“The National Archives is in the process of reviewing several thousand documents related to meetings held between senior Obama Administration and Ukrainian officials at the White House in 2016. The trove of documents was discovered after a request for documents was submitted by two top GOP Senators in November of last year, this website has learned.

The documents requested by Senator’s Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, are significant as they directly concern meetings that senior Obama Administration and Ukrainian officials had at the White House in 2016. The documents are expected to be reviewed for classification purposes, as well as Executive privilege by lawyers for both President Obama and President Donald Trump, officials told SaraACarter.com.

Johnson, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, and Grassley, Chairman of the Committee on Finance, sent the three page detailed request letter in November to David S. Ferriero, the head of the National Archives. The request was for “records of multiple White House meetings that took place in 2016 between and among Obama Administration officials, Ukrainian government representatives, and Democratic National Committee officials.”

Sen. Johnson, who spoke to this reporter, said:

“…we will continue our oversight. We are going to get to the bottom of what all has been happening here. Hopefully we will get access to the information to make it available to the American public so they really do understand what’s been happening.”

A source familiar with the ongoing Senate investigation told SaraACarter.com that the request for documents “is still in NARA’s notification process.”

The National Archives (NARA) did not immediately respond for comment. This story will be updated when and if NARA officials respond to the request. (Read more: Sarah Carter, 2/03/2020)  (Archive)

“Earlier today Senator Rand Paul delivered his remarks on impeachment from the Senate floor.  During his remarks Senator Paul highlighted the real and present danger of allowing agents within government to plot against a sitting president.

Senator Paul asks the same question he presented to Chief Justice John Roberts as the presiding officer of the Senate trial.  A question Roberts refused to ask:

“Are you aware that House intelligence committee staffer Shawn [sic] Misko had a close relationship with Eric Ciaramella while at the National Security Council together; and are you aware -and how do you respond to reports that Ciaramella and Misko may have worked together to plot impeaching the President before there were formal house impeachment proceedings?“

(Conservative Treehouse, 2/04/2020)  (Archive)

FBI Oversight Hearing – February 5, 2020

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified at an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Mr. Wray addressed Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse allegations during the 2016 election. “The failures highlighted in that report are unacceptable, period. They don’t reflect who the FBI is as an institution and they cannot be repeated,” he said. Mr. Wray added that his agency was implementing all of the recommendations made in the report and taking even further steps to ensure higher accountability.

(CSpan 2/05/2020)

Chuck Grassley (l) and Ron Johnson

“The Treasury Department has handed over documents to a pair of GOP Senate chairmen as part of a months-long probe into Burisma Holdings, Ukraine and Hunter Biden, according to the top Democrat on one of the panels.

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — the chairmen of the Finance and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees, respectively — sent a letter to the Treasury Department in November saying they were investigating “potentially improper actions” during the Obama administration.

The Treasury Department is complying with their request, according to a spokeswoman for Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, who noted that Democratic requests for information have been stonewalled.

(…) The development was first reported by Yahoo News, with a source telling the publication that the Treasury Department began complying with the Grassley-Johnson request in less than two months.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.   (Read more: The Hill, 2/06/2020)  (Archive)

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman not only funded the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus, he also bankrolled the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate campaign, reports Max Blumenthal.

Reid Hoffman (Credit: public domain)

(…) The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democrat Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money Democratic nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.

The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns.

Dmitri Mehlhorn (Credit: public domain)

The billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman is a top funder of novel Democratic Party social media campaigns accused of manipulating voters through social media. He is assisted by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a corporate consultant who pushed school privatization before joining Hoffman’s political empire.

One of the most consequential beneficiaries of Hoffman’s wealth is Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old former journalist and Obama for America veteran.

Once touted as “a weapon of a woman whose innovative tactics make her critically important to the Democratic Party,” McGowan’s name is now synonymous with the fiasco in Iowa. She happens to be married to a senior advisor to Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Back in December 2018, McGowan personally credited Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s Investing in US initiative with the birth of her dark money pressure group, Acronym.

“I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri [Mehlhorn], have supported and helped to fund over the past two years,” she declared on Twitter in December 2018.

At the time, Hoffman had just been exposed for funding Project Birmingham, a covert disinformation campaign consisting of false flag tactics that aimed to depress voter turnout and create the perception of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama senate election.

Hoffman and Mehlhorn have also faced scrutiny for their alleged operation of a series of deceptive pages that attempted to manipulate center-right users into voting for Democrats. Today, Acronym’s McGowan oversees a massive Facebook media operation that employs similarly deceptive techniques to sway voters.

Tara McGowan (Credit: public domain)

Through youthful, tech-centric operatives like McGowan, Hoffman and Mehlhorn are building up a massive new infrastructure that could supplant the party’s apparatus.

As Vanity Fair reported, “Hoffman and Mehlhorn, after all, are not just building a power base that could supplement traditional Democratic organizations, they are, potentially, laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely.” (Read more: Consortium News, 2/06/2020)  (Archive)

***

“Iowa’s voting debacle has renewed fears that the DNC is again working against Bernie Sanders and his grassroots campaign. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal breaks down the network of dark money billionaires, Democratic elites, and Russiagate profiteers behind the app that ruined the Iowa vote, and a wider effort to stop Sanders’ progressive momentum. Guest: Max Blumenthal, Editor of The Grayzone and author of “The Management of Savagery.”

Marie Yovanovich (Credit: Greg Nash/The Hill)

“Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a central figure in the House impeachment of President Trump, on Thursday warned the public against allowing the U.S. to become a country that silences those who stand up to the government.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Yovanovitch recalled how she and other civil servants spoke out last year when they believed the Trump administration was committing wrongdoing in its dealings with Ukraine.

She added that they also testified before Congress because they believed that speaking up about impropriety is the “American way.”

“I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death,” Yovanovitch wrote. “We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act. ”

(…) Yovanovitch said that it has been “shocking” to see the “criticism, lies and malicious conspiracies that have preceded and followed my public testimony.” But she asserted that she had no “regrets” about testifying before Congress, noting that “I did — we did — what our conscience called us to do.”

“We did what the gift of U.S. citizenship requires us to do,” she said.” (Read more: The Hill, 2/07/2020)  (Archive)

David Lipton (Credit: Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

“One of the most senior figures at the International Monetary Fund is stepping down in a move that will allow the Trump administration to influence who will take over as second-in-command at the financial watchdog.

David Lipton, 66, will step down as first deputy managing director after a nine-year tenure that made him the longest-serving official to hold what is effectively the number two position.

When he leaves at the end of this month he will be joined by Carla Grasso, chief administrative officer and one of three deputy managing directors appointed in 2015.

The moves will allow the IMF’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva to stamp her mark on the organisation four months after she took on the top job. It is understood she wants to raise the profile of the departmental directors who are the key people who will implement her policy on the ground.

However, according to precedent, the first deputy managing director of the IMF has traditionally been an American national, offsetting the fact that Europeans have always held the top job of the Washington-based multilateral lender.

(…) A year ago, David Malpass, a senior Treasury official, was appointed as president of the World Bank after being nominated by US president Donald Trump”. (Read more: Independent, 2/07/2020)  (Archive)

Alexander Vindman, (Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Eugene Vindman (Credit: public domain)

Anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother have been fired and escorted out of the White House by security, according to his attorney.

Vindman, a Ukraine specialist who sat on the National Security Council who was accused of being coached by House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), was present on a July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, when the US president asked that Ukraine investigate former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as claims of pro-Clinton meddling in the 2016 US election.

He was also notably counseling Ukraine on how to counter President Trump’s foreign policy according to the New York Times, which led some to go as far as accusing him of being a double agent.

The now-former White House employee, who admitted to violating the chain of command when he reported his concerns over the call, had been rumored to be on the chopping block for much of Friday.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 2/07/2020)  (Archive)

Gordon Sondland (Credit: public domain)

“President Donald Trump on Friday fired Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, just hours after firing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council official who testified at House impeachment proceedings against the commander-in-chief.

Like Vindman, Sondland testified at the impeachment proceedings.

“I was advised today that the president intends to recall me effective immediately as United States Ambassador to the European Union,” Sondland said in a statement, according to The New York Times.

The dual firings came days after Trump was acquitted in the Senate on charges that he abused his power by exerting pressure on Ukraine to open up politically charged investigations.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/07/2020)  (Archive)

“President Trump is making good on his promises to “drain the swamp” and cut Obama-era holdovers from his staff, especially the critical and recently controversial National Security Council.

Officials confirmed that Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien have cut 70 positions inherited from former President Barack Obama, who had fattened the staff to 200.

Many were loaners from other agencies and have been sent back. Others left government work.

The NSC, which is the president’s personal staff, was rocked when a “whistleblower” leveled charges that led to Trump’s impeachment.

(Washington Examiner, 2/10/2020)  (Archive)

Joe diGenova tells D.C. radio show “Mornings on the Mall” that a senior admin official told him the White House has identified the “Anonymous” NY Times writer, and that person’s departure is expected shortly.

*****

The Daily Caller writes:

(…) White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham previously called the anonymous official a “coward” and the claims within the book “nothing but lies.”

“Real authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact-checked–but this person is in hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer impossible,” she said in response to the news of the book’s release.

Just prior to the book’s release, the Justice Department took steps toward possibly unmasking the official. Joseph Hunt, assistant attorney general for the civil division, sent a letter to the anonymous official’s publisher and literary agency asking about the official’s access to classified information.

“If the author is, in fact, a current or former ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration, publication of the book may violate that official’s legal obligations under one or more nondisclosure agreements,” the letter reads.”

The back cover of the book, A Warning, Anonymous.

(Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/10/2020)  (Archive)

The Justice Department “established an intake process” for information Rudy Giuliani gathered about the Bidens in Ukraine, saying it “has an obligation to have an open door to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant.”

“We have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from Ukraine. There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine. There are a lot of cross currents. And we can’t take anything we receive from the Ukraine at face value.”

Watch Barr’s statement:

(Read more: Axios, 2/10/2020)  (Archive)

“Lou Dobbs shared some incredible information with his audience that highlights just how Machiavellian the DC system of tiered justice can be.

In a tremendous expose’ on Fox Business with Lou Dobbs, the intrepid bringer of sunlight outlined how the Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe leaked the FISA application used against Carter Page and how DC U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu dropped all charges related to the leak and instead only charged Wolfe with one count of lying to FBI investigators.   Wolfe only received a 60 day sentence.  WATCH:

(Conservative Treehouse, 2/11/2020)  (Archive)

Jessie Liu (Credit: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

“President Trump has reportedly withdrawn his nomination of Jessie Liu to serve as Treasury Department Undersecretary and Trump ally Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-Calif) seemed to unofficially confirm Tuesday’s news reports on  “Lou Dobbs Tonight” saying, “I am hearing now that the president has actually pulled that nomination so that would be good news.”

Liu, a veteran  Washington, D.C., attorney oversaw many politically-charged cases while including former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s case of lying to the FBI and longtime Trump ally Roger Stone ‘s case of lying to Congress. Liu stepped down from that role once Trump nominated her.

