Featured Timeline Entries
May 19, 2019 - Trey Gowdy says he has seen exculpatory transcripts of FBI spies engaged with Papadopoulos
“In September 2016 the FBI used a longtime informant, Stefan Halper, to make contact with George Papadopoulos, pay him $3k and fly him to London for consulting work and a policy paper on Mediterranean energy issues.
As part of the spy operation the FBI sent a female intelligence operative (a spy) under the alias Azra Turk to pose as Halper’s assistant and engage Papdopoulos. A month later the FBI used Papadopoulos as a supplemental basis for a FISA warrant against Carter Page.
Former Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, tells Maria Bartiromo that he has seen transcripts of the Halper/Turk operation, and those transcripts exonerate Papadopoulos.
(Transcript)
Bartiromo: I’m really glad you brought that up; the FBI agents’ discussion with George Papadopoulos. Because when the FBI sends in informants to someone they’re looking at, typically those conversations are recorded right? Those people are wired?
Gowdy: Yeah, I mean if the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired; and if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls there’s going to be a transcript of that.
And some of us have been fortunate enough to know whether or not those transcripts exist; but they haven’t been made public and I think one in-particular is going – it has the potential to actually persuade people. Very little in this Russia probe I’m afraid is going to persuade people who hate Trump, or who love Trump, but there is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer if it’s ever made public.
Bartiromo: You say that’s exculpatory evidence and when people see that they’re going to say: wait, why wasn’t this presented to the court earlier?
Gowdy: Yeah, you know, Johnny Ratcliffe is rightfully exercised over the obligations that the government has to tell the whole truth to the court when you are seeking permission to spy, or do surveillance, on an American. And part of that includes the responsibility of providing exculpatory information, or information that tends to show the person did not do something wrong. If you have exculpatory information, and you don’t share it with the court, that ain’t good. I’ve seen it, Johnny’s seen it, I’d love for your viewers to see it.
(End Transcript)
May 23, 2019 - Trump's declassification orders gives Barr sweeping authority to declassify and unredact several of Clinton's still secret communications
A 2017 cartoon symbolic to the popularly held belief that the FBI was ‘With Her’ throughout the 2016 election. (Credit: Branco/Comically Incorrect.com)
(…) “White House lawyers wrote the May 23 order in a way that delegates sweeping authority to Barr to declassify or un-redact documents covering both 2016 presidential investigations. This is key, because the same former Justice Department and FBI officials who led the Russia “collusion” investigation also headed the Clinton inquiry.
Under the order, these and other agencies will finally have to cough up key classified documents — including summaries of suspect and witness interviews, confidential source reports, transcripts of covert recordings and other investigative records — that they’ve withheld from congressional Republicans investigating whether the former administration misused its spying powers to monitor Trump and his aides. In addition, they’ll have to loosen their grip on secret papers related to the probe of Clinton’s illicit server.
One of these undisclosed papers remains so secret that Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz was barred from discussing it in his 500-plus-page report on the FBI’s investigation of Clinton. “The information was classified at such a high level by the intelligence community that it limited even the members [of Congress] who can see it, as well as the staffs,” he said.
The documents are said to implicate the Clinton campaign and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret deal to fix the Clinton email investigation.
In his memoir, former FBI Director James Comey says he worried Lynch might be viewed as “politically compromised” if the secret information leaked, especially after the public found out she privately met with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac just days before the FBI interviewed his wife in July 2016.
In recent closed-door House testimony, Lynch said she received a “defensive briefing” from the FBI on the potentially incriminating material in late summer 2016, but claimed it told her it couldn’t verify the information and didn’t think it “worthy of investigation.”
The FBI has been sitting on the documents — which I’m told are classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, meaning they can only be viewed in a secure room known as a SCIF — since March 2016.
The CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence also have copies and are keeping them under tight seal. (ODNI is the intelligence hub through which all requests and approvals for declassification normally flow.) Horowitz said they told him they need to protect “sources and methods” — an excuse the agencies too often hide behind when they don’t want to release embarrassing or potentially incriminating information.
But Trump’s order gives Barr unilateral authority to declassify any information classified under Obama’s Executive Order 13526, including “intelligence sources or methods.”
Count on Barr also freeing up a highly classified May 2016 memo drafted by Clinton investigators for higher-ups at Justice’s National Security Division. At the time, agents sought access to a still-secret intelligence report that a foreign government (reportedly China) penetrated Clinton’s unsecured private server and exfiltrated classified emails. They needed to explore the issue to complete their investigation, since cyber-espionage was relevant to their probe.
But this was the same month Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Clinton, so the memo was never sent. And the breach was never fully investigated. “The FBI left a potential mountain of evidence unreviewed,” former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said.
In August 2015, the Intelligence Community’s IG first alerted then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok to an “anomaly” related to the foreign intrusion on Clinton’s emails going through her server. Strzok’s notes from their meeting have suddenly turned up “missing,” or at least that’s what the FBI is telling the watchdog group Judicial Watch after it FOIA’d them.” (Read more: IssuesInsights, 8/09/2019)
May 31, 2019 - The DOJ admits the FBI has never seen an unredacted version of the Crowdstrike report on the DNC Russian hacking claim
“The foundation for the Russian election interference narrative is built on the claim of Russians hacking the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently releasing damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server. Instead the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. In a court filing (full pdf below) the scale of sketchy has increased exponentially.
