Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 12:11:29 PM

Title: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 12:11:29 PM: I'm thinking this needs its own thread:

30 minute video

http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/13/scholar-unravels-the-big-lie-surrounding-the-tump-campaign-and-russian-collusion-video/

Scholar Victor Davis Hanson says there’s a “big lie” surrounding the “boogeyman of Russian collusion” that Democrats and the media rally around, according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Hanson’s analysis begins by reminding us of the recent massive Democratic losses, which he places at the feet of President Barack Obama’s policies and identity politics gone awry. “The blue wall crumbled,” he says, turning working people against the Democrats in droves. The party then scrambled for any alternative to explain the electoral defeats.

He mentions the financial entanglements with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia by Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton that betray the sudden growing Russiaphobia of most Democrats.

When “the big lie” of Russian collusion is repeated by influential Democrats, doubt is cast and suspicions are raised against President Donald Trump, even without actual evidence. Then, Trump’s approval ratings are expected to fall, ensuring greater erosion of Republican support for the president’s agenda — an agenda that threatens the progressive project that was designed to ensure continued Democratic dominance.

Hanson predicts there will be new surprising evidence of Obama malfeasance against Trump over the next six months.

The scholar then discusses the causes and ramifications of the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” unfolding politically and culturally. He gives Trump high marks for using his unpredictability to restore vital deterrence on the world stage.

Yet, for many Republican elites, he says, they focus on Trump’s appearance — his Queen’s accent, and his gaudiness. A class-driven hostility to this president is revealed, Hanson says, when he hears such charges as, “he hangs out with wrestling people; he likes Mike Tyson; he’s just uncouth.”

In a “weird way” the polarization Obama’s identity politics brought to America will largely evaporate if Trump is able to bring about economic growth, which will unify us again, Hanson says.

As for Democratic leaders, he calls them simply “geriatric.” He sees the younger ones as “unhinged and in search of an identity.” Rather than find policies to bring working class voters back to the Democratic Party, Hanson predicts they will rally around race, class, and gender, as well as climate change and other fads thought up by Hollywood and radical elites.

This compelling video features Hanson discussing the intolerance and infantilization on display on American campuses, as well as tips for ordinary Americans living with growing intolerance and incivility.
Title: Who are Comey and Rowenstein?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 12:14:31 PM: Well, well, looky here , , ,

Who is James Comey?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/politics/who-is-james-comey-fbi-director-things-to-know/

Who is Rod Rowenstein?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article149815754.html

What implications?
Title: Re: Who are Comey and Rowenstein?
Post by: G M on May 15, 2017, 12:57:03 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 12:14:31 PM
Well, well, looky here , , ,

Who is James Comey?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/politics/who-is-james-comey-fbi-director-things-to-know/

Who is Rod Rowenstein?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article149815754.html

What implications?

http://ijr.com/2016/09/703663-fbi-director-let-hillary-off-the-hook-now-we-know-why-he-wouldnt-talk-about-the-clinton-foundation/
Title: This makes sense to me
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 01:54:44 PM: The Shapiro Report for 5/11/2017

While the Democrats and media suggest that President Trump fired FBI director James Comey in order to somehow stymie an investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump team in the 2016 campaign, the more plausible theory was far less damning to Trump. I theorized on Wednesday that this was all an elaborate set-up for a bank heist. But that’s not the theory to which I’m referring. Here’s the actual
theory:

Trump fired Comey because he was angry Comey was allowing the Russia investigation to drag along, and used Comey’s ridiculous Congressional testimony as a pretext for firing him. Under this theory, Trump isn’t necessarily guilty of collusion with Russia — at least not knowingly — and he’s merely ticked off that Comey appeared to be dragging his feet while refusing to state openly that he had no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

Essentially, Trump believes that he had nothing to do with Russia; even if his former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort had corrupt ties with the Kremlin, Trump doesn’t understand why that would implicate him personally, since he has never linked his fate with that of his subordinates. Trump was shocked and appalled that Comey wouldn’t simply come out and exonerate him, when he knew that Comey had no evidence of Trump’s direct involvement in anything; he was even more angry that Comey appeared to be fanning the conspiracy theory flames, even though Comey wouldn’t help him out with a bit of doubletalk on Obama administration wiretapping and leaks. So he fired him.
Unfortunately, when you
fire someone because they’re failing to clear you in a timely manner, it looks as though you’re firing them because they refuse to clear you at all. Thus the scandal.

All of which could have been avoided through some professional discretion.
Trump
could have dumped Comey ceremoniously, coordinated with his team, and ensured a suitable replacement was at hand. Instead, he decided he wanted Comey gone, told the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to write up a memo saying why Comey had to go — a hook upon which to hang Trump’s hat — and then wrote his own letter basically admitting that he was firing Comey because Comey wouldn’t publicly exonerate him.

Here’s The Washington Post reporting:

Trump had long questioned Comey’s loyalty and judgment, and was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government. By last weekend, he had made up his mind: Comey had to go… The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a
directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey… The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.

Trump is used to running a business. In business, the CEO is the dictator.
He can
fire people without blowback. If employees — people who serve at the pleasure of the president — cross him, the CEO can simply drop Trump’s signature line:
“You’re
fired.” But as president, the job is a bit different. You can fire James Comey, but you’re likely to hear some outcry if the firing is perceived to be politically-motivated.

That’s what likely happened here.

Democrats have no evidence to suggest that Trump is shutting down the Russia investigation, although Trump would obviously like to do so — and he’d certainly like to expedite the process by which he can be cleared, so that the cloud hanging over his administration can dissipate. Unfortunately, with his rash and incompetent action here, he’s damned himself to months more of speculation at the very least… and if Flynn and Manafort end up in the dock, he may have done himself far more damage than that. This is just one problem with a knee-jerk reactionary with volatile emotional issues at the head of the executive branch — even if he isn’t in thrall to the Russians, his inability to see any perspective outside his own leads him to jump on a landmine he planted himself.
Title: Kenneth Starr opines!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 02:01:16 PM: By Kenneth W. Starr
May 14, 2017 2:08 p.m. ET
502 COMMENTS

The long knives are out. The ultimate doomsday scenario for a constitutional republic in peacetime—calls for impeachment of the president—has now been augmented by a growing chorus of voices demanding a far less dramatic but nonetheless profoundly serious step: appointment of a special prosecutor. Even for this less drastic move, the calls are way off base. At a minimum, the suggestion is premature.

The developing narrative, trumpeted on the weekend talk shows, is that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein must appoint a special prosecutor to restore his long-established reputation for integrity and professionalism. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the entire matter.

The basic complaint is that the newly appointed second-in-command at the Justice Department lost public confidence by crafting a three-page memorandum to the attorney general that severely criticized then-FBI Director James Comey, whom President Trump quickly fired. At least one senator has already mocked Mr. Rosenstein’s May 9 memorandum as “laughable.” They are wrong.

Let’s see what the Rosenstein memorandum actually says. It is titled “Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI.” Mr. Rosenstein rightly praises the bureau as “our nation’s premier investigative agency.” Mr. Rosenstein singles out Mr. Comey for high praise as “an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice.” The memorandum goes on to praise the FBI chief for his long and distinguished public service.

Mr. Rosenstein then turns to the director’s profound failures during his stewardship of the FBI. Above all, the new deputy attorney general states: “I cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton’s emails.” In this Mr. Rosenstein echoes the vehement complaints by Democrats during the 2016 campaign, and indeed comments only last week by Mrs. Clinton herself. Even Republicans had raised an arched eyebrow at what the director did and when he chose to do it. The deputy attorney general goes on to express befuddlement that Mr. Comey still refuses “to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”

The memorandum then identifies the fatal offense of any FBI leader—the usurpation of the authority of the Justice Department itself. In a power grab, Mr. Comey had announced the ultimate prosecutorial decision, namely that Mrs. Clinton would not be prosecuted. The FBI director had no authority to do that. That was not all. Mr. Comey, the memo went on, “compounded the error” by holding a press conference releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.” This was all way outside the foul lines of Justice Department professionalism.

Succinctly, but with devastating effectiveness, the Rosenstein memorandum demonstrates Mr. Comey’s egregious violations of long-settled Justice Department practice and policy. Mr. Rosenstein draws from the director’s testimony before Congress and his unprecedented letter to Congress days before the election. He addresses Mr. Comey’s argument that had he failed to insert himself once again into the presidential campaign—as voting was already under way in many states—it would have constituted “concealment.”

Balderdash, the deputy attorney general concludes, albeit in more polite language. Prosecutors, to say nothing of FBI directors, are not to set out a confidence-shattering bill of particulars with respect to any potential defendant’s conduct, and certainly not a presidential candidate in the heat of a national campaign.

Finally, the Rosenstein memorandum sets forth paragraph after paragraph recounting the scathing criticism of the director’s woefully timed election interference. The deputy attorney general demonstrates that his own conclusions are shared by a wide range of respected former officials of the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations. One example: President Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, is quoted as condemning Mr. Comey for having “chosen personally to restrike the balance between transparency and fairness, departing from the department’s traditions.”

There’s nothing “laughable” about what the Rosenstein memorandum says. In setting forth undisputed and fireable offenses, the memorandum bespeaks professionalism, integrity and fidelity to Justice Department policy and practice, as befits the Harvard-trained lawyer and career prosecutor who was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate only weeks ago.

Rod Rosenstein is universally respected, a broad-based admiration founded on his long service and distinguished record in the Justice Department. Unless stepping aside represents the deputy attorney general’s considered judgment as the right thing to do, calling in a special prosecutor now would simply cause further delay, add greater cost, and disrupt the continuing work of the FBI.

The bureau’s investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election is continuing, under the leadership of Acting Director Andrew McCabe. In addition, the work of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee is well under way. Regardless of the unhappy fate of one public servant, the guardrails of constitutional republic are in place. And with its 10,000-plus special agents, the world’s most respected law-enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, should be encouraged to get on with the job, and a respected deputy attorney general permitted—with accountability to Congress—to come to his considered judgment. That’s precisely the kind of structural protection that the Founders had in mind over two centuries ago.

Mr. Starr served as a federal judge, solicitor general and Whitewater independent counsel.
Title: Trump leaned on Comey over Flynn?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 02:52:37 PM: Donald, you stupid fk!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/james-comey-trump-flynn-russia-investigation.html?emc=edit_na_20170516&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2017, 03:17:50 PM: "Donald, you stupid fk!"

If true then drain the swamp indeed. What to bring in a new one? :cry: :x
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 16, 2017, 04:02:23 PM: Quote from: ccp on May 16, 2017, 03:17:50 PM
"Donald, you stupid fk!"

If true then drain the swamp indeed. What to bring in a new one? :cry: :x

Way to hand a cudgel to the other side. Brilliant!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 16, 2017, 04:29:25 PM: If this is so bad, then why didn't Comey report it or resign? After all, this supposedly occurred 3 months ago. And the investigation of Flynn has continued.

Since Comey worked for the FBI, his memos are FBI property. We should be able to see all of Comey's memos about all of his meetings with superiors while he was FBI Director.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 05:38:48 PM: WONDERFUL to see you here Rick!

Excellent points.

You would be a good man to ask a question about which I have been wondering: What is the legal basis for asserting that Congress can subpoena Trump's alleged tapes? Wouldn't that be a violation of separation of powers?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 17, 2017, 02:07:13 AM: Thanks, Marc. I figured here was one place where these issues could be discussed sensibly.

On Feb 14, was there a criminal investigation of Flynn underway at the FBI? If not, Trump cannot be obstructing justice by telling Comey that he hopes that now that Flynn has resigned that the FBI can move past this issue. As far as we know, there is no criminal investigation of Flynn underway at the FBI. There is a counter-intelligence investigation underway of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. In that context, expressing a hope that the counterintelligence investigation can move past Flynn is not obstruction.

Under the Hillary rule, wouldn't you need to prove intent in order to charge Trump anyway?

As to subpoenas of any Trump tapes of his meetings with Comey and separation of powers, it's a good question. The Nixon decision at the Supreme Court held that executive privilege does not shield these things from a special prosecutor when there is probable cause that a crime has been committed. In that case, there had been a burglary and Nixon was trying to use his power to cover up the burglars' links to his own campaign.

An argument can be made that Comey's notes of his meetings with Trump are also protected by executive privilege.

Right now, I don't believe anything being leaked to the press because the leaks are selective, misleading and designed to advance many agendas. E.g., some are trying to sabotage Trump's meetings with Israel and Saudi Arabia by leaking that Israel was the source of the intel that was supposedly given to the Russians. But who leaked this? The people who talked to WaPo and the NYT.

If you recall, firstt there was a story floated that allowing he Russians into the Oval Office without US press there may have led them to inadvertently discover classified info sitting in the open around the office. When that did not generate any buzz, the WaPo publishes the story based upon hearsay info. But McMaster said in no uncertain terms that nothing inappropriate was told to the Russians at that meeting. "I was there and it didn't happen."

In response, the media pays its next card, NYT says that on Feb 14 Trump tells Comey that he hopes you can put the Flynn matter behind you now that Flynn has resigned. But what criminal investigation is Trump trying to obstruct when he says that? Nothing.

White House says that Trump never tried to stop the Russia investigation or any criminal investigation.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 04:42:11 AM: Really glad to have you join our conversation here-- that is some clear headed analysis there.

I would nit pick this: "Under the Hillary rule, wouldn't you need to prove intent in order to charge Trump anyway?"

The way I understand it is that for the criminal statute(s) in question regarding the handling of Top Secret intel, the legal standard was not the usual "intent" but "gross negligence". In my considered opinion, the factually and legally wrong application of the intent standard was the linchpin of Comey's play to get Hillary off the hook lest the , , , ahem , , , "nauseating" Donald Trump become President.

Anyway, thus there is no "Hillary standard", only what the statute in question provides-- which most likely is the usual intent standard.

"On Feb 14, was there a criminal investigation of Flynn underway at the FBI? If not, Trump cannot be obstructing justice by telling Comey that he hopes that now that Flynn has resigned that the FBI can move past this issue. As far as we know, there is no criminal investigation of Flynn underway at the FBI. There is a counter-intelligence investigation underway of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. In that context, expressing a hope that the counterintelligence investigation can move past Flynn is not obstruction."

I had not thought of this!

That said, can it not still be said to be highly inappropriate to ask an employee to not continue a counter intel investigation into his friend Flynn? If true, does not asking others to leave the room show mens rea?

"An argument can be made that Comey's notes of his meetings with Trump are also protected by executive privilege."

Wouldn't making this argument be devastating politically?

"Right now, I don't believe anything being leaked to the press because the leaks are selective, misleading and designed to advance many agendas. E.g., some are trying to sabotage Trump's meetings with Israel and Saudi Arabia by leaking that Israel was the source of the intel that was supposedly given to the Russians. But who leaked this? The people who talked to WaPo and the NYT."

I had not put that together!

"Right now, I don't believe anything being leaked to the press because the leaks are selective, misleading and designed to advance many agendas."

YES. For example, if I have it right, the unsourced allegation that AAG Rowenstein threatened to resign has been contradicted by Rowenstein himself. The unsourced allegation that Comey got fired after asking for more money to expand the investigation seems to have disappeared into the cyber ether as well.
Title: Pravda on the Hudson defining "obstruction of justice"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 04:47:48 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/obstruction-of-justice-explained-russia-investigation.html
Title: If Hillary were president...
Post by: G M on May 17, 2017, 06:37:45 AM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/image-1.png)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 17, 2017, 07:04:49 AM: "YES. For example, if I have it right, the unsourced allegation that AAG Rowenstein threatened to resign has been contradicted by Rowenstein himself. The unsourced allegation that Comey got fired after asking for more money to expand the investigation seems to have disappeared into the cyber ether as well."

It's all just endless attacks meant to churn emotions and spook the cattle.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 17, 2017, 07:26:03 AM: "until he committed suicide under suspicious circumstances"

or was out of no where, suddenly shot to death, in the back, in a totally unwitnessed "robbery attempt".
Title: Re: The alleged Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 17, 2017, 07:54:43 AM: Rick: "If this is so bad, then why didn't Comey report it or resign? After all, this supposedly occurred 3 months ago. And the investigation of Flynn has continued."

- Yes, this is a great point. To explain it, I think: 1) either the report is false, or 2) (most likely) they removed the context that explains why no action was taken (another version of false or misleading), or 3) Comey was accumulating a J Edgar Hoover like file on his potential enemies to keep them in line. On its face, the latest shiny news object makes no sense.

Director Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, including questions by Democratic Senators Leahy and Coons relating to the call for a special prosecutor, and Comey took a pass on the opportunity to bring this up then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ImYOb0X-Ik

Rick: "Since Comey worked for the FBI, his memos are FBI property. We should be able to see all of Comey's memos about all of his meetings with superiors while he was FBI Director."

Ben Sasse, chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee (caught reading the forum?) said this morning that all of Comey's notes should be turned over... http://www.hughhewitt.com/senator-ben-sasse-vanishing-american-adult-comey-memo/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 17, 2017, 08:09:40 AM: marc - why is it inappropriate for the President to tell the FBI Director how he sees the priorities in the counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference when there is not AG and no Deputy AG? Was it unwise? Yes, due to the fact that Comey was part of the swamp. But not inappropriate and not obstruction of justice. My guess is that when we see the entire memo and hear its full context, Trump was telling Comey to investigate the leaks with as much vigor as they were investigating the Russians. In that context, getting past Flynn now that he has resigned is a completely proper comment since Yates had presented the whole issue as a personnel problem - not a criminal investigation.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 09:58:37 AM: Asking an employee to back off with regard one's friend seems like a basis for a case, even without an AG or even a Deputy AG. By all means encourage investigating the leaks.

"My guess is that when we see the entire memo and hear its full context, Trump was telling Comey to investigate the leaks with as much vigor as they were investigating the Russians. In that context, getting past Flynn now that he has resigned is a completely proper comment since Yates had presented the whole issue as a personnel problem - not a criminal investigation."

Fair enough.
Title: Tips for reading WaPo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 11:56:55 AM: http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/16/tips-for-reading-washington-post-stories-about-trump-based-on-anonymous-leaks/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 17, 2017, 12:26:27 PM: FBI reviewed Flynn's calls with Russian ambassador and found nothing illegal. So, I ask again. What investigation was Trump obstructing on Feb 14?

From the 1/23/17 Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.416090f64c93 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.416090f64c93)

"The FBI in late December reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn — national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump — but has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government, U.S. officials said.

The calls were picked up as part of routine electronic surveillance of Russian officials and agents in the United States, which is one of the FBI’s responsibilities, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterintelligence operations.

Nonetheless, the fact that communications by a senior member of Trump’s national security team have been under scrutiny points up the challenge facing the intelligence community as it continues its wide-ranging probe of Russian government influence in the U.S. election and whether there was any improper back-channel contacts between Moscow and Trump associates and acquaintances."
Title: Trump could not have told because he did not know
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 01:18:43 PM: and more at

http://libertyunyielding.com/2017/05/16/clear-attempt-sabotage-u-s-relations-intel-leakers-tell-media-trump-not-tell-russians/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 18, 2017, 03:50:58 AM: Good choice for independent counsel. But this will not stop the drumbeat.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2017, 06:09:26 AM: Excellent intrusion from reality Rick!

There was some good intelligent conversation last night on Tucker Carlson.

One of the key take-aways for me was "Bad idea, good choice". While Mueller seems to be a fine choice, the fundamental question remains-- exactly what is the crime being alleged? What, if any, are the implied subject matter limits? If we are investigating "Russian interference" then surely we should be investigating Hillary's far more extensive and far more proven corrupt interactions with Russia (the payments to Bill, the donations to the Foundation, the money to Podesta and to his brother, etc etc etc)-- yet somehow I'm not holding my breath for this.
Title: Former Bush AG On Comey’s 2007 Brush With Scandal: ‘Jim’s Loyalty Was More To C
Post by: G M on May 18, 2017, 07:24:53 AM: http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/former-attorney-general-on-comeys-integrity-jims-loyalty-was-more-to-chuck-schumer/

Former Bush AG On Comey’s 2007 Brush With Scandal: ‘Jim’s Loyalty Was More To Chuck Schumer’
This isn't the first time James Comey placed himself at the center of a partisan attempt to oust a top Republican. He did the same thing in 2007.
Sean Davis By Sean Davis
MAY 17, 2017
The revelation by fired former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey’s close friends that he has kept meticulous records detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged attempts to improperly influence an ongoing FBI investigation has sent Washington into a tailspin. Did Trump really threaten a sitting FBI director in a private meeting? Did the former FBI director accurately record what happened? Could this be the beginning of the end of Trump?

At the moment, untangling fact from fiction is difficult, given that the event Comey allegedly describes took place only between Comey and the president. With no ability at this time to independently verify either man’s account, we are instead left with a he-said/he-said explanation of events, which means the credibility of the two men involved becomes the prime determinant of one’s view of the situation.

The narrative from the Acela corridor media establishment is that Trump is a known liar and Comey is a honest public servant above reproach, so clearly Comey’s word must be believed, the total absence of any other corroborating evidence notwithstanding. An examination of Comey’s history as the consummate Beltway operator, however, raises questions about whether the towering former U.S. attorney, deputy attorney general, and FBI director is as open and forthright as his allies would have you believe.

In fact, the current episode is not the first time Comey and his associates plotted to oust a sitting Republican official through highly orchestrated political theater and carefully crafted narratives in which Comey is the courageous hero bravely fighting to preserve the rule of law. To understand how Comey came to be FBI director in the first place, and how he operates in the political arena, it is important to review the last scandal in which Comey had a front-row seat: the 2007 U.S. attorney firings and the fight over the 2004 reauthorization of Stellar Wind, a mass National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program designed to mitigate terrorist threats in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The pivotal scene in the Comey-crafted narrative, a drama that made Comey famous and likely paved the road to his 2013 appointment by President Barack Obama to run the FBI, occurred in a Beltway hospital room in early 2004. In Comey’s view, Comey was the last honest man in Washington, the only person standing between a White House that rejected any restraints on its power, and the rule of law protecting Americans from illegal mass surveillance.

A former White House counsel and attorney general with extensive first-hand experience dealing with Comey, however, paints a very different picture of what happened in that hospital room, and disputes numerous key details. In this account, Comey’s actions showcase a duplicitous, secretive schemer whose true loyalties were not to the officials to whom he reported, but to partisan Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). To fully understand and appreciate Jim Comey’s approach to politics, the writings and testimony of Alberto Gonzales, who served as both White House counsel and attorney general during the events in question and is intimately aware of Comey’s history of political maneuvering, is absolutely essential.

Gonzales’s descriptions of his interactions with Comey, included in his 2016 book “True Faith And Allegiance,” are detailed and extensive. While his tone is measured, the language he uses to describe Comey’s actions in 2004 and 2007 leaves little doubt about the former top Bush official’s views on Comey’s character. Gonzales’s opinion is clearly colored by the fact that Comey cravenly used him to jumpstart his own political career by going public with surprise (and questionable) testimony that Gonzales had attempted to take advantage of a deathly ill man in order to ram through authorization of an illegal surveillance program.

Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft had taken ill and was in the hospital at a pivotal time. The legal authorization of a surveillance program meant to find and root out terrorist threats was days from expiring. What happened in Ashcroft’s hospital room in March of 2004 later became political fodder for a hearing in which Senate Democrats used Comey to dredge up the 2004 hospital meeting to tar Gonzales’ credibility and suggest he was unfit to continue serving as attorney general. As the 2004 and 2007 sagas show, Comey is clearly no stranger to using the unarguably legal dismissal of government employees as the backdrop for casting himself as the story’s protaganist standing up to the forces of corruption.

“ told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly to the hospital,” Comey testified. “I got out of the car and ran up — literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Comey said.

Comey’s use of the phrase “overrule me” is especially noteworthy, given that the authority he referenced belongs not to the deputy attorney general, but to the attorney general himself. However, unbeknownst to anyone at the White House on that day, Comey had assumed for himself the authorities attendant to Ashcroft’s position. Rather than personally informing anyone at the White House, including the president, the vice president, the White House chief of staff, or the White House counsel, the Department of Justice sent a mere fax to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue noting the change in power. For some reason, the newly designated acting attorney general didn’t feel compelled to personally inform any of his superiors that he was now a cabinet official.

It’s at this point in the narrative that Comey’s testimony took a turn for the dramatic:

I sat down in an armchair by the head of the attorney general’s bed. The two other Justice Department people stood behind me. And Mrs. Ashcroft stood by the bed holding her husband’s arm. And we waited.

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, ‘But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.’

[…]

And as he laid back down, he said, ‘But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general,’ and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left. The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room. And within just a few moments after that, Director Mueller arrived. I told him quickly what had happened. He had a brief — a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general and then we went outside in the hallway.
Gonzales was taken aback by Comey’s appearance and testimony. It turns out that was by design. Comey kept secret his pre-hearing planning with Schumer and his staff to maximize the fallout of the bomb he planned to drop on Gonzales and the Bush administration. In a significant breach of protocol, Comey also refused to share with the White House or the Department of Justice that he had planned to testify about his work at DOJ, a move which made it impossible for the White House to consider whether it needed to assert executive privilege over portions of Comey’s planned testimony.

As fate would have it, the Schumer staffer who spearheaded the entire spectacle was none other than Preet Bharara, a former employee of Comey’s in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York. Bharara, like Comey, was fired by President Donald Trump earlier this year. And Bharara, like Comey, owes his most recent position of authority in the U.S. government to Schumer and President Barack Obama.

“When I found out from our DOJ legislative liaison that Comey was testifying, I was surprised,” Gonzales wrote after noting that Comey hadn’t worked at DOJ for years when the U.S. attorneys were fired. “It was also odd that we had received no notice at DOJ regarding the appearance of one of the former members of our leadership team at a Senate hearing.”

“I called the White House counsel Fred Fielding, and Fred confirmed that he had no prior notice of Comey’s testimony either,” Gonzales continued. “I was disappointed that the man who had been given so much in his legal career — appointed by President Bush as a U.S. attorney and then as deputy attorney general — did not even notify the White House or me in advance of his testimony.”

“It felt to me that Jim’s loyalty was more to his friend Preet Bharara and to Chuck Schumer,” he wrote.

Gonzales also questioned whether Bharara’s role in ambushing the previous Republican presidential administration was the reason Obama later appointed Bharara to Comey’s old job as U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York.

Comey’s 2007 testimony went off just as he, Bharara, and Schumer planned. It was shocking and dramatic. Comey weaved a tale that involved him being notified at the last possible second that Bush’s chief of staff and counsel planned to ambush Ashcroft in his hospital bed and force him against his will to sign a legal document authorizing an ongoing mass surveillance program that Comey and his deputy, Jack Goldsmith, had very recently decided was illegal despite multiple DOJ and National Security Agency legal opinions to the contrary. According to Gonzales, despite having been on the job for months, Comey and Goldsmith didn’t disclose their concerns to the White House counsel about the legality of the surveillance initiative until March 6, just five days before the program’s authorization expired.

The narrative Comey provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee was riveting. But according to Gonzales, it didn’t actually happen.
The narrative Comey provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee was riveting. But according to Gonzales, it didn’t actually happen the way it was presented. And the conflicting details between Comey’s and Gonzales’ account, given Comey’s current attempts to use his credibility and recollection of events witnessed only by himself to take down a Republican official, raise significant questions about the trustworthiness of Comey’s current claims.

According to Gonzales, rather than sitting directly next to Ashcroft, Comey and his two deputies, Goldsmith and Pat Philbin, never made their presence known, and neither Gonzales nor Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff, had any clue they were there during the 10-minute meeting. To the contrary, Gonzales noted in his book that he assumed the small handful of people in the hiding in the periphery of a darkened room were actually Ashcroft’s security detail doing their best to stay out of the way.

More important, in Gonzales’ telling, Ashcroft never even mentioned Comey, let alone pointed him out to Gonzales as being physically present in the room.

“I was told this morning that I’m no longer attorney general,” Gonzales wrote was Ashcroft’s response to a request to re-authorize the Stellar Wind program, a far cry from the forceful declaration Comey attributed to Ashcroft.

“Certainly, had the vice president, Andy, or I known about the matter, we would have informed the president, and he could have simply summoned the deputy attorney general,” Gonzales wrote. “But none of us knew until John Ashcroft announced the news to us in his hospital room.”

President George W. Bush himself, in his book “Decision Points,” expressed his feeling of shock when he found out that Comey had seized the attorney general’s authority in March of 2004.

It’s unclear why Comey did not feel compelled to inform the president of the United States, his superior, that he had assumed for himself the powers of the office of attorney general.
“I was stunned,” Bush wrote. “Nobody had told me that Comey, John Ashcroft’s deputy, had taken over Ashcroft’s responsibilities when he went in for surgery. If I had known that, I never would have sent Andy and Al to John’s hospital room.”

To date, it’s unclear why Comey did not feel compelled to inform the president of the United States, his superior, that he had assumed for himself the powers of the office of attorney general. Gonzales minced no words in his characterization of the hero narrative Comey wove before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007.

“The details later presented by Jim Comey, and facilitated by Senator Schumer’s staffer, Preet Bharara, describing flashing lights, sirens, and dashing up the hospital staircases may or may not be technically true, but they certainly do not depict what happened later in that hospital room,” Gonzales wrote. “Contrary to Hollywood-style myth, there simply was no confrontation.”

Gonzales even pointedly questioned the Comey narrative that Ashcroft’s health status had made it impossible for him to continue his duties.

“[Card and I] both agreed that Ashcroft had been competent and understood the intricacies of the disputed surveillance matter. He seemed to have been well briefed by [Comey], Goldsmith, and Philbin,” Gonzales wrote. “In an ironic twist, it is possible some or all of those briefings occurred while the attorney general was hospitalized and in a weakened condition, thus raising the question of whether his subordinates had taken advantage of him.”

This cynicism is not unwarranted, given that according to Comey’s own testimony, Ashcroft allegedly addressed Card and Gonzales in the hospital room with language that was “rich in both substance and fact…drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier.” If Ashcroft had such detailed command of facts he had only briefly discussed the previous week, then what exactly was the rationale for Comey continuing to assert the powers of Ashcroft’s position? Comey’s recollection of that conversation reveals an attempt to have it both ways: there was no choice but to designate Comey as acting attorney given Ashcroft’s medical state, and yet Ashcroft was competent enough to slap down Card and Gonzales in exquisite and detailed fashion. Which was it?

Gonzales’s belief, expressed in the book, that Comey and Bharara colluded in secret with Schumer in an attempt to take down a top Bush administration official is no unsupported conspiracy theory, as Bharara himself confirmed Gonzales’s suspicions about Comey’s scheme in a 2016 interview with The New Yorker‘s Jeffrey Toobin:

As Bharara recalled, ‘Jim told me the whole story on the phone, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck, because I realized what a significant story this was, and I was sworn to secrecy and nobody knew about it. I told Chuck. He was, like, ‘Whoa!’ ” In the days leading up to the hearing, Bharara and Schumer told no one about the revelation that was coming. ‘I was afraid that if the story got out of what Jim was going to say the Bush Administration would figure out a way to prevent him from testifying,’ Bharara said. ‘We needed to preserve the element of surprise.’
That Bharara, a Senate staffer for Schumer, would plot with Comey to oust a top Republican official is no real surprise. After all, Bharara owes his federal prosecutor career to Comey, for whom Bharara worked when Comey was a U.S. attorney, and to Schumer, who recommended to Obama that Bharara be appointed as the top federal prosecutor in New York. Both men owed their fame and near-universal adoration by the Washington-New York media in the late 2000’s to the political theater they orchestrated at Gonzales’s expense.

This brings us back to 2017 and an emerging drama in which Comey and his former employees Bharara and Goldsmith are once again key actors. This clearly isn’t their first rodeo, nor the first time they have worked together to present a public narrative in which Comey plays the role of the last honest man who just wants to figure out if Col. Jessup ordered the Code Red.

This clearly isn’t their first rodeo, nor the first time they have worked together to present a public narrative in which Comey plays the role of the last honest man.
Is it possible that everything they and their friends are alleging about Comey and Trump is true? Absolutely. Everything they and their associates are anonymously providing to journalists eager to promote their narrative could be true, especially given Trump’s tendency to rhetorically shoot from the hip.

But given Comey’s history of secretly colluding with Democratic officials to craft a disputed narrative that makes everyone but himself look awful in order to oust a top Republican who didn’t sufficiently kowtow to Comey, there’s little reason to assume events transpired exactly the way Comey and his friends allege, especially given that both Comey and Bharara have rather obvious axes to grind on the matter. After all, Trump is the reason neither of them currently has a job. In light of Comey’s history of twisting private conversations and events, it’s probably a good idea to take anonymous leaks from him and his friends with a grain of salt.

“Over the years, various commentators and politicians have picked up on Comey’s remark to the president [about Bush’s staff knowing about Stellar Wind’s legal problems for weeks] and expanded it to say that President Bush’s staff knew of the specific surveillance problem for months before broaching it with the president,” Gonzales wrote in his book. “That is absolutely false, and the implication that the president was ill served by individuals attempting to keep information from him about a highly sensitive matter is also disingenuous.”

Sound familiar?

Now, Gonzales has publicly raised questions about the timing and rationale of Trump’s firing of Comey and stated the American people deserve a full account of what happened. And the former attorney general has thus far stayed out of the media fray regarding the latest alleged revelations about Comey and Trump.

So Comey could be telling the truth. Or he could be disingenuously characterizing private conversations with the president to get revenge against a higher-ranking official who got in Jim Comey’s way. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just ask Alberto Gonzales.

Sean Davis is the co-founder of The Federalist.
Title: FBI continuing to leak? This is bad for Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2017, 07:42:52 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/michael-flynn-donald-trump-national-security-adviser.html?emc=edit_na_20170517&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Special "Councel"
Post by: DougMacG on May 18, 2017, 09:45:36 AM: Counsel mis-spelled in the President's tweet. https://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/furious-trump-breaks-twitter-silence-with-misspelled-tweet-complaining-about-illegal-obama-acts/

"Bad idea, good choice"

Right. Let an FBI Director (former) oversee the closing of this FBI inquiry for credibility while we lack a permanent and confirmed new Director - as if that will make the controversy of the Trump election go away.

NPR was talking impeachment all day yesterday. I turned on PBS News Hour in the evening and the first word was impeachment. An impeachable cover up without a cover up or an underlying crime!

Appointing a Special Prosecutor where no evidence of a crime exists means the Republicans agree to be forever judged by a double standard, and forever investigated and castigated.

We know:
1) The January WaPo story Rick posted, the Flynn tapes exposed no crime or conspiracy.
2) The May 3 Comey testimony under oath, he has never been pressured to end an investigation for political reasons.
3) Democratic Senators studying this admitted they have no evidence yet, meaning no probable cause to dig and look further, and
4) No Counsel was appointed for Fast and Furious, Benghazi or IRS targeting, Clinton-Russia-Uranium all of which did have far more than probable cause exposed.

Republicans, if we call the Trump people that, are held to a false and different standard by their own consent!

Predicting the lessons out of this. The investigation will end without charges. Appointing a special prosecutor will add no credibility to those who shout the loudest. People who wanted Trump impeached will be even more energized. Mueller's great reputation ended with acceptance of this job. Democrats who screamed bloody murder over nothing will do it even more and get their way, even when lacking the votes in all branches of government.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 18, 2017, 02:48:14 PM: http://gotnews.com/breaking-fbi-director-james-comey-testified-oath-may-3rd-trump-administration-doesnt-obstruct-investigations/ (http://gotnews.com/breaking-fbi-director-james-comey-testified-oath-may-3rd-trump-administration-doesnt-obstruct-investigations/)

This has the video clip of Comey testifying under oath before the Senate committee that he has never been asked to stop an investigation for political reasons by the Attorney General or DOJ.

Gregg Jarrett column on same issue. He is also a lawyer.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/16/gregg-jarrett-comeys-revenge-is-gun-without-powder.html (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/16/gregg-jarrett-comeys-revenge-is-gun-without-powder.html)
Title: What If There's No Scandal for the FBI to Find?
Post by: G M on May 18, 2017, 03:51:28 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/369822.php

May 18, 2017
Democrats and NeverTrumpers Worry:
What If There's No Scandal for the FBI to Find, After We've Staked What Remains of Our Credibility on Suggesting There are High Crimes in Play?
Whoops.

Bluffed called, assholes.

Eli Lake is right: The DOJ's appointment of widely-respected former prosecutor Robert Mueller to lead the special inquiry into the Trump campaign's potential collusion with Russia is a reprieve for a Trump Administration in crisis--a reprieve that it will almost certainly squander, but a reprieve nonetheless.
How do we know? Because the responses from Trump’s most dogged critics on the Russia question betray a kind of anxiety about the Mueller appointment--an anxiety that the no-nonsense law enforcement wise man will lower the temperature in Washington without actually uncovering enough damaging material to bring down the President.

Take, for example, Josh Marshall declaring that while he has confidence in Mueller to identify and expose any criminal activities undertaken by Trump or his associates, he won’t be able to prosecute the real Trump-Russia wrongdoing: a labyrinthian "conspiracy" which may not even involve any illegal behavior.

It is critical to understand that the most important details we need to know about the Russian disruption campaign and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with it may not be crimes. Indeed, I would say that the crimes we’re likely to discover will likely be incidental or secondary to the broader actions and activities we're trying to uncover. Just hypothetically, what if Russia had a disruption campaign, Trump campaign officials gave winks and nods to nudge it forward but violated no laws? That’s hard to figure but by no means impossible. (Our criminal laws are not really designed for this set of facts.)...
And here’s David Frum in the Atlantic making a similar objection:

The special counsel will investigate whether people in the Trump campaign violated any laws when they gleefully leveraged the fruits of Russian espionage to advance their campaign.
By contrast, what happened in plain sight --cheering rather than condemning a Russian attack on American democracy--will be treated as a non-issue, because it was not criminal, merely anti-democratic and disloyal.

Since the summer before the election, Trump's critics have been suggesting or sometimes stating outright that Russia is involved with a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle. But now that an unimpeachable bulldog prosecutor has been named to probe these very allegations, the critics seem to be trying to move the goalposts, saying that the real problem isn't criminality, but the sleaze and outlandish behavior of the Trump campaign more generally...

Indeed. One question I keep asking -- and which I encourage people to ask of these assholes -- is this: "What specific crime, including what specific acts, are you accusing Trump of?"

Note that in Hillary's case, critics were quite specific about what crimes she had committed: She violated the Espionage Act by transferring classified information to non-authorized users. She also set up this system precisely to avoid her FOIA obligations -- repeatedly telling people there were no responsive documents, when she was deliberately not searching for such documents on the secret serve she knew they were on.

I don't know if that last one is a crime, but I can definitely make that specific description of the bad conduct I'm alleging.

What similar specifics can these assholes offer re: Trump? They keep citing "contacts" -- but it's not a crime to have a "contact" with anybody. Literally, there is no person in the world, not even Osama bin Ladin's Satan-raped ghost, that it's illegal to have a "contact" with.

They also use the very vague word "collusion" to mask the fact they have no idea what Trump and Putin "colluded" about, or how. What quid pro quo are they alleging? How was this contract formed? Who negotiated this contract?

They have no idea, because they don't even really believe such a thing happened.

If they really believed such things happened, they would specifically say "Trump Aide X, with Trump's knowledge and permission, negotiated to trade American policy Y to Russia in exchange for Russian act Z."

They don't ever say that, because this is all bullshit. They just keep talking about the non-crime "contacts" and the deliberately vague, purposefully elusive word "collusion."
Title: Comey's version
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2017, 05:49:29 PM: I can picture Trump not taking a hint , , ,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/us/politics/james-comey-memo-fbi-trump.html?emc=edit_ta_20170518&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 19, 2017, 05:20:50 AM: The current atmosphere really demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of the President as executive and the legislation that created the 10 year term for the FBI Director.

All executive power is vested in the President. Congress cannot take any of that power away from the President by legislation. The President can order the DOJ or the FBI to conduct any investigation he wants conducted. Also, he can order the DOJ and FBI Director not to conduct any investigation that he does not want conducted. The President can make his views about any investigation known to the FBI or DOJ. The President is the ultimate executive power and his delegation of duties to members of his cabinet or staff does not strip the President of that constitutional power.

This is no different than the Commander-in-Chief clause. The President can overrule any commander's decision about anything. He is the top dog in that chain of command. In fact, many writers applaud JFK's decision to override the Joint Chiefs during the Cuban Missile Crisis and impose a naval blockade instead of ordering air strikes. Same with Truman and MacArthur during the Korean War.

The 10 year term for FBI Director was established to prevent another J. Edgar Hoover from recurring. That term places a limit on how long the Director can act before his position requires a review and oversight by both the President and Congress. This limit was not added in order to make the Director somehow independent of the President. You would not want a national police force to be independent of oversight for 10 years.

The constitutional issue is whether the President abused his executive power when he asked Comey to move on from Flynn now that Flynn had resigned the day before. And whether the President abused his power when he fired Comey on May 9. And when he asked Comey whether he (Trump) was the subject of any FBI investigation.

IMO, the answer in all 3 cases is, "No." Looking at these issues in reverse order.

3. Trump, as the repository of all executive power under the Constitution, has a right to know if he is the subject of any FBI investigations before he makes any decisions that could constitute an abuse of power. That includes the decision to fire Comey. The AG and his underlings owe any President that duty because each President is elected by the majority of votes in the Electoral College. Those election results reflect the consent of the governed for that 4-year term. And the duty of all federal employees and officers is to the Constitution. An act that constitutes an abuse of power under one set of circumstances and not an abuse of power under another set should not depend upon the decision of an underling not to disclose certain facts to POTUS. Trump had a right to know all of the facts relevant to any personnel decision before making it.

2. Comey served at the pleasure of any President who held office during his maximum term as FBI Director. He owed any President loyalty to the extent that the President did not violate the Constitution or was seeking not to faithfully execute the laws of the land. If Comey did not see the current leaks from the Executive office as a priority, then Trump had every power, right and duty to fire him. Comey had no more power to set the parameters of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia or any other investigation into anything related to the 2016 election than MacArthur had to cross the Yalu into China aganst TRuman's wishes.

1. Any President has the power to tell any subordinate what he thinks should be done in any investigation. Clearly Trump did not tell Comey to end any investigation into Flynn because that investigation has supposedly progressed to grand jury subpoenas. The actions of Comey and the Bureau after the Feb 14 conversation prove that Comey was not ordered to do anything. Thus, Trump did not abuse his executive power.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 19, 2017, 07:15:30 AM: Great analysis Rick!

If the NY Times original, double blind, hearsay story is true as reported ('anonymous sources' saw a memo that the 'reporters' did not see) that President Trump applied inappropriate pressure on then Director Comey in February to stop an FBI investigation for personal or political reasons that Comey denied under oath in May, Comey committed perjury. I wonder if Mueller will prosecute his successor. Or was the reporting, deceptive, wrong, and intended to turn the country into crisis over nothing?
---------------

Crafty: "I can picture Trump not taking a hint , , ,"

I can picture Comey putting valuable resources on a non-story and not investigating felonious, damaging leaks.

The NYT youtube of the handshake is the best evidence they have to support what they allege? 70 year old Trump pulled in "6 feet 8 inches tall" Comey against his will for a hug? Good grief. Sadly, I reviewed the tape a number of times. There was no hug. It was Comey that leaned in more so than Trump, and I'll bet no one in the room detected inappropriate touching. ) And Biden's fondling of every appointee's wife goes unmentioned? What has this newspaper come to, all the shiny narrative objects fit to print?
Title: NRO: When does all that evidence of collusion arrive?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 08:47:08 AM: Rick:

Are you saying that the President can ask the FBI Director to back off an investigation of a friend of his?

==========================================================================

When Does All That Evidence of Collusion Arrive?

Thursday, White House communications officials were eager to spotlight these comments from legislators, admitting or confirming, that they had, so far, seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Sam Stein, Huffington Post: “But just to be clear, there has been no actual evidence yet.”

REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): “No, it has not been.”

Keep in mind, this is “Mad Maxine” Waters, who begins that interview by contending, “Lock her up, lock her up, all of that, I think that was developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Putin.” Right, right, there’s no way the Trump campaign could have possibly thought of that rallying cry on their own. That’s gotta be the work of Russian intelligence right there — you’ve cracked the case, Congresswoman!

Then there’s a Republican senator who hasn’t been a consistent Trump ally with the same assessment.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina: “There is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians as of this date. I do not believe the president himself is a target or subject of any criminal investigation as of right now. So that’s what I know right now, and where this goes, I don’t know. Follow the facts where they lead.”

Perhaps the most significant comes from Senator Dianne Feinstein of California:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: “The last time we spoke, Senator, I asked you if you had actually seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and you said to me -- and I’m quoting you now -- you said, ‘not at this time.’ Has anything changed since we spoke last?”

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): “Well, not—no, it hasn’t.”
…
BLITZER: “But I just want to be precise, Senator. In all of the—you’ve had access from the intelligence committee, from the Judiciary committee, all of the access you’ve had to very sensitive information, so far you’ve not seen any evidence of collusion, is that right?”

SEN. FEINSTEIN: “Well, evidence that would establish that there’s collusion. There are all kinds of rumors around. There are newspaper stories, but that’s not necessarily evidence.”

Feinstein is the most intriguing, because think about how easily she could have fudged her answer: “I’ve seen things that trouble me, Wolf” or “I’ve seen things that raise serious questions” or some other word salad that avoid the word “no.”

And then there was this Reuters article, reporting that Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and e-mails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race,

The people who described the contacts to Reuters said they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far. But the disclosure could increase the pressure on Trump and his aides to provide the FBI and Congress with a full account of interactions with Russian officials and others with links to the Kremlin during and immediately after the 2016 election.

(The Reuters story cites “current and former U.S. officials” as sources. Every time we see the words “former U.S. official” we should keep in mind there’s a good chance the source would be more accurately characterized as a “former Obama-administration official.” This doesn’t mean that former official is automatically lying, just that they have a particular agenda for leaking this information, and one that is being effectively withheld from readers.)

Democrats are increasingly convinced that the seemingly endless storm of allegations around Trump will inevitably lead to his impeachment, and an impeachment that will come soon, not late in Trump’s first term. They’re convinced that evidence of Trump violating the law exists, and they’re convinced that the FBI or the investigating committees in Congress will find it.

Are any Democratic lawmakers starting to fear that they’re not going to find that evidence? The intelligence community is presumably always watching the Russian government as closely as they can. The FBI counterintelligence guys presumably track Russian agents on our soil as much as possible. You figure the NSA can track just about any electronic communication between Russians and figures in the Trump campaign.

If there was something sinister and illegal going on between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the U.S. government as a whole had every incentive in the world to expose that as quickly as possible. They didn’t expose it before Election Day, they didn’t expose it before the Electoral College voted, they didn’t expose it before Inauguration Day… How many months have the best investigators in the United States been digging into this?

Imagine a scenario where the FBI and prosecutors eventually can prove some underling violated the law — obstruction of justice? Lying to investigators? — but not Trump. Will Democrats accept that?

Pity the FBI and intelligence community. They have to get to the bottom of this in a world where just under half of Capitol Hill, most of the media, almost all of academia, a good portion of the think-tank world and “intellectual class” etc., believe that the real mission of the investigation is to correct the “error” of the 2016 election.

If you talk to Democrats lately, they speak not as if the voters merely made a mistake, but that somehow history itself has gone wrong. They speak we’re living in an alternative timeline, experiencing events that “weren’t supposed” to happen. In their eyes, Hillary Clinton was obviously so much more appealing that Trump. She led in the polls! She had so many more campaign offices! She spent so much more money! She ran so many more ads! Surely, a result like this must be the result of someone cheating.

Because so many Democrats associate Trump with apocalyptic threats — global warming, the sudden establishment of a repressive theocracy like The Handmaid’s Tale, nuclear confrontation, race wars — they all see themselves as their own personal Kyle Reeses, on a mission to save the future.

With this desperate, all-or-nothing mindset, they will always insist that the evidence to take down Trump is waiting to be found, just around the next corner…
Whoa, Leakers, Take It Easy. You’re Starting to Embarrass the Obama Folks

Raise your hand if you expected John Brennan, who President Obama appointed to head the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013, to offer a qualified defense of Trump:
“What I have found appalling is the number of leaks that have taken place over the last several months,” former CIA Director John Brennan said at the SALT conference in Las Vegas, the annual gathering of hedge-fund managers and other financiers. “This needs to be stopped.” Brennan was CIA director during President Obama’s second term, stepping down in January, when Mike Pompeo replaced him.

Brennan said Trump made a “serious mistake” when he reportedly shared sensitive intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in an Oval Office meeting in early May. But this mistake wasn’t sharing intelligence; it was violating the protocol for doing so. “I shared intelligence with the Russians when I was the director of the CIA,” Brennan said. “But you share that through intelligence channels, and you make sure you word it in such a way as to not reveal sources and methods. President Trump didn’t do that.”

Brennan said the press coverage of Trump’s impromptu intelligence reveal was “hyperbolic” and possibly more damaging than anything Trump revealed. “The damage that was done is what was leaked in the aftermath, what was put in the media. The real damage to national security is the leaks.” He suggested, without saying so explicitly, that news accounts revealed more sensitive information than Trump did.

“The real damage to national security is the leaks,” Brennan said. “These individuals who still stay within the government and are leaking this stuff to the press need to be brought to task.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 09:00:08 AM: Could someone find the citation(s) for that Team Obama woman who let the cat out of the bag about how they left landmines for Trump, and also relevant citations about Obama expanding Super Duper Top Secret stuff from a handful of people to 17 agencies?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 19, 2017, 09:18:05 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 09:00:08 AM
Could someone find the citation(s) for that Team Obama woman who let the cat out of the bag about how they left landmines for Trump, and also relevant citations about Obama expanding Super Duper Top Secret stuff from a handful of people to 17 agencies?

http://pamelageller.com/2017/03/obama-loyalists-trump.html/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out
Title: Comey confirms our Rick's analysis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 10:39:15 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JbeJpKgyV4
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 10:54:53 AM: Very helpful GM-- can you find the one(s) of the Obama team woman inadvertently admitting everything in a TV interview?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 19, 2017, 11:14:18 AM: Craft Dog wrote:

Quote
Are you saying that the President can ask the FBI Director to back off an investigation of a friend of his?

IMO, yes. He has the constitutional authority to do so. He has the constitutional authority to order the FBI to stop investigating his friend.

The very first sentence of Article II: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

The issue is whether the request is such an abuse of that power that it constitutes an "other High Crime and Misdemeanor." Or whether the friend bribed him for the request. Otherwise, such an order or request is a political issue that gets resolved in an election. For example, the President can order the pardon or commutation of a friend's conviction and sentence. He could even receive money like Bill Clinton received from the wife of Marc Rich.
Title: Rowenstein discussed firing Comey with Sessions
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 12:11:27 PM: Thank you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/politics/rod-rosenstein-fbi.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&rref=politics&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&pgtype=article
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 19, 2017, 12:56:56 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 10:54:53 AM
Very helpful GM-- can you find the one(s) of the Obama team woman inadvertently admitting everything in a TV interview?

http://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017/03/29/did-former-obama-aide-evelyn-farkas-just-admit-that-trumps-staff-was-spied-on/
Title: Twice, Comey declined to charge the Clintons
Post by: G M on May 19, 2017, 01:08:50 PM: Papers reveal FBI's 'public corruption' probe into Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive Marc Rich, whose wife Denise gave $450K to his presidential library – and $100K to make Hillary a senator

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3895636/papers-FBI-s-public-corruption-probe-Bill-Clinton-s-pardon-fugitive-wife-gave-450K-build-presidential-library-100K-make-Hillary-senator.html

Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich on his last day in the White House
Rich faced an indictment for racketeering, tax evasion, wire fraud, and illegally trading oil with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis
He was in Switzerland when a federal Grand Jury indicted him, and never came back to the U.S.
His wife gave $450,000 to build Bill's presidential library, $100,000 to Hillary's U.S. Senate campaign, and far more to other Democratic causes

The FBI released 129 pages of heavily redacted documents on Monday related to the criminal investigation of the pardon – just 7 days before Hillary's big election day
By DAVID MARTOSKO, US POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 20:17 EDT, 1 November 2016 | UPDATED: 11:03 EDT, 2 November 2016

SCANDAL: Fugitive financier Marc Rich was indicted for racketeering, fraud, tax evasion and illegal oil trading with Iran, but Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day in the White House

The FBI on Monday released 129 pages of documents related to former president Bill Clinton's lame-duck pardon of a fugitive financier whose family contributed $450,000 to help build his presidential library and millions more to other Democratic Party causes.

Rich's wife Denise also contributed $100,000 to Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign as the first family prepared to clear out of the White House.

The disclosures will prove embarrassing to the former first family as Hillary Clinton tries to avoid a career-ending defeat next Tuesday at the hands of Donald Trump.

The FBI investigated the case of Marc Rich, who died in 2013, more than a decade ago, assigning it to the ominous sounding 'Public Corruption Unit.'

The documents released Monday leave much to the imagination, mostly redacted by government lawyers for privacy reasons and to preserve the secrecy of a federal Grand Jury.

But merely bringing the episode back up so close to Election Day has put an old Clinton black eye back on the front burner.

Rich, a legendary oil commodities and hedge-fund trader in his day, was charged with multiple counts of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and cutting petroleum deals with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.

Rich was in Switzerland when he was indicted, and never returned to the United States. He hired Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel to Clinton, as his lawyer.

His wife later renounced her U.S. citizenship and moved to Austria where she already had dual citizenship – saving herself tens of millions of dollars in taxes.

Rich passed away in 2013 and was laid to rest in Tel Aviv.

Pardoning Rich on his last day in office turned out to be one of Bill Clinton's most controversial acts of president.

The FBI concluded that Clinton did not follow established procedures when he finalized the pardon, and only informed one person at the Department of Justice that Rich had sought the pardon: future Obama administration attorney general Eric Holder.

FBI director James Comey, then a federal prosecutor, ran the investigation into the Rich pardon. He criticized Holder's involvement in the controversy, calling the pardon 'a huge misjudgment.'

But he never recommended criminal charges against anyone embroiled in the scandal.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3895636/papers-FBI-s-public-corruption-probe-Bill-Clinton-s-pardon-fugitive-wife-gave-450K-build-presidential-library-100K-make-Hillary-senator.html
Title: This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves
Post by: G M on May 19, 2017, 01:24:14 PM: https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/05/18/this-is-a-coup-against-our-right-to-govern-ourselves-n2328059

This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: May 18, 2017 12:01 AM
This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves

The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president – our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid.

This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.

It’s brazen. It’s bold. It’s insulting to our intelligence. They aren’t even trying to hide their lies anymore. Truth is irrelevant; this is a choreographed dance routine and everyone has his moves. Call it Breakin’ 2: Electric Leakaroo, except instead of trying to save the community center they’re trying to save their power and prestige.

To buy the media narrative on this latest Russian nonsense, you must believe:

1. That whatever was revealed was super-secret, though we don’t know exactly what it was. When in doubt, assume it’s on par with the nuclear codes!

2. That there was no good reason to share this info with Russia, like coordinating our fight against our joint enemy or to prevent another Russian airliner massacre. Because why would we want another power fighting ISIS or civilians not to be blown out of the sky?

3. That LTG McMaster, who literally wrote the book on soldiers standing up to misbehaving civilian leaders and displayed immense personal courage in battle, turned chicken and sat there silently as Trump monologued about this unknown mystery info of doomsday-level import.

4. That LTG McMaster lied on camera. Twice. And that Secretary of State Tillerson lied too.

5. That random anonymous sources in an intelligence community that hates Trump with a burning passion must be believed without question, though we don’t know their identities or their motives.

6. That these anonymous randos must be believed, even though they were not actually in the room to, you know, actually hear what happened. The traditional bar on hearsay is apparently now just a bourgeois conceit.

7. That when the Washington Post and the rest of the media publishes classified stuff (including intelligence provided by allies) leaked by anyone not named “Donald Trump,” it’s awesome.

8. That the Washington Post and the rest of the media, which has been wrong over and over again in their reporting, are not wrong again.

9. That the Washington Post and the rest of the media are objective and have no anti-Trump bias, even though they are literally cheering the hits on the president.

10. That there are unicorns.

The latest pseudo-scandal is that Trump doesn’t think Mike Flynn did anything wrong, and told James Comey so back in February. So basically, Trump expressed the same view he had of the whole Flynn nonsense to Comey as he has expressed to every interviewer. Comey did nothing, and said nothing (even when testifying to Congress) for nearly three months, because it was nothing. The Russian snipe hunt continued throughout unabated. That off-hand comment was a pretty poor attempt at obstruction of justice since it didn’t obstruct anything – to the limited extent these Russian witch hunts can be confused with “justice” at all.

So the Menschian thinkers who usually scream “Treason!” are now screaming “Obstruction of Justice!” It’s adorable when they learn new terms and try to use them correctly; they’re so proud of themselves and their vocabulary building that you almost feel bad having to point out that they sound like idiots.

It is nice, though, to have liberals finally come out against the abuse of executive power, misuse of classified material, and Russians. Welcome to the party, except we know you’re full of Schumer.

It’s all lies, and they know it and we know it. Normal people just shake their heads and wonder why Washington is so consumed with political nonsense instead of solving problems. But then, Washington does not produce solutions. It produces only political nonsense.

This is a concentrated, coordinated effort by elite insiders to take down not this president – Trump’s not the point here – but to take down us, the normal American they seek to rule. Someone came to Washington who wasn’t part of the club, and that’s intolerable. So they are desperate to expel him, and by extension, us.

Every day will be a crisis, every action he takes will be the worst thing that has ever happened, and every step towards keeping his promises a crime.

Repeal Obamacare? TRUMP’S SENTENCING MILLIONS TO DEATH!

Talk to Russians? IT’S TREASON!

Telling Comey he wishes this nonsense would stop? OBSTRUTION OF JUSTICE EVEN THOUGH NOTHING WAS OBSTRUCTED!

Now, this campaign isn’t aimed at us. Normal people, people who don’t live in DC or NYC or LA, just tune it out. After all these years, and with the help of the web, we normals know the game. We’re woke, as the dorky leftists say.

The target of this constant barrage is the soft and the stupid, the smug and the sanctimonious, the wusses and the surrender flunkies. That’s why you get the girlish-handed likes of David Brooks writing dainty columns that give Trump such a pinch! That’s why David Frum starts using words like “courage” to impugn actual men who have done actual man-things, like LTG McMaster. That’s why Kasich spews his bilious funk of sanctimony and submission, among other funks. It’s all to appeal to the Fredocons, the soft-headed RINOs who are smart, not dumb like everyone says, who just want something for themselves – attention, approval, and media pats on their pointy little heads.

So these fussy ninnies, fresh from having some v-capped crone screeching at them that they will vote to take away her right to have taxpayers fork cash over to kill the baby no man will ever give her, wander outside into a wall of mics and cameras and pause. Then they talk, and when what they say trashes Trump sufficiently, the smiles from the press come, and the nods, and then the faux respect. Now they are no longer mean old Rethuglicans but dauntless heroes, at least in Georgetown, because they are willing to dance and caper to the tune of the establishment.

This tsunami of baloney isn’t aimed at us. It’s aimed at them, the Republicans who are foolish enough to believe their new friends when they whisper words like “honor” and “patriotism.” Some of the marks are real patriots who fall prey to these liars when they couch their bogus narrative in national defense terms. But the majority of the marks are just morons.

When targeting the dummies, the goal is simple. Draw off enough weak, attention-addicted RINOs to make it impossible for the President to govern. Then, hopefully, us normals will shrug, and slink away, having relearned our place. After all, we’re deplorable.

And when the liberal establishment retakes power, and the mavericks and goody-goodies get tossed aside, the bureaucracy, media and the Democrats will conspire to ensure that no one can ever take their power from them again. But they haven’t considered the consequences. We’ll object.

So we have to fight against this cable network coup. Because, if we don’t fight now, we all may end up fighting later.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 19, 2017, 04:15:11 PM: Given the performance of the same group of agenda-driven people after Benghazi in 2012, I distrust every alleged leak coming from unnamed sources.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2017, 04:59:57 PM: The whereabout in the white house of Obama : a *source* told me Obama was screwing an intern during the Benghazi attack. That is why it was hushed up. And worse that that was after a dinner in which he had *TWO* scoops of ice cream while forcing everyone else present to suffer with only *ONE* scoop.

So why is this not "breaking news" with power delirious news (democrat party employees) people urinating all over themselves ranting and raving about this "scoop" 24/7?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-ice-cream/index.html
Title: Spengler
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 05:52:19 PM: https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/05/18/a-coup-attempt-not-a-constitutional-crisis/
A Coup Attempt, Not a Constitutional Crisis
By David P. Goldman May 18, 2017
chat 974 comments

A ranking Republican statesman this week told an off-the-record gathering that a “coup” attempt was in progress against President Donald Trump, with collusion between the largely Democratic media and Trump’s numerous enemies in the Republican Party. The object of the coup, the Republican leader added, was not impeachment, but the recruitment of a critical mass of Republican senators and congressmen to the claim that Trump was “unfit” for office and to force his resignation.

It’s helpful to fan away the psychedelic fumes of allegation and innuendo and clarify just what Trump might have done wrong. Trump will not be impeached, and he will not be harried out of office. But he faces a formidable combination of media hostility—what the president today denounced as a “witch hunt”—and a divided White House staff prone to press leaks. The likely outcome will be a prolonged dirty war of words that will delay Trump’s domestic agenda and tie down his loyalists with the chores of fire-fighting.
Sponsored

One thinks of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Trump was elected by campaigning against the Republican Establishment as well as Obama, ridiculing their policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan and questioning their credibility. In the flurry of personal attacks, the underlying policy issues have faded into the background, and that gives the initiative to Trump’s enemies.

Nothing that has been alleged, much less proven, about President Trump comes close to the threshold for impeachment, as Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University’s law school explained in a May 17 comment in The Hill. Even if Trump asked then FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Gen. Michael Flynn, Prof. Turley notes, “Encouraging leniency or advocating for an associate is improper but not necessarily” illegal. The charge of obstruction of justice presumes that there is an issue before the bar of justice, but as Turley adds, “There is no indication of a grand jury proceeding at the time of the Valentine's Day meeting between Trump and Comey. Obstruction cases generally are built around judicial proceedings — not Oval Office meetings.”

The appointment of respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into allegations of Russian interference in the November 2016 election strongly suggests that the Trump team feels it has nothing to fear from a thorough review. In this case Trump’s detractors appear to be bluffing. Press reports of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian diplomats and businessmen appear to reflect the sort of conversations that every presidential campaign conducts with important foreign governments. It is not clear that Russia was responsible for the delivery of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks, moreover. Pro-Trump media report that DNC staffer Seth Rich was Wikileaks’ source. Rich was murdered on a Washington street in July 2016, and a counter-conspiracy theory is circulating about his death.

Then there is the alleged leak of highly classified intelligence on the laptop bomb threat to airliners, of which Wall Street Journal editors intoned, “Loose Lips Sink Presidencies.” Exactly what the president told the Russians is under dispute, but the salient fact in the case is that presidents and cabinet members frequently leak classified information without prompting the condemnations that piled up on Trump. Obama’s then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaked the role of Pakistani physician Shakil Afridi in locating Osama bin Laden’s lair, and President Obama himself revealed that Seal Team 6 had killed Osama, making the unit a subsequent target for terrorists. Apart from inadvertent leaks, the Obama administration deliberately leaked British nuclear secrets to Russia, over bitter protests from London.
Sponsored

Why did Obama get a pass while Trump got the bum’s rush? Apart from the antipathy of the major media to a candidate who campaigned against them, there is the hostility of the intelligence agencies. That, the Wall Street Journal editors said, is Trump’s own fault: “Mr. Trump’s strife and insults with the intelligence community were also bound to invite blowback,” their May 17 editorial scolded. “In that case the public leaks about Mr. Trump’s actions, if true, will do more damage than whatever he said in private.”

The Journal editors imply that disaffection in the intelligence community is the result of Trump’s obstreperousness, but the source of the dispute is policy and accountability. Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was fired by Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for claiming that U.S. intelligence agencies bore some responsibility for the emergence of ISIS. The CIA funded Sunni rebels against the Assad regime including many from a branch of al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, in its campaign to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump has shifted America’s priority to stopping the bloodshed in Syria rather than forcing out al-Assad, and is willing to work with Russia to achieve this—provided that the result doesn’t give undue influence to Iran, a senior administration official explained.

A shift to peacemaking and the limited possibility of a regional deal with Russia away from the covert war operations of the CIA under the Obama administration represents a major policy change. It threatens the credibility of Sen. McCain, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the Republican Establishment, not to mention the CIA officials who made their careers on collaboration with Syria’s Sunni rebels.

During the campaign, candidate Trump delivered an effective message that he would abandon the costly and unpopular nation-building campaigns of his predecessors and focus instead on America’s own security. He attacked not only Obama but the George W. Bush administration and the Republican Establishment which had fostered a failing policy in the region.

Trump won by calling attention to the errors of his opponents and by dominating the news cycle. He played continuous offense. At the White House, by contrast, Trump has appeared cautious in stating his foreign policy goals, and defensive in responding to attacks on his performance and propriety. The policy issues that stood out clear during the campaign and helped Trump outflank the Republican Establishment have become fuzzy, especially after the firing of Gen. Flynn.

With the policy issues out of focus, Trump has lost control of the news cycle, and risks letting the news cycle control him. His opponents won’t succeed in dislodging him. But they have succeeded in distracting Trump from his policy agenda.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2017, 06:45:27 PM: I remember when Krauthammer complimented Obama noting his "temperament" as his "greatest" asset.

For Trump one could say it is his biggest liability.

The Trump opposition will keep egging him on making every effort to keep him riled up and saying stupid unforced things, and he will keep doing what he always has - just that.

Who was it Brennan or Clapper who said that is the way to beat him?

Repubs are already caving which is also predictable.

If he can only hold it together and focus on his policies......
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 19, 2017, 06:56:23 PM: Quote from: ccp on May 19, 2017, 04:59:57 PM
The whereabout in the white house of Obama : a *source* told me Obama was screwing an intern during the Benghazi attack. That is why it was hushed up. And worse that that was after a dinner in which he had *TWO* scoops of ice cream while forcing everyone else present to suffer with only *ONE* scoop.

So why is this not "breaking news" with power delirious news (democrat party employees) people urinating all over themselves ranting and raving about this "scoop" 24/7?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-ice-cream/index.html

Any guesses what his name was? Does this mean Reggie Love was out of town?
Title: Jared, "person of interest"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2017, 08:57:12 PM: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jared-kushner-russia-investigation-trump-song-in-law-probe-person-interest-a7745916.html

I remember there being a meeting with Flynn and the Russian ambassador at Trump Towers that very much raised my eyebrows.
Title: Dershowitz on Tucker Carlson: Where's the crime?
Post by: rickn on May 20, 2017, 03:13:44 AM: How come it's OK for Obama to fire Flynn for not being loyal to Obama's policies; but it is not OK for Trump to fire Comey for refusing to say that he will be loyal to Trump's policies?

The FBI works for the President. It is not an autonomous directorate. Or do some want another Hooveristic bureau if it acts that way to further their political goals?

Dershowitz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WnauFiafY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WnauFiafY)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2017, 04:07:04 AM: Your thoughts on this Rick?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
Title: Found it! Evelyne Farkas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2017, 04:28:19 AM: Hmmm , , , that's odd-- it is no longer there , , , : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVGp2FZmVA4


Well, well looky here-- Dem. Evelyne Farkas squeals
« Reply #58 on: March 30, 2017, 03:39:52 PM »
   Reply with quote Modify message Remove message Split Topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVGp2FZmVA4

Mark Levin analyzes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfSES06rlIU

Hannity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6GB45nRBOk
« Last Edit: March 30, 2017, 03:46:10 PM by Crafty_Dog »    Report to moderator 47.150.118.24 (?)
Crafty_Dog
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If Farkas resigned in 2015, then how did she know?
« Reply #59 on: March 30, 2017, 03:48:41 PM »
   Reply with quote Modify message Remove message Split Topic
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-29/if-evelyn-farkas-resigned-2015-how-did-she-have-access-trump-russian-intelligence

============================

Also see: http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2017/03/29/smoking-gun-obama-defense-deputy-slips-up-on-live-tv-reveals-spying-on-trump-team-and-leaking-of-intel/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2017, 04:29:14 AM: Third post:

Generally this https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2644.0 should be merged into the present thread.
Title: Russians thought they had Flynn in their pocket
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2017, 04:33:58 AM: Fourth post
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 20, 2017, 01:32:43 PM: "... I distrust every alleged leak coming from unnamed sources."

Isn't that the truth! I would add, it is not a leak or a crime for a high placed unnamed source to put out false information. There is no penalty to either the source or the reporter.

A pattern in liberal media deception goes like this:
1) The original story from the unnamed source is deceptive, out of context or false.
2) Headline writer goes beyond what the reporter falsely reported.
3) The media talk cycle goes beyond what the headline writer wrote.
4) Leftist politicians draw some conclusion beyond the first three levels of error and deception.
5) The media accurately report what the leftist politicians said as a news story.
6) They demand the President or target respond.
7) Media report what he said as an unpersuasive denial, or "refused comment."
8.) The media polling organizations ask how people feel about the terrible accusations dominating the news cycle.
9) Impeachment, resignation and surrender are presented as all that can fix it.
10) Then start over on whoever is next to attack.

MSNBC is calling on Trump to prove he didn't collaborate with the Russians. Because Hillary said that's why she lost the election. And Fox News is gone, because of accusations. Welcome to America, 2017!

The previous administration sold arms to drug Runners and use the IRS admittedly to stop the political activities of their opponents. 'That is not worse than this because shut up.'
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 20, 2017, 04:55:36 PM: Both theories hold that the President is a unitary executive.

The plain language I cited from Article II, Sec 1 says so.

Congress has a check on the President through the Senate's power to confirm appointments of those officers to whom the President wishes to delegate part of his executive power. This is a separate power written in Article II, Sec. 2. Congress does not have the power to prevent the President from firing an officer; but it could express its political displeasure by screwing around with the confirmation proceedings for the successor.

The President has a right to expect loyalty from his officers. Of course, that expectations cannot include illegal acts. But it does include policy preferences. Thus, if Comey did not see the importance of investigating the leaks and unmaskings of Trump people, then Trump has the power to fire him and replace him with an FBI Director that will investigate those issues.

This is not Watergate where the burglars were caught in the Watergate Office complex during the commission of that felony against office of the DNC. And the burglars were directed by a member of the President's staff and were funded in part by campaign contributions to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. And, then, Nixon used his powers as President to keep the investigation from uncovering the links between the burglars and his aides and campaign staff.

This is a case in which Trump did not trust Comey to carry out his policies. He saw how Comey had interfered in the election. Comey would not give him any affirmation of loyalty to Trump's policy priorities. So, Trump did not order any investigations stopped. But he wanted to get his own guy in there. Whether or not Trump's assessment of Comey is accurate, Trump still has the power to fire him and replace him with a different FBI Director.
Title: Mueller worked with islamist groups to castrate DHS materials
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2017, 11:15:33 PM: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/05/russia-special-counsel-mueller-conspired-radical-islamic-groups-fbi-chief/
Title: Brennan's Congressional testimony
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2017, 08:15:38 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/us/politics/congress-testimony-john-brennan-russia-budget.html?emc=edit_na_20170523&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2017, 08:45:44 AM: Brennan:

Mr. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, said Tuesday that he became concerned last year that the Russian government was trying to influence members of the Trump campaign to act — wittingly or unwittingly — on Moscow’s behalf.

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Mr. Brennan told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee.

“It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals,” he said, adding that he did not know whether the Russian efforts were successful.

He added, “I don’t know whether such collusion existed.”

---------------

me: can anyone imagine if he had instead said there is 8no evidence of any collusion*? Slightly re wording this makes all the difference. Even if a conclusion finally comes , God knows when, that no collusion was found the LEFT will for ever and ever claim it existed but was just not found.

The right should start labelling them as quack "conspiracy theorists "

Why are not the intelligence agencies investigating reports of the DNC staffer being the source of the DNC email leaks to wikileaks?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 23, 2017, 08:50:00 AM: Quote from: ccp on May 23, 2017, 08:45:44 AM
Brennan:

Mr. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, said Tuesday that he became concerned last year that the Russian government was trying to influence members of the Trump campaign to act — wittingly or unwittingly — on Moscow’s behalf.

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Mr. Brennan told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee.

Continue reading the main story
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Continue reading the main story

“It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals,” he said, adding that he did not know whether the Russian efforts were successful.

He added, “I don’t know whether such collusion existed.”

---------------

me: can anyone imagine if he had instead said there is 8no evidence of any collusion*? Slightly re wording this makes all the difference. Even if a conclusion finally comes , God knows when, that no collusion was found the LEFT will for ever and ever claim it existed but was just not found.

The right should start labelling them as quack "conspiracy theorists "

Why are not the intelligence agencies investigating reports of the DNC staffer being the source of the DNC email leaks to wikileaks?

Because that would be too easy to prove or disprove. I expect Marc Rich's computer to go missing or get lost somehow.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2017, 09:49:17 AM: " I expect Marc Rich's computer to go missing or get lost somehow. "

Or hard drive removed tampered with then put back or replaced with only partial data. This is what I have seen though not at national security levels obviously.
Though I agree it simply disappearing ala Hillary/Bill/DNC would be the safest mode of disposing of incriminating evidence.
(Oh but it's storage is safe in a DC police station. :roll:)

Why would Comey not have demanded access to it and had it forensically evaluated? Is not that the death was mysterious, the victim a noted disgruntled Sanders supporter enough grounds to look into the possibility that he not Russia etc gave the emails to Wikileaks?

yet we take the word of some DNC hired Ukranian security firm as though it is gospel. (as pointed out by Rush L)

Bottom line :

If it helps republicans the MSM makes it into some "crazy right wing conspiracy" theory. But if it helps libs it is "proof", and a guilty to proven innocent attitude ,yada yada......
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 23, 2017, 09:53:58 AM: Quote from: ccp on May 23, 2017, 09:49:17 AM
" I expect Marc Rich's computer to go missing or get lost somehow. "

Or hard drive removed tampered with then put back or replaced with only partial data. This is what I have seen though not at national security levels obviously.
Though I agree it simply disappearing ala Hillary/Bill/DNC would be the safest mode of disposing of incriminating evidence.
(Oh but it's storage is safe in a DC police station. :roll:)

Why would Comey not have demanded access to it and had it forensically evaluated? Is not that the death was mysterious, the victim a noted disgruntled Sanders supporter enough grounds to look into the possibility that he not Russia etc gave the emails to Wikileaks?

yet we take the word of some DNC hired Ukranian security firm as though it is gospel. (as pointed out by Rush L)

Bottom line :

If it helps republicans the MSM makes it into some "crazy right wing conspiracy" theory. But if it helps libs it is "proof", and a guilty to proven innocent attitude ,yada yada......

The whole reason it was taken by law enforcement would be for the purpose of examining the contents of the computer. If Rich had forwarded the DNC emails from this computer, that would be easy to determine. Unless it had been wiped like Hillary's servers.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 24, 2017, 06:34:57 AM: "The whole reason it was taken by law enforcement would be for the purpose of examining the contents of the computer. If Rich had forwarded the DNC emails from this computer, that would be easy to determine. Unless it had been wiped like Hillary's servers."

As you can see on Drudge today the family is outraged by the reports. But private investigators are the ones who are questioning the investigation.
The family has full confidence in the metropolitan police department and maybe rightly so , but I have seen things covered up before and what seems to be on the up and up is not.

The family may be mistaken
The family may know more truth then we do (or what they have been told) and may be totally correct .
Maybe it was nothing more then a tragic death to a "botched robbery"
Maybe the killer(s) got scared and ran off before taking anything form his body
But also maybe it wasn't. Frankly it is hard to believe anyone with the political stakes so high.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters, Brennan clueless
Post by: DougMacG on May 24, 2017, 07:46:55 AM: John Brennan, CIA Director through January 2017: I know of contacts, not collusion. I don't do evidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=209&v=VgjY_01FRgs

The inquiry was opened in July 2016. It's been almost a year with no evidence.
Title: david french knows the answer ; just ask him
Post by: ccp on May 24, 2017, 08:24:15 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447903/sean-hannity-seth-rich-conspiracy-theory-disgrace
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2017, 02:32:11 PM: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/335204-senate-intel-heads-get-broad-subpoena-power-in-russia-probe
Title: Spectator: Brennan behind everything
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2017, 10:32:37 PM: https://spectator.org/confirmed-john-brennan-colluded-with-foreign-spies-to-defeat-trump/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 26, 2017, 07:10:19 AM: As to Seth Rich, he can be a leaker to Wikileaks without his murder being part of a conspiracy to shut him up. That could be a coincidence like when Chandra Levy's murder led to her relationship with Condit, her boss, being publicized. However, the only leaked evidence from the anonymous DC police source to the private detective said there was evidence on Rich's computer that he had been in contact with Wikileaks. That could mean a lot of things. Before anyone begins speculating about the nexus of his murder to these contacts, they first better be able to ascertain what constituted these contacts. Did he just go to the Wikileaks website? Were there email exchanges between him and Wikileaks? And what were the dates of these contacts? Quite frankly, I don't believe much of what Assange says because he has his own agendas. I don't think it is a disgrace to purse this hypothesis. However, I don't think it is wise to fixate on it until you have definitive proof that Rich actually leaked something to Wikileaks. If his contacts were something else, then the whole thing is a false flag planted by Assange to hide how he really obtained the emails.

I do recall public accounts stating that Podesta's personal Gmail account was phished. Unknown third parties obtained his Google username and password by convincing him to give it to them. I recall reading some articles that blamed an IT guy in the DNC for telling Podesta that it was OK to answer that phishing email. That data was then sold or given to others who sold or gave it to "the Russians" who then used it access and download all of his emails. But who are those Russians? They could be government agents. Or they could be just crooks. The fact that agents ofthe Russian government may have been doing other things to try and disrupt the election; e.g., using bots to flood comments sections of various articles published online, does not prove that agents of the Russian government also were the ones behind the successful phish of Podesta's Gmail account and the ones who gave those emails to Wikileaks. Just like in the matter of Seth Rich, there's a whole lot of hypothesizin' goin' on.

We are beginning to learn facts that point to the Obama administration's decision to investigate the Russian leaks as a justification for conducting intelligence operations against Trump for political reasons. Disclosing confidential information has been the MO of every Obama campaign. Someone leaked his challenger's sealed divorce records to the press when he ran for Senate. Someone leaked Joe the Plumber's sealed records to the press in 2008. The IRS prevented many Tea Party groups from organizing for the 2012 election by not acting upon their requests for designations under the IRC; e.g., the Lois Lerner matter. They falsely blamed an obscure video for the Benghazi compound assault that killed our ambassador and 3 other Americans on 9/11/2012. (I happened to look at that video on 9/12/12 and there were about only 80 views.) We know that his NSA routinely violated an order of the FISA court. And we can begin to isolate the persons who unmasked Flynn and others. And we know that in early January 2017, the administration increased the permitted zone of distribution for these unmasked conversations of Trump aides. All of this constitutes strong initial evidence of a circumstantial nature that the Obama Adminsitration used the Russian investigation as a pretext to spy on their political opponents.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 26, 2017, 08:17:55 AM: "We are beginning to learn facts that point to the Obama administration's decision to investigate the Russian leaks as a justification for conducting intelligence operations against Trump for political reasons. Disclosing confidential information has been the MO of every Obama campaign. Someone leaked his challenger's sealed divorce records to the press when he ran for Senate. Someone leaked Joe the Plumber's sealed records to the press in 2008. The IRS prevented many Tea Party groups from organizing for the 2012 election by not acting upon their requests for designations under the IRC; e.g., the Lois Lerner matter. They falsely blamed an obscure video for the Benghazi compound assault that killed our ambassador and 3 other Americans on 9/11/2012. (I happened to look at that video on 9/12/12 and there were about only 80 views.) We know that his NSA routinely violated an order of the FISA court. And we can begin to isolate the persons who unmasked Flynn and others. And we know that in early January 2017, the administration increased the permitted zone of distribution for these unmasked conversations of Trump aides. All of this constitutes strong initial evidence of a circumstantial nature that the Obama Adminsitration used the Russian investigation as a pretext to spy on their political opponents."

Indeed. This makes it impossible for us regular people to trust or believe anything from our government. Our news media was supposed to help sort out fact from fiction but now more then ever they are not to be trusted either.
Title: The interesting Jared Kushner
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2017, 10:27:56 AM: http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-fbi-investigating-kushner-meetings-1495758726-htmlstory.html

BTW, notice who his lawyer is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gorelick
Title: Ummm , , , is CNN making any sense here? Comey and the fake Russian email
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2017, 05:16:42 PM: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/james-comey-fbi-investigation-fake-russian-intelligence/index.html
Title: Kushner asked for secret back channel to Kremlin says Russki ambassador
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2017, 06:33:34 PM: Third post

http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/26/russian-ambassador-said-kushner-asked-for-secret-channel-to-kremlin-officials-say/
Title: Re: Kushner asked for secret back channel to Kremlin says Russki ambassador
Post by: DougMacG on May 27, 2017, 04:14:29 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2017, 06:33:34 PM
Third post

http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/26/russian-ambassador-said-kushner-asked-for-secret-channel-to-kremlin-officials-say/

Headline should read, NY Times and Washington Post confirm Obama administration was eavesdropping on Trump transition team.
Title: Is there any source at all for any of this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2017, 08:20:52 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/us/politics/jared-kushner-russia-investigation.html
Title: Comey FBI broke own rules spying on Americans, Trump team
Post by: DougMacG on May 30, 2017, 09:49:13 AM: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/05/28/james_rosen_comeys_fbi_broke_its_own_rules__procedures_on_spying_on_americans.html

JAMES ROSEN: [House Democratic Leader] Pelosi confessed ignorance of this week's disclosure that the National Security Agency for at least five years under the Obama administration systematically violated Americans' Fourth Amendment rights...

Civil liberties groups said the disclosures should factor into lawmakers' decision at year's end about whether to reauthorize the NSA collection program that witnessed the abuses...

The sheer scale of the 4th Amendment violations is staggering, as was the sternness of the rebuke of the Obama administration by the FISA court, which ordinarily approves 99.9% of the government's request.

As of a few minutes ago, this story had not been covered by the Washington Post, the New York Times or any of the three broadcast networks.
Title: Re: Comey FBI broke own rules spying on Americans, Trump team
Post by: G M on May 30, 2017, 09:53:38 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on May 30, 2017, 09:49:13 AM
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/05/28/james_rosen_comeys_fbi_broke_its_own_rules__procedures_on_spying_on_americans.html

JAMES ROSEN: [House Democratic Leader] Pelosi confessed ignorance of this week's disclosure that the National Security Agency for at least five years under the Obama administration systematically violated Americans' Fourth Amendment rights...

Civil liberties groups said the disclosures should factor into lawmakers' decision at year's end about whether to reauthorize the NSA collection program that witnessed the abuses...

The sheer scale of the 4th Amendment violations is staggering, as was the sternness of the rebuke of the Obama administration by the FISA court, which ordinarily approves 99.9% of the government's request.

As of a few minutes ago, this story had not been covered by the Washington Post, the New York Times or any of the three broadcast networks.

Did professional journalist Martha Raddatz cover it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb0Zc6y3FMo
Title: Pelosi and the previous Russian ambassador
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2017, 12:56:47 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjm27Yr_yzw&feature=youtu.be
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 31, 2017, 04:58:38 PM: House subpoenas unmasking records concerning Rice, Brennan, and Samantha Power, UN Ambassador and wife of Cass Sunstein.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/31/house-intelligence-committee-sends-subpoenas-to-intel-agencies.html (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/31/house-intelligence-committee-sends-subpoenas-to-intel-agencies.html)
Title: WaPo: Trump Admin negotiating return of Russian compounds in US?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2017, 07:08:50 PM: I had forgotten that Samantha Power was married to Cass Sunstein--anyway a lot of potential for excitement coming out of those subpoenas!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-moves-to-return-russian-compounds-in-maryland-and-new-york/2017/05/31/3c4778d2-4616-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.10fe7779c714

A longish article, with some interesting details.
Title: [Obama Administration surveil, leak, unmask] Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight
Post by: DougMacG on June 01, 2017, 06:59:14 AM: ...we now know for certain that the Obama administration weaponized the intelligence agencies in order to use them against political opponents, in a manner that is unprecedented, highly dangerous to our democracy, and criminal. - John Hinderaker, Powerline
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/05/the-scandal-hiding-in-plain-sight.php

...what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law? - Glenn Reynolds, USA Today
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/05/30/obama-admin-illegal-spying-worse-than-watergate-glenn-reynolds-column/102284058/?siteID=je6NUbpObpQ-PSUC.z3GwIKZpb208tiH2A

James Rosen: Unmasking Obama Administration's Unmaskers
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/05/31/james_rosen_unmasking_obamas_unmaskers_subpoenas_served_to_susan_rice_john_brennan__samantha_power.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/samantha-power-unmasked-1496272676
Samantha Power Unmasked
Why would a diplomat need to know the names of Trump officials?

Gowdy to Brennan, DO YOU RECALL ANY U.S. AMBASSADORS ASKING THAT THE NAME S BE UNMASKED? >> I DON'T KNOW. MAYBE...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4670969/mr-trey-gowdy-asking-brennan-unmasking

Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties
http://circa.com/politics/declassified-memos-show-fbi-illegally-shared-spy-data-on-americans-with-private-parties
The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/51117/2016_Cert_FISC_Memo_Opin_Order_Apr_2017.pdf
Title: Roger Stone-- uh oh
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2017, 02:29:15 PM: Things in here I did not know , , ,

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/trumps-good-job-call-to-roger-stone?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%28174%29&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=11165405&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1180096584&spReportId=MTE4MDA5NjU4NAS2
Title: The real collusion
Post by: G M on June 02, 2017, 09:01:21 AM: https://amgreatness.com/2017/05/31/the-real-collusion/

The real collusion

Maybe it will be remembered as the weekend when, at long last, the media-Democrat complex overplayed its hand on the “Collusion with Russia” narrative. They are still having so much fun with the new “Jared back-channel to the Kremlin” angle, they appear not to realize it destroys their collusion yarn.

Their giddiness is understandable. The new story is irresistible: President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a December 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the ubiquitous Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, discussed setting up a communications “back-channel” between the incoming administration and the Kremlin.

There is now the inevitable Kush-said-Kis-said over exactly who proposed the back-channel. For Trump’s critics, the meeting itself, as well as the contemplated (but apparently never consummated) line-of-communications, are a twofer against Trump: a) the amateurish attempt to insulate the transition’s discussions with an important foreign power from monitoring by the Obama intelligence agencies, and, b) the naïve sense that the Russians would keep their discussions discrete rather than humiliate Trump at the first opportunity.

As if that were not enough, more cause for media-Democrat excitement: Reports that Kushner’s outreach to Kislyak resulted in the former’s being passed along to a shady Russian banker—a close Putin crony with roots in Russia’s intelligence services.

For anti-Trumpers of all ideological stripes, the story is a much needed gap-filler. For all the hype in D.C. and the Democrats’ coastal enclaves, the collusion story is flagging in most of the country. It lacks what a scandal needs to sustain itself: evidence. There is none: not when it comes to anything concrete that the Trump campaign may have done to aid and abet the Russian “interference in the election” project―a project that, though probably real, is more a matter of educated intelligence conjecture than slam-dunk courtroom proof.

For anti-Trumpers of all ideological stripes, the story is a much needed gap-filler. For all the hype in D.C. and the Democrats’ coastal enclaves, the collusion story is flagging in most of the country. It lacks what a scandal needs to sustain itself: evidence.
The latest episode in the Trump-Kislyak follies may divert attention from this omission for a few days. But sooner or later the new angle must be recognized for what it logically is: the death knell of the collusion narrative. Once that dawns on the commentariat, maybe we can finally get around the real collusion story of the 2016 campaign: The enlistment of the U.S. government’s law-enforcement and security services in the political campaign to elect Hillary Clinton.

Let’s start with the ongoing collusion farce. National-security conservatives harbored pre-existing reservations about Donald Trump that were exacerbated by his Putin-friendly rhetoric on the campaign trail. It is no secret that many conservatives who supported Trump in November―or at least voted against Hillary Clinton―preferred other GOP candidates. All that said, we’ve found the collusion story risible for two reasons.

First, to repeat, there is no there there. The “there” we have is a campaign by politicized intelligence operatives to leak classified information selectively, in a manner that is maximally damaging to the new administration. Democrats and their media friends have delighted in this shameful game, in which the press frets over imaginary crimes while colluding in the actual felony disclosure of intelligence. Such is their zeal, though, that we can rest assured we’d already have been told about any real evidence of Trump collusion in the Russian 2016 campaign project. Instead, after multiple investigations, a highly touted (and thinly sourced) report by three intel agencies (FBI, CIA and NSA), and a torrent of leaks, they’ve come up with exactly nothing.

Second, the eight-year Obama record is one of steadfastly denying that Russia posed a profound threat, and of appeasing the Kremlin at every turn. This even included a hot-mic moment when Obama explicitly committed to accommodate Putin―to America’s detriment―on missile defense.

It could scarcely be more manifest that the collusion narrative is strictly political. Were that not the case, there would be no bigger scandal than the Clinton Foundation dealings with Russia that lined Bill and Hillary Clinton’s pockets while the Russians walked away with major American uranium reserves.

The truth of the matter is that Obama, the Democrats, and their media megaphone had no interest in Russian aggression and duplicity until they needed a scapegoat to blame for their dreadful nominee’s dreadful campaign.
The truth of the matter is that Obama, the Democrats, and their media megaphone had no interest in Russian aggression and duplicity until they needed a scapegoat to blame for their dreadful nominee’s dreadful campaign. Until the fall and The Fall, the Left’s default mode was to ridicule Republicans and conservatives who took Putin’s provocations seriously―like Obama’s juvenile jab about the 1980s wanting its foreign policy back when, at a 2012 debate, Mitt Romney correctly cited Russia as a major geo-political menace.

Palpably, the point of the collusion storyline is to damage Trump politically. It is not good faith alarm over Putin’s regime.

The latest revelation about Kushner’s contacts with Russia underscores the emptiness of the collusion narrative. The contacts took place weeks after the election was over. Put aside the Trump transition’s foolishness in deputizing the young, green Kushner to negotiate with Kislyak, a wily former Soviet apparatchik. We’re talking collusion in the election here. If there had been such collusion―if the story the Left has been peddling for six months were true―there would have been no need for a discussion in December about opening communications channels. The lines of communication would long have been up and running.

Thus, the latest Kushner brouhaha strongly suggests that the Trump campaign did not have a collusive relationship with Kremlin operatives during the 2016 campaign, much less one specifically aimed at influencing the 2016 campaign.

Of course, that hardly means there was no collusion.

Kushner’s Trump transition companion at the December 2016 meeting with Kislyak was none other than retired army General Michael Flynn. His presence is significant, but not because of the now familiar Flynn-as-Putin-puppet caricature.

Flynn was Donald Trump’s top adviser in the 2016 campaign, particularly regarding intelligence about the threats confronting the United States throughout the world. He had also been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency until Obama fired him in 2014. Flynn’s conflict with the White House boiled down to one thing: He believed the administration had politicized the intelligence community―i.e., that Obama’s top intelligence officials were altering fact-based assessments made by the analysts in their agencies in order to support rosy administration narratives that downplayed threats to the United States.

Flynn laid this case out in the bestselling 2016 book he co-authored with historian Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. Remarkably, despite Flynn’s travails, his book is virtually never mentioned in the collusion coverage.

Or maybe it’s not so remarkable. After all, Flynn’s book argues that the Putin regime, along with its Iranian ally, forms the core of a global challenge that confronts the United States on multiple fronts, including through the jihadist groups it supports. That is, Flynn’s book not only undermines the “Putin puppet” claims; it contends that Obama’s foreign policy was an abject failure in refusing to factor the reality of Russian hostility into dealings with the Kremlin on areas of mutual interest.

The Field of Fight also includes passages like this one:

In 2014, I was fired as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after telling a congressional committee that we were not as safe as we had been a few years back. Others who want to tell the truth about the war are fighting back against their censors. In the late summer of 2015, dozens of military analysts protested that their superiors at CENTCOM—the Central Command for the war in the Middle East—were blocking or altering their reports on the true course of events. That allegation was then investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general. The story was leaked, and congressional hearings were held. This book shows that the censorship isn’t new; it has been going on for years, and threatens our ability to win.
It is a theme of Flynn’s argument that the Obama administration put American intelligence―its credibility and its capacity to shape narratives―in the service of the Obama political agenda. Can there be any doubt that this is true?

Do we really need to wonder whether our intelligence agencies were exploited this way in 2016 when it is undeniable that they were so exploited in 2012? Do we really need a reminder that during the two months between September 11, 2012, and Election Day, when Obama was locked in a tight race, the White House and the intelligence community colluded to defraud the electorate into believing the Benghazi massacre was the result of a “protest” run amok over an anti-Muslim video, rather than an epic failure of Obama’s policy of empowering sharia-supremacists in Libya?

So what do we know about the 2016 election so far?

The Obama Justice Department bent over backwards to avoid charging Hillary Clinton with patent violations of law―involving mountainous evidence of the mishandling of classified emails and destruction of thousands of government records―while simultaneously investigating the Trump campaign with great zeal over what appears to be vague suspicion.

The Obama White House, State Department and intelligence community shrouded the Iran deal in secrecy, hiding risible terms, cash ransom payments to the mullahs, and Tehran’s violations, in order to preserve the arrangement without harming Clinton’s campaign.

The NSA and FBI have both been cited by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for flouting court-ordered restrictions against accessing and exploiting intelligence about Americans gathered under foreign intelligence-collection authorities.

Foreign intelligence-collection authorities were used to investigate Trump campaign and transition officials, at least some of whose identities were “unmasked” even though they should presumptively have been concealed under court-ordered restrictions.

The New York Times, based on classified leaks, reported that the FBI was consulting with “Obama advisers” while the Bureau investigated Flynn’s communications with Kislyak—communications that were appropriate given that Flynn, as Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was communicating with various foreign officials as the new administration prepared to take power. “Obama officials” pressed the FBI on whether Flynn had discussed a “quid pro quo” with Kislyak—i.e., the possible dropping of sanctions in exchange for Russian cooperation of some kind. The FBI conceded that he had not.

In a strangely timed order just days before his administration ended, President Obama loosened the restrictions on access to raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share it throughout the community of intelligence agencies before sanitizing it to protect American identities in accordance with privacy protections. This would geometrically increase the likelihood of leaks of classified information involving American citizens.

A former Obama Defense Department official, Evelyn Farkas, let slip in an interview that the administration and its allies were encouraging Congress to demand disclosure of classified information, especially intelligence pertaining to Trump and alleged ties to Russia. This, again, would dramatically enhance the likelihood of selective, unlawful disclosures of top-secret intelligence. Or, as Ms. Farkas put it, “That’s why you have all the leaking.”

Finally—I know you’ll be shocked to hear this—there has been a spate of classified leaks since Election Day, clearly designed to undermine Trump’s capacity to govern and advance the agenda on which he campaigned.

Should Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn have met with the Russian ambassador without alerting the Obama Administration and its intelligence apparatus? No. They should have known our spies would learn about their communications by monitoring Russian operatives―and, probably, that those Russian operatives would put out misinformation about the meeting for the purpose of embarrassing Trump. (Memo to POTUS: for the umpty-umpth time, Russia is not your friend.)

But to concede that Kushner and Flynn used bad judgment is not to say they didn’t have their reasons. There is abundant cause for concern that the Obama administration tore down the wall between the missions of law-enforcement and foreign-intelligence, on one side, and partisan politics, on the other. The White House and its politicized security services wanted Hillary Clinton to become president, and they do not want to let Donald Trump be president.

There’s a collusion story here, but it’s got nothing to do with Russia.

About the Author: Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former chief assistant U.S. attorney best known for successfully prosecuting the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven other jihadists for waging a terrorist war against the United States – a war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a subsequent plot to bomb New York City landmarks. He is a recipient of the Justice Department’s highest honors, helped supervise the command-post near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks, and later served as an adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. His several popular books include the New York Times bestsellers Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. He is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor at National Review. He is a frequent guest commentator on national security, law, politics, and culture in national media, and his columns and essays also appear regularly in The New Criterion, PJ Media, and other major publications.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2017, 09:59:07 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/what-does-russia-think-about-all-this-washington-has-gone-crazy/2017/06/01/c4c7f07a-46ec-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.32ac83c49dd6
Title: WSJ: The Trump Russia Story starts making sense
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2017, 10:18:52 PM: The Trump-Russia Story Starts Making Sense
The Kremlin seems to have bet big on the willingness of U.S. intelligence agencies to leak.
Opinion Journal: How Moscow Manipulated the FBI
Opinion Journal Video: Business World Columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. on why the real Russia scandal doesn’t involve the Trump campaign team. Photo credit: Getty Images.
[IMG]
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Updated May 26, 2017 8:06 p.m. ET
1035 COMMENTS
The Trump -Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence. Instead he spoke of CIA fears that Russia would try to recruit/blackmail/trick Trump colleagues into being witting or unwitting agents of influence.

This is a realistic fear of any incoming administration. It’s especially realistic in the case of an “outsider” campaign full of naive, inexperienced and unvetted individuals. But it’s quite different from “collusion.”

The other shoe was dropped by the Washington Post. Finally we have details of an alleged email exchange showing influential liberals trusting in then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to corral an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. According to the Post, this email appears not to exist. It was cited in a secret Russian intelligence document that inspired FBI chief James Comey to usurp the attorney general’s role and publicly clear Mrs. Clinton of intelligence mishandling. Allegedly, he feared the real email (which didn’t exist) would surface and discredit any Justice Department announcement clearing Mrs. Clinton.

Are you now thinking of the Trump dossier circulated by former British agent Christopher Steele, which also felt like a Russian plant? While the political circus in Washington has focused on purloined Democratic emails and fake news spread during the election by Russian bots, the more effective part of Moscow’s effort may have been planting fake leads to prod U.S. enforcement and intelligence agencies to intervene disruptively in the campaign.

This also should shed new light on today’s anti-Trump leakers in the intelligence agencies: They may be the real unwitting agents of Russian influence.

There are plenty of lessons to go around. Mr. Trump, if he ever really thought Vladimir Putin was his friend, probably has wised up by now. He should have wised up the moment the Steele document came into view, supposedly based on plumbing Mr. Steele’s peerless Russian intelligence contacts. It always appeared possible, even likely, that Mr. Steele was the semi-witting vehicle for Russian rumors designed expressly to undermine Mr. Trump just as Russia was also trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton.

Plenty of people in Washington could also afford to rethink how their partisan idiocy makes them soft touches for such Russian disruption efforts. That includes Rep. Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. It includes Mr. Trump too. Overdue is an inquiry into a possible Russian role in flogging the birther conspiracy and the 9/11 truther miasma. Mr. Trump, who loves a conspiracy theory, might consider how he and his ilk showed Russia a vulnerability in American political discourse that it could exploit.

Let’s remember that ex-FBI chief Robert Mueller’s mission is to investigate Russian influence in the election, not the narrow matter of Trump collusion. Whether Russia suborned or tried to suborn people like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Caputo is a necessary question. Whether Russia exploited Facebook to proliferate fake anti-Hillary news is a necessary question. But so is the provenance of the Steele document and the fake email purporting a Democratic coverup of Hillary Clinton’s server activity. If the FBI’s Mr. Comey allowed himself to be manipulated by Russian intelligence into intervening in the race, that’s something we need to know about. And we need to know about the leaks.

Mr. Brennan, the former CIA chief, has pointed out that these leaks are palpable, unambiguous crimes. Recall that Russia twice sent us detailed warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. President Trump is entitled to share terrorism intelligence with Russia’s ambassador. The only criminal leak occurred when anonymous officials relayed the classified content of these briefings to the press.

Certain press hyenas then cackled that Mr. Trump further “leaked” when he said, during his visit to Israel, that he never mentioned an Israeli source for any intelligence he shared with Russia’s representative. Mr. Trump is entitled to make this statement, and in any case the information had already been made public through another criminal leak. Mr. Trump’s obvious point was that criminal leakers leaked information beyond what he had legally and confidentially shared with the Russians.

It’s times like this we are reminded how personally stupid are many people who make up the media. These leaks need to be investigated—and by Mr. Mueller specifically to the extent that the leaks, as seems more and more likely, indirectly or partly have their origins in Russian manipulation of our own intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Democrats wanted an independent counsel investigation of Russia’s election meddling. They believed it would lead to evidence of, or at least keep alive the story of, Trump collusion. They may be unpleasantly surprised where it really leads.

Appeared in the May 27, 2017, print edition.
Title: DNI Coates and President Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2017, 06:20:50 PM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-intelligence-official-told-associates-trump-asked-him-if-he-could-intervene-with-comey-to-get-fbi-to-back-off-flynn/2017/06/06/cc879f14-4ace-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.8120437dd7ac
Title: WSJ: Questions for the private Jim Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2017, 11:20:29 AM: The ‘Private’ Jim Comey
Some good questions the former FBI chief prefers not to answer.
James Comey appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday May 03, 2017.
James Comey appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday May 03, 2017. Photo: Getty Images
June 6, 2017 7:20 p.m. ET
215 COMMENTS

The media are pitching James Comey’s Thursday testimony as the biggest since Watergate, and the former FBI director may provide high Trump ian drama. Let’s hope Congress also challenges Mr. Comey on matters he’d rather not talk about.

The politically savvy Mr. Comey has a knack for speaking in congenial forums such as the clubby Senate Intelligence Committee he’ll address Thursday. By contrast he is refusing to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee—where he came under a grilling in May, days before he was fired—though there is no bar to him testifying more than once.

Circa News is also reporting (and we have confirmed) that Mr. Comey is refusing to answer seven questions sent to him in a letter from Judiciary on May 26. The bipartisan request is from Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, as well as the chairman and ranking Member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.

The questions are aimed at discovering how the contents of Mr. Comey’s famous “memo” to himself came to be splashed across the press. This still private memo reportedly says President Trump asked Mr. Comey to back off an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and its contents surfaced in the New York Times not long after Mr. Comey was fired—courtesy of an unidentified Comey “associate.”

The Judiciary letter asks if Mr. Comey created other memos about interactions with Justice Department officials or Mr. Trump; if he shared the contents of his memos with people inside or outside the Justice Department; if he retained copies of the memos, and if so to turn them over to the committee.

We’re told Mr. Comey replied via email that he didn’t have to answer the questions because he is now a “private citizen.” But that same private citizen will be opining in front of a national TV audience before a committee investigating serious questions of law and intelligence. Mr. Comey shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which of his memos he sends to Congress and which he can keep for his memoirs. If Mr. Comey wrote those memos while FBI director, as his talkative pals claim, the memos are government work product and he has a duty to provide them to investigators.

The “private citizen” excuse is useful in that it exposes that Mr. Comey’s main goal will be providing testimony against Mr. Trump while reviving his own reputation. Tip for Thursday viewing: Notice if Mr. Comey answers questions selectively, ducking those he doesn’t like behind the cover of Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.

The Intelligence Committee shouldn’t let him get away with it. If Mr. Comey wants a public stage to tell his side of the Trump story, fair enough. But he should also be required to provide actual copies of his memos (if they exist), disclose with whom he shared them, and where they are now stored. He should also tell the country if President Trump was a target of the Russia investigation while he supervised it at the FBI.

Oh, and someone should also ask Mr. Comey if it’s true, as the Washington Post has reported, that the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails was triggered by a phony document provided by Russian intelligence. The point of this Congressional oversight is to help the public understand how Russia tried to meddle with American democracy, and Mr. Comey’s duty didn’t end with his dismissal.

Appeared in the June 7, 2017, print edition.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 07, 2017, 12:53:37 PM: And what is Clapper's description that this is much bigger then Watergate?

On what basis?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 07, 2017, 07:36:31 PM: I was glad to see the WSJ editorialize in favor of Comey's dismissal by Trump because in his prepared testimony to the Senate tomorrow, he wrote

"That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch."

The WSJ wrote:

"The most troubling part of Mr. Comey’s statement is his belief in what he calls “the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch,” which he invokes more than once. Independent? This is a false and dangerous view of law enforcement in the American system.

Mr. Comey is describing an FBI director who essentially answers to no one. But the police powers of the government are awesome and often abused, and the only way to prevent or correct abuses is to report to elected officials who are accountable to voters. A director must resist intervention to obstruct an investigation, but he and the agency must be politically accountable or risk becoming the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover."

This goes back to my earlier posts about the unitary executive. The FBI Director is subservient to the President because the FBI is carrying out part of the executive power of the federal government; i.e., the statutory authority given by Congress to investigate violations of federal laws and the authority to conduct certain counterintelligence investigations. In these respects, the FBI is exercising executive powers. And Article II of the Constitution vests all executive power in a President of the United States.

Comey viewed Trump's Feb 14 comments as simply a request that the FBI not extend its investigation of Flynn to the matter of Flynn's allegedly inaccurate or misleading statements made to the VP about his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

If I were Trump and my FBI Director viewed himself as independent of my executive authority, I would have fired him, too. It also explains more clearly the Deputy AG's rationale in his memo to the AG that was attached to the press release announcing Comey's immediate dismissal. Comey botched the handling of the Clinton investigation and he botched the handling of the Russia probe because he was asserting an authority for FBI Director that was far greater than permitted under Article II of the Constitution. As the WSJ states in its editorial, this was the same problem presented by J Edgar Hoover. Whether Trump understand these constitutional issues when he decided to fire Comey, he got the result correct and upheld his oath as President to preserve and protect the Constitution.
Title: Something to keep in mind...FBI not so above scrutiny
Post by: G M on June 07, 2017, 07:41:03 PM: When somebody asserts the FBI is above scrutiny.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/

CSI Is a Lie
America's forensic-investigation system is overdue for sweeping reform.

Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn't help but feel ashamed "to live in a land where justice is a game." Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: "Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000," the newspaper reported, adding that "the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death."

The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice "confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989."
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2017, 10:33:11 PM: Excellent post Rick!
Title: Yes Warner is *disturbed*
Post by: ccp on June 08, 2017, 07:20:12 AM: The ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee says former FBI director James Comey's account of his conversations with the president about the Russia investigation are "disturbing."

so is the useful idiot McCain.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 08, 2017, 08:13:35 AM: Comey calls Trump a liar! Nothing like this ever would have happened even just a few years ago. The coarseness of political discourse has seen the bar lowered to the absolute floor. I remember many times on this board I lamented that no one in the MSM or political establishment would ever use the (L)iar word - ever. This was especially true during the Clinton years. I have no problem calling a liar a liar when the facts justify it.

Well I cannot disagree with Comey.

Trump made grave error not firing him on day one.

He absolutely did defame Comey with the way in which he fired him. Clearly incompetent on Trump's part. No question. Not that he did fire him but the way he did it.

That the guy should find out about it from a background cable TV announcement while he is giving a talk to FBI personnel is so unprofessional to say the least.

Trumps intemperante impulsiveness richohete's back in his face and by that route right back at the rest of us who are depending on him to not be a STUPID ass.
Title: Alan Dershowitz agrees with Rickn
Post by: G M on June 08, 2017, 08:16:59 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ15ymETv-s

Constitutional powers of the President.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 08, 2017, 08:21:38 AM: No not obstruction of justice. That is fake news.

But just stupid incompetent *methods* by Trump.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 08, 2017, 04:25:21 PM: Rubio's questioning of Comey distills well the gist of this political soap opera.

http://eblnews.com/video/sen-rubio-recaps-3-things-president-trump-asked-james-comey-125148 (http://eblnews.com/video/sen-rubio-recaps-3-things-president-trump-asked-james-comey-125148)

Comey did not like how his firing was handled by Trump. He felt embarrassed and defamed (his own word) by some of Trump's comments about how he was viewed by others in the Bureau. He then does not like Trump's tweet about Comey better be sure that Trump himself does not have any tapes of their conversations before he begins leaking to the press. So, Comey leaks his CYA memos recounting his conversations with Trump to the NYT via a friend who is a law school professor. In other words, Comey did what Trump thought he would do ... leak.

This enables Trump to get publicized that he has never been under investigation in the Russia probe. And Comey is forced to admit that Trump agreed with him that it would be good to get the whole story out there and that it would be good for Trump to learn if some of his "satellites" in the campaign were in fact violating the law.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 10, 2017, 06:22:22 AM: Thoughts on Comey testimony:

Big waste of time when no high crime or misdemeanor was committed. Trump (allegedly) called him a nut job and Comey has behaved ever since as a guy trying to get even. But this is testimony under oath so words matter.

The key word was "hope". Trump 'hoped' Flynn could be left alone, allegedly. A guy he could pardon anyway if he had too.

If Trump was obstructing the investigation, Comey was under obligation to report that immediately by penalty of high crime. He didn't but under later reflection with hatred as a bias tells all the reasons he should have.

The testimony I heard was all about feelings. Seriously. How did you feel when he said that etc. What did you feel he meant when he said that. Opponents dwelling on that are essentially admitting they have nothing more.

Trump was a target. Didn't collude. No evidence he did etc.

Russians did interfere. That happened for sure. All the agencies agree. And it went to the top. No mention ever that was a security breach/faiilure of the Obama administration. The hearings should be about how the Obama administration failed to protect us, where they failed to protect us, why they failed to protect us. Where they too focused on trans gender bathrooms, adjusted climate change, Muslims in space?

The Obama administration through Loretta Lynch in cooperation with the Clintons directed Comey to not use the word investigation relating to the investigation of the Clintons. Creepy if not illegal interference. What is his job in it other than investigations, note the name of the bureau, federal bureau of investigations. This was more of a kinetic operation of resources into a situation. Good grief. No one was outraged to hear that?

The leaks were the biggest crimes exposed so far. No questions hardly on getting to the bottom of that. Comey was one of the leakers. The Comey memo was a government produced document of an official meeting, presumed private and classified? He leaked it trying to enact or change policy. That's how Washington works now; go through the press with leaked documents. Why would it be a crime?

One story by the NY Times, still not corrected, was totally false - about Trump under investigation. A point made on these pages often, but it is not illegal to leak and get published false information said to be classified, but it is illegal for people knowing the true classified information to correct the false public reporting. So goes our media-led discourse coming out of Washington.

Rubio made the point that the only thing not leaked was that Trump was never a target of the investigation.

While the country focuses on a shiny object and the real crimes go uninvestigated and unsolved (okay, they got one Democrat activist in the NSA leaker), tax reform is not done, Obamacare is still not repealed, North Korea is conducting missile tests for nuclear attacks explicitly for the purpose of hitting the US mainland, and China is militarizing the South China Sea from Taiwan to Singapore. What could possibly wrong?
Title: Mueller and Comey - "brothers in arms"
Post by: ccp on June 12, 2017, 06:26:00 AM: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-is-robert-mueller-conflicted-in-trump-probe/article/2625638

Gingrich calls for congress to stop the independent counsel. Thinks he sees it will certainly lead to problems for Trump.
I don't agree as the political ramifications if they did that would be too great. Trump with has big mouth boxed himself in. And of course keeps doing it:

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/06/11/gingrich-congress-should-now-intervene-and-should-abolish-the-independent-counsel/

I think I read Mueller will try to wrap the investigation up by 3 months........

That is if he will not find/make a damaging case for the Dems to move on.

One lawyer's take:

Trump just keeps boxing himself ( with his big mouth [me]):

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/trump-mistake-oath-offer/2017/06/12/id/795492/
Title: Comey is a corrupt scumbag
Post by: G M on June 12, 2017, 08:32:13 PM: http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/12/james-comey-long-history-questionable-obstruction-cases/

James Comey Has A Long History Of Questionable Obstruction Cases
From Martha Stewart to Frank Quattrone to Steven Hatfill, former FBI director James Comey has left a long trail of highly questionable obstruction of justice cases that he used to make a name for himself.
By Mollie Hemingway
JUNE 12, 2017

Following countdown clocks on cable outlets and dramatic claims in the media about what devastating testimony to expect, James Comey sat down before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. The hearing ended up being a bit of a let-down for critics of President Trump who hoped to get him impeached (or removed via the 25th amendment!) as soon as possible. Comey admitted that Donald Trump had told the truth when he wrote that the former FBI director had thrice told him he was not under investigation in the Russia meddling probe. Comey admitted that Trump had twice encouraged him to get to the bottom of the Russian meddling issue.

But the media chose to run with a dramatically different narrative. That narrative was if James Comey had not proven obstruction, he came pretty darn close.

“Is Trump Guilty Of Obstruction Of Justice? Comey Laid Out The Case,” was the big takeaway from NPR’s Domenico Montanaro.

“Comey Bluntly Raises Possibility of Trump Obstruction and Condemns His ‘Lies’,” exulted the New York Times, describing his testimony as “a blunt, plain-spoken assessment” by a man who was “humble, folksy and matter-of-fact.”

The New Yorker was even more breathless. “Comey’s Revenge: Measuring Obstruction,” wrote Evan Osnos. “[T]his was not a political partisan tossing off a criticism of a rival; this was a career prosecutor, who served Republican and Democratic Presidents, presenting a time line of specific statements from the President that he described as either untrue or potentially criminal.”

MSNBC agreed. And I watched an hour of CNN the night of the hearing with the sober legal analysis of Jeffrey Toobin, who declared repeatedly that he’d never seen such obstruction of justice in the history of the world. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

Most liberal, mainstream media have flipped and flopped on their view of James Comey, in direct relationship to whether his actions hurt Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. They’re currently huge fans, needless to say.

Comey is a man of rectitude, they’re currently saying. A boy scout who is very honest, and good at laying out obstruction of justice cases.

It’s worth looking at a few of these cases, and whether they say anything about his current judgment.

One of the few media outlets that has consistently expressed skepticism about Comey is the Wall Street Journal. When he was nominated by President Barack Obama to be FBI director in 2013, they presciently wrote a piece headlined, “The Political Mr. Comey: Obama’s FBI nominee has a record of prosecutorial excess and bad judgment.” The article described even then Comey’s “media admirers” and a “media fan base” that refused to ask him tough questions. But the Journal had concerns:

Any potential FBI director deserves scrutiny, since the position has so much power and is susceptible to ruinous misjudgments and abuse. That goes double with Mr. Comey, a nominee who seems to think the job of the federal bureaucracy is to oversee elected officials, not the other way around, and who had his own hand in some of the worst prosecutorial excesses of the last decade.
Frank Quattrone

Let’s begin with the case of one Frank Quattrone, a banker who Comey pursued relentlessly on banking related charges without fruition. But while he couldn’t find any wrong-doing on criminal conduct, he went after him for supposed “obstruction of justice” because of a single ambiguous email. Sound familiar?

Before he was indicted, Comey made false statements about Quattrone and his intent. The first trial ended in a hung jury but the second one got a conviction.

That conviction was overturned in 2006. Quattrone was so scarred by the harassment, he began funding projects designed to help innocent people who are victims of prosecutorial overreach or other problems. He said his motivation for supporting such projects was that at the very moment he was found guilty in the second trial, he realized there must be innocent people in prisons who lacked the financial resources to fight for justice. He also started the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Quattrone has noted with interest the disparities in how he was treated by Comey for a single email compared to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email server scandal.

Martha Stewart

You might remember Martha Stewart being sent to jail. You might not remember that James Comey was the man who put her there, and not because he was able to charge her for anything he began investigating her for. The original investigation was into whether Stewart had engaged in insider trading. They didn’t even try to get her on that charge. Gene Healy wrote about it in 2004, warning about federal prosecutorial overreach:

Comey didn’t charge Stewart with insider trading. Instead, he claimed that Stewart’s public protestations of innocence were designed to prop up the stock price of her own company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and thus constituted securities fraud. Stewart was also charged with making false statements to federal officials investigating the insider trading charge — a charge they never pursued. In essence, Stewart was prosecuted for “having misled people by denying having committed a crime with which she was not charged,” as Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds put it.
The pursuit was described as “vindictive” in the New York Times and “petty and vindictive” in The Daily Beast.

But she still served a five-month prison sentence.

Steven Hatfill
The FBI absolutely bungled its investigation into the Anthrax attacker who struck after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Carl Cannon goes through this story well, and it’s worth reading for how it involves both Comey and his dear “friend” and current special counsel Robert Mueller. The FBI tried — in the media — its case against Hatfill. Their actual case ended up being thrown out by the courts:

Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled. They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.
More from Cannon, recounting how messed up the attempt to convict Steven Hatfill for a crime he didn’t commit was:

In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters – including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI). So what evidence did the FBI have against Hatfill? There was none, so the agency did a Hail Mary, importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d “alerted” on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.
When Bush administration officials were worried about the quality of the case Mueller and Comey had, the two men assured them. “Comey was ‘absolutely certain’ that it was Hatfill,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said.

“Such certitude seems to be Comey’s default position in his professional life,” Cannon wrote. He shouldn’t have been certain in this case. After the six years the FBI spent destroying his life, they settled a $4.6 million lawsuit he filed and officially exonerated him.

Scooter Libby, Judith Miller
After pressuring John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the responsibility on the grounds of potential conflicts of interest, Comey gave Patrick Fitzgerald, his close personal friend and godfather to one of his children, the role of special counsel into the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee. Some conflicts of interest are more important to Comey than others, apparently.

Fitzgerald immediately discovered that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the leaker. Of course, the FBI and Department of Justice had known that all along, so Comey’s push for a special counsel is … intriguing.

Not only did they not shut down the investigation that never needed to begin, Comey expanded its mandate within weeks. The three-year investigation was a cloud over the Bush administration and resulted in nothing but the jailing of a journalist for not giving up a source, and a dubious prosecution of Scooter Libby for, wait for it, obstruction of justice. Comey was unconcerned about the jailing of journalists and never threatened to resign over this infringement on First Amendment freedoms.

Hillary Clinton
Comey treated Hillary Clinton poorly by convicting her in the court of public opinion without giving her the chance to defend herself in a free and fair trial. But it’s interesting to note why Comey didn’t pursue charges against Clinton. He claimed — despite this not being a legal standard of relevance, that he didn’t think Clinton had intent. And while Clinton and her team engaged in massive evidence destruction shortly after subpoenas were issued, Comey — who was near-delirious in his pursuit of others on obstruction charges — didn’t seem to think anyone would be interested in prosecuting here.

Clinton had classified info on a private server, was extremely careless in handling that information, and had caused the destruction of evidence. The notion that “no reasonable prosecutor” would even try to charge her with the misdemeanors or felonies in question is beyond belief.

But there’s so much more to that case, such as upon learning that two Clinton staff members had classified information, the FBI didn’t subpoena those computers but gave the employees immunity in return for giving them up. The FBI severely limited their own searches for data on the computers and then destroyed them. A technician who destroyed evidence lied to FBI investigators even after he received immunity, and Comey did nothing. And after the FBI discovered that President Obama had communicated with Clinton on the non-secure server, Obama said he didn’t think Clinton should be charged with a crime because she hadn’t intended to harm national security. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted, “As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.”

Did Comey pursue the case under the relevant laws or follow Obama’s wish that charges not be filed? In this case, he chose the latter. As a Wall Street Journal editorialist wrote last July, “Mr. Comey wasn’t ready to go it alone and impose accountability on Mrs. Clinton. That would have been tough. That would have been brave. He instead listed her transgressions in detail and left it to the public to pass judgment at the ballot box in November. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. But Mr. Comey is no John Adams.”

Donald Trump
As the Journal noted in 2013, the media are enamored with Comey. Such blinders make it difficult to see problems with his own testimony. He claimed that his motivation to leak was to achieve the appointing of a special prosecutor. His very close friend — and associate in the bungled Hatfill prosecution — Robert Mueller was, in fact, named as a result of his leak. The immediate cause of the leak was, he said, Donald Trump telling him not to leak. Yet the day before that tweet, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “In a private dinner, Trump demanded loyalty. Comey demurred.” The information, as with the story about the memos Comey leaked, was sourced to associates of Comey. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out who was pushing this information.

More bizarre was his claim regarding the notes he kept before leaking. He said, inexplicably, that he never kept notes on his meetings with George Bush (he did) or Barack Obama but kept notes on Trump simply because he believed he was a liar. He said he viewed these notes as personal property, despite the fact that they were government work product, produced on classified computers in a government vehicle following a meeting with the President of the United States. We don’t know why the FBI is unable to deliver these memos to the investigative committees, or whether the FBI even has copies of them. But we do know that his claim to have not kept notes about his meeting with President Bush was false.

As John Hinderaker details, Barton Gellman wrote a book against Dick Cheney that used extensive notes from a meeting between Comey and President Bush. And the information contained therein reads very much similar to the Trump memos, down to the gratuitous grandfather clocks that are mentioned and 15 lines of dialogue in which Comey appears to be, however implausibly, the only virtuous man in Washington.

Comey’s case would require his friend Robert Mueller to agree that the president’s actions weren’t bad enough to make Comey do literally anything other than chat with subordinates about it and save notes in case of vengeance, but then somehow bad enough to be obstruction of justice. Mueller has fans within the D.C. establishment, but I’m not sure that’s a case he’d be willing to take on, no matter how many recipients of Comey leaks cheer him on.

There are many other examples of Comey’s poor judgment when it comes to obstruction of justice cases. But the idea that Comey should be trusted to lay out an impartial case for obstruction is going to be hard to swallow.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway
Title: Re: The Russian hack, breached 39 states
Post by: DougMacG on June 13, 2017, 09:11:14 AM: We are a long way into this story without knowing what the Russians actually hacked, stole or changed. This article in Bloomberg goes a long way to specifying that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections

Not mentioned is that this has nothing to do with Trump or Republicans and that the entire breach of internet happened under the watch of his bumbling predecessor.

The DNC was hacked. RNC security held up to the outside threats. Podesta fell for a phishing expedition. Kellyanne Conway did not.

Elections are about vision and competence. The Dems on attack keep showing neither.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: AG Sessions recusal was unnecessary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2017, 11:22:18 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448615/jeff-sessions-recusal-unnecessary
Title: Who is really colluding with the Russians?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2017, 11:37:53 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-sessions-hearing-shows-whos-really-colluding-with-russia/2017/06/14/87f5b04e-507c-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.a37c1b037bd1
Title: Skullduggery ahead; who could have seen this coming?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2017, 06:20:34 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/us/politics/mueller-trump-special-counsel-investigation.html?emc=edit_na_20170614&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

"A former senior official said " i.e. an Obama official

"Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, has never said what exactly prompted him to appoint Mr. Mueller, "
Q: What, if any, connections between AG Rosenstein and Comey?
Title: Karl Rove: What Trump has to fear from Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2017, 07:20:22 PM: second post

What Trump Has to Fear From Mueller
Special counsels can run amok. One went after me once for the crime of forgetfulness.
By Karl Rove
June 14, 2017 7:31 p.m. ET
35 COMMENTS

While Jeff Sessions was testifying Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Sen. Ron Wyden suggested that the attorney general had recused himself from investigating Russian electoral meddling because of unknown, “problematic” reasons. “There are none—I can tell you that for absolute certainty,” Mr. Sessions shot back, dismissing the supercilious charge as “secret innuendo.”

Good for Mr. Sessions. But since Democrats seem intent on preparing the battlefield for the 2018 midterm elections, expect more such baseless charges. Never mind the damage they do to public trust.

Consider the accusation that President Trump obstructed justice in the FBI investigation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn. According to former FBI Director James Comey, the president told him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

“There’s no question he abused power,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said last week. Two Democratic backbenchers, Reps. Al Green of Texas and Brad Sherman of California, have even drafted articles of impeachment based on the charge.

But I talked to four legal experts—two former Justice Department officials, a former White House lawyer and a former U.S. attorney—who all agreed Mr. Trump has the rightful power, as head of the executive branch, to order the FBI to end any investigation.

One expert raised this thought experiment: If President John F. Kennedy had ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to stop investigating Martin Luther King Jr., would that have constituted obstruction of justice?

It’s also far from clear Mr. Trump ordered anything. His words were vague. A hope is not an order. The president said he wanted to get to the bottom of Russian election meddling. He added that he hoped Mr. Comey would discover whether any of Mr. Trump’s “satellites”—an apparent reference to people who worked in his presidential campaign—had done anything wrong. Both statements suggest Mr. Trump wanted the Russian investigation to go forward and believed it would clear his name.

The statute that describes obstruction of justice speaks of “corrupt” conduct. Yet there is no evidence Mr. Trump acted with criminal purpose—for example, that he was bribed to shut down the Flynn investigation, or that he was trying to hide some personal financial interest in Mr. Flynn’s foreign lobbying. No wonder Mr. Comey, when discussing the conversation at the time with other officials, didn’t claim obstruction.

Still, Mr. Trump has created a potential problem for himself. At a Friday press conference, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked the president whether he would be “willing to speak under oath to give your version of those events.” Mr. Trump replied: “One hundred percent.”

The president had better hope that Robert Mueller, the special counsel now looking into potential Russia-Trump ties, is nothing like Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel appointed in 2003 to investigate the leaking of a CIA official’s name to the columnist Robert Novak.

Mr. Fitzgerald knew within days, if not hours, of his appointment that the leak had come from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage but that it violated no law since the CIA employee was no longer a covert operative.

Despite no underlying crime, Mr. Fitzgerald spent more than three years obsessed with trying to justify his existence by prosecuting someone in the Bush White House for lying under oath. I was one of those in his sights.

He focused on me because, while I could not remember a brief call in 2003 from a Time reporter, I had ordered my staff the following year to search for any evidence I had talked to the journalist. That was supposed to be proof I had lied. Mr. Fitzpatrick gave up hunting me only when he learned that my lawyer had directed me to search my files after hearing from the reporter’s colleague that I had talked with him.

Instead Mr. Fitzpatrick indicted the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a very good man, on a disagreement over who said what, when and to whom.

Today, given what we know, Mr. Trump is not vulnerable on obstruction of justice. But if Mr. Mueller turns out to be another Mr. Fitzgerald and finds no underlying offense, he may decide that he must still get someone for something, even over inconsequential differences of memory.

Promising to speak under oath is dangerous for Mr. Trump, since any trial would be in Washington, D.C. There were no Republicans on Mr. Libby’s jury, and Mr. Trump received a mere 4% of the vote there. The president better pray Robert Mueller is more responsible than Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley ” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Appeared in the June 15, 2017, print edition.
Title: shock Oliver Stone
Post by: ccp on June 16, 2017, 07:51:42 AM: (I assume no relation to Roger!) is shocked by the fifth column:

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/06/15/oliver-stone-vladimir-putin-russia-meddling-us-election-trump-more
Title: WT: Mueller faces tough obstruction case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2017, 09:52:18 PM: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/15/robert-mueller-faces-tough-obstruction-case-agains/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTm1Vd016STFZVEV4T0RWaiIsInQiOiJweDJcL05qdXArVUlcL2t3VUxUMit3cG52Q2R3cndvSVpJRzF4eDlWdHhLK3loWGhVbkF5XC9uT01CZFo2bVhuSFNqZVNKWTBiYlJMcTNteEJwNDJ5TlBmR3N0Z0RzRDY0Z3pkc1MxNm1KMXNHVm5vWVJGem1lM1lUM1p4VFJUZnpJbyJ9
Title: The New Yorker on Rosenstein
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2017, 11:28:30 AM: http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/why-trump-attacked-his-own-deputy-attorney-general?mbid=nl__daily&CNDID=50142053&mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%28182%29&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=11283996&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1181492685&spReportId=MTE4MTQ5MjY4NQS2
Title: Angus King
Post by: ccp on June 18, 2017, 10:54:26 AM: "20 % "done

lets see . We need to get this to continue at least through Nov 2018.

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/angus-king-investigation-trump-russian/2017/06/18/id/796722/
Title: POTH: How Michael Flynn’s Disdain for Limits Led to a Legal Quagmire
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2017, 10:14:47 AM: Yes, yes, it is Pravda on the Hudson, but there is a lot to chew on here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/18/us/politics/michael-flynn-intel-group-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollection%2FThe%20Trump%20White%20House&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Collection&region=Marginalia&src=me&version=newsevent&pgtype=article

WASHINGTON — Michael T. Flynn was a man seething and thwarted. In the summer of 2014, after repeatedly clashing with other Obama administration officials over his management of the Defense Intelligence Agency — and what he saw as his unheeded warnings about the rising power of Islamic militants — Mr. Flynn was fired, bringing his military career to an abrupt end.

Mr. Flynn decided that the military’s loss would be his gain: He would parlay his contacts, his disdain for conventional bureaucracy, and his intelligence career battling Al Qaeda into a lucrative business advising cybersecurity firms and other government contractors. Over the next two years he would sign on as a consultant to nearly two dozen companies, while carving out a niche as a sought-after author and speaker — and ultimately becoming a top adviser to President Trump.

“I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit,” Mr. Flynn said in an interview in October 2015. In the military, he added, “I learned that following the way you’re supposed to do things isn’t always the way to accomplish a task.”

But instead of lofting him into the upper ranks of Beltway bandits, where some other top soldiers have landed, his foray into consulting has become a legal and political quagmire, driven by the same disdain for boundaries that once propelled his rise in the military. His business ties are now the subject of a broad inquiry by a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. That investigation now includes work Mr. Flynn did for Russian clients and for a Turkish businessman with ties to that country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Flynn sometimes seemed to be trying to achieve through business what he could not accomplish in government. He believed that the United States was engaged in a “world war” against Islamist militants, and that Washington’s national security elite had so thoroughly politicized the country’s intelligence agencies that few left in government could see the threat. The United States, he believed, needed to take a tougher line against the Islamic State, and it needed to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight.

“He got out of the service and had a passion to reform the intelligence community, where he saw some deficiencies,” said Todd Wilcox, a former Green Beret and C.I.A. officer who founded Patriot Capital, a Florida-based defense contractor that named Mr. Flynn to an advisory board in 2015.

But Mr. Flynn also became entangled with controversial clients. One company that paid him, OSY Technologies, is part of a cyberweapons company whose software has been used to hack Mexican activists and an opposition leader in the Middle East. Another, a Boston company selling a technology to replace lie detectors, is accused by its former chief scientist of marketing a counterfeit version of his technology to foreign clients.

Dozens of interviews and a review of public documents suggest that Mr. Flynn’s business was as scattershot as it was ambitious — and that there were few opportunities he would pass up. His clients ranged from a drone manufacturer in Florida to major software companies; at one point, Mr. Flynn took a $5,000 gig as an expert witness in a personal injury case. Some of his clients came through a tight-knit circle of Iranian-Americans, one of whom became a key partner in Mr. Flynn’s businesses.

Photo
Bijan R. Kian, second from right, with Mr. Flynn, right, in 2014. Mr. Kian, a business partner of Mr. Flynn’s, supervised much of the political work they did for Turkish interests. Credit Alfredo Flores/Alfredo Flores Photography, via Associated Press

Mr. Flynn’s work paid well — while it lasted. Financial disclosure forms released in March showed income of between $1.37 million and $1.47 million for a period that roughly covered 2016, the bulk of it from the Flynn Intel Group.

Mr. Flynn closed the Flynn Intel Group at the end of 2016, as he planned to join the Trump administration. But within months, he was fired as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser; the White House has said he was forced out for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Now under scrutiny by the F.B.I. and congressional investigators, Mr. Flynn faces legal bills that are well into the six figures, and former clients are scrambling to distance themselves from the ex-general whose counsel they once avidly sought.

Mr. Flynn declined to comment for this article, and his lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to answer questions from The New York Times. But in an interview not long ago, Mr. Flynn expressed pride in his moneymaking skills. “I’m a capitalist at heart,” Mr. Flynn said in October. “If I’ve discovered anything, it’s that I’m a good businessman.”

A New Consulting Business

In the fall of 2014, Mr. Flynn registered his new company, Flynn Intel Group, from an Alexandria, Va., townhouse owned by Stanley A. McChrystal, a friend and fellow general-turned-consultant. Among his first clients was Palo Alto Networks, a rising Silicon Valley firm seeking to win more government contracts. A few months later, he inked a deal with the software giant Adobe, which paid him a six-figure fee to provide “periodic counsel to Adobe’s public sector team,” according to a company spokeswoman.

But Mr. Flynn also joined the board of a little-known company called GreenZone Systems, which marketed secure mobile communications systems. GreenZone was run by Bijan R. Kian, an Iranian-American businessman who served until 2011 as a director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. A friend of Mr. Kian, the businessman Nasser Kazeminy, also hired Mr. Flynn as an adviser.

Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kian soon found a third partner: Philip Oakley, a former Army intelligence analyst, longtime Flynn friend, and owner of two small companies that provided software for defense and intelligence clients. They restarted Flynn Intel Group in June 2015, according to Delaware corporate records, pitching themselves as a premier private intelligence and cybersecurity advisory firm.

None of the partners responded to repeated attempts to contact them. But their business interests were closely intermingled. Beginning in 2015, Mr. Oakley’s firms employed Mr. Flynn as an adviser and paid him $90,000 in salary over 11 months.

Jim McGuire, a business partner of Mr. Kazeminy, said in an email that Mr. Flynn had provided guidance on public sector business opportunities.
Photo
Nasser Kazeminy, a businessman, also hired Mr. Flynn as an adviser. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Mr. McGuire declined to say whether GreenZone had won any government business during Mr. Flynn’s tenure as an adviser, which ended last fall. If Mr. Oakley thought joining with Mr. Flynn would turbocharge his business, he may have been disappointed: Mr. Oakley’s companies do not appear to have received any new contracting work directly from the federal government, though government databases do not reliably include subcontractors.

Mr. Flynn continued to collect advisory board memberships, however: His credentials were a marketable asset. Fledgling contractors like Patriot Capital, Mr. Wilcox said, use advisory boards to “build some gravitas.”

Links to Russian Firms

Yet even as Mr. Flynn consulted for American cybersecurity companies, he was developing closer financial ties to Russia, a country whose own intelligence apparatus was moving aggressively to penetrate United States government systems. In 2015, Mr. Flynn accepted a payment from Kaspersky Lab, a Russian research firm that works to uncover Western government spyware and whose founder has long been suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence services.

In 2015, the firm’s American subsidiary, Kaspersky Government Security Solutions Inc., paid him $11,250. The same year, Mr. Flynn received the same amount from Volga-Dnepr Airlines, a Russian carrier that has been examined by the United Nations for bribery.

Both payments were for unspecified “services” provided by Mr. Flynn, according to a letter sent to the White House in March by Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which is examining Mr. Flynn’s financial dealings. Kaspersky has said that Mr. Flynn was paid for remarks he delivered at a 2015 cybersecurity forum in Washington.

In December 2015, Mr. Flynn traveled to Moscow for a paid speaking engagement on behalf of RT, the Kremlin-financed news network that American intelligence agencies say is a Russian propaganda outlet. RT paid Mr. Flynn $45,000 for the trip, which also included an invitation to a lavish anniversary party for the network, where he was photographed sitting at the elbow of President Vladimir V. Putin.

The three payments from Russian companies are among the issues being investigated by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the Justice Department inquiry.

Mr. Flynn believed that Moscow could be cultivated as an ally against Islamist militants. As director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he had even visited the headquarters of the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service.

Photo
Mr. Flynn, center left, sat beside President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, center right, at a dinner in Moscow on Nov. 17, 2016. Credit Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev

His colleagues in the American intelligence community took a less favorable view, especially when he continued to push for closer ties after Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. They believed Mr. Flynn was willing to be used by Russia if he could advance his views on forging a united front to battle the Islamic State.
A Growing List of Clients

By early 2016, Mr. Flynn’s public profile was rising. He had signed a book deal and began hitting the public speaking circuit. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seemed to validate his criticism of Obama administration policy, and Mr. Flynn soon become a regular adviser to Mr. Trump’s insurgent presidential campaign.

But behind the scenes, his client list was also expanding.

That May, Mr. Flynn joined the advisory board of OSY Technologies, part of the NSO Group, a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials. He also consulted with Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm that controls NSO Group.

The same year, the company’s products were linked to an attempt to hack the cellphone of Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates. They were also used to harass public health advocates of a Mexican soda tax, who began receiving threatening text messages.

In a statement, NSO said it “only develops the software, and is not involved in any way, shape or form in operating the system.”

Steve Eisner, the general counsel of Francisco Partners, suggested that Mr. Flynn had served the company in a relatively limited advisory role.

“We routinely engage consultants to help us understand industries that we are investing in,” Mr. Eisner said. Mr. Flynn was paid a little more than $40,000 by OSY, and “less than $100,000” by Francisco, Mr. Eisner said.

Another client was Brainwave Science, a tiny Massachusetts company that purports to have technology that can scan the brain to determine if someone is lying.

Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell, the company’s former chief scientist and inventor of its technology, said in an interview that Brainwave was using a counterfeit version of his work and was the target of a federal investigation related to its product. He declined to provide further details.

A man previously listed as one of the company’s board members, Subrahmanyam M. Kota, the head of an I.T. consulting firm called the Boston Group, was caught in a sting in the 1990s and accused of trying to sell secrets to the K.G.B. As part of a deal that involved his testimony against another defendant, he eventually pleaded guilty to charges related to theft and tax evasion.

Mr. Kota denied in an interview that he had served on the board of Brainwave; Dr. Farwell said Mr. Kota was actually the principal investor. A lawyer for Brainwave declined to answer questions about the dispute with Dr. Farwell or Mr. Flynn’s work for the company.

Dr. Farwell added that he had warned Mr. Flynn against getting involved with the company. “I’m not going to make any representations as to what Flynn’s positions or words were, but I was in communication with him directly, and with his staff,” Dr. Farwell said.

A Slapdash Effort

By the fall of 2016, Mr. Flynn was spending significant time on the campaign trail with Mr. Trump. Back in Washington, Mr. Kian brought in a new client: A prominent Turkish businessman named Ekim Alptekin, who headed a Turkish trade association with ties to the country’s government.

Mr. Alptekin had come to know Mr. Kian during Mr. Kian’s days at the Export-Import Bank, Mr. Alptekin said in an interview this month. Last fall, after the failed July 2016 coup against the Turkish president, he wanted to fight back against those whom Mr. Erdogan blamed for the attempt: members of the Islamic religious movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who has lived in Pennsylvania since 1999.

“Like many Americans rolling up their sleeves in 9/11 to do something, I decided to do something,” Mr. Alptekin said.

His public explanations for hiring the Flynn Intel Group have not always been consistent: In March, he told a reporter that Mr. Flynn had been hired “to produce geopolitical analysis on Turkey and the region” for an Israeli energy company.

Photo
Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman, said he hired Mr. Flynn’s firm to lead a public relations campaign against a group that Turkey’s president blames for orchestrating a failed coup. Credit Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Mr. Alptekin now says that he wanted to hire a credible American firm to lead a public relations campaign against the Gulenists. Mr. Kian suggested the Flynn Intel Group, Mr. Alptekin said — though without disclosing his own involvement with the firm.

“You need independent work; you need research that is done by Americans,” Mr. Alptekin said. “Flynn was well credentialed; he was a head of D.I.A.”

The Flynn Intel Group promised what sounded like a sophisticated research and lobbying effort, employing former intelligence and military veterans, and led by Mr. Flynn himself. The company would produce a documentary and seek to persuade members of Congress that Mr. Gulen ought to be extradited. Mr. Alptekin agreed to pay $600,000 for the work.

But the effort appears to have been slapdash from the start, according to several people involved in the effort, who asked for anonymity because of the continuing federal investigations.

Mr. Flynn had little to say during meetings, though he would hand out signed copies of his book at each one. A former United States intelligence operative named Mike Boston appeared to be quarterbacking the assignment, but according to one person involved, he mostly sat in the corner or paced around the room saying nothing.

Mr. Flynn’s partners also appeared unsure of what legal requirements they faced, according to another person involved in the project. Yet another Kian friend, a lawyer named Robert Kelley, was brought in for advice, and later filed a lobbying disclosure on the company’s behalf, indicating that its client was Mr. Alptekin’s company, Inovo BV.

Mr. Kian later disclosed that he met twice in October 2016 with staff members for the House Committee on Homeland Security. According to a report in The Daily Caller, Mr. Kian at first pitched them on technology developed by GreenZone, the contracting firm he also ran. But at the second meeting, Mr. Kian initiated a discussion of the Gulen research, surprising the Hill staffers.

Mr. Flynn did not attend those meetings. But the day after the election, he published an op-ed calling Mr. Gulen “a shady Islamic mullah” and comparing his movement to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Alptekin said he advised Mr. Kian against publishing the op-ed and that the Flynn Intel Group eventually refunded the lobbying portion of his payments.

But the op-ed caught the attention of Justice Department lawyers, who opened an investigation into whether Mr. Flynn was in fact working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey — a matter that is now part of Mr. Mueller’s broader inquiry into Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

Months later, in March, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kian filed additional disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The new disclosures acknowledged that the Gulen project “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.”

Around $270,000 worth of the fees Mr. Alptekin paid to Flynn Intel Group are not accounted for in the foreign agent disclosure, which details payments to roughly a dozen other individuals and firms associated with the Gulen project.

Mr. Alptekin says he does not know where the money went.

Danielle Ivory contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2017, 10:16:57 AM: OTOH, quite a bit of this is shockingly shallow:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/07/us/politics/trump-russia-flynn-kushner.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article
Title: JW: NSC buries Susan Rice unmasking materials at Obama Library
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2017, 06:46:18 PM: BOMBSHELL:

Judicial Watch today announced that the National Security Council (NSC) on May 23, 2017, informed it by letter that the materials regarding the unmasking by Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of “the identities of any U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team” have been removed to the Obama Library. The NSC will ***not*** fulfill a Judicial Watch request for records regarding information relating to people “who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.” Specifically, the NSC told Judicial Watch: 'Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library. You may send your request to the Obama Library. However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, Presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.' Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said: “Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by the Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library. We are considering our legal options but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.”
Title: Re: JW: NSC buries Susan Rice unmasking materials at Obama Library
Post by: DougMacG on June 20, 2017, 08:54:26 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2017, 06:46:18 PM
BOMBSHELL:
Judicial Watch today announced that the National Security Council (NSC) on May 23, 2017, informed it by letter that the materials regarding the unmasking by Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of “the identities of any U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team” have been removed to the Obama Library. The NSC will ***not*** fulfill a Judicial Watch request for records regarding information relating to people “who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.” Specifically, the NSC told Judicial Watch: 'Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library. You may send your request to the Obama Library. However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, Presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.' Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said: “Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by the Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library. We are considering our legal options but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.”

"We are considering our legal options but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.”

Is it a library or a document burial ground? This is evidence in a criminal investigation. I would hope the SC already has that - or should be fired for incompetence.
Title: Dicey Flynn stuff
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2017, 10:47:31 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/us/politics/mike-pompeo-cia.html?emc=edit_na_20170620&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: The dog that didn't bark
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2017, 01:11:56 PM: No Drama Obama
By August, the FBI had evidence that Russian-backed hackers had targeted electoral systems in 21 American states, officials confirmed Wednesday. So why did the Obama administration wait until Oct. 7 to reveal the cyberattack on the U.S. elections process? Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, said Obama administration officials feared they would be blamed for trying to influence the election. “We were very concerned that we would not be perceived as taking sides in the election, injecting ourselves into a very heated campaign,” he said.

Also see

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-johnson-russia-20170621-story.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 22, 2017, 02:00:30 PM: on this board we wrote for years the risk of a DNC manipulation of e voting.

so other countries might try it is no surpise
Title: WaPo: Obama, Putin, 2016 election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 10:50:27 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-putin-election-hacking/?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_russiaobama-banner-7a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.8ddbfa156299
Title: Re: WaPo: Obama, Putin, 2016 election
Post by: DougMacG on June 23, 2017, 01:28:09 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 10:50:27 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-putin-election-hacking/?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_russiaobama-banner-7a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.8ddbfa156299

I can't tell if this is a soap opera or a tragedy they are covering. It sounds like a parody of an American administration.

They still don't have one voting machine hacked or one vote changed. The most they have is the wikileaks dump that wikileaks says was not from the Russians and that contains documents that were under subpoena that we should have seen anyway. The leakers we know of so far were hired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the DNC. And also the FBI, the CIA, the NYT and the Washington Post. The CIA has the ability to put Russian or any other fingerprints on cyber breaches. The CIA under Brennan a partisan hack was too responsible and professional to do that? ANd again, so what if it came from Russia. (Prosecute them.) It was information the voters deserved to know anyway.

The story that Putin feared and hated Clinton more than Trump is not credible to me. One personal story about how she pissed him off versus all the past and future appeasement. Trump is the unknown, a greater rick to both ally and enemy IMO. Putin is not capable of putting out disinformation like that he preferred HRC? DNC was hacked. Whose fault? Sec State was hacked? WHOSE FAULT? RNC security held up to attacks, to whose credit? Head of the RNC is now White House Chief of Staff. All of this is to his credit, while they try to put a cloud on it.

Flynn could have been blackmailed (NYT story). What about Hillary? They had 22,000 emails about her that were not wedding planning or funeral. They had her campaign chairman's account, with all the political cheating. They would not want to blackmail Hillary as President? Just give it up when she was winning anyway? For what end? I don't buy it. Having these released during the campaign would have been liberating to her Presidency. As the Clintons always say after months, yearts of stonewalling, "that old story?"

I hate to put the analysis of a radio show above that of professional journalists, but Rush L. correctly points out that the blame-Russia narrative was hatched by the Hillary campaign 24 hours after the election. Notice that before the election we had all this running around and calling meetings to no end.

Nothing ties Trump to any of this - after a year of investigating. Just a great big story about how scary and stressful it was to be in an administration trying to decide what kind of nothing response they should have about nothing. MHO. )
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2017, 02:00:27 PM: "most they have is the wikileaks dump that wikileaks says was not from the Russians and that contains documents that were under subpoena that we should have seen anyway"

Yep. And the veracity of the information was never even disputed!

"Rush L. correctly points out that the blame-Russia narrative was hatched by the Hillary campaign 24 hours after the election"

I trust Rush far more then MSM jurnolisters!

He is still the king of radio. Just no one like him who is so amazing at articulating his thoughts and so sharp with his logic and discussions with callers.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 03:58:28 PM: The amount of sources and methods exposed by this article is extraordinary :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 23, 2017, 04:30:13 PM: "most they have is the wikileaks dump that wikileaks says was not from the Russians and that contains documents that were under subpoena that we should have seen anyway"

I should have added to that, they have other information that they agreed with the US Government not to disclose. Whatever the hell that means. Once again, it comes down to journ-o-listic trust, of which there is none. Either the hidden info is significant or it isn't. We have no way of knowing.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2017, 06:04:58 PM: Two thing to take away from all this that seems to be ignored

if the DNC hadn't rigged the primary process to Hillary's favor and if Hillary was not a lying crook then any of these "leaks" would not have mattered.

Dems just can't get over they couldn't cover up their corruption.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 24, 2017, 06:07:59 AM: Andrew McCarthy's opinion piece

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448940/trump-obstruction-narrative-comey-knew-it-was-fake (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448940/trump-obstruction-narrative-comey-knew-it-was-fake)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 24, 2017, 06:21:34 AM: IMO, many Dem's think this is retaliation for the Obama was born in Kenya narrative made by many after his election in 2008. Especially since Trump himself attempted to profit from it with his "reward" for "the real birth certificate."

Big difference though. None of the actors in that false narrative were government officials, leaked government information, or created a plethora of government funded "investigations" to decide the issue.

Also, if you scream loudly about the alleged "wolf" of Russian interference, you can distract investigators from those events that might be highly embarrassing to your side. For example, Podesta's ties to Putin-backed Russian operatives get subsumed by the Trump narrative. So, does Clinton's uranium deal. And so does Podesta's embarrassing fall for a Russian phishing scheme for his gmail account. And so does the Russian hack of the DNC network.

This is why the Dem's began complaining loudly about Manafort's prior political consulting deals with the pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine. And why they expanded upon it to include any Trump associate who may have done business in Russia - including the Trump corporations themselves.

And when Trump surrogates float an idea to fire Mueller, that part of the bureaucracy responds with a leak that Mueller's group is "investigating" Trump's ties to Russia. Which is nothing more likely than some people in that group were reviewing the FBI files on the entire matter.

The result will be billions of dollars and thousands of man hours spent investigating a non-event while the real Russian interference attempts get short shrift and the needed security measures to reduce the likelihood of successful future hacks are ignored and not implemented in the same manner that so many government agencies still operate on 30-50 year old computing networks that do not communicate with each other.

The inertia continues because all anyone seems interested in is protecting their phony baloney jobs.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 24, 2017, 07:02:03 AM: I notice CNN is trying its best to ignore recent critical assessments of the way Obama handled the exaggerated Russian interference and keep forcing pro Trump guests away from that and onto the repeated never ending assault like questioning of them on "what is Trump doing about this now".

We keep hearing "what is Trump doing now" over and over again. What are the guests supposed to say?

The intelligence people are surely looking into it and why do we need to discuss every detail about it in public?

I am glad Trump supporters are throwing the fake news back in their CNN faces. Good to see them get a taste of their own medicine.
Title: POTH tries to go after Manafort
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2017, 10:16:18 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/us/politics/paul-manafort-jeffrey-yohai.html?emc=edit_th_20170624&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
Title: A superior analysis by a superior man
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2017, 10:35:41 AM: second post

A superior analysis
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448940/trump-obstruction-narrative-comey-knew-it-was-fake
by a superior man
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 25, 2017, 01:20:54 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 03:58:28 PM
The amount of sources and methods exposed by this article is extraordinary :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x

Some people agreeing with you:

The story comes complete with this revelation: “Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow. The project, which Obama approved in a covert-action finding, was still in its planning stages when Obama left office. It would be up to President Trump to decide whether to use the capability.”
I’m sure Putin is grateful for the heads-up from the Post.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/an-epidemic-of-lawlessness.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on June 25, 2017, 01:28:08 PM: Quote from: DougMacG on June 25, 2017, 01:20:54 PM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 03:58:28 PM
The amount of sources and methods exposed by this article is extraordinary :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x

Some people agreeing with you:

The story comes complete with this revelation: “Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow. The project, which Obama approved in a covert-action finding, was still in its planning stages when Obama left office. It would be up to President Trump to decide whether to use the capability.”
I’m sure Putin is grateful for the heads-up from the Post.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/an-epidemic-of-lawlessness.php

The deep state is at war with both Trump and the American people.
Title: M. Mukasey: Trump, Mueller, and Athur Anderson
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2017, 06:30:45 AM: Not quite sure I follow the relevance of the point about Arthur Anderson, but several legal points of interest raised herein:

Trump, Mueller and Arthur Andersen
Did the president act ‘corruptly’? Not from what we know—but then neither did the accounting firm.
Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate in 2013.
Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies before the Senate in 2013. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
By Michael B. Mukasey
Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006)
June 25, 2017 5:05 p.m. ET

What exactly is Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating? The basis in law—regulation, actually—for Mr. Mueller’s appointment is a finding by the deputy attorney general that “criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted.”

According to some reports, the possible crime is obstruction of justice. The relevant criminal statute provides that “whoever corruptly . . . influences, obstructs or impedes or endeavors [to do so], the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had,” is guilty of a crime. The key word is “corruptly.”

President Trump’s critics describe two of his actions as constituting possible obstruction. One is an alleged request to then-FBI Director James Comey that he go easy on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was under investigation for his dealings with Russia and possible false statements to investigators about them. According to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump told him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” because “he is a good guy.”

An obstruction charge based on that act would face two hurdles. One is that the decision whether to charge Mr. Flynn was not Mr. Comey’s. As FBI director, his job was to supervise the investigation. It is up to prosecutors to decide whether charges were justified. The president’s confusion over the limits of Mr. Comey’s authority may be understandable. Mr. Comey’s overstepping of his authority last year, when he announced that no charges were warranted against Hillary Clinton, might have misled Mr. Trump about the actual scope of Mr. Comey’s authority. Nonetheless, the president’s confusion could not have conferred authority on Mr. Comey.

The other is the statutory requirement that a president have acted “corruptly.” In Arthur Andersen LLP v. U.S. (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the following definition: that the act be done “knowingly and dishonestly, with the specific intent to subvert or undermine the integrity” of a proceeding. Taking a prospective defendant’s character into account when deciding whether to charge him—as Mr. Comey says Mr. Trump asked him to do—is a routine exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It is hard to imagine that a properly instructed jury could decide that a single such request constituted acting “corruptly”—particularly when, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump also told him to pursue evidence of criminality against any of the president’s “ ‘satellite’ associates.”

The second act said to carry the seed of obstruction is the firing of Mr. Comey as FBI director. The president certainly had the authority; it is his motive that his critics question. A memorandum to the president, from the deputy attorney general and endorsed by the attorney general, presented sufficient grounds for the firing: Mr. Comey’s usurpation of the prosecutor’s role in the Clinton matter and his improper public disclosure of information unfavorable to Mrs. Clinton. But the president’s detractors have raised questions about the timing—about 3½ months into the president’s term. They have also cited the president’s statement to Russian diplomats days afterward that the firing had eased the pressure on him.

The timing itself does not suggest a motive to obstruct. Rather, coming a few days after Mr. Comey refused to confirm publicly what he had told Mr. Trump three times—that the president himself was not the subject of a criminal investigation—the timing suggests no more than an understandable anger. The statement to Russian diplomats, which might have been intended to put the Russians at ease, collides with the simple fact that an investigation—conducted by agents in the field—proceeds regardless of whether the director continues in office, and thus hardly suggests the president acted “corruptly.”

One of Mr. Mueller’s early hires among the dozen-plus lawyers already aboard has a troubling history with the word “corruptly.” Andrew Weissmann led the Enron prosecution team that pressed an aggressive interpretation of “corruptly,” which permitted a conviction even absent the kind of guilty knowledge the law normally associates with criminal charges. As a result, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted. By the time the conviction was reversed on appeal to the Supreme Court in 2005—in large part due to the erroneous application of “corruptly” in the statute at issue—Arthur Andersen had already ceased operation.

What if—for some reason not apparent to the public now—Mr. Mueller were to conclude that the president did act “corruptly”? Could he initiate a criminal prosecution? The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, which sets policy for the department and other agencies of government, has already opined more than once—starting in 1973, during Watergate—that the answer is no. It would offend the Constitution for the executive branch to prosecute its head.

What else might Mr. Mueller do? Some have suggested that if he finds criminal activity occurred he could report his findings to the House so as to trigger an impeachment proceeding, as Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr did in 1998. But the law under which Mr. Starr was appointed has lapsed, and the regulations governing the special counsel provide for only two kinds of reports—either to Justice Department leadership when some urgent event occurs during the investigation, or to the attorney general to explain the decision to prosecute or not. Reports of either type are to be treated as confidential.

Mr. Mueller could simply take the bit in his teeth and write a public report on his own authority, or write a confidential report and leak it to the press. If he did either, he would be following Mr. Comey’s lawless example.

Or if, as appears from what we know now, there is no crime here, Mr. Mueller, notwithstanding his more than a dozen lawyers and unlimited budget, could live up to his advance billing for integrity and propriety and resist the urge to grab a headline—not necessarily his own urge but that of some he has hired.

Hold fast. It may be a rough ride.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006).
Title: Re: M. Mukasey: Trump, Mueller, and Athur Anderson
Post by: DougMacG on June 26, 2017, 07:48:43 AM: Arthur Anderson is the case law name of the governing rule:

” In Arthur Andersen LLP v. U.S. (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the following definition: that the act be done “knowingly and dishonestly, with the specific intent to subvert or undermine the integrity” of a proceeding."

Saying "I hope" someone gets a good outcome might fall a bit short of “knowingly and dishonestly with the specific intent to subvert or undermine" to most reasonable people.
Title: Dossier / DNC Scandal? FBI Too?
Post by: DougMacG on June 26, 2017, 09:16:54 AM: The latest twist seems to be alleged collusion between the Democratic Party and the phony Dossier:

The Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month threatened to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after it refused to answer questions and provide records to the panel identifying who financed the error-ridden dossier, which was circulated during the election and has sparked much of the Russia scandal now engulfing the White House.
***
Fusion GPS was on the payroll of an unidentified Democratic ally of Clinton when it hired a long-retired British spy to dig up dirt on Trump. In 2012, Democrats hired Fusion GPS to uncover dirt on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And in 2015, Democrat ally Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to investigate pro-life activists protesting the abortion group.

the FBI has failed to cooperate with congressional investigators seeking documents.
http://nypost.com/2017/06/24/inside-the-shadowy-intelligence-firm-behind-the-trump-dossier/

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/analyze-this-26.php

DEMOCRATS, FBI COLLABORATED ON TRUMP SMEAR
What is shocking is the FBI’s apparent involvement in the effort to smear Trump with false rumors:

The FBI received a copy of the Democrat-funded dossier in August, during the heat of the campaign, and is said to have contracted in October to pay Steele $50,000 to help corroborate the dirt on Trump — a relationship that “raises substantial questions about the independence” of the bureau in investigating Trump, warned Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

It raises more questions than that. Why was the FBI meddling in a U.S. presidential election? Partisan interference in the election by public agencies like the FBI and major news sources like NBC are far more worrisome than anything Russians allegedly might do from afar.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/democrats-fbi-collaborated-on-trump-smear.php
Title: Jenkins/WSJ: A different take
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2017, 09:19:10 AM: By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
June 27, 2017 7:00 p.m. ET
509 COMMENTS

In the Sunday Washington Post’s 7,000-word account of what President Obama knew about Russian election meddling and what he did about it, one absence is notable. Nowhere in the Post’s lengthy tick-tock is Mr. Obama presented with evidence of, or described as worried about, Trump collusion with Russia.

Moscow intervened in the election eight ways from Sunday, but it’s clearer than ever that what’s occupied Americans for the past six months are baseless accusations about the Trump campaign.

Among the evidence on Mr. Obama’s desk was proof that Vladimir Putin was personally directing the Russian espionage effort. For a variety of sensible reasons, though, the White House and U.S. intelligence also concluded that Russia’s meddling was “unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election.”

President Obama made at least one inevitably political calculation: Hillary Clinton was going to win, so he would keep relatively mum on Russian interference to avoid provoking “escalation from Putin” or “potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph,” in the Post’s words.

Strangely missing from the Post account, however, is one Russian intervention, revealed by the paper’s own earlier reporting, that may really have, in farcical fashion, elected Donald Trump.

This was FBI Director James Comey’s ill-fated decision to clear Hillary Clinton publicly on intelligence-mishandling charges. His choice, it now appears, was partly shaped by a false intelligence document referring to a nonexistent Democratic email purporting to confirm that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had vowed to quash any Hillary charges.

On April 23, the New York Times first alluded to the document’s existence in an 8,000-word story about Mr. Comey’s intervention.

On May 24, the Post provided a detailed description of the document and revealed that many in the FBI considered it “bad intelligence,” possibly a Russian plant.

On May 26, CNN adumbrated that Mr. Comey “knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email was fake—created by Russian intelligence—but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself.”

“In at least one classified session [before Congress],” CNN added, “Comey cited that intelligence as the primary reason he took the unusual step of publicly announcing the end of the Clinton email probe. . . . Comey did not even mention the other reason he gave in public testimony for acting independently of the Justice Department—that Lynch was compromised because Bill Clinton boarded her plane and spoke to her during the investigation.”

Why has this apparently well-documented, and eminently documentable, episode fallen down the memory hole, in favor of a theory for which there is no evidence, of collusion by the outsider Mr. Trump?

The alternative history is incalculable, but consider: If Mr. Comey had followed established practice, the Hillary investigation would have been closed without an announcement, or the conflicted Ms. Lynch or an underling would have cleared Mrs. Clinton. How would this have played with voters and the media? Would the investigation’s reopening in the race’s final days, with discovery of the Weiner laptop, have taken place? Would the reopening have become public knowledge?

The noisy, obnoxious ways Russia meddled amounted to nothing. The public was able to discount them. It was only through a bumptious act of our own law-enforcement community, in a way the public didn’t know at the time may have been influenced by planted Russian intelligence, that the Kremlin conceivably really may have affected an extraordinarily close race in the Electoral College.

What also emerges from the Post’s tick-tock, as well as from public testimony by U.S. intelligence chiefs, is that Russia did not seek to hide its meddling. The Russian goal was to sow confusion and bring disrepute on the U.S. leadership class. If so, any investigation of Russian meddling that fails to focus on the Comey actions will amount to a coverup.

Expect a coverup: The truth is absolutely unacceptable to the establishment that Special Counsel Robert Mueller represents. There is no appetite for the truth among Democrats: They cling to Mr. Comey’s legal exoneration of Mrs. Clinton in the server matter.

There is no appetite among Republicans: Messrs. Comey and Mueller are Republicans, promoted in their careers by Republican presidents. There is no appetite in the Trump White House, which doesn’t want its win tainted in history by a Russian dirty trick.

There is no appetite in the Kremlin: Mr. Putin knows that relations with the American superpower are slipping toward an all-out hostility that he can’t afford.

In the U.S., to acknowledge the truth would be to complete the task Russia set itself in discrediting the U.S. leadership class.

A coverup is the only way to go.

Appeared in the June 28, 2017, print edition.
Title: 4 intel agencies, not 17
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2017, 08:51:16 AM: http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/29/nyt-issues-correction-on-claim-that-intel-agencies-agreed-russia-attempted-to-help-trump-win-election/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social
Title: Re: 4 intel agencies, not 17
Post by: G M on June 30, 2017, 08:53:35 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2017, 08:51:16 AM
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/29/nyt-issues-correction-on-claim-that-intel-agencies-agreed-russia-attempted-to-help-trump-win-election/?utm_campaign=thedcmainpage&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social

Fake news!
Title: GOP operative sought Hillary's emails from hackers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2017, 11:46:39 AM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851

https://lawfareblog.com/time-i-got-recruited-collude-russians
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 01, 2017, 12:27:28 PM: You mean the Trump campaign sought dirt on Hillary?

What a scandal ! :roll: :wink:

as though Dems would not have paid dearly for same no matter where or how it was gotten..................
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2017, 09:20:08 PM: My reaction exactly!
Title: Bartiromo vs. Podesta
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 02, 2017, 10:05:47 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9U5zxVyTqA
Title: Why is the DNC still hiding their hacked server from the FBI?
Post by: G M on July 07, 2017, 08:48:44 AM: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/5/dnc-email-server-most-wanted-evidence-for-russia-i/

Hacked computer server that handled DNC email remains out of reach of Russia investigators

Former DHS Chief Says DNC Didn't Want Help After Their Systems Were Hacked

By Dan Boylan - The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 5, 2017
It is perhaps the key piece of forensic evidence in Russia’s suspected efforts to sway the November presidential election, but federal investigators have yet to get their hands on the hacked computer server that handled email from the Democratic National Committee.
Indeed, the only cybersecurity specialists who have taken a look at the server are from CrowdStrike, the Irvine, California-based private cybersecurity company that the DNC hired to investigate the hack — but which has come under fire itself for its work.
Some critics say CrowdStrike’s evidence for blaming Russia for the hack is thin. Members of Congress say they still believe Russia was responsible but wonder why the DNC has never allowed federal investigators to get a look at the key piece of evidence: the server. Either way, a key “witness” in the political scandal consuming the Trump administration remains beyond the reach of investigators.

“I want to find out from the company [that] did the forensics what their full findings were,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is leading the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry, told The Washington Times.
Scrutinizing the DNC server hack and CrowdStrike’s analysis has not factored heavily in multiple probes exploring the Russia issue. But behind the scenes, discussions are growing louder, congressional sources say.
President Trump will hold an official bilateral meeting on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Germany, although it’s unclear how big the Russian election hacking scandal will loom in their private talk.

In recent days, questions about the server have taken on more importance as attention has focused on an email suggesting that the DNC and the Obama administration’s Justice Department were trying to limit the scope of the FBI’s investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s secret email account.
Mentioned in recent reporting and testimony from fired FBI Director James B. Comey, the correspondence reportedly shows Obama-era Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch privately assuring “someone in the Clinton campaign that the email investigation would not push too deeply into the matter.”
Some observers have wondered whether the information is real or is Russian disinformation.
The hacked server was last photographed in the basement of the DNC’s Washington headquarters near a file cabinet dating from the 1972 break-in of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.
Both Republicans and Democrats say the DNC’s reaction to the hacking is troubling.
Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary under President Obama, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last month that his department offered to assist the DNC during the campaign to determine what was happening, but Mr. Johnson said he was rebuffed.
“The DNC,” Mr. Johnson said at the time, “did not feel it needed DHS’ assistance at that time. I was anxious to know whether or not our folks were in there, and the response I got was the FBI had spoken to them, they don’t want our help, they have CrowdStrike.”
In January, Mr. Comey told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the FBI issued “multiple requests at different levels” to assist the DNC with a cyberforensic analysis. Those requests were also denied.
DNC officials said the Russian hack had already been discovered and dealt with when the Homeland Security Department approached them last summer.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris, California Democrat and a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said more needs to be known about the interaction.
“As a general point, there is no question that we need to look into everything in terms of who did what, what was invasive about hacking, and what they gained from it and why,” Ms. Harris told The Times. “Not only so we can establish what happened, but so it can teach us what is frankly inevitable about the next election cycle if we don’t figure out what happened.”
The White House has highlighted what it says is the DNC’s reluctance to accept help dealing with the server hack. President Trump, in a May 7 tweet, wondered: “When will the Fake Media ask about the Dems dealings with Russia & why the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI to check their server or investigate?”
Clouds over CrowdStrike
The DNC hack produced embarrassing internal emails that were posted to WikiLeaks and sparked a nasty internal battle just as the party was preparing for its convention and refereeing a spirited primary contest between front-runner Hillary Clinton and the insurgent campaign of Sen. Bernard Sanders.
Some emails suggested that the DNC leadership — including Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — had plotted to undermine Mr. Sanders’ ascent in the presidential race. The WikiLeaks revelations on July 22 eventually resulted in the departures of Ms. Wasserman Schultz and several other top DNC executives.
To explore the hack, the DNC called in CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity tech company launched in 2011 hoping to challenge better-known industry leaders such as Symantec and McAfee.
Co-founded by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, both former McAfee employees, CrowdStrike quickly acquired a string of high-profile clients.
In 2014, it investigated the Sony Pictures leak, the disclosure of a trove of sensitive and embarrassing internal emails and executive salary data apparently orchestrated by hackers sympathetic to North Korea, and who objected to Sony’s comic depiction of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“We don’t have a mission statement — we are on a mission to protect our customers from breaches,” CrowdStrike’s website declares.
The firm also has found success in generating venture capital support. Fortune magazine reported that it has raised $256 million and boasts a “valuation exceeding $1 billion.”
Investors include Warburg Pincus, whose president, Timothy Geithner, worked for the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Clinton campaign’s largest corporate contributor, Google, whose employees donated more than $1.3 million to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign last year, also has funded CrowdStrike.
During the election cycle last year, the DNC paid CrowdStrike more than $410,000. This year, it has collected more than $121,000 from the party.
The DNC declined to answer questions about CrowdStrike. During a telephone call with The Times, DNC communications staff also refused to discuss the location of its infamous server.
In an ironic twist, CrowdStrike has added the National Republican Congressional Committee to its client list. The NRCC also declined to answer questions for this report.
In an email to The Times, CrowdStrike defended its record and said criticisms about its DNC work and interaction with U.S. law enforcement agencies are unfounded.
“In May 2016 CrowdStrike was brought to investigate the DNC network for signs of compromise, and under their direction we fully cooperated with every U.S. government request,” a spokesman wrote. The cooperation included the “providing of the forensic images of the DNC systems to the FBI, along with our investigation report and findings. Those agencies reviewed and subsequently independently validated our analysis.”
Questions
Still, the company faces increasing scrutiny, including over the impartiality of co-founder Mr. Alperovitch.
Mr. Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank focused on international issues that is partially funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who reportedly has donated at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Late last year, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a respected British think tank, disputed CrowdStrike’s analysis of a Russian hack during Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists. CrowdStrike later revised and retracted portions of its analysis.
CrowdStrike’s most famous finding — that Russian-supported hackers penetrated the DNC server — has triggered the most questions.
Last year, that finding was wrapped into the assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which first raised alarms about Russian meddling.
The DNI, which briefed Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump on the Russian meddling operation and issued classified and public assessments, concluded that “the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” meaning the DNC hack.
CrowdStrike said it found malware known as X-Agent on the DNC computers. Russia’s Federal Security Service and its main military intelligence branch, the GRU, have used this malware to penetrate unclassified networks at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CrowdStrike also said it had identified two teams of Russian hackers, with the code names “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear,” operating inside the DNC network.
“We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well,” Mr. Alperovitch wrote on CrowdStrike’s blog in June 2016.
But cybersecurity consultant Jeffrey Carr questioned whether CrowdStrike’s evidence clinches the case.
“X-Agent has been around for ages and has always been attributed to the Russian government, but others use it,” said Mr. Carr, who has supplied the U.S. intelligence community with analysis.
Mr. Carr said in an interview that the malware can be recovered, reverse-engineered and reused. Copies of X-Agent exist outside Russian hands, including one with an American cybersecurity company. He said it’s possible CrowdStrike was duped — or simply sees Russia’s handiwork everywhere.
WikiLeaks has consistently denied that it received the material from the Kremlin amid reports that a leaker within the DNC might have abetted the hack. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News in January: “We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.”
Atlanta-based hacker Robert David Graham, who runs a consultancy called Errata Security, said CrowdStrike’s certainty about the Russian role can’t be accepted uncritically.
“CrowdStrike is better than anything that the government has,” he said. “But once you decide it is Russia, you will go looking for Russia.”
Overall, he said, political factors distorted what needs to be a more scientific approach to who had access to the DNC servers.
“For good or bad, we make judgments based on our expertise and knowledge,” he said. “Sometimes they are insightful and awesomely correct. Sometimes they fall flat on their face.”
Mr. Graham, a libertarian like many others in the hacker community, said that from a privacy standpoint, he understands why the DNC would not want to hand over its server to the federal government. “What private company would?”
Congressional inquiry?
Whether CrowdStrike appears before a congressional inquiry anytime soon could depend on the momentum of the overall Russia investigations throughout Capitol Hill.
Late last month, after hearing Mr. Johnson say the DNC denied Homeland Security overtures to help secure its computers, Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said, “There may be something else on that server [that the DNC] didn’t want law enforcement to see.”
Mr. Graham has insisted he needs to know more about CrowdStrike.
“What did they find?” he asked.
Some on Capitol Hill have an even harsher take. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a conservative Texas Republican and a former prosecutor, said DNC and CrowdStrike are acting like defendants with something to hide in declining to allow government investigators access to the server.
“Why would they not invite them in?” Mr. Gohmert asked in a Fox News interview last month. “And I’m really interested in their excuse. But just from my own experience in all those years, usually the reason somebody didn’t want to invite law enforcement in to investigate is because they knew they would find that they had committed crimes if they came in and started investigating.”
The cybersecurity community also wants more answers.
“The only things that pay in the cybersecurity world are claims of attribution,” Mr. Carr said. “Which foreign government attacked you? If you are critical of the attack, you make zero money. CrowdStrike is the poster child for companies that operate like this.”
Last year, alongside one of the DNI assessments, the Obama administration released a spreadsheet containing part of CrowdStrike’s cyberforensic work. The data included digital signatures and IP addresses, which trace computer-to-computer communications and help identify hackers. Mr. Graham, the hacker, said the only way to dispel all doubt would be to analyze independently everything CrowdStrike has seen. To do so would mean getting access to the DNC server.
As for CrowdStrike, when asked whether officials would be willing to testify before a congressional inquiry, a spokesman reiterated in an email that the company already “provided the forensic images and our analysis to the FBI.” He said the company is “standing by the work it did for the DNC.”
In May, less than a week after Mr. Comey was fired as FBI director, CrowdStrike announced it had raised $100 million in venture capital.
Title: What do we think of this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2017, 02:35:48 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html?emc=edit_ta_20170708&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: What do we think of this?
Post by: G M on July 08, 2017, 02:44:56 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2017, 02:35:48 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html?emc=edit_ta_20170708&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.

:roll:

So, were these records created when Obama ordered the president elect spied upon?
Title: TODAY IN COLLUSION
Post by: G M on July 09, 2017, 11:18:56 AM: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/today-in-collusion-2.php

POSTED ON JULY 9, 2017 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, MEDIA, RUSSIA
TODAY IN COLLUSION

It’s been all quiet on the mainstream media’s “collusion” front since Shane Harris’s laughable Wall Street Journal’s articles last Friday and Saturday. Andrew McCarthy took up Harris’s contribution in “‘Collusion’ as farce: The hunt for Hillary’s hackers.” You have to wonder if anyone on the news side of the Journal is capable of embarrassment.

Today, however, the New York Times mounts another offensive on the “collusion” front. Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman report: “Trump Team met with lawyer linked to Kremlin during campaign.” The inanity of the article is difficult to capture without full immersion.

On June 9, 2016, a meeting was held in Trump Tower. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort attended the meetng. They met “with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.” The Russian lawyer is identified as Natalia Veselnitskaya, “best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act[.]”

So what did they talk about? As described to the Times, the confidential government records apparently don’t say. The article also transforms those “confidential government records” into “documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.” So where is the good stuff? “People familiar with [the documents” didn’t have any.

“In a statement,” however, “Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed.” As I say, neither did the Times’s friends with confidential records.

The Times would really have a story here if they had a story. As it is, they are like geezers masticating their gums with their dentures removed. At great length. They won’t shut up. They want to review the greatest hits of days gone by. It’s almost funny.

In his statement, Donald Trump, Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

He added: “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”

After the story was first posted online yesterday, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer noted that the Times may not have gotten the full story from its friends familiar with documents. The story now adds an unfunny complication:

Late Saturday, Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, issued a statement implying that the meeting was a setup. Ms. Veselnitskaya and the translator who accompanied her to the meeting “misrepresented who they were,” it said.

In an interview, Mr. Corallo explained that Ms. Veselnitskaya, in her anti-Magnitsky campaign, employs a private investigator whose firm, Fusion GPS, produced an intelligence dossier that contained unproven allegations against the president. In a statement, the firm said, “Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it. Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is false.”

Sara Carter and John Solomon expand on the backstory here at Circa. They write:

The president’s legal team said Saturday they believe the entire meeting may have been part of a larger election-year opposition effort aimed at creating the appearance of improper connections between Trump family members and Russia that also included a now-discredited intelligence dossier produced by a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele who worked for a U.S. political firm known as Fusion GPS.

“We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for President Trump’s legal team. “Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the President and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier. ”

“These developments raise serious issues as to exactly who authorized and participated in any effort by Russian nationals to influence our election in any manner,” Corallo said.

Who sought the meeting? Someone is apparently saving that for tomorrow in “collusion.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2017, 12:32:49 PM: Intriguing find-- and glad to have it with which to counter certain friends on FB :-D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 09, 2017, 01:09:04 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2017, 12:32:49 PM
Intriguing find-- and glad to have it with which to counter certain friends on FB :-D

Well, be sure to let those "friends" know that if they are interested in some documentation of collusion between an American president and Russia, there is plenty. Just not the one they want.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/07/08/surprise-american-communist-party-was-tool-of-ussr/

Several hundred American Communists carried their devotion to the Soviet Union even further, working, mostly without recompense, for Soviet intelligence agencies. Virtually all of the approximately 500 Americans who served as Soviet spies between the ’30s and early ’50s, including senior government officials like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, were either Communists or Communist sympathizers. The C.P.U.S.A. had a clandestine apparatus that cooperated with the K.G.B. and the Soviet intelligence directorate, vetting potential recruits and occasionally suggesting useful sources. Three successive party leaders — Lovestone, Browder and Eugene Dennis — knew and approved of this relationship.

That the leaders of an American political party always under attack for its Soviet connections would take the incredibly risky step of actually working with Soviet intelligence speaks volumes about the ultimate loyalties of the American Communist Party. Rank and file members might have had no idea of such behavior, but anyone who remained in the C.P.U.S.A. for more than a short spell had to be aware that criticism of the Soviet Union was not tolerated. Those who stayed in the C.P.U.S.A. through one of its many changes of line knew that fealty to the homeland of socialism took precedence over any other allegiance. The dream of those who believed in an Americanized Communism was killed by this lie.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/the_washington_empostem_sugarcoats_obamas_communist_mentor.html

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mgQaFlo_p8
Title: Donald Jr. and Manafort met with Russians promising dirt on Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2017, 06:31:18 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html?emc=edit_na_20170709&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Comey's memos contained classified info
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2017, 06:34:25 PM: second post

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/341225-comeys-private-memos-on-trump-conversations-contained-classified?rnd=1499645596
Title: Re: Comey's memos contained classified info
Post by: G M on July 09, 2017, 06:39:14 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2017, 06:34:25 PM
second post

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/341225-comeys-private-memos-on-trump-conversations-contained-classified?rnd=1499645596

He is such a scumbag. Will there be justice?
Title: what a tangled web
Post by: ccp on July 10, 2017, 05:07:33 AM: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Russian-lawyer-ties-DNC/2017/07/09/id/800676/

Was Jr. set up?
Title: DNC breach was an inside job, not hacker
Post by: DougMacG on July 10, 2017, 06:37:39 AM: https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/
Title: Re: DNC breach was an inside job, not hacker
Post by: G M on July 10, 2017, 07:02:20 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on July 10, 2017, 06:37:39 AM
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/

But Trump was seen having Russian dressing on his salad!!!!1!!!111!!!!!!!! :-D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2017, 10:50:02 AM: Kelly Ann Conway had a real hard time with Chris Cuomo this morning defending Donald Jr's meeting with the Russian lawyer his changing versions of it.
Title: Another shoe drops?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2017, 10:15:25 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html?emc=edit_na_20170710&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

OTOH there is the matter of Team Hillary openly colluding with the Ukrainian govt. , , ,
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2017, 04:12:04 AM: We can forget about tax cuts
we can forget about immigration enforcement

The crats will push this to the ends of the Earth.

If they win back the houses
check mate.

That said we all know the crats would and did do the same all day long to us with campaign dirt.

Worst of all CNN will be fawning all over themselves over this. The glee and glow on their faces. The I told you so arrogance the veneer they will radiate as though that they are off the hook.

Oh and can anyone guess what Comey's friend and band of Democrat lawyers are going to do with this? They will follow the plan they had all along.............. :x
Title: HIllary and the Ukrainians
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2017, 06:07:16 AM: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446
Title: Re: Another shoe drops?
Post by: DougMacG on July 11, 2017, 09:17:43 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2017, 10:15:25 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html?emc=edit_na_20170710&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

Liz Sheld of PJ Media does a nice job of putting to words what I thought of the NY Times story.
Three anonymous people saw the emails?? (Now we have the emails, thanks to DT Jr.)
https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/tuesdays-hot-mic-14/entry-210740/
NYT anonymous sources have no pattern of credibility.
The story alleges no wrongdoing if true.
DT Jr "believed" would offer him compromising information... ? No. He went there to find out what they had. We don't know what he "believed".

https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/tuesdays-hot-mic-14/entry-210728/
The New York Times is reporting that no less than three (!!!) anonymous sources have said that Donald Trump Jr. was told in advance that he would be meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer interested in colluding with the Trump campaign to help his father win the election.

That's not what the Times wrote but that's what it meant. Here's what the Times wrote:

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
Three people with knowledge. Who are these people and how do they know what was in the email? I'm serious, who would have this information (three people!!!)? (Answer: IMO, the IC who are/were monitoring Manafort. Here's that pesky unmasking again...) And why are the Times and other media outlets relying on anonymous sources when so many of their sources have misled them? (Answer: #resist.)

Crafty: "OTOH there is the matter of Team Hillary openly colluding with the Ukrainian govt. , , ,"

And Hillary colluding with the Russians. (Uranium purchase)

They accuse Trump without evidence what Obama actually did, with evidence, soliciting and accepting illegal foreign donations.
http://nypost.com/2012/10/21/obama-campaign-accepted-foreign-web-donation-and-may-be-hiding-more/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters, DJTJr emails
Post by: DougMacG on July 11, 2017, 09:19:36 AM: https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/tuesdays-hot-mic-14/entry-210740/

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr
Title: never Trumpsters smelling blood?
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2017, 12:58:13 PM: Let's not forget where French stood on Trump last year. Without Trump there will be no immigration enforcement, but only immigration reform which is total amnesty.
Without Trump there will be no tax cuts but just a duplicitous tax increase to cancel out arithmetically any cut.

"Western civilization" will go the way of globalization. Foreign policy will have less teeth and Repubs will be conciliators again with the Left's juggernaught and the media will bask in all their leftist glory and the swamp levels will start rising again but no will be blaming global warming.

I like Pence. But I just don't know.....

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449376/donald-trump-jr-e-mails-proof-trump-campaign-attempted-collusion-russia
Title: Keen insights into the "collusion"
Post by: G M on July 11, 2017, 01:24:00 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7f-pw2SXUU

I can't wait for her lawfare article!

*This is actually a joke. :-D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 11, 2017, 01:45:11 PM: Just wondering how there could be a crown prosecutor of Russia when the crown and his family were all murdered 99 years ago?

Or did Crown Princess Anastasia have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren?
Title: Re: never Trumpsters smelling blood?
Post by: DougMacG on July 11, 2017, 03:14:54 PM: ccp: "I like Pence. But I just don't know....."

I like Pence much better than Trump, but not Pence for President if Trump is wrongly removed. It was Trump who won the nomination, and he won Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and the electoral college. It was Hillary who colluded in her nomination contest and with the Russians, left classified information unsecured. It was the Obama administration that colluded with Netanyahu's opponent and tried to defeat Theresa May with foreign intervention and left us vulnerable to whatever this unidentified Russian attack was under his watch that changed not a single vote.

Like Flynn gone, Sessions recused, DTjr under fire, they aren't trying to get the underlings; they're trying to overturn an election. It started as a joke, as a scape goat. They won't stop with Trump either and they won't stop if they got Pence out with him. When Pence picks Nikki Haley to serve with him they will go after her next. This doesn't have an end to it as long as they, the left and the media I repeat myself, are out of power.

They throw the word collusion around without tying it to a crime. Maybe you and I will collude to have lunch someday. The campaign had an interest in evidence of crimes committed by the opposition. No shit. The opportunism of people like Lindsey Graham and National Review is sickening. I would drop my subscription if I had one.

Why don't they get focused on getting 50 Senators behind a tax and healthcare bill while we still have 50.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2017, 03:55:17 PM: CCP's NRO post ( http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449376/donald-trump-jr-e-mails-proof-trump-campaign-attempted-collusion-russia ) is deeply concerning.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2017, 04:27:23 PM: "Why don't they get focused on getting 50 Senators behind a tax and healthcare bill while we still have 50."

This is so frustrating
we may never get such an opportunity again and they cannot get their acts together

of course we have never seen such opposition
or a president who tweets and does not take listen to lawyers ( or is a lawyer)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 11, 2017, 06:25:03 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2017, 03:55:17 PM
CCP's NRO post ( http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449376/donald-trump-jr-e-mails-proof-trump-campaign-attempted-collusion-russia ) is deeply concerning.

As has been mentioned before, exactly what crime is being alleged here? I can cite specific violations of federal law when it comes to Hillary. "Collusion" sounds like legalese, but aside from a dem/MSM psyop against Trump, what is the crime?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2017, 10:19:30 PM: Legally, zip.

However the problem is that this can readily be made to look like he was quite willing to collude. This is will reinvigorate the whole fg thing.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 12, 2017, 03:35:00 AM: Likely scenario.

The singer and his father had been bragging to others in Russia about their connections to Trump. One of those persons was the private lawyer who last was a Public Prosecutor in 2002 and who also likely represents Americans and Russians who are engaged in business or wish to become engaged in business in Russia. Also, likely, she had a lucrative adoption business involving American clients. The lawyer wants a meeting in order to begin lobbying for reinstatement of her adoption business.

After Trump wins Indiana and secures the nomination, the lawyer persuades the singer and his father to get her a meeting with Trump. They use their PR rep and tell him to say that the lawyer has some dirt on Hillary. The PR guy gets Trump, Jr to meet the lawyer. The PR guy describes the lawyer first as a "Crown Prosecutor" and then as a government lawyer. Both are false.

Trump, Jr thinks the meeting is for the lawyer to pitch to him the negative information about Hillary. The lawyer wants the meeting to get the Trumps on board for reinstating the adoption business. When it becomes clear early why the lawyer wanted the meeting, Kushner walks out and Trump Jr ends the meeting 10-20 minutes afterwards. They all view it as a waste of time and the move on to more important issues.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 04:27:50 AM: "Likely scenario.

The singer and his father had been bragging to others in Russia about their connections to Trump. One of those persons was the private lawyer who last was a Public Prosecutor in 2002 and who also likely represents Americans and Russians who are engaged in business or wish to become engaged in business in Russia. Also, likely, she had a lucrative adoption business involving American clients. The lawyer wants a meeting in order to begin lobbying for reinstatement of her adoption business.

After Trump wins Indiana and secures the nomination, the lawyer persuades the singer and his father to get her a meeting with Trump. They use their PR rep and tell him to say that the lawyer has some dirt on Hillary. The PR guy gets Trump, Jr to meet the lawyer. The PR guy describes the lawyer first as a "Crown Prosecutor" and then as a government lawyer. Both are false.

Trump, Jr thinks the meeting is for the lawyer to pitch to him the negative information about Hillary. The lawyer wants the meeting to get the Trumps on board for reinstating the adoption business. When it becomes clear early why the lawyer wanted the meeting, Kushner walks out and Trump Jr ends the meeting 10-20 minutes afterwards. They all view it as a waste of time and the move on to more important issues."

Rick, can you send this scenario to Trump Jr. and his lawyer(s)? Jr certainly needs some help. :lol:

-------------------------------------------------

The following headline means nothing. So a Russian who does business in both America and Russia is seen sitting next to an ambassador . Yet looks at the headlines. Politically not legally this gives the Left the means to keep bashing and Mueller something more to expand on. The former for at least 3 yrs.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/07/well-lookie-russian-lawyer-veselnitskaya-pictured-obama-ambassador-russia-8-days-trump-jr-mtg/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 04:48:14 AM: NRO again. Why is it always the public has a right to know when it concerns Trump but OTOH it is not the public right to know what hillary was doing with information that is true and not related to national security

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449384/donald-trump-jr-meeting-russian-lawyer-email-revelations
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 12, 2017, 09:19:42 AM: Rick's scenario sounds about right to me. We see same lady pictured with Obama administration officials so it also could have been a set up. One unknown is what did the NY Times know and when did they know it? (Proof it was a setup?) More importantly, how did they know it? Do they have 3 unnamed people who know what's in my email too?

The possibility that a campaign might want to run negative ads that portray an opponent in a bad light is not as shocking to people as the left seems to think. It makes no sense that Russia would prefer Trump over Hillary, and providing negative ad material isn't a campaign contribution to my knowledge. If we were tough on foreign contributions, we would impeach Clinton and Obama before Trump.

G M: "What is the crime?"
Crafty: "Legally, zip."

Good. I thought I was missing something.

I was listening to the 'outrage' on NPR yesterday. It fits their narrative and feeds their audience. Same for the MSNBC and the rest. But the DT jr email release helps to burn this story out faster and stop the drip.

Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc, translation: "With this, therefore because of this".
This false liberal logic is as old as the Latin language.

They have the narrative: "collusion", whatever that means, and they have miscellaneous facts. To the left media, each fact is part of the proof of the narrative - if you will buy it. Better than real proof of which they have none, each new 'fact' serves to keep the narrative alive.

Russia and Putin wanted Hillary defeated. It was personal. Leftists have a documentary on that.
Trump wanted to win the election, wanted Hillary to lose.
This lawyer once did work in a Russian courtroom.
Trump had business dealings with Russians.
Putin runs Russia.
Putin is rich. Trump is rich.
Russians hack.
Anyone in Russia can be tied to Putin.
Therefore, if anyone on his staff looked out a window on the east side of Trump tower or ordered Russian dressing on a house salad, the narrative must be true. The more they look the more they will find.

When HRC says reset or Pres. Obama says tell Vladimir privately he can disarm the US (treason), that's different. It fits nothing in the narrative and it stays on right wing media.

A point made by Rush is that they want to shut down any career of DT Jr too, not just the President. Unlike his father, he is an ideological conservative.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 09:23:09 AM: In the interest of full disclosure, I do regularly purchase and consume Karkov Vodka.

Collusion!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:31:24 AM: Yes, and , , ,

http://www.nationalreview.com/morning-jolt/449396/donald-trump-jr-russia-meeting-david-brooks-sandwich-class-column?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170712_Jolt&utm_term=Jolt
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 09:35:52 AM: https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/how-americans-get-news/

Overall, 4 in 10 Americans report that they delved deeper into a particular news subject beyond the headlines in the last week.

Russia! Trump! Collusion! Meeting with Kremlin attorney!

This is how the game is played. Most people only read the headlines.
Title: ...which isn’t how a KGB man would normally conceal the handoff of state secrets
Post by: DougMacG on July 12, 2017, 09:37:06 AM: "Mr. Goldstone publicly checked into Trump Tower on Facebook during the meeting, which isn’t how a KGB man would normally conceal the handoff of state secrets."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/keystone-kops-collusion-1499814375
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 09:40:30 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:31:24 AM
Yes, and , , ,

http://www.nationalreview.com/morning-jolt/449396/donald-trump-jr-russia-meeting-david-brooks-sandwich-class-column?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170712_Jolt&utm_term=Jolt

Yes, let's surrender to the left because the family Trump is less than ideal. Was Mittens "Milquetoast" Romney smarter and more ethical? Yes. How did that presidential administration go?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:43:35 AM: C'mon GM, that's not my point.

But our support of President Trump is because of what we believe-- and IMHO if we cannot speak Truth about failings our big picture credibility suffers.

Too bad that Donnie was not bright enough in his interview last night on Hannity to make the point that the alleged intel was that HILLARY was colluding with the Russians and that he took the meeting as a patriotic American. Dilbert creator Scott Adams DID make this point last night on Tucker. Donnie did say that if something HAD come out of the meeting he would have notified the proper authorities.

This may be the most effective play:

1) A British publicist (a profession known to attract blowhards, and Donnie knew this man in particular) made noise so the meeting was taken and should something have come of it, Donnie would have notified the proper authorities.

2) This still leaves all the points to be made about the hiring of an ex-British intel officer, the collusion with the Ukrainians, etc.

Nonetheless, a fg mess. Once again we are left cleaning up. The notion that this was all a witch hunt, which was gathering strength among the American people, is now blown.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 09:51:13 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:43:35 AM
C'mon GM, that's not my point.

But our support of President Trump is because of what we believe-- and IMHO if we cannot speak Truth about failings our big picture credibility suffers.

I believe foremost in trying to preserve what's left of the country I grew up in. Trump is most likely the last chance we have to do so. If Hillary had won, all the vote fraud, all the corruption and the serious issues that are on the verge of ending this nation would be triumphant. There would be NO opportunity to drain the swamp. The swamp would be eternal and don't think for a second our voices wouldn't be silenced.

Europe is getting wiped out in front of our eyes, and big money is making it happen. The same thing is being done here. Trump is being fought with such ferocity, because he is a threat to their plans for us.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:56:13 AM: AGREED!!!

This is to the good: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341564-trump-jr-i-probably-would-have-handled-russia-meeting-differently
Title: Documented collusion with Russia!
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 10:12:59 AM: http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/10/lawmakers-cite-evidence-russia-colluded-with-u-s-green-groups-to-block-frackin/

Lawmakers Cite Evidence Russia ‘Colludes’ With US Green Groups to Block Fracking
Kevin Mooney / @KevinMooneyDC / July 10, 2017 / comments

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Gazprom Chief Executive Alexei Miller inspect work June 23 on the Turkish Stream gas pipeline project aboard the Pioneering Spirit, a pipeline-laying ship, in the Black Sea near Anapa, Russia. (Photo: Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/Reuters/Newscom)
Forget about allegations of Russian interference in U.S. presidential elections for a moment, or even “collusion” between Russian officials and Trump campaign operatives.

“If successful, an anti-fracking campaign deprives Americans of affordable, dependable energy.”–@NiconomistLoris

The real action is in the European and U.S. energy markets, according to a letter from two Texas congressmen to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that details what they call “a covert anti-fracking campaign” with “little or no paper trail.”

The Daily Signal obtained a copy of the June 29 letter to Mnuchin from Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber, both Republicans who chair energy-related House panels. (See the full letter below.)

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

Smith and Weber quote sources saying the Russian government has been colluding with environmental groups to circulate “disinformation” and “propaganda” aimed at undermining hydraulic fracturing. Commonly called fracking, the process makes it possible to access natural gas deposits.

The sources include a former secretary-general of NATO, who is quoted by the GOP congressmen as saying:

Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.

This anti-fracking campaign seizes upon environmental issues and health concerns that could be used to constrain U.S. drilling and fracking exercises, the letter explains.

Gazprom, a large Russian oil company, stands to benefit if Russian-funded environmental activism results in reduced levels of fracking and natural gas production in the United States, Smith and Weber tell Mnuchin. They write:

It is easy to see the benefit to Russia and Gazprom that would result from a reduction in the U.S. level of drilling and fracking—a position advocated for by numerous environmental groups in the U.S.

Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, joined Weber, chairman of that panel’s energy subcommittee, in calling on the treasury secretary to investigate whether Russia works with American environmental activists to prevent the U.S. from developing its natural gas resources.

Top U.S. government officials who have acknowledged the connection between Russian and environmental groups include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

In 2014, Clinton delivered a “private speech” in which she discussed Russia’s financial support for environmental groups, the letter says. The speech was included in documents released by WikiLeaks, it says.

An Oct. 10, 2016, report in The Washington Times quoted Clinton as saying:

We [the State Department and the U.S. government] were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand up against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of that money supporting that effort was coming from Russia.

Contrary to what Russia’s propaganda machine and its environmental allies have told news consumers in Europe and America, fracking is safe, effective, and enormously beneficial, Nick Loris, an economist and energy policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, said in an email to The Daily Signal.

“If successful, an anti-fracking campaign is depriving Americans of good-paying jobs and affordable, dependable energy,” Loris said. “Despite smears and outright lies from environmental activists, smart drilling and energy extraction technologies have been proven to be safe.”

“It feels like every week a new study is published, confirming what we already know,” he said. “Hydraulic fracturing does not contaminate drinking water. The facts and history of hydraulic fracturing, a history that dates back more than half a century and over 1 million fracked wells, indicate that many of the fears associated with the process are grossly exaggerated or flat-out unsubstantiated.”

Loris added:

The good news, however, is that the anti-fracking campaign really hasn’t been all that successful in ‘keeping it in the ground.’ The U.S. is the world’s largest petroleum and natural gas producer, and we can thank fracking and American energy companies for it.

The result is that money is going back into bank accounts of hardworking families through lower energy bills, and American businesses are more competitive because of lower input costs. And we’re in a position to supply our allies with power, significantly reducing the ability of any one nation’s ability to manipulate energy markets for political gain.

