(Credit: public domain)

(…) …the CIA exfiltrated a Russian government official who spied for the CIA for decades from inside the Kremlin.

Those stories appear to be based on leaks of information — likely highly classified — from U.S. government officials with access to information about CIA spy operations. And leaks of those operations began appearing in the press in late 2016, before Trump and Barr obtained access government secrets.

In a bizarre twist, leaks about CIA intelligence gathering operations to the media may have sparked the extraction of the longtime Kremlin mole in the first place.

On Monday, The New York Times and Washington Post reported that inquiries from the media about CIA sources for the Russia investigation prompted the decision to exfiltrate the spy. In 2016, the CIA offered to help the asset, but he refused. But in 2017, as media interest intensified, the CIA again offered to extricate him. He finally agreed.

NBC News also reported Monday that a longtime Russian spy was living in the Washington, D.C. area under his own name.

CNN was the first outlet to report details of the exfiltration, but the network appears to have gotten a key detail of the story wrong. Jim Sciutto, a CNN anchor and former Obama administration official, reported that the exfiltration was carried out in part because of intelligence community concerns that Trump would mishandle highly secret information.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/10/2019)

(…) “On January 3rd, 2017, the new congressional year began.  SSCI Vice-Chair Dianne Feinstein abdicated her position within the Gang-of-Eight, and turned over the reigns to Senator Mark Warner.  Warner was now the vice-chair of the SSCI and a Go8 member.

On January 6th, 2017, the Obama White House published the Intelligence Community Assessment, and declared:

We assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.  (pdf link)

It is not coincidental the ICA was “high confidence” by Brennan and Clapper; and less confidence by Mike Rogers (NSA).

With the Flynn Dec. 29, 2016, transcript in hand, the DOJ and FBI began aiding the Logan Act narrative with Obama intelligence officials supporting the Russia Conspiracy claims and decrying anyone who would interfere or counter the official U.S. position.

On January 12th, 2017, the content of the communication between Flynn and Kislyak was leaked to the Washington Post by an unknown entity. Likely the leak came from the FBI’s counterintelligence operation; the same unit previously carrying out the 2016 campaign spying operations. [Andrew McCabe is highly suspected]

The FBI CoIntel group (Strzok, McCabe etc.), and the DOJ-NSD group (Yates, McCord etc.) were the largest stakeholders in the execution of the insurance policy phase because they were the epicenter of spygate, fraudulent FISA presentations and the formation of the Steele Dossier.

The media leak of the Flynn conversation with Kislyak was critical because the DOJ/FBI were pushing a political narrative. This was not about legality per se’, this effort was about establishing the framework for a preexisting investigation, based on a false premise, that would protect the DOJ and FBI.  The investigation they needed to continue evolved into the Mueller special counsel.  This was all insurance.

The Flynn-Kislyak leak led to Vice-President Mike Pence being hammered on January 15th, 2017, during a CBS Face the Nation interview about Trump campaign officials in contact with Russians.  Pence was exceptionally unprepared to answer the questions and allowed the media to blend questions about campaign contacts with necessary, and entirely appropriate, transition team contacts.

•Sunday January 15th, 2017 – VP-elect Mike Pence appears on Face The Nation. [Transcript Here]

Mike Pence appears on CBS Face the Nation. (Credit: CBS)

JOHN DICKERSON: But there’s a distinction between that feeling about the press and legitimate inquiry, as you say, that the Senate Intelligence Committee is doing.

Just to button up one question, did any advisor or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?

MIKE PENCE: Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy. (link)

*NOTE* The incoming administration was under a false-narrative siege created by the media.  At the time (early Jan, 2017) ‘any contact’ with Russians was evidence of meddling/election-collusion with Russians.  VP-elect Mike Pence poorly answered the question from Dickerson from a very defensive position.

The toxic media environment and Mike Pence speaking poorly during a Face The Nation interview now became a much bigger issue.

Once Vice-President Mike Pence made the statement that Flynn had no contact with anyone from Russia etc. any contradictory statement from Flynn would make Pence appear compromised.  Michael Flynn is now contrast against Pence’s false point without clarification.  As National Security Advisor Flynn was interviewed by the FBI on January 24th, nine days after Pence made his comments.

• Tuesday January 24th – Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was interviewed at the WH by the FBI.

During this ambush interview, disguised as a meeting, FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka were contrasting Vice-President-elect Pence’s statements to CBS against the known action of Mike Flynn.  [Flynn has three options: either (1) Flynn contradicts Pence, or (2) he tells a lie; or (3) Flynn explains Pence misspoke, those were his options.]

How Flynn responded to the line of inquiry, and explained/reconciled the difference between Pence’s statement on Jan 15th and what actually took place on December 29th, 2016, is why the FBI ended up with the initial conclusion that Flynn wasn’t lying.

It is within this dynamic where the FD-302 reports, written by Strzok and Pientka, then became the subject of political manipulation by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

The FBI knew the content of the Flynn call with Sergey Kislyak because they were listening in.  The FBI were intercepting those communications.  So when Pence said no-one had any contact on January 15th, the FBI crew IMMEDIATELY knew they had an issue to exploit.

We see the evidence of the FBI knowing they had an issue to exploit, and being very nervous about doing it, in the text messages between Lisa Page and FBI Agent Peter Strzok who would end up doing the questioning of Flynn.

The day before the Flynn interview:

♦January 23, 2017, the day before the Flynn interview, Lisa Page says: “I can feel my heart beating harder, I’m so stressed about all the ways THIS has the potential to go fully off the rails.” Weird!

♦Strzok replies: “I know. I just talked with John, we’re getting together as soon as I get in to finish that write up for Andy (MCCABE) this morning.” Strzok agrees with Page about being stressed that “THIS” could go off the rails… (Strzok’s meeting w Flynn the next day)

[We’re not sure who “John” is, but we know “Bill” is Bill Priestap, FBI Deputy Director in charge of Counterintelligence. And “Jen” is Jennifer Boone, FBI counterproliferation division]

So it’s the day before they interview Flynn.  Why would Page & Strzok be stressed about “THIS” potentially going off the rails?  The answer is simple: they knew the content of the phone call between Mike Flynn and Sergey Kislyak because they were listening in, and they were about to exploit the Pence statement to CBS.  In essence they were admitting to monitoring Flynn, that’s why they were so nervous.  They were planning and plotting with Andrew McCabe about how they were going to exploit the phone-tap and the difference in public statements by VP Mike Pence.

There’s a good possibility Flynn was honest but his honesty contradicted Pence’s national statement on CBS; and Flynn likely tried to dance through a needle without being overly critical of VP-elect Pence misspeaking.   Remember, the alternative: if Flynn is brutally honest, the media now runs with a narrative about Vice-President Pence as a national liar.  

• Wednesday January 25th, 2017,  –  The Department of Justice, National Security Division, (at this timeframe Mary McCord was head of the DOJ-NSD) – received a detailed readout from the FBI agents who had interviewed Flynn. Yates said she felt “it was important to get this information to the White House as quickly as possible.”
• Thursday January 26th – (morning) Yates called White House Counsel Don McGahn first thing that morning to tell him she had “a very sensitive matter” that had to be discussed face to face. McGahn agreed to meet with Yates later that afternoon.
• Thursday January 26th – (afternoon)  Sally Yates traveled to the White House along with a senior member of the DOJ’s National Security Division, “who was overseeing the matter”, that is Mary McCord.  This was Yates’ first meeting with McGahn in his office, which also acts as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

Yates said she began their meeting by laying out the media accounts and media statements made by Vice President Mike Pence and other high-ranking White House officials about General Flynn’s activity “that we knew not to be the truth.”

According to Sally Yates testimony, she and Mary McCord presented all the information to McGahn so the White House could take action that they deemed appropriate.  When asked by McGahn if Flynn should be fired, Yates answered, “that really wasn’t our call.”

Yates also said her decision to notify the White House counsel had been discussed “at great length.”  According to her testimony: “Certainly leading up to our notification on the 26th, it was a topic of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community.”

•Friday January 27th – (morning)  White House Counsel Don McGahn called Yates in the morning and asked if she could come back to his office.

•Friday January 27th – (late afternoon) According to her testimony, Sally Yates returned to the White House late that afternoon.  One of McGahn’s topics discussed was whether Flynn could be prosecuted for his conduct.

Specifically, according to Yates, one of the questions *McGahn asked Yates: “Why does it matter to DOJ if one White House official lies to another?” She explained that it “was a whole lot more than that,” and reviewed the same issues outlined the prior day.

McGahn then expressed his concern that taking any action might interfere with the FBI investigation of Flynn, and Yates said it wouldn’t: “It wouldn’t really be fair of us to tell you this and then expect you to sit on your hands,” Yates claims to have told McGahn.

McGahn asked if he could look at the underlying evidence of Flynn’s conduct, and she said they would work with the FBI over the weekend and “get back with him on Monday morning.”

•Friday January 27th, 2017 – (evening) In what appears to be only a few hours later, President Trump is having dinner with FBI Director James Comey where President Trump asked if he was under investigation. Trump was, but to continue the auspices of the ongoing investigation, Comey lied and told him he wasn’t.

This why the issue of how the FBI agents write the 302 summary of the Flynn interview becomes such an important facet.   We see that dynamic again playing out in the messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok; with Andrew McCabe providing the guidance.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/29/2019)

A video is posted to YouTube on January 2, 2017, titled “President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko Together with US Senators Under Shirokino” and by the account name of “Office of the President of Ukraine.” The video shows John McCain and Lindsey Graham meeting with Petro Poroshenko and a Ukrainian military unit, encouraging them to war with Russia.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch also appear in the video.

Lindsey Graham cheers:

“Your fight is our fight, 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Enough of a Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price.”

John McCain follows:

“I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win and we will do every-thing we can to provide you with what you need to win.”

A cursory search of the word “Shirokino” appearing in Poroshenko’s video title, reveals a war-torn city in the Donbass region of Ukraine that was hit hard by the Azov Batallion two years prior to the video.

In May 2015, the following observation of Shirokino was made:

(…)  Empty streets. Apricot trees are in bloom in the front yards of war-disheveled houses. Torn wires, crooked lamp-posts, burned military machinery, wooden cartridge crates. Broken glass and slate fragments crack under one’s feet. From what used to be the road here and there mine “tails” are protruding. People have left their houses, and their hungry abandoned dogs follow you about and imploringly look into your eyes. But the emptiness around is misleading. What used to be a house became a firing point. As you are walking in the street you can always sense that someone is watching you, you look around and you notice silhouettes moving among the ruins. Before the war, Shirokino had 1500 inhabitants, and twice as many in the summertime — because of the holiday-makers. Now few dozens are waiting for the firing to stop in their house basements. So who remains? Old folks for whom to leave means to give up everything — to start life anew, and they are not ready for it. They don’t want to be a burden for anyone and they are not asking for any help. This is the third month of severe fighting in Shirokino, during all that time they have been sleeping in basements, drinking rainwater and burning candles in the evening (there’s no electricity, gas or water in the village — nor has been for a very long time). They remain to watch the shells destroy everything that was part of their life and wait for all that to be over.” (BirdInFlight, 5/12/2015)

OSCE representatives talk to a local woman. Many inhabitants of Shirokino come back to their village when they hear of the OSCE observers’ arrival. Shooting usually stops during such visits. (Credit: Petr Shelomovsky)

“New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Trump said Tuesday evening that an intelligence briefing on Russia’s cyber activities “was delayed until Friday” and suggested that intelligence agencies weren’t prepared. NBC News reported, however, that the briefing was always planned for Friday.

“The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” the president-elect wrote on Twitter.”

(Read more: The Hill, 1/03/2017)

On Jan. 3, 2017, another section of Executive Order 12333, Section 2.3 Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the NSA [National Security Agency], was signed into effect by the Obama administration. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, signed off on Section 2.3 on Dec. 15, 2016, and the order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.

The new order allowed for the other intelligence agencies to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contain relevant information that would be useful to a particular mission. Crucially, privacy protection of the underlying raw data was specifically bypassed by the order.

As the New York Times noted at the time, “the new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws.”

On its face, the rule was supposedly put in place in order to reduce the risk that “the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency,” but in reality, it dramatically expanded government officials’ access to the private information of American citizens.

As noted by the NY Times, historically, “the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.”

However, with the Jan. 3, 2017, approval of Section 2.3, and the associated expansion of sharing globally intercepted communications, other intelligence agencies would  be able to search “directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for ‘minimizing’ privacy intrusions.”

The requirement for this broad latitude was fairly simple and spelled out in the executive order.

An “Intelligence Community element” may “intentionally select foreign communications of or concerning a U.S. person or a person in the United States if the element’s compliance organization or legal counsel confirms that” the targeted person is a “current FISA target” or has been determined to be “an agent of a foreign power or employee of a foreign power” and the “purpose of the selection is to acquire significant foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

As of Oct. 21, 2016, although it wasn’t known to the public, Carter Page met these requirements.

When the order was signed, many wondered at the timing and questioned why there was a  pressing need to rush an order that allowed for significant expansion in the sharing of raw intelligence among agencies during the final days of the Obama administration.

An equally valid question was why was the order so overdue.

Section 2.3 was reported as being on “the verge” of finalization in late February 2016 as reported by the NY Times:

“Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that the administration had developed and was fine-tuning what is now a 21-page draft set of procedures to permit the sharing.”

It had been anticipated that the order would be finalized by early- to mid-2016.

Interestingly, the finalized version contained a provision relating to “Political Process” that hadn’t been in place in earlier versions of Section 2.3:

“3. (U) Political Process in the United States. [Any IC element that obtains access to raw SIGINT under these Procedures will] Not engage in any intelligence activity authorized by these Procedures, including disseminations to the White House, for the purpose of affecting the political process in the United States. The IC element will comply with the guidance applicable to NSA regarding the application of this prohibition. Questions about whether a particular activity falls within this prohibition will be resolved in consultation with the element’s legal counsel and the General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) (and the DoD’s Office of the General Counsel in the case of a DoD IC element).” [emphasis added]

If the above language had been implemented in early 2016 as originally scheduled, dissemination of any raw intelligence on or relating to the Trump campaign to officials within the Obama White House would likely have been made more difficult or prohibited.

In other words, prior to the signing of Section 2.3, it appears that greater latitude existed for officials in the Obama administration to gain access to information. But once the order was signed into effect, Section 2.3 granted greater latitude to interagency sharing of that information.” (Read more: themarketswork, 4/20/2020)  (Archive)

McCord’s notes indicate it was Bob Litt that raised the Logan Act violation. pic.twitter.com/NLOJpian8n

— CiceroConsultancy (@CiceroConsulta1) October 3, 2020

McCord FBI 302 Report

Those aware at the time (Jan 3rd) were Clapper, Litt, Baker,Anderson and McCabe. pic.twitter.com/P3vgkNnXgO

— CiceroConsultancy (@CiceroConsulta1) October 3, 2020

(Mary McCord FBI 302, 8/10/2017)

The operation that targeted Flynn: CROSSFIRE RAZOR

January 4, 2017: FBI field office found “No derogatory information” on Flynn and decided to close RAZOR.

January 4, 2017: FBI leadership (STRZOK) went off the rails and targeted Flynn: “Don’t close RAZOR”

FBI Washington Field Office Report:

FBI and US Govt (CIA?) databases showed “no derogatory information” on Flynn.

Flynn determined to be “no longer a viable candidate” as part of the Crossfire Hurricane case.

Peter Strzok texts to the FBI Case Manager handling the Crossfire Razor (Flynn) case.

Strzok: “If you haven’t closed RAZOR, don’t do so yet”

Strzok: “7th floor involved” (FBI Leadership)

(Possible use of Logan Act “violations” to keep the investigation open)

(Exhibit 7 – DOJ/Motion to Dismiss/Flynn 5/07/2020)

Logan Act theory coincides w/ Page/Strzok emails on January 4, 2017 (same day Flynn file was to be closed) about Logan Act.

HT Excellent – Semi-Casual Observer @CasualSemi

Judicial Watch – new emails

“New emails from @JudicialWatch reveal Strzok, Page, Priestap, Anderson, and an unknown were emailing about the Logan Act on January 4th, 2017. After the Kislyak calls; but weeks before the Ignatious leaks, Flynn interview, and Yates alleging Logan Act violations.”

“I believe this is the earliest example we have of people in the FBI/DOJ connected to the Flynn investigation discussing the Logan Act.”

Read the Crossfire Razor FBI Field Office Memo/Texts/emails HERE.

(Read more: Techno Fog @Techno_Fog, 4/30/2020)  (Archive)

The FBI files a report on January 4, 2017 to close General Flynn’s investigation and it is approved by Joseph Pientka. The case is not closed as recommended.

The report is finally declassified and released to the public on May 7, 2020 as Exhibit 1 in the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the charges that are erroneously filed against General Flynn.

Catherine Herridge has a twitter thread in which she provides images of two internal FBI email exchanges early in the workday of January 4, 2017. Those email exchanges involve Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and James A. Baker. First, here is an image of the emails:

The first email is from Lisa Page to James Baker, and is captioned: “code section at question.” I wonder whether Page means “code section IN question”? The entire text of the email is simply the United States Code citation to the Logan Act: “18 USC 953”.

What’s going on here?

It looks like the day before Comey’s big Oval Office meeting–which took place on January 5, 2017–the lawyers for the top two officials at the FBI were scrambling to get a handle on the Logan Act. The reason I say they were “scrambling to get a handle on the Logan Act” will be apparent when we look at the second email–Strzok’s.

(…) The next step that we see, however, is a lengthier email from Strzok to Page just a few minutes later, at 09:52:37. It has no caption, but it’s all about the Logan Act. That must mean that Page, as soon as she had emailed Baker, immediately contacted Strzok (text? phone?) to tell him what was up.

In less than ten minutes Strzok emails Page providing the text of the Logan Act as well as a precis of an article on the statute gleaned from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Strzok does two things:

1) He points out that nothing in CRS suggests that the Logan Act could apply to an incoming administration, and

2) He quotes a passage from CRS which points out all the constitutional problems with the Logan Act. Among other things, CRS correctly notes that no one has ever actually been prosecuted under the Logan Act–not just never convicted, but never prosecuted. The very few attempts were dropped before things ever got to a trial–wiser heads having prevailed.

We presume, therefore that James Baker did his homework and came to the same conclusions that Strzok pointed out as emerging from the CRS presentation: That the Logan Act certainly doesn’t apply to an incoming administration and may not apply to anyone, due to its well known constitutional infirmities. To proceed against Flynn on the basis of the Logan Act would be a very risky undertaking, both legally and politically. Thus when Obama takes Comey and Sally Yates aside the next day, at the Oval Office meeting, and the topic of the Logan Act is raised, Comey–who, whatever else you may say about him is not a stupid lawyer–responds forthrightly that the Flynn – Kislyak calls “appear legit.”

If Comey had been smarter politically he would have said to himself, Whoa, I cannot allow myself to get involved in a plot with knuckleheads raising a Logan Act issue! But he went ahead when he saw that’s what Obama and the Deep State–probably including several GOP senators–clearly wanted. He tried, in effect, to finesse the matter by pretending that the contact with Flynn was pure routine, while hoping to find some false statement in Flynn’s answers that could somehow be put to use.”  (Read more: meaninginhistory.blogspot  6/27/2020)  (Archive)

A few random facts about .@GenFlynn and the Logan Act.

Barnett was told there was a potential Logan Act violation on Jan 4th, 2017. pic.twitter.com/TAoABALVAS

— CiceroConsultancy (@CiceroConsulta1) October 3, 2020

William J. Barnett Doc, 9/24/2020

By all accounts, Obama and top officials discussed phone calls between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during a White House meeting in the final days of the Obama administration. But the details about the conversation—including who brought up Flynn and when—differ from account to account, suggesting there is more to learn about what transpired at the Oval Office.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said she first learned about the Flynn–Kislyak calls during the Jan. 5 meeting, according to a recently declassified summary (pdf) of Yates’s interview with special counsel Robert Mueller on Dec. 7, 2017. According to Yates, after the president was briefed about the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Obama dismissed everyone present except for Yates and FBI Director James Comey. Obama then told Yates and Comey that he learned about the Flynn–Kislyak calls and the fact that the two men discussed sanctions.

Comey’s account of what transpired differs. In his recently declassified testimony (pdf) to the House Intelligence Committee on March 7, 2017, Comey said that Obama brought up the Flynn topic sometime during the Jan. 5 meeting, but didn’t mention whether the conversation occurred before or after Obama dismissed the rest of the officials from the Oval Office. According to Comey’s account, Obama brought up Flynn.

But according to a recently declassified email written on Jan. 20, 2017, by then-national security adviser Susan Rice, Yates and Comey weren’t the only people in the room with Obama after the rest of the officials were dismissed. Rice wrote that she and Vice President Joe Biden were present as well, contradicting the version of the events put forth by Yates. Rice’s email also contradicts Comey’s account, stating that Comey, not Obama, was the one to bring up Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/21/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“Then-President Barack Obama was intimately aware of the details of December 2016 intercepted phone calls between President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, and then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, according to court documents released Thursday.

The former president’s knowledge and role in his administration’s investigations of the Trump campaign have long been an open question. The revelation puts the former president right in the center of the last administration’s efforts to investigate and target Flynn, whom the Justice Department just dropped their case against on Thursday. Obama had appointed Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency but had fired him in 2014, and he had reportedly warned Trump not to hire Flynn.

The newly released documents from the government’s motion to dismiss their case against Flynn show, however, that at a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Obama had asked Comey and Yates to “stay behind.”

Obama told them he had “learned of the information about Flynn” and his conversation with Kislyak, where they discussed sanctions his administration had levied against Russia. (A memo penned by then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice also showed that Biden stayed behind as well.)

Obama “specified he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information.”

“Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation. Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act, but can’t recall if he specified there was an ‘investigation.’ Comey did not talk about prosecution in the meeting,” the documents said.

“It was not clear to Yates from where the President first received the information. Yates did not recall Comey’s response to the President’s question about how to treat Flynn. She was so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time,” the documents said.

— Byron York (@ByronYork) May 7, 2020

(Read more: Breitbart, 5/08/2020)  (Archive)

Susan Rice (c) joins President Barack Obama (r) as he participates in a bilateral meeting with Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta (not pictured) at the State House in Nairobi July 25, 2015. (Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

“January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA and the Office of the National Intelligence Director.

Just as significant: January 5 was the day before these same intelligence-community leaders would brief President-elect Trump on the same report.

Also on hand at the January 5 White House briefing were Vice President Joe Biden and acting Attorney General Sally Yates. According to Rice, immediately after the briefing, President Obama had his two top law-enforcement officials, Yates and Comey, linger for “a brief follow-on conversation” with the administration’s political leadership: Obama, Biden, and Rice.

(Susan Rice January 5, 2017 Email)

Let’s think about what was going on at that moment. It had been just a few days since Obama imposed sanctions on Russia. In that connection, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, had contacted Trump’s designated national-security adviser, Michael Flynn. Obama-administration leadership despised Flynn, who (a) had been fired by Obama from his post as Defense Intelligence Agency chief; (b) had become a key Trump supporter and an intense critic of Obama foreign and national-security policy; and (c) was regarded by Yates and Comey as a possible criminal suspect — on the wayward theories that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak could smack of a corrupt quid pro quo deal to drop the sanctions and might violate the never invoked, constitutionally dubious Logan Act.

What else was happening? The Justice Department and FBI had gone to the FISA court on October 21, 2016, for a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That warrant relied largely on the Steele dossier, which alleged a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin involving (a) a cyberespionage operation against the 2016 election, (b) corrupt negotiations regarding the sanctions, and (c) the Kremlin’s possession of “kompromat” that would enable the Putin regime to blackmail President-elect Trump.

Significantly, by the time of this January 6 meeting with Trump, the 90-day surveillance period under the FISA warrant would have had just a bit over two weeks left to run — it was set to expire just as Trump was to take office. (Reporting suggests that there may also have been a FISA warrant on Paul Manafort around this time.) The Obama administration was therefore confronting a deadline if the FISA warrant was to be renewed while Obama was still in power. The officials in the meeting would need to figure out how the investigation could continue despite the fact that its central focus, Trump, was about to be sworn in as president.

Obama had incredibly claimed that he never intervened in cases under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI. He was emphatic in an April 2016 interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace: “I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line and always have maintained it.” Ever the cheeky Obama, he made this claim while in the same breath arguing against indicting Hillary Clinton.

Obviously, if Obama was having a “follow-on conversation” with Yates and Comey, what it was following on was the briefing he’d just received about an investigation implicating the Trump campaign in Russian espionage. (As Comey’s March 20 House testimony would later elucidate, Russia’s interference in the election was always seen by law-enforcement officials as inseparable from suspected Trump campaign collusion in that interference.) There would be no reason to have such a follow-on conversation unless Obama wanted an update on what his law-enforcement officials were doing.” (Read more: National Review, 2/15/2018)  (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.

(Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/22/2020) (Archive)

h/t @theconservador/Twitter:

#NEW Oh Boy!

Jan 5 2017. The same day as the Oval Office Meeting, Brennan said this. #WATCH! 📺

It is as if John already cracked the case wide open. He has the whole story already planned out. And was Rogers at the meeting, or did he back out? pic.twitter.com/pA8tIMDQ6D

— the conservador (@theconservador) September 5, 2020

As a sidenote, @theconservador also posts an audio clip of Sy Hersh discussing Russiagate being a “Brennan operation” and giving more insight into Admiral Mike Rogers.

Let me add this. I cannot verify Sy’s allegations but listen to how he describes Mike Rogers’s role with Brennan. cc @LeeSmithDC pic.twitter.com/27L7osTAcp

— the conservador (@theconservador) September 5, 2020

Barack Obama sits with James Comey during a ceremony at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters in Washington, DC, Oct. 28, 2013. (Credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

Even after Obama had left office and Comey had a new commander-in-chief to report to, Comey continued to follow Obama’s prompt by withholding intel from Trump. Recently released documents included as exhibits to the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Flynn reveal this reality.

During that same January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting in which Obama counseled Comey to be cautious in sharing information about Russia with the Trump administration, Obama and Comey discussed Flynn’s late-December telephone calls with the Russian ambassador.

Following Trump’s inauguration, Comey remained adamant that Trump not be briefed of the details of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador, and then “broke every protocol” to preempt Yates’s directive that he inform the White House of the conversation, by sending agents to interview Flynn in the West Wing on January 24, 2017.

