Michael Sentonas (Credit: Crowdstrike)

“Endpoint security firm CrowdStrike announced on Wednesday that Michael Sentonas has been appointed chief technology officer (CTO) after Dmitri Alperovitch decided to leave the company to launch a non-profit policy accelerator.

Alperovitch, one of the founders of CrowdStrike, has been acting as CTO since the company’s launch in 2011. In its announcement, CrowdStrike only said he had transitioned out of the company, but Alperovitch has shared some information about his future plans on social media.

“I have left CrowdStrike to launch a non-partisan, non-profit policy accelerator,” Alperovitch said. “Since founding CrowdStrike and during my tenure, I helped transform the cybersecurity industry and want to apply the same ingenuity and a venture approach to galvanize solutions to pressing cybersecurity national security and foreign policy challenges.” (Read more: SecurityWeek, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today it received letters from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) stating they will neither confirm nor deny the existence of emails and other communications related to CIA official  Eric Ciaramella, who reportedly worked on Ukraine issues while on detail to both the Obama and Trump White Houses.

These letters were received in response to two December 2019 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed after the CIA and DOJ failed to respond to November 2019 requests for communications between Ciaramella and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and/or the Special Counsel’s Office (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-03809)) and all of Ciaramella’s emails from June 1, 2016, to November 12, 2019 (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:19-cv-03807)).

Ciaramella is widely reported as the person who filed the whistleblower complaint that triggered the impeachment proceedings. His name reportedly was “raised privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry.”

The CIA letter stated:

In accordance with section 3.6(a) of Executive Order 13526, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the requests. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself exempt from FO IA under exemption (b )(3) and Section 6 of the CIA Act of I 949, 50 U.S.C. § 3507, and, to the extent your request could relate to CIA intelligence sources and methods information, the fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is exempt from FOIA under exemption (b)( I) and exemption (b)(3) in conjunction with Section 102A(i)(l) of the National Security Act of 1947, 50 U.S.C § 3024(i)( I).

This completes our response to the above referenced cases.

The Justice Department also refused to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records, citing, among other justifications, the personal privacy of Ciaramella.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

Kash Patel (Credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

“Kash Patel, a former top National Security Council official who also played a key role as a Hill staffer in helping Republicans discredit the Russia probe, is now a senior adviser for new acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, according to four people familiar with the matter.

It’s not clear what exact role Patel is playing in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community. He started at ODNI on Thursday, according to an administration official.

Patel, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate last February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role at the NSC in mid-summer.

He had previously worked as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)’s top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and was the lead author of a report questioning the conduct of FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference. Republicans later used the report to bolster arguments that the probe was a plot to take down President Donald Trump.” (Read more: Politico, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

“Nate Cain is a Patriot. He risked everything to reveal the active cover-up of FBI Director Comey and his efforts to protect the Clinton Global Crime Network. Comey suppressed huge troves of FBI investigative files; Nate found them and turned them over to Rep. Devin Nunes and IG Michael E. Horowitz. This is Nate’s story, many of the details never before disclosed.

Bards Of War Podcast explores politics, culture, economics, faith, war, and human nature by building context through story and narrative. Effective research will cross-reference material to create a hybrid map built on qualitative and quantitative data cycling. This allows narratives to be developed, assessed and analyzed. This is the foundation of cultural analysis.

The podcast episodes are presented by Scott Kesterson, a U.S. documentary filmmaker, backpack journalist, researcher and writer.”

“Former Acting DNI Joseph Maguire did not brief the white house prior to taking Shelby Pierson, the person in charge of evaluating intelligence regarding election security, to lead the presentation to the house intel committee (HPSCI).   That’s the key takeaway from a taped preview of National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on Face The Nation.

Shelby Pierson (Credit: public domain)

With NSA O’Brien confirming what many suspected it begs the question why would Shelby Pierson and Joseph Maguire intentionally blindside the White House? The briefing was obviously spun by HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff and democrats on the committee, and there was no intelligence presented to support the claims made by Democrats and media.

Sending shockwaves through the intelligence community, now Acting DNI Grenell has asked the intelligence community, including Shelby Pierson to produce the underlying intelligence within her briefing. It is reported that Pierson and the alliance of intelligence around her are going bananas. Sounds like Ms. Pierson might not last long. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/22/2020)  (Archive)

“…anonymous intelligence officials are reporting to CNN that Ms. Pierson “overstepped” her position, was “misleading” in her briefing, and “mischaracterized” the underlying intelligence. Imagine that.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Washington (CNN)–The US intelligence community’s top election security official appears to have overstated the intelligence community’s formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month, three national security officials told CNN.

The official, Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected.

[…] “The intelligence doesn’t say that,” one senior national security official told CNN. “A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it’s a step short of that.

[…] One intelligence official said that Pierson’s characterization of the intelligence was “misleading” and a national security official said Pierson failed to provide the “nuance” needed to accurately convey the US intelligence conclusions.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where Pierson is a senior official, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. (more)

Why would Shelby Pierson and Joseph Maguire intentionally blindside the White House?

The briefing was obviously spun by HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff and Democrats on the House Intel Committee; and there was no intelligence presented during the briefing to support the claims made by Pierson, Democrats, and media. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/23/2020)  (Archive)

Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos (Credit: Financial Times Graphic)

“Newly declassified FBI memos directly conflict with court filings that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team made in asking a federal judge to send former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos to prison, further calling into question the government’s conduct in investigating the now-debunked “Russia collusion” narrative.

The memos, released under federal Freedom of Information laws, are likely to focus renewed attention on former Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who played a key role in prosecuting Papadopoulos before working on the case of longtime GOP operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone.

(…) Zelinsky was one of three Mueller team prosecutors who signed a sentencing memo in August 2018 seeking prison time for Papadopoulos. They argued there that Papadopoulos hindered federal prosecutors’ ability to question or arrest a European professor named Joseph Mifsud in mid-February 2017 while the Maltese academic was in Washington.

According to the sentencing memo signed by Zelinsky and fellow Mueller prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein: Papadopoulos’ “lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017, and he has not returned to the United States since then.”

Aaron Zelinsky (l) Jeannie Rhee (c) and Andrew Goldstein (Credit: public domain)

But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest  Mifsud while he was in the United States.

Papadopoulos, a former volunteer foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, told agents during an interview on Feb. 10, 2017 that he “inquired to Mifsud about how he knew the Russians had [Clinton’s] emails, to which Mifsud strangely chuckled and responded, ‘they told me they have them.’”

According to the Mueller Report, in an interview with the FBI on the same day, Feb. 10, Mifsud “denied that he had advance knowledge that Russia was in possession of emails damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Mifsud did not leave Washington until the next day, Feb. 11. Papadopoulos’ information should have enabled investigators to confront Mifsud with conflicting testimony on a point of critical importance to the stated purpose of the Russia collusion investigation before the professor’s departure. But this information was not mentioned in Team Mueller’s original statement of offense, or plea agreement, filed Oct. 5, 2017, nor its later sentencing recommendation. In contrast, those documents portray Papadopoulos as trying to thwart the investigation.

According to Zelinksy, Rhee, and Goldstein’s August 17, 2018 sentencing memo filed with U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss, “the defendant’s false statements were intended to harm the investigation, and did so.” Papadopoulos’ “lies negatively affected the FBI’s Russia investigation,” they argued, “and prevented the FBI from effectively identifying and confronting witnesses in a timely fashion.”

The FBI interview memos, however, paint a far different picture. They show, for example, that Papadopoulos expressed his willingness to participate actively in helping the bureau locate Mifsud personally even before Feb. 10, 2017.” (Read more: Lee Smith/JustTheNews, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Viktor Shokin and Joe Biden (Credit: Volodymyr Petrov/Agence France Presse)

(…) Unfortunately for Biden, Shokin refused to go quietly into the night.

French media outlet Les Crises reported in January that Shokin filed a federal complaint with Ukraine’s National Bureau of Investigation (NABU) which accuses Biden of abusing his power. At that time, Ukrainian District Court Judge S. V. Vovk ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigations to review Shokin’s claim.

In April, Just the News’ John Solomon reported that Vovk ordered the country’s law enforcement services to formally list the fired prosecutor, Victor Shokin, as the victim of an alleged crime.

Still, Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies “refused to name Biden as the alleged perpetrator of the crime, instead listing the potential defendant as an unnamed American.”

All of that has recently changed. Vovk ruled that “anonymous listing was improper and ordered the law enforcement agencies to formally name Biden as the accused perpetrator.” Vovk’s ruling states:

A competent person of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine who conducts procedural management in criminal proceedings No. 62020000000000236 dated February 24, 2020 to enter information into the Unified register of pre-trial investigations … a summary of facts that may indicate the commission of a criminal offense under Paragraph 2 of Article 343 of the Criminal procedure code of Ukraine on criminal proceedings No. 62020000000000236 dated February 24, 2020, namely: information on interference in the activities of the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Shokin, Viktor Mykolaiovych performed by citizen of the United States of America Joseph Biden, former U.S. Vice President…

The order of the court may not be appealed.

(Ukraine Court Ruling (English Translation): 4-21-20 Shokin Case)

(Read more: Redstate, 5/20/2020)  (Archive)

“The latest dossier defense, offered up by Arthur Snell, a managing director at Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, suggests that former FBI cybersecurity official Anthony Ferrante has validated the dossier.

Arthur Snell (Credit: public domain)

Anthony Ferrante (Credit: public domain)

But what Snell failed to disclose is that BuzzFeed News reportedly paid Ferrante $4.1 million to investigate only a narrow part of the dossier as part of a lawsuit that the website faced for publishing Steele’s report.

Ferrante was unable to corroborate Steele’s allegations, despite the hefty payday. But that didn’t stop Orbis from citing the former FBI official in its latest dossier defense.

“Orbis maintains the highest standards of professionalism. We stand by the integrity and quality of our work,” Snell wrote in the letter to The Sunday Times.

Snell, whose letter is entitled “Trump-Russia dossier was valid,” was responding to a Sunday Times story published on Jan. 26 that criticized Steele’s work.

“You ignore more recent assessments of Steele’s work by intelligence professionals such as John Sipher, Chuck Rosenberg, and Anthony Ferrante,” wrote Snell.

Sipher is a former CIA officer, and Rosenberg is a former FBI chief of staff to James Comey. Both wrote essays defending aspects of the dossier, but that was before the release of the special counsel’s report and the inspector general’s report, both of which undermined key allegations in the dossier. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

“House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says.

Aaron Zelinsky (l) Jeannie Rhee (c) and Andrew Goldstein (Credit: public domain)

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress.

“We’re now going through these 302s, and we’re going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,” Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast set to air on Tuesday.

Nunes specifically reacted to a story in Just the News disclosing that FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos show he was helpful in trying to locate a witness named Joseph Mifsud but that Mueller’s prosecutors portrayed Papadopoulos as trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation’s efforts to question Mifsud.

The new FBI memos provide “our first evidence of the Mueller team lying to the court. It a lie. It’s a total lie,” the lawmaker said, referring to the Mueller team’s claim that Papadopoulos tried to hinder efforts to locate and question Mifsud.

“I always assumed that Papadopolis probably was helpful. I mean, he’s kind of alluded to that, that he offered to be helpful, but we had never seen the actual 302s,” Nunes said.

You can listen to the Nunes interview here.

(Read more: John Solomon/JustTheNews, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Viktor Shokin (l) and Joe Biden (Credit: public domain)

“The State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) has registered a criminal case on pressure from former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin.

“The SBI has added information on the criminal offence to the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations,” Shokin’s lawyer Oleksandr Teleshetsky said during a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency on February 27.

The case was opened under an appeal from Shokin. The court obliged the SBI to register the proceeding.

In his motion, Shokin spoke of pressure put on him by Biden, Teleshetsky said.

“The reason for the pressure was the investigation being conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine into grave crimes of international corruption linked with the activities of former Ecology Minister of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky and top managers at the Burisma company,” he said.

Shokin’s motion was filed with the State Bureau of Investigations back on January 28, 2020, but information about the criminal offence was added to the Unified Register of Pretrial Investigations only on February 24 after the country ordered the bureau to register the case, Teleshetsky said.” (Read more: Interfax-Ukraine, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

The Crossfire Hurricane Scheme Team (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The Daily Caller News Foundation and the watchdog group Citizens United sued the Justice Department and its inspector general on Tuesday for a slew of records from the watchdog’s report on the FBI’s abuse of surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Citizens United filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on behalf of the DCNF related to public records requests that both organizations filed Feb. 24.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., seeks all transcripts, summaries and notes from 27 individuals interviewed as part of the inspector general’s probe, including Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, and former FBI executives like James Comey and Andrew McCabe.

Citizens United filed the lawsuit after the DOJ and IG’s office failed to provide documents within the 20-day window required under the Freedom of Information Act.

(…) The Citizens United/DCNF lawsuit seeks records from former FBI officials who took part in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, including Comey, McCabe, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bill Priestap, James Rybicki and Michael Kortan. 

The lawsuit also seeks the records of current and former DOJ officials Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann, Zainab Ahmad, Bruce Swartz, Stuart Evans, John Carlin, Mary McCord, George Toscas, and David Laufman.”  (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/14/2020)  (Archive)

“An FBI agent faulted for some of the most significant problems laid out in the Justice Department’s inspector general report on FISA abuse against a Trump campaign associate has been identified.

The New York Times, citing people familiar with the FBI’s Russia probe, identified Stephen A. Somma, a counterintelligence investigator who works out of the bureau’s New York field office, as “Case Agent 1” from the inspector general’s (IG) report.

The upper-level DOJ/FBI officials also responsible for FISA applications. (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

(…) According to the IG report, he was the FBI agent who initially sought a surveillance warrant against Page. Somma pushed for a FISA warrant “almost immediately” after the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the IG said.

Somma’s initial request was rejected, but FBI lawyers later approved seeking a FISA warrant on Page after the bureau received information from former British spy Christopher Steele. In his dossier, Steele alleged that Page was a key player in the Trump campaign’s “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

The IG report said the FBI failed to verify the allegations about Page before using Steele’s information in FISA applications. The special counsel’s investigation undercut the idea that Page or anyone on the Trump team worked with Russians.

Somma was in charge of verifying the accuracy of information included in the FISA applications. He was also the FBI handler for Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor who met with and secretly recorded Trump campaign aides Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos.

The IG report said Somma failed to disclose potentially exculpatory information that Page and Papadopoulos told Halper. He also failed to disclose that the CIA told him on Aug. 15, 2016, that Page had been an “operational contact” for the agency years earlier.

Perhaps Somma’s most egregious omission deals with an interview he conducted in January 2017 with Steele’s primary source for information in the dossier.

According to the IG report, the Steele source, referred to as “Primary Sub-Source,” told FBI agents that Steele misrepresented information attributed to him in the dossier, including about Page. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose the information in its final two applications for FISA orders on Page.

Largely because of the omission, the Justice Department has deemed the two orders to be invalid.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Andrew McCabe (l) and James Comey (Credit: Jahi Chikwendiu/Matt McClain, Getty Images)

“The FBI agent who ran the bureau’s warrantless spying program said Wednesday he warned ex-Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe that the program was a useless waste of taxpayer money that needlessly infringed Americans’ civil liberties but his bosses refused to take action.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014. He told Just the News he fears the deeply flawed program, which was started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was allowed to keep going to give Americans a false sense of security in the war on terror and possibly to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was used for political spying or political espionage,” Youssef said during a lengthy interview for the John Solomon Reports podcast.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef tells The Hill in an interview March 2018, that the surveillance program was responsible for helping disrupt just one possible terror plot over more than a decade, searching through thousands of Americans’ records. (Credit: The Hill)

Youssef confirmed that the FBI performed an audit of the highly classified program (also known as the NSA program because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden leaked its existence.

The audit showed that while the program had generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorism attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing tens of millions of dollars per year.

In fact, the program was generating large numbers of “false negatives and positives,” Youssef said.

The audit, he added, also showed “there was collateral damage in terms of civil liberties” of Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily searched or who were falsely identified as connected to terrorism.

Youssef said he discussed the concerns with McCabe both when McCabe served as assistant director for counterterrorism and then when he was promoted to acting executive assistant director, the No. 3 job in the bureau. But his efforts to pause the program and reform it so it could work better, cost less, and infringe less on American privacy fell on deaf ears, he said. (Read more: JustTheNews/John Solomon, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“In November of 2019 buried deep in the congressional budget Continuing Resolution (CR) was a short-term extension to reauthorize the FISA “business records provision”, the “roving wiretap” provision, the “lone wolf” provision, and the more controversial bulk metadata provisions [Call Detail Records (CDR)], all parts of the Patriot Act.  As a result of the FISA CR inclusion the terminal deadline was pushed to March 15, 2020:

WASHINGTON – Attorney General William Barr told Senate Republicans on Tuesday that the Trump administration could support a clean extension of contentious surveillance laws set to expire next month. And Barr said he could make changes on his own to satisfy President Donald Trump and his allies who have railed against the use of the law to monitor his 2016 campaign, according to senators at a party briefing.

But Barr also clashed with GOP critics of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has three key provisions set to lapse on March 15.

(…) Republicans emerged from the lunch meeting mostly supportive of a clean extension of the law to avoid a gap; doing so is a top priority of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“The attorney general just wanted to underscore again the importance of these provisions that were enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack. They’re still relevant to our effort to go after terrorists today like they were after 9/11,” McConnell told reporters.

But Barr also sparred with skeptics, primarily libertarian-leaning Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Barr told Lee his criticisms of surveillance law are dangerous, while Paul said Americans shouldn’t be subject to secret FISA courts, one of the people said.

(…) Senate Republicans prefer kicking a broad FISA debate to as late as 2022, when other pieces of the law expire. In the interim, Barr would make administrative changes to address complaints from conservatives that surveillance authorities were abused during Trump’s campaign — something the president continues to seethe over.

“You’ve got three provisions to deal with. I think it’d be smart to keep them in place. It would give us some time to work on FISA writ large, we’ve got three years,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is preparing hearings on FISA.

(…) “A lot will happen between now and March 15. We may do a placeholder and take it past March 15. We’ve got to get this right,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “Anybody who reads the Horowitz report on misfire hurricane will understand what I’m talking about.” (read more)

Prior to the December 9, 2019 inspector general report on FISA abuse, FISA Court judges Rosemary Collyer (declassified 2017) and James Boasberg (declassified 2019) both identified issues with the NSA bulk database collection program being exploited for unauthorized reasons. For the past several years no corrective action taken by the intelligence community has improved the abuses outlined by the FISA court.

The sketchy programs, and abuse therein, has public attention yet congressional representatives are not responding to the findings.

Worse still, there is a confluence of current events pointing toward a likelihood Congress and the intelligence apparatus writ large want to reauthorize the FISA surveillance and collection authorities without further sunlight and without public input.

Keep in mind the deadline for the DOJ to respond to the FISA court about the abusive intelligence practices identified in the Horowitz report was February 5th, more than two weeks ago. The responses from the DOJ and FBI have not been made public.

FISA Court Order – FISA Court Notice of Extension.

It appears the DOJ is trying to get the FISA reauthorization passed before the FISC declassifies the corrective action outlined from the prior court order. This response would also include information about the “sequestering” of evidence gathered as a result of the now admitted fraudulent and misrepresented information within the FISA applications.

The FISA “business records provision”, the “roving wiretap” provision, the “lone wolf” provision, and the more controversial bulk metadata provisions [Call Detail Records (CDR)], again all parts of the Patriot Act, must not be reauthorized without a full public vetting of the abuses that have taken place for the past several years.

At a minimum the pending DOJ/FBI response to the FISA court needs to be made public prior to any reauthorization by congress.  And to better understand the scale of the issue, the consequences when the system is abused, the upstream sequester material needs to be made public.

Let the American public see what investigative evidence was unlawfully gathered, and let us see who and what was exposed by the fraudulently obtained FISA warrants. At a minimum congress and the American people need to understand the scale of what can happen when the system is wrong – BEFORE that exact same system is reauthorized. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/25/2020)  (Archive)

Carter Page speaks with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 2, 2017. (Credit: Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press)

“Carter Page, the informal Trump campaign adviser victimized by invalid FBI wiretaps, says there are more abuses to be uncovered in the coming months.

Mr. Page tells The Washington Times that he has been conducting his own inquiries for a project he cannot yet detail. The goal, he said, is to go beyond the surveillance abuses uncovered by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

“Tip of the iceberg is a good way to describe it,” said the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and energy investor, who has spent the last three years clearing his name.

“It was a broad array of people, and so far there has been no accountability,” Mr. Page said. “I have a lot of questions that IG Horowitz never covered. These need to be answered ASAP. I am also going to be taking some action. There’s much more to come.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, has announced a new probe into Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse and asked 17 Justice Department and FBI players to testify.

Mr. Page has drafted 19 questions he wants the committee to ask Mr. Horowitz.” (Read more: Washington Times, 2/25/2020)  (Archive)

Ukrainian authorities have launched a criminal investigation into an HIV nonprofit that receives huge sums of money from the U.S. government as well as leftwing billionaire George Soros. The foreign probe exposes one of many outrageous collaborative efforts between Uncle Sam and the Hungarian philanthropist who funds a multitude of projects worldwide aimed at spreading a radical globalist agenda. Learn more about the financial and staffing nexus between Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the U.S. government in a Judicial Watch special report.

In this latest case, the U.S. and Soros-funded nonprofit helped another Ukrainian group embezzle international assistance, according to a Ukrainian news report that cites a member of parliament. The elected official requested that the country’s National Police launch an investigation, which was officially announced a few days ago. The probe partially targets a controversial civil rights activist named Vitaly Shabunin who operates a scandal-plagued group—also funded by Soros—called Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC). During the 2016 U.S. presidential election Ukrainian prosecutors tried investigating the group’s activities but were ordered to stand back by the Obama administration. At the time Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office was looking into AntAC while investigating whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption had been improperly diverted.

Now officials in the former Soviet republic allege that a Ukrainian HIV charity that gets boatloads of money from American taxpayers as well as Soros, helped AntAC embezzle a chunk of it. Formerly known as All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH, the nonprofit is now called 100% Life and its mission is to fight for the life of people living with HIV in Ukraine’s 25 regions. Thanks to the generous contributions of donors such as American taxpayers, the group annually provides services to nearly 200,000 patients throughout Ukraine. The Ukrainian lawmaker who prompted the investigation says the scheme involved “embezzlement of international technical assistance through the All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH (now 100% Life Charity Fund).” From 2015 to 2017, PLWH-controlled structures received around $142 million, the Ukrainian official revealed in the news report.

A generous portion of it came from American taxpayers, according to government records obtained by Judicial Watch. They show that, since 2012, the U.S. has doled out more than $25 million in grants to 100% Life. Most of the money has flowed through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), though one grant for $3.5 million came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It is not clear whether the criminal probe will have an impact on the U.S. government’s funding. The head of 100% Life’s board of directors, HIV-infected activist Dmytro Sherembey, is also named in the recently launched investigation. Last year he published a book about AIDS that promotes the legalization of sex work and illicit drug use without punishment.” (Judicial Watch, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

Barbara Novick (Credit: public domain)

“BlackRock Inc vice chairman and co-founder Barbara Novick will step down from her day-to-day duties at the asset manager, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Novick, 59, will continue in her current role until her successor is chosen, after which, she will serve as a senior adviser to the company, according to the memo.

She will also assist in conducting internal and external searches to find her successor.

“Much of the post-financial crisis policy work that Barbara led is largely implemented, and she has greatly enhanced our stewardship practices, including our commitment to transparency”, Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said in the memo.

Less than half of BlackRock’s original slate of eight co-founders will remain at the firm once Novick leaves.” (Read more: Reuters, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

***********

According to Ukraine investigators, two American companies have been implicated in a money-laundering scheme to help former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych ship millions out of Ukraine. Interfax-Ukraine reports the two companies are Franklin Templeton Investments and BlackRock.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a Russian-British historian’s lawsuit against several U.S. newspapers and Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor who served as a confidential human source for the FBI during the Trump-Russia probe.

Judge Leonie Brinkema (Credit: public domain)

Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that the statute of limitations had expired for many of the allegations in the defamation lawsuit, which Svetlana Lokhova filed on May 23, 2019. Brinkema also ruled that news articles that Lokhova cited in her lawsuit were not defamatory.

(…) Beginning in February 2017, stories began appearing in British and U.S. media outlets suggesting without evidence that Lokhova and Flynn had improper contact during the Cambridge event, which Halper co-convened with Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.

The Wall Street Journal published a story on March 18, 2017 that suggested that Flynn had improperly failed to disclose his interactions at the 2014 event with Lokhova, a British citizen who was born in Russia.

Lokhova has argued that the story and several others created false innuendo that she and Flynn were having an affair, or that she was a Russian spy. She has vehemently denied both allegations.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

President Trump is threatening to blow up an extension of expiring intelligence programs as he backchannels with a cadre of top allies who want to use the bill to reform a shadowy surveillance court.

