Category: Russiagate

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Drain The Swamp Russiagate 8 Comments

Roger Kimball;

In the matter of James Brien Comey Jr., how finds the court? I do not mean a court of law. I mean the tribunal of history.

Granted, we will be hearing from a Virginia court of law about JBC quite soon. On Thursday, Comey became the first former FBI director in history to be indicted by a grand jury for a felony. The charges? Lying to Congress and obstructing justice. (For the legal eagles among you, the statutes in question are USC 18 §1001 and USC 18 §1505.)

Call it karma, irony, or just good old-fashioned just desserts: whatever your literary preference, there is a delicious symmetry in the fact that USC 18 §1001—which prohibits making “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” to a government official—was the statute under which Comey tormented and bankrupted General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor for a few weeks in 2017.

Dispatches from the Maple Gulag Insane Asylum

Basic Dictatorship Canada’s Bolsheviks Russiagate Trump 46 Comments

Andrew Coyne has completely lost it…

By now it should be clear that the subjection of the United States to the dictatorship of Donald Trump is no longer a theoretical possibility or even a distant probability. It is an imminent reality.

It is not here, quite – critics of the President remain at large, the courts are still attempting to enforce the rule of law, the results of the 2026 and 2028 elections have not yet been determined – but the pieces are being put in place at astonishing speed.

To call what is happening a “slide” into authoritarianism, as if it were something anarchic and uncontrolled, would not be apt. It is more like a cementing. Having slipped back into power by the narrowest of margins, Mr. Trump and his acolytes have been steadily expanding from that beachhead, each new power serving as the means to acquire still more.

Often these powers have been acquired illegally, in brazen defiance of the Constitution. But so long as no one holds them to account for it, and so long as the administration refuses to be held to account, they become ratified by convention, or practice, or sheer nerve, the de facto rapidly congealing into the de jure.

…or maybe Andrew is bitter because Conservatives fired his father…

The Coyne Affair

 

Russia, Russia, Russia

Putin Russiagate Trump 17 Comments

Whenever the timing is awkward, assume the timing is intentional;

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released two emails that are significant not only for their content but for their timing, coming just two days before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. The emails reveal that in late 2016, then-DNI James Clapper pushed the fraudulent narrative that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC), overriding pointed objections from then-National Security Agency chief Admiral Mike Rogers.

The timing matters because this very narrative — the claim that Russia had hacked the DNC to help President Trump — was used to sabotage the 2018 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. Just three days before that meeting, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian nationals on charges of hacking the DNC. The indictment was designed to create political chaos. Mueller knew that the 12 Russians were located in Russia and would never stand trial, meaning he would never need to prove the case. The result of the indictments was exactly what Mueller, his team, and any yet-to-be-identified co-conspirators intended: to sabotage the summit and effectively criminalize diplomacy with Russia.

h/t roaddog

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

47 New Rules Russiagate 8 Comments

Fox News Exclusive;

Attorney General Pam Bondi directed her staff Monday to act on the criminal referral from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard related to the alleged conspiracy to tie President Donald Trump to Russia, and the Department of Justice is now opening a grand jury investigation into the matter, Fox News Digital has learned.

Bondi personally ordered an unnamed federal prosecutor to initiate legal proceedings and the prosecutor is expected to present department evidence to a grand jury, which would allow the department to secure a potential indictment, according to a letter from Bondi reviewed by Fox News Digital and a source familiar with the investigation.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on the report of an investigation but said Bondi is taking the referral from Gabbard “very seriously.” The spokesperson said Bondi believed there is “clear cause for deep concern” and a need for next steps.

America This Week is a good watch today on this, as always. In particular, spend a few minutes with this segment reviewing an Obama interview in December 2016.

Open Letter to the Columbia Journalism Review, on the Atrocious New York Times

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Drain The Swamp Russiagate 13 Comments

New York Post;

FBI Director Kash Patel discovered “burn bags” filled with thousands of documents dating back to the bureau’s Trump-Russia probe during the 2016 campaign, a source familiar with the findings told The Post Wednesday.

