Followed by Trey Gowdy.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Fusion GPS was/is essentially in the ‘information for hire‘ business, selling to clients for a price and using networks of journalists and former government officials to transmit, share and disseminate information on behalf of their clients. Essentially, Fusion GPS is an opposition research group with a network of journalists, paid and unpaid, that it uses to frame constructed narratives to the benefit of their clients. In the spring, summer and fall of 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign was one such client.
In April 2017, at the time of this meeting with AP reporters, Andrew Weissmann was chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section. Weissmann joined the special counsel a month later, May 2017.
We already know the FISA searches were essentially political opposition research being conducted by these opaque ‘contractors’. We know the ideology within the DOJ-NSD and FBI, the generic intent of their motive, from the communication amid the group doing the Clinton and Trump investigations; text messages, memos and emails which have since become public.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are crying foul over a meeting Justice Department prosecutors held with four Associated Press reporters last year as news organizations and the FBI bore down on the longtime lobbyist and political consultant.
Manafort’s defense has argued for months that the off-the-record session on April 11, 2017, was a potential conduit for improper leaks to the press about the probe that led to two criminal cases against the former Trump campaign chief.
Now, Manafort’s attorneys have fresh evidence they say bolsters their claims: two memos written by FBI agents who attended the meeting and documented their version of what transpired.
Manafort’s legal team paints the evidence as confirmation that journalists were given inside information about the investigation in violation of Justice Department policies and, perhaps, legal prohibitions on disclosure of grand jury secrets.
Via Drudge, where there are additional items up.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
The NSA is effectively noting that collected call logs are infected with errors. The NSA cannot isolate or fix these errors. As a result, the NSA is actively purging all the data they have ever collected.
By all data I mean every bit of data collected under the USA Freedom Act of 2015 (Fact sheet here). About 685 million call logs.
Which is pretty odd given that this matter was supposedly addressed back in early 2017.
[…]
This doesn’t feel like a corrective action. This feels like a purge.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
The whole world knew of the Abedin-Weiner marriage. The bandits of the Afghanistan mountains knew Huma and Anthony were married. The chipmunks of Central Park knew Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin were married. There are anchorites sitting on a tree spike somewhere in a desolate and empty landscape that knew this. Charlie Rose knew it.
However, there was one man, one mind alone, not furnished with that factum. It was the top man at the FBI, the No. 1 sleuth of the greatest investigative institution in all of human history, James Comey.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Nobody cuts through the bullshit like the Great One.
More here:
1) Don’t believe anyone who claims Horowitz didn’t find bias. He very carefully says that he found no “documentary” evidence that bias produced “specific investigatory decisions.” That’s different #IGReport
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) June 14, 2018
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
BUMPED FOR UPDATE: The report is public, can be accessed here.
New developments.. An FBI attorney who worked on the special counsel’s Russia investigation until earlier this year sent anti-Trump text messages to a colleague, including one exclaiming: “Viva le Resistance.”
Fox News: The Justice Department inspector general referred five FBI employees for investigation into whether their politically-charged and “hostile” text messages and instant messages violated FBI code, according to the damning inspector general report released Thursday.
Original post continues below… scroll down for further finds from the report.
IG Report findings begin to trickle out…
Former FBI Director James Comey “deviated” from FBI and Justice Department procedures in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the law enforcement agencies’ image of impartiality even though he wasn’t motivated by political bias, the department’s watchdog found in a highly anticipated report.
“While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in the report’s conclusions, which were obtained Thursday by Bloomberg News.
Horowitz’s report examined actions taken by top officials before the 2016 election, including the handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. The investigation expanded to touch on an array of politically sensitive decisions by officials including Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Nothing that readers of this site won’t already know, but we’re not most people. I’ll expand on this post as updates (and the official release) come in.
I recommend you watch this Twitter account, as well. (sorry, corrected with link).
Related: The Silencing of the Inspectors General.
FBI agent Peter Strzok assured his mistress and colleague Lisa Page that they would stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in a text message, a new report from the DOJ inspector general finds per Bloomberg News White House Correspondent Jennifer Jacobs.
“Several FBI employees Who played critical roles in the investigation sent political messages,” the report reads, according to Jacobs.
“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok, Bloomberg reports.
“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” Strzok reportedly replied
How is it that Lisa Page’s question (“Trump’s not going to become president, right?”) was leaked, but Peter Strzok’s response (“No, we’ll stop it”) was not until now? And how is that not a massive deal?
My mind is boggled.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 14, 2018
More.
"No bias at the FBI" or something. This exchange is nuts. pic.twitter.com/uUj0NlYNAf
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 14, 2018
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
A former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee — who was in charge of maintaining all classified information from the Executive Office to the panel — was indicted for allegedly giving false statements to FBI agents looking into possible leaks to reporters, the Justice Department announced Thursday night.
James A. Wolfe, 58, served as the panel’s security director for 29 years, according to the feds.
Wolfe lied to the FBI in December 2017 about contacts he had with three reporters, the indictment read. He also allegedly lied about giving two reporters non-public information about committee matters.