(…) Liu would have become the undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, as the Trump administration imposes economic sanctions as a national security tool. The attorney general said Liu had “served with distinction” as U.S. attorney.

Liu was scheduled for a Senate hearing on Thursday.” (Read more: Fox News, 2/11/2020)  (Archive)

“Four prosecutors from the Justice Department (DOJ) have withdrawn from their roles in the Roger Stone case, following the department’s decision to reduce the amount of prison time they are recommending for the Trump associate.

Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis,  Adam C. Jed, and Michael Marando

Prosecutors Aaron Zelinsky (pdf), Jonathan Kravis (pdf), Adam C. Jed (pdf), and Michael Marando (pdf) filed notices withdrawing from the case on Feb. 11. The move follows the department’s decision to override the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years made by the federal prosecutors.

Along with withdrawing from the case, Kravis also will resign from his position as an assistant U.S. attorney. Zelinsky and Jed previously worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

(…) The charges were related to allegations that Stone had made false statements to the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and attempted to persuade a witness to give false testimony and withhold pertinent information from investigators.

On Feb. 10, the department filed a sentencing memorandum that urged the court to consider a sentence of 87 to 108 months, or 7 to 9 years (pdf). The prosecutors said the lengthy sentence would “send the message that tampering with a witness, obstructing justice, and lying in the context of a congressional investigation on matters of critical national importance are not crimes to be taken lightly.”

Then in a reversal on Feb. 11, the department said it was going to reduce the prison term they were seeking. A senior DOJ reporter told media outlets that the DOJ was not briefed about the recommendation and that the department “finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses.” The department has not announced what sentencing recommendation it would amend to.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 2/11/2020)  (Archive)

(Donald Trump/Twitter 2/11/2020)

Hours later, The Federalist‘s Sean Davis reported that federal prosecutors were reportedly blindsided by the recommendation, which a Fox News source said the DOJ felt was “extreme, excessive, and grossly disproportionate” to Stone’s crimes.

“The Department was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation in the filing in the Stone case last night,” the DOJ official reportedly told Fox. “The sentencing recommendation was not what had been briefed to the Department.”

The report from Fox News suggested that DOJ was in the process of rescinding the rogue prosecutors’ recommendation. –The Federalist

What’s more, “Sources told The Federalist that Timothy Shea, who was recently appointed to take over as the top federal prosecutor in D.C. earlier this month, was bullied into agreeing to the sentence recommendation by Adam Jed and Aaron Zelinsky, who were originally tapped by Mueller to investigate whether Donald Trump treasonously colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 2/11/2020)  (Archive)

“Former U.S. Attorney for DC, Jessie Liu, is scheduled for a Senate confirmation hearing this upcoming Thursday at 10:00am.  There’s also an unreported background story connected to the DOJ, Rod Rosenstein and Ms. Liu so controversial, it’s as big as Spygate.

In the event any Senator on the approval committee would be brave enough to question the participant here’s the story:

EVENT ONE – On February 9th, 2018, the media reported on text messages from 2017 between Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Mark Warner and Chris Steele’s lawyer, a lobbyist named Adam Waldman.  In 2017 and 2018 Mr. Waldman represented the interests of dossier author Chris Steele and Russian Billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

There was some initial media discussion of the text messages, and some eyebrows raised over why the Vice-Chairman of the SSCI would make statements saying “he would rather not have a paper trail” around the Steele communication, but generally speaking the DC media dropped the story quickly.  It just didn’t fit the anti-Trump narrative in early 2018.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of media curiosity, some rather elementary questions were never asked (let alone answered).  Questions including: •Why were the 2017 text messages between Mark Warner and Adam Waldman captured?  •Who captured them?.. and, perhaps more importantly: •why were they released?

The February 2018 story soon disappeared, and no-one ever paid enough attention to go back and see the answers to the questions….

We did.

EVENT TWO – Four months after the Mark Warner texts were made public, on June 8th, 2018, another headline story surfaced.  An indictment for Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Security Director James Wolfe was unsealed on June 7th, 2018.

Mr. Wolfe was indicted for leaking information from within the SSCI to four journalists; and lying to FBI investigators.

Within the indictment we discover the FBI were conducting an ongoing leak investigation throughout 2017.  Within that investigation a top-secret document was transferred to the custody of SSCI Security Director James Wolfe on March 17, 2017.  The details inside that document were leaked to the media.

The indictment describes FBI investigators informing Mr. Wolfe in October of 2017 about their investigation of national security leaks.  In December of 2017, Mr. Wolfe was confronted with evidence of his leaking to journalists including a woman now working for the New York Times named Ali Watkins, with whom he was having a sexual relationship – implied as a possible quid-pro-quo.

Wolfe left the SSCI quietly in mid-December and resigned shortly thereafter.   No-one, outside of the principal characters involved, knows about the investigation until six months later, June 2018, when the indictment is made public.  [Keep this in mind]

The June 2018 media coverage of the Wolfe indictment primarily focused on the affair with Ms. Watkins and Wolfe’s lying to investigators.   Headlines quickly disappeared as the case moved into the formality of legal proceedings between the DOJ and Wolfe’s defense.

No-one drew a connection between the February ’18 publicity of SSCI Vice-Chairman Warner’s text messages and the June ’18 release of the FBI investigation of Wolfe from inside the SSCI the prior year (2017).

EVENT THREE – Slightly less than two months after the release of the Wolfe indictment, another headline story.  On July 21st, 2018, the DOJ/FBI declassified and publicly released the FISA application(s) used against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The release was connected to a FOIA case filed by the New York Times the year prior [NOTE THIS].  There has never been a good explanation of why the application was declassified and released.  Despite the pre-existing NYT FOIA case, it never made sense why the DOJ/FBI did not attempt to deny the FOIA request.  The request was a FOIA for FISA information, the highest security classification possible.  It would have been very easy to deny the FOIA simply because the NYT was seeking classified documents.  A no brainer for shielding any release.  FISA is classified as “Top-Secret”.

So, given the nature of the FISA application itself; and considering the DOJ had denied a similar request from congress; why did the DOJ/FBI suddenly decide it was okay to release the FISA application to the public?

The media discussion of the FISA application release was very heavy.  The story consumed a great deal of air time, print coverage and debate from the release on July 21st, 2018, all the way through to the Inspector General Horowitz report of December 2019, and that coverage continues through today.   However, just like the Warner Texts; and just like the Wolfe indictment; no-one bothered to go back and connect the three component stories.

♦ Within the Wolfe indictment you’ll notice the “Top Secret” document picked-up by SSCI Director James Wolfe took place on March 17th, 2017:

♦ Within the Mark Warner text messages you’ll note the SSCI Vice-Chairman went into the SSCI Secured Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on March 17th, 2017, shortly after 4:00pm:

♦ Within the declassified and released FISA application you’ll notice the copy date from the FISA clerk for the FISA application was March 17th, 2017:

The information within the three events (Warner Text release, Wolfe Indictment release, and Carter Page FISA release) shows the connection of the events.  James Wolfe took custody of the Carter Page FISA, delivered it to the SCIF, it was reviewed by SSCI Vice-Chair Mark Warner, and then leaked by James Wolfe.

It was the Carter Page FISA application that James Wolfe leaked to Ali Watkins as outlined within the unsealed June 2018 indictment.

Sidebar, a fourth albeit buried public release on December 14, 2018, confirmed everything.  The FBI filed a sentencing recommendation proving it was the Carter Page FISA that was leaked:

I only share the sidebar (out of chronological sequence) to emphasize there is no doubt it was the FISA application that James Wolfe leaked.  (Don’t get hung up here).

This explains (slightly, but there’s a much bigger story) why the DOJ/FBI released the FISA application in July 2018, as the result of a New York Times FOIA request.

The investigators within the DOJ/FBI knew the New York Times already had the FISA application from the James Wolfe leak to journalist Ali Watkins.

It’s going to get complex and I’m likely to lose all except the most dedicated readers who can understand what comes next…..

Keep in mind when the FISA court released the application copy to Wolfe on March 17th, 2017, there was only the original application from October 21st, 2016, and one renewal from January that existed.  [The release was March 17th, 2017 – the April and June 2017 renewals had not taken place.]

Additionally, within the July 2018 public release (of the March 17th 2017 copy), the FBI investigators redacted all dates relating to the copy they released to Wolfe.  AND, in all subsequent releases of any information from the FBI -through the declassification process- (including the initial version of the IG report on FISA) those dates were always redacted.

There has purposefully never been a clean copy release of the original FISA application and the three renewals.  Therefore there has never been a clean copy release without date redactions – which includes the FISC copy dated March 17th.

When the DOJ/FBI released its July 2018 FOIA compliant set of FISA application(s) they didn’t just print a new copy, instead they re-released the Wolfe version and then added the last two renewals.

RECAP Chronology:  February 2018 release of Warner Texts.  June 2018 unsealed Wolfe Indictment.  July 2018 release FISA application.  All three of these releases are connected to one much larger story.

Knowing that James Wolfe was caught by the FBI and DOJ leaking the FISA application, why wasn’t the SSCI Security Director ever charged with leaking classified information?

Here’s where the poop hits the fan.

Here’s the cover-up.

Here’s where another event comes in.

Keep in mind SSCI Vice-Chairman Senator Mark Warner was the impetus for the FISA Court releasing the March 17th copy; also keep in mind the purpose of the text messages between Senator Warner and Chris Steele’s lawyer Adam Waldman.

During his initial summer and fall negotiations with the DOJ, James Wolfe threatened to subpoena the SSCI in his defense.  The implication was that Wolfe was directed to leak the FISA by members of the committee; and/or Wolfe was operating independently but under the assumption of alignment with SSCI members who were not averse to Wolfe’s leak.

The investigation of Wolfe (October through December 2017) explains how and why the Warner text messages surfaced in Feb 2018.  It’s highly likely Warner’s communication with Waldman was intercepted by FBI investigators who then questioned the Vice-Chairman about those texts.  Or it’s possible/probable the FBI investigators asked Warner if he was aware of Wolfe’s leaks.

That investigative scenario prompted Senator Warner to attempt to get out in front of the story about his secret and covert communication efforts to contact and meet with Christopher Steele.  Thus in February 2018 the Warner texts hit the media.  The texts go from February 2017 though May 2017 [SEE HERE] and encompass the exact period when Wolfe leaked the FISA application – March 2017 (with April discussion).

As the Wolfe defense team discussions with the DOJ played out throughout the fall of 2018, there was little movement. Then came another event, the November 2018 mid-term election where Democrats took control over the House.

Meanwhile, in the lame-duck congressional period Senators on the SSCI asked the DOJ to go easy on Wolfe:

Immediately after the 2018 mid-terms DC Attorney Jessie Liu dropped most of the charges against Wolfe, and he was allowed -under a plea agreement- to plead guilty to only one count of lying to investigators.

