Tag Archives: James Comey

The FBI Further Damages Its Reputation

Posted on by

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about James Comey’s memos that the FBI collected at his house after he was fired.

The article reports:

Yesterday it was reported that agents showed up to Comey’s home to collect the evidence in June and one of his memos was written on June 6, nearly a full month after he was fired on May 9.

The memos retrieved by FBI agents on June 7, 2017 were dated February 14, 2017; March 30, 2017; April 11, 2017; and one is dated “last night at 6:30 pm.”

The FBI docs also revealed that Comey recalled to agents that he wrote two other memos after he spoke with Trump that he claimed were “missing.”

The article continues:

Judicial Watch also received a newly declassified FBI document dated June 16, 2017, in which FBI agents describe Comey telling them that he had written two additional Trump meeting memos that he could no longer find:

Former FBI Director James Comey was interviewed at his residence at [redacted]. This interview was scheduled in advance, for the purpose of providing certain classified memoranda (memos) to Comey for review. After being advised of the identity of the interviewing Agents and the nature of the interview, Comey provided the following information:

After reviewing the memos, Comey spontaneously stated, to the best of his recollection, two were missing:

In the first occurrence, Comey said at an unknown date and time, between January 7, 2017, which Comey believed was the date of his briefing at Trump Tower, and Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2017, Comey received a phone call from President Elect Donald J. Trump. The originating telephone number may have had a New York area code. Following the telephone conversation, Comey drafted and e-mailed a memo to James Rybicki and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

In the second instance, Comey was on his way to a FBI leadership conference in Leesburg, Virginia (March 9, 2017) when he was diverted to Liberty Crossing to respond to a request from Trump to contact him. Comey contacted Trump from Liberty Crossing on a Top Secret telephone line. The conversation was “all business” and related to [redacted]. Comey is less sure he drafted a memo for his conversation but if he did, he may have sent it on the FBI’s Top Secret network.

The article explains that the FBI might not have been telling the truth about the events:

Overnight it was uncovered that there are two major flaws to the FBI story provided the day before:

1. Additional evidence shows that the FBI previously has sworn in a Federal Court that they received the Comey memos on May 12, 2017, a full month before the dates reported in yesterday’s story coming from the FBI!

2. Also more evidence shows that FBI Agents Rybicki and Bowdich, both friends and accomplices of Comey, retrieved from Comey on May 12, 2017, his badge and a document related to a training course.  His memos are not reported as being obtained.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It raises some very important questions about the honesty of James Comey’s FBI.

The Truth Continues To Seep Out

Posted on by

Yesterday The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) posted the following on its website:

The ACLJ has just obtained previously unreleased documents related to the Clinton investigation and immunity agreements given to top Clinton aids. These agreements reveal that James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice (DOJ) granted immunity to Hillary Clinton’s aids and lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, from prosecution for anything found on their laptops violating multiple felony criminal statutes governing the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records, including Espionage Act provisions. Further, the DOJ and FBI also agreed to evade the statutory requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by purporting to deem the contents of the laptops as not under DOJ or FBI “custody or control.”

These laptops were critical to any meaningful investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails and records. According to the DOJ Inspector General, who identified these as the “culling laptops,” “[a]ll 62,320 emails pulled from the Clinton servers were stored at one time on these laptops.” Having taken control of these laptops, agreeing to severely limit its searches, agreeing to unlawfully shield the laptops from FOIA, then agreeing to dispose of the laptops, it appears the Comey FBI and Lynch DOJ did everything in their power to protect Clinton’s senior aids and lawyers from both criminal liability and public scrutiny.

While these immunity agreements and related news have been publicly discussed to some extent, the ACLJ has now obtained the actual documents so the public may see and judge them accordingly.

The article also states:

According to the DOJ’s immunity agreement with Mills:

As we have advised you, we consider Cheryl Mills to be a witness based on the information gathered to date in this investigation. We understand that Cheryl Mills is willing to voluntarily provide the Mills Laptop to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if the United States agrees not to use any information directly obtained from the Mills Laptop in any prosecution of Cheryl Mills for the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records as described below.

And, according to the immunity agreement:

To that end, it is hereby agreed as follows:

    1. That, subject to the terms of consent set forth in a separate letter to the Department of Justice dated June 10, 2016, Cheryl Mills will voluntarily produce the Mills Laptop to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its review and analysis.
    2. That no information directly obtained from the Mills Laptop will be used against your client in any prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 793(e) and/or (f); 18 U.S.C. § 1924; and/or 18 U.S.C. § 2071.
    1. That no other promises, agreements, or understandings exist between the parties except as set forth in this agreement, and no modification of this agreement shall have effect unless executed in writing by the parties.

The agreement was then executed by Cheryl Mills. The immunity agreement with Samuelson reads the same.

Mills and Samuelson Were Granted Immunity From Prosecution Under Multiple Felony Statutes for Anything Found on Their Laptops.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Unfortunately this is a glaring example of unequal justice under the law.

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.