But it wasn’t just Obama and Comey’s secreting of the supposed intel about Flynn that shows they put damaging the incoming Trump administration above protecting the country from purported Russian agents. The Flynn investigation was but one aspect of the Crossfire Hurricane probe, and Trump was not briefed on the other investigations either—most significantly the continuing investigation of Carter Page.

The FBI, however, is not solely to blame for keeping this “important” information from Trump: They were only following the counsel of former President Barack Obama.

Obama knew the Russia investigation was a hoax from the get-go.

(Read more: The Federalist, 5/11/2020) (Archive) (h/t X22Report)

The INITIAL Flynn/Kislyak leak was not to David Ignatius – it was to WaPo reporter Adam Entous. The leak came directly from “sources [who] saw a transcript and described it to [Entous].”

We suspect the Flynn/Kislyak [leak] occurred around January 5, 2017 – the same date Obama was allegedly briefed on the call by Clapper.

This date coincides with Entous reporting on other “intercepted communications” from Russian officials leaked to Entous.

Entous: “My sources start whispering to me that there were these mysterious communications” between Flynn and Kislyak.

This caused an internal WaPo discussion about whether to run the Flynn/Kislyak story.

To his credit, Entous didn’t find it newsworthy.

As a columnist, he was about to throw out the Flynn/Kislyak call and ask “What was it about?”

I’m not certain the call was ever independently leaked to Ignatius.

Further Flynn/Kislyak leaks to Entous on February 9, 2017 – perhaps from the same sources who provided the initial leak, and supported by new sources. “Current and former U.S. officials” confirmed the contents of Flynn’s call with Kislyak.

February 13, 2017 – likely DOJ leaks related to (or on behalf of) Sally Yates by “an official familiar with her thinking.”

Curious if that was McCord or Tashina Gauhar.

How close was the source to Yates? Close enough to know exactly when Yates saw the intelligence.

“when this intelligence came in, which would be in late December, early January . . . Yates saw the intelligence”

(Techno Fog@Techno_Fog/Twitter, 5/11/2020)   (Archive)

Jonathan Winer (Credit: public domain)

“Winer, a former legislative assistant to former Sen. John Kerry who became the State Department’s Special Envoy for Libya when Kerry was Secretary of State – was Steele’s contact at the State Department, and received the now-debunked reports claiming that President Trump had been compromised by the Russians.

According to the Senate report, Winer disclosed that he destroyed reports that Steele had sent him over the years. The Senate report also says that Winer failed to reveal when asked in his first interview with the committee that he had arranged the meeting for Steele at the State Department months earlier. –Daily Caller

“After Steele’s memos were published in the press in January 2017, Steele asked Winer to make note of having them, then either destroy all the earlier reports Steele had sent the Department of State or return them to Steele, out of concern that someone would be able to reconstruct his source network,” reads the Senate report, which quotes Winer as saying “So I destroyed them, and I basically destroyed all the correspondence I had with him.”

In total, Winer had received over 100 intelligence reports from Steel between 2014 and 2016.

Emails that The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that Winer shared Steele’s reports with a small group of State Department oFederal Burfficials. The Senate report says that the State Department was able to provide the committee with Steele’s reports from 2015 and 2016, though most from 2014 are missing. –Daily Caller

In March, Steele told a UK court that he had “wiped” all of his dossier-linked correspondence in December, 2016 and January, 2017, and had no records of communications with his primary dossier source, Igor Danchenko.

In addition to receiving reports from Steele, Winer gave Steele various anti-Trump memos from Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal, which originated with Clinton “hatchet man” Cody Shearer. Winer claims he didn’t think Steele would share the Clinton-sourced information with anyone else in the government.

“But I learned later that Steele did share them — with the FBI, after the FBI asked him to provide everything he had on allegations relating to Trump, his campaign and Russian interference in U.S. elections,” Winer wrote in a 2018 Op-Ed.

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 8/20/2020)  (Archive)

“FBI employees discussed the January 5, 2017, briefing of Obama: “What’s the word on how O’s briefing went”? asked one employee, to which the other replied,

“Don’t know but people here are scrambling for info to support certain things and it’s a mad house.”  “Trump was right. Still not put together…why do we do this to ourselves. What is wrong with these people.” 

FBI Texts – page 6

James Comey (l), John Brennan (c) and James Clapper testify about “World Wide Cyber Threats” during an open hearing of the House (Select) Intelligence Committee on September 10, 2015. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior-most US intelligence chiefs — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.

One reason the nation’s intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.

(…) Sources tell CNN that these same allegations about communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians, mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year, prompted then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to send a letter to FBI Director Comey in [August], in which he wrote, “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States.” (Read more: CNN, 1/12/2017)

“Former FBI Director James Comey wrote in a newly released memo that pressure from news outlets — “CNN in particular” — convinced him to brief then-President-Elect Donald Trump on the infamous Steele dossier during a meeting at Trump Tower on Jan. 6, 2017.

“I said media like CNN had [the dossier] and were looking for a news hook,” Comey wrote in a memo just after briefing Trump about the salacious allegations in the dossier.

“I said it was inflammatory stuff that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports,” he added.

Four days after that meeting, CNN published a story revealing the existence of a salacious report alleging the Russian government had compromised Trump. The CNN story was referring to what’s now known as the dossier — an unverified 35-page report written by former British spy Christopher Steele.

CNN found its news hook: the very same meeting Comey said was necessary because of pressure from CNN.

CNN’s bombshell report created another news hook but for another news outlet. Hours after the CNN story went live, BuzzFeed News published the entire 35-page dossier, which was later revealed to be funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

The report has cast a cloud over the Trump presidency ever since, even though Trump has vehemently denied its allegations.

The Republican has reportedly fumed he believes Comey set him up. Comey’s briefing was used as a pretext to publish the dossier, which alleges the Russian government is blackmailing Trump with video of him using prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, the president argued.

The leaker of the Comey briefing to Trump has not been identified, though only a small number of government officials would have been aware of the meeting and of what Comey told Trump.

Joining Comey were James Clapper, John Brennan and Adm. Mike Rogers, the directors of the Office of National Intelligence, the CIA and the National Security Agency, respectively.”  (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/19/2018)

“The footnotes in a letter from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson outline a series of previously unknown emails between top FBI and DOJ officials as they discuss the Steele Dossier and prepare for a release by CNN.

The emails show that hours before FBI Director James Comey briefed President-Elect Trump on the dossier, Comey’s chief-of-staff James Rybicki e-mailed staff that Director Comey “is coming into HQ briefly now for an update from the sensitive matter team.”

On January 8th, 2017, two days after the Comey briefing, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe wrote an e-mail to top FBI officials (James Comey, James Rybicki, David Bowdich and Michael Kortan), with the subject: “Flood is coming.”

47 minutes later Andrew McCabe then emails across the street to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and her deputy assistant Matthew Axelrod.  Andrew McCabe uses the subject line “News” in his e-mail to alert the Main Justice officials.

The letter from Senator Johnson then goes on to outline how CNN reported breaking news of the dossier on January 10th, using the ‘hook’ created by a leak of the briefing Comey gave to president-elect Trump.  CNN headlined their report: “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.”  A few hours later, BuzzFeed News published the contents of the “Steele dossier.”

Within the letter Senator Johnson asks Director Chris Wray to provide a list of all members of the “sensitive matters team” referenced by James Rybicki.  Additionally, Johnson requests Wray to provide all details about how FBI officials “first learned that media outlets, including CNN, may have possessed the Steele dossier.”

From the footnotes we can see the emails were first obtained by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General (Michael Horowitz) and turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

What makes this interesting is the emails are: all post-election; all seemingly unrelated to any of the three known primary IG investigative inquiries; and all provided by the OIG to congress, without prior request (that we know of).  Much like the Page/Strzok text message release, this email release seems specifically intended to spur further congressional inquiry, and broaden the general public awareness.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Why would IG Horowitz send these to congress?  Well, there’s not much he can do with them.  All of the outlined participants/recipients are no longer within the DOJ or FBI except David Bowditch (now Asst. Director under Wray); however, they do provide an expanded awareness and understanding of the post-election ‘small group‘ activity.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/22/2018)

Statement for the Record

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
James B. Comey
June 8, 2017

Chairman Burr, Ranking Member Warner, Members of the Committee

Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I was asked to testify today to describe for you my interactions with President-Elect and President Trump on subjects that I understand are of interest to you. I have not included every detail from my conversations with the President, but, to the best of my recollection, I have tried to include information that may be relevant to the Committee.

January 6 Briefing

James Comey (Credit: ABC News)

“I first met then-President-Elect Trump on Friday, January 6 in a conference room at Trump Tower in New York. I was there with other Intelligence Community (IC) leaders to brief him and his new national security team on the findings of an IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the election. At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.

The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.

The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect. Although we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I were concerned that the briefing might create a situation where a new President came into office uncertain about whether the FBI was conducting a counter-intelligence investigation of his personal conduct.

It is important to understand that FBI counter-intelligence investigations are different than the more-commonly known criminal investigative work. The Bureau’s goal in a counter-intelligence investigation is to understand the technical and human methods that hostile foreign powers are using to influence the United States or to steal our secrets. The FBI uses that understanding to disrupt those efforts. Sometimes disruption takes the form of alerting a person who is targeted for recruitment or influence by the foreign power. Sometimes it involves hardening a computer system that is being attacked. Sometimes it involves “turning” the recruited person into a double-agent, or publicly calling out the behavior with sanctions or expulsions of embassy-based intelligence officers. On occasion, criminal prosecution is used to disrupt intelligence activities.

Because the nature of the hostile foreign nation is well known, counterintelligence investigations tend to be centered on individuals the FBI suspects to be witting or unwitting agents of that foreign power. When the FBI develops reason to believe an American has been targeted for recruitment by a foreign power or is covertly acting as an agent of the foreign power, the FBI will “open an investigation” on that American and use legal authorities to try to learn more about the nature of any relationship with the foreign power so it can be disrupted.

In that context, prior to the January 6 meeting, I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on President Elect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) — once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months — three in person and six on the phone.” (Read more: CNN, 6/8/2017)

In a Comey interview with George Stephanopolous on April 13, 2018, he admits to not telling Trump the Steele Dossier was paid for by his political opponents, Clinton and the DNC.  (YouTube clip, 4/13/2018)

James Rybicki (Credit: The Associated Press)

(…) “Comey claimed that he was compelled to brief Trump on the dossier because “CNN had [it]” and was “looking for a news hook.”

Hours before Comey briefed Trump, FBI chief of staff James Rybicki e-mailed staff that Comey “is coming into HQ briefly now for an update from the sensitive matter team.” Just as the same officials dubbed the Clinton e-mail investigation the “mid-year exam” and the anti-Trump counterintelligence investigation “Crossfire Hurricane,” they also used various phrases using “sensitive” to refer obliquely to the dossier.

Two days after the briefing, on January 8, 2017, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who earlier this year was fired and then referred for criminal prosecution by the DOJ inspector general for repeatedly lying about media leaks, wrote an e-mail to top FBI officials with the subject, “Flood is coming.”

“CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story,” McCabe wrote to Comey, Rybicki, and two others. “The trigger for them is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment.” He did not detail how he came to know what CNN’s “trigger” was for publishing the dossier briefing story.

Although the January 10 story from CNN also claimed that Trump was presented with a two-page summary of the dossier, which was not part of the official intelligence community assessment given to Trump, Comey himself later claimed that he did not give the two-page document to Trump, raising questions about whether McCabe himself was a source for CNN’s assertion that Trump had been given the entire two-page document during the briefing.

Shortly after sending his e-mail to Comey and other FBI officials, McCabe e-mailed then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and her deputy, Matthew Axelrod. McCabe used the subject line “News” in his e-mail to the DOJ officials.

“Just as an FYI, and as expected,” McCabe wrote, “it seems CNN is close to running a story about the sensitive reporting.” It is not clear how McCabe came to be so familiar with CNN’s understanding of the dossier, its briefing, or how close CNN was to reporting on the matter.

In a Monday letter to FBI director Christopher Wray, Sen. Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked the director to provide a list of all members of the “sensitive matters team” referenced by Rybicki in his January 6 e-mail. Johnson also requested that Wray provide all details about how FBI officials “first learned that media outlets, including CNN, may have possessed the Steele dossier.” (Read more: The Federalist, 5/22/2018)

The Trump Tower in New York City, December 2018. (Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

(…) Comey told Horowitz that the information he obtained from his conversation with Trump “ought to be treated…[like] FISA derived information or information in a [counterintelligence] investigation.” In other words, his meeting with Trump had very direct surveillance overtones and intentions—and directly counters what he had testified to Congress.

According to his Congressional testimony, Comey had told Trump at the Jan. 6, 2017, meeting that he was not under investigation by the FBI, noting, “sir, we’re not personally investigating you.”

Prior to the meeting with Trump at Trump Tower, Comey met with FBI officials involved in the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the Trump campaign to discuss a strategy to obtain information and how to memorialize it right after the meeting.

Comey told the IG that in advance of his meeting with President-elect Trump, he “met with senior leaders of the FBI, including his Chief of Staff James Rybicki, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, and the supervisors of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

According to the IG report, multiple FBI witnesses said the meeting was intended, in part, to see how President-elect Trump reacted to the allegations and whether he would reveal new information useful for their counterintelligence investigation.

(…) Comey’s meeting with Trump followed a formal briefing that Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and National Security Director James Clapper had provided to Obama just hours earlier regarding the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia hacking and election interference.

Comey outlined to the IG the details of the meeting that took place between only himself and Trump:

“At the conclusion of our session, the COS [Chief of Staff Priebus] asked whether there is anything we haven’t mentioned that they should know or that might come out. I said there was something that Clapper wanted me to speak to the PE [President-Elect] about alone or in a very small group…”

“…I then executed the session exactly as I had planned. I told him [President Trump] that I wanted to meet with him to tell him more about what is in the reports written by [redacted – likely Steele]. I said that the written reports themselves were [redacted] and the content known at IC senior level and that I didn’t want him caught cold by some of the detail…”

“I said the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013…I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [REDACTED] and that we were keeping it very close-hold.”

Notably, Comey only informed President Trump of the “salacious” details contained within the dossier. Comey would later tell CNN’s Jake Tapper that he did so “Because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community agreed he needed to be told about.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/02/2019)

(L-R) James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Adm. Michael Rogers testify about “worldwide cyber threats” during an open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee on September 10, 2015. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

(…) “On Friday, Jan. 6, 2017, Comey, along with CIA head John Brennan, national intelligence chief James Clapper, and NSA Director Mike Rogers, met with Trump in Trump Tower in New York. Together, they briefed the president-elect on the findings of the intelligence community investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

But the group, and especially Comey, had bigger plans than that. Before the meeting, they agreed that after briefing Trump on Russian efforts, the others would leave and Comey would stay to brief Trump alone about the Steele Moscow sex allegation.

Comey and top FBI officials prepared meticulously for the moment. The IG report says Comey had a planning meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, chief of staff James Rybicki, general counsel James Baker, and “the supervisors of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.” (It is unclear who was in that last group, although the now-famous FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page played large roles in the investigation.)

The IG report says the group “agreed that the briefing needed to be one-on-one so that Comey could present the ‘salacious’ information in the most discreet and least embarrassing way.” But however it was presented, the FBI leaders worried that Trump might “perceive the one-on-one briefing as an effort to hold information over him like a ‘Hoover-esque type of plot.'” That was a reference to the FBI’s notorious founding director J. Edgar Hoover, who relished keeping (and using) embarrassing secrets on top political leaders.

The group discussed how Trump might react. In particular, they considered whether he would “make statements about or provide information of value to the pending Russia interference investigation” known as “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Perhaps Trump would say something incriminating. The FBI officials made plans for Comey, immediately after leaving the meeting, to write down everything he could remember about whatever Trump said. Comey also wanted to discuss Trump’s reactions with top aides immediately. Comey told the inspector general it was “important for FBI executive managers to be ‘able to share in [Comey’s] recall of the salient details of those conversations.'” Bureau officials also wanted to be able to respond if Trump publicly “misrepresent[ed] what happened in the encounter.”

So, preparations were made. “Comey said he had a secure FBI laptop waiting for him in his FBI vehicle and that when he got into the vehicle, he was handed the laptop and ‘began typing as the vehicle moved,'” the report says. He worked on his account as the FBI car took him to the New York field office, where aides had set up a secure video teleconference with Rybicki, McCabe, Baker, and the “Crossfire Hurricane” supervisors. Comey continued to work on his memo after that and sent the group a final version the next day, Saturday, Jan. 7.

In his memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, Comey wrote that at the Trump Tower briefing he assured the president-elect, “We are not investigating you, sir.” At the moment Comey said those words, he had the “Crossfire Hurricane” team ready for a secure video conference on Trump’s response to the Steele dossier allegation.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 8/29/2019)

John Clapper and Jake Tapper (Credit: The Associated Press/CNN)

“…Clapper had personally briefed Tapper about the Comey-Trump meeting almost immediately after it occurred. We know this from findings contained within the House’s Final Report on Russian Active Measures:

“It is important to note that Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein of CNN reported on January 12, 2016 [original publication was on January 10, 2017], that President-elect Trump was briefed on classified information indicating that the Russians have compromising personal or financial information that the Russians could use against President-elect Trump.”

“The Committee’s investigation revealed that President-elect Trump was indeed briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier and when questioned by the Committee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence of the dossier to the media.”

Clapper at first denied leaking the information of the dossier and the Comey-Trump meeting, but ultimately acknowledged having done so:

“When initially asked about leaks related to the ICA in July 2017, former DNI Clapper flatly denied ‘discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.’ Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.”

“Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information,’ a two-page summary of which was ‘enclosed in’ the highly-classified version of the ICA.”

On Jan. 10, 2017, CNN published the article “Intel Chiefs Presented Trump With Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him.” The allegations within the dossier were made public, and with reporting of the briefings by intelligence community leaders, instant credibility was given to the dossier’s assertions. Immediately following the CNN story, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, and the Trump–Russia conspiracy was pushed into the mainstream.

On the following day, Jan. 11, 2017, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, Clapper issued a formal statement where he noted his “profound dismay at the leaks” and denied that the leaks came from within the Intelligence Community.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/02/2019)

James Clapper (Credit: The Federalist)

(…) “In one of the findings within the 253-page report, the House intelligence committee wrote that Clapper leaked details of a dossier briefing given to then-President-elect Donald Trump to CNN’s Jake Tapper, lied to Congress about the leak, and was rewarded with a CNN contract a few months later.

“Clapper flatly denied discussing the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists,’” the committee found.

When asked directly whether he had ever discussed the dossier with any journalists, Clapper replied that he had not, according to a transcript of the proceedings:

MR. ROONEY: Did you discuss the dossier or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking  of the 2016 election with journalists?

MR. CLAPPER: No.

The former DNI later changed his story after he was confronted specifically about his communications with Jake Tapper of CNN.

“Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic,” the report continued. “Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information,’ a two-page summary of which was ‘enclosed in’ the highly-classified version of the ICA,” or intelligence community assessment.” (Read more: The Federalist, 04/27/2018)

Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.

John Brennan, left, with Robert Mueller in 2013: The CIA director’s explosive conclusion in the ICA helped justify continuing Trump-Russia “collusion” investigations, notably Mueller’s probe as special counsel. (Credit: Bebeto Matthews/AP)

The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks [January 7, 2017], before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower” whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

John Durham (Credit: Department of Justice)

The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”

The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

“They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.

He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment that Putin personally ordered “active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was “weak.”

Adam Schiff: Soon after the Democrat took control of the House Intelligence Committee, its review of the drafting of the intelligence community assessment was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe. (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.

The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” which was the interagency analytical group Obama’s top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.

Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.

The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.

A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal investigation and  “only a witness to events that are under review.”  Durham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Andrea Kendall-Taylor: A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and recently defended the ICA in a “60 Minutes” interview. (Credit: 60 Minutes)

The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden Victory Fund.

Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC, a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.

It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined comment.

Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Russia’s election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case “based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it’s based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence.”

But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.

Eric Ciaramella: The Democratic national security “whistleblower,” whose complaint led to President Trump’s impeachment, was a close colleague of Kendall-Taylor. It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. (Credit: whitehouse.gov)

It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.

“Some of the FBI source’s [Steele’s] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment,” stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists. “The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’ “

Steele’s reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department’s inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele’s own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department’s watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the “Crown material,” was incorporated with the ICA because it was “corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment “The IC analysts found it credible on its face,” Comey said.

The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.

“The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election,” said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.

Ex-CIA officer Julia Gurganus with former deputy Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Brennan allies who worked on the Trump-Russia intelligence community assessment. (Credit: public domain)

Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence. “To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous,” she recently told NBC News.

Her boss during the ICA’s drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.

They, in turn, worked closely with NIC’s cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike’s president has testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)

Durham’s investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports.

No Input From CIA’s ‘Russia House’

The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.

“It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. “It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.”

The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.

The official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe.

The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.

“It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” as has been widely reported in the media, he said. “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”

Brennan’s tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.

In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

“The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump,” argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.

Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen Institute event. {Credit: Aspen Institute)

“Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported,” Warner added. “There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared.”

However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled “Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election.” Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with “varying substantiation” and with “differing confidence levels.” It also notes “concerns about the use of specific sources.”

Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his “fusion team” at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco’s role in the ICA is unclear.

Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.

Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.

“It’s dynamite,” said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.

“There are things in there that people don’t know,” he told RCI. “It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election.”

However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.

He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.

Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan’s questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said. (RealClearInvestigations, 9/24/2020)  (Archive)

(This and all other original articles created by RealClearInvestigations may be republished for free with attribution.)

The first important incident (or one of the first) in the metastasis of Clinton campaign “dirty tricks” into institutional resistance to the incoming Trump administration was the commissioning of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which sabotaged incoming Trump administration.

The commissioning of the ICA – and its use in destabilizing the new administration – was neatly choreographed by the outgoing Obama administration, the CIA and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) – so neatly choreographed that the coordination has almost entirely escaped public notice, with nearly all the relevant documents remaining shrouded in secrecy.

With the passage of time, it is difficult to fully recall that, early on, before the ICA, there was still agnosticism and even skepticism that Russia interfered in US election in order to elect Trump. Before the ICA, if any one individual was then blamed by Democrats for Clinton’s loss, it would have been James Comey, rather than Vladimir Putin. It was an innocent time when Comey’s announcement of the re-opening of the Clinton email investigation[1] in late October was viewed as more important to the election outcome than Buff Bernie Facebook ads.

As of December 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation had turned up nothing[2]. And despite all the “lock her up” rhetoric of the campaign, in his acceptance speech, Trump declared that he had moved on from such recriminations and would let bygones be bygones.

However, the ICA re-animated the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which, as manipulated by Comey, mutated into the Mueller inquisition. Equally important, the ICA allegations were institutionalized by the Senate SCI through the announcement of its own “bipartisan” investigation into the Russiagate allegations concurrent with the release of the ICA in January 2017.

The ICA’s effectiveness in destabilizing the new administration came from two widely publicized “findings”:

• That Russia agencies, under personal direction from Putin, had interfered in election on multiple fronts, not with a generalized intent of countering aggressive international interference by US-backed NGOs by exposing hypocrisy in US democracy, but with the specific intent of electing Trump. This claim led to the sensational portrayals of Trump as a sort of Manchurian candidate that undermined the incoming administration throughout its tenure;
• Its endorsement of the credibility of Steele and his “network”, together with the immediate leak to media that Steele dossier allegations had been included in the classified ICA and personally briefed to President-elect Trump.

Although the public ICA was very skimpy on facts and evidence (to say the least), it was wildly successful in creating suspicion about the incoming administration and institutionalizing an atmosphere in which there was a realistic prospect of a coalition of Democrats and McCain neocon Republicans could undo the 2016 election through impeachment – insurrection through lawfare, so to speak.  The SSCI investigation hung over the Trump administration even longer than the Mueller investigation, as the final results of this investigation were not published until August 2020 – just in time for the 2020 election campaign.  As with other key documents, the SSCI Report was heavily redacted. In particular, the sections containing the purported evidence for the most important ICA claims being more or less totally redacted.

In this article, I will re-visit available information on the origin and execution of the ICA. (Read more: Stephen McIntyre/Substack, 2/17/2024)  (Archive)

Part 2

Part 3

Matthew Axelrod (l), Andrew McCabe (c) and Sally Yates (Credit: public domain)

“Comey wrote in a January 7, 2017 email to FBI leadership that he told Trump that he was providing the briefing about the dossier because “media like CNN had [the dossier] and were looking for a news hook.”

“I said it was inflammatory stuff that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports,” Comey continued.

On January 8, 2017 then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe wrote to senior FBI leadership that “CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story … The trigger for them [CNN] is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment.”

McCabe, who was Lisa Page’s boss, also emailed then-deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then-principal deputy Attorney General Matthew Axelrod, saying, “Just an FYI, and as expected, it seems CNN is close to running a story about the sensitive reporting.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/14/2018)

Fiona Hill (Credit: public domain)

“Fiona Hill, who served as a top Russia adviser to President Donald Trump, testified at an impeachment hearing Thursday that a longtime Clinton insider showed her a copy of the Steele dossier a day before it was published by BuzzFeed News.

Hill testified that Strobe Talbott, the former president of the Brookings Institution, shared the salacious document with her on Jan. 9, 2017. At the time, Hill was a director at Brookings, a left-of-center foreign policy think tank. She joined the Trump White House in early 2017 as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council.

A day after Hill’s exchange with Talbott, BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Hillary Clinton and Strobe Talbott (Credit: Getty Images)

Hill’s testimony establishes yet another link between Steele’s dossier work and Clinton world. Talbott is a longtime Clinton associate who served in the Bill Clinton administration in the1990s. His brother-in-law is Cody Shearer, a Clinton-linked operative who is the author of a Trump dossier of his own that closely mirrors allegations made by Steele.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 11/21/2019)  (Archive)

Christopher Steele (Credit: public domain)

“A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Obama and Trump.

Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and it is also populated by the very wealthy.” (Read more: Buzzfeed, 1/10/2017)

In an October 24, 2019 court filing by Flynn attorney Sidney Powell, on page 15 she requests the phone records of James Clapper to confirm his contacts with Washington Post reporter, David Ignatius. In particular, she’s interested in getting a copy of a letter that Clapper sent to Ignatius, dated January 10, 2017, where Clapper asks that he “take the kill shot” on Lt. General Michael Flynn.

