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New reflections on the American coup and what lies behind it

October 17, 2019 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 comments

Yesterday, I ran across four articles of interest.

The coup

The starting point is James Howard Kunstler’s October 15 essay, ‘Wait For It’, which is about the ongoing American coup, the latest development being President Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine and the Democrats’ ‘whistleblower’ (emphases mine):

For one thing, he-she-it is not a “whistleblower” at all; was only labeled that via legalistic legerdemain to avoid revealing the origin of this affair as a CIA cover-your-ass operation. Did Mr. Schiff actually think he could conceal this figure’s identity in a senate impeachment trial, when it came to that — for what else is impeachment aimed at? Anonymous sources are not admissible under American due process of law. Mr. Schiff must have missed that class in law school.

All of this hocus-pocus suggests to me that there is no “whistleblower,” that it is a phantom confabulation of gossip threads that unraveled the moment Mr. Trump released the transcript of his phone call to Ukraine’s president Zelensky, aborting Mr. Schiff’s game plan. The ensuing weeks of congressional Keystone Kops buffoonery since then appears to conceal a futile effort by Mr. Schiff and his confederates to find some fall guy willing to pretend that he-she-it is the “whistleblower” …

One marvels at Rep. Schiff’s tactical idiocy. But just imagine the panicked consternation it must be triggering among his Democratic colleagues. Notice that Mrs. Pelosi has been hiding out during this latest phase of the action. She may sense that there is nothing left to do but allow Mr. Schiff to twist slowly slowly in the wind, as he has hung himself out to dry. She should have known better since every previous declaration of conclusive evidence by Mr. Schiff over the past three years has proved to be false, knowingly and mendaciously so.

One also clearly senses that all the smoke-and-mirrors are a desperate attempt to divert attention from a soon-to-drop DOJ Inspector General’s report which, by the way, will only be an overture to much more damaging action likely to come from Mr. Barr’s proceeding. After all, IG Horowitz was not allowed under the rules to compel the testimony of persons outside the Department of Justice, which would now include Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and many others at the center of the RussiaGate prank …

That lame admission will not avail to protect him or the CIA, an agency that is behind the administrative civil war. It has been a rogue agency for a long long time, but may have finally overplayed its hand, along with the newer adjunct agencies that have been stitched onto it since 9/11/01 — the dark network that goes by the name Intelligence Community. So many shoes are ready to drop on them that the din might drown out all the John Philip Sousa marches ever played in the lobby at Langley, let alone the thin trilling of a fake whistleblower.

Apart from these fateful developments the prize for the week’s most transparently disingenuous bit of media agitprop goes to Saturday’s New York Times puff piece on former FBI Director Jim Comey, which actually sets him up for federal indictment on something like sedition or treason.

Did you notice that the photo-caption states: James Comey plans to spend the next 13 months working to drive President Trump from power. Oh, really? By what means, exactly? Single-handedly or with whom? And how did the strategy he kicked off in 2016 work out? In case Mr. Barr is looking for some way to attribute motive to the actions that he’s investigating, he may need to seek no further. Also, consider that The New York Times and its editor-in-chief Dean Baquet, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger may be named as unindicted co-conspirators in the three-year campaign of sedition (freedom of the press, of course). Alert the shareholders.

I should emphasise that Jim Kunstler is not a Trump supporter, but even the Democrats’ continuing attempts at getting a legitimately elected president out of office have been making him think a bit more about the coup.

The ‘revolution in reverse’

The comments to Kunstler’s article were as wide-ranging and fascinating as ever.

Someone linked to an October 10 essay on Tzarism.com called ‘The Hi-Tech Traditionalist: A Revolution In Reverse: The Uprising Of The American Elites Against The American People’. The author, Dr Baruch Pletner, is a polyglot:

The Hi-Tech Traditionalist – Baruch Pletner is an entrepreneur, a scientist, an inventor, and a private pilot. He is passionate about education, the outdoors, and the war on globalism. Baruch holds a PhD degree from the Technion in Haifa, Israel and an MBA from Northeastern University in Boston.

He points out that the leftist revolution taking place in the United States is the inverse of what usually happens in an uprising:

The great Bolshevik revolutions of the last century in Russia, in China, and in Cuba all followed a familiar pattern: a group of young, energetic, endlessly corruptible, but not yet corrupt outsiders take on, in the name of the people, a tired corrupt establishment. A civil war ensues in which the people side with the revolutionaries because they (mistakenly) think that things can never be worse. Revolutionaries win, slaughter the establishment elites, and proceed to rob and enslave the people in even more outrageous fashion. Soon enough the old guard revolutionaries become every bit as corrupt as the ones they have replaced if not more so and the cycle repeats itself.

In America, the situation is rather farcically backwards. In America, the corrupt establishment elites have decided to stage a Bolshevik coup against the American people rather than the other way around. A Tsar fully in command of his own kingdom staging a coup against his own people is a bizarre development to say the least, and yet, here we are in 2019 America. Like always, there are reasons. First and foremost among them is the sheer scope of the nepotism and corruption of the American elites in business, government, technology, and the intelligence services. This scope has very likely far exceeded anything previously known in human history. Had the dimensions of the robbery perpetrated by the American ruling classes against the American people become widely known earlier, America could well have experienced a more typical revolution, one by the people against the elites.

There are other reasons, he says, which date from the late 1980s. Continuing on from the previous paragraph, he tells us:

Well aware of the possibility if not probability of such an outcome, the people who run America put in place a plan to make it all but impossible. The plan involved the gradually escalating erosion of the limits on government powers put in place by the Constitution with a parallel erosion in the God-given rights guaranteed every American by the same document. This was a fully bipartisan effort, put in place immediately after president Reagan departed office. It is sufficient to observe the exponential increase in government versus private sector employment in America from 1988 to 2019 to fully grasp this point. Stopping immigration from countries that have (or at least used to have) a tradition of personal freedom and limited government while throwing open the spigots for immigration from countries that have neither was the second part of the same plan. The destruction of family values and Christianity in America was the third.

Then there were the social, guilt-inducing conditioning of the majority of the American populace, who have no control over their skin colour. As such:

Americans allowed themselves to become squeezed out of well-paying jobs by the elites-induced trifecta of low and high-skilled immigration and automation, with nary a whisper in protest.

Then, he says, along came Donald Trump. In the eyes of the elite, President Trump must be stopped:

Trying to pin on Trump their own sins of sexual corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, etc. has not been a well-thought out strategy on the part of the American power elites simply because it enabled him to begin educating the American public as to the breathtaking scope of their own criminality. Now, on the verge of Trump’s inevitable reelection, they are left with only one option: a coup d’etat against the American people, the American Constitution, and the American Republic itself.

Since the elites still very much permeate every hall of power in America, this is a one-off deal in which the rulers of a country set out to violently overthrow the very political structure of the country they are ruling, but, as they say, it is what it is. The cover may be different, but the playbook is the same, so we are already being exposed to the oldies but goodies of escalating agitprop (weaponized lies and propaganda), suppression of unwanted elements (cancel culture), and paid snitching (whistleblowing). Now we are entering into a new phase, that of secret trials with a predetermined outcome.

He means impeachment hearings, which he goes on to discuss, adding:

… what follows next will not be pretty. Having obtained an illegal impeachment that has no chance in the Senate, the powers that be in America will use this “impeachment” to force Trump off the 2020 ballot by any means possible, including things that now sound crazy like setting up a parallel Supreme Court having declared the Constitution illegitimate because it was written by white males some of whom supported slavery and ratified without African American and other minority votes.

Needless to say, such actions may well precipitate an armed conflict we know of as civil war, but that would not be an unexpected outcome for the elites. We know now that the American intelligence services all work for the elites and not for the people. They will fight on their side in the coming war. What we don’t know is to what degree the armed forces have been infiltrated, especially the mid-level officer corps.

That is my concern, too.

The New York Times and Carlos Slim’s fortune

Someone else responding to Kunstler’s piece posted a 2015 Ann Coulter article for Townhall, ‘Carlos Slim: The New York Times’ Sugar Daddy’.

Ann Coulter observed the editorial shift in the New York Times since Carlos Slim rescued the failing newspaper in 2008.

Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”

And, going back further to the Clinton administration, the NYT used to point out porous border problems:

In 1997—the pre-Slim days—the Times had editorialized: “Fighting illegal immigration is a difficult and important job. But Congress should do it in a way that will deter illegal entry at the border.”39 Another editorial that year complained that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had “done a poor job of keeping out illegal aliens, deporting criminals [and] processing requests for asylum.” This wasn’t even Bush-bashing—Clinton was president!

Coulter explains how Slim makes his money off the American taxpayer, which involves much more than enlightened citizens buying copies of the New York Times:

One of the ways Slim makes money off of illegal immigration in the United States is by overcharging Mexicans to call home, especially during World Cup soccer season. Slim takes a percentage of all cell phone calls into Mexico—and Telmex’s “interconnection rates” are astronomical. International roaming rates are 37 percent higher in Mexico than the average of all OECD countries.

But the main way illegal immigrants benefit Slim is through their remissions. Monopolistic pricing is of little value in a poor country. A monopoly on air in Burundi would not produce the world’s richest man. Luckily for Slim, Mexico is located right next to one of the wealthiest nations in the world. The OECD estimates that Slim’s suffocating telecommunications monopoly costs Mexican consumers $26 billion a year, with more than half of that coming from Slim gouging his customers. They would have $20 billion less to spend without 40 million Mexicans living in the United States.

According to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Mexican immigrants or those of Mexican descent send at least $20 billion out of America back to their relatives in Mexico each year.29 No wonder immigrants are so reliant on welfare—they’re sending so much of it out of the country! Twenty billion dollars is significantly more—about a quarter more—than the amount of money the United States sends to Mexico in direct foreign aid. The $20 billion being sent to immigrants’ grandmothers in Chiapas is forever eliminated from the American economy—unavailable for investment in American companies, the purchase of American products, or hiring American workers. That’s a cost of immigration that Americans are never told about.

These billions of dollars being drained out of the U.S. economy every year would be bad enough if the money were coming exclusively from cheap-labor employers like Sheldon Adelson. But it’s worse than that. It comes from American taxpayers. Not only do taxpayers have to support Americans who lose their jobs to low-wage immigrant laborers, taxpayers support the immigrants, too. Seventy-five percent of immigrant families from Mexico are on government assistance.

Putting two and two together, we can more easily understand the New York Times‘s editorial line under Slim and the billionaire’s desire to see more Mexicans enter the United States illegally:

That’s why, in 2014, Slim was exhorting Mexican youth to cross illegally into the United States for jobs. The stated purpose of Obama’s open defiance of American immigration laws was to avoid punishing “children” who were brought to the United States by their parents. Slim didn’t care about that. (Then again, neither did Obama.) He just wanted more Mexicans working in America and sending dollars back to him. As the CEO of the “Carlos Slim Foundation” explained, “[O]ur goal is to reduce the access barriers for them to reach this potential . . . to build not just them but their families, so they’re able to contribute to the economy”—i.e., the Mexican economy owned by Carlos Slim.

The ‘invisible government’

Truthdig has an article by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, ‘Our Invisible Government’, which is, in part, a book review of Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

I will not be excerpting Hedges’s article except for this:

Kinzer builds his book around Sidney Gottlieb, an elusive, quirky and powerful operative in the CIA who in his quest for mind control—something he and others in the CIA had convinced themselves the Soviets had mastered—oversaw medical experiments that had been originated by his German and Japanese collaborators. These experiments were coded-named Bluebird and later Artichoke, which Kinzer calls “one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.” The torture sessions often permanently shattered the minds of his subjects. Victims were kidnapped (later this would be called “extraordinary rendition”) and sent to clandestine centers around the globe—now known as “black sites”—or were picked from the prison population abroad and at home. Those forced into taking part in these experiments included impoverished African Americans at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky. Many of the victims were labeled “expendables,” meaning they could be murdered after the experiments and disappeared. The corpses were usually burned. Anyone who was powerless, or could be made powerless, was a potential target. Mentally handicapped children at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, for example, were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium and their induced sicknesses were monitored. Gottlieb oversaw the administering of LSD and other drugs to induce psychotic states at the federal prison in Atlanta and a youth correctional facility in Bordentown, N.J. None of his subjects consented to being a human guinea pig, and many ended up psychologically impaired for life. The Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, being held in the Atlanta penitentiary, was told he would be part of an experiment on curing schizophrenia but then was surreptitiously given LSD nearly every day for 15 months. CIA scientists also conducted experiments on terminally ill patients at an annex of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Gottlieb searched for years for a cocktail of drugs that, in Kinzer’s words, would draw “prisoners away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.” It was a vain quest. But with each failure he and the CIA became ever more zealous, working closely with former German Gen. Walter Schreiber, the onetime surgeon general of the Nazi army who had “approved experiments at the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored.” Kinzer adds that according to one American researcher, the experiments “usually resulted in a slow and agonizing death.”