Prepare The Popcorn

Posted on by

Washington is nothing if not leaky. The leaks are starting to come out about the Inspector General’s report. The report will be scrutinized and edited before any (or all) of it is released to the public in September, so we really don’t know what we will be allowed to see. It seems to me that if (if?) there is corruption in our government that the American people are entitled to know about it, but that’s just naivete`.

Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air today giving his take on the subject.

The article reports:

If RealClearInvestigations’ sources accurately describe Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ upcoming report, it’s no wonder Donald Trump fired James Comey. According to two sources reportedly briefed on the upcoming Horowitz report, the former FBI director repeatedly lied about not targeting Trump in his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey also had what amounted to a spy in the White House, raising the specter of J. Edgar Hoover all over again:

Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Who authorized placing spies inside the White House? Wouldn’t that come under the definition of treason–spying on the American government? If the spies were reporting back to James Comey, who was James Comey reporting back to?

Stay tuned.

Judicial Watch Uncovers More Lying Under Oath

Posted on by

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about the interview notes of the FBI’s interview with Hillary Clinton’s attorney Heather Samuelson. Those notes have been uncovered due to the efforts of Judicial Watch. There are some problems with the facts as stated by Ms. Samuelson.

The article reports:

In the interview Samuelson states to the FBI’s Peter Strzok that she was assigned the duty of reviewing Hillary’s emails and in doing so, Samuelson reviewed the emails on her laptop both at her apartment and in Cheryl Mills’ office.

…Samuelson was assigned the task of obtaining Hillary’s emails for her tenure as Obama’s Secretary of State. After making a request for Hillary’s emails from Platte River Networks (PRN), the firm that administered Hillary’s personal email system, Samuelson reviewed them and noticed that some of Hillary’s emails were missing.

Samuelson stated that she believed that Hillary’s emails that were missing for the period between January 2009 through March 2009 must have not been backed up.

The article then notes that the government email system is such that there is no way that emails from a Secretary of State would not have been backed up.

The story continues:

Next Samuelson makes another shocking remark.  She states that after Clinton left the State Department she started using another domain for her emails (@hrcoffice.com).  But she states that no old emails were transferred from the clintonemail.com domain to the new domain.  She also stated that she didn’t know how Clinton or her close assistant Huma Abedin obtained her old emails once the new domain was established.

The article states the problem with Ms. Samuelson’s statement:

And here is where Samuelson lays an egg!  Samuelson noticed during her review that Hillary’s emails were displayed as hrod17@clintonemail.com,  but this address was not even created until after Hillary was Secretary of State. 

The article notes:

You can’t send emails from an account that is not created or in place!

The only reasonable explanations for the receipt of emails from a domain that was not yet in place is, 1)  the source name in the emails had been doctored and updated to an email account not yet in service, or 2) a utility was used to copy the emails in bulk from one account to another and in the process change some of the fields including the original email source.

Why would Hillary do this?  The only explanation that makes sense is that the Hillary team was trying to eliminate or strip out all the classified markings in her emails, and in the process, they stripped out the old email addresses, and since that account didn’t exist anymore, their process added the new address.

To put it plainly – Hillary attempted to doctor (i.e. change) her emails for some reason and in so doing she inadvertently changed her email address.

Clearly if Hillary was caught editing her emails by the FBI, then former FBI Director James Comey knew very well that Hillary intended to break the law!  Three years ago Jim Comey lied to America!

Please follow the link to read the entire article. This scandal is complicated because of the technical aspects involved. The bottom line is simple–Hillary Clinton set up a secret server in order that many of her emails would not become public. We have a very limited idea of what is in those missing emails.

In October 2016, Charles Krauthammer (who died in 2018) stated:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This brings us back full circle to the beginning. The question was originally: Why did she have the private server? She said convenience, obviously that was ridiculous…

It was obvious she was hiding something.

And think about it, she set it up in 2009, before becoming Secretary of State. So, she anticipated having exchanges that she would not want anyone to see. So, we’ve been asking ourselves on this set for a year almost, what exactly didn’t she want people to see?

Well, now we know.

And as we speculated, the most plausible explanation was the rank corruption of the Clinton Foundation, and its corrupt — I don’t know if it’s illegal, but corrupt relationship with the State Department.

And her only defense as we saw earlier– the Democrats are saying, well, there was nothing she did… that was corrupted by donations. You can believe that if you want, but there’s a reason that people give donations in large amounts, and that’s to influence the outcome of decisions. So, this — we are getting unfolding to us, exactly what she anticipated having to hide, and it is really dirty business.

He was obviously ahead of his time in his thinking.

Choose Your Lawyer Wisely

Posted on by

It was announced recently that General Flynn had fired the attorneys who were supposed to defend him against the charges brought against him in the Mueller investigation. It is annoying to me that James Comey bragged about not going through the proper protocol to interview General Flynn and about telling the General that he did not need a lawyer. It seems to me that a man who had served his country for many years was treated very shabbily by the government he served for so many years. Well, things may be changing.

Sara Carter posted an article today reporting that General Flynn has hired defense attorney Sidney Powell to represent him before his sentencing hearing in Washington D.C.’s federal court. Sidney Powell wrote the book License to Lie about previous cases where Andrew Weissmann  misused his power as a prosecutor.

