Two years ago, Texas attorney, Ty Clevenger, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show:

Ty Clevenger: Originally I thought there was some Obama holdover in the FBI that was trying to cover this up. But as you know last week Senator Graham and Senator Grassley released a letter indicating that the former FBI Director James Comey had already decided to exonerate Mrs. Clinton before she was even interviewed. And so at this point, I believe the FBI is trying to cover its own rear-end. I think they know this thing is going to look terrible for them. They deep-sixed this. They white-washed it. And they don’t want the documents coming out showing how badly they covered it up…

On July 2, 2019, “Ty Clevenger filed a series of subpoenas in the lawsuit filed against Matt Couch, and America First Media.

Per Attorney Ty Clevenger:

This afternoon I issued subpoenas to the FBI, CrowdStrike, and the Democratic National Committee for their records on murdered DNC employee Seth Rich. The subpoenas further demand all evidence that Russian hackers were responsible for obtaining DNC emails in 2016 that were later published by Wikileaks.

Two weeks ago, attorneys representing Roger Stone forced prosecutors to admit that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Obama-era intelligence officials never examined the DNC servers that purportedly were hacked by the Russians. Instead, Mueller and Obama officials relied on redacted draft reports prepared by CrowdStrike, Inc., a private company hired by the law firm Perkins Coie, the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele.

(…) You can read the FBI subpoena by clicking here, the CrowdStrike subpoena by clicking here, and the DNC subpoena by clicking here. The case is Edward Butowsky v. Michael Gottlieb, et al., Case No. 4:19-cv-00180 (E.D.Tex.). (Read more: The DCPatriot, 7/02/2019)

George Nader (Credit: Getty Images)

“George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who was a key witness in the special counsel’s probe, was charged earlier in July with transporting a 14-year-old European boy to the U.S. for sex, according to an indictment unsealed Friday.

Nader was charged on three counts, including a charge for possessing child pornography and one for traveling with a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity. He is accused of transporting the teenage boy from Europe to his home in the U.S. in 2000.

The indictment, which was handed down July 3, comes on top of one unsealed in June against Nader, who was a longtime adviser to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. Nader played a key role in setting up a meeting in January 2017 between defense contractor Erik Prince and the head of Russia’s direct investment fund in the Seychelles.

Nader also met during the presidential transition period with Jared Kushner, and worked closely with Elliot Broidy, a former top Republican fundraiser who is reportedly under investigation for bribery and money laundering. In August 2016, Nader offered help to the Trump campaign during a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and Prince.

Nader, 60, was interviewed multiple times during the special counsel’s investigation, all but one time under a proffer agreement with prosecutors. Nader is mentioned approximately 120 times in the special counsel’s report, but there is no mention of his long history of alleged child sex crimes.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 7/19/2019)

In April, 2018, al-Jazeera reports, “Nader has used his international visits to import child pornography since at least 1985, according to court testimony from one of his defence attorneys, pled guilty to child pornography charges in 1991 and has been convicted of committing sex acts with 10 underage boys in Europe.” (al-Jazeera, 4/06/2018)

Michael Horowitz (Credit: Getty Images)

“Key witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the 11th hour, Fox News has learned.

Sources familiar with the matter said at least one witness outside the Justice Department and FBI started cooperating — a breakthrough that came after Attorney General William Barr ordered U.S. Attorney John Durham to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the bureau’s 2016 Russia case that laid the foundation for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

While the investigative phase of the inspector general’s long-running probe is said to be complete, the sources said recent developments required some witnesses to be reinterviewed. And while Barr testified that he expected the report into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse to be ready in May or last month, multiple sources said the timeline has slipped.

(…) A spokesman for Horowitz would not comment on the report’s status. But during largely unrelated testimony in November, Horowitz offered some guidance for the timeline of the FISA abuse probe in response to questions from GOP Rep. Jim Jordan.

“What I can say is given the volume of documents we’ve had and the number of witnesses it looks like we’ll need to interview, we are likely to be in the same sort of general range of documents and witnesses as the last report,” Horowitz said, referring to his team’s review of the Clinton email case. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we are in that million or so plus range of documents and a hundred-ish or so interviews. The last review, as you know, took us about … 16 months or so.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/05/2019)

Christopher Wray (r) tells NBC’s Lester Holt at an Aspen Security Forum in July, 2018 that he considered resigning as FBI director. (Credit: NBC News)

“The FBI is going to court to fight the public release of a small number of documents the State Department sent to agents from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence operative and Hillary Clinton-paid political muckraker, during the 2016 election.

Normally, such Freedom of Information Act cases don’t merit public attention. This one does.

To hear the FBI tell it, the release of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Kathleen Kavalec’s documents is tantamount to giving up the keys to President Trump’s nuclear briefcase, aiding the enemy or assisting terrorists.

“We know that terrorist organizations and other hostile or foreign intelligence groups have the capacity and ability to gather information from myriad sources, analyze it and deduce means and methods from disparate details to defeat the U.S. government’s collection efforts,” an FBI assistant section chief swore in an affidavit supporting the request to keep the documents secret.

The FBI can’t afford to “jeopardize the fragile relationships that exist between the United States and certain foreign governments,” the FBI official declared in another dramatic argument against the conservative group Citizens United’s request to release the memos.

And if that wasn’t enough, the bureau actually claimed that “FBI special agents have privacy interests from unnecessary, unofficial questioning as to the conduct of investigations and other FBI business.”

In other words, agents don’t want to have to answer to the public, which pays their salary, when questions arise about the investigative work, as has happened in the Russia case.

The FBI’s July 10 court filing speaks volumes about Director Christopher Wray’s efforts to thwart the public understanding of what really happened in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia collusion probe.

