A lengthy yet stupendous article written by J.E. Dyer
exposes the hypocrisy of the lying Dems when it comes to criminal justice and
the U.S. Constitution. The Dems feign (cough
Pelosi) love of the rule of law except or unless that law applies to
Dem/Leftist/Deep State law violations. READ ON!
JRH 2/14/20
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***************************
The Jessie Liu clue: A D.C. cover-up that IS Spygate
By J.E. Dyer
February 13, 2020
The "Old"
(Eisenhower) Executive Office Building across from the White House in
Washington, D.C.. (Image: Wikimedia)
Four federal prosecutors resigned from
their case on Tuesday when Attorney General William Barr overruled the
sentencing recommendation they made for Roger Stone, whom Robert Mueller had
forwarded charges against involving “five separate counts of lying to the House
Intelligence Committee and two charges of obstructing a congressional
investigation and intimidating a witness.”
Notably, the Justice Department’s lead counsel in the Stone
case, Jessie Liu – the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia – had
recently turned over that role to Timothy Shea, because Ms. Liu had been
nominated for a post at the U.S. Treasury. Liu was also the lead counsel
for some time on the Michael Flynn case.
On Tuesday, Trump withdrew the Liu nomination for the
Treasury job, about the same time the four prosecutors, three of whom were
members of the Mueller team, announced they were off the Stone case. Liu
was previously scheduled for a Senate hearing on Thursday.
Jessie Liu - center on
MSNBC - MSNBC video (screen capture)
In the interest of getting expeditiously to the meat of this
post, I won’t rehash the whole story on this. It can be gleaned at the
links. One thing is important to note, however, as we survey what looks
very much like a major maneuver of some kind between the “swamp” and the Trump
administration.
According to a DOJ source, the four prosecutors who left the
Stone case on Tuesday changed their sentencing recommendation
between the time they briefed it to the Department and their formal filing with
the court. The clear implication is that they told their bosses one
thing, but then filed with the court for another. The sentence they
recommended – seven to nine years – was well outside the sentencing guidelines
for the offenses, and the DOJ (according to the source) had not seen or
approved it. Rather, the DOJ thought the recommendation would be a
different one.
At this initial stage, readers should draw their own
conclusions about who is telling the truth here. There is reason, at
least, to believe that the formal sentencing recommendation was made without
approval from the DOJ higher-ups.
That would be enough reason for the four prosecutors to be
off the case. But Jessie Liu wasn’t involved in the sentencing recommendation,
so that incident, in itself, doesn’t explain why her nomination was withdrawn.
Enter the March 2017 handoff
This section of the analysis is what we might call a
wholly-owned subsidiary of sundance at Conservative Treehouse, to whom
the credit goes for the superb sleuthing that revealed
a bottom line I’m going to state up-front. It is fully developed by
sundance, and for the essential background and documentation, please read the
CTH article.
The bottom line is that some media outlets have had a
complete copy of at least the first FISA application on Carter Page since March
of 2017, when Senate Intelligence Committee official James Wolfe leaked it to
four journalists, including his girlfriend Ali Watkins. This is recorded
in documents from James Wolfe’s prosecution, which were unsealed in 2018.
CTH points out what that means: that outlets like the New
York Times, where Watkins later took a job, have known what was in the FISA
application since shortly after the compromising handover by James Wolfe took
place. The date was 17 March 2017, two months after Trump took office,
and long before the FISA applications were made available in redacted form to
the public.
James A. Wolfe. (Image: Fox News, LinkedIn)
Moreover, Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, may have known about the compromise at the time it
happened.
And Jessie Liu was the prosecutor who eventually accepted a
plea from James Wolfe to a minimal charge, and
effectively swept this bombshell leak of incendiary Top Secret material under
the rug. As pointed out at CTH, a core motive for this was the
determination of Wolfe’s defense to call witnesses who would almost certainly
have revealed that members of the Senate knew what Wolfe was doing.