The article reports:

Powell is the author of the New York Times best seller and tell-all book Licensed To Lie, which exposed the corruption within the justice system. The book is based on the case Powell won against prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, when he was deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force.

Weissmann served as Mueller’s second in command for the special counsel investigation into the Trump campaign, despite the fact that his tactics have been highly criticized by both judges and colleagues. He was called unscrupulous and has had several significant issues raised about how he operated during the Mueller inquiry into Trump campaign officials, including Flynn.

He prosecuted the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP, which ended in the collapse of the firm and 85,000 jobs lost world wide. Maureen Mahoney took the case to the Supreme Court, and Powell consulted.  Mahoney overturned Weissmann’s conviction and the decision was reversed unanimously by the court.

Powell has openly stated in columns and on cable networks that Weissmann’s dirty tactics of withholding exculpatory evidence and threatening witnesses to garner prosecutions should have had him disbarred long ago.

It seems to me that Weissmann has not changed his tactics. It is good news that Sidney Powell will be representing Michael Flynn. I suspect that with her as his lawyer, Flynn’s case will be thrown out of court.

This Incidental Information Is Going To Be Very Important In The Near Future

Posted on by

Before you read this article, I want you to consider how the Democrats (particularly the Clintons) have avoided being held accountable for skirting the law in the past. Generally speaking, the playbook means keeping questions about whatever the scandal is in the news until everyone is sick of hearing about the scandal. At that point, when the answers begin to come out, everyone tunes out because they are totally bored with anything having to do with whatever behavior went on. That is exactly the playbook that is being used on the question of how the Russian-collusion investigation began and why members of President Trump’s campaign and transition team were under surveillance. Keep that in mind as you read the following.

Today Breitbart posted an article with the following headline, “Biden Present at Russia Collusion Briefing Documented in ‘Odd’ Susan Rice Email.”

The article reports:

Vice President Joe Biden was documented as being present in the Oval Office for a conversation about the controversial Russia probe between President Obama, disgraced ex-FBI chief James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and other senior officials including Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice.

In an action characterized as “odd” last year by then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Rice memorialized the confab in an email to herself describing Obama as starting “the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’”

Grassley, in a letter to Rice, commented: “It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation.”

Grassley noted the unusual timing of the email sent by Rice to herself more than two weeks after the January 5, 2017 White House meeting on the Russia investigation, but mere hours before she vacated the White House for the incoming Trump administration.

The email, Grassley documented, was sent by Rice to herself on Trump’s inauguration day of January 20, 2017.

“If the timestamp is correct, you sent this email to yourself at 12:15 pm, presumably a very short time before you departed the White House for the last time,” Grassley wrote to Rice in a letter seeking clarification on a number of issues regarding the email and the Oval Office briefing at which Biden was documented as being present.

The article cites a Washington Post article describing how few people were involved in the Trump/Russia investigation:

The lengthy Washington Post article from 2017 detailed the closed circle of Obama administration officials who were involved in overseeing the initial efforts related to the Russia investigation — a circle than was narrowly widened to include Biden, according to the newspaper report.

According to the newspaper, in the summer of 2016, CIA Director John Brennan convened a “secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.”

The Post described the unit as so secretive it functioned as a “sealed compartment” hidden even from the rest of the U.S. intelligence community; a unit whose workers were all made to sign additional non-disclosure forms.

The unit reported to top officials, the newspaper documented:

They worked exclusively for two groups of “customers,” officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.

The number of Obama administration officials who were allowed access to the Russia intelligence was also highly limited, the Post reported. At first only four senior officials were involved, and not Biden. Those officials were CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey. Their aides were all barred from attending the initial meetings, the Post stated.

This is looking more and more like an attempted political coup.

Spying, What Spying?

Posted on by

Supposedly Attorney General Barr dropped a bombshell when he told Congress that there was spying on the Trump campaign. Although Congress seemed shocked, I suspect most Americans were not.

An article in The Gateway Pundit yesterday quotes James Comey in a recent interview:

“With respect to Barr’s comment, I have no idea what he’s talking about when he talks about spying on the campaign and so I can’t really react,” Comey said Thursday at a Hewlett Foundation conference.

…“The FBI and the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance, “Comey said. “I have never thought of that as spying…and if the Attorney General has come to the belief that that should be called ‘spying’ – WOW!”

“But I don’t know what he meant by that term — and factually I don’t know what he meant because I don’t know of any court-ordered electronic surveillance aimed at the Trump campaign and that’s the reason for my confusion,” Comey said.

So now the argument is that the FISA warrants were not aimed at the Trump campaign? I’m sure it is just an incredible coincidence that most of the surveillance allowed by those FISA warrants were on members of the Trump campaign who would have communicated with the candidate fairly frequently. This may be believable to the never-Trump crowd, but I sure wouldn’t try to sell it anywhere else.

He who defines the words controls the debate.

It really doesn’t matter if it is court-ordered or not, if you are listening to a person’s private conversations, it is spying. Notice that in claiming it was court-ordered, he avoids the issue of whether or not the court was deceived.