Two days later,  an article by Ignatius appears in the WaPo, dated January 12, 2017, titled “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” In it he writes the possible  “kill shot” and keep in mind, Ignatius allegedly had the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with Kislyak, thanks to the possible leak by ONA Director, Col. James H. Baker (see below).

Ignatius writes with attached links:

James Clapper, now a CNN contributor and outspoken critic of President Trump, is known for falsely testifying in front of Congress in March 2013 that the National Security Agency does not collect data from millions of Americans. (Credit: Graeme Jennings/Getty Images)

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius listens to introductions before his interview with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, hosted by the Center on International Cooperation, at New York University, April 29, 2015. (Credit: Richard Drew/The Associated Press)

Within the small group conducting the 2016 FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, the Steele Dossier was called “Crown Material“.  A name relating to Christopher Steele’s British intelligence position. [James Comey testimony to congress]

The “Crown Material” has become more interesting recently against the backdrop of U.S. Attorney John Durham seeking the documents and communication from former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey [SEE HERE] where John Brennan wanted the Crown Material (Steele Dossier) included the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.

However, there’s a coded email from Lisa Page, on January 10th, 2017, that might prove to be even more valuable for Mr. Durham as he investigates a possible conspiracy therein:

SOURCE: Page 365 of pdf

Note the highlighted box text in the email from Peter Strzok to members of the small group.

“CNN update – Per Rich, CNN to publish C material today betweeen 4 and 5″

The “C material” is a reference to “Crown Material”, and when put into context of the date and email participants this tells a remarkably explosive story.

FBI lawyer Lisa Page is forwarding an origination email from Peter Strzok and informing the FBI small group: Peter Strzok, Bill Priestap, Jonathan Moffa and Jennifer Boone, that “We have lots of details from [Mike] Kortan” for a briefing at 3:45 pm on January 10th.

“Kortan” is FBI Asst. Director of Media Comms Michael Kortan, who appears in multiple emails and text messages coordinating communication with the small group media allies.

However, for the context of this specific email, Peter Strzok has initiated contact with CNN to leak a story… and Strzok is informing the group that CNN will publish the “C Material”, or a story predicated on the Steele Dossier, on January 10th, 2017, between 4 and 5 pm.   That is Jake Tappers’ hour for broadcast.

What “C Material” did FBI Agent Peter Strzok leak to CNN, that FBI Spokesperson Mike Kortan confirmed for the FBI?

Here’s the January 10th, 2017, story from Tapper.  WATCH:

There is no doubt the FBI small group shared the information about the Steele Dossier with the CNN stenographers in a collaborative effort to generate the illusion of enhanced credibility for the Steele Dossier; a document they knew was demonstrably fraudulent, yet they relied upon it for the Carter Page FISA application.

That would be a clear “conspiracy”.

I find it curious that IG Horowitz could not find this email in his latest investigation.

Additionally, the Lisa Page FBI email, highlighting an internal “conspiracy”, becomes even more interesting when overlaying the third conspiracy referral previously mentioned by Devin Nunes:

The third conspiracy referral is less specific and pertains to evidence collected that shows a small group of government officials engaged in “global classified intelligence leaks” to the U.S. media and other entities and/or persons. (link)

My hunch is that email from Lisa Page is part of the evidence Nunes collected to show how the FBI manufactured “global classified intelligence leaks” to U.S. media.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 12/20/2019) (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 include an email dated January 10, 2017, in which Strzok said that the version of the dossier published by BuzzFeed was “identical” to the version given to the FBI by McCain and had “differences” from the dossier provided to the FBI by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and Mother Jones reporter David Corn. January 10, 2017, is the same day BuzzFeed published the anti-Trump dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, The emails also show Strzok and other FBI agents mocking President Trump a few weeks before he was inaugurated. In addition, the emails reveal that Strzok communicated with then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about the “leak investigation” tied to the Clinton Foundation (the very leak in which McCabe was later implicated).

(…) On January 10, 2017, Strzok, under the subject “RE: Buzzfeed published some of the reports,” writes: “Our internet system is blocking the site. I have the pdf via iPhone, but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what [Sen. John] McCain had (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson).”

Strzok sent the email to Page and several top-ranking FBI officials, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap, Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Jon Moffa, Assistant Director for Public Affairs Michael Kortan, General Counsel James Baker, and Director James Comey’s Chief of Staff James Rybicki.

Earlier, on January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier that Strzok said was “identical” to what McCain’s office had turned over to the FBI. Strzok sent theBuzzFeed-related email at 7:48 PM. At 8:23 PM on the same day, Strzok forwards to Page and several FBI officials an article by the UK outlet The Guardian titled “FBI chief given dossier by John McCain alleging secret Trump-Russia contacts.”

David Corn was one of Steele’s media contacts. Fusion GPS paid Steele, via funds from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to write the dossier. In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017, Simpson said he was not aware of any version of the Steele dossier being given to the FBI.

While acknowledging he had given the dossier to the FBI, McCain had denied being the source of the BuzzFeed dossier report. But court filings which were unsealed in March 2019 show the Arizona Republican senator and an associate had shared the dossier with several media outlets.

Former State Department official and McCain associate David Kramer said in a December 13, 2017, deposition that the dossier was given to him by Steele and he then provided it to journalists at outlets including CNN, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. The details were first reported by The Daily Caller.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 4/21/2020) (Archive)

In addition, Breitbart writes:

“Also David Kramer, a long-time adviser to late Senator John McCain, revealed in testimony that he met with two Obama administration officials to inquire about whether the anti-Trump dossier authored by was being taken seriously.  This was before Kramer obtained the dossier and McCain passed it officially to the FBI.

In a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that was later posted online, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December 2016 to meet about the dossier with Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry’s State Department, as well as an official from the National Security Council.

Nuland’s role in the dossier episode has been the subject of some controversy for her.

In their book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, authors and reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier’s claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.

TRANSCRIPT: But amidst all of that today there was the news broken by CNN tonight and
then bolstered later by Buzzfeed this evening about Russia. And on the
surface this looks like really red-hot stuff. I will tell you the amount
of it. It`s been verified by U.S. Intelligence agencies or by NBC news is
very thin. What we can tell you is that President Obama and the incoming
president and the gang of eight, leadership of both the house and the
senate, heads of the intelligence committees, they were all given a sort of
dossier of alleged dirt that the Russians allegedly say they allegedly have
on Donald Trump.

Alleged dirt that they allegedly used to allegedly cultivate him is
basically a Russian asset who would do what they want because he knew what
embarrassing stuff they had on him. Buzzfeed tonight then published what
is says are the 35 pages of raw material from which this dossier was built.
We have no way of knowing if anything in it is true or if this document
itself some kind of plant or dirty trick. The basic claim here though is
that all of these top officials, including the president elect have now
been given a summary of this information by the intelligence agencies.
Whether it`s true we don`t know.

Whether it is believed to be true by our intelligence agencies we don`t yet
know but I bet we`ll find out. If it is true, of course, and Donald Trump
is a Russian agent and knows he is one that`s the story of the century. If
it isn`t true, it`s nevertheless the biggest possible distraction at a time
when things are already really wobbly for the incoming administration and
this historically unpopular president-elect. Joining us now here in New
York is NBC News chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel. Richard?

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Good to talk to you.

MADDOW: Might be the story of the century. Might be – we don`t know.

ENGEL: It is very, very strange. And this has been bouncing around for
several months now. There have been a lot of allegations. I would even
call them rumors at this stage that the Russians put together a file on
Donald Trump, compromising material, compromising him financially,
compromising him personally –

MADDOW: Stuff that they – that he did that was bad that they had
documentation of?

ENGEL: That they caught him on trips to Russia and neighboring states
doing nefarious things and that they have evidence to back it up and that
he effectively fell victim to a Russian trap. This is the allegation. And
that they have assembled this file of compromising information on him and
that they are just waiting at any moment to either use it or use it to
blackmail him so he is a sort of a puppet. I have heard these allegations
for a long time. I have heard very, very specific allegations, times,
places, amounts of money, specific activities, I haven`t been able to prove
any of it. These allegations –

MADDOW: You have been chasing the story to see if you can document it?

ENGEL: I have called people in Russia, I have called leading experts, I
have tried to chase it down in this country and I`m not the only one.
Other reporters have been given this kind of material and have been looking
in to it and haven`t been able to prove it. And I called some of the
sources who were sending this my way, they said, ok, you have this
material, you say it is compromising as it is, show me the proof. Show me
these tapes that supposedly exist, show me the records of the money that
was supposedly paid. All of these things that these allegations that if
true would be incredibly compromising. So far I haven`t been able to find
anything. What`s interesting –

MADDOW: Why is this coming out now?

ENGEL: So, that`s what the interesting thing. There are lot of rumors.
These rumors have been circulating for months. Why would the intelligence
community then today boil it down to two pages and drop it like a bomb on
President-elect Trump, on many senior leaders in Washington.

MADDOW: Yes.

ENGEL: And on the president himself`s lap? Why do it right now? And
that`s the question. I was told by a senior intelligence source that the
reason they did it is the intelligence community is angry, the intelligence
community effectively wants to put him on notice saying, look, you are
saying all these things about Russia, be careful, there are all these
allegations out there. Are any of them true?

And I was told, “we can`t help you, Mr. Trump, unless you tell us more. We
need more input.”

MADDOW: These allegations are out there, we need to know if we need to be
taking care of this.

ENGEL: And lastly that there was a concern that these allegations just in
themselves could become a distraction and make it difficult for him to
govern.

MADDOW: Well yes. I mean you don`t have to – it doesn`t have to be true
for you to blackmail somebody with it, right? I mean I guess that`s –

ENGEL: I would treat them at this state with a lot of caution.

MADDOW: NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel. Richard thank
you for coming in to talk to us about this, weird news there, right man?
All right Brian Williams is up next for an hour of coverage followed

(Transcript)

The dossier is 35 pages long and has the following layout and structure (see the sample from page 13 below):

Section 1 – Company intelligence report number date/running total
Section 2 – Report subheading “Russia/USA Growing Backlash in Kremlin…”
Section 3 – Summary of report usually in bullet point format (the ‘raw intelligence’)
Section 4 – Detailed discussion of summary points with a citation of sources

Dossier sample report

The dossier reports contain multiple PDF page image sizes and exhibit post-production processing such as handwritten page numbers and highlighted text. They are not sequential and are spaced unevenly. It is unclear if the report numbering applies just to the dossier or if it’s a running total of all the reports produced by Orbis for multiple customers in that time frame. These gaps strongly suggest that some of the reports have been removed from the final distribution. It’s clear from the visual evidence that some of the reports have formatting problems and that they were scanned multiple times. As can be seen from the table below some reports contain data entry errors (e.g. report 86 is dated 20-Jul-2015) which suggest some haste and carelessness in their preparation and poor review prior to publication.

The reports production schedule and volume are also problematic. As can gleaned from the above frequency graph, the report numbers between Oct-20th to Dec-13th spike from 136 to 166.

The “Count Increase” is an anomaly because the report number and dates (see above table) do not follow his average production rates and could indicate that Steele is gaming the numbers by creating fictitious report numbers, deleting ‘problematic’ reports, or altering their composition dates.” (Read more: Apelbaum, 3/17/2018)  (Archive)

The Steele Dossier by The Conservative Treehouse on Scribd

John McCain, Glenn Simpson and David Corn (Credit: public domain)

(…) “We know from public testimony that dossier author and former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele shared his findings with the FBI in summer and fall 2016 before he was terminated as a confidential source for inappropriate media contacts.

And we learned that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) provided a copy to the FBI after the November 2016 election — out of a sense of duty, his office says.

Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.

Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.

That revelation is in an email that disgraced FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote to FBI executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

“Our internal system is blocking the site,” Strzok wrote of the document posted on BuzzFeed. “I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what McCain had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)”

The significance of Strzok’s email is obvious to investigators who reviewed it in recent days. The FBI is supposed to be immune to manipulation by circular information flows, especially with sensitive investigations such as evaluating whether a foreign power tampered with an American election.

Yet, in this case, the generally same information kept walking through the FBI’s door for months — recycled each time by a new character with ties to Hillary Clinton or hatred for Trump — until someone decided they had to act.

That someone was Strzok, whose own anti-Trump bias was laid bare by his personal text messages. He first opened a case on Russia-Trump collusion on July 31, 2016 after the first flow of information, then escalated to get a warrant targeting a former Trump adviser in October after a second flurry of allegations.

The pattern is so troubling that one investigator said this to me: “The dossier and its related dirt was on a circular flight path aboard a courier service called ‘Air Clinton,’ and the FBI kept signing for the packages.” (Read more: The Hill, 7/10/2018)

Peter Strzok (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“A newly revealed text message suggests that former FBI official Peter Strzok sought to capitalize on news reports in January 2017 that President Donald Trump had been briefed about allegations in the infamous Steele dossier.

Strzok wanted to use a CNN report related to the dossier as a reason to interview witnesses as part of the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government, according to the text message.

“Sitting with Bill watching CNN. A TON more out,” Strzok, a former FBI counterintelligence official, texted to FBI lawyer Lisa Page on Jan. 10, 2017.

“Hey let me know when you can talk. We’re discussing whether, now that this is out, we use it as a pretext to go interview some people,” continued Strzok, according to a CNN report published Friday.

Just before Strzok sent the message, CNN had reported that top government officials, including then-FBI Director James Comey, briefed then-President-Elect Trump on Jan. 6, 2017 about some of the salacious allegations in the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by Democrats.

Hours after CNN reported about the briefing, BuzzFeed News published the unverified dossier in full.

It is not clear why Strzok needed the CNN report as a pretext to conduct interviews.

Strzok took part in some of those interviews as the FBI’s lead investigator on the probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. He and another FBI agent interviewed then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017. Flynn has since pleaded guilty to lying in that interview about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/14/2018)

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

(CNN also reports that Christopher Steele was vetted and is a credible source.)

On January 10, 2017, FBI analysts knew it was so bad that they “all went and purchased professional liability insurance.” The same employees worried that “the whole thing is pretty ugly…we shall see how things pan out” and “[t]he concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ and the NYT among others was going to do a piece.” Further, “the new AG might have some questions…then yada yada yada…we all get screwed.” Exhibit A (emphasis added).

FBI Texts – page 8

“In addition to the Trump transition team and NBC reporting, Fox News is now also reporting the original claims by CNN were entirely manufactured, “fake news” by four CNN agenda-driven reporters:

(L-R) Jake Tapper, Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez and Carl Bernstein (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Nothing reported as fact by the CNN constructionists actually took place.  Against, the backdrop of CNN’s destroyed credibility, pundit Anderson Cooper attempts to obfuscate and push back against the collapse during a contentious interview with Kellyanne Conway:

Despite Anderson Cooper’s professional pearl-clutching, even the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper issued a statement refuting the CNN construct:

(Conservative Treehouse, 1/12/2017)

[It is later learned in March 2018, that James Clapper leaked to Jake Tapper immediately after Comey left Trump Tower on Jan 6, 2017.]

Michael Avenatti and Alexandra Chalupa have dinner in August 2018. (Credit: Facebook)

“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact on the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

(…) Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s regime while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime.

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”

Revelations about Ukraine’s anti-Trump efforts could further set back those efforts. (Read more: Politico, 1/11/2017)

“The newly released records include a January 11, 2017, email from Strzok to Lisa Page, Priestap, and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Jon Moffa, a New York Times report which refers to the dossier as containing “unsubstantiated accounts” and “unproven claims.” In the email, Strzok comments on the article, calling it “Pretty good reporting.” (Judicial Watch, 7/17/2020)

“Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details — unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats — were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report.

The consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day. Word of the summary, which was also given to President Obama and congressional leaders, leaked to CNN Tuesday, and the rest of the media followed with sensational reports.

Mr. Trump denounced the unproven claims Wednesday as a fabrication, a Nazi-style smear concocted by “sick people.” It has further undermined his relationship with the intelligence agencies and cast a shadow over the new administration.

Late Wednesday night, after speaking with Mr. Trump, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued a statement decrying leaks about the matter and saying of Mr. Steele’s dossier that the intelligence agencies have “not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.” Mr. Clapper suggested that intelligence officials had nonetheless shared it to give policymakers “the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” (Read more: The New York Times, 1/11/2017)

Sir Mark Lyall Grant resigns as UK’s National Security Advisor in February 2017. (Credit: Reuters)

On page 30 of Sidney Powell’s most recent court filing on behalf of Lt. General Flynn, she states there is a letter written by the UK’s National Security Advisor, Sir Mark Lyall Grant,  that questions Christopher Steele’s credibility, undermines Russiagate, and it is being suppressed. The letter was hand-delivered to the incoming National Security team in New York. Powell writes:

Michael Horowitz (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

“The Justice Department inspector general’s office said on Thursday it would open an investigation into the decision in October by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, to inform Congress about a new review in the Hillary Clinton email investigation — a move Mrs. Clinton has said cost her the election.

The inquiry is not a blow for Mr. Comey only. It also draws negative attention again to the F.B.I. on an issue that agents had hoped was behind them.

The inspector general’s office said the investigation had come in response to complaints from members of Congress and the public about actions by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department during the campaign that might be seen as politically motivated.

Chief among those actions was the decision by Mr. Comey to write two letters on the email matter within 11 days of the election, creating a wave of damaging news stories about the controversy late in the campaign. In the end, the new emails that the F.B.I. reviewed — which came up during an unrelated inquiry into Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin — proved irrelevant.

But the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, said he would also be examining other issues, including whether the deputy director of the F.B.I., whose wife ran as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate, should have recused himself from any involvement in the Clinton email investigation. Another issue is whether a top Justice Department official gave information to the Clinton campaign.” (Read more: New York Times, 01/12/2017)

Sean Newell

Sean Newell, deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control at the Justice Department.

Newell may have been the assistant to Laufman who took part in the January 2017 interview with Steele’s source. The IG report said that a deputy to Laufman conducted the second half of the interview with the Steele source.

(DOJ OIG FISA Report – Pg. 185)

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

And the larger intelligence community had decided it did not want to vouch for the Steele dossier in its official Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

It was in that environment in the final days of the Obama administration that Clapper had written Comey earlier on Jan. 11, 2017 to inform the FBI that Clapper had decided to release a public statement declaring that the Steele dossier was only mentioned in an appendix to the intel community’s report because the “IC has not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.”

Comey tried to push back, suggesting Steele was deemed reliable (he actually had been terminated by the FBI for leaking by that time) and that his network included sources that might be in a position to know things (although the key source had already disavowed the information attributed to him in the dossier).

(Comey email to Clapper)

Then Comey added the line that undercut his argument: “That said, we are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting to include it in the body of the report.”

You can read the full memo here:

 ComeyClapperMemo1-12-17.pdf

(Read more: JustTheNews, 2/15/2021)  (Archive)

David Ignatius (l) and Michael Flynn

David Ignatius writes:

(…) Question 3: What discussions has the Trump team had with Russian officials about future relations? Trump said Wednesday that his relationship with President Vladimir Putin is “an asset, not a liability.” Fair enough, but until he’s president, Trump needs to let Obama manage U.S.-Russia policy.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, cultivates close Russian contacts. He has appeared on Russia Today and received a speaking fee from the cable network, which was described in last week’s unclassified intelligence briefing on Russian hacking as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

If the Trump team’s contacts helped discourage the Russians from a counter-retaliation, maybe that’s a good thing. But we ought to know the facts. (Read more: Washington Post, 1/12/2017)  (Archive)

On January 13, 2017, FBI employees messaged that “someone leaked the Flynn calls with Kislyak to the WSJ.”

In a response reeking with sarcasm, an FBI employee messaged

“I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ll resume my duties as Chief Morale Officer and rectify that.”

FBI Texts – page 8

In a January 2017 email, Strzok takes issue with a UK Independent report which claimed Steele had suspected there was a “cabal” within the FBI which put the Clinton email investigation above the Trump-Russia probe. Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent, was at the heart of both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations. (Judicial Watch, 7/17/2020)

(UK, Independent, 7/13/2017)

(…) In the same month Mr Steele produced a memo, which went to the FBI, stating that Mr Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine. Four days later Mr Trump stated that he would recognise Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. A month later officials involved in his campaign asked the Republican party’s election platform to remove a pledge for military assistance to the Ukrainian government against separatist rebels in the east of the country.

Mr Steele claimed that the Trump campaign was taking this path because it was aware that the Russians were hacking Democratic Party emails. No evidence of this has been made public, but the same day that Mr Trump spoke about Crimea he called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.

The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.” (UK, Independent, 1/13/2017)

(…) The FBI’s probe of the Clinton Foundation is actually a compartmentalized investigation. Field offices in Los Angeles and New York are spearheading the case but other offices are involved and contributing, sources said.

According to federal sources, transactions linked to Clinton corporate holdings have raised several regulatory eyebrows even beyond of the Justice Department, specifically in the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that reports to the Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. FinCEN’s mission is to combat and pinpoint money laundering for personal profit or underwriting terrorism through the collection, analysis, and dissemination of financial intelligence and strategic use of financial authorities, namely banks and investment houses.

According to federal sources, FinCEN is warehousing numerous Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) forwarded to Treasury from financial institutions for transactions from Clinton-owned entities, both in the United States and globally, all triggered by anti-money laundering safeguards. These reports are confidential but federal agents are using these filings as key pieces to the Clinton Foundation financial puzzle.

According to details gleaned from FinCEN, federal agents acknowledge the Clinton Foundation operates a menagerie of subsidiaries and corporate structures beyond the parent charity. According to law enforcement sources, the FinCEN revelations coupled with the emails recovered by the NYPD detail a complex myriad of shell corporations linked to the Clintons and their charity. FBI sources describe these financial entanglements as vast and global. And many defy normal operating procedures of legitimate charities, officials said.

Has the Clinton Foundation underwritten or profited from linked terror groups per the intelligence warehoused in FinCEN’s vast Treasury database? It is distinctly possible the Clinton Foundation has conducted business — knowingly or not — with terror-backed financial concerns or groups, federal agents said, especially because these are the exact suspicious transactions the U.S. Treasury mandates compliance and security officials in U.S. financial institutions to report to FinCEN under threat of hefty fines and imprisonment.

Triggered by such anti-money laundering controls, federal investigators, for example, said they have examined a Clinton-affiliated offshore entity that essentially is a multi-million dollar private for-profit equity firm operated like an unsanctioned U.S. hedge fund outside the regulatory reach of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That for-profit business however, is controlled by New York-based Clinton Foundation, a not-for-profit registered charity. Also, while the profits of the offshore company are taxable in its foreign domicile, the parent company — the Clinton Foundation — is exempt from the same annual taxes in the United States.

Likewise, because the affiliate of the Clinton Foundation operates as a private offshore company, no one — including regulators in the United States — is privy to its clients, its investments or whether it perhaps served as a front company to secretly commission pay-for-play political schemes and favors during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The challenge for the investigators? The Clinton Foundation and family have dozens of such affiliates and companies, an intricate corporate tapestry confusing to outsiders and intentionally complex by design.That’s why FBI agents in more than five separate field offices are working this case, federal sources said.”  (Read more: The True Pundit, 1/15/2017)  (Archive)

Vice-president Joe Biden met with Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko on his last foreign trip before leaving office. (Credit:: TASS / Barcroft Images)

“Vice-president Joe Biden, on a last foreign trip before leaving office, met Ukraine’s president on Monday and called on the incoming Donald Trump administration to retain Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.

Biden’s comments at a briefing with Petro Poroshenko came after Trump indicated in an interview with the Times and Bild that he could end sanctions imposed in the aftermath Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, in return for a nuclear arms reduction deal.

Trump’s attitude to Russia and praise for Vladimir Putin has been a consistently controversial feature of his rise to the White House, which will be completed with his inauguration in Washington on Friday.

US intelligence agencies believe Russia sought to covertly influence the US election in Trump’s favour and against the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump has recently admitted that he believes Russia did orchestrate such hacks, but has nonetheless fuelled a bitter feud with intelligence officials over the issue.

“The international community must continue to stand as one against Russian coercion and aggression,” Biden told reporters, standing alongside Poroshenko, in remarks which did not include reference to Trump by name.

“The Crimea-related sanctions against Russia must remain in place until Russia returns full control to the people of Ukraine.”

I’ve been waiting for anyone to be able to explain to me how CNN was able to report on air the ‘Dossier’ contained OPPOSITION RESEARCH 3 days BEFORE Trump’s inauguration when that wasn’t reported until Oct. 2017!
Anyone?https://t.co/iJWuHKefrD

— David Gray (@DGrayTexas45) April 20, 2023

CNN reporting on the “Russian Dossier” on January 17, 2017 (THREE DAYS BEFORE TRUMP’S INAUGURATION) included “OPPOSITION RESEARCH” in this report. NINE months later they report the Dossier was paid for by Clinton and the DNC for “opposition research”. CNN obviously knew this “RUSSIAN DOSSIER” was “OPPOSITION RESEARCH” bought and paid for by the Democrats…the OPPOSITION. Then for nine months they reported how the Dossier was used to obtain FISA warrants and used as a “road map for the FBI investigation” and NEVER said a word.

Lisa Page (Credit: public domain)

Ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose Trump-bashing texts made it clear who she backed in the 2016 presidential election, refers in a newly revealed message to serving as an intern “under Clinton.”

Page, who exchanged tens of thousands of texts with disgraced FBI official Peter Strzok, revealed the information in one message among a new batch exclusively obtained by Fox News.

“Get inspired and depressing reading that article about how Obama approached the mail room,” Page wrote Strzok on Jan. 19, 2017 – the last day of the Obama administration. “Needless to say, it was very different when I interned there under Clinton.”

The article they were discussing was a Jan. 17, 2017 story in the New York Times Magazine entitled “To Obama With Love, and Hate, and Desperation,” which described eight years of mail that poured through the mailroom.

In the text message exchange, Strzok tried to engage Page in a discussion about her time in the internship.

“How was it different?” he replied.

“Will have to talk in person,” answered Page. “It’s hard to describe. More of a rote have to respond to the mail exercise.”

