(…) “Beginning in September 2015, Ohr began working for Fusion GPS. Ohr told investigators that she “read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name. I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities.”

When later questioned as to her previous knowledge of Simpson, Ohr stated, “I had been at a conference that he was at. I don’t recall directly talking with him at that conference, and I don’t know whether he knew who, you know, who I was other than the fact that I attended that conference.”

Ohr acknowledged to congressional investigators that Simpson was acquainted with her husband, Bruce Ohr. (read more)

The implication here is that Nellie Ohr approached Fusion-GPS owner Glenn Simpson for a job; essentially to work on political opposition research files Fusion-GPS was assembling in 2015. This is distinctly different from Glenn Simpson seeking out Nellie Ohr, and opens the entire background to larger ramifications.

Our research has always indicated that Nellie’s work product was transmitted to Christopher Steele as part of an intelligence laundry process. Chris Steele laundered Nellie’s information, provided second verification where possible, formatted into an official intelligence file, and returned that file -now named the Steele Dossier- to the FBI.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

However, if it becomes verified that it was CIA contracted (former or current) Nellie Ohr who approached Simpson, then it becomes possible, perhaps likely, the intelligence information (seeds carried by Nellie), originated from the CIA.

Nellie Ohr petitioning Glenn Simpson for a job would be an explosive change in the dynamic.  However, it could further explain some other unusual side-issues including why Nellie suddenly started using a HAM radio.

First, this revelation would imply that an inside government effort from the CIA was likely the origination of material that Nellie would “discover” while working for Fusion.  Under this possibility the laundry process would have two washes.

The first wash was from some unknown CIA intelligence sources to Nellie Ohr…. The second wash was from Nellie Ohr to Christopher Steele (the second wash we always knew).

Second, whether Glenn Simpson knew of Nellie’s intent, or was likely willfully blind, is another question.  I tend to think it didn’t really matter.  Simpson hired Nellie to get valuable oppo-research he could turn into a commodity.

Simpson wouldn’t necessarily care how Nellie found the information, and he knew her background in the intelligence research community. The commodity was always the Trump-research file; which was then sold to the Clinton campaign after the contract with the DNC was made through Perkins Coie.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/28/2019)

Former CIA Director John Brennan lies at the heart of the intelligence community decision to weaponize against Donald Trump.  In this outline, I will make the case for a possible criminal referral by Devin Nunes.

The FBI’s formal origination of the counterintelligence investigation into candidate Donald Trump known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane”, begins with a two-page memo submitted by former CIA Director John Brennan to former FBI Director James Comey.

The two-page origination memo is known as an “EC” or “electronic communication”.  This classified origination memo is one of the key documents requested by Congress for declassification by President Trump, to be shared with the American people.

According to House Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes; who is also a member of the intelligence oversight ‘Gang-of-Eight’; that EC contains intelligence material that did not come through “official intelligence channels” into the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

On April 22nd, 2018, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes appeared on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the origin of the July 2016 counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign.

WATCH the first two minutes:

The origin of the 2016 counterintelligence operation was the Electronic Communication document, a ‘raw intelligence product’ delivered by CIA Director John Brennan to the FBI.

The EC was not an official product of the U.S. intelligence community. Additionally, Brennan was NOT using official partnerships with intelligence agencies of our Five-Eyes partner nations; and he did not provide raw intelligence –as an outcome of those relationships– to the FBI.

When we first watched this interview the initial questions were: if the EC is not based on official intelligence from U.S. intelligence apparatus or any of the ‘five-eyes’ partners, then what is the origin, source and purpose therein, of the unofficial raw intelligence? Who created it? And why?

Now we know many of the answers to those questions.

All research indicates CIA Director John Brennan enlisted the help of U.S. and foreign intelligence assets to run operations against the Trump campaign early in 2016. The objective was to give the false and manufactured appearance of compromise. Once the CIA established the possibility of compromise, that activity created the EC which opened the door for an FBI investigation.

The operation run by Brennan targeting Papadopoulos is at the center of the two-page “EC” (electronic communication); given to FBI Director James Comey to start the counterintelligence operation (Crossfire Hurricane) against the Trump campaign.  Two of the intelligence assets Brennan organized were Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper.

Yes, the primary intelligence source of John Brennan’s “EC” is was the operation run by FBI and CIA operative Stefan Halper. A great background on Halper is HERE.

In March 2018 Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller took a deep dive into how Stefan Halper interacted with George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.  Halper is sketchy, and he was trying to initiate contacts with low-level Trump campaign aides. [SEE HERE]

DAILY CALLER – Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.

The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.

Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned. (Please Keep Reading)

We now know Brennan’s originating structure involved Stefan Halper the foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor deeply connected to the CIA and willing to run the operation to benefit the political objective for CIA Director Brennan.  This is how John Brennan originates the “EC” through non-traditional intelligence channels.  The EC is then given to James Comey, who starts Operation Crossfire Hurricane on July 31st, 2016.

(NOTE: •On July 31st, 2016 the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign. They did not inform congress until March 2017. •At the beginning of August (1st-3rd) 2016 FBI Agent Peter Strzok traveled to London, England for interviews with UK intelligence officials. •On August 15th, 2016 Peter Strzok sends a text message to DOJ Lawyer Lisa Page describing the “insurance policy“, needed in case Hillary Clinton were to lose the election. That’s where Carter Page comes in.)

However, CIA Director John Brennan didn’t stop with simply originating the FBI investigation, he went on to promote additional material from his knowledge of the Christopher Steele Dossier.

This is the part that John Brennan has denied; however, the evidence proving his lies is overwhelming.

We start by remembering the sworn testimony of John Brennan to congress on May 23rd, 2017. Listen carefully to the opening statement from former CIA Director John Brennan and pay close attention to the segment at 13:35 of this video [transcribed below]:

Brennan: [13:35] “Third, through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept congress apprised of these issues as we identified them.”

“Again, in consultation with the White House, I PERSONALLY briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election to congressional leadership; specifically: Senators Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr; and to representatives Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff between 11th August and 6th September [2016], I provided the same briefing to each of the gang of eight members.”

“Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case [that means the FBI], involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of congress; each of whom was accompanied by one senior staff member.”

Notice a few things from this testimony.  First, where Brennan says “in consultation with the White House“.  This is a direct connection between Brennan’s activity and President Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough, each of whom would have held knowledge of what Brennan was briefing to the Go8.

Secondly, Brennan is describing raw intelligence (obviously gathered prior to the Carter Page FISA Application/Warrant – October 21st, 2016) that he went on to brief the Gang-of-Eight (pictured below).  Notice Brennan said he did briefings “individually”.

Brennan also says in his testimony that he began the briefings on August 11th, 2016.  This is a key point because former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to James Comey on August 27th, 2016, as an outcome of his briefing by John Brennan. But it is the content of Reid’s letter that really matters.

In the last paragraph of Reid’s letter to Comey he notes something that is only cited within the Christopher Steele Dossier [full letter pdf here]:

This letter is August 27th, 2016.  The Trump advisor in the letter is Carter Page. The source of the information is Christopher Steele in his dossier. Two months later (October 21st, 2016) the FBI filed a FISA application against Carter Page using the Steele Dossier.

So what we are seeing here is CIA Director John Brennan briefing Harry Reid on the Steele dossier in August 2016, even before the dossier reached the FBI.  However, John Brennan has denied seeing the dossier until December of 2016.  A transparent lie.

Brennan goes on to testify the main substance of those 2016 Go8 briefings was the same as the main judgements of the January 2017 classified and unclassified intelligence assessments published by the CIA, FBI, DNI and NSA, ie. “The Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA).

However, we know Brennan put material from the Dossier into the ICA.

We also know from Paul Sperry: “[…] A source close to the House investigation said Brennan himself selected the CIA and FBI analysts who worked on the ICA, and that they included former FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok.  “Strzok was the intermediary between Brennan and [former FBI Director James] Comey, and he was one of the authors of the ICA,” according to the source.” (link)

♦Summary so far:  During a period early in 2016 CIA Director John Brennan manufactured the material needed to start the FBI investigation on July 31st, 2016.  John Brennan also received information from within the Steele Dossier which he put into President Obama’s Daily Briefing and shared with the Gang of Eight.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

On December 15, 2016, Strzok and Page texted each other about a sister organization leaking to the mainstream media. The next day, December 16, Strzok texted Page again, this time to discuss an article in The Washington Post: “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House”, where Strzok argued that the Central Intelligence Agency is more capable of manipulating the press and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the initial position, not the Central Intelligence Agency…

So it would seem that Brennan was leaking to the media and pushing hard on this same Russia narrative during the transition period.  It’s almost bizarre to see Brennan now saying “perhaps he had bad information”…  BRENNAN IS THE INFORMATION !!

