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Scandularity: A Summary of a Summary of Two Summaries

Saturday, September 15th, 2018

Like a toothache that never goes away, the dull, throbbing pain of constant FISA-gate scandularity revelations never quite goes away. There have been some unusual twists and turns as of late, so let’s get this mini-scandularity update out the door.

First up: Powerline’s Scott Johnson has a good summary of two Andrew McCarthy summaries of various released FISA documents:

Andy says he has read the FISA applications so you don’t have to. He has performed a great public service in these columns. Even so, I say you have to review the FISA applications with your own eyes. They are shocking. Drawing from my series on Doss’s Weekly Standard cover story, I want to restate the relevant background in the context of Andy’s linked columns:

  • Under Title I of FISA — see this useful House Intel Committee summary — it was the burden of the government to establish probable cause that Page was engaging in espionage, terrorism, or sabotage by or on behalf of a foreign power that involved a violation of a criminal statute. (Doss stated: “Although Page had left the campaign, the FBI feared Russia was using him for its own purposes. The application states that the FBI alleged there was probable cause to believe Page was an agent of a foreign power under a specific provision of FISA that involves knowingly aiding, abetting, or knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power with clandestine intelligence gathering activities, engage in clandestine intelligence gathering at the behest of a foreign power, or participate in sabotage or international terrorism or planning or preparation therefor.”)
  • Doss to the contrary notwithstanding, the allegations cited by Doss in her article don’t make out probable cause that Page is a Russian agent on any fair reading of the facts once the Steele dossier is seen for what it is.
  • The FBI relied in substantial part on the allegations of the Steele dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page. Although the applications swear otherwise, these allegations were unverified. I observed in my series that Andy was one of the knowledgeable observers who disputes Doss on the propriety of this reliance. Doss simply omitted any acknowledgement of the related issues.
  • The FBI nevertheless secured the FISA surveillance warrant on Page in October 2016 and renewed it three more times at 90-day intervals. I held out the possibility that the cited facts together with the redacted material fairly establish probable cause, but we have yet to see it. McCarthy now demonstrates that this is highly unlikely.
  • Whether or not the FBI made out probable cause, it must have monitored Page’s every communication by text, email and cell phone for a year. Yet Page remains a free man. No charge of any kind — not even a process crime such the one used against Michael Flynn and George Papadoploulos — has been brought against Carter Page. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Page is not a Russian agent.
  • Given the year-long surveillance on him without any resulting charge, Page might not only not be a Russian agent, he might be the cleanest man in Washington.
  • Carter Page was a victim of government misconduct whose true object was Donald Trump.

    • Quotable quote: “[L]et’s dispense with the tired claim that the Obama administration did not really spy on Trump and his campaign. Every one of the four FISA warrant applications, after describing Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, makes the following assertion (after two redacted lines): ‘the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] campaign.’”

    One more: “For Mueller, the Russia counterintelligence probe was cover to conduct a criminal investigation of Trump in the absence of grounds to believe a crime had occurred.”

    Other Scandularity news:

  • Did Bruce Ohr break multiple laws?

    A review of publicly available information causes a reasonable person to wonder whether Bruce Ohr broke the law by promoting his wife’s anti-Trump research to the FBI when he was working at the Justice Department.The law prohibits public officials from involvement in matters in which their spouse has a financial interest. The question is, Did Ohr “personally and substantially” participate in a particular matter in which his spouse had a “financial interest” while he was employed by the Justice Department as the assistant attorney general? Let’s take a closer look.

    Recall that the Hillary Clinton campaign (through its law firm Perkins Coie) hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to generate dirt on Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. Fusion GPS in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the Trump dossier containing as yet unproven allegations of Russian dirt on Trump.

    We learned in December that Ohr met with Fusion GPS in November 2016 — a critical time frame — while he was the associate deputy attorney general. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has confirmed Ohr fed the FBI documents pertinent to the investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, and The Hill reported the FBI used Ohr to continue collecting information from Steele, even after it terminated him as a source for leaking word of the investigation to the media.

    John Solomon filled in the contours of Ohr’s role in the investigation, writing in The Hill of recently disclosed emails: They also confirm that Ohr later became a critical conduit of continuing information from Steele after the FBI ended the Brit’s role as an informant.

    The FBI specifically instructed Steele that he could no longer ‘operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI,’ those memos show.

    Yet, Steele asked Ohr in the Jan. 31 text exchange if he could continue to help feed information to the FBI: ‘Just want to check you are OK, still in the situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues.’

    ‘I’m still here and able to help as discussed,’ Ohr texted back. ‘I’ll let you know if that changes.’

    Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy recently expressed alarm that Ohr would insert himself into the ongoing Russia investigation. Understandably so. The FBI acts as the Justice Department’s investigator, and normally must convince the DOJ that the quality and quantity of gathered evidence will support a case before a federal court. When a senior DOJ prosecutor gives the FBI information, it comes with the DOJ’s implied endorsement of the evidence. This kind of implied endorsement may have played a role in the FBI’s decision to pay Steele to continue research on the Trump dossier.

    Ohr sponsored Steele’s research in spite of the fact that, as Steele later admitted, critical allegations in the dossier remain unverified. In particular, Steele now refuses to stand by his allegations of Russian hacking. Steele reportedly said his dossier allegations were never supposed to be made public, which is incongruous with his dissemination of the allegations to Ohr and his decision to leak word of the investigation to the press.

    Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson disclosed in a sworn declaration that Fusion GPS paid Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, a Russia expert, to help research and analyze potential opposition research on Trump.

    Curiously, it appears Ohr’s relationship with both Simpson and Steele predated his wife’s work for Fusion GPS, which raises the question whether Simpson may have hired her to gain favor with him. We don’t know how long Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, but Simpson’s December 2017 declaration indicates bank records from August 2015 through that time reflected she contracted with the firm to help research Trump. Ohr’s promotion of his wife’s research to the FBI potentially helped stoke continued demand for her services.
    As pointed out by The Daily Caller, Ohr failed to disclose that his wife was being paid by Fusion GPS in his mandatory public financial disclosure form. The purpose of the form is to “identify potential or actual conflicts of interest.” Thus, The Daily Caller posits that when Ohr became involved in brokering his wife’s Trump-Russia research to the FBI, he deprived DOJ of the opportunity to identify this potential conflict of interest by failing to disclose the source of her “consulting” income. The DOJ had a legal right to know that Ohr’s wife was personally profiting from the research he promoted to the FBI.

    One question that remains unanswered is whether Ohr also had a role in approving or overseeing the Trump-Russia investigation from within the DOJ. As noted by The Daily Mail, he “worked closely” with both Sally Yates, former assistant attorney general, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

    Also of note is that both Yates and Rosenstein signed off on one or more of the spy warrants for Trump associate Carter Page. If either Yates or Rosenstein consulted Ohr on the propriety of those applications, Ohr would have been in a position to endorse the validity of research for which his spouse was paid.

    Violation of the law prohibiting public officials from involving themselves in matters in which their spouse has a financial interest (18 U.S.C. §208) is a crime punishable for up to five years in prison, if the conduct is deemed willful. The DOJ has the power to enforce this law civilly and criminally, and as Ohr’s employer, has a responsibility to do so if he violated it.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Speaking of leaks to the media: “Rep. Jordan: Thirteen Different FBI Agents Were Working with One Reporter.” Sound like a horrible indictment of the FBI even if, by some unlikely miracle, they weren’t all leaking to get Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In the “old news is so exciting” category, here’s an in-depth examination of the Strzok hearings from back in July, which was only two months ago, but seems much, much longer:
  • Former FBI Director James Comey says people must vote for Democrats this fall. Gee, how could anyone have imagined the FBI was biased against Trump?
  • Were there three different fake Trump Dossiers, each one pushed by someone with ties to the Clinton Administration? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Mueller campaign is a vertible buffet of conflicts of interest. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Here’s a another state of play piece from Andrew C. McCarthy from a few months ago that nicely encapsulates what was known then:

    With due respect, this is not a situation in which, out of the blue, “a congressional majority [has made] substantial charges of Department of Justice wrongdoing.” Against the backdrop of its blatant tanking of the criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential nominee, the Democratic administration’s Department of Justice went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign to seek monitoring of a former adviser of the Republican presidential campaign — monitoring that would inevitably have revealed campaign communications in stored email and texts, and quite possibly in real-time conversations — based on a stated suspicion that there was a traitorous confederation between the Republican campaign (quite possibly including the Republican nominee) and the Putin regime.