It was not clear who exactly Page interned for or what she did. Page, 39, attended American University in Washington in the late 1990s, studying public affairs and earning her bachelor’s degree in 2000. (Read more: Fox News, 9/14/2018)

On June 21, 2013, Obama and Comey applaud outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller after Obama announces his nomination of Mr. Comey to the same office. (Credit: Michael Reynolds/EU Press)

Recent revelations reveal that Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s team was out to “get Trump”:

An FBI agent who played a lead role investigating Michael Flynn told the Justice Department there was never evidence of wrongdoing by the retired general or Russian collusion by President Trump, but the probe was kept open by Special Counsel Robert Mueller because his team had a “get Trump” goal, according to an explosive interview released Friday.

(…) In spite of the Left and Deep State efforts to distance and isolate the Obama-Biden White House from James Comey, Andy McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bob Mueller’s phony investigation meant to “get Trump,” we have seen a steady stream of stories and information tying the Obama-Biden White House to the scheme.  One of those stories, that Mueller’s team accidentally wiped their phones, prompted the ACLJ to submit yet another FOIA request just last week.

Yet now we know and can report that new documents turned over to the ACLJ through our FOIA litigation over Comey’s spies placed in the White House show that President Obama’s White House Counsel emailed Comey and McCabe the day before Inauguration Day, and attached a letter.  The FBI has withheld the actual letter from us, and we will be challenging that in court. Here is what the records we obtained actually show:

On January 19, 2017 (the night before the President Trump’s Inauguration) at 9:52 PM, James Comey emails his General Counsel James Baker an “FYI” and an attached pdf “Letter.”  The email is marked TOP SECRET. The email is a forwarded email that Neil Eggleston, President Obama’s White House Counsel, had sent to Comey and McCabe earlier that day, with the subject line “[TOP SECRET, Record],” and an attached Letter, and says, “Director and Deputy Director – Please see the attached letter.”

Eggleston Letter, 1/19/2017

Another FBI record the ACLJ obtained in this FOIA lawsuit shows that a meeting was organized by James Comey with a participant whose name has been redacted. That meeting was set for April 10, 2017, at 1:00 pm, in Room 7062 (the 7th floor).  The redacted name of the person with whom Comey set the meeting notice could only be a communication with or about, or regarding Anthony Ferrante, Jordan Rae Kelly, or Tashina Gauhar, in order for it to be responsive to the ACLJ’s request.”

(Read more: ACLJ, 9/26/2020)  (Archive)

(…) “In addition to being a Clinton Foundation donor, Pinchuk is also on the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council – a NATO-aligned American think tank specializing in the field of international affairs.

Pinchuk’s fellow Advisory Board members are industry leaders and former heads of state.

Their Board of Directors list is equally – if not more – impressive.

The Atlantic Council has been historically active in Ukraine through its Ukraine in Europe Initiative. More recently, on January 19, 2017, the Atlantic Council announced a partnership with Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Group.

A conference on the U.S.-Ukraine partnership, energy independence and security, as well as prospects for the Ukrainian economy was held on April 17, 2018. It was hosted by a globally recognized non-governmental U.S. think tank Atlantic Council and Ukraine’s largest private gas producer Burisma Group with support from the Kharkiv Regional Administration. The forum was attended by the Kharkiv Governor Yuliya Svitlychna, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Roman Popadiuk, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Evelyn Farkas, President of U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC) Morgan Williams and Advisor to the Board of Directors at Burisma Group and Chairman of the Board at the Association of Ukrainian Gas Producers Vadym Pozharskyi. (Credit: 112 Ukraine News)

Hunter Biden, former VP Joe Biden’s son, sits on Burisma’s board.

Biden was placed on Burisma’s board after Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt held a phone conversation regarding the installation of Arseniy Yatsenyuk in place of then-President Yanukovych. Need for support from VP Biden was noted (more here):

On or before February 4, 2014 – Call between Pyatt and Nuland discussing removal of Yanukovych and installation of Yatsenyuk.

February 22, 2014 – Yanukovych was removed as President of Ukraine.

February 27, 2014 – Yatsenyuk was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk would resign in April 2016 amidst corruption accusations.

April 18, 2014 – Hunter Biden was appointed to the Board of Directors for Burisma – one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine.

April 22, 2014 – VP Biden travels to Ukraine and offers support and $50 million in aid for Yatsenyuk’s shaky new government.

The Atlantic Council, along with the Brookings Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, were the subject of an unflattering portrayal in a New York Times article, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks:

More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign governments. And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law.

As a result, policymakers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in funding the research.

The arrangements involve Washington’s most influential think tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council.

Each is a major recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and organizing private briefings for senior United States government officials that typically align with the foreign governments’ agendas.

Some interesting connections run through the Atlantic Council.” (Read more: themarketswork, 3/11/2018)

The Atlantic Council has its own page on Burisma Holding’s website. (Credit: Burisma Holding)

“The shady arrangement between the Atlantic Council and Burisma – the gas company at the center of the ‘Ukrainegate’ scandal – is just one dubious deal out of many at a DC think tank that has become a clearinghouse for legal corruption.

With its relentless focus on corruption in Russia and Ukraine, the Atlantic Council has distinguished itself from other top-flight think tanks in Washington. Over the past several years, it has held innumerable conferences and panel discussions issued a string of reports and published literally hundreds of essays on Russia’s “kleptocracy” and the scourge of Kremlin disinformation.

At the same time, this institution has posed as a faithful partner to Ukraine’s imperiled democracy, organizing countless programs on the urgency of economic reforms to tamp down on corruption in the country.

But behind the curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold.

(…) Even with Hunter Biden on his company’s board, Zlochevsky was still seeking influential allies in Washington. He found them at the Atlantic Council in 2017, literally hours after he was cleared of corruption charges in Ukraine.

Joe Biden speaks to the Atlantic Council in August, 2014. (Credit: public domain)

On January 19, 2017 – just two days after the investigation of Zlochevsky ended – Burisma announced a major “cooperative agreement” with the Atlantic Council. “It became possible to sign a cooperative agreement between Burisma and the Atlantic Council after all charges against Burisma Group companies and its owner [Mykola] Zlochevskyi were withdrawn,” the Kyiv Post reported at the time.

The deal was inked by the director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia program, a former US ambassador to Ukraine named John Herbst.

Since then, Burisma helped bankroll Atlantic Council programming, including an energy security conference held this May in Monaco, where Zlochevsky currently lives.

“[Zlochevsky] invited them purely for whitewashing purposes, to put them on the façade and make this company look nice,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, said of the Monaco event to the Financial Times.

Burisma Group in partnership with HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco June 2, 2016, in Monte Carlo, attends a forum on “Energy Security for the Future. Hunter Biden is also listed as a guest speaker. (Credit: public domain)

At one such conference in Monaco, then-Burisma board member Hunter Biden declared, “One of the reasons that I am proud to be a member of the board at Burisma is that I believe we are trying to figure out the way to create a radical change in the way we look at energy.” (Hunter Biden left Burisma with $850,000 in earnings when his father launched his presidential campaign this year).

While the Atlantic Council was bringing Burisma in from the cold, the company was still too toxic for much of the business world to touch.

As the Financial Times noted, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine had rejected Burisma’s application for membership. “We’ve never worked with them for integrity reasons. Never passed our due diligence,” a Western financial institution told the newspaper.

“The company just does not pass the smell test,” a businessman in Ukraine commented to the Financial Times. “Their reputation is far from squeaky clean because of their baggage, the background and attempts to whitewash by bringing in recognizable Western names on to the board.”

In fact, a year before the Atlantic Council initiated its partnership with Burisma, the think tank published a paper describing Zlochevsky as “openly on the take” and deriding board members Hunter Biden and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski as his “trophy foreigners.” (Kwasniewski is today a member of the Atlantic Council’s international advisory board).

For Herbst, however, Burisma’s generosity seemed too hard to resist.

“If there are companies that want to support my work, if those companies are not doing anything that I know to be illegal or unethical, I’ll consider their support,” Herbst stated in reply to questions about the Burisma partnership from the Ukrainian news site, Hromadske.

“They’ve been good partners,” he added.” (Read more: The GrayZone, 10/13/2019)  (Archive)

Donald Trump takes his oath of office on January 20, 2017. (Credit: The Associated Press)

“Judicial Watch today released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents, 38 pages and 48 pages, showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).

Judicial Watch obtained the documents through a June 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a February 2018 request seeking records of the Obama State Department’s last-minute efforts to share classified information about Russia election interference issues with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv-01381)).

The documents reveal the Obama State Department urgently gathering classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.

• In a Thursday, January 5, 2017, email chain then-State Department Congressional Advisor Hera Abassi indicates that then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland’s bureau was attempting to get Russian investigation related documents to the office of Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) office as quickly as possible. (In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.)

In the email, with the subject line “For Immediate Review – Call Sheet for S Call with Senator Warner,” Abassi writes:

“I told Cardin’s folks … that the process is long. Can we ensure that there are no holdups on our end?”

Minutes later, Abassi confirms that Nuland was fully aware of the information that the State Department was providing to members of Congress alleging Russia interference information:

“This is definitely on EUR A/S radar!”

• Leaving no doubt that the State Department officials knew they were transmitting classified information, in a Wednesday, January 18, 2017, email with the subject line “Cables/M,” Former Foreign Service Officer Kerem Bilge writes to State Department Congressional advisor Hilary Johnson and others: “Highest class is SECRET/NOFORN.”

Johnson replies:

“FYI – so we can keep the SECRET/NOFORN header, and should declassify it 25 years from tomorrow.

“I forwarded the fully cleared version to the two of you on the high side [Editor’s Note: “high side” is State Department term for high security classification system], but let me know if there’s anything else you need from me on this.

“Note: we’ll need to make sure there is someone in Senate security tomorrow who can accept these.”

• On Wednesday, January 18, 2017, Johnson confirms that classified documents were sent to Senator Corker in addition to Senator Cardin. “Flagging that I sent you a high side request for clearance of the draft transmittal letter to send documents to Senators Corker and Cardin.”

Additionally, involved in providing classified information to members of the Senate was Naz Durakoglu, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs. In an email dated Thursday, January 19, 2017, with the subject line “Signed, sealed, delivered” Durakoglu apparently confirms that Obama State Department officials were eager to provide the classified material before Trump was sworn into office: “We made the deadline!” Durakoglu states [Emphasis added] “Thank you everyone for what was truly a Department-wide effort!”

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 12/14/2018)

Snippet of Podesta email

“Did billionaire speculator George Soros, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and Obama/Clinton adviser John Podesta conspire to overthrow the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and replace him with a radical, Pope Francis? Did they use America’s intelligence agencies, and our nation’s diplomatic machinery, political muscle, and financial power to coerce and blackmail “regime change” in the Roman Catholic Church?

Far from being some wild conspiracy theory, there is sound prima facie evidence to indicate that this is a serious effort to expose a political scandal of the highest order, involving flagrant, criminal abuse of power at the top levels of the U.S. government. A group of respected Catholic lay leaders have sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to launch an official investigation into the activities of the above-mentioned individuals (and others) who appear to have been involved in this alleged Vatican coup. They cite eight specific questions they seek to have answered concerning suspect events that led to the resignation of Pope Benedict, the first such papal abdication in 700 years.

“Specifically, we have reason to believe that a Vatican ‘regime change’ was engineered by the Obama administration,” say the petitioners, in their January 20 letter to President Trump. The five signatories to the letter, first published in the Catholic newspaper/weblog, The Remnant, are Lieutenant Colonel David L. Sonnier, US Army (Retired); Michael J. Matt, editor of The Remnant: Christopher A. Ferrara, author, attorney, and president of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, Inc.; Chris Jackson, Catholics4Trump.com; and, Elizabeth Yore, Esq., Founder of YoreChildren. (Read more: New American, 1/28/2017)  (Archive)

The letter was published by the Catholic newspaper, The Remnant, on January 22, 2017, with accompanying source links.

An Open Letter to President Donald Trump (20 January, 2017)

Pope Francis arrives to lead a special mass for the opening of the 20th Caritas Internationalis general assembly in Saint Peter’s basilica at the Vatican May 12, 2015. (Credit: Max Rossi/Reuters)

“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good,  America will cease to be great.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Dear President Trump:

The campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” resonated with millions of common Americans and your tenacity in pushing back against many of the most harmful recent trends has been most inspiring. We all look forward to seeing a continued reversal of the collectivist trends of recent decades.

Reversing recent collectivist trends will, by necessity, require a reversal of many of the actions taken by the previous administration.  Among those actions we believe that there is one that remains cloaked in secrecy.  Specifically, we have reason to believe that a Vatican “regime change” was engineered by the Obama administration.

We were alarmed to discover that, during the third year of the first term of the Obama administration your previous opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other government officials with whom she associated proposed a Catholic “revolution” in which the final demise of what was left of the Catholic Church in America would be realized.[1]  Approximately a year after this e-mail discussion, which was never intended to be made public, we find that Pope Benedict XVI abdicated under highly unusual circumstances and was replaced by a pope whose apparent mission is to provide a spiritual component to the radical ideological agenda of the international left. [2] The Pontificate of Pope Francis has subsequently called into question its own legitimacy on a multitude of occasions. [3]

During the 2016 presidential campaign we were astonished to witness Pope Francis actively campaigning against your proposed policies concerning the securing of our borders, and even going so far as to suggest that you are not a Christian [4].  We appreciated your prompt and pointed response to this disgraceful accusation [5].

We remain puzzled by the behavior of this ideologically charged Pope, whose mission seems to be one of advancing secular agendas of the left rather than guiding the Catholic Church in Her sacred mission.  It is simply not the proper role of a Pope to be involved in politics to the point that he is considered to be the leader of the international left.

While we share your stated goal for America, we believe that the path to “greatness” is for America to be “good” again, to paraphrase de Tocqueville.  We understand that good character cannot be forced on people, but the opportunity to live our lives as good Catholics has been made increasingly difficult by what appears to be a collusion between a hostile United States government and a pope who seems to hold as much ill will towards followers of perennial Catholic teachings as he seems to hold toward yourself.

With all of this in mind, and wishing the best for our country as well as for Catholics worldwide, we believe it to be the responsibility of loyal and informed United States Catholics to petition you to authorize an investigation into the following questions:

– To what end was the National Security Agency monitoring the conclave that elected Pope Francis? [6]

–  What other covert operations were carried out by US government operatives concerning the resignation of Pope Benedict or the conclave that elected Pope Francis?

–  Did US government operatives have contact with the “Cardinal Danneels Mafia”?  [7]

–  International monetary transactions with the Vatican were suspended during the last few days prior to the resignation of Pope Benedict.  Were any U.S. Government agencies involved in this? [8]

–  Why were international monetary transactions resumed on February 12, 2013, the day after Benedict XVI announced his resignation? Was this pure coincidence? [9]

–  What actions, if any, were actually taken by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and others tied to the Obama administration who were involved in the discussion proposing the fomenting of a “Catholic Spring”?

– What was the purpose and nature of the secret meeting between Vice President Joseph Biden and Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on or about June 3, 2011?

–   What roles were played by George Soros and other international financiers who may be currently residing in United States territory? [10]

We believe that the very existence of these unanswered questions provides sufficient evidence to warrant this request for an investigation.

Should such an investigation reveal that the U.S. government interfered inappropriately into the affairs of the Catholic Church, we further request the release of the results so that Catholics may request appropriate action from those elements of our hierarchy who remain loyal to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Please understand that we are not requesting an investigation into the Catholic Church; we are simply asking for an investigation into recent activities of the U.S. Government, of which you are now the chief executive.

Thank you again, and be assured of our most sincere prayers.

Respectfully,

David L. Sonnier, LTC US ARMY (Retired)
Michael J. Matt, Editor of The Remnant
Christopher A. Ferrara (President of The American Catholic Lawyers Association, Inc.)
Chris Jackson, Catholics4Trump.com
Elizabeth Yore, Esq., Founder of YoreChildren

1. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293
2.http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-pope-francis-became-the-leader-of-the-global-left-1482431940
3.http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2198-the-year-of-mercy-begins
4.http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/politics/pope-francis-trump-christian-wall/
5. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-response-to-the-pope
6. http://theeye-witness.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-compromised-conclave.html
7. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal-danneels-part-of-mafia-club-opposed-to-benedict-xvi
8. http://www.maurizioblondet.it/ratzinger-non-pote-ne-vendere-ne-comprare/
9. https://akacatholic.com/money-sex-and-modernism/
10. http://sorosfiles.com/soros/2013/03/soros-funded-catholic-groups-behind-african-socialist-as-next-pope.html

(…) A top foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. rejected warnings from a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist against forming a partnership with Burisma Holdings, the energy firm linked to Hunter Biden that has faced allegations of corruption.

Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of a Ukrainian group called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), contacted John Herbst, a director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, on Jan. 20, 2017, and asked him to reconsider plans to work with Burisma, newly released State Department emails show.

Kaleniuk alleged that Burisma was using the Atlantic Council to “clear up its reputation” following bribery investigations into the firm and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.

The activist said the Atlantic Council’s partnership with Zlochevsky “is a very painful backblow for us, and … for many other good people in Ukraine who strive for reforms.”

Kaleniuk forwarded the emails she sent to Herbst to State Department officials. The documents were published by the agency in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/11/2021)  (Archive)

(…) “Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that meeting in New York.

Anthony Ferrante speaks at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham College, August 2019. (Credit: Chris Taggart)

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Although Comey took many actions on his own, he was not working in isolation. One focus of Horowitz’s inquiry is the private Jan. 6, 2017, briefing Comey gave the president-elect in New York about material in the Democratic-commissioned dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Reports of that meeting were used days later by BuzzFeed, CNN, and other outlets as a news hook for reporting on the dossier’s lascivious and unsubstantiated claims.

Comey’s meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump — a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN.

Jordan Rae Kelly and Robert Mueller (Credit: public domain)

At the same time Comey was personally scrutinizing the president during meetings in the White House and phone conversations from the FBI, he had an agent inside the White House working on the Russia investigation, where he reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to officials familiar with the matter. The agent, Anthony Ferrante, who specialized in cybercrime, left the White House around the same time Comey was fired and soon joined a security consulting firm, where he contracted with BuzzFeed to lead the news site’s efforts to verify the Steele dossier, in connection with a defamation lawsuit.

Knowledgeable sources inside the Trump White House say Comey carved out an extraordinary new position for Ferrante, which allowed him to remain on reserve status at the FBI while working in the White House as a cybersecurity adviser.

“In an unprecedented action, Comey created a new FBI reserve position for Ferrante, enabling him to have an ongoing relationship with the agency, retaining his clearances and enabling him to come back in [to bureau headquarters],” said a former National Security Council official who requested anonymity.

“Between the election and April 2017, when Ferrante finally left the White House, the Trump NSC division supervisor was not allowed to get rid of Ferrante,” he added, “and Ferrante continued working — in direct conflict with the no-contact policy between the White House and the Department of Justice.”

Through a spokeswoman at FTI Consulting, which maintains the BuzzFeed contract, Ferrante declined to comment.

Another FBI official, Jordan Rae Kelly, who worked closely with Mueller when he headed the bureau, replaced Ferrante upon his White House exit (though she signed security logs for him to continue entering the White House as a visitor while he was working for BuzzFeed). Kelly left the White House last year and joined Ferrante at FTI Consulting.

Working with Comey liaison Ferrante at the NSC in early 2017 was another Obama holdover — Tashina Gauhar, who remains a top national security adviser at the Justice Department.

In January 2017, Gauhar assisted former acting Attorney General Sally Yates in the Flynn investigation. Later, she helped Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein resist, initially, Trump’s order to fire Comey. Gauhar also took copious notes during her meetings with White House lawyers, which were cited by Mueller in the section of his report dealing with obstruction of justice.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 7/22/2019)

Anthony Ferrante (Credit: public domain)

“Former FBI Director James Comey had an inside man at the White House, feeding the bureau information about President Trump and his aides in 2017.

Now this individual, who after leaving the government was hired by BuzzFeed to verify parts of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, may be tied to an investigation into alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ and the FBI being conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

This previously unreported mole in the White House appears in a new report by RealClearInvestigations that explored possible misconduct by Comey for what two U.S. officials described as essentially “running a covert operation against” the president even as he was assuring Trump he was not the subject of any investigation.

Anthony Ferrante, a longtime FBI official, worked as a cybersecurity adviser on the National Security Council. Officials said Ferrante was working in the White House even while the FBI held him on reserve status. All the while, he was sharing information about Trump and his aides back to FBI headquarters.

One former National Security Council official said Ferrante’s unique position was highly irregular.

“In an unprecedented action, Comey created a new FBI reserve position for Ferrante, enabling him to have an ongoing relationship with the agency, retaining his clearances and enabling him to come back in [to bureau headquarters],” the official said, adding that the NSC division supervisor was “not allowed to get rid of Ferrante” and that the arrangement appeared to be “in direct conflict with the no-contact policy between the White House and the Department of Justice.”

Ferrante left the White House in April 2017, not long before Trump fired Comey as FBI director. (Read more: Washington Examiner, July 22, 2019)

At 12:15pm on January 20th, 2017, Obama’s outgoing National Security Advisor Susan Rice writes a memo-to-self. Many people have called this her “CYA” (cover your ass) memo, from the position that Susan Rice was protecting herself from consequences if the scheme against President Trump was discovered. Here’s the email:

“A top Republican senator called the number of leaks during the first several months of President Trump’s tenure “completely out of control.”

Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo that there were dozens of leaks that threatened national security in those days and argued they were part of a scheme to “frustrate and sabotage” the Trump administration.

The leaks in that time period have taken on renewed significance as Attorney General William Barr has appointed multiple U.S. attorneys to review politically sensitive investigations, particularly the Russia investigation and the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn. As Democrats and former Obama administration officials shrug off what they have pegged as a toothless, manufactured controversy, Trump and his allies are pushing claims under the “Obamagate” banner that former President Barack Obama and his team schemed to undermine the Trump administration.

“A leak a day, 125 leaks in the first 126 days, and 62 of these leaks threatened national security, by President Obama’s own definition of that, because they were concerned about that as well,” Johnson said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.

“They had eight leaks of a similar nature in Obama vs. the Bush administration, about nine. They had 62. President Trump had 62 that threatened national security. It was completely out of control,” the Wisconsin Republican added before taking a swipe at the media for their role in disclosing sensitive information.

Claiming reporters were either “duped or complicit,” the senator said there appeared to be a dearth of self-reflection in the journalism field.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 5/31/2020)  (Archive)

James Clapper (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday that he has submitted his resignation to President Barack Obama and will not stay on past the transition to Donald Trump.

Clapper offered the news during his opening statement in a rare open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee after the panel’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said he had heard rumors that the spy chief might stay on into the Trump administration.

That’s not going to happen, Clapper said. “I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good,” he said. “I got 64 days left, and I think I’d have a hard time with my wife anything past that.”

Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who took on the intelligence director role in 2010, had long said he would be done after this year. He will finish out his term at noon on Jan. 20, his office said afterward.” (Read more: Politico, 11/17/2016)

Daniel J. Jones (Credit: The Guardian)

“New evidence suggests that a former top staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) may be directing the post-election efforts of Fusion GPS, a Democrat-linked political opposition research firm, to vindicate a series of memos alleging illegal collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials.

Congressional documents and recently leaked texts between Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and a registered foreign agent for a Russian aluminum oligarch indicate that Daniel J. Jones is intimately involved with ongoing efforts to retroactively validate a series of salacious and unverified memos produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, and Fusion GPS. The dossier, which declassified documents show was used as a basis for securing secret wiretaps on Trump campaign affiliates, was reportedly jointly funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

(…) “The former Feinstein staffer’s participation in ongoing efforts to retroactively validate the dossier was first publicly hinted at in January in several inquiry letters from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to various Democratic party leaders who were likely responsible for funding Fusion GPS’s 2016 dossier work, including John Podesta, Donna Brazile, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“Understanding the extent of the DNC’s knowledge of, and interactions with, Mr. Steele and others involved in Fusion GPS’s work is essential to this inquiry,” the two senators wrote.

“In light of this, by February 8, 2018, please answer the following questions and provide the following requested documents.” The twelfth item the lawmakers requested, which appears to be the first time Jones’s name was publicly mentioned in connection with the dossier, was all communications between the letters’ recipients and a host of characters involved with the dossier and its financing, creation, and dissemination:

“For the period from March 2016 through January 2017, please provide all communications to, from, copying, or relating to: Fusion GPS; Bean LLC; Glenn Simpson; Mary Jacoby; Peter Fritsch; Tom Catan; Jason Felch; Neil King; David Michaels; Taylor Sears; Patrick Corcoran; Laura Sego; Jay Bagwell; Erica Castro; Nellie Ohr; Rinat Akhmetshin; Ed Lieberman; Edward Baumgartner; Orbis Business Intelligence Limited; Orbis Business International Limited.; Walsingham Training Limited; Walsingham Partners Limited; Christopher Steele; Christopher Burrows; Sir Andrew Wood, Paul Hauser;4 Oleg Deripaska; Cody Shearer; Sidney Blumenthal; Jon Winer; Kathleen Kavalec; Victoria Nuland; Daniel Jones; Bruce Ohr; Peter Strzok; Andrew McCabe; James Baker; Sally Yates; Loretta Lynch; John Brennan.”

The grouping of the names is a story in itself: the first 15 names (through Nellie Ohr) are those of Fusion GPS’s principals and key staff in 2016; the next 12 (through Deripaska) are connected to Steele and a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the United States, the next two (Shearer and Blumenthal) are longtime Clinton hangers-on who reportedly wrote and disseminated their own dossier of unverified allegations; the next three are key Obama-era State Department officials who likely spread allegations about the Trump campaign throughout the government; then Jones; the next six are top Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who used the dossier to secure secret wiretaps on Trump affiliates; and the final name belongs to Obama’s CIA director.” (Read more: The Federalist, 2/20/2018)

Twitter user and independent researcher, Rosie memos@almostjingo, raises an interesting question after perusing a copy of Lt. General Michael Flynn’s Executive Branch Public Financial Disclosure Report (OGE Form 278e). He was required to submit this report after Trump appointed him as his National Security Advisor.

Flynn’s financial disclosure report was linked in this Hill report.

This Fox News report verifies Flynn was under FBI investigation at the same time he was a paid consultant for them.

How is it possible that one can be a FBI consultant and be under FBI investigation at the same time?