Fucking Brennan.

Additionally, if you want to throw on an even more stunning layer upon this manipulation matrix, consider that Nellie Ohr was likely working for the CIA.

“I read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name. I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities.”

~ Nellie Ohr via congressional testimony

If Nellie Ohr, a known CIA open source contractor, sought out Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS for the job in 2015, not vice-versa, then it would appear a sting operation from within the CIA (John Brennan) was underway and long planned.  The evidence of this likelihood surfaces later from Brennan’s knowledge of the specific intelligence within the Steele Dossier as shared with Obama and briefed to Harry Reid in August 2016.

So let us recap:

♦In the first phase of this operation the CIA, likely Brennan, seeded Fusion GPS with information via Nellie Ohr.  After it became clear that Donald Trump would be the 2016 GOP candidate, that information was then piped-into another Fusion GPS contractor and former FBI Source, Chris Steele.  Steele then “laundered”, and returned the Ohr research material into an official intelligence product to the FBI. [The tool was Carter Page.]

♦Concurrently timed with the start of this first phase, Brennan was running an operation using Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud to generate the “EC” and initiate the FBI to begin a counterintelligence operation named Crossfire Hurricane. [The tool was George Papadopoulos]

This is why the media got/get somewhat confused with the origins of everything: Papadopoulous (Crossfire Hurricane) -vs- Carter Page (dossier into FISA); an origination confusion which still exists through today.

In essence we can see that John Brennan was the initiator manipulating everything, somewhat behind the scenes, for all of the activity (tangentially noted by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in their text messages about the CIA leaks).   After the 2016 election, Brennan continued pushing the Steele Dossier into the media bloodstream as it carried the Russian Conspiracy virus he created.

During the time James Comey’s FBI was running operation Crossfire Hurricane, Comey admitted he intentionally never informed congressional oversight: “because of the sensitivity of the matter“.  I suspect he knew there was manipulation behind the events that initiated the construct; he was, however, willfully blind to it.

When Brennan now says in hindsight he might have received “bad information“, it’s laughable – because the information is his creation.

Now with all of that hindsight in mind, watch the first four minutes of this interview and pay attention to the duping delight:

Lastly, unlike other DOJ and FBI officials connected to the fraudulent exploitation of the FISA court, John Brennan is not attached to the ongoing DOJ Inspector General investigation being conducted by IG Horowitz. The inspector general is only looking at the process, procedures and people who were involved in submitting an unverified and likely fraudulent FISA application.  The list of the participants does not include anyone outside the DOJ and FBI process.

This means John Brennan, or any other Obama-era official outside the DOJ and FBI, can be referred for criminal investigation and that referral will not impede any ongoing investigation by IG Michael Horowitz.

That’s why Devin Nunes could likely submit a criminal referral for ¹John Brennan.

¹Or, NSA Advisor Susan Rice, ODNI James Clapper, or former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power (unmasking); or any other administration official who may have engaged in leaking and/or disseminating classified intelligence information.”

(Conservative Treehouse, 3/28/2019)  (Archive)

(Credit: Lazaro Gamio/Axios)

“In a very revealing filing last night (full pdf below) the lead FBI investigator for the Mueller special counsel, David W. Archey, informs the court that with the ending of the special counsel some of the memo material can be released, such as their existence; however, Archey also states much of the memo content and sealed background material from the FBI must continue to remain sealed and redacted.

The FBI will file a further declaration on or before April 15, 2019, to explain why the remaining redactions to the Third Archey Declaration continue to be necessary. (page 2)

Within the filing we discover the lead FBI agent was David W. Archey (background here). Archey was selected by Robert Mueller when the special counsel took over the counterintelligence investigation from Special Agent Peter Strzok. According to ABC: “Agent David Archey is described by colleagues as a utility man of sorts within the FBI”. However, until now his exact role was not known.

(Source pdf)

Following the conclusion of the Mueller probe, David Archey was moved.  Effective March 8, 2019, Archey became head of the Richmond, VA, FBI field office. (link) Due to the corrupt nature of the special counsel, this is somewhat concerning. I digress…

The first three pages of the filing consist of David Archey explaining to the court that some of the material can be released, but other material must be withheld.  He then goes on to reference two prior sealed attachments outlined as “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B”.

“Exhibit A” is a filing from the FBI on January 31st, 2018, essentially supporting an earlier “in camera ex parte declaration” requesting continuance of a prior court order to keep the background material sealed from public view.  In essence, the FBI didn’t want the public to know what was/is contained within the Comey memos (including the scale thereof).

“Exhibit B” is where the action is.

This is the original declaration outlining to the court on October 13th, 2017, why the Comey memos must be sealed.  It is inside this exhibit where we discover there are many more memos than previously understood, and the content of those memos is far more exhaustive because James Comey documented the FBI investigation.

In essence Comey created these memos to cover his ass. (pg 13):

FBI Agent Archey then goes on to explain what is inside the memos: It is in this section where we discover that Comey made notes of his meetings and conversations with investigators.

Along with writing notes of the meetings and conversations, apparently Comey also made notes of the sources and methods associated with the investigation.  Why would Comey generate classified information in these notes (sources and methods) unless he was just covering his ass because he knew the investigation itself was a risk…

The content of the memos seems rather exhaustive; it appears Comey is keeping a diary for use in the event this operation went sideways. (page #14, exhibit B)

(…) This is an October 2017 filing, Comey was fired May 9th. FBI Agent Archey is outlining Trump as the target who might adjust his testimony. Again, more evidence of the special counsel focus being motivated by the obstruction case they were hoping to build. [Reminder, Comey was still FBI director at the time these memos were written]

The next section gets to the heart of why the FBI wants to keep the Comey memos hidden and not released.

In this section Archey outlines how FBI Director James Comey wrote down who the sources were; what code-names were assigned; how those confidential sources engaged with FISA coverage initiated by the FBI; what foreign governments were assisting with their effort; and what the plans were for the investigation.”

(Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 4/09/2019)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

♦ Prove the July 31st, 2016, Crossfire Hurricane operation originated from fraud by exposing the CIA operation that created the originating “Electronic Communication” memo. Declassify that two-page “EC” document that Brennan gave to Comey.

♦ Release and declassify all of the Comey memos that document the investigative steps taken  by the FBI as an outcome of the operation coordinated by CIA Director John Brennan in early 2016.

♦ Reveal the November 2015 through April 2016 FISA-702 search query abuse by declassifying the April 2017 court opinion written by FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer. Show the FBI contractors behind the 85% fraudulent search queries. [Crowdstrike? Fusion-GPS? Nellie Ohr?]

♦ Subpoena former DOJ-NSD (National Security Division) head John Carlin, or haul him in front of a grand jury, and get his testimony about why he hid the abuse from the FISA court in October 2016; why the DOJ-NSD rushed the Carter Page application to beat NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers to the FISA court; and why Carlin quit immediately thereafter. Squeeze this bastard’s nuts in the proverbial legal vice.

♦ Prove the Carter Page FISA application (October 2016) was fraudulent and based on deceptions to the FISA Court. Declassify the entire document, and release the transcripts of those who signed the application(s); and/or depose those who have not yet testified.

♦ Release all of the Lisa Page and Peter Strzok text messages without redactions. Let sunlight pour in on the actual conversation(s) that were taking place when Crossfire Hurricane (July ’16) and the FISA Application (Oct ’16) were taking place.

♦ Release all of Bruce Ohr 302’s, FBI notes from interviews and debriefing sessions, and other relevant documents associated with the interviews of Bruce Ohr and his internal communications. Including exculpatory evidence that Bruce Ohr may have shared with FBI Agent Joseph Pientka. [And get a deposition from this Pientka fella]

♦ Release the August 2nd, 2017, two-page scope memo provided by DAG Rod Rosenstein to special counsel Robert Mueller to advance the fraudulent Trump investigation, and initiate the more purposeful obstruction of justice investigation.

Yes, they were spying.

(Conservative Treehouse, 4/14/2019)

The *methods* the team used were always focused on trying to goad Trump into firing, or interfering, thereby creating more obstruction fuel.