    That was a very “substantial charge” for the Justice Department to make. It is completely reasonable, then, to demand of it what David demands of the House Intelligence Committee’s allegations: a carefully researched presentation (in this instance, in a FISA warrant application) “that provide[d] supporting evidence for each and every inflammatory charge.” Certainly, it is fair to expect that of the Justice Department since (a) that is the standard to which the DOJ proudly holds itself, and (b) the DOJ and FBI typically work as a harmonious unit, unlike a congressional committee composed of sharply divided partisans in the throes of a highly charged political rift.

    Snip.

    It got worse when the Obama administration started spying on its domestic opponents during the Iran deal, when the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for domestic political advantage. As Adam Entous, then of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in a December 2015 article, “the National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

    Obama administration officials had leaked the story to Entous in order to shape its reception. After all, the real news was pretty bad—Obama had spied on Americans and the Americans he spied on, Congress and Jewish community leaders, knew it. But in Entous’ account, it was only by accident that the National Security Agency had listened in on Americans opposed to the Iran deal, opponents whose communications had simply been “swept up.” While Entous’ evident lack of skepticism about that account was hardly good reporting, it was perfectly in keeping with the maxim of not biting the hand that feeds you.

    What the White House really wanted to know, on Entous’ telling, was what the Israeli prime minister and his ambassador to Washington were doing to contest the Iran deal. Except, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer makes U.S. policy: Congress does. As I explained in an April Tablet article, the purpose of the spying campaign was to help the White House fight U.S. legislators and other Americans critical of the deal—i.e., to win a domestic political battle. A pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the Iran deal fight told me last year, “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans.” With the Iran deal, as would later happen with Russiagate, the ostensible targets of intelligence collection—Israel, then Russia—were simply instruments that the Obama administration used to go after the real bad guys, namely its enemies at home.

    The same process of weaponizing foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes that the Obama administration road-tested during the Iran-deal fight was used to manufacture Russiagate and get it to market. Except instead of keeping a close hold of the identities of those swept up during “incidental collection” of U.S. persons, departing Obama White House officials leaked the names to friendly reporters.

  • “Another Husband-Wife Team Linked to Fusion GPS Found in Russia Collusion Probe:

    House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigators appear to have uncovered a second husband-wife team providing a conduit for opposition research by Fusion GPS into the highest levels of former President Barack Obama’s White House.

    Shailagh Murray, a former Obama policy adviser who previously served as deputy chief of staff and communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, is married to Neil King, Jr., who, according to Fox News, works for the shadowy Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm that hired former British spy Christopher Steele.

    Snip.

    Murray and King both worked for The Wall Street Journal, while Murray also was at the Washington Post during her career. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson, another former Wall Street Journal reporter.

    Snip.

    She and a second former Biden aide, Colin Kahl, are being questioned via a questionaire, according to Fox News. Should either of them decline to respond, the intelligence committee will seek to compel their answers.

    Committee investigators see parallels between the Murray-King duo and that of Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr, whose husband Bruce, was deputy associate attorney general during the 2016 campaign. Bruce Ohr was demoted after it was learned he failed to disclose on federal conflict of interest reports required details of his wife’s employment.

  • If both left and right agree that Russiagate is bunk, why does it live on?

    The specter of an intelligence bureaucracy working in tandem with the press to preserve the prerogatives of a ruling clique is the kind of thing that someone who knows Russia from the inside and actually fears the specter of authoritarian government would naturally find worrying. And not surprisingly, concerns over the role of the intelligence community and its increasingly intrusive methods motivate other Russiagate critics on the left, like Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, historian Jackson Lears writing at the London Review of Books, and Stephen Cohen at The Nation.

    “One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate,” writes Lears, “is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling—a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves liberals.”

    Cohen, a distinguished if often overly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union, was even more alarmed. “Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community?” asks Cohen, referring to former CIA director John Brennan as well as ex-FBI chief James Comey. “If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history and the most detrimental to American democracy.”

    Yes, the left hates Trump. I didn’t vote for him, either. But what Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and Cohen all understand is that Russiagate isn’t about Trump. He’s just a convenient proxy for the real target. Their understanding is shared by writers on the right, like Andrew McCarthy, a former lawyer at the Department of Justice, who has unfolded the Russiagate affair over the last year in the pages of National Review, where he has carefully explained how the DOJ and FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on Carter Page and violate the privacy of an American citizen.

    What unites Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and McCarthy obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to delegitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite.

  • One of Ann Althouse’s readers goes through all four Carter Page FISA warrants so you don’t have to:

    Here is the absolute truth — all of the applications rely on the Steele Dossier and the Isikoff story from September 2016 — a story that Steele himself was the source for. Those are the only two pieces of “evidence” the FBI supplied to the FISA court that could reasonably be inferred to assign probable cause that Page was a knowing Russian agent. The only other things mentioned in regards to Page are that he lived in Russia for a time, travels there sometimes as an energy consultant, and was approached by Russian agents in the past, one of whom Page himself helped to trap and convict by serving as a willing FBI informant. That last part is incongruous with designating him as a Russian agent, but is included any way as an attempt, not to exonerate him, but to tar him.

    Also, if you do a page by page comparison of all four applications, there is little material added from one to the other —if you compared the applications side by side, practically every redacted section is identical in shape and length and page designations. In other words, in each of the renewals, it is apparent that the FBI got jackshit from the surveillance — there was nothing they could add to each application, and so just mostly copied the first application serially.

    In addition, none of the applications told the court that the Clinton Campaign is the one who paid Steele and FusionGPS — not a single time. Indeed, the only mention in all the applications of “Candidate 2” is in the very last renewal, and that section wasn’t discussing who hired the law firm, but was instead discussing some letters Page wrote criticizing the Clinton Campaign. The FBI knew who hired the law firm — they knew Steele (Source 1) was hired by Glenn Simpson (aka US citizen), and they knew Simpson was hired by a law firm- i.e. the FBI knew which law firm and thus it was the Clinton Campaign. The applications studiously avoid mentioning “Candidate 2” at every point they describe the chain of cutouts- always ending with “law firm”.

    Finally, it clear the FBI confirmed nothing of the Steele Dossier. At no point does it appear that Steele revealed his sources to the FBI- they are always described as “subsources”- this is FBI legalese for “we don’t even know the name so that we can designate them by number”.

    The House Intelligence Republican memo was correct on all counts. The Democrat memo was extremely misleading — there is nothing else other than the Steele Dossier and the story Steele sourced to Isikoff.

    • As always if you’re following scandularity twists and turns, this timeline of treason from Director Blue is invaluable.

    And if all that weren’t enough, hold on to your hats: As many as 50,000 new text messages and emails from Strzok may be released next week. It used to be people wondered how he could do any work with all his adultery and test messaging. Now I’m beginning to wonder how he even had time for adultery…

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    Clinton Corruption Update for June 19, 2018

    Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

    We know that Hillary Clinton, through FusionGPS, was deeply involved in the FBI/CIA/deep state/FISA abuse affair that’s come to be known as the “Scandularity.” That’s why news on that came to dominate the semi-regular Clinton Corruption updates.

    The problem is that so much information is coming out on the Scandularity that I don’t have time to do the regular Clinton Corruption updates if I include the Scandularity stuff. This thing just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, so that I never had time to finish one before another huge Scandularity revelation came down the pike. This meant the regular Clinton Corruption updates grew so large and stale that I was unable to whip them into coherent form.

    So now I’m separating them out again into distinct updates for my own sanity.

    Because I kept adding to that update, some of this is going to be oldish news, but this let’s me empty out the Clinton Scandal bucket so I can pour fresh new links in going forward.

    First up: The Inspector General report on the Clinton Email Investigation!