Gottlieb had a habit of secretly lacing the drinks of colleagues with LSD to see their reaction. Some never recovered. One of his victims was Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who was appalled by the brutal interrogations he witnessed and planned to resign from the CIA. Gottlieb and his secretive group of torturers and assassins were terrified Olson would go public. Olson was found dead in 1953 on a sidewalk in Manhattan after allegedly diving through a hotel window. His son Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994 and turned over to James Starrs, a forensic pathologist at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. “Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window,” Kinzer writes. “Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.”

“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded.

Starrs was later more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”

As awful as that is, the rest of the article has details of even more gruesome and demonic ‘experiments’, which those interested may read at their leisure.

Conclusion

We have much to pray for in the coming months: the safety of Donald Trump and his family, the thwarting of evil deeds from our notional betters and the return of a moral society, which is the only way to conserve the freedoms we know in the West. Those, too, must be restored, with Big Government — the malicious Nanny State — being thrown out.

Also, please spare a prayer for Brexit. What has been going on in Parliament and the upper courts of law since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister has been chilling, to say the least.

‘Witch hunt’ over as Mueller report lays to rest Left’s ‘collusion’ narrative

March 29, 2019 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 comments

At 5 p.m. on Friday, March 22, 2019, news emerged that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was complete, with no more indictments:

Attorney General William Barr wrote a letter to both houses of Congress:

This investigation has been a millstone around President Trump’s neck since 2017.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina) said:

It was an expensive investigation:

The third paragraph in the following announcement details what it involved — all to no avail:

Imagine the disappointment:

Media and the coming downfall

The media were positive that President Trump was guilty of a criminal offence, as they watched the Mueller probe unfold involving:

More on this in a moment:

For now, let’s look at three people on MSNBC.

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow wasn’t crying, but she came pretty close:

Mika Brzezinski

Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski also had a close call with the tear ducts:

Chris Matthews

Chris Matthews, who once said he felt a tingle go up his leg during Obama’s 2008 campaign, looked as if he was fighting back tears but spoke in anger. He was particularly upset the report was released at 5 p.m. on a Friday:

There is always the danger that a lie told long enough appears to be true:

There was also this gem in Chris’s segment:

HE ADMITS they were “TARGETING” Trump! Listen about 2/3 the way through Apx 1 min into it he slips up & calls Pres. Trump “THE PERSON BEING TARGETED” and quickly corrected himself saying “the subject being investigated”

Ratings tank

On Wednesday, March 27, Breitbart‘s John Nolte reported on the tanking ratings for CNN and MSNBC (excerpts follow, emphases mine):

During the week of March 18, the far-left CNN lost almost 30 percent of an audience that is already minuscule …

On the credibility front, CNN chief Jeff Zucker tried to excuse his network’s two-year deliberate deception about Trump colluding with the Russians by admitting on Tuesday that no one at CNN does investigative work.

Like we didn’t already know that.

“We are not investigators,” he told the far-left New York Times. “We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.”

All Zucker did there was to confirm what we already knew: CNN acts as stenographers for the establishment, most especially the intelligence community, all of whom share CNN’s left-wing agenda for the country.  The facts are that so-and-so told us this and so-and-so told us that, is not journalism. Journalism requires investigation and the risk of uncovering a truth that might be inconvenient to your own personal beliefs and still reporting that truth …

For the week of March 18, meaning prior to the release of the Mueller Report exonerating Trump from the Russia Collusion Hoax, CNN lost a jaw-dropping 24 percent of its total day viewers and 27 percent of its primetime viewers, when compared to this same week last year.

In the 25-54 age demo, which sets advertiser rates, CNN lost an astonishing 37 percent of total day viewers and 38 percent primetime viewers.

For comparison purposes, during this same week, Fox News increased its total day and primetime viewership by +8 and +2 percent, respectively.

MSNBC, CNN’s competition for left-wing viewers, only lost 9 percent of its total day viewers and 15 percent of primetime viewers. In the 25-54 demo, MSNBC also took a huge loss in total day and primetime; 33 percent and 32 percent, respectively …

On Monday, during primetime, four of CNN’s hours failed to break 700,000 total viewers: Jake Tapper (683,000), Wolf Blitzer (637,000 & 622,000), Erin Burnett (685,000).

MSNBC might see a ratings dip as it maneuvers in the post-Mueller world, but CNN was already in trouble, already in far-last place, and those wondering how CNN’s ratings could possibly get any worse are about to find out.

With the Mueller probe wrung dry, Rachel Maddow’s show definitely took a hit:

Not surprisingly, Trump tweeted about both networks’ ratings:

Reactions from Democrats and their allies

Before the Mueller report was completed, the American public saw these now-familiar Democrats on television with nauseating regularity:

The Dems and their supporters will continue to press on with other anti-Trump talking points:

Assassination attempt

This attempted coup has roused radicals to take matters into their own hands. The latest was, thankfully, thwarted on Wednesday, March 27, on the border between West Virginia and Maryland:

Nancy Pelosi

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has put impeachment on the back burner for now:

Adam Schiff

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and is one of the president’s most constant critics, refuses to let go:

He commiserated with Rachel Maddow, but that was only momentarily:

A fellow House member, Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), has strong words for him …

… as does journalist Paul Sperry:

On March 27, Fox News reported of Republicans’ calls for Schiff’s resignation:

Republicans are stepping up calls for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to resign or give up his committee post for repeatedly pushing claims of collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Now that Robert Mueller’s probe has shown no evidence of collusion, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has been the most vocal in calling for Schiff’s resignation – telling “Fox & Friends” on Monday that the California Democrat “ought to resign today.”

… While not going so far as Conway in calling for Schiff to leave office, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said that Schiff does owe “an apology to the American public” and should step down from his post as head of the intelligence committee.

“He owes an apology to the American public,” McCarthy said. “There is no place in Adam Schiff’s world or in Congress that he should be chair of the intel committee.”

McCarthy added: “There is no way he could lead the intel committee and he should step back.”

James Comey

On Sunday, March 24, former FBI director James Comey tweeted, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) — chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — duly replied:

Sean Hannity also replied:

Yes Mr . Let’s start with why did you sign off on the FISA warrant based on hrc lies in oct 2016. And in January 2017 say it’s “unverified and salacious” ? Did you commit a fraud of the FISA court or lie to the President Elect you hated?

And, let’s not forget a memo that Comey leaked in 2017:

Comey instructed his friend, Daniel Richman, to give the [New York] Times a memo he wrote about a conversation he had with Trump on Feb. 14, 2017. Comey claimed Trump asked him to shut down an investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Comey’s ploy worked, as Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel May 17, 2017.

What happens next?

It seems probable that President Trump will not let sleeping dogs lie. Nor should he.

On Wednesday, March 27, he gave an interview to Sean Hannity, his first since the Mueller report’s completion (watch on YouTube):

President Trump, in an exclusive wide-ranging interview Wednesday night with Fox News’ “Hannity,” vowed to release the full and unredacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants and related documents used by the FBI to probe his campaign, saying he wants to “get to the bottom” of how the long-running Russia collusion narrative began.

Trump told anchor Sean Hannity that his lawyers previously had advised him not to take that dramatic step out of fear that it could be considered obstruction of justice.

“I do, I have plans to declassify and release. I have plans to absolutely release,” Trump said. “I have some very talented people working for me, lawyers, and they really didn’t want me to do it early on. … A lot of people wanted me to do it a long time ago. I’m glad I didn’t do it. We got a great result without having to do it, but we will. One of the reasons that my lawyers didn’t want me to do it, is they said, if I do it, they’ll call it a form of obstruction.”

Trump added: “Frankly, thought it would be better if we held it to the end. But at the right time, we will be absolutely releasing.”

Trump also accused FBI officials of committing “treason” — slamming former FBI Director James Comey as a “terrible guy,” former CIA Director John Brennan as potentially mentally ill, and Democrat House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff as a criminal.

He mentioned ‘treason’ more than once:

“It was treason, it was really treason,” Trump said, referring to texts between former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that discussed an “insurance policy” in the event of Trump’s election.

“You had dirty cops, you had people who are bad FBI folks … At the top, they were not clean, to put it mildly.” He said later, “We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president.”

Also:

“I think Brennan’s a sick person, I really do,” Trump said. “I believe there’s something wrong with him, for him to come out of the CIA and act that way was so disrespectful to the country and to the CIA. He was not considered good at what he did. He was never a respected guy.”

Looking back to 2016:

“When I said there could be somebody spying on my campaign, it went wild out there,” Trump told Hannity. “They couldn’t believe I could say such a thing. As it turned out, that was small potatoes compared to what went on. … Millions and millions [spent] on the phony dossier, and then they used the dossier to start things. It was a fraud, paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.”

As for the mysterious tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch during the summer that year, he said:

I had a lot of planes for a long time. I’ve never stopped the plane on the tarmac to let somebody on the plane. Bill Clinton said he was there to play golf, but I know the area very well. Arizona. It’s a little warm at that time of year for golf, OK?

He also had a dig at his own former AG Jeff Sessions — and rightly so:

Trump also told Hannity “this all would not have happened” if Attorney General William Barr had been with his administration from the beginning.

I could not agree more!

However, without Mueller and Stumbling Block Sessions, the administration can move forward, and one congressman, dairy farmer Devin Nunes (R-California), is raring to go:

Onwards and upwards!

MAGA!

Trump mentions ‘treason’ in tweets

February 21, 2019 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

Last week, I wrote ‘Senate Intelligence Committee: “no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia”‘.

On Sunday, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe appeared for a half-hour on CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview with Scott Pelley.

McCabe is currently doing a book tour to promote The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.

On March 16, 2018, President Trump tweeted:

Two weeks earlier, Fox News reported that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, was expected to (emphases mine):

criticize former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for approving a leak of information about the Hillary Clinton investigation to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times reported late Thursday.

According to the Times, which cited four people familiar with the investigation into the department’s handling of the Clinton probe, McCabe will be censured for disclosing the investigation’s existence to the Journal.

The Journal report in question, which was published Oct. 30, 2016, recounts a conversation in which McCabe sparred with a senior Justice Department official over an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Journal — which cited sources including “one person close to Mr. McCabe” — said McCabe insisted that the FBI should move forward with its investigation, while the Justice Department official expressed concern about its potential effect on the presidential election.

McCabe, a frequent target of President Donald Trump’s ire, left his position as FBI deputy director in January and is scheduled to retire later this month. He had served for several months as acting director following Trump’s firing last May of FBI Director James Comey.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department, the FBI and the inspector general had no immediate comment on the report Thursday evening …

Trump verbally attacked McCabe during the campaign and again as president because McCabe’s wife, during a failed state Senate run, had accepted campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally.

David J Harris Jr and Real Clear Politics have more detail, dating from January 2018.

On March 14, a Fox producer for DoJ news tweeted:

On March 15, the Washington Examiner reported that McCabe was ‘still holding on to his retirement’:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is holding onto his pension just days before he is set to officially retire.

McCabe was at the Justice Department to meet with Scott Schools, the most senior career attorney in the department, as well as other officials, for a majority of the afternoon Thursday, to make a case why he should be allowed to retire and not be fired.

Schools reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who in turn reports to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The decision to fire McCabe before Sunday, and thus strip McCabe of his full pension and benefits, is in Sessions’ hands.

The_Donald featured a fiery thread in response:

So, This Lying, Leaking, Lawless LOSER Is Pleading To The DOJ Today To Keep His Pension? WE, The Taxpaying Citizens Demand This CRIMINAL Receive NOTHING And Be INDICTED For His CRIMES!!

Then, the next day:

CBS News, in reporting McCabe’s meeting the previous Friday pointed out:

If McCabe is fired, it is believed his only avenue of appeal would be to file a lawsuit to try to reclaim his pension.

Twitter exploded.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) was indignant:

So was the former CIA director, directing his ire at President Trump:

Later that day, McCabe issued a lengthy statement (click on image to see it in full, also available at CNN):

His statement elicited this response:

. McCabe, you disgraced the oath you swore. You harmed the nation by your deceit. You took 1/2 million dollars for your wife’s campaign from Hillary’s guy, McAuliffe, the said you should be FIRED. You deserve it.

McCabe’s lawyer also issued a statement. (Apparently, his lawyer — a former Inspector General for the DoJ — supported the current Inspector General’s report until McCabe was implicated by it.)

The DoJ disagreed with McCabe and his lawyer:

I hope that FBI Director Christopher Wray received all of McCabe’s documentation about the 2016 election.

There were also newsy snippets:

On March 17, The Hill, among other media outlets, noted that McCabe’s weekend statement seemed to contradict James Comey’s testimony from May 2017 about relaying sensitive information to the media.