One of the documents, discovered in a purported secret room at the FBI’s DC headquarters, is a classified annex to the 2023 report by then-special counsel John Durham that scrutinized the original probe, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The 29-page appendix to the Durham report, which has never been publicly released, includes details of the intelligence he reviewed, according to Fox News Digital, which first reported on the discovery.

In official parlance, “burn bags” refer to containers that hold classified documents that are meant to be destroyed after a certain period of time.

It was not immediately clear whether the documents found by Patel had yet to reach their destroy date or were preserved due to an oversight by officials.

Fox News;

Sources exclusively briefed Fox News Digital on some of the contents of the classified annex — including that the U.S. intelligence community had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the alleged Trump–Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.

A source familiar with the contents of the classified annex told Fox News Digital that while it may not have been exactly clear in the moment what the intelligence collection meant, with the benefit of hindsight, it predicted the FBI’s next move “with alarming specificity.”

Related: “Two days after the election in 2016, I was called up on the NSA phone. The person said I had to be on the intelligence community assessment that was assembling to finalize the Russia narrative. because we were going to prove that Trump was a Russian asset, and we were going to delay or block the inauguration of Donald J. Trump for the first term.”

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Democrats Russiagate The One 19 Comments

It’s a thread.

… top national security officials including FBI Dir James Comey, CIA Dir John Brennan and DNI James Clapper gathered at the Obama White House to discuss Russia. Obama directed the IC to create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even though it would contradict multiple intelligence assessments released over the previous several months.

Update: Matt Taibbi weighs in (link corrected).

The material is bolstered throughout by explanations of a whistleblower from then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office. Just this handful of documents holds explosive implications, implicating a much bigger pool of White House officials than previously understood, including Obama himself, in what appears to be a top-down effort to create a false narrative about Russia meddling to help Donald Trump. If there’s an analog in American history, I can’t think of it.

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Drain The Swamp Russiagate 15 Comments

Matt Taibbi;

What a roller-coaster the last week has been.

On the heels of the devastating, embarrassing announcement by Donald Trump’s Justice Department that there would be no new document releases in the Jeffrey Epstein case, there is real — if confusing — progress in an equally explosive investigation. In a story first broken by Fox News, reported further by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, and Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, and bolstered now by our own sources at Racket, it’s confirmed: FBI Director Kash Patel has opened criminal investigations into former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, for offenses related to the Trump-Russia scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.”

The opening of criminal probes into two of the most powerful enforcement chiefs of the Trump era marks the first steps toward consequences for the elaborate and historically unprecedented intelligence fraud that for years consumed American politics. The Bureau will look at possible perjury and conspiracy offenses for both, focusing initially on how Brennan’s CIA and Comey’s FBI worked to produce the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 6th, 2017.

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Drain The Swamp Russiagate 12 Comments

Latest FBI Revelations Show The Mueller Special Counsel Was A Cover-Up, And Much More

Last Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a recently declassified FBI “Electronic Communication,” or EC, dating from September 2019, which the Iowa Republican maintains “Proves Fusion GPS Contractor Nellie Ohr Lied To Congress About Contributions To Crossfire Hurricane.” That 43-page document, drafted by a FBI Washington Field Office agent, detailed extensive evidence indicating Nellie Ohr lied multiple times during her congressional testimony concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign.

The catalogue of evidence against Nellie Ohr, who is married to Bruce Ohr — one of the key FBI Russia-collusion hoaxers — raises the question of why the DOJ never pursued criminal charges against the Fusion GPS contractor. The EC also suggests that Nellie Ohr’s open-source research may have made its way into the Steele dossier and the fraudulent Alfa Bank materials provided to the FBI.

Those details, however, pale in comparison to two explosive facts the EC revealed by way of background. First, the EC explained the FBI’s Sentinel case management system allows investigative material to be coded “Prohibited Access,” which renders the files not merely inaccessible to other agents — but invisible to them. And second, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team designated the Trump/Russia-collusion investigations “Prohibited Access” in Sentinel, meaning any agents running keyword search in Sentinel would wrongly believe there were no responsive documents.

Emphasis mine. Read it all.

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