What The Transcripts Tell Us

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

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

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

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

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

The article reports:

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

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

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

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

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

A second point by Apelbaum was –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article then explains the significance of the screenshot:

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

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

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

The article concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article notes:

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

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

What a disaster for the Democrats!

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Game

As you no doubt are aware, Senator Schumer has ‘uncovered’ documents that show that the Democrats need to call witnesses in the Senate in addition to witnesses that testified in the House of Representatives. While this is much ado about nothing, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article today that explains the actual goal of all the drama. The article is very detailed (including the full arguments from the House of Representatives asking for more witnesses and the Department of Justice’s response). I suggest that you follow the link above to read the entire thing.

The article notes:

As we suspected, albeit against much criticism, House counsel Doug Letter has responded to the DC Appeals Court arguing the forced testimony of White House counsel Don McGahn is needed for evidence in impeachment trial. [Court pdf Avail Here]

This court filing today bolsters the unspoken background motive for delayed House Impeachment Managers.  The House Judiciary Committee is using impeachment as support for their ongoing effort to gain: Don McGahn deposition, and Mueller grand jury material (6e).  The goal is opposition research; impeachment is a tool to establish legal standing to obtain it.  Everything else is chaff and countermeasures.

The Democrats are looking for a legal basis to continue their fishing expedition to gather campaign fodder for 2020.

The article continues:

This court filing bolsters CTH analysis that rushed House articles are a means to an end. That is – a way for House lawyers to argue in court all of the constitutionally contended material is required as evidence for pending judicial proceedings, a trial in the Senate.

This would explain why all the prior evidence debated for inclusion and legal additions to “articles of impeachment” were dropped. Instead the House focused only on quickly framing two articles that can facilitate pending court cases.

…REMINDER: The House Judiciary Committee (HJC) led by Chairman Jerry Nadler has been seeking: (1) Mueller grand jury material; (2) a deposition by former White House counsel Don McGahn; and less importantly (3) Trump financial and tax records.  Each of these issues is currently being argued in appellate courts (6e and McGahn) and the supreme court (financials/taxes).

Looking at the legal maneuvers from that perspective means the grand jury material is the unspoken goal and impeachment is simply the enhanced means to obtain it.

The 6(e) material relates to evidence gathered by the Mueller team for grand jury proceedings in their two-year effort to construct a case against President Trump.

Remember, the Mueller evidence was gathered during a counterintelligence investigation, which means all things Trump -including his family and business interests- were subject to unbridled surveillance for two years; and a host of intelligence gathering going back in time indefinitely. A goldmine of political opposition research.

Obviously if Jerry Nadler could get his hands on this material it would quickly find its way into the DNC, and ultimately to the 2020 democrat candidate for president. This material would also be fuel for a year of leaks to DC media who could exploit rumor, supposition, and drops of information that Andrew Weissmann and team left to be discovered.

The article highlights some of the Department of Justice response:

[…] “Pursuing an interbranch suit in court while simultaneously pursuing impeachment, and then using that litigation as part of the impeachment proceedings, is “far from the model of the traditional common-law cause of action at the conceptual core of the case-or-controversy requirement.” Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811, 833 (1997) (Souter, J., concurring). But that is exactly what the Committee has done. The effect of that choice is
to “embroil the federal courts in a power contest nearly at the height of its political tension.” Id.

Indeed, if this Court now were to resolve the merits question in this case, it would appear to be weighing in on a contested issue in any impeachment trial. That would be of questionable propriety whether or not such a judicial resolution preceded or post-dated any impeachment trial. Cf. Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224, 232, 235-36 (1993).

The now very real possibility of this Court appearing to weigh in on an article of impeachment at a time when political tensions are at their highest levels—before, during, or after a Senate trial regarding the removal of a President—puts in stark relief why this sort of interbranch dispute is not one that has “traditionally thought to be capable of resolution through the judicial process.” Raines, 521 U.S. at 819.

This Court should decline the Committee’s request that it enter the fray and instead should dismiss this fraught suit between the political branches for lack of jurisdiction.

Stay tuned. Meanwhile, understand that the emails that Senator Schumer has discovered are not a ‘smoking gun’–they are simply a record of the way business is done in Washington.

The Story The Media Does Not Want You To Hear

John Solomon at The Hill has done an amazing job of investigating the corruption of the deep state that is aligned against President Trump. On Monday he posted an article about some recent documents uncovered.

The article reports:

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.

The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.

The article continues:

The political pressure continued. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial U.S. aid to Kiev if Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor. Ukraine would have been bankrupted without the aid, so Poroshenko obliged on March 29, 2016, and fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

At the time, Biden was aware that Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma, the firm employing Hunter Biden, after a December 2015 New York Times article.

What wasn’t known at the time, Shokin told me recently, was that Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the monies he was receiving from Ukraine. If such an interview became public during the middle of the 2016 election, it could have had enormous negative implications for Democrats.

Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.

Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton–funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.

Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.

Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.

The article concludes:

The evidence is so expansive as to strain the credulity of the Democrats’ current outrage at Trump’s behavior with Ukraine.

Which raises a question: Could it be the Ukraine tale currently being weaved by Democrats and their allies in the media is nothing more than a smoke screen designed to distract us from the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report into abuses during the Democratic-inspired Russia collusion probe?

It’s a question worth asking.

Wow.