Steele’s contacts at State can’t possibly be equated to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. The same research he provided to State and the FBI in fall 2016 was being provided to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and to the media. (Read more: The Hill, 7/30/2019)

Michael Flynn and new attorney, Sidney Powell. (Credit: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

“Prosecutors from the team of special counsel Robert Mueller wanted Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to testify to something that isn’t true, Flynn’s lawyers said. When he refused, they tried to label him a co-conspirator in a case where they previously said he was only a witness.

A federal judge denied the prosecutors’ move, saying the government didn’t present enough evidence to introduce Flynn’s statement as one of a co-conspirator.

Flynn, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, is expected to face a light sentence after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and after extensively cooperating with the Mueller team and the Justice Department. He was also expected to testify on another case of making false statements on foreign lobbying registration forms.

In his November 2017 guilty plea, he said that the forms submitted by lawyers for his now-defunct lobbying company, Flynn Intel Group (FIG), contained false and misleading statements. The prosecutors, however, recently asked him to testify that he signed those forms knowing about the falsities and intending for them.

He refused.

“Mr. Flynn cannot give that testimony because it is not true,” Flynn’s recently hired lawyers, Jesse Binnall, Sidney Powell, and William Hodes, said in a July 8 court filing.

They said Flynn only acknowledged in his plea the falsities “with some hindsight.” At the time of signing the forms, in March 2017, Flynn only read the cover letter and didn’t know about or intend for anything false in them, they said.

“Mr. Flynn trusted his former counsel who held themselves out as experts in this area of law,” the filing stated.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 7/10/2019)

Judge Anthony Trenga (Credit: American Law Institute)

“U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga in the Eastern District of Virginia slammed the Department of Justice’s request to designate former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn a ‘co-conspirator’ in the ongoing case it has against his former business partner after the government stated on numerous occasions that Flynn was a cooperating witness.

Trenga issued the 38-page scathing opinion in the late afternoon Tuesday that the “United States at this point has not presented or proffered evidence to sufficient to establish by a preponderance of the evidence a conspiracy for the purposes of admitting against the Defendant the hearsay statements of alleged co-conspirators.”

Trenga goes on to argue that “Notably absent from the government’s proffer is any evidence from Michael Flynn, who, as discussed above, has admitted that he made certain false statements in the FARA filing that was the object of one of the charged conspiracy and has entered into a cooperation agreement with the United States that extends to this prosecution.”

“A rather stunning report from Gateway Pundit outlines information contained within a lawsuit filing.  The lawsuit, filed by Businessman Ed Butowsky, alleges Wikileaks founder Julian Assange confirmed to Fox News analyst Ellen Ratner that the DNC leaked emails were received from Seth Rich and his brother Aaron.

(Source, lawsuit filing – pdf link, page 13)

The details contained within the lawsuit filing (full pdf below) are stunning.

If this information is true and accurate, the DOJ claim of a Russian hack – based on assertions by DNC contractor, Crowdstrike– would be entirely false.  Additionally the DC murder of Seth Rich would hold a far more alarming motive.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 7/15/2019)

***UPDATE: “Due to the scale of ramification, there was some valid skepticism about the Butowsky assertion.  However, recently unearthed footage from Ellen Ratner talking about her visit with Assange in November of 2016 seems to validate what the Butowsky’s lawsuit alleges.

In the video taken during a November 9th, 2016, Embry Riddle University symposium, Fox News analyst Ellen Ratner, representing the left, and former Congressman now Fox political analyst John Leboutillier, from the right, discussed the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.  EXCERPT:

(h/t Michael Sheridan for the excerpt)  The date of the Ratner symposium November 9, 2016, aligns with the time-frame of Ratner’s travel and meeting with Assange as outlined by Butowsky in his lawsuit.   As noted Mrs. Ratner confirms that she did meet with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and that he did in fact tell her the leaked DNC emails came from inside the DNC.  It was not a Russian hack.

Hopefully this will spur the DOJ under Attorney General Bill Barr to launch an inquiry which must obviously start with the questioning of Ratner.

(…) If this information turns out to be true and accurate, the entire narrative around the DNC “hack” will have been proven to be intentionally manufactured.” (Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 7/21/2019)

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan points to the U.S. flag while speaking to former national security adviser Michael Flynn on December 22, 2018. (Credit: Dana Verkouteren via/AP)

A DC federal judge has ordered Michael Flynn’s former attorneys to appear in court next month after Flynn’s current legal counsel claims they haven’t been given the entire case file by the team at Covington & Burling.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, an Obama appointee, scheduled a status conference for August 27 at 11 a.m., and has invited a Senior Legal Ethics Counsel to weigh in on the conversation.

“In light of the representations made by defense counsel regarding the delay in receiving the client files, the Court hereby gives notice to the parties of the Court’s intent to invite Senior Legal Ethics Counsel for the District of Columbia Bar to attend the status conference and explain on the record the applicable District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct,” wrote Sullivan.

In a filing on Thursday, Flynn’s new attorneys Jesse Binnall, Sidney Powell and William Hodes wrote that they “do not yet have the entire file” from Flynn’s former lawyers and said they had been advised “it will be several weeks before all the information can be transferred.”

Flynn’s attorneys also reiterated that they already have a “massive” amount of files to review — spanning four hard drives that exceed 253 gigabytes of documents — and noted they had identified “crucial and troubling issues that should concern any court” without going into detail. –The Hill

Flynn’s former attorneys have responded, saying they will have the rest of the case files delivered by July 26, per Politico.

Meanwhile, Flynn’s former attorney testified on Tuesday against Flynn’s former business partner, 67-year-old Bijan Rafiekian, an Iranian-American who has been charged with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

Prosecutors called ex-Flynn attorney Robert Kelner as a witness Tuesday at the trial of Bijan Rafiekian, 67, an Iranian-American businessman who was Flynn’s key counterpart in a lobbying and consulting firm the retired Army general opened after leaving government, Flynn Intel Group.