(Rosie Memos/Twitter, 5/17/2019)

♦ Strzok replies: “I know. I just talked with John, we’re getting together as soon as I get in to finish that write up for Andy [McCabe] this morning.” Strzok agrees with Page about being stressed that “THIS” could go off the rails…(Strzok’s meeting w Flynn the next day)

♦Why would Page & Strzok be stressed about “THIS” potentially going off the rails if everything was by the book?

BECAUSE IT WASN’T!

It was a conspiracy to entrap Gen Mike Flynn. All Strzok needed was an excuse to speak w Flynn. Everything in the 302 was likely fabricated.

♦February 14th, 2017, there is another note about the FBI reports filed from the interview.

Peter Strzok asks Lisa Page if FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is OK with his report: “Also, is Andy good with F-302?”

Lisa Page replies: “Launch on F 302”.

And we know from their discussions of manipulating FBI reports a year earlier, inside the Hillary Clinton investigation – that Peter Strzok has withheld information, and manipulated information, through use of the 302 reports:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/11/2018)

Robert Hannigan (Credit: GCHQ)

“The director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, is to stand down early for personal reasons, mainly health issues involving his wife and other family members.

Hannigan only took over at the UK’s surveillance agency in November 2014 to oversee a more open approach after revelations by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden put GCHQ on the defensive in 2013.

His sudden resignation – he informed staff just hours before making this decision public – prompted speculation that it might be related to British concerns over shared intelligence with the US in the wake of Donald Trump becoming president.

But the GCHQ press release stressed his decision was exclusively for family reasons. As well as his ill wife, Hannigan has two elderly parents to look after. He will remain in post until a successor is appointed.” (Read more: The Guardian, 1/23/2017)

Peter Strzok,  one of two FBI agents to interview Lt. General Michael Flynn. (Credit: Getty Images)

“Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who arranged the bureau’s interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 — the interview that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea on one count of making false statements — suggested Flynn not have a lawyer present at the session, according to newly-filed court documents. In addition, FBI officials, along with the two agents who interviewed Flynn, decided specifically not to warn him that there would be penalties for making false statements because the agents wanted to ensure that Flynn was “relaxed” during the session.

The new information, drawn from McCabe’s account of events plus the FBI agents’ write-up of the interview — the so-called 302 report — is contained in a sentencing memo filed Tuesday by Flynn’s defense team.

Citing McCabe’s account, the sentencing memo says that shortly after noon on Jan. 24 — the fourth day of the new Trump administration — McCabe called Flynn on a secure phone in Flynn’s West Wing office. The two men discussed business briefly and then McCabe said that he “felt that we needed to have two of our agents sit down” with Flynn to discuss Flynn’s talks with Russian officials during the presidential transition.

McCabe, by his own account, urged Flynn to talk to the agents alone, without a lawyer present. “I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Flynn] and the agents only,” McCabe wrote. “I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice. [Flynn] stated that this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants.”

Within two hours, the agents were in Flynn’s office. According to the 302 report quoted in the Flynn sentencing document, the agents said Flynn was “relaxed and jocular” and offered the agents “a little tour” of his part of the White House.

“The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview,” the Flynn memo says. According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials “decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport.”

The agents had, of course, seen transcripts of Flynn’s wiretapped conversations with Russian then-ambassador Sergey Kislyak. “Before the interview, FBI officials had also decided that if ‘Flynn said he did not remember something they knew he said, they would use the exact words Flynn used … to try to refresh his recollection. If Flynn still would not confirm what he said … they would not confront him or talk him through it,'” the Flynn memo says, citing the FBI 302. (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 12/11/2018)

Sally Yates testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on Capitol Hill May 8, 2017 (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“It is unclear why Yates was upset with the FBI for meeting with Flynn. She has since testified to the Senate that she informed the White House general counsel days after Flynn’s interview that she believed he was lying to the FBI.

Flynn was fired as national security adviser on Feb. 13, 2017. The White House claims he was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the details of his conversations with Kislyak.

According to Strzok, then-FBI Director James Comey “was going to tell Yates right before the interview, but she called him first for another reason before he had a chance to call.”

“When he told her the FBI was interviewing Flynn she was not happy,” reads the summary of the Strzok interview.

Strzok also referred to an argument between unidentified officials “about the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn.”

(Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/14/2018)

(Credit: CentipedeNation)

“FBI Agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka interviewed National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on January 24, 2017. According to documents presented in the court case, agent Peter Strzok did the questioning and agent Joe Pientka took most of the notes.

Following the interview agent Pientka then took his hand-written notes and generated an official FD-302; an FBI report of the interview itself. There has been a great deal of debate over the first draft, the original FD-302 as it was written by Joe Pientka. In the case against Flynn the DOJ prosecutors never presented the original Pientka 302.

On May 2, 2017, the DOJ, using new information gathered by U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, declassified and released a segment of James Comey testimony that was previously hidden.  Within the transcript Comey says Pientka wrote the Flynn 302 on January 24th immediately following the interview. Screengrab below – (pdf here).

Flynn Motion to Dismiss

That January 24, 2017, version of the 302 is the one that has gone missing.

(Timeline editor’s note: I’m including recently released text messages between Strzok and Page that may have relevance to this time)

People defending the FBI have even said it never existed.  However, the testimony of FBI Director James Comey proves the 302 was drafted on January 24th.

Additionally, recent evidence from Brady material turned over to the defense by auditing attorney Jeff Jensen showed FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI Agent Peter Strzok rewriting, editing and shaping the 302 on February 10, 2017, more than two weeks later:

Lisa Page is “pissed off” because Peter Strzok previously edited the 302 and she says he “didn’t even attempt to make this cogent and readable.”

Peter Strzok replies back to Lisa Page that he was “trying to completely re-write the thing so as to save Joe’s voice” because Joe Pientka was the actual author.

Peter Strzok is re-writing the interview notes of Pientka in order to construct the framework to accuse Flynn of lying. Lisa Page is editing the re-write to make it more cogent and readable.

The question has remained: Where is the original 302 report as written by Pientka?

While the question(s) around the missing original 302 have yet to be reconciled, one possible path to discover its location and a copy of its original content lies in the testimony of Sally Yates. Former DAG Sally Yates testified to Congress that after the Flynn interview DOJ-National Security Division:

“The DOJ-National Security Division received a detailed readout from the FBI agents who had interviewed Flynn.” Yates said she felt “it was important to get this information to the White House as quickly as possible.”

Yates is describing the Pientka 302. The Pientka 302 could have been received at the DOJ-NSD later in the evening of January 24th, or perhaps the morning of the 25th. Either is possible because Yates was having meetings about the topic.

The calendar of DOJ-NSD Associate Deputy AG Tashina Gauhar shows meetings with Sally Yates which align with the discussions of the Flynn interview and Yates receiving a summary on the 24th and the detail on the 25th:

Schedule of Associate Deputy Attorney General Tashina Gauhar

In the DOJ motion to dismiss the case against Flynn, the records indicate Yates received a summary of the interview the night of the 24th, and the full detailed record came on the morning of January 25th:

Aligning with what Sally Yates previously described, James Comey admits the FD-302 draft was written on January 24th, exactly as Sally Yates is describing:

Together with DOJ-NSD head Mary McCord, Sally Yates used the 302 from Joe Pientka to travel to the White House on January 26th and brief White House counsel Don McGahn about the Flynn interview contrast against the content of the previously captured call between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Lt. Gen Mike Flynn.

If the FBI search for the original Pientka 302 is mysteriously impossible, perhaps the DOJ should go and get the version that was received by the DOJ-NSD on the evening of January 24th, or the morning of January 25th, 2017.

Sally Yates had the original Pientka FD-302 report

Yates testimony below:

•Wednesday January 25th, 2017, – The Department of Justice, National Security Division, (at this timeframe Mary McCord was head of the DOJ-NSD) – received a detailed readout from the FBI agents who had interviewed Flynn. Yates said she felt “it was important to get this information to the White House as quickly as possible.”

•Thursday January 26th – (morning) Sally Yates called White House Counsel Don McGahn first thing that morning to tell him she had “a very sensitive matter” that had to be discussed face to face. McGahn agreed to meet with Yates later that afternoon.

•Thursday January 26th – (afternoon) Sally Yates traveled to the White House along with a senior member of the DOJ’s National Security Division, “who was overseeing the matter”, that is Mary McCord. This was Yates’ first meeting with McGahn in his office, which also acts as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

Yates said she began their meeting by laying out the media accounts and media statements made by Vice President Mike Pence and other high-ranking White House officials about General Flynn’s activity “that we knew not to be the truth.”

According to Sally Yates testimony, she and Mary McCord presented all the information to McGahn so the White House could take action that they deemed appropriate. When asked by McGahn if Flynn should be fired, Yates answered, “that really wasn’t our call.”

Yates also said her decision to notify the White House counsel had been discussed “at great length.” According to her testimony: “Certainly leading up to our notification on the 26th, it was a topic of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community.”

•Friday January 27th – (morning) White House Counsel Don McGahn called Yates in the morning and asked if she could come back to his office.

•Friday January 27th – (late afternoon) According to her testimony, Sally Yates returned to the White House late that afternoon. One of McGahn’s topics discussed was whether Flynn could be prosecuted for his conduct.

Specifically, according to Yates, one of the questions *McGahn asked Yates: “Why does it matter to DOJ if one White House official lies to another?” She explained that it “was a whole lot more than that,” and reviewed the same issues outlined the prior day.

McGahn then expressed his concern that taking any action might interfere with the FBI investigation of Flynn, and Yates said it wouldn’t: “It wouldn’t really be fair of us to tell you this and then expect you to sit on your hands,” Yates claims to have told McGahn.

McGahn asked if he could look at the underlying evidence of Flynn’s conduct, and she said they would work with the FBI over the weekend and “get back with him on Monday morning.”

•Friday January 27th, 2017 – (evening) In what appears to be only a few hours later, President Trump is having dinner with FBI Director James Comey where President Trump asked if he was under investigation. Trump was, but to continue the auspices of the ongoing investigation, Comey lied and told him he wasn’t.

Sally Yates received the original Flynn 302 (January 25th) and then went to the White House and informed Don McGahn (January 26th) about the nature of the interview.

The Flynn 302 was edited by Page and Strzok on February 10th.  The 302 was changed and altered to match the FBI claims of a discrepancy.  Flynn was fired on Feb 13th.  The Flynn 302 was debated again on Feb 14th and entered into the record on February 15th.

Sally Yates was fired, and later testified to congress on May 8, 2017.  She modified her testimony to avoid an admission that she held the original 302; likely because she knew the 302 was rewritten in February.

Bottom line the Flynn 302 was written on January 24, 2017.  James Comey, Andew McCabe and Sally Yates all saw it.” (Conservative Treehouse, 5/15/2020)  (Archive)

On December 10, 2018, The Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway discusses how former FBI Director James Comey admitted to sending FBI agents to interview Michael Flynn without telling the White House.

On January 25, 2017, Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, forwarded text messages to him that she’d sent to her “colleagues,” where she refers to the Steele dossier as the “yellow rain dossier” and the “yellow showers dossier.”

In the same set of forwarded texts, Nellie speculates that Department K of the Russian intelligence service FSB “would be a pretty good candidate for listening in on Hillary.” (Judicial Watch, 8/14/2019)

Statement for the Record

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
James B. Comey
June 8, 2017

Chairman Burr, Ranking Member Warner, Members of the Committee

Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I was asked to testify today to describe for you my interactions with President-Elect and President Trump on subjects that I understand are of interest to you. I have not included every detail from my conversations with the President, but, to the best of my recollection, I have tried to include information that may be relevant to the Committee.

January 27 Dinner

James Comey (Credit: ABC News)

“The President and I had dinner on Friday, January 27 at 6:30 pm in the Green Room at the White House. He had called me at lunchtime that day and invited me to dinner that night, saying he was going to invite my whole family, but decided to have just me this time, with the whole family coming the next time. It was unclear from the conversation who else would be at the dinner, although I assumed there would be others.

It turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room. Two Navy stewards waited on us, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.

The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away.

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.

I replied that I loved my work and intended to stay and serve out my ten-year term as Director. And then, because the set-up made me uneasy, I added that I was not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but he could always count on me to tell him the truth. I added that I was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the President.

A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner. At one point, I explained why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be independent of the White House. I said it was a paradox: Throughout history, some Presidents have decided that because “problems” come from Justice, they should try to hold the Department close. But blurring those boundaries ultimately makes the problems worse by undermining public trust in the institutions and their work.

Near the end of our dinner, the President returned to the subject of my job, saying he was very glad I wanted to stay, adding that he had heard great things about me from Jim Mattis, Jeff Sessions, and many others. He then said, “I need loyalty.” I replied, “You will always get honesty from me.” He paused and then said, “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.” I paused, and then said, “You will get that from me.” As I wrote in the memo I created immediately after the dinner, it is possible we understood the phrase “honest loyalty” differently, but I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further. The term — honest loyalty — had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear what he should expect.

During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.

As was my practice for conversations with President Trump, I wrote a detailed memo about the dinner immediately afterwards and shared it with the senior leadership team of the FBI.” (Read more: CNN, 6/8/2017)

Christopher Steele leaves the High Court in London following a hearing in the libel case brought against him by Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev, July 22, 2020. A key sub-source for material in the Steele dossier has been unmasked: Igor Danchenko, a Ukraine-born think-tank analyst. (Credit: Victoria Jones/PA/AP)

(…) Danchenko was another matter. The FBI first interviewed him in late January 2017 after he was identified as Steele’s subsource. His interview was documented on an electronic communication, or EC, an internal FBI communication, and not on an FD-302, which is used to document interviews of witnesses. Nor was it logged on a specific source report form. Since it was made under a proffer agreement with his attorney present — meaning nothing he said could be used directly against him in court — Danchenko must have believed he was in legal jeopardy. This would make him not a traditional source, and certainly not someone who would be promised confidentiality indefinitely. If he continued cooperating with the FBI after the initial interview, he would have been considered a cooperating witness. Yes, the FBI would try to protect his identity, but no promises would be made — and not forever.

Critics who claim that Attorney General William Barr has recklessly declassified this FBI electronic communication, putting Danchenko and other sources — and future source operations — in peril are wrong. Steele was a “non-U.S. Person,” and not an FBI source when he was de facto working for the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to develop opposition research against Donald Trump. Steele subcontracted this work to Danchenko, also not a government agent or source, who, by his own admission during the FBI interview, provided what he categorized as “bar talk over beers” back to Steele. The fact that this kind of information in an FBI communication was classified as “secret” in the first place is unexplainable. How is bar talk by a collection of drinking friends a threat to the national security of the United States, the very description of what constitutes “secret” information?

The information that Danchenko provided was the last nail in the coffin of the Steele dossier, and it created a serious dilemma for the FBI. A substantial portion of the Russia collusion narrative, and all of the evidence used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, was no longer viable.” (Read more: The Hill, 8/01/2020)  (Archive)

Judicial Watch released two productions (335 pages and 44 pages) of Justice Department (DOJ) documents showing strong support by top DOJ officials for former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ refusal to enforce President Trump’s Middle East travel ban executive order. In one email, Andrew Weissmann, one of Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors and formerly the Obama-era Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section, applauds Yates, writing: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.”

(Credit: UndercoverDC)

The emails, several sent from official Justice Department email addresses, show strong support for Yates, who was fired for disobeying a direct order from the President:

• Thomas Delahanty, then the United States Attorney for Maine wrote: “You are my hero.”

• Liz Aloi, a career service employee and Chief of the Justice Department’s Special Financial Investigations Unit told Yates she was “Inspirational and heroic.”

• Emily Gray Rice, then the U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire and an Obama appointee said: “AAG Yates, thank you, as always, for making us proud. It is truly an honor to work for you.”

• Obama appointee Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan told Yates, “Thank you for your courage and leadership. This is wonderful news.”

• DOJ Civil Division Appellate Attorney Jeffrey Clair wrote: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law. The President’s order is an unconstitutional embarrassment and I applaud you for taking a principled stand against defending it.”

“This is an astonishing and disturbing find. Andrew Weisman, a key prosecutor on Robert Mueller’s team, praised Obama DOJ holdover Sally Yates after she lawlessly thwarted President Trump,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “How much more evidence do we need that the Mueller operation has been irredeemably compromised by anti-Trump partisans? Shut it down.” (Judicial Watch, 12/05/2017)

Michael Flynn (Credit: The New Yorker)

“A bombshell revelation was barely noticed at National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s hearing Tuesday, when his counsel revealed in court the existence of a Justice Department memo from Jan. 30, 2017 exonerating Flynn of any collusion with Russia. The memo, which has still not been made available to Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell, is part of a litany of Brady material she is demanding from prosecutors. The memo is currently under a protective order and Powell is working with prosecutors to get it disclosed, SaraACarter.com has learned.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan presided over the hearing Tuesday and set a tentative Dec. 18 sentencing date. He told the prosecution and defense that the sentencing date could be moved depending on the outcome of requests for Brady material requested by Powell and how the case will unfold in the upcoming months. Sullivan also noted during the hearing that the Brady order takes precedence over the plea agreement.

(…) …if Comey would have advised Trump of the Jan. 30 memo it would have cleared up any unfounded lies that Flynn had in any way colluded or conspired with Russia.

If and when this memo is made public, the ongoing narrative continuing to be pushed by those former Obama officials, as well as, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff who continues to push for hearings on obstruction will be squashed.

It looks like Comey, who would have been fully aware of this memo, has a lot of explaining to do.” (Read more: Sara Carter, 9/10/2019)

(Credit: Judicial Watch, 11/08/2019)

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower” who touched off Trump’s impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues.

Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new “America First” foreign policy, a sea change from President Obama’s approach to international affairs.

“Just days after he was sworn in they were already talking about trying to get rid of him,” said a White House colleague who overheard their conversation.

“They weren’t just bent on subverting his agenda,” the former official added. “They were plotting to actually have him removed from office.”

Sean Misko (Credit: Center For a New American Century)

Misko left the White House last summer to join House impeachment manager Adam Schiff’s committee, where sources say he offered “guidance” to the whistleblower, who has been officially identified only as an intelligence officer in a complaint against Trump filed under whistleblower laws. Misko then helped run the impeachment inquiry based on that complaint as a top investigator for congressional Democrats.

(…) Two former co-workers said they overheard Ciaramella and Misko, close friends and Democrats held over from the Obama administration, discussing how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office within days of Trump’s inauguration. These co-workers said the president’s controversial Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies had been looking for.

“They didn’t like his policies,” another former White House official said. “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”

Their efforts were part of a larger pattern of coordination to build a case for impeachment, involving Democratic leaders as well as anti-Trump figures both inside and outside of government.

All unnamed sources for this article spoke only on the condition that they not be further identified or described. Although strong evidence points to Ciaramella as the government employee who lodged the whistleblower complaint, he has not been officially identified as such. As a result, this article makes a distinction between public information released about the unnamed whistleblower/CIA analyst and specific information about Ciaramella.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 1/22/2020)  (Archive)

“The piecemeal release of FBI files in the Russia collusion investigation has masked an essential fact: James Comey’s G-men had substantially debunked the theory that Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow by the time the 45th president was settling into the Oval Office, according to declassified memos, court filings, and interviews.

And that means a nascent presidency and an entire nation were put through two more years of lacerating debate over an issue that was mostly resolved in January 2017 inside the bureau’s own evidence files. The proof is now sitting in plain view.

In rapid-fire sequence in January 2017, U.S. officials:

• received multiple warnings about the credibility of informant Christopher Steele and his dossier;
• affirmed key targets of the FBI counterintelligence investigation made exculpatory statements denying collusion to undercover sources;
• concluded retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, was not engaged in collusion with the Russians.

The latter revelation has mostly escaped much notice, contained in a single sentence in a once-sealed court motion filed by Flynn defense attorney Sidney Powell that requested what is known as Brady material, or evidence of innocence.

Sidney Powell appears on Fox News on November 6, 2019 to discuss the FBI admission that it has for years misattributed authorship of the notes used in preparing the FBI 302 interview summaries that were themselves altered to incriminate Flynn. (Credit: Fox News)

That motion dated Sept. 11, 2019 requested access to “an internal DOJ document dated January 30, 2017, in which the FBI exonerated Mr. Flynn of being ‘an agent of Russia.’”

Flynn’s motion is confirmed by a 2018 letter obtained by Just the News between Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and defense lawyers. It shows the DOJ exoneration memo was written after Flynn had been interviewed by FBI agents in January 2017 and after the government learned the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had kept his old agency briefed on his contacts with Russia, something that weighed heavily against the notion he was aiding Moscow.

“According to an internal DOJ memo dated January 30, 2017, after the Jan. 24 interview, the FBI advised that based on the interview the FBI did not believe Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia,” Mueller’s team wrote in the letter.” (Read more: Just the News, 3/11/2020)  (Archive)

“A few people have started looking at the connections behind Mark Zaid, the attorney for CIA “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella.  What is starting to emerge is evidence of what CTH outlined yesterday; the current impeachment process is part of a coup continuum, and everything around the whistleblower is part of a long-ago planned and pre-constructed operation.

Two strong examples are very poignant:

(Twitter)   (Archive)

This 2017 tweet by the whistleblowers’ attorney is evidence of what we were sharing yesterday.  A point that almost everyone is missing…what is happening now with Adam Schiff and his Lawfare-contracted legal aide, Daniel Goldman, was designed last year.  The current HPSCI legislative impeachment process and every little aspect within it is the execution of a plan, just like the DOJ/FBI plan was before it in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Mark Zaid (Credit: MSNBC)

The use of a ‘whistle-blower’ was pre-planned long ago.  The agreements between Schiff, Lawfare and the CIA ‘whistle-blower’ were pre-planned.  The changing of whistle-blower rules to assist the plan was designed long ago.

Adam Schiff and Daniel Goldman are executing a plan concocted long ago. None of the testimony is organic; all of it was planned a long time ago, long before anyone knew the names Marie Yovanovitch, Kurt Volker, Gordon Sondland or Bill Taylor.   All of this is the coordinated execution of a plan.

“The anti-Trump members of the National Security Council and U.S. State Department were always going to be used.  Throughout 2018 and 2019 embeds in the ‘resistance’ network were awaiting instructions and seeding evidence, useful information, to construct an impeachment narrative that was designed to detonate later.

When Bill Taylor is texting Gordon Sondland about a quid-pro-quo, and Sondland is reacting with ‘wtf are you talking about’, Taylor was texting by design.  He was manufacturing evidence for the narrative.  This was all a set-up. All planned.

When Marie Yovanovitch shows up to give her HPSCI deposition to Daniel Goldman with three high-priced DC lawyers: Lawrence Robbins, Laurie Rubenstein and Rachel Li Wai Suen, having just sent her statements to the Washington Post for deployment immediately prior to her appearance, Yovanovitch is doing so by design.  All planned.

Here is another example from Mark Zaid, attorney for the “Whistleblower”, just ten days after the inauguration of President Trump where he directly calls out an ongoing “coup“:

(Twitter) (Archive)

This mention of the “coup has started” is even more nefarious, and even more specific to a CTH warning, because Zaid is specifically noting that Dana Boente was/is part of the effort.

Why is that name important?  Because Dana Boente is currently FBI chief legal counsel, hired into the FBI in January 2018.  Boente is dirty.

In April of this year we outlined the evidence to show how Dana Boente was a dirty cop [SEE HERE]; and then in June of this year HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes threatened to send criminal referrals for FBI Director Christopher Wray and FBI counsel Dana Boente [SEE HERE].

(Dirty Cops – Full Backstory)

(Conservative Treehouse, 11/06/2019)

Jeff Sessions (l) and Andrew McCabe (Credit: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)

“Top FBI official Andrew McCabe did not just investigate President Trump. As he notes in a little-publicized part of his new book, McCabe even investigated his department boss — then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions — after Senate Democrats asked McCabe to look into allegations Sessions perjured himself during his confirmation hearings when he denied meeting with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

Sessions had, in fact, met with the Russian ambassador. He later corrected the record and explained he had forgotten speaking with the official and was not trying to mislead Congress.

Ordering the Sessions probe was “another unprecedented, partisan action that has been forgotten,” said former federal prosecutor Solomon L. Wisenberg, a partner at Nelson Mullins LLP in Washington.

McCabe dished a healthy portion of scorn on Sessions in his book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.” He accused him of having “trouble focusing” and having to overcome a “huge learning curve for an attorney general.” He claimed he wasn’t even reading briefing materials on national security threats. McCabe also accused Sessions of being Islamophobic and making racist comments in meetings. He even claimed that the attorney general thought federal agents who were taken hostage overseas “had it coming” and shouldn’t be rescued.

A former senior Justice Department aide to Sessions, who was in high-level meetings with McCabe and the former attorney general, strongly disputed McCabe’s allegations, calling them “fiction.”

“They’re beyond absurd and outright false. Like just about everything else he says,” the official told RealClearInvestigations. “He was fired, after all, for lying. To the FBI.” (Read more: Real Clear Investigations, 3/04/2019)

(Credit: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

“Former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was one of Fusion GPS’s “most helpful” resources in an effort to raise money after the 2016 election to continue investigating President Donald Trump, the co-founders of the opposition research firm revealed in a book released on Nov. 26.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the co-founders of Fusion GPS, wrote in “Crime in Progress” that Podesta provided welcome support in early 2017 for an effort to raise money to fund The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP), a nonprofit group former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Daniel Jones created on Jan. 31, 2017.

Podesta agreed during a meeting with Simpson in early 2017 to contact potential donors to help arrange meetings with Fusion GPS and Jones, according to the book.

“In mid-February [2017] and then again in early March, Jones — supported by Fritsch and Simpson — took prospecting trips in the West. They didn’t know the tech community well, so before heading out, they sought some door openers and validators from the world they knew best,” the authors wrote.

“One of the most helpful” resources turned out to be Podesta, according to Simpson and Fritsch.

“Podesta agreed to contact some friends out west on Jones’s behalf and told him to drop his name in talks with other potential supporters,” they said. “It was a brave gesture: He could have easily chosen to stay out of it altogether, given the fact that he had served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/02/2019)  (Archive)

Sally Yates and James Comey testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 8, 2015 . (Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Newly revealed emails show Trump dossier author Christopher Steele was uneasy when President Trump fired Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in January 2017.

In a brief correspondence between Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, Steele pressed for a back-up plan to be put in place if his back-channel to the FBI was ever placed in jeopardy.