News emerged that McCabe wrote memoranda of his conversations with President Trump and gave those to Robert Mueller. CBS reported that details of James Comey’s firing were included.

Fox News correspondent Adam Housely said that McCabe’s dismissal was a morale boost to FBI agents.

On March 18, TownHall posted an editorial, ‘The Coming Collusion Bloodbath’. Nearly one year on, we could be at that point:

That Comey, McCabe, and others have practiced an obvious double standard in the email case of Hillary Clinton where ample evidence caused 106 of the case agents and attorneys working on the case to believe indictment would occur, and simultaneously going to such extraordinary measures through the assistance of essentially Hillary’s campaign operation to attempt to thwart the outcome of the election is more than enough reason to go after them on a criminal basis alone.

That McCabe reportedly lied to the low key Inspector General, while attempting to send General Michael Flynn to prison for lying to the same FBI is of highest hypocrisy.

Before McCabe was fired, Reddit had censored discussions about his ‘corruption issues’. Now that he was gone, they could be discussed freely once more.

Attention then turned to the McCabe’s connections with Hillary Clinton. A New York radio host tweeted:

The following 2017 video resurfaced. It shows that McCabe had (still has?) a home in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons live (start at 5:00 in):

On April 13, Inspector General Horowitz issued his report:

Fox News explained:

The report, handed over to Congress on Friday and obtained by Fox News, looked at a leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation.

The report says that McCabe authorized the leak and then misled investigators about it, leaking in a way that did not fall under a “public interest” exception.

“[W]e concluded that McCabe’s decision to confirm the existence of the CF investigation through an anonymously sourced quote, recounting the content of a phone call with a senior department official in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of department leadership, was clearly not within the public interest exception,” the report says …

Sessions said that McCabe “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor − including under oath − on multiple occasions.”

James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent said that, according to the IG’s report, firing McCabe was the right thing to do. He says that whether you are a Marine or a special agent of the FBI, the same rules apply:

In May, FBI agents wanted to be subpoenaed in order to testify against Comey and McCabe:

Questions arose in Congress. The Gateway Pundit reported that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wanted answers about the FBI’s treatment of General Flynn.

Early in June:

Allegations arose about McCabe’s involvement in the 302s (FBI reports) regarding General Flynn:

On September 6, the Washington Post reported that a grand jury had been investigating McCabe ‘for months’:

… an indication the probe into whether he misled officials exploring his role in a controversial media disclosure has intensified, two people familiar with the matter said.

The grand jury has summoned more than one witness, the people said, and the case is ongoing. The people declined to identify those who had been called to testify.

The presence of the grand jury shows prosecutors are treating the matter seriously, locking in the accounts of witnesses who might later have to testify at a trial. But such panels are sometimes used only as investigative tools, and it remains unclear if McCabe will ultimately be charged.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., which has been handling the probe, declined to comment.

Michael Bromwich, a lawyer for McCabe, said in a statement after this report was published online that he had been confident McCabe would not be charged, absent “inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration.”

“Unfortunately, such pressure has continued, with the President targeting Mr. McCabe in numerous additional tweets,” Bromwich said. The lawyer also raised questions about the timing of the news report on the grand jury.

ZeroHedge had more (emphases in the original):

Specifically, McCabe was fired for lying about authorizing an F.B.I. spokesman and attorney to tell Devlin Barrett of the Wall St. Journal – just days before the 2016 election, that the FBI had not put the brakes on a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation, at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton proxy pal, Terry McAuliffe. 

In order to deal with his legal woes, McCabe set up a GoFundMe “legal defense fund” which stopped accepting donations, after support for the fired bureaucrat took in over half a million dollars – roughly $100,000 more than his wife’s campaign took from McAuliffe as McCabe’s office was investigating Clinton and her infamous charities.

On September 17, Trump tweeted about the two FBI employees who were part of the group working against his presidency:

On September 18, the Gateway Pundit reported on the press release for McCabe’s upcoming book, The Threat, mentioned above. The press release quoted McCabe as saying (emphases mine):

I wrote this book because the president’s attacks on me symbolize his destructive effect on the country as a whole. He is undermining America’s safety and security, and eroding public confidence in its institutions. His attacks on the most crucial institutions of government, and on the professionals who serve within them, should make every American stand up and take notice.

On September 21 came the first mention of reports that Rod Rosenstein offered to wear or joked about ‘wearing a wire’ for a meeting with Trump:

A few weeks earlier, President Trump had intended to declassify various unredacted documents. By September 22, he had backtracked. The DoJ advised him that declassification could harm the Mueller probe. In addition, US allies warned against declassification for security reasons. Trump instructed IG Horowitz to review them instead. Had Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein any influence on Trump on this subject? Declassification would have been a huge risk for Rosenstein — and McCabe.

On September 27, the then-House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California) said that he planned to release testimony from 70 or more witnesses who were interviewed in the HSPCI’s own Trump-Russia probe. The Daily Caller reported:

Nunes said that between 70 and 80 percent of the transcripts do not contain classified information. The remaining transcripts would have to be reviewed by the office of the director of national intelligence. Nunes said that review process “would only take a matter of days.”

Nunes and other House Republicans have also led a push to get President Donald Trump to declassify and release documents related to the FBI and Justice Department’s collusion investigation.

It also transpired that McCabe and Rosenstein were feuding via the media. McCabe represented the faction that wanted to end Trump’s presidency. Rosenstein represented the people currently at the DoJ and FBI.

Rosenstein was using the Washington Post to get his story out. McCabe was using the New York Times.

One example of this was when the Rosenstein-wear-a-wire story appeared in The New York Times:

On October 9, The Hill‘s John Solomon reported that Rosenstein was desperate to downplay the story. However, released testimony from former FBI lawyer James Baker indicated that this was no joke:

Baker’s story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of the administration to remove the president from power.

Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the window around the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss’s firing with a secret recording operation?

I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be engineered.

This wasn’t a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.

And that makes the FBI’s involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political — even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.

Also:

Keep in mind, this is the same FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page — his lover and the top lawyer to McCabe — about using their official powers to “stop” Trump in the election and having an “insurance policy” against the GOP nominee. That insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — a Trump hater himself — that was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through their mutual law firm.

“You walk away from the Baker interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time frame saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a force to stop Trump’s election before it happened and then maybe reversing it after the election was over,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation.

The following day, the Washington Post published an article outlining the tension between McCabe and Rosenstein. The FBI higher-ups did not like that Rosenstein had recommended in writing that President Trump fire James Comey. DoJ officials did not like that the FBI, McCabe in particular, opened an investigation on Trump immediately after Comey’s departure. WaPo reported that the two quarrelled shortly after Robert Mueller was appointed — in front of him.

Rosenstein, incidentally, had allegedly already made his ‘wear a wire’ comment.

The subject of the meeting in question was whether Rosenstein or McCabe should recuse themselves from involvement in the Mueller probe:

Rosenstein wanted McCabe out of the Russia probe, and McCabe felt differently, arguing that it was the deputy attorney general, not the head of the FBI, who should step away from the case.

Although neither recused himself:

The McCabe-Rosenstein relationship has only worsened with time …

The Rosenstein-McCabe relationship has come under renewed scrutiny as lawmakers have demanded answers about memos written by McCabe and his then-senior counsel, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, about the discussions on May 16, 2017, in which McCabe wrote that Rosenstein suggested recording the president and discussed the 25th Amendment.

Rosenstein was due to meet that week with The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees about the DoJ, but the meeting never happened.

On October 11, the Washington Examiner reported that the FBI was delaying publication of McCabe’s book, The Threat. It would not appear until February 2019:

McCabe was fired by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in March, less than 48 hours before his retirement day because of “allegations of misconduct” found by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. McCabe, has disputed the IG report, and is now the subject of a grand jury inquiry.

According to the FBI’s employment agreement, all disclosure of information must be reviewed and adhere to the FBI’s “Prepublication Review Policy Guide,” made official in 2015.

Although there is more to cover on McCabe, this is a good point at which to bring us to the present day.

On Monday, February 18, 2019, President Trump pulled no punches:

Is this the first time President Trump has tweeted the letters ‘t-r-e-a-s-o-n’?

Here’s ‘treason’ again:

Trump was on fire:

We can only hope that the tables start turning soon.

Perhaps the new attorney general, Bill Barr, will set things in motion.

Be prepared for 2018 news: part 6 — Spygate

June 1, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 comments

This post is part of a series about anticipated news topics in 2018. Readers who have not seen the first five posts from earlier this year might find them of interest, as all relate to today’s news item:

Part 1: hate in Washington DC

Part 2: Hillary WAS supposed to win (The 16 Year Plan to Destroy America)

Part 3: FBI’s missing texts

Part 4: ‘secret society’ and more on missing FBI texts

Part 5: release of the Nunes FISA memo

Since then, more information has come to light about what surveillance took place on the Trump campaign, who was involved and so on. The Conservative Treehouse — The Last Refuge — has the best posts on the subject.

May 2018 marked the first anniversary of Robert Mueller’s continuing investigation. President Trump estimates it has cost upwards of $20 million thus far.

I would elaborate, but that would be pointless. The Storm, which the original Q promised last autumn, never arrived. The next incarnation of Q says to ‘trust the plan’. Although I haven’t given up, I’m no longer holding my breath.

One thing I will say is: this MUST break well in advance of mid-terms and before early voting begins, where applicable. In other words, the Trump administration — e.g. Jeff Sessions — must do something by August or September.

On Wednesday, May 23, 2018, President Trump coined the word ‘Spygate’:

Since then, he has been tweeting about it a lot (see here and here).

On Tuesday, May 29, Trump once again quoted The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway …

… before tweeting:

Trump’s right.

Mueller isn’t looking at people who really have colluded with Russia.

TheLastRefuge — Sundance from The Conservative Treehouse — has condensed his analysis into an easy to understand Twitter thread called ‘Understanding “Spygate”, the Big Picture’. The unrolled thread is here.

Excerpts and a summary follow, emphases mine:

This sort of thing has been going on for years. The difference now is:

6. The current “spygate” debate centers around the modern weaponization of that process using advances in technology for surveillance. See: Edward Snowden (NSA) *whistleblower* and/or even Reality Winner (NSA *contractor*) for a more modern context.

(That is a subject I covered earlier this week.)

Spygate began to unfold in 2015, with the ingenious use of ‘contractors’ working within the intelligence community (IC). Said ‘contractors’ are not subject to government oversight or constraints. They also:

as labeled by the IC and FISA Court, had “deliberate access” to NSA and FBI databases.

One of the many contractors involved was Daniel Richman, a friend of James Comey. According to an April 24 Fox News article, Richman — a Columbia law professor — was:

a “special government employee” (SGE) for Comey’s FBI on an unpaid basis …

“I did indeed have SGE status with the Bureau (for no pay),” Richman wrote in an email.

Here I must break from TheLastRefuge to show Professor Richman during a November 2016 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Cooper, by the way, was a CIA summer intern many moons ago. One wonders what was going through his mind …

You don’t even need the sound, just watch:

The Fox News article says that, even if Richman was unpaid:

Richman emerged last year as the former FBI director’s contact for leaking memos documenting his private discussions with President Trump – memos that are now the subject of an inspector general review over the presence of classified material. Sources familiar with Richman’s status at the FBI told Fox News that he was assigned to “special projects” by Comey, and had a security clearance as well as badge access to the building. Richman’s status was the subject of a Memorandum of Understanding.

While Richman’s portfolio included the use of encrypted communications by terror suspects, the sources said Richman also was sent talking points about the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Those talking points attempted to compare and contrast Clinton’s use of an unsecured personal server exclusively for government business with the case of retired Gen. David Petraeus, who shared classified information with his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell, as well as the case brought against the late Sandy Berger. The former national security adviser under President Clinton pleaded guilty to the unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives.

Back now to TheLastRefuge. Note the sensitive access the various contractors had:

Early in 2016 — several months before the election — Admiral Mike Rogers saw what was happening. Afterwards, the contractors had to change tactics. This is important, especially the graphic:

They were quick to react:

At that point, Donald Trump was one of the few left in the Republican presidential primary race. Jeb Bush had dropped out by then. It was only Trump, Ted Cruz and, in distant third, John Kasich. Trump looked strong, despite what the media were telling the public.

The Democrats mobilised forces. Again, note the contractors involved and the husband and wife duo, the Ohrs:

25. Clinton Campaign hires FusionGPS April 2016. Fusion GPS hires Nellie Ohr wife of DOJ-NSD Bruce Ohr. Bruce Ohr has access to FBI/NSA database. Bruce Ohr is #4 in DOJ Bruce Ohr can hire contractors. Fusion GPS then sub-contracts Christopher Steele.

This is what happened next:

Note that actual intelligence agents and/or spies weren’t even involved:

The man in the middle, Stefan Halper, has dual US/UK nationality. He has been involved in politics on both sides of the aisle from the Nixon through to the Reagan administrations. Currently, he is employed by Cambridge University, where he directs the Department of Politics and International Studies.

