Category: Russiagate

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

Daily Caller;

The judge presiding over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered the FBI in a secret court filing earlier in December to identify all cases handled by a former FBI lawyer who allegedly altered an email during the investigation of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
 
Judge Rosemary Collyer ordered the review Dec. 5, several days before the release of a Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report that found the FBI made “significant inaccuracies” in applications to surveil Page.
 
The report said a now-former FBI lawyer who has been identified as Kevin Clinesmith altered an email from the bureau’s liaison to the CIA in June 2017 to say Page was “not a source” for the agency.

More here on Kevin Clinesmith.

But that’s not the new news. This is: Former NSA Director Mike Rogers Working With John Durham For Several Months…

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

@TheLastRefuge – OK, so here’s a little thread on the specifics hinted in this article.. (Paywalled)

The federal prosecutor scrutinizing the Russia investigation has begun examining the role of the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan in how the intelligence community assessed Russia’s 2016 election interference, according to three people briefed on the inquiry.
 
John H. Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr. Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on his inquiry. He wants to learn what Mr. Brennan told other officials, including the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, about his and the C.I.A.’s views of a notorious dossier of assertions about Russia and Trump associates.
 
Mr. Durham’s pursuit of Mr. Brennan’s records is certain to add to accusations that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. The president has long attacked Mr. Brennan as part of his narrative about a so-called deep state cabal of Obama administration officials who tried to sabotage his campaign, and Mr. Trump has held out Mr. Durham’s investigation as a potential avenue for proving those claims.
 
Mr. Durham is also examining whether Mr. Brennan privately contradicted his public comments, including May 2017 testimony to Congress, about both the dossier and about any debate among the intelligence agencies over their conclusions on Russia’s interference, the people said.

Related;

The co-founder of the prominent intelligence community blog, Lawfare, admitted that a recent report from the Justice Department inspector general on FBI FISA abuses for Trump campaign surveillance has destroyed their own credibility.
 
On a Thursday podcast hosted by Stewart Baker, a partner at the Washington office of Steptoe & Johnson LLP, the blog’s founder, Bobby Chesney admitted that the damming report from the DOJ IG documenting FBI abuses and vindicating the infamous Nunes memo on the discredited Steele Dossier alleging Russian collusion has been destructive to his publication’s reputation.

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

More here.

The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.

Well, finally.

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

Thread.

IG Report identifies “seven significant inaccuracies and omissions” in FISA warrant application.
 
This is legal speak for – 7 lies.

Full report here.

Sen. Lindsay Graham reacts.

@tracybeanz Thread: Analysis of the IG Report on the Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s CrossfirevHurricane Investigation

More:

Durham says: “last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened“. This is important because the difference between the inspector general and the U.S. attorney is that John Durham has interviewed Downer and Mifsud, and Horowitz has not.
 
Therefore for Durham to state the predication was not justified, has to come from his contact with Ambassador Downer or Joseph Mifsud.

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

The Horowitz Report into FISA abuse drops today.

Related: Look everybody! A shiny ball!

Update: The Swamp is deep.

Update #2 Statement from AG Barr;

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
 
Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.
 
The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

Well, finally.

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


Thread.

More at Conservative Treehouse;

This would appear to be one of the few positive indicators that AG Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham are indeed doing more than bondo.

And now just breaking:

At American Greatness;

In a scorching court filing Wednesday, Gen. Michael Flynn’s legal team accused Department of Justice prosecutors of stonewalling and suppressing exonerating evidence the defense itself uncovered.
 
Lead counsel Sidney Powell also accused “certain elements in the government” of targeting Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, for destruction because he had “publicly expressed intent to audit the intelligence agencies where billions of dollars are unaccounted for.”

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

Finally?

Several news outlets are now reporting that U.S. Attorney for DC, Jessie Liu, will likely indict former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying to FBI investigators.
 
The reporting is based on leaked email communications from the lawyers representing Andrew McCabe, where McCabe’s legal appeals to Main Justice and current DOJ Deputy Attorney General James Rosen were rejected.

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

A Story of 2 Probes and the FBI

The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?
 
The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a “quid pro quo” to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.
 
Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers’ cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
 
The private Libya inquiry leaves important issues unsettled. The documents do not include emails or other original source material to support the allegations within. While claiming to possess evidence that Blumenthal and his associates had contracts and offshore accounts to repatriate the money, the documents say “no concrete evidence” was found suggesting Clinton acted to support the effort.
 
Yet if verified, the files might shed light on why Clinton kept her emails, tens of thousands of which have gone missing, out of normal government communication channels.

It’s long, grab a coffee.

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

More at Conservative Treehouse;

Keep in mind, as you review SSCI Mark Warner attempting covert contact, for the expressed political purpose of conducting a ‘soft coup’….. the Vice-Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mark Warner, is also a member of a very specific group known as the oversight “Gang-of-Eight”; and has contact with the most sensitive and secret covert government operations.
 
When you realize that senate members of the Gang-of-Eight in 2016 (Feinstein and Reid) were participating in the targeting…. and that continued into 2017 (Warner, Schumer, Burr, Ryan) with the soft coup effort against a sitting President; you begin to realize the scale of this.
 
The effort extends outside the Intelligence Apparatus into the halls of the most powerful politicians in DC. That’s where SSCI Security Director James Wolfe comes in; and is directly the reason why corrupt DOJ officials dropped charges against Wolfe in 2018 to control damage and mitigate risk. The truth of Wolfe leaking classified documents at the behest of Senators Warner and Burr was just too devastating.
 
A branch of the United States government (legislative) was attempting a coup against the elected leader of another branch of government (executive); by using planted and designated corrupt agents within the cabinet.
 
In 2015 and 2016 the dossier is connected to political opposition research laundered into weaponized intelligence to target a political campaign. However, after the election of November 2016, that DOJ/FBI, State Department and Senate effort then became an actual coup-plot against a sitting president.

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

There’s a new sheriff in town.

A top Republican investigator said accountability is coming for any of those individuals who may have committed crimes during the Trump-Russia investigation.
 
With the Justice Department conducting a review of that operation, Rep. John Ratcliffe said during a Fox News interview Sunday that he trusts Attorney General William Barr and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to provide answers.
 
And while Ratcliffe said he does not want to prematurely accuse any specific person of a crime — as Democrats have done with President Trump — he stressed that it is clear crimes were committed by people during the Obama administration, including government officials.

More here.

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