December 11th, DOJ sentencing memo [HERE], and then a very pissed-off FBI follow-up within the DOJ response to the Defense sentencing memo [HERE] dated December 14th.

In essence, after the November election, SSCI Director Wolfe was allowed to avoid prosecution for leaking top-secret classified documents; and the bigger issue was covered-up.

DAG Rod Rosenstein was in charge; the Mueller investigation was ongoing; and DC U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu signed-off on the plea deal.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/11/2020)  (Archive)

Brandon Van Grack

“One of special counsel Robert Mueller’s former prosecutors, Brandon Van Grack, argued in a Wednesday filing that the case against Michael Flynn should not be dismissed in light of “egregious government misconduct,” because the FBI’s extensive FISA abuse uncovered by the DOJ’s Inspector General “has no relevance to his false statements to the FBI on January 24, 2017.”

“Beyond failing to identify misconduct that satisfies the legal test cited in his own brief — that the misconduct be ‘so grossly shocking and so outrageous as to violate the universal sense of justice’ — the defendant fails to identify any government misconduct in this case,” Van Grack continues.

JUST IN: Prosecutor Brandon Van Grack makes a new filing in the FLYNN case, arguing that the IG’s findings of FBI FISA problems has no bearing on Flynn’s effort to throw out his guilty plea for lying to the FBI. Kyle Cheney@kyledcheney  February 12, 2020

(Brandon Van Grack – court filing)

Except – Flynn attorney Sidney Powell says the FBI excluded crucial information from his ‘302’ form – the original draft of which stated that Flynn was honest with the FBI agents who interviewed him (one of whom was Peter Strzok).

The prosecution filing also argues that a slew of failures that the Justice Department’s inspector general found in the FBI’s handling of surveillance applications merit serious attention but that the faults involved Carter Page, a Trump 2016 foreign policy adviser, and not Flynn.

“The government does not dispute the seriousness of the ‘significant errors and omissions’ described in the Report,” Van Grack wrote. “But the compliance and diligence failures and ‘significant errors’ as they relate to the Page FISA applications do not warrant or necessitate the dismissal of the charge against the defendant.” –Politico

In short – failings by the same cabal within the FBI that handled the Clinton email investigation, the Trump investigation, and the offshoot investigations (Flynn, Stone, etc.) – don’t matter.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 2/12/2020)  (Archive)

John Brennan (Credit: Twitter)

The NY Times notes that over the last several months, “Durham and his team have examined emails among a small group of intelligence analysts from multiple agencies, including the C.I.A., F.B.I., and National Security Agency, who worked together to assess the Russian operation.”

Durham has reportedly interviewed these analysts and has specifically focused on information that the CIA reportedly attempted to withhold from other agencies—including the identity and placement of a CIA source inside the Kremlin.

The article noted that intelligence analysts at the NSA wanted to know more about the “identity and placement” of a specific Russian source, in order “to weigh the credibility of his information.” But, according to the article, the CIA “was initially reluctant to share details about the Russian’s identity but eventually relented.”

Information about the alleged Russian CIA spy was first reported in September 2019 by the NY Times and was the focus of an article by The Epoch Times.

The New York Times noted in the article that the source was “outside of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, but saw him regularly and had access to high-level Kremlin decision-making — easily making the source one of the agency’s most valuable assets.”

But the article also noted that there were some doubts within the CIA. Following the refusal of extraction in late 2016, some officials within the CIA “wondered whether the informant had been turned and had become a double agent, secretly betraying his American handlers.”

The CIA’s Russian source was apparently highly regarded by Brennan, who felt the identity of the source was so important that, according to the NY Times article, he “kept information from the operative out of President Barack Obama’s daily brief in 2016.”

“Instead, Mr. Brennan sent separate intelligence reports, many based on the source’s information, in special sealed envelopes to the Oval Office,” according to the article.

But the nature of the source raises some significant questions. If, for example, the source was indeed so highly placed, why then was the United States so seemingly ill-informed regarding many of Russia’s foreign policy actions, particularly in Syria or Crimea, when Russia forcibly annexed the peninsula from Ukraine?

And if this asset was indeed so highly placed, how is it that Russia was able to hack the DNC’s servers and extract their emails without the CIA’s advance knowledge of the alleged Russian activities?

A June 2017 article from The Washington Post had previously touched on the existence of a “Russian source,” noting that Brennan had received “an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.”

The Post noted that “the intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives—defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.”

This was the same information that Brennan reportedly conveyed “in special sealed envelopes to the Oval Office.” However, as the Post noted, “despite the intelligence the CIA had produced, other agencies were slower to endorse a conclusion that Putin was personally directing the operation and wanted to help Trump.”

There is another significant problem, as well. The Mueller report, after two lengthy years of investigation, concluded there was no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, thereby proving a key part of the alleged Russian activities incorrect.” (Read more: Jeff Carlson/themarketswork, 2/13/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the FBI for all records related to murdered Democratic National Committee (DNC) Voter Expansion Data Director Seth Rich.

Rich, 27, was murdered on July 10, 2016, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. The DC police reports that Rich was killed at approximately 4:19 a.m. in the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW, Washington, DC.

No one has been charged in connection with Rich’s death. The case has not been closed, and the DC police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the FBI failed to respond to a July 26, 2019, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all records related to Rich and his murder (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:20-cv-00385)).

“There is significant public interest in the Seth Rich murder and the FBI’s game-playing on document production in this case is inexcusable,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/13/2020)  (Archive)

“Former Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe will not face criminal charges for allegedly lying to agents about a leak to reporters, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) letter released Friday afternoon.

J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, two officials in the DOJ’s Fraud & Public Corruption Section, wrote to McCabe’s lawyers, saying, “after careful consideration, the Government has decided not to pursue criminal charges against your client, Andrew G. McCabe.”

McCabe was under investigation for reportedly lying to FBI agents in 2017 who were investigating a leak to the Wall Street Journal which he allegedly authorized. The Washington Post reported that a grand jury was impaneled for the case in 2018. Breitbart’s Joshua Caplan wrote:

In April, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long-awaited report concluded McCabe made false statements to U.S. officials on at least four occasions and improperly disclosed information to then-Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett “to advance his personal interests over those of the Justice Department.”

(Read more: Breitbart, 2/14/2020)  (Archive)

“In latest eye-popping move by the Department of Justice, Attorney General William Barr has tasked a U.S. Attorney to review the case against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, is an appointee of President Donald Trump and will reportedly be examining the circumstances of the FBI’s Flynn interview.

Jensen will not be doing this by himself, according to a DOJ official.

Here’s what we know about Jensen.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Jeffrey Jensen (Credit: Wesley Law/St. Louis Magazine)

Jensen was nominated by Trump in July 2017 and subsequently confirmed by the Senate in Oct. 2017, his DOJ bio notes. Jensen’s office in the Eastern District of Missouri prosecutes all manner of federal crimes, whether terrorism or public corruption.

Jensen’s path to U.S. Attorney is relevant for the Flynn case. After beginning a career as an accountant, he joined the FBI and was an agent for a decade. Suffice it to say, he is plenty familiar with FBI procedures. That, no doubt, played a role in his selection in examining the FBI’s role in the Flynn case.

A Jan. 2019 profile of Jensen shed more light on his time before and after he joined the FBI:

I definitely zigzagged. I started out as a CPA, because at the time I graduated from college, that was the most likely area to find employment. But then the FBI was hiring accountants, because of the savings and loan failures of the late 1980s, and I’d always wanted to be in the FBI.

(…) I was primarily in the white-collar crime group, and for a time I was a member of the FBI SWAT team. When I was an agent, I was just fascinated by what happened in the courtroom. I decided I’d like to be an assistant U.S. attorney. So after 10 years with the FBI, I took five years to go through law school at night. I was an assistant U.S. attorney for 10 years, and then I went into private practice doing corporate compliance work. I’ve got four kids, and I was trying to pay for them. Then this job opened.”

(Read more: Law & Crime, 2/14/2020)  (Archive)

(Crowdstrike header on LinkedIn)

“A lot of people are laughing at the huge mistake the Democrats made by trying to impeach President Trump. Besides being stuck with Trump, the argument goes, they may also pay a heavy price in November for single-mindedly pursuing impeachment without being able even to gesture at any underlying crime.

But it might be a good idea to think a bit before joining in.

All the ruckus Democrats raised over Trump’s concern about the Biden family’s wheeling and dealing in Ukraine turned out to be very useful in ways some Republicans are not calculating. It did, after all, make the rest of us forget the other subject broached in that now historic chat with President Volodymyr Zelensky: the alleged Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers that we’re all supposed to think netted the emails WikiLeaks published during the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

The Democrats’ apparently self-destructive obsession allowed the media, once more, to distract from the crucial question on which the president keeps trying to focus our attention: Why did the DNC repeatedly reject FBI and Department of Homeland Security requests to examine their supposedly hacked machines?

Whenever Trump raises that question, the establishment press tries to smother public interest by carpet-bombing us with stories about how delusional he is. We’re told over and over again that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary occurred and the words “debunked conspiracy theory” are scattered like shrapnel at anyone bold enough to dissent.

But it’s all misdirection and blatant lies.

FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson both testified to Congress about the DNC’s reluctance to cooperate in a case the Democrats nonetheless relentlessly hyped as tantamount to an act of war.

Jeh Johnson testifies to the House Intel Cmte. on June 21, 2017, the DNC did not cooperate in any way with DHS to respond to the hacks. (Credit: CSpan)

Comey claimed he didn’t know why the DNC rejected the FBI’s “[m]ultiple requests at different levels” to collect forensic evidence. Johnson was so unsettled by the DNC’s refusal even so much as to discuss the case with the DHS that he twice remarked he “should have brought a sleeping bag and camped out in front of” their headquarters.

A week before Comey’s remarks, the DNC even tried to shift the blame, claiming it was all the FBI’s fault for having “never requested access.” Apart from Comey’s testimony, they were also contradicted in no uncertain terms the very next day, when a senior FBI official told The Hill:

The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise . . . This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information.

That third party was CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm on the DNC’s payroll. The firm was the only entity ever allowed to inspect the Democrats’ allegedly hacked machines as well as the first to finger Russia publicly for the alleged crime. Trump also mentioned CrowdStrike to Zelensky.

But the establishment press spent a couple of days bullying us into thinking any concerns about CrowdStrike were nuts. Then Democrats started hysterically shouting their patent nonsense that Trump’s remarks about Biden were an impeachable offense. The unrelenting media coverage of their obviously hopeless quest to oust him kicked in.

Within just a few days of hearing their name, everyone had forgotten all about CrowdStrike. And a public discussion of the very questionable role the company played in the Democrats’ efforts to destroy the president was, thus, forestalled.

What a Lucky Coincidence

(Credit: Wikileaks)

Neither Hillary Clinton nor any of her surrogates ever once challenged the authenticity of any of the emails WikiLeaks published. Instead, from the very beginning, her sole strategy was relentlessly hammering home the narrative that there was a Russian plot allegedly responsible for making them public.