During about two-and-a-half hours on the witness stand in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Kelner appeared to do some damage to Rafiekian by telling jurors that the Flynn associate never shared key information about links between the lobbying work and Turkish government officials.

Kelner also said Rafiekian, better known as Kian, seemed upset by the lawyers’ recommendation in early 2017 that the firm make a retroactive filing about the work Flynn’s firm did to try to build support for the extradition from the U.S. of a dissident Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. –Politico

“My recollection is that he was not happy about it. In part, he was not happy about the suggestion that FIG’s work primarily benefited the Government of Turkey,” said Kelner.

Attorney Robert Barnes raises the question: “Why was Covington firm ever representing Flynn given it knew it might be a material witness in a case related to Flynn? Did the government knowingly profit from this conflict?” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/16/2019)

(Twitter)

On July 19, 2019, Dr. Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, testifies at a Senate hearing and persuasively argues that Google helped influence 2.6 million votes in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Dr. Epstein has also been a long time supporter of the Clintons.

A month later, President Trump tweets about Dr. Epstein’s findings and Hillary Clinton responds by claiming her good friend’s study was “debunked.”

Breitbart explains, “…Hillary Clinton accused President Donald Trump of lacking evidence to support his claim that biased Google search results shifted votes in her favor in 2016.

However, she’s since been contradicted by Dr. Robert Epstein, the nation’s leading expert on the psychological effects of search engines — even though he himself was a Hillary supporter!

It was Dr. Epstein’s research that Trump cited Monday, leading Clinton to tweet that the psychologist and search engine expert’s findings had been “debunked” and was based on a sample of “21 undecided voters.”

Dr. Epstein says both of Clinton’s claims are wrong.

“I was and still am a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton,” said Dr. Epstein, in a comment to Breitbart News. “Her tweet, however, is inaccurate.”

“I’m not aware that any credible authority has ‘debunked’ my 2016 election monitoring project. When Google’s CEO said, in December 2018, that ‘we take issue with Epstein’s methodology,’ that’s hardly a debunking.”

Dr. Epstein also took issue with the allegation that his research was based on 21 undecided voters.

“My numbers are based on two things” said Epstein. “Results from my 2016 monitoring project, which preserved 13,207 election-related search results, along with the 98,044 web pages to which the search results linked. he data were collected by 95 field agents in 24 states — all registered voters — all of whom conducted their searches by drawing from a list 250 different search terms which independent raters had judged to be unbiased politically.”

The psychologist also highlighted “years of conducting randomized, controlled, counterbalanced, double-blind experiments — now encompassing tens of thousands of participants and five national elections in four countries — which allow me to calculate fairly precisely the impact that biased search results have on undecided voters.”

Epstein said his 2016 research “found significant pro-Hillary bias on Google.com, but not on Bing or Yahoo, and the pro-Hillary bias was present in all ten search positions on the first page of Google search results.”

“The minimum number of votes which I believe Google’s biased search results shifted to Hillary Clinton in the months leading up to the 2016 election was 2.6 million, and that estimate is conservative. It is conservative because I had no way of measuring the impact that repeated exposures to Google’s biased content would have had on users over time. I also had no way of knowing whether Google used targeting to influence users.”

Dr. Epstein/Twitter

(Read more: Breitbart, 8/20/2019)

Adam Schiff speaks with moderator Kristen Welker with NBC News as part of the Aspen Security Forum on July 20, 2019. (Credit: Austin Colbert/The Aspen Times)

“House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) has pivoted from ‘deepfake doom‘ influencing the 2020 election, to downplaying an upcoming watchdog report by the DOJ’s Inspector General due sometime in September.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Conference (where he had a pow-wow with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson last July), Schiff claims that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was co-opted into a scheme to protect President Trump by instigating a “fast track” report last year at Trump’s behest, according to the Washington Examiner‘s Daniel Chaitin.

Schiff claimed the president wanted McCabe, who briefly took over as acting FBI director after Trump fired James Comey in May 2017, investigated and his pension taken away and suggested someone such as former Attorney General Rod Rosenstein obliged the president by making a referral.

“The inspector general found that McCabe was untruthful. He may very well have been untruthful,” the California Democrat said, but noted that is not where main his concern lies.

The initiation of the inspector general’s inquiry in McCabe happened, Schiff said, “because the president wanted it politically.” He added, “Once you go down that road, it leads to disaster.” –Washington Examiner

“I have no reason to question the inspector general’s conclusion, but that investigation was put on a fast track. It was separated from a broader inspector general investigation, which is still ongoing,” said Schiff. “Why was that done? It was done so he could be fired to not get a pension. It was done to please the president when the initiation investigation is tainted. So are the results of that investigation.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/22/2019)

(Graphic credit: The Rebel Media)

“Last night, attorneys for the Democratic National Committee and CrowdStrike formally objected to subpoenas from Ed Butowsky, refusing to provide any records about whether DNC emails were leaked internally or hacked by Russians. The FBI also missed a deadline yesterday for providing records about Seth Rich.

Surprise, surprise. Three years after the purported Russian attack on DNC servers, and nobody outside the DNC or its contractors has seen those servers. Why not?

Frankly, I expected the DNC and CrowdStrike to balk, and I’ll be filing motions to compel in the next few weeks.

You will recall that Roger Stone forced federal prosecutors to admit in late May that neither the FBI nor Special Counsel Robert Mueller had investigated the DNC servers that allegedly were hacked by Russians. Instead, Mueller and the FBI relied exclusively on a redacted report from CrowdStrike.