In their letter to the treasury secretary, Smith and Weber also say the Russians have been able to advance their strategy without “a paper trail.”

They pass along reports that Russia apparently funnels the money through a Bermuda-based “shell company” known as Klein Ltd.

Tens of millions of dollars are moved from Russia through Klein “in the form of anonymous donations” to a U.S.-based nonprofit called the Sea Change Foundation.

The money, the congressmen write, then is moved in the form of grants to U.S. environmental organizations.

Here is their complete letter to Mnuchin:

Smith, Weber Letter to Mnuchin re Russia and Green Groups by The Heritage Foundation on Scribd
Title: The Brennan-CIA Conspiracy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 11:03:29 AM: https://spectator.org/confirmed-john-brennan-colluded-with-foreign-spies-to-defeat-trump/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 11:04:53 AM: second post

We need to have a good summary of the Clinton collusion with Ukraine.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 11:05:56 AM: Third post:

This is what I posted on my FB page:
===========================================
Initial response to the Donnie Jr. brouhaha:

Prior to the whole Russia conspiracy frenzy and in the midst of an off the charts ferocious presidential campaign, a British publicist (a profession known to attract blowhards and bullsh*tters) known to Donnie alleges to have intel on Hillary colluding with the Russians.

(The irony of the symmetry is worth noting!)

Oddly-- or is it plausibly?-- the source is alleged to be , , , from within the Russia government.

Donnie takes the meeting; it turns out-- surprise!-- his publicist was misled and/or is a blowhard. The true purpose has to do with soliciting help on Russian-US child adoption policy. The meeting comes to end in short order and Life goes on.

Rather reasonably Donnie does not consider this to be a meeting with the Russian government or its agents because , , , drum roll , , , it wasn't!

As best as I can tell, the big issue is the allegation that Donnie behavior showed a willingness to do what the Hillary campaign is known by all to have done with the Ukrainians-- collude with a foreign government to affect our election.

His answer is that if something had developed at the meeting of course he would have informed the appropriate authorities.

Have I missed anything?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 11:18:01 AM: CD's post :

https://spectator.org/confirmed-john-brennan-colluded-with-foreign-spies-to-defeat-trump/

I am glad someone is looking closer at this guy Brennan. He strikes me a a very viscous person who will seek revenge and at the same do anything to further himself.

Another of CD's posts:

*Lawmakers Cite Evidence Russia ‘Colludes’ With US Green Groups to Block Fracking*

No national security problem here. (sarcasm) No problem because Putin makes the LEFT happy. :x
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 11:31:13 AM: more examples of LEFT's deceit hypocrisy and lies:

_________________________________________________________________
"He didn't go to Jared"

Posted July 12, 2017 12:15 PM by Rob Eno Jeffrey Hamilton (from Conservative Review)

UNPRECEDENTED …
NYT laughable assertion … Writing at the New York Times, Jonathan Martin claims that “Campaign Opposition Research Is Standard. But Not ‘Oppo’ From Hostile Nations.” The piece goes through a chronology of what opposition research is and says that only Nixon has done this before. No mention of the KGB files where Ted Kennedy allegedly asked the Soviets to defeat Reagan makes it into his story.

Or the Democrats who used Russians against Trump … What makes Martin’s case even less plausible is that Democratic operatives hired a former British spy who got opposition research on Trump from people high up in the Russian government in the same election. In March, Vanity Fair ran an excellent look at how Christopher Steele, that former British spy, got the information for his “Trump Dossier” that ended up in BuzzFeed. One source mentioned was a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” and another was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.”

What about Ukraine … While the Ukraine may not be “hostile,” it is well documented that a DNC consultant who previously worked for the Clinton administration interfaced with Ukrainian government officials to try to affect the election. She also “shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign.” Here’s Politico’s reporting on the story.

How do we stop the mainstream media from warping the national narrative? We push back together. With the truth. Be the first to receive CRTV’s free weapon against the worst the media has to offer. Introducing WTF MSM!?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 12:29:12 PM: GM writes:

"In the interest of full disclosure, I do regularly purchase and consume Karkov Vodka."

In my interest of full disclosure I did see this in 1966 when my parents brought me into NYC to see it. 7 hour movie played over 2 successive days:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/war-and-peace-1969
Title: Politico: Team Clinton and the Ukrainians
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 01:21:49 PM: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446
Title: The case for criminal charges
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 01:23:27 PM: https://www.justsecurity.org/42956/open-door-moscow-facts-potential-criminal-case-trump-campaign-coordination-russia/
Title: mccarthy cuts through a lot of noise here
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 03:03:32 PM: "both sides [Left and Right] of the political aisle are badly misinformed about the Constitution’s take on executive misconduct. When the president’s behavior is at issue, it is the Constitution, not the criminal law, that is paramount."

also :

"On the Left, meanwhile, are the legal beagles. They are busily squirreling through the law books and straining their creative brains to come up with an offense — some novel prosecution theory under which the Trump-Russia facts can be pigeonholed into a campaign-law violation, a computer-fraud crime, or maybe even misprision of a felony (i.e., a failure to report one). "

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449401/trump-jr-emails-high-crimes-misdemeanors

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449401/trump-jr-emails-high-crimes-misdemeanors
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 04:35:52 PM: Pasting this from our friend "Body by Guiness" a.k.a. "Buzwardo":

Reddit Russian timeline: Reddit:Thanks to /u/Thatman5454 for today's Natalia connections.
Timeline:
Jan 2016 - Natalia Veselnitskaya visa expired. Asked by Senator Grassley of Iowa yesterday: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-jr-email-chain-…
May 4, 2016 - Trump becomes presumptive GOP nominee https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-night-donald-trump-b…/…
May 16, 2016 - Democrat oppo research listed Emin Agalarov as a possible route to draw a connection to Vladimir Putin. Their long game has always been to implicate Trump to Russia through the “shady businessman” angle. https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/10436
June 3, 2016 - According to the full email chain Donald Trump Jr released, Emin Agalarov cold contacted DTJ through Rob Goldstone on June 3, 2016 saying Natalia Veselnitskaya had oppo research damaging to Clinton. Email chain: https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789418455953413
June 9, 2016 - DTJ wanted a call instead but took the meeting on June 9, 2016 which turned out to be under false pretenses and he left after 20 minutes. In the meeting Natalia simply spoke about the Magnitsky Act and Russian adoptions. Same source.
June 14, 2016 - Still with no Visa, Natalia Veselnitskaya is seen sitting behind Obama’s Russian ambassador Michael McFaul during a Foreign Affairs Committee Meeting. She is sitting in front of Emin Agalarov who set up the meeting with DTJ. Left side towards the end of the video in tan dress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtpaGJYQxJY
Confirmation today by Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul that she was in fact there: https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/885022490686349315
Bonus: Here is a picture posted by Natalia inside traitorous war hawk and fake piss gate dossier pusher Senator John McCain’s office in December 2015 https://archive.fo/GFjIm
Bonus: Natalia’s law firm works with Fusion GPS who created the “Steele Dossier” aka fake Russian Piss Gate against Trump which was given to the FBI by John McCain. https://www.theguardian.com/…/russian-lawyer-who-met-trump-…
June 14, 2016 - First reports of “Russian hacking” of DNC servers by the Washington Post who has a $600 million contract with the CIA (Deep state unelected government) https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/cf006cb4-316e-11e6-8ff7-7b…
Source (liberal) on WP contract with CIA. Their parent company Amazon has the contract and owns the Washington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/why-the-washington-posts_b_…
July 10, 2016 - Bernie Sanders supporter Seth Rich, who worked on the inside of the DNC and was outspoken against voter fraud and Super Delegates is killed without motive. He is suspected by many to have leaked the documents from the inside to Wikileaks instead of an outside hacker (Russia.) https://archive.is/…/bb71ea32102489ed5ee4142afbf1a6f573e420…
July 22, 2016 - Wikileaks releases documents from the DNC server including emails from John Podesta detailing how the DNC screwed Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/756501723305414656…
July 24, 2016 - DNC Director Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigns in light of the cheating in favor of Hillary. She is immediately hired by Hillary’s campaign. https://www.nytimes.com/…/debbie-wasserman-schultz-dnc-wiki…
November 8, 2016 - Donald Trump becomes President. Queue 9 months of Russia coverage.
August 9, 2016 - Wikileaks offers $20,000 reward for information leading to Seth Rich’s murder: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763041804652539904…^tfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanmirror.com%2Fflashback-wikileaks-offered-20000-reward-seth-rich-tips%2F
August 9, 2016 - Assange hints that Seth Rich is the leaker (not Russia): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg
February 23, 2017 - John Podesta joins the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/john-podesta-joins-the-w…/…
May 31, 2017 - FBI Director Comey confirms the DNC denied the FBI access to their servers, even though they were reportedly hacked by a foreign government. The DNC instead hired third party company CrowdStrike to investigate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqIY8KvuoJo
July 12, 2017 - Full Circle: The original plot in May 2016 to tie Trump to Putin through Agalarov is being pushed by the media today through the 20 minute meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya about adoptions: https://www.yahoo.com/…/new-details-emerge-moscow-real-esta…
Title: here is the Russia Trump part in the oppo research
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2017, 04:49:48 PM: Trump: “I Know Russia Well” Because I Hosted The 2013 Miss Universe In Moscow. “Trump has said his understanding of Russia is based in part on the 2013 Miss Universe event in Moscow, where the Manhattan mogul watched 86 contestants don shimmering evening gowns and skimpy swimsuits for what he would call ‘the world’s biggest and most iconic beauty contest.’ ‘I know Russia well,’ Trump told Fox News on May 6. ‘I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event.” Asked whether he had met with Putin there, Trump declined to say, though he added: “I got to meet a lot of people.’ ‘And you know what?’ he continued. ‘They want to be friendly with the United States. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with somebody?’ Critics ridiculed the idea that Trump gleaned any real understanding of Russia from hosting a beauty pageant there. But the deeper story of how he brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow — a classic Trumpian tale of money, power and pulchritude — does shed fresh light on the business interests and personal contacts that have helped to shape his views about the country. It also reveals more about his personal courtship of Putin, which long predates his presidential bid.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

Trump Worked With Russian Real Estate Billionaire Aras Agalarov On Real Estate Deals In Russia. “Critics ridiculed the idea that Trump gleaned any real understanding of Russia from hosting a beauty pageant there. But the deeper story of how he brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow — a classic Trumpian tale of money, power and pulchritude — does shed fresh light on the business interests and personal contacts that have helped to shape his views about the country. It also reveals more about his personal courtship of Putin, which long predates his presidential bid. At the heart of the episode is Trump’s relationship with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin, and Agalarov’s rakish son, Emin, 36, a dance-pop singer with ambitions to international stardom who got Trump to appear in one of his music videos. The father and son are two of several ultra-wealthy Russians to whom Trump is connected and with whom he has pursued real estate deals. ‘I have always been interested in building in Russia,’ he told the New York Post just after his return from Moscow. He also boasted upon his return from the pageant that ‘almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.’ The elder Agalarov was born in Azerbaijan in 1956 and has made a Forbes-estimated fortune of nearly $1.3 billion in real estate development — thanks in part to lucrative contracts his company, Crocus Group, has won from Putin’s Kremlin, including for two World Cup 2018 stadiums. Putin himself recognized Agalarov’s commercial work in a 2013 ceremony at the Kremlin, where he pinned a medal of honor on Agalarov’s lapel.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

· Russian Oligarch Aras Agalarov Had Close Ties To Vladimir Putin. “It also reveals more about his personal courtship of Putin, which long predates his presidential bid. At the heart of the episode is Trump’s relationship with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin, and Agalarov’s rakish son, Emin, 36, a dance-pop singer with ambitions to international stardom who got Trump to appear in one of his music videos. The father and son are two of several ultra-wealthy Russians to whom Trump is connected and with whom he has pursued real estate deals. ‘I have always been interested in building in Russia,’ he told the New York Post just after his return from Moscow. He also boasted upon his return from the pageant that ‘almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.’ The elder Agalarov was born in Azerbaijan in 1956 and has made a Forbes-estimated fortune of nearly $1.3 billion in real estate development — thanks in part to lucrative contracts his company, Crocus Group, has won from Putin’s Kremlin, including for two World Cup 2018 stadiums. Putin himself recognized Agalarov’s commercial work in a 2013 ceremony at the Kremlin, where he pinned a medal of honor on Agalarov’s lapel.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

2013: Russian Oligarch Aras Agalarov Got Trump To Appear In His Son Emin’s Music Video. “It also reveals more about his personal courtship of Putin, which long predates his presidential bid. At the heart of the episode is Trump’s relationship with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin, and Agalarov’s rakish son, Emin, 36, a dance-pop singer with ambitions to international stardom who got Trump to appear in one of his music videos. The father and son are two of several ultra-wealthy Russians to whom Trump is connected and with whom he has pursued real estate deals. ‘I have always been interested in building in Russia,’ he told the New York Post just after his return from Moscow. He also boasted upon his return from the pageant that ‘almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.’ The elder Agalarov was born in Azerbaijan in 1956 and has made a Forbes-estimated fortune of nearly $1.3 billion in real estate development — thanks in part to lucrative contracts his company, Crocus Group, has won from Putin’s Kremlin, including for two World Cup 2018 stadiums. Putin himself recognized Agalarov’s commercial work in a 2013 ceremony at the Kremlin, where he pinned a medal of honor on Agalarov’s lapel.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

· Trump In Emin Agalarov’s Music Video: “Emin, Wake Up! You’re Always Late. You’re Just Another Pretty Face. I’m Really Tired Of You. You’re Fired!” “But the Agalarovs have not forgotten their powerful American friend. Soon after Trump's visit, Emin released a video for his song ‘In Another Life,’ in which he dozes off during a boardroom meeting and dreams about lounging around his apartment as scantily clad Miss Universe contestants parade around. The video ends back in the boardroom, where Trump himself has appeared at the head of the table. ‘Emin, wake up!’ the mogul barks. ‘You’re always late. You’re just another pretty face. I’m really tired of you. You’re fired!’ The next year, Trump opened a video produced for Emin’s 35th birthday and posted on YouTube. ‘Emin, I can’t believe you’re turning 35. … You’re a winner, you’re a champ!’ he says, just before a drum beat kicks in to unleash an Emin Europop ballad.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

Trump Called The Agalarovs “One Of The Great Families In Russia.” “But it’s Agalarov’s musician son, Emin, who started the chain of events that brought Trump to Moscow. Emin’s website describes him as having ‘rock star good looks,’ and his music is in the Euro-club style, featuring risque lyrics over thumping dance beats. While Emin claims some commercial success in Russia, his family fortune ensures he can afford a hedonistic lifestyle, one he chronicles on his Instagram account, where he poses on beaches, in swimming pools and at nightclubs — often wearing hats and T-shirts with slogans like ‘Surprise, I’m Drunk Again’ and ‘Your Girlfriend Hates My Alarm Clock.’ Emin Agalarov’s connection to Donald Trump runs through a beauty queen. In 2013 Emin filmed the video for his single ‘Amor,’ in which the young singer pursues Miss Universe 2012, Olivia Culpo, through darkened city streets with a flashlight. Miss Universe representatives later came to Moscow with Culpo to meet with the Agalarovs, and subsequently introduced the Russians to Trump… Trump announced the venue in June 2013, saying Russia had beaten out 17 other countries. ‘Moscow right now in the world is a very, very important place,’ he said. ‘We wanted Moscow all the way.’ Trump added of the Agalarovs: ‘One of the great families in Russia is our partner in this endeavor.’” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

Trump Invited Putin To His 2013 Miss Universe Gala In Moscow. “Whether Trump also considered Putin’s potential reaction isn’t known. But he clearly sought the Russian president’s favor. A few weeks before departing for Moscow, Trump made clear he still hoped to see the Russian leader at his Nov. 9 gala. ‘I know for a fact that he wants very much to come, but we’ll have to see. We haven’t heard yet, but we have invited him,’ Trump told an interviewer that October.” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

During His November 2013 Trip To Moscow, Trump Met With The Russian Developers Agalarovs, Alex Sapir, And Rotem Rosen. “Putin never showed. But the pageant went off smoothly, crowning 25-year-old Gabriela Isler of Venezuela before what NBC claims was a worldwide audience of 1 billion. (To the disappointment of some LGBT activists, no mention was made of the anti-gay law.) After the contest, Trump attended a vodka-infused 1 a.m. afterparty at which ticket holders were promised a meeting with the New Yorker, along with the pageant contestants. He also met with the Agalarovs to talk business. Trump had explored real estate projects in Russia before. In 1987, he visited Moscow and St. Petersburg at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., though he doubted the standards of Soviet construction firms and never followed through. In 2008, his son Donald Jr. visited Moscow to explore licensing the Trump name to properties there, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The paper also reported that, a few years earlier, Trump had considered aiding the reconstruction of the city’s Moskva and Rossiya hotels. Joining Trump’s November 2013 meeting with the Agalarovs were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, a pair of New York-based Russian developers who helped to develop the Trump Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan. Sapir later told New York’s Real Estate Weekly that Russian visitors to the Trump Soho ‘have been telling us they wish there was something modern and hip like it in Moscow. … A lot of people from the oil and gas businesses have come to us asking to be partners in building a product like Trump Soho there.’” [Politico, 5/15/16<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-russia-moscow-miss-universe-223173#ixzz48qHLuYBH>]

Campaign Finance
Title: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 04:56:58 PM: https://medium.com/theyoungturks/the-basic-formula-for-every-shocking-russia-trump-revelation-e9ae390d9f05

Michael TraceyFollow
Roving journalist
Mar 2
The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation

The basic formula for every breaking Trump/Russia story is essentially as follows:
The New York Times or Washington Post releases an article that at first blush appears extremely damning.
Anti-Trump pundits and Democrats react reflexively to the news, express shrieking outrage, and proclaim that this finally proves untoward collusion between Trump and Russia — a smoking gun, at last.
Aggrieved former Clinton apparatchiks *connect the dots* in a manner eerily reminiscent of right-wing Glenn Beck-esque prognostication circa 2009.

4. Self-proclaimed legal experts rashly opine as to whether the new revelation entails some kind of criminally actionable offense. (Recall the now-laughable certitude that felled National Security Advisor Mike Flynn violated the 200+ year old Logan Act.) This latest version is the certitude that Jeff Sessions committed perjury, when that at the very least is highly questionable.

(Probably best to at least read the relevant statute first.)
5. The notion of Russian “collusion” being key to toppling Trump becomes further implanted in the minds of the most energized Democratic activists, as evidenced this time around by a troupe of protesters who showed up to the Department of Justice headquarters brandishing trademarked “Resist” placards, chanting “Lock Him Up,” and (as usual) hyperventilating about Putin. As I’ve written before, Trump/Putin theories are increasingly the top concern that plugged-in “Resistance” types bring up at the highly-charged town hall meetings that have received so much attention of late.

6. Pointing out these glaring flaws in the latest anti-Russia frenzy is immediately construed by cynics as “defending Trump” or “defending Sessions” when it most assuredly is not. At least in my own case, it’s a defense of not getting enraptured by irrational hysterics to further short-term political aims.
7. People who’d spent the past 12 hours frothing at the mouth gradually come to realize that their initial furor was probably overblown, and that a more sober look at the actual facts at hand reveal that the anti-Trump chorus probably got ahead of itself…again.

8. Democrats who sought to capitalize on the uproar end up looking extremely foolish.

9. It becomes “normalized” (that new favorite buzzword!) to cast any meetings or contacts with Russian officials as inherently sinister. Rather than just a basic function of a Senator’s ordinary duties, meeting with “The Russians” is increasingly viewed as evidence of nefarious intent, and perhaps participation in a grand global conspiracy.
10. Political ineptitude and clumsiness (as was very probably the case with Flynn) gets interpreted as something more calculated than it really is. Sessions could’ve avoided this ridiculous controversy by saying something to the effect of: “I did not meet with any Russian officials in my informal capacity as Trump campaign surrogate, but I did speak with Russian officials over the course of my ordinary Senatorial duties.” The problem is, such an admission would’ve probably blown up into a big political snafu; Democrats would’ve seized on it as evidence of Russian collusion. So Sessions tried to lawyer himself out of trouble with an ambiguous comment during sworn testimony. This allowed him to sneak through the confirmation process, but created an even bigger political storm later.
11. A Trump official’s least egregious quality ends up being portrayed as his most egregious quality. There were any number of reasons to be highly worried about the presence of Mike Flynn in the Trump administration, from his bellicose posture toward Iran, to his outlandish views on the alleged threat posed by Islam. Conversing with the Russian ambassador about reducing tensions would very clearly not have been on the “reasons to be worried about Flynn” list. Likewise, Jeff Sessions is a troubling figure for a whole host of reasons, ranging from his hawkishly retrograde attitude about Drug Prohibition to his dicey history on racial matters. That he spoke to the Russian Ambassador in September 2016 would not be on the “reasons to be worried about Sessions” list.
12. The overall political climate gets further degraded and warped without any commensurate upside.
13. Repeat.
Title: WaPo actually allows a good analysis to be printed!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 05:42:57 PM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/12/can-it-be-a-crime-to-do-opposition-research-by-asking-foreigners-for-information/?utm_term=.532b6475ea58
Title: Manafort heh heh
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 05:57:55 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/449403/paul-manafort-must-have-been-rolling-his-eyes
Title: DOJ made special arrangements for Russian lawyer visa
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 07:23:19 PM: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341788-exclusive-doj-let-russian-lawyer-into-us-before-she-met-with-trump
Title: But wait! There's more!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 07:32:01 PM: http://conservativefighters.com/news/cnn-reporter-tweets-pic-russian-attorney-behind-obama-ambassador-days-trump-jr-meeting-freakout-ensues/?utm_content=bufferd6ec9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Title: Re: But wait! There's more!
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 07:37:25 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 07:32:01 PM
http://conservativefighters.com/news/cnn-reporter-tweets-pic-russian-attorney-behind-obama-ambassador-days-trump-jr-meeting-freakout-ensues/?utm_content=bufferd6ec9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

It would be interesting for her to be questioned under oath.
Title: Exclusive: DOJ let Russian lawyer into US before she met with Trump team
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 07:51:15 PM: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341788-exclusive-doj-let-russian-lawyer-into-us-before-she-met-with-trump

Even more interesting.
Title: Why was Russian money laundering case dismissed?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:17:44 PM: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-was-russian-money-laundering-case-dismissed-house-dems-2017-7
Title: CNN keeps trying
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:24:28 PM: Drip drip drip. Curious that the contents of the last line were placed , , , last.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/12/politics/video-trump-relationships-russian-associates/index.html
Title: Trump's real estate dealings in Russia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2017, 09:45:14 PM: https://www.yahoo.com/news/new-details-emerge-moscow-real-estate-deal-led-trump-kremlin-alliance-190126219.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 13, 2017, 04:39:28 AM: What's not being talked about here is how this info was discovered. Kushner and Manafort disclosed the meeting to relevant federal governmental authorities. Thus, it is likely that the leakers were members of the staffs of the relevant federal authorities who received those disclosures along with the emails.

But the story is written from the point of view that Trump, Jr. did not disclose the same meeting that was disclosed by the other two. Trump, Jr is not a federal employee (Kushner) and is not a registered foreign agent (Manafort). He is not required to disclose anything. And it is likely that the investigators got the emails from Kushner.

Now,it turns out that the lawyer herself was admitted to the USA only to attend the trial of one of her clients, a Russian company. But she broke the terms of her visa and used her presence in the USA to conduct unregistered lobbying to amend the Magnitsky Act. And she got a meeting with Trump, Jr., Kushner, and Manafort by falsely claiming to the singer and his father that she had some dirt on Clinton.

In other words, this was NOT an effort by the Russian government to interfere or influence the 2016 elections. It was a lobbying effort to persuade the Trump campaign to support repeal of the Magnitsky Act. It was part of an open effort that involved a film presentation at the Newsuem in DC and meetings with or introductions to up to 80 Congressmen. And one of the backers of this lobbying effort was former Congressman Ron Dellums, a well-known leftist from the San Francisco area.
Title: of interest
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:08:02 AM: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/-- no evidence of actual Russian interference

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4690834/Don-Trump-Jr-lawyer-linked-dirty-dossier-firm.html
This matter of the money laundering case does seem to have a whiff to it

Comey testifies FBI never got hands on DNC server
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqIY8KvuoJo
Title: Kushner's digital campaign alleged to have directed Russian mis-intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:19:34 AM: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:33:41 AM: Third post:

A major progressive friend cites this hard to read page https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/9/1679290/-Abramson-connects-the-dots-collusion-is-certain-and-Trump-knew

and summarizes it thus:

==============================================

To summarize the collusion (the individual pieces are now out there and this is my belief about how it all came together):

- Trump's clan was contacted by his friends in Russia once it was clear that he would win the Republican Party nomination.

- Russia knew it would be unlikely Trump would win but believed it could test out its information warfare capabilities, which it had been bragging about in open conferences in Russia but now needed a test case on the international stage (the low price of oil has gutted the Russian economy and the oligarchs have stolen hundreds of billions from the Russian people without punishment, so cyber warfare rather than physical warfare are now their game).

- Trump's people, not actually believing they could win, took the bait and started meetings as far back as April to see how hey might get help from the country that has been funding Trump's poorly performing businesses (via DeutcheBank as the paper processor).

- In characteristic fashion, the Russians mount a full court press, meeting with a half dozen or more people involved in the campaign and built strong roots with people who were already US citizens acting as foreign agents (Manafort, et al).

- Russia promised a whole slew of support which was all discussed in all the meetings with the Russians--from Sessions to Manafort to Carter Page, to Don Jr's meetings--and included discussions of how the Trump camp could feed Russia information that Russia could use for micro targeting through Facebook (which has been proven).

- These meetings and discussions entangle the Trump campaign in a way that, even if the campaign wanted to get out, were stuck (proof is in how Flynn was brought in as national security advisor, in a giant coup for the Russians, proving to them that their entanglement works at the highest levels).

- The lack of cloaking is so evident that Trump gets on stage in early June 2016, 4 days after the meeting with Don Jr and the other cronies he brags that he is going to reveal a whole bunch of Clinton dirt! It was planned, it was orchestrated and colluded upon, no question about it.

- Russia knew that if their information warfare techniques could actually shift the election, with the recordings the Russians had on Trump's people, they owned the entire group and could see their bought and sold Trump people all the way into the White House (both to have morons who would repeal the sanctions but also to fundamentally destabilize the world and the US leadership role, which have now already happened in only a few months, and not even with Trump needing to be told what to do!).

- Trump was so highly undesirable that only an information warfare approach in the key districts (the now legendary 77,000 votes) created the painful secret anti-Clinton vote that allowed those districts to flip red and the Electoral College to go for Trump despite a massive popular vote win for Clinton (this was all aided by the stupid overconfidence of Clinton by not anticipating the flipping and not playing as dirty as Trump-Russia).

- When Trump can't seem to lose by saying the most extraordinary things, the Russians double-down on true fake news (Clinton running a sex ring...etc.) and find that people continue to believe it. In fact more than 75% of the Facebook impressions during the campaign were for fake rather than real news, affecting 15 million people, more than enough to sway 77,000 votes in key districts.

- When journalists (thank g-d) started penetrating the strange new world and leakers (thank g-d) started leaking at the greatest levels ever seen, we got to see a picture of exactly what a purchased, compromised executive branch looks like--state attorney generals who were promised a job but who were investigating Russian ties being fired, compromised people like Flynn being pushed in, firings of Comey who were close to the truth, and now the unstoppable cascade of new revelations coming out.

We will look back on this day and say, my g-d, it was all right there in front of us but too surreal to believe. From the likes of Michael Crichton or John Le Carré novels, this is real. The Russians have created the most powerful bioweapon: our own self-loathing and gullibility.

Believe.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 13, 2017, 09:18:49 AM: If Trump had a true political pro in the position Donald Jr was in when this happened, (some say) this wouldn't have happened. A true pro would have smelled a rat, recognized false claims, not written 'I love it' to the offer and shook out the opposition research they needed without leaving an embarrassing trail full of land mines. At the time this happened, there was no Russia stole it narrative, but a true political pro would have steered around that anyway.

But if Trump had surrounded himself with only political professionals and always listened to them, he wouldn't have been the nominee or won the election.

If there had been a big collusion conspiracy strategy in place with Putin at the top of the Trump campaign to steal the election, one of these 3 people would have known about it. DT Jr would have carefully steered this request to those channels, not set up a meeting and a paper trail. Not this way:
"Mr. Goldstone publicly checked into Trump Tower on Facebook during the meeting, which isn’t how a KGB man would normally conceal the handoff of state secrets."

Interesting to see what heroic lengths the Obama administration and the Loretta Lynch Justice Department went through to enable this particular meeting, in the context that the phony Dossier earlier was DNC inspired (peeing on the bed?!) and all of it broken through the same, irresponsible newspaper.

The longer this story goes on, the worse the derangement side looks. cf. Tim Kaine.

G M, previously in this thread: "according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
rolleyes
So, were these records created when Obama ordered the president elect spied upon?"

Worse yet, maybe it was all set up by DNC / Obama administration operatives. It looks that way:
(https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_480w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/07/11/Others/Images/2017-07-11/Veselnitskaya.JPG?uuid=N1I-7mZoEeeUq1sfD_RZ3w)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 13, 2017, 10:02:20 AM: "Worse yet, maybe it was all set up by DNC / Obama administration operatives. It looks that way:"

That would explain why after losing the election the Dems *immediately* went all guns blazing about some Russia connection and the rest.....

They had thought of this long before early November. The whole machine made this their story from day ONE.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 13, 2017, 10:43:34 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:33:41 AM
Third post:

A major progressive friend cites this hard to read page https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/9/1679290/-Abramson-connects-the-dots-collusion-is-certain-and-Trump-knew

and summarizes it thus:

==============================================

To summarize the collusion (the individual pieces are now out there and this is my belief about how it all came together):

- Trump's clan was contacted by his friends in Russia once it was clear that he would win the Republican Party nomination.

- Russia knew it would be unlikely Trump would win but believed it could test out its information warfare capabilities, which it had been bragging about in open conferences in Russia but now needed a test case on the international stage (the low price of oil has gutted the Russian economy and the oligarchs have stolen hundreds of billions from the Russian people without punishment, so cyber warfare rather than physical warfare are now their game).

- Trump's people, not actually believing they could win, took the bait and started meetings as far back as April to see how hey might get help from the country that has been funding Trump's poorly performing businesses (via DeutcheBank as the paper processor).

- In characteristic fashion, the Russians mount a full court press, meeting with a half dozen or more people involved in the campaign and built strong roots with people who were already US citizens acting as foreign agents (Manafort, et al).

- Russia promised a whole slew of support which was all discussed in all the meetings with the Russians--from Sessions to Manafort to Carter Page, to Don Jr's meetings--and included discussions of how the Trump camp could feed Russia information that Russia could use for micro targeting through Facebook (which has been proven).

- These meetings and discussions entangle the Trump campaign in a way that, even if the campaign wanted to get out, were stuck (proof is in how Flynn was brought in as national security advisor, in a giant coup for the Russians, proving to them that their entanglement works at the highest levels).

- The lack of cloaking is so evident that Trump gets on stage in early June 2016, 4 days after the meeting with Don Jr and the other cronies he brags that he is going to reveal a whole bunch of Clinton dirt! It was planned, it was orchestrated and colluded upon, no question about it.

- Russia knew that if their information warfare techniques could actually shift the election, with the recordings the Russians had on Trump's people, they owned the entire group and could see their bought and sold Trump people all the way into the White House (both to have morons who would repeal the sanctions but also to fundamentally destabilize the world and the US leadership role, which have now already happened in only a few months, and not even with Trump needing to be told what to do!).

- Trump was so highly undesirable that only an information warfare approach in the key districts (the now legendary 77,000 votes) created the painful secret anti-Clinton vote that allowed those districts to flip red and the Electoral College to go for Trump despite a massive popular vote win for Clinton (this was all aided by the stupid overconfidence of Clinton by not anticipating the flipping and not playing as dirty as Trump-Russia).

- When Trump can't seem to lose by saying the most extraordinary things, the Russians double-down on true fake news (Clinton running a sex ring...etc.) and find that people continue to believe it. In fact more than 75% of the Facebook impressions during the campaign were for fake rather than real news, affecting 15 million people, more than enough to sway 77,000 votes in key districts.

- When journalists (thank g-d) started penetrating the strange new world and leakers (thank g-d) started leaking at the greatest levels ever seen, we got to see a picture of exactly what a purchased, compromised executive branch looks like--state attorney generals who were promised a job but who were investigating Russian ties being fired, compromised people like Flynn being pushed in, firings of Comey who were close to the truth, and now the unstoppable cascade of new revelations coming out.

We will look back on this day and say, my g-d, it was all right there in front of us but too surreal to believe. From the likes of Michael Crichton or John Le Carré novels, this is real. The Russians have created the most powerful bioweapon: our own self-loathing and gullibility.

Believe.

He needs meds. Especially for the upcoming sadness when reality again frustrates their impeachment fantasies.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 13, 2017, 11:06:04 AM: The Russia interference scenario is a corollary of the "Manafort is a Russian dupe" scenario that was directed at Trump beginning in May or June 2016.

This was their pre-emptive strike against the Clinton Foundation and the uranium deal argument that they knew would be an issue in the campaign. As well as a pre-emptive strike against the Podesta was phished problem. If the Dems could blame that whole debacle on sophisticated Russian spies instead of Podesta falling for an obvious phishing scheme, then they can escape responsibility for their own failures.

If you recall, the anti-Trump Repub's and the Dem's went all in against Trump because Manafort had previously consulted for the preferred Russian political leader in Ukraine. This is why Ukraine operatives tried to help Clinton in the 2016 election. The argument went something like this: because Manafort had once consulted for pro-Russian politician, ergo Trump must be pro-Putin.

Then, the AZ airport meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton was revealed.

Then, Comey held his first press conference at which he announced that he would recommend against not indicting Hillary over her email issues, but during which he made serious allegations against Hillary's email security.

The Mnafort line of attack stopped working after the Trump campaign replaced Manafort with Bannon and Conway.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-resigns-from-trump-campaign-227197 (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-resigns-from-trump-campaign-227197)

Afterwards, when it became clear that Wikileaks had obtained Podesta's emails and would be releasing them, the Dem's began to shift the emphasis of this towards Russian hackers having illegally obtained these emails.

The shift in Dem talking points also occurred about the same time, August 2016, when Obama first learned of Russian attempts "to interfere in the election."

And, today, we learn that it was Sen. McCain who first sought to use the fake dossier on Trump.
Title: The Intel Community's role
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 11:27:44 AM: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/07/12/democrat-and-ex-cia-trump-is-right-democrats-did-spread-british-dossier-so-did-intel-community.html
Title: Goldstone's role
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 12:22:06 PM: Can someone print this please?

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/rob-goldstones-pivotal-role-in-the-donald-trump-jr-scandal?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%2831%29&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=11468581&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1201179447&spReportId=MTIwMTE3OTQ0NwS2
Title: Clapper and Morell's analysis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 03:14:45 PM: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/exclusive/clapper-trump-jr-emails-only-one-anecdote-much-larger-story-1091

This makes sense to me:

“What I find striking — and alarming — is less that these senior Trump officials stepped over the ethical line, but that they don’t seem to even understand that such a line exists,” Morell said.
Title: Re: Clapper and Morell's analysis
Post by: G M on July 13, 2017, 07:10:47 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 03:14:45 PM

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/exclusive/clapper-trump-jr-emails-only-one-anecdote-much-larger-story-1091

This makes sense to me:

“What I find striking — and alarming — is less that these senior Trump officials stepped over the ethical line, but that they don’t seem to even understand that such a line exists,” Morell said.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2011/02/dni-clapper-retreats-from-secular-claim-on-muslim-brotherhood-033259

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is backing away from comments he made Thursday calling Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement "largely secular."

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-resume-calls-for-james-clapper-perjury-charges

Some lawmakers reacted to the long-expected resignation announcement from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Thursday by wishing him an eventful retirement, featuring prosecution and possible prison time.

The passage of more than three years hasn’t cooled the insistence in certain quarters that Clapper face charges for an admittedly false statement to Congress in March 2013, when he responded, “No, sir" and "not wittingly” to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans.

About three months after making that claim, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the answer was untruthful and that the NSA was in fact collecting in bulk domestic call records, along with various internet communications.

To his critics, Clapper lied under oath, a crime that threatens effective oversight of the executive branch. In an apology letter to lawmakers, however, Clapper said he gave the “clearly erroneous” answer because he “simply didn’t think of” the call-record collection.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:12:33 PM: A timely reminder.

Still, this remains:

"“What I find striking — and alarming — is less that these senior Trump officials stepped over the ethical line, but that they don’t seem to even understand that such a line exists,” Morell said."
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 13, 2017, 08:23:28 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 08:12:33 PM
A timely reminder.

Still, this remains:

"“What I find striking — and alarming — is less that these senior Trump officials stepped over the ethical line, but that they don’t seem to even understand that such a line exists,” Morell said."

What ethical line is this? This is all bullshiite. You need to stop giving the MSM/Dems/deep state gaslighting memes credit. Both Clapper and Morrell have the credibility of a methamphetamine addict car thief.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html?mtrref=en.wikipedia.org&gwh=C453C850BC21F7FF8F179DC8F7A94E52&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion
Title: Caveat Lector: Peter Smith suicide
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 10:04:38 PM: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
Title: Re: Caveat Lector: Peter Smith suicide
Post by: DougMacG on July 14, 2017, 05:29:47 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 10:04:38 PM
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html

Plenty of reasons to be suspicious. A hotel used almost exclusively for Mayo clinic patients is probably not where you find cases of untreated depression. I don't understand the role of the helium or how people learn or decide best way :-( to commit suicide. Maybe it gives him comfort breathing something as the oxygen disappears. Did he buy the helium himself? Did he research that method online in his own browser history?

Even if genuine suicide, this adds to the enormous trail of dead bodies along the Clinton path. From the article:

"For years, former Democratic President Bill Clinton was Smith's target. The wealthy businessman had a hand in exposing the "Troopergate" allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life. And he discussed financing a probe of a 1969 trip Bill Clinton took while in college to the Soviet Union, according to Salon magazine.'

Are there any Clinton scandal researchers still alive. Whoever killed him is probably asking that question too.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2017, 05:38:48 AM: life insurance policies probably do pay even in case of suicide though there may be a 2 yr delay in payment.

that said the whole thing sounds weird
Title: Re: Clapper and Morell's analysis
Post by: DougMacG on July 14, 2017, 06:37:51 AM: “What I find striking — and alarming — is less that these senior Trump officials stepped over the ethical line, but that they don’t seem to even understand that such a line exists,”

Peggy Noonan wrote:
[Not criminal, not collusion] "It was worse, it was classless."

This lacks context. I have to check the timeline for what was known when, but this woman (HRC) was running a criminal enterprise out of the US state department, selling favors, collecting money, and a significant part of that happened in and with Russia. She had at times a 90% chance of becoming President. The only person who could stop that was whoever won the R nomination, turned out to be Trump. As opposed to unethical, to DT Jr, stopping her and electing his father was quite patriotic, and opposition research or dirt on the opponent is a known, legal and accepted part of that. A lot of her dirty work was in dirty places overseas. That is where a legitimate break in the campaign might come from. In this case it led to nothing.

Everyone who tries to get a meeting with someone important touts themselves as important, with ties to people high up for example if they are unknown themselves. The claim of ties to the government or its intentions is just noise on the page to a Presidential nominee's gatekeeper. It might be true; it might not be true. We have no reason to believe DT Jr believed any of it, just that he agreed to listen.

Further context is that Trump's predecessor won a foreign policy debate against Romney on the idea 1) that Russia is not a threat, "The 1980s called and wants their foreign policy back." And 2) he won on the idea that he talk to anyone, even Iran, the world's number one state sponsor of terror. 'Can't hurt to talk to them'. Wrong as that is, that view was accepted and prevailed.

This might be bad behavior if they received and used ill-gotten information, but there was none.

A 'crime' could have been non-disclosure but it was disclosed.

And most of all, quid pro quo, a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something, and there was none.

No quid. No pro. No quo. Just. bait and switch.

Trumps classless? 'ya think?

The class they were seeking was Presidential victory and the lines they shouldn't cross are legal ones. It's not an under-regulated business. One legal line never mentioned is freedom of speech which I take to include DT Jr's freedom to listen. This meeting happened in the US, but there is no law against picking up the phone and talking to Russia. There is no law against meeting with them, far as I know. But if you plot or commit a crime during the call, the email or the meeting, that is a different matter. Once again we are nationally neck deep into a 'scandal' and no one can tell us what the crime is that was committed. So it's classless, unethical. I disagree, but even if it was, bfd. Big F'ing Deal.

Meanwhile, federal spending just hit $400B/month. In all the wrong places. yawn. shrug shoulders. no outrage there.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2017, 08:24:18 AM: "Peggy Noonan wrote:
[Not criminal, not collusion] "It was worse, it was classless."

What bothers me is the rinos almost in unison turning on Trump.

The Krystals the Krauthammers the Noonans and the rest of many of the establishment types.

I don't think Jrs seeking dirt on Hillary is classless at all. Not one iota. It was smart. He would have been a fool a sucker if they didn't pursue this.
however I wish he was smarter about it : leaving emails like , "I love it"
or that he simply disclosed the meeting up front.

WE here all know crats would have done EXACTLY the same thing, have done the exact same (think Ed Kennedy - Russia) though most likley they would have been wiser about going about it.
Title: Re: Caveat Lector: Peter Smith suicide
Post by: G M on July 14, 2017, 08:34:18 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on July 14, 2017, 05:29:47 AM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2017, 10:04:38 PM
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html

Plenty of reasons to be suspicious. A hotel used almost exclusively for Mayo clinic patients is probably not where you find cases of untreated depression. I don't understand the role of the helium or how people learn or decide best way :-( to commit suicide. Maybe it gives him comfort breathing something as the oxygen disappears. Did he buy the helium himself? Did he research that method online in his own browser history?

Even if genuine suicide, this adds to the enormous trail of dead bodies along the Clinton path. From the article:

"For years, former Democratic President Bill Clinton was Smith's target. The wealthy businessman had a hand in exposing the "Troopergate" allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life. And he discussed financing a probe of a 1969 trip Bill Clinton took while in college to the Soviet Union, according to Salon magazine.'

Are there any Clinton scandal researchers still alive. Whoever killed him is probably asking that question too.

I saw the term "Arkancide" used. Struck me as funny. In a very dark sort of way.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 15, 2017, 04:41:52 AM: This pseudo-scandal is beyond laughable.

So, now, the big deal is that other Russian lobbyists and an interpreter accompanied the lawyer. But the meeting was with the lawyer and the lawyer did all of the talking through an interpreter.

According to another lobbyist who was in the Russian "delegation", the lawyer claimed to have information showing a flow of illicit funds from Russia to the DNC. Trump Jr then asks her whether she has evidence to back up her claim including proof of the actual flow of money. The lawyer then replied that the Trump campaign would have to research it more.

http://apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-says-he-was-in-Trump-son's-meeting (http://apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-says-he-was-in-Trump-son's-meeting)

At this point, Trump Jr lost interest. Kushner left the room. The lawyer pivots to bring up the real reason she was there - to lobby for repeal of the Magnitsky Act so that Putin would rescind restrictions on Americans adopting Russian children. Trump Jr ends the meeting after a total of 20-30 minutes.

In other words, in reality, Trump, Jr. decided not to work with "the Russians."
Title: pseudo-scandal - agree but
Post by: ccp on July 15, 2017, 06:41:51 AM: "This pseudo-scandal is beyond laughable" yes I agree but

I would be laughing too if it were not for the persistent and damaging *political* headlines that gives the LEFT media DNC legal hollywood victim constituent complex leverage to work this to stop Trumps' agenda

We see how this has already worked to demoralize Republicans , further damage Trump's support among them, and contribute to keeping him and the feckless legislatures from being able to do anything. Although the legislatures would probably not be getting anything done anyway.

Trump will survive this (at this point) but the endless use of this pseudo-scandal to keep words like "treason, collusion, crook, illegitimate , stolen election and the rest" in the headlines as well as giving CNN , rightly or wrongly , more confidence to keep up their 24/7 attacks on Trump...............
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 15, 2017, 08:09:59 AM: It turns out that "the Russians" who met with Trump Jr., are also connected to Fusion GPS, the company that commissioned the fake British dossier.

http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/07/14/shocker.-wont-believe-employed-former-soviet-counterintelligence-official-trump-meeting/ (http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/07/14/shocker.-wont-believe-employed-former-soviet-counterintelligence-official-trump-meeting/)

Trump, Jr. declined to collude with these Russians and declined their "help" against Hillary. Shortly afterwards, a dossier of alleged Trump Sr. indiscretions began to circulate. And Senator McCain was somehow linked to requesting this info. In addition, this dossier gets to the FBI and Comey.

Fusion GPS is at the center of all of these "collusions."
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 15, 2017, 08:48:27 AM: "And Senator McCain was somehow linked to requesting this info."

Certainly one asks the question as is being done in some circles:

was this whole thing a set up from day one?

McCain always available, willing and able, as a darling of the left and its media, comes through for them again, and proves what an idiot he is (the word "useful" [to the enemy left] can be tacked on to the word "idiot" but it is no longer necessary - he is just an *idiot*!)
Title: Dershowitz on Judge Jeanine !
Post by: ccp on July 17, 2017, 04:22:04 AM: :-o wow - what bedfellows! Dershowitz again calls out this whole thing with junior :

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/07/16/dershowitz-on-trump-jr-meeting-a-candidate-has-the-right-to-get-information-from-whatever-source/
Title: New Report, 60 million and up to 304 of the electors colluded to elect Trump
Post by: DougMacG on July 17, 2017, 07:52:10 AM: This secret conspiracy swept undetected by journalism across 29 states. A true story as the word collusion has come to have a valid use even when nothing criminal took place.

https://babylonbee.com/news/cnn-report-millions-american-voters-may-colluded-elect-trump/

CNN Report: Millions Of American Voters May Have Colluded To Elect Trump
July 13, 2017
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U.S.—A new, exclusive CNN investigative report revealed Thursday that millions of American voters may have potentially colluded with the Trump campaign to elect Donald Trump as President of the United States.

While Russia has been accused of interfering in the election, the breaking report indicates that the collusion may have extended to a significant portion of the U.S. population—“as many as 60 million citizens, and possibly even more.”

“The conspiracy goes much deeper than anyone expected,” Jake Tapper said on his news segment The Politics Lead. “We’re talking tens of millions of people involved in this secret plot to make sure Hillary didn’t make it into the White House and to prop up Donald Trump as the winner.”

The CNN report does not accuse anyone of hacking or rigging the vote, but rather suggests that those colluding with the real estate mogul in the far-reaching scheme may have simply walked into voting booths and cast their vote for Donald Trump, giving him the electoral college victory.

“It’s far more sinister than we thought,” a visibly disturbed Tapper said.
Title: former Russian intel officer at the meeting worked for US State Dept.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2017, 09:48:18 PM: This is Breitbart so let's double check this, but it appears that the former Russian intel officer at the meeting along with the Russian lawyer with Donnie of whom the Pravdas trumpet was

a) a double citizen of US and Russia (how does a former Russian intel guy get US citizenship?), and

, , , drum roll , , ,

b) had worked as an interpreter for Hillary's State Department:

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/07/17/new-york-times-omits-clinton-state-department-link-trump-jr-meeting/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20170717
Title: WaPo: Russki ambassador says Sessions discussed campaign with him
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2017, 06:37:04 PM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-discussed-trump-campaign-related-matters-with-russian-ambassador-us-intelligence-intercepts-show/2017/07/21/3e704692-6e44-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html?utm_term=.3930cd8ca097

This reads article REALLY badly. DO NOTE the incongruity of the headline and this within the body:

"Officials emphasized that the information contradicting Sessions comes from U.S. intelligence on Kislyak’s communications with the Kremlin, and acknowledged that the Russian ambassador could have mischaracterized or exaggerated the nature of his interactions.

“Obviously I cannot comment on the reliability of what anonymous sources describe in a wholly uncorroborated intelligence intercept that the Washington Post has not seen and that has not been provided to me,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a Justice Department spokeswoman in a statement. She reiterated that Sessions did not discuss interference in the election."

AGAIN, on the whole this article reads quite devastatingly.

Russian and other foreign diplomats in Washington and elsewhere have been known, at times, to report false or misleading information to bolster their standing with their superiors or to confuse U.S. intelligence agencies."
Title: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: ccp on July 22, 2017, 07:13:45 AM: " President Trump accomplished only one thing by railing at Attorney General Sessions: He added to the growing disinclination of quality people to work in his administration. No one with self-respect wants to work in a place where the boss not only won’t back you up when the going gets tough, but will turn on you with a vengeance — especially when there’s a need to divert attention from his own shortcomings.

Whether we’re talking about the shoddy behavior that intensified calls for a special counsel or about the selection of the officials who made the key decisions that have armed the special counsel with limitless jurisdiction, the president has only himself to blame. "

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449743/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-president-blame-mueller-affair

As Doug says impeachment would not happen unless the Right gives in............. :|
Title: Tom Delay
Post by: ccp on July 22, 2017, 07:32:24 AM: He is the guy who could get things done in the House. We need someone like him back. Ryan is a loser.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/attorney-general-recusal-investigation-Tom-DeLay/2017/07/20/id/802914/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 12:45:34 PM: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/343164-trump-launches-all-out-assault-on-mueller-probe?rnd=1500739275
Title: Tucker and Ned Ryan: Weaponizing classified intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 12:55:55 PM: Fascinating discussion about at 06:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjCi2xLRgZQ

about this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-discussed-trump-campaign-related-matters-with-russian-ambassador-us-intelligence-intercepts-show/2017/07/21/3e704692-6e44-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html?utm_term=.0246b51d7c7c

Why isn't the FBI going after these leakers?

Also see the segment at 10:22
Title: Re: Tucker and Ned Ryan: Weaponizing classified intel
Post by: G M on July 22, 2017, 12:57:32 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 12:55:55 PM

Fascinating discussion about at 06:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjCi2xLRgZQ

about this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-discussed-trump-campaign-related-matters-with-russian-ambassador-us-intelligence-intercepts-show/2017/07/21/3e704692-6e44-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html?utm_term=.0246b51d7c7c

Why isn't the FBI going after these leakers?

A very good question.
Title: Morris: Did Trump make a concession to Putin at G20 on adoptions?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 01:42:00 PM: Did Trump Make A Big Concession To Putin At G20?
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on July 21, 2017
At the recent G20 meeting in Hamburg this month, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin met on the side with President Trump for what they called an "informal" fifteen minute session. Press reports indicate that they discussed "adoptions."

Presumably, this refers to the Russian ban on American adoptions of Russian infants that was enacted in 2012 to retaliate against the United States for new sanctions imposed by the Congress on Russians. The sanctions, called the Magnitsky Act, were voted to punish individual Russians who were complicit in the jailhouse murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was arrested after exposing hundreds of millions of dollars of corruption by Putin.

At the time of the adoption ban, Russia was the third most popular country for infant adoptions with almost 1,000 adoptions each year.

Putin wants the Magnitsky Act repealed by Congress. Human rights activist Bill Browder wants them extended to 280 new Russians who he says were complicit in the persecution, arrest, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky or in the corruption he exposed.

To say that they discussed "adoptions" is a euphemism for the fact that they likely talked about repealing the Magnitsky Act. Because Magnitsky's charges of corruption were personally leveled at Putin and perhaps because he might have been involved in the murder, the Russian leader has pushed hard for it repeal.

The push to weaken the Magnitsky Act interfaces with the charges that Trump and Putin conspired to fix the U.S. election. The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her countryman, lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, both were hired as lobbyists for a Foundation pushing for repeal of the Magnitsky Act. And they were also both present at the now famous meeting with Trump's son and also raised the issue of "adoptions" with him.

To add to the mix, Fusion GPS, the negative research firm that hired former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump, also worked to lobby against the Magnitsky Act.

So, we are driven to ask the question: Did Trump promise Putin to weaken -- or at least not expand -- the Magnitsky Act?

The fact that Putin's lobbyists raised the Magnitsky Act with Trump Jr. and now that the dictator himself brought it up with the president, shows how important the question is to Putin personally. If Trump relented and gave in to Putin on the issue, it is a very big deal indeed.

The media, so far, has not penetrated beyond the description of the meeting as being about "adoptions" to get at the real issue beneath.
Title: Re: Morris: Did Trump make a concession to Putin at G20 on adoptions?
Post by: G M on July 22, 2017, 02:28:16 PM: Ok, my eyes are glazing over. Russian adoptions? Who exactly gives a rat's ass?

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 01:42:00 PM
Did Trump Make A Big Concession To Putin At G20?
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on July 21, 2017
At the recent G20 meeting in Hamburg this month, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin met on the side with President Trump for what they called an "informal" fifteen minute session. Press reports indicate that they discussed "adoptions."

Presumably, this refers to the Russian ban on American adoptions of Russian infants that was enacted in 2012 to retaliate against the United States for new sanctions imposed by the Congress on Russians. The sanctions, called the Magnitsky Act, were voted to punish individual Russians who were complicit in the jailhouse murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was arrested after exposing hundreds of millions of dollars of corruption by Putin.

At the time of the adoption ban, Russia was the third most popular country for infant adoptions with almost 1,000 adoptions each year.

Putin wants the Magnitsky Act repealed by Congress. Human rights activist Bill Browder wants them extended to 280 new Russians who he says were complicit in the persecution, arrest, and murder of Sergei Magnitsky or in the corruption he exposed.

To say that they discussed "adoptions" is a euphemism for the fact that they likely talked about repealing the Magnitsky Act. Because Magnitsky's charges of corruption were personally leveled at Putin and perhaps because he might have been involved in the murder, the Russian leader has pushed hard for it repeal.

The push to weaken the Magnitsky Act interfaces with the charges that Trump and Putin conspired to fix the U.S. election. The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her countryman, lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, both were hired as lobbyists for a Foundation pushing for repeal of the Magnitsky Act. And they were also both present at the now famous meeting with Trump's son and also raised the issue of "adoptions" with him.

To add to the mix, Fusion GPS, the negative research firm that hired former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump, also worked to lobby against the Magnitsky Act.

So, we are driven to ask the question: Did Trump promise Putin to weaken -- or at least not expand -- the Magnitsky Act?

The fact that Putin's lobbyists raised the Magnitsky Act with Trump Jr. and now that the dictator himself brought it up with the president, shows how important the question is to Putin personally. If Trump relented and gave in to Putin on the issue, it is a very big deal indeed.

The media, so far, has not penetrated beyond the description of the meeting as being about "adoptions" to get at the real issue beneath.
Title: Russia coalition with anti-frackers via shell corp
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2017, 02:10:36 PM: Not directly on point, but worth noting:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/16/russia-fights-us-fracking-using-shell-company-to-f/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdSalpUQTNNMll3WVdZeCIsInQiOiJINlVCRmZJSHVPOVN2VW5TVGczYXluOHQ2UmZJeE9HcjBhQWNNK1p4TWI0NHk2dXhvZmRrajA2blBtZ0t3ZGVRd2M2TEtqcVZUa3Uyc21sUGZraWhQcnZGUG1KY09ibk1wQXVXTDFBQmxhUzlxZm00dmxQb2xaSW1QOUdTRHhBTCJ9
Title: Kushner's statement
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2017, 12:51:58 PM: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/kushnerstatement0724.pdf
Title: Trump Needs To Be Smart About How He Fires Mueller
Post by: G M on July 26, 2017, 08:12:50 AM: https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/07/24/trump-needs-to-be-smart-about-how-he-fires-mueller-n2358768

Trump Needs To Be Smart About How He Fires Mueller
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Jul 24, 2017 12:01 AM

Trump must eventually fire Robert Mueller, a partisan tool carrying water for his Establishment pals as he oversees an utterly corrupt “investigation” where the only person we actually know committed any wrongdoing is his bestest buddy Jim Comey. But Trump can’t just lash out and do it, though it is well within his political and moral right to do so. No, he’s got to do it cleverly, with cunning, in a way that shows the American people exactly why Mueller’s witch hunt is a flaming dumpster fire of conflicts of interest and contempt for the right of normal Americans to have a say in their own governance.

Trump has to set the stage before he pulls the trigger and puts the coup de grace into the temple of this appalling fiasco. He has to do it so the American people will see and understand why ending this idiocy is so absolutely necessary to preserve our Republic despite the mainstream media’s best effort to hide the truth.

Trump needs to seize the initiative from Leaky Bob. You know, I keep hearing how Mueller was this squared-away Marine officer, but through these incessant leaks his organization demonstrates a complete lack of both integrity and discipline. Mueller seems unwilling or unable to exercise any kind of leadership over his team of Hillary donors, or to instill a culture of seriousness and impartiality. The continuing misconduct of his out-of-control, ever-expanding fiefdom demonstrates that he must be relieved of command. And here’s the letter the president should send to him to set the stage to do it.

Robert Mueller

Special Counsel

United States Department of Justice

Dear Mr. Mueller:

I write in my capacity as the President, and to you in your capacity as a subordinate executive branch officer.

[This is where the president clarifies who works for whom – and whom the American people elected. Hint: It wasn’t the Menschian Suddenly-Aware-That-Russia-Is-Bad Gang.]

You were appointed to investigate the baseless and politically motivated claims of collusion with Russia. While I am frustrated at the partisan innuendo and improper leaks, I respect this process. Yet these false claims have interfered with my administration’s ability to deliver on the promises I made to the tens of millions of Americans who voted for me last November.

[This is where the President makes clear that he will not let these bogus charges derail the policies the American people voted for. You establishment creeps want to go back to business as usual? Win an election. Your coup fantasies? Not happening.]

It is important for me to tell you and the American people, who will read this letter since I intend to make it public, that nothing here seeks to impugn your integrity. You served your country honorably as a Marine overseas and in various roles at home.

[Of course, Trump must tweet out this letter, and it must be distributed far and wide by the skillful and smooth Anthony Scaramucci so that voters can read it themselves and not have to rely on the CNN/NYT/MSNBC/WaPo Lie Machine’s spin.]

But several troubling matters related to your investigation have arisen, so I am directing you to provide me a written explanation regarding the following matters no later than noon three days hence. I intend to release your response to the public, which must have full confidence in your investigation if it is to put to rest these baseless allegations.

[Shift the paradigm! Mr. President, this guy works for you. He owes you – and the American people – an explanation!]

1. 28 CFR 45.2 (”Disqualification arising from personal or political relationship”) bars participation in any investigation involving a personal friend. You are a long-time, close personal friend and mentor of James Comey. He is the source of allegations against me that leaks from your team that indicate that you are investigating. Please explain why you contend that 28 C.F.R. 45.2 does not apply to you based upon your close personal friendship with Mr. Comey. Please explain how your close friendship with this accuser will not undermine the American people’s confidence in the impartiality and fairness of your investigation.

[I was just discussing with one of my very, very prominent lawyer buddies how this whole thing stinks and would never be tolerated in the normal legal world. Any American is going to understand that you don’t appoint the pal of the “victim” to investigate the “crime.”]

2. Federal Election Commission filings show the political donations made by your staff, including donations of the maximum amount allowed by law, are overwhelmingly directed toward the Democratic Party. [Insert here a list of them and their Hillary payoffs so the people can see just how outrageous this really is.] Please explain why 28 C.F.R. 45.2 does not apply to your staff based on their demonstrated partisan preference for liberal Democrats who oppose my administration. Please explain how it happens that none of your staff appears to have primarily donated to Republicans – nor any of them to my candidacy despite the fact about 45% of American voters voted for me.

[Seriously. What the hell? The American people need to hear loudly and clearly that Mueller is picking members of the Felonia von Pantsuit fraternity for his metastasizing mob – and they’ll ask “Why?” Mueller cannot give a good explanation because there isn’t one.]

3. On June 14, 2017, the news media reported a leak from inside your investigation to the effect that I was personally the subject of an investigation for “obstruction of justice.” This leak was widely perceived as a bureaucratic maneuver designed to prevent me from exercising my prerogative under the Constitution of relieving you, a subordinate executive branch officer, of your duties. Recently, there were leaks about you unilaterally further expanding the probe beyond the bogus Russian collusion claims to my personal financial matters from a decade ago. Fairly or not, these shameful betrayals of your confidence by members of your team (assuming the media is accurate, which is questionable) portray you as using the kind of tactics that resulted in my mandate to “drain the swamp.” And these endless leaks are especially troubling in light of Mr. Comey’s admission that he leaked information to manipulate the special counsel process, while hiding from the American people the fact that I was never under investigation for collusion with Russia.

[Time to remind people that Mueller is not leading a group of dedicated professionals pursuing the truth but a liberal agenda-driven, undisciplined band of Hillary hacks who are just another set of Washington insiders playing the same old political games.]

If these leaks are accurate, please explain the steps you are taking to identify who on your team violated your trust and the trust of the American people. If the leaks are not true, please unequivocally state that fact. Please also explain the steps you are taking to ensure that your staff will act professionally and with integrity in the future in order to regain the American people’s confidence in the impartiality and fairness of your investigation.

[Boom. Put it back on Mr. Integrity™ to explain what he plans to do to restore some professionalism to the circle of jerks that is his team.]

This matter must be resolved quickly and completely, in a manner which all Americans see as absolutely impartial and fair. I am directing your public response to this letter both in fairness to you, because you deserve a chance to answer these concerns, and for the American people, who have questions that require answers.

[So you wanna play this out in the media? Okay. Except now you can’t do it from in hiding using whispers and lies. Time to stand up and be held accountable instead of talking smack via cowardly gossip through friendly liberal media catamites.]

And the American people deserve those answers soon, because they deserve an executive branch that can devote its full efforts to the agenda the people voted for. I am confident you share my determination that this not become another endless, expensive, and ultimately meaningless exercise in Washington gamesmanship. Accordingly, unless additional time, not to exceed 30 days, is granted upon a showing of good cause, I direct you to present your written findings by October 31, 2017. At that point, your appointment as Special Counsel will expire and any remaining matters requiring further investigation will continue to be investigated via normal Department of Justice investigatory channels.

[Set a fuse and light it. This charade cannot go on endlessly, so don’t let it.]

Donald J. Trump

President of the United States

[A useful reminder that he is the duly-elected President, and all the haters, liberal liars, and media hacks are not.]

Mueller has to go, sooner or later, but the President must first set the stage and make sure the American people understand exactly how much of an utter scam this whole thing is before he acts. Impeachment – the ultimate goal of Mueller/Comey and their liberal establishment string-pullers – is a political act. To pull off their unbelievably dangerous and destructive coup, the establishment needs to get a bunch of Republicans and the House and Senate to go along. Some of the RINOs are itching to, but they are cowards and they can be controlled by fear of voter backlash. By appealing to the people and making his case to them, the President will ensure that the people will tell their elected representatives, “Oh, hell no.” And the coup will sputter then peter out in pathetic failure, much like a Fredocon watching Cinemax at midnight without his Viagra.

Sad!

But Trump can’t act before he makes the case. Sure, the media will empty its bowels in horror at this letter and scream about “intimidation” and “interference,” but normal people will read it and ask “Yeah, why is this guy investigating claims made by his friend? That sounds unfair. And how come Mueller is appointing all Democrat Hillarybots? That’s not right.”

So, when Mueller refuses to follow the reasonable order of his elected superior to explain his outrageous conflicts of interest, Trump will be able to toss him and his band of hacks into the Schumer can. Yeah, the media will melt down, but normal Americans will shrug, and Trump will continue doing the job we elected him to do.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 26, 2017, 08:23:54 AM: Rush Limbaugh spoke of this exact Kurt Schlichter article yesterday

But since when has Trump been smart about firing anyone ?

Fed up in NJ
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 26, 2017, 08:26:35 AM: Quote from: ccp on July 26, 2017, 08:23:54 AM
Rush Limbaugh spoke of this exact Kurt Schlichter article yesterday

But since when has Trump been smart about firing anyone ?

Fed up in NJ

This is the problem.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 09:12:26 AM: In addition to all the donations by his team, there is also the attorney who represented Hillary against FOIA requests. IMHO, this communicates Mueller's intent even stronger than donations.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 26, 2017, 11:17:54 AM: " IMHO, this communicates Mueller's intent even stronger than donations. "

What does anyone make of belt way Repubs coming out and saying they have the upmost respect for Mueller when ever they get approached about all these Clinon Obma lawyers being hired?

Such as Paul Ryano
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 12:18:06 PM: That as usual they are grabbed by the pussy.
Title: More Emily Farkas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 01:10:44 PM: Given the source, read with care.

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/07/25/video-ex-obama-official-advocated-spying-trump-urges-intel-community-compromise-sources-methods/
Title: WSJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 01:33:00 PM: Some additional thoughts:

a) Trump explicitly ran on prosecuting Hillary;

b) He went against this promise after the election; therefore unfair to Sessions to criticize him for failure to prosecute now;

c) Sessions is doing excellent Trumpism work on MS-13 and illegal immigration

d) In my opinion, Sessions has performed badly on the legal issues surrounding the six Muslim country moratorium (ban)

e) Who would replace? Who could be approved? Giuliani? Nope, he supports Sessions recusal and would be much weaker on illegals.

The WSJ makes some powerful points here:

By The Editorial Board
July 25, 2017 7:54 p.m. ET
1479 COMMENTS

Donald Trump won’t let even success intrude on his presidential ego, so naturally he couldn’t let the Senate’s health-care victory stand as the story of Tuesday. Instead he continued to demean Jeff Sessions, and in the process he is harming himself, alienating allies, and crossing dangerous legal and political lines.

For a week President Trump has waged an unseemly campaign against his own Attorney General, telling the New York Times he wished he’d never hired him, unleashing a tweet storm that has accused Mr. Sessions of being “beleaguered” and “weak.”

Mr. Trump is clearly frustrated that the Russia collusion story is engulfing his own family. But that frustration has now taken a darker turn. This humiliation campaign is clearly aimed at forcing a Sessions resignation. Any Cabinet appointee serves at a President’s pleasure, but the deeply troubling aspect of this exercise is Mr. Trump’s hardly veiled intention: the commencement of a criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton by the Department of Justice and the firing of special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

On Tuesday morning Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Sessions “has taken a very weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes. ” This might play well with the red-meat crowd in Mr. Trump’s Twitterverse, but Sen. Lindsey Graham was explicit and correct in describing the legal line Mr. Trump had crossed.

“Prosecutorial decisions should be based on applying facts to the law without hint of political motivation,” Sen. Graham said. “To do otherwise is to run away from the long-standing American tradition of separating the law from politics regardless of party.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis also came to Mr. Sessions’ defense, citing his “unwavering commitment to the rule of law,” and Sen. Richard Shelby called him “a man of integrity.”

We will put the problem more bluntly. Mr. Trump’s suggestion that his Attorney General prosecute his defeated opponent is the kind of crude political retribution one expects in Erdogan’s Turkey or Duterte’s Philippines.

Mr. Sessions had no way of knowing when he accepted the AG job that the Russia probe would become the firestorm it has, or that his belated memory of brief, public meetings with the Russian ambassador in 2016 would require his recusal from supervising the probe. He was right to step back once the facts were out, not the least to shelter the Trump Administration from any suspicion of a politicized investigation.

If Mr. Trump wants someone to blame for the existence of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, he can pick up a mirror. That open-ended probe is the direct result of Mr. Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey months into his Russia investigation and then tweet that Mr. Comey should hope there are no Oval Office tapes of their meeting. That threat forced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump thought he could say anything and get away with it, and most often he did. A sitting President is not a one-man show. He needs allies in politics and allies to govern. Mr. Trump’s treatment of Jeff Sessions makes clear that he will desert both at peril to his Presidency.

No matter how powerful the office of the Presidency, it needs department leaders to execute policy. If by firing or forcing out Jeff Sessions Mr. Trump makes clear that his highest priority is executing personal political desires or whims, he will invite resignations from his first-rate Cabinet and only political hacks will stand in to replace them. And forget about Senate confirmation of his next AG.

Even on the day that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was scraping together enough Republican votes to avoid a humiliating defeat for the President on health care, Mr. Trump was causing Senators to publicly align themselves with Mr. Sessions. Past some point of political erosion, Mr. Trump’s legislative agenda will become impossible to accomplish. Mr. Trump prides himself as a man above political convention, but there are some conventions he can’t ignore without destroying his Presidency.
Title: WSJ: GPS Unregistered Russian agent?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 02:43:39 PM: Second post:

By James Freeman
July 26, 2017 4:55 p.m. ET
180 COMMENTS

Democrats are now promising Americans a “better deal,” but it will be hard to stop talking about the deal that voters rejected last November. Today The Hill reports:

Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book will double down on Russia’s interference and James Comey’s involvement in her stunning election defeat, according to sources familiar with the memoir.

Privately, Clinton has told friends and longtime associates that she “wants the whole story out there” as she rushes to tweak and put the finishing touches on the book due out in September.

And if there’s one thing that Hillary Clinton is known for, it’s getting the whole story out there. But readers interested in this subject won’t have to wait until September to learn more. A witness expected to testify at Thursday’s rescheduled hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee may shed some light on Russian interference in the 2016 election, though perhaps not in the way Mrs. Clinton might have hoped.

William Browder, an American-born investor and onetime cheerleader for Russia’s economic potential, has for years been among Vladimir Putin’s most effective opponents. Ever since his Russian investment fund was ripped off and his Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered, Mr. Browder has been shining a light on Russian corruption. He succeeded in persuading Congress and President Obama to enact the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to sanction Russia’s human-rights abusers.

In Mr. Browder’s prepared testimony for Senate Judiciary, he accuses a network of Beltway influence peddlers of disseminating Russian propaganda in an effort to persuade U.S. lawmakers to repeal the Magnitsky Act. According to Mr. Browder:

While they were conducting these operations in Washington, DC, at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

United States law is very explicit that those acting on behalf of foreign governments and their interests must register under FARA so that there is transparency about their interests and their motives.

Mr. Browder says that a leader of the anti-Magnitsky campaign was Natalia Veselnitskaya, who recently became famous for trying to make this case to Donald Trump, Jr. in a meeting last summer. Also relevant to the 2016 campaign, Mr. Browder says:

Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act. He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistle-blower and was instead a criminal. They also spread false information that my presentations to lawmakers around the world were untrue.

So the same firm that generated rumors about the Russians having damaging information on President Trump—a project funded by Mr. Trump’s American political opponents, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin—was also working for the Russians?

Fox News describes the reaction today of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa):

“Mr. Simpson’s company, Fusion GPS, is the same firm that oversaw the creation of the unverified Trump Dossier,” Grassley said in his opening statement. “It is vital for the Committee to fully understand Fusion’s failure to register under FARA and its role in the creating and spreading of the dossier...There are public reports that the FBI used the dossier to kickstart its Russia investigation—Did the FBI know that Fusion pitched Russian propaganda for another client as it pushed the Trump dossier?”

This column asked Fusion GPS to comment on Mr. Browder’s prepared testimony and received this response:

Let’s be clear about what’s really happening: The President’s political allies are targeting Fusion GPS because the firm was reported to be the first to raise the alarm over Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

That may be true, but it’s not a denial of anything in Mr. Browder’s prepared testimony. Speaking of which, as readers make judgments about the character of various players in this drama, they might want to review Mr. Browder’s account of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky after he blew the whistle on corruption and was imprisoned because he would not withdraw his sworn testimony against Russian officials:

They put him in cells with no heat and no windowpanes and he nearly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor and sewage bubbling up...He developed severe abdominal pains, he lost 40 pounds, and he was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones and prescribed an operation for August 2009. However, the operation never occurred. A week before he was due to have surgery, he was moved to a maximum security prison called Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the harshest prisons in Russia. Most significantly for Sergei there were no medical facilities there to treat his medical conditions.

At Butyrka his health completely broke down. He was in agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote 20 desperate requests for medical attention, filing them with every branch of the Russian criminal justice system. All of those requests were either ignored or explicitly denied in writing.

After more than three months of untreated pancreatitis and gallstones, Sergei Magnitsky went into critical condition. The Butyrka authorities did not want to have responsibility for him, so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison that had medical facilities. But when he arrived there, instead of putting him in the emergency room they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons.

That night he was found dead on the cell floor.
Title: Trump looks a tad like Mussolini
Post by: ccp on July 26, 2017, 02:50:13 PM: "" Donald Trump won’t let even success intrude on his presidential ego, ""

There is an old clip of Mussolini nodding his head with a facial expression of his own self importance. Trump last night with his self important facial epxressions reminded me of that look on Mussolini. Not that Trumps policies are Mussolini's (of course not ) but the ego....................

Here it is . Imagine the orange hair :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOv-Ncs7vQk
Title: Scaramucci sells company to Chinese front
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2017, 09:10:10 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/anthony-scaramucci-business-white-house.html?emc=edit_th_20170201&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=1
Title: the Hill: intel chairman accuses OBAma aides of massive unmasking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2017, 07:19:07 PM: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/344226-intelligence-chairman-accuses-obama-aides-of-hundreds-of-unmasking
Title: WSJ: Strassel: Who paid for The Trump Dossier?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2017, 03:24:28 AM: By Kimberley A. Strassel
July 27, 2017 6:09 p.m. ET
336 COMMENTS

It has been 10 days since Democrats received the glorious news that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley would require Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort to explain their meeting with Russian operators at Trump Tower last year. The left was salivating at the prospect of watching two Trump insiders being grilled about Russian “collusion” under the klieg lights.

Yet Democrats now have meekly and noiselessly retreated, agreeing to let both men speak to the committee in private. Why would they so suddenly be willing to let go of this moment of political opportunity?

Fusion GPS. That’s the oppo-research outfit behind the infamous and discredited “Trump dossier,” ginned up by a former British spook. Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson also was supposed to testify at the Grassley hearing, where he might have been asked in public to reveal who hired him to put together the hit job on Mr. Trump, which was based largely on anonymous Russian sources. Turns out Democrats are willing to give up just about anything—including their Manafort moment—to protect Mr. Simpson from having to answer that question.

What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility.

We know Fusion is a for-hire political outfit, paid to dig up dirt on targets. This column first outed Fusion in 2012, detailing its efforts to tar a Mitt Romney donor. At the time Fusion insisted that the donor was “a legitimate subject of public records research.”

Mr. Grassley’s call for testimony has uncovered more such stories. Thor Halvorssen, a prominent human-rights activist, has submitted sworn testimony outlining a Fusion attempt to undercut his investigation of Venezuelan corruption. Mr. Halvorssen claims Fusion “devised smear campaigns, prepared dossiers containing false information,” and “carefully placed slanderous news items” to malign him and his activity.

William Browder, a banker who has worked to expose Mr. Putin’s crimes, testified to the Grassley committee on Thursday that he was the target of a similar campaign, saying that Fusion “spread false information” about him and his efforts. Fusion has admitted it was hired by a law firm representing a Russian company called Prevezon.

Prevezon employed one of the Russian operators who were at Trump Tower last year. The other Russian who attended that meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, is a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. He has acknowledged in court documents that he makes his career out of opposition research, the same work Fusion does. And that he’s often hired by Kremlin-connected Russians to smear opponents.

We know that at the exact time Fusion was working with the Russians, the firm had also hired a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump. Mr. Steele compiled his material, according to his memos, based on allegations from unnamed Kremlin insiders and other Russians. Many of the claims sound eerily similar to the sort of “oppo” Mr. Akhmetshin peddled.

We know that Mr. Simpson is tight with Democrats. His current attorney, Joshua Levy, used to work in Congress as counsel to no less than Chuck Schumer. We know from a Grassley letter that Fusion has in the past sheltered its clients’ true identities by filtering money through law firms or shell companies (Bean LLC and Kernel LLC).

Word is Mr. Simpson has made clear he will appear for a voluntary committee interview only if he is not specifically asked who hired him to dig dirt on Mr. Trump. Democrats are going to the mat for him over that demand. Those on the Judiciary Committee pointedly did not sign letters in which Mr. Grassley demanded that Fusion reveal who hired it.

Here’s a thought: What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources? Moreover, what if those Kremlin-tied sources already knew about this dirt-digging, tipped off by Mr. Akhmetshin? What if they specifically made up claims to dupe Mr. Steele, to trick him into writing this dossier?

Fusion GPS, in an email, said that it “did not spread false information about William Browder.” The firm said it is cooperating with Congress and that “the president and his allies are desperately trying to smear Fusion GPS because it investigated Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.”

If the Russian intention was to sow chaos in the American political system, few things could have been more effective than that dossier, which ramped up an FBI investigation and sparked congressional probes and a special counsel, deeply wounding the president. This is all to Mr. Putin’s benefit, and the question is whether Russia engineered it.

If Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Democrats and the media really want answers about Russian meddling, this is a far deeper well than the so-far scant case against Mr. Trump. If they refuse to dive into the story, we’ll know that the truth about Russia and the election was never what they were after.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 28, 2017, 11:18:16 AM: It looks more and more like Russia played both sides of the election and sought destabilization of US politics in retaliation for passage of the Magnitsky Act by Congress in 2012.

Russia appears to have succeeded in its efforts as well as the UK succeeded with the Zimmerman Telegram 100 years earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on July 28, 2017, 03:06:39 PM: Hi Rick,

yes looks like Russia did and the Dems are furthering the confusion and chaos by delegimazing Trump every which way they can though I don't think Russia had anything to do with outcome
Hillary should blame herself for the loss . Everything released was true. IF Comey and the DOJ had done their jobs in first place instead of giving her a pass then she would not evven have gotten as far as she did.

Putin must be hysterical with laughter over vodka behind the scenes.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on July 28, 2017, 04:16:12 PM: When one follows the money to Fusion GPS and the phony "Russian dossier" that it pushed to anti-Trump people, one can see the links to Putin and his efforts to rescind the Magnitsky Act. All you need know here is that the retired Brit who authored the "dossier" defended a libel action against him in the UK by claiming that he thoroughly disclosed to Fusion GPS that his sources were Russian.

Comey, McCain, and a cast of thousands were duped by that dossier because it confirmed their pre-existing opinions of Trump. Comey likely used the dossier to ratchet up the counterintel investigation of Trump people. Information in it was used to obtain a FISA warrant against certain Trump associates.

Of course, the Russians had the other alternative covered. If Hillary had been elected, then we'd be having investigations into the emails, servers, and other stuff. I am confident that Russian intel operatives were behind the leak of the Podesta emails to Wikileaks; but I am not confident that they did the original phishing scam on Podesta.

The most likely scenario here is that Putin outfoxed the DC swamp and the swamp does not want to admit it. Hence, it is in full cover-up mode. And, its cover-up consists mainly of attacking Trump in order to deflect the spotlight from them.

So, Putin and Russian intel has suceeded in neutralizing Trump with a special counsel investigation based upon a phony dossier that was spoon-fed to anti-Trump oppo research peeps by Russian operatives. And the entire meeting with Trump Jr was a set-up designed to ascertain whether his group would be friendly to Russia and its efforts to overturn Magnitsky. When Trmup Jr, Kushner and Manafort walked away, the effort shifted to the current effort to undermine Trump by using political opponents as unwittings.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on July 28, 2017, 04:58:13 PM: Quote from: rickn on July 28, 2017, 04:16:12 PM
When one follows the money to Fusion GPS and the phony "Russian dossier" that it pushed to anti-Trump people, one can see the links to Putin and his efforts to rescind the Magnitsky Act. All you need know here is that the retired Brit who authored the "dossier" defended a libel action against him in the UK by claiming that he thoroughly disclosed to Fusion GPS that his sources were Russian.

Comey, McCain, and a cast of thousands were duped by that dossier because it confirmed their pre-existing opinions of Trump. Comey likely used the dossier to ratchet up the counterintel investigation of Trump people. Information in it was used to obtain a FISA warrant against certain Trump associates.

Of course, the Russians had the other alternative covered. If Hillary had been elected, then we'd be having investigations into the emails, servers, and other stuff. I am confident that Russian intel operatives were behind the leak of the Podesta emails to Wikileaks; but I am not confident that they did the original phishing scam on Podesta.

The most likely scenario here is that Putin outfoxed the DC swamp and the swamp does not want to admit it. Hence, it is in full cover-up mode. And, its cover-up consists mainly of attacking Trump in order to deflect the spotlight from them.

So, Putin and Russian intel has suceeded in neutralizing Trump with a special counsel investigation based upon a phony dossier that was spoon-fed to anti-Trump oppo research peeps by Russian operatives. And the entire meeting with Trump Jr was a set-up designed to ascertain whether his group would be friendly to Russia and its efforts to overturn Magnitsky. When Trmup Jr, Kushner and Manafort walked away, the effort shifted to the current effort to undermine Trump by using political opponents as unwittings.

Exactly!
Title: Matthew Bracken on the attempted coup
Post by: G M on July 29, 2017, 08:46:35 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRKIsBlzVOk

Matthew Bracken on the attempted coup. Makes a lot of sense.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2017, 09:43:51 PM: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-lawyer-exclusive-idUSKBN1AH5F9
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on August 02, 2017, 03:37:35 AM: Lawyers performing a counterintelligence investigation is a recipe for disaster.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on August 02, 2017, 04:13:46 AM: "Lawyers performing a counterintelligence investigation is a recipe for disaster."

and maybe especially lawyers who are left handed going up against a right handed pitcher.

often that is by design from the manager.
Title: McCarthy: Why doesn't Trump unmask the unmaskers?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2017, 04:39:55 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450113/obama-administration-unmasking-trump-should-declassify?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-03&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: NRO: In defense of McMaster
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2017, 04:42:30 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450135/h-r-mcmaster-national-security-council-no-islamist-conspiracy-theory?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-03&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: McCarthy explaining what this means
Post by: ccp on August 03, 2017, 06:14:45 PM: Does anyone think for more then a fleeting second the mostly Obama ad Clinton tied lawyers will not find SOMeTHING?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450149/robert-mueller-grand-jury-appointment

Difference between Clinton is he was a hero to the press and could stay mostly popular in the polls while Trump is neither

It is much harder to believe this could end well then vice a versa :cry:
Title: Tucker, Krauthammer, & Turley
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2017, 08:04:53 PM: Some serious conversation here

00:00-12:05

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMotHFkwPds
Title: Re: McCarthy explaining what this means, Grand Jury
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2017, 06:24:18 AM: Quote from: ccp on August 03, 2017, 06:14:45 PM
Does anyone think for more then a fleeting second the mostly Obama ad Clinton tied lawyers will not find SOMeTHING?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450149/robert-mueller-grand-jury-appointment
...
It is much harder to believe this could end well then vice a versa :cry:

If having a special counsel at all was called for, this would be a routine step. But given other special prosecutors' history of running wild, this cannot end well. Mueller is certainly trying to be too entrenched to be dissolved. Might as well put him in the cabinet at this point, and in the Presidential chain of succession. It looks like a permanent department, like we had after Fast and Furious and IRS Targeting... oh skip that.

Grand Juries only hear the prosecutor's side of a story. Defense comes later, after being charged and in front of a different jury.

Just speculating, they will find irregularities in Trump's past Russian dealings, enough to make the derangement side go nuts but not enough to impeach or remove him from office. Like Scooter Libby, somebody will fall, guilty or not, for trying to help the boss, maybe a family member.

Unless there is some crime they know of and we don't, this is a witch hunt. If Putin had inside plants in the US government during the 2016 election, those officials were in the Obama administration. It's hard to believe that's where this is leading but that's where the power was and where the violations of law most likely occurred. Trump didn't need their money - like the Clintons did. And everyone seeks opposition rearch.

I can't imagine that a prosecutor staffs up for war and then ends up taking my view that Trump was an oaf for saying he hopes Russia will hack and disclose Hillary's emails and his offspring same thing for taking the fake meeting, but did nothing seriously wrong.

The electorate already ruled on the parts we already knew. None of that leads to impeachment. It has to be something new, big and unexpected.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on August 04, 2017, 07:16:36 AM: " The electorate already ruled on the parts we already knew. None of that leads to impeachment. It has to be something new, big and unexpected. "

For impeachment yes. For political destruction no.

Yes the derangement side led by Wash compost NY slimes and fake news CNN will be leading the political damage assault with every legal argument this run away prosecution will dredge up.

The LEFT will use this for campaigning and the very weak Republicans will run in panic flight, which is worst of all.

Tax reform will be half hearted .

Forget a wall. IF we do get real enforcement of immigration we can also go ahead and send welcome flowers to everyone already here and to all their extended families whose immigrations lawyers are already working out sytem to get here.

I am pessimistic.
Title: Implications of Grand Jury being in DC and not VA
Post by: ccp on August 04, 2017, 05:57:29 PM: right in 90% african american DC no less..........

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/alan-dershowitz-robert-mueller-grand-jury-russia/2017/08/04/id/805961/

This is all a hit job.
Title: Mueller asks WH for Flynn documents re Turkish money
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2017, 10:20:58 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/us/politics/robert-mueller-michael-flynn-turkey.html?emc=edit_na_20170804&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Russian money to various Reps
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 05, 2017, 11:11:14 AM: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/03/tangled-web-connects-russian-oligarch-money-gop-campaigns
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on August 05, 2017, 04:53:53 PM: Len Blavatnik is not exactly a secretive person.

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326628 (http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326628)

Blavatnik's investment company's office is on the 20th floor of a large office building across the street from Trump Tower. So is the Argentine Consulate and many other business.

The gist of the professor's article is that because Blavatnik may know Deripaska and because Deripaska is connected to Putin and other pro-Putin oligarchs, ergo, Blavatnik's donations to the Republican PAC's are motivated by pro-Putin interests rather by Blavatnik's interest in maintaining good relations with the party that might control the SEC and other regulators that have authority over his US based investment business.

The author's bio

http://www.udallas.edu/cob/about/faculty/may-ruth.php (http://www.udallas.edu/cob/about/faculty/may-ruth.php)

I am unimpressed with her reasoning in the article. For example, 48% does not constitute a majority stake in any company. I thought a CFP and a business professor would know that. Also, it appears that she is connected with many of the same Ukrainian characters that attempted to assist Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign. In other words, she does not seem all that more credentialed than many posters on this forum. Yet, she published a sloppily written column designed to make a political point.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on August 06, 2017, 06:23:18 PM: Quote from: rickn on August 05, 2017, 04:53:53 PM
Len Blavatnik is not exactly a secretive person.

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326628 (http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326628)

Blavatnik's investment company's office is on the 20th floor of a large office building across the street from Trump Tower. So is the Argentine Consulate and many other business.

The gist of the professor's article is that because Blavatnik may know Deripaska and because Deripaska is connected to Putin and other pro-Putin oligarchs, ergo, Blavatnik's donations to the Republican PAC's are motivated by pro-Putin interests rather by Blavatnik's interest in maintaining good relations with the party that might control the SEC and other regulators that have authority over his US based investment business.

The author's bio

http://www.udallas.edu/cob/about/faculty/may-ruth.php (http://www.udallas.edu/cob/about/faculty/may-ruth.php)

I am unimpressed with her reasoning in the article. For example, 48% does not constitute a majority stake in any company. I thought a CFP and a business professor would know that. Also, it appears that she is connected with many of the same Ukrainian characters that attempted to assist Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign. In other words, she does not seem all that more credentialed than many posters on this forum. Yet, she published a sloppily written column designed to make a political point.

http://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=Ruth+May&type=donors

Lots of donations to Hillary from a Ruth May, who just happens to work for the University of Dallas.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2017, 07:25:09 AM: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/6/donald-trump-fights-robert-mueller-in-public-relat/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRRM09EWmxOR1kyTkRReSIsInQiOiJjQWJcL3V5elVGd3NENkF3K1c0eEkzNG5qVnFPMnc3Nmg5bnF1TG91MStjYnIxbHFBV1d0SEhYaG1UaElsQ1NIekpleDIzenQ4ZU9Zd1FmQzhOSjJMUWdvb09MZWFSZERIMjBsQlwvWHJSM252Q1RTSDh1eWNvTVZtVmJ1bld6NkNhIn0%3D
Title: Mueller searches Manafort's home
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2017, 09:15:35 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/us/politics/paul-manafort-home-search-mueller.html?emc=edit_na_20170809&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: From the left, here comes the judge
Post by: ccp on August 10, 2017, 06:33:08 AM: Judge that is reported to be umpiring Mueller's team of Democrat Party lawyers against the much smaller and weaker team of Trump attorneys

Originally appointed by W for some commission and later Judgeship by no other then Brock. She did some lobbying briefly for the RIIA - the corrupt musci business
and her husband is a high level exec at Nat Geo ( we know how liberal that mag has become from multiple posts on this board)
While this does not prove political bias it seems like all the people involved with Mueller have ties to the crats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_A._Howell
Title: How Obama’s Weakness Encouraged Russian Election Meddling
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2017, 08:15:22 AM: It was Obama not Trump who was calibrating policy toward Russia

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/08/04/obamas-weakness-encouraged-russian-meddling/

How Obama’s Weakness Encouraged Russian Election Meddling
DAMIR MARUSIC
From the mysterious death of Mikhail Lesin in Washington DC to the assault on an American in front of our embassy in Moscow, President Obama was very careful in calibrating his responses to Russian provocations throughout 2016. Too careful.

Amid the unrelenting media din accompanying the latest twist in the White House’s ongoing personnel struggles last week, BuzzFeed News managed to cause a minor stir by publishing an update on the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Mikhail Lesin, the former Putin advisor instrumental in cowing Russia’s lively media in the early 2000s. Lesin, who died in a Washington DC hotel room on November 5, 2015 of “blunt force injuries of the head,” was said to have fatally injured himself by falling after being “excessively” drunk for several days. The death was officially ruled an accident in October 2016. The BuzzFeed article updated the narrative: two FBI agents with some knowledge of the case seemed to suggest that Lesin had in fact been beaten, perhaps with a baseball bat; that he was in Washington to talk to the Feds, and was put up at his hotel by the Department of Justice; and, implicitly, that there had been some kind of cover-up by the Obama Administration.

I was at a small conference in Lithuania almost two years ago, alongside several other Russia-watchers, when the news of Lesin’s death first broke. As our phones lit up with notifications, the consensus was unanimous: “He’s been whacked!” Russia experts have a kind of gallows humor reflex about unexpected deaths of those surrounding Vladimir Putin. Lesin had stepped down as the head of Gazprom Media a little less than a year before amid rumors of having fallen out with someone well-placed in the Kremlin, so his death immediately conjured up conspiracies in our minds. The fact that the Russian Embassy was furiously spinning the story hours after it had broken, saying Lesin had died of a heart attack when there was no way they could have known, just added fuel to the fire. And when it took more than four months for the D.C. coroner to announce that Lesin had died from a blow to the head, and another seven months for investigators to conclude that he had received it from an unlucky drunken fall, those suspicions hardened into a theory: The Obama Administration didn’t want this spiraling out into a large scandal because, among other things, it sought Russian cooperation on Syria and Ukraine.

Does BuzzFeed’s article confirm the theory? Not necessarily. We on the outside can’t know everything the Obama Administration was seeing at the time as it was calibrating its policy towards Russia, and we won’t know definitively for many more years to come. But given what we know of President Obama’s foreign policy thinking during his second term, largely due to the work of Jeffrey Goldberg and David Samuels, we can say that as a tendency, the President saw Putin’s Russia as a problem child to be corralled, not as an aggressive actor to be confronted. And in practice, that personal tendency of the President manifested itself as an over-reluctance to react on the part of his Administration—a kind of timidity.

This timidity was on display all throughout 2016, well before the President was confronted with a detailed report from the CIA containing evidence of Russian interference in our elections. In July of that year, just a little after Trump, Jr. held his meeting with the so-called Russian lobbyists in New York, an explosive video started making the rounds—footage of a Russian security guard wrestling an alleged U.S. spy to the ground right outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in the process fracturing the American’s shoulder. It was an act of unprecedented aggression on the part of the Russians, with at least one former U.S. intelligence official noting how such brazen behavior was unheard of even at the height of the Cold War. And it was but the most egregious manifestation of what appears to have been a concerted effort to intimidate U.S. diplomats in Russia. One American family had found its dog killed upon coming home; another diplomat discovered human feces smeared on his rug; and around the time the video, already months old, was leaked to the press, a military helicopter had repeatedly buzzed a car carrying a U.S. defense attaché in the north of Russia. To these provocations, the Obama Administration repeatedly turned the other cheek, presumably out of a desire to not scotch what they hoped were promising signs of a breakthrough in Ukraine or Syria.

Of course, not only did the promising breakthrough not materialize, but a month later, CIA Director John Brennan was knocking down President Obama’s door with a grim intel assessment: President Putin had personally authorized his agencies to commence meddling in the U.S. elections. It was armed with this knowledge that Obama said he confronted Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Huangzhou, China, telling him to “cut it out, or there would be serious consequences.” Putin must have had himself a hearty laugh.

In explaining how he approached Putin, Obama defended his understated manner at a press conference in December. “There have been folks out there who suggest somehow if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow it would potentially spook the Russians,” Obama said. “I think it doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well.” Given the fuller picture we now can piece together, it’s clear that it is Obama who didn’t read the Russian thought process very well. If Russian agents had bludgeoned Lesin into a pulp on U.S. soil under the nose of the Feds and had beaten a U.S. spy on the threshold of the U.S. embassy in Moscow without any perceptible blowback, what possible danger was there for Putin to roundly ignore Obama’s feeble threats?

And indeed, as the Washington Post reported, while Obama did in the end quietly authorize U.S. intelligence agencies to start developing and deploying a powerful cyber-weapon into critical Russian infrastructure, the most visible element of his response to Russian election meddling was taking two compounds used for intelligence gathering and expelling 35 suspected Russian spies—a symbolic gesture. Adding to the irony, the confiscations and expulsions were originally mooted as a response to the roughing up of the American agent in Moscow. Had Obama acted forthrightly then, Putin would have taken him more seriously when he leveled his threats in September.

Many Democrats seem to have conveniently forgotten just how halting, indecisive, and weak President Obama’s approach to Putin’s Russia had been in practice. When the BuzzFeed story first broke, some of the more prominent conspiracy theorists even tried to tie it to the Trump-Russia investigations:

"BREAKING: Vladimir Putin has likely killed another Russian related to the Trump-Russia probe. That makes it... {counting}... a *lot*." (Seth Abramson - Twitter)

The truth is, insofar as Russian interference helped elect Donald Trump at the margins, it was Obama’s timidity that encouraged them to try such brazen things in the first place.
Title: The Manafort Raid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2017, 12:09:14 PM: https://patriotpost.us/articles/50714
Title: Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC
Post by: G M on August 11, 2017, 02:47:56 PM: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/10/heres-the-memo-that-blew-up-the-nsc/amp/

Here’s the Memo That Blew Up the NSC

Fired White House staffer argued "deep state" attacked Trump administration because the president represents a threat to cultural Marxist memes, globalists, and bankers.
8 HOURS AGO
CATEGORIES: EXCLUSIVE
Jana Winter and Elias Groll
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The memo at the heart of the latest blowup at the National Security Council paints a dark picture of media, academics, the “deep state,” and other enemies allegedly working to subvert U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a copy of the document obtained by Foreign Policy.

The seven-page document, which eventually landed on the president’s desk, precipitated a crisis that led to the departure of several high-level NSC officials tied to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The author of the memo, Rich Higgins, who was in the strategic planning office at the NSC, was among those recently pushed out.

The full memo, dated May 2017, is titled “POTUS & Political Warfare.” It provides a sweeping, if at times conspiratorial, view of what it describes as a multi-pronged attack on the Trump White House.

Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”

The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president’s agenda.

Though not called out by name, McMaster was among those described in the document as working against Trump, according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the memo and the events. Higgins, the author, is widely regarded as a Flynn loyalist who dislikes McMaster and his team.

“It was about H.R. McMaster,” the source said. “So, when he starts reading it, he knows it’s him and he fires [Higgins].”

The story of the memo’s strange journey to the Oval Office captures the zeitgeist of what has become the tragicomedy of the current White House: a son trying to please his father, an isolated general on a mission to find a leaker, a right-wing blogger with a window into the nation’s security apparatus, and a president whose closest confidante is a TV personality.

The result is an even wider rift between the president and his national security advisor, marking what may be the beginning of the end of the general’s tenure, and a radical shift of power on the NSC.

The controversy over the memo has its origins in a hunt for staffers believed to be providing information to right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who seemed to have uncanny insight into the inner workings of the NSC. Cernovich in the past few months has been conducting a wide-ranging campaign against the national security advisor.

“McMaster was just very, very obsessed with this, with Cernovich,” a senior administration official told FP. “He had become this incredible specter.”

In July, the memo was discovered in Higgins’s email during what two sources described to Foreign Policy as a “routine security” audit of NSC staffers’ communications. Another source, however, characterized it as a McCarthy-type leak investigation targeting staffers suspected of communicating with Cernovich.

Higgins, who had worked on the Trump campaign and transition before coming to the NSC, drafted the memo in late May and then circulated the memo to friends from the transition, a number of whom are now in the White House.

After the memo was discovered, McMaster’s deputy, Ricky Waddell, summoned Higgins, who was told he could resign — or be fired, and risk losing his security clearance, according to two sources.

Higgins, who agreed to resign, was escorted out of the building. He later learned from his colleagues still at the NSC that his association to this now-infamous memo was the reason he was removed.

Following Higgins’s departure, McMaster set out to clean house, a source close the White House said — getting rid of NSC staffers linked to the memo, perceived as loyal to his predecessor, Michael Flynn, or simply those with whom he’d butted heads over foreign policy. Among those fired was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC’s top intelligence official, and Derek Harvey, who handled the NSC’s Middle East portfolio.

In the meantime, however, the memo had been working its way through the Trump White House. Among those who received the memo, according to two sources, was Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Jr., at that time in the glare of media scrutiny around his meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign, gave the memo to his father, who gushed over it, according to sources.

In a comedy of errors, Trump later learned from Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close friend of the president, that the memo’s author had been fired. Trump was “furious,” the senior administration official said. “He is still furious.”

The memo lays out what it described as a concerted campaign to undermine the president.

“The administration has been maneuvered into a constant back-pedal by relentless political warfare attacks structured to force him to assume a reactive posture that assures inadequate responses,” it reads. “The president can either drive or be driven by events; it’s time for him to drive them.”

The purpose of the memo, said a source familiar with the document, was to educate others in the White House about just what the president is allegedly up against.

“The memo maybe reads a little crazy, sure, but it’s not wrong and Rich isn’t crazy,” an administration official said.

Many inside the White House had only seen the first page or two of the memo — or had only read the excerpts published in the Atlantic, which first reported the existence of the memo, several sources said.

The memo’s repeated references to the Muslim Brotherhood — which is grouped among “key international players that includes the European Union and the United Nations — surprised few inside the NSC familiar with what been a Flynn obsession. “Oh look, it’s the newest member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” was a common joke among those critical of Flynn loyalists, and what they regarded as a conspiracy theory, a source close to the NSC said.

This 3,500-word memo was written in a personal capacity, according to a source familiar with its drafting. The source described it as a “technical assessment” of the current political situation, and said it was never disseminated from the NSC in any official manner, but shared with personal contacts from the Trump campaign.

“While opposition to President Trump manifests itself through political warfare memes centered on cultural Marxist narratives, this hardly means that opposition is limited to Marxists as conventionally understood,” the memo reads. “Having become the dominant cultural meme, some benefit from it while others are captured by it; including ‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”

“It’s not wrong per se,” said another official. “Actually, it’s not wrong at all. The not-wrong part is just, well, buried a bit I guess by some of the wackier parts.”

The memo calls out those pushing for rights “based on sex or ethnicity,” which is a “direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed.” It also says that “transgender acceptance” is “denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one’s sex.”

Contacted by FP, Higgins declined to comment on the memo or his departure from the NSC.

The recent NSC shake-up appears to go beyond concerns about the memo. The recently ousted NSC staffers had been brought in by Flynn, who resigned for allegedly lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the substance of a December phone call he had with a Russian official.

Flynn is now under investigation for, among other things, failing to report income for lobbying on behalf of Turkey shortly before he became involved in the campaign.

The elimination of Higgins, Cohen-Watnick, and Harvey has helped McMaster assert control of the NSC, which was staffed during the early days of the administration by those loyal to Flynn and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist.

Late last week, McMaster also planned to put at least four other NSC staffers on the chopping block, but was prevented from doing so by newly installed Chief of Staff John Kelly, according to two sources. All but one of those staffers had ties dating back to the campaign or transition.

A source close to McMaster denied those planned firings.

The White House press office did not respond to FP‘s request for comment. A NSC spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy against speaking about internal personnel issues.

Despite Higgins’s firing, McMaster’s difficulties inside the White House aren’t going away anytime soon — though he might.

McMaster “doesn’t really have any allies,” said a source familiar with the NSC staff. “It doesn’t seem as though he has the ear of the president, which is obviously essential to his survival.”

Kate Brannen and Jenna McLaughlin contributed reporting to this article.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on August 11, 2017, 03:35:45 PM: " http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/10/heres-the-memo-that-blew-up-the-nsc/amp/ "
IF true then McMAster covering it up

Trump knows of memo yet he defends McMaster so I don't know what to think.
Title: Trump and the campaign rejected meetings with Russians, Washington Post
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2017, 09:05:34 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-emails-show-aides-repeated-efforts-to-set-up-russia-meetings/2017/08/14/54d08da6-7dc2-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_russians-558pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.be1058cc6362

Amazing (or predictable?) how they put negative stories ahead of this one and then write and title this to sound like more appearances of collusion before you read far enough to see they kept turning down those offers.

"Trump campaign emails show aide’s repeated efforts to set up Russia meetings"

Yet the higher up you go in the organization, the more emphatic the answer NO was to the offers.

Mueller must be moving on to try to find 'evidence of other crimes that came up in the investigation'.

Don't ever let an IC and a good Grand Jury go to waste.
Title: A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Post by: G M on August 20, 2017, 04:01:08 PM: https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.
By Patrick LawrenceTwitter AUGUST 9, 2017

It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in the spring and early summer of 2016 were identified as remote hacks and, in short order, attributed to Russians acting in behalf of Donald Trump. A great edifice has been erected during this time. President Trump, members of his family, and numerous people around him stand accused of various corruptions and extensive collusion with Russians. Half a dozen simultaneous investigations proceed into these matters. Last week news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury, which issued its first subpoenas on August 3. Allegations of treason are common; prominent political figures and many media cultivate a case for impeachment.

The president’s ability to conduct foreign policy, notably but not only with regard to Russia, is now crippled. Forced into a corner and having no choice, Trump just signed legislation imposing severe new sanctions on Russia and European companies working with it on pipeline projects vital to Russia’s energy sector. Striking this close to the core of another nation’s economy is customarily considered an act of war, we must not forget. In retaliation, Moscow has announced that the United States must cut its embassy staff by roughly two-thirds. All sides agree that relations between the United States and Russia are now as fragile as they were during some of the Cold War’s worst moments. To suggest that military conflict between two nuclear powers inches ever closer can no longer be dismissed as hyperbole.

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

We are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception.
Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment. Few have noticed since these evasive terms first appeared that an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge. This is how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept—as the record shows many of them have done.

We come now to a moment of great gravity.

There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate.” This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
This article is based on an examination of the documents these forensic experts and intelligence analysts have produced, notably the key papers written over the past several weeks, as well as detailed interviews with many of those conducting investigations and now drawing conclusions from them. Before proceeding into this material, several points bear noting.

One, there are many other allegations implicating Russians in the 2016 political process. The work I will now report upon does not purport to prove or disprove any of them. Who delivered documents to WikiLeaks? Who was responsible for the “phishing” operation penetrating John Podesta’s e-mail in March 2016? We do not know the answers to such questions. It is entirely possible, indeed, that the answers we deserve and must demand could turn out to be multiple: One thing happened in one case, another thing in another. The new work done on the mid-June and July 5 events bears upon all else in only one respect. We are now on notice: Given that we now stand face to face with very considerable cases of duplicity, it is imperative that all official accounts of these many events be subject to rigorously skeptical questioning. Do we even know that John Podesta’s e-mail address was in fact “phished”? What evidence of this has been produced? Such rock-bottom questions as these must now be posed in all other cases.

Two, houses built on sand and made of cards are bound to collapse, and there can be no surprise that the one resting atop the “hack theory,” as we can call the prevailing wisdom on the DNC events, appears to be in the process of doing so. Neither is there anything far-fetched in a reversal of the truth of this magnitude. American history is replete with similar cases. The Spanish sank the Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898. Iran’s Mossadegh was a Communist. Guatemala’s Árbenz represented a Communist threat to the United States. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet. The Sandinistas were Communists. The truth of the Maine, a war and a revolution in between, took a century to find the light of day, whereupon the official story disintegrated. We can do better now. It is an odd sensation to live through one of these episodes, especially one as big as Russiagate. But its place atop a long line of precedents can no longer be disputed.

Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in our national-security institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty.
Three, regardless of what one may think about the investigations and conclusions I will now outline—and, as noted, these investigations continue—there is a bottom line attaching to them. We can even call it a red line. Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency—leave these new findings without reply. Not credibly, in any case. Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in these very institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty. Silence now, should it ensue, cannot be written down as an admission of duplicity, but it will come very close to one.

It requires no elaboration to apply the above point to the corporate media, which have been flaccidly satisfied with official explanations of the DNC matter from the start.

Qualified experts working independently of one another began to examine the DNC case immediately after the July 2016 events. Prominent among these is a group comprising former intelligence officers, almost all of whom previously occupied senior positions. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded in 2003, now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence. The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. Most of these men have decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies. This article reflects numerous interviews with all of them conducted in person, via Skype, or by telephone.

The customary VIPS format is an open letter, typically addressed to the president. The group has written three such letters on the DNC incident, all of which were first published by Robert Parry at www.consortiumnews.com. Here is the latest, dated July 24; it blueprints the forensic work this article explores in detail. They have all argued that the hack theory is wrong and that a locally executed leak is the far more likely explanation. In a letter to Barack Obama dated January 17, three days before he left office, the group explained that the NSA’s known programs are fully capable of capturing all electronic transfers of data. “We strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks,” the letter said. “If NSA cannot produce such evidence—and quickly—this would probably mean it does not have any.”

The day after Parry published this letter, Obama gave his last press conference as president, at which he delivered one of the great gems among the official statements on the DNC e-mail question. “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking,” the legacy-minded Obama said, “were not conclusive.” There is little to suggest the VIPS letter prompted this remark, but it is typical of the linguistic tap-dancing many officials connected to the case have indulged so as to avoid putting their names on the hack theory and all that derives from it.

Until recently there was a serious hindrance to the VIPS’s work, and I have just suggested it. The group lacked access to positive data. It had no lump of cyber-material to place on its lab table and analyze, because no official agency had provided any.

Donald Rumsfeld famously argued with regard to the WMD question in Iraq, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In essence, Binney and others at VIPS say this logic turns upside down in the DNC case: Based on the knowledge of former officials such as Binney, the group knew that (1) if there was a hack and (2) if Russia was responsible for it, the NSA would have to have evidence of both. Binney and others surmised that the agency and associated institutions were hiding the absence of evidence behind the claim that they had to maintain secrecy to protect NSA programs. “Everything that they say must remain classified is already well-known,” Binney said in an interview. “They’re playing the Wizard of Oz game.”

New findings indicate this is perfectly true, but until recently the VIPS experts could produce only “negative evidence,” as they put it: The absence of evidence supporting the hack theory demonstrates that it cannot be so. That is all VIPS had. They could allege and assert, but they could not conclude: They were stuck demanding evidence they did not have—if only to prove there was none.

Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations.
Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst. Two independent researchers selected it, Snowden-like, as the medium through which to disclose their findings. One of these is known as Forensicator and the other as Adam Carter. On July 9, Adam Carter sent Elizabeth Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media, a paper by the Forensicator that split the DNC case open like a coconut.

By this time Binney and the other technical-side people at VIPS had begun working with a man named Skip Folden. Folden was an IT executive at IBM for 33 years, serving 25 years as the IT program manager in the United States. He has also consulted for Pentagon officials, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Folden is effectively the VIPS group’s liaison to Forensicator, Adam Carter, and other investigators, but neither Folden nor anyone else knows the identity of either Forensicator or Adam Carter. This bears brief explanation.

The Forensicator’s July 9 document indicates he lives in the Pacific Time Zone, which puts him on the West Coast. His notes describing his investigative procedures support this. But little else is known of him. Adam Carter, in turn, is located in England, but the name is a coy pseudonym: It derives from a character in a BBC espionage series called Spooks. It is protocol in this community, Elizabeth Vos told me in a telephone conversation this week, to respect this degree of anonymity. Kirk Wiebe, the former SIGINT analyst at the NSA, thinks Forensicator could be “someone very good with the FBI,” but there is no certainty. Unanimously, however, all the analysts and forensics investigators interviewed for this column say Forensicator’s advanced expertise, evident in the work he has done, is unassailable. They hold a similarly high opinion of Adam Carter’s work.

Forensicator is working with the documents published by Guccifer 2.0, focusing for now on the July 5 intrusion into the DNC server. The contents of Guccifer’s files are known—they were published last September—and are not Forensicator’s concern. His work is with the metadata on those files. These data did not come to him via any clandestine means. Forensicator simply has access to them that others did not have. It is this access that prompts Kirk Wiebe and others to suggest that Forensicator may be someone with exceptional talent and training inside an agency such as the FBI. “Forensicator unlocked and then analyzed what had been the locked files Guccifer supposedly took from the DNC server,” Skip Folden explained in an interview. “To do this he would have to have ‘access privilege,’ meaning a key.”

What has Forensicator proven since he turned his key? How? What has work done atop Forensicator’s findings proven? How?

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public on July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate.
Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.

Time stamps in the metadata indicate the download occurred somewhere on the East Coast of the United States—not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone.
What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

“It’s clear,” another forensics investigator wrote, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”
In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. “It’s clear,” another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”

To be noted in this connection: The list of the CIA’s cyber-tools WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to. (The tool can also “de-obfuscate” what it has obfuscated.) It is not known whether this tool was deployed in the Guccifer case, but it is there for such a use.

It is not yet clear whether documents now shown to have been leaked locally on July 5 were tainted to suggest Russian hacking in the same way the June 15 Guccifer release was. This is among several outstanding questions awaiting answers, and the forensic scientists active on the DNC case are now investigating it. In a note Adam Carter sent to Folden and McGovern last week and copied to me, he reconfirmed the corruption of the June 15 documents, while indicating that his initial work on the July 5 documents—of which much more is to be done—had not yet turned up evidence of doctoring.

In the meantime, VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:

On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.
On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.
On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.
It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”

By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

“We continue to stand by our report,” CrowdStrike said, upon seeing the VIPS blueprint of the investigation. CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.

In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us. The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.

I concluded each of the interviews conducted for this column by asking for a degree of confidence in the new findings. These are careful, exacting people as a matter of professional training and standards, and I got careful, exacting replies.

All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. “The laws of physics don’t lie,” Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. “It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,” William Binney said in response to my question. “There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.” When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, “I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.”

Editor’s note: In its chronology, VIPS mistakenly gave the wrong date for CrowdStrike’s announcement of its claim to have found malware on DNC servers. It said June 15, when it should have said June 14. VIPS has acknowledged the error, and we have made the correction.

Editor’s note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.”

Patrick LawrenceTWITTERPatrick Lawrence is a longtime columnist, essayist, critic, and lecturer, whose most recent books are Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World and Time No Longer: America After the American Century. His website is patricklawrence.us.
Title: Re: A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Post by: G M on August 20, 2017, 04:03:24 PM: As the "Russia, Russia, Russia" narrative falls apart, it's getting memory-holed and replaced with "Teh Trump is a nazi!!!!"

Quote from: G M on August 20, 2017, 04:01:08 PM
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.
By Patrick LawrenceTwitter AUGUST 9, 2017

It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in the spring and early summer of 2016 were identified as remote hacks and, in short order, attributed to Russians acting in behalf of Donald Trump. A great edifice has been erected during this time. President Trump, members of his family, and numerous people around him stand accused of various corruptions and extensive collusion with Russians. Half a dozen simultaneous investigations proceed into these matters. Last week news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury, which issued its first subpoenas on August 3. Allegations of treason are common; prominent political figures and many media cultivate a case for impeachment.

The president’s ability to conduct foreign policy, notably but not only with regard to Russia, is now crippled. Forced into a corner and having no choice, Trump just signed legislation imposing severe new sanctions on Russia and European companies working with it on pipeline projects vital to Russia’s energy sector. Striking this close to the core of another nation’s economy is customarily considered an act of war, we must not forget. In retaliation, Moscow has announced that the United States must cut its embassy staff by roughly two-thirds. All sides agree that relations between the United States and Russia are now as fragile as they were during some of the Cold War’s worst moments. To suggest that military conflict between two nuclear powers inches ever closer can no longer be dismissed as hyperbole.

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

We are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception.
Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment. Few have noticed since these evasive terms first appeared that an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge. This is how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept—as the record shows many of them have done.

We come now to a moment of great gravity.

There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate.” This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
This article is based on an examination of the documents these forensic experts and intelligence analysts have produced, notably the key papers written over the past several weeks, as well as detailed interviews with many of those conducting investigations and now drawing conclusions from them. Before proceeding into this material, several points bear noting.

One, there are many other allegations implicating Russians in the 2016 political process. The work I will now report upon does not purport to prove or disprove any of them. Who delivered documents to WikiLeaks? Who was responsible for the “phishing” operation penetrating John Podesta’s e-mail in March 2016? We do not know the answers to such questions. It is entirely possible, indeed, that the answers we deserve and must demand could turn out to be multiple: One thing happened in one case, another thing in another. The new work done on the mid-June and July 5 events bears upon all else in only one respect. We are now on notice: Given that we now stand face to face with very considerable cases of duplicity, it is imperative that all official accounts of these many events be subject to rigorously skeptical questioning. Do we even know that John Podesta’s e-mail address was in fact “phished”? What evidence of this has been produced? Such rock-bottom questions as these must now be posed in all other cases.

Two, houses built on sand and made of cards are bound to collapse, and there can be no surprise that the one resting atop the “hack theory,” as we can call the prevailing wisdom on the DNC events, appears to be in the process of doing so. Neither is there anything far-fetched in a reversal of the truth of this magnitude. American history is replete with similar cases. The Spanish sank the Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898. Iran’s Mossadegh was a Communist. Guatemala’s Árbenz represented a Communist threat to the United States. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet. The Sandinistas were Communists. The truth of the Maine, a war and a revolution in between, took a century to find the light of day, whereupon the official story disintegrated. We can do better now. It is an odd sensation to live through one of these episodes, especially one as big as Russiagate. But its place atop a long line of precedents can no longer be disputed.

Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in our national-security institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty.
Three, regardless of what one may think about the investigations and conclusions I will now outline—and, as noted, these investigations continue—there is a bottom line attaching to them. We can even call it a red line. Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency—leave these new findings without reply. Not credibly, in any case. Forensic investigators, prominent among them people with decades’ experience at high levels in these very institutions, have put a body of evidence on a table previously left empty. Silence now, should it ensue, cannot be written down as an admission of duplicity, but it will come very close to one.

It requires no elaboration to apply the above point to the corporate media, which have been flaccidly satisfied with official explanations of the DNC matter from the start.

Qualified experts working independently of one another began to examine the DNC case immediately after the July 2016 events. Prominent among these is a group comprising former intelligence officers, almost all of whom previously occupied senior positions. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded in 2003, now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence. The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. Most of these men have decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies. This article reflects numerous interviews with all of them conducted in person, via Skype, or by telephone.

The customary VIPS format is an open letter, typically addressed to the president. The group has written three such letters on the DNC incident, all of which were first published by Robert Parry at www.consortiumnews.com. Here is the latest, dated July 24; it blueprints the forensic work this article explores in detail. They have all argued that the hack theory is wrong and that a locally executed leak is the far more likely explanation. In a letter to Barack Obama dated January 17, three days before he left office, the group explained that the NSA’s known programs are fully capable of capturing all electronic transfers of data. “We strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks,” the letter said. “If NSA cannot produce such evidence—and quickly—this would probably mean it does not have any.”

The day after Parry published this letter, Obama gave his last press conference as president, at which he delivered one of the great gems among the official statements on the DNC e-mail question. “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking,” the legacy-minded Obama said, “were not conclusive.” There is little to suggest the VIPS letter prompted this remark, but it is typical of the linguistic tap-dancing many officials connected to the case have indulged so as to avoid putting their names on the hack theory and all that derives from it.

Until recently there was a serious hindrance to the VIPS’s work, and I have just suggested it. The group lacked access to positive data. It had no lump of cyber-material to place on its lab table and analyze, because no official agency had provided any.

Donald Rumsfeld famously argued with regard to the WMD question in Iraq, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In essence, Binney and others at VIPS say this logic turns upside down in the DNC case: Based on the knowledge of former officials such as Binney, the group knew that (1) if there was a hack and (2) if Russia was responsible for it, the NSA would have to have evidence of both. Binney and others surmised that the agency and associated institutions were hiding the absence of evidence behind the claim that they had to maintain secrecy to protect NSA programs. “Everything that they say must remain classified is already well-known,” Binney said in an interview. “They’re playing the Wizard of Oz game.”

New findings indicate this is perfectly true, but until recently the VIPS experts could produce only “negative evidence,” as they put it: The absence of evidence supporting the hack theory demonstrates that it cannot be so. That is all VIPS had. They could allege and assert, but they could not conclude: They were stuck demanding evidence they did not have—if only to prove there was none.

Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations.
Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst. Two independent researchers selected it, Snowden-like, as the medium through which to disclose their findings. One of these is known as Forensicator and the other as Adam Carter. On July 9, Adam Carter sent Elizabeth Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media, a paper by the Forensicator that split the DNC case open like a coconut.

By this time Binney and the other technical-side people at VIPS had begun working with a man named Skip Folden. Folden was an IT executive at IBM for 33 years, serving 25 years as the IT program manager in the United States. He has also consulted for Pentagon officials, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Folden is effectively the VIPS group’s liaison to Forensicator, Adam Carter, and other investigators, but neither Folden nor anyone else knows the identity of either Forensicator or Adam Carter. This bears brief explanation.

The Forensicator’s July 9 document indicates he lives in the Pacific Time Zone, which puts him on the West Coast. His notes describing his investigative procedures support this. But little else is known of him. Adam Carter, in turn, is located in England, but the name is a coy pseudonym: It derives from a character in a BBC espionage series called Spooks. It is protocol in this community, Elizabeth Vos told me in a telephone conversation this week, to respect this degree of anonymity. Kirk Wiebe, the former SIGINT analyst at the NSA, thinks Forensicator could be “someone very good with the FBI,” but there is no certainty. Unanimously, however, all the analysts and forensics investigators interviewed for this column say Forensicator’s advanced expertise, evident in the work he has done, is unassailable. They hold a similarly high opinion of Adam Carter’s work.

Forensicator is working with the documents published by Guccifer 2.0, focusing for now on the July 5 intrusion into the DNC server. The contents of Guccifer’s files are known—they were published last September—and are not Forensicator’s concern. His work is with the metadata on those files. These data did not come to him via any clandestine means. Forensicator simply has access to them that others did not have. It is this access that prompts Kirk Wiebe and others to suggest that Forensicator may be someone with exceptional talent and training inside an agency such as the FBI. “Forensicator unlocked and then analyzed what had been the locked files Guccifer supposedly took from the DNC server,” Skip Folden explained in an interview. “To do this he would have to have ‘access privilege,’ meaning a key.”

What has Forensicator proven since he turned his key? How? What has work done atop Forensicator’s findings proven? How?

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public on July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate.
Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.

Time stamps in the metadata indicate the download occurred somewhere on the East Coast of the United States—not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone.
What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

“It’s clear,” another forensics investigator wrote, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”
In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. “It’s clear,” another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”

To be noted in this connection: The list of the CIA’s cyber-tools WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to. (The tool can also “de-obfuscate” what it has obfuscated.) It is not known whether this tool was deployed in the Guccifer case, but it is there for such a use.

It is not yet clear whether documents now shown to have been leaked locally on July 5 were tainted to suggest Russian hacking in the same way the June 15 Guccifer release was. This is among several outstanding questions awaiting answers, and the forensic scientists active on the DNC case are now investigating it. In a note Adam Carter sent to Folden and McGovern last week and copied to me, he reconfirmed the corruption of the June 15 documents, while indicating that his initial work on the July 5 documents—of which much more is to be done—had not yet turned up evidence of doctoring.

In the meantime, VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:

On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.
On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.
On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.
It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”

By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

“We continue to stand by our report,” CrowdStrike said, upon seeing the VIPS blueprint of the investigation. CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.

In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us. The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.

I concluded each of the interviews conducted for this column by asking for a degree of confidence in the new findings. These are careful, exacting people as a matter of professional training and standards, and I got careful, exacting replies.

All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. “The laws of physics don’t lie,” Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. “It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,” William Binney said in response to my question. “There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.” When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, “I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.”

Editor’s note: In its chronology, VIPS mistakenly gave the wrong date for CrowdStrike’s announcement of its claim to have found malware on DNC servers. It said June 15, when it should have said June 14. VIPS has acknowledged the error, and we have made the correction.

Editor’s note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.”

Patrick LawrenceTWITTERPatrick Lawrence is a longtime columnist, essayist, critic, and lecturer, whose most recent books are Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World and Time No Longer: America After the American Century. His website is patricklawrence.us.
Title: Whoops! Podesta Group back files
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2017, 06:02:04 AM: I have been flagging the Podesta-Russian connection here for quite some time , , ,

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-do-you-say-whoops-in-russian-podesta-group-retroactively-files-more-doj-disclosures-for-pro-putin-work/article/2632538
Title: Side effect of Arapaio pardon
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2017, 10:24:22 PM: Not very polished but the main point seems valid:

http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2017/08/trump-just-nuked-mueller-inquisition.html
Title: Trump Russian hotel project during campaign?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2017, 10:08:12 AM: https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/trumps-real-estate-ambitions-in-moscow?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%2843%29&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=11812145&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1222740797&spReportId=MTIyMjc0MDc5NwS2

IF true, this is a disgrace.
Title: Will special counsel Mueller examine the DNC server, source of the great Russia
Post by: G M on August 30, 2017, 08:01:14 PM: http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/russia-hacking-dnc-server-comey-mueller-hillary-clinton-20170829.html

Will special counsel Mueller examine the DNC server, source of the great Russiagate caper?
Updated: AUGUST 29, 2017 — 5:19 AM EDT

by George Parry
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release stolen computer files that pertained to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Two days later, CrowdStrike, a computer security company working for the Democratic National Committee, announced that it had detected Russian malware on the DNC’s computer server. The next day, a self-described Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, claimed he was a WikiLeaks source and had hacked the DNC’s server. He then posted online DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack.

Much to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton, the released files showed that the DNC had secretly collaborated with her campaign to promote her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination over that of Bernie Sanders. Clearly, the Clinton campaign needed to lessen the political damage. Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s public relations chief, said in a Washington Post essay in March that she worked assiduously during the Democratic nominating convention to “get the press to focus on … the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary.”

Thus was laid the cornerstone of the Trump-Russia-collusion conspiracy theory.

Since then, the mainstream media have created a climate of hysteria in which this unsubstantiated theory has been conjured into accepted truth. This has resulted in investigations by Congress and a special counsel into President Trump, his family, and his campaign staff for supposed collusion with the Russians.

But in their frenzied coverage, the media have downplayed the very odd behavior of the DNC, the putative target of the alleged hack. For, when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the hacking claim, they asked to examine the server. The DNC refused. Without explanation, it continues to deny law enforcement access to its server.

Why would the purported victim of a crime refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Is it hiding something? Is it afraid the server’s contents will discredit the Russia-hacking story?

The answers to those questions are beginning to emerge thanks to an exacting forensic examination of the available evidence by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts.

By way of background, VIPS has a well-established record of debunking questionable intelligence assessments that have been slanted to serve political purposes. For example, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, VIPS courageously and correctly challenged the accuracy and veracity of the CIA’s intelligence estimates that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he posed a threat to the United States. Similarly, VIPS has scondemned the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected terrorists. In short, VIPS can hardly be described as either a right-wing cabal or as carrying water for the Republican Party.

In its ongoing analysis of the purported DNC hack, VIPS has brought to bear the impressive talents of more than a dozen experienced, well-credentialed experts, including William Binney, a former NSA technical director and cofounder of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, former NSA technical director for the Office of Signals Processing; and Skip Folden, former manager of IBM’s information technology. As the French would say, these are l’hommes serieux, as are the other computer-system designers, program architects, and analysts with whom they are investigating the Clinton-DNC hack story.

Recently, VIPS released its initial investigative findings, and they are stunning.

First, VIPS has concluded that the DNC data were not hacked by the Russians or anyone else accessing the server over the internet. Instead, they were downloaded by means of a thumb drive or similar portable storage device physically attached to the DNC server.

How was this determined? The time stamps contained in the released computer files’ metadata establish that, at 6:45 p.m. July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. This took 87 seconds, which means the transfer rate was 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed, according to VIPS, that “is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.” Such a speed could be accomplished only by direct connection of a portable storage device to the server. Accordingly, VIPS concludes the DNC data theft was an inside job by someone with physical access to the server.

VIPS also reports that, if there had been a hack, the NSA would have a record of it that could quickly be retrieved and produced. But no such evidence has been forthcoming. Can this be because no hack occurred?

Even more remarkable, the experts have determined that files released by Guccifer 2.0 have been “run, via ordinary cut and paste, through a template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints.” In other words, the files were deliberately altered to give the false impression that they were hacked by Russian agents.

Up to this point, Russiagate has been notable as an irrational, self-levitating media jihad devoid of any material-supporting evidence. Now, thanks to the VIPS experts, the Russia-hacking story — the very genesis of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory — appears to have been affirmatively and convincingly undercut. And this raises many questions concerning the purveyors of the Russia hacking story, as well as the heretofore semicomatose federal investigation of the alleged hack.

After the DNC denied law enforcement access to its server, the FBI — under James Comey’s flaccid leadership — meekly agreed to accept the findings of CrowdStrike, the DNC’s private computer security firm, as to the server’s contents. This was in lieu of the FBI’s using the legal process to search the server for Russian malware and evidence of hacking.

Why did Comey and the FBI agree to such an impotent, absurd, and self-defeating arrangement? And why to this day has this bizarre situation been allowed to continue?

Special counsel Robert Mueller has been tasked with investigating the alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy. Unlike the feckless Comey, he has used a grand jury and at least one search warrant to obtain evidence. May we expect Mueller to use similar tactics in dealing with the mysteriously recalcitrant DNC? Will the server at long last be subjected to a non-DNC-controlled forensic analysis? Will the server and CrowdStrike’s work product be analyzed to either confirm or disprove the presence of Russian malware? And, if none is found, will the special counsel investigate the persons responsible for that deception?

Will the DNC files released by Guccifer 2.0 be analyzed to determine if they were, as VIPS has concluded, altered to give the false impression that the Russians had hacked the server? If so, will Mueller pursue those responsible for the adulteration? If, as appears likely, the server was not hacked, will Mueller investigate why Hillary Clinton and the DNC claimed it was? Will he investigate whether the DNC files were stolen by someone who had direct physical access to the DNC server? Will he try to determine who at the DNC had a motive to leak the files? Could it be someone who wanted to make public Clinton and the DNC’s underhanded treatment of Sanders?

These are but a few of the areas of inquiry that any fair and competent investigator intent on getting to the truth would pursue. Will Mueller honestly and vigorously investigate them at the risk of incurring the anti-Trump media’s wrath and possibly exposing the Russia-hacking story as a carefully orchestrated falsehood by Clinton and the DNC?

Or will the unraveling Russiagate fable continue to be a fig leaf for a one-sided, politically motivated effort by Mueller and his staff of Hillary Clinton supporters to undo the outcome of the 2016 presidential election?

George Parry is a former state and federal prosecutor practicing law in Philadelphia. lgparry@dpt-law.com
Title: Russians confirm Trump attorney letter re hotel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2017, 04:13:06 PM: https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2673.msg105989#new
Title: Comey started drafting statement exonerating Hillary Clinton before FBI intervie
Post by: G M on August 31, 2017, 07:05:26 PM: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/james-comey-started-drafting-statement-exonerating-hillary-clinton-before-fbi-interviewed-her-aides/article/2633095

James Comey started drafting statement exonerating Hillary Clinton before FBI interviewed her, aides
by Melissa Quinn | Aug 31, 2017, 1:40 PM

Former FBI Director James Comey started to draft a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in the bureau's investigation into her use of a private email server before the FBI interviewed her or her key witnesses, the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday.

"Conclusion first, fact-gathering second — that's no way to run an investigation. The FBI should be held to a higher standard than that, especially in a matter of such great public interest and controversy," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a letter to the FBI.

The Judiciary Committee reviewed transcripts, which were heavily redacted, indicating Comey began drafting the exoneration statement in April or May 2016, before the FBI interviewed up to 17 key witnesses, including Clinton and some of her close aides.

Comey's work on the statement also came before the Justice Department entered into immunity agreements with Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff while she was Secretary of State, and Heather Samuelson, who served as the State Department's White House liaison.

Comey announced in July 2016 the FBI wouldn't recommend criminal charges against Clinton.

Democrats in Congress alleged last fall that Comey's actions in the FBI's investigation into Clinton's email use violated the Hatch Act, which caused the Office of Special Counsel to launch an investigation.

During its investigation, the Office of Special Counsel interviewed James Rybicki, Comey's chief of staff, and Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel of national security and cyberlaw, who were close to Comey at the FBI.

The Office of Special Counsel shared those interview transcripts at Grassley's urging after Comey was fired.

In their interview with Anderson, the Office of Special Counsel asked when she first learned Comey was planning to make a public statement about the Clinton investigation.

"I'm not entirely sure exactly when the idea of the public statement first emerged," Anderson said. "It was, I can't, I can't put a precise timeframe on it, but [redacted] ... And then I believe it was in early May of 2016 that the director himself wrote a draft of that statement."

In his interview, Rybicki told the Office of Special Counsel that Comey emailed several people in the spring "to say, you know, again knowing sort of where—knowing the direction the investigation is headed, right, what would be the most forward-leaning thing we could do."

When asked whether the Comey statement was drafted in either April or early May, before Clinton herself was interviewed by the FBI, Rybicki said that was correct.

In their letter to the FBI, Grassley and Graham requested drafts of Comey's statement closing the Clinton email investigation, including his initial draft from April or May and his final statement. The senators also asked for all records related to communications from FBI officials related to Comey's draft statement, and records provided to the Office of Special Counsel.
Title: Re: Comey started drafting statement exonerating Hillary Clinton before FBI intervie
Post by: DougMacG on August 31, 2017, 10:28:28 PM: She was exonerated for lack of intent.

The interview asked no questions about intent.

The law didn't even require intent.

Why wait for the interview when the decision wa already made at a higher level.

Nothing can surprise anyone after what the IRS did to opponents of President Obama trying to organize against him - the worst mis-use of American government power in my lifetime.

The fish stinks from the head.

The only thing that connected better than 'build the wall' was 'drain the swamp'.

Their filth caused the Trump phenomenon, and now they complain about it.
Title: How did this fall into Mueller's hands and why do we know about it?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2017, 01:57:38 PM: "She was exonerated for lack of intent. The interview asked no questions about intent. The law didn't even require intent. Why wait for the interview when the decision wa already made at a higher level."

Very pithy.

==============================

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/trump-comey-firing-letter.html?emc=edit_na_20170901&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
Title: Comey is a corrupt scumbag, Part whatever
Post by: G M on September 01, 2017, 07:01:56 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/371393.php

September 01, 2017

James Comey Told Congress He Didn't Make a Decision on Hillary Clinton Until After all Interviews, Despite Having Drawn Up Draft Exoneration Statement Months and Months Before
Straight-shooter. Wears a sheriff's star of pure gold alloyed with Resolute Integrity.

Also, a genuine Democrat Tool.

The new revelation that James Comey circulated a draft of a statement he wrote as FBI director exonerating Hillary Clinton in last year’s email investigation appears to be at odds with what he told a House panel last September.
“If colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to contact me privately so we can have a conversation about this,” Comey said during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 28, 2016.

“All I can do is tell you again, the decision was made after that because I didn’t know what was going to happen in that interview,” he added.

That statement, which Politico flagged on Thursday, appears to conflict with the revelation on Thursday that two of Comey’s top aides at the FBI said in transcribed interviews last year that Comey circulated drafts clearing Clinton as early as last April, months before he actually publicly cleared the former secretary of state, who had been under investigation for mishandling classified information on her private email server.

Sean M. Davis had a good point yesterday on Twitter: If Comey had drafted his girl's Get Out of Jail Free pass in April, what the hell was he doing issuing immunity to all of Hillary's cronies before Fake-Interviewing them? Having fixed the outcome, was he now just making sure there were no witnesses left unimmunized who could disturb the fix?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2017, 08:22:52 AM: "Sean M. Davis had a good point yesterday on Twitter: If Comey had drafted his girl's Get Out of Jail Free pass in April, what the hell was he doing issuing immunity to all of Hillary's cronies before Fake-Interviewing them? Having fixed the outcome, was he now just making sure there were no witnesses left unimmunized who could disturb the fix?"

Good questions!
Title: MY question to Andrew/Comey was Obama's puppet
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2017, 03:06:55 PM: Is, what do we do about this now? I am not inclined to just drop this and let /Clinton / Obama off?

Could anyone imagine the uproar from the Compost and Pravda and Complicit news network if a Republican President had subverted the law in this way?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision
Title: Re: MY question to Andrew
Post by: DougMacG on September 03, 2017, 04:19:54 PM: Quote from: ccp on September 03, 2017, 03:06:55 PM
Is, what do we do about this now? I am not inclined to just drop this and let /Clinton / Obama off?

Could anyone imagine the uproar from the Compost and Pravda and Complicit news network if a Republican President had subverted the law in this way?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision

Right and we all knew it when it happened. If words mean anything, Comey was the lead investigator at best, not the prosecutor by any stretch. When the AG recused, shouldn't that responsibility go up the chain, maybe downward, not sideways?
Title: Re: MY question to Andrew
Post by: G M on September 03, 2017, 05:19:04 PM: Questions unasked by the professional journalists, and the republican wing of the DNC.

Quote from: DougMacG on September 03, 2017, 04:19:54 PM
Quote from: ccp on September 03, 2017, 03:06:55 PM
Is, what do we do about this now? I am not inclined to just drop this and let /Clinton / Obama off?

Could anyone imagine the uproar from the Compost and Pravda and Complicit news network if a Republican President had subverted the law in this way?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision

Right and we all knew it when it happened. If words mean anything, Comey was the lead investigator at best, not the prosecutor by any stretch. When the AG recused, shouldn't that responsibility go up the chain, maybe downward, not sideways?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2017, 07:44:06 PM: Good find CCP.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 05, 2017, 07:09:27 AM: Andrew McCarthy is right. After Pres Obama basically said she wouldn't be prosecuted, the only suspense left was to find out if the FBI (and DOJ) were real agencies or merely puppets of the corrupt leadership.

"It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen."

What she did as a cabinet official and got away with is HIS Presidential legacy. Most politically corrupt administration ever.

It's funny to see how these "principled" people now refuse to take an oath of loyalty to a new boss. Moral relativism, circumstantial integrity, selective professionalism? State Dept, EPA, IRS, FBI, NSA, DOJ, and most of the Appellate and Supreme Court, paraphrasing the folks at Instapundit, just think of them as Democratic operatives with big titles and rest all makes sense.

Political appointee Loretta Lynch did not recuse herself without knowing the fix was already in place. The only piece of the justice system they didn't control was an unknown weakness in the foundation of the electoral college Blue Wall.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on September 05, 2017, 07:46:41 AM: " After Pres Obama basically said she wouldn't be prosecuted"

As Doug notes we knew the fix would be in from the start.

But when Brock said more or less she did not intend or do it on purpose or something to that effect, he announced to the world he as putting his stamp of approval on the method of the fix and the Democrat mob is blessed from the ONE go forward with it publicly after months of behind the scenes planning.

Corruption has no bounds .
Title: Trump was right, Feds were wiretapping Trump Tower (Manafort)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2017, 06:20:45 PM: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/18/paul-manafort-wiretapped-during-trump-campaign/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTUdRNE5qWmlZamd4T0RRdyIsInQiOiJkd2JuOFdOeGJjZ3JhRGpvTW1aek84YUZ2VVhhQlNlTmJlOW8xTVwvN20zMUdMdWVlTlhKNXJtdEN5VlR5NW1xM05QdVhCOGoydytZUFhRN090Y2RhVDY2eXA1dEd2QUFZQkg1ZHNLaHdKZ2hSSHF4eWRWWExpSWRIbVgweXYwQVEifQ%3D%3D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on September 19, 2017, 04:18:51 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2017, 06:20:45 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/18/paul-manafort-wiretapped-during-trump-campaign/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTUdRNE5qWmlZamd4T0RRdyIsInQiOiJkd2JuOFdOeGJjZ3JhRGpvTW1aek84YUZ2VVhhQlNlTmJlOW8xTVwvN20zMUdMdWVlTlhKNXJtdEN5VlR5NW1xM05QdVhCOGoydytZUFhRN090Y2RhVDY2eXA1dEd2QUFZQkg1ZHNLaHdKZ2hSSHF4eWRWWExpSWRIbVgweXYwQVEifQ%3D%3D

Well. Well. Well. Trump Tower was indeed wiretapped.
Title: The political opposition responds
Post by: ccp on September 19, 2017, 04:43:26 PM: no surprise here :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/19/cnn-says-the-government-wiretapped-manafort-does-that-vindicate-trumps-obama-wiretapped-me-claims/?utm_term=.1b2df3efd46c
Title: Tucker on the Manafort taps
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2017, 08:08:10 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCF8fnXQt_Q
Title: Trump's baseless wiretap claims
Post by: G M on September 20, 2017, 09:48:32 AM: (http://ace.mu.nu/archives/CNN%20-%20Trump%20wiretapping.jpg)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/CNN%20-%20Trump%20wiretapping.jpg

This IS CNN.
Title: WSJ: All Mr. Comey's Wiretaps
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2017, 01:34:23 PM: All Mr. Comey’s Wiretaps
Congress needs to learn how the FBI meddled in the 2016 campaign.
By The Editorial Board
Sept. 19, 2017 7:13 p.m. ET
629 COMMENTS

When Donald Trump claimed in March that he’d had his “wires tapped” prior to the election, the press and Obama officials dismissed the accusation as a fantasy. We were among the skeptics, but with former director James Comey’s politicized FBI the story is getting more complicated.

CNN reported Monday that the FBI obtained a warrant last year to eavesdrop on Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager from May to August in 2016. The story claims the FBI first wiretapped Mr. Manafort in 2014 while investigating his work as a lobbyist for Ukraine’s ruling party. That warrant lapsed, but the FBI convinced the court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to issue a second order as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the election.

Guess who has lived in a condo in Trump Tower since 2006? Paul Manafort.

The story suggests the monitoring started in the summer or fall, and extended into early this year. While Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign in August, he continued to speak with Candidate Trump. It is thus highly likely that the FBI was listening to the political and election-related conversations of a leading contender for the White House. That’s extraordinary—and worrisome.

Mr. Comey told Congress in late March that he “had no information that supports those [Trump] tweets.” Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was even more specific that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against—the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” He denied that any such FISA order existed. Were they lying?

The warrant’s timing may also shed light on the FBI’s relationship to the infamous “ Steele dossier.” That widely discredited dossier claiming ties between Russians and the Trump campaign was commissioned by left-leaning research firm Fusion GPS and developed by former British spy Christopher Steele—who relied on Russian sources. But the Washington Post and others have reported that Mr. Steele was familiar to the FBI, had reached out to the agency about his work, and had even arranged a deal in 2016 to get paid by the FBI to continue his research.

The FISA court sets a high bar for warrants on U.S. citizens, and presumably even higher for wiretapping a presidential campaign. Did Mr. Comey’s FBI marshal the Steele dossier to persuade the court?

All of this is reason for House and Senate investigators to keep exploring how Mr. Comey’s FBI was investigating both presidential campaigns. Russian meddling is a threat to democracy but so was the FBI if it relied on Russian disinformation to eavesdrop on a presidential campaign. The Justice Department and FBI have stonewalled Congressional requests for documents and interviews, citing the “integrity” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

But Mr. Mueller is not investigating the FBI, and in any event his ties to the bureau and Mr. Comey make him too conflicted for such a job. Congress is charged with providing oversight of law enforcement and the FISA courts, and it has an obligation to investigate their role in 2016. The intelligence committees have subpoena authority and the ability to hold those who don’t cooperate in contempt.

Mr. Comey investigated both leading presidential campaigns in an election year, playing the role of supposedly impartial legal authority. But his maneuvering to get Mr. Mueller appointed, and his leaks to the press, have shown that Mr. Comey is as political and self-serving as anyone in Washington. No investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign will be credible or complete without the facts about all Mr. Comey’s wiretaps.
Title: THIS MUST be investigated!
Post by: G M on September 20, 2017, 01:50:26 PM: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/341225-comeys-private-memos-on-trump-conversations-contained-classified

Comey’s private memos on Trump conversations contained classified material
BY JOHN SOLOMON - 07/09/17 08:12 PM EDT
45,296

More than half of the memos former FBI Director James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.

This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton over in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.

Comey testified last month before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a friend. He asked that friend, a law professor at Columbia University, to leak information from one memo to the news media in hopes of increasing pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI director.

“So you didn’t consider your memo or your sense of that conversation to be a government document?” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked Comey on June 8. “You considered it to be, somehow, your own personal document that you could share to the media as you wanted through a friend?”
“Correct,” Comey answered. “I understood this to be my recollection recorded of my conversation with the president. As a private citizen, I thought it important to get it out.”

Comey insisted in his testimony he believed his personal memos were unclassified, though he hinted one or two documents he created might have been contained classified information.

“I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership,” he testified about the one memo he later leaked about former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

He added, “My view was that the content of those unclassified memorialization of those conversations was my recollection recorded.”

But when the seven memos Comey wrote regarding his nine conversations with Trump about Russia earlier this year were shown to Congress in recent days, the FBI claimed all were, in fact, deemed to be government documents.

While the Comey memos have been previously reported, this is the first time there has been a number connected to the amount of memos the ex-FBI chief wrote.

Four of the memos had markings making clear they contained information classified at the secret or confidential level, according to officials directly familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the FBI on Sunday declined to comment.

FBI policy forbids any agent from releasing classified information or any information from ongoing investigations or sensitive operations without prior written permission, and it mandates that all records created during official duties are considered to be government property.

“Unauthorized disclosure, misuse, or negligent handling of information contained in the files, electronic or paper, of the FBI or which I may acquire as an employee of the FBI could impair national security, place human life in jeopardy, result in the denial of due process, prevent the FBI from effectively discharging its responsibilities, or violate federal law,” states the agreement all FBI agents sign.

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It adds that “all information acquired by me in connection with my official duties with the FBI and all official material to which I have access remain the property of the United States of America” and that an agent “will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official written authorization by the FBI.”

Comey indicated in his testimony that the memos were in his possession when he left the bureau, leaving him in a position to leak one of them through his friend to the media. But he testified that he has since turned them over to Robert Mueller, a former FBI chief who is now spearheading the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the presidential race.

It is not clear whether Comey as director signed the same agreement as his agents, but the contract is considered the official policy of the bureau. It was also unclear when the documents were shown to Congress whether the information deemed secret or confidential was classified at the time Comey wrote the memos or determined so afterward, the sources said.

Congressional investigators had already begun examining whether Comey’s creation, storage and sharing of the memos violated FBI rules, but the revelation that four of the seven memos included some sort of classified information opens a new door of inquiry into whether classified information was mishandled, improperly stored or improperly shared.

That was the same issue for which the FBI investigated Clinton, a former secretary of State in the Obama administration, in 2015 and 2016 under Comey. Clinton used a private email server during her tenure that at times contained classified material.

Comey ultimately concluded in July 2016 that Clinton’s email practices were reckless, but that he could not recommend prosecution because FBI agents had failed to find enough evidence that she intended to violate felony statutes prohibiting the transmission of classified information through insecure practices. Clinton at the time was the Democratic nominee for president.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said in a decision panned by Republicans and embraced by Democrats.

Now, congressional investigators are likely to turn their attention to the same issues to determine if Comey mishandled any classified information in his personal memos.

In order to make an assessment, congressional investigators will have to tackle key questions, such as where and how the memos were created, including whether they were written on an insecure computer or notepad; where and how the memos were stored, such as inside Comey's home, in a briefcase or on an insecure laptop; whether any memos were shown to private individuals without a security clearance and whether those memos contained any classified information; and when was it determined by the government that the memos contained classified information — before Comey took them and shared one or after.

One avenue for answering those questions is for a panel like Senate Intelligence, House Intelligence or Senate Judiciary to refer the matter to the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, the inspector general, or to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its inspector general, aides said.
Title: Reminder: This is what happens when you aren't in the protected elite class
Post by: G M on September 20, 2017, 02:02:15 PM: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/kristian-saucier-investigation-hillary-clinton-223646

Sub sailor's photo case draws comparisons to Clinton emails
By JOSH GERSTEIN 05/27/2016 08:07 AM EDT Updated 05/27/2016 11:19 AM EDT
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A Navy sailor entered a guilty plea Friday in a classified information mishandling case that critics charge illustrates a double standard between the treatment of low-ranking government employees and top officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus.

Prosecutors allege that Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier used a cellphone camera to take photos in the classified engine room of the nuclear submarine where he worked as a mechanic, the USS Alexandria, then destroyed a laptop, camera and memory card after learning he was under investigation.

Last July, Saucier was indicted on one felony count of unlawful retention of national defense information and another felony count of obstruction of justice. He pleaded guilty Friday to the classified information charge, which is part of the Espionage Act, a prosecution spokesman confirmed. No charge of espionage was filed and no public suggestion has been made that he ever planned to disclose the photos to anyone outside the Navy.

The sailor now faces a maximum possible sentence of up to ten years in prison, but faced up to 30 years if found guilty on both charges. Federal guidelines discussed in court Friday appear to call for a sentence of about five to six-and-a-half years, although the defense has signaled it will seek a lighter sentence.

Saucier’s friends, conservative commentators and others say the stiff charges leveled against Saucier were out of whack with more lenient treatment given to senior officials who face allegations of mishandling classified information, like Clinton.

“I just don’t think it’s fair,” said Gene Pitcher, a retired Navy sailor who served with Saucier aboard the Alexandria. “In reality, what she did is so much worse than what Kris did. ... I think it’s just a blatant double standard.”

Clinton has not been charged with any crime, but the FBI has been investigating how information that intelligence agencies consider classified wound up on the private server that hosted her only email account during the four years she served as secretary of state. Some news reports have said charges are unlikely.

“Felony charges appear to be reserved for people of the lowest ranks. Everyone else who does it either doesn’t get charged or gets charged with a misdemeanor,” said Edward MacMahon, a Virginia defense attorney not involved in the Saucier case.

To some, the comparison to Clinton’s case may appear strained. Clinton has said none of the information on her server was marked classified at the time. In many cases, it was marked as unclassified when sent to her by people in the State Department more familiar with the issues involved.

By contrast, sailors are trained early on that the engine compartment of a nuclear sub is a restricted area and that much information relating to the sub’s nuclear reactors is classified.

Still, it’s far from obvious that the information Saucier took photos of is more sensitive than information found in Clinton’s account. Court filings say the photos were clear enough that they reveal classified details about the submarine that could be of use to foreign governments, such as the vessel’s maximum speed.

However, the Navy says the photos are classified “confidential,” which is the lowest tier of protection for classified information and is designated for information that could cause some damage to national security but not “serious” or “exceptionally grave” damage.

Intelligence agencies claim that Clinton’s account contained 65 messages with information considered “Secret” and 22 classified at the “Top Secret” level. Some messages contained data under an even more restrictive “special access program” designation.

Clinton and her campaign have disputed those findings, calling them a result of “overclassification” and urging that the messages be released in full.

However, Clinton’s critics and some former intelligence officials said she should have recognized the sensitivity of the information. They’ve also noted that about 32,000 messages on Clinton’s server were erased after her lawyers deemed them personal.

“The DOJ is willing to prosecute a former sailor to the full extent of the law for violating the law on classified material, in a situation where there was no purposeful unsecured transmission of classified material,” conservative blogger Ed Morrissey wrote last year. “Will they pursue Hillary Clinton and her team, at the other end of the power spectrum from the rank-and-file, for deliberate unsecured transmission of improperly marked classified nat-sec intelligence? Will they pursue the same kind of obstruction of justice charges for Hillary’s wiping of her server as they are for Saucier’s destruction of his laptop?”

Jury selection in Saucier’s case took place earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and opening arguments were scheduled to take place Tuesday, just after the Memorial Day holiday. The change of plea hearing Friday morning was not publicly noticed on the court's docket.

Judge Stefan Underhill set sentencing in the case for August 19. Both sides agreed that sentencing guidelines call for a sentence of 63 to 78 months, but the judge will also calculate the guidelines range and can give a sentence outside the range. Plea documents indicate that the defense plans to ask for a more lenient sentence on the basis that Saucier's conduct was "aberrant."

A defense attorney for Saucier did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.

The investigation into Saucier kicked off in a rather unusual way in 2012 when a supervisor at a dump in Hampton, Connecticut, found a cellphone “on top of a pile of trash approximately three to four feet into the middle of a dumpster at the transfer station,” a court filing read. The supervisor showed the images to a retired Navy friend who turned over the device to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Pitcher acknowledges that his friend violated Navy rules if he took the photos as prosecutors allege, but he says such infractions by submariners were not uncommon and were almost always dealt with through what the military calls “nonjudicial punishment” or Captain’s Mast. Those involved were demoted and docked some pay, but didn’t face a felony record or the prospect of years behind bars, the retired sailor said.

“Two guys in our boat were caught taking photos in the engine room on the nuclear side of things. Basically, all that happened to them was they … lost a rank,” Pitcher said. “I’ve seen quite a few cases like this and never seen any handled like Kris’.”

secondary_sub_compy_1_ho_1160.jpg
Redacted and declassified cell-phone photos of nuclear sub’s engine room/Justice Department Court Filing
One factor that may have led investigators and prosecutors to handle Saucier’s case more aggressively is the way he responded when confronted about the photos. Court filings say he initially denied he took the pictures. Prosecutors say he later smashed his laptop, camera and memory card and threw them in the woods.

On top of that, Saucier had a handgun not registered to him in his home, prosecutors allege. After the FBI and NCIS showed up to question him, he allegedly cleaned it with bleach and stashed it under the dishwasher.

“They love the obstruction charges,” MacMahon said. “What they look for is something that’s aggravating.”

The defense attorney noted that CIA Director David Petraeus was accused of lying to the FBI when first confronted about keeping top secret notebooks at home and sharing them with his lover. Many lawyers believe that fact may have tipped the case against Petraeus from something that might have cost him his job to one that resulted in criminal prosecution.

Still, Petraeus was never charged with obstruction of justice. Before any charges were filed, his attorney reached a deal with prosecutors in which the retired general pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information.

A former military investigator who handled classified information cases said the military tends to treat such violations more seriously than civilian government agencies do and there are some valid reasons for that.

“It is exceedingly common for people in the military to be held accountable for classified information violations, much more so than in the civilian government or contractor world,” said Bill Leonard, former director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office. “My sense is that’s just a reflection of the military’s emphasis on good order and discipline. ... It really does make a difference to the guy or gal next to you if [sensitive] information is compromised. That’s a very real consequence.”

secondary_sub_compy_2_ho_1160.jpg
Redacted and declassified cell-phone photos of nuclear sub’s engine room/Justice Department Court Filing
Since Saucier is still in the Navy, it’s unclear why he was charged in federal civilian court rather than sent to a court-martial. One possibility is that investigators may have considered charging others in civilian life with conspiring with the Navy sailor, but that has not happened.

Former Navy sailors said Saucier’s case also overlaps with a period during which the Navy was trying to strike a balance involving the boredom of submarine life during deployments as long as six months and the increasing popularity of smartphones, video-game players and similar devices.

While photography was always banned in engine rooms and taking a camera there would have been highly suspicious, ubiquitous phones with cameras have added new complexity to the situation, the sailors said.

With his friend set to plead guilty, Pitcher said he’s still convinced that Saucier is being treated more harshly than others in government of low or high rank.

“A lot of people were doing what Kris was doing,” Pitcher said. “Clearly, to an educated observer, this is not fair treatment in comparison to other highly visible cases.”
Title: Levin: Obama HAD to know about wiretapping
Post by: ccp on September 20, 2017, 03:42:28 PM: What about the records of the Presidential briefings from that time period

(probably being burned in the archives as we speak) or the scheisters are dreaming up some argument to suppress

https://soundcloud.com/conservativereview/levin-on-trump-wiretapping-obama-had-to-know-9-19-17
Title: Serious read from Andrew McCarthy on Manafort's legal problems
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2017, 06:14:30 PM: For proper formatting, see here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451525/paul-manafort-legal-trouble-donald-trump-might-not-be-involved?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-09-20&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

================================================

Paul Manafort Is in Legal Jeopardy fullscreen Paul Manafort (Reuters file photo: Carlo Allegri) Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Plus one article on Google Plus +1 Print Article Adjust font size AA by Andrew C. McCarthy September 20, 2017 7:28 AM @AndrewCMcCarthy But Trump may not be We already knew that Paul Manafort was in a heap of trouble. It was almost two months ago — July 26, to be precise — that his Virginia residence was raided by the FBI in the predawn hours. As I said at the time, prosecutors do not obtain warrants to toss the homes of people they regard as cooperating witnesses. When they are dealing with cooperators, prosecutors politely request that documents be produced, expecting the witness (and his lawyers) to comply. If some coercion is thought necessary, they will issue a grand-jury subpoena — an enforceable directive to produce documents, but one that still allows the witness to hand over the materials, not have them forcibly seized. The execution of a search warrant, even if it goes smoothly, is a show of force. It is intimidating. When we first learned of the raid, I also emphasized its timing: predawn. Under federal law, search warrants are supposed to be executed during daytime hours, when agents can be expected to knock on the door, announce their presence and purpose, and be admitted by the occupant of the premises. If investigators want to search a home before 6 a.m., they need permission. To get it, they have to convince the judge that, if the occupant were alerted to the agents’ presence before they entered, it is likely he would destroy evidence or pose a danger. When I pointed that out, some said I was reading too much into it. To promote agent safety, they countered, the FBI proceeds in the early morning whenever possible. In fact, that is not always the case; and, in any event, the FBI’s preference to proceed in “the early morning” (e.g., at 6 a.m.), is not the same thing as barging in even earlier — for which, again, special permission is required. But now you needn’t take my word for it. Assuming Monday’s New York Times report is correct, the FBI entered covertly by picking the lock on Manafort’s front door while he was sleeping. Clearly, that is not standard operating procedure — certainly not in a white-collar case. Mueller’s investigators wanted to start grabbing files and copying hard drives before Manafort had a chance to call his lawyers or impede the search in any way. It was their way of saying Manafort could not be trusted. That’s intimidating, too. Powered by In light of the latest revelations (which our David French has outlined well in a Corner post), I stand by what I said when news of the raid first surfaced: There are two possible rationales for a search warrant under the circumstances. First, the legitimate rationale: Investigators in good faith believed Manafort, who is either a subject of or witness in their investigation, was likely to destroy rather than surrender relevant evidence. Second, the brass-knuckles rationale: The prosecutor is attempting to intimidate the witness or subject — to say nothing of others who are similarly situated — into volunteering everything he may know of an incriminating nature about people the prosecutor is targeting. Note that these rationales are not mutually exclusive. A few points are worth mulling over at this stage. 1. The current Manafort probe is a criminal investigation, which special counsel Mueller is pursuing with a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. The July search involved a regular criminal-law search warrant. By contrast, the prior surveillances of Manafort were counterintelligence investigations conducted by the Obama Justice Department and FBI with the assistance of the secret court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Counterintelligence investigations are thus often called “FISA investigations” or “national-security investigations.” The difference, as we’ve pointed out several times, is significant. A criminal investigation is an effort to make a prosecutable case that a suspect has committed a crime. A FISA investigation is an effort to understand the actions and intentions of a foreign power by monitoring one of its suspected agents — i.e., by eavesdropping on communications or conducting searches under FISA. Being a foreign agent is not a crime, per se; whether the relationship is criminal depends on the nature of the actions the operative takes (including whether he has disclosed his agency, as required by federal law). So in a FISA investigation, it is not necessary to show probable cause that a suspect has committed a crime in order to search his home or tap his phone; all that is needed is probable cause that he is acting as an agent of a foreign power. According to CNN’s latest revelations, the FISA surveillance took place in two phases: the first, from 2014 until sometime in early 2016; the second in late 2016 into early 2017. This suggests that they were probably two separate FISA investigations: Initially, I suspect Manafort was investigated as an agent of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich faction in Ukraine (for which he had done political consulting work for many years, reportedly for millions of dollars); subsequently, Manafort was investigated as a suspected agent of Russia in connection with the Putin regime’s meddling in the 2016 election. I am betting the probable-cause evidence was overwhelming in Phase I, and sketchy in Phase II. While criminal and FISA investigations are critically different, they can also be closely related — intelligence derived from FISA can incidentally bolster a criminal case, although the federal government is not permitted to use FISA as a ruse to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation. Mueller wants to prosecute Manafort, so criminal-law investigative tactics are now being used. 2. As I pointed out in the aforementioned column, the criminal search warrant executed at Manafort’s home on July 26 would give us insight into what suspected crimes Mueller is investigating. There would have to have been a probable-cause showing of specific crimes before a judge authorized the warrant; and the warrant itself had to have described the evidence the agents expected to find. We still do not know what crimes are under investigation, because the Justice Department did not comply with a regulation that calls for it to provide a factual description of the criminal investigation the special counsel has been authorized to conduct. But Manafort has a good idea of what Mueller is after, because the agents were required by law to provide Manafort with a copy of the warrant and an inventory of what they seized. These have not been publicly revealed. 3. Prosecutors do not like it when other investigative bodies, including congressional committees, are trying to scrutinize the same matters they are probing. We should bear this in mind in considering the timing of the search warrant. Not only did Manafort meet with Senate Intelligence Committee investigators the day before the search; he was also scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the very day of the search. Indeed, by pouncing at the precise time Manafort was cooperating with Congress, Mueller’s investigators were able to seize binders of documents that Manafort and his counsel had prepared to assist his Senate testimony. After the early-morning raid, Manafort ended up not testifying before the Judiciary Committee. The committee’s senior senators, chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), later issued a joint statement that their subpoena to Manafort had been withdrawn because he produced documents (reportedly over 300 pages’ worth) to the committee. Obviously, though, Manafort would not have the same willingness to testify before Congress if he suddenly had reason to believe he was likely to be indicted (such that any testimony he gave could be used against him in a criminal case). The New York Times reports that Mueller’s prosecutors have told Manafort they intend to indict him. That, too, is intimidating. It is more plausible that the first FISA surveillance was aborted because it was not turning up any useful intelligence about the Putin regime and its Ukrainian puppets. 4. CNN claims that the first FISA surveillance of Manafort was shut down in 2016, after over a year, due to “lack of evidence.” That is strange. Again, the point of FISA surveillance is not to build a criminal case but to gather intelligence about the foreign power for which the subject is allegedly acting as an agent. To say FISA surveillance was aborted for “lack of evidence” makes it sound like Manafort was not an agent for the Ukrainian faction after all. But we know he was: Not only is this common knowledge; he belatedly registered as a foreign agent. It is more plausible that the first FISA surveillance was aborted because it was not turning up any useful intelligence about the Putin regime and its Ukrainian puppets. That implies that the Obama Justice Department and FBI concluded that Manafort was no longer an active foreign agent in early 2016 — before he (briefly) joined the Trump campaign. 5. CNN elaborates that the second FISA surveillance, apparently begun in late 2016, “was part of the FBI’s efforts to investigate ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives.” This is not news: Months ago, we began discussing reports that there may have been FISA surveillance of Manafort and longtime Trump confidant (and Manafort partner) Roger Stone, as well as Carter Page, a tangential figure who was identified by the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser but does not seem to have been much of one or to have much of a relationship with Donald Trump. CNN says it is “unclear” when the second FISA surveillance started, but that the FBI’s interest in Manafort was rekindled “last fall because of intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves.” This FISA counterintelligence investigation of Manafort is said to have included a search warrant, executed in early 2017 on a storage facility he controlled. Because this was a FISA search warrant, it is classified; there has been no leak (yet) about what the Obama Justice Department’s application alleged and what the agents found. Assuming these claims are true (and of that we cannot be sure), the timing of the surveillance and search would be of great importance. Was it before the November election, in the immediate aftermath of which President Obama said the Russians did not and could not rig it? Or was it later, when Democrats had settled on a narrative that Russia stole the election in collusion with the Trump campaign? 6. It has been reported that during the campaign’s final weeks, the FBI was dealing with Christopher Steele, the former British spy retained to compile the so-called Trump dossier by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reports, the FBI and Justice Department have been stonewalling the House Intelligence Committee’s efforts to find out whether any part of the dossier factored into in the Russia investigation. The dossier’s allegations, which former FBI director James Comey has described as “salacious and unverified,” were said to come from Steele’s well-placed Russian sources, and the research effort was backed by wealthy Hillary Clinton supporters. So, the question naturally arises: Was any part of Steele’s claims used by the FBI in applications to the FISA court for surveillance and searches of Manafort or other Trump associates? 7. On a parallel track with the 2016–17 FISA investigation, we also know that Obama’s national-security team was involved in a startling amount of “unmasking” in intelligence reporting — i.e., revealing the names of Americans who were incidentally caught up in foreign-intelligence-collection efforts targeting other people. Normally, unmasking just means that these identities get revealed in classified reports disseminated among intelligence agencies, not that they get revealed to the public. Yet, we now know that there was considerable leaking — very likely by design. Thus, another obvious question: Was there correlation between (a) the intelligence generated by the FISA surveillance of Manafort and (b) the unmasking of people associated with the Trump campaign? Obama’s national-security team was involved in a startling amount of ‘unmasking’ in intelligence reporting. We should stress, of course, that if there was solid evidence of an espionage relationship between Manafort and the Kremlin, there would be nothing necessarily inappropriate in conducting surveillance and unmasking relevant American identities. The question is: Was there solid evidence? 8. Some Trump enthusiasts are suggesting that the latest revelations about the surveillance of Manafort “vindicate” the president in his March tweets, which accused his predecessor of tapping his phone lines at Trump Tower. Even if Trump had been proven 100 percent correct about this — and he clearly has not — he would not be vindicated. It was an irresponsible allegation for him to make, especially the way he made it: (a) FISA investigations are classified; (b) it was an explosive thing to accuse a former president of; (c) since Trump had access to the relevant information, he had a special responsibility to be ironclad accurate if he chose to speak about it; and (d) Twitter is not a proper or sensible forum in which to make a startling claim regarding a surveillance process that requires some explanation. All that said, though, I have been arguing for months that the Obama camp’s denials, for all their strident indignation, have been narrow and Jesuitical. Some Obama apologists made the point that the president neither orders FISA surveillance nor directs the steps taken to carry it out. This was silly: Every sentient person understood that Trump was talking about the Obama administration under Obama’s guidance; he was not claiming that Obama personally interacted with the FISA court or personally conducted any surveillance. When interviewed by the press, former Obama officials, such as his national intelligence director, James Clapper, gave denials that sounded sweeping but, when parsed, told us nothing more than that Trump’s tweet was literally wrong — his personal phone lines at Trump Tower had not been targeted for eavesdropping. That carefully avoided addressing other phone lines that may have been subjected to surveillance, and it was not a categorical denial that Trump’s conversations had ever been monitored. The artful answers left open the possibility that Trump, even though not named as a target in a FISA application, may have been monitored incidentally, perhaps even under circumstances in which his interception had been quite foreseeable (because the actual FISA targets were associates of his known to be in contact with him). Now we have more reason to believe Manafort was targeted for FISA surveillance at a time when he had a residence at Trump Tower and was in periodic contact with Trump. Again, this doesn’t make Trump’s tweets correct or justifiable. But it does once again raise the question whether Trump’s conversations were tapped. If they were, the Obama camp’s denials would seem, shall we say, lawyerly. Bottom line: Paul Manafort appears to be in serious jeopardy, but any suspected criminality may involve matters having nothing to do with President Trump. It is worth recalling former FBI director James Comey’s congressional testimony: Trump wanted it made clear that he personally was not under investigation, but agreed that “if some of my satellites did something wrong, it’d be good to find that out.” Maybe we’ll soon find out. It has never necessarily followed that legal trouble for Manafort is legal trouble for Trump — even if it does portend tremendous political trouble for the Trump administration.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451525/paul-manafort-legal-trouble-donald-trump-might-not-be-involved?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-09-20&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Remember When James Clapper Categorically Denied Any Wiretap Against Trump Camp
Post by: G M on September 20, 2017, 06:30:10 PM: https://www.mediaite.com/columnists/remember-when-james-clapper-categorically-denied-any-wiretap-against-trump-campaign/

Remember When James Clapper Categorically Denied Any Wiretap Against Trump Campaign?
by Larry O'Connor | 12:08 pm, September 19th, 2017

Why in the world would the mainstream media continue to take James Clapper seriously?

In March the former Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama appeared on Meet the Press to respond to President Donald Trump‘s now-infamous tweets regarding a “wiretap” related to his campaign during the Obama Administration. Host Chuck Todd asked Clapper point-blank whether any wiretap had occurred:

But I will say that, for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against– the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign. I can’t speak for other Title Three authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity.

Fmr. DNI Clapper: "There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, president-elect, candidate or campaign."
8:24 AM - Mar 5, 2017

ALSO ON MEDIAITE
Fox & Friends Guest: 'Jim Clapper is an Idiot,' Has a 'Vacant Look'
Clapper’s answer appeared unequivocal, but there was still a little wiggle room. So Todd, to his credit, drilled down and asked a very specific question about a very specific scenario:

TODD: Yeah, I was just going to say, if the F.B.I., for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not know?

CLAPPER: Yes.

TODD: You would be told this?

CLAPPER: I would know that.

TODD: If there was a FISA court order–

CLAPPER: Yes.

TODD: –on something like this.

CLAPPER: Something like this, absolutely.

TODD: And at this point, you can’t confirm or deny whether that exists?

CLAPPER: I can deny it.

Now we learn that there was, in fact, a FISA court order and it came from the FBI and Clapper, in his own words, claimed he would have known about that. And he denied it, unequivocally. Maybe he forgot all about the FISA order wiretapping Paul Manafort while he was in direct contact with Trump in his campaign and after the election.

Clapper also “forgot” that the NSA had a data collection program of every single American citizen when he testified before the Senate Intelligence committee and denied its existence.

James Clapper, former DNI chief and now, favorite guest of media outlets looking to attack President Trump, either has a terrible, terrible memory, or he was kept in the dark about a FISA order that occurred on his watch, or he’s just a liar. Can’t think of any other options here, can you?

I ask again, why in the world would the mainstream media continue to take James Clapper seriously? Or, for that matter, book him as a guest?
Title: Clapper admits Trump wiretaps possible
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 21, 2017, 11:35:33 PM: http://www.speroforum.com/a/XPLQOCOPDK38/81727-Obama-official-admits-Trump-wiretaps-possible?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PCCYQBJXQN34&utm_content=XPLQOCOPDK38&utm_source=news&utm_term=Obama+official+admits+Trump+wiretaps+possible#.WcSutnrcCeQ
Title: Why Obama really spied on Trump
Post by: G M on September 23, 2017, 11:21:38 AM: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267923/why-obama-really-spied-trump-daniel-greenfield

WHY OBAMA REALLY SPIED ON TRUMP
Obama had to spy on Trump to protect himself.
September 20, 2017 Daniel Greenfield 359

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump. After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress.

Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office. The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance.

While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser. Kushner is a senior adviser. Those are exactly the people you spy on to get an insight into what your political opponents plan to do.

Now the latest CNN spin piece informs us that secret FISA orders were used to spy on the conversations of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The surveillance was discontinued for lack of evidence and then renewed under a new warrant. This is part of a pattern of FISA abuses by Obama Inc. which never allowed minor matters like lack of evidence to dissuade them from new FISA requests.

Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

If any of Trump’s people were talking to non-Americans, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could be used to spy on them. And then the redacted names of the Americans could be unmasked by Susan Rice, Samantha Power and other Obama allies. It was a technically legal Watergate.

If both CNN stories hold up, then Obama Inc. had spied on two Trump campaign leaders.

Furthermore the Obama espionage operation closely tracked Trump’s political progress. The first FISA request targeting Trump happened the month after he received the GOP nomination. The second one came through in October: the traditional month of political surprises meant to upend an election.

The spying ramped up after Trump’s win when the results could no longer be used to engineer a Hillary victory, but would instead have to be used to cripple and bring down President Trump. Headed out the door, Rice was still unmasking the names of Trump’s people while Obama was making it easier to pass around raw eavesdropped data to other agencies.

Obama had switched from spying on a political opponent to win an election, to spying on his successor to undo the results of the election. Abuse of power by a sitting government had become subversion of the government by an outgoing administration. Domestic spying on opponents had become a coup.

The Democrat scandals of the past few administrations have hinged on gross violations of political norms, elementary ethics and the rule of law that, out of context, were not technically illegal.

But it’s the pattern that makes the crime. It’s the context that shows the motive.

Obama Inc. compartmentalized its espionage operation in individual acts of surveillance and unmasking, and general policies implemented to aid both, that may have been individually legal, in the purely technical sense, in order to commit the major crime of eavesdropping on the political opposition.

When the individual acts of surveillance are described as legal, that’s irrelevant. It’s the collective pattern of surveillance of the political opposition that exposes the criminal motive for them.

If Obama spied on two of Trump’s campaign leaders, that’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.

A criminal motive can be spotted by a consistent pattern of actions disguised by different pretexts. A dirty cop may lose two pieces of evidence from the same defendant while giving two different excuses. A shady accountant may explain two otherwise identical losses in two different ways. Both excuses are technically plausible. But it’s the pattern that makes the crime.

Manafort was spied on under the Russia pretext. Bannon may have been spied on over the UAE. That’s two different countries, two different people and two different pretexts.

But one single target. President Trump.

It’s the pattern that exposes the motive.

When we learn the whole truth (if we ever do), we will likely discover that Obama Inc. assembled a motley collection of different technically legal pretexts to spy on Trump’s team.

Each individual pretext might be technically defensible. But together they add up to the crime of the century.

Obama’s gamble was that the illegal surveillance would justify itself. If you spy on a bunch of people long enough, especially people in politics and business, some sort of illegality, actual or technical, is bound to turn up. That’s the same gamble anyone engaged in illegal surveillance makes.

Businessmen illegally tape conversations with former partners hoping that they’ll say something damning enough to justify the risk. That was what Obama and his allies were doing with Trump.

It’s a crime. And you can’t justify committing a crime by discovering a crime.

If everyone were being spied on all the time, many crimes could be exposed every second. But that’s not how our system works. That’s why we have a Fourth Amendment.

Nor was Obama Inc. trying to expose crimes for their own sake, but to bring down the opposition.

That’s why it doesn’t matter what results the Obama surveillance turned up. The surveillance was a crime. Anything turned up by it is the fruit of a poisonous tree. It’s inherently illegitimate.

The first and foremost agenda must be to assemble a list of Trump officials who were spied on and the pretexts under which they were spied upon. The pattern will show the crime. And that’s what Obama and his allies are terrified of. It’s why Flynn was forced out using illegal surveillance and leaks. It’s why McMaster is protecting Susan Rice and the Obama holdovers while purging Trump loyalists at the NSC.

The left’s gamble was that the Mueller investigation or some other illegitimate spawn of the Obama eavesdropping would produce an indictment and then the procedural questions wouldn’t matter.

It’s the dirty cop using illegal eavesdropping to generate leads for a “clean” case against his target while betting that no one will look too closely or care how the case was generated. If one of the Mueller targets is intimidated into making a deal, the question of how the case was generated won’t matter.

Mueller will have a cooperative witness. And the Democrats can begin their coup in earnest. It will eventually turn out that there is no “there” there. But by then, it’ll be time for President Booker.

There’s just one problem.

If the gamble fails, if no criminal case that amounts to anything more than the usual investigational gimmick charges like perjury (the Federal equivalent of ‘resisting arrest’ for a beat cop) develops, then Obama and his allies are on the hook for the domestic surveillance of their political opponents.

With nothing to show for it and no way to distract from it.

That’s the race against the clock that is happening right now. Either the investigation gets results. Or its perpetrators are left hanging in the wind. If McMaster is fired, which on purely statistical grounds he probably will be, and a Trump loyalist who wasn’t targeted by the surveillance operation becomes the next National Security Adviser and brings in Trump loyalists, as Flynn tried to do, then it’s over.

And the Dems finally get their Watergate. Except the star won’t be Trump, it will be Obama. Rice, Power, Lynch and the rest of the gang will be the new Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell.

Once Obama and his allies launched their domestic surveillance operation, they crossed the Rubicon. And there was no way back. They had to destroy President Trump or risk going to jail.

The more crimes they committed by spying on the opposition, the more urgently they needed to bring down Trump. The consequences of each crime that they had committed spurred them on to commit worse crimes to save themselves from going to jail. It’s the same old story when it comes to criminals.

Each act of illegal surveillance became more blatant. And when illegal surveillance couldn’t stop Trump’s victory, they had to double down on the illegal surveillance for a coup.

The more Obama spied on Trump, the more he had to keep doing it. This time it was bound to pay off.

Obama and his allies had violated the norms so often for their policy goals that they couldn’t afford to be replaced by anyone but one of their own. The more Obama relied on the imperial presidency of executive orders, the less he could afford to be replaced by anyone who would undo them. The more his staffers lied and broke the law on everything from the government shutdown to the Iran nuke sellout, the more desperately they needed to pull out all the stops to keep Trump out of office. And the more they did it, the more they couldn’t afford not to do it. Abuse of power locks you into the loop familiar to all dictators. You can’t stop riding the tiger. Once you start, you can’t afford to stop.

If you want to understand why Samantha Power was unmasking names, that’s why. The hysterical obsession with destroying Trump comes from the top down. It’s not just ideology. It’s wealthy and powerful men and women who ran the country and are terrified that their crimes will be exposed.

It’s why the media increasingly sounds like the propaganda organs of a Communist country. Why there are street riots and why the internet is being censored by Google and Facebook’s “fact checking” allies.

It’s not just ideology. It’s raw fear.

The left is sitting on the biggest crime committed by a sitting president. The only way to cover it up is to destroy his Republican successor.

A turning point in history is here.

If Obama goes down, the left will go down with him. If his coup succeeds, then America ends.
Title: New Yorker: Manafort and the Trump business model
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 23, 2017, 04:18:30 PM: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-latest-paul-manafort-revelations-fit-with-trumps-business-model?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%2853%29&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=11990771&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1242028395&spReportId=MTI0MjAyODM5NQS2

Flynn:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mounting-pressure-on-michael-flynn
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on September 24, 2017, 04:19:14 AM: Finally finishing the Court of the Red Tsars about Stalin .

Endless stories on how they would arrest anyone that Stalin didn't like and everyone that person knew.

The lucky ones just got sent to Siberia. Some were spared torture others were beaten into confessing "their crimes" to the Party ot the State, real, imagined, made up , or infinitely trivial.

They would also be beaten till they gave up the names of other political enemies.

What Mueller is doing is only a different version of the above. We will torture you every way we can till you give up Trump for crimes to the Democratic Party , real , imagined, trivial , or made up.
Title: IRS gives records to Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2017, 04:18:15 PM: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politics/special-counsel-irs-russia-probe-information-sharing/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 27, 2017, 07:32:37 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2017, 04:18:15 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politics/special-counsel-irs-russia-probe-information-sharing/

During the Obama administration, the Obama administration unleashed the enormous powers of the IRS against their political opponents.

During the Trump administration, the Obama administration unleashed the enormous powers of the IRS against their political opponents.
Title: Rohrabacher, Assange, and not the Russians
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2017, 11:42:44 AM: https://pjmedia.com/video/rohrabacher-assange-has-absolute-proof-of-who-gave-him-dnc-emails-and-it-aint-the-russians/

The left does not want this to come out.
Where are the Dems demanding this evidence?

Of course they already have their fall back position:

The Russians gave it to whoever gave it to Assange to cover their tracks. That way they keep the phony news story going.
Title: 17 statements of NO EVIDENCE to support claim of Trump Russian collusion
Post by: DougMacG on October 09, 2017, 08:54:53 AM: Sharyl Atkisson formerly of CBS lays out what we know so far:

https://sharylattkisson.com/2017/10/07/11-times-dems-repubs-said-no-evidence-of-trump-russia-collusion-10-times-people-claimed-there-was/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SharylAttkisson+%28Sharyl+Attkisson%29&utm_content=Yahoo%

1. The New York Times
Nov. 1, 2016
According to the newspaper, the FBI says there’s no definitive connection between Donald Trump and the Russian government, reaching that conclusion after a wide-ranging investigation. The Times cited law-enforcement officials who said any cyberattacks carried out were “aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump.” The FBI also found no conclusive evidence of deliberate communications between Trump and a Russian bank, that were alleged earlier.

President Trump
2. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin, House Speaker)
Feb. 28, 2017
“No one has ever showed us any evidence that any collusion had occurred between an American involved with the political system and the Russians.”

3. James Clapper (Former Obama Director of National Intelligence)
March 5, 2017
“[Regarding] NSA, FBI…CIA…Director of National Intelligence (DNI), that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians, there was no evidence of that included in our [January] report,” Clapper testified. He was asked, “…but does it exist?” He answered, “Not to my knowledge.”

Former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
4. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California, House Intelligence Committee Chairman)
March 20, 2017
During a hearing, Nunes questioned then-FBI Director James Comey:
NUNES: Do you have any evidence that any current Trump White House or administration official coordinated with the Russian intelligence services?
COMEY: Not a question I can answer…
NUNES: Well, I think — I understand that…but I can tell you that we don’t have any evidence and we’re conducting our own investigation here.
Rep. Devin Nunes, Chairman of House Intelligence Committee

5. James Comey, then-FBI Director
March 20, 2017
Comey was asked if he agreed with former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Clapper who said there was “no evidence” of “collusion between the members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.” Comey replied, “I think he’s right about characterizing the [January] report which you all have read.”

6. Rep. Chris Stewart, (R-Utah, House Intelligence Committee)
March 20, 2017
“At this point, everyone on this dais should agree with Mr. Clapper because we in the committee have seen no evidence, zero, that would indicate that there was collusion or criminal wrongdoing between any members of the previous [sic] administration or campaign and Russian officials.”

The Kremlin in Moscow is the official residence of the Russia’s President.
7. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California, House Intelligence Committee)
April 2, 2017
When asked, “Can you say definitively that there was collusion, there were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from [Hillary campaign chair] John Podesta or the DNC?” Schiff replied, “I don’t think we can say anything definitively at this point.”

8. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California, Senate Intelligence Committee)
May 3, 2017
When asked if she had evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, Feinstein replied, “Not at this time.”

9. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia, Senate Intelligence Committee)
May 8, 2017
“People that might have said they were involved, to what extent they were involved, to what extent the president might have known about these people or whatever, there is nothing there from that standpoint that we have seen directly linking our president to any of that.”

10. James Clapper (again)
May 8, 2017
At a hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) asked Clapper if it’s still accurate that he has no knowledge of the existence of evidence of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. Clapper replied, “It is.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Photograph by: Frank Plitt via Wikimedia Commons

11. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California)
May 9, 2017
Rep. Waters has repeatedly stated that President Trump “has colluded with the Russians,” but when asked if she has seen evidence to back up her claims, Waters replied: “No, we have not.”

12. President Donald Trump
May 9, 2017
In a letter of termination to FBI Director Comey, President Trump wrote that Comey had informed him “on three occasions that I am not under investigation.” (This was later confirmed by Comey, contrary to reporting that stated Trump was “lying.”)
President Donald J. Trump

13. James Clapper (yet again)
May 28, 2017
On NBC, Clapper states that in looking at possible Russian collusion, “my dashboard warning light was clearly on” but “I have to say, at the time I left, I did not see any smoking gun certitude evidence of collusion.”

14: Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
June 4, 2017
On CNN, Sen. Warner is asked whether he has seen any evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. He says: “There is a lot of smoke,” but “we have no smoking gun at this point.”

15. Former FBI Director James Comey (again)
June 8, 2017
Comey confirmed to Congress that he had, indeed, told President Trump three times that he was not personally under investigation.

16. Jeh Johnson, Obama Homeland Security Secretary
June 21, 2017
In Congressional testimony, Johnson was asked whether, at the time he left the government in January 2017, he had “seen any evidence that Donald Trump or any member of his campaign colluded, conspired or coordinated with the Russians or anyone else to infiltrate or impact our voter infrastructure?” He said, “Not beyond what has been out there open-source, and not beyond anything that I’m sure this committee has already seen and heard before, directly from the intelligence community. So anything I’d have on that is derivative of what the intelligence community has — and the law enforcement community.”

17. Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) at press conference with Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA)
Oct. 4, 2017
“We can certifiably say that no vote totals were affected, that the tallies are accurate. The outcome of the election, based upon the counting votes. They did not in any way shape or form that we’ve been able to find alter that.” As for collusion with Russia, “the issue of collusion is still open, that we continue to investigate both intelligence and witnesses, and that we’re not in a position where we will come to any type of temporary finding on that until we’ve completed the process.”
Title: WSJ: Strassel: About that Trump Dossier Wall
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2017, 04:13:59 PM: By Kimberley A. Strassel
Oct. 5, 2017 6:57 p.m. ET
796 COMMENTS

More non-news on the Russia-collusion front came Wednesday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee said it has now verified what everyone knew nine months ago: Russia worked to sow chaos during the 2016 election; vote totals weren’t affected; and no evidence has emerged that Donald Trump was in cahoots with Moscow.

But in the more distant, less camera-filled corners of Washington, there actually is some interesting new information. It centers on the document that increasingly looks central to the “chaos” Russia sowed: the Trump dossier.

That was the infamous list of accusations compiled starting in the summer of 2016 by a former British spook, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by the liberal opposition-research firm Fusion GPS. The discredited rumors about Mr. Trump came from anonymous Russian sources. This is notable, since it turns out Fusion was separately—or maybe not so separately—working with entities tied to the Kremlin.

How close was Fusion’s leader, Glenn Simpson, to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer? Did the Russians know about the dossier all along and help plant the information in it? Were American law-enforcement agencies relying on Russian-directed disinformation when they obtained secret warrants against Trump associates? Chaos, indeed.

Witness how hard the Federal Bureau of Investigation is fighting to avoid divulging any information about the dossier. More than a month ago the House Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas to the FBI and the Justice Department, asking for dossier-related documents. Lawmakers were told to go swivel.

A little more than a week ago, the committee’s frustrated chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, took the case all the way to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who finally offered to make an FBI official available for a briefing. But the bureau is still withholding all documents. To date, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Judiciary Committee has not received any paper from the FBI on Russia matters, despite numerous requests, some countersigned by the Democratic ranking member, Dianne Feinstein.

Increasingly, one name is popping up: Gregory Brower, who leads the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs. Mr. Brower is an odd man for the job. These gigs tend to go to more-junior people, since they involve the drudgery of answering calls from grumpy congressional staffers. Yet Mr. Brower is a former U.S. attorney—a job that requires Senate confirmation—and a former Nevada state senator.

Before his latest role, he was the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that post he was described as a confidant of former FBI Director James Comey. It was Mr. Comey who installed Mr. Brower in the congressional affairs job, just a few days before President Trump fired the director.

Mr. Brower has been shutting down congressional requests and stonewalling ever since. He has even tried appealing directly to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office to squelch committee demands for documents. The FBI keeps justifying its intransigence by saying it doesn’t want to interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But Mr. Grassley recently announced that Mr. Mueller’s separate inquiry would no longer be considered a legitimate reason for the FBI to withhold information from Congress.

Now here’s the surprise: Reuters reported Wednesday that Mr. Mueller “has taken over FBI inquiries into a former British spy’s dossier” against Mr. Trump. How very convenient. The Mueller team has leaked all manner of details from its probe, even as it had avoided the dossier. But just as Congress is ratcheting up pressure on the FBI, anonymous sources say that it’s out of the bureau’s hands.

Some Republicans might be tempted to cheer news that the special counsel is looking into the dossier. They shouldn’t. A Mueller takeover will make it even harder for Congress to conduct an independent investigation—which may well have been the reason for the move. Mr. Mueller has had months to look into the document, and his lack of curiosity so far speaks volumes. As a friend of Mr. Comey and a former FBI director himself, Mr. Mueller cannot be counted on to examine impartially whether the FBI was duped.

Sen. Richard Burr, who leads his chamber’s Intelligence Committee, noted on Wednesday that his dossier investigation has “hit a wall.” Mr. Steele has gone underground. Mr. Simpson won’t hand over relevant documents or say who paid him. The FBI is stiff-arming lawmakers. No one wants to talk about a dossier that Paul Roderick Gregory, a Russia expert at the Hoover Institution, found to read like something “compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who follows the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports.” No one wants to discuss an array of Russian lawyers, lobbyists and Kremlin officials who may have been involved in its creation.

All of this is a lot more shady than Facebook ads. If Congress wants to produce the answers it has promised, it has to break through the dossier “wall.”

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: Tit for tat; Mueller's Tom Price problem
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 10, 2017, 03:02:11 PM: https://spectator.org/robert-muellers-tom-price-problem/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20171010215956
Title: WSJ: The Rest of the Russia Story
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 16, 2017, 08:36:41 AM: By The Editorial Board
Updated Oct. 15, 2017 6:03 p.m. ET
433 COMMENTS

The Beltway media move in a pack, and that means ignoring some stories while leaping on others. Consider the pack’s lack of interest in the story of GPS Fusion and the “dossier” from former spook Christopher Steele.

The House Intelligence Committee recently issued subpoenas to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that paid for the dossier that contained allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and ties to Russia. The dossier’s details have been either discredited or are unverified, but the document nonetheless framed the political narrative about Trump-Russian collusion that led to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Democrats and Fusion seem to care mostly that House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes issued the subpoenas, given that he temporarily stepped aside from the Russia probe in April. But only the chairman is allowed to issue subpoenas, and Mr. Nunes did so at the request of Republican Mike Conaway, who is officially leading the probe.

The real question is why Democrats and Fusion seem not to want to tell the public who requested the dossier or what ties Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson had with the Russians in 2016. All the more so because congressional investigators have learned that Mr. Simpson was working for Russian clients at the same time he was working with Mr. Steele.

Americans deserve to know who paid Mr. Simpson for this work and if the Kremlin influenced the project. They also deserve to know if former FBI director James Comey relied on the dossier to obtain warrants to monitor the Trump campaign. If the Russians used disinformation to spur a federal investigation into a presidential candidate, that would certainly qualify as influencing an election.

The House committee also subpoenaed FBI documents about wiretap warrants more than a month ago but has been stonewalled. There is no plausible reason that senior leaders of Congress—who have top-level security clearance—can’t see files directly relevant to the question of Russian election interference.

Justice Department excuses about interfering with Mr. Mueller’s investigation don’t wash. Mr. Mueller is conducting a criminal probe, while Congress has a duty to oversee the executive branch. Both investigations can proceed simultaneously. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mr. Mueller, needs to deputize specific Justice officials to handle Congress’s requests.

The media attacks on Mr. Nunes for issuing the subpoenas are a sign that he is onto something. He recused himself in April after complaints about his role bringing to light Obama Administration officials who “unmasked” and leaked the names of secretly wiretapped Trump officials. Mr. Nunes has since been vindicated as we’ve learned that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power did the unmasking. Yet Democrats on the House Ethics Committee have refused to clear Mr. Nunes—trying to keep him sidelined from the Russia probe.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has also pursued the Fusion GPS trail, but he could use House backup. Speaker Paul Ryan needs to call on the Ethics Committee to render a quick decision on Mr. Nunes or allow him to resume his Russia investigation. Mr. Ryan should also prepare to have the House vote on a contempt citation if the Justice Department doesn’t supply subpoenaed documents.

Mr. Mueller will grind away at the Trump-Russia angle, but the story of Democrats, the Steele dossier and Jim Comey’s FBI also needs telling. Americans don’t need a Justice Department coverup abetted by Glenn Simpson’s media buddies.
Title: A real Russian conspiracy not fake one
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2017, 04:32:58 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/452776/russian-nuclear-scandal-what-did-hillary-clinton-know
Title: FBI Confirms: Yes, James Comey Finished His Draft of the Speech Absolving Hilla
Post by: G M on October 18, 2017, 03:49:17 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372037.php

October 18, 2017
FBI Confirms: Yes, James Comey Finished His Draft of the Speech Absolving Hillary Clinton Months Before Concluding the Investigation
A lot of people most convinced of their holy integrity are actually vile rats.

In documents it released on Monday, the FBI confirmed that former FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement about the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation months before interviewing Clinton.
The records show that on May 2, 2016, Comey emailed Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, general counsel James Baker and chief of staff and senior counselor James Rybicki. The subject of the email was "midyear exam," and though the email says its contents are unclassified, the body of the email is redacted in the release.

...

FBI and Justice Department analysts are divided on whether Comey violated rules or broke with tradition by drafting the statement prior to interviewing Clinton and other witnesses. "To me, this is so far out of bounds it’s not even in the stadium," Chris Swecker, who retired from the FBI in 2006 as assistant director for the criminal investigative division and acting executive assistant director for law enforcement services, previously told Newsweek. "That is just not how things operate.... It's built in our DNA not to prejudge investigations, particularly from the top."

For Comey's response, we'll have to wait to see what he leaks to his friend at Columbia and then to the New York Times.
Title: MSM blackout of Obama?Clinton era corruption
Post by: ccp on October 19, 2017, 07:57:26 AM: Bamster can do no wrong as again the wagons circle around him. Got to protect THEIR guy:

https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/wtf-msm-virtually-no-coverage-of-the-obama-clinton-russian-uranium-bombshell
Title: Silverglate: How Robert Mueller Tried To Entrap Me
Post by: G M on October 19, 2017, 12:33:21 PM: http://news.wgbh.org/2017/10/17/silverglate-how-robert-mueller-tried-entrap-me?utm_content=buffer3e885&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Silverglate: How Robert Mueller Tried To Entrap Me
October 17, 2017
HARVEY SILVERGLATE
Is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in mid-May to lead the investigation into suspected ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and various shady (aren’t they all?) Russian officials, the choirboy that he’s being touted to be, or is he more akin to a modern-day Tomas de Torquemada, the Castilian Dominican friar who was the first Grand Inquisitor in the 15th Century Spanish Inquisition?

Given the rampant media partisanship since the election, one would think that Mueller’s appointment would lend credibility to the hunt for violations of law by candidate, now President Trump and his minions.

But I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor. My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.

When Mueller was the acting United States Attorney in Boston, I was defense counsel in a federal criminal case in which a rather odd fellow contacted me to tell me that he had information that could assist my client. He asked to see me, and I agreed to meet. He walked into my office wearing a striking, flowing white gauze-like shirt and sat down across from me at the conference table. He was prepared, he said, to give me an affidavit to the effect that certain real estate owned by my client was purchased with lawful currency rather than, as Mueller’s office was claiming, the proceeds of illegal drug activities.

My secretary typed up the affidavit that the witness was going to sign. Just as he picked up the pen, he looked at me and said something like: “You know, all of this is actually false, but your client is an old friend of mine and I want to help him.” As I threw the putative witness out of my office, I noticed, under the flowing white shirt, a lump on his back – he was obviously wired and recording every word between us.

Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court. Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him. (That “lead,” of course, was provided by a fellow that we lawyers, among ourselves, would indelicately refer to as a “scumbag.”)

This experience made me realize that Mueller was capable of believing, at least preliminarily, any tale of criminal wrongdoing and acting upon it, despite the palpable bad character and obviously questionable motivations of his informants and witnesses. (The lesson was particularly vivid because Mueller and I overlapped at Princeton, he in the Class of 1966 and me graduating in 1964.)

Years later, my wariness toward Mueller was bolstered in an even more revelatory way. When he led the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, I arranged in December 1990 to meet with him in Washington. I was then lead defense counsel for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who had been convicted in federal court in North Carolina in 1979 of murdering his wife and two young children while stationed at Fort Bragg. Years after the trial, MacDonald (also at Princeton when Mueller and I were there) hired me and my colleagues to represent him and obtain a new trial based on shocking newly discovered evidence that demonstrated MacDonald had been framed in part by the connivance of military investigators and FBI agents. Over the years, MacDonald and his various lawyers and investigators had collected a large trove of such evidence.

The day of the meeting, I walked into the DOJ conference room, where around the table sat a phalanx of FBI agents. My three colleagues joined me. Mueller walked into the room, went to the head of the table, and opened the meeting with this admonition, reconstructed from my vivid and chilling memory: “Gentlemen: Criticism of the Bureau is a non-starter.” (Another lawyer attendee of the meeting remembered Mueller’s words slightly differently: “Prosecutorial misconduct is a non-starter.” Either version makes clear Mueller’s intent – he did not want to hear evidence that either the prosecutors or the FBI agents on the case misbehaved and framed an innocent man.)

Special counsel Mueller’s background indicates zealousness that we might expect in the Grand Inquisitor, not the choirboy.

Why Special Prosecutors Are A Bad Idea

The history of special counsels (called at different times either “independent counsel” or “special prosecutor”) is checkered and troubled, resulting in considerable Supreme Court litigation around the concept of a prosecutor acting outside of the normal DOJ chain of command.

The Supreme Court in 1988 approved, with a single dissent (Justice Antonin Scalia), the concept of an independent prosecutor. Still, all subsequent efforts to appoint such a prosecutor have led to enormous disagreements over whether justice was done. Consider Kenneth Starr’s obsessive four-year, $40-million pursuit of President Bill Clinton for having sex with a White House intern and then lying about it. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s 2006 pursuit of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is not as infamous, but it should be. Fitzgerald indicted and a jury later convicted Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, for lying about leaking to the New York Times the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Subsequent revelations that there were multiple leaks and that Wilson’s CIA identity was not a secret served to discredit Libby’s indictment. Libby’s sentence was commuted. Libby’s relatively speedy reinstatement into the bar is seen by many as evidence of his unfair conviction. Considered in tandem, the campaigns against Democrat Clinton and Republican Libby raise disturbing questions about the use of special or independent prosecutors.

Yet despite the constitutional issues, the most serious problem with a special counsel is that when a prosecutor is appointed to examine closely the lives and affairs of a pre-selected group of targets, that prosecutor is almost certain to stumble across multiple actions that might be deemed criminal under the sprawling and incredibly vague federal criminal code.