  • Mollie Hemingway has read all of the report and has 11 takeaways. Like this one:

    2. FBI Agent Who Led Both The Clinton and Trump Probes Promised He’d Prevent Trump’s Election…On page 420, the IG says that the conduct of five FBI employees who were caught talking about their extreme political bias in the context of their duties “has brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI.” The Midyear investigation was the code for the Clinton probe. Or note this blistering passage:

    [W]hen one senior FBI official, [Peter] Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, [Lisa] Page, that ‘we’ll stop’ candidate Trump from being elected—after other extensive text messages between the two disparaging candidate Trump—it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

    The report goes on to say that the text messages and Strzok’s decision to prioritize the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign over the Clinton email criminal investigation “led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”

    This text is not just interesting because the FBI’s deputy head of the counterintelligence division who was investigating a major-party candidate told the woman he was cheating on his wife with that “we” would stop the candidate from becoming president. It’s also interesting because this text was hidden from congressional committees performing oversight of the FBI.

    And this:

    3. Comey Mishandled The Clinton Probe In Multiple Ways

    It’s worth re-reading Acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 9, 2017, recommendation that James Comey be fired as FBI director. He cited Comey’s usurpation of the attorney general’s authority in his press conference announcing that Clinton’s case would be closed without prosecution, the release of derogatory information about Clinton despite the decision to not indict her, and Comey’s letter to Congress announcing the FBI had reopened a probe against Clinton.

    The IG backs up each and every one of those critiques, and adds much more detail to them.

    We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct. We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the Attorney General, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of Department prosecutors.

    The IG said Comey violated longstanding department practice to avoid “trashing people we’re not charging.” He also inadequately and incompletely explained how Justice prosecutors came to make decisions. “Many of the problems with the statement resulted from Comey’s failure to coordinate with Department officials,” the IG wrote. Had he talked with them, they would have warned him about the problems his statement posed. What’s more, the prosecutors had a very different understanding of why they were declining to charge Clinton than the one Comey claimed they had in his public press conference.

    Comey also violated departmental practice in announcing publicly he reopened the probe after additional relevant emails were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Both of these decisions were controversial inside and outside the agency.

    Also this:

    7. Breathtaking Bias

    Some FBI defenders latched onto the IG’s claim that he “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.” All that means is that none of the politically biased texts specifically said political bias was leading them to make certain decisions. Of course, that would be a weird thing to find in any case.

    What the investigators found, however, was breathtaking anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias from five of the key employees handling the Clinton email probe. No evidence was found of pro-Trump bias. And this evidence of profound bias is only for those who were foolish enough to record their extreme views. The IG also apparently had no texts from Justice Department officials, perhaps because Justice didn’t preserve them.

    The texts range from vile insults of Trump and his supporters to fears about how awful a Trump presidency would be and the need to prevent it. One employee said Trump voters were “all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.” One FBI lawyer discussed feeling “numb” by Trump’s November 2016 election win, later proclaiming “Viva le Resistance” when asked about Trump.

    Strzok wrote in July 2016, “Trump is a disaster. I have no idea how destabilizing his Presidency would be.” After the election, Page wrote that she’d bought “All the President’s Men,” adding, “Figure I needed to brush up on watergate.” The two openly fantasize about impeachment.

    In the preparation to interview Clinton as part of the criminal probe, Page tells a handful of her colleagues to take it easy on Clinton. “One more thing: she might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear.”

    After each text exchange, the IG report includes defenses from the agents, some even harder to believe than the previous:

    August 8, 2016: In a text message on August 8, 2016, Page stated, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded, ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’ When asked about this text message, Strzok stated that he did not specifically recall sending it, but that he believed that it was intended to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation.

    Sure, hoss.

    All five of the FBI employees were referred back to the FBI for disciplinary action.

    Read the whole thing.

  • It appears that deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe didn’t add Lisa Page to his team despite her having an affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok, but because of it, as a way to monitor the Clinton probe:

    Then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe tasked the mistress of lead agent Peter Strzok to stay appraised of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private server — a decision that other bureau officials took issue with at the time, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s bombshell report.

    McCabe was supposed to be insulated from the probe by two levels of management: Strzok worked for counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who worked for national security head Michael Steinbach, who reported up to McCabe. However, Strzok communicated about the probe with his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked directly for McCabe and acted as a liaison for the Clinton investigation for the deputy director.

    The report says:

    Lisa Page, who was Special Counsel to McCabe, became involved in the Midyear investigation after McCabe became the Deputy Director in February 2016. Page told the OIG that part of her function was to serve as a liaison between the Midyear team and McCabe.

    Page acknowledged that her role upset senior FBI officials, but told the OIG that McCabe relied on her to ensure that he had the information he needed to make decisions, without it being filtered through multiple layers of management.

    Several witnesses told the OIG that Page circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap’s or Steinbach’s knowledge. McCabe said that he was aware of complaints about Page, and that he valued her ability to “spot issues” and bring them to his attention when others did not.

    Luke Rosiak also uses this image from the report:

  • Ironically, if Strzok hadn’t tried to sit on the Weiner laptop information discovered in September 2016, Hillary Clinton might be President now. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I’ve asked before: Why was Strzok on both the Clinton email and Trump Russia probes? Does the FBI not have any other field agents? It appears that Strzok’s role was precisely to “to ‘stop’ Trump from being elected.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Wait, Strzok and Page weren’t the only FBI lovebirds texting each other about the case? Where the hell was this investigation being run from, The Love Boat? Bonus: “She joked to Agent 1 that Donald Trump’s supporters in Ohio were ‘retarded.’ She sneered that she didn’t know who was worse, Trump, the FBI, or ‘+o( Average American public.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More love for American voters from Strzok: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
  • And speaking of what FBI agents on the Clinton email probe thought about American voters:

  • “FBI analysts and Prosecutor 2 told us that former President Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her clintonemail.com account.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Which Obama blatantly lied about.
  • This Wall Street Journal piece on the fall of Tony Podesta. Is well worth reading if you can find a way around the paywall. I especially like the part how Podesta was buying expensive new artworks while laying people off…
  • And remember: the Podesta Group worked for pro-Russian Ukrainian political party “Party of Regions.”
  • “FBI Informant In Uranium One Scandal Testifies Against Obama”

    The FBI’s informant in the Uranium One scandal involving the Obama administration gave written testimony to three congressional committees this week in which he accused the Obama administration of making decisions that directly benefited the Russian government and their goals of gaining geopolitical advantages over the United States.

    The informant, Douglas Campbell, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that Moscow sent millions of dollars to the U.S. with the expectation that it would benefit the Clintons, while Hillary Clinton “quarterbacked a ‘reset’ in US-Russian relations” in her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administration, The Hill reported.

    Key facts:

  • Campbell participated in closed-door interviews with the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.

    Campbell said that Russian nuclear officials told him that Moscow hired an American lobbying firm, APCO Worldwide, because it was in a unique position to influence the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton in particular.

    Democrats are aggressively trying to discredit him but are having little success as “the FBI found Campbell’s undercover work valuable enough to reward him with a $50,000 check in 2016.”

    Campbell says that the FBI told him that his work was “briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” which would mean that Obama was aware of the crimes committed by the Russian officials.

    The FBI forced him to pay $500,000 of his own money to Russian officials as bribes to facilitate his cover, and the bureau never reimbursed him despite their praise of his work and the fact that the ordeal was so stressful that he developed serious, life-threatening illnesses.

    Initially, reports indicated that Campbell was threatened by the Obama administration in an attempt to silence him before the 2016 election as they did not want this case hurting Hillary Clinton after then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department learned that he filed a lawsuit in a Maryland federal court. It was not immediately clear what the lawsuit was about, however Sara Carter reports: “Campbell filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court against the Russian nuclear entities asking for the return of the money he had to launder out of his own paychecks.”

    “Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration,” The Hill noted.

    He provided documentation of the corruption and crimes taking place to help Russia to the Obama administration months before they made a series of decisions that directly benefited Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

    He provided documentation to the Obama administration that showed that the Russian government was actively involved in trying to help Iran develop their nuclear capabilities years before the Obama administration implemented the now-infamous Iran deal.

    He said that he was told by the FBI that the politics of the Obama administration overruled justice from taking place against the criminal activity that was happening.

    “I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” Campbell said in his testimony, as reported by The Hill’s John Solomon. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.”

    “I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct,” Campbell continued. “His answer: ‘Ask your politics.'”

    Some of the key players that were engaging in the criminal racketeering case have started to face justice, albeit years later. Sara A. Carter reports:

    It wasn’t until years later in 2015 that American businessman Daren Condrey, whose company Transportation Logistics International, plead guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and conspiring to commit wire fraud, according to the DOJ.