To my knowledge, the U.S. Department of Justice had never before handed off a computer crime investigation to a third-party contractor hired by the alleged victim. Instead, the FBI (or some other law enforcement agency) had always investigated those crimes. Obviously, the DNC doesn’t want any independent investigation of its claims that Russian hackers — as opposed to a DNC employee like Seth Rich — were responsible for transferring DNC emails to Wikileaks.” (Read more: LawFlog, 7/23/2019)

“Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President Trump – telling him in private that he wasn’t the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while refusing to admit to this in public.

According to RealClearInvestigations‘ Paul Sperry, “Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will file a report in September which contains evidence that “Comey was misleading the president” while conducting an active investigation against him.

Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent. –RCI

According to two US officials familiar with Horowitz’s upcoming report on FBI misconduct, Comey was essentially “running a covert operation” against Trump – which began with a private “defensive briefing” shortly after the inauguration. RCI‘s sources say that Horowitz has poured over text messages between the FBI’s former top-brass and other communications suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of the president during their January 2017 meeting in New York.

(…) Sperry notes that Comey wasn’t working in isolation on the Trump effort. In particular, Horowitz has looked at the January 6, 2017 briefing on the infamous ‘Steele Dossier’ – a meeting which was used by BuzzFeed, CNN and others to legitimize reporting on the dossier’s salacious and unsubstantiated claims.

Comey’s meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump — a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN. -RCI

While Comey claims in his book, “A Higher Loyalty” that he didn’t have “a counterintelligence case file open on [Trump],” former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy notes that just because Trump’s name wasn’t on a formal file or surveillance warrant doesn’t mean that he wasn’t under investigation.

“They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him,” said McCarthy. “The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading. The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was the main subject.”

What’s more, the FBI couldn’t treat Trump as a suspect – formally, as they didn’t have the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. “They had no probable cause against Trump himself for ‘collusion’ or espionage,” he said, adding “They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing.”

What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting president. The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theories. Comey himself was an early skeptic of the Steele dossier — the opposition research memos paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that were the road map of collusion theories – which he dismissed as “salacious and unverified.” -RCI

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/23/2019)

United States attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham (Credit: Bob Child/The Associated Press)

“While most of the political world focused its attention elsewhere, special prosecutor John Durham’s team quietly reached out this summer to a lawyer representing European academic Joseph Mifsud, one of the earliest and most mysterious figures in the now closed Russia-collusion case.

An investigator told Swiss attorney Stephan Roh that Durham’s team wanted to interview Mifsud, or at the very least review a recorded deposition the professor gave in summer 2018 about his role in the drama involving Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election.

(…) For those who don’t remember, Mifsud is a Maltese-born academic with a VIP Rolodex who frequented Rome and London for years and engaged at the highest levels of Western diplomatic and intelligence circles.

Mueller’s team alleges that Mifsud is the person who fed a story in spring 2016 to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about Moscow possessing purloined emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was the earliest known contact in the now-debunked collusion narrative and the seminal event that the FBI says prompted it on July 31, 2016, to open its probe into the Trump campaign.

Joseph Mifsud is introduced as the Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, by Dr. Ivan Timofeev, Programme Director of the Valdai Club Foundation in May, 2016. (Credi: Valdai Club/YouTube)

Mueller concluded that Mifsud was a person with extensive Russia ties who planted the story about the Clinton emails in Moscow and then lied about his dealings with Papadopoulos when interviewed by the FBI in 2017. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Mifsud.

(…) Conservative defenders of President Trump, including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), have raised recent concerns that Mueller’s portrayal of the Mifsud-Papadopoulos contacts doesn’t add up.

Roh told me the information he is preparing to share with Durham’s team from his client will accentuate those concerns.

Mifsud was a “longtime cooperator of western intel” who was asked specifically by his contacts at Link University in Rome and the London Center of International Law Practice (LCILP) — two academic groups with ties to Western diplomacy and intelligence — to meet with Papadopoulos at a dinner in Rome in mid-March 2016, Roh told me.

A May 2019 letter from Nunes to U.S. intelligence officials corroborates some of Roh’s account, revealing photos showing that the FBI conducted training at Link in fall 2016 and that Mifsud and other Link officials met regularly with world leaders, including Boris Johnson, elected today as Britain’s new prime minister.

A few days after the March dinner, Roh added, Mifsud received instructions from Link superiors to “put Papadopoulos in contact with Russians,” including a think tank figure named Ivan Timofeev and a woman he was instructed to identify to Papadopoulos as Vladimir Putin’s niece.

Mifsud knew the woman was not the Russian president’s niece but, rather, a student who was involved with both the Link and LCILP campuses, and the professor believed there was an effort underway to determine whether Papadopoulos was an “agent provocateur” seeking foreign contacts, Roh said.

The evidence, he told me, “clearly indicates that this was not only a surveillance op but a more sophisticated intel operation” in which Mifsud became involved.” (Read more: The Hill, 7/23/2019)

Chuck Todd says Mueller was a complete failure and Dems can’t combat Right’s propaganda machine. (Credit: NBC News)

“Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd on Wednesday called former special counsel Robert Mueller‘s testimony “a disaster” for Democrats from an optics perspective.

“On substance, the Democrats got what they wanted,” Todd noted during a panel discussion anchored by NBC’s Lester Holt.

“They got him to confirm that he didn’t make a charge because of the Justice Department memo. He confirmed that you can still indict [President Trump] on these charges after he leaves office. And he seemed to confirm the idea that under any other circumstance, he likely would have filed some charges.”

“But he provided such, what do you call it, uncomfortable clarity?” Todd continued. “As they [Democrats] were using him for clarity, he’d somehow fog it up in how he’d do certain things. So look, on optics, this was a disaster,” Todd concluded.