Paying any attention to all the proof of her corruption and incompetence would be unpatriotic, Clinton warned, because its publication was part of a nefarious plot hatched by that arch-fiend Putin to throw the election to Trump. The real story here, we were told, is that the Kremlin attacked, not just her campaign, but literally all of America on Trump’s behalf. A New York Times headline published a few days after the DNC emails started dropping said it all: “Democrats Allege D.N.C. Hack Is Part of Russian Effort to Elect Donald Trump.”

The Times supported Clinton’s allegations by citing some unnamed “researchers” who’d claimed that “the D.N.C.’s server had been breached by Russian intelligence agencies.” Besides not naming CrowdStrike, the Times failed to mention that the “researchers” it used to substantiate the Democrats’ accusations were on the DNC’s payroll.

It sure was lucky that CrowdStrike’s conclusions turned out to be so useful for Hillary Clinton. The DNC’s tech firm couldn’t have come up with something better suited to transform WikiLeaks’ disturbing revelations about her into suspicions about her opponent if they’d concocted it out of thin air just for that purpose.

Interestingly, CrowdStrike had first publicly announced the alleged Russian breach of the DNC’s servers exactly two days after WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange had warned that the DNC emails were coming by declaring he had “upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails pending publication.”

But CrowdStrike’s conclusions wouldn’t have been very useful at all had they been the only ones fingering the Russians. To get any mileage out of their allegations, Clinton obviously needed confirmation by some authority not on the DNC’s payroll.

A clipping of the NYT headline and featured photo.

And, lo and behold, the very next day she was blessed by yet another remarkable coincidence. Some anonymous FBI officials just happened to leak information to the New York Times for a follow-up story with the incredibly useful headline: “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C.”

According to the Times, a “federal investigation, involving the F.B.I. and [other] intelligence agencies” had concluded that “the Russian government was behind the theft” of the emails WikiLeaks had just published. So certain was Russia’s guilt that senior intelligence agency officials had even informed President Obama.

Thanks to that timely leak, Clinton could now cite the authority of the U.S. intelligence community to back her insistence that the dreaded embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, was the one responsible for informing American voters about her gross unfitness for office. She was thus spared reliance on the word of a private contractor working on the DNC’s dime whose interest even her allies in the media would have to admit was conflicted.

Or so we were led to believe, at any rate.

A Highly Respected, High-Class Entity

Though the New York Times’ follow-up story did report that the DNC had hired CrowdStrike, the Times either didn’t know or neglected to mention that Comey’s FBI had accepted CrowdStrike’s forensics in lieu of being allowed to collect any themselves. More than five months would pass before Americans learned that the official conclusions Hillary Clinton so successfully wielded as a shield to deflect any damage inflicted by WikiLeaks email releases on to Trump had relied on forensics commissioned by her good friends at the DNC.

James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on ‘Russian intelligence activities’ January 10, 2017. (Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)

Besides Comey’s January 2017 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the DNC had rejected “[m]ultiple [FBI] requests at different levels,” to collect forensic evidence, he also testified twice more (once before the House in March and again to the Senate in June) about their adamant refusal to cooperate with the federal agencies investigating the alleged Russian espionage Clinton has never stopped hyping.

On all three occasions, Comey repeatedly tried to downplay any natural concern about the DNC’s recalcitrance by quickly adding that they’d allowed someone else to examine their servers who had eventually shared “what they saw there” (as he’d put it in January 2017) with the FBI. Not once did Comey refer to CrowdStrike by name, instead preserving their anonymity by means of descriptions like “the private party.” He also made sure to always toss in at least one confidence-inspiring superlative. In his January testimony, CrowdStrike was “a highly respected private company.” In March, they were “pros.” In June, the assembled Senators learned that the FBI had gotten its evidence from “a high-class entity.”

Apart from sounding like a third-rate salesman with a head injury, Comey also tortured the English language in what seemed like an attempt to disclaim any knowledge of exactly what information CrowdStrike had turned over or even any precise idea of how his investigation had been conducted.

During his June testimony, when Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) pointed out the obvious importance of examining evidence firsthand, Comey responded:

It is but what was briefed to me by the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

But no one seemed to notice that Comey had contradicted this reassuring story of CrowdStrike’s promptness in March, when U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas) pressed him on exactly when the company turned over its forensics to the FBI. Comey first said he couldn’t recall, that it might have been in June, but that he very well might be wrong. One suspects to his great chagrin, National Security Agency chief Admiral Michael Rogers happened also to be testifying and chimed in, reminding Comey that the handoff had occurred in mid-June 2016. Comey was forced to agree without any commitment-dodging qualifications; meaning that, contrary to his later testimony, a full six weeks had gone by since CrowdStrike had started investigating the DNC breach in early May before they handed anything over to the FBI.

On whichever occasion it turns out Comey had falsely testified about when he’d received CrowdStrike’s forensics, one can understand why he might have wished to palm off responsibility on “the people who were his folks at the time” for accepting it. Even if he had no recourse against the DNC’s dogged determination to keep the FBI from collecting any evidence themselves, that didn’t justify accepting it from a private contractor the DNC had hired as a substitute regardless of how “high class” an “entity” they were.

A Concrete Motive

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tells his audience “it’s illegal” for them to read Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails but “it’s different for the media.” (Credit: CNN)

Contrary to all the media gaslighting about Trump’s suspicions being utterly groundless, it was exactly as though someone had reported a burglary but then refused to give the cops access to the crime scene. Even if doing so was perfectly within the victim’s rights, that wouldn’t make it okay for law enforcement to accept evidence from a private investigator he’d hired as a substitute.

Indeed, the self-professed victim’s adamance that law enforcement not collect any evidence themselves would make his eagerness to hand over a privately commissioned dossier all the more suspect. Especially if the private eye’s conclusions just so happened to tarnish the reputation of someone possessing proof of his client’s misdeeds.

Forensics gathered without any supervision by a private contractor hired by the DNC couldn’t possibly satisfy any reasonable chain of custody requirements. And the utility of CrowdStrike’s conclusions to the Clinton campaign made mischief more than just an abstract possibility; it provided a concrete motive.

Both WikiLeaks’ DNC emails and those from John Podesta’s Gmail account published a few months later were undeniably authentic. The proof of Hillary Clinton’s corruption and incompetence they contained was all in her own words or those of her closest advisors. None of them ever even once tried denying any of it. Instead, from the moment their own words appeared in public to haunt them, they endlessly chanted “Russia, Russia, Russia!” to try and make them haunt Trump instead.

Absent CrowdStrike’s conclusions, Clinton’s campaign would have had no response whatsoever to all the damaging emails by and about her.

But why on earth had the DNC let CrowdStrike announce they’d been hacked by Russia at all? Publicizing the breach only made the Democrats look bad at a time when Clinton was being battered daily about her unsecured private email server. Comey’s surprise announcement exonerating her was still three weeks away. What purpose could announcing the Russian DNC breach have possibly served if not to deflect attention away from the damaging emails Assange had forewarned would be released just two days before. Why better strategy than to make it seem like they were part of a Russian plot to help Trump? If nothing else, Comey ought to have considered all this before blithely accepting CrowdStrike’s DNC-funded forensics.

Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta’s emails were stolen in March 2016, when he foolishly gave the password to his Gmail account away to a fake representative of Google. Ironically, the pilfered emails themselves contain the correspondence documenting Podesta’s pathetic but immensely consequential blunder. Clinton’s campaign knew almost immediately that a lot of devastatingly irrefutable information had fallen into unfriendly hands. They must have quickly convened some kind of investigation to develop a strategy for dealing with its likely disastrous publication during the campaign. We know the strategy on which they ultimately settled was claiming that Russia had hacked Podesta’s emails as a favor to Trump.

But, of course, we’ve never heard anything about how they first developed it.

Some Hidden Opportunity

What we do know is that, on April 29, 2016, CrowdStrike supposedly completed a five-week investigation for the DNC of an entirely unrelated computer episode that had occurred in mid-December. That means the DNC had called CrowdStrike in to work three months after the incident we’re supposed to think they were investigating but only around five days after they discovered the theft of Podesta’s emails. And, of course, whoever dealt with the technical aspects of Podesta’s stolen emails would need some other excuse for any work they were doing at the DNC.”

(Read much more: Michael Thau/AClearerPicture, 2/14/2020)  (Archive)

Judge Amy Berman Jackson (Credit: public domain)

“Several months ago, during the early days of Roger Stone’s trial, the prosecution and defense teams were busy fighting over what jurors would end up making the final cut for the official jury pool and alternates. Obama appointed Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who has ruled against every conservative figure or cause that has ever come before her court, would routinely ignore the concerns of Stone’s defense team about juror bias.

Judge Jackson didn’t care that potential jurors had political backgrounds or had given inappropriate and extremely biased answers in their jury questionnaires.

In fact, Judge Jackson agreed with prosecutors to remove a potential juror because she had at one point, nearly three decades ago, held a small role in the Ronald Reagan for President campaign. Politics would not be allowed in her courtroom, Judge Amy Berman Jackson proclaimed.

However, when it was revealed that a potential juror had served in a high-level communications role within President Barack Obama’s administration, objections and questions about bias from Stone’s legal team were laughed off, by both the judge and prosecutors. You see, if a potential juror showed bias against conservatives, Judge Amy Berman Jackson declared that their prior service to an administration or political cause, even if it was that of a far-left socialist like Barack Obama, was not sufficient evidence to bar them from serving on the jury. It was at this moment, that this Gateway Pundit reporter joined Alex Jones on Infowars to sound the alarm.

A high-level Obama communications director with a documented past involvement with the far left was being considered as a prime candidate to make the final cut for the jury in Roger Stone’s trial. We all already know that nearly 91% of the District of Columbia voted for Hillary, so the notion of Stone being judged by a jury of his peers was pretty much out the window, but it was hard to believe that the Judge and prosecutors would be so blatant in their advocacy of selecting highly-partisan jurors.

This interview went viral and the mainstream media and Democrats went insane. They claimed that we were threatening the safety of the juror and the sanctity of the trial, never mind that we never mentioned the name of the juror or any other information that could lead to them being harmed. In fact, mainstream media reporters had already tweeted far more personal information about the juror. However, this did not stop corrupt Judge Amy Berman Jackson and the Mueller prosecution team from doing something unheard of and drastic. Before court the next day, I was informed by several sources that Judge Amy had issued a sealed order of contempt for this Gateway Pundit reporter, there was even talk of having me detained for trying to “intimidate potential jurors” through my reporting.” (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 2/14/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“A former Justice Department official who is discussed throughout the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse added his name Monday to a petition calling on William Barr to resign as attorney general.

David Laufman, who served as chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section through 2018, said Monday that he joined more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees who signed the petition, which was started by the anti-Trump activist group, Protect Democracy.

(…) Laufman, who appears frequently on MSNBC and CNN, often to criticize the Trump administration, played a key role in both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia probe.

