This follow up links to the PDF that partially unredacts IG
Horowitz’s foot notes that expose FBI deception in its presentation to a FISA
Court to get secret warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The follow is
entitled, “FBI failed to review Steele's ties to Russians, warned some of
dossier was Moscow disinformation”.
JRH 4/11/20
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Key FBI
officials failed to review an intelligence file identifying Christopher
Steele's ties to Russian oligarchs and were later advised some of the
information he provided agents in his dossier appeared to be misinformation
planted by Russian intelligence, according to declassified information made
public Friday.
The explosive revelations were contained in footnotes that
had been originally redacted from Justice Department inspector general Michael
Horowitz's December report on FBI failures in the Russia case. The
information was provided to two Senate committees in recent days.
One of the newly declassified footnotes highlights a glaring
misstep early in the Russia case, when key officials failed to review the
intelligence control file for Steele, a former MI6 agent who approached the FBI
with unverified allegations about Trump after he was hired to do opposition
research by the firm working for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Checking such files is a basic procedure in a
counterintelligence probe when an informant is involved, officials told Just
the News.
The footnote states that an FBI intelligence analyst and a
supervisory special agent working on the Crossfire Hurricane probe admitted
they "did not recall reviewing information in Steele's Delta file
documenting Steele's frequent contacts with representatives for multiple
Russian oligarchs in 2015."
"In addition to the information in Steele's Delta file
documenting Steele's frequent contacts with representatives for multiple
Russian oligarch, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received
[redacted] indicating the potential for Russia disinformation influencing
Steele's election reporting," a second footnote revealed.
Specifically, that footnote added: "A [redacted]
2017 report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a
limited subset of Steele's reporting about the activities of (former Trump
lawyer) Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high
confidence in this subset of Steele's reporting and assessed that the
referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to
denigrate U.S. foreign relations."
That same footnote reveals a separate report to the FBI,
dated 2017, “contained information … that the public reporting about the
details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were
false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source
into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on
Trump’s activities.” RIS is an acronym for Russian intelligence services.
The new information provides the most explosive information
to date that FBI officials had serious reason to doubt Steele's dossier when it
first arrived and during the time it was used to support FISA surveillance
warrants targeting the Trump campaign in late 2016 and 2017.
Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who
worked to get the footnotes declassified, said Friday the information withheld
from the American public for two years confirms the FBI collusion probe that
dogged the Trump administration was flawed from start to finish and covered up
by a false narrative driven by news media leaks.
“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks,
innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign
were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation," the
senators said. "The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite
exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative.
"The mounting evidence undercutting this narrative
should have stopped the investigation early in its tracks. Instead, it took
several years and millions in taxpayer dollars to conclude that the allegations
were baseless."
You can read the newly declassified documents here.
JusttheNews.comis committed to just reporting facts from journalists
with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where opinion and
supposition are too often substituted for fact and where journalists rush to
get things first and hope their stories are correct, JusttheNews.com tries to
stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of getting news first, but first
getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive news you can trust.
JusttheNews.com is a
back-to-the-future initiative where old-fashioned, honest and exclusive
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old and new, JusttheNews.com journalists deliver unprecedented transparency by
offering a Dig Deeper tool on their Web site that … READ THE REST
Declassified case notes referring to Christopher Steele
deception and FBI knowledge of that deception demonstrates just how infested
and invested the FBI is as a Deep State agent to take down a sitting President.
NO ONE past or present in the FBI to date has been accountable! WHY THE HELL
NOT?!
JRH 4/10/20
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Russia case footnotes to be declassified, exposing FBI
concerns about Steele disinformation
Previously redacted footnotes from Inspector General
Michael Horowitz's report expected to raise questions about prior FBI
assessment of key informant.
FBI to face new scrutiny
with declassified Russia case notes.
U.S.
intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent
Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI’s
investigation into President Trump’s campaign, including that agents possessed
evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian
disinformation, Just the News has learned.
The previously redacted footnotes are likely to
raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about
the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials
supplied to Congress.
The declassified sections from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December review of
FBI FISA abuse could be made available to key Senate and House committees as
early as the end of this week, according to people familiar with the effort.
The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data
points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected,
that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous
and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.