Sundance calls this the “DC cover-up that’s as big as
Spygate.” Key aspects must be noted in that regard; e.g., that there are
media outlets that must therefore be complicit in selling the pubic a bill of
goods on the “FISA applications” narrative. They’ve known all along what
those applications contained, yet published as if they didn’t: not to protect
national secrets, but to support a narrative that injured real people – through
harassment and manufactured prosecutions – based on falsehoods that the FISA
applications expose.
Sundance also makes a sound case that Mark Warner, and
probably others, knew as well; not only what was in the FISA applications
(which Warner had to know, having been authorized to read them unredacted in
the SCIF), but that the FISA applications had been leaked to the media.
Again, it is certain that at least one of the first two FISA
applications (from October 2016 and January 2017) constituted the material
leaked. A sentencing document filed by the
DOJ in December 2018 makes that clear. It may have been only the first
application that was leaked; I discuss that below.
This is undoubtedly enough of a compromising situation for
some in the Senate to not want it coming out in a confirmation hearing for
Jessie Liu. Sundance prepared some good, suggested questions for the
now-canceled hearing. But I doubt members of the Senate would really want
the answers coming out in public – or even just the implications raised by the
questions.
This was Spygate
I would go further than sundance, meanwhile, and say that
this cover-up isn’t merely as big as Spygate. It is Spygate.
It was part and parcel of the effort to gain advantage over Trump and take him
down, an effort that started before he was even elected, and one whose full
panoply of methods we still haven’t grasped.
To lay it out, I’ll start by noting something that hadn’t
clicked into place with me until sundance highlighted it in the post linked
above. I had followed the James Wolfe case, knew
about Jessie Liu’s role, and even understood that the classified material
involved – i.e., leaked by Wolfe – was related to the FISA applications.
But it hadn’t registered meaningfully with me that Wolfe
leaked the material on 17 March 2017.
Recognizing the significance of that specific date makes the
difference in how we see the event and its motivation. Why? Because
during that period, Devin Nunes was working on a set of requests for the
executive agencies which included FISA applications, and information about
“unmasking” actions taken by federal authorities.
Devin Nunes (Image: Screen grab of Fox News video, YouTube)
Nunes had sent a demand – disclosed to the Washington
Post on 15 March – to the NSA, CIA, and FBI for information from them on
whose names had been “unmasked” from incidental (non-targeted) electronic
surveillance, in the period of the Trump transition (and probably some
additional time on either side of it).
But he also sent a separate request to the Justice
Department specifically for FISA applications.
In February 2018, the Lawfare blog posted a handy (if
hostile) timeline of Nunes’s efforts to
figure out what was going on with the unmasking. Most Spygate followers
will chiefly remember Nunes’s dramatic press conferences
later in March of 2017.
But he had gained sharpened awareness of the unmasking as an
issue when it became clear, with the David Ignatius article in the Washington
Post on 11 January 2017, that Michael Flynn had been unmasked in a phone
call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Nunes fully understood the relationship between
FISA-authorized surveillance and unmasking. And he knew that it would be
necessary to look into the records on both aspects of intelligence processing
to determine what had been going on.
VIDEO: Devin Nunes: Trump
Communications ‘Incidentally’ Collected By Intelligence Agencies | NBC News
[Posted by NBC News
1.84M subscribers - Mar 22, 2017
Devin Nunes, the Chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee tells press he has been notified that Trump team
communications have been “incidentally,” legally collected. He also said more
names involved in Trump campaign have been unmasked but … MORE TO READ]
After President Trump sent his famous 4 March 2017 tweets
about having been “wiretapped” by Obama, Nunes and Adam Schiff, the ranking
member on the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to the acting
attorney general (Dana Boente) requesting “copies of any applications the
Justice Department submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
any orders that the court released, and any copies of warrants issued by
federal judges or magistrates regarding Trump, his campaign surrogates,
business associates, employees, family and friends.” The timeframe
requested was the year 2016.
That letter was sent 8 March 2017. And note this about
it: whatever your opinion of Devin Nunes, one thing no one would say of him is
that he was complicit with either anti-Trump media or anti-Trump officials
(i.e., “deep staters”) inside the government.
