Posts Tagged ‘Cody Shearer’

Lee Stranahan On The Clinton State Department Crony Origin Of The Russian Collusion Hoax

Sunday, October 6th, 2019

Here’s an interesting thread by Lee Stranahan on how Clinton cronies at the State Department were building the Russian Collusion hoax story back in early 2016, before Fusion GPS hired Steele to assemble the fake dossier.

So that’s TWO State Department employees being briefed by Steele; Jonathan Winer & Victoria Nuland.

They both have 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections, as does Steele.

And there’s one more State Department who is VERY relevant to the whole story…Clinton’s Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott.

Strobe Talbott is one of the Clinton’s oldest and closest friends.

He headed the Brookings Instituion for years.

And is the THIRD State Department official briefed by Steele.
This is already looking very much like a State Department operation.

The 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections are everywhere.

Strobe link to a VERY important connection.

Back in the 1970s, Strobe married the twin sister of a man who would become a shadowy Clinton operative: Cody Shearer.

Read that Jonathan Winer op-Ed from earlier in the thread and you’ll that he was shown the little discussed “second dossier” that Cody Shearer assembled.

Steele gave it to the FBI.

But it’s totally misnamed. Why?

Because it came first, as you’ll see soon.

Snip.

Cody Shearer was assembling HIS dossier BEFORE STEELE WAS HIRED.

He was discussing Trump / Russia in MARCH OR APRIL of 2016.

Other names that play a role in the timeline: DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa, notorious Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal, George Soros, John McCain and even convicted felony Brett Kimberlin, though those last three names appear to be involved in the Steele story only tangentially. Also, I don’t buy Stranahan’s “Ukraine bad/Russia good” positioning near the end of the thread. But the information about State Department/Clinton crony involvement in assembling the Steele hoax dossier information much earlier than most people know is worth pointing out.

Clinton Corruption Update: The Converging

Wednesday, January 31st, 2018

As I previously mentioned, several Clinton Corruption scandals, and the Obama Administration FISA/Unmasking scandal, have been converging into one giant scandal for some time.

Well things just got a whole lot more convergy. So I’m going to crank this out before the FISA abuse memo drops.

  • Would you believe that the FBI has a second secret Trump “dossier”, this one written by well know Clinton crony and dirty tricks man Cody Shearer?
  • More on the same subject:

  • You know what other Clinton cronies may have helped out on the fake dossier?

    Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie[sic] Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.

    The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.

    Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.

    According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.

    Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.

    Podesta met with Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson the day after the Trump-Russia dossier was published by Buzzfeed News.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Why did so many FBI agents break the law? Because they expected President Hillary Clinton to reward them for their loyalty.

    the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

    On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

    Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

    Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.

    How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.

    How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe?

    Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.

    Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?

    Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.

  • Another reason: to protect Obama.

    From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

    These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

    If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

  • You might have heard that Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe stepped down, possibly under pressure. Did you also hear that the whole “Hillary Emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop” scandal broke in October because McCabe didn’t want to investigate them?

    The Justice Department’s inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

    The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

    A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point.

    A major line of inquiry for the inspector general has been trying to determine who at the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, and when they learned about them. McCabe is a central figure in those inquiries, these people said.

    (Hat tip: Sean Davis’ Twitter feed.)

  • It’s not just McCabe. FBI Director Christopher Wray will be replacing his chief of staff James Rybicki just a week after the latter testified to congress about his handling of EmailGate.
  • “Current and former FBI officials said McCabe’s resignation is the beginning of more resignations to come.”
  • 10 Takeaways From Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS Senate Testimony. Nicely divided between outright lies and mere evasion. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
  • The Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner divorce is off. Gee, do you think this might have to do with the fact that spouses cannot legally be compelled to testify against each other, but ex-spouses can?
  • ”It looks like the ‘James Bond’ behind the dossier let a Putin pawn do all the work.”

    it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).

    While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.

    During that contract, which ran through October 2016, Baumgartner worked closely in Moscow with the Russian lawyer who lobbied Donald Trump Jr. at a now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to help lift US sanctions on Russia. Her talking points were written by Simpson, who also dealt directly with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

    During the case, Simpson and Baumgartner also met with her partner, former Russian military intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.

    As the Prevezon case was winding down, Simpson said he assigned Baumgartner, who shares his enmity toward Trump, to help dig up dirt on him. Baumgartner contributed research targeting the central Trump campaign figures charged in the dossier.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • FBI agents felt pressure to end the EmailGate probe early. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • I was thinking I should produce a dramtis persona for the Clinton/FusionGPS Uniconspiracy, but someone has already done one in handy flow-chart form.
  • Hillary Clinton refused to fire Burns Strider, the “faith advisor” for her 2008 Presidential campaign, despite allegations of sexual harassment. Why, it’s almost like there’s a pattern in the way she handles things…
  • Bill Clinton signed a $25 million contract with the Australian government that he wasn’t legally entitled to sign.