Congress has approximately 10 working days to reauthorize three expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act, a 2015 bill that overhauled the country’s surveillance laws, with Attorney General William Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) backing a “clean” extension.

But Trump threw a grenade into those already fragile plans Thursday when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told reporters that the president supports his effort to include broader reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as part of any reauthorization of the intelligence programs.

“I’ve talked to the president, and I plan on insisting on getting a vote,” Paul said, asked by The Hill about including broader FISA reforms in a bill would authorize the expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act.

Paul wants a vote on an amendment that would prevent FISA warrants from being used against Americans. Paul’s proposal would also prevent FISA information from being used against Americans in a domestic courtroom. The president, according to Paul, is supportive of his amendment.

Trump’s apparent support for including broader changes to the surveillance court associated with FISA comes as he’s railed repeatedly about his campaign being “spied” upon by the Obama-era FBI.” (Read more: The Hill, 2/27/2020)  (Archive) 

This is a good timeline entry as a refresher on Steven Schrage and why his appearance at Ms. Lokhova’s panel on Russiagate is significant.

Steven Schrage’s name also surfaces in this July 2019 interview with Carter Page, after the Mueller Report was released.

“Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is preparing to issue the panel’s first subpoena as part of an investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company linked to Hunter Biden, he said in a letter on Sunday.

Andrii Telizhenko (Credit: Twitter)

Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told Democratic Michigan Sen. Gary Peters of his plans to subpoena Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian embassy official and former consultant for Blue Star Strategies, a firm that Burisma hired to fight against corruption allegations.

Telizhenko, who was a consultant for Blue Star from July 2016 to June 2017, has provided some documents to the committee, according to Johnson. But he says that he cannot turn over others without a subpoena because they are protected by a non-disclosure agreement.

“He cannot provide this responsible information unless he is compelled to do so by subpoena,” Johnson wrote to Peters in his letter, which was first reported by CBS News.

Republicans have been investigating whether Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s position as vice president to help Burisma, which has long been dogged by allegations of corruption.

Hunter Biden, who joined Burisma’s board in April 2014, is reportedly who linked the energy company up with Blue Star Strategies. Biden served on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal national security think tank, with Sally Painter, one of Blue Star’s co-founders.

“As part of the Committee’s ongoing investigation, it has received U.S. government records indicating that Blue Star sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role as a board member of Burisma to gain access to, and potentially influence matters at, the State Department,” Johnson said in the letter.

State Department records show that Painter and her Blue Star co-founder, Karen Tramontano, reached out to top State Department officials through 2016 to set up meetings to discuss Ukraine and Burisma.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/02/2020)  (Archive)

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Sally Painter (c) Karen Tramontano (r) U.S. -Ukraine Business Council members Greenbrier/Amsted Rail, Deloitte Ukraine, Blue Star Strategies, LLC and others for attending the event. (Credit: Burisma Group)

On February 18, 2020, Blue Star Strategies lobbyist, Karen Tramontano participated in a discussion on CSpan where she discusses Ukraine, Trump’s impeachment and where to go from here. It was introduced on CSpan as follows:

Impeachment Inquiry

The Institute of Politics, Policy and History at the University of the District of Columbia hosted a discussion that dissected the impeachment process, as well as the next steps moving past impeachment. Speaking at the event were House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, former deputy Clinton White House deputy chief of staff Karen Tramontano, and Georgetown University law Professor Paul Butler. Sharon Pratt, former Washington, D.C., mayor and the founding director for the Institute of Politics Policy and History, moderated. (CSpan Video)

(Twitter)

“Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama Defense Department official now running for Congress in New York’s 17th Congressional District, can often be found railing against President Trump’s efforts to investigate Burisma Holdings from her platforms on cable news and social media.

The analyst-cum-candidate has called Trump’s actions “illegal,” brushed off concerns about money laundering at the Ukrainian energy giant (“nothing to see there”), and argued that scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma just ends up “helping Russia.”

“The beneficiary of @realDonaldTrump ‘s fake @JoeBiden story is the Kremlin,” wrote Farkas in one tweet. “This is why ppl call @realDonaldTrump a Russian intel asset.”

Left unmentioned in her public statements is that Farkas was an integral part of a muscular effort by Burisma to rehabilitate its reputation both in the United States and abroad. As a part of that effort, Farkas traveled to Ukraine on Burisma’s dime and spoke at an Atlantic Council conference bankrolled by the energy company in 2018.

Evelyn Farkas and the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst wearing Burisma-branded clothing. (Credit: Twitter)

At the time of her trip, Farkas was a nonresident senior fellow specializing in Ukraine policy at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from Burisma for its Eurasia programming.

The conference attracted a spate of local news coverage that broadcast the fact that “American diplomats” were visiting Burisma’s oil fields. Photos from the trip show Farkas wearing a jacket with a Burisma logo while touring the gas company’s facilities in the region.” (Read more: The Washington Free Beacon, 3/02/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch today announced that U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted Judicial Watch’s request to depose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her emails and Benghazi attack documents. The court also ordered the deposition of Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills and two other State Department officials.

Additionally, the court granted Judicial Watch’s request to subpoena Google for relevant documents and records associated with Clinton’s emails during her tenure at the State Department.

The ruling comes in Judicial Watch’s lawsuit that seeks records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch famously uncovered in 2014 that the “talking points” that provided the basis for Susan Rice’s false statements were created by the Obama White House. This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

In December 2018, Judge Lamberth first ordered discovery into whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” The State and Justice Departments continued to defend Clinton’s and the agency’s email conduct.

Judge Lamberth today overruled Clinton’s and the State and Justice Department’s objections to limited additional discovery by first noting:

Discovery up until this point has brought to light a noteworthy amount of relevant information, but Judicial Watch requests an additional round of discovery, and understandably so. With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers.

Additionally, Judge Lamberth said that he is troubled by the fact that both the State Department and Department of Justice want to close discovery in this case:

There is still more to learn. Even though many important questions remain unanswered, the Justice Department inexplicably still takes the position that the Court should close discovery and rule on dispositive motions. The Court is especially troubled by this. To argue that the Court now has enough information to determine whether State conducted an adequate search is preposterous, especially when considering State’s deficient representations regarding the existence of additional Clinton emails. Instead, the Court will authorize a new round of discovery.

With respect to Clinton, the court found that her prior testimony, mostly through written sworn answers, was not sufficient:

The Court has considered the numerous times in which Secretary Clinton said she could not recall or remember certain details in her prior interrogatory answers. In a deposition, it is more likely that plaintiff’s counsel could use documents and other testimony to attempt to refresh her recollection. And so, to avoid the unsatisfying and inefficient outcome of multiple rounds of fruitless interrogatories and move this almost six-year-old case closer to its conclusion, Judicial Watch will be permitted to clarify and further explore Secretary Clinton’s answers in person and immediately after she gives them. The Court agrees with Judicial Watch – it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.

“Judicial Watch uncovered the Clinton email scandal and we’re pleased that the court authorized us to depose Mrs. Clinton directly on her email conduct and how it impacted the people’s ‘right to know’ under FOIA,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.” (Judicial Watch, 3/02/2020)  (Archive)

A federal judge has ruled that Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills must sit for a deposition within 75 days.   Judicial Watch won the court ruling despite the ongoing efforts by the DOJ to block their inquiry. (JW Link)  (PDF)

Cheryl Mills (l), walks with Hillary Clinton as they arrive at Caracol, Haiti, October 22, 2012. (Credit: Getty Images)

From the Ruling – “The Court has considered the numerous times in which Secretary Clinton said she could not recall or remember certain details in her prior interrogatory answers. In a deposition, it is more likely that plaintiff’s counsel could use documents and other testimony to attempt to refresh her recollection. And so, to avoid the unsatisfying and inefficient outcome of multiple rounds of fruitless interrogatories and move this almost six-year-old case closer to its conclusion, Judicial Watch will be permitted to clarify and further explore Secretary Clinton’s answers in person and immediately after she gives them. The Court agrees with Judicial Watch – it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.”

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/02/2020)  (Archive)

Greg Jarret writes:

“It’s not over yet, Hillary. The Clintons have become accustomed to the mainstream media and bureaucracies forgiving their misdoings. Not this time. Judicial Watch, the conservative activist group issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the United States District Court for D.C. regarding Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State.

Thus far, Mrs. Clinton has skated through the serious issue that she used her personal email account surely compromised national security. She did not even face consequences while running for the President of the United States. Democrats were more than thrilled to put corrupt Clinton in the White House over Donald Trump.

Revenge is sweet, particularly when a Clinton has evaded consequences for far too long. The Federal court ruled today that the former Secretary of State must “sit for a deposition where she will be questioned on matters relating to her use of a private server during her time at the State Department” reports Fox News.

With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers…

Previously, the court had ordered, “discovery into three main areas: whether Clinton’s use of a private email server was an intentional attempt to evade FOIA; whether the State Department had previously attempted to settle the case in ‘bad faith’; whether the State Department had ‘adequately searched’ for records pertinent to Judicial Watch’s request.”

Not surprisingly for those who are not under the spell of the Clinton cult, further discovery was required. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth stated, “Although discovery in FOIA cases is rare, the Court again reminds the government that it was State’s mishandling of this case – which was either the result of bureaucratic incompetence or motivated by bad faith – that opened discovery in the first place.” (Read more: Gregg Jarrett, 3/02/2020) (Archive)

On January 22, 2020, Crowdstrike’s editorial team publishes an article that appears to create distance from Ukraine and Russia’s connections to Wikileaks.

“For more than three years, the mainstream media promoted the biggest fraud in US history – that the Russians hacked the DNC’s emails and gave the emails they hacked to WikiLeaks who then leaked the emails before the 2016 election.

Now, suddenly the firm at the center of this fraud, Crowdstrike, is taking a step back from their previous actions related to the entire sham.

(…) A week ago Personal Liberty ran a wire story originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

In the article ‘Editor’s Notes’ were added in places where the LA Times piece reported fake news.  One of the editor’s notes concerned the MSM trope that “Russian intelligence operatives stole and released thousands of internal emails and other documents in an effort to boost Trump’s chances, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.”

The Editor’s note was as follows:

This is fake news. While it’s oft-repeated by the propagandists in the MSM legacy corporate media, there is no evidence that the emails were stolen and released by “Russian intelligence operatives.” The emails were released by WikiLeaks and an entity called Guccifer 2.0. WikiLeaks denies it got them from any Russians, and Julian Assange has hinted that they were stolen by murdered DNC operative Seth Rich. The FBI was denied access to the emails and the conclusion that they were stolen and released by “Russian intelligence operatives” was made by the DNC-hired cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which has ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and the Council on Foreign Relations. –BL

John Eddy (Credit: Goldin Solutions)

A few days later, this past Tuesday, Personal Liberty reportedly received an email from John Eddy, Executive Vice President of the PR firm Goldin. The email follows:

My firm works with CrowdStrike and we read your article titled “Trump seeks to boost Sanders and foment discord among Democrats”  (personalliberty.com). We need to request important updates to the article.

The article states that the “FBI was denied access to the emails and the conclusion that they were stolen and released by ‘Russian intelligence operatives’ was made by the DNC-hired cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which has ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and the Council on Foreign Relations.” This is incorrect.

CrowdStrike’s founders have no connections to Ukraine. The company also provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI that they requested, and the conclusions have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/). Additionally, CrowdStrike was hired by the DNC to respond to the suspected breach of its servers, and did not do any investigations around the release of the information.

Could you please update the article for accuracy to clarify that CrowdStrike does not have ties to Ukraine, and that the company was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of the servers?

Note the phrase from Crowdstrike’s PR firm, stating that Crowdstrike “did not do any investigations around the release of the information.

January 2018 Crowdstrike blog features a Russia-based actor we call VOODOO BEAR. (Credit: Crowdstrike)

UPDATE—  We contacted the Crowdstrike’s PR Firm Goldin Solutions and they confirmed their email to Personal Liberty.

Now after three and a half years of the fraudulent Russia collusion scam being repeated so often that half of America believes that Russia hacked the DNC and gave their emails to WikiLeaks, Crowdstrike announces that it had nothing to do with assessing that Russians gave the emails to WikiLeaks??!!

So why is Crowdstrike announcing this now?  Are they liable for fraud by not announcing this years ago? Their lack of response allowed the coup against the President of the United States to progress!  If they didn’t confirm the Russians gave the emails to WikiLeaks, then who did?

The Mueller report clearly states that Russians hacked the DNC and gave the hacked emails to WikiLeaks:

So if Crowdstrike now claims they didn’t confirm that Russians gave emails to WikiLeaks, then who the hell did?

We believe that both Mueller and Crowdstrike are lacking candor!”  (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 3/06/2020)  (Archive)

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Personal Liberty also published an update that says the following:

Update: On March 3, 2020 we received an email from the PR firm Goldin which claimed to represent Crowdstrike asking us to correct information in the editor’s note referencing Crowdstrike’s “owners” ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and claims that the DNC denied the FBI access to the servers. A Mr. John Eddy requested we publish a clarification stating “that Crowdstrike does not have ties to Ukraine that the company was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of the servers.” We responded by informing Mr. Eddy that we did not state Crowdstrike’s owners had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs, but that the company did, and we linked several articles published in the MSM stating as much and what those ties were. We also provided Mr. Eddy with links from the MSM in which FBI Director Comey had testified and other sources had verified that the FBI was denied access to the servers and emails.

“Crazy” was the term the FBI agent used to describe the behavior of Christopher Steele, author of the now-debunked Trump-Russia dossier. “I’ve seen crazy source-related stuff in 20 years in New York and this was one of the craziest,” the veteran agent testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Christopher Steele: “I’m very upset about – we’re very upset – about the actions of your agency,” Steele said, according to Gaeta. Using the first person plural, Steele likely meant himself and his client, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson. (Credit: Victoria Jones/The Associated Press)

Nevertheless, the FBI continued to rely on Steele’s allegations – that Donald Trump and his team were conspiring with Russians who possessed compromising information – to justify its surveillance of the Trump campaign. Without evidence to verify Steele’s claims, the FBI fell back on its assertion that the former British intelligence agent was reliable.

The previously unreported testimony [published August 18, 2020] of FBI agent Michael Gaeta is found on page 900 of the fifth and final volume of the Senate committee’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It raises new questions about the basis of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign, Crossfire Hurricane, and the declarations it made to the FISA court in four separate applications submitted to spy on American citizens.

Gaeta had a long history with the London-based Steele, who had started his own firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, after leaving the British spy service MI6 in 2009. Between 2013 and 2016, the bureau had paid Steele $95,000 to pass along tidbits on Eurasian organized crime; Gaeta was his contact at the bureau. It was Gaeta whom Steele approached in July 2016 with wild and depraved stories of collusion and kompromat. Gaeta became the “handling agent” for Steele’s participation in Crossfire Hurricane. Among his tasks was to get Steele paid (a process that came along slowly) and to see to it that Steele didn’t violate the FBI’s rules on confidentiality.

Michael Gaeta attends a forum in Rome to discuss “The Challenges of Transnational Organized Crime Today” in October 2016. (Credit: public domain)

Here’s how Gaeta recounted that conversation to the Senate: “Listen, is it about the money?” Gaeta asked Steele. “Because we have the money now. Is it about the money?” The FBI had promised but had yet to deliver to Steele, $15,000 for one meeting with Crossfire Hurricane agents. The bureau had further promised Steele he would be paid “significantly” for his Trump-Russia research.

Gaeta assumed at first a delay in payment had made Steele go rogue.

“Yes, I’m owed the money, but that’s secondary,” Steele told Gaeta. “I’m very upset about – we’re very upset – about the actions of your agency.” By the “we” in “we’re very upset” one can reasonably infer that Steele was speaking about himself and his client, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson (whose client, not counting cutouts, was Hillary Clinton’s campaign).

The handling agent was shocked: “I had no idea what he was talking about.” Before Gaeta could inquire further, Steele started railing about ”your Director” and his “reopening of the investigation.” This was an apparent reference to former FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server after 340,000 copies of State Department emails between Clinton and her close personal aide, Huma Abedin, were discovered on a laptop used by Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner. He was a disgraced congressman under investigation by the bureau’s New York office for sending sexually explicit messages and photos to an underage girl.

At which point it all became clear to the handling agent: “I’m now understanding that he did this because he was upset that the Director’s reopening of the investigation was going to negatively affect the election for Hillary Clinton.”

The handling agent described his reaction to Steele’s behavior as “surprise and disbelief.”  Gaeta told the Senate that Steele’s actions and attitude weren’t just “crazy source-related stuff,” but “one of the craziest” the veteran agent had seen in two decades of handling sources. The words are significant: Steele’s behavior with the FBI has been characterized as a sort of professional disagreement, uncomfortable perhaps but not unreasonable. Gaeta’s blunt assessment casts things in a much harsher light and undercuts subsequent efforts by the FBI’s top officials to rehabilitate Steele in order to justify using his “reporting.”

Although it has been downplayed until now, Steele’s acting out – and his overtly declared partisan motivations — constituted  a crisis for the bureau, so much so that the handling agent describes it in violent terms: “After that point – after everybody digests what happened,” Gaeta told the Senate committee, “[p]hones were ringing at that point; people’s ears were bleeding.”

“Management said we were going to close him,” Gaeta told the Senate. “At that point it’s just obvious. That’s all you could do.” The “management” was Priestap, according to Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “Priestap decided that Steele had to be closed immediately.” Gaeta drew up the paperwork and Steele was removed from the list of official bureau sources on Nov. 17, 2016.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 9/09/2020)  (Archive)

Donna Brazil is very offended that anyone suggests the DNC would rig the 2020 Democratic primary.

(Illustration on examining the FISA court by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times)

“Justice Department and FBI officials under review for their role in the flawed wiretaps of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page are banned from having any involvement in the pursuit of electronic monitoring through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Judge James Boasberg issued a 19-page opinion on Wednesday, ordering that “no DOJ or FBI personnel under disciplinary or criminal review relating to their work on FISA applications shall participate in drafting, verifying, reviewing, or submitting such applications to the Court.”

“Any finding of misconduct relating to the handling of FISA applications shall be promptly reported to the Court,” the U.S. District Court judge added.

Boasberg said, “The frequency and seriousness” of the errors found by the DOJ independent watchdog “called into question the reliability of the information proffered in other FBI applications.” The judge said the government has been “acknowledging its deficiencies” and “undertaking multiple remedial measures” in response to Horowitz’s report and to court orders but also noted that “the errors the OIG pointed out cannot be solved through procedures alone” and that everyone at the DOJ and FBI “must fully understand and embrace the heightened duties of probity and transparency” in the secret court proceedings.

Boasberg touched on three main areas of the FBI’s internal FISA reforms: improvements to procedures for preparing FISA applications, improvements to training and other efforts to institutionalize the importance of accuracy and completeness, and oversight more broadly.

“While more rigorous procedures for preparing FISA applications should prove helpful, the Court is also mindful that changes in culture will require more than checklists,” Boasberg said.” (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 4/04/2020)  (Archive)

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(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The Conservative Treehouse writes:

(…) The issues of what evidence the FBI/DOJ gathered from the exploitation of the fraudulent warrant is not addressed.  Nor does the court deal with the downstream issues of what cases may have been enhanced with illegally obtained surveillance authority.  Additionally, how the DOJ and FBI are attempting to round-up (“sequester”) any evidence that was gathered as a result of the fraudulent and unlawful FISA application is also not addressed.

Instead, within his opinion & order Judge Boasberg focuses exclusively on the recommendations from Amici Curiae David Kris, the appointed arbiter and liaison between the court and the DOJ, along with the changes proposed by FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. AG Bill Barr to the FISA application process.

The FISC opinion and order is embedded below and available in pdf form here.  I would strongly urge everyone to read it and make up your own mind.  From my perspective the 19-page outline is ridiculous.

The only FISC reform proposed, that could dissuade corrupt exploitation of the court, is simply a ruling that no DOJ or FBI official is allowed to participate in the FISA process if they are caught -and under review- for engaging in illicit conduct.   There are no legal consequences upon any DOJ or FBI member for any fraud upon the court in the past, present or future; they just get put in time-out. (Read more)

“Democratic congressional candidate Evelyn Farkas sent out a fundraising letter on Thursday slamming a Washington Free Beacon report on her ties to a lobbying effort by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, and arguing that she is the best candidate to stand up against foreign political influence.

Farkas, a former Obama administration official, participated in Burisma’s extensive public relations campaign in Washington, going on a trip to Kharkiv, Ukraine, bankrolled by the gas company while working at a think tank that received funding from Burisma, the Free Beacon reported on Monday.

Farkas, whose campaign had declined to comment on her involvement with Burisma prior to publication, blasted the Free Beacon report as “a false article” and claimed it tied her to “a fake scandal.”

The fundraising email included an image of the Free Beacon website with the article’s headline covered by a large box labeled “FALSE,” obscuring any mention of Farkas’s association with Burisma.

(…) The campaign asked supporters to “rush a donation” to Farkas, who is currently running against over a dozen other Democrats in New York’s 17th Congressional District primary. She has billed herself as the candidate who can best prevent “foreign interference” by the Russian government in U.S. elections, according to her website.” (Read more: The Washington Free Beacon, 3/05/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit Conservative Treehouse)

“For much of the last three years, key law enforcement leaders have insisted they did nothing wrong in pursuing counterintelligence surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign starting during the 2016 election. And, they’ve added, if mistakes were made, they were unintentional process errors downstream from them and not an effort to deceive the judges.

But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg, the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials.

In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” Boasberg wrote.

(…)”The frequency and seriousness of these errors in a case that, given its sensitive nature, had an unusually high level of review at both DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have called into question the reliability of the information proffered in other FBI applications,” Boasberg wrote.

(…) For those who have begged the FISA court for years to more aggressively rebuke the conduct in the Russia case, Boasberg’s ruling was a welcome step in the right direction and a first effort to end the excuse-making. But those critics are holding out for more, including prosecutions or disciplinary action.

In the meantime, those who led the FBI and DOJ through that turbulent time — Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, as well as former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and Rosenstein — must come to grips with this new reality. A judge has formally concluded that his court was misled by the work product they oversaw and signed. (Read more: JustTheNews, 3/09/2020)  (Archive)

Graphic by: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)

(…) Speaking to students at Oxford University in England, he described the probe into Russian interference as having failed to do any “drilling down into financial networks and leverage,” which he said was “the way Russian influence works.”

His appearance at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, was held in private but attended by The Daily Beast.

Steele said he had been interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team probing potential collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government for “two whole days” but said: “I was surprised that very little of what I had discussed with them appeared in the final report.”

He criticized the report for being “too narrow” and failing to follow up on crucial evidence. “There were many things about the report that were good… but other (aspects) that were not so good,” he said.

Steele said the fact that “a number of witnesses—including for instance, Donald Trump Jr.” had avoided being interviewed “wasn’t great.”

The former head of the Russia desk at Britain’s MI6 said it was no surprise that Trump did not appreciate the work of the secret service. “Trump himself doesn’t like intelligence because its ground truth is inconvenient for him,” he said.

Steele also attacked the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general report on the Russia probe, which criticized the FBI’s interactions with him, when The Daily Beast asked him about its findings.

Steele described having cooperated with the inquiry over “4 to 5 months” but he said he had seen some “very bad qualities” from U.S. officials, whom he accused of acting in “bad faith.” (Read more: The Daily Beast, 3/06/2020)  (Archive)

“An attorney for Michael Flynn says [s]he’s reached an agreement with the federal government in which the attorneys who represented her client in the Russian collusion investigation will be interviewed — a major step in the former national security adviser’s effort to withdraw his guilty plea in connection with the probe.

In late-January, Flynn’s legal team filed a motion to withdraw the retired general’s guilty plea on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel.

Powell argued that Covington Burling was “laboring under a severe conflict of interest” when it advised its client to plead guilty.

The firm was, at the time, facing government scrutiny over a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing that it had submitted on Flynn’s behalf.

(…) Sidney Powell recently discussed the progress of the case with Just the News‘ John Solomon. Listen here. (Just the News, 5/06/2020)  (Archive)

On March 6, 2017, Senator Grassley writes a letter to former FBI Director Comey regarding payments to Steele.

On March 7, 2017, messages (pg. 25) are exchanged between Steele (redacted name) and Bruce Ohr about the Grassley letter:

(Judicial Watch – Ohr/Steele Messages pg. 25)

(Judicial Watch, 7/17/2020)  (Archive)

“A top House Republican said a memo from the British government disavowing British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier, has gone “missing.”

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans have asked around for the communique a top United Kingdom national security official is said to have delivered to the Trump transition team a week before President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

“Now look, that document went missing,” the California Republican said on Fox & Friends Weekend, noting that the letter is “critical” for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s defense.

“Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have asked, but like everything on this Russia hoax, the documents seem to disappear that are really important for the Trump administration and Republicans,” Nunes added.