“B, doubtless a sad and crazy day for you re-SY [Sally Yates]. Just wanted to check you are OK, still in situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues, with our guy if the need arises? Many Thanks and Best as Always, C,” Steele wrote to Ohr on Jan. 31.

Ohr replied: “Bruce: Yes, a crazy day. I’m still here and able to help as discussed. I’ll let you know if that Changes. Thanks!”

“Thanks. You have my sympathy and support,” Steele wrote back. “If you end up out though, I really need another (Bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can’t allow our guy to be forced to go back home. It would be disastrous all round, though his position right now looks stable. A million thanks. C.”

Ohr said in return: “Bruce: Understood. I can certainly give you an FBI contact if it becomes necessary.”

(…) Of particular concern to Republican lawmakers was a previously revealed text Ohr sent to Steele, saying, “very concerned (abt) about [former FBI Director James] Comey’s firing — afraid they will be exposed.” Comey was fired in May 2017.

Ahead of testimony Ohr gave to a GOP task force looking into alleged bias by the FBI and DOJ last year, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, a key member of a GOP task force that looked into alleged bias by the FBI and DOJ, said there were other “equally troubling” texts that “relate to the firing of Sally Yates and the impact that that may have and that leads to some questions.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 3/07/2019)

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul Pelosi Jr. visited Ukraine in 2017 to meet with government officials in connection to a business initiative. Now, unearthed records reveal that Paul Pelosi Jr. was an executive of a gas industry company that did business in Ukraine – and his mother Nancy Pelosi was featured in one of the company’s promotional videos.

Journalist Patrick Howley broke the story Thursday:

(…) As Patrick Howley found, Paul Pelosi Jr. previously held top positions with the energy-sector companies Viscoil Group and NRGLab.

On March 5, 2013, NRGLab New Technology posted two videos on Youtube. One video opened with a clip of Nancy Pelosi discussing energy-efficient technology, followed by a direct-to-camera statement from her son Paul Pelosi Jr., filmed in Washington, D.C. in 2010.

(…) Another video posted that same day confirmed that NRGLab was working in Ukraine.

Paul Pelosi (l), Nancy Pelosi (c) and Paul Pelosi, Jr. (Credit: UPI)

(…) NRGLab’s website states that the company is based in Singapore and notes, “The company’s additional projects include a strategic partnership and investment from Viscoil Holdings to recycle waste materials into eco-friendly diesel fuel. NRGLab has obtained an exclusive license for the Viscoil Technology for the South East Asian region for all raw materials.”

Viscoil Holdings is currently suspended by the California Secretary of State. It was registered in 2009 to a manager named David Strawn in Escondido, California. As of 2010, it listed two managers: Strawn and an individual named Sergey Sorokin based in Moscow, Russia.

Paul Pelosi Jr. co-founded the company Natural Blue Resources, which the SEC charged with securities fraud in 2014.

Nancy Pelosi led a congressional delegation to Ukraine in 2015 to discuss issues including “energy security.” (Read more: National File/Patrick Howley, 10/03/2019) (Archive) 

Today Michael Flynn and his attorney Sidney Powell returned to federal court for a status hearing before Judge Emmet Sullivan.  Generally status hearings are uneventful; however, this hearing falls on the heels of an explosive filing by Flynn’s defense outlining allegations of serious prosecutorial misconduct; and claims the DOJ is withholding Brady material.

(…) “A DOJ memo exists dated February 8, 2017, that clears General Flynn of the Logan Act violation he was accused of violating. (Remember, the “Logan Act” was said by Sally Yates to be a big part of the reason for the FBI to interview Flynn.)

Then Ms. [Sidney] Powell went on to discuss the issues surrounding the missing notes from FBI Agent Joseph Pientka, and the original FD-302 written by Pientka.  The DOJ says they don’t have it.

Judge Sullivan asked Ms. Powell if she was going to withdraw the guilty plea based on the direction she was going.  Ms. Powell said no, and pointed to the possibility of dismissal based on wrongful prosecution; and a case that would never have been brought if all the evidence was visible.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/10/2019)

“Last month the DOJ admitted to the FISA court that two of the four FISA warrants used against Carter Page were fraudulently obtained.

However, what the DOJ did not admit publicly was how the current FBI Chief Legal Counsel, Dana Boente, participated in obtaining the April 2017 warrant.  In hindsight, this story explains the ongoing issues within the FBI.

The original FISA application was October 21st, 2016. The first FISA renewal was January 12, 2017 (84 days from origination) and prior to the inauguration of President Trump. The second renewal was April 7, 2017 (85 days from prior renewal). The third renewal was on June 29th, 2017 (83 days from prior renewal).

The originating FISA and first renewal were authorized by the Obama administration officials.  However, it was the second renewal -now identified as fraudulent- on April 7th 2017, under the Trump administration, when the conniving FBI ran into a problem.

Here’s what happened.

On January 30th, 2017, Sally Yates was fired for refusing to defend the Trump travel ban from extremist countries.  Yates was replaced on January 31st by the U.S. Attorney from the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), Dana Boente.  There wasn’t an existing AG because Loretta Lynch had left.

As a result of Yates exit and Dana Boente’s entry, Boente was Acting Deputy Attorney General, and in charge until Jeff Sessions was confirmed on February 8th, 2017.

On February 9th, 2017, President Trump issued executive order 13775 changing the line of DOJ succession, moving the EDVA up, and granting Boente the full legal authority to carry out the duties of the Deputy AG until a permanent replacement was confirmed.

When Jeff Sessions became Attorney General, Dana Boente became Acting Deputy AG, a role Boente would retain until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed on April 25th, 2017. (Note: Boente also remained EDVA U.S. Attorney)

On March 2nd, 2017, Dana Boente was one of a small group who participated in a conversation that led to the recusal of Jeff Sessions from anything related to the 2016 election.  This recusal included the ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, which was later picked up by Robert Mueller.

The other attendees for the recusal decision-making meeting (see above schedule) included Sessions’ chief of staff Jody Hunt; Criminal Chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, Jim Crowell; Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) in the Department of Justice National Security Division Tash Gauhar (FISA lawyer); and Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools.  [Note: Tash Gauhar was lawyer for FBI Clinton case; and Scott Schools was part of drafting Clinton exoneration letter.]

Boente, Crowell, Gauhar and Schools convinced AG Jeff Sessions he must recuse himself.  In hindsight each of the people giving Sessions advice was connected to previously corrupt activity within Main Justice that included the Clinton and Spygate operations.  Not knowing the conflict each advisor was carrying Sessions took their advice and recused himself; a big mistake.

With AG Jeff Sessions recused from anything involving the 2016 election; which included the Russia investigation; effective the evening of March 2, 2017, FBI Director James Comey now reported to Acting Deputy AG Dana Boente.

Technically, as this point in March 2017 Boente is still U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) and is only ‘acting’ as Deputy AG.  With Sessions recused Boente would be needed when the Carter Page FISA would be up for renewal (April, 2017).

With Sessions recused from the Russia investigation, and without a confirmed Deputy AG able to authorize, all of the material the FBI investigators needed from Main Justice would have to flow through Dana Boente.  [Note: Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein was not confirmed until April 25th.]

The January 12th FISA renewal was going to expire on April 12th, 2017 (90-days).  FBI Director James Comey had to work with and brief Dana Boente on the sensitive issues around the Russia investigation; including discussions with Boente about President Trump as a target of that investigation, and surveillance issues; if he was going to extend the FISA warrant with DOJ approval.

Toward the end of March 2017 FBI Director Comey was in discussions with Dana Boente about the issue.

We discover the hand-written notes later on as they were leaked to MSNBC, almost certainly leaked by the people within the Mueller investigation in April 2018. [You’ll see how we know in a minute]  However, at the time of the 2018 leak there was no context for the notes that Boente was taking.

It was only after the FISA application was declassified in July 2018 that Boente’s hand-written notes and the topic therein made sense.   To date no-one has connected this issue… until now.  (Pay attention to the date, Comey March 30th, 2017)

Obviously these notes are from a conversation between then Acting AG Dana Boente and FBI Director James Comey on March 30th, 2017.  It appears to be a phone call.

In hindsight the subject matter almost certainly relates to the issue of the Russia investigation, the sensitivity of administration being under that investigation, and James Comey sharing his interactions with President Trump with Dana Boente.

With Jeff Sessions recused, it is now Acting AG Dana Boente approving whatever James Comey needs from Main Justice.  James Comey wants the Carter Page FISA extended.

AG Jeff Sessions is recused (incapable); there is no Deputy AG in position; therefore the U.S. Attorney for the EDVA holds the authority to perform the duties of the office.  Dana Boente is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

After the February 9th executive order initiating the change of DOJ succession was signed Dana Boente can now officially sign the Carter Page FISA application renewal.  Which is exactly what happens a week after their March 30th call when James Comey and Dana Boente sign the admittedly fraudulent FISA renewal – April 7th, 2017:

(Page #271 – Carter Page FISA Application)

Do you see what just happened here? President Trump signed an executive order that facilitated the FBI continuing to spying on his administration.

(…) So when FBI Director James Comey is making contact with Acting DAG Dana Boente on March 30th, 2017, for issues relating to the need for a FISA renewal in April 2017, the FBI was absolutely certain there was no validity to the underlying evidence within the FISA application.

Yet the FBI team was so determined to get the fraudulent FISA reauthorized, they ignored all of the evidence that undermined their objective.

Think about the scale of deceit and corruption involved.

But it doesn’t end…. it gets worse.

On April 25th, 2017, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is confirmed.   Rosenstein now takes over the responsibilities held by Acting DAG Dana Boente; this includes the FBI counterintelligence probe.

On May 9th, 2017, FBI Director James Comey is fired.

On May 10th, 2017, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe opens a criminal ‘obstruction of justice investigation’ of President Trump to parallel the ongoing counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and administration.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Dana Boente now becomes the Asst. Attorney General and head of the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD).  Simultaneously retaining role as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of VA.  At that moment, guess who is Dana Boente’s legal counsel – Michael Atkinson.

Yes, that’s the same Michael Atkinson who is the current ICIG who facilitated the Whistle-blower complaint; was senior legal counsel to Dana Boente while he headed the DOJ-NSD.

On May 16th, 2017, Rosenstein takes Robert Mueller to the White House to meet President Trump. On May 17th, 2017, Rosenstein appoints the Robert Mueller special counsel probe. And we’re off to the Trump-Russia-Collusion-Obstruction races…

On June 29th, 2017, Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe reauthorize that same fraudulent FISA application for Robert Mueller and his corrupt team of 19 special prosecutors and now 40 FBI agents to continue to exploit.

Dana Boente is still head of DOJ-NSD from May 11th, 2017 through the end of October 2017 when he officially announced his intent to retire.  But wait,… On January 23rd, 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray announces Dana Boente has shifted over to the FBI to be Chief Legal Counsel (replacing James Baker).

Yes, that is correct.  As Mueller is using 19 lawyers, and 40 FBI investigators, Boente now becomes a legal adviser to Christopher Wray, inside the FBI, while the Mueller probe is ongoing….. Oh, and as you can see from his participation with Mueller, Dana Boente is also now a fact witness within the Mueller investigation.

It gets better, who do you think is in charge of the 40 FBI agents now conducting the third year of that fraudulent Mueller investigation?

Yup, the very same Dana Boente!

This is staggeringly unreal.  It’s no wonder FBI Director Christopher Wray appears detached, disconnected and completely unfazed by the scale and scope of the corrupt enterprise he is in charge of.  His own chief legal counsel was a key player in the operation to remove the president.

It always seemed odd that White House Counsel Don McGahn left in 2018; until you look at the bigger picture.  The Carter Page FISA Application was officially declassified and made public in late July 2018.  No doubt as McGahn looked at the FISA issues from his unique perspective, he likely realized in hindsight how the FISA issues crossed-over two administrations and what the executive orders on DOJ succession were really all about.

In his position as White House Counsel, Don McGahn would now be a fact witness if anyone started investigating.   Approximately two weeks after the FISA applications were declassified and made public, in August 2018, Don McGahn submitted his resignation.

PS. The deadline for the FBI and DOJ to inform the FISA Court about their sequestration and recovery effort (ie. a proverbial search for the fruit of a poisonous tree. Where is it?), was February 5th. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/13/2020)  (Archive)

(…) From the IG Report — Footnote 336 — is that David Laufman, Chief of the Export Control Section of the National Security Division of DOJ, told the IG that he negotiated the terms of the Danchenko interview with Danchenko’s attorney.

Laufman told us that he negotiated with the Primary Sub-source’s counsel to facilitate the FBI’s interview and sought to “build a cooperative relationship that could … result in the Bureau’s being in a position to assess the validity of information in the [Steele election reporting] resulting from [the Primary Sub-source’s] activities or the collection of [his/her] sub-subsources. So I saw my role as a broker to get that relationship consolidated .” Laufman said that the portion of the interview he attended established the line of communication with the Primary Sub-source and, as he recalled, generally covered the facts in a “superficial” way. He said that after the completion of the interview, he never saw the FBI’s written summary of the interview.

The IG Report says that Laufman attended only the first day of the 3-day interview and that one of his deputies attended days 2 and 3.  Note that Laufman told the IG he never saw the 57 page EC that documented the interview.  In my experience that would not be unusual. EC’s are normally internal FBI documents and do not get circulated outside the Bureau.  Both Laufman and his deputy were present and able to take notes for themselves.  I would be most curious to know — one hasn’t surfaced yet — if either of them prepared a “memo to file” or something similar reflecting what Danchenko said.  I would not have done so had I been there — that would be creating another document possibly subject to discovery — though it would likely be covered by a privilege.  I would have probably kept handwritten notes, and held onto those for later use if needed.

Rachel Maddow reports Donald Trump has issued a directive to the intelligence community to cooperate with William Barr in investigating the Trump-Russia investigation, and reports that David Laufman calls the directive “a grotesque abuse of the intelligence community.” (Credit: MSNBC)

What is also curious about Laufman’s presence is “Why him?”  The reliability of PSS and verification of his information was a key issue in the ongoing Carter Page FISA that was supervised and approved by the Officer of Intelligence of the National Security Division.  Why wasn’t it the OI Chief who attended the meeting?  Was it to contain the information?  Laufman is a partisan Democrat loyalist — he’s made that clear since he left government.  That is a question Mary McCord should answer since she was the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division at the time, and it would have been her decision — assuming she made it — to have Laufman interact with Danchenko’s attorney and then attend the FBI interview.

So Laufman’s presence for the first day of the interview was not a coincidence, and it wasn’t because the FBI called him and said “Steele’s PSS is going to be interviewed. Do you want to be present?”

Further, a “use immunity” agreement doesn’t just lay around on a desk somewhere waiting for someone to fill in the blanks, date, and sign it.  These documents have various titles, and take various forms and have varying content — “proffer letter” is another common phrase used in describing them.  The EC references that a “proffer letter” is attached.”  (Read more: RedState, 7/25/2020)  (Archive)

John Podesta (l), Glenn Simpson (c) and Jake Sullivan

“Top officials with the Hillary Clinton campaign re-engaged with the opposition researchers behind the Steele dossier just three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, newly declassified congressional witness transcripts reveal, indicating her campaign’s participation in an ongoing and well-funded effort to undermine the president by casting him as a tool of the Kremlin.

Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta testified that he met on Feb. 10, 2017, with Daniel Jones, a former aide to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Glenn Simpson and his partner Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS. In separate testimony, Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan revealed he also participated in the meeting. The Clinton campaign had funneled money through a law firm, Perkins Coie, to pay Fusion to compile the now-discredited dossier which was a prime driver of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories – and FBI investigations — that have shadowed his administration.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, co-founders of Fusion GPS, join Andrea Mitchell and defended their investigation into Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia in 2015. Simpson says that there was no Democratic conspiracy to frame Trump, and that the allegation that Christopher Steele’s dossier about Trump’s contacts in Russia had originated from Ukraine is ‘another phony conspiracy theory.'(Credit: Andrea Mitchell/MSNBC)

“They were interested in trying to raise money to continue their efforts to investigate the Russian interference in the campaign,” Podesta told the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017. The transcripts of his and Sullivan’s testimony were among the dozens of Russiagate interviews that had been withheld from the public for more than two years before being released last week.

Podesta said he agreed to help the trio open doors to big Democratic fund-raisers and sit down for press interviews and documentaries regarding any “new developments” uncovered by dossier author and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Sullivan accompanied Podesta to the meeting, which he said lasted about an hour and was held in an office building in Washington.

“Was the conversation about the then-dossier?” a House panel staffer asked Sullivan, who had previously worked in the Obama administration as Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

“I mean not specifically about the dossier,” Sullivan replied. “lt was sort of about the effort that they had put into finding out ties between Trump and Russia and what their belief was based on the accumulation on that.”

Sullivan testified behind closed doors in a separate hearing held about two weeks after Podesta’s testimony.

Neither man was asked whether their efforts were known by Clinton, who has publicly suggested that Russia has compromising information. Podesta’s testimony did confirm earlier reporting by RealClearInvestigations that Clinton knew her campaign was paying opposition researchers to examine Trump’s ties to Russia.

Just 10 days before the  February 2017 meeting, Jones had incorporated a nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project (known internally as TDIP) after huddling with Simpson. The goal of their ongoing project is to “prove” the allegations in the dossier while digging up new dirt on Trump and feeding it to media outlets, congressional investigators and the FBI to derail his presidency.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 5/14/2020)  (Archive)

Peter Strzok testifies to the Judiciary Committee on July 12, 2018. (Credit: Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

“Peter Strzok, former FBI head of counterintelligence operations, significantly changed an early draft of the official FBI report from its questioning of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, newly released text messages indicate.

To this day, the FBI hasn’t shown the early draft to Flynn. An eye-witness said the draft included exculpatory information, which was removed in the final version, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, previously said.

(…) Agents are supposed to memorialize their interviews in an FD-302 form within five days, but the earliest 302 draft Flynn was provided was dated Feb. 10, 2017.

The new text messages suggest that an earlier version of the draft existed, either produced on Feb. 10 or earlier.

Strzok said he was “trying to not completely rewrite” the document “so as to save [redacted] voice.”

(Powell/Flynn Documents)

According to Powell, Strzok and Page were editing the Flynn 302 and Strzok was referring to the Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) who co-conducted the interview with him. The Epoch Times and other media have identified the agent as Joe Pientka.

The texts show “that there, in fact, exists an original 302 document created by SSA,” Powell said in an April 30 statement.

(…) “I’ve now found a witness who says the original 302 did in fact say that Flynn was honest with the agents and did not lie,” she told Larry O’Connor on his WMAL radio show. “So for somebody to delete that from the 302 is just beyond outrageous.”

She told The Epoch Times the witness saw the document.

The new text messages are among a number of documents recently handed over to Flynn as a result of an ongoing review of his case by Jeffrey Jensen, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who was directed in January to perform the review by Attorney General William Barr.

The documents revealed that an FBI official involved in the decision to interview Flynn had questioned whether the bureau was trying to catch Flynn in a lie rather than get to the truth through their questioning.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/01/2020)  (Archive)

Late last week General Michael Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell released her filing to the court. …It is clear that as requested by Powell, General Flynn’s case must be dismissed based on the many crimes committed by the government to set him up.

Techno Fog was first on the Internet to analyze the document –

(Techno_Fog/Twitter)

Powell describes how the Flynn 302 was altered –

(Techno_Fog/Twitter)

(Doc at Techno_Fog/Twitter)

Powell also notes in a footnote that James Clapper was related to the illegal leak of General Flynn’s phone call with Russian Ambassador Kislyak  –

(Techno_Fog/Twitter)

(Techno_Fog/Twitter)

(Timeline editor’s note: We’re including a clipping of Lisa Page (incoming) and Peter Strzok’s (outgoing)  February 10, 2017 text messages that are included in Sidney Powell’s court filing.)

(Powell Briefing – PDF page 48/161)

On page 26, Powell states the government’s case against Flynn is “so fundamentally unfair as to be shocking to the universal sense of justice.”

Powell also asserts that the government has the original 302’s that the FBI agents prepared as a result of their illegal interrogation of Flynn in the White House. The FBI’s system does not lose these documents. The only way they could be lost is through tampering. The government doesn’t want to provide them because it is clear that they will exonerate Flynn and it will be “game over” for the Deep State.

A few days later, Sidney Powell is retweeted:

(Cassandra Payne/Twitter)

(Read more: X22 Report, 10/29/2019)

“The records also include a February 10, 2017, email from Strzok to Page mentioning then-national security adviser Michael Flynn (five days before Flynn resigned) and includes a photo of Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Strzok also makes a joke about how McCabe had fat-shamed Kislyak.” (Judicial Watch, 7/17/2020)

Shared photo of General Flynn and Sergey Kislyak (Credit: Peter Strzok)

George Papadopoulos (l) and Professor Joseph Mifsud meet in Rome, March 14, 2016. (Credit: CNN)

(…) “Documents I obtained from sources show Mifsud told the FBI in February 2017 that his contacts with Papadopoulos a year earlier, during the 2016 presidential campaign, were mostly innocuous. He made that point both in an FBI interview and a follow-up email to agents.

He described the contacts as an academic exercise in pursuit of peace, not a global plot to hijack the election. And he went out of his way to say there was no talk of sinister cybersecurity intentions such as a plot to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“I reaffirm that the content of our conversations was always on wide geo-strategic issues,” he wrote FBI agents on Feb. 11, in an email that was quickly sent to the very top of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Mifsud sent the email just hours after agents interviewed him

He said the conversations mostly centered around “how the Trump then-campaign team looked to develop a conversation on Europe/UK … and with Russia” and “the fallout in policy in the deteriorating relationship between the major countries in the world today.”

(…) “Mifsud acknowledged he introduced Papadopoulos to a contact in Russia, whom he identified as Dr. Ivan N. Timofeev, who he described as “a director of a think tank in Moscow with strong links with a number of U.S. institutions.”

But, again, he stressed the contacts were mostly academic in nature.” (Read more: The Hill, 8/29/2018)

“President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned late Monday night amid mounting accusations that he had illicit communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States that positioned him as a potential target for blackmail.

Flynn submitted his letter of resignation to the president just three weeks into the administration, saying he “inadvertently” gave Vice President Mike Pence “incomplete information” on phone calls he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which he allegedly discussed lifting sanctions against Moscow.

“I have sincerely apologized to the President and the Vice President,” the letter stated, “and they have accepted my apology.”

Flynn, who was fired by then-President Barack Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he was honored to serve with Trump and believed in the mission to “make America great again.”

Retired Army Gen. Keith Kellogg will take over on an interim basis.” (Read more: The New York Post, 2/13/2017)

Hillary Clinton is putting her newly-found extra free time to good use and trolls General Flynn and his son via Twitter.

The two-time failed presidential candidate responds to a tweet from long-time confidante Phillipe Reines directed at General Michael Flynn and his son saying “what goes around ‘COMETS’ around,“ a reference to the Pizzagate scandal.

Reines tweets late in the evening on the same day General Flynn resigns as President Trump’s national security advisor:

A few minutes later, Reines retweets Clinton’s quick response to his tweet:

Reines is referencing a tweet that Flynn posted in December 2016.

(The tweet has since been deleted)

(…) There is a SCIF at Mar-a-Lago, which is used when President Donald Trump is in town.

Ironically, the existence of the SCIF at the president’s private club in Palm Beach was first revealed in a White House press briefing on February 14, 2017, to rebut criticism Trump himself had put sensitive discussions at risk.

That was days after Trump held an impromptu security gathering in a Mar-a-Lago dining area with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and their aides moments after a North Korea missile test.

Aides surround Shinzo Abe after he and Trump are notified of a North Korea missile launch during his visit to Mar-a-Lago on February 11, 2017. (Credit: Shannon Donnelly/Daily Wire)

But during a press briefing three days later, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer downplayed the discussion and said Trump had been briefed in a secure area before dinner.

“The president was briefed in a SCIF ahead of dinner,” Spicer said. “He went with his national security team. They briefed him on the situation in North Korea.”

President Donald Trump receives a briefing on a military strike on Syria from his National Security team, including a video teleconference with Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, on Thursday, April 6, 2017, in a secured location at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida.(Credit: Shealah Craighead/Wikipedia)

Spicer said people wrongly jumped to “nefarious conclusions” about the famous photo of Trump, Abe and their aides huddled around a table with Mar-a-Lago members and guests seated nearby.

“At that time, apparently there was a photo taken, which everyone jumped to nefarious conclusions about what may or may not be discussed,” Spicer told the media that day. “There was simply a discussion about press logistics, where to host the event. And then after the dinner, the president went back into the SCIF to get a further update from his team. So I’m not really sure where people jumped to conclusions. There is a SCIF there. It was utilized on two occasions that evening to convey to the president by his national security team the situation in North Korea.” (Read more: The Palm Beach Post, 11/5/2019)  (Archive)

On February 14, 2017, former-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Kathleen Kavalec forwarded Ohr a Huffington Post article touting the Steele Dossier’s claim that an alleged deal between Russian oil company Rosneft and Trump supporter Steve Schwarzman constituted a “high crime of treason worthy of impeachment.” Ohr forwarded the article to the FBI’s Washington Field Office the same day.

(A snippet from the Huffington Post article)

Four months prior to this exchange, Kavalec had found Christopher Steele not credible because of factual inaccuracies that he had relayed to her in October 2016, as uncovered by Judicial Watch.

(Judicial Watch, 8/14/2019)

Statement for the Record

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
James B. Comey
June 8, 2017

Chairman Burr, Ranking Member Warner, Members of the Committee

Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I was asked to testify today to describe for you my interactions with President-Elect and President Trump on subjects that I understand are of interest to you. I have not included every detail from my conversations with the President, but, to the best of my recollection, I have tried to include information that may be relevant to the Committee.

February 14 Oval Office Meeting

James Comey (Credit: ABC News)

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President. He sat behind the desk and a group of us sat in a semi-circle of about six chairs facing him on the other side of the desk. The Vice President, Deputy Director of the CIA, Director of the National CounterTerrorism Center, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and I were in the semi-circle of chairs. I was directly facing the President, sitting between the Deputy CIA Director and the Director of NCTC. There were quite a few others in the room, sitting behind us on couches and chairs.