The new information “will make clear the FBI possessed
information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to
sustain a collusion investigation” and will be specific enough to renew a
debate in Washington over “whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or
simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly,” one source with direct
knowledge said.
The evidence could also raise new questions about whether
statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading,
and whether the intelligence community’s official assessment that Vladimir
Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence
in FBI files, the sources said.
Grassley and Johnson are two strong allies of Trump who
played a key role in debunking the false collusion allegations the FBI
investigated. Johnson's investigators flagged the redacted passages during a
review of the Horowitz report and worked with Grassley's team to escalate to
Attorney General William Barr.
“We are concerned that certain sections of the public
version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant
and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes,” Grassley and
Johnson wrote Barr. “This classified information is significant not only
because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also
because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire
investigation.”
Sources said DNI and Justice Department are planning to
declassify those four footnotes as well as others in the report that will
provide new understanding about failures in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia
collusion probe.
One of the key revelations will be the unmasking of
footnotes that show specific red flags raised inside the bureau’s intelligence
files that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent whose anti-Trump dossier
played a key role in the collusion probe, could have been the victim of Russian
disinformation through his contacts with Russian oligarchs, the sources said.
Horowitz's report in December concluded that most of the
allegations Steele included in the dossier he gave the FBI were inaccurate,
uncorroborated, or internet rumor and that the FBI falsely represented to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Steele's intelligence had been
verified in securing a FISA warrant to target the Trump campaign and former
adviser Carter Page in fall 2016 in an investigation code-named Crossfire
Hurricane.
Horowitz’s report also raised concerns the FBI failed
to fully evaluate evidence in its intelligence files that suggested Russian
disinformation was flowing to Steele, who was working during the 2016 campaign
for the opposition research firm trying to help Hillary Clinton and the
Democratic Party defeat Trump.
Those concerns were echoed in the report by former FBI
counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and former Justice Department lawyer
Stuart Evans.
“In view of information we found in FBI files we reviewed,
and that was available to the Crossfire Hurricane team during the relevant time
period, we believe that more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts
with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as
potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele's reporting
or, at a minimum, influenced Steele's understanding of events in Russia that
furnished context for the analytical judgments he used to evaluate the
reporting,” Horowitz wrote at the time. “We agree with the assessment of
Priestap and Evans that this issue warranted more scrutiny than it was
afforded.”
While Horowitz raised the issue broadly, a detailed set of
footnotes laying out what actually was in the FBI files was completely
redacted. That footnote is expected, along with other information, to be
declassified.
Persons familiar with the effort said the new
declassifications also may raise questions about representations FBI witnesses
made in classified briefings and briefing documents to Congress in 2017.
Horowitz’s report flagged one such possible episode,
recounting a memo that the FBI provided in December 2017 to congressional
leaders that claimed to have dismissed the notion that Steele was the victim of
disinformation.
“According to an FBI memorandum prepared in December 2017
for a Congressional briefing, by the time the Crossfire Hurricane investigation
was transferred to the Special Counsel in May 2017, the FBI did not assess it
likely that the [Steele] [ election reporting] was generated in connection to a
Russian disinformation campaign,” Horowitz noted.
Such a claim may have dismissed or overlooked evidence
sitting in the FBI’s own files, the report suggested.
When pressed by the IG about the possibility that Steele had
been the victim of Russian disinformation, Priestap, the former
counterintelligence chief whose supervised the lead case agent Peter Strzok,
offered an uncertain answer.
“I'm struggling, with, when you know the Russians, and this
I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they're trying
to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don't know why you'd run
a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side,” Priestap answered.
Steele broadly defended his work in an interview with the
IG. And after Horowitz's report was issued, the former British spy issued a statement
through his lawyers and his company Orbis Business Intelligence disputing many
of the IG's findings, including the allegation that Steele's primary
sub-source had disowned or denied much of the information attributed to him in
the dossier.
"Public discussions about a source are always fraught
with danger for the source and the source's sub-source," the statement
said. "Had Orbis been given an opportunity to respond in a private
session, the statement by the primary sub-source would be put in a very
different light."