The sentiment echoed remarks earlier by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who called the hearing “a disaster for the Democrats” and “for the reputation of Robert Mueller” during a discussion on the network that was retweeted by Trump.” (Read more: The Hill, 7/24/2019)

(Credit: MSNBC screenshot)

“A House Republican pulled out a screengrab from Wednesday’s CNN coverage of Robert Mueller’s hearing as part of a demonstration to argue that the special counsel cannot legally prove exoneration.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) was questioning Mueller on the legal concept of exoneration, arguing it doesn’t exist and that neither Mueller or Attorney General Bill Barr could “exonerate” someone.

“The report states, accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it does not exonerate him,” Turner said. “There’s no office of exoneration at the Attorney general’s office, no certificate at the bottom of his desk. Mr. Mueller, would you agree with me that the Attorney General does not have the power to exonerate?”

Mueller frequently declined to discuss the question, saying, “I’m not prepared to deal with a legal discussion in that arena.” (Read more: Mediaite, 7/24/2019)

********

All of Rep. Turner’s questions for Robert Mueller can be seen here:

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., questions former special counsel Robert Mueller during his July 24 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Gaetz addresses the Steele Dossier, the Trump Tower meeting and Peter Strzok.

Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein (Credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)

(…) “How Epstein entered Clinton’s orbit remains unclear. When the president released his initial statement on Epstein, he did not explain the multiple other trips he appears to have taken on the financier’s plane—including one flight to Westchester with Epstein, his alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, and an “unnamed female.”

Clinton also failed to mention the intimate 1995 fundraising dinner at the Palm Beach home of Revlon mogul Ron Perelman, where Clinton hobnobbed with the likes of Epstein, Don Johnson, and Jimmy Buffett. (Nearby, at Epstein’s own Palm Beach mansion, the money man allegedly abused hundreds of underage girls.)

Clinton and Epstein were on the guest list for a “small dinner party” hosted by Revlon mogul Ron Perelman to raise funds for the Democratic National Convention in 1995.

The two were clearly chummy by the early Clinton Foundation years, as attested to by a 2002 photo of Epstein and Clinton in Brunei that appeared in Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of the financier. In a 2002 piece for New York magazine about the Africa trip, Clinton praised Epstein as a “highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist.”

Bill Clinton is pictured with Jeffrey Epstein’s social fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, at Chelsea’s wedding in 2010. (Credit: Getty Images)

Politico recently claimed that Clinton and Epstein connected in the first few years after the president left office. Citing “people who know those involved,” the article pegged Maxwell as the glue connecting the two men, and Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, as the tie between the president and the British socialite. Politico noted that Maxwell had vacationed with the Chelsea in 2009, attended her wedding in 2010, and participated in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013. (A Clinton spokesperson denied Chelsea and Ghislaine were close.)

Documents in the Clinton Library, however, attest to much earlier links between Maxwell, Epstein, and the Clinton White House.

In late September of 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton hosted a reception for supporters who had contributed to recent White House renovations. The nearly $400,000 overhaul—which included new gold draperies and a 13-color woven rug for the Oval Office—was funded entirely by donations to the White House Historical Association, a private organization that helps preserve and promote the White House as a historical monument.

The reception took place at the White House residence from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., according to a copy of the president’s daily schedule. White House Social Secretary Ann Stock—who appears in Epstein’s little black book of phone numbers—was listed as the point of contact. According to multiple attendees, the evening included an intimate tour of the newly refurbished residence, followed by a receiving line with the president and first lady. Dessert was served in the East Room, where the couple thanked everyone for attending and announced the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.

Guests for the event, according to the invitation list, included the journalist and philanthropist Barbara Goldsmith, heiress Jane Engelhard, political consultant Cynthia Friedman, and “Mr Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell.” Epstein and Maxwell do not appear on the ‘regret list,’ and there is a letter ‘A’ next to both of their names, indicating they planned to attend. A press release from the event, put out by Hillary Clinton’s office, lists Epstein as a White House Historical Association donor.

Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to repeated requests for comment. (Read much more: The Daily Beast, 7/24/2019)

By Kimberly Strassel

A CSpan subtitle refers to the Mueller hearing on July 24, 2019, as an Obstruction of Justice Investigation by the House Judiciary Committee. (Credit: CSpan3)

(…) “The most notable aspect of the Mueller report was always what it omitted: the origins of this mess. Christopher Steele’s dossier was central to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe, the basis of many of the claims of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet the Mueller authors studiously wrote around the dossier, mentioning it only in perfunctory terms. The report ignored Mr. Steele’s paymaster, Fusion GPS, and its own ties to Russians. It also ignored Fusion’s paymaster, the Clinton campaign, and the ugly politics behind the dossier hit job.

Mr. Mueller’s testimony this week put to rest any doubt that this sheltering was deliberate. In his opening statement he declared that he would not “address questions about the opening of the FBI’s Russia investigation, which occurred months before my appointment, or matters related to the so-called Steele Dossier.” The purpose of those omissions was obvious, as those two areas go to the heart of why the nation has been forced to endure years of collusion fantasy.

Mr. Mueller claimed he couldn’t answer questions about the dossier because it “predated” his tenure and is the subject of a Justice Department investigation. These excuses are disingenuous. Nearly everything Mr. Mueller investigated predated his tenure, and there’s no reason the Justice Department probe bars Mr. Mueller from providing a straightforward, factual account of his team’s handling of the dossier.