Everything Mueller and Rosenstein were doing in late 2017 and throughout 2018 was intended to drag-out the Russia conspiracy narrative as long as possible, even though there was no actual Trump-Russia investigation taking place and Robert Mueller *DID* interview President Trump about the obstruction case. Rod Rosenstein was there for the deposition…. Only President Trump didn’t know his remarks were being recorded and transcribed.

Robert Mueller Did Interview President Trump Regarding Obstruction Case…

What, you think that over-the-top broadcast (leaked to CNN) raid on Roger Stone with heavily armed SWAT teams was a mistake? Oh hell no… Team Mueller/Rosenstein were trying to get Trump to lash out. It was strategic and purposefully agressive, just like the Manafort raid.

Every action was taken by the Mueller special counsel in order to get Trump to respond to the heavy-handed tactics. It was always “obstruction” bait. Intentional provocation…. It was purposefully over-the-top. They were goading the President.

People still don’t appreciate just how sinister and Machiavellian this was. It was the obstruction case they hoped would build the impeachment outcome.

This was always the objective….. all the way back to May of 2017.

The obstruction case was based on the updated Scope Memo written by Rosenstein on August 2nd, 2017. Everything they were doing was to create that obstruction case. That’s why we are not allowed to see the scope memo.

The scope memo outlines the same targets that originally existed within Crossfire Hurricane and the Steele Dossier: Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen. This was how they hoped to get to Trump.

Mueller targeted these individuals on other issues, any issues, because he needed to shut them down, hide the fraudulent origin of the original operation…. and thereby protect his obstruction investigation… For Mueller’s purposes:

1. The Obstruction investigation, building toward the impeachment narrative, was always the original goal of Mueller and Rosenstein. Therefore…
2. The Obstruction investigation needed the precursor of the Trump-Russia investigation to remain standing; However…
3. The structure of the Trump-Russia investigation, the underlying evidence to support the effort, is predicated on the “Steele Dossier”. Therefore…
4. Mueller needed to protect the Steele Dossier from scrutiny and deconstruction.

Remember, because there was no Trump-Russia collusion/conspiracy, it was always the “obstruction” investigation that could lead to the desired result by Mueller’s team of taking down President Trump through impeachment.

The “obstruction case” was the entirety of the case they were trying to make from August 2017 through to March 2019.

New scope memo. New FBI Team Leader. New approach. New goals. Mueller’s goals. What he was enlisted to produce. etc.

The Mueller targets would generate pressure points against President Trump. If they could not deliver direct evidence against Trump (on any criminal angle) they could be used to bait Trump into taking actions that would assist the obstruction case.

Obstruction was always the impeachment long-game, and their political plan needed the 2018 mid-term election and the House of Representatives in Pelosi’s hands to work.

This is why DAG Rod Rosenstein pressured Trump in September of 2018 not to declassify the underlying SpyGate/FISA documents.

Rosenstein knew sunlight would have undermined the Russia narrative, and worse…. it might have upended the goal of winning the House (a key part of their long-term plan); so Rosenstein informed Trump declassification would be impeding the Mueller investigation.

Along the road toward building the obstruction case, Mueller and Rosenstein needed to retain the illusion of a “Russian Interference Investigation.

The need to keep up the “Muh Russia” appearances is why Mueller and Rosenstein had to pause every six months and throw out a few phony, structurally silly, Russia indictments.

Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and Rod Rosenstein knew the people they accused would never show up to defend themselves. The Russian interference indictments were for appearances only, and always came with a specific disclaimer:

This disclaimer is purposeful for two reasons. Number one: there was no Trump-Russia collusion/conspiracy; and number two: saying it satiated their target, President Trump.

While President Trump’s legal team were asking what was taking so long, the real program was for Mueller’s team to build the ‘obstruction’ case, which would be the launching point for the impeachment.

Andrew Weissmann & team were continually trying to bait/provoke President Trump into making statements, or taking action that could be added to the ‘obstruction’ file; while Mueller is telling Trump’s legal team they were only a subject-witness in the Russia investigation.

The entire Mueller team were working to goad President Trump into something Mueller could then color/construe as obstruction and then open House impeachment grounds; and they were having fun doing it.

The manner of the pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort, and the way they treated him, along with the manner of the raid on Michael Cohen was all done purposefully hoping to draw a reaction from Trump, which they would add to the obstruction file.

Once Rosenstein and Mueller had the mid-term election goal secure (Dec ’18), then they set about enhancing the impeachment narrative with even stronger ‘obstruction‘ provocations.

The outrageous manner of arrest of Roger Stone is an example. The scale of it; heavily armed swat teams, tanks etc; and the fact that Weissmann enlisted CNN for the purpose of intentionally broadcasting the outrageous nature of the arrest, was by design.

After the 2018 election the type of provocations increased. From all appearances they had no intention of not continuing to ramp up the provocation.

All designed to make Trump lash out and give the appearance needed for obstruction.

The reason why Mueller’s team ended up stopping the scheme is because William Barr showed up and refused to participate. This would explain why a disgruntled Weissmann and Mueller team punted on the obstruction decision to AG William Barr.

It was their last desperate effort, amid a failure to construct a solid legal case, to politicize the possibility and innuendo, and force Barr to be the one to say: “no obstruction.”

(Read more: The Last Refuge/Conservative Treehouse, 4/19/2019)

(Editor’s note: republished with permission, photos courtesy of Conservative Treehouse)

(…) “So, what are the Woods Procedures? They were instituted in April 2001 and require the FBI to vet and support the facts it presents to a FISA court when it seeks a warrant to eavesdrop on a U.S. citizen. The individual who knows this process best is none other than the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller. In a response to questions from Sen. Leahy back in August of 2003, then FBI Director Mueller explains the significance of the procedures highlighting that they were instituted in order to “minimize factual inaccuracies in FISA packages.”

Mueller continues, “specifically, the goal of the procedures is to ensure accuracy with regard to: (1) the facts supporting probable cause; (2) the existence and nature of any related criminal investigations or prosecutions involving the subject of the FISA; (3) the existence and nature of any prior or ongoing asset relationship between the subject and the FBI.”

Starting in 2003, field offices were required to follow an eight page FISA request form when eliciting information about a targets status as well as the facts and circumstances that establish probable cause to believe the target is an agent of a foreign power.

Reading the testimony from Mueller a decade and a half ago is truly stunning as it shows just how hypocritical the “Special Counsel” was in both his actions and inactions by failing to investigate, let alone acknowledge, the violations of the Woods Procedures he once so vehemently defended. This may come back to bite the government as Department of Justice court records from 2015 have provided details about how Carter Page previously cooperated with FBI agents in exposing and helping to catch Russian spies working inside the United States.

If Page’s prior asset work was not included in the FISA application or the three renewals, then what is the point of the Woods Procedures to begin with?”

(Read more: Politically Short/4/20/2019

I went through Mueller Report and compiled dates and persons of all interviews reported in footnotes, so that I could sort by dates or by person/dates. (Why didn’t Mueller provide appendix of ALL interviews?)

(Stephen McIntyre, 4/22/2019)

“The admissions within the New York Times story today -outlining how President Obama’s intelligence apparatus ran simultaneous intelligence operations against the Trump campaign- are starting to merge the FBI and CIA operations. CTH anticipated this.

With new information about the “U.K. operation” using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

On August 15th, 2016, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok discussed the “insurance policy“:

Two weeks later, September 2nd, 2016, CIA operative Stefan Halper reaches out to George Papadopoulos and introduces him to CIA/FBI asset Azra Turk.

This alignment between the CIA and FBI is not a surprise to anyone who has followed the story behind the 2015/2016 political surveillance issues.  However, there’s a specific connection here many are missing.

Remember, everything AFTER March 9th, 2016, is a cover-story.  Everything after March 9th, 2016, are operations from both the CIA and FBI to hide the political surveillance that was going on before March 9th, 2016.  The surveillance was happening through exploitation of the NSA database through unauthorized FISA search queries; and involved both the CIA and FBI.

This is the point that has not been emphasized enough. However, FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer outlined the connection, albeit with mandatory redactions.  The connective evidence is in a footnote on page #87 of Collyer’s report that few are paying attention to:

Read that carefully and you’ll see an agreement between the CIA and FBI to allow contractors.  Note:

“[CIA] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding enter into [in ????])”

CTH believes that redacted date is 2012 as a result of another section of the report and the emphasis that Collyer is placing on the time-frame throughout her full report.  Notice also:

“Despite the existence of an inter-agency memorandum of understanding (presumably prepared or reviewed by FBI lawyers) no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016.”

So there was a secret agreement between the CIA and the FBI that was kept hidden from the FISA court until 2016 when Director Mike Rogers exposed and reported it.