    Russian national Vadim Mikerin, who was a top official of the Russian nuclear arms subsidiary Tenex and would later become president of Tenam the American subsidiary of Rosatom, was also sentenced in December 2015. Mikerin, who only plead guilty to money laundering, was arrested for a racketeering scheme that dated back to 2004. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison.

    Boris Rubizhevsky, another Russian national from New Jersey, who was president of the security firm NEXGEN Security, was also involved in the conspiracy and plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in 2015. He served as a consultant to Tenam and to Mikerin. Rubizhevsky was sentenced to prison last year along with three years of supervised release and a $26,500 fine, according to a recent Reuters report.

    And Mark Lambert, 54, a co-owner of Transportation Logistics International, was charged this month on an “11-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering,” as stated in the DOJ press release. Lambert’s charges stem from an alleged scheme to bribe Mikerin in order to secure contracts with TENEX, according to the DOJ release.

  • “The Clinton Foundation Borrowed $28.5 Million. Who Made It Disappear?”

    If we are to believe public filings submitted to the IRS under penalties of perjury, an entity known today as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation borrowed $28.5 million on Feb. 20, 2004 — see page 30.

    Yet the foundation’s accounting firm, BKD LLP, issued on June 9, 2006, “Independent Accountants’ Report and Financial Statements” that contradict earlier IRS filings by claiming that proceeds from the $28.5 million in borrowing arrived at the Clinton Foundation by Dec. 31, 2003, or 51 days before the loans were actually secured.

    Read the whole thing for the forensic accounting details.

  • “How The Obama Justice Department Tried To Shut Down The FBI’s Investigation Into The Clinton Foundation”
  • “Top Liberal Think Tank and Clinton Adviser Accused of Sheltering Sexual Harassers and Retaliating Against Victims.”

    Leading liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), stands accused of sheltering sexual harassers and operating a toxic culture that made victims fear retaliation for speaking out.

    A heavily-reported exposé by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday documented those allegations–made by 19 former and current employees and staffers with the organization.

    One former junior staffer, who asked to be identified as Mary, left the organization by sending an exit memo to top CAP officials. This memo detailed sexual harassment she had experienced from a manager on her team named Benton Strong. Mary alleged that Strong’s harassment was well known within CAP’s upper ranks, that they did nothing about it, and that she was retaliated against for reporting the harassment in the first place. Mary’s emailed exit memo reads, in part:

    [O]n several occasions, myself and others on the team felt as if reporting had been a mistake and that the retaliation, worsening of already tenuous team dynamics, and treatment by supervisors outweighed the seemingly positive act of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.

    At another point in her exit memo, Mary described “lewd and inappropriate text messages” from Strong which made her “uncomfortable being in the workplace around him.” One of those text messages–confirmed by multiple other CAP staffers at the time–was sent after midnight and expressed Strong’s desire to perform oral sex on Mary. Others included discussions of blowjobs, comments about her body and frequent entreaties to meet for drinks.

    Snip.

    One former union member singled out CAP’s president Neera Tanden. In comments to Buzzfeed, they described an allegedly unproductive meeting with Tanden regarding sexual harassment at CAP:

    Neera’s approach was maybe we can start hosting brown bags with HR so people will feel more comfortable coming out and doing things. So they had almost a do-nothing approach. … They said they would think about things that [the union brought up], and that was essentially it.

    Tanden is a high-profile Twitter user, staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton and the former secretary of state’s longtime advisor.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Hillary Clinton remains consistently tone-deaf when it comes to those bitter, clinging freaks known as “voters”:

    For years, I’ve been writing that the great myth about Hillary Clinton is the notion she shared even a fraction of her husband’s political skills. There is no transitive property to marriage. If Bill Clinton could play the xylophone, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have gained the skill when she said, “I do.” So it goes with politics. Bill Clinton would never dream of saying anything like this. Having risen in Arkansas politics — not an over-performing state GDP-wise — he understood how to talk to working-class voters in ways Hillary never learned in 40 years of standing next to him sagely nodding.

    So, what’s wrong with what she said? Well, nearly everything, starting with the fact that she probably believes all of it. It shows that she really doesn’t like large swathes of the country. She has a Manichaean view that says people who voted against her are backward, racist, sexist, and kind of dumb. I didn’t love the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and Lord knows I didn’t like Trump’s campaign style. But for millions of decent Americans, Trump’s program was optimistic. “We’re gonna make America great again” may sound unequivocally racist to the race-obsessed, but that’s not how everyone who liked it heard it. How easy and comfortable it must be to think that anyone who voted against you is against “black people getting rights.”

  • Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees have inexplicably declined by 90%. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why does Bill Clinton get a pass on #MeToo?

    It’s 2018. One of the world’s most powerful married men had a 22-year-old intern perform oral sex on him in his office. He’s been accused of sexual assault by three other women. One claims, as is the case with so many of the men who have fallen from positions of power as a result, that he exposed himself to her (which always makes me, at least, pause and wonder why on earth so many men seem to want to do this). We know, too, that he lied about his tryst with the intern.

    So why is Bill Clinton still presiding over glamorous parties?

    When Monica Lewinsky was disinvited from a Town & Country Philanthropy Summit earlier this month where Bill Clinton was speaking, the question shouldn’t have been why was she disinvited. It should have been why is Bill Clinton is headlining events at all.

    And boy, is he ever. Clinton has a full social schedule this summer. In June he’ll be publicizing his book “The President is Missing” along with his co-author James Patterson all across the country. He’ll also make time to host the Clinton Foundation dinner, where tickets range from $2,500 to $100,000 and Shaggy and Sting are scheduled to perform.

    Again, he’s almost certainly guilty of actions that would be categorized as harassment in 2018. The fact that the Lewinsky affair happened as long ago as 1995 is no matter.

    Charlie Rose is accused of harassment by several employees dating back to the late 1990s — and he lost his job in November.

    People seem curiously willing to hold Clinton to a different standard than other men accused of sexual harassment. Many don’t seem especially bothered by his actions at all and lay the blame for the scandal squarely on Lewinsky. In a 2014 Economist/YouGov poll, 58 percent of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, 48 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Lewinsky.

    As recently as 2016, the very liberal Joy Behar was dismissing the women who slept with Clinton as “tramps” on “The View.” Not that much has changed since the period in the ’90s when Maureen Dowd dismissed Lewsinky as being “nutty and slutty” and “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon.”

    A Rasmussen Reports poll taken in November 2017, a month after the #MeToo movement began, found that 59 percent of people believe the accusations against Bill Clinton. But you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s being treated.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • You know that NXIVM sex cult that’s been so much in the news as of late? At least three members are “invitation-only” members of the Clinton Global Initiative:

    On March 14 and April 13, records show, more than a dozen contributions poured into Clinton’s coffers from NXIVM, an executive and group-awareness training organization led by Brooklyn-born Keith Raniere, 47.

    Most were from first-time political donors, each giving the $2,300 maximum.

    Three of the March and April Clinton pledges came from Raniere’s most high-profile followers: Seagram heiresses Clare and Sara Bronfman, and Pamela Cafritz, daughter of D.C. A-listers Buffy and Bill Cafritz.

    Hillary isn’t the only Clinton NXIVM officials are attracted to.

    At least three of them – group President Nancy Salzman and the Bronfman sisters – are members of Bill’s charitable organization, the Clinton Global Initiative. Membership is by invitation only and requires at least a $15,000 donation per person for one year.

  • “Family’s Illegal Control of Clinton Charity Violates Multiple State Laws, Regs.
  • “No Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion, But ‘Clear Links’ Between Clinton Campaign & Russians.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Judicial Watch: At Least 18 Classified Emails Found on Weiner’s Laptop.”
  • “Hillary Clinton’s team pressured the New York Times into printing misleading corrections.”
  • So this is evidently not a Photoshop:

  • Hillary Clinton, Boozehound.
  • Not-so-coincidentally, Hillary Clinton has been trying to hide still more health problems, such as a broken wrist and…
  • …a back brace.
  • British nationals illegally campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
  • Did Chelsea Clinton help funnel $11 million in federal contacts to her best friend’s phony think tank?

    During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, more than $11 Million of federal contracts were awarded to a questionably legitimate think-tank, which is owned and operated by Chelsea Clinton’s “Best Friend”.

