Category: Russiagate

Well, Rats!

Drain The Swamp Russiagate 37 Comments

Politico;

“Everyone I’ve talked to, mostly lawyers, are losing their minds,” said one DOJ attorney, who like most of the people interviewed for this article was granted anonymity to speak freely about colleagues and avoid retribution from the president-elect and his allies. “The fear is that career leadership and career employees everywhere are either going to leave or they’re going to be driven out.”

While alarm over Trump’s return is widespread throughout the federal bureaucracy, it is perhaps most acute at the Justice Department, which was at the center of many of the major controversies of his first term.

Most of the department’s 115,000 employees were around for those controversies. Critics believed the Trump White House meddled in some of the department’s high-profile prosecutions. Both of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, eventually lost the president’s confidence. And his first term ended with a stunning showdown between Trump and nearly all of his DOJ appointees as they resisted his attempts to cling to power.

But department veterans say those events pale in comparison to what they expect when Trump gets a second chance to try to remake the DOJ in his vision. They also know Trump’s anger at the department has only deepened in the past four years as it launched two unprecedented criminal prosecutions against him.

This Is CNN

Bill's Wife CreepyJoeBiden Media Russiagate 20 Comments

Mollie Hemingway;

Before I tell you what happened next, I need to explain why I’ve never told this story publicly before. During commercial breaks and while remote reporters are on air, people on television sets share personal stories, funny jokes, and information about stories they’re working on. I have long treated on-set interactions that are not broadcast as not to be discussed.

But in the same way that a reporter can publicly disclose an anonymous source who burns them with bad information, Tapper and CNN are causing serious harm to the country with their revisionist history of their own key role in the Russia collusion hoax. It’s become a matter of conscience that I stop hiding what I witnessed at CNN.

Related.

More on Tapper, from Ace.

Breaking News: The Tenet Media Investigation

Blogging Media Russiagate 25 Comments

Matt Christiansen is engaged in a live feed, explaining his role in the Tenet Media investigation. You probably want to rewind it to the beginning.

More here.

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

Bill's Wife Democrats Russiagate 16 Comments

Totally unrelated: Charles McGonigal’s and Hunter Biden’s daughters play on the same Lacrosse team.

More related: FBI Agent Lied Under Oath About Knowledge of Hunter Biden Laptop: Rep. Jordan.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Bill's Wife Media Russiagate 7 Comments

Russian Collusion And The Death Of Journalism

Ashley Rindsberg, investigative journalist and author of “The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History,” outlined the broad strokes of the Russian Collusion narrative that was manically propagated by the mainstream media and then quietly ignored after its claims were categorically discredited.

In January 2023, the Columbia Review, a highly respected journalistic publication, published an in-depth review of the “Russiagate” scandal written by industry veteran Jeff Gerth. Gerth concluded that every major claim made about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion was false. “Let’s step back and consider what this means: for some five years, the Mainstream Media, the New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN fed a grotesque lie to the public, that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to subvert an American election.”

A similar fact pattern would emerge in many of the allegations — initial sourcing from opposition research or highly disreputable sources would be referenced by the FBI or other government agents in anonymous statements to the media, who would then parrot the claims as if they were credible because the FBI was investigating them.

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

Drain The Swamp Margin Of Fraud Russiagate 29 Comments

A useful look back by Tom Elliot;

The more we learn about the 2020 election, the more undeniable it becomes that Biden owes his “victory” to blatant political corruption. To wit:

1) An IRS probe into the Bidens money laundering payments from hostile nations — the normal outcome of which would have ended his candidacy — was instead given a stand-down order

2) The FBI & IRS wanted to search Biden’s house in September 2020 but were given a stand down order.

3) The @FBI authenticated Hunter’s laptop a year before the NYPost first reported on its contents

4) Rather than use the laptop’s voluminous documentation of myriad felonies to initiate criminal investigations, the FBI hatched a plot to warn social media companies of an imminent “hack & leak” operation of what they heavily suggested was Russian disinformation

5) The FBI used its 2016 Russia collusion probe — which the Durham probe has since proven was essentially an extension of the Clinton campaign — to rationalize its meddling in the 2020 election. Continue reading →

“Have you no sense of decency?”

Bill's Wife Russiagate Surveillance State 12 Comments

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.

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

Democrats Drain The Swamp Russiagate 20 Comments

Jonathan Turley:

The Red Scare is back and it is going blue.

I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.

The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialist, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.

This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who became persona non grata for her anti-war sentiments in Congress. She was later labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, who has refused to support that scurrilous claim of a former member.

For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics labeled as Russian apologists. Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent.

If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some. Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.

This probably doesn’t need to be said, but for the few who might not have realized it yet – we’ve been dragged into Ukraine to fight not Russia, but a Democrat proxy war with Trump.

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

Democrats Drain The Swamp Russiagate 20 Comments

Margot Cleveland;

The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago reveals the deep-state cabal and their corrupt media partners deployed no fewer than 10 of the same tradecrafts used to push the Russia-collusion hoax. And with that, history is repeating itself with the same corrupt plot.

Related: Kevin McCarthy just absolutely destroyed a reporter who questioned his decision to remove Schiff and Swalwell from the intel committee.

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

Claws of the Panda Drain The Swamp Russiagate 5 Comments

It was a life-or-death call. The Chinese government had been systematically picking off American spies in China, dismantling a network that had taken the CIA years to build. A mole hunt was underway, and the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was the prime suspect.

The FBI could have arrested him on the spot for possessing classified information. But inside a secretive government task force, investigators argued against it, former U.S. officials recalled.

@wretchardthecat: Guess who (wait for it…) ran the investigation?

Let That Sink In

Democrats Drain The Swamp Russiagate Social Disease 7 Comments

Matt Taibbi;

Remember this one? Russian bots and trolls were blamed by virtually every major news organization in the country for amplifying the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The files contain a mass of emails from executives blowing up this ridiculous story, once and for all.

The #ReleaseTheMemo scandal was one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of our media, but taken seriously by all but one or two mainstream editors at the time. All citing the same dubious source — the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” trumpeted by former FBI counterintelligence official and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts — they insisted Russians deployed Twitter bot-armies to whip up cyber-support for Republican congressmann Devin Nunes. Nunes had just released a classified memo alleging Democrats and the FBI used the infamous paid oppositional research dossier of ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain secret FISA surveillance authority on Trump-connected figures like Carter Page, amid other improprieties.

We now know Twitter internally found no evidence, as in zero, that Russians were anywhere near this story.

“I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo,” wrote a piqued Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, in all other respects as loyal a Democratic partisan as can be imagined. “None of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

“These hashtags are organic,” said a second.

“Not seeing it,” said a third.

This is a constant theme in the files. In addition to revelations about FBI censorship, shadow-banning, Pentagon use of fake accounts, and suppression of true information about issues like Covid-19, the Twitter emails regularly expose the wide delta between what we were told about foreign threats, and what a major platform seeing the raw data knew.

The Twitter Files:The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag

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