He is very well connected.

Until recently, no one outside those in the know had ever heard of him.

That, in itself, amazes me. His role in this will continue to unfold in the months to come.

And that is the introduction to Spygate.

My word, who would ever have imagined something of this magnitude taking place in the United States?

Revisiting Q — April 2018

May 4, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

On April 2, 2018, Q gave a rundown of what he/they expected to happen last month.

Let’s look back to see how many of the topics Q mentioned in message 988 of April 2 made the news cycle:

Q !xowAT4Z3VQ 875265

April [A].
IG report.
Sessions public attack.
RR problems.
Seals broken.
[A]rrests.
Why was Huber made public?
Why now?
Everything has meaning.
[A]wan.
Tarmac.
Iran.
NK.
U1.
FBI.
DOJ.
Mueller.
Election Integrity.
Immigration Bill.
Border.
Wall.
Military start.
BIG month.
Q

The IG — Inspector General’s — report was scheduled for April but is now thought to appear in a few weeks’ time. Whether that is actually in May or June is unknown.

Sessions public attack — meaning Attorney General Jeff Sessions — bubbled up in April and continued during the first week in May with calls for his resignation.

RR — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — definitely had problems in April, which I will cover in a separate post.

Seals broken — if that meant indictments, that did not happen.

Arrests — none of note.

Awan — the Awan brothers from Pakistan, led by Imran Awan, who were running the IT for Democrats in the House of Representatives, did make pro-Trump news sites, and Trump tweeted about ‘the Pakistani mystery man’. I will cover the Awan investigation in a separate post.

Tarmac — the infamous secret meeting between then Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton in July 2016 on Lynch’s plane. James Comey and Lynch disagree on their recollections of the Hillary Clinton ‘investigation’, or ‘matter’. Comey said one thing in his new book, A Higher Loyalty, and Lynch remembers differently. In early April (after Q’s post), NBC’s Lester Holt interviewed Lynch:

LESTER HOLT: But, so Comey says you want to call it, “The Clinton matter.” He wants to call it, “The Clinton investigation.” To the extent, though, that he noted it, that it bothered him did he go to you and question your credibility with regard to the Clinton case?

LORETTA LYNCH: Well, look I can tell you that, you know, it was a meeting like any other that we that we had had where we talked about the issues. And we had a full and open discussion about it.

LESTER HOLT: And he didn’t raise any concerns about?

LORETTA LYNCH: And concerns were not raised.

Trump tweeted:

Q corroborated the tweet (message 1161 of April 15), hinting that Lynch could have been offered Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court if Hillary had been elected. I have no interpretation of the mention of Rep Adam Schiff (D-California), the 187 (dead code) and John Brennan, former CIA director, other than it seems Q is saying Brennan is a black hat:

SC – Supreme Court.
RBG.
AS 187 / Clown Black (Brennan).
Q

Q’s next message, 1162, says:

We made sure a reporter was there to capture.
These people are stupid.
Q

The reporter’s name is Christopher Sign. He moved to Atlanta in 2017. His last day with KNXV Phoenix was September 29.

Iran — was a big news item. Critical Threats has a summary:

Key takeaway: Iranian officials may be preparing to retaliate against Israel after Israel launched its second airstrike against Iranian targets in Syria since April 8.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted Iranian assets in western Syria on April 29 and reportedly killed 18 Iranian fighters. Iranian media denied the reports of Iranian deaths following the strike. The April 29 strike comes after Israel’s April 8 airstrike on the Pro-Syrian regime T-4 airbase in Homs, Homs Governorate in southern Syria. The April 8 strike killed seven IRGC fighters. Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Secretary Ali Shamkhani vowed to “punish” Israel for its “evil action” following the April 8 airstrikes. Defense Minister Artesh Brigadier General Amir Hatami warned Israel on May 1 to stop its “scheming and dangerous behaviors” and suggested that the Axis of Resistance and Iran would confront Israel with a “regrettable and blindsiding” response.

NK — North Korea — was April’s blockbuster news item, which will feature in a separate post.

U1 — Uranium One — made a brief blip in the news cycle and might relate to the Mueller investigation’s raid on the properties and hotel room of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on April 9:

FBI, DOJ and Mueller — much is happening there which will feature in a separate post, although some April news is in my post about Jeff Sessions’s recusals.

Election Integrity — a report about voting abuses and the actual number of votes from the 2016 election was due but has not yet materialised.

Immigration Bill — nothing has happened since the beginning of the year.

Border — two stories made the news: part of the human caravan reached the US border with Mexico and dozens of California communities voted against the state’s sanctuary city policy.

Wall — construction began on March 26.

Military start — the National Guard was sent to the border with Mexico, and there was another attack on Syria nearly a year to the day after 2017’s.

BIG month — yes, especially where North Korea is concerned.

Q’s daily posts discussed John McCain’s trip to Syria a few years ago, social media tracking, the raid on Michael Cohen, trade with China, the plane incidents (‘new booms’, message 1174), the change of government in Armenia (CIA — ‘clowns’ — losing control, message 1243), not to mention the Iran deal and Uranium One — asking about the possibility that Uranium One material ended up in Syria.

Q also reiterated that the administration has the information it needs and that it will soon be time to proceed to the next phase: justice (message 1296, April 29).

I hope so, because, right now, things look rather unsettled.

As always, Q advised everyone to stay united rather than divided.

Sessions’s recusals are more like refusals

May 2, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

In the first half of 2017, Trump supporters — myself included — were enthusiastic about Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as attorney general.

On February 10, I wrote about child molesters and traffickers:

Can Jeff Sessions make pizza great again?

Although perverts and traffickers are always being arrested, under Sessions’s watch, the number began to increase exponentially. Great news!

Another big problem was MS-13. On April 10, I posted:

Attorney General Sessions sends message to MS-13: ‘We will find you’

From those two targets, we see that Sessions’s DOJ was making a move on people all of us can agree fall into the category of criminal.

However, there is another type of criminal: Washington DC politicians who work against the interests of the United States and, within that group, the subset which has been trying to bring down President Donald Trump since November 9, 2016, the day after the election. George True’s guest post of April 15, 2018 explains how serious this is:

Guest post: a reader’s perspective on the Deep State and Mueller investigation

That Jeff Sessions does not consider the DC Swamp rats to be criminals is problematic.

My other 2018 posts about him have reflected this:

Trump tweets frustration with slow investigation (February 24 – 28, 2018)

Increasing outcry for Sleepy Sessions to go (April 19)

Guest post: a reader’s perspective on Jeff Sessions’s priorities (George True, April 20 and Rosenstein’s presidential cufflinks)

Jeff Sessions began recusing himself from Swamp rat investigations early in 2017.

As a result, he has made life extremely difficult for President Trump and his associates. The coup continues apace.

January 10, 2017 — first hint of recusal

As early as January 2017, Sessions said he would recuse himself from any campaign issues involving Hillary Clinton.

On January 10, the Los Angeles Times reported (emphases mine):

Sen. Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s pick to be the next attorney general, testified before Congress on Tuesday that he would recuse himself from any investigations and prosecutions involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Sessions and Trump called during the fall campaign for Clinton to be investigated and prosecuted for her use of a private email server, despite determinations by the FBI and Justice Department that her actions did not warrant charges. Since his election, Trump has said he did not support such an investigation or prosecution. 

Sessions said he had made comments during the “contentious” campaign about Clinton’s use of the email server and her family’s charitable foundation that could place his objectivity in question.

“I believe the proper thing for me to do would be to recuse myself from any questions involving those kind of investigations that involve Secretary Hillary Clinton,” the Alabama Republican told senators on the Judiciary Committee.

March 2, 2017 – first recusal statement

After Sessions was appointed attorney general, he formally recused himself from campaign investigations.

On March 2, he gave a statement, excerpted below:

During the course of the confirmation proceedings on my nomination to be Attorney General, I advised the Senate Judiciary Committee that ‘[i]f a specific matter arose where I believed my impartiality might reasonably be questioned, I would consult with Department ethics officials regarding the most appropriate way to proceed.’ 

During the course of the last several weeks, I have met with the relevant senior career Department officials to discuss whether I should recuse myself from any matters arising from the campaigns for President of the United States. 

Having concluded those meetings today, I have decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States. 

Quartz provided the background:

US attorney general Jeff Sessions, responding to mounting pressure from Democrats and from his own party, announced that he is recusing himself from any current or future investigations into the 2016 US presidential campaigns. The decision followed reports that he had spoken twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the US. Russia, of course, is widely believed by US intelligence agencies to have meddled in the election.

Sessions, a former Republican senator and an advisor to US president Donald Trump during the race, had testified during his Senate confirmation hearing in January that he had not had communications with the Russians during the campaign. At his press conference today (March 2), Sessions spoke about one of the meetings, recalling that it ending in a tense confrontation about Ukraine.

Business Insider provided more detail:

The attorney general recused himself on March 2 after reports emerged that Sessions had twice met with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, during the course of the election, contradicting statements he made during his Senate confirmation hearing, in which he said under oath that he did not have contacts with Russians during the campaign. 

Following the bombshell report, Democrats swiftly demanded Sessions’ resignation, while a growing group of Republicans called on the attorney general to recuse himself from campaign-related investigations.

During questioning by Sen. Ron Wyden later in the hearing, Sessions said that there were no classified reasons for his recusal, as former FBI Director James Comey suggested in his Senate testimony last week. Sessions also claimed that he had informally recused himself since he was confirmed to lead the Justice Department. 

“I basically recused myself the first day I got into the office because I never accessed files, I never learned the names of investigators, I never met with them, I never asked for any documentation,” Sessions told Wyden. “The documentation — what little I received — was mostly already in the media.” 

Months later, the Los Angeles Times noted:

In March, Sessions announced he was recusing himself from any investigation into charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion between Russians and Trump’s campaign. Following his announcement, reports surfaced that Trump was irate that Sessions had recused himself from any investigation.

Fake news or a grain of truth in that last sentence?

I’m writing up what happened to HR McMaster, which I will post here in due course, and found that these rumours and reports turned out to be true.

June 13, 2017 – second recusal statement

On June 13, 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported Sessions’s second formal recusal, this time into Russian collusion:

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions insists his recusal from any investigation into Russian collusion in last year’s election was simple: It’s the law.

In an opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Sessions cited a Department of Justice regulation that he said mandated him stepping aside …

“I recused myself not because of any asserted wrongdoing on my part during the campaign,” Sessions said. “But because a Department of Justice regulation, 28 CFR 45.2, required it.”

“That regulation states, in effect, that department employees should not participate in investigations of a campaign if they have served as a campaign advisor,” said Sessions.

Throughout much of the 2016 election, Sessions served as a senior advisor to Trump’s campaign.

July 2017 — a vexed Trump unloads

On July 19, three New York Times reporters — Peter Baker, Michael S Schmidt and Maggie Haberman — published an interview (and transcript) with President Trump at the White House.

Trump did not mince words. The article led with this:

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

However, the topic did not come up until later in the interview. On this and other subjects, this has to be one of the best interviews ever. On Robert Mueller, Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, Trump had this to say:

SCHMIDT: What do you understand to be the four corners of what Mueller [Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation] can look at, if he steps—— [crosstalk]

TRUMP: I don’t know. Nobody has contacted me about anything.

_________

TRUMP: Because I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.

BAKER: Can we put that on the record?

TRUMP: Because so far, the only — yeah, you can put it down.

SCHMIDT: Was that [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s mistake or [Deputy Attorney General Rod J.] Rosenstein’s mistake?

________

TRUMP: Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.

BAKER: Was that a mistake?

TRUMP: Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.

HABERMAN: He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?

TRUMP: Zero. So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.

HABERMAN: Rosenstein.

TRUMP: Who is he? And Jeff hardly knew. He’s from Baltimore.

________

TRUMP: Yeah, what Jeff Sessions did was he recused himself right after, right after he became attorney general. And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I would have — then I said, “Who’s your deputy?” So his deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. So, he’s from Baltimore. Now, he, we went through a lot of things. We were interviewing replacements at the F.B.I. Did you know Mueller was one of the people that was being interviewed?

HABERMAN: I did, actually.

TRUMP: He was sitting in that chair. We had a wonderful meeting.

HABERMAN: Day before, right?

SCHMIDT: Did he want the job?

TRUMP: The day before! Of course, he was up here, and he wanted the job.

HABERMAN: And he made that clear to you? He would have——

________

TRUMP: So, now what happens is, he leaves the office. Rosenstein leaves the office. The next day, he is appointed special counsel. I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts? But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point. So Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.

HABERMAN: You mean at the hearing?

TRUMP: Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t. He then becomes attorney general, and he then announces he’s going to recuse himself. Why wouldn’t he have told me that before?

HABERMAN: Why do you think it was? What do you think it was?