A letter from the British Embassy to the incoming national security team after Trump was elected to the White House was mentioned in an unsealed filing in federal court by former national security adviser Flynn’s lawyers. The filing claimed this letter was also sent to outgoing national security adviser Susan Rice and “apparently disavows former British Secret Service Agent Christopher Steele, calls his credibility into question and declares him untrustworthy.”

North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a Republican ally of Nunes and Trump, said in May that he sent a referral to the Justice Department for the memo after its existence was revealed by a whistleblower.

“Based on my conversations with that individual, and the credible timelines that are supported by other events, I made a referral to Attorney General William Barr and Inspector General Michael Horowitz for further investigation,” Meadows said at the time. “There now is overwhelming evidence to suggest that on multiple occasions the FBI was warned that Christopher Steele and the dossier had severe credibility issues.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 3/09/2020)  (Archive)

(…) In Chinese culture, choosing an auspicious name for a new member of the family is an ancient art. The name not only determines one’s fate and future but also affects the happiness of the entire family and surrounding community. A name is chosen to harmonize various factors such as the metaphorical meaning of the name, the visual aesthetic of the characters, combined with consideration of time and place of birth, and other esoteric elements of Chinese culture like principles of yin-yang.

Due to these delicacies, westerners seeking to translate their given names into Chinese often seek the advice of a native Chinese speaker to guide them through this process.

In mid-2014 Sergei Millian sought out the wisdom of master calligrapher Johnny Lu, a world-renowned artist who has done work for President Barack Obama, the United Nations, and other charitable causes.

According to legend, the sinology professor meditated on the issue for a month, and then produced Sergei’s Chinese name by hand:

赛 天 龙 = Sài Tiàn Long

Sergei has been using this name for official business in China ever since. Several examples can be found in print and digital media.

(…)  Sergei’s official Chinese name, given in 2014, is the literal Google translation of the CODE NAME discussed in the October 18, 2016 email by Crossfire FBI team members Lisa Page and Peter Srzok:

(Read more: Monsieur America, 3/09/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department for all text and other electronic messages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin after discovering an email that strongly suggests Clinton used text messages for official business (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:20-cv-00441)).

In January 2020, Judicial Watch released emails that included an August 2011 email from Abedin to Clinton stating: “Sent you a couple of text messages.” The email was among other emails that had only recently been found by the FBI and produced to the State Department. Last week, a federal court criticized the State and Justice Departments for providing no explanation about how these emails were found at this late date:

State failed to fully explain the new emails’ origins when the Court directly questioned where they came from.

Judicial Watch filed its recent FOIA lawsuit after the State Department denied any responsive records exist in response to two January 2020 FOIA requests for:

• All text messages, encrypted app messages and instant messages involving official government business sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013.
• All text messages, encrypted app messages and instant messages involving official government business sent or received by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013.

“Where are Hillary Clinton’s text messages?” asked Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch uncovered the hidden Clinton emails and now we’ve uncovered that Secretary Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin used text messages.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 3/10/2020)  (Archive)

“Lawmakers are debating ways to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from abusing its surveillance authority again. While they’re at it, they have an obligation to address their own privacy transgressor, Rep. Adam Schiff.

Brendan Carr (Credit: public domain)

That’s the gist of a pointed letter from Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, which landed Thursday at the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Schiff spent months conducting secret impeachment hearings. His ensuing report revealed that he’d also set up his own surveillance state. Mr. Schiff issued secret subpoenas to phone carriers, to obtain and publish the call records of political rivals. Targets included Rudy Giuliani and another attorney of the president, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee (Rep. Devin Nunes) and a journalist (John Solomon).

Impeachment is over, but Mr. Carr hasn’t forgotten this abuse of power, and his letter, which I obtained, calls for answers and reform. The FCC takes call privacy seriously, only recently having proposed some $200 million in fines on phone carriers for failing to protect customer data. Mr. Carr’s message to Mr. Schiff is that Congress doesn’t get a pass. It is not automatically entitled to “a secret and partisan process that deprives Americans of their legal right to maintain the privacy of this sensitive information.”

Mr. Carr doesn’t dispute that Congress may, “in at least some circumstances,” have the legal authority to obtain call records under the Communications Act. The offense, he writes, was denying his targets the right to fight the subpoenas: “Courts long ago established a process for Americans to seek judicial review before Congress obtains and then publishes documents in response to a congressional subpoena.” (Read more: Fox News, 3/12/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today that lawyers for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills have asked the Court of Appeals to overturn a U.S. District court order granting Judicial Watch’s request for their depositions about Clinton’s emails and Benghazi attack records. Lawyers for Clinton and Mills filed a “Petition for Writ of Mandamus” earlier today.

(…) In December 2018, Judge Lamberth first ordered discovery into whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” The State and Justice Departments continued to defend Clinton’s and the agency’s email conduct.

Judge Lamberth overruled Clinton’s and the State and Justice Department’s objections to limited additional discovery by first noting:

Discovery up until this point has brought to light a noteworthy amount of relevant information, but Judicial Watch requests an additional round of discovery, and understandably so. With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers.

Additionally, Judge Lamberth said that he is troubled by the fact that both the State Department and Department of Justice want to close discovery in this case:

There is still more to learn. Even though many important questions remain unanswered, the Justice Department inexplicably still takes the position that the court should close discovery and rule on dispositive motions. The Court is especially troubled by this. To argue that the Court now has enough information to determine whether State conducted an adequate search is preposterous, especially when considering State’s deficient representations regarding the existence of additional Clinton emails. Instead, the Court will authorize a new round of discovery…

With respect to Clinton, the court found that her prior testimony, mostly through written sworn answers, was not sufficient:

The Court has considered the numerous times in which Secretary Clinton said she could not recall or remember certain details in her prior interrogatory answers. In a deposition, it is more likely that plaintiff’s counsel could use documents and other testimony to attempt to refresh her recollection. And so, to avoid the unsatisfying and inefficient outcome of multiple rounds of fruitless interrogatories and move this almost six-year-old case closer to its conclusion, Judicial Watch will be permitted to clarify and further explore Secretary Clinton’s answers in person and immediately after she gives them. The Court agrees with Judicial Watch – it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.

“This desperate act is yet another attempt by the Clinton machine to delay truth and accountability for her email conduct and how it impacted the people’s ‘right to know’ under FOIA,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 3/13/2020)  (Archive)

Almost everyone who researched the substance behind Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller’s heavily promoted Russian indictments knew the underlying claims were centered on the thinnest of evidence.

A few Facebook memes were used to accuse Russian company Concord LLC of violating FARA and FEC election laws.

In July 2018, Robert Mueller asked a federal judge in Washington for an order that would protect the handover of voluminous evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February 2018 indictment. They are accused of producing propaganda, posing as U.S. activists and posting political content on social media as so-called trolls to encourage strife in the U.S.

Indeed, to an incurious media, a Russian catering company posting Facebook memes might sound like a good justification for a vast Russian election interference prosecution; however, when Concord & the accused Russians show up in court and request to see the evidence against them, well, the prosecutors might just have a problem.  It’s that problem that dogged the Mueller prosecution since 2018.   Today, predictably and finally, the DOJ dropped the nonsense case (full pdf below):

The prosecution was always just a farce.  The ridiculous Russian indictments were only created to give some sense of validity to a premise that did not exist and to allow the Robert Mueller investigation to continue operating when there was never a valid justification for doing so.

This was perhaps the biggest shell game operation, with a non-existent pea, using the DOJ and FBI to give the impression that something nefarious had happened; when factually the ‘Russian Conspiracy Narrative’ was all just one big hoax upon the American people.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/16/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Getty Images)

“Lawyers for the Democratic National Committee claimed in court filings this week that the Steele dossier’s statements regarding Trump campaign aide Carter Page were “substantially true,” a defense that is at odds with the findings of the Justice Department’s inspector general.

“Here, the ‘gist’ of the complained-of statements — that Page coordinated with Russian government contacts as an adviser to the Trump campaign — aligns with Page’s own description of his conduct,” the DNC lawyers asserted in a court filing on Monday.

The filing was the DNC’s first in response to a defamation lawsuit that Page filed on Jan. 30 accusing the DNC and two lawyers for its outside law firm, Perkins Coie, of providing false information to journalists that came from Christopher Steele, a former British spy.

Perkins Coie, which also represented the Clinton campaign, hired the firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to investigate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS in turn hired Steele to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Steele produced 17 memos as part of the project, alleging a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

(…) Steele also asserted that Page met with two Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, during a highly-publicized trip he made to Moscow in July 2016. The dossier says that Page met with Sechin to discuss a bribe involving a contract related to Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that Sechin controls. Steele also alleged that Page and Diveykin discussed exchanging blackmail material related to both Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Page has insisted for years that he did not meet with Sechin and Diveykin in Moscow.

The special counsel and IG found no evidence that Page met either Sechin or Diveykin during his Moscow trip.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/21/2020)  (Archive)

(Glenn Simpson (l) and Christopher Steele (Credit: Neil King and public domain)

(…) Steele recently testified in a British court that he believed both then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and then-Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice were aware of his dossier research as it was going on in summer 2016.

The testimony makes his most direct link yet between his Russia collusion research and the top of the Clinton campaign and Obama White House.

Steele told a British court he believed he had been hired by the Fusion GPS firm owned by Glenn Simpson through the Democratic National Committee-linked law firm Perkins Coie to assist the Clinton campaign during the election, according to a transcript of the testimony.

“I presumed it was the Clinton campaign, and Glenn Simpson had indicated that. But I was not aware of the technicality of it being the DNC that was actually the client of Perkins Coie,” Steele testified in March under questioning from lawyers for Russian bankers suing over his research.

“You knew it was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign didn’t you?” a lawyer for the businessmen asked.

“I believed it was the campaign. Yes,” he answered.

“The leadership of the Clinton campaign?” he was asked.

“Fine, the leadership of the campaign,” Steele conceded.

The lawyer persisted.

“You also understood that Hillary Clinton herself was aware of what you were doing?” the lawyer asked.

“I think Glenn had mentioned it, but I wasn’t clear,” Steele answered.

Then Steele was confronted with what lawyers said were notes he took at a meeting with the FBI in 2016 in which he purported to tell agents that Clinton was aware of his research. The lawyers read from those notes during the court proceedings.

The notes, according to the transcript, read: “We explained that Glenn Simpson/GPS Fusion was our commissioner but the ultimate client were the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign and that we understood the candidate herself was aware of the reporting at least, if not us.”

The lawyers prodded: “It’s your note, so we assume it’s accurate?”

“Yes,” Steele answered during the March 17 testimony.

You can read that testimony here:

File
SteeleTestimonyonClinton.pdf

(Read more: JusttheNews, 4/28/2020)  (Archive)

A Fancy Bear Report, December 22, 2016 (Credit: Crowdstrike)

By Larry Johnson

“Here is the bottom-line—despite being hired in late April (or early May) of 2016 to stop an unauthorized intrusion into the DNC, CrowdStrike, the cyber firm hired by the DNC’s law firm to solve the problem, failed abysmally. More than 30,000 emails were taken from the DNC server between 22 and 25 May 2016 and given to Wikileaks. Crowdstrike blamed Russia for the intrusion but claimed that only two files were taken. And CrowdStrike inexplicably waited until 10 June 2016 to reboot the DNC network.

CrowdStrike, a cyber-security company hired by a Perkins Coie lawyer retained by the DNC, provided the narrative to the American public of the alleged hack of the DNC, But the Crowdstrike explanation is inconsistent, contradictory and implausible. Despite glaring oddities in the CrowdStrike account of that event, CrowdStrike subsequently traded on its fame in the investigation of the so-called Russian hack of the DNC and became a publicly traded company. Was CrowdStrike’s fame for “discovering” the alleged Russian hack of the DNC a critical factor in its subsequent launch as a publicly traded company?

The Crowdstrike account of the hack is very flawed. There are 11 contradictions, inconsistencies or oddities in the public narrative about CrowdStrike’s role in uncovering and allegedly mitigating a Russian intrusion (note–the underlying facts for these conclusions are found in Ellen Nakashima’s Washington Post story, Vicki Ward’s Esquire story, the Mueller Report and the blog of Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch):

Two different dates—30 April or 6 May—are reported by Nakashima and Ward respectively as the date CrowdStrike was hired to investigate an intrusion into the DNC computer network.

There are on the record contradictions about who hired Crowdstrike. Nakashima reports that the DNC called Michael Sussman of the law firm, Perkins Coie, who in turn contacted Crowdtrike’s CEO Shawn Henry. Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch tells Nakashima a different story, stating our “Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

CrowdStrike claims it discovered within 24 hours the “Russians” were responsible for the “intrusion” into the DNC network.

CrowdStrike’s installation of Falcon (its proprietary software to stop breaches) on the DNC on the 1st of May or the 6th of May would have alerted to intruders that they had been detected.

CrowdStrike officials told the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima that they were, “not sure how the hackers got in” and didn’t “have hard evidence.”

In a blog posting by CrowdStrike’s founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, on the same day that Nakashima’s article was published in the Washington Post, wrote that the intrusion into the DNC was done by two separate Russian intelligence organizations using malware identified as Fancy Bear (APT28) and Cozy Bear (APT29).

But, Alperovitch admits his team found no evidence the two Russian organizations were coordinating their “attack” or even knew of each other’s presence on the DNC network.

There is great confusion over what the “hackers” obtained. DNC sources claim the hackers gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. DNC sources and CrowdStrike claimed the intruders, “read all email and chat traffic.” Yet, DNC officials insisted, “that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken.” However, CrowdStrike states, “The hackers stole two files.”

Crowdstrike’s Alperovitch, in his blog posting, does not specify whether it was Cozy Bear or Fancy Bear that took the files.

Wikileaks published DNC emails in July 2016 that show the last message taken from the DNC was dated 25 May 2016. This was much more than “two files.”

CrowdStrike, in complete disregard to basic security practice when confronted with an intrusion, waited five weeks to disconnect the DNC computers from the network and sanitize them.

Let us start with the very contradictory public accounts attributed to Crowdstrke’s founder, Dmitri Alperovitch. The 14 June 2016 story by Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and the October 2016 piece by Vicki Ward in Esquire magazine offers two different dates for the start of the investigation:

When did the DNC learn of the “intrusion”?

(Read more: Larry Johnson, 3/17/2020)  (Archive)

“Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows.

The former MI6 officer made the disclosures during a March 17-18 deposition in a defamation case related to the dossier. The DCNF obtained a transcript of the deposition.

Steele suggested in a Dec. 10 statement that he had evidence that would shed light on what his main dossier source told him back in 2016 when Steele was working for the firm Fusion GPS to investigate the Trump campaign.

Steele’s statement was a response to an IG report released the day before that said that Steele’s source — dubbed the “Primary Sub-Source” — told the FBI in January 2017 that Steele misrepresented or embellished information in the dossier.

(…) The status of the information was revealed during an exchange Steele had on March 18 with Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Petr Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman, the owners of Alfa Bank.

Mikhail Fridman (l), Petr Aven (c), and Lord Browne at the L1 Energy launch in New York, May 2015. (Credit: LetterOne Group)

The three Russian bankers are suing Steele for defamation over a memo in the dossier that accused them of making illicit payments to Vladimir Putin.

Tomlinson pressed Steele over the accuracy of his memo, as well as his relationship with “Primary Sub-Source,” the transcript shows.

The lawyer asked Steele about the existence of the documents and recordings that his attorneys mentioned in their rebuttal to the IG report.

“But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed?” a lawyer asked Steele.

“They no longer exist,” Steele said.

(Read more: Daily Caller, 4/23/2020)  (Archive)

Michael Sussmann (l), Christopher Steele (c) and Marc Elias. (Credit: Perkins Coie and public domain)

A lawyer representing the DNC and Clinton campaign provided Christopher Steele with information in 2016 regarding an alleged secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, the former spy told a British court last month.

That now-debunked tip, from Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann, set off a chain of events that led to Steele publishing a Sept. 14, 2016 memo accusing the founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, of having “illicit” ties to Vladimir Putin. A week after Steele wrote that memo, he had another meeting with Sussmann’s colleague, Marc Elias.

Steele disclosed the previously unreported meetings with Sussmann and Elias during testimony in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the Alfa Bank founders, according to a court transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele’s testimony about Sussmann and Elias provides insight into how deeply involved the two lawyers were in the Trump investigation and suggests they helped shape Steele’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/27/2020)  (Archive)

Left to Right: Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton, John Durham, Michael Sussmann, Mark Elias

A lawyer representing the DNC and Clinton campaign provided Christopher Steele with information in 2016 regarding an alleged secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, the former spy told a British court last month.

That now-debunked tip, from Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann, set off a chain of events that led to Steele publishing a Sept. 14, 2016 memo accusing the founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, of having “illicit” ties to Vladimir Putin, according to a court transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News.

A week after Steele wrote that memo, he had another meeting with Sussmann’s colleague, Marc Elias, according to the transcript.

Steele disclosed the previously unreported meetings with Sussmann and Elias during testimony in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the Alfa Bank founders, the transcript shows.

Steele’s testimony about Sussmann and Elias provides insight into how deeply involved the two lawyers were in the Trump investigation and suggests they helped shape Steele’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

(…) The three owners of Alfa Bank have sued Steele in the U.S. and U.K. over the Sept. 14, 2016 memo, which is referred to as “Company Intelligence Report 112” in the dossier.

Steele testified under oath in London on March 17 and 18.

He revealed that Sussmann, a former Justice Department official, told him during a meeting on July 29, 2016 about suspicious network traffic between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, according to the transcript.

He also said that the theory about the computer server traffic was the catalyst for the dossier memo he would write six weeks later about Alfa Bank, the transcript shows.

“I’m very clear is that the first person that ever mentioned the Trump server issue, Alfa server issue, was Mr. Sussman [sic],” Steele told Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for the Alfa Bank owners, on March 17, the transcript shows.

Steele went on to say that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson instructed him at some point after the Sussmann meeting to write a report about Alfa Bank, according to the transcript.

“I was given the instruction sometime after that meeting by Mr. Simpson,” said Steele, adding that the instruction from Simpson “was absolutely, definitely linked to the server issue,” the transcript shows.

It was not previously known whether Steele keyed in on Alfa Bank on his own initiative, or if someone else tasked him with investigating the bank.

Steele said that he directed his dossier source to collect information from Russia about the bank, the transcript shows. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/27/2020) (Archive)

“Judicial Watch today released 80 pages of new emails recently found by the FBI that further document how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her unsecure, non-government email to transmit classified and other sensitive government information. The documents include 11 new Clinton email documents. The emails include an email sent by Mrs. Clinton a month after the Benghazi terrorist attack referencing a “Benghazi security” issue. The emails also include talking points, which are redacted, for a meeting with President Obama. (This is the second release from the batch of Clinton emails the FBI inexplicably found late last year.)

The State Department previously claimed it had produced all releasable Clinton emails, including emails recovered by the FBI that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or withhold. The State Department initially claimed all responsive emails had been produced in 2018, but then found more emails, which were produced for the first time early this year.

Robert Barnett (Credit: public domain)

The new emails include an October 13, 2012, message from Clinton telling private attorney Robert Barnett about a conversation with Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s senior advisor and deputy chief of staff, about Benghazi: “Jake and I were discussing the Benghazi security issue since he tried to tell [Redacted] would be asked about it but they didn’t think so. Might be good for you to call Jake too.” Clinton also mentions then-candidate Mitt Romney’s “47% remark,” referring to his dismissal of Obama voters as irresponsible.

On August 29, 2011, Sullivan sends a “cheat sheet” with “key issues” to Clinton, Abedin and Clinton’s confidential assistant Monica Hanley including “Talking Points for POTUS” for a briefing that day. The talking points are completely redacted.

The new email cache includes an email dated August 31, 2011, that former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman sends to former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, William Burns and others, which is heavily redacted as classified. Burns forwards the email to Sullivan. Sullivan forwards it to Clinton’s private email, and she responds: “I called him [redacted.] Didn’t you get memcon?”

Joseph Wilson (Credit: Getty Images)

On December 22, 2009, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson emails Clinton “directly … rather than Sid [likely Sidney Blumenthal]” about Afghanistan, disparaging “cost plus contractors” and promoting his company, Symbion Power. Wilson includes a memo from his boss, an Inspector General audit of USAID in Afghanistan’s power sector activities and a memo of USAID management’s comments regarding the audit. Clinton forwards the email to Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Jacob Lew, Mills and Sullivan with the following instructions:

Please check out what Joe is saying here. He is now working for a company that has a good track record building in Iraq and wants to do so in Afghanistan. Let me know. Thx.

On August 30, 2011, Melanne Verveer emails Clinton an article titled “Family planning as a pro-life cause,” and tells Clinton “I know you are going off to France for the Libya meeting.” Clinton forwards the message to Sullivan.

David Hale (c) exits a closed-door congressional deposition during Trump’s impeachment inquiry, November 21, 2019. (Credit: Getty Images)

On August 28, 2011, Clinton aide Lona Valmoro sends Clinton, Abedin and Sullivan a copy of Clinton’s sensitive daily schedule, which is fully redacted.

On November 1, 2012, Valmoro sends Clinton, Abedin and Hanley a copy of Clinton’s sensitive schedule that includes a briefing with President Obama and afterward a meeting with then-Special Envoy for Middle East Peace David Hale, Burns and Sullivan.

In a September 1, 2011, email marked sensitive Abedin notifies Clinton that United Arab Emirates’ money for the Transitional National Council of Libya is blocked in the U.S. financial system. The assumption was that the money was actually frozen Libyan assets. The UAE claimed it was not Libyan money.

“Magically, after years, the FBI finds more Clinton emails that are classified, involve Benghazi, and detail communications with President Obama,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This drip, drip game that the DOJ, FBI, and State are playing is a key reason a federal court authorized more discovery, including the sworn deposition of Hillary Clinton.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 3/20/2020)  (Archive)

Tedros Anhanom Ghebreyesus and Bill Gates attend a Rotary convention to discuss WHO and the Gates Foundation’s collaborative initiatives focusing on primary health care on June 13, 2017. (Credit: Tedros AdhanonGhebreyesus/Facebook)

The current head of WHO is a Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, formerly the head of the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, a speaker at the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, and named chair of the board of the Global Fund in July 2009: Global Fund Board appoints Minister of Health of Ethiopia as Chair

The Global Fund is an independent Geneva-based financing entity launched in 2002 to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The US government provides 1/3rd of its funding totaling $18B to date since inception:

The U.S. & The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

This updated fact sheet examines the key role played by the United States in the Global Fund, an independent, multilateral financing entity designed to raise significant new resources to combat HIV…

Not widely known or broadcasted is the fact that the Clinton Foundation and Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (an unauthorized and unapproved program by IRS codes) has been a sub-recipient of Global Fund money (pages 8, 9, 11, 25, 51): Independent Progress Report Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative in Indonesia 

During Tedros Adhanom’s tenure as board chair of the Global Fund, the organization gets rocked by claims of fraud and misappropriation of funds. The US House Committee on Foreign Relations drafts a report:

Fraud and Abuse of Global Fund – Investments at Risk Without Greater Transparency

“…to ensure that all necessary steps are taken to correct and prevent the misuse of Fund resources.”

(page 6/10) The Congressional report and other reviews minimize the size of the fraud and misappropriation of funds. Others with a more discerning eye had a more critical take.

A full 67% of money spent on an anti-AIDS program in Mauritania was misspent, the investigators told the fund’s board of directors. So did [sic] 36% of the money spent on a program in Mali to fight tuberculosis and malaria, 30% of grants to Djibouti”

How Did the Global Fund Fire Its Inspector General and Then Claim He Worked Without Interference?

The problem here — the loophole the Congress left open and the State Department drove its certification process through — is secrecy.

Who was minding the purse strings of USAID which was the source of funds that went from the US State Dept to the Global Fund at this juncture? Documents we sourced from the State Department show that none other than Secretary Hillary Clinton herself oversaw the USAID funds.

How did the State Department view this fraud at the Global Fund?  From a letter we sourced written by the Government Accountability Project on April 22, 2016, we learned:

“…this documentation strongly indicates an irregular and improper collusion between the Global Fund and the State Department in Washington that cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the succeeding years. It is tantamount to fraud.”

At the same time, the Clinton Fdn and Clinton HIV/AIDs and Clinton Health Access Initiative were collecting millions in fees, the Global Fund and also other recipients of Global Fund money who in turn were donors to the Clinton Foundation (classic money laundering). These donors include the governments of the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, and Lesotho. Where was the State Department IG while all this was going on? Oh, yes, that’s right there was no IG for the State Department during HRC’s tenure. How does that happen? Perhaps the same way a Secretary of State sets up a secret server. Rule of law, anybody?

State Department Lacked Top Watchdog During Hillary Clinton Tenure

The State Department had no permanent inspector general during Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure as secretary, leaving in place an acting inspector who had close ties to agency leadership.