Suspecting they could prove the Russian hacking claim was false, lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the Crowdstrike report.
Yes, that is correct. The FBI and DOJ were only allowed to see a “draft” report prepared by Crowdstrike, and that report was redacted… and that redacted draft is the “last version of the report produced”; meaning, there are no unredacted & final versions.
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!
This means the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
The entire apparatus of the U.S. government just took their word for it…
…and used the claim therein as an official position…
…which led to a subsequent government claim, in court, of absolute certainty that Russia hacked the DNC.
Think about that for a few minutes.
The full intelligence apparatus of the United States government is relying on a report they have never even been allowed to see or confirm; that was created by a paid contractor for a political victim that would not allow the FBI to investigate their claim.
The DNC server issue is foundation, and cornerstone, of the U.S. government’s position on “Russia hacking” and the election interference narrative; and that narrative is based on zero factual evidence to affirm the U.S. government’s position.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/15/2019)
May 31, 2019 - Sidney Powell discusses DOJ in the Lawfare era: “guilty until proven innocent”
Not enough people understand the role of the Lawfare group in the corruption and political weaponization of the DOJ, FBI and larger intelligence community.
Benjamin Wittes (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)
What Media Matters is to corrupt left-wing media, the Lawfare group is to the corrupt DOJ and FBI.
All of the headline names around the seditious conspiracy against Donald Trump assemble within the network of the Lawfare group.
Three days after the October 21st, 2016, FISA warrant was obtained, Benjamin Wittes outlined the insurance policy approach.
FBI Director James Comey, FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, Comey memo recepient Daniel Richman, Deputy AG Sally Yates, Comey friend Benjamin Wittes, FBI lead agent Peter Strzok, FBI counsel Lisa Page, Mueller lead Andrew Weissmann and the Mueller team of lawyers, all of them -and more- are connected to the Lawfare group; and this network provides the sounding board for all of the weaponized approaches, including the various new legal theories as outlined within the Weissmann-Mueller Report.
The Lawfare continuum is very simple. The corrupt 2015 Clinton exoneration; which became the corrupt 2016 DOJ/FBI Trump investigation; which became the corrupt 2017 DOJ/FBI Mueller probe; is currently the 2019 “impeachment” plan. Weissmann and Mueller delivering their report evolved the plan from corrupt legal theory into corrupt political targeting. Every phase within the continuum holds the same goal.
The current “impeachment strategy” is planned-out within the Lawfare group.
After the 2018 mid-terms, and in preparation for the “impeachment” strategy, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler hired Lawfare Group members to become committee staff. Chairman Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link), and Chairman Nadler hired Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link), all are within the Lawfare network.
Remember, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller didn’t come into this process as an ‘outsider’, and Mueller didn’t select his team. The corrupt Lawfare team inside government (FBI Counsel James Baker, DOJ Deputy Andrew Weissmann, FBI Deputy McCabe etc.) already knew Mueller. The team had established personal and professional connections to Mueller, and they brought him in to lead the team.
When you realize that Robert Mueller didn’t select the team; rather the preexisting team selected their figurehead, Robert Mueller; then results make sense. Robert Mueller can never be allowed to testify to congress because if questioned he actually has very little understanding of what took place.
A disconcerting aspect to the Lawfare dynamic is how current U.S. Attorney General William Barr has knowledge of this. Barr knows and understands how the Lawfare network operates. Barr is from this professional neighborhood. Like Mueller, Barr also knows these people.
“As a matter of law. In other words, we didn’t agree with the legal analysis- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers.“
Under Eric Holder, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Tom Perez, Robert Mueller, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the focus of the DOJ and FBI became prismatic toward politics and tribalism. All of the hired senior lawyers and officials had to be aligned with the political intents of the offices.
(CIA Director John Brennan brought the same political goals to an intelligence apparatus that held a preexisting disposition of alignment, see Mike Morell: “I ran the CIA now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.”)
Their agencies were used against their ideological enemies in large operations like Fast-n-Furious, IRS targeting, Gibson Guitar etc. And also smaller operations: Henry Louis Gates, George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, Ferguson, Baltimore etc. All of these activist Lawfare examples were pushed and promoted by an allied media.
Many of the ‘weaponized’ approaches use radical legal theory (ex. disparate impact), and that ties into the purposes and methods of the Lawfare Group. The intent of Lawfare is described in the name: to use Law as a tool in Warfare. The ideology that binds the group is the ideological outlook and purpose: using the legal system to target political opposition.
The Lawfare group ensures you have the right to remain guilty until they verify your politics and determine your alignment with the tribe. If accepted, your disposition shifts to innocent and you receive a pass to avoid any legal jeopardy…
When special counsel Robert Mueller formally closed the Russia investigation on May 29th, he opened the door to wide-ranging speculation as to the intent behind his statement. In the eyes of Former Texas Prosecutor Sidney Powell, Mueller’s words stood the rule of law and the presumption of innocence on their heads. (Conservative Treehouse, 6/01/2019)
May 31, 2019 - Devin Nunes: "It's all a fraud" - Deceptive edits found in Mueller Report
“Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) on Saturday called for the immediate release of “all backup and source information” for the Mueller report after internet sleuth @almostjingo (Rosie Memos) discovered that the special counsel’s office deceptively edited content which was then cited as evidence of possible obstruction.