In Mueller’s case, one can have a very high degree of confidence that he will uncover alleged felonies within the ranks of the inner circle of the President’s men (there are very few women to investigate in this administration). This could well include Trump himself.

I described this phenomenon long before Trump began his improbable rise, in my 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” (Encounter Books, updated edition, 2011). I explained how federal “fraud” statutes were so vague that just about any action in the daily life of a typically busy professional might be squeezed into the elastic definition of some kind of federal felony. Harvard Law Professor (and, I should note, my former professor and subsequent longtime friend and colleague) Alan Dershowitz has beaten me to the punch, making the case in a raft of articles and on TV and radio that none of the evidence thus far leaked to or adduced by investigative reporters constitute federal crimes.

But Mueller’s demonstrated zeal and ample resources virtually assure that indictments will come, even in the absence of actual crimes rather than behavior that is simply “politics as usual”. If Mueller claims that Trump or members of his entourage committed crimes, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily so. We should take Mueller and his prosecutorial team with a grain of salt. But a grain of salt seems an outmoded concept in an age when both sides – Trump and his critics – seem impervious to inconvenient facts. The most appropriate slogan for all the combatants on both sides of the Trump wars (including, alas, the reporters and their editors) might well be: “Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up.”

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and First Amendment lawyer and writer, is WGBH/News’ “Freedom Watch” columnist. He practices law in an “of counsel” capacity in the Boston law firm Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP. He is the author, most recently, of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (New York: Encounter Books, updated edition 2011). The author thanks his research assistant, Nathan McGuire, for his invaluable work on this series.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2017, 12:57:52 PM: Nice find.
Title: Mueller investigating Tony Podesta
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2017, 09:29:28 AM: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mueller-now-investigating-democratic-lobbyist-tony-podesta-n812776

URLs in article about nature of investigation into Manafort too.
Title: Pravda on the Hudson preparing for defeat?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 24, 2017, 10:21:48 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/us/politics/russia-investigation-congress-intelligence-committees-gowdy.html
Title: Shock: Clinton Campaign, DNC Paid For Research That Became the PeePeeParty Dossi
Post by: G M on October 24, 2017, 04:48:05 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372183.php

October 24, 2017
Shock: Clinton Campaign, DNC Paid For Research That Became the PeePeeParty Dossier
Fusion's fighting a congressional subpoena to avoid disclosing who paid for this, and now Fusion releases this?

This is about the second client -- who is now revealed to be Clinton and the DNC, which they've long denied, but which we've long suspected.

Meanwhile, Fusion is in court trying to defeat a congressional subpeona to find out who both of the clients paying them for this were.

The second client we now know.

But the first remains hidden -- and if Fusion prevails in court, it will remain hidden.

The DNC's lawyer released Fusion from its confidentially agreement to reveal this -- but this doesn't answer who the original client was. Which is precisely what Fusion is fighting in court to continue to conceal.

What is it about the first client that's so important that Fusion and the DNC are willing to throw the DNC and Hillary Clinton under the bus to protect?

Maybe that's the entire point -- to get the judge to say "Well you know one of the clients, so I'm ruling that Fusion can continue defying the subpoena to reveal the first client."

Story appears in the DNC's house organ, the Washington Post.

Someone really doesn't want Fusion to be compelled to open up its books and client list.

he Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to the people.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the firm in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Prior to that agreement, Fusion GPS's research into Trump was funded by a still unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

Note that we only have anonymous leaks claiming that last bit -- that an unknown Republican originally paid for it.

But someone wishing to obscure the actual client would, of course, put out that kind of disinformation, anonymously.

Interesting that the National Laughingstock claims this as some kind of verified fact, when the whole point of the congressional subpeona is to find out if this anonymously sourced claim is actually true, or just a cover story.

Modified limited hang-out is what we called it during the Nixon and Clinton days.

Get Ready For Another Reality-Warping Mindshock:

Follow
Maggie Haberman ✔@maggieNYT
Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html …
4:07 PM - Oct 24, 2017

Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier
Fusion GPS was hired by a Democratic lawyer acting on behalf of campaign, committee.
washingtonpost.com
697 697 Replies 724 724 Retweets 790 790 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy

BTW, she's a NYT reporter, coming there from Politico. And even she seems a bit astonished at the lying from Clinton and the DNC.

Again, I'm sorry to have to suggest this blasphemy against the solidity of your psychic reality, but Hillary Clinton might not always be entirely truthful with you.

Namaste. Cat/Cow. Child's pose. Fluffy pillows, fuzzy slippers and dozing kittens.

More: It begins to look like a Clinton-funded hatchet job formed the entire basis of the later DOJ/FBI probe accusing Trump of precisely what Clinton paid someone to accuse Trump of.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 24, 2017, 05:47:05 PM: Well. Well. Well.

From the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.e22b156b7b91 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.e22b156b7b91)

By Adam Entous, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman October 24 at 7:21 PM

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS’s role.

The dossier has become a lightning rod amid the intensifying investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. Some congressional Republican leaders have spent months trying to discredit Fusion GPS and Steele and tried to determine the identity of the Democrat or organization that paid for the dossier.

Trump tweeted as recently as Saturday that the Justice Department and FBI should “immediately release who paid for it.”

Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement. Spokesmen for the Clinton campaign and the DNC had no immediate comment.

Some of the details are included in a Tuesday letter sent by Perkins Coie to a lawyer representing Fusion GPS, telling the research firm that it was released from a client-confidentiality obligation. The letter was prompted by a legal fight over a subpoena for Fusion GPS’s bank records.

People involved in the matter said that they would not disclose the dollar amounts paid to Fusion GPS but that the campaign and the DNC shared the cost.

Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier is a compilation of reports he prepared for Fusion GPS. The dossier alleged that the Russian government collected compromising information about Trump and that the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist his campaign for president.

U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment asserting that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether Trump associates helped the Russians in that effort.

Trump has adamantly denied the allegations in the dossier and has dismissed the FBI probe as a witch hunt.

Officials have said that the FBI has confirmed some of the information in the dossier. Other details, including the most sensational accusations, have not been verified and may never be.

Fusion GPS’s work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when the GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate the real estate magnate’s background.

Fusion GPS did not start off looking at Trump’s Russia ties but quickly realized that those relationships were extensive, according to the people familiar with the matter.

When the Republican donor stopped paying for the research, Elias, acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, agreed to pay for the work to continue. The Democrats paid for research, including by Fusion GPS, because of concerns that little was known about Trump and his business interests, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Those people said that it is standard practice for political campaigns to use law firms to hire outside researchers to ensure their work is protected by attorney-client and work-product privileges.

The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’ since November 2015 — though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.

At no point, the people said, did the Clinton campaign or the DNC direct Steele’s activities. They described him as a Fusion GPS subcontractor.

Some of Steele’s allegations began circulating in Washington in the summer of 2016 as the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into possible connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Around that time, Steele shared some of his findings with the FBI.

After the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele was publicly identified in news reports.

The dossier was published by BuzzFeed News in January. Fusion GPS has said in court filings that it did not give BuzzFeed the documents.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that Steele was respected by the FBI and the State Department for earlier work he performed on a global corruption probe.

In early January, then-FBI Director James B. Comey presented a two-page summary of Steele’s dossier to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. In May, Trump fired Comey, which led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia matter.

Congressional Republicans have tried to force Fusion GPS to identify the Democrat or group behind Steele’s work, but the firm has said that it will not do so, citing confidentiality agreements with its clients.

Last week, Fusion GPS executives invoked their constitutional right not to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee. The firm’s founder, Glenn Simpson, had previously given a 10-hour interview to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Over objections from Democrats, the Republican leader of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), subpoenaed Fusion GPS’s bank records to try to identify the mystery client.

Fusion GPS has been fighting the release of its bank records. A judge on Tuesday extended a deadline for Fusion GPS’s bank to respond to the subpoena until Friday while the company attempts to negotiate a resolution with Nunes.
Title: one R involved
Post by: ccp on October 24, 2017, 06:50:43 PM: who was the Republican ?

Bush campaign?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 25, 2017, 01:54:36 AM: Quote from: ccp on October 24, 2017, 06:50:43 PM
who was the Republican ?

Bush campaign?

One of 15 possibilities. Could also be Romney or McCain or someone close to them like Graham.

If the information in this dossier was used in probable cause affidavits for FISA warrants or other law enforcement investigative actions, then the Russian interference campaign will have achieved results beyond expectations. It has caused the US federal government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of personnel hours chasing a classic disinformation campaign that used a political opposition research firm to spread its magic dust.

Unfortunately, I sense that this is a huge ball of yarn that is not anywhere close to being unraveled. And a lot of other data points like the bleached emails, the Clinton Foundation, Uranium One and a bunch of other things are tied into this effort.

Nothing reported about this issue for the past 18-20 months can be trusted.
Title: Byron York: Now That the Clinton/DNC Connection to the FusionGPS Info Op is Esta
Post by: G M on October 25, 2017, 10:14:01 AM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372189.php

Byron York: Now That the Clinton/DNC Connection to the FusionGPS Info Op is Established, The FBI Is the Next Cog in the Machine That Needs to be Confirmed
Update: Paul Ryan Adds His Weight to Subpeona

The information op is coming from inside the house.

Read it all.
Title: Tucker on a rampage with new intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 25, 2017, 11:00:14 AM: Watch the first 13:21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNSF2Mqpq-c
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 25, 2017, 11:41:39 AM: I wonder if Bill Kristol hired Fusion GPS. Or if he had enough money to hire them. Just speculating here.
Title: Mysterious Republican
Post by: ccp on October 25, 2017, 04:18:45 PM: FWIW his "net worth" on internet is 5 million . Probably not enough (if accurate to any degree) if was to fund this on his own.

What I find odd is the "Republican" is mysteriously unnamed. It must be a much bigger fish . Romney? even more likely Koch brothers - they got the cash and probably the snooping where with all to fund something like this.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 26, 2017, 04:31:37 AM: In late 2015 or early 2016, there was a donor funding a Republican Stop-Trump movement. There was even a website. This person could have been the donor who paid others to retain Fusion GPS.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 27, 2017, 05:26:52 PM: The Washington Free Beacon has admitted to hiring Fusion GPS in the fall of 2015. This website was founded originally by the Center for American Freedom as anon-profit entity. Bill Kristol is a board member of the Center for American Freedom.

The editor in chief of the Free Beacon is Matthew Continetti. This publication went private in 2014 or 2015. Continetti remains as Editor in Chief of the Free Beacon. He is the son-in-law of Bill Kristol.

An alleged investor in the for-profit Free Beacon is hedge fund operator Paul Singer who is the chairman of Elliott Management. This company is an activist investor. One of its more successful activist endeavors was its reorganization of Juniper Networks.
Title: Free Beacon's statement
Post by: ccp on October 27, 2017, 07:05:47 PM: on the public disclosure of their involvement with Fusion GPS:

http://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/fusion-gps-washington-free-beacon/

There denial of any affiliation with the Steel dossier seems plausible since did it sounds like Fusion GPS went to the DNC or/and Clintons when Free Beacon stopped paying them .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2017, 07:29:42 AM: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-gates-campaign-aide-indicted-along-manafort/

what is truly amazing there is nothing here that cannot be said of Clinton, Podesta, and Schultz and one or more of the lawyers

Nothing !
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 30, 2017, 08:16:48 AM: Quote from: ccp on October 30, 2017, 07:29:42 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-gates-campaign-aide-indicted-along-manafort/

what is truly amazing there is nothing here that cannot be said of Clinton, Podesta, and Schultz and one or more of the lawyers

Nothing !

If these allegations are true, then Manafort and Gates will not be the first to have tried such a scheme ... and they will not be the last as long as the US taxes worldwide income regardless of where the income was earned. There was a local married couple near me who tried the same thing with income earned from the operation and sale of medical schools located on several Caribbean islands. You are OK until you try and bring the money back into the US without declaring the relevant portion of it as income. Any transaction of any size creates reports at your receiving US banks that get filed with FinServ at Treasury.

The Swiss banks used to provide very specific advice to their clients on setting up off-shore companies like these in order to avoid the tax. Then, the US went after them and held their ability to do business in the US hostage until they agreed to abandon their long-term commitment to customer confidentiality.

Also, what is also weird here is that the US had provided an amnesty window for filing FBAR reports on foreign bank accounts. Manafort and Gates could have escaped most all liability here if they had filed accurate FBAR's during that amnesty period.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2017, 10:21:10 PM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-dossier-dam-is-breaking-1509143847?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on October 31, 2017, 03:44:51 AM: The Podesta Group is very likely one of the two companies named in the Manafort indictment as being hired by Manafort to lobby in the US for his pro-Russia Ukraine clients. Tony Podesta resigned yesterday as the head of The Podesta Group and blamed Fox News.

What the Sp Counsel alleges against Manafort is that he earned a bunch of money overseas, did not declare it as income, deposited it into various undeclared on FBAR's foreign bank accounts that he and Davis controlled, and, brought back part of those funds into the US without declaring that as income and paying income tax on it. In the midst of this, they also allege money laundering. This will be difficult to prove because it is not illegal to earn money for political consulting in foreign countries.

But, if the Sp Counsel can prove that Manafort and Gates controlled certain banks opened in the names of foreign companies that they also controlled, then this is the same principle as income tax evasion.

In the end, we are going to learn that Russia was actively lobbying here for many things. And this does not even touch the entire UraniumOne issue. Of course, by passing Magnitsky Act, Congress was attempting to influence internal Russian policies.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on October 31, 2017, 05:26:06 AM: " Of course, by passing Magnitsky Act, Congress was attempting to influence internal Russian policies. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2017, 08:25:43 AM: Rick:

Would love to get your take on why virtually nothing is being done by AG Sessions, the DOJ, the FBI et al, on the Uranium One/Clinton Slush Fund/bribery etc. matter
Title: frustrating that DOJ FBI silent on Uranium etc
Post by: ccp on October 31, 2017, 08:48:51 AM: " Rick:

Would love to get your take on why virtually nothing is being done by AG Sessions, the DOJ, the FBI et al, on the Uranium One/Clinton Slush Fund/bribery etc. matter "

I wonder if one reasons is the DOJ is infected with leftists and Sessions has not had the time to get more loyalists into the mix.

The DOJ must be staffed with almost all crats as are most government and at least Fed employees.
Could you imagine the slow walking any investigation anything Hillary, or Saint Barack. *Everything* would be leaked to the Dem machine even before it had a chance.

John Batchelor had a guest who was saying that it is not that easy to find loyal qualified replacements at State or DOJ . First of all there are not many people applying.

I cannot find the interview at the moment to post here.

That said the double standard is obvious and extremely frustrating.
Title: The Week: Mueller Running Amok
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2017, 08:45:32 PM: https://theweek.com/articles/734070/mueller-running-amok
Title: Russian conspiracy, Comey, Sharyl Attkisson, FBI, DNC Servers
Post by: DougMacG on November 01, 2017, 11:46:49 AM: Sharyl Attkisson ✔@SharylAttkisson - tweet
If Democratic National Committee DNC had turned its server(s) over for FBI exam after alleged Russia hacking of emails, I wonder what would have been found. Why didn't FBI didn't just take servers if national security were at stake? Permission not needed for matters so important.
https://twitchy.com/jacobb-38/2017/10/29/sharyl-attkisson-poses-the-question-to-the-fbi-concerning-last-years-dnc-hack/
Title: Serious read from Andrew McCarthy on Manafort's legal problems 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2017, 04:41:34 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453305/paul-manafort-indictment-mystifying-enigmatic?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-11-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: JW does a deep dive on the Trump Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2017, 04:53:21 PM: fourth post of the day

https://www.judicialwatch.org/video-update/inside-judicial-watch-truth-behind-trump-dossier/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=action+alert&utm_term=members&utm_content=20171101235219
Title: Nunes Dems rushed to see Dossier?
Post by: ccp on November 02, 2017, 02:57:53 PM: I don't get this . Is he saying the DEms have not seen or heard about the Dossier? How can that be? It was paid for by Clinton and the DNC mob .

and as Crafty keeps asking why are not the Repubs ALL OVER THIS?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/nunes-dems-suddenly-interested-viewing-doj-dossier-docs-didnt-want-subpoenaed/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2017, 06:06:33 AM: https://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/sit-on-it-2/
Title: Forbes: Why was Obama DOJ silent?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2017, 09:16:57 AM: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/10/25/why-was-obamas-justice-department-silent-on-criminal-activity-by-russias-nuclear-agency/#4d3a3f20be17
Title: It's time for Republicans in the House and Senate
Post by: ccp on November 07, 2017, 07:54:45 AM: to put pressure on getting this thing to end:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453476/donald-trump-mueller-investigation-embarrassment-america

I am not optimistic that Mueller will not endeavor to keep this going through the '18 election as is obviously the goal. (if not longer)
Title: Fusion GPS again
Post by: ccp on November 07, 2017, 05:28:33 PM: met along with the same Russian lawyer as Trump Jr
though in some places it states prior to Trump and in at least one place it states after the Trump Jr. meeting:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/11/07/fusion-gps-official-met-with-russian-operative-before-and-after-trump-jr-sit-down.html

What a coincidence !!! :-P
Title: WSJ/Strassel: Lifting the Steele Curtain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2017, 07:53:04 AM: Lifting the Steele Curtain
The Fusion GPS dossier was one of the dirtiest political tricks in U.S. history.
Then-candidate Hillary Clinton at a rally in Kent, Ohio, Oct. 31, 2016.
Then-candidate Hillary Clinton at a rally in Kent, Ohio, Oct. 31, 2016. Photo: Brooks Kraft/Getty Images
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Nov. 9, 2017 7:34 p.m. ET
1388 COMMENTS

The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.

Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.

Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.

The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV and Twitter to spread the allegations.

The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”

Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun a smear document into an abusive investigation.

To that point, it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document. Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?

The idea that the federal government and a special counsel were mobilized—that American citizens were monitored and continue to be investigated—based on a campaign-funded hit document is extraordinary. Especially given that to this day no one has publicly produced a single piece of evidence to support any of the dossier’s substantive allegations about Trump team members.

So yes, Mrs. Clinton, the dossier—which you paid for—was used in the election. And we are only beginning to understand in how many ways.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Mueller's double standard
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2017, 11:02:56 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453659/mueller-paul-manafort-investigation-hardball-tactics?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Week%20in%20Review%202017-11-12&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Flynn looking to cut a deal?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 23, 2017, 02:06:33 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/politics/flynn-mueller-russia-trump.html?emc=edit_na_20171123&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: FBI left targets in dark
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2017, 10:04:13 AM: https://patriotpost.us/articles/52627
Title: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: ccp on December 01, 2017, 12:53:37 PM: To help me sort out all the lib hysteria:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454269/michael-flynn-plea-no-breakthrough-russia-investigation

I am going to have to not watch the news for 6 months. All the news is going to be tough to put up with.
no respite after 8 yrs obama
Title: Swamp abuse of power
Post by: ccp on December 01, 2017, 06:16:37 PM: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/levin-muellers-mickey-mouse-investigation-fails-again
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2017, 01:05:48 AM: Doesn't the legal language specify that additional charges are not precluded?

What about the Turkish money Flynn took? As best as I can tell what he did there was seriously illegal and seriously wrong.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 02, 2017, 07:13:05 AM: "What about the Turkish money Flynn took? As best as I can tell what he did there was seriously illegal and seriously wrong."

That may be true but that , however I don' t think is that is within the scope of what of what the the SPECIAL counsel is supposed to be . He is not and *independent causel*.

As Levin points out he can turn over corrupt business dealings to a regular type of prosecutor . Here is another opinion along the same lines posted on CNN no less though it is 3 or more months old..

Mueller is digging up any dirt and everyone in site and using what ever he finds to intimidate and "break" everyone around Trump to get them to turn on Trump. As Dershowitz no less pointed out why is anything Flynn says suddenly credible when his main crime so far is lying to the FBI?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/06/opinions/rosenstein-should-curb-mueller-whittaker-opinion/index.html
Title: McCarthy: Mueller is all political
Post by: ccp on December 02, 2017, 07:25:53 AM: Andrew McCarthy: this is ALL political and Trump should appoint his own independent counsel to look into Obama's collusion with Iran under the guise of a counter intelligence investigation:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454293/robert-mueller-trump-russia-investigation-michael-flynn-obama-administration-foreign-policy-israel
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2017, 08:02:36 AM: Dang, McCarthy is good!
Title: Fired FBI agent oversaw Flynn interview, softened Comey language on Clinton
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2017, 07:55:28 PM: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/04/fbi-agent-fired-from-russia-probe-oversaw-flynn-interviews-softened-comey-language-on-clinton-email-actions.html
Title: WSJ: Mueller's Credibility Problem
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2017, 09:16:41 PM: Mueller’s Credibility Problem
The special counsel is stonewalling Congress and protecting the FBI.
Robert Mueller
Robert Mueller Photo: thew/epa-efe/rex/shutterstock/EPA/Shutterstock
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 4, 2017 7:05 p.m. ET
692 COMMENTS

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, as his many ill-advised tweets on the weekend about Michael Flynn, the FBI and Robert Mueller’s Russia probe demonstrate. But that doesn’t mean that Mr. Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation deserve a pass about their motives and methods, as new information raises troubling questions.

The Washington Post and the New York Times reported Saturday that a lead FBI investigator on the Mueller probe, Peter Strzok, was demoted this summer after it was discovered he’d sent anti- Trump texts to a mistress. As troubling, Mr. Mueller and the Justice Department kept this information from House investigators, despite Intelligence Committee subpoenas that would have exposed those texts. They also refused to answer questions about Mr. Strzok’s dismissal and refused to make him available for an interview.

The news about Mr. Strzok leaked only when the Justice Department concluded it couldn’t hold out any longer, and the stories were full of spin that praised Mr. Mueller for acting “swiftly” to remove the agent. Only after these stories ran did Justice agree on Saturday to make Mr. Strzok available to the House.

This is all the more notable because Mr. Strzok was a chief lieutenant to former FBI Director James Comey and played a lead role investigating alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Mr. Mueller then gave him a top role in his special-counsel probe. And before all this Mr. Strzok led the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and sat in on the interview she gave to the FBI shortly before Mr. Comey publicly exonerated her in violation of Justice Department practice.

Oh, and the woman with whom he supposedly exchanged anti-Trump texts, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, worked for both Mr. Mueller and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who was accused of a conflict of interest in the Clinton probe when it came out that Clinton allies had donated to the political campaign of Mr. McCabe’s wife. The texts haven’t been publicly released, but it’s fair to assume their anti-Trump bias must be clear for Mr. Mueller to reassign such a senior agent.

There is no justification for withholding all of this from Congress, which is also investigating Russian influence and has constitutional oversight authority. Justice and the FBI have continued to defy legal subpoenas for documents pertaining to both surveillance warrants and the infamous Steele dossier that was financed by the Clinton campaign and relied on anonymous Russian sources.

While there is no evidence so far of Trump-Russia collusion, House investigators have turned up enough material to suggest that anti-Trump motives may have driven Mr. Comey’s FBI investigation. The public has a right to know whether the Steele dossier inspired the Comey probe, and whether it led to intrusive government eavesdropping on campaign satellites such as Carter Page.

All of this reinforces our doubts about Mr. Mueller’s ability to conduct a fair and credible probe of the FBI’s considerable part in the Russia-Trump drama. Mr. Mueller ran the bureau for 12 years and is fast friends with Mr. Comey, whose firing by Mr. Trump triggered his appointment as special counsel. The reluctance to cooperate with a congressional inquiry compounds doubts related to this clear conflict of interest.
***

Mr. Mueller’s media protectorate argues that anyone critical of the special counsel is trying to cover for Mr. Trump. But the alleged Trump-Russia ties are the subject of numerous probes—Mr. Mueller’s, and those of various committees in the House and Senate. If there is any evidence of collusion, Democrats and Mr. Mueller’s agents will make sure it is spread far and wide.

Yet none of this means the public shouldn’t also know if, and how, America’s most powerful law-enforcement agency was influenced by Russia or partisan U.S. actors. All the more so given Mr. Comey’s extraordinary intervention in the 2016 campaign, which Mrs. Clinton keeps saying turned the election against her. The history of the FBI is hardly without taint.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mr. Mueller, is also playing an increasingly questionable role in resisting congressional oversight. Justice has floated multiple reasons for ignoring House subpoenas, none of them persuasive.

First it claimed cooperation would hurt the Mueller probe, but his prosecutions are proceeding apace. Then Justice claimed that providing House investigators with classified material could hurt security or sources. But House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes has as broad a security clearance as nearly anyone in government. Recently Justice said it can’t interfere with a probe by the Justice Department Inspector General—as if an IG trumps congressional oversight.

Mr. Nunes is understandably furious at the Strzok news, on top of the other stonewalling. He asked Justice to meet the rest of his committee’s demands by close of business Monday, and if it refuses Congress needs to pursue contempt citations against Mr. Rosenstein and new FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The latest news supports our view that Mr. Mueller is too conflicted to investigate the FBI and should step down in favor of someone more credible. The investigation would surely continue, though perhaps with someone who doesn’t think his job includes protecting the FBI and Mr. Comey from answering questions about their role in the 2016 election.
Title: Compare and Contrast: Clinton Aides went unpunished
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2017, 11:46:16 AM: http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/04/clinton-aides-went-unpunished-after-making-false-statements-to-anti-trump-fbi-supervisor/
Title: Dershowitz rejects obstruction of justice theory
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2017, 11:51:42 PM: http://www.speroforum.com/a/GLBGLMPVCL16/82314-Dershowitz-disagrees-with-Napolitano-on-possible-obstruction-of-justice-by-Trump?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=QMMLFAGGYP58&utm_content=GLBGLMPVCL16&utm_source=news&utm_term=Dershowitz+disagrees+with+Napolitano+on+possible+obstruction+of+justice+by+Trump#.WiehEnZrzcs
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 06, 2017, 04:03:28 AM: I wouldn't bet the Judge against Dershowitz.

Judge has been off base before.
Title: Mueller deputy represented Ben Rhodes and Clinton Foundation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 06, 2017, 11:52:42 AM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/another-one-mueller-deputy-personal-attorney-ben-rhodes-represented-clinton-foundation/
Title: Judicial Watch on recent developments
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 06, 2017, 06:23:40 PM: JW has been the tip of the spear for much of this-- very strong work! I am a donor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz00xzWpoU
Title: NRO: Andrew McCarthy on Strzock
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2017, 04:51:01 AM: Not quite how I see things, but McCarthy's analysis is always deserving of serious read and respect:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454413/fbi-agent-peter-strzok-justice-department
Title: David Stockman (!): Why the Deep State is at war with Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2017, 07:01:56 AM: Second post

https://mises.org/wire/why-deep-state-war-trump
Title: Top DOJ official demoted had contacts with dossier firm
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2017, 12:41:33 PM: Third post

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/07/top-doj-official-demoted-amid-probe-contacts-with-trump-dossier-firm.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 07, 2017, 02:33:01 PM: anyone care to wager if this Mueller thing continues till the '18 election?

:wink:
Title: Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mills and Abedine Going to Jail with Gen. Flynn
Post by: DougMacG on December 08, 2017, 12:35:34 PM: Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedine told the FBI (Strzok and Laufman) that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department.

https://hotair.com/archives/2017/12/05/werent-huma-abedin-cheryl-mills-charged-lied-peter-strzok-fbi/
http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/04/clinton-aides-went-unpunished-after-making-false-statements-to-anti-trump-fbi-supervisor/
Title: Another Member of Mueller's Deep State All-Stars Defended the Hillary IT Aide
Post by: G M on December 08, 2017, 04:52:58 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372883.php

December 08, 2017
OMG: Another Member of Mueller's Deep State All-Stars Defended the Hillary IT Aide Who Destroyed Her Blackberries (Federal Evidence) with a Hammer
Shut. It. Down.

From NiceDeb:

Aaron Zebley served previously as Mueller’s chief of staff at the FBI and as a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. He also served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security and Terrorism Unit in Alexandria, Virginia.
He is often referred to in the media as Mueller's "right-hand man."

Also, in 2015 when he was a lawyer, he represented Justin Cooper, the IT staffer who personally set up Hillary Clinton's unsecure server in her Chappaqua home, Fox News' Tucker Carlson revealed on his show Thursday.

Cooper, it so happens, is also the aide who destroyed Clinton's old BlackBerries with a hammer.

Documents obtained by Fox News show that Senate investigators grew frustrated with Zebley after being repeatedly stonewalled when they were trying to set up a meeting with Cooper.

Jordan Schachtel
✔
@JordanSchachtel
Updated partial list of partisans on Team Mueller:
-An attorney for Ben Rhodes.
-Attendee of Hillary's election night party
-Guy who cleared Hillary of wrongdoing+texted anti-Trump bias.
-Man who helped Hillary cover up evidence by smashing her Blackberry to pieces
Shut It Down?
12:29 PM - Dec 8, 2017
29 29 Replies 247 247 Retweets 353 353 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy

That tweet says, at the end, "the man who helped Hillary cover up evidence by smashing her Blackberry to pieces." That's not accurate -- it's the lawyer for the guy who smashed the Blackberries to pieces.

But you get the point.

In related news, the LAPD has assigned the former members of OJ Simpon's legal team to finally find "The Real Killer."

Makes as much sense as hiring Hillary's Valkyries to investigate Trump.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 08, 2017, 05:34:48 PM: Remember from DAY ONE when Newt Gingrich heard about the lawyers Mueller was hiring he said stop it now - shut it down and Trump should do it. ( I don't know how he would get away with it though)

It must be great to be a BIG DC lawyer . Just think of their high fees and how self serving keeping this investigation open is not only for political reasons but (by finding anything and everything they can dream of) to keep this thing going.

BTW, why are not their fees public ? Think of the publicity they get as well to pad their CV . Most are or will be Dem Party darlings .
Title: The Trump Dossier is a Fraud; Flynn's guilty plea; Ben Rhodes attorney
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2017, 10:05:08 PM: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/12/ishmael-jones-the-trump-dossier.php

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/12/05/what_flynns_guilty_plea_means_sans_the_exaggerations_135701.html

https://pjmedia.com/trending/another-one-mueller-deputy-personal-attorney-ben-rhodes-represented-clinton-foundation/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2017, 11:50:52 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/us/politics/hope-hicks-russia-trump-fbi.html

Money paragraph: "In some ways, the Russian outreach to Ms. Hicks undercuts the idea that the Russian government had established deep ties to the Trump campaign before the election. If it had, Russian officials might have found a better entrèe to the White House than unprompted emails to Ms. Hicks.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2017, 04:54:50 AM: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/364010-in-white-house-mood-is-perseverance-amid-the-storm?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12545
Title: Pravdas suffer humiliating defeat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2017, 12:06:24 PM: https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-now-refuses-all-transparency-over-what-happened/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Where is the proof of cyberespionage?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2017, 08:35:06 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454515/russian-cyberespionage-does-mueller-have-proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-12-11&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Not crooked at all...
Post by: G M on December 12, 2017, 07:57:02 PM: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/283195/

DECEMBER 12, 2017
SO I JUST HAD AN INTERESTING EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S PRESS OFFICE:

Me:

I’m hearing from a source that Lisa Page was involved in approving Peter Strzok’s warrant requests to the FISC and possibly elsewhere. Can you confirm or deny if this was the case? And please tell me what her job title and function are in your office. Thanks.

Them (via spokesman Joshua Stueve):

Lisa Page, who was an attorney on detail to the Special Counsel’s office, returned to the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel in mid-July.

Me again:

Thank you but that doesn’t answer my question. What role did Lisa Page have in the handling of warrant applications, and in particular those involving Peter Strzok?

Them again:

I’ll decline to comment further.

Well, then.

Page, remember, is the FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an extramarital affair and exchanging anti-Trump texts. Perhaps someone with more resources than I will be able to get to the bottom of this. (Bumped).
Title: VDH: One concidence too many
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2017, 05:28:38 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454543/mueller-investigation-too-many-anti-trump-coincidences
Title: Re: VDH: One concidence too many
Post by: DougMacG on December 13, 2017, 06:33:54 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2017, 05:28:38 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454543/mueller-investigation-too-many-anti-trump-coincidences

Nine bias coincidences documented too many to serve justice with any level of confidence, and more coming every day it seems.
Title: VDH does it again
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2017, 07:27:04 AM: ****VDH: One concidence too many
« Reply #377 on: Today at 07:28:38 AM »
Reply with quote
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454543/mueller-investigation-too-many-anti-trump-coincidences****

VDH , again does great job summarizing the air tight case that Mueller and his team are out to GET the President. This is their brand of justice for someone who is not a liberal and or disses the DC estab.
Title: "Insurance Policy"
Post by: G M on December 13, 2017, 09:31:21 AM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372933.php

December 13, 2017
Strzok Wrote That Trump Could Not Be Permitted to Become President, and That an "Insurance Policy" Was Necessary
Jim Jordan connected up two of Strzok's most conspiracy-suggesting outbursts to the timing of the the FBI's -- probably actually Strzok's -- application for a FISA warrant to "spy on Americans."

That video is below, but here are the two text chains he focuses on.

Shannon Bream
✔
@ShannonBream
Strzok/Page texts

LP – And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace. (links to NYT article)

PS – ... I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps
7:04 PM - Dec 12, 2017
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So there you have Strzok saying he can "protect the country at many levels" from the "menace" of Trump in his position as an FBI agent.

Then he talks about a conversation that happened in Andrew McCabe's office-- remember, McCabe's wife ran for office in Virginia as a Democrat and was partly bankrolled by Friend of Hillary Terry MacAuliffe -- in which McCabe, Lisa Page, and Andrew Strzok apparently spent work-time discussing the menace of a Trump presidency.

Although Lisa Page threw out a "path" by which she claimed Trump could not win te race -- and we don't know what this "path" was about -- Strzok was still too worried about the prospect of it, and announced "I'm afraid we can't take that risk" and cryptically refers to an "insurance policy" against that possibility:

Bret Baier
✔
@BretBaier
Text-from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page (Andy is Andrew McCabe): "I want to believe the path u threw out 4 consideration in Andy's office-that there's no way he gets elected-but I'm afraid we can't take that risk.It's like an insurance policy in unlikely event u die be4 you're 40"

6:32 AM - Dec 13, 2017
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The video below begins mid-quotation, but Jordan is quoting from the texts above. He knits these together to show that Strzok was a man who considered himself the last insurance policy against a Trump presidency, which just might be why he then packaged up the Steele dossier and presented it to a FISA court to get warrants to begin spying on Trump associates.
Title: coulter's take on Alabama
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2017, 03:17:41 PM: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/12/13/ann-coulter-secretly-wanted-roy-moore-lose-brooks-2020/
Title: Bill O'Reilly makes bombshell accusation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2017, 11:12:49 PM: http://www.speroforum.com/a/THMZWANRTV52/82384-Bill-OReilly-makes-bombshell-claim-about-Trump-accuser?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=QLXKUSZRQJ34&utm_content=THMZWANRTV52&utm_source=news&utm_term=Bill+OReilly+makes+bombshell+claim+about+Trump+accuser#.WjIjnHZrzcs
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2017, 05:28:37 AM: He must not be able to come out with it from his own legal woes involving such matters.

Either a lot of these women are enjoying the limelight or are getting paid off. I have no idea which allegations are true or not. Certainly some are over the top.

" he propositioned me on an elevator at Madison Square Garden" - I am sure she has PTSD for such a travesty the rest of her life.
Title: The "Insurance Policy" chart
Post by: G M on December 14, 2017, 11:23:37 AM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/dragiryvqaedjry-jpg-large.jpeg)
Title: even NR is calling for investigation into Mueller and his team
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2017, 02:53:12 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454649/robert-mueller-team-investigate-the-investigators

People like Ryan and McConnell are simply silent...........

I don't think if Ryan quit after '18 we could do a much worse...........
Title: File under "Insurance Policies"
Post by: G M on December 14, 2017, 03:55:48 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372960.php

December 14, 2017
Early Drafts of Comey Exoneration Memo Said That Hillary Clinton's Secret Serve Was "Likely" Hacked and Accessed by Hostile Powers;
This Was of Course Omitted By the Time Comey Publicly Exonerated Her, Softened to "Possible"
Insurance policies.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, released copies Thursday of the edits to Comey's highly scrutinized statement.
One showed language was changed to describe the actions of Clinton and her colleagues as "extremely careless" as opposed to "grossly negligent." This is a key legal distinction.

Johnson, writing about his concerns in a letter Thursday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, said the original "could be read as a finding of criminality in Secretary Clinton’s handling of classified material."

"The edited statement deleted the reference to gross negligence – a legal threshold for mishandling classified material – and instead replaced it with an exculpatory sentence," he wrote.

The edits also showed that references to specific potential violations of statutes on "gross negligence" of classified information and "misdemeanor handling" were removed.
The original also said it was "reasonably likely" that "hostile actors" gained access to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account. That was later changed to say that scenario was merely "possible."
Title: Conservative Tree House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2017, 11:54:07 PM: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/12/14/an-investigative-pattern-emerges/comment-page-3/
Title: All the FBI's Edits
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2017, 08:48:16 AM: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fbi-made-a-ton-more-edits-to-water-down-james-comeys-statement-on-clinton-email-probe/article/2643568
Title: How did Mueller get tens of thousands of Team Trump emails?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2017, 05:21:23 PM: https://www.axios.com/scoop-mueller-obtains-tens-of-thousands-of-trump-transition-emails-2517994590.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on December 17, 2017, 09:51:30 AM: oh but FBI had no problem with Hillary and Huma removing many of their pre-chosen emails without a peep.

If this is not a witch hunt for ANYTHING to get an impeachment I don't know what is.

Just how delighted his team of Democrat lawyers must feel going after their hated target and - getting paid - all at the same time.
Title: Meuller, Comey, the waterfall flows up stream
Post by: DougMacG on December 22, 2017, 03:15:02 PM: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/21/barack-obama-used-classified-intelligence-leaks-po/
Title: the Atlantic: Putins' Game
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2017, 05:47:26 PM: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/
Title: Re: the Atlantic: Putins' Game
Post by: DougMacG on December 28, 2017, 06:22:51 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2017, 05:47:26 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/

I'm not sure if I believe all of the details, but this is a very good article!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 28, 2017, 10:41:15 AM: I found it interesting too.

"The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia, as well as the publication of information about Putin’s personal wealth, but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard, the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had?"

Ah, the true concern of the guilty , , ,
Title: POTH: Papadopoulus was how investigation began
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 30, 2017, 11:49:04 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html?emc=edit_ta_20171230&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: McCarthy, French: POTH tries a reset
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2018, 10:55:45 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455036/new-york-times-trump-russia-collusion-narrative-reset-george-papadopoulos-carter-page

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455033/new-york-times-george-papadopoulos-scoop-unproven-withhold-judgment?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-01-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: GPS Fusion makes its case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2018, 06:01:54 AM: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html?_r=0&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F
Title: Manafort sues Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2018, 01:02:32 PM: http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/367283-manafort-sues-mueller-justice-department
Title: Trump Lawyer demands Bannon cease and desist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2018, 06:57:00 AM: WSJ
Trump Lawyer Demands Bannon ‘Cease and Desist’
President Trump and his onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon are feuding over revelations from a new book in which Mr. Bannon is quoted as saying that a 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and some Russian representatives was "treasonous." WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains the implications of the rift. Photo: Getty
by Eli Stokols

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump publicly repudiated Steve Bannon, his former senior strategist and onetime campaign chief, after a new book surfaced in which Mr. Bannon made scathing and highly personal criticisms of some of the president’s top advisers, including several family members.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Mr. Trump said in a statement released to reporters on Wednesday. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

In the book, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bannon called a June 2016 meeting between top Trump campaign aides and a Russian lawyer “treasonous” and aired concerns that missteps by aides could lead to legal jeopardy for the president.

The meeting has become a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump campaign aides colluded with the Kremlin in the interference. Mr. Trump has said his campaign didn’t collude with Russia, and Moscow has denied meddling in the U.S. election.

The president’s statement was released after the publication of quotes and excerpts from “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by Michael Wolff. In the book, Mr. Bannon sharply criticizes the president’s adult children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, all of whom Mr. Bannon sparred with during his six months inside the administration.

Mr. Bannon is quoted as describing Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, as “dumb as a brick.” A spokeswoman for Ms. Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Bannon declined to comment. A person close to him said Mr. Bannon didn’t deny his quotes in the book.

President Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon left his job at the White House on Aug. 18, marking another major administration shakeup. WSJ's Shelby Holliday looks at Bannon's turbulent year with President Trump. Photo: Getty
.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called the book “trashy tabloid fiction” that was “filled with false and misleading accounts.”

Late Wednesday, an attorney for President Trump and his campaign sent a letter to Mr. Bannon demanding that he “cease and desist” making disparaging statements to the news media about Mr. Trump and his family.

The letter from attorney Charles Harder said that Mr. Bannon violated the terms of his employment agreement with the Trump campaign by making the comments.

In the five-page letter, Mr. Harder wrote that under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Bannon promised that while working for the campaign “and at all times thereafter” he would not “demean or disparage publicly” Mr. Trump and his family, among others.

The letter contends that Mr. Bannon disclosed “confidential information” to Mr. Wolff. In talking to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Bannon “in some cases” made “outright defamatory statements” about the president and his family, the letter alleged.

The letter called on Mr. Bannon to confirm within 24 hours that he will comply with the demands.

A publicist with Henry Holt, the imprint of Macmillan that is publishing the book, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Wolff didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Bannon resigned his post in August shortly after John Kelly was named White House chief of staff with a mandate to bring more discipline to the West Wing. Mr. Bannon since then has positioned himself as a torch bearer for Trumpism and a minter of conservative candidates heading into the 2018 midterm elections. He returned to the conservative website Breitbart website, where he is executive chairman.

Mr. Bannon supported Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, while Mr. Trump initially backed another Republican candidate, Luther Strange, in the party primary before ultimately backing Mr. Moore in the general election. Mr. Moore lost that race to Democrat Doug Jones, who was sworn in Wednesday. Mr. Moore had been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct with teenagers when he was in his 30s, which he denied.

Mr. Trump has had public fallouts with various people, including lawmakers, in the past, some of which he has later patched up. A permanent rift between the president and Mr. Bannon could have political implications leading up to November’s midterm elections and into 2020. A battle for the president’s political base could divide the conservative movement, especially if Mr. Trump begins to align himself more with the GOP establishment, which views Mr. Bannon with the same level of enmity as he views it.

In his statement, Mr. Trump played down Mr. Bannon’s role in the Trump movement.

“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,” the president’s statement said. “Steve had very little to do with our historic victory…. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.”

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon during a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in December.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon during a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in December. Photo: jonathan bachman/Reuters
.
Mr. Trump also charged that Mr. Bannon, known for his so-called economic nationalist stances on trade and immigration, portrayed himself as more influential than he actually was. “Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books,” Mr. Trump said.

At Wednesday’s media briefing, Ms. Sanders said the president was “furious” as he read excerpts from the book. She said Mr. Wolff, the author, visited the White House more than a dozen times last year and “95%” of the visits were to see Mr. Bannon. His only contact with Mr. Trump, she said, was a five-minute phone conversation. She said she believed Mr. Bannon and the president last spoke in early December 2017.

In the book, Mr. Bannon described the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the president’s oldest son and top advisers and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.”

.
Donald Trump Jr. has denied he did anything wrong in agreeing to the meeting, in which the campaign had been promised negative information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He said no useful information emerged from the meeting.

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Wednesday: “Steve had the honor of working in the White House & serving the country. Unfortunately, he squandered that privilege & turned that opportunity into a nightmare of backstabbing, harassing, leaking, lying & undermining the President.”

In the book, Mr. Bannon sharply criticized Mr. Kushner and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for taking part in the Russia meeting along with Donald Trump Jr.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic…and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Mr. Bannon is quoted in the book as saying.

Further, Mr. Bannon predicted that the investigation by Mr. Mueller will focus on money laundering.

“This is all about money laundering,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Wolff. The path to “Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner,” he said. “It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

Mr. Manafort pleaded not guilty in October to charges stemming from lobbying work he performed for the ruling party of Ukraine as well as attempts to allegedly hide the payments from that work. He filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that Mr. Mueller had exceeded his authority in indicting Mr. Manafort on the charges. A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.

By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Wolff’s book, available for preorder, was the No. 1 title on Amazon.com.

—Michael C. Bender contributed to this article
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2018, 06:58:12 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455105/fusion-gps-steele-dossier-collusion-narrative-falls-apart

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fusions-russia-fog-1515024911?shareToken=st9af62b8852e64ae59a857d1ac3be82d7&reflink=article_email_share

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/3/charles-grassley-says-james-comey-likely-leaked-cl/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTWpneU5qYzNZVFppTkdJNSIsInQiOiIxOEcrVmZNQ0lMcHlGY1I5QUwrc2FPVjlhV1psbG9EdzZ1UTFkTTd0cHNFeG1tUVRmUmlNdndZSHB4WDhqazNPVWJxVFBWSmFkMTFsUUY5a0VhNXZqcU1kOHVFeFJCZ3IxTnBFNlpVS3NzZFVjM2NGXC91d2pBQmN1S29VeUREVEcifQ%3D%3D
Title: Grassley: The Memos James Comey Illegally Leaked to His Buddy (To Leak to the NY
Post by: G M on January 04, 2018, 12:28:16 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/373248.php

January 04, 2018
Charles Grassley: The Memos James Comey Illegally Leaked to His Buddy (To Leak to the NYT) Are So Sensitive That I Could Only View Them in a SCIF
Grassley has written a letter to conspirator Rod Rosenstein, demanding answers to questions about Comey's lawbreaking, but of course Rosenstein will ignore these questions, as he ignores all questions about the DOJ's and FBI's behavior in this matter.

This Committee has previously written to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the memoranda that former Director Comey created purportedly memorializing his interactions with President Trump.[1] My staff has since reviewed these memoranda in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI, and I reviewed them in a SCIF at the Office of Senate Security. The FBI insisted that these reviews take place in a SCIF because the majority of the memos are classified.
Of the seven memos, four are marked classified at the "SECRET" or "CONFIDENTIAL" levels. Only three did not contain classified information. FBI personnel refused to answer factual questions during the document reviews, including questions about the chain of custody of the documents I was reviewing, the date that they were marked classified, and who marked them as classified.

According to press reports, Professor Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School stated that Mr. Comey provided him four of the seven memoranda and encouraged him to "detail [Comey's] memos to the press."[2] If it's true that Professor Richman had four of the seven memos, then in light of the fact that four of the seven memos the Committee reviewed are classified, it would appear that at least one memo the former FBI director gave Professor Richman contained classified information.[3] Professor Richman later read a portion of one of the memos to a New York Times reporter.[4]

When the Committee contacted Professor Richman seeking copies of the memos Mr. Comey had provided him, he refused to provide them, did not say how many he had received from Mr. Comey, and refused to say whether he retained copies.[5] It is unclear whether any of the memos reviewed by the Committee were retrieved from Professor Richman. The Committee has accordingly not determined which of the seven memos Mr. Comey provided him.

Sean M. Davis highlighted this on Twitter. Seb Gorka had a good response:

If you don't get that -- on Twitter, James Comey offers up a lot of self-righteous, self-aggrandizing quotes, often drawn from the Bible.
Title: Big escalation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2018, 12:17:17 PM: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/senators-grassley-graham-refer-christopher-steele-criminal-investigation
Title: Re: Big escalation
Post by: G M on January 05, 2018, 02:02:32 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2018, 12:17:17 PM
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/senators-grassley-graham-refer-christopher-steele-criminal-investigation

About fookin time.
Title: Dem Mccarthyism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2018, 02:09:30 PM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-russian-descent-1515111025?shareToken=stb4e529384b2442d68a1e3839deace3a0&reflink=article_email_share
Title: Andrew McCarthy nails it yet again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2018, 09:53:14 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455202/hillary-clinton-email-investigations-trump-justice-department-revives-motive-criminal-intent
Title: Operation Condor
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2018, 09:11:51 PM: Haven't had a chance to give this a proper read. Not familiar with the source-- is this all it thinks it is?

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/05/operation-condor-how-nsa-director-mike-rogers-saved-the-u-s-from-a-massive-constitutional-crisis/
Title: Re: Operation Condor
Post by: G M on January 07, 2018, 04:48:32 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2018, 09:11:51 PM
Haven't had a chance to give this a proper read. Not familiar with the source-- is this all it thinks it is?

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/05/operation-condor-how-nsa-director-mike-rogers-saved-the-u-s-from-a-massive-constitutional-crisis/

At first glance, it's pretty compelling.
Title: NR and The Hill on the Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2018, 07:08:13 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455267/christopher-steele-dossier-obama-administration-hillary-clinton-campaign-congress-fisa-court

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/368210-five-takeaways-from-the-fusion-gps-testimony
Title: JW: Closer to facts on Comey memos; State Dept must speed up Clinton emails
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2018, 05:06:58 PM: (Weekly Update: Live with Tom Fitton)

One Step Closer to Facts on Comey Memos
Court Orders State Department to Speed Up Delivery of Clinton Emails
Atlanta Jail Lets Muslim Inmates Wear Hijabs

One Step Closer to Facts on Comey Memos
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg has given us an important victory in our quest for the truth about former FBI Director James Comey and his infamous memos.

Boasberg rule that the FBI must turn over to the court for in camera, non-public review of Comey’s memos allegedly detailing conversations he had with President Donald Trump:

The court, in seeking to review the documents, shows it doesn’t trust the FBI or Justice Department’s representations about the memos. We hope now that Americans are one step closer to knowing the facts about these memos, which were written and leaked for pernicious purposes to target a sitting president with a criminal investigation. It’s high time they begin to see the light of day. We’re glad the court followed up on our specific suggestion that it review the documents directly.

The court order tells the government to turn over the Comey memos for review by January 18. In doing so, the court rejects arguments by the Sessions Justice Department to dismiss the lawsuits seeking the Comey information.

On June 16, 2017, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for “ FBI Director James Comey’s February 14, 2017 memorandum … memorializing an Oval Office conversation he had with the President on that date regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.”

On September 7, 2017, we filed a related FOIA lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation for “all unclassified memoranda authored by former FBI Director James Comey that contemporaneously memorialized his discussions with President Donald Trump and his aides.”

We recently made court filings on behalf the Daily Caller News Foundation and on behalf of Judicial Watch, requesting that the Justice Department be ordered to produce all of Comey’s unclassified memoranda about his one-on-one conversations with the president. We argued that, “at a minimum, the Court should review the Comey Memos in camera to determine whether all responsive records have been located. This can be easily accomplished by comparing the memos to the very public testimony of Director Comey.”

The Justice Department previously argued to the court that Comey’s leak of the memo regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was unauthorized and compared it to WikiLeaks.

Comey admitted to Congress regarding the “Flynn” memo: “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter [for The New York Times] … I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” The New York Times published a report about the memo on May 16, 2017. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed the following day.

Both Judicial Watch cases have been consolidated in Cable News Network, Inc., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation (No. 1:17-cv-01167).

The Comey leak was outrageous, leading to the appointment of an out-of-control, conflicted, and compromised Robert Mueller. Let’s hope this initial court victory leads to the ultimate success of getting the full truth about Comey’s machination to target President Trump.
Court Orders State Department to Speed Up Delivery of Clinton Emails
The Deep State bureaucracies in Washington give awful life to the cliché that “the wheels of justice turn slowly.” Such has been the case with the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Last year, the FBI uncovered 72,000 pages of documents that Clinton attempted to delete or did not otherwise disclose. The State Department had been processing these documents at a rate that would have required us and the American people to wait until at least 2020 to see them.

Now I’m pleased to tell you that a federal court judge has ordered State to speed up the processing and production of these emails. U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg ordered State to finish processing the remaining documents by September 28, 2018.

Prior to the FBI investigation, Clinton repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in another Judicial Watch case, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.”

Clinton failed to turn over at least 627 emails in that 55,000-page production, further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails had been turned over to department.

Judge Boasberg’s November 30 order came in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on May 6, 2015, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)) seeking:
All emails sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her official capacity as Secretary of State, as well as all emails by other State Department employees to Secretary Clinton regarding her non-“state.gov” email address.
The court also ordered the State Department to identify and explain the basis for all documents withheld in full from both the 55,000 pages of emails turned over by Clinton and the 72,000 pages of records recovered by the FBI which have been processed thus far by April 6, 2018.

Here is some background. In November 2016, Judge Boasberg ordered the State Department to process no less than 500 pages a month of records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The following year, in October 2017, we asked the court to increase the State Department’s processing requirement, noting that, under its current pace of production, the Clinton emails would not be completely released until at least 2020.

At the October 2017 hearing, the State Department reported to the court that they were revamping their FOIA processing and reallocating resources. Judge Boasberg then issued an order instructing the State Department to explain “how its anticipated increase in resources will affect processing of records in this case …” Ultimately, JW’s pressure and continued court oversight led to getting the State Department to get on the ball and begin producing records in a timely manner.

How ironic it is that the Trump State Department had to be ordered by a federal court to stop slow rolling the release of Clinton emails. Our Freedom of Information Act lawsuits – not Congress or the media – uncovered Clinton’s email cover-up and related crimes. Now it is up to the Justice Department to finally follow up with an honest and independent investigation.
Title: Uranium One indictment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 13, 2018, 10:54:24 AM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/25828/breaking-indictment-handed-out-russian-bribery-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=011318-news&utm_campaign=position3
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Anatomy of a Farce
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 13, 2018, 06:48:59 PM: Serious read here folks:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455426/steele-dossier-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-trump-russia-investigation?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-01-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Is money laundering within Mueller's mandate?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2018, 09:49:35 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/11/robert-mueller-money-laundering-push-could-spark-c/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1dZeVptWmpaalZoTnpWaiIsInQiOiIramQ1cWNaV2VxbDZ1Qld6QklJVUN1bnVBVTFtaHl1RzY0c3RYeWRoYW9yVmZndWlhZU9ZUFN1VUd5NHBDbVFIXC9IUVRHM0F2QldXNnQ4cG9pWlBQY3R4eDFCa1VwSnBDdFdvQ0xkU3ZYXC9jTDFrMUVxc2VcL0ZzaDk5MDZwVWhqRyJ9
Title: Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Fusion, HRC, Do I have this right?
Post by: DougMacG on January 18, 2018, 02:00:40 PM: Is it true that the Hillary campaign hired and paid for a false dossier against her opponent Donald Trump that served as basis for a FISA court order granting authority for the Obama administration "Justice Department" (who was backing Hillary) to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign, and then they fed that information back to political players in the administration to the Hillary campaign? And that the FBI and DOJ knew the basis information was largely false when they launched the phony collusion investigation that was formed with the authority to include "all matters arising out of the investigation" in order to find and create crimes where none were known to exist?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2018, 04:43:02 PM: I'm sitting here not liking what I just heard from Judge Napolitano on Bret Baier Special Report just now , , , ,

Re-posting this-- read with care:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455426/steele-dossier-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-trump-russia-investigation?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-01-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

but feeling better now that I see this:

Transparency for Fusion and the FBI
Democrats vote to keep documents secret but Congress will see them.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Oct. 24, 2017.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Oct. 24, 2017. Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated Press
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 18, 2018 6:53 p.m. ET
32 COMMENTS

The chance that Americans will learn what really happened between the FBI and Fusion GPS is growing with Thursday’s vote by the House Intelligence Committee to give every House Member access to key information. Soon the House should move to declassify all documents in the case that don’t jeopardize intelligence sources and methods so the public can get the complete story.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes also moved Thursday to release to the public his committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Every Democrat joined Republicans in voting for that public disclosure. Yet every Democrat voted against letting the rest of the House see a memo that will list the facts about the FBI’s use of FISA warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign in 2016. Strange. What are Democrats afraid of?

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has been a loud voice for accountability regarding the Trump-Russia probe, but his outrage evaporates regarding the role that Fusion GPS and its Democratic financiers may have played in persuading the FBI to seek a warrant to eavesdrop on American civilians. What were the FBI’s reasons and the evidence it used to seek such an extraordinary writ?

All of this is relevant to the House’s recent vote to extend Section 702 that allows law enforcement to monitor foreigners. Mr. Nunes provided two closed briefings to Republicans last week as they prepared to renew Section 702, and he assured Members that he’d seen no evidence that government had abused 702 powers. But he also said he had seen evidence that law enforcement misused powers involving the surveillance of U.S. citizens as part of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Thus the vote to let all Members see a memo describing relevant classified documents at intelligence agencies. The Constitution and Congress impose strict rules on government surveillance of U.S. citizens, and the FISA court relies on the integrity of law enforcement when granting warrants. If a senior Member of the House is attesting to abuse, all of Congress should see the evidence before deciding how to respond.

FBI sources are telling the media that this will endanger national security. But all Members have top-secret clearance and can view any classified information that the House Intelligence Committee grants access to. They must adhere to nondisclosure agreements and are subject to the same criminal penalties for leaking classified information as FBI officials. Recall that former director James Comey leaked by his own admission.

Once the Members have a chance to see the details, the full House can also move to declassify as much as possible and “read in” the American people. The FBI played an extraordinary and troubling role in the 2016 election, and access to the facts of what happened shouldn’t be limited to FBI leakers, their media protectors and partisans in Congress.
Title: Sara Carter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2018, 07:06:34 PM: https://saraacarter.com/2018/01/18/a-bombshell-house-intelligence-report-exposing-extensive-fisa-abuse-could-lead-to-the-removal-of-senior-government-officials/
Title: Trump and Executive Privilege
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2018, 07:09:03 PM: third post

Eventually the President Will Have to Talk
Executive privilege can’t be applied in a criminal probe.
President Donald Trump arriving back at the White House, Jan. 1.
President Donald Trump arriving back at the White House, Jan. 1. Photo: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
By Sai Prakash and
John Yoo
Jan. 18, 2018 7:05 p.m. ET
29 COMMENTS

As investigations continue into alleged Russian election meddling, potential witnesses are clamming up. Former White House aide Steve Bannon this week refused to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee. President Trump has flip-flopped on whether he will talk to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Confidants may have urged Mr. Trump to invoke executive privilege—the president’s constitutional right to keep conversations and documents secret—to frustrate both congressional and criminal investigations. While this privilege protects deliberations about national security and diplomacy, it cannot shield Mr. Trump from criminal probes. Ultimately, he would lose any conflict with Mr. Mueller over secrecy.

Presidents have long claimed a right to withhold their confidential talks from Congress and the courts. It began with Thomas Jefferson, who ordered the prosecution of his former vice president, Aaron Burr, for raising a rebellion in Louisiana. Burr claimed Jefferson had blessed his plans and sought military reports to prove his innocence. Chief Justice John Marshall, sitting as the trial judge, subpoenaed the president.

Jefferson ultimately gave up some documents, but he considered ignoring Marshall outright, because the Constitution gives each branch the right “to protect itself from enterprises of force attempted on them by the others.”

In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), which rooted executive privilege in the separation of powers, the Supreme Court suggested that all three branches had a right to confidentiality. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that the president’s authority as commander in chief and chief executive might establish an absolute privilege “to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets.” But the justices agreed their duty to ensure a fair trial of the Watergate burglars, who hoped President Nixon’s White House tapes would prove their innocence, outweighed his right to confidential talks.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on executive privilege against congressional investigations. Indeed, the judiciary may never decide. In Nixon v. U.S. (1993), involving a different Nixon, the justices held that matters of impeachment are “political questions” reserved to Congress, not the courts. Similarly, they could leave fights over executive information to the politicians, who can use spending cuts, oversight hearings and refusal to confirm nominees to get information from the executive. Still, delay benefits the president because he has the information Congress seeks.But delay benefits the executive, which enjoys withholding the information.

But the Watergate ruling makes clear that criminal investigations trump executive privilege. Mr. Mueller can seek a court subpoena that would compel Mr. Bannon, the president and his associates to turn over documents or even to testify under oath. If Mr. Trump then wished to prevent the questions, he would have to fire Mr. Mueller. But no matter who replaced him as special counsel, the White House would eventually have to talk.

Mr. Prakash is a law professor at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Miller Center. Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Title: Release the memo!
Post by: G M on January 19, 2018, 12:56:26 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/373438.php

We the people need to see it.
Title: Steele didn't write the (phony) dossier
Post by: DougMacG on January 19, 2018, 01:45:42 PM: Yet another twist in the story, the British English was most likely produced by a lousy Russian to British English translator program with no one checking the myriad of grammar and punctuation errors.

Christopher Steele is a highly skilled writer, at least technically, well educated, he wrote for the Cambridge University student publication.

He didn't write this sentence:
"Alpha held 'kompromat' on Putin and his corrupt business activities from the 1990s whilst although not personally overly bothered by Alpha's failure to reinvest the proceeds of its TNK oil company sale into the Russian economy since, the Russian president was able to use pressure on this count from senior Kremlin colleagues as a lever on Fridman and AVEN to make them do his political bidding."

Nor could it pass the smell test at the FBI, DOJ or FISA Court.

More at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/did_christopher_steele_write_his_dossier_or_did_a_russian_associate.html#ixzz54fY4DYKZ
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 19, 2018, 04:33:50 PM: Interesting catch Doug.

Though the prospect of transparency on the Dossier seems quite promising for our side, I do have one deep worry-- prompted by the Andrew McCarthy article I posted a few days ago. If I have it right, it was and is within President Trump's power to declassify the FISA warrant application. Why hasn't he? Per McCarthy, it may be because the Dossier was not the only thing in support of the warrant application and Trump fears whatever else it is that is in there e.g. money laundering stuff.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 19, 2018, 05:46:10 PM: second post

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/369851-fierce-battle-erupts-over-declassifying-intelligence-report
Title: Simpson lied to/misled Congress
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2018, 10:32:12 AM: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/01/simpson-tried-to-deceive-congress-on-the-fusion-gps-obama-doj-connection.php
Title: Tangent: Mueller and 911
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2018, 10:17:15 PM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2018/01/fbi-director-mueller-helped-cover-fla-9-11-probe-court-docs-show/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180125061520
Title: Tangent #2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 07:23:16 AM: WSJ

By
Ted Van Dyk

Jan. 24, 2018 6:28 p.m. ET

Tear him for his bad verses!’ the crowd roars in Shakespeare’s “ Julius Caesar, ” mistaking the poet Cinna for a conspirator. There are myriad reasons to be angry with President Trump’s performance. Based on the publicly available evidence, however, the least of them is “collusion” with Russia to influence the 2016 election. The media and even congressional investigators seem to misunderstand how presidential campaigns and transition teams interact with foreign governments.

Real collusion took place in October 1968, when Republican nominee Richard Nixon directed Anna Chennault, his campaign co-chairman and a longstanding Asia hawk, to intervene with the South Vietnamese government to stop peace negotiations with North Vietnam. Ms. Chennault urged Saigon to boycott the talks because Nixon would continue to support the South Vietnamese war effort, whereas his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, had said he’d end the war in 1969.

The White House learned of the initiative through intelligence intercepts. President Lyndon B. Johnson convened his national-security advisers to determine his response. Principally on the advice of Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, he decided to do nothing. Humphrey did not denounce the Nixon intervention publicly, presuming Nixon would call it a last-minute election lie. He did, however, issue a strong statement two days before the election stating that if the South Vietnamese government refused to come to the table, he would negotiate a peace without them. Nixon won narrowly, and the war continued.

The collusion became public early in 1969, but Nixon paid no price. Critics discussed invoking the Logan Act of 1799, which prohibits diplomacy by private citizens. But Logan Act violations are almost never prosecuted, and Nixon, as president, could easily have avoided its application.

In 1996 President Clinton received millions in re-election campaign contributions from an Indonesian consortium and from Asian-American fundraisers thought to be receiving the money from Chinese intelligence agencies. The fundraisers were prosecuted for campaign-finance violations, but nothing happened to Mr. Clinton. There was, in any case, no apparent policy payoff for the campaign money.

There seems little doubt that before Mr. Trump ran for office, he and his associates, possibly including family members, had business dealings with Russians and other offshore players. We know that 2016 campaign figures, some important and some marginal, were in contact with Russians during the campaign year. But did they receive campaign money or collude with the Russian government to influence the outcome? Were policy favors promised? Did the candidate direct them to have the meetings or know about them?

I was Humphrey’s assistant in 1968 and served in senior policy and political roles in several subsequent Democratic presidential campaigns. I often met with foreign ambassadors and other representatives, mainly to clarify my candidate’s campaign positions. No money or favors ever were sought, offered or received from their governments. At times, however, campaign advisers or would-be appointees embarrassed the campaigns by undertaking foreign contacts on their own—most often to enhance their own importance and exposure.

And there was the occasion in 1972 when Pierre Salinger, who’d served as JFK’s press secretary, contacted North Vietnamese peace negotiators in Paris without candidate George McGovern’s authorization. A marginal Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, might well have gotten the Trump campaign into trouble in a similar way.

Presidential campaigns generally consist of the candidate, a handful of close advisers and staff, and a small army of organizers, advance people, media consultants and others. They’re thrown together temporarily in a quasi-wartime environment. There is always a certain amount of chaos—and occasional individual misconduct.

Early in the 1964 presidential campaign, President Johnson was embarrassed by the arrest of his chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, for disorderly conduct in a YMCA restroom. Johnson responded by ordering FBI investigations of all campaign staff. It fell to me to administer the clearances of Humphrey’s vice-presidential campaign staff, mainly Washington attorneys and regulars. I sent a memo to all suggesting that anyone not wishing FBI vetting should simply resign. To my surprise, some 20% quit.

The Trump campaign and transition were characterized by high personnel turnover and glitches generated by an ignorant and inexperienced candidate and senior staff. The Trump White House and cabinet, especially in national-security roles, have shown greater professionalism. But Mr. Trump and his closest associates, a year later, remain less at home in the White House than any modern president and his team.

Mr. Trump has been guilty of many “bad verses,” in Shakespeare’s phrase, but none thus far that have reflected any collusion with Russia. Perhaps such collusion will be proved at the end of the special counsel and congressional committee inquiries. But until that happens, critics would be well served to muffle public cries for impeachment. This polarized country needs evidence that due process and the rule of law still prevail.

Mr. Van Dyk was active in Democratic national policy and politics for 40 years. He is author of “Heroes, Hacks and Fools” (University of Washington Press, 2007).
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, ... McCabe
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2018, 07:40:44 AM: McCabe's wife took almost $700,000 for a failed political campaign in Virginia from Clinton chum and VA governor Terry McAuliffe, WHILE McAuliffe was under investigation by the feds for accepting campaign donations from shifty sources.
Title: Re: Tangent #2, (Ted Vabn Dyk, WSJ)
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2018, 08:57:46 AM: A lot of wisdom in that piece, 'wait for evidence and due process before calling for impeachment', but this is not your father's Democratic party.
-------
Trump is saying he will happily testify under oath. I would suggest he require the same of Mueller in exchange:
Mr. Trump, did you illegally collude with the Russians to win this election?
Mr. Mueller, have you found any evidence of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians in a year of searching at the cost of millions of dollars and the cloud it puts over our government to justify continuing the investigation?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 12:05:52 PM: The clip I saw of Trump talking about looking forward to Mueller also had him saying "subject to his lawyers' advice".

Somehow that qualifier seems to be getting left out of most reports , , ,
Title: Shapiro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 01:04:16 PM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/26282/muellers-investigation-targets-trump-over-supposed-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=012518-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: Morris: McCain's revenge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 01:08:23 PM: https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-mccains-revenge-how-he-helped-set-up-trump/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-01-25&utm_campaign=can
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Let's see what ya got in the memo!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 04:11:20 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455757/release-the-memo-lets-see-in-it?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-01-25&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Long interview with Julia Loffe on "The Putin Files"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 04:30:12 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88&feature=youtu.be
Title: An Excrement Storm Cometh
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 07:13:08 PM: WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.

The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.

Amid the first wave of news media reports that Mr. Mueller was examining a possible obstruction case, the president began to argue that Mr. Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation, two of the people said.

Photo
Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, believed that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic impact on the presidency and would raise more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation. Credit Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press

First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mr. Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mr. Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.

After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

Mr. McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own. The president then backed off.

Ty Cobb, who manages the White House’s relationship with Mr. Mueller’s office, said in a statement, “We decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process.”

Mr. McGahn, a longtime Republican campaign finance lawyer in Washington who served on the Federal Election Commission, was the top lawyer on Mr. Trump’s campaign. He has been involved in nearly every key decision Mr. Trump has made — like the firing of the former F.B.I. director — that is being scrutinized by Mr. Mueller. Mr. McGahn was also concerned that firing the special counsel would incite more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation.

Around the time Mr. Trump wanted to fire Mr. Mueller, the president’s legal team, led then by his longtime personal lawyer in New York, Marc E. Kasowitz, was taking an adversarial approach to the Russia investigation. The president’s lawyers were digging into potential conflict-of-interest issues for Mr. Mueller and his team, according to current and former White House officials, and news media reports revealed that several of Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors had donated to Democrats.

Mr. Mueller could not legally have considered political affiliations when making hiring decisions. But for Mr. Trump’s supporters, it reinforced the idea that, although Mr. Mueller is a Republican, he had assembled a team of Democrats to take down the president.

Another option that Mr. Trump considered in discussions with his advisers was dismissing the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, and elevating the department’s No. 3 official, Rachel Brand, to oversee Mr. Mueller. Mr. Rosenstein has overseen the investigation since March, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.

Mr. Trump has significantly ratcheted back his criticisms of Mr. Mueller since he hired Mr. Cobb for his legal team in July. A veteran of several high-profile Washington controversies, Mr. Cobb has known Mr. Mueller for decades, dating to their early careers in the Justice Department.

He advised Mr. Trump that he had nothing to gain from combat with Mr. Mueller, a highly respected former prosecutor and F.B.I. director who has subpoena power as special counsel. Since Mr. Cobb’s arrival, the White House has operated on the premise that the quickest way to clear the cloud of suspicion was to cooperate with Mr. Mueller, not to fight him.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has wavered for months about whether he wants to fire Mr. Mueller, whose job security is an omnipresent concern among the president’s legal team and close aides. The president’s lawyers, including Mr. Cobb, have tried to keep Mr. Trump calm by assuring him for months, amid new revelations about the inquiry, that it is close to ending.

Mr. Trump has long demonstrated a preoccupation with those who have overseen the Russia investigation. In March, after Mr. McGahn failed to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the inquiry, Mr. Trump complained that he needed someone loyal to oversee the Justice Department.

The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said Mr. Trump asked him for loyalty and encouraged him to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey said he sidestepped those requests. He was soon fired.

In an interview with The New York Times in the Oval Office in July, the president pointedly kept open the option of firing Mr. Mueller, saying that the special counsel would be passing a red line if his investigation expanded to look at Mr. Trump’s finances. Mr. Trump said he never would have made Mr. Sessions the attorney general if he had known he would recuse himself from the investigation.

Last month, as Republicans were increasing their attacks on the special counsel, Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times that he believed Mr. Mueller was going to treat him fairly.

“No, it doesn’t bother me because I hope that he’s going to be fair,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question about whether it bothered him that Mr. Mueller had not yet ended his investigation. “I think that he’s going to be fair.”

Mr. Trump added: “There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair.”
Title: The Hill: Memo issues and politics; FB says "No there, there"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2018, 04:40:11 AM: second post

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/370801-trump-poised-for-clash-with-doj-over-classified-memo

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/370806-facebook-tells-senators-it-cannot-prove-or-disprove-collusion-between-trump
Title: Re: An Excrement Storm Cometh
Post by: DougMacG on January 26, 2018, 06:24:29 AM: "Mr. Mueller could not legally have considered political affiliations when making hiring decisions."

- He was the FBI Director, the greatest investigative agency in the world(?) and either had no awareness of what agents were doing, saying, donating or even sleeping with, or he hired nothing but left wing activists by choice. He could not take overwhelming bias that into consideration? Surely they jest. Any professional in that situation would recuse him or herself. Any decision short of that makes them either a political hack or ignorant and incompetent. There is nothing (legally) wrong with the idea of firing Mueller at the time that Trump and the public started to find all this out. As a practical and political matter, he may be better off to cooperate and let the witch hunt run its course.
Title: WSJ STrassel: Operation Sabotage the Memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2018, 09:59:47 AM: By Kimberley A. Strassel
Jan. 25, 2018 7:09 p.m. ET

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him.

The shrieks of reckless harm and national security are designed to pressure Mr. Trump to object. And wait for it: In coming days the Justice Department’s protectors will gin up a separate, desperate claim that Mr. Trump will somehow be “interfering” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe unless he objects to the release. According to this view, it is Mr. Trump’s obligation not just to sit by while the media and the Mueller team concoct their narrative, but to block any evidence that might undercut it.

The slippery shadow in all this is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal put Mr. Rosenstein in charge of digging into the actions—right or wrong—of the Justice Department and FBI in 2016. Instead of taking up that challenge, he named an old and dear friend of the FBI as special counsel, and directed him only to look at Mr. Trump. And Mr. Rosenstein appears to have signed up as an active participant in the effort to thwart any congressional investigation of the other side of the issue.

A department head interested in truth doesn’t flout subpoenas. He doesn’t do a runaround of the Intelligence Committee and try to sucker House Speaker Paul Ryan into aiding a stonewall by asking him to intervene just before a deadline and block a contempt citation. He doesn’t sit on the knowledge of outrageous texts between FBI agents and force Congress to drag it out of him. And he doesn’t sign off on the leaks and character assassination in which his department daily engages to undermine Congress.

The good news is that these frantic reactions are a sign Americans are getting closer to the truth. So long as the truth-tellers keep moving forward.
Title: The Dutch plug a hole in the dike
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2018, 04:09:13 PM: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/dutch-spies-infiltrated-russian-hacking-unit-dnc-attack/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=January2018
Title: McCarthy: President Trump should refuse Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2018, 04:00:47 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455841/trump-mueller-interview-president-refuse-request
Title: Judiciary committee goes after Donna Brazille
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2018, 04:01:38 PM: second post

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2018-01-25%20CEG%20LG%20to%20Brazile%20(Steele%20Dossier).pdf
Title: More on President Trump should refuse Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2018, 08:28:11 PM: Fourth post

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/01/27/what-alleged-illegality-is-mueller-investigating-trump-exercising-lawful-presidential-authority.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on January 28, 2018, 06:13:17 AM: why should Trump walk through a mine field ? He should refuse though he could be called in front of grand jury and made to testify?
Although there is still no evidence of wrong doing
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on January 29, 2018, 06:15:22 AM: Quote from: ccp on January 28, 2018, 06:13:17 AM
why should Trump walk through a mine field ? He should refuse though he could be called in front of grand jury and made to testify?
Although there is still no evidence of wrong doing

ccp, I agree. He eliminates the public demand to testify for now by saying he wants to do it, but he never will if his attorneys have any say in the matter.
Title: VDH: Hillary's sure victory explains everything
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 07:58:40 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/455885/print
Title: Sharyl Attkission raises important points
Post by: G M on January 30, 2018, 10:42:16 AM: https://mobile.twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/958204411204968449

Sharyl Attkisson
Sharyl Attkisson
@SharylAttkisson
Prior to any FBI interview w/@realDonaldTrump, has FBI authored an exoneration memo, promised immunity to his top associates & agreed not to record the interview? If not, it implies: 1. Hillary probe wasn't done according to norm or 2. Trump is being treated differently.Thoughts?
9:05 PM · Jan 29, 2018
Title: The Shearer Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 11:11:04 AM: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/trump-russia-collusion-fbi-cody-shearer-memo
Title: Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 11:32:20 AM: second post

https://www.facebook.com/votevets/videos/10154944748801022/?hc_ref=ARTLcGMpByTEB3G2oS2frW8sOJaJZIbLnJlfmZNnowyx_Zfvbl4FGKwZ0tDWbtZlcsw

A savvy friend notes:

"The article’s author fails to spot the fact that, just because two documents say the same thing, it may still not be true. Especially if the two documents are relying on information from the same source. Even moreso if the source is FSB controlled. Which seems likely."
Title: Re: The Shearer Dossier
Post by: DougMacG on January 30, 2018, 11:39:18 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 11:11:04 AM
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/trump-russia-collusion-fbi-cody-shearer-memo

I agree with your friend.

Not convincing to me that both came up with all this including the least credible part, the 'lewd act' in Russia, "independently" though both were tied to the Clintons and Dems and both made their reports just in time to affect the result of the election, an October Surprise, when Hillary IIRC bragged of having one coming - which we presumed was the Access Hollywood tape.

The Steele Dossier was not written by Steele, see an earlier post. This story looks timed to confuse the Nunes memo release. If the FISA was based on both, that doesn't vindicate either of them. My guess is this report dated Oct 2016 and this story TODAY were created and placed by the same puppet masters who write Adam Schiff's script. Trump is a germaphobe who assumes Russian Hotels are bugged and filmed to get his money, making the 'golden showers' story beyond unlikely. Trump's weakness is money and maybe sex, not urination or racism, the alleged and not credible motive for the 'lewd act'. The Guardian is as independent as CNN/MSNBC. I don't buy any of this but it is good that we know this is out there.

At the end of the story the Guardian basically admits they don't have resources to check the stories they print.
"More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast."
They are vouching for the Dossier's existence, not its validity.
Title: Shifty Adam Schiff
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 11:53:00 AM: http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/30/adam-schiffs-versions-of-events-are-frequently-false-or-missing-key-details/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on January 30, 2018, 01:17:53 PM: "shyster" Schiff fits better then shifty schiff
but for those who don't know yiddish - 'shifty' will do.
Title: WaPo: DOJ probe eyes McCabe in final weeks of election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 03:33:27 PM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/internal-justice-department-probe-eyes-mccabes-role-in-final-weeks-of-2016-election/2018/01/30/db2ea8f0-05c7-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.1c5237ffc4a9
Title: POTH: Wray unhappy with idea of Memo's release
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 31, 2018, 12:20:49 PM: F.B.I. Condemns Push to Release Secret Republican Memo

By ADAM GOLDMAN and NICHOLAS FANDOSJAN. 31, 2018
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Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, went to the White House to try to stop the release of the memo on Monday. Credit Zach Gibson for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, clashed publicly with the president for the first time on Wednesday, condemning a push by House Republicans to release a secret memo that purports to show how the bureau and the Justice Department abused their authorities to obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser.

The “F.B.I. was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the bureau said in a statement. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

Though Mr. Wray’s name was not attached to the statement, the high-profile comment by the F.B.I. thrust him into a confrontation with President Trump, who abruptly fired his predecessor, James B. Comey. Mr. Trump wants to see the memo released, telling people close to him that he believes it makes the case that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials acted inappropriately when they sought the highly classified warrant in October 2016 on the campaign adviser, Carter Page.

The president’s stance puts him at odds with much of his national security establishment. The Justice Department has warned repeatedly that the memo, prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, is misleading and that its release would set a bad precedent for making government secrets public. F.B.I. officials have said privately that the president is prioritizing politics over national security and is putting the bureau’s reputation at risk.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

People who have read the three-and-a-half-page memo say it contends that officials from the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were not forthcoming to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge in seeking the warrant. It says that the officials relied on information assembled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, without adequately explaining to the judge that Democrats had financed the research.
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How to Get a Wiretap to Spy on Americans, and Why That Matters Now JAN. 29, 2018

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Ron 3 minutes ago

One cannont but come to the conclusion, based on the desparate actions taken to impune the FBI and DOJ, that this President and his...
Hastings 3 minutes ago

Most politicians are hypocritical, but the astounding heights the GOP has recently reached is mind boggling. Think of the false outrage they...
William Case 3 minutes ago

The FBI should provide the omitted facts tp the House Intelligence Committee for inclusion in the memo.

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Mr. Page, a former Moscow-based investment banker, had been on authorities’ radar for years. He had visited Moscow in July 2016 and was preparing to return there that December when investigators obtained the warrant in October 2016.

The memo has come to the forefront in a string of attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to shift attention from the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling and toward the actions of the investigators themselves. Republicans in Congress and in conservative media have asserted that the memo will show political bias in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

The Republican-led Intelligence Committee voted along party lines on Monday night to release it, invoking an obscure, never-before-used House rule to sidestep the usual back-and-forth between lawmakers and the executive branch over the government’s most closely held secrets. Democrats on the committee objected and have prepared their own 10-page point-by-point rebuttal of the Republican document. The committee voted against releasing the Democrats’ memo publicly.

Under the rule, Mr. Trump has five days to try to stop the release for national security reasons.

Democrats have called the Republican document a dangerous effort to build a narrative to undercut the department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates colluded with Russians and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. They say it uses cherry-picked facts assembled with little or no context and could do lasting damage to faith in federal law enforcement.

The F.B.I. statement ran counter to the decidedly low-key approach that Mr. Wray has taken as director, avoiding news media interviews and delivering anodyne speeches to law enforcement groups. He had worked quietly in the hopes of keeping the F.B.I. out of the president’s cross hairs.
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Since taking over the F.B.I. about six months ago, Mr. Wray has had to defend the F.B.I. against the president’s broadsides. But the director has done so in a nonconfrontational manner. In December, when Mr. Trump said the F.B.I.’s standing was the “worst in history” and its reputation in “tatters,” Mr. Wray sent a message to the bureau’s more than 35,000 agents and support staff saying that the professionalism and dedication was inspiring.

Mr. Wray had strongly objected to the move to release the memo and was allowed to review it only on Sunday, after the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes of California, relented. Mr. Wray made a last-ditch effort on Monday, going to the White House with the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to try to persuade the White House to stop the release of the memo. They spoke to John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, but were unsuccessful.

Mr. Trump could only block the release of the memo, not make it public himself, but with his approval, House Republicans were expected to move quickly to unveil the document. Mr. Kelly said on Wednesday that he expected the memo to be released “pretty quick,” while cautioning that White House lawyers were still reviewing it.

Ultimately, though, Mr. Trump was eager to see the document released. Even as the White House’s review was continuing, Mr. Trump was overheard on Tuesday night as he exited his first State of the Union address assuring a House Republican that he would see to the document’s release.

“Oh, don’t worry, 100 percent,” Mr. Trump told the lawmaker, Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina. “Can you imagine that?”

The memo is also said to highlight the role of several senior law enforcement officials, including Mr. Rosenstein, who authorized a renewal of the surveillance of Mr. Page in the spring of 2017. Mr. Trump has recently expressed his displeasure with Mr. Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel conducting the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III. And the memo could expose Mr. Rosenstein to some of the criticisms being directed by Republicans at other officials.

Also mentioned is Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I., who has been a target of Republicans in Congress and of Mr. Trump. Mr. McCabe stepped down on Monday, telling people close to him that he had felt pressured to because of a separate Justice Department inspector general investigation.

During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wray foreshadowed Wednesday’s confrontation. He told senators that he was no pushover and would resist political interference.

Mr. Wray has followed through. He resisted White House pressure to replace staff members, including Mr. McCabe, who were once loyal to Mr. Comey, to avoid appearing as though he was taking orders from the president in a job that is supposed to be politically independent. Mr. Wray did eventually sideline Mr. McCabe, who stepped down abruptly, but only after finding cause to do so.

In late September, Mr. Wray said in a speech in Washington that the F.B.I. would abide by the rule of law and that wouldn’t change as long as he was director. He also said the F.B.I. would not bow to intimidation.

“We’re going to follow the facts independently,” he said, “no matter where they lead, no matter who likes it.”
Title: Flynn Sentencing Delayed
Post by: DougMacG on February 01, 2018, 11:13:26 AM: Read what you want into this, it is timed with the release of the memo presumably exposing that the FBI had no valid, legal reason for questioning Flynn.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4364040/1-31-18-Flynn-Status-Report.pdf
Title: More excellence from Andrew McCarthy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 01, 2018, 11:19:23 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456003/devin-nunes-fisa-memo-positioning-ahead-its-release
Title: NY Post: Why investors should pay attention to bombshell memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 01, 2018, 11:21:51 AM: second post

https://nypost.com/2018/01/31/why-investors-should-pay-attention-to-bombshell-memo/
Title: Day by day's take on Comey
Post by: G M on February 01, 2018, 12:30:12 PM: (https://www.daybydaycartoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/020118-1.jpg)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 01, 2018, 02:10:42 PM: all day long I am waiting for the darn memo. Now tomorrow - the drama of it all. This is more tense then who he was going to fire on celebrity apprentice - by a smidgeon
But this gives more time for Wash post cnn and NYT Newsweek Huffpost and the dem shysters and the jornolister DNC people to get their counter blitz act together.

they are all over the airwaves with everything else they can think of
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 01, 2018, 03:28:22 PM: Not quite the Hyborian Age, but we live in times of great Adventure , , ,
Title: Comey: "weasels and liars"
Post by: ccp on February 01, 2018, 05:32:26 PM: This guy along with Loretta Lynch and Obama refused to enforce the law against Clinton. So who is the weasel?

was he also part of a get Trump conspiracy I don't know .
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity!
Post by: G M on February 01, 2018, 06:13:25 PM: http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/371853-new-fbi-messages-reveal-agents-searching-for-way-to-evade-record?amp&__twitter_impression=true

The laws only apply to the little people.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 01, 2018, 07:20:42 PM: Please post that in Rule of Law as well.
Title: The Memo!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 10:35:22 AM: https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-gop-memo/2746/

A useful guide and set of questions for reading the memo:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/memo-reading-for-nonpartisans-1517530297?shareToken=st2970f114d2f540e48731de9fa29f34e8&reflink=article_email_share
Title: Re: The Memo!
Post by: G M on February 02, 2018, 11:13:24 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 10:35:22 AM

https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-gop-memo/2746/

A useful guide and set of questions for reading the memo:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/memo-reading-for-nonpartisans-1517530297?shareToken=st2970f114d2f540e48731de9fa29f34e8&reflink=article_email_share

A historical day, as most tragedies are. The FBI needs to be dissolved and lots of people need to go to prison.
Title: Re: The Memo!
Post by: DougMacG on February 02, 2018, 01:50:56 PM: Quote from: G M on February 02, 2018, 11:13:24 AM
A historical day, as most tragedies are. The FBI needs to be dissolved and lots of people need to go to prison.

Does this fit under RICO for prosecuting organized crime?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
Title: Memo, text and salient points
Post by: DougMacG on February 02, 2018, 02:16:29 PM: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/02/what-the-house-intelligence-committee-memo-says.php

Here are some salient points, put together by John Hinderaker: (full text below)

* The FISA warrants that are the subject of the memo all relate to Carter Page. The original warrant was sought on October 21, 2016, and the memo says that there were three renewals, which apparently occur every 90 days. This would appear to take the surveillance well past the presidential election, and beyond President Trump’s inauguration. The memo does not explain this aspect of the timing. The FISA applications were signed by some familiar names: James Comey signed three, and Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein all signed one or more.

* The fake “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele with the assistance of unknown Russians “formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. In fact, McCabe testified before the committee that no FISA warrant would have been sought without the fake dossier. Steele was paid over $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to come up with derogatory information–true or false, apparently–on Donald Trump.

* DOJ and FBI failed to mention in their FISA application that it was based on opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, even though this apparently was known to the FBI. The application apparently tried to mislead the FISA court by saying that Steele “was working for a named U.S. person”–the memo doesn’t tell us who that person was–but not disclosing Fusion GPS or Glenn Simpson, let alone Hillary Clinton and the DNC. This appears to be a deliberate deception of the court.

* In addition to Steele’s fake dossier, the FISA application cited an article about Carter Page that appeared on Yahoo News. The application “assessed” that this corroborating account did not originate with Christopher Steele. In fact, it did: Steele himself leaked the information to Yahoo News.

* The memo casually notes that “the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.” This is news to me. It has been reported that Steele sought funding from the FBI, but I believe prior reports have been to the effect that the Bureau refused. Was the FBI paying Steele, known to be working for the Hillary Clinton campaign?

* Steele was terminated as an FBI source for leaking to news outlets about his relationship with the Bureau. The memo says that Steele should have been terminated for the same reason in September, before the first FISA application, because of other news media contacts, “but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.”

* Bruce Ohr’s involvement is even worse than we thought. In September 2016, according to the FBI’s files, Steele told Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The FBI hid this from the FISA court. Not only that, Ohr’s wife went to work for Fusion GPS and was part of the opposition research effort against candidate Trump. “Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.”

* At the time of the FBI’s initial application for a FISA warrant in October, its effort to corroborate Steele’s report was in its “infancy,” according to the Bureau. Subsequently, an FBI report characterized Steele’s dossier as “only minimally corroborated.” Nonetheless, in January 2017 James Comey purported to “brief” president-elect Trump on the contents of Steele’s fake report, at which time the report was leaked to the press.

* The memo ends with a brief reference to George Papadopoulos, who had a slight relationship to Trump’s campaign. FBI agent Peter Strzok opened a counterintelligence investigation into Papadopoulos in July 2016.

The Intelligence Committee memo obviously outlines a major scandal that indicts principal figures in the FBI, including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, unless the latter two officials were unaware of the fraud that was being perpetrated on the federal court. Whether some of those involved should go to prison would require a careful examination of relevant federal statutes.

The memo leaves much unsaid. The timing is unclear, at least to me. It sounds as though the FBI continued to renew its FISA warrant long after it had terminated its relationship with Steele and knew, or should have known, that his information was bogus. Why? Did the FBI tell the FISA court in these renewal applications that it had terminated its relationship with Steele, or that it had been unable to corroborate his claims? Presumably not.

Also, we don’t know what was done with the information that was collected about Carter Page–and, of course, about anyone with whom he communicated. This is where the enormous number of “unmasking” requests by Obama officials like Susan Rice come in. Did the Obama administration use the ill-gotten FISA warrants to spy, not only on Carter Page, but on others who had some relationship with Trump, or even Trump himself? Did the Obama administration pass information obtained from improper surveillance on to the Clinton campaign, or leak it to the press after the election?

The Intelligence Committee memo is a major step forward, but we have not yet gotten to the bottom of what happened in the heavily-politicized Department of Justice and FBI.
Full text:
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https://www.scribd.com/document/370601487/370599093-FISA-Memo-Full-Text?irgwc=1&content=27795&campaign=&ad_group=3059047&keyword=ft500noi&source=impactradius&medium=affiliate
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 02:30:55 PM: FWIW driving around today I was listening a bit to Michael Medved. He felt the whole memo thing is a bunch of hooey.

*For good reason, Carter Page was on the intel radar screen for three years prior to the election.

*the FISA applications were after the Trump campaign let him go (after minimal involvement) precisely because of his Russian dealings i.e. there was not boot strapping to get after Team Trump.
Title: Ben Shapiro on the Memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 02:37:10 PM: This seems rather lucid:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/26693/5-things-you-need-know-about-bombshell-house-ben-shapiro?utm_medium=email&utm_content=020218-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: WSJ on the Memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 03:03:05 PM: Obama and the FISA Court
Both of their reputations cannot survive the collusion investigation.
Former President Barack Obama in Chicago in December.
Former President Barack Obama in Chicago in December. Photo: maury/EPA/Shutterstock
By James Freeman
Updated Feb. 2, 2018 5:45 p.m. ET
283 COMMENTS

This column is trying to imagine how an editor at The Wall Street Journal would treat a draft article alleging a political campaign adviser was secretly working for a foreign government if the story featured uncorroborated opposition research paid for by a rival campaign. If the writer of the draft article assured the editor that readers would not be told where the information originated, it’s a safe bet this would not increase the chances of publication.

This column is also trying to imagine the conversation that would ensue if a reporter or writer then tried to persuade the editor by appealing to the authority of Yahoo News.

Of course the Journal isn’t the only media outlet that enforces standards. Many organizations strive to ensure basic accuracy and fairness. Can it possibly be true that the evidentiary standards for obtaining a federal warrant allowing the government to spy on the party out of power are significantly lower than in a professional newsroom?

Today the American people are finally able to see the memo from the majority staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence alleging abuse of government surveillance powers during the last presidential campaign. Many will be appalled that, at least according to the memo, on October 21, 2016 the Department of Justice and the FBI obtained a court order authorizing electronic surveillance on a Trump campaign volunteer without telling the court that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee had paid for at least some of the research presented.

The memo further states that according to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, corroboration of the research was in its “infancy” at the time the government requested and received approval for this surveillance. Is it that easy to spy on the party out of power?

Today a number of libertarians and liberals are pointing to a blog post by USC law professor Orin Kerr, who says that failure to disclose the interests of the source is often a non-issue:

Part of the problem is that judges figure that of course informants are often biased. Informants usually have ulterior motives, and judges don’t need to be told that. A helpful case is United States v. Strifler, 851 F.2d 1197, 1201 (9th Cir. 1988), in which the government obtained a warrant to search a house for a meth lab inside. Probable cause was based largely on a confidential informant who told the police that he had not only seen a meth lab in the house but had even helped others to try to manufacture meth there. The magistrate judge issued the warrant based on the informant’s detailed tip. The search was successful and charges followed.

The defendants challenged the warrant on the ground that the affidavit had failed to mention the remarkable ulterior motives of the informant. The affidavit didn’t mention that the “informant” was actually a married couple that had been in a quarrel with the defendants; that the couple was facing criminal charges themselves and had been “guaranteed by the prosecutor that they would not be prosecuted if they provided information”; and that they had been paid by the government for giving the information. The affidavit didn’t mention any of that. A big deal, right?

According to the court, no. “It would have to be a very naive magistrate who would suppose that a confidential informant would drop in off the street with such detailed evidence and not have an ulterior motive,” Judge Noonan wrote. “The magistrate would naturally have assumed that the informant was not a disinterested citizen.” The fact that the magistrate wasn’t told that the “informant” was guaranteed to go free and paid for the information didn’t matter, as “the magistrate was given reason to think the informant knew a good deal about what was going on” inside the house.

If this is accurate, and if it’s also acceptable to include uncorroborated information in warrant applications, this means that the bar for approving government spying against domestic political opponents is significantly lower than most Americans have been led to believe.

A former government official, having read the Kerr argument, writes via email:

In meth cases, the judges all know the informants are dirtbags. But as Kerr admits, context is everything in these fact determinations. It’s hardly irrelevant that one presidential campaign is being spied on with the collusion of the existing administration and its candidate. Perhaps prosecutors should be mindful of their high ethical obligations in such a unique case. After all, there is the small matter of the credibility not only of law enforcement but the entire democratic process riding on it.

The Democrats on the Intelligence committee seem eager to release their own memo so perhaps we’ll learn more, but based on today’s release it appears either that the Obama administration engaged in historic abuse or that the FISA court cannot be trusted to protect our liberties, or perhaps both.

Readers concerned about the government’s surveillance authority may be interested to know about one current member of the Intelligence committee who began focusing on this issue all the way back in the George W. Bush administration.

In March of 2007, he announced that he was “deeply troubled” by what he called “abuses of authority” by the FBI in acquiring personal information on U.S. citizens. Over the years, he urged various restrictions on the ability of the executive branch to get information on Americans’ phone calls. In order “to protect privacy and increase transparency” he sought in various ways to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—the very court that approved the electronic surveillance of a Trump associate for reasons that are still not entirely clear.

Way ahead of the news, this particular lawmaker specifically introduced the “Ending Secret Law Act” which according to a press release from his office, “would require the Attorney General to declassify significant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions, allowing Americans to know how the Court has interpreted” its legal authorities.

This lawmaker said that his legislation “will help ensure we have true checks and balances when it comes to the judges who are given the responsibility of overseeing our most sensitive intelligence gathering and national security programs.”

His name is Adam Schiff, and he is now the ranking member on House Intelligence. But oddly he doesn’t seem to want to take credit for his early concern for civil liberties.
Title: Representative Bill Hurd "Why I voted to release the Memo"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2018, 03:03:59 PM: third post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-i-voted-to-release-the-nunes-memo/2018/02/02/30fea380-0824-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.8a123da5dffe
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 02, 2018, 03:24:21 PM: MIchael Medved: from CD post :

*the FISA applications were after the Trump campaign let him go (after minimal involvement) precisely because of his Russian dealings i.e. there was not boot strapping to get after Team Trump."

I don't agree. The STeele Dosier was the reason the FISA application was granted . And why did team Comey at el totally leave out the political and financial bias of STeele
and a payoff to FBI guys wife and DOJ wife and the obvious Trump hatred - "insurance policy "
"Trump cannot be allowed to be President " all consistent with the total kid gloves on Hillary - sounds like bias to me and a bid F deal to quote the other great one - Joe Biden.
Title: Spengler is correct
Post by: G M on February 02, 2018, 05:11:39 PM: https://pjmedia.com/spengler/trump-triumphs-release-house-intel-memo/

Read it all.
Title: Re: Spengler is correct
Post by: DougMacG on February 02, 2018, 05:46:20 PM: Quote from: G M on February 02, 2018, 05:11:39 PM
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/trump-triumphs-release-house-intel-memo/
Read it all.

"Some may consider it dangerous to expose senior officials of America’s counterintelligence service as political hacks and fools. They needn’t worry. America’s adversaries have been well aware of this for a long time."
Title: Worse than Watergate
Post by: G M on February 02, 2018, 08:51:53 PM: https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/02/worse-than-watergate/

Much, much worse.
Title: never Trumpers : "nothingburger"
Post by: ccp on February 03, 2018, 04:13:48 AM: Seem to have nothing better to do than quote Hillary Clinont "nothingburger";

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/02/nevertrump-rallies-to-defend-deep-state-dismiss-memo/

Oh Carter Page was part of a counterintelligence investigation before FISA. Why do they keep repeating this. McCabe himself said the FISA was only obtained because of the dossier.

And if it is such a nothingburger why is the left going bonkers ?

Why did Comey et company go nuts trying to prevent its release?
Title: As usual VDH nails it
Post by: ccp on February 03, 2018, 05:13:12 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/456084/nunes-memo-fbi-doj-corruption-ticking-memo
Title: The WSJ weighs in:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2018, 10:01:40 AM: A Reckoning for the FBI
The House memo reveals disturbing facts about the misuse of FISA.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 2, 2018 7:27 p.m. ET

Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.

The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.

This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.

Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.

We don’t know the political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Steele and Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters to try to defeat Mr. Trump before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.

No matter its motives, the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.

We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

Democrats are howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and leaves out essential details. They are producing their own summary of the evidence, and by all means let’s see that too. President Trump should declassify it promptly, along with Senator Chuck Grassley’s referral for criminal investigation of Mr. Steele. But note that Democrats aren’t challenging the core facts that the FBI used the dossier to gain a FISA order or the bureau’s lack of disclosure to the FISA judges.

The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is doing a service by forcing these facts into the public domain where the American people can examine them, hold people accountable, and then Congress can determine how to prevent them in the future. The U.S. has weathered institutional crises before—Iran-Contra, the 9/11 intelligence failure, even Senator Dianne Feinstein’s campaign against the CIA and enhanced interrogation.

The other political misdirection is that the memo is designed to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible Trump collusion with Russia. We doubt Mr. Mueller will be deterred by any of this. The question of FISA abuse is independent of Mr. Mueller’s work, and one that Congress takes up amid a larger debate about surveillance and national security. Mr. Trump would do well to knock off the tweets lambasting the Mueller probe, and let House and Senate Republicans focus public attention on these FISA abuses.
***

If all of this is damaging to the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, then that damage is self-inflicted. We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused. Its apparent misuse during the presidential campaign needs to be fully investigated.

Toward that end, the public should see more of the documents that are behind the competing intelligence memos to judge who is telling the truth. Mr. Trump and the White House should consider the remedy of radical transparency.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 04, 2018, 05:11:18 AM: "Their [Democrats] latest meme is "cherry picking." The memo was cherry-picked and therefore to be ignored. That's like saying a murderer who has a clean driving record and is a good cook is not a murderer."

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/democrats-lie-baldly-memo/
Title: 2nd post ; Rosenstein threatens intel committee members
Post by: ccp on February 04, 2018, 05:26:09 AM: not sure what the significance of this and caveat emptor the source (Jarret on Hannity show):

https://www.spartareport.com/2018/02/breaking-second-source-comes-forward-rosenstein-threatened-to-retaliate-against-congress/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on February 04, 2018, 07:06:06 AM: Quote from: ccp on February 04, 2018, 05:11:18 AM
"Their [Democrats] latest meme is "cherry picking." The memo was cherry-picked and therefore to be ignored. That's like saying a murderer who has a clean driving record and is a good cook is not a murderer."

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/democrats-lie-baldly-memo/

Well, once the memo was out, the hysterical claims about the damage to national security didn't work. Exposing "sources and methods" didn't work, unless you count perjury as a proprietary method, which it just might be for the Obama DOJ/FBI.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 04, 2018, 07:42:19 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/opinion/leaving-the-fbi.html

one question for this FBI agent:

explain to me Comey's failure to enforce the law during the Clinton investigation and giving her and her layers and aids all passes
Title: Two tough questions for us
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2018, 10:28:06 AM: Answer me this:

1) Carter Page had left the Trump campaign before the FISA warrant application was approved. So how is this a boot strapping into listening in on the Trump campaign?

2) http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456063/nunes-memo-big-flaw-confirms-new-york-times-story?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Week%20in%20Review%202018-02-04&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Re: Two tough questions for us
Post by: DougMacG on February 04, 2018, 01:49:49 PM: Crafty, I don't know the answer to those. One take is here:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/02/trump-right-fisa-warrant-allowed-fbi-spy-carter-page-trump-campaign/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Doug] We will know more if/when more complete information comes out. How did they know all about Flynn before they questioned him if the campaign and administration wasn't being spied on by our own agencies? Why did they delay his sentencing? Why wasn't Hillary questioned under oath? She would be facing the same charges as Flynn only to a much higher underlying crime. Why did Mueller hire DNC donors? Why were these people hired, trusted, fired, McCabe, Ohr, Lisa Page, Strzok? Did Comey commit a crime? Should Mueller recuse himself over Comey? If this group that can't shoot straight, issues a damning report now, could anyone rely on it?

While the Sunday shows are in denial that something big went wrong, I would ask:
1. Is it a big deal to get a FISA court order to wiretap a US citizen? Yes, hugely!
2. Did they know the infdormation they were submitting was false, four times? Yes, obviously!
3. Does the other side, the suspect, get a say in a FISA court hearing? No.
4. Will those who perpetrated a fraud on the court pay a price for this, 4 times over? No. Only the American people will pay. The abuse of this power will result in the loss of this power and leave the US susceptible to attacks on a scale of 9/11 and greater.

I don't buy the line that nothing much happened here. This is an investigation into FOLLOWING THE RULES!

We pay $75billion/year for 200,000 intelligence agents and for the most important issue of our time (apparently) they submitted the Steele report to get the wiretap order, not written by Steele as shown in these pages, loaded with obviously false information like the "golden showers". Trump hired prostitutes to pee on a hotel room bed because he believed Barack Obama, a half black man, once slept there. Who doesn't that strike as absurd? Did they hire people to pee on the White House too?? No matter how despicable you think Trump is, this whole thing is absurd. Bad choice of words, but who applied the smell test to it? Pictured here with Mohammed Ali and Rosas Parks receiving the Ellis Island award, racism is not what anyone honestly thinks is what primarily motivates Trump. Money, power and ego all come ahead of any racism.
(https://us-east-1.tchyn.io/snopes-production/uploads/2016/09/trump-immigrant.jpg?resize=768,510)

It's Year Two of a politically intentional cloud over the trump administration. Is the public entitled to one shred of real evidence of illegal collusion by Trump with the Russians to support why this is STILL under investigation?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2018, 03:13:16 PM: I'm about to head out to the gym and have only skimmed the piece, but this jumped out at me:

"How did they know all about Flynn before they questioned him if the campaign and administration wasn't being spied on by our own agencies?"

Ummm, because, as we most certainly should, we were listening in on the Russians?

If I have this right, it is more than a little feeble of this article to proffer such BS.
Title: Mukasey: Where's the Crime?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2018, 09:52:59 PM: Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006).
================================================================

The Memo and the Mueller Probe
If the investigation arose from partisan opposition research, what specific crime is he looking into?
Special counsel Robert Mueller leaves a Capitol Hill meeting, June 21, 2017.
Special counsel Robert Mueller leaves a Capitol Hill meeting, June 21, 2017. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/associated press
By Michael B. Mukasey
Feb. 4, 2018 3:57 p.m. ET
182 COMMENTS

The memo released Friday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was the product of necessity, not choice. Even before its release, the debate over its provenance, motive and effect was obscuring the crucial point that it is the underlying facts the memo alleges that present the real issues.

The committee’s memo says that yet another memo, which goes by the cloak-and-dagger title “Steele dossier,” provided at least part of the basis for a wiretap of Carter Page, a U.S. citizen who had volunteered as a foreign policy-consultant to the Trump campaign. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the wiretap application from the FBI and Justice Department two weeks before the 2016 election. In order to obtain the warrant, the government had to show probable cause that Mr. Page was acting as the agent of a foreign power and that in so doing he had committed a crime.

The Steele dossier is 35 pages of opposition research on Donald Trump, described by former FBI Director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.” It was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had a luminous dislike for Mr. Trump and was also an informant for the FBI.

The House memo reports that the FBI and Justice Department did not advise the FISA court that the dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. It also reports that the government’s cited support for the accuracy of contentions in the wiretap application—statements in a news article—had originated in a leak from Mr. Steele himself. Mr. Steele was fired by the FBI for a later unauthorized disclosure to the press, a cardinal offense by an informant. But the FBI continued to receive information from him through a Justice Department employee whose wife worked for the opposition-research firm that employed Mr. Steele and was paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign through a law firm, which acted as a cutout to conceal the source of the payments.

All that and more was known by the FBI and the Justice Department, according to the House memo, but not disclosed to the FISA court. That is certainly scandalous, but how consequential it is would seem to depend at least in part on what role the Steele dossier played in the application for the warrant.

According to the House memo, the FBI’s then deputy director testified in December that there would have been no application for the warrant but for the dossier. The committee’s Democrats deny he said that. In any case, it appears the Steele dossier played some role in the FISA application. The dossier, thanks to a long-ago leak, is publicly available; if you’d enjoy a swan dive into a cesspool, go read it. The FISA application is not available. How come?

Such applications are at the highest level of classification. They often contain sensitive intelligence information that can betray confidential sources and methods; disclosure can severely damage national security. But notice that the FBI’s only objection to the House memo at the time of its release was that it was incomplete, not that it disclosed sources and methods. Thus it is possible to summarize parts of a classified document to disclose information relevant to a public issue without disclosing secrets.

It is also possible to redact a classified document to the same end. It should be possible to disclose the parts of the FISA application that are alleged to come from the Steele dossier to see if there is any there there. That was not done because the FBI and the Justice Department resisted, and the committee had to make do with a summary. That is why the memo was a product of necessity, not choice.

Those critical of its release say it is intended to damage special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. How does possible misconduct by senior FBI officials, which is certainly bad enough, intersect with the Mueller investigation? As follows: The Justice Department regulation that authorizes the appointment of special counsels requires a determination that a “criminal investigation” is warranted, and that there is a conflict or other good reason that prevents ordinary Justice Department staff from conducting it.

The regulation that governs the jurisdiction of the special counsel requires that he be “provided with a specific statement of the matter to be investigated.” The letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointing Mr. Mueller says he is to “conduct the investigation confirmed by then-Director James Comey before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017,” which covers “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” and any matters that may arise “directly” from that investigation.

But the investigation then disclosed by Mr. Comey was not a criminal investigation; it was a national-security investigation. Possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election is certainly a worthy subject for a national-security investigation, but “links” or “coordination”—or “collusion,” a word that does not appear in the letter of appointment but has been used as a synonym for coordination—does not define or constitute a crime. The information, and misinformation, in the Steele dossier relates to that subject.

If partisan opposition research was used to fuel a national-security investigation that has morphed into a series of criminal investigations, and the special counsel has no tether that identifies a specific crime, or “a specific statement of the matter” he is to investigate, that is at least unsettling. By contrast, the Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater investigations, whatever you think of how they were conducted, identified specific crimes. The public knew what was being investigated.

Here, none of the charges Mr. Mueller has brought thus far involved “coordination” or “collusion” with the Russians. Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos both pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, the latter over the timing of conversations with Russians in which he was allegedly offered but never received “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton, including her emails. He also attempted to set up a meeting between the Russians and Mr. Trump, but the campaign blew off that effort. Notably, Mr. Papadopoulos did not plead guilty to participating in any plot that involved “coordination.” The Paul Manafort and Rick Gates indictments charge fraud on the government through receipt of and failure to disclose payments from a pro-Russian Ukraine politician.

What to do? I believe that at a minimum, the public should get access to a carefully redacted copy of the FISA application and renewals, so we can see whether officials behaved unlawfully by misleading a court; and Mr. Mueller’s mandate should be defined in a way that conforms with the legal standard of his office. Both would go a long way toward assuring that we do more than talk about a “government of laws.”

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006).
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2018, 10:06:40 PM: second post

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epoch-times-investigation-beyond-the-memo_2431505.html

"The Epoch Times used additional sources, including a declassified top-secret report of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to paint a fuller picture of the apparent abuse of power.

After the initial FISA warrant was approved, dozens, if not hundreds of so-called unmasking requests were made by senior members of then-President Barack Obama’s administration.

It also opened the floodgate to a number of intelligence leaks to media organizations, which served to turn public opinion against Donald Trump.

Continuing well after Trump was elected, the spying and leaking raise serious concerns about apparent efforts by the Obama administration, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign to prevent Trump from being elected and to delegitimize him once he was in office."
Title: WSJ: Strassel: Did Steele really snooker the FBI?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 07:09:17 AM: Did Steele Really Snooker the FBI?
The bureau should have known he was talking to the press—but it told the FISA court he wasn’t.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 4, 2018 3:55 p.m. ET
927 COMMENTS

The House Intelligence Committee memo about 2016 surveillance abuses, released Friday, lays out grave evidence that the FBI wasn’t fully forthcoming with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as it sought an order to wiretap former Trump adviser Carter Page. It’s possible the FBI’s lack of candor was even worse than the memo describes.

Democrats are disputing the memo on lots of grounds, but they’ve said little about the FBI’s failure to inform the court that the bureau had itself decided one of its main sources, dossier author Christopher Steele, was unreliable. Mr. Steele in October 2016 gave Mother Jones an unauthorized interview about the dossier. As a former British intelligence officer, Mr. Steele would have known that sources are not supposed to blab to the press. The interview appeared but a few days before the election, was at the direction of his paymaster, the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, and was clearly designed to help the ultimate client: the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Stuck with a source now brazenly using the FBI for political purposes, the bureau suspended and then terminated Mr. Steele. Only nine days before the Mother Jones interview, the bureau had filed its application for the Page wiretap order, which rested on the Steele dossier. Yet the FBI did not immediately go back to tell the court it no longer trusted Mr. Steele, the author of a crucial piece of evidence.

And the Mother Jones interview wasn’t the first time Mr. Steele went to the press. A month earlier he had sat down with an array of media outlets to brief them on the dossier that he’d given the FBI in July. Out of this came a Sept. 23, 2016, article by Michael Isikoff in Yahoo News, published under the headline “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The story was a bombshell, blowing the FBI investigation into the public sphere.

The FBI and Justice Department intimately knew this article, as they relied on it as part of their wiretap application. And while Mr. Isikoff did not name Mr. Steele as his source, the FBI should have been able to figure out his identity. The Isikoff article relates specific dossier details, though the dossier wasn’t public at the time. It explains that the “intelligence reports” the FBI was reviewing—the dossier—came from a “well-placed Western intelligence source.” Sen. Chuck Grassley last month referred Mr. Steele to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of whether he lied to the feds about his contacts with the press. From this we can assume that the FBI’s FISA court application claimed Mr. Steele had not worked with the press.

The House memo gives the FBI the benefit of the doubt, stating that Mr. Steele “improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.” Then again, what was the date of this claim? If Mr. Steele told the FBI when he first met with them in July that he’d not briefed media, that would have been accurate as far as we know. Did the FBI ask him again after the Isikoff article?

Even if it did and if he denied talking to reporters, the FBI would have had every reason to believe he was lying. The provenance of the Isikoff article is exceptionally clear. And the FBI could easily have checked Mr. Steele’s recent whereabouts (Britain or the U.S.) or even asked Mr. Isikoff, though he might not have answered. While Mr. Steele might have proved unreliable, there’s reason to wonder if he’d lie outright to the FBI.

The Grassley referral needs be fully declassified, just as the House memo was. The FBI needs to answer straightforward questions about Mr. Steele’s claims, and he needs to provide his version.

The FBI got fooled by a source, or it knew its source was lying, or it didn’t bother to check, or it was too incompetent to see the obvious. Take your pick. None of the possibilities look good, especially if you’re a FISA judge.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on February 05, 2018, 07:11:04 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2018, 03:13:16 PM
...this jumped out at me:
"How did they know all about Flynn before they questioned him if the campaign and administration wasn't being spied on by our own agencies?"

Ummm, because, as we most certainly should, we were listening in on the Russians?
If I have this right, it is more than a little feeble of this article to proffer such BS.

I edited my post since then to separate their link from my questions. That 'BS' was mine. ) The Gateway link purports to answer your question but also falls a little short.

To your question:
"1) Carter Page had left the Trump campaign before the FISA warrant application was approved. So how is this a boot strapping into listening in on the Trump campaign?"

According to others, Carter Page was still in contact with the campaign and that seems to be the connection to the others - "in his circle".

The Mukasey piece seems quite level headed on the issue. I agree, we need to see the (redacted) FISA applications and we need to know the underlying evidence of a crime they are investigating, sooner rather than later.

Another center of this scandal is the unmasking. To your question, how is this a boot strap into listening into the Trump campaign (and transition and administration?), I think the unmasking documents will tell that story. [How did we know it was Flynn? Flynn was unmasked. Why? By Whom?]
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2662.msg104058#msg104058

Recall this roadblock, well covered on the forum:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2662.msg104442#msg104442
JW: NSC buries Susan Rice unmasking materials at Obama Library
« Reply #108 on: June 19, 2017, 08:46:18 PM » Crafty_Dog
BOMBSHELL:
Judicial Watch today announced that the National Security Council (NSC) on May 23, 2017, informed it by letter that the materials regarding the unmasking by Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of “the identities of any U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team” have been removed to the Obama Library. The NSC will ***not*** fulfill a Judicial Watch request for records regarding information relating to people “who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.” Specifically, the NSC told Judicial Watch: 'Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library. You may send your request to the Obama Library. However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, Presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.' Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said: “Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by the Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library. We are considering our legal options but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.”
-----------------------------
The tracks are covered. I don't believe we need to wait 5 years for documents needed in a criminal investigation!

If Mueller won't pursue this, The President should hire someone who will.

And it's time for us to bring Rick N. back in on this, who had it right from the beginning:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2662.msg103728#msg103728
Title: Why the Steele dossier is bogus
Post by: G M on February 05, 2018, 07:15:56 AM: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/01/13/the-trump-dossier-is-false-news-and-heres-why/

Constructed for deception.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 07:23:44 AM: Doug:

Thank you for that answer.

Modifying my question about Carter Page: He was told he was a person of interest in 2013 or so-- long predating the Trump candidacy. Does this neuter the assertion that all this was drummed up to bootstrap into spying on Trump and friends?

Does the unmasking originate in the FISA warrant or in Obama's decision to expand from 3 to 17 the number of agencies with access the super-duper top secret NSA raw data?
Title: Re: WSJ: Strassel: Did Steele really snooker the FBI?
Post by: DougMacG on February 05, 2018, 07:44:13 AM: "described by former FBI Director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.” "

This is a key point because it comes under oath from Comey, but it omits the bigger points, the Dossier is false and plagiarized.

"The FBI got fooled by a source, or it knew its source was lying, or it didn’t bother to check, or it was too incompetent to see the obvious. Take your pick. None of the possibilities look good, especially if you’re a FISA judge."

Assuming the Obama appointed FISA court judge is not part of the conspiracy!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Crafty for clarifying the question. I hope those answers come to us. I want the whole truth to come out wherever it falls.
Title: Keep this in mind about what Comey actually testified to about the Steele dos.
Post by: G M on February 05, 2018, 08:43:50 AM: https://www.redstate.com/patterico/2018/01/02/comey-really-testify-entire-steele-dossier-unverified/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on February 05, 2018, 09:44:34 AM: We need to see all warrant requests made to the FISC by DOJ or other government agencies that involved Carter Page - not just the initial one that was granted in October 2016. Were there requests made before October 2016 that were not granted by the FISC?

We need to learn the identities of all US citizens who were subjected to federal investigation, surveillance, or any other inquiries by any agency of the federal govt (not just the Special Counsel) as a result of information learned through the Page FISC-authorized surveillance. Whose bank records were seized? Whose neighbors, friends, or business associates were interviewed? In other words why was the surveillance re-authorized 4 more times?

Were subsequent requests for extension of the Page FISC order also supported by the intercepts of Flynn and others talking to the Russian ambassador?

In other words, there exists strong probable cause to believe that Comey, Strzok and Page leaked to the press certain information learned from the counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. How were they acquiring all of this information in that investigation? Certainly, not just from the Page surveillance.

If these actors would go to these lengths to get FISC authorization for surveillance on Page, what else were they doing under color of federal law once the investigation commenced in mid-2016?

One main assessment that can be made here is that the entire story of Trump collusion with Russia was a deliberate disinformation effort concocted to conceal a lot of other really bad stuff. Human behavior patterns do repeat themselves.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 10:38:14 AM: Rick:

Glad to see you here! You are a very bright guy with a strong background in understanding these things.

Some questions and comments:

"We need to see all warrant requests made to the FISC by DOJ or other government agencies that involved Carter Page - not just the initial one that was granted in October 2016. Were there requests made before October 2016 that were not granted by the FISC?"

My understanding is that there was a prior request late spring/early summer which was rejected. Thus it seems plausible to infer temptation to improve the next application.

My understanding is that the renewal requests (every 90 days?) require showing the actual substance has been achieved justifying the continuation of the warrant.

"We need to learn the identities of all US citizens who were subjected to federal investigation, surveillance, or any other inquiries by any agency of the federal govt (not just the Special Counsel) as a result of information learned through the Page FISC-authorized surveillance. Whose bank records were seized? Whose neighbors, friends, or business associates were interviewed? In other words why was the surveillance re-authorized 4 more times?"

Unlike the Nunes memo, wouldn't this get into "sources and methods" issues and interfering with ongoing investigations? Perhaps the Nunes Oversight committee is already looking into this?

"Were subsequent requests for extension of the Page FISC order also supported by the intercepts of Flynn and others talking to the Russian ambassador?"

We SHOULD be listening in to the Russian ambassador and were. As former head of the DIA Flynn undoubtedly knew this. A bit of a mystery why he handled the FBI request for interview as he did , , , Presumably the Russian ambassador assumes we are listening and is quite capable of playing mis-intel games with what he says and does.

"In other words, there exists strong probable cause to believe that Comey, Strzok and Page leaked to the press certain information learned from the counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. How were they acquiring all of this information in that investigation? Certainly, not just from the Page surveillance."

Well, for sure the Strzok-Page comms provide hard evidence that they were leaking! And Comey himself testified under oath that he leaked to the Columbia Law School professor , , , but does that prove they were using Russian countel-intel info? I do not know enough to judge , , ,

There is the matter in December 2016 of Obama enabling raw NSA data to go to 17 agencies instead of 3-- with the reasonable inference that this was done to make it virtually impossible to trace leakers, and the unmasking by officials who had no business doing so such as Samantha Powers at the UN. I forget her name, but at the time some Obama official gaffed into openly admitting to a conspiracy to leave untraceable landmines for Trump everywhere (we posted here about it)-- and there is the matter of President Trump's calls to the Mexican president and the Australian PM being leaked. Who the hell has access to that?!?

"If these actors would go to these lengths to get FISC authorization for surveillance on Page, what else were they doing under color of federal law once the investigation commenced in mid-2016?"

As I sure you already know, Page was informed to be a person of interest some two years before the Trump candidacy and that he was no longer with Team Trump-- who vigorously disavowed his importance and the extent of his interaction with the campaign (unimporatant unpaid volunteer, blah blah at the time. To what extent does that undercut this narrative as far as Page goes?

"One main assessment that can be made here is that the entire story of Trump collusion with Russia was a deliberate disinformation effort concocted to conceal a lot of other really bad stuff. Human behavior patterns do repeat themselves."

As best as I can tell Trey Gowdy is correct when he says that while the Page FISA warrant application was full of bad behavior by top actors at FBI and DOJ, that as a matter of logic that is a point separate from the merits of the Russian interference/collusion story. That said I AGREE 100% that conspiracy most foul has been afoot-- see e.g. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/02/how-we-got-here-2.php but at the moment I am of the opinion that the Nunez memo is less than hard proof of that. I'd be pointing more at the millions into the Clinton Foundation, Bill's $500,00 payoff, Uranium One and the internal sabotage of the Comey FBI investigation into Hillary (no grand jury, ex parte comms between Bill and AG Lynch, the immunity deals for Mills and Brazille(?) while agreeing to destroy their computers after looking at them, etc etc etc for that.

The facts on the ground are shifting every day and as new facts come to my attention I stand ready to change my mind.

===================================
PS: Tangentially, here is a bit of background on Comey's history: http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/former-attorney-general-on-comeys-integrity-jims-loyalty-was-more-to-chuck-schumer/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 10:49:52 AM: PS: Amongst the propaganda, this article from Pravda on the Potomac confirms the point I am offering about the disconnect between the misbehavior on the warrant application and the Mueller investigation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/02/05/trumps-latest-stunt-is-about-to-blow-up-in-his-face/?undefined=&utm_term=.71da3fdcb17e&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
Title: Andrew McCarthy's usual excellence; on the Nadler memo plus larger points
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 01:45:57 PM: third post

Damn McCarthy is good!

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456093/jerrold-nadler-memo-rebuttal-weak-unpersuasive
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy's usual excellence; on the Nadler memo plus larger points
Post by: G M on February 05, 2018, 03:07:28 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 01:45:57 PM
third post

Damn McCarthy is good!

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456093/jerrold-nadler-memo-rebuttal-weak-unpersuasive

Very good!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on February 05, 2018, 03:34:42 PM: crafty - always glad to contribute when possible.

The Nunes memo summarizes some evidence learned on the classified side of the House Committee's oversight investigation into the issue of the Obama Administration's use of counterintelligence tools under the pretext of investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because this info was classified, it was kept in a secure reading room and one member of the Committee only could actually read it. The Committee chose Trey Gowdy for this assignment. Rep. Gowdy examined the evidence and then reported on what he read to the Chairman Nunes. Then, in consultation with Gowdy, Nunes prepared a classified memo for distribution to the Republican members of his committee. The memo confirmed some of the worst fears about how the FISC may have been manipulated into granting a warrant to spy on US citizens. The Page case became one example of this abuse of power.

Remember that the committee is investigating a series of possible abuses that include misleading the FISC. The Committee is also investigating the possible abuse of the power to unmask the identity of US citizens involved in conversations with foreign agents that are lawfully having their conversations intercepted. This led to Flynn and his process crime of lying to an investigator about talking to the Russian ambassador. The Committee also is likely investigating other possible abuses of power.

Nunes and Gowdy, I suspect, both fear that the Obama administration abused its foreign intelligence power in more than one way in order to spy on Trump. They are trying to build a case that will result in more reforms and perhaps the prosecution of those who violated the law. They both saw the Russian collusion political ploy as an opportunity to train the oversight powers of the Congress onto these potential abuses and expose them for the public to see. Thus, when the Democrats wanted the Congress to investigate Russian interference and potential collusion with Trump in the last election, they supported the investigation.

The Nunes memo should be viewed as one piece of direct and circumstantial evidence that will lead to proving or disproving their hypothesis about Obama admin abuses. Both Gowdy and Nunes have made no secret of the fact that they both fear past similar abuses of power in the disclosures about the Benghazi debacle and the IRS actions to deny tax-exempt certification to pro-Republican, Tea Party, and other groups that sought to support Romney during the 2012 election.

In addition, Andy McCarthy has made a strong case that President Obama himself may have been behind the whole scheme in order to hide his emails he sent under a false name to Hilary's personal email account. The Russian collusion story then becomes a replay of the anti-Muslim video scenario that was used to justify why we were surprised that in a North African nation, Libya, on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, that a mob suddenly attacked our compounds in Benghazi. You invent a story, punish a scapegoat or two and hide from the public what really happened.

Mrs. Clinton's personal email server would require disclosure of these emails from the President under a false name. Suddenly, thousands of emails are scrubbed, bleached, and cannot be found. Kind of like losing 18 minutes of tape ...

And when the political campaign would then bring up the Clinton Foundation's dealings with Russian lobbyists, the response is that Trump did it, too. And when a lot of emails are phished from Podesta's personal gmail account because he fell for a phishing scam, the response is that not only did Trump work with the Russians on business deals, but also he colluded with them to steal the election from Hilary.

To apply a phrase from the Nixon years, the Obama admin and its supporters went into full hold-out and, then, cover-up mode. Just as Nixon did abuse certain powers and tried to get other agencies to join him, the Obama admin also did the same thing. Instead of using "plumbers", they used the secret FISC process. Instead of using burglars, they abused the unmasking process. Etc., etc., etc ...

This certainly seems to be a reasonable hypothesis to investigate. The Nunes memo is the first step in a long process of using Congressional oversight to obtain the proof - for or against such a hypothesis. The Nunes memo certainly supports more investigation into the facts to determine whether this hypothesis is the truth. The fact that it cannot be readily disproved at this time is the fact that most disturbs me today.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 06:27:59 PM: 1:

Very thoughtful Rick.

I like your reminder of the context for Gowdy and Nunes of having tried to oversee the Benghazi coverup and the IRS coverup and that they may well be building to something much bigger.

Question that I have had a long time and asked a couple of times previously: Doesn't the NSA have a copy of everything e.g. Hillary's missing 30,000 emails in that giant facility across the street from Camp Williams UT? I've been to Camp Williams several times to work with 19th SF and so have seen the facility from the outside. IT IS BIG.

I suspect we all here are agreed with McCarthy that Obama has been a major player, indeed perhaps the puppet master, in all of this but , , , also worth noting that somewhere in this thread is a McCarthy article in which he suggests that the reason President Trump has not declassified the FISA warrant applications is because in addition to the Dossier there may well be other matters quite inconvenient to the President.

2:

This appears to be a major development: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/us/politics/trump-lawyers-special-counsel-interview.html?emc=edit_na_20180205&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta

3:

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/372431-gop-probes-put-new-focus-on-state?rnd=1517872117/?userid=188403

I would add that this thread and the Rule of Law thread have repeatedly cited articles on apparent State Department stonewalling on Hillary's behalf, even after she was gone.

4:

Well, well, looky here , , ,
https://www.westernjournal.com/judge-kicked-off-flynn-case-issued-the-fisa-warrant-to-spy-on-carter-page/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-02-05&utm_campaign=can
Title: The Dossier, Steele, and Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 07:17:15 AM: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2017/11/02/hillary-that-dirty-russian-dossier-on-trump-that-we-paid-for-was-just-opposition-research-n2403961
Title: Re: The Dossier, Steele, and Hillary
Post by: G M on February 06, 2018, 07:39:40 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 07:17:15 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2017/11/02/hillary-that-dirty-russian-dossier-on-trump-that-we-paid-for-was-just-opposition-research-n2403961

So Hillary, by means of multiple cutouts, colluded with the Russians to defame Trump.
Title: VDH: FISAgate boomerangs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 08:07:20 AM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456134/fisagate-boomerangs-democrats-hillary-obama?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180206_Jolt&utm_term=Jolt

Good to see him make the points about a 99+% approval rate by the FISA court and the June rejection.
Title: FBI's scandalous attempt to block the Nunes memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 10:10:50 AM: second post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fbis-scandalous-attempt-to-block-the-nunes-memo/2018/02/05/05b10b54-0a91-11e8-8b0d-891602206fb7_story.html?utm_term=.4a5979d3e4b6
Title: Dems & media protecting the Greatest Human Being who ever lived
Post by: ccp on February 06, 2018, 10:14:41 AM: No not Jesus. Levin :

https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/levin-theres-no-way-obama-didnt-know-administrations-police-state-tactics/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on February 06, 2018, 10:58:23 AM: From Baraq the leaker in a couple of other threads:
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 07:09:22 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/21/barack-obama-used-classified-intelligence-leaks-po/?utm_source=FB-ARB&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=TWT_Chacka_Breaking%20News&utm_content=144117374&utm_term=144117374

From the article and relevant to this discussion:

Remarks by former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, as well as Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former top White House strategist Steve Bannon, were all captured in surveillance of a Trump Tower meeting in December 2016. Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, has since acknowledged she asked that the identities of the Americans in the surveillance be revealed, citing what she said were legitimate concerns about the purpose of the group’s meeting with foreigners.
--------------------------
I don't know how any of this works or the accuracy of anything I read, but the question was posed, how does a tap into Carter Page, a former volunteer campaign adviser, starting 2 weeks before the election, get you to all these other treasure troves. It seems to me the above is an answer to that.
Title: Biden agrees with Trump's lawyers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2018, 11:37:09 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/7/joe-biden-says-he-would-advise-donald-trump-not-to/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRnNE1XVTRPV013WWpGbCIsInQiOiJINW1sTTRnYWwxT3BNaXhzTGJkVUtqN21Xakt2QWpqZVdpa0k4QXNJRmtNbEs2K1BBNkpcL04zYXRVbGpRenVNT25Sd2g0VCt5QkJIWnVjRlV2OXk3cWprNjlqc01VSUhJd3YrcTVMQWIzUjg0RURBcmc2NXB4WHo3eG9XTGVPNXMifQ%3D%3D
Title: Very good timeline summary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2018, 11:38:33 AM: second post

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasdelbeccaro/2018/02/05/biased-fbi-and-doj-officials-broke-the-law-and-tried-to-decide-the-election-an-annotated-timeline/#5b4662f67f34
Title: Strzok-Page untraceable phones
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2018, 06:08:38 AM: https://gellerreport.com/2018/02/strzok-page-intraceable-phones.html/
Title: WSJ: More doubts about Steele
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2018, 06:50:54 AM: More Doubts About Mr. Steele
Including an appearance by none other than Sidney Blumenthal.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 7, 2018 7:09 p.m. ET

The case of the FBI and Christopher Steele gets curiouser and curiouser. In the latest news, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham late Tuesday released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Mr. Steele, who wrote the now famous dossier alleging Russian collusion with Donald Trump. The letter supports the recent House Intelligence Committee claims of surveillance abuse and offers new evidence that the Clinton campaign may have been more involved than previously known.

Democrats claim the House Intel memo distorts the FBI’s actions in obtaining in October 2016 an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. But the Grassley-Graham referral makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI’s FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application.

In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier. “The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier,” says the letter. And “the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an ‘identified U.S. person’—now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS,” the firm that hired Mr. Steele.

But, adds the referral letter, “the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s not being honest with the judges who sign off on an eavesdrop order.

The referral also confirms the House memo’s finding that the FBI “relied heavily” on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims, as well as on a Yahoo News article for which Mr. Steele was the main source. And the letter notes that “the application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page.”

James Comey, who was running the FBI at the time of the FISA fiasco, told the Senate Judiciary Committee as much in March 2017. According to the referral, when Mr. Comey was asked “why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration,” he said this was “because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.”

(MARC: As noted in a previous post -- Andrew McCarthy?-- the statute REQUIRES meaningful corroboration of the sources themselves, not Steele)

In other words, the FBI rested its wiretap application on the credibility of a source who was working at the direction of the Clinton campaign. (!!!) The FBI also seems to have closed its eyes to evidence that Mr. Steele wasn’t honest. The FBI acknowledges that it told Mr. Steele not to speak to the media about the dossier. Yet in September 2016 the ex-British spy briefed reporters about the FBI’s investigation and the dossier, which resulted in the Yahoo News article. The Clinton campaign cited that article on TV and social media to attack the Trump campaign. This was about a month prior to the FBI filing its first FISA application.

Yet the FBI’s October application told the FISA court that, “The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press.” Whether Mr. Steele lied to the FBI, or the FBI was too incompetent to verify that he was the source of the Yahoo News story, the result is the same: The FISA court issued a surveillance order on the basis of false information about the credibility of the FBI’s main source.

Even after Mr. Steele said under oath in court filings in London that he had briefed Yahoo News, and this fact was reported by U.S. media in April 2017, the FBI didn’t tell the FISA court in any subsequent wiretap application.

The Grassley-Graham referral also drops the stunning news that Mr. Steele received at least some of the information for his dossier from the Obama State Department. The letter redacts the names involved. But the press is now reporting, and our sources confirm, that one of the generators of this information was none other than Sidney Blumenthal. GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, who has seen the documents, told Fox News “that would be really warm” when asked if Mr. Blumenthal is one of the redacted names.

Mr. Blumenthal has declined comment to several media outlets. But our readers will recall that he is a long-time Hillary Clinton operative whom President Obama barred from an official role at State but was later discovered to have sent her policy and political advice via her private email server. This revelation raises questions about the degree to which the Clinton team was involved in the Steele-Fusion effort from the beginning.

Some of our media friends are so invested in the Steele dossier, or in protecting their Fusion pals, or in Donald Trump’s perfidy, that they want to ignore all this. But journalists ought to tell the complete story.

The best way to learn what’s true and false in the Russian influence story is radical transparency, and the Trump Administration should declassify all four FISA applications on Mr. Page and all of the documents behind them. Meanwhile, thanks to the two Senators for helping get closer to the truth.
Title: Uranium One and real Russian collusion
Post by: G M on February 08, 2018, 07:15:19 AM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/26891/bombshell-fbi-informant-uranium-one-scandal-ryan-saavedra
Title: Andrew McCarthy's usual excellence; Rosenstein can clean the mess
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2018, 12:24:29 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456185/nunes-memo-rod-rosenstein-can-clean-mess
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity! It appears not quite unbiased investigators
Post by: G M on February 08, 2018, 03:07:15 PM: http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/07/fbi-clinton-emails-marked-classified/

Fingers on the scales of Justice.
Title: McCarthy: And the biggest finger was Obama's
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2018, 03:45:36 PM: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision
Title: Sen. Mark Warner, secret sleuth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2018, 12:58:29 PM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/26956/sen-mark-warner-texted-russian-oligarch-lobbyist-joseph-curl
Title: How Brennan targetted Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2018, 08:50:08 AM: Papadoulas story came from Brits not the Aussies? Isn't Steele Brit?

"In other words, the FBI investigation didn’t start when the Australians, according to the Times—or the Brits, according to Brennan’s most recent version of the story—contacted the FBI after the Papadopoulos-Downer meeting. No, it started when the director of the CIA decided to start an investigation, when Brennan passed on information and intelligence to the FBI, and signaled that the bureau better act on it."

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255020/how-cia-director-john-brennan-targeted-james-comey
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 10, 2018, 09:07:22 AM: " no, it started when the director of the CIA decided to start an investigation, when Brennan passed on information and intelligence to the FBI, and signaled that the bureau better act on it."

Remember when Chuck Schumer said something to the affect that the intelligence agencies have multiple ways to get back at you if you annoy them
Title: Re: How Brennan targetted Comey
Post by: G M on February 10, 2018, 10:58:12 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2018, 08:50:08 AM
Papadoulas story came from Brits not the Aussies? Isn't Steele Brit?

"In other words, the FBI investigation didn’t start when the Australians, according to the Times—or the Brits, according to Brennan’s most recent version of the story—contacted the FBI after the Papadopoulos-Downer meeting. No, it started when the director of the CIA decided to start an investigation, when Brennan passed on information and intelligence to the FBI, and signaled that the bureau better act on it."

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255020/how-cia-director-john-brennan-targeted-james-comey

We may never know much, if any details, but GCHQ was surveilling Trump, and passing it to US entities. The bogus FISA warrants were probably just figleaves for the intercepts.
Title: Fisa was *counter intelligence* not *criminal* investigation
Post by: ccp on February 10, 2018, 11:28:46 AM: Rush a few days ago explained how Andrew McCarthy actually corrected him on this:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456222/lisa-page-obama-fbi-text-shows-trump-obstruction-claims-absurdity
Title: Sharyll Attkinson: Looks like FBI violated Woods Procedures
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2018, 11:31:46 AM: http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/372233-nunes-memo-raises-question-did-fbi-violate-woods-procedures
Title: FBI Informant testimony
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2018, 10:09:52 AM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/26891/bombshell-fbi-informant-uranium-one-scandal-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=021118-news&utm_campaign=position4
Title: WSJ: Who is Christopher Steele?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2018, 10:36:57 AM: second post

Who Is Christopher Steele?
The man who revealed a vast international conspiracy but didn’t know his own client.
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who set-up Orbis Business Intelligence and compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, in London.
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who set-up Orbis Business Intelligence and compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, in London. Photo: Victoria Jones/Zuma Press
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 8, 2018 7:15 p.m. ET
1459 COMMENTS

America has been inundated by the words dossier, memo, collusion, FISA, Carter Page. They all come back to the actions of one man: Christopher Steele. Which is why the only news that matters this week is that the former British spy’s credibility has been dismantled.

To the extent the U.S. press has focused on Mr. Steele, it has been to portray him in heroic epic style. A Washington Post profile told how Mr. Steele, a former MI6 agent who left in 2009 to start his own firm, felt “professional obligations” to take his dossier to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s how “worried” and “rattled” and “alarmed” he was about the Trump -Kremlin “plot.” The FBI welcomed this “well-trusted” source, who had provided information in the past, as a “peer”—only later to let our hero down.

This is the narrative put forward by Mr. Steele and his paymaster, Fusion GPS. They and their press friends have an obvious interest in propagating it. But the new facts about Mr. Steele’s behavior destroy this tale, and show how badly the FBI got snookered.

To be sure, the FBI should have known better. Even if Mr. Steele had previously been helpful, the bureau had every reason to be wary in 2016. This wasn’t like prior collaborations. He was coming to the FBI as a paid political operative, hired by Fusion, as a subcontractor for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Opposition researchers are not retained to present considered judgment. They are retained to slime an opponent and benefit a client.

The FBI also had reason to view his research with skepticism—on grounds of its tabloid-like allegations, and also on the near-fantastical claim of skill that underlay it. To wit, that a man who had been out of official spy rings for seven years was nonetheless able, in a matter of weeks and with just a few calls from London, where he lives, to unravel an international conspiracy that had eluded the CIA, FBI, MI6 and every other Western intelligence agency, all of which have access to the globe’s most sophisticated surveillance tools.

But rather than proceed with caution, the FBI swallowed the whole package. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s declassified criminal referral, former Director James Comey testified that the bureau couldn’t meaningfully corroborate the dossier, but used it in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proceedings anyway because Mr. Steele had previously provided “reliable” information.

Mr. Steele and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson immediately proceeded to use the bureau to advance their client’s interests. They went to the press with a stream of briefings about the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. Thanks to the FBI, Mr. Steele didn’t have to present the media with crazy-sounding oppo research about sexual perversion; he got to point to a full-on government investigation. The resulting stories were awesome for the Clinton campaign—but not so much for the FBI, since the Fusion crew had publicly tipped off the targets of its probe.

There is no excusing these actions. The FBI had expressly told Mr. Steele not to speak to anybody outside the bureau about the dossier. And Mr. Steele failed to disclose these briefings, or perhaps lied about them, since the FBI assured the FISA court that he was not talking to the press.

Mr. Simpson has claimed he never told Mr. Steele that Fusion was working for Mrs. Clinton, and maybe the ex-spy didn’t know. Though this requires us to believe that the man who unraveled an international conspiracy could not discover the identity of his own ultimate paymaster—or didn’t care. Our super sleuth also didn’t bat an eye over sucking up information from two notorious Clinton political operators, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Either Mr. Steele knew and actively worked to help the Clinton campaign, or he didn’t and was nonetheless willing to undercut the FBI at Mr. Simpson’s behest.

Some Steele supporters have suggested that the motive for his press briefings was his worry that the FBI was not taking his claims seriously enough. Yet by Mr. Simpson’s own sworn testimony, that disillusion didn’t hit until a few days before the election, when the FBI reopened its probe into Mrs. Clinton’s negligent handling of classified emails. At the time of his September and October press blabbings, Mr. Steele was still working with the FBI and even talking to the bureau about a financial arrangement.

Is a reliable and credible source one who defies FBI orders, meets with the press, undercuts a probe, and lies about it? Is a professional someone who refuses to answer questions from congressional investigators, but is happy to spin a tale to friendly journalists?

Watch for the House Democrats, in their memo, to continue defending Mr. Steele despite all this. They have to. No credible Steele, no credible dossier. And no credible dossier means even more reason to worry that the FISA court and surveillance authority were abused in the election.
Title: Important read from Jack Dumphy
Post by: G M on February 11, 2018, 12:48:03 PM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/wrote-hundreds-warrants-heres-nunez-memo-troubling/
Title: Nunes investigating Brennan for Perjury; WSJ: Release the FISA Docs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2018, 09:46:33 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/02/11/former_cia_director_john_brennan_investigated_for_perjury.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/release-the-fisa-documents-1518383776
Title: Comey told Congress FBI agents did not think Flynn lied
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2018, 07:22:29 PM: Second post

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-comey-told-congress-fbi-agents-didnt-think-michael-flynn-lied/article/2648896

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/02/did-michael-flynn-actually-do-anything-wrong.php
Title: Susan Rice's last minute email
Post by: G M on February 14, 2018, 06:11:17 AM: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/02/why-susan-rice-wrote-an-email-to-herself.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2018, 06:54:14 AM: Excellent find GM.

THIS:

"From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.

The next paragraph of the email remains classified and has been redacted. The email concludes:

The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.

Why did Susan Rice send herself an email purporting to document this part of the meeting? Because she was C’ing her own A. Rice was nervous about the fact that, at the president’s direction, she had failed to “share information fully as it relates to Russia” with President Trump’s incoming national security team."

Absolutely stunning how much right wing yammer (including FOX) misses this-- which is, in point of fact, the main point!
Title: answer is obvious
Post by: ccp on February 14, 2018, 07:33:10 AM: If she did "everything by the book" then why email this to your self?

:x
Title: Bribe to McCabe was $500,000 bigger than previously reported
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2018, 02:36:22 PM: https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-clintons-gave-mccabes-wife-1-2-million-bribe/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-02-14&utm_campaign=can
Title: Totally not corrupt
Post by: G M on February 15, 2018, 02:22:36 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/373870.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Mueller indicts Russians!
Post by: DougMacG on February 16, 2018, 11:15:35 AM: This is a positive development! If he's going to hire expensive staff and keep the commission open, he needs to prosecute some criminals. So much of cyber crime is across borders and ignored by our federal law enforcement agencies. Good to see some attempt no matter who that implicates here. No allegation of any American involved. No indication it affected the outcome.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/16/russians-indicted-in-special-counsel-robert-muellers-probe.html
Special counsel Robert Mueller said a grand jury had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The defendants allegedly conducted "information warfare" against the United States election process to help Donald Trump win.
The defendants used fake American personas, social media platforms, and other Internet media to advance their scheme, according to an indictment.
Title: Legal Issues for the Mueller Trump interview
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2018, 12:53:22 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/14/trump-lawyers-resist-robert-mueller-interview-cite/
Title: Tangent to the Mueller indictment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2018, 02:06:19 PM: A friend writes:

"Mueller indictment, 2 of the Russians were able to enter U.S. on travel visas which they received after applying for them through the State Dept in 2014. From June 4, 2014 – June 26, 2014 they traveled around the US. Who was head of the FBI & State Dept at this time again?"

IIRC there are a number of queer Hillary grants of visas-- anyone remember what they were?

For example:

https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-humas-influence-hillary-let-islamic-scholar-now-charged-with-rape-into-the-us/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-02-16&utm_campaign=can
Title: Re: Tangent to the Mueller indictment
Post by: G M on February 16, 2018, 02:10:02 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2018, 02:06:19 PM
A friend writes:

"Mueller indictment, 2 of the Russians were able to enter U.S. on travel visas which they received after applying for them through the State Dept in 2014. From June 4, 2014 – June 26, 2014 they traveled around the US. Who was head of the FBI & State Dept at this time again?"

IIRC there are a number of queer Hillary grants of visas-- anyone remember what they were?

For example:

https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-humas-influence-hillary-let-islamic-scholar-now-charged-with-rape-into-the-us/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-02-16&utm_campaign=can

Per recent legal rulings regarding DACA, the left seems to find in the Constitution the right of anyone, anywhere to enter and remain in the US, so this would be consistent with that.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 16, 2018, 05:18:14 PM: Should Israel indict Brock for interfering with Netanyahus election?

And what did the Russians do anyway that affected the outcome of the election? Still have never heard an answer. "The Russians did it" in all left wing media outlets like an echo chamber. So what harm was done by the Russians specifically that cost the Hill the election? I have yet to hear the answer.

Except that the dowager got her ass handed to her.

Were Russians the source of Wikileaks that more or less proves the outright corruption of the Clinton/ DNC mafia rings
They actually did justice a favor.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2018, 05:30:10 PM: "Should Israel indict Brock for interfering with Netanyahu's election?"

GOOD ONE!
Title: Bernie burned
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2018, 09:59:49 PM: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/bernie-sanders-russia-2016-election-interference-415691
Title: Kerry State Department approved the Russki trolls
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2018, 10:02:49 PM: Don't know this site, but the dates do seem to lead to this conclusion:

https://patriotbeat.com/2018/02/17/john-kerrys-state-dept-approved-visas-muellers-13-russian-operatives/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 18, 2018, 04:20:04 AM: "Kerry State Department approved the Russki trolls
« Reply #533 on: Today at 12:02:49 AM »
Reply with quote
Don't know this site, but the dates do seem to lead to this conclusion:

https://patriotbeat.com/2018/02/17/john-kerrys-state-dept-approved-visas-muellers-13-russian-operatives/"

That must why the LEFT makes the point that US citizens were unaware of the nature of the Russians. Otherwise it would , using their logic against Trump et al, be just as reasonable to investigate Kerry as an accomplice ( and other libs like Hillary and BIll) and conspirator .
Title: Kerry Associate played middleman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2018, 07:23:39 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/9/john-kerry-associate-played-middleman-hillary-agen/?utm_source=FB-ARB&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Chacka_CL:TWT_FR:Traffic_D:180207_CP:Breaking%20News%202018&utm_content=145173138&utm_term=145173138
Title: Did Oligarch pay Steele?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2018, 06:00:51 AM: second post:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255290/christopher-steele-putin-oleg-deripaska?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=35166114ab-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-35166114ab-207194629
Title: Re: Kerry Associate played middleman
Post by: DougMacG on February 19, 2018, 07:03:50 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2018, 07:23:39 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/9/john-kerry-associate-played-middleman-hillary-agen/?utm_source=FB-ARB&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Chacka_CL:TWT_FR:Traffic_D:180207_CP:Breaking%20News%202018&utm_content=145173138&utm_term=145173138

I was going to post this link here when I discovered my source was Crafty and this thread... )

Did we just go from sort of knowing that Syd Blumenthal was behind the dossier to having it reliably reported that he was completely behind the Steele Dossier, AND the other dossier, and the go-between was our own State Dept? Besides Hillary and the DNC, Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama were involved?

If they had labeled Steele's accumulations of Russian translations "FILTH and gossip" instead of a "Dossier" it would have been harder to present it to a FISA court as real intelligence and then start unmasking the subjects.

If it is impossible to make sent emails go away, won't 'competent investigators' soon have all the pieces of this puzzle - if they are truly curious?

Doesn't the entire Steele Dossier all its perpetrators constitute a conspiracy violating same laws as the ones the current indictments cite or should be citing? Like Section 5 of the indictments: hiding the source of funds used to try to alter the election.

Our laws were written more to protect against money crimes than information crimes. If stealing power in Washington can be defined as a money crime, this whole operation will fall under RICO where all of the little co-conspirators get charged with all of the crime.
Title: A flaming lib doing his part to keep the fairy tale alive
Post by: ccp on February 19, 2018, 08:47:05 AM: I don't know who is more delusional and lib partisan ; The crazy lib Jews, like this guy, or many African Americans .

https://www.yahoo.com/news/robert-mueller-trump-cornered-130900469.html

I still see no collusion . How anything the Russians did got Trump elected (unless as I have posted prior they were the source of the Clinton emails and other corruption - the accuracy of which has never been even denied much less proven wrong)

China has been running a soft war against us forever as has been Russia. Oh but looks what they did to the lying sniveling crooked dowress.

No mention of the Glib pompous one telling Romney was wrong to name Russia as an enemy shortly Brock led the way with "wait until after the election" [2012].
Hillary and KErry were the ones letting Russian agents into the US
Title: Russians had 4 one thousands of a percent influence on our election!
Post by: DougMacG on February 19, 2018, 10:17:05 AM: Just for quantitative perspective, the Russian influence in our election was four-thousands of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-a-non-alarmist-reading-of-the-mueller-russia-indictment/article/2649445

Not counting the multiplier effect of that.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on February 19, 2018, 01:55:39 PM: "Just for quantitative perspective, the Russian influence in our election was four-thousands of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content."

Thanks Doug.

Oh bet the Russians were suppressing Black votes
Oh you mean Blacks were that naive to stay home and not vote because of 1 out of 23,000 news feeds.
Title: The Flynn affair comes alive again, interesting choice of judge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2018, 10:33:19 AM: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-an-unusual-turn-in-the-michael-flynn-case/article/2649272
Title: WSJ: Mueller Focuses on Molehills
Post by: DougMacG on February 21, 2018, 09:18:13 AM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-focuses-on-molehills-1519169467
Mueller Focuses on Molehills
The mountain is whether the FBI was an unwitting agent of Russian influence.
Title: Andrew McCarthy's usual excellence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2018, 06:53:53 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/obstruction-confusions/
Title: How to dig up dirt from the Russians
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2018, 11:24:21 AM: http://www.weeklystandard.com/how-to-dig-up-dirt-from-the-russians/article/2011707
Title: Jonathan Turley: Method to Mueller's Madness, what the Gates deal really means
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2018, 05:20:01 AM: Turley is a serious player on the legal scene whose thinking is worthy of consideration:

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/375385-the-method-to-muellers-madness-what-the-gates-deal-really-means
Title: Excellent list of Dem collusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2018, 10:52:03 AM: second post

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/the-russians-colluded-massively-with-democrats/
Title: Mueller's authorization by Rowenstein
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2018, 06:39:55 PM: We should probably have this in here.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/967231/download
Title: The Dem rebuttal memo to the Nunes memo
Post by: ccp on February 25, 2018, 07:56:05 AM: For those of you inspired to read the memo:

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/24/democratic-memo-fbi-trump-423447

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From POTH is of course the one sided take on the Democratic memo rebuttal
to the Nunes Memo:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/us/politics/takeaways-democratic-memo.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sen Nunes rebuttal to the Dem and NYT WP and most likely the Huff Post/CNN left wing propaganda mafia:

https://saraacarter.com/republicans-refute-point-point-democratic-memo-dossier/
Title: Informant Campgell: Russians bragged that Hillary would delivery Uranium 1 deal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2018, 07:36:22 PM: This has been mentioned here before and this article fails to mention (it's Dick Morris, thoroughness was never a forte) the part about Bill getting $140M for the Clinton Slush Fund helping the Russkis in Kahzakstan with the same company.

https://www.westernjournal.com/fbi-informant-campbell-tells-russians-bragged-clintons-deliver-uranium-sale/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-02-25&utm_campaign=can
Title: WSJ: Democrats for Eavesdrop Abuse
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2018, 05:27:33 AM: second post

Democrats for Eavesdrop Abuse
Their intel memo confirms the FBI used Clinton research to spy on Carter Page.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 25, 2018 5:41 p.m. ET
737 COMMENTS

The House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released the long-awaited Democratic response to allegations the FBI abused its surveillance powers during the 2016 election. Committee Chairman Devin Nunes owes ranking Democrat Adam Schiff a thank you for assisting his case.

The 10-page Democratic memo begins by declaring that “The FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” Yet the facts it lays out show the opposite.

In particular the memo confirms that the FBI used an opposition-research document paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee as part of its application to surveil Carter Page, who was associated with the Donald Trump campaign.

Democrats dispute the degree to which the FBI relied on the dossier created by opposition-researcher Christopher Steele in applying for its FISA court order, but that’s beside the point. If the FBI had as much “compelling evidence” and “probable cause” as the memo asserts, it would not have needed to cite the Steele document. And the Democrats do not dispute that the Steele dossier was the FBI’s only source in its initial FISA application for its allegation that Mr. Page met with suspect Russians in Moscow in July 2016.

The Democratic memo makes no attempt to rebut the widely reported news that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told Congress that the FBI would not have sought a surveillance warrant without the dossier. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes claimed on “Fox News Sunday” that Mr. McCabe never said that, but then why not put that in the memo?

The Democratic memo also confirms that the FBI withheld from the court the partisan provenance of the dossier. Democrats even provide, for the first time in public, the precise language the FBI used in its initial application in a long, obfuscating footnote.

Democrats say the FBI told the FISA court that a “law firm” [Clinton/DNC firm Perkins Coie] hired “an identified U.S. person” [oppo-research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson ] to “conduct research regarding Candidate #1s ties to Russia.” The “identified U.S. person” then hired “Source #1” [Mr. Steele] to do the research. The footnote ends: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”

Speculates? Likely? Could? The dossier was paid for by actors whose overriding purpose was to defeat Mr. Trump. Nowhere do Democrats say the FBI used the words “political” or “partisan” or “campaign,” much less Clinton or Democratic National Committee.

The Democratic memo claims the FBI acted “appropriately” in not “revealing” the name of an “entity” in a FISA application, but this is laughable. The FBI sometimes masks identities to preserve sources and methods, but the Steele dossier was a pastiche of gossip and rumor based on Mr. Steele’s contacts. Disclosing his partisan funders would have betrayed no important intelligence sources but would have given the court reason to ask the FBI for more credible information before granting an eavesdrop order.

Messrs. Steele and Simpson briefed their media friends in September and October about their dossier, despite FBI prohibitions. The FBI nonetheless falsely told the court that Mr. Steele wasn’t the source of a Yahoo News article that it used as additional evidence in its application. While the Democratic memo repeatedly refers to Mr. Steele’s reporting as “reliable” and “credible,” it confirms that the FBI fired Mr. Steele after it found he hadn’t told the truth about his media spinning.

The Democratic memo devotes considerable space to smearing the hapless Mr. Page, as if he’s some kind of master spy and the Rosetta Stone of the Trump-Russia story. Yet no one has offered proof that he colluded with the Russians, and he hasn’t been indicted.

Democrats also make much of the fact the FBI started looking into the Trump campaign in July 2016 but didn’t receive “Steele’s reporting” until “mid-September.” So what? The issue here is the fairness and honesty of the FISA application in late October (not the investigation), and what matters is that the FBI didn’t move on the FISA application until after it received the dossier.
***

The only definitive evidence of political “collusion” so far is that the Clinton campaign paid Mr. Steele to troll his Russian sources for dirt on Donald Trump. The FBI then used this dirt as a reason to spy on Mr. Page and anyone he was communicating with. Imagine how the press would be playing this story if the roles were reversed?
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Insufficent basis for Page surveillance application
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2018, 12:35:12 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/adam-schiff-memo-carter-page-fisa-warrant-fbi-should-have-interviewed/
Title: Andrew McCarthy asked the very same question
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2018, 07:20:30 AM: a month or so ago-- and his surmise was that maybe there was stuff there that the President would NOT want seeing the light of day.

The WSJ editorial here makes some very relevant points and asks some very pertinent questions

======================================

Trump vs. Jeff Sessions
If he really wants FBI answers, why not declassify everything?
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 28, 2018 7:35 p.m. ET

Anyone who serves in a presidential cabinet understands that the job comes with people trying to undermine you. But in the Trump Administration the undermining too often seems to come from the President.

That’s the pickle Jeff Sessions finds himself in. On Wednesday morning President Trump used Twitter to call his Attorney General “DISGRACEFUL!” for asking the Justice Department’s inspector general to look into possible eavesdropping abuse by the FBI. Mr. Trump went on a similar tear in July, when he accused Mr. Sessions of being “VERY weak” in handling the Hillary Clinton investigations.

Mr. Trump prides himself on his business acumen, but we don’t know a CEO who thinks the way to get the best out of subordinates is to humiliate them in public. Mr. Sessions is Attorney General because Mr. Trump chose him. If Mr. Trump’s purpose is to goad Mr. Sessions into resigning, he ought to know that he’s unlikely to get a replacement through the Senate. That means the department would be run by someone Mr. Trump might like even less, e.g., Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.

In his tweet the President also derided Inspector General Michael Horowitz as “an Obama guy.” It’s true his appointment dates to 2012, but the IG was also appointed to the federal sentencing commission by George W. Bush. In 2012 Mr. Horowitz released a scathing report on the Obama Justice Department’s handling of “Fast and Furious,” a botched operation that put weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Mr. Trump might also recall that when the FBI said it couldn’t find 50,000 texts between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, Mr. Horowitz announced that his office had recovered them.

Unlike in July, this time Mr. Sessions responded publicly that Justice had “initiated the appropriate process” to investigate the FBI issues. He added that as long as he is AG, he’d continue to discharge his duties “with integrity and honor” and the department would do its work “in a fair and impartial manner.”

Mr. Trump has a point about investigations dragging on without conclusions. But a big reason is that key government institutions, including the FBI and Justice, have stonewalled efforts to get answers. Yet for some reason he refuses to use his presidential power to declassify the FISA court and FBI documents so the public can judge.

Instead of whining about Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump could order him to appoint someone at Justice with the sole responsibility of making public the documents that would give the American people the answers they deserve.
Title: New Line of Attack by Mueller; George Nader
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2018, 06:45:55 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/us/politics/george-nader-mueller-investigation-united-arab-emirates.html?emc=edit_na_20180303&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta

WASHINGTON — George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, has hovered on the fringes of international diplomacy for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.

Mr. Nader is now a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Nader and have pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

The investigators have also asked about Mr. Nader’s role in White House policymaking, those people said, suggesting that the special counsel investigation has broadened beyond Russian election meddling to include Emirati influence on the Trump administration. The focus on Mr. Nader could also prompt an examination of how money from multiple countries has flowed through and influenced Washington during the Trump era.

How much this line of inquiry is connected to Mr. Mueller’s original task of investigating contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia is unclear. The examination of the U.A.E. comes amid a flurry of recent activity by Mr. Mueller.

Last month, investigators negotiated a plea agreement with Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and indicted 13 Russians on charges related to a scheme to incite political discord in the United States before the 2016 election.

In one example of Mr. Nader’s influential connections, which has not been previously reported, last fall he received a detailed report from a top Trump fund-raiser, Elliott Broidy, about a private meeting with the president in the Oval Office.

Mr. Broidy owns a private security company with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the United Arab Emirates, and he extolled to Mr. Trump a paramilitary force that his company was developing for the country. He also lobbied the president to meet privately “in an informal setting” with the Emirates’ military commander and de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan; to back the U.A.E.’s hawkish policies in the region; and to fire Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

A copy of Mr. Broidy’s memorandum about the meeting was provided to The New York Times by someone critical of the Emirati influence in Washington.

Mr. Trump has closely allied himself with the Emiratis, endorsing their strong support for the new heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia, as well as their confrontational approaches toward Iran and their neighbor Qatar. In the case of Qatar, which is the host to a major United States military base, Mr. Trump’s endorsement of an Emirati- and Saudi-led blockade against that country has put him openly at odds with his secretary of state — as well as with years of American policy.

Mr. Nader, 58, made frequent trips to the White House during the early months of the Trump administration, meeting with Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner to discuss American policy toward the Persian Gulf states in advance of Mr. Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, according to people familiar with the meetings. By some accounts, it was Mr. Bannon who pushed for him to gain access to White House policymakers. Others said Mr. Kushner backed him.

Reached by phone last month, Mr. Nader said he had dinner guests and would call back. He did not, and attempts to reach him over several weeks were unsuccessful. Mr. Nader’s lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Broidy said his memorandum had been stolen through sophisticated hacking.

“We have reason to believe this hack was sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr. Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism,” said the spokesman, adding that Mr. Broidy had also made the accusation in a letter to the Qatari ambassador in Washington.

Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, declined to comment. Axios first reported Mr. Mueller’s questioning of Mr. Nader.

Mr. Nader has long been a mysterious figure. In the 1990s, he presided over an unusual Washington magazine, Middle East Insight, which sometimes provided a platform for Arab, Israeli and Iranian officials to express their views to a Washington audience.

On the magazine’s 15th anniversary, in 1996, a West Virginia congressman praised Mr. Nader on the floor of the House, calling him a “recognized expert on the region” and pointing out that the magazine had been a showcase for prominent figures such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, and Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“He always struck me as a person who really thought he should be in the eye of the storm trying to make things happen,” said Frederic Hof, a former top American diplomat who knew Mr. Nader in the 1990s.

Late in that decade, Mr. Nader convinced the Clinton administration that he had valuable contacts in the Syrian government and took on a secretive role trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria. Working with Ronald S. Lauder, the American cosmetics magnate and prominent donor to Jewish causes, Mr. Nader shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem, using his contacts in both capitals to try to negotiate a truce.
Photo
Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fund-raiser, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in 2008. Credit David Carp/Wallenberg Committee, via Associated Press

“In the 1990s, George was a very effective under-the-radar operator in the peace process,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and a member of a team put together by President Bill Clinton to negotiate peace deals between Israel and its neighbors.

“Then, he disappeared.”

Indeed, a man with a once very public profile in Washington effectively vanished from the capital’s policy scene, and his magazine ceased publication in 2002.

During the middle part of the last decade, Mr. Nader appears to have spent most of his time in the Middle East, especially in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. He developed close ties to national security officials in the Bush White House.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the private security company now known as Academi, at one point hired Mr. Nader to help the company generate business deals in Iraq. In a 2010 deposition that Mr. Prince gave as part of a lawsuit against the company, Mr. Prince described Mr. Nader as a “business development consultant that we retained in Iraq” because the company was looking for contracts with the Iraqi government.

Mr. Prince said that Mr. Nader was unsuccessful in getting contracts, and that senior Blackwater officials did not work directly with him.

“George pretty much worked on his own,” he said.

At the beginning of the Obama era, Mr. Nader tried to parlay his ties to the Syrian government into access to senior members of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team, while also seeking to advance business deals with former advisers to President George W. Bush.

By the time of the 2016 election, he had become an adviser to Prince Mohammed of the U.A.E. According to people familiar with the relationship, it was around Mr. Trump’s inauguration that Mr. Nader first met Mr. Broidy, the Republican fund-raiser, who is a California-based investor with a strong interest in the Middle East.

Mr. Broidy’s security company, Circinus, provides services to both United States agencies and foreign governments. Run by former American military officers, Circinus promises on its website that it “can employ personnel worldwide to provide physical force protection to individuals, groups or facilities within austere, hostile environments” as well as conducting “specialized operations, infrastructure protection, and training.”

Mr. Broidy, 60, had once stumbled into legal trouble over payments to a political figure. In 2009, he agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for providing $1 million in illegal gifts to New York State pension authorities, including trips, payouts and a secret investment in a film called “Chooch” that was produced by an official’s brother. In exchange for the gifts, the state pension fund invested $250 million with an Israeli-based investment management firm that Mr. Broidy had founded. He reimbursed the pension fund for $18 million in fees.

After the inauguration, Mr. Nader became friendly with Mr. Broidy and introduced him to Prince Mohammed. Circinus then signed contracts with the United Arab Emirates worth several hundred million dollars, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

By Oct. 6, Mr. Broidy had evidently become close enough to both the prince and Mr. Nader to send a detailed memorandum to an encrypted email address used by Mr. Nader recounting his advocacy on the U.A.E.’s behalf during the meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office amid an afternoon of stops throughout the White House.

An ally of the White House involved in one of the initiatives discussed — a counterterrorism task force — said Mr. Broidy sent the memorandum because he had been asked by the crown prince to seek the president’s views on the idea. Mr. Broidy believed that the creation of the task force would aid American security, this person said.

According to the memo, Mr. Broidy repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump to meet privately with Prince Mohammed, preferably in an informal setting outside the White House.

“I offered that M.B.Z. is available to come to the U.S. very soon and preferred a quiet meeting in New York or New Jersey,” Mr. Broidy wrote to Mr. Nader, using the crown prince’s initials. “President Trump agreed that a meeting with M.B.Z. was a good idea.”

Mr. Broidy wrote that he had twice told Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, that the crown prince “preferred an informal setting to meet one on one with President Trump.” But General McMaster resisted. “LTG McMaster smiled and replied that heads of state usually meet in the White House,” as “protocol dictates.”

In his memorandum, Mr. Broidy recounted that he had told Mr. Trump that he recently returned from meeting with the crown prince about Circinus work for the U.A.E. Mr. Broidy had explained “the exciting and transformational plan being constructed by M.B.Z. to develop a counterterrorism task force,” which Mr. Broidy told the president was “inspired” by his speech at a conference in Riyadh.

Mr. Broidy was harshly critical of the crown prince’s neighbor and nemesis, Qatar. The U.A.E. has accused Qatar, an American ally, of using its satellite network Al Jazeera to promote political Islam, among other allegations.

Mr. Trump also asked about Mr. Tillerson — who had publicly criticized the isolation of Qatar — and Mr. Broidy said that the secretary of state should be fired. “Rex was performing poorly,” Mr. Broidy said, according to the memorandum.

In between the discussions of diplomacy, business and statecraft, Mr. Broidy wrote, he and the president “spoke for several minutes about politics and the fund-raising efforts for the midterm elections as well as the state of affairs at the R.N.C.,” or the Republican National Committee.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2018, 07:05:14 AM: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/269503/mueller-fighting%C2%A0-muslim-brotherhoods-war-daniel-greenfield
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy with the Left - opposing US energy production
Post by: DougMacG on March 07, 2018, 07:32:51 AM: Credit to John Hinderaker of Powerline (among others) for pointing this out and a Congressional report linked below for documenting it.

Details and sample ads moved to cyberwar thread for further discussion:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1586.msg109291#msg109291
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2018, 07:48:42 AM: Doug:

You raise a great point and illustrate it really well, but I'm thinking the Cyberwar thread will be a better place for continuing the discussion.
Title: Susan Rice ordered NSC officials to stand down on fighting Russian interference
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2018, 06:29:42 AM: https://www.dcstatesman.com/susan-rice-ordered-national-security-council-officials-to-stand-down-on-fighting-russian-interference/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=sas&utm_campaign=n31318
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2018, 06:04:37 PM: Very interesting conversation tonight between Martha MacCaullum and Isikoff, covering Trey Gowdy saying that yes the Russian meddling favored Trump. Can someone find and post it please?
Title: The Hillbillary Clintons Russian Collusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 15, 2018, 04:15:42 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/russia-collusion-real-story-hillary-clinton-dnc-fbi-media/
Title: Cover for action
Post by: G M on March 17, 2018, 08:18:19 PM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/dyfp01cv4aaogcq.jpg)
Title: Newspeak: Russian Trolls spreading Hannity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2018, 10:37:22 AM: http://www.newsweek.com/russians-fox-news-sean-hannity-mueller-trump-probe-789828
Title: Shifty Schiff shifts again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2018, 04:07:45 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adam-schiff-andrew-mccabes-firing-may-be-justified
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 19, 2018, 10:12:07 AM: MCabe, 49 at his firing, did not lose his pension. He lost access to some early retirement benefits.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/mccabe-pension-benefits-not-lost/

If he's not in jail, or even if he is, he can still probably write a book.
-----------------------
ccp: "he may still be able to appeal and STILL get his well deserved revoking of his pension reversed"

That's good, he deserves a right of appeal - just so all his crooked work and criminality on the job gets aired in the appeal.

I hope they have a long, contested public hearing.
Title: Trump adds diGenova to legal team
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2018, 02:01:07 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/politics/joseph-digenova-trump-lawyer.html?emc=edit_ta_20180319&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on March 19, 2018, 02:35:33 PM: well I have another question. why is a guy who is 50 able to retire anyway?

I can see a police officer who needs to get physical, but a pencil pushing FBI agent?

Am I missing something?

needs time to write his book get lucrative private industry job, media consultant, or get on some corporate board because of contacts I guess
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 19, 2018, 02:40:45 PM: Welcome to (part of) the world of civil service. No offense to the good ones intended and not all have cush deals, but this kind of contract is not available if you work a career in the private sector.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 20, 2018, 05:01:40 AM: A subject better for the Bureaucracy thread , , ,
Title: a good read on the attempted coup
Post by: G M on March 23, 2018, 10:31:33 AM: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/976584904304668673.html

Read it all.
Title: More excellence- Andrew McCarthy: Mueller's investigation flouts DOJ standards
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2018, 10:40:46 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/muellers-investigation-flouts-justice-department-standards/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180323171222
Title: American Spectator: The Real Andrew McCabe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2018, 08:34:24 AM: Though the article skims over the possibility of certain counter arguments, very much worth reading:

https://spectator.org/the-real-andrew-mccabe/
Title: Trump's legal team hires-- whoops, nevermind
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2018, 10:02:50 AM: second post

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/us/politics/trump-digenova-toensing.html
Title: Russian intel ties to Team Manafort during campaign?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2018, 08:17:51 AM: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/manafort-associate-had-russian-intelligence-ties-during-2016-campaign-prosecutors-say/ar-BBKNKXj?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP
Title: Re: Russian intel ties to Team Manafort during campaign?
Post by: G M on March 28, 2018, 08:59:50 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2018, 08:17:51 AM
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/manafort-associate-had-russian-intelligence-ties-during-2016-campaign-prosecutors-say/ar-BBKNKXj?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP

Rather than make a case in court, team deep state keeps illegally leaking.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on March 28, 2018, 09:10:50 AM: Comey , CNN's favorite homey.

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/380628-cnn-to-host-town-hall-with-comey-next-month

First he was a hero when he corruptly along with Lynch and the One let Hillary slide

Then he was a goat when he publicized some new email thing about the old hag. Now he is a hero again for being justly fired.

"they love me , they love me not, they love me they love me not"

Nothing he can say will change my mind
Title: DOJ FBI abuse
Post by: ccp on March 28, 2018, 03:28:14 PM: what about letting criminal Hillary go?

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/28/inspector-general-launches-probe-on-alleged-doj-fbi-abuse-of-surveillance-law/
Title: I was wondering why Time would put him on the cover
Post by: ccp on March 29, 2018, 04:24:36 PM: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/03/29/sessions-federal-prosecutor-evaluating-alleged-fbi-doj-wrongdoing-no-second-special-counsel-for-now.html
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Mueller's investigation flouts DOJ standards 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2018, 11:06:35 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/robert-mueller-doj-standards-robert-gates-plea-deal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-04-01&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Discrediting Mueller is not obstruction of justice
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2018, 07:03:44 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/trump-trying-to-delegitimize-robert-mueller-not-obstruction-protected-speech/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-04-02&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Uranium One and a real threat from Russia
Post by: G M on April 03, 2018, 06:42:00 PM: https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/the-uranium-one-deal-is-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-america/

I'm sure the DNC-MSM will be all over this.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2018, 07:46:14 PM: Do you have any experience with that site?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on April 03, 2018, 08:04:57 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2018, 07:46:14 PM
Do you have any experience with that site?

I started reading it after instapundit.com started linking to it's stories. I haven't seen Glenn Reynolds link to a bogus site yet.
Title: Comey and the Pulse nightclub shooting
Post by: G M on April 05, 2018, 07:06:33 AM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/374629.php
Title: CIA Brennan to Sen. Harry Reid to FBI Comey during campaign?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2018, 05:58:14 AM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/in-the-news/tom-fitton-mueller-operation-irrelevant-compared-brennan-corruption-video/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=on%20the%20air&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180407125249
Title: Andrew McCarthy: on the Rosenstein memo's deficiencies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 08, 2018, 12:09:08 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/russia-investigation-rod-rosenstein-memo-mueller-probe-limits/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-04-08&utm_term=VDHM

It is Andrew McCarthy so of course it is very good. Here it is a discussion of the distinction between a counter-intel investigation and a criminal investigation, with links referring back to other matters of relevance.
Title: Dershowitz rips Mueller
Post by: ccp on April 08, 2018, 01:40:48 PM: This is a shocking statement. Wondering why Trump doesn't hire Dershowitz? Maybe he already asked him.

Clearly he is right that Mueller's job is to "get Trump" - not necessarily the truth. This should all be rapped up by now but Mule will keep it going as long as he and his partisan team can

Repubs who support Mueller (with such blurbs about his integrity tc) are stupid or just as anxious to get Trump or both. Anybody can see it already:

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/alan-dershowitz-mueller-political-zealot/2018/04/08/id/853235/
Title: Morris: Rod Rosenstein's wife
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2018, 10:03:18 AM: http://www.dickmorris.com/rod-rosensteins-wife-top-lawyer-obama-clinton-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
Title: Ukrainian donation to Trump Foundation during campaign?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2018, 05:50:05 PM: This is NOT good!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/us/politics/trump-mueller-ukraine-victor-pinchuk.html?emc=edit_na_20180409&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193ing-news&ref=cta
Title: Re: Ukrainian donation to Trump Foundation during campaign?!?
Post by: G M on April 09, 2018, 07:04:56 PM: 8-)
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2018, 05:50:05 PM
This is NOT good!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/us/politics/trump-mueller-ukraine-victor-pinchuk.html?emc=edit_na_20180409&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193ing-news&ref=cta

Another illegal leak from the deep state. Meanwhile, Uranium One goes uninvestigated...
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 09, 2018, 09:04:16 PM: raiding Trump's attorney's office home and temporarily lodging.

Like they did to Manafort.

Yet Hillary's place was never raided , her attorneys were able to actually pick and choose what they wanted to turn over with emails and electronic evidence and then one or two were cut deals 'before' they asked questions.

System is rigged against conservatives and for Dems .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2018, 04:35:25 AM: Of all that I have heard so far Judge Napolitano's assessment makes the most sense to me:

To raise the payoff money Trump's lawyer fibbed to the bank about the reason for the loan. This constitutes bank fraud.

If I have this right, bank fraud can get you up to thirty years in prison.

Mueller, purportedly to stay within the framework of Rosenstein's authorization directive, handed this off to the Southern District of NY, now headed by a Trump appointee. He assessed the validity of whether the special criteria for grabbing a lawyer's files were met and found that they were. He found a judge who agreed.

Apparently the process is that now a FBI agent will review the files to filter out those not relevant to the charge with the relevant files going to the prosecuting attorney.

What happens to the other files?

Good question!!!

Reads to me like the FBI would then have a remarkable bird's eye view of Trump's affairs to inform them where to look to give Trump shit for the rest of his life.

One commentator I heard suggested that Trump's lawyers would be wise to move that the files be reviewed by a judge instead.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on April 10, 2018, 12:17:42 PM: "move that the files be reviewed by a judge instead."

Yes. This makes sense to me. Probably too late. FBI agents of questionable intent are already probably having a field day with whatever they are finding.

Attorney-client privilege? Whatever. The case against Trump is not criminal; it is political. Find it. Leak it. Others will take it from there.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Easiest job in America...
Post by: DougMacG on April 10, 2018, 01:30:18 PM: First this, ccp: "Yet Hillary's place was never raided"

They didn't seize data and hard drives under subpoena that were refused and delayed to investigators and oversight. The double standard is glaring. Worse than than anything we have seen before.
--------------------------------------------------

I noticed this yesterday. Easiest job in America, being Bob Mueller's spokesman:

“Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment.”

Since Mueller’s office never says anything outside court publicly, who knew he had a spokesman or needed one?

https://nypost.com/2018/04/08/time-for-mueller-to-lay-it-all-out/
Title: VDH: Some liars in the Russian conspiracy, Comey, Brennan, McCabe, Clapper, Rice
Post by: DougMacG on April 11, 2018, 03:15:25 PM: Why would we think they're lying about this? It's what they do. No one holds them to account.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/career-government-servants-distort-truth/

Our Unelected Officials’ Distortions
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
March 29, 2018 6:30 AM

Why haven’t we held career government servants in the intelligence community and the Department of Justice accountable for their fabrications?
On March 17, former CIA director John Brennan tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . . America will triumph over you.”

That outburst from the former head of the world’s premier spy agency seemed a near threat to a sitting president, and former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tweeted that it probably was: “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

If there is such a thing as a dangerous “deep state” of elite but unelected federal officials who feel that they are untouchable and unaccountable, then John Brennan is the poster boy.

Immediately after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the careerist Brennan quickly reinvented himself as a critic of the very methodologies that he once, as a George W. Bush administration official, had insisted were effective. Brennan was initially appointed Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then took over the CIA after the abrupt and mysterious resignation of General David Petraeus following the 2012 election.

Brennan claimed that intelligence agencies had not missed clear indications in 2009 that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” would try to take down a U.S. airliner. Just days later, when his denials were ridiculed, Brennan flipped and blasted intelligence agencies for their laxity.

In 2011, Brennan falsely alleged that the Obama administration’s drone program had not caused a single civilian death in Pakistan over the previous year. In truth, around 50 civilians had been killed by drones since the 9/11 attacks.

The same year, Brennan offered various versions of the American killing of Osama bin Laden. His misleading narratives required White House revisions.

In March 2014, Brennan denied accusations that CIA analysts had hacked the computers of U.S. Senate staffers to find out what they knew about possible CIA roles in enhanced interrogations. After he was caught in a lie, Brennan was forced to apologize to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Most recently, in May 2017, Brennan testified under oath before Congress that he had no knowledge during the 2016 presidential campaign of the origins of the Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele dossier. Nor, Brennan claimed, was he aware that the FBI and the Department of Justice had used the infamous file to obtain surveillance warrants from the FISA court before and after the election.

Several sources, however, have said that Brennan was not only aware of the Steele dossier, but wanted the FBI to use it to pursue rumors about Trump. Brennan reportedly briefed Democratic senator Harry Reid on the dossier. Armed with those rumors, Reid then became insistent that they be leaked before the 2016 election, according to reports.

Brennan is typical of the careerist deep state.

Former national-security adviser Susan Rice lied about the Benghazi tragedy, the nature of the Bowe Bergdahl/Guantanamo detainee exchange, the presence of chemical weapons in Syria, and her role in unmasking the identities of surveilled Americans.

Andrew McCabe, recently fired from his job as FBI deputy director, openly admitted to lying to investigators, claiming he was “confused and distracted.” McCabe had said that he was not a source for background leaks about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. He wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post that “some of my answers were not fully accurate . . .”

Former FBI director James Comey likely lied about not drafting a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in her email scandal before interviewing her.

Comey misled a FISA court by not providing the entire truth about the Steele dossier. He falsely assured the president that he was not under investigation while likely leaking to others that Trump was, in fact, under investigation.

Former director of national intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee when he said that the National Security Agency did not collect data on American citizens. When caught in the lie, Clapper claimed that he had given the “least untruthful” answer to the committee that he could publicly provide.

In the past, Clapper had also misled the country about the “secular” nature of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Note that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and Rice so far have not been held to account for their distortions. We cynically expect our politicians and even presidents to fabricate, but we idealistically (and naïvely) assume that career government servants do not.

A common strategy of the deep-state careerist is the psychological tactic known as “projection.” To square their own circles of lying, our so-called best and brightest loudly accuse others of precisely the sins that they themselves commit as a matter of habit.

In the ensuing chaos and uproar, careerists such as Brennan, Clapper, and Comey usually escape scrutiny — to proceed to their next political reincarnation, Beltway billet, book deal or television gig.
Title: Attorney Cohen raid, stormy; Andrew McCarthy "The Mini-Mess"
Post by: DougMacG on April 12, 2018, 05:26:05 AM: If Cohen acted alone on the hush money, the raid of his office did not pierce the attorney client relationship in that regard. But what about all the other documents they are going to find and make more referrals? If the hush money constitutes a "campaign contribution", that is an opinion not a fact and is minor on a scale of 1/20th of violations committed by the Obama campaign in 2008, not even counting the 'Facebook contribution'.

Unless they had something really big that we don't know yet to trigger this, I think they lost the country with their jack booted thug tactics. Andrew McCarthy writes about the mini-mess that trump is now in. It doesn't look good for Trump but it's all speculation at this point.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/the-cohen-searches-and-trumps-de-mini-mess/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 12, 2018, 08:32:22 AM: "I think they lost the country with their jack booted thug tactics."

I doubt it. The Left is cheering them.

The MSM is having fun and ratings with this.

The academics enjoy this. Even many of the Repubs are happy it seems.

Holocaust survivors seem to think it is the target Trump not the thug tactics that reminds them of Nazi Germany. Perhaps being in a concentration camp has scrambled their brains

If I recall my hero Elie Wiesel was a fan of at least some of Trump's policies - at least regarding Israel. His head was still on right .

I have to admit that if Trump wasn't such and impulsive narcissist a lot of this likely would have been avoided. Most of his policies have been great .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on April 12, 2018, 09:52:27 AM: Quote from: ccp on April 12, 2018, 08:32:22 AM
"I think they lost the country with their jack booted thug tactics."

I doubt it. The Left is cheering them.

The MSM is having fun and ratings with this.

The academics enjoy this. Even many of the Repubs are happy it seems.
...

Yes, the Left and MSM are cheering before having any idea of the facts or if these tactics were justified. Their hypocrisy is glaring. Imagine the reverse situation.

So many of these news stories require us to wait and see, and it goes on for years. Lasting damage is done with early false reports but their excesses have tended to be their downfall.

Beyond the hardcore Left, quite a few people are going to be underwhelmed if none of this is about collusion. If another of his contacts gets a criminal charge not directly related to the point of the investigation, it won't hurt Trump, just energize those who already hated him..

Jack booted thugs can break down doors but documents randomly found under these circumstance will have limited legal and political value IMHO, except if the probable cause was rock solid and they found exactly what they thought they would find and would not have gotten in any other way. Then good for them; let the chips fall where they may.

Trump and Pence won a four year term. I don't think they will get my guy Pence in any scenario so they can only paralyze this administration, not truly bring it down. What they have on Trump, if anything, still hasn't been reported or leaked and very likely has nothing to do with Russia, the point of the badly authorized investigation. Maybe his lawyer went too far trying to hide Trump's dirt and faces charges. I doubt there is a business document signed by Trump that says rough up these women. If this comes down to business practices from his previous career, I highly doubt it leads to the removal of Trump from office.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2018, 06:41:51 AM: by
Erick Erickson
4 hrs

Remember the pink haired, liberal, gay dude who confessed all his sins about Cambridge Analytica? He is James Comey.

Remember the pink haired, liberal, gay dude who confessed all his sins about Cambridge Analytica? He is James Comey.

What happened in that story was a leftwing guy got embedded among conservatives. Those conservatives beat the left. So the guy had to tell the left the leftwing fan fiction they wanted to hear about the evil conservatives and Mercer family in order to be welcomed back into polite society.

Everything you knew just had to be true was true in his telling. He was a genius and the Cambridge Analytica team did massively illegal things to cause Trump to win and he is so sorry. Never mind that it simply wasn't true and Cambridge Analytica really did nothing majorly unique and certainly didn't do anything illegal with the Facebook data.

This is the story of confession and repentance that had to be told so the guy could rejoin his tribe.

That is what is happening with Comey. Everything you believe is true in your fan faction is true if that will help Comey be welcomed back into polite society without the scorn of causing Hillary to lose.

This is, let us not forget, the man the left blames for Hillary's loss. How ever will he be welcomed back into polite society and allowed to walk the halls of Ivy League campuses without being assaulted? By telling the left what they want to hear about Trump.

Comey's book is an act of confession and redemption. The truth does not matter. What the left wants to be true is what matters. He will tell them what they want to hear and maybe then he can go teach at Harvard without Black Lives Matter and the women-gender studies professors protesting.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on April 13, 2018, 08:02:45 AM: "Comey's book is an act of confession"

Justice depends on polling and outcomes?

James Comey confesses:
"It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election were closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know."

John Hinderaker: "This is a stunning admission. The FBI Director was following the polls and assumed that Hillary had the election in the bag. (Not surprising, given that Comey is an out-of-touch swamp denizen.) If the election had been close, he may have kept the FBI’s renewed investigation to himself. But since Hillary was sure to win anyway, he felt it was safe to announce the restarted investigation based on Anthony Weiner emails."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/james-comey-confesses.php

Hillary must be furious at Huma for getting her into that mess but she met Weiner through their mutual connection to the Clintons. Bill Clinton serving as the officiant at their wedding. Who didn't vet whom?
-----------------
https://spectator.org/how-comey-lied-about-spying-on-trump-tower/
He leaked, lied, bent rules, treated FBI material as his own personal property, violated confidential conversations, and generally acted like a government unto himself.

So here was an FBI director using the front page of a newspaper to libel a sitting president, all while a FISA warrant based on Hillary’s campaign research, which gave Comey the power to reach into Trump Tower, sat on his desk.

look at his scummy maneuvering in response to Trump’s “wiretap” tweets. Those tweets turned out to be entirely accurate: The Obama administration was intercepting communications at Trump Tower, both during the campaign and the transition. Comey knew perfectly well that Trump was right.

Comey had a story placed in the New York Times shortly after Trump’s tweets: “Comey Asks Justice Department to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim.” It quoted Comey’s leakers, “senior American officials,” as saying that Trump’s assertion was “false” and that the FBI director had asked the Justice Department to refute it.

Meanwhile, Comey sat back as Jim Clapper, another dolt he could manipulate, reinforced his lie on television, which the Times included in its story to bolster Comey’s leak:

Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said that there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper added.

Think about that: Comey, with the Carter Page warrant in hand (which gave Comey the power to rifle through Trump Tower communications both past and future), planted a story in the Times, designed to make Trump look like a lunatic, that makes use of a Clapper quote Comey knew to be false. What a weasel.
----------------------------------

Comey is the ultimate professional?
"His hands(?) are [Trump's] smaller than mine..."
Not quite as juicy as Anderson Cooper and Stormy Daniels.

Libraries will struggle with the question of where to shelve this book, fiction or non-fiction? They need a section for 'profit-seeking'.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 13, 2018, 09:03:04 AM: Doug writes :

"His hands(?) are [Trump's] smaller than mine..."

question mark noticed. Mark Rubio could be thinking ,

"you know what they say about people with small hands"

:-P

I don't know what to say other then Trump started all this with his total clumsiness
If he had just fired Comey in a respectful dignified way ...........

Interesting that Trump was dignified in the way he spoke of Ryan who (lied a few weeks back saying he was not going to retire) just announced his retirement) .
Title: Andrew McCarthy: The SDNY investigation could be serious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2018, 11:21:31 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/michael-cohen-investigation-serious-peril-for-trump/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-04-15&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 16, 2018, 06:38:10 AM: everything Comey and now his wife say is to expultate themselves with the Left.

no mention of how he *corruptly* lets Hillary off the hook from crimes she committed by his present book tour by him, his wife, or the MSM :

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/04/15/comey-wife-wanted-woman-president-really-badly-supported-hillary-clinton/

he is corrupt he was obviously in cahoots with Lynch and Obama to let Hillary off. End of story
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2018, 08:10:03 AM: Agreed.

Moving on, Judge Napolitano this morning points out that the SDNY investigation is regular DOJ and as such AG Sessions is not recused with regard to them.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on April 16, 2018, 10:38:05 AM: Quote from: ccp on April 16, 2018, 06:38:10 AM
everything Comey and now his wife say is to expultate themselves with the Left.

no mention of how he *corruptly* lets Hillary off the hook from crimes she committed by his present book tour by him, his wife, or the MSM :

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/04/15/comey-wife-wanted-woman-president-really-badly-supported-hillary-clinton/

he is corrupt he was obviously in cahoots with Lynch and Obama to let Hillary off. End of story

He has gotten everything wrong so far and his bias is showing. He even admitted political calculations came into his decision making.

I heard a minute of liberal radio today. Comey never should have said Hillary was careless if there was no crime. She only had like 3 emails with a little 'c' on them. And where was the intent? Ummm, there were crimes, it wasn't like 3 emails, there was no investigation into intent and intent is not part of the statute.

The panel on Meet the Press all agreed Trump would soon be impeached, but could not, did not still point to a single point of collusion with Russia or crime he committed in conjunction with the slimey attorney. He is presumed guilty, right on the most prestigious of mainstream shows. They may be right and Trump might be just about to fall but if so it will be for a misdeed that none of us know about yet.

Back to Comey, I notice with my rental applicants that good liars sound just like honest people until later when discrepancies begin to come to light. Then you can go back and recognize more and more lies. Comey had a long career and presented himself well and then ... well now he has been reduced to gossip column relevance, reporting on tan lines, hand size and opinions about moral issues no more or less valid than anyone else's. Meanwhile Trump started as a perceived lightweight on the big stage but is now holding NK, China, Assad and Russia accountable, Iran next, and has turned around the US economy and the Supreme Court.

So far it looks like the deplorables got it right.
Title: Shapiro: Comey loves Comey, AG Lynch does not
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2018, 12:08:24 PM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/29466/5-big-takeaways-comeys-big-abc-news-interview-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=041618-news&utm_campaign=position1

https://www.dailywire.com/news/29459/breaking-loretta-lynch-releases-statement-slamming-ryan-saavedra?utm_medium=email&utm_content=041618-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: VDH: The real colluders
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2018, 06:05:52 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/colluders-washington-clinton-obama-loaylists/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2018, 02:42:22 PM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/29509/following-story-about-trump-lawyer-mueller-issues-ryan-saavedra?utm_medium=email&utm_content=041718-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: DOJ called FBI to shut down Clinton Foundation investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 18, 2018, 09:11:20 AM: https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/fbis-mccabe-doj-are-you-telling-me-i-need-shut-down-clinton
Title: Gulliani now on Trumps team
Post by: ccp on April 19, 2018, 05:12:31 PM: I am not sure how he can possibly negotiate this when Mueller et al thinks REMOVING Trump by any means if "for the good of the country" but nonetheless:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/04/19/rudy-giuliani-joins-trump-legal-team-i-have-high-regard-for-the-president-and-for-bob-mueller/
Title: Re: Giuliani now on Trump's team
Post by: DougMacG on April 20, 2018, 08:06:56 AM: Quote from: ccp on April 19, 2018, 05:12:31 PM
I am not sure how he can possibly negotiate this when Mueller et al thinks REMOVING Trump by any means if "for the good of the country" but nonetheless:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/04/19/rudy-giuliani-joins-trump-legal-team-i-have-high-regard-for-the-president-and-for-bob-mueller/

The Giulliani appointment is interesting. Yes, it's time to wrap up the Mueller investigation if no Trump-Russia collusion occurred and it apparently didn't. Trump through Rudy can put public pressure on Mueller to release his report which he ought to be doing anyway.

As Andrew McCarthy, also from the SDNY office, is guessing, the NY referral is no small legal matter. Speculating that it is mostly Cohen in trouble and less significantly Trump, and Trump is guilty of a few shenanigans but not high crimes, Trump will need the best public face for a lawyer to make that case and finesse this fiasco to a conclusion.

NOT in the evidence, I predict, is anything that indicates Trump or Cohen sent a guy to a parking lot to scare 'Stormy' and her daughter. And if Cohen didn't do it, no one did. Otherwise what you have with her story is a questionable accusation of a 'campaign contribution' on 1/20th of a scale of what Obama 2008 admitted to. That could be a 25-30k fine, not a high crime, even if Trump knew about it.

The statute of Limitations for most money crimes in NY is 3 years, 2 1/2 of which he has been a candidate for President or President. Going through a lifetime of shady business dealings is not their job. They need something recent, specific and provable and maybe they will find one or two things.

The worst of the accusations we know of so far I think are all false. Prostitutes peeing on each other for hire by Trump in front of Trump because a bed in a hotel in Moscow because the Obamas once slept in it and they are black and half black is absurd on so many levels. That is right out of a Dem playbook in the first place that Trump picked on Obama out of racism and that he is a pervert rather than a sex hound. Trump's interests are simpler and than that. He doesn't hate blacks; he is interested money, power, ego and putting his penis into the vagina of beautiful women, probably more for the ego than sexual pleasure. There are plenty of ex-wives and mistresses including Stormy and McDougal out there with public stories to verify his bedroom interest. The urination interest sounds more like entertainment for people who don't or can't have sex. The whole dossier is made suspect by its most salacious and least credible part.

Stormy-Stephanie alleges one incident of consensual infidelity with a man known for infidelity, a crime against Melania but not a punishable crime. She said she was not a victim, before adding the roughing up part later to give the story legs. The artist's sketch looks like her own lawyer did it. She can't prove the sex much less the rough up. It's clearly designed to elevate her public status in her field which it did and to give the derangement crowd something to cling to. Without the rough up accusation, it doesn't get the prime time attention.

The McDougal affair, if true, means this man is a marital cheater. Disgusting, but we already knew that. Not recent and not a high crime. It makes her look like low-life too, knowing about Melania and the newborn. This is a hooker and a stripper making mild accusations, though men hold a Playmate of the Year on a higher pedestal than that. To the extent that men do, they are envious of Trump, not disgusted. What irked McDougal was that they were going to publish serious articles of hers and didn't; now they have an agreement to do that. She will fade into the background shortly as she shifts her own focus to her health column career. Will probably advise young women not to sleep with old, married, rich men.

The Manafort crime is not tied to the Trump campaign or Presidency. The Flynn 'crime' will most likely will be dropped, or pardoned, and didn't involve anything nefarious with Trump.

Most importantly, none of it has anything to do with what was originally alleged and ordered to be investigated. The one tie was a bonehead public statement made by Trump, 'Russia, I hope you can find and release Hillary's emails that she is hiding from Congress and prosecutors.' That public statement is not what a man guilty of collusion behind the scenes says. It means further that Trump didn't even know wikileaks wasn't getting its hacks from Russia.

This was a very bizarre, shiny object chapter in American history. Proof that the intelligence community doesn't want scrutiny and that Democrats don't want a straight up debate on the issues.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 20, 2018, 08:34:56 AM: NOw the NY bar is going after Kushner in their effort to destroy Trump every way they can dream of.

Like criminals who lay awake nights dreaming of how to steal money and scams and cons , the Dems are dreaming of every way imaginable

If claims against Crafty's favorite person (Jar[h]ed) are true then he may well be the crook his old man is .

I would certainly not be surprised.

And what could be expected when you got this guy running billion dollar company at same time he is wheeling and dealing in government?
That is asking for trouble. Dems are frothing like starving wolves.
Title: The Comey dumpster fire intensifies.
Post by: G M on April 21, 2018, 10:06:55 AM: http://coldfury.com/2018/04/21/final-nails/

Burn baby

Posted on 4/21/2018 by Mike
The Comey dumpster fire intensifies.

Comey’s Memos Indicate Dossier Briefing Of Trump Was A Setup
Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossier’s allegations. In multiple memos, Comey specifically mentioned that CNN had the dossier and wanted a “news hook” that would enable the network to report on its most salacious allegations even though they had not been verified.

“I said the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013,” Comey wrote of his conversation with Trump in a classified memo that was released in redacted form late Thursday. “I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands.”

No media organizations had reported the allegations at the time Comey briefed Trump.