Earlier Thursday, the New York Times revealed that federal investigators had seized years’ worth of email and phone records relating to one of its reporters, Ali Watkins. She previously had a three-year romantic relationship with Wolfe,…
@TheLastRefuge2 – Choosing this particular intelligence leaker, Jim Wolfe, to indict first was also very smart strategy. Wolfe indictment captures 4 Reporters, 4 outlets: CNN, NYT, NBC and ABC. Thereby most major media journalists are immediately on notice.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
POLITICIZING THE FBI: How James Comey Succeeded Where Richard Nixon Failed
Recent revelations show, chillingly, that he involved the FBI in what appears to have been a plot to entrap, and even frame, a political opponent and his campaign regarding Russian collusion. This radical politicization of the Bureau makes any Nixonian scheme seem like child’s play. Nixon shamefully tricked the FBI into doing a routine background check on his enemy, journalist Daniel Schorr. Comey outdid Nixon by a wide margin, using his FBI to construct a false case of possible treason against a political enemy.
Grab a coffee.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
If FBI contractors were mining the FBI's NSA-connected database for political opposition research on behalf of their paying clients such as, oh, let's say, THE DNC & THE HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN & they pulled the name 'Michael Cohen' visiting Prague out of that database…
— Stealth Jeff (@drawandstrike) May 29, 2018
When The President Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Obama’s spying scandal is starting to look a lot like Watergate;
“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.
It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives had burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.
Related. ” Bad as these latest developments are, however, they pale in comparison to looming negative consequences now that the State Department has begun dribbling out more than 30,000 missing Clinton emails, together with supporting attachments.”
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
When The Obama Administration Became The Deep State
In early January 2017, then-President Barack Obama, SHMOTUS Joe Biden, and a small sub-group of the national security team began their transition to what’s commonly called the “Deep State.” Based on the footprints they left behind we can tell that they took time from their real jobs of running the country, this proto-deep state planned, coordinated, and leaked a timed media burst of articles about Trump and Russia. Each of the stories was leaked to different outlets. Each story was published between the 10th and 12th of January. This was the turning point when the Obama Administration became the deep state.
At NRO on Tuesday, Andrew McCarthy came to an important conclusion about the Trump-Russia investigation. It has been increasingly clear that the investigation – to the extent we may call it that – started quite a while before 31 July 2016, the date long given for its formal launch. McCarthy suggests it began in the early spring, probably around the end of March.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
The Hunter Becomes the Hunted;
In response to Trump’s demand, Rod Rosenstein has asked the DOJ inspector general to review the possible infiltration of the Trump campaign. The hunters have themselves become the hunted. For better or worse, two major American political factions are trying to jail each other. The outcome of their struggle may determine not only who occupies the White House, but what future role the intelligence agencies play in public life.
The specifics of the individual accusations may be fake, but the struggle over the control of the bureaucracy is frighteningly real. Concern over the independence of powerful bureaucracies has long been paramount for a reason. The biggest problem with weaponizing intelligence agencies is it CREATES a pathway for the foreign takeover of the system. If a once hostile power takes over the White House and that president corrupts the agencies, an unfettered secret police will have the ability to remain in power indefinitely. […]
Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins.
Related: In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate Measures
Just grab a coffee, and read them both.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
[The] current scandal is far, far worse than Watergate, which, bad as it was, was the coverup of a completely unnecessary buffoon-like break-in during an election that was already won in a landslide. What is being exposed now is an attempt by our highest law enforcement agency working in concert with our intelligence agencies and, evidently, the blessing of the former administration itself to block the candidate of the opposing party, even to defraud and spy on him, that is to, as others have said, “set him up.” And then, if they were unsuccessful, make it impossible for him to govern. In addition, in all probability, the same players conspired to make certain Hillary Clinton was not indicted for a crime for which virtually any other American would have done jail time.
h/t Warren K Smith
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
The question Mr. Nunes’s committee seems to be investigating is what other moments—if any—were engineered in the spring, summer or fall of 2016 to cast suspicion on Team Trump. The conservative press has produced some intriguing stories about a handful of odd invitations and meetings that were arranged for Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos starting in the spring—all emanating from the United Kingdom. On one hand, that country is home to the well-connected Mr. Steele, which could mean the political actors with whom he was working were involved. On the other hand, the Justice Department has admitted it was spying on both men, which could mean government was involved. Or maybe . . . both.
Which brings us to timing. It’s long been known that Mr. Steele went to the FBI in early July to talk about the dossier, and that’s the first known intersection of the strands. But given the oddity and timing of those U.K. interactions concerning Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos, and given the history of some of the people involved in arranging them, some wonder if the two strands were converging earlier than anyone has admitted. The Intelligence Committee subpoena is designed to sort all this out: Who was pulling the strings, and what was the goal? Information? Or entrapment?
It’s reasonable to assume that much of the new information in the New York Times report relates to leakers’ fears about information that will be coming out in the inspector general report.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
CASTING A WIDE NET: Mueller Indicted A Russian Company That Didn’t Even Exist, Court Transcripts Say
The investigation’s in the very best of hands.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Maybe they were talking about a different “insurance policy” …
The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.
More…
I don’t think the FBI is being straight. I’m speculating, of course, but I think it’s going to turn out that they were spying on Trump from surprisingly early on, and that they didn’t expect him to win, and that when he did win, the Russian “collusion” thing was hyped up as a smokescreen.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.
Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.
Related: Mueller’s Tough Week in Court