“It’s all a fraud” tweeted Nunes, replying to a tweet by @JohnWHuber (Undercover Huber), who also posted a comparison between the Mueller report and a newly released transcript of a November 2017 voicemail message left by former Trump lawyer John Dowd, in which he asked former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s attorney for a “heads up” if Flynn was planning on saying anything that might damage the president.
Mueller’s team omitted key context suggesting that Dowd was trying to strongarm Flynn and possibly obstruct justice by shaping witness testimony, while the actual voicemail reveals that Dowd was careful not to tread into obstruction territory in what was a friendly and routine call between lawyers.
Dowd qualifies his request by saying “without you having to give up any…confidential information” in order to determine “If, on the other hand, we have, there’s information that…implicates the President, then we’ve got a national security issue, or maybe a national security issue, I don’t know… some issue, we got to-we got to deal with, not only for the President but for the country.”
Mueller’s deceptive edits beg the question; what else may have been manipulated by the special counsel to make Trump look guilty? When reached for comment by attorney ‘Techno Fog’ (@Techno_Fog), Dowd said of the edits: “It is unfair and despicable. It was a friendly privileged call between counsel – with NO conflict. I think Flynn got screwed.”
Dowd told Fox News: “During the joint defense relationship, counsel for the president provided to Flynn’s counsel documents, advice and encouragement to provide to SC [the special counsel] as part of his effort to cooperate with the SC,” adding “SC never raised or questioned the president’s counsel about these allegations despite numerous opportunities to do so.”
Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russians and is currently awaiting sentencing.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has resisted a court order to release the transcripts of Flynn’s conversations with Russian officials, including former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
This raises at least two questions. First, did the DOJ give Flynn the transcripts?And second, did the DOJ violate a previous court order from Judge Emmett Sullivan to produce evidence during discovery?”
June 3, 2019 - Former State official testifies he warned about Clinton email issues and was concerned about interference with classified Clinton Benghazi emails
“Judicial Watch announced today that John Hackett, the former Director for Information Programs and Services (IPS), which handles records management at the State Department, testified under oath that he had raised concerns that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff had “culled out 30,000” of the secretary’s “personal” emails without following strict National Archives standards. The full deposition transcript is available here.
John Hackett, as part of a series of court-ordered depositions and questions under oath of senior Obama-era State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) review process related to the classification of Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails.
Hackett served first as deputy director then as director for Information Programs and Services, which handles the FOIA request program and the retirement of and declassification of documents at the State Department. He was at the department from April 2013 to March 2016.
In March 2015, Clinton told reporters that she and her staff had deleted more than 30,000 emails “because they were personal and private about matters that I believed were within the scope of my personal privacy.” ABC News reported: “However, after a year-long investigation, the FBI recovered more than 17,000 emails that had been deleted or otherwise not turned over to the State Department, and many of them were work-related, the FBI has said.”
(Heather Samuelson, the Clinton lawyer who deleted the Clinton emails, separately testified to Judicial Watch that she received immunity from the Justice Department.)
Hackett answered during the deposition that he recalled a conversation that he had when he was at the State Department about requesting rules or parameters from Secretary Clinton or her attorneys that they used to segregate her personal and official work emails.
Hackett: I recall it wasn’t much of a conversation. I — I was — I mean, I have to say, it was emphatic to the Under Secretary of Management — and I didn’t speak in tones like that very often to him — you know, that we needed these — you know, the guidelines.
Judicial Watch: And when you said, the Under Secretary, are you referring to Patrick Kennedy [then-Under Secretary of State for Management]?
Hackett: Yes.
Hackett: I think I might have raised it to Rich Visek, the Acting Office of Legal Advisor, or Peggy — or Margaret Grafeld [an executive-level State Department FOIA official] raised it to Rich, as well.
Judicial Watch: Why did you feel so strongly that this was necessary, that they provide this information?
Hackett: Well, we heard that there were 50,000 or 60,000 emails, and that they had – “they” being the Secretary’s team — had culled out 30,000 of these. And which is — so we wanted to know what criteria they used. The standard from the National Archives is very strict. If there was — if there were mixed records, that would be considered a federal record. If it was mixed personal and mentioned a discussion, that would be — under the narrow National Archives rules, it would be considered a federal record.
John Hackett testifies that his initial concern over Hillary Clinton’s email use arose in June 2013 when he said he viewed a photograph on the WTOP website of Clinton ‘sitting on a plane with a BlackBerry.’(Credit: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
(…) Hackett testified that his initial concern over Secretary Clinton’s email use arose in June 2013 when he said he viewed a photograph on the WTOP website of Clinton “sitting on a plane with a BlackBerry. “And that got me thinking that, well, what — what was that BlackBerry? Was it a government BlackBerry? And if so, where were the emails relating to that BlackBerry?” Hackett said.
Hackett testified he went to then-IPS Director Sheryl Walter “after seeing that photograph and suggested that we had to be careful about what sort of responses we made relating to Hillary Clinton’s emails, when it — if there was a No Record Located response that was being given out. In fact, I advised Sheryl that we should stop giving No Record Located responses until we come to — kind of come, you know — find out what that BlackBerry meant, come to ground about what was known about the former Secretary’s emailing habits.”
Asked how Walter responded, Hackett said “My recollection is, she agreed with me.”