Thus, his letter of 8 March would have been the first
communication from such a person – an official outside the anti-Trump
circle – posing formal questions, to which the Carter Page FISA
applications had to be the answer.
In other words, Nunes was taking aim at the real
target. (Something I noted at the time; see my link on his 22 March 2017
press conference, above.)
Don’t get ahead of me here, because understanding this as a
Spygate episode requires seeing it whole. Nunes and Schiff gave the DOJ a
deadline of 13 March to respond. On 13 March, the DOJ requested more
time. Nunes’s office told the media that if there was no response before
FBI Director James Comey testified to the House committee the following Monday
(20 March), Nunes would request the information during Comey’s hearing, and
would subpoena it if necessary.
On 17 March, the day the FISA applications were made
available in the SCIF on Capitol Hill, Nunes then provided this very
informative statement to the media: “The Committee is satisfied that the
Department of Justice has fully complied with our request for information from
our March 8 letter on possible surveillance related to Donald Trump or his
associates.”
That statement comports perfectly with what we would expect
if the DOJ had forwarded copies of its 2016 applications made to the FISA
court, including the Carter Page application.
Note two things. One, fulfilling this request from
Nunes and Schiff would have been the reason the Carter Page FISA application
was sent to the Hill on 17 March 2017.
Mark Warner and the Senate Intelligence staff would have
known the request had been made – and known that the documents were coming on
the 17th – because Warner was in the Intelligence Gang of Eight, and Schiff
would have shared it with him, at a minimum.
Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) –
Youtube (screen capture)
Two, only the first Carter Page application, from October
2016, would have met the terms of the House Intelligence Committee request,
which was for applications made in 2016.
That’s why I think it’s probable that only the first FISA
application was leaked to the media on 17 March 2017.
A decision point, identified
But of more importance is the point that Nunes was the
catalyst for shaking it out of the DOJ. That means that at the time the
FISA application was leaked, and indeed for at least a couple of weeks before,
some group of Deep Staters was closely attuned already to the significance of
Nunes’s role and what he was trying to do. They knew he was on the hunt
for a trail of activity that would lead back to them.
The interval between 13 and 17 March is thus an intriguing
one. The DOJ asked for more time on 13 March, but apparently without
previewing anything it was committing to. By 17 March, it had delivered
the Carter Page FISA application, along with the others from 2016.
That tells me a decision was made between 13 and 17 March to
deploy the Carter Page application rather than trying to keep it under wraps.
The method of deployment was sending it to Capitol Hill.
This would constitute circumstantial evidence of the
collusion that sundance postulates, presumably involving actors other than
James Wolfe on Capitol Hill – and suggesting cooperation with the Justice
Department, which sent the FISA application, and the media, whose members
received the leak from Wolfe.
On Tuesday 21 March, the day after Comey’s 20 March hearing,
Nunes made his famous visit to the White House complex and viewed material on
the unmasking of U.S. persons, an inspection arranged for him by officials
inside the White House. The next day, 22 March, Nunes briefed his
concerns to the media, setting off a firestorm.
There were other events in the ensuing timeline; read them
at your leisure. I’ll skip ahead to the one on 30 March, when as Lawfare
recounts, “The New York Times reports that Ezra
Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for
intelligence, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office
working on national security issues, provided Nunes the intelligence documents
he referenced in his March 22 press conference.”
The events highlighted above, including that last one, are
the ones that matter.
The Nunes events make this Spygate
The date 17 March 2017 was not happenstance. Because
Devin Nunes was probing for information about surveillance of the Trump team,
there were quite a few people on Capitol Hill – and in the media – who would be
motivated to set a counter-operation in motion at the first opportunity.
It’s easy to identify 17 March 2017 as that opportunity,
because that’s the date stamped on the “official copy” of the Carter Page FISA
application that made its way to the Hill.
But can we find the outlines of a Deep State/anti-Trump plan
here? Can we justify thinking in terms of collusion, and supposing that
multiple people were involved in taking advantage of that opportunity?
There are strong reasons to say yes. They relate to
two circumstances. One is the 30 March New York Times article
identifying two individuals as Devin Nunes’s contacts in the White House.