    Jacqueline Newmyer, who Chelsea Clinton says is her “best friend”, owns and operates Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG). Over the past 10 years, LTSG has been awarded more than $11 million from a Department of Defense think-tank known as the Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

    Long Term Strategy Group, has a virtually non-existent website and has no security clearances, yet to date they have received $11.2 Million in federal contracts according to USAspending.gov.

  • Man claiming to be Bill Clinton’s son wants another DNA test.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Obama Scandals | 8 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 8, 2018

    Friday, June 8th, 2018

    Another week full of bears. Enjoy a LinkSwarm:

  • In South Texas, more of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist.
  • Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness:

    Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.

    The Fast and Furious scandal was, among other things, about deliberate government gun-running of weapons to Mexico, perhaps in a warped effort to discredit current U.S. firearms laws. The Benghazi debacle involved a cover-up of a preplanned terrorist hit on our consulate, an attack that was possible only because it was well known that the consulate’s security was lax. The Benghazi cover-up involved U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lying five times on national television in a single day, when she claimed that the terrorist operation was the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. And to justify that reelection-cycle concoction, the video maker, a foreign resident on U.S. soil, was summarily jailed on a trumped-up probation charge.

    An IRS regional high official, and Obama partisan, Lois Lerner, weaponized and discredited the IRS, by hounding conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Lerner staged a self-serving public stunt to leak her misbehavior to friendly ears — she had a reporter ask her a planted question about targeting conservatives. At her later congressional testimony, Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. She was never charged by the Obama State Department. Indeed, Obama himself, after expressing initial pseudo contriteness in the face of public furor, waited the public out before finally announcing that there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the IRS. Lerner, in effect, was rewarded for successfully neutralizing many conservative activist groups just months before the 2012 election. In October 2017, facing a lawsuit by conservative groups, the IRS admitted in court that it had unfairly targeted them during the Obama administration. It agreed to a multi-million-dollar settlement, and the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, apologized to the more than 450 conservative organizations in question.

    Nadine Strossen, a liberal and the former president of the American Civil Liberty Union, conceded — but only in hindsight when both Obama and she were out of their respective offices — that Obama was one of the most hostile presidents to civil liberties in history. Perhaps she was referring to the fact that Eric Holder’s and Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department had spied on Associated Press reporters, monitored the communications of Fox reporter James Rosen, and subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to force him to reveal his confidential sources. Holder was also the first Attorney General in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over subpoenaed documents.

    But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions. His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.

    We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community.

  • How Twitter is attacking Stephen Kruiser’s account.

    The most frustrating aspect of all is the lack of communication. If the goal is to create a better overall experience on the site, then it would make sense to tell people who have had their accounts restricted exactly why it happened so the problem could be avoided in the future.

    The fact that they don’t do so really heightens the perception that it isn’t about anything other than punitively targeting accounts that don’t fit in with the hive mind. The appearance of deliberate censorship could be gotten rid of with a bare amount of transparency and communication from Twitter. That, sadly, does not seem to be a priority.

  • Tommy Robinson and the collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK:

    Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

    Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an “activist” while Peter refers to him as “Alt-Right”. I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like. But it also cuts to the heart of this question. If we don’t look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment. The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades. The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

    The alleged perpetrators are described as “asian males”, as if some of them were from China or Korea. This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

    Are the “asian males” actually Pakistani immigrants? Are they all muslim? Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims? To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

    The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here. It’s actually worse – one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary – the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

    It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we’re told is an “Alt-Right” fringe.

    Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

    This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris. If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

    You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

    This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

    Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off. Blood feud may be the only option.

  • Attempting to secure the border in the Rio Grande Valley:

    On May 16, agents discovered 2,119 pounds of marijuana concealed in a commercial shipment of charcoal into the U.S. On May 20, agents discovered 56 pounds of cocaine, approximately $432,500 in street value, on a Mexican commercial bus on the McAllen-Reynosa International Bridge and another $1.4 million worth of cocaine at the Kingsville checkpoint. In the first week of May, $247,000 worth of methamphetamine was apprehended at the Falfurrias checkpoint. Over Memorial Day weekend, $2.2 million in marijuana was seized in Harlingen, another 300 pounds was confiscated in Roma, and another 90 pounds of marijuana along with 35 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the checkpoints.

    Bonus: Seized baby tiger.

  • Charles Krauthammer is is dying of cancer, and is only expected to have weeks to live. There was probably no columnist or pundit more vital to holding Obama to account during the first year of his first term.
  • Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez has yet to run a single Facebook ad since she won the primary. It would be some kind of anti-miracle for Valdez to run a worse campaign than Wendy Davis ran in 2014, but thus far she’s been all but invisible. Also this: “The Valdez campaign was also recently ensnared in a bit of controversy after the Houston Chronicle unearthed public records showing Valdez, ‘owes more than $12,000 in overdue taxes on seven properties in two counties.’ Valdez had been ‘campaign[ing] to close loopholes in the state’s broken property-tax system,’ according to the report.” (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
  • “Miss America is scrapping its swimsuit competition, will no longer judge based on physical appearance.” In other news, American Idol to eliminate all that annoying singing.
  • Theater reviewers must not be allowed to give positive reviews of plays that exhibit wrongthink.
  • White House intern on how she lost her virginity to John F. Kennedy.
  • How Social Justice Warriors ruined Portland’s food scene.
  • Literary agency bookkeeper accused of embezzling $34 million. Chuck Palahnuik among those ripped off.
  • Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain dead of apparent suicide. More from Dwight.
  • Seven pairs of tweezers. Guess where they were found?
  • “Resistance Win: When One Of Her Students Wore A MAGA Hat To Class, This Incredible Teacher Stopped Having Sex With Him After School.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Jihad, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    After The Memo: What Next?

    Monday, February 5th, 2018

    Now that the memo has dropped, what’s next for the investigation of the Clinton/Obama/FBI/Fusion GPS conspiracy to subvert the rule of law for political ends?

    For one thing, Rep. Devin Nunes is now looking at the Obama State Department:

    Devin Nunes (R-CA) said that the investigation leading up to the four-page FISA memo released on Friday was only “phase one,” and that the House Intelligence Committee is currently in the middle of investigating the State Department over their involvement in surveillance abuses.

    “We are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this,” said Nunes.

    “That investigation is ongoing and we continue work towards finding answers and asking the right questions to try to get to the bottom of what exactly the State Department was up to in terms of this Russia investigation.”

    Snip.

    Aside from the infamous 35-page “Trump-Russia” dossier Steele assembled for opposition research firm Fusion GPS (a report which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton and the DNC), Congressional investigators have been looking into whether Steele compiled other reports about Trump – and in particular, whether those other reports made their way to the State Department, according to The Examiner.

    …they are looking into whether those reports made their way to the State Department. They’re also seeking to learn what individual State Department officials did in relation to Steele, and whether there were any contacts between the State Department and the FBI or Justice Department concerning the anti-Trump material.

    It will be interesting to see how the State Department – and in particular Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – responds to “phase two.”

    Another thread is how a Michael Isikoff Yahoo story was used by the FBI/DOJ as independent corroboration of the Steele dossier, even though it was based entirely on the Steele dossier. Says who? Says Michael Isikoff:

    It’s not every day that investigative journalists discover their work was cited in a controversial warrant application that has become a flashpoint of partisan conflict in the US. So, it’s telling that, rather than being honored to see his work having such a profound impact, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff said he was “stunned” to see a story he published more than a year ago cited in the “FISA memo” as one of the justifications in a FISA warrant application for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

    As Isikoff explains, his story was almost entirely based on information from the Steele dossier, which was passed to him by an intermediary. Therefore, citing it would be redundant. The revelation, which was made in a memo released by the House Intelligence Committee on Friday, “stuns me,” Isikoff said in an episode of his podcast, “Skullduggery.”

    That’s a problem:

    Then there’s the Ohrs angle: Fusion GPS Could Have Been Trying To Buy Access To DOJ With Payments To Official’s Wife:

    Under a contract from the Clinton campaign, the Fusion GPS research firm was paying the wife of a senior Department of Justice official as part of its efforts to gather opposition research on Trump, and the same official then brought that research to the FBI.

    Knowledge of the relationship has raised questions about the extent to which the firm may have paid for heightened access to the criminal justice system, and whether they would have hired Nellie Ohr absent her spousal connection to the DoJ.

    A declassified memo said Bruce “Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the” court when it was used to obtain a surveillance warrant.