He conducted interviews alongside disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok during the Clinton email investigation. Laufman and Strzok interviewed Clinton herself July 2, 2016. They also conducted interviews with Clinton aides Human Abedin and Cheryl Mills in which the pair appear to have made inconsistent statements about their knowledge of Clinton’s private email server.

(DOJ IG Report)

The Justice Department inspector general’s report on FISA abuse said Laufman helped arrange a key meeting for FBI and Justice Department officials that would raise significant concerns about the reliability of Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose dossier the FBI used to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page.

Donald Trump issues a directive to the intelligence community to cooperate with William Barr’s review of the Trump-Russia investigation and David Laufman responds to that directive on the Maddow Show, May 24, 2019. (Credit: MSNBC)

The inspector general report said Laufman arranged a meeting in January 2017 for Steele’s main source for information in the dossier. Laufman sat in on part of the interview.

Steele’s source disputed much of what was attributed to him in the dossier. The source, who has not been identified, told FBI agents and DOJ officials that Steele embellished or misrepresented information in the dossier that suggested a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government, according to the inspector general report.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/17/2020)  (Archive)

Richard Donoghue (Credit: public domain)

“U.S. attorney has been designated to oversee all Ukraine-related investigations by federal prosecutors around the country.

The Justice Department revealed on Tuesday that Richard Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was assigned to the task by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

Donoghue will “assist in coordinating … several open matters being handled by different U.S. Attorney’s Offices and Department components that in some way potentially relate to Ukraine,” according to a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee.

Donoghue, a St. John’s University School of Law graduate and Army Judge Advocate General Corps veteran, spent more than a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney and was working as the chief litigation counsel for a global tech company before becoming a U.S. attorney in 2018.

“The Deputy Attorney General implemented this policy to avoid duplication of efforts across Department offices and components, to facilitate information sharing, to ensure there are no conflicts among potentially overlapping matters, and to efficiently marshal the resources of the Department,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler in the letter.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 2/18/2020)  (Archive)

John Rood (Credit: CNN)

“The Pentagon’s top policy official who warned against withholding military aid to Ukraine last year resigned on Wednesday at the request of President Donald Trump, according to a copy of his resignation letter obtained by CNN.

John Rood, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, is the latest senior national security official involved in the Ukraine controversy to be forced out following Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, but sources told CNN that he broke with the administration on several issues, in addition to the handling of aid to Ukraine, leading to a loss of support from leadership.

“It is my understanding from Secretary Esper that you requested my resignation from serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Senior administration officials appointed by the President serve at the pleasure of the President, and therefore, as you have requested, I am providing my resignation effective February 28, 2020,” Rood wrote in his letter to President Donald Trump, dated Wednesday.

(…) Officials tell CNN that Rood has differed with the administration on a number of issues including Afghanistan and Ukraine. Officials have said Rood often was perceived as not embracing some of the changes in policy the White House and senior Pentagon officials wanted.

One official said some examples of Rood’s differing views from some of Trump’s key policy stances included being skeptical about peace talks with the Taliban as well as the administration decision to scale down military exercises with South Korea during talks with North Korea and him pushing for a more aggressive approach to Russia by supporting Ukraine.

Rood is the Pentagon’s top policy official and oversees aspects of the Pentagon’s relationship with US allies and partners.

He was involved in certifying to Congress that Ukraine had embarked on significant reforms to justify its receipt of $250 million in security assistance.

That certification undermined one of the justifications — concerns about corruption in Kiev — that some members of the Trump administration made to defend blocking aid to Ukraine.

Hours after Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a conversation that was at the center of impeachment proceedings, Rood emailed Secretary of Defense Mark Esper — who had been in the job two days — informing him about an upcoming deputies meeting, “to discuss the President’s concern about endemic corruption in Ukraine and his reported view that US should cease providing security assistance,” according to emails reviewed by CNN.

Rood notes in his email to the secretary that “placing a hold on security assistance at this time would jeopardize this unique window of opportunity and undermine our defense priorities with a key partner in the strategic competition with Russia.” (Read more: CNN, 2/19/2020)   (Archive)

A thread by Twitter sleuth,  ghost of daniel parker@seekerOTL:

“On June 6, 2016, a defense contractor met with an FBI special agent working the Hillary Clinton email investigation codenamed Mid-Year Exam.

Thanks to the great work of @walkafyre, we have a good idea what lies behind the redactions in the 302 of that interview.

Having long suspected, I think there is enough information out in the latest Mueller drop to say that we now know the “Unknown Defense Contractor” hired by Judicial Watch and Barbara Ledeen is Donald Berlin, of Investigative Consultants, Inc. pic.twitter.com/UQedCQ2WF8

— walkafyre (@walkafyre) November 2, 2019

The defense contractor, Donald Berlin, was contacted by Barbara Ledeen in the summer of 2015.

Ledeen wanted Berlin to determine if Clinton’s server had been breached by a foreign entity. The investigation was to be financed by Judicial Watch.

Barbara Ledeen is on the staff of Senator Chuck Grassley.

She is also the wife of Michael Ledeen. I’ve chronicled several of his numerous intrigues in previous threads.

1\

Spygate: Origins

The Final Thread

Part I

Let me tell you a story about the time regime change in Iran was planned on the back of a napkin. pic.twitter.com/9xK4gBE7op

— ghost of daniel parker (@SeekerOTL) January 14, 2020

The defense contractor handed over documents produced as part of his investigation to the FBI. They can be found in the FBI vault here:

Clinton Vault, Part 33

Most of the docs concerned an alleged plan by Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal to appropriate the hidden assets of deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Also included was possible evidence that the Russians hacked Clinton’s server.

RealClearInvestigations, 9/09/2019

So in June 2016, the FBI was aware that Ledeen was searching for HRC’s emails.

Gen Mike Flynn’s “Field of Fight,” co-authored with Michael Ledeen, was published on July 1st, 2016.

In late July, Wikileaks released the DNC emails. On July 26, the Australian government officially notified the US government that they had learned Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos “had some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama).”

From July 28 to July 31, officials at FBI Headquarters discussed whether to open counterintelligence investigation.

Investigation Crossfire Hurricane officially launched on July 31, 2016.

According to the IG report, Peter Strzok and Case Agent 2 worked on both Mid-Year Exam and Crossfire Hurricane.

So at least some members of the Crossfire Hurricane team would have known that Ledeen was searching for Clinton’s emails and that the Russians were suspected of possessing them.

The Crossfire Hurricane team then tasked Stefan Halper with determining if the Trump campaign was planning an October Surprise, specifically if the Russian government planned on releasing Clinton’s emails in coordination with the Trump campaign and Wikileaks.

---

Before we go any further, let’s address the most famous October Surprise.

As the presidential election day grew closer in 1980, the campaign of Ronald Reagan feared that the Carter administration would engineer the release of the American hostages from Iran in the weeks prior to the election.

Ironically, this most famous October Surprise actually never happened. The hostages were not released before the election; they were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

The historical debate is whether or not the Reagan campaign made a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.

1\

Book Review

(a thread) pic.twitter.com/NuHgAcvpRn

— ghost of daniel parker (@SeekerOTL) July 27, 2019

You’ve probably read about Stefan Halper’s link to the October Surprise.

 CIA,gov

What you probably haven’t read are these paragraphs from Robert Parry’s book, “Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq”:

That’s right. Michael Ledeen was neck deep in the October Surprise.

In 1999, the House of Representatives created the October Surprise Task Force to investigate the conspiracy theory.

Perry claims that during his exhaustive research of the October Surprise, he discovered a draft copy of a report from the Task Force that stated Ledeen was an unofficial member of the Reagan campaign’s October Surprise Group.

(Robert Perry: The Original October Surprise (Scoop)

So Halper and Ledeen were both allegedly part of the Reagan campaign’s “dirty tricks” operations.

So they’re on the same side, right?

Well, no. At some point they had a falling out, if they were ever truly allies.

The Reagan campaign was comprised of two very distinct camps: hard-line defense hawks associated with Ronald Reagan and moderate “realists” associated with George H W Bush.

The Bush team was comprised of a large contingent of current and former CIA employees, which included Halper and his father-in-law Ray Cline.

Ledeen fell squarely in the first camp; Halper in the second.

Washington Post 3/01/1980

In 1983, Halper was forced out of the Reagan administration when a New York Times article exposed him as the ringleader of an operation to gather information on the Carter campaign.

New York Times 7/03/1983

Halper had been accused of stealing a copy of Jimmy Carter’s debate prep book.

However, when Halper was outed as an FBI informant in 2018, Craig Shirley, the author of several books on Ronald Reagan, wrote an article for the Washington Post denying that Halper stole Carter’s “debate books.”

An article from UPI reports that according to former Reagan campaign workers the charges against Halper were part of a larger plan to by defense hawks to displace James Baker from the Reagan White House.

UPI 7/07/1983

James Baker was Reagan’s White House Chief of Staff.

However, he’s more often associated with George H W Bush. Baker was Bush’s Secretary of State during the first Persian Gulf War.

Baker has drawn the wrath of neoconservatives over the years for espousing the use of prudence, restraint and diplomacy in foreign policy decision-making.

Foreign Policy 8/09/2012

---

So the rivalry between Halper and Ledeen dates wayyyy back and has continued over the years, at least on the level of policy.

In his book, The Silence of the Rational Center, Halper cites Ledeen as a staunch advocate of reckless regime change.

In 2004, Halper was one of the first authors to identify the neocon influence on the presidency of the younger Bush in his book, America Alone: Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order.

There’s yet another person involved in Crossfire Hurricane who’s very familiar with the history of the October Surprise: David Laufman was the Republicans’ senior associate counsel on the October Surprise Task Force.

Yes, Laufman is a Republican.

It’s almost completely forgotten today how vigorously the left opposed George W Bush’s nomination of Laufman for the position of Defense Department Inspector General.

Daily Kos 11/08/2006

So Laufman was one of the primary individuals involved in both Mid-Year Exam and Crossfire Hurricane and he had knowledge of the 1980 October Surprise as well as the roles Halper and Ledeen played in the Reagan campaign.

I provide this backstory in hopes of providing some context to the August 11 and 12, 2016 meetings between Halper and the members of Crossfire Hurricane.

Note the objective of the initial meeting with Halper was to ask him questions about his experience working on presidential campaigns.

The following day, when Halper and the team met again, “Source 2 provided additional information about the role of a foreign policy advisor in a presidential campaign.”

Did they discuss the October Surprise in 1980?

I think so.

Now, there is no evidence that Halper was told about Barbara Ledeen’s investigation into HRC’s emails.

However, Halper was certainly aware that Michael Ledeen co-authored Flynn’s book “Field of Fight” that was published a couple of months earlier.

Keep in mind that the FBI did not open a counterintelligence investigation into Mike Flynn until AFTER they met with Halper.

Did the CH team based their decision on what they learned in their meetings with Halper?