“The other thing that we did, or I did at that time, was, we wanted to find out what this BlackBerry meant,” Hackett testified. “So we tasked — my recollection is, we verbally tasked Tasha Thian, the department’s Records Manager at that time, to look into the BlackBerry. And I believe Tasha contacted Clarence Finney in the Secretary’s office to ask him what he knew about the former Secretary’s emailing habits.”
Asked what Thian found out, Hackett responded: “I don’t recall exactly what she found out, but she didn’t find out much. Tasha also contacted the part of the State Department that’s part of the intelligence community, and Intelligence and Research Bureau, to ask to see if there were any classified emails on — in the classified systems that the Secretary might have produced. And I do recall that I think Tasha came back with the answer that they did not have any.”
Hackett went on to say that “There was a lot of confusion about exactly what that BlackBerry, you know, meant at that time. you had a concern as to how the department was responding to FOIA requests that related to Secretary Clinton’s emails after you saw the photograph of the Secretary holding a BlackBerry. … My recollection is — and I had only been there two months — that someone had told me that, — and I can’t remember — that she did not have an email account, a government email account. So there was obviously a contradiction here when, you know, there’s that photograph. So we were just trying to find out what was the ground truth. So that’s why I had a concern about issuing responses that said no records had been located.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 7/02/2019)
June 4, 2019 - Trump's campaign lawyers cite the Mueller report in their fight against the DNC lawsuit
A screenshot of DNC chairman Tom Perez appearing on Meet the Press on April 22, 2018 to discuss the DNC’s Trump-Russia lawsuit. (Credit: NBC)
“Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign asked a judge Tuesday to penalize the Democratic National Committee for alleging in a lawsuit a conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, saying special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings revealed the “doomed effort to prove a falsehood.”
But lawyers for the Democratic Party responded by saying Mueller’s report confirms and bolsters their claims by detailing the campaign’s repeated suspicious interactions with Russian agents, proving the campaign participated in Russia’s election interference.
The arguments on both sides were included in the Trump campaign’s filing in Manhattan federal court, where a judge is considering the merits of the DNC’s April 2018 lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks and Trump’s son and son-in-law. The lawsuit sought unspecified damages, alleging a conspiracy to cheat Democrats.
In seeking sanctions Tuesday including legal costs, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. contended that Mueller “definitively refuted the notion that the Campaign conspired or in any way coordinated with Russia.
The 448-page Mueller report was released on April 18, though nearly 40% of the report’s pages had redactions.
“The assumption, of course, was that the Special Counsel would substantiate the DNC’s claims,” the Trump campaign lawyers wrote. “Suffice it to say, that assumption did not pan out.”
The campaign’s lawyers said the report “debunks any such conclusion by walking through the vast body of evidence that his Office collected and establishing that none of this evidence showed that the Campaign formed any sort of agreement with Russia.”
They said the report shows the DNC can never prove its key allegations, “yet has refused to accept this reality.”
“The DNC has thus made clear that it wants to proceed with a politically motivated sham case, tying up the resources of this Court and the Campaign — and inevitably burdening the President himself — all in a doomed effort to prove a falsehood,” the lawyers wrote.” (Read more: The Associated Press, 6/05/2019)
June 10, 2019 - DOJ outlines to Congress its investigation of the investigators
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd (Credit: Wikipedia)
“The Justice Department’s investigation of the investigators involved in the Trump-Russia probe will look at actions both by the U.S. government and by foreigners.
That’s what the agency said Monday, telling Congress its review is “broad in scope and multifaceted” in a letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.
The DOJ said the wide-ranging inquiry led by Attorney General William Barr, along with his right-hand man U.S. Attorney John Durham, would seek to “illuminate open questions regarding the activities of U.S. and foreign intelligence services as well as non-governmental organizations and individuals.”
The letter made it clear that DOJ’s review is not limited just to their specific agency, but would also scrutinize the intelligence community as a whole. The letter stated that the DOJ review team had already asked certain intelligence community agencies to preserve records, make witnesses available, and start putting together documents that the DOJ would need to carry out its inquiry.
And the DOJ made it clear that they weren’t just looking to see if policies were violated — they’ll be looking at whether any laws were broken, too.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 6/10/2019)
June 12, 2019 - Rep. Elise Stefanik fact checks Rep. Adam Schiff on Comey testimony
“Elise Stefanik (R., NY) clashed with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Ca.) Tuesday during a House Intelligence Committee hearing. Schiff claimed Stefanik was wrong about former FBI director James Comey’s testimony concerning when Congress was informed about the investigation into the Trump campaign.
The New York representative questioned Andrew McCarthy during a committee hearing yesterday about notifying congressional leadership when an investigation is opened into a political campaign. She specifically referred to the FBI opening its investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, a counter-intelligence investigation codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Former FBI Director James Comey testified in March of 2017 that congressional leadership was not notified until that month about the investigation due to its sensitive nature.
“We know now that the FBI opened its counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, but they did not brief the Gang of Eight until March 2017 just days before former director Comey publicly announced the investigation during a March 20th, 2017 open hearing before this committee,” Stefanik said yesterday.
Schiff tried to correct Stefanik, telling her that her timeline was not correct, to which Stefanik doubled down.
“Regarding the timeline, it was clear in the open hearing in front of this committee that director Comey testified that he chose not to brief the Gang of Eight on the opening of the counter-intelligence investigations,” Stefanik said.
“I hope you would agree based upon the testimony of Director Comey that he circumvented the process,” she added later.