So when you hear from @BillGates and the World Health Organization @WHO and the Global Fund @GlobalFund and a host of others about WHO leader Tedros Adhanom and for another version of the Global Fund to battle coronavirus, please retweet this thread.” (Financial Bounty Hunters/USA @LWDoyleUSA, 3/27/2020)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: The Twitter thread that includes this source material has been reformatted for an easier read.)

A clipping of the DOJ OIG memorandum released on March 30, 2020:

Clippings from the DOJ OIG memorandum released on March 30, 2020:

“After the DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG), Michael Horowitz presented his December 2019 findings of the FISA application used against U.S person Carter Page, the gross deficiencies and intentional fraud were so extensive the IG said he was going to review a sample of FISA applications to identify if the fraud and abuse were widespread.

The OIG began reviewing FISA applications from eight field offices (the proverbial “rank and file”).  The OIG selected 29 FISA applications from those field offices over the period of October 2014 to September 2019.  Additionally, every field office and the DOJ-NSD generate internal “Accuracy Reviews”, or self-checks on FISA applications; so the OIG inspected 42 of the accuracy review FISA files to determine if they were compliant.

The results were so bad the IG produced an interim memorandum to the DOJ and FBI [pdf link here].  Within the 17-page-memo the IG notifies Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray that all of the claimed FISA processes, in every field office, are grossly deficient, and in most cases, there is zero compliance with FISA standards.  The IG memorandum is presented before the IG even looks at the specifics of the non-compliance.

Below is the report/memorandum.  Additionally, I am summarizing the stunning top-lines identified by the IG memo:

• The IG reviewed 29 FISA applications, surveillance warrants, used against U.S. persons.
• The 29 FISA applications were from eight different field offices.
• The FISA applications were from Oct/2014 through Sept/2019.
• All of the FISA applications reviewed were approved by the FISA court.

The ‘Woods File’ is the mandatory FBI evidence file that contains the documentary proof to verify all statements against U.S. persons that are contained in the FISA application.  Remember, this is a secret court, the FISA applications result in secret surveillance and wiretaps against U.S. persons outside the fourth amendment.

♦ Within the 29 FISA applications reviewed, four were completely missing the Woods File.  Meaning there was zero supportive evidence for any of the FBI claims against U.S. persons underpinning the FISA application.  [ie. The FBI just made stuff up]

♦ Of the remaining 25 FISA applications, 100% of them, all of them, were materially deficient on the Woods File requirement; and the average number of deficiencies per file was 20.  Meaning an average of twenty direct statements against the target, supporting the purpose of the FISA application, sworn by the FBI affiant, were unsubstantiated.  [The low was 5, the high was 63, the average per file was 20]

♦ Half of the FISA applications reviewed used Confidential Human Sources (CHS’s).  The memo outlines that “many” of applications containing CHS claims had no supportive documentation attesting to the dependability of the CHS.

♦ Two of the 25 FISA applications reviewed had renewals; meaning the FISA applications were renewed to extended surveillance, wiretaps, etc. beyond the initial 90-days.  None of the renewals had any re-verification.  Both FISAs that used renewals were not compliant.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

But wait… it gets worse.

The DOJ and FBI have an internal self-check mechanism.  The DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) chief counsel and the chief counsel for every FBI field office are required to conduct an “Accuracy Review” of selected FISA applications.  One per field office (25 to 30 field offices), which are also sent to DOJ-NSD (main justice) for general counsel inspection.

Keep in mind, these “accuracy reviews” are known in advance, so the FBI has all the time in the world to select the best FISA file for review.  Additionally, I surmise the OIG wanted to inspect the “accuracy review” FISA’s because they would show the best light on the overall system itself.  The OIG was looking for the best, most compliant, product to report on.

However, when the OIG inspected 42 of these Accuracy Reviews, the IG identified that only three of them had accurately assembled documents (Woods File) supporting the application.  The error rate within the files self-checked was over 93%.

So the best FBI files are selected to undergo the FBI and DOJ-NSD accuracy review.  The accuracy review takes place by FBI legal counsel and DOJ-NSD legal counsel.  However, the IG finds that only three FBI applications in the accuracy reviews were compliant.

The error rate in the files undertaken by the internal accuracy review was over 93% (3 compliant out of 42 reviewed).  These were the FISA files with the greatest possibility of being accurate.  Let that sink in…” (Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 3/31/2020)  (Archive)

Sidney Powell (l), General Michael Flynn (c) and Lee Smith

“A lawyer for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said her client was prepared to “audit” the U.S. intelligence community as White House national security adviser.

And that, according to former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, is partly why federal agents “set up” Flynn.

Flynn, 61, is fighting to dismiss the government’s case against him. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 for lying to investigators about his conversations with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak on sanctions on Russia and a United Nations resolution on Israel, but in January, he told the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that he was “innocent of this crime.”

Powell, who took over Flynn’s defense last summer, told the Vicki McKenna Show on 1310 WIBA Madison on Tuesday that her client was “totally set up” because he threatened to expose wrongdoing by top intelligence officials in the Obama administration.

“He was going to audit the intel agencies because he knew about the billions Brennan and company were running off books,” Powell said, referring to former CIA Director John Brennan.

Powell offered no evidence during the interview to support the claim, but her comments echo the findings of investigative journalist Lee Smith, the author of The Plot Against the President.

During a November interview on Maria Bartiromo’s Insiders on Fox Nation along with Powell, Smith said Flynn was scrutinizing possible misconduct by the U.S. intelligence community.

“In addition to Gen. Flynn’s name being cleared, I hope that his initiative to get to the bottom of what these people were doing — to audit the intelligence community … that’s something else we need to look at again,” Smith said. “As well, his initiative to clean out the deep state.” (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 4/01/2020)  (Archive)

“Stung by new evidence of surveillance errors, the nation’s intelligence court on Friday ordered the FBI to review more than two dozen wiretap applications to determine if they were so flawed as to have led to inappropriate spying on Americans.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Chief Judge James Boasberg gave the bureau until June 15 to complete the review, moving quickly to react to a Justice Department inspector general’s memo earlier this week that found 29 FISA warrants to spy on Americans contained inaccurate or unverified information in violation of the FBI’s so-called Woods Procedures.

The judge’s order requires the FBI to determine if the errors were material enough to void the already approved warrants.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

(…) The court signaled on Friday additional action may be taken given the widespread problems now revealed about the FBI’s handling of FISA warrants dating back five years. “When problems are identified in particular cases, furthermore, the Court must evaluate what remedial measures may be necessary,” Boasberg wrote.

The FBI said Friday night it would cooperate with the court and noted that since the problems with the Page warrants were revealed it has taken more than three dozen corrective actions to ensure future FISA would meet the standard of accuracy required by the court and the bureau’s rules.

You can read the IG’s memo here.

You can read the ruling here.

(Read more: JusttheNews, 4/03/2020)  (Archive) (Ruling Archive)

(Credit: CNN)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it and the State Department, which is represented by Justice Department lawyers, filed responses opposing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills’ Writ of Mandamus request to overturn a U.S. District Court order requiring their testimony under oath regarding Clinton’s emails and Benghazi attack records. At the same time, the government argued that it did not engage in “bad faith” in failing to disclose the Clinton non-government email system to Judicial Watch and the court. The briefs were filed on April 3 with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The filings come in the appeals court’s proceedings concerning Judicial Watch’s lawsuit that seeks records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State

Judicial Watch argues that Clinton and Mills “must demonstrate that they have no other adequate means of relief,” which they failed to show. Also, Clinton and Mills do not demonstrate “that the District Court’s order was a judicial usurpation of power or a clear abuse of discretion, or that [Clinton and Mills] have a clear and indisputable right to a writ.” In fact, “the District Court reasonably concluded that Clinton’s previous explanations for using a personal email server are cursory, incomplete, and seemingly at odds with what discovery has yielded to date.”

Judicial Watch further argues that Clinton and Mills are trying to avoid their deposition testimony by relying on, “their status as former high-level government officials.” Clinton and Mills, “do not offer a single case from this Court or any other, holding that former high-level government officials should not be required to follow regular appellate channels to challenge a discovery order.” Particularly in Mills’ case, Judicial Watch notes that they, “identify no case in which a court entertained a mandamus petition to stop the deposition of even a sitting cabinet member’s chief of staff.” [Emphasis in original]

Judicial Watch also argues against Clinton’s argument that she held the server under “claim of right,” when it contained thousands of federal records. Judicial Watch states that unlike other Secretaries of State, like Henry Kissinger, Clinton did not obtain an opinion from State’s Legal Adviser on whether she could take the federal records prior to her departure from State. Clinton’s “claim of right” argument over her server would be like a bank robbery:

A bank robber who stuffs bills into a duffle bag during a robbery may own the bag, but has no “claim of right” to the stolen cash. Is Clinton claiming a legal right to the agency records stored on the server? If so, Petitioners offer no factual or legal support for such a claim. While the server may have been Clinton’s property, the agency records on the server plainly were not.

Though they repeatedly sought to shut down any further inquiry in the lower court proceedings, the State and Justice Departments also argue against Clinton and Mills’ appeal to overturn the order for their depositions:

The government did not seek and thus does not support the extraordinary relief of mandamus due to the unique circumstances of this case.

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 4/06/2020)  (Archive)

…The recent IG report outlining Atkinson’s gross incompetence in the FISA scandal, vis-a-vis the 42 DOJ-NSD Accuracy Reviews, is the atomic shield against the political narrative….

President Trump has sent a letter to congress giving them 30-days advance notice and informing them of the removal of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson:

The necessary, albeit politically controversial, move comes about two months after President Trump assigned Ric Grenell to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Grenell is ultimately the acting boss of the overall intelligence community. It is likely DNI Grenell provided some key insight into the sketchy background activity in/around Atkinson’s office, and the overall intelligence apparatus writ large.

Additionally, former congressman Mark Meadows is now President Trump’s Chief-of-Staff; and Meadows has been a critic of those within the intelligence apparatus who attempted a soft-coup twice: Once by special counsel (Russia investigation) Robert Mueller; and once by impeachment (Ukraine investigation) using CIA operative Eric Ciaramella and NSC operative Alexander Vindman.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Also, in the recent FISA review by the OIG the DOJ inspector general specifically identified issues with the “accuracy reviews” conducted by DOJ-NSD chief legal counsel.  Who was that former DOJ-NSD chief legal counsel?  That would be current ICIG Michael Atkinson…

Currently, former CIA Director John Brennan is under investigation for his role in the FBI spy operations against the Trump campaign and administration.  Brennan is being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham, an assignment from AG Bill Barr.

Few people have asked why it would take a U.S. attorney to conduct a review of the CIA considering ICIG Atkinson should have been doing that oversight already.  The answer within that non-discussed dynamic points to the reason why Ric Grenell as ODNI was needed.

Intelligence Committee member John Ratcliffe has been nominated for the permanent ODNI role, but his nomination has not been taken up by corrupt Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Chairman Richard Burr.   Ironically, Senator Burr is now under investigation for insider trading related to his selling of Wall Street stocks prior to the financial collapse due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since our original research into ICIG Atkinson revealed he was part of a corrupt effort to cover-up his own involvement in the FBI operation against candidate Trump, there have been some rather interesting discoveries.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/03/2020)  (Archive)

Mainstream Media mocked Trump for months:

One of the most bizarre and disturbing aspects of President Trump’s nightly press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic is when he turns into a drug salesman. Like a cable TV pitchman hawking “male enhancement” pills, Trump regularly extols the virtues of taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus, as a potential “game changer” that just might cure covid-19.

On Saturday, he even said: “I think people should — if it were me — in fact, I might do it anyway. I may take it. Okay? I may take it.” I’m not only the president of the Hair Club for Men, I’m also a client.

But the evidence that hydroxychloroquine could actually be an effective treatment is, at this point, extremely thin. Might it be some kind of aid in treating the disease, for some patients? Yes, it’s possible. But Trump’s enthusiasm for it is so out of proportion, and so relentless, that one has to ask: What the heck is going on here?

Some people are inclined to believe that Trump must have a financial motive, and the New York Times did report that he owns some stock in Sanofi, a company that makes the name-brand version of the drug. But I doubt that’s what’s at work. Instead, I think there are two reasons Trump is working so hard to convince everyone that hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure, neither of which are about Trump’s own bank account.

The first is that Trump is listening to all the wrong people. We know that he finds those with advanced degrees extremely intimidating, activating his contempt and envy for experts. So when all the doctors and public health experts and epidemiologists tell him that while we can look into the potential of hydroxychloroquine, there’s no reason to think it’s going to be transformative, it makes him more, not less, convinced that it must be spectacular.

Trump compensates for his own insecurity by working to convince himself and everyone else that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about, and he knows more than them about everything. As he said in an appearance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” The scientists standing with him neither burst out in laughter nor began weeping uncontrollably, a tribute to their self-control. (Read more: Washington Post, 4/07/2020)

Anthony Fauci also mocked Trump for months:

The great Covid cover up. After Donald Trump had just announced his support for the use of hydroxycloroquine, Anthony Fauci said this…
“Hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of coronavirus disease or COVID-19.” #COVID19#COVID pic.twitter.com/qq3JdF2Pf9

— Freyja™ (@FreyjaTarte) April 9, 2024

Interestingly, Fauci’s National Institute of Health published a study in August 2005 discussing the effectiveness of chloroquine against the SARS coronavirus:

“Everything anyone needed to know about the motives and intents of fired Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson is evidenced by his releasing a political statement tonight protesting his termination.

Atkinson doesn’t write a “letter”, his diatribe is not addressed to anyone, it is just a political “statement” designed to be exploited by the same people, for the same intents, as his prior ICIG work product.  This transparently political effort is ridiculous.

Just as pathetic and political as Atkinson’s statement is the statement expressed by current DOJ IG Michael Horowitz on behalf of Atkinson:

…“Inspector General Atkinson is known throughout the Inspector General community for his integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law and independent oversight.”…

What makes this Horowitz statement so ridiculous, political and hypocritical, is that only four days earlier IG Horowitz was so alarmed at the gross incompetence of Atkinson that he submitted an interim memorandum noting extreme deficiencies in the FISA work product of Michael Atkinson as legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/05/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today it has obtained new documents from the Department of State containing the telephone transcripts from the evening of September 12, 2012, in which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informs then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil that the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi “had nothing to do with the film.”  The documents include previously unreleased telephone transcripts with world leaders about the Benghazi attack.

Clinton’s admission to Kandil was first produced to the Select Committee on Benghazi on October 13, 2015 and publicized on the day of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, October 22, but court filings in Judicial Watch litigation show that the record was only produced after two federal court judges ordered the State Department to produce more Benghazi-related records to Judicial Watch.  Similarly, Judicial Watch litigation also forced the release of the September 11, 2012 email in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed her daughter by email that the attack had been staged by an “Al Qaeda-like group,” rather than as the result of “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” as Mrs. Clinton had claimed in her official public statement one hour earlier.

The State Department previously told a federal court that the Kandil document wasn’t responsive to Judicial Watch’s request and resulting lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01511)) seeking:

Any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to notes, updates, or reports created in response to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. This request includes, but is not limited to, notes taken by then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or employees of the Office of the Secretary of State during the attack and its immediate aftermath.

But the State Department then produced this information last month to Judicial Watch.  The records, the State Department told the Court, were found among thousands of new Clinton State Department records supposedly only discovered in December 2015 – again, two months after the key Kandil document was first produced to the Benghazi Committee.

Under court order, the State Department released 11 documents responsive to the Judicial Watch request with large blocks of information redacted. The documents also include phone conservations between Clinton and other foreign dignitaries and heads of state during the period of the deadly terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate.

At 10:08 p.m. on September 11, Mrs. Clinton issued an official State Department press statement, approved by the White House, placing the blame for the attack on an Internet video:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

Yet the next day, in her 3:04 PM September 12 conversation with Kandil, Clinton said:

“We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.  It was a planned attack – not a protest.”  Clinton went on to add, “You’re not kidding. Based on the information we saw today we believe that group that claimed responsibility for this is affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

On September 15, in a telephone call with then-Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr, Clinton emphatically portrayed the “stupid, very offensive film” as the root cause of the Benghazi violence. Clinton told Amr:

“I have repeatedly, as has the President and other officials in our government, deplored not only the content of this stupid, very offensive film… But we have to exercise more self-discipline… otherwise we’ll be in a vicious downward circle against everyone who has ever felt offended, particularly on the internet….”

Clinton’s telephone call with Amr also contained a curious reference to what the former secretary referred to as a “very successful investment visit led by my deputy Tom Nides, and on the very day they left this series of incidents began to unfold.” According to the Washington Post, Nides, who was deputy secretary for management and resources at the State Department, was at the same time responsible for “communications with donors” to the Clinton Foundation. Nides was also involved in the scandal involving Clinton’s efforts to provide special access to State Department officials for hedge fund clients of her son-in-law, Marc Mezinsky.

In a September 12 call with Afghan President Hamid Kharzi, Clinton says at some point they need to talk about “about religious feelings and insults and defamation.”  Islamists seek to criminalize criticism (“defamation”) of Islam.  The Obama administration worked closely with advocates for restrictions on free speech as part of their Benghazi video pr campaign.

The documents also show that Clinton referenced the “actions of a mob” to Tunisian Prime Minister Jebali on September 14.  Jebali responded that he condemned “these terrorist actions.”

“There are two scandals here.  The first is Hillary Clinton was telling different stories to different foreign leaders about the Benghazi attack – including an admission that it was a terrorist attack,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The second is the State Department’s cover-up of these documents.  The State Department is forcing Judicial Watch to play ‘whack-a-mole’ with Clinton and Benghazi documents.  It is no wonder that two frustrated federal court judges granted Judicial Watch discovery into the Clinton FOIA issues.” (Judicial Watch, 4/06/2016)  (Archive)

It has been so long since the original 2018 congressional request that many people have forgotten what was included in the “Bucket Five” declassification request.

George Papadopoulos is released from prison, December 7, 2018. (Credit: Fox News)

Bucket Five – Intelligence documents that were presented to the Gang of Eight in 2016 that pertain to the FISA application used against U.S. person Carter Page; including all exculpatory intelligence documents that may not have been presented to the FISA Court.

Bucket Five includes transcripts of the FBI wiretap operations using confidential human sources that were run against members of the Trump campaign; including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

One of those transcripts, from the operation against Papadopoulos was declassified on April 1st, and released last night and today.

(…) ♦ A note of caution…the declassification of documents in/around the core issues of Spygate may indicate a more political approach to sunlight, and not any criminal investigation, at least in part, of the overall IC schemes.  Whatever U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into (seems targeted to John Brennan) does not appear to be related to a criminal finding of wrongdoing by the FBI actors.   However, don’t be alarmed by that nuance because it has long been visible that the FBI position would boil down to a claim they were hoodwinked by an unknown political agenda within the CIA.

Former FBI Director James Comey has leaned into the “we were duped” approach; but the “we” in that deflection doesn’t necessarily apply to the reality of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s participation.   Comey may have been willfully blind, and incompetent toward his responsibilities, thereby holding plausible deniability as his exit strategy; thus Comey kept all those notes and memos to cover his ass. However, McCabe was not a mere bystander, subject to the manipulation of bad actors within the schemes. McCabe was an active participant, that’s the essential difference between the two.

OK, now on to the transcript as released…

In May 2016 George Papadopoulos was contacted by two members of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Terrence Dudley and Greg Baker, working out of the U.S. embassy in London. Two American spies working in London put Papadopoulos in contact with their ally/counterpart in the Australian Embassy, Erika Thompson. [ie. ‘unofficial channels’] After meeting with Downer’s aide, Erika Thompson on May 6th, she sets up a meeting between George Papadopoulos and her boss for May 10th.

On May 10th, 2016, Ms Erika Thompson and Mr. Alexander Downer then meet with George Papadopoulos.  After the meeting, Ambassador Downer reports back to the Australian government on his conversation with Papadopoulos. [document release]. It is from this May 10th, 2016, meeting where communication from Downer, July 26th, 2016, is referenced as the origin of Crossfire Hurricane July 31st.

On August 2, 2016, Special Agent Peter Strzok and another agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Alexander Downer in London to discuss his conversation with Papadopoulos further. Strzok then received reading materials, which he texted about to Lisa Page.

A month later September 2016, the FBI used a longtime informant, Stefan Halper, to make contact with George Papadopoulos, pay him $3k and fly him to London for consulting work and a policy paper on Mediterranean energy issues.  As part of the spy operation, the FBI sent a female intelligence operative (a spy) under the alias Azra Turk to pose as Halper’s assistant and engage Papadopoulos.

A month later, October 21, 2016, the FBI used Papadopoulos as a supplemental basis for a FISA warrant against Carter Page.

(Carter Page FISA Application)

A few weeks after the FBI received the FISA warrant against Carter Page, they ran another operation against George Papadopoulos using a friend as an asset; a wired asset.

The FBI labeled Papadopoulos as “crossfire typhoon”, and ran a confidential human source (CHS #3) recently identified as Jeffrey Wiseman.

Former Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, told Maria Bartiromo in May 2019 that he had seen the transcripts of the FBI’s Jeffrey Wiseman operation and those transcripts exonerate Papadopoulos.  WATCH:

(Transcript Video 01:10) Bartiromo: I’m really glad you brought that up; the FBI agents’ discussion with George Papadopoulos. Because when the FBI sends in informants to someone they’re looking at, typically those conversations are recorded right? Those people are wired?

Gowdy: Yeah, I mean if the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired; and if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls there’s going to be a transcript of that.

And some of us have been fortunate enough to know whether or not those transcripts exist; but they haven’t been made public and I think one in-particular is going – it has the potential to actually persuade people.  Very little in this Russia probe I’m afraid is going to persuade people who hate Trump, or who love Trump, but there is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer if it’s ever made public.

Bartiromo: You say that’s exculpatory evidence and when people see that they’re going to say: wait, why wasn’t this presented to the court earlier?

Gowdy: Yeah, you know, Johnny Ratcliffe is rightfully exercised over the obligations that the government has to tell the whole truth to the court when you are seeking permission to spy, or do surveillance, on an American.  And part of that includes the responsibility of providing exculpatory information, or information that tends to show the person did not do something wrong.  If you have exculpatory information, and you don’t share it with the court, that ain’t good.  I’ve seen it, Johnny’s seen it, I’d love for your viewers to see it.

Today the transcript of the Wiseman operation was released.  This is the transcript where Papadopoulos’s friend Jeffrey Wiseman is wired by the FBI for a meeting in Chicago.

Papadopoulos told Wiseman that he knew “for a fact” that nobody on the Trump campaign was involved in hacking the DNC.

The IG report said the FBI tapped Wiseman, referred to as “Source 3” in the report, due to a previous “connection” with Papadopoulos. The report said Wiseman indicated years earlier during an interview for a separate investigation he would be willing to work with the FBI.

After lunch, Wiseman and Papadopoulos traveled to a casino, where they played blackjack. According to the transcript, in addition to discussing Russia and the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos said he had worked for Israeli businesses, “to lobby for them in Washington.”  This conversation appears to be taking place in late October or early November 2016, prior to the election.

Despite all of the surveillance operations against Papadopoulos, the target was not interviewed by the FBI until January 2017. None of the exculpatory information was included in the January FISA renewal or the two subsequent renewals.

It’s likely the FBI will justify not including the exculpatory evidence based on the fact that Carter Page and not Papadopoulos was the primary target of the FISA application.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

With the release of the Papadopoulos transcript, this interview from May 2019 also takes on new context.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/09/2020)  (Archive)

Sen. Chuck Grassley suggests the redacted footnotes contradict IG Report statements. (Crecit: Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

“U.S. intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI’s investigation into President Trump’s campaign, including that agents possessed evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian disinformation, Just the News has learned.

The previously redacted footnotes are likely to raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials supplied to Congress.

(…) The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected, that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.

The new information “will make clear the FBI possessed information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to sustain a collusion investigation” and will be specific enough to renew a debate in Washington over “whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly,” one source with direct knowledge said.

The evidence could also raise new questions about whether statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading, and whether the intelligence community’s official assessment that Vladimir Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence in FBI files, the sources said.(Read more: JusttheNews, 4/09/2020)  (Archive)

George Papadopoulos is ordered to report to prison on November 26, 2018. (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“A newly declassified transcript from the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe reviewed by CBS News shows a recorded conversation between former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos and the bureau’s confidential human source turned up no evidence of coordination between the campaign and Russia.

The 90-page, lightly redacted transcript between Papadopoulos — who is identified by the code name “Crossfire Typhoon,” or CT  — and the bureau’s confidential human source, or CHS, captures the October 23, 2016 conversation.

Papadopoulos does boast about setting up “a meeting with…  (t) President of Egypt and Trump,” according to the transcript, and says that he had made “a lot of cool [connections] and I’m going to see what’s going to happen after the election.”

The recorded conversation was documented in the December Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Of the October 23, 2016 transcript, Horowitz wrote, “Papadopoulos did not say much about Russia during the first conversation with Source 3, other than to mention a “friend Sergey…[who] lives in…Brooklyn,” and invite Source 3 to travel with Papadopoulos to Russia in the summertime.”

