Tag Archives: Michael T. Flynn

The Insurance Policy

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Andrew McCarthy posted an article at The National Review today titled, “Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’?” It is a rather lengthy article, and I strongly suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article. However, there are two sections of the article that I think tell the whole story.

The article states:

The Obama-era FBI and Justice Department had great faith in Steele because he had previously collaborated with the bureau on a big case. Plus, Steele was working on the Trump-Russia project with the wife of a top Obama Justice Department official, who was personally briefed by Steele. The upper ranks of the FBI and DOJ strongly preferred Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the point of overlooking significant evidence of her felony misconduct, even as they turned up the heat on Trump. In sum, the FBI and DOJ were predisposed to believe the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.

There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden.

The best laid schemes . . . gang aft agley.

I honestly don’t know if President Trump is going to be able to drain the swamp, but the above statement makes it obvious that had Hillary Clinton become President, the swamp would only have gotten bigger.

The article concludes:

In conclusion, while there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Trump was scheming with Russia to lift sanctions if he were elected president. Congress should continue pressing for answers, and President Trump should order the Justice Department and FBI to cooperate rather than — what’s the word? — resist.

Our Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves.

 

 

Behind The Scenes In The Inspector General Investigation Of The FBI and DOJ

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Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the Congressional attempts to get information from Deputy FBI Director Andrew “Andy” McCabe and his role in the 2016 “Trump Project”.

Here are some highlights from the article:

♦It is increasingly clear the entire purpose of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was not to investigate some nefarious and innocuous Russian election interference; but rather with a Trump victory the same people who weaponized the FBI and DOJ to conduct the “Trump Project” needed to generate a shield or firewall to protect them from sunlight. The Mueller probe is that shield.

…♦Secondly, the same FBI and DOJ officials, along with career FBI and DOJ lawyers and administrators, who are at risk from exposure within the plot, do not want to answer questions in public hearings. They are using closed sessions under the auspices of everything therein being “classified”. This venue and manner of testimony blocks congressional representatives from talking about the content publicly.

Everything is being structured to avoid public scrutiny. In essence these career co-conspirators are using the familiar DC system to protect themselves from ramifications of their plot reaching the public.

♦Having said that, it certainly appears we have one person on the side of justice who predicted this was going to happen. By all external appearances DOJ Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz has moved proactively to set up as much transparency as possible upon his years-long investigation into the politicization of the FBI and DOJ.

The article goes on to list some of the things the Inspector General has released to the press in order to increase transparency in the FBI and DOJ:

IG Stimulated Releases of Information:

♦Release #1 was the FBI Agent Strzok and Attorney Lisa Page story; and the repercussions from discovering their politically motivated bias in the 2015/2016 Clinton email investigation and 2016/2017 Russian Election investigation.

♦Release #2 outlined the depth of FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page’s specific history in the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton to include the changing of the wording [“grossly negligent” to “extremely careless”] of the probe outcome delivered by FBI Director James Comey.

♦Release #3 was the information about DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr being in contact with Fusion GPS at the same time as the FISA application was submitted and granted by the FISA court; which authorized surveillance and wiretapping of candidate Donald Trump; that release also attached Bruce Ohr and Agent Strzok directly to the Steele Dossier.

♦Release #4 was information that Deputy Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was an actual contract employee of Fusion GPS, and was hired by F-GPS specifically to work on opposition research against candidate Donald Trump. Both Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr are attached to the origin of the Christopher Steele Russian Dossier.

♦Release #5 was the specific communication between FBI Agent Strzok and FBI Attorney Page. The 10,000 text messages that included evidence of them both meeting with Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to discuss the “insurance policy” against candidate Donald Trump in August of 2016.

The Inspector General’s report is due out in January. If the media chooses to report on it, I suspect it will be very interesting reading for all Americans. I also expect that it may put an abrupt end to the idea that President Trump colluded with the Russians.

The Truth Eventually Comes Out

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This story is based on articles in Politico, The Conservative Treehouse, and The Washington Examiner. All three articles deal with comments by former interim CIA Director Mike Morell about the politicization of the CIA during the presidential election campaign on 2016 and after President Trump was elected.

Politico quotes Mr. Morell on the friction between the CIA and President Trump when he became the Republican nominee for President:

And then he sees a former acting director and deputy director of CIA criticizing him and endorsing his opponent. And then he gets his first intelligence briefing, after becoming the Republican nominee, and within 24 to 48 hours, there are leaks out of that that are critical of him and his then-national security advisor, Mike Flynn.

And so, this stuff starts to build, right? And he must have said to himself, “What is it with these intelligence guys? Are they political?” The current director at the time, John Brennan, during the campaign occasionally would push back on things that Donald Trump had said.