The agreement centered around “access to FBI systems“; and, THIS IS IMPORTANT, we know the overarching issue was “deliberate decision-making” that led to “contractor access to the NSA database”, and the fact those contractors were searching “U.S. persons”.

Can you see the process now?

Can you see the potentially layered illegality of the process now?

CIA operatives (contractors) were using FBI portal access (per the secret agreement) to exploit the NSA database and extract search results.  Remember, the CIA is not supposed to be conducting surveillance, aka “spying”, inside the U.S. on American citizens.

In essence the secret agreement, unknown to the court, was the CIA hiding their extraction of U.S. person information by using FBI database access.  [Through the DOJ-NSD (National Security Division)]   Now does it make sense why the DOJ would not allow Inspector General oversight?

In 2015 the Office of Inspector General requested oversight and it was Deputy AG Sally Yates who responded with a lengthy 58-page legal explanation saying, essentially, ‘nope – not allowed.’ (PDF HERE) All of the DOJ is subject to oversight, except the NSD.

The secret MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the CIA and FBI was the reason why the DOJ-NSD could never allow inspector general oversight.

In the Obama-era political surveillance programs the lines between the CIA and FBI were blurred. They were working together through contractors. This is why you are noticing blurred lines between the CIA and FBI in the construct of the cover-up.

This is the parallel tracks we previously described, copied below for reference:

Everything after March 9th, 2016, is a function of two intelligence units, the CIA and FBI, operating together to coverup prior political surveillance and spy operations.

Prior to March 9th, 2016, the surveillance and spy operation was using the NSA database to track and monitor their political opposition.  However, once the NSA compliance officer began initiating an internal review of who was accessing the system, the CIA and FBI moved to create ex post facto justification for their endeavors. [Full Backstory]

The evidence for this is found in the documents attached to both operations; and bolsters the original statements by Congressman Devin Nunes as highlighted below.” (Read much more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/02/2019)

Former FBI Director James Comey gave a radio interview to Los Angeles radio station KNX 1070-AM after the New York Times outlined FBI spies used in the 2016 election. When questioned about the FBI using intelligence assets to engage with Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos, Comey replied:

“Really? What would you have the FBI do? We discover in the middle of June of 2016 that the Russians were engaged in a massive effort to mess with this democracy to interfere in the election. We’re focused on that and at the end of July we learn that a Trump campaign adviser — two months earlier, before any of this was public — had talked to a Russian representative about the fact that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton and wanted to arrange to share it with the Trump campaign.”

(Link to Radio Interview)

What Comey is describing there is “Russian representative” Joseph Mifsud talking to George Papadopoulos. Mifsud allegedly told Trump aide George Papadopoulos in April 2016 that Russia had “thousands” of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

On May 6th, 2016, some unknown intelligence apparatus ran an operation using Australian aide to Ambassador Downer, Erika Thompson, to interview Papadopoulos; and on May 10th, Ambassador Downer interviewed Papadopoulos and recorded their contact.

Later, in July 2016, the May 6th meeting with Thompson was used by FBI Agent Peter Strzok to write an Electronic Communication memo, transferred from CIA Director John Brennan to FBI Director James Comey, opening Crossfire Hurricane on July 31st.

It is worth remembering from a recent court filing by the FBI we are now aware that James Comey documented each intelligence decision in a series of multiple CYA memos that remain hidden. An additional court filing originally scheduled for April 15th, to determine the outcome of those memos, has been delayed until May 7th (next week).

The trail to understand the scale of the Comey memos surfaced as part of the FOIA case (Backstory Here) where DC Court Judge James E. Boasberg -an Obama appointee and also a FISA judge- asked the FBI to file an opinion about the release of Comey memos to the public. There were two issues: (1) can the memos be released? and (2) can prior sealed FBI filings, arguing to keep the memos hidden, be released?

In a very revealing filing April 8th, 2019, (full pdf below) the lead FBI investigator for the Mueller special counsel, David W. Archey, informed the court that with the ending of the special counsel some of the memo material can be released, such as their existence; however, Archey also stated much of the memo content and sealed background material from the FBI must continue to remain sealed and redacted.

Within the filing we discover the lead FBI agent was David W. Archey (background here). Archey was selected by Robert Mueller when the special counsel took over the counterintelligence investigation from Special Agent Peter Strzok. According to ABC: “Agent David Archey is described by colleagues as a utility man of sorts within the FBI”. However, until now his exact role was not known.

(Source pdf)

Following the conclusion of the Mueller probe, David Archey was moved. Effective March 8, 2019, Archey became head of the Richmond, VA, FBI field office. (link) Due to the corrupt nature of the special counsel, this is somewhat concerning. I digress…

The first three pages of the filing consist of David Archey explaining to the court that some of the material can be released, but other material must be withheld. He then goes on to reference two prior sealed attachments outlined as “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B”.

“Exhibit A” is a filing from the FBI on January 31st, 2018, essentially supporting an earlier “in camera ex parte declaration” requesting continuance of a prior court order to keep the background material sealed from public view. In essence, the FBI didn’t want the public to know what was/is contained within the Comey memos (including the scale thereof).

“Exhibit B” is where the action is.

This is the original declaration outlining to the court on October 13th, 2017, why the Comey memos must be sealed. It is inside this exhibit where we discover there are many more memos than previously understood, and the content of those memos is far more exhaustive because James Comey documented the FBI investigation.

In essence Comey created these memos to cover his ass. (pg 13):

FBI Agent Archey then goes on to explain what is inside the memos: It is in this section where we discover that Comey made notes of multiple meetings and conversations with investigators.

Along with writing notes of the meetings and conversations, apparently Comey also made notes of the sources and methods associated with the investigation. Why would Comey generate classified information in these notes (sources and methods) unless he was just covering his ass because he knew the investigation itself was a risk?

The content of the memos seems rather exhaustive; it appears Comey is keeping a diary for use in the event this operation went sideways. (page #14, exhibit B)

All of those investigative elements would likely be contained in official FBI files and notes by the investigative agents. There is no need for a contemporaneous personal account of meeting content unless Comey was constructing memos for his own protection. These memos appear to be motivated by the same mindset that caused Susan Rice to generate her email to self on inauguration day.

In the next section FBI Agent David Archey explains the scale of the memos. There are obviously far more than previously discussed or disclosed publicly. Additionally, look carefully at the way the second part is worded.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/04/2019)

By: Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations

“Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile “investigative reports” and other “information.”

The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.

Robert Mueller arriving at the office: His report recycles dossier dirt. (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press)

They suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller’s operation – and even had a hand in his final report – because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017. Also, Mueller’s lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from Fusion with the media.

Raising additional suspicions, Mueller’s report recycles the general allegations leveled in the dossier. And taking a page from earlier surveillance-warrant applications in the Russia investigation, it cites as supporting evidence several articles – including one by Yahoo! News – that used Steele and Fusion as sources.

Mueller even kept alive one of the dossier’s most obscene accusations – that Moscow had “compromising tapes” of Trump with Russian hookers – by slipping into a footnote an October 2016 text Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received from a “Russian businessman,” who cryptically intimated, “Stopped flow of tapes from Russia.” Lawyers for the businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (who is actually a Georgian-American), are demanding a retraction of the footnote, arguing Mueller omitted the part of his text where he said he did not believe the rumor about the tapes, for which no evidence has ever surfaced.

Mueller’s reliance on the Steele dossier is raising questions because it occurred long after FBI Director James B. Comey described the dossier as “salacious and unverified.”

U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the report should be renamed “The Mueller Dossier,” because he says it contains a lot of similar innuendo. Even though Mueller failed to corroborate key allegations leveled in the dossier, Nunes said his report twists key facts to put a collusion gloss on events. He also asserted that it selectively quotes from Trump campaign emails and omits exculpatory information in ways that cast the campaign’s activities in the most sinister light.

A detail from the website of Steele’s private London firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.

Steele’s 17-memo dossier alleged that the Trump campaign was involved in “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. It claimed this conspiracy “was managed on the Trump side by Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy adviser Carter Page and others as intermediaries.” Specifically, the dossier accused Page of secretly meeting with Kremlin officials in July 2016 to hatch a plot to release dirt on Hillary Clinton. And it accused Manafort of being corrupted by Russian President Vladimir Putin through his puppets in the Ukraine.

Likewise, Mueller’s report focuses on Manafort and Page and whether they “committed crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Though the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government, the Mueller report implies there may be a kernel of truth to the dossier’s charges.