The date on the transcript reflects that the FBI was using a confidential source to gather intelligence about the former campaign aide less than three weeks before the presidential election. Within days of the Papadopoulos recorded conversation, the FBI Russia team, known as “Crossfire Hurricane” had also secured a surveillance warrant for Page to investigate alleged coordination between the Trump team and Moscow.

(…) Earlier this month, CBS News was first to report that transcripts of a separate conversation, on October 31, 2016, showed that Papadopoulos denied to an FBI confidential source that the campaign was involved in the circumstances surrounding the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s email system, calling the idea “illegal.”

However, Horowitz also noted in his report that “Case Agent 1” had said of a similar recorded conversation with Papadopoulos in September 2016, “the Crossfire Hurricane team’s assessment was that the Papadopoulos denial was a rehearsed response and that he did not view the information as particularly germane to the investigation of Carter Page.” (Read more: CBS News, 4/25/2020)  (Archive)

“Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson asked that four footnotes be unredacted in the IG FISA abuse report. The footnotes at issue are: Footnotes 302, 334, 342* and 350. The letter states that the classified footnotes contradict information in Horowitz’s report that appears to have misled the public.

The contradiction can be found in footnote 334 recently unredacted. @JohnWHuber highlights it here:

(Twitter)

All but one of the footnotes (342*), were mostly unredacted and released by the DOJ on April 10, 2020.  Senator Grassley’s office then responds with a letter:

“The “central and essential” evidence used to justify invasive surveillance of an American citizen in the FBI’s probe into Russian interference was, itself, an example of Russian interference, according to once-secret footnotes declassified at the urging of two U.S. Senators. The footnotes, part of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed operation to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, were released just hours after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) renewed their push for transparency. The senators expect a fuller declassification in the coming days.

The footnotes reveal that beginning early on and continuing throughout the FBI’s Russia investigation, FBI officials learned critical information streams that flowed to the dossier were likely tainted with Russian Intelligence disinformation. But the FBI aggressively advanced the probe anyway, ignoring internal oversight mechanisms and neglecting to flag the material credibility concerns for a secret court. Despite later intelligence reports that key elements of the FBI’s evidence were the result of Russian infiltration to undermine U.S. foreign relations, the FBI still pushed forward with its probe. It would eventually spill over into the years-long special counsel operation, costing taxpayers more than $30 million and increasing partisan divisions – all based on faulty evidence. In the end, the special counsel concluded that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia.

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation. The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative. The mounting evidence undercutting this narrative should have stopped the investigation early in its tracks. Instead, it took several years and millions in taxpayer dollars to conclude that the allegations were baseless,” Grassley and Johnson said.

“Had FBI leadership heeded the numerous warnings of Russian disinformation, paid attention to the glaring contradictions in the pool of evidence and followed long-standing procedures to ensure accuracy, everyone would have been better off. Carter Page’s civil liberties wouldn’t have been shredded, taxpayer dollars wouldn’t have been wasted, the country wouldn’t be as divided and the FBI’s reputation wouldn’t be in shambles.

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation. These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”

The IG report detailed how the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. According to Footnote 302, in October 2016, FBI investigators learned that one of Steele’s main sources was linked to the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS), and was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.  However, the FBI neglected to include this information in its application, which the FISA Court approved that same month. Two months later, investigators learned that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, told a Justice Department attorney that he assessed the same source “was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” In January, the FISA warrant was renewed.

Footnote 302 – Redacted

Footnote 302 – Unredacted

Footnote 334 – Redacted

Footnote 334 – Unredacted

Footnote 350 states that, in 2017, the FBI learned that intelligence reports “assessed that the referenced subset [of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen] was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”

That same footnote states that a separate report, dated 2017, “contained information … that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”

Footnote 350 – Redacted

Footnote 350 – Unredacted

An Exposé On How Hollywood And The Mainstream Media Manipulate The Multitudes By Spreading Propaganda Throughout Their Content.

The Out Of Shadows Documentary Lifts The Mask On How The Mainstream Media & Hollywood Manipulate & Control The Masses By Spreading Propaganda Throughout Their Content. The Goal Is To Wake Up The General Public By Shedding Light On How We All Have Been Lied To & Brainwashed By A Hidden Enemy With A Sinister Agenda.

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–

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Every exposed PEDO is one less

Sally Yates testified before a Senate committee on May 8, 2017. (Credit: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)

“Another unredacted footnote pertained to the FISA signoff by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, noting that her approval provided the requisite authorization required under Executive Order 12333, Section 2.5, which requires that the attorney general “has determined in each case that there is probable cause to believe that the technique is directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.” The unredacted footnote, number 293, reads:

“Her signature also specifically authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page under Section 705(b) of the FISA and Executive Order 12333 Section 2.5”

During congressional testimony on Aug. 31, 2018, Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI and head of the bureau’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch, highlighted the unusual nature of the Page FISA application process and the unusual roles of McCabe and Yates, who provided approvals of the Page FISA before regular FBI and DOJ approvals had been obtained:

“There were individuals, all the way up to the Deputy Director and the Deputy Attorney General on the DOJ side, who had essentially given their approval to the FISA before it got to that step in the process. That part of it was unusual, and so I didn’t consider my review at that point in the process to be substantive in nature,” Anderson told congressional investigators.

A major problem with the issuance of the Page FISA was that information had been provided to the FBI indicating that Page had previously worked with or on behalf of another agency, likely the CIA. That information, if provided to the Office of Intelligence (OI) or the FISA court, would have made it significantly more difficult for the FBI to claim that Page was “an agent of a foreign power.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 4/16/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it served a subpoena, authorized by a DC federal court, on Google to produce all Clinton emails from a Google account believed to contain former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Platte River Networks’ IT specialist Paul Combetta reportedly used the Google account to transfer Clinton’s emails from a laptop to a Platte River server, then used BleachBit to remove any traces of the emails from the laptop. Judicial Watch’s subpoena seeks all Clinton emails from her time at State, January 21, 2009, to February 1, 2013. Google is requested to produce the emails by May 13.

The Google subpoena comes in a Judicial Watch’s lawsuit that seeks records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch famously uncovered in 2014 that the “talking points” that provided the basis for Susan Rice’s false statements were created by the Obama White House. This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

During an August 2019 federal court hearing, U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth raised concerns about Clinton’s Gmail cache and ordered Judicial Watch to “shake this tree” on the issue. Judge Lamberth noted that Senator Grassley released:

…a report in which he had some very troubling information about a guy named Combetta who had been one of the contract employees on the Clinton emails, and he and the Senator who Chairs the Homeland Security Committee released in the Senate this report Friday, and the gist of it was that Combetta had said, I guess, that he had created a dummy email account with all of the Hillary Clinton emails in it in a different name, and the FBI had investigated that to see whether or not the Chinese had ever hacked into it. They have determined that the Chinese hadn’t, but that the FBI never told the State Department about that account and that the emails that were not given over to State could have been obtained from that account, but the FBI never told State about it. So it leaves out in the open whether there are these other emails that State could have obtained but nobody ever bothered to tell State about them. I don’t know the status of that and I’m sure you don’t either, but that did occur to me that would be a problem for me as to whether an adequate examination of that circumstance occurred and, assuming that Combetta deleted them, as he said he did before he took the Fifth, I guess, whether or not the server that they were on or the — or whoever maintained the server, whether they can be reconstructed from — by that …

Just last week, the Senate’s – Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees released documents revealing that Clinton IT aide Paul Combetta copied all but four of the missing emails to a Gmail account that does not appear to have ever been reconstructed and searched. The court thinks Judicial Watch ought to shake this tree.

On March 2, 2020, Judge Lamberth granted Judicial Watch’s request to subpoena Google for relevant documents and records associated with Clinton’s emails during her tenure at the State Department.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 4/15/2020)  (Archive)

Twitter user/deep diver Undercover Huber reviews some of the more interesting footnotes declassified and released today by ODNI and DOJ.  His Twitter thread carries the before and after footnotes, we are just posting the unredacted copy. Starting with footnote 17:

17. Steele said MI6 gave consent to him working with IG

21. IG did not review all material collected under FISA

63. CHS operations were NatSec extraterritorial (needs higher approval per FBI manuals)

164. USG agency not running Mifsud as asset, but no derogatory info either

166. A “senior intelligence official” was present at a meeting on July 27 2016, providing the FFG information on Papadopoulos (likely in London)

205. Evidence Chris Steele lied by denying he thought he was an official CHS, as payments to him had CHS’s “Payment Name”

208. A 2015 report written by FBI’s TOCI Unit on 10 Russian oligarchs noted between Jan-May 2015 “5 of these had their intermediaries contact Steele”. These were “outreach efforts” by Steele with the Oligarchs. Gaeta was AWARE of these efforts and Oligarch contacts!

211. “Sensitive source” reporting from June 2017 indicated that a “person affiliated” with Russian Oligarch 1 (Oleg Deripaska) was “possibly aware” of Steele’s election investigation as of early July 2016

214. Confirmation none of Steele’s sources from his time at MI6

244. Info about Person 1 (assessed as being Sergei Millian), still heavily redacted

253. A number of these reports do not appear in the BuzzFeed published dossier – e.g. 132, 137 and 139.

253. Steele report “139” (not published by BuzzFeed), says that “Person 1 [Sergei Millian] was forced to lie low abroad following his/her exposure in the western media and was currently in [redacted]”….

253. …Report 139 being about Person 1 (Sergei Millian) suggests Steele kept giving reports to FBI/Gaeta AFTER being terminated by an FBI CHS as Millian was only identified in the WSJ in early 2017. Also, Steele appears to know Person 1’s location

276. The FBI wanted FISA surveillance in place on Page before Mon Oct 17 due to his upcoming travel to the U.K and South Africa.

293. Sally Yates authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page.

296. MI6 said Steele was only in a “moderately senior” position, which contradicted the “high ranking” position suggested by Steele to the FBI.

301. Person 1 info still redacted 🤔

302. Person 1 had contact with suspected Russian intelligence persons and entities

328. During a London meeting with MI6, Bill Priestap (who authorized opening the CH probe) “may have made a commitment to MI6 not to document [MI6s] views on Steele as a condition for obtaining the information”

The FBI DID NOT WANT anything derogatory in writing🚨

334. Steele’s Primary Sub Source did NOT view his/her contacts as a “network of sources, but rather as FRIENDS with whom he/she has conversations about current events & government relations”

339. Page/Sechin meeting allegation came from a source linked to RUS intel 🚨

342. In late Jan 2017, FBI aware that Russian intel may have targeted Steele’s company Orbis [redacted] and research all publicly available information about it [redacted].

342. By early June 2017 US Intel Community report indicated two persons affiliated with Russian intelligence were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016 [Note: one of these may be the same person linked to Oleg Deripaska mentioned in FN211]

347. FBI received info in early June 2017 that revealed there were [long redaction] “personal and business ties between the sub-source and Primary Sub Source; contacts between the sub-source and an individual in the Russian Prez Admin in June/July 2016….” 🚨 [Note: Smolenkov?]

350. FBI received a report on Jan 12 2017 giving inaccuracies in Steele’s reporting. Nothing else new unredacted from the previous release.

Note: Wording and timing strongly suggests this came from the British government and was given to then NSA Michael Flynn’s office.

368/377. Like Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein authorized overseas surveillance of Page.

372. This is first direct evidence that FISA material collected after the 3rd improper FISA (renewal 2) has been sequestered as ordered by the FISA court.

379. FBI conducted PHYSICAL searches under the Page FISA (which appear to have taken place on July 13 and July 29 2017, after the final FISA was authorized). The FBI did not meet minimization procedures, which it disclosed to the FISC nearly two years later 🚨

389. The ODNI/DOJ are *still* redacting the words “Russian-based” for some reason. Someone really doesn’t want people to know whether the “Primary Sub Source” was really Russian-based or not 🤔

464 & 484. Appears to repeat the similar new info on Mifsud as FN164

526. More details on the National Security nature of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the use of extraterritorial CHS’s

(Credit: Undercover Huber @JohnWHuber with before/after footnotes, 4/15/2020)  (Archive) (Footnotes PDF)

(…) “Despite multiple reports in 2017 warning that claims in an anti-Trump dossier were ‘false’ and ‘part of a Russian disinformation campaign,’ the FBI continued to rely on the Democrat-funded opposition research to spy on a Trump campaign aide. The once-classified details contained in footnotes of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed spying operation were unmasked at the repeated urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.),” Grassley released Wednesday night.

“Earlier this month, the Justice Department provided the senators with a partially-declassified version of three footnotes following their January request, but key information detailing exactly when the FBI became aware of exculpatory intelligence reports remained redacted. The new material, provided with the assistance of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sheds new light on the remaining redactions as well as additional information that was previously classified in the IG report,” the release continues.

Details in the footnotes reveal the FBI knew the dossier wasn’t credible before applying for FISA renewals on at least one Trump campaign official. This information was also known before the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Adding insult to injury, Russian intelligence officials were aware of Steele’s investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016. This information helped Russia with disinformation campaigns against the United States.” (Read more: TownHall, 4/16/2020)  (Archive)

Declassified footnotes DNI by Katie Pavlich on Scribd

Twitter writer Undercover Huber @JohnWHuber makes a few interesting discoveries in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s recently released set of Carter Page’s FISA warrant applications.

Undercover Huber/Twitter

“More proof Rep Adam Schiff’s FISA memo was deliberately misleading about “narrow use” of the Steele dossier to spy on Carter Page.

Also EXCLUSIVE: the FBI/DOJ FISAs *heavily relied* on reporting attributed to “Source E” / “Person 1” (Sergei Millian) for probable cause.

Let’s compare yesterday release of a more declassified set of @carterwpage FISA warrant applications with Adam Schiff’s memo again

Reminder: Schiff and staff had full, clear text access to all the unredacted FISAs before they wrote their memo in Jan 2018.

Schiff’s Memo claimed the FISAs:

“…made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016, chiefly his suspected July 2016 meetings in Moscow with Russian officials.”

“Narrow use” of Steele’s sources, and just for the Moscow trip:

Schiff also claimed that only a “specific sub-section” of the FISA applications referred to “Steele’s reporting” (the section that discusses the allegation that Page met secretly Igor Sechin and other Russian officials in Moscow in July 2016).

This “specific sub-section” of the FISA starts at p.15 (Section III,B)

This is where the FISA first *appears* to mention Steele, and rely on his dossier reporting about Page’s alleged meetings in Moscow with Igor Sechin and others – or the “narrow use”, according to Schiff.

Until yesterday’s release, it was hard to 100% disprove Schiff’s memo just from the FISA itself. You could rely on the 2019 IG report, but Schiff can claim he didn’t know the IG’s findings when he wrote his memo.

Not true: Schiff knew he was lying at the time, in Jan 2018.

Section II, p.10 of the FISA was partially redacted in the original release in July 2018. But Schiff knew what was under these black lines – he had full access at the time he wrote his memo. Okay, what do they say?

The latest declassification reveals *for the first time publicly* that Section II, p.10 said that:

“[Carter] Page…has been identified by source reporting as an intermediary with Russian leadership” in “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” to influence the 2016 election.

A “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” with Page and “Russian leadership” is **literally cut and pasted from the Steele dossier**

And specifically, the source is “Source E”, referred to as “Person 1” by the IG report (referring to Sergei Millian).

That’s a major problem for FBI/DOJ:

—FBI/DOJ submitted this FISA, which relies on Person 1 as a key source, on Oct 21 2016

—The FBI had opened a counterintelligence case on Person 1 for their alleged links to Russian intel *before* the FISA, likely between Oct 3-12 2016

You read that right.

The FBI claimed a Collusion “conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia in a secret FISA warrant application relying on a source they were supposedly investigating for having links to Russian intelligence which they didn’t disclose to the court.

—Schiff knew on Jan 18 the FISA relied on the Steele reporting to claim a “conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign (using Page) & Russia

—Schiff made up a claim of “narrow use” and hid this fact

—FBI/DOJ also hid the evidence that could refute this

—The FBI/DOJ used Steele’s “source reporting” to claim a “conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia, relying on Source E/Person 1/Millian 🚨

—At the time they wrote this FISA they now claim they also had a CI investigation into Source E/Person 1/Millian🤔

Oh, and this is now the second time it’s been proven that the FBI/DOJ literally *cut and pasted* entire phrases and sections out of the Steele dossier and put them into the Page FISA warrant applications. So much for “narrow use.”

And of course, the media [and fact checkers] almost entirely bought into Schiff’s spin about “narrow use” of the dossier.

Examples:
NYT

FactCheck dot org

Politifact

Steele defender @DavidCornDC weighed in of course:

None of these guys have corrected their prior reporting, or more importantly, questioned whether they should rely in the future on documented fraudster and liar Adam Schiff for information, given his clearly intentional misrepresentations about the FISA warrants.

UPDATE:  Case Agent 1 is in a lot of trouble

In this Oct 2016 FISA, the FBI alleged there was a “well developed conspiracy of co-operation”, involving Carter Page working with Paul Manafort to collude with Russian leadership (sourced to Person 1/Millian from the dossier) (Read update: UndercoverHuber @JohnWHuber, 4/17/2020)  (Archive)

Jonathan Finer (Credit: Council on Foreign Relations)

“An extensive New Yorker profile of Steele named another former official from Kerry’s State Department for alleged involvement in circulating the dossier. The magazine reported that Kerry’s chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer, obtained the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually decided to share the questionable document with Kerry.

Finer received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with Nuland.

After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Post oped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele.

Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.” (Read more: Breitbart, 4/21/2020)  (Archive)

John Brennan is nominated for the CIA director’s position and appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a hearing in 2013. (Credit: Jason Reed/Reuters)

By: Jeff Carlson @themarketswork

A John Brennan thread touching on some of his 2016 actions – mostly in his own words.

Brennan used unofficial intelligence from unofficial channels and then fed this information repeatedly into the FBI as a tactic to push the FBI into starting a Counterintelligence Investigation.

Brennan Testimony:

“Sometime this summer, there was information that the CIA had that was shared with the Bureau. But it wasn’t the only period of time where such information was shared with the Bureau.”

February 4, 2018 on Meet the Press:

“The CIA and the Intelligence Community had collected a fair amount of information in the summer of 2016 about what the Russians were doing on multiple fronts. And we wanted to make sure that the FBI had full access to that.”

Brennan Testimony:

“We were uncovering information intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.”

Brennan Testimony (Responding to Gowdy):

“I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper personally confirmed foreign intelligence involvement during congressional testimony in May 2017:

Brennan Testimony:

“I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the bureau [FBI].”

Brennan on Maddow:

“Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI…we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there…”

Brennan established a Task Force to investigate:

Maddow: “So, it’s an intelligence-sharing operation…”

Brennan: “Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected.”

February 4, 2018 on Meet the Press:

Brennan: “The FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals…”

Brennan’s “intelligence” served as the basis for the FBI Counterintelligence Investigation:

“I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons…and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”

Brennan stated that he briefed the Gang of Eight. Brennan had already informed the Obama WH:

“Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept congress apprised of these issues…In consultation with the White House, I personally briefed the full details.”

But there’s a problem. Devin Nunes told us on April 22, 2018:

“There was no intelligence that passed through the Five Eyes channels to our government…We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation.”

Brennan on his knowledge of the Steele Dossier:

Brennan: “I know that there were efforts made by the Bureau to try to understand whether or not any of the information in that was valid, but I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of it.”

Todd: “When did you first learn of the so-called Steele dossier and what Christopher Steele was doing?”

Brennan: “I had heard just snippets about it…I did not see it until later in that year. I think it was in December…it did not play any role whatsoever in the [ICA]”

But during a CNN Interview with Clapper a slightly different story was told:

Clapper: “Some of the substantive content of the dossier we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community assessment from other sources in which we had very high confidence.”

And Meadows indicated that Brennan knew of the dossier in Aug ’16 during Q&A of Lisa Page:

Meadows: “We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid…Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [dossier]?”

Brennan’s ICA was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Trump.

Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.

Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama on the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early Jan 2017.

Gowdy asked Brennan about unmasking:

Gowdy: Have you ever requested that a U.S. person’s name be unmasked?

Brennan: Yes I have.

***

Gowdy: Do you recall any U.S. ambassadors asking that names be unmasked?

Brennan: I don’t know. Maybe it’s ringing a vague bell…

Gowdy: On either Jan 19th or up to noon on Jan 20th did you make any unmasking requests?

Brennan: I do not believe I did.

Gowdy: You did not make any requests on the last day that you were employed?

Brennan: No, I was not in the agency on the last day I was employed.

(Read more: Jeff Carlson, themarketswork/Twitter, 4/18/2020)  (Archive)  (The Epoch Times, 4/21/2020)

Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (r) and the committee’s vice chairman Senator Mark Warner speak to the media about the committee’s findings and recommendations on threats to election infrastructure, March 20, 2018. (Credit: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

“After Trump’s surprise election, then-President Obama directed “CIA Director John Brennan to conduct a review of all intelligence relating to Russian involvement in the 2016 election and produce a single comprehensive assessment.” With Brennan at the helm, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and FBI compiled a report for Obama, which the FBI insisted include the now-discredited Christopher Steele dossier.

Other intelligence leaders objected, and as the committee report explained, the disagreement “was ultimately resolved by including the information as Annex A, a two-page summary attached only to the most classified version of the ICA.” The report explained the NSA was not involved in the discussion or the decision to include the Steele dossier in the annex, but then-FBI Director James Comey insisted that Steele’s “intel” be included, although he “was agnostic as to whether it was footnoted in the document itself, put as an annex.”

Significantly, in tracing this history of the decision to include the Steele dossier in the intel report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted that “the FBI didn’t want to stand behind” Steele’s reporting.

But the FBI did stand behind Steele reporting to federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court judges four times: once months earlier, and then mere weeks after the FBI opted to only summarize the dossier in the annex to the ICA report because the agents didn’t “want to stand behind” the reporting. As Inspect General Michael Horowitz found, and as the recent additional declassifications of the FISA applications prove, the Steele dossier was indispensable to the FISA surveillance applications. Yet “the FBI didn’t want to stand behind” it!

Nonetheless, and without a hint of self-reflection, Comey has pointed to yesterday’s Senate report as exoneration. Those who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “were professionals,” Comey tweeted.

(Read more: The Federalist, 4/21/2020)  (Archive)

Devin Nunes (Credit: public domain)

“A top Republican said a criminal referral sent to the Justice Department last year relates to the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke about the assessment on Tuesday after the Senate intelligence panel released its 158-page bipartisan report defending the assessment that was released in the waning days of the Obama administration.

The California congressman told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that it was “suspect” the U.S. intelligence community put it together in a matter of several weeks, at the behest of former President Barack Obama. Referring to what he called “Obama’s dossier,” Nunes noted that his panel, when he was chairman, determined the “tradecraft was not up to snuff” and said he stands by his determination in the face of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s much different conclusion.

The lead GOP investigator revealed that one of the several criminal referrals he sent to the Justice Department last year, which were related to the Trump-Russia investigation, had to do with the intelligence community assessment. He said it focuses on “whether or not intelligence was manipulated for political purposes.”

Nunes’s assertions run counter to what the Senate intelligence panel wrote in its report. The heavily redacted report said Senate investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determined the assessment by the CIA, FBI, and NSA “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.

(Read more: The Washington Examiner, 4/21/2020)  (Archive)

(…) Accusing the intelligence community of improper “analytic tradecraft” in analyzing Russia’s strategic intentions is an extremely grave indictment for a congressional oversight committee to make. In my opinion, there is no question the House Intelligence Committee is right for the reasons in its 2018 report and other subsequent findings.

The House committee found the intelligence community assessment violated protocols for drafting such assessments. This major finding shows why America needs strong legislative oversight over the intelligence services.

For example, although the protocols require intelligence community assessments to be “community products” and vetted with all intelligence agencies and analysts with equities in a given subject, only three intelligence agencies were asked to draft this assessment: the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI.

With the 14 other intelligence agencies left out, the three participating agencies included only two dozen “handpicked” analysts. Other intelligence agencies working on this issue, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, were excluded.

In addition, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed the actual drafting of the intelligence community assessment was done by three close associates of former CIA Director Brennan, who has proven to be the most politicized intelligence chief in American history.

Contrary to common practice for controversial intelligence community assessments, Brennan’s team allowed no dissenting views or even an annex with reviews by outside experts.

These were extraordinary violations of intelligence community rules to ensure that analysis is accurate and trusted. The Senate committee reports ignored these foundational violations.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report falsely claims that “all analytical lines are supported with all-source intelligence” and that analysts who wrote the intelligence community assessment consistently said they “were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”

House Intelligence Committee staff members found the opposite. They told me there was conflicting intelligence evidence on Russian motivations for meddling in the 2016 election.

More gravely, they said that CIA Director Brennan suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election. They also told me that Brennan suppressed that intelligence over the objections of CIA analysts.