“I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Comey added in his memo about the briefing with Trump on January 6, 2017.

With which Comey, via the maskirovka of his meticulously incomplete, manipulative briefing of Trump, was was only too happy to provide them.

It just so happens that the existence of the very briefing he cooked up with Clapper and Brennan was leaked to CNN within a few days, providing them with the very “news hook” Comey told Trump CNN was looking for.

And… oh right, the House Intelligence Committee report says that Clapper gave “inconsistent” answers regarding his contacts in this time frame with, get this, CNN.

Oh, I’m sure it was all just a coincidence and not any kind of deliberately-set trap for Trump or anything. I mean, come on; Comey is an honest guy, a man of integrity and principle. He’s been saying so endlessly this past week, to everybody within reach, so it has to be true. If you don’t believe it, just ask him; you ought to be able to approach him easily enough to pose the question, given the attendance at his book-tour appearances so far. He’s just sitting around on his little stool all by himself getting his picture taken, pretty much. If you can get through the fawning libmedia scrum, you’re good to go.

Things are going to get pretty hot for Comey from here on out. He’s looking more and more like the key to unraveling the whole conspiracy. The Left is beginning to get serious about throwing him under the bus now, which hints at his imminent scapegoat status pretty broadly: note how eager libmedia is to get Comey’s “lifelong Republican” Congressional-testimony remarks out there, and expand on them. That there is a tell, folks. They’re trying to disassociate the Democrat Socialists, especially his co-conspirators Obama and Hillary!™, from him as preamble to hanging him out to dry.

If you’re calculating the odds on whether the treasonous higher-ups who conspired to rig and then overturn an American presidential election will ever face justice for their high crimes, pay attention to what happens with Comey. If the DoJ takes the criminal referral seriously and honestly follows through on it, Comey will almost certainly be among the first to stand trial. At that point, one of two things happens: either Comey decides to save his own bacon, stops lying, goes rat, and spills his guts under oath, or he decides to play out his fantasy of being a latter-day G Gordon Liddy, fulfilling his self-proclaimed destiny to Save Democracy! by nobly taking one for the team.

Hard to say which he’ll do, honestly. He (mis)represents himself as a heroic defender of truth, justice, and the American Way, despite seeing nothing wrong with subverting not just one but several American institutions, as well as putting paid to any remaining faith in the integrity of our election system and revealing participatory democracy and self-government to be a sham. If his belief in his fantasies is strong enough, it could conceivably steel him to do what he so hazily sees as his duty, clam up to protect the big wheels, and face what he no doubt will consider a travesty of justice, a persecution by Enemies of the State, on his own.

Then again, Comey is a pissant, a poor excuse for a man, and no kind of patriot regarding anything the Founders would recognize as righteous government. The prospect of doing time would have to frighten a cowardly Deep State weasel like him half out of his wits. Being long accustomed to the protection of the federal tyranny—to hiding his lawless skullduggery behind the scrim of a sprawling, faceless, untouchable bureacracy ever loyal to its own—and then seeing that protection suddenly removed is likely to motivate such a “man” to start looking out for Numero Uno (as if that wasn’t what he’s been doing his entire career) and make some kind of deal to cooperate that keeps him from being put behind bars, or at least getting his hair mussed and his manicure ruined by doing serious time in a real prison.

In either of those cases, Deep State blood is likely to spill—the puddle of gore spread much wider and deeper by the former scenario than the latter—and Comey himself will be duly wrecked. Thereby will justice be served in at least some measure, although the former scenario won’t make for a very satisfying meal.

On the other hand, if the DoJ softpedals its investigation, setting up more endless hearings designed to bog down in pedantry and speechifying long enough for public interest to fade so they can announce sotto very damned voce the foregone inconclusive verdict of “Eh, Whatever” before turning the whole kit and kaboodle loose with nothing worse than an opprobius look and a shrug, we’ll know that the capos of the Deep State truly are invulnerable, that they are de facto immune from justice no matter how clear-cut and heinous their crimes, that the votes supposed to give voice to the will of normal Americans matter not a whit…and that our system of government is in fact rotten beyond all hope of repair.

Or they could also lead lesser vermin like, say, McCabe, Stroke/Page, or maybe even Brennan to slaughter as token sacrifical offerings, providing Big King Rats like Obama, Hillary!™, and Lynch a gaping hole in the rule of law to squirm through and scurry away before anyone notices. Lady Justice is pretty easy to gyp in America that way, what with her blindfold and all.

Which is when it gets to be just about time to start shooting the bastards.
Title: Deep State
Post by: G M on April 21, 2018, 02:18:12 PM: (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DbOaIAjUMAEnlLb.jpg)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DbOaIAjUMAEnlLb.jpg
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 21, 2018, 08:18:32 PM: one can only imagine the who knows how many sex partners have been paid off over the years from famous, wealthy or otherwise political figures.

who in their right mind would not think it is common

From Schwarzenegger, to Travolta, to Menendez, to Eric Schmidt and enough others probably so many to list to run out of space on a computer with 2 gigs.
Title: Joe DiGenova : politicization of the FBI (Hillsdale)
Post by: ccp on April 23, 2018, 04:12:31 AM: After reading this is is really impossible not to see how all the dots connect implicating the notorious characters in a fix for the Hill and a plot to bring Trump down:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-politicization-of-the-fbi/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Comey confims the fix was in
Post by: ccp on April 28, 2018, 10:33:10 AM: If you ask me McCarthy, James Comey's friend of 30 yrs cuts him way too much slack.
Oh, his leaks were wrong but not criminal........ What is the use of having laws if there are always ways for clever lawyers to get around them?

article states once again Comey confirmed what ayd rational and savvy conservative knew all along - the FIX was in for Clinton. Rush said what we all knew - virtually no way was Obamster and his mob going to enforce the law against Hillary

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/comey-confirms-in-clinton-emails-caper-the-fix-was-in/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2018, 08:43:39 PM: Respect for McCarthy's candor about the conflicting forces of friendship and analysis for him.
Title: James Come alias
Post by: ccp on April 29, 2018, 10:36:33 AM: DT tweet this :

Comey's new nick name :

"slick Jimmy"

:-D
Title: Carter Page claimed being an advisor to the Russians
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2018, 01:04:19 PM: Worth noting.

http://time.com/5132126/carter-page-russia-2013-letter/

PS: That McCarthy article, as with pretty much everything he writes, is quite good.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on April 29, 2018, 05:36:02 PM: That doesn't mean he doesn't cut Comey too much slack here.

Comey was part of a high level fix , plain and simple. He thought Clinton would win so he played ball - dishonestly.

If McCarthy doesn't want to just say it it fine but doesn't change the truth.
I don't want to hear about his personal ambivalent feelings about it through half the article.
Title: Tom Fitton: Hillary and Comey are in the same legal boat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2018, 02:28:47 PM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/in-the-news/tom-fitton-hillary-comey-legal-boat/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=on+the+air&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180430212746
Title: I am going to go with yes
Post by: G M on May 01, 2018, 02:18:55 PM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/is-comey-lying-about-what-he-told-the-house-intel-committee-in-march-2017/

Is Comey Lying About What He Told the House Intel Committee in March 2017?
BY DEBRA HEINE APRIL 30, 2018 CHAT 89 COMMENTS
FBI Director James Comey speaks to the Intelligence and National Security Alliance Leadership Dinner in Alexandria, Va.
FBI Director James Comey (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are not happy that the intelligence community blacked out a crucial portion of fired FBI director James Comey's words in their recently released report on Russia interference in the 2016 election. Lawmakers hope the issue gets resolved soon because Comey has been denying in interview after interview what he purportedly said in the redacted portion of the transcript.

The quotes in question allegedly concern fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was interviewed by two FBI agents at the White House in January of 2017. Republicans say that when Comey went to Capitol Hill that March to brief lawmakers on the Russia investigation, he told them that the agents who questioned Flynn did not believe he had lied and that any inaccuracies were unintentional.

Lawmakers reportedly left the briefing with "the impression that Flynn would not be charged with lying to the FBI," according to the Washington Examiner's Byron York. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe allegedly told lawmakers the same thing -- that Flynn didn't lie -- which is why so many people were shocked in November of 2017, when Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

For whatever reason, the intel community redacted both McCabe's and Comey's quotes regarding Flynn in the HPSCI's final Russia report.

Comey, meanwhile, has been on his publicity tour to promote his book, A Higher Loyalty, and has been denying that he told the House Intelligence Committee what Republican sources say he said.

Most recently, "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd pressed Comey on the question Sunday morning on NBC.

"In the Washington Examiner, they report that, according to sources familiar with meetings that you had, that you told lawmakers when you were still director of the FBI that FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional," Todd said to Comey. "If that's the case, what did he plead guilty to?"

"Yes, an example of how you can't believe everything you read in the media," Comey said.

"This is not true?" Todd asked.

"Not true," said Comey. "And I don't know what people heard me say, if they're reporting it accurately, what they heard me say, they misunderstood. But that's not accurate."

Comey said the same thing in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier last week.

"Did you tell lawmakers that FBI agents didn't believe former national security adviser Michael Flynn was lying intentionally to investigators?" asked Baier.

"No," said Comey.

"You did not—" said Baier.

"And I saw that in the media," Comey said. "I don't know what — maybe someone misunderstood something I said. I didn't believe that and didn't say that."

And in Comey's first interview two weeks ago, ABC's George Stephanopoulos said, "There's been some reporting that at one point you told the Congress that the agents who interviewed Mike Flynn didn't believe that he had lied."

"Yeah, I saw that," said Comey. "And that — I don't know where that's coming from. That — unless I'm — I said something that people misunderstood, I don't remember even intending to say that. So my recollection is I never said that to anybody."

Comey's recollection is not going to square with the transcript, Republicans say.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that the transcript of Comey's briefing shows him telling lawmakers that the FBI agents thought Flynn was telling the truth.

"Director Comey's recollection is flawed," Gowdy said. "If he does not remember telling Congress that his agents told him they didn't think Flynn was lying, then he needs to get his lawyers to go back and look at the transcript. We did not mishear. Maybe he misspoke, but that's in the transcript."

HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes complained about the redactions after the report was issued and vowed to fight for an unredacted version: "We object to the excessive and unjustified number of redactions, many of which do not relate to classified information," Nunes said in a statement . "The committee will convey our objections to the appropriate agencies and looks forward to publishing a less redacted version in the near future."

House Intel spokesman Jack Langer pointed out that the intelligence community quickly removed redactions from the House Intel Democrats' counter-report.

"The Democrats got all the redactions on their minority views lifted within a day," Langer said Sunday evening, "while we're still struggling to get our concerns addressed."

The conflict is a stark one, and leads one to wonder -- what was it about McCabe and Comey's testimony that the intel community considered classified, anyway?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 01, 2018, 03:30:19 PM: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-team-leaked-mueller-apos-131407252.html

Larry tribe knows who leaked and it was from Trump's lawyers
So because they know which "team" it was from because of the way the questions are worded?
IF true more likely it was the NYT leaking the leaker .

Besides since when is leaking such an outrage all of a sudden?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2018, 07:44:52 PM: a) FWIW my sense of things is that the leak was by Team Trump;

b) IMHO once again Trump undercuts his own credibility;
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 01, 2018, 07:47:18 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2018, 07:44:52 PM
a) FWIW my sense of things is that the leak was by Team Trump;

b) IMHO once again Trump undercuts his own credibility;

How does this undercut Trump's credibility?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2018, 04:52:22 AM: "FWIW my sense of things is that the leak was by Team Trump;"

Explain CD . Why do you come to that conclusiion?

why because CNN et al say that it is ?

all we know is it was "reportedly" written in a way that looks as though a lawyer did not do it.

How come every leaker in the human race is protected by LeftMSM EXCEPT when it is in their convenience to blame someone on the RIGHT or TRUMP?

Why was this leaker not protected? Even if it was Trump's team it doesn't mean Trump was behind it. It was NEVER and issue having every leak come from the WH for this whole time when it was about embarrassing Trump (and presumably from his "team) but now that it makes the Mule team look bad then suddenly this is a big issue and must be blamed on Trump.

Why should we trust them ?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2018, 08:19:14 AM: Alternate theory: Trump's lawyers are trying to wake him the fk up as to the dangers of sitting down with Comey.

Alternate theory: Trump's lawyers are looking to prepare public opinion for impending legal arguments that Comey overreaches;

Alternate theory: Per two Office of Legal Council opinions, one under Bush 43 and one under Obama, under the Constitution the President cannot be prosecuted because the C. specifies impeachment as the remedy
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2018, 08:48:31 AM: CD,

some good thoughts above

This absolute partisan hit mob run by Mueller (Comey' good friend ), CNN and the DC lawyers is making my want to vote even more this NOv.
Hope other Repubs come to the same opinions.

If some never Trump repubs think and impeachment after some sort of indictment from a Mueller grand jury is going to be good for Repubs - I beg to differ
Title: WaPo: Mueller playing hardball
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2018, 09:29:52 AM: Robert Mueller and Co. are playing hardball
by Aaron Blake May 2 at 8:08 AM Email the author
3:02
Trump is a 'subject' of Mueller's probe. Here's what that means.

Special counsel Robert Mueller told the president's lawyers that Trump's a subject in his probe, not a target. The Post's Carol Leonnig explains the difference. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

President Trump and his allies in the House have done just about anything they can to undermine Robert S. Mueller III's investigation and intimidate its leaders. They've questioned the Mueller team's neutrality. They've wrongly suggested the investigation was launched based on the Steele dossier or the leaking of classified information. They've attacked the FISA court process. James B. Comey was fired. Andrew McCabe was targeted and later fired. And there have been threats to get rid of basically everyone else in charge of it, including most recently Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

Mueller, it seems, isn't cowed. Neither, for that matter, is Rosenstein.

The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig and Robert Costa broke a big story Tuesday night, reporting that Mueller at one point threatened to subpoena Trump if he wouldn't voluntarily sit for an interview. Here's the scene:

... Mueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

The flare-up set in motion weeks of turmoil among Trump’s attorneys as they debated how to deal with the special counsel’s request for an interview, a dispute that ultimately led to Dowd’s resignation.

Presidents have faced subpoenas before, but the mere threat of one ratchets up the confrontation between Mueller's and Trump's teams. Trump could also fight the subpoena or even plead the Fifth Amendment, though that may come with political costs.

That conversation, notably, came a few weeks before Trump's lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen had his office raided on a referral from Mueller's investigation — a highly unusual move. The raid once again had Trump claiming the Mueller probe is one big violation. When combined with the show-of-force raid on Paul Manafort, the subpoena of the Trump Organization and the number of guilty pleas Mueller's team has obtained for lying to investigators, it suggests Mueller isn't exactly being shy about using his authority to locate the skeletons.

The same could be said of Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller and oversees the investigation. After news broke Monday night of an effort by conservative House Republicans to draft impeachment papers against Rosenstein, just in case they're needed, he issued a striking rebuke for a top Justice Department official. He first noted that “nobody has the courage to put their name on” the impeachment document and poked at its authors for leaking word of their efforts.

Then came this: “I think they should understand by now that the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said. “We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law, and any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.”
ADVERTISING

“Extorted.” The guy who is in charge of the scope of the Russia investigation just accused House Republicans of attempted extortion.

And he's not totally out of line. Intimidation has suited Trump well, in general. It certainly worked in the business world, and it has also worked well in the political world, where Republicans have repeatedly rebuked Trump and distanced themselves from him only to come to regret it. Trump's power with the base makes running afoul of him a very dicey proposition — so much so that Republicans rarely even try anymore. The mere threat of a presidential tweet is enough, in many cases.

It's not difficult to understand why Trump and his allies would try this tactic on their investigators, too. If you know that an adverse finding about Trump will come with a personal cost and with 35 percent of the country thinking you are a rogue prosecutor trying to take down a president with trumped-up charges, that could feasibly affect your conclusions, even subconsciously.

[The number of people who say the Mueller investigation should continue is shrinking]

Law enforcement officials, though, are trained to be studiously neutral and to resist such pressure, and they have fewer personal political concerns than do members of Congress. Yes, they still have their personal lives and legacies to consider, including whether they handled this investigation fairly with the stakes being so high. But their jobs are less inherently political and, as James B. Comey showed, rising to the top ranks often rewards cocksureness (sometimes too much of it).
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 02, 2018, 09:33:20 AM: Mueller is corrupt and should be the one facing a grand jury.
Title: Alan Dershowitz: Maybe Mueller should be investigated
Post by: G M on May 02, 2018, 10:34:49 AM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-maybe-robert-mueller-should-be-investigated

Alan Dershowitz: Maybe Mueller should be investigated
by Alan Dershowitz
| April 23, 2018 04:33 PM

Just as the first casualty of war is truth, so, too, the first casualty of hyperpartisan politics is civil liberties.

Many traditional civil libertarians have allowed their strong anti-Trump sentiments to erase their long-standing commitment to neutral civil liberties. They are now so desperate to get President Trump that they are prepared to compromise the most basic due process rights. They forget the lesson of history that such compromises made against one’s enemy are often used as precedents against one’s friends. As Robert Bolt put it in the play and movie "A Man for all Seasons":

Roper: So now you would give the Devil benefit of Law!

Thomas More: Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Thomas More: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

But today’s fair weather civil libertarians are unwilling to give Trump — who they regard as the devil — the “benefit of law” and civil liberties.

Consider the issue of criticizing Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Any criticism or even skepticism regarding Mueller’s history is seen as motivated by a desire to help Trump. Mueller was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston, the head of its criminal division, the head of the criminal division in Main Justice, and the director of the FBI during the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI. Four innocent people were framed by the FBI to protect mass murdering gangsters who were working as FBI informers while they were killing innocent people. An FBI agent, who is now in prison, was tipping off Whitey Bulger as to who might testify against him so that these individuals could be killed. He also tipped off Bulger, allowing him to escape and remain on the lam for 16 years.

What responsibility, if any, did Mueller, who was in key positions of authority and capable of preventing these horrible miscarriages, have in this sordid incident? A former member of the parole board — a liberal Democrat who also served as mayor of Springfield, Mass. — swears he saw a letter from Mueller urging the denial of release for at least one of these wrongfully convicted defendants. When he went back to retrieve the letter, it was not in the file. This should surprise no one since Judge Mark Wolf (himself a former prosecutor), who conducted extensive hearings about this entire mess, made the following findings:

The files relating to the Wheeler murder, and the FBI's handling of them, exemplify recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Flemmi and Bulger. First, there appears to be a pattern of false statements placed in Flemmi's informant file to divert attention from his possible crimes and/or FBI misconduct….
Second, contrary to the FBI's usual policy and practice, all but one of the reports containing Halloran's allegations against Bulger and Flemmi were not indexed and placed in an investigative file referencing their names. Thus, those documents were not discoverable by a standard search of the FBI's indices. Similar irregularities in indexing and, therefore, access occurred with regard to information that the FBI received concerning an extortion by Bulger of Hobart Willis and from Joseph Murray concerning the murder of Brian Halloran, among other things.
Third, when documents damaging to the FBI were found by the Bureau, they were in some instances not produced to the defendants or the court at the time required by the court's Orders.
Wolf also made a finding that directly references Mueller’s state of knowledge regarding the “history”:

“The source also claimed to have information that Bulger and Pat Nee had murdered Halloran and Bucky Barrett. The source subsequently said that there was an eyewitness to the Halloran shooting who might come forward, and elaborated that: 'there is a person named John, who claims he talked to Whitey and Nee as they sat in the car waiting for Halloran on Northern Avenue. He sits in a bar and talks about it. He saw the whole operation.” The source added that the person providing the information to the source “will be willing to talk to you (authorities) soon.” On Feb. 3, 1988, Weld directed Keeney to have the information that he had received sent to the United States Attorney in Boston, Frank McNamara, and to the strike force chief, O'Sullivan. Weld added that: “Both O'Sullivan and [Assistant United States Attorney] Bob Mueller are well aware of the history, and the information sounds good.”

It is not beyond the realm of possibility therefore that Mueller wrote this letter, even if it is no longer in the files. If in fact Mueller wrote such a letter, without thoroughly investigating the circumstances, he surely bears some responsibility. Moreover, it is widely believed among Boston law enforcement observers the FBI was not really looking for Bulger during the years Mueller was its director. It is believed the FBI was fearful about what Bulger would disclose about his relationship with agents over the years. It took a member of the U.S. Marshall’s office to find Bulger, who was hiding in plain view in Santa Monica, Calif.

Recently, a former federal judge, who used to be a civil libertarian, rushed to Mueller’s defense, declaring “without equivocation” Mueller “had no involvement” in the massive miscarriage of justice. Her evidence is the lack of evidence in the files. But no civil libertarian should place such great trust in government files, especially in light of Wolf’s findings. They should join my call for an objective investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department before they assure the public “without equivocation” Mueller had absolutely “no involvement.”

But these “Get Trump At Any Cost” partisans have rejected my call for an investigation, out of fear that it may turn up information that might tarnish the image of the special counsel who is investigating Trump. Instead they criticize those of us who point out Mueller was “at the center” of the Justice Department and FBI while this miscarriage of justice occurred. All civil libertarians should want the truth about this sordid episode, and Mueller’s possible role in it, regardless of its impact, if any, on the Trump investigation. Mueller should welcome an objective investigation, which might eliminate any doubt about his role in this travesty. But too many former civil libertarians are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties and the quest for truth on the altar of “Get Trump.”

This is all too typical of the about-face many civil libertarians have taken since Trump became president. I have previously written about the ACLU’s abdication of its traditional role in challenging governmental overreach. For the new ACLU, getting Trump trumps civil liberties.

It is ironic to see many right-wingers being the ones to criticize overreach by law enforcement, while many left-wingers now defend such overreaching. Hypocrisy and selective outrage abounds, as neutral principles take a back seat. Conservatives used to say “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” I would respond that “a liberal is a conservative who is being audited or whose kid was busted for pot.” Today, a civil libertarian is a conservative whose candidate is being investigated, while a law-and-order type is a liberal who wants to see Trump charged or impeached.

I am a liberal who voted against Trump, but who insists that his civil liberties must be respected for all of our sake.

Alan Dershowitz ( @AlanDersh ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School and author of Trumped up! How Criminalizing Politics is Dangerous to Democracy.
Title: Good analysis by Dershowitz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2018, 05:55:18 AM: http://www.speroforum.com/a/WWZURIOQUE13/83266-Dershowitz-Trump-should-answer-Mueller-with-Article-2-of-Constitution?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=RAZLRBBAYT21&utm_content=WWZURIOQUE13&utm_source=news&utm_term=Dershowitz+Trump+should+answer+Mueller+with+Article+2+of+Constitution#.WusGY3rcBGA
Title: Motivation!
Post by: G M on May 04, 2018, 11:06:20 AM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/dcwo0dcw4aawjbq.jpg)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2018, 07:37:00 PM: That is a very pithy meme!

===========================
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/u-s-judge-questions-special-counsels-powers-in-manafort-case-idUSKBN1I51WE
Title: Mueller questions Russian oligarch Vekselberg
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2018, 09:19:57 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/viktor-vekselberg-mueller-investigation.html?nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193ries&ref=cta
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 06, 2018, 07:09:52 AM: IF one believes the theory of "six degrees " of separation of the world's population

then by 2019 Mueller should be interviewing me and everyone on this board
Those on Huffpost will be spared.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 06, 2018, 10:38:35 AM: Quote from: ccp on May 06, 2018, 07:09:52 AM
IF one believes the theory of "six degrees " of separation of the world's population

then by 2019 Mueller should be interviewing me and everyone on this board
Those on Huffpost will be spared.

Analysts on both sides seem to agree that if there was no conspiracy-collusion with Russia case, then there was no obstruction to cover up what didn't happen. The Stormy thing leads us where? He lied about sex? Maybe and we'll never really know the beneath sheets parts. Is there a blue dress? Consensual sex by a man who cheated on each of his wives. Yes it's ugly, slimy, but it's already measured in to his support ceiling and disapproval floor. Campaign contribution? That's a reach, and not a high crime. I would agree on appearances that 130k sounds more like an annoyance payment than payment to silence a real threat of taking down a multi-billionaire. Trump lied about the payment? We really don't know that but again, already factored in. People are quickly getting tired of hearing about it. The whole distraction is very long media story that still has no evidence of a crime, and trump isn't on the ballot anyway. Tax cuts, Korea summit, tariff war, lots of other things going on out there.

A former liberal, now independent said to me yesterday, I like the policies, not the person. To that I say, good enough. Me too.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 06, 2018, 10:43:43 AM: " A former liberal, now independent said to me yesterday, I like the policies, not the person. To that I say, good enough. Me too."

I am intrigued

did you get him to change his views?

how does a "liberal " evolve into someone who likes Trump's policies?

If only more common..........
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2018, 08:59:44 PM: I suspect more common than you might think , , ,
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 07, 2018, 07:25:45 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/6/devin-nunes-push-hold-jeff-sessions-contempt/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 07, 2018, 08:39:01 AM: "did you get him to change his views?
how does a "liberal " evolve into someone who likes Trump's policies?"

It's a 'her' and I just withhold sex when she supports the Bernie-type stuff. A little more seriously, as we try to find common ground on issues, she is finding it easier to change her mind than mine.

In the 2016 election, no matter how open minded she was on issues, she could not vote someone of his character. So I laid out the Hillary scandal stuff and she voted for neither. After a half year of dating, we were half way there, from Bernie supporter to independent voter. The connection between Bernie Sanders policies and Venezuela failure also resonated. How can any honest leftist explain that any way but failure. She answered [of liberalism], "maybe they went too far". Agreed. Maybe we did too.

Being an honest liberal is an unstable position. She sees the inner city stuff that I work with and the argument about how our welfare state destroys their families and choices resonates. And that our tax system chases away the good.

In the context of this thread, it is hard to watch the Mueller-Russia thing and not see the glaring double standard in investigations and media coverage. Still no evidence of collusion and the investigations go on. Yesterday morning, we have the Korea summit, Israel Iran war, China militarizing the South China Sea, lowest unemployment rate in decades and [regarding climate change our own lake had its latest "ice-out" date in recorded history yesterday, and Fox News Sunday led with Stormy Daniels and Mueller. Again, you can't be an honest liberal or anything else and not see it.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 07, 2018, 10:19:48 AM: Doug wrote : " I just withhold sex when she supports the Bernie-type stuff. "

Bravo!!!!! But not surprising from an extreme skier and tennis champ. :-D

Rush would get a big kick out of that and market your discovery that Conservatives should withhold sex from any Liberal who refuses to be open minded and objective to other points of view.

Seriously , if only most libs would be open to other viewpoints. CD says I would be surprised .
And if that is the case the what Tim Scot said on a morning Fox show this AM about Repubs in the House being tough and smart but lacking in messaging may be right on the money.

Doug wrote:

" it is hard to watch the Mueller-Russia thing and not see the glaring double standard in investigations and media coverage."

I am noticing some defensive posturing from the libs the past week about the probe. Lib from POTOH on CNN or LSD this AM saying how the media is too much sucked in by Trump and focusing on him rather then the "important" issues when they get bogged on tweets, Stephanie Clifford, Russia etc.
CNN pointed out at least 3 times in span of few minutes that the Judge who questioned Mueller's motives in the Manafort case is a "Reagan appointee". As well as more and more statements about Muller being a "registered Republican" .

When have we ever heard them point out a Judge being the One's or Bills' appointee? I don't recall ever hearing that.
I think you and GM have pointed out the Left's methods will back fire. We may be seeing the early signs of this.
Title: POTH: Firm tied to Russian Oligarch made payments to Michael Cohen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 08, 2018, 06:59:44 PM: Firm Tied to Russian Oligarch Made Payments to Michael Cohen
Image
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer and fixer. His shell company received payments from a firm linked to a Russian oligarch, as well as corporations with business before the Trump administration.CreditBrendan Mcdermid/Reuters

By Mike McIntire, Ben Protess and Jim Rutenberg
May 8, 2018

A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.

Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.

Among the previously unreported transactions were payments last year of about $500,000 from Columbus Nova, an investment firm in New York whose biggest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch. A lawyer for Columbus Nova, in a statement on Tuesday, described the money as a consulting fee that had nothing to do with Mr. Vekselberg.

Other transactions described in the financial records include hundreds of thousands of dollars Mr. Cohen received from Fortune 500 firms with business before the Trump administration, as well as smaller amounts he paid for luxury expenses like a Mercedes-Benz and private club dues.

References to the transactions first appeared in a document posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star who was paid $130,000 by Essential Consultants to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. The lawyer’s seven-page document, titled “Preliminary Report of Findings,” does not explain the source of his information but describes in detail dates, dollar amounts and parties involved in various dealings by Mr. Cohen and his company. Most of the transactions involved two banks: First Republic Bank and City National Bank.

The Times’s review of financial records confirmed much of what was in Mr. Avenatti’s report. In addition, a review of documents and interviews shed additional light on Mr. Cohen’s dealings with the company connected to Mr. Vekselberg, who was stopped and questioned at an airport earlier this year by investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Taken together, the Times’s findings and Mr. Avenatti’s report offer the most detailed picture yet on Mr. Cohen’s business dealings and financial entanglements in the run-up to the election and its aftermath. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud and election-law violations, among other matters, according to people briefed on the investigation. Stephen Ryan, a lawyer representing Mr. Cohen, declined to comment.

Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, is suing Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to break her nondisclosure agreement related to the $130,000.

It is unclear whether that or any of the other transactions were improper, but Mr. Avenatti has asserted that Mr. Cohen’s use of Essential Consultants potentially violated banking laws. The financial records indicate that at least some of the money that passed through Essential Consultants was from sources and in amounts that were inconsistent with the company’s stated purpose.

Mr. Cohen also used the company to collect $250,000 after arranging payments in 2017 and 2018 by a major Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, to a former Playboy model he allegedly impregnated, according to news reports last month.

Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the financial records were four for $99,980 each between October and January by Novartis Investments S.A.R.L., a subsidiary of Novartis, the multinational pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland. Novartis — whose chief executive was among 15 business leaders invited to dinner with Mr. Trump at the World Economic Forum in January — spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington last year and frequently seeks approvals from federal drug regulators. Novartis said in a statement that its agreement with Essential Consultants had expired.

In addition, Korea Aerospace Industries paid Mr. Cohen’s company $150,000 last November, according to the records. The company, an aircraft manufacturer, has partnered with the American defense contractor Lockheed Martin in competing for a multibillion-dollar contract to provide trainer jets for the United States Air Force that is expected to be awarded this year. A representative for Korea Aerospace declined to comment.

AT&T made four payments totaling $200,000 between October 2017 and January 2018, according to the documents. AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner is pending before the Justice Department, issued a statement on Tuesday evening confirming that it made payments to Mr. Cohen’s firm.

“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” the statement said. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

The payments by Columbus Nova occurred between January and August of last year. Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive and Mr. Vekselberg’s cousin, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show. He and Mr. Vekselberg attended the event together and met with Mr. Cohen there, according to a person briefed on the matter. Columbus Nova retained him as a consultant soon afterward.

The consulting deal was worth $1 million and was supposed to last for a year, according to documents reviewed by The Times. But Columbus Nova decided to end the agreement midway through after it yielded a few investment ideas but no actual deals.
Comments

A person close to Mr. Intrater said that the executive had no idea Essential Consultants was used for the separate payment to Ms. Clifford, and that he hired a number of other consultants at the time for similar prices.

“Columbus Nova is a management company solely owned and controlled by Americans,” said Richard Owens, a lawyer for Mr. Intrater and Columbus Nova. “After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures. Reports today that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false. Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else other than Columbus Nova’s owners were involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provide funding for his engagement.”

A lawyer for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to questioning Mr. Vekselberg, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have also interviewed Mr. Intrater, though there is no indication that either man is suspected of wrongdoing, The Times reported last week.

The person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, unrelated to Mr. Cohen, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington.

Mr. Vekselberg has invested in Columbus Nova’s private equity funds through his sprawling Russian-based conglomerate, the Renova Group, which operates in the energy sector and elsewhere. Mr. Vekselberg was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration, which also imposed the penalties on the Renova Group.

Renova has had a financial relationship with VTB, one of the largest state-owned banks in Russia, according to documents that were part of the “Panama Papers” leak of files from an offshore law firm. The documents show that Mr. Vekselberg’s companies received at least $350 million in loans or investments from VTB and a subsidiary, VTB Capital. The current state of the debt is unclear, though one document suggests it was discharged in 2010.

Mr. Cohen created Essential Consultants in Delaware less than two weeks before he completed his deal with Ms. Clifford, who is now contesting her contract with Mr. Cohen as invalid. Mr. Cohen initially said he paid her out of his own pocket by way of a home equity line of credit.

But last week, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York said that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen through several $35,000 monthly transactions that amounted to more than $400,000 — covering the payment to Ms. Clifford and, he said, other “incidental expenses.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 09, 2018, 04:20:30 AM: So the Mueller people who raided Cohen's office show the NYT Cohen's records and the Times of course prints this in the news the day after Schneiderma to get that off the front page and be able to replace it with more alleged Trump related scandal of a bribe.

How convenient. Are Cohen's records public knowledge for all to read?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 09, 2018, 07:40:32 AM: ccp: "How convenient. Are Cohen's records public knowledge for all to read?"

Good point! The Feds kick down the doors and now the whole world can see all his records?

The over-reach of swamp "law enforcement" and agenda media has political consequences - and the taking down of a President is a political matter.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 09, 2018, 08:13:10 AM: indeed.

the leak may well have come from Schneiderschmuck's office himself since Cohen case was turned over to him I believe. Call to NYT may have been the last thing he did before he vacated his office.

or maybe he had one of his slaves do it.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 09, 2018, 09:44:08 AM: Along those lines, it turns out the "redactions" are mostly to cover agency embarrassment, not privacy or national security concerns

Outrageous Redactions to the Russia Report
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/russia-report-redactions-cover-fbi-missteps/
----------------------
Wouldn't we want people free of deceptions and lies to investigate people for their deceptions and lies?

Why do they go more than a year without so much as an interim report to know why they are funded, continue to investigate, and what we are waiting for?

Mueller wants to get someone for something no matter the tactics required to do that and his staff wants to get Trump out no matter what he did or didn't do. By the time a report comes out, it will mean nothing.

If trump committed impeachable acts in the campaign, in the transition, in the early days of his Presidency, or before all of that, this is a year of our nation's history he shouldn't have been President. Make a report. If he didn't, get out of his way Mueller, you aren't his superior.

"What were you thinking when you fired Comey?" "How did you feel when you heard I was appointed?"

Mueller, how do you feel when you are dominating the news and wasting our time?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2018, 01:38:09 PM: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/seven-questions-answered-about-those-payments-to-michael-cohen?mbid=nl_Daily%20050918&CNDID=50142053&spMailingID=13475791&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1400829189&spReportId=MTQwMDgyOTE4OQS2
Title: Morris: The Clinton bribe to McCabe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2018, 09:04:27 AM: http://www.dickmorris.com/clintons-paid-mccabes-wife-run-senate-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
Title: Comey and Mueller coordinated testimony
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2018, 08:09:28 AM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/in-the-news/tom-fitton-comey-mueller-worked-together-testimony/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=on+the+air&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180511150828
Title: NRO: FBI Spy in Trump campaign?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2018, 07:25:38 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/did-fbi-have-spy-in-trump-presidential-campaign/
Title: Avenatti threatens to sue reporters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2018, 11:51:17 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stormy-daniels-lawyer-threatens-sue-reporters-digging-into-background/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Strzok-Page texts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2018, 08:39:15 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/strzok-page-texts-trump-russia-investigation-origins/
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy: Strzok-Page texts
Post by: G M on May 15, 2018, 11:52:00 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2018, 08:39:15 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/strzok-page-texts-trump-russia-investigation-origins/

The information being redacted is because it is embarrassing, not because it's classified. At least not most of it. Which is illegal. But, that's how the deep state rolls.
Title: Senate panel agrees with Intel assessment that Russians interferred for Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2018, 10:04:00 AM: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/387967-senate-panel-agrees-with-intel-assessment-on-russian-interference?userid=188403
Title: Crossfire Hurricane-- long and serious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2018, 11:41:23 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/crossfire-hurricane-trump-russia-fbi-mueller-investigation.html?nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193ries&ref=cta
Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Top Secret Origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump Investigation

Days after the F.B.I. closed its investigation into Hillary Clinton in 2016, agents began scrutinizing the presidential campaign of her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump.CreditAl Drago for The New York Times
By Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos
May 16, 2018

WASHINGTON — Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia 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 name, a reference to the Rolling Stones lyric “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” was an apt prediction of a political storm that continues to tear shingles off the bureau. Days after they closed their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, agents began scrutinizing the campaign of her Republican rival. The two cases have become inextricably linked in one of the most consequential periods in the history of the F.B.I.

This month, the Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the findings of its lengthy review of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Clinton case. The results are certain to renew debate over decisions by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to publicly chastise Mrs. Clinton in a news conference, and then announce the reopening of the investigation days before Election Day. Mrs. Clinton has said those actions buried her presidential hopes.

Those decisions stand in contrast to the F.B.I.’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation but risked revealing the existence of the case. Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act. When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy.

Fearful of leaks, they kept details from political appointees across the street at the Justice Department. Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent, explained in a text that Justice Department officials would find it too “tasty” to resist sharing. “I’m not worried about our side,” he wrote.

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.

The facts, had they surfaced, might have devastated the Trump campaign: Mr. Trump’s future national security adviser was under investigation, as was his campaign chairman. One adviser appeared to have Russian intelligence contacts. Another was suspected of being a Russian agent himself.

In the Clinton case, Mr. Comey has said he erred on the side of transparency. But in the face of questions from Congress about the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. declined to tip its hand. And when The New York Times tried to assess the state of the investigation in October 2016, law enforcement officials cautioned against drawing any conclusions, resulting in a story that significantly played down the case.

Mr. Comey has said it is unfair to compare the Clinton case, which was winding down in the summer of 2016, with the Russia case, which was in its earliest stages. He said he did not make political considerations about who would benefit from each decision.

But underpinning both cases was one political calculation: that Mrs. Clinton would win and Mr. Trump would lose. Agents feared being seen as withholding information or going too easy on her. And they worried that any overt actions against Mr. Trump’s campaign would only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him.
The F.B.I. now faces those very criticisms and more. Mr. Trump says he is the victim of a politicized F.B.I. He says senior agents tried to rig the election by declining to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, then drummed up the Russia investigation to undermine his presidency. He has declared that a deeply rooted cabal — including his own appointees — is working against him.

That argument is the heart of Mr. Trump’s grievances with the federal investigation. In the face of bipartisan support for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Trump and his allies have made a priority of questioning how the investigation was conducted in late 2016 and trying to discredit it.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Mr. Trump said last month on Fox News. “And they know that, and I’ve been able to message it.”

Congressional Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, have begun to dig into F.B.I. files, looking for evidence that could undermine the investigation. Much remains unknown and classified. But those who saw the investigation up close, and many of those who have reviewed case files in the past year, say that far from gunning for Mr. Trump, the F.B.I. could actually have done more in the final months of 2016 to scrutinize his campaign’s Russia ties.

“I never saw anything that resembled a witch hunt or suggested that the bureau’s approach to the investigation was politically driven,” said Mary McCord, a 20-year Justice Department veteran and the top national security prosecutor during much of the investigation’s first nine months.

Crossfire Hurricane spawned a case that has brought charges against former Trump campaign officials and more than a dozen Russians. But in the final months of 2016, agents faced great uncertainty — about the facts, and how to respond.

Anxiety at the Bureau

Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. “I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,” Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.

The mood in early meetings was anxious, former officials recalled. Agents had just closed the Clinton investigation, and they braced for months of Republican-led hearings over why she was not charged. Crossfire Hurricane was built around the same core of agents and analysts who had investigated Mrs. Clinton. None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when agents did not know what would come of the Australian information.

The question they confronted still persists: Was anyone in the Trump campaign tied to Russian efforts to undermine the election?

The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. Each was scrutinized because of his obvious or suspected Russian ties.

[Here are the key themes, dates and characters in the Russia investigation]

Mr. Flynn, a top adviser, was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Manafort, the campaign chairman, had lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, was well known to the F.B.I. He had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign.

Lastly, there was Mr. Papadopoulos, the young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton. But even if the F.B.I. had wanted to read his emails or intercept his calls, that evidence was not enough to allow it. Many months passed, former officials said, before the F.B.I. uncovered emails linking Mr. Papadopoulos to a Russian intelligence operation.

Mr. Trump was not under investigation, but his actions perplexed the agents. Days after the stolen Democratic emails became public, he called on Russia to uncover more. Then news broke that Mr. Trump’s campaign had pushed to change the Republican platform’s stance on Ukraine in ways favorable to Russia.

The F.B.I.’s thinking crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey showing that the Russian government was behind an attack on the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation. The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently, three officials said.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said that after studying the investigation as a member the Senate Intelligence Committee, he saw no evidence of political motivation in the opening of the investigation.

“There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he said in an interview. “That’s

Abounding Criticism

Looking back, some inside the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say that Mr. Comey should have seen the political storm coming and better sheltered the bureau. They question why he consolidated the Clinton and Trump investigations at headquarters, rather than in a field office. And they say he should not have relied on the same team for both cases. That put a bull’s-eye on the heart of the F.B.I. Any misstep in either investigation made both cases, and the entire bureau, vulnerable to criticism.

And there were missteps. Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, was cited by internal investigators for dishonesty about his conversations with reporters about Mrs. Clinton. That gave ammunition for Mr. Trump’s claims that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted. And Mr. Strzok and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. lawyer, exchanged texts criticizing Mr. Trump, allowing the president to point to evidence of bias when they became public.

The messages were unsparing. They questioned Mr. Trump’s intelligence, believed he promoted intolerance and feared he would damage the bureau.

The inspector general’s upcoming report is expected to criticize those messages for giving the appearance of bias. It is not clear, however, whether inspectors found evidence supporting Mr. Trump’s assertion that agents tried to protect Mrs. Clinton, a claim the F.B.I. has adamantly denied.

Mr. Rubio, who has reviewed many of the texts and case files, said he saw no signs that the F.B.I. wanted to undermine Mr. Trump. “There might have been individual agents that had views that, in hindsight, have been problematic for those agents,” Mr. Rubio said. “But whether that was a systemic effort, I’ve seen no evidence of it.”
Mr. Trump’s daily Twitter posts, though, offer sound-bite-sized accusations — witch hunt, hoax, deep state, rigged system — that fan the flames of conspiracy. Capitol Hill allies reliably echo those comments.

“It’s like the deep state all got together to try to orchestrate a palace coup,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said in January on Fox Business Network.
Cautious Intelligence Gathering

Counterintelligence investigations can take years, but if the Russian government had influence over the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. wanted to know quickly. One option was the most direct: interview the campaign officials about their Russian contacts.

That was discussed but not acted on, two former officials said, because interviewing witnesses or subpoenaing documents might thrust the investigation into public view, exactly what F.B.I. officials were trying to avoid during the heat of the presidential race.

“You do not take actions that will unnecessarily impact an election,” Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general, said in an interview. She would not discuss details, but added, “Folks were very careful to make sure that actions that were being taken in connection with that investigation did not become public.”

Mr. Comey was briefed regularly on the Russia investigation, but one official said those briefings focused mostly on hacking and election interference. The Crossfire Hurricane team did not present many crucial decisions for Mr. Comey to make. Top officials became convinced that there was almost no chance they would answer the question of collusion before Election Day. And that made agents even more cautious.

The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. That has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.

Looking back, some at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. now believe that agents could have been more aggressive. They ultimately interviewed Mr. Papadopoulos in January 2017 and managed to keep it a secret, suggesting they could have done so much earlier.

“There is always a high degree of caution before taking overt steps in a counterintelligence investigation,” said Ms. McCord, who would not discuss details of the case. “And that could have worked to the president’s benefit here.”

Such tactical discussions are reflected in one of Mr. Strzok’s most controversial texts, sent on Aug. 15, 2016, after a meeting in Mr. McCabe’s office.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected,” Mr. Strzok wrote, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

Mr. Trump says that message revealed a secret F.B.I. plan to respond to his election. “‘We’ll go to Phase 2 and we’ll get this guy out of office,’” he told The Wall Street Journal. “This is the F.B.I. we’re talking about — that is treason.”

But officials have told the inspector general something quite different. They said Ms. Page and others advocated a slower, circumspect pace, especially because polls predicted Mr. Trump’s defeat. They said that anything the F.B.I. did publicly would only give fodder to Mr. Trump’s claims on the campaign trail that the election was rigged.

Mr. Strzok countered that even if Mr. Trump’s chances of victory were low — like dying before 40 — the stakes were too high to justify inaction.

Mr. Strzok had similarly argued for a more aggressive path during the Clinton investigation, according to four current and former officials. He opposed the Justice Department’s decision to offer Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers immunity and negotiate access to her hard drives, the officials said. Mr. Strzok favored using search warrants or subpoenas instead.

In both cases, his argument lost.

Policy and Tradition

The F.B.I. bureaucracy did agents no favors. In July, a retired British spy named Christopher Steele approached a friend in the F.B.I. overseas and provided reports linking Trump campaign officials to Russia. But the documents meandered around the F.B.I. organizational chart, former officials said. Only in mid-September, congressional investigators say, did the records reach the Crossfire Hurricane team.

Mr. Steele was gathering information about Mr. Trump as a private investigator for Fusion GPS, a firm paid by Democrats. But he was also considered highly credible, having helped agents unravel complicated cases.

In October, agents flew to Europe to interview him. But Mr. Steele had become frustrated by the F.B.I.’s slow response. He began sharing his findings in September and October with journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, according to congressional testimony.

So as agents tried to corroborate Mr. Steele’s information, reporters began calling the bureau, asking about his findings. If the F.B.I. was working against Mr. Trump, as he asserts, this was an opportunity to push embarrassing information into the news media shortly before the election.

That did not happen. News organizations did not publish Mr. Steele’s reports or reveal the F.B.I.’s interest in them until after Election Day.

Congress was also increasingly asking questions. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, had briefed top lawmakers that summer about Russian election interference and intelligence that Moscow supported the Trump campaign — a finding that would not become public for months. Lawmakers clamored for information from Mr. Comey, who refused to answer public questions.

Many Democrats see rueful irony in this moment. Mr. Comey, after all, broke with policy and twice publicly discussed the Clinton investigation. Yet he refused repeated requests to discuss the Trump investigation. Mr. Comey has said he regrets his decision to chastise Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless,” even as he announced that she should not be charged. But he stands by his decision to alert Congress, days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton inquiry.

The result, though, is that Mr. Comey broke with both policy and tradition in Mrs. Clinton’s case, but hewed closely to the rules for Mr. Trump. Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that alone proves Mr. Trump’s claims of unfairness to be “both deeply at odds with the facts, and damaging to our democracy.”

Spying in Question

Crossfire Hurricane began with a focus on four campaign officials. But by mid-fall 2016, Mr. Page’s inquiry had progressed the furthest. Agents had known Mr. Page for years. Russian spies tried to recruit him in 2013, and he was dismissive when agents warned him about it, a half-dozen current and former officials said. That warning even made its way back to Russian intelligence, leaving agents suspecting that Mr. Page had reported their efforts to Moscow.

Relying on F.B.I. information and Mr. Steele’s, prosecutors obtained court approval to eavesdrop on Mr. Page, who was no longer with the Trump campaign.

That warrant has become deeply contentious and is crucial to Republican arguments that intelligence agencies improperly used Democratic research to help justify spying on the Trump campaign. The inspector general is reviewing that claim.

Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, signed the first warrant application. But subsequent filings were approved by members of Mr. Trump’s own administration: the acting attorney general, Dana J. Boente, and then Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
“Folks are very, very careful and serious about that process,” Ms. Yates said. “I don’t know of anything that gives me any concerns.”

After months of investigation, Mr. Papadopoulos remained largely a puzzle. And agents were nearly ready to close their investigation of Mr. Flynn, according to three current and former officials. (Mr. Flynn rekindled the F.B.I.’s interest in November 2016 by signing an op-ed article that appeared to be written on behalf of the Turkish government, and then making phone calls to the Russian ambassador that December.)

In late October, in response to questions from The Times, law enforcement officials acknowledged the investigation but urged restraint. They said they had scrutinized some of Mr. Trump’s advisers but had found no proof of any involvement with Russian hacking. The resulting article, on Oct. 31, reflected that caution and said that agents had uncovered no “conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”

The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.

A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning. Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day.

Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times.

For Mr. Steele, it dashed his confidence in American law enforcement. “He didn’t know what was happening inside the F.B.I.,” Glenn R. Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, testified this year. “And there was a concern that the F.B.I. was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people.”

Assurances Amid Doubt

Two weeks before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, senior American intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Russian hacking and deception. They reported that Mr. Putin had tried to sow chaos in the election, undermine Mrs. Clinton and ultimately help Mr. Trump win.

Then Mr. Comey met with Mr. Trump privately, revealing the Steele reports and warning that journalists had obtained them. Mr. Comey has said he feared making this conversation a “J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,” with the F.B.I. presenting embarrassing information to lord over a president-elect.

In a contemporaneous memo, Mr. Comey wrote that he assured Mr. Trump that the F.B.I. intended to protect him on this point. “I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Mr. Comey wrote of Mr. Steele’s documents. “I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the F.B.I. had the material.”

Mr. Trump was not convinced — either by the Russia briefing or by Mr. Comey’s assurances. He made up his mind before Mr. Comey even walked in the door. Hours earlier, Mr. Trump told The Times that stories about Russian election interference were being pushed by his adversaries to distract from his victory.

And he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: “This is a political witch hunt.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matthew Rosenberg.
Follow Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos Twitter: @adamgoldmanNYT and @npfandos.
Title: Re: Crossfire Hurricane-- long and serious
Post by: G M on May 17, 2018, 12:32:17 PM: http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/17/10-key-takeaways-from-new-york-times-error-ridden-defense-of-fbi-spying-on-trump-campaign/

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2018, 11:41:23 AM

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/crossfire-hurricane-trump-russia-fbi-mueller-investigation.html?nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193ries&ref=cta
Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Top Secret Origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump Investigation

Days after the F.B.I. closed its investigation into Hillary Clinton in 2016, agents began scrutinizing the presidential campaign of her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump.CreditAl Drago for The New York Times
By Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos
May 16, 2018

WASHINGTON — Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia 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 name, a reference to the Rolling Stones lyric “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” was an apt prediction of a political storm that continues to tear shingles off the bureau. Days after they closed their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, agents began scrutinizing the campaign of her Republican rival. The two cases have become inextricably linked in one of the most consequential periods in the history of the F.B.I.

This month, the Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the findings of its lengthy review of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Clinton case. The results are certain to renew debate over decisions by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to publicly chastise Mrs. Clinton in a news conference, and then announce the reopening of the investigation days before Election Day. Mrs. Clinton has said those actions buried her presidential hopes.

Those decisions stand in contrast to the F.B.I.’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation but risked revealing the existence of the case. Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act. When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy.

Fearful of leaks, they kept details from political appointees across the street at the Justice Department. Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent, explained in a text that Justice Department officials would find it too “tasty” to resist sharing. “I’m not worried about our side,” he wrote.

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.

The facts, had they surfaced, might have devastated the Trump campaign: Mr. Trump’s future national security adviser was under investigation, as was his campaign chairman. One adviser appeared to have Russian intelligence contacts. Another was suspected of being a Russian agent himself.

In the Clinton case, Mr. Comey has said he erred on the side of transparency. But in the face of questions from Congress about the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. declined to tip its hand. And when The New York Times tried to assess the state of the investigation in October 2016, law enforcement officials cautioned against drawing any conclusions, resulting in a story that significantly played down the case.

Mr. Comey has said it is unfair to compare the Clinton case, which was winding down in the summer of 2016, with the Russia case, which was in its earliest stages. He said he did not make political considerations about who would benefit from each decision.

But underpinning both cases was one political calculation: that Mrs. Clinton would win and Mr. Trump would lose. Agents feared being seen as withholding information or going too easy on her. And they worried that any overt actions against Mr. Trump’s campaign would only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him.
The F.B.I. now faces those very criticisms and more. Mr. Trump says he is the victim of a politicized F.B.I. He says senior agents tried to rig the election by declining to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, then drummed up the Russia investigation to undermine his presidency. He has declared that a deeply rooted cabal — including his own appointees — is working against him.

That argument is the heart of Mr. Trump’s grievances with the federal investigation. In the face of bipartisan support for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Trump and his allies have made a priority of questioning how the investigation was conducted in late 2016 and trying to discredit it.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Mr. Trump said last month on Fox News. “And they know that, and I’ve been able to message it.”

Congressional Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, have begun to dig into F.B.I. files, looking for evidence that could undermine the investigation. Much remains unknown and classified. But those who saw the investigation up close, and many of those who have reviewed case files in the past year, say that far from gunning for Mr. Trump, the F.B.I. could actually have done more in the final months of 2016 to scrutinize his campaign’s Russia ties.

“I never saw anything that resembled a witch hunt or suggested that the bureau’s approach to the investigation was politically driven,” said Mary McCord, a 20-year Justice Department veteran and the top national security prosecutor during much of the investigation’s first nine months.

Crossfire Hurricane spawned a case that has brought charges against former Trump campaign officials and more than a dozen Russians. But in the final months of 2016, agents faced great uncertainty — about the facts, and how to respond.

Anxiety at the Bureau

Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. “I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,” Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.

The mood in early meetings was anxious, former officials recalled. Agents had just closed the Clinton investigation, and they braced for months of Republican-led hearings over why she was not charged. Crossfire Hurricane was built around the same core of agents and analysts who had investigated Mrs. Clinton. None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when agents did not know what would come of the Australian information.

The question they confronted still persists: Was anyone in the Trump campaign tied to Russian efforts to undermine the election?

The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. Each was scrutinized because of his obvious or suspected Russian ties.

[Here are the key themes, dates and characters in the Russia investigation]

Mr. Flynn, a top adviser, was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Manafort, the campaign chairman, had lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, was well known to the F.B.I. He had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign.

Lastly, there was Mr. Papadopoulos, the young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton. But even if the F.B.I. had wanted to read his emails or intercept his calls, that evidence was not enough to allow it. Many months passed, former officials said, before the F.B.I. uncovered emails linking Mr. Papadopoulos to a Russian intelligence operation.

Mr. Trump was not under investigation, but his actions perplexed the agents. Days after the stolen Democratic emails became public, he called on Russia to uncover more. Then news broke that Mr. Trump’s campaign had pushed to change the Republican platform’s stance on Ukraine in ways favorable to Russia.

The F.B.I.’s thinking crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey showing that the Russian government was behind an attack on the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation. The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently, three officials said.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said that after studying the investigation as a member the Senate Intelligence Committee, he saw no evidence of political motivation in the opening of the investigation.

“There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he said in an interview. “That’s

Abounding Criticism

Looking back, some inside the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say that Mr. Comey should have seen the political storm coming and better sheltered the bureau. They question why he consolidated the Clinton and Trump investigations at headquarters, rather than in a field office. And they say he should not have relied on the same team for both cases. That put a bull’s-eye on the heart of the F.B.I. Any misstep in either investigation made both cases, and the entire bureau, vulnerable to criticism.

And there were missteps. Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, was cited by internal investigators for dishonesty about his conversations with reporters about Mrs. Clinton. That gave ammunition for Mr. Trump’s claims that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted. And Mr. Strzok and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. lawyer, exchanged texts criticizing Mr. Trump, allowing the president to point to evidence of bias when they became public.

The messages were unsparing. They questioned Mr. Trump’s intelligence, believed he promoted intolerance and feared he would damage the bureau.

The inspector general’s upcoming report is expected to criticize those messages for giving the appearance of bias. It is not clear, however, whether inspectors found evidence supporting Mr. Trump’s assertion that agents tried to protect Mrs. Clinton, a claim the F.B.I. has adamantly denied.

Mr. Rubio, who has reviewed many of the texts and case files, said he saw no signs that the F.B.I. wanted to undermine Mr. Trump. “There might have been individual agents that had views that, in hindsight, have been problematic for those agents,” Mr. Rubio said. “But whether that was a systemic effort, I’ve seen no evidence of it.”
Mr. Trump’s daily Twitter posts, though, offer sound-bite-sized accusations — witch hunt, hoax, deep state, rigged system — that fan the flames of conspiracy. Capitol Hill allies reliably echo those comments.

“It’s like the deep state all got together to try to orchestrate a palace coup,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said in January on Fox Business Network.
Cautious Intelligence Gathering

Counterintelligence investigations can take years, but if the Russian government had influence over the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. wanted to know quickly. One option was the most direct: interview the campaign officials about their Russian contacts.

That was discussed but not acted on, two former officials said, because interviewing witnesses or subpoenaing documents might thrust the investigation into public view, exactly what F.B.I. officials were trying to avoid during the heat of the presidential race.

“You do not take actions that will unnecessarily impact an election,” Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general, said in an interview. She would not discuss details, but added, “Folks were very careful to make sure that actions that were being taken in connection with that investigation did not become public.”

Mr. Comey was briefed regularly on the Russia investigation, but one official said those briefings focused mostly on hacking and election interference. The Crossfire Hurricane team did not present many crucial decisions for Mr. Comey to make. Top officials became convinced that there was almost no chance they would answer the question of collusion before Election Day. And that made agents even more cautious.

The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. That has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.

Looking back, some at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. now believe that agents could have been more aggressive. They ultimately interviewed Mr. Papadopoulos in January 2017 and managed to keep it a secret, suggesting they could have done so much earlier.

“There is always a high degree of caution before taking overt steps in a counterintelligence investigation,” said Ms. McCord, who would not discuss details of the case. “And that could have worked to the president’s benefit here.”

Such tactical discussions are reflected in one of Mr. Strzok’s most controversial texts, sent on Aug. 15, 2016, after a meeting in Mr. McCabe’s office.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected,” Mr. Strzok wrote, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

Mr. Trump says that message revealed a secret F.B.I. plan to respond to his election. “‘We’ll go to Phase 2 and we’ll get this guy out of office,’” he told The Wall Street Journal. “This is the F.B.I. we’re talking about — that is treason.”

But officials have told the inspector general something quite different. They said Ms. Page and others advocated a slower, circumspect pace, especially because polls predicted Mr. Trump’s defeat. They said that anything the F.B.I. did publicly would only give fodder to Mr. Trump’s claims on the campaign trail that the election was rigged.

Mr. Strzok countered that even if Mr. Trump’s chances of victory were low — like dying before 40 — the stakes were too high to justify inaction.

Mr. Strzok had similarly argued for a more aggressive path during the Clinton investigation, according to four current and former officials. He opposed the Justice Department’s decision to offer Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers immunity and negotiate access to her hard drives, the officials said. Mr. Strzok favored using search warrants or subpoenas instead.

In both cases, his argument lost.

Policy and Tradition

The F.B.I. bureaucracy did agents no favors. In July, a retired British spy named Christopher Steele approached a friend in the F.B.I. overseas and provided reports linking Trump campaign officials to Russia. But the documents meandered around the F.B.I. organizational chart, former officials said. Only in mid-September, congressional investigators say, did the records reach the Crossfire Hurricane team.

Mr. Steele was gathering information about Mr. Trump as a private investigator for Fusion GPS, a firm paid by Democrats. But he was also considered highly credible, having helped agents unravel complicated cases.

In October, agents flew to Europe to interview him. But Mr. Steele had become frustrated by the F.B.I.’s slow response. He began sharing his findings in September and October with journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, according to congressional testimony.

So as agents tried to corroborate Mr. Steele’s information, reporters began calling the bureau, asking about his findings. If the F.B.I. was working against Mr. Trump, as he asserts, this was an opportunity to push embarrassing information into the news media shortly before the election.

That did not happen. News organizations did not publish Mr. Steele’s reports or reveal the F.B.I.’s interest in them until after Election Day.

Congress was also increasingly asking questions. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, had briefed top lawmakers that summer about Russian election interference and intelligence that Moscow supported the Trump campaign — a finding that would not become public for months. Lawmakers clamored for information from Mr. Comey, who refused to answer public questions.

Many Democrats see rueful irony in this moment. Mr. Comey, after all, broke with policy and twice publicly discussed the Clinton investigation. Yet he refused repeated requests to discuss the Trump investigation. Mr. Comey has said he regrets his decision to chastise Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless,” even as he announced that she should not be charged. But he stands by his decision to alert Congress, days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton inquiry.

The result, though, is that Mr. Comey broke with both policy and tradition in Mrs. Clinton’s case, but hewed closely to the rules for Mr. Trump. Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that alone proves Mr. Trump’s claims of unfairness to be “both deeply at odds with the facts, and damaging to our democracy.”

Spying in Question

Crossfire Hurricane began with a focus on four campaign officials. But by mid-fall 2016, Mr. Page’s inquiry had progressed the furthest. Agents had known Mr. Page for years. Russian spies tried to recruit him in 2013, and he was dismissive when agents warned him about it, a half-dozen current and former officials said. That warning even made its way back to Russian intelligence, leaving agents suspecting that Mr. Page had reported their efforts to Moscow.

Relying on F.B.I. information and Mr. Steele’s, prosecutors obtained court approval to eavesdrop on Mr. Page, who was no longer with the Trump campaign.

That warrant has become deeply contentious and is crucial to Republican arguments that intelligence agencies improperly used Democratic research to help justify spying on the Trump campaign. The inspector general is reviewing that claim.

Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, signed the first warrant application. But subsequent filings were approved by members of Mr. Trump’s own administration: the acting attorney general, Dana J. Boente, and then Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
“Folks are very, very careful and serious about that process,” Ms. Yates said. “I don’t know of anything that gives me any concerns.”

After months of investigation, Mr. Papadopoulos remained largely a puzzle. And agents were nearly ready to close their investigation of Mr. Flynn, according to three current and former officials. (Mr. Flynn rekindled the F.B.I.’s interest in November 2016 by signing an op-ed article that appeared to be written on behalf of the Turkish government, and then making phone calls to the Russian ambassador that December.)

In late October, in response to questions from The Times, law enforcement officials acknowledged the investigation but urged restraint. They said they had scrutinized some of Mr. Trump’s advisers but had found no proof of any involvement with Russian hacking. The resulting article, on Oct. 31, reflected that caution and said that agents had uncovered no “conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”

The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.

A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning. Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day.

Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times.

For Mr. Steele, it dashed his confidence in American law enforcement. “He didn’t know what was happening inside the F.B.I.,” Glenn R. Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, testified this year. “And there was a concern that the F.B.I. was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people.”

Assurances Amid Doubt

Two weeks before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, senior American intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Russian hacking and deception. They reported that Mr. Putin had tried to sow chaos in the election, undermine Mrs. Clinton and ultimately help Mr. Trump win.

Then Mr. Comey met with Mr. Trump privately, revealing the Steele reports and warning that journalists had obtained them. Mr. Comey has said he feared making this conversation a “J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,” with the F.B.I. presenting embarrassing information to lord over a president-elect.

In a contemporaneous memo, Mr. Comey wrote that he assured Mr. Trump that the F.B.I. intended to protect him on this point. “I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Mr. Comey wrote of Mr. Steele’s documents. “I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the F.B.I. had the material.”

Mr. Trump was not convinced — either by the Russia briefing or by Mr. Comey’s assurances. He made up his mind before Mr. Comey even walked in the door. Hours earlier, Mr. Trump told The Times that stories about Russian election interference were being pushed by his adversaries to distract from his victory.

And he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: “This is a political witch hunt.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matthew Rosenberg.
Follow Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos Twitter: @adamgoldmanNYT and @npfandos.
Title: Re: Senate panel agrees with Intel assessment that Russians interferred for Trump
Post by: DougMacG on May 17, 2018, 03:08:16 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2018, 10:04:00 AM
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/387967-senate-panel-agrees-with-intel-assessment-on-russian-interference?userid=188403

My understanding is that Putin/Russians intervened for the purpose of weakening the support of presumed President Hillary Clinton, not that they wanted other candidates like Sanders and Trump to win.

If they preferred Trump then, they regret it now.

While media and Democrats obsess about Russia, isn't China a bigger threat - on cyber war and overall?

Under which President's watch did this Russian security failure occur? (Obama) We lost a battle in a crucial war. Who in the intelligence community lost their job over that?
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Pravda On The Hudson buries lede
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2018, 06:27:59 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/crossfire-hurricane-new-york-times-report-buries-lede/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-05-17&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Criminal investigation vs. Counter Intel Investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2018, 11:44:25 AM: https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/17/qa-with-andrew-mccarthy-a-sitting-president-cant-be-indicted/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell%22&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RVNU56Y3daalk0T1RZMyIsInQiOiJaWE91T3FJRTdRRk1wV0s0UU1aaEM1WWtHa2pHRFFYQkhDVHdIUU1rdER1VzhuckdtTmZXK3A3Um1BV1wvYkxiUlMrY05ZUklhWlN2Y1FwTUlSazJFblZ4RmtVbEYwT2JtYVd1NVBvWCtseGNIbEhzTG1aY05yMVJyR1pZM2EzT1IifQ%3D%3D
Title: Judicial Watch: Mueller avoids the Podesta- Ukraine/Russia connection
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2018, 06:22:46 PM: Those of us who have been watching the Mueller Circus avoid the real collusion with Russia are no longer surprised when we see even more hypocrisy oozing from the Swamp.

Consider:

We just uncovered new documents from the U.S. Department of State showing the Podesta Group working on behalf of the pro-Russia Ukrainian political group “Party of Regions.” The documents also show then-Obama White House Counsel John Podesta lobbying on behalf of his brother’s firm.

We obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department filed on November 20, 2017, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:17-cv-02489)). The lawsuit was filed after the State Department failed to respond to a September 13, 2017, FOIA request for:
•   All records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any principal, employee, or representative of Podesta Group, Inc.
•   All records produced related to any meetings or telephonic communications between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any principal, employee, or representative of Podesta Group, Inc.
•   All records regarding the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.
•   The FOIA request covers the timeframe of January 1, 2012 to the present.
A March 28, 2013, email from now-Deputy Executive Secretary in the Office of the Secretary of State Baxter Hunt shows the Podesta Group, led by Tony Podesta, a Clinton bundler and brother of Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta, represented the Party of Regions, a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

In the March 2013 email, to a number of officials including then-U.S. Foreign Service Officer John Tefft (who would go on to be U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 2014) and State Department Director for the Office of Eastern Europe Alexander Kasanof, Hunt writes:

See below, I also stressed to them the need for GOU to take concrete steps to get new SBA with IMF and avoid PFC/loss of GSP. Podesta Group is noted among host of Ukraine lobbyists in article I’ll forward in article on low side.

Ben Chang and Mark Tavlarides of the Podesta Group, which is representing the Party of Regions, told us they were working with Klyuyev on a visit he plans to make to Washington in early May. They are working to broaden the POR’s contacts on the Hill, including setting up a meeting for Klyuyev with Chris Smith, and have advised Kyiv to stop trying to justify their actions against Tymoshenko in Washington. They also noted that during his recent meeting with former EC President Prodi, HFAC Chairman Ed Royce said that Congress would not be enacting sanctions legislation against Ukraine.

The Party of Regions served as the pro-Kremlin political base for Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014.

Like Paul Manafort, who is currently under indictment in the errant special counsel Russia investigation, the Podesta Group had to retroactively file Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosures with the Justice Department for Ukrainian-related work. The filing states that the Podesta group provided for the nonprofit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine “government relations and public relations services within the United States and Europe to promote political and economic cooperation between Ukraine and the West. The [Podesta Group] conducted outreach to congressional and executive branch offices, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations and think tanks.” Unlike Manafort and his partner Rick Gates, the Mueller special counsel operation hasn’t indicted anyone from the Podesta Group.

Also, the new emails show efforts to secure a maintenance facility from Jet Blue and Lufthansa for Puerto Rico.

In a June 27, 2013, email former U.S. Ambassador to Germany and current New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy writes to John Podesta, Minister-Counselor for Economic Affairs at the American Embassy in Berlin Seth Winnick, and others:
Jet Blue and Lufthansa are considering 2 locations for a maintenance center - Puerto Rico or Mexico. The Governor of PR wants this badly. The question is can we get to LH at the right levels to make the case. Either John or colleague OR John’s brother Tony or colleague will get to us with more details.
Winnick then writes to John Podesta: “Washington alerted us to this advocacy issue and we are on it. Phil will try to connect in the next few days and we will follow up.”

Later that day, in an email sent to his brother Tony Podesta and Winnick, John Podesta writes: “Thanks Seth. The Governor is a friend of mine. My brother Tony represents Puerto Rico and will follow up with details.”

Winnick replies to John and Tony Podesta: “Happy to help on this one. I think we have the details we need for now from SelectUSA at Commerce but will come back if any issues arise.”

Puerto Rico was selected by the airlines for the facility to service A320s in 2014.

Judicial Watch is waiting to hear on any additional documents the State Department may produce in response to our Podesta Group FOIA lawsuit.

By the standards of the Mueller special counsel operation, these emails alone would have been enough for the Podestas to have been hauled before a grand jury or worse. These emails are a stark reminder that the Mueller’s special counsel operation seems more interested in the alleged foreign ties of the Trump team, rather than Hillary Clinton’s (and Barack Obama’s) associates.

Do you think Robert Mueller’s partisan prosecutors have even thought of looking into this? I had a few choice things to say about his spurious quest in this interview with Lou Dobbs. If and when we get more Podesta documents I’ll be updating you here.
Title: POTH: There was good reason for FBI informant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2018, 06:25:14 PM: Third post

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/politics/trump-fbi-informant-russia-investigation.html?emc=edit_na_20180518&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193ing-news&ref=cta
Title: Re: POTH: There was good reason for FBI informant
Post by: G M on May 18, 2018, 07:38:29 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2018, 06:25:14 PM
Third post

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/politics/trump-fbi-informant-russia-investigation.html?emc=edit_na_20180518&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193ing-news&ref=cta

Pissing on our legs and telling us it's raining!
Title: POTH goes after Trump Jr again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2018, 10:23:13 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/politics/trump-jr-saudi-uae-nader-prince-zamel.html?emc=edit_na_20180519&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193ing-news&ref=cta
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2018, 08:42:48 AM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/30864/doj-responds-trumps-demand-review-alleged-spying-ryan-saavedra?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=052118-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: Office of Legal Council Opinions-- hat tip to our Big Dog
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2018, 12:09:03 PM: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/2000/10/31/op-olc-v024-p0222_0.pdf

https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinions

https://www.lawfareblog.com/mueller-bound-olcs-memos-presidential-immunity
Title: Podesta Group worked for pro Russia Ukrainian Party
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2018, 12:36:55 PM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-obtains-emails-showing-podesta-groups-work-pro-russia-ukrainian-political-party/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180521192332
Title: Clinton pollster calls for an end to Mueller investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2018, 03:13:23 PM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/former-clinton-pollster-calls-for-end-to-the-mueller-partisan-inquisition/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=May2018
Title: Why no hacking indictment?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2018, 07:33:40 AM: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/388707-mystery-in-mueller-probe-wheres-the-hacking-indictment?userid=188403
Title: CNN-FBI collusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2018, 02:38:01 PM: second post

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/21/breaking-e-mails-show-fbi-brass-discussed-dossier-briefing-details-cnn/#.WwQHDhpLshB.twitter
Title: yes I know its Brietbart
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2018, 12:22:06 PM: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/23/fbi-agents-eager-blow-whistle-comey-holder-lynch-mccabe/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2018, 12:44:25 PM: http://dailycaller.com/2018/05/22/fbi-agents-congress-subpoenas/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Smoke begins to clear, noose begins to tighten
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2018, 10:25:45 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-russia-investigation-obama-administration-origins/
Title: Michael Cohen looking swampy?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2018, 10:27:56 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/us/politics/michael-cohen-viktor-vekselberg-trump-tower.html?nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193ries&ref=cta
Title: 21 minutes of Cong. Gohmert on history of Mueller's career
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2018, 10:39:39 AM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/video-update/inside-judicial-watch-mueller-unmasked-featuring-congressman-louie-gohmert/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=action+alert&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180524223636
Title: Jonah Goldberg: They may not have colluded but they did want to
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2018, 02:28:35 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/hedges-garden-liberty-virtue-shame-constitution/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180525_G-File&utm_term=GFile
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 25, 2018, 06:11:48 PM: Ok Trump et al wanted to collude with the Russians .

My question is when and by how much is collusion with any foreigner become an issue?

One we know that the collusion was to get TRUE And FACTUAL "dirt" on Hillary . Wikileaks had emails that exposed real corruption from Hillary , her campaign, some of her lawyers , Obama (who knew she had her own server ) and the rest.

So should Trump have ignored that ?

What about team Hillary financing Brits to find dirt on Trump and using that though NONE of it confirmed?

Why is one perfectly "normal " opposition research and the other a collusion?

Does anyone for a single second think the Dems would not have used any real factual corruption on any Republican ever?
Give me an example Mr Goldberg.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2018, 06:55:27 PM: Well reasoned and well said.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: G M on May 25, 2018, 08:40:25 PM: Remember, journalists as a group are clueless dumbasses, in general. The use of the word collusion gives the impression that it’s an actual crime, however there is no such crime in existence in US code.

Quote from: ccp on May 25, 2018, 06:11:48 PM
Ok Trump et al wanted to collude with the Russians .

My question is when and by how much is collusion with any foreigner become an issue?

One we know that the collusion was to get TRUE And FACTUAL "dirt" on Hillary . Wikileaks had emails that exposed real corruption from Hillary , her campaign, some of her lawyers , Obama (who knew she had her own server ) and the rest.

So should Trump have ignored that ?

What about team Hillary financing Brits to find dirt on Trump and using that though NONE of it confirmed?

Why is one perfectly "normal " opposition research and the other a collusion?

Does anyone for a single second think the Dems would not have used any real factual corruption on any Republican ever?
Give me an example Mr Goldberg.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 26, 2018, 09:46:45 AM: " use of the word collusion gives the impression that it’s an actual crime, however there is no such crime in existence in US code."

Good point. Another Reason Jonah's argument does not work.

Like the crat word playing now - there was no "spy"

just "informants"

More evidence of Clintonesque like slimy word games that have made politics more corrupt then before.
Title: second post
Post by: ccp on May 26, 2018, 10:59:37 AM: Andrew McCarthy, "let's see the evidence":

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/obama-administration-politicized-intelligence-law-enforcement-apparatus/

Maybe Trump should order it all get released.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Desperate Times, Disparate Measures
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2018, 12:46:17 PM: As always, superior work by Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/clinton-email-trump-russia-probes-justice-department-double-standards/

Tom Vitton:

Obama knew https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=KPR2vfGn2e0
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on May 27, 2018, 03:56:16 AM: The reason they want to prove collusion is to prove a predicate to an ancillary crime like violations of FEC reg's; e.g., the Stormy Daniels trial balloon at that tactic. This is all part of a cover-up to hide the abuses of our counterintelligence powers committed by many members of the Obama administration during the 2016 campaign.

The timeline becomes important because if the counterintelligence investigation began in March-April 2016, then the original stories about Page and Papadopoulis fall apart. And the likely reason was Paul Manafort's involvement in the Trump campaign. From March-June 2016, Manafort led the effort to secure enough delegates to win the Republican nomination. But during that time, stories began to appear about his connections to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman only from mid-June to mid-August 2016. Manafort resigned August 19, 2016. And it was during this time that the first FISA application was made, the Steele dossier was first published, and the FBI counterintelligence investigation was launched.

What I think occurred is that some legitimate initial concerns about Manafort morphed into an excuse to spy on Trump's entire campaign - even after Manafort left on August 19th. But with Manafort having left the Trump campaign months before the election, the temptation to use these concerns as a pretext to abuse our national security apparatus became too great for many members of the Obama administration who wanted to keep their jobs under Clinton. So, they kept doubling down on their abuses of power and kept upping the alleged facts of Russian collusion in order to cover-up their own abuses of power. When Trump won the election, they decided to try and cover-up their own abuses of power by screaming Russian collusion and Manafort.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2018, 12:02:27 PM: Good seeing you here Rick!

"And it was during this time that the first FISA application was made, the Steele dossier was first published, and the FBI counterintelligence investigation was launched."

A timeline dots I had not connected.

If I have my timeline correct, the first FISA application was rejected (a court with a 98% approval rate, yes?) and it was not until the Steele psuedo-data was included that the warrant was approved.
Title: soft Coup timeline
Post by: G M on May 27, 2018, 12:24:07 PM: https://sharylattkisson.com/2018/05/20/collusion-against-trump-timeline/

Well worth studying.
Title: The Federalist: Ridiculous to say FBI spying was to protect Trump campaign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2018, 12:35:17 PM: http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/25/ridiculous-say-fbis-spying-trying-protect-trump-campaign/
Title: Very Interesting History/Timeline of Spygate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2018, 03:10:35 PM: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1000862125944864768.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2018, 07:01:23 AM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/clapper-disinformation-campaign-1527636194?shareToken=stf2e850f7a4014877872861dea31f0310&ref=article_email_share
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2018, 08:11:01 AM: one thing not mentioned is Clapper is very likely well paid as an "analyst"

don't think he is going on CNN for nothing.

What a scam. He has a self interest in bashing Trump so he loves to go on TV to do just that. CNN has decided they are at war with the POTUS so they love to have Clapper come on wearing his credentials thinking this gives them more gravitas in their 24/7 belittling of Trump et al.

So they are happy to pay him for his "expertise" and he gets paid to come on every time they need to fill a spot with an interviewer who will always be counted on bashing Trump

How perfect for all of them.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2018, 12:28:57 PM: Any thoughts on Gowdy's comments yesterday? (Sorry no citation at hand)
Title: Levin on Trey Gowdy
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2018, 06:45:19 PM: Is Gowdy looking for a job with MSM?
I agree with Levin, something is going on with Gowdy.

smells like rotten grouper to me.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-torches-trey-gowdys-defense-of-spygate/
Title: A McCarthy bashes Gowdy and Rubio today like Levin did to Gowdy
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2018, 04:58:48 AM: Could the Louisiana polls be right - Rubio is simply not that smart?

Gowdy must want a job either with the media or with the establishment:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-campaign-spying-obama-administration-investigation/

Gowdy's claims are just so preposterous - something is going on with that.
He sounds like Adam Schiff.
Title: Dershowitz "half persuaded " by Gowdy
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2018, 06:54:21 AM: https://www.newsmax.com/politics/alan-dershowitz-trey-gowdy-fbi-russia/2018/05/30/id/863152/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Gowdy is wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2018, 08:11:55 AM: We all liked Gowdy back during the days of the Benghazi investigation and when he was cross-examining Comey, but now , , , maybe in part he is just thinking like the DA that he used to be?

Regardless,, as usual Andrew McCarthy sets things straight:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-campaign-spying-obama-administration-investigation/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2018, 04:13:17 PM: Hi CD,

Yes I posted the McCarthy link on post 691

You may also check out post 690 where Mark Levin takes down Gowdy whose assessment is wrong on different levels.

Hard to explain Gowdy.

If he gets job in media we will know answer.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Gowdy, Rubio
Post by: DougMacG on June 01, 2018, 07:20:47 AM: "Gowdy said he thinks the president would have a different perspective if he was shown classified documents he and his colleagues were shown last week. "I think his lawyers have an obligation to share with him what Devin [Nunes] and Paul [Ryan] and I saw last week, I'm convinced when he sees it, he's going to say 'you know what, that's what I told [James] Comey I wanted the FBI to do."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trey-gowdy-says-fbi-has-obligation-to-run-out-leads-on-russian-interference/

My thoughts on Gowdy:
1. He knows something we don't know?
2. He is judging what they did with the information known then, outside the context of the information we know now, such as that Comey had an agenda, McCabe is a crook and Popadopolous and the rest of it was a setup.
3. Gowdy isn't properly separating a criminal investigation viewpoint from fighting espionage.
4. He has a heavy bias toward trusting investigators and prosecutors.

Rubio wants to separate himself from Trump and raise his own standing by siding the intelligence agencies.

I side with Andrew McCarthy as it sits so far with the caveat that we should mostly be taking a wait and see attitude when there is so much more information to be learned.

Here is proof positive that the FBI was not blindly following leads wherever it led them:
They have shown no real desire to see the hacked DNC servers.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-agency-requested-access-to-dnc-servers/
Where was that get-Manafort-at-all-costs, break-down-the-door-before-dawn enthusiasm and same for attorney Cohen when the DNC stonewalled the FBI denying them access to their hacked servers?

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/388507-trump-why-didnt-dnc-hand-over-hacked-server-to-fbi
"Then-FBI Director James Comey said last year that the DNC had denied the bureau’s requests to examine the breached servers."

A deplorable lack of curiosity.

"Comey said at the time that the FBI and DNC agreed to let a private firm access the servers and share the findings with investigators." Imagine the IRS or FBI "requests" your records and you deny them access, offer to have a private party view them and make a report. How far would that go?

Two systems of Justice, and Republicans in power can't get on the same page to fight it.
Title: The real reason-- interesting
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2018, 05:40:04 PM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-reason-why-the-fbi-had-a-spy-in-the-trump-campaign/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=June2018
Title: Not spying!
Post by: G M on June 01, 2018, 06:08:37 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/not%20spying.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/not%20spying.jpg)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2018, 07:12:34 PM: https://www.thenation.com/article/amid-russiagate-hysteria-what-are-the-facts/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Why the Spy
Post by: DougMacG on June 02, 2018, 05:48:01 AM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-reason-why-the-fbi-had-a-spy-in-the-trump-campaign/

How the threat should have been handled.
Title: Serious Read: Trump's legal team's letter to Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2018, 12:55:19 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/02/us/politics/trump-legal-documents.html
Title: Serious Read: The Maltese Phantom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2018, 12:56:11 PM: second post

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/26/the_maltese_phantom_of_russiagate_.html
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Papadopoulas case needs closer look
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2018, 12:41:54 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/george-papadopoulos-case-needs-closer-look/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-06-03&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Where was Obama on Russian spying?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2018, 12:44:46 PM: second post

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-russia-investigation-obama-administration-spying-hypocritical/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-06-03&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Gowdy, McCarthy
Post by: DougMacG on June 04, 2018, 09:53:42 AM: Gowdy: "The fact that two people who were loosely connected to the Trump campaign may have been involved doesn’t diminish the fact that Russia was the target and not the campaign."

McCarthy: "Gowdy is simply wrong when he says that the object here was to monitor the activities of a few tangential [people] that had kind of tenuous connections to the Trump campaign. It was said explicitly in congressional testimony a number of times by former Director Comey that the FBI was conducting an investigation of the Trump campaign for coordinating in Russia’s cyberespionage operation…”

Spy or informant? McCarthy: “The back and forth about whether it was a spy or an informant is beside the point….They’re government-controlled covert operatives who you send in to get information regardless of what you call them and the important thing always is why you sent them in, not what you call them…”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/the-spy-who-must-be-told.php
Title: Andrew McCarthy and David Limbaugh on Levin last night
Post by: ccp on June 04, 2018, 09:58:54 AM: In case you didn't see it this is part of it it appears:

http://www.foxnews.com/shows/life-liberty-levin.html

me: "Great One!"
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2018, 10:40:04 AM: Watch Levin's Sunday show every week!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 05, 2018, 04:18:22 AM: What was the code name for the counterintelligence efforts directed at Papadopoulis and others before Crossfire Hurricane was commenced in June-July 2016? Because, if there were no such counterintelligence investigation, then who tasked a humint operative onto George P and why?

Also, did you ever notice that the acronym for Halper's organization at Cambridge is CRASSH?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2018, 07:13:25 AM: How did it happen that a CIA asset was used by the FBI?
Title: CRASSH
Post by: ccp on June 05, 2018, 09:24:12 AM: Hi Rick,

"Also, did you ever notice that the acronym for Halper's organization at Cambridge is CRASSH?"

What do make of this?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: rickn on June 05, 2018, 10:17:23 AM: Could be crass with a lisp. Or crash with 2 "s's".

Kinda reminds me of "The Oneders" in the movie "That Thing You Do."

Well maybe a CIA asset was used first and then the info "distributed" to the Bureau in order for the original CRASS(H) action to become obscured.
Title: Superb summary of the chicanery
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2018, 04:53:32 PM: http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/06/8-times-obamas-intelligence-agencies-set-people-fabricate-russia-story/#.WxfLNZdEa0I.twitter
Title: It's like they've forgotten who they work for...
Post by: G M on June 07, 2018, 04:51:52 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/375605.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 09, 2018, 11:47:05 AM: Unbelievable - the Director of Senate Intelligence - passing all anti Trump information to his Mata Hari girlfriend who is almost young enough to be his daughter who conveniently uses him to scoop articles to POTH. Of course she will conveniently hide behind freedom of press blah blah blah
and will go on to be a new icon of the Left Wing media . She will be up for a Pulitzer.
Bezos will probably pay for all her legal fees:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/james-wolfe-leak-investigation-journalists-double-standard/

This guy Wolfe certainly deserves to get the full 15 yrs but watch he will get 5 in minimum security hotel and be out in one ........

But good work and shout out to Jeff Sessions for getting tougher. Keep this up Jeff ! 8-)
Title: The FBI's fractured fairytale
Post by: G M on June 10, 2018, 06:46:44 PM: http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/391566-the-fbis-fractured-fairytale

The FBI's fractured fairytale
By Sharyl Attkisson, opinion contributor — 06/10/18 03:10 PM EDT

Once upon a time, the FBI said some thugs planned to rob a bank in town. Thugs are always looking to rob banks. They try all the time. But at this particular time, the FBI was hyper-focused on potential bank robberies in this particular town.

The best way to prevent the robbery — which is the goal, after all — would be for the FBI to alert all the banks in town. “Be on high alert for suspicious activity,” the FBI could tell the banks. “Report anything suspicious to us. We don’t want you to get robbed.”

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Instead, in this fractured fairytale, the FBI followed an oddly less effective, more time-consuming, costlier approach. It focused on just one bank. And, strangely, it picked the bank that was least likely to be robbed because nobody thought it would ever get elected president — excuse me, I mean, because it had almost no cash on hand. (Why would robbers want to rob the bank with no cash?)

Stranger still, this specially-selected bank the FBI wanted to protect above all others happened to be owned by a man who was hated inside and outside the FBI.

So, to protect this bank owned by the guy the FBI hated, the FBI secretly examined a list of bank employees and identified a few it claimed would be likely to help robbers — or, at least, would not stop a robbery. How did it select these targets? By profiling them based on their pasts.

These particular bank employees, the FBI said, were chosen because they worked long ago with customers who might have known bank robbers in the past — maybe not the particular robbers planning a bank robbery this time, but different people who knew people who were thought to have robbed banks in the past ... or, perhaps, people who thought of robbing banks at some point but never got around to it.

So the FBI decided these particular bank employees, who may have known or met with suspicious people in the past, might be capable of committing a future crime.

Mind you, these targeted bank employees had never served time in prison, never been convicted of anything, never even been charged with a crime. If the FBI had just gone to them and said, “Hey, we think some people are going to rob this bank and we’ve got our eye on you, too,” the bank robbery probably would be avoided. Everybody would be watching out for the robbers.

Instead, the FBI secretly sent at least one spy — er, “informant” — to commingle with the bank employees and get info. Yes, you are thinking, it would seem to make a lot more sense to spy on the would-be robbers than their intended victims. But the FBI chose to spy on the victims. You know, for their own good.

At least one of the FBI informants/spies met with the targeted bank employees, pretending to be interested in them, and asked questions like “If you could have a million dollars tomorrow, what would you buy?” and “Would the owner of this bank be happy for you if you came across a sudden inheritance?” The FBI informant/spy then reported back to FBI headquarters that the bank employees were clearly thinking about robbing the bank, and that the owner of the bank was part of the scheme.

Next, because the FBI claimed these employees were clearly acting suspiciously and had criminal minds, the FBI unleashed the most intrusive, sensitive intel tools on them, tools that are rarely to be used against U.S. citizens — surveillance and wiretapping. FBI officials also leaked information about their investigation to the local press — not information that disparaged the robbers so much as cast suspicion on the bank’s owner and employees. In fact, it almost seemed like the FBI had forgotten all about the robbers.

And so, while all this was going on, the robbers robbed the bank.

Despite all the media innuendo, the secret surveillance and the spies/informants, the FBI said the robbers made off with a lot of cash. Even though the bank didn’t have much cash.

Afterward, the FBI stepped up its investigation of the bank employees. It couldn’t find solid proof the employees had anything to do with any bank robbery but claimed they were present a couple of times when the robbers cased the joint, so they must have known a robbery was going to happen. The owner must have known, too, the FBI concluded.

After digging deeply into the bank employees’ background, the FBI found other things: One bank employee hadn’t paid proper taxes six years before; another had been briefly accused of embezzling from a previous employer years ago but was never charged; a third said things in an FBI interview that the FBI concluded were untrue. The FBI charged them all with crimes and pressured them to become witnesses — not against the robbers, but against the bank owner.

In the end, the FBI held out hope that the townsfolk wouldn’t focus on the idea that all the FBI’s hard work and planning to supposedly protect the town’s banks only resulted in the utter failure of its stated mission: The bank got robbed, the cash would never be recovered, and the robbers would never serve time. Yet, some of the bank employees might — not for the robbery but for that other stuff.

The moral of the story: It’s a weird way to prevent a bank robbery.

On the other hand, if the FBI’s real goal — in this fractured fairytale — was to frame the hated owner of the bank and his employees, it all makes sense.

Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) is an Emmy-award winning investigative journalist, author of the New York Times bestsellers “The Smear” and “Stonewalled,” and host of Sinclair’s Sunday TV program, “Full Measure.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: ccp on June 11, 2018, 04:44:03 AM: Good analogy
Bank robbers were not the target.
Target was bank president all along.
Title: Re: The FBI's fractured fairytale
Post by: DougMacG on June 11, 2018, 08:13:44 AM: Yes. She is a great journalist and this is a phenomenal column and analogy.

As I read and listen to those trying to follow the details of these current scandals, like during Whitewater, I can't keep all the names and misdeeds straight. Once the public is lost on it, they don't want to hear any more details. At some point, the story of what happened needs to be simplified and Attkisson does that beautifully here for at least this part of it.

From the column: "moral of the story: It’s a weird way to prevent a bank robbery"

They weren't trying to prevent Russian cyberwar. They were trying to frame the President and anyone close to him.

The one or two things we all knew from "Independent" Counsels:
1. Define their mission very, very specifically and don't stray from it.
- And then Rosenstein said 'and any crimes that come out of wherever the undefined investigation may lead.'
2. Make the credentials of these unchecked investigators beyond reproach.
- And then Mueller started his hiring right off of Hillary's contributor list.
What could possibly go wrong?

As Mark Steyn has been saying for over a year, what we're missing in the Russian collusion case is - a Russian.

Deplorable lack of curiosity: FBI and Hillary and Cheryl Mills sat down a few minutes to have tea in Chappaqua in pajamas on the morning of 4th of July not under oath, discuss nothing to do with motive, conclude there was no intent on a crime where intent is irrelevant and call it completion of an investigation, then release the letter of exoneration they drafted months earlier. Do you have to be far right wing in your politics to smell a rat? Or is the whole, real conspiracy hiding in plain sight?

In the end, if justice gets fully served, there could be more jailed investigators than guilty Russians.
Title: Emails reveal when Hillary's exoneration was decided
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2018, 09:11:33 PM: http://www.speroforum.com/a/KFJNTXEPEV39/83468-New-emails-reveal-Comey-planned-early-Clinton-exoneration?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WHOTSCMBAV50&utm_content=KFJNTXEPEV39&utm_source=news&utm_term=New+emails+reveal+Comey+planned+early+Clinton+exoneration#.WyCY9XrcCmA
Title: Mueller: Nah, that doesn't apply to me , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2018, 10:13:05 AM: https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/mueller-fearmongers-about-election-interference-to-try-to-hide-evidence-from-defendants-in-russian-trolls-case/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Rosenstein's subpoena threat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2018, 11:26:05 AM: It's Andrew McCarthy. 'Nuff said!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/rod-rosenstein-subpoena-threat-shows-conflict-of-interest/
Title: huff post : IG proves Comey hurt Clinton not Trump
Post by: ccp on June 14, 2018, 05:15:35 PM: This is after Comey and other officials, DOJ and Obama refused to enforce the law against Hillary who should behind bars not running for Prresident.

Is there no mention of Comey and Lynches handling of letting off the hook scot free?
Title: Re: huff post : IG proves Comey hurt Clinton not Trump
Post by: G M on June 14, 2018, 07:30:20 PM: Quote from: ccp on June 14, 2018, 05:15:35 PM
This is after Comey and other officials, DOJ and Obama refused to enforce the law against Hillary who should behind bars not running for Prresident.

Is there no mention of Comey and Lynches handling of letting off the hook scot free?

Epic corruption in the DOJ/FBI being exposed and this is their spin.

Amazing.
Title: Re: huff post : IG proves Comey hurt Clinton not Trump
Post by: DougMacG on June 15, 2018, 06:14:52 AM: Quote from: G M on June 14, 2018, 07:30:20 PM
Quote from: ccp on June 14, 2018, 05:15:35 PM
This is after Comey and other officials, DOJ and Obama refused to enforce the law against Hillary who should behind bars not running for Prresident.

Is there no mention of Comey and Lynches handling of letting off the hook scot free?

Epic corruption in the DOJ/FBI being exposed and this is their spin.
Amazing.

The facts, not Comey, hurt Hillary more than Trump.

The Dem argument is that Comey should have done more to hide the facts. Call them out on that.

I learned while reading the very first global warming report that headlines and conclusions can be written with an agenda not supported in the data. In Comey's famous press conference, he laid out the details of the crimes she committed, then changed the conclusion from criminal gross negligence to extreme carelessness enabling the accused and her 97% of the press could run with the story that their client was "exonerated".

Anyone who covolutes the convoluted conclusion, "Political bias did not affect Clinton probe, watchdog report finds", is simply unable or unwilling to read and comprehend the report.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/political-bias-did-not-affect-clinton-probe-watchdog-report-finds
That isn't what it said. But it will be repeated.

If former Director James Comey had left the correct words 'Gross Negligence' in the report and stopped there instead of making a decision that was not his to make, not to prosecute, and real justice had followed up with no regard to political power and political timing, Hillary would have been headed into the election under indictment and facing trial. Democrats would have replaced her and Bernie or Biden had a fair chance to win with a candidate with no connection to her misdeeds.

The bias and criminal mishandling of these two cases is proven in the facts sections of the report. Look it up and lock them up.
Title: Justice Department IG Reveals FBI Corruption
Post by: G M on June 15, 2018, 06:18:40 AM: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/justice-department-ig-reveals-fbi-corruption/

Justice Department IG Reveals FBI Corruption
Senior FBI agent threatened to prevent Trump election in text message; agents took gifts from reporters

BY: Bill Gertz
June 14, 2018 5:02 pm

The FBI mishandled the politically charged investigation of classified information found on Hillary Clinton's private email server, and Bureau agents engaged in improper behavior including a text message threat to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, according to a Justice Department inspector general probe.

A report by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, however, appeared to let the FBI off the hook for allowing political biases and concerns about protecting the FBI's reputation influence its investigation of classified data found on the email server.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by President Trump, came in for blistering criticism in the IG report for not informing Justice Department superiors about his decision in July 2016 to publicly exonerate Clinton in the probe—three weeks before she was named the Democratic presidential nominee.

Comey and the FBI were also was criticized in the report for delaying and then re-opening the email investigation days before the November 2016 election after tens of thousands of new emails were found after the probe had been closed in July.

The IG found "no evidence" Comey's July 2016 statement ending what the report called the FBI's "Midyear" probe of classified information found in the Clinton emails was the result of political bias or "an effort to influence the election."

"We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct," the report said.

"We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the attorney general, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of department prosecutors."

Comey announced July 5, 2016, that he was recommending against prosecuting Clinton based on a lack of illegal intention and asserting that no reasonable attorney would prosecute her for the security breaches.

The FBI also failed to act quickly in responding to the discovery of emails between Clinton and key aide Huma Abedin found two months later on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, Abedin's husband, as part of an investigation of Weiner sexting with a minor.

The delays created the perception that the FBI was slow-rolling a decision to reopen the email probe.

Comey told investigators when he learned of the Weiner laptop emails he did not know Weiner was Abedin's husband and failed to grasp the significance of the new evidence.

Clinton place both "secret" and "top secret" information on emails found on the private server used while she was secretary of state to avoid triggering official records preservation rules.

The FBI declined to charge her for the mishandling of classified information because classification markings had been removed from the information in the emails, the report said.

The 568-page IG report, "A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election" contains details of several FBI and Justice Department scandals that emerged since the 2016 election.

The report reveals that:

Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch acted improperly in not cutting short a meeting aboard an aircraft with former President Bill Clinton during the investigation of Hillary Clinton. Both Lynch and Bill Clinton denied discussing the ongoing email probe during the meeting.
The FBI improperly permitted two Clinton aides who were witnesses in the investigation to sit in on the FBI's questioning of Clinton
Comey drafted an initial statement exonerating Clinton months before the investigation ended.
The draft statement exonerating Clinton also removed the term "gross negligence"—a condition that could have been used for prosecution—and replaced with "especially concerning."
An initial assessment in the Comey draft statement saying foreign spy services were "reasonably likely" to have accessed the classified data on the Clinton server was replaced with "possible."
FBI ethics officials "did not fully appreciate" the potential conflict of interest by former FBI Director Andrew McCabe's wife receiving $675,288 in 2015 from Clinton associate Terry McAuliffe, then-governor of Virginia, for her political campaign for a state senate seat. McCabe became head of the email probe in early 2016.
The FBI improperly regarded a parallel investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump presidential campaign in 2016 to be more important the Clinton email probe.

The most damaging disclosures in the IG report relate to five FBI officials, including FBI counterintelligence official and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok who was involved in both the email and Russia probes.

Strzok was having an affair with Lisa Page, special counsel to the FBI deputy director, and the two officials exchanged thousands of emails revealing political bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton.

The IG report noted "particular concern" by the apparent political bias in elevating the Russian investigation over the email probe, as revealed in text messages between Strzok and Page.

The texts between the two FBI officials "potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions they made were impacted by bias or improper considerations."

Most of the texts between Strzok and Page that appeared to impact investigative decisions were related to the Russian probe that was not part of the IG review.

"Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, ‘No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it' in response to her question, ‘[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!', it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects," the report said.

"Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias," the report said.

In addition to Strzok and Page, text messages also were reviewed by the IG related to two other FBI agents, one on the email probe, and another FBI lawyer.

"The text messages and instant messages sent by these employees included statements of hostility toward then candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton, and several appeared to mix political opinions with discussions about the Midyear investigation,' the report said.

The conduct "brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI."

No direct evidence was found that the political biases were linked to investigative decisions, the report said.

But the report noted "the conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the FBI Midyear investigation and sowed doubt over the FBI's work on, and its handling of, the Midyear investigation."

"Moreover, the damage caused by their actions extends far beyond the scope of the Midyear investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI's reputation for neutral fact finding and political independence."

The IG finding of bias will likely fuel further criticism by President Trump of the Russia investigation that eventually was elevated into Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

Trump has denounced the probe of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign as a political witch-hunt designed to discredit his presidency.

Clinton, for her part, has blamed Comey for undermining her election bid by re-opening the email investigation so close the election.

The IG report said Comey believed that his failure to disclose the newly found emails to Congress would be an act of concealment.

The IG, however, sharply criticized Comey for saying he had only two doors to enter, one for concealment and one for publicizing the re-opened probe.

"The two doors were actually labeled ‘followpolicy/practice' and ‘depart from policy/practice,'" the report said.

"Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment."

Comey was also influenced in mishandling the case because he believed Clinton would be elected president and he feared the information would leak if the FBI failed to make it public.

He also was concerned that "failing to disclose would result in accusations that the FBI had ‘engineered a cover up' to help Clinton get elected," the report said.

The report said there also were "concerns about protecting the reputation of the FBI" and worries about the perceived illegitimacy of a Clinton presidency if the discovery of the emails was not made public.

"We found no evidence that Comey’s decision to send the October 28 letter [to Congress] was influenced by political preferences," the report said.

"Instead, we found that his decision was the result of several interrelated factors that were connected to his concern that failing to send the letter would harm the FBI and his ability to lead it, and his view that candidate Clinton was going to win the presidency and that she would be perceived to be an illegitimate president if the public first learned of the information after the election."

Regarding FBI agents disclosing information to reporters, the IG stated that agents had unauthorized contacts with reporters and accepted favors and gifts in apparent exchange for details about the email investigation.

"We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters," the report said.

"In addition, we identified instances where FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events," the IG said, noting the improper activities are under investigation.

The report said leaks, fear of potential leak and "a culture of unauthorized media contacts" influence FBI decisions regarding its investigations.

The report recommended providing guidance to agents and prosecutors on legal actions that could impact an election.

The IG also called for making an explicit rule that an investigating agency cannot announce its charging decision without consulting the attorney general or other senior Justice officials.

The report also suggested developing a policy on discussing the conduct of uncharged persons in public statements.

The IG also recommended improving the policy of saving of text messages from official mobile phones and devices and to include a banner on the devices warning users they have no expectation of privacy.

Better education of FBI employees regarding the policy on accepting gifts is also needed, along with disciplinary action to deter improper conduct.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, related matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 15, 2018, 08:27:36 AM: https://nypost.com/2018/06/14/inspector-generals-report-highlights-comeys-biggest-mistake/

there are bombshells along the way, like the fact that Comey himself sometimes used his personal e-mail to conduct (unclassified) FBI business. And that top FBI agent Peter Strzok actually e-mailed documents from the Anthony Weiner investigation to his own private account.

Indeed, Horowitz seems most frustrated by the Weiner angle — in particular, by the fact that the FBI’s top ranks waited nearly a month before acting on word from New York that the feds there had found Clinton e-mails on the disgraced ex-congressman’s laptop.

He finds all their explanations for the delay “unpersuasive” but couldn’t “identify a consistent or persuasive explanation for the FBI’s failure to act.”
Title: IG Horowitz FBI Comey Report - link to text
Post by: DougMacG on June 15, 2018, 08:52:22 AM: https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

"Nonetheless, these messages cast a cloud over the
FBI’s handling of the [Hillary] investigation and the
investigation’s credibility."

Yes they do.

(Search nonetheless at the link text, this is the 2nd usage.

GRE English, use of words like nonetheless, however, but: what follows is in contradiction to what precedes it.
http://www.conhecer.org.br/download/INGLES%20INTERMEDIARIO/APROFUNDAMENTO%20-%20CONJUNCTIONS.pdf
(Over a thousand combined uses of nonetheless, however, but, in the report.) Nothing like writing in clear, straightforward English!

No bias except there was obvious bias in these instances.

"But our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed" :?
Title: Coming was protecting the legitimacy of the presumed Clinton presidency
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2018, 07:35:16 PM: This makes a lot of sense to me:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/15/comeys-fbi-protecting-legitimacy-presumed-clinton-presidency/#.WyPqYrsFwaQ.facebook
Title: THE IG Report itself
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2018, 08:03:08 PM: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.justice.gov%2Ffile%2F1071991%2Fdownload&h=AT0ivOj177tSyfwU5DcQOSY9HRblHrJ5DkemSvpwLZH7NtgIv_ZK2S5cMAiePXgkcag3cy2FxIclSUpwN89ey3oLT10oy-AjgayH3R5vklOKaf6vcn6RJZHbIewiQynbyvBJbvUQ-4Q

""...As described in Chapter Five, the Midyear team did not seek to obtain every device or the contents of every email account that it had reason to believe a classified email traversed. Rather, the team focused the investigation on obtaining Clinton's servers and devices. Witnesses stated that, due to what they perceived to be systemic problems with handling classified information at the State Department, to expand the investigation beyond former Secretary Clinton's server systems and devices would have prolonged the investigation for years. They further stated that the State Department was the more appropriate agency to remediate classified spills by its own employees..." - Page 84 of 568, A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election
Title: Compromised
Post by: G M on June 15, 2018, 09:49:30 PM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/dfwujkovaaaf9c8.jpg)
Title: We cannot spare this man
Post by: G M on June 15, 2018, 10:18:12 PM: http://coldfury.com/2018/06/16/we-cannot-spare-this-man/

We cannot spare this man
Posted on 6/16/2018 by Mike
Devin Nunes, bless his heart, battles on against the swarm of Deep State vermin.

House Intel Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was flabbergasted to find that the Strzok-Page text messages released with the IG report were redacted. He called it a “classic case of obstruction” from Congress. On the Thursday edition of FOX News’ Ingraham Angle, Nunes promised the committee is “going to get all of the documents” and the question will become, “Who is going to get busted? Who’s going to jail?”

The IG report was a whitewash, which is the only result one could expect when a Mordor on the Potomac bureaucracy as profoundly and irretrievably corrupt as the FBI/DOJ is allowed to “investigate” itself. Nunes knows all this.

“I mean, this is a classic case of obstruction, but then, the question is, who’s going to go investigate these guys?” he added.

“I want to read, to you, an exchange between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the star-crossed lovers. She basically said, you know, she was worried (ph) he’s — Donald Trump’s not going to get elected, right, right. And he answers, basically, don’t worry, we’ll stop it. No, no, no, no, we’ll stop it,” host Laura Ingraham said to the Congressman.

“He was the lead investigator on the Clinton e-mail case,” Nunes responded. “He’s the lead investigator that starts off the counter intelligence investigation, using our intelligence agencies to go after and target the Trump campaign. This is the guy who leads that off, but worse than all that, worse than all that, and I just want to repeat what I said, in the opening.”

“Why wasn’t that given to Congress? Why did I find out about that, today, at noon?” Nunes asked.

Oh, I think we can all figure that one out easily enough.

Nunes said he doesn’t know how the Mueller investigation can “end up fairly” after at least five people have already been kicked off the team and Clinton donors make up the “rest.”

It can’t. It was never intended to. That wasn’t its purpose.

“So if there’s five people who’ve been kicked off the campaign, I mean off the Mueller team, how is it possible that – if you look at the rest of the people that are there, I mean they were all Clinton donors. So – I – you know, I don’t know how this is – this is going to end up fairly. I don’t know where this is going,” he said.

It’s either going to fizzle out eventually with a shrug and a “meh,” followed by a very loud silence, or it’s going to lead to an upheaval so violent—yes, perhaps literally—that it will shake the very foundations of our metastized, malignant cancer of a national government.
Title: Roger Simon : Wray the wrong, guy
Post by: ccp on June 16, 2018, 09:15:16 AM: https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/christopher-wray-not-the-man-to-proudly-fix-the-fbi/
Title: Re: Roger Simon : Wray the wrong, guy
Post by: G M on June 16, 2018, 11:38:27 AM: Quote from: ccp on June 16, 2018, 09:15:16 AM
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/christopher-wray-not-the-man-to-proudly-fix-the-fbi/

The FBI needs to be dissolved.
Title: Classified Appendix? Wonder what's in it , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2018, 01:03:03 PM: https://outline.com/YSZGcn
Title: The IG Report and The Legacy of Obama
Post by: G M on June 16, 2018, 01:39:02 PM: https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-ig-report-and-the-legacy-of-obama/

The IG Report and The Legacy of Obama
BY MATT MARGOLIS JUNE 16, 2018

President Barack Obama announces he will nominate U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, right, to be the next Attorney General, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014 (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

As shocking as the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Hillary email investigation released earlier this week was, the truth is none of us should be surprised by it. I certainly wasn’t. Anyone who paid any attention at all to what was going on during the Obama years would know that what happened in the summer of 2016 within Obama’s Justice Department was the climax of an eight-year crescendo of partisan corruption, intent on protecting Obama’s legacy from Donald Trump.

Eight years is a short time for the FBI to go from a respected institution to a partisan arm of the White House, but it happened right under our noses, with the media doing its best to keep us in the dark.

From the earliest days of the Obama administration, the Obama/Holder/Lynch Justice Department protected political allies from justice. A slam-dunk case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party during the 2008 presidential election was inexplicably dropped, resulting in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declaring in the summer of 2010 that there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department. Obama also blocked a corruption probe that implicated former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bribery. He also illegally fired an inspector general who was investigating a friend and donor of Obama’s. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder worked in concert to protect each other. Holder would stonewall congressional investigations into Obama administration corruption and Obama would assert executive privilege to keep damaging information away from the eyes of investigators, such as crucial documents in the Fast and Furious investigation.

The Obama Justice Department also targeted Obama’s enemies. When conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for making $20,000 in straw donations to a friend’s U.S. Senate campaign, many legal experts saw it as partisan selective prosecution, including liberal Harvard Law School professor and Obama supporter Alan Dershowitz. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was placed on a terrorist watch list in order to limit his international travel after posting a viral video showing himself dressed like a terrorist crossing back forth over the U.S. border with Mexico to demonstrate the horrible state of our nation’s border security.

There are dozens of scandals in the Obama administration that never resulted in any of the key players being prosecuted. No special counsels were ever appointed. By the end of the Obama administration, they’d been able to get away with so much because the media refused to give anything damaging to Obama the coverage it deserved for eight years.

So, is it really that surprising that anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok was leading both the Trump investigation and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? There was no justification for this, but yet, it happened. And the impact of their political bias is undeniable. We now know from text messages between Strzok and his fellow FBI agent and lover Lisa Page (who also was involved in the investigations) that Strzok was going to do whatever he could, with the power of the FBI, to keep Trump out of the White House:

Page: [Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!
Strzok: No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.

There are other anti-Trump text messages from several FBI agents and lawyers as well, all of which raise legitimate concerns that the FBI’s investigation of Trump was a political witch hunt, and that there was a concerted effort to protect Hillary Clinton.

Dinesh D’Souza, speaking with Laura Ingraham on Fox News earlier this week, believes that the ”tremendous kind of glee and sense of immunity with which these agents at the high level of operating” suggests they were ordered by someone high up. Who gave the order? The answer to that, according to D’Souza, is the answer to the question, who benefits?

“Hillary benefits, but Hillary clearly couldn't have given the order," D'Souza said. "She was secretary of state and then she was out of the government. Obama, on the other hand, very much did not want Trump to win. He knew that Trump would try to erase his legacy. It's very embarrassing for him to be succeeded by Trump. I wonder if Obama is the one who gave the order.”

The reputation and our faith in the FBI have been severely compromised by eight years of politicization under the “leadership” of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch. That is a legacy of Obama’s that must be fixed. I have no doubt that most of the agents in the FBI, regardless of their political leanings, are upstanding individuals who believe in equal justice. But, somehow a slew of hyper-partisan anti-Trump agents all ended up running the most pivotal investigations leading up to the 2016 election by aggressively pursuing the dubious link between Trump and Russia, while simultaneously easing up on the Clinton email investigation.

We must make sure that the right people are held accountable, and safeguards are put in place to make sure such terrible abuses never happen again. But our faith in the FBI won’t be so easily restored.

Matt Margolis is the author of the new book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
Title: Russia, Comey, Mueller, IG and related, Who do they hold accountable?
Post by: DougMacG on June 18, 2018, 07:45:13 AM: Again, if Trump's Sec of State had an email scandal, it would be a Trump scandal. Obama was part of Hillary's scandal and is still left out of it except for in commentary from the side that didn't like him in the first place.

Strzok and Page are a Strzok and Page scandal, McCabe, Weisman, and the rest., nothing to do with Comey, Mueller, Lynch, Obama? I disagree. Who hired them? Who supervised them? Who decided same team loaded with bias heads up both investigations? Who authorized Cheryl Mills present, nothing under oath, don't come loaded for bear? Comey under under Lynch and Obama. Who hired the same biased agenda driven team to the top of the Mueller commission? Mueller. He didn't know?? He was hired because he did know this kind of thing.

WHERE ARE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TEXTS DURING ALL THIS?? That might tell you more about who knew what and when. None. Why was the "We will Stop him" text previously omitted? WHO DID THAT?

How is that there is no consequence and no accountability?

This all came out Thursday-Friday. Meet the Press on Sunday was 100% about Trump Lies: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/17/meet_the_press_roundtable_president_trump_vs_justice_department_family_separation_policy.html
Title: Where oh where have our little law doggies gone?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2018, 12:23:57 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/18/comey-refuses-testify-congress-mccabe-pleads-fifth/
Title: Pat Caddell
Post by: ccp on June 18, 2018, 02:45:31 PM: notable because he was a jimmy carter man:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/06/18/exclusive-pat-caddell-ig-report-on-hillary-case-contains-enough-indictable-incidents-for-special-prosecutor/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2018, 04:34:10 PM: Caddell has impressed me more than once on FOX as a man of intellectual integrity.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on June 18, 2018, 04:42:02 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2018, 04:34:10 PM
Caddell has impressed me more than once on FOX as a man of intellectual integrity.

More rare than rooster teeth, to see that in a dem.
Title: WSJ: Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2018, 06:18:44 AM: Mueller’s Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
It makes no difference how honorable he is. His investigation is tainted by the bias that attended its origin in 2016.
FBI agent Peter Strzok and special counsel Robert Mueller.
FBI agent Peter Strzok and special counsel Robert Mueller. Photo: Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA Wire, Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and
Elizabeth Price Foley
June 22, 2018 6:38 p.m. ET
169 COMMENTS

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may face a serious legal obstacle: It is tainted by antecedent political bias. The June 14 report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, unearthed a pattern of anti-Trump bias by high-ranking officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some of their communications, the report says, were “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but imply a willingness to take action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” Although Mr. Horowitz could not definitively ascertain whether this bias “directly affected” specific FBI actions in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, it nonetheless affects the legality of the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.

Crossfire was launched only months before the 2016 election. Its FBI progenitors—the same ones who had investigated Mrs. Clinton—deployed at least one informant to probe Trump campaign advisers, obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wiretap warrants, issued national security letters to gather records, and unmasked the identities of campaign officials who were surveilled. They also repeatedly leaked investigative information.

Mr. Horowitz is separately scrutinizing Crossfire and isn’t expected to finish for months. But the current report reveals that FBI officials displayed not merely an appearance of bias against Donald Trump, but animus bordering on hatred. Peter Strzok, who led both the Clinton and Trump investigations, confidently assuaged a colleague’s fear that Mr. Trump would become president: “No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” An unnamed FBI lawyer assigned to Crossfire told a colleague he was “devastated” and “numb” after Mr. Trump won, while declaring to another FBI attorney: “Viva le resistance.”

The report highlights the FBI’s failure to act promptly upon discovering that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained thousands of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. Investigators justified the delay by citing the “higher priority” of Crossfire. But Mr. Horowitz writes: “We did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on [the] investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.”

Similarly, although Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that then-FBI Director James Comey was trying to influence the election, Mr. Comey did make decisions based on political considerations. He told the inspector general that his election-eve decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation was motivated by a desire to protect her assumed presidency’s legitimacy.

The inspector general wrote that Mr. Strzok’s text messages “created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations.” The report adds, importantly, that “most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation.” Given how biases ineluctably shape behavior, these facts create a strong inference that by squelching the Clinton investigation and building a narrative of Trump-Russia collusion, a group of government officials sought to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s electoral chances and, if the unthinkable happened, obtain an insurance policy to cripple the Trump administration with accusations of illegitimacy.

What does this have to do with Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 after President Trump fired Mr. Comey? The inspector general concludes that the pervasive bias “cast a cloud over the FBI investigations to which these employees were assigned,” including Crossfire. And if Crossfire was politically motivated, then its culmination, the appointment of a special counsel, inherited the taint. All special-counsel activities—investigations, plea deals, subpoenas, reports, indictments and convictions—are fruit of a poisonous tree, byproducts of a violation of due process. That Mr. Mueller and his staff had nothing to do with Crossfire’s origin offers no cure.

When the government deprives a person of life, liberty or property, it is required to use fundamentally fair processes. The Supreme Court has made clear that when governmental action “shocks the conscience,” it violates due process. Such conduct includes investigative or prosecutorial efforts that appear, under the totality of the circumstances, to be motivated by corruption, bias or entrapment.

In U.S. v. Russell (1973), the justices observed: “We may someday be presented with a situation in which the conduct of law enforcement agents is so outrageous that due process principles would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction.” It didn’t take long. In Blackledge v. Perry (1974), the court concluded that due process was offended by a prosecutor’s “realistic likelihood of ‘vindictiveness’ ” that tainted the “very initiation of proceedings.”

In Young v. U.S. ex rel. Vuitton (1987), the justices held that because prosecutors have “power to employ the full machinery of the state in scrutinizing any given individual . . . we must have assurance that those who would wield this power will be guided solely by their sense of public responsibility for the attainment of justice.” Prosecutors must be “disinterested” and make “dispassionate assessments,” free from any personal bias.

In Williams v. Pennsylvania (2016), the court held that a state judge’s potential bias violated due process because he had played a role, a quarter-century earlier, in prosecuting the death-row inmate whose habeas corpus petition he was hearing. The passage of time and involvement of others do not vitiate the taint but heighten “the need for objective rules preventing the operation of bias that might otherwise be obscured,” the justices wrote. A single biased individual “might still have an influence that, while not so visible . . . is nevertheless significant.”

In addition to the numerous anti-Trump messages uncovered by the inspector general, there is a strong circumstantial case—including personnel, timing, methods and the absence of evidence—that Crossfire was initiated for political, not national-security, purposes.

It was initiated in defiance of a longstanding Justice Department presumption against investigating campaigns in an election year. And while impartiality is always required, a 2012 memo by then-Attorney General Eric Holder emphasizes that impartiality is “particularly important in an election year,” and “politics must play no role in the decisions of federal prosecutors or investigators regarding any investigations. . . . Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Strong evidence of a crime can overcome this policy, as was the case with the bureau’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, which began more than a year before the 2016 election. But Crossfire was not a criminal investigation. It was a counterintelligence investigation predicated on the notion that Russia could be colluding with the Trump campaign. There appears to have been no discernible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion at the time Crossfire was launched, further reinforcing the notion that it was initiated “for the purpose” of affecting the presidential election.

The chief evidence of collusion is the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s servers. But nothing in the public record suggests the Trump campaign aided that effort. The collusion narrative therefore hinges on the more generic assertion that Russia aimed to help Mr. Trump’s election, and that the Trump campaign reciprocated by embracing pro-Russian policies. Yet despite massive surveillance and investigation, there’s still no public evidence of any such exchange—only that Russia attempted to sow political discord by undermining Mrs. Clinton and to a lesser extent Mr. Trump.

Some members of the Trump team interacted with Russians and advocated dovish policies. But so did numerous American political and academic elites, including many Clinton advisers. Presidential campaigns routinely seek opposition research and interact with foreign powers. The Clinton campaign funded the Steele dossier, whose British author paid Russians to dish anti-Trump dirt. The Podesta Group, led by the brother of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, received millions lobbying for Russia’s largest bank and the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, both with deep Kremlin ties. The Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton took millions from Kremlin-connected businesses.

No evidence has emerged of Trump-Russia collusion, and Mr. Mueller has yet to bring collusion-related charges against anyone. Evidence suggests one of his targets, George Papadopoulos, was lured to London, plied with the prospect of Russian information damaging to Mrs. Clinton, and taken to dinner, where he drunkenly bragged that he’d heard about such dirt but never seen it. These circumstances not only fail to suggest Mr. Papadopoulos committed a crime, they reek of entrapment. The source of this information, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, admits Mr. Papadopolous never mentioned emails, destroying any reasonable inference of a connection between the DNC hack and the Trump campaign.

Crossfire’s progenitors thus ignored an obvious question: If Russia promised unspecified dirt on Mrs. Clinton but never delivered it, how would that amount to collusion with the Trump campaign? If anything, such behavior suggests an attempt to entice and potentially embarrass Mr. Trump by dangling the prospect of compromising information and getting his aides to jump at it.

Given the paucity of evidence, it’s staggering that the FBI would initiate a counterintelligence investigation, led by politically biased staff, amid a presidential campaign. The aggressive methods and subsequent leaking only strengthen that conclusion. If the FBI sincerely believed Trump associates were Russian targets or agents, the proper response would have been to inform Mr. Trump so that he could protect his campaign and the country.

Mr. Trump’s critics argue that the claim of political bias is belied by the fact that Crossfire was not leaked before the election. In fact, there were vigorous, successful pre-election efforts to publicize the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Shortly after Crossfire’s launch, CIA Director John Brennan and Mr. Comey briefed Congress, triggering predictable leaking. Christopher Steele and his patrons embarked on a media roadshow, making their dossier something of an open secret in Washington.

On Aug. 29, 2016, the New York Times published a letter to Mr. Comey from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, saying he’d learned of “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” which had “employed a number of individuals with significant and disturbing ties to Russia and the Kremlin.” On Aug. 30, the ranking Democratic members of four House committees wrote a public letter to Mr. Comey requesting “that the FBI assess whether connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian interests” may have contributed to the DNC hack so as “to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.” On Sept. 23, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff reported the Hill briefings and the Steele dossier’s allegations regarding Carter Page. On Oct. 30, Harry Reid again publicly wrote Mr. Comey: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government.”

That these leaking efforts failed to prevent Mr. Trump’s victory, or that Mr. Comey’s ham-fisted interventions might have also hurt Mrs. Clinton’s electoral prospects, does not diminish the legal significance of the anti-Trump bias shown by government officials.

The totality of the circumstances creates the appearance that Crossfire was politically motivated. Since an attempt by federal law enforcement to influence a presidential election “shocks the conscience,” any prosecutorial effort derived from such an outrageous abuse of power must be suppressed. The public will learn more once the inspector general finishes his investigation into Crossfire’s genesis. But given what is now known, due process demands, at a minimum, that the special counsel’s activity be paused. Those affected by Mr. Mueller’s investigation could litigate such an argument in court. One would hope, however, that given the facts either Mr. Mueller himself or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would do it first.

Mr. Rivkin and Ms. Foley practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. She is a professor at Florida International University College of Law.
Title: IG report
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2018, 07:02:06 AM: " special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may face a serious legal obstacle: It is tainted by antecedent political bias. The June 14 report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, unearthed a pattern of anti-Trump bias by high-ranking officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation"

A side point. Rush made a good observation when he explained how the IG report exposed nothing really. Everything in there we already knew .

JW people and others have pointed out for most part IG reports don't really do much
They never come to the obvious conclusions and just spit out a bunch of facts in ways so that each political side can use for their benefit.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Accountability or Theater?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2018, 05:23:59 PM: Love AM but would love to see him address the matter of the RINO Reps being what they are:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/fbi-doj-bias-only-president-trump-can-address/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-06-23&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: IG report blocks part about AG Lynch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2018, 07:46:16 PM: https://spectator.org/the-buried-lede-of-the-inspector-generals-report/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180627024248
Title: WSJ: CIA needs its own Horowitz report
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2018, 05:19:20 PM: Interesting , , ,

Why the CIA Needs Its Own Horowitz Report
No need to speculate: The intelligence agencies saw Trump as a de facto agent of the Kremlin.
Former FBI Director James Comey at a panel discussion in Berlin, June 19.
Former FBI Director James Comey at a panel discussion in Berlin, June 19. Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty Images
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
June 29, 2018 6:36 p.m. ET
9 COMMENTS

Now that the world has digested the Horowitz report, notice how much of the story it doesn’t tell. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is treated as a closed loop when, in fact, much of its decision making was based on intelligence and advice supplied by other agencies.

Michael Horowitz deals with some of this information in a classified appendix, which the public can’t see. Even so, as Justice Department inspector general, he is not authorized to examine and dissect the internal communications and decision-making of other agencies the way he did the FBI’s. Yet the necessity of doing so fairly screams at us.

Mr. Horowitz mentions Russia many times in relation to the Trump collusion investigation but never in relation to the Hillary Clinton email investigation. He refers to secret intelligence that was pivotal to FBI Chief James Comey’s decision to intervene publicly in the Clinton case, but he doesn’t mention (as media reporting last year did) its Russian origins.

He tells us the FBI regarded the intercepted information, involving a purported improper communication by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as “objectively false.” He doesn’t tell us, as the Washington Post and CNN did last year, that some in the FBI regarded the information as a Russian plant.

He tells us that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama exchanged emails on her private server while Mrs. Clinton was especially vulnerable in the “territory of a foreign adversary.” He doesn’t tell us the foreign adversary was Russia.

One thing we learned, because Mr. Horowitz blurted it out in Senate testimony on June 18, is that the Loretta Lynch information, so crucial to Mr. Comey’s actions, has been kept from the public and even members of Congress because it “was classified at such a high level by the intelligence community.” Which is certainly convenient for the intelligence community.

Let’s be realistic. We’ve been told officially many times that Russia didn’t hide its activity in the 2016 race: It carried out its meddling in a blunt, in-your-face manner that would have been seen as a direct challenge to our own intelligence agencies. These agencies, in turn, viewed Mr. Trump as a witting or unwitting Kremlin agent.

We don’t need to speculate about this. The FBI’s Mr. Comey, since Election Day, has been a model of discretion compared with Obama CIA chief John Brennan and Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Brennan suggested on national TV that Vladimir Putin possesses secret information he uses to control President Trump. Mr. Clapper, also on national TV, called Mr. Trump a Kremlin “asset” whose election was secured by Russian meddling.

Their involvement in the events Mr. Horowitz details was extensive and pervasive and yet these men are invisible in his report. And it is hardly plausible that they were more restrained in their accusations against Mr. Trump in their private dealings with Mr. Comey before the election than they have been on TV since.

Which brings us to Mr. Comey’s potentially most consequential decision, his reopening of the Hillary email investigation just before Election Day, which many Democrats and independent analysts say may inadvertently have elected Mr. Trump.

Mr. Horowitz finds no convincing explanation of why a month elapsed between the surfacing of the Weiner laptop and Mr. Comey’s action. It might be useful, though, to understand what else was going on between Sept. 26 and Oct. 28. The Yahoo news article based on the Steele dossier had recently appeared. A Mother Jones piece would soon appear. Inquiries about the Steele dossier would have been pouring into the agency. The FBI would soon break off relations with Christopher Steele for speaking to the press. Harry Reid would soon exploit the FBI’s possession of the dossier to try to get its allegations into the media.

Mr. Comey would have seen that a partisan explosion was coming. Nothing would remain secret. Even in the expected Hillary victory, a GOP Congress would insist on an investigation.

This is the environment in which he made a decision that objectively seems aimed at redeeming the FBI’s reputation as a straight shooter amid a welter of intelligence community actions that eventually would be exposed and second-guessed.

An underremarked facet of the Horowitz report reveals just how much illegal leaking to the press FBI officials were guilty of. The same rock needs to be turned over with respect to Mr. Brennan’s and Mr. Clapper’s former agencies. If Mr. Putin’s goal was to make a mockery of U.S. democracy, his most useful if unwitting allies may well have been our so-called intelligence community.

Mr. Comey’s FBI is not the only intelligence branch that needs a good shaking out. Historians have a strong case already that both sets of today’s partisan talking points are valid: The Obama intelligence agencies were biased against Mr. Trump and also blunderingly helped elect him—a conclusion based in fact and yet so disconcerting that the press has turned away from it.
Title: Interesting USG contractor Strzok mentioned
Post by: G M on July 05, 2018, 06:37:12 PM: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014351249754415110.html

I'm sure our professional journalists will dig deep on this!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2018, 03:22:01 PM: http://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/395776-memos-detail-fbis-hurry-the-f-up-pressure-to-probe-trump-campaign
Title: George Will: Is Trump correct that Mueller's appt. is unC'l?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2018, 03:14:45 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/trump-says-robert-mueller-appointment-was-unconstitutional/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-07-12&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Looking at Strzok’s testimony through a post-modern lens
Post by: G M on July 13, 2018, 03:39:01 PM: http://coldfury.com/2018/07/13/looking-at-strzoks-testimony-through-a-post-modern-lens/

Looking at Strzok’s testimony through a post-modern lens
Posted on 7/13/2018 by Billy Hollis

Man who considers himself a transgender woman: “In my mind, I’m a woman. You are required to take my opinions, residing solely in my brain, over any evidence to the contrary. It’s outrageous and insulting to suggest otherwise.”

Peter Strzok, paraphrased from his testimony yesterday: “In my mind, I’m not biased in my professional performance. You are required to take my opinions, residing solely in my brain, over any evidence to the contrary. It’s outrageous and insulting to suggest otherwise.”

It’s no accident that this comparison feels valid. The parallels are there. They come from the post-modern idea that there is no objective truth. There is only the narrative.

A man with gender dysphoria doesn’t believe in objective facts about his situation. He believes only in what he feels, and what he can get others to accept. If he gets a critical mass of people to agree that he’s a woman, then the narrative is established, and the rest of us are not supposed to challenge it with any of our grubby facts and evidence.

When it comes to Peter Strzok’s motivations and actions, he doesn’t believe in objective facts either. Not even for the purposes of law enforcement. The FBI has shown that facts in cases against people they dislike are not particularly important. What’s important is what they can get a grand jury, a judge, and the public to go along with. The narrative is that a minor misstatement by innocuous people like Martha Stewart or Scooter Libby is a heinous crime, deserving of prison time, whereas breaking federal law for years and mishandling classified information is no big deal and certainly not worthy of prosecution.

In the testimony yesterday, Strzok’s narrative is that he might have a teensy weensy bit of bias against Trump and for Hillary, but he’s such a superman that he never, ever, not for a single moment, allowed that bias to affect his professional performance.

This doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Yet, the post-modern left, including Strzok’s toadying allies in the Democrat Party and the media, defend him to the hilt. I call them all post-modern because the truth about the situation is entirely irrelevant when it comes to what the left wants and needs. What matters is what kind of narrative they can spin and get accepted.

That narrative doesn’t have to be actually believed by their opponents. Many people look at a man with gender dysphoria, and simply don’t believe that he’s a woman. They know the biology, and they know how people can deceive themselves into believing all kinds of nutty things. But the howler monkey gallery on the left will descend upon them if they make that opinion known. So they never say what they believe about it; life is hard, and there’s just no benefit to standing up to a psychologically disturbed person and stating the truth.

Similarly, the media and the Democrats don’t care if you or I believe Strzok is a lying sack of shit and a thug with a badge, or if we think the investigations he drove were explicitly to help the side he likes and sabotage the side he hates. They just want there to be enough people around parroting their narrative about him, so that if we say something negative about Strzok in polite conversation, one of their brainwashed howler monkeys will jump in with “How dare you?”

Much of the left’s energy in modern day society is devoted to constantly, continuously battling the truth that makes them look bad. Their main weapon is to make discussion of such truth out of bounds. They have many tactics to do that; we saw some on the floor of the Congress yesterday.

I think the most important single reason they loathe Trump with all their being is that he says what he thinks anyway, swatting their outrage aside like a gnat, and thereby poses an existential threat to their main means of control.

We all better hope Trump is successful in rendering that tactic ineffective. Otherwise, the end result is two political sides that hate each others’ guts and have no way to communicate about it.

Let me be clear, in case it isn’t obvious: the side that is responsible for that state of affairs is the one that abandoned truth in favor of post-modernist thinking. You can’t argue with them in Enlightenment fashion because they don’t accept the premises of the Enlightenment.

At this point, the left’s complete capitulation to post-modernism means that they have shut off all paths to a peaceful resolution. It’s about attaining and maintaining power for them now. Until people like Trey Gowdy and Jeff Sessions(zzz) are prepared to accept this reality and use every means at their disposal, including force. For example, they need to be jailing perps such as Strzok, Page, Comey, Lerner, Koskinen, McCabe, et.al. Otherwise, the left pays no price for their thuggishness and denial of reality. They will retain their power to maliciously ruin the lives of their political opponents, and retain control for the left at the federal level, no matter what the citizenry wants.

If allowed to stand, this effectively ends the American experiment. We all know the possibilities that branch outward from that point, and none of them are good.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 13, 2018, 04:22:01 PM: "For example, they need to be jailing perps such as Strzok, Page, Comey, Lerner, Koskinen, McCabe, et.al. Otherwise, the left pays no price for their thuggishness and denial of reality. They will retain their power to maliciously ruin the lives of their political opponents, and retain control for the left at the federal level, no matter what the citizenry wants."

exactly.

however we have always seen the LEFT's people come to to the Congress , virtually and for all practical purposes , spit in their faces. and mock the proceeding and viola - end of story.
Have there EVER been real consequences. Can Congress do anything ? I don't know.

we need a jury trial with 12 objective Martians who will call it like it is . Not a DC jury that is out to gt the Right
Title: WSJ: What Trump should declassify
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2018, 07:29:07 PM: rd

Biography
@WSJopinion
WSJOpinion/

July 13, 2018 6:58 p.m. ET
232 COMMENTS

FBI agent Peter Strzok’s appearance before Congress Thursday was a predictable political circus, and here’s what we learned: President Trump will have to declassify a host of documents if he wants Americans to learn the truth about what happened in 2016.

Mr. Strzok was combative, and he pointed to an FBI lawyer in the room as reason not to disclose much of anything about his investigation into the Russia connections of the Trump campaign. Under pressure from Ohio’s Jim Jordan, Mr. Strzok did reveal that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr acted as a channel between the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and the FBI in 2016. We already knew that Mr. Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion.

This means that Fusion, an outfit on the payroll of the Clinton campaign, had a messenger on the government payroll to deliver its anti-Trump documents to the FBI. This confirms that the FBI relied on politically motivated sources as part of its probe, even as Mr. Strzok insists he showed no political bias in his investigating decisions.

Yet if this is the most Congress could pry out of the FBI’s lead Russia investigator over 10 hours, legislative oversight won’t discover the truth. Mr. Trump will have to help Congress by ordering Justice and the FBI to declassify the relevant documents. Consistent with protecting legitimate sources and methods, here is the document list Mr. Trump should want released:

• The FISA applications. Justice and the FBI made one application and three renewals for warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The text of those applications would show the degree to which the FBI relied on the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele at the request of Fusion GPS. They would also show how honest FBI and Justice were with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approves warrants.

• Woods procedures documents. The FBI is required to vet and support the facts its presents to a FISA court when it seeks a warrant to eavesdrop on a U.S. citizen. These rules are known as Woods procedures, and releasing sections of this Woods file would show the extent to which the FBI verified the dossier or other evidence it used as its justification to listen to Trump campaign aides. More broadly, Mr. Trump should declassify any document that demonstrates what the FBI and Justice knew about the provenance and accuracy of the Fusion-Steele dossier.

• The 302s. These forms include information taken from the notes FBI agents make while interviewing a source or subject. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley last week asked Justice to declassify the 302s for 12 separate FBI interviews with Mr. Ohr concerning his contacts with Mr. Steele. Declassifying other 302s related to the subjects in this probe (including former Trump aides George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn ) would reveal what the FBI was told, who provided what information, and how much came from politically motivated sources.

• The 1023s. These are the equivalent of 302s for counterintelligence, and they document FBI debriefings with informants or sources. Mr. Trump should declassify these and other documents showing interaction between the FBI and Mr. Steele, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Fusion backer Dan Jones, informant Stefan Halper, or anyone the FBI used to keep tabs on the Trump campaign. These documents would reveal the extent and dates of the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign.

Mr. Trump is undoubtedly being told that declassifying these documents would set a bad precedent, or risk accusations that he is undermining special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation. But the worst precedent would be letting mistrust and partisan suspicion persist over how law enforcement behaved during a presidential campaign.

Mr. Mueller’s probe is also moving ahead without interference, as his indictment Friday of a dozen Russian agents for hacking Democratic National Committee computers shows. But indictments of Russians who will never see a U.S. courtroom don’t tell us anywhere near the complete story. That duty falls to Congress, not to a special counsel whose job is deciding whether or not to prosecute crimes.

Mr. Trump is going to be attacked no matter what he does. He should declassify these records or stop complaining about his Justice Department’s lack of cooperation
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Defecate or get off the pot
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2018, 02:37:47 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/peter-strzok-testimony-congress-should-use-contempt-power-or-end-investigations/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-07-14&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: A McCarthy's piece
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2018, 04:00:58 PM: answers the question I posed in previous post:

*****For example, they need to be jailing perps such as Strzok, Page, Comey, Lerner, Koskinen, McCabe, et.al. Otherwise, the left pays no price for their thuggishness and denial of reality. They will retain their power to maliciously ruin the lives of their political opponents, and retain control for the left at the federal level, no matter what the citizenry wants."

exactly.

however we have always seen the LEFT's people come to to the Congress , virtually and for all practical purposes , spit in their faces. and mock the proceeding and viola - end of story.
Have there EVER been real consequences. Can Congress do anything ? I don't know.

we need a jury trial with 12 objective Martians who will call it like it is . Not a DC jury that is out to gt the Right *****

Not clear is why the consummate fighter , Trump , is not ordering documents be turned over. He is afraid of being labelled as obstructing justice? Is as Andrew wonders he hiding something?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on July 14, 2018, 05:06:02 PM: Several things became clearer with yesterday's indictments of the Russian cyber-intelligence operatives.

1. Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server was much more dangerous to national security than anyone cares to admit.

2. The Russians thought that Hillary would win, but they wanted to weaken her position as President and as leader of the Democrat party in order to help further Russian self-interest.

3. Wikileaks and Julian Assange were very likely acting in concert with the Russians. Wikileaks may claim being an unwitting here. I have my doubts.

4. Certain members of the political establishment sought to misuse the Russian intelligence operations for domestic political purposes by making them the justification to turn parts of the federal government's intelligence resources upon the Trump campaign. They were also influenced in this regard by a Ukrainian operative who worked at the DNC. Manafort became a justification for this action because of his positions in the Trump campaign and because he was an operative for certain pro-Russian factions in Ukraine.

5. When Trump won the election in a surprise result, the same members of the political establishment that had misused our federal government intelligence then began an effort to cover up these crimes with a classic disinformation campaign about Trump collusion with the Russians.

6. Unfortunately, most of the media is so anti-Trump that it is unable and unwilling to investigate this abuse of power because it suits their political agendas to leave it alone.
Title: Re: A McCarthy's piece
Post by: G M on July 14, 2018, 05:43:29 PM: Quote from: ccp on July 14, 2018, 04:00:58 PM
answers the question I posed in previous post:

*****For example, they need to be jailing perps such as Strzok, Page, Comey, Lerner, Koskinen, McCabe, et.al. Otherwise, the left pays no price for their thuggishness and denial of reality. They will retain their power to maliciously ruin the lives of their political opponents, and retain control for the left at the federal level, no matter what the citizenry wants."

exactly.

however we have always seen the LEFT's people come to to the Congress , virtually and for all practical purposes , spit in their faces. and mock the proceeding and viola - end of story.
Have there EVER been real consequences. Can Congress do anything ? I don't know.

we need a jury trial with 12 objective Martians who will call it like it is . Not a DC jury that is out to gt the Right *****

Not clear is why the consummate fighter , Trump , is not ordering documents be turned over. He is afraid of being labelled as obstructing justice? Is as Andrew wonders he hiding something?

If they had anything, anything at ALL, they would have leaked it to the media a YEAR ago.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2018, 07:20:22 PM: Several things became clearer with yesterday's indictments of the Russian cyber-intelligence operatives.

1. Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server was much more dangerous to national security than anyone cares to admit.

2. The Russians thought that Hillary would win, but they wanted to weaken her position as President and as leader of the Democrat party in order to help further Russian self-interest.

3. Wikileaks and Julian Assange were very likely acting in concert with the Russians. Wikileaks may claim being an unwitting here. I have my doubts.

4. Certain members of the political establishment sought to misuse the Russian intelligence operations for domestic political purposes by making them the justification to turn parts of the federal government's intelligence resources upon the Trump campaign. They were also influenced in this regard by a Ukrainian operative who worked at the DNC. Manafort became a justification for this action because of his positions in the Trump campaign and because he was an operative for certain pro-Russian factions in Ukraine.

5. When Trump won the election in a surprise result, the same members of the political establishment that had misused our federal government intelligence then began an effort to cover up these crimes with a classic disinformation campaign about Trump collusion with the Russians.

6. Unfortunately, most of the media is so anti-Trump that it is unable and unwilling to investigate this abuse of power because it suits their political agendas to leave it alone.

HI Rick,
We know all the above. But it makes no difference.
As a "righty" this is all so frustrating.

If you don't mind my asking are you actually involved in the above process or simply taking an interest in this ?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2018, 10:36:18 PM: Rick:

Good to see you here!

Flesh this out for me please:

"3. Wikileaks and Julian Assange were very likely acting in concert with the Russians. Wikileaks may claim being an unwitting here. I have my doubts."

Marc
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on July 16, 2018, 04:28:31 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2018, 10:36:18 PM
Rick:

Good to see you here!

Flesh this out for me please:

"3. Wikileaks and Julian Assange were very likely acting in concert with the Russians. Wikileaks may claim being an unwitting here. I have my doubts."

Marc

Marc, if he is not an unwitting, then what is he?

http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-assange-wikileaks-and-russia-2013-8 (http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-assange-wikileaks-and-russia-2013-8)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 16, 2018, 05:11:38 PM: Still digesting this morning's events , , , just watched the Chris Wallace interview of Putin , , , a friend sent me this:
https://brassballs.blog/home/strzok-worked-for-cia-and-fbi-at-the-same-time-in-counterespionage?format=amp&__twitter_impression=true

We live in interesting times , , ,
Title: Daily Beast: What missing server?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2018, 07:29:25 AM: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-missing-dnc-server-is-neither-missing-nor-a-server?via=ios
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on July 17, 2018, 08:50:02 AM: A lot of people are criticizing Trump for not saying that he believes the intelligence assessment of Russian interference over Putin's denials.

I think that Trump handled the issue properly, but not artfully.

Mueller's Friday the 13th indictment of those 12 Russian operatives turned a counterintelligence issue into a matter of US criminal procedure. As Andy McCarthy noted correctly, because the indictment asserts US jurisdiction over their actions, the Mueller indictment granted those 12 Russian defendants the full protection of the US Constitution. For federal court defendants, this involves especially Amendments 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. And this also includes the presumption of their innocence.

If Trump answers that question by saying that he believes the US intelligence assessment over Putin's denials, then he has prejudged the case and Mueller's ability to prosecute those 12 defendants successfully would have been reduced significantly.

Whether or not Trump had thought the matter through this far is unimportant. Whatever the motivation for his answer, the answer was the correct one. Trump cannot have an official opinion about the evidence against these 12 defendants now that Mueller made the matter one of criminal justice instead of counterintelligence.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on July 17, 2018, 02:03:19 PM: Trump now says that he meant to say, "Why wouldn't it be Russia?" instead of "Why would it be Russia?"

OK. You must be careful with the double negatives.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 18, 2018, 04:55:37 PM: https://mic.com/articles/190318/house-democrats-say-gop-blocked-them-from-interviewing-alleged-russian-agent-in-probe#.WzbTUTs2A
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 19, 2018, 09:53:06 AM: quote author=Crafty_Dog
Still digesting this morning's events , , , just watched the Chris Wallace interview of Putin , ,
We live in interesting times , , ,
----------------
I watched the interview yesterday. Quite interesting! Besides being a ruthless murderer, Putin is quite a skilled politician. There were a number of tense moments. I don't know how they do it without interpreter delays. On Chris Wallace's part, perhaps it was the best interview attempt ever by an American journalist.

Putin seamlessly mixed his truths, untruths and avoidance. He was far more candid than I expected.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/vladimir-putins-chris-wallace-interview-5-tense-moments.html
Title: The law of unintended consequences strikes again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2018, 10:50:20 AM: I'm guessing our Rick can add to this , , ,

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/muellers_indictment_of_12_russian_intel_officers_slams_into_the_law_of_unintended_consequences.html

Of relevance here I am told is this:

https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/pm/rls/othr/misc/23425.htm
Title: Lisa Page reveals meaning of "There's no there there."
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2018, 09:36:27 AM: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/report_lisa_page_revealed_under_oath_that_there_was_no_basis_for_muellers_appointment.html
Title: 2017: That DNC server
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2018, 01:06:52 PM: Michael Tracey
Roving journalist
Jun 7, 2017
CrowdStrike, The DNC’s Security Firm, Was Under Contract With The FBI

Claims of “Russian interference” have been ubiquitous in U.S. political discourse for almost a full year now; these often amount to a melange of allegations ranging from “hacking” to “influence campaigns” to “online trolls” sent by the Kremlin to harangue unsuspecting Midwestern voters. “Hacking,” however, remains the centerpiece of the narrative — the idea that Russian state actors “hacked” the Democratic National Committee and exfiltrated emails is routinely cited as the centerpiece of the overall “interference” thesis. After the alleged hacking, the DNC retained a private security firm — CrowdStrike — which made the determination that the Russian government was responsible, setting into motion a chain of Russia-related events that continue to unfold even now.

TYT can report that at the same time CrowdStrike was working on behalf of the DNC, the company was also under contract with the FBI for unspecified technical services. According to a US federal government spending database, CrowdStrike’s “period of performance” on behalf of the FBI was between July 2015 and July 2016. CrowdStrike’s findings regarding the DNC server breach — which continue to this day to be cited as authoritative by everyone from former FBI Director James Comey, to NBC anchor Megyn Kelly — were issued in June 2016, when the contract was still active.

Last week at a forum with Vladimir Putin, Kelly listed all the authoritative American entities which she claimed have corroborated the conclusion that Russian state actors “interfered” in the 2016 presidential election. (Notwithstanding its vagueness and imprecision, the term “interference” has come to be the standard term American media personalities invoke when seeking to describe how “Russians” maliciously undermined the sanctity of the 2016 US election process.) Querying Putin, Kelly repeated the canard that “17 intelligence agencies” had all independently concluded that Russia indeed “interfered” — whatever that means, exactly. She then continued: “Even private, non-partisan security firms say the same… that Russia interfered with the US election.”

The most prominent “private, non-partisan security firm” is CrowdStrike, and despite Kelly’s use of the term “non-partisan” to describe the firm, its fiduciary relationship with the DNC suggests otherwise. As the journalist Yasha Levine wrote in The Baffler,

Far from establishing an airtight case for Russian espionage, CrowdStrike made a point of telling its DNC clients what it already knew they wanted to hear: after a cursory probe, it pronounced the Russians the culprits. Mainstream press outlets, primed for any faint whiff of great-power scandal and poorly versed in online threat detection, likewise treated the CrowdStrike report as all but incontrovertible.

In April 2016, two months before the June report was issued, former President Barack Obama appointed Steven Chabinsky, “general counsel and Chief Risk officer” for CrowdStrike, to a presidential “Commission for Enhancing Cybersecurity,” further demonstrating CrowdStrike’s intermingling with powerful Democratic Party factions.

Neither the FBI nor CrowdStrike responded to requests for comment on the nature of the services provided. As of yet, the only entity known to receive primary access to the DNC servers is CrowdStrike. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in January, Comey testified that the FBI had been denied access to the servers by the DNC after repeated requests. And unnamed FBI officials told reporters, “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated.”

Comey’s long-awaited Congressional testimony on Thursday may provide additional insight into the FBI’s reliance on the firm.

Effectively, information that is now central to massively consequential geopolitical disputes has been “privatized“ and held exclusively by a profit-seeking entity. CrowdStrike’s findings continue to be repeated by journalists and politicians with unflinching certainty — despite the fact that it was forced to retract a central element of another report involving related malware attribution, raising doubts about the reliability of its DNC conclusions. As Jeffrey Carr, a security researcher who has been critical of CrowdStrike’s methods, told me: “The foundation of placing the blame on Russia was false.”

Power to determine world events is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of self-proclaimed “experts” who aren’t accountable to the public, but to clients and investors. CrowdStrike, evidently benefitting from the surge in PR, announced last month that it had been valued at one billion dollars.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2018, 01:32:30 PM: second post

Why Trump’s Detractors Cry ‘Treason’
He won’t go along with their efforts to deny the legitimacy of his election. Can you blame him?
By Michael Anton
July 19, 2018 6:21 p.m. ET

President Trump is, as ever, fortunate in his enemies. Whatever one thinks of what he said in Helsinki, the overreaction is helping him plow through yet another media meltdown. Cries of “treason,” charges that the president is a Russian “asset,” and insistence that remarks at a press conference constitute impeachable offenses fire up the Democratic base. To everyone else, they seem unhinged.

What’s the fuss about, anyway? Before Helsinki, Mr. Trump had said three times—on camera—that he believed Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Yet a reporter asked him again. Why?

Mr. Trump intuits, correctly, that the media push the issue in order to undermine his legitimacy. He obviously has no interest in helping them do that, hence he challenges the question’s premise. His opponents won’t take yes for an answer because asking him over and over fuels the falsehood that he “sides with Russia over his own intelligence agencies.”

He doesn’t. But doesn’t he have good reason to be cautious about the intelligence community? There’s plenty of evidence of illicit American interference in the 2016 election, all of it to defeat Mr. Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Yet when Mr. Trump points that out, he’s literally called a traitor—by the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. John Brennan and James Clapper attack the president in vitriolic terms almost daily. James Comey occasionally chimes in with a Bible quote. They have a First Amendment right to do so. But constantly bashing the president casts doubt on their impartiality and professionalism while in office.

Despite all this, Mr. Trump says he believes their case that Russia meddled in 2016. So do I. But I stress the word “believe.” I don’t know and neither does anyone outside the highest levels of government. Those in the media who hyperventilate every time Mr. Trump is insufficiently emphatic in acknowledging Russian meddling don’t seem to realize he is one of the very few people in the country who’ve actually seen the underlying evidence.

Before last week’s indictments, all the intelligence community had made public was a 14-page unclassified summary that states conclusions but reveals nothing about how they were reached. That’s typical for an unclassified product, but it means the rest of us—including the media—have to take the case on faith. Yet, bizarrely, the media insist they know better than Mr. Trump.

There is more public evidence of American meddling—politicized leaks, gaming a criminal investigation, surveillance of campaign associates, and strings of biased messages by officials—than of Russian. There may be piles of secret evidence of the latter. If so, why not make more of it public? Especially since, as we have been told, acknowledging Russian interference is the patriotic imperative of our time.

From what has been made public, Russian meddling consisted of trolling social media and allegedly hacking Democratic National Committee emails. Information operations are also as old as statecraft. There’s not a lot the target country can do to stop them, beyond pointing out and ridiculing ham-fisted propaganda. Throughout the Cold War, most Americans not on the left were unaffected by far more aggressive and better-financed Soviet disinformation. But we’re supposed to believe that $10 million spent on Facebook ads and troll farms overcame Mrs. Clinton’s $768 million war chest?

Every effort should be made to protect all of America’s cybernetworks, including the privacy of campaign operatives. But it’s absurd to assume that a single vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin was turned by reading John Podesta’s embarrassing emails.

Few of the president’s opponents actually say that Russia swung him the election. But that’s clearly what they insinuate and want people to believe. Mr. Trump understands this and is frustrated by it. Can you blame him?

Mr. Anton, a lecturer at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, served as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications, 2017-18.
Title: no end to this.
Post by: ccp on July 20, 2018, 05:25:53 PM: https://www.newsmax.com/politics/cohen-trump-recorded-payment/2018/07/20/id/872873/

:cry:

Michael Savage sounded like he is almost given up. Begged Trump to please take a break from tweets.
Talking about what it will be like to live in socialism. The young appear to have no clue.
Title: Was there sufficient notice of motives behind dossier in FISA application?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2018, 08:01:39 AM: Argues that FISA warrant application made reasonable/sufficient notice of political motivation behind Steele dossier.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-carter-page-fisa-applications
Title: Re: Was there sufficient notice of motives behind dossier in FISA application?
Post by: G M on July 22, 2018, 08:11:31 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2018, 08:01:39 AM
Argues that FISA warrant application made reasonable/sufficient notice of political motivation behind Steele dossier.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-carter-page-fisa-applications

No.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/saturday-night-document-dump.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 22, 2018, 08:26:57 AM: IF they had adequately and HONESTLY informed the judge of the "dossier " or whatever one wants to call it as being paid for by a political opponent would it have made one pubic hair bit of difference?

Is it not true the FISA courts grants just about everything asked of it to the tune of 99%?
Title: The FISA application; Why is Mueller handing off key cases?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2018, 08:59:11 AM: One of the accusations from our side was that the court was not fairly apprised of the political motivations behind the acquisition of the "evidence" being proffered.

At the moment I would say that this charge from our side has been answered.

As for the 97% (my understanding of the what number is) warrant approval rate goes, IIRC the original application was actually rejected and was not approved until a subsequent application that used the Steele dossier material. The Deep State has argued that the dossier was a secondary and not very important part of the application, Team Trump and supporters of the rule of law have argued that it was essential to the application.

As best as I can tell from this morning's heavily redacted release, the dossier is being shown to have been the PRIMARY source for the application that succeeded.

Also to be kept in mind is that the law and DOJ regs in question REQUIRE that the evidence being proffered be vetted by those presenting the warrant and that this was NOT done, they relied upon Steele, and did not independently vet.

Separately, here is this interesting piece:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/why-is-mueller-handing-off-key-cases

Several points worth noting, one that caught my eye as a simple debating point for us-- If Mueller was serious about indicting the GRU 12, why did he not keep the indictments secret so as to facilitate snatching them if/when any of them went outside of Russia?
Title: WTF? US open to lifting sanctions on Russian aluminum company?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2018, 02:16:00 PM: First ZTE, now this , , , :?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-argentina-mnuchin-rusal-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-open-to-lifting-sanctions-off-aluminum-giant-rusal-mnuchin-idUSKBN1KA2VS?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b528b7004d30108082582cb&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2018, 08:43:21 AM: A savvy friend comments:

The third paragraph is the only one worth reading. We don’t want to blow up the global aluminum market, and a bunch of countries asked us to ease back a bit. Remember that sanctions make sense only if they hurt the target more than they hurt you.

On Jul 22, 2018, at 14:16, Marc Denny <craftydog@dogbrothers.com> wrote:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-argentina-mnuchin-rusal-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-open-to-lifting-sanctions-off-aluminum-giant-rusal-mnuchin-idUSKBN1KA2VS?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b528b7004d30108082582cb&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook
Title: Andrew McCarthy: on the Carter Page FISA warrant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2018, 10:27:26 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/carter-page-fisa-applications-fbi-steele-dossier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jiwLkOggfo
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2018, 12:04:16 PM: Third post

https://patriot.imgix.net/a4df1bc17694832e41646b3551f758aa2a0b7e990beb76507e23e18757a7a5fc.jpg?w=720&auto=format
Title: Russia gate explained
Post by: G M on July 23, 2018, 03:22:33 PM: https://lidblog.com/memes-explain-ruissiagate/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2018, 08:24:35 AM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/judge-orders-firm-behind-trump-dossier-to-give-deposition-in-lawsuit-report
Title: Daily Beast humor like NY Daily News
Post by: ccp on July 27, 2018, 02:04:09 PM: "art of the rat"

"no need to wire up - I already did !"

"bullet shit"

https://www.thedailybeast.com/michael-cohen-debuts-the-art-of-the-squeal

***it's like the Trump - Rosie bruhaha of several years ago - only now he is President and the tabloids are CNN and the MSM and Mueller is acting like the paparazzi.

How can we keep a straight face?*** :lol:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Trey Gowdy
Post by: DougMacG on July 30, 2018, 06:39:39 AM: ' I've seen as much evidence as anyone in Congress has seen...
Not one scintilla of evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...
You can rest assured that if there was, Adam Schiff would have leaked it all over the media' - Trey Gowdy recently

I post this not because it is news but because the Sunday shows I saw were all Russia all the time while the news in the world they are diverting from is the roaring American economy.

I thought we were about to receive a Mueller report. If he cannot release a final report, shouldn't he have an interim report to serve as a factual basis for the midterm elections?

Where is the indictment of Don Trump Jr.? He met with a Russian intending to get dirt on his opposition. If that is illegal, again, where is the indictment? Now the president is accused of knowing about the meeting where nothing illegal occurred. This is the biggest news story in the country?

Who knew that Russia conspiracy and a media invented frenzy could be merged into one thread?

The midterm is about impeachment versus letting this President govern. Don't we deserve to see evidence of one arguably impeachable offense so that we can debate it? So far all I've seen is sour grapes from a party who failed to develop one serious presidential contender for 2016 and isn't developing any for 2020.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 30, 2018, 02:19:49 PM: we are seeing headlines
bottom line if c[rat]s win Congress we are in another 2 yrs of war with no ability to push through any agenda and an impeachment drama that will dominate headlines for the next 2 yrs .
they CANNOT win period.
we know all along this was all about getting Trump. can anyone think of on c[rat] who was squeezed to squeal like the bands of DC lawyers are doing to Trump people ?

How do the Podesta brothers simply walk. We all ready know about Schultz Clinton and Cheryl Mills and on and on .

They must not win this :

http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/07/30/paul-manafort-trial-robert-mueller-hoping-he-will-choose-testify-against-trump-rather-die

Crime or not there will a case made for impeachment which is what Mueller's team of lawyers was doing from day one.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Mueller report before Sept 5 or bust
Post by: DougMacG on July 31, 2018, 05:40:32 AM: Is it a formal or informal rule that he should not inject his report within 60 days of an election? In any case that is but a month away. If he does it at the last second, he still is injecting his report into the campaign. Giuliani basically said Trump isn't going to answer any questions. They've provided enough. The investigation is not legitimate from their point of view. End this. The Manafort trial starts now. That is irrelevant to the Trump Russia non-allegation.

My view: We paid for an expensive, flawed investigation. At some point, like now, show us what you've got. Prosecute or remove the legal cloud. Close up shop. The implication is that they are holding something that is borderline impeachable. The voters deserve to know the facts before they choose the membership of the new Congress Times up. Show us your cards.
Title: Federalist: Facts behind meeting incriminating, but not to whom you may think
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2018, 07:47:02 AM: Strong article:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/30/facts-behind-trump-tower-meeting-incriminating-not-trump/
Title: Is it?
Post by: G M on July 31, 2018, 07:01:18 PM: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjYpjOQU4AAM3Ea.jpg

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjYpjOQU4AAM3Ea.jpg)
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Don't Impeach Rosenstein
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2018, 09:50:21 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/rod-rosenstein-impeachment-bad-idea/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-07-31&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 01, 2018, 06:06:08 AM: GM:

"is the Russian collusion in the room right now with us?"

since collusion not a crime now they switched to "conspiracy". Though to me it is still a fabricated farce . If people working together to dig up dirt on an opposition candidate, now called "conspiring" to beat this candidate is now a crime then every politician in the US should be in jail.

And if the source is a foreign government so what if the information is 100% true . The only crimes are the ones exposed by the information on Hillary and mob ironically.

And as pointed out Hill and gang had no problem using s compilation of Russian sourced info (the STeele hit job) to hurt Trump and Mueller and gang and whole Dem party had not problem "conspiring " to use that to go after Trump

NO the only conspiracy that is criminal is this whole use of deep state to go after Trump.

Sure if you want to find out what Russia did fine , beyond that the rest is a illegal conspiracy to take down a President they don't like.

I am stepping off my soap box now.

Hope this was not too long winded .
Title: Dianne Feinstein ; move along folks nothing here
Post by: ccp on August 03, 2018, 09:16:01 PM: *******Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee*******
Assumed office
January 3, 2017
*******Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee********
In office
January 3, 2015 – January 3, 2017
*******Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee**********
In office
January 3, 2009 – January 3, 2015

HAD CHINESE SPY DRIVE HER AROUND FOR 20 YRS.: UNTIL ABOUT 5 YRS AGO. (while she was chair of senate [un]intelligent committee)
ALAS SHE FIRED HIM:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/03/sen-dianne-feinsteins-personal-driver-20-years-chinese-spy/
Title: Re: Dianne Feinstein ; move along folks nothing here
Post by: G M on August 04, 2018, 11:49:47 PM: Quote from: ccp on August 03, 2018, 09:16:01 PM
*******Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee*******
Assumed office
January 3, 2017
*******Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee********
In office
January 3, 2015 – January 3, 2017
*******Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee**********
In office
January 3, 2009 – January 3, 2015

HAD CHINESE SPY DRIVE HER AROUND FOR 20 YRS.: UNTIL ABOUT 5 YRS AGO. (while she was chair of senate [un]intelligent committee)
ALAS SHE FIRED HIM:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/03/sen-dianne-feinsteins-personal-driver-20-years-chinese-spy/

I can't find any sign of outrage from the left. Weird.
Title: Spectator: Who hired Steven Halper?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2018, 08:08:42 AM: https://spectator.org/who-hired-stefan-halper/
Title: Re: Spectator: Who hired Steven Halper?
Post by: G M on August 08, 2018, 07:33:11 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2018, 08:08:42 AM
https://spectator.org/who-hired-stefan-halper/

A crucial question!
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Of course there is a perjury trap
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 12, 2018, 12:50:38 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-perjury-trap-legitimate-concern-reason-to-decline-mueller-interview/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-08-12&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 14, 2018, 07:32:05 AM: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/russian-collusion-hillary-clinton/

All true but this:
"What's next? It's possible the collusion investigation soon will turn from Trump to Clinton. If so, it could lead to more resignations and possibly jail time for those involved. That includes perhaps even Hillary Clinton, who sits at the political epicenter of all this illegality."

This won't happen with Jeff Sessions or whats his face who works with him
The Mueller team is not interested since they are all crats and I don't know what makes anyone at this point believe Mueller is not corrupt either.

This as fully expected will drag on till after the election and if crats don't win the House probably till '20. If they do strategy is to present case for impeachment .

We all know this. Getting fully tired of the MSM denying the obvious and the Dems simply lying as they always have done . Probably the only high level Dem I can think of who was not a liar was Jimmy Carter .
Title: The Trump Tower meeting a Clinton set up?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2018, 10:41:07 AM: https://patriotpost.us/articles/57673-infamous-trump-tower-meeting-a-clinton-setup?mailing_id=3683&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3683&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
Title: Andrew McCarthy's best yet
Post by: ccp on August 18, 2018, 04:38:04 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/john-brennan-security-clearance-revocation-justified/

This part leaves me aghast. Suddenly the God Damn Left is making some sort of scandal about NDAs between Trump and someone who was on his reality show and then I read this:

" we should add Hayes’s reporting that Brennan’s CIA presented NDAs to survivors of the Benghazi terrorist attack — at a memorial service for those killed during the siege — in order to silence them while the Obama administration’s indefensible performance was being investigated.) In 2015, over 50 intelligence analysts complained that their reports on ISIS and al-Qaeda were being altered by senior officials in order to support misleading Obama-administration storylines. "

The sad part is because we have a Left wing media Obama gets away with it all.
Not one iota of responsibility for this Benghazi mess he and Hillary created .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 18, 2018, 06:50:26 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/john-brennan-refused-to-affirm-trump-russia-collusion-before-congress/
Title: WSJ: Trump waives the privilege
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2018, 07:09:47 AM: By The Editorial Board
Aug. 19, 2018 6:19 p.m. ET

Donald Trump has a credibility problem, but so do the media. A case in point is the weekend story that White House counsel Don McGahn has cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller. Let’s try to navigate through this Beltway Hall of Mirrors.

The thesis of the New York Times story is that Mr. McGahn cooperated in a way that could hurt Donald Trump in order to protect himself and because he doesn’t trust the President. This fits the media narrative that Mr. Trump is covering up his collusion with Russia and his obstruction of justice, and thus Mr. McGahn must be scrambling to save himself.

Yet lost in the resulting tempest is a crucial fact that appears to contradict this spin: Mr. Trump had to waive executive privilege for Mr. McGahn to cooperate with Mr. Mueller.

Mr. McGahn is not Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, so attorney-client privilege isn’t at issue. But as White House counsel Mr. McGahn represents the Presidency. He is a careful enough lawyer to advise Mr. Trump that agreeing to answer Mr. Mueller’s questions would waive executive privilege. And the Times reports that Mr. McGahn’s attorney, William Burck, said on the record that Mr. McGahn cooperated only after Mr. Trump waived any privilege claim.

This in turn meant that Mr. McGahn would have to answer all of Mr. Mueller’s questions. Once privilege is waived, Mr. McGahn couldn’t decide to answer, say, what Mr. Trump told him about Attorney General Jeff Sessions but refuse to discuss the President’s state of mind when he fired James Comey at the FBI. Without invoking privilege there is no legal basis for Mr. McGahn to refuse to answer a question.

This isn’t what you’d expect if Mr. Trump is leading a coverup. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton fought extensive legal battles with prosecutors over executive privilege. Mr. Clinton invoked privilege to block aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal from testifying to Ken Starr’s grand jury.Yet when Mr. Trump doesn’t invoke privilege for his White House counsel, he gets no credit.

Could it be that Mr. Trump let Mr. McGahn cooperate with Mr. Mueller because he felt he had nothing to cover up? This is precisely what Mr. Trump tweeted Saturday: “I allowed him and all others to testify - I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide.”

Because Mr. Trump makes so many false statements, this claim is also assumed to be false—though legal logic and the public evidence suggest that in this case it may be true. Keep in mind that Mr. Trump’s lawyers cooperated extensively with Mr. Mueller for months, turning over tens of thousands of documents—also without claiming executive privilege.

In recent months, as the Mueller probe has dragged on, Mr. Trump has turned to denouncing it as a “witch hunt.” His lawyers now fear that letting the President talk to Mr. Mueller’s team, as Mr. Trump has said he wants to do, could be walking into a perjury trap. This is a rational fear, but the lawyers are still negotiating with Mr. Mueller.

Mr. McGahn has been one of the President’s most effective advisers—notably on judicial nominations. But some in and outside the White House resent his influence and might want to portray him as undermining Mr. Trump. The bottom line is that readers should remain skeptical about what is reported about Mr. Mueller’s probe, waiting to see the evidence he actually produces.
Title: Newt's argument here seems strong to me
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2018, 05:16:15 PM: Mueller’s Fatal Mistake
Originally published at Fox News

There is now no excuse for Special Counsel Mueller to ask to interview President Trump.

In fact, it is now clear the investigators have been given so much information about the President’s actions and had such remarkably open access, they should just close shop and write their final report.

They no longer have any grounds for going to court to get a subpoena to compel the President to testify.

Mueller’s fatal mistake was revealed Saturday in The New York Times story titled, “White House Counsel, Don McGahn, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry.” Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman reported that there were at least 30 hours of interviews between the Mueller team and the White House Counsel.
Don McGahn asserted throughout the interviews that “he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities.”

McGahn’s cooperation is historically unique because President Trump waived both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege. President Trump was so confident of his innocence that he waived both of these protections to allow the Special Counsel to thoroughly question the White House attorney.

Accepting such thorough and detailed briefing from the White House Counsel will ultimately hurt the efforts of Mueller’s team of left-wing Democratic lawyers.
McGahn is a very widely-respected lawyer, who thoroughly understands the difference between legal and illegal behavior – and he was in the room for virtually all of President Trump’s activities.

It couldn’t be more clear: The Trump White House was comfortable talking for 30 hours with a pack of high-powered, very tough-minded investigators, because the President has done nothing wrong.

Nevertheless, at every stage, Mueller has conducted an aggressive, one-sided, and increasingly irresponsible, investigation.

Mueller was brought in to seek the truth about whether there was collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russians to impact the 2016 election.

His first step down the road of abusive aggressiveness was to hire a completely partisan team of mostly Democrat attorneys. Mueller could have hired a balanced team of Republican and Democratic lawyers. He could have avoided hiring lawyers who had worked for Hillary Clinton or gone to the Clinton election night party. Instead he hired totally biased opponents of Trump – who want to take down the President.

Mueller’s second step down the road was to find accusations that had nothing to do with the election, the Russians, or a question of collusion.

Look at the outrageous abuse of Paul Manafort. Manafort had been campaign chairman. He had ties with foreign businessmen. He had done extensive business in Ukraine. I’m sure the Mueller team believed if anyone was the obvious entry point for collusion, it would have been Manafort.

Yet, they found nothing.

Let me repeat this, because it is so ignored by the daily media headlines: The Mueller team found no evidence of Manafort colluding with any foreign entities on the 2016 election.

Manafort is being tried over tax and banking issues that have nothing to do with Russian collusion or any election.

In fact, the Manafort trial is a case study in how a ruthless prosecutor can use the power of the state to intimidate and punish an individual. Manafort and his wife were awakened in their pajamas in pre-dawn hours by FBI agents conducting a raid on their residence – even though the previous day Manafort had been cooperating with the Senate’s investigative body. Furthermore, there was no evidence Manafort represented any danger of violence or flight. The early morning attack was designed to frighten Manafort and send a signal to other potential witnesses to cooperate – or else.

An extraordinary abuse of power was displayed through Mueller’s holding of Manafort in solitary confinement in a cell for 23 hours a day as he awaited trial. This level of deprivation is astonishing when done to an American citizen, who has committed no violent crimes and has not been convicted of anything. Again, it is an effort to intimidate and coerce.

Mueller also understands that every person he goes after has to hire lawyers, spend their lifetime savings, and potentially end up deeply in debt to simply protect themselves from government lawyers who could potentially put them in prison.

Now, we are at the end of the failed investigation.

With McGahn’s 30 hours of testimony, it is clear there is no evidence of President Trump either colluding with the Russians or engaging in illegal obstruction of justice.
Saturday’s New York Times story should be the end of the story.

No sitting president has the time for distractions as big as the Mueller investigation absent the showing of a compelling need – the most important element of which is that any information President Trump has cannot be derived from some other source.

President Trump has not invoked any privilege and has permitted complete access to his White House Counsel, as well as others. Mueller can no longer even come close to meeting the compelling need standard. As such, it is time to shut the investigation down and allow the President to do what Americans hired him to do – focus on making America great again. Continuing to draw out this partisan investigation only serves to confirm what most Americans now understand – it had no basis in law or fact.

Mueller should write his report to Congress and return to his retirement.
Your Friend,
Newt
P.S. The Gingrich Foundation's award-winning documentary film, The First American is now on Amazon Prime Video. Add to your watchlist>>
Title: Re: Newt's argument here seems strong to me
Post by: DougMacG on August 21, 2018, 07:02:36 AM: Agreed on your main point, just quibbling with Newt's wording:

"Mueller’s Fatal Mistake"

The goal in the first place was to investigate a crime that didn't happen, not to prosecute it. It is not a failure to find no one guilty and issue a report. The failure was the time and resources wasted.

Is he really going to leave a cloud over the mid-terms when he has still found no evidence of collusion?

Lindsey Graham makes a good point about the double standard. Senator Feinstein was warned of a spy on her team. Why was candidate and president Trump not afforded the same courtesy? Partisan 'justice', unequal treatment under the law. Were they trying to prevent espionage or were they setting a trap? The answer to that is obvious.

On the other hand, it was quite cringe-worthy when Trump publicly asked the Russians to release Hillary's emails if they have them. Brennan either used that as his launching point or more likely he used it to justify what he had already improperly and illegally launched.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2018, 07:34:51 AM: Doug writes : " otoh was quite cringe-worthy when Trump publicly asked the Russians to release Hillary's emails if they have them."

The key word is *pulbicly* Trump always happy to speak on uncontrolled impulses.
But at least he was honest.

Hillary used her mobster lawyers to covertly reach out to Fusion to get purported dirt on Trump from the Russians .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 21, 2018, 09:14:12 AM: ccp, True. He wouldn't have said it publicly if he was trying to cover up collusion.

It turns out people did want to know what was in the hidden emails. The Russians or Wikileaks would have had no role if she had complied with Congressional subpoenas when they were issued.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2018, 05:03:26 PM: The complaint comes down to this: Those devious Russkis affected the outcome of the election by informing the American voters of a missing piece of the Truth.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: No basis for Mueller's interview request
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2018, 05:18:07 PM: second post

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/robert-mueller-donald-trump-interview-request/
Title: Cohen Plea
Post by: rickn on August 21, 2018, 05:37:23 PM: A guilty plea creates no precedent. It is simply the decision of Cohen to admit to these allegations in return for the government agreeing not to oppose a sentence greater than 63 months. He was in much bigger trouble for the income tax and bank fraud allegations - like Manafort got hit with today.

It is not a campaign contribution for a candidate to settle with his own private funds a prior disputed allegation of a personal nature that does not involve actions that occurred during the campaign - even if the settlement would benefit the campaign by imposing a nondisclosure agreement upon the complaining parties.

Cohen was reimbursed with funds from the Trump real estate company - not the Trump campaign. The US Attorney's written plea agreement and complaint alleges and admits this important fact. So, if Trump authorized Cohen to settle the Stormy Daniels and the McDougal allegations with money settlements paid by funds that were not part of the Trump campaign, there is no campaign finance violation. The fact that Cohen advanced the funds personally in one instance and convinced the National Enquirer to advance the funds in another instance does not make either transaction into a campaign contribution when the intended reimbursement for the settlements was always going to come from Trump's personal funds in his business.

The Chief Asst. US Attorney running the case was a Preet Bharra appointee and Bharra was fired by Trump as US Atty for that District of NY shortly after Trump took office. So, this was a form of political payback by forcing Cohen to make Trump look bad with guilty pleas to legally dubious counts in return for sentence leniency.
Title: Is this headline accurate?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2018, 05:38:21 PM: Third post

Unfamiliar with this source-- Is the headline accurate?

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/comey-deleted-obamas-name-from-hillary-hacked-emails-report/
Title: Thanks for your opinion
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2018, 06:32:14 PM: RickN

wrote "....there is no campaign finance violation....."

Yet the MSM will go on and on with this every minute of every day as thought this nails Trump.

"The Chief Asst. US Attorney running the case was a Preet Bharra appointee and Bharra was fired by Trump as US Atty for that District of NY shortly after Trump took office. So, this was a form of political payback by forcing Cohen to make Trump look bad with guilty pleas to legally dubious counts in return for sentence leniency."

Yes. And a couple years ago I posted on DBF that Preet was a hero of mine for white collar crime busting. Then when Trump came along and fired all the US Attorney's (like previous presidents) Preet distinctly, and as far as I read uniquely, came out in public and requested he be allowed to keep the position. When Trump, or team denied it , he publicly showed his displeasure as though he alone deserved special treatment. I lost my admiration for him. It would not surprise me if he did have something to do with this.
It seems (witness Brennan and many others in intelligence) that they are vengeful whenever they get their feathers ruffled.
Title: A Path to Prosecuting President Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2018, 07:59:33 PM: https://www.justsecurity.org/59789/path-prosecuting-president-trump/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 22, 2018, 04:30:25 AM: In Stalinist and likely after in Russia the secret police would kidnap someone then either beat the heck out of him or stick a gun to his/her head and order them to sign a confession

Here they just threaten you with jail till you die
unless you state the words we tell you to read off the paper which you will sign

So destroying hard drives, lying to Federal officials ignoring intelligence laws was poor judgement but paying off a couple of girls to be silent about affairs is watergate and crimes of the century . Like girls have not been paid off before.

Hillary must be laughing. What a joke , her dear *admirer* Lanny Davis is Cohen's lawyer who obviously was biased up the rear end.

The Repubs should stand up to this . I am not confident they will do that like the Dems always do when a lot is at stake.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on August 22, 2018, 05:10:48 AM: Trump settled two disputed claims for money. He denies having an affair with McDougal. He denies having consensual sex with Clifford aka Daniels. In the presidential campaign, both women came forward with their stories not for political purposes but for the purposes of getting paid for telling them. Both claims involve acts alleged to have occurred in about 2005-06. Both women had hired their own lawyers to pitch their stories to the tabloid media. Both women sought to use the presidential campaign as leverage in order to make their stories more valuable to them.

Neither woman was paid with any funds from the Trump campaign. Cohen drew funds from his home equity line of credit to set up a corporation that paid Clifford. The National Enquirer paid McDougal. The fed complaint alleges that both payments were made with the expectation of reimbursement from Trump. At the same time, Cohen was a VP in a Trump corporation. He was reimbursed by the same corporation for an amount of money needed to reimburse him for paying Clifford, the amount needed to reimburse the National Enquirer for paying McDougal, and a bonus for his work in securing the NDA settlements. The amount was grossed up for tax purposes so Cohen had enough after-tax money to make the reimbursements.

Preet Bharra's successor alleges that these transactions constitute campaign contributions because they were done, in part, to influence the 2016 election. Of course, Preet Bharra himself had asserted in the recent past a now discredited and overly broad theory about what constituted insider trading. His office used this theory to extract guilty pleas from certain traders. When his theory was challenged in court by a defendant who chose not to plead guilty, it was overturned by SCOTUS. Just because a prosecutor alleges that certain actions violate a statute does not mean that the prosecutor is correct.

The US Atty's theory of the case is that any time a person becomes a candidate for any office governed by federal campaign finance laws, that person cannot instruct his or her lawyer to settle disputed claims confidentially through intermediaries even when no campaign funds are used because the advancement of funds for the settlement by the intermediary is a campaign contribution. That is absurd.

Compare to DNC, Fusion GPS and Steele Dossier

Remember that Fusion GPS was hired by a law firm in which a DNC officer or director was a partner. The DNC was billed by the law firm and reimbursed the firm for the retainer fee paid to Fusion GPS.

Fusion GPS then hired Steele and was reimbursed by the law firm for the costs of hiring Steele. The law firm, in turn, was paid by the DNC. The purpose of these transactions was to influence the 2016 election.

Under the SDNY theory, the funds advanced by the law firm to pay Fusion GPS would constitute campaign contributions.

Compare to Hillary and Email Destruction

Hillary Clinton hired a third party to destroy those 33,000 emails on her server with BleachBit so they could not be used against her in her presidential campaign. Under the SDNY theory, these payments would constitute campaign contributions.

We face grave danger from corrupt prosecutors from within our own legal system when they abuse their powers in order to use unproven legal theories in order to embarrass a political opponent. I am much more concerned about these abuses of prosecutorial discretion than I am about whether Trump had consensual sex one time with a porn star more than 10 years ago.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 22, 2018, 07:00:03 AM: I agree with all of this, great post by Rick.

"Just because a prosecutor alleges that certain actions violate a statute does not mean that the prosecutor is correct."

I was going to say the reverse, just because the conduct did not constitute a crime does not mean some prosecutor will not run full speed with it.
Title: Levin : Trump obviously in clear
Post by: ccp on August 22, 2018, 08:54:30 AM: It is imperative that repubs win the House Nov MORE then ever.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-on-cohen-guilty-plea-donald-trumps-in-the-clear/
Title: Re: Levin : Trump obviously in clear
Post by: DougMacG on August 22, 2018, 09:14:23 AM: Quote from: ccp on August 22, 2018, 08:54:30 AM
It is imperative that repubs win the House Nov MORE then ever.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-on-cohen-guilty-plea-donald-trumps-in-the-clear/

This follows closely with what Rick wrote. Nothing was adjudicated here, it wasn't a campaign contribution and it doesn't matter what a prosecutor or defense lawyer say. Regarding Lanny Davis & Cohen, we have no idea what else Cohen was involved with that motivates a guilty plea to unrelated charges.

A rich, married men paying to hush up infidelity allegations is certainly not exclusively a campaign expense. Imagine the trouble he'd be in if he had paid this with campaign funds.

With two years of Investigations and gushing leaks, I'm surprised we haven't learned worse about Trump's prior business dealings. He is in the clear or else Mueller and his band of media megaphone Democratic activist are keeping the biggest political secret ever.

Slightly off topic and rhetorical only, how does a germaphobe have sex with Stormy Daniels? Yuck.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on August 22, 2018, 10:29:54 AM: We don't know exactly what legal jeopardy was being faced by Cohen because the US Atty proceeded by complaint with an attached plea deal. In the federal system, the govt can initiate a criminal case by grand jury indictment or by complaint. What occurred in this case was that the govt and Cohen negotiated a deal before legal proceedings began. The government then filed a complaint limited to those claims to which Cohen agreed to plead guilty. Then, Cohen pled guilty to those specific crimes pursuant to an agreement for a sentence no more than 63 months.

The time stamped date of the complaint was yesterday, August 21. And the complaint was filed along with the written plea and sentence agreement signed by the US atty and Cohen himself. What we don't know are the other charges against Cohen that the government was considering before Cohen took the deal. Those things get swept under the rug when a deal like this one is filed.

We do know that Cohen failed to declare about $4 million as income from 2012-2016. And he lied on an application for a home equity line of credit.

But I still remain unconvinced that if a candidate for any federal office settles disputed claims about past extramarital relationships by paying the claimants money in return for an NDA, that this constitutes a campaign contribution.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2018, 01:01:24 PM: Outstanding clarity Rick!
Title: Cohen's word against Trump's
Post by: ccp on August 22, 2018, 07:02:41 PM: As per the now historical figure Lanny Davis :

https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/08/22/lanny-davis-no-new-evidence-just-mr-cohens-word-versus-mr-trumps/
Title: The flow chart
Post by: G M on August 22, 2018, 09:22:23 PM: (https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/poltrumpcohenchart.jpg)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2018, 10:07:59 PM: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/was_the_strange_language_in_michael_cohens_guilty_plea_a_setup.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 23, 2018, 03:06:47 PM: The worst part of this Mueller stuff is that we are going to be forced to listen to this endless propaganda for the next 2.5 yrs day in and day out.
They won't remove him (unless the liked of several big time loser Mitt Romney gets in the Senate.)

Is it too late to get another Repub other then Romney to run in UTAH - write in?
Title: Paul Sperry: FBI "Investigation" Into Weiner Laptop Was a Gigantic Fraud
Post by: G M on August 23, 2018, 03:09:06 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/376713.php

Paul Sperry: FBI "Investigation" Into Weiner Laptop Was a Gigantic Fraud Upon the Public;
FBI Only Looked at 3000 Emails, and Only Glanced At Those in a 12 Hour Window; Never Conducted Mandatory Security Assessment

Big, big story.

Don't expect Your Very Conservative Betters to note this, because they voted for Hillary or voted for a third party candidate with the hope that Hillary would win.

When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had "reviewed all of the communications" discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the "hundreds of thousands" of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Comey later told Congress that "thanks to the wizardry of our technology," the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as "duplicates" of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked "night after night after night" to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

BTW, Peter Strzok was one of those three FBI officials. The guy who spoke of an "insurance policy" against Trump's election. The guy who said that Trump would never win the election, because "we will stop him."

"Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence" of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Yet even the "extremely narrow" search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said. Contradicting Comey's testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.

Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intelligence agencies to determine if national security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated "damage assessment" directive.

The newly discovered classified material "was never previously sent out to the relevant original classification authorities for security review," the official, who spoke to RealClearInvestigations on the condition of anonymity, said.

Other key parts of the investigation remained open when the embattled director announced to Congress he was buttoning the case back up for good just ahead of Election Day.

One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to New York colleagues that officials in Washington tried to "bury" the new trove of evidence, which he believed contained the full archive of Clinton's emails -- including long-sought missing messages from her first months at the State Department.

RealClearInvestigations pieced together the FBI's handling of the massive new email discovery from the "Weiner laptop." This months-long investigation included a review of federal court records and affidavits, cellphone text messages, and emails sent by key FBI personnel, along with internal bureau memos, reviews and meeting notes documented in government reports. Information also was gleaned through interviews with FBI agents and supervisors, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials, as well as congressional investigators and public-interest lawyers.

If the FBI "soft-pedaled" the original investigation of Clinton's emails, as some critics have said, it out-and-out suppressed the follow-up probe related to the laptop, sources for this article said.

"There was no real investigation and no real search," said Michael Biasello, a 27-year veteran of the FBI. "It was all just show -- eyewash -- to make it look like there was an investigation before the election."

Although the FBI's New York office first pointed headquarters to the large new volume of evidence on Sept. 28, 2016, supervising agent Peter Strzok, who was fired on Aug. 10 for sending anti-Trump texts and other misconduct, did not try to obtain a warrant to search the huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016. Violating department policy, he edited the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search.

The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated back to 2007. But the warrant to search the laptop excluded any messages exchanged before or after Clinton's 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state, key early periods when Clinton initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands of emails sought by investigators.

Far from investigating and clearing Abedin and Weiner, the FBI did not interview them, according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely. The machine was not authorized for classified material, and Weiner did not have classified security clearance to receive such information, which he did on at least two occasions through his Yahoo! email account – which he also used to email snapshots of his penis.

Many Clinton supporters believe Comey's 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand. At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence.

...

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

That's just the basics of the article.

Some key facts:

Hillary Clinton only turned over 30,000 emails to the Government which she and her lawyers deemed "relevant." The rest of the emails, she claimed, were about yoga routines and wedding plans, but no one was able to check on this, as she had deleted the rest of them. Bleach-bitted them, in fact.

There were nearly seven hundred thousand relevant emails on Huma Abedin's/convicted pervert Anthony Weiner's computer.

That's a lot of emails. A lot more than Clinton turned over.

However, the FBI repeatedly narrowed the search warrant for the emails that they would even bother receiving, to make sure that only the tiniest fraction of these 700,000 emails was even given a once-over.

The less evidence you even look at, the less likely it is you'll be forced to hurt Hillary Clinton's electoral chances, after all.

Even with such a massive narrowing of the evidence they were willing to look at -- just 3,077 out of the nearly 700,000 -- they still found new classified emails, even in that very limited sampling of emails.

Of course, the FBI, under Strzok's guidance, ignored the NY office's report that they had hundreds of thousands of emails relevant to the "Midyear Review." They delayed reviewing them for as long as they could -- they only wound up reviewing them when they found out that news had leaked and congressmen knew they were sitting on this.

Here's one exchange illustrating that:

By Oct. 21, Strzok had gotten the word. "Toscas now aware NY has hrc-huma emails," he texted McCabe’s counsel, Lisa Page, who responded, "whatever."
Four days later, Page told Strzok -- with whom she was having an affair -- about the murmurs she was hearing from brass about having to tell Congress about the new emails. "F them," Strzok responded, apparently referring to oversight committee leaders on the Hill.

Even IG Horowitz called the extremely restricted search of the emails "too narrow:"

"The FBI only reviewed emails to or from Clinton during the period in which she was Secretary of State, and not emails from Abedin or other parties or emails outside that period," Horowitz pointed out in a section of his report discussing concerns that the search warrant request was "too narrow."
That put the emails the New York case agent found between 2007 and 2009, when Clinton's private server was set up, as well as those observed after her tenure in 2013, outside investigators' reach. The post-tenure emails were potentially important, Horowitz noted, because they may have offered clues concerning the intent behind the later destruction of emails.

Remember, Clinton's IT guy destroyed the bulk of these emails off Hillary Clinton's servers right after speaking to Hillary Clinton's lawyer. He did this despite the fact that these were government records and they were under official request for disclosure by the government. The IT guy has never explained what Hillary Clinton's lawyer said in that conversation -- he claimed lawyer-client privilege, despite the fact that he had never been a client of that lawyer before. The IT guy was also found to be obviously, flagrantly lying when asked bout the emails.

These emails on the Abedin computer could have told us what happened to cause the destruction of so many emails from Hillary Clinton's servers. But Comey had decided to not even look into this potential obstruction of justice and destruction of government records, only searching her emails for classified-information violations, and the subsequent warrant for the Abedin/Weiner records likewise avoided searching them for evidence of obstruction of justice.

Even though it was impossible to search even these few emails and clear Hillary before the election, Strzok decided that they would do the impossible for Hillary anyway:

At the same time, they cut off communications with the New York field office. "We should essentially have no reason for contact with NYO going forward on this," Strzok texted Page on Nov. 2.
Strzok followed up with another text that same day, which seemed to echo earlier texts about what they viewed as their patriotic duty to stop Trump and support Clinton.

"Your country needs you now," he said in an apparent attempt to buck up Page, who was "very angry" they were having to reopen the Clinton case. "We are going to have to be very wise about all of this."

"We're going to make sure the right thing is done," he added. "It's gonna be ok."

Responded Page: "I have complete confidence in the [Midyear] team."

"Our team," Strzok texted back. "I'm telling you to take comfort in that." Later, he reminded Page that any conversations she had with McCabe "would be covered under atty [attorney-client] privilege."

The article then notes that Comey claimed it was now possible to do the impossible by an amazing technological breakthrough, in which computers would find the duplicate emails and thereby eliminate them from the need of human review.

But this was a lie. They only attempted this technological trick; it actually failed.

But according to the IG, FBI's technology division only "attempted" to de-duplicate the emails, but ultimately was unsuccessful. The IG cited a report prepared Nov. 15, 2016, by three officials from the FBI’s Boston field office. Titled "Anthony Weiner Laptop Review for Communications Pertinent to Midyear Exam," it found that "ecause metadata was largely absent, the emails could not be completely, automatically de-duplicated or evaluated against prior emails recovered during the investigation."
...

Contrary to Comey's claim, the FBI could not sufficiently determine how many emails containing classified information were duplicative of previously reviewed classified emails. As a result, hundreds of thousands of emails were not actually processed for evidence, law enforcement sources say.

"All those communications weren't ruled out because they were copies, they were just ruled out," the federal investigator with direct knowledge of the case said. The official, who wished to remain anonymous, explained that hundreds of thousands of emails were simply overlooked. Instead of processing them all, investigators took just a sample of the batch and looked at those documents.

Remember the very biased Agent #1 and Agent #5, one of whom cried when Hillary lost, and one of whom said he'd start carrying guns on the street to protect himself against Trump's America?

Here's what these two were telling each other during this "investigation:"

As the search was under way, one of the Midyear agents – Agent 1 -- confided to another agent in a Nov. 1 instant message on the FBI's computer network that "no one is going to pros[ecute Clinton] even if we find unique classified [material]."
But they also did their damnedest to avoid finding new classified material.

And so, given that there was no "amazing technological breakthrough" allowing them to complete this "review" and clear Hillary before the election, three agents, including Strzok, went through the 3,077 emails (out of almost 700,000) in just a 12 hour period.

Here's what Strzok said when his 12-hour fake-review was done and he had told Comey he could re-close this sham investigation:

As news of the case's swift re-closure hit the airwaves, Page and Strzok giddily exchanged text messages and celebrated. "Out on CNN now ... And fox... I WANT TO WATCH THIS WITH YOU!" Strzok said to Page. "Going to pour myself a glass of wine..."
And... even trying not to find new classified material, Hillary's emails were so stuffed with it they failed to miss the thing they were trying not to find:

Yet investigators nonetheless found 13 classified email chains on the unauthorized laptop just in the small sample of 3,077 emails that were individually inspected, and four of those were classified as Secret at the time.
Contrary to the FBI's public claims, at least five classified emails recovered were not duplicates but new to investigators.

The end of the article describes those Secret emails.

Read the whole thing. At least click the link and maybe look at some other headlines from Real Clear Investigations. They did amazing work here and should be rewarded.
Title: The National Enquirer, Pecker, Cohen, et al
Post by: rickn on August 23, 2018, 04:02:55 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2018, 10:07:59 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/was_the_strange_language_in_michael_cohens_guilty_plea_a_setup.html

If reporters actually read the Information (Complaint) filed on Tuesday together with Cohen's plea agreement, you learn these important facts.

1. The National Enquirer's Chairman, David Pecker, met with Cohen and an unnamed campaign official in August 2015 and offered to alert them to any potentially negative stories about Trump and women. (Paragraph 27 of Information)

2. In June 2016, Pecker called Cohen and alerted him to the fact that Linda McDougal was offering to sell her story of a one year affair with Trump in 2006-07. (Par. 29)

3. Cohen encouraged Pecker to buy the story by reminding him of his August 2015 offer to help Trump. (Par. 29)

4. Cohen promised to reimburse the National Enquirer for any money paid to McDougal. (Par. 29)

5. The Enquirer bought McDougal's story on August 5, 2016 for $150,000. (Par. 30)

6. About 4 weeks later, Pecker and Cohen signed an agreement for Cohen to buy McDougal's story from the Enquirer for $125,000; but Pecker changed his mind before Cohen wired him the money. (Par. 31)

7. On 8 October 2016, Stormy Daniels' agent contacted the Enquirer and offered to sell her story of sex with Trump. Her agent and lawyer were put in contact with Cohen by the Enquirer. Over the next few days, Cohen negotiated a deal directly with Daniels' lawyer to pay her $130,000 in return for an NDA. (Par. 32)

8. Cohen didn't do anything more for about 2 and 1/2 weeks. Then on the evening of October 25, 2016, Daniels' lawyer told the Enquirer that Cohen had not closed the deal and that Daniels was close to selling her story to a rival media outlet. Pecker and his editor then called Cohen and told him about the problem and Cohen called Daniels' attorney and agreed to pay the money right away. (Par. 33)

9. The next day, Cohen set up a new corporation. The day after that, Cohen deposited $131,000 into the corporation's bank account. This money came from Cohen's home equity line that was the subject of the Count VI bank fraud allegations. And Daniels was paid on November 1, 2016 when Cohen wired $130,000 of his home equity loan proceeds from the corporation's bank account to the account of Daniels' attorney. (Par. 34)

10. In January 2017, Cohen sought reimbursement of the Stormy Daniels money, the $35 wire fee and a $50,000 tech consulting fee from Trump's company (not his campaign). (Par. 37)

11. The Information claims that Cohen was part of the Trump campaign because he had an email address at the campaign, sometimes advised the campaign, including on matters of interest to the press, and made media appearances on behalf of the campaign. (Par. 25)

****************************
The basic theory of the government's case was that Cohen was part of the campaign; therefore, anything expenditure he made that could possibly benefit the candidate was a campaign expenditure even if there was a legitimate non-campaign reason to make the expenditure and even though Cohen also never had a formal title on the campaign. The "at the direction of the candidate" were Cohen's words in his plea allocution on Tuesday.

The unnamed campaign officials were never identified. Remember that Trump is identified as "Individual-1" in the Information.

Cohen also wore other hats in relation to Trump. He was an officer in Trump's company. And he acted as Trump's personal attorney on some matters.

According to the Information, he National Enquirer people never spoke to anyone but Cohen about the two womens' stories. The government does not allege that the Enquirer spoke to Individual-1. Nor does the government allege that the Enquirer spoke to the other unnamed campaign officials mentioned vaguely in paragraph 27.
Title: Pravda on the Potomac admits hush payments may have been legal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2018, 07:30:47 PM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/those-payments-to-mistresses-were-unseemly-that-doesnt-mean-they-were-illegal/2018/08/22/634acdf4-a63b-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html?utm_term=.095474911e9c=
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on August 24, 2018, 05:12:02 AM: Cohen's allocution that he made the payments at Trump's direction and with his authorization is most likely embellished.

The taped meeting leaked to the media occurred after AMI had bought McDougal's story and after Cohen had promised AMI that he would reimburse it for any money spent to buy McDougal's story. How do we know that? Because the tape replays discussions about Cohen's plan to buy the McDougal story from AMI - not from McDougal. And it occurred before AMI decided not to accept reimbursement from Cohen. At worst, Trump agreed to Cohen's plan to buy the story from AMI. And with his own personal funds. These facts do not indicate an intent to violate campaign finance laws. Trump's insistence on a check and use of his personal funds indicate an intent to comply with campaign finance laws by using personal money to pay for personal expenditures.

More importantly, this meeting occurred weeks before Clifford even appeared at AMI seeking to sell her "story" of a one night stand with Trump in 2007. And this was a story that she had been peddling for at least 5 year before that time. Why? Because her claim of intimidation from Trump's people occurred in Las Vegas in 2010 or 2011.

