Tag Archives: email server

The Swamp Has Been The Swamp For A While

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Issues & Insights posted an article today with the following headine, “This Isn’t The First Time The IG Denied Flagrant Bias At The FBI.”

The article reports:

Democrats and the mainstream press – is there any difference between the two these days? – have been clinging to the “no bias” statement by the Justice Department inspector general with all their might.

The IG said that he couldn’t state definitively that political bias motivated officials at the FBI to launch and then sustain an investigation against the Trump campaign based on the Clinton-campaign funded and thoroughly discredited Steele Dossier.

That was enough for press to run headlines such as:

“Bias didn’t taint FBI leaders running Trump-Russia Investigation”

“Report on F.B.I. Debunks Anti-Trump Plot”

“Mistakes, but no political bias in FBI probe of Trump campaign: watchdog”

And when Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Democrats repeatedly pressed him to state his “no bias” claim over and over.

“You didn’t find a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against candidate or President Trump,” Sen. Diane Feinstein asked in the form of a statement.

“We found no bias,” Horowitz said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy repeated the “question,” saying that the IG had found “no evidence that the investigation was motivated by anti-Trump or political bias.”

The notion that there was “no bias” at all is impossible to believe when you look at the evidence that Horowitz gathered.

The article also notes:

In any case, this “no bias” language in the latest IG report is almost identical to what Horowitz said in his June 2018 report about the hopelessly biased FBI “investigation” into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of State.

In that report, the also G claimed that there was “no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias.” The report then went on to say that officials made a series of “judgment calls” that were technically proper.

But the truth is that every single one of these judgment calls benefited Clinton.

Plus, the IG found plenty of evidence of flagrant bias among the key players in that investigation, including exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page about how “we’ll stop” Trump from being elected.

The article concludes:

What kind of “inaccuracies and omissions”? Oh, things like hiding from the court information that “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele reporting that was used.” And failing to tell the court that Page had been an FBI informant, which involved working with Russian intelligence officers.

“We also found” he went on, “basic, fundamental, and serious errors during the completion of the FBI’s factual accuracy reviews.” And it found that FBI officials “did not give appropriate attention to facts that cut against probable cause.”

In other words, any shreds of evidence that there was no reason to spy on Page.

Horowitz said these “basic and fundamental errors” were made by “three separate, hand-picked investigative teams.”

If the FBI were simply incompetent, you’d expect these “fundamental errors” to be more random. But as with the “judgment calls” during the Clinton email investigation, all of these mistakes just happened to cut in one direction only. In this case of Clinton, they all helped the FBI reach the decision they’d made at the start to exonerate her. In Trump’s case, every supposed screw-up all helped to keep the probe going.

Even Horowitz himself wouldn’t categorically deny that bias played a role in the FISA applications. As he told Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, “it gets murkier … when you get to the FISA.”

“Murkier” is one way of putting it. “Deep state, anti-Trump bias” is another way. Just because an inspector general won’t say those words doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

We truly are on a quest to restore equal justice under the law. Right now we don’t have it.

I Don’t Have Enough Imagination To Come Up With This

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The following appeared in The Daily Caller yesterday:

This is real. I am not kidding.

The article notes:

Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server as secretary of state, will speak at a cyber defense summit later in 2019, it was announced Thursday.

FireEye, a cybersecurity company based in California, announced Clinton will give the keynote speech at its annual summit in Washington, D.C., in October.

The article continues:

The FBI investigated Clinton for mishandling classified information, but she was not charged in the probe.

James Comey, who served as FBI director during the investigation, called Clinton’s use of the server “extremely careless.” He said it made more vulnerable to cyber attack by foreign powers, though investigators did not find evidence that the server was hacked.

Clinton has also asserted the hacks of her campaign chairman’s emails and that of the Democratic National Committee led to her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

The Russian government allegedly hacked into the DNC’s computer systems and released nearly 20,000 emails through WikiLeaks. The same Russian intelligence operation also stole John Podesta’s emails through an unsophisticated spear-phishing attack.

I would like to note that the FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC’s computer systems to confirm how John Podesta’s emails were accessed–it was done by an organization called CrowdStrike, considered an ally of the Democrat Party. There has always been speculation that the Podesta emails were leaked by a Democrat. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has stated on numerous occasions that he did not get the emails from the Russians.

At any rate, would you attend a cyber security conference with Hillary Clinton as the featured speaker?

 

Sunshine Is The Best Disinfectant

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Today The American Greatness website posted an article by Victor Davis Hanson about the Mueller investigation. The article is a refreshing bit of common sense in a world of spin.

Mr. Hanson observes:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation—with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his “dream team” of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

Mr. Hanson notes that the investigation has been less than transparent, noting that “Mueller at first did not announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strzok from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.”

Mr. Hanson then points out that there is at least an appearance of collusion by the Clinton campaign that Mueller has chosen to ignore:

It is likely that during the 2016 campaign, officials at the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency broke laws to ensure that the outsider Trump lost to Hillary Clinton. FBI and Justice Department officials misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to obtain warrants to surveil Trump associates. National security officials unmasked the names of those being monitored and likely leaked them to the press with the intent to spread unverified rumors detrimental to the Trump campaign.

A spy on the federal payroll was implanted into the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton’s campaign team paid for research done by a former British intelligence officer working with Russian sources to compile a dossier on Trump. Clinton hid her investment in Christopher Steele’s dossier by using intermediaries such as the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS to wipe away her fingerprints.