During their meeting in August 2016, it was Halper who brought up the 1980 October Surprise to Page. The subject is raised again later in their conversation.

The discussion of a possible October Surprise was not incidental; it was exactly what the Crossfire Hurricane Team was searching for.

Later in early September, Halper met with a “high-level Trump campaign official,” Sam Clovis, and the conversation once again turns to a possible October Surprise.

There’s nothing subtle about it either. Halper asks Clovis directly if the Trump campaign was planning an October Surprise.

When Halper meets with George Papadopolous, he doesn’t use the term “October Surprise,” but he’s clearly tasked by the Crossfire Hurricane team with finding evidence of such a plan.

That Halper never attempted to approach Mike Flynn should not come as a surprise. The CH team must have assumed that Ledeen would have tipped off Flynn about Halper’s intelligence background.

The CH team already believed someone had coached PapaD in how to respond to Halper’s questions.

In general, there is little in the IG report about the Flynn investigation beyond noting that SSA 1 (Joe Pientka) attended a strategic intelligence briefing in which Gen Flynn was in attendance.

The open EC for the Flynn investigation states there was “an articulable factual basis” that Flynn “may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf other Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the nation security.”

But there’s scant evidence of a Russia investigation in either the IG report or the Mueller report. (We know, though, a FARA investigation Flynn’s connection to Turkey was opened).

What the Mueller report does reveal is how seriously the FBI took the pursuit of Clinton’s emails (“Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.”)

The Ledeen/Smith investigations are discussed at length.

Perhaps most significant are the footnotes that reveal that in 4 different interviews with the special counsel’s office, Mike Flynn discussed the Ledeen/Smith investigations.

I have some issues with how the Ledeen/Smith investigations are presented in the Mueller report; however, that’s a discussion for another thread.

What I hope to establish in this thread is the importance the FBI placed on Ledeen’s search for HRC’s emails.

It’s telling that when the 4 Crossfire Hurricane cases were divvy upped that Strzok assumed program management responsibilities for the Flynn and PapaD cases.

1\

SPYGATE: ORIGINS

Thread Six

The Italian Connection Part II pic.twitter.com/QFMgR3FCUs

— ghost of daniel parker (@SeekerOTL) August 4, 2019

These cases were the two most likely to have a connection to Ledeen. Flynn, directly. PapaD indirectly, via his Hudson Institute and Israeli connections.

And I have to say the FBI’s suspicion wasn’t without justification. Michael Ledeen has a very long history of such intrigue.

In his memoir of his involvement in the Iran-contra affair, Ledeen explains the role of a “trusted envoy.”

Three Days In Rome

Did the FBI suspect Page and PapaD were being used as trusted envoys, wittingly or unwittingly?

Perhaps.

It should be acknowledged that an October Surprise involving emails did occur when Wikileaks released John Podesta’s hacked emails.

And Peter Smith, who conduct a search for Clinton’s emails, did commit suicide.

So perhaps an investigation was justified. HOWEVER, the results were no evidence was found that Ledeen or Smith or anyone else on the Trump campaign recovered Clinton emails.

When Halper provided the FBI with EXCULPATORY evidence after his final meeting with PapaD, why did the investigation continue?

It was almost immediately after this final meeting between Halper and PapaD when the Crossfire Hurricane team received their first reports from Christopher Steele.

The timing is curious. It’s at the point the investigation seems to go off the rails.

I have no answers as to what happens after this point or why. Any conspiracy theory would have to account for Case Agent 1’s and Kevin Clinesmith’s blatant investigatory misconduct.

I have seen some speculation that Halper was feeding information to Steele.

I dunno. Maybe.

That’s a possibility, but only a theory at this point.

Some readers may want to be told who’s a white hat and who’s a black hat.

Sorry, I can’t give you that, especially when the subject is the world of intelligence and political intrigue. Characters like Halper and Ledeen aren’t so easily labeled.

I admit to possessing a certain sympathy for Mike Flynn. 33 years of honorable military service goes a long way with me.

Flynn’s declaration on Jan 20th is how I’ve always viewed him. There’s no shame in admitting that one’s life has not prepared him for a world without honor, a world in which the ends justify the means.

I have attempted to keep the discussion in this thread narrowly focused on what is revealed in the Mueller and IG reports.

(ghost of daniel parker@SeekerOTL, 2/19/2020)  (Archive)

Joseph Maguire (Credit: Ron Sachs/CNP)

“The New York Times and a host of allied political narrative engineers attempted to spin up another Russia narrative yesterday.  The claim surrounds a briefing by DNI Joseph Maguire (pictured below) to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).  Adam Schiff and house Democrats in the briefing claim DNI Maguire stated Russians favored President Trump and would work to assist his re-election.

The Democrat spin was to claim President Trump replaced Maguire as an outcome of this briefing, and Trump wants to ignore Russia interference assistance. etc. etc.  The media ran with the framework of the Democrat narrative; and the political operatives piled-on.

However, in a surprise move Jake Tapper actually undercuts the narrative engineering through his own sources with information on the reality of the briefing:

(1) DNI Joseph Maguire never said Russia was, would, or is working to interfere in the election to help President Trump.  Rather the briefing nuance was that Russia has an understanding of Trump and would likely view him as a deal-maker they could work with and Sanders, Buttigieg et al were unknowns.

(2) President Trump wasn’t angered at the Maguire briefing; however, he was angered that he had to find out about the briefing from GOP members of the HPSCI instead of Maguire briefing the President on the material prior to briefing congress.  The executive office was blindsided by committee members asking questions of the White House when Maguire never informed the President of his briefing material in advance.

Those two points were spun wildly by the left-wing media.  Kudos to Jake Tapper for setting the record straight.

However, it is not a surprise for President Trump to end the tenure of Maguire as DNI given this end-run around the President and the possibility Maguire’s motives might just be another example of the intelligence community undercutting the office of the President. [I would say that’s highly likely]

The fact DNI Joseph Maguire would brief Congress without informing the White House of the briefing material highlights a possible intent by Maguire to undermine the President.  Whether that intent is accurate is a moot point.  The action by Maguire leaves open the possibility, and his lack of judgment created a mess for the White House.

Therefore Maguire’s action showed poor judgment and a compromise within his position.  Given the sensitive nature of the position he holds, both issues are fatal flaws.

Hence, President Trump selected a more dependable Richard “Ric” Grenell to replace Maguire as interim Acting DNI.”

(Conservative Treehouse, 2/21/2020)  (Archive)

Michael Sentonas (Credit: Crowdstrike)

“Endpoint security firm CrowdStrike announced on Wednesday that Michael Sentonas has been appointed chief technology officer (CTO) after Dmitri Alperovitch decided to leave the company to launch a non-profit policy accelerator.

Alperovitch, one of the founders of CrowdStrike, has been acting as CTO since the company’s launch in 2011. In its announcement, CrowdStrike only said he had transitioned out of the company, but Alperovitch has shared some information about his future plans on social media.

“I have left CrowdStrike to launch a non-partisan, non-profit policy accelerator,” Alperovitch said. “Since founding CrowdStrike and during my tenure, I helped transform the cybersecurity industry and want to apply the same ingenuity and a venture approach to galvanize solutions to pressing cybersecurity national security and foreign policy challenges.” (Read more: SecurityWeek, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

“Judicial Watch announced today it received letters from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) stating they will neither confirm nor deny the existence of emails and other communications related to CIA official  Eric Ciaramella, who reportedly worked on Ukraine issues while on detail to both the Obama and Trump White Houses.

These letters were received in response to two December 2019 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed after the CIA and DOJ failed to respond to November 2019 requests for communications between Ciaramella and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and/or the Special Counsel’s Office (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-03809)) and all of Ciaramella’s emails from June 1, 2016, to November 12, 2019 (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:19-cv-03807)).

Ciaramella is widely reported as the person who filed the whistleblower complaint that triggered the impeachment proceedings. His name reportedly was “raised privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry.”

The CIA letter stated:

In accordance with section 3.6(a) of Executive Order 13526, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the requests. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself exempt from FO IA under exemption (b )(3) and Section 6 of the CIA Act of I 949, 50 U.S.C. § 3507, and, to the extent your request could relate to CIA intelligence sources and methods information, the fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is exempt from FOIA under exemption (b)( I) and exemption (b)(3) in conjunction with Section 102A(i)(l) of the National Security Act of 1947, 50 U.S.C § 3024(i)( I).

This completes our response to the above referenced cases.

The Justice Department also refused to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records, citing, among other justifications, the personal privacy of Ciaramella.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

Kash Patel (Credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

“Kash Patel, a former top National Security Council official who also played a key role as a Hill staffer in helping Republicans discredit the Russia probe, is now a senior adviser for new acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, according to four people familiar with the matter.

It’s not clear what exact role Patel is playing in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community. He started at ODNI on Thursday, according to an administration official.

Patel, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate last February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role at the NSC in mid-summer.

He had previously worked as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)’s top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and was the lead author of a report questioning the conduct of FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference. Republicans later used the report to bolster arguments that the probe was a plot to take down President Donald Trump.” (Read more: Politico, 2/20/2020)  (Archive)

“Nate Cain is a Patriot. He risked everything to reveal the active cover-up of FBI Director Comey and his efforts to protect the Clinton Global Crime Network. Comey suppressed huge troves of FBI investigative files; Nate found them and turned them over to Rep. Devin Nunes and IG Michael E. Horowitz. This is Nate’s story, many of the details never before disclosed.

Bards Of War Podcast explores politics, culture, economics, faith, war, and human nature by building context through story and narrative. Effective research will cross-reference material to create a hybrid map built on qualitative and quantitative data cycling. This allows narratives to be developed, assessed and analyzed. This is the foundation of cultural analysis.

The podcast episodes are presented by Scott Kesterson, a U.S. documentary filmmaker, backpack journalist, researcher and writer.”

“Former Acting DNI Joseph Maguire did not brief the white house prior to taking Shelby Pierson, the person in charge of evaluating intelligence regarding election security, to lead the presentation to the house intel committee (HPSCI).   That’s the key takeaway from a taped preview of National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on Face The Nation.

Shelby Pierson (Credit: public domain)

With NSA O’Brien confirming what many suspected it begs the question why would Shelby Pierson and Joseph Maguire intentionally blindside the White House? The briefing was obviously spun by HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff and democrats on the committee, and there was no intelligence presented to support the claims made by Democrats and media.

Sending shockwaves through the intelligence community, now Acting DNI Grenell has asked the intelligence community, including Shelby Pierson to produce the underlying intelligence within her briefing. It is reported that Pierson and the alliance of intelligence around her are going bananas. Sounds like Ms. Pierson might not last long. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/22/2020)  (Archive)

“…anonymous intelligence officials are reporting to CNN that Ms. Pierson “overstepped” her position, was “misleading” in her briefing, and “mischaracterized” the underlying intelligence. Imagine that.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Washington (CNN)–The US intelligence community’s top election security official appears to have overstated the intelligence community’s formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 election, omitting important nuance during a briefing with lawmakers earlier this month, three national security officials told CNN.