TRUMP: I don’t know.

BAKER: What would cause you — what would be the line beyond which if Mueller went, you would say, “That’s too far, we would need to dismiss him”?

TRUMP: Look, there are so many conflicts that everybody has. Then Rosenstein becomes extremely angry because of Comey’s Wednesday press conference, where he said that he would do the same thing he did a year ago with Hillary Clinton, and Rosenstein became extremely angry at that because, as a prosecutor, he knows that Comey did the wrong thing. Totally wrong thing. And he gives me a letter, O.K., he gives me a letter about Comey. And by the way, that was a tough letter, O.K. Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K. But he gives me a very strong letter, and now he’s involved in the case. Well, that’s a conflict of interest. Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are? But then, then Comey also says that he did something in order to get the special prose— special counsel. He leaked. The reason he leaked. So, he illegally leaked.

Trump took to Twitter to express his vexation with Sessions, who was on an MS-13 mission in El Salvador at the time (see his priorities!):

So why aren’t the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?

On July 27, Sessions told Tucker Carlson (Fox News) how ‘hurtful’ the President’s tweets were. Note that he defended his recusals:

He never should have taken the job!

Mueller conflicts of interest

To go into all the conflicts of interest in this investigation would take ages. Uranium One is the biggest, and it involves Russia, Mueller and Rosenstein.

That said, the public were angry at the way Big Media — especially CNN — were reporting the Mueller investigation.

On July 24, a contributor to The_Donald posted a testy thread, the title of which is:

FAKE NEWS CNN defending Sessions’ recusal while DEAD SILENT about Mueller needing to recuse for the same reasons. MUELLER IS MORE CONFLICTED THAN SESSIONS! REPORT THE TRUTH!

By way of reply, someone posted a link to a Crime and Consequences article, ‘My View: Mueller is Conflicted Out‘. The premise of the article is that Robert Mueller cannot continue to serve as Special Counsel under 28 USC Section 528 and 28 CFR Section 45.2. You can read the article for the detail.

The author provides an excellent summary of Mueller, James Comey and more. The following continues to be discussed today, particularly in light of Comey’s recent book launch and associated interviews:

Jim Comey and Bob Mueller have been friends for about 15 years …

Comey now finds himself smack-dab at the center of the Russian investigation over which Mueller presides. Questions swirl around Comey — about whether the President wanted/hinted/hoped/asked/directed/or something else the investigation of National Security Adviser Gen. Flynn to be stopped/abandoned/slowed/soft-peddled/something else. This is probably the central element of the obstruction of justice case Mr. Trump’s opponents would like to see made against him.

Questions also swirl about Comey’s notes about this conversation, why he gave them to a private individual (Prof. Dan Richman of Columbia Law) to convey to the press. Additional questions have arisen about whether this curious and seemingly devious means of putting contents of the notes in the public domain (leaking, in other words) was designed specifically to bring about the appointment of a Special Counsel outside the President’s direct reach — and, indeed, whether Comey wanted, expected or intended his friend Mueller to get the job.

There is much to be said of all this, none of it very happy-making. But one thing that can be said with considerable clarity if not comfort is that, under the governing rules (set forth above), Mueller has a long-term relationship with Comey that “may result in a personal…conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof.”

He is therefore disqualified. I hope and believe that Mueller, whom I believe to be an honest man and a partisan of the rule of law, will see this for himself. If he doesn’t, I hope Rod Rosenstein will.

As I’ve said in many other contexts, I like rule-orientation and fear self-justification, a ubiquitous flaw in even the best of men. There is no way Comey is not a central witness in this investigation (if not a subject). Even less is there a way Mueller can be expected to evaluate Comey’s credibility with the fresh neutrality, arm’s-length curiosity, and objective sharp eye his job demands.

Whether Mueller’s departure would work out well or badly for Mr. Trump is not knowable (it is also decidedly not the subject of this post). My point is about the application of stated rules to the facts at hand. Let the chips fall where they may, the application is clear: Mueller cannot remain as Special Counsel.

That article was from June 2017. Nearly one year later, nothing has changed. Mueller’s still in situ.

On September 20, Law & Crime‘s Rachel Stockman asked why Rosenstein wasn’t recusing himself from the Mueller probe. Because Sessions recused himself, Rosenstein is the DOJ’s link to Mueller (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s Russia investigation after Jeff Sessions recused himself. However, there are some concerns about his ability to adequately supervise an investigation that he has now become a part of. On Tuesday night, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that over the summer, Mueller’s investigators interviewed Rosentein about President Donald Trump‘s firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

The Journal claims the FBI’s handling of the interview “could be a sign that Mr. Mueller’s team doesn’t view Mr. Rosenstein as a central witness in its probe, as the deputy attorney general hasn’t withdrawn himself from overseeing it since that interview.” That could very well be the case, but the optics don’t look good. A spokesperson for Rosenstein said “if there comes a time when he needs to recuse, he will. However, nothing has changed.” Well, now might be the time …

Rosenstein, as a federal lawyer and a DOJ employee, is guided by both local D.C. ethics rules and Justice Department guidelines. Both would prohibit him from overseeing an investigation if he is a person of interest or a target …

However, legal experts emphasize that we don’t know yet whether Rosenstein is a target of the investigation for his role in writing that infamous memo giving Trump “justification” for firing Comey.  Did Rosenstein cooperate in a lie to the public?  18 USC 1512(c)(2) says that obstruction happens when a person “corruptly… impedes [an] official proceeding or attempts to do so.”

“Creating a false narrative for firing Comey could be such an attempt. The definition of ‘official proceeding; includes “a proceeding before a Federal Government agency which is authorized by law.’ That language is broad enough to encompass the FBI and the Comey investigation,” Gillers said.

Now, the hope is that if the investigation starts honing in on Rosenstein, Mueller would advise him that he needed to recuse himself.  BUT there is this added wrinkle: Mueller may have an incentive in wanting to keep Rosentein as his supervisor. Trump’s team has hinted more than once that he might fire Mueller. Federal law says that technically Trump can’t do the firing. Instead, the U.S. Attorney General (or in this case Rosenstein since Sessions recused himself) would have to do it. From all indications, Rosenstein would probably not demure to such a demand from Trump …

In the end, we must rely on Mueller’s integrity, and pray that if Rosenstein was in legal jeopardy, Mueller would do the right thing and ask him to take himself off the investigation. In the wake of James Comey’s breach in DOJ policy, asking us to trust our public officials seems like a scary thought. With so much at stake, so many unknowns, and the world watching, Mr. Rosenstein needs to think long and hard about recusing himself. 

Well, Rosey’s still managing the Mueller investigation.

September 2017 – calls for unrecusal

By September, there were calls for Sessions to unrecuse himself. Here’s Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch:

By December, there was doubt as to whether Sessions should have recused at all:

On December 18, Alan Dershowitz offered the clearest rationale for an unrecusal. Emphases mine below.

He told Fox & Friends (video at the link):

Sessions could un-recuse himself, because the law allows anyone who’s recused themselves to un-recuse if there are new developments or circumstances.

And Dershowitz said the reason Sessions can do this, is because Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should recuse himself.

Rosenstein is a “key witness” after writing the memo justifying Jim Comey’s firing.

November 2017 – question over possible Uranium One recusal

On November 2, Breitbart reported that Rep. Mark Gaetz (R – Florida) told them that Sessions would recuse over Uranium One (H/T: Conservative Treehouse). Bold emphasis in the original, those in purple mine:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a small group of lawmakers in late September he was recused from appointing a special counsel to look into potential corruption surrounding the Uranium One deal and Fusion GPS’s work on the Trump dossier, according to one of the lawmakers present.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that he and other House Judiciary Committee Republicans had met with Sessions at the Justice Department on September 28 in advance of an upcoming committee hearing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein later this month.

Gaetz said that when he asked Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2010 Uranium One deal and Fusion GPS, the attorney general stood up, said he could not discuss the matter because he had recused himself, and walked out of the room, leaving them with a group of Rosenstein staffers “who showed no interest.”

“He said that anything that had to do with 2016 election, or Russia, or the candidates in the 2016 election, fell under the scope of his recusal, and he left the room,” Gaetz said.

“It was Sessions’ position that his recusal on the Russia matter divorced him from any oversight on Uranium One and Fusion GPS. That’s troubling. Sessions’ recusal is a function of his involvement in the Trump campaign. In no world does that impact his judgment as it relates to Fusion GPS and Uranium One. But he views the recusal more broadly. That’s troubling because that puts Rosenstein in charge,” he said.

Gaetz said Rosenstein’s staffers provided “no answers” and “no timeline for answers.”

This is why many of us have been saying that Sessions must resign or, as such time as the Senate will approve a replacement, be fired.

Yet, investigative journalist Sara Carter told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the report was not true:

I hope Sara Carter is correct.

November 2017 – Sessions critics told they are disloyal

Sleepy’s critics are constantly being told by his supporters that by being critical of him they are being critical of Trump! False!

As much as I liked Imperator_Rex — currently Vachel Lindsay — on Twitter, the logic that he and others employ with this stance is wrong. Here’s a taster from a rather long thread of his from November 3:

Who knows what’s happening with The Storm? All the people we want to see brought to justice have been going on book tours (Hillary, Comey), giving speeches overseas (Obama) and leading a normal life (e.g. John Podesta).

Re 36, no, it’s not because Trump ‘wants’ Sessions there, it’s because the only way Trump can get a replacement for him is if he (Sessions) resigns (vacancy rules apply).

The Senate told Trump in 2017 that they will not approve any new cabinet members, making it impossible for Trump to fire Sessions. Nor will the Senate allow Trump to appoint someone new when the Senate is not in session. Consequently, the Senate has not been declaring any formal recess.

Trump’s hands are tied, unless Sessions resigns.

Even then, Trump has to have a replacement in mind.

It certainly won’t be Rosenstein.

Re 37, saying that Sessions critics are disloyal to Trump is egregious. We care deeply about President Trump. That’s why we want Sessions out of the way, so that Swamp rats can be dealt with the way the Founding Fathers intended.

Again, we have only Sara Carter’s word for that.

December 2017 – Former FBI director Kallstrom says Mueller should recuse

On December 4, former FBI director James Kallstrom told Breitbart that Robert Mueller should recuse himself:

“Bob Mueller should have never been offered nor accepted the job as special counsel as he has a huge conflict of interest,” Jim Kallstrom tells Breitbart News …

Not only do observers describe Mueller and the man he recommended to replace him as FBI director, James Comey, as close or even best friends, but the special counsel pursues an investigation heavily involving the bureau he once led. How one maintains detachment in leading a team that includes numerous anti-Trump partisans in a probe involving one’s close friend and the former bureau for which Mueller served as director goes unexplained.

Other problems Kallstrom sees include the means by which investigators obtained information and what constituted probable cause to obtain it.

“The Obama administration apparently, had the advantage of using electronic surveillance, collecting information on the Trump campaign,” Kallstrom explains. “That collection, in my view, may be found to be unlawful.”

…

If the surveillance and investigatory methods prove unlawful, Kallstrom notes that this puts Mueller in an awkward position of looking into his close friend and perhaps the bureau that both men once led.

“If they used the phony dossier as the predicate for the FISA order they obtained, that could be a huge problem,” Kallstrom tells Breitbart News. “If they knew the information was phony, that is a felony. If they did not know it was phony, they were incompetent.”

January 2018 – White House tried to talk Sessions out of recusal

On January 5, 2018, Fox News reported that White House officials tried to talk Sessions out of recusing himself in 2017 (emphases mine):

President Trump instructed three senior White House officials to talk Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and members of the Trump campaign, multiple sources told Fox News on Friday.

Trump called on White House counsel Don McGahn, former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer to stop Sessions from recusing himself.

Spicer has denied the allegation.

The push to convince Sessions allegedly took place over the course of a number of telephone calls that covered a variety of other topics, the well-placed sources told Fox.

On Thursday, The New York Times first reported that Trump had directed McGahn to contact Sessions this past March. According to The Associated Press, two anonymous sources confirmed that McGahn unsuccessfully lobbied Sessions to continue to oversee the Russia investigation.

Sessions supporters will have trouble with ‘multiple sources’ and ‘anonymous sources’, but every single presidential administration has had them.

My upcoming McMaster chronicle shows that, nearly every time one of these sources spoke to the media, they were telling the truth.

March – Sessions took recusal advice from Obama lawyers

Just when the Sessions situation couldn’t seem more intolerable, the Gateway Pundit reported on March 14 that the attorney general took recusal advice from Obama adminstration lawyers (emphases in the original):

On Wednesday night FOX News contributor and legal expert Gregg Jarrett told Sean Hannity that Sessions used the WRONG LAW when announcing his recusal. He took advice from OBAMA OFFICIALS and they misled him.