If anything, Mr. Mueller had an obligation to answer those questions, since they go to the central failing of his own probe. As Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Mr. Mueller, how could a special-counsel investigation into “Russia’s interference” have any credibility if it failed to look into whether the Steele dossier was itself disinformation from Moscow? Mr. Steele acknowledges that senior Russian officials were the source of his dossier’s claims of an “extensive conspiracy.” Given that no such conspiracy actually existed, Mr. Gaetz asked: “Did Russians really tell that to Christopher Steele, or did he just make it up and was he lying to the FBI?”

Mr. Mueller surreally responded: “As I said earlier, with regard to Steele, that is beyond my purview.”

So it went throughout the whole long day. Republicans asked basic questions about the report’s conclusions or analysis, and Mr. Mueller dodged and weaved and refused to avoid answering questions about the FBI’s legwork, the dossier’s role and Fusion’s involvement. Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot asked how the report could have neglected to mention Fusion’s ties to a Russian company and lawyer. Mr. Mueller: “Outside my purview.” California Rep. Devin Nunes asked several questions about one of the men at the epicenter of the “collusion” conspiracy—academic Joseph Mifsud, whom former FBI Director Jim Comey has tried to paint as a Russian agent. Mr. Mueller: “I am not going to speak to the series of happenings as you articulated them.”

Then again, how could he? The Mueller team, rather than question the FBI’s actions, went out of its way to build on them. That’s how we ended up with tortured plea agreements for process crimes from figures like former Trump aide George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. They were peripheral figures in an overhyped drama, who nonetheless had to be scalped to legitimize the early actions of Mr. Comey & Co. Mr. Mueller inherited the taint, and his own efforts were further tarnished. That accounts for Mr. Mueller’s stonewalling.” (Read more: The Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2019)

The transcript of President Trump’s telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25th, 2019. The transcript was declassified and released on September 24, 2019. PDF copy here.

(Timeline editor’s note: I searched for a Scribd copy of the transcript and could not find a single one that didn’t have a distorted first page and the remaining pages were not there. So I’m posting the individual copies of each page, courtesy of The Epoch Times.)

(Graphic credit: freestateofV.com)

(…) On July 25, Trump spoke with new Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky on the phone and asked him to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr. He and Trump were both determined to discover the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign.

“They say a lot of it started with Ukraine,” Trump told the Ukrainian president. “I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people, and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it, if that’s possible.”

Trump had another matter he wanted to raise. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it. It sounds horrible to me.”

Other senior U.S. officials whose duties and areas of expertise required it were listening in on the call. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was listening, and so was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s Ukraine director. After the morning call, Vindman registered his concerns with two NSC staff lawyers, one of whom was his twin brother, Yevgeny. In the afternoon, Alexander Vindman phoned Eric Ciaramella, who also worked on Ukraine and Russia issues.

The next day Ciaramella wrote a memo about his conversation with Vindman: “The official who listened to the entirety of the phone call was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call.”

The official described the call as “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.”

The official asserted that the president used the call to persuade Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political rivals, chiefly former vice president Biden and his son Hunter. The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the president had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own reelection bid in 2020.

“The president,” Ciaramella wrote, “did not raise security assistance.”

Just two days after the curtain dropped on the Mueller investigation, Ciaramella was rebooting the collusion narrative. According to the story the CIA officer and his colleagues would tell, Trump was again in league with a foreign power to defeat a rival candidate. They rotated Ukraine in for Russia and Biden for Clinton.

The operation’s personnel drew from the same sources as the Russia collusion operation — serving officials from powerful government bureaucracies, the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department, as well as elected officials, political operatives, and the press. Therefore, the process was also the same: The actors would work the operation through the intelligence bureaucracy and the media to start an official proceeding, in this case an impeachment process. The play was set to begin.”  (Read more: JusttheNews, 9/27/2020)  (Archive)

Jonathan Li (Credit: BHR Partners)

Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associates sent Hunter more than $250,000 worth of wires and listed Joe Biden’s Delaware home as the beneficiary address, the House Oversight Committee found.

Hunter Biden was paid $10,000 by Chinese business associate Wang Xin on July 26, 2019 and $250,000 by Chinese business associate Jonathan Li on Aug. 2, 2019, according to the House Oversight Committee. Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home was listed as the beneficiary address on both wires, Fox News first reported. Joe Biden announced his 2020 presidential campaign before the payments from China listed his address.

🚨CHINA WIRES LIST JOE’S HOME AS BENEFICIARY ADDRESS 🚨

A few months after Joe Biden announced his candidacy in 2019, information available to the Committee shows Hunter Biden received two wires from China for $250,000 and $10,000, including from Jonathan Li.

More alarming, the…

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) September 26, 2023

Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified in July that Joe Biden had coffee with Li in Beijing and wrote a letter of recommendation for Li’s daughter’s college application. Li was CEO of BHR Partners, a joint business venture with Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners and Chinese investment firm Bohai Capital, Fox News reported.

House Oversight has released bank records showing the Biden family and its business associates received more than $20 million from Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Romanian and Kazakh business associates. The committee now has records showing the Biden family and its associates received an estimated $24 million, according to Fox News.

🚨BREAKING🚨

I just subpoenaed & obtained two bank wires revealing Hunter Biden received payments originating from Beijing in 2019 when Joe Biden was running for President.

Joe Biden’s Delaware home is listed as the beneficiary address for both money wires from China. pic.twitter.com/jzRX2o1hB1

— Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer) September 26, 2023

(Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/26/2023) (Archive)

George Papadopoulos leaves federal prison on December 7, 2018, after serving 12 days. (Credit: public domain)

“The Justice Department’s internal review of the Russia investigation is zeroing in on transcripts of recordings made by at least one government source who met with former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos overseas in 2016, specifically looking at why certain “exculpatory” material from them was not presented in subsequent applications for surveillance warrants, according to two sources familiar with the review.