“I would only say that that was not his testimony,” Schiff responded. “The first time he was briefing the counter-intelligence investigation to us was contemporaneous with his disclosing it to the public.” Stefanik responded that Schiff was misrepresenting her statement.
A subsequent tweet from Stefanik confirmed her claims about Comey’s testimony. The video of Comey’s March 2017 testimony shows Comey admitting that the FBI delayed notifying congressional leadership about the investigation into the Trump campaign.
June 17, 2019 - The State Department identifies 23 violations, 'multiple security incidents' concerning Clinton emails
(Credit: Fox News)
“The State Department revealed Monday that it has identified “multiple security incidents” involving current or former employees’ handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and that 23 “violations” and seven “infractions” have been issued as part of the department’s ongoing investigation.
The information came in a letter to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is responsible for overseeing the security review.
“To this point, the Department has assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents,” Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, wrote to Grassley. “DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions incidents. … This number will likely change as the review progresses.”
The State Department, calling the matter “serious,” said it expected to conclude the investigation by Sept. 1. The department acknowledged that the probe was unusually time-consuming.
(…) “In every instance in which the Department found an individual to be culpable of a valid security violation or three or more infractions, the Department forwarded the outcome to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s Office of Personnel Security and Suitability (DS/PSS), to be placed in the individuals’ official security file,” Taylor wrote. “All valid security incidents are reviewed by DS and taken into account every time an individual’s eligibility for access to classified information is considered.
“This referral occurred whether or not the individual was currently employed with the Department of State and such security files are kept indefinitely,” Taylor added. “Consistent with the referral policy, for individuals who were still employed with the Department at the time of adjudication, the Department referred all valid security violations or multiple infractions to the Bureau of Human Resources.”
The State Department declined to release the names of the employees, consistent with its procedures. The department promised another update once its review is completed.” (Read more: Fox News, 6/17/2019)
June 14, 2019 - Wray promotes Jennifer Boone after she oversees Page FISA; her connection to Ohr; and the interview of primary sub-source
“Flying under the radar. Jennifer Boone – the FBI official who oversaw (FISA): 1) The improper use of Bruce Ohr as a Steele intermediary; and 2) The FBI’s interview of the Steele primary sub-source…was promoted by Director Wray after the FBI learned of FISA issues.
Jennifer Boone (Credit: public domain)
IG Report: Boone was informed of serious concerns about Ohr’s connections. That the contact of a closed source (Steele through Ohr) was “out of the norm.” Boone directed the FBI agent to meet with Ohr anyway.
This becomes more noteworthy now because Boone supervised the team who determined the dossier “sources.” This includes the newly released (and disastrous) interviews of the Steele primary sub-source that undermined the FISA warrants. Excerpt HT @adamgoldmanNYT
(Techno Fog@Techno_Fog, 7/17/2020) (Archive)
June 25, 2019 - Congress issues a subpoena to Robert Mueller and he agrees to testify
Robert Mueller (Credit:Kevin Dietsch/UPI)
“Special Counsel Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress on July 17 on his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee announced Tuesday night.
In a joint statement, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said that Mueller had agreed to testify in an open session.
“Americans have demanded to hear directly from the Special Counsel so they can understand what he and his team examined, uncovered, and determined about Russia’s attack on our democracy, the Trump campaign’s acceptance and use of that help, and President Trump and his associates’ obstruction of the investigation into that attack,” they said.
The committees issued subpoenas Tuesday to compel Mueller’s testimony, according to the joint statement. The decision to compel Mueller to testify is a landmark move that will put an end to a months-long saga on Capitol Hill where lawmakers have for weeks fought to get access to information about whether President Trump obstructed justice. (Read more: The Daily Beast, 6/25/2019)
July 10, 2019 - FBI's Chris Wray is going to court to fight against the release of State Dept. official Kathleen Kavalec's memos
Christopher Wray (r) tells NBC’s Lester Holt at an Aspen Security Forum in July, 2018 that he considered resigning as FBI director. (Credit: NBC News)
“The FBI is going to court to fight the public release of a small number of documents the State Department sent to agents from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence operative and Hillary Clinton-paid political muckraker, during the 2016 election.
Normally, such Freedom of Information Act cases don’t merit public attention. This one does.
To hear the FBI tell it, the release of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Kathleen Kavalec’s documents is tantamount to giving up the keys to President Trump’s nuclear briefcase, aiding the enemy or assisting terrorists.
“We know that terrorist organizations and other hostile or foreign intelligence groups have the capacity and ability to gather information from myriad sources, analyze it and deduce means and methods from disparate details to defeat the U.S. government’s collection efforts,” an FBI assistant section chief swore in an affidavit supporting the request to keep the documents secret.
The FBI can’t afford to “jeopardize the fragile relationships that exist between the United States and certain foreign governments,” the FBI official declared in another dramatic argument against the conservative group Citizens United’s request to release the memos.
And if that wasn’t enough, the bureau actually claimed that “FBI special agents have privacy interests from unnecessary, unofficial questioning as to the conduct of investigations and other FBI business.”
In other words, agents don’t want to have to answer to the public, which pays their salary, when questions arise about the investigative work, as has happened in the Russia case.
The FBI’s July 10 court filing speaks volumes about Director Christopher Wray’s efforts to thwart the public understanding of what really happened in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia collusion probe.