Gregg Jarrett: He betrayed the president. He knew when he was sworn in that he was going to recuse himself and the very next day he put the recusal in motion. He never told the president about that. And by the way he cited the regulation in his recusal… He cited the wrong law. It didn’t apply.

Sara Carter: I think he was being advised badly at the time.

Gregg Jarrett: Yeah, by Obama’s holdovers. Who in the world would believe them?

Good grief! He cited the wrong law!

The DOJ regulation Sessions cited — 28 CFR 45.2— says “no DOJ employee may participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would be directly affected by the outcome.”

As Andrew McCarthy at National Review reported, “The regulation he cited applies to a different type of investigation.”

Once again the question must be asked: Who did deep state catch Jeff Sessions in bed with?

My thoughts exactly.

April 2018 – Congress asks Sessions to investigate Swamp

On April 18, members of Congress wrote to Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray and United States Attorney John Huber requesting that they issue a criminal referral for a long list of Swamp dwellers, including FBI Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton and others – including FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, for a laundry list of potential crimes surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

You can read the letter in full at Scribd.

ZeroHedge has more (emphases in the original):

Recall that Sessions paired special prosecutor John Huber with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz – falling short of a second Special Counsel, but empowering Horowitz to fully investigate allegations of FBI FISA abuse with subpoena power and other methods he was formerly unable to utilize.

The GOP letter’s primary focus appears to be James Comey, while the charges for all include obstruction, perjury, corruption, unauthorized removal of classified documents, contributions and donations by foreign nationals and other allegations.

The letter also demands that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “be recused from any examination of FISA abuse,” and recommends that “neither U.S. Attorney John Huber nor a special counsel (if appointed) should report to Rosenstein.”  

April 2018 – possible partial recusal in Cohen investigation

Early in April, the home, office and hotel room of President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen were ransacked.

It’s possible that Sessions could recuse himself from this, too — at least partially.

On April 24, Gateway Pundit carried a news story, ‘WTH? AG Sessions Will Not Recuse Himself From Cohen Investigation — Only on Certain Issues‘ (emphases in the original):

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has decided not to recuse himself from the investigation into Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Don’t get too excited because Sessions will consider stepping back on specific matters tied into the Cohen probe …

On Tuesday, GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin sent a letter to AG Sessions demanding to know his involvement in the FBI raid of Cohen.

“We would like to know if you approved, were consulted, or had any involvement in this decision by the Department of Justice,” Zeldin asked in a letter to AG Sessions about the FBI raid of Cohen on April 9th.

Gateway Pundit cited a Reuters article which says that Sessions discussed the matter at a Senate appropriations subcommittee meeting about the proposed 2019 budget for the Justice Department. Please read it, because it’s got all the classic Sessions recusal statements.

Conclusion

To date, Sessions’s recusals look increasingly like refusals to do the AG job in its entirety.

Jeff Sessions is up for the chop. It’s just a matter of time and circumstance. After the Cohen raid, Trump is even unhappier with the AG and the DOJ than he was a year ago at this time.

Grassley memo: more on the Russian dossier

February 11, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Friday’s post provided background to the Russian dossier.

Today’s post looks at the memo from Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) about the dossier. A second version — less redacted — appeared on Tuesday, February 6.

First, this is the current state of play with FBI and DOJ employees involved with the dossier:

On December 7, 2017, Fox News had more on Bruce Ohr’s demotion (emphases mine):

Until Wednesday morning, Bruce G. Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”

Ohr will retain his OCDETF title but has been stripped of his higher post and ousted from his office on the fourth floor of “Main Justice.”

Initially senior department officials could not provide the reason for Ohr’s demotion, but Fox News has learned that evidence collected by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., indicates that Ohr met during the 2016 campaign with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the “dossier.” 

Also:

According to congressional sources, Simpson and Ohr met sometime around Thanksgiving last year, when President-elect Trump was in the process of selecting his cabinet, and discussed over coffee the anti-Trump dossier, the Russia investigation and what Simpson considered the distressing development of Trump’s victory.

How exactly Simpson and Ohr came to know each other is still being investigated, but initial evidence collected by the House intelligence committee suggests that the two were placed in touch by Steele, a former FBI informant whose contacts with Ohr are said by senior DOJ officials to date back to 2006.

A man by the name of Carter Page was used as the excuse to spy on Donald Trump. He very briefly volunteered for the Trump campaign but, contrary to what the media say, was not his foreign affairs adviser:

Christopher Steele, the former MI-6 spy, was responsible for that:

Steele was well known to the FBI:

Some at the FBI were heavily involved with Hillary Clinton’s campaign:

The Conservative Treehouse points out the the DOJ was only interested in this state of affairs when Inspector General Michael Horowitz found out (purple highlights mine):

Proving, once again, this is a well thought-out strategy, Chuck Grassley’s newest partly declassified version of the Graham-Grassley memo highlights the DOJ didn’t care about Bruce Ohr meeting with Christopher Steele until Inspector General Michael Horowitz found out.

Page #5 of the Grassley Memo (pg. 7 pdf), highlights the FBI interviewed DOJ Deputy Attorney Bruce Ohr on November 22nd, and December 12th, 2016 [FD-302 Interview Notes], yet didn’t take any action about their discoveries until Inspector General Michael Horowitz found out and revealed the interviews on December 7th, 2017.

Based on what we know to date, the following tweets suggest how the dossier was most likely compiled:

Interesting:

But who is Cody Shearer?

Egads!

You could not make this up!

Conclusion:

Yes, indeed.

Be prepared for 2018 news: part 5 — release of the Nunes FISA memo

February 3, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 13 comments

This post is part of a series about expected news items in 2018. Readers who have not seen the first two posts might find them of interest:

Part 1: hate in Washington DC

Part 2: Hillary WAS supposed to win (The 16 Year Plan to Destroy America)

Part 3: FBI’s missing texts

Part 4: ‘secret society’ and more on missing FBI texts

Today’s post is related to all of the above. It concerns the release of the Devin Nunes FISA memo on February 2, 2018.

Representative Devin Nunes (R-California) is the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

His four-page memo concerns FISA warrants allowing surveillance of President Donald Trump and several others.

Democrats and media want one-party state

Before going into the content of the memo, what everyone around the world heard this weekend on media outlets has been an onslaught of anti-Republican and anti-Trump thought.

This is because — as I said in Part 2 — Donald Trump was patently not supposed to have won the 2016 election:

A firestorm of protests and objections to Trump ran from the day after the election to the present. Even former attorney general Loretta Lynch got involved early in 2017:

The blurb for the video reads:

The Obama administration’s former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has made an impassioned video plea for more “blood” and “death” on the streets – a video that was later posted on the Facebook page of Senate Democrats as “words of inspiration.”

There are some big players behind the move for the one-party state, and many people who ally themselves with the Democrats have been persuaded that this is for the common good. However, based on this memo — and the Democrats’ clear disdain for the American people as seen at the State of the Union address — that might not play out:

Tucker Carlson (Fox News) interviewed Representative Eric Swalwell (D-California) the evening of the memo’s release. Swalwell suggested that Carlson, in defending the memo’s release, was doing Vladimir Putin’s work. Absurd:

The Nunes — FISA — memo

The Nunes — or FISA — memo is four pages long and has no footnotes. A two-page letter from the White House states the president approves of its release. Both are on Scribd and PDF.

Here is a big picture overview of the background to the memo (courtesy of The_Donald):

This image from 8chan has additional information, equally important:

Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch describes the scenario in a nutshell:

This graphic is helpful in understanding what happened when:

Also involved is a man named Carter Page, who was briefly and peripherally involved with the Trump campaign. He was the gateway for the surveillance. Anyone he spoke to on the campaign was automatically surveilled.

The Federalist has a short, concise summary of what is in the memo. Excerpts follow from ‘The 7 Biggest Bombshells In The House Intel Memo On FISA Abuses’, emphases mine outside of the headings:

1. FBI Used News Articled Sourced By Steele To Corroborate His Dossier

The memo, which President Trump agreed to declassify Friday, states that the FBI did not tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) a lot of crucial information about the dossier it was citing as evidence when the bureau sought a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor Page.

In September 2016, ex-British spy Christopher Steele–who compiled an infamous dossier filled with unfounded claims about President Trump–told Yahoo News about Page’s visit to Moscow. Yahoo News subsequently published a story about this trip. The FBI then cited this Yahoo News report, sourced entirely by Steele, as evidence in its initial FISA warrant application to corroborate information the ex-British spy compiled in his dossier. The FBI incorrectly asserted to the court in its application that Steele did not provide information to Yahoo News about Page’s Moscow trip. British court filings, however, show Steele admitted he met with Yahoo News in September 2016, two months before the FBI got its initial warrant, to discuss the trip at the direction of Fusion GPS.

Think of it — using a Yahoo News article to obtain a FISA warrant. You could not make this up. The journalist who wrote the article is stunned:

2. FBI Knew Steele Was Being Paid By DNC, Hillary Clinton, Chose Not To Tell The Court

The FBI did not tell the court that information cited in its warrant application was gathered by an individual who was being paid by Trump’s political opponents.

The bureau was aware that Steele was working for Fusion GPS, a research firm that was hired by Perkins Coie, a law firm Hillary Clinton and the DNC were making payments to. The DNC and Clinton campaign paid Steele $160,000 …

In December 2017 FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Steele testified that if the dossier hadn’t existed, the FBI would not have sought a warrant (Bombshell 3).

4. FBI Spied On Trump’s Associate For Nearly a Year

The FBI obtained the initial FISA warrant to surveil Page on October 21, 2016 after he visited Moscow and reportedly spoke to a Russian official who had expressed support for Trump in July 2016. The warrant was renewed three times for the full extent allowed of 90 days each, totaling 360 days under surveillance …

With each of these renewals, the FBI choose not to disclose to the court that it had relied on information funded by Trump’s political opponents in its quest to surveil a Trump campaign member.

Signatories included then-FBI director James Comey, then-deputy director Andrew McCabe, then-deputy attorney general Sally Yates, then-acting-deputy attorney general Dana Boente, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

What this means is that Trump was under surveillance even after he became president:

Steele began playing up his role in the operation and gave an interview to David Corn of Mother Jones on October 30, 2016, only several days after the first FISA warrant was approved. The FBI dismissed him as an ongoing source, as he violated bureau protocol (Bombshell 5). However, the FBI never told FISC — the FISA court — when seeking warrant renewals (Bombshell 6).

7. DOJ Official’s Wife Was Getting Paid By Fusion GPS

Throughout the process of obtaining the initial warrant, then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump. At the firm, she helped conduct opposition research on Trump and his associates. The FBI did not disclose this to the court.

Ohr was demoted within the DOJ in December 2017 after it was discovered he had concealed meetings with Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. During these meetings, Steele confided in Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.” The FBI knew about Steele’s political bias against Trump, but did not make this known to the court.

Why this matters — constitutional crisis?

Exposing this — what many Trump supporters knew or suspected — is a very big deal and could cause a constitutional crisis:

From The_Donald:

This congressman takes it even further:

Ultimately:

What’s coming soon

On February 2, Gateway Pundit reported that Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) are busy attempting to get a Senate Judiciary Committee memo declassified.

The HPSCI will also vote to make supporting documents to the FISA memo discussed here available to the public.

Expected in March is the inspector general’s — Michael Horowitz’s — report which is likely to cover this and much more.

2018 will be quite the year for news. Stay tuned.

(Forbidden Bible Verses will appear on Sunday, February 4.)

Be prepared for 2018 news: part 4 — ‘secret society’ and more on missing FBI texts

January 25, 2018 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

This post is part of a series about expected news items in 2018. Readers who have not seen the first two posts might find them of interest:

Part 1: hate in Washington DC

Part 2: Hillary WAS supposed to win (The 16 Year Plan to Destroy America)

Part 3: FBI’s missing texts

Today’s instalment has more on the missing texts, FBI agent Peter Strzok and another topic, the ‘secret society’ revealed in these messages.

More missing texts

Fox News has discovered that Strzok and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page were not the only agency employees to have texts go missing:

The Fox News article says, in part:

EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of FBI cellphones were affected by the technical glitch that the DOJ says prevented five months’ worth of text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page from being stored or uploaded into the bureau’s archive system, federal law enforcement officials tell Fox News.

The missing messages have been at the center of a storm of controversy on Capitol Hill, after the DOJ notified congressional committees that there is a gap in records between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. Strzok and Page are under scrutiny after it was revealed that the former members of Robert Mueller’s team exchanged a series of anti-Trump texts during the presidential campaign.

The gap in records covered a crucial period, raising suspicion among GOP lawmakers about how those messages disappeared.

But Fox News is told that the glitch affected the phones of “nearly” 10 percent of the FBI’s 35,000 employees.

Senior Department of Justice officials told Fox News they are “taking steps” to possibly recover the texts from the appropriate cellphone carriers. The same officials told Fox News they are also making every effort to track down the physical cellphones in question so they could be subject to a forensic review.