So, when Trump talked about the Iran nuclear deal being the worst deal in the history of American diplomacy, and he was going to tear it up on the first day—John Brennan came out publicly and said, “That would be an act of folly.” So, he sees current sitting director pushing back on him. Right?

Then he becomes president, and he’s supposed to be getting a daily brief from the moment he becomes the president-elect. Right? And he doesn’t. And within a few days, there’s leaks about how he’s not taking his briefing. So, he must have thought—right?—that, “Who are these guys? Are these guys out to get me? Is this a political organization? Can I think about them as a political organization when I become president?”

So, I think there was a significant downside to those of us who became political in that moment. So, if I could have thought of that, would I have ended up in a different place? I don’t know. But it’s something I didn’t think about.

The Washington Examiner notes:

The answer to that was simple: Yes, they were political. But the astonishing part of the Morell interview is his admission that at the time he did not stop to consider what was happening from Trump’s perspective, even as the leaks continued when Trump took office. “He must have thought, ‘Who are these guys?'” Morell said. “Are these guys out to get me? Is this a political organization?”

The first time Trump met the FBI‘s then-director, James Comey, was when the intelligence chiefs chose Comey to tell Trump, then the president-elect, about a collection of “salacious and unverified” (Comey’s words) allegations about Trump, compiled by operatives working for the Clinton campaign, that has since become known as the Trump dossier. That surely got Trump off to a good start with the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operation. It was also a clever way for the intel chiefs to push the previously-secret dossier into the public conversation, when news leaked that Comey had briefed the president on it.

The Conservative Treehouse reports:

It is important to emphasize here the possibly illegal “unmasking“, and the certainly illegal “leaking“, were all based on intelligence reports generated from raw intelligence, and not the raw intelligence itself.  It was the FBI (Comey) and ODNI (Clapper) generating the intel reports, including the Presidents’ Daily Briefing (PDB).

The CIA provided raw intel, and the NSA generated the raw monitoring intelligence from the characters identified by the CIA and approved by FBI FISA warrant submissions.

It would be EXPLOSIVE if it turned out the October 2016 FISA warrant was gained by deception, misleading/manipulated information, or fraud as a result of the Russian Dossier; and exponentially more explosive if the dossier was -in part- organized by the wife of an investigative member of the DOJ who was applying for the FISA warrant; the same warrant that led to the wiretapping and surveillance of the Trump campaign and General Flynn, and was authorized by FISA Court Judge Contreras – who was, until recently, the judge in Flynn’s case.

The FBI were running the counter-intelligence operation and generating the actual reports that were eventually shared with the White House, Susan Rice and the Dept of Justice.  Those reports, and interpretations of the report content, were eventually leaked to the media.

During the time James Comey’s FBI was generating the intelligence reports, Comey admitted he intentionally never informed congressional oversight: “because of the sensitivity of the matter“.

John Brennan effectively (and intentionally) took himself out of the picture from the perspective of the illegal acts within the entire process.  James Clapper while rubbing his face and scratching his head had taken the same route earlier.

That leaves James Comey.

Stay tuned. This is going to get interesting, even while the press tries to avoid the major question of whether or not the Russian dossier was used as the basis for surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition team.

The Most Important Question In The Investigation By The Special Prosecutor

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The charges against Michael Flynn are based on the difference between how he described a telephone conversation and the written transcripts the FBI had of that conversation. The most important question is, “Why was his name unmasked in the transcript of that conversation?” That question is now being asked by Congress, and the FBI and the DOJ are refusing to answer it. Since Congress is charged with oversight of these government agencies, this is the making of a constitutional crisis.

Yesterday CNS News posted a story which details some of the problems with the ongoing investigation by the Special Prosecutor.

The article reports:

Two simple questions: How did the FBI’s Russia investigation start? And was it started because the Trump “dossier” was presented to somebody at the FBI?

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked FBI director Christopher Wray those questions at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, but he got no answers:

This is a portion of the questioning of the Director:

Wray answered, “I’m not aware of who started the investigation within the FBI.”

DeSantis followed up: “Was it started because the dossier was presented to somebody in the FBI?”

“I don’t have the answer to that question,” Wray said.

DeSantis asked Wray if he could get back to the committee with the answer:

“Well, if there’s information that we can provide that — without compromising the ongoing special counsel investigation, I’m happy to see what there is that we can do to be responsive,” Wray said.

Any bets on whether or not that question will ever be answered?

The article continues with questioning by Jim Jordan (R-Ohio):

Jordan questioned why someone like Strzok would be selected for Mueller’s team — and why he’d be kicked off it:

“If you kicked everybody off Mueller’s team who was anti-Trump, I don’t think there’d be anybody left,” Jordan said. “There’s got to be something more here. It can’t just be some text messages that show a pro-Clinton, anti-Trump bias. There’s got to be something more. And I’m trying to figure out what it is,” Jordan said.