“In July 2016, Campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page traveled in his personal capacity to Moscow and gave the keynote address at the New Economic School,” according to the section on him. “Page had lived and worked in Russia between 2003 and 2007. After returning to the United States, Page became acquainted with at least two Russian intelligence officers, one of whom was later charged in 2015 with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Russia.”

Carter Page at a news conference  in Moscow in 2016. (Credit: Pavel Golovkin/The Associated Press)

Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, heads to a news conference at RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Dec. 12, 2016. Page said he was in Moscow on a visit to meet with businessmen and politicians.

Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow and his advocacy for pro-Russian foreign policy drew media attention,” Mueller’s narrative continued. “July 2016 was also the month WikiLeaks first released emails stolen by the GRU [Russian intelligence] from the DNC.”

“Page acknowledged that he understood that the individuals he has associated with were members of the Russian intelligence services,” the report added, implying that Page in the 2015 case (referenced above) knowingly cavorted with Russian spies, which echoes charges Steele made in his dossier.

But federal court records make it clear that Page did not know that those men were Russian agents.

Mueller also left out of his report a detail RealClearInvestigations has previously reported: that Page was a cooperating witness in the case in question, helping the FBI eventually put a Russian agent behind bars in 2016. Nor did Mueller see fit to include in his report another exculpatory detail revealed in agent Gregory Mohaghan’s complaint and reported earlier by RCI — namely, that the Russians privately referred to Page as “an idiot” who was unworthy of recruitment.

Excluding such details is curious, given that the Mueller report quotes from the same FBI complaint and cites it in its footnotes. Similarly, in its section dealing with Manafort, the Mueller report echoes the dossier’s claims that the Trump campaign chairman was in cahoots with the Kremlin, even though Mueller never charged him with  conspiring to collude with Russia.

A 2006 photo of Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime employee of Paul Manafort who ran the Ukraine office of his lobbying firm. The Mueller report suggests he was one of Manafort’s Kremlin handlers. (Credit: The Associated Press)

The special prosecutor’s report indicated that one of Manafort’s Kremlin handlers was Konstantin Kilimnik.

“Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s plan to win the election,” it said. “That briefing encompassed the Campaign’s messaging and its internal polling data. It also included discussion of ‘battleground’ states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.”

Except that this wouldn’t have been an unusual conversation: Kilimnik was a longtime Manafort employee who ran the Ukraine office of his lobbying firm. Footnotes in Mueller’s report show that Manafort shared campaign information to impress a former business partner, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was suing him over financial losses. Mueller failed to tie the information exchange to Russian espionage. He also failed to mention that Deripaska is an FBI informant.

Mueller’s team worked closely with dossier author Steele, a long-retired British intelligence officer who worked for the Clinton campaign. Mueller’s investigators went to London to consult with Steele for at least two days in September 2017 while apparently using his dossier as an investigative road map and central theory to his collusion case. Steele now runs a private research and consulting firm in London, Orbis Business Intelligence.

It’s not clear if Mueller’s office paid Steele, but recently released FBI records show the bureau previously made a number of payments to him, and at one point during the 2016 campaign offered him $50,000 to continue his dossier research. Steele was also paid through the Clinton campaign, earning $168,000 for his work on the dossier.

Paul Manafort at court last year with wife Kathleen. (Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press)

Expenditure statements show that the Special Counsel’s Office outsourced “investigative reports” and “information” to third-party contractors during Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian “collusion” during the 2016 presidential election.

Over the past few months, Mueller’s office has rejected several formal requests from RealClearInvestigations for contract details, including who was hired and how much they were paid.

Washington-based Judicial Watch suspects Mueller’s office may have farmed out work to the private Washington research firm Fusion GPS or its subcontractor Steele, both of whom were paid by the Clinton camp during the 2016 presidential election. Several law enforcement and Hill sources who spoke with RCI also believe Steele and Fusion GPS were deputized in the investigation.

The government watchdog group has requested that the Justice Department turn over the contracting records, along with all budget requests Mueller submitted to the attorney general during his nearly two-year investigation. It’s also requested all communications between the Special Counsel’s Office and the private contractors it used.

A Judicial Watch spokesman said its Freedom of Information Act request is pending.

Glenn Simpson (Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press)

Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr declined comment when asked specifically if Mueller’s team hired or collaborated with Fusion GPS or any of its subcontractors. Mueller took over the FBI’s Russia probe in May 2017, whereupon he hired many of the agents who handled Steele and pored over his dossier.

For the first reporting period ending Sept. 30, 2017, and covering just four months, the Special Counsel’s Office reported paying $867 to unnamed contractors for “investigative reports/information,” along with $3,554 in “miscellaneous” payments to contractors.

In the next reporting period ending March 31, 2018, the office stopped breaking out investigative reports and information as a separate line item, lumping such contractual services under the category “Other,” which accounted for a total of $10,812, or more than 4% of the total spending on outside contracts.

For the six months ending Dona – the latest reporting period for which there is data – Mueller’s office showed a total of $310,732 in payments to outside contractors. For the first time, it did not break out such expenses into subcategories, though it noted that the lion’s share of the $310,000 was spent on “IT services.”

Mueller concluded his investigation and delivered his final report in March. The next expenditure report, for the period October 2018-March 2019, will cover contract work directly tied to compiling the report.

Asked if the contracting details were classified, Carr demurred. If the information is not deemed classified, it must be made public, Judicial Watch maintains.

Republican critics on the Hill say Mueller’s written narrative was slanted to give the impression there still might be something to the dossier’s most salacious allegations, even though Mueller found no evidence corroborating them or establishing that Trump or his campaign coordinated or cooperated with Russian meddling in the election.

“Whoever wrote the report leaves you with the idea there’s still something to all the allegations of collusion that were first promoted by the dossier,” said a witness who was interviewed by Mueller’s investigators late in the probe and is referenced in the report.

Donald Trump Jr., right, with his father: The Mueller report gives the miss-impression that the president’s oldest son was collaborating with WikiLeaks. (Credit: Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)

In a section on Donald Trump Jr., moreover, the report gives the misimpression that the president’s oldest son was collaborating with WikiLeaks on the release of the Clinton campaign emails.

“Donald Trump Jr. had direct electronic communications with WikiLeaks during the campaign period,” it stated.

In fact, Trump got an unsolicited message through his Twitter account from WikiLeaks. He described the outreach as “weird” in an email to senior Trump campaign staff at the time. Other contemporaneous messages make it clear he had no advance knowledge about any Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks.

The FBI first began receiving memos from Steele’s dossier in early July 2016 and used the documents as the foundation for its October 2016 application for a warrant to wiretap the private communications of Page. These milestones are missing from the Mueller report’s chronology of events. In fact, neither Steele nor his dossier is mentioned by name anywhere in the first half of the report dealing with collusion, though their allegations are hashed out.

Some Mueller critics are focused on the role played by his top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter with longstanding ties to Steele and Fusion GPS.

Andrew Weissmann, now a senior fellow at NYU Law. (Credit: NYU Law)

“Weissman had a lot to do with the way the report was written,” said author Jerome Corsi, who, as a friend of Trump confidant Roger Stone, was targeted by Mueller. “That’s why it’s basically a political document.”

Corsi said he spent more than 40 hours with Mueller’s prosecutors and investigators, who grilled him about possible ties to WikiLeaks but never charged him with a crime.

Formerly a top Justice Department official under Obama, Weissmann not only donated to Clinton’s presidential campaign but also attended her election-night party in New York City in November 2016. Three months earlier, he was briefed on Steele’s dossier and other dirt provided by the Clinton contractor and paid FBI informant. In early 2017, Weissmann helped advance the Russia collusion narrative by personally sharing Steele’s and Fusion’s dirt on Trump and his advisers with Washington reporters.

In an April 2017 meeting he arranged at his office, Weissmann gave guidance to four Associated Press reporters who were investigating Manafort, according to internal FBI  documents.

Among other things, they discussed rumors that Manafort used “some of the money from shell companies to buy expensive suits.” A month later, Weissmann became the lead prosecutor handling the Manafort case for Mueller. His February 2018 indictment of Manafort highlights, among other things, the Trump adviser’s taste for expensive suits.

Attempts to reach Weissmann for comment were unsuccessful.

Edward Baumgartner: worked for Fusion GPS
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. (Credit: YouTube screen grab)

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said there are signs Mueller may have hired “researchers” like Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, who worked with Steele on the dossier, along with Edward Baumgartner and Nellie Ohr, who have worked for Fusion GPS, which originally hired Steele in June 2016 after contracting with the Clinton campaign.