House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.

Instead, the Brennan team included low-quality intelligence that failed to meet intelligence community standards to support the political claim that Russian officials wanted Trump to win, House Intelligence Committee staff revealed. They said that CIA analysts also objected to including that flawed, substandard information in the assessment.” (Read more: Fox News, 4/22/2020)  (Archive)

On May 12, 2020, Ed Henry confirms Fred Fleitz’s findings:

“The FBI’s top lawyer was torn over what to do when FBI Director James Comey asked in 2016 whether he should inform Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

FBI General Counsel James Baker had been told that FBI agents discovered between 600,000 and 1 million emails on disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop relating to Clinton. The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee’s top aide, Huma Abedin, was married to Weiner, who was being investigated for sending illicit texts to an underage girl.

Baker, who left the FBI in May 2018, told author David Rohde that he felt like the “fates had thrown him a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball.”

Baker “believed it was likely that the FBI could find new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton,” Rohde wrote in his recently released book, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State.”

“She wins the election, we go to DOJ, and we recommend that they indict her before she becomes president,” Baker said, describing his nightmare scenario. “That’s not a good place for the country. That’s not a good place for the FBI.”

Baker also worried that the bureau’s credibility would be damaged if Comey did not inform Congress.

“I thought, ‘What is best for the law enforcement and judicial system?’” he said. “I said, ‘I thought the director had an obligation to notify Congress.’ Director Comey agreed with my advice.” (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 4/24/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today it received 138 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

The records were produced to Judicial Watch in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 2017 request for all communications between Strzok and Page (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).

(…) The documents also include several emails in which Strzok forwards Russiagate-related news articles to Page and other FBI officials. On January 1, 2017, Strzok forwarded to Moffa and another unidentified official a New York Times article titled “Trump Promises Revelation on Hacking”. The article discusses President-elect Donald Trump’s skepticism about U.S. intelligence assessments of Russian hacking relating to the 2016 election. Strzok cut-and-pasted a quote from the article in which Trump said, “I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe. I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.” The article mentions that Trump said new information would be coming out the following Tuesday. Strzok then says in his cover note, “I think the Tuesday surprise is all the stuff [redacted] told him during the CI [counterintelligence] briefing. He DID mention the stuff about his son and the computer password …” A redacted FBI agent replies to Strzok, but the reply is also redacted. Another FBI agent then responds, “To be accurate he called it a code word not a password. Ha!” Strzok replies, “Funnies.”

On December 15, 2016, Strzok forwards to Page an article from the Daily Mail which states that a former British diplomat, Craig Murray, claimed to have received emails that were stolen from the DNC and John Podesta. Murray said he received the emails near the grounds of American University in Washington, DC. The article says the emails were from an inside DNC source, not Russians. Strzok writes in his cover note to Page, “Shaddy sh*t at AU…;)”.

On December 21, 2016, Strzok forwards to Page a link to a Defense One article about Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Strzok cut-and-pasted a quote from former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell in which Morell says, “To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11.”

On December 26, 2016, Strzok forwards to Moffa and an unidentified Washington Field Office agent a Bloomberg article titled “Trump Aide Partnered with Firm Run by Man with Alleged KGB Ties.” The article reports that Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, having partnered in 2016 with Subu Kota, a man who pleaded guilty in 1996 to selling stolen biotech material to an FBI agent posing as a Russian spy. Strzok forwarded the article to Page, saying, “See, look, I’m sharing… ;)”

On January 4, 2017, Strzok forwards to Page a 14-page white paper by the Congressional Research Center entitled “Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan Act.” He had previously sent the same file to Office of General Counsel attorney Trisha Anderson and to Priestap.

In a January 4, 2017, email thread a redacted official in the FBI’s Operational Technology Division emails Strzok and Page: “The AD [Assistant Director] of Cyber is apparently bringing up the idea of [redacted]. [Redacted] just messaged me after being pinged by SF [likely the FBI’s San Francisco office]. He asked why this was coming up again, and he wants to talk to me about it next week. Any recommendation on how to deal with this?” Pages replies, “Why don’t you let Pete or Bill or I reach out to the AD of Cyber to let him know how we got here [redacted]. It might then be worth [redacted].” The official responds, “Perfect. That works for me and you can mention that OTD brought it to you. My initial recommendation was for the AD to reach out to you two, but I can only assume that message did not reach him.”

On January 9, 2017, in an email with the subject line “USIC report,” [U.S. Intelligence Community] Strzok tells Page and a redacted official “Per D’s request on Friday, NYO received a single copy of the influence report from ODNI’s [redacted]; it is being maintained in the CD SAC’s safe for PEOTUS [president-elect of the United States]/senior staff.”

On January 10, 2017, Strzok emails Page, Moffa, Priestap and Jennifer Boone to say, “Per Rich [presumably Richard Quinn, formerly with the public affairs office], CNN to publish C material today between 4 and 5. Page replies: “We have lots of details from kortan [Asst Dir Michael Kortan of public affairs]. He will brief at the 3:45.” Strzok responds: “Can I maybe get a read out vis a vis relationship with Brits etc?”

These new emails show that Strzok and his Obama FBI colleagues knew almost immediately that McCain likely leaked the infamous dossier,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The emails also show that senior FBI officials had contempt for President Trump and gossiped about its counterintelligence briefing to him. The FBI under Comey and McCabe was a train wreck and, given the ongoing cover-up of these docs, the agency hasn’t improved much.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 4/24/2020)  (Archive)

General Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“New court documents filed under seal include significant exculpatory information about Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, an FBI official familiar with the situation told The Federalist on Friday. The new documents, which were filed under seal by the Department of Justice Friday, allegedly include exonerating evidence about Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with foreign diplomats as Trump’s top incoming foreign policy adviser and is currently attempting to withdraw his plea, as well as evidence of malfeasance by the FBI during its investigation of Flynn.

According to the FBI official who spoke to The Federalist, FBI general counsel Dana Boente led the charge internally against DOJ’s disclosure of the new materials. Boente, who briefly served as acting Attorney General after Trump became president, personally signed off on one of the federal spy warrants against former Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page. The new documents, which were filed under a protective order by DOJ on Friday, will reflect poorly on the FBI, the official told The Federalist. It is not clear when, or even if, those documents will be unsealed and made available to the public for review.

Because the documents were filed under seal, The Federalist has not been able to review them independently. Neither the Department of Justice nor the White House responded to requests for comment about the newly filed court documents or their legal or political implications. Trump has reportedly been weighing whether to issue a pardon for Flynn.” (Read more: The Federalist, 4/24/2020)  (Archive)

Michael Flynn Jr. (l) with his father Lt. General Michael Flynn. (Credit: ABC News)

“The criminal case against Michael Flynn imploded Friday. First, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia provided Flynn’s legal team with documents discovered by an outside review of the Flynn prosecution — documents withheld for years. Then, Sidney Powell, the attorney who took over Flynn’s defense nearly a year ago, filed new documents in the case, revealing a secret “lawyers’ understanding” not to prosecute Flynn’s son if the retired lieutenant general pleaded guilty.

(…) When a defendant cuts a deal with the government and agrees to cooperate and testify against a co-defendant or others, under Giglio those other defendants are entitled to learn the benefit of the plea agreement. But the email excerpts above suggest as Powell argued in her latest filing, that the lead prosecutor, Van Grack, “made a side deal not to prosecute Michael G. Flynn [Jr.] as a material term of the plea agreement, but he required that it be kept secret between himself and the Covington attorneys expressly to avoid the requirement of Giglio.”

Those emails also distinguish Flynn’s case from the run-of-the-mill criminal case in which a defendant seeks to avoid a plea agreement because of a side deal. Courts regularly dismiss such challenges because the terms of the plea agreement expressly provide that there are no other agreements beyond those set forth in the written plea agreement. As typical, Flynn’s plea agreement included such a provision, as seen below.

But Flynn’s case is different for two reasons. First, the emails attached as Exhibits 1 and 2 in Friday’s filing provide evidence of a side agreement — something lacking in most criminal cases. Second, the emails suggest the government intended to bind itself to this commitment via a “lawyers’ understanding” and omitted the term from the written plea agreement for an improper purpose — to avoid the constitutionally mandated disclosures. Thus, in this case, the side agreement implicates the integrity of the judicial process and suggests prosecutorial misconduct.” (Read more: The Federalist, 4/27/2020)  (Archive)

“In a supplement to the defense motion to dismiss [pdf here] we discover some of the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct turned over by the DOJ to the Flynn defense. Specifically Lt. General Michael Flynn’s plea was based on a threat against Michael Flynn Jr. if his father didn’t sign the plea.  This will very likely get the plea dismissed.

Because the exhibits had to be filed under seal, they are heavily redacted; however, Flynn’s defense counsel, Sidney Powell, has asked the court to release & unredact the full content of the exhibits so the world can see the coercion behind the corrupt plea agreement.

The Mueller prosecution team lead by Brandon Van Grack put the agreement and threat in writing, but they also made a deal with the former defense team to hide the terms in an effort to cover-up their misconduct.  Coercion to force a plea is unethical and unlawful.

The full filing is here.

Today’s filing by Sidney Powell proves what Conservative Treehouse originally outlined in April 2019.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/24/2020)  (Archive)

👇KEY POINTS OF INTEREST👇

2:00 Deep-dive into the entire investigation of FISA abuse and Crossfire Hurricane

29:15 The culpability of the media

40:52 Breaking down the “mess” created by a string of massive COVID 19 relief bills

Just how is it that some media have gotten away with calling “Spygate” a conspiracy theory?

With the DOJ IG Report footnotes, new revelations about FISA abuse, and disappearing Steele dossier records, what do we now know about the potential weaponization of the US Intelligence community against the Trump campaign?

And, what’s Kimberley Strassel’s prescription for dealing with the “mess” she argues has been created by the unprecedented COVID 19 spending bills?

In this episode, we sit down with Kimberley Strassel, a columnist and member of the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board. She writes a weekly Potomac Watch column, and she is also the author of “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.”

This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Chuck Grassley gives an opening statement before swearing-in Attorney General William Barr to testify, May 1, 2019. (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

“Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) wrote to Attorney General William Barr asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to produce a number of documents related to information from Christopher Steele’s primary source who ultimately contradicted Steele’s reporting.

In DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse, Steele’s main source of information was identified as the “Primary Sub-source.” IG Horowitz’s report found that the FBI heavily relied upon this information to obtain FISA warrants to surveil Carter Page even though:

• the Primary Sub-source’s information substantially undercut Steele’s subsequent reporting; and
• the FBI interviewed the Primary Sub-source at least three times and internally deemed the individual to be “truthful and cooperative.”

Further, the FBI made it appear to the FISA court that the Primary Sub-source’s information corroborated Steele’s reporting and did not bring up credibility issues uncovered during the FBI’s interviews with the Primary Sub-source.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee continues to investigate FISA abuse, Graham requested DOJ produce the following documents:

1) All documents and communications related to the FBI’s interviews with the Primary Sub-source in January, March, and May 2017, including the “lengthy written summary” of the Primary Sub-source’s January 2017 interview memorialized by the Supervisory Intel Analyst and Case Agent 1  and the two-page Intelligence Memorandum circulated by the Supervisory Intel Analyst in late February 2017 to Bill Priestap and other Counterintelligence Division officials, discussing “aspects of the Primary Sub-source’s interview.”

2) The complete February 15, 2017, email exchange between Peter Strzok, Bill Priestap and others, in which Strzok stated that “recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal [Steele] may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his sub-source network.”

3) The complete March 31, 2017, email exchange between individuals identified in the OIG Report as the “OI Attorney” and the “OGC Attorney” regarding the second FISA Renewal Application and the Primary Sub-Source’s credibility.

4) The complete email exchange between the Supervisory Intel Analyst and the OGC Attorney in March 2017 referenced in Footnote 389 of the OIG Report.

5) The “analytical documents prepared by, or with the assistance of, the Supervisory Intel Analyst after the Primary Sub-source interview” that “identified inconsistencies between Steele and the Primary Sub-source regarding some of the information contained in Reports 94 and 95.”

The full text of Graham’s letter can be found HERE.

(Senate Judiciary Committee, 4/27/2020)  (Archive)

Twitter     (Transcript)

(Senate Judiciary Committee – FISA Investigation)

Catherine Herridge: On new records, motion to dismiss, Judge Sullivan sets first deadline within days: “GOV shall file a response to Mr. Flynn’s sealed motion by no later than 12:00 PM on 5/4/2020 and Mr. Flynn shall file his reply by no later than 12:00 PM on 5/6/2020.

“President Trump on Monday did not rule out the possibility of bringing his former national security advisor Michael Flynn back into the administration if the retired general is exonerated.

“I will only say this: I think that General Flynn is a wonderful man. He had a wonderful career and it was a disgrace what happened to General Flynn,” Trump said during Monday’s coronavirus task force briefing.

“Let’s see what happens now. But what happened to General Flynn should never happen again in our country,” Trump said.

(Read more: JusttheNews, 4/27/2020) (Archive)

“Former US Attorney was on with Howie Carr again this week and he dropped some more bombshells about the current investigation of the investigators involved in removing President Trump and his team from office.

DiGenova discussed the Durham investigation and said at the 5:30 mark that Durham is building a conspiracy case and anyone who lied to the court will be indicted for obstruction of justice charges:

The bottom line is this, it’s unfolding and what’s happening is, what Durham is actually doing is he’s painting a picture and not everyone of these acts is going to be a specific separate crime. But they are going to be, what’s called overt acts in a conspiracy. One to defraud the United States government. One to deny the civil rights of Trump and Flynn and Page and a bunch of other people.

At the 8:55 mark diGenova drops another bomb when discussing the notes that were released today that show the government was actively working to frame General Flynn:

DiGenova: You know Baker is now working with Durham. James Baker the former General Counsel.

Carr: He’s flipped?

DiGenova: Who was a target, is now understandably cooperating because he was looking at a boat load of criminal charges. Once these notes were discovered, and by the way, these were the notes that [FBI Director] Chris Wray and Dana Boente did not want turned over.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 4/28/2020) (Archive)

A Federal judge denies Roger Stone’s request for a new trial on April 16, 2020. (Credit: Reuters)

“The DOJ on Tuesday unsealed several search warrants in the Mueller deep state investigation and set up of Roger Stone.

The newly released documents offer a more detailed version than was previously known of how former special counsel Robert Mueller and other federal investigators aggressively collected evidence on Roger Stone in their corrupt and criminal probe of the Trump campaign and administration – reported CNN.

The Mueller team knew before the investigation was launched that there was no collusion with Russia.

Roger Stone sent us this statement tonight following the release of the warrants:

STATEMENT OF ROGER STONE ON RELEASE OF SEARCH WARRANTS

April 28, 2020

The Search warrants ordered released today by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper proves the baseless over-reach of the Mueller witch hunt and exonerate me from the crazed left-wing media charges of Russian collusion, Wikileaks collaboration and the receipt and dissemination of stolen e-mails, false narratives that ruined my life for the last 3 years. Although there are private communications contained in the warrants, they prove no crimes. I have no trepidation about their release as they confirm there was no illegal activity and certainly no Russian collusion by me during the 2016 Election. There is, to this day, no evidence that I had or knew about the source or content of the Wikileaks disclosures prior to their public release.

Nearly every day, I would turn on the news and open the papers and read that I had committed treason against our great country, that I would be charged with espionage, trafficking in stolen e-mails and other cyber-crimes. Ultimately, despite the colonoscopy into my life, the Muller investigation could not find what the media wanted and insisted was there or that I did anything wrong in the 2016 election of my friend, President Donald Trump. Although I was not part of his formal campaign, I worked hard-and legally-to help elect the President.

The search warrants and the affidavits used to support them released today clearly demonstrate the overreach of the Mueller investigation. Prosecutors and FBI investigators alleged, under oath, to several federal judges and magistrates that they had probable cause to investigate me for outrageous crimes for which they had and found no evidence. In the early days of the Mueller inquisition, the crimes they tried to pin on me were: “Conspiracy Against the United States” “Foreign Contribution Ban” “Fraud and Related Activities in Connection with Computers” “Wire Fraud” “Aiding and Abetting” “Unauthorized Access of a Protected Computer” “Accessory After the Fact” just to name a few. All of this based on nothing more than the exercise of my First Amendment rights and my public Twitter feed.

When my attorneys argued the warrants and affidavits were nothing more than a collection of conclusory statements, the Judge in my case sided with the Mueller inquisitors. We forcefully argued that the warrants and the affidavits lacked evidence and only contained supposition. There were no factual allegations supporting the issuance of the warrants. They were clearly based on misrepresentations by the FBI and the Muller team.

The uncharged conduct- crimes the Mueller dirty cops said they had probable cause to secure the warrants- particularly relied upon the assumptions the Russian state was responsible for hacking of the DNC. The Government admitted in discovery in my trial that they relied on a redacted draft memo from Crowdstike- hardly an unbiased or credible source and the Government admitted the FBI never inspected the DNC servers. Screenshots of a computer server are like photos of a murder weapon-they cannot be examined. The sur-reply filed by former Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Kravis claiming the Mueller investigators had additional proof that the Russians hacked the DNC, included none of the alleged proof and was a fraud upon the Court. I was barred by Judge Jackson from proving this at trial through the production of forensic evidence and the testimony of experts such as former NSA Russia specialist and Technical Director, Bill Binney.

The much-publicized raid and exhaustive 13- hour search of my home and office yielded no evidence used against me at trial. When no evidence of Russian collusion, collaboration with Wikileaks, receipt or dissemination of stolen e-mails- including the stolen e-mails of John Podesta – was found, I was charged with lying to Congress even though there was no underlying crime to lie about and the Trump campaign’s interest in the already announced Wikileaks disclosures was a matter of public record. Testifying voluntary I had no intent or motive to lie as the matters I am charged with lying about were already in the public domain.

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 4/28/2020)  (Archive)

The DOJ released the following documents on April 28, 2020. Twitter user and document sleuth Brennan’sOrangeJumpsuit dives in:

(DOJ FOIA Release 4/28/2020) (h/t Brennan’sOrangeJumpsuit@15poundstogo)

“Interesting timing all things considered…. Michael Flynn removed and replaced his prior legal defense counsel, Covington & Burling, after asserting their ineffective and legally conflicted representation. (NOTE: former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is a partner at Covington & Burling.)  As a result of Sidney Powell taking over the Flynn defense, his prior counsel was supposed to turn over all client materials and evidence in the case.

After some recent jaw-dropping revelations in the case; which may include evidence highlighting how the FBI participated in framing Michael Flynn; and certainly contains evidence of an unethical prosecutorial agreement with the former defense counsel, to coerce a guilty plea by threatening to arrest Michael Flynn Jr; suddenly today Covington & Burling discover an additional 6,800 pages of evidence they conspicuously omitted.

The timing is very sketchy and Judge Sullivan does not appear amused.  After receiving the supplemental notice of case material transfer (full pdf below) Judge Sullivan issues an order to the Covington law firm to re-re-review all of their case files and file a notice of compliance by Monday May 4th.

Judge Sullivan has been very favorable to the position of the justice department throughout the case, but it appears even he is starting to question all of these “unintentional” miscommunications and material coincidences that paint a very challenging picture for the prosecution to explain.

Here’s the filing from the Covington law firm where they attempt to explain their new discovery and why they failed to present this material over the past ten months.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/28/2020)  (Archive)

“The first of the sealed documents provided to the Flynn defense have been unsealed.  The documents include emails between FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, his FBI counsel Lisa Page, as well as FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka in the lead-up to the January 24, 2017 interview of Michael Flynn.

This specific release is the court filing of five pages that were initially turned-over to the Flynn defense team last Friday. [The pdf is here]  (There are an additional 11 pages of documents from another production earlier today; those are not in this release.)

The documents today also include handwritten notes taken by FBI counterintelligence chief William “Bill” Priestap; which show him both questioning and outlining the purpose of the interview: to remove National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

(Above written notes transcribed)

According to the Priestap notes it appears the position of the FBI on January 23, 2017, was that Michael Flynn had violated the Logan Act by having a conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016, prior to the inauguration.

This was a ridiculous position, there was no violation of the Logan Act; however, it was this position from which the questioning the next day, January 24 2017, would be based.

The next page of notes discusses the “Afterwards”:

The redactions are likely “the transcript“; where the FBI has the transcript of the call between Michael Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak.   The redaction would be continued to protect the source of the material (“sources and methods”).

Interestingly, on the second day, the actual day of the interview, it appears Bill Priestap had second thoughts and was questioning the goal of the interview: “I thought about it last night and I believe we should rethink this”…

FBI Asst. Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap then asks the question: “what is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

The premise of “wrongdoing” vis-a-vis a Logan Act violation was ridiculous.  As the incoming National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn would be talking to many counterparts throughout the globe.   Even Priestap started to realize what they were doing was “playing games.”

Here’s the full release.

[…] Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe.

[…]  A special prosecutor is reviewing DOJ’s and the FBI’s handling of the Flynn prosecution, which led to the former Trump adviser and retired general pleading guilty to lying to the FBI under a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia case.

Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell filed a court motion last week saying new evidence has emerged showing Flynn was “framed” and his conviction should be dismissed. The officials said the notes are part of that new evidence and had been withheld from Flynn’s defense team for years even though they were potential evidence of innocence.

More evidence is being produced in the next few days that will further illuminate the FBI’s conduct in the case that is now at the center of the DOJ investigation, officials said.  (more)

Keep in mind, the Mueller special counsel knew this all along…

Keep in mind, former DAG Rod Rosenstein knew this all along…

Also, keep in mind, current FBI Director Chris Wray and current FBI Legal Counsel Dana Boente knew this all along…

These documents have been inside the DOJ and FBI for more than three years; while they prosecuted him and drove his family into bankruptcy.” (Conservative Treehouse, 4/29/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Bill Priestap (Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)

“A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.”

The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe.

The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview — a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.”

Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe.

You can download and read the notes here:
 FlynnFBINotes.pdf

(…) The handwritten notes suggest the FBI official had a concern about the way his bureau was approaching the interview with Flynn.

“I agreed yesterday that we shouldn’t show Flynn [REDACTED] if he didn’t admit • I thought @ it last night, + I believe we should rethink this,” he wrote.

Later he added: “If we’re seen as playing games, WH will be furious • Protect our institution by not playing games.”

The notes hint that some in the FBI might have believed giving Flynn the normal warning or allowing him the courtesy to see a transcript of his calls with Russians to refresh his recollection was “going easy” on the new Trump national security adviser.

“I don’t see how getting someone to admit their wrongdoing is going easy on him,” the official wrote to himself.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 4/29/2020)  (Archive)

Andrew Weissmann (Credit: public domain)

“One of special counsel Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors said he believes the Justice Department is trying to “soften the blow” of a presidential pardon for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia investigation, said President Trump has “no business” pardoning his former adviser and took another shot at the outside prosecutor whom Attorney General William William Barr ordered to review the government’s case against Flynn:

“I was in the Department of Justice for over 20 years, and I think the way I look at this is from the parochial point of view of what I think the department is doing, which I think the department is trying to soften the blow and make it politically easier for the president to pardon Gen. Flynn. The disclosure of documents from a purported neutral team that is reviewing the Flynn case, it seems kind of laughable to me,” Weissmann told MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on Thursday.”

(Read more: Washington Examiner, 4/30/2020)  (Archive)

“Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo authorizing Robert Mueller’s anti-Trump investigation was riddled with conspiracy theories lifted straight from the bogus dossier of Christopher Steele, a newly released, less redacted version of the memo shows. The memo, portions of which were declassified on April 30, 2020, specifically targeted former Trump campaign affiliates Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and one individual whose identity is redacted.

(Mueller’s team did not find sufficient evidence.)

The Aug. 2, 2017 scope memo, which was provided by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the Senate Judiciary Committee following requests from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cited Steele dossier collusion conspiracy theories about Manafort and Page.

Rosenstein ordered Mueller to investigate allegations that Page “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election[.]” The same language was used to justify the targeting of Manafort.

Rosenstein’s memo also peddled discredited legal theories about the Logan Act, a 1799 law criminalizing political speech by American citizens that has never been successfully prosecuted, to justify investigations of former White House National Security Adviser (NSA) Michael Flynn. The scope memo directed Mueller to investigate allegations that Flynn “committed a crime or crimes by engaging in conversations with Russian officials during the period of the Trump transition.” (The Federalist, 5/06/2020)  (Archive)

Just what do the newly unsealed General Michael Flynn case documents actually reveal? Are they really “bombshells?”

Do they exonerate Flynn, President Trump’s former national security advisor?

And, was the Steele dossier really a product of Russian disinformation, as some are alleging, with Sergei Millian playing a role?

In this episode, we sit down with investigative journalist Lee Smith, author of “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.”

This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

An exhaustively researched book that reads like an investigative thriller, Fallout reveals how Obama’s “Russian Reset” led to corruption, scandal, and a desperate bid to impeach Donald Trump.