The sources also said the review is taking a closer look at the actual start date of the original FBI investigation into potential collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians, as some allege the probe began earlier than thought. Both components are considered key in the review currently being led by Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney from Connecticut John Durham –– an effort sure to draw more attention in the coming weeks and months now that Robert Mueller’s testimony is in the rearview.

The recordings in question pertain to conversations between government sources and Papadopoulos, which were memorialized in transcripts. One source told Fox News that Barr and Durham are reviewing why the material was left out of applications to surveil another former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page.

“I think it’s the smoking gun,” the source said.

“These recordings have exculpatory evidence,” the other source added. “It is standard tradecraft to record conversations with someone like Papadopoulos—especially when they are overseas and there are no restrictions.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/26/2019)

“Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos told Fox News‘ Maria Bartiromo in an exclusive interview that he is heading back to Greece to retrieve $10,000 that he suspects was dropped in his lap as part of an entrapment scheme by the CIA or FBI — and federal investigators want to see the marked bills, which he said are now stored in a safe.

Screenshot of Maria Bartiromo and George Papadopoulos on July 28, 2019. (Credit: Fox News)

Papadopoulos said on Sunday Morning Futures he was “very happy” to see Devin Nunes, R-Calif., grill Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the summer 2017 payment during last week’s hearings — even though Mueller maintained, without explanation, that the matter was outside the scope of his investigation.

“I was very happy to see that Devin Nunes brought that up,” Papadopoulos said. “A man named Charles Tawil gave me this money [in Israel] under very suspicious circumstances. A simple Google search about this individual will reveal he was a CIA or State Department asset in South Africa during the ‘90s and 2000s. I think around the time when Bob Mueller was the director of the FBI.

So, I have my theory of what that was all about,” Papadopoulos added. “The money, I gave it to my attorney in Greece because I felt it was given to me under very suspicious circumstances. And upon coming back to the United States I had about seven or eight FBI agents rummaging through my luggage looking for money.”

According to Papadopoulos, “the whole setup” by the “FBI likely, or even the special counsel’s office,” was intended to “bring a FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation against me.” The FARA statute played a key role in the prosecutions of former Trump aides, including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/28/2019)

“With the Justice Department conducting a review of that operation, Rep. John Ratcliffe said during a Fox News interview Sunday that he trusts Attorney General William Barr and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to provide answers.

And while Ratcliffe said he does not want to prematurely accuse any specific person of a crime — as Democrats have done with President Trump — he stressed that it is clear crimes were committed by people during the Obama administration, including government officials.

“I think the first thing we need to do is make sure we don’t do what the Democrats have done,” the Texas Republican told host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “They accused Donald Trump of a crime and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation. So I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime, I just want there to be a fair process to get there. What I do know as a former federal prosecutor is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”

(…) Ratcliffe recommended three leads for the “investigation of the investigators.”

The first related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “You talked earlier about Michael Flynn. His phone call with the Russian ambassador was a highly classified NSA intercept. Someone in the Obama administration leaked that call to the Washington Post. That’s a felony,” he said.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed in February 2018 that the Justice Department was investigating that leak, and that he was overseeing the inquiry himself. “I am directing it personally and we’re pursuing it aggressively,” Sessions said at the time.

Ratcliffe suggested investigators also look into conflicting congressional testimony between Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. Fusion GPS was the opposition research firm behind British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which was full of unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia and was used extensively by the FBI in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify surveillance of Page. Ohr acted as an unofficial back channel between Steel and the FBI. “Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS in talking about the Steele dossier, said under oath that he and Bruce Ohr did not meet until after the election. Bruce Ohr said under oath that they met three months before the election. One of them is not telling the truth. We need a process to identify that,” Ratcliffe said.

The third area of interest, Ratcliffe said, is former FBI Director James Comey’s memos on his interactions with Trump before he was fired in May 2017. “Where it all started, Jim Comey. He admitted that he leaked his confidential conversations with the president to a reporter. Did that include classified information? We need a fair processes to find out answers to that,” Ratcliffe said.” (Read more:  Washington Examiner, 7/28/2019)

“Former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker appeared on Fox News to discuss the replacement of Dan Coats with John Ratcliffe as head of the ODNI, and the current status of AG Bill Barr’s ongoing reviews into prior DOJ and FBI (mis)conduct.

(…) Then comes the BOMBSHELL…. (@01:26 below) while seemingly not realizing what he just said, Whitaker outlines U.S. Attorney John Huber as reviewing “anything related to Comey’s memos and the like.”  Boom… There it is.

THAT finally explains why the DOJ is fighting the release of the David Archey declarations in the FOIA lawsuit by CNN.  [Listen carefully at 01:26 of the interview]

Until that obscure comment, likely a slip that not many would catch, there has been no valid explanation by the DOJ about any investigation of the Comey memos, which would also encompass the “Archey Declarations”.

If U.S. Attorney John Huber is indeed looking at those Comey memos, that would explain why the DOJ is fighting the release of the Archey Declarations in the DC Circuit Court with Judge James E Boasberg.  Now it makes sense.  That little obscure comment by Whitaker is a big effen’ deal.

(…) BACKSTORY – In the background of what was The Mueller Investigation, there was a FOIA case where the FBI was fighting to stop the release of the Comey memos.

Within that courtroom fight Mueller’s lead FBI agent David Archey wrote a series of declarations to the court describing the content of the memos and arguing why they should be kept classified.

The FOIA fight shifted.

The plaintiff, CNN, argued for public release of the content of the FBI agent’s descriptions, now known as the “Archey Declarations”.

After a lengthy back-and-forth legal contest, on June 7th Judge James E Boasberg agreed to allow the FBI to keep the Comey memo content hidden, but instructed the DOJ/FBI to release the content of the Archey Declarations.