Thus, as far as the publicly available information shows at this time, Trump ok'd Cohen's plan to buy the McDougal story from AMI. Most likely Cohen sought this approval because, six weeks earlier, he had already promised to reinburse AMI if they bought the story and Cohen did not want to use his own money to pay AMI. And, the publicly available information shows that Cohen's meeting with Trump occurred weeks before Stephanie Clifford even appeared at AMI seeking to sell her story. Without further evidence, I don't believe Cohen's claim.
Title: New Yorker: Follow the Money
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2018, 09:46:18 AM: Haven't read this yet; leaving in one hour for business trip:

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/trump-asks-how-did-we-end-up-here-we-suggest-follow-the-money?mbid=nl_Daily%20082418&CNDID=50142053&utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20082418&utm_content=&spMailingID=14126743&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1462171861&spReportId=MTQ2MjE3MTg2MQS2
Title: New Yorker: The Conspiracy Memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2018, 09:48:02 AM: Second post, also unread

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-conspiracy-memo-aimed-at-obama-aides-that-circulated-in-the-trump-white-house?mbid=nl_Daily%20082418&CNDID=50142053&utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20082418&utm_content=&spMailingID=14126743&spUserID=MjAxODUyNTc2OTUwS0&spJobID=1462171861&spReportId=MTQ2MjE3MTg2MQS2
Title: Watch this before it's disappeared
Post by: G M on August 24, 2018, 02:06:02 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=839&v=v3j-YbJTgbI
Title: Re: The Russian non-conspiracy, Mueller, not impartial Justice
Post by: DougMacG on August 27, 2018, 08:02:28 AM: What is the criminal difference between the alleged political contribution hidden and not reported by Michael Cohen and the work of Hillary's lawyers hiding and not reporting their contribution to Fusion GPS for the dossier

Question posed by Kim Strassel, wsj, and others.

Not impartial justice.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2018, 07:31:47 AM: A question for the Rule of Law thread as well.
Title: WSJ: Anatomy of a Fusion Smear
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2018, 09:11:12 PM: Anatomy of a Fusion Smear
Democrats and their media friends made false claims about a lawyer.
200 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 31, 2018 7:10 p.m. ET
Cleta Mitchell, a partner at Foley & Lardner in Washington, D.C., Feb. 6, 2014.

Cleta Mitchell is a top campaign-finance lawyer in Washington, D.C. This year she’s also been the target of a political and media smear that reveals some of the nastiness at work in the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A partner at Foley & Lardner, Ms. Mitchell was astonished to find herself dragged into the Russia investigation on March 13 when Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued an interim report. They wrote that they still wanted to interview “key witnesses,” including Ms. Mitchell, who they claimed was “involved in or may have knowledge of third-party political outreach from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign, including persons linked to the National Rifle Association (NRA).”

Two days later the McClatchy news service published a story with the headline “NRA lawyer expressed concerns about group’s Russia ties, investigators told.” The story cited two anonymous sources claiming Congress was investigating Ms. Mitchell’s worries that the NRA had been “channeling Russia funds into the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump.”

Ms. Mitchell says none of this is true. She hadn’t done legal work for the NRA in at least a decade, had zero contact with it in 2016, and had spoken to no one about its actions. She says she told this to McClatchy, which published the story anyway.

Now we’re learning how this misinformation got around, and the evidence points to Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the outfit that financed the infamous Steele dossier. New documents provided to Congress show that Mr. Simpson, a Fusion co-founder, was feeding information to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. In an interview with House investigators this week, Mr. Ohr confirmed he had known Mr. Simpson for some time, and passed at least some of his information along to the FBI.

In handwritten notes dated Dec. 10, 2016 that the Department of Justice provided to Congress and were transcribed for us by a source, Mr. Ohr discusses allegations that Mr. Simpson made to him in a conversation. The notes read: “A Russian senator (& mobster) . . . [our ellipsis] may have been involved in funneling Russian money to the NRA to use in the campaign. An NRA lawyer named Cleta Mitchell found out about the money pipeline and was very upset, but the election was over.”

A spokesman for Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, says the “Minority did not speak with Mr. Simpson or Fusion GPS about this,” though he declined to disclose who named Ms. Mitchell. Our sources say they can’t remember Ms. Mitchell coming up in any of the documents collected or witness interviews conducted for the investigation. So how did Mr. Schiff get his tip? Fusion’s media friends? Mr. Ohr? The FBI? Fusion GPS and Mr. Simpson did not answer a request for comment.

Ms. Mitchell says the fallout for her goes beyond inconvenience and a false allegation. Mr. Schiff’s team in May sent her a letter demanding testimony and documents, though no one in Mr. Schiff’s office alerted her before naming her in an official document.

She received similar demands from Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, who wanted Ms. Mitchell to turn over records related to “the transfer of money, or anything of value” between her and several Russians. After Ms. Mitchell in May responded that she had no information related to any of those Russians and accused the committee of being duped by “Glenn Simpson & Co.,” she heard nothing more.

But social media attacks on her haven’t ended. “That allegation impugns my ethical integrity and professional reputation,” she says, one reason she’s calling for Mr. Simpson to be prosecuted for lying to a federal official.

The Russian collusion accusations ginned up by Fusion at the behest of a law firm working for the Clinton campaign haven’t been corroborated despite two years of investigations. But no one should forget the smears that they and their media mouthpieces peddled along the way.
Title: VDH: The Truth Will Set Us Free
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2018, 11:31:28 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-russia-probe-robert-mueller-time-for-truth/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-09-02&utm_term=VDHM
Title: JW: DOJ admits no FISA hearings held on Carter Page warrants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2018, 06:37:29 AM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-justice-department-discloses-no-fisa-court-hearings-held-on-carter-page-warrants/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newswatch&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180907133629
Title: The Federalist: Mollie Hemingway: Fact is that Trump Campaign was spied on.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2018, 06:39:07 AM: second post: Mollie Hemingway is one of my favorites:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/26/media-gaslighting-cant-hide-fact-trump-campaign-was-spied-on/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Mr. Rosenstein, where is the crime?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2018, 08:03:07 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-russia-probe-robert-mueller-investigation/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-09-08&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Steele & Ohr pushed debunked Trump-Russian Bank story
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2018, 08:56:46 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/9/bruce-ohr-notes-contradict-glenn-simpson-on-donald/
Title: Strzok and Page Planned Media Leak; Andrew Weissmann Also Made Unauthorized Leak
Post by: G M on September 11, 2018, 03:28:50 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/376990.php

Criminal acts.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on September 11, 2018, 05:30:30 PM: "Criminal acts."

Only if you are a Republican
and not a Democrat DC lawyer.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 12, 2018, 08:03:24 AM: Just a note in time that Mueller missed the unofficial 60-day deadline of releasing a damaging report in the days coming in to an election. If he had clear and convincing evidence from the beginning that Trump committed treason by colluding illegally with the enemy, wouldn't that have come out by now?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on September 12, 2018, 09:15:15 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on September 12, 2018, 08:03:24 AM
Just a note in time that Mueller missed the unofficial 60-day deadline of releasing a damaging report in the days coming in to an election. If he had clear and convincing evidence from the beginning that Trump committed treason by colluding illegally with the enemy, wouldn't that have come out by now?

They would have illegally leaked to the DNC-MSM long ago.
Title: Ah, it's only 13...
Post by: G M on September 13, 2018, 09:38:09 AM: https://pjmedia.com/video/rep-jordan-thirteen-different-fbi-agents-were-working-with-one-reporter/

Nothing to see here, move along.

Not some sort of strategy to remove a lawfully elected president.
Title: Andrew McCarthy on Mamafort's guilty plea
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2018, 03:41:30 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/paul-manaforts-guilty-plea/
Title: Was Steele disseminating Russian disinfo to the FBI?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2018, 03:49:51 PM: https://www.weeklystandard.com/eric-felten/was-christopher-steele-disseminating-russian-disinformation-to-the-fbiSecond post
Title: A first though not getting hopes up
Post by: ccp on September 15, 2018, 03:16:22 PM: OMG five times over:

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/obamas-former-white-house-counsel-lawyers-up-after-mueller-probe-referral/

A DC dem lawyer being investigated.

All we need is charges and threats he go to jail for rest of his life unless he flips on Baraq and tells the truth that Brock was involved in the cover up of Hillary and the Trump spying all along.

Then again dreams like this are only dreams...........
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Trump, Russia probe, FBI and the FISA application
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2018, 04:04:53 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-russia-probe-fbi-fisa-application/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-09-15&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Mueller sending people to jail, but not for collusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2018, 02:41:59 PM: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-mueller-investigation-is-sending-people-to-jail-but-not-for-collusion/
Title: Trump declassifies records
Post by: ccp on September 17, 2018, 03:57:40 PM: https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/17/donald-trump-orders-declassification-of-russia-investigation-records/
Title: Trump walks back declassification , , , for now
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 21, 2018, 09:26:23 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-walks-back-his-plan-to-declassify-russia-probe-documents/2018/09/21/79d95f94-bdac-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html?utm_term=.28796201e334&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
Title: Let's see the evidence!
Post by: G M on September 21, 2018, 10:59:37 AM: (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnZPniZU0AAX4mB.jpg)
Title: Rosenstein, Wire, 25th Amendment, surprised that Trump relied on his memo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 21, 2018, 03:01:05 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/politics/rod-rosenstein-wear-wire-25th-amendment.html
Title: This seems like a BFD , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2018, 09:25:27 AM: https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/409817-russia-collusion-bombshell-dnc-lawyers-met-with-fbi-on-dossier-before
Title: Re: This seems like a BFD , , ,
Post by: G M on October 07, 2018, 01:11:24 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2018, 09:25:27 AM
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/409817-russia-collusion-bombshell-dnc-lawyers-met-with-fbi-on-dossier-before

Yes it is.
Title: Andrew McC on WSJ interview with Rosenstein
Post by: ccp on October 20, 2018, 01:37:13 PM: If I understand Andrew's review of the article it sounds as though EVEN the supposed conservative WSJ whitewashed Rosenstein's role in this whole affair:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/rod-rosenstein-interview-defends-mueller-probe/
Title: One lefty begins to get it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2018, 09:48:05 AM: https://theweek.com/articles/802798/how-mueller-fairy-tale-ends
Title: swamp lawyers' principle affiliation
Post by: ccp on October 23, 2018, 02:17:43 PM: is always the The Swamp.

Got to keep the beltway connections alive:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/former-trump-lawyer-ty-cobb-no-witch-hunt-mueller-is-an-american-hero/

No bias . Just the principle of it all.........
Title: DOJ ties a Trump FISA release to obstruction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2018, 09:54:22 PM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/10/26/doj_ties_a_trump_fisa_release_to_obstruction.html
Title: DOJ tried to tie fisa release with obstruction
Post by: ccp on October 27, 2018, 09:01:50 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/10/26/doj_ties_a_trump_fisa_release_to_obstruction.html

Some one please help me out. Trump is the chief law enforcement official in the nation . DOJ works for HIM. and yet he can't get the bureaucrats to carry out his orders?
Title: 44.5 yrs later days before an election the Dems do this
Post by: ccp on October 31, 2018, 06:28:43 PM: someone, obviously crats decided for no particular reason to release this now:

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/watergate-roadmap-released-read-the-formerly-sealed-grand-jury-report-and-recommendation/

Man we are really up against a propaganda MACHINE
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2018, 09:43:42 PM: Welcome to Rome.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on October 31, 2018, 09:48:31 PM: Rape!

Bombs!

Synagogue shooting!

Russian collusion? Never heard of it.
Title: Five things to know about Acting AG Matthew Whitaker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2018, 05:52:14 PM: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/415637-5-things-to-know-about-new-acting-attorney-general-matthew-whitaker
Title: Hillary's lawyer Rhee
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2018, 10:57:28 AM: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/mueller-witness-exposes-prosecutor-middle-heated-court-battle-shatters-leftist-narrative/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=conservativetribune&utm_content=2018-11-14&utm_campaign=manualpost
Title: Yup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2018, 09:41:07 AM: https://outline.com/L7U6TA
Title: Counter Intel gone wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2018, 10:05:07 AM: https://outline.com/VGPa2S
Title: Whitaker has seen and unseen powers over Mueller probe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 23, 2018, 05:56:10 AM: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/417912-ample-tools-at-whitakers-disposal-to-disrupt-mueller-probe?userid=188403
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on November 27, 2018, 07:54:58 AM: Manafort may have met with Assange

my response => so what.

he should have told assange to not dump emails proving Hillary Clinton was COMMITTING MULTIPLE FELONIES.
of course any Democrat would have refused to associate.
Title: Mueller, you naughty boy!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2018, 02:21:07 PM: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/exclusive-mueller-is-being-criminally-investigated-and-jerome-corsi-knew-about-the-case/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on November 27, 2018, 04:24:58 PM: Did Whitey Bulger (Mueller's colleague ) slip Mueller's men the gun he planted on Darren Huff ?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2018, 04:27:07 PM: Not pushing that aside, but how long has Manafort been kept in solitary confinement?
Title: In case anyone cares to contribute
Post by: ccp on November 29, 2018, 06:25:31 AM: To his go fund me page.

I wonder how much his lawyers take ?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/27/17783590/michael-cohen-go-fund-me-lanny-davis

Why does he have to be Jewish? :cry:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2018, 06:45:12 AM: I'm not liking what I'm seeing about Corsi-Stone comms , , ,
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2018, 09:38:28 AM: This looks really bad:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-to-lying-to-congress-about-moscow-building-project/

I know Cohen's lawyer is a Hillary pit bull, but this looks really bad. There very well could be tapes, it's in State courts (no pardons), fuk , , , , :-o :-o :-o
Title: Bongino on Spygate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2018, 11:20:20 AM: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/11/25/dan_bongino_on_spygate_obama_mueller__the_biggest_spy_scandal_in_american_history.html?fbclid=IwAR2a8TpKInXioyF7rGDLmqIJqe4Okpjqk1JYEQtbTDn8OZb7FeEzSy9U0eE
Title: OK, breathing easier now , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2018, 03:33:15 PM: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/418879-is-mueller-team-bludgeoning-to-get-narrative-it-wants
Title: No special protection for Mueller
Post by: ccp on November 30, 2018, 05:10:08 AM: Agreed . At this point the whole thing is obviously political not legal.
so why should Trump be forced to surrender his ability to fight back by firing the hack?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/robert-mueller-protection-bill-trump-russia-probe/
Title: The Russian conspiracy, Mueller, exoneration?
Post by: DougMacG on December 03, 2018, 06:41:38 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/12/02/actually_mueller_appears_to_be_exonerating_trump.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 03, 2018, 06:51:13 AM: "The Russian conspiracy, Mueller, exoneration?"

I am not holding my breath that he will ever conclude this though n writing or public speaking . If he does I might be the first to gasp with shock.

And of course the LEft will always turn it to a negative no matter what.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 03, 2018, 06:59:18 AM: Exoneration in fact, not in the words of the report.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/12/notes-on-the-cohen-plea-2.php

The back channel was the public email address.
Title: lets see if Mueller is the class guy we keep hearing about
Post by: ccp on December 03, 2018, 07:55:22 AM: "Exoneration in fact, not in the words of the report."

AGree Doug
But we must have Mueller state unequivically this in his report

Not just he found no evidence but he concludes to clear Trump

in my HO.
That will be the best way to put a stop to the LEFt twisting everything around - but Mueller won't do this.

Like the IGs they give facts but will not state the obvious conclusions and as a result we have the Dem Party Dem DC lawyers and their media outlets
turning and twisting and spinning 'a la' George Stephanapolous (when he was WH press guy in early 90s)
everything around to the opposite from the correct conclusion .

If Mueller is truly the classy non partisan guy as per Paul Ryan etc ,
but he likely won't . He will just throw out a bunch of facts and each side will twist them in the wind......
Title: Re: lets see if Mueller is the class guy we keep hearing about
Post by: DougMacG on December 04, 2018, 05:58:42 AM: He will just throw out a bunch of facts and each side will twist them in the wind......

My prediction too. No collusion but plenty for the Democrats to snip at. The main points will be other activities unrelated to the Mueller mission. Trump hired some shady characters. Not worse than his opponent or his predecessor, but shady characters.
Title: Takeaways from the Comey testimony
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2018, 08:29:08 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/key-takeaways-from-james-comeys-testimony-before-congress_2734427.html/amp?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2cmS379TBEpCOxODJMeKIMCGmtkdfDiAEFiBLkZW_1RYJUuiQk9ggVrzk
Title: WSJ: Wrap it up; Donald, cough them up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2018, 04:55:11 AM: second post

Wrap It Up, Mr. Mueller
Democratic dilemma: Impeach Trump for lying about sex?
738 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 9, 2018 6:35 p.m. ET

Last week was supposed to be earth-shaking in Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe, with the release of sentencing memos on three former members of the Trump universe—Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. Yet Americans learned little new and nothing decisive about the allegations of Russia-Trump collusion that triggered this long investigation.

The main Russia-related news is the disclosure, in Mr. Mueller’s memo on Mr. Cohen, of a previously unknown attempt by an unidentified Russian to reach out to the Trump presidential campaign. “In or around November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for, and spoke with, a Russian national who claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level,’” the memo says.

The Russian also offered the possibility of a meeting between Mr. Trump and Vladimir Putin. Alas for conspiracy hopefuls, Mr. Cohen “did not follow up on this invitation,” the memo says, because Mr. Cohen says he was already talking to other Russians about a Trump Tower hotel project that has been previously disclosed. Mr. Trump has said he shut down that hotel negotiation in 2016 because he was running for President.

So a Russian wanted to insinuate himself into the Trump orbit but nothing happened. Why drop this into a sentencing memo? The press is breathing heavily that it signals Mr. Mueller’s intention to promote a narrative that the Trumpians were all too willing, for commercial and political reasons, to hear Russian solicitations.

This would make Trump officials look dumb or naive, as Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were when they took that famous meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016. Such a narrative would be politically embarrassing, but it’s not conspiring to hack and release the email of Democratic Party officials.

The Manafort memo is even less revealing. The memo says Mr. Manafort lied about his contacts with a Ukrainian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik. But the memo redacts the details about those lies, so it’s impossible to know if they concern Russia or the tax and other violations that Mr. Manafort has pleaded guilty to. We are left again with media speculation about what else Mr. Mueller knows, not with evidence of any attempt to steal an election.

More legally troubling is the separate sentencing memo on Mr. Cohen from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Mueller handed off the probe into Mr. Cohen’s business practices, including the legal grifter’s payoffs to porn actress Stormy Daniels and another woman who claim to have had affairs with Donald Trump and threatened to go public during the 2016 campaign.

This was another example of dumb and dumber, since any sentient voter knew Mr. Trump had a bad history with women. Voters ignored it in 2016 because Hillary Clinton spent years apologizing for worse behavior by her husband. But the payoffs are now a political problem for Mr. Trump because Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance laws and implicated Mr. Trump.

Campaign violations are often treated as civil, not criminal, violations, and the Justice Department dropped criminal charges against Democrat John Edwards in 2012 for payments made by campaign donors to his mistress. But acting U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami is playing up Mr. Trump’s role, saying in the memo that Mr. Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1” (Mr. Trump).

The memo waxes on about the importance of campaign-finance law to American democracy, which suggests Mr. Khuzami would indict Mr. Trump if he could. Justice Department guidelines advise against indicting a sitting President, so Mr. Khuzami’s memo looks more like a road map for House Democrats. So much for all the media handwringing that Mr. Trump has interfered with the independence of the Justice Department. He has less influence at Justice than any President since Richard Nixon in his final days.

The political dilemma for Democrats is that lying about sex and paying to cover it up are wrong, but they’re a long way from collaborating with the Kremlin to beat Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump lied to the public about his dealings with Mr. Cohen. Bill Clinton lied to the public and under oath in a legal proceeding, yet Democrats defended him. Good luck trying to impeach Mr. Trump for campaign-finance violations.
***

All of this argues for Mr. Mueller to wrap up his probe and let America get on with the political debate over its meaning for Mr. Trump’s Presidency. Mr. Mueller has been investigating for 19 months, and the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign began in July 2016, if not earlier. The country deserves an account of what Mr. Mueller knows, not more factual dribs and drabs in sentencing memos.
==============================================================

All the FBI’s Documents
Trump rages about Comey but he still won’t release FBI records.
62 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 9, 2018 6:34 p.m. ET

Donald Trump took to Twitter Sunday to rage about “Leakin’ James Comey, ” claiming the former FBI director lied to Congress. We can understand his pique, since we advised Mr. Trump in January 2017 to fire Mr. Comey as soon as he became President. But fuming in frustration now won’t do any good. The way to expose the truth about the FBI’s behavior in the 2016 presidential campaign is to declassify and release all the relevant documents.

Mr. Trump promised this fall to release many of these records only to renege under FBI and insider pressure. After the election the President again threatened to release them if Democrats went ahead with their multiple investigations into the 2016 campaign.

Well, what are you waiting for, Mr. Trump? Every Democrat in range of a microphone is promising to investigate your every Presidential decision, plus your taxes, business and family.

Meanwhile, New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee in January, said Friday he will shut down the investigation into FBI and Justice decision-making. He called it “a waste of time to start with.” If Mr. Trump really wants Americans to know about the FBI’s 2016 political machinations, he’ll have to be the agent of transparency.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: President Trump will be indicted by Southern District
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2018, 06:22:20 PM: https://www.theblaze.com/news/watch-former-federal-prosecutor-explains-why-trump-will-be-indicted-eventually?utm_content=buffer181cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=theblaze
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy: President Trump will be indicted by Southern District
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2018, 08:07:17 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2018, 06:22:20 PM
https://www.theblaze.com/news/watch-former-federal-prosecutor-explains-why-trump-will-be-indicted-eventually?utm_content=buffer181cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=theblaze

Yes, but what law did he break? As Angus King and others explain, the President could exert a number of defenses. It was not a political contribution; it is something he has done previously in general business practices. Contributions to his own campaign are unlimited. Failure to disclose has been punished previously only with monetary penalties, not criminal charges. Jury for similar John Edwards case did not convict. If reelected, statute of limitations expires.

US Attorney signaling he would indict does not mean court would convict. McCarty does not agree with what he sees the prosecutor signaling.

Prosecution is signaling they are a runaway freight train.

P.S. What about the crimes of the women and their lawyers extorting political candidates for money for their own consensual transgressions? If it is legal to demand money for silence, how can it be illegal to pay it?
Title: New Details on Flynn-FBI interview
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2018, 09:21:06 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/memo-fbi-recommended-michael-flynn-not-have-lawyer-present-during-interview-did-not-warn-of-false-statement-consequences
Title: Re: New Details on Flynn-FBI interview
Post by: DougMacG on December 12, 2018, 08:37:14 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2018, 09:21:06 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/memo-fbi-recommended-michael-flynn-not-have-lawyer-present-during-interview-did-not-warn-of-false-statement-consequences

Convictions in court will be more difficult with the large number of FBI top agents handling these cases who have been fired, demoted, reassigned and discredited. This story starts with Andrew McCabe. Note the prosecution's emphasis on plea-bargains versus trials.

That Comey and then Mueller hired these bums doesn't reflect well on their judgment or credibility.

If not a 'witch' hunt this so far is a one-sided political hunt.

IF Mueller really had the goods on Trump, meaning collusion on illegal activity with Russia and has had them all along, it is disgraceful professional negligence that he hasn't come forward especially before the mid-terms to report what he has.
Title: Whatever happened to this Mueller?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2018, 11:13:50 PM: https://www.wired.com/story/robert-mueller-vietnam/amp?fbclid=IwAR19NEtO6AdRgYzLhWfPyQcGqfaTWNjo3ZgSJAfg9PB-kYnQn_AiYi4sgEM
Title: The Comey/Strock Flynn entrapment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2018, 07:07:58 AM: second post

https://outline.com/6CUMTt
Title: Time to shut him down IF this is true
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2018, 09:45:05 AM: Crafty D asks : "Whatever happened to this Mueller?"

I guess nothing - he is on search and destroy mission it appears. Just his target isn't John Gotti or North Vietnamese soldiers or even Whitey Bulger's competitors - it is the present President of the United States . If you read his Vietnam war years as in CD's post (2 post aboe ) one would think that Mueller would indeed have a very personal gut wrenching distate for anything Trump.

I just cannot believe he is not doing this with some thoughts of retribution involved. If not partisan then personal. How can it not be?

This partisan independent counsel investigation needs to be shut if this happens.

Trump need to fire Rosenstein and replace and if the replacement doesn't fire Meuller then Trump should just do it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/get-ready-for-muellers-phase-two-the-middle-east-connection
Title: Jeannie Rhee
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2018, 12:25:11 PM: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/clinton-crony-lawyer-targeting-roger-stone-apparently-lied-about-hillarys-missing-emails/
Title: DOJ IG finds 19,000 "lost" Strock and Page emails
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2018, 01:34:15 PM: https://eagleactionreport.com/articles/the-doj-inspector-general-found-19-000-lost-strzok-and-page-texts?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=10811&utm_content=20181213213206
Title: Lie under oath? James Comey, I Know Nothing, except ...
Post by: DougMacG on December 13, 2018, 04:16:47 PM: Interesting contradiction by Comey noticed by James Freeman, WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unbelievable-james-comey-1544478713
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/12/a-comey-contradiction.php

On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. For example:

Mr. Gowdy. Do you recall who drafted the FBI’s initiation document for that late July 2016 Russia investigation?
Mr. Comey. I do not.
Mr. Gowdy. Would you disagree that it was Peter Strzok?
Mr. Comey. I don’t know one way or the other.
Mr. Gowdy. Do you know who approved that draft of an initial plan for the Russia investigation in late July 2016?
Mr. Comey. I don’t.
etc. etc. 245 times, don't know, don't recall. Then this:

Mr. Deutch: Director Comey, do you believe the FBI or DOJ ever investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes?
Mr. Comey: I not only don’t believe it, I know it not to be true.
Mr. Deutch: I’m sorry, would you repeat that?
Mr. Comey: I know it not to be true. I know that we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes.

[James Freeman, WSJ] How would he know if the rest of his testimony is accurate?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unbelievable-james-comey-1544478713
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2018, 06:07:31 PM: [James Freeman, WSJ]

"How would he know if the rest of his testimony is accurate?"

He could answer this question by stating " I don't recall"

Almost is like a who's on first Abbott and Costello routine
however this ain't funny
Title: FBI deleted iphone emails of Strzok and Page
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2018, 07:52:13 AM: since we don't have 90 % + the media on our side nothing will become of this and the LEfT will go on their merry ways:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/obstruction-mueller-probe-wiped-strzok-phone-before-giving-it-to-investigators/
Title: Re: FBI deleted iphone emails of Strzok and Page
Post by: DougMacG on December 14, 2018, 09:01:43 AM: Quote from: ccp on December 14, 2018, 07:52:13 AM
since we don't have 90 + the media on our side nothing will become of this and the LEfT will go on their merry ways:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/obstruction-mueller-probe-wiped-strzok-phone-before-giving-it-to-investigators/

Unbelievable. $40 million budget and they are re-using phones that are known to contain sensitive information. This happened during the unaccountable Mueller investigation. HE should be fired. They can't investigate their own crime ring. All his top people have been discredited plus Comey that referred him and Rosenstein who hired him. If he ever got at the truth, how would we know?

Even with media 93% against Trump and not reporting important facts and stories it is amazing that the average independent voter isn't appalled over what has happened in Investigationgate.
Title: State Dept provided classified Russiagate docs to Senators
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2018, 12:17:05 PM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-documents-reveal-obama-state-department-urgently-provided-classified-russiagate-documents-to-multiple-senators-immediately-ahead-of-trump-inauguration/?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=press%20release
Title: Re: FBI deleted iphone emails of Strzok and Page
Post by: G M on December 14, 2018, 01:14:13 PM: Quote from: DougMacG on December 14, 2018, 09:01:43 AM
Quote from: ccp on December 14, 2018, 07:52:13 AM
since we don't have 90 + the media on our side nothing will become of this and the LEfT will go on their merry ways:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/obstruction-mueller-probe-wiped-strzok-phone-before-giving-it-to-investigators/

Unbelievable. $40 million budget and they are re-using phones that are known to contain sensitive information. This happened during the unaccountable Mueller investigation. HE should be fired. They can't investigate their own crime ring. All his top people have been discredited plus Comey that referred him and Rosenstein who hired him. If he ever got at the truth, how would we know?

Even with media 93% against Trump and not reporting important facts and stories it is amazing that the average independent voter isn't appalled over what has happened in Investigationgate.

So corrupt...
Title: Comey's shenanigans
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2018, 08:35:10 PM: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/421530-no-glory-in-james-comey-getting-away-with-his-abuse-of-fbi-power
Title: Comey et al getting away with corruption
Post by: ccp on December 17, 2018, 05:42:01 AM: Just goes to show us the power of the media

Without pressure from fake news the Dems politicians can just ignore any corruption on their side
and only 7 % of the media (most of that is talk radio!) will even call them on it.

We are like in a cave where we echo news that does not get past the walls.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2018, 10:10:39 AM: What an uncoincidence today with the going public on the FARA indictment of Flynn's buddy viz the Turkish money.

For the record, the way I remember the Turkish money is that Flynn looked quite in the wrong in taking it. I've no problem with him having consequence in this regard.
Title: Did Mueller Destroy Evidence?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2018, 09:08:10 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/16/mueller-destroyed-evidence/?fbclid=IwAR2L2yk6J9Fq1dAva-LxCM5UFW2PBxE1ZUpgkJBhk80rzcUEOIIMtkVP5Ao
Title: Rev. Wright and Stormy Daniels
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2018, 12:35:25 PM: https://www.westernjournal.com/obama-paid-rev-wright-trump-paid-stormy-silence-difference/?utm_source=push&utm_medium=conservativetribune&utm_content=2018-12-19&utm_campaign=manualpost
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2018, 01:06:20 PM: Dick makes good points.

Sadly the answer is the difference is who is/was Prez ; one the darling of the estab.
And the other their stated enemy
Truth Justice and half the country can go screw themselves for not agreeing with them.
Title: Some lefty types actually get it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2018, 06:17:05 PM: https://theweek.com/articles/813343/mueller-delusion
Title: "some lefties get it" from above CD post
Post by: ccp on December 20, 2018, 05:42:09 AM: https://theweek.com/articles/813343/mueller-delusion

I like the link to the word *sedition* summing up what we are seeing in one single word

Endless libel being used as a form of insurrection
which is truly what we are seeing
Title: Not a witch hunt, it's a snipe hunt
Post by: DougMacG on December 20, 2018, 07:22:41 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2018, 06:17:05 PM
https://theweek.com/articles/813343/mueller-delusion

This is very well expressed. The Left should beware of this kind of unrestrained, attack oriented scrutiny. How would the administrations of Obama and Clinton held up to that? Break the door down at dawn with jack booted thugs instead of asking nicely for emails and billing records...

Excerpts:
"... indicting Flynn under the terms of the Logan Act, which is the prosecutorial equivalent of announcing a snipe hunt."
...
"Mueller is doing a good impersonation of a delusional power-crazed middle-school librarian. "Did you ever have a conversation with Rob and Pat in this library? Did you use your library voice? Okay, was it on a Tuesday? No, it was actually a Wednesday, and you, sir, are getting detention. Oh, what's that? You happen to know that Kev and Phil were smoking cigarettes on the loading dock back in the seventh grade? Thank you, thank you so much! No, that's all right, I can ring their employers."
...
"let's get real. Random meetings with randos? Not collusion. Cheating on taxes? Not collusion. Illegal campaign contributions? Not collusion. Sleeping with porn stars and lying about it with the help of some greasy tabloid maven? Disgusting but not collusion."

He gets it.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2018, 08:43:00 AM: We've not mentioned it here, nor have I seen it mentioned much in our usual news sources, but am I wrong in thinking that Trump having signed a letter of intent for a hotel deal in Russia pretty much nails him in a lie when he said he had nothing going on in Russia?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 20, 2018, 09:13:22 AM: " We've not mentioned it here, nor have I seen it mentioned much in our usual news sources, but am I wrong in thinking that Trump having signed a letter of intent for a hotel deal in Russia pretty much nails him in a lie when he said he had nothing going on in Russia? "

It looks sleazy
he is working on hotel deal in Moscow ( which I read he had been doing since 2003 or 04.)
And at the same time publicaly stating he can work with Putin and saying we need to give Russia a chance.

He spent his whole life thinking about making money . Never in politics before.
He could not see the appearance of this connection, or was it pure greed and the endless pursuit to close deals in his interest no matter what ? Hard to know .

Then again while sleazy this in not high crimes or mideamers
I wouldn't think taking the opinions of some attorneys like Dershowitz
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 20, 2018, 09:58:30 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2018, 08:43:00 AM
We've not mentioned it here, nor have I seen it mentioned much in our usual news sources, but am I wrong in thinking that Trump having signed a letter of intent for a hotel deal in Russia pretty much nails him in a lie when he said he had nothing going on in Russia?

Or as the NYT put it, he was less than forthcoming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/us/politics/fact-check-cohen-trump-.html

“I have nothing to do with Russia. I never did.”
On at least 23 occasions since the summer of 2016, Mr. Trump has said either that he had “nothing” to do with Russia, or that he has “no deals,” no investments and no “business” in Russia.
------------------
Trump is not a carefully accurate speaker as both his supporters and detractors well know. I would add that his detractors are not careful listeners.

I take the denials to come with qualifications, not that the word Russia has never been spoken within a global company or that a project was never contemplated. A discussion, even letter of intent is not business, a deal, or an investment, to him, before a closing, as they call it in real estate. To him, the Russia Project was not then and did not (yet) turn into a deal.

Did money change hands or just words? How is the head of a global development company not always looking for the next project?

I did not know about the "letter of intent" from October 2015. Yes that looks bad but non-binding is the opposite of a contract or a "deal".
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/18/politics/trump-signed-letter-of-intent-rudy-giuliani-moscow/index.html

I don't see his signature on it but easily concede he knew about it.
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/12/18/attachment.1.pdf

Of course they would want to build there. Did something inappropriate happen in regard to that.

Two systems of Justice: If one wanted to prosecute anything to do with that they should have first locked up both Clintons over Uranium One where quid pro quo most certainly and measurably happened and American interests were clearly compromised.

Was he supposed to quit his company in the campaign or just remove himself from operations of the company if elected? I think he did the latter and this would be fatal if what is alleged happened after inauguration.

The opposition focus is on impeachment so there is a special emphasis on what has he done in terms of high crimes AS PRESIDENT. This seems to be missing a high crime and didn't happen as President.
Title: Carter: The confusion is on purpose
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2018, 09:59:48 AM: "Unsealing the indictments against Flynn’s former partners a day before Flynn’s sentencing hearing muddied the water. It roped in Flynn, who despite cooperating with the Special Counsel, was now tainted by another mess."

https://saraacarter.com/the-sentencing-that-didnt-happen-why-flynns-case-is-bigger-than-flynn/?utm=push
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Why Barr is on Dem hit list
Post by: ccp on December 20, 2018, 02:02:42 PM: The latest Andrew McCarthy piece clarifies why CNN and the rest of the hit mob are trying to pull a Justice Kavanaugh on Attorney General nominee Barr:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/the-barr-memo-is-a-commendable-piece-of-lawyering/
Title: Mueller Report could be a Disaster for Democrats
Post by: DougMacG on December 31, 2018, 08:07:19 AM: Paraphrasing and taking a line of thought from Marc Theissen writing in the Bezos Bulletin last week...

Most likely the report will have no Russian collusion, no felonies committed by Trump in office, but will find medium level business transgressions from somewhere in his past.

Democrat base has wanted to impeach before there was evidence. Most certainly the report will put activists in a position where they have to support only Democrats who move to impeach and vote to remove from office.

Impeachment only requires a House majority which the Democrats reach this week. It they attempt impeachment and fail, their party is by definition divided - divided on the biggest - only - issue of the day, Trump.

If impeached in the Dem House, the conviction removal trial in the Senate will most certainly fail for the reasons cited above, no Russian collusion, no high crimes committed in office plus the bad tactics and mission creep of the FBI and Mueller probe tainting their evidence.

Meanwhile a Presidential endorsement campaign kicks into high gear instantly and any Dem soft on this issue will be run over. What will they call them, Democrat in name only?

Then combine that with the lessons of recent history, the voters will punish the party of impeachment, not the unethical guy that committed the lowly transgressions.

In other words, what the country wants and what the activists want are diametrically opposed. So which way do you turn if you are an elected Democrat, with your base or with your state, district and country? Hint: your base can punish you first.

Meanwhile, all Republicans need to do is sit quietly through all the proceedings and vote their conscience like adults at the end. And talk about the issues the country should be focusing on.

After impeachment and the removal that will never happen, all Democrats can succeed in doing is making Mike Pence the President running as the incumbent, while Trump continues to break down trade and business barriers for American employers and workers, standing up to rogue dictators and pulling us out of foreign wars right up until the end.

Logic and Leftism are mutually exclusive, how does the fight to make Mike Pence President reverse the 2016 election?

Bill Clinton had a 73% approval rating after the impeachment and removal trial even though 100% of the public knew he lied to the American people, lied under oath and put his semen on a medium large blue dress of a willing adult outside of marriage in the Oval Office while serving as President.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 31, 2018, 01:24:40 PM: "Democrat base has wanted to impeach before there was evidence. Most certainly the report will put activists in a position where they have to support only Democrats who move to impeach and vote to remove from office.

Impeachment only requires a House majority which the Democrats reach this week. It they attempt impeachment and fail, their party is by definition divided - divided on the biggest - only - issue of the day, Trump."

The 93 % media that is leftist will be doing their part to sway opinion in favor or impeachment with endless polls from the usual leftist sources convincing as a majority want impeachment .

Then it will full throttle ahead .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on December 31, 2018, 01:30:57 PM: (http://ace.mu.nu/archives/hate%20my%20president.jpg)
Title: The Russia Hotel deal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2019, 06:20:31 AM: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/423958-five-things-to-know-about-the-trump-tower-moscow-proposal?userid=188403
Title: Re: The Russia Hotel deal
Post by: DougMacG on January 06, 2019, 09:59:19 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2019, 06:20:31 AM
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/423958-five-things-to-know-about-the-trump-tower-moscow-proposal?userid=188403

Trump tweet, Jan 2017 just before taking office: I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

Note the all-important tense and timing above. I understood that he had past real estate financing with Russians. If so, he is declaring that any of those were settled before inauguration. He told the nation he entered office with no existing, ongoing business with Russia. The so-called Moscow project does not contradict that.

"Letter of Intent" which is not a contract ("deal") was signed October 2015, not exactly a secret deal in the Oval Office.

People well knew Trump was actively in the development business of projects (like this) around the world, and would likely continue in that if not elected President. He had no reason as a private citizen to chase deals everywhere but Moscow. He didn't claim to step away from company operations until well into the transition. The Moscow proposal may look bad undisclosed in the campaign period point of view but is not anything near an impeachable offense committed by a President of United States.

Trump's lawyers: "there was never a formal, binding agreement and that the deal never came to fruition."

Absent new facts, nothing presented contradicts that.

Assuming Mueller doesn't have someone lying to investigators about this, getting this story out now actually helps Trump. He would like to answer the Mueller report with 'nothing new, nothing illegal, no collusion, nothing impeachable' in the report.

More worrisome is the unknown unknown, past business dealings of illegality that come up while the teams of investigators dig into the everything of an integrity challenged character. But prosecutors face a ticking statute of limitations on business crimes short of murder, typically 1-5 years depending on the crime and jurisdiction. Accusations of how he handled the mob controlled contractors in NYC 1990 have no meaning or relevance here. If it's not indictable, it's probably not impeachable. Assuming he was more and more careful with tax laws, housing laws, employment laws etc while he moved closer to running, Mueller is letting that clock run while spends up a fortune with his activist team. Everyday that limits how far he can meaningfully go back into Trump's past.

Reading Mueller's hand from here, he has nothing big or he would have come forward much sooner.

Removal from office happens when the President's own party turns against him. With all that is known we have none of that so far. I believe it will take a serious and consequential misdeed committed while in office to get there. Unless he screwed up on his open book test, his written answers to investigators, the rest of it like firing Comey is political, not criminal.
Title: The most successful cover-up
Post by: G M on January 07, 2019, 03:02:46 PM: https://spectator.org/the-most-successful-coverup/

Democrats get away with a much worse crime than Watergate.
Since Watergate, the Washington wisdom has always held that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup that sinks a politician. But that’s only the case when the coverup fails.

But what if the coverup succeeds?

It’s horribly simple. The crimes are never uncovered and the perpetrators are never brought to justice no matter how serious their crimes may be. That is precisely what has happened because of the FBI and Justice Department’s coverup of their abuses of power and illegal actions during the 2016 election.

In this case, the FBI and the Justice Department have succeeded in the most significant coverup in American political history. The abuses of power and crimes they have succeeded in covering up are not only against the law: they are crimes against our system of law and government. They were perpetrated by employees of the government, under color of law, with the intention of affecting the outcome of an election.

For almost two years an investigation into the abuses of power — and probable crimes — committed by the FBI and Justice Department during the election has been conducted by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal). Rep. Bob Goodlatte — chairman of the Judiciary Committee — and Trey Gowdy — chairman of the Oversight and government reform committee — tried to investigate other aspects of the FBI and DoJ actions.

These investigations have been stonewalled by the refusal of the FBI and Justice Department to produce the documents and provide access to witnesses that would, in all likelihood, prove that the major abuses of power and crimes had been committed.

Nunes, Goodlatte, and Gowdy had effectively split their inquiries: Nunes investigating possible crimes and abuses of power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Goodlatte and Gowdy jointly investigating the FBI’s mishandling and improper actions in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, insecure email system for conversations with her staff — and Obama — on top secret information, including special access programs and satellite intelligence.

The two important products of those investigations were the 18 January 2017 memo declassified by President Trump and released by Nunes and the newly released 28 December 2018 letter from Goodlatte and Gowdy addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

If this is the first you’ve heard of the 28 December letter, that’s because it’s been studiously ignored by the media.

The key facts revealed by the Nunes memo were:

(1) that the FBI used, as the factual basis for the Foreign Intelligence Act Surveillance Court warrant applications, information from the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified. The FBI nevertheless swore to the truth of that information to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that in the process of obtaining the search warrants the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

As I wrote at the time of the memo’s release, and on several occasions since, the Nunes memo showed that the actions of the FBI and Justice Department, sometimes in conjunction with the Obama White House, were worse than Watergate.

The Nunes investigation is over, but myriad questions remain. Among them:

What other FISA warrants were obtained to surveil the communications of Americans, particularly those of the Trump campaign advisors and Trump himself?
Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, was asking for and obtaining hundreds of “unmaskings,” revealing of U.S. citizens’ identities when their communications were intercepted by the FBI and NSA as part of intelligence operations. Whose names were unmasked, was this information used to Trump’s disadvantage in the campaign, why did the unmaskings occur, and what information was shared by Rice with Obama and/or Clinton?
What direction did the FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies receive from Obama, Rice, and Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, with respect to the monitoring of Trump-related communications?
Most, if not all, of that information could be gleaned from documents and testimony the FBI and DoJ have withheld from congressional investigators.

The latest, and almost certainly last, effort to expose the facts of this scandal are contained in the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter. They are the last exposé because the Democrats have stopped these investigations cold. There will be no more hearings, no more testimony, and no further attempts to get the documents and testimony from the FBI and Justice Department that have been withheld.

The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter is as revealing as was the Nunes memo. The two outgoing committee chairmen chose to focus on the importance of decisions made and not made by the FBI and DoJ, the bias of some agents and attorneys involved, and the evidently disparate treatment of the Clinton email investigation and the counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

Under 18 US Code Section 793(f) it is a felony to handle classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner. The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter flatly says that the FBI and DoJ read elements into the “gross negligence” law that do not exist. In then-FBI director James Comey’s 5 July 2016 televised statement exonerating Clinton, the FBI read into the law a higher level of scienter — intent and knowledge of the unlawfulness of conduct — than the law required.

Moreover, the letter says, there is little or no evidence investigators made any effort to identify evidence that could have satisfied the FBI-devised scienter element that is not in the law.

We should remember Comey’s televised statement in which he said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would have brought a case against Clinton under the gross negligence law. He also said that the decision not to do so was unanimous among those involved.

That was one of Comey’s biggest lies. As the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter points out, FBI General Counsel James Baker told them that he did believe a case could be made and the recommendation not to charge Clinton wasn’t unanimous.

Goodlatte and Gowdy point out that Comey’s exoneration memo was drafted before all of the relevant witnesses had been interviewed. What they fail to mention is that the FBI and DoJ were handing out immunity from prosecution agreements to Clinton staffers as freely as if the agreements were Halloween candy.

Immunity agreements are given to key witnesses in criminal investigations for a price: their testimony against a target of the investigation which could not otherwise be obtained. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the witnesses involved — Clinton staffers such as Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff at the State Department — gave any evidence that justified the immunity agreements.

The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter also points out that the Comey exoneration memo was changed before it was issued, but fails to specify the biggest change. Originally a part of the memo said that Clinton and her staff handled classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner. Comey changed that to read “extremely careless,” clearly to prevent the law from being applied. The only difference between the two phrases is that one appears in the statute and one doesn’t, but Comey nevertheless stated that there was no prosecutable case.

Comey also, according to the letter, overlooked evidence that foreign actors had accessed Clinton’s emails, and probably those of her staffers, including at least one containing “Secret” information. That information, too, was excised from Comey’s draft exoneration memo for the purpose of helping Clinton.

The only conclusion possible — which Goodlatte and Gowdy do not state — is that Comey’s FBI intentionally gave Clinton a pass when they should have recommended to the Justice Department that she be prosecuted.

Comey is not the only malfeasant named in the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter. The other is former FBI agent Peter Strzok, he of the thousands of text messages sent to or received from his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, that showed he — and she and others in the FBI — weren’t only biased against Trump, but had an abiding hatred of him.

Strzok’s central role in the Clinton and Trump investigations probably ended in 2017 when Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed him from the Mueller team. Before that, as the letter says, Strzok:

Conducted the interview of Clinton (which wasn’t recorded or transcribed contrary to normal procedure) and participated heavily in other aspects of the Clinton investigation;
Initiated the Russia investigation of the Trump campaign and helped draft— and possibly swore to — the FISA warrant applications;
Promised to stop Trump from becoming president and openly discussed an “insurance policy” if Trump won;
Called Trump “destabilizing; and
Interviewed Michael Flynn, leading to Flynn’s indictment for lying to the FBI.
Strzok was finally fired from the FBI in August 2018. We — including Nunes, Goodlatte and Gowdy — don’t know whether he was involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign after Mueller removed him in 2017.

Comey’s appearances in congressional hearings have yielded nothing of value because he has been instructed by FBI lawyers not to answer any of the critical questions.

Another possible malfeasant, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, has been equally protected. As the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter explains, former FBI general counsel James Baker testified that after Trump fired Comey there were discussions among FBI staff about Trump’s fitness for office and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump.

Baker testified that he was told — by then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and Strzok’s lover, Lisa Page — that Rosenstein had proposed wearing a recording device in conversations with President Trump. To record what? Rosenstein was supposed to be interviewed by the Goodlatte-Gowdy investigators but was never available. Rosenstein has denied that he said anything about wearing a recording device in conversations with Trump.

The only avenue that was left to find the truth was for President Trump to have ordered the documents declassified and provided to Congress. But he never acted and now the investigations are closed. The Senate won’t reopen them, nor will acting AG Whitaker or IG Horowitz. The only hope resides in U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber, an Obama appointee, who then-AG Jeff Sessions tasked to investigate FBI misconduct in the election. Those who place their hopes in Huber will be disappointed.

The stain on our system of justice and the 2016 election created by the abuses of power and probable crimes committed by FBI and DoJ officials during and after the 2016 presidential campaign will not be erased. Their coverup has succeeded.
Title: Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian associate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2019, 02:44:00 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/paul-manafort-shared-trump-campaign-polling-data-with-russian-associate-prosecutors-claim/
Title: Re: Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian associate
Post by: DougMacG on January 10, 2019, 09:51:34 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2019, 02:44:00 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/paul-manafort-shared-trump-campaign-polling-data-with-russian-associate-prosecutors-claim/

Sounds bad but I'm not following what the significance of this is...
Title: Well not Russians - now it is Ukranian
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2019, 01:58:05 PM: So how much more important about internal polling data vs the 50 public polling datas we were hit with every day on the media?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/09/politics/manafort-ukrainian-oligarchs/index.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2019, 06:05:45 PM: Doug:

The significance that I see is that yet again Manafort enables Mueller to blow smoke.

Rumint says that the solitary confinement thing is really getting to him , , ,
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on January 10, 2019, 08:50:37 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2019, 06:05:45 PM
Doug:

The significance that I see is that yet again Manafort enables Mueller to blow smoke.

Rumint says that the solitary confinement thing is really getting to him , , ,

Out: Trump left the toilet seat up! journalism

In: Trump left the toilet seat up! prosecution
Title: NRO: French: FBI was right to investigate Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2019, 03:31:06 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/the-fbis-counterintelligence-investigation-of-trump-was-prudent-and-proper/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-01-15&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on January 15, 2019, 05:56:27 PM: " NRO: French: FBI was right to investigate Trump"

Thanks Dave !

Do we ever see such pansies on the Left ?
Title: Re: NRO: French: FBI was right to investigate Trump
Post by: G M on January 16, 2019, 01:22:36 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2019, 03:31:06 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/the-fbis-counterintelligence-investigation-of-trump-was-prudent-and-proper/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-01-15&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Why didn't the FBI investigate Obama?
Title: What is French for fool?
Post by: ccp on January 16, 2019, 02:24:10 PM: Even Rich Lowry , a never Trumper, shuts down French.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/when-did-it-become-the-fbis-job-to-act-as-a-check-and-balance-to-the-president/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2019, 02:55:15 PM: I just came to post that but you beat me to it!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on January 16, 2019, 03:01:23 PM: " I just came to post that but you beat me to it!"

Wack!

Just kidding but I could not resist.
Title: Mueller report coming soon?? Is there an end to this?
Post by: DougMacG on January 17, 2019, 06:44:46 AM: The Mueller report is allegedly coming out soon, Feb or March. It wasn't ready ahead of the midterm and now can be timed to follow the confirmation of a new Attorney General. Certain Trump's public statements and actions will be heavily criticized. He was way out of bounds when he jokingly asked the Russians to release Hillary's emails if they have them, for example. On the core question it will have nothing. Did candidate or President Trump collude with the Russians to do anything illegal? No. Did people he hired commit past crimes? Yes. Nothing in the report will make Trump look good but he will most certainly declare himself vindicated by the report. The Left will soon be criticizing Mueller for weakness and for his past ties to Republicans. He didn't go far enough. The indictments and referrals made along the way already give the blueprint of the report. The opponents of Trump will see plenty in it to make accusations of wrongdoing. Those already calling for impeachment will call for impeachment. An impeachment vote will be taken in the House, and fail. Dems will be more divided on it than Republicans. The investigations will continue in the congressional committees.

What will the Mueller report say and what will be done about all the FBI and Mueller senior staff misdeeds exposed along the way? Those I presume also will be mostly swept under the rug. It would quite a startling outcome if Mueller ends his probe with a referral to the new Attorney General prosecute his own disgraced senior staff.

Russian collusion will be investigated in the House and perhaps someone will get the charge of Eric Holder, contempt of congress, as they try to avoid the committee or exert and executive privilege. Expect court challenges on all of that.

FBI abuse of the system will be investigated in the Senate no more effectively than the previous Benghazi and Hillary email investigations in the House. They will easily be made to look bad but face no criminal consequence. The public's eyes and ears will glaze over all the confusing names and details about Strzok, Page, Ohr, McCabe, Comey, Weisman, Steele, Page and FISA. Only someone already supporting Trump will understand

The media will get off scot free for their role in concocting this fake scandal out of nothing real.

New events and new alleged scandals will put this fiasco behind us. The lesson learned will be to go ahead and take anyone you disagree with or lose to down with every means possible at every opportunity if you have that power.
Title: Ohr told them all but they still hid it from the FISA court
Post by: DougMacG on January 17, 2019, 08:05:33 AM: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/425739-fisa-shocker-doj-official-warned-steele-dossier-was-connected-to-clinton

The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.

Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller.

At the time, Ohr was the associate attorney general. Yet his warnings about political bias were pointedly omitted weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that the FBI obtained from a federal court, granting it permission to spy on whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 presidential election.
--------------------------

They knew and they withheld key source information. The FISA application refers to a law firm, not a campaign as the funding source.

Who signed the four FISA applications? Comey, Yates, McCabe, and Rosenstein.

Those are some big fish to fry.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2019, 08:18:27 AM: This is of significant import.
Title: If true this will be grounds for impeachment
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2019, 07:32:37 AM: any evidence other than from a rat who has gun held to his head?

I wish someone would do same to Rice Lynn and Holder to get them to admit Obama covered up crimes and refused to enforce the law which we know he did .

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation
Title: Re: If true this will be grounds for impeachment
Post by: DougMacG on January 18, 2019, 09:45:56 AM: Quote from: ccp on January 18, 2019, 07:32:37 AM
any evidence other than from a rat who has gun held to his head?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation

A few flaws in the story. Cohen is a convicted liar. Buzzfeed is unreliable. The two law enforcement officers they cite would be breaking rules to disclose that, especially with such detail, therefore unreliable. Trump did not have a deal in Russia, he hoped to have a deal in Russia. Can a client even advise their own lawyer to lie? isn't the burden the other way around, for the lawyer to advise the client not to lie under oath or to Congress.

"The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office."

That is not the special counsel's office disclosing that. They have had no known leaks. Why the whole range of sources, none by themselves is clear or convincing? Buzzfeed does not even allege it came from the special counsel's office.

If it is true, we will know soon enough. Was a law broken? Can you suborn perjury to your own lawyer.

I don't think Trump uses email and doubt he puts instructions like that in text. Funny they don't mention the taped conversations as the source, the only evidence likely to show something like this.

"Dear Michael, Please lie under oath on my behalf to help me win the election. - Donald"
I'll bet that's what he wrote. (sarc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZITsYGMsMQ 'Everything wrong with Buzzfeed'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/12/why-so-many-journalists-are-mad-at-buzzfeed/?utm_term=.3c9ee3191f62
https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/jul/25/buzzfeed/buzzfeed-awesome-fact-about-toothbrush-and-toothpa/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on January 18, 2019, 01:12:14 PM: Did the authors see any evidence? Yes! says one. No! says the other:
https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/live-blog-168/entry-250466/
https://t.co/zzQ3zFCW38
Title: Levin makes good points about the "report"
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2019, 04:52:08 PM: https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-find-who-the-criminals-are-in-mr-muellers-office/
Title: fake news
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2019, 05:43:21 PM: buzz feed BS

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/18/shocker-reporter-who-co-wrote-bombshell-story-about-trump-directing-cohen-to-l-n2539285
Title: Re: Bunk
Post by: DougMacG on January 18, 2019, 08:01:42 PM: Quote from: ccp on January 18, 2019, 05:43:21 PM
buzz feed BS
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/18/shocker-reporter-who-co-wrote-bombshell-story-about-trump-directing-cohen-to-l-n2539285

https://cdn.dailycaller.com/2019/01/18/muellers-office-disputes-buzzfeeds-report/

https://twitter.com/NolteNC/status/1086440815721959425

"BOTTOM LINE OF WHAT HAPPENED:

Buzzfeed knew it published a lie. Rest of the media knew it was a lie, spread it anyway. The story was BS. They knew it. We all did.

BUT they figured there was no way they could be caught.

Because no one dreamed Mueller would fact check them."
--------------------------------------
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-18-at-20.46.47.png)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2019, 09:03:13 PM: *My source* told me that Buzzfeed got their bombshell information from a *Russian source*.

Time for an investigation into the collusion between Putin and the liberal media for trying to bring down Trump!
Title: Rep. Louie Gohmert charges Mueller with Uranium One deal
Post by: DougMacG on January 28, 2019, 09:58:35 AM: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/09/gohmert_mueller_covering_involvement_in_clinton-uranium_deal_while_trying_to_have_a_coup_against_trump.html

Mueller was FBI Director when this deal was approved, was warned about the shady Russian characters involved.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/409356-fbis-37-secret-pages-of-memos-about-russia-clintons-and-uranium-one

PolitiFact on Uranium One deal:
The real reason Russia wanted this deal was to give Rosatom’s subsidiary the Uranium One’s very profitable uranium mines in Kazakhstan - the single largest producer of commercial uranium in the world.
https://www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/dec/07/blog-posting/complex-tale-involving-hillary-clinton-uranium-rus/

Did Mueller look at it again after the financier donated to the Clintons?
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html

Nov 2018, FBI goes after Clinton Foundation whistleblower?
https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/29/fbi-whistleblower-clinton-uranium/

An ex-president, a mining deal and a big donor - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/world/americas/31iht-31donor.9634647.html

Former Kazakhstan uranium czar blames imprisonment on sale of Clinton-linked Canadian company to Russians
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/former-kazakhstan-uranium-czar-blames-imprisonment-on-sale-of-clinton-linked-canadian-company-to-russians

As PoliticFact put it, link above, a "complex tale involving Hillary Clinton, uranium and Russia resurfaces"
Title: Opinion from USA today
Post by: ccp on January 30, 2019, 04:20:47 AM: no collusion no crime by Trump:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/roger-stone-apos-not-guilty-203253756.html

New AG needs to put time limit on MUUUler ? and Winesteen. Put up or shut up already.
Title: Re: Opinion from USA today
Post by: DougMacG on January 30, 2019, 07:48:57 AM: Quote from: ccp on January 30, 2019, 04:20:47 AM
no collusion no crime by Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/roger-stone-apos-not-guilty-203253756.html

New AG needs to put time limit on MUUUler ? and Winesteen. Put up or shut up already.

Mueller is done, closing up shop without any encouragement. There was no collusion.

Andrew McCarthy makes the same point:
Stone indictment makes clear there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy
"If the Trump campaign had been in an espionage conspiracy with Russia to hack Democratic email accounts, why would the campaign have needed Stone to try to figure out what stolen information WikiLeaks had and when it would release that information?"
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/427241-andrew-mccarthy-stone-indictment-makes-clear-there-was-no-trump-russia

Trump will say vindicated and Democrats will say guilty and the debates will go on. HRC, Clapper and Brennan who lied to Congress will face nothing. Trump's indicted advisers will go to jail. Weisman, Ohr, Stzruk, McCabe, Page, Comey, Yates, Rosenstein et al will face nothing, I assume, for corrupt, misleading investigations.
Title: Nunes on Rosenstein-- deep implications
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2019, 01:57:20 PM: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/the-stunning-importance-of-what-devin-nunes-said-yesterday-rosenstein-made-president-trump-muellers-target/?fbclid=IwAR2cpJrQnnO4ZrybMQ5uwgxcZ8xg0S9mPq41jnXI_vmgtfI-AN3-r8fdO00
Title: McCarthy: Stone indictment makes clear no Trump-Russia collusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2019, 02:04:45 PM: second post

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/427241-andrew-mccarthy-stone-indictment-makes-clear-there-was-no-trump-russia
Title: new avenue for harassment
Post by: ccp on February 11, 2019, 06:51:50 AM: https://www.thedailybeast.com/mistress-lauren-sanchezs-brother-leaked-bezos-racy-texts-to-enquirer-sources-say-7

Next "the hassasers " Nadler Schiff will be announcing an investigation into the connection between the brother of Sanchez and Trump.
Title: McCarthy on McCabe, Rosenstein, and the 25th Amendment Coup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2019, 04:50:53 AM: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-mccabe-rosenstein-and-the-real-truth-about-the-25th-amendment-coup-attempt?fbclid=IwAR2hJp2wei58s0BnlIo3hePC1xz01T8SHPkvulHf7nJRHateXT5nAnV827Q
Title: It is about time !
Post by: ccp on February 19, 2019, 07:30:41 AM: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-deputy-attorney-general-step-082111079.html

should have been fired long time ago
now he needs to be investigated
Title: Could as Joe Digenova suggest - everyone take the 5th
Post by: ccp on March 05, 2019, 10:39:11 AM: be a real viable strategy:

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/joe-digenova-no-one-should-talk-committee-everyone-should-take-fifth

Any attorneys here who could would care to comment?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2019, 03:32:40 PM: I'm in over my head on this, but that sure would be my first reaction.
Title: Fourth day ?
Post by: ccp on March 06, 2019, 06:07:02 AM: Wait , I thought it was going to be 3 days .

They must down to questions like , "Mr. Cohen , is it not true the Mr Trump serves Russian cavier at Mar a Lago
Do you know how he got this cavier?

https://hosted.ap.org/article/991f1295ab4d436f99e11b20fd1c433f/cohen-returns-capitol-hill-4th-day-testimony

Dershowitz on Hannity said that he thinks one of those 80 + plus people who have documents requested of them could bring a legal case claiming this is excessive political harassment. The Framers may have intended Congress to have oversight they did not intend to abuse that oversight to continue to harass a duly elected President.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2019, 06:35:30 AM: I've not had a chance to deep dive into this (no rush, I figure, it looks to be around for a long time) but my understanding is that this is a fishing expedition into private business actions prior the campaign , , , Do I have this right?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on March 06, 2019, 07:08:35 AM: basically investigating everyone and anyone near Trump

I would say is fishing for anything that with their media accomplices
they can use to spin into a story that makes Trump look bad
get anyone to turn on him and further a case to impeach
and generally stall him from being able to do his work making America Great.
and of course have fodder propaganda for 2020.

the problem is we need to bring the case to judges who are honest and not policial Obama operatives.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2019, 09:27:02 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-resistance-government-anonymous-james-baker-samantha-power/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR+Daily+Monday+through+Friday+2019-03-05&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart&fbclid=IwAR3zbNB8y-HEOoJpFLSzdAmgIjY2UKK4hJMmasq3V45XMP4WzLn6f-W3LWw

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/17/autopsy-of-a-dead-coup/?fbclid=IwAR2TGq3namkO9ZlEQ7rqdAo_Zv35iS1vDqUZOEKx1eNSillycWDNFaI2z9k
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on March 06, 2019, 11:41:14 AM: can't open NR article - asking for me to subscribe which I don't think is worth it except for McCarthy ad VDH.

The rest are all blowhards frankly
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2019, 12:36:11 PM: Here you go- hope the formatting turns out OK:
======================================

The Forgotten Foot Soldiers of the ‘Resistance’
By Victor Davis Hanson

March 5, 2019 6:30 AM

We are still trying to fathom the apparent but transient palace-coup attempts of Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe. No one has gotten to the bottom of the serial lying by McCabe and James Comey, much less their systematic and illegal leaking to pet reporters.

We do not know all the ways in which James Clapper and John Brennan seeded the dossier and its related gossip among the press and liberal politicians — only that both were prior admitted fabricators who respectively while under oath misled congressional representatives on a host of issues.

The central role of Hillary Clinton in funding the anti-Trump, Russian-“collusion,” Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele dossier is still not fully disclosed. Did the deluded FISA court know it was being used by Obama-administration DOJ and FBI officials, who withheld from it evidence to ensure permission to spy on American citizens? Could any justice knowingly be so naïve?

Do we remember at all that Devin Nunes came to national prominence when he uncovered information that members of the Obama administration’s national-security team, along with others, had systematically unmasked surveilled Americans, whose names then were leaked illegally to the press?

One day historians will have the full story of how Robert Mueller stocked his legal team inordinately with partisans. He certainly did not promptly disclose the chronology of, or the interconnected reasons for, the firings of Lisa Page and Peter Strozk. And his team has largely used process-crime allegations to leverage mostly minor figures to divulge some sort of incriminating evidence about the president — none of it pertaining to the original mandated rationale of collusion.

These are the central issues and key players of this entire sordid attempt to remove a sitting president.

But we should remember there were dozens of other minor players who did their own parts in acting unethically, and in some cases illegally, to destroy a presidency. We have mostly forgotten them. But they reflect what can happen when Washington becomes unhinged, the media go berserk, and a reign of terror ensues in which any means necessary is redefined as what James Comey recently monetized as a “Higher Loyalty” to destroy an elected president.

Here are just a few of the foot soldiers we have forgotten.

Anonymous
On September 5, 2018 (a date seemingly picked roughly to coincide with the publication of Bob Woodward’s sensational tell-all book about the inside of the Trump White House), the New York Times printed a credo from a supposed anonymous Republican official deep within the Trump administration. In a supposed fit of ethical conviction, he (or she) warned the nation of the dangers it faced under his boss, President Trump, and admitted to a systematic effort to subvert his presidency:

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.

Anonymous elaborated:

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

We do not know whether Anonymous was describing the coup attempt as described by Andrew McCabe that apparently entailed Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department informally polling cabinet officials, or marked a wider effort among Never Trump Republicans and deep-state functionaries to ensure that Trump failed — whether marked by earlier efforts to leak confidential calls with foreign officials or to serve up unsubstantiated rumors to muckrakers or simply slow-walk or ignore presidential directives.

In any case, Anonymous’s efforts largely explain why almost daily we hear yet another mostly unsubstantiated account that a paranoid, deranged, and dangerous Trump is holed up in his bedroom with his Big Macs as he plans unconstitutional measures to wreck the United States — and then, by accident, achieves near-record-low peacetime unemployment, near-record-low minority unemployment, annualized 3 percent GDP growth, record natural-gas and oil production, record deregulation, comprehensive tax reform and reduction, and foreign-policy breakthroughs from the destruction of ISIS to cancellation of the flawed Iran deal.

James Baker
In the course of congressional testimony, it was learned that the FBI general counsel, James Baker, for a time had been under investigation for leaking classified information to the press. Among the leaks were rumored scraps from the Steele dossier passed to Mother Jones reporter David Corn (who has denied any such connection) that may have fueled his sensational pre-election accusation of Trump–Russian collusion.

Nonetheless, about a week before the 2016 election, Corn of Mother Jones was writing lurid exposés, such as the following, to spread gossip likely inspired from the Christopher Steele dossier (italics inserted):

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not?

An FBI spokeswoman says, “Normally, we don’t talk about whether we are investigating anything.” But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government. In June, the former Western intelligence officer — who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients — was assigned the task of researching Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm.

What does “assigned” mean, and by whom? That Fusion/GPS (which, in fact, is a generic opposition-research firm with no particular expertise in Russia) hired with disguised Clinton campaign funds a has-been foreign-national spy to buy dirt from Russian sources to subvert a presidential campaign?

Those leaks of Christopher Steele’s dirt also did their small part in planting doubt in voters’ minds right that electing Trump was tantamount to implanting a Russian asset in the White House. Baker has been the alleged center of a number of reported leaks, even though the FBI’s general counsel should have been the last person to disclose any government communication to the press during a heated presidential campaign. And there is still no accurate information concerning what role, if any, Baker played in Andrew McCabe’s efforts to discuss removing the president following the Comey firing.

Evelyn Farkas (MARC: We discussed her here)
On March 1, 2017, just weeks after Trump took office, the New York Times revealed that. in a last-minute order, outgoing president Obama had vastly expanded the number of government officials with access to top-secret intelligence data. The Obama administration apparently sought to ensure a narrative spread that Trump may have colluded with the Russians. The day following the disclosure, a former Pentagon official, Evelyn Farkas (who might have been a source for the strange disclosure of a day earlier), explained Obama’s desperate eleventh-hour effort in an MSNBC interview:

I was urging my former colleagues, and, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill . . . it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.

Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people who left so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy, um, that the [stutters] Trump folks — if they found out how we knew what we knew about their [the] Trump staff, dealing with Russians — that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.

So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia, so then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were also trying to help get information to the Hill.

Despite media efforts to spin Farkas’s disclosure, she was essentially contextualizing how outgoing Obama officials were worried that the incoming administration would discover their own past efforts (”sources and methods”) to monitor and surveil Trump-campaign officials, and would seek an accounting. Her worry was not just that the dossier-inspired dirt would not spread after Trump took office, but that the Obama administration’s methods used to thwart Trump might be disclosed (e.g., “if they found out how we knew what we knew about their [the] Trump staff, dealing with Russians — that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence”).

So Farkas et al. desperately sought to change the law so that their rumors and narratives would be so deeply seeded within the administrative state that the collusion narrative would inevitably lead to Congress and the press, and thereby overshadow any shock at the improper or illegal methods the Obama-administration officials had authorized to monitor the Trump campaign.

And Farkas was correct. Even today, urination in a Russian hotel room has overshadowed perjury traps, warping the FISA courts, illegal leaking, inserting a spy into the Trump campaign, and Russian collusion with Clinton hireling and foreign agent Christopher Steele.

Samantha Power
We now forget that for some reason, in her last year in office, but especially during and after the 2016 election, Power, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, reportedly asked to unmask the names of over 260 Americans picked up in government surveillance. She offered no real explanations of such requests.

Even stranger than a U.N. ambassador suddenly playing the role of a counterintelligence officer, Power continued her requests literally until the moments before Trump took office in January 2017. And, strangest of all, after Power testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Representative Trey Gowdy reported that “her testimony is ‘they [the unmasking requests] may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”

Who, in the world, then, did make those requests and why and, if true, did she know she was so being used?

And were some of those unmasking requests leaked, thus helping to fuel media rumors in late 2016 and early 2017 that Trump officials were veritable traitors in league with Russia? And why were John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, and Sally Yates reportedly in the last days (or, in some cases, the last hours) requesting that the names of Americans swept up in surveillance of others be unmasked? What was the point of it all?

In sum, did a U.N. ambassador let her name be used by aides or associates to spread rumors throughout the administrative state, and thereby brand them with classified government authenticity, and then all but ensure they were leaked to the press?

We the public most certainly wondered why the moment Trump was elected, the very name Carter Page became synonymous with collusion, and soon Michael Flynn went from a respected high-ranking military official to a near traitor, as both were announced as emblematic of their erstwhile complicit boss.

Ali Watkins and James Wolf
Watkins was the young reporter for Buzzfeed (which initially leaked the largely fake Steele dossier and erroneously reported that Michael Cohen would implicate Trump in suborning perjury) who conducted an affair with James Wolf, a staffer, 30 years her senior, on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Wolf, remember, systematically and illegally began leaking information to her that found its way into sensationalized stories about collusion. But as Margot Cleveland of the Federalist pointed out, Watkins was also identified by Buzzfeed “in court filings as one of the individuals who ‘conducted newsgathering in connection with the Dossier before Buzzfeed published the Article’ on the dossier. This fact raises the question of whether Watkins received information from Wolfe concerning the dossier and, if so, what he leaked.”

In other words, the dossier was probably planted among U.S. senators and deliberately leaked through a senior Senate aide, who made sure that the unverified dirt was published by the press to damage Donald Trump.

And it did all that and more.

The list of these bit players could be easily expanded. These satellites were not coordinated in some tight-knit vast conspiracy, but rather took their cue from their superiors and the media to freelance with assumed impunity, as their part in either preventing or ending a Trump presidency. And no doubt the Left would argue that the sheer number of federal bureaucrats and political appointees, in a variety of cabinets and agencies, throughout the legislative and the executive branches, all proves that Trump is culpable of something.

Perhaps. But the most likely explanation is that a progressive administrative state, a liberal media, and an increasingly radicalized liberal order were terrified by the thought of an outsider Trump presidency. Therefore, they did what they could, often both unethically and illegally, to stop his election, and then to subvert his presidency.
54

In their arrogance, they assumed that their noble professions of higher loyalties and duties gave them exemption to do what they deemed necessary and patriotic. And others like them will continue to do so, thereby setting the precedent that unelected federal officials can break the law or violate any ethical protocols they please — if they disagree with the ideology of the commander in chief. We ridicule Trump for going ballistic at each one of these periodically leaked and planted new stories that raised some new charge about his stupidity, insanity, incompetence, etc. But no one has before witnessed any president subjected to such a comprehensive effort of the media, the deep state, political opponents, and his own party establishment to destroy him.

Subversion is the new political opposition. The nation — and the Left especially — will come to regret the legacy of the foot soldiers of the Resistance in the decades to come.

Victor Davis Hanson — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 06, 2019, 03:31:45 PM: What a mess. Nobody recaps it like VDH but it is still too convoluted to be repeated or understood. I took the time to learn all the players and events of Whitewater and gained nothing from it. People confuse impeachment with removal. Impeach is a word; remove from office is an act but still only makes the VP of the same party President. The crooks came out ahead politically in Clinton's time when the other side was painted as over-reaching. A rapist convinced the opinion polls that the special counsel was obsessed with sex. Reminds me of a joke...

Now we have sinister and partisan 'intelligence' figures, guilty, discredited, fired, that nobody can keep track of, facing no consequence. Comey, McCabe, Ohr, Stzruk, Lisa Page, Brennan, Clapper and so on. Two have wives that were involved. Two were sleeping with each other. At least one admitted they had a plan to stop Trump, not joking. Mueller is supposed to be the good guy but built his team with filth. Rosenstein wrote the memo to fire Comey then was aghast to learn Comey was fired. Comey, Yates, McCabe and Rosenstein all knowingly signed misleading FISA applications, a HUGE abuse of power. A host of Obama officials were in this up to their necks, Samantha Power for example and whoever was pulling her marionette strings. The Washington Post, NY Times, CNN and the bit players of media were involved. Trump asked the Russians publicly to release the emails if they have them. People who don't recognize an obvious joke are considered on the spectrum; I guess that includes all of deep state Washington. Trump has his own bit players with their own misdeeds, Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Carter Page, Stone. HRC was involved. McCain played the role of stooge. Does somebody want to tie this all together in a campaign bumper sticker?

Mueller will report no collusion we think. The House will investigate Trump's financial dealings. On Face the Nation, Adam Schiff said "Trump Tower Moscow" at least four times, a "deal" where no money changed hands, which means he has nothing more, yet. They want to get Trump's family, especially the son in law. Great idea, target the Jew, for what, right while they rebuke anti-semitism. Trump says he will cooperate with congressional investigations which means he will not. Precedent comes from Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, Obama and Hillary trickling out the most innocent of her emails. They either gave zero cooperation to committees or lied, and faced no consequence either way. Don't forget about two sets of rules. The courts will get involved. Hopefully the Senate committees and DOJ will look at how this farce got started and what went wrong.

While they compete to expose the other side, somebody will be eventually seen as over-reaching. "What about the business of the people?" The President has the advantage there; he will hopefully be focused on advancing his agenda while the House is blocking it even if his motive is to distract them. Meanwhile the campaign and the candidates with their own scandals, eating salad with a comb, and the time limits of Congress. Hard to do endless investigations and Hollywood fundraisers at the same time.

Each voter will see this all only from the side they started on.

For the hundredth time in a row this election will be 'the biggest one of our lifetime'. Either party could win all three "branches" or more likely we end up with some other combination of divided government.

Meanwhile the issues, the deficit. Wait, LOOK! There's a shiny object, over there --->
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2019, 05:05:31 PM: Good analysis Doug.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on March 06, 2019, 05:10:15 PM: "In their arrogance, they assumed that their noble professions of higher loyalties and duties gave them exemption to do what they deemed necessary and patriotic. "

Not sure but this seems to me could apply to James Baker who has been immersed in the swamp for decades.
He is likely friends with all the deep state guys.
Title: Nadler & Son
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2019, 12:01:46 PM: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/exclusive-jerry-nadlers-son-works-for-firm-suing-trump-which-presents-conflict-of-interest/
Title: Shifty Schiff's witness tampering
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2019, 06:28:41 AM: https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/429041-adam-schiff-glenn-simpson-and-their-forrest-gump-like-encounter-in-aspen

https://pjmedia.com/trending/michael-cohen-met-with-schiff-staffers-at-least-four-times-10-hours-total-before-testimony/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=March2019&fbclid=IwAR03wNlSvFO2JYYuyosE6NZBOjymae0fMResIxG_gipLvtW6dBavpnj5eps
Title: JW gets judicial order against recalcitrant FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2019, 12:56:16 PM: Judicial Watch's Weekly Update: Court Victory Against Deep State FBI

Judge Declares FBI’s Search for Peter Strzok Records Inadequate

A petulant child or employee will perform a task halfway and wait to see if he can get away with it. Such seems to be the strategy of the entire Deep State bureaucracy.

The FBI is particularly good at this, and we are particularly good at calling them on it. Luckily for the American people we have judges who respect the Freedom of Information Act.

A case in point: U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper for the District of Columbia has agreed with that the FBI did not adequately search for records related to the removal and reassignment of Peter Strzok from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team. He was a former deputy to the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI.

In granting our request, Judge Cooper ordered the FBI to further search their records. (The original, deficient search had only returned 14 pages.)

The order comes in the December 2017 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed after the DOJ failed to respond to and August 17, 2017, request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Federal Bureau of Investigation (No. 1:17-cv-02682)). Judicial Watch seeks:

•   All records regarding the assignment of FBI Supervisor Peter Strzok to the special counsel’s investigation led by former Director Robert Mueller.
•   All records related to the reassignment of FBI Supervisor Peter Strzok from the special counsel’s investigation to another position within the FBI.
•   All SF-50 and/or SF-52 employment forms, as well as all related records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the FBI and any other individual or entity.

On July 31, 2018, we released the first 14 pages of FBI documents produced in this FOIA lawsuit, showing that Strzok insisted on retaining his FBI security clearance before moving to the Mueller team and confirmed that Strzok played a pivotal role in the flawed Hillary Clinton email investigation.

In his decision, Judge Cooper called the FBI’s search “overly cramped:”

Notwithstanding that Judicial Watch’s request referred to Mueller by name … the Bureau searched only for the term “special counsel.” But surely one would expect that Agent Strzok and other FBI personnel might use the Special Counsel’s name — “Mueller” — rather than his title when discussing Strzok’s assignment to the Russia investigation, especially in informal emails. Another logical variation on “special counsel” is its commonly used acronym “SCO,” which appears to be used within the Special Counsel’s Office itself, as reflected by documents that the FBI uncovered and produced to Judicial Watch.

The ruling also stated that the FBI did not adequately respond to our FOIA lawsuit because it limited its search to only Strzok’s email account.

Judge Cooper ordered that the FBI must conduct a new search that includes “the email accounts of any of Agent Strzok’s superiors or other Bureau officials who were involved in the decision to assign him to the Special Counsel’s Office or the decision to reassign him to the FBI’s Human Resources Division after his removal from the Mueller investigation.”

The FBI must also expand its search to other forms of communication in addition to email. Given Strzok’s well-known use of text messaging, “it strikes the Court as reasonably likely that he discussed his assignment to the Special Counsel’s Office in text messages—which again is the standard for assessing an agency’s selection of search locations.”

Strzok was reportedly removed from the Mueller investigative team in August 2017 and reassigned to a human resources position after it was discovered that he and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page exchanged text messages during the Clinton investigation and 2016 election season that raised serious questions about his anti-Trump/pro-Clinton bias. They were also engaged in an extramarital affair. Strzok infamously texted “there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”

Strzok reportedly oversaw the FBI’s interviews of former National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn; changed former FBI Director James Comey’s language about Hillary Clinton’s actions regarding her illicit email server from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless;” played a lead role in the FBI’s interview of Clinton and is suspected of being responsible for using the unverified dossier to obtain a FISA warrant in order to spy on President Trump’s campaign.

The Court rightly slammed the FBI for its gamesmanship in searching for records about one of the most notorious FBI agents of all time – Peter Strzok. The FBI leadership is in cover-up mode on its abuses targeting President Trump, and we’re pleased a federal court pushed back on this stonewall.

Judicial Watch Sues for Key Anti-Trump Coup Doc

Perhaps you remember the 1964 film “Seven Days in May,” in which a Deep State cabal plotted a takeover of the government. Burt Lancaster starred, and Rod Serling, appropriately, wrote script.

Now we’re living through a real life “Eight Days in May” featuring Rod Rosenstein, the disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe and a slew of characters conniving to bring down a real life President.

In the latest scene we are suing the Department of Justice for the communications of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein between May 8 and May 17, 2017.

We filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after the DOJ failed to respond to a September 21, 2018, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00481)). We are seeking:

Any and all e-mails, text messages, or other records of communication addressed to or received by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein between May 8, 2017, and May 22, 2017.

This time period is critical. On May 8, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memo to President Trump recommending that FBI Director James Comey be fired. The next day, President Trump fired Comey. On May 17 Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Between May 8 and May 17, Rosenstein met with then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and other senior Justice Department FBI officials and discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump and whether Rosenstein and others should wear a wire to secretly record conversations with the President.

We previously filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking the communications of former FBI Deputy Director McCabe, the Office of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or the Office of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein discussing the 25th Amendment or presidential fitness. Additionally, that lawsuit seeks all recordings made by any official in the Office of the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General of meetings in the Executive Office of the President or Vice President.

These critical days in May, a scant three months into President Trump’s term, included extraordinary targeting of President Trump by Rod Rosenstein and other Deep State officials at the DOJ and FBI. Our focused FOIA lawsuit aims to uncover exactly what Mr. Rosenstein’s role was in any discussions to overthrow President Trump.

I don’t have much use for Hollywood, but sometimes it ominously foreshadows reality.

Judicial Watch Files Ethics Complaint Against Congressman Adam Schiff

The plot deep within the Justice Department to bring down President Trump is but one of three legs: The DOJ/FBI maneuver has been given covering fire all along by the media, and it has been buttressed by members of the Congress, whose unhinged behavior has seriously eroded that institution’s credibility.

No one has been more eager to get in front of the cameras and spout knowingly false conspiratorcy theories than Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who is, remarkably, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

We have now filed an official complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics about Rep. Schiff’s controversial communications and contacts with two congressional witnesses: Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS and Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer.

We are asking that Rep. Schiff be investigated in connection with recent revelations that he met with Simpson in Aspen, Colorado, in July 2018 and that he and his staff coordinated with Michael Cohen on Cohen’s recent testimony to congressional committees. Cohen’s testimony is alleged to be false in several important respects.

You will recall that we filed an ethics complaint on April 13, 2018, against Rep. Schiff and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) for improperly confirming classified information in violation of House rules but the Committee has yet to take any public action on the complaint.

Rep. Schiff has an ethics problem. His and his staff’s irregular communications with anti-Trump witnesses reflect poorly on the credibility of the House and its committees’ investigations. It has long been apparent that Rep. Schiff can’t be trusted to lead the Intelligence Committee, so we hope that Democrats on the Ethics Committee stop protecting Mr. Schiff and take action.

In our complaint we elaborate on our concerns:

Dear Chairman Skaggs,

Judicial Watch is a non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government and fidelity to the rule of law. We regularly monitor congressional ethics issues as part of our anti-corruption mission.

This letter serves as our official complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) concerning the activities of Rep. Adam Schiff. Rep. Schiff appears to have violated House Code of Official Conduct, Rule 23, clauses 1 and 2, by inappropriately communicating with witnesses. Clauses 1 and 2 provide:

1. A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.

2. A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall adhere to the spirit and the letter of the Rules of the House and to the rules of duly constituted committees thereof.

Rep. Adam Schiff attended the Aspen Security Forum conference in July 2018, which was also attended by Glenn Simpson, the founder of the firm Fusion GPS. Press reports have detailed evidence of a meeting and discussion between Rep. Schiff and Glenn Simpson at the July 2018 Aspen Security Forum. As noted in The Hill newspaper:

At the time of the encounter, Simpson was an important witness in the House Intelligence Committee probe who had given sworn testimony about alleged, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Fusion GPS is the political opposition research firm involved in procuring “unverified” information claiming the Trump presidential campaign had “colluded” with Russia, among other things. That Fusion GPS-supplied information was the basis upon which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrants against Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

Mr. Simpson’s leadership of Fusion GPS and his centrality to events resulted in his having to testify before congressional committees or their staffs. Specifically, Mr. Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee, of which Rep. Schiff was the ranking Democratic member, on October 16, 2018 – approximately three (3) months after the Aspen Security Forum.

We note that following revelations in 2017 that Rep. Devin Nunes had informed President Trump that U.S. intelligence agencies had been engaging in “incidental collection” of his campaign’s communications, Rep. Schiff demanded that Rep. Nunes, then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, recuse himself from any investigations involving alleged Trump collusion with Russia. Indeed, Rep. Schiff wrote the following on twitter:

This is not a recommendation I make lightly … But in much the same way that the attorney general [Jeff Sessions] was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after failing to inform the Senate of his meetings with Russian officials, I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman.

Then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi concurred with Rep. Schiff’s call for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself.

The July 2018 contacts between Rep. Schiff and Mr. Simpson create, at a minimum, the appearance of impropriety. As a result of Rep. Schiff’s previously undisclosed, private discussions with Mr. Simpson, the public’s confidence in Mr. Schiff’s ability to objectively and impartially carry out his duties as Committee Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been gravely damaged.

Further, Rep. Schiff’s contacts with Mr. Michael Cohen should also be scrutinized in the same light as the Simpson contacts. Journalists have reported:

President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen told House investigators this week that staff for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., traveled to New York at least four times to meet with him for over 10 hours immediately before last month’s high-profile public testimony, according to two sources familiar with the matter – as Republicans question whether the meetings amounted to coaching a witness.

The sources said the sessions covered a slew of topics addressed during the public hearing before the oversight committee – including the National Enquirer ‘s “Catch and Kill” policy, American Media CEO David Pecker and the alleged undervaluing of President Trump’s assets.

Again, Rep. Schiff’ s conduct creates the appearance of unethical collusion and synchronization of efforts that calls into question whether Cohen’s testimony was a legitimate congressional hearing or well-rehearsed political theatre.

During Mr. Cohen’s congressional testimony, he was questioned by Rep. Mike Turner concerning the number, nature and subject of his [Cohen’s] contacts with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Rep Jim Jordan pressed Cohen on the subject in subsequent questioning. Cohen hesitantly acknowledged that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”

A pattern of conduct on the part of Rep. Schiff in these matters would exponentially increase the gravity of the prejudice and harm to the public’s confidence in the institution of the House of Representatives.

Rep. Schiff’s conduct and contacts with witnesses must be treated with the same gravity that Reps. Schiff and Pelosi accorded Rep. Nunes’s actions. Rep. Nunes recused himself for a time from certain oversight responsibilities with respect to the Russia-Trump investigations.

In the least, Rep. Schiff and his staff communications with Glenn Simpson and Michael Cohen, undermine the “credibility of the House” and its committee proceedings, especially given Mr. Cohen’s subsequent alleged false testimony.

We call upon the OCE to investigate Rep. Schiff and his previously undisclosed, inappropriate contact with key witnesses in congressional investigation over which that Member holds significant sway.

Thank you for your attention.

The ethics process in the House is a mess so I don’t expect something quickly to happen, but it is important that we put the House on official notice so no politician there has an excuse to let Adam Schiff 'suntoward behavior slide.

Clinton Email Scandal Witness Testimony Begins

In January U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered senior Obama Administration officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap – to respond under oath to our questions regarding Benghazi and the Clinton email scandal.

We now have a schedule for the depositions.

This court-ordered discovery comes in our July 2014 FOIA lawsuit filed after the U.S. Department of State failed to respond to a May 13, 2014 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch seeks:

Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or relating to talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency.

Remember that this lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

Our 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.
The confirmed discovery schedule now includes:

March 12: State Department’s responses to interrogatories and document requests were due.

March 14: Deposition of Justin Cooper, a former aide to Bill Clinton who reportedly had no security clearance and is believed to have played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton’s non-government email system.

April 5: Deposition of John Hackett, a State Department records official “immediately responsible for responding to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.”

April 16: Deposition of Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.

April 23: Deposition of Sheryl Walter, former State Department Director of the Office of Information Programs and Services/Global Information Services.

April 26: Deposition of Gene Smilansky, a State Department lawyer.

April 30. Deposition of Monica Tillery, a State Department official.

May 7: Deposition of Jonathon Wasser, who was a management analyst on the Executive Secretariat staff. Wasser worked for Deputy Director Clarence Finney and was the State Department employee who actually conducted the searches for records in response to FOIA requests to the Office of the Secretary.

May 14: Deposition of Clarence Finney, the deputy director of the Executive Secretariat staff who was the principal advisor and records management expert in the Office of the Secretary responsible for control of all correspondence and records for Hillary Clinton and other State Department officials.

June 11: 30(b)(6) Deposition, which will be designated by the State Department.

June 13: Deposition of Heather Samuelson, the former State Department senior advisor who helped facilitate the State Department’s receipt and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

As yet to be determined is the deposition date for Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell, who wrote a March 2, 2009, internal memorandum titled “Use of Blackberries on Mahogany Row,” in which he strongly advised that the devices not be allowed.

Written questions under oath are to be answered by:

Monica Hanley, Hillary Clinton’s former confidential assistant at the State Department.

Lauren Jiloty, Clinton’s former special assistant.

E.W. Priestap, is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations. Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.

Susan Rice, President Obama’s former UN ambassador who appeared on Sunday television news shows following the Benghazi attacks, blaming a “hateful video.” Rice was also Obama’s national security advisor involved in the “unmasking” the identities of senior Trump officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Ben Rhodes, an Obama-era White House deputy strategic communications adviser who attempted to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.”

We’re doing the heavy lifting in the Clinton email scandal, even as Congress dropped the ball and DOJ and State continued to obstruct our quest for the truth. The Court in our case wants real answers on the Clinton email scandal, which is why our request for basic discovery was granted.

Judicial Watch is #1 on FOIA!
Since 2001 we have led all nonprofit organizations in filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, according to figures released late last year by The FOIA Project of Syracuse University.
We are announcing this in honor of “Sunshine Week,” March 10-16, which is an “annual nationwide celebration of access to public information.”

According to the FOIAproject.org’s most recent study, we were again No. 1 on the top ten list of most frequent Nonprofit/Advocacy Groups (Jan 21, 2001-July 2018) challenging federal government withholding in court and for the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.

Overall Top 10 FOIA Filers (Jan 21, 2001 – July 2018)
Rank    Plaintiff in FOIA Suit   Number Filed
1.    Judicial Watch   391
2.    American Civil Liberties Union   130
3.    Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility   94
4.    Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington    88
5.    Electronic Privacy Information Center   74
6.    Natural Resources Defense Council   59
7.    Center for Biological Diversity   47
8.    Cause of Action Institute   44
9.    American Oversight   43
10.    Electronic Frontier Foundation   43

The FOIA Project “aims to: (1) create a shaming mechanism by which agencies and officials who ignore the law are held accountable, and (2) arm the public with the full record of FOIA efforts that have and haven’t worked, so anyone can more effectively surmount frequently used roadblocks to public access.”

We use the open records or freedom of information laws and other tools to uncover misconduct by government officials and hold to account those who engage in corrupt activities. When agencies balk at releasing information that is of value to the public, we sue.

The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to improve public access to government records. The FOIA Project says there is wide agreement that the FOIA’s administrative process has many flaws, with federal agencies frequently resisting its mandates by either refusing to provide properly requested records or ignoring the requirements that the documents be made available within specified time periods.

The most-sued agency is the Department of Justice, which has been the defendant in 2,312 FOIA suits since 2001. Within the DOJ, the FBI has been the most sued division with 712 suits. We frequently clash with the DOJ and FBI in court, often in cases involving IRS malfeasance, the Clinton email scandal, and the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation. Judicial Watch currently is pursuing 40 lawsuits against the DOJ.

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Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on March 23, 2019, 07:28:01 AM: Now that Mueller has ended his work and filed no more indictments, it is clear that the investigation was primarily an attempt to cover up and divert attention from the massive abuses of federal espionage powers for political purposes by many high-up officials in the Obama administration. They took the Steele dossier and transformed it from political opposition research into a classic disinformation campaign. This has/had all the hallmarks of being run by intelligence operatives in the various agencies that conduct those kinds of things.

The Mueller investigation and Russia collusion hoax was also a classic Chicago-style political power game. Instead of using a ward boss or a city government department head to cut off a political opponent's electricity or water, the operatives abused the national intelligence powers to do the same thing to their political opponents. Always remember that Obama himself, although claiming to be a community organizer, was really just another Chicago machine politician. Never forget that Michelle Obama is the daughter of a city water department employee who was also a Chicago democrat machine precinct captain.

Finally, this investigation was the last best hope for those people who fancy themselves as clear-headed thinkers to rationalize their purely emotional response to Trump as a person and the fact that he won the Republican nomination and won the 2016 election.
Title: Rick , let me pick you brain
Post by: ccp on March 23, 2019, 09:43:54 AM: "Now that Mueller has ended his work and filed no more indictments, it is clear that the investigation was primarily an attempt to cover up and divert attention from the massive abuses of federal espionage powers for political purposes by many high-up officials in the Obama administration. They took the Steele dossier and transformed it from political opposition research into a classic disinformation campaign. This has/had all the hallmarks of being run by intelligence operatives in the various agencies that conduct those kinds of things."

So Rick , do you think that now the Mueller is FINALLY finished his end (though we have endless politically driven investigations form Congress and may somewhat more justified criminal investigations fro SDNY) DO YOU THINK BARR WILL START INVESTIGATING THE DEEP STATE?

ND DO YOU THINK TRUMP WOULD HAVE IT? as i posted in another thread we keep seeing how the beloved Jared and Ivanka are using personal , not government communication devices or modes to conduct government business.
So now trying to go after DEEP STATERS and up to Clinton and Obama might just be finding just as many worms as finding treasure.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2019, 10:34:13 AM: Glad to see that your busy life gives you a moment to be with us once again Rick. You are always quite welcome here.

At the moment things are looking good for our the President, but I am going to hold off celebrating until AG Barr comes out with his summary.

IF IF IF the absence of indictments means what we hope/think it means, then it would appear the political-legal foundation for a serious investigation with an eye to prosecution is in place.

We shall see. My read of AG Barr is that he is a very serious lawyer but very much of Bush Patrician Brahmin temperament , , ,

Here is Pravda on the Hudson's take on him:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/william-barr-bio-facts-history.html?emc=edit_cn_20190323&nl=politics&nlid=4964119320190323&te=1
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 24, 2019, 06:50:50 AM: "...I am going to hold off celebrating until AG Barr comes out with his summary."

Likewise. Russian collusion looks dead but none of us would want our worst enemies to have full subpoena power to investigate us for years. It seems that Trump has been trying to warn us of something coming, a development if not a bombshell. He points to the economy and his accomplishments as reasons to not impeach. But those are not reasons to not impeach. The Barr summary will include some (new?) negative information on the President that supporters and detractors will have to deal with.

On the other side of it, how does he not report on the FBI, DOJ, HRC and Obama administration side of the scandal? We will see.
Title: The DoJ's summary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2019, 03:03:47 PM: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706351394/read-the-justice-departments-summary-of-the-mueller-report?fbclid=IwAR1Cvoh4RAunk7rD0EI1scz-TQBumj6JMQKodPneTasN2Ti88OaUUyphfeE
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on March 24, 2019, 04:08:53 PM: Barr's summary states two important things about Mueller.

1. Mueller found no evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign colluded with any Russian attempts to destabilize the 2016 election.

2. Mueller punted his discretion to Barr on the obstruction of justice issue by laying out the facts and arguments in favor and against an obstruction charge in an objective manner without expressing an opinion on the ultimate issue.

Barr's summary states one important thing about the obstruction issue.

1. Barr found that the Mueller report identified "no act" committed by Trump that constituted "obstructive conduct."

So Mueller completely exonerated Trump's campaign on the Russian collusion hoax. And Barr completely exonerated Trump on the obstruction of justice argument.

Of course, by punting the decision on obstruction to Barr, Mueller avoids the political heat from a complete exoneration. And he gives the deep state Democrats and their allies an argument that Barr's decision on obstruction is tainted by his political appointment by Trump to the AG position. Barr deflected that argument a little by writing in the summary that both he and Rosenstein concluded that the Mueller report identified no act that would constitute obstructive conduct.
Title: Re: Dershowitz on Tucker Carlson: Where's the crime?
Post by: G M on March 24, 2019, 07:04:23 PM: Quote from: rickn on May 20, 2017, 03:13:44 AM
How come it's OK for Obama to fire Flynn for not being loyal to Obama's policies; but it is not OK for Trump to fire Comey for refusing to say that he will be loyal to Trump's policies?

The FBI works for the President. It is not an autonomous directorate. Or do some want another Hooveristic bureau if it acts that way to further their political goals?

Dershowitz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WnauFiafY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WnauFiafY)

There is a different standard between Obama presidential powers and Trump's presidential powers because "Orange Man BAD"!

The FBI today has gone beyond the worst abuses under J. Edgar. At this point, it needs to be dissolved.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 24, 2019, 07:19:38 PM: That was very helpful Rick, thank you!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 25, 2019, 05:57:47 AM: Strange that this investigation went on for two years, almost three with the part before Mueller, for nothing.

Besides prosecution of certain investigators and false FISA applications, unmasking etc., the taxpayers deserve a refund for the cost of it.

We deserve the House back too.
Title: But wait! There's more to do!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2019, 08:20:04 AM: https://nypost.com/2019/03/23/how-to-end-our-national-nightmare-probe-hillary-clinton-again/?fbclid=IwAR2F3pz75f_fHcs3FaSz0hrUbtBpJSq7RaE1ONq7wScvbkiQihn-RlBe_sE
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on March 25, 2019, 08:51:13 AM: There certainly is more to do

***Especially*** since the LEFT has near 85 investigation of Trump et., most just getting started for God Sakes!

DOJ needs to look into this
as well as Clintons and Podesta and Craig Comey , McCabe, Lynn Rice and the rest of them.
Title: Heh!
Post by: G M on March 25, 2019, 10:24:41 AM: (https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Screen-Shot-2019-03-25-at-12.50.49-PM-600x324.png)

Really like this LG 2.0 !
Title: Trump Russia Collusion Treason Was All Just Another Elite Lie
Post by: G M on March 25, 2019, 10:48:23 AM: https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/03/25/trump-russia-collusion-treason-was-all-just-another-elite-lie-n2543599

Trump Russia Collusion Treason Was All Just Another Elite Lie

Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Mar 25, 2019 12:01 AM

The Mueller report dropped and the liberal elite experienced the kind of intense, agonizing disappointment usually reserved for a Fredocon’s bride on her wedding night.

It’s important to remember exactly what nonsense the elite liars were trying to stuff down our throats, because in the aftermath of their humiliation they are busy trying to hide it via their goalpost-shifting three card monte act. Behold their original assertion:

Donald Trump was a willing agent of Vladimir Putin actively acting in concert with Russia to betray the United States and steal the election!

Wow. Those of us who are neither shameless liars nor blithering idiots – or, such as my congressjerk Ted Lieu, both – never bought into this transparently ridiculous notion. But the Democrats, their slobbering media suck-ups, and their conservagimp submissives did, or at least pretended to. Why? Because the dumpster fire ruling class they represent was outraged that we, the People, rejected its divine right to govern us when we chose a brash, pugnacious outsider over their designated monarch to-be, Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit.

This sham investigation was not anything like the administration of justice. It was part of, as people say but we’ve stopped being shocked when we hear it, a soft coup. It was a deliberate attempt by the powerful to use the levers of government to eliminate a threat to the ruling class’s hold on political power by manufacturing a false narrative with the active assistance of those in government and media whose whole job is to prevent these sorts of fascist shenanigans.

The damage to our country is hard to calculate right now. It will take a while to fully appreciate how this betrayal by our alleged betters has undermined the foundations of our Republic. But the signs are ominous. Normal people, those of us who build, feed, fuel and defend this country, have been awakened to the utterly incompetent and thoroughly venal nature of what Instapundit Glenn Reynolds correctly identifies as the U.S. franchise of a useless trans-national elite that prioritizes its own power and perks over the welfare of those is purportedly serves.

We’re woke now. We see that the people we’ve been electing – the people they allow us to elect – are really all the same. Only the labels are different, but the objective – their own money and influence – is identical. Except for Trump, who neither respects the elite nor plays by its shabby rules. And that’s why they threw away any pretens of honesty, integrity or respect for the rule of law to drive him out of the Oval Office they covet.

Let’s briefly touch on all the lives ruined on the way to this flaccid finale, especially the people swopped up in the search for a crime, any crime, in the neighborhood of the Bad Orange Man. How many people naïvely thought, “Gee, I’ll go serve in government for a while” and found themselves saddled with six figures in legal bills and their reputations ruined by the media’s breathless lies?

And what collusion crimes did Mueller uncover? None. This was such nonsense that his pack of Democrats couldn’t even manage to frame anyone near Trump for Russia stuff. But they had their man so they found some crimes, or what are more or less crimes, among his associates. Manafort was dirty long before Trump morphed from punchline to president, but does anyone imagine he would have been jammed up if had not dared cavort with the unapproved POTUS? In fact, the feds had looked at Manafort before all this and given him a pass. Yet now he’s doing hard time while his Democrat partners are uncharged and free as birds, enjoying their plunder. Is that justice?

General Mike Flynn got arm-twisted into pleading to lying even though the FBI agents who talked to him said he wasn’t lying while the Three Stooges Brennan, Clapper and Comey lied their lizard hearts out to Congress and … nothing. What about Felonia? Everyone knows that anyone of us doing a tenth of what that Looming Doofus Comey said she did right before he gave her a pass would still be making large rocks into small ones. Oh, and now Americans can rest easy knowing that our government is ready to face the menace of a PJ-clad Roger Stone with its SWAT teams.

Congrats. This whole fiasco has convinced Americans that there are two sets of rules in America, one for the elite and one for us, and that the justice system is just a scam designed to help the elite hold onto power by punishing those who would challenge its rule. That’s poison to a free country, which is probably okay with our scuzzy elite since it does not actually want a free country. It wants a happy-face dictatorship, and it wants to do the dictating.

So, what next? What do we do?

Mr. President, pardon the people who are collateral damage to this witch hunt. Pardon General Flynn and Roger Stone and George Papaplatypus. Manafort? Communte his sentence to one consistent with the sentences given others of the elite guilty of similar crimes – which effectively means commute his sentence to nothing. There cannot be two sets of rules. They must apply equally to everyone or no one.

Next, order Attorney General Barr to clean house at the DoJ. Fire anyone associated with any of these antics. Then direct an investigation of the investigations – another special prosecutor, this one not bestest buddies with the guys he’s investigating. If we want the rule of law, we need to enforce the law and do it without the elite shoving manifest conflicts of interest in our faces.

Next, order Barr to sue the state of New York to enjoin the threats by its ridiculous AG of bogus investigations not based on actual crimes but on purely vindictive politics. We cannot have a system where an out-of-control leftist prosecutor in some moral backwater like New York City can prevent the elected POTUS from doing his job by tying him down with endless, aimless fishing expedtions without any probable cause of a crime.

Do not cooperate with the House’s promised Russiagate re-do. No more patty cake with these creeps. The proper response to Mueller 2: Electric Boogaloo is “No” – as in no documents, no cooperation, no nothing. And if someone gets called to testify, repeat after me: “This proceeding is a sham and a kangaroo court and I refuse to be part of it. I assert my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to remain silent, and you can all go to hell.”

And as for the rest of us, we need to embrace two other amendments. We need to exercise our First Amendment rights to speak out and organize to prevent these aspiring fascists from returning to power unopposed. We need to be militant and loud in defense of our liberty. 2020 is coming; start now if you like being free.

And if this attempted coup, with our elite running roughshod over the rule of law and using the force of the government to oppress political opponents, has taught us anything, it is the wisdom of the Founders in enshrining the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights. It is absolutely essential that we, the American citizenry, remain armed and ready to protect ourselves, our families, our communities and our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Our elite has demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is morally unworthy of retaining a monopoly on armed force within our society. Do you have any doubt about what these people would do if we foolishly allowed ourselves to be disarmed? Just look at Britain, where the people bought into the lie that being civilized means being defenseless. They now get arrested for mean tweets and their masters are poised to ignore the people’s vote on the Brexit referendum. Buy guns and ammunition and train with them. Be a citizen, not a subject.

The Mueller report marks the proverbial end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end, of this grave crisis. It’s a crisis where our Republic is in danger of becoming something very different, and something very much less free. Eliminating the Electoral College, letting in millions of illegal aliens, packing SCOTUS, banning guns – these are all leftist policies designed with one singular purpose, to dispossess you of the power to participate in your own governance and to ensure that we can never again elect someone like Trump who might challenge the elite’s stranglehold on control. We won this battle, but there is a long campaign ahead. Get ready, because if we let up then we will lose our liberty forever.

The Trump Russia Treason!!! lie reinforces the essential message of my novels People’s Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire, about an America split apart into red and blue nations and at each other’s throats. Recently hailed by formerly-prominent cruise-shilling Conservative, Inc. grifters as “appalling,” these action-packed and hilarious tomes must be onto something because all the liberal collaborators and pudgy conservaquislings you despise are demanding that you not be allowed to read them. So check ‘em out!
Title: It appears Trump was in India when the Mueller report came out...
Post by: G M on March 28, 2019, 01:31:42 AM: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzXsQzM_h2E&time_continue=93

It gets better every time!
Title: Shifty Schiff the Pencil Necked shafted by prank call
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2019, 03:05:14 PM: COLLUSION!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxHrn6Byz3g
Title: Obama intel officials in cross hairs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 29, 2019, 08:28:31 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/28/john-brennan-and-james-comey-obama-intelligence-ch/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=enqXUg7I2evLhoGvOH1A1eOW2iC6jd%2FEq58sbkfSZnVh8V1pLX65ozdpz5RiO6FT&bt_ts=1553861158427
Title: Another fine one from Andrew McCarthy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2019, 04:31:35 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/mueller-report-collusion-debate-inflated-talking-points/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202019-03-30&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Rush: FBI tried planting Russia linked informant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2019, 01:37:58 AM: https://www.westernjournal.com/limbaugh-fbi-tried-plant-russia-linked-informants-trump-campaign-prove-collusion/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=thenewvoice&fbclid=IwAR3Hep7Pd5DeT4vLwx_iRLVPrMBGRfQA-FCXagSji-uTnpNMdMg00tGm4ks
Title: Re: Rush: FBI tried planting Russia linked informant
Post by: DougMacG on April 01, 2019, 06:59:11 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2019, 01:37:58 AM
https://www.westernjournal.com/limbaugh-fbi-tried-plant-russia-linked-informants-trump-campaign-prove-collusion/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=thenewvoice&fbclid=IwAR3Hep7Pd5DeT4vLwx_iRLVPrMBGRfQA-FCXagSji-uTnpNMdMg00tGm4ks

Strange times that we live in when a radio commentator with no security clearance gives us more accurate information than the msm NYT Washington Post CNN etc.

Similar story of how this started: FBI agent told Papadopolous the Russians had incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, including emails. Papadopoulos then mentioned to an Australian diplomat who reports back and the FBI began to take a look - at their own planted information.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/fbi-releases-documents-showing-payments-trump-dossier-author-steele-n897506

When you get to court with all the information, they call it entrapment, but this President was on political trial, in the press. The FBI plants stories, plants evidence, plants sources, the media reports, the FBI uses the media reports as a second source to get more warrants, the media reports on the investigation on the information the investigators planted, the media polls on how many believe collusion occurred and how many think he should be impeached.

Now they are busted and we will see where this investigation leads. In the case of the Obama administration, did the fish stink from the head? If not Obama, this plan was hatched by whoever really ran that administration. Who ordered the 200 unmasks requested by UN ambassador Susan Rice? Susan Rice was the brain trust? I don't think so, but she should do jail time whether she gives up the names or not. How much more vulnerable will we be to real terrorists now that our intelligence agencies cannot be trusted to follow the rules on bulk data?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2019, 11:15:38 AM: I suspect the counter argument will be that there was good reason to suspect Trump and given the potential risks to our country of having a compromised president, certain measures were necessary blah blah.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on April 01, 2019, 02:44:18 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2019, 11:15:38 AM
I suspect the counter argument will be that there was good reason to suspect Trump and given the potential risks to our country of having a compromised president, certain measures were necessary blah blah.

The same people who were totally cool with Obama's connections to various nefarious characters and pallets of cash to the biggest terror nation on the planet.
Title: Russian hoax, Comey FBI Probe, Washington Times, Where's John Huber
Post by: DougMacG on April 02, 2019, 06:44:24 PM: John Huber leaves Congress in dark on FBI probe: 'It's like Where's Waldo?'

By Jeff Mordock - The Washington Times - Monday, April 1, 2019
Attorney General Jeff Sessions thought he had already answered calls for a special counsel to look into the FBI’s handling of sensitive political investigations when he named a Utah prosecutor to conduct an inquiry and report back.

Nearly 18 months later, there has been nary a public peep from U.S. Attorney John Huber, the man Mr. Sessions assigned to get to the bottom of things.

Likely witnesses say Mr. Huber has never contacted them, and members of Congress say they are still in the dark despite regular pleas to see progress.

“It concerns me that we haven’t heard a darn thing,” Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, told The Washington Times last week. “It’s like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ‘Where’s Huber?’”

Mr. Huber’s assignment is coming under scrutiny as top Republicans, including President Trump, demand a Justice Department investigation into the way the FBI and Justice Department targeted Mr. Trump’s campaign and his associates in 2016 while looking to give Hillary Clinton a pass on criminal wrongdoing, as Republican lawmakers allege.

When it was revealed last year that the FBI used questionable information to obtain a wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Mr. Sessions faced calls for a special counsel. He rejected those calls, saying he already had asked Mr. Huber to investigate and, with the power to call a grand jury, Mr. Huber was supposed to be every bit as adept as a special counsel.

Mr. Sessions was ousted last year. William P. Barr is now ensconced as head of the Justice Department, yet it’s unclear what that means for Mr. Huber and his secret work.

Legal analysts said he should have produced some evidence of progress after more than a year.

“There should be some proof of life,” said Andrew Leipold, a law professor at the University of Illinois who served as a consultant on special counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s Whitewater investigation.

“We should see people going in and out of his building, people interviewed leaking to the press, or a target calling a press conference,” he said. “The fact that none of that has happened is puzzling.”

Carter Page, the former Trump adviser who was a subject of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act snooping warrant, said he hasn’t heard from Mr. Huber.

He said he is not concerned, but others are frustrated.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department prosecutor and now a private lawyer, represents a whistleblower against the Clinton Foundation. The witness, Doug Campbell, is an FBI informant who says he has evidence that Mrs. Clinton helped a Russian company obtain U.S. uranium rights in exchange for large donations to the foundation, known as the Uranium One scandal.

Although the Uranium One allegations are within Mr. Huber’s purview, Ms. Toensing has heard nothing from him. She has not reached out to Mr. Huber but said he should have contacted her within the first two months of his investigation.

“It is head fake, a farce,” she said of the Huber investigation. “It was an attempt by Sessions to get Republicans off his back. I’m embarrassed for them because they fell for it, and I hope something happens now.”

There have been some tantalizing tidbits of operational data.

Appearing before Congress in November, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed that he had “several contacts” with Mr. Huber, but he refused to explain further.

“I think you need to talk to him about what scope and what he’s working on,” he told Mr. Jordan. “I wouldn’t begin to presume I know all of what he is necessarily working on.”

The Justice Department, Mr. Huber’s office and the inspector general declined to comment on the investigation or even confirm whether it is still open.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Sessions also declined to comment.

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III said the lack of information could be a sign that the investigation is being handled properly.

“I can remember all kinds of investigations that went on in secret when I was attorney general, and properly so,” he said. “The less that is said about an ongoing probe, the better. It is absolutely proper to not speak about a probe until you have an outcome or no announcement at all if there is no indictment.”

Others aren’t convinced by such reasoning and say they want to see more activity.

“The Mueller probe is what a real investigation looks like,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “There were grand juries, indictments, subpoenas and fights in court. I don’t know why people are putting their hopes in a secret investigation.”

One possibility for the lack of information is that Mr. Huber doesn’t want to upstage the inspector general’s inquiry into some of the same matters.

Yet for some Republicans, only a new special counsel can get to the bottom of things.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is among those calling on Mr. Barr to name such a special counsel.

Mr. Graham told The Times that he has not received any updates from Mr. Huber but doesn’t intend to call him before the Senate. He said he would defer to Mr. Barr on how to handle that investigation.

“I want to give Barr a chance to set it up the way he wants to,” Mr. Graham said.

Mr. Meese disagreed. He said the Justice Department’s public integrity section or Mr. Horowitz should investigate the allegations.

“This should be handled by the regular personnel at the Justice Department who are dedicated to handling things like this,” he said. “There is no reason to have a special counsel as such because it only confuses things. You have to do things like set up new procedures and hire lawyers from the outside.”
Title: Carter & Solomon on Mark Levin!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2019, 09:46:07 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=ySxG1xbRC0w
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on April 03, 2019, 09:40:18 AM: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/03/house-panel-approves-subpoenas-for-trump-officials-mueller-report/

so what happens if everyone shows up for the show and everyone takes the 5th?
what the crats going to do?

I would love to see the red faces on the LEFT then. :evil:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 04, 2019, 11:53:28 AM: Moving CCP's post to here:

Mueller's dem lawyers colluding with the Dem lawmakers to get the word out.

one says to the other , PSSSSSST the report is more damaging than Barr lets on ("between you and me of course")
and then within 5 minutes it is front page news in NY edition of Pravda:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/some-on-muellers-team-see-their-findings-as-more-damaging-for-trump-than-barr-revealed/ar-BBVB0HE

Now shifty schiff and naughty nads will take this and go on all their propaganda platforms in the MSM
and send out the talking points to all the jurnolisters to do the same
Title: If you don't indict, you can't incite
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 06, 2019, 06:32:04 AM: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/437496-note-to-team-mueller-if-you-dont-indict-you-cant-incite
Title: Russian conspiracy, Nunes criminal referral
Post by: DougMacG on April 08, 2019, 09:44:48 AM: I think this is BIG:

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/437764-nunes-says-he-will-soon-send-8-criminal-referrals-to-barr

No names, but looks like all the big ones that lied to Congress, Comey? Clapper? Cohen? And those who misled the FISA court, the FBI gang?

The big news will be whatever A.G. Barr decides to do with this referral. Most likely nothing but who knows...
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on April 08, 2019, 09:46:17 AM: "The big news will be whatever A.G. Barr decides to do with this referral. Most likely nothing but who knows..."

I hope he is NOT another Jeff Sessions on this.............
Title: Ukranian money?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 08, 2019, 11:04:06 AM: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/ukrainian-prosecutor-claiming-evidence-dem-election-crimes-says-kept-presenting-evidence-us/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2019-04-08&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR0embvAxxaJ3_z83_JKm2AuuHujMsFa8Gzg600hibm4GbXoADotvl99wrg
Title: Spying did occur, but focus on the leaking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2019, 04:25:56 PM: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/spying-did-occur-but-barr-should-also-focus-on-the-leaking?fbclid=IwAR2AvhFOFbz3nmbUzwnlUT3Q74OXOfD-yCCZDRgx_WNHtFprcAHZBofi45M
Title: clinon/obama dem operative lawyer indicted
Post by: ccp on April 11, 2019, 07:31:08 PM: to my knowledge this is a first:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/former-clinton-obama-white-house-lawyer-greg-craig-indicted-in-mueller-probe/

of course we will see if he has the connections to simply get off anyway
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 12, 2019, 01:46:58 PM: Perhaps I am naive, but in a perfect world this could be the beginning of looking into things Ukrainian-- where a lot of Hillary dirt is to be found.
Title: McCarthy: Why isn't Assange charged with collusion with Russia?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2019, 09:15:27 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/why-isnt-assange-charged-with-collusion-with-russia/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202019-04-14&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Behind Team Obama's plan to spy on Trump campaign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2019, 03:20:33 PM: https://nypost.com/2019/04/15/behind-the-obama-administrations-shady-plan-to-spy-on-the-trump-campaign/
Title: Spying is not spying when Democrat partisans do it
Post by: G M on April 17, 2019, 02:23:35 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/380917.php
Title: Mueller Report
Post by: DougMacG on April 18, 2019, 08:27:41 AM: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

Maybe we can get Rick N to read it for us. )
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on April 18, 2019, 10:08:01 AM: yes Rick N's input always helpful and appreciated

but no matter the LEFT is already spinning every thing around

headlines like "The Trump campaign tried to get Hillary's emails" - as though that is some sort of crime
and yet at the same time her campaign paying and English guy to make up dirt on Trump is ok.

like "Many contacts with Russians " yet Hillary giving away uranium for gigantic bribes is not even mentioned

Like "Trump tried many times to obstruct " yet the question is obstruct what - there is no treasonous behavior or working with hostile power to cheat in an election to start with

The list will go on and now the LEFT has more BS to keep throwing out there day in and day out.

Trump has not had one minute of any peace his entire time in office and will not get an iota of any.
That by association extends to us on the Right.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on April 18, 2019, 01:07:31 PM: It takes awhile to read and understand 400 pages.

As I posted earlier this year, Mueller punted and his report on obstruction is disingenuous because he declines to apply traditional prosecutorial judgment to the obstruction issue.

For example, many of the 10 obstruction instances involved the President's reaction to published media reports - not the investigation itself. A prime example is the section on whether Trump told the White House counsel to get Mueller fired.

Trump says he told the WH counsel to tell Rosenstein that Mueller was conflicted and should go. The WH counsel told Mueller's team that Trump told him to go to Rosenstein and get Mueller fired. Shortly afterwards, the NYT and WaPo publish articles claiming that the WH Counsel was threatening to resign because Trump told him to get Mueller fired.

So, Trump calls in the lawyer and asks him to issue a statement saying that Trump never demand that Mueller be fired. Trump said he wanted this lawyer to convey to Rosenstein his concern about Mueller's personal conflicts of interest, convey his opinion to Rosenstein, but let Rosenstein decide what to do with Mueller. This was directed at Mueller - not at the existence of a special counsel.

The WH Counsel refused to issue such a clarification or place a note to that effect in his file. Of course, the WH counsel never conveyed Trump's opinion to Rosenstein. And Trump never fired the WH counsel. And Trump never ordered the WH counsel to stop cooperating with the Mueller and his team.

Mueller's team argued that Trump's attempt to get the WH counsel to issue a public statement denying that Trump ever said "fire" could be obstruction.

Of course, it is isn't obstruction if Trump's recollection of the conversation is accurate and the WH Counsel's use of "fired" is inaccurate.

On June 9th meeting at Trump Tower between the Fusion GPS client's Russian lawyer and Trump, Jr., I'm still amazed that the original emails about a crown prosecutor in Russia having dirt on Hillary were true because there hasn't been a crown in Russia since 1917 when Nicholas II abdicated in response to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Just some initial thoughts.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on April 18, 2019, 02:50:46 PM: The more I think about it, the more I have concluded that having the White House counsel convey concerns to Rosenstein about Mueller's alleged conflicts was the proper way to communicate those concerns because it avoids the appearance of direct communication between Rosenstein and the President.
Title: Sad
Post by: ccp on April 19, 2019, 05:28:43 AM: That people in our intelligence arms of government are more concerned about their own status and power than us.
Clapper using the report to justify himself , continue to go after President he never liked , and make a nice payday from confused news network with Mario's entirely obnoxious little brat kid:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/18/james-clapper-mueller-report-devastating-road-map-for-impeachment/

So what do you say Jim? What would be the "righteous thing for the Congress to do here ? Well Chris , I think there is a clear road map for impeachment.

Later , check from Zucker Fucker for 100 grand in the mail to Big lying Jim.

These are the kind of people who run our intelligence ?

Brennen is worse. :-(
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Barr Vindicated
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 19, 2019, 07:20:45 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-vindicates-william-barr/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR+Daily+Monday+through+Friday+2019-04-19&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart&fbclid=IwAR10SLI_jL5GFRCu-_9B8-teMpmmRiBGZpskr4rNbMNOoxd81Qy7HIHAC3M
Title: Dershowitz: Mueller using motive as premise
Post by: ccp on April 20, 2019, 02:42:56 PM: No doubt a stretch of a legal theory , not Constitutional, probably encouraged by his Democratic biased lawyers who predominated his staff:

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/439647-alan-dershowitz-who-won-who-lost-in-mueller-report
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on April 20, 2019, 03:06:20 PM: Most "experts" have glossed over the banalities on pages 11-12 of the Mueller Report about the August and October 2017 memos from Rosenstein that provided details to Mueller about his charging authority.

Rosenstein's August memo specifically named Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Paul Manafort and authorized Mueller to investigate and decide whether they had "committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government's efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

By including Carter Page on this list, this means that Rosenstein was using the Steele Dossier as the predicate for the initial grant of authority for the special counsel. Why? Because the August 2, 2017 memo explained that the original May 17, 2017 appointment order had been word categorically (generally) "in order to permits its public release without confirming specific investigations involving specific individuals." (Mueller Report, p.11)

Rosenstein's October 20, 2017 memo added Michael Cohen, Richard Gates, Roger Stone, and two other redacted (for personal privacy) names to the list of people that could be investigated. In this memo, Cohen was added so that the Special Counsel could investigate "leads related to Cohen's establishment and use of Essential Consultants LLC to, inter alia, receive funds from Russian backed entities." This is how Rosenstein bootstrapped the Stormy Daniels matter into the Special Prosecutor's investigation. (Mueller Report, p.12)

Therefore, the Mueller investigation was based upon the phony Steele Dossier, George Papadopoulos' drunken bragging that the Russians had hacked Hillary's emails, and a desire to get Paul Manafort because he had once worked for a Russian-backed group in Ukraine.

The report goes on to state that the FBI had been investigating these issues for 10 months before the May 17th appointment of Mueller; i.e., July 2016. Then, why was the FBI investigating Page? Answer: the Steele dossier. Why was the FBI investigating Papadopoulos? Answer: bragging to an Aussie diplomat at a bar about the Russians hacking Hillary's emails. Why was the FBI investigating Manafort? Answer: opposition research fed to the media by a pro-Ukraine faction member on the DNC.

How did Papadopoulos acquire his information about the Russians having hacked Hillary's emails? Answer: from Jospeh Mifsud and/or Stefan Halper, CIA assets who had spread that info to Papadopoulos at two meetings in Europe earlier in 2016. Who ran the CIA in the summer of 2016? John Brennan. For whom did he work in the summer of 2016? James Clapper.
Title: CIA set up ?
Post by: ccp on April 20, 2019, 03:43:16 PM: From Rick N post above:

"How did Papadopoulos acquire his information about the Russians having hacked Hillary's emails? Answer: from Jospeh Mifsud and/or Stefan Halper, CIA assets who had spread that info to Papadopoulos at two meetings in Europe earlier in 2016. Who ran the CIA in the summer of 2016? John Brennan. For whom did he work in the summer of 2016? James Clapper. "

So it was they were 'CIA' assets not 'FBI' informants I had heard somewhere else.

Needless to say this is a classic CIA/spy type of setup. Have the informant masquerade as one thing and plant information with the target (Papadopoulos in this case) and see where the target goes with it.

Katherine and I have been set up many times with such con games.

Obvious to say this set up game was not done with any prominent Democrats in mind as targets. (as far as I know) . (Feinstein's office, Clinton people etc). Only with Republicans and Trump people.

Using the adjective "framed " to describe the whole affair and how it relates to Trump is a valid description of the theory he was set up by "deep state".
Title: Dershowitz on the obstruction issue
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2019, 02:39:23 AM: https://twitter.com/AlanDersh/status/1120043971059884032?fbclid=IwAR2a0lybu1_PwivdfHHL8xDn7ouNIoxa54l9-UvH3PLCsJr--xSYwvjj1LM
Title: New from Papadoulas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2019, 11:51:47 AM: https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/papadopuolos-spills-the-beans-on-new-spygate-player/?fbclid=IwAR2IPoDG7NPQVaEO--LROr-FKjLvIqfAlZFi7iiRifptKG15brOAzLeH-ss
Title: Napolitano goes after Trump real hard
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2019, 12:35:57 PM: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2019/04/26/andrew-napolitano-mueller-report-donald-trump-william-barr/3585006002/?fbclid=IwAR0KPRiRiL0HIyL9MZMMjapJBnKz7JzogPxq5gYIqqQk1bNiTy5dazvbs9s
Title: Re: Napolitano goes after Trump real hard
Post by: G M on April 26, 2019, 01:07:28 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2019, 12:35:57 PM
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2019/04/26/andrew-napolitano-mueller-report-donald-trump-william-barr/3585006002/?fbclid=IwAR0KPRiRiL0HIyL9MZMMjapJBnKz7JzogPxq5gYIqqQk1bNiTy5dazvbs9s

There is no rule of law, just power games in this country.

We need to stop pretending.
Title: Obama White House, Ukraine, Biden's son, & 2016 election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2019, 10:02:09 PM: https://www.dailywire.com/news/46449/obama-white-house-sought-ukraines-help-taking-down-ashe-schow?%3Futm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=benshapiro
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on April 27, 2019, 06:03:30 AM: The anti-Russia faction in Ukraine had a contract employee on the DNC. Her name was Alexandra Chalupa.

I think that we will find that these lobbyists and influencers were as much behind the Russia collusion narrative as Fusion GPS. In fact, they may have originated it; and, then Fusion GPS ran with it in order to show value to the Clinton campaign and the DNC in 2016.

Here is a good public record timeline of the many things that ended up in the Russia collusion narrative.

https://sharylattkisson.com/2019/01/collusion-against-trump-timeline/ (https://sharylattkisson.com/2019/01/collusion-against-trump-timeline/)

We may have been caught in the middle of two opposing factions in Ukraine waging a war for influence in the USA over the region at and after Russia seized Crimea and other parts of land claimed by Ukraine. Because some of the stuff being peddled about Trump (due to Manafort's hiring) originated in Ukraine, this may have played into the Dem's dislike and fear about Trump. So, they ran with it; and, this caused enough of their partisans to believe it. So they decided to act against Trump. At least, this was likely their rationalization for their actions in 2016-2019.

Remember that the initial bad stuff about Manafort and Russia started seeping into the media at about the same time that Papadopoulos was targeted by Halper. This occurred when Chalupa still had influence at the DNC. If there was a crossfire here, the two sides firing were the pro-Russia and anti-Russia factions in Ukraine. The Democrats became unwitting accomplices and the nation has paid a big price because the Dems clearly used the Russia pretext as their reasons for spying on the Trump campaign - even after he won the election.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2019, 11:19:46 AM: That Atkkinsson timeline article is a very good find Rick!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on April 27, 2019, 02:41:11 PM: Why were the Russians particularly interested in the DNC 's emails in 2015 and 2016? Because they knew about Chalupa and her contacts and they wanted intelligence on Ukraine and the potential influence Ukraine would have when Clinton won the 2016 election.

Why did the Russians distribute all of those emails obtained from Podesta via Wikileaks? So, Clinton would be embarrassed and still subject to compromise after she won the election.

Why would Ukraine not want Trump as President? Because it feared that Trump's prior business dealings with Russia would make him pro-Russia when it came to the ongoing territorial disputes between Ukraine and Russia.

Why would Russia supply Steele with disinformation about Trump? Because it viewed Clinton as the more pliable President when she was elected as all the experts predicted. So, different Russian operatives played both sides of the game in the 2016 election.

In the end, what began as a pure intelligence operation to learn what Ukraine officials were doing with the DNC and Clinton turned into an unexpected bonanza of political chaos inflicted upon the USA when Obama administration officials used the Russian intelligence efforts aimed at the DNC over Ukraine as cover for their misuse of US counterintelligence to spy on the Trump campaign. The reason why the Mueller investigation never investigated this side of the Russian interference efforts was that it would have implicated many on their own staff as well as many political appointees with whom they agreed politically.

The above is certainly a reasonable hypothesis based upon facts as we know them. It's no different than Watergate when Nixon took a valid national security concern about the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and turned it into a justification for a burglary of the DNC office in the Watergate complex. Plumbers. Unmasking. All the presidents' men (and women). Just two different presidents.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on April 27, 2019, 03:29:32 PM: " . The reason why the Mueller investigation never investigated this side of the Russian interference efforts was that it would have implicated many on their own staff as well as many political appointees with whom they agreed politically."

but wait, I thought the boyscout ex marine with integrity up the ass was . going to get to the full unadulterated truth?

Hopefully Barr at DOJ and Graham in the Senate . can give us the REST of the story Mueller so conveniently leaves oot
along with his Dem operative lawyers
Title: The Nation: The Real Damage Done
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2019, 10:20:37 AM: https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-trump-mueller-report-no-collusion/
Title: Re: The Nation: The Real Damage Done
Post by: G M on April 28, 2019, 12:09:52 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2019, 10:20:37 AM

https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-trump-mueller-report-no-collusion/

Even the Nation is giving up on the Russia hoax!
Title: Timeline for coup (Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, Evelyne Farkas)
Post by: G M on April 28, 2019, 05:21:42 PM: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1122360238512807938.html

===============

Deleted?!?
Title: Ben Rhodes looking nervous
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2019, 01:44:09 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=pPX85LMuBFs
Title: Why are Clapper and Brennan not in jail?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2019, 08:56:01 PM: https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/29/why-are-clapper-and-brennan-not-in-jail/?fbclid=IwAR2qX3x_mPIW4GyXWNKydQZgAv3V6Nvnx9IX5lRVuCrgCPmGcFjqrvGoZSA
Title: An American hero and the death of a FISA narrative (Admiral Rogers)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2019, 09:03:52 PM: Second post

https://themarketswork.com/2018/01/10/an-american-hero-the-death-of-a-fisa-narrative/?fbclid=IwAR2bJxFfjAFxXf2jFFR0BUqOX4VnikEOd5xscz9559lDt5jMbv-6CqxVji8

:-o :-o :-o
Title: Re: Why are Clapper and Brennan not in jail?
Post by: G M on April 30, 2019, 09:06:22 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2019, 08:56:01 PM

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/29/why-are-clapper-and-brennan-not-in-jail/?fbclid=IwAR2qX3x_mPIW4GyXWNKydQZgAv3V6Nvnx9IX5lRVuCrgCPmGcFjqrvGoZSA

The same reason Hillary isn't.
Title: Re: An American hero and the death of a FISA narrative (Admiral Rogers)
Post by: G M on April 30, 2019, 09:09:47 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2019, 09:03:52 PM
Second post

https://themarketswork.com/2018/01/10/an-american-hero-the-death-of-a-fisa-narrative/?fbclid=IwAR2bJxFfjAFxXf2jFFR0BUqOX4VnikEOd5xscz9559lDt5jMbv-6CqxVji8

:-o :-o :-o

We live in dark times.
Title: More confusion thanks to the most important man in America
Post by: ccp on May 01, 2019, 04:39:17 AM: another illegal leak timed to coincide with the policial attacks by the Dems.

I am trying to think of a single leak that EVER was in the favor of Trump. Anyone think of any?

And now even more confusion

thanks Rob!

Yea you . have really helped out haven't you :

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mueller-complained-that-barrs-letter-did-not-capture-context-of-trump-probe/ar-AAAKJB8
Title: Andrew McCarthy: The Diva was just worried about media coverage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2019, 06:49:34 AM: **Barr and Mueller spoke by phone the day after Mueller sent his letter. If you wade through the first 13 paragraphs of the Post’s story, you finally find the bottom line:

"When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not but felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said."

So even Mueller conceded, through gritted teeth, that Barr’s letter was accurate. The diva was just worried about the media coverage.**

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-mueller-letter-barr-report-washington-post.amp?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2sK3Vvs5H1k3_kAp7bRSgVnP9R3MN5tF3cETJqAumkBdlXZpZiT-BIbmA
Title: If Trump had Fired Mueller...
Post by: DougMacG on May 01, 2019, 03:30:09 PM: If Trump had Fired Mueller:

1. It is a constitutional, Article II power.

2. It would have for cause:
https://pjmedia.com/video/rep-ratcliff-mueller-undermined-the-publics-confidence-himself-when-he-hired-trump-haters-to-his-team/

3. The investigation would have continued so that alone is not obstruction.

4. It would not have been an impeachable offense. It's not a high crime or a misdemeanor.

5. He didn't do it.
Title: never again!
Post by: ccp on May 01, 2019, 05:25:18 PM: any parties on Martha's Vineyard or CNN appearances.

and "sorry out of space" on NYT and WP op ed pages this week and every other week !

put in dictionary "Dershowitz" is the antonym of a mench!

oh vey , he used to be a good Jewish boy. What happened to him ? he has gone to the dark side.. Early dementia?

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-mueller-report-william-barr-cabinet/2019/05/01/id/914161/
Title: Heh heh, the worm begins to turn , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2019, 07:21:09 PM: https://www.theblaze.com/news/barr-confirms-multiple-criminal-investigations-to-find-russia-probe-leakers?utm_content=buffer6c2e0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=glennbeck&fbclid=IwAR23t_JC-vrf5BlIBtFkgQymt33exJkJ7q5WLQMpcVJviAO-uX__8K5A8Q8
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on May 02, 2019, 03:25:38 AM: Mueller's leaked letter to Barr disproves all of his report's obstruction theories centered around Trump's efforts to have Mueller recused or removed for conflicts of interest. Mueller was operating as a political animal instead of an investigator searching for the truth.

It also disproves Mueller's theory of obstruction centered upon Trump's efforts to restrict public information from reaching the media. Mueller's concern about the media narrative about his report is no different than Trump's concern about the media narrative's effect upon his ability to govern.

I would argue that under the Mueller report's own theory of obstruction of justice, Mueller's leak of his letter to Barr would constitute an obstruction of a Senate investigation.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2019, 05:12:13 AM: " .Mueller's concern about the media narrative about his report "

This is the part that is fuzzy to me. So EXACTLY WHAT IS HIS CONCERN?

no one has specified

Is it the leftist media is reading too much into the obstruction thing or the right media is not doing so enough?

Not clear though I presume he is annoyed that it is not automatically leading to impeachment hearings.

But I could be wrong and as a result even more confusion .

Thanks Rob!
Title: Joe DiGenova lays out some important points
Post by: rickn on May 02, 2019, 07:29:09 AM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=iWH8i5jQNPM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=iWH8i5jQNPM)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2019, 08:35:48 AM: thanks Rick
I did not see this on Hannity
Title: Barr to the rescue!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2019, 09:35:04 AM: Check this out!

https://humanevents.com/2019/05/01/checkmate/?fbclid=IwAR1Tncz8Ak3Y94I_hj_c_pZkF3_2VjGhe69zGljb5rPWOWBP-H4nC4kur28
Title: Re: Barr to the rescue!
Post by: DougMacG on May 02, 2019, 10:26:05 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2019, 09:35:04 AM
Check this out!

https://humanevents.com/2019/05/01/checkmate/?fbclid=IwAR1Tncz8Ak3Y94I_hj_c_pZkF3_2VjGhe69zGljb5rPWOWBP-H4nC4kur28

Funny what legal issues you run into when you investigate people widely and deeply without any evidence of a crime.
Title: FBI Admits Sending Spy - Azra Turk - To Engage George P
Post by: rickn on May 02, 2019, 02:18:17 PM: And now the not-spying spies are running for cover by leaking ahead of the IG report and the AG's report on Comey.

NY Times article via MSN.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-sent-investigator-posing-as-assistant-to-meet-with-trump-aide-in-2016/ar-AAAOePQ (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-sent-investigator-posing-as-assistant-to-meet-with-trump-aide-in-2016/ar-AAAOePQ)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2019, 06:05:32 PM: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/441892-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-trump-dirt-in-2016?fbclid=IwAR2pVBd5lVv0RW5e_EgUmPuBAPIdbCZQeH-TxtYevlzQa0krZ3_eP80zP0U
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on May 02, 2019, 08:27:40 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2019, 06:05:32 PM
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/441892-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-trump-dirt-in-2016?fbclid=IwAR2pVBd5lVv0RW5e_EgUmPuBAPIdbCZQeH-TxtYevlzQa0krZ3_eP80zP0U

The key players of the attempted coup that have mostly managed to remain in the shadows so far:

The CIA and British Intelligence.
Title: Taco Bell is Ukrainian?
Post by: rickn on May 03, 2019, 12:08:31 AM: And Ms. Chalupa appears again.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: The Big Lie that Barr Lied
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2019, 10:14:32 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/the-big-lie-that-barr-lied/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202019-05-05&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Title: Good summary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 08, 2019, 11:09:19 AM: https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/07/the-sinking-of-muellers-prosecutorial-pequod/?fbclid=IwAR1tYqTiBXBSvt3Ct2qTqby8IF1nh8n0WydmxIKS5-ivkXTVZvs-AVFIyxo#.XNLrc2VxDew.facebook
Title: State Department buried this for 2.5 years; FBI lost notes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2019, 07:09:12 AM: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442592-steeles-stunning-pre-fisa-confession-informant-needed-to-air-trump-dirt?fbclid=IwAR15mdV_dmb6ZfJI8p0Rf7sS7AMTjLs7eqYmVDQI3eY9EYFLIPptxBtTAU4

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-lost-notes-from-clinton-probe-meeting-significant-to-concerns-over-foreign-exfiltration-lead_2912428.html
Title: Turley: In comtempt of contempt charges
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2019, 07:36:19 AM: second post

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/442732-democrats-showing-contempt-by-holding-william-barr-in-contempt
Title: This sounds rather compelling , , ,FBI Steele story falling apart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2019, 05:52:59 PM: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442944-fbis-steele-story-falls-apart-false-intel-and-media-contacts-were-flagged?fbclid=IwAR25vE2byBPDd3vnzW0oI_NtPuWI4qyXa_btu1t-gC_x4aCQEKMOvLzjY3g#.XNSPsgPbNgw.facebook
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2019, 07:57:18 AM: https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/09/trump-nadler-mueller-constitutional-crisis/
Title: David French - yet again
Post by: ccp on May 10, 2019, 01:59:45 PM: I could not disagree more with this guy:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/senate-intelligence-committee-right-to-subpoena-donald-trump-jr/

Why in the world does Trump jr need to testify at a public Senate I C for?

what more could they discern that an entire group of anti Trump lawyers working for a special prosecutor with unlimited power who spent nearly 2 yrs trying to connect any dots that they could even dream about could not come up with?

What does he mean their "Constitutional duty" to do this??

(to be partisan?)

Why are not our intelligence agencies working to protect us from foreign influence.

Why do they not call Hillary Clinton in?

How about Biden's kid?

How about as Mark Levin points out , Pelosi and her family who seem to continue enriching themselves while she is Speaker with all sorts of deals etc......

I could go on .

I don't understand how someone who appears to be quite smart like French , has to keep making himself seem so above partisanship that he bends over backwards to agree with crazy partisan Democrats. As for Burr , why not make a lunch date with Don Jr and simply ask him some questions if he is so concerned.

This sounds more like it:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/limbaugh-et-tu-sen-burr/
Title: Re: David French - yet again
Post by: G M on May 10, 2019, 05:10:12 PM: The dems are trying to stay on the offensive to avoid email-spygate from entering the public's awareness.

Quote from: ccp on May 10, 2019, 01:59:45 PM
I could not disagree more with this guy:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/senate-intelligence-committee-right-to-subpoena-donald-trump-jr/

Why in the world does Trump jr need to testify at a public Senate I C for?

what more could they discern that an entire group of anti Trump lawyers working for a special prosecutor with unlimited power who spent nearly 2 yrs trying to connect any dots that they could even dream about could not come up with?

What does he mean their "Constitutional duty" to do this??

(to be partisan?)

Why are not our intelligence agencies working to protect us from foreign influence.

Why do they not call Hillary Clinton in?

How about Biden's kid?

How about as Mark Levin points out , Pelosi and her family who seem to continue enriching themselves while she is Speaker with all sorts of deals etc......

I could go on .

I don't understand how someone who appears to be quite smart like French , has to keep making himself seem so above partisanship that he bends over backwards to agree with crazy partisan Democrats. As for Burr , why not make a lunch date with Don Jr and simply ask him some questions if he is so concerned.

This sounds more like it:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/limbaugh-et-tu-sen-burr/
Title: Timeline and comments
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2019, 08:12:01 AM: https://ricochet.com/620923/comey-v-trump-jan-march-2017/
Title: Mueller, and Whitey Bulger
Post by: G M on May 16, 2019, 01:48:03 PM: https://www.independentsentinel.com/barrs-investigator-john-durham-once-probed-mueller-in-a-shocking-case/

Funny how Whitey met his end just as this began to bubble to the surface.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2019, 04:57:41 PM: " Funny how Whitey met his end just as this began to bubble to the surface "

From Wikipedia:

"Bulger was transferred from the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City to United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia on October 29, 2018.[22][96] At 8:20 a.m. on October 30, the 89-year-old Bulger[97] was found unresponsive in the prison. Bulger was in a wheelchair and had been beaten to death by multiple inmates armed with a sock-wrapped padlock and a shiv."

A deep state hit?
Title: Whitey Bulger
Post by: G M on May 16, 2019, 05:36:33 PM: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/05/14/prison-letters-james-whitey-bulger-writes-determination-stay-alive/4o3m8cZPiNcwYzTZ3WE5iM/story.html

Quote from: ccp on May 16, 2019, 04:57:41 PM
" Funny how Whitey met his end just as this began to bubble to the surface "

From Wikipedia:

"Bulger was transferred from the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City to United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia on October 29, 2018.[22][96] At 8:20 a.m. on October 30, the 89-year-old Bulger[97] was found unresponsive in the prison. Bulger was in a wheelchair and had been beaten to death by multiple inmates armed with a sock-wrapped padlock and a shiv."

A deep state hit?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2019, 05:54:24 PM: So what was the connection of the man that AG Barr just appointed to the WB case?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on May 16, 2019, 08:58:24 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2019, 05:54:24 PM
So what was the connection of the man that AG Barr just appointed to the WB case?

https://www3.bostonglobe.com/metro/1970/01/19/one-lingering-question-for-fbi-director-robert-mueller/613uW0MR7czurRn7M4BG2J/story.html?arc404=true

One lingering question for FBI director Robert Mueller

Back in 1976, as we were celebrating the 200th birthday of this republic, Congress passed a law limiting the tenure of the FBI director to 10 years.

This was done because, after the scandalous findings of the Church Commission, Congress realized that letting J. Edgar Hoover serve as director of the bureau from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972 had only confirmed Lord Acton’s maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Hoover was a power unto himself, and the FBI that was created very much in his image sometimes acted more like the secret police of the totalitarian regimes Hoover regularly denounced: running rogue wiretaps, harassing political dissidents, using illegal means to collect evidence. Hoover’s FBI wasn’t accountable; it was untouchable.

So now, just weeks after the FBI’s worst nightmare, a gangster and FBI informant by the name of Whitey Bulger came strolling back into town, Congress is about to ignore its own wisdom and let Bob Mueller, the FBI director and former US Attorney in Boston, stay on an extra two years.

President Obama says he needs Mueller to stay because there’s been so much turnover in the national security teams at the CIA and Pentagon, and that’s all well and good.

Mueller has wide, bipartisan support in Congress. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I know Bob Mueller and he’s no J. Edgar Hoover, though the folks at the ACLU might take exception to that.

The recent FBI targeting of antiwar and labor activists in the Midwest has a disturbing echo of the days when the bureau considered Martin Luther King Jr. a sinister threat to national security.

But Mueller’s a Marine veteran and tough enough to take a question or two before Congress gives the president what he wants, and Mike Albano is just the guy to ask it: What did you know about Whitey Bulger, and when did you know it?

Back in the 1980s, when he was serving on the Massachusetts parole board, Albano expressed some sympathy for a group of men who had always maintained they had been framed for the 1965 gangland murder of a hoodlum named Teddy Deegan in Chelsea. The FBI had been instrumental in seeing that the men - Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Joe Salvati, and Louis Greco - were convicted. The FBI contended that Tameleo was the consigliere of the Mafia in Boston, and that Limone was a Mafia leader. There is no question that both men were bad actors, and Mafia players, but the evidence showed that neither had anything to do Deegan’s murder.

So in 1983, after Albano indicated he might vote to release Limone, he got a visit from a pair of FBI agents named John Connolly and John Morris. They told Albano that the men convicted of Deegan’s murder were bad guys, made guys.

“They told me that if I wanted to stay in public life, I shouldn’t vote to release a guy like Limone,’’ Albano said. “They intimidated me.’’

Turns out that Connolly was Whitey Bulger’s corrupt handler and Morris was Connolly’s corrupt supervisor. When they weren’t pocketing bribes from Bulger, they were helping him murder potential witnesses who were poised to expose the FBI’s sordid, Faustian deal with the rat named Whitey Bulger.

Albano was messing with the FBI’s national policy of going after the Mafia and the Mafia alone. That was the justification the FBI gave for making deals with devils like Whitey Bulger and his partner in crime, Stevie Flemmi. They were supposedly giving up their pals in the Mafia. The problem with the FBI’s national policy is that it didn’t take into account that the most vicious, murderous gangsters in Boston were Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.

After Albano was elected mayor of Springfield in 1995, he soon found the FBI hot on his tail, investigating his administration for corruption. The FBI took down several people in his administration, and Albano is convinced that the FBI wasn’t interested in public integrity as much as in publicly humiliating him because he dared to defy them.

The recent FBI targeting of antiwar and labor activists in the Midwest has a disturbing echo of the days when the bureau considered Martin Luther King Jr. a sinister threat to national security.

Kevin Cullen, Globe Columnist
In 2001, the four men convicted of Teddy Deegan’s murder were exonerated. Turned out the FBI let them take the rap to protect one of their informants, a killer named Vincent “Jimmy’’ Flemmi, who just happened to be the brother of their other rat, Stevie Flemmi. Thanks to the FBI’s corruption, taxpayers got stuck with the $100 million bill for compensating the framed men, two of whom, Greco and Tameleo, died in prison.

Albano was appalled that, later that same year, Mueller was appointed FBI director, because it was Mueller, first as an assistant US attorney then as the acting US attorney in Boston, who wrote letters to the parole and pardons board throughout the 1980s opposing clemency for the four men framed by FBI lies.

Of course, Mueller was also in that position while Whitey Bulger was helping the FBI cart off his criminal competitors even as he buried bodies in shallow graves along the Neponset.

“Before he gets that extension,’’ Mike Albano said, “somebody in the Senate or House needs to ask him why the US Attorney’s office he led let the FBI protect Whitey Bulger.’’

I called FBI headquarters in Washington and tried to do just that. The nice lady who answered suggested I talk to one of the FBI’s “public affairs specialists.’’ But my call was not returned.

Four years ago, when questioned about the FBI’s corruption in Boston, Mueller told the Globe, “I think the public should recognize that what happened, happened years ago.’’

That’s true. And we still don’t know what really happened.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees...Durham, who was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and has been a Justice Department lawyer since 1982, has conducted special investigations under administrations of both parties. Attorney General Janet Reno asked Mr. Durham in 1999 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious informant: the organized crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned Mr. Durham to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes in 2005 showing the torture of terrorism suspects. A year later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate to also examine whether the agency broke any laws in its abuses of detainees in its custody.

___________________________________________________________________________________

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/30/howie-carr-muellers-hands-dirty-in-old-fbi-frame-up/

Howie Carr: Mueller’s hands dirty in old FBI frame-up

RUMOURED RESULTS: Findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election are rumored to be announced after the Nov. 6 midterm elections. Associated Press file photo.
By HOWIE CARR | howard.carr@medianewsgroup.com | Boston Herald
PUBLISHED: January 30, 2019 at 12:08 am | UPDATED: January 30, 2019 at 6:35 am
Roger Stone keeps talking about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reprehensible behavior with the FBI in Boston way back when.

But I don’t think he or most people understand how bad Mueller’s actions were – “chilling,” is how a Clinton federal judge in 2006 described the former FBI director’s attempts to cover up a massive frame-up by Boston G-men decades earlier.

For the record, Mueller did not railroad four innocent men into prison – two onto death row – for a Chelsea murder they did not commit back in 1965.

That frame job was handled by the Boston office of the FBI, where at one point at least six G-men were taking payoffs from organized crime. That information came from serial killer Stevie Flemmi, who last summer admitted in federal court to taking part in 50 murders.

Everyone knew the four men were innocent, but the FBI wanted them to rot in prison, so the scandal would not be revealed. In the 1980s, two U.S. attorneys in Boston wrote letters to the state demanding that the innocent men not be released, but Mueller, an interim U.S. attorney in 1986-87, did not write one. (At least I couldn’t find one.)

Making sure the innocent men remained in prison was mostly handled by two of the G-men on the mobsters’ payroll, Zip Connolly and John “Vino” Morris, who made sure they left no paper trails. They were hit men with badges — Morris set up a double murder for Whitey Bulger in 1982 in Southie, after which Vino was promoted to director of the FBI training academy in Quantico.

Meanwhile, Zip is doing 40 years in a Florida prison for another gangland hit, in Miami, set up by the same crooked fed who set up the 1965 frame-up.

This is the world of “law enforcement” that Robert Mueller operated in. Not everyone was crooked – just everyone who mattered.

Fast forward to 2006. Mueller is now the FBI director.

After 35 years in the can, two of the four innocent men are dead, the other two have finally been freed. The four men or their estates are suing the feds for wrongful imprisonment. It is not a frivolous lawsuit – they will eventually win a judgment of $102 million.

The plaintiffs – the victims – are trying to get the necessary information from the crooked FBI now run by Mueller about how they were framed. But Mueller absolutely stonewalls the release of the information.

Here’s a show-cause order I discovered last year from U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over the civil case. The FBI was refusing to turn over the exonerating evidence to either the plaintiffs or the Justice Department, which was defending the FBI after its frame up.

Mueller’s stonewalling, Gertner wrote, was a “serious problem.”

“This is a case about, inter alia, informant abuse, about the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence bearing on the innocence of the four plaintiffs, about FBI agents allegedly ‘hiding the ball,’ not disclosing critical information that would have exonerated the plaintiffs, and not doing so, for 40 years.”

Think about that again – for 40 years, ever since the night of the murder, the FBI had known that these four guys were innocent, and yet they never stepped up to identify the real killers, because they were FBI rats. And Mueller’s FBI was prolonging the cover-up, the judge wrote.

“Given those accusations,” she wrote, “the position the FBI is taking is chilling … This Court is not remotely satisfied.”

Six days after Mueller was threatened with contempt, the feds filed this: “This matter has been brought to the personal attention of the Director of the FBI… (the innocent men and the DOJ) have been provided with unredacted copies of the FBI documents.”

And all it took to bring Mueller around to doing the right thing was the threat of a contempt citation by an ultra-liberal federal judge who went to Yale Law School with the Clintons.

Of course, that wasn’t the first time Mueller’s FBI tried to broom the scandal of the four framed men. In 2002, Mueller directed the G-men to oppose state pardons for the four men because the FBI’s own evidence that exonerated them was merely “fodder for cross-examination.”

Despite the FBI’s knowledge that the men, including Peter Limone, were innocent, Mueller’s FBI claimed to a state board that the incontrovertible exculpatory evidence “does not necessarily mean, however, that Limone or any of the other defendants is innocent – it merely means that they are entitled to a new trial.”

By the way, one of the innocent men, Louie Greco, was in Florida the night of the murder he was falsely convicted of. One of the crooked Boston FBI agents (who died in prison in Oklahoma while facing murder charges in another gangland hit) later bragged to a local gangster about their brilliant railroad:

“How does Louie Greco like going from Miami to death row? He wasn’t even there.”

This is your FBI, the organization that Bob Mueller was – and still is – trying to protect from being exposed as irredeemably corrupt.

Good luck, Roger Stone. You’re going to need it, despite your not guilty plea Tuesday.

Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon Vol. 2,” is now available for immediate shipment at howiecarrshow.com.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2019, 10:50:06 PM: Thank you.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 18, 2019, 08:45:30 AM: (https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/05/IMG_9939.jpg?w=884&ssl=1)
Title: Andrew McCarthy: The Unverified Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2019, 06:07:58 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/the-steele-dossier-and-the-verified-application-that-wasnt/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202019-05-19&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Title: Trail leading to the Brits?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2019, 08:17:19 PM: https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/05/21/tom-fitton-coup-cabal-was-an-international-effort-to-take-out-trump/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=other
Title: Very Important video: Strassel: The Left Will Silence You
Post by: G M on May 22, 2019, 10:28:25 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=6den-SEYXb0

Take the 36 minutes to watch this. It's worth it.
Title: Epoch Times: Collusion with the Brits?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2019, 04:33:29 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/uk-intel-agencies-frame-spygate-involvement-ahead-of-trumps-declassification_2930221.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6d440dc6db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_23_03_41&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6d440dc6db-239065853
Title: Nadler
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2019, 04:44:44 AM: https://www.jta.org/2019/03/06/politics/7-things-to-know-about-jerrold-nadler-the-house-democrat-in-charge-of-probing-donald-trump

Some admiral accomplishments - but all for my political enemies :x

So many Jews and so many socialists and communists.....

Thank God we have a few such as Mark Levin and others.
Title: Heh heh, the worm begins to turn , , , 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2019, 06:05:27 PM: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-gives-ag-barr-authority-to-declassify-documents-related-to-2016-campaign-surveillance?fbclid=IwAR0-bffffeDJQd_PaFO0ubTg6zphTBKOsUFHNKsq6xeMXUiy8zZqa_M9v80
Title: Sounds like Barr is getting ever more traction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2019, 09:01:27 AM: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/24/joe-biden-reportedly-involved-in-controversial-early-stages-of-2016-russia-probe/
Title: Schiff Committe and DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2019, 09:16:47 AM: second post

OTOH

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/445334-house-intelligence-enjoys-breakthrough-with-justice-department?userid=188403
Title: what???
Post by: ccp on May 26, 2019, 04:42:44 AM: brennan still has his clearance:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-targeting-of-intelligence-agencies-gains-a-harder-edge/ar-AABU9Mb

National Security "would be jeopardized ". - sorry I don't believe that for one second.

" both attempts petered out, hampered by aides who slow-rolled the president"

Who Jarodd?
Title: Fresh from Judicial Watch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2019, 03:15:19 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKunDsQuhec
Title: Re: Fresh from Judicial Watch
Post by: DougMacG on May 30, 2019, 05:53:04 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2019, 03:15:19 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKunDsQuhec

Amazing stuff. Thank God (and donors) for Judicial Watch.

Lisa Page preparing for a meeting: "POTUS (Barack Obama) wants to know everything we're doing." Barack Obama ran on a 'platform' of audacity. Check.

Most amazing is that half of America is not spooked by this. Ends justify means and the purpose was to bring down Donald Trump. Trump's domestic and foreign policy is not further from center than Obama. What was the fear of him other than to expose them.

Steele Dossier was proven false but also was false on its face. The most public claim in it (prostitutes peeing on a bed because the Obamas were black and once slept in it?) was ludicrous, didn't pass a laugh or smell test.

How is it that Mueller did not issue at least an interim report to the public coming into the midterms saying that we have nothing. That Mueller was serving as a cloud over the administration during the midterms was exactly his purpose at tha point. Then a half year later he comes out and says he had nothing all along - but was 'not able to establish the President's innocence'.

The crimes and misdeeds these deep state operatives committed were not the worst part. As posted since, the damage done is the loss of trust. While the Left extreme calls for abolishing ICE, the rest of us regrettably must consider abolishing intelligence agencies and powers, leaving our country vulnerable to the real threats because our deep state unelected government cannot be trusted and isn't on the side of national security, liberty or justice.

Said of Trump, someone else died in his place when he avoided Vietnam service. In this case, what real crimes and real foreign threats went uninvestigated as these top intelligence resources spent two to three years on a snipe hunt?

This operation had better result in serious charges for all the co-conspirators.
Title: VDH . Trump = the Great White Whale
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2019, 07:37:13 AM: and the crats are Ahab!

Yes - great analogy !

Here the Democrats are played by Gregory Peck :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMPW4R727QQ

:-D :-) 8-) :lol: :evil: :mrgreen:

I might add I can only hope the Democrats ship is sunk to the bottom of the ocean but endings in real like are not as wonderful as in movies.
Title: Mueller was the marine who set out to get his target.
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2019, 04:50:44 PM: Once upon a time a soldier was tasked to take his platoon who were all the faithful to the the revolutionary wing of a country

and kill the leader of the presiding wing of the same country

Deep into the jungle they went on the mission to search and destroy the enemy king. They pulled no stops . surrounded said king's family and all his troops and all his court members. Held knives to their throats and threatened their way of life if only they would turn over the secret , any secret that would lead to their ability to destroy their target, the opposition king.

They searched the court, the castle, the grounds, and all the forests close, far and wide turning over every stone every leaf looking for the poison formula that they hoped, prayed laid beneath.

When they could not find the weapon with which to make the assassination they then tried a different approach. Their new strategy would be one of harassment irritation , badger threaten threw silent covert and overt means to get the king to break to fold to force him into errors

The king did speak too much , fret too much and almost did succumb but in the end this soldier and his small kill squad could still not destroy their intended target.

So finally the soldier would get the last word in . If he could not stroll into the gates of Rome a victor he would reach out and make one last cry before he left the stage to make sure his wing of the country would still yet use the Kings staggers and gaffows and panics and tempers under all the pressure as an excuse to dethrone him through appeal and from the part of the kingdom controlled by the opposing revolutionaries

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/robert-mueller-investigation-was-always-impeachment-probe/
Title: We will be hearing more about this
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2019, 12:41:38 PM: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voicemail-shows-trump-lawyer-asking-flynns-for-heads-up-during-mueller-probe?fbclid=IwAR0Q2If3HH_R6U0Rm1GoiYdHSVIVR6n_Pc3K9DRTcHvxOOB1jCaletB2NTs

Without having delved into this, I would say that the pertinent response is that this needs to be assessed in the context of the joint defense agreement and its termination.
Title: Re: We will be hearing more about this
Post by: G M on June 01, 2019, 12:58:47 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2019, 12:41:38 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voicemail-shows-trump-lawyer-asking-flynns-for-heads-up-during-mueller-probe?fbclid=IwAR0Q2If3HH_R6U0Rm1GoiYdHSVIVR6n_Pc3K9DRTcHvxOOB1jCaletB2NTs

Without having delved into this, I would say that the pertinent response is that this needs to be assessed in the context of the joint defense agreement and its termination.

:roll:
Title: Re: We will be hearing more about this
Post by: G M on June 02, 2019, 07:09:27 PM: Quote from: G M on June 01, 2019, 12:58:47 PM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2019, 12:41:38 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voicemail-shows-trump-lawyer-asking-flynns-for-heads-up-during-mueller-probe?fbclid=IwAR0Q2If3HH_R6U0Rm1GoiYdHSVIVR6n_Pc3K9DRTcHvxOOB1jCaletB2NTs

Without having delved into this, I would say that the pertinent response is that this needs to be assessed in the context of the joint defense agreement and its termination.

:roll:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-01/its-all-fraud-deceptive-edits-found-mueller-report

Unpossible! Mueller has a badge forged from pure integrity by a Dwarven King deep in the Misty Mountains.
Title: The Left not going to bamboozle us the way they did in 1973
Post by: ccp on June 03, 2019, 03:04:12 PM: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/03/john-dean-testify-mueller-report-1352065

I was never happy what they did to Nixon.
With their owning the media and Repubs snuckerred into thinking this is an integrity issue
they got the polls on their side

Not this time ....

We have our own news media albeit only 1/11th of theirs and Republicans finally catching on to the Left's games .

Let them trot out their self serving heroes of the Left - no one is impressed but themselves
Who but the media looks up to this cast of characters other then Leftist media types
Title: At least Abbott and Costello were funny
Post by: ccp on June 12, 2019, 09:05:15 AM: and would be categorize as comedy:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-schiff-opens-hearing-russia-133436342.html

These guy's act would be categorized as "farce"
35 % positive on Rotten Tomatoes - all Trump haters and party addicted identity and free stuff democrats the only ones to enjoy this box office bomb .
Title: There is NO deep state, there is NO multi-tiered justice system
Post by: G M on June 13, 2019, 01:29:07 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/381776.php

June 13, 2019
Eric Felten: Bruce Ohr Deliberately Concealed His Wife's Work for Fusion GPS from Federal Ethics Disclosures; Got No Punishment

I'm sure this was just a careless oversight.

Bruce Ohr states of his wife's work that she is an "Independent contractor." But look high and low on the form, you won’t find any information describing who Nellie Ohr did her contract work for, or how much she was paid. The Office of Government Ethics explicitly requires those details. When it comes to a spouse’s income, the filer is instructed to: "Provide the name of the source and, for privately held companies, the nature of the business." Not only should Bruce Ohr have listed Fusion GPS as the source of his wife's income, he should have revealed her income and included a description of the Fusion enterprise.
Failure to file accurately can be punished with either civil or criminal charges. Why take that risk if the employment is innocent and unobjectionable? Perhaps because the "certifying officer" charged with policing filings for accuracy and completeness isn’t always vigilant: Ohr's certifying officer, an associate deputy attorney general named Scott Schools, may have had too much on his plate to devote much time to mundane chores such as checking ethics reports.

RealClearInvestigations reached out to Schools for comment, including through media relations at Uber, where Schools is now director of compliance. He did not respond.

...

What we know now is that Ohr recognized his wife’s work for Fusion GPS created a conflict of interest. He was interviewed last year by the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Lawmakers asked whether the bureau knew that the information Ohr was offering was compromised by having come from his spouse's paymaster. Ohr testified that in his August 2016 meeting with Andrew McCabe "I warned them that my wife worked for Fusion GPS." Ohr said he wanted McCabe, "in evaluating any information that I transmitted to the FBI... to be aware of any possible bias."

But when asked, "Did you ever file financial disclosures reflecting that you received financial benefits as it pertained to your wife Nellie Ohr on a matter before the Department of Justice?" Ohr claimed to be in compliance: "I filed the public financial disclosure reports regularly," he said. But "I did not report that I was receiving money in connection with a matter I was working on because, in my mind, I'm not."

...

The fundamental federal ethics statute resists such attempts at hair-splitting. Title 18 of the U.S. Code, section 208, prohibits any "officer or employee of the executive branch" from participating in any matter in which he or his spouse "has a financial interest."

And participate Bruce Ohr did, acting as Fusion GPS' inside man in getting Chrisopher Steel's (Sydney Blumenthal's) rumors and conspiracy theories to the Assistant Deputy of the FBI, among others.

And Flashback: On May 1, John Solomon reported that false testimony charges are being weighted against Nellie Ohr.

"At any point prior to fall of 2016, did you discuss your research on organized crime and Donald Trump with individuals outside of Fusion GPS, outside of this Mayflower breakfast meeting?" Nellie Ohr was asked during her congressional testimony last fall. "No," she testified.
But the DOJ emails show that Nellie Ohr frequently forwarded open-source research on Russian organized crime figures, Trump, Manafort and developments in Ukraine with implications for the Trump campaign....

Those documents eventually led Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign and face criminal prosecution by Mueller’s team for improper foreign lobbying.

...

On more than one occasion, Nellie Ohr forwarded articles about Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate and former Manafort business partner. She testified that Deripaska was one of the focal points of her research.

...

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of those who questioned Nellie Ohr last fall, said he is reviewing the accuracy of her testimony given the recent emergence of the emails.

"If Ms. Ohr used her time at the opposition research firm to place information directly in the hands of investigators, it would be a severe conflict of interest," Meadows told me. "Contrary to Ms. Ohr's congressional testimony, it appears that she funneled research gathered during her time at Fusion GPS directly to the DOJ. A draft of a criminal referral for giving false testimony to Congress is currently being reviewed."

Joshua Berman, a lawyer for Nellie Ohr, did not immediately respond to email and phone requests for comment.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2019, 02:32:00 PM: and nothing will happen to Brennan, Comey , and rest of the gang that tried to alter the results of an election
and frame DJT.

I would be in shock if it did .

They will get off scott free just like Clinton.
Title: I thought we were done with Sidney Blumenthal
Post by: ccp on June 18, 2019, 10:07:44 AM: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/06/17/fitton-emails-show-obama-state-departments-role-in-anti-trump-coup-cabal/

someone should investigate THIS guy.
Title: Emails show FBI scrambled to correct Comey's testimony
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2019, 09:33:24 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/emails-show-fbis-mad-scramble-to-correct-james-comey-testimony-about-huma-abedin?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=other
Title: Comey Hid ‘CLINTON EMAILS’ n His Office Safe
Post by: DougMacG on June 26, 2019, 04:05:16 AM: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/comey-hid-clinton-emails-binder-in-his-office-safe-and-had-hillarys-backup-email-device/
Title: Strzok manipulated search warrant for Weiner's laptop
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2019, 10:52:29 AM: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/comeys-fbi-agent-peter-strzok-manipulated-search-warrant-for-weiners-laptop-to-protect-hillary/
Title: Judge Rebukes Mueller for Falsely Alleging Evidence of Russian Government Involv
Post by: G M on July 12, 2019, 08:14:15 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/382248.php

July 12, 2019
Judge Rebukes Mueller for Falsely Alleging Evidence of Russian Government Involvement In Hack; Muller's Own Prosecutor Admits No Evidence
Mueller Testimony to House Postponed
Gee, I wonder if these things are related. I wonder if Mueller needs time to, um, recalibrate his claims.

So Mueller's testimony has been delayed a week.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s highly-anticipated Capitol Hill testimony will be delayed one week under a tentative arrangement he reached with House Democrats, according to multiple sources briefed on the discussions.
Although it’s unclear why Mueller's testimony was delayed until July 24, lawmakers familiar with the matter said one reason was an ongoing negotiation about how much time they would have to question the former special counsel.

It is possible that's part of the reason -- Nadler is trying to limit who can ask Meuller questions, and grandstanding Democrats aren't happy that they won't get TV Time.

But I think it might also have to do with Mueller and Nadler gaming out Mueller's answers to Republican questions about why Mueller insinuated evidence of a Russian government connection to the DNC hack, but then, when rebuked by a judge for insinuating it without providing evidence of it, had to claim they never claimed it at all.

See below.

This is a major blow not just to Mueller but to the entire "Russian Active Measures" talking point. As the judge acknowledges, the IRA (which, btw, put out juvenile clickbait mostly unrelated to the election) is a private entity & Mueller never establishes a Kremlin connection. pic.twitter.com/WT2n5nZ5Fy

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 9, 2019

This inconsistency, confirmed by a DC judge, raises new Qs about the validity of Mueller's claim of a "sweeping and systematic" Russian gov't interference campaign. If Mueller was disingenuous in falsely trying to link it to Russian gov't, what else was he disingenuous about?

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 9, 2019
I should clarify re: validity, above: given how disingenuous Mueller is overall -- ignoring Steele dossier; obscuring how weak the official Papadopoulos predicate; omitting Kilimnik's extensive State Dept ties & falsely hyping him as GRU indictment -- this is only latest example. pic.twitter.com/vHWR7bF40O

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 9, 2019
Now that a judge has rebuked Mueller for claiming this, one of Mueller's prosecutors comes before the judge and says that the Mueller team never claimed evidence of a Russian government connection:

Kravis is right, & accordingly acknowledging that Mueller report is disingenuous. While the report does not explicitly claim troll farm was Russian gov't activity, it gives the false impression that it was, by including it as 1 of 2 "principal" Russian interference "operations": pic.twitter.com/8APfYkbwjA

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 11, 2019

The Federalist's Adam Mill has an article about this admission:

A newly released transcript reveals details of a humiliating hearing that took place the day before Mueller’s puzzling press conference. The judge asked the prosecutor, “Can you address also the specific tie to the Russian government, which is the overarching comment that the attorney general made tying both this case and then the case involving the hacking and the release of the e-mails, the GRU case, to the Russian government?”
Buckle up, buttercup, because you’re not going to believe DOJ’s response: “The report doesn’t say that.” What? I thought we “knew” that the Russian government committed an act of war by posting politically charged information on the internet. Now the DOJ is backing away from any tie between the internet troll farm and the Russian government?

The DOJ has now admitted that the Mueller report “itself does not state anywhere that the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency [and Concord] activity.” Whoa. The judge then asked, “So it is the government’s position that tying Concord and its co-defendants to the Russian government is not prejudicial?”

In the subsequent order, Judge Freidrich wrote: “On May 29, 2019, following the Court’s hearing, the Special Counsel held a press conference…[in which he] carefully distinguished between the efforts by ‘Russian intelligence officers who were part of the Russian military’ and the efforts of” Concord. This, the Judge found, made the criminal contempt proceedings she contemplated against Mueller’s team “unnecessary and excessive under the circumstances.”

A narrow escape it was indeed. Freidrich found that both the release of the Mueller report and Barr’s statements boosting the report violated DC Rule 57.7 prohibiting lawyers from trying cases in the press. Judge Freidrich rejected the government’s argument that the Mueller report did not smear Concord with unproven links to the Russian government.

Mate's taking a victory lap:

Post-report, we’ve seen Mueller’s disingenuousness exposed: Kilimnik had extensive US ties that were minimized; Mueller team had to admit IRA, Russian troll farm, was not the Russian govt, & was rebuked by judge for suggesting otherwise;

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 12, 2019

Or additionally, buying more time to prepare for the critical Qs he’ll inevitably face.

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 12, 2019
Also: July 24th is just two days before the August recess. After endlessly hyping collusion & impeachment expectations, this July 24 delay gives Russiagate-peddling Democrats a quick exit from DC & the camera lights after Mueller’s testimony delivers yet one more dud.

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 12, 2019
To be honest, I'm feeling that Robert Mueller is a tired old man who was really only the face of this operation. I get the sense that Weissman is the main operator.

Mate's report for Real Clear Investigations was highly recommended to me, but I never read it. I'll correct that this weekend. Here's the link.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2019, 09:03:04 AM: Let's keep an eye on this , , ,
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on July 25, 2019, 02:42:54 AM: Here is how I assessed Mueller's testimony yesterday.

Mueller: Nobody impeded our investigation. But we can't exonerate Trump of violating a certain federal obstruction statute because we are prevented from making a prosecutorial decision about a sitting president due to the DOJ OLC's policy letter on the subject. But we can present in my report to the AG a new and unaccepted theory of what constitutes a violation of that statute and then use a bunch of newspaper reports about stuff leaked by us to the media together with intentionally edited transcripts of conversations with third parties that altered the full context of statements so that they appear to support our otherwise new and untested theory of what constitutes a violation of the obstruction law. But despite the DOJ's OLC policy, we could make a prosecutorial decision that the evidence was insufficient to prove that no member of the Trump campaign or any other American conspired with the Russian government or their agents to subvert the 2016 election. But don't ask me about any details contained in the report with my full name on its cover page because I don't know any of the details contained in that report. And don't ask me about whether we investigated the credibility of the witnesses who we used to support our version of the facts because assessing their credibility was beyond the purview of my investigation. And don't ask me about whether we investigated whether the Russians were also running through sources directed at Christopher Steele a disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 election because that's beyond the purview of my investigation. And don't ask me about the potential interest, bias, or prejudices of the staff that I hired because I determined they were the ones best able to get the job done.

Question by unnamed Congressman: Mr. Mueller. Then what was the job with which you were tasked?

Mueller: That's beyond my purview.
Title: Good summary Rick
Post by: ccp on July 25, 2019, 04:25:18 AM: :-D

BTW , who is Christopher Steele? :wink:

Some of the Dems response to all this : this is the only act 1. :roll:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2019, 07:15:12 AM: So, how did it all begin? Jordan brings it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbpxh1aF2nM&fbclid=IwAR1w8LcRsME4Q3zEeAZkmvwp2bjxhf7NGePKsP1d91jvn7sQMYOZoyaK5yk

Ratcliffe brings it home on exoneration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8jpJS6mKUA&fbclid=IwAR2FdiwvZqKEtNqxAXXE0E9wq8j2zvcAsArOLkgjuuuC1cr2rNgTOmkBjvc
Title: Mueller in front of Congress
Post by: DougMacG on July 26, 2019, 12:38:54 PM: It looks like Mueller did not write the Mueller report, was a figurehead to cover for the angry partisans that made up the team. Impeachment was dead before and more dead now if that is possible. Didn't they already vote impeachment down once this week? Next is to wait for two more reports to come out, the inspector general into FISA abuse and AG Barr's investigation into the investigation. SOmething went criminally wrong.

So many scandals come and go without consequence. I hate to be pro-prosecution and detest criminalizing political differences, but if crimes were committed during this massive abuse of power, people - via due process - should go to jail.
Title: Andrew McCarthy drives home a key point
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2019, 10:48:24 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-mueller-reports-fundamental-dodge/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202019-07-28&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Title: Re: Mueller in front of Congress
Post by: DougMacG on July 29, 2019, 07:07:53 AM: Previously: "It looks like Mueller did not write the Mueller report, was a figurehead to cover for the angry partisans that made up the team."

I see that Lindsey Graham and Newt Gingrich share this view.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/07/25/graham_mueller_report_in_name_only_special_counsel_was_in_a_weakened_state.html
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/newt-gingrich-robert-mueller-testimony-investigation-congress
Best analysis of it all is right here is this thread: the post by Rick N.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 29, 2019, 10:46:32 AM: Rick's posts are always quite strong.
Title: The case of the missing memos!
Post by: G M on July 31, 2019, 01:06:46 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/382603.php

Whodunnit?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 31, 2019, 02:12:56 PM: "FBI Tried to Recover the Classified Memos that James Comey Illegally Leaked, But, Get This, Two "Went Missing," Per Comey's Claim"

you mean the man who documented everything so he could sell his book later just happened to lose 2 important memos.

Must have been the music thieves snuck into his house while he was out speaking with his publisher and knew where to get them.
Title: Comey will walk
Post by: ccp on August 01, 2019, 03:46:13 PM: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fox-news-comey-doj-prosecute/2019/08/01/id/926865/

From Shawshank Redemption :
Andy also leaves something behind at the very end with a Biblical-ish quote, “His judgment cometh, and that right soon,”

but that occurs only in the movies . :wink:
Title: Re: Comey will walk
Post by: G M on August 01, 2019, 04:57:50 PM: Quote from: ccp on August 01, 2019, 03:46:13 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fox-news-comey-doj-prosecute/2019/08/01/id/926865/

From Shawshank Redemption :
Andy also leaves something behind at the very end with a Biblical-ish quote, “His judgment cometh, and that right soon,”

but that occurs only in the movies . :wink:

Our multi-tiered Criminal Justice system at work.
Title: Five Questions I answered by Mueller,
Post by: DougMacG on August 02, 2019, 06:06:38 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/08/01/here_are_5_big_holes_in_muellers_work_119790.html
Title: Mueller
Post by: ccp on August 02, 2019, 07:47:41 AM: Many thought Mueller was just being forgetful, feeble , getting old or cognitively impaired

I think he knew exactly what he was doing - simply avoiding everything he could
he certainly knew well enough to say I don't know, out of my purview for every important question

As for claiming he did not know who Steele was - frankly that was simply BS.
Of course he knew who he is.
Title: Re: Mueller
Post by: DougMacG on August 02, 2019, 09:38:18 AM: Quote from: ccp on August 02, 2019, 07:47:41 AM
Many thought Mueller was just being forgetful, feeble , getting old or cognitively impaired

I think he knew exactly what he was doing - simply avoiding everything he could
he certainly knew well enough to say I don't know, out of my purview for every important question

As for claiming he did not know who Steele was - frankly that was simply BS.
Of course he knew who he is.

I agree. He partly didn't know what was going on but mostly he was trying for various reasons to say nothing of any new significance. They should have had his whole team on the stand.

Some of the important matters are still under investigation but its hard to appreciate that we can't know what a $25 million investigation that we paid for and waited for found.

3 more reports are coming soon, I believe:

Inspector General report on FISA abuse
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/reluctant-witnesses-in-fisa-abuse-probe-agree-to-talk-to-doj-inspector-general

US attorney Utah looking into FBI misconduct
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/who-is-john-huber/index.html

AG Barr investigation into previous administration handling of Clinton campaign (?)
https://nworeport.me/2019/06/02/barr-has-not-received-satisfactory-answers-bombshell-shows-clinton-being-investigated/

Maybe these will set history straight with what really happened all the way through.
Title: Re: Mueller
Post by: G M on August 02, 2019, 09:49:19 AM: https://www.hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Gohmert_Mueller_UNMASKED.pdf

Take the time to read the whole thing.

Quote from: DougMacG on August 02, 2019, 09:38:18 AM
Quote from: ccp on August 02, 2019, 07:47:41 AM
Many thought Mueller was just being forgetful, feeble , getting old or cognitively impaired

I think he knew exactly what he was doing - simply avoiding everything he could
he certainly knew well enough to say I don't know, out of my purview for every important question

As for claiming he did not know who Steele was - frankly that was simply BS.
Of course he knew who he is.

I agree. He partly didn't know what was going on but mostly he was trying for various reasons to say nothing of any new significance. They should have had his whole team on the stand.

Some of the important matters are still under investigation but its hard to appreciate that we can't know what a $25 million investigation that we paid for and waited for found.

3 more reports are coming soon, I believe:

Inspector General report on FISA abuse
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/reluctant-witnesses-in-fisa-abuse-probe-agree-to-talk-to-doj-inspector-general

US attorney Utah looking into FBI misconduct
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/29/politics/who-is-john-huber/index.html

AG Barr investigation into previous administration handling of Clinton campaign (?)
https://nworeport.me/2019/06/02/barr-has-not-received-satisfactory-answers-bombshell-shows-clinton-being-investigated/

Maybe these will set history straight with what really happened all the way through.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 02, 2019, 04:28:27 PM: add to this the possibility that FBI used Epstein as an informant
that may have contributed to cutting deal with the pedophile.

Now that sounds Hooveresque.

This would have occurred while Mueller was director.
Title: Mueller didn't know
Post by: G M on August 05, 2019, 10:13:12 AM: https://tammybruce.com/2019/07/flashback-2013-fbi-director-mueller-admits-he-did-not-know-tsarnaev-boston-bombers-attended-mosque-with-radical-ties.html

An ongoing theme.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 06, 2019, 05:59:57 AM: (https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/08/Screen-Shot-2019-07-29-at-9.40.07-PM.png?w=1002&ssl=1)

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/the-week-in-pictures-dark-psychic-forces-edition.php
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-clintons-russia-trump-688592
Title: Frank Figluizzi
Post by: G M on August 07, 2019, 01:04:07 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/382694.php

August 07, 2019
Brian Williams and Robert Mueller's Pick to Lead Entire FBI Counterintelligence Division: Trump's Choice of Dates to Mourn the Deaths of the Shooting Victims Is Actually a Secret Neo-Nazi "Numerology" Code
Batshit, bugfuck insane.

And this is the former FBI assistant director and Muller's handpicked choice to lead the Counterintelligence division.

"Numerology."

A former FBI assistant director used numerology on MSNBC Monday to link neo-Nazism to President Donald Trump's decision to fly flags at half-staff to honor the victims of shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Frank Figluizzi floated the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory during an interview with Brian Williams.

Figluizzi, an MSNBC contributor, said Trump’s decision will appeal to neo-Nazis and supporters of Adolf Hitler because of the date that the flags will return to full mast. Earlier on Monday, Aug. 5, Trump ordered flags to be lowered for three days in order to honor the 31 victims of the two mass shootings.

Figluizzi said that he was "not going to imply" that Trump deliberately timed the flag maneuvers to appeal to neo-Nazis, but then he laid out his theory to an unflinching Brian Williams.

"The president said that we will fly our flags at half mast, until August 8th. That's 8/8. Now, I'm not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using it as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that's being demonstrated by the White House,” he said.

I'm not outright saying it, but, you know, I'm strongly hinting slash outright saying it.

"The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter 'H' is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 88 together Stand for 'Heil Hitler.' So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8," he continued.

Williams appeared to accept Figliuzzi's rationale....

We're going to need a divorce.

Not asking for it any longer; we're demanding it. We cannot remain in a political association with these vile, violent-minded lunatics.

Derek Hunter says in his podcast that MSNBC is one step away from actively calling for Trump's assassination. (This podcast is incredible. Bookmark it for later.)

From the comments:

29 Lynn Swann is a Republican. Lynn Swann wore... wait for it... number 88!
Connect the dots, people!
Posted by: Hands

Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi broke out some numerology last night on MSNBC in what was truly one of the most insane segments that the network has aired in a while (including the ones with Mensch) https://t.co/cwFD3cQ6sI

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) August 7, 2019

His defense (paraphrased): “I clearly said Trump didn’t do this intentionally, you fools, his advisors just didn’t understand the numerology”

Which is an admission that Trump *isn’t* a white supremacist which contradicts most of MSNBC’s recent output

— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) August 7, 2019
These are the guys who ran the most powerful investigative organization in the U.S. government? And we wonder why our counter-terrorism efforts have been ineffective for the better part of two decades. https://t.co/UfB5Ln5dyl

— Kyle Shideler (@ShidelerK) August 7, 2019
Title: 8/8 = HH according to the FBI clown
Post by: ccp on August 07, 2019, 03:03:59 PM: I saw this few nights ago
I could not tell you . the rage I felt seeing this partisan ex FBI guy get paid to come onto MSNBC to claim the 8/8 was either picked by Trump because his aids are too stupid to know 8/8 could also stand for Heil Hitler (the Hs being the 8th letter of the alphabet)
or Trump was in worst case scenario sending a veiled message to neo nazis.

I guess if he had picked 8/6 they would link it up to Hiroshima and if to 8/9 to Nagasaki
Title: Re: 8/8 = HH according to the FBI clown
Post by: DougMacG on August 07, 2019, 09:44:43 PM: In America, 8/8 means August 8.

If Nazis weren't saying Heil h#tler all the time, Alan Turing couldn't have broken the code.
Title: Re: 8/8 = HH according to the FBI clown
Post by: G M on August 07, 2019, 10:08:13 PM: Quote from: DougMacG on August 07, 2019, 09:44:43 PM
In America, 8/8 means August 8.

If Nazis weren't saying Heil h#tler all the time, Alan Turing couldn't have broken the code.

I am so old, I can remember when the FBI wasn’t just the sword and shield of the democrat party.
Title: Great Summary by Andrew McCarthy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2019, 12:47:06 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-hillary-clinton-ruins-the-plan/
Title: Andrew McCarthy on the latest left wing gotcha game ; whistleblower
Post by: ccp on September 21, 2019, 09:38:56 AM: Maybe we should start new thread :

"The Lefts continuous impeachment quest heading up to 2020":

https://news.yahoo.com/breaking-down-whistleblower-frenzy-103053753.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 21, 2019, 08:38:22 PM: As always, AMcC is astute.
Title: Judgment of Acquittal for Flynn associate
Post by: rickn on September 25, 2019, 05:04:49 AM: Federal district just issued a judgment of acquittal - overturning a jury verdict of guilty - in the case brought against Michael Flynn's business partner for acting as an unregistered agent of the government of Turkey. Here's a link to the actual opinion since you can't rely upon most media sources to report accurately about most stuff these days.

https://www.scribd.com/document/427385713/Acquittal-1 (https://www.scribd.com/document/427385713/Acquittal-1)
Title: Update on the Flynn case
Post by: DougMacG on September 25, 2019, 10:49:25 AM: Thank you Rick.
-----------------
Also this in the Flynn case:
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/12/sidney-powells-latest-motion-michael-flynns-case-russiagate-bombshell/

On Wednesday, the previously sealed Motion to Compel filed against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case was made public with only minor redactions. Just the day before, during a hearing before federal judge Emmet Sullivan, Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, had highlighted some of the evidence prosecutors withheld from her defense team. Yesterday’s filing expanded exponentially on the areas of evidence Powell seeks and lays bare Powell’s bigger plan moving forward: to expose the breadth and depth of SpyGate and how flaying Flynn lay at the heart of the soft coup attempt.

In her Motion to Compel, Powell catalogued 40 categories of evidence the government has refused to turn over. She seeks a court order requiring federal prosecutors to provide the withheld evidence under Brady and its progeny. Brady and its offshoots require prosecutors to disclose material exculpatory and impeachment evidence to the defense team. And, as Judge Sullivan made clear during Tuesday’s hearing, that duty exists even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty and even though he had agreed that the government would not be required to provide him with further evidence.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Flynn case
Post by: G M on September 25, 2019, 05:31:45 PM: The USDOJ has proven to be utterly corrupt, over and over again.

Quote from: DougMacG on September 25, 2019, 10:49:25 AM
Thank you Rick.
-----------------
Also this in the Flynn case:
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/12/sidney-powells-latest-motion-michael-flynns-case-russiagate-bombshell/

On Wednesday, the previously sealed Motion to Compel filed against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case was made public with only minor redactions. Just the day before, during a hearing before federal judge Emmet Sullivan, Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, had highlighted some of the evidence prosecutors withheld from her defense team. Yesterday’s filing expanded exponentially on the areas of evidence Powell seeks and lays bare Powell’s bigger plan moving forward: to expose the breadth and depth of SpyGate and how flaying Flynn lay at the heart of the soft coup attempt.

In her Motion to Compel, Powell catalogued 40 categories of evidence the government has refused to turn over. She seeks a court order requiring federal prosecutors to provide the withheld evidence under Brady and its progeny. Brady and its offshoots require prosecutors to disclose material exculpatory and impeachment evidence to the defense team. And, as Judge Sullivan made clear during Tuesday’s hearing, that duty exists even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty and even though he had agreed that the government would not be required to provide him with further evidence.
Title: JW wins against State Dept colluding with Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2019, 12:59:49 PM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-court-forces-release-of-clinton-wikileaks-discussion-email-that-confirms-state-department-knew-about-her-email-account/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=press_release&fbclid=IwAR2sXTblwM8r5fdCb9vBSZaz9N5ZkmGoaldwOGIn6CjGdAUYv7E2TgM0DE8
Title: response to NYT "leak" of the day
Post by: ccp on September 30, 2019, 02:53:26 PM: They got a whole stack of bullshit to put on their front page each day as though any of it means anything.

I thought we already knew this:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-pressed-australian-leader-to-help-barr-investigate-mueller-inquirys-origins/ar-AAI4KVh

My response:

https://www.google.com/search?q=image+of+yawn&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjfv6HMw_nkAhXqnuAKHWipCG8QsAR6BAgHEAE&biw=1440&bih=789

just remarkable how they (MSM) the democrats are so coordinated to attempt to manipulate our thoughts.

:x
Title: Re: response to NYT "leak" of the day
Post by: G M on September 30, 2019, 03:51:55 PM: Quote from: ccp on September 30, 2019, 02:53:26 PM
They got a whole stack of bullshit to put on their front page each day as though any of it means anything.

I thought we already knew this:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-pressed-australian-leader-to-help-barr-investigate-mueller-inquirys-origins/ar-AAI4KVh

My response:

https://www.google.com/search?q=image+of+yawn&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjfv6HMw_nkAhXqnuAKHWipCG8QsAR6BAgHEAE&biw=1440&bih=789

just remarkable how they (MSM) the democrats are so coordinated to attempt to manipulate our thoughts.

:x

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/383525.php
Title: Misfud-Brit connection?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2019, 10:52:57 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/phones-of-russia-probes-central-figure-point-to-uk-connections_3122857.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=a8cf73169c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_22_12_59&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-a8cf73169c-239065853
Title: FISA gate is now criminal
Post by: DougMacG on October 25, 2019, 08:56:19 AM: I hate to agree with the cynics, but maybe all this impeach stuff was all about upstaging what is to come.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/politics/john-durham-criminal-investigation.html

Time to indict a ham sandwich - like Comey?

Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein - each signed one or more FISA applications,”
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2018/02/02/fisa-names-names-597194
Title: The corrupt targeting of Gen. Flynn
Post by: G M on October 25, 2019, 11:15:30 AM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/383959.php

Massive corruption.
Title: Andrew McCarthy's book
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 25, 2019, 04:30:05 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kudos-andy-for-ball-of-collusion/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-10-25&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Media collusion with Weissman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2019, 12:40:48 PM: AP Reporters Pushed FBI to Prosecute Manafort; Benghazi Docs Confirm Clinton Cover-Up; State Dept. Monitored People It Didn't Like

AP Reporters Pushed FBI to Prosecute Manafort

The Associated Press, founded in 1846 as a cooperative association of newspapers, has enjoyed a reputation for independence and fairness over the years. Lately, however, it has come under criticism for what some see as a left/liberal bias.

Certainly, what we have just learned about its dealings with anti-Trump partisans in the Justice Department does nothing to improve our perception of the news service.

We have released two sets of heavily redacted FBI documents – 28 pages and 38 pages –about an April 11, 2017, “off-the-record” meeting set up by then-Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section Andrew Weissmann.

The meeting included representatives of the DOJ, the FBI and the Associated Press in which AP reporters provided information on former Trump Campaign Director Paul Manafort, including the numeric code to Manafort’s storage locker.

Two months later, in early June, Weissmann was hired to work on Robert Mueller’s special counsel operation against President Trump. Weissman then reportedly spearheaded the subsequent investigation and prosecution of Manafort.

Included among the new documents are two typed write-ups of the meeting’s proceedings and handwritten notes taken during the meeting by two FBI special agents.

According to a June 11, 2017, FBI write-up:
The purpose of the meeting, as it was explained to SSA [supervisory special agent, redacted] was to obtain documents from the AP reporters that were related to their investigative reports on Paul Manafort.
No such documents were included in the documents released to us.

During the meeting, the AP reporters provided the FBI information about a storage locker of Manafort (the Mueller special counsel operation raided the locker on May 26, 2017):
The AP reporters advised that they had located a storage facility in Virginia that belonged to Manafort…The code to the lock on the locker is 40944859. The reporters were aware of the Unit number and address, but they declined to share that information.
The reporters shared the information that “payments for the locker were made from the DM Partners account that received money from the [Ukraine] Party of Regions.”

The notes suggest the AP pushed for criminal prosecution of Manafort:
AP believes Manafort is in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), in that Manafort send [sic] internal U. S. documents to officials in Ukraine AP has documentation proving this, as well as Manafort noting his understanding doing so would get him into trouble.
AP asked about the U.S. government charging Manafort with violating Title 18, section 1001 for lying to government officials, and have asked if the FBI has interviewed Manafort. FBI and DOJ had no comment on this question.
Also, according to the FBI write-up, “The AP reporters asked about FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violations and they were generally told that they are enforceable.”

Although, according to the FBI write-up, “no commitments were made [by DOJ] to assist the reporters,” Andrew Weissmann asked the AP to contact foreign authorities to follow up:
[A]fter the meeting was started and it was explained to the reporters that there was nothing that the FBI could provide to them, the reporters opted to ask a series of questions to see if the FBI would provide clarification. No commitments were made to assist the reporters in their further investigation into the life and activities of Paul Manafort and the AP reporters understood that the meeting would be off the record.

***

They [AP reporters] reiterated what they had written in their article, which was a response from the Cypriot Anti-Money Laundering Authority (MOKAS) that they [MOKAS] had fully responded to Department of Treasury agents in response to [Treasury’s] request. The AP reporters were interested in how this arrangement worked and if the U.S. had made a formal request. FBI/DOJ did not respond, but Andrew Weissman [sic] suggested that they ask the Cypriots if they had provided everything to which they had access or if they only provided what they were legally required to provide.

***

The AP reporters asked if we [DOJ/FBI] would be willing to tell them if they were off based [sic] or on the wrong traack [sic] and they were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings.
The reporters asked about any DOJ request for the assistance of foreign governments in the U.S. Government’s investigation of Manafort:
The AP reporters asked if there had been any official requests to other countries. FBI/DOJ declined to discuss specifics, except to state that the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty requests are negotiated by diplomats, so they should remain at that level.
AP reporters told the FBI about payments in the “black ledger,” a Ukrainian record of allegedly illegal off-the-books payments:
The reporters advised that their next report, which was scheduled to come out in the next day or so after the meeting, would focus on confirming, to the extent that they could payments in the so called “black ledger” that were allegedly made to Manafort.

***

The impression that their sources give is that Manafort was not precise about his finances, specifically as it related to the “black ledger.” The AP reporters calculated that he received $60 to $80 million from his work in Ukraine, during the time period the ledger was kept. According to their review of the ledger, it appears that there is a slightly lesser amount documented based on all of the entries. The AP reporters accessed a copy of the ledger online, describing it as “public” document (Agent's note - the ledger has been published in its entirety by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, after it was given to them by Sergei Leshenko, Ukrainian RADA member [Ukrainian parliament] and investigative reporter.)
The AP reporters discussed an extensive list of issues, companies, and individuals that they felt should be investigated for possible criminal activity, including a $50,000 payment to a men’s clothing store; a 2007 meeting with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska; Loav Ltd., which was possibly incorporated by Manafort; NeoCom, which the AP reporters implied was incorporated solely to cover up money laundering; and other matters.

The reporters described an “internal U.S. work product that had been sent to Ukraine.” The reporters described it as an “internal White House document.” The FBI report stated that it “was not clear if the document was classified.”

Evidently referring to these documents, Manafort’s lawyers alleged that Weissmann provided guidance and leaked grand jury testimony to the AP reporters investigating Manafort.

This document production comes in our April, 2019 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00879)) filed after the FBI failed to respond to a July 5, 2018, FOIA request for:
• All records concerning the April 2017 meeting between Department of Justice and FBI personnel and representatives of The Associated Press. This request includes all notes, reports, memoranda, briefing materials, or other records created in preparation for, during, and/or pursuant to the meeting.
• All records of communication between any representative of the Department of Justice and any of the individuals present at the aforementioned meeting.
Under Mueller, Weissmann became known as “the architect of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort,” which produced no evidence of collusion between Manafort, the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. It indicted Manafort on unrelated charges.

In an October 2017 article describing Weissmann as Mueller’s “Pit Bull,” The New York Times wrote, “He is a top lieutenant to Robert S. Mueller III on the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links to the Trump campaign. Significantly, Mr. Weissmann is an expert in converting defendants into collaborators — with either tactical brilliance or overzealousness, depending on one’s perspective.” Weissman oversaw the pre-dawn home raid of Manafort in what one former federal prosecutor described as “textbook Weissmann terrorism.” Weissmann reportedly also attended Hillary Clinton’s Election Night party in New York.

In May 2019, we uncovered 73 pages of records from the DOJ containing text messages and calendar entries of Weissmann showing he led the hiring effort for the investigation that targeted President Trump.

In December 2017, we made public two productions of DOJ documents showing strong support by top DOJ officials for former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ refusal to enforce President Trump’s Middle East travel ban executive order. In one email, Weissmann applauds Yates, writing: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.”

These latest shocking FBI reports evidence a corrupt collusion between the DOJ and the media, specifically The Associated Press, to target Paul Manafort. These reports are further reason for President Trump to pardon Manafort and others caught up in Mueller’s abusive web.

This new evidence strengthens the widespread belief that the media are in league with the anti-Trumpers in the administration and in the Congress.
Title: The Nation, why investigating the investigators is important
Post by: DougMacG on October 29, 2019, 06:02:40 AM: The Nation is so far, pure left that they also believe in winning on the issues without cheating and scandal.

https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-brennan/
Title: Daily Beast: Barr & Misfud
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2019, 07:31:44 AM: Anti-Trumper sent me this:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-how-dumb-bill-barrs-great-mifsud-conspiracy-story-really-is?ref=home&fbclid=IwAR0Cf7arn5QBPyvQGEVN7qHb9MVSuEMONkji6tIs9wJy2i_32TZaBu8UtWQ
Title: Re: Daily Beast: Barr & Misfud
Post by: DougMacG on October 30, 2019, 07:58:07 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2019, 07:31:44 AM
Anti-Trumper sent me this:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-how-dumb-bill-barrs-great-mifsud-conspiracy-story-really-is?ref=home&fbclid=IwAR0Cf7arn5QBPyvQGEVN7qHb9MVSuEMONkji6tIs9wJy2i_32TZaBu8UtWQ

Good to know what anti Trumpers are reading but there is no indication in the article what inside knowledge the author has about what AG Barr, Justice Department inspector general Horowitz or U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating. We will know soon enough.