We need to keep in mind that this was court-ordered surveillance of a political opponent’s campaign. It was the use of the government to spy on that campaign–it was not simple ‘opposition research.’ Richard Nixon was impeached for far less. Unless we hold those responsible accountable, this will become an everyday occurrence in political campaigns.

The Epstein Case Gets Murkier

Posted on by

Mike Cernovich is reporting that the mystery man who filed the brief to keep the records sealed in the Jeffrey Epstein case formerly worked for Robert Mueller and James Comey.

The article reports:

A mystery man with massive wealth and power retained a powerful law firm to keep the records sealed in a case involving Jeffrey Epstein. (See Politico here, and the Miami Herald’s report here.)

After the Second Circuit Court Court of Appeals, in a lawsuit involving investigative Julie Brown of the Miami Herald and others, signaled it was prepared to order an entire vault of records unsealed, the mystery man made the unusual move of filing what’s known as an amicus curiae brief anonymously. Latin for “friend of the court,” an amicus curiae brief is only supposed to be filed when the brief will help the Court reach a proper conclusion of law.

Seeking to bypass ordinary judicial procedure with high-powered lawyers, the mystery man filed a brief that would only benefit himself, and called it an amicus brief.

The Miami Herald’s lawyers properly called out this outrageous move, which would get an ordinary lawyer sanctioned for abuse of the judicial process:

  • “As a preliminary matter, John Doe’s proposed amicus brief is an improper vehicle by which to submit his arguments. See United States v. Gotti, noting that the phrase amicus curiae means, literally, ‘friend of the court,’ and ‘serv[es] for the benefit of the court and for the purpose of assisting the court in cases of general public interest’….”
  • “John Doe is admittedly self-interested in seeking closure.”

Evidently there are some very important people who engaged in some very awful activities and don’t want what they did revealed. If what they were involved in was illegal (as it appears to be), their activities need to be revealed and the appropriate justice applied.

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.

Avoiding The Consequences Of Bad Behavior

Posted on by

On February 11th, Judicial Watch posted the following Press Release:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 215 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Justice revealing former FBI General Counsel James Baker discussed the investigation of Clinton-related emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall. Baker then forwarded the conversation to his FBI colleagues.

The documents also further describe a previously reported quid pro quo from the Obama State Department offering the FBI more legal attaché positions if it would downgrade a redaction in an email found during the Hillary Clinton email investigation “from classified to something else.”

The newly obtained emails came in response to a May 21 order in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 4, 2017 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)). Judicial Watch seeks:

  • All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page;
  • All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strzok.
  • All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.

On October 28, 2016, the day that Comey sent a letter to Congress regarding the FBI’s discovery that the Weiner laptop contained Clinton’s emails. Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall, within hours, emails Baker requesting a call “ASAP” about the Comey letter. Baker describes his follow-up call to senior FBI officials:

I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back. Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that.

[Redacted paragraph]

He said that our letter was “tantalizingly ambiguous” and made statements that were “inchoate and highly ominous” such that what we had done was worse than transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out to make out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton.

I told him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I would discuss it with others and get back to him.

I suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours. Sound reasonable?

Baker’s heads up on the Kendall call was sent to:

The emails show that a conference call for the above senior officials was set up for the next day by Peter Strzok. (Two days before the election, on November 6, Comey sent a second letter reporting that the FBI’s review of the Weiner laptop material would not change his “conclusion” that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted.)

On October 13, 2016, former FBI attorney Lisa Page sent an email, which apparently references a related Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit and further discusses a previously reported quid pro quo offer from the State Department:

Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation. These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week. As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else. [Emphasis added]

The lawsuit also forced the release of a November 6, 2016, email by then-FBI official Peter Strzok telling Bowdich, Priestap, Rybicki, Page, former FBI General Counsel James Baker and others: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media.”

As Judicial Watch previously reported, there were at least 18 classified emails found on the Weiner laptop by the FBI. Paul Sperry’s RealClear Investigations report revealed that only 3,077 of the 340,000 emails “were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.”

The new records also include a September 2, 2016, email that Comey forwards containing a press release issued that day by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in which Grassley criticized the FBI for not publicly releasing many unclassified records related to the Clinton email-server investigation, as demanded by Congress. In his cover note responding to Grassley’s charge, Comey tells his top aides, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Page then responds with, “Outstanding.”

On October 23, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Page and others the Wall Street Journal article revealing that Andrew McCabe’s wife had received a half million dollars for her Democratic state senate campaign. Page responded that the article, “shaded or omitted or mischaracterized” facts “in order to get out the story [the reporter] wanted to tell.” She claimed the WSJ story was just “another depressing chapter in this whole post-investigation saga.”

“It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”

Last month, United States District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that discovery can begin in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides will now be deposed under oath. Senior officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and FBI official E.W. Priestap — will now have to answer Judicial Watch’s written questions under oath. The court rejected the DOJ and State Department’s objections to Judicial Watch’s court-ordered discovery plan. (The court, in ordering a discovery plan last month, ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

Judicial Watch’s discovery will seek answers to:

  • Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
  • whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
  • whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

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.