“I ran into Glenn at the 2017 Aspen Security [Forum], and I distinctly remember him leaning in and claiming he was working for the government,” said one associate, who wished to remain anonymous.

Congressional investigators say Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has been feeding Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate investigative tips regarding Trump and his associates, including Manafort.

In 2017, for instance, he urged Democrats specifically to look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank, which has financed some of Trump’s businesses, because he suspected some of the funding may have been laundered through Russia.

Around the time Simpson began coordinating with Democratic investigators looking into Trump’s bank records, Mueller subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for financial records for Manafort and other individuals affiliated with Trump.

Simpson did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

Founded by the journalist-turned-opposition researcher, Fusion has rehired Steele to continue his anti-Trump work with millions of dollars in left-wing funding from The Democracy Integrity Project, a Washington-based nonprofit started in 2017 by former FBI analyst Daniel Jones, who also worked for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

In March 2017, Jones met with FBI agents to provide them data he collected from IT specialists he hired to analyze web traffic between servers maintained by the Trump Organization and a Russian bank mentioned in the dossier. The traffic turned out to be innocuous marketing emails, or spam. (RealClearInvestigations, 5/09/2019)

(This and all other original articles created by RealClearInvestigations may be republished for free with attribution. These terms do not apply to outside articles linked on the site.)

“President Trump indicates he is well aware of the intents and motives of FBI Director Christopher Wray covering for the illegal coup effort:

President Trump may have been aware of Chris Wray’s corrupt disposition prior to today; however, this is the first visible indication he understands the internecine organization of it.  Hopefully we can start the countdown clock to Wray’s exit.

Next up, Chris Wray’s #1 strategic hire, current FBI Legal Counsel Dana Boente.

In 2015 the DOJ-OIG (office of inspector general) requested oversight of the DOJ National Security Division.  It was Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates who responded with a lengthy 58 page legal explanation saying, essentially, ‘nope – not allowed.’ (PDF HERE) All of the DOJ is subject to oversight, except the DOJ-NSD.

When John Carlin resigned as Asst. Attorney General in charge of the DOJ National Security Division in October 2016 he was replaced by Principal Deputy Asst. Attorney General and Chief of Staff, Mary McCord.  After President Trump took office on January 20th, 2017, Sally Yates was Acting AG and Mary McCord was in charge of the DOJ-NSD.

Yates and McCord were the two Main Justice officials who then engaged with White House Counsel Don McGahn on January 26th, 2017, regarding the General Flynn FBI interview conducted on January 24th.  The Trump-Russia Collusion Conspiracy was the headline.

On January 30th, 2017, Sally Yates was fired for refusing to defend the Trump travel ban from extremist countries.  Yates was replaced on January 31st by the U.S. Attorney from the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), Dana Boente.

With his shift to Main Justice Dana Boente was Acting Attorney General, and Mary McCord was Asst. AG in charge of the DOJ-NSD.  Boente was in the Acting AG position from Jan 31st, 2017, until Jeff Sessions was confirmed on February 8th, 2017.

When Jeff Sessions became AG, Dana Boente became Acting Deputy AG, a role he would retain until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed on April 25th, 2017.   [Mary McCord remained head of the DOJ-National Security Division]

On March 2nd, 2017, Dana Boente was one of the small group who participated in a conversation that led to the recusal of Jeff Sessions from anything related to the 2016 election.  This recusal included the ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, which was later picked up by Robert Mueller.

The other attendees for the recusal decision-making meeting (see above schedule) included Sessions’ chief of staff Jody Hunt; Criminal Chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, Jim Crowell; Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) in the Department of Justice National Security Division Tash Gauhar (FISA lawyer); and Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools.  [Note: Tash Gauhar was lawyer for FBI Clinton case; and Scott Schools was part of drafting Clinton exoneration letter.]

The Main Justice group influenced Jeff Sessions to recuse.

With AG Jeff Sessions recused on March 2, 2017, FBI Director James Comey now reported to Acting Deputy AG Dana Boente.  [Technically, Boente is still EDVA U.S. Attorney and is only ‘acting’ as Deputy AG]  Additionally, on March 31st, 2017, President Trump signs executive order 13787 making the U.S. EDVA Attorney the 3rd in line for DOJ succession.

Question:  If Dana Boente was appointed “Acting Attorney General” on January 31st, 2017 (he was), then why did Don McGahn need to draw up XO 13787 on March 31st, 2017… especially after confirmed AG Jeff Sessions was already in place Feb 9th?

The answer likely has to do with a sign-off needed for FISA.

See the issue?

How does somebody (unknown) advise White House Counsel Don McGahn to draw up an executive order so that Boente can sign a FISA…. without telling Don McGahn the reason why AG Sessions can’t sign off on the FISA?   See the issue now?

In the period between March 2nd and April 25th – With AG Sessions recused, and without a Deputy AG confirmed, Dana Boente is simultaneously:

• U.S. Attorney for EDVA
• Acting Deputy AG.
• Acting AG for all issues related to Sessions recusal.

It is James Comey and Dana Boente who sign the April 2017 FISA renewal for Carter Page.

(Page #271 – Carter Page FISA Application)

This dynamic would later become important as notes Boente took from conversations with James Comey became evidence for Mueller’s expanded obstruction investigation. (March 2, 2017 Mary McCord is still head of DOJ-NSD.)

Somehow Acting Deputy AG Dana Boente’s personal and handwritten notes were mysteriously leaked to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/12/2019)

“Devin Nunes appears on Fox News to discuss why the origin of the Russia narrative is important.  The scale and scope of the fraudulent construct is now a strongly enmeshed narrative, toxic to the systems of cohesive government:

If you read the Weissmann/Mueller report carefully one aspect stands out strongly; the Mueller investigation was fully committed to The Steele Dossier. An inordinate amount of the report is focused on justifying their investigative validity and purpose in looking at the claims within the Steele Dossier.

Repeatedly, the investigative unit references their mandate based around the Steele Dossier, and the mid-summer 2016 origin of the FBI counterintelligence operation.

Why? Why was/is Crossfire Hurricane (July ’16) and the Steele Dossier (Oct. ’16) so important to the principle intelligence apparatus, and the Mueller team (’17, ’18, ’19)?

I believe former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers has told us the answer. In early 2016 Rogers caught on to a massive and pre-existing weaponization of government surveillance and the use of collected NSA metadata for political spy operations. Everything, that comes AFTER March 2016 is one big blanket cover-up operation….. ALL OF IT.

The Russian election interference narrative; the use of Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, the London and Australian embassy personnel; Erika Thompson, Alexander Downer, U.S. DIA officials; everything around Crossfire Hurricane; and everything after to include the construct of the Steele Dossier; all of it was needed for the creation of an ‘after-the-fact‘ plausible justification to cover-up what Mike Rogers discovered in early 2016, AND the downstream unmasked records that existed in the Obama White House SCIF.

Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. The intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. They already knew everything about the Trump campaign. The Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a justification for pre-existing surveillance and spy operations.

That’s why the FBI, and later the Mueller team, are so strongly committed to, and defending, the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

On Pages #11 and #12 of the Weissmann/Mueller report, the special counsel team outlines the purpose and intent of the probe as delivered by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Within these pages Mueller outlines the August 2nd Scope Memo that has previously been hidden and remains redacted through today.

Read the highlighted portion carefully to understand the scope of the instructions. Note the careful wording “the Special Counsel had been authorized since his appointment to investigate allegations”… This means from Day #1 of the special counsel, the scope of the probe was always to investigate the claims within the Ohr/Steele Dossier:

The August 2nd Scope Memo additionally authorized the investigation of “certain other matters” specifically relating to Manafort (financial crimes), and Papadopolous and Flynn (FARA violations).

These paragraphs tell us a great deal about what originated the purpose of the FBI investigation and the continued purpose of the special counsel. Remember, the special counsel was a continuance of the FBI counterintelligence operation which officially began on July 31st, 2016. [The unofficial beginning was much earlier]

Understanding now that Mueller is saying from Day One he was investigating the Steele Dossier; here’s where we all need to question the assumptions.

Why is the Steele Dossier so important?” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/14/2019)

“Apparently, the Italian media is reporting that Prime Minister Giuseppe Conté has requested the resignations of several top Italian intelligence officials. The move is being interpreted as the Conte’ government responding to the previous governments’ coordinated activity with U.S. intelligence officials during the 2016 U.S. election surrounding “Spygate”.