The signal to noise ratio is rather low right now.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2019, 01:54:50 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGNzEGqwqrw
Title: needs to change his tat
Post by: ccp on November 05, 2019, 02:48:32 PM: https://www.google.com/search?q=roger+stone+tattoo&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiis_LzktTlAhX3QkEAHYQnCe4QsAR6BAgFEAE&biw=1440&bih=789

Does anyone think if Roger gets a tattoo of Trump over the Nixon or on top
or maybe in the front
he might get a pardon?
Title: The Michael Flynn smoking gun: FBI headquarters altered interview summary
Post by: G M on November 05, 2019, 04:43:43 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-michael-flynn-smoking-gun-fbi-headquarters-altered-interview-summary

The Michael Flynn smoking gun: FBI headquarters altered interview summary
by James Gagliano
| November 05, 2019 12:23 PM

Print this article
As a self-proclaimed adherent to Hanlon’s Razor, I once cynically viewed the frenzied focus on FBI actions during the 2016 Russian election-meddling investigation as partisan and overwrought. Hanlon’s Razor suggests that we never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. Having proudly served in the FBI for 25 years, I bristled at insulting accusations of an onerous deep state conspiracy. Some obvious mistakes made during the investigation of the Trump campaign were quite possibly the result of two ham-handedly overzealous FBI headquarters denizens, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, clumsily seeking to impress each other with ever-increasing levels of loathing for then-candidate Donald Trump.

FBI employees are entitled to their own political views. But senior-level decision-makers who express them on government devices, while overseeing a supremely consequential investigation into a political campaign, simply do not possess the requisite judgment and temperament for the job.

Their stunning text message exchanges and talk of an onerous “insurance policy” in the event Trump were to win prove how ill-suited they were for their positions in James Comey’s cabinet. What other steps might they have taken that have yet to be discovered? The inspector general is soon set to release a report into FBI actions in the effort to surveil the Trump campaign. Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department is conducting its own review, and U.S. Attorney John Durham recently expanded his investigation into the case as well, by converting the review into a full-blown criminal investigation. Barr has faced backlash from critics of his investigation, who ironically have referred to it as a witch hunt.

But as we anxiously await the expected reports, there recently appeared some fairly explosive allegations into potential investigator misconduct that have not received the attention they deserve. With her filing of a blistering Motion to Compel against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case just made public, Sidney Powell has upended my adherence to Hanlon’s Razor. Powell is the attorney for former national security adviser and retired Army Lt. Gen. Flynn, who pled guilty to one count of lying to FBI agents during the special counsel investigation. Powell’s motion seeks to unravel a case many feel was biased from its inception.

One of the most damning charges contained within Powell’s 37-page court brief is that Page, the DOJ lawyer assigned to the office of then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, may have materially altered Flynn’s interview FD-302, which was drafted by Strzok. FBI agents transfer handwritten interview notes onto a formal testimonial document, FD-302, within five days of conducting an interview, while recollections are still fresh.

It is unheard of for someone not actually on the interview itself to materially alter an FD-302. As an FBI agent, no one in my chain of command ever directed me to alter consequential wording. And as a longtime FBI supervisor, I never ever directed an agent to recollect something different from what they discerned during an interview. Returning a 302 for errors in grammar, punctuation, or syntax is appropriate. This occurs before the document is ultimately uploaded to a particular file, conjoined with the original interview notes which are safely secured inside a 1-A envelope, and secured as part of evidence at trial.

With this in mind, this related text message exchange from Strzok to Page dated Feb. 10, 2017, nauseated me:

"I made your edits and sent them to Joe. I also emailed you an updated 302. I’m not asking you to edit it this weekend, I just wanted to send it to you."
Powell charges that Page directed Strzok to alter his Flynn interview 302. As in most instances in life, words matter. The change in wording was instrumental in moving Flynn from a target to a subject. One recalls how critical wording was in the FBI’s decision not to argue that DOJ charge Hillary Clinton with a crime in the private email server investigation. Comey elected not to use “gross negligence” to characterize Clinton's actions — which would have been the required language in the mishandling of classified information statute — and instead settled upon the more benign and non-indictable “extreme carelessness."

Later, it was determined that none other than Strzok was the impetus behind the recrafting of Comey’s words.

Powell’s motion requests that Flynn’s case be dismissed. Central to this appeal are details surrounding Flynn’s first interview by the FBI on Jan. 24, 2017. Recall also how Comey famously told NBC’s Nicolle Wallace, in front of an audience, that Flynn was visited by FBI agents at the White House in chaotic early days of Trump transition because, in Comey’s words, “I sent them.”

Comey received warm laughter for his quip from an appreciative audience, reveled in the adulation, and further elaborated, providing this shockingly partisan move:

"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. 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."
So, did an accomplished 3-star general actually misrepresent the truth? Or, was his recollection of events later spun to be a mendacious accounting by overzealous investigators who followed their boss’s lead, while circumventing established protocol in an ambush-style interview? What apparently followed was a “tweaking” of the accounting to ensure Flynn be charged with Title 18 USC § 1001 – something I have long argued was never charged by any U.S. Attorney’s Office during my time serving in the FBI unless we wanted to threaten it and employ as leverage.

Setting aside valid arguments that the FBI acted inappropriately — treating the Trump White House differently than they would have treated Bush’s or Obama’s, as the hubristic Comey proudly admits — Powell’s charges of egregious government misconduct are certainly deserving of the court’s consideration. The withholding of clearly exculpatory material related to revelations that “important substantive changes were made to the Flynn 302” may well be central to the findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Durham, as well.

Here’s me, acknowledging my mistake. I was dead wrong. It now seems there was a concerted effort, though isolated, within the upper-echelons of the FBI to influence the outcome of the Flynn investigation. By “dirtying up” Flynn, Comey’s FBI headquarters team of callow sycophants shortcut the investigative process. Arm-twisting Flynn through the “tweaked” version of his interview afforded him criminal exposure. The cocksure Comey team felt supremely confident that would inspire him “flipping” and give them the desperately sought-after evidence of Trump-Russia collusion that the wholly unverified Steele dossier was never remotely capable of providing.

I am physically nauseous as I type these words. I have long maintained that innocent mistakes were made and that the investigators at the center of this maelstrom were entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

No more.

They have tarnished the badge and forever stained an agency that deserved so much better from them. I am ashamed. The irreparable damage Comey’s team has done to the FBI will take a generation to reverse.

I ashamedly join Hanlon’s Razor in getting this one wrong.

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2019, 09:04:58 PM: Wow.

As suspected, but wow nonetheless.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2019, 07:06:40 AM: "I am physically nauseous as I type these words. I have long maintained that innocent mistakes were made and that the investigators at the center of this maelstrom were entitled to the benefit of the doubt."

I though career government employees were beyond reproach or bias.
serving the constitution , country and the people of the US.

Sure they make mistake like everyone else
but to suggest they are corrupt (like everywhere else) is out of bounds.

Just ask CNN
Only DJT and his team are government employees who are corrupt.

Tonight smart Lemon will come out and claim all this is already "debunked " and just a Fox news and right conspiracy .
Title: Fiona Hill undercuts Steele Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 08, 2019, 06:34:59 PM: https://dailycaller.com/2019/11/08/fiona-hill-steele-dossier-disinformation/
Title: Fiona Hill says Russia tried to damage both Trump and Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2019, 05:50:56 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/impeachment-witness-fiona-hill-russia-tried-to-damage-both-trump-and-clinton
Title: Mueller lawyer is the ex FBI official
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 22, 2019, 04:21:42 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mueller-lawyer-with-anti-trump-bias-is-ex-fbi-official-facing-fisa-criminal-investigation
Title: Judge rules McGahn must testify
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 25, 2019, 04:50:08 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-judge-rules-don-mcgahn-must-testify-in-trump-impeachment-inquiry/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=18718005
Title: WSJ: Turning over the 2016 Rocks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2019, 11:22:15 PM: Who Will Turn Over the 2016 Rocks?
The republic can survive the truth, but the FBI and CIA probably can’t.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 26, 2019 6:50 pm ET

James Comey, former director of the FBI, speaks in Salzburg, Austria, June 21. PHOTO: ALEX KRAUS/BLOOMBERG NEWS
A forthcoming report by the Justice Department inspector general will look into the FBI’s formal handling of the Steele dossier and its launching of a counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Far more consequential, though, was the FBI’s informal role in allowing itself to be used to inject the dossier into the political sphere to spark the Russia collusion folly.

And where is the similar report on the CIA under John Brennan ? His promotion of the Russia collusion canard was bad enough. Unexamined is his role in promoting the still-secret Russian “intelligence” used to justify FBI Director James Comey’s chaotic intercessions in the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Mike Bloomberg Roils the Democratic Presidential Race

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The story is worth retelling. Mr. Comey’s rationale, not disclosed until after the election, we may suppose was of crucial importance to somebody who makes himself out to be such a stickler for doing the right thing. Yet his public explanations have been a tissue of absurdities. He claims the secret Russian intelligence might have leaked and discredited a Justice Department decision to clear Mrs. Clinton, but how did his usurping the DOJ’s decision improve matters? The information still could have leaked. Plus didn’t his own actions discredit the DOJ?

He says he was protecting the FBI, that an FBI decision would be more credible than a Justice Department decision. This is laughable. On the eve of the convention, the FBI was going to deprive the president’s party of its nominee even as the reviled Mr. Trump was storming to the GOP nomination? It would have been institutional hara-kiri. Nobody believes the FBI’s decision was any less foreordained than the Justice Department’s.

Making further mincemeat of Mr. Comey’s rationale, the inspector general has revealed that his FBI colleagues judged the Russian intelligence to be “objectively false” and possibly a Kremlin plant. If the Russians can fake one email chain to discredit the Justice Department, they can fake another to discredit the FBI. Again, how did Mr. Comey fix any problem?

This still-hidden Russian intelligence, we know from leaks, referred to a presumably intercepted Democratic email chain. The email chain, in turn, referred to an alleged conversation in which Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch promised the Clinton campaign she would defuse the email investigation.

The testimony on this point is murky, but it does not appear Mr. Comey or the FBI made any serious effort to establish whether such a conspiracy to obstruct justice took place. We’re left with the possibility that Mr. Comey and his intelligence brethren manufactured out of flotsam an excuse to fix the Hillary email case themselves—or knowingly exploited a false pretext gifted by the Russians to do so.

If not for his first intervention, he wouldn’t have committed his second—reopening the case shortly before Election Day. So we’re left with the possibility that Mr. Comey’s actions in response to dubious Russian danglings accidentally elected Donald Trump.

The Obama administration, after Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, shifted overnight from downplaying Russian meddling to highlighting it. We’re left with the possibility that the collusion canard was deliberately promoted to distract from what otherwise would have been the story of the century—the FBI’s harebrained intervention in a presidential election.

Mutely, and without admitting it to themselves, the permanent liberal establishment preferred insinuating that Mr. Trump was a Russian mole to looking at the truth of 2016. And yet even Rep. Adam Schiff, when pressed by the New Yorker, admitted that, if Mr. Comey’s account of his actions is accurate, it represents the “most measurable” and “most significant” way Russia influenced the election.

Wafting above all is an odor of 1963, when the press deliberately ignored Lee Harvey Oswald’s communist affiliations in favor of a distracting talking point about right-wing extremism in Dallas. Do I think the republic today can survive a full airing of the U.S. intelligence community’s inept actions in the 2016 race? Yes, and with minimal shock at this point. It’s the FBI and CIA that are unlikely to survive without undergoing a sweeping institutional housecleaning.

Which brings us to the latest inspector general’s report due in a couple weeks, itself a down payment on a criminal investigation now in the hands of U.S. Attorney John Durham. Because Washington is seldom keen to prosecute even plainly illegal leaks when Republicans are the victims, and because unprofessional credulousness in the face of dubious “intelligence” (like the Steele dossier) is not about to become a crime, the cathartic prosecutions of Obama intelligence officials that some Trump loyalists crave are unlikely to happen.

Many of us avidly await the coming revelations for a different reason: to see if the mainstream media will finally interest itself in the truths of 2016. Looming over the fourth estate is a quietly important question: whether continuing to collude in a coverup can remain consistent with commercial survival.
Title: New fisa gate documents declassified in Oct
Post by: DougMacG on December 01, 2019, 06:52:35 AM: https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/fisa-court-ruled-that-fbi-improperly-used-nsa-surveillance-data-to-snoop-on-americans/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2019, 07:10:14 AM: :-o :-o :-o :x :x :x
Title: POTH on Horowitz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2019, 03:06:23 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/horowitz-ig-report.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Title: Killer closing line
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2019, 05:14:43 PM: Of course, every headline in the institutional media points out that the IG found that the FBI had sufficient evidence to satisfy the investigation. Yes, according to Horowitz, the “low threshold” for opening an investigation was met. It’s true. The problem is that the threshold for opening the case into Trump–Russia collusion was a lot lower than it was for the case for accusing the FBI of wrongdoing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/the-inspector-generals-report-is-hardly-exculpatory-of-the-fbi/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-12-10&utm_content=A&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Just how bad was the FBI's Russia FISA?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2019, 11:10:09 PM: Sent to me by a high level Fed LEO:

https://johnsolomonreports.com/just-how-bad-was-the-fbis-russia-fisa-51-violations-and-9-false-statements/?fbclid=IwAR3mDFjkN-lsLadnCLU7JbQA2_YcvTE9m0nrURbI1BomiV7WM3lBgNY6upI
Title: The Russians Colluded Massively With the Democrats
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2019, 11:44:23 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/the-russians-colluded-massively-with-democrats/?fbclid=IwAR1ravPD3PdzgsHUGGq55esSfLw9EkFUDvuR7qJG0FiZRxmxJmbeLFsfCv0
Title: FBI DOJ, Comey, FISA gate: Bill McGurn bullet points
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2019, 03:27:51 PM: Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn provides this:

• Even though Christopher Steele’s dossier was full of material Mr. Comey himself characterized as “salacious and unverified,” it played a “central and essential role” in the bureau’s decision to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

• The FBI failed to inform Justice of “significant information that was available” but “was inconsistent with, or undercut,” claims in the FISA applications that Mr. Page was “an agent of a foreign power.”

• The FBI ignored various warnings about Mr. Steele’s political bias, and it took him at his word when he falsely told agents he wasn’t the source for a Yahoo News article the FBI would cite in its application to the court.

• Overall, the report identifies “at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications”—for which investigators received no “satisfactory answers.”

• The FBI also didn’t inform the FISA court that Mr. Page had served as a Central Intelligence Agency source and received a “positive assessment” for candor from the agency.

• Mr. Comey pushed to include Mr. Steele’s dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment even though the CIA “expressed concern about the lack of vetting.”

• An FBI lawyer altered an email he’d received confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source. After he changed it to read “not a source,” the email was then used to help renew the FISA warrant on Mr. Page.

...

Mr. Horowitz lays the blame at the top: “We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny. We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the [investigation’s] chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed.”

Mr. Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” relates how as FBI director he kept on his desk a copy of the October 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover asking for permission to wiretap Martin Luther King. He claims he did so to help ensure the bureau would never forget how a “legitimate counterintelligence mission . . . morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack.”

Mr. Horowitz’s findings about what was done under Mr. Comey’s leadership suggest there’s still a need for such a reminder. But maybe it should be a copy of the FISA applications for Carter Page the FBI sent to the court with false, misleading and incomplete information—and Mr. Comey’s signature.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/12/live-from-comeyworld.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2019, 03:33:43 PM: 500 pages of serious wrongdoing, all in one direction, against Trump.

Either they were incompetent or they were biased? These serious errors don't randomly all fall in the same direction. No one believes that. No documentary evidence means literally that, this isn't all sewn together in one document.

Those who did this were not incompetent, they were over-confidant.
Title: IG: FBI doctored evidence
Post by: G M on December 11, 2019, 08:37:05 PM: https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/09/ig-report-fbi-doctored-evidence-to-falsely-paint-carter-page-as-russian-spy/

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: Barr nails it in two minutes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2019, 06:59:27 PM: https://twitter.com/JohnWHuber?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1204544953948528640&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.westernjournal.com%2Fvideo-ag-barr-exposing-fbi-corruption-may-important-2-minutes-3-year-corruption-scandal%2F
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2019, 01:27:01 PM: From the article https://www.theepochtimes.com/william-barr-has-suddenly-become-chatty-and-hes-provided-quite-an-information-dump_3171471.html

Below are 24 points Barr felt the need to make after the release of the Horowitz report. (All of the information is attributed to Barr.)

1. Don’t expect Durham’s findings to be announced before late spring or summer 2020.

2. The FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. That’s what electronic surveillance is.

3. Regarding the FBI’s actions in surveilling Trump campaign associates, it was a “travesty” and there were “many abuses.”

4. From “day one,” the FBI investigation generated exculpatory information (tending to point to the targets’ innocence) and nothing that corroborated Russia collusion.

5. It’s a “big deal” to use U.S. law enforcement and intelligence resources to investigate the opposing political party, and I cannot think of another recent instance in which this happened.

6. Evidence to start the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates was “flimsy” from the start and based on the idea that Trump aide George Papadopoulos expressed he may have had pre-knowledge of a Democrat National Committee computer hack. However, it was actually just an offhand barroom comment by a young campaign aide described merely as a “suggestion of a suggestion, a vague allusion” to the fact that the Russians may have something they can dump. But by that time, May 2016, there was already rampant speculation online and in political circles that the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2014 and that they might surface. So the idea that Papadopoulos’s comment showed pre-knowledge of the Democratic National Committee hack and dump “is a big stretch.”

7. It was “wrong” for the FBI to presume the Trump campaign was part of a plot. They should have gone to the campaign and discussed their suspicions.

8. The normal thing to do would be to tell the campaign that there could be attempted foreign interference. There is no legitimate explanation as to why the FBI didn’t do this. The FBI’s explanation for this was that they only do “defensive briefings” if they’re certain there’s no chance they’re tipping someone off. But this simply isn’t true, isn’t plausible, and doesn’t hold water because our intelligence officials and President Barack Obama repeatedly contacted the Russians, the guilty party, to tell them to “cut it out.”

9. If the purpose were to protect the election, you would have given the Trump campaign a defensive briefing. You could have disrupted any foreign activity in time to protect the U.S. election.

10. As to the FBI’s motive, “that’s why we have Durham.” I’m not saying the motivations were improper, but it’s premature to say they weren’t.

11. The inspector general operates differently as an internal watchdog. Horowitz’s approach is to say that if people involved give reasonable explanations for what appears to be wrongdoing, and if he can’t find documentary or testimonial evidence to the contrary, he accepts it.

12. Contrary to much reporting, Horowitz didn’t rule out improper motive; he didn’t find documentary or testimonial evidence of improper motive. Those are two different things.

13. Instead of talking to the Trump campaign, the FBI secretly “wired up” sources and had them talk to four people affiliated with the Trump campaign, in August, September, and October 2016.

14. All of the information from this surveillance came back exculpatory regarding any supposed relationship to Russia and specific facts. But the FBI didn’t inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, which approved wiretaps against former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page four times.

15. At one point early on, the FBI didn’t have enough probable cause for a wiretap warrant, so it took the “Steele dossier” information against Trump, “which they’d done nothing to verify,” and used that to get the wiretaps.

16. The wiretaps allowed the FBI to go back and capture Page’s communications, emails, and other material from weeks, months, and even years ago.

17. Should the four FBI applications to wiretap Trump campaign aide Carter Page have ever been made, considering there were 17 critical omissions or errors by the FBI making it appear they had better evidence than they had? This is the meat of the issue, and “if you spend time to look at what happened, you’d be appalled.”

18. The FBI withheld from the court all of the exculpatory information and the lack of reliability of the main FBI source, Christopher Steele, who was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to find evidence connecting Trump to Russia.

19. The major takeaway is that after the election in January, the FBI finally talked to one of Steele’s important sources to try to verify some of the “dossier” information and sourcing, as they’re required to do. This Steele source told the FBI he didn’t know what Steele was talking about in the dossier, and that he’d told Steele that the information he’d provided was “supposition” and “theory.” At that point, “it was clear the dossier was a sham.” Yet the FBI didn’t tell the court, and continued to get wiretaps based on the dossier.

20. Further, the FBI falsely told the court that Steele’s source had been proven reliable and truthful. In fact, what the source had told the truth about was that “the dossier was garbage.” It’s hard to look at this “and not think it was gross abuse.”

21. Were the four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judges who approved the four wiretaps against Trump associate Carter Page badly misled by the FBI? Yes.

22. Are people going to be held accountable, including at the very top of our intelligence agencies and FBI? Well, they’re all gone.

23. The whole Russia collusion hype was a “bogus narrative hyped by an irresponsible press” that proved entirely false in the end.

Are former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI official Andy McCabe and others implicated in the Durham investigation? I think there was a failure of leadership in that group. Quoting the inspector general, the explanations he received “were not satisfactory. You can draw your own conclusions.”

24. Why haven’t we already thrown people in prison? “These things take time.” The government has to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we indict; it’s a substantial hurdle. Nobody is going to be indicted and go to jail unless that standard is met.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on December 14, 2019, 02:52:13 PM: 24. Why haven’t we already thrown people in prison? “These things take time.” The government has to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we indict; it’s a substantial hurdle. Nobody is going to be indicted and go to jail unless that standard is met.

BULLSHIITE!

It requires probably cause to indict, in fact the DOJ is quite good at indicting the proverbial "ham sandwich". Proof is required beyond a reasonable doubt for CONVICTION.

The Deep State DOJ/FBI didn't move at this casual pace, yet suddenly when the Deep State is facing legal liability things turn glacial and new legal standards are invented. Just like the one Comey invented for Hillary and her accomplices. Funny how that works.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2019, 01:27:01 PM

From the article https://www.theepochtimes.com/william-barr-has-suddenly-become-chatty-and-hes-provided-quite-an-information-dump_3171471.html

Below are 24 points Barr felt the need to make after the release of the Horowitz report. (All of the information is attributed to Barr.)

1. Don’t expect Durham’s findings to be announced before late spring or summer 2020.

2. The FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. That’s what electronic surveillance is.

3. Regarding the FBI’s actions in surveilling Trump campaign associates, it was a “travesty” and there were “many abuses.”

4. From “day one,” the FBI investigation generated exculpatory information (tending to point to the targets’ innocence) and nothing that corroborated Russia collusion.

5. It’s a “big deal” to use U.S. law enforcement and intelligence resources to investigate the opposing political party, and I cannot think of another recent instance in which this happened.

6. Evidence to start the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates was “flimsy” from the start and based on the idea that Trump aide George Papadopoulos expressed he may have had pre-knowledge of a Democrat National Committee computer hack. However, it was actually just an offhand barroom comment by a young campaign aide described merely as a “suggestion of a suggestion, a vague allusion” to the fact that the Russians may have something they can dump. But by that time, May 2016, there was already rampant speculation online and in political circles that the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2014 and that they might surface. So the idea that Papadopoulos’s comment showed pre-knowledge of the Democratic National Committee hack and dump “is a big stretch.”

7. It was “wrong” for the FBI to presume the Trump campaign was part of a plot. They should have gone to the campaign and discussed their suspicions.

8. The normal thing to do would be to tell the campaign that there could be attempted foreign interference. There is no legitimate explanation as to why the FBI didn’t do this. The FBI’s explanation for this was that they only do “defensive briefings” if they’re certain there’s no chance they’re tipping someone off. But this simply isn’t true, isn’t plausible, and doesn’t hold water because our intelligence officials and President Barack Obama repeatedly contacted the Russians, the guilty party, to tell them to “cut it out.”

9. If the purpose were to protect the election, you would have given the Trump campaign a defensive briefing. You could have disrupted any foreign activity in time to protect the U.S. election.

10. As to the FBI’s motive, “that’s why we have Durham.” I’m not saying the motivations were improper, but it’s premature to say they weren’t.

11. The inspector general operates differently as an internal watchdog. Horowitz’s approach is to say that if people involved give reasonable explanations for what appears to be wrongdoing, and if he can’t find documentary or testimonial evidence to the contrary, he accepts it.

12. Contrary to much reporting, Horowitz didn’t rule out improper motive; he didn’t find documentary or testimonial evidence of improper motive. Those are two different things.

13. Instead of talking to the Trump campaign, the FBI secretly “wired up” sources and had them talk to four people affiliated with the Trump campaign, in August, September, and October 2016.

14. All of the information from this surveillance came back exculpatory regarding any supposed relationship to Russia and specific facts. But the FBI didn’t inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, which approved wiretaps against former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page four times.

15. At one point early on, the FBI didn’t have enough probable cause for a wiretap warrant, so it took the “Steele dossier” information against Trump, “which they’d done nothing to verify,” and used that to get the wiretaps.

16. The wiretaps allowed the FBI to go back and capture Page’s communications, emails, and other material from weeks, months, and even years ago.

17. Should the four FBI applications to wiretap Trump campaign aide Carter Page have ever been made, considering there were 17 critical omissions or errors by the FBI making it appear they had better evidence than they had? This is the meat of the issue, and “if you spend time to look at what happened, you’d be appalled.”

18. The FBI withheld from the court all of the exculpatory information and the lack of reliability of the main FBI source, Christopher Steele, who was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to find evidence connecting Trump to Russia.

19. The major takeaway is that after the election in January, the FBI finally talked to one of Steele’s important sources to try to verify some of the “dossier” information and sourcing, as they’re required to do. This Steele source told the FBI he didn’t know what Steele was talking about in the dossier, and that he’d told Steele that the information he’d provided was “supposition” and “theory.” At that point, “it was clear the dossier was a sham.” Yet the FBI didn’t tell the court, and continued to get wiretaps based on the dossier.

20. Further, the FBI falsely told the court that Steele’s source had been proven reliable and truthful. In fact, what the source had told the truth about was that “the dossier was garbage.” It’s hard to look at this “and not think it was gross abuse.”

21. Were the four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judges who approved the four wiretaps against Trump associate Carter Page badly misled by the FBI? Yes.

22. Are people going to be held accountable, including at the very top of our intelligence agencies and FBI? Well, they’re all gone.

23. The whole Russia collusion hype was a “bogus narrative hyped by an irresponsible press” that proved entirely false in the end.

Are former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI official Andy McCabe and others implicated in the Durham investigation? I think there was a failure of leadership in that group. Quoting the inspector general, the explanations he received “were not satisfactory. You can draw your own conclusions.”

24. Why haven’t we already thrown people in prison? “These things take time.” The government has to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we indict; it’s a substantial hurdle. Nobody is going to be indicted and go to jail unless that standard is met.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: rickn on December 16, 2019, 04:28:05 AM: Yesterday, in his interview with Chris Wallace, Comey admitted that he was responsible for the abuses disclosed by the IG last Monday.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/12/15/chris_wallace_grills_james_comey_on_ig_report_fisa_abuse.html (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/12/15/chris_wallace_grills_james_comey_on_ig_report_fisa_abuse.html)

Ergo, he has admitted that Trump had cause to fire him as FBI Director.

Of course, if he were truly ignorant of what was being run by McCabe in Crossfire Hurricane and the other operations, then he would not have written his series of CYA memos; and, then had them leaked to the press after he was fired.

All of these agency heads were in on it. Comey's FBI. Clapper's DNI. Brennan's CIA. Obama's staff including Rice's NSC, Kerry's State Department, and Lynch and Mueller at the DOJ. In true Nixonian fashion, they circled the wagons and continued onwards - not because they had a true patriotic fervor.

No. The greater loyalty was to themselves and to save their asses from going to jail. Their actions are as close to treason as one could get without actually acting for a nation like the current Iranian regime that is an openly avowed enemy of the USA.
Title: Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, related matters, schiff, Eli Lake
Post by: DougMacG on December 16, 2019, 06:11:06 AM: @EliLake
Schiff says on @FoxNewsSunday “there were serious abuses of FISA” but then says it wasn’t apparent two years ago. He had the same information as Nunes. Nunes called out those abuses. Schiff chose to attack Nunes instead of performing his oversight duties.

9:43 AM - Dec 15, 2019
——---------
A rare Profesional Journalist sighting.
Title: The Blues at St. James Infirmary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2019, 11:40:11 AM: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/17/the_blues_at_st_james_comeys_infirmary_141977.html
Title: Re: The Blues at St. James Infirmary
Post by: G M on December 17, 2019, 07:07:38 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2019, 11:40:11 AM
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/17/the_blues_at_st_james_comeys_infirmary_141977.html

If Comey and many others don't go to prison for many years, this govenment is beyond saving.
Title: Taibbi: Rolling Stone: Questions after the Horowitz Report
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2019, 01:49:27 PM: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/horowitz-report-russia-investigation-questions-remaining-928081/
Title: Barr: Comey lied
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2019, 02:18:41 PM: second

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-simply-not-true-comey-was-hands-off-during-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/
Title: Re: Barr: Comey lied
Post by: DougMacG on December 20, 2019, 06:26:42 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2019, 02:18:41 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-simply-not-true-comey-was-hands-off-during-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

It sure is a breath of fresh air to hear these falsehoods shot down by a person of authority.

Barr: “One of the problems with what happened was precisely that they pulled the investigation up to the executive floors, and it was run and birddogged by a very small group of very high-level officials,” Barr said. “The idea that this was seven layers below him is simply not true.”

It was an absurd statement when Comey made it, his direct subordinates are seven levels below him? These people were one level below him, the people it is his job to directly supervise. Failure to do so is dereliction of duty. But he didn't fail to do so. He is the one who directed all these resources to this. He signed three of their FISA applications himself(?) and still thought he maintained plausible deniability? Absurd. The question is who else is he covering up? They never told candidate Trump he was under surveillance. Lied to him that he wasn't the target, but we are to believe they did this high level operation, suspecting the opposition candidate of being under the direction of a foreign power and didn't tell President Obama? If they didn't tell him it could only be because he was ordering or directing the operation. What rises to a higher level of national security than what they were suspecting, investigating, and who is ultimately in charge of national security? The President of the United States, Barack Obama. Either he approved it, was directing it or this was a rogue, runaway operation that continued on with full confidence of all the people around him. What else would give people of this high authority the confidence to sign FOUR bogus FISA applications? Then after inauguration, who is in charge of national security when President Trump is not trusted by the intelligence community? These people thought they were in charge.

The only thing more astonishing than all that is that elected Democrats and Democratic voters are not appalled as they learn these facts.

Not one question or statement on this in the Democrat debate? Was their feigned interest in the constitution over impeachment merely a one night stand?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2019, 11:20:40 AM: Robert Mueller’s Dossier Dodge
Why did the special counsel not tell America that Christopher Steele’s information was false?
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 20, 2019 7:09 pm ET

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller stands before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, July 24. PHOTO: JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?

Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.”

Who Won the Latest Democratic Debate?

He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.

This makes no sense. The Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated.

Instead he abdicated, and the mystery is why. Perhaps as a former FBI director, Mr. Mueller wanted to protect the bureau’s reputation. But the best way to do that was to lay out the truth and explain any mistakes. A less generous explanation is that Mr. Mueller was more a figurehead as special counsel, and that the investigation was really run by his deputy Andrew Weissmann.

Remember that Justice official Bruce Ohr —who served as a conduit between Mr. Steele and the FBI—says Mr. Weissmann was among those at Justice he briefed that Mr. Steele hated Mr. Trump and that the dossier was opposition research. Before Mr. Mueller made him deputy, Mr. Weissmann also praised then Acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email for refusing to implement a Trump executive order. This November he appeared on MSNBC to suggest that Mr. Trump had broken the law and that he didn’t have faith in Attorney General William Barr to honestly handle the work of career prosecutors.

Mr. Mueller’s dodge on the Steele dossier—and Mr. Weissmann’s partisanship—vindicates our view from 2017 that Mr. Mueller was the wrong man to be special counsel. On the evidence in the Horowitz report, the special counsel team had to know the truth about the Steele dossier and false FBI claims to the FISA court, but they chose to look the other way.
Title: FISA Court shocked
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2019, 11:25:10 AM: FISA Court Owes Some Answers
Why did the presiding judge stonewall Rep. Devin Nunes when he reported FBI abuses?

By Kimberley A. Strassel
Dec. 19, 2019 6:58 pm ET
l
Potomac Watch: As Sen. Chuck Grassley outlines the background of why the FISA court was established, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Devin Nunes highlight the FISA court's too-little-too-late response to the FBI's abuse of power. Image: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week blasted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “misconduct” in the Carter Page surveillance warrant. Some would call this accountability. Others will more rightly call it the FISC’s “shocked to find gambling” moment.

Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer issued her four-page rebuke of the FBI Tuesday, after a Justice Department inspector general report publicly exposing the FBI’s abuses. The judge blasted the FBI for misleading the court by providing “unsupported or contradicted” information and by withholding exculpatory details about Mr. Page. The FISC noted the seriousness of the conduct and gave the FBI until Jan. 10 to explain how it will do better.

The order depicts a court stunned to discover that the FBI failed in its “duty of candor,” and angry it was duped. That’s disingenuous. To buy it, you’d have to believe that not one of the court’s 11 members—all federal judges—caught a whiff of this controversy until now. More importantly, you’d have to ignore that the court was directly informed of the FBI’s abuses nearly two years ago.

On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI’s Page application. He wrote that “the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information” that went to the court, “misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information,” and “failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.” Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.

Judge Collyer responded a week later, with a dismissive letter that addressed only the last request. The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn’t maintain a “systematic record” of proceedings and that, given “separation of power considerations,” Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department. The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.

Mr. Nunes tried again in a June 13, 2018, follow-up letter, which I have obtained. He told the court that Congress “uncovered evidence that DOJ and FBI provided incomplete and potentially incorrect information to the Court,” and that “significant relevant information was not disclosed to the Court.” This was Mr. Nunes telling FISC exactly what Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the world—18 months sooner. Mr. Nunes asked Judge Collyer to “initiate a thorough investigation.” To assist her, the same month he separately sent FISC “a classified summary of Congress’s findings and facts” to that point. The letter was signed by all 13 Republican members of the Intelligence Committee.

Judge Collyer blew him off. Her letter on June 15, 2018, is four lines long. She informs Mr. Nunes she’s received his letter. She says she’s also received his classified information. She says she’s instructing staff to provide his info to “the judges who ruled on the referenced matters.” She thanks him for his “interest” in the court.

This is stunning, given the House Intelligence Committee has oversight jurisdiction of FISA. And Mr. Nunes didn’t come to the court with mere suspicions; he provided facts, following a thorough investigation. The court at the very least had an obligation to demand answers from the FBI and the Justice Department.

It didn’t—because it didn’t want to know. One of the biggest criticisms of the FISA court since its inception is that it is a rubber stamp for law enforcement. The FISA process is one in which government lawyers secretly and unilaterally present their case for surveillance to judges, with no defense attorney to argue in opposition. The system relies on judges to push back, but they don’t. Until recently, the FISA court routinely approved 100% of the applications before it.

Just as it rubber stamped the Page warrant. That application made clear the FBI was asking to spy on a U.S. citizen associated with a presidential candidate. And the court was provided a footnote indicating political operators were involved in producing the allegations. If ever there was time to grill a few government lawyers, this was it. Yet from the inspector general’s evidence, the court whipped through the warrant with barely a blink.

The secrecy of FISA had always shielded the players from scrutiny. But Mr. Nunes’s inspection of the Page applications threatened to highlight this rot in the system. Judge Collyer’s dismissive letters made clear just what the court thought of Congress poking its nose into the secret club.

After the Horowitz report, the court had no choice but to respond. It’s predictably pointing fingers at the FBI, but the court should itself account for its failure to provide more scrutiny, and its refusal to act when Mr. Nunes first exposed the problem. The FBI is far from alone in this disgrace.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: McCain and the Steele Dossier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2019, 01:00:40 PM: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/26/ig-report-reveals-steele-funneled-claims-through-john-mccain-after-fbi-dropped-him/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20191226&utm_content=Final
Title: The Lies and Distortions of the Hatchet Men at Fusion GPS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2019, 01:13:20 PM: second post

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-lies-and-distortions-by-the-hatchet-men-at-fusion-gps

The lies and distortions by the hatchet men at Fusion GPS
by Jason Foster
| December 27, 2019 12:00 AM

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Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch tried to keep the American people in the dark as long as possible. For most of 2017, the founders of Fusion GPS hid the truth about the origins of their now-infamous dossier on President Trump. The real story behind their fight to keep its partisan funding a secret is very different from the version the journalists-for-rent tell in their recent book, Crime in Progress. I know, because I was there.

They smear me, and my former boss, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then they paint themselves as victims of “ruthlessly partisan” McCarthyite tactics. The irony is rich, given that these former journalists collected a million bucks from one political party to accuse the other of acting as agents of Russia.

The dossier they peddled ignited hysteria about alleged traitors in our government more than anything else has since Joe McCarthy’s Enemies from Within speech nearly 70 years ago. Unlike traditional opposition research, the dossier relied on anonymous foreign sources to allege an international criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Two independent reviews have since gutted its sensational claims.

The report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general exposed how the FBI improperly used the dossier to justify domestic spying (a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant). The IG made it clear that the dossier was clearly unreliable. Special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find sufficient evidence to charge a single American with the dossier’s collusion conspiracy despite two years, $32 million, 500 witnesses, and 2,800 subpoenas-worth of additional investigation.

Like the dossier itself, Fusion’s attempt to defend its work in Crime in Progress cannot withstand scrutiny. It devotes a chapter to denouncing Grassley for asking inconvenient questions about Fusion and the dossier. The essentially fictitious story casts Simpson as “Captain America":

Working to “protect the republic at all costs” from a Manchurian Candidate, with the First Amendment as his only shield, Simpson battles Congressional persecutors who were “trashing the Bill of Rights” by subpoenaing his bank to learn who funded the dossier.
Fusion’s founders target me, as then-counsel to Grassley, for supposedly “pulling the strings” that led to outing their secret. They had promised never to reveal who bankrolled the project. Why? Their book concedes a “more strategic reason” to stonewall: They wanted to control the larger political narrative.

As they write in Crime in Progress: “If it came out too soon that the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton Campaign, that revelation would allow the Republicans to depict [Christopher] Steele’s work as a partisan hit job.” It was “a fact that Fusion managed to keep secret” for nearly 11 months after the dossier became public.

During those 11 months, Fusion’s clients denied their involvement, and Fusion fought to keep anything from coming to light that would contradict those denials. Grassley tried to learn more about the dossier’s claims and Fusion’s involvement. Fusion’s founders claim they would have been willing “to explain their past work” without a protracted battle if “Grassley had simply approached Fusion in good faith and asked.”

Actually, we tried. When I called Simpson, he immediately refused to talk. He lawyered up. He’s also one of only two people who refused to cooperate with the inspector general. Without voluntary cooperation, prying any information loose would prove to be a challenge. Absent a full committee vote, no subpoena could be issued without Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s agreement. Contrary to Fusion’s caricature of our efforts as hyperpartisan, we adopted those new rules in early 2017 to strengthen the committee’s hand in what we expected would be bipartisan oversight work during the Trump administration.

Feinstein was initially willing to question Fusion, but bipartisan efforts to look into the dossier and its allegations soon disappeared. In the beginning, she co-signed document requests to Fusion, which its founders misrepresent in their book as ominous partisan threats solely from Grassley. Feinstein also agreed to subpoena Simpson to testify at a public hearing in the summer of 2017, but he refused to appear, citing his Fifth Amendment rights. We later negotiated a limited voluntary interview in private, where he refused to answer questions on many topics, including who funded the dossier.

Feinstein increasingly began to resist any dossier-related line of inquiry. At the time, Grassley and his staff were unaware the Democratic National Convention’s law firm had funded the dossier or that that a former Feinstein staffer, Daniel Jones, had privately claimed to the FBI that he raised $50 million from “seven to 10 wealthy donors primarily in New York and California.” That money reportedly funds Fusion’s ongoing postelection efforts to vindicate the dossier. It’s unclear how much Feinstein and her staff knew about this at the time.

Grassley played it straight. He supported the Mueller investigation and bucked his own GOP leadership in the Senate to shepherd a bipartisan bill protecting Mueller’s independence through his committee. He worked to conduct vigorous oversight and ask tough questions of everyone, even threatening to subpoena Trump’s son to ensure Democrats had an unlimited opportunity to question him on the record. Of course, Fusion’s narrative omits this evidence of good faith.

The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Fusion’s bank records, and in late October 2017, its clients confessed to funding the dossier after it became clear they were going to lose in court. New York Times senior White House correspondent Maggie Haberman wrote, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” A nonpartisan, nonprofit organization complained to the Federal Election Commission that campaign disclosures falsely described payments to Fusion for opposition research as “legal services.”

During the court battle, Fusion unleashed “a blizzard of filings” in which it “piled on new allegations” of supposed congressional misconduct. The court rejected all of them.

One of the failed tactics that Fusion considered “central” was to argue that the House Intelligence Committee learned “Fusion had an account at TD Bank from someone in Grassley’s staff” and to imply that was somehow improper. While it is true that we had asked about the bank during Simpson’s voluntary interview on the Senate side, it is false to claim, as Fusion does, that we learned the bank’s name from his “confidential” interview and that the information was unavailable elsewhere.

Anyone reading the transcript (p. 17-18) can see that committee staff already knew the bank’s name and mentioned it first. Fusion’s attorney did not ask how we learned it, and we wouldn’t have answered if he had. The committee protects whistleblowers and confidential sources, just as the press does. Fusion had apparently made little effort to keep its bank’s name confidential up to that point. Not only did Simpson voluntarily confirm it when asked, but we also had reason to believe he listed it on invoices to clients, so it was hardly a state secret.

Casting aspersion on the congressional investigators who forced the truth about the dossier’s funding into the open is no more effective in Fusion’s book than it was in the court proceedings. In the end, it’s merely a distraction from the bigger issues with the dossier’s unreliability, which go far beyond the partisan motives of its sponsors.

Although the special counsel and inspector general reports dealt devastating blows to its credibility, Simpson and Fritsch still maintain in their book that “time will tell” whether the dossier “deserves to take its place among” documents that have “bent the course of history,” such as the Pentagon Papers or the Warren Report. A more apt analogy might be the phony list of traitors hyped by McCarthy. But, unlike the Americans targeted in the dossier, a few of McCarthy’s victims actually were colluding with the Russians.

Jason Foster was chief investigative counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is now a consultant at DCI Group.
Title: The Russiagate conspiracy continues
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2019, 02:02:43 PM: Amazing that material relevant to this thread keeps coming up :-o

https://spectator.us/crime-progress-russiagate-whistleblowers/
Title: A lie that Horowitz missed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2020, 09:54:45 AM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/02/exclusive-the-inspector-general-missed-yet-another-lie-from-the-fbi/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=4e1da25490-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-4e1da25490-81168121
Title: Re: A lie that Horowitz missed
Post by: G M on January 03, 2020, 09:45:03 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2020, 09:54:45 AM
https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/02/exclusive-the-inspector-general-missed-yet-another-lie-from-the-fbi/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=4e1da25490-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-4e1da25490-81168121

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/385102.php

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: Kerry aide emails Steele reports to State Dept
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2020, 07:12:47 AM: https://www.judicialwatch.org/in-the-news/documents-show-senior-kerry-aide-used-private-email-to-send-steele-reports-to-state-department-colleagues/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=other
Title: Flynn withdraws guilty plea
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2020, 09:42:01 PM: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/14/michael-flynn-withdraws-guilty-plea/
Title: Comey ilegally leaked Wasserman Schultz
Post by: ccp on January 16, 2020, 05:00:51 PM: assured the Clinton mob the fix was in
and more evidence of different justice for differently connected people :

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/01/16/justice-department-investigation-into-leaks-focusing-on-james-comey-n2559664
Title: DOJ investigating Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2020, 08:52:38 PM: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/01/16/justice-department-investigation-into-leaks-focusing-on-james-comey-n2559664
Title: Re: DOJ investigating Comey
Post by: G M on January 16, 2020, 11:02:37 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2020, 08:52:38 PM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/01/16/justice-department-investigation-into-leaks-focusing-on-james-comey-n2559664

Don't be too shocked when the "No reasonable prosecutor can be expected to hold the deep state accountable" standard is invoked.
Title: Eli Lake: The FBI Scandal
Post by: DougMacG on January 23, 2020, 09:43:11 AM: Definitive, by one of the best reporters out there.

"Here is what happened."

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-fbi-scandal/
Title: FISA court confirms at least two of Carter Page apps not valid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2020, 02:12:15 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fisa-court-confirms-two-carter-page-surveillance-applications-not-valid/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=19245133

https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-doj-says-comeys-fbi-had-insufficient-predication-to-establish-probable-cause-in-fisa-scandal

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/23/breaking-spy-court-admits-fisa-warrants-against-carter-page-were-not-valid/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2020, 01:20:36 PM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/top-british-spy-report-strong-possibility-that-anti-trump-dossier-was-completely-fabricated

Said by someone who has the right to this opinion:

"Anyone who has seen real intel, or who is capable of critical thought, recognized that Steele’s work was probably Russian dezinformatsiya."
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on January 27, 2020, 04:28:26 AM: "Anyone who has seen real intel, or who is capable of critical thought, recognized that Steele’s work was probably Russian dezinformatsiya."

Yes. We all here knew it was false at first mention without any special training or inside information.

Note the post title of its first mention on the forum, before inauguration:

The Deep State uses Pravda on the Hudson to continue its subversion of Trump
« Reply #152 Trump Transition on: January 19, 2017, 10:38:31 PM » Crafty_Dog
Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2618.msg101168#msg101168

"The Deep State uses Pravda on the Hudson to continue its subversion of Trump"

- It turns out that's exactly what was happening.

Anyone of close to average intelligence could see on first glance it was make believe. So what did the FBI and MSM do with it, knowing it was bunk? Run with it at full speed.

I said to one of my liberal friends after the Mueller report, a Trump hater and subscriber of the NYT, "hard to believe the NY Times turned out to be less honest than Trump."

The NYT's use of it was subversive. The FBI's use of it was criminal.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2020, 10:19:28 AM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/28/ig-report-proves-obama-administration-spied-on-trump-campaign-big-time/
Title: McCabe case was a loser
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2020, 02:11:07 PM: DOJ Drops Unwinnable Case Against McCabe
Thomas Gallatin

The Justice Department announced Friday that it was declining to prosecute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying to inspector general investigators over his unauthorized leak to the press regarding the FBI's Hillary Clinton email investigation back in 2016. In light of the DOJ's aggressive prosecution and subsequent conviction of both former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos for lying, the decision wafts the pungent odor of a politically based double standard.

As National Review's Andrew McCarthy observes, "The FBI's former deputy director, though he undeniably misled investigators, remains a commentator at CNN. In the meantime, Papadopoulos is a felon convicted and briefly imprisoned for misleading investigators, while Flynn and Stone are awaiting sentencing on their false-statements charges. That covers both tiers of our justice system."

So, why did the DOJ make this decision? Well, it appears to have boiled down to a question of winnability. As unsatisfying as that answer may be, the most unsatisfying answer of all may be that we may never fully know why. That said, there are some indications as to why the DOJ made this decision, and it wasn't necessarily because of some deep-state cover-up.

First, as former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy noted, this decision was made regarding a narrow specific incident — McCabe's lying about a press leak. Furthermore, the DOJ's announcement does not signal that McCabe is completely out of the woods — not by a long shot. It may be that McCabe factors into prosecutor John Durham's ongoing criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. That investigation could reveal much more serious criminal actions than lying about an unauthorized press leak.

A second reason that may have factored into this decision was the DOJ's recognition that winning a conviction against McCabe was far from a forgone conclusion. The likelihood of getting a conviction with a Washington jury pool in the current highly partisan environment is slim. And adding to this is Trump's careless penchant for publicly calling for the prosecution of those he believes wronged him. Even if his assessment is accurate, it only serves to bolster any claims from McCabe's defense that the case is a politically motivated prosecution. As McCarthy states, "If you want people held accountable for their crimes, you have to ensure their fundamental right to due process. When the government poisons the well, the bad guys reap the benefits."

On a positive note, Attorney General William Barr has installed an outside prosecutor to review Flynn's case. This is part of a larger effort by Barr; The New York Times reports that he recently "installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases." Like a cat tasked with clearing the barn of rats, Barr has set about his work with the utmost seriousness. Trump needs to trust him, let him do his work, and avoid throwing out ammunition for Democrats to use against him.
Title: Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2020, 02:25:44 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/16/secret-letter-to-william-barr-set-stage-for-indepe/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=fjZLRxU4L%2BvqxBH4gpXMpGjm6%2BiDsM0sC1MqJXls09ppMVWwN5p2gmVcIrDLq%2Be2&bt_ts=1581935585220
Title: Re: McCabe case was a loser
Post by: G M on February 17, 2020, 02:50:34 PM: Ah, "No reasonable prosecutor". Sounds better than the Deep State takes care of it's own.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2020, 02:11:07 PM
DOJ Drops Unwinnable Case Against McCabe
Thomas Gallatin

The Justice Department announced Friday that it was declining to prosecute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying to inspector general investigators over his unauthorized leak to the press regarding the FBI's Hillary Clinton email investigation back in 2016. In light of the DOJ's aggressive prosecution and subsequent conviction of both former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos for lying, the decision wafts the pungent odor of a politically based double standard.

As National Review's Andrew McCarthy observes, "The FBI's former deputy director, though he undeniably misled investigators, remains a commentator at CNN. In the meantime, Papadopoulos is a felon convicted and briefly imprisoned for misleading investigators, while Flynn and Stone are awaiting sentencing on their false-statements charges. That covers both tiers of our justice system."

So, why did the DOJ make this decision? Well, it appears to have boiled down to a question of winnability. As unsatisfying as that answer may be, the most unsatisfying answer of all may be that we may never fully know why. That said, there are some indications as to why the DOJ made this decision, and it wasn't necessarily because of some deep-state cover-up.

First, as former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy noted, this decision was made regarding a narrow specific incident — McCabe's lying about a press leak. Furthermore, the DOJ's announcement does not signal that McCabe is completely out of the woods — not by a long shot. It may be that McCabe factors into prosecutor John Durham's ongoing criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. That investigation could reveal much more serious criminal actions than lying about an unauthorized press leak.

A second reason that may have factored into this decision was the DOJ's recognition that winning a conviction against McCabe was far from a forgone conclusion. The likelihood of getting a conviction with a Washington jury pool in the current highly partisan environment is slim. And adding to this is Trump's careless penchant for publicly calling for the prosecution of those he believes wronged him. Even if his assessment is accurate, it only serves to bolster any claims from McCabe's defense that the case is a politically motivated prosecution. As McCarthy states, "If you want people held accountable for their crimes, you have to ensure their fundamental right to due process. When the government poisons the well, the bad guys reap the benefits."

On a positive note, Attorney General William Barr has installed an outside prosecutor to review Flynn's case. This is part of a larger effort by Barr; The New York Times reports that he recently "installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases." Like a cat tasked with clearing the barn of rats, Barr has set about his work with the utmost seriousness. Trump needs to trust him, let him do his work, and avoid throwing out ammunition for Democrats to use against him.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2020, 02:54:33 PM: "as former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy noted, this decision was made regarding a narrow specific incident — McCabe's lying about a press leak"
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on February 17, 2020, 03:50:13 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2020, 02:54:33 PM
"as former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy noted, this decision was made regarding a narrow specific incident — McCabe's lying about a press leak"

Ah, what was Roger Stone and convicted of?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2020, 12:18:38 PM: IIRC for seven felonies, including:

Perjury
Witness tampering/intimidation
Title: KT McFarland vs. Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2020, 08:12:24 PM: https://www.amgreatness.com/2020/02/19/k-t-mcfarland-says-mueller-interrogators-put-her-through-hell-and-left-her-trauamatized/
Title: Bill's tarmac meeting with AG Lynch was planned
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2020, 04:10:54 PM: https://www.foxnews.com/media/loretta-lynch-bill-clinton-tarmac-meeting-new-book
Title: Re: Whitey Bulger
Post by: G M on February 22, 2020, 07:54:07 PM: You learn something new everyday. I found this quite disturbing:

https://apnews.com/8dff185e1324cb7079b8a86c48c2ec56

Quote from: G M on May 16, 2019, 05:36:33 PM
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/05/14/prison-letters-james-whitey-bulger-writes-determination-stay-alive/4o3m8cZPiNcwYzTZ3WE5iM/story.html

Quote from: ccp on May 16, 2019, 04:57:41 PM
" Funny how Whitey met his end just as this began to bubble to the surface "

From Wikipedia:

"Bulger was transferred from the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City to United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia on October 29, 2018.[22][96] At 8:20 a.m. on October 30, the 89-year-old Bulger[97] was found unresponsive in the prison. Bulger was in a wheelchair and had been beaten to death by multiple inmates armed with a sock-wrapped padlock and a shiv."

A deep state hit?
Title: More on Sid Gottlieb
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2020, 08:51:18 PM: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html

but back to Whitey

Bulger murdered and no one convicted?

While in jail?

Very weird. Like Epstein. Dies . The silence is deafening.
Title: Re: More on Sid Gottlieb
Post by: G M on February 22, 2020, 09:53:12 PM: I wonder if the video cameras were malfunctioning then as well...

Quote from: ccp on February 22, 2020, 08:51:18 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html

but back to Whitey

Bulger murdered and no one convicted?

While in jail?

Very weird. Like Epstein. Dies . The silence is deafening.
Title: DHS whistleblower dead
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2020, 01:46:04 PM: Where was Hillary at the time?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8034145/DHS-whistleblower-Philip-Haney-shot-dead-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound.html
Title: Well you come after ----- "you
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2020, 05:22:45 PM: come against an army. You will lose, and it won’t be pretty."

Susan Rice

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/susan-rice-tells-snoop-dogg-to-back-the-off-gayle-king-he-says-he-didnt-threaten-her
Title: Re: DHS whistleblower dead
Post by: G M on February 24, 2020, 08:20:02 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2020, 01:46:04 PM
Where was Hillary at the time?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8034145/DHS-whistleblower-Philip-Haney-shot-dead-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound.html

I really would like to see the reports.
Title: Russia collusion case fell apart 1st month of Trump presidency; more
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2020, 09:33:06 AM: https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/fbis-russia-collusion-case-fell-apart-first-month-trump-presidency#.XmoWums-lZ0.twitter

But wait! There's more!

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/03/12/buried_from_trump_tower_meeting_translators_avowal_of_no_collusion_122774.html
Title: Did Halper work for Hillary?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2020, 08:17:06 AM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/13/did-spygate-source-stefan-halper-work-for-the-hillary-clinton-campaign/

A friend comments:

"Halper is exactly the sort of connected grifter who seems to circulate in that world. I haven’t experienced the phenomenon directly, but my understanding is that they love to use college professors who go to and/or host conferences as access agents. I.e., to help spot and recruit potential sources. Not necessarily nefarious on its face, but it’s easy to see how one of the professors might either go off on his own entirely, go beyond his mandate, or get misused. My bet with Halper is that he probably went a bit beyond what he was asked to do, but that people were happy about that, and even helped him go further. Probably the same sort of thing with Mifsud."
Title: Flynn didn't frame himself
Post by: G M on March 16, 2020, 02:58:24 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386360.php
Title: Obama officials knew Steele dossier was Russian DisInfo
Post by: G M on April 16, 2020, 11:01:51 AM: https://saraacarter.com/declassified-horowitz-footnotes-show-obama-officials-knew-steele-dossier-was-russian-disinformation-designed-to-target-trump/
Title: if only we can show the obvious : Obama of course knew this as well
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2020, 08:29:36 AM: https://www.yahoo.com/news/report-footnotes-fbi-knew-russians-231304021.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2020, 08:35:55 AM: Note that the journalist of that piece is Catherine Herridge, formerly of Bret Baier's Special Report at FOX where she caught my attention as an outstanding reporter, particularly with matters related to intel.
Title: Federalist: Seven Devastating Revelations about Crossfire Hurricane
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 20, 2020, 08:14:53 PM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/20/7-devastating-revelations-about-crossfire-hurricane-in-new-releases/
Title: Kerry State Dept in on it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2020, 07:46:10 PM: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/21/fisa-docs-show-john-kerrys-state-dept-was-key-player-in-russia-collusion-hoax/
Title: Federalist counter to the Senate Intel Comm report
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2020, 08:11:12 PM: second post

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/21/senate-intel-committee-still-running-interference-for-russia-collusion-nonsense/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2020, 08:26:28 PM: GM: Snark noted even as I delete it :-D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on April 21, 2020, 08:27:08 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2020, 08:26:28 PM
GM: Snark noted even as I delete it :-D

:-D
Title: Andrew McCarthy: More media misdirection on Trump-Russia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2020, 09:35:40 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/more-media-misdirection-on-trump-russia/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: More media misdirection on Trump-Russia
Post by: ccp on April 23, 2020, 05:54:52 AM: Andrew McCarthy: More media misdirection on Trump-Russia

Andrew also point out the fecklessness of the Senate Republicans on the committee as well

disappointing
Title: Steele dossier deleted emails from source
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2020, 12:07:22 PM: https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/23/christopher-steele-dossier-deleted-emails-source/
Title: anyone think it is the principal and not the money promised
Post by: ccp on April 24, 2020, 02:00:00 PM: https://nypost.com/2020/04/23/rick-bright-hires-anti-kavanaugh-lawyers-in-white-house-battle/

the same two jewish democrat lawyers again
who funds them?
Title: FBI hid Brady Material
Post by: G M on April 24, 2020, 07:57:23 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386978.php

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: one Tucker Carlson thought this best explanation yet from Andrew McC last night
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2020, 05:38:20 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/fbi-set-up-michael-flynn-to-preserve-trump-russia-probe/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2020, 06:12:13 AM: The Judge and Michael Flynn
New documents suggest violations of the Brady rule on evidence.
By The Editorial Board
May 1, 2020 6:49 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
583

Gen. Michael Flynn in December 2017
PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan is overseeing the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who is accused of lying to the FBI. The judge now has a second issue of fact and law to examine—to wit, whether prosecutors withheld crucial information from the Flynn defense.

Joe Biden's Denial/Michael Flynn's Evidence

SUBSCRIBE
The Justice Department has recently and belatedly provided to Mr. Flynn’s lawyers documents that are potentially exculpatory. Mr. Flynn in late 2017 pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the former Russian ambassador to the U.S. But in 2019 he obtained new counsel and this year moved to withdraw his guilty plea, as evidence has mounted that the FBI ambushed him in the January 2017 interview in which prosecutors claim he lied.

The latest documents certainly raise alarms about the bureau’s tactics. The FBI in early 2017 obtained transcripts of the Flynn-ambassador calls and jumped on the dubious theory that Mr. Flynn’s conversations about Russian sanctions violated the Logan Act—a 1799 law that has never been used to convict an American. The FBI already knew what Mr. Flynn had said and arranged to interview him.

Handwritten notes from former FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap suggest the purpose was to trap Mr. Flynn in a lie. Mr. Priestap writes: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” A separate document shows the FBI had already decided there was nothing to allegations of Flynn-Russia collusion. So why keep pursuing him on absurd Logan Act claims?

A newly released email from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page shows that bureau officials debated how to skirt its policy of providing Mr. Flynn a formal warning against lying to agents. Former FBI Director Jim Comey bragged in 2018 that he sent the agents who told Mr. Flynn he needn’t consult the White House counsel.

Other documents show the FBI deliberately chose to provide no warning to Mr. Flynn and hid from him that the interview was being conducted in an investigatory context—allowing him to think he was merely chatting with fellow government officials. The FBI, in other words, looks to have set up a situation designed to coax Mr. Flynn into saying something it could later claim was at odds with the transcript.

Enter Judge Sullivan, who will have to decide if these underhanded tactics now merit throwing out the case. The evidence also raises questions about former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s decision to prosecute Mr. Flynn. Beyond dispute is that prosecutors and the FBI failed in their obligation to hand over the information as they sought to coerce Mr. Flynn into accepting a plea deal or face financial ruin.

In Brady v. Maryland (1963), the Supreme Court required prosecutors to turn over all information that might exonerate a defendant. But the only reason these potentially exculpatory documents are now with Mr. Flynn is because Attorney General Bill Barr this year appointed the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, Jeffrey Jensen, to review the Flynn case. Mr. Jensen decided to turn over the documents.

Judge Sullivan should be furious given his own experience with prosecutorial abuse. As he related in a 2017 op-ed in these pages, his “wake-up call” came in 2008 when he presided over the corruption trial of former Senator Ted Stevens. Six months after the guilty verdict, “it was revealed that federal prosecutors had concealed numerous pieces of evidence that very likely could have resulted in Stevens’s acquittal,” wrote Judge Sullivan.

He assigned a lawyer to investigate DOJ misconduct. His practice since has been to begin each case by issuing a Brady order, putting prosecutors on notice of their obligation to turn over exculpatory information, and reminding them that noncompliance can lead to sanctions or contempt of court.

The Jensen team clearly views the documents as relevant to the Flynn defense—it would have no basis otherwise for turning them over. So what’s DOJ’s excuse for failing to provide them until now? Who decided they weren’t relevant to the defense?

All of this throws into doubt the Flynn prosecution and plea, and Judge Sullivan has an obligation to examine the prosecutorial record. Prosecutors wield extraordinary power, and Brady abuses are all too common. If judges aren’t willing to police misbehavior, Americans can have no faith in our system of justice.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2020, 06:29:35 AM: "he Justice Department has recently and belatedly provided to Mr. Flynn’s lawyers documents that are potentially exculpatory"

This I don't understand. Why is DOJ run by Barr holding up documents - hiding and concealing relevant evidence?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2020, 06:36:58 AM: My understanding is that it is thanks to Barr that the docs have been turned over.
Title: Love the prosecutor at end of interview
Post by: ccp on May 08, 2020, 05:34:37 AM: " I have been a Federal prosecutor for 14 yrs and have never seen anything like this"

I guess the guy is either senile or lying to pretend he could not read of Loretta Lynn and ERic Holder political moves:

https://news.grabien.com/story-cnn-doj-dropping-case-against-flynn-unprecedented-fix-and-ab

CNN again
God they suck
Title: Re: Love the prosecutor at end of interview
Post by: DougMacG on May 08, 2020, 06:12:39 AM: Quote from: ccp on May 08, 2020, 05:34:37 AM
" I have been a Federal prosecutor for 14 yrs and have never seen anything like this"
I guess the guy is either senile or lying to pretend he could not read of Loretta Lynn and ERic Holder political moves:
https://news.grabien.com/story-cnn-doj-dropping-case-against-flynn-unprecedented-fix-and-ab

CNN again
God they suck

For one who doesn't watch cable news, a look at a few samples is hard to take. Funny they think conservative radio poisons people's minds. Conservatives play right and left in their own words, then get fact checked by taking things out of context. As you suggest, what is the context of a hundred criminal or politically biased actions taken (and not taken) by the Holder and Lynch Justice Departments?

I feel sorry for the vulnerable, poisoned minds of their viewers. 0.1% of the country watch this but these false stories set the narrative that echos across social media all day.
Title: Obama comes out to hand his leftist media pals reason to change the subject
Post by: ccp on May 10, 2020, 09:31:44 AM: Funny - he publicly calls trump's handling of corona is a "chaotic disaster" - (*why now* ; well isn't it obvious?)

for his leftist media propaganda hacks (including Drudge) to change the subject away from the evidence coming out he was clearly on board with spying etc. on his political enemy while he was prez:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/05/crooked-obama-panics-deep-state-reporter-isikoff-releases-leaked-call-former-presidents-fingerprints-attempted-coup-documents-coming/

With a legitimate media - we would be hearing how this is worse then Watergate.

Not only was the be bopping Prez involved in the cover up , but he was part to the corrupt organization committing crimes.
But alas , not a peep. Even the now Trump hating drudger port is carrying water for the LEFT.

:cry: :x
Title: Twelve Revelations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2020, 11:05:23 AM: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/dirty-dozen-12-revelations-sunk-muellers-case-against
Title: Jesse Waters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2020, 03:59:33 PM: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1259328864859422723?s=20
Title: Morris: Seth Rich, not Russians, hacked/leaked DNC server?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2020, 05:00:52 PM: https://www.dickmorris.com/lawsuit-says-seth-rich-leaked-dnc-emails-not-russia-lunch-alert/
Title: Counter argument on Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2020, 08:11:20 AM: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/opinion/bill-barr-michael-flynn.html
Title: brennan: bring durham on !
Post by: ccp on May 17, 2020, 08:22:56 AM: I have nothing to hide:

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/05/15/brennan-i-welcome-chance-to-talk-with-durham-investigators-i-have-nothing-to-hide/

This could be true.
We already know he did whatever he could to bring Trump down before during and after the election .
Title: WSJ: Flynn and the Logan Act
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 09:33:35 AM: The Mueller-Rosenstein Logan Act
How a musty 1799 law became an excuse to squeeze Michael Flynn.
By The Editorial Board
Updated May 19, 2020 8:32 am ET

The continuing prosecution of Michael Flynn is a miscarriage of justice on many levels, but one angle that deserves more attention is the reliance by Justice officials on the Logan Act as an investigatory excuse.

The Logan Act is the appendix of U.S. statute books, a law that serves no useful purpose. The 1799 law bars private citizens from intervening in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. No American has ever been convicted under the law, though it is sometimes exploited for political ends. President Trump has picked up the Logan chant in attacking former Secretary of State John Kerry’s private talks with Iran’s foreign minister.

The law was especially dubious in application to Mr. Flynn, who as Mr. Trump’s appointee as national security adviser in late 2016 and early 2017 would naturally talk to foreign officials. He needed to get to know people he would soon deal with. Obama Administration officials apparently resented that Mr. Flynn was discussing President Obama’s December 2016 sanctions against Russia for meddling in the U.S. election with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Yet whatever the wisdom of his conversations, the Logan claim is silly.

The Justice Department made this clear two weeks ago in its court filing seeking to drop its charges against Mr. Flynn. The filing explains that even the Obama Justice Department abandoned a possible Logan charge as too “difficult to prosecute,” a reason the FBI never opened an independent criminal investigation on a Logan basis.

Yet, strangely, the Logan Act rationale somehow made it into the memo that then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote in August 2017 laying out the scope of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. A section of the memo is devoted to Mr. Flynn, authorizing the Mueller team to investigate “crimes” he may have committed by “engaging in conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition.”

Why was Mr. Rosenstein giving Mr. Mueller permission to indulge a dubious prosecutorial theory that was dropped by his own department eight months earlier? Mr. Rosenstein wrote his scope memo nearly three months after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, and it reads like the special counsel team grasping at any legal tactic it could find to pressure Mr. Flynn. In the end even the special counsel’s office dropped its Logan Act pursuit and squeezed Mr. Flynn to cop to lying to the FBI when even the interviewing FBI agents weren’t sure he was lying.

Mr. Rosenstein hasn’t had to explain his scope memo in public and under oath, and we’d like to hear him do so. We hope the Senate Judiciary Committee puts the question to him when Chairman Lindsey Graham begins hearings on the Russian collusion investigation in early June. While they’re at it, how about repealing the Logan Act?

Flynn critics have separately adopted the tedious chant that Mr. Flynn somehow got off easily, given his separate Turkey “crimes.” This is a reference to Mueller team claims that Mr. Flynn did not provide accurate Foreign Agents Registration Act filings to the Department of Justice about lobbying work he did for Turkey before he joined the Trump Administration.

Yet the 1938 FARA is almost as musty as the Logan Act. In the 50 years through 2016, the Justice Department brought only seven criminal FARA cases and won three convictions. Until it was resurrected by Mr. Mueller to squeeze information out of Trump associates, it was routine for Beltway operators to file belated or inaccurate reports—and work out fines or remedies with DOJ. Mr. Flynn’s work for Turkey was distasteful, but Mr. Mueller’s threat of a FARA charge was a new and unequal application of the law. In any event, Mr. Flynn was never charged with a FARA violation. The FARA accusation was gratuitously listed in a “statement of offense” against Mr. Flynn, though it was not part of the plea agreement.
Title: Jerry Nads
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2020, 01:45:37 PM: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/19/democrats-are-in-the-middle-of-another-impeachment-inquiry-during-coronavirus-pandemic-n406406

Wikipedia reports Dick Morris helped get Jerry Nadler elected to high class president

small world

then again he got Clinton re elected

all this before he turned conservative. :-o
Title: Susan Rice, Comey, and Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 03:15:34 PM: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/susan-rice-email-declassified-release-is-imminent-source

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/declassified-susan-rice-email-shows-comey-had-no-indication-flynn-passed-classified-info-to-russian-ambassador/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=20364484
Title: VDH : justice - forggetaboutit
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2020, 04:00:52 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/
Title: Rice memo analyzed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 09:02:26 AM: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/explosive-rice-memo-declassified.php
Title: Timeline: The Making of a Myth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 10:10:42 AM: second post

https://justthenews.com/accountability/media/making-myth-timeline-media-role-selling-trump-russia-collusion-narrative#.Xr7c84K5FYg.twitter
Title: Re: Rice memo analyzed
Post by: DougMacG on May 20, 2020, 12:55:25 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 09:02:26 AM
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/explosive-rice-memo-declassified.php

John Hinderacker, from the article:

"[Susan] Rice [Michael Flynn's redecessor]foresaw that despite the Obama holdovers’ best efforts, the truth about their “Russia investigation” could come to light someday. If that happened, she wanted it to be on record that President Obama had authorized her to lie, on advice from James Comey."

- THAT is why it's called ObamaGate. The corruption scandal was done in his name with his knowledge and support. Intentionally disrupting the smooth, peaceful, cooperative, change of government to his elected successors, one of the most important features of our republic - for the first time in history, - and it was authorized and fully supported by the POTUS.

Now that it is all known, where are the denials? Is anyone going to ask him about it? Under oath?? What about Biden? He was there. Just a wallflower?? Even more relevant because he is currently being vetted for the top job.

That we don't want to prosecute former Presidents [and Vice Presidents] doesn't mean we don't get to know all of what happened.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 02:11:51 PM: Remember too her experiences getting burned when she lied previously for the team (Benghazi, Bergdahl, etc)
Title: How Russiagate began-- the Iranian Deal theory
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2020, 08:12:57 PM: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/russiagate-obama-iran
Title: Weissman now on Team Biden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2020, 09:29:41 PM: second post

https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2020/05/21/mueller-investigator-andrew-weissmann-headlining-biden-virtual-fundraiser/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20200521
Title: McCarthy: Flynn was not masked to begin with
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2020, 09:43:00 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/michael-flynn-was-not-masked-because-fbi-framed-him-as-a-clandestine-agent-of-russia/
Title: Judge Sullivan getting backed into a corner
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2020, 04:26:24 PM: https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2020/05/23/what-a-circus-techno-fog-and-others-weigh-in-on-judge-emmet-sullivan-hiring-an-attorney-to-represent-him/
Title: Andrew McCarthy on the current posture of the Flynn writ of mandamus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2020, 09:15:48 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/michael-flynn-case-judge-luttig-respectful-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

Savy friend comments:

"It’s really, really simple. Sullivan’s self-regard caused him to forget the First Rule of Holes."
Title: Declassified Flynn transcripts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2020, 04:51:35 PM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/29/declassified-flynn-transcripts-contradict-key-mueller-claims-against-flynn/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein to testify today
Post by: DougMacG on June 03, 2020, 06:13:33 AM: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia/republican-led-u-s-senate-probe-to-hear-first-testimony-on-trump-russia-investigation-idUSKBN23A1EB

This is a big deal Rosenstein signed one of the false FISA docs, was complicit, knew it was bogus when he hired the special prosecutor. What say he under oath about it all? I don't recall? I invoke my 5th amendment protections? The truth, so help me God? Imagine if a public official just stepped up there and told us the truth.
----------------------------
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/10-most-important-questions-rod-rosenstein
The 10 most important questions for Rod Rosenstein
From an alleged plot to remove the president from office to Robert Mueller's appointment, the former deputy attorney general is going to face some intense interrogation Wednesday by senators.

By John Solomon
Last Updated:
June 3, 2020 - 9:09am
Two years ago, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein chafed when asked whether congressional Republicans might have legitimate reason to suspect the factual underpinnings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that targeted Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the Russia probe.

Seeming a bit perturbed, Rosenstein launched into a mini-lecture on how much care and work went into FISA applications at the FBI and Justice Department.

"There's a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I've seen talk about it seem not to recognize that a FISA application is actually a warrant, just like a search warrant. In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career law enforcement officer who swears the information is true ... And if it is wrong, that person is going to face consequences," Rosenstein asserted.

"If we're going to accuse someone of wrongdoing, we have to have admissible evidence, credible witnesses, we have to prove our case in court. We have to affix our signature to the charging document," he added.

Rosenstein did affix his signature to the fourth and last FISA warrant against Page in 2017. And now in 2020, newly declassified evidence shows the FBI did not have the verified evidence or a credible witness in the form of Christopher Steele and his dossier to support the claims submitted to the FISA court as verified.

In fact, DOJ has withdrawn the very FISA application Rosenstein approved and signed after the department's internal watchdog found it included inaccurate, undocumented, and falsified evidence.

On Wednesday, when he appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosenstein is likely to strike a humbler tone in the face of overwhelming evidence that the FBI-executed FISAs have been chronically flawed, including in the Russia case he supervised.

"Even the best law enforcement officers make mistakes, and some engage in willful misconduct," Rosenstein said in a statement issued ahead of his appearance. “Independent law enforcement investigations, judicial review and congressional oversight are important checks on the discretion of agents and prosecutors."

Republicans led by Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are likely to interrogate Rosenstein extensively as they try to determine whether the glaring FISA failures and the FBI's representations in the Russia probe were a case of misplaced trust or a deeper plot by unelected bureaucrats to unseat and/or thwart President Trump.

Here are the 10 most important questions those senators are likely to set out to answer:

Did Rosenstein read the FISA warrant renewal he signed in summer 2017 against Page, review any evidence supporting it, or ask the FBI any questions about the case before affixing his signature?
Does the former No. 2 DOJ official now believe the FISA was so flawed that it should never have been submitted to the court? Does he regret signing it?
Given what he now knows about flaws with the Steele dossier and FBI probe, would Rosenstein have appointed Robert Mueller as the Russia Special Counsel if given a do-over?
Did Rosenstein engage in a conversation with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in 2017 about wearing a wire on President Trump as part of a plot to remove the 45th president from office under the 25th Amendment?
Who drafted and provided the supporting materials that Rosenstein used to create the scope of investigation memos that guided Mueller's probe?
Does Rosenstein have any concerns about the conduct of fired FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as he looks back on their tenure and in light of the new evidence that has surfaced?
When did Rosenstein learn that the CIA had identified Page as one of its assets — ruling out he was a Russian spy — and that information in Steele's dossier used in the FISA warrant had been debunked or linked to Russian disinformation?
Does Rosenstein believe the FISA court was intentionally misled, or can the glaring missteps be explained by bureaucratic bungling?
What culpability does Rosenstein assign to himself for the failures in the Russia case he supervised, and what other people does he blame?
Does the former deputy attorney general believe anyone in the Russia case should face criminal charges?
Title: I guess I goofed
Post by: ccp on June 03, 2020, 01:36:32 PM: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/rod-rosenstein-special-counsel-mueller/2020/06/03/id/970341/

now that almost no one is paying any attention

HAHAHAHAHHHAHa

so what are going to do about it teach?
Title: Rosenstein to testify today, swing and a miss
Post by: DougMacG on June 03, 2020, 04:11:36 PM: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/06/03/four-issues-highlight-how-lindsey-grahams-senate-hearings-are-a-deep-state-cover-operation/

Detailed article about what was not asked.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 03, 2020, 04:14:31 PM: ".Detailed article about what was not asked."

why this could not be because maybe Lindsay Graham and other Republicans also supported an IC .

can't get tooo deep into. this now.

:x :wink:
Title: Russian conspiracy, Obamagate, Mueller, the Left and the media,
Post by: DougMacG on June 08, 2020, 05:24:33 AM: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany:

It’s a pretty grave thing to spy on an American citizen, to violate his Fourth Amendment rights, to not have a basis to do so, and to rely on a Russian dossier full of lies as the justification. So, it’s really astonishing to hear from [Rosenstein] that he’s not sure he read every page of that warrant. But, I suppose it’s encouraging to hear – with his 20/20 hindsight – that he wouldn’t have signed on it, though I’m sure that’s of no comfort to Carter Page.
***
The President is dismayed. This happened to the President’s campaign. A Republican campaign was spied on by a Democratic presidency – a Democratic administration – based on a dossier paid for by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the DNC. This is absolutely extraordinary. It is the biggest political scandal that we’ve seen and the lack of journalistic curiosity on this front is appalling.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/quote-of-the-day-13.php
Title: Rosenstein's devastating admissions
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2020, 07:03:00 PM: https://spectator.us/rod-rosenstein-devastating-admissions/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: What is the point?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2020, 07:19:15 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/lindsey-graham-investigation-objectives-unclear/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202020-06-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2020, 09:42:06 PM: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/evidence-puts-obama-intelligence-assessment-russia

Comment from astute friend:

"Note the direct quotes from Hoffman, who probably knows and understands the Russians better than anyone else you’re hearing from."
Title: This seems HUGE to me!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2020, 12:13:22 PM: According to Katherine Herridge CBS News. #FLYNN Defense motion reveals recently uncovered agent Strzok notes, discovered by US Attorney Jensen as part of DOJ review. “Strzok’s notes believed to be of January 4, 2017, reveal that former President Obama, James Comey, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, and apparently Susan Rice discussed the transcripts of Flynn’s calls and how to proceed against him. Mr. Obama himself directed that “the right people” investigate General Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious: General Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak “appear legit.” Get focused key section agent Peter Strzok declassified notes believed to be January 4, 2017 - 2 1/2 weeks before inauguration. NOTE: ‘D’ is FBI shorthand for Director (in this case Comey) and why so many reactions when the notes were declassified 6/23... to Strzok’s notes, it appears that Vice President Biden personally raised the idea of the Logan Act. " @CBSNews

https://twitter.com/CBS_Herridge/status/1275823198114906112
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2020, 01:00:43 PM: second post

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/biden-raised-logan-act-in-oval-office-discussion-about-flynn-peter-strzok-notes-show
Title: Andrew McCarthy: DC Ciruit to Judge Sullivan: STFU
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2020, 04:43:10 PM: third

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/federal-appeals-court-orders-judge-sullivan-to-dismiss-the-flynn-case/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-06-24&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: This seems HUGE to me!
Post by: DougMacG on June 24, 2020, 07:31:43 PM: This is big, bigger than IRS targeting, which was bigger than anything Nixon did.
-----------------------------------------
" it appears that Vice President Biden personally raised the idea of the Logan Act. " @CBSNews

And they are all worried Trump was involved targeting Biden in Ukraine corruption.
Title: but wait , I thought he couldn't remember anything
Post by: ccp on July 13, 2020, 06:35:17 AM: https://www.breitbart.com/news/mueller-defends-russia-probe-says-stone-remains-a-felon/
Title: Obamagate was an attempted coup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2020, 03:13:02 AM: https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/obamagate-isnt-a-conspiracy-theory-its-the-biggest-political-scandal-of-our-time/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 18, 2020, 04:35:54 AM: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/just-released-trump-russia-documents-show-anti-trump
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 18, 2020, 06:14:23 AM: 1) Too bad the American people didn't know all that in Jan 2017. 2). Too bad they don't know it now. It was all false.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 18, 2020, 12:50:50 PM: "There is as yet no explanation in the documents or from the New York Times as to the identities of the four "American officials" who apparently provided the misleading and false information; or what their motivation was."

The public's right NOT to know.
Title: WSJ: The Unasked FBI Question: Why?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2020, 05:46:05 AM: The Unasked FBI Question: Why?
G-men rightly debunked the Steele dossier. And then peddled it anyway.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
July 21, 2020 6:55 pm ET

New revelations out of the 2016 Russia follies more emphatically underline a question nobody seems willing to ask: Why did the FBI fan a Russia collusion confabulation that it knew was unfounded, false and baseless?

The obvious answer is not so much rejected as turned away from: because the FBI, and specifically Director James Comey, had a powerful interest in changing the subject from Mr. Comey’s chaotic actions in the Hillary Clinton email case.

OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
Chaos In Portland / Steele Dossier Documents

SUBSCRIBE
First, the latest news: Christopher Steele is revealed more than ever to be a fabulous fraud—or a spy practicing his penchant for disinformation. An FBI interview with his “primary source,” now made public, shows the British ex-agent was trading on tall tales by a random kibitzer who had no idea what use his badinage was being put to.

More tellingly, we learn from a newly released memo that the FBI’s counterintelligence deputy, Peter Strzok, was befuddled by a Feb. 14, 2017, New York Times report, based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had uncovered numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. The FBI hadn’t found such contacts. It still hasn’t.

OK, let’s cut to the chase. Clearly somebody whom the press deemed credible was even then peddling in the name of the FBI that such evidence existed. The same FBI seen in these documents so diligently disproving the Steele dossier was simultaneously pushing on a federal surveillance court the claim that the dossier was credible in a way that would have lent verisimilitude to leaks to the media suggesting the agency was hot on the trail of collusion.

And all this came from the same FBI leadership that had just gotten done using a questionable Russian intercept, one that FBI colleagues considered false and a possible Kremlin hoax, as rationale for a series of antic, improper and insubordinate actions in the Hillary Clinton email case. These actions culminated in the decision, shortly before Election Day, to reopen the case, which Clinton officials, independent pollsters and even Trump pollsters pointed to as the one factor that may have shifted a close Electoral College result to Donald Trump.

For Perry Mason, all this could only be strongly suggestive of an FBI motive to change the subject after Election Day to the Trump campaign’s nonexistent Russian connections. Whether the FBI itself was a direct or indirect source of the leaks then being strategically filtered into the press, its actions helped create a gauze of plausibility for such stories promoted by Mr. Trump’s enemies in the intelligence community.

You may want to dispose of the stereotype of reporters as irrepressible truth seekers. We seem to hire nowadays mainly people who are unnaturally conformist and unnaturally unwilling to perceive phenomena until their milieu gives them the OK. Use your imagination: It is impossible to exaggerate how mortifying all this would have been for Mr. Comey—or how discrediting to the FBI to have been spoofed by a Russian fabrication into interfering in a U.S. presidential election, helping to deliver what fellow intelligence agencies now claim was the Kremlin’s preferred outcome.

The press’s failure to face this story is most glaringly manifested in its failure even to report the existence of a classified appendix, written by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, describing Mr. Comey’s actions in relation to the still-hidden Russian intelligence that drove his intervention in the Hillary case.

Never mind that Mr. Horowitz himself has publicly flagged the appendix’s significance. Never mind that he called before Congress for it to be declassified. Unbelievably, his secret report still goes unmentioned by most of the U.S. media. There have been no editorials, no clamor calling for its release that I can find.

Why? Maybe because the mainstream press was so complicit, so gullible, in the Christopher Steele matter, it is unenthused about a story that would amplify its malfeasance. For their part, pro-Trump news sites clearly have no use for a story that portrays his victory as a Comey-spawned accident.

Look, nothing of interest happens in our world except by cooperation. “Conspiracy” is a word for cooperation toward a criminal end. One more laziness on top of many others is to dismiss these inconvenient facts as a “conspiracy theory.”

At least one cognizable alleged crime already exists in the public domain and practically tells the entire story in miniature. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, in one Horowitz report, is seen complaining to a colleague in a text message about the FBI’s role in helping elect Mr. Trump. In another, he’s seen doctoring a CIA email to portray Trump associate Carter Page falsely to the surveillance court as a Kremlin agent when he really was a CIA informant.

Normally this is the kind of dramatic microcosm the press loves, the entire narrative in a nutshell. You may well be learning of it here for the first time.
Title: A long and excellent account of the Soft Coup attempt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2020, 12:18:16 PM: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/put-job

Long and excellent account of the Russia coup attempt.
Title: Binney didn't kill himself!
Post by: G M on August 01, 2020, 11:05:48 PM: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cia-fabricated-russiagate-evidence-says-former-nsa-tech-chief
Title: Andrew McCarthy: There was no defensive briefing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2020, 05:38:43 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/russiagate-probe-neither-trump-nor-his-campaign-ever-got-a-defensive-briefing/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-08-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2020, 06:45:38 AM: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/10/graham_fbi_committed_a_new_crime_with_steele_dossier_somebody_needs_to_go_to_jail_for_this.html

"Somebody needs to go to jail for this." Comey? The lies under oath continued under Christopher Wray.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on August 10, 2020, 07:58:43 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on August 10, 2020, 06:45:38 AM
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/10/graham_fbi_committed_a_new_crime_with_steele_dossier_somebody_needs_to_go_to_jail_for_this.html

"Somebody needs to go to jail for this." Comey? The lies under oath continued under Christopher Wray.

Ms. Lindsey talks tough on tv, yet does nothing with actual impact.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2020, 10:10:39 AM: Quote from: G M on August 10, 2020, 07:58:43 AM

Ms. Lindsey talks tough on tv, yet does nothing with actual impact.

Yes. With John Durham and AG Bill Barr, this is yet to be determined. Best guess is that the Grand Jury work started around July 1 and takes around 6 weeks. Isn't that about now.

The Justice Dept prosecuting the (former?) Justice Department. We don't want petty prosecutions of political opponents or previous administrations. We want clear violations of important laws that protect us prosecuted - no matter who it is.

Barr said that he expects there to be “some developments, hopefully before the end of the summer.”
https://www.lawfareblog.com/durham-investigation-what-we-know-and-what-it-means

I think we've already had developments. We are waiting for announcements.

One thing they can't and won't say is that we've looked hard and found no wrong doing. Question now is can they find specific criminal acts tied to specific people with good, hard evidence. And are they willing to take that to its full conclusion.

Not slap on the wrist plea bargaining: (Sandy Burglar)
https://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/08/berger.sentenced/#:~:text=Berger%20reached%20a%20plea%20deal,to%20avoid%20a%20jail%20sentence.&text=The%20revelations%20were%20a%20dramatic,unintentionally%20threw%20the%20documents%20away.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2020, 11:14:07 AM: There may be a political calculus not to stir things up until/if Trump wins.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on August 10, 2020, 12:54:02 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2020, 11:14:07 AM
There may be a political calculus not to stir things up until/if Trump wins.

Or loses, or whatever. Can't hold the deep state accountable. Bad optics.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2020, 03:34:13 PM: But why complicate the waters by starting the prosecution during the election if it hurts him electorally? Barr won't be able to finish the prosecution unless Trump wins.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on August 10, 2020, 03:41:09 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2020, 03:34:13 PM
But why complicate the waters by starting the prosecution during the election if it hurts him electorally? Barr won't be able to finish the prosecution unless Trump wins.

Who is going to vote for Trump, unless Barr were to prosecute Spygate? What group is this?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2020, 04:37:11 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2020, 03:34:13 PM
But why complicate the waters by starting the prosecution during the election if it hurts him electorally? Barr won't be able to finish the prosecution unless Trump wins.

If they start prosecution before the election, it looks political. If they have all the evidence they need and don't prosecute now because of the election, that IS political.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 11, 2020, 04:44:52 AM: ".f they start prosecution before the election, it looks political."

does anyone think the Dems who saved and released the Billy Bush tape just before the election would do such a thing?

I say prosecute
and then make Biden or his VP whitewash the whole thing if they win.

Then the Repubs should scream like hell calling for IC
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 11, 2020, 06:55:19 AM: "I say prosecute"

Yes. Assuming the evidence is convincing and overwhelming. Do whatever is right and let the political consequences fall where they may.

Pres Trump on Hugh Hewitt this morning,
"I believe it’s bigger and far more, far reaching and far more powerful than anyone ever thought possible."
https://www.hughhewitt.com/president-trump-on-a-scotus-vacancy-china-college-football-joe-bidens-vp-and-more/

Prosecutors declining to prosecute IS vindication in politics. Don't give that to the known guilty.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on August 11, 2020, 09:01:24 PM: Barr has been AG for 544 days.

Spygate indictments/arrests=0

Epstein "Suicide" indictments/arrests=0

Hillary Clinton cabal indictments/arrests=0

Ilhan Omar immigration fraud indictments/arrests=0

And yet Gen. Flynn is still in legal jeopardy...

Huh.

Quote from: DougMacG on August 11, 2020, 06:55:19 AM
"I say prosecute"

Yes. Assuming the evidence is convincing and overwhelming. Do whatever is right and let the political consequences fall where they may.

Pres Trump on Hugh Hewitt this morning,
"I believe it’s bigger and far more, far reaching and far more powerful than anyone ever thought possible."
https://www.hughhewitt.com/president-trump-on-a-scotus-vacancy-china-college-football-joe-bidens-vp-and-more/

Prosecutors declining to prosecute IS vindication in politics. Don't give that to the known guilty.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 12, 2020, 04:48:20 AM: Quote from: G M on August 11, 2020, 09:01:24 PM
Barr has been AG for 544 days.

Spygate indictments/arrests=0

Epstein "Suicide" indictments/arrests=0

Hillary Clinton cabal indictments/arrests=0

Ilhan Omar immigration fraud indictments/arrests=0

And yet Gen. Flynn is still in legal jeopardy...

Huh.

Good points! And still, he is our last, best hope for law, order and justice. Let's also track how many days since the Durham report came out, and how many prosecutable deep state crimes he let the statute of limitations run out on.

Sharing our frustration, here is Hugh Hewitt this morning LAMBASTING his friend Sen Ron Johnson, chair of oversight, for not putting all these co-conspirators under oath, on the record, before the clock runs out.
https://www.hughhewitt.com/straight-talk-with-senator-ron-johnson/ 10 minutes. Listen.

He hints that he doesn't have the vote of all his Republican Senators to subpoena these traitors. Fellow 'Republican' Senator(s) hesitate for political reasons. Hewitt wants him to call them out so we can vote them out. (Answer below)

We've seen versions of this story before. They fear rocking the boat for political reasons, then lose elections for being no different and no better than the other side.

The last half year of a two year cycle (or all two years) is too long to behave like lame ducks.
----
[Guess who's on Ron Johnson's committee: Mitt Romney 'R'-UT] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/about
ccp, you might ask Josh Hawley who's holding up the Senate investigation. Romney should have lost his committee assignments for his BS impeachment vote. If he's not interested in who ordered and conducted the coup, he isn't Republican, he isn't American. R.I.N.O. A.I.N.O. Imaging Democrats being afraid of appearing partisan - in the face of a conservative coup. Not possible.

Ron Johnson has no idea if there even is a Grand Jury - or he is unwilling to tell us. He has spoken with Barr but not Durham. He has no expectation of anything happening before the election. I have no expectation of anything happening after the election.
Title: The Spies Who Hijacked America-MUST READ
Post by: G M on August 12, 2020, 09:41:12 AM: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-spies-who-hijacked-america/

The Spies Who Hijacked America
As a doctoral candidate at Cambridge working under "FBI Informant" Stefan Halper, I had a front-row seat for Russiagate
Steven P. Schrage, PhD
Aug 9
534
97

Global scandals now labeled Russiagate, Spygate, and what President Trump calls “Obamagate” shook the political world, but hit me closer to home. I’m the reason the so-called FBI “spy” at the center of Spygate, Stefan Halper, met Carter Page, the alleged “Russian Asset” in Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

On May 19, 2018, this realization blindsided me in London as I was about to fly out for my wedding. The New York Times, NBC News and other sources had outed my PhD supervisor, Stefan Halper, as a spy known to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service as “The Walrus.”

It didn’t seem real. Could a former professor I once trusted as a mentor have betrayed his word, profession, and country to start these disasters? I had moved to England to pursue an academic career and leave DC’s politics behind, only to have my PhD supervisor throw me back into the most outrageous political firestorms I could imagine. Just my luck. Then an even worse question began nagging at me. Did I unintentionally light the match that started it all?

As I started to piece together what happened over the next few months, I realized something. The stories that The New York Times, Washington Post, and others were pushing didn’t add up. Many seemed planted to cover up or advance the agendas of several individuals whose tentacles secretly ran through these scandals, and who each had longstanding ties to intelligence services like the FBI, CIA, and MI6. I call these individuals the Cambridge Four.

Strangely, all four were linked through that sleepy British academic town thousands of miles from the alleged “ground zeroes” of Russiagate’s conspiracies, Moscow and DC. In addition to the central “Spygate” figure Halper, they include the central source of “Russiagate’s” fake conspiracy theories, Christopher Steele; former MI6 Director Sir Richard Dearlove; and Halper’s and Dearlove’s partner in a Cambridge Intelligence Seminar linked to titillating — but false — tales of a “Russian spy” seducing Trump’s top national security advisor. My years of work with Halper provided an inside view of how their four networks interconnected.

The more I dug up new pieces of this puzzle, the more I saw how these individuals’ seemingly separate acts might fit together in an absurd picture of how these scandals really started.

Armed with first-hand knowledge and evidence, I quietly sought to help federal investigators uncover these scandals’ mysteries. It wasn’t my first rodeo. After witnessing the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, I led G8 and State Department international crime and terrorism efforts with Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and intelligence officials and had worked for decades in White House, Congressional, and presidential campaign roles.

This helped me keep a stiff upper lip when I was falsely accused in 2019 by the House Intelligence Committee’s Ranking Republican and others on television as being part of a secret anti-Trump cabal. As much as I wanted to defend myself, I knew our best shot of exposing the real forces behind these scandals was for me to remain publicly silent and not let those under investigation know what I knew or was willing to say.

Yet a few weeks ago, I asked to speak to the DOJ lead investigator John Durham to give his team a heads up. I would continue to offer help, but my time for waiting for government to act was over. Recently, I had discovered and flagged for Durham disturbing recordings. One involved one of the Cambridge Four, Halper, and raised serious questions about the origins of what has been called the “kill shot” against Trump’s first national security advisor, General Michael Flynn.

On January 12, 2017 a felony leak about phone calls between the Russian Ambassador and General Flynn was published by The Washington Post. This led to Flynn’s downfall and reignited the Trump-Russia investigations still tearing our nation apart. 48 hours before the leak was published, my former supervisor Halper eerily laid out what was about to happen to Flynn, something he had no independent reason to know. Halper described how Flynn’s “so called enemies” would make Flynn “blow up…he’s really fucked.”

The next legal hearing on Flynn’s prosecution is this Tuesday. Yet for four years government officials have withheld key materials and blocked individuals like Halper from testifying about the real genesis of these scandals and the felony leak on Flynn. While I once worked in Republican politics, I know Americans of every affiliation believe citizens deserve a fair trial without the government concealing evidence.

The remaining mysteries of Russiagate are too important to be turned into a game of political football, or buried until after the election when unsubstantiated allegations could be dug up to sabotage Vice President Biden if he is elected president — as I believe was done to President Trump.

Nor should they be used as a cynical, last-minute Republican “October Surprise” to disrupt the election. Nothing excuses foreign meddling in U.S. elections. Yet it is hypocritical and absurd to use that as an excuse to hide abuses by U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and political officials against our own citizens.

I know the consequences of my speaking out. America is now in a political “UnCivil War” where individuals—even at outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post that profess objective journalism—are personally attacked if their facts don’t fit entrenched narratives.

Key politicians and intelligence figures would like the facts surrounding Russiagate’s origins classified and buried for decades, as with past U.S./MI6 intelligence scandals. I can’t let that happen. After all, I inadvertently helped jump-start it. Even if this story is hidden now, it will ultimately impact Trump, Biden, the 2020 election, and our country for years.

There is far too much to tell in a single article. In the next several weeks I plan to reveal what I know, including: the comedy of errors leading to a Cambridge Four member meeting and targeting the FBI’s main surveillance excuse Carter Page; the information given to an FBI source in August 2016 should have immediately ended their investigation alleging Page was a master spy linking top Trump officials to Putin; how a secret anti-Trump source sought one of the world’s most powerful positions that could undermine the president; and how official statements by FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane officials to the DOJ Inspector General were factually inaccurate or wildly inconsistent with other evidence, raising the question of if those officials risked criminal prosecution to conceal their acts.

This is not a position I ever sought. As I worked with government investigators it seemed inconceivable that key facts could be covered up until now. Yet with both Flynn’s hearing and the election approaching, whatever the consequences, everyone impacted deserves to know the truth.

Conspiracy of Dunces

People who convince themselves that they’re really smart often do the dumbest things. I’ve fallen prey to this dynamic myself in the past. Yet perhaps no one in history is a better example of this than the Cambridge Four. Their story is both a tragedy and a farce—think Jason Bourne meets Austin Powers — with larger-than-life characters that might be equally at home in a Saturday Night Live skit or a John Le Carré spy thriller. Yet the damage they did is deadly serious.

The Cambridge Four’s most mythical, larger-than-life character — both literally and figuratively — is my former advisor, Halper. Codenamed “the Walrus,” in person he appears well over 300 pounds, and carries himself with grandiose airs, evoking fictional anti-heroes like Ignatius O’Reilly of Confederacy of Dunces or Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

At first, I was drawn to and respected him for his bold books opposing brain-dead Republican orthodoxies on the Iraq War and China policy. It seemed his real-world government experience eerily mirrored my own. I had yet to discover his checkered past, including: his reported role in organizing ex-CIA operatives to steal Jimmy Carter’s 1980 debate materials; 1990’s crack cocaine arrest; and FBI firing in 2011 for “mercurial” behavior, demanding more “compensation” and “questionable allegiance to [intelligence] targets.”

By the time I organized a major 2016 conference to serve as a capstone of my years of research at Harvard and Cambridge — ironically focused on the national security risks of U.S. presidential campaigns — Halper was a gregarious, opinionated eccentric who struggled to use Cambridge’s basic internet system without help.

He appeared slightly more “mercurial” and rattled after losing his politics professorship in the months before my conference. Yet the idea that any competent FBI or government official would rely on him as a linchpin for world-changing Trump-Russia conspiracy investigations was and is preposterous.

Halper might have faded into retirement — and Spygate likely never would have happened — without my driving forward with the 2016 conference, one that Halper, again ironically, had repeatedly urged me to cancel. An all-star cast of international academics and officials would be there, headlined by Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton’s confidante Madeleine Albright.

But after a 20-something Cambridge administrative official smugly told me “there’s no way Trump can win” and cut our travel funding, it sent me on a mad scramble. I had to find someone, anyone, to fly over on a last-minute economy ticket to represent the Trump campaign. This is the only reason Spygate’s “FBI Spy” Halper and Russiagate’s “Russian Spy” Carter Page ever met, with consequences still shaking politics today. For most of the conference, Halper couldn’t be bothered with Page, about whom he made snarky comments about behind Page’s back, while focusing on Albright. That all changed when another one of the Cambridge Four arrived.

Sir Richard Dearlove is a former director of MI6 and Halper’s long-time collaborator. He arrived at the last minute from a billionaire’s Rocky Mountain soiree called the Allen Conference, whose other attendees reportedly included Oprah, Obama confidants, and Hollywood sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Dearlove was under the cloud of an official UK investigation into the Iraq war rationale, called the Chilcot Report that were serious even by the Walrus’s or Weinstein’s standards, given the geopolitical consequences.

Among other things, it involved Dearlove’s MI6 allegedly withholding the fact that a key piece of “intelligence” George W. Bush used to launch the attacks – the idea that chemical munitions were kept in “glass beads or spheres” – suspiciously mirrored an erroneous factoid from the plot of the 1996 WMD-heist movie The Rock, starring Nicholas Cage.

At my conference’s last session, Dearlove went far off the script I had discussed with his assistant, lambasting Trump as a national security threat in front of a Trump advisor, and our official guest, Page. My jaw hit the floor in embarrassment, but that, and his discussion with Dearlove, seemed to cause Halper to do a 180-degree shift. Suddenly, he seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign.

Dearlove’s former MI6 agent and the third Cambridge Four member, Christopher Steele, is now as famous as his old boss. According to multiple reports, Steele had been hired by a Clinton campaign contractor a few weeks earlier to compile the infamous “Steele Dossier.” Steele filled his “intelligence” reports with obviously non-intelligent assertions, including that Trump-Russia conspiracies were run out of Russia’s Miami consulate — a consulate an average high schooler with internet access could instantly show did not exist.

Similarly, Steele’s famous allegations that notorious germaphobe Trump paid prostitutes to urinate while Putin recorded him seemed like a teenage boy’s dream after watching too many Austin Powers movies — and with recent news revealing Steele’s highly suspect sub-source, Igor Dyachenko, his story appears just about as based on reality.

The Cambridge’s Four’s final member, Christopher Andrew, seemed the least likely to become involved. He initially called some of Halper’s Russia conspiracy theories “absurd.” Yet by early 2017 he published an articlethat helped legitimize false allegations against Trump’s team and even implicated his own student.

I call them — Halper, Steele, Dearlove, and Andrew — the Cambridge Four because of parallels to another British spy story of yore, perhaps the most notorious intelligence scandal in history. That earlier “Cambridge Five” spy ring, including infamous names like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, became the basisfor John LeCarré’s famous spy thriller and film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Five were Cold War Soviet spies who escaped virtually unpunished after embarrassed British and American officials essentially covered up the extent of their betrayals. One, Anthony Blunt, was even knighted and served as art curator to the Queen.

These Cambridge men undermined democracy and the U.S.-UK relationship, while making fools of politicians, the media, and officials linked to the FBI, CIA and MI6 for years. The same can be said of our new Cambridge Four.

I have no indication that any of the Cambridge Four were ever on Russia’s payroll or were actual spies for Russia, like their Cambridge Five namesakes. Yet the Cambridge Four, and their media and political enablers, did a miraculous job in pushing fake Trump-Russia conspiracy stories that undermined America’s democratically-elected government and sparked investigations still ripping us apart today. In this regard, the Cambridge Four were probably the most effective tools for Russia’s disinformation campaign to divide America that Putin could have ever dreamed of.

Flynn’s Tag Team Take Down

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Cambridge Four’s roles — or is more urgent given Flynn’s legal hearing August 11 — than the takedown of Trump’s national security advisor. Starting in 2016, Halper made odd requests for me to brief him and others on Trump’s team. He even had me research Trump, allegedly as part of my thesis work, even though my thesis was focused on past, not present, presidents.

In these discussions I stressed that Flynn was indispensable. He was perhaps the only campaign advisor who both had Trump’s personal trust and the deep intelligence experience necessary to expose hidden problems in the intelligence community. At one point, I even recall telling Halper that taking Flynn out would be like “beheading” Trump’s team. I had no idea I had been unintentionally aiding a spy preparing the guillotine and helping lead Flynn to exactly such a beheading.

Whether and to what degree the Cambridge Four’s individual acts were formally coordinated can likely only be proven by testimony under oath and reviewing phone records, emails, and documents — things government officials seem to have blocked the Cambridge Four and Halper’s FBI handler, Steve Somma, from for four years. Yet it would seem odd if four, interconnected individuals linked to a town thousands of miles from Moscow or DC, randomly took acts that fit together so perfectly to take down Flynn.

My conference ended on July 12, 2016 with a closing session where Halper, Dearlove, and Page had their strange interactions. Almost immediately after that, the sparks of international intelligence interest surrounding Trump-Russia connections caught fire. Seven days after the conference, Steele provided a new report for the Clinton Campaign. In it, for the first time, Steele made Page central to his Trump-Russia conspiracies.

Eleven days after that, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation officially launched, allegedly due to a tip (based on a casual London wine bar conversation two months earlier) by an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer linked to the Clinton Foundation and to the Cambridge Four through the tight-knit London/Cambridge Five Eyes intelligence community (involving the CIA, FBI, and MI6). Current CIA Director Gina Haspel was the CIA station chief in London when Downer reportedlybroke typical protocol by giving his tip directly to that Embassy’s team.

Halper’s long-time FBI handler Steve Somma, who personally saved Halper’s FBI career after Halper’s firing in 2011, was quickly reassigned to Crossfire Hurricane despite Somma telling the DOJ’s Inspector General that he “lacked a basic understanding of simple [campaign] issues.” Shortly after his reassignment, Somma claimed he “couldn’t believe [their] luck” as he “kind of stumbled upon” Halper’s ties to Crossfire Hurricane’s top targets, including from his recently meeting Page at my conference.

Halper quickly agreed to highly questionable, if not illegal, FBI requests to secretly record his own party’s presidential campaign advisers. Two business days after Somma held his meetings with Halper, the Crossfire Razor investigation of Flynn launched on August 16.

In the weeks after my Summer 2016 conference, Halper and Dearlove quit an academic entity, the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (CIS), they’d put together with Andrew. After these resignations, rumors circulated that Trump’s national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, was seduced by a young blonde “Russian spy” in Cambridge years earlier. This “seduction” allegedly occurred after three of the Cambridge Four — Halper, Dearlove, and Andrew — hosted Flynn for CIS events in 2014. I attended part of their program and found nothing untoward, just typical academic fare. Neither apparently did any of the Cambridge Four find anything wrong, until years later after two of them crossed paths with Page at my conference.

Steele’s role pushing anti-Flynn stories was revealed in his dossier and the testimony of an aide to Republican Senator John McCain. Steele met the aide in London during the fall of 2016, telling him that “Flynn had an extramarital affair with a Russian woman in the U.K.” and using details mirroring the other Cambridge Four stories. The Washington Post also reports Steele and Dearlove discussed how his anti-Trump work might integrate with UK government actions from at least “early fall” 2016.

Yet by winter 2016, these efforts were imploding. After Trump’s election, FBI agents texted about “a lot of scared MFers” at headquarters who needed to “tart looking for new jobs fellas.” Yet doubling down on questionable investigations might have been some of the FBI Keystone Cops’ only escape route.

Before the election, Halper and the FBI made several wired-up spying attempts: secretly recording and questioning Page and Papadopoulos to try and catch them in statements supporting Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracies. Their clown car operation backfired spectacularly, often contradicting Steele. Halper at one point awkwardly put a phone down as if to record Papadopoulos while spewing questions about Russia. On an FBI recording, Halper apparently admitted he was “three sheets to the wind” drunk.

The supposedly “confidential” source Halper seemingly made a public, last-ditch attempt to try and legitimize allegations of a Russian conspiracy at Cambridge through a December 16 Financial Times newspaper article. Halper claimed he and Dearlove quit the seminar that hosted Flynn due to “unacceptable Russian influence.” Halper’s partner Andrew initially called Halper’s assertions “absurd.” Another professor added that “Cambridge is a wonderful place for conspiracy theories, but the idea there is a Machiavellian plot here is ridiculous…it’s real Reds under the Bed stuff—the whole thing is ludicrous.”

But Andrew later seemed to flip, giving legs to his Cambridge Four comrades’ smears by authoring an 2017 article implying their falsely accused “Russian spy” behaved seductively towards Flynn. That this fake “spy” was a new mother — and Andrew’s own student mentee for years — made this more disturbing.

Despite Halper’s article, a few weeks later these efforts were dead. A memo to terminate the Flynn investigation was on its way to FBI director on January 4, finding “no derogatory evidence.” Flynn would soon lead the NSC, where he would be empowered to expose the Cambridge Four and could bring them to their own career guillotines. They would likely be joined by Director Comey, McCabe, and FBI officials whom Democrats had widely derided earlier for botching the Hillary Clinton email investigation before they staked what remained of their credibility to Steele’s falsehoods. Then everything changed.

A General, a Walrus, and a “Kill Shot”

McCabe’s FBI subordinate Peter Strzok — who earlier texted that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was like an “insurance policy” in case of Trump’s election which “[w]e’ll stop” and he could “SMELL the Trump support” at a Walmart — intervened on January 4 to pull the memo terminating Flynn’s investigation.

The next day, January 5, Strzok attended an Oval Office Meeting with President Obama, National Security Adviser Rice, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director Comey. Among the topics were intercepted calls between Flynn and Russia’s Ambassador discussing sanctions. Strzok’s notes indicate Vice President Biden suggested that Flynn somehow violated a 216-year-old, possibly unconstitutional, and never successfully prosecuted, law called the Logan Act.

All of this — White House discussions, the taping of Flynn, Flynn-Russia conversations — were highly classified. They were never supposed to go public. If no one commits a felony by leaking them, this whole situation likely disappears. It is hard to believe anyone in Trump’s White House, or even in the last days of Obama’s presidency, would try to prosecute Flynn for a “Logan Act” violation of a possibly unconstitutional law he probably didn’t even violate, and that hasn’t been successfully prosecuted in its over two centuries of existence.

If this law — created to stop private citizens from intervening in foreign affairs — applied to incoming presidential teams, likely Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and most of the incoming international teams of Presidents Obama, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton would be guilty. Under our Constitution, it is the job of presidential campaigns to announce how they will change policy. So, unless someone commits the leak against Flynn, this all would be resolved internally. It is never transformed into a public Russia-Trump conspiracy tearing our country apart. But as we all now know, and history recorded, that is not what happened.

Five days after that the January 5 Oval Office meeting, I met Halper in Virginia. I didn’t think much about that meeting until Durham’s team requested I review my records. Because Halper had seemed increasingly erratic in our dealings, making it difficult to advance my doctoral work, I requested to start recording our conversations back in 2015 to document his guidance.

When I listened to my January 10, 2017 recording a few weeks ago, I expected to find boring academic discussions. Instead I found something else.

In the recording Halper laid out what was about to happen to Flynn, something he had no independent reason to know. “I don’t think Flynn’s going to be around long,” he said, adding, “the way these things work” was that “opponents… so-called enemies” of Flynn would be “looking for ways of exerting pressure…that’s how it builds.”

Flynn, he said, would be “squeezed pretty hard,” and Flynn’s “reaction to that is to blow up and get angry. He’s really fucked. I don’t where he goes from there. But that is his reaction. That’s why he’s so unsuitable.”

The full audio of his Flynn discussion is linked here:

Those still defending the Crossfire Hurricane investigation will say there is no smoking gun here. There is no confession that individuals lied to ensnare Flynn, leaked classified information, or illegally undermined and sabotaged America’s government.

As someone experienced in crime and terrorism efforts, I can assure you of a hard truth: there almost never is. That is why we have jury trials, congressional investigations, and adversarial processes to uncover the truth.

That is why the most disturbing thing is that the Cambridge Four, their FBI/intelligence handlers, and others have been hidden from critical public and government inquiries for over four years. Context (including my background and materials) is vital, as is the chance for Halper, myself, Carter Page, and others involved to publicly testify, defend themselves, and answer questions. Yet for now, the context I can add makes this more troubling.

Halper would not have independently known Flynn, Trump’s most trusted security advisor, was about to go down. Halper knew the Cambridge Four’s Flynn affair allegations were, at best, unsubstantiated speculations, if not intentional lies. The FBI sought to close Flynn’s investigation and had mounting evidence undermining Steele’s Page and Papadopoulos allegations.

Even if Halper knew about Flynn’s “Logan Act violation” calls, it wouldn’t have mattered. Trump’s Administration would not prosecute this. It was, as Obama’s Acting Attorney General Sally Yates even admitted, “certainly unlikely” Obama’s Administration would either — it would expose their Crossfire investigation and spark bipartisan ridicule over a legally and politically suspect “Logan Act” prosecution in Obama’s last 10 days.

Halper was often unhinged and “mercurial,” as FBI described him in his 2011 firing. Months earlier he exploded screaming to block my long-planned outreach to the Trump campaign, likely fearing I would expose him and the Cambridge Four. Now Halper’s efforts were collapsing like a house of cards, likely leading to the Cambridge Four’s actual exposure, possibly even prosecution, once Flynn came to power. He should have been at wits’ end. Yet in the recording he was as eerily calm, almost cocky, as I’ve ever heard him.

One of the remaining tasks of investigators is determining the precise source of the leaks about Flynn to the Washington Post. These leaks were a critical inflection point. They revived the Trump-Russia investigations that were about to die and stopped Flynn before he could expose the fabrications and incompetence behind it all.

This is not a classic whistleblowing situation, wherein the confidentiality of the leaker should ideally remain sacrosanct in light of an important, socially-beneficial disclosure. This is the opposite: a leak seemingly manufactured with the intent of creating a media firestorm around a figure the FBI had already investigated, to no effect. The FBI’s key “confidential” source was already naming himself in a major global newspaper as he openly pushed Russia conspiracy theories.

Fairness demands individuals have a chance to testify under oath and defend themselves, yet members of the Cambridge Four, once again, have links that should be explored. It is demonstrably true that Halper knew Ignatius for decades, and he also bragged to me Ignatius was his press contact. Ignatius’ Post colleague, Robert Costa, was also Halper’s former student, and has described Halper as a “friend” he “had dinner with on many occasions.”

When Halper was outed as an FBI informant in 2018, Ignatius quickly filed a story calling Halper a “bit player” and a “middle man,” in what may have been an attempt to turn attention away from his long-time source. It is also worth noting that Flynn’s lawyer, Sydney Powell, has accused Pentagon official James Baker of making the leak — a charge a Pentagon official denied — and of coordinating with Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on what she called a “kill shot” on Flynn.

Baker leads the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which reported paying Halper $411,575 while he surveilled Trump’s team. ONA claims this enormous sum —more than the annual salary of the President of the United States — was paid to Halper for fairly normal, largely publicly-sourced, reports to this office. I always found it strange that Halper profusely thanked me for introducing him to Carter Page, even after Page was accused of being a “Russian spy.” The disclosure that some of these payments started around the time Halper met Page, provided me with a theory on why he was so grateful.

According to a former Washington Post reporter, numerous sources were checked before the January 12, 2017 Ignatius story was published. While Flynn’s lawyer Powell suggested Baker leaked to Ignatius, it might be safer for Halper, rather than highly monitored government officials like Baker or Clapper, to provide information to his long-time media contact Ignatius, former student Costa, or one of their Post colleagues. Halper’s confidential FBI source role could be used to hide him from Congressional or public scrutiny. Halper’s FBI handler Somma could be hidden by a DOJ policy shielding lower-level employees, while foreign members of the Cambridge Four can selectively dodge U.S. investigations.

This exactly corresponds to what has happened so far.

The Getaway

My former supervisor, using his booming voice and bold ideas, likes to be the center of attention. Yet for two years his allies with powerful intelligence, political, and media ties seem to have done the impossible. They made this massive figure almost completely disappear.

The Mueller and DOJ IG investigations of these scandals relied in large part on input from DOJ and FBI officials linked to potential abuses — including the FBI’s Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Lisa Page and DOJ’s Andrew Weisman. When Congress grilled long-time FBI leader Mueller about why he didn’t interview “Steven Schrage” or others who might expose DOJ or FBI improprieties, he stammered: “n those areas, I am going to stay away from…I stand by that which is in the report and not so necessarily with that, which is - which is not in the report.”

Given Mueller’s stated preference to “stay away” from those with information that might implicate members of his team and the DOJ IG’s reliance on DOJ insiders, it’s not surprising that people like me who were in a position to expose the Russiagate narrative were not interviewed.

What is surprising for anyone valuing journalistic standards, is that those under government investigation for abuses of power have so easily avoided hard questions. Some have even been given media contractsto spin their own actions. Imagine if Nixon’s allies appointed the Watergate burglars to investigate themselves, then placed them in nightly news positions where they could attack anyone questioning them. Politics shouldn’t destroy our principles.

There is too much to fully detail here, but further revelations – and they are forthcoming – will make these moves even more damning. How Cambridge Four members and Carter Page came together is a comedy of errors rivaling Dumb and Dumber. An FBI source had information that should have stopped Carter Page’s invasive surveillance in August 2016 before it started. A covert anti-Trump operative sought to be appointed to one of the world’s most powerful positions that could be used to undermine the president.

Evidence suggests undisclosed famous officials, including Republicans, tried to cover up their links to Steele’s smears. The IG report contains statements by Crossfire officials that appear factual inaccurate, inherently inconsistent, or highly improbable, raising questions about whether they risked prosecution to conceal their acts.

“I don’t remember.” That should be the official, trademarked motto of the government officials involved in these events. It is what former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates responded under oath this past Wednesday.

She had been asked if Vice President Biden raised the Logan Act in their Oval Office discussion of Flynn on January 5, 2017, seven days before the felony leak on Flynn’s alleged “Logan Act” violation was published. Flynn’s appeals hearing is on Tuesday, and Vice President Biden and President Trump are on the ballot in less than 90 days. These issues should be beyond politics. They should have been dealt with before now. They would have, if Washington insiders could “remember” things, like how to provide legally-mandated documents under our Constitution or their duties to the public.

This is also beyond the pervasive, often subconscious, partisanship that now blinds us. The intelligence leak claiming Russia supported Bernie Sanders over Vice President Biden in 2020’s critical Nevada Democratic caucuses, shows how our national security powers could just as easily be deployed against Democrats as against Republicans.

In my work after 9/11, I saw how those national security powers combined with unaccountable government officials could do things George Orwell never dreamed over. Russia and foreign interference in elections should be taken seriously. Yet pushing the threat of Russia—now a country with a GDP the CIA publicly estimates is far closer to Indonesia’s than our own—like we are in the middle of a 1950’s Red Scare push by Senator Joseph McCarthy, should not be used as a political weapon to cover up or excuse our own government officials’ abuses.

For years, political and intelligence officials have concealed key documents — and even my former supervisor the Walrus — in ways that have divided America and derailed our government’s work.If Biden, Trump, or members of their teams grossly abused national security powers to upend democracy, we deserve to know as soon as possible before the election.

This should not be turned into an “October surprise” or later used to throw any new presidential administration into chaos.Allowing politicians and national security officials to cover up or even profit from abuses of power, puts us on course for even greater disasters. America can’t afford another government and media strike out, after four years of too much denial, incompetence, and coverup.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller. AG Barr
Post by: DougMacG on August 14, 2020, 06:21:40 AM: Development today, not an earth shaking one.

When we feel we have proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a violation of law, we will charge it.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/13/barr_will_be_significant_developments_in_durham_probe_before_election.html
Title: guilty plea for FBI lawyer
Post by: ccp on August 15, 2020, 09:53:39 AM: small fry but something I guess
he probably will get house arrest
so long as he talks.

MSM as far as I know will either not mention at all or only for less than 30 seconds or on page 82 just so they can deny they ignore and can say they are nonpartisan and "covered this"

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/08/14/boom-fbi-russiagate-lawyer-who-lied-about-carter-page-in-fisa-document-to-plead-guilty-n792389
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2020, 10:02:58 AM: Maybe they are announcing him to pressure others to rat out others.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on August 15, 2020, 11:24:57 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2020, 10:02:58 AM
Maybe they are announcing him to pressure others to rat out others.

We shall see.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 16, 2020, 08:39:47 AM: Quote from: G M on August 15, 2020, 11:24:57 AM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2020, 10:02:58 AM
Maybe they are announcing him to pressure others to rat out others.
We shall see.

Yes. Getting one FBI lawyer is (hopefully) not the intended endgame.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/bringing-first-russiagate-charge-durham-hints-other
In bringing first Russiagate charge, Durham hints at other crimes
Prosecutor unveils evidence FBI knew before first FISA warrant in 2016 that Carter Page worked with CIA, wasn't a Russia stooge, and didn't inform court.

By John Solomon
Updated: August 15, 2020 - 9:47am

Spygate, once derided by media and political elites as a fringe conspiracy theory, is now fact thanks to a court filing that confirms an ex-FBI lawyer who disliked President Trump falsified evidence that was used to keep surveillance against Trump associates going.

U.S. Attorney John Durham filed the felony charge Friday against Kevin Clinesmith, and the ex-FBI assistant general counsel is expected to plead guilty soon and cooperate with the ongoing investigation of the Russia investigators.

That alone is significant, since Clinesmith was witness to other controversial moments in the failed Trump-Russia collusion probe, including an operation to spy on the future president during a counterintelligence briefing in summer 2016.

But within the four-plus page criminal information filed in U.S. District Court, Durham also laid out evidence of an additional crime that could be prosecuted in the coming weeks.

The court filing notes that Clinesmith "willfully and knowingly" altered a document in June 2017 to falsely claim that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — one of the main targets of the Russia collusion probe and identified in the court document as "Individual #1" — was not a source for the CIA, identified in the court documents as "Other Government Agency" or "OGA." In reality, Page was a CIA asset.

File
Clinesmith-Document-2020-08-14.pdf
The filing says Clinesmith's misdeed caused the FBI to mislead the Justice Department and the FISA court when filing an application for the last of four surveillance warrants that targeted Page for over a year.

But Durham also reveals in the filing that the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team — led by since-fired Agent Peter Strzok — had already been told of Page's relationship with the CIA all the way back in August 2016 and failed to tell the FISA court that essential information about Page before the three prior FISA warrants were approved.

Such a failure is known as a material omission because the FBI was claiming they believed Page was an agent of Russia when in fact he was an asset of the U.S. government helping to inform on Russian intelligence targets. In other words, had the FBI not omitted the truth, the judges would have known before they approved even the first FISA warrant that Page was a CIA-handled source, not a Russian stooge.

Here's how Durham worded the account:

"On Aug 17, 2016, prior to the approval of FISA #1, the OGA (CIA) provided certain members of the Crossfire Hurricane team a memorandum indicating that Individual #1 (Page) had been approved as an operational contact for the OGA (CIA) from 2008 to 2013 and detailing information that Individual #1 (Page) had provided to the OGA (CIA) concerning Individual #1's prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers. The first three FISA applications did not include Individual #1's history or status with the OGA (CIA)."

Several experts said Durham's inclusion of the earlier notification signals he has concerns others may also have been involved in deceiving the court.

"It's more than an oversight. Whether the omission was purposeful or not, it is a fraud on the court," said Kevin Brock, the FBI's former assistant director for intelligence and the man who created many of the procedures the bureau employs with confidential human sources in national security investigations.

"At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, I think it is clear that Durham is positioning a deeper dive into this issue of FISA application abuse," Brock added.

Earlier inspector general reports also revealed that Clinesmith engaged in the exchange of some anti-Trump text messages, adding to the portrait of a lawyer who doctored a document.

In one instance the day after Trump won, Clinesmith texted this anti-Trump, anti-Mike Pence screed: "The crazies won finally. This is the tea party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years. We have to fight this again. Also Pence is stupid," he wrote in a text quoted by the inspector general.

A lawyer for Clinesmith on Friday offered an apology for his client's action ahead of his guilty plea, but suggested Clinesmith didn't intend to mislead the court when he altered the CIA document.

Brock dismissed that argument.

"The fact that the bureau was advised even before the first application that Carter Page was a source of the CIA and chose not to include it for the first three applications undercuts that argument," the retired FBI executive said. "It stretches credulity that Clinesmith would claim he believed he was providing accurate information. They already knew it was inaccurate."

Brock isn't alone in the view that Durham has tipped his hand to future prosecutions.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), whose work in Congress unraveled many of the abuses in the FBI Russia probe, noted that Clinesmith was also identified in FBI documents as being involved in an August 2016 episode in which the FBI inserted an agent into one of Trump's first counterintelligence briefings to spy on the future president.

"Those who orchestrated, enabled and amplified the bogus Russia collusion saga must face a reckoning, and those who violated the law must face justice," Grassley said. "Thanks to recent declassifications, we now know that the same FBI lawyer who doctored evidence to push for spying authority on Trump's campaign was also intimately involved in plans to co-opt intel briefings to spy on Trump himself. Today, he is being held to account."

Grassley urged Durham to keep pressing ahead "for the good of our nation."

"His team must continue to provide transparency into this multi-year, multimillion-dollar debacle," the veteran senator said.
Title: Brennan again
Post by: ccp on August 23, 2020, 07:59:37 AM: pretending to be apolitical
self righteous as always

hopes Durham will be apolitical (of course like the Senate Intelligence Committee and Mueller gang of Democrat lawyers)

in other words if Durham finds anything against him or his accomplices there is only one conclusion
from Brennan - it was all political to begin with.

Durham must find that Brennan was justified and correct the whole time - otherwise you , Durham area a political tool a hack.

Not like himself - above the fray

I forgot which network is Brennan receiving money from ?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/08/22/durhams-team-questioned-brennan-for-8-hours-over-cias-trump-russia-activities-n2574870
Title: State Dept destroyed Steele docs at his request
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 25, 2020, 07:56:04 PM: https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/08/20/state-department-official-destroyed-records-at-foreign-agents-request/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CapitolBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTjJNMU9UUTRZbVpqTlRkaiIsInQiOiIzdFVnMUZhV0duV2R2cisyNEVRcmViXC9kdXBiSlpqcWx4NDZiXC9XeGJveWxJdkhZRGpJdEppQlNvSlBsWjkySUFSSVU5UUc0b3hkTUtublZqcXZSalhTS0xqSDRaR3BvN1wvVWpXaks2UTEwMkJ6UDFGbFV2NllnSHJkaTNLTG0yYyJ9&utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200825200033
Title: comey wire tapped Trump towers just prior to election
Post by: ccp on August 28, 2020, 06:22:19 PM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/huge-new-strzok-page-emails-show-comey-fbi-investigated-president-trumps-tweets-critical-obama-fbi/

no doubt Biden and O had no clue......... :wink:
Title: No politics - just "Rule of Law"
Post by: ccp on September 01, 2020, 04:57:29 AM: from 8 Democrat judges

was Merrick Garland one ?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/michael-flynn-case-dc-circuit-rules-against-mandamus-case/
Title: Re: No politics - just "Rule of Law"
Post by: DougMacG on September 01, 2020, 05:42:24 AM: Quote from: ccp on September 01, 2020, 04:57:29 AM
from 8 Democrat judges

was Merrick Garland one ?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/michael-flynn-case-dc-circuit-rules-against-mandamus-case/

The vote was 8-2. I wonder which 2 will end up on the Supreme Court.

After pursuing every other possibility, Judge Sullivan will do the right thing.
Title: WSJ: Time to pardon Flynn (Marc: After the election or now?)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2020, 08:21:55 AM: More Torture for Michael Flynn
The D.C. Circuit goes to great lengths to keep his prosecution going.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Sept. 1, 2020 8:44 am ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
330

Michael Flynn leaves the federal court following a status conference in Washington, D.C., Sept. 10, 2019.
PHOTO: MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
One test of a judicial ruling in a controversial case is whether it would have come out the same way if the defendant’s name were John Doe. On that measure, among others, it’s hard to credit as legally justified Monday’s appellate court ruling against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In an en banc appeal, the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a writ of mandamus issued by a court panel on behalf of Mr. Flynn. The writ had ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the prosecution of Mr. Flynn on grounds that the original case had no legal basis. Mr. Flynn sought the writ after Judge Sullivan refused to grant the motion to dismiss,

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The en banc appeal of a writ is all but unheard of, but then the D.C. Circuit these days is stacked with liberals appointed by Barack Obama. In an unsigned opinion, the en banc court ducked the essence of the panel ruling, which concerned judicial meddling in the executive branch’s prosecution power. Instead the en banc judges made a procedural case that the harm to the separation of powers was “speculative” because Judge Sullivan hadn’t yet issued a formal ruling in the case. This also let the court claim the Flynn case was different from D.C. Circuit precedents, notably the 2016 Fokker Services ruling by chief judge Sri Srinivasan.

But as Judge Karen Henderson noted in dissent, there is no case on record in which a judge sought a Rule 35 en banc appeal of a mandamus ruling that essentially makes himself a party to the case. She also pointed out that, “From early on in this case, the trial judge [Judge Sullivan] has demonstrated a pattern of conduct that, taken together, raises serious concerns about the appearance of impartiality.”

At a plea hearing, he mused without evidence that Mr. Flynn might have committed treason and asserted his “disdain” and “disgust” for Mr. Flynn’s actions. A former judge whom Judge Sullivan hired for advice on the motion to dismiss had written an anti-Flynn op-ed.

Judge Sullivan has even suggested he could second-guess the Justice Department’s dismissal motion by investigating if career prosecutors disagreed with political appointees in the case. This is an unconstitutional judicial intrusion into executive authority. If Judge Sullivan takes this course now that he’s won on appeal, we hope Attorney General William Barr tells him to pound sand. Judge Sullivan might hold Mr. Barr in contempt but then the case would go directly back on appeal.

All of this continues the ordeal of Mr. Flynn, who has had his life turned upside down for nearly four years. Judge Sullivan could now choose to hold his dismissal ruling until the November election. If Joe Biden wins, the judge might figure that the Biden Justice Department would reinstate the prosecution and torture Mr. Flynn further. As Judge Neomi Rao put it in her fine dissent:

“By allowing the district court to scrutinize ‘the reasoning and motives’ of the Department of Justice, the majority ducks our obligation to correct judicial usurpations of executive power and leaves Flynn to twist in the wind while the district court pursues a prosecution without a prosecutor. The Constitution’s separation of powers and its protections of individual liberty require a different result.”

What a dispiriting, politicized performance by the judiciary. Time for a pardon.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 01, 2020, 10:19:19 AM: Let it run its legal course first.

"Judge Sullivan could now choose to hold his dismissal ruling until the November election. If Joe Biden wins, the judge might figure that the Biden Justice Department would reinstate the prosecution and torture Mr. Flynn further."

There is also the time between the election and inauguration available for pardons.
Title: Strange how so many documents disappear
Post by: G M on September 03, 2020, 02:41:04 PM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/carter-pages-fisa-related-fbi-woods-file-documents-mysteriously-disappeared-recreated-muellers-team/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2020, 03:23:36 PM: "strange how so many documents disappear"

How Clintoneasque .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 03, 2020, 04:51:02 PM: Our country is slipping on the banana peels of the banana republic cancer within our permanent government , , ,
Title: Mueller's Angry Dems scrubbed Cell Phones
Post by: G M on September 10, 2020, 03:48:03 PM: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/muellers-angry-democrats-scrubbed-cell-phones-after-russia-investigation
Title: Re: Mueller's Angry Dems scrubbed Cell Phones
Post by: G M on September 10, 2020, 03:53:11 PM: Quote from: G M on September 10, 2020, 03:48:03 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/muellers-angry-democrats-scrubbed-cell-phones-after-russia-investigation

18 U.S. Code § 1519.Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
U.S. Code

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

(Added Pub. L. 107–204, title VIII, § 802(a), July 30, 2002, 116 Stat. 800.)
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on September 11, 2020, 04:39:36 AM: "18 U.S. Code § 1519.Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
U.S. Code"

To this the MSM would scream democrats lives matter

it is all swept under the rug and not relevant since in the end it is all about getting DJT.

"rule of law" need not apply,

when speaking of the "righteous" - democrats.
Title: listen to the excuses
Post by: ccp on September 11, 2020, 06:24:09 PM: look what they did to Flynn
compared to this cover up

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/republicans-mueller-cellphones-russiaprobe/2020/09/11/id/986512/
Title: Schiff and Pravdas at it again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2020, 03:19:51 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/media-help-adam-schiff-rehabilitate-the-image-of-his-latest-whistleblower/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-09-11&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: Mueller's Angry Dems scrubbed Cell Phones
Post by: G M on September 13, 2020, 03:44:53 PM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/must-see-sidney-powell-speaks-mueller-gang-wiped-clean-info-27-phones-requested-justice-department-inspector-general-video/

Quote from: G M on September 10, 2020, 03:53:11 PM
Quote from: G M on September 10, 2020, 03:48:03 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/muellers-angry-democrats-scrubbed-cell-phones-after-russia-investigation

18 U.S. Code § 1519.Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
U.S. Code

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

(Added Pub. L. 107–204, title VIII, § 802(a), July 30, 2002, 116 Stat. 800.)
Title: The FBI is totally not corrupt!
Post by: G M on September 15, 2020, 12:11:34 PM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/390227.php

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: More record destruction from Team Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2020, 06:14:55 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mueller-team-records-failures-extend-far-beyond-wiped-iphones_3504443.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on September 18, 2020, 07:08:05 AM: ".More record destruction from Team Mueller "

oh just routine
clearing of devices before turning them in

nothing here

DC lawyers at their most honest , integrity, upholders of the rule of law, beyond scrutiny ( well yeah all evidence destroyed), and defenders of "Democracy"!!!

laws apply to little people not big shot DC lawyers.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 27, 2020, 06:08:47 AM: The buffoonery with the Flynn trial is hurting the FBI scum and helping Trump.

New notes and texts by FBI agents on the case reveal their known subversion and guilt.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/24/trump-was-right-explosive-new-fbi-texts-detail-internal-furor-over-handling-of-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/
Title: not surprising but fits as expected
Post by: ccp on September 29, 2020, 02:13:00 PM: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/09/29/bombshell-hillary-clinton-may-have-signed-off-on-plan-to-sink-trump-with-russia-hoax-n985890

probably an hour didn't go by after Hill lost the election this conspiracy theory was making its way through the jornolister email chain
Title: The CIA (Brennan) knew and Obama also knew of the plan
Post by: ccp on September 29, 2020, 03:55:13 PM: and they they never said a peep
never leaked to NYT WP or Columbia Professors

and Comey said nothing

all dirtballs:

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/cia-fbi2016election/2020/09/29/id/989487/
Title: Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it
Post by: DougMacG on September 29, 2020, 07:38:43 PM: JUST DECLASSIFIED: The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, and the Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/today-in-russia-hoax-news.php

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EjGshRlWoAMWhLv?format=jpg)
Title: Sen. Hawley destroys James Comey
Post by: DougMacG on October 01, 2020, 06:43:11 PM: https://menrec.com/video-sen-hawley-destroys-comey-why-dont-you-regret-your-role-in-the-unprecedented-misleading/
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Allegation Hillary orchestrated it all
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2020, 03:36:31 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/allegation-hillary-clinton-orchestrated-collusion-hoax-to-distract-from-her-emails-according-to-russian-intel/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=most-popular&utm_term=first
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy: Allegation Hillary orchestrated it all
Post by: DougMacG on October 02, 2020, 05:51:45 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2020, 03:36:31 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/allegation-hillary-clinton-orchestrated-collusion-hoax-to-distract-from-her-emails-according-to-russian-intel/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=most-popular&utm_term=first

McCarthy:
"Steele claimed Russia was using its consulate in Miami as a hub for the sinister arrangement with Trump. Russia did not have a consulate in Miami."
---------------------------
- It shouldn't have taken anyone with curiosity more than a minute to know the dossier was false.

Given all this, it is safe to assume Hillary orchestrated the Benghazi protest got out of hand story too. Her henchman think this stuff up she orchestrates and Obama's folks signed off on it all, while calling themselves a scandal-free administration. In fact, they were a scrutiny-free administration.
Title: McCabe will not comply with not appear, "virus concerns"
Post by: DougMacG on October 05, 2020, 06:21:04 AM: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/519481-mccabe-will-not-appear-at-senate-hearing-citing-coronavirus-concerns

Or is it because Comey did so badly and the whole cover story is falling apart.
Title: Brennan's handwritten notes!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2020, 05:14:50 PM: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dni-declassifies-brennan-notes-briefed-obama-intelligence-hillary-clinton-concocted-trump
Title: CIA's Gina Haskell trying to block declassification
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2020, 05:36:44 PM: second

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/02/john_solomon_haspel_blocking_declassification_of_russiagate_documents_to_protect_cias_reputation.html#!?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20201006201729
Title: cover up nearly complete
Post by: ccp on October 09, 2020, 07:43:28 AM: https://www.newsmax.com/politics/ag-barr-durham-russia-trump/2020/10/09/id/991163/

thats that

our only hope for truth
though the elites

will ignore anyway

once Trump leaves office this will all be whitewashed like

freedom from our lives................
Title: Any minute now!
Post by: G M on November 07, 2020, 12:17:44 PM: Spygate indictments/arrests=0

Epstein "Suicide" indictments/arrests=0

Hillary Clinton cabal indictments/arrests=0

Ilhan Omar immigration fraud indictments/arrests=0

And yet Gen. Flynn is still in legal jeopardy...

Huh.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on November 07, 2020, 12:40:14 PM: Hi GM,

might as well add
this to the list

voter fraud indictments / arrests = 0
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on November 07, 2020, 12:43:43 PM: Quote from: ccp on November 07, 2020, 12:40:14 PM
Hi GM,

might as well add
this to the list

voter fraud indictments / arrests = 0

Of course! That's just a right wing myth!
Title: rule of law only applies to Republicans
Post by: ccp on November 15, 2020, 03:32:42 PM: https://pjmedia.com/election/victoria-taft/2020/11/15/what-the-hell-report-claims-durham-investigation-into-spy-gate-is-dropped-n1148534

intimidated ?

:x

we the people will never know
but the MSM will use this as excuse to label as just another conspiracy theory

did we call this here?
Title: Re: rule of law only applies to Republicans
Post by: G M on November 15, 2020, 03:56:33 PM: Quote from: ccp on November 15, 2020, 03:32:42 PM
https://pjmedia.com/election/victoria-taft/2020/11/15/what-the-hell-report-claims-durham-investigation-into-spy-gate-is-dropped-n1148534

intimidated ?

:x

we the people will never know
but the MSM will use this as excuse to label as just another conspiracy theory

did we call this here?

Yes.
Title: Using Crafty logic which I agree with
Post by: ccp on November 18, 2020, 05:57:18 PM: Durham makes political decision to avoid looking political

sound like he trained under Justice Roberts......:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/durham-probe-moving-full-steam-ahead-after-election-day-source
Title: Barr who read the Forum
Post by: ccp on December 02, 2020, 05:43:23 AM: agreed with me to appoint a special counsel
though not sure if this is same as "independent " counsel

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?projector=1

Schiff is already all over there propaganda outlets saying how a new AG

can still shut this down.
Title: Re: Barr who read the Forum
Post by: DougMacG on December 02, 2020, 09:22:48 AM: Quote from: ccp on December 02, 2020, 05:43:23 AM
agreed with me to appoint a special counsel
though not sure if this is same as "independent " counsel

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?projector=1

Schiff is already all over there propaganda outlets saying how a new AG

can still shut this down.

New AG can shut this down - as easily as Trump could shut down the Mueller probe.

Different though because of co-conspirator media and spineless opposition party?
Title: FBI lawyer sorry he got caught
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2020, 07:09:02 AM: https://nypost.com/2020/12/04/fbi-lawyer-who-lied-to-surveil-trump-aide-says-prison-not-necessary/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR0Kq6iExXaiUmCaecWdGZt65rrkhUgZtFbewRLkCXMcYH82x-5z5PU_Kug
Title: Whoops! I guess the FBI did have some records...
Post by: G M on December 10, 2020, 11:56:24 AM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/attorney-ty-clevengers-determination-led-fbi-announcing-today-actually-thousands-documents-seth-richs-laptop/

Fidelity!
INTEGRITY!
Bravery!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on December 10, 2020, 01:30:24 PM: wait I am not clear because they have 20K emails and his laptop

it means Seth Rich sent DNC hacked material to Wikileaks
or that this excludes Russia

Am I reading this wrong

it seems like these conclusions are made from the fact they FBI does have a file on Rich.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on December 10, 2020, 09:30:06 PM: https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fbi-involved-seth-rich-case-officials/story?id=47565705

“So much of the conspiracy theory has been dependent on the allegation of federal investigators being involved, and the fact that the FBI has not and never had been involved with this investigation is critical to understanding just how false these conspiracy theories are,” Bauman said.

Quote from: ccp on December 10, 2020, 01:30:24 PM
wait I am not clear because they have 20K emails and his laptop

it means Seth Rich sent DNC hacked material to Wikileaks
or that this excludes Russia

Am I reading this wrong

it seems like these conclusions are made from the fact they FBI does have a file on Rich.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2020, 05:50:15 AM: "understanding just how false these conspiracy theories are"

Are there different levels of false? Not when it is all true.

I wonder if election fraud planning is in the DNC content.
Title: more on Rich
Post by: ccp on December 11, 2020, 07:44:37 AM: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/seth-rich-wikileaks-fox-news-sean-hannity-donald-trump-russia-1094896/

but what about this settlement ?
did the sides know FBI has file that is kept secret?
suppose there is evidence the DC
NC operative did leak DNC stuff to wikileaks

so far we know he reached out to wikileaks
correct?

mayb Fox can sue Rich family now.
Title: Cyrus Vance's kid
Post by: ccp on December 31, 2020, 04:46:16 AM: https://populist.press/crooked-democrat-justice-department-looking-to-lynch-trump/

lets not forget this NY Democrat lawyer cabal .. law fare

The DC Democrat Lawyers could not finish Trump so the NY mob is going after him.
Title: Wrist slap for Kevin Klinesmith
Post by: ccp on January 29, 2021, 08:09:04 AM: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/clinesmith-fbi-guilty-special-counsel/2021/01/29/id/1007758/

big deal :roll:

what a joke
Title: Re: Durham to seek jail for one FBI person
Post by: G M on January 29, 2021, 10:23:49 AM: Quote from: ccp on January 29, 2021, 08:09:04 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/clinesmith-fbi-guilty-special-counsel/2021/01/29/id/1007758/

big deal :roll:

what a joke

The Deep State takes care of it's own. I'm betting he doesn't lose his bar card.
Title: Re: Durham to seek jail for one FBI person
Post by: G M on January 29, 2021, 10:42:24 AM: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392419.php

Quote from: G M on January 29, 2021, 10:23:49 AM
Quote from: ccp on January 29, 2021, 08:09:04 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/clinesmith-fbi-guilty-special-counsel/2021/01/29/id/1007758/

big deal :roll:

what a joke

The Deep State takes care of it's own. I'm betting he doesn't lose his bar card.
Title: Re: Durham to seek jail for one FBI person
Post by: G M on January 29, 2021, 11:14:52 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/01/28/dc_fails_to_disbar_anti-trump_fbi_lawyer_despite_guilty_plea_126937.html

Quote from: G M on January 29, 2021, 10:42:24 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392419.php

Quote from: G M on January 29, 2021, 10:23:49 AM
Quote from: ccp on January 29, 2021, 08:09:04 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/clinesmith-fbi-guilty-special-counsel/2021/01/29/id/1007758/

big deal :roll:

what a joke

The Deep State takes care of it's own. I'm betting he doesn't lose his bar card.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on January 29, 2021, 02:01:24 PM: Durham going up against the heavweight DC lawyers

is like Marcia Clark going up against the World Class Dream Team

let me see that "frightening" tough rough prosecutor school picture for the millionth time as though the Left should be terrified:

https://time.com/5693083/john-durham-justice-department-investigation/

maybe we should have a thread

"the non accomplishments " of Bill Barr
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on January 29, 2021, 04:32:44 PM: Quote from: ccp on January 29, 2021, 02:01:24 PM
Durham going up against the heavweight DC lawyers

is like Marcia Clark going up against the World Class Dream Team

let me see that "frightening" tough rough prosecutor school picture for the millionth time as though the Left should be terrified:

https://time.com/5693083/john-durham-justice-department-investigation/

maybe we should have a thread

"the non accomplishments " of Bill Barr

He ran out the clock. That was what he intended. Mission accomplished.
Title: Hillary's lie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 23, 2021, 02:39:13 AM: https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=9e98fb5d28ecf7e72f390d2148b86358_614c7ff6_6d25b5f&selDate=20210923
Title: Re: Hillary's lie
Post by: DougMacG on September 23, 2021, 06:28:23 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 23, 2021, 02:39:13 AM
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=9e98fb5d28ecf7e72f390d2148b86358_614c7ff6_6d25b5f&selDate=20210923

Hillary looks really bad in this, if anyone looks.

Washington Times links aren't taking me directly to the story intended.
Title: DNC computers NOT hacked by Russians
Post by: ccp on October 09, 2021, 09:10:15 AM: they were hacked by ordinary thumb drive

and later made to look like Russians did it by "gucifer":

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/

this furthered the Russia interfered with the election HOAX
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Dossier Deceit
Post by: DougMacG on November 07, 2021, 06:05:08 AM: National Review
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-dossier-deceit/

Kim Strassel
https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/inside-the-clinton-dossier-and-the-con-behind-the-russiagate-scandal/
Title: A. McCarthy estimation of Durham invest.
Post by: ccp on November 09, 2021, 08:57:34 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/where-john-durhams-investigation-is-heading/

the big shots get off is his call
as THEY NEARLY ALWAYS DO

can't get big shot DC wheeler and dealers
just can't

above the law

:-(

angry, but expected this anyway
Title: Re: A. McCarthy estimation of Durham invest.
Post by: G M on November 09, 2021, 09:38:08 AM: Paywalled. Did Deep State Andy do his mandatory tongue bath for his DOJ buddies?

Quote from: ccp on November 09, 2021, 08:57:34 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/where-john-durhams-investigation-is-heading/

the big shots get off is his call
as THEY NEARLY ALWAYS DO

can't get big shot DC wheeler and dealers
just can't

above the law

:-(

angry, but expected this anyway
Title: Re: A. McCarthy estimation of Durham invest.
Post by: DougMacG on November 09, 2021, 12:12:22 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/subscribe
IF he's right, this is disappointing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last week’s indictment of Igor Danchenko has the commentariat buzzing. If special counsel John Durham has cracked the core of the Russiagate case, if he has established that the Steele dossier on which the FBI substantially based its spy warrants was fraudulent, does that mean he is nearing a sweeping conspiracy indictment? Will there be criminal charges that target the real 2016 collusion — not between the Trump campaign and Russia, but between the Clinton campaign and U.S. officials who abused government investigative powers for political purposes?

Almost certainly not.

All signs are that Durham will end his investigation with a narrative report. It has looked that way for a long time. There are reasons why then-attorney general Bill Barr appointed then-Connecticut U.S. attorney Durham as a special counsel shortly before the Trump administration ended.

Unlike ordinary federal prosecutors, who either file charges or close investigations without comment, special counsels are required by regulation to write a report for the attorney general. As we saw with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019, there is typically great outside pressure on the AG to make such reports public (though doing so is not required). Barr obviously knew enough about Durham’s investigation to grasp that there was unlikely to be a grand, overarching criminal-conspiracy case; there had, however, been rampant malfeasance and abuse of power that might never come to light absent a comprehensive investigative report.

I am not saying there will be no more indictments. There could be. But if there are, they will likely be similar to the indictments of Sussmann and Danchenko — who, you no doubt noticed, were separately charged, and are not alleged to have conspired with each other or anyone else. Those indictments imply that Durham has uncovered a Clinton-campaign scheme to leverage the Obama/Biden administration’s investigative powers against Clinton’s political opponent, Trump. Yet, Durham has charged the two defendants only with lying to the FBI. And tellingly, he did not file charges against people with whom Danchenko and Sussmann collaborated in supplying specious information to investigators, much less accuse the investigators themselves of misconduct.

At work here is the same phenomenon I addressed during the Mueller probe when predicting that there would be no “Trump-Russia collusion” conspiracy charges. If Mueller had had such a case, he would have brought it against the first defendants he charged — especially the ones who’d agreed to cooperate with his investigators. The way a prosecutor builds a big conspiracy case is by getting the suspects to admit the existence of the conspiracy and the roles they played in it. Charging the small fish with comparatively minor crimes doesn’t get you there. And you don’t develop effective cooperating witnesses by having them plead guilty only to being liars — which, were they later to testify, would be the first thing the jury learned about them.

Let’s think about Durham’s investigation. If there were a grand conspiracy to prosecute, it would have to center on some scheme to defraud the court and obstruct judicial proceedings. Furthermore, for it to have been as heinous as the most outraged Trump supporter believes it was, Obama-administration officials — or at the very least, FBI agents — would have to be implicated.

Now, consider Danchenko. If anyone were to have been instrumental in such a scheme, he would be the guy. He is the principal source of the scurrilous information in the dossier compiled by his associate Christopher Steele. There is reason to suspect he knew that Steele was sharing information with the U.S. government, which, in turn, was using it as a predicate to investigate Trump — perhaps even to seek eavesdropping warrants from federal judges.

But what does Durham charge Danchenko with? Lying to the FBI. And not even lying about the all-important substance of the information he communicated to Steele, but just about the sources from whom he heard it.

To be sure, there is abundant reason to believe Danchenko knew that what he told Steele was nonsense, and that Steele had to have known it was at least highly suspect. But Durham doesn’t allege that; he goes for two charges that should be much easier to prove. He alleges that Danchenko knowingly lied when claiming some of the dossier information came from Trump associate Sergey Millian, and when claiming none of it came from Clinton crony Charles Dolan.

And lied, it must be emphasized, to the FBI.

For those of us who’ve closely followed it, the most dismaying part of the collusion caper (as we observed in our editorial over the weekend) has been the FBI’s abuse of its investigative authorities. Durham is not saying, in his indictments, that there was no such abuse — as in recklessness, incompetence, and failure to be as forthright with the court as the law and agency procedures require. But he is also not alleging that the FBI — either as an institution, or in a conspiracy among individual agents — defrauded the court or otherwise obstructed justice.

Sussmann, like Danchenko, was indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI. And, like Danchenko’s indictment, the Sussmann indictment avoids the question of whether the defendant actually believed the substance of his suspicions about Trump. Sussmann is not accused of lying when he claimed that Trump was using Alfa Bank as a conduit for secret communications with the Kremlin; he is alleged to have deceptively concealed that he was advancing this claim on behalf of clients — the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for a government job if Clinton defeated Trump.

There is one FBI official who can be said to have caused misinformation to be given to the FISA court, lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. But he was indicted for lying to an FBI agent about whether the CIA had informed the bureau that Carter Page had been an agency informant, not for defrauding the court. In fact, in sentencing him to no jail time, the judge (implausibly) seemed to accept that Clinesmith did not intend to deceive the court.

The bottom line of all this is that Durham’s position is that the FBI was duped, not that it was part of a grand conspiracy.

It may well be true — I think it is true — that the FBI was predisposed to believe the worst about Donald Trump. This predisposition, if it existed, would almost certainly have influenced the bureau’s dereliction in failing to take rudimentary steps to verify the outlandish allegations being made about Trump before relying on them for investigative purposes (including in sworn court applications). The FBI would thus be culpable, in a practical and moral sense, for enabling the Clinton campaign to exploit government power for political purposes. But plainly, Durham is not going to allege that FBI officials knowingly and willfully conspired to deceive the court.

Let’s remember, moreover, some other relevant history.

During the 2020 campaign, then-AG Barr made clear that former president Obama and vice president Biden were not subjects of Durham’s investigation. There was also public reporting that former CIA director John Brennan, who energetically hyped the Trump–Russia-collusion narrative, was told he was not a subject of Durham’s investigation before submitting to at least one extensive interview. And in congressional testimony (among other public statements), while then-AG Barr was blistering in his criticism of the FBI, he allowed that its excesses may have been driven by overzealousness, not criminal intent. That is, bureau higher-ups may have been sincerely concerned, based on flimsy evidence, about Russian infiltration of the Trump campaign, as opposed to intentionally collaborating with Trump’s political opposition — they may have been incompetent, rather than malevolent.

Clearly, these are not the makings of a prosecutable conspiracy that put the government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of Democratic Party objectives to get Mrs. Clinton elected and, failing that, to undermine Trump’s administration.

Of course, that doesn’t mean such a conspiracy didn’t exist. The government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus did in fact serve the Democrats’ anti-Trump objectives. For a criminal prosecution, though, it is not sufficient to prove that something bad happened. Prosecutors must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the bad thing happened because the participants knowingly and willfully planned it that way.

It looks like Durham can’t prove that.

That’s not surprising. As I elaborated in Ball of Collusion, many things that smack of abuse of power are not prosecutable crimes. The law necessarily gives government officials a wide berth to use aggressive investigative measures based on dubious suspicions. It is easy to see the abuse, but much harder to establish it as a crime. That is why a system that fails to hold abusive officials politically accountable will be a failed system. Establishing their criminal guilt is much harder.

Political dirty tricks are similarly ill-suited to criminal prosecution. We don’t want the FBI and Justice Department poking around campaigns and elections. Politicians habitually paint opponents in the worst light and tell the public many terrible things about them — gross exaggerations as well as flat-out falsehoods. Sadly, it is not all that unusual for the demagoguery to include allegations of criminal misconduct and traitorous corruption. Such allegations, when unsupported by evidence, are morally reprehensible. On occasion, they may even be slanderous under the civil law. But political mudslinging is generally not serious enough to warrant prosecution because we want our politics cordoned off from intrusion by the incumbent party’s criminal investigators.

For all these reasons, Durham has long appeared, at least to my eyes, to be heading toward a narrative final report, not a sweeping criminal indictment. Both of his recent indictments, in their rich detail, are consistent with the theory that “Trump–Russia collusion” was a political narrative concocted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Campaign operatives spun and manufactured the collusion “evidence.” They understood that the Obama administration shared their baleful view of Trump and that the media would be onboard. And with those built-in advantages, they calculated that Obama administration national-security and law-enforcement officials were open to believing and airing dark suspicions about Trump.

It will make for an infuriating report. But not a criminal indictment.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: G M on November 09, 2021, 12:21:41 PM: “It looks like Durham can’t prove that.“

No, it looks like he isn’t even trying, and Deep State Andy knows it.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2021, 05:23:05 PM: Ugh.
Title: Wash Post retracts support of Russia collusion
Post by: ccp on November 15, 2021, 08:15:06 AM: https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/wapo-retracts-steele-dossier-russia-collusion-reporting-points-finger-at-hillary-clinton/

"better late then never"???

doesn't do much good now.......

perhaps they are sacrificing Hillary to protect
their icon Baraq?

who HAD to be in on it.

hillary is junk in the basement
while Baraq et al is still the silent leader behind the Left.
Title: Re: Wash Post retracts support of Russia collusion
Post by: DougMacG on November 15, 2021, 08:56:04 AM: Quote from: ccp on November 15, 2021, 08:15:06 AM
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/wapo-retracts-steele-dossier-russia-collusion-reporting-points-finger-at-hillary-clinton/

"better late then never"???

doesn't do much good now.......

perhaps they are sacrificing Hillary to protect
their icon Baraq?

who HAD to be in on it.

hillary is junk in the basement
while Baraq et al is still the silent leader behind the Left.

Yes, doesn't do much good now. They are protecting only themselves, but guilt is guilt and the correction is peanuts. They won a Pulitzer on false reporting of a false story. Complete shame and not one liberal faults them. False is true? George Orwell's 1984 was not a how-to guide. Try, try again.
Title: it is going to be Mueller Comey 2.0
Post by: ccp on November 30, 2021, 11:27:58 AM: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/28/michael-cohen-trump-organization-investigations

since we are going to get Trump again for '24 we are going to have to live through this stuff again .....

I have a headache already
Title: Re: it is going to be Mueller Comey 2.0
Post by: DougMacG on November 30, 2021, 02:04:53 PM: Quote from: ccp on November 30, 2021, 11:27:58 AM
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/28/michael-cohen-trump-organization-investigations
since we are going to get Trump again for '24 we are going to have to live through this stuff again .....
I have a headache already

Convicted liar on "Meet the Press". Stir it up again. Let me guess, didn't get to the Hunter story.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance leaves in one month. We'll know soon enough if he files charges. Charges for WHAT? If it's a clear-cut case, what's the holdup? And why dump it on your successor if you have a career making case?

So far Michael Cohen has only succeeded at being a tool.
Title: Great, just fg great , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2021, 09:42:47 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/is-durhams-case-on-clinton-tied-lawyer-michael-sussmann-collapsing/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-12-11&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Jan 6 Committee reports maybe this summer and fall
Post by: ccp on December 29, 2021, 07:36:25 AM: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-11-17/americans-support-the-right-to-abortion

anyone think the timing is political ?
what a joke.

:roll:
Title: Russell Brand searches for Truth and finds quite a bit
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2022, 07:44:41 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k6X03XvxWw&t=27s
Title: Byron York: Of course they spied on Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2022, 10:43:07 AM: OF COURSE THEY SPIED ON TRUMP. One of the most contentious claims Donald Trump ever made was his insistence that he had been the target of spying. He made the charge in several different ways. For example, in March 2017, Trump, just two months in office, tweeted, "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" Two years later, in April 2019, he was less specific but equally adamant when he said, "There was absolutely spying into my campaign." In August 2020, during his Republican National Committee acceptance speech, he said, "Remember this: They spied on my campaign."

Each time, all the usual anti-Trump voices rushed to accuse the president of lying. But over the years, a series of facts emerged that, while they did not support some of Trump's most specific charges — Obama did not wiretap Trump in Trump Tower — did support the larger idea that Trump was indeed the target of spying.

We learned that in the final days of the 2016 presidential race, when the Clinton campaign came up with the Steele dossier, a collection of sensational and unsupported allegations about Trump and Russia, the FBI used the dossier to win approval to wiretap Carter Page, a low-level former Trump campaign adviser. Then we learned that also in 2016, the FBI used a confidential informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to spy on Page and George Papadopoulos, another low-level Trump adviser. Then we learned that in 2016, the FBI sent an undercover agent — a woman who used the alias Azra Turk — to secretly record conversations with Papadopoulos.

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So, there is ample evidence to say that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Now we are learning about another type of spying — the Clinton campaign spying on the Trump campaign. The revelations are coming from the investigation of John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration, and retained by the Biden administration, to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.

In a court filing Friday, Durham reported that in July 2016, a tech executive named Rodney Joffe (he is unnamed in the court papers, but the name has been widely reported) worked with the Clinton campaign's law firm to "mine Internet data," some of it "non-public and/or proprietary" — that means secret — to search for information that could be used to claim a Trump-Russia connection. Among the secret data that was "exploited," according to Durham, was internet traffic from Trump Tower, from Donald Trump's Central Park West apartment building, and — after Trump was elected president — the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Joffe's company, Durham says, "had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement" — a government contract — to provide tech services. They then "exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP's [Internet] traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump."

After that, the Clinton team went to the CIA to try to get the nation's spy agency interested in the anti-Trump effort. That mirrored earlier Clinton approaches to the FBI, when Clinton operatives tried to interest agents on what is known as the "Alfa Bank" story, which was a phony allegation that there were all sorts of suspicious connections between a Russian bank and the Trump campaign.

The bigger goal of all of it, Durham says, was "to establish 'an inference' and 'narrative' tying then-candidate Trump to Russia." So there was a two-track operation going on: While the FBI was doing spying of its own, the Clinton team was spying, too, and trying to get the FBI and CIA involved. It was all part of a larger plan to push the "narrative" of Trump-Russia collusion.

How did it end? You'll remember that a special counsel, Robert Mueller, using all the resources and powers of federal law enforcement, searched for collusion for years and could never establish that it happened, much less that any Trump campaign figures might have been involved.

Going to the FBI and CIA had tactical advantages for the Clinton campaign, in this way: If a Clinton operative approached a member of the press, claiming to have hot information about a Trump-Russia connection, the reporter, even if normally biased toward Democrats, might view it skeptically. After all, consider the source — a campaign flak trying to plant a story. But if the Clinton operative approached the press with information that the FBI was investigating a possible Trump-Russia connection — that's news! If the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating Trump, that's a big story, in and of itself. And indeed, that is how the dossier ultimately got into public circulation, when sources told CNN that the country's top intel chiefs had briefed Trump on it.

The new revelation is confirmation for some of the Republicans who uncovered the early clues of the spying operation. "Democrat-paid operatives illegally hacked their political opponents' communications during a presidential campaign and then did it again to a sitting president and the White House staff," said Devin Nunes, who as House Intelligence Committee chairman investigated the spying allegations. "These actions are characteristic of third-world dictatorships, not democracies. It is undoubtedly the biggest political scandal of our lifetime." (Nunes, who just left Congress, is now CEO of the new Trump social media venture.)

For former President Donald Trump, the message was much simpler. On Sunday, he sent out an email statement that read, simply: "THEY SPIED ON THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!"

Yes, they did.
Title: Re: Byron York: Of course they spied on Trump
Post by: DougMacG on February 14, 2022, 11:52:27 AM: A family member used this in 2016, Trump said his campaign was "wiretapped", as an example of how he is nuts, paranoid, unfit, etc.

She was right - if you believe Lying Narrative News.

Over and over and over again, he keeps getting proved right and "fake news" keeps getting proved fake.

As I just posted on the media thread, perhaps worse than Lying News is Omission News.
Title: Re: Byron York: Of course they spied on Trump
Post by: G M on February 14, 2022, 02:13:10 PM: Quote from: DougMacG on February 14, 2022, 11:52:27 AM
A family member used this in 2016, Trump said his campaign was "wiretapped", as an example of how he is nuts, paranoid, unfit, etc.

She was right - if you believe Lying Narrative News.

Over and over and over again, he keeps getting proved right and "fake news" keeps getting proved fake.

As I just posted on the media thread, perhaps worse than Lying News is Omission News.

Who is going to prison for this?
Title: The WSJ weighs in
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2022, 06:20:53 PM: Special Counsel John Durham continues to unravel the Trump-Russia “collusion” story, and his latest court disclosure contains startling information. According to a Friday court filing, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign effort to compile dirt on Donald Trump reached into protected White House communications.

The filing relates to Mr. Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign while he worked for the Perkins Coie law firm. Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show secret internet communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information solely as a good citizen—failing to disclose his ties to the Clinton campaign. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

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The indictment revealed that Mr. Sussmann worked with “Tech Executive-1,” who has been identified as Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar Inc. The indictment says Mr. Joffe used his companies, as well as researchers at a U.S. university, to access internet data, which he used to gather information about Mr. Trump’s communications.

Mr. Durham says Mr. Joffe’s “goal” was to create an “inference” and “narrative” about Mr. Trump that would “please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at [Perkins Coie] and the Clinton Campaign.”

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***

The new shocker relates to the data Mr. Joffe and friends were mining. According to Friday’s filing, as early as July 2016 Mr. Joffe was “exploit[ing]” his “access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including “Internet traffic pertaining to . . . the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”).”

The filing explains that Mr. Joffe’s employer “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided [internet services]” to the White House. Mr. Joffe’s team also was monitoring internet traffic related to Trump Tower, and Mr. Trump’s apartment on Central Park West.

White House communications are supposed to be secure, and the notion that any contractor—much less one with ties to a presidential campaign—could access them is alarming enough. The implication that the data was exploited for a political purpose is a scandal that requires investigation under oath.

The filing suggests the data collection continued into the Trump Presidency. Mr. Durham says that on Feb. 9, 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with a second federal agency (“Agency-2”) to provide “an updated set of allegations,” and that these “allegations relied, in part, on the purported [internet traffic] that [Mr. Joffe] and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP” and a healthcare provider.

(Late Monday a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said in a statement that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S Government who has never worked for a political party.” The statement added that “there were serious and legitimate national security concerns about Russian attempts to infiltrate the 2016 election” and that “respected cyber-security researchers were deeply concerned about the anomalies they found in the data and prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the CIA.”) That could certainly use some elaboration.

The filing says the new allegations Mr. Sussmann provided—claiming suspicious ties between a Russian mobile phone operator and the White House—were also bogus, and that Mr. Sussmann again made the false claim that he wasn’t working on behalf of a client.

***

The disclosures raise troubling questions far beyond the Sussmann indictment. How long did this snooping last and who had access to what was found? Who approved the access to White House data, and who at the FBI and White House knew about it? Were Mrs. Clinton and senior campaign aides personally aware of this data-trolling operation?

Mr. Durham’s revelations take the 2016 collusion scam well beyond the Steele dossier, which was based on the unvetted claims of a Russian emigre working in Washington. Those claims and the Sussmann assertions were channeled to the highest levels of the government via contacts at the FBI, CIA and State Department. They became fodder for secret and unjustified warrants against a former Trump campaign official, and later for Robert Mueller’s two-year mole hunt that turned up no evidence of collusion.

Along the way the Clinton campaign fed these bogus claims to a willing and gullible media. And now we know its operatives used private tech researchers to monitor White House communications. If you made this up, you’d be laughed out of a Netflix story pitch.

Mr. Durham’s legal filing is related to certain conflicts of interest in Mr. Sussmann’s legal team, and it remains unclear where else his probe is going. But the unfolding information underscores that the Russia collusion story was one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. Mr. Durham should tell the whole sordid story.
Title: Re: The WSJ weighs in
Post by: DougMacG on February 15, 2022, 06:38:41 AM: "The disclosures raise troubling questions far beyond the Sussmann indictment. How long did this snooping last and who had access to what was found? Who approved the access to White House data, and who at the FBI and White House knew about it? Were Mrs. Clinton and senior campaign aides personally aware of this data-trolling operation?"
-----------
What did she know and when did she know it.

First we expect the defense of plausible deniability. Facts prove the campaign did this but unless someone flips, and no one will, they can't prove she ordered it and knowingly benefited from it.

The contradictory explanation is that the criminality stinks from the head. Her whole political narrative is that she is highly involved in everything. She was co-president, not a ceremonial first lady. She was involved in every minute detail right down to shutting up Juanita Broadrick, even naming Bill's distractions as bimbo eruptions. He wasn't cheating with women of substance like her, these were all just bimbos, no cost in personally destroying them. They perfected the practice of personal destruction and their friend Trump now stood in their way and made a very big and easy target.

It isn't a question of when she knew, it's an evidentiary question of whether prosecutors can avoid finding out it was all her evil idea.

The criminal consequences aside, can't everyone see it was her who ordered it, used it and benefited politically from it using basic pattern recognition skills?
Title: More LEFTIST contortions
Post by: ccp on February 15, 2022, 08:21:36 AM: "Trump and his allies"

claiming this is "proof " of spying :

https://news.yahoo.com/tech-exec-used-access-white-013032349.html

this when we claim anything it is Trump and Republicans

and not proof ( shyster obfuscation)

the next step is this will be labelled a

"conspiracy theory "

that still had no merit

:-(
Title: Tucker: Trump was right!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2022, 01:10:17 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY5I_QTiDE8
Title: I am told this is who did the work
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2022, 07:51:44 PM: https://informatics.indiana.edu/contact/profile/?Jean_Camp&fbclid=IwAR3yYneCWprwPhuxNIdK-_67gqjAmJHbeJv5YCAqbEpZa-8keC1u7GDAkh8
Title: I think more photos of Andrew Jackson exist in Media then J Durham
Post by: ccp on February 16, 2022, 07:51:47 AM: https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=john+durham+image&fir=kE9IjNKrJmItCM%252C7hAd8MT3Qah3vM%252C_%253BUlcbIN-Xp_AwEM%252C7hAd8MT3Qah3vM%252C_%253BKZBFiKFVhz9LcM%252CswfmdsXQxfVUVM%252C_%253BrO2SHArTWLxtnM%252CyPNWdHlPewSdzM%252C_%253BYbETLP4DKNylQM%252Cy2Ld2K4v0adoMM%252C_%253BNje_Kep48AeSYM%252CyPNWdHlPewSdzM%252C_%253B2x2vbU8l1wDtVM%252CCEGqbPsuFA5MDM%252C_%253Bca058G-nG-U9HM%252C6vi5T6eoAfD07M%252C_%253Ba_bylt7DRUQD5M%252C3B7kBn93ysKMrM%252C_%253BifXlD_OldAbqWM%252Ccf8h3HdxqH2OLM%252C_%253B8EqiwZJbM1XyhM%252C3B7kBn93ysKMrM%252C_%253BYwz1qdUQgSvDnM%252C-sBs85GGgmaE0M%252C_%253BRvpjJoudbabC5M%252CUAJVGMZ1xV4HMM%252C_%253BGqGdw2dBIZPAsM%252CWmQgN2Q2kWeOAM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kT66SgsZs3vglZhVaaWWTLKAUI78g&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXmrG3yYT2AhUOm-AKHRVBC04QsAR6BAgCEAM&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2
Title: Re: I think more photos of Andrew Jackson exist in Media then J Durham
Post by: G M on February 16, 2022, 08:11:51 AM: Quote from: ccp on February 16, 2022, 07:51:47 AM
https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=john+durham+image&fir=kE9IjNKrJmItCM%252C7hAd8MT3Qah3vM%252C_%253BUlcbIN-Xp_AwEM%252C7hAd8MT3Qah3vM%252C_%253BKZBFiKFVhz9LcM%252CswfmdsXQxfVUVM%252C_%253BrO2SHArTWLxtnM%252CyPNWdHlPewSdzM%252C_%253BYbETLP4DKNylQM%252Cy2Ld2K4v0adoMM%252C_%253BNje_Kep48AeSYM%252CyPNWdHlPewSdzM%252C_%253B2x2vbU8l1wDtVM%252CCEGqbPsuFA5MDM%252C_%253Bca058G-nG-U9HM%252C6vi5T6eoAfD07M%252C_%253Ba_bylt7DRUQD5M%252C3B7kBn93ysKMrM%252C_%253BifXlD_OldAbqWM%252Ccf8h3HdxqH2OLM%252C_%253B8EqiwZJbM1XyhM%252C3B7kBn93ysKMrM%252C_%253BYwz1qdUQgSvDnM%252C-sBs85GGgmaE0M%252C_%253BRvpjJoudbabC5M%252CUAJVGMZ1xV4HMM%252C_%253BGqGdw2dBIZPAsM%252CWmQgN2Q2kWeOAM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kT66SgsZs3vglZhVaaWWTLKAUI78g&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXmrG3yYT2AhUOm-AKHRVBC04QsAR6BAgCEAM&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2

Because some people care about AJ. Nothing will come from Durham.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: ccp on February 16, 2022, 08:16:40 AM: "Because some people care about AJ. Nothing will come from Durham."

yes

no *willing* controlling legal authority

we all know hillary spied
we all know intelligence people were doing same
we all know it likely happens all day long
in DC
like at Wall St
like corporate espionage - all day long
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2022, 06:44:37 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/16/hawley-demands-jake-sullivans-wife-justice-departm/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=cq%2F6ba5Nqb840TqRMrtpLRp66CSlnulqLwy8w9F5EnlAFcH2m5ePENarI50R5Ziz&bt_ts=1645061191588
Title: McCarthy: Welcome to the Swamp Mr. Durham
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2022, 11:33:08 PM: Welcome to the Swamp, Mr. Durham
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
February 19, 2022 6:30 AM

Left: U.S. Attorney John Durham. Right: Michael Sussmann on C-SPAN in 2016. (United States Attorney's Office, District of Connecticut/Wikimedia; Screenshot via C-SPAN)
For the special counsel, the prosecution of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann in a Washington, D.C., courtroom will not be a home game.

Roy Cohn, the notorious rogue lawyer and Donald Trump confidant, famously said, “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” And the judge in Special Counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Michael Sussmann will have to decide a point of false-statements law: materiality.

Sussmann, of course, is the former Perkins Coie lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC), among other notable political clients. The case against him stems from his efforts to peddle to government investigative agencies the political slander that Donald Trump was a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime — at bottom, he is alleged to have concealed that the main client on whose behalf he labored in this endeavor was the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The crescendo toward which Durham appears to be building is a final report that will show the Trump–Russia “collusion” innuendo that gripped the country for three years was essentially concocted by Mrs. Clinton and her minions. Though some comparatively minor crimes may have been committed along the way, such a partisan scheme would not necessarily be a crime in and of itself. It would, however, be one of the dirtiest, swampiest political tricks of all time.

Sussmann’s trial is scheduled for May, but the case has already whipped Washington into a frenzy with allegations of political spying, counterclaims of a political witch-hunt, and now, the return of the ponderous Hillary herself. Shaking off her latest crash-and-burn, Mrs. C is back making speeches again, wheedling her way into position as the Democrats’ go-to 2024 alternative in the not-unforeseeable event that President Biden continues to stumble and Vice President Kamala Harris continues to speak. At a state Democratic convention in New York Thursday, Clinton could be heard inveighing that this latest criminal investigation hovering about her — which seems like the millionth criminal investigation to hover about her over the last 30 years — is yet another “right-wing lie” whose proponents are bordering on “actual malice” against her. (New York Times readers and Sarah Palin fans will recognize actual malice as the standard for proving libel — Hillary! remains subtle as ever.)

It’s pretty standard fare: Sussmann claims there is no false statement as a matter of law because, he contends, Durham can’t prove that the alleged lie to the FBI was material. Materiality is the low-hurdle requirement that, to be prosecutable, a lie has to have been material to some decision the government had to make (like whether it would have been important to know, before deciding to pursue an investigation, that an explosive allegation that one major-party presidential candidate was a Putin puppet had actually been ginned up by the other major-party candidate).

The court will eventually rule on the Sussmann camp’s dismissal motion. In a high-profile, politically fraught case like this one, though, it would be most unusual for a judge to take it on himself to throw the indictment out before trial. Materiality is one of those “mixed questions of law and fact,” as they say in the biz — the jury decides whether, in fact, a lie was material, but the decision is controlled by legal precedents, so the judge also has the power to determine that the prosecutor hasn’t shown enough proof of materiality for the question to be submitted to the jury. The judge will get several other bites at this apple as the proceedings move along — during trial, when the prosecution rests, right before summations, and even post-trial if the jury finds Sussmann guilty — so there is no need to rule pretrial.

The issue, however, is central to the Sussmann case. Which brings us back to Cohn’s question: Who is the judge? Who is presiding over this case in which the machinations of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the Democrats’ Trump–Russia obsession, are the heart of the matter?

Funny you should ask. The case is assigned to Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper, who was appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2014.

Judge Cooper is a protégé of the late Judge Abner J. Mikva, for whom he clerked on the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1993. Some of us of a certain age remember Judge Mikva as White House counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Mikva took that top Clinton-administration job in 1994, the same year Cooper joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Clinton’s appointed deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick. While Cooper worked for Gorelick from 1994 until 1996, a major issue for the DOJ was the interplay, in terrorism cases, of crime-investigation techniques and foreign-intelligence collection under FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). At the time, FISA surveillance applications were reviewed by the DOJ’s Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). By 1996, another young prosecutor, James Baker, was working at OIPR.

Like Cooper and Baker, Michael Sussmann also worked at the Justice Department during the Clinton era. Like Baker, he stayed there for many years working on national-security issues. Eventually, Sussmann became an expert in cybersecurity law, which was his niche in private practice at Perkins Coie, where he represented the DNC after its servers were hacked. The Obama-era intelligence agencies and the Mueller investigation attributed the hack to Putin’s regime, but the matter is murky. In part, that’s because the DNC would not allow the FBI to examine its servers, and, for some reason, the FBI (where Baker was by then general counsel) did not get the Obama Justice Department to issue a subpoena for them.

Meanwhile, Cooper left the Justice Department in 1996, so he was no longer a top adviser to the deputy attorney general in 1997, when President Clinton appointed Eric Holder to that position. But by the time President Obama appointed Cooper to the bench in 2014, Holder was Obama’s attorney general. As AG, Holder needed a national-security counselor. He chose Amy Jeffress . . . who happens to be married to Judge Cooper.

In private practice, Jeffress recently represented Lisa Page, the former Justice Department and FBI lawyer who was embroiled in both the Clinton-emails and Trump–Russia investigations, and whose overt loathing of Trump was, shall we say, controversial. Page was plugged into the top hierarchy of the FBI under Director James Comey, because she was a special legal adviser to Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe. She also worked closely with James Baker, a top Comey adviser and the Bureau’s general counsel from 2014 through 2017.

(Interestingly, Comey was appointed FBI director by Obama while Holder was AG. Holder’s 2008 nomination to the top job at the DOJ had initially run into some headwinds due to his complicity in President Clinton’s pardons scandal — particularly the pay-for-play pardon of Marc Rich. But the nomination was given a boost when Holder was publicly endorsed by Comey — who, besides having been President Bush’s deputy attorney general, had for a time been the prosecutor assigned to the Marc Rich case while Rich was a fugitive on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.)

In September 2016, the Clinton campaign decided to bring to the FBI its claim that Trump was a Putin plant and was using Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, as a communications back-channel to the Kremlin. Sussmann was chosen to convey to the Bureau the Internet-traffic data that had been carefully mined by Rodney Joffe, a tech executive who allegedly hoped to score a job in what everyone assumed would be the Hillary Clinton administration.

Sussmann decided not to report the information through regular FBI channels. See, ordinary citizens who seek to report potential crimes or security threats contact the FBI and are referred to an agent. But unlike mere mortals, Sussmann is a big-cheese former DOJ cybersecurity official with big-cheese political connections. So he sought, and was granted, a meeting with the Bureau’s top lawyer, Baker — who, in later congressional testimony, conceded that this was indeed a very unusual way for the FBI to receive investigative information, since FBI lawyers are not FBI agents and generally try to stay out of the chain of evidence.

The meeting was one-on-one. Usually, a person with important information to pass along will meet with not one but two FBI agents (again, not FBI lawyers). That way, one agent can take notes while the other agent leads the questioning, and if, down the road, there is ever any dispute about what happened and what was said during the encounter, there are two FBI agents available to testify. Yet, when these two lawyers with longtime government experience in Washington got together to discuss whether the Republican presidential nominee might be a Russian spy, there was no one else in the room.

Baker is thus the only witness to Sussmann’s alleged false statement, which was neither digitally recorded nor transcribed. And Cooper is the judge hearing the case.

This is not John Durham’s first rodeo. He is 71, and has spent his entire professional life as a state and federal prosecutor in Connecticut. Over the decades, he has been asked to handle a number of politically sensitive, special-counsel-type investigations, precisely because he is not a Swamp creature. When the Sussmann trial starts this spring, he will be representing the United States government in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. But for him, this will not be a home game.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2022, 06:06:22 AM: "The crescendo toward which Durham appears to be building is a final report that will show the Trump–Russia “collusion” innuendo that gripped the country for three years was essentially concocted by Mrs. Clinton and her minions."

was it not within a day or two Clinton was already planting the rumor it was the "Russians". who were responsible for her loss.

clearly then, she was in on it.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2022, 06:11:37 AM: "Funny you should ask. The case is assigned to Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper, who was appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2014.

Judge Cooper is a protégé of the late Judge Abner J. Mikva, for whom he clerked on the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1993. Some of us of a certain age remember Judge Mikva as White House counsel to President Bill Clinton."

"Shysterlisters" is my name for these lawyers
Part of the Clinton mob

"Welcome to the Swamp, Mr. Durham"

reminds me of the lead at Judicial Watch who told me on the phone:

"welcome to Washington DC!"
Title: another post
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2022, 06:28:32 AM: This is what happens when politicians
and some lawyers and lobbyists
and some jurnolists (WP) go to DC:

https://www.google.com/search?q=cesspool&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjjvJbwvY72AhXujYkEHZTUB2EQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2#imgrc=KIgFjtQ79e4N0M
Title: Durham, by Hillary Sycophant
Post by: DougMacG on February 21, 2022, 11:59:51 PM: "It's time for Durham to shut down his investigation". Analysis by someone who has not read a word of it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/165437/john-durham-trump-special-counsel-sham-investigation

This kind of drivel becomes their talking point and they never have to discuss the substance. Quite a bit of projecting going on. In the corrections we learn the author didn't even know how indictments Durham has come out with, yet this will ignorance will be the model for answering the charges.

Oh, and it is a material fact that Sussman lied about who his client was, the Democratic Presidential nominee spying on the Republican nominee, just like has happened how many times ... NEVER ... in our republic's history.

Watergate was about trying to get the opponent's inside information, and his removal from office had to do with lying about it. THIS WAS FAR WORSE.

I don't know where this will lead but one thing is clear, Durham didn't make it all up.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2022, 10:04:39 AM: ".I don't know where this will lead but one thing is clear, Durham didn't make it all up."

lets keep our fingers crossed he does not get discovered at his home hanging from a rafter
in an "apparent suicide".

or like the Russians do it -> get hit by a car in a "random accident".
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: G M on February 22, 2022, 10:20:46 AM: Quote from: ccp on February 22, 2022, 10:04:39 AM
".I don't know where this will lead but one thing is clear, Durham didn't make it all up."

lets keep our fingers crossed he does not get discovered at his home hanging from a rafter
in an "apparent suicide".

or like the Russians do it -> get hit by a car in a "random accident".

They don't need to kill him. Nothing of importance will come from this. At most, a few low level people will get sweet plea deals and be taken care of by the system.
Title: Real Clear Politics on Russia hoax and participants
Post by: ccp on March 17, 2022, 01:05:09 PM: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/06/fingerprints_on_russiagate_smoking_gun_are_ignored_144381.html?utm_source=realclearpolitics.com_internal&utm_medium=internal&utm_campaign=realclearpolitics.com_internal&utm_content=1015253027&utm_term=1000871&crst=1647547278&wrst=1647547272
Title: Durham: 5 Clintonites refusing to cooperate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 18, 2022, 02:36:25 PM: Durham: 5 Witnesses Connected to Clinton Campaign Refusing to Cooperate
By Jack Phillips April 18, 2022 Updated: April 18, 2022biggersmaller Print
Special counsel John Durham revealed that five witnesses who have connections to the Clinton campaign are invoking their Fifth Amendment right and will not cooperate with his investigation, according to a recent court filing.

In a motion filed (pdf) on April 15, Durham revealed that one unnamed individual, “Researcher-2,” was given immunity in exchange for testimony, while “at least five other witnesses who conducted work relating to the Russian Bank-1 allegations invoked (or indicated their intent to invoke) their right against self-incrimination,” referring to the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

The names of those five individuals were not provided in the filing, although they pertain to former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who is accused by Durham of lying to the FBI in 2016 when he met with the bureau’s then-general counsel, James Baker, and told him that then-candidate Donald Trump had a secret back channel with a Russian bank. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have said Durman’s investigation is politically motivated.

“Researcher 2” was granted immunity by the government on July 28, 2021, about a month before Sussmann was indicted, according to Durham’s filing.

“The Government therefore pursued Researcher-2’s immunity in order to uncover otherwise-unavailable facts underlying the opposition research project that Tech Executive-1 and others carried out in advance of the defendant’s meeting with the FBI,” the filing said. A spokesperson for Rodney Joffe told news outlets in February that he is “Tech Executive-1” mentioned in Durham’s filings. Joffe was previously in charge of a technology firm known as Neustar.

Earlier this month, Durham, in court filings, sought to compel the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, Democratic election firm Perkins Coie, and others to provide evidence in the Sussmann case. However, they have refused to hand over the documents and said they are protected by attorney-client privilege, according to Durham, who accused those entities of improperly withholding those documents.

Durham further said that of 1,455 documents withheld by Fusion GPS, the firm that was heavily involved in the creation of the controversial and discredited “Steele dossier” on Trump, only 18 emails actually involve an attorney. This means, according to the prosecutor, that attorney-client privilege cannot be applied in the remaining tranche of documents.

Days before that, Durham said Sussmann, Joffe, and Democrats engaged in a “joint venture” to gather and spread claims that Trump had a connection to the Russian government—claims that dominated the early portion of the Trump administration.

“Contrary to the allegations in this recent filing, Mr. Joffe is an apolitical Internet security expert with decades of service to the U.S. Government who has never worked for a political party, and who legally provided access to DNS data obtained from a private client that separately was providing DNS services to the Executive Office of the President (EOP),” a spokesperson for Joffe said earlier this year.

In that early April filing, Durham asserted that Fusion GPS’s work “[does] not appear to have been a necessary part of, or even related to, [Perkins Coie’s] legal advice to [the Clinton campaign] and the DNC.”

“Instead, contemporaneous communications and other evidence make it clear that the primary purpose of [Fusion GPS’s] work related to the [Steele] dossier, the [Russian bank] allegations, and the other issues was to assemble and publicize allegations that would aid the campaign’s public relations goals,” it reads.

Meanwhile, in the same filing that was uploaded Friday, Durham said Sussmann met with a second government agency other than the FBI in February 2017 and handed over alleged evidence claiming to link Trump to Russia. Durham did not name the agency but reports indicated that it was the CIA.

The CIA later concluded that the allegation about the secret channel and a separate allegation about Russian-manufactured phones was not “technically plausible,” did not “withstand technical scrutiny,” “contained gaps,” “conflicted with [itself],” and was “user-created and not machine/tool generated,” according to Durham’s filing.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2022, 08:00:13 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/breaking-down-the-flurry-of-legal-filings-by-clinton-campaign-associates-in-durhams-prosecution-of-michael-sussmann_4417313.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-04-21-1&utm_medium=email&est=VuDCVg8eLPXqdCj2yIy1P8zcmHAUaKWSEcfm4um4hN%2FDBZfUpk50KJZOLknK%2Bbka1HiN

Breaking Down the Flurry of Legal Filings by Clinton Campaign Associates in Durham’s Prosecution of Michael Sussmann
By Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke April 20, 2022 Updated: April 21, 2022biggersmaller Print
News analysis

In a coordinated legal action between a number of Hillary Clinton operatives and associates, almost two dozen separate documents were simultaneously filed on April 19 in special counsel John Durham’s case against former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.

This sudden flurry of mass filings included responses from former Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook, Clinton campaign lead lawyer Marc Elias, contractors Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign itself, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The trigger for the flurry of filings was a request by Durham to unseal a number of emails involving the parties. The emails are currently being withheld on very questionable grounds of attorney–client privilege. Based on the coordinated filings, it appears that a large number of important people associated with the Clinton campaign are very concerned about the information in those emails becoming public.

Based on available metadata, it appears as if most of the individuals involved in Clinton’s scheme to vilify Trump with claims of Russia collusion were all communicating with each other as that scheme unfolded in real time.

The first person who filed in response to Durham’s request was Rodney Joffe, the tech executive who produced data that purportedly tied Trump to Russia. Joffe had been promised a top government job in case of a Hillary Clinton election victory.

Joffe claimed in his filing that his communications should be treated as privileged because they were part of his attorney-client relationship with Sussmann. Joffe was indeed a client of Sussmann’s starting in 2015. But, in an unexpected and perhaps unintentional comment, Joffe also disclosed that he had hired Sussmann specifically to advise him how to share sensitive information concerning Trump with government agencies—without revealing his identity and thereby exposing himself to potential liability.

In effect, Joffe publicly admitted that he hired Sussmann to take information about Trump to the FBI. The problem for Sussmann is that he’s been charged with lying about exactly that point. Sussmann claimed–in an email to then FBI General Counsel James Baker–that he wasn’t taking the information to the FBI on behalf of any client but instead was merely acting as a good Samaritan.

If Joffe throwing Sussmann under the proverbial bus wasn’t bad enough, the next filing was even worse for Sussmann. It came from Clinton campaign operatives Fusion GPS who also want their emails to be withheld from Durham.

In order to obtain the benefit of attorney–client privilege, Fusion now claims to have assisted Sussmann and his law firm with legal matters.

That claim is demonstrably false as Fusion’s main role—acknowledged by Fusion’s owners Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch in their book—was to conduct opposition research on Trump and seed those stories with the media.

To make matters even worse, Simpson and Fritsch admitted that in writing in their 2019 book “Crime in Progress.” It appears as if Fusion’s lawyers didn’t read their client’s book ahead of their filing. This blunder won’t have gone unnoticed by Durham’s team.

The next filing came from Perkins Coie, the legal firm for which Clinton campaign lawyers Sussmann and Elias worked in 2016. Perkins didn’t want to disclose any of its emails either, but the excuse was a lot simpler. The firm noted that Elias had left the company last year and had taken all of the related files with him.

A separate submission came from Elias himself. Elias, a well-known Democratic Party lawyer, made an argument that essentially mirrored that of Fusion, namely that Fusion was providing Perkins Coie with input that was related to legal advice, and any communications were therefore covered by privilege. Elias failed to address the basic fact that Fusion had been hired to collect and disseminate opposition research to the media. Elias similarly didn’t address that Sussmann himself had disseminated Fusion’s stories to the media, as well as to the FBI, thereby piercing any pretense of attorney–client privilege.

But the most interesting filing came from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. Like everyone else, Mook’s main objective was to claim that everything that had been done took place within a legal advice relationship. But unlike the others, Mook didn’t actually claim that everything was above board. Instead, he repeatedly asserted that he thought everything was done above board.

In essence, Mook’s filing essentially shifted the blame onto Elias and the other Clinton operatives. Mook’s apparent refusal to confirm that everything was done legally might end up showcasing Mook as the weak link in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to cover up the origins of the Russiagate scandal. This development is something that Durham will no doubt have taken note of.

The overarching problem with all these claims of privilege is that by legal necessity they have to be based on legal advice. If the task at hand wasn’t about legal advice—such as Fusion pushing false stories about Trump to the media—then there is no attorney-client privilege.

With that backdrop in mind, Fusion GPS claimed in its filing that it was retained by then-partner Elias at Perkins Coie to “assist in providing legal advice to its clients, the Hillary for America Campaign Committee and the DNC during the 2016 presidential campaign. As we noted earlier, Elias’s own submission mirrored this claim.

But there’s a huge problem when we compare these new claims with an Oct 24, 2017 letter from Perkins Coie, which officially detailed its retention and hiring of Fusion on April 11, 2016.

Matthew Gerringer, general counsel for Perkins Coie, noted that Fusion approached Perkins Coie in early March 2016. Gerringer stated that Fusion expressed an interest in its continuation of “research regarding then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump,” research that “Fusion GPS had conducted for one or more other clients during the Republican primary contest.”

And it wasn’t just Perkins Coie that was saying this. In their 2019 book, Fusion’s owners told a very similar story, specifically that they had pitched the idea to Elias that they would continue to collect opposition research on Trump on Elias’s behalf. There was never any mention from either Fusion or Elias of legal services or legal advice.

Fusion appears to have now twisted the meaning of its engagement, stating that it wasn’t really doing opposition research and media outreach, but instead was focused on privileged investigative work and analysis.

There are several problems with Fusion’s assertion. Dossier author Christopher Steele —who had been hired by Fusion to push Trump Russia collusion stories—told a UK court in May 2017 that he was directed by Fusion GPS to speak with a number of media outlets on several different occasions.

Steele testified that in September 2016 he had personally briefed a large number of journalists at Fusion’s instruction. Those journalists were from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN. In October 2016, Steele was instructed once again to speak to the NY Times, Washington Post, Yahoo News, and Mother Jones.

Based on Steele’s stories, many of these outlets subsequently published extremely damaging stories about Trump–Russia collusion. None more so than Mother Jones’s David Corn, who not only put out an article discussing the contents of the dossier just ahead of the 2016 election but also shared Steele’s dossier reports with James Baker of the FBI. Notably, Baker was the same person who met with Sussmann in September 2016.

Additionally, there were also multiple communications that took place between the owners of Fusion, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, and various corporate media reporters during this same time frame.

In a flurry of conversations on Oct. 5, 2016, Fusion’s Fritsch reached out to Tom Hamburger of The Washington Post, providing supposed DNS data claiming links between a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Fritsch then provided the same data to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. Fritsch also provided NBC’s Matthew Mosk with a ZIP file of data in an email containing the subject line: Dude this is huge.

Just a few weeks later, on Oct. 18, 2016, Fritsch wrote to Reuters’ Mark Hosenball on Oct 18, 2016, telling him “Do the F***ing alfa bank secret comms story. It is hugely important…”

The actions of Fusion at the behest of Elias had nothing to do with legal advice. They did, however, have everything to do with establishing a false narrative, one that had been crafted by these Clinton operatives themselves–which is precisely why they are now panicking about their emails being released to Durham.

But the flurry of filings wasn’t the only major development in the Durham investigation. In a subsequent hearing on Wednesday, a Durham prosecutor told Obama appointee Judge Christopher Cooper that the project to link Trump and Russia through DNS data had actually originated with Joffe. The prosecution stated that Joffe’s plan was carried out through the help of Clinton campaign agents. Durham’s team also revealed that there were meetings between Elias, Sussmann and Joffe during which Joffe was allegedly encouraged to create “imprints” that would tie Trump to Russia through data.

It’s not yet known exactly how Durham’s office came to know about the meeting between Elias, Joffe, and Sussmann, but if such a meeting actually did take place, it would completely destroy any pretense that the relationship between these parties had anything to with providing legal services. This discovery also could land Elias and Joffe in significant legal trouble for lying in their filings to the court.
Title: McCarthy: Durham investigation finally getting interesting
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2022, 02:16:19 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/durhams-investigation-is-finally-getting-interesting/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202022-04-23&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Judge limits evidence, Durham bummed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2022, 09:41:07 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/9/judge-limits-evidence-clinton-campaign-sussmann-tr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=cFPCEFSCxWPFrWBcCNH8DI9gHmmvJnVNFOHExA1Vu0IyKgKMyd9wtJ0oKKLi8QFV&bt_ts=1652109025860
Title: Fuct by the FBI again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2022, 09:47:04 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/23/fbi-official-struggles-recall-key-details-sussmann/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=53Wf3YJGi3%2BQE8dyJYZpF8%2BNmb8isV362aLxQjQ01jOrJ04uh%2F4TDR9EY7ddfcsn&bt_ts=1653320359906
Title: If only , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2022, 04:41:58 PM: second

https://rumble.com/v15t2jj-kash-patel-lisa-page-and-peter-strzok-are-next-in-durhams-crosshairs.html?mref=22lbp&mc=56yab&fbclid=IwAR06u6N0CKCizSt8mRruY0hP4kLzi-qCaLJNSrMjJeRWFj7yAgkofjPuXuw
Title: Judge again rules against admission of background context to Sussman lie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2022, 04:19:05 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-strikes-email-testimony-suggesting-trump-russia-claims-may-have-been-fabricated_4491341.html?utm_source=Morningbrief-ai&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-05-28-ai&est=jTnCF0gc7jzQ%2ByRMwle%2BDJzmPze6jxAJM4AKxYwOk8NnA6UXtl2aKDV%2FZB0EnL8XVb7G
Title: DC jury acquits Sussman
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2022, 10:03:53 AM: https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-former-clinton-campaign-lawyer-michael-sussmann-acquitted-in-trump-russia-collusion-case?utm_campaign=64487

The legal works we will here Democrats scream
while all the while
also screaming we MUST SAVE DEMOCRACY

political trials should never be held in DC
Title: Re: DC jury acquits Sussman
Post by: G M on May 31, 2022, 12:23:47 PM: Quote from: ccp on May 31, 2022, 10:03:53 AM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-former-clinton-campaign-lawyer-michael-sussmann-acquitted-in-trump-russia-collusion-case?utm_campaign=64487

The legal works we will here Democrats scream
while all the while
also screaming we MUST SAVE DEMOCRACY

political trials should never be held in DC

Durham isn't going to save us?

I guess we better VOTE HARDER!
Title: Re: DC jury acquits Sussman
Post by: G M on May 31, 2022, 12:30:14 PM: Quote from: G M on May 31, 2022, 12:23:47 PM
Quote from: ccp on May 31, 2022, 10:03:53 AM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-former-clinton-campaign-lawyer-michael-sussmann-acquitted-in-trump-russia-collusion-case?utm_campaign=64487

The legal works we will here Democrats scream
while all the while
also screaming we MUST SAVE DEMOCRACY

political trials should never be held in DC

Durham isn't going to save us?

I guess we better VOTE HARDER!

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399356.php
Title: Re: DC jury acquits Sussman
Post by: G M on May 31, 2022, 04:35:43 PM: Quote from: G M on May 31, 2022, 12:23:47 PM
Quote from: ccp on May 31, 2022, 10:03:53 AM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-former-clinton-campaign-lawyer-michael-sussmann-acquitted-in-trump-russia-collusion-case?utm_campaign=64487

The legal works we will here Democrats scream
while all the while
also screaming we MUST SAVE DEMOCRACY

political trials should never be held in DC

Durham isn't going to save us?