The Lingering Question

Posted on by

In listening to news commentary this morning, I heard a question asked regarding the charges against General Flynn that I had not considered. If the FBI had transcripts of General Flynn’s conversation with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S, why did they need to interview General Flynn? First of all, General Flynn’s civil rights were violated when he was unmasked as the person in that conversation–a law was broken. Secondly, if General Flynn broke a law somewhere in that conversation, why not convene a Grand Jury, charge him, and sentence him? The answer is becoming obvious. Keeping the investigation and charges against General Flynn in the news is damaging to President Trump (that may be temporarily true, but I suspect at some point the media and deep state may overplay their hand). Those responsible for this travesty are bragging about their actions.

Yesterday CNS News posted an article about some recent comments by former FBI Director James Comey.

The article notes:

Former FBI Director James Comey, speaking to an appreciative audience in New York on Sunday, told NBC’s Nicole Wallace that he sent two FBI agents to visit then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn at the White House on January 24, 2017, because he figured he could get away with it.

Wallace asked Comey: “You look at this White House now, and it’s hard to imagine two FBI agents ending up in the State room. How did that happen?”

“I sent them,” Comey replied. The audience laughed, and Comey continued:

Something we’ve — I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation — a more organized administration. In the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration.

The protocol, two men that all of us perhaps have increased appreciation for over the last two years. (The audience applauded.)

And in both those administrations there was process. And so if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House Counsel and there’d be discussions and approvals and it would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough, let’s just send a couple of guys over.

And so we placed a call to Flynn, said, hey, we’re sending a couple of guys over. Hope you’ll talk to them. He said, sure. Nobody else was there. They interviewed him in a conference room in the Situation Room, and he lied to them. And that’s what he’s now pled guilty to.

“What did he think they were coming over there for?” Wallace asked Comey.

“I don’t think he knew,” Comey replied. “I know we didn’t tell him.”

General Flynn is not the person who should be getting ready to be sentenced.

Stalling For Time

Posted on by

In less than four weeks, the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives. So what can we expect before than happens? I don’t mean to be cynical, but I suspect we will see the illusion of motion while very little is actually accomplished.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about James Comey’s testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concerning the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and the irregularities in the FISA applications that allowed the Justice Department to spy on the Trump campaign and later the Trump administration.

The article reports:

FOX News Catherine Herridge reported that a DOJ attorney is telling Comey not to answer questions. They may have to call Comey back in for more questioning.

The Republicans in the House have maybe two working weeks before losing control of the House. Does anyone honestly believe that Comey will answer pertinent questions about these matters in that time? Does anyone honestly believe that the Democrats will ask these questions after they take control of the House?

I don’t know why the Republicans have avoided dealing with this previously. I do know that this looks very much like they wanted to look like they were doing something without actually accomplishing anything. I think a lot of voters are getting very tired of that method of doing business.

It’s Hard To Get Anything Done When You Are A Lame-Duck Congress

Posted on by

I will admit that I am becoming very cynical about anyone being charged for misdeeds and abuses of power during the Obama administration. It seems as if the House of Representatives is making an effort, but I can’t help but think it is a lame effort that is simply too late.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about the upcoming hearings in the House of Representatives. The article notes that on November 22, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) issued subpoenas to both former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Former FBI Director Comey intends to fight the subpoena in court. Former Attorney General Lynch has not yet publicly responded to the subpoena. All they have to do is tie the case up in court until January when the Democrats take control of the House. The Democrats will drop the matter, and the FBI and Justice Department corruption will continue unabated. I hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt it.

The article reports:

“While the authority for congressional subpoenas is broad, it does not cover the right to misuse closed hearings as a political stunt to promote political as opposed to legislative agendas,” Kelley (one of Comey’s attorneys, David Kelley) said.

On November 22, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) issued subpoenas to both Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The former FBI Director responded on Thursday, tweeting that he will “resist” a “‘closed-door’ thing” — ironically claiming it was over his concerns about selective leaking.

Comey infamously leaked a memo of a private conversation between Trump and himself at the White House. This led to the Justice Department Inspector General conducting an investigation into classification issues related to his leaked memo.

While Comey may be attempting to claim that he is doing this for the sake of transparency, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has pointed out that during his last testimony he used the fact that it was public to dodge answering nearly 100 questions.

“So why in the world would he want to go back to a setting where he knows he can’t answer all the questions,” Gowdy asked on Fox News on Monday.

Stall, stall, stall, while the American people hope that someday justice will occur.

Ignoring Government Transparency Rules

Posted on by

The following is a Judicial Watch Press Release dated November 1:

Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed lawsuits regarding the maintenance of text messages as federal records and for records of the audit of communications of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

After the FBI claimed that text messages are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Judicial Watch filed suit to ensure that text messages are being preserved. The new Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit against the FBI challenges the FBI failure to preserve FBI text messages as required by the Federal Records Act. (Judicial Watch v. FBI (No.1:18-cv-02316)).

In its lawsuit Judicial Watch points to a related case in which Michael G. Seidel, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section in the FBI’s Information Management Division, stated: “text messages on [FBI]-issued devices are not automatically integrated into an FBI records system.” (Danik v. U.S. Department of Justice, (No. 1:17-cv-01792)).