Prime Minister Conté visited with President Trump in June 2018 at the White House; and reflects a more nationalistic outlook in Italy.  Conte’ has high approval in the country; however, it appears the socialists (including media) are outraged at the challenge to the intelligence apparatus.”

(Via Google Translate) The senator of the Pd Luigi Zanda presented an urgent question to the President of the Council after the news appeared today in the newspaper La Repubblica about a presumed request for the resignation of the four deputy directors of the departments of the Italian secret services.

“The facts reported, if confirmed, appear to be of absolute gravity, providing for the application of a system of rigid spoil system and a real political subdivision applied to the intelligence system, which is entrusted with the security of our country” reads in the question, where it is underlined that “such behavior would risk not only to question the operational efficiency of our intelligence systems in a very delicate moment, but also to destroy their credibility in the precious international information network, which finds its fundamentals in professionalism, independence and in the absence of political interests in the heads of the secret services of the countries to which we are connected “.

Zanda therefore asks the President of the Council to know “if the facts reported in the introduction correspond to the truth and, if so, if he intends to revoke the request for resignation, and what urgent initiatives he intends to take to ensure that the appointments of the directors and deputy directors of our security system always respond to criteria of operational efficiency and are never subjected to the logic of political subdivision “.

The senator of the Democratic Party Roberta Pinotti, former Minister of Defense, subscribes to the question. “Intelligence and security services – he said – are a good of the state to safeguard the community and we cannot think of naming the top on the basis of spoil system logics”. “I do not remember that the change of service executives ever took place in the fullness of their mandate, not as a result of any errors or serious shortcomings, but simply to politically reorient the offices“.

“If the press reports were confirmed, we would be faced with an episode that would humiliate the structure of our Intelligence and the people involved and that would create a very serious precedent, establishing an extremely dangerous and unacceptable practice in a democratic country,” concludes Pinotti. (La Repubblica)

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/16/2019)

A partial Twitter thread by independent researcher, Undercover Huber @JohnWHuber:

“The “Steele” dossier source who falsely claimed there was a Russian Consulate in Miami was ALSO  a source for the Moscow “pee tape” AND **the key source** alleging an “extensive conspiracy” between the Trump campaign & Russia involving Manafort and Page ?

Christopher Steele tells State Dept. Official Kathleen Kavalec on Oct 11 2016 that a “human/technical operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” is “hacking” and “recruiting” and “payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami.”

Kavalec (likely after a cursory search) says “It is important to note there is no Russian Consulate in Miami.” ?

This is critical to the credibility of Steele’s source for this “payments to hackers” allegation: if they’re wrong about “Miami” what *else* are they wrong about? ?

N.B: Kavalec was right: at the time, the Russian Consulate in Florida was 450 km away from Miami, in Tampa (apparently in the same building as the US Commerce Dept.) – literally a 60 second Google search would have shown that this allegation about payments from “Miami” was false.

(FYI: These notes from Kavalec are immediately forwarded to Stephen Laycock in FBI Counterintelligence, who then passes them on to Peter Strzok (note: the Page FISA is generated out of the Counterespionage section [CD4] of the Counterintelligence division, which Strzok supervises.)

Here is the part of Steele’s dossier about the “Miami” payments to “cyber operators” (i.e. hackers) “based in the U.S.” and it is attributed to…

…”SOURCE E” ?

(“Miami” is not mentioned anywhere else in the dossier except attributed to Source E)

Source E  also “confirms” the Trump/hookers “pee tape” allegations and provides an introduction to a Ritz-Carlton hotel employee for validation of this kompromat allegation.

Steele even tells Kavalec that he’s only “persuaded the story about the prostitutes is accurate” *BECAUSE OF SOURCE E*. The same guy who doesn’t know where the Russian Consulate is in Florida? Yep, he’s the Pee Tape confirmation.

Reminder: Intel sources called Steele “meticulous” with a “formidable record.”

Back to Source E. He is *also* the primary source for “Steele’s” explosive claim of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [Trump] and the Russian leadership”, which is managed by Paul Manafort via @carterwpage, including the DNC hacking/release to Wikileaks. ?

That allegation of a conspiracy involving Page and members of the Trump campaign to interfere in the election in “coordination” with Russia is what the FBI/DOJ swore they believed to the FISA court. “Conspiracy” is also the exact word needed to implicate potential federal crimes.

Some conclusions:

• The FBI should have known there was no Russian Consulate in Miami *themselves*, when they attempted to verify the dossier claims
• Even if the FBI didn’t try and properly verify the dossier (likely), Kavalec told the FBI this fact explicitly *BEFORE THE FISA*
• So, Steele’s SOURCE E for the “Miami” payments is giving Steele FALSE information, either mistakenly, or worse: deliberately
• The next logical source verification step once the FBI realizes this is to check all of the *other* allegations made by SOURCE E as they’re also suspect

There is no evidence that the FBI/DOJ even tried to verify the dossier before the FISA, and no evidence they even informed the FISC that SOURCE E was potentially unreliable after the first FISA was sought.

And it gets worse… (Read more: Undercover Huber, 5/16/2019)

(Timeline editor’s note: We believe there are several timeline entries that suggest Cody Shearer could be Source E. You can find his tag archive HERE:)

“In September 2016 the FBI used a longtime informant, Stefan Halper, to make contact with George Papadopoulos, pay him $3k and fly him to London for consulting work and a policy paper on Mediterranean energy issues.

As part of the spy operation the FBI sent a female intelligence operative (a spy) under the alias Azra Turk to pose as Halper’s assistant and engage Papdopoulos.  A month later the FBI used Papadopoulos as a supplemental basis for a FISA warrant against Carter Page.

Former Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, tells Maria Bartiromo that he has seen transcripts of the Halper/Turk operation, and those transcripts exonerate Papadopoulos.

(Transcript)

Bartiromo: I’m really glad you brought that up; the FBI agents’ discussion with George Papadopoulos. Because when the FBI sends in informants to someone they’re looking at, typically those conversations are recorded right? Those people are wired?

Gowdy: Yeah, I mean if the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired; and if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls there’s going to be a transcript of that.

And some of us have been fortunate enough to know whether or not those transcripts exist; but they haven’t been made public and I think one in-particular is going – it has the potential to actually persuade people.  Very little in this Russia probe I’m afraid is going to persuade people who hate Trump, or who love Trump, but there is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer if it’s ever made public.

Bartiromo: You say that’s exculpatory evidence and when people see that they’re going to say: wait, why wasn’t this presented to the court earlier?

Gowdy: Yeah, you know, Johnny Ratcliffe is rightfully exercised over the obligations that the government has to tell the whole truth to the court when you are seeking permission to spy, or do surveillance, on an American.  And part of that includes the responsibility of providing exculpatory information, or information that tends to show the person did not do something wrong.  If you have exculpatory information, and you don’t share it with the court, that ain’t good.  I’ve seen it, Johnny’s seen it, I’d love for your viewers to see it.
(End Transcript)

(Page FISA Application)

(HPSCI Memo)

(Downer Operation Link)

(The Conservative Treehouse, 5/19/2019)

“The foundation for the Russian election interference narrative is built on the claim of Russians hacking the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently releasing damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.

Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server.  Instead the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.

The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked.  In a court filing (full pdf below) the scale of sketchy has increased exponentially.

Suspecting they could prove the Russian hacking claim was false, lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack.  When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission.  Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the Crowdstrike report.

(A snippet from the Crowdstrike Report)

Yes, that is correct.  The FBI and DOJ were only allowed to see a “draft” report prepared by Crowdstrike, and that report was redacted… and that redacted draft is the “last version of the report produced”; meaning, there are no unredacted & final versions.

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!

This means the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.

The entire apparatus of the U.S. government just took their word for it…

…and used the claim therein as an official position…

…which led to a subsequent government claim, in court, of absolute certainty that Russia hacked the DNC.

Think about that for a few minutes.

The full intelligence apparatus of the United States government is relying on a report they have never even been allowed to see or confirm; that was created by a paid contractor for a political victim that would not allow the FBI to investigate their claim.

The DNC server issue is foundation, and cornerstone, of the U.S. government’s position on “Russia hacking” and the election interference narrative; and that narrative is based on zero factual evidence to affirm the U.S. government’s position.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/15/2019)

Not enough people understand the role of the Lawfare group in the corruption and political weaponization of the DOJ, FBI and larger intelligence community.

Benjamin Wittes (Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

What Media Matters is to corrupt left-wing media, the Lawfare group is to the corrupt DOJ and FBI.

