Tag Archives: Russia Hoax

This Could Get Very Interesting

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On Wednesday, Fox News posted the following headline:

GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna seeks $16 million fine against Adam Schiff for ‘lies’ about Trump-Russia collusion

The fine is roughly half the cost of the Trump-Russia probe, which found no collusion

If there are supposed to be consequences for lying to Congress, shouldn’t there be consequences if Congressmen lie to Congress?

The article reports:

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., introduced a resolution that would fine Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., $16 million for his claims that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

Luna says that amount is about half of the cost of the federal investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, which was debunked by special counsel reports from both Robert Mueller and John Durham.

“The GOP Conference agrees that Adam Schiff has betrayed the trust of the American people, purposely abused positions of extreme authority, lied continuously, and as such, must be held to account,” Luna said. “Accordingly, the resolution requires Rep. Schiff to pay a $16 million dollar fine, half of the cost American taxpayers were forced to pay for the Russia hoax investigation.”

…Luna’s resolution said as chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Schiff had a position of “extreme trust” that gave him access to sensitive information not available to other members, but Schiff “abused this trust” by citing evidence of collusion that later special counsel reports showed did not exist.

“By repeatedly telling these falsehoods, Representative Schiff purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people,” the resolution said. It noted that Schiff “lent credibility” to the Steele dossier, supported a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Trump aide Carter Page, and publicly accused Page of being a Russian collaborator.

“Representative Schiff exploited his positions on HPSCI to encourage and excuse abusive intelligence investigations of Americans for political purposes,” it said. “Representative Schiff used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

I believe that there are a number of people who should be in jail for misusing the Justice Department for political purposes, but that has been going on since J.  Edgar Hoover. However, the people who kept the hoax going and covered up the hoax should pay a price.

The Fix Is In

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Many Americans are hopefully watching the trial of Michael Sussmann for indications that our justice system’s principle of all men are equal under the law still applies. Well, don’t get your hopes up too high. If you are following the case, you realize that the prosecution is very carefully laying out the case that the bad people in the Clinton campaign fooled the Justice Department into going along with the Russia hoax. There is no suggestion that the Justice Department was part of the plan. That is the first indication that this trial is a show put on to appease those in America who actually want to see people held responsible for ignoring the civil liberties of their political opponents and lying to the media and the American public. There are also some other indications that the truth is not actually welcome in this trial.

On Friday, Fox News posted the following quote from Jonathan Turley:

JONATHAN TURLEY: Durham faces a lot of challenges in this trial. The judge in the trial has hit the prosecution with limiting orders. This jury pool is a nightmare for the prosecutors. There are three Clinton donors on the jury. In the last 24 hours, the judge turned down a motion to dismiss a juror whose daughter is actually playing on the same team with the daughter of Sussmann. So I think for the prosecutors, it seems like the only thing that is missing on the jury is Chelsea Clinton. A jury of your peers is not supposed to mean other Clinton people. And so, I think that the prosecutors have quite a challenge with this pool.

If I am ever charged with a crime, can I get a jury of my friends? How likely is that?

There Will Be No Consequences, But The Truth Does Matter

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Slowly but surely, documents from the Russian Hoax are being declassified. These documents tell a story that is very different from the one told to Congress by the people involved. Unfortunately, most of the bureaucrats who lied under oath to Congress will probably never be held accountable for their lies.

Yesterday Just the News posted an article about a recent document that was declassified.

The article reports:

The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.

“We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting,” Comey wrote in a Jan. 12, 2017 email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was declassified and made public through an open records lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The memo recounts an internal debate inside the U.S. intelligence community during one of the most delicate moments in the FBI’s then six-month old Crossfire Hurricane probe.

CIA officials had already informed Comey’s FBI that the target of the FISA warrant, Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather an asset helping U.S. intelligence. The bureau had received warnings about Steele and the reliability of his source network, including that it might have been compromised by Russian disinformation. Agents had also just recommended on Jan. 4, 2017 shutting down the probe’s inquiry into incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lack of evidence.

The FBI had been warned the previous summer that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have planted the false Russia collusion story as a way to “vilify” Trump and distract from her email scandal, and agents were about to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, who would discount much of the information in the dossier attributed to him as bar talk and unconfirmed rumor not worthy of official intelligence.

The article concludes:

The FBI also failed to disclose to the FISA judge that the source known as Person 1 was under a separate counterintelligence investigation by the FBI, the IG report footnotes show.

In fact on Jan. 12, 2017, the very day Comey signed the FISA and engaged with Clapper, the FBI had received clear warnings in a report that some of Steele’s dossier information about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations,” according to another declassified footnote from the IG report.

In other words, Comey’s representations to Clapper and sworn avowals of verification to the FISA court had already been directly undercut by his bureau’s own evidence.

Unfortunately I have no doubt that the illegal surveillance of American citizens is continuing under the Biden administration. Because there were no consequences under the Obama administration for these actions, there really is no incentive to end the illegal behavior.

 

Occasionally The Fake News Gets Called Out

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The Washington Examiner posted an article today about a recent award given to The New York Times for their podcast series “Caliphate.”

The article reports:

The paper of record announced this weekend that Caliphate, its award-winning 10-part podcast series on the Islamic State, contains “significant falsehoods and other discrepancies.”

The disclosure concludes an internal investigation launched this year after Canadian officials charged the podcast’s central narrative character with lying about his supposed involvement with the terrorist group.

Absent the testimony of the accused hoaxer, Canadian resident Shehroze Chaudhry, who spoke to the New York Times under the pseudonym “Abu Huzayfah,” there is not much left to the Caliphate podcast. Indeed, the show’s most gripping and grizzly “reporting” on ISIS’s operations in Syria relied entirely on the say-so of a supposed “executioner” who most likely has never even been to Syria.

“We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,” New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet explained this week in an interview with NPR.

The article concludes:

Caliphate won the 2018 Peabody Award. The New York Times has already returned it. The Overseas Press Club has also rescinded the podcast’s Lowell Thomas Award.

Man, what a year for the paper of record.

From publishing Chinese communist propaganda, to getting it wrong on coronavirus vaccine readiness, to losing top opinion editors following a temper tantrum thrown by newsroom staffers, to having nearly its entire bench of columnists suffer a collective nervous breakdown ahead of Election Day, to pretending still as if its fraudulent 1619 Project is not an abject embarrassment, 2020 has been as lousy a year for the New York Times as it has been for everyone else.

Actually, this was a careless, innocent mistake. I can’t say the same for much of their other reporting. They have never done a fair job of reporting on President Trump, and they did their best to convince people that Joe Biden was capable of handling the office of president. I really don’t feel sad that they had to give up their Peabody Award. They should also give up the Pulitzer Prize they won for their false reporting on the Russia hoax during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.