Judicial Watch argued that the FBI “does not have a recordkeeping program in place that provides effective controls over the maintenance of electronic messages, including text messages.” Moreover, “The FBI relies upon its personnel to incorporate their text messages into a recordkeeping system. If FBI personnel do not actively incorporate their text messages into a recordkeeping system, the text messages are not preserved.”

Judicial Watch asked the court to declare the FBI’s failure to have a recordkeeping program for electronic messages to be “not in accordance with law” and that the court order the FBI “to establish and maintain a recordkeeping program that provides effective controls over the maintenance of electronic messages.”

If text messages are not preserved, then they may be deleted and never produced to Congress, criminal investigators, and to the American people under FOIA.

Judicial Watch also filed suit against the Justice Department after the DOJ failed to respond to an August 27, 2018, FOIA request seeking the FBI’s audit records of McCabe’s communications (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-02283)).

In 2015, a political action committee run by Terry McAuliffe, a close friend and political supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, donated nearly $500,000 to Andrew McCabe’s wife Jill, who was then running for the Virginia State Senate. Also, the Virginia Democratic Party, over which McAuliffe had significant influence, donated an additional $207,788 to the Jill McCabe campaign. In July 2015, Andrew McCabe was in charge of the FBI’s Washington, DC, field office, which provided personnel resources to the Clinton email probe.

In July 2017, Judicial Watch filed three FOIA lawsuits seeking communications between the FBI and McCabe concerning “ethical issues” involving his wife’s political campaign; McCabe’s communications with McAuliffe; and McCabe’s travel vouchers.

Following an Inspector General Report, a grand jury reportedly was impaneled recently to investigate McCabe’s possible role in leaks to the media “to advance his personal interests.”

The FBI has told Judicial Watch that it is under no legal obligation to produce any of Andrew McCabe’s text messages under FOIA, which has attracted criticism from President Trump.

“This lawsuit exposes a massive FBI cover-up of its text messages, which are government records and are, by the thousands, likely to have been deleted and lost by FBI employees,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And of course, this cover-up conveniently impacts the production of text messages to Judicial Watch and Congress of disgraced FBI officials Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and James Comey.”

It is time to uncover the corruption in the FBI during the Obama administration. The FBI should be subject to FOIA requests.

It’s Going To Be An Interesting Week

Posted on by

CNS News posted the following headline today, “Glenn Simpson, James Baker, and Nellie Ohr Scheduled to Testify This Week; Simpson Taking the 5th.” My, what an interesting combination of testimonies.

The article reports:

Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, will take the Fifth, refusing to testify, when he appears before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Taking the Fifth does not necessarily mean that you are guilty of anything, but the article speculates on why Mr. Simpson might want to take the Fifth:

Simpson previously has testified before the House intelligence committee and two Senate committees. In response to a subpoena to testify on Tuesday, Simpson’s lawyers sent a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, saying in part that the “inquiry is not designed to discover the truth.”

“The obvious — and at times explicitly stated — goal of this Committee is to discredit and otherwise damage witnesses to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, all as part of an effort to protect a President who has sought to placate and curry favor with a hostile foreign power and who demands that the Justice Department stop investigating him,” said the letter obtained by various media outlets.

When the flak becomes thick, it means that you are getting close to the target. It is becoming obvious to almost everyone that the Special Prosecutor’s investigation is going nowhere because it was a political scheme to interfere with the Trump presidency. Now we are reaching a time when those responsible for the scheme may be held accountable.

The article further reports:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused a request to appear last Thursday, prompting calls by some Republicans to subpoena him:

“He didn’t show up,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said of Rosenstein. “Look, when you’re the guy who in reality is running the Justice Department, and the chairman of the committee that has jurisdiction over your agency asks you to come, you are obligated to come and you’re obligated to come and testify under oath. He didn’t do that.

“So if it takes a subpoena, that’s exactly what should happen. We need him to answer questions about all kinds of issues associated with the Trump-Russia investigation, but specifically the statement that it’s alleged that he said where he talked about actually recording the commander in chief of our great country and he talked about the 25th Amendment.

“That is specifically what I want to ask him about,” Jordan told “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo.

Rosenstein has said he was joking when he suggested wearing a wire into the Oval Office with the goal of documenting the alleged dysfunction of the commander in chief.

But according to some press reports, three FBI officials — Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and James Baker — did not take Rosenstein’s words as a joke, believing him to be serious about wiretapping the president in the wake of James Comey’s firing.

It’s interesting that Rod Rosenstein wrote the letter that recommended Comey’s firing.

The article highlights some of the history of the Russian collusion investigation:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused a request to appear last Thursday, prompting calls by some Republicans to subpoena him:

“He didn’t show up,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said of Rosenstein. “Look, when you’re the guy who in reality is running the Justice Department, and the chairman of the committee that has jurisdiction over your agency asks you to come, you are obligated to come and you’re obligated to come and testify under oath. He didn’t do that.

“So if it takes a subpoena, that’s exactly what should happen. We need him to answer questions about all kinds of issues associated with the Trump-Russia investigation, but specifically the statement that it’s alleged that he said where he talked about actually recording the commander in chief of our great country and he talked about the 25th Amendment.