Steele’s contacts at State can’t possibly be equated to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. The same research he provided to State and the FBI in fall 2016 was being provided to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and to the media. (Read more: The Hill, 7/30/2019)
July 10, 2019 - Flynn’s lawyers: Mueller team wants false testimony, possibly retaliates when rebuked
Michael Flynn and new attorney, Sidney Powell. (Credit: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
“Prosecutors from the team of special counsel Robert Mueller wanted Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to testify to something that isn’t true, Flynn’s lawyers said. When he refused, they tried to label him a co-conspirator in a case where they previously said he was only a witness.
A federal judge denied the prosecutors’ move, saying the government didn’t present enough evidence to introduce Flynn’s statement as one of a co-conspirator.
Flynn, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, is expected to face a light sentence after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and after extensively cooperating with the Mueller team and the Justice Department. He was also expected to testify on another case of making false statements on foreign lobbying registration forms.
In his November 2017 guilty plea, he said that the forms submitted by lawyers for his now-defunct lobbying company, Flynn Intel Group (FIG), contained false and misleading statements. The prosecutors, however, recently asked him to testify that he signed those forms knowing about the falsities and intending for them.
He refused.
“Mr. Flynn cannot give that testimony because it is not true,” Flynn’s recently hired lawyers, Jesse Binnall, Sidney Powell, and William Hodes, said in a July 8 court filing.
They said Flynn only acknowledged in his plea the falsities “with some hindsight.” At the time of signing the forms, in March 2017, Flynn only read the cover letter and didn’t know about or intend for anything false in them, they said.
“Mr. Flynn trusted his former counsel who held themselves out as experts in this area of law,” the filing stated.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 7/10/2019)
July 16, 2019 - Lt. General Michael Flynn judge calls former lawyers back to court and are accused of withholding case files
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan points to the U.S. flag while speaking to former national security adviser Michael Flynn on December 22, 2018. (Credit: Dana Verkouteren via/AP)
A DC federal judge has ordered Michael Flynn’s former attorneys to appear in court next month after Flynn’s current legal counsel claims they haven’t been given the entire case file by the team at Covington & Burling.
Judge Emmet Sullivan, an Obama appointee, scheduled a status conference for August 27 at 11 a.m., and has invited a Senior Legal Ethics Counsel to weigh in on the conversation.
“In light of the representations made by defense counsel regarding the delay in receiving the client files, the Court hereby gives notice to the parties of the Court’s intent to invite Senior Legal Ethics Counsel for the District of Columbia Bar to attend the status conference and explain on the record the applicable District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct,” wrote Sullivan.
In a filing on Thursday, Flynn’s new attorneys Jesse Binnall, Sidney Powell and William Hodes wrote that they “do not yet have the entire file” from Flynn’s former lawyers and said they had been advised “it will be several weeks before all the information can be transferred.”
Flynn’s attorneys also reiterated that they already have a “massive” amount of files to review — spanning four hard drives that exceed 253 gigabytes of documents — and noted they had identified “crucial and troubling issues that should concern any court” without going into detail. –The Hill
Flynn’s former attorneys have responded, saying they will have the rest of the case files delivered by July 26, per Politico.
Meanwhile, Flynn’s former attorney testified on Tuesday against Flynn’s former business partner, 67-year-old Bijan Rafiekian, an Iranian-American who has been charged with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
Prosecutors called ex-Flynn attorney Robert Kelner as a witness Tuesday at the trial of Bijan Rafiekian, 67, an Iranian-American businessman who was Flynn’s key counterpart in a lobbying and consulting firm the retired Army general opened after leaving government, Flynn Intel Group.
During about two-and-a-half hours on the witness stand in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Kelner appeared to do some damage to Rafiekian by telling jurors that the Flynn associate never shared key information about links between the lobbying work and Turkish government officials.
Kelner also said Rafiekian, better known as Kian, seemed upset by the lawyers’ recommendation in early 2017 that the firm make a retroactive filing about the work Flynn’s firm did to try to build support for the extradition from the U.S. of a dissident Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. –Politico
“My recollection is that he was not happy about it. In part, he was not happy about the suggestion that FIG’s work primarily benefited the Government of Turkey,” said Kelner.
Attorney Robert Barnes raises the question: “Why was Covington firm ever representing Flynn given it knew it might be a material witness in a case related to Flynn? Did the government knowingly profit from this conflict?” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/16/2019)
July 23, 2019 - James Comey is under DOJ Investigation for misleading Trump while targeting him In FBI probe
“Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President Trump – telling him in private that he wasn’t the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while refusing to admit to this in public.
According to RealClearInvestigations‘ Paul Sperry, “Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will file a report in September which contains evidence that “Comey was misleading the president” while conducting an active investigation against him.
Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent. –RCI
According to two US officials familiar with Horowitz’s upcoming report on FBI misconduct, Comey was essentially “running a covert operation” against Trump – which began with a private “defensive briefing” shortly after the inauguration. RCI‘s sources say that Horowitz has poured over text messages between the FBI’s former top-brass and other communications suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of the president during their January 2017 meeting in New York.
(…) Sperry notes that Comey wasn’t working in isolation on the Trump effort. In particular, Horowitz has looked at the January 6, 2017 briefing on the infamous ‘Steele Dossier’ – a meeting which was used by BuzzFeed, CNN and others to legitimize reporting on the dossier’s salacious 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. -RCI
While Comey claims in his book, “A Higher Loyalty” that he didn’t have “a counterintelligence case file open on [Trump],” former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy notes that just because Trump’s name wasn’t on a formal file or surveillance warrant doesn’t mean that he wasn’t under investigation.