True Pundit, which looks click-baity but is run by a former FBI employee, has more, possibly based on anonymous FBI tip-offs. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

A high-ranking FBI official confirms a number of the missing 50,000 FBI text messages — as well as other text and email messages among FBI brass — reportedly discussed initiating physical harm to President Donald Trump …

The FBI official urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the U.S. Secret Service  — to launch an investigation of the Justice Department, the FBI and all text messages missing and otherwise that threatened the President.

“This is dangerous territory and all FBI text messages and personal phones should be examined,” the official said. “It would reveal some frightening conversations.”

Did FBI brass discuss the assassination of President Donald Trump? If not, what was the nature of the threats against the president from inside the alleged premier law enforcement agency in the United States?

“(Director) Wray wants a lid on this,” the FBI official said. “Many know there was talk of harming Trump politically but there is a group here (in D.C. HQ) that understands it goes deeper. We need a special counsel or Homeland Security. Somebody has to clean this up outside of DOJ. It is unacceptable.

This is scary:

As reported yesterday in True Pundit, members of the FBI and Justice Department’s top brass at their Washington D.C.headquarters and other field offices are now using burner phones to stay under the radar of federal investigators and lawmakers, according to FBI insiders.

The shocking revelations come on the heels of news that the FBI deleted thousands of text messages between anti-Trump FBI agents before investigators could review their content.

While that is disturbing on one level, FBI and DOJ hierarchy employing the telecom habits of drug cartel bosses reaches a new low for the once-heralded federal law enforcement agency and the DOJ. And breaks federal laws as well.

The Hill reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the DOJ will investigate the matter and do everything possible to recover the missing texts:

“We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source,” Sessions said in a statement.

“I have spoken to the Inspector General and a review is already underway to ascertain what occurred and to determine if these records can be recovered in any other way. If any wrongdoing were to be found to have caused this gap, appropriate legal disciplinary action measures will be taken,” he continued.

As my post of yesterday pointed out, there are several ways these and other ‘missing’ electronic data can be recovered.

In addition, the phones being used were supposed to be Samsung S5 phones, which do not have a bug that deletes texts. Hmm:

However, The Hill‘s article says that a number of Republican legislators are echoing Trump’s claim that the Robert Mueller investigation is a political witch hunt. Strzok and Page were part of Mueller’s team until he found out about the copious text exchanged between these two anti-Trumpers.

The Daily Caller recaps what Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee told a Milwaukee radio host about one of the texts in which Strzok says that they won’t find anything on Trump, insinuating that he only joined the Mueller investigation to depose the president:

In an interview with WISN-Milwaukee radio host Jay Weber, Johnson read aloud a May 19, 2017 text that Strzok sent to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer and his mistress.

Strzok wrote: “You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern that there’s no big there there” …

As the FBI’s deputy counterintelligence chief, Strzok was picked in July 2016 to oversee the investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government. Prior to that, he was a top investigator on the Clinton email inquiry.

“I think that’s kind of jaw-dropping,” said Johnson, a Republican, said of the Strzok text.

“In other words, Peter Strzok, who was the FBI deputy assistant director of the counterintelligence division, the man who had a plan to do something because he just couldn’t abide Donald Trump being president, is saying that his gut sense is that there’s no big there there when it comes to the Mueller special counsel investigation,” he said.

The text message was included in 400 pages of text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page. Lawmakers have started reviewing the trove of documents for evidence of anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias.

CBS News has a related article with several of the text messages the two exchanged.

Johnson and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, sent a four-page letter to Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz with a list of questions about these missing messages.

Imperator_Rex thinks there is a strategy behind the news about the missing texts:

5. So while Strzok & Page (or someone else) deleted the texts, I’m not buying the separate conclusion that they no longer exist. Here’s what I think may be happening.

6. Option #1 -The OIG discovered the texts were deleted during their investigation & recovered them. Working with DOJ, they are now leaking fake news to confuse the perps in this conspiracy and/or hoping to stimulate comms between them (they’d all be under surveillance), or

7. #2 – this is part of the lead up to the memo release & part of a well planned, calibrated campaign to educate the American public for that shock, as well as what follows. Remember,most Americans are only just waking up to what many of us have known for months.

8. #3 – they are ALL lost forever, never to be found again. Remember, even if the SMSs are lost (they aren’t), the signatures of where, who, how & when the deletions occurred will remain. AND they already have more than enough evidence to nail these sob’s to the wall, anyway.

9. May be wrong, but one thing I have learned in the last 12 months is NEVER to accept what’s happening on the surface at face value. ESPECIALLY leaks to the media. We learned this in the ‘leaks are real, news is fake’ campaign that started as soon as Trump was inaugurated.

Transfers, resignations

Strzok has been transferred internally and is now working in the FBI’s HR department.

Page has been transferred from the FBI to the DOJ.

However, more transfers — and resignations — have occurred. This could be because of IG Horowitz’s independent investigation of the FBI:

On Tuesday, January 23, James Rybicki, chief of staff to the Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray, resigned. He was to have appeared before the House Oversight Committee the Thursday before.

to testify as part of the committee’s investigation into the Department of Justice’s probe in Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and the decision by then-FBI Director James Comey to announce there would be no criminal charges against the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

Rybicki will also appear before the House Judiciary Committee, an aide told the Washington Examiner.

He showed up, apparently.

Fox News reported that Rybicki’s departure had been on the cards for months and that he was not fired. He will be moving to the corporate sector.

The Conservative Treehouse has more:

Rybicki was the key figure in circulating and coordinating the “Clinton Exoneration Statement” read by Director Comey.  For Clinton endeavor Rybicki was the hub collecting and dispatching communication as the ‘talking points’ were constructed, edited, refined and ultimately finalized.

Additionally, Rybicki was the communication hub surrounding the Clinton-Lynch ‘Tarmac Meeting’ discussion points that led to public statements therein by the FBI and ultimately Loretta Lynch’s public statements about distancing herself from the investigation.

Also, James Rybicki was listed as one of the key witnesses requested by Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes as outlined in the letter of agreement between Nunes and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.   James Rybicki was/is being questioned by Nunes et al.

Zachary Harmon is Rybicki’s replacement.

Then, we have this move:

CNN‘s article states:

Dana Boente, the acting head of the Justice Department’s national security division and the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has been picked to become the new FBI general counsel, according to a source familiar with the move.

Boente was first thrust into the spotlight in January 2017 as the acting attorney general after President Donald Trump fired Sally Yates for her refusal to defend the first travel ban. He later moved to the No. 2 spot at the Justice Department as acting deputy attorney general, tasked with overseeing the Russia probe after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself and then delivering the news to a slew of US attorneys left over from the Obama administration that they had been fired.

He will take the place of James Baker, who was reassigned within the FBI late last year.

I highlighted part of the first paragraph, because his move means that leaves a vacancy for a new US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, no doubt a Trump appointee.

Eventually, the FBI — and DOJ — will be cleaned up, but it won’t be any time soon.

TrumpSoldier has a good thread — complete with video clips — on FBI director Christopher Wray, who is waiting for the IG’s report on the bureau so he can do a complete clean up:

‘Secret society’

The Strzok/Page text exchange mentioned a ‘secret society’ intending to remove Trump from office:

Michael Goodwin mentions it in a good article in the New York Post about how politicised the FBI has become:

… each day brings credible reports suggesting there is a massive scandal involving the top ranks of America’s premier law enforcement agency. The reports, which feature talk among agents of a “secret society” and suddenly missing text messages, point to the existence both of a cabal dedicated to defeating Donald Trump in 2016 and of a plan to let Hillary Clinton skate free in the classified email probe.

If either one is true — and I believe both probably are — it would mean FBI leaders betrayed the nation by abusing their powers in a bid to pick the president.

ABC News has an exclusive on the ‘secret society’, which includes this:

Asked Wednesday whether he believes there’s a “secret society” inside the FBI to take down the president, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said, “That’s Strzok and Page’s term.”

“Everything I take with a grain of salt,” he added. “[But] I’ve heard from an individual that … there was a group of managers within the FBI that were holding meetings off site.”

So “when Strzok and Page had described a secret society, that didn’t surprise me because I had corroborating information,” Johnson said.

He declined to describe the “whistleblower” in any way, and he said he did not know what the FBI’s “off-site” meetings might have entailed.

Nevertheless, he said he is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”

Johnson is pictured in the ABC tweet above. He also spoke to Fox News.

Infowars has more, summarising material from True Pundit and its founder who tweets as Thomas Paine:

Paul Joseph Watson tells us:

On Monday, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) revealed that congressional investigators learned from a new batch of text messages between anti-Trump FBI investigators Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that a “secret society” within the DOJ and the FBI had schemed immediately after Trump’s election win to undermine the president …

“They communicate with meetings over cocktails, at homes, via encrypted chat rooms, texting on drug-cartel-inspired burner phones, and even via an email list, according to sources. Others have secured phones in the names of relatives to try to stay under the radar.”

The source of these claims, a Twitter account under the name of Thomas Paine who also runs the intelligence website True Pundit, could be easily dismissed as a crank – if were not for the fact that he exposed the secret society within the FBI a month before it was in the news.

On December 19, 2017 – over a month before it was made public, the Thomas Paine account tweeted, “What is this I hear about a private meeting away from FBI HQ by high-ranking FBI agents trying to get their stories and alibis straight?”

Ross Daniels, writing on Medium, has more:

A source on the inside has informed me of a top secret meeting that is alleged to have taken place between prominent intelligence community officials, both currently serving and retired.

The source details a meeting that took place in Virginia of December 2016 at the The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner. Officials met for several hours, there were some very, very prominent intelligence officials there, including Robert Mueller, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, Phil Mudd, David Petraeus, Michael Hayden & former Attorney General Eric Holder.

My word. If true, that’s an all-star line-up.

There’s more:

They openly joked about the now famous Russian dossier, likely used to obtain the FISA court warrant to spy on the transition team. The source wouldn’t reveal that it was used to obtain the warrant, because of the legal repercussions of declassifying such a revelation, but strongly hinted that was indeed the case …

The source wouldn’t go into too many other details, citing the typical lingo of “can’t compromise sources and methods etc”… this person was also in fear they would be outed for going public about the meeting, a meeting they were told “never took place” upon arriving at the lavish hotel. They tried to take this to more mainstream outlets, but didn’t think anyone would believe the story …

This further proves that the IC was actively working to undermine the President from day one in backroom closed door meetings. I am also told this wasn’t the only meeting.

Former US Attorney Joe diGenova believes this could well be true and, if so, thinks the group still meets. He is none too happy with the current FBI director, Wray, either, for not cleaning house:

Representative Mark Gaetz (R-Florida) gave an interview about the ‘secret society’, calling it a ‘palace coup’:

I do not know how much of this message from another Anon is true — not all of it, one imagines — but it mentions the ‘secret society’ and a plan to kidnap Trump’s grandchildren, suggesting that is why Donald Trump Jr dropped his Secret Service detail for private security.

In closing, here is part of a thread from Representative Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina) about the widespread corruption at the FBI:

Think about how important that is. We have a text from Peter Strzok talking about the pressure to end the Clinton investigation, and then–within 48 hours–documents suggesting Peter Strzok changed Dir. Comey’s letter from criminal charges to just “carelessness.” That’s major.

Folks, this stinks to high heaven. If this is anything what it looks like–the FBI changing course on investigation, putting their thumb on the scale to undermine Donald Trump and essentially help Hillary Clinton–that is as wrong as it gets. This demands further investigation.

And remember, this doesn’t even address a host of other questions! The dossier. The Carter Page FISA application (that they still won’t show us). The 5 months of mysteriously “missing” Page/Strzok texts. The FBI communicating with Fusion GPS/DNC-hired Christopher Steele. Come on.

This is not party politics. This is not partisan bickering. This is an issue that gets at the very heart of who we are as a nation. If any officials at the FBI were engaged in this kind of behavior, we need to know.

Bottom line: tell us the truth. Tell us the truth about what happened with the Clinton investigation, the 2016 election, and leading up to this “collusion” investigation. All of it. Americans deserve the truth.

I will have more on 2018 news next week.

December 1 and 2: update on the weekend’s news

December 4, 2017 in history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 comments

Yesterday’s post discussed the events that took place Friday, December 1, 2017.

Today’s entry serves as an update on the weekend’s news. I won’t be recapping much of what I wrote about Friday, so you might want to read that post before continuing here.

ABC’s Brian Ross

ABC’s veteran reporter Brian Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay for his fake news of Friday that caused the US stock market to dip for an hour:

President Donald Trump was delighted:

But he was not yet finished:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, father of Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is a past Republican presidential candidate and former Fox News show host:

This lawyer and writer for The Federalist listed more of Ross’s huge blunders:

Mueller investigation — Peter Strzok

One of Robert Mueller’s top investigators has been sacked from his team investigating the Trump campaign’s notional Russian collusion:

One could not make this up:

 

You can read clips from more articles on that subject here (image courtesy of a Reddit contributor).