“That is specifically what I want to ask him about,” Jordan told “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo.

Rosenstein has said he was joking when he suggested wearing a wire into the Oval Office with the goal of documenting the alleged dysfunction of the commander in chief.

But according to some press reports, three FBI officials — Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and James Baker — did not take Rosenstein’s words as a joke, believing him to be serious about wiretapping the president in the wake of James Comey’s firing.

Hopefully anyone involved in plotting against a duly-elected President will pay a high price for their actions.

How Would This Be Handled In The Business World?

Posted on by

During my working years I was hardly at the executive level–although at various times I was involved in hiring decisions, I was rarely involved in firing decisions. However, I did see a number of those decisions going on around me. Insubordination or working against the basic aims of the company were often the reasons given for someone being fired. With that in mind, I wonder what the appropriate response is to the actions of Rod Rosenstein as reported by The New York Times today.

The Independent Journal Review posted an article today about a recent disclosure by The New York Times.

The article reports:

The U.S. official who oversees the federal investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election last year suggested secretly recording President Donald Trump and recruiting Cabinet members to invoke a constitutional amendment to remove him from the White House, the New York Times reported on Friday.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the suggestions in the spring of 2017 after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the newspaper said.

…Rosenstein told McCabe, who was also later fired by Trump, that he might be able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John Kelly, the former homeland security secretary and current White House chief of staff, to invoke the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which deals with presidential succession and disability.

The Times said none of those proposals came to fruition.

Rosenstein assumed oversight of the investigation into Russian interference and possible coordination between Trump campaign members and Moscow because Sessions in March 2017 recused himself from the matter, citing his service on the campaign. In May 2017, Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to lead the investigation.

How long would this person have a job in your corporation? I strongly suggest following the link to The Independent Journal Review to read the entire article. President Trump needs people in his administration who will work with him–not against him. It is truly time to clean house.

This Isn’t Really A Surprise

Posted on by

The only surprise in what I am about to share is that it took so long to find out the truth.  As people begin to read through the Inspector General’s Report recently released, it is becoming more obvious that there were a lot of things going on behind the scenes that were simply wrong. BizPac Review posted an article today about one revelation in the Inspector General’s report.

The article reports:

Stunning revelations from the IG report of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz (an Obama appointee) suggests that the 2016 tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton was coordinated — contradicting their claims that the meeting was accidental and coincidental.

In 2016, Lynch — the U.S. attorney general under Barack Obama — secretly met for 30 minutes with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Arizona. At the time, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was being investigated by the FBI over her 30,000 deleted emails and her destroyed government-issued phones, which she and her team smashed with hammers.

…Page 203 of the IG report suggests that Bill Clinton’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI detail to set up the meeting when their planes were on the tarmac:

“The OPA (Office of Public Affairs) Supervisor said that he later learned that former President Clinton’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI security detail to let them know that the former President wanted to meet with Lynch. Although Lynch’s staff was supposed to receive notice of such 204 requests, witnesses told us that they were not informed of the request from former President Clinton.”

The meeting was planned, and an effort was made to limit the number of people who were aware of or present at the meeting.

The article concludes:

Less than a week after the Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting, then-FBI Director James Comey (whose boss was Loretta Lynch) announced that the FBI would not recommend an indictment against Hillary. Coincidence?

The Evidence Is In The Edits

Posted on by

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?

Thank God For Honest People In The FBI

Posted on by

Yesterday The Conservative Tribune posted an article about an FBI agent who is willing to testify against James Comey regarding the FBI’s treatment of General Flynn.

The article includes the following:

James Comey and Robert Mueller have been on a fishing expedition for a while. They are searching for someone who did something questionable at some point in their life so that they can convince that person to testify against President Trump. The eventual aim is the destruction of President Trump. The want him impeached, disgraced, and destroyed. They have totally lost their objectivity.  It is ironic that their actions may be turning against them–not against their target.

The article concludes:

More and more, it appears the Comey-led FBI set out to target and bring down specific people, not methodically investigate specific crimes.

That is the same modus operandi now being used by Mueller against Trump and his team: Dig into the lives of political opponents, pushing the boundaries of what is legal and disregarding just cause, in order to overturn every rock and search every closet for skeletons.

This isn’t the way an investigation is supposed to happen, yet elitists within the DOJ don’t seem to care. The American people, however, do — and Mueller, Comey, and their cronies may be in for a surprise as this scandal continues to be exposed.

Oddly enough draining the swamp at the top levels of the FBI may actually be done by those in the lower levels of the FBI who respect the former integrity of the organization.

Exactly What Is A Confidential Human Source?

Posted on by

The careful use of words is one way to make a really bad situation sound not quite so bad. A tweet by James Comey yesterday is a great illustration of that concept. Twichy posted an article yesterday including the following tweets:

Byron York had the perfect response:

That says it all. Who was in charge of inserting a spy in the Trump campaign? Can you imagine the media going crazy if Watergate had been a spy instead of a wiretap attempt?