“They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him,” said McCarthy. “The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading. The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was the main subject.”
What’s more, the FBI couldn’t treat Trump as a suspect – formally, as they didn’t have the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. “They had no probable cause against Trump himself for ‘collusion’ or espionage,” he said, adding “They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing.”
What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting president. The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theories. Comey himself was an early skeptic of the Steele dossier — the opposition research memos paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that were the road map of collusion theories – which he dismissed as “salacious and unverified.” -RCI
July 23, 2019 - Durham's team reaches out to Mifsud to review a deposition he gave last year that suggests he was instructed to put Papadopoulos in touch with Russians
United States attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham (Credit: Bob Child/The Associated Press)
“While most of the political world focused its attention elsewhere, special prosecutor John Durham’s team quietly reached out this summer to a lawyer representing European academic Joseph Mifsud, one of the earliest and most mysterious figures in the now closed Russia-collusion case.
An investigator told Swiss attorney Stephan Roh that Durham’s team wanted to interview Mifsud, or at the very least review a recorded deposition the professor gave in summer 2018 about his role in the drama involving Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election.
(…) For those who don’t remember, Mifsud is a Maltese-born academic with a VIP Rolodex who frequented Rome and London for years and engaged at the highest levels of Western diplomatic and intelligence circles.
Mueller’s team alleges that Mifsud is the person who fed a story in spring 2016 to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about Moscow possessing purloined emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was the earliest known contact in the now-debunked collusion narrative and the seminal event that the FBI says prompted it on July 31, 2016, to open its probe into the Trump campaign.
Joseph Mifsud is introduced as the Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, by Dr. Ivan Timofeev, Programme Director of the Valdai Club Foundation in May, 2016. (Credi: Valdai Club/YouTube)
Mueller concluded that Mifsud was a person with extensive Russia ties who planted the story about the Clinton emails in Moscow and then lied about his dealings with Papadopoulos when interviewed by the FBI in 2017. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Mifsud.
(…) Conservative defenders of President Trump, including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), have raised recent concerns that Mueller’s portrayal of the Mifsud-Papadopoulos contacts doesn’t add up.
Roh told me the information he is preparing to share with Durham’s team from his client will accentuate those concerns.
Mifsud was a “longtime cooperator of western intel” who was asked specifically by his contacts at Link University in Rome and the London Center of International Law Practice (LCILP) — two academic groups with ties to Western diplomacy and intelligence — to meet with Papadopoulos at a dinner in Rome in mid-March 2016, Roh told me.
A May 2019 letter from Nunes to U.S. intelligence officials corroborates some of Roh’s account, revealing photos showing that the FBI conducted training at Link in fall 2016 and that Mifsud and other Link officials met regularly with world leaders, including Boris Johnson, elected today as Britain’s new prime minister.
A few days after the March dinner, Roh added, Mifsud received instructions from Link superiors to “put Papadopoulos in contact with Russians,” including a think tank figure named Ivan Timofeev and a woman he was instructed to identify to Papadopoulos as Vladimir Putin’s niece.
Mifsud knew the woman was not the Russian president’s niece but, rather, a student who was involved with both the Link and LCILP campuses, and the professor believed there was an effort underway to determine whether Papadopoulos was an “agent provocateur” seeking foreign contacts, Roh said.
The evidence, he told me, “clearly indicates that this was not only a surveillance op but a more sophisticated intel operation” in which Mifsud became involved.” (Read more: The Hill, 7/23/2019)
July 24, 2019 - Rep. Mike Turner questions Bob Mueller on his mythical power to 'exonerate' Trump and points to the media's use of the word before the hearing ends
(Credit: MSNBC screenshot)
“A House Republican pulled out a screengrab from Wednesday’s CNN coverage of Robert Mueller’s hearing as part of a demonstration to argue that the special counsel cannot legally prove exoneration.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) was questioning Mueller on the legal concept of exoneration, arguing it doesn’t exist and that neither Mueller or Attorney General Bill Barr could “exonerate” someone.
“The report states, accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it does not exonerate him,” Turner said. “There’s no office of exoneration at the Attorney general’s office, no certificate at the bottom of his desk. Mr. Mueller, would you agree with me that the Attorney General does not have the power to exonerate?”
Mueller frequently declined to discuss the question, saying, “I’m not prepared to deal with a legal discussion in that arena.” (Read more: Mediaite, 7/24/2019)
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All of Rep. Turner’s questions for Robert Mueller can be seen here:
July 24, 2019 - Jeffrey Epstein visited the Clinton White House multiple times in the early ’90s
Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein (Credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
(…) “How Epstein entered Clinton’s orbit remains unclear. When the president released his initial statement on Epstein, he did not explain the multiple other trips he appears to have taken on the financier’s plane—including one flight to Westchester with Epstein, his alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, and an “unnamed female.”
Clinton also failed to mention the intimate 1995 fundraising dinner at the Palm Beach home of Revlon mogul Ron Perelman, where Clinton hobnobbed with the likes of Epstein, Don Johnson, and Jimmy Buffett. (Nearby, at Epstein’s own Palm Beach mansion, the money man allegedly abused hundreds of underage girls.)