    Bruce Ohr was deputy associate attorney general until December. House investigators determined that he met personally with Glenn Simpson, Fusion GPS’ founder.

    The FBI has limited resources to deal with a firehose of information, so people seeking the FBI’s attention could potentially benefit from greasing the wheels in order to get info to the front of the queue and to a high level.

    “The money sweetened the pot for the Ohrs, and it certainly made it easier for Fusion to get the dossier to be used before the court if they made that payment to Bruce Ohr’s wife,” former judge and Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert told The Daily Caller News Foundation,

    “Fusion had to have known that because of the relationship between Bruce Ohr and his wife, they were bringing Fusion, the DOJ and the DNC together under one roof to work for the same goal, which was to stop Donald Trump from becoming president,” he said.

    Ohr’s wife, Nellie, is a Russia expert, but it is not known what her specific contribution to the dossier was.

    “The financial arrangement between Mrs. Ohr and Fusion GPS gives the appearance of government-for-hire,” said Tom Anderson, an ethics expert at the conservative-leaning watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center. It “appears to be a sophisticated scheme to get access to the highest levels of our government … ensuring the use of government resources in an attempt to influence an election.”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Democrats meanwhile, are still in full-bore freakout mode:

    The Democrats and the federal agency implicated in the memo predicted tragic consequences if the memo was released. We were told the release of the memo would spark a constitutional crisis. I agree: it is evident the Democrats and the administrative state are not interested in participating in the American checks and balances system. The Democrats and their surrogate media claim the committees are partisan. Congress has oversight of the Department of Justice and yet the department has resisted cooperation with the congressional investigators tasked with this oversight. I have to ask: is congressional oversight necessarily partisan when the GOP is in the majority but not when the Democrats are? If so, what kind of oversight do we have for these agencies? Does the DOJ prefer not to have any oversight at all? That’s what it sounds like according to the snowflake who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times explaining why he quit the FBI. “To be effective, the F.B.I. must be believed and must maintain the support of the public it serves,” former FBI employee and James Comey’s assistant Josh Campbell writes. Well, how about you earn that support and not abuse the public trust by using the power of the government to punish those you decide are your political adversaries?

    We were also told that the release of the memo would gravely endanger national security but that turned out to be laughable after the memo was released and we all read it. No one will ever call out the Democrats who made these claims about their ridiculous exaggerations. It certainly reinforces the suspicion that something improper was going on at the DOJ since the Democrats and Democrat media surrogates were willing to say anything to keep this memo secret.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    I have a distinct sense that the worst of this abuse of power scandal hasn’t been uncovered yet. The House Intelligence Committee and Judicial Watch continue to uncover additional documents, and I suspect there are many revelations ahead…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Obama Scandals | 3 Comments »

    The Memo and the Damage Done

    Saturday, February 3rd, 2018

    The Memo we’ve all been waiting for has been released. For those who have been following the scandal here, the only big surprise is that the FBI knew the Steele dossier was unreliable, used it as the basis of a FISA warrant anyway, and then lied about it to the courts.

    Here’s the text of the memo from The Atlantic, which I’m using just to avoid a half hour of stripping line returns and typos out of the ScribeD text file a lot of outlets posted:

    January 18, 2018

    To: HPSCI Majority Members

    From: HPSCI Majority Staff

    Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

    Purpose

    This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.

    Investigation Update

    On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.

    The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.

    Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.

    1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

    a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.

    b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.

    2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington D.C. in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

    a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.

    b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling—maintaining confidentiality—and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.

    3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files—but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

    a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.

    4) According to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was—according to his June 2017 testimony—“salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

    5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.

    Again, if you’ve been following this blog regularly, almost none of that was in dispute and very little of it should be new. But the FBI/DOJ misrepresenting the source of the dossier as reliable information, and hiding that it was partisan hackery, is new.

    Here’s Ace of Spades HQ on the issue:

    Bear in mind, when the FBI and DOJ presented the Steele Dossier to the court as their pretext to open surveillance, they would have almost certainly identified him as a “source” who has “previously proven reliable” (the quotes are just-for-example verbiage, not actual quotes) and cited, for example, his work in the FIFA investigation as well as his service in MI6.

    In short, they would have presented his inherent reliability as a reason to believe the otherwise completely unsubstantiated claims his “dossier” offered. His dossier offered no proof — the only “proof” of the dossier’s claims would Steele’s reliability, honesty, and lack of bias or material interest in this case.

    But, according to The Memo, the FBI and DOJ had reason to know that Steele wasn’t all that reliable — and they concealed each of these points from the court:

    1. They withheld from the court that Steele was working for Trump’s rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, and the DNC, which Hillary Clinton had contractually taken over by this point. They only said in their application that Steele was working for a “U.S. person.”

    The fact that Steele had been commissioned by Trump’s political opponent would have greatly diminished his perceived reliability — he had a material interest in this dossier “succeeding.” He had been paid $160,000 to produce it. (And note, Glenn Simpson refused to say if he was ever paid to get an investigation started.)

    As this information would have reduced Steele’s reliability in the court’s eyes, the FBI/DOJ concealed that from the court. They lied. They represented Steele as reliable, but then hid competing evidence of his unreliability.

    This sort of hearing is ex parte. Only one side gets to present evidence to a judge. No representative of Trump or Carter Page was in the room. It seems to me that the government, when seeking a warrant in an ex parte hearing, should present contrary evidence so that the judge can make an informed decision. There’s no opposing party in the room to offer that contrary evidence, and no one except the government itself to look out for the civil rights of the people it’s seeking surveillance orders on.

    The government does not seem to have offered the court such information, and seems to have concealed information they knew would be relevant to the judge’s understanding of the situation and his decision on granting the warrant.

    To the detriment of a citizen’s civil rights, note.

    2. No less an authority than Bruce Ohr communicated to his superiors that Steele was personally extremely biased in this matter. Not just paid to be biased; but personally, emotionally biased himself.

    Ohr reported that Steel personally “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”

    Steele’s reliability depends largely on his judgment, his dispassion. Steele didn’t have any information of his own — he got his information long-distance from Russian operatives and government officials whom he might have paid. Steele has always been touted as an “MI6 agent” to prove that he is expert in separating bullshit from real intelligence — and yet, he put transparent nonsense like the Pee-Pee Party bullshit into his dossier.

    Given that he was “desperate” and “passionate” to keep Trump out of the White House, one begins to understand his failure to discriminate between plausible claims and implausible ones.

    This information would have helped the court determine if it agreed with the FBI and DOJ that Steele was reliable and a good judge of unverified gossip and rumor — so the FBI and DOJ again concealed this highly-pertinent information from the court.

    3. The FBI and DOJ had, of course, a huge reason to suspect Steele wasn’t as reliable as they were representing to the court– namely, that they stopped working with him for violating their ethical rules of confidentiality in peddling these claims to media organizations. I would say that Steele betrayed himself here, proving that he was still working for FusionGPS as a political operative trying to plant dirt against a target he was paid to undermine, and not an informant or researcher working for the FBI.

    The FBI and DOJ concealed the fact that they had terminated their relationship with Steele from the court.

    4. On that, the initial FISA application claimed that Steele’s claims were corroborated by independent reporting by Michael Isikoff — the idea being, this isn’t just Steele who’s reporting this, it’s also the completely independent reporter Michael Isikoff.

    But Michael Isikoff wasn’t an independent source at all — he was fed these claims by Steele himself.

    So there was no second source for Steele’s claims — you had Steele making these claims, and then Steele’s stenographer repeating Steele’s claims under a byline of “Totally Not Christopher Steele.”

    However, the FBI/DOJ “assessed” that Isikoff’s reporting was independent and represented it that way to the court.

    Now, it we can’t say they lied on that point — they might just have been wrong. Incompetent, as usual. Steele lied to them about, or at least concealed, his blabbing to reporters.

    Or so we’re told, anyway.

    However, after the DOJ/FBI ended its association with Steele for spreading his claims to various media organizations, in violation of FBI/DOJ confidentiality agreements, it surely must have at least occurred to them that perhaps Steele had also previously spread his tales of Urinary Olympics to Michael Isikoff.

    However, if such thoughts occurred to them, they quickly put them out of mind. Despite now having reason to suspect that they had, whether wittingly or unwittingly, misrepresented to the court that Isikoff’s article constituted independent corroboration, they seem to have taken no efforts to repair that misrepresentation and inform the court that their initial representation may have been completely false.