“But my hunch is it has something to do with the dossier. Director, did Peter Strzok help produce and present the application to the FISA court to secure a warrant to spy on Americans associated with the Trump campaign?”

Wray refused to discuss anything having to do with the FISA process in an open setting.

“We’re not talking about what happened in the court,” Jordan said. “We’re talking about what the FBI took to the court, the application. Did Peter Strzok — was he involved in taking that to the court?”

Wray again refused to discuss it.

There is a house of cards here. The dossier was a piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign. It has never been proven true. To use it as an excuse for surveillance and later to drum up support for a special prosecutor is to base an investigation on a fictitious political document and to use government agencies for political purposes. That shouldn’t happen in a representative republic–that is the kind of thing that goes on in a banana republic.

A Disgusting Waste Of Taxpayer Money

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This post is based on two articles–one by Andrew McCarthy at the National Review and one by Byron York at The Washington Examiner.

Andrew McCarthy makes the case that the charges against Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI are an indication that Special Prosecutor Mueller doesn’t have anything else to charge anyone for. Byron York makes the case that the Trump Administration was set up by the Obama Administration to be charged with violating the Logan Act (a law under which no one has ever been prosecuted) on day one. Both articles are an indication of how desperate some people in Washington are to undo the results of a valid election. That is a sad place for our country to be.

Andrew McCarthy reminds us:

Bottom line: If the FBI had a collusion case of some kind, after well over a year of intensive investigation, Flynn and Papadopoulos would have been pressured to plead guilty to very serious charges — and those serious offenses would be reflected in the charges lodged against Manafort. Obviously, the pleas and the indictment have nothing to do with collusion because Mueller has no collusion case.

Since there is no collusion case, we can safely assume Mueller is primarily scrutinizing President Trump with an eye toward making a case of obstructing an FBI investigation. This also makes sense in light of the pleas that have been taken.

Obstruction itself is a process crime — i.e., it relates to interference in the investigation of an underlying transaction that may or may not be criminal. In the first point, above, we noted that prosecutors generally do not let a cooperator settle a case by pleading guilty to a mere process crime. But if the main case the prosecutor is trying to build is itself a process crime, such as obstruction, then it is not all that damaging that the witnesses have pled guilty only to process crimes. The theme of such a prosecution is that the investigative process must be protected, not that some terrible underlying crime (like an espionage conspiracy) has been committed. Witnesses such as Flynn and Papadopoulos would therefore not be made to look like they had gotten a pass on serious offenses; they would look like they had owned up to corrupting the process and are now helping the prosecutor against the principal corruption target.

Keep in mind that the obstruction charge is obstructing justice in the investigation of a crime that was never committed. This is beyond bizarre–particularly when Hillary Clinton was not charged with obstruction after she destroyed evidence in the email case.

Byron York reports:

As for another concern that Yates said she had over the Flynn-Kislyak conversations — the worry that Flynn’s lie to Vice President Mike Pence (that sanctions were not discussed on the call) would open Flynn up to possible blackmail — perhaps that is a legitimate concern, but why did it warrant FBI questioning of Flynn under the penalty of prosecution for making false statements? Certainly Yates could have warned the White House about that without interrogating Flynn at all.

Instead, it was the prospect of a Logan Act prosecution that led to the FBI interview, which then, when Flynn lied to investigators, led to his guilty plea on a false statements charge.

From today’s perspective, nearly a year later, it has become apparent that, farfetched as it might seem, the Logan Act made it possible for the Obama administration to go after Trump. The ancient law that no one has ever been prosecuted for violating was the Obama administration’s flimsy pretense for a criminal prosecution of the incoming Trump team.

And by the way, when it finally came time to charge Flynn with a crime, did prosecutors, armed with the transcripts of those Flynn-Kislyak conversations, choose to charge him with violating the Logan Act? Of course not. But for the Obama team, the law had already served its purpose, months earlier, to entangle the new administration in a criminal investigation as soon as it walked in the door of the White House.

Our FBI has become an arm of the Democratic Party. It needs to be replaced. That is a shame.

This Is Not Incidental Data Collection

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As I have listened to the Congressional hearings, I have heard the term ‘incidental data collection‘ mentioned as the reason there were transcripts of conversations between former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador. Well, that excuse is no longer valid. The Gateway Pundit posted an article today that included information from a whistleblower who Congressional investigators chose to ignore. I strongly suggest that you follow the link above to read the entire article. It is chilling to realize how seriously the rights of American citizens were breached and that people in high places chose to try to bury the information on the surveillance.

The article cites a letter from the whistleblower to Representative David Nunes from the General Council at Freedom Watch.

The article includes the following excerpt from the letter:

If these charges are true, and it sounds as if the whistleblower has the information to back them up, some of our highest government officials belong in jail. It truly is time to drain the swamp.