The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone. I stayed in my chair. As the participants started to leave the Oval Office, the Attorney General lingered by my chair, but the President thanked him and said he wanted to speak only with me. The last person to leave was Jared Kushner, who also stood by my chair and exchanged pleasantries with me. The President then excused him, saying he wanted to speak with me.

When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify.

The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information — a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed.

The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.”

The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President.

I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. I could be wrong, but I took him to be focusing on what had just happened with Flynn’s departure and the controversy around his account of his phone calls. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.

The FBI leadership team agreed with me that it was important not to infect the investigative team with the President’s request, which we did not intend to abide. We also concluded that, given that it was a one-on-one conversation, there was nothing available to corroborate my account. We concluded it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations. (He did so two weeks later.) The Deputy Attorney General’s role was then filled in an acting capacity by a United States Attorney, who would also not be long in the role. After discussing the matter, we decided to keep it very closely held, resolving to figure out what to do with it down the road as our investigation progressed. The investigation moved ahead at full speed, with none of the investigative team members — or the Department of Justice lawyers supporting them — aware of the President’s request.

Shortly afterwards, I spoke with Attorney General Sessions in person to pass along the President’s concerns about leaks. I took the opportunity to implore the Attorney General to prevent any future direct communication between the President and me. I told the AG that what had just happened — him being asked to leave while the FBI Director, who reports to the AG, remained behind — was inappropriate and should never happen. He did not reply. For the reasons discussed above, I did not mention that the President broached the FBI’s potential investigation of General Flynn. (Read more: CNN, 6/8/2017)

On February 14, 2017, Strzok forwards Priestap a New York Times article titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” In his cover note, Strzok states, “This is the article Mike K [presumably Kortan] gave a heads up on earlier. Contains flat out inaccuracies. I will sit down with [redacted] early and draft some comments in advance of D [Director Comey] meeting with Burr.”

New York Time’s headline, 2/14/2017

Priestap replies, “Thank you and, yes, please get info to [redacted] Lisa and Rybicki (and cc me), as soon as you have finished.” Strzok then forwards the exchange to Page, Rybicki, Jon Moffa and an unidentified person, saying, “See thread below. There are several significant errors/inaccuracies in the NYT article this evening. We’ll get you a red-lined copy with comments first thing tomorrow in advance of D meeting with Burr.”

Judicial Watch

February 15, 2017, Michael Kortan emails Strzok about the same piece, saying, “Pete, Can you send me you [sic] latest analysis on the NYT story from last night?” Strzok replies, “Just sent on red side.”

(Judicial Watch, 8/28/2020)

The Penn Biden Center, located in Washington, DC, opened its doors in February 2018. (Credit: New York Post)

“A government watchdog is demanding the US attorney probing Hunter Biden in Delaware investigate tens of millions in anonymous donations from China to the University of Pennsylvania, where an academic center is named for his father, President Biden.

The Ivy League college raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records.

Most of the anonymous donations came after the university announced in February 2017 that it would create the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Joe Biden, whose term as vice president had just ended, was to lead the center and was also named a professor at the university.

The center, which is located in Washington, DC, opened its doors in February 2018. Antony Blinken, whom Biden named as secretary of state, briefly served as its managing director.

The Ivy League university received $15.8 million in anonymous Chinese gifts that year, including one eye-popping $14.5 million donation in May 2018, records show.

The flurry of donations may be related to first son Hunter Biden’s business interests in China, the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based watchdog, alleged in complaints sent in May and October 2020 to the Departments of Education and Justice.”

Last week, the group asked US Attorney David Weiss to step in and investigate the Chinese largesse to the school as part of his federal tax probe of Hunter Biden.

“We’ve asked … Weiss to pursue the larger network of individuals and institutions who benefited from millions doled out by foreign interests connected to Hunter Biden’s work in China and Ukraine,” said Tom Anderson, director of the NLPC’s Government Integrity Project.

In its 12-page complaint, the watchdog cited a 2017 text found on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop that CEFC China Energy Co, one of the firms that Hunter Biden had a financial stake in, wanted to lobby politicians in the US but did not want to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, as required for all foreign lobbyists.” (Read more: New York Post, 4/9/2022)  (Archive)

Also, checked Hunter’s laptop and this e-mail regarding the Penn Biden Center is fascinating…

Item 4. Wealth Creationhttps://t.co/ZE8gL7Ucxq pic.twitter.com/2XiETZXb53

— Titania (@Titania977) January 10, 2023

Only Solution To CCP Infiltration Is Subpoena Of Every Penny Of CCP Money That Went In US Pockets

Julian Assange (l) and Adam Waldman (Credit: public domain)

(…) “This yarn begins in January 2017 when Assange’s legal team approached Waldman — known for his government connections — to see if the new Trump administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks founder, holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy. They hoped Waldman, a former Clinton Justice Department official, might navigate the U.S. law enforcement bureaucracy and find the right people to engage.”

(…) “Assange had a bargaining chip: The U.S. government knew he had a massive trove of documents from classified CIA computers, identifying sensitive assets and chronicling the agency’s offensive cyber warfare weapons.

Waldman contacted Ohr, a Justice official he’d met during the Russia election case. They talked by phone and encrypted text messages in early January, then met Feb. 3, 2017, in Washington, records show. In between, Waldman met three times with Assange in London.”

(…) “Ohr consulted his chain of command and the intelligence community about what appeared to be an extraordinary overture that raised hopes the government could negotiate what Assange would release and what he might redact, to protect the names of exposed U.S. officials.

Assange made clear through the lawyer that he would never compromise his sources, or stop publishing information, but was willing to consider concessions like redactions.”

(…) “The shuttle diplomacy soon resulted in an informal offer — known in government parlance as a “Queen for a Day” proffer — in which Assange identified what he wanted and what he might give.

“Subject to adequate and binding protections, including but not limited to an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement, Mr. Assange welcomes the opportunity to discuss with the U.S. government risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks’ possession or control, such as the redaction of agency personnel in hostile jurisdictions and foreign espionage risks to WikiLeaks staff,” Waldman wrote Laufman on March 28, 2017.

Not included in the written proffer was an additional offer from Assange: He was willing to discuss technical evidence ruling out certain parties in the controversial leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. The U.S. government believes those emails were hacked by Russia; Assange insists they did not come from Moscow.

“Mr. Assange offered to provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases,” Waldman told me. “Finally, he offered his technical expertise to the U.S. government to help address what he perceived as clear flaws in security systems that led to the loss of the U.S. cyber weapons program.”

A snippet of Julian Assange’s agreement.

(…) “But an unexpected intervention by Comey — relayed through Warner — soured the negotiations, multiple sources tell me. Assange eventually unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come.

What U.S. officials did not fully comprehend was that an earlier event weighed heavily on the Assange team’s distrust of U.S. intentions.

Just a few days after the negotiations opened in mid-February, Waldman reached out to Sen. Warner; the lawyer wanted to see if Senate Intelligence Committee staff wanted any contact with Assange, to ask about Russia or other issues.

Warner engaged with Waldman over encrypted text messages, then reached out to Comey. A few days later, Warner contacted Waldman with an unexpected plea.

“He told me he had just talked with Comey and that, while the government was appreciative of my efforts, my instructions were to stand down, to end the discussions with Assange,” Waldman told me. Waldman offered contemporaneous documents to show he memorialized Warner’s exact words.” (Read more: The Hill, 6/25/2018)

CNN framed a story of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asking the FBI to rebuke an earlier story, based on anonymous leaks, of Trump campaign contacts with Russia.  According to the agenda, CNN wanted to make it look like the administration was pressuring the FBI to provide the White House political cover.

However, the truth behind the entire episode shows an entirely different story than the false narrative created by CNN.

On February 15th while discussing another issue FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe asked Reince for 5 minutes alone after the meeting.  At the one-on-one McCabe told Priebus the New York Times Russia and Trump campaign story was a “bunch of BS”.

Andrew McCabe (l) and Reince Preibus (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Priebus asked McCabe if McCabe would be able to say that publicly.  McCabe said he would check.  Later, McCabe called back and said he couldn’t issue a statement about it. (See Screengrab)

So the entire construct by CNN of the White House (via Priebus) trying to pressure the FBI is complete nonsense. Very Fake News…aka a false narrative.  It was the FBI who approached Priebus and wanted to clear the record.

Priebus is simply asking the FBI to make the same disclosure public that they were making to him in private.   Reince Priebus is asking for transparency, for truth, for openness.

President Trump goes to twitter to call out two issues. First, the media constructing fake news:

However, perhaps more important, it’s the leaks within the FBI, to CNN which aid in the construction of the false narrative, that are now becoming more concerning to President Trump.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/24/2017)

“In our last article, we went through a series of warrants related to the U.S. Dept. of Justice (DOJ) investigation of Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.). DOJ disclosed the warrants late in 2020 in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by a coalition of corporate media outlets. We left off by asking:

“The warrants in Attachments 4 and 5 specifically name email accounts and electronic devices, unlike Attachments 1 through 3 where the named targets were individuals in the earlier versions or law firms in the revimedised ones. And all the electronic files and devices are “currently located at [the] FBI Washington [D.C.] Field Office.

So the FBI is already in possession of the electronic files and devices. The only reason that should be the case is if they had already been subpoenaed or turned over willingly by the Trump transition team/administration. In either case, the FBI shouldn’t need a warrant to search the evidence already in their possession. So what’s the deal?”

~Excerpt from “The DOJ Used The Logan Act to Obtain Warrants Against General Flynn”

We believe we found the answers for both; how the FBI obtained the materials and why The Logan Act was used as the basis for the final two warrants. When both are considered together, the degree of government corruption is simply shocking.

The story of how the FBI came into possession of the material is detailed in a 285-page Senate report jointly by Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) Committee on Finance and Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs from October 2020. The report is titled appropriately enough, “Don’t Brief the Trump Team: How the GSA and the FBI Secretly Shared Trump Transition Team Records,” and exposes the degree of bureaucratic resistance and corruption the Trump administration was facing right out of the gates.

October 2020 Grassley-Johnson Senate Report

In short, officials at the highest level of the General Services Administration (GSA) were gaslit by media reports about Gen. Flynn’s resignation as President Trump’s National Security Advisor (NSA) on February 15, 2017. Based solely on the news—without being prompted and on their own accord—they reached out to the FBI through their Office of Inspector General (GSA OIG) to see if they should begin preserving all Trump Presidential Transition Team (PTT) records still in their possession. This was done in direct contrast to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) GSA had with Trump’s PTT organization (Trump for America, Inc. or “TFA”), and in violation of their own rules and without any legal basis to do so. Based simply on a phone call with the FBI, GSA halted its standard procedures of wiping all PTT records and devices. This despite the fact they were the private records of TFA and not the property of GSA or U.S. Government records subject to any record-keeping regulations.

GSA OIG Carol Ochoa previously worked for the law firm Covington & Burling.

GSA would then spend most of 2017 misleading the Trump White House and TFA about the status of the PTT records in coordination with the FBI and Mueller Special Counsel Office (SCO), even denying Trump’s representatives access to copies of their own records for an extended period of time. GSA would eventually hand over the PTT records to the FBI and Mueller SCO late in the summer of 2017, again without any legal justification. Trump’s White House or TFA was not even informed ahead of time—affording them the opportunity to review, object, or exert executive privilege or attorney-client privilege on anything—and was only made aware of the GSA disclosures well after-the-fact in mid-December 2017.

October 2020 Grassley-Johnson Senate Report

(Read more: The Washington Pundit, 6/22/22)  (Archive)

Cofer Black (Credit: Jack MacGregor)

“Mitt Romney’s national security adviser in his 2012 campaign — a career CIA spook who rose to its top levels — sits on the board of directors of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that formerly paid Hunter Biden $50K a month despite his complete lack of credentials or qualifications.

It is also an odd coincidence that Mitt has, as CNN puts it, “been a lone Republican voice expressing concern about President Donald Trump’s July phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Ukraine’s President to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family.”

Still more oddly coincidental is the background of Mitt’s adviser deep in the CIA, part of the Intelligence Community that has “six ways from Sunday” in foiling a mere president who might oppose it, according to Chuck Schumer.

(…) Here are the specifics:

Back on October 6, 2011, presidential candidate Mitt Romney proudly announced that Joseph Cofer Black (listed as “Cofer Black”) was among the people chosen as “special advisers”:

… to advise Governor Romney on foreign policy strategy, defense issues, intelligence matters, counterterrorism, and regional policy. These advisers will assist Governor Romney as he presents his vision for restoring American leadership in the world and securing our enduring interests and ideals abroad.

Mr. Black brought to this role his extensive background at the CIA, which he joined in 1974 and where he trained for covert operations.  He rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 1999 to 2002.  Coincidentally, this was the time in which al-Qaeda planned and carried out the 911 attack without hindrance from the counterintelligence apparatus of the Intelligence Community.  But Black was not penalized; he failed upward, being appointed ambassador at large and coordinator for counter-terrorism by President George W. Bush in December 2002. (Read more: American Thinker, 9/26/2019)

(…) “The media’s focus on Trump’s Russian connections ignores the much more extensive and lucrative business relationships of top Democrats with Kremlin-associated oligarchs and companies. Thanks to the Panama Papers, we know that the Podesta Group (founded by John Podesta’s brother, Tony) lobbied for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. “Sberbank is the Kremlin, they don’t do anything major without Putin’s go-ahead, and they don’t tell him ‘no’ either,” explained a retired senior U.S. intelligence official. According to a Reuters report, Tony Podesta was “among the high-profile lobbyists registered to represent organizations backing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.” Among these was the European Center, which paid Podesta $900,000 for his lobbying.

That’s not all: The busy Podesta Group also represented Uranium One, a uranium company acquired by the Russian government which received approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department to mine for uranium in the U.S. and gave Russia twenty percent control of US uranium. The New York Times reported Uranium One’s chairman, Frank Guistra, made significant donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for one speech from a Russian investment bank that has “links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.” Notably, Frank Giustra, the Clinton Foundation’s largest and most controversial donor, does not appear anywhere in Clinton’s “non-private” emails. It is possible that the emails of such key donors were automatically scrubbed to protect the Clinton Foundation.

Let’s not leave out fugitive Ukrainian oligarch, Dymtro Firtash. He is represented by Democratic heavyweight lawyer, Lanny Davis, who accused Trump of “inviting Putin to commit espionage” (Trump’s quip: If Putin has Hillary’s emails, release them) but denies all wrongdoing by Hillary.

(…) Lobbying for Russia is a bi-partisan activity. Gazprombank GPB, a subsidiary of Russia’s third largest bank, Gazprombank, is represented by former Sen. John Breaux, (D., La.), and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R., Miss.), as main lobbyists on “banking laws and regulations, including applicable sanctions.” The Breaux-Lott client is currently in the Treasury Department list of Russian firms prohibited from debt financing with U.S. banks.” (Read more: Forbes, 2/18/2017)

“A Chinese-American businessman at the center of a Clinton campaign finance scandal secretly filmed a tell-all video as an ‘insurance policy’ – because he feared being murdered.”

Johnny Chung (Credit: The Daily Mail)

(…) “In the never-before-released footage, [Johnny] Chung described how he feared for his life after he publicly admitted to funneling money from Chinese officials to President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.

He also claimed Democrats pressured him to stay silent about his dealings with the Clintons and said the FBI tried to enlist him in a sting against a top Chinese general at a Los Angeles airport.

The video comes amid renewed interest in foreign influence in Washington, as some members of President Donald Trump’s team have been scrutinized for their associations with Russian officials.

The video grew out of a controversy in the mid-1990s when evidence surfaced that Chinese officials were pouring hundreds of thousands into then president Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign through American straw donors.

Chung, one of the main players in the ‘Chinagate’ scandal, was accused of giving over $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee on behalf of the head of China’s military intelligence agency during Clinton’s reelection bid.

Chung cooperated with the Department of Justice during the investigation, and was sentenced to five years of probation for campaign finance violations, bank fraud and tax evasion in 1998. (Read more: The Daily Mail, 2/23/2017)

Jake Sullivan (Credit: public domain)

President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, served alongside the president’s son Hunter on a national security think tank board for two years before joining the Biden 2020 presidential campaign, an archived web page shows.

Both Sullivan and Hunter Biden served on the board of the Truman National Security Project between 2017 and 2019, according to an archived version of the organization’s website. Hunter, who served on the board starting in 2012, was on the board of Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, at the same time.

The Truman National Security Project exists to train and organize left-of-center professionals in the defense and foreign policy space. It was founded in 2004 by Democratic activist Rachel Kleinfeld and Matthew Spence, who went on to serve in multiple defense roles in the Obama administration. The organization still lists Sullivan as an emeritus member.

(…) Before 2017, Sullivan served in the Obama administration as then-Vice President Biden’s National Security Adviser. He was present on a trip to Asia during which Hunter Biden and his wife also traveled with Joe Biden. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 5/22/2023)  (Archive)

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing a storm of criticism over newly disclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, recused himself on Thursday from any investigation into charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

(…) Mr. Sessions insisted there was nothing nefarious about his two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, even though he did not disclose them to the Senate during his confirmation hearing and they occurred during the heat of the race between Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Sessions was advising on national security.

In his account on Thursday of the more substantive meeting, which took place in his Senate office on Sept. 8, Mr. Sessions described Mr. Kislyak as one of a parade of envoys who seek out lawmakers like him to glean information about American policies and promote the agendas of their governments.” (Read more: The New York Times, 3/02/2017)

The DOJ files a motion to dismiss the evidence against General Flynn on May 07, 2020. The government moved to dismiss with prejudice the criminal information filed in this case pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48 and as an exercise of its prosecutorial discretion.

Exhibit 5 is included with the filing and it is a clipping from Comey’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on March 2, 2017.

DOJ motion to dismiss – Exhibit 5: 2017 Comey transcript says FBI, Intel “tasked” to find out why Moscow not responding to expulsions, sanctions and “turned up these calls.” While intel close hold, “our people judged was appropriate..to have..Flynn’s name unmasked.”

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) May 20, 2020

(Exhibit 5 – DOJ Motion to Dismiss)

The next day, the White House issued a formal statement demanding investigation into the claims.https://t.co/8poj0DpPkU

— MonsieursGhost (@MonsieursGhost) December 18, 2021

“On March 6, 2017, Page forwards to Strzok a Washington Examiner article sent to her from the General Counsel’s Office discussing how the GAO determined many sensitive US government offices and officials were being housed in property owned by companies connected to foreign governments like China, posing a security threat.

Page asked Strzok, “Did you hear about this?”

Strzok replies, “I hadn’t, thank you.”

Strzok forwarded the article to Dina Corsi, of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, “FYI.” A redacted official in the Counterintelligence Division responds, “Thank you for highlighting this to us!” Strzok forwards that response to Page, and says, “Our property ci. folks hadn’t heard either.”  (Judicial Watch, 8/28/2020)

March 7: Trump’s provocation was instrumental in hoodwinking @AdamSchiffCA into being “HAPPY” to call for an investigation into Trump’s claims, making initiation of investigation into FBI coup a bipartisan operation. Schiff smells impeachment blood. https://t.co/noXO0LDstV pic.twitter.com/VQWV9OXN3X

— MonsieursGhost (@MonsieursGhost) December 18, 2021

James Comey testifies before Congress in March 2017 after his misleading “Gang of Eight” private briefing for top lawmakers. (Credit: AP)

“The FBI deceived the House, Senate and the Justice Department about the substance and strength of evidence undergirding its counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, according to a recently declassified document and other material.

A seven-page internal FBI memo dated March 8, 2017, shows that “talking points” prepared for then-FBI Director James Comey for his meeting the next day with the congressional leadership were riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions. Both the Senate and the House opened investigations and held hearings based in part on the misrepresentations made in those FBI briefings, one of which was held in the Senate that morning and the other in the House later that afternoon. RealClearInvestigations reached out to every member of the leadership, sometimes known as the “Gang of Eight.” Some declined to comment, while others did not respond to queries.

The talking points were prepared by Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer who later resigned from the bureau amid accusations of anti-Trump bias, and were used by Comey in his meeting with Hill leaders. They described reports the FBI received in 2016 from “a former FBI CHS,” or confidential human source, about former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page) allegedly conspiring with the Kremlin to hack the election.

Paul Manafort was falsely alleged to have “managed” Trump-Russia collusion. (Credit: The Associated Press)

Quoting from the reports, Comey told congressional leaders that the unidentified informant told the FBI that Manafort “initially ‘managed’ the relationship between Russian government officials and the Trump campaign, using Carter Page as an intermediary.” He also told them that “Page was reported to have had ‘secret meetings’ in early July 2016 with a named individual in Russia’s presidential administration during which they discussed Russia’s release of damaging information on Hillary Clinton in exchange for alterations to the GOP platform regarding U.S. policy towards Ukraine.”

Carter Page was allegedly an intermediary. (Credit: AP)

But previous FBI interviews with Carter Page and other key sources indicated that none of that was true – and the FBI knew it at the time of the congressional briefings.

The Lisa Page memo anticipated concerns about the quality of information Comey was relaying to Congress and suggested he preempt any concerns with another untruth. The memo advised Comey to tell lawmakers that “some” of the reporting “has been corroborated,” and to point out that the informant’s “reporting in this matter is derived primarily from a Russian-based source,” which made it sound more credible.

Igor Danchenko: American-based, not Russian-based. (Credit: AP)

By this point, however, the FBI knew that the main source feeding unsubstantiated rumors to the informant, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt on Trump, was American-based.

The FBI first interviewed that source – a Russian national named Igor Danchenko who was living in the U.S. and had worked at the Brookings Institution – in January 2017. Danchenko had told them that the anti-Trump dirt he funneled to Steele was dubious hearsay passed along over drinks with his high school buddies and an old girlfriend named Olga Galkina, who had made up the accusations about Carter Page and Manafort that the FBI relayed to Congress.

Christopher Steele: Dubious hearsay from Danchenko’s drinking buddies and an old girlfriend became part of the dossier. (Credit: AP)

Danchenko is now under criminal indictment in Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation for lying about the sourcing for his information. The source to whom he attributed spurious charges against Trump – including his being compromised by a sex tape held by the Kremlin – was a fabrication, according to the indictment. He never spoke with the person as he claimed. Another source turned out to be a longtime Hillary Clinton campaign adviser.

The FBI did not tell the Gang of Eight that Danchenko was working for Steele and did not really have any sources inside the Kremlin, according to the script prepared for Comey, which was recently declassified as part of pre-trial discovery in Special Counsel John Durham’s probe. The FBI also concealed Steele’s identity and the fact he was working for the Clinton campaign.

From FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s misleading memo prepping Director Comey to brief Congress. (Credit: Department of Justice/Sussmann trial)

‘Crowning’ Deception

Adding to the deception, Comey referred to the unnamed informant by the codename “CROWN,” making it appear as if Steele’s dossier was a product of British intelligence, although Steele had not worked for the British government for several years and was reporting entirely in a private capacity. According to the talking-points memo, Comey also withheld from Congress the fact that Steele had been fired by the FBI for leaking information to the media. Instead of sharing that critical information about his reliability and credibility – to say nothing of his political and financial motivations – Comey hid the truth about his star informant from the nation’s top lawmakers.

“If asked about CROWN/Steele” during the briefing, the memo anticipated, Comey was to tell lawmakers only that “CROWN, a former FBI CHS, is a former friendly foreign intelligence service employee who reported for about three years, and some of whose reporting has been corroborated.”

Meanwhile, FBI headquarters officials were duping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in similar fashion in order to continue to obtain warrants to spy on Carter Page. They led judges on the secret surveillance court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible.

Brian Auten: Let a false claim influence spy warrants. (Credit: Patrick Henry College)

The official in charge of vetting the Steele dossier at the time – and interviewing him and his primary source Danchenko to corroborate their allegations – was FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten. By March 2017, Auten knew the “Russian-based” claim was untrue, and yet he let case agents slip it into two FISA renewal requests targeting Page.

Auten seemed to become concerned about the falsehood only when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked to see the Page spy warrants. He then reviewed the FISA applications in advance of Comey briefing the panel on March 15 and raised concerns with then-FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who was assisting with redactions to the documents before sharing them with Congress. Auten wondered in text messages whether a correction should be reported to the court. But no amendment was ever made.

Kevin Clinesmith falsified evidence for spy warrants.

Years later, in a closed-door 2020 hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee investigators finally caught up with Auten and asked him about it.

“The FISA applications all say that he’s Russian-based,” then-chief Senate Judiciary Committee investigative counsel Zach Somers pressed Auten. “Do you think that should have been corrected with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court?”

Auten said he raised the issue with Clinesmith, who was convicted last year by Durham on charges related to falsifying evidence in the FISA application process. “And what response did you get back?” Somers asked. “I did not get a response back,” Auten replied.

Fraud and More Fraud

And so the “Russian-based” fraud lived on through the FISA renewals, which also swore to the court that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative.” (Attempts to reach Auten for comment were unsuccessful. The FBI declined comment.)

The five-year statute of limitations for criminal liability related to the invalid FISA applications expires at the end of this month. It has already expired regarding false statement offenses that may have been committed during the March 2017 Gang of Eight briefings.

However, legal experts say Durham could bypass the statute by filing conspiracy charges. Some former FBI attorneys and prosecutors believe the special counsel is building a “conspiracy to defraud the government” case against former FBI officials and others. (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 6/09/2022)  (Archive)

March 9: Nunes & Schiff send demand to DOJ for “any applications to the FISA Court, any orders that court released, and any copies of warrants issued by federal judges” relating to surveillance of Trump Team.

The deadline is March 13th.

archive.is/8uf5e

(@MonsieursGhost, ThreadReader, 12/18/2021)  (Archive)

March 9 & 10: coincidentally, @carterwpage is interviewed by FBI for the first time since opening of Crossfire, on same day that bi-partisan demand for any surveillance warrants is issued. (@MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

All five of Carter Page’s interviews with the FBI during March 2017:

1. 3/09/17 <—- added tonight
2. 3/10/17
3. 3/16/17
4. 3/30/17
5. 3/31/17 pic.twitter.com/Em9iaY5Rnu

— La Cosa Jostra (@codyave) May 12, 2019

March 13: Deadline is here and DOJ wants an extension of time. CNN goes out of their way to note that the SENATE Intel Committee has no such deadlines, and further that Richard Burr has got all the answers he needs from “conversations”.

CNN, 3/13/2017

Nunes responds by threatening to serve subpoenas at THE BIG SHOWDOWN, which is the March 20th “House Intelligence Committee Hearing on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election”.

