tried to salvage the segment by concluding: “But as we showed, six people who are close to the President have pleaded guilty throughout this investigation.”

Even before Mueller has completed his investigation, the media are already gearing up for other investigations into the President as they prepare for the possibility that Mueller may not find Trump guilty of anything.

It should be noted that the six people who have pleaded guilty have been charged with crimes that either have no connection to either President Trump or Russia or are process crimes charging people who did not remember accurately facts that were totally unrelated to any investigation of Trump-Russia collusion. Generally speaking this has been an investigation searching for a crime and charging people close to the President with anything that might cause them to invent a crime rather than go to jail. The past two years of the Mueller investigation have given us a lot of insight into how things work in a banana republic.

Bias Is As Much About What Isn’t Reported As How News Is Slanted

Posted on by

Newsbusters posted an article yesterday about the report that the Senate Intelligence Committee has found no material evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. You might think that after two years and millions of dollars spent on an investigation, that might be news. You might think that, but evidently the major news media disagrees with you.

The article reports:

It’s been two days since NBC’s exclusive reporting that the Senate Intelligence Committee has found no material evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and as of yet none of the three major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have given it even a single second of coverage in their evening newscasts. Considering these networks have given the Russia probe a massive 2,202 minutes of airtime, their silence on this major development is deafening. 

MRC analysts examining all coverage on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and the NBC Nightly News found that those 2,202 minutes spent on the Russia investigation accounted for nearly 19 percent of all Trump-related reporting between January 21, 2017 and February 10, 2019. However none of those three shows have even mentioned the investigation since NBC’s report came out on February 12.

The situation has been much the same on those networks’ flagship morning shows. Neither CBS This Morning nor NBC’s Today have even acknowledged this new information from Senate investigators since the news broke on February 12. ABC’s Good Morning America briefly touched on it in a news brief totaling less than one minute on February 13. 

In that segment, ABC’s Mary Bruce focused only on the public disagreement between Republican Chairman Richard Burr and Democratic Ranking Member Mark Warner. She failed to acknowledge NBC’s reporting that other Democrats on the Committee had agreed with Burr’s finding that thus far, they had found no direct evidence of collusion.

The article concludes:

Over the past two years, broadcast evening news shows have spent more than 36 hours haranguing viewers about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Given their keen interest in the subject, you might expect a bipartisan group of investigators finding “no material evidence” of collusion to be newsworthy. But evidently, you’d be wrong.

And there are still some people who wonder why most Americans do not trust the mainstream media.

Collusion

Posted on by

On Sunday The Hill posted an article about Russian collusion. Just for the record, a number of legal experts have stated that collusion is not a crime, so I am not sure what all the fuss is about, but there has been quite a fuss.

The article states:

With Republicans on both House and Senate investigative committees having found no evidence of Donald Trump being guilty of Democrat-inspired allegations of Russian collusion, it is worth revisiting one anecdote that escaped significant attention during the hysteria but continues to have U.S. security implications.

As secretary of State, Hillary Clinton worked with Russian leaders, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-President Dmitri Medvedev, to create U.S. technology partnerships with Moscow’s version of Silicon Valley, a sprawling high-tech campus known as Skolkovo.

Clinton’s handprint was everywhere on the 2009-2010 project, the tip of a diplomatic spear to reboot U.S.-Russian relations after years of hostility prompted by Vladimir Putin’s military action against the former Soviet republic and now U.S. ally Georgia.

A donor to the Clinton Foundation, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, led the Russian side of the effort, and several American donors to the Clinton charity got involved. Clinton’s State Department facilitated U.S. companies working with the Russian project, and she personally invited Medvedev to visit Silicon Valley.

The collaboration occurred at the exact same time Bill Clinton made his now infamous trip to Russia to pick up a jaw-dropping $500,000 check for a single speech.

The former president’s trip secretly raised eyebrows inside his wife’s State Department, internal emails show.

That’s because he asked permission to meet Vekselberg, the head of Skolkovo, and Arkady Dvorkovich, a senior official of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear giant seeking State’s permission to buy Uranium One, a Canadian company with massive U.S. uranium reserves.

Years later, intelligence documents show, both the Skolkovo and Uranium One projects raised serious security concerns.

It may have raised concerns, but it is sad that the Department of Justice was so compromised at that point that they chose to do nothing about it. Does anyone really believe that Russia would have paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech without getting something in return?

The article also notes the involvement of Russia in the dirty dossier scandal:

The intersections between the Clintons, the Democrats and Russia carried into 2016, when a major political opposition research project designed to portray GOP rival Donald Trump as compromised by Moscow was launched by Clinton’s presidential campaign and brought to the FBI.

Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS research firm was secretly hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party through their law firm, Perkins Coie.

Simpson then hired retired British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — whom the FBI learned was “desperate” to defeat Trump — to write an unverified dossier suggesting that Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the election.

Simpson, Steele and Perkins Coie all walked Trump-Russia related allegations into the FBI the summer before the election, prompting agents who openly disliked Trump to launch a counterintelligence probe of the GOP nominee shortly before Election Day.

Simpson and Steele also went to the news media to air the allegations in what senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr would later write was a “Hail Mary” effort to influence the election.

The article concludes:

Collusion can be criminal if it involves conspiracy to break federal laws, or it can involve perfectly legal, unwitting actions that still jeopardize America’s security against a “frenemy” like Russia.

There is clear evidence now that shows Hillary Clinton’s family and charity profited from Moscow and simultaneously facilitated official government actions benefiting Russia that have raised security concerns.

And there’s irrefutable evidence that her opposition research effort on Trump — one that inspired an FBI probe — was carried out by people who got information from Russia and were consorting with Russians.

It would seem those questions deserve at least some of the scrutiny afforded the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry that is now two-plus years old.

Someone needs to take the blinders off of Robert Mueller and turn him in the right direction. His investigation is the equivalent of the man looking for his keys under the street light because the light is better (despite the fact that he dropped his keys across the street).

What An Amazing Coincidence

Posted on by

On Thursday, John Solomon at The Hill reported that the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, met with Fusion GPS Founder Glenn Simpson at an event in Aspen last year. Maybe they were talking about their grandchildren.

The article reports:

At the time of the encounter, Simpson was an important witness in the House Intelligence Committee probe who had given sworn testimony about alleged, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Simpson ran the firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party to find dirt on Trump in Moscow. He employed retired British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose infamous and unverified dossier became the main evidence for the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign, particularly the surveillance warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

And by the time of the meeting, the House Intelligence Committee had already received evidence from a senior Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, that called into question Simpson’s testimony to lawmakers.

Specifically, Simpson claimed he had not begun meeting with Ohr until after Thanksgiving 2016, well after the FBI had begun investigating Trump-Russia collusion and after the presidential election in which Simpson’s client, Clinton, lost to Trump.

But Ohr provided compelling evidence, including calendar notations, testimony and handwritten notes, showing that Simpson met with him in August 2016, well before the election and during a time when Steele was helping the FBI start an investigation into Trump.

When confronted with the Aspen conference photos of Schiff, in sport coat and open-neck dress shirt, and Simpson, wearing casual attire, representatives for both men tried to minimize their discussion, insisting nothing substantive about the Russia case was discussed.

“In the summer of 2018, Mr. Simpson attended a media-sponsored social event where he exchanged small talk with Rep. Schiff and many other people who were in attendance,” Fusion GPS said in a statement to me. “The conversation between the two was brief and did not cover anything substantive. There has been no subsequent contact between Mr. Simpson and Rep. Schiff.”

The problem here is not the meeting–it’s the double standard:

There is nothing illegal or technically improper about a congressman meeting, intentionally or unintentionally, with a witness in an investigation. At least not under the law or the House Intelligence Committee’s rules.

But Schiff created a far higher standard two years ago when he demanded that his Republican counterpart on the committee, then-Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), be investigated for having meetings with national security council officials at the Trump White House without telling the committee. Schiff’s attacks led Nunes to temporarily recuse himself from the Russia probe.

Schiff assailed Nunes’s contacts with a source outside the committee confines as “a dead-of-night excursion” and said it called into question the impartiality of the inquiry because the committee wasn’t informed.

“I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman,” Schiff said at the time.

So how did Schiff meet his own standards? Boland (Schiff spokesman Patrick Boland) declined to say if his boss told the committee about his Simpson contact.

Democrats in Congress seem to have no concept of treating members of both political parties equally. I think that is one of the reasons people become disgusted with politics.

I Don’t Think This Is What They Meant To Prove

Posted on by

The National Review today posted an article by Andrew McCarthy about the indictment of Roger Stone. The headline of the article is, “Stone Indictment Underscores That There Was No Trump-Russia Conspiracy.” Since Andrew McCarthy is an experienced prosecutor, he is very familiar with how the law works.

The article notes:

Roger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment, made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States.

Nor is the critical thing the indictment’s implicit confirmation that there was no criminal “collusion” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

What matters is this: The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency — over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern — heedless of the damage to the country.