On July 5th, the U.S. Department of Justice -under Attorney General Bill Barr- while waiting until the last minute (28 days since court order), filed a motion [full pdf below] to block the release of the Archey Declarations, despite the June 7th judicial order.

On July 19th, CNN filed a motion against the FBI and DOJ to force the release of the Archey Declarations (full pdf below), and enforce the order.

On July 25th, the DOJ filed a response requesting more time to reply. The DOJ is currently asking for more time, a delay until August 2nd, to file a response to a supportive motion from CNN that would force the DOJ to release the “Archey Declarations” (detailed explanations of what’s inside the Comey Memos).

The DOJ wants these declarations hidden.  Now we know why.

Here’s the last motion from CNN which demands the DOJ and FBI to comply with the prior ruling of June 7th, (embed pdf  – cloud pdf link here):

The DOJ is requesting more time, August 2nd, 2019, to respond to the CNN motion.

CNN wants the June 7th ruling enforced and the Archey Declarations, which describe the content of the Comey memos, released.

David Archey was the FBI lead agent on Robert Mueller’s team. Archey replaced Peter Strzok when Strzok was removed. Yes, Archey’s declarations might possibly describe material evidence the DOJ are using in ongoing matters. However, THIS IS IMPORTANT– the DOJ and FBI have never made that assertion in their court arguments.

Despite the original media FOIA lawsuit coming from CNN -vs- DOJ, there is no-one in the MSM covering this story. Here is the July 5th DOJ filing:

Here’s the background on the June 7th, 2019, ruling as we shared at the time:

Judge Boasberg was deciding what could be publicly released, meaning current redactions removed, based on two connected events: (#1) The content of the Comey Memos; and (#2) the declarations of lead FBI agent for Robert Mueller’s special counsel, David Archey, in describing those memos. CNN had filed a lawsuit to gain full access.

(Note: the descriptions of the Comey memos by FBI agent David Archey are known as the “Archey Declarations” – Read Here.)

For those who may not be aware, there are so many memos (dozens) when assembled they seem to make up an actual diary of moment-by-moment events, during the FBI investigation of Donald Trump, as documented by FBI Director James Comey.

♦ In the issue of the redactions within the Comey Memos, the judge doesn’t remove them. Some are ordered to be removed, some are approved to stay in place. The Comey memo aspect, and the redaction decision, is basically a splitting of the baby 50/50. It will be interesting, but meh, maybe not too much detail. – CNN ARTICLE

(pdf link)

The issues argued by the FBI lawyers to keep the Comey memos hidden surround sources and methods. The judge generally agreed to the potential for compromise, but also outlined several sections of redactions within the Comey memos where that argument doesn’t hold up. (The judge has read the fully unredacted memo content.)

♦ However, on the issue of the Archey Declarations there’s an opportunity for some very interesting information to surface. Here’s an example of currently existing redactions within the Archey Declarations:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 7/29/2019)

Judge John G. Koeltl (Credit: NYU Law)

“Hours before the Democratic presidential debates, a federal judge dismissed the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit that accused the Trump campaign, the Russian Federation, WikiLeaks and others of interfering in the 2016 elections.

“The primary wrongdoer in this alleged criminal enterprise is undoubtedly [sic] the Russian Federation, the first named defendant in the case and the entity that surreptitiously and illegally hacked into the DNC’s computers and thereafter disseminated the results of its theft,” wrote U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, a Clinton appointee.

Before weighing the evidence against Russia, however, Koeltl found that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act foreclosed him from holding it liable for the DNC server hack.

The DNC blamed a host of secondary actors in a conspiracy, including Russian-linked Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud; oligarchs Emin and Aras Agalarov; and Trump family members and campaign figures like Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone.

Finding these claims likewise unconvincing, Koeltl ruled that the U.S. Constitution protected them from liability related to disseminating stolen emails.

“The First Amendment prevents such liability in the same way it would preclude liability for press outlets that publish materials of public interest despite defects in the way the materials were obtained so long as the disseminator did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place,” the 81-page opinion states.

Citing precedent from the the Pentagon Papers case, Koeltl held that treating WikiLeaks as an accomplice “would render any journalist who publishes an article based on stolen information a co-conspirator in the theft.”

“If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet,” the opinion states. “But that would impermissibly elevate a purely private privacy interest to override the First Amendment interest in the publication of matters of the highest public concern. The DNC’s published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election. This type of information is plainly of the type entitled to the strongest protection that the First Amendment offers.”

WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange argued last year that the DNC’s lawsuit threatened freedom of the press. Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the American Civil Liberties Union echoed those concerns in a friend-of-the-court brief.” (Read more: Courthouse News, 7/30/2019)

Jeremy Fleming (r) with Prince Charles at GCHQ in July 2019. (Credit: Robert Weideman/European Pressphoto Agency)

“Newly surfaced text messages between Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his counterpart at MI-5, the UK’s domestic security service, have cast new light on Britain’s role in the FBI’s 2016 ‘Russiagate’ investigation, according to The Guardian.

Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about “our strange situation” as the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia, The Guardian has learned.

Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, now the head of GCHQ, also reveal their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a “wake-up call”, according to a person familiar with the matter. –The Guardian

McCabe and Fleming’s texts were “infrequent and cryptic,” but “occurred with some regularity” after the June 2016 Brexit referendum.

In his text message about the August 2016 meeting, Fleming appeared to be making a reference to Peter Strzok, a senior FBI official who travelled to London that month to meet the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. Downer had agreed to speak with the FBI about a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, who had told him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in the race. –The Guardian

In 2017, The Guardian reported that Britain’s spy agencies had played a key role in alerting their American counterparts of communications between members of the Trump campaign and “suspected Russian agents,” which was passed along to the US in what was characterized as a “routine exchange of information.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/30/2019)