The run-up to March 20 testimony was chaos. IC wasn’t responding to oversight. Democrats were threatening to subpoena Trump over wiretap claims. These morons seriously thought POTUS could be impeached for what they THOUGHT was a ‘slander’ of Obama.

The Washington Post, 3/15/2017

(Read more: @MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

“On the heels of the explosive release of Wikileaks’ “largest ever publication of confidential documents” originating from the CIA, Wikileaks editor Julian Assange recently revealed startling information regarding the intelligence community’s plans to impeach President Donald Trump and replace him with Mike Pence, his vice president.

Assange, tweeting early Tuesday morning, claimed that two intelligence officials close to Vice President Mike Pence “stated privately this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover.” However, as Assange noted, they did not say if Pence was aware of the plan or if he had agreed to it.

Perhaps more surprising was the revelation that the push for a “Pence takeover” goes beyond the intelligence community. Another tweet from Assange asserted that Hillary Clinton “stated privately this month that she is quietly pushing for a Pence takeover” as “Pence is predictable hence defeatable.” As MintPress has previously noted, a major cornerstone of Trump’s negotiation strategy and politicking is his unpredictability – a clear point of concern among U.S. establishment insiders.

Though the suggestion that such a “takeover” could be taking place may be shocking to some, it is not altogether surprising, given that the intelligence community’s hostility towards Trump has been evident for some time.” (Read more: Whitney Webb/Mint Press News, 3/16/2017)  (Archive)

Judge Andrew Napolitano (Credit: Fox News)

(…) “Sources have told me that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump’s calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints.

Thus, when senior American intelligence officials denied that their agencies knew about this, they were probably being truthful. Adding to this ominous scenario is the fact that three days after Trump’s inauguration, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, abruptly resigned, stating that he wished to spend more time with his family.

I hope the investigations of Trump’s allegation discover and reveal the truth — whatever it is. But the lesson here is terribly serious.

We face the gravest threat to personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 proscribed criticism of the government.

We have an unelected, unnamed, unaccountable elite group in the intelligence community manipulating the president at will and possessing intimate, detailed knowledge about all of us that it can reveal.” (Read more: Fox News, 3/16/2017)

March 15: Trump makes appearance w Tucker, asked about wiretap claims. Aside from clarifying that ‘wiretap’ is catch-all for #SpyGate surveillance en toto, Trump states two times for effect: “WE HAVE IT BEFORE THE COMMITTEE. WE’RE SUBMITTING SOME THINGS.” (@MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

On Page 7 of the “Deputy Director McCabe Office of Professional Responsibility Investigation, Part 1 of 2”, there was a complaint received by the Inspection Division’s Internal Investigations Section on March 15, 2017.

The day before the complaint was received, True Pundit published the article “EXCLUSIVE: FBI’s Own Political Terror Plot; Deputy Director and FBI Brass Secretly Conspired to Wage Coup Against Flynn & Trump.”  It regards a media leak involving a statement overheard in early February 2017, allegedly made by FBI EM [Executive Management]. Specifically, the alleged comments were made by DD A. G. McCabe and pertained to General Michael T. Flynn and the POTUS.”

(Public Meme)

True Pundit:

“Mere days before Gen. Michael Flynn was sacked…” [Before February 13, 2017].

IE. “Early February 2017“.

“FBI DD McCabe gathered more than a dozen of his top FBI disciples”

I.E. “FBI EM [Executive Management]

“McCabe emphatically declared at the invite-only gathering with raised voice: Fuck Flynn and then we Fuck Trump”.

“Specifically, the alleged comments were made by DD A. G. McCabe and pertained to General Michael T. Flynn and the POTUS.”

(Read: The_War_Economy, 12/12/2018) (Archive)

Jennifer Boone and Charles McGonigal (Credit: public domain)

March 16: Boone and McGonigal discuss @carterwpage‘s “Top Secret FISA” being briefed to House HPSCI tomorrow”. Already worried about possible leaks.

Coincidentally, Page is being interrogated at same moment in New York, and they’re also worried he’ll go AWOL if FISA goes public. (MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

“Allegations from the United States that British spy agency GCHQ snooped on Donald Trump during his election campaign are “arrant nonsense,” the deputy head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said in an interview on Saturday.

President Trump has stood by unproven claims that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 White House race. On Thursday his spokesman cited a media report that Britain’s GCHQ was behind the surveillance.

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told BBC News the idea that Britain had a hand in spying on Trump was “just crazy.”

“It belies a complete lack of understanding of how the relationship works between the intel community agencies, it completely ignores the political reality of ‘would the UK government agree to do that?’” Ledgett said.

There would be no advantage for Britain’s government in spying on Trump, given the potential cost, he said.

“It would be epically stupid,” said Ledgett, who is due to retire shortly.

Current and former NSA officials have described an acrimonious relationship between intelligence agencies and the Trump administration.” (Read more: NBC News, 3/18/2017)  (Archive)

The Guardian reports an official GCHQ denial before following less than a month later with an exclusive which strangely contradicts the substantive claims. (MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

“In the first part of this research into the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) we outlined how the committee was engaged in the 2017 effort –with specific evidence of communication– to support Robert Mueller and the ‘soft coup‘ team. [See Here] When you understand what the group was doing in early 2017, you understand why the FBI had to use DOJ official Bruce Ohr as a go-between to contact with Chris Steele.

Now we move on to overlay several data-points that happened throughout 2018 that are connected to a much more troubling part of the overall issues.  In 2018 the DOJ and FBI covered-up the corruption evident during the 2017 pre-Mueller effort.

The problem for Attorney General Bill Barr is not only investigating what we don’t know, but rather navigating through what ‘We The People’ are already aware of…. A branch of the United States government (Legislative) was attempting a coup against the leader of another branch of government (Executive); by using the Senate Intelligence Committee and designated corrupt agents within the executive branch cabinet.

This 2017 and 2018 time period covers Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, Jeff Sessions as AG, Rod Rosenstein as Deputy, Chris Wray as FBI Director, David Bowditch as Deputy and Dana Boente as FBI legal counsel.  I’ll lay out the evidence, you can then determine who was powerful enough to have made these decisions.

As a result of a FOIA release in mid-December 2018, Judicial Watch revealed how the State Department was feeding “classified information” to multiple U.S. Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration:

The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).

Judicial Watch obtained the documents through a June 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a February 2018 request seeking records of the Obama State Department’s last-minute efforts to share classified information about Russia election interference issues with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv-01381)).

The documents reveal the Obama State Department urgently gathering classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.  (read more)

The impeachment program was a plan, an insurance policy of sorts; a coordinated effort between corrupt politicians in the Senate and hold-over allies in the executive; however, because she didn’t want to participate in this – Senator Dianne Feinstein abdicated her vice-chair position to Senator Mark Warner.  [Background Here]

This is the pre-cursor to utilizing Robert Mueller.  A plan that was developed soon after the  election.  The appointment of a special counsel was always the way they were going to hand-off and continue the investigation into Trump; but they needed a reason for it.

The continued exploitation of the Steele Dossier was critical; thus they needed Chris Steele to be solid.  And the continued manipulation of the media was also critical; thus they needed Fusion-GPS to continue.  [Dan Jones paid both]

While Mark Warner was communicating with Adam Waldman and Dan Jones as a conduit to Chris Steele, the FBI/DOJ team was communicating through Bruce Ohr to Chris Steele (and by extension to Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS).

Part of Warner’s role was to weaponize the Legislative branch to advance the ‘Muh Russia conspiracy’, a fundamental necessity if a special counsel was going to have justification.

The SSCI, and the security protocols within it, were structurally part of the plan; hence the rapid information from Obama’s State Dept. to the SSCI and Senate participants in the last moments prior to departing.

♦ On March 17th, 2017, the Senate Intelligence Committee took custody of the FISA application used against Carter Page.   We know the FISA court delivered the read and return Top-Secret Classified application due to the clerk stamp of March 17, 2017.

(Page FISA Application, Link)

The FISA application (original and first renewal) was delivered to Senate Security Director James Wolfe.  Senator Mark Warner entered the basement SCIF shortly after 4:00pm on March 17, 2017, the day it was delivered (texts between Warner and Waldman):

Now, when SSCI Security Officer James Wolfe was indicted (unsealed June ’18), we could see the importance of the March 17th date again:

(Wolfe Indictment Link)

We can tell from the description within the indictment FBI investigators are describing the FISA application.  Additionally Wolfe exchanged 82 text messages with his reporter/girlfriend Ali Watkins.  The FISA application is 83 pages with one blank page.

The logical conclusion was that Wolfe text Ali Watkins 82 pictures of the application.

FBI Investigators applied for, and received a search warrant for the phone records of journalist Ali Watkins.  Ms. Watkins was notified in February 2018, three months after Wolfe was questioned by FBI investigators in December 2017.

However, despite the overwhelming (public) circumstantial evidence that Wolfe leaked the FISA application, he was never charged with leaking classified information.  Wolfe was only charged with lying three times to federal authorities, and he pled down to one count of lying to the FBI.

CTH made the case in mid 2018 that someone at the DOJ had influenced a decision not to charge Wolfe with the leaking of the FISA application; despite the FBI and DOJ having direct evidence of Wolfe leaking classified information.

The logical reason for the DOJ not to charge Wolfe with the FISA leak was because that charge could ensnare a Senator on the powerful committee, likely Mark Warner.

Remember, the SSCI has intelligence oversight of the DOJ, DOJ-NSD, FBI and all associated counterintelligence operations. Additionally, when the FBI was investigating Wolfe for leaking classified documents, according to their court filings they had to inform the committee of the risk Wolfe represented.  Who did they have to inform?.. Chairman Burr and Vice-Chair Warner.

D’oh. Think about it.  A gang-of-eight member (Warner), who happened -as a consequence of the jaw dropping implications- to be one of only two SSCI members who was warned by the FBI that Wolfe was compromised…. and he’s the co-conspirator.  The ramifications cannot be overstated.  Such a criminal charge would be a hot mess.

Thus, the perfect alignment of interests for a dropped charge and DC cover-up.

Then, in an act of serendipity, James Wolfe himself bolstered that suspicion when he threatened to subpoena members of the SSCI as part of his defense. [See Here]

(…) Attorneys for James A. Wolfe sent letters to all 15 senators on the committee, notifying them that their testimony may be sought as part of Mr. Wolfe’s defense, according to two people familiar with the matter.

(…) Mr. Wolfe’s defense lawyers are considering calling the senators as part of the proceedings for a variety of reasons, including as potential character witnesses and to rebut some of the allegations made by the government in the criminal complaint, these people say.  (link)

Immediately after threatening to subpoena the SSCI (July 27, 2018), the DOJ cut a deal with Wolfe and dropped the charges down to a single charge of lying to investigators.  However, someone doing the investigative legwork wasn’t happy with that decision.

Our overwhelming CTH circumstantial evidence that Wolfe leaked the FISA application went from a strong suspicion, to damn certain (after the plea deal) when the DOJ included a sentencing motion in mid-December 2018.

On December 15th, 2018 the DOJ filed a response to the Wolfe defense teams’ own sentencing memo (full pdf), and within the DOJ response they included an exhibit (#13) written by the FBI [redacted] special agent in charge, which specifically says: “because of the known disclosure of classified information, the FISA application”… Thereby admitting, albeit post-plea agreement, that Wolfe did indeed leak the damn FISA:

(link to document)

Right there, in that FBI Special Agent description is the bombshell admission that James Wolfe leaked the Carter Page FISA application to his concubine Ali Watkins at Buzzfeed.

We know the special agent who wrote exhibit #13 in the December filing was Special Agent Brian Dugan, Asst. Special Agent in Charge, Washington Field Office.  The same investigator who originally signed the affidavit in the original indictment.

So with hindsight there was absolutely no doubt that James Wolfe leaked the 83-page Carter Page FISA application on March 17, 2017.  Period.  It’s all documented with circumstantial and direct evidence; including the admissions from the FBI agent in charge.

So, why was James Wolfe allowed to plea to a single count of lying to investigators?

Back to where this started….

A branch of the United States government (Legislative) was attempting a coup against the leader of another branch of government (Executive); by using planted and designated corrupt agents within the cabinet…

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/11/2019)

March 17: the FISA document containing SECRET & TOP SECRET national security info concerning C
Carter Page is sent to SSCI at the last minute on Friday before BIG SHOWDOWN on Monday the 20th.

March 17, 9:30pm: later that same evening, FBI small team is discussing contact from @nakashimae from WaPo who also has the leak and is requesting comment!

(@MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2021)

Christopher Steele (l) and Bruce Oh. (Credit: public domain)

“In March 2017, two days before former FBI Director James Comey testified to lawmakers that the bureau had an open counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele sent an urgent message to Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr hoping that “important firewalls will hold” when Comey testified.

The text message from Steele, who compiled the infamous unverified dossier on Trump, was sent on March 18, 2017 to Ohr and obtained by SaraACarter.com from a government source, familiar with the ongoing investigation.

Ohr was demoted twice by the Department of Justice for not disclosing that his wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, the now-embattled research firm which paid Steele for the documents. Ohr has been deposed for questioning by the House Judiciary Committee and is expected to speak to lawmakers behind closed doors on Aug. 28.

In the text, Steele writes Ohr, “Hi! Just wondering if you had any news? Obviously, we’re a bit apprehensive given scheduled appearance at Congress on Monday. Hoping that important firewalls will hold. Many thanks.”

Ohr writes back later that day, saying “Sorry, no new news. I believe my earlier information is still accurate. I will let you know immediately if there is any change.”

It is not certain, based on the limited communications obtained by Congress between the pair, what Ohr was referring to when he discussed “earlier information” that he delivered to Steele.” (Read more: Sarah Carter, 8/15/2018)

March 18, 12:30am: later into the night, Pete Strzok and Lisa Page discuss @nakashimae’s prior reporting and likelihood she has a Source at HSCI.

March 18: for some reason, Strzok and Small Team are now obsessing over Trump’s breakout claims from the 4th…

March 19: Its Sunday, but the Small Team is not resting. They are reviewing additional oversight requests and also preparing for @Comey’s testimony on Monday the 20th.

(@MonseursGhost, 12/17/2021)

Trump and Manafort at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016 [Credit: Rick Wilking/Reuters]

“Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.”

Manafort’s name was reportedly listed in the 400-page ledger 22 times, although his actual signature wasn’t authenticated and any payments made to him remain unverified. The documents implicating Manafort had been released by Serhiy Leshchenko.

On March 20, 2017, Leshchenko released another set of documents, this time alleging to show that Manafort took steps to hide payments related to his work for former Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovych. Leshchenko’s documents “included an invoice that appeared to show $750,000 funneled through an offshore account and disguised as payment for computers.”

In a strange twist, it was reported by Politico in late February 2017 that a hack of the phone belonging to one of Manafort’s daughters revealed a text containing a blackmail threat that Manafort has attributed to Leshchenko. It’s not known with any certainty who actually sent the text, which contains an attachment that references “the Yanukovych accounting book” and lists an email address for Leshchenko.

Leshchenko became the subject of an investigation in Ukraine and in December 2018, a Kyiv court ruled that Leshchenko, along with NABU Director Artem Sytnyk “acted illegally when they revealed that Manafort’s surname and signature were found in the so-called “black ledger” of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions,” the Kyiv Post reported on Dec. 12, 2018.

The court noted the material was part of a pre-trial investigation and its release “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

The Hill recently reported that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko stated that he was opening “a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainians to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Surprisingly, the report, which focuses on Sytnyk, makes no mention of Leshchenko—or of the December court ruling which determined that both Leshchenko and Sytnyk violated Ukrainian law.” (Read more: themarketswork, 4/11/2019)  (Archive)

“Representative Elise M. Stefanik is a young, freshman republican congresswoman from the Albany New York area.  And using a probative questioning timeline, she single-handily pulled the mask from FBI Director James Comey, yet no-one seemed to notice.

Obviously Ms. Stefanik has not been in the swamp long enough to lose her common sense.

In the segment of the questioning below Rep. Stefanik begins by asking director Comey what are the typical protocols, broad standards and procedures for notifying the Director of National Intelligence, the White House and senior congressional leadership (aka the intelligence Gang of Eight), when the FBI has opened a counter-intelligence investigation.

The parsel-tongue response from Comey is a generalized reply (with uncomfortable body language) that notification of counter-Intel investigations are discussed with the White House, and other pertinent officials, on a calendar basis, ie. “quarterly”.

With the statement that such counter-Intel notifications happen “generally quarterly”, and against the backdrop that Comey stated in July of 2016 a counter-Intel investigation began, Stefanik asks:

”When did you notify the White House, the DNI and
congressional leadership?”

BOOM!  Watch an extremely uncomfortable Director James Comey outright LIE… by claiming there was no active DNI -which is entirely false- James Clapper was Obama’s DNI.

Watch it again.

Watch that first 3:00 minutes again.  Ending with:

“Because of the sensitivity of the matter.”  ~ James Comey

Director Comey intentionally obfuscates knowledge of the question from Rep Stefanik; using parseltongue verbiage to get himself away from the sunlit timeline.

The counter-Intel investigation, by his own admission, began in July 2016.  Congress was not notified until March 2017.  That’s an eight month period – Obviously obfuscating the quarterly claim moments earlier.

The uncomfortable aspect to this line of inquiry is Comey’s transparent knowledge of the politicized Office of the DNI James Clapper by President Obama.  Clapper was used rather extensively by the Obama Administration as an intelligence shield, a firewall or useful idiot, on several occasions.

Anyone who followed the Obama White House intel policy outcomes will have a lengthy frame of reference for DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan as the two primary political operatives.   Brennan admitted investigating, and spying on, the Senate Intelligence Committee as they held oversight responsibility for the CIA itself.

The first and second questions from Stefanik were clear.  Comey’s understanding of the questions was clear.  However, Comey directly evaded truthful response to the second question.   When you watch the video, you can see Comey quickly connecting the dots on where this inquiry was going.

There is only one reasonable explanation for FBI Director James Comey to be launching a counter-intel investigation in July 2016, notifying the White House and Clapper, and keeping it under wraps from congress.    Comey was a participant in the intelligence gathering for political purposes – wittingly, or unwittingly.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/20/2017)

Andrew McCabe (Credit: Getty Images)

“The FBI opened an investigation into an unauthorized media leak of a comment made by former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe about former national security adviser Michael Flynn and President Trump, according to bureau documents released Monday.

The documents show that the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs received a complaint about an alleged leak that involved “a statement overheard in early February 2017.”

“Specifically, the alleged comments were made by DD AG McCabe and pertained to General Michael T. Flynn and the POTUS,” one document states.

The investigation into the unauthorized media disclosure appears to have started on March 20, 2017.

The document states that McCabe was a witness in the investigation, and that the subject, or the person who leaked the comment, was unknown.

A spokesperson for McCabe declined to comment.” (Read more: The Hill, 10/16/2018)

Rep. Trey Gowdy attempts to question FBI director James Comey about how many people have the power to ‘unmask’ the name of a U.S. citizen in communications intercepted by the intelligence services. This information would serve as the basis for any investigation into who has been leaking classified documents.

Transcript

GOWDY: Admiral Rogers said there are 20 people within the NSA that are part of the unmasking process. How many people within the FBI are part of the unmasking process?

COMEY: I don’t know for sure. As I sit here, surely more, given the nature the FBI’s work. We come into contact with U.S. persons a whole lot more than the NSA does because we may be conducting — we only conduct our operations in the United States to collect electronic surveillance — to conduct electronic surveillance, so I don’t — I can find out the exact number, I don’t know it as I sit here.

GOWDY: Well, I think, Director Comey, given the fact that you and I agree this is critical, vital, indispensable, a similar program is coming up for reauthorization this fall with a pretty strong head wind right now. It would be nice to know the universe of people who have the power to unmask a U.S. citizen’s name. Because that might provide something of a roadmap to investigate who might’ve actually disseminated a masked U.S. citizen’s name.

COMEY: Sure. The number is relevant but what I hope the U.S. — the American people realize is the number’s important, but the culture behind it is in fact even more important. The training, the rigor, the discipline. We are obsessive about FISA in the FBI for reasons I hope make sense to this committee but we are — everything that’s FISA has to be labeled in such a way to warn people this is FISA, we treat this in a special way.

So we can get you the number, but I want to assure you the culture of the FBI and the NSA around how we treat U.S. person information is obsessive and I mean that in a good way.

GOWDY: Director Comey, I am not arguing with you and I do agree that culture is important, but if there are 100 people who have the ability to unmask and the knowledge of a previously masked name, then that’s 100 different potential sources of investigation and the smaller the number is, the easier your investigation is.

So the number is relevant. I can see the culture is relevant. NSA, FBI, what other U.S. government agencies have the authority to unmask a U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I think all agencies that collect information pursuant to FISA have what are called standard minimization procedures, which are approved by the FISA court that govern how they will treat U.S. person information. So I know the NSA does, I know the CIA does, obviously the FBI does. I don’t know for sure beyond that.

GOWDY: How about the department of — how about Main Justice?

COMEY: Main Justice, I think does have standard minimization procedures.

GOWDY: All right, so that’s four. The NSA, FBI, CIA, Main Justice. Does the White House have the authority to unmask a U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I think other elements of the government that are consumers of our products can ask the collectors to unmask. The unmasking resides with those who collected the information.

And so if Mike Rogers’s folks collected something and they sent it to me in a report and it says U.S. person number one and it’s important for the FBI to know who that is, our request will go back to them. The White House can make similar requests of the FBI or of NSA but they can’t on their — they don’t own their own collect and so they can’t on their own unmask. I got that about right?

ROGERS: No, that’s correct.

COMEY: Yeah.

GOWDY: I guess what I’m getting at, Director Comey, is you say it’s vital, you say it’s critical, you say it’s indispensable. We both know it’s a threat to the reauthorization of 702 later on this fall. And by the way, it’s also a felony punishable by up to 10 years.

So how would you begin your investigation, assuming for the sake of argument that a U.S. citizen’s name appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times unlawfully. Where would you begin that investigation?

COMEY: Well, I’m not gonna talk about any particular investigation…

GOWDY: That’s why I said in theory.

COMEY: You would start by figuring out, so who are the suspects? Who touched the information that you’ve concluded ended up unlawfully in the newspaper and start with that universe and then use investigative tools and techniques to see if you can eliminate people, or include people as more serious suspects.

GOWDY: Do you know whether Director Clapper knew the name of the U.S. citizen that appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post?

COMEY: I can’t say in this forum because again, I don’t wanna confirm that there was classified information in the newspaper.

GOWDY: Would he have access to an unmasked name?

COMEY: In — in some circumstances, sure, he was the director of national intelligence. But I’m not talking about the particular.

GOWDY: Would Director Brennan have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: In some circumstances, yes.

GOWDY: Would National Security Adviser Susan Rice have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I think any — yes, in general, and any other national security adviser would, I think, as a matter of their ordinary course of their business.

GOWDY: Would former White House Advisor Ben Rhodes have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I don’t know the answer to that.

GOWDY: Would former Attorney General Loretta Lynch have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name? COMEY: In general, yes, as would any attorney general.

GOWDY: So that would also include Acting AG Sally Yates?

COMEY: Same answer.

GOWDY: Did you brief President Obama on — well, I’ll just ask you. Did you brief President Obama on any calls involving Michael Flynn?

COMEY: I’m not gonna get into either that particular case that matter, or any conversations I had with the president. So I can’t answer that.

(RealClearInvestigations, 3/20/2017)  (Archive)

March 20: Comey & NSA Director Rogers testify at a HSCI hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey acknowledged his agency was investigating whether members of the Trump campaign collaborated w Russian Government.

After @DevinNunes openly asks for whistleblowers to come forward with information about leaking or surveillance of Trump campaign, a whole series of events transpires, causing the infamous “unmasking” news conference.

(@MonsieursGhost, 12/17/2017)

“The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that some of the communications of the Trump transition team were “monitored” after the election as part of an “incidental collection.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said these surveillance operations produced “dozens” of reports which eventually unmasked several individuals’ identities and were “widely disseminated.”

Nunes would not confirm if Trump’s own communications were specifically monitored, saying only that it was “possible” that the president’s communications were picked up.

Nunes said none of the reports he had read mentioned Russia, and he was unsure whether the surveillance occurred at Trump Tower, as Trump has suggested.

He said he believes the intelligence collections were done legally, but he is concerned because they were apparently not related to the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election and because they were “widely disseminated” across the intelligence community.

Nunes said he told House Speaker Paul Ryan earlier Wednesday and was set to tell Trump and the White House later in the afternoon.” (Read more: Fox News, 3/22/2017)

https://youtu.be/VFWPOa3uUWk

Dennis Montgomery (Credit: New York Times)

“The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference disclosing that President Trump had been under “incidental surveillance,” Attorney and FreedomWatch Chairman, Larry Klayman, sent a letter to the House Committee on Intelligence imploring them to pursue the claims and evidence presented under oath at a Washington DC FBI Field Office by his client – CIA / NSA Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery – who Klayman claims “holds the keys to disproving the false claims…that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped”

When Montgomery attempted to deliver this information through the appropriate channels two years ago, the former CIA and NSA contractor wasn’t given the time of day:

When Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was “blown off;” no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.

As a result, Montgomery went to attorney and FreedomWatch founder Larry Klayman – who then approached the FBI:

Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis, Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia. There he laid out how persons like then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration.

Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly. Working side by side with Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama’s former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed “up close and personal” this “Orwellian Big Brother” intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.

He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.

Given the fact that the FBI had Montgomery’s testimony and evidence for over two years, Klayman traveled to Washington DC last Thursday to meet with Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in the hopes that he would ask FBI Director Comey why the FBI hadn’t pursued Montgomery’s evidence. When Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was “blown off” and instead shared his information with committee attorney Allen R. Souza – who Klayman requested in turn brief Nunes on the situation.

During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee’s complicity in keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent cover-up of the Montgomery “investigation.”

And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey’s feet to the fire about the Montgomery investigation?

Klayman has detailed all of this in a NewsMax article, followed up with an official letter to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey on Montgomery’s evidence. Perhaps this explains Nunes’ impromptu press conference today admitting that Trump’s team was under “Incidental Surveillance” before making his way to the White House to discuss with the President.”

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 3/22/2017) (Klayman letter to Nunes)