The official, Shelby Pierson, told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump get reelected.

[…] “The intelligence doesn’t say that,” one senior national security official told CNN. “A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it’s a step short of that.

[…] One intelligence official said that Pierson’s characterization of the intelligence was “misleading” and a national security official said Pierson failed to provide the “nuance” needed to accurately convey the US intelligence conclusions.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where Pierson is a senior official, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. (more)

Why would Shelby Pierson and Joseph Maguire intentionally blindside the White House?

The briefing was obviously spun by HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff and Democrats on the House Intel Committee; and there was no intelligence presented during the briefing to support the claims made by Pierson, Democrats, and media. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/23/2020)  (Archive)

Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos (Credit: Financial Times Graphic)

“Newly declassified FBI memos directly conflict with court filings that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team made in asking a federal judge to send former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos to prison, further calling into question the government’s conduct in investigating the now-debunked “Russia collusion” narrative.

The memos, released under federal Freedom of Information laws, are likely to focus renewed attention on former Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who played a key role in prosecuting Papadopoulos before working on the case of longtime GOP operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone.

(…) Zelinsky was one of three Mueller team prosecutors who signed a sentencing memo in August 2018 seeking prison time for Papadopoulos. They argued there that Papadopoulos hindered federal prosecutors’ ability to question or arrest a European professor named Joseph Mifsud in mid-February 2017 while the Maltese academic was in Washington.

According to the sentencing memo signed by Zelinsky and fellow Mueller prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein: Papadopoulos’ “lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017, and he has not returned to the United States since then.”

Aaron Zelinsky (l) Jeannie Rhee (c) and Andrew Goldstein (Credit: public domain)

But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest  Mifsud while he was in the United States.

Papadopoulos, a former volunteer foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, told agents during an interview on Feb. 10, 2017 that he “inquired to Mifsud about how he knew the Russians had [Clinton’s] emails, to which Mifsud strangely chuckled and responded, ‘they told me they have them.’”

According to the Mueller Report, in an interview with the FBI on the same day, Feb. 10, Mifsud “denied that he had advance knowledge that Russia was in possession of emails damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Mifsud did not leave Washington until the next day, Feb. 11. Papadopoulos’ information should have enabled investigators to confront Mifsud with conflicting testimony on a point of critical importance to the stated purpose of the Russia collusion investigation before the professor’s departure. But this information was not mentioned in Team Mueller’s original statement of offense, or plea agreement, filed Oct. 5, 2017, nor its later sentencing recommendation. In contrast, those documents portray Papadopoulos as trying to thwart the investigation.

According to Zelinksy, Rhee, and Goldstein’s August 17, 2018 sentencing memo filed with U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss, “the defendant’s false statements were intended to harm the investigation, and did so.” Papadopoulos’ “lies negatively affected the FBI’s Russia investigation,” they argued, “and prevented the FBI from effectively identifying and confronting witnesses in a timely fashion.”

The FBI interview memos, however, paint a far different picture. They show, for example, that Papadopoulos expressed his willingness to participate actively in helping the bureau locate Mifsud personally even before Feb. 10, 2017.” (Read more: Lee Smith/JustTheNews, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Viktor Shokin and Joe Biden (Credit: Volodymyr Petrov/Agence France Presse)

(…) Unfortunately for Biden, Shokin refused to go quietly into the night.

French media outlet Les Crises reported in January that Shokin filed a federal complaint with Ukraine’s National Bureau of Investigation (NABU) which accuses Biden of abusing his power. At that time, Ukrainian District Court Judge S. V. Vovk ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigations to review Shokin’s claim.

In April, Just the News’ John Solomon reported that Vovk ordered the country’s law enforcement services to formally list the fired prosecutor, Victor Shokin, as the victim of an alleged crime.

Still, Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies “refused to name Biden as the alleged perpetrator of the crime, instead listing the potential defendant as an unnamed American.”

All of that has recently changed. Vovk ruled that “anonymous listing was improper and ordered the law enforcement agencies to formally name Biden as the accused perpetrator.” Vovk’s ruling states:

A competent person of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine who conducts procedural management in criminal proceedings No. 62020000000000236 dated February 24, 2020 to enter information into the Unified register of pre-trial investigations … a summary of facts that may indicate the commission of a criminal offense under Paragraph 2 of Article 343 of the Criminal procedure code of Ukraine on criminal proceedings No. 62020000000000236 dated February 24, 2020, namely: information on interference in the activities of the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Shokin, Viktor Mykolaiovych performed by citizen of the United States of America Joseph Biden, former U.S. Vice President…

The order of the court may not be appealed.

(Ukraine Court Ruling (English Translation): 4-21-20 Shokin Case)

(Read more: Redstate, 5/20/2020)  (Archive)

“The latest dossier defense, offered up by Arthur Snell, a managing director at Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, suggests that former FBI cybersecurity official Anthony Ferrante has validated the dossier.

Arthur Snell (Credit: public domain)

Anthony Ferrante (Credit: public domain)

But what Snell failed to disclose is that BuzzFeed News reportedly paid Ferrante $4.1 million to investigate only a narrow part of the dossier as part of a lawsuit that the website faced for publishing Steele’s report.

Ferrante was unable to corroborate Steele’s allegations, despite the hefty payday. But that didn’t stop Orbis from citing the former FBI official in its latest dossier defense.

“Orbis maintains the highest standards of professionalism. We stand by the integrity and quality of our work,” Snell wrote in the letter to The Sunday Times.

Snell, whose letter is entitled “Trump-Russia dossier was valid,” was responding to a Sunday Times story published on Jan. 26 that criticized Steele’s work.

“You ignore more recent assessments of Steele’s work by intelligence professionals such as John Sipher, Chuck Rosenberg, and Anthony Ferrante,” wrote Snell.

Sipher is a former CIA officer, and Rosenberg is a former FBI chief of staff to James Comey. Both wrote essays defending aspects of the dossier, but that was before the release of the special counsel’s report and the inspector general’s report, both of which undermined key allegations in the dossier. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

“House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says.

Aaron Zelinsky (l) Jeannie Rhee (c) and Andrew Goldstein (Credit: public domain)

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress.

“We’re now going through these 302s, and we’re going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,” Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast set to air on Tuesday.

Nunes specifically reacted to a story in Just the News disclosing that FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos show he was helpful in trying to locate a witness named Joseph Mifsud but that Mueller’s prosecutors portrayed Papadopoulos as trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation’s efforts to question Mifsud.

The new FBI memos provide “our first evidence of the Mueller team lying to the court. It a lie. It’s a total lie,” the lawmaker said, referring to the Mueller team’s claim that Papadopoulos tried to hinder efforts to locate and question Mifsud.

“I always assumed that Papadopolis probably was helpful. I mean, he’s kind of alluded to that, that he offered to be helpful, but we had never seen the actual 302s,” Nunes said.

You can listen to the Nunes interview here.

(Read more: John Solomon/JustTheNews, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Viktor Shokin (l) and Joe Biden (Credit: public domain)

“The State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) has registered a criminal case on pressure from former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin.

“The SBI has added information on the criminal offence to the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations,” Shokin’s lawyer Oleksandr Teleshetsky said during a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency on February 27.

The case was opened under an appeal from Shokin. The court obliged the SBI to register the proceeding.

In his motion, Shokin spoke of pressure put on him by Biden, Teleshetsky said.

“The reason for the pressure was the investigation being conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine into grave crimes of international corruption linked with the activities of former Ecology Minister of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky and top managers at the Burisma company,” he said.

Shokin’s motion was filed with the State Bureau of Investigations back on January 28, 2020, but information about the criminal offence was added to the Unified Register of Pretrial Investigations only on February 24 after the country ordered the bureau to register the case, Teleshetsky said.” (Read more: Interfax-Ukraine, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

The Crossfire Hurricane Scheme Team (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The Daily Caller News Foundation and the watchdog group Citizens United sued the Justice Department and its inspector general on Tuesday for a slew of records from the watchdog’s report on the FBI’s abuse of surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Citizens United filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on behalf of the DCNF related to public records requests that both organizations filed Feb. 24.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., seeks all transcripts, summaries and notes from 27 individuals interviewed as part of the inspector general’s probe, including Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, and former FBI executives like James Comey and Andrew McCabe.

Citizens United filed the lawsuit after the DOJ and IG’s office failed to provide documents within the 20-day window required under the Freedom of Information Act.

(…) The Citizens United/DCNF lawsuit seeks records from former FBI officials who took part in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, including Comey, McCabe, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bill Priestap, James Rybicki and Michael Kortan. 

The lawsuit also seeks the records of current and former DOJ officials Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann, Zainab Ahmad, Bruce Swartz, Stuart Evans, John Carlin, Mary McCord, George Toscas, and David Laufman.”  (Read more: The Daily Caller, 4/14/2020)  (Archive)

“An FBI agent faulted for some of the most significant problems laid out in the Justice Department’s inspector general report on FISA abuse against a Trump campaign associate has been identified.

The New York Times, citing people familiar with the FBI’s Russia probe, identified Stephen A. Somma, a counterintelligence investigator who works out of the bureau’s New York field office, as “Case Agent 1” from the inspector general’s (IG) report.

The upper-level DOJ/FBI officials also responsible for FISA applications. (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

(…) According to the IG report, he was the FBI agent who initially sought a surveillance warrant against Page. Somma pushed for a FISA warrant “almost immediately” after the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the IG said.

Somma’s initial request was rejected, but FBI lawyers later approved seeking a FISA warrant on Page after the bureau received information from former British spy Christopher Steele. In his dossier, Steele alleged that Page was a key player in the Trump campaign’s “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

The IG report said the FBI failed to verify the allegations about Page before using Steele’s information in FISA applications. The special counsel’s investigation undercut the idea that Page or anyone on the Trump team worked with Russians.

Somma was in charge of verifying the accuracy of information included in the FISA applications. He was also the FBI handler for Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor who met with and secretly recorded Trump campaign aides Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos.

The IG report said Somma failed to disclose potentially exculpatory information that Page and Papadopoulos told Halper. He also failed to disclose that the CIA told him on Aug. 15, 2016, that Page had been an “operational contact” for the agency years earlier.

Perhaps Somma’s most egregious omission deals with an interview he conducted in January 2017 with Steele’s primary source for information in the dossier.

According to the IG report, the Steele source, referred to as “Primary Sub-Source,” told FBI agents that Steele misrepresented information attributed to him in the dossier, including about Page. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose the information in its final two applications for FISA orders on Page.