The other is the very first event in the Lawfare timeline:
11 November 2016, when Nunes was appointed as an adviser to the Trump
transition team.
Trump-transition-Trump-Tower
- AFP video, YouTube (screen capture)
That means Nunes himself had been subject to being
dragnetted in the Carter Page surveillance, by the two-hop rule, since 11 November
2016.
Nunes probably wasn’t the only one on Capitol Hill, for that
matter. But once he was seriously on the hunt for FISA and unmasking
information – which would lead to the activity trail of the anti-Trump
surveillance – the motive to keep him under surveillance would have been
exceptionally strong. He met that definition by mid-February 2017 at the
latest.
Remember, it’s not “wiretapping” we’re talking about.
It’s not listening in on phone calls. The method would have been
retrieving “non-contents” information from telecom providers, using tailored
queries that met the criteria authorized by the Carter Page FISA warrant.
That kind of surveillance, covering phone calls, texts, and other instant messages,
could be done without the subject or anyone connected with him ever knowing.
If Deep State planners were tracking Nunes, they had not
only the motive to drop the Carter Page FISA application to the Hill, and
thence to the media, on 17 March 2017, but the means to foresee that Nunes’s
contacts with the White House would lead very soon to his being afforded a look
at what had been going on there. They were alerted, in other words, to
the danger to themselves, in time to take planned and deliberate advantage of
the FISA application’s arrival on Capitol Hill.
Tracking Nunes (and probably the other two individuals named
by the New York Times) was also a likely and accurate way to identify
Nunes’s White House contacts(s). It had the merit of not requiring an
initial cue from a source who actually witnessed the interactions.
Knowing whom Nunes had been in contact with, his monitors could then ask
intelligent questions of White House leakers who had only incidental awareness
of what others in their vicinity were doing.
Pulling Liu’s nomination
If I were Trump and Barr, and had assembled information
pointing in essence to a scenario like this – or were still in the process of
assembling it – I wouldn’t want the Jessie Liu confirmation hearing to trip
landmines before their time.
Trump wouldn’t withdraw the Liu nomination merely out of
misplaced compassion for embarrassed senators or Deep Staters. He’d have
good reasons to do it for his own purposes (with or without a dramatic event
like the four prosecutors’ departure).
One of those reasons would be that Jessie Liu probably
doesn’t belong in the job at Treasury. Whatever else she knew about James
Wolfe and the Senate Intelligence Committee in the March 2017 timeframe, she
knew that the classified material Wolfe leaked to the media was the Carter Page
FISA application. She was apparently willing to cooperate in keeping that
explosive information out of the public eye.
It may be that Liu was less culpably complicit than willing
to go along, on the sidelines of an ambiguous situation, under pressure from
higher echelon. We needn’t have a bloodthirsty attitude about Liu, per
se.
But here’s what we do need to have: an accounting to the
American people, before even one more official involved in very questionable
actions by the government gets another pass.
The people have trusted the system in the blind long
enough. No reckoning – no happy-face career progression for the known
participants. If you want to object, go sell it to Michael Flynn and his
family. (Or sell it to Roger Stone. DOJ let James Wolfe off with a two-month
sentence.)
An additional reason for pulling the Liu nomination is
simply that it may not be time to detonate the landmine yet. John Durham
is doing his job. He, Barr, and Trump will know when it’s time.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
BLOG EDITOR: I’ve apparently
been placed in restricted Facebook Jail! The restriction was relegated after
criticizing Democrats for supporting abortion in one post and criticizing
Virginia Dems for gun-grabbing legislation and levying protester restrictions.
Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I
choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me completely.
Conservatives are a huge portion of Facebook. If more or all Conservatives are
banned, it will affect the Facebook advertising revenue paradigm. SO FIGHT
CENSORSHIP BY SHARE – SHARE – SHARE!!! Facebook notified me in
pop-up on 1/20/20: “You're temporarily restricted from joining and posting to
groups that you do not manage until April 18 at 7:04 PM.”
____________________________
J.E.
Dyer is a retired
Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The
Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles
have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller,
The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.