The article continues:

So now we have the Stone indictment.

It alleges no involvement — by Stone or the Trump campaign — in Russia’s hacking. The indictment’s focus, instead, is the WikiLeaks end of the enterprise — i.e., not the “cyberespionage” of a foreign power that gave rise to the investigation, but the dissemination of the stolen emails after the hacking. And what do we learn? That the Trump campaign did not know what WikiLeaks had. That is, in addition to being uninvolved in Russia’s espionage, the Trump campaign was uninvolved in Julian Assange’s acquisition of what Russia stole.

The Stone indictment reads like an episode of The Three Stooges. Stone and two associates — conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerry Corsi, and left-wing-comedian-turned-radio-host Randy Credico, respectively denominated “Person 1” and “Person 2” — are on a quest to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton and when Assange is going to publicize it. But that does not suit Stone, who has cultivated an image of political dirty trickster and plugged-in soothsayer. In public, then, Stone pretends to know more than he knows and to have an insider’s view of Assange’s operation; behind the scenes, he scrounges around for clues about what Assange is up to, hoping some insider will tell him.

The article concludes with two paragraphs that should give all of us something to think about:

There is no reason why the special counsel could not have issued an interim report clearing the president of suspicion that he was a Russian agent. Doing so would merely have removed the specter of traitorous conspiracy from the White House. It would not have compromised Mueller’s ability to investigate Russia’s interference in the election; it would not have undermined Mueller’s probe of potential obstruction offenses by the president. (And while it is not Mueller’s job to discourage the president’s puerile “witch hunt” tweets, if the public had been told that the Justice Department withdrew its highly irregular public statements about Trump’s possible criminal complicity in Russia’s espionage, presidential tirades about the investigation would have ebbed, if not disappeared entirely.)

We are not just talking about having our priorities in order — i.e., recognizing that the ability of the president to govern takes precedence the prosecutor’s desire for investigative secrecy. We are talking about common sense and common decency: The Justice Department and the FBI went out of their way to portray Donald Trump as a suspect in what would have been the most abhorrent crime in the nation’s history. It has been more than two years. Is it too much to ask that the Justice Department withdraw its public suggestion that the president of the United States might be a clandestine agent of Russia?

It is time to clean house in the FBI and the DOJ–too many people have taken part in this charade to bring down a duly-elected President.

 

A Disturbing Timeline

Posted on by

The Gateway Pundit posted a revealing timeline today showing that the deep state plan to undercut the presidency of President Trump was formulated about the time President Trump won the Republican nomination. This timeline illustrates the use of government agencies to prevent Donald Trump’s election to the presidency (obviously they failed at that) and if that failed, either drive him from office or discredit him to the point where he couldn’t get anything done. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you sit on, the idea of using government agencies (non-elected officials) to undermine elected officials should be disturbing to you. Please follow the link above to the article to read the entire timeline.

Here are just a few items:

Now through a review of information from April, 2016, related to the corrupt Obama Administration’s fake Trump – Russia collusion farce, we see that this was the exact same time that the fake Trump-Russia collusion story was created.

The following incidents are now known to have occurred in mid to late April, 2016 –

2016-04-15 Obama CIA Chief John Brennan assembles a multi-agency task force that served from April 2016 to July 2016 as the beginnings of a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign. “The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently,” three officials told the NYTimes [source].  (Note that the Crossfire Hurricane team was not reportedly in existence until the end of July 30, 2016, so how could they play a part?)

2016-04-15 James Comey tells Sally Yates sometime around 04/16 that he’s considering a special counsel [see:June 2018 IG report p. 172]

2016-04-15 It’s reported that Victoria Nuland and other State Department officials became “more alarmed” about what the Russians were up to in the spring of 2016, they were authorized by then Secretary of State John Kerry to develop proposals for ways to deter the Russians.  [source]  Nuland stated that she had been briefed as early as December 2015 about the hacking of the DNC, long before senior DNC officials were aware of it.

The article concludes:

By the end of April, 2016, the Deep State of Obama, Comey, Brennan, Kerry and others had already put in place spies on Trump team members, and allegations of a made up company, DCLeaks, that allegedly hacked DNC emails.  They also began their sinister Trump – Russia collusion fairy tale.

April 2016 will go down in history as the month that a sitting President (Obama) began his scheme using the intelligence community of the United States to spy on its competing campaign in the US election in an effort to prevent them from winning the 2016 Presidential election.

If the people responsible for this misuse of government power are not brought to justice, we can expect to see similar behavior in the future. These actions are not appropriate in a representative democracy–they belong in a banana republic.