As a result of wrongful conduct, more than a dozen officials at the FBI and the Justice Department have resigned or retired, or were fired or reassigned. Yet so far none of these miscreants has been indicted or has faced the same legal scrutiny that Mueller applies to Trump associates.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton destroyed evidence when she was being investigated for her private email server, but somehow no one in the Justice Department seems concerned about that. Can you imagine what would happen if you or I destroyed subpoenaed evidence?

Mr. Hanson concludes:

The only way to clear up this messy saga is for Trump to immediately declassify all documents—without redactions—relating to the Mueller investigation, the FISA court warrants, the Clinton email investigation, and CIA and FBI involvement with the dossier, and the use of informants.

Second, there needs to be another special counsel to investigate wrongdoing on the part of senior officials in these now nearly discredited agencies. The mandate should be to discover whether there was serial conflict of interest, chronic lying to federal officials, obstruction of justice, improper unmasking and leaking, misleading of federal courts, and violation of campaign finance laws.

It is past time to stop the stonewalling, the redacting, the suppression, the leaking to the press and the media hysteria. The government must turn over all relevant documents to two special counsels and free each to discover who did what in 2016.

Americans need the whole truth to ensure equality under the law and to thereby set us free from this nearly two-year nightmare.

Let the truth come out.

The Evidence Is In The Edits

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Yesterday BizPacReview posted an article about a recent tweet by Sharyl Attkisson. The tweet shows the original language James Comey proposed to use about Clinton classified email and the edited version.

This is the information in the tweet:

The original sentence: “There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the private email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information.

The edited sentence: “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate the laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in very sensitive, highly classified information.”

So what’s the difference?

 US Code Sec. 793 (f) says:

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer-

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

The article further comments on the difference made by the editing:

A social media user offered a stellar explanation of just what the altered sentence achieved.

“And ‘Intent’ was not part of the relevant law. Mishandling classified information for ANY reason was a violation, & a lack of intent should have had no effect on a decision to prosecute,” the tweet read. “Comey simply invented an reason not to act. Then he watered down even that bogus explanation.”

The question now becomes, do we actually have equal justice under the law?

There Are Definitely A Lot Of Alligators In The Swamp

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Yesterday Sara Carter posted an article on her website about the long-awaited (and we are still waiting) Inspector General’s report of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation.

The article reports:

The Department of Justice and the FBI are deliberately attempting to slow roll and redact significant portions of DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz’s report on the bureau’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, according to numerous congressional officials and investigators.

The 400-page report, which was completed several weeks ago and addresses Clinton’s use of her private server for government business, is currently being reviewed by the DOJ and FBI. According to sources, individuals mentioned in the reports are also allowed to review the document. It is expected to be “long and thorough” and will criticize the handling of the investigation by former FBI Director James Comey, who has spent the better part of the past several months promoting his book A Higher Loyalty.

Hillary Clinton is said to have stated in an email to Donna Brazile, “If that f***ing bastard wins, we’re all going to hang from nooses!!!!” I think we are beginning to see what she was talking about. The swamp is fighting the release of information related to what went on during the 2016 election campaign. I honestly don’t know if there are enough honest people left in our government to be able to expose the use of the Justice Department and FBI for political purposes that obviously occurred.

The article concludes:

In a turn of events, Democrats later changed their position on Comey after President Trump fired him at the request of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who stated that he failed in leading the investigation into Clinton.

“The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution,” Rosenstein wrote in his May 9, 2017 letter.

The letter continued:

It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors. The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. However, the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department. There is a well-established process for other officials to step in when a conflict requires the recusal of the Attorney General. On July 5, however, the Director announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders.

Now, however, it is Rod Rosenstein who is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as obstruction for firing Comey.

Get out the popcorn, there is going to be a show.

I’m Not Overly Optimistic, But It’s A Start

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Last Thursday The Hill posted an article about the FBI’s handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Why is this important? Because, as anyone who has ever held a security clearance knows, there are very strict rules for handling classified information. It is obvious that those rules were broken. The question then becomes, “Does America have equal justice under the law?” George Orwell stated in Animal Farm, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Have we reached that point in America?

The article in The Hill reported some upcoming events regarding the investigation:

House Republicans are preparing to conduct the first interviews in more than four months in their investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe.

A joint investigation run by the Judiciary and the Oversight and Government Reform committees has set three witness interviews for June, including testimony from Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, and Michael Steinbach, the former head of the FBI’s national security division.

Multiple congressional sources confirmed Priestap’s interview. Steinbach confirmed to The Hill that he would be appearing.

The third witness is John Giacalone, who preceded Steinbach as the bureau’s top national security official and oversaw the first seven months of the Clinton probe, according to multiple congressional sources.

The article notes:

Since October, the panel is believed to have interviewed only two witnesses — of about 20 potential witnesses — infuriating conservative members who are eager to uncover what some have characterized as “corruption.”

The pace of this investigation is disturbing. It causes me to wonder if it is being slow-walked in the hopes that the Democrats will take Congress and the investigation will go away. At that point we will have a totally corrupt government that does not represent the American people.

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted the following statement:

Never, ever, ever trust a member of the Washington DC UniParty.  Write it down; underline it; stick a reminder on your bathroom mirror -if needed- in order to see it when you brush your teeth twice daily; do what ever it takes not to forget the fundamental aspect to avoid consigning yourself to a life of ‘Battered Conservative Syndrome‘.

I am hoping this statement will be proven false. I am not optimistic, but I am hoping.