    The FBI knew the partisan origins of the Steele Dossier, knew that it was funded by the Clinton campaign, then omitted that very material information from the FISA warrant requests. That’s the documented and unambigious use of national security surveillance powers to spy on American citizens to further the partisan political objectives of the party controlling the Executive branch.

    That’s the abuse.

    That’s why this is bigger than Watergate.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

    FBI Amazing Coincidence Theater

    Wednesday, January 24th, 2018

    I could save this for the next Clinton Corruption update, since it’s all one big pro-Clinton/anti-Trump conspiracy, but let’s break down these two amazing FBI coincidences separately.

    First we learn that five months of FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text messages to and from his mistress Lisa Page have gone missing:

    The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

    The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

    Snip.

    “That texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”

    Wow, what an amazing coincidence! Just after Strzok had referred to “a secret society” in the wake of Trump’s unexpected win, just when when the Russian Conspiracy Fantasy was in it’s first bloom! What are the odds? Especially since May 17 was the date when the special council was first convened. (By the way, Strzok and Page exchanged more than 50,000 text messages during and after the election. How did they find time to get any FBI work done?)

    But keep in mind, those messages may be “missing” but they’re probably not “gone”:

    Speaking of amazing coincidences, Daniel Richman, a law professor who helped former FBI director James Comey leak classified information to the media, is now claiming that he’s acting as Comey’s lawyer, and thus protected by client-attorney privilege, something neither Richman nor Comey claimed until this week!

    A friend of former FBI director James Comey who leaked sensitive FBI memos to The New York Times in the wake of Comey’s firing in 2017 now claims to be Comey’s personal attorney. Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, told The Federalist via phone on Tuesday afternoon that he was now personally representing Comey.

    The revelation comes in the wake of news that Comey was interviewed by the special counsel’s office last year. According to The New York Times, the line of questioning from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller focused on memos that Comey wrote and later leaked after he was fired from his job by President Donald Trump. A review of FBI policies governing the handling of sensitive government documents suggests Comey violated FBI policy by leaking the memos, which were produced on government time, using government equipment, and directly related to his official government responsibilities, according to Comey’s own testimony before Congress.

    Context:

    More and more, FBI agents involved in anti-Trump activities are expecting us to buy explanations from them that an FBI field agent would never buy from a potential suspect.

    It stinks, and they know it stinks.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Obama Scandals | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for January 19, 2018

    Friday, January 19th, 2018

    This morning starts with Republican house members calling for the release of a deeply disturbing secret memo that evidently relates to the whole FISA/Clinton/Obama misuse of America’s national security assets to spy on Domestic political opponents, including Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. House members who have read the memo say the scandal unveiled is “worse than Watergate.” Those reading this blog should already be broadly familiar with the outlines of the scandal.

    However, since that memo hasn’t been released as of this writing, on with a regular Friday LinkSwarm.

    Oh, and Democrats are still threatening a government shutdown over illegal alien amnesty for Obama’s “Dreamers.” So you’ve got that to look forward to as well.

  • Speaking of “Dreamers” (which, by the way, is also the name of a porn store in north Austin), illegal aliens of “Dreamer” age have a crime rate double that of American citizens.
  • Including the accused cop killer who says he “wish he killed more of the motherfuckers.”
  • “Analysis: Leftism is a status machine. A very, very successful status machine. Conservatives have lost status battle after status battle, often because they fought it as a policy battle. It rarely is.”

    The media offers people clues about what things are high status within the areas they cover. People notice, and act accordingly. Yet most conservatives still don’t understand Trump’s response:

    If I lower the media’s status, I will wreck their power.

    So The Donald says that the media has “some of the most dishonest people” he has ever seen. Not an arm’s length complaint. A direct and personal status attack, rooted in truth.

    Trump also acts in ways that cause journalists to fulfill his pre-suasion labeling. He makes “outrageous” statements, which many people outside the Beltway Bubble agree with. Those statements receive over-the-top media attacks, which make his enemies look ridiculous. Then events swiftly show that Trump had a point. Trump rubs it in, using the media’s own “Fake News” term against them and pouncing on every sloppy and dishonest mistake. As a final topper, Trump makes the dishonest media a focus during every massive rally. Which strengthens his out-grouping effect among participants and viewers.

    He uses ridicule and lèse majesté, not bended knee and appeals — note that subordinating word — to logical argument.

  • Jim Goad offers a brief essay on comparative shitholes:

    In terms of life expectancy, Norway leads the pack at 81.8 years. Then comes the USA (79.3), with a sudden drop to 63.5 years for Haitians and a mere 55.0 years for Somalians.

    Norway also wins the blue ribbon when it comes to per-capita income, which is a staggering 38 times that of Haitians and 173 times that of Somalians.

    The noble Norsemen also win when it comes to their nation’s mean IQ, which is 100 compared to the USA’s 98. Somalia (68) and Haiti (67) both suffer a mean IQ that is below the commonly accepted cutoff line for “retarded.”

    The only category where the USA comes out on top is the percentage of the population with access to improved sanitation facilities—one index claims that 100% of Americans can find a functional toilet if they try. Next comes Norway at 98.1%. Haiti (27.6%) and Somalia (23.5%) are far, far worse. According to Wikipedia, “Sewer systems and wastewater treatment are nonexistent” in Haiti, which would mean the country is a literal shithole.

  • Andrew McCarthy goes into great detail about what a nothingburger the entire Trump-Russia conspiracy fantasy is. Though larded up with the requisite National Review distaste for Trump, it does include a few valuable nuggets I hadn’t chanced across heretofore, including that the law firm of BakerHostetler was who was funneling payments from Natalia Veselnitskaya and Prevezon Holdings to Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Is Sweden contemplating sending the army to regain control over no-go zones?
  • Democratic Senator Patty Murray’s office: “We don’t care about anti-Semitism in this office,” Murray’s senior adviser said. “We care about transgenders, we care about blacks, we care about Hispanics, we care about gays, we care about lesbians, we care about the disabled.”
  • “Switzerland Rejects Citizenship Bids of Residents Who Have Been on Welfare.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Speaking of which: “Swiss town denies passport to Dutch vegan because she is ‘too annoying.'”
  • Why hasn’t power been restored to Puerto Rico? Maybe because Puerto Rican authorities were hoarding bital electrical equipment?
  • Austin on finalist list for Amazon’s second headquarters.
  • Baltmore’s mayor fires the police commissioner.
  • Dear Millennials: It has been scientifically proven that your music sucks.
  • East Coast Comicon bans Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo because he’s friends with Sean Hannity.
  • Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer for The Cranberries, dead at the untimely age of 46.
  • Former Senator, Republican Majority leader, Presidential candidate and World War II veteran Bob Dole just received the Congressional Gold Medal. Best tweet from the event:

  • Gonna pass on the expedited shipping, thanks.

    • A little light today, but I want to hit publish on this before that memo drops…

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Tony Podesta Steps Down From Podesta Group

    Tuesday, October 31st, 2017

    Things that make you go “Hmmmm“:

    Democratic power lobbyist Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, is stepping down from the firm that bears his name after coming under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

    Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure.

    The investigation into Podesta and his firm grew out of investigators’ examination of Manafort’s finances. Manafort organized a PR campaign on behalf of a nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Podesta Group was one of several firms that were paid to do work on the PR campaign to promote Ukraine in the U.S.

    Podesta Group filed paperwork with the Justice Department in April stating that it had done work for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine that also benefited the same Ukrainian political party that Manafort once advised. Podesta Group said at the time it believed its client was a European think tank untethered to a political party.

    Podesta is handing over full operational and financial control of the firm to longtime firm CEO Kimberley Fritts, according to multiple sources with knowledge of Monday’s meeting. Fritts and a senior group of the Podesta team will be launching a new firm in the next one or two days. Sources said the transition has been in the works for the past several months.

    Sort of like Harvey Weinstein stepping down from The Weinstein Corporation, only presumably less rapey.

    I’ve long reported on Podesta’s documented ties to Putin’s Russia. Remember than John and Tony Podesta formed The Podesta Group way back in 1988, even before John became Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff.