The Investigation Of Russian Collusion Just Keeps Coming Off The Rails

Posted on by

Kimberley Strassel posted an article at The Wall Street Journal yesterday that casts further doubt on the origin of the investigation into President Trump and Russian collusion. As we learn more and more about spying on the Trump campaign and other nefarious activities of our FBI and Justice Department during the campaign, it becomes obvious that the investigation of President Trump was an investigation in search of a crime.

The article states:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what’s driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Trump-Russia probe. “If the campaign was somehow set up,” he told the hosts, “I think that would be a problem.”

That is definitely an understatement.

The article explains some of things we have recently learned:

Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands—one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials—all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI—and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected—and one crucial question is how early that happened.

What may well have kicked off both, however, is a key if overlooked moment detailed in the House Intelligence Committee’s recent Russia report. In “late spring” of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House “National Security Council Principals” that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here’s what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.

And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections. The job of any good swamp operator is to gin up a fatal October surprise for the opposition candidate. And what could be more devastating than to paint a picture of Trump-Russia collusion that would provoke a full-fledged FBI investigation?

It is definitely ironic that as the Mueller investigation continues, more and more facts discrediting the Mueller investigation seem to surface. If I were Mr. Mueller, I would be in a hurry to wrap this up before the American people find out any more about what was behind the investigation.

The article ends with a statement about leaking and about government transparency:

Whatever the answer—whether it is straightforward, or whether it involves political chicanery—Congress and the public have a right to know. And a Justice Department willing to leak details of its “top secret” source to friendly media can have no excuse for not sharing with the duly elected members of Congress.

The More We Know, The Worse It Gets

Posted on by

Yesterday The New York Times posted an article about the government spying on the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Crossfire Hurricane was the name given to an operation that was so secret only a few in the FBI knew about it.

The New York Times reports on the operation:

…in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.

Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I. interview to describe his meeting with the campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The agents summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the investigation was opened. Their report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation. But at the time, a small group of F.B.I. officials knew it by its code name: Crossfire Hurricane.

The article reports:

Only about five Justice Department officials knew the full scope of the case, officials said, not the dozen or more who might normally be briefed on a major national security case.

That alone should set off alarms in the minds of those who worry about abuses of power in our government.

The article goes into a rather lengthy analysis of the investigation from The New York Times’ point of view. What it doesn’t say is more instructive than what it does say. The article fails to mention the very real possibility that Mr. Papadopoulos was set up to trigger the investigation or that the Comey briefing of the President was to make way for the media to report on the Russian dossier.

What the article does confirm is that spying on President Trump began during the campaign and continued after the election. The Inspector General’s report will be out at some time in the future and will confirm that Fourth Amendment rights were violated and that certain people within our intelligence agencies should go to jail.

Why I Don’t Trust The Mainstream Media

Posted on by

On Saturday, The New York Post posted an article titled, “White House admits it played us for fools to sell Iran deal.”

The article reports:

In an astounding New York Times piece by David Samuels, senior White House officials gleefully confess they use friendly reporters and nonprofits as public relations tools in the selling of President Obama’s foreign policy — and can do it almost at will because these tools are ignorant, will believe what they’re told, will essentially take dictation and are happy to be used just to get the information necessary for a tweet or two.

Their greatest triumph, according to Samuels, was selling a misleading narrative about the nuclear deal with Iran — the parameters of which were set a year before the administration claimed and which had nothing to do with the fact that a supposedly more accommodating government had risen to power.

The mastermind of the Obama machine is Ben Rhodes, a New Yorker who joined the Obama campaign as a speechwriter in 2007 and has risen to become the most influential foreign-policy hand in the White House.

Rhodes drips with contempt for almost everyone but his boss. He consigns all those who do not share every particular of the Obama-Rhodes foreign-policy perspective to a gelatinous mass called “The Blob” — including, Samuels writes, Hillary Clinton.

I have previously written an article about this New York Times piece. However, as the media panic over ending the Iran deal continues, I would like to add a few thoughts to the discussion. First of all, many of the Democrats now yelling that the sky is falling because President Trump pulled out of the deal did not support the deal in the first place. The Iran deal was never given to the Senate as a treaty because the Obama Administration understood that it did not have the votes to pass. So I am not sure if the work of Ben Rhodes was actually successful–the treaty (or non-treaty as it was) never really gained majority approval.

The article at The New York Post concludes:

It was, Samuels says, a deliberately misleading narrative. The general terms were actually hammered out in 2012 by State Department officials Jake Sullivan and William Burns, rooted in Obama’s deep desire from the beginning of the administration to strike a grand deal with the mullahs.

Why on Earth was such conduct remotely acceptable? Because, Samuels makes clear, Rhodes and Obama believe they’re the only sensible thinkers in America and that there’s no way to get the right things done other than to spin them. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he tells Samuels. “But that’s impossible.”

Impossible? There was a sober, reasoned public debate over the Iran deal. Its opponents were deadly serious. In the end, 58 senators voted against it on sober, reasoned grounds.

What the Samuels piece shows is that the Obama administration chose to attempt to get its way not by winning an argument but by bringing an almost fathomless cynicism to bear in manipulating its own clueless liberal fan club.

Would a Hillary Clinton presidency have been any different?