Clinton and Epstein were on the guest list for a “small dinner party” hosted by Revlon mogul Ron Perelman to raise funds for the Democratic National Convention in 1995.
The two were clearly chummy by the early Clinton Foundation years, as attested to by a 2002 photo of Epstein and Clinton in Brunei that appeared in Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of the financier. In a 2002 piece for New York magazine about the Africa trip, Clinton praised Epstein as a “highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist.”
Bill Clinton is pictured with Jeffrey Epstein’s social fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, at Chelsea’s wedding in 2010. (Credit: Getty Images)
Politico recently claimed that Clinton and Epstein connected in the first few years after the president left office. Citing “people who know those involved,” the article pegged Maxwell as the glue connecting the two men, and Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, as the tie between the president and the British socialite. Politico noted that Maxwell had vacationed with the Chelsea in 2009, attended her wedding in 2010, and participated in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013. (A Clinton spokesperson denied Chelsea and Ghislaine were close.)
Documents in the Clinton Library, however, attest to much earlier links between Maxwell, Epstein, and the Clinton White House.
In late September of 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton hosted a reception for supporters who had contributed to recent White House renovations. The nearly $400,000 overhaul—which included new gold draperies and a 13-color woven rug for the Oval Office—was funded entirely by donations to the White House Historical Association, a private organization that helps preserve and promote the White House as a historical monument.
The reception took place at the White House residence from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., according to a copy of the president’s daily schedule. White House Social Secretary Ann Stock—who appears in Epstein’s little black book of phone numbers—was listed as the point of contact. According to multiple attendees, the evening included an intimate tour of the newly refurbished residence, followed by a receiving line with the president and first lady. Dessert was served in the East Room, where the couple thanked everyone for attending and announced the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.
Guests for the event, according to the invitation list, included the journalist and philanthropist Barbara Goldsmith, heiress Jane Engelhard, political consultant Cynthia Friedman, and “Mr Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell.” Epstein and Maxwell do not appear on the ‘regret list,’ and there is a letter ‘A’ next to both of their names, indicating they planned to attend. A press release from the event, put out by Hillary Clinton’s office, lists Epstein as a White House Historical Association donor.
Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to repeated requests for comment. (Read much more: The Daily Beast, 7/24/2019)
July 25, 2019 - WSJ Editorial: What Mueller Was Trying to Hide
By Kimberly Strassel
A CSpan subtitle refers to the Mueller hearing on July 24, 2019, as an Obstruction of Justice Investigation by the House Judiciary Committee. (Credit: CSpan3)
(…) “The most notable aspect of the Mueller report was always what it omitted: the origins of this mess. Christopher Steele’s dossier was central to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe, the basis of many of the claims of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet the Mueller authors studiously wrote around the dossier, mentioning it only in perfunctory terms. The report ignored Mr. Steele’s paymaster, Fusion GPS, and its own ties to Russians. It also ignored Fusion’s paymaster, the Clinton campaign, and the ugly politics behind the dossier hit job.
Mr. Mueller’s testimony this week put to rest any doubt that this sheltering was deliberate. In his opening statement he declared that he would not “address questions about the opening of the FBI’s Russia investigation, which occurred months before my appointment, or matters related to the so-called Steele Dossier.” The purpose of those omissions was obvious, as those two areas go to the heart of why the nation has been forced to endure years of collusion fantasy.
Mr. Mueller claimed he couldn’t answer questions about the dossier because it “predated” his tenure and is the subject of a Justice Department investigation. These excuses are disingenuous. Nearly everything Mr. Mueller investigated predated his tenure, and there’s no reason the Justice Department probe bars Mr. Mueller from providing a straightforward, factual account of his team’s handling of the dossier.
If anything, Mr. Mueller had an obligation to answer those questions, since they go to the central failing of his own probe. As Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Mr. Mueller, how could a special-counsel investigation into “Russia’s interference” have any credibility if it failed to look into whether the Steele dossier was itself disinformation from Moscow? Mr. Steele acknowledges that senior Russian officials were the source of his dossier’s claims of an “extensive conspiracy.” Given that no such conspiracy actually existed, Mr. Gaetz asked: “Did Russians really tell that to Christopher Steele, or did he just make it up and was he lying to the FBI?”
Mr. Mueller surreally responded: “As I said earlier, with regard to Steele, that is beyond my purview.”
So it went throughout the whole long day. Republicans asked basic questions about the report’s conclusions or analysis, and Mr. Mueller dodged and weaved and refused to avoid answering questions about the FBI’s legwork, the dossier’s role and Fusion’s involvement. Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot asked how the report could have neglected to mention Fusion’s ties to a Russian company and lawyer. Mr. Mueller: “Outside my purview.” California Rep. Devin Nunes asked several questions about one of the men at the epicenter of the “collusion” conspiracy—academic Joseph Mifsud, whom former FBI Director Jim Comey has tried to paint as a Russian agent. Mr. Mueller: “I am not going to speak to the series of happenings as you articulated them.”
Then again, how could he? The Mueller team, rather than question the FBI’s actions, went out of its way to build on them. That’s how we ended up with tortured plea agreements for process crimes from figures like former Trump aide George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. They were peripheral figures in an overhyped drama, who nonetheless had to be scalped to legitimize the early actions of Mr. Comey & Co. Mr. Mueller inherited the taint, and his own efforts were further tarnished. That accounts for Mr. Mueller’s stonewalling.” (Read more: The Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2019)