    [Tony] Podesta has long been a larger than life figure on K Street, growing his business from a boutique firm into a massive lobbying and public relations operation. He is well known for his flashy dressing, vast art collection, generous campaign donations across all levels of Democratic politics and, of course, for his brother John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

    Podesta Group has struggled in the wake of the Mueller investigation. More than a dozen of its lobbying clients have cut ties with the firm this year, according to lobbying filings. Revenues have also declined: The firm brought in an estimated $4.8 million in the third quarter of 2017, down from $5.2 million in the second quarter of 2017 and from $6.1 million in the third quarter of 2016.

    I would caution those who believe “Indictments for Hillary are just around the corner!” to temper their expectations. These things take time, and the Podestas are so deeply enmeshed in Democratic Party politics I would expect them to take the fall rather than flip on either Clinton or Obama.

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    Posted in Democrats, Obama Scandals | 1 Comment »

    Clinton Corruption Update for October 25, 2017: Clinton/DNC Backing of Fake Russian Dossier Confirmed

    Wednesday, October 25th, 2017

    After so much time accusing President Donald Trump of being a stooge of Russia, it appears that Hillary Clinton is caught in her own Russian pincer movement.

    First off, we now have confirmation that that fake Russian dossier on Trump was jointly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee:

    The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

    Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

    After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the firm in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by a still unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

    The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

    Snip.

    The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’ since Nov. 2015 — though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    Second, there’s still more information leaking out about the Uranium One deal and Hillary Clinton’s role in it:

    Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

    The Facebook-ad buy, which started in June 2015 — before Donald Trump entered the race — was more left-wing agitprop (ads pushing hysteria on racism, immigration, guns, etc.) than electioneering. The Clintons’ own long-time political strategist Mark Penn estimates that just $6,500 went to actual electioneering. (You read that right: 65 hundred dollars.) By contrast, the staggering $500,000 payday from a Kremlin-tied Russian bank for a single speech was part of a multi-million-dollar influence-peddling scheme to enrich the former president and his wife, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton. At the time, Russia was plotting — successfully — to secure U.S. government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One, and with it, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.

    Here’s the kicker: The Uranium One scandal is not only, or even principally, a Clinton scandal. It is an Obama-administration scandal.

    The Clintons were just doing what the Clintons do: cashing in on their “public service.” The Obama administration, with Secretary Clinton at the forefront but hardly alone, was knowingly compromising American national-security interests. The administration green-lighted the transfer of control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, a hostile regime — and specifically to Russia’s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom. Worse, at the time the administration approved the transfer, it knew that Rosatom’s American subsidiary was engaged in a lucrative racketeering enterprise that had already committed felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses.

    Indeed, the Obama Administration knew that Russia was trying to bribe the Clintons, yet they supressed the information and approved the Uranium One deal anyway:

    Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

    Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

    They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow.

    It appears that Russia targeted Hillary Clinton from the very beginning of her term as Secretary of State:

    Russian intelligence targeted Hillary Clinton before she became secretary of state in 2009, FBI documents show.

    New FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton’s actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010.

    For a decade, the FBI ran an operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. Ghost Stories tracked a ring Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C., under false identities. It was one of the FBI’s most elaborate and successful counterintelligence operations in history.

    After the FBI arrested 10 of the spies in June, 2010, Secretary of State Clinton worked feverishly to return the Russian agents to Moscow in a hastily arranged, lopsided deal with Putin.

    It all happened as the uranium deal was in play: An arrangement to provide Moscow’s state Rosatom nuclear agency with 20 percent of American uranium capacity, with $145,000,000 to pour into the Clinton Family Foundation and its projects.

    For the Clintons, the FBI’s biggest counterintelligence bust in history couldn’t have come at a worse time.

    The day the FBI arrested the Russian agents, on June 28, 2010, the day before the secretary of state’s husband, Bill Clinton, was to give a speech in Moscow. A Kremlin-connected investment bank, Renaissance Capital, paid the former president $500,000 for the hour-long appearance.

    An unnamed Hillary Clinton spokesman told ABC News that there was “no reason to think the Secretary was a target of this spy ring.”

    That was a lie.

    State Department spokesman Phil Gordon brushed off the spy ring as old news: “I don’t think anyone was hugely shocked to know that some vestiges of old attempts to use intelligence are still there.” Breaking the spy network, he said, was “a law enforcement action.” Gordon’s implication was that it had nothing to do with the department Clinton headed.

    That didn’t explain why Clinton stayed silent and worked hard to return the 10 spies back to Moscow, before any could be put on trial or turned by the FBI. Or why Clinton settled for a very poor bargain in a one-sided spy swap. But other evidence does.

    The source of that $145,000,00 number is evidently from Clinton Cash.

    And speaking of Clinton Cash, here’s “7 Uranium One Facts Every American Should Know.” Including this one:

    Senate Republicans Want an FBI Gag Order Lifted
    Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has called for the Justice Department to lift the gag order on the FBI’s whistleblower, indicating that he may have more explosive revelations related to the case and on what the Clintons and the Obama administration knew about the case and when they knew it.

    Here’s a timeline of the Uranium One scandal. Including the tidbit that Bill Clinton met personally with Vladimir Putin in Russia in 2010, while his wife was Secretary of State and while the Uranium One deal was still under considerations by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    In other Clinton Corruption news:

  • “State Department Tells Court It Processed only 32,000—And Has Yet to Review 40,000 Clinton Records.”
  • Criticism of Hillary Clinton, and praise for President Trump from, of all people, Jimmy Carter. “When I compared the Clinton Foundation with the Carter Center, Carter noted: ‘Rosie and I put money in the Carter Center. We never take any out.'” Also: “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Obama Scandals, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 20, 2017

    Friday, October 20th, 2017

    Enjoy another complimentary Friday LinkSwarm:

  • The Imran Awan scandal could result in hundreds of federal charges. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Remember Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that came up with the ludicrously fake Trump Dossier? They were called to testify before congress…and plead the fifth. “So you have what seems to be the Democrats, and Fusion GPS and these officials — intelligence agency bureaucrats — all blocking every single attempt we’re making to get the most basic information about this document, which … may have been the single document that sparked the entire Russia investigation in the first place.”
  • Bonus: That fake dossier may have been the basis of the FISA warrants used in the Trump unmasking scandal.
  • Kurt Schlichter is unimpressed with Salon’s list of Fredocons:

    The media only hires nominal conservatives who already agree with liberals, liberals have no idea what real conservatives think or why. This is the reason they end up baffled when they lose and lose and lose again – sure, Felonia von Pantsuit was also stupid and drunk, but you get the point. As Sun Tzu observed, and I believe this is a verbatim translation from the original Chinese text, a wise general must seek to know and understand the true nature and schemes of his enemy lest he end up as forlorn and humiliated as a foxy fern in the Miramax head office.

  • DNC Chair Tom Perez purges supporters of one-time rival Keith Ellison while filling key positions with Clinton supporters.
  • Speaking of which: Heh.
  • “Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for governor, deleted his black running mate from his campaign fliers. His campaign says that’s not a big deal.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Plurality of Americans believe the media fabricate stories. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Try to protest by blocking roads? Welcome to a jail cell.
  • This piece on how Facebook changed the 2016 election is peppered with the usual left-wing slant (has any liberal media outlet ever been labeled “hyperpartican”?), but is also filled with nuggets of insight on how liberal complacency and conservative mastery of social media blind-sided Democrats.
  • Republicans gain in voter registration:

    In short, among the truly contested states in 2016, the only ray of hope for the Democrats is Colorado, and even there, the trends have flattened some. They have stabilized New Jersey and Delaware, but Republicans continue to gain significant ground in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and above all, Pennsylvania. If these trends continue through 2020, Florida would be have a slight Republican registration edge, North Carolina would be nearly even, and New Mexico would be close enough that it could never be taken for granted. Moreover, Pennsylvania and Iowa would be solid Trump states.

    The remarkable thing about the Republican trending states is that they have moved steadily ever since last November, in almost every case without a single break. Democrats continue to lose voters, and they are not becoming independents. All of this appears to be due to Trump and Trump alone, as the Republican Party has not offered any reasons to embrace it.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • One of Obama’s “Dreamers” murders high school girl. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Denison Whataburger fires employee for refusing to serve police officers. Good.
  • Kobe Steel, Japan’s third largest steel manufacturer, falsified quality reports, affecting over 500 manufacturers. Enjoy your flight.
  • Heh 2. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

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