(Official publication date, July 14, 2020)

In 2015, a major story broke exposing Hillary Clinton’s role in approving the sale of American uranium assets to the Russian state nuclear agency, Rosatom. Not only did the sale of Uranium One put 20 percent of America’s domestic uranium supply under the control of Vladimir Putin, there was also evidence that the Clintons themselves had hugely profited from the deal.
When presidential candidate Donald Trump made Uranium One the centerpiece of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks, the Clinton team feared its potential to damage Hillary’s campaign. Others in the Obama-Biden camp worried that if elected, Trump would expose their role in selling out America’s security to Putin. Their desperate need to neutralize the issue led them to launch an unprecedented investigation into the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia.

The infamous Steele dossier, produced by Clinton-connected Fusion GPS, sparked an investigation under FBI Director James Comey. Instead of ending after the election, the investigation grew bigger, eventually leading to Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller failed to find grounds for impeachment, Democrats seized on an ambiguous phone call with the Ukrainian president as a pretext to remove Trump from office. This gambit blew up in their faces when it exposed the secrets that Democrats tried hard to keep buried.

An indispensable guide to the hidden background of recent events, Fallout shows how Putin’s bid for nuclear dominance produced a series of political scandals that ultimately posed one of the greatest threats to our democracy in modern American history.” (Amazon)

Chris Wray (Credit: public domain)

An interesting article from Fox News asks the question of whether Mueller’s special counsel attorney Brandon Van Grack misled Judge Sullivan in the Flynn case by not being forthcoming about the background documents under the DOJ Brady obligation.

Additionally, as a consequence of the Flynn evidence discoveries, people are now asking why the FBI and DOJ did not produce these documents earlier.  Representative Jim Jordan is specifically asking these questions of current FBI Director Chris Wray.

In response to the Fox News article, the FBI has released a statement which itself is very interesting.  Apparently the FBI Director is trying to dig himself and his institution out of a hole, but it is only getting worse.  First, here’s the follow-up from the FBI:

After this article was published, the FBI provided a statement to Fox News saying that under Wray’s leadership, the bureau had turned over relevant Flynn materials to the U.S. attorney probing possible FBI criminal misconduct during the Trump probe, John Durham — but the FBI didn’t say when exactly the handoff happened.

“Under Director Wray’s leadership, the FBI has fully cooperated and been transparent with the review being conducted by U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, just as it has been with U.S. Attorney John Durham and was with Inspector General Michael Horowitz,” the statement read.

The FBI continued: “With regard to certain documents in the Michael Flynn matter from the 2016-2017 time period that are now the subject of reporting by the press, the FBI previously produced those materials to the Inspector General and U.S. Attorney Durham. The Flynn investigation was initiated and conducted during this time period, under prior FBI leadership.

Since taking office, Director Wray has stressed the importance of strictly abiding by established processes, without exception. Director Wray remains firmly committed to addressing the failures under prior FBI leadership while maintaining the foundational principles of rigor, objectivity, accountability, and ownership in fulfilling the Bureau’s mission to protect the American people and defend the Constitution.” (link)

The FBI statement is factually flawed on many levels and substantively false on the specifics.

“With regard to certain documents in the Michael Flynn matter from the 2016-2017 time period that are now the subject of reporting by the press, the FBI previously produced those materials to the Inspector General and U.S. Attorney Durham.

Notice how this part of the statement does not say the exculpatory documents were turned over to the Special Counsel (they were).  Also notice how Wray is attempting to deflect the timing by saying they were produced to the IG and Durham.

U.S. Attorney John Durham didn’t enter the picture until May 2019, as instructed by newly confirmed AG Bill Barr.  So what was the FBI doing with those documents prior to Durham in 2017 and 2018?

The prosecution of Flynn started mid-2017; and Chris Wray knew of the specific misconduct within the FBI at the same time.  Remember, Wray removed James Baker from official duty as FBI legal counsel in December 2017 [LINK] approximately three weeks after the corrupt and coerced Flynn guilty plea on November 30th.

FBI Director Wray allowed James Baker to remain in the FBI, in some unknown capacity, through May 4, 2018, when Baker officially resigned [LINK]  By late December 2017 Wray clearly knew several FBI officials were participants in a multitude of corrupt schemes, including the prosecution of Michael Flynn.

The sheer volume of removals from the FBI outlines the extent of Chris Wray’s knowledge. Think about it….

FBI Agent Peter Strzok was removed; FBI lawyer Lisa Page was removed; FBI counsel James Baker was removed; FBI public relations officer Michael Kortan was removed; and eventually FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was removed.  All of these removals surrounded discovery of their corrupt and political activity in 2016, 2017, and early 2018….

…But the evidence was not provided to the Flynn defense until April 2020?

Let’s not forget in July 2018, a full year after FBI Director Chris Wray took over leadership, the FBI lied to the FISA court about the Carter Page FISA application; and the DOJ/FBI made the ridiculous claim the FISA application was still adequately predicated.

So it seems more than a little ridiculous for FBI Director Chris Wray to justify the hidden documents by saying the FBI did turn them over to John Durham (2019) and/or AUSO Jeff Jensen in 2020; when he held back the evidence in 2017, 2018, while the underlying activity was being discovered.

Also don’t forget the original purpose of U.S. Attorney John Lausch (Chicago), yeah, remember him?  In 2018 John Lausch’s entire function was to produce documents.

Additionally, if the FBI did factually turn over all of these documents to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while three distinct IG investigations were ongoing, then how did the IG claim they could find “no evidence of political bias”, when the explosive documents – specifically the Bill Priestap notes – show direct evidence of biased intent?  What does that say about the fidelity of the Inspector General?

Lastly, again the construct of the Mueller investigation being used as a shield surfaces.  Not only did the corrupt Mueller probe control various elements within the DOJ and FBI, but the Mueller probe as an “ongoing investigation”, shielded those documents from sunlight and discovery.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/05/2020)  (Archive)

Photo of John McCain with “Source D-Source E” of Steele Dossier — Sergei Millian. (Credit: Paul Sperry/Twitter)

“Sergei Millian is not in hiding. Even if he was, he isn’t any longer. He reached out to SaraACarter.com on Tuesday to dispute a recent podcast interview with a famous British historian who accused him of possibly being connected to Russia’s GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence. He called the allegations outlandish and accused historian Nigel West of attempting to spread disinformation about him, much like former British spy Christopher Steele did about the Trump campaign.

Millian, an American citizen born in Belarus, was believed to be an unwitting source, in Steele’s infamous and now-debunked dossier. But lawmakers and some intelligence experts have more questions than answers when it comes to Millian. They say Millian is the only one that can provide clarity on what exactly happened during his time with Steele.

On Monday, this reporter interviewed West on The Sara Carter Show podcast. He stated that he believed, based on Millian’s own past statements in open-source media, that he could be linked to Russian intelligence.

Shortly after the podcast and story were posted, Millian reached out to this reporter to dispute West’s assertions saying emphatically that the information is “one-hundred percent false.”

“Nigel West so far gave 100% false information about me in his last public interview in London (where he claimed I was PSS),” Millian told me. “Now, he doubled on from the first lie and there is not an ounce of truth what he claims. He is an out of his mind crazy, deranged man. I’m not kidding. Ask him to provide proof of any of his false rumors and wild innuendoes. USSR disbanded when I was still a teenager. The big question is why West, out of London, lies about me, an AMERICAN citizen, so much just like Steele before West? Is it coordinated and what’s their plan?”

But a mystery still surrounds Millian and senior U.S. lawmakers are seeking to interview him. Ranking Republican of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes has said he wishes to interview the mysterious Millian.” (Read more: Sara Carter, 5/05/2020) (Archive)

The DOJ has finally released a less redacted version of the second special counsel scope memo, written August 2, 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The second scope memo (full pdf here) authorized Robert Mueller to target Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and an unknown entity (Richard Gates, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn Jr. likely possibilities).

The DOJ has been hiding the second scope memo behind redactions for almost three years.  A heavily redacted version was released in April 2018.  They are finally releasing a less redaction version today (see below).  Don’t forget, the DOJ has never released or discussed the third (super secret) scope memo written on October 20, 2017.

The scope memos are important because when contrast against known evidence of investigative corruption the scope memos show how targets were selected by the Mueller team and approved by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.  Additionally, the scope memos show what actions Mueller’s corrupt investigative authorities were looking into.

On a personal note CTH has been like a dog with a bone on these scope memos for almost three years because it was clear the FBI investigative unit was fully aware the Russian involvement was total nonsense in early 2017.  So all of these expanded scopes were based on a false premise.  DAG Rosenstein was authorizing the special counsel to target people with clear knowledge the primary basis for the targeting was false. These were investigations in search of a crime.

When the 2nd scope was previously released (April 2nd 2018), page two was almost entirely redacted.  Everyone knew Carter Page was primary, and now we can officially see who three additional targets were, and based on what claims: (page 2)

The strongest possibility for the remaining redaction is Richard Gates (Manafort’s partner who was never charged).  However, it could be Michael Cohen, President Trump’s attorney; or it could be Michael G Flynn Jr (Mike Flynn Jr) who was also never charged.

The fifth redaction will likely be claimed as justified by the DOJ, because the person outlined was not charged with a crime. Hence the possibility of Mike G Flynn or Richard “Rick” Gates…. [It could also be Jeff Sessions]

However, with public trust in the DOJ/FBI at nil, I will not trust that traditional justification….

There is a possibility the Fifth name is redacted because it would be damaging or embarrassing to the DOJ and/or would highlight the corrupt intents of the Mueller investigation.  My gut tells me this is the reason.

♦Regarding Papadopoulos:  Notice how the Mueller team was claiming the possibility of “lobbying for the Israeli government”.  Another FARA violation.  It was non-existent because Papadopoulos wasn’t lobbying, however, it now makes more sense why the corrupt Mueller team tried to set-up Papadopoulos with the $10,000 sting operation.

Papadopoulos was lured to Israel under the pretense of a contract for consultation on energy development.  That’s where CIA operative George Tawil gave Papadopoulos $10,000 in cash under sketchy circumstances.   The FBI was waiting for Papadopoulos at Dulles airport upon his return, and they searched for the cash without a warrant using the authority of customs, duties and a legal airport search.  [More Here]

#1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges.

(A “laundering” charge applies if the money is illegally obtained. The FARA violation would be the *illegal* aspect making the treasury charges heavier. Note: the use of the airport baggage-check avoids the need for a search warrant (the agents didn’t have one).)

Andrew Weissmann and Brandon Van Grack (special counsel 951/FARA expert) were conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering…. All they needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S.

The key aspect is the FARA violation.  As we have seen in the EDVA case against Flynn’s partner Bijan Rafiekian, the DOJ-NSD bizarre interpretation of FARA laws creates a violation from any unregistered purposeful business contact with a foreign entity.

What Weissmann wanted for Papadopoulos was to create the same FARA scenario that previously trapped Manafort, Flynn, and Rafiekian.  They intercepted Papadopoulos in Washington DC because it was the customs port of entry.  Papadopoulos was ticketed to Chicago with a transfer flight at Dulles.

However, because Papadopoulos suspected something, and left the money in Greece with his lawyers, upon arrival at the DC airport the sting operation collapsed in reverse.

No money means no treasury violation, no laundering and no evidence of the consultancy agreement; which would have been repurposed in the DOJ filing to mean lobbying for Israel via Mr. Tawil (FARA 951 violation) and Tawil would have become a confidential informant and witness (though Tawil would likely never be used to testilie because the special counsel would force a plea).

That operational collapse is why the FBI agents were “scrambling” at the airport and why they had no pre-existing criminal complaint.  The DOJ couldn’t get a warrant because they couldn’t tell a judge their suspect was traveling with $10k from Israel because the judge would ask how they knew that.

The entrapment’s success was contingent upon the cash as a pre-existing condition; and arriving at a Federal airport means they didn’t need a search warrant.

Note how even if Papadopoulos didn’t have the full $10k, the DOJ-NSD would only have lost the treasury violation…. they could still have used any substantial amount of money to charge the FARA part of the business arrangement by questioning Papadopoulos about where he gained the cash from.  [Full Backstory Here]

♦Regarding Michael Flynn – Notice the first ridiculous point: “Committed a crime or crimes by engaging in conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition.”   That’s Rod Rosenstein authorizing the Mueller special counsel to investigate a Logan Act violation…. authorizing that IN AUGUST 2017?  Total nonsense.

The fourth bullet point on Flynn was the claim they used against Mike G Flynn Jr. to get Lt. General Flynn to plea.   This argument was later made in court against Flynn’s business partner Bijan Rafiekian (Flynn Intel Group), only to have the case totally thrown out of court by a Virginia judge; in a blistering and extremely rare judicial move.

All four points against Flynn were fabrications; but seeing them written down as to justify the fraudulent investigations is blood-boiling.

Page #3 of the August 2, 2017, scope memo:

But wait… The release of the second scope memo is not good enough…

We know there is a third scope memo dated October 20, 2017, because it was outlined in the Mueller report:

This third scope memo is perhaps the most damaging of all because it was written so long after the DOJ and FBI knew the underlying claims of the Trump-Russia investigation were totally and completely untrue.  Yet DAG Rosenstein authorized another expanded scope.

The October 20, 2017, scope memo will be guaranteed to show Robert Mueller asking Rod Rosenstein to authorize the targeting of Mike G Flynn and at least one other person.

If anyone from the DOJ, FBI or ODNI is reading this, please don’t think we will be satisfied with only one expanded scope memo….

….We also need to see the October 20th scope!

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/06/2020)  (Archive)

Shawn Henry Transcript (Credit: Fox News graphic)

Aaron Mate’ does a deep dive into Shawn Henry’s recently released transcript of his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee:

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 7, 2020

9:42 PM · May 7, 2020

11:37 PM · May 7, 2020

11:40 PM · May 7, 2020

11:43 PM · May 7, 2020

Shawn Henry had an entirely different message for the American public when he wasn’t under oath. From January 6, 2017:

(Shawn Henry Transcript)

Shawn Henry (R) speaks during a news conference with other officials from the FBI’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force at the Department of Justice December 6, 2010. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/The Associated Press)

“The cybersecurity firm that investigated and remediated the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016 found no direct evidence that hackers stole any data or emails, according to a newly declassified interview transcript.

Shawn Henry, the president of CrowdStrike Services, told the House Intelligence Committee in late 2017 that his firm had no evidence that the alleged Russian hackers stole any data from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers.

(…) Mueller’s indictment alleges that Russian hackers broke into a DNC server and stole emails on or about May 25 and June 1 of 2016, roughly three weeks after CrowdStrike installed its software on the DNC servers and assessed that Russian hackers had gained access.

CrowdStrike’s involvement in the events surrounding the alleged DNC hack has long been the subject of controversy. Some facts about the firm’s involvement remain disputed by key players, including Henry, who told the House Intelligence Committee that he was not aware of the DNC or CrowdStrike denying any FBI requests related to the server hack. Henry’s testimony contradicted what then-FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017. Comey told senators that the FBI sought and was repeatedly denied access to the physical DNC servers.

(Shawn Henry transcript – pg. 30-31)

Henry was not the only one to contradict Comey. The DNC’s director of technology, Andrew Brown, told the House Intelligence Committee the DNC fully cooperated with every FBI request. The DNC’s IT director, Yared Tamene, told the committee the FBI never requested access to the physical servers. And Michael Sussman, the DNC’s outside counsel, told the committee that the FBI declined a DNC offer for full access to its servers.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/11/2020)  (Archive)

(Ben Rhodes Transcript, 10/25/2017 – pg. 23)

Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.

On June 22, 2018, he is interviewed by CBS News and says:

(…) “It was not until after President Obama ordered what became the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment – an effort led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – that the picture became clearer and starker, Rhodes said.

“My sense was all of the information that went into that review – suddenly different things are corroborating each other,” he said, adding that this included information that came to light only after the election. He also explained that the inclusion of information from the FBI, in particular, brought much more of the picture into focus.

“When the FBI’s material was put together with everything else, once again, it confirmed a more alarmist picture of what had happened,” Rhodes told Morell. The delivery of that cumulative assessment, Rhodes said, was what “drove the needle to ten.”

In April, 2019:

“Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor to President Obama, told Nicholas Ballasy with PJ Media that Attorney General Bill Barr and the Justice Department “will find nothing” showing that former President Obama or his White House staff had any political “involvement” with the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign or the creation or distribution of the Steele dossier.

“No, no, I cannot be clear enough about this. We didn’t even know there was an FBI investigation of Trump. I didn’t. President Obama didn’t, like, we actually abided by the firewalls between – if there were any investigations that took place, those decisions were made in the Justice Department, in the FBI, not in the White House,” Rhodes said following a discussion at Georgetown University about his book, “The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House,” on Thursday.” (RealClearPolitics, 4/29/2019)

“Brandon Van Grack, the lead prosecutor in the government’s case against former national security adviser and retired Gen. Michael Flynn suddenly resigned Thursday, without explanation.

In a single sentence filing to the court, Van Grack informed federal Judge Emmet Sullivan that he would be quitting the case.

Pressure from President Trump and his supporters has built in the past weeks to, not just exonerate Flynn, but have the entire case thrown out of court as the result of newly publicized documents revealing that FBI investigators set Flynn up to lie to the agency.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 5/07/2020)  (Archive)

Loretta Lynch Transcript (Credit: Fox News graphic)

(Transcript clipping – pg. 26)

Regardless of the fact that former AG Loretta Lynch admits to seeing no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, just three months into his presidency in March, 2017, she takes to the airwaves encouraging Antifa to continue their attacks against his supporters.

Simona Mangiante

Representative Eric Swalwell knew that the CIA/FBI spy, Joseph Mifsud, was a member of the Clinton Foundation and hid that evidence from the American people.

Simona Mangiante, George Papadopoulos’ wife, testified to the House Intelligence Committee on July 18, 2018, and stated Joseph Mifsud mentioned several times while in her company, that he was a member of the Clinton Foundation.

Simona Mangiante and Swalwell’s discussion were clipped from pages 49-51 of the above-linked transcript.

“Former Obama administration defense official Evelyn Farkas testified under oath that she lied during an MSNBC interview when she claimed to have evidence of alleged collusion, a newly declassified congressional transcript of her testimony shows. Farkas testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on June 26, 2017, as part of the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Lawmakers keyed in on an appearance Farkas made on MSNBC on March 2, 2017, in which she urged intelligence community bureaucrats to disseminate within the government and potentially even leak to media any incriminating information they had about Trump or his aides.

“I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama administration] people who left…[that] it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy,” Farkas said.

Farkas, who served in the Obama administration as the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 2012 through 2015, also claimed that administration officials appointed by Trump might even destroy evidence of alleged collusion if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.”

They might “try to compromise those sources and methods,” Farkas alleged in the MSNBC interview. “And we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”

“Not enough was coming out into the open and I knew there was more,” Farkas claimed.

Evelyn Farkas Transcript

(Read more: The Federalist, 5/07/2020)  (Archive)

“There are at least forces within the FBI that wanted her to lose,” John Podesta said during an interview with John Heilemann hosted by NewCo. (Credit: The Associated Press)

“In recently unsealed testimony to Congress, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta acknowledged that both he and Hillary Clinton were aware that her campaign had purchase opposition research and was looking for dirt on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election.

Podesta’s comments are the most direct acknowledgment about what Donald Trump’s opponent knew in real-time about the effort that ultimately became known as the Steele dossier.

In a second appearance before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, Podesta testified that Clinton likely didn’t know the names of the firm, Fusion GPS, and former British spy Christopher Steele who had conducted the research. But he said she and he were both cognizant of an opposition research effort to connect Trump to business dealings in Russia.

“I think she was — she knew that we had an — we had an opposition research staff in-house. We, the campaign, directly purchased some opposition research. And she knew I think in general terms that we were trying to figure out, which was not easy, what Mr. Trump’s financial relationships were, what his relationships might be to Russia and other former Soviet Union actors that, you know. But I don’t – I don’t think we – I mean, she wasn’t – you know, if I wasn’t, she certainly wasn’t sort of saying, ‘Who are your vendors?’ ”

(Read more: JusttheNews, 5/11/2020)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: I am adding more clippings from Podesta’s testimony}:

John Podesta Transcript 12/2017 (pg. 26-27)

(Susan Rice Transcript (Credit: Fox News graphic)

(Susan Rice transcript clipping – pg. 27)

In April 2017, Rice appears on CNN to defend the actions she took, based on the intelligence she received.

Samantha Power Transcript (Credit: Fox News graphic)

(Samantha Power transcript clipping – pg. 61)

Newly declassified records show that Samantha Power made seven separate unmasking requests related to Flynn in late 2016 and early 2017.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power testified to Congress in 2017 that she never sought to unmask records containing information about former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Newly declassified documents from the National Security Agency (NSA), however, show that her name appeared on at least seven separate requests to unmask Flynn’s name between Nov. 30, 2016, and Jan. 11, 2017.

(Samantha Powers/Unmasking Document)

James Clapper Transcript (Credit: Fox News graphic)

When searching for a video of Clapper saying the opposite to the American public via media interviews, it appears he has been one of the few in Obama’s administration who has consistently admitted there was no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. From May, 2017:

Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes listen to Gordon Sondland, the U.S ambassador to the European Union, testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill November 20, 2019. (Credit: Doug Mills/Getty Images)

• Interview Transcript of Rinat Akhmetshin (November 13, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Stephen Bannon (January 16, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Stephen Bannon (February 15, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Andrew Brown (August 30, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Michael Caputo (July 14, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of John Carlin (July 27, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Thomas Catan (October 18, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of James Clapper (July 17, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Samuel Clovis (December 12, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Dan Coats (June 22, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Michael Cohen (October 24, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Rick Dearborn (January 17, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Diana Denman (December 5, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Marc Elias (December 13, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Boris Ephsteyn (September 28, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Evelyn Farkas (June 26, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Peter Fritsch (October 18, 2017) 
• Interview Transcript of Michael Goldfarb (December 12, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Rob Goldstone (December 18, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Jeffrey Gordon (July 26, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Rhona Graff (December 22, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Shawn Henry (December 5, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Hope Hicks (February 27, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Ike Kaveladze (November 2, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of David Kramer (December 19, 2017)
  • Letter from Counsel to David Kramer to HPSCI (December 23, 2017)
    
• Interview Transcript of David Kramer (January 10, 2018)
  • Letter from Counsel to David Kramer to HPSCI (January 5, 2018)
  • Letter from Counsel to David Kramer to HPSCI (January 10, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Jared Kushner (July 25, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Corey Lewandowski (January 17, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Corey Lewandowski (March 8, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Loretta Lynch (October 20, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Simona Mangiante (July 18, 2018)
• Interview Transcript of Andrew McCabe (December 19, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Mary McCord (November 1, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Alexander Nix (December 14, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Carter Page (November 2, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Brad Parscale (October 24, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Walid Phares (December 8, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of John Podesta (June 27, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of John Podesta (December 4, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Samantha Power (October 13, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Erik Prince (November 30, 2017)
  • Letter from HPSCI to Department of Justice (April 30, 2019)
• Interview Transcript of Benjamin Rhodes (October 25, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Susan Rice (September 8, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Jonathan Saffron (October 12, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Anatoli Samochornov (November 28, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Felix Sater (December 20, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Keith Schiller (November 7, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Jefferson Sessions (November 30, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Roger J. Stone, Jr. (September 26, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Jake Sullivan (December 21, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Michael Sussman (December 18, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Matthew Tait (October 6, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Yared Tamene Wolde-Yohannes (August 30, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Donald Trump, Jr. (December 6, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Witness Name Redacted (December 20, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Sally Yates (November 3, 2017)
• Interview Transcript of Christopher Wylie (April 25, 2018)

Report

• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – Democratic Minority Views (March 26, 2018)
• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – Republican Report on Russian Active Measures (March 22, 2018)

ODNI Director Ric Grenell also releases a copy of the transcripts.

Q: Does the new evidence show that the counterintelligence case against General Flynn was simply left open to lay a trap for lying?

BARR: Yes. Essentially.

As customary CBS only broadcast a small snippet of the interview between CBS reporter Catherine Herridge and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.   The full interview is much longer and much more interesting than the edited narrative broadcast by CBS.

When you read the conversation you will immediately notice why CBS refused to broadcast it, and why the segment that did air was so brutally edited.Here is the transcript.

The video can be seen in its entirety, here.

(Copy also pasted at Conservative Treehouse, 5/07/2020)  (Archive)

Ric Grenell enters the DOJ with the satchel. (Credit: public domain)

Earlier this afternoon Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard “Ric” Grenell delivered a satchel of declassified documents to Attorney General Bill Barr.  According to DC sources the content could possibly be released tomorrow in an explosive Friday document dump.  Stay tuned…

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/07/2020) (Archive)

The Justice Department files a motion to drop the charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Read the filing here.