Horowitz isn't the only government official to raise
concerns that Steele may have been victimized by Russian disinformation. One of
the Democrats' star witnesses during President Trump's impeachment investigation,
government Russia expert Fiona Hill, testified about Steele
that she had "misgivings and concern that he could have been played" by
Russian disinformation. Hill had previously worked with Steele when he was with
MI6.
“Their goal was to discredit the presidency,” she testified
in an October deposition. “Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken
them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her
at this time if she was President Clinton. There’s been a cloud over President
Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that’s exactly what
the Russians intended.”
The new evidence from the declassified footnotes will give
the American public a first chance to evaluate whether the FBI dropped the ball
on evaluating Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier.
Whatever the final verdict, the upcoming declassifications
are a pointed reminder that the public still has much to learn about what did,
and did not, go right in the Russia collusion probe.
JusttheNews.comis committed to just reporting facts from
journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where
opinion and supposition are too often substituted for fact and where
journalists rush to get things first and hope their stories are correct,
JusttheNews.com tries to stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of
getting news first, but first getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive
news you can trust.
JusttheNews.com is a
back-to-the-future initiative where old-fashioned, honest and exclusive
reporting is delivered in a neutral voice, but delivered through the modern
channels of YouTube, podcasting, e-books and social media. And in a twist of
old and new, JusttheNews.com journalists deliver unprecedented transparency by
offering a Dig Deeper tool on their Web site that … READ THE REST
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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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.”
***************************
The Jessie Liu clue: A D.C. cover-up that IS Spygate
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.
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.
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.
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 formalquestions, 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.
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.
Dyeris 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.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked Federal U.S.
Attorney John Huber (Office in Utah) to investigate FISA abuse allegations in
spying on the Trump campaign. The problem with Huber’s investigation: HE DIDN’T
DO SQUAT! Huber is either incompetent or a Deep Stater.
Thankfully President Trump now has a competent Attorney
General in William Barr. Barr removed Huber whose tasks were assigned to U.S.
Attorney John Durham. Story at The Gateway Pundit.
Today on CBS Attorney General William Barr disclosed that
the Huber investigation is over.
Huber was assigned to look at FISA applications and the
electronic surveillance during the 2016 election and actions by Hillary
Clinton.
Huber did not even start his investigation.
He didn’t do a damn thing!
AG Barr said this
morning on CBS News that Huber did nothing and
his work was taken over by the team he set up under US Attorney John Durham:
JAN CRAWFORD: Um,
what’s the status of Huber’s investigation in Utah? I think the former Attorney
General Sessions had asked him to look at this.
WILLIAM BARR: Right,
so Huber had originally been asked to take a look at the FISA applications and
the electronic surveillance but then he stood back and put that on hold while
the Office of Inspector General was conducting its review, which would’ve been
normal for the department. And he was essentially on standby in case Mr.
Horowitz referred a matter to him to be handled criminally. So he has not been
active on this front in recent months and so Durham is taking over that role.
The other issues he’s been working on relate to Hillary Clinton. Those are
winding down and hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring those to fruition.
JAN CRAWFORD: So
he won’t be involved in this really at all then?
John Huber was
the special prosecutor tapped by former AG Jeff Sessions to investigate FISA
abuses by Obama’s DOJ/FBI. Sessions nominated Huber to perform this
investigation after numerous calls for a special investigation into the Clinton
Foundation and the Deep State.
Mark Meadows
(R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Doug Collins (R-GA) sent a letterto
special prosecutor John Huber on January 8th demanding answers by a January
21st deadline.
“Your investigation
has been ongoing for over nine months. During the course of our extensive
investigation we have interviewed more than a dozen current and former DOJ and
FBI personnel, and were surprised to hear none of these potentially informative
witnesses testified to speaking with you,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.
The Clinton
Foundation whistleblowers, Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Doyle told the committee they
had to send their evidence to the Huber investigation THREE TIMES because they
kept losing it.
In October,
Congressman Meadows and Jim Jordan said they wanted to haul John Huber in
before Congress to testify because they had not received any updates on Huber’s
investigation.
Now we know that
it was all a farce. Huber did NOTHING!
Huber and the
former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, should be brought before a grand jury
and investigated for their actions in obstructing justice.
The American
people are very angry about all that is going on in DC. We want OUR
country back! We DEMAND justice!