Largely because of the omission, the Justice Department has deemed the two orders to be invalid.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/24/2020)  (Archive)

Andrew McCabe (l) and James Comey (Credit: Jahi Chikwendiu/Matt McClain, Getty Images)

“The FBI agent who ran the bureau’s warrantless spying program said Wednesday he warned ex-Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe that the program was a useless waste of taxpayer money that needlessly infringed Americans’ civil liberties but his bosses refused to take action.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014. He told Just the News he fears the deeply flawed program, which was started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was allowed to keep going to give Americans a false sense of security in the war on terror and possibly to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was used for political spying or political espionage,” Youssef said during a lengthy interview for the John Solomon Reports podcast.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef tells The Hill in an interview March 2018, that the surveillance program was responsible for helping disrupt just one possible terror plot over more than a decade, searching through thousands of Americans’ records. (Credit: The Hill)

Youssef confirmed that the FBI performed an audit of the highly classified program (also known as the NSA program because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden leaked its existence.

The audit showed that while the program had generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorism attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing tens of millions of dollars per year.

In fact, the program was generating large numbers of “false negatives and positives,” Youssef said.

The audit, he added, also showed “there was collateral damage in terms of civil liberties” of Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily searched or who were falsely identified as connected to terrorism.

Youssef said he discussed the concerns with McCabe both when McCabe served as assistant director for counterterrorism and then when he was promoted to acting executive assistant director, the No. 3 job in the bureau. But his efforts to pause the program and reform it so it could work better, cost less, and infringe less on American privacy fell on deaf ears, he said. (Read more: JustTheNews/John Solomon, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“In November of 2019 buried deep in the congressional budget Continuing Resolution (CR) was a short-term extension to reauthorize the FISA “business records provision”, the “roving wiretap” provision, the “lone wolf” provision, and the more controversial bulk metadata provisions [Call Detail Records (CDR)], all parts of the Patriot Act.  As a result of the FISA CR inclusion the terminal deadline was pushed to March 15, 2020:

WASHINGTON – Attorney General William Barr told Senate Republicans on Tuesday that the Trump administration could support a clean extension of contentious surveillance laws set to expire next month. And Barr said he could make changes on his own to satisfy President Donald Trump and his allies who have railed against the use of the law to monitor his 2016 campaign, according to senators at a party briefing.

But Barr also clashed with GOP critics of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has three key provisions set to lapse on March 15.

(…) Republicans emerged from the lunch meeting mostly supportive of a clean extension of the law to avoid a gap; doing so is a top priority of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“The attorney general just wanted to underscore again the importance of these provisions that were enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack. They’re still relevant to our effort to go after terrorists today like they were after 9/11,” McConnell told reporters.

But Barr also sparred with skeptics, primarily libertarian-leaning Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Barr told Lee his criticisms of surveillance law are dangerous, while Paul said Americans shouldn’t be subject to secret FISA courts, one of the people said.

(…) Senate Republicans prefer kicking a broad FISA debate to as late as 2022, when other pieces of the law expire. In the interim, Barr would make administrative changes to address complaints from conservatives that surveillance authorities were abused during Trump’s campaign — something the president continues to seethe over.

“You’ve got three provisions to deal with. I think it’d be smart to keep them in place. It would give us some time to work on FISA writ large, we’ve got three years,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is preparing hearings on FISA.

(…) “A lot will happen between now and March 15. We may do a placeholder and take it past March 15. We’ve got to get this right,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “Anybody who reads the Horowitz report on misfire hurricane will understand what I’m talking about.” (read more)

Prior to the December 9, 2019 inspector general report on FISA abuse, FISA Court judges Rosemary Collyer (declassified 2017) and James Boasberg (declassified 2019) both identified issues with the NSA bulk database collection program being exploited for unauthorized reasons. For the past several years no corrective action taken by the intelligence community has improved the abuses outlined by the FISA court.

The sketchy programs, and abuse therein, has public attention yet congressional representatives are not responding to the findings.

Worse still, there is a confluence of current events pointing toward a likelihood Congress and the intelligence apparatus writ large want to reauthorize the FISA surveillance and collection authorities without further sunlight and without public input.

Keep in mind the deadline for the DOJ to respond to the FISA court about the abusive intelligence practices identified in the Horowitz report was February 5th, more than two weeks ago. The responses from the DOJ and FBI have not been made public.

FISA Court Order – FISA Court Notice of Extension.

It appears the DOJ is trying to get the FISA reauthorization passed before the FISC declassifies the corrective action outlined from the prior court order. This response would also include information about the “sequestering” of evidence gathered as a result of the now admitted fraudulent and misrepresented information within the FISA applications.

The FISA “business records provision”, the “roving wiretap” provision, the “lone wolf” provision, and the more controversial bulk metadata provisions [Call Detail Records (CDR)], again all parts of the Patriot Act, must not be reauthorized without a full public vetting of the abuses that have taken place for the past several years.

At a minimum the pending DOJ/FBI response to the FISA court needs to be made public prior to any reauthorization by congress.  And to better understand the scale of the issue, the consequences when the system is abused, the upstream sequester material needs to be made public.

Let the American public see what investigative evidence was unlawfully gathered, and let us see who and what was exposed by the fraudulently obtained FISA warrants. At a minimum congress and the American people need to understand the scale of what can happen when the system is wrong – BEFORE that exact same system is reauthorized. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 2/25/2020)  (Archive)

Carter Page speaks with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 2, 2017. (Credit: Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press)

“Carter Page, the informal Trump campaign adviser victimized by invalid FBI wiretaps, says there are more abuses to be uncovered in the coming months.

Mr. Page tells The Washington Times that he has been conducting his own inquiries for a project he cannot yet detail. The goal, he said, is to go beyond the surveillance abuses uncovered by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

“Tip of the iceberg is a good way to describe it,” said the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and energy investor, who has spent the last three years clearing his name.

“It was a broad array of people, and so far there has been no accountability,” Mr. Page said. “I have a lot of questions that IG Horowitz never covered. These need to be answered ASAP. I am also going to be taking some action. There’s much more to come.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, has announced a new probe into Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse and asked 17 Justice Department and FBI players to testify.

Mr. Page has drafted 19 questions he wants the committee to ask Mr. Horowitz.” (Read more: Washington Times, 2/25/2020)  (Archive)

Ukrainian authorities have launched a criminal investigation into an HIV nonprofit that receives huge sums of money from the U.S. government as well as leftwing billionaire George Soros. The foreign probe exposes one of many outrageous collaborative efforts between Uncle Sam and the Hungarian philanthropist who funds a multitude of projects worldwide aimed at spreading a radical globalist agenda. Learn more about the financial and staffing nexus between Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the U.S. government in a Judicial Watch special report.

In this latest case, the U.S. and Soros-funded nonprofit helped another Ukrainian group embezzle international assistance, according to a Ukrainian news report that cites a member of parliament. The elected official requested that the country’s National Police launch an investigation, which was officially announced a few days ago. The probe partially targets a controversial civil rights activist named Vitaly Shabunin who operates a scandal-plagued group—also funded by Soros—called Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC). During the 2016 U.S. presidential election Ukrainian prosecutors tried investigating the group’s activities but were ordered to stand back by the Obama administration. At the time Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office was looking into AntAC while investigating whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption had been improperly diverted.

Now officials in the former Soviet republic allege that a Ukrainian HIV charity that gets boatloads of money from American taxpayers as well as Soros, helped AntAC embezzle a chunk of it. Formerly known as All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH, the nonprofit is now called 100% Life and its mission is to fight for the life of people living with HIV in Ukraine’s 25 regions. Thanks to the generous contributions of donors such as American taxpayers, the group annually provides services to nearly 200,000 patients throughout Ukraine. The Ukrainian lawmaker who prompted the investigation says the scheme involved “embezzlement of international technical assistance through the All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH (now 100% Life Charity Fund).” From 2015 to 2017, PLWH-controlled structures received around $142 million, the Ukrainian official revealed in the news report.

A generous portion of it came from American taxpayers, according to government records obtained by Judicial Watch. They show that, since 2012, the U.S. has doled out more than $25 million in grants to 100% Life. Most of the money has flowed through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), though one grant for $3.5 million came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It is not clear whether the criminal probe will have an impact on the U.S. government’s funding. The head of 100% Life’s board of directors, HIV-infected activist Dmytro Sherembey, is also named in the recently launched investigation. Last year he published a book about AIDS that promotes the legalization of sex work and illicit drug use without punishment.” (Judicial Watch, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

Barbara Novick (Credit: public domain)

“BlackRock Inc vice chairman and co-founder Barbara Novick will step down from her day-to-day duties at the asset manager, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Novick, 59, will continue in her current role until her successor is chosen, after which, she will serve as a senior adviser to the company, according to the memo.

She will also assist in conducting internal and external searches to find her successor.

“Much of the post-financial crisis policy work that Barbara led is largely implemented, and she has greatly enhanced our stewardship practices, including our commitment to transparency”, Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said in the memo.

Less than half of BlackRock’s original slate of eight co-founders will remain at the firm once Novick leaves.” (Read more: Reuters, 2/26/2020)  (Archive)

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According to Ukraine investigators, two American companies have been implicated in a money-laundering scheme to help former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych ship millions out of Ukraine. Interfax-Ukraine reports the two companies are Franklin Templeton Investments and BlackRock.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a Russian-British historian’s lawsuit against several U.S. newspapers and Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor who served as a confidential human source for the FBI during the Trump-Russia probe.

Judge Leonie Brinkema (Credit: public domain)

Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that the statute of limitations had expired for many of the allegations in the defamation lawsuit, which Svetlana Lokhova filed on May 23, 2019. Brinkema also ruled that news articles that Lokhova cited in her lawsuit were not defamatory.

(…) Beginning in February 2017, stories began appearing in British and U.S. media outlets suggesting without evidence that Lokhova and Flynn had improper contact during the Cambridge event, which Halper co-convened with Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.

The Wall Street Journal published a story on March 18, 2017 that suggested that Flynn had improperly failed to disclose his interactions at the 2014 event with Lokhova, a British citizen who was born in Russia.

Lokhova has argued that the story and several others created false innuendo that she and Flynn were having an affair, or that she was a Russian spy. She has vehemently denied both allegations.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)

President Trump is threatening to blow up an extension of expiring intelligence programs as he backchannels with a cadre of top allies who want to use the bill to reform a shadowy surveillance court.

Congress has approximately 10 working days to reauthorize three expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act, a 2015 bill that overhauled the country’s surveillance laws, with Attorney General William Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) backing a “clean” extension.

But Trump threw a grenade into those already fragile plans Thursday when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told reporters that the president supports his effort to include broader reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as part of any reauthorization of the intelligence programs.

“I’ve talked to the president, and I plan on insisting on getting a vote,” Paul said, asked by The Hill about including broader FISA reforms in a bill would authorize the expiring provisions of the USA Freedom Act.

Paul wants a vote on an amendment that would prevent FISA warrants from being used against Americans. Paul’s proposal would also prevent FISA information from being used against Americans in a domestic courtroom. The president, according to Paul, is supportive of his amendment.

Trump’s apparent support for including broader changes to the surveillance court associated with FISA comes as he’s railed repeatedly about his campaign being “spied” upon by the Obama-era FBI.” (Read more: The Hill, 2/27/2020)  (Archive)