(Department of Justice, 5/07/2020)

Rep. Adam Schiff and the entire apparatus of official Washington has been exposed by the recently released House Intelligence Committee transcripts, as well as by the documents just released in the Michael Flynn case. Tucker shows us a montage of various media clips of Adam Schiff lying to the American public and claiming there was overwhelming evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. He also quotes the transcripts of several Obama officials who deny ever seeing any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.

“The good news is former President Obama is panicked by recent sunlight; the slight possibility of a U.S. DOJ that may soon have him in the cross-hairs; and the more obvious possibility the American people will discover the scale of his corrupt weaponization of intelligence to target his political opposition.

The better news is former President Obama is so heavily concerned about the looming possibilities; rather than relying on intermediary instructions through Media Matters; he is giving political operatives and national media his instructions directly.  LISTEN:

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/08/2020)  (Archive)

“How Van Grack’s misrepresentations about the Flynn investigation and evidence led Judge Sullivan to issue an inaccurate opinion.

Why a show-cause hearing is appropriate.

Van Grack told Judge Sullivan that the Flynn “lies” “impeded” and “had a material impact on” the Trump/Russia investigation.

Van Grack also told Judge Sullivan that he had provided all Brady evidence – and all “information that could reasonably be construed as favorable and material to sentencing.”

Van Grack to Judge Sullivan:

The govt has provided all Brady Evidence.

The government has not “suppressed evidence.”

(All this turned out to be false.)

Flynn FBI Notes

“Here are the 12 revelations that unraveled the false narrative and Mueller’s prosecution of a 33-year military veteran:

1. Flynn’s RT visit with Putin wasn’t nefarious. In fact, it was cleared by his former employer, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he received a defensive briefing before he went to Russia and debriefed with U.S. intelligence after he returned. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/423558-exculpatory-russia-evidence-about-mike-flynn-that-us-intel-kept-secret

2. Not a Russian agent. A Justice Department memo exonerated Flynn of Russia collusion on Jan. 30, 2017, nearly a year before he pled guilty. “The FBI did not believe Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia,” a DOJ memo states. https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/fbis-russia-collusion-case-fell-apart-first-month-trump-presidency

3. Case closed memo. FBI agents wrote a memo to close the investigation of Flynn on Jan. 4, 2017, writing they found “no derogatory” evidence that Flynn committed a crime or posed a national security threat. FBI management then ordered the closure to be rescinded and pivoted toward trying to lure Flynn into an interview. https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-found-no-derogatory-russia-evidence-flynn-planned

4. DOJ heartburn. Senior Justice officials expressed concern and alarm at the way the FBI was treating Flynn, including trying to interview him without the normally required notification to the Trump White House. Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates expressed significant concern that White House officials weren’t being advised. “The interview was problematic from Yates’ perspective because, as a matter of protocol and courtesy, the White House Counsel’s Office should have been notified beforehand,” a DOJ memo stated. https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/yates-other-obama-doj-officials-sounded-alarm-about-fbis-treatment

5. Logan Act threat wasn’t real. DOJ officials immediately did not believe Flynn could realistically be prosecuted under the Logan Act for his conversations with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified he was told such a prosecution was a “long shot,” and former Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord “said that upon learning of Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak, a Logan Act prosecution seemed like a stretch to her,” DOJ memos say. https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/yates-other-obama-doj-officials-sounded-alarm-about-fbis-treatment

6. Unequal treatment. James Comey bragged in a videotaped interview that he authorized the FBI to try to conduct a Flynn interview without the proper notifications and protocol, hoping to catch Flynn and the new Trump White House off guard. In other words, they didn’t follow procedure or treat Flynn like others when it came to due process. Comey said the tactic was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/comey-admits-decision-to-send-fbi-agents-to-interview-mike-flynn-was-not-standard

7. Disguising a required warning. FBI officials debated whether they could avoid, disguise or slip in the required FBI admonition against lying to agents at the start of Flynn’s interview to keep him off guard. “It would be an easy way to just casually slip that in,” FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted during the discussions. https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/breaking-fbi-notes-detail-effort-catch-flynn-lie-get-him.

8. “Playing games.” Then-Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap wrote in handwritten notes that he feared the bureau was “playing games” with the Flynn interview in an effort to get the national security adviser to lie so “we can prosecute him or get him fired.” https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/breaking-fbi-notes-detail-effort-catch-flynn-lie-get-him

9. No deception. The FBI agents who interviewed Flynn, including Peter Strzok, did not believe Flynn intended to lie or be deceptive in his interview. “Strzok provided his view that Flynn appeared truthful during the interview,” a memo from Mueller’s team stated. https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/yates-other-obama-doj-officials-sounded-alarm-about-fbis-treatment

10. No actual denial. The FBI agents who interviewed Flynn indicated in a draft report that Flynn did not directly deny talking to Kislyak about sanctions, as he was accused by Mueller. Instead they noted he couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure and even conceded it was possible. Here’s a direct quote from the draft interview memo. “FLYNN stated it was possible that he talked to KISLYAK on the issue, but if he did, he did not remember doing so.” That’s a far cry from a direct denial. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6936-michael-flynn-motion-to-dismiss/fa06f5e13a0ec71843b6/optimized/full.pdf

11.) Interview Reports Edited. According to evidence DOJ disclosed this month, FBI officials subsequently edited the original Flynn interview report. After Strzok and fellow special agent Joe Pientka interviewed the Trump adviser, Pientka wrote the original interview report, known as a 302, then Strzok heavily edited it, so much so that he worried he was “trying not to completely re-write” the memo. Then FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who neither attended the interview nor is an agent, edited it again, according to the DOJ evidence. And then that version of the 302 was never given to the court. Instead, a substitute summary of the interview written months later was presented as official evidence, an act current and former FBI officials told me was extraordinarily unusual. https://www.wsj.com/articles/rewrite-in-flynns-case-shows-fbi-needs-reform-11588541993

12.) Evidence withheld. The biggest, and perhaps most troubling discovery, according to DOJ officials and Flynn’s lawyers, was the majority of the above evidence was withheld from the courts and Flynn’s legal team for years despite repeated orders that all exculpatory Brady materials, i.e. evidence of innocence, be produced.

(Read more: JustthNews, 5/09/2020)  (Archive)

“Former CIA Director and Spygate ringleader John Brennan lashed out at President Trump on Saturday after the DOJ dropped its case against Flynn.

The Justice Department dropped its case against General Mike Flynn Thursday after bombshell documents released proved he was framed by Comey’s FBI.

The DOJ said in its motion to dismiss that “The interview of Mr. Flynn was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn.”

During an interview on Fox & Friends Friday morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Trump, “Why did it take a judge to release these [Flynn] documents and where was the FBI Director Chris Wray? Why did he not put this out?”

President Trump replied, “Well, a lot of things are going to be told over the next couple of weeks and let’s see what happens. He was appointed by Rod Rosenstein and a lot of things are coming out. You’ll see a lot of things coming out. It’s disappointing.”

Brennan is not happy that his plot to sabotage and ultimately remove President Trump from office is being exposed.” (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 5/09/2020)  (Archive)

(John Brennan/Twitter)

“In its pursuit of establishing surveillance on the Trump campaign, the FBI turned its attention to Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the spring of 2016, culminating in the issuance of a FISA warrant—which allows for some of the most intrusive spying methods on an American citizen.

As part of this process, the FBI relied extensively on the flawed Steele dossier, leading an FBI legal counsel to note that this was “essentially a single source FISA.”

(The Epoch Times, 5/11/2020)  (Archive)

“GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley is taking on the media, the Justice Department, and even President Obama over the federal government’s handling of the Michael Flynn case.

(…) Among the revelations was that FBI agents, in the early days of the Trump administration, went beyond the scope of federal government’s case to interview the then-White House national security adviser. Flynn later, in a plea agreement, pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents.

(…) The senator also questioned purported comments made last week by President Obama cautioning that the rule of law may be at risk following the Justice Department’s recommendation to drop the case against Flynn, a retired lieutenant Army general.

“I believe the opposite is true,” he said. “The rule of law is at risk if the federal government can get away with violating the constitution to do what they did to Lt. Gen. Flynn.”

Grassley then asked why the former president would choose to comment on the dropping of the case against Flynn, but not the significant evidence that government directors under his control lied and manipulated processes at every turn of the investigation into him.

“I’ve heard no comment from Mr. Obama about independent inspector general findings that Andrew McCabe lied under oath to federal investigators multiple times,” said Grassley, referring to the former FBI deputy director.

“Or about how DOJ prosecutors falsely told the court that they had produced all Brady material to Flynn. Or when the federal government surveilled an American citizen connected to the Trump campaign without probable cause and based on intelligence the FBI knew was questionable at best,” Grassley continued.

Grassley hinted that the evidence released last week is so significant in its implications of top-tier government corruption that, “it’s time we asked: what did Obama and Biden know and when did they know it?” (Read More: JusttheNews, 5/11/2020) (Archive)

“Senator Grassley sends a letter (pdf here) thanking AG Bill Barr and DNI Richard Grenell for the declassified documents produced so far.  With the DOJ deciding to drop the Flynn prosecution Grassley notes there are three more buckets of classified documents he would like to see declassified and presented soon:

(1) The Flynn/Kislyak transcript. (2) The Susan Rice Memo to file. (3) The original and mysteriously missing Flynn 302 authored by FBI agent Joe Pientka. [Grassley Press]

Within the letter, Senator Grassley notes he previously requested the release of these documents from former DAG Rod Rosenstein; who refused to submit them and made excuses to congressional oversight.

(Grassley Press Release, 5/12/2020)

Additionally, Senator Grassley appeared on Fox Business for an interview with Liz MacDonald.  Interestingly Ms. MacDonald went into a deep dive on the 2016 FISA Court ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer today…. and, even more interestingly, MacDonald connected the FBI searches of the NSA database to the recent activities of the DNI.

Here she is interviewing Senator Grassley about his letter and other interesting developments… listen carefully at 02:20:

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/12/2020)  (Archive)

Viktor Shokin and Joe Biden (Credit: Volodymyr Petrov/Agence France Presse)

Former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokhin has appealed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the guarantor of the Constitution with a request to ensure the response of law enforcement agencies to allegations of unlawful acts by former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.

At the Interfax-Ukraine agency’s press conference on Tuesday, Shokin’s lawyer Oleksandr Teleshetsky noted that the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) and the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) have not complied with a number of court decisions on the registration and investigation of the crimes that Shokin alleges.

Teleshetsky said more than three months passed after Shokin appealed to law enforcement authorities about the commission of criminal acts against him, but no investigative actions were carried out.

According to him, SBI investigators sent Shokin’s statement to the National Police, and then the crime statement returned to the SBI, where it was ignored. According to Shokin’s complaint, the court had ordered the SBI investigators to enter information about the allegations to the Unified Register of Pretrial Investigations, something that was not done.

“Shokin again went to court and on April 14 received a relung, which obliges the PGO to open proceedings on the fact that SBI officials did not comply with the court decision,” the lawyer said, adding that this decision also remains unfulfilled.

“In connection with another failure to comply with the court decision … Shokin was forced to appeal again to the court with a corresponding complaint about inaction,” the lawyer said.

According to him, Shokin was never questioned either as a victim, or even as a witness, and no other investigative actions were carried out either.

“Obviously, the investigator and the prosecutor were given the task … to block and ignore this case,” the lawyer said.

Teleshetsky said proceedings on Shokin’s statement about Biden’s criminal actions are in the investigative department of the National Police, but investigators there are not taking any steps to investigate.

This is why Shokin is appealing to Zelensky, the lawyer said.

“Shokin prepared an appeal to the president with a request to ensure the protection of the rights and interests as a citizen of Ukraine in this criminal proceeding and bring those responsible to justice for the systematic failure to execute court decisions in criminal proceedings according to his statements,” the lawyer said.

He also added that there is every reason to provide Shokin with protection in connection with the information published by him about Biden’s pressure.

“Shokin’s life could be in danger. The Ukrainian state should initiate protection through law enforcement agencies. …We believe that today there are enough grounds for this,” the lawyer said.

As reported, on February 27, the SBI registered a criminal proceeding about pressure on Shokhin by former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden. The reason for the pressure was the investigation by the PGO of serious crimes in the field of international corruption related to the activities of ex-Minister of Ecology of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky and the leaders of the Burisma company. The case was opened under Part 2 of Article 343.

The lawyer of U.S. President Donald Trump Rudolf Giuliani in a number of interviews announced the intervention of the former vice president in Ukrainian politics and participation in corruption cases. In particular, he claims that Shokin was fired at the request of Biden – ostensibly for his knowledge of Burisma’s ties with his son Hunter Biden.

At the end of January 2020, Shokin stated that he had been poisoned with mercury five months ago [August 2019] during his stay in Greece, after which he underwent a long period of treatment.

“I don’t have any obvious enemies whom I can blame for this. Of course, one of the versions, but this version requires investigation, is that Biden was somehow involved in some way in these issues. I officially addressed the Greek law enforcement authorities on this and asked them to investigate… Officially, I haven’t received an answer yet, although I contacted them quite a while back about opening criminal proceedings in connection a premeditated attempt to murder me,” Shokin said. (Interfax-Ukraine, 5/12/2020)  (Archive)

“Judge Sullivan is requesting retired judge John Gleeson to file an amicus brief outlining why: (a) the charge against Flynn should not be dropped, and (b) frame the argument about how to prosecute Flynn for perjury.

Former Judge John Gleeson (U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of New York) recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that Flynn should continue to be prosecuted.

John Gleeson (Credit: Wikipedia)

May 11, 2020 – (…)  There has been nothing regular about the department’s effort to dismiss the Flynn case. The record reeks of improper political influence. Hours after the career prosecutor abruptly withdrew, the department moved to dismiss the indictment in a filing signed only by an interim U.S. attorney, a former aide to Attorney General William P. Barr whom Barr had installed in the position months before.

The department now says it cannot prove its case. But Flynn had already admitted his guilt to lying to the FBI, and the court had accepted his plea. The purported reasons for the dismissal clash not only with the department’s previous arguments in Flynn’s case — where it assured the court of an important federal interest in punishing Flynn’s dishonesty, an interest it now dismisses as insubstantial — but also with arguments it has routinely made for years in similar cases not involving defendants close to the president.  ~ John Gleeson

There are now questions being raised about whether Judge Emmett Sullivan is having ex-parte communication about the case; with outside interests helping to steer the decision-making. It would not come as a surprise to discover this is happening, albeit unethically.

Now the purpose of the leaked conference call, aka instructions, from former President Barack Obama comes into play; especially considering that Obama specifically mentioned “perjury” which is now part of what Judge Sullivan is attempting to accomplish.” (Conservative Treehouse, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)

Ironically, it appears Judge Gleeson will be arguing against a precedent that was set in a case he oversaw in October 2014.

(StephenMcIntyre@ClimateAudit/Twitter)

(Hasbajrami v US* (October 2014) Gleeson J)

On May 11, 2020, John Gleeson penned this Washington Post article, “The Flynn case isn’t over until the judge says it’s over.“

The attorneys for the Mueller team withheld Brady evidence from General Flynn for over a year.

Just a reminder, the last time the Lawfare types filed an outraged amicus brief with a court…

…it was with the FISA Court, trying to claim that @DevinNunes memo was false for claiming FISA abuse 🤦🏻‍♂️

— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) May 13, 2020

“During President Trump’s impeachment, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch testified to Congress that she knew little beyond an initial briefing and “press reports” about Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that had hired Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was dogged by a corruption investigation.

“It just wasn’t a big deal,” she declared under oath on Oct. 11, 2019.

But newly unearthed State Department memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Yovanovitch’s embassy in Kiev, including the ambassador herself, was engaged in several discussions and meetings about Burisma as the gas firm scrambled during the 2016 election and transition to settle a long-running corruption investigation and polish its image before President Trump took office.

Yovanovitch, for instance, was specifically warned in an email by her top deputy in September 2016 — three years before her testimony — that Burisma had hired an American firm with deep Democratic connections called Blue Star Strategies to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the Ukrainian gas firm and that it had placed “Hunter Biden on its board,” the memos show.

She also met directly with a representative for Burisma in her embassy office, less than 45 days before Trump took office, a contact she did not mention during her impeachment deposition.

The discussions about Burisma inside Yovanovitch’s embassy were so extensive, in fact, that they filled more than 160 pages of emails, memos, and correspondence in fall 2016 alone, according to the State Department records obtained under FOIA by the conservative group Citizens United.

The contacts included a detailed private letter hand-delivered to Yovanovitch by one of Burisma’s lawyers in September 2016, a briefing later that month from her staff on Burisma’s issues, and a meeting scheduled between the ambassador and a Burisma representative shortly before Christmas 2016 as the Obama administration was preparing to leave office.” (Read more: JustTheNews, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)

“Top Obama administration officials purportedly requested to “unmask” the identity of former national security adviser Michael Flynn during the presidential transition period, according to a list of names from that controversial process made public on Wednesday.

The list was declassified in recent days by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and then sent to GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who made the documents public. The roster features top-ranking figures including then-Vice President Joe Biden — a detail already being raised by the Trump campaign in the bare-knuckle 2020 presidential race where Biden is now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

The list also includes then-FBI Director James Comey, then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Obama’s then-chief of staff Denis McDonough.

(…) Both the DOJ and Grenell had been discussing these “unmasking” files, after Grenell appeared to have delivered those files to the department last week. There were some tensions between the two offices over who would actually pull the trigger to release them — ultimately, the publication came from Capitol Hill after Grenell sent lawmakers the files.

The declassified list specifically showed officials who “may have received Lt. Gen Flynn’s identity in response to a request processed between 8 November 2016 and 31 January 2017 to unmask an identity that had been generically referred to in an NSA foreign intelligence report,” the document, obtained by Fox News, read.

(…) “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” the document said. “Only certain personnel are authorized to submit unmasking requests into the NSA system. In this case, 16 authorized individuals requested unmasking for [REDACTED] different NSA intelligence reports for select identified principals.”

The document added: “While the principals are identified below, we cannot confirm they saw the unmasked information. This response does not include any requests outside of the specified time-frame.”

(Read more: Fox Business, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)

We noted in the list provided by Senators Grassley and Johnson that the unmaskings occurred long before General Flynn’s conversation with Russian Ambassador Kislyak regarding sanctions on December 29, 2016.

First things first: ♦Understand Obama’s Surveillance Operation.  ♦Michael Flynn was not under a FISA Title-1 Warrant …. that’s the background.

Devin Nunes appears on Lou Dobbs to discuss the recent list of Obama-era officials who unmasked NSA intercepts of Michael Flynn talking to foreign government officials.  Rep. Nunes reminds the audience that Flynn is only one person within a much larger group of Trump transition team members who were under surveillance by Team Obama.

March 27, 2017, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Devin Nunes, held a brief press conference and stated he was provided intelligence reports brought to him by unnamed sources including ‘significant information’ about President-Elect Trump and his transition team.

These reports included unmaskings of President Trump campaign officials; and included Donald Trump himself…. You know what that means:

1.) …”On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

2.) “Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

3.) “Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition members were unmasked.”

4.) “Fourth and finally, I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.

“The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination, to determine a few things here that I want to read off:”

• “Who was aware of it?”
• “Why it was not disclosed to congress?”
• “Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking?”
• “Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates?”
• “And whether any laws, regulations or procedures were violated?”

“I have asked the Directors of the FBI, NSA and CIA to expeditiously comply with my March 15th letter -that you all received a couple of weeks ago- and to provide a full account of these surveillance activities.”

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)

George Papadopoulos (Credit: public domain)

(…) [The Judiciary Committee releases] recently declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications submitted by the Department of Justice to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a unique judicial body that approves requests for secret warrants used by law enforcement to conduct covert electronic and physical surveillance of U.S. citizens, reveal that the predicate for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Russian collusion by the Trump campaign was triggered by a May 10, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer (who at the time was the Australian Ambassador to the United Kingdom) in a London bar.

According to Downer, Papadopolous revealed that, based upon an April 26 conversation with a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud, “he [Papadopolous] thought that the Russians may release information, might release information, that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign at some stage before the election.”

Downer and a fellow Australian diplomat who was also at the meeting and witnessed Papadopolous’ statement, drafted a cable back to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Canberra recording the gist of the conversation. “There was no suggestion from Papadopoulos nor in the record of the meeting that we sent back to Canberra, there was no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians,” Downer said. “All we did is report what Papadopoulos said.”

After the release by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, of thousands of emails allegedly sourced from the DNC, Downer, concerned that there might be a link between Papadopolous and the DNC emails, provided a copy of his cable to the U.S. Embassy in London, which forwarded it on to the FBI. This cable was used by the FBI to initiate its Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign; a derivative investigation into Papadopolous was given the codename “Crossfire Typhoon.”

As far as predicates for sensitive counterintelligence investigations of presidential campaigns go, the Papadopolous conversation with Misfud is transparently weak. A cursory examination of the emails released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, shows that no in-time reference pre-dates May 25, 2016, more than a month after the alleged “data staging” event that Schiff highlighted as the link between the DNC hack and Papadopolous.

In short, regardless of the content of Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud, as relayed by Downer, there was no linkage between any emails alleged to be in the possession of Russia at the time of April 26, 2016, Papadopolous-Misfud meeting and the actual data released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, that the FBI used to justify the opening of both the Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Typhoon investigations. As Mueller notes in his report, the information released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, coincides with a separate, alleged cyber attack on the DNC Microsoft Exchange Service between May 25 and June 1, 2016 — an attack that Mifsud could not have known about when he met with Papadopolous in April.

Moreover, the FBI knew before it interviewed Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017, that Papadopolous was not involved in any scheme to acquire purloined Russian emails on behalf of the Trump campaign. In September and October of 2016, the FBI made use of two confidential human sources (CHS) to engage Papadopoulos in conversations designed to elicit corroboration into its now-debunked theory.

In a Sept. 15, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an FBI-controlled CHS, Papadopolous was asked outright whether or not the Trump campaign could benefit from third-party intervention from the likes of WikiLeaks or Russia. Papadopolous made it clear in his response that no one in the campaign was advocating for this kind of intervention because it was “illegal,” “compromised national security,” and “set a bad precedent.”

News media around the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 7, 2018, waiting for former Trump adviser George Papadopolous, found guilty of lying to the FBI, (Credit: Phil Roeder/Flickr)

“At the end of the day,” Papadopolous said, “it’s an illegal, it’s illegal activity. Espionage is treason. This is a form of treason.” And when asked by a second FBI-controlled CHS on Oct. 29, 2016, about who he thought was behind the hacking of the DNC, Papadopolous responded that it could be “the Chinese,” “the Iranians,” “Bernie supporters,” or “Anonymous” — but not the Russians. “Dude, Russia doesn’t have any interest in it anyways,” Papadopolous said. “They — dude, no one knows how a president is going to govern anyways. I mean…Congress is very hostile to Russia anyways.” It was a prescient, and telling, exchange — one the FBI chose to ignore.

In the court filing detailing the facts sustaining Papadopolous’s guilty plea, Mueller declared that “defendant PAPADOPOULOS impeded the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the Campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

However, any careful examination of the data used by the FBI to link Papadopolous to the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails on July 22, 2016, clearly shows that there was absolutely no connection. As such, Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud had zero material bearing on the FBI’s investigation, a fact known to the FBI prior to its interview of Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017.” (Read more: Scott Ritter/Consortium News, 5/14/2020)  (Archive)

Jim Jordan (Credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

“Republicans are demanding that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo turn over a broad scope of unreacted Obama-Biden State Department documents pertaining to the corrupt Ukrainian company which that was at the center of the impeachment inquiry earlier this year against President Donald Trump.

“I write regarding documents that the State Department recently released pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),” stated Jordan, in a letter to Pompeo on Thursday. “Although these documents are partially redacted, they appear to shed new light on the actions of State Department employees during the Obama-Biden Administration in relation to the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, and its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky.”

(…) According to Jordan the State Department documents also reveal that the alleged “whistleblower” who began the partisan impeachment against President Trump “also played a role in facilitating the Obama-Biden Administration’s interactions with the Ukrainian government relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

Jordan told Pompeo that the documents reportedly detail “how the ‘whistleblower,’ as a National Security Council (NSC) detailee, hosted a White House meeting that took place with Ukrainian prosecutors in January 2016 regarding a concern that HunterBiden’s role with Burisma could complicate a potential prosecution of the company’s wrongdoing.”

Moreover, “contemporaneous visitor logs confirm that numerous Ukrainian officials were present at the White House on the day of the meeting,” he added.

(…) The recently redacted documents also reveal information pertaining to former Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, as well as former Secretary John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, and Devon Archer, who worked together during that time period.

Jordan referenced a Wall Street Journal story, which revealed that Hunter Biden, Heinz and Archer may have been part “of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connect Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama Administration.”

The original stories, which were first published by John Solomon, who was then with The Hill and now with Just The News, focused on Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings at the same time his father, Vice President Joe Biden, was responsible for the United States’s diplomatic efforts with Ukraine.” (Read more: Sarah A. Carter, 5/14/2020)  (Archive)