What They Actually Did

Yesterday Sebastian Gorka posted an article at American Greatness about the recent dust-up about President Trump’s comments in an interview with George Stepanopoulos. The comments had to do with accepting information on an opposing candidate from a foreign source. Sebastian Gorka’s response to the dust-up is to list the offenses committed by President Obama and candidate Hillary Clinton that fit that description. I strongly recommend that you follow the link and read the entire article, but I will try to list the highlights.

The article lists what we know as fact so far:

  • Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with close ties to the Kremlin and an intense hatred for Donald Trump was paid by Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and the Democrat Party to compile a file of damaging information on candidate Trump. He did so without registering as an agent of a foreign power.
  • This file was replete either with unverifiable fabrications, old accusations that were already out in the open or which were deceptively repackaged to implicate Donald Trump, or outright propaganda Steele had “acquired” from his contacts associated with Russian intelligence.
  • Steele was deemed so unreliable and biased a political actor by the FBI and the State Department, that he was terminated as a source by the Bureau.
  • Senior DoJ official Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS, the company that hired Christopher Steele, and he funneled anti-Trump opposition research from his wife to the FBI.
  • The DNC dispatched a contractor to the embassy of Ukraine to collect proffered opposition research on Donald Trump from the government in Kiev with a plan to coordinate a smear campaign with officials from that non-NATO nation, foreign power.
  • As the Trump campaign grew in strength, Clinton’s allies in the Obama Administration initiated an unprecedented cross-agency operation code-named CrossFire Hurricane to target Donald Trump and his associates.
  • This involved the exploitation of foreign “liaison services,” especially in the UK (and possibly Italy and Australia as well) in order to circumvent constitutional protection that forbid U.S. intelligence agencies from spying on Americans citizens for political reasons. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, was the pivotal actor driving these operations, which led in part to the sudden resignation of the director of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, and included FBI Director James Comey as well.
  • On multiple occasions, U.S. intelligence assets were tasked with penetrating the Trump campaign to lure its representatives into what they believed were attempts to connect with the Russia government.
  • This included targeting George Papadopoulos, a minor figure in the campaign, via the offices of the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and a female FBI “analyst” known as Azra Turk who no one has been able to locate. (Note: When Downer was Foreign Minister he funneled $25 million of taxpayer dollars to the Clinton Foundation).
  • The NSA’s massive database of surveillance intercepts was repeatedly accessed illegally, often by contractors with no authority to do so.
  • At a rate never seen before in the history of the U.S. Intelligence Community (I.C.), the identity of hundreds of American citizens innocently caught up in NSA intercepts were “unmasked” by senior Obama Administration officials. Some of the officials who authorized the unmaskings weren’t even members of the I.C. and who had no plausible reason for the unmasking, including Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
  • The fabricated allegations provided by Russian government sources that Clinton and the DNC bought from Christopher Steele were used to obtain a secret FISA Court warrant to spy on Carter Page and the Trump campaign. The unverified quality of the “Steele dossier” and the fact that is was opposition research paid for by Donald Trump’s political opponent was hidden from the secret FISA court.

The article concludes:

In sum: Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party paid a foreign agent to collect or manufacture damaging information about the Republican candidate for president, information that was sourced from the Russian government. The subsequent propaganda file was used to surveil members of the Trump campaign, illegally, as NSA and British assets were also used to spy on those associated with Clinton’s political rival, and as human intelligence assets were deployed in an attempt to entrap Trump advisers and members of his staff.

The fall-out of the Stephanopoulos interviews is great. But not in the way George and his allies would like it to be.

With one sentence, the president has yet again turned the nation’s attention to the real scandal that should claim our focus: how the Democrats willingly colluded with a nation that remains our enemy in an attempt to win an election and defraud the will of the American people, in the biggest and most successful information operation Moscow has ever deployed against us.

Now it is up to Attorney General William Barr to uncover the rest of their crimes before our next election.

Much of America is waiting for equal justice under the law.

 

When You Never Look In The Mirror

ABC News posted an article today about a shocking statement made by President Trump during an interview with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos.

This is the controversial quote:

Asked by ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether his campaign would accept such information from foreigners — such as China or Russia — or hand it over the FBI, Trump said, “I think maybe you do both.”

“I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump continued. “If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

The mainstream media is shocked–simply shocked. Somehow they have overlooked the fact that the Clinton campaign actually paid for the Steele dossier.

The article continues:

President Trump lamented the attention on his son, Donald Trump Jr., for his role in the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. Stephanopoulos asked whether Trump Jr. should have taken the Russians’ offer for “dirt” on then-candidate Hillary Clinton to the FBI.

“Somebody comes up and says, ‘hey, I have information on your opponent,’ do you call the FBI?” Trump responded.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. You don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do,” Trump continued. “Oh, give me a break – life doesn’t work that way.”

“The FBI director said that is what should happen,” Stephanopoulos replied, referring to comments FBI Director Christopher Wray made during congressional testimony last month, when he told lawmakers “the FBI would want to know about” any foreign election meddling.

Should Hillary Clinton have called the FBI after she paid Steele for the dossier? Oh yeah, I forgot, she did call the FBI in order to make sure the information in the dossier was leaked to the press. There was never an investigation into the fact that the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier or that it was information from a foreign source. Had President Trump called the FBI with a foreign source claiming to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton, I wonder what their response would have been.

I am hoping American voters will begin to think about the implications of this question and how it reflects the bias of the press.