Trump chimed in:

Advice came in for the new FBI director, Christopher Wray:

Judicial Watch has been keen for the McAuliffe/Clinton scandal to be investigated:

Their November 21 article begins with this summary:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 79 pages of Justice Department documents concerning ethics issues related to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s involvement with his wife’s political campaign. The documents include an email showing Mrs. McCabe was recruited for a Virginia state senate race in February 2015 by then-Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam’s office.

The news that Clinton used a private email server broke five days later, on March 2, 2015. Five days after that, former Clinton Foundation board member and Democrat party fundraiser, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, met with the McCabes. She announced her candidacy on March 12. Soon afterward, Clinton/McAuliffe-aligned political groups donated nearly $700,000 (40% of the campaign’s total funds) to McCabe’s wife for her campaign.

Most Trump supporters knew about that during the 2016 campaign, but it got little media coverage.

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton has been doing great work in exposing Swamp scandals. See here, here and here.

This is very serious. Can one imagine a Republican getting away with such a thing?

Where’s the justice?

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn has been made to look like a criminal for lying to the FBI, but we have senior US officials — present and former — who have committed crimes. The American people are told there is nothing to see.

Congressman Steve Smith (R-Georgia) summarised the situation well:

Trump is, rightly, on the warpath:

Is he having a go at his Attorney General Jeff ‘Sleepy’ Sessions?

Sleepy will be leaving soon, probably early in 2018.

His immediate recusal from this probe, because it was connected with the Trump campaign and he was part of the campaign, caused a lot of grief for a lot of people, including the spring-summer campaign manager Paul Manafort, whom the Mueller team treated terribly — including a middle-of-the-night FBI raid on his and his wife’s home while they were asleep.

What Manafort has been indicted for isn’t even related to the Trump campaign but to work he did in Ukraine years before.

See how justly Manafort has been treated:

Obama still acts as if he’s in office

But wait, there’s more.

Never has there been a US president who hasn’t let his successor be in charge.

But not Obama:

Even if he was only referring to climate change, he should do the decent thing.

On December 2, the Washington Examiner reported:

While speaking to a group of business leaders in Paris, former President Barack Obama said there is a “temporary absence of American leadership” when it comes to tackling climate change.

“I grant you that at the moment we have a temporary absence of American leadership on the issue,” the former president noted, which was met with laughter from the room full of French former ministers and CEOs at the invite-only event, according to Reuters.

Obama also recently visited China:

Swamp tries to trap CIA director Pompeo

On December 2, the CIA director Mike Pompeo — a Trump appointee — was a guest at the Reagan National Defense Forum.

TrumpSoldier has a detailed Twitter thread on Pompeo’s appearance, video clips and still photos included. A summary with most of the tweets follows. I corrected a few original typos below.

The Reagan National Defense Forum (RNDF) sounds conservative until one looks at who is on the steering committee (see point 4), including the CEO/Publisher of the Washington Post, a few Obama appointees, anti-Trump Republican senator John McCain and former Clinton adviser and CIA director Leon Panetta. Fox News’s Bret Baier conducted an interview on stage with Pompeo and Panetta (emphases mine below):

5) Mike Pompeo was going into swamp territory and now everything makes sense to me as you will soon see.

6) The slogan for the RNDF is “Investing in Peace Through Strength” I like Peace through Strength but the “investing” part sets off alarm bells. I am not going to investigate who funds them but I imagine it’s not pretty.

7) The RNDF is an organization that is run by active and retired swamp creatures whose main purpose is influencing and shaping policy.

8) Mike sat down with Panetta and his lackey Bret Baier for an hour and they discussed world events from a security perspective. It was light hearted and fun and that is all part of the set up.

9) Mike Pompeo is relaxed, joking and having fun. Panetta even tries to connect with him as “two Italians”. Bret’s ambush questions are strategically placed for maximum effect.

10) The Triggering!
Baier asks Mike Pompeo about Saudi Arabia: Panetta and decades of swamp failure are brought face to face with the dramatic sudden success of Trump Administration Foreign Policy.

11) Everything was jovial up to this point (at about 30 minutes in) Panetta’s reactions became really serious and concerned and his responses became lectures. An old swamp thing cut off from power flailing for relevance.

12) The Soft Ball
Baer asks Mike Pompeo how he shares intelligence with Trump.

No real answer, by the way. Good.

14) The Ambush!
Mike Pompeo asked about #FakeNews stores regarding the mental state of President Trump: “It’s Absurd” (watch and listen closely)

15) Remember everyone is laughing and having a good time up to this point and on cue as the question is asked Panetta laughs. It was the perfect set up!

16) You can see the moment when Mike senses the trap he licks his lips and smiles ever so slightly. He is ready!

17) Mike breaks character, reveals his power level, and suddenly kills the room! Panetta nervously begins laughing some more to try to lighten the mood. I would have loved to see Baier’s face as he absorbed this stare. I guarantee he looked down and away.

18) The next order of business to to try to get Pompeo to listen to the wisdom of a “very concerned” Panetta regarding the danger of #TrumpTweets

19) #TrumpTweets are Dangerous!
Mike Pompeo doesn’t think so. He uses them strategically.

In fact, The Hill reported on this interview:

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said on Saturday that President Trump’s Twitter habits have actually helped his agency gather and understand intelligence …

 “I’ve actually seen it help us,” he said. “I have seen things the president has put on his Twitter account actually have a real-world impact on our capacity to understand what’s going on in other places in the world.”

“That is, our adversaries responded to those tweets in ways that were helpful to us to understand command and control issues, who’s listening to what messages, how those messages are resonating around the world.”

Back now to the Twitter thread. Baier was eager to pursue this line of questioning, even though Pompeo wanted to move on to other topics. Panetta also pressed Pompeo on Trump’s tweets, expressing ‘concern’.

22) Note Mike’s body language and comments he really is trying to politely end the conversation but they keep pushing…

23) THE KILL
CIA Director Mike Pompeo reminds old swamp creature (Leon Panetta) that he is a failure and irrelevant.

24) After you are done laughing consider how deadly serious this was. It was a carefully orchestrated trap completely scripted and gamed out in advance and Mike came up aces!

25) Pompeo’s ruthless defense of Donald Trump speaks volumes about his loyalty and dedication to the cause. His defense of #TrumpTweets confirms that they are highly strategic and coordinated with the CIA. This frightens everyone… but us.

No doubt this week’s narrative will be about Trump’s mental health again.

The Left’s dirty game

For over a year, the media and other Democrats have been saying that it was wrong for the Trump team to speak to the Russians prior to the inauguration.

It is legal and something that every president-elect’s transition team does.

As for contact with Russia during the campaign, to date, Mueller’s team has found nothing, except for the abortive meeting with the Russian lawyer. Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner left soon after it started. President Trump was unaware of it at the time.

My post yesterday listed three meetings that campaign advisers to then-candidate Obama had with Hamas and FARC. When he was still president-elect in January 2009, he met with the president of Mexico.

The Democrats — including the media — are being very dishonest with this anti-Trump narrative which is dividing the country.

In January 2017, Obama’s press secretary Mark Toner said there was no problem with the Trump team speaking with the Russian ambassador:

That text comes from the transcript of January 13. This is what precedes it:

QUESTION: — reports starting yesterday, but then more of them this morning, about contact between the incoming national security advisor and the Russian ambassador. I’m just wondering, from the State Department’s point of view, is this something that’s of concern at all? Or – I’ll just leave it there and then follow up.

MR TONER: Again, not necessarily – I’ve seen the reports. I don’t think they’ve been confirmed or corroborated yet. But that’s – as he’s part of the transition team, that’s really for them to speak to in how they are engaging. I mean —

QUESTION: Right, but —

MR TONER: — the president-elect is also engaged on his own with many world leaders.

 

Lt Gen Michael Flynn

Now a word about the embattled Lt General Michael Flynn.

On Saturday, December 2, Trump tweeted:

And:

The Conservative Treehouse has a good analysis and timeline of Flynn and the Russian ambassador, including Flynn’s dismissal. Excerpts follow (emphases in the original):

Many people have asked the question why would Michael Flynn have lied about talking to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the first place?

It’s a great question.

The Occam’s Razor answer is the toxic political environment that existed in January 2017, where the administration was being hammered by a tsunami of media narratives and political opposition claiming that any scintilla of contact with anything Russian meant that Putin and Trump were “colluding” BFFs,…. and Flynn didn’t want to fuel that nonsense.

That’s really the only reason to mislead about Russian contacts.

And/or once Vice-President Mike Pence made the statement that Flynn had no contact with anyone from Russia etc. any contradictory statement from Flynn would make Pence appear compromised; so Flynn had to stick to it without clarification.

Sunday January 15th – VP-elect Mike Pence appears on Face The Nation. [Transcript Here] …

[*NOTE* Notice the narrative questioning at the time (early Jan) was framed that ‘any contact’ with Russians was evidence of meddling/election-collusion with Russians.]

•Friday January 20th – Inauguration

•Tuesday January 24th – Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was interviewed at the WH by the FBI.  [Either Flynn contradicts Pence, or he tells a lie, those were his options.]

Afterwards, having received a report of the interview, Department of Justice (DOJ) employee, Sally Yates — since fired — had discussions about Flynn with other senior Obama holdovers still working there. This was what brought about the charge that Flynn lied to the FBI.

Another part of this story is that Flynn had talked to the Russian ambassador in December 2016 about the sanctions that Obama had imposed on Russia.

The following comes from The Last Refuge, the founder and author of The Conservative Treehouse (emphases mine below):

11. So on December 29th, sanctions day, Flynn spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak… Essentially, saying ‘chill out, we’ll get through this’ etc.

14. We arrive at Sunday January 15th. VP-Elect Mike Pence appears on Sunday talks to discuss political stuff and the Trump administration.

15. On that Sunday 1/15/17 Pence appeared on CBS Face the nation (John Dickerson)

16. What does Dickerson start off with? Of course – The Vast Russian Hacking Election conspiracy: “did any advisor or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?”

17. Amid the questioning, there is no distinction between *BEFORE* the election, and during the President-Elect transition period (ie. *AFTER* the election). It’s just one long framed question about “contact” and “collusion” etc.

18. And with that framework VP-Elect Pence says: “Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

19. VP-Pence says “of course not”, ie NO CONTACT. In doing so, and without pointing out the transition team would have ordinary and customary contact, Pence has now painted Flynn into a corner.

20. Flynn has had contact (ordinary and appropriate contact), but VP-Elect Pence gave an emphatic: “Of course not.”

22. The January 24th [FBI] interview is where the “Flynn Lied” to the FBI came from.

23. At the time of the interview the media cycle was filled with intelligence leaks. During that interview Flynn had two options: Option #1) tell investigators he did have conversations with Kislyak in December – and as a consequence contradict VP Pence.

24. Option #2) tell investigators he did not have conversations with the Russians (Kislyak) and align with VP Pence statement a week prior.

Option #1 puts the criticism and Russia story on VP Pence for lying to CBS. (He didn’t, because the question was vague on timing but that didn’t matter amid the frenzy) and as an outcome weaken the incoming administration 4 days after inauguration.

26. Option #2 puts himself at risk; but protects VP Pence and avoids the immediacy of a narrative against the White House and new administration.

27. Likely Flynn knew the FBI was up to no good because they probably already knew the answer to the question (wiretapping). But these decisions were about politics amid the frenzied media swarm. The downstream sh[*]t-storm on Pence would have been brutal.

28. The very next day, Wed Jan 25th, Sally Yates (DOJ) gets an after action report on the FBI questioning of Flynn.

37. Note the presumption here is that Flynn had lied to VP Pence. However, there is nothing to indicate that angle/aspect is or was actually correct. Specifically, there is ample evidence the ‘lie to Pence’, evolved from a storyline -driven by necessity- to save face for Pence.

38. The administration was now boxed in. Flynn lied to protect Pence’s political posture/integrity/position, (ie. Military Leadership Training 101: never compromise your leadership), but was now confronted by Sally Yates. FUBAR!!

Conclusion — thus far

It seems this past weekend served, in part, as a watershed moment.

As I write, Trump’s Twitter account has over 43m subscribers. Imagine factoring in millions of others, e.g. yours truly, who don’t subscribe but check it at least once a day.

Tens of millions of people are reading and passing his tweets along to millions more every day.

Over time, that’s a lot of red pills being handed out.

Trump is taking this time to get the American people psychologically prepared for The Storm / the Silent War.

I have read several online commenters saying that they never realised how corrupt America is until they read about the Strzok dismissal and the crookedness of this Mueller investigation which, so far, has cost around $5m in taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, actual criminals who served at federal level are on the loose. Where’s the DOJ? Where’s the justice?

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