Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

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.

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:

"No bias at the FBI" or something. This exchange is nuts. pic.twitter.com/uUj0NlYNAf

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 14, 2018

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.

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.

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.)

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.”

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.)

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.

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.