I guess we better VOTE HARDER!

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399363.php
Title: Turley: Friends with Benefits
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2022, 08:23:40 PM: https://jonathanturley.org/2022/05/30/friends-with-benefits-sussmann-trial-is-an-indictment-of-the-fbi-and-the-washington-establishment/
Title: Perkins Coie and the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2022, 08:24:30 PM: second

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/rep-matt-gaetz-dnc-law-firm-perkins-coie-admits-fbi-workspace-dc-office-michael-sussmann-operating-worksite-video/
Title: Jury member admits she is partisan who ignored
Post by: ccp on June 01, 2022, 05:42:11 AM: the whole case against Sussmann

Why is this not grounds for a retrial in a different location
the jury member admits that she does not think lying to FBI is important to her
and case should not even have been brought

certainly her mind was made up from day 1:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/31/juror-who-acquitted-sussmann-there-are-bigger-things-than-lying-to-fbi/
Title: Re: Jury member admits she is partisan who ignored
Post by: G M on June 01, 2022, 04:52:29 PM: If you are found not guilty, it can't be appealed. At least as far as I remember from the police academy legal classes.

Quote from: ccp on June 01, 2022, 05:42:11 AM
the whole case against Sussmann

Why is this not grounds for a retrial in a different location
the jury member admits that she does not think lying to FBI is important to her
and case should not even have been brought

certainly her mind was made up from day 1:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/31/juror-who-acquitted-sussmann-there-are-bigger-things-than-lying-to-fbi/
Title: an example the justice system works
Post by: ccp on June 01, 2022, 05:31:35 PM: as per Judge Jeanine

this afternoon
on Fox......

while talking about the Depp/Heard non important story trial results
especially since she is an expert on "battered women" and she knew Heard was lying from day one

what a joke

within days of finding an obviously guilty lawyer get off from playing in one of the largest hoaxes ever perpetrated on Americans......
Title: Re: an example the justice system works
Post by: G M on June 01, 2022, 05:45:46 PM: Quote from: ccp on June 01, 2022, 05:31:35 PM
as per Judge Jeanine

this afternoon
on Fox......

while talking about the Depp/Heard non important story trial results
especially since she is an expert on "battered women" and she knew Heard was lying from day one

what a joke

within days of finding an obviously guilty lawyer get off from playing in one of the largest hoaxes ever perpetrated on Americans......

Good thing we can just VOTE HARDER!

It's not like the system is utterly corrupt...

Wait...
Title: Re: an example the justice system works
Post by: G M on June 01, 2022, 07:20:52 PM: Quote from: G M on June 01, 2022, 05:45:46 PM
Quote from: ccp on June 01, 2022, 05:31:35 PM
as per Judge Jeanine

this afternoon
on Fox......

while talking about the Depp/Heard non important story trial results
especially since she is an expert on "battered women" and she knew Heard was lying from day one

what a joke

within days of finding an obviously guilty lawyer get off from playing in one of the largest hoaxes ever perpetrated on Americans......

Good thing we can just VOTE HARDER!

It's not like the system is utterly corrupt...

Wait...

Mollie Hemingway:

"Allowing a continuation of two standards of justice, one where friends of the regime can do anything and get off scot-free and one where opponents of the regime will have their lives destroyed for things that friends of the regime can do, is an existential threat to the country."
Title: Re: Perkins Coie and the FBI
Post by: G M on June 01, 2022, 08:27:26 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2022, 08:24:30 PM
second

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/rep-matt-gaetz-dnc-law-firm-perkins-coie-admits-fbi-workspace-dc-office-michael-sussmann-operating-worksite-video/

https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/06/if-this-isnt-living-definition-of.html

Utterly corrupted.
Title: Durham treated FBI as dupes, not collaborators; Turley; Last chance for Durham
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2022, 03:39:33 AM: https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/durham-lost-because-he-treated-fbi-as-a-dupe-rather-than-clinton-collaborator/?fbclid=IwAR088fimo9-tKazavolJxjyeWU_CQ3HBArGGlZRqIqSS-dsenEmJeBMlq6g

================================================

Turley:

Friends with Benefits

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/05/30/friends-with-benefits-sussmann-trial-is-an-indictment-of-the-fbi-and-the-washington-establishment/?fbclid=IwAR03klpjGrzS6i5ynpNPXkBR3tVBWe420g13MM76sjO4Q85gSrQnipKVPAc

===============

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/1/durham-team-seeks-redemption-danchenko-trial/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=s3RlUR5MgnCrnr0ASfVcbPcXLtfgYA4RkKUS3OeijSK5QTa9%2F4oEwSV4qMos3xzQ&bt_ts=1654164292312
Title: AMcC: Indict Hillary!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2022, 01:43:12 PM: By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 4, 2022 6:30 AM
If historical accountability now outweighs all concerns about due process, how could you do better than a Hillary Clinton trial?
‘Whither John Durham?” That is now the pressing question for every Russiagate watcher. Admittedly, the crowd of Russiagate watchers has grown smaller since Tuesday, when a Democrat-heavy jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Michael Sussmann, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer, of Special Counsel Durham’s charge that Sussmann had lied to the FBI.

The answer, if we are to learn the central lesson of the Sussmann case, is simple: Indict Hillary Clinton.

But . . . for what?

I’ll resist the urge to say, “There’s always something,” which would be more a commentary on the career of the former secretary of state (and cattle-futures trader, travel-office-staff director, grand-jury amnesiac, “bimbo eruptions” scourge, pardons coordinator, voice of calm, suspender of disbelief, Russian “reset” visionary, Benghazi bungler, Muslim-movie maven, charity entrepreneur, and homebrew-server savant) than a real answer.

The truth is I have no idea whether Hillary has done anything indictable this time. Orchestrating the Trump–Russia collusion farce is icky politics and maybe even civil libel. But whether it violated the criminal law in some way is a tougher question.

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I do know this, though: If you really want to get to the bottom of what is scandalous about Russiagate, there could be no surer way to do it than to indict that most ruthless of cutthroat, cold-blooded politicians and sit back and enjoy the show as she sets her phalanx of gladiator–lawyers on the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Obama White House.

Okay, I admit, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek. But still, in a perfect world — a world where there were no constitutional and ethical constraints against indictment absent a good-faith belief that the evidence of guilt is solid — there could be no better solution. Just give Hillary the incentive to do the job the special counsel’s prosecutions have avoided: Shine the light on the government’s complicity in Russiagate, instead of portraying the government as the witless victim of the Clinton campaign.

In the Sussmann trial, what we learned on that score came from the Sussmann defense, not the prosecutors. But it was limited, because Sussmann was just a bit player in Russiagate. Mrs. C is the big kahuna.

More on
HILLARY CLINTON

The Sussmann Verdict Is an Indictment of Durham, Not a Vindication of the Ex-Clinton Lawyer
Durham’s Work Must Go On, despite Sussmann Acquittal
Clinton Lawyer’s Achievement: Getting Donald Trump Elected President
The “collusion” caper involves a scheme to smear Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential candidate, as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. This calumny — or “narrative,” as they say in the biz — was concocted by the Clinton campaign. As dictated by the shopworn modus operandi of the Clintons, who are Yale-educated lawyers, the heavy lifting was done by the campaign’s well-paid attorneys — who would then be able to claim that any damning communications were privileged when, as tends to happen with Bill and Hill, investigators started snooping around.

The campaign’s attorneys, who were then at the Perkins Coie law firm, retained the “oppo” beavering skills of Fusion GPS, a self-styled “information” firm (though invention may be more accurate). Fusion recruited a motley crew of “researchers,” including the former-British-spy-turned-Trump-hating-fabulist Christopher Steele and his sidekick, the suspected-Russian-spy-turned-respected-Brookings-scholar Igor Danchenko.

Fusion and the lawyers also collaborated with other like-minded Trump-loathers, including a gaggle of Internet researchers, led by tech executive Rodney Joffe. They composed the mood music of the Sussmann trial: a collusion subplot about how Trump and his masters in Moscow had supposedly exploited servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank to create a covert communications back-channel. I guess that’s what supposedly enabled Trump (the puppet) to order Putin (the master) to hack Mrs. Clinton’s homebrew servers (which were no longer online or in her possession). Or something.

One of Durham’s challenges was that Sussmann, the guy he decided to indict, was among the most minor players in this farrago. The prosecutors understandably theorized that his false statement to the FBI — the claim that he wasn’t representing anyone when he brought the bureau the Clinton campaign-generated tale about a Trump–Putin back channel — took place within the context of this broader scheme. A giveaway regarding Durham’s lack of conviction about the enterprise that has led to Sussmann’s lack of a conviction is that prosecutors labeled it, almost benignly, as “the joint venture” — i.e., they pulled up short of charging it as a criminal conspiracy to defraud the government, even though they sought to admit evidence of “the joint venture” based on conspiracy principles.

More to the point, though, proving up this broad, audacious enterprise to try to nail Sussmann on a narrow, comparatively trivial false statement is like proving up the Pacific Ocean just to show a single yellowfin darting about in it. Durham had much to complain about regarding the judge, Obama appointee Christopher Cooper. But any judge would have cut these prosecutorial ambitions down to something fit for a relatively minor culprit.

So next time, Durham shouldn’t go for the minor culprit. He should go for the Pacific Ocean herself.
Title: Re: AMcC: Indict Hillary!
Post by: G M on June 04, 2022, 10:40:51 PM: Nothing is happening, and Deep State Andy knows it.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2022, 01:43:12 PM
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 4, 2022 6:30 AM
If historical accountability now outweighs all concerns about due process, how could you do better than a Hillary Clinton trial?
‘Whither John Durham?” That is now the pressing question for every Russiagate watcher. Admittedly, the crowd of Russiagate watchers has grown smaller since Tuesday, when a Democrat-heavy jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Michael Sussmann, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer, of Special Counsel Durham’s charge that Sussmann had lied to the FBI.

The answer, if we are to learn the central lesson of the Sussmann case, is simple: Indict Hillary Clinton.

But . . . for what?

I’ll resist the urge to say, “There’s always something,” which would be more a commentary on the career of the former secretary of state (and cattle-futures trader, travel-office-staff director, grand-jury amnesiac, “bimbo eruptions” scourge, pardons coordinator, voice of calm, suspender of disbelief, Russian “reset” visionary, Benghazi bungler, Muslim-movie maven, charity entrepreneur, and homebrew-server savant) than a real answer.

The truth is I have no idea whether Hillary has done anything indictable this time. Orchestrating the Trump–Russia collusion farce is icky politics and maybe even civil libel. But whether it violated the criminal law in some way is a tougher question.

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I do know this, though: If you really want to get to the bottom of what is scandalous about Russiagate, there could be no surer way to do it than to indict that most ruthless of cutthroat, cold-blooded politicians and sit back and enjoy the show as she sets her phalanx of gladiator–lawyers on the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Obama White House.

Okay, I admit, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek. But still, in a perfect world — a world where there were no constitutional and ethical constraints against indictment absent a good-faith belief that the evidence of guilt is solid — there could be no better solution. Just give Hillary the incentive to do the job the special counsel’s prosecutions have avoided: Shine the light on the government’s complicity in Russiagate, instead of portraying the government as the witless victim of the Clinton campaign.

In the Sussmann trial, what we learned on that score came from the Sussmann defense, not the prosecutors. But it was limited, because Sussmann was just a bit player in Russiagate. Mrs. C is the big kahuna.

More on
HILLARY CLINTON

The Sussmann Verdict Is an Indictment of Durham, Not a Vindication of the Ex-Clinton Lawyer
Durham’s Work Must Go On, despite Sussmann Acquittal
Clinton Lawyer’s Achievement: Getting Donald Trump Elected President
The “collusion” caper involves a scheme to smear Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential candidate, as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. This calumny — or “narrative,” as they say in the biz — was concocted by the Clinton campaign. As dictated by the shopworn modus operandi of the Clintons, who are Yale-educated lawyers, the heavy lifting was done by the campaign’s well-paid attorneys — who would then be able to claim that any damning communications were privileged when, as tends to happen with Bill and Hill, investigators started snooping around.

The campaign’s attorneys, who were then at the Perkins Coie law firm, retained the “oppo” beavering skills of Fusion GPS, a self-styled “information” firm (though invention may be more accurate). Fusion recruited a motley crew of “researchers,” including the former-British-spy-turned-Trump-hating-fabulist Christopher Steele and his sidekick, the suspected-Russian-spy-turned-respected-Brookings-scholar Igor Danchenko.

Fusion and the lawyers also collaborated with other like-minded Trump-loathers, including a gaggle of Internet researchers, led by tech executive Rodney Joffe. They composed the mood music of the Sussmann trial: a collusion subplot about how Trump and his masters in Moscow had supposedly exploited servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank to create a covert communications back-channel. I guess that’s what supposedly enabled Trump (the puppet) to order Putin (the master) to hack Mrs. Clinton’s homebrew servers (which were no longer online or in her possession). Or something.

One of Durham’s challenges was that Sussmann, the guy he decided to indict, was among the most minor players in this farrago. The prosecutors understandably theorized that his false statement to the FBI — the claim that he wasn’t representing anyone when he brought the bureau the Clinton campaign-generated tale about a Trump–Putin back channel — took place within the context of this broader scheme. A giveaway regarding Durham’s lack of conviction about the enterprise that has led to Sussmann’s lack of a conviction is that prosecutors labeled it, almost benignly, as “the joint venture” — i.e., they pulled up short of charging it as a criminal conspiracy to defraud the government, even though they sought to admit evidence of “the joint venture” based on conspiracy principles.

More to the point, though, proving up this broad, audacious enterprise to try to nail Sussmann on a narrow, comparatively trivial false statement is like proving up the Pacific Ocean just to show a single yellowfin darting about in it. Durham had much to complain about regarding the judge, Obama appointee Christopher Cooper. But any judge would have cut these prosecutorial ambitions down to something fit for a relatively minor culprit.

So next time, Durham shouldn’t go for the minor culprit. He should go for the Pacific Ocean herself.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2022, 02:48:12 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-altered-statement-on-intrusion-into-democrat-network-based-on-input-from-lawyer_4505749.html?utm_source=Morningbrief-ai&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-05-ai&est=PGYisDK4%2Fa038Ybu0LD%2BzJfURXpL%2F64S8XPGI%2FjhfBPPqwM5jhdPmozIP1%2F409ihCTkf

FBI Altered Statement on Intrusion Into Democratic Network Based on Input From Democrats’ Lawyer
By Zachary Stieber and Ivan Pentchoukov June 2, 2022 Updated: June 2, 2022biggersmaller Print

0:00
5:42

1

A lawyer representing Democrats proposed alterations to an FBI statement on the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to avoid undermining the narrative from his clients, according to emails released as part of the trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann.

FBI officials in mid-2016 were drafting a statement regarding an alleged intrusion into the DCCC network and sent the draft to Sussmann, a lawyer representing the DCCC, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and other Democrats.

Jim Trainor, assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division, wrote to Sussmann on July 29, 2016: “Michael—our press office is once again getting a ton of calls on the DCCC matter. A draft response is provided below. Wanted to get your thoughts on this prior to sending out.”

Sussmann zeroed in on the first sentence, which he said seemed to undermine what the DCCC was saying about the reported intrusion.

“The draft you sent says only that the FBI is aware of media reports; it does not say that the FBI is aware of the intrusion that the DCCC reported. Indeed, it refers only to a ‘possible’ cyber intrusion and in that way undermines what the DCCC said in its statement (or at least calls into question what the DCCC said),'” Sussmann said.

Sussmann proposed changing the press release from saying the FBI is aware of reporting on “a possible cyber instruction involving the DCCC” to saying the bureau “is aware of the cyber intrusion involving the DCCC that has been reported in the media and the FBI has been working to determine the nature and scope of the matter.”

Trainor said the proposed alterations were fine.

“We try to really limit what we see and not acknowledging too much but the below edits are fine and we will send out,” Trainor said.

The bureau ended up using language similar to that offered by Sussmann, telling news outlets that it was “aware of media reporting on cyber intrusions involving multiple political entities, and is working to determine the accuracy, nature, and scope of these matters.”

The emails were introduced as exhibits during Sussmann’s trial and obtained by The Epoch Times. Sussmann was acquitted on May 31 of lying to the FBI.

The FBI headquarters
The FBI headquarters in Washington on Jan. 2, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
According to notes taken by then-CIA Director John Brennan, President Barack Obama received a briefing on July 28, 2016—one day before Sussmann’s email to Trainor. Brennan told Obama of an intelligence intercept showing that Russia was aware of a plan approved by Clinton to “vilify” her rival, Donald Trump, by “stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

Days later, the CIA informed the FBI of intelligence suggesting that Clinton’s plan was meant “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

According to the indictment of several Russian nationals brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, the alleged Russian conspirators gained access to the DCCC network on April 12, 2016. That same day, then-FBI Director James Comey held a meeting with senior FBI officials to discuss how to execute a “credible … conclusion” of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private email server to conduct government business.

The DCCC and the DNC hired CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm, to investigate and remediate the network intrusions. The FBI conducted its own investigation, relying on server images and reports produced by CrowdStrike, with Sussmann playing as the singular point of contact representing the DNC and the DCCC, according to another email introduced during the trial.

The CrowdStrike reports sent to the FBI were partly redacted. An email addressed to Sussmann by an FBI agent indicated that receiving the nonredacted versions of the reports was the top priority for the bureau. According to a previous filing by the Department of Justice in the case against Trump associate Roger Stone, the bureau never received the unredacted reports. The FBI has rejected Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents.

Other missives entered during Sussmann’s trial showed the lawyer becoming upset after the bureau announced that it was investigating the reported intrusion into the DNC network.

Sussmann messaged Trainor, questioning the “significance of this announcement” and requesting the bureau consult with him before making public statements about the DNC case.

Trainor apologized, agreeing that when the FBI makes statements “we need to be in lock step with victims and partners.”

Trainor said the statement was an attempt to “respond in a more authentic way” and that the bureau intended to “be equally cooperative partners as we navigate this matter.”

“Thank you for that explanation. You can understand how the statement was confusing to us,” Sussmann said. “Please try to keep us informed if the FBI says anything else publicly about its investigation.”

Sussmann was the FBI’s point of contact on the investigations into the intrusions into the DCCC and DNC network, according to an email that FBI agent Jennifer Frasch sent in August 2016.

Sussmann was close to the FBI for years and had a badge that allowed him access to the bureau’s headquarters. Sussmann used the badge to gain entry on Sept. 19, 2016, when he handed over sketchy allegations against Trump to FBI lawyer James Baker.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: G M on June 05, 2022, 05:28:31 AM: WE.MUST.VOTE.HARDER!

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2022, 02:48:12 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-altered-statement-on-intrusion-into-democrat-network-based-on-input-from-lawyer_4505749.html?utm_source=Morningbrief-ai&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-05-ai&est=PGYisDK4%2Fa038Ybu0LD%2BzJfURXpL%2F64S8XPGI%2FjhfBPPqwM5jhdPmozIP1%2F409ihCTkf

FBI Altered Statement on Intrusion Into Democratic Network Based on Input From Democrats’ Lawyer
By Zachary Stieber and Ivan Pentchoukov June 2, 2022 Updated: June 2, 2022biggersmaller Print

0:00
5:42

1

A lawyer representing Democrats proposed alterations to an FBI statement on the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to avoid undermining the narrative from his clients, according to emails released as part of the trial of former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann.

FBI officials in mid-2016 were drafting a statement regarding an alleged intrusion into the DCCC network and sent the draft to Sussmann, a lawyer representing the DCCC, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and other Democrats.

Jim Trainor, assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division, wrote to Sussmann on July 29, 2016: “Michael—our press office is once again getting a ton of calls on the DCCC matter. A draft response is provided below. Wanted to get your thoughts on this prior to sending out.”

Sussmann zeroed in on the first sentence, which he said seemed to undermine what the DCCC was saying about the reported intrusion.

“The draft you sent says only that the FBI is aware of media reports; it does not say that the FBI is aware of the intrusion that the DCCC reported. Indeed, it refers only to a ‘possible’ cyber intrusion and in that way undermines what the DCCC said in its statement (or at least calls into question what the DCCC said),'” Sussmann said.

Sussmann proposed changing the press release from saying the FBI is aware of reporting on “a possible cyber instruction involving the DCCC” to saying the bureau “is aware of the cyber intrusion involving the DCCC that has been reported in the media and the FBI has been working to determine the nature and scope of the matter.”

Trainor said the proposed alterations were fine.

“We try to really limit what we see and not acknowledging too much but the below edits are fine and we will send out,” Trainor said.

The bureau ended up using language similar to that offered by Sussmann, telling news outlets that it was “aware of media reporting on cyber intrusions involving multiple political entities, and is working to determine the accuracy, nature, and scope of these matters.”

The emails were introduced as exhibits during Sussmann’s trial and obtained by The Epoch Times. Sussmann was acquitted on May 31 of lying to the FBI.

The FBI headquarters
The FBI headquarters in Washington on Jan. 2, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
According to notes taken by then-CIA Director John Brennan, President Barack Obama received a briefing on July 28, 2016—one day before Sussmann’s email to Trainor. Brennan told Obama of an intelligence intercept showing that Russia was aware of a plan approved by Clinton to “vilify” her rival, Donald Trump, by “stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

Days later, the CIA informed the FBI of intelligence suggesting that Clinton’s plan was meant “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

According to the indictment of several Russian nationals brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, the alleged Russian conspirators gained access to the DCCC network on April 12, 2016. That same day, then-FBI Director James Comey held a meeting with senior FBI officials to discuss how to execute a “credible … conclusion” of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private email server to conduct government business.

The DCCC and the DNC hired CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm, to investigate and remediate the network intrusions. The FBI conducted its own investigation, relying on server images and reports produced by CrowdStrike, with Sussmann playing as the singular point of contact representing the DNC and the DCCC, according to another email introduced during the trial.

The CrowdStrike reports sent to the FBI were partly redacted. An email addressed to Sussmann by an FBI agent indicated that receiving the nonredacted versions of the reports was the top priority for the bureau. According to a previous filing by the Department of Justice in the case against Trump associate Roger Stone, the bureau never received the unredacted reports. The FBI has rejected Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents.

Other missives entered during Sussmann’s trial showed the lawyer becoming upset after the bureau announced that it was investigating the reported intrusion into the DNC network.

Sussmann messaged Trainor, questioning the “significance of this announcement” and requesting the bureau consult with him before making public statements about the DNC case.

Trainor apologized, agreeing that when the FBI makes statements “we need to be in lock step with victims and partners.”

Trainor said the statement was an attempt to “respond in a more authentic way” and that the bureau intended to “be equally cooperative partners as we navigate this matter.”

“Thank you for that explanation. You can understand how the statement was confusing to us,” Sussmann said. “Please try to keep us informed if the FBI says anything else publicly about its investigation.”

Sussmann was the FBI’s point of contact on the investigations into the intrusions into the DCCC and DNC network, according to an email that FBI agent Jennifer Frasch sent in August 2016.

Sussmann was close to the FBI for years and had a badge that allowed him access to the bureau’s headquarters. Sussmann used the badge to gain entry on Sept. 19, 2016, when he handed over sketchy allegations against Trump to FBI lawyer James Baker.
Title: WSJ: Hillary's role in the Russia Hoax
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2022, 01:17:16 PM: Hillary’s Role in the Russia Smear
The Sussmann trial provides more evidence that she personally directed the effort.
By Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein
June 5, 2022 1:45 pm ET

The acquittal of former Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann—charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while acting on behalf of her 2016 campaign—leaves major questions unanswered about Mrs. Clinton’s role in her campaign’s effort to tie Donald Trump to Russia. It also provides new evidence that she personally directed the effort.

In July 2016, John Brennan, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed President Obama that Mrs. Clinton gave “approval” for a “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up scandal and claiming interference by the Russian security service,” according to Mr. Brennan’s notes from the meeting, which were obtained by Fox News.

During Mr. Sussmann’s trial, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, testified that he and other top aides decided to feed the press a story in October 2016 about the now-disproven allegations of secret ties between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Importantly, Mr. Mook said that Mrs. Clinton was aware of, and approved of, this plan. “We discussed it with Hillary,” Mr. Mook testified. “She agreed with the decision.”

When the campaign leaked the unverified story, Clinton aide Jake Sullivan—now President Biden’s national security adviser, and perhaps the foreign-policy adviser to whom Mr. Brennan referred—issued a statement indicating that a probe could be imminent: “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.” Mrs. Clinton tweeted out Mr. Sullivan’s statement.

Another reason to think Mrs. Clinton directed the effort was its sheer cost. The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid $12.4 million, $5.6 million of which came from the campaign, to Perkins Coie, Mr. Sussmann’s law firm, to pay Fusion GPS for this opposition research on Trump.

One of us (Mr. Schoen) worked with Mrs. Clinton during her 2000 Senate race and worked closely with President Clinton during his 1996 re-election campaign. In 1996 both Clintons had detailed knowledge of virtually every aspect of the campaign and the Whitewater investigation. Mrs. Clinton is far more precise and organized than her husband, and she is meticulous about campaign spending. It isn’t plausible that her campaign would have spent so much money without her knowing every major aspect of the undertaking—including how this information would be shared with federal authorities.

Mr. Clinton is also obsessed with October surprises. In 1996 he led Bob Dole comfortably, yet six months before the election the campaign had internal conversations about what Dole’s October surprise would be and how the campaign could blunt it. It’s probable that Mrs. Clinton, a prohibitive favorite 20 years later, also worried about October surprises.

FBI director James Comey delivered an October surprise, the revelation that the bureau had reopened its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s improper use of a private email account to conduct official State Department business. But in September 2016, when Mr. Sussmann went to the FBI, she had every reason to believe the bureau wouldn’t be hostile. Mr. Comey had issued a favorable decision for Mrs. Clinton on the email matter in July 2016, and the wife of then deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe had run for Virginia Senate with the Clintons’ support.

Taken together, the revelations from the Sussmann trial, the resources that went into the campaign’s attempt to tie Trump to Russia, the Clintons’ focus on October surprises, and their cordial relationship with the FBI make it abundantly likely that Mrs. Clinton not only knew about but led the entire smear campaign.

Mr. Schoen was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, a White House adviser (1994-2000) and an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 U.S. Senate campaign. Mr. Stein, a Democrat, served as New York City Council president, 1986-94.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 06, 2022, 01:27:16 PM: "In July 2016, John Brennan, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed President Obama that Mrs. Clinton gave “approval” for a “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump "

well wait a second. what about Obama's role

he obviously knew what was going on

and the whole thing was a witch hunt
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2022, 01:37:39 PM: Good point!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: G M on June 08, 2022, 09:40:27 AM: The one will be protected above all others.

Quote from: ccp on June 06, 2022, 01:27:16 PM
"In July 2016, John Brennan, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed President Obama that Mrs. Clinton gave “approval” for a “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump "

well wait a second. what about Obama's role

he obviously knew what was going on

and the whole thing was a witch hunt
Title: Yes time to focus on BHO 's involvement
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2022, 07:38:34 AM: https://republicbrief.com/obama-was-in-on-it-more-information-comes-out-that-obama-was-behind-russian-collusion/

some one read my question about O's involvement on this board few days ago....

:-D

our media need to focus on this

the MSM will respond with the usual lying shysters......and mcCabes etc
and no one will be held to account - yet
so what .
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2022, 10:01:35 AM: The true narrative of all this needs to be established in the hearts and minds of the American people.
Title: mccabe on CNN last night bitching about IRS audit
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2022, 08:23:06 AM: oooh.

ahhhhh.

:roll:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/comey-mccabe-two-trump-foes-114525783.html

conclusion
orange haired man - bad

leftist media
Title: DOJ ordered to release Barr memo used to clear Trump of obstruction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2022, 02:59:06 PM: DOJ ordered to publicly release memo Barr used to clear Trump of obstruction

Attorney General William Barr appears before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 9, 2019. The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memorandum Barr cited in publicly announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not committed obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. That's the ruling by a federal appeals court Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) **FILE**
Attorney General William Barr appears before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 9, 2019. The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memorandum Barr cited in publicly announcing that then-President ... more >

By Jeff Mordock - The Washington Times - Friday, August 19, 2022

A federal appeals court upheld the public release of a redacted 2019 Justice Department memo cited by Attorney General William P. Barr as the reason for not charging former President Donald Trump with obstructing the Russia collusion probe.

In a unanimous 28-page decision Friday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Justice Department, which has spent two years fighting the memo’s release, improperly shielded portions of the memo from the public.

The memo has been long-sought by Mr. Barr’s critics who accuse him of distorting special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings to protect Mr. Trump from obstruction or shield himself from allegations he lied to Congress.

Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning open-government organization, filed the lawsuit seeking the memo.

The panel ruled that the memo, which was written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was not a legal analysis of whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime. Instead, the court ruled it detailed what Mr. Barr should say to Congress and the public about Mr. Mueller’s findings on whether the former president obstructed his investigation.

“Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the panel.

Judge Srinivasan, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also wrote that the Justice Department never proved the memo should remain shielded from the public, accusing it of creating a “misimpression” about the nature of its decisional process on whether to charge Mr. Trump with obstructing the Russia probe.

He said the Justice Department was given “ample opportunity” to tie the deliberation process to Mr. Barr’s public messaging, but never did so.

“The Department was given a number of opportunities to justify its withholding of the March 2019 memorandum,” Judge Srinivasan wrote.

The appellate court ruling upholds a May 2021 decision by U.S. Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington.

At the time, the Justice Department vowed it would appeal Judge Jackson’s decision, which accused the government of being “disingenuous” about its reasons for keeping the memo private.

Portions of the memo have been released to the public, but the Justice Department has bristled over releasing the full text, arguing it fell under exceptions to the public records law for attorney-client privilege and government decision-making.

A group of Senate Democrats last year urged Attorney General Merrick Garland not to appeal Judge Jackson’s decision. They said in a letter that Mr. Barr‘s memo needed to be exposed quickly.

In a somewhat surprising move, Mr. Garland ignored the Democrats’ call to abandon the case and pressed forward with the appeal.

“To be clear, these misrepresentations preceded your confirmation as Attorney General, but the Department you now lead bears responsibility for redressing them,” the lawmakers wrote at that time.

Mr. Barr said in 2019 that his decision to clear Mr. Trump of obstruction came in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers.

As part of that process, the OLC prepared the memo at issue in Judge Jackson’s decision.

In her 2021 ruling, Judge Jackson said the memo disputes Mr. Barr’s claim that the decision to charge the president “was under his purview” because special counsel Robert Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed the probe of alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

She also said it appeared that the Justice Department leadership had decided not to prosecute Mr. Trump even before Mr. Mueller submitted his final report.

“The review of the document reveals that the attorney general was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the president should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” she wrote.

In March 2019, Mr. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress summarizing Mr. Mueller’s conclusions in his investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Barr wrote in the letter that after consulting with the OLC, he determined that the investigation did not support charging the president with obstruction.

• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
Title: AMcC: Could Trump talk himself into an indictment?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2022, 06:10:49 PM: Could Trump Talk Himself into an Indictment?

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 22, 2022 2:29 PM

How the former president may be strengthening the hand of DOJ officials who would like to prosecute him
Allow me some speculation here.

I have never believed that the Biden Justice Department wanted to charge former president Trump with criminal offenses over his retention of records from his presidency. There are many reasons for this, but significantly, the difficulty of proving a crime at trial is not one of them. Proving illegality on the facts as we understand them would be a lay-up.

That is why Trump could easily talk himself into being charged if he’s not careful. The fact that this is a case that probably should not be brought does not mean it would be a hard case for the Justice Department to win — in a jury trial in deep blue, deeply anti-Trump Washington, D.C.

There are legal reasons not to bring charges, but they are defenses of law, not of fact. That is, they are based on legal principles that courts and the Justice Department itself might – but also might not — find persuasive.

No former president of the United States has ever been charged with a federal crime. The Constitution does not bar such a prosecution, but the tradition against it is prudent. The presumption this creates against such an indictment should be overcome only for a gravely serious offense.

Retaining presidential records should not meet that high bar. For nearly two centuries, presidents were thought to own these materials. To be sure, post-Watergate legislation, the Presidential Records Act (PRA), has made clear for a half-century that such records are government property. Trump’s reported rationalization that they are his is characteristically petulant.

But we are not talking about the crime of the century here. The PRA was not enacted as a criminal statute. Although other statutes now criminalize illegal government-records retention, there is a good argument that Congress did not envision former presidents being prosecuted for transgressing the PRA. In any event, I sense that what the government really wanted here was to get the records back, especially any highly classified ones. It has now accomplished that. There would not be much more upside in prosecuting Trump over this, particularly weighed against the downside.

The other legal consideration is equal justice under the law. Hillary Clinton unlawfully retained and destroyed thousands of government records. The Obama/Biden Justice Department never searched her home. Moreover, the DOJ made ridiculously accommodating arrangements with her lawyers about what evidence the FBI would be permitted to review, distorted the plain language of statutes in order to rationalize not indicting her for mishandling classified information, and turned a complete blind eye to her conversion and destruction of non-classified government records.

With that as a recent and glaring precedent — a precedent created when Clinton was poised to seek the presidency, just as Trump is today — Trump should not be indicted. Charging him would amount to exactly the same unjustifiably selective prosecution that the Obama/Biden Justice Department claimed prosecuting Clinton would have been.

Then there are the purely political considerations.

The Biden Justice Department should resist being seen as a political weapon. Of course, whenever a Justice Department under one party investigates figures from the opposition party, the claim of partisan animus is sure to be made. But the specter of politicized prosecution is magnified when the target of the prosecution is a likely opponent of the incumbent president in the next election.

Unlike some commentators, I do not believe this situation creates a conflict of interest that necessarily triggers appointment of a special counsel — again, it is just a more intense iteration of a recurring and often unavoidable issue in politically fraught cases. It would be prudent, however, for the Justice Department to avoid being seen as a political tool in the absence of a truly egregious offense.

Many believe that this would be a risk worth running if the DOJ could make a January 6 case against Trump — for reasons I’ve explained, I would agree with that only if there were strong evidence Trump was willfully complicit in the violence, and I do not believe there is such evidence. But records-retention offenses are not serious enough for the Justice Department to immolate itself over: By charging Trump at this point, the DOJ would probably help his political standing — it would appear as if Democrats were looking for any excuse to persecute and derail their arch political nemesis because they fear they can’t beat him fair and square in the 2024 election.

So what could change these calculations? Trump could change them.

The Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Circus

Inside the DOJ, I bet officials are steamed because they believe they’ve acted reasonably, yet Trump and his apologists are accusing prosecutors and the FBI of corruption. The DOJ has not been helped by an erratic Attorney General Merrick Garland, who, despite making a highly unusual public statement about a pending investigation, neither addressed the claims that Trump was making publicly nor shed light on the matters of most importance to the public: Why do a search warrant? Why now? And wasn’t there some less-intrusive way of handling this dispute?

Rest assured, though, that this is how Main Justice and the FBI see things: Trump had no right to retain these records; the retention of highly classified intelligence in an insufficiently secure setting was both illegal and irresponsible; the government had been trying to get him to return this stuff for over a year; there was no reason to believe he would return all the records voluntarily; there was apparently (according to the search warrant) reason to believe Trump would destroy (or already had destroyed) records; and therefore, if the government did not take them forcibly by warrant, the records would never have been returned and preserved as the law mandates.

Moreover, Justice Department officials undoubtedly believe that Trump, despite his complaining, is being given favorable treatment. In the vast majority of investigations in which the FBI and the DOJ go to the trouble of convincing a judge to issue a search warrant because there is probable cause to believe crimes — here, three federal felonies — have been committed, charges quickly follow. What’s more, if the government gets a warrant on probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found in the search, and then that evidence is in fact found in the search, that usually cinches things: The suspect gets indicted.

Here, that hasn’t happened. The Justice Department hasn’t charged Trump even though it (a) convinced a judge that the former president probably committed crimes and (b) then apparently found the inculpatory evidence it predicted would be in his home. The DOJ has cited a statutory crime in the warrant, Section 2071, which seems to make such a case a slam-dunk, regardless of whether the government records in question are classified. And while, as to the few classified documents involved, Trump’s defense that he declassified the documents cannot be dismissed out of hand (as I explained here), the court might disagree. That is, assuming Trump failed to create any written record that he’d declassified the documents, a trial judge might well find that either (a) they are still deemed classified as a matter of law, or (b) it is up to the jury to decide whether the documents are still classified.

This is all to say: I am betting the prosecutors involved in the matter believe they have a strong case and would convict the former president if they could get him in front of a Washington jury — and maybe any jury.

I was a federal prosecutor for a very long time. I handled cases in which there was great controversy over whether criminal charges were the right way to go even if the evidence of guilt seemed convincing. And when I was a boss, I had to make the decision about whether we should charge in such cases. I can attest to this: A major factor in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion is the public perception of the Justice Department’s conduct.

If a suspect is out publicly claiming that the prosecutors, the FBI, and the government generally are corrupt — e.g., that they planted incriminating evidence, lied to court, illegally seized privileged materials, and so on, there is apt to be strong pushback within the DOJ. I assure you that prosecutors and agents whose honor has been besmirched are certain to be pleading with their supervisors to let them charge the case so they can demonstrate to the public that they carried out their duties appropriately and that it is the suspect who willfully violated the law.

Finally, I observed at the start of this column that Trump’s defenses in this case are mainly legal, not factual. That is, they go to whether the Justice Department should bring the case, not whether the conduct it is able to prove violated the law. Does that remind you of any recent case? If you guessed the Steve Bannon case, you’ve aced the course.

The Justice Department’s decision to charge Bannon was controversial, and he had some colorable (if not necessarily persuasive) legal claims for why the indictment was unwarranted. But when these were rejected by the court, he was essentially left with no factual defense that could sway a jury. Perhaps months from now, he will get a sympathetic hearing from an appeals court, but the Washington jury took about a nanosecond to convict him after two-day trial.

There is a lesson in this. Bannon was very public in his attacks on the January 6 committee, the flouting of whose subpoenas were the basis for the case against him. He was public in his attacks on the Biden Justice Department. He might have tried quiet negotiation and belated cooperation. Instead, he portrayed the government as his corrupt, mortal enemy and tried to make that case in the court of public opinion.

How’d that go?

Trump has not been charged. I really hope he is not, because it would be bad for our deeply divided country, and the continued spotlight on Trump is a distraction from what should be a focus on the Democrats’ ruinous policies. I’m betting that if AG Garland really wanted to prosecute the former president for illegally retaining records, the Justice Department would already have charged him, probably at the same time the FBI executed the search warrant, or shortly afterward.

Trump, however, could talk his way into being charged. Every time he publicly attacks the Justice Department’s integrity in this matter, he is strengthening the hand of DOJ officials who are surely urging the attorney general to green-light an indictment.
Title: Re: AMcC: Could Trump talk himself into an indictment?
Post by: G M on August 22, 2022, 09:56:42 PM: A new and disgusting low for Deep State Andy.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2022, 06:10:49 PM
Could Trump Talk Himself into an Indictment?

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 22, 2022 2:29 PM

How the former president may be strengthening the hand of DOJ officials who would like to prosecute him
Allow me some speculation here.

I have never believed that the Biden Justice Department wanted to charge former president Trump with criminal offenses over his retention of records from his presidency. There are many reasons for this, but significantly, the difficulty of proving a crime at trial is not one of them. Proving illegality on the facts as we understand them would be a lay-up.

That is why Trump could easily talk himself into being charged if he’s not careful. The fact that this is a case that probably should not be brought does not mean it would be a hard case for the Justice Department to win — in a jury trial in deep blue, deeply anti-Trump Washington, D.C.

There are legal reasons not to bring charges, but they are defenses of law, not of fact. That is, they are based on legal principles that courts and the Justice Department itself might – but also might not — find persuasive.

No former president of the United States has ever been charged with a federal crime. The Constitution does not bar such a prosecution, but the tradition against it is prudent. The presumption this creates against such an indictment should be overcome only for a gravely serious offense.

Retaining presidential records should not meet that high bar. For nearly two centuries, presidents were thought to own these materials. To be sure, post-Watergate legislation, the Presidential Records Act (PRA), has made clear for a half-century that such records are government property. Trump’s reported rationalization that they are his is characteristically petulant.

But we are not talking about the crime of the century here. The PRA was not enacted as a criminal statute. Although other statutes now criminalize illegal government-records retention, there is a good argument that Congress did not envision former presidents being prosecuted for transgressing the PRA. In any event, I sense that what the government really wanted here was to get the records back, especially any highly classified ones. It has now accomplished that. There would not be much more upside in prosecuting Trump over this, particularly weighed against the downside.

The other legal consideration is equal justice under the law. Hillary Clinton unlawfully retained and destroyed thousands of government records. The Obama/Biden Justice Department never searched her home. Moreover, the DOJ made ridiculously accommodating arrangements with her lawyers about what evidence the FBI would be permitted to review, distorted the plain language of statutes in order to rationalize not indicting her for mishandling classified information, and turned a complete blind eye to her conversion and destruction of non-classified government records.

With that as a recent and glaring precedent — a precedent created when Clinton was poised to seek the presidency, just as Trump is today — Trump should not be indicted. Charging him would amount to exactly the same unjustifiably selective prosecution that the Obama/Biden Justice Department claimed prosecuting Clinton would have been.

Then there are the purely political considerations.

The Biden Justice Department should resist being seen as a political weapon. Of course, whenever a Justice Department under one party investigates figures from the opposition party, the claim of partisan animus is sure to be made. But the specter of politicized prosecution is magnified when the target of the prosecution is a likely opponent of the incumbent president in the next election.

Unlike some commentators, I do not believe this situation creates a conflict of interest that necessarily triggers appointment of a special counsel — again, it is just a more intense iteration of a recurring and often unavoidable issue in politically fraught cases. It would be prudent, however, for the Justice Department to avoid being seen as a political tool in the absence of a truly egregious offense.

Many believe that this would be a risk worth running if the DOJ could make a January 6 case against Trump — for reasons I’ve explained, I would agree with that only if there were strong evidence Trump was willfully complicit in the violence, and I do not believe there is such evidence. But records-retention offenses are not serious enough for the Justice Department to immolate itself over: By charging Trump at this point, the DOJ would probably help his political standing — it would appear as if Democrats were looking for any excuse to persecute and derail their arch political nemesis because they fear they can’t beat him fair and square in the 2024 election.

So what could change these calculations? Trump could change them.

The Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Circus

Inside the DOJ, I bet officials are steamed because they believe they’ve acted reasonably, yet Trump and his apologists are accusing prosecutors and the FBI of corruption. The DOJ has not been helped by an erratic Attorney General Merrick Garland, who, despite making a highly unusual public statement about a pending investigation, neither addressed the claims that Trump was making publicly nor shed light on the matters of most importance to the public: Why do a search warrant? Why now? And wasn’t there some less-intrusive way of handling this dispute?

Rest assured, though, that this is how Main Justice and the FBI see things: Trump had no right to retain these records; the retention of highly classified intelligence in an insufficiently secure setting was both illegal and irresponsible; the government had been trying to get him to return this stuff for over a year; there was no reason to believe he would return all the records voluntarily; there was apparently (according to the search warrant) reason to believe Trump would destroy (or already had destroyed) records; and therefore, if the government did not take them forcibly by warrant, the records would never have been returned and preserved as the law mandates.

Moreover, Justice Department officials undoubtedly believe that Trump, despite his complaining, is being given favorable treatment. In the vast majority of investigations in which the FBI and the DOJ go to the trouble of convincing a judge to issue a search warrant because there is probable cause to believe crimes — here, three federal felonies — have been committed, charges quickly follow. What’s more, if the government gets a warrant on probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found in the search, and then that evidence is in fact found in the search, that usually cinches things: The suspect gets indicted.

Here, that hasn’t happened. The Justice Department hasn’t charged Trump even though it (a) convinced a judge that the former president probably committed crimes and (b) then apparently found the inculpatory evidence it predicted would be in his home. The DOJ has cited a statutory crime in the warrant, Section 2071, which seems to make such a case a slam-dunk, regardless of whether the government records in question are classified. And while, as to the few classified documents involved, Trump’s defense that he declassified the documents cannot be dismissed out of hand (as I explained here), the court might disagree. That is, assuming Trump failed to create any written record that he’d declassified the documents, a trial judge might well find that either (a) they are still deemed classified as a matter of law, or (b) it is up to the jury to decide whether the documents are still classified.

This is all to say: I am betting the prosecutors involved in the matter believe they have a strong case and would convict the former president if they could get him in front of a Washington jury — and maybe any jury.

I was a federal prosecutor for a very long time. I handled cases in which there was great controversy over whether criminal charges were the right way to go even if the evidence of guilt seemed convincing. And when I was a boss, I had to make the decision about whether we should charge in such cases. I can attest to this: A major factor in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion is the public perception of the Justice Department’s conduct.

If a suspect is out publicly claiming that the prosecutors, the FBI, and the government generally are corrupt — e.g., that they planted incriminating evidence, lied to court, illegally seized privileged materials, and so on, there is apt to be strong pushback within the DOJ. I assure you that prosecutors and agents whose honor has been besmirched are certain to be pleading with their supervisors to let them charge the case so they can demonstrate to the public that they carried out their duties appropriately and that it is the suspect who willfully violated the law.

Finally, I observed at the start of this column that Trump’s defenses in this case are mainly legal, not factual. That is, they go to whether the Justice Department should bring the case, not whether the conduct it is able to prove violated the law. Does that remind you of any recent case? If you guessed the Steve Bannon case, you’ve aced the course.

The Justice Department’s decision to charge Bannon was controversial, and he had some colorable (if not necessarily persuasive) legal claims for why the indictment was unwarranted. But when these were rejected by the court, he was essentially left with no factual defense that could sway a jury. Perhaps months from now, he will get a sympathetic hearing from an appeals court, but the Washington jury took about a nanosecond to convict him after two-day trial.

There is a lesson in this. Bannon was very public in his attacks on the January 6 committee, the flouting of whose subpoenas were the basis for the case against him. He was public in his attacks on the Biden Justice Department. He might have tried quiet negotiation and belated cooperation. Instead, he portrayed the government as his corrupt, mortal enemy and tried to make that case in the court of public opinion.

How’d that go?

Trump has not been charged. I really hope he is not, because it would be bad for our deeply divided country, and the continued spotlight on Trump is a distraction from what should be a focus on the Democrats’ ruinous policies. I’m betting that if AG Garland really wanted to prosecute the former president for illegally retaining records, the Justice Department would already have charged him, probably at the same time the FBI executed the search warrant, or shortly afterward.

Trump, however, could talk his way into being charged. Every time he publicly attacks the Justice Department’s integrity in this matter, he is strengthening the hand of DOJ officials who are surely urging the attorney general to green-light an indictment.
Title: Re: AMcC: Could Trump talk himself into an indictment?
Post by: DougMacG on August 23, 2022, 08:40:33 AM: "No former president of the United States has ever been charged with a federal crime.
...
... presumption... should be overcome only for a gravely serious offense."
----
One small problem with the entire framing, Democrats including DOJ do not see Donald Trump as a former President. They seek to keep him from being the next President.

(Much to agree with in the column. Interesting that they have not charged him yet even after allegedly finding and taking what was sought.)
------
" Every time he publicly attacks the Justice Department’s integrity in this matter,"

- Who is going to do that if he doesn't?

It's going to be a VERY public trial, not the two day Bannon trial.

If convicted of a technical violation, he can run on the platform of pardoning himself of a wrongful charge,

If Trump wins the R nomination, Biden or a judge could stay the sentence. It doesn't look good to have your opponents locked up.
Title: Right next to the cigars , , , a Clinton precedent in favor of Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 11:22:12 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/22/tapes-stored-bill-clintons-sock-drawer-could-affec/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=dR%2FYU6QvHOD1fHz4lFCrUcU82yR2bvVXa%2BRDtvm%2Bou%2BLY0kXy9elE1y1hx4HHvty&bt_ts=1661247942695
Title: Re: Right next to the cigars , , , a Clinton precedent in favor of Trump
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 11:36:45 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 11:22:12 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/22/tapes-stored-bill-clintons-sock-drawer-could-affec/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=dR%2FYU6QvHOD1fHz4lFCrUcU82yR2bvVXa%2BRDtvm%2Bou%2BLY0kXy9elE1y1hx4HHvty&bt_ts=1661247942695

G M
Power User
***
Posts: 23482
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Deep State Andy won't want to mention this
« Reply #1376 on: August 18, 2022, 08:29:44 PM »
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400552.php
Title: How would the Feds get to see this footage? And how would this guy know?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 03:17:25 PM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-fbi-official-thinks-trump-s-surveillance-footage-flipped-the-switch-for-doj-to-issue-search/ar-AA1113Q5?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=062a2f51d4014c93b800ed3d4db3ad5f
Title: Rivkin & Casey: Trump Warrant had no legal basis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 03:29:43 PM: Rivkin and Casey are serious heavyweight attorneys:
===================================

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis
A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Aug. 22, 2022 12:51 pm ET

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

The PRA dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents. Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated their White House papers as their personal property, and neither Congress nor the courts disputed that. In Nixon v. U.S. (1992), the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Richard Nixon had a right to compensation for his presidential papers, which the government had retained under the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 (which applied only to him). “Custom and usage evidences the kind of mutually explicit understandings that are encompassed within the constitutional notion of ‘property’ protected by the Fifth Amendment,” the judges declared.

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The PRA became effective in 1981, at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It established a unique statutory scheme, balancing the needs of the government, former presidents and history. The law declares presidential records to be public property and provides that “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”

The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access. Notably, it doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.

The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers. Those papers must ultimately be made public, but in the meantime—unlike with all other government documents, which are available 24/7 to currently serving executive-branch officials—the PRA establishes restrictions on access to a former president’s records, including a five-year restriction on access applicable to everyone (including the sitting president, absent a showing of need), which can be extended until the records have been properly reviewed and processed. Before leaving office, a president can restrict access to certain materials for up to 12 years.

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The only exceptions are for National Archives personnel working on the materials, judicial process, the incumbent president and Congress (in cases of established need) and the former president himself. PRA section 2205(3) specifically commands that “the Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative,” regardless of any of these restrictions.

Nothing in the PRA suggests that the former president’s physical custody of his records can be considered unlawful under the statutes on which the Mar-a-Lago warrant is based. Yet the statute’s text makes clear that Congress considered how certain criminal-law provisions would interact with the PRA: It provides that the archivist is not to make materials available to the former president’s designated representative “if that individual has been convicted of a crime relating to the review, retention, removal, or destruction of records of the Archives.”

Nothing is said about the former president himself, but applying these general criminal statutes to him based on his mere possession of records would vitiate the entire carefully balanced PRA statutory scheme. Thus if the Justice Department’s sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.

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In making a former president’s records available to him, the PRA doesn’t distinguish between materials that are and aren’t classified. That was a deliberate choice by Congress, as the existence of highly classified materials at the White House was a given long before 1978, and the statute specifically contemplates that classified materials will be present—making this a basis on which a president can impose a 12-year moratorium on public access.

The government obviously has an important interest in how classified materials are kept, whether or not they are presidential records. In this case, it appears that the FBI was initially satisfied with the installation of an additional lock on the relevant Mar-a-Lago storage room. If that was insufficient, and Mr. Trump refused to cooperate, the bureau could and should have sought a less intrusive judicial remedy than a search warrant—a restraining order allowing the materials to be moved to a location with the proper storage facilities, but also ensuring Mr. Trump continuing access. Surely that’s what the government would have done if any other former president were involved.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Title: Re: How would the Feds get to see this footage? And how would this guy know?
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 03:41:13 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 03:17:25 PM

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-fbi-official-thinks-trump-s-surveillance-footage-flipped-the-switch-for-doj-to-issue-search/ar-AA1113Q5?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=062a2f51d4014c93b800ed3d4db3ad5f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQhggbxh9og

The footage clearly shows where the espionage charge came from!
Title: Re: How would the Feds get to see this footage? And how would this guy know?
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 04:17:52 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/former-assistant-fbi-director-suggests-congressmen-trump-officials-should-be-arrested-for-capitol-riot/

Quote from: G M on August 23, 2022, 03:41:13 PM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 03:17:25 PM

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-fbi-official-thinks-trump-s-surveillance-footage-flipped-the-switch-for-doj-to-issue-search/ar-AA1113Q5?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=062a2f51d4014c93b800ed3d4db3ad5f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQhggbxh9og

The footage clearly shows where the espionage charge came from!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 06:16:17 PM: Herwith the condensed version of the Rivkin & Casey piece:

AMcM is 100% wrong.
Title: Cong. Perry pauses suit
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2022, 01:51:12 PM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-ally-perry-pauses-suit-amid-talks-with-u-s-over-seized-cellphone/ar-AA112TdM?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=bc73dd89f381448bc680d71273f857c6
Title: WSJ: Trial by leaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2022, 02:19:22 PM: Washington’s Mar-a-Lago Prosecution by Leaks
The Justice Department wants the search affidavit secret while details spill to the press.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Aug. 23, 2022 6:43 pm ET

Merrick Garland opened a press briefing two weeks ago with the words, “Since I became Attorney General, I have made clear that the Department of Justice will speak through its court filings and its work.” Then how does the Right Honorable Attorney General explain the multiple leaks to the press concerning the Department of Justice investigation of Donald Trump’s handling of presidential documents?

***
It sure looks like someone is prosecuting the case through the media. The latest example arrived Monday in a dispatch in the New York Times that Justice has recovered “more than 300 documents with classified markings” from Mr. Trump since he left office.

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Which documents? The report doesn’t say. But, rest assured, they “included documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest, a person briefed on the matter said.” Ah, there’s our old friend, a person briefed on the matter. Nice to hear from you again, whoever you are.

This follows the Aug. 11 Washington Post report that the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who searched Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home were looking for “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Which nuclear secrets the Post didn’t say, and the search warrant released later included no mention of documents related to nuclear weapons.

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As the leakers know, these reports are an attempt to justify to the public the extraordinary search of a former President’s home. They have the effect of suggesting that Mr. Trump may have committed a crime in mishandling the documents. They also keep the former President at the center of the 2022 midterm election campaign, which is exactly where Democrats in Congress want him.

Meanwhile, Mr. Garland’s lawyers are telling federal Judge Bruce Reinhart that the legal affidavit with more details about the search shouldn’t be released to the public. Or that, if the judge releases it, the affidavit should be so heavily redacted as to tell the public and Mr. Trump’s lawyers very little.

In other words, “a person briefed on the matter” can leak details about the investigation to the press that the public is supposed to credit as true. But the actual “court filings and its work,” in Mr. Garland’s phrase, must remain secret. And these people wonder why tens of millions of Americans don’t trust the Justice Department and FBI?

If this all sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the Russia collusion probe. That story was also fed by leaks to the press with episodes that were portrayed as ominous—“the walls are closing in”—but often turned out to have innocent provenance or far less consequence. We later found out the entire collusion probe was a political concoction promoted by a lawyer for Hillary Clinton with an assist from Justice and James Comey’s FBI.

Meanwhile, a report Tuesday in Just The News says that officials at the White House gave the green light to Justice and the National Archives to pursue the documents case by nixing Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege. The reporter, John Solomon, is Mr. Trump’s representative to the Archives, but the documents he cites appear to be genuine. Don’t expect this to get page one play in most of the press, but for those who want to do more than take Justice dictation this news isn’t reassuring that the probe is apolitical.

Two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago search, the legal case also doesn’t look any stronger. Lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey made a compelling case Tuesday on these pages that Mr. Trump has every right to hold the documents for a time at his home under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. If there is a dispute over them, that is a matter for negotiation and at most a minor sanction. Their argument is stronger than anything we’ve read so far about possible violations by Mr. Trump of the Espionage Act or some obstruction of justice charge.

Perhaps Mr. Garland’s prosecutors are sitting on bombshell evidence that Mr. Trump did something nefarious with the documents. But then putting that doubt in the public mind is one purpose of the leaks—make it all look bad without having to prove it.

***
All of which goes back to the question of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Garland may think he is being scrupulous about the law in pursuing Mr. Trump, but he has opened a political trauma room. If he doesn’t have a solid case that Mr. Trump committed serious crimes, with evidence that a majority of the public will find persuasive, he should settle the whole matter quickly. Prosecution by leak is hurting Justice as much as it is Mr. Trump.
Title: ET: Biden implicated in Trump Raid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2022, 07:38:28 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuK1JzgIDto&t=4s
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2022, 05:49:20 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-aides-unlikely-to-face-charges-on-their-own-in-mar-a-lago-probe-ex-prosecutors-say/ar-AA117Gzj?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=b0315084fa0cb8e34340febad8814646

=======================================================

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/wow-anderson-cooper-shocked-to-learn-trump-attorney-is-former-one-america-news-host/ar-AA116uJD?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9cab5f35174578151edcd526926c2103

Trump seems to have a hard time putting together a quality legal team and keeping it , , ,

=======================================================

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-agents-searched-melania-trump-s-closet-during-the-mar-a-lago-raid-which-made-trump-furious-report-says/ar-AA117NfJ?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9cab5f35174578151edcd526926c2103
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on August 26, 2022, 06:25:49 AM: Yes, any attorney that dares to defend Trump faces having their career destroyed.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2022, 05:49:20 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-aides-unlikely-to-face-charges-on-their-own-in-mar-a-lago-probe-ex-prosecutors-say/ar-AA117Gzj?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=b0315084fa0cb8e34340febad8814646

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/wow-anderson-cooper-shocked-to-learn-trump-attorney-is-former-one-america-news-host/ar-AA116uJD?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9cab5f35174578151edcd526926c2103

Trump seems to have a hard time putting together a quality legal team and keeping it , , ,

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-agents-searched-melania-trump-s-closet-during-the-mar-a-lago-raid-which-made-trump-furious-report-says/ar-AA117NfJ?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9cab5f35174578151edcd526926c2103
Title: American Thinker: Bill Barr is a worm in the grass
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2022, 03:40:48 AM: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/bill_barr_returns_to_make_every_conservative_seethe_with_frustration.html?fbclid=IwAR3qjSNxU50mahhU3E4YLrQk1QnZv24zL0yEyl7Y0z3XeNS-aQ18vPLG724
Title: Re: American Thinker: Bill Barr is a worm in the grass
Post by: G M on August 27, 2022, 07:22:32 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2022, 03:40:48 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/bill_barr_returns_to_make_every_conservative_seethe_with_frustration.html?fbclid=IwAR3qjSNxU50mahhU3E4YLrQk1QnZv24zL0yEyl7Y0z3XeNS-aQ18vPLG724

Barr's job was and is to damage Trump on behalf of the deep state.
Title: FBI, Mar a Lago, factual errors on the affidavit?
Post by: DougMacG on August 28, 2022, 06:38:06 AM: One take on the raid, Paul Sperry. (Don't know the accuracy.)

https://gettr.com/post/p1ojosgd2c0

The FBI affiant who swore to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant appears to have made a critical factual error by stating in the unsealed affidavit: “I do not believe that any spaces within the PREMISES have been authorized for the storage of classified information.” This finding, which is the linchpin of the criminal case vs. Trump, overlooks the fact that:

1) White House records confirm that a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) authorizing the briefing and storage of classified material up to the TS/SCI level had in fact been installed at Mar-a-Lago; and,

2) records show that the Secret Service had recently awarded a nearly $600,000 contract to upgrade physical security within the premises at Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s post-presidency transition

Sperry later posted:

DEVELOPING: The unsealed FBI affidavit contains several oddities:

1. No where does it flat-out say “classified information” was found in Trump’s 15 boxes. On page 2, it refers only to docs “with classification markings,” which raises the specter they were no longer classified

2. It states the docs “appear” to contain National Defense Information. But agents “triaged” the boxes; they would know if they contain NDI or not

3. The affiant claimed “there is probable cause to believe evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises,” yet there’s no “obstruction” header or section spelling out why he believes this

4. He said he doesn’t believe “any spaces” w/in Mar-a-Lago are “currently” authorized for storage of classified info. So they were, but not “currently”?
--------
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/paul_sperry/
Title: FBI using WhatsApp for warrants?
Post by: G M on August 28, 2022, 08:13:03 AM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/kash-patel-responds-deep-state-not-redacting-name-fbi-affidavit-drops-bomb/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 01:10:59 AM: DOJ Says FBI Agents Took Potentially ‘Privileged’ Materials in Trump Raid
By Jack Phillips August 29, 2022

Officials have completed their examination of documents that were taken during a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and it’s possible that “attorney-client privileged information” was seized by FBI agents, the Department of Justice stated in an Aug. 29 filing.

The Justice Department (DOJ) was responding to a motion filed by Trump to request the appointment of a special master to review the seized documents.

The DOJ’s “privilege review team” was tasked with reviewing the documents, prosecutors said in the Aug. 29 legal brief (pdf), coming in response to a weekend ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon to schedule a hearing on whether an independent third party to oversee the department’s combing of evidence is needed.

That team “identified a limited set of materials that potentially contain attorney-client privileged information, completed its review of those materials, and is in the process of following the procedures,” according to the DOJ’s filing, which noted that the review was carried out before Trump’s request. Prosecutors will provide more information this week, they said.

The procedures include asking the court to make a determination on possibly privileged material and asking Trump’s lawyers whether they will assert privilege, according to the filing.

“Additionally, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are currently facilitating a classification review of materials recovered pursuant to the search,” prosecutors said. “As the Director of National Intelligence advised Congress, ODNI is also leading an intelligence community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of these materials.”

About a week prior in a court motion, Trump’s legal team called the FBI search of his property politically motivated and aggressive.

Trump and members of his team have said that while in office, the former president declassified a range of materials.

Cannon, in response, wrote on Aug. 27 that she’ll likely approve a special master to look at the documents and other materials. A special master—usually a retired judge or prosecutor—is a neutral third party that’s used to settle some legal disputes such as those involving attorney-client privilege.

“Pursuant to Rule 53(b) (1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court’s inherent authority, and without prejudice to the parties’ objections, the Court hereby provides notice of its preliminary intent to appoint a special master in this case,” Cannon wrote (pdf).

However, the Trump-appointed judge stipulated that the Aug. 27 order “should not be construed as a final determination on Plaintiff’s Motion.”

Cannon isn’t the same judge who approved the FBI search warrant of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this month and who last week approved the release of a heavily redacted Justice Department affidavit used to obtain the warrant. Days before he ordered the release of the affidavit, U.S. Judge Bruce Reinhart also unsealed a warrant and property receipt in the search.

Seized Documents

Federal authorities took about two dozen boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 that were allegedly classified or top secret, according to the property receipt. Avril Haines, head of the ODNI, told congressional lawmakers on Aug. 26 that U.S. intelligence officials will review the materials.

The significantly redacted affidavit unsealed on Aug. 26 revealed that agents were attempting to obtain “physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of three potential crimes.” Since the raid, neither the DOJ nor the FBI have publicly disclosed what the agents were searching for or why.

Trump’s complaint last week noted that agents and Justice Department authorities, including top intelligence official Jay Bratt, visited Mar-a-Lago about two months before the raid. The affidavit also noted that DOJ officials told Trump’s team to place additional security on a storage room that apparently held the documents.

Federal officials were greeted by Trump’s lawyers on June 8 when they arrived to retrieve some documents, Trump’s filing states (pdf). The agents were shown a basement storage room with boxes of documents and memorabilia from when Trump was president.

The filing also claimed that after one FBI agent saw the storage room, they told Trump’s team: “Thank you. You did not need to show us the storage room, but we appreciate it. Now it all makes sense.”

In the Mar-a-Lago storage room, there were “boxes, many containing the clothing and personal items of President Trump and the First Lady,” according to the complaint. Department of Justice official Jay Bratt asked the Trump team to secure that storage room and the former president “directed his staff to place a second lock on the door,” it reads.
Title: Notice how the "ORANGEMANBAD has nuke secrets" narrative has disappeared
Post by: G M on August 30, 2022, 07:56:08 AM: Meanwhile, the documents showing FBI corruption have been reclassified/hidden.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 08:41:53 AM: Yup.
Title: AMcC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 06:23:18 PM: By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 30, 2022 10:35 AM

If I were the judge on the case, I’d be furious.

The Trump legal team’s inexplicable delay in seeking court intervention, in the form of a so-called special master, has had the predictable consequence: Even before the court could rule on the belated request, the Justice Department completed its review of the documents and made unilateral determinations about what was potentially privileged.

The DOJ’s “privilege-review team” has presumably disseminated what it determined to be the non-privileged documents (the vast majority of what was seized) to the “case team” (i.e., the prosecutors and agents working on the investigation). As a result, even though the Trump team’s application for court intervention had merit, the Justice Department has laid the groundwork to argue that the point is moot. In fact, case prosecutors seem poised to blast the former president and his legal team, having obtained leave to file a lengthy submission on Tuesday rebutting their factual and legal claims.

If I were the judge on the case, I’d be furious.

Of course, I’m not the judge on the case. I am an analyst — and one who does not believe the Justice Department intends to prosecute Trump for mishandling classified information or records-retention violations. Therefore, I’m not surprised that prosecutors are living dangerously. But it’s worth observing that they are being presumptuous, heedlessly so in my view.

Understand: Although it’s the Trump camp that moved for a special master — i.e., a court-appointed arbiter to make determinations about what documents are privileged, rather than allowing the Justice Department to do this unilaterally — such a procedure protects the government’s interests, too. Prosecutors and investigators who are exposed to a suspect’s privileged information may be disqualified from participating in any prosecution. If privileged information is found to have informed investigative or charging decisions, it is possible that charges could be dismissed. Appointment of a special master can forfend these problems.

Of course, if you’re not planning on bringing charges, you don’t pause much over such concerns.

The Justice Department has been extremely aggressive here. First, note that in the warrant affidavit (at pp. 31-32), the DOJ acknowledges only that Trump may have attorney-client privilege (ACP). To the contrary, Trump is claiming both ACP and executive privilege — based, as we’ve noted in other contexts, on the Supreme Court’s post-Watergate case, Nixon v. Administrator (1977), which instructed that former presidents maintain some unspecified quantum of executive privilege over materials generated by their presidency. As the Court put it:

The confidentiality necessary to this exchange [of “full and frank submissions of facts and opinion” between the president and his advisers] cannot be measured by the few months or years between the submission of the information and the end of the President’s tenure; the privilege is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic. Therefore the privilege survives the individual President’s tenure. [Emphasis added. Citations and internal quotations omitted.]

To be sure, Nixon elaborated that an incumbent president’s assessment of the prior president’s privilege assertion was entitled to great weight. Ergo, in our present case, President Biden’s decision not to support former President Trump’s privilege invocation is significant. But is it dispositive? The Justice Department is making a giant leap in concluding that it is. To be clear, I believe prosecutors are probably right about that. Still, it’s no sure thing. (Compare, e.g., Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion, here.)

Yes, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (affirmed by the Supreme Court) relied heavily on Biden’s opposition to Trump’s privilege claims in deciding that certain Trump presidential materials should be disclosed to the House January 6 committee. But Biden was not making a blanket waiver of any Trump privilege claims; he was making a narrow waiver, specifically related to the investigation of the Capitol riot.

The D.C. Circuit did not hold that Trump had no conceivable claim of executive privilege. That question was not raised. Yet, the DOJ seems to be assuming that it was not only raised but decided conclusively — as is the Acting National Archivist Debra Seidel Wall, whose May 10, 2022, letter rejected Trump’s privilege claim on the advice of Biden’s Justice Department.

Since this issue has not been decided by the courts, it would have been better if the Justice Department and FBI had flagged it for the court in the warrant affidavit. They should have explained to Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart that they were taking the position that Trump had no executive privilege, and therefore that the special “filter” procedures for handling privileged information did not have to account for executive privilege — only attorney-client privilege. After all, as we’ve discussed in connection with classified FISA proceedings, when the government is permitted to make an ex parte investigative application, with the suspect given no notice and no opportunity to be heard in opposition, the Justice Department has a heightened obligation to be forthright with the court. But the Justice Department does not appear to have alerted Reinhart to the scope-of-privilege issue (unless it did so in what’s been redacted, which seems unlikely). There is, moreover, no indication that Reinhart raised the question of executive privilege on his own.

Why wouldn’t the DOJ highlight the issue? That seems obvious: If executive privilege is viable, it would block from DOJ review a much broader array of documents than would be blocked by attorney-client privilege. It would potentially have covered all conversations Trump had with his advisers, conversations subordinates had to carry out policy, and work product flowing therefrom. The documents that are covered only by ACP are, no doubt, a small subset of that.

This is worth noting because the Justice Department has already gotten through its review of what it deemed to be privileged information — by assuming that what was potentially privileged was much narrower than what Trump claims is privileged.

On Monday afternoon, the New York Times reports, prosecutors informed Judge Aileen M. Cannon (the federal district judge in Florida before whom Trump’s petition for a special master is being litigated) that the privilege-review team has finished its work. By the terms of the procedures outlined in the warrant affidavit, once that team “determines that documents or data are not potentially attorney-client privileged, they will be provided to the law-enforcement personnel assigned to the investigation.”

In other words, what’s the point of having a special master? The Justice Department is not only saying there is no point, it is making sure there is no point. Because the DOJ continued with its privilege review, even as the court said it wanted to consider installing a special master, the point is moot. That is, the thing the special master would have overseen — namely, the transfer of documents to the investigative team only after ensuring that privileged materials were not included — has already happened.

This is Justice Department hardball. Remember, in the Hillary Clinton emails case, the DOJ purported to be so fearful of impinging on the attorney-client privilege that, far from seizing evidence by search warrants, it engaged in indulgent negotiations and allowed the Clinton team to impose conditions on the FBI’s examination of evidence.

Not so with Trump. Here, despite knowing that a former president of the United States was seeking court intervention, the DOJ rushed through a unilateral privilege-review process. Not only did the DOJ ignore the scope of Trump’s privilege claims, it quite intentionally frustrated the capacity of the court to supervise the review of potentially privileged documents.

On the other hand, the DOJ will surely counter that: (a) Prosecutors and the FBI made full disclosure of their intentions to unilaterally decide privilege issues when they submitted the search-warrant application to Magistrate Judge Reinhart; (b) the Trump team sat on its hands for two weeks rather than promptly seek a special master when it knew the Justice Department was performing this review; and (c) Judge Cannon did not grant Trump’s request that the court instruct the Justice Department to cease and desist its review until the court could sort out the special-master issue.

I want to focus on (c). To repeat, if I were the judge, I’d be livid.

It does not appear that Judge Cannon expressly denied the Trump team’s cease-and-desist request. To recap, Trump’s initial motion for a special master was deficient. The judge instructed Trump’s counsel to clarify it by last Friday. The lawyers did so, making various claims for relief. Among these, they asked the court to direct the Justice Department to suspend the privilege review.

Preliminarily, Cannon indicated that she believed the motion for a special master had merit, and that the government should provide Trump with a more detailed inventory of the property seized from Mar-a-Lago. But being cautious, she wanted to hear from the Justice Department and directed that the DOJ respond by Tuesday (August 30), in anticipation of a hearing Cannon planned to hold on Thursday (September 1).

To summarize: As tends to happen in complex litigation in a compressed time frame, the judge did not rule one way or the other on Trump’s cease-and-desist motion. I sense that she thought she’d made clear to the government that it should not do anything that would change — and, especially, irretrievably change — the status quo. The DOJ should just file its response Tuesday, be ready for a hearing Thursday, and do nothing of consequence in the interim.

To the contrary, the Justice Department acted in a way that makes Thursday’s hearing pointless. That seems awfully cheeky.

As noted, Cannon did not explicitly rule, one way or the other, on Trump’s cease-and-desist request. In that situation, I believe that any scrupulous DOJ prosecutor, before allowing the DOJ’s review of Mar-a-Lago documents to continue, would have felt obliged to inform the court that, having gotten no ruling on Trump’s cease-and-desist request, the Justice Department intended to proceed. That way, if the judge had inadvertently overlooked Trump’s cease-and-desist request, she’d have had a chance to rule on it, one way or the other, before the DOJ took actions that would undermine the judge’s ability to decide the matter. (Federal judges typically do not leave litigants to wonder what silence means — they explicitly grant or deny requests for relief.)

That was not what this Justice Department opted to do, despite being led by a highly experienced former federal judge. In these unprecedented circumstances, though one would think the byword would be caution, the Justice Department just put its head down and bored through its privilege review, heedless of whether this was consistent with the court’s wishes.

Many judges would get pretty steamed about that. It will be interesting to observe how Judge Cannon reacts. For now, I would simply say that, if the Justice Department’s filter team — inadvertently or not — passed along to its investigative team materials that were privileged, this would mainly be a problem only if the government intended to prosecute. The investigators’ exposure to privileged information might trigger disqualification of “tainted” prosecutors or dismissal of charges.

By contrast, if there isn’t going to be an indictment, then there’s nothing much to worry about. The government can afford to be very aggressive, both in its narrow construction of privilege and in its determination to bull through the privilege-review process without waiting on such inconveniences as judicial review. The Justice Department can afford to irritate the court if there is not going to be a courtroom prosecution.

Again, I don’t think the Justice Department intends to prosecute Trump on classified information and records-retention offenses. I think the government just wanted its documents back — to restore order, to conduct a damage assessment regarding any national-security compromises, and to assess whether any documents bear on the DOJ’s January 6 investigation.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 31, 2022, 10:52:10 AM: Trump is in trouble - on technicalities, document storage. I expect a big news conference soon probably by Garland making the case that Trump is guilty but won't be prosecuted, removing the possibility of Trump vindicating himself in court.

Documents were found in his personal desk, not all in the storage as promised.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/31/trump-fbi-raid-doj-says-docs-were-likely-concealed-and-removed-at-mar-a-lago/

SOME documents "marked top secret" might in fact have been declassified but not marked as such.

SOME documents taken MAY HAVE been protected by attorney client privilege. The Federal government, being the adversary, should not be reading those documents.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on August 31, 2022, 10:56:55 AM: The law, like the constitution and like gender is whatever the left wants it to be.

Quote from: DougMacG on August 31, 2022, 10:52:10 AM
Trump is in trouble - on technicalities - unlikely to be prosecuted.

Documents were found in his personal desk, not all in the storage as promised.

SOME documents "marked top secret" might in fact have been declassified but not marked as such.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/31/trump-fbi-raid-doj-says-docs-were-likely-concealed-and-removed-at-mar-a-lago/

SOME documents taken MAY HAVE been protected by attorney client privilege. The Federal government, being the adversary, should not be reading those documents.
Title: AMcC: Trump Indictment coming?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2022, 12:04:01 AM: Why Yesterday’s DOJ Filing Suggests a Trump Indictment Is Coming
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 31, 2022 3:07 PM

Former president Trump is likely to be charged with obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to investigators.
Former president Donald Trump is facing the very serious prospect of being indicted for obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to the government. That is the upshot of a court submission filed by the Justice Department on Tuesday night, in response to the Trump camp’s belated motion for the appointment of a special master to review materials seized three weeks ago from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Last week, when an extensively redacted version of the affidavit supporting the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was released, I opined that “perhaps the most overlooked sentence” in the document was this one: “There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES.” The government’s Tuesday night court filing bears that out.

The submission also illustrates that, while the affidavit remains substantially under wraps, we already know the gist of it (as I explained last week). Prosecutors begin with a factual recitation (pp. 2-13) that substantially echoes a letter written by Archivist Debra Seidel Wall to Trump’s counsel — covering events from the time Trump left office on January 20, 2021, through May 10, the date of Wall’s letter.

Moreover, we already knew that after Wall’s letter there followed (a) an initial grand-jury subpoena for classified documents, served on May 11; (b) a meeting at Mar-a-Lago on June 3, which, contrary to Trump’s public depiction of an amicable negotiation session between his lawyers and DOJ officials (into which Trump himself popped in), was actually compliance — or as it turned out, non-compliance — with a grand-jury subpoena in an active criminal investigation; and (c) a second grand-jury subpoena, served on June 22, for Mar-a-Lago surveillance video. These events dovetailed with the FBI’s interviews of Mar-a-Lago employees and Trump’s post-presidency staffers, as well as the bureau’s review of the surveillance video. In combination, these convinced the government of what it already suspected at the time of the June 3 meeting: Trump was lying about how much classified information he was hoarding, and about where he was hoarding it.

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Consequently, even without the new submission, we already knew that the Justice Department believed the unprecedented execution of a court-authorized search warrant at the home of a former American president was fully justified because: (a) the government had exhausted other options, after not just 18 months of trying to reason with Trump but, especially, his flouting of a grand-jury subpoena (i.e., even though he knew things had been elevated to a criminal investigation, he nevertheless engaged in conduct punishable by imprisonment); (b) there was a high likelihood that Trump was continuing to direct the movement, concealment, and perhaps destruction of classified documents which, as the Trump camp’s June 3 machinations showed, the former president had no intention of surrendering to the government; and (c) there was a vital need for U.S. intelligence agencies to re-acquire any highly classified intelligence that had been mishandled (and was still being mishandled), in order to assess the damage that mishandling had done to national security.

Although we already knew all these things, the new Justice Department submission fills in some salient gaps.

1. No Claim of Declassification

In January 2022, when Trump initially surrendered 15 boxes of presidential records — only after months of pleading by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which finally prompted NARA to warn that it would have to involve Congress if Trump persisted in ignoring the Presidential Records Act — a prodigious amount of classified information was included. At the time that this material — 184 distinct documents, containing over 700 pages classified at the highest levels — was handed over to NARA, Trump made no claim that it had been declassified. Furthermore, in subsequent correspondence, even after NARA pointed out that much of the material appeared to be classified, Trump’s counsel never made any claim that Trump had declassified any of it, much less all of it.

2. An Implied Admission that Nothing Was Ever Declassified

The June 3 Mar-a-Lago meeting occurred pursuant to a grand-jury subpoena, which demanded the surrender of “any and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings.” The subpoena instructed that, in lieu of a personal appearance by Trump’s records custodian before the grand jury in Washington, D.C., the documents could be surrendered to the FBI “at the place of their location” (presumably, Mar-a-Lago), provided that the custodian executed a “sworn certification that the documents represent all responsive records” that would be transmitted to the grand jury (i.e., the equivalent of the sworn testimony that would have been sought if Trump’s custodian had personally appeared before the grand jury).

More on
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Justice Department Bulldozes Court on Trump Privilege Claims
Trump Moved and Hid Classified Records at Mar-a-Lago, DOJ Filing Claims
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To repeat, contrary to Trump’s public claims, this was not an amicable visit in which a totally cooperative, completely transparent former president hosted some government officials. It was a meeting under duress: a legally mandated response to a subpoena (i.e, a court order, enforceable by criminal law), directly occasioned by the former president’s obdurate lack of cooperation. Indeed, in its submission, the Justice Department drops a footnote (p. 9, n. 4) that pointedly refutes the claim that Trump is the one who “determined a search for the [classified] materials should be conducted.” Instead, the search was conducted because a subpoena demanded that it be conducted.

Beyond that, the Justice Department’s filing offers a significant point about classification: The subpoena required the production of any classified records in Trump’s possession, and Trump (through his representatives) produced documents on the recognition that they were classified documents responsive to the subpoena. Neither Trump nor his representatives ever claimed that he’d declassified any of the documents. They never claimed that he did not need to comply with the subpoena because any documents in his possession were no longer classified. His compliance with the subpoena — though only partial and deceptive — was tantamount to an admission that he’d been retaining classified documents in an unauthorized location, in violation of federal criminal law.

3. The Government Clearly Has Witnesses

Even before its mid May review of the first 15 boxes Trump gave NARA, the FBI already had one or more witnesses who’d informed the bureau that Trump was still hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

After being delayed by Trump’s futile attempts to stall and assert privilege, the FBI’s review, which took three days, commenced on May 16. Yet, notice that the grand-jury subpoena demanding all classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago was issued on May 11 — five days earlier.

The Justice Department’s submission explains that by the time the May 11 subpoena was issued, the FBI had “developed evidence” indicating that “dozens of additional boxes” of records were still being held at the Florida estate. The filing does not say what this evidence was, or how it was developed. The prosecutors omit this information because, they say, they’re worried about intimidation of witnesses and other obstructive conduct. They also emphasize that Magistrate Judge Reinhart found probable cause to believe that criminal obstruction had occurred when he approved the search warrant on August 5; and, in thereafter explaining why he would not order disclosure of the unredacted affidavit, Reinhart concluded that revealing this type of information could “impede the ongoing investigation through obstruction of justice and witness intimidation or retaliation.”

4. False Statements, Including Under Oath, to the FBI and the Grand Jury

At the June 3 Mar-a-Lago meeting, Trump’s representatives provided the sworn statement demanded by the subpoena. It reads:

Based upon the information that has been provided to me, I am authorized to certify, on behalf of the Office of Donald J. Trump, the following: a. A diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida; b. This search was conducted after receipt of the subpoena, in order to locate any and all documents that are responsive to the subpoena; c. Any and all responsive documents accompany this certification; and d. No copy, written notation, or reproduction of any kind was retained as to any responsive document.

I swear or affirm that the above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.

The government’s court filing does not say who signed the sworn statement. Media reports indicate that the signatory was Trump lawyer Christina Bobb (though she has publicly said that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran oversaw the supposedly “diligent search”). That the statement itself is patently false does not necessarily mean Bobb was lying when she signed it (if, indeed, she was the one who signed it) — we don’t yet know what information she was given and thus cannot assess whether she was willfully misleading investigators. We can safely assume, however, that (a) the lawyers who conducted the “diligent search” and provided the sworn statement for the grand jury (among other statements the lawyers made that day to the FBI) are subjects of the investigation — and likely to become central witnesses; and (b) the government would argue that Trump made false statements to the FBI and to the grand jury, reasoning that his agents’ statements are attributable to him, and he had to know, when he caused his agents to make these statements, that he was not providing all of the classified documents compelled by the subpoena.

We can also safely say that the government had reason to believe, even as the June 3 meeting was taking place, that the representations made on Trump’s behalf by his lawyers were false. Which brings us to the next point.

5. The Government Did Not Agree to Trump’s Retention of Records, Which He Barred Government Officials from Inspecting

Contrary to Trump’s claims, the Justice Department objected to Trump’s continued retention of presidential records (which are by law the property of the government, not the former president) in the Mar-a-Lago storage room. At the June 3 meeting, a request to view the storage area was made by the government officials (three FBI agents and Jay I. Bratt, the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the DOJ’s National Security Division — and the principal author of the government’s submission last night). They were permitted to do so. Here, the DOJ’s court filing relates that:

Critically, however, the former President’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained.

Obviously, the government did not take at face value the sworn statement signed by Trump’s representatives. The DOJ officials wanted to “confirm” that the statement was accurate, and they were made suspicious by the Trump team’s refusal to allow that. It is also clear that the officials asked other questions on June 3 to probe the representations made in the sworn statement. The court filing states that Trump representatives told the officials that the boxes of records in the storage room were “the remaining repository” of White House records. The filing elaborates: “Counsel further represented that there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.”

Plainly, the government did not believe this story. Over two weeks before the June 3 meeting, the FBI had completed its inspection of the first 15 boxes. Agents found that Trump had strewn classified documents, with no apparent rhyme or reason, throughout the boxes. Classified documents were intermingled with items having nothing to do with classified matters. The government thus had reason to believe that (a) there would likely be more classified information strewn through the boxes in the storage area (which was why Trump’s lawyers would not let the contents of the boxes be inspected); and (b) classified documents were likely being kept in areas outside the storage room (the Trump team’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding).

To be clear, then, the government was not content to allow Trump to keep the boxes in the storage area. The Justice Department fully intended to pursue the boxes, though it was not prepared to escalate matters right there and then on June 3. The DOJ admonished the Trump team to tighten up security and later demanded surveillance video through an additional grand-jury subpoena. But these were interim measures to which the government agreed in deference to Trump’s status as a former president. (In similar circumstances, normal suspects who were withholding subpoenaed government records would have been treated to a view of the FBI’s carrying their boxes away, probably while being charged with obstruction, handcuffed, and taken away themselves.)

6. The Classified Documents Delivered on June 3

The classified documents provided on June 3 were packaged in a Redweld envelope, “double-wrapped in tape” — a detail prosecutors include to emphasize that Trump and his lawyers knew the contents were highly classified and were not claiming they’d been declassified. Included were 38 separate classified documents, 17 of which were classified at very high levels.

7. ‘Obstructive Conduct’ and Fears of Witness Tampering

In its court filing, the government explicitly describes the Trump team’s behavior in response to the grand jury’s June 3 subpoena as “obstructive conduct.” It is also implicit that the FBI has located one or more witnesses with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago’s layout and the former president’s routine. The submission relates:

In particular, the government developed evidence that a search limited to the Storage Room would not have uncovered all the classified documents at the Premises. The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.

Relatedly, prosecutors quote Magistrate Judge Reinhart’s observation at the hearing on whether the affidavit should be disclosed in unredacted form: “These concerns are not hypothetical in this case. One of the statutes for which I found probable cause was 18 U.S.C. § 1519, which prohibits obstructing an investigation.”

Again, while we have not seen the relevant portions of the affidavit, we have very good insight into what the witnesses were telling the FBI. In their submission, prosecutors stress that, based on the probable cause showing in the affidavit, Reinhart’s warrant authorized the search of:

the “‘45 Office’ [the former President’s office space at the Premises], all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by [the former President] and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate” but not “areas currently (i.e., at the time of the search) being occupied, rented, or used by third parties (such as Mar-a-Largo Members) and not otherwise used or available to be used by [the former President] and his staff, such as private guest suites.”

That is to say: There was reason to believe both that Trump was hoarding classified documents in his office, and that, because he did not exercise care in handling such documents, there could be classified documents kept in other places that he and his staff frequented.

Not only did Trump, through his team, falsely represent on June 3 that all remaining classified documents were in the Redweld envelope they’d turned over; prosecutors stress that the search conducted at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 also “cast serious doubt on the claim in the [June 3] certification (and now in [Trump’s special-master motion]) that there had been a ‘diligent search’ for records responsive to the grand jury subpoena.”

===============================

Reposting this from August 23

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis
A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Aug. 22, 2022 12:51 pm ET
WSJ

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

The PRA dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents. Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated their White House papers as their personal property, and neither Congress nor the courts disputed that. In Nixon v. U.S. (1992), the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Richard Nixon had a right to compensation for his presidential papers, which the government had retained under the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 (which applied only to him). “Custom and usage evidences the kind of mutually explicit understandings that are encompassed within the constitutional notion of ‘property’ protected by the Fifth Amendment,” the judges declared.

The PRA became effective in 1981, at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It established a unique statutory scheme, balancing the needs of the government, former presidents and history. The law declares presidential records to be public property and provides that “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”

The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access. Notably, it doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.

The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers. Those papers must ultimately be made public, but in the meantime—unlike with all other government documents, which are available 24/7 to currently serving executive-branch officials—the PRA establishes restrictions on access to a former president’s records, including a five-year restriction on access applicable to everyone (including the sitting president, absent a showing of need), which can be extended until the records have been properly reviewed and processed. Before leaving office, a president can restrict access to certain materials for up to 12 years.

The only exceptions are for National Archives personnel working on the materials, judicial process, the incumbent president and Congress (in cases of established need) and the former president himself. PRA section 2205(3) specifically commands that “the Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative,” regardless of any of these restrictions.

Nothing in the PRA suggests that the former president’s physical custody of his records can be considered unlawful under the statutes on which the Mar-a-Lago warrant is based. Yet the statute’s text makes clear that Congress considered how certain criminal-law provisions would interact with the PRA: It provides that the archivist is not to make materials available to the former president’s designated representative “if that individual has been convicted of a crime relating to the review, retention, removal, or destruction of records of the Archives.”

Nothing is said about the former president himself, but applying these general criminal statutes to him based on his mere possession of records would vitiate the entire carefully balanced PRA statutory scheme. Thus if the Justice Department’s sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.

In making a former president’s records available to him, the PRA doesn’t distinguish between materials that are and aren’t classified. That was a deliberate choice by Congress, as the existence of highly classified materials at the White House was a given long before 1978, and the statute specifically contemplates that classified materials will be present—making this a basis on which a president can impose a 12-year moratorium on public access.

The government obviously has an important interest in how classified materials are kept, whether or not they are presidential records. In this case, it appears that the FBI was initially satisfied with the installation of an additional lock on the relevant Mar-a-Lago storage room. If that was insufficient, and Mr. Trump refused to cooperate, the bureau could and should have sought a less intrusive judicial remedy than a search warrant—a restraining order allowing the materials to be moved to a location with the proper storage facilities, but also ensuring Mr. Trump continuing access. Surely that’s what the government would have done if any other former president were involved.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Title: Re: AMcC: Trump Indictment coming?
Post by: DougMacG on September 01, 2022, 02:52:54 AM: Very strange how different those two posts are.

"A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid."

- Title from the second not mentioned in the first.

None of them tell us, what are these documents, to judge for ourselves. Trump wanted the nuclear codes to sell or build his own? I doubt it. Evidence of FBI wrongdoing he didn't want to give back for their destruction?

The first, if true, reeks of all the Dem situations that went unprosecuted or wrist slapped.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2022, 05:56:39 AM: "Very strange how different those two posts are."

Indeed!!! Which is why I reposted the second one with it as I posted the AMcC piece. I like AMcC's legally informed and analytical mind, but our GM is not wrong when he complains of blind spots that tend to favor the Deep State.

The basic principle is that prosecutors should not discuss/leak about investigations because to do so is inherently to the accused, who is not getting a trial to defend his name.

Clearly that has gone by the wayside here-- we are seeing a massive and purposeful campaign to smear Trump with trial by leak.

The most recent example is the photo of the documents that they strew upon the floor. Adding to the inappropriateness is that the world now knows what the jackets of secure and secret documents look llike. WTF?!?
=================

WT

FBI chooses Mar-a-Lago raid to jolt critic Kash Patel

The knives are out in this ongoing battle

By Rowan Scarborough

In 2017, Kash Patel and his boss, Rep. Devin Nunes, then chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, launched an unprecedented challenge to the FBI’s 7th-floor hierarchy and to its ballyhooed counterintelligence division. They wanted to see how the bureau had targeted the new president, Donald Trump, in its Russia collusion investigation. More particularly, they asked if the bureau was relying on a Democrat-financed gossipy unverified bundle of anti-Trump claims that had circulated through Washington as the goods that would vanquish the hated “Orange Man.”

The Nunes/Patel team read and double-checked and then issued a bombshell memo in January 2018. The FBI had in fact relied on the Christopher Steele dossier to obtain warrants for electronic surveillance against a Trump campaign person. The FBI asserted to judges that the allegations against Carter Page were golden. They were not.

Spring forward to Aug. 8 and another unprecedented event in the history of Mr. Trump and his nemesis, the FBI. FBI agents, led by the Washington field office and specifically authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland, raided Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, home, including his hangout, “45 Office,” a storage room and his wife Melania’s closets.

The objective was to collect top secret and other classified documents Mr. Trump took from the White House and kept at Mar-a-Lago. An FBI search warrant affidavit said the entire chain of events was illegal. It mentions Mr. Trump eight times.

There is only one other insider whose name appears in the otherwise heavily censored pages — Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s trusted aide in 2019-20 and now part of his social media company.

“This same FBI has been investigating death threats made against me due to baseless political overreach by government gangsters and in their greed for political vengeance, have threatened my safety again,” Mr. Patel says.

Here is what the unnamed Washington field office agent told the judge: “I am aware of an article published in Breitbart on May 5, 2022 … which states that Kash Patel, who is described as a former top FPOTUS [former president of the United States] administration official, characterized as ‘misleading’ reports in other news organizations that [National Archives] had found classified materials among records that FPOTUS provided to [National Archives] from Mar-a-Lago. Patel alleged that such reports were misleading because FPOTUS had declassified the materials at issue.”

There it is. The FBI decided to leave Mr. Patel’s name an open secret, subjecting him to the immediate destructive Washington speculation grinder because he expressed an opinion that is the same as Trump legal team’s.

What message do you think the FBI is sending? Peter Strzok says he knows. Mr. Strzok headed the FBI’s Russia probe, known as Crossfire Hurricane, when the Nunes/Patel team in 2017 began pressing him and his upper echelon for access to highly classified documents. He is best remembered for the series of texts he exchanged with his then-lover, Lisa Page, the counsel for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Mr. Strzok pledged to Ms. Page that the bureau would “stop” the Trump candidacy.

The Nunes-Patel January 2018 memo, declassified by Mr. Trump, brought scorn from the Washington press corps. But it has passed the test of time. The memo asserted the FBI abused its wiretap authority by misleading the courts. A subsequent 2019 Justice Department inspector general report confirmed this. Judges later made two of the four warrants invalid.

The Nunes-Patel memo said, “Our findings raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.” For example, none of the FBI’s four warrant applications told judges that the Steele dossier was financed by Democrats including the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Strzok was so delighted to see his former bureau colleagues feature the Patel name that he all but convicted him in a tweet.

“Never great to see your unredacted name in a search warrant affidavit,” he said.

“To borrow from Eric Hirschman, ‘I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great F’ing criminal defense lawyer — you’re going to need it.’” Mr. Strzok cited the famous quote from Trump impeachment attorney Hirschman in his testimony to the Jan. 6 House committee. He recounted how he gave blunt advice to lawyer John Eastman who sold the outgoing president on a convoluted strategy to overrun the 2020 election. Asha Rangappa, another anti-Trump ex FBI agent (a good number are on liberal cable news stations) openly wished for a conviction. “Kash Patel going to jail could be the silver lining of this entire fiasco,” she tweeted. To Patel supporters, the Mar-a-Lago raid is starting to take on the hallmarks of the original 2016-19 Russia probe. That investigation nailed some Trump people for not paying taxes. Its big fish, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was later exonerated via new court filings. The FBI itself never thought he had lied to agents. But in the Mar-a-Lago probe, there were in fact classified documents housed at Mr. Trump’s home. He is making a legal argument: He had the power, as U.S. government chief executive officer, to declassify them and take possession. He is essentially doing his own “Russiagate” investigation as his separate civil lawsuit against dossier traffickers plays out in U.S. District Court.

It is the fiery Mr. Patel who has carried Mr. Trump’s stance to podcast/cable news airways.

And then the Justice Department released the search warrant affidavit, with the FBI highlighting his name, framed by thick lines of ominous black ink.

Mr. Patel refers to FBI agents as “gangsters” who are still trying to cover up “Russiagate.”

He calls the unmasking “another vicious attack from DoJ/FBI who intentionally jeopardized my safety by un-redacting my name in the most reviewed search warrant in the history of the United States,” he says.

Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
Title: Trump lawyer may have walked into a perjury trap
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2022, 07:06:47 PM: Trump Lawyer May Have Walked Into DOJ Perjury Trap, New Documents Suggest
Hans Mahncke
August 31, 2022

In a late-night filing on Aug. 30 in response to former President Donald Trump’s motion for an independent party to scrutinize documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, the Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a judge not to grant the motion.

Much attention has focused on a photograph attached to the DOJ’s filing. The photograph shows a number of documents marked “Top Secret” laid out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ’s accompanying filing claims that the items in the photograph were recovered from the “45 office,” which it defines as “the former President’s office space at the Premises.”

Trump and his legal team have insisted that he declassified the documents in his possession and, therefore, it doesn’t matter what the markings on the papers are. The DOJ appears to have been prepared for that argument.

While the photograph was likely included in the filing for its PR value—evidenced by the fact that it’s currently on the front page of every news outlet—the DOJ’s real focus appears to be elsewhere, specifically on a grand jury subpoena dated May 11 and a certification signed by a Trump lawyer on June 3. Both of these documents are included in the new filing.

The subpoena demands that “Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump” hand over “any and all documents … bearing classification markings, including but not limited to the following.”

The subpoena goes on to specify the various classification markings used by the U.S. government.

When Trump received the subpoena in May, he had two options. Comply or challenge the subpoena. He chose to comply. One of Trump’s lawyers, whose name has been redacted in the new filings, certified in June that “any and all responsive documents” had been handed over and that none were withheld.

It now appears that the statement was untrue, as many documents marked classified were still at Mar-a-Lago.

It bears repeating that the DOJ didn’t ask for classified documents but rather for documents that bear classification markings. Thus, the actual status of the documents is moot.

The certification by Trump’s attorney appears problematic in other regards as well. While the subpoena addresses documents held by Trump and his office, the certification only mentions Trump’s office. The certification also appears to attempt to narrow the scope of what should be handed over by using word games, for instance by referring to documents in “boxes” as opposed to documents generally. The problem for Trump’s attorneys is that all efforts at trying to create wiggle room are nullified by the statement that all “responsive documents” had been handed over.

A far bigger problem is that the use of lawyerese or word games—for instance, leaving out Trump himself and only referring to his office—could have immediately raised red flags at DOJ, practically begging for the matter to be investigated further.

There was no benefit from playing word games. It only invited further scrutiny. If Trump wasn’t willing or able to hand over all documents, his legal team should have challenged the subpoena.

Instead, they attested that all documents marked classified had been returned, when that appears not to have been the case. Notwithstanding that the DOJ photograph appears to show originals, some have argued that the documents retained were merely copies and that all original documents were returned. The problem with that argument is that Trump’s attorney also attested that no copies remained at Mar-a-Lago.

It may well turn out that the lawyer’s certification was the result of incompetence, a case of poor lawyering, and of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. But to a DOJ that has already shown that it’s determined to get Trump, these arguments won’t hold sway.

It’s likely that the DOJ will now target Trump’s attorney to find out the details behind the certification. Who authorized the lawyer to sign the certification? Who told the lawyer to say that everything had been handed over? Did anyone tell the attorney to lie?

The bottom line is that a lawyer for Trump might have walked into a perjury trap by attesting to something that wasn’t true. In the first instance, this is a problem for the lawyer. But it may become Trump’s problem if the lawyer implicates him, truthfully or not, as we have already seen happen in the case of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney.
Title: Re: Trump lawyer may have walked into a perjury trap
Post by: G M on September 06, 2022, 07:18:47 PM: If the law doesn't have moral authority, all they have is force.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2022, 07:06:47 PM
Trump Lawyer May Have Walked Into DOJ Perjury Trap, New Documents Suggest
Hans Mahncke
August 31, 2022

In a late-night filing on Aug. 30 in response to former President Donald Trump’s motion for an independent party to scrutinize documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, the Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a judge not to grant the motion.

Much attention has focused on a photograph attached to the DOJ’s filing. The photograph shows a number of documents marked “Top Secret” laid out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ’s accompanying filing claims that the items in the photograph were recovered from the “45 office,” which it defines as “the former President’s office space at the Premises.”

Trump and his legal team have insisted that he declassified the documents in his possession and, therefore, it doesn’t matter what the markings on the papers are. The DOJ appears to have been prepared for that argument.

While the photograph was likely included in the filing for its PR value—evidenced by the fact that it’s currently on the front page of every news outlet—the DOJ’s real focus appears to be elsewhere, specifically on a grand jury subpoena dated May 11 and a certification signed by a Trump lawyer on June 3. Both of these documents are included in the new filing.

The subpoena demands that “Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump” hand over “any and all documents … bearing classification markings, including but not limited to the following.”

The subpoena goes on to specify the various classification markings used by the U.S. government.

When Trump received the subpoena in May, he had two options. Comply or challenge the subpoena. He chose to comply. One of Trump’s lawyers, whose name has been redacted in the new filings, certified in June that “any and all responsive documents” had been handed over and that none were withheld.

It now appears that the statement was untrue, as many documents marked classified were still at Mar-a-Lago.

It bears repeating that the DOJ didn’t ask for classified documents but rather for documents that bear classification markings. Thus, the actual status of the documents is moot.

The certification by Trump’s attorney appears problematic in other regards as well. While the subpoena addresses documents held by Trump and his office, the certification only mentions Trump’s office. The certification also appears to attempt to narrow the scope of what should be handed over by using word games, for instance by referring to documents in “boxes” as opposed to documents generally. The problem for Trump’s attorneys is that all efforts at trying to create wiggle room are nullified by the statement that all “responsive documents” had been handed over.

A far bigger problem is that the use of lawyerese or word games—for instance, leaving out Trump himself and only referring to his office—could have immediately raised red flags at DOJ, practically begging for the matter to be investigated further.

There was no benefit from playing word games. It only invited further scrutiny. If Trump wasn’t willing or able to hand over all documents, his legal team should have challenged the subpoena.

Instead, they attested that all documents marked classified had been returned, when that appears not to have been the case. Notwithstanding that the DOJ photograph appears to show originals, some have argued that the documents retained were merely copies and that all original documents were returned. The problem with that argument is that Trump’s attorney also attested that no copies remained at Mar-a-Lago.

It may well turn out that the lawyer’s certification was the result of incompetence, a case of poor lawyering, and of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. But to a DOJ that has already shown that it’s determined to get Trump, these arguments won’t hold sway.

It’s likely that the DOJ will now target Trump’s attorney to find out the details behind the certification. Who authorized the lawyer to sign the certification? Who told the lawyer to say that everything had been handed over? Did anyone tell the attorney to lie?

The bottom line is that a lawyer for Trump might have walked into a perjury trap by attesting to something that wasn’t true. In the first instance, this is a problem for the lawyer. But it may become Trump’s problem if the lawyer implicates him, truthfully or not, as we have already seen happen in the case of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2022, 03:10:01 AM: So, the law applies only to Trump?

Agents give instances of FBI leaders’ lax security

Breaches rampant in no-phone zone

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

An FBI whistleblower has told the House Judiciary Committee that he witnessed the bureau’s deputy director violating security policies and putting classified information at risk.

The special agent told lawmakers that Paul Abbate, who oversees all FBI domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities, used his smartphone in an FBI sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, which is a violation of bureau security protocols.

Just bringing a phone into the SCIF is a security breach.

The senior agent accused Mr. Abbate of walking around in the SCIF while talking on the smartphone and sending text messages and emails.

Another FBI whistleblower said senior FBI officials routinely break the no-cellphone rule in SCIFs.

The Washington Times viewed a letter the whistleblowers’ attorney sent to Judiciary Committee Republicans that described the accusations against Mr. Abbate. It is part of a flood of FBI whistleblower complaints about politicized investigations and misconduct at the bureau. This time, the subject of the complaint is in the top tier of FBI leadership.

The FBI bristled when asked about the whistleblowers’ accusations. “This reporting is categorically false,” the FBI said in a statement to The Times.

The whistleblowers’ attorney, Kurt Siuzdak, who is also a former FBI

Exclusive

agent, said he sent the disclosures to the FBI’s office of general counsel but was rebuffed.

“The technical and operational secrets in the United States lie within SCIFS. They are the place where the most important information regarding the security of the US is. And the fact that this number of executives would just violate the requirements is outrageous,” Mr. Siuzdak said.

The FBI’s office of general counsel said in a series of email exchanges with Mr. Siuzdak that the whistleblower complaints were not submitted properly.

The disclosure of SCIF security breaches was presented to Congress just weeks after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida to investigate suspected mishandling of classified material.

The search warrant said the agents were investigating a reported violation of the Espionage Act. This World War I-era law covers crimes beyond spying, including the refusal to return national security documents upon request or mishandling or destroying classified government documents.

“I appreciate that people are heeding my call and coming forward to restore integrity to their agencies — in this case, the FBI. We encourage more to come forward. The only way to restore credibility to these agencies is if we expose the corruption and hold people accountable,” Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican and member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees, told The Times.

“It’s always dangerous when leaders believe rules don’t apply to them but then enforce those rules against everyone else. It is particularly dangerous when federal law enforcement believes it is above the law and then proceeds to apply the law unequally in a highly partisan fashion. This has created the multi-tier system of justice that is unacceptable in America. It must be exposed and stopped.”

Mr. Abbate is not the first highranking FBI official accused of using a cellphone inside a SCIF. In 2018, The Daily Caller reported that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who ran the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server, texted his thenlover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, from inside a SCIF.

The reckless practice is widespread, another senior FBI agent told members of Congress in a separate whistleblower complaint.

The second agent said executivelevel FBI officials have been bringing cellphones into the SCIFs at field offi ces across the country and at a facility in McLean, Virginia, known as LX1, an X-shaped building that houses the National Counterterrorism Center and the National Counterproliferation Center.

Although all FBI personnel are prohibited from bringing electronic devices into SCIFs, FBI senior executives wore cellphones in the SCIFs in front of their subordinates, the second whistleblower said.

According to the agent, some executives would walk in and out of the SCIFs numerous times wearing cellphones on their belts. Although some would leave the SCIF to answer their phones, others would not, the agent said.

Some executives wore multiple cellphone belt holders, indicating they were also wearing their cellphones in the SCIFs, according to the agent.

The agent said that FBI executives who prepare daily briefings for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray or participate in FBI headquarters daily briefings have brought classified materials to their residences without properly packaging them for transport or storage in their homes.

The second anonymous FBI agent said that although the bureau is investigating people not currently employed by the FBI for mishandling of classified materials, he cannot recall an FBI Senior Executive Service official who was ever reprimanded for these violations unless they involved incidents in which the classified material was found in public
Title: AMcC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2022, 07:01:49 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/the-doj-sends-ominous-sign-for-trump/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-09-09&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: AMcC reminds Dems of their history
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2022, 11:26:40 AM: A New Salvo against the Trump Justice Department

Then-President Donald Trump speaks during the coronavirus response daily briefing at the White House, April 10, 2020.(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
September 10, 2022 6:30 AM

The Russiagate ‘collusion’ context seems conveniently absent.

The New York Times had a big article Thursday on the release of a memoir by Geoffrey Berman about his tenure leading the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. The book, called Holding the Line, was released this week. (I was an SDNY prosecutor for many years and overlapped with Berman when he was a prosecutor in the early Nineties. I don’t know him well.)

The memoir is the latest salvo against the Trump Justice Department, an odd crusade in light of that department’s (a) controversial appointment of a special counsel to investigate the then president, and (b) key role in dispelling Trump’s “stolen election” balderdash.

Berman was never a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney. He was nominated after volunteering to work on the 2016 Trump campaign, and appointed on an acting basis by Trump’s then attorney general, Jeff Sessions. In 2018, when the position had gone for many months without a confirmed U.S. attorney, the SDNY judges appointed Berman under a statute that enables the court to fill a vacancy pending Senate confirmation of a presidential nominee. Berman was in the news in June 2020 because Trump fired him, at the behest of then attorney general Bill Barr, when Berman rebuffed Barr’s request that he resign and take a different high-level Justice Department post so the administration could try to install a different nominee. (Barr instead ended up installing Audrey Strauss, Berman’s deputy at the time, as the acting U.S. attorney.)

The most explosive allegation in Berman’s book appears to be that Trump wanted former Obama secretary of state John Kerry to be prosecuted over his discussions with Iranian officials. These talks were seen, with abundant reason, as undermining Trump’s foreign policy of abandoning President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and implementing sanctions pressure.

Berman relates that he was pressured by the Trump Justice Department in 2018 to pursue that investigation. The impetus was the theory that Kerry had violated the Logan Act. Berman appears to have believed, rightly, that such a prosecution would have been absurd. He also says he does not know what prompted Trump’s Justice Department to pursue a Kerry investigation — it appears to him simply to have been a matter of “the conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice.”

Absent from this account is some salient context. One needn’t delve too deep to become skeptical about Berman’s reported mystification.

A little over a year earlier, Trump had been induced to fire his first national-security adviser, retired Army general Michael Flynn. In late 2016, while Flynn was a Trump transition official, and after it was clear that he was to be Trump’s top White House adviser on national-security matters, he famously engaged in discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Though that made Flynn just one of countless political figures to rub elbows with the Kremlin’s envoy, a glib man-about-town, this was the era of Democrat-fabricated Trump–Russia “collusion” hysteria. In the spirit of the times, the Obama administration, its Justice Department, and the FBI conducted an investigation of Flynn. The essential basis for suspecting Flynn of criminal wrongdoing was . . . yes . . . the Logan Act.

As I recounted in Ball of Collusion (in an excerpt we published here):

On January 12, 2017, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius published a leak from an unidentified “senior U.S. government official,” describing Flynn’s communications with Kislyak after Obama announced the anti-Russia sanctions. Naturally, the classified leak was not the crime that interested the journalist. Ignatius instead focused on an imaginary crime — one that just happens to have been under consideration at that very time in the top tier of the Obama Justice Department: Flynn’s flouting of the Logan Act.

Deputy Attorney General [Sally] Yates was theorizing that it might be possible to prosecute Flynn under this vestige of the John Adams administration (1797–1801), a dark time for free-speech rights. The statute purports to criminalize “any correspondence or intercourse” with agents of a foreign sovereign conducted “without authority of the United States” — an impossibly vague phrase that probably means permission from the executive branch. No court has had an opportunity to rule that the Logan Act is unconstitutional because, realizing its infirmity, the Justice Department never invokes it. In its 219-year history, the Logan Act has not resulted in a single conviction; indeed, there have been only two indictments, the last one in 1852.

Yet, the Logan Act appears to have been what the Justice Department had in mind. In later Senate testimony, Yates recounted that, in the first days of the new administration, she and Mary McCord (then-chief of Justice’s National Security Division) brought their ongoing concerns about Flynn to the attention of Don McGahn, then the White House counsel. According to Yates, “the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn engaged in was problematic in and of itself.” The “underlying conduct,” of course, was Flynn’s communication with Kislyak — his temerity to engage in talks with foreign officials without approval from the Obama administration.

The Wall Street Journal later scathingly recounted Yates’s bout of amnesia when she was asked, in Senate testimony, whether then vice president Joe Biden had raised the Logan Act during a January 5, 2017, Oval Office discussion about Flynn between Obama and some top administration security officials. Though Yates said she could not remember, the Journal’s editorial board provided a refresher:

The Logan Act was the main premise that Justice Department officials and the FBI cited for going after Gen. Flynn for his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Notes taken by the FBI head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, ask if the goal of the bureau’s interview with Mr. Flynn was to “get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act.” Notes about the Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting taken by FBI agent Peter Strzok have Mr. Biden bringing up the Logan Act. And the leak to the Washington Post that ginned up all the hysteria against Gen. Flynn tied his calls to Russia’s ambassador to the Logan Act.

Ms. Yates is rewriting history. While she testified that the Flynn investigation was all about counterintelligence, her argument that Gen. Flynn had “neutered” the sanctions President Obama had imposed on Russia is also an implicit Logan Act argument.

We’re delighted everyone now agrees that prosecuting Mr. Flynn under this statute would have been ridiculous. In many ways the Logan Act has become the new Steele dossier, something that was taken very seriously by the FBI and Justice and the press—but is now so discredited that everyone wants to run away from it. Including Sally Yates and Joe Biden.

I could not agree more with what I take to be Berman’s contention that the Justice Department should never use the Logan Act as a pretext for weaponizing law enforcement against an administration’s political opponents. But the suggestions that Trump invented this ploy, or that it’s hard to imagine how Trump could possibly have come up with the idea of applying the Logan Act to Kerry, is a bit rich, no?

Berman also recounts what he took to be Trump Justice Department pressure to prosecute Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel, on crimes related to the Foreign Agent Registration Act. FARA prosecutions are only slightly less rare than the Logan Act prosecutions: just seven (and only three successful) in the half century prior to the Trump administration. But then — what a surprise! — everything changed, as FARA became the backbone of the Mueller investigation’s unsuccessful attempt to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy.

After being convicted in a separate trial, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort agreed to Special Counsel Mueller’s offer to settle the rest of the case by pleading guilty to, among other things, a conspiracy to violate FARA — in connection with Ukraine, not Russia. Meanwhile, Elliott Broidy, a Trump and GOP fundraiser, pled guilty to conspiring to violate FARA on behalf of Malaysia and China (but was eventually pardoned by Trump).

In light of Berman’s suggestion that the FARA prosecution of Craig seems to have been a political hit job from out of the blue, we should recall that Mueller induced a false-statements guilty plea from Alex van der Zwaan, formerly a junior lawyer at Craig’s firm, Skadden Arps. The plea arose out of work for Ukraine that van der Zwaan did in collaboration with the firm, Manafort, Manafort’s partner Rick Gates, and . . . yes . . . Greg Craig.

In a nutshell, Craig and a Skadden team prepared a report for the purpose of defending former Ukrainian president (and Manafort political-consultancy client) Viktor Yanukovych from allegations that he persecuted a political rival. In 2019, Skadden entered an agreement with the Justice Department that required it to disgorge the $4.6 million in fees it earned on the Ukraine project. The firm admitted that (a) it should have registered as an agent of Ukraine under FARA, and (b) Craig, a firm partner, had “made false and misleading oral and written statements” six years earlier (in 2013) that caused the Justice Department’s FARA unit to conclude the firm need not register. Meantime, Craig was indicted, not for failing to register under FARA but for providing false statements to the Justice Department’s FARA unit. While the statements were sufficiently lawyerly that jurors probably would have had a tough time convicting Craig in any event, his quick acquittal may be explained by the technical nicety that the prosecution faced significant statute-of-limitations hurdles (for most federal crimes, the statute of limitations is five years; Craig was indicted in 2018 for conduct that occurred from 2012 to 2013).

Berman may be right that the Craig prosecution was a mistake, but it was a closer call than he suggests. More to the point, the lesson of the episode is that the Mueller team’s zeal to nail Trump on something — anything — took the Justice Department to the extreme of pouring immense prosecutorial resources and invoking rarely used laws to scrutinize a transaction that had utterly nothing to do with Russia . . . or Trump.

The Times report features a provocative story drawn from Berman’s book, one that close reading finds inconclusive — and one that is odd if one happens to know the players involved. Berman writes that in September 2018, his deputy Rob Khuzami reported that he’d gotten a call from Ed O’Callaghan, then a top official at Main Justice. (Khuzami is my longtime friend and former trial partner; I’ve always thought highly of O’Callaghan, with whom I overlapped in the SDNY in the late Nineties.) According to the Times’ account, Berman’s book says O’Callaghan asked that the SDNY “‘even things out’ by charging Mr. Craig before Election Day” — translation: indict a prominent Democrat to settle the score for all the Trump-related prosecutions.

O’Callaghan is a very smart guy, so I have a hard time imagining him saying something so stupid and so at odds with what I take to be his conception of proper law enforcement. Reached for comment, he told the Times it was “categorically false” that he’d made such statements. Perusing the report, I note that the Times does not claim that Khuzami quoted O’Callaghan as making such a statement — just that “the book” portrays O’Callaghan as having done so. There is, however, no suggestion that Berman heard O’Callaghan say such a thing.

I have no idea what happened, but it is easy to surmise that someone who held Trump and his Justice Department in low esteem, and who was thus inspired to put the worst spin on things, deduced that Trump officials politicized the investigation of Craig — eager to show that a notable Democrat was somehow spared from being put through the Mueller wringer, despite being implicated in the same Ukraine misadventure over which Mueller nailed Manafort, Gates, and van der Zwaan.

To sum up, no, Craig and Kerry should not have been hounded. Let’s not forget, though, that when it came to rationalizing bogus claims of Trump collusion with Russia, the nation’s top prosecutors didn’t seem too terribly upset about abusive Justice Department resort to FARA and the Logan Act.
Title: Dershowitz on Executive Privilege
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 10:54:07 AM: Is This the End of Executive Privilege? Or Only for Trump?
by Alan M. Dershowitz
September 14, 2022 at 5:00 am

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[L]et's see how this would have played out if the shoe were on the other foot.

What if Obama had been called by a congressional committee to turn over all internal communications — written and oral — regarding his decision, and he claimed executive privilege? And what if then President Trump were to have waived Obama's privilege?

One thing we know to be certain: many of the academic "experts" and media "pundits" who now support the argument that an incumbent president can waive the executive privilege of his predecessor would be making exactly the opposite argument. They would be saying — as I am saying now— that presidents would be reluctant to have confidential communications with their aides if they knew these communications could be made public by their successor in order to gain partisan electoral advantage. It would essentially mark the end of executive privilege, which is rooted in Article II of the Constitution.

Accurate predictions today require us to know which persons or parties will be helped or hurt by particular outcomes. Hypocrisy reigns. And those who engage in it are not even embarrassed when their double standards are exposed. The current "principle" is that the ends justify the means, especially if the end is the end of Trump.

"Because we can" has become the current mantra of both parties. Neutral principles, which apply equally without regard to partisan advantage, is for wimps, not party leaders or other government officials. "They do it too" has become the excuse de jure. Both parties do it, but that is not a valid excuse even in hardball politics. Two constitutional violations do not cancel each other. They only make things worse.

Executive privilege is important to both parties -- and to the constitutional rule of law. Today's partisan victory for Democrats, if their waiver argument is accepted, will soon become their loss should Republicans take control.

So beware of what you wish for. Today's dream may well become tomorrow's nightmare.
Title: Re: Dershowitz on Executive Privilege
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 10:56:30 AM: The dems do not plan on ever losing power.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 10:54:07 AM
Is This the End of Executive Privilege? Or Only for Trump?
by Alan M. Dershowitz
September 14, 2022 at 5:00 am

Send
Print
[L]et's see how this would have played out if the shoe were on the other foot.

What if Obama had been called by a congressional committee to turn over all internal communications — written and oral — regarding his decision, and he claimed executive privilege? And what if then President Trump were to have waived Obama's privilege?

One thing we know to be certain: many of the academic "experts" and media "pundits" who now support the argument that an incumbent president can waive the executive privilege of his predecessor would be making exactly the opposite argument. They would be saying — as I am saying now— that presidents would be reluctant to have confidential communications with their aides if they knew these communications could be made public by their successor in order to gain partisan electoral advantage. It would essentially mark the end of executive privilege, which is rooted in Article II of the Constitution.

Accurate predictions today require us to know which persons or parties will be helped or hurt by particular outcomes. Hypocrisy reigns. And those who engage in it are not even embarrassed when their double standards are exposed. The current "principle" is that the ends justify the means, especially if the end is the end of Trump.

"Because we can" has become the current mantra of both parties. Neutral principles, which apply equally without regard to partisan advantage, is for wimps, not party leaders or other government officials. "They do it too" has become the excuse de jure. Both parties do it, but that is not a valid excuse even in hardball politics. Two constitutional violations do not cancel each other. They only make things worse.

Executive privilege is important to both parties -- and to the constitutional rule of law. Today's partisan victory for Democrats, if their waiver argument is accepted, will soon become their loss should Republicans take control.

So beware of what you wish for. Today's dream may well become tomorrow's nightmare.
Title: Durham was always part of the cover-up
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 10:59:13 AM: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/09/13/the-machiavellian-intent-of-john-durham-surfaces-inside-his-court-filing-outlining-the-fbi-hiring-of-igor-danchenko-as-confidential-informant/
Title: NRO: Russian source for Steele dossier on FBI payroll for three years
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 05:36:35 PM: By BRITTANY BERNSTEIN
September 14, 2022 8:10 AM
Igor Danchenko, a primary contributor to the Steele dossier, was hired by the FBI as a confidential informant in 2017, Special Counsel John Durham revealed in a new court filing.

The Russian national was ultimately charged in 2021 as part of Durham’s probe of the Trump-Russia investigation; he is accused of lying to the FBI regarding his sources for some claims in the Steele dossier. The charges focus on statements Danchenko made related to the sources he used in providing information to an investigative firm in the United Kingdom.

The new filing reveals the FBI hired Danchenko as a confidential informant in March 2017 after having interviewed him about his work on the dossier months earlier. Danchenko is accused of having made false statements regarding the sources of some information that he provided to a U.K. investigative firm in 2017 that was later passed to the FBI.

Long before Danchenko’s involvement in the Steele dossier, he was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in 2009 as an analyst at the Brookings Institute after one of his colleagues alleged that Danchenko asked if he would be willing to sell him classified information. In 2011, the FBI closed the probe after Danchenko left the U.S.

It is not clear whether Danchenko worked as an informant to provide information about the dossier or as part of the investigation into the Trump campaign, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

The allegation that Trump colluded with Russia and “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” stemmed from the dossier by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. After the 2016 election, the dossier was found to have included a number of unverified or erroneous claims and Steele was accused of peddling the Russian election interference hoax to undermine Trump’s campaign with his dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign through its law firm Perkins Coie.

During an interview with the FBI, Danchenko suggested that even he was skeptical of some of the contents included in the dossier.

“Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt,” Danchenko said. “Who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”

However, the FBI reportedly did not share Danchenko’s concerns with the Justice Department. The DOJ inspector general found in 2019 that the FBI had relied on information from the dossier despite Danchenko casting doubt on its contents.

The FBI ended its relationship with Danchenko in October 2020.
Title: Re: NRO: Russian source for Steele dossier on FBI payroll for three years
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 05:59:51 PM: The FBI knew he was lying before they started paying him.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 05:36:35 PM
By BRITTANY BERNSTEIN
September 14, 2022 8:10 AM
Igor Danchenko, a primary contributor to the Steele dossier, was hired by the FBI as a confidential informant in 2017, Special Counsel John Durham revealed in a new court filing.

The Russian national was ultimately charged in 2021 as part of Durham’s probe of the Trump-Russia investigation; he is accused of lying to the FBI regarding his sources for some claims in the Steele dossier. The charges focus on statements Danchenko made related to the sources he used in providing information to an investigative firm in the United Kingdom.

The new filing reveals the FBI hired Danchenko as a confidential informant in March 2017 after having interviewed him about his work on the dossier months earlier. Danchenko is accused of having made false statements regarding the sources of some information that he provided to a U.K. investigative firm in 2017 that was later passed to the FBI.

Long before Danchenko’s involvement in the Steele dossier, he was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in 2009 as an analyst at the Brookings Institute after one of his colleagues alleged that Danchenko asked if he would be willing to sell him classified information. In 2011, the FBI closed the probe after Danchenko left the U.S.

It is not clear whether Danchenko worked as an informant to provide information about the dossier or as part of the investigation into the Trump campaign, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

The allegation that Trump colluded with Russia and “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” stemmed from the dossier by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. After the 2016 election, the dossier was found to have included a number of unverified or erroneous claims and Steele was accused of peddling the Russian election interference hoax to undermine Trump’s campaign with his dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign through its law firm Perkins Coie.

During an interview with the FBI, Danchenko suggested that even he was skeptical of some of the contents included in the dossier.

“Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt,” Danchenko said. “Who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”

However, the FBI reportedly did not share Danchenko’s concerns with the Justice Department. The DOJ inspector general found in 2019 that the FBI had relied on information from the dossier despite Danchenko casting doubt on its contents.

The FBI ended its relationship with Danchenko in October 2020.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 06:12:27 PM: If I have this right, the FBI knowingly paid a Russian agent for three years to get Russian lies to use against the American president.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 06:18:36 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 06:12:27 PM
If I have this right, the FBI knowingly paid a Russian agent for three years to get Russian lies to use against the American president.

Yes.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 07:43:41 PM: Quote from: G M on September 14, 2022, 06:18:36 PM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 06:12:27 PM
If I have this right, the FBI knowingly paid a Russian agent for three years to get Russian lies to use against the American president.

Yes.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442944-fbis-steele-story-falls-apart-false-intel-and-media-contacts-were-flagged/

Notes and testimony from senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr make clear Steele admitted early on that he was “desperate” to get Trump defeated in the election, was working in some capacity for the GOP candidate’s opponent, and considered his intelligence raw and untested. Ohr testified that he alerted FBI and other senior Justice officials to these concerns in August 2016.

Steele eventually was fired by the FBI for leaking to the press — in violation of his source agreement with the bureau — and lying about it. But that did not happen until Nov. 1, 2016 — after the FISA warrant was secured. And, even then, the court wasn’t notified until a few months later, well after Election Day.

Steele’s admission of media contacts on Oct. 11, 2016, and the mere existence of his meeting at the State Department likewise violated his confidentiality agreement with the bureau and clearly were discoverable well before the FISA warrant was secured Oct. 21, 2016.

If the State Department and Ohr could figure out that Steele was a partisan, paid by a political client and facing an Election Day deadline to broadcast raw intelligence that in some cases probably was false, the FBI should have done the same before it ever envisioned taking his evidence to a FISA court.

Igor Danchenko, a primary contributor to the Steele dossier, was hired by the FBI as a confidential informant in 2017, Special Counsel John Durham revealed in a new court filing.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/who-is-igor-danchenko-steele-dossier-source-john-durham

The FBI knew Steele was full of shiite and knew Danchenko was his primary source. They made Danchenko a CI to hide him. "We cannot reveal sources and methods".

Utterly corrupt.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on September 15, 2022, 05:04:56 AM: "Utterly corrupt."

Great post. We usually think of corrupt motive as enriching yourself or your family, friends with money, but in this case the motive is for the powerful deep state to undermine the Democratic system and take over the country.

I can't think of a criminal charge for that short if treason punishable by life in prison, or I would hope, fair trial followed by plenty of appeals and then lethal injection, if we care about the future of the republic.

Yes, the agency that organized this should be dismantled.

Never again.
Title: "Sources and methods"
Post by: G M on September 15, 2022, 08:00:17 AM: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/09/14/doj-nsd-frantic-that-special-master-might-review-ic-defined-classified-documents-even-if-trump-declassified-because-sources-and-methods/
Title: Ta da! Prez Trump's declassification order.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2022, 02:29:44 PM: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/
Title: POTP: Oathkeeper prosecution
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2022, 02:06:51 PM: Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers. (Susan Walsh/AP)
By Rachel Weiner, Tom Jackman and Spencer S. Hsu
Updated October 3, 2022 at 4:34 p.m. EDT|Published October 3, 2022 at 10:17 a.m. EDT

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Opening statements are underway in the trial of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and other members of the extremist group who face seditious conspiracy and other charges in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Rhodes and four co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — have pleaded not guilty to felony charges alleging that they conspired for weeks after the 2020 presidential election to unleash political violence to oppose the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden.

The defendants came from Texas, Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and allegedly led a group that traveled to Washington and staged firearms nearby before forcing entry through the Capitol Rotunda doors in combat and tactical gear.

In his opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler highlighted violent rhetoric in Oath Keepers’ text messages, video and recorded conversations from before, during and after the Capitol riot to present the group as bent on keeping President Donald Trump in office “by whatever means necessary.” He described Rhodes as a “general overlooking the battlefield,” who oversaw those who broke into the building and encouraged them afterward to keep up an armed rebellion against Biden.

Rhodes and his co-defendants have said their actions were defensive, taken in anticipation of what they believed would be a lawful order from Trump deputizing armed groups under the Insurrection Act.

Rhodes’s attorney Phillip Linder said in court Monday that the evidence would show the “Quick Reaction Forces” of armed Oath Keepers stationed at hotels outside D.C. on Jan. 6 were “not offensive” and for use only “if Trump called them in.”

More coverage:

Oath Keepers sedition trial could reveal new info about Jan. 6 plotting
FAQ: What you need to know about the Oath Keepers trial
Who are the Oath Keepers going to trial on seditious conspiracy charges?
28 minutes ago

These 7 Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to Jan. 6 conspiracy charges
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By Spencer Hsu
Members of the Oath Keepers on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Members of the Oath Keepers on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Three Oath Keepers members have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, and four others to conspiring to obstruct Congress’s confirmation of the presidential vote on Jan. 6, 2021.

Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Ala., and Brian Ullrich, 44, of Guyton, Ga., were charged with seditious conspiracy with Stewart Rhodes. William Todd Wilson, 45, of Newton Grove, N.C., was charged separately. All are cooperating with U.S. prosecutors.

In plea papers, James said that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes “instructed [him] and others to be prepared and called upon to … use lethal force if necessary” to keep Trump in office. After Jan. 6, James said he spent several weeks with Rhodes in Texas, where he said they gathered weapons, burner phones and tactical gear, then returned to Alabama where he “awaited Rhodes’s instructions,” according to his plea.

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1 hour ago

FBI agent investigating Oath Keepers guarded crying senators on Jan. 6
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By Rachel Weiner
On Jan. 6, 2021, FBI special agent Michael Palian was working from home on a health-care fraud squad, he testified as the first witness at the trial of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four others.

Palian was called to the Capitol at 3:30 p.m. that day and was eventually asked to go to the undisclosed location nearby where U.S. senators had relocated.

“It was chaotic,” he said. The senators were in “shock,” he said, and some were crying. At 7:30 p.m., he and about 70 other FBI agents walked the senators back to the Capitol building and into the Senate chamber.

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1 hour ago

Two defendants defer opening statements; testimony to start
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By Tom Jackman
A demonstrator wears an Oath Keepers anti-government organization badge on a protective vest during a protest outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, 2021.
A demonstrator wears an Oath Keepers anti-government organization badge on a protective vest during a protest outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)
After attorneys for Stewart Rhodes, Thomas Caldwell and Jessica Watkins made their opening statements Monday, attorneys for two defendants — Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson — chose to defer their case introductions to the jury. So prosecutors are now readying their first witness of the trial.

Defense lawyers have the option of giving their opening statement after the prosecution has rested its case or at the outset of the defense case. Defense lawyers are of varying opinions on whether to lay out the defense before the prosecutors start or after they’ve finished. Some believe it is best to get the defense side in before evidence is presented. Some believe it’s better to respond to that evidence after the jury has heard it.

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1 hour ago

Ohio bar owner was a ‘protest junkie’ just ‘there to help,’ lawyer says
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By Tom Jackman
Jessica Marie Watkins (second from left) on the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Jessica Marie Watkins (second from left) on the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)
The lawyer for Jessica Watkins, the Ohio bar owner who is accused of leading one of the assaults on the Capitol on Jan. 6, said she became involved with the Oath Keepers out of her compulsion to protect people and had no role in planning for any attack on the Capitol.

Watkins had served in the Army but was discharged early, then served as a firefighter, her attorney Jonathan Crisp said. She started the Ohio State Regular Militia, Crisp said, because “she was a protest junkie. She wanted to go to protests and help law enforcement. She was a medic, she was there to help. She followed protest to protest to protest, that was her thing.”

Watkins joined the Oath Keepers in 2019 and first assisted them in their security actions during the protests in Louisville following the police killing of Breonna Taylor, Crisp said. “You will learn her desire to serve and protect ultimately is what took her to D.C. this day,” Crisp said. “What you will also learn is that Jessica is a transgender woman, and that has impacted who she is and the Oath Keepers around her. A lot of things she did that day was because she tried to fit in.”

Crisp said that he was not arguing that Watkins entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, as part of a stack of Oath Keepers members, was appropriate, and that she said things that would be offensive to some. But he also noted that some of Watkins’s actions, involving recruiting and training members, occurred well before President Donald Trump announced in December that there would be a rally in D.C. on Jan. 6, and so couldn’t have been preparing specifically for the attack on the Capital. Crisp said Watkins did not meet or speak with Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, until the day of the Jan. 6 riot.

Prosecutors have said that Watkins helped lead a stack of Oath Keepers up the east side of the Capitol, and helped break open the doors on that side of the building, then encouraged rioters trying to overwhelm police. Crisp claimed that happened after the doors had already been breached.

1 hour ago

Who is Stewart Rhodes, what has he said about Jan. 6 and why does he wear an eye patch?
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By Spencer Hsu and Hannah Allam
Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers. (Aaron Davis/The Washington Post)
Would-be paramilitary commander or couch-surfing grifter? Stewart Rhodes has been described as both and more as he has risen to become one of the most visible leaders of the right-wing “Patriot/militia” movement.

A former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate, Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 with the what he said was the mission of preventing a “full-blown totalitarian dictatorship,” and drawn recruits from the military and law enforcement. In practice, analysts say, it is a collection of local chapters with a similar, disinformation-fueled ideology about what they view as the inevitable collapse of the U.S. government into tyranny.

Rhodes in interviews with The Washington Post after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, initially denied staging any armed “Quick Reaction Force” teams around Washington, described those who entered the building as having “gone stupid” and “totally off mission,” and said of his communication with members, “I wanted to make sure my guys didn’t get into trouble.”

But his talk before and after the 2020 election was apocalyptic, predicting “open warfare with Marxist insurrectionists by Election Day,” declaring that “civil war is here, right now,” and calling on members to prepare for doomsday scenarios by stocking up on arms, supplies and going to ground for a long battle with authorities.

Rhodes wears an eye patch due to an accident with a firearm. His wife and other associates have previously told The Washington Post that he shot himself while cleaning his gun.

Read what Rhodes and other defendants have said since the 2020 election:

Calls, texts by Oath Keepers founder contain ‘substantial evidence’ of Capitol conspiracy, prosecutors allege
Oath Keepers founder, associates exchanged 19 calls from start of Jan. 6 riot through breach, prosecutors allege
DOJ seeks to build large conspiracy case against Oath Keepers for Jan. 6 riot
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on October 03, 2022, 03:08:05 PM: VDH writes :

"The once American, isolationist, and antiwar Left is now mimicking the old, interventionist, neocon Right. After the failure of the Russian collusion hoax and the various impeachments, it wishes to construct the war as proof that it was right all along about demonic Vladimir Putin—as if anyone ever doubted that he was a dangerous adversary who should never have been appeased by the embarrassing “resets” of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama—and Joe Biden."

and lets not forget to add this Obama speak that was 100% dead wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1409sXBleg

of. course this is bleached bitted out of our memories by the MSM
Title: NRO: MAL
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2022, 03:54:30 PM: By CAROLINE DOWNEY
About Caroline Downey
Follow Caroline Downey On Twitter
October 4, 2022 5:14 PM
In a filing made by his lawyers on Tuesday, former president Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision to allow the Department of Justice to continue its review of classified records seized by the FBI at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August.

Last month, the Eleventh Circuit granted the Justice Department’s request to use the confidential documents in its ongoing criminal investigation into the former president, and instituted a stay on District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of a special master, a court-appointed third party adjudicator. Three judges including two Trump appointees and a Barack Obama appointee handed down the ruling. They ruled that the DOJ was no longer required to present the confiscated materials to special master Ray Dearie for his review.

In their filing, Trump’s legal team argued that contra the Eleventh Circuit, the special master should be permitted to survey the documents seized from the Florida property. The application was submitted to Justice Clarence Thomas for consideration, although he is expected to refer the petition to the full court.

“The Eleventh Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review, much less stay, an interlocutory order of the District Court providing for the Special Master to review materials seized from President Trump’s home, including approximately 103 documents the Government contends bear classification markings. This application seeks to vacate only that portion of the Eleventh Circuit’s Stay Order limiting the scope of the Special Master’s review of the documents bearing classification markings,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

Trump’s legal team wants the documents that were originally exempted from the special master review for the DOJ’s investigation to be brought back in for Dearie to examine. “Any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of materials seized in the extraordinary raid of a President’s home erodes public confidence in our system of justice,” they said in the filing.

The case was sent to the Eleventh Circuit after the DOJ appealed the ruling of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — which first temporarily blocked the government from accessing the documents — arguing that the move jeopardized an ongoing national security risk assessment being conducted by the intelligence community.
Title: Remember when Trump gave UK nuclear secrets to Russia?
Post by: G M on October 06, 2022, 07:01:37 AM: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-administration-trade-british-nuclear-secrets-with-russia

Trump? Sorry, I meant Obama.

The DOJ/FBI did what?
Title: Obama certainly is a menace
Post by: ccp on October 06, 2022, 07:42:40 AM: "The reports that the Obama administration has told the Russians certain British nuclear secrets in order to secure a New START promotes him from being a mere irritant for the Special Relationship to a downright menace"

WOW
I didn't recall this at all.

also amazing this article is published in the LEFT wing 'Daily Beast'!

he led to the rise of ISIS - the JV team
he helped Iran fund nuclear research and build the impenetrable underground bunkers
he said Cold War is "over"
he made racism far worse in US
he did as little as he could to secure border
his economic policies slowed growth
I am hard pressed to think of anything good other then giving the green light to the Osama raid
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2022, 07:44:24 AM: Nice haul up from the Memory Hole!
Title: Re: Remember when Trump gave UK nuclear secrets to Russia?
Post by: G M on October 06, 2022, 07:47:51 AM: Quote from: G M on October 06, 2022, 07:01:37 AM
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-administration-trade-british-nuclear-secrets-with-russia

Trump? Sorry, I meant Obama.

The DOJ/FBI did what?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mgQaFlo_p8

Collusion!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on October 06, 2022, 07:55:55 AM: this I remember

love how Brock reaches out and grabs Medvedev's hand

as the latter says "I understand"

probably thinking you dope

you think you can charm me ?

laughing but not "out loud
Title: Russian conspiracy, Durham, FBI Misled Congress
Post by: DougMacG on October 12, 2022, 07:14:01 AM: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/bombshell-revelation-1m-offer-steele-shows-fbi-misled
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on October 12, 2022, 07:35:17 AM: Kash Patel

is a virtual deep state slaying warrior :-D
Title: ET
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2022, 02:22:24 AM: Will James Comey and Robert Mueller Be Prosecuted for Lies John Durham Uncovered?
By Hans Mahncke October 16, 2022

News Analysis

While special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko appears to be headed toward acquittal, Durham has used the trial to make public a number of revelations that cast the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative in a fresh light.

Most prominently, Durham revealed that on Oct. 3, 2016, the FBI had offered dossier author Christopher Steele up to $1 million to provide any information, physical evidence, or documentary evidence that could back up the claims in his dossier. But despite the huge reward on offer, Steele did not provide any such information.

Crucially, despite Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, a mere 18 days later the FBI proceeded to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page. In its application to the FISA court, the FBI used the Steele dossier—specifically, its claim that Page was acting as an agent of Russia—as evidence.

Then, after Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community, which included the FBI, began drafting an intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference in the election. The ICA was issued in early January 2017, claiming that Russia had helped Trump win the election.

The assessment included a summary of the dossier, claiming that it had been partly corroborated. The inclusion of Steele’s dossier in an official U.S. intelligence community product gave the dossier the credibility it had lacked up until that point.

It also gave the media, which had held back from reporting on the dossier between July 2016 and January 2017, the excuse it needed to start doing so. For the next several years, the dossier and its lurid claims became the centerpiece of the media’s campaign against Trump. As Durham has now made public, the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA was based on a lie.

Danchenko on FBI’s Payroll
Another major revelation exposed by Durham in a pre-trial motion was that Danchenko had been on the FBI’s payroll between March 2017 and October 2020 as a confidential human source (CHS). By bestowing this coveted status on Danchenko, the FBI was able to conceal the existence of Danchenko from congressional and other investigators. This was crucial, as Danchenko had told FBI investigators in January 2017 that the dossier was based on rumors and gossip made in jest. The admission that the Steele dossier was nothing more than bar talk needed to be concealed if the FBI was to continue its investigation of Trump.

Appointing Danchenko as a CHS had another benefit for the FBI. As Danchenko’s handler, FBI agent Kevin Helson, confirmed in court last week, because he was an incoming CHS, Danchenko was directed to scrub his phone. Conveniently, that also meant scrubbing evidence of Danchenko’s alleged lies to the FBI, evidence that Durham now lacks.

Comey’s Lies
In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed congressional leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, on his investigation of the Trump campaign. As Comey’s briefing notes reveal, members of Congress were not told about Steele’s failure to back up his dossier, despite the huge reward on offer, nor were they told that Danchenko had disavowed the dossier.

Additionally, Comey told congressional leaders that the dossier was “derived primarily from a Russian-based Sub-Source” and that the “FBI has no control over the Russian-based Sub-Source.” The same wording was also used by the FBI in the Page FISA warrant application. And it was entirely false. Danchenko was not “Russian-based,” he was a former Brookings Institution analyst based in Virginia. And not only did the FBI have control over him, but he was working for them.

Comey’s lies successfully ratcheted up the pressure and in May 2017, acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Mueller’s Lies
Mueller has denied having investigated the Steele dossier. In congressional testimony on July 24, 2019, Mueller repeatedly stated that the dossier was outside his purview. However, evidence elicited by Durham last week from two counterintelligence agents, Brittany Hertzog and Amy Anderson, paints a very different picture.

Hertzog and Anderson were assigned to Mueller’s special counsel office in the summer of 2017. Hertzog testified last week that she was assigned the task of investigating the Steele dossier, a task that Mueller claimed was outside the purview of his investigation. According to Anderson’s testimony, Mueller’s dossier team comprised at least five agents.

As part of their assignment, Hertzog and Anderson investigated two of Danchenko’s alleged sub-sources, Olga Glakina, a Russian national living in Cyprus, and Charles Dolan, a public relations executive with decades-long ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Illustrating the depths to which Mueller’s team went to investigate the dossier, Anderson flew to Cyprus to personally interview Galkina.

According to Anderson’s testimony last week, Galkina admitted that Dolan was a source for the dossier. Given Dolan’s longstanding ties to the Clintons, this presented a huge problem for Mueller’s team. When Anderson additionally found out that Dolan was well connected in the higher echelons of the Russian government, she recommended that an investigation into Dolan be opened. However, according to her testimony, Mueller’s team blocked the investigation from going forward and destroyed her memo on the matter.

Mueller’s false statements do not end there. A central alleged figure to the dossier, Sergei Millian, now claims on Twitter that he was in touch with Mueller’s office from 2017 to 2019. Mueller’s report claims that Millian refused to meet with investigators. Millian claims that he offered to meet Mueller’s team in various locations, including in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Mueller’s team could easily have arranged such a meeting if it had wanted to, as illustrated by the fact it was willing and able to interview Galkina in Cyprus.

It appears that the reason Mueller did not want to talk to Millian—and later lied about this fact—is that Millian is central to the dossier. According to Steele, Millian was the originator of the dossier’s key allegations, including that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, the infamous pee tape story, and that Russia had helped Trump by passing hacked Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks.

However, there was a snag. Millian never spoke to Steele or Danchenko. Danchenko later admitted to the FBI that he had told Steele otherwise. This was not only a problem for Danchenko, but also for Mueller and the FBI. Without Millian, the dossier’s main allegations would have collapsed. That is why Mueller could not afford to talk to Millian.

While Durham’s revelations explain crucial aspects of the false witch hunt against Trump, they do not amount to much unless those responsible are held to account.

Durham himself has shown a marked disinterest in pursuing key government actors such as Comey or Mueller, focusing instead on private actors. A possible reason for this may be that Durham’s hands were tied by Biden’s Department of Justice. If that is the case, Durham’s final report, which will likely be issued in the next few months, should detail instances of such obstruction.

Whatever the reasons for Durham’s failure to pursue FBI leadership and Mueller’s team, he has now left a trail of evidence for others to pursue.

For instance, Mueller’s untrue statement that he did not investigate the Steele dossier is still within the statute of limitations until 2024 for charges to be brought. The concealment of Danchenko behind CHS status carried on until 2020, meaning that the statute of limitations on related charges does not expire until 2025. Durham may be nearing the end of his work, but there is plenty left for others to pick up.

==========================================

Agent says FBI ignored request to examine Democrat linked to dossier

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

An FBI agent who served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has revealed that her request to interrogate a Democratic operative involved in the anti-Trump dossier was scuttled by top officials at the bureau.

FBI agent Amy Anderson took the stand Friday in the trial of Russian analyst Igor Danchenko. Mr. Danchenko was charged with lying to the FBI about how he obtained information for former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier.

Ms. Anderson, who was part of Mr. Mueller’s team investigating purported Trump-Russia collusion, said she asked in 2017 to interview Democratic operative Charles Dolan about the dossier but FBI officials ignored and then deep-sixed her requests.

“I wanted to look into him,” Ms. Anderson testified in the federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia. “The job at the time was to verify if statements in the dossier were valid or not, so if the witness had knowledge of those statements, that would have been an important part of the job.”

Ms. Anderson was the second witness Friday to testify that an FBI supervisor stymied efforts to look into Mr. Dolan, a longtime Democratic operative with ties to Hillary Clinton.

It was the latest evidence of FBI failures to scrutinize claims of collusion when investigating Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and then his presidency. The trial, however, is focused on claims of Mr. Danchenko’s dishonesty in what is likely the last act of special counsel John Durham’s three-year investigation into the origins of the FBI’s hunt for Trump-Russia collusion.

Mr. Durham’s case sustained a setback Friday when the judge tossed out one of the five counts of lying to the

FBI. The dismissed count claimed Mr. Danchenko lied when he told FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson that he “talked” with Mr. Dolan in 2016 about information that ended up in the Steele dossier. Rather than talking directly, Mr. Danchenko and Mr. Helson exchanged emails. U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga said that nuance undermined the case.

Mr. Danchenko faces up to four years in prison on each of the remaining four counts.

Earlier Friday, Brittany Hertzog, a former FBI intelligence analyst who worked on Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, testified that she also pressed to interview Mr. Dolan and made that recommendation to the FBI’s headquarters and Washington field office.

“I believe it needed to be acted on,” Ms. Hertzog testified.

Despite pressure from Ms. Anderson and Ms. Hertzog to open an investigation into Mr. Dolan, nothing happened, they said. They blamed the FBI’s chain of command, but they did not provide further details.

Ms. Anderson said her request to take “investigative steps” against Mr. Dolan sat in the FBI system for three to four weeks before she deleted it. She said she erased the request because it couldn’t remain in the FBI’s computer system if no one was going to take action on it.

Investigative steps would include subpoenaing Mr. Dolan for testimony and executing a search warrant for his phone and email records.

Ms. Anderson and Ms. Hertzog said they don’t know why investigators ignored their requests.

On Thursday, Mr. Dolan testified that he lied to Mr. Danchenko in 2016 when he claimed to have information from a Republican insider about why Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort resigned from the campaign. That information, pulled from a cable news talking head, made its way into Mr. Steele’s compilation of unverified and salacious claims against Mr. Trump.

The accusations surrounding Mr. Manafort’s departure from the Trump campaign appear in the Steele dossier and are attributed to “an American political figure associated with Donald Trump.”

That information came from Mr. Dolan, who said he learned it by having drinks with “a GOP friend who knows the players.” Under oath, Mr. Dolan testified that he never spoke with a Republican source and acknowledged that the information came from an analyst on a cable news talk show.

Ms. Anderson said they started suspecting that Mr. Dolan contributed the Manafort information after traveling to Cyprus and interviewing Olga Galkina, a childhood friend of Mr. Danchenko’s.

“She was slightly hesitant. She asked me to remove my sunglasses so she could look me directly in the eye and confirmed it was Mr. Dolan,” Ms. Anderson said. She said Mr. Dolan would have been of interest to Mr. Mueller’s team because of his connections to the Russian government. Mr. Dolan had done public relations work for the Kremlin and developed a strong connection with Dimitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Anyone who had access to the Kremlin would have been very valuable,” she said.
Title: Durham, FBI is the elephant in the room
Post by: DougMacG on October 18, 2022, 07:11:06 AM: https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/10/17/durham-the-fbi-is-the-elephant-in-the-room-in-danchenko-trial-n503970
Title: POTP: The Deep State's strategy against Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2022, 10:31:39 AM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/22/trump-documents-dearie-fbi/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3833df0%2F635413cef3d9003c58180120%2F61cdf026ae7e8a4ac205b2b3%2F9%2F70%2F635413cef3d9003c58180120&wp_cu=10fdb05edea8f32c1b02f6dfec609335%7CD462DD329F9C56B3E0530100007F597F
Title: Scumbag Andrew Weissman's read
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2022, 07:18:37 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/clear-sign-trump-will-be-indicted-weissmann-on-doj-s-latest-move/vi-AA13B9HF?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5ada431e2d0a46c1aaef61e862079392&category=foryou
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on November 01, 2022, 08:25:10 AM: kind of ironic how pompous Weissmann tries to clever his way out of insulting the DOJ attorneys
by saying the are not the big guns needed to take down Trump . And saying how smart it is to have Jamie Raskin and Merrick Garland leading the case.

ironic , since Weissmann FAILED to bring down Trump with the phony Russian Collusion senile Mueller mob.

he himself is the big loser .

He claims it is so smart a strategy to indict /convict a "lower level" government employee for mishandling classified documents to then be able to argue :

we got this low level gov. employee so how can we not go after the vastly more dangerous Trump who is guilty (in his mind - the same or worse crimes )?

then add to this the laughable left wing :

"NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!"
Title: Bill Barr: there will be no FBI accountability
Post by: ccp on November 05, 2022, 10:35:57 AM: as we all here expected:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/former-ag-barr-there-will-be-no-fbi-accountability-after-russiagate-debacle
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2022, 01:49:19 PM: :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
Title: AG Barr: There will be no accountability for FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2022, 02:00:45 PM: Given the ostentatious integrity he showed in going against Trump, this is sure to get a lot of coverage.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/former-ag-barr-there-will-be-no-fbi-accountability-after-russiagate-debacle
Title: AG Garland names special prosecutor
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2022, 01:01:24 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/merrick-garland-to-name-special-counsel-in-trump-criminal-investigations-reports/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=29743322
Title: Durham report
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2023, 02:09:32 PM: perhaps the final post here

after years all Durham can do is come out with a written note to the principal scolding
those involved

the principal will simply throw in the recycle bin

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/05/15/durham-n2623276

who would have thought this would be the result ?
:roll:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2023, 02:21:30 PM: "perhaps the final post here"

??? :-o :-o :-o
Title: What will be done?
Post by: G M on May 17, 2023, 08:29:55 AM: https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg)

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg)
Title: Re: What will be done?
Post by: G M on May 17, 2023, 09:18:27 AM: Quote from: G M on May 17, 2023, 08:29:55 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg)

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg)

https://sonar21.com/the-corruption-of-america-takes-a-dangerous-turn/
Title: Re: What will be done?
Post by: G M on May 17, 2023, 09:53:32 AM: Quote from: G M on May 17, 2023, 09:18:27 AM
Quote from: G M on May 17, 2023, 08:29:55 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/295/original/f388819b505cfbd8.jpeg)

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/062/306/original/f926b5be7e3d986f.jpeg)

https://sonar21.com/the-corruption-of-america-takes-a-dangerous-turn/

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/069/837/original/a013ad59bc195b09.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/069/837/original/a013ad59bc195b09.jpg)
Title: Kunstler correctly assesses the situation
Post by: G M on May 19, 2023, 09:21:25 AM: https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/dum-da-dum-dum-dah/
Title: Another chance for GM to take a win with AMcC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 10:44:44 AM: By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 16, 2023 2:16 PM
The bureau expected Clinton to be the next president. So her Trump strategy became the FBI’s Trump strategy.

Among the most troubling conclusions in special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate report is that the FBI — even as it relied on Clinton-campaign-funded opposition research against Donald Trump that it failed to verify — ignored strongly supported intelligence that Hillary Clinton was intentionally smearing Trump as a Putin puppet.

To my mind, Durham is being too kind.

Perusing the report, I find it impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the FBI, and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy but rather that the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government knowingly abetted Clinton’s implementation of the strategy.

Here is what Durham recounts about American spy agencies’ covert discovery in late July 2016: Their Russian counterparts had assessed that Clinton had approved a campaign plan “to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”

One objective of this demagoguery was to distract from Clinton’s own email scandal, which was far more consequential to the 2016 election than the DNC emails. Clinton was not a meaningful participant in the DNC emails; they factored into the election only as a prop to portray Trump as complicit in a Russian-hacking conspiracy.

Clinton and her campaign staffers scoffed, in interviews by Durham’s office, that the Russian intelligence analysis was “ridiculous” and “disinformation.” But the analysis was obviously true, regardless of whether the Russians truly believed it or were floating it to confuse our spies.

The Clinton campaign sponsored the bogus “dossier” prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele. It alleged that “there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and Russian leadership.” This was a fabrication: Steele’s source, Igor Danchenko, never actually spoke to Sergei Millian, to whom this “intelligence” was attributed. Millian never made the claim.

FBI Whistleblower Testifies Bureau ‘May Have’ Had Confidential Human Sources in the Capitol on J6

It was in the context of this nonexistent “conspiracy of cooperation” that Steele claimed Russia had hacked the DNC emails to help Trump win the election. Through Steele, his Fusion GPS confederates, and the campaign’s lawyers, Clinton’s Trump–Russia “collusion” smear was peddled to friendly media and sympathetic government officials.

With equal fervor, moreover, the Clinton campaign concocted the farcical claim that Trump had established a communications back channel with Putin through servers at Alfa Bank, an important Russian financial institution.

After succeeding in getting this nonsense publicized less than two months before Election Day, Clinton herself tweeted: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based Bank.” Jake Sullivan, one of Clinton’s top aides (and now President Biden’s national-security adviser) breathlessly proclaimed that Alfa Bank “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow”; that “this secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia”; and that “we can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”

Clearly, there was a Clinton campaign strategy to frame Trump. Yet the most sensible interpretation of the evidence Durham has amassed is not that the FBI, in evaluating its collusion evidence, failed to weigh intercepted Russian intelligence about that strategy. It is that the FBI was well aware of Clinton’s strategy, fully expected Clinton to be the next president, and helped implement the strategy, regardless of what Russian spies may or may not have thought about it.

The FBI knowingly treated Clinton with kid gloves. FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned the bureau’s senior intelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, to tread lightly in interviewing Clinton about the email scandal — fearful that, upon winning the election, Clinton would otherwise be vengeful against the FBI.

The special counsel elaborates on attempts by two foreign governments to buy influence with Clinton by making donations to her campaign. Contrary to the zealousness with which the FBI opened a full-blown investigation of Trump’s campaign based on risibly thin information in the stretch run of the 2016 race, the bureau sat on the Clinton information for months — even though the first foreign scheme commenced in 2014, before Clinton had even formally announced her candidacy. Clinton’s campaign was given a defensive briefing to ensure she was not placed in a compromising position. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, was immediately subjected to a full-court press, including eavesdropping and the deployment of informants — which persisted for a year, even though the evidence gathered was exculpatory.

Durham documents that President Obama, Vice President Biden, top intelligence officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director Comey were fully briefed by CIA director John Brennan on Russia’s assessment of Clinton’s plan to frame Trump.

According to Durham, it appears that FBI headquarters withheld the information from some investigators who should have had it. No surprise there. We learned during Durham’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann that headquarters concealed from the bureau’s own investigators that Sussmann was the source of the Alfa Bank data. But this information about a Clinton strategy to smear Trump wasn’t ignored. Rather, it was echoed. At the same time that the FBI had this information, the bureau nevertheless went to the FISA court and swore under oath to the Steele dossier claim that Trump and Putin were in a “conspiracy of cooperation.”

To make Trump look like Putin’s puppet, which is exactly what Clinton wanted, the FBI departed from the most elementary investigative steps, especially the duty to verify information before presenting it to a court. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith (who later pled guilty) altered a document that would have undercut false claims the FBI was making to the FISA court. As the FBI gathered information proving that the allegations it had made to the FISA court were false, it concealed that information from the judges and kept re-alleging the false claims.

There is not a chance that the FBI — or anyone in America — was unaware that the Clinton campaign wanted Trump to be seen as a Russian operative. But the bureau expected Clinton to be the next president. That was her Trump strategy, so it became the FBI’s Trump strategy.
Title: AM : Durham being too kind
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2023, 11:05:35 AM: AM rehabilitated

in my mind

:-D
Title: Re: Another chance for GM to take a win with AMcC
Post by: G M on May 19, 2023, 02:47:18 PM: In this episode of “Weak tea with Deep State Andy” Andy begrudgingly restates what we all know already as gingerly as possible without actually articulating the many federal crimes committed or any suggestion that they be prosecuted.

:roll:

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 10:44:44 AM
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 16, 2023 2:16 PM
The bureau expected Clinton to be the next president. So her Trump strategy became the FBI’s Trump strategy.

Among the most troubling conclusions in special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate report is that the FBI — even as it relied on Clinton-campaign-funded opposition research against Donald Trump that it failed to verify — ignored strongly supported intelligence that Hillary Clinton was intentionally smearing Trump as a Putin puppet.

To my mind, Durham is being too kind.

Perusing the report, I find it impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the FBI, and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy but rather that the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government knowingly abetted Clinton’s implementation of the strategy.

Here is what Durham recounts about American spy agencies’ covert discovery in late July 2016: Their Russian counterparts had assessed that Clinton had approved a campaign plan “to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”

One objective of this demagoguery was to distract from Clinton’s own email scandal, which was far more consequential to the 2016 election than the DNC emails. Clinton was not a meaningful participant in the DNC emails; they factored into the election only as a prop to portray Trump as complicit in a Russian-hacking conspiracy.

Clinton and her campaign staffers scoffed, in interviews by Durham’s office, that the Russian intelligence analysis was “ridiculous” and “disinformation.” But the analysis was obviously true, regardless of whether the Russians truly believed it or were floating it to confuse our spies.

The Clinton campaign sponsored the bogus “dossier” prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele. It alleged that “there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and Russian leadership.” This was a fabrication: Steele’s source, Igor Danchenko, never actually spoke to Sergei Millian, to whom this “intelligence” was attributed. Millian never made the claim.

FBI Whistleblower Testifies Bureau ‘May Have’ Had Confidential Human Sources in the Capitol on J6

It was in the context of this nonexistent “conspiracy of cooperation” that Steele claimed Russia had hacked the DNC emails to help Trump win the election. Through Steele, his Fusion GPS confederates, and the campaign’s lawyers, Clinton’s Trump–Russia “collusion” smear was peddled to friendly media and sympathetic government officials.

With equal fervor, moreover, the Clinton campaign concocted the farcical claim that Trump had established a communications back channel with Putin through servers at Alfa Bank, an important Russian financial institution.

After succeeding in getting this nonsense publicized less than two months before Election Day, Clinton herself tweeted: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based Bank.” Jake Sullivan, one of Clinton’s top aides (and now President Biden’s national-security adviser) breathlessly proclaimed that Alfa Bank “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow”; that “this secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia”; and that “we can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”

Clearly, there was a Clinton campaign strategy to frame Trump. Yet the most sensible interpretation of the evidence Durham has amassed is not that the FBI, in evaluating its collusion evidence, failed to weigh intercepted Russian intelligence about that strategy. It is that the FBI was well aware of Clinton’s strategy, fully expected Clinton to be the next president, and helped implement the strategy, regardless of what Russian spies may or may not have thought about it.

The FBI knowingly treated Clinton with kid gloves. FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned the bureau’s senior intelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, to tread lightly in interviewing Clinton about the email scandal — fearful that, upon winning the election, Clinton would otherwise be vengeful against the FBI.

The special counsel elaborates on attempts by two foreign governments to buy influence with Clinton by making donations to her campaign. Contrary to the zealousness with which the FBI opened a full-blown investigation of Trump’s campaign based on risibly thin information in the stretch run of the 2016 race, the bureau sat on the Clinton information for months — even though the first foreign scheme commenced in 2014, before Clinton had even formally announced her candidacy. Clinton’s campaign was given a defensive briefing to ensure she was not placed in a compromising position. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, was immediately subjected to a full-court press, including eavesdropping and the deployment of informants — which persisted for a year, even though the evidence gathered was exculpatory.

Durham documents that President Obama, Vice President Biden, top intelligence officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director Comey were fully briefed by CIA director John Brennan on Russia’s assessment of Clinton’s plan to frame Trump.

According to Durham, it appears that FBI headquarters withheld the information from some investigators who should have had it. No surprise there. We learned during Durham’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann that headquarters concealed from the bureau’s own investigators that Sussmann was the source of the Alfa Bank data. But this information about a Clinton strategy to smear Trump wasn’t ignored. Rather, it was echoed. At the same time that the FBI had this information, the bureau nevertheless went to the FISA court and swore under oath to the Steele dossier claim that Trump and Putin were in a “conspiracy of cooperation.”

To make Trump look like Putin’s puppet, which is exactly what Clinton wanted, the FBI departed from the most elementary investigative steps, especially the duty to verify information before presenting it to a court. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith (who later pled guilty) altered a document that would have undercut false claims the FBI was making to the FISA court. As the FBI gathered information proving that the allegations it had made to the FISA court were false, it concealed that information from the judges and kept re-alleging the false claims.

There is not a chance that the FBI — or anyone in America — was unaware that the Clinton campaign wanted Trump to be seen as a Russian operative. But the bureau expected Clinton to be the next president. That was her Trump strategy, so it became the FBI’s Trump strategy.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 04:43:59 PM: :-D :-D :-D
Title: Wayne Root: Obama behind it all
Post by: G M on May 20, 2023, 06:51:09 AM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/wayne-root-everyone-has-missed-real-revelation-durham/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2023, 06:57:30 AM: Entirely plausible/probable-- but substance is needed to really run with this.
Title: Just like vote fraud, the lack of punishment means it will happen again
Post by: G M on May 20, 2023, 06:59:55 AM: https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/05/the-russiagate-players-got-rich-and.html
Title: AMcC replies to GM: How thin the collusion case really was
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2023, 07:37:15 AM: The Durham Report Exposes How Thin the Collusion Case Really Was

Special Counsel John Durham departs the U.S. Federal Courthouse after opening arguments in the trial of Attorney Michael Sussmann in Washington, D.C., May 17, 2022. (Julia Nikhinson/Reuters)
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 20, 2023 6:30 AM

Even FBI officials working the case admitted that it had been opened on the flimsiest of grounds.

The vaporousness of the predication for the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was described Tuesday in our editorial on the Durham Report (and in my post the same day). For years, I have maintained that the probe was opened on false pretenses. But now that we have Special Counsel John Durham’s careful and comprehensive account of the debacle, the bureau and its allied Russiagate agonistes ought to be humiliated. They deranged the country for years over what, at the time they opened the case, FBI leaders knew was a grossly irresponsible basis for commencing any serious investigation, let alone for intruding the bureau into the politics of a presidential election. The damage this sordid affair has done to the FBI as an institution may not be reparable.

It is totally predictable and in character that “collusion” cheerleaders, including some of the former FBI officials who were fired, are now mewling that Durham’s report is a “nothing burger.” But it’s still tough to abide.

As we’ve noted, amid the media–Democratic-complex hysteria resulting from the publication of hacked DNC emails during the 2016 Democratic Convention, the FBI opened the investigation in late July 2016. This was not a normal case, so the decision was made by top officials at headquarters, based on a strained interpretation of casual comments made two months earlier by George Papadopoulos to a pair of Australian diplomats at a bar in London.

Papadopoulos was a green, unpaid Trump campaign aide. At the time they were made, his remarks were sufficiently incomprehensible — and un-comprehended — that the Aussies thought little of them. In summarizing what Papadopoulos said in a contemporaneous memo, the best one of the diplomats could come up with was that he’d made a suggestion of some kind of suggestion:

[Papadopoulos] also suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process [of exploiting the “baggage” of Hillary and Bill Clinton] with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton (and President Obama).

Papadopoulos did not claim to know what, if anything, Russian intelligence had on Hillary Clinton. He did not use the word “emails” or even “dirt.” The diplomats were not intelligence agents, but they knew enough to be dismissive. (As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, one of them, Alexander Downer, had intriguing relationships with both British intelligence officers and such American politicians as the Clintons, to whose foundation he had arranged a $25 million Australian contribution.) Any competent intelligence analyst would have known that, if Trump actually were in some kind of “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin, the last person in the world who’d have known anything about it was George Papadopoulos. It’s unlikely Trump could have picked Papadopoulos out of a line-up. (Sure, they once sat at the same crowded table, and there’s a photograph of it; but there’s also a photograph of Trump chatting with a woman who accused him of rape, and at a deposition he mistook her for his second wife.)

Russian intelligence is very capable. Donald Trump, by contrast, has exhibited neither awareness nor habits of intelligence craft through his half-century in public life. If the Aussie diplomats had been intelligence agents, they would have realized that Moscow’s spies would hardly have needed the chaotic Trump campaign’s help to gather or disseminate kompromat on Hillary Clinton. More to the point, though, if the kind of cryptic speculation attributed to Papadopoulos were a sufficient rationale for opening a counterintelligence investigation, the FBI might as well have opened one on its own then-director.

Recall that Director Jim Comey held a July 5, 2016, press conference at which he laid out the evidence against Clinton that the FBI had uncovered during the emails investigation — flouting Justice Department guidelines against public statements about misconduct by uncharged persons. As recounted in DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s eventual report, Comey’s statement was months in the making: He had started drafting it in late April and early May — i.e., even before Papadopoulos’s mid-May meeting with the Aussie diplomats (but, as I’ve previously pointed out, only shortly after President Obama’s nationally televised assertion that he did not want Clinton charged with a crime).

This means that prior to Papadopoulos’s supposed “suggestion of some kind of suggestion,” there were already internal discussions at FBI headquarters about how former secretary Hillary Clinton, all by herself, had given the Russians all the help they needed to undermine her presidential bid. Specifically, Comey had been briefed that, because she recklessly used a homebrew email server to do her State Department work, Clinton was uniquely vulnerable not just to hacking, but to hacking that could capture her sensitive communications with Obama while she was in Russia.

It is not enough to say that Clinton’s private-server system was so non-secure that it could easily have been penetrated by competent foreign intelligence services. The FBI assessed that it probably had been penetrated. By the time of Comey’s press conference, that embarrassing finding had been massaged into this portion of his script:

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

As scathing as that was, Comey’s earlier drafts (described in Horowitz’s report) were even more damning. The director had been planning to say that Clinton

also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.” [Emphasis added.]

This express mention of Obama was veiled in a subsequent draft, which referred instead to “another senior government official.” Realizing this would only draw unwanted attention to Clinton’s communications with Obama, which had very possibly been hacked by Russian or other hostile intelligence services, Comey and his advisers completely omitted any allusion to Obama from the remarks he finally delivered on July 5. (Prior to leaving office, Obama quietly directed that his email communications with Clinton be sealed.)

Remember, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane in late July 2016 as a full-throttle investigation — without interviewing Papadopoulos, the Aussie diplomats, or a single relevant witness — because of the supposition that Papadopoulos might have been saying that the Trump campaign believed the Russians had compromising information that they might use against Clinton. Yet, less than four weeks earlier, the FBI’s top official had openly speculated that hostile actors (obviously the Russians, among others) had compromising material that they might use against Clinton.

To put it another way, in reading what Comey told the world at his presser, one could easily detect a “suggestion of a kind of suggestion” that the Russians had hacked Clinton’s communications and were in a position to disseminate them at a time that could have been maximally harmful to her presidential campaign, revealing both (a) private conversations that Clinton would understandably have wanted kept confidential, and (b) her gross negligence in conducting sensitive government business this way — which Trump or any other political rival would inevitably argue demonstrated her unfitness to be president.

If that’s what the FBI’s own director was saying publicly, what else would you expect from George Papadopoulos?

Not much. And thanks to Durham, we now know that’s what the FBI agents working the case thought of the vaunted predication for the case: not much. Less than that, really.

As noted above, the bureau opened a full-scale investigation against a presidential campaign based on information from the Aussie diplomats before even interviewing them (just as the bureau failed to interview Christopher Steele’s main source, Igor Danchenko, until after twice swearing under oath to his allegations in FISA-court warrant applications). The bureau got around to this apparently lower priority of actually talking to witnesses on August 2, 2016. Because the interview was to be done in London, the FBI had to consult with its British intelligence counterparts.

As Durham details, to pave the way, the bureau’s legal attaché (leg-at) in London (whose name is not given in the report) was dispatched to discuss the opening of the investigation with the Brits. Their reaction was one of “real skepticism.” They told the leg-at that the sketchy statements attributed to Papadopoulos by the Aussie diplomats were “not assess[ed]” to be “particularly valuable intelligence.” In fact, the leg-at added, “the British could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was,” so they assumed the FBI must have more information that it was holding back.

It didn’t. By that first week in August, the FBI had assigned a first case agent (also not named in the report) to work under the direction of Agent Peter Strzok and help interview the Aussies. In an August 11 conversation, the leg-at and the case agent had this exchange:

Leg-at: Dude, are we telling [British intelligence] everything we know, or is there more to this?

Case agent: That’s all we have. Not holding anything back.

Leg-at: Damn, that’s thin.

Case agent: I know.

The one who knew the most at the time about bureau headquarters’ thinking was Strzok. The leg-at recalled that as the agents taxied to the Australian High Commission in London, Strzok muttered, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”

Grounded nothing, I think, is what’s often called a “nothing burger.” Here, the nothing burger is actually the FBI’s Trump–Russia “collusion” investigation, not the Durham Report.
Title: Re: AMcC replies to GM: How thin the collusion case really was
Post by: G M on May 20, 2023, 07:48:08 AM: The FBI knew it was BS, they just assumed that when they used it as a pretext for surveillance/investigation they would actually find evidence of an actual crime. Funny enough, for all Trump's flaws, he may be one of the cleanest presidents since George Washington. That ruined their plan for a legitimate criminal charge. The COUP still took place in 2020.

No one has been charged for that, most like Deep State Andy won't even call it that.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2023, 07:37:15 AM
The Durham Report Exposes How Thin the Collusion Case Really Was

Special Counsel John Durham departs the U.S. Federal Courthouse after opening arguments in the trial of Attorney Michael Sussmann in Washington, D.C., May 17, 2022. (Julia Nikhinson/Reuters)
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 20, 2023 6:30 AM

Even FBI officials working the case admitted that it had been opened on the flimsiest of grounds.

The vaporousness of the predication for the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was described Tuesday in our editorial on the Durham Report (and in my post the same day). For years, I have maintained that the probe was opened on false pretenses. But now that we have Special Counsel John Durham’s careful and comprehensive account of the debacle, the bureau and its allied Russiagate agonistes ought to be humiliated. They deranged the country for years over what, at the time they opened the case, FBI leaders knew was a grossly irresponsible basis for commencing any serious investigation, let alone for intruding the bureau into the politics of a presidential election. The damage this sordid affair has done to the FBI as an institution may not be reparable.

It is totally predictable and in character that “collusion” cheerleaders, including some of the former FBI officials who were fired, are now mewling that Durham’s report is a “nothing burger.” But it’s still tough to abide.

As we’ve noted, amid the media–Democratic-complex hysteria resulting from the publication of hacked DNC emails during the 2016 Democratic Convention, the FBI opened the investigation in late July 2016. This was not a normal case, so the decision was made by top officials at headquarters, based on a strained interpretation of casual comments made two months earlier by George Papadopoulos to a pair of Australian diplomats at a bar in London.

Papadopoulos was a green, unpaid Trump campaign aide. At the time they were made, his remarks were sufficiently incomprehensible — and un-comprehended — that the Aussies thought little of them. In summarizing what Papadopoulos said in a contemporaneous memo, the best one of the diplomats could come up with was that he’d made a suggestion of some kind of suggestion:

[Papadopoulos] also suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process [of exploiting the “baggage” of Hillary and Bill Clinton] with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton (and President Obama).

Papadopoulos did not claim to know what, if anything, Russian intelligence had on Hillary Clinton. He did not use the word “emails” or even “dirt.” The diplomats were not intelligence agents, but they knew enough to be dismissive. (As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, one of them, Alexander Downer, had intriguing relationships with both British intelligence officers and such American politicians as the Clintons, to whose foundation he had arranged a $25 million Australian contribution.) Any competent intelligence analyst would have known that, if Trump actually were in some kind of “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin, the last person in the world who’d have known anything about it was George Papadopoulos. It’s unlikely Trump could have picked Papadopoulos out of a line-up. (Sure, they once sat at the same crowded table, and there’s a photograph of it; but there’s also a photograph of Trump chatting with a woman who accused him of rape, and at a deposition he mistook her for his second wife.)

Russian intelligence is very capable. Donald Trump, by contrast, has exhibited neither awareness nor habits of intelligence craft through his half-century in public life. If the Aussie diplomats had been intelligence agents, they would have realized that Moscow’s spies would hardly have needed the chaotic Trump campaign’s help to gather or disseminate kompromat on Hillary Clinton. More to the point, though, if the kind of cryptic speculation attributed to Papadopoulos were a sufficient rationale for opening a counterintelligence investigation, the FBI might as well have opened one on its own then-director.

Recall that Director Jim Comey held a July 5, 2016, press conference at which he laid out the evidence against Clinton that the FBI had uncovered during the emails investigation — flouting Justice Department guidelines against public statements about misconduct by uncharged persons. As recounted in DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s eventual report, Comey’s statement was months in the making: He had started drafting it in late April and early May — i.e., even before Papadopoulos’s mid-May meeting with the Aussie diplomats (but, as I’ve previously pointed out, only shortly after President Obama’s nationally televised assertion that he did not want Clinton charged with a crime).

This means that prior to Papadopoulos’s supposed “suggestion of some kind of suggestion,” there were already internal discussions at FBI headquarters about how former secretary Hillary Clinton, all by herself, had given the Russians all the help they needed to undermine her presidential bid. Specifically, Comey had been briefed that, because she recklessly used a homebrew email server to do her State Department work, Clinton was uniquely vulnerable not just to hacking, but to hacking that could capture her sensitive communications with Obama while she was in Russia.

It is not enough to say that Clinton’s private-server system was so non-secure that it could easily have been penetrated by competent foreign intelligence services. The FBI assessed that it probably had been penetrated. By the time of Comey’s press conference, that embarrassing finding had been massaged into this portion of his script:

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

As scathing as that was, Comey’s earlier drafts (described in Horowitz’s report) were even more damning. The director had been planning to say that Clinton

also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.” [Emphasis added.]

This express mention of Obama was veiled in a subsequent draft, which referred instead to “another senior government official.” Realizing this would only draw unwanted attention to Clinton’s communications with Obama, which had very possibly been hacked by Russian or other hostile intelligence services, Comey and his advisers completely omitted any allusion to Obama from the remarks he finally delivered on July 5. (Prior to leaving office, Obama quietly directed that his email communications with Clinton be sealed.)

Remember, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane in late July 2016 as a full-throttle investigation — without interviewing Papadopoulos, the Aussie diplomats, or a single relevant witness — because of the supposition that Papadopoulos might have been saying that the Trump campaign believed the Russians had compromising information that they might use against Clinton. Yet, less than four weeks earlier, the FBI’s top official had openly speculated that hostile actors (obviously the Russians, among others) had compromising material that they might use against Clinton.

To put it another way, in reading what Comey told the world at his presser, one could easily detect a “suggestion of a kind of suggestion” that the Russians had hacked Clinton’s communications and were in a position to disseminate them at a time that could have been maximally harmful to her presidential campaign, revealing both (a) private conversations that Clinton would understandably have wanted kept confidential, and (b) her gross negligence in conducting sensitive government business this way — which Trump or any other political rival would inevitably argue demonstrated her unfitness to be president.

If that’s what the FBI’s own director was saying publicly, what else would you expect from George Papadopoulos?

Not much. And thanks to Durham, we now know that’s what the FBI agents working the case thought of the vaunted predication for the case: not much. Less than that, really.

As noted above, the bureau opened a full-scale investigation against a presidential campaign based on information from the Aussie diplomats before even interviewing them (just as the bureau failed to interview Christopher Steele’s main source, Igor Danchenko, until after twice swearing under oath to his allegations in FISA-court warrant applications). The bureau got around to this apparently lower priority of actually talking to witnesses on August 2, 2016. Because the interview was to be done in London, the FBI had to consult with its British intelligence counterparts.

As Durham details, to pave the way, the bureau’s legal attaché (leg-at) in London (whose name is not given in the report) was dispatched to discuss the opening of the investigation with the Brits. Their reaction was one of “real skepticism.” They told the leg-at that the sketchy statements attributed to Papadopoulos by the Aussie diplomats were “not assess[ed]” to be “particularly valuable intelligence.” In fact, the leg-at added, “the British could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was,” so they assumed the FBI must have more information that it was holding back.

It didn’t. By that first week in August, the FBI had assigned a first case agent (also not named in the report) to work under the direction of Agent Peter Strzok and help interview the Aussies. In an August 11 conversation, the leg-at and the case agent had this exchange:

Leg-at: Dude, are we telling [British intelligence] everything we know, or is there more to this?

Case agent: That’s all we have. Not holding anything back.

Leg-at: Damn, that’s thin.

Case agent: I know.

The one who knew the most at the time about bureau headquarters’ thinking was Strzok. The leg-at recalled that as the agents taxied to the Australian High Commission in London, Strzok muttered, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”

Grounded nothing, I think, is what’s often called a “nothing burger.” Here, the nothing burger is actually the FBI’s Trump–Russia “collusion” investigation, not the Durham Report.
Title: Who is Joseph Misfud?
Post by: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:05:52 PM: https://www.insideover.com/schede/politics/joseph-mifsud-who-is-he.html
Title: Sir Charles Farr
Post by: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:25:33 PM: https://news.sky.com/story/british-intelligence-involved-in-trump-election-probe-sources-say-11825044
Title: Re: Sir Charles Farr
Post by: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:30:15 PM: Quote from: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:25:33 PM
https://news.sky.com/story/british-intelligence-involved-in-trump-election-probe-sources-say-11825044

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/13/charles-farr-gchq-spymaster-counter-terrorism
Title: Re: Sir Charles Farr
Post by: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:35:57 PM: Quote from: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:30:15 PM
Quote from: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:25:33 PM
https://news.sky.com/story/british-intelligence-involved-in-trump-election-probe-sources-say-11825044

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/13/charles-farr-gchq-spymaster-counter-terrorism

https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1130225259775447041

From the UK, without love.
Title: Don’t forget to vote harder against the global intelligence agencies coup!
Post by: G M on May 22, 2023, 09:19:18 AM: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/john-durham-ignores-role-u-s-u-k/

Just a small oversight!

Andrew McCarthy will explain in detail soon!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2023, 09:34:54 AM: A fair point.

I agree that it seems likely that Brit intel interfered with our election mightily.
Title: They all knew
Post by: G M on May 23, 2023, 06:30:57 AM: https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/960/231/original/e01da36b2a9f6ce7.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/960/231/original/e01da36b2a9f6ce7.jpeg)
Title: Re: Don’t forget to vote harder against the global intelligence agencies coup!
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 08:12:40 AM: https://sonar21.com/john-durham-ignores-role-of-u-s-u-k-australian-and-israeli-intelligence-operatives-in-setting-the-stage-for-crossfire-hurricane/

Quote from: G M on May 22, 2023, 09:19:18 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/john-durham-ignores-role-u-s-u-k/

Just a small oversight!

Andrew McCarthy will explain in detail soon!
Title: Crossfire Hurricane declass docs
Post by: G M on June 08, 2023, 06:23:43 AM: https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1666443247416164355
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2023, 11:08:52 AM: This is going to be very interesting.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2023, 11:42:38 AM: "Perhaps the biggest problem for the prosecution is that a wide variety of government officials — Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, former CIA director John M. Deutch, former CIA director and retired U.S. Army general David Petraeus, former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Joe Biden, Mike Pence — have been caught taking classified documents out of secure locations to their homes or other locations, with no criminal charges."
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 09, 2023, 01:29:38 PM: oh but they did not do so willingly
and then refuse to return the docs
in violation of the espionage act scream all the Dem shysters and media syncophants
Title: Turley : indictment damning
Post by: ccp on June 09, 2023, 03:33:19 PM: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/06/09/turley-explains-why-the-latest-trump-indictment-is-a-serious-threat-n2624300

won't matter

40 % MAGAs will scream and yell for Trump anyway

and he could win the nomination with a ceiling favorability ~45 % (as pointed out by Schlichter )

God does not seem to be on our side :cry:
Title: Prof Dersh on latest revelations
Post by: ccp on June 09, 2023, 05:13:23 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRkIWDlFSFI
Title: The great werewolf hunt!
Post by: G M on June 09, 2023, 07:29:36 PM: https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-great-doj-werewolf-hunt/
Title: the man with upmost integrity Jack Smith
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2023, 06:04:18 AM: JACK SMITH WITH STRAIGHT FACE AND STERN SERIOUS LOOK AND DEMEANOR :

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-justice-department-releases-trump-indictment

ME:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7rJpRqK-8E

:wink:
Title: NRO weighs in
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 06:36:36 AM: The Trump Indictment Is Damning

Former president Donald Trump speaks during his rally in Selma, N.C., April 9, 2022. (Erin Siegal McIntyre/Reuters)
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By THE EDITORS
June 10, 2023 6:30 AM
Just as paranoiacs sometimes have enemies, people obsessively pursued for alleged violations of the law by their political opponents sometimes commit criminal offenses.

At many junctures, most recently with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s flimsy charges, we’ve had occasions to point out how Donald Trump’s adversaries have twisted the law in a politically motivated effort to nail the former president. And we certainly do not welcome the precedent of a federal prosecutor, who ultimately reports to the president, indicting that president’s leading rival for reelection. That said, it is impossible to read the indictment against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and not be appalled at the way he handled classified documents as an ex-president, and responded to the attempt by federal authorities to reclaim them.

When he moved out of the White House, Trump moved many boxes of materials to Mar-a-Lago. Many contained nothing more than mementos such as newspaper clippings, photos, cards, and various notes and letters. But included along with these run-of-the-mill items were hundreds of documents marked classified. These documents, according to the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida, included “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”

Once Trump was no longer president, he had no right to these materials. He stored them recklessly — not in a secured space that had been approved to handle classified documents, but, farcically, in places including his bedroom, a bathroom, and a ballroom. This was within his Mar-a-Lago Club that has hosted events for tens of thousands of people within the roughly year and a half that the documents were in his possession.

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Trump brushed off months of demands from the National Archives and Records Administration to return the missing records before relenting in January 2022, but only providing a portion of what was in his possession — roughly 15 boxes, which included 197 documents that were marked as classified. After a grand-jury subpoena demanded all classified documents, Trump’s lawyers then turned over 38 more documents marked classified. But when the FBI carried out a controversial search warrant later that summer and seized more boxes, they found 102 additional documents with classified markings.

The indictment offers evidence that Trump misled investigators about his possession of the documents and took actions to conceal them. But most damning is the transcript of a conversation during which Trump showed one of the documents to a reporter. Speaking of a theoretical attack plan, Trump produced a document and said, “It is like, highly confidential.” He also said, “See as president I could have declassified it” but admitted, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

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The audio of this conversation makes it a lot more difficult for Trump to chalk everything up to an innocent case of some classified documents getting mixed up with other personal items from his presidency. It also directly contradicts some of the laughable public defenses that were made by Trump and his team last summer, including the idea that there was a “standing order” that whatever documents he brought to Mar-a-Lago to work on were automatically declassified. It’s clear from the conversation that he not only knew he was in possession of secret documents that were never declassified, but knowingly shared them with people who lacked the security clearance to see them.

Equally damning, particularly for someone who was and would like again to be the nation’s chief executive, responsible for the enforcement of the laws, is the evidence that Trump not only deceived the investigators and the grand jury, but his own lawyers — knowing and intending that they would consequently obstruct the investigation. If the allegations in the indictment are true, Trump tried to nudge his lawyers into concealing or destroying incriminating evidence. Unable to bend them in that direction, he and an aide hid boxes of documents from them, causing them falsely to tell the grand jury, under oath, that the classified documents they delivered to the FBI in June 2022 were the only ones remaining in his possession. They weren’t lying; according to prosecutors, they were passing along what he told them. It is worth noting, moreover, that the substantiation of this allegation is likely to come from testimony of the lawyers themselves — not from people out to get the former president, but people who tried, futilely, to help him.

We understand why many conservatives are unwilling to view the charges against Trump in a vacuum given that the Justice Department let Hillary Clinton off the hook for her reckless handling of government secrets and the resulting cover-up, that President Biden is unlikely to pay a price for his own mishandling of classified documents, and that Democrats and their allies have pursued a yearslong campaign to get Trump. All of those are legitimate considerations, and the contrast with how James Comey and Co. handled the Hillary case is particularly galling. But it doesn’t change the fact the country wouldn’t be in this uncharted territory if Trump hadn’t taken documents he had no right to, and simply complied when asked to give them back.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2023, 06:41:31 AM: anti Trump NRO

no surprise

but this time I agree with NRO
we can only hope Trump is not the candidate

of course he will take us all down with him to the end

maybe if he goes to jail he can be placed in same cell where Epstein was.
no tears from me.
Title: NRO stakes out its position
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 06:50:29 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/the-trump-indictment-is-damning/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=31754333
Title: AMcC: Prosecute all of them!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 06:57:01 AM: Why Trump’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Cries Ring Hollow in Face of DOJ Indictment

Former president Donald Trump delivers remarks on the day of his court appearance in New York after being indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, in Palm Beach, Fla., April 4, 2023.(Marco Bello/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 10, 2023 6:30 AM
Just look at the source of some of the evidence. It’s not his enemies.
On May 23, 2022, Donald Trump, formerly the president of the United States and thus the nation’s chief executive responsible for executing and upholding its laws, sat down with two lawyers he had retained to help him handle a grand-jury subpoena.

The subpoena, which is a legally enforceable court order, not a suggestion, required that he surrender to the grand jury (via the FBI) intelligence files that he had illegally retained at Mar-a-Lago, his resort club and estate in Palm Beach. Trump was bent on defying the order. He would willfully refuse the command of the subpoena and the directive of government officials.

Already, you can see a problem here. Trump and his two lawyers understood that the point of the meeting was to decide how to handle the subpoena. But, it turns out, not everyone was on the same page about what handle meant.

Trump turned the conversation to a favorite obsession, Hillary Clinton. Specifically, he spoke of a lawyer who had represented her when she was in a similar pickle: the recipient of a subpoena (hers was from Congress) demanding that she turn over emails from her home-brew, nongovernment, nonsecure server system. Humiliating emails she had no intention of surrendering.

According to Trump, then, she got herself a lawyer who would help her, you know, handle the subpoena. To the former president, this was the very model of legal acumen. Referring to this exemplary lawyer, Trump advised his two attorneys:

He was great, he did a great job. You know what? He said, he said that it — that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments. And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get into any trouble because he said he was the one who deleted them.

Get it? It doesn’t require a lot of translation. But just in case anyone missed the point, the indictment recounts that the former president of the United States “related that story more than once that day.”

Now, since we’re hearing a lot, and we’re going to hear a lot more, about selective prosecution, about the sense that the “boxes hoax” is the “biggest witch hunt of all time,” understand this: The evidence of this soliloquy — wherein it was Trump-splained that a “great job” by a lawyer entails making incriminating evidence disappear and taking the fall for it so the client escapes jeopardy — does not come from Donald Trump’s enemies.

These are not the people who want to take him out. This is not Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, congressional Democrats, or the “fake news” media. It’s not even RINO Republicans or that (apparently) fiercest of political combatants, “Ada” Hutchinson.

No, the evidence comes from Trump’s lawyers. The people who were trying to minimize his criminal exposure and push back against his destructive tendencies. The people who were trying to help him.

One of these lawyers, Evan Corcoran, kept trying to help Trump even after he knew he’d been had. For his trouble in representing a former president, Corcoran was subpoenaed and forced by a federal judge and an appellate court to testify. He fought them all the way, struggling to preserve Trump’s attorney-client privilege even though, apparently unbeknownst to Corcoran at the time, Trump had blithely negated the privilege by using Corcoran to provide false information, under oath, in response to a subpoena.

It’s the Trump pattern: Good people try to help wrestle his demons, he gets his kicks out of making unsavory acts of loyalty the price of prestigious jobs, they finally realize the price is too high — usually too late for their own good — and he trashes them as they make their quietus. Rinse and repeat.

Corcoran was not trying to hurt Trump, even though Trump had thought nothing of putting the lawyer’s livelihood at risk. Corcoran provided the lurid testimony reflected in the indictment — including Trump’s suggestions that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he did not have documents marked classified, and that he “pluck” out of a package of documents responsive to the subpoena “anything really bad in there” — because the law required him to, not because he wanted to.

Is the former president being unfairly singled out for prosecution by special counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count indictment? I think so . . . but not for the reasons Trump and his devotees posit.

The problem is not that Democrats, who are leveraging the government’s law-enforcement power for partisan advantage, are going after him, even though Democrats and Beltway big shots — Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, David Petraeus, and (soon) Joe Biden — get a pass. The problem is that Clinton, Berger, Petraeus, and (soon) Biden get a pass.

It’s not that Trump is owed a pass. It’s that every official who is entrusted with access to the nation’s secrets, and who then betrays that trust by willful law violations and cover-ups, should be prosecuted. Every . . . single . . . one.

And none of them has any business near power.

The lesson of the Hillary Clinton precedent is that Joe Biden should be investigated and prosecuted. That’s how the scales of justice are evened out. The fix for a two-tiered justice system is not equal injustice under the law.

As for Trump, say what you want about Democrats being out to destroy him. I know all about that — wrote a book about it, in fact. But if Trump ends up being destroyed in this case, it will be based on the accounts of people who had his best interests at heart.

I don’t believe that Trump’s lawyers, who were trying to help him, would testify — as they have very reluctantly testified — that he tried to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice, unless he really did try to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice.

If you tell me I need to look the other way on that because Hillary Clinton got a pass, I respectfully suggest that you’ve lost your way.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 07:10:02 AM: Quote from: ccp on June 10, 2023, 06:41:31 AM
anti Trump NRO

no surprise

but this time I agree with NRO
we can only hope Trump is not the candidate

of course he will take us all down with him to the end

maybe if he goes to jail he can be placed in same cell where Epstein was.
no tears from me.

You think the DOJ will treat you or me any differently? If Trump went away, do things go back to “normal”?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2023, 07:37:39 AM: we need someone who will not make it all about him/her
but about the more important stuff

perhaps is would be same with DeSantis
but we could at least do without dump stupid childish comments

lying and constantly making things worse

we HAVE TO FIGHT BACK.

but not with some reckless genius/& fool at the same time

I am not looking forward to talking about HIM nonstop for the next 1 and 1/2 yr
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 07:46:00 AM: "If Trump went away, do things go back to “normal”?"

No, but then we could fight for America without spending a goodly % of our time defending/rationalizing/apologizing for him.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 07:57:53 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 07:46:00 AM
"If Trump went away, do things go back to “normal”?"

No, but then we could fight for America without spending a goodly % of our time defending/rationalizing/apologizing for him.

If it's DeSantis, he will be the new Hitler. Unless he has been co-opted, then you get another JEB! that will only peacefully surrender in typical republican failure theater. "Gosh, guys We Tried!!" :roll:

The left WILL NEVER voluntarily give up power EVER again.

They have torn the structures of this country to pieces. None of this is accidental.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2023, 08:48:49 AM: "The left WILL NEVER voluntarily give up power EVER again."

agreed
great one said this a week ago or so
even if we do win the '24 elections
the left will never go away
till they are totally destroyed

I don't see how unless the country collapses and China moves in for the kill
inflation continues it endless upward trend
and enough of the LEFTies *suffer* and see the truth

either way => yes this is very bad
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 09:19:44 AM: Quote from: ccp on June 10, 2023, 08:48:49 AM
"The left WILL NEVER voluntarily give up power EVER again."

agreed
great one said this a week ago or so
even if we do win the '24 elections
the left will never go away
till they are totally destroyed

I don't see how unless the country collapses and China moves in for the kill
inflation continues it endless upward trend
and enough of the LEFTies *suffer* and see the truth

either way => yes this is very bad

When the left that isn’t part time of the inner party suffers, they will be told that it is because of us.

When “reparations” fail to materialize, you in the blue zoos will get pogromed.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 09:49:50 AM: Quote from: G M on June 10, 2023, 09:19:44 AM
Quote from: ccp on June 10, 2023, 08:48:49 AM
"The left WILL NEVER voluntarily give up power EVER again."

agreed
great one said this a week ago or so
even if we do win the '24 elections
the left will never go away
till they are totally destroyed

I don't see how unless the country collapses and China moves in for the kill
inflation continues it endless upward trend
and enough of the LEFTies *suffer* and see the truth

either way => yes this is very bad

When the left that isn’t part time of the inner party suffers, they will be told that it is because of us.

When “reparations” fail to materialize, you in the blue zoos will get pogromed.

This is now, with full bellies and electricity and running water:

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/139/847/082/original/ab9d74211f6da326.mp4

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/139/847/082/original/ab9d74211f6da326.mp4)
Title: Matt Bracken: "The Rats have zero fear of future legal action against them."
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 10:19:09 AM: https://gab.com/Matt_Bracken/posts/110519714125552230

The Rats have zero fear of future legal action against them.

They believe that they own our country and don't give a damn what we think about it.
They assume they will be able to rig and win every election, and they will own every corrupt judge and DA/USAttorney/SA. They have zero fear of legal consequences.

Going forward they will rule America like a one-party police state ruled by the Left.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/032/478/original/445058de5ef73bab.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/032/478/original/445058de5ef73bab.jpg)
Title: Tom Vitton of JW harassed by DOJ in front of grand jury
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 05:56:03 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnMURQgsCeU
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 10, 2023, 05:57:42 PM: second

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-who-ruled-in-trumps-favor-in-previous-matter-assigned-to-new-case_5325494.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-06-10&src_cmp=gv-2023-06-10&utm_medium=email
Title: More subtle than the old Deep State
Post by: G M on June 11, 2023, 10:23:07 AM: https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/112/496/original/49972c68f3ebbbdd.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/112/496/original/49972c68f3ebbbdd.jpg)
Title: Trump judge challenged
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2023, 06:51:13 AM: https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=1bbc291ec07c58e48febbdb68812e89f_64886f11_6d25b5f&selDate=20230613
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2023, 03:58:44 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/republican-lawmaker-warns-trump-supporters-about-falling-into-doj-trap_5329405.html?utm_source=Goodevening&deep_link_sub1=article&source_caller=api&shortlink=zqevocnf&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=gv-2023-06-13&src_src=Goodevening&deep_link_value=5329405&src_cmp=gv-2023-06-13&est=FgkZqQncFoJyqfiHYwJNWC3tfkOYCjHNIDe33rCvloB3eV0diNeIC9WlfVg5LpyLRkfy
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2023, 07:16:47 PM: I thought Trump's speech tonight to be quite strong and his demeanor , , , presidential.

So infuriating the childish excrement like Cuomo was better than DeSantis on Wuhan Virus.
Title: WSJ: The Self Destructive Donald Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2023, 01:15:18 AM: The Self-Destructive Donald Trump
The document indictment is misguided, but he made it easier for his enemies, as he always does.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
June 13, 2023 7:01 pm ET

Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to federal charges on Tuesday, with the typical array of supporters and opponents. It’s depressing to think this could continue for another two years as the indictment and trial dominate the 2024 presidential campaign. Republican primary voters may be the last resort to spare the country this fate.

We’re on record as believing that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s indictment of Mr. Trump is a misguided use of prosecutorial power that could have destructive consequences. It intervenes in a presidential election campaign, unleashing political furies that are impossible to predict. It keeps Mr. Trump the dominant issue of the presidential campaign, denying the country the larger debate the public deserves.

The shame is that this is exactly what both Mr. Trump and the White House want. Mr. Trump would rather not be charged, but he is already brandishing the indictments against him as a campaign credential. He’s all but saying Republicans must nominate him as the only defense Americans have against Democrats and the deep state. Democrats want to run against Mr. Trump because they think he’d be the easiest Republican to beat, or to ruin in office if he does win again.

***
GOP primary voters can benefit from reading the latest Trump indictment and asking what it means for a second Trump term. The facts alleged show that Mr. Trump has again played into the hands of his enemies. His actions were reckless, arrogant and remarkably self-destructive. This is the same Donald Trump they will get if they nominate him for a third time.

