Steve Friend was a distinguished FBI agent. The FBI retaliated against him after he exposed how the Bureau was cooking the books on domestic violent extremism cases. pic.twitter.com/X1JpMYDkBq
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2023
“If you don’t comply, they will retaliate“.
The Durham Report is out, cataloguing everything we already knew.
In a long-awaited report released Monday, special counsel John Durham slammed the FBI for actions agents took during the 2016 probe scrutinizing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and it alleged ties to Russia.
Durham’s final report examining the origins of the Russia investigation brings to a close a four-year probe that failed to produce any major convictions despite the expectations pushed by Trump and his allies […]
“In short, it is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report says. “An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”
While Durham does not appear to say outright that the FBI’s Russia investigation should not have been launched, he strongly suggests that is the case — while using sharp language to admonish former FBI leadership and agents and describing his findings as “sobering.”
Update: DeSantis blasts
Jonathan Turley: The blackout on Biden corruption is truly ‘Pulitzer-level stuff’
This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.
The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”
For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.
However much you hate them, it’s not enough.
@ConceptualJames – The top rated New York Times comment right now. Most of top comments are like this. New Yorkers are PISSED. Their city leadership and DA Bragg have failed them unbelievably.
Just not enough to stop voting for it.
Both: Is Christopher Wray Covering up for the Biden Family or the FBI Itself?
Oh man this forum in Grande Prairie is and these locals are pissed. They had dozers out there putting out the fire and were forced away. There were 8 more dozers coming and they turned them around. Something is afoul about this fire it seems. pic.twitter.com/SgJ4GKaYdF
— Bushels Per Acre (@BushelsPerAcre) May 10, 2023
They’re in the very best of hands.
More.
This Rancher from Grande Prairie spits pure
Saying they were evacuated when they were in no danger & forced to abandon their livestock & farms. Pipestone Energy offered to pump insurmountable water but was rejected.
Calls out how they are being lied topic.twitter.com/H09b4Nv9eg— Bushels Per Acre (@BushelsPerAcre) May 10, 2023
Entitled to their entitlements.
Blacklocks- Bonuses Were Extra: Fortier
Cabinet’s estimated $5.2 billion cost of settling with striking federal employees did not include the expense of $2,500 bonuses, says Treasury Board President Mona Fortier. Bonuses would add more than a third of a billion to the settlement: “We can adjust the amount.”
They need you to go, Joe: Charges Against Hunter Biden May Be Imminent
…He saw something in that wreckage that caused him to become paranoid and went on a mission to tell everyone what he saw. He was found in a field, cut up tortured, strangled and shot. His death was ruled a suicide.
New at the WSJ: Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief, Goldman’s Top Lawyer
The circle of people who associated with Jeffrey Epstein years after he was a convicted sex offender is wider than previously reported, according to a trove of documents that include his schedules.
William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited …
It’s paywalled, I’ll update as more trickles out.
Update: Zerohedge has a post up now.
Now Archived. (h/t Larry )
At the Revere Hotel in Boston, FBI agents and Army Special Ops units were about to conduct a “training exercise”.
In the “exercise”, they would go into a room and interrogate a “role player”.
Instead, they went to the wrong room, where an unsuspecting airline pilot answered the door. They handcuffed him, threw him into the shower, and interrogated him for about an hour, before he was able to convince them he wasn’t the “role player”.
They then told him that he could never speak about what had happened, and left.
When it became public, the government’s response was basically “oops”.
Days after a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, Sec. of State Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, reached out to a former CIA official + “set in motion the events that led” to a statement from intelligence officials say House Republicans.pic.twitter.com/wYQ3uAYFQd
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) April 21, 2023
More at Post Millenial
“The Fall of the FBI” – I have only one criticism of the just-released book by long-time superstar FBI agent Thomas Baker entitled “The Fall of the FBI.” It really should be entitled “The Winter of the FBI.” That’s how bad things have gotten in the upper echelons of the Bureau.
New documents obtained from the National Archives appear to reveal the direct involvement of the Biden Administration in the FBI’s controversial and widely-panned raid on President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida last year.
As reported by Breitbart, the documents were obtained by the legal watchdog group America First Legal (AFL). At the time of the raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8th, 2022, the Biden Administration claimed that it was “stunned” by the development, while the National Archives claimed that it had “not been involved in the DOJ investigation.” The excuse that the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland gave for carrying out the authoritarian and unprecedented raid was that President Trump allegedly possessed several classified documents, which had to be returned to the National Archives.
However, the new documents reveal that the National Archives ultimately did cooperate with the Biden FBI and DOJ due to a “special access request” from the Biden Administration, which was filed on behalf of the DOJ.
One of the facts exposed by the documents is that John Laster, the Archives official responsible for handling all access requests for presidential records, was in direct communication with the FBI as he discussed preparing the seized Trump documents for FBI review on August 23rd, 2022.
In October, the National Archives told senior Republicans Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.) about the Trump documents, which the Archives “discovered that they contained classified national security information,” at which point “NARA’s OIG (Office of the Inspector General) subsequently referred the matter to DOJ on February 9, 2022.”
But the discrepancy arises from Laster’s decision to directly coordinate with the FBI himself, thus discrediting the Archives’ claims that the OIG acted independently of the Archives’ leadership. Furthermore, the Biden Administration’s attempt to use “special access request” as a pretext for a law enforcement raid is an unprecedented abuse of presidential records law.
“The special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House,” a spokesman for America First Legal explained further. “Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”
Reed Rubinstein, senior counselor at AFL, added that “the evidence further suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people.”
FBI Undercover Agent Developed Plan to Spy on Catholics
“So, apparently, I’m an extremist.”
Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
It’s no-holds-barred banana republic stuff now: Trump indicted by Manhattan grand jury
The indictment comes in a case centered on a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with the married Trump in 2006, a claim the former president has denied. Trump had classified his reimbursement of the payout as a legal expense.
Cernovich notes: DeSantis is listening to the wrong people.
Update: Well, he’s listening to the right people now.
The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head.
It is un-American.
The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is…
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 30, 2023
Glenn Beck: “There’s going to be 100 million people that will walk on broken glass and through fire to vote for someone other than this corrupt banana republic administration”
Hamilton 68 and the Hoax Of The Century.
In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.
For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.
Until 2017, that is…
But it’s about much more than that. Grab a coffee, send it on.
Jim Jordan Demands IRS Explain Unannounced Visit to Matt Taibbi’s Home