Mr. Trump believes he had the right to keep the documents under the Presidential Records Act, and we think he has a stronger case than the press claims. But once he received a subpoena for those documents, Mr. Trump should have known he was at legal peril if he concealed them or lied about having them.

Yet if the indictment is correct, that is precisely what he did. He allegedly suggested to a lawyer that he could “pluck” out a page and not turn it over. In the most striking episode, he brandished a classified document related to a war plan in front of his staff and a writer.

Incredibly, the indictment says he did this while he knew he was being tape-recorded: “Mr. Trump: Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. You attack, and—”

In the same conversation, he allegedly admitted that he hadn’t declassified the document, as he previously told the public he had done with all documents he retained. He thus undercut part of his own potential defense. The narcissism and wretched judgment are familiar, but still hard to believe.

It’s also telling that Mr. Trump is now struggling to find lawyers to replace the two who resigned last week. How can a former President not find a lawyer?

All of this fits the pattern that made Mr. Trump’s Presidency less productive than it could have been. Yes, he was wronged by the false Russia collusion claims. But too often he helped his opponents.

In 2017 he retained James Comey as FBI director against better advice because he thought he could control him. Four months later Mr. Trump undercut his own deputy attorney general’s explanation for firing Mr. Comey by saying he fired him because the FBI director wouldn’t publicly exonerate him. This triggered the Mueller special counsel probe.

Mr. Trump aided his own first impeachment with a phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky looking for dirt on Joe Biden. He undermined his credibility on Covid because he lacked the self-discipline to avoid brawling with reporters who knew they could always goad him.

His role in the disgrace of Jan. 6, 2021, is well known. But had he accepted the 2020 election results, he might now be coasting to the nomination and have an excellent chance to win.

***
If Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee, he is unlikely to defeat Joe Biden. But if he did win, the document fiasco is what a second term would be like. He wouldn’t be able to deliver the conservative policy victories that Republicans want because he can’t control himself. He’d be preoccupied with grievance and what he calls “retribution.” The best people won’t work for him because they see how he mistreated so many loyalists in the first term.

If Republicans really want to defeat Democrats, the press and a hostile bureaucracy, they’ll nominate a candidate who won’t shrink from a fight but will also be smart enough not to blunder into obvious traps.

If Republicans nominate Mr. Trump again, they won’t “own the libs,” as the faddish saying goes. The libs will own them.
Title: WSJ: Clinton Socks drawer case very strong for Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2023, 02:27:32 AM: Trump’s Boxes and Clinton’s Sock Drawer

A president chooses what records to return or keep and the National Archives can’t do anything about it.By Michael BekeshaJune 13, 2023 7:08 pm ET431 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-sock-drawer-and-trumps-indictment-documents-pra-personal-files-13986b28?mod=opinion_lead_pos5#comments_sector)Gift unlocked article

A courtroom sketch of former President Donald Trump in Miami Tuesday with his aide Walt Nauta, far left, and attorneys Chris Kise and Todd Blanche. PHOTO: JANE ROSENBERG/REUTERSAlthough the indictment against Donald Trump (https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/donald-trump) doesn’t cite the Presidential Records Act, the charges are predicated on the law. The indictment came about only because the government thought Mr. Trump took records that didn’t belong to him, and the government raided his house to find any such records.

This should never have happened. The Presidential Records Act allows the president to decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency. And the National Archives and Records Administration can’t do anything about it. I know because I’m the lawyer who lost the “Clinton sock drawer” case.

In 2009, historian Taylor Branch published “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.” The book is based on recordings of Mr. Branch’s 79 meetings with Bill Clinton between Jan. 20, 1993, and Jan. 20, 2001. According to Mr. Branch, the audiotapes preserved not only Mr. Clinton’s thoughts on issues he faced while president, but also some actual events, such as phone conversations. Among them:

• Mr. Clinton calling several U.S. senators and trying to persuade them to vote against an amendment by Sen. John McCain requiring the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia

* Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone call with Rep. William Natcher (D., Ky.) in which the president explained that his reasoning for joining the North American Free Trade Agreement was based on technical forecasts in his presidential briefings.

• Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone conversation with Secretary of State Warren Christopher about a diplomatic impasse over Bosnia.

• Mr. Clinton seeking advice from Mr. Branch on pending foreign-policy decisions such as military involvement in Haiti and possibly easing the embargo of Cuba.

The White House made the audiotapes. Nancy Hernreich, then director of Oval Office operations, set up the meetings between Messrs. Clinton and Branch and was involved in the logistics of the recordings. Did that make them presidential records?

The National Archives and Records Administration was never given the recordings. As Mr. Branch tells it, Mr. Clinton hid them in his sock drawer to keep them away from the public and took them with him when he left office.

My organization, Judicial Watch, sent a Freedom of Information Act request to NARA for the audiotapes. The agency responded that the tapes were Mr. Clinton’s personal records and therefore not subject to the Presidential Records Act or the Freedom of Information Act.

We sued in federal court and asked the judge to declare the audiotapes to be presidential records and, because they weren’t currently in NARA’s possession, compel the government to get them.

In defending NARA, the Justice Department argued that NARA doesn’t have “a duty to engage in a never-ending search for potential presidential records” that weren’t provided to NARA by the president at the end of his term. Nor, the department asserted, does the Presidential Records Act require NARA to appropriate potential presidential records forcibly. The government’s position was that Congress had decided that the president and the president alone decides what is a presidential record and what isn’t. He may take with him whatever records he chooses at the end of his term.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed: “Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office,” she held, “it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”

Judge Jackson added that “the PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President ‘categorized’ and ‘filed separately’ as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only ‘assumes responsibility for the Presidential records.’ . . . PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President.”

I lost because Judge Jackson concluded the government’s hands were tied. Mr. Clinton took the tapes, and no one could do anything about it.

The same is true with Mr. Trump. Although he didn’t keep records in his sock drawer, he gathered newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs, documents and other materials in cardboard boxes. Then Mr. Trump, like Mr. Clinton, took those boxes with him when he left office. As of noon on Jan. 20, 2021, whatever remained at the White House was presidential records. Whatever was taken by Mr. Trump wasn’t. That was the position of the Justice Department in 2010 and the ruling by Judge Jackson in 2012.

A decade later, the government should never have gone searching for potential presidential records. Nor should it have forcibly taken records from Mr. Trump. The government should lose U.S. v. Trump. If the courts decide otherwise, I want those Clinton tapes.

Mr. Bekesha is a senior attorney at Judicial Watch.
Title: ET: Trump prosecution is untested legal theory
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2023, 05:47:29 AM: DONALD TRUMP
IN-DEPTH: Trump Indictment Rests on Untested Legal Theory, Experts Say

'The Espionage Act has never been used to prosecute in this sort of a setting,' says former federal prosecutor
By Petr Svab
June 13, 2023Updated: June 14, 2023
biggersmaller Print

The indictment of former President Donald Trump for holding military documents and obstructing the government from taking them is built on a novel legal theory that has multiple weaknesses, according to several lawyers and other experts.

The case has been portrayed in the media as being about Trump’s retaining classified documents from his presidency. However, the charges sidestep that issue and instead use a clause in the Espionage Act that criminalizes a failure to hand over national defense information. The indictment further alleges that Trump and staffer Waltine Nauta hid some documents when the government demanded them through a subpoena.

The alleged Espionage Act violations impose a high burden of proof and raise the question of whether the statute should have been applied to begin with and, if not, whether the underlying investigation should serve as a basis for obstruction charges, some lawyers told The Epoch Times.

“The key legal issue here is the interplay between the Presidential Records Act and the Espionage Act,” said Will Scharf, a former federal prosecutor.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 stipulates that after a president leaves office, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) takes custody of all his official records.

The law allows former presidents to keep personal documents such as “diaries, journals, or other personal notes” not used for government business.

“If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA,” NARA’s website states.

However, the Presidential Records Act isn’t a criminal statute. If a former president refuses to turn over some documents or claims obviously official documents as personal, the worst he could face is a civil lawsuit.

There’s little case law on such matters. In 2012, Judicial Watch tried to force former President Bill Clinton to turn over dozens of interview tapes he kept from his presidency. Clinton claimed the tapes were personal and the court sided with him. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, went so far as to argue that the court had no way to second-guess a president’s assertion of what is and isn’t personal.

“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” Jackson wrote.

However, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now arguing that former presidents can be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for possession of documents that they kept from their presidencies.

“That’s a totally novel legal issue,” Scharf said. “It’s never been tested before. The Espionage Act has never been used to prosecute in this sort of a setting.”

Some lawyers believe the Espionage Act can’t be used this way because it wasn’t meant to be used in such a fashion. Before 1978, former presidents owned all documents from their presidencies, including any national defense information. There’s never been any suggestion that their holding on to such documents violated the Espionage Act.

“Congress has been very, very clear … that the act that applies to presidents and former presidents is the Presidential Records Act. The act that applies to everyone else is the Espionage Act, which has different requirements,” said Jesse Binnall, a lawyer that represented Trump in another matter.

Mike Davis of the conservative Article III Project voiced a similar opinion.

“Even if President declassifies his presidential records and takes them when he leaves office, he can still get charged under Espionage Act. … Promise that theory won’t fly with Supreme Court,” he said in a tweet.

Criminal Intent
Much of the indictment rests on the allegation that Trump kept national defense documents “willfully”—with criminal intent.

Yet the document falls short in providing evidence for such intent.

On May 11, 2022, the DOJ obtained a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over all documents with classification markings, including electronic ones.

One of the key claims is that Trump instructed Nauta to move boxes of documents around before his lawyer came to search the boxes for documents in response to the subpoena.

Nauta allegedly moved 64 boxes out of a storage room where Trump kept items and documents from his presidency and moved them to Trump’s residence at the resort. Nauta then moved back 30 boxes shortly before Trump’s then-lawyer, Evan Corcoran, searched the storage room for the subpoenaed documents, according to the indictment, which refers to security camera footage obtained from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort via a subpoena.

The indictment alleges that the boxes were moved to hide responsive documents from Corcoran. It presents a text message in which Nauta said Trump told him to put some boxes in his room.

“I think he wanted to pick from them,” Nauta said.

There’s no word of whether Trump, in fact, went through the boxes and if so, what he was looking for.

On Aug. 8, 2022, when the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in West Palm Beach, 102 documents with classified markings were found in the storage room and in Trump’s office.

Some lawyers have argued that Trump should have challenged the subpoena in court because it was too broad. It’s likely that Trump had many documents with classification markings that had been declassified. Reams of such documents are available online.

Also, the subpoena mentioned nothing about national defense information, which doesn’t need to bear classification markings.

The indictment states that Trump’s alleged crime of willfully retaining 31 specific national defense-related documents started on Jan. 21, 2021, after he allegedly “caused” boxes of materials from his term to be shipped to Mar-a-Lago.

Details about moving the boxes to Mar-a-Lago remain unclear. Newsweek reported that 27 boxes were shipped to Trump’s home by accident. Trump’s former lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said the documents were moved by the General Services Administration.

The indictment doesn’t explain how Trump was supposed to know of these specific documents. It presents no evidence of any criminal intention on Trump’s part to take and keep these documents.

“There are serious, serious legal infirmities in the arguments that they’re using,” Scharf said.

If the Espionage Act charges won’t withstand judicial scrutiny, the additional obstruction charges shouldn’t stand on their own, he argued.

“There’s a longstanding DOJ practice that you don’t indict for obstruction, or for really any process-related crime, unless there’s underlying criminality,” Scharf said. “So if the DOJ launches an investigation into something, somebody allegedly obstructs that investigation, but it turns out the investigation itself wasn’t well founded, that typically won’t result in an indictment.”

When it comes to investigations involving Trump, however, prosecutors have commonly brought process-crime charges alone, such as in the cases of Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and his 2016 presidential campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

“I think in this case, especially, you’re seeing this weaponization of process crimes that the FBI has begun to use, where they will, under some flimsy or some circumstantial premise, open an investigation on somebody for something and then during the course of that investigation hope that they can bring charges that are process crimes,” said former FBI agent and whistleblower Steve Friend.

The Clinton Treatment
There are indications that Trump expected to be able to deal with the government similarly to Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In a CNN town hall earlier this year, Trump said that based on the Presidential Records Act, he was allowed to “negotiate” with NARA on what he could and couldn’t keep as personal items. NARA has rejected such an interpretation, but Trump was likely referring to the 2012 Clinton case.

The indictment also indicates that Trump questioned his lawyers on whether he could handle the subpoena similarly to how Hillary Clinton did in 2015, when her lawyers infamously sorted through her emails from her State Department tenure and had about half of them deleted, claiming that they weren’t work-related. The FBI later found out thousands of work-related emails were missing.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked and recounted the Clinton episode multiple times.

Binnall said those were “absolutely valid legal questions” for Trump to raise.

“You’re saying, ‘Well, wait a second. If legally [Clinton lawyers] were able to do this, and it worked, why can’t we do it the same way?’”

Prosecutorial Misconduct
The case has been brought by Jack Smith, a former federal prosecutor appointed special counsel by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Nov. 18, 2022.

Smith has been criticized by Republicans for allowing his prosecutors to go rogue both in this case and in his prior role as head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Binnall recalled how a decade ago, prosecutors under Smith violated a defendant’s constitutional rights before a grand jury, leading the court to dismiss charges against the defendant. In the same case, prosecutors seized his client’s phone and failed to use a filter team to prevent the investigators from seeing Binnall’s privileged communications with his client, he said.

In the Trump case, Smith managed to get a judicial order to pierce Trump’s client-attorney privilege, but that issue could be relitigated, Binnall suggested.

“I think you’re going to see motions to suppress [evidence] based on the violation of attorney-client privilege,” he said.

Trump’s lawyers may also try to remove from trial evidence obtained during the Mar-a-Lago raid on the grounds that the search warrant was overbroad, according to William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who now represents many people charged with relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol protest and riot.

“The issue is the failure to describe ‘with particularity’ the items to be seized,” Shipley wrote in a tweet.

Binnall also predicted attempts to have the case tossed for prosecutorial misconduct.

Parlatore told the media he saw multiple instances of such misconduct when he voluntarily sat down for questioning before a grand jury. One of the prosecutors accused him of “refusing” to answer a question that pertained to privileged attorney-client conversations, and Parlatore had to remind the jurors that he wasn’t refusing but was rather barred by ethical rules from answering, he told CBS News.

There have also been reports that prosecutors implied to the attorney for Nauta that his application for judgeship in Washington could be tied to his client’s willingness to cooperate.

“That is another clear example of prosecutorial misconduct,” Binnall said, arguing that Garland’s appointment of Smith betrayed his bias.

“Personnel is always policy.

“Merrick Garland knew exactly what he was getting when he appointed Jack Smith, the special counsel. He appointed a zealot. He appointed a Trump hater. He appointed somebody that he knew was going to stop at nothing to go after and get Trump.”

The contrast between Smith’s aggressive pursuit of the case compared to FBI’s cautious approach in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails speaks to unequal application of the law, he suggested.

“What we have right here is the very idea that you would always find an excuse to give a pass to people like [President] Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and always find an excuse to go after Donald Trump,” Binnall said.
Title: Just a reminder...
Post by: G M on June 14, 2023, 06:31:12 AM: https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/378/495/original/cb3939441f11182e.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/378/495/original/cb3939441f11182e.jpg)

Will Andy McCarthy point this out?
Title: Soros' Special Persecutor
Post by: G M on June 14, 2023, 06:40:12 AM: https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/06/12/who-is-jack-smith-bidens-special-counsel-lives-abroad-married-an-obama-devotee-linked-to-soros-clinton/
Title: Re: Just a reminder...
Post by: G M on June 15, 2023, 06:36:24 AM: Quote from: G M on June 14, 2023, 06:31:12 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/378/495/original/cb3939441f11182e.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/140/378/495/original/cb3939441f11182e.jpg)

Will Andy McCarthy point this out?

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/back-up-plan-jack-smith-corrupt-prosecutor-andrew/

It's like they will do whatever it takes...
Title: Tom Fitton and DJT
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2023, 07:12:16 AM: https://nypost.com/2023/06/15/trump-rejected-lawyers-efforts-to-settle-classified-docs-case-report/

:-o

Frankly, I am inclined Trump would preferred the circus rather then make a deal and do so irregardless of Tom's "advice".

Nothing more pleases him then that which places HIM at the center of daily public arguments.

Plus he presumes the fight will rally the MAGA cult heads.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 08:27:24 AM: Do I read correctly between the lines that Trump's ex-lawyers are leaking?!?

If Trump/Fitton and the losing lawyer in the Clinton Sock Drawer case are correct in saying that Trump is correct under the Presidential Records Act, why should he have bent the knee?

If I understand correctly here, the propaganda pressure we are seeing brought here (including e.g. Bill Barr) is based upon the tautology that the National Archives Act is controlling. If the Presidential Records Act is controlling, then does not the whole case fall apart?
Title: does this answer your question
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2023, 08:59:04 AM: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bill-barr-mocks-mark-levins-ridiculous-defense-against-trump-charges-its-a-sideshow/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 09:25:52 AM: "What did he do? He engaged in outrageous act of obstruction and deception that obstructed that subpoena. And that is wrong. That’s a law. I mean, that’s a violation of law. That’s a serious problem for him. What he did was, according to the indictment, he took a lot of the boxes away, hid them from his lawyer, told his lawyer to go and search what remained, and then cause that lawyer to file a statement to the court saying that there had been a complete search. And if anyone did that, that would be obstruction. So that is why I think the Justice Department pulled the trigger, and that’s the central part of this case. So talking about whether he had the right to have the documents or not. Well, it’s it’s ridiculous. It’s a sideshow! You cannot defend what he did with that subpoena using."

From that article.

Seems almost as strong as deleting governmental 33,000 emails, then bleaching them, then smashing them with a hammer after leaving them vulnerable to hacking on a server in a bathroom as Colorado.

A legit argument , , , I suppose , , , but are we to spend our time yet again arguing such distinctions?

I remain with DeSantis.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 15, 2023, 09:33:43 AM: Deep State Barr helped hide Hunter’s laptop while the Dems impeached Trump.
Like Benedict Pence, a scumbag traitor.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 09:25:52 AM
"What did he do? He engaged in outrageous act of obstruction and deception that obstructed that subpoena. And that is wrong. That’s a law. I mean, that’s a violation of law. That’s a serious problem for him. What he did was, according to the indictment, he took a lot of the boxes away, hid them from his lawyer, told his lawyer to go and search what remained, and then cause that lawyer to file a statement to the court saying that there had been a complete search. And if anyone did that, that would be obstruction. So that is why I think the Justice Department pulled the trigger, and that’s the central part of this case. So talking about whether he had the right to have the documents or not. Well, it’s it’s ridiculous. It’s a sideshow! You cannot defend what he did with that subpoena using."

From that article.

Seems almost as strong as deleting governmental 33,000 emails, then bleaching them, then smashing them with a hammer after leaving them vulnerable to hacking on a server in a bathroom as Colorado.

A legit argument , , , I suppose , , , but are we to spend our time yet again arguing such distinctions?

I remain with DeSantis.
Title: Intimidating lawyers from representing Trump?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 09:39:54 AM: Unaware of that. How did he do that?

Meanwhile , , ,

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19725/donald-trump-lawyer
Title: Re: Intimidating lawyers from representing Trump?
Post by: G M on June 15, 2023, 09:49:29 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 09:39:54 AM
Unaware of that. How did he do that?

Meanwhile , , ,

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19725/donald-trump-lawyer

https://www.dailynews.com/2022/12/25/fbi-suppression-of-the-hunter-biden-laptop/amp/

The FBI had Hunter’s laptop while Barr was AG. It might have been important evidence in the impeachment, would it not?

https://www.dailynews.com/2022/12/25/fbi-suppression-of-the-hunter-biden-laptop/amp/
Title: Trump Strategy Options
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 02:35:10 PM: So how is it the AG Barr would be expected to know what the FBI was hiding?

===========================

By Jeff Mordock - The Washington Times - Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Former President Donald Trump has multiple defenses available to fight federal criminal charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, legal scholars say.

Among the strongest legal options for Mr. Trump are invoking the Presidential Records Act and suppressing notes from one of his attorneys.

The sprawling, 37-count indictment filed last week by special counsel Jack Smith claims Mr. Trump recklessly handled some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including documents about nuclear programs and potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies.

Mr. Trump, who pleaded not guilty to the charges on Tuesday in a federal courtroom in Miami, is also accused of blocking the government’s efforts to retrieve the classified materials.

The severity of the charges might make it difficult for Mr. Trump’s legal team to mount a defense, but analysts say some avenues are open to the former president.

“Obviously, this is a serious case, but I think it is a case that could be won by the defense. There are areas of potential vulnerability for the government,” said Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where Mr. Trump was charged.

SEE ALSO: Trump shatters political norms again: Charges ‘will guarantee his nomination’

“The government is relying on testimony from Trump‘s lawyer. It doesn’t always work out when lawyers are put on the stand who cooperated against their own client. That’s just one area of potential vulnerability for the government,” Mr. Coffey continued.

Todd Blanche, a lawyer representing Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, declined to comment on possible defenses.

Mr. Trump and his aides might have already raised the strongest defense: that a president can take any documents he wants under the Presidential Records Act.

The 1978 statute gives the National Archives and Records Administration complete ownership and control of presidential records at the end of an administration but makes a distinction between official records and personal documents.

Defense attorneys could argue that Mr. Trump’s presidential authority granted him absolute power to declassify documents. Mr. Trump has already made that assertion. A president can take government property as personal documents once they are declassified.

“It would radically deflate the government’s case if the defense managed to make a successful argument about the Presidential Records Act,” said Joseph Moreno, a former federal prosecutor.

The full scope of the Presidential Records Act has never been fully litigated and is open to different legal interpretations.

William Barr, who served as attorney general in Mr. Trump’s administration, threw cold water on the idea of invoking the Presidential Records Act. During a recent Fox News interview, he called it “facially ridiculous.”

“They’re the government’s documents — they’re official records,” Mr. Barr said. “They’re not his personal records. Battle plans for an attack on another country or Defense Department documents about our capabilities are in no universe Donald J. Trump’s personal documents.”

Former Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore told CNN last week that the law gives outgoing presidents two years after they leave office to review all their documents to determine which papers are personal and which are presidential.

Mr. Trump was not charged with violating the Presidential Records Act, which has no defined penalties. The statute is not mentioned at all in the 49-page indictment.

“The fact that the Justice Department doesn’t address it in the indictment makes me think they are a little wary of it,” Mr. Moreno said. “I would be all over that if I was on Trump’s team and make that my No. 1 target.”

The various interpretations of the Presidential Records Act likely mean federal appellate courts and, ultimately, the Supreme Court would need to decide its full power and limitations before Mr. Trump’s legal team can invoke it as a defense.

“It’s extraordinarily rare to get an appeal before the case goes to trial, but there is nothing about this case that is normal,” Mr. Coffey said.

Regardless of how a defense involving the Presidential Records Act might shake out, Mr. Trump clearly believes it’s his strongest argument.

“Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all of this,” he wrote on Truth Social after the indictment was unsealed. He repeated that claim in a speech in Georgia over the weekend.

Another potential attack for the defense would be notes written by Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys.

The notes, first recorded into an iPhone and put down on paper, provide some of the prosecution’s strongest evidence. They suggest that Mr. Trump urged Mr. Corcoran to block government investigators from retrieving the classified material and suggested that Mr. Corcoran lie to investigators or withhold the documents altogether.

Mr. Smith gained access to the notes under the crime-fraud exception. The exception allows prosecutors to remove the shield of attorney-client privilege if they have evidence that a client used legal advice to further a crime.

Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that Mr. Smith’s team could access Mr. Corcoran’s notes under the crime-fraud exception.

That means Mr. Corcoran, hired by Mr. Trump to fend off prosecutors in the classified documents case, could be a key prosecution witness.

Mr. Corcoran recused himself in April from representing the former president in the documents case but is representing Mr. Trump in other matters.

Legal analysts say the use of Mr. Corcoran’s notes opens up two areas of attack for Mr. Trump’s team.

First, the defense could argue that Mr. Trump’s statements to his attorney were taken out of context and he was asking what is allowed or not allowed under the law.

Defense attorneys also could point out that Mr. Smith asked a federal judge in the more left-leaning District to decide the crime-fraud exception while indicting Mr. Trump in Southern Florida.

“Trump’s team could argue the law for the government is more favorable in D.C. and the government did some maneuvering to get a home-field advantage,” Mr. Coffey said. “The defense can ask a Florida federal judge to reconsider it, arguing precedent is different there.”

If none of these attempts derails the charges, legal analysts say, Mr. Trump’s team could seek trial delays with other motions.

They could keep pushing back the case so it would go to trial after the election. If Mr. Trump wins the presidency, either the attorney general he appoints could withdraw the case or he could pardon himself.

“Even if Trump’s lawyers don’t try to delay it, it is possible that it won’t go to trial until after the election,” Mr. Moreno said. “Classified documents make this more cumbersome because there is an entire process that needs to be gone through to bring classified documents into a civilian court.”

• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
Title: WSJ backs Trump Case Judge from calls to recuse
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 02:41:11 PM: The Recuseniks Come for the Trump Case Judge
Judge Aileen Cannon gets the criminal document case, and she need not recuse herself.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Updated June 14, 2023 6:55 pm ET

The federal case against President Trump for allegedly mishandling national secrets has landed, by random assignment, on the bench of district court Judge Aileen Cannon. The anti-Trump partisans are now shouting that she must disqualify herself, since the law says judges must step aside if their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned.”

President Trump appointed Judge Cannon in 2020. But that can’t be the standard for recusal, or hundreds of judges would be unable to preside, including one third of the Supreme Court. Half the country would argue that there are reasonable questions on the other side about whether Mr. Trump can get impartiality from progressive jurists named by a Democratic President. Most federal judges take their oath of office seriously, regardless of which party is in power.

The more detailed argument against Judge Cannon is that she gave favorable rulings to Mr. Trump in an earlier stage of the case, and her judgment was ultimately overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s true as far as it goes. After the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, she ordered the appointment of a special master to review the seized documents, while temporarily blocking the feds from using them for criminal investigative purposes.

Judge Cannon wrote that she was taking into account “the undeniably unprecedented nature of the search of a former President’s residence,” while warning that Mr. Trump “ultimately may not be entitled to return of much of the seized property or to prevail on his anticipated claims of privilege.” This was legally erroneous, the 11th Circuit soon said in overruling her.

Applying a multifactor test from a 1975 case, Richey v. Smith, a trio of appeals judges said the situation did not “favor exercising equitable jurisdiction.” To start, the feds had not demonstrated “callous disregard” for Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights, as precedent requires. His claim of “injury” from having investigators examine his sensitive documents would equally apply to “nearly every subject of a search warrant.”

The unsigned opinion concludes: “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations.” Two of the judges were Trump appointees. The third was Judge William Pryor, who was on Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court short list.

This is a strong signal that Judge Cannon was wrong on the law. But district courts are reversed all the time, much as appeals courts are overruled by the Supreme Court. That’s how it works. Perhaps Judge Cannon’s mistake was clear to the 11th Circuit, but she’s relatively new to the bench. Any ruling she makes in the Trump case is bound to be appealed to the 11th Circuit, and probably the Supreme Court, so she wouldn’t be the final legal word.

Yet Judge Cannon is being treated as if she shows up for arguments wearing a black robe and a MAGA hat. Democratic and media recuseniks always do this. If they had their way, half the Supreme Court would have to sit out important cases, and we don’t have to tell you which half.
Title: A McCarthy interview : Trump no defense
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2023, 03:04:32 PM: https://hughhewitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/06-15hhs-mccarthy.mp3
Title: AMcC: Where JW's defense of Trump goes wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 03:09:24 PM: This seems strong to me, even though it is from Deep State Andy ;-)

Where Judicial Watch’s Defense of Trump Goes Wrong
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 14, 2023 3:05 PM

Michael Bekesha, the ‘Clinton sock drawer’ lawyer, misses the distinction between agency records and presidential records.
I’ve already extensively addressed why the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is not a viable defense against charges that President Trump unlawfully and willfully retained national-defense information under Section 793(e) of the federal criminal code (which, in hope of avoiding Senator Lindsey Graham’s conniptions, I’ll refrain from calling the Espionage Act). So I’ll state the main point as succinctly as I can: Agency records are not presidential records.

Trump’s case is about agency records regarding the national defense — mainly, classified intelligence reporting generated by U.S. spy agencies. The PRA, by contrast, addresses documents and other records generated by and for the president in the carrying out of his duties.

Significantly, the PRA explicitly excludes agency records from the definition of “presidential records.” Under Section 2201(2)(B) the term presidential records “does not include any documentary materials that are . . . official records of an agency.” As if the term agency were not clear enough, the PRA incorporates the definition set forth in Section 552 of Title 5, U.S. Code. (That definition has been moved. In 1978, when the PRA was enacted, it was in Section 552(e); it is now in Section 552(f).) That provision broadly instructs that an agency is

any executive department, military department, Government corporation, Government controlled corporation, or other establishment in the executive branch of the Government (including the Executive Office of the President), or any independent regulatory agency.

Further, the provision broadly defines an agency record to include any information the agency or its contractors maintain in connection with the agency’s operations. Patently, intelligence reports compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, NSA, FBI, and other U.S. national-security agencies are agency records. They are not presidential records by definition and by common sense — i.e., these agencies are created by Congress, their operations are authorized by Congress, they are underwritten with taxpayer funds by Congress, and Congress is empowered to conduct oversight of their activities, which necessitates that agency officials and lawmakers have access to their records.

It is no surprise, then, that the PRA excludes agency records from its coverage.

The remorseless fact that agency records are not presidential records harpoons today’s attempt by Michael Bekesha in the Wall Street Journal to stake out a PRA defense of Trump based on an inapposite case, Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). As I’ve pointed out (here and here), Trump and his defenders have stitched this lower-court ruling to the PRA as a purported defense. Amusingly, Bekesha proclaims that he is well positioned to defend Trump because he is “the lawyer who lost the ‘Clinton sock drawer’ case” — meaning he is now arguing against the position he argued in court.

To repeat, that case did not involve agency records — much less classified reporting by the government’s intelligence agencies. It involved nonclassified tape recordings that President Clinton made with historian Taylor Branch in anticipation of compiling a history of his presidency.

Bekesha was right to argue in the case that the tapes were presidential records, as the PRA defines that term, and that Clinton should thus have archived them with NARA, in accordance with PRA procedures. Instead, the president hid them in a White House sock drawer until his term ended, then took them with him (along with furniture, china, art, and other property the Clintons swiped). Nevertheless, the bottom-line issue in the case was whether NARA had civil-law authority under the PRA to compel Clinton to archive the tapes post-presidency (which would have helped Judicial Watch get access to them, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act).

That has nothing to do with the issue in the Trump case, which is whether the Justice Department has criminal-law authority to enforce Section 793 in connection with Trump’s unlawful retention of classified agency records — which, to repeat for the umpteenth time, are not presidential records under the PRA.

Note, also, Bekesha’s sleight of hand. He claims that then District Judge Amy Berman Jackson “concluded the government’s hands were tied. Mr. Clinton took the tapes, and no one could do anything about it” (emphasis added). But that’s not what she concluded. She ruled that NARA’s hands were tied, which was the only question before her. She did not and could not credibly have said that no arm of the federal government was authorized to take action to retrieve the tapes. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but in 2009, when Judicial Watch began complaining about Clinton’s hoarding of presidential records, the Obama Justice Department had no interest in taking action against the former two-term Democratic president, who had appointed Obama’s attorney general (Eric Holder) as his own deputy attorney general, and who was married to Obama’s secretary of state.

Judicial Watch was thus reduced to nudging NARA to do its job by trying to retrieve the tapes. But Jackson, an Obama appointee, concluded that, as between NARA and Clinton, it was the president, during his presidency, who got to decide whether a record covered by the PRA was either a presidential record that had to be archived, or a personal record that the president could keep for himself.

This goes to a weakness in the Trump PRA arguments that I’ve already highlighted. Even if we ignore that the PRA does not cover agency records, the only documents a president is lawfully permitted to keep without archiving are what the PRA defines as personal records. These are such items as diaries or journals — not agency intelligence reports.

In any event, Judge Jackson’s ruling is unavailing for Trump because the agency reports of national-defense information that he is being prosecuted over are expressly excluded from PRA coverage. But that said, to the extent Jackson reasoned — or is at least being construed as having reasoned — that the president is at liberty to ignore the PRA, that’s just wrong.

Under Section 2203, the president and his staff are supposed to designate documentary materials (which include audio recordings) as either presidential records or personal records “upon their creation or receipt.” Moreover, if the president wants to dispose of materials rather than archiving them, Section 2203 directs that he consult with the archivist and, if they disagree, allow the archivist the opportunity to consult with Congress.

Clearly, Clinton did not comply with the PRA in good faith — what a shock. Berman found that the PRA (a) did not enable NARA to second-guess Clinton’s determination that the tapes were personal records because, implicitly, he had made that decision during his presidency; and (b) did not empower NARA to retrieve the documents from Clinton. On the latter, it’s true that the PRA has no enforcement provisions (we’ll come back to that in a second); on the former, even if NARA lacked its own authority, it could have referred the matter to Congress or the Justice Department to take any action they deemed appropriate. The fact that the judge and NARA had no authority to force other arms of government to take action did not mean that those other arms of government lacked authority to take action — they just lacked interest in taking action.

On the matter of the PRA’s enforcement provisions, Bekesha’s op-ed argument would have more bite if we were talking about what the Biden Justice Department did in connection with the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, as opposed to the Mar-a-Lago indictment.

Recall, with respect to the search warrant, prosecutors and the FBI claimed there was probable cause, not only of Section 793 and obstruction offenses, but also of another criminal statute, Section 2071, which prohibits removing and concealing government documents or files — not just national-defense information but any information.

At the time, I was among the commentators who pointed out that the Justice Department’s inclusion of Section 2071 was controversial. It was thrown into the mix because, for 18 months, NARA had been trying to force Trump to give back all of the government records in his possession. In addition to over 300 documents bearing classification markings, Trump had caused the shipment from the White House to Mar-a-Lago of thousands of other government documents that had never been archived. Trump thumbed his nose at NARA, and NARA could do nothing about it because — as we’ve seen — the PRA does not have enforcement provisions. Had Congress wished to have the statute’s procedures criminally enforced, it could have included in the PRA such crimes as those prescribed in Section 2071. To the contrary, lawmakers decided that would be overkill; they instead trusted presidents to work in good faith with NARA to comply with the PRA’s requirements.

Consequently, by adding the Section 2071 offense to its search warrant, and exploiting that as a basis to seize, not only documents marked classified, but all government records in Trump’s possession, prosecutors were, in effect, amending the PRA to include criminal-enforcement provisions that Congress had declined to incorporate.

In writing the indictment, Biden Special Counsel Smith refrained from including the Section 2071 crime that DOJ had put in the search warrant. This was prudent, especially since Section 2071 had already served its purpose: It expanded the scope of the search warrant enough to enable the FBI to do what NARA couldn’t — retrieve the thousands of files. NARA and DOJ did not want to prosecute Trump for violating the PRA, they just wanted to archive these materials in accordance with the PRA.

Hypothetically, though, if Smith had charged a 2071 offense in the indictment, it would have set up a legal controversy: Was the Justice Department merely enforcing Section 2071, as it is permitted to do, or was it using Section 2071 to criminalize the PRA — i.e., to rewrite Congress’s statute, which it is not permitted to do?

My guess is that the courts would have sided with the prosecutors. The clear terms of Section 2071 indicate that Congress intended it to apply to government officials. Plus, having failed to comply with the PRA’s terms, Trump would have been ill-suited to claim that the PRA gave him immunity from a Section 2071 prosecution. But the issue is not free from doubt.

For what it’s worth, I doubt that Judicial Watch v. NARA would have helped Trump much in this hypothetical situation. Though the former president is understandably treating the “Clinton sock drawer” case as if it were an exalted precedent up there with Marbury v. Madison, it is a really just a questionable opinion by a district court judge who decided, a dozen years after Clinton left office, not to challenge his noncompliance with PRA strictures under circumstances where neither NARA nor the Obama Justice Department had any interest in pursuing the matter. The argument that Michael Bekesha made during the case was better than the antithetical one he posits in the Wall Street Journal today.

But that’s beside the point. To be sure, former President Trump will have arguments to make against the indictment brought by special counsel Smith. But there is nothing illegitimate about the government’s enforcement of both Section 793’s protection of national-defense information and the obstruction statutes. The government’s vital interest in enforcing those criminal laws is patent. And unlike the search warrant, there is no plausible argument that the indictment impermissibly rewrites the PRA — a civil-law provision that applies only to presidential records, not to the agency records at issue in Trump’s prosecution, let alone national-security agency records of secret intelligence.

Andrew C. McCarthy

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
Title: NRO: How to read the indictment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 07:09:33 PM: second

How to Read the Trump Boxes Indictment
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
June 15, 2023 10:54 AM

Don’t let knee-jerk partisan tribalism prevent you from reading the Trump boxes indictment critically.
It’s tempting to retreat immediately into partisan and tribal trenches when confronted with something like the federal indictment of Donald Trump for retaining and concealing boxes of sensitive and classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. There is a powerful pull to view the whole thing solely through the lens of what you already thought of Trump, or of his legal pursuers, or of the Justice Department and the FBI.

Those things matter. But the facts matter, the law matters, and the spirit and practice of due process matter in distinguishing what is true from what is not. A thing as consequential as the first-ever federal indictment of a former president demands that we scrutinize it with real seriousness.

Cause for Mistrust

There are some glaringly conspicuous reasons why conservatives and Republicans are right to greet this indictment with skepticism, and it is reasonable for that attitude to animate our analysis of the indictment.

First, of course, it is an indictment. An indictment is not evidence or a verdict; it is simply a series of accusations. The legal system presumes the innocence of the defendant precisely because the facts alleged in an indictment don’t always end up getting proven at trial, after defense lawyers get to poke holes in them or present their own side of the case. The legal presumption of innocence doesn’t bar us, in the court of political opinion, from believing the truth of allegations that seem well-supported by evidence, but as a social value it still cautions us not to jump straight to the guilty verdict without assessing the credibility of the allegations.

Second, we have crossed a Rubicon here. No president before Trump has ever been indicted. No leading candidate for a major-party presidential nomination has ever been indicted. While the Manhattan district attorney was the first to cross that line, special counsel Jack Smith reports to the Department of Justice, which reports to the sitting president. Joe Biden defeated Trump three years ago and would face him again if both men (their parties’ current leaders in the polls) win their respective nominations. And for all of Trump’s political liabilities, he currently leads Biden by two points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup. The political incentive for the Biden DOJ to damage Trump politically is powerful.

As I have argued before, the unprecedented nature of such an indictment demands that it meet a high standard of clear legal violations that are regularly enforced. That standard seems to be met here — albeit on the basis of charges that were famously not brought against Hillary Clinton in a similarly egregious situation.

Third, the political incentives for Biden and his administration are even more specific. It is well known that Biden and his political team believe, with good reason, that Trump would be an easier general-election opponent than another Republican. Democrats are not above meddling in Republican primaries to pick their favored opponents; they spent tens of millions of dollars on this precise strategy in 2022, almost always supporting candidates who identified with Trump. They know perfectly well that Republican voters will rally around Trump if he is being criminally charged by Joe Biden’s administration for the very crimes that Hillary and Biden himself have been given a pass on. This is a particular reason to mistrust this indictment.

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Fourth, the pursuers of Trump in general, and federal law enforcement in particular, have severely damaged their credibility in recent years in ways that should subject their work to more public skepticism. Bragg’s indictment is comically shoddy, abusive, and full of obvious legal defects. The Russiagate investigation was, as we have seen, launched to investigate nonexistent crimes on the basis of an FBI fraud on the FISA court. The Justice Department under Merrick Garland has become frequently indistinguishable from a left-wing blog, going easy on literal left-wing bomb-throwers and rioters; slow-walking serious investigations of the Biden family while stonewalling congressional demands for information; and using its law-enforcement powers to build political narratives. That last objective includes compiling bogus statistics, branding parents complaining to school boards as domestic terrorists, and using heavy-handed and intimidating tactics to bring abusive charges against pro-lifers. The DOJ has not been especially honest with the public about this very investigation. Regardless of whether you entered the past eight years with a lot of faith in the FBI and the Department of Justice or very little, any rational American must have less confidence in their integrity, fairness, candor, and sobriety than we did in 2015.

Mistrust, but Verify

All of those background reasons for skepticism should weigh on how we read the indictment. None of them counsel for simply pretending that this whole thing is just another “hoax.”

I spent a lot of my two-decade career as a lawyer reading allegations — usually in civil complaints, sometimes in criminal indictments. There are four possible ways in which allegations can mislead the reader:

The allegations are factually false.
The allegations, whether true or not, can’t be proven by admissible evidence.
The allegations leave out important context that would lead to a different conclusion.
The allegations don’t actually add up to a violation of the law.
Consider the possibility here of each of the four.

False Allegations

Putting phony facts in an indictment signed off on by this many levels of review would require, in essence, a conspiracy. Now, conspiracies are real sometimes: This very indictment alleges one, and the Durham Report details something that functioned very much like a conspiracy even if it wasn’t an entirely formal one. It is hardly unheard-of for prosecutors to allege things that end up being revealed as untrue. But in considering any theory of a conspiracy, it is worth asking what one is being asked to believe without evidence, and how many people would need to be in on it. That should guide our sense of what might be false in this indictment, and what is very unlikely to be false.

Despite all the flaws of the DOJ and the FBI, they remain professional organizations. Even given the decline in rigor and norms of ethical behavior with the spread of progressivism within the legal profession, lawyers and law enforcement agents still mostly know how and why to be careful and cover themselves. If nothing else, their willingness to push the envelope will vary based on what they think they can get away with. And this is all being done under the oversight of Jack Smith, who is by no means a Democratic partisan, nor a senior citizen like Robert Mueller who may not have been on top of everything his staff was doing.

This matters a lot when a public pleading is filed that initiates a legal process that’s expected to end up before a judge and/or a jury. That is the case with a criminal indictment of a wealthy, powerful, public man who has every incentive to fight the charges tooth and nail. With one conspicuous exception — I’ll get to that in a moment — everything in this indictment needs to stand up in court.

One of the major reasons why the Russiagate investigation was so rife with abuse was that it was initiated as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal investigation, and it sought warrants from the FISA court, which hears sealed applications that are rarely seen by the public. The people who used shoddy evidence to get warrants thought those warrant applications would never see the light of day. The more true-believing members of the investigation thought the warrants would unveil things explosive enough that nobody would look too closely at how they got the original warrants. Not so here.

Moreover, it is worth recalling that even the Russiagate story was not a complete hoax. It was absolutely the case that Donald Trump, his family, and members of his campaign had various unsavory ties to Russia, said things publicly suggestive of undue sympathy for Vladimir Putin, and expressed both public and private interest in receiving political dirt from Russian sources (just as Trump himself was later impeached for trolling for political dirt from the president of Ukraine). All of that was real, and remains real in spite of the misconduct of the FBI and the Justice Department. The phony part of the Russiagate investigation was in the connective tissue between that conduct and the legal process: “Collusion” isn’t a real crime, there was never any evidence of Trump conspiring with Russians to do anything illegal or anything that affected the outcome of the 2016 election, warrants were sought and obtained on the basis of partisan and foreign-sourced (sometimes Russian-sourced) political-opposition research, etc. It wasn’t all invented. But vitally important parts were.

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It is quite clear that a lot of what is in the boxes indictment is true; that doesn’t mean all of it is. We know, because there’s been an extensive public controversy, adversarial legal proceedings, and public admissions by Trump and his representatives, that Trump took a lot of records with him when he left the White House, brought them to Mar-a-Lago, and ended up having them seized by the FBI when it raided the resort last August. That much isn’t really even in dispute. Nor are the public statements by Trump that are cited here as evidence of his understanding of the importance of secure handling of classified materials.

Next, there is the stuff in the indictment that comes from documentary, photographic, or recorded evidence. It is always possible, but highly unlikely, that this is fabricated. A lot of people would need to be in on that. There’s quite a lot of it here, and it’s damning. It would be a giant fiasco for the DOJ and the FBI if the photographs in the indictment were faked or the recordings and text messages described weren’t real. I don’t think I’m going far out on a limb assuming that they all exist and are genuine. I will be legitimately shocked if they are not.

Then, there’s the evidence that comes from witness testimony. This is where the fewest people need to be misbehaving in order for the allegations to be false. In a criminal case, the likeliest source of false allegations in an indictment comes from trusting the word of witness testimony. That is often the testimony of a cooperating witness or co-conspirator who tries to project his own criminal conduct onto the defendant, or who exaggerates in order to cut a deal. Even in complex white-collar cases where there appears to be a serious paper trail, it can sometimes be the case that a witness tells a story that adds crucial context to the documents, but that context turns out to be false and it wasn’t exposed before the grand jury because there was no defense lawyer around to cross-examine the witness.

Nearly all of the testimony that would support the factual allegations in this case, however, would come from Donald Trump’s own employees, mainly his lawyers. It seems unlikely that these are hostile witnesses, even after he hung them out to dry and tried to get them blamed for his own misconduct in misleading the National Archives and Records Administration and the grand jury. Nor is it likely that these are people who committed crimes on their own initiative and are belatedly trying to pin those on Trump. Nobody else had the opportunity to move deeply classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, or a comparable motive to lie to conceal their presence there.

As Andy McCarthy explains:

The evidence comes from Trump’s lawyers. The people who were trying to minimize his criminal exposure and push back against his destructive tendencies. The people who were trying to help him.

One of these lawyers, Evan Corcoran, kept trying to help Trump even after he knew he’d been had. For his trouble in representing a former president, Corcoran was subpoenaed and forced by a federal judge and an appellate court to testify. He fought them all the way, struggling to preserve Trump’s attorney-client privilege. . . .

Corcoran was not trying to hurt Trump, even though Trump had thought nothing of putting the lawyer’s livelihood at risk. Corcoran provided the lurid testimony reflected in the indictment — including Trump’s suggestions that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he did not have documents marked classified, and that he “pluck” out of a package of documents responsive to the subpoena “anything really bad in there” — because the law required him to, not because he wanted to.

The other main source of witness testimony in this indictment will come from the FBI agents who conducted the raid on Mar-a-Lago. That brings us to . . .

Unprovable Allegations

Now, we get to the point at which the government may actually have a serious problem. It’s both a practical problem in trying the case, and a legitimate perception problem in convincing the public of the legitimacy of this case. There are crucial pieces of the indictment that the jury will never see. We have many photographs of boxes, but what was in them?

That raises the specter of the same sorts of “Deep State” shenanigans that plagued Russiagate. The things that were done to impose a process-is-the-punishment investigation on Trump then may come back to haunt the FBI and the DOJ now that they really do seem to have Trump dead to rights. And if they fail as a result, it will be their own fault.

Thirty-one of the 37 counts in the indictment are under 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), a section added in 1950 to the Espionage Act of 1917. Let’s break it into its five elements:

[1] Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note (the “Unauthorized Possession” requirement)

[2] relating to the national defense. . . . (the “National Defense Information” requirement)

[3] which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation. . . . (the “Potential to Injure” requirement)

[4] willfully retains the same (the “Willful Retention” requirement); and

[5] fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it [commits a crime] (the “Failure to Deliver” requirement).

How will the government prove its case? Consider the National Defense Information requirement and the Potential to Injure requirement. The statute doesn’t say anything about classified documents. Nor should it. The classification system is designed to protect information that relates to the national defense, whose disclosure could injure the United States and/or give advantage to a foreign nation. The fact that a document is classified is certainly relevant: It means somebody looked at this and decided that those elements were met, and it puts the defendant on notice that this may contain highly sensitive information. But we all know that not everything that is classified actually meets the legal requirements for classification. A person charged with a criminal violation is entitled to contest whether a classified document actually contains non-public information relating to the national defense.

Rather than have guilt or innocence depend on proof of classification status, the statute requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the contents of the document in fact related to the national defense, and that the defendant had reason to believe that the information in the document could meet the Potential to Injure requirement.

Here’s the catch: The jury will never see the documents themselves and make their own assessment. If they really are sensitive national-security documents such as potential U.S. war plans, satellite battle maps, and assessments of American vulnerabilities, the government can’t let them become public. If they’re not that sensitive, the prosecution can’t get them declassified without admitting that they’re not sensitive and losing the case. To some extent, the prosecution needs to bring people who have seen the documents — including the FBI agents who testify that these are the same documents they took from Mar-a-Lago, and that nobody planted anything in the haul from that search — and tell the jury, “Trust us.”

That might be a tough sell inside the courtroom; it’s a very hard sell in the court of public opinion. Of course, the legal system has established ways of presenting evidence of the contents of a document that no longer exists or is otherwise unavailable for the jury’s review. Agents can testify that they reviewed the documents, and assuming Trump is able to hire lawyers with adequate security clearances, they can review the documents and cross-examine those witnesses. The indictment offers summaries, and a chart of such summaries (perhaps with more detail) can be offered to the jury. Prosecutors might produce redacted versions of some documents that illustrate the classification markings and give some indication of the originating agency.

This is an incredibly laborious process that could consume months of hotly contested pre-trial proceedings. Trump and his lawyers may do everything possible to make it hard to present this case. There is a long-standing “state secrets privilege” against putting sensitive documents in evidence, but the corollary is that courts sometimes find that a case simply cannot be fairly tried without them.

If you’re inclined to think that a large segment of the national-security state is bitter enough at Trump to set him up for this sort of charge, I confess that there’s not much I can do to persuade you that Trump will have a fair day in court to demand that the government prove otherwise. One thing working in the government’s favor, however, is that Trump was apparently stupid enough to actually wave around some of these documents in front of witnesses (possibly including Kid Rock), even in recorded conversations, while admitting that they were sensitive documents he wasn’t supposed to show them. That will make it a lot harder to claim that this is all nothing but a frame-up.

A second problem for prosecutors: Corcoran’s testimony was only elicited before the grand jury based on a decision that the attorney-client privilege had been abused in furtherance of a crime. That evidence will probably be admissible as a result, but there is sure to be a second effort by Trump’s lawyers to get it excluded.

Missing Context and Legal Flaws

Having gone on long enough, I’ll skim briefly over the final two issues now; but we may see more of them later, and they are related. In addition to the Espionage Act counts, there are six counts of varying types of obstruction of justice. Notwithstanding some floundering efforts to the contrary, none of these counts involves an obvious legal flaw. That said, the Willfulness requirement means that the prosecution needs to prove (as the Fourth Circuit has said) “specific intent to do something that the law forbids. That is to say, with a bad purpose either to disobey or to disregard the law.” That is normally a very high bar, but the allegations in the indictment look like more than enough to satisfy it, if proven.

As to missing context, it is likely that Trump’s legal team will want to put on testimony, or elicit cross-examination, to suggest that the case is not as open-and-shut as it reads on paper. Much will depend on what the defense can get out of Trump’s former lawyers, who may not be averse to fleshing out their stories in ways that are less damning than what’s quoted in the indictment. But there is a lot less room for ambiguity here than in a lot of criminal cases. Trump undoubtedly knew that he had the documents in his possession and that they contained things that were not supposed to be shown to anyone without security clearance. He’s allegedly on tape saying so. There may be more room for ambiguity in the allegations about his intent to have his lawyers mislead the grand jury about what he had.

We’re not all the way to knowing what the boxes indictment tells us. Read critically, it can’t dispel all sources of skepticism about this prosecution. That said, the parts of the indictment that seem most credible are awfully damning.
Title: Re: AMcC: Where JW's defense of Trump goes wrong
Post by: G M on June 16, 2023, 06:55:42 AM: Deep State Andy spewing his usual deep state talking points.

Who has the ultimate declassification authority? If say one B. Obama gave the Russians the UK's nuclear secrets, is that within his authority as president?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8304654/WikiLeaks-cables-US-agrees-to-tell-Russia-Britains-nuclear-secrets.html

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 03:09:24 PM
This seems strong to me, even though it is from Deep State Andy ;-)

Where Judicial Watch’s Defense of Trump Goes Wrong
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 14, 2023 3:05 PM

Michael Bekesha, the ‘Clinton sock drawer’ lawyer, misses the distinction between agency records and presidential records.
I’ve already extensively addressed why the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is not a viable defense against charges that President Trump unlawfully and willfully retained national-defense information under Section 793(e) of the federal criminal code (which, in hope of avoiding Senator Lindsey Graham’s conniptions, I’ll refrain from calling the Espionage Act). So I’ll state the main point as succinctly as I can: Agency records are not presidential records.

Trump’s case is about agency records regarding the national defense — mainly, classified intelligence reporting generated by U.S. spy agencies. The PRA, by contrast, addresses documents and other records generated by and for the president in the carrying out of his duties.

Significantly, the PRA explicitly excludes agency records from the definition of “presidential records.” Under Section 2201(2)(B) the term presidential records “does not include any documentary materials that are . . . official records of an agency.” As if the term agency were not clear enough, the PRA incorporates the definition set forth in Section 552 of Title 5, U.S. Code. (That definition has been moved. In 1978, when the PRA was enacted, it was in Section 552(e); it is now in Section 552(f).) That provision broadly instructs that an agency is

any executive department, military department, Government corporation, Government controlled corporation, or other establishment in the executive branch of the Government (including the Executive Office of the President), or any independent regulatory agency.

Further, the provision broadly defines an agency record to include any information the agency or its contractors maintain in connection with the agency’s operations. Patently, intelligence reports compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, NSA, FBI, and other U.S. national-security agencies are agency records. They are not presidential records by definition and by common sense — i.e., these agencies are created by Congress, their operations are authorized by Congress, they are underwritten with taxpayer funds by Congress, and Congress is empowered to conduct oversight of their activities, which necessitates that agency officials and lawmakers have access to their records.

It is no surprise, then, that the PRA excludes agency records from its coverage.

The remorseless fact that agency records are not presidential records harpoons today’s attempt by Michael Bekesha in the Wall Street Journal to stake out a PRA defense of Trump based on an inapposite case, Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). As I’ve pointed out (here and here), Trump and his defenders have stitched this lower-court ruling to the PRA as a purported defense. Amusingly, Bekesha proclaims that he is well positioned to defend Trump because he is “the lawyer who lost the ‘Clinton sock drawer’ case” — meaning he is now arguing against the position he argued in court.

To repeat, that case did not involve agency records — much less classified reporting by the government’s intelligence agencies. It involved nonclassified tape recordings that President Clinton made with historian Taylor Branch in anticipation of compiling a history of his presidency.

Bekesha was right to argue in the case that the tapes were presidential records, as the PRA defines that term, and that Clinton should thus have archived them with NARA, in accordance with PRA procedures. Instead, the president hid them in a White House sock drawer until his term ended, then took them with him (along with furniture, china, art, and other property the Clintons swiped). Nevertheless, the bottom-line issue in the case was whether NARA had civil-law authority under the PRA to compel Clinton to archive the tapes post-presidency (which would have helped Judicial Watch get access to them, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act).

That has nothing to do with the issue in the Trump case, which is whether the Justice Department has criminal-law authority to enforce Section 793 in connection with Trump’s unlawful retention of classified agency records — which, to repeat for the umpteenth time, are not presidential records under the PRA.

Note, also, Bekesha’s sleight of hand. He claims that then District Judge Amy Berman Jackson “concluded the government’s hands were tied. Mr. Clinton took the tapes, and no one could do anything about it” (emphasis added). But that’s not what she concluded. She ruled that NARA’s hands were tied, which was the only question before her. She did not and could not credibly have said that no arm of the federal government was authorized to take action to retrieve the tapes. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but in 2009, when Judicial Watch began complaining about Clinton’s hoarding of presidential records, the Obama Justice Department had no interest in taking action against the former two-term Democratic president, who had appointed Obama’s attorney general (Eric Holder) as his own deputy attorney general, and who was married to Obama’s secretary of state.

Judicial Watch was thus reduced to nudging NARA to do its job by trying to retrieve the tapes. But Jackson, an Obama appointee, concluded that, as between NARA and Clinton, it was the president, during his presidency, who got to decide whether a record covered by the PRA was either a presidential record that had to be archived, or a personal record that the president could keep for himself.

This goes to a weakness in the Trump PRA arguments that I’ve already highlighted. Even if we ignore that the PRA does not cover agency records, the only documents a president is lawfully permitted to keep without archiving are what the PRA defines as personal records. These are such items as diaries or journals — not agency intelligence reports.

In any event, Judge Jackson’s ruling is unavailing for Trump because the agency reports of national-defense information that he is being prosecuted over are expressly excluded from PRA coverage. But that said, to the extent Jackson reasoned — or is at least being construed as having reasoned — that the president is at liberty to ignore the PRA, that’s just wrong.

Under Section 2203, the president and his staff are supposed to designate documentary materials (which include audio recordings) as either presidential records or personal records “upon their creation or receipt.” Moreover, if the president wants to dispose of materials rather than archiving them, Section 2203 directs that he consult with the archivist and, if they disagree, allow the archivist the opportunity to consult with Congress.

Clearly, Clinton did not comply with the PRA in good faith — what a shock. Berman found that the PRA (a) did not enable NARA to second-guess Clinton’s determination that the tapes were personal records because, implicitly, he had made that decision during his presidency; and (b) did not empower NARA to retrieve the documents from Clinton. On the latter, it’s true that the PRA has no enforcement provisions (we’ll come back to that in a second); on the former, even if NARA lacked its own authority, it could have referred the matter to Congress or the Justice Department to take any action they deemed appropriate. The fact that the judge and NARA had no authority to force other arms of government to take action did not mean that those other arms of government lacked authority to take action — they just lacked interest in taking action.

On the matter of the PRA’s enforcement provisions, Bekesha’s op-ed argument would have more bite if we were talking about what the Biden Justice Department did in connection with the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, as opposed to the Mar-a-Lago indictment.

Recall, with respect to the search warrant, prosecutors and the FBI claimed there was probable cause, not only of Section 793 and obstruction offenses, but also of another criminal statute, Section 2071, which prohibits removing and concealing government documents or files — not just national-defense information but any information.

At the time, I was among the commentators who pointed out that the Justice Department’s inclusion of Section 2071 was controversial. It was thrown into the mix because, for 18 months, NARA had been trying to force Trump to give back all of the government records in his possession. In addition to over 300 documents bearing classification markings, Trump had caused the shipment from the White House to Mar-a-Lago of thousands of other government documents that had never been archived. Trump thumbed his nose at NARA, and NARA could do nothing about it because — as we’ve seen — the PRA does not have enforcement provisions. Had Congress wished to have the statute’s procedures criminally enforced, it could have included in the PRA such crimes as those prescribed in Section 2071. To the contrary, lawmakers decided that would be overkill; they instead trusted presidents to work in good faith with NARA to comply with the PRA’s requirements.

Consequently, by adding the Section 2071 offense to its search warrant, and exploiting that as a basis to seize, not only documents marked classified, but all government records in Trump’s possession, prosecutors were, in effect, amending the PRA to include criminal-enforcement provisions that Congress had declined to incorporate.

In writing the indictment, Biden Special Counsel Smith refrained from including the Section 2071 crime that DOJ had put in the search warrant. This was prudent, especially since Section 2071 had already served its purpose: It expanded the scope of the search warrant enough to enable the FBI to do what NARA couldn’t — retrieve the thousands of files. NARA and DOJ did not want to prosecute Trump for violating the PRA, they just wanted to archive these materials in accordance with the PRA.

Hypothetically, though, if Smith had charged a 2071 offense in the indictment, it would have set up a legal controversy: Was the Justice Department merely enforcing Section 2071, as it is permitted to do, or was it using Section 2071 to criminalize the PRA — i.e., to rewrite Congress’s statute, which it is not permitted to do?

My guess is that the courts would have sided with the prosecutors. The clear terms of Section 2071 indicate that Congress intended it to apply to government officials. Plus, having failed to comply with the PRA’s terms, Trump would have been ill-suited to claim that the PRA gave him immunity from a Section 2071 prosecution. But the issue is not free from doubt.

For what it’s worth, I doubt that Judicial Watch v. NARA would have helped Trump much in this hypothetical situation. Though the former president is understandably treating the “Clinton sock drawer” case as if it were an exalted precedent up there with Marbury v. Madison, it is a really just a questionable opinion by a district court judge who decided, a dozen years after Clinton left office, not to challenge his noncompliance with PRA strictures under circumstances where neither NARA nor the Obama Justice Department had any interest in pursuing the matter. The argument that Michael Bekesha made during the case was better than the antithetical one he posits in the Wall Street Journal today.

But that’s beside the point. To be sure, former President Trump will have arguments to make against the indictment brought by special counsel Smith. But there is nothing illegitimate about the government’s enforcement of both Section 793’s protection of national-defense information and the obstruction statutes. The government’s vital interest in enforcing those criminal laws is patent. And unlike the search warrant, there is no plausible argument that the indictment impermissibly rewrites the PRA — a civil-law provision that applies only to presidential records, not to the agency records at issue in Trump’s prosecution, let alone national-security agency records of secret intelligence.

Andrew C. McCarthy

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
Title: Re: Trump Strategy Options
Post by: G M on June 16, 2023, 07:26:17 AM: Because he was STILL AG when it was public knowledge.

Barr lied about investigating 2020 vote fraud, but he's being honest about everything else?

Sure.

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 02:35:10 PM
So how is it the AG Barr would be expected to know what the FBI was hiding?

===========================

By Jeff Mordock - The Washington Times - Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Former President Donald Trump has multiple defenses available to fight federal criminal charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, legal scholars say.

Among the strongest legal options for Mr. Trump are invoking the Presidential Records Act and suppressing notes from one of his attorneys.

The sprawling, 37-count indictment filed last week by special counsel Jack Smith claims Mr. Trump recklessly handled some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including documents about nuclear programs and potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies.

Mr. Trump, who pleaded not guilty to the charges on Tuesday in a federal courtroom in Miami, is also accused of blocking the government’s efforts to retrieve the classified materials.

The severity of the charges might make it difficult for Mr. Trump’s legal team to mount a defense, but analysts say some avenues are open to the former president.

“Obviously, this is a serious case, but I think it is a case that could be won by the defense. There are areas of potential vulnerability for the government,” said Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where Mr. Trump was charged.

SEE ALSO: Trump shatters political norms again: Charges ‘will guarantee his nomination’

“The government is relying on testimony from Trump‘s lawyer. It doesn’t always work out when lawyers are put on the stand who cooperated against their own client. That’s just one area of potential vulnerability for the government,” Mr. Coffey continued.

Todd Blanche, a lawyer representing Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, declined to comment on possible defenses.

Mr. Trump and his aides might have already raised the strongest defense: that a president can take any documents he wants under the Presidential Records Act.

The 1978 statute gives the National Archives and Records Administration complete ownership and control of presidential records at the end of an administration but makes a distinction between official records and personal documents.

Defense attorneys could argue that Mr. Trump’s presidential authority granted him absolute power to declassify documents. Mr. Trump has already made that assertion. A president can take government property as personal documents once they are declassified.

“It would radically deflate the government’s case if the defense managed to make a successful argument about the Presidential Records Act,” said Joseph Moreno, a former federal prosecutor.

The full scope of the Presidential Records Act has never been fully litigated and is open to different legal interpretations.

William Barr, who served as attorney general in Mr. Trump’s administration, threw cold water on the idea of invoking the Presidential Records Act. During a recent Fox News interview, he called it “facially ridiculous.”

“They’re the government’s documents — they’re official records,” Mr. Barr said. “They’re not his personal records. Battle plans for an attack on another country or Defense Department documents about our capabilities are in no universe Donald J. Trump’s personal documents.”

Former Trump attorney Timothy Parlatore told CNN last week that the law gives outgoing presidents two years after they leave office to review all their documents to determine which papers are personal and which are presidential.

Mr. Trump was not charged with violating the Presidential Records Act, which has no defined penalties. The statute is not mentioned at all in the 49-page indictment.

“The fact that the Justice Department doesn’t address it in the indictment makes me think they are a little wary of it,” Mr. Moreno said. “I would be all over that if I was on Trump’s team and make that my No. 1 target.”

The various interpretations of the Presidential Records Act likely mean federal appellate courts and, ultimately, the Supreme Court would need to decide its full power and limitations before Mr. Trump’s legal team can invoke it as a defense.

“It’s extraordinarily rare to get an appeal before the case goes to trial, but there is nothing about this case that is normal,” Mr. Coffey said.

Regardless of how a defense involving the Presidential Records Act might shake out, Mr. Trump clearly believes it’s his strongest argument.

“Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all of this,” he wrote on Truth Social after the indictment was unsealed. He repeated that claim in a speech in Georgia over the weekend.

Another potential attack for the defense would be notes written by Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys.

The notes, first recorded into an iPhone and put down on paper, provide some of the prosecution’s strongest evidence. They suggest that Mr. Trump urged Mr. Corcoran to block government investigators from retrieving the classified material and suggested that Mr. Corcoran lie to investigators or withhold the documents altogether.

Mr. Smith gained access to the notes under the crime-fraud exception. The exception allows prosecutors to remove the shield of attorney-client privilege if they have evidence that a client used legal advice to further a crime.

Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that Mr. Smith’s team could access Mr. Corcoran’s notes under the crime-fraud exception.

That means Mr. Corcoran, hired by Mr. Trump to fend off prosecutors in the classified documents case, could be a key prosecution witness.

Mr. Corcoran recused himself in April from representing the former president in the documents case but is representing Mr. Trump in other matters.

Legal analysts say the use of Mr. Corcoran’s notes opens up two areas of attack for Mr. Trump’s team.

First, the defense could argue that Mr. Trump’s statements to his attorney were taken out of context and he was asking what is allowed or not allowed under the law.

Defense attorneys also could point out that Mr. Smith asked a federal judge in the more left-leaning District to decide the crime-fraud exception while indicting Mr. Trump in Southern Florida.

“Trump’s team could argue the law for the government is more favorable in D.C. and the government did some maneuvering to get a home-field advantage,” Mr. Coffey said. “The defense can ask a Florida federal judge to reconsider it, arguing precedent is different there.”

If none of these attempts derails the charges, legal analysts say, Mr. Trump’s team could seek trial delays with other motions.

They could keep pushing back the case so it would go to trial after the election. If Mr. Trump wins the presidency, either the attorney general he appoints could withdraw the case or he could pardon himself.

“Even if Trump’s lawyers don’t try to delay it, it is possible that it won’t go to trial until after the election,” Mr. Moreno said. “Classified documents make this more cumbersome because there is an entire process that needs to be gone through to bring classified documents into a civilian court.”

• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
Title: Tom Vitton about to go under the bus?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2023, 11:44:37 AM: https://resistthemainstream.com/trump-ignored-a-plan-in-fall-of-2022-from-top-lawyer-after-his-mar-a-lago-home-was-raided-by-the-fbi/?utm_source=newsletter2
Title: Judge rules lawyers must get security clearances
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2023, 11:54:30 AM: second

Federal Judge Issues Order on Trump’s Classified Documents Case
By Jack Phillips
June 16, 2023Updated: June 16, 2023

U.S. district judge Aileen Cannon handed down an order since former president Donald Trump entered a not guilty plea to charges in connection with the Department of Justice’s case alleging he mishandled classified documents.

Cannon, in brief Thursday order, instructed all parties involved to obtain security clearances for lawyers who will need them. The order appears to emphasize the sensitivity of the case, as it is dealing with classified materials that a president could access.

“On or before June 16, 2023, all attorneys of record and forthcoming attorneys of record shall contact the Litigation Security Group of the U.S. Department of Justice, if they have not done so already, to expedite the necessary clearance process for all team members anticipated to participate in this matter, and thereafter file a Notice of Compliance” no later than June 20, Cannon wrote.

Over the past week, Cannon has faced significant pressure and criticism from mainstream media outlets, claiming that because she was appointed by Trump, the judge would act in a biased manner that favors the former commander-in-chief. Some Democratic lawmakers, too, called on the judge to recuse herself in the case.

Notably, in August 2022, Cannon barred Justice Department investigators from using classified documents that were obtained during an FBI raid targeting Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort until a special master could review the materials. Cannon said at the time that Trump could suffer “reputational harm” from the search, appearing to make note of leaks to the mainstream media about Trump-related investigations.

“I’m very concerned about her prior rulings and her potential mindset in this case,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters this week. Meanwhile, former attorney general Eric Holder publicly claimed that Cannon lacks the “legal acumen” to handle the case, without elaborating on why.

Cannon, 42, was appointed by Trump in November 2020. She was randomly selected to oversee Trump’s case, which was brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith.

Smith and prosecutors charged Trump with 37 counts stemming from his handling of classified documents. In a court appearance on Tuesday, the former president pleaded not guilty, and on social media, he has frequently written that the case is tantamount to election interference.

After entering his not guilty plea in a Miami federal court, he returned to his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, and delivered a speech that attacked the Justice Department, Smith, and other federal officials. He said that Smith is a “raging and uncontrolled Trump hater, as is his wife,” arguing that the special counsel is being selective in his prosecution.

“There was an unwritten rule” to not prosecute former presidents and political rivals, Trump told supporters in a speech at his golf club in New Jersey on Tuesday. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” he remarked.

He added: “The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized department of injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country … this vicious persecution is a travesty of justice.”

According to the indictment, Trump held onto classified documents after leaving the White House, allegedly admitted on tape that they were classified, and that he no longer had the presidential power to declassify them, then refused to return the records when the government demanded them back. Trump has publicly said that he declassified those materials.

The federal charges against Trump come two months after the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with 34 counts of allegedly falsifying business information in arranging payments during the 2016 election. He also faces legal jeopardy in Fulton County, Georgia, where local prosecutors have launched a wide-ranging investigation, while a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., continues to probe his activity after the 2020 election.

Polls show that Trump is the GOP frontrunner for the 2024 election, largely ahead of the other Republican candidates. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is behind Trump, with a HarrisX poll showing Trump has 53 percent to DeSantis’ 17 percent.

If convicted on all the charges, Trump, who recently turned 77, could face up to 400 years in prison and nearly $9.5 million in fines. Trump’s aide, Walt Nauta, was also charged in the case, and court documents show that he is to enter his plea on June 27.

Before he was charged, Trump told Politico that he will continue running for president even if he’s convicted in the DOJ case.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Title: Mark Levin responds to Bill Barr and A McCarthy
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2023, 04:43:36 AM: https://www.marklevinshow.com/audio-rewind/

go to the 6/15 auto rewind.

his defense of Trump is kind of "what about isms " and as far as I can tell less about the precise accusations against Trump

he point out (deep state *1) Andy McCarthy and (deep state *2) Bill Barr can never give an honest answer to what about Hillary what about Biden etc .

Bibliography:

*1 GM Firehydrant of Freedom , 2020
*2 GM , Firehydrant of Freedom 2020
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 05:46:18 AM: Thank you CCP.

I find my thinking in this moment to be rather fluid.

In this moment I assess as follows:

a) Trump had a long history of being shifty and abusive of the litigation process before he ever ran for office. Indeed this was one of the many reasons I strongly opposed him during the 2016 primaries.

b) It does not strain credulity that he would fib to his lawyers about not having some of the documents in question and leave their legal standing as lawyers in jeopardy.

c) Among the various outrageous Deep State actions against Trump in this most recent round, there appear to be some charges that have merit. It seems however that more of the charges are (deliberate?) misstatements of the law e.g. concerning his power to declassify and the role of the Presidential Records Act (which Trump too may be misstating in whole or part).

d) None of what he is charged with comes anywhere near close to Hillary's long list of serious felonies. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that this prosecution is not a matter of "no one is above the law" but rather is politically driven.

e) Given what has been done to him by the Deep State since he declared for office, I can understand/rationalize that he would have papers he would want to hold onto and would feel entitled to lie about having them. Question Presented: Why not just make copies and hand the originals back to the Archives folks? It would appear that once again he has been in his worst enemy and we are torn between denying the Deep State its game to knock him out of the box, and spending the election embroiled in this food fight that is all about him.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2023, 06:29:20 AM: well said

yes they go after him in unique ways
yes it is unfair two tiered justice system
and yes he makes everything even worse
and yes it is all about him - for endless times - he loves it this way for sure

and yes he is also a damn lying narcissist who I am totally sick of
and while I agree with Mark Levin I still would rather hold Trump to account and get rid of him before he brings us all down

like Barr obviously does.

I would rather deep state win this one then fight like hell for someone , frankly , more deserving

and not someone who is making this all. about his personal revenge
dragging us all along for the ride down into a mine shaft that will crumble
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 06:52:01 AM: "I would rather deep state win this one then fight like hell for someone, frankly, more deserving."

I respectfully but strongly disagree.

GM argues it is already too late, but in my considered opinion this election is our last chance to stop the Deep State. We cannot survive another loss and remain America.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2023, 06:57:54 AM: I would be more willing to fight for Trump

#1 - if these situations did not arise in part due to his temperament
and impulsive decisions
#2 - if he was at least a perennial winner instead of the opposite
he won by his pubic hair only in the electoral college in '16
we then lost '18, '20. '22 - costing us very dearly
#3 - he has never polled over 50 % !

if he is the only one who could win - we are doomed
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 17, 2023, 07:08:45 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 06:52:01 AM
"I would rather deep state win this one then fight like hell for someone, frankly, more deserving."

I respectfully but strongly disagree.

GM argues it is already too late, but in my considered opinion this election is our last chance to stop the Deep State. We cannot survive another loss and remain America.

If Trump or someone else not compromised got in, many people in the DS lose badly, including prison. Who thinks they'll let that happen?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 09:02:34 AM: CCP:

Strong points, well made.

That said, let's dig a bit deeper:

As a matter of logic it seems fair to reason that to the extent you demotivate you increase the chances of what all of us here strongly oppose, yes? The same applies to me too btw!

Question: By what process do we get to someone else who both can win and has what it takes to take on the DS and has what it takes to win? And who might that be?

GM raises an interesting question. Now that we experience them going for a take-out (and prison?!?) via the legal system, are we to do the same? And what does that look like in execution? And in aftermath?

IMHO, some we clearly must. Exactly who? and how do we need to go about it to avoid an endless revenge cycle?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 17, 2023, 09:38:31 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 09:02:34 AM
CCP:

Strong points, well made.

That said, let's dig a bit deeper:

As a matter of logic it seems fair to reason that to the extent you demotivate you increase the chances of what all of us here strongly oppose, yes? The same applies to me too btw!

Question: By what process do we get to someone else who both can win and has what it takes to take on the DS and has what it takes to win? And who might that be?

GM raises an interesting question. Now that we experience them going for a take-out (and prison?!?) via the legal system, are we to do the same? And what does that look like in execution? And in aftermath?

IMHO, some we clearly must. Exactly who? and how do we need to go about it to avoid an endless revenge cycle?

One side is going to end up in mass graves. One side will win.

Pick which one you want to be.

All other options are gone.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 17, 2023, 10:18:34 AM: Quote from: ccp on June 17, 2023, 06:57:54 AM
I would be more willing to fight for Trump

#1 - if these situations did not arise in part due to his temperament
and impulsive decisions
#2 - if he was at least a perennial winner instead of the opposite
he won by his pubic hair only in the electoral college in '16
we then lost '18, '20. '22 - costing us very dearly
#3 - he has never polled over 50 % !

if he is the only one who could win - we are doomed.

Great points. My view is I will fight for Trump against targeting and false charges but support someone else for the nomination.

Trump came to the Oval Office without a team and had no chance against the tilted swamp much less the corrupt parts. He made so many hiring mistakes just by his own admission, and that was just the top person in each department, not the rank and file permanent class. He forced no budget constraints, no deeper personnel changes inside any of the agencies. (To his credit he did deregulate but that didn't weaken these agencies..)

I am hopeful with DeSanrtis. No question that he governs better, has a good team and manages people with a purpose. Is that enough? Who knows. At least he knows what he's up against. Our job is to find and advance the person has the best shot at turning this around. It's hard to say in 2023-2024 that is Trump.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 17, 2023, 10:25:48 AM: Quote from: DougMacG on June 17, 2023, 10:18:34 AM
Quote from: ccp on June 17, 2023, 06:57:54 AM
I would be more willing to fight for Trump

#1 - if these situations did not arise in part due to his temperament
and impulsive decisions
#2 - if he was at least a perennial winner instead of the opposite
he won by his pubic hair only in the electoral college in '16
we then lost '18, '20. '22 - costing us very dearly
#3 - he has never polled over 50 % !

if he is the only one who could win - we are doomed.

Great points. My view is I will fight for Trump against targeting and false charges but support someone else for the nomination.

Trump came to the Oval Office without a team and had no chance against the tilted swamp much less the corrupt parts. He made so many hiring mistakes just by his own admission, and that was just the top person in each department, not the rank and file permanent class. He forced no budget constraints, no deeper personnel changes inside of any of the agencies. (To his credit he did deregulate but that didn't weaken these agencies..)

I am hopeful with DeSanrtis. No question that he governs better, has a good team and manages people with a purpose. Is that enough? Who knows. At least he knows what he's up against. Our job is to find and advance the person has the best shot at turning this around. It's hard to say in 2023-2024 that is Trump.

When they blatantly steal 2024 just like they did in 2020 and 2022, who is your pick to lose in 2028?

Will they allow voting in the internment camps?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 01:44:13 PM: "Great points. My view is I will fight for Trump against targeting and false charges but support someone else for the nomination.

"Trump came to the Oval Office without a team and had no chance against the tilted swamp much less the corrupt parts. He made so many hiring mistakes just by his own admission, and that was just the top person in each department, not the rank and file permanent class. He forced no budget constraints, no deeper personnel changes inside any of the agencies. (To his credit he did deregulate but that didn't weaken these agencies..)

True, but

a) leaves out quite a bit of his quite substantial achievements.
b) how was he to realize just how deep and deranged and illegal the opposition was to be?
c) regarding budget, to get the military spending he had to acede to Dem domestic spending. I'm with him on this.

"I am hopeful with DeSanrtis. No question that he governs better, has a good team and manages people with a purpose. Is that enough? Who knows. At least he knows what he's up against. Our job is to find and advance the person has the best shot at turning this around. It's hard to say in 2023-2024 that is Trump."

I too favor DeSantis , , , so far. So far beyond platitudes, he is tabla rasa on geopolitics. I think Trump was very good on geopolitics and stands ready to pick up the reigns on Day One.
Title: Investigation ended in Westchester County golf course affair
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 03:47:00 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/westchester-county-da-ends-investigation-into-trump-golf-course_5337542.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-06-17&src_cmp=gv-2023-06-17&utm_medium=email
Title: Rudy G says
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2023, 03:31:00 PM: I am hearing that Rudy G says the wife of the Burisma executive with the phone tapes has been offed.

Confirm or deny?
Title: Eh tu Barr?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2023, 10:01:02 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/barr-says-hed-testify-against-trump-in-documents-case-if-asked_5341091.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-06-19-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-06-19-1&utm_medium=email
Title: Re: Eh tu Barr?
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 10:31:36 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2023, 10:01:02 AM

https://www.theepochtimes.com/barr-says-hed-testify-against-trump-in-documents-case-if-asked_5341091.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-06-19-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-06-19-1&utm_medium=email

Just continuing his mission to get Trump.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2023, 12:00:09 PM: Trump has that effect on a very high percentage of people who have worked for him.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 12:13:47 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2023, 12:00:09 PM

Trump has that effect on a very high percentage of people who have worked for him.

Barr was specifically sent in to sabotage Trump and protect the deep state.
Title: A contributing factor to Trump's challenge in finding lawyers?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2023, 06:06:19 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/disbarment-proceedings-for-john-eastman-ex-trump-election-lawyer-begin-in-california/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=31841658
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2023, 06:44:10 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/20/judges-sets-date-for-trumps-trial-in-documents-case/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=q7M6WHhIav9AheLYoWSxHZydp0v.WIkmPLWtx7t5vg1mYFsw0B5uPQbkySO6Xww5KXeVXSFY
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2023, 07:08:50 AM: third

https://www.judicialwatch.org/trumps-closed-circuit-video/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members
Title: We see who they really are
Post by: G M on June 20, 2023, 07:18:39 AM: https://www.libertystorch.info/2023/06/19/theyve-discarded-all-pretense/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2023, 10:44:14 AM: Plausible to say Secret stuff should not be divulged, but roadblocks in his having lawyers who can see the documents in question definitely no bueno.
Title: Durham says FBI agents apologized
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2023, 08:28:25 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/21/john-durham-fbi-agents-apologized-investigation-emotional/?pnespid=7L1pUi9aN7xB0fLDrCWlCJzXuEqqDsR9L_2kxbdv9hZmG34.jQFHnPW8SDnwHoPja82YiqlZ
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on June 21, 2023, 08:40:46 AM: remember all those postings of the very same image of Durham looking so stern and tough

what a joke

as always Dems always get off with zero consequences
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2023, 09:26:57 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/ny-attorney-general-makes-unusual-prediction-in-trump-case_5330967.html?utm_source=News&deep_link_sub1=article&source_caller=api&shortlink=ae487l3g&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-06-14-2&src_src=News&deep_link_value=5330967&src_cmp=breaking-2023-06-14-2&est=o6gceD0beR2q9Of4dSQuFre6974hF9e8OL3iWOEQlNwq3RQ/SojFgeUek0kpEns2Ar5E
Title: Grounds for interlocutory appeal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2023, 12:22:44 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/3/feds-piercing-of-attorney-client-veil-gives-trump-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=UStUsoZWP%2BWoB87u605jZeEzwgnmOYelm6GWXufQ8WoNtGOSzTxVDUGAmy13zpB2&bt_ts=1688405612046
Title: Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers warns Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 04, 2023, 01:53:33 PM: Can't say he's wrong , , ,

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/4/stewart-rhodes-convicted-oath-keepers-leader-warns/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=W%2F%2F4NM1IDlOXU3HUOVyuUVq1SsV3%2FebUo4f8Se1I7kPQ71UEpoUWV1RJXo0WBikT&bt_ts=1688497877416
Title: Who is the mole?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2023, 09:23:48 AM: Who is the mole informing the FBI to look at/see security footage showing movement of boxes?

Attorney Corcoran? Feeling hoodwinked by Trump and feeling susceptible to disbarment?
Title: GA indictment coming?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2023, 02:01:15 AM: GEORGIA

Georgia district attorney closer to indicting Trump

Jury selection starts to decide election interference charges

BY SUSAN FERRECHIO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Former President Donald Trump, who is already facing dozens of felony charges in separate state and federal criminal cases, could be indicted in weeks, if not days, on new charges related to his actions in Georgia following the 2020 election.

Grand jury selection started Tuesday in Fulton County to determine whether District Attorney Fani Willis has sufficient evidence to bring election interference charges against Mr. Trump and his associates who tried to get Georgia officials to overturn the state’s presidential election results.

“It could be pretty quick because there’s really no defense presentation,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani said. “If they want to get an indictment, they should be able to get it in a matter of days. Weeks would likely be the maximum.”

Ms. Willis said in April she would file any charges against Mr. Trump between July 11 and Sept. 1.

Ms. Willis began investigating the former president three years ago based on his bid to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to dig up enough votes to overtake President Biden’s narrow victory in the state.

In a call made on Jan. 2, 2021, Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”

Mr. Trump has defended the call as “perfect” and said it concerned “widespread election fraud in Georgia.”

Mr. Trump has continued to make the claim that election irregularities gave Mr. Biden an unfair advantage.

Ms. Willis, he said in a statement last year, is fishing around for a way to charge “a very popular president” with “a tiny word of phrase” from the call.

Mr. Rahmani believes Ms. Willis will ask the grand jury to indict Mr. Trump on felony charges.

The grand jury only needs to be convinced of probable cause and will not hear from defense arguments. Ms. Willis may be emboldened by the total 73 felony charges Mr. Trump is facing in two other cases.

“I would expect that Fani Willis will seek an indictment,” Mr. Rahmani said. “She has a reputation as an aggressive prosecutor and any kind of hesitation by her to be the first person to charge a former president and opening up a political Pandora’s box, that’s all gone.”

Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Mr. Trump in June on 37 felony charges related to storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Mr. Trump in April on 34 felony charges related to alleged hush money payments in 2016 to silence claims he had extramarital affairs.

The Georgia grand jury is also expected to weigh charges against other individuals.

In addition to the call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis is investigating Mr. Trump and others involved in a plan to appoint an alternative set of Georgia electors who would endorse Mr. Trump, and not Mr. Biden, as the state’s winner in the presidential contest.

A special grand jury last year heard from 75 witnesses in the case, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, and Mr. Trump’s former attorney, Rudy W. Giuliani.

The special grand jury recommended undisclosed charges for multiple people and reported possible perjury by some of the witnesses.

Jury forewoman Emily Kohrs made a round of media appearances in February. She told CNN the jury produced “a whole list” of indictments, including “the big name everyone keeps asking about.”

Following his indictment in Manhattan, Mr. Trump aimed Ms. Willis, calling her “a local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta who is doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call.”

Ms. Willis told a Georgia news outlet that Mr. Trump’s comment was “ridiculous” but protected by the First Amendment
Title: NRO: Garland's sleight of hand
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2023, 02:14:44 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/07/garlands-sleight-of-hand-in-hunters-sweetheart-plea-deal/?bypass_key=UkllZk5HQ3cybTlTWE5hSW5CVHpZQT09OjpWWEZJTVZvNVFuRjZjRUpYV21sWWVUWXJUM0JoWnowOQ%3D%3D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2023, 06:35:15 AM: JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Trump prosecutors dig for charges from obscurities of history

Reconstruction-era law most surprising

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

At the heart of the Justice Department’s twin cases against former President Donald Trump are two statutes so rarely used that one had been invoked by federal prosecutors only about a dozen times in the past 20 years.

Federal prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol sent a letter last week suggesting that Mr. Trump could be charged with violating a federal law enacted to crack down on post-Civil War voting intimidation.

Special counsel Jack Smith also invoked an arcane law in a case accusing the former president of illegally mishandling classified documents. The Espionage Act, a law from World War I, was aimed at spies.

John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said Mr. Smith is using these arcane laws in Trump cases because a former U.S. president had never before been prosecuted.

“These older, obscure statutes are coming up in these Trump cases because trying to criminally prosecute a former president is without precedent,” said Mr. Yoo, who served as deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush. “There are no criminal statutes aimed at presidential conduct or the conduct of a presidential candidate.” Curt Levey, head of the Committee for Justice, a judicial reform group, offered a different explanation. “The Justice Department made up their mind that they were going to charge Trump for something and searched high and low for a statute that — that even if rarely used and very old — can be cobbled together for a theory that Trump violated it,” he said.

Mr. Smith’s letter referred to three criminal statutes, including conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.

It was the third criminal law that caught legal analysts by surprise. The letter cited a statute that makes it illegal to deprive citizens of the free exercise of constitutional rights, such as voting.

The statute, Title 18, Section 241 of the U.S. Criminal Code, was drafted during Reconstruction to crack down on Whites in the South, including Ku Klux Klan members, from stopping formerly enslaved Black people from voting. A conviction carries up to 10 years in prison.

Just because the target letter referenced Section 241 does not mean Mr. Trump will be charged with violating the law or even that he could face criminal charges.

Still, legal scholars were surprised to see the Section 241 reference.

Mr. Yoo said he thinks it is the first time the section has been used against a federal official.

“It’s typically used against state and local officials and people conspiring with the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a real stretch in this case and reflects uncertainty on the part of the special counsel about the charges they are bringing,” he said.

Section 241 makes it a crime to conspire to “injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” a person exercising “any right or privilege” secured under the Constitution.

The use of Section 241 instead of a potential sedition or insurrection charge raised eyebrows. Mr. Trump was widely expected to face those charges in the case of the Capitol riot, but the target letter does not list either.

It’s unclear how Mr. Smith intends to argue that Mr. Trump violated the statute. One theory is that he would cite a 1974 Supreme Court opinion expanding Section 241 violations to include cases of voter fraud conspiracies. In that case, the court held that West Virginians who cast fake ballots on a voting machine violated Section 241 because it distorted votes that were counted fairly.

Mr. Smith could argue that the law applies to Mr. Trump’s pressure on the Georgia secretary of state to find enough votes to overcome Joseph R. Biden’s win of state electors. He could also try to make the case that Mr. Trump violated the statute with his plan to appoint fake electors in states won by Mr. Biden to block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s 2020 election win.

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law, said each application would be a stretch.

“There is a risk in bringing in these novel crimes where there isn’t a lot of precedent. It doesn’t always work,” he said. “A judge can say the statute doesn’t apply or the jury could acquit.”

It’s also unclear how Mr. Trump might have blocked the counting of votes, Mr. Blackman said. At the time of the phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state or the fake elector scheme, votes had been counted fairly.

“It’s not like Trump was taking legitimately cast votes and stuffing them in his pockets. He made a phone call asking if there were votes to be counted, and I’m sure his lawyers will make that argument,” he said. Using obscure statutes seems to be part of Mr. Smith’s playbook in Trump investigations. He also surprised legal watchers by charging Mr. Trump under the Espionage Act in the classified documents case.

Mr. Trump is one of a little over a dozen people charged in the past 20 years with willful retention of classified documents. Most of the others were littleknown defendants in cases that rarely made headlines.

The Espionage Act has been relatively rare and limited to spies. It was used to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty in 1951 of giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

Mr. Smith isn’t the only prosecutor to use obscure laws against Mr. Trump and his associates. Special counsel Robert Mueller wielded the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to charge former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, deputy Rick Gates and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Until then, the Foreign Agents Registration Act sat dormant. The Justice Department had initiated only seven cases, two of which ended with the charges dismissed, from 1966 through 2015.
Title: Trump PAC spends $40+M on legal fees for Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2023, 06:06:17 AM: https://www.wxii12.com/article/trump-leadership-pac-spends-more-than-40-millio-legal-fees/44682639?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%20-%20Politics&utm_source=64c7a94b08e95c6cdd75a4a7e4c120e1&brzu=53ecab0f3b8d6a2ca09b65d8510e60ad77b56f8da9314608af37a86d81a4a63c&lctg=63c87aa24ca70c165be352a5
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on July 31, 2023, 09:05:22 AM: Pac spends on Trump's legal fees

so he has NO incentive to try to limit the fees

I have a problem with this, though on the other hand if everyone who donates to Trump know in advance they are paying for his lawyers then if they still want to donate to that that is their choice.

But somehow I don't like Trump using donors money to keep himself out of jail.......

yes political prosecutions but conflating his self interests with the Conservative cause is quite annoying to me.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 31, 2023, 01:08:47 PM: ccp, I wondered about that too. Can they spend campaign funds on legal fees? If they're not supposed to, it sets up an interesting fight. Trump's campaign is the legal battles. Anyway, what are they going to do, charge him with a crime? He already faces about 60 felonies and leads in the polls. Meanwhile the incumbent that's pulled off the largest corruption in the nation's history faces no criminal charges.

The times we live in...
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2023, 04:20:07 AM: I get the point you guys are making but tend to come down on the side of his action being legit because the prosecutions are intensely political persecutions by the Deep State.
Title: Deep State Andy rides again haha
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2023, 09:13:07 AM: Love AMcC, but not with him on this one.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doj-to-archer-on-eve-of-house-testimony-you-are-going-to-prison/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2023, 09:40:46 AM: third

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/01/takeaways-gop-campaign-finance-filings/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
Title: FBI Corruption by Redaction
Post by: DougMacG on August 02, 2023, 05:49:45 AM: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/08/01/deception_by_redaction_how_the_fbi_tried_to_hide_the_full_extent_of_fisa_abuses_using_fake_news_in_the_washington_post_969200.html
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2023, 06:58:46 AM: Doug asked which thread for the J6 indictment. Answer: Here.

Pasting his link for him:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-indictment-2020-election-jack-smith-january-6-fraud-e0068c4f
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 02, 2023, 07:51:50 AM: Similar take on the indictments from National Review, also no fan of Trump:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/this-trump-indictment-shouldnt-stand/

(Doug) All the bad charges serve to empower Trump to the nomination, but not to the Oval Office.

Ann Althouse:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/08/after-nearly-decade-of-trump-convincing.html
Title: Whoopsie!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2023, 02:15:19 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/us/jack-smith-admits-to-making-false-claim-to-court-in-trump-case-5437903?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-08-02-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-08-02-1&utm_medium=email&est=xKhUtW8N98UfDe%2Feg5v7FOKedGt6c5sXdc8DtcJ414aUYhx6eqotakW8WMMN95cnskJo
Title: Jack Smith track record
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2023, 05:55:46 PM: second

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/special-counsel-jack-smith-mixed-history-pursuing-politicians
Title: Hinderaker on the indictment
Post by: DougMacG on August 02, 2023, 06:51:13 PM: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/08/trump-indictment-sad-story-lousy-legal-theories.php
------------
One more from Powerline, Steve Hayward, John Yoo podcast say it is to be the biggest criminal in the history of the nation:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/08/podcast-the-3whh-special-midweek-edition-on-the-trump-indictment.php
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 03, 2023, 10:26:32 AM: Did we mention the new indictment is pure BS?

It rests on the assumption that Trump knew the reported outcome was true and accurate because, I guess, two or three people told him so in addition to all his opponents and the mainstream media. Even the expression, the big lie, presumed he believed the outcome to be true and accurate. Clearly he didn't and still doesn't.

That will be interesting to litigate in a federal court.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/lawyer-newest-indictment-gives-trump-legal-power-never/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2023, 01:47:48 PM: Previously Smith got a political conviction reversed 9-0 by the SCOTUS. He could very well be headed for another crushing defeat.

Furthermore, as best as I can tell, Trump has been gifted a chance to relitigate the integrity of the election and the plausibility validity of Eastman's theories.

Regarding the latter, something I picked up (Turley?) is that the notion that "the recounts showed that Trump lost blah blah" misses the point-- which is that the wrong votes were counted both originally and in the recount. For example, the PA Constitution says the legislature sets the rules, but the electoral bureaucracy made changes that admitted hundreds of thousands of additional votes. This is not a stupid argument as best as I can tell.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2023, 01:50:23 PM: Working from memory here so I may be imprecise, but I gather she was part of a law firm where Hunter played a big role.
Title: POTP: Know your players: Jeffrey Clark
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2023, 02:24:38 PM: Third

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/03/jeffrey-clark-trump-coconspirator-doj-indictment/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 03, 2023, 03:29:31 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2023, 01:50:23 PM
Working from memory here so I may be imprecise, but I gather she was part of a law firm where Hunter played a big role.

Yes, and sentenced j6 protesters to more than the prosecution asked for. Small hint of bias. Also contributed to Obama campaign. I wonder if that was before or after her appointment.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2023, 07:40:05 AM: Would love to have a link with precise description of her, her prior firm and Hunter.
Title: so what if the judge is Obama appointee
Post by: ccp on August 04, 2023, 08:40:46 AM: that does not matter
it only matters when he/she is TRUMP APPOINTEE!!!!!

hypocracy

the Left media now state it does not matter who appointed the judge

they are arbitrators of the Constitution and all are of upmost impeccable integrity

as per CNN MSPCP

and probably PBS
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2023, 10:35:24 AM: https://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-did-judge-trump-224400905.html

It is a fact that Hunter Biden and Chutkan were both employed by, or partners of, BSF. It is also factual that BSF provided services to the Ukrainian oil company Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden served.

Chutkan worked at BSF from 2002 until the time of her appointment to the D.C. Circuit by then U.S. President Barack Obama in June 2014. She was made a partner of the firm in 2007. Biden, meanwhile, held the title of counsel at BSF from 2010 to 2014.

After joining the board of Burisma in April 2014, as Hunter Biden described in his memoir, he recommended the consulting services of his law firm to help the company implement "corporate practices that were up to accepted ethical snuff." Burisma paid BSF at least $250,000 dollars for its work.

In sum, it is factual that both Hunter Biden and Chutkan worked under the umbrella of Boies Schiller Flexner between 2010 and 2014, and it is also true that BSF did business with Burisma via Hunter Biden in May 2014. As such, we rate this claim as "True."
Title: Daily Signal, Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump case
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2023, 11:15:36 AM: https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/03/4-things-know-about-obama-appointed-judge-presiding-new-trump-case/

People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent,” Chutkan said during an October 2021 court hearing. “But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

Chutkan has sentenced at least 38 people convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes to jail or prison terms, ranging from 10 days to more than five years, The Associated Press reported.

The AP has reported that Chutkan was the only judge of about two dozen presiding over prosecutions of some 600 Jan. 6 defendants who routinely imposed sentences that exceeded what federal prosecutors had asked for
Title: Jack Smith and Lois Lerner
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2023, 12:23:17 PM: Excellent reporting by Katie Pavlich:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/08/03/how-former-irs-official-lois-lerner-is-tied-to-trumps-latest-indictment-n2626579

IRS Targeting was the scandal where I first realized civil war is possible.

Talk about militarizing the deep state...

If I read this correctly, Jack Smith is tied to it.
Title: Jack Smith and Lois Lerner
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2023, 06:46:01 AM: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/08/03/how-former-irs-official-lois-lerner-is-tied-to-trumps-latest-indictment-n2626579
Title: Judge: DC grand jury for FL case? WTF?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2023, 06:20:54 AM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/7/judge-grills-special-counsels-use-dc-grand-jury-tr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=51XvS8VBtenoJ6K6w0Ri%2FdNnrpizmXe3ZXGumeuu%2FtrCD7%2F%2F3P1Ruzb3rqKNub24&bt_ts=1691433862169
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 08, 2023, 09:12:33 AM: very interesting! :-o
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2023, 08:09:13 AM: AUGUST 10, 2023

Why Not Impose Protective Orders on All Politicians?
By Joshua Philipp

The plan by former President Donald Trump’s team to use the most recent indictment to expose evidence of election fraud in 2020 may be crushed by the Justice Department.

President Trump was indicted last week in Washington on four charges. It frames his claims that the election had been rigged, his attempts to litigate, to get dueling electors in place, and then his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots as a planned conspiracy.

The case will require prosecutors to prove that President Trump didn't, in fact, believe the 2020 elections were rigged. And his legal team was quick to fire back, saying they would use discovery and subpoenas to show the public every piece of evidence available—everything they can obtain—to show why the former president believed that the election was stolen.

But that plan may have ended already in the form of a protective order requested by the DOJ. That would mean while President Trump's team will still likely be able to use discovery and subpoenas to gain access to evidence, the information would be unlikely to see the light of day.

On Aug. 4, President Trump wrote on Truth Social, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”

The DOJ immediately labeled that a threat, and prosecutors requested that the U.S. district court judge in charge of the case issue a protective order.

But what’s interesting is that this protective order wouldn't protect them. It would protect the evidence in the case. And, in particular, it prevents that evidence from being shown to the public. Now, I don’t know how stopping the public from seeing court evidence resolves an alleged threat from Trump, but that’s their claim.

In laying out why they believe there should be a protective order, prosecutors said they’re going to hand over a “substantial” amount of evidence to President Trump’s legal team. Apparently, a lot of this information is “sensitive and confidential.”

If we go by the official narrative, we’ve been shown all the necessary evidence relating to Jan. 6 and alleged election fraud. We’re told that the courts and Congress all seem to agree that the official narrative is irrefutable. So why would sensitive or confidential information be harmful?

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Wouldn’t any evidence that hasn’t been shown to the public just help their case—maybe it could even help restore public trust in the institutions. And wouldn’t that be a great thing, right ahead of the 2024 elections?

That is, unless the evidence shows otherwise. And the real irony here is that if the judge chooses to keep it hidden from the public, much of the public is going to believe that’s the case.

On the part of President Trump’s legal team, they say that his Truth Social post wasn't about the prosecution but in response to “dishonest special interest groups and Super PACs.” They also claim it represented “the definition of free speech.”

A hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 11 by the judge in the case.

On Aug. 6, President Trump requested that the judge recuse herself, and for the case to be moved out of Washington. He wrote, “There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge 'assigned' to the ridiculous freedom of speech/fair elections case."

He also said that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, is interfering with the 2024 elections by choosing to prosecute now.

Of course, the former president has a reputation for his “mean tweets.” The question is whether he should be able to comment on the case—and show his side publicly—when he will inevitably be attacked by establishment news outlets, and others on the case. For context, Mr. Smith made public scorching accusations against President Trump in the indictment.

Democrat politicians and Republican primary opponents have repeatedly attacked the former president. If it’s wrong for him to verbally attack in response, then it's also wrong for them to attack President Trump.

Maybe they should all have protective orders, if that’s the case.
Title: Special Counsel Weiss
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 12, 2023, 07:09:55 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/11/attorney-irs-whistleblower-david-weiss-special-counsel-hunter-biden/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=v6t4FXpHL7kKh6HFpGS0GYmDvxmjC5wsc7LgzLBm9EVmIvdVbqDyeLRghJBKEUWD.xZO6qok

https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/11/tom-cotton-justice-department-refile-charges-hunter-biden-tax/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=rLZkGS0YJr4IgqLEtDC5D5vduE_tCJloMLK3wrF1skRm4toFt5YX5cGGIiwh7jR8kQbhixvk

https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/11/jonathan-turley-merrick-garland-special-counsel-hunter-biden/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=5qI4CytILv8fyOXd.GimQoqMpUz2CYAnNeK5wuIwqRxmob5P2_5qwSplXJwvafetyJXY57fk

=====================

I'm seeing that Weiss does not meet the requirements for being chosen Special Counsel:

a) SC must come from outside government!

b) Must have a good reputation for integrity. Weiss's covering for the Biden's goes back to protecting Joe from a donations bundling scheme in 2008, not to mention the immunity scheme for Hunter, letting statute of limitations expire etc etc.

===============

Andy McCarthy

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1690055160574447616?s=46&t=BsNU80vOiU0wvZaktSPHyQ&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20230812_Weekend_Jolt&utm_term=Jolt-Smart

THIS IS A FARCE:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/garlands-special-counsel-appointment-in-the-biden-probe-is-a-farce/?bypass_key=L2RBRVMzZWxBUUs2MTZzbktORENtUT09OjpWRVE1ZUVnMmNHTkJOQzlYTDFkR1dYWk5WR3h4VVQwOQ%3D%3D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 12, 2023, 08:01:13 AM: I also hear there is not a damn thing anyone can do to force or pressure Garland to change this pick

while the law states shall be chosen from outside government there is no remedy to force Garland to do otherwise.

leftist shysters always give us the middle finger.
Title: As we knew announcing Ga indictment timing would be coordinated
Post by: ccp on August 12, 2023, 10:36:24 AM: of course timing again is the Dem playbook

announce the Weiss appointment and then of course to distract from that, blast the left MSM headlines next week by announcing Georgia indictment

:roll:
Title: Prof Turley points out the obvious reasons why Weiss appointment is a sham
Post by: ccp on August 13, 2023, 07:13:27 AM: https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/4149641-shoeless-joe-weiss-and-the-fixing-of-the-hunter-biden-game/

This AM CNN points out that Republicans called for appointment of special counsel and now they are complaining about an appointment of a Special Counsel

MSPCP people joked about Republicans anger at Weiss being appointed and ask who do they want "Rudy Guliani" while laughing hysterically

MSM ignores the obvious conflict of interests as pointed about above
Title: Re: Prof Turley points out the obvious reasons why Weiss appointment is a sham
Post by: DougMacG on August 13, 2023, 08:03:51 AM: They 'elevated' a US Attorney to have the power of a US Attorney, virtually meaningless, and chose one hand-picked by the target, diabolical at best, already proven to not be 'independent' and under the thumb of Garland and Biden.

Same gang chose an 'independent' counsel for Trump biased against him, and ended up with a judge biased against him - and only one side is offended by all this.
Title: GA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2023, 11:41:49 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/communications-show-trump-team-was-involved-in-georgia-voting-system-breach-report/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32386970
Title: Re: GA
Post by: DougMacG on August 13, 2023, 10:57:45 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2023, 11:41:49 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/communications-show-trump-team-was-involved-in-georgia-voting-system-breach-report/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32386970

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/cnns_claim_that_trumps_team_hacked_georgia_voting_systems_is_belied_by_its_facts.html
Title: Jesse Waters: Cong Dems destroy J6 impeachment evidence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2023, 06:12:11 AM: This is what I have been asking about!

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1689443497076555776

I'm not on X/Twitter. Is there some other link with this?

IMO this is a HUGE deal-- they destroy evidence that Trump could use to defend himself on the J6 charges!!!

Let's be relentless on this!!!
Title: Cong Dems destroy J6 impeachment evidence 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2023, 02:10:39 PM: https://www.kusi.com/trump-reveals-the-january-6th-committee-extinguished-and-destroyed-all-evidence/
Title: Re: Cong Dems destroy J6 impeachment evidence 2.0
Post by: DougMacG on August 14, 2023, 03:13:37 PM: Exculpatory.
Title: The Left
Post by: ccp on August 15, 2023, 06:05:17 AM: changes DON

to MAFIA DON

yeah right :roll:

Desantis could run on me, or the MAFIA DON

or me vs. Al Capone.
Title: AMcC: GA charges the most enduring
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 06:50:37 AM: https://nypost.com/2023/08/14/out-of-all-indictments-georgia-is-the-most-perilous-threat-to-trump/

Also see:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-the-looming-georgia-indictment-the-most-perilous-for-trump/?lctg=547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b9&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20230815&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Title: Re: AMcC: GA charges the most enduring
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2023, 07:37:11 AM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 06:50:37 AM
https://nypost.com/2023/08/14/out-of-all-indictments-georgia-is-the-most-perilous-threat-to-trump/

Also see:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-the-looming-georgia-indictment-the-most-perilous-for-trump/?lctg=547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b9&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20230815&utm_term=Jolt-Smart

I respect his opinion and observations but he is not putting much there for specifics.

My belief is that Trump was trying to find and "invalidate" invalid Biden votes, with a pressing deadline.

How do you do that? By making phone calls and by sending people there to look into it. If they crossed the line, then those infringements are the crime, not proof of a great conspiracy.

Hear all of his words at the time and since, in his mind he believes he was cheated and was trying to make that right.

"The Big Lie" comes from a political attack on the Iraq war. Media and Democrat operatives, redundancy acknowledged, made the case for war out to be lying, not just a mistake. 23 reasons in the Iraq war resolution, supported by John kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, all lies. With the complicity of the media, that works in politics but not in a fair criminal trial where the criteria is much stricter and more scrutinized.

Funny, the Georgia recount found thousands of votes counted wrong, against Trump's favor, without looking into most of the issues presented. The margin dropped from 14,000 to 12,000 out of 5 million cast.
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-2020-election-results/2020/11/19/936647882/georgia-releases-hand-recount-results-affirming-bidens-lead

Questioning that right up to the deadline is standard fare. Seriously, what Democrat wouldn't have pursued that, shoe on the other foot?

That said, he is not saying the case has merit; he is saying the charge is perhaps the most enduring relative to the other cases.

Most likely, this will all come down to venue, judge and jury selection.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 08:59:32 AM: Good analysis, useful citation.
Title: WSJ on the GA indictment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 09:03:20 AM: Georgia Case Presents Unique Challenges for Trump—and Prosecutors
RICO charges afford prosecutors opportunity to present to jury a sweeping narrative, but could prove unwieldy
By Corinne Ramey and James Fanelli
Aug. 15, 2023 9:28 am ET

The indictment in Georgia against Donald Trump for racketeering and a dozen other alleged offenses represents the most ambitious and sweeping case brought against the former president, and is likely to pose unprecedented legal challenges—both for Trump and the prosecutors.

The case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, centers on allegations that Trump, along with 18 others, participated in a sweeping criminal enterprise to change the 2020 presidential election in his favor, in violation of the state’s antiracketeering law.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. The former president has called Willis partisan and said he didn’t tamper with the election.

The Georgia law is modeled on the 1970 federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which gave federal prosecutors a new tool to pursue the mafia by tying mob bosses to the conduct of subordinates within their criminal organizations. Prosecutors in New York and elsewhere successfully used the federal RICO law throughout the following decades to bring down several prominent mafia families and other criminal enterprises.

Georgia’s law is in some respects broader than the federal version, as it includes a longer list of underlying offenses that can qualify as a basis for alleging that a group of defendants engaged in a joint criminal enterprise.

“Georgia’s RICO statute, because of the breadth of it, allows the prosecutor to tell the whole story: the who, what, when, where and how,” said Gwen Keyes Fleming, a former DeKalb County District Attorney.

Former President Donald Trump is facing four separate indictments at both state and federal levels. WSJ breaks down each of the indictments and what they mean for his 2024 presidential campaign. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao
Special counsel Jack Smith’s recent federal indictment of Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election hits some of the same themes as the Georgia case, but with a concise, targeted approach.

By contrast, Willis’s indictment, put forth chronologically in a series of alleged “acts,” lays out a vast and sprawling conspiracy to subvert the election, with Trump the alleged political equivalent of a mob boss.

“If Jack Smith’s tightly focused indictment against Trump is Hemingway, Fani Willis’s sweeping 19-defendant, 41-count charging document is Dickens,” said Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s as large and complex as the alleged conspiracy itself was.”

The large number of alleged participants in the scheme also potentially gives Willis, a Democrat, more leverage. In the typical RICO case, prosecutors often look to secure plea deals from some defendants in exchange for their testimony against the highest-profile targets. Monday’s 98-page indictment suggests prosecutors already have cooperating witnesses, including some people identified in the document as unindicted co-conspirators.

Another prominent feature of Georgia’s racketeering law: A conviction comes with a mandatory minimum prison term of five years.

“If he gets convicted, he’s going to jail,” said Jerry Froelich, a former federal prosecutor and Atlanta-based criminal defense lawyer.

If Trump wins the next presidential election, he could attempt to pardon himself in any federal case or steer the Justice Department to retreat from Smith’s charges. In Georgia, he would lack the ability to wipe away a state conviction or prison term. Even if Trump were to seek a state pardon, he wouldn’t be eligible to do so until after serving a sentence for any conviction. In Georgia, any such pardon would be determined by a state board, not the governor.

The inability to dangle the promise of a pardon to others involved in the Georgia case could also make it harder for Trump to keep alleged co-conspirators and co-defendants from seeking cooperation deals with Willis’s office.

Willis, however, also faces challenges. The large number of defendants could bog down trial scheduling, delaying any proceedings. Jury selection could also drag on for months, due to the political nature of the case and the anticipated length of a potential trial.

“The federal cases are more likely to go to trial quickly, and not get bogged down by multiple defendants and arguments,” said John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. The Georgia case, he said, “is the dream case to delay.”

Another pending case illustrates the point. Last year, Willis brought a 56-count RICO indictment of 27 defendants associated with a violent street gang. Some defendants have accepted plea deals, but jury selection for the remaining defendants began in January and is expected to last for another month or two. The trial is expected to take between six and nine months.

Brian Steel, an Atlanta-based lawyer who represents one of the defendants in the case, said RICO prosecutions with a large number of defendants can be logistically challenging and move slowly. He has already argued weeks of pretrial motions and still has 50 more left to be heard by a judge. “And that’s just me, that’s just my client,” Steel said.

Trump could seek to move the case to federal court, further delaying proceedings. Such a move would require the approval of a judge. The former president made a similar request in his New York prosecution, involving the payment of hush money to a porn star. It was rejected, on the grounds that Trump wasn’t carrying out his presidential duties in the alleged hush-money scheme. Some lawyers say Trump may have stronger arguments for moving the Georgia case, because it is much more directly tied to the presidency.

In this courtroom sketch, Former President Donald Trump is taking an oath in federal court during a plea hearing earlier this month on charges that he orchestrated a plot to try to overturn his 2020 election loss. PHOTO: JANE ROSENBERG/REUTERS
Trump, who has now been indicted in four separate cases, was first hit with charges in New York in April. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, alleging he orchestrated a scheme to bolster his 2016 presidential campaign by paying hush money to suppress potentially damaging sexual allegations. As a first-time offender, he would be unlikely to face jail time if convicted in that case.

Trump was hit with his first federal charges in June, when Smith alleged he kept possession of classified documents that he knew he shouldn’t have retained after leaving the White House. Smith later added charges that Trump and his aides sought to have surveillance footage from his Mar-a-Lago club deleted so it couldn’t be turned over to a grand jury.

The special counsel brought his separate and more sweeping case this month, alleging Trump conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election to remain in power.

Trump, the 2024 front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, pleaded not guilty to the other indictments and accused the prosecutors of seeking to interfere with his electoral prospects.

Write to Corinne Ramey at corinne.ramey@wsj.com and James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2023, 12:33:40 PM: Seems to me RICO is how the vote cheat investigation should have been pursued.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 15, 2023, 01:28:44 PM: "Seems to me RICO is how the vote cheat investigation should have been pursued"

great thought

*if only* every email, text, phone call, tapes, money could be followed like they do to Trump and other Republicans we could see the mafia style vote fixing around the country in a totally coordinated way provided by an army of DNCers.

Dem shysters never investigate themselves ......of course
Title: Dershowtiz assesses
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 03:46:49 PM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9TBFX5pUg
Title: AMcC rips GA RICO charge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 06:34:53 PM: Fani Willis’s Flawed RICO Charge against Trump

Left: Former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at campaign rally in Erie, Pa., July 29, 2023. Right: Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks to the media after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former President Donald Trump, in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023. (Lindsay DeDario, Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 15, 2023 3:15 PM
The DA is turning to the organized-crime law because she can’t charge an overarching conspiracy to achieve a criminal objective.
Iwas waiting for the Fulton County, Ga., indictment of former president Donald Trump — and, it seems, a cast of thousands — with an open mind. Fani Willis in Atlanta, like Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, is first and foremost an elected Democrat and, in this era (which I hope fades away soon) it is good politics for an elected Democrat to wield the law-enforcement powers with which she has been trusted against the party’s nemesis. That, naturally, does not make for good law enforcement — quite the opposite.

On the other hand, as I opined yesterday, in our federalist constitutional system, elections are principally conducted and policed by the states. As a result, I thought it was likely Willis would have an easier time with at least some aspects of her election-interference case than Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith will have with his. Because the federal government is not the first line of defense when it comes to policing elections, federal criminal law does not much address that function. Ergo, Smith has to apply legal concepts — fraud, obstruction, and civil rights — that were not enacted for the election-integrity purpose to which he is applying them. Where you come out in the hot debate over that depends on how well you think the laws invoked fit the facts alleged. Willis, to the contrary, is a state official responsible for enforcing specific election-integrity laws. I calculated that she would be able to invoke statutes that better fit the conduct at issue.

To some degree, that is true. In the main, though, Willis is trying to make a splash by applying not election laws but RICO — i.e., Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (the better-known federal version of which was first enacted in 1971).

I have other points to make about the indictment, but to avoid turning this post into a tome, I’ll start with RICO and address other subjects in one or more additional posts.

DA Willis’s claims of experience in organized-crime cases notwithstanding, I don’t think she grasps RICO. If she does, then she is using it in lieu of the simpler crime that any prosecutor would prefer to charge — plain old conspiracy — in order to try to paper over the big hole in her case.

The hole is that the objective of the schemes described in her 98-page indictment — namely, to retain Trump in power despite his election loss — is not a crime per se. Of course, if people pursue a lawful objective through illegal means, they may commit crimes in implementing those means. But a conspiracy, very simply, is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime. The conspiracy need not be successful to be prosecutable because, in conspiracy, the crime is the agreement itself not the crime the conspirators agreed to commit. If we agree to rob the bank but the police get wind of the plan and arrest us on the way to the bank, we are guilty of conspiracy to commit bank robbery, even though we can’t be prosecuted for actual bank robbery. That said, though, the crucial point is that the objective of the agreement must be a crime. If a group of people take egregious actions in the pursuit of an objective that is not a crime, there is no conspiracy — even though, collaterally, some of the egregious actions may amount to crimes if they violate penal statutes.

Willis seeks to obscure this problem by charging a RICO conspiracy. I assume she figures it works as a vehicle for tying together a narrative about a large group of people involved in various types of bad behavior. But she misses the point of what RICO is meant to do.

Prior to 1971, the challenge in prosecuting organized crime was that these groups were involved in disparate schemes — murder, extortion, gambling, prostitution, stolen goods, etc. — that were difficult to indict and try as one case. There would be too much “prejudicial spillover” on, say, the gambling operatives if they were forced to be in a trial with the murderers. So you’d have to indict different cases to address each different criminal scheme — which meant more opportunities for the crime syndicates to intimidate witnesses, tamper with jurors, etc.

The innovation of RICO is that the essence of the crime is membership in the group, not the component schemes carried out by the group.

In RICO parlance, the group is the enterprise. It often is but need not be criminal in nature. By definition, an enterprise is merely “an association in fact” — a broad definition that could apply to groups that run the gamut from innately illicit (e.g., a mafia family) to legitimate (e.g., labor union or political party), and from regimented (say, a militia) to loosely knit (say, a street gang). The enterprise becomes a RICO enterprise if it conducts its affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity — which generally means two or more felonies (usually a lot more) of the kind that are staples of organized crime. (See §1961(1), the capacious federal definition of racketeering activity. I also note: There are other kinds of RICO offenses that are not germane to our discussion.)

The gravamen of a RICO crime is being a member of the enterprise that commits crimes, not the commission of any particular crime the enterprise carries out. Concrete example: Let’s say the Gambino mafia “family” commits murder, extortion, etc. — the usual run of mob crimes. If you are indicted for RICO conspiracy in that context, the crime is not the killing of X rival mobster, or the extortion of Y businessman (although you probably would be indicted for those crimes in separate counts if you were personally complicit in them). The crime is to intentionally conduct or participate in the affairs of the Gambino family. The prosecutor must show that you did that through the commission of crimes (i.e., the pattern of racketeering activity). But the gist of the offense is the enterprise.

This is where I believe Willis’s theory founders.

In fact, she gets it wrong right out of the starting gate, describing Trump and his 18 alleged co-racketeers as a “criminal organization.” This is just dumb. If you could prove they conspired to do something illegal, you could accurately call them members of a criminal pact; but the 19 defendants are not even members of a single organization, much less one that is innately criminal.

Moreover, from the prosecution’s perspective, there need not be a “criminal organization” in order for there to be a RICO enterprise — as we’ve seen, the latter can be a lawful entity as long as it is an association in fact. As a prosecutor, it is hard enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the elements of offenses that must be established to secure a conviction; so the state should never allege something it does not need to prove, let alone something that cannot be proved because it isn’t true.

But more important, the 19 people charged have no driving interest in being part of the group that Willis frames as “the enterprise.” Their objective was to keep Trump in power. It was that objective, and not the sustaining of any group, that brought them together; and once that objective was attained or conclusively defeated, the group — to the dubious extent it really was an identifiable group — would (and did) melt away. That’s another good sign that you’re not dealing with a RICO enterprise. The vast run of such enterprises are in it for the money — you want to be in an enterprise because it generates lots of income over time. And the law calls for prosecutors to prove that RICO enterprises are continuing threats, so an economic purpose and the carrying on of activities (criminal and otherwise) to sustain the gravy train are the fabric of a RICO enterprise.

Jack Smith’s federal election-interference case, of which I am not a fan, is nonetheless a better case because he identifies real crimes that he alleges the conspirators agreed to commit in the course of retaining Trump in power. Smith doesn’t claim that retaining Trump in power is a crime per se, and he fully acknowledges that the objective of retaining Trump in power was the motive for the crimes that are charged. But the conspiracies he alleges are violations of federal penal law — defrauding the United States, corruptly obstructing Congress, and undermining the civil rights of voters. I have my quarrels regarding whether the facts he alleges establish those crimes as they have been construed by the courts; but I freely concede that they are crimes.

Willis, by contrast, is turning to RICO because she can’t charge an overarching conspiracy to achieve a criminal objective. Instead, she can prove a lot of chicanery carried out in the service of a lawful aim. But alleging that Trump and his 18 co-defendants orchestrated this chicanery as part of an “enterprise” does not solve her problem.

I should hasten to add that Willis charges other conspiracy offenses besides RICO, including against Trump, in her 41-count indictment. I will come to them in subsequent posts. Here, I’ve confined myself to the RICO offense, Count One, which runs 71 pages, including 161 alleged overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy — the framework of the state’s case.
Title: Re: Dershowtiz assesses
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2023, 08:08:15 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2023, 03:46:49 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9TBFX5pUg

My take from Dershowitz:
Prosecutors must prove Trump knew the election was perfectly accurate. (Not possible)
If Fulton county jury makes a flimsy conviction, State appeals court could easily reverse.
Proving his state of mind opens up all the alleged evidence of irregularities, making it all public and newly relevant.
Prosecutor wants the case done in 6 months. Dershowitz says this has never been done.

Looks like it can't be done before the election. Just one more thing hanging over it all. The fact that the case is flimsy, my words, means it strengthens Trump's case to his supporters that he is a victim and they are the real target.

100% of hardcore Trump supporters believe the election was stolen. It's definitional.
Title: Byron York on the "fake electors" charge
Post by: DougMacG on August 16, 2023, 06:39:28 AM: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trump-indictment-four-too-much

In a nutshell, there was a lawsuit pending and no remedy available if an alternative set of electors had not met on that day. It was all done and covered publicly. All felonies in the eyes of the prosecutor.
Title: Who is the GA judge?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2023, 10:08:37 AM: Excellent find!!!

=======================

https://www.oann.com/newsroom/who-is-scott-mcafee-judge-overseeing-trumps-georgia-election-probe/

https://www.oann.com/newsroom/georgia-jail-where-trump-could-be-booked-is-under-investigation/
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 16, 2023, 11:57:31 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/the-brains-behind-fake-trump-electors-was-once-a-liberal-democrat/ar-AA1fmaoR
previous liberal attorney included as lawyer participating in Jan 6 elector strategy:
Kenneth J. Chesebro

"“He was not making good-faith legal arguments for his client,” said Tribe, who said he has been distressed to see his former mentee emerge as an architect of Trump’s plans to cling to power. “He was inventing legal fiction that paid no attention to the law and creating a pretext for a conspiracy to steal an election.”

This coming from a partisan left wing Democrat Lawrence the Tribe
who BTW lost both impeachment cases in the Senate.

and only won in a Democrat controlled House.
Title: By this standard, Alan Dershowitz would be in jail
Post by: DougMacG on August 17, 2023, 06:35:48 AM: By this standard, Alan Dershowitz would be in jail, by his own admission.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12413181/ALAN-DERSHOWITZ-Al-Gore-2000-Donald-Trump-indictment.html

And with that, I'm tired of looking into the TDS court cases.

In the 1990s I studied and learned the Clinton scandals backward and forward. It did me no good whatsoever.

I'm tired of the Biden scandals too. It looks like it was over $50 million. Largest in history. Joe was more than in on it. Appointment of Weiss is a violation of federal law. Garland should be impeached. Weiss too. If the articles support it. Make the timing of the Senate trial be as politically disadvantageous to the Democrats as possible. And move on.

This is all important but more important is that both parties are currently picking the wrong candidate for the next 4 years.
Title: WSJ: The curious case of Mark Meadows
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 17, 2023, 11:52:07 AM: The Curious Case of Mark Meadows, Told Through Two Trump Indictments
Meadows is seeking to move the charges in Georgia to federal court claiming he was working in his official capacity
By Isaac YuFollow
Aug. 17, 2023 7:39 am ET

In the federal indictment against Donald Trump for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Mark Meadows goes unnamed and appears just four times, referenced only as “the Defendant’s chief of staff.” There is no suggestion that Meadows is a criminal.

In new charges announced in Georgia this week, however, Meadows’s alleged actions are described in much more detail—and he is charged with two crimes, one of 19 co-defendants including Trump.

How can Meadows play such a small part in one story, but commit prosecutable offenses in the other?

The answer lies in the diverging approaches prosecutors took in each case and the nature of the charges levied. In the federal case, Trump is the only defendant, accused of defrauding the government, impeding civil rights and obstruction. None of his six alleged co-conspirators are named, though most are identifiable as members of his circle. Despite being Trump’s right-hand man in the months after the election, however, Meadows doesn’t match any of the co-conspirators’ descriptions.

The Georgia prosecution, however, is a racketeering case, with Trump charged as being at the center of a criminal enterprise. Under Georgia’s RICO law, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has the power to cast a wider net and implicate any player—big or small—who took part in the alleged conspiracy. Any act that furthers the alleged enterprise, which could be as simple as making a phone call or sending an email, can place an individual in legal jeopardy if done to advance the conspiracy’s broader goals.

The federal indictment does not name Meadows directly, instead referring to him four times by his title, 'Chief of Staff,' and mostly in minor references (top); the Georgia indictment (bottom) paints a broader portrait of his role.
While Trump spent his final months in the Oval Office, it was his allies who jetted in and out of contested states, delivering the marching orders for their allies on the ground, organizing slates of fraudulent electors and imploring local officials to unlawfully alter vote counts, the Georgia indictment alleges. To this end, the indictment lays out 161 prosecutable acts taken by those allies, including those allegedly committed by Meadows.

The differences in Meadows’s role between the two cases are the latest twist on how the chief of staff fits in the investigations and prosecutions in the aftermath of Jan. 6.

“It really comes down to the power of the RICO conspiracy,” said Jeffrey Cohen, a professor at Boston College Law School. “The Jack Smith indictment is much more circumscribed and charges discrete conspiracies, whereas the Georgia indictment is really charging a RICO conspiracy, which is a much broader tool.”

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases and called the probes “witch hunts.” A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on this article. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Meadows’s attorneys, Joseph M. Englert and George J. Terwilliger III, argued in a court filing Tuesday that the Georgia case should be dismissed or at minimum moved from state court to the federal system because the charges relate to Meadows’s conduct when he was a federal official.

“Nothing Mr. Meadows is alleged in the indictment to have done is criminal per se: arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the President’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the President,” they wrote. “One would expect a Chief of Staff to the President of the United States to do these sorts of things.”

Terwilliger and Englert didn’t respond to requests for comment.

These excerpts from the federal (top) and Georgia (bottom) indictments describe Meadows at the Cobb County Civic Center in December 2020, though he is only named in the Georgia indictment.

Before joining the Trump administration in March 2020, Meadows represented a North Carolina district in the House, where he had risen to prominence as a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus. As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was embedded in the former president’s inner circle during the peak of the 2020 campaign and in the crucial weeks following the election.

Meadows’s role as a liaison between Trump and other officials in the election’s aftermath came to light during the testimony of Meadows’s former aide Cassidy Hutchinson in a hearing before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Hutchinson testified that Meadows knew “things might get real, real bad” and at one point requested a pardon from Trump.

CASE AGAINST TRUMP IN GEORGIA

Trump and His Orbit: The Scope of Georgia’s Election Case Explained

Meadows declined to testify before the panel himself. In December 2021, the Democratic-controlled House voted mostly along party lines to hold Meadows in contempt for defying that subpoena, though the Justice Department declined to prosecute him.

Prosecutors have a high degree of discretion over how they pursue their cases: Smith has become known during his time as a federal prosecutor for cases that are more streamlined, while Willis has often opted for sweeping cases, including many under RICO laws, that implicate numerous defendants.

Much is unknown about Meadows’s interactions in either case. Meadows did testify in Smith’s probe after Trump’s efforts to block him on executive privilege grounds failed. He originally declined to testify in Georgia and was eventually ordered to do so by a state judge in South Carolina, where Meadows is now a resident.

Former President Donald Trump is facing four separate indictments at both state and federal levels. WSJ breaks down each of the indictments and what they mean for his 2024 presidential campaign. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao
Willis’s probe in Georgia paints a broader portrait of Meadows, who is charged with two crimes, racketeering and soliciting a public official to violate his oath. The indictment cites him more than a dozen times and describes in much greater detail his alleged actions to further an election conspiracy.

Beyond taking part in several strategy meetings with Trump, Meadows allegedly texted a Fulton County investigator, offering campaign funds to help speed up the county’s signature verification process. He also worked with Trump to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and at another point asked Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.) to help him contact leaders in the Pennsylvania state legislature, according to the indictment.

Most of Meadows’s actions as described by the Georgia indictment go unmentioned in Smith’s. The only apparent overlap between the two indictments is a single episode in which Meadows visits Cobb County, Ga., in an attempt to observe a signature matching audit process.

Meadows, who texted Trump that he thought the officials he observed were “conducting themselves in an exemplary fashion,” didn’t appear to reassure the former president.

“They are slow walking the signature verification in Georgia,” Trump tweeted the next day. “They don’t want results to get out prior to January 6th. They know what they are trying so hard to hide. Terrible people!”

Lindsay Wise and Sadie Gurman contributed to this article.

Write to Isaac Yu at isaac.yu@wsj.com
Title: This is what comes of making unnecessary enemies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 17, 2023, 07:00:05 PM: https://americanwirenews.com/former-ag-bill-barr-likens-trump-to-a-defiant-9-year-old-and-predicts-j6-indictment/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=6-19-23%20Daily%20AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 18, 2023, 07:42:37 AM: for the most part I agree with Barr

except I am not clear why he did not pursue Hunter Biden allegations. more seriously

I missed the early part of his interview with recently when this question was asked

I suspect Barr was too concerned with his and the DOJ image of not wanting to look too parisan.

I agree with him on Trump - he will drag us all down
Title: AMcC: The Chicanery of the Hunter Biden Plea Bargain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2023, 07:22:26 AM: The Chicanery of the Hunter Biden Plea Bargain
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 19, 2023 6:30 AM

‘Special counsel’ David Weiss has done everything in his power to make the DOJ’s investigation of Biden family corruption disappear.
Sham special counsel David Weiss could not have more royally screwed up the Hunter Biden case. But of course, if that was the plan, it’s not really a screwup, right?

Back in Judge Maryellen Noreika’s Delaware courtroom this week, we found the prosecutor still flailing in the miasma of his imploded schemes. At issue was the corrupt “diversion agreement” that Weiss, on behalf of the president’s Justice Department, executed with the president’s son: the pact whereby Weiss gifted Hunter not merely a complete pass on a gun felony punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment, but a total immunity bath — no prosecution for bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, failing to register as a foreign agent, or any other crimes arising out of the Biden family business of peddling Joe Biden’s political influence to operatives of corrupt and anti-American regimes.

Having been humiliated by Judge Noreika’s exposure of Biden Justice Department corruption, Weiss is now posing as a tough guy who insists the diversion is null and void because Hunter did not fulfill a separate plea agreement that called for him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges — not content with eschewing easily provable tax felonies, tough guy Weiss also promised to push for a no-jail sentence.

This would be quite hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating.

As it happens, the public will be spared from the worst of Weiss’s machinations, at least in the short term. But that is no thanks to Weiss. He’d like you to think he’s a born-again prosecutorial dynamo after last week’s charade, in which Merrick Garland pretended to name him a special counsel. In reality, Weiss remains a high-ranking Biden Justice Department official who is ineligible to be a special counsel — at least by regulation as opposed to Garland’s hocus-pocus. A special counsel is an attorney brought in from outside the government, while Weiss is the Delaware U.S. attorney. A special counsel is brought in because the Justice Department has a conflict of interest, and Weiss is a high-ranking Justice Department official. A special counsel would have indicted the case by now, and Weiss has not. Nothing has changed.

No, Hunter will be denied his “stay out of jail free forever” card because of the actions of the court, not the prosecutor. Essentially, since the executive branch won’t follow Justice Department guidelines when dealing with the president’s son, we have to rely on the judiciary to do it. First, Judge Noreika derailed the plea agreement by asking a few simple questions about its blatant irregularities. And now the court’s probation office has refused to approve the diversion agreement that runs afoul of Justice Department policy against diversion for gun crimes.

We’ll get to the Probation Department’s intervention in due course. First though, with all the delusional chatter about how Weiss’s special-counsel appointment is a boon for the Biden “investigation,” we must explore in detail the depth of his skullduggery.

Weiss Has Been Disappearing the Biden Case for Five Years

You can’t blame Hunter Biden’s lawyers for these antics. Their job is to get the best deal possible for their client. Weiss and the Biden Justice Department, by contrast, are duty bound to enforce the criminal law with appropriate vigor, consistent with DOJ guidelines that would have called for felony charges and a felony plea to the most serious, readily provable offense.

In our adversarial system, this is how prosecutors vindicate the public’s interests in the rule of law and equal treatment. Weiss and the Biden DOJ, to the contrary, acted as Hunter’s second set of defense lawyers. Predictably, given the Justice Department’s impossible conflict of interest in this case, Weiss sought to serve and protect the president. On the surface, that meant insulating Hunter from real prosecution. The main objective, however, was to steer the “ongoing investigation” away from Hunter’s dear old dad. To label the DOJ’s Joe Biden whitewash “the Hunter Biden plea deal” is like calling a green-new-boondoggle “the Inflation Reduction Act.”

To reiterate, Weiss has never indicted the case because he’s intentionally disappearing the case. The failure to file formal charges lets the statute of limitations run. This Garland/Weiss gambit has already achieved much of its purpose. The most damaging evidence implicating Joe Biden is the sale of his political influence during his years as Obama administration vice president. Thanks to Weiss’s “don’t indict” game plan, the statute of limitations (six years for tax crimes, five years for all other crimes) has rendered time-barred any and all criminal offenses committed from 2014 through 2017. The IRS and FBI agents who were actually trying to make the case believe the scheme petered out in 2019, when Joe’s 2020 presidential bid forced the family business to go dark. Pretty soon, then, there will be nothing left to charge: Even if Weiss finally manages to choreograph a face-saving filing of trivial charges against Hunter, the clock will still run out on Joe’s criminal exposure. Mission accomplished.

Since Weiss’s aim was to sabotage the case, that’s what the agreements attendant to Hunter’s plea bargain were structured to achieve.

Weiss’s strategy required keeping the plea agreement (tax misdemeanors) completely separate from the diversion agreement (gun felony). One wonders how, hearing Weiss pine in court on Tuesday that the diversion agreement is voided by the failure of the plea agreement — as if the two agreements were interdependent —Judge Noreika avoided falling off the bench in spasms of laughter.

Hiding the Ball from the Court

A diversion agreement is like any other written contract: It is signed by the parties, with each giving something of value as consideration, mutually locking in the other party’s commitment. Here, the Biden Justice Department agreed to defer and eventually dismiss the gun charge, while Hunter agreed, among other things, to waive indictment and abide by the two years’ probation term. That’s a contract.

And here’s the significant part: Because Weiss wanted the diversion agreement to be separate from the plea agreement and stand on its own, the diversion agreement does not mention the plea agreement. That’s now a problem for Weiss because of a so-called completeness clause that he included in the diversion agreement (p. 8, para. 19) but disingenuously omitted from the plea agreement:

This agreement sets forth all of the terms of the Agreement between the United States and Biden. It constitutes the complete and final agreement between the United States and Biden in this matter. There are no other agreements, written or otherwise, modifying the terms, conditions, or obligations of this Agreement. No future modifications of or additions to this Agreement, in whole or in part, shall be valid unless they are set forth in writing and signed by the United States, Biden, and Biden’s counsel. [Emphasis added.]

How can Weiss now say with a straight face that the validity of the diversion agreement is dependent upon the successful completion of the plea agreement? The Justice Department expressly and unambiguously stated that there were no other written or oral agreements that modified the terms of the diversion agreement. The studiously unmentioned plea agreement thus has no effect on the diversion agreement.

Now, why did Weiss stick the completeness provision in the diversion agreement but not the plea agreement? Because he was hiding the ball from the court.

The Justice Department always puts a completeness clause in plea agreements. Defendants often have buyer’s remorse about plea deals, especially if the sentence subsequently imposed by the judge ends up being more harsh than anticipated. Many thus come back to court insisting that they would never have pled guilty were it not for some side deal that somehow went unmentioned in the plea agreement. Courts reject these claims out of hand because of the completeness clause. That’s why the Justice Department insists on including it.

Except, of course, in the case of the president’s son. For Hunter, Weiss cooked up something vaguely resembling a completeness clause, clearly hoping the judge would skim it inattentively, if at all. But the clause (Plea Agreement, p.6, para. 13) is dodgy. This becomes clear when it is compared to the standard, ironclad completeness clause in the diversion agreement (excerpted above). Noreika noticed. It was a tipoff that Weiss was trying to pull a fast one.

The most important provision in any plea agreement — other than the precise description of the offenses to which the defendant is agreeing to plead guilty — is the immunity clause. That’s where the government lays out, with what is supposed to be clarity, the crimes and potential crimes for which it is promising the defendant will not be prosecuted. But in the Hunter plea agreement, there is no immunity provision.

Why? Because Weiss was trying to hide it from the judge, hoping she’d be a rubber stamp.

Here, we come to another big difference between a plea agreement and a diversion agreement: The judge has to approve the plea agreement — federal law so mandates. After all, the plea agreement is the basis on which the judge will find the defendant guilty and impose a sentence. By contrast, the judge does not sign off on a diversion agreement. Diversion is just a matter of prosecutorial discretion: The Justice Department agrees not to prosecute on a charge if the defendant fulfills certain conditions, so there is no plea, no conviction, and no sentence.

Thankfully, there is a catch when the diversion agreement contemplates probationary conditions. We’ll come to that in due course.

Obfuscating Hunter’s Immunity Bath

The breadth of immunity Weiss was trying to give Hunter was outrageous. Any sentient judge would have questioned it. So Weiss tried to hide it in two ways.

First, he tucked it into the diversion agreement that he hoped the judge wouldn’t peruse, while omitting it from the plea agreement that the judge would have to look at (though, Weiss hoped, not too closely). But because he was omitting the all-important immunity clause from the plea agreement, Weiss had no choice but to omit the completeness clause, too. The only reason Hunter agreed to plead guilty, even to two trivial misdemeanors, was the sweeping immunity grant. If the plea agreement had included the standard completeness clause but left out the immunity grant, Hunter and his lawyers would never have signed it.

It was one thing to hope Noreika wouldn’t notice the plea agreement’s omission of an immunity term. But betting that she’d snooze through the lack of the completeness clause that the DOJ habitually puts at the end of every plea agreement was unrealistic — and if Weiss surmised that Noreika, like himself, was a standard Delaware “don’t you dare question the Bidens” type, then he hadn’t taken her measure.

Weiss’s second stratagem was to camouflage the indefensible breadth of the immunity grant: In exchange for a guilty plea to two puny misdemeanor tax charges with no jail time, he intended to shield Hunter from prosecution for all potential felonies from 2014 through 2019. In a plea deal, the government is supposed to state clearly the crimes it is forfeiting the authority to prosecute, but Weiss knew that if he spelled this out, there would be an earthquake on Capitol Hill, outcry from the public, and deep embarrassment for the White House and the Justice Department. So even though he hoped the judge would not make a fuss about his insertion of the immunity term in the diversion agreement, he knew the diversion agreement would have to be public. Ergo, he concocted a device to obfuscate the immunity terms.

That was “Exhibit A” of the diversion agreement. It is a narrative “statement of facts” describing Hunter’s professional pursuits and personal foibles from 2014 to 2019. It is supposed to take the place of a clear description of the immunized crimes; but of course, Hunter was not going to admit to serial felonies. Hence, it worked this way: Hunter and Weiss jointly adopted the four-page statement of facts; then Weiss — in the key paragraph 15 of the diversion agreement — gave Hunter immunity for any charges that might be “encompassed” in that recitation. That is, the Biden Justice Department didn’t come out and directly tell us what potential crimes prosecutors had immunized; it was instead left up to the reader to figure out what potential crimes could be teased out of the statement of facts.

Once they had slammed that past the judge, the plan was for Hunter to give a cloying statement about how relieved he and his family were to have this hiccup behind them — in fact, a podium was even set up right outside the courthouse in anticipation of this denouement. Concurrently, Hunter’s lawyers would crow that the diversion agreement, by its sweeping immunity term that expressly incorporates the statement of facts, ended the Biden case once and for all — might as well forget that molehill those crazy House Republicans are portraying as a mountain of Biden corruption, because the government could no longer prosecute Hunter. Finally, for their part, Weiss and the Biden Justice Department wouldn’t have said anything . . . but they wouldn’t have prosecuted Hunter for anything, either.

This legerdemain went poof because the judge asked about the immunity term in open court. Put prematurely on the spot, Hunter’s lawyers proclaimed that it covered everything — and they were right, that was the intention. Weiss, however, was too humiliated to admit this. Consequently, the Biden Justice Department lied, claiming that there was still an “ongoing investigation” and that Hunter could still be prosecuted — even though, if those things were true, it would have made no sense to give a principal subject a misdemeanor plea with a promise of no jail time in the middle of the “ongoing investigation.” Hunter’s lawyers became indignant, and understandably so. Yes, it’s an outrageous deal . . . but it’s the deal Weiss and the Biden Justice Department promised until they got caught.

There Is No Biden Corruption Investigation at the Biden Justice Department

But that barely scratches the surface of Weiss’s sabotage. The statement of facts that he adopted is Hunter’s version of events. This shows that (a) there is no real Justice Department Biden investigation, and (b) Weiss is trying to kill the case before it engulfs the president.

How do we know this? Because of the information thus far gathered by Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis), as well as House committees led by Oversight chairman James Comer (R., Ky.). The energetic congressional efforts, contrary to the dormant Justice Department “probe,” are undergirded by bank records, Hunter’s laptop, and the testimony of both whistleblower IRS agents and Hunter’s partner Devon Archer. This mosaic shows that Hunter was the front man for a scheme in which foreign actors paid millions of dollars in bribes to purchase access to Joe Biden, and that the Bidens and their confederates tried to hide (a) the sources of those money transfers, (b) the fact that they were raking in millions, and (c) the fact that they were acting as foreign agents. While minor, the tax misdemeanors to which Hunter was trying to plead guilty were consistent with this scheme: The Bidens pretended this money came from legitimate business activity and then hid the proceeds by, among other things, not reporting the income and not paying the taxes due.

That is what the evidence shows. But what did Weiss do? He adopted a statement of facts in which Hunter asserts that the foreign income was legitimately earned through his purported work as a high-end lawyer and business consultant (i.e., no way it’s bribery, influence peddling, and foreign-agent work), and that he failed to pay his taxes because he was drug-addled (i.e., no way it’s money laundering and tax evasion).

The statement of facts adopted by Weiss completely undermines the essence of the Biden corruption scheme. If you were a prosecutor who was assigned to the Biden case, and you truly had an “ongoing investigation” into the Biden business activities, there is no way in a million years that you would adopt a defendant’s spin on the “facts” that contradicts the evidence amassed by your investigators. Indeed, there is no way, in the middle of your “ongoing investigation” of serious felonies, that you would gift one of the main subjects of the investigation with a plea deal involving two misdemeanor tax charges — a plea deal in which you promised to seek a no-jail sentence and which you structured so the defendant could credibly claim complete immunity from any crimes uncovered in your “ongoing investigation.”

In the end, Hunter’s lawyers are right and “special counsel” Weiss is wrong: Weiss had every intention of giving away the store. The way Weiss and the Biden Justice Department wrote the plea and diversion agreements, they are wholly independent — the collapse of the plea should have no effect on the validity of the diversion. And the way the diversion agreement is written, Hunter should have complete immunity from prosecution, notwithstanding the lack of even an admission of guilt to the misdemeanor tax charges.

Probation Office Shoots Down Weiss’s Inexplicable Diversion of a Gun Felony

Hunter and his lawyers are trying to convince Judge Noreika that the diversion agreement and the broad immunity it promises are still valid and enforceable. In the end, he is going to lose, but not because Weiss has suddenly grown a backbone. Hunter will lose because, once again, the court rode to the rescue. It wasn’t the judge this time; it was the Delaware federal court’s chief probation officer, Margaret M. Bray.

While the judge need not sign off on a diversion agreement, the probation office must approve it if the agreement includes probationary conditions, as the one between Weiss and Hunter’s lawyers did. This is because the probation office is responsible for monitoring a defendant’s compliance with such conditions. Routinely, the probation office signs off on diversion agreements. Weiss and Hunter’s lawyers must have figured this one would be rubber-stamped as well. But Chief Probation Officer Bray declined.

How come? It is not a subject Weiss wants to dwell on, but we should. There is no explanation on the record. Yet, we know that Justice Department guidelines instruct that a defendant is ineligible for diversion if he is “accused of an offense involving brandishing or use of a firearm or other deadly weapon.” Hunter is known to have obtained a gun in October 2018 by lying on a required government form about his illegal-drug use. There is video from the laptop showing him brandishing a gun a few days later in a depraved and potentially dangerous scene with a prostitute. Not long after that, because of his carelessness, the gun he purchased after lying on the federal form was lost across the street from a school. (It was later recovered.)

As if that weren’t bad enough, I believe the probation office realized Hunter had to have been handling more than one gun on his autumn 2018 drug binge — and it’s not clear all guns have been accounted for. The gun he purchased after lying on the form is a revolver (described in the diversion agreement as a Colt Cobra 38-special revolver); but the gun in the video from a few days later is not a revolver (it appears to be a Glock). Note, moreover, that the diversion agreement called for Hunter to forfeit “all firearms . . . including but not limited to” the revolver. Implicitly, Weiss was acknowledging that there could be multiple guns at issue. Naturally, the Biden Justice Department doesn’t want to broadcast that fact: President Biden is as demagogic as Democrats get in demonizing law-abiding gun-owners and Second Amendment rights; his son’s felony possession of a single gun — that his Justice Department tried to give Hunter a pass on — is humiliating enough.

Judge Noreika exposed the shameful plea agreement, so now the misdemeanor charges have been dismissed. Chief Probation Officer Bray refused to be party to the appalling diversion agreement, so it too is sure to be scrapped. The commentariat is fantasizing that, with Attorney General Garland having now branded him a “special counsel,” David Weiss will turn alpha-prosecutor. I wouldn’t count on that. Weiss remains a top Biden Justice Department official, and he has methodically undermined the Biden case for years. It’s a better bet that he’s now huddling again with counsel for the president’s son, struggling to come up with more plea-bargain cosplay they can try to sell as real law enforcement.

Meanwhile, the statute-of-limitations clock keeps on ticking.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 19, 2023, 07:56:52 AM: ".Meanwhile, the statute-of-limitations clock keeps on ticking."

I thought the clock stopwatch goes on stop once an official investigation begins

I guess not.
Title: Andy McC, GA, One flaw. No clear crime committed
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2023, 03:03:35 PM: https://themessenger.com/opinion/the-flaw-in-trumps-georgia-indictment
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2023, 06:34:57 AM: "While constitutional due process guarantees that every American is presumed innocent, it also dictates that no American can be charged with a crime and forced to stand trial unless there is probable cause that a crime has been committed"

this would not matter to a DC grand jury :x since it involves *TRUMP!!!!*
Title: WT: Peter Navarro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2023, 06:22:37 AM: U.S. v. Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg

The indictment a grand jury should return for the persecution of former President Trump

By Peter Navarro

The Grand Jury in the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming charges: The Defendants, Attorney General Merrick Garland, special prosecutor Jack Smith, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree with co-conspirators known and unknown to the Grand Jury.

Defendants engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. They attempted to impair or destroy the candidacy of Republican front-runner Donald Trump and thereby deprive Mr. Trump and his supporters of their rights under color of law.

Defendants used a three-pronged attack. The first was a full-frontal assault to wrongly convict Mr. Trump and his associates of numerous felonies. These convictions would preclude Mr. Trump from serving if he won the 2024 race and deny Mr. Trump the services of his associates.

In the event a conviction could not be secured, Defendants sought to damage Mr. Trump’s reputation beyond repair with knowingly false allegations. They believed that an onslaught of negative publicity would turn Mr. Trump from front-runner to also-ran.

Third, Defendants used their baseless and weaponized prosecutions to distract Mr. Trump and his associates from campaigning. Defendants also sought to divert Mr. Trump’s campaign resources, both money and staff, toward fighting his legal battles. These battles had to be fought in different jurisdictions hundreds or thousands of miles from one another and thereby drained tens of millions of dollars from Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign coffers.

To advance their conspiracy, Defendants shared clearly identifiable common strategies and tactics that illustrate the high degree of explicit collusion or tacit coordination that conspiratorially occurred between and among them.

Their manner and means include: Each Defendant relied on a novel legal theory far outside the boundaries of true justice and without any basis in settled law. For example, Defendant Willis relied on the federal RICO (Racketeering) Act rather than violations of state election laws while Defendant Bragg attempted to twist a misdemeanor of allegedly falsifying business records into a felonious federal campaign violation.

Each indictment was timed to the 2024 election cycle to maximize its possible negative impacts on voter perceptions of Mr. Trump. By rolling their indictments, arraignments, and proposed trial dates through the election cycle, Defendants also sought to substantially curb Mr. Trump’s ability to move freely about the country to campaign.

Each Defendant sought to adjudicate their case in Trump-unfriendly jurisdictions with high Democratic registration. Defendants believed this would lead to a higher probability that members of a grand jury and jury would first indict and then convict Mr. Trump and do so in rapid fashion, e.g., Defendant Bragg’s Manhattan, Defendant Smith’s Washington, D.C., or the “rocket docket” in Miami known for its speedy trials.

Each Defendant excessively charged Mr. Trump with multiple counts that collectively added up to over 700 years of prison time. The underlying tactic, wellknown in prosecutorial circles, was to throw everything at the wall and hope that something would stick.

Each Defendant falsely charged numerous Trump associates to pressure these prosecutorial victims to turn “state’s evidence.” This pressure included both the threat of prison time and the drain on family resources from paying significant legal bills.

Finally, each Defendant built his or her case around the rebuttal presumption that the 2020 presidential election was unmarred by fraud and irregularities. No reasonable person reviewing the forensic evidence in key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — or who simply watched the films “2000 Mules” or “Rigged” — can assert with 100% certainty that Mr. Trump did not have good reasons to believe the election was stolen from him and the American people.

The Defendants’ criminal enterprise enlisted numerous unindicted co-conspirators in the print and television media. These co-conspirators publicized leaks from the investigations and readily adopted the false narratives and malicious talking points disseminated to them directly by the bureaucracies controlled by the Defendants.

While the Defendants’ conspiracy ultimately backfi red by consolidating support for Mr. Trump and thereby paved the way for his return to the White House in 2025, Defendants did incalculable damage to the integrity of the American judicial and election systems.

Defendants did similar incalculable harm to economic and national security by diverting the American electorate’s attention away from critical issues, including the economic challenge of stagflation and the clear and present dangers that rogue nations such as China, North Korea and Iran now pose to this nation.

Are these Defendants guilty of any of these possible charges? Should these Defendants bear any economic or legal burdens for their actions? You the jury reading this column can render your own verdict by taking the poll at www.peternavarro.substack.com. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Peter Navarro served as former President Donald Trump’s manufacturing czar and chief China strategist. This column originally appeared at his Substack.
Title: Florida records case - Trump guilty
Post by: ccp on August 23, 2023, 06:39:48 AM: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-vows-massive-tariffs-elected-184138555.html

O'Reilly states he is clearly guilty on this one the other three are bogus

Watching Dershowitz and Turley also hedge squirm and admit Trump's biggest problem of the four is clearly the Mar a Lago case

makes me think he has real problem here.

Dumb hard ass Trump would not simply return the damn documents - just has to give anyone who bothers him the middle finger

so now we will have to go through this mess for nothing .

And not I don't think he had dirt on Biden as reason for keeping the documents or he was covering something embarrassing.
I suspect it was just his being a plain hard ass.

This is so distracting .....
Title: Levin unhappy with "Deep State Andy": Giuliani
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2023, 06:33:08 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mark-levin-attacks-fox-news-colleague-andy-mccarthy-for-criticizing-trump-sadly-unserious/ar-AA1fDxf4?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=644a2c0d8fc347bba61235c6f657d337&ei=14

===============

https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/23/rudy-giuliani-mugshot-released-fulton-county-georgia/?pnespid=tKU4V35ZNPgd1eib_TS7EMnXswPzVcUnKuK2yuxtvAFmjNufMbnCgXUN.B_bAc6rU8syKxoA
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on August 24, 2023, 07:40:51 AM: I love Mark
but I disagree with him and all the other pro Trumpers till death crowd at NewsMax
about Trump

Most Americans do NOT want Trump - what is it that Mark does not understand?

Every poll has shown this for yrs.

Why can't we have a candidate who can win over 50% ?

Going into the election praying the Democrat is worse than Trump is asking to get whipped .

Nikkei Haley was correct last night.
Can anyone imagine having a candidate whom 2/3 of the nation do NOT want to vote for?
Title: AMcC: Stop the special counsel shenanigans ; hearing over removal to fed court
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2023, 02:52:26 PM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/stop-the-special-counsel-shenanigans/?bypass_key=NVN1SlNUSmU5MnNHRERlZzFEOVdaQT09OjpWVGxRU21wWGJtcDJSMVZ2VG14aE5FdHVlbkpGWnowOQ%3D%3D

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/federal-judge-orders-2nd-hearing-removing-georgia-election-case-5480826?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-08-26-2&src_cmp=breaking-2023-08-26-2&utm_medium=email&est=OExHESSheKNgUIAYXIf8S7WpHnnBaDJhNAEepYzP4KyWS1ScfU6m3yucP5BhRWo5N%2BRj
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2023, 06:16:18 AM: Trump in Fulton County
Voters, not prosecutors, should select presidential nominees.
James Freeman
WSJ
Aug. 25, 2023 12:37 pm ET

One does not need to approve of Donald Trump’s behavior to be appalled at the prosecutorial abuses directed against him, nor to be concerned about destructive precedents being set in the partisan pursuit of a former president.

The Journal’s Cameron McWhirter, Jan Wolfe and Aruna Viswanatha reported on Thursday from Atlanta:

Former President Donald Trump surrendered at the Fulton County, Ga., jail to answer charges that he operated a criminal enterprise that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in the state.
It provided a striking moment in which, for the fourth time this year, Trump had to present himself to authorities to face criminal charges—and the first time he, or any former U.S. president, stood for a mug shot.
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky is a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. He argued recently:

The attack on the First Amendment and the very structure of the American legal system by the Star Chamber of Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is a profound assault on our democratic republic and the rule of law... Willis is trying to criminalize free speech and have a chilling effect on anyone in the future who might dare to question the results of an election...
By naming as alleged co-conspirators the lawyers who were representing Trump and providing him with advice and counsel in the legal actions that were in the state and before legislators during public hearings and in private conversations, Willis is also attacking the fundamental way that our justice system works, in which lawyers are tasked with vigorously pursuing the interests of their clients.
Mr. von Spakovsky delved into some specific allegations against Mr. Trump:

In order to justify her fantasy, Willis lists a series of actions that occurred from Nov. 4, 2020, to Sept. 15, 2022, which were supposedly overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. But Willis lists incident after incident (what the indictment terms “Acts”) of perfectly legal actions that not only don’t violate any laws, but are fully protected under the First Amendment...
The first “illegal” act listed is Trump on Nov. 4, 2020, making a “nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election.” She makes similar ridiculous claims against other defendants, such as Giuliani, for example, because he “appeared at a press conference at the Republican National Committee Headquarters” making similar “false statements concerning fraud” in the 2020 election.
Willis even laughably lists as part of the unlawful conspiracy many public tweets by Trump, such as one on Dec. 3, 2020, and another on Dec. 30, urging the public to watch the live coverage of the Georgia legislature’s hearings on the 2020 election. Or another tweet on Dec. 30 thanking the Georgia legislature “for today’s revealing meeting!” that Trump said uncovered “Massive VOTER FRAUD.”
Under that bizarre notion, would the legislators who participated in those hearings, listened attentively, and considered the allegations that had been raised be unindicted co-conspirators? That is how nutty Willis’ claims are—claims that are a direct attack on political speech.
It’s never clear whether prosecutors targeting Mr. Trump are trying to rule him out of U.S. politics or trying to anger Republicans enough to nominate him again and give Joe Biden a fighting chance at re-election. In either case they need to get out of the way and let voters make free decisions.
Title: Mark Meadows, defendant, Atlanta paper
Post by: DougMacG on August 28, 2023, 08:19:25 PM: https://www.ajc.com/politics/breaking-meadows-defends-actions-as-he-testifies-in-federal-court/YG3IFQBGGJA5BGAP5FNO74CIMI/
Title: Access to J6 footage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2023, 10:35:53 AM: https://www.oann.com/newsroom/house-gop-rolls-out-access-to-view-january-6-footage/
Title: AMcC: Trump deserves due process
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2023, 07:33:12 AM: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/guilty-or-not-trump-deserves-due-process/?bypass_key=SE54K1B5Ym5BcW1uWWZ2VlZ6a1RKQT09OjpOMGhETTNkT1dFVjRNbVY2YTJGQlMydFNRVzE2WnowOQ%3D%3D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: objectivist1 on September 10, 2023, 05:52:51 PM: Brilliant piece by Mark Levin on the absurdity of using the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump.

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/levin-the-democrat-partys-fetish-for-the-14th-amendment-is-a-vile-attack-on-our-elections-directed-at-one-man-donald-trump
Title: Mark to be on 2 xper week
Post by: ccp on September 11, 2023, 05:59:56 AM: Did you see Marks show last night?

He announced starting this Saturday he will be on 2 x per weekend with new shows.
Sat @ 8PM & Sun @ 8PM :-D :-D :-D :-D
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2023, 06:06:36 AM: Did not see!
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2023, 09:06:28 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/14/judge-shoots-down-fani-willis-bid-october-trump-trial/?pnespid=6LRhFyJHN6MKgenAqyTvTZaUpxnyWZt5LvixnvRnrQ9mxUAg5pmVZc8BdXTOQ3MSY.uM4TWk
Title: AMcC: Fani Willis's montrous Trump Case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2023, 03:09:59 PM: Fani Willis’s Monstrous Trump Case
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023.(Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
September 16, 2023 6:30 AM
If Willis is to be believed, a person need not commit or agree to commit any statutory crime in order to be guilty of RICO conspiracy.
Oh, about those 161 “overt acts” in furtherance of a RICO conspiracy that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis trumpeted in the first few dozen pages of her mammoth indictment of Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. Never mind. Turns out, according to Willis, that those 161 acts don’t really define the sprawling conspiracy to — well, to do something. They just give you some flavor.

The prosecutor now says she need not prove any of them. That was Willis’s position in contesting the attempt by Trump’s co-defendant and former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to remove the prosecution to federal court. The district attorney insists that, instead of proving what she’s ramblingly pleaded in the first 60 pages of the indictment, she can just prove other acts, even if they’re not in the indictment. By the DA’s lights, whatever she decides to prove just needs to be somehow connected to what she frames as a conspiracy to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election — notwithstanding that it is not a crime to try to reverse the result of an election.

So how are Trump, Meadows, and the other 17 defendants supposed to know what they are alleged to have done to make themselves guilty of racketeering? Well, what’s there to know? In Willis World, to be guilty, they don’t need to have done anything! According to the DA, as long as any defendant was “associated” with the group that is alleged to have conspired, that defendant is guilty — and is looking at a sentence of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, with a minimum of five years in the slammer.

That’s the prosecutor’s story. And I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that it was good enough for Judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee to the U.S. district court in Atlanta. In a 49-page opinion issued September 8, Judge Jones rejected Meadows’s removal gambit.

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Yes, Jones conceded, the overt acts that Willis outlined against Meadows did happen within the context of his official duties as a high federal official. Generally, that’s the low bar a defendant must hurdle to warrant removal, a remedy intended to prevent state governments from obstructing federal officials. But at Willis’s urging, Jones decided that the overt acts that Willis took pains to plead (and proclaim to the media) are irrelevant, because they “only serve to tell a broader story” about the conspiracy charge.

What matters, the court rationalized, is the gist of what Meadows is accused of doing — which Judge Jones describes as conspiracy to “unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in favor of President Trump.” Putting aside the lack of evidence of unlawful conduct, Jones concluded that Meadows’s efforts were essentially political and thus outside the scope of a presidential chief of staff’s governmental duties (the ones the removal doctrine protects). The judge emphasized that he was finding only that Meadows had failed to show that the case should be removed to federal court, not rendering any opinion on the merits of Willis’s case.

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We’ll have time to revisit the removal issue. Counsel for Meadows have already appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, and there are additional removal motions by other defendants who were federal officials at the relevant time, in particular, Trump and former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark.

For now, let’s stick with Willis’s ballyhooed RICO indictment.

The other big story regarding the Fulton County case at the end of last week was the publication of the final report by the investigative grand jury on whose work the indictment is based. What caused a stir was that, despite having indicted 19 people, including the former president of the United States, Willis must have disappointed her investigative grand jury. That panel recommended that she indict 39 Trump supporters, including Senator Lindsey Graham (the South Carolina Republican and Trump ally whom Willis had informed he was not even a subject of the investigation), as well as former Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and former Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn. For good measure, the grand jury also suggested charging a passel of Trump campaign lawyers (yes, that would be in addition to the several attorneys Willis did indict).

While Willis did not charge Graham et al., it is important to understand that the grand jurors’ recommendations had to have been based on the instructions Willis gave them about the law covering racketeering and related crimes. There is no judge in the grand jury. There are no defense lawyers. The grand jury’s adviser on matters of law, including on the proof requirements in statutes defining the potential crimes under investigation, is the prosecutor.

As previously explained, I don’t believe Willis’s racketeering-conspiracy charge states a crime. A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime — meaning a statutory offense. If the agreement is aimed at achieving a lawful objective, it is not a criminal conspiracy — period. If people who agree to a lawful objective commit crimes while pursuing that objective, then they are guilty of those crimes; that, however, does not transmogrify the lawful objective into a criminal conspiracy. Let’s say you and I agree to buy a house; finding ourselves without sufficient funds, we defraud a bank to try to get the money we need. That makes us guilty of bank fraud. We are not guilty of conspiracy to buy a house, because buying a house is not a crime.

Seeking the reversal of a presidential election is not a crime. Hence, agreeing to pursue that objective cannot be a criminal conspiracy. In fact, state law anticipates challenges to the outcome of presidential elections. So does federal law — see, e.g., Section 5(c) of presidential-election law, which provides that a state certification of electors could be “revised by any State or Federal judicial relief” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.

Furthermore, the Constitution protects the right of citizens to petition the government, which obviously includes petitioning state legislatures and election officials. And as any Democrat who has pleaded with President Biden to cancel student debt could tell you, it is not a crime to petition the government to do something lawless. As Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) could tell you, the Constitution even enables partisan-hack congressmen, in blatant violation of federal election law, to petition the vice president not to count state-certified electoral votes.

Willis, nevertheless, seeks to criminalize such constitutionally protected activity by framing it as the Georgia crime of solicitation to commit a felony. The notion is that these state legislators and election officials would not just have been flouting the civil law but would have been guilty of a criminal offense if they had taken official action to undo the election result — notwithstanding that those officials would have had immunity for even wrongheaded actions taken within their official duties.
Title: NY court rules Trump defrauded banks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2023, 02:27:44 PM: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/sep/26/donald-trump-defrauded-banks-insurers-as-he-built-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=H2hKw8TmF%2FjX8Plxv6N2w25HpFn9vLdo0nTliN6kw5DZpd0OgSVQcwKHFf6LLPtG&bt_ts=1695762558050
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on September 28, 2023, 09:49:43 AM: https://nypost.com/2023/09/26/trump-committed-fraud-by-inflating-wealth-ny-judge/

I believe this is civil persecution so Trump cannot pardon himself.

We knew this was coming with Shysters always whispering on enemy media outlets "what about Jared taking money from the Saudis?"

Plus the investigation of the Saudi wealth fund is suspicious.

https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/the-senate-permanent-subcommittee-on-investigations-issues-subpoena-to-saudi-investment-fund

Is this used as leverage over the Saudis by the Democrats?
Is this to find some sort of dirt on Jared?

I suspect this is all politically motivated not regulatory motivated.

No faith in the integrity of the Dems in any fashion whether it be the politicians media donors etc.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2023, 01:48:49 PM: My understanding is that lenders ALWAYS do serious due diligence in RE deals. As such, I suspect this to be yet more horseshit, but good God how tiring it is to be having to make this sort of case yet again.
Title: Giuliani fuct
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2023, 10:37:47 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/giuliani-in-epic-tailspin-as-legal-woes-attorney-bills-pile-up/ar-AA1huHe0?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=35ca20e75d9640ffb86b0f7d54161494&ei=19
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2023, 09:20:51 AM: Read he is being sued for invasion of privacy.

Amazing the endless legal tools high priced lawyers can pull out of their shyster bag to torture and intimidate their targets.
As long as this California lawyer Morris seems to be funding Abe Lowell to no end.
Reported it could cost $ 1 million per month (I believe it) to pay Abbe's fees.

I wonder who else is funding this?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2023, 11:31:01 AM: Amy champerty issues in funding him?
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on October 01, 2023, 01:29:12 PM: "I wonder who else is funding this?"

- Yes. I was thinking of two related points. With Biden lawyers, follow the money. And with all the cases against Trump, one of the objectives beyond diverting his attention and put him in jail is to drain his resources. Bidens OTOH (my take) won't have to pay a penny out of pocket if they keep following the the directives of the ruling cabal.
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: DougMacG on October 06, 2023, 04:02:40 AM: https://babylonbee.com/news/fbi-stops-by-antifa-burning-down-federal-building-to-ask-if-theyve-seen-any-dangerous-maga-around
Title: Trump on Sydney Powell's plea deal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2023, 12:13:10 AM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-speaks-out-after-sidney-powell-flips/ar-AA1iEYY5?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=4283d08cf25840f2b3ecae8df9a01e74&ei=15

I confess that I had missed the distinction that she was not his attorney!
Title: Presidential Immunity?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2023, 05:29:15 AM: https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2023/10/30/do-former-presidents-have-immunity-from-criminal-prosecution-trumps-lawyers-say-yes-they-may-be-right-n2165684?utm_source=rsafternoonbriefing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=60490e5326405359080e7e273e00aec7
Title: Judge considers delay
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2023, 01:53:07 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/judge-to-decide-on-postponing-trial-in-trump-mar-a-lago-case-5520997?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-11-02-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-11-02-1&utm_medium=email&est=FQKvFIJd79MS7yW5f1B3l1aFS9C8DIO6thv0mKngTqT4JkEzPAPCdkg8%2BT9AV0lYZWG3
Title: Gotcha ! Don Jr. !
Post by: ccp on November 13, 2023, 09:48:33 PM: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-jr-just-uttered-word-223839127.html

shyster thinks one wrong word self incriminates the Trump empire.

me:

what a joke .

what a mockery of the law .

:roll:
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2023, 11:13:59 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trump-election-interference-case-may-extend-to-2025-fani-willis-5529994?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-11-15-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-11-15-1&utm_medium=email&est=jgGCoKfJTfENWa92O7ECLSpWqMkZe5Mzqqi81y21nCxHka%2BOnqQp74mwIBb20IqRLtMt
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2023, 01:46:18 PM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/dc-judge-denies-trump-request-for-subpoenas-of-j6-committee-materials-5536816?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-11-28-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-11-28-1&utm_medium=email&est=%2B44S67ByA2VMQH1CYTQLEK6Q5MljM3baZHuDanTAJpJWeFBHnsUY9voqoH%2BFUL14WfkS
Title: Trump can be sued civilly for J6
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2023, 10:30:37 AM: WSJ

Trump Can Be Sued for Jan. 6 Incitement, Judges Rule
Former president sought to dismiss civil cases, saying his office gave him ‘absolute immunity’
By
Sadie Gurman
Follow
and
Jan Wolfe
Follow
Dec. 1, 2023 11:55 am ET

WASHINGTON—Civil lawsuits seeking to hold Donald Trump accountable for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol can move forward, a federal appeals-court panel ruled Friday, expressing skepticism toward the former president’s claims of “absolute immunity” from allegations that he incited violence that day.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said while presidents can carry out their official duties without exposure to lawsuits, plaintiffs including Capitol Police officers had adequately established that Trump wasn’t acting in that capacity while campaigning for re-election.

“The Office of the Presidency as an institution is agnostic about who will occupy it next,” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in the 67-page opinion. “And campaigning to gain that office is not an official act of the office.”

Trump can try to claim immunity again later, the opinion said, but not at this early stage of the proceedings.

“The President doesn’t spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities. And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he doesn’t continue to enjoy immunity from damages liability just because he happens to be the President,” the opinion said. “When he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil suits like any private citizen.”

Srinivasan, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, was joined on the panel by Circuit Judges Judith Rogers and Gregory Katsas. Rogers was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, while Katsas is a Trump appointee.

Katsas joined Srinivasan’s decision, but wrote a separate concurring opinion to clarify the limits of the majority decision. He wrote that the panel didn’t definitively rule on whether Trump was acting in an official capacity when he gave the Jan. 6 speech. Instead, the court held that the plaintiffs had met their burden to survive Trump’s motion to dismiss, Katsas wrote.

A spokesman for Trump called the decision “limited, narrow, and procedural.”

“The facts fully show that on January 6 President Trump was acting on behalf of the American people, carrying out his duties as President of the United States,” said the spokesman, Steven Cheung.

The ruling affirms a lower judge’s decision last year to dismiss Trump’s immunity claims in lawsuits brought by Capitol police officers and Democratic lawmakers.

Judge Amit Mehta ruled in that decision that the lawmakers and officers had plausibly alleged that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric during his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, galvanized his supporters to violently oppose the peaceful transfer of power. Those suits can now move forward.

The decision “brings us a crucial step closer to holding the former president accountable for the harm brought on members of Congress and on our democracy itself,” said Joe Sellers, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

Trump will likely appeal the decision, which marks a setback as he uses a similar argument in the federal criminal prosecution charging him with trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump’s lawyers are seeking to have that case dismissed, arguing he is immune because the allegations involve actions he took when he was president. The trial is set for March.

Special counsel Jack Smith has urged the judge to reject Trump’s immunity claim. Prosecutors have closely tied Trump to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, saying his efforts to overturn the election “culminated and converged” that day when he attempted to prevent the certification of President Biden’s victory.
Title: WSJ: Jack Smith and SCOTUS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2023, 03:34:15 AM: Jack Smith and the Supreme Court
The special counsel tries to drag the Justices into his political timetable for the Jan. 6 trial of Donald Trump.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 15, 2023 6:40 pm ET

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump have made him a central actor in the 2024 election, and now he is dragging the Supreme Court into the political thicket. The Justices don’t have to dance to Mr. Smith’s timetable, nor to his view of presidential immunity.

The Justices this week agreed to consider Mr. Smith’s petition for expedited appeal of Mr. Trump’s claim that his post-election actions related to Jan. 6, 2021, are shielded by presidential immunity. Mr. Trump’s lawyers must file a response to the petition next week. Mr. Smith wants the Court to skip the normal appellate process through the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and rule promptly so the Jan. 6 trial can begin on March 4.

***
Federal trial Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against Mr. Trump’s immunity claim, and the special counsel wants a trial and conviction before Election Day. March 4 is the day before the GOP Super Tuesday primaries, so voters may not know the trial verdict until after Mr. Trump has locked up the nomination.

If that trial date holds, Mr. Smith will have helped Mr. Trump win the nomination by spurring a GOP backlash against his charges. The prosecutor will then become a de facto campaign voice for the Democrats in the general election. This is one of the reasons that trying to disqualify Mr. Trump by prosecution was such a mistake.

Mr. Smith’s prosecution all but assured that the Supreme Court would eventually be hauled into the polarizing election politics, but the Court needn’t rush to judgment. There are important issues at stake for the law and presidential power in both the Jan. 6 and document-mishandling cases. (Trial on the latter is scheduled to begin in May.)

The special counsel argues that the Court heard the Watergate tapes case in expedited fashion, so it should do so again now. But in U.S. v. Nixon, Richard Nixon was resisting a subpoena. There is no such legal urgency here, only Mr. Smith’s desire to meet a political timetable. That is not the Supreme Court’s job, and it would be damaging for the Court’s credibility if it appears to be acting politically for or against either side.

The Court could decide to skip the D.C. Circuit and hear a direct appeal from the two parties. But it should then do so in the normal course of its business, with ample, unrushed time for briefs, friend-of-the-court briefs, and oral argument. The Court could still rule before its current term ends in June. That could mean a trial could begin in the summer, but the trial date is the province of the trial judge and the two parties, not the Supreme Court.

The press corps has ignored the presidential immunity claim from the start, but it isn’t frivolous. The relevant precedent is Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 civil case in which the Court ruled 5-4 that Nixon had “absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”

The charges against Mr. Trump are criminal, so whether absolute immunity extends to crimes is one issue if the Court hears the case. The Justices will have to decide if Mr. Trump’s allegedly illegal acts fall within the “outer perimeter” of his power to see that election laws are faithfully executed. Some might, making them immune from prosecution, while others might not, so Mr. Smith’s case could continue. Whatever the Justices decide, it would be best for the country and the Court if its ruling is unanimous.

The implications of the case go beyond Mr. Trump’s political fate. In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Court recognized the unique pressures and duties of the Presidency. It also noted the risk that the lack of immunity for official acts would “subject the President to trial on virtually every allegation that an action was unlawful.” This would hamstring the Presidency.

On the other hand, no one thinks a President has immunity for criminal acts unrelated to his official duties. If he did, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, to borrow a famous Trump locution, and get off. That’s why defining what falls under the “outer perimeter” will be crucial if the Court hears the appeal.

***
These legal complications mean that Mr. Smith’s path to conviction may not be as seamless as he hopes. As we warned Mr. Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland, indicting Mr. Trump would thrust them into the middle of an election campaign. This would have unintentional and perhaps damaging consequences. The wiser decision would have been to lay out the facts of what the special counsel found and let the voters decide.

They chose to prosecute, and the damage has begun to unfold. Let’s hope the Supreme Court can fly above the partisanship, and minimize some of the harm.
Title: Ed Meese: Jack Smith has no more legal authority than Taylor Swift
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2023, 05:18:21 AM: https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/12/22/former-ag-drops-bombshell-allegation-against-jack-smith-has-no-more-authority-than-taylor-swift-1421900/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
Title: WT: Smith to use data from Trump's phone?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 01, 2024, 04:14:14 AM: Special counsel Jack Smith said he intends to use the data his investigators extracted from former President Donald Trump’s smartphone in his evidence. ASSOCIATED PRESS

INVESTIGATION

Smartphone data seizure by Smith sets ‘precedent’

Critics: Move crosses ‘red line’ for immunity

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Special counsel Jack Smith disclosed in court filings that he retrieved data from former President Donald Trump’s smartphone, potentially crossing what critics call a “red line” for presidential immunity.

Mr. Smith revealed that his investigators extracted data from Mr. Trump’s smartphone and he intends to use the records as evidence in his prosecution of the former president for election interference.

Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, said the seizure of Mr. Trump’s cellphone data “crosses a red line” in terms of executive privilege and will have a chilling effect on future administrations.

“This sets a destructive precedent for the presidency, as it seriously undermines the president’s ability to get his constitutionally protected, confidential and candid advice from his advisers,” he said.

The issue of presidential immunity hangs over Mr. Smith’s prosecution of Mr. Trump for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election and inciting the Capitol riot.

Mr. Trump claims that presidential immunity shields him from criminal charges because the events took place while he was commander in chief. His motion to dismiss the charges due to presidential immunity was kicked to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it remains after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Smith’s bid for the justices to fast-track a final decision.

If the election interference case proceeds to trial, Mr. Smith likely will try to show jurors the smartphone data revealing when Mr. Trump’s phone was “unlocked and the Twitter application was open” during the hours of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Previous court rulings offer little insight into whether a president’s electronic communications can be privileged and, therefore, shielded from prosecutors, or if Mr. Smith opened the floodgates for access to that data.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon did not have immunity privileges to withhold audio tapes of conversations he recorded in the Oval Office. The court held that a president does not have executive privilege when it comes to immunity from subpoenas or other court actions.

That ruling suggested Mr. Smith’s seizure of Mr. Trump’s electronic data is legally sound.

However, the Supreme Court in 2018 concluded that warrantless search and seizure of cellphone records, which includes the locations of movements of the phone user, violate the Fourth Amendment.

The decision could give Mr. Trump an avenue to challenge the use of his phone data at trial.

“The phone records may add to the unease of some judges and justices over the fight over presidential immunities and privileges,” said Jonathan Turley, who teaches Constitutional Law at George Washington University.

“However, Smith has the Nixon case to cite for such demands in the investigation of possible criminal acts. What is clear is that the Court may be pushed into a major line-drawing decision over inherent presidential immunities,” he said.

Jamil Jaffer, former associate White House counsel to George W. Bush, said the use of presidential cellphone data “raises really hard, complex questions on an unprecedented set of facts.”

Other legal experts seemed to agree that Mr. Smith’s disclosure was bad news for Mr. Trump.

Harry Litman, a constitutional law professor at UCLA, said the revelation should have Mr. Trump’s legal team “totally freaked out.”

“Experts apparently can figure out through Twitter data not just what Trump tweeted and visited but his physical whereabouts and others who used his phone. Gulp!,” he wrote on X.

In court filings, Mr. Smith said a person identified as “Expert 3” extracted and processed data from the White House cellphones of Mr. Trump and someone identified as “Individual 1.”

Individual 1 is believed to be former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Mr. Trump’s lawyer during the time. A spokesperson for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

The filing also says that Expert 3 “reviewed and analyzed data on the defendant’s phone and on Individual 1’s phone, including analyzing images found on the phones and websites visited.”

Earlier last year, it was revealed that Mr. Smith’s team obtained location data and draft tweets from the president after a legal battle with Twitter, now known as X. The company attempted to block the prosecutor’s effort. The social media giant ultimately lost the court battle and handed over an extensive list of data related to Mr. Trump’s account, including all tweets “crafted, drafted, favorited/ liked or retweeted.”
Title: Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
Post by: ccp on January 01, 2024, 07:20:46 AM: If only we could investigate the "by the book" "squeaky clean" Prez we would prove what we all know. He is not as described.

yes I am talking about the great snake

who claimed he bought house in DC because his daughter had 1 to 2 more yrs of school there.

She has long graduated and 'oddly' ( :roll:) he still has house there.
Title: GA case in big trouble
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2024, 06:32:41 AM: https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2024/01/09/oh-la-la-court-filing-accuses-fulton-county-da-fani-willis-of-sleeping-with-the-help-n4925326
Title: Fani Willis divorcee
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2024, 06:54:59 AM: checked her out on Wikipedia

and noticed she is divorced since '05
2 children
so at least she was not cheating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fani_Willis
Title: Re: Fani Willis divorcee
Post by: DougMacG on January 10, 2024, 09:15:58 AM: Quote from: ccp on January 10, 2024, 06:54:59 AM
checked her out on Wikipedia

and noticed she is divorced since '05
2 children
so at least she was not cheating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fani_Willis

Cheating on the taxpayers, not on a husband. If the story is true, she traveled extensively on the money she personally directed to him.

In another scenario, she could sleep and travel with the guy but not appoint him to this bogus position because of the CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

If not for double standards they would have no standards.
Title: Fani's lover met with the White House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2024, 08:53:31 AM: https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/10/very-detailed-planning-fox-business-guest-suggests-white-house-coordinating-fani-willis-take-down-trump/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=u_hsDiQZZKoFxqTK_D6wEp_A5RTwSpInK_W1xrE5ogFm_ozpgFx2yF77oOqrBRsUATLL16LV
Title: More on the deleted J6 files
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2024, 06:10:36 AM: https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=7d75a59d9632d6d657a1365f14c7f38e_65b126a2_6d25b5f&selDate=20240124

Jan. 6 panel accused of deleting over 100 files before takeover

GOP lawmaker demands passwords to encrypted records

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The now-defunct House Select Committee on Jan. 6 destroyed over 100 encrypted files from its 2021 investigation before Republicans took over the chamber, House investigators say.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the Georgia Republican leading the House Administration Committee’s oversight investigation, said his computer forensic investigators discovered 117 files deleted by the Jan. 6 committee.

He is demanding former leaders of the Jan. 6 committee hand over passwords to the encrypted files.

It’s the latest twist in a monthslong back-and-forth struggle between GOP investigators and the defunct Democratic-run committees’s former chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, about the whereabouts of video recordings of witness depositions, transcripts, and other missing records.

Mr. Loudermilk said there is ample evidence of missing records from the Jan. 6 committee investigation run by Mr. Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican Trump foe whom Wyoming voters rejected in the 2022 GOP primary.

“It’s obvious that they went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules,” Mr. Loudermilk said on Fox News.

In a letter to Mr. Thompson last week, Mr. Loudermilk said his computer forensic team was able to recover the 117 deleted digital records from hard drives archived by the Jan. 6 committee. One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived.

“Further, we found that most of the recovered files are passwordprotected, preventing us from determining what they contain,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote. “In order to access these files and ensure they are properly archived, I ask that you provide a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the select committee.”

The panel said Mr. Thompson has not complied with the request.

Mr. Loudermilk questioned what else was missing.

“You sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote last week to Mr. Thompson. “You also claimed that you turned over 4 terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the select committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3 terabytes of data.”

Mr. Thompson acknowledged in July that the Jan. 6 committee did not archive all its records as required by House rules.

He also said in a Dec. 13 letter to Mr. Loudermilk’s panel that the Jan. 6 committee “transmitted its evidence of potential crimes to prosecutors who are investigating former President Trump.”

Mr. Loudermilk said the missing documents include records of information shared with the Department of Justice and Fulton County District Attorney, as alluded to in the Jan. 6 committee’s final report.

Mr. Thompson previously denied that the select committee’s investigative matter was destroyed.

The Washington Times asked Mr. Thompson in December if the Jan. 6 committee had destroyed documents or other material.

“I’m not aware of the destruction of any documents,” Mr. Thompson said. “I’m not aware of staff being instructed to destroy any documents.”

“The law requires us that whatever product that we use, we archive that and that’s what we did. Everything that we used as a committee product, we shared,” he said, indicating that only edited material displayed at public hearings was archived.

Mr. Thompson, in a letter responding to Mr. Loudermilk, said the accusations were “false” and that the Jan. 6 committee closely followed House rules for archiving records.

He called Mr. Loudermilk’s accusations nothing more than a “futile effort to amplify conspiracy theories and attack the credibility of the Select Committee and outside prosecutors.”

The Times previously pressed Mr. Thompson about what happened to the unedited video of the depositions that were not shown at the Select Committee hearings.

“I have no idea,” Mr. Thompson said. “We’re not required to keep certain materials.”

Mr. Loudermilk also wrote letters last week to White House counsel Richard A. Sauber and Department of Homeland Security counsel Jonathan Meyer requesting “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of White House and DHS testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.

In his letter to Mr. Meyer, Mr. Loudermilk wrote that he failed to respond to his Aug. 8 letter requesting that he return records sent to him by the Jan.6 Select Committee.

“Based on records in our possession and public reporting, we know that numerous Secret Service employees were interviewed who were either with former President Trump or in proximity to former President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote.

“It is extremely concerning House Democrats did not archive the transcripts of these testimonies as required by House rules, but instead hid them from House Republicans by sending them to your office.”

He added, “If you continue to refuse to return these records, I will have no other choice than to take steps to compel you to return these records.
Title: More on Fani Willis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2024, 05:07:30 PM: https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/23/fani-willis-removed-fake-electors-case-georgia/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=7_djBH1eaP4A1vyfvW65CJbS4h72WoYmMLG6nuF59gVm1AWjKzR8Svcskpa.XE1sxcJFL6xT

https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/23/fani-willis-removed-fake-electors-case-georgia/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=7Oc5CXwZbapK0Pue.W3lEp.Ro0rxX4ApNOfi3rVtqkFmtjk58L8ygaq4fBiqnc20GvWilDGb
Title: Fani Willis WH meetings merit deep investigaion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2024, 07:59:48 PM: https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/30/fani-willis-white-house-meetings-warrant-a-very-deep-investigation-ex-prosecutor-says-1432192/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
Title: Anonymous Leaks (Smith?) of secret Mar a Lago room.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2024, 12:50:47 PM: https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/02/03/report-of-hidden-room-at-mar-a-lago-leaked-to-media-could-another-raid-be-coming-1433551/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
Title: Re: Anonymous Leaks (Smith?) of secret Mar a Lago room.
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 03, 2024, 10:54:25 PM: Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2024, 12:50:47 PM
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/02/03/report-of-hidden-room-at-mar-a-lago-leaked-to-media-could-another-raid-be-coming-1433551/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
Raw meat for True Believers and those that suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Hard to squeeze much noise out of a delayed trial, so toss a secret room into the echo chamber and let the memes and dark conclusions fly.
Title: A reasoned assesment of the GA case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2024, 09:14:02 AM: Though I disagree with the take on the 2020 elections, the rest of this is a pretty good attempt at REPORTING on the GA case.

https://www.readtangle.com/fani-willis-testimony-trump-georgia-election/?ref=tangle-newsletter
Title: IRS Contractor that Stole Trump's Tax Returns Stole 10,000+ More
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 23, 2024, 08:41:45 AM: Couldn't find a relevant IRS thread and so am dropping this here. Scope of theft by contractor that stole & shared Trump's tax returns far broader than reported:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2024/02/22/it-wasnt-just-trump-whose-tax-files-were-stolen-by-an-irs-contractor-n2635490?fbclid=IwAR3cdesJ82fk8uRRThil_cLGXHCf59u7mZ9zHt81Mno1inr-oEI6rL9i9i4
Title: Russia Hoaxes & Their Explanations
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 26, 2024, 03:51:09 PM: A thorough catalog of sundry Russia asshattery:

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/fourteen-russian-hoaxes-and-what-explains-them/?fbclid=IwAR0JrxLklc0JcnaEwLiesElrOzO1YrTnvTwWd3FFLWLBcPeOSFYJA-IBv0E

One contains a link good for many a giggle:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/02/lawrence-odonnells-cross-dressing-goat-wrestling-helium-huffing-ways/

I’m old enough to remember when the leftmost of the left discounted Stalin and his the corpses he piled high, gulags, the abject misery of Russian citizens under communism, and so on. Now the leftmost of the left blame Russia’s nefarious schemes for darn near well every ill facing America today. Clearly mass graves are < ersatz conspiracies in some circles….
Title: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Eigth applies to the States
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2024, 12:33:26 PM: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-opinion-trump/2024/02/27/id/1155111/?ns_mail_uid=9e44746c-d32a-4357-a423-c22f178828aa&ns_mail_job=DM589065_02272024&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010502davp3i&fbclid=IwAR0PEvkFe_xTTzbjGtUCP1Y-dd8VfUWM1Ww8aZsffSr1tNsaudwzn5cLz-M
Title: Isikoff’s Fani Kissing Backfires, Take 2
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 07, 2024, 02:57:16 PM: Hell's Bells, once again were the shoe on the other foot the rending of garments and other histrionics would deafen; instead amoral nitwits are gilded and illegal acts glossed over. Note how poorly our dear Liz Cheney comes off here as well as her hope her J6 machinations would breathe life into her flagging political career, and perhaps even lead to a presidential bid. Yo Lizbo, how's that working out for you?

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of an illegally recorded phone call, defendants might pursue legal recourse.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

Democrat Fani Willis’ legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography of Willis. For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.

For years, the media and other Democrats have held up Willis as a brilliant and credible prosecutor of Republicans. The new book suffers from poor timing, with Willis and her lover accused of perjury, subornation of perjury, bribery, and kickbacks related to the prosecution. Willis could be removed from the prosecution as early as this week.

Willis’ Radical Roots

Nevertheless, the book shares interesting details about Willis’ father, John C. Floyd, and his radical past. Described as a “onetime radical activist” who considered the police to be the “enemy” and an “occupying army,” Floyd founded the Black Panther Political Party of Los Angeles and said of it, “Our political philosophy is black nationalism.” He took former Communist Party vice presidential nominee Angela Davis as a lover and lived with her prior to her being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for purchasing the gun used to murder a Marin County, California judge.

Willis, who was raised by her father, worked for Beverly Hills attorney Howard Schmuckler before he was disbarred and also before he was imprisoned for running a fraudulent mortgage rescue company. She worked for another lawyer in Atlanta who was disbarred for tipping off a drug dealer to an impending DEA raid. At that firm, she represented a crack dealer who “turned out to be the male stripper at her bachelorette party” and worked with Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and now a top domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden.

Isikoff provides these details to help readers “understand how Willis became the kind of law-and-order DA who would unflinchingly take on Donald Trump.”

Willis ran on pledges to restore professionalism and sexual ethics to the Fulton County district attorney’s office and to begin to deal with a backlog of 11,000 unindicted homicides, assaults, shootings, and other crimes. Instead, the night before her official first day, word leaked of a recent phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The phone call had been dishonestly portrayed by Trump opponents, and Willis hoped that Raffensperger had been in Fulton County for the call, so she could prosecute Trump based on that false understanding of the call.

When she showed up for her first day of work, according to the book, “‘I just remember sitting down and looking at the TV and thinking’ maybe he was in Fulton County, she recalled. Her county.”

A Political Activist in Georgia’s Election Office

However, the person who recorded the phone call wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia. That’s a problem. Jordan Fuchs, a political activist who serves as Raffensperger’s chief of staff, was in Florida, where it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. She neither asked for nor received consent to record.

Fuchs was one of the main sources for Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, they admit in their acknowledgments. While they reward her with effusive praise throughout, she comes off very poorly. For example, she offers a frankly unhinged conspiracy theory that President Trump was planning to lose the 2020 election as early as May of 2020 and was therefore floating a plan with Washington Post reporters to win the election in Georgia through the legislature. She describes how she “invented a new policy” to block public view of an election audit. She indicates such little knowledge of election laws and processes that she seems to think Georgia requires voters to use Social Security numbers to vote.

Fuchs is instead described as a “street-smart deputy” of Raffensperger who is obsessed with personal slights, political payback, and her hatred of Trump, his supporters, and his team. Her previous dabbling in the occult is contextualized, along with her shocking lack of knowledge of election law and processes — which brings us to the illegally taped phone call.

Illegal Phone Call Recording

“Unlike many of her fellow Republican consultants with whom she had worked, Fuchs had a friendly working relationship with members of the Fourth Estate,” Isikoff and Klaidman write before describing Fuchs’ regular leaks to The Washington Post, which conservatives despise for its left-wing propaganda, hoaxes such as the Russia-collusion lie, and smears of conservatives such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Fuchs first gave The Washington Post fabricated quotes they later had to retract about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the elections office. Though Fuchs was not busted for her lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump, the authors of the book say the embarrassment of being found out taught her the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’ investigation. They do not explain how this lesson worked in terms of the space-time continuum.

In any case, Fuchs recorded a phone call between Trump, Raffensperger, and their associates. Fuchs ended the call by saying they should get off the phone and work to “preserve the relationship” between the two offices. Instead, she immediately leaked the phone call to The Washington Post, which published it hours later.

Covering up the Crime

This is where the authors of the book admit that the very recording of the call was a crime:

Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.

Republicans had long suspected Fuchs was the source of the audiotaped call and, further, that she had illegally recorded it in Florida. Fuchs had noted in a Facebook post that she was in Florida visiting family around the time of the call. The book describes the close working relationship and “secret collaboration” of the Liz Cheney-led Jan. 6 committee and Fani Willis’ prosecutorial team. Fuchs should have been a major part of the televised show trial Cheney put on, further convincing Republicans that Fuchs had illegally taped the call and Cheney was helping cover that up. (Incidentally, the book portrays Cheney as the real leader of the Jan. 6 committee, that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”)

The authors go on to say Fuchs would attempt to escape prosecution for the call if a Florida official brought charges by claiming she taped and immediately leaked the call to The Washington Post for “law enforcement purposes.” The authors somewhat hilariously describe this claim as an “effective defense.”

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The problem for Fani Willis’ political prosecution is that the book convincingly shows the entire prosecution rests on a piece of evidence that everyone now knows was illegally obtained — never mind that the evidence has also been completely misinterpreted.

“And Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors write. “Without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped the call.”

“It was all the evidence Fani Willis needed to get started,” they write of the leaked recording, adding, “The recording was the single piece of damning evidence that had launched the investigation.”

With this evidence provided in the hagiography of Willis, those persecuted by her political prosecution could argue the entire investigation is corrupted by the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.

“Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. “As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential ‘tree’ is tainted, so is its ‘fruit.’ The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.”

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse. It’s the latest challenge for Willis, even if the political ally judge reviewing whether she can continue prosecuting Georgia Republicans rules in her favor.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections." Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/07/new-book-admits-fani-willis-get-trump-investigation-began-with-illegal-recording/
Title: Fani's fans at the Ethics Board
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2024, 03:54:43 PM: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fulton-county-ethics-board-drops-fani-willis-complaints-from-hearing/ar-BB1jv97I?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=0f3b926433634fe4a38b8fccb8657244&ei=53
Title: Scum Andrew Weissman says things going badly for Jack Smith
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2024, 08:22:07 AM: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/jack-smith-gets-worst-possible-outcome-after-recent-ruling-former-official-5608131?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-03-16-2024&src_cmp=gv-03-16-2024&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP
Title: Biden's legal bills covered by DNC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 12, 2024, 10:12:27 AM: https://www.axios.com/2024/04/12/dnc-covered-biden-legal-bills-special-counsel-probe?fbclid=IwAR3gIcAdDLl5P8QQ-CBevK22dSOAIUxzVF-fto9CYIDUUHCunQVhu6Xg6CE_aem_AZ5_E1dHWDdFD3_ToH4cuyhlUfzOtlgmkJOVbjUQ5wUe6cgu_1CFkvVpTVE8Mu9JTmGqYFDtNG-bfNW1tr8FJGDT
Title: Dems support bill to Epstein Trump if convicted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2024, 03:42:21 PM: https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=75113e2914a674447326b4859dfbbeee_66266102_6d25b5f&selDate=20240422
Title: FO: Biden WH colluded w DOJ on Docs case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2024, 07:49:12 AM: (3) TRUMP LAWYERS SAY BIDEN ADMIN COLLUDED ON CLASSIFIED DOCS CASE: Former President Trump’s legal team said Jack Smith’s office disregarded legal obligations and Department of Justice (DOJ) policies “to support the Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system” against Trump.

According to the legal team’s filing, new evidence revealed that “politically motivated operatives” in the Biden administration and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began a “crusade” against Trump in early 2021.

Why It Matters: Newly un-redacted filings in the Miami court show that Trump Presidential Record Act representatives were cooperating with the NARA on turning over documents as required by the law. However, the records Trump’s legal team received through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the White House Counsel’s Office was already in contact with the NARA on 21 January 2021 and referred the NARA to the DOJ. The evidence presented by Trump’s counsel appears to show that federal officials, including the Biden White House, began coordinating a politically motivated effort to punish Trump as soon as he left office. – R.C.
Title: Turley: This is Embarassing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2024, 12:03:38 PM: second

https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/22/jonathan-turley-alvin-bragg-trial-donald-trump/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=tbR7WDgZNKcfhaLYpS.tHsjTpUOvDZp9K_27zu1stxRmgPbo8YodGvxHo1yTx6UQ26ZNSCi5

Check out the detail about Coangelo moving laterlly from Biden's DOJ to Bragg's team.

Even Prada On The Hudson allows such thoughts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/bragg-trump-trial.html?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=u_g7AiBOObsLwv.bqDWsHMKDpR6tVosrL.Tixudn80NmhqkkXjpMrd2GEpXCIODDErR_ybZY