All of the headline names around the seditious conspiracy against Donald Trump assemble within the network of the Lawfare group.

Three days after the October 21st, 2016, FISA warrant was obtained, Benjamin Wittes outlined the insurance policy approach.

FBI Director James Comey, FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, Comey memo recepient Daniel Richman, Deputy AG Sally Yates, Comey friend Benjamin Wittes, FBI lead agent Peter Strzok, FBI counsel Lisa Page, Mueller lead Andrew Weissmann and the Mueller team of lawyers, all of them -and more- are connected to the Lawfare group; and this network provides the sounding board for all of the weaponized approaches, including the various new legal theories as outlined within the Weissmann-Mueller Report.

The Lawfare continuum is very simple.  The corrupt 2015 Clinton exoneration; which became the corrupt 2016 DOJ/FBI Trump investigation; which became the corrupt 2017 DOJ/FBI Mueller probe; is currently the 2019 “impeachment” plan.  Weissmann and Mueller delivering their report evolved the plan from corrupt legal theory into corrupt political targeting.  Every phase within the continuum holds the same goal.

The current “impeachment strategy” is planned-out within the Lawfare group.

After the 2018 mid-terms, and in preparation for the “impeachment” strategy, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler hired Lawfare Group members to become committee staff. Chairman Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link), and Chairman Nadler hired  Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link), all are within the Lawfare network.

Remember, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller didn’t come into this process as an ‘outsider’, and Mueller didn’t select his team. The corrupt Lawfare team inside government (FBI Counsel James Baker, DOJ Deputy Andrew Weissmann, FBI Deputy McCabe etc.) already knew Mueller.  The team had established personal and professional connections to Mueller, and they brought him in to lead the team.

When you realize that Robert Mueller didn’t select the team; rather the preexisting team selected their figurehead, Robert Mueller; then results make sense.  Robert Mueller can never be allowed to testify to congress because if questioned he actually has very little understanding of what took place.

A disconcerting aspect to the Lawfare dynamic is how current U.S. Attorney General William Barr has knowledge of this.  Barr knows and understands how the Lawfare network operates. Barr is from this professional neighborhood. Like Mueller, Barr also knows these people.

“As a matter of law. In other words, we didn’t agree with the legal analysis- a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers.“

~ AG BILL BARR

Under Eric Holder, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Tom Perez, Robert Mueller, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the focus of the DOJ and FBI became prismatic toward politics and tribalism.  All of the hired senior lawyers and officials had to be aligned with the political intents of the offices.

(CIA Director John Brennan brought the same political goals to an intelligence apparatus that held a preexisting disposition of alignment, see Mike Morell: “I ran the CIA now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.”)

Their agencies were used against their ideological enemies in large operations like Fast-n-Furious, IRS targeting, Gibson Guitar etc.  And also smaller operations: Henry Louis Gates, George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, Ferguson, Baltimore etc.  All of these activist Lawfare examples were pushed and promoted by an allied media.

Many of the ‘weaponized’ approaches use radical legal theory (ex. disparate impact), and that ties into the purposes and methods of the Lawfare Group.  The intent of Lawfare is described in the name: to use Law as a tool in Warfare.  The ideology that binds the group is the ideological outlook and purpose: using the legal system to target political opposition.

The Lawfare group ensures you have the right to remain guilty until they verify your politics and determine your alignment with the tribe.  If accepted, your disposition shifts to innocent and you receive a pass to avoid any legal jeopardy…

When special counsel Robert Mueller formally closed the Russia investigation on May 29th, he opened the door to wide-ranging speculation as to the intent behind his statement. In the eyes of Former Texas Prosecutor Sidney Powell, Mueller’s words stood the rule of law and the presumption of innocence on their heads. (Conservative Treehouse, 6/01/2019)

“Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) on Saturday called for the immediate release of “all backup and source information” for the Mueller report after internet sleuth @almostjingo (Rosie Memos) discovered that the special counsel’s office deceptively edited content which was then cited as evidence of possible obstruction.

“It’s all a fraud” tweeted Nunes, replying to a tweet by @JohnWHuber (Undercover Huber), who also posted a comparison between the Mueller report and a newly released transcript of a November 2017 voicemail message left by former Trump lawyer John Dowd, in which he asked former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s attorney for a “heads up” if Flynn was planning on saying anything that might damage the president.

Mueller’s team omitted key context suggesting that Dowd was trying to strongarm Flynn and possibly obstruct justice by shaping witness testimony, while the actual voicemail reveals that Dowd was careful not to tread into obstruction territory in what was a friendly and routine call between lawyers.

Dowd qualifies his request by saying “without you having to give up any…confidential information” in order to determine “If, on the other hand, we have, there’s information that…implicates the President, then we’ve got a national security issue, or maybe a national security issue, I don’t know… some issue, we got to-we got to deal with, not only for the President but for the country.”

Mueller’s deceptive edits beg the question; what else may have been manipulated by the special counsel to make Trump look guilty? When reached for comment by attorney ‘Techno Fog’ (@Techno_Fog), Dowd said of the edits: “It is unfair and despicable. It was a friendly  privileged call between counsel – with NO conflict. I think Flynn got screwed.”

Dowd told Fox News: “During the joint defense relationship, counsel for the president provided to Flynn’s counsel documents, advice and encouragement to provide to SC [the special counsel] as part of his effort to cooperate with the SC,” adding “SC never raised or questioned the president’s counsel about these allegations despite numerous opportunities to do so.”

Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russians and is currently awaiting sentencing.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has resisted a court order to release the transcripts of Flynn’s conversations with Russian officials, including former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

This raises at least two questions. First, did the DOJ give Flynn the transcripts?And second, did the DOJ violate a previous court order from Judge Emmett Sullivan to produce evidence during discovery?”

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 6/02/2019)

“Comey FBI apologist, Fusion GPS co-conspirator and Lawfare Alliance media narrative engineer, Natasha Bertrand, has an outline published today on the background interview of dossier author Christopher Steele.

From within the article, beyond the sympathetic propaganda, some overarching details are interesting:

♦(1) As expected Mr. Steele would only talk to OIG investigators from Horowitz’s office; Steele would not speak to U.S. Attorney John Durham.

♦(2) The interview took place at the same time President Trump traveled to the U.K (June 3rd-5th) for a state visit.  Likely coordinated so FBI officials could travel innocuously without media scrutiny (lots of security officials traveled on behalf of U.S. interests at the time); likely the preferred timing of Steele himself.

♦(3) The interview(s) took place over two days for a total of sixteen hours of conversation. The recent reports of IG delay and follow-up interviews are almost certainly related to the outcome of the investigative findings (ie. Kathleen Kavalec cooperation etc.).

♦(4) Current officials within the DOJ/FBI; with obvious interests related to the corrupt activity surrounding the FBI and DOJ use of Steele (ie. McCabe and Comey apologists); are leaking the content of the investigative interviews to their notorious Lawfare Alliance media cohorts, ie. Natasha Bertrand.

WASHINGTON DC – Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the infamous “dossier” on President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, was interviewed for 16 hours in June by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The interview is part of an ongoing investigation that the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has been conducting for the past year. Specifically, Horowitz has been examining the FBI’s efforts to surveil a one-time Trump campaign adviser based in part on information from Steele, an ex-British MI6 agent who had worked with the bureau as a confidential source since 2010.

The extensive, two-day interview took place in London while Trump was in Britain for a state visit, the sources said, and delved into Steele’s extensive work on Russian interference efforts globally, his intelligence-collection methods and his findings about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who the FBI ultimately surveilled. The FBI’s decision to seek a surveillance warrant against Page — a warrant they applied for and obtained after Page had already left the campaign — is the chief focus of the probe by Horowitz.

The interview was contentious at first, the sources added, but investigators ultimately found Steele’s testimony credible and even surprising. The takeaway has irked some U.S. officials interviewed as part of the probe — they argue that it shouldn’t have taken a foreign national to convince the inspector general that the FBI acted properly in 2016. Steele’s American lawyer was present for the conversation.  (read more)

Adam Waldman (l) and Christopher Steele (Credit: public domain)

Steele’s American lawyer is likely Adam Waldman (far left), the same U.S. lawyer/lobbyist who was working to put Steele in touch with SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner in 2017.

Attorney Waldman has interests in alignment with the Lawfare network and direct connection to Daniel Jones, Dianne Feinstein’s former chief-of-staff who also took millions from resistance operatives (more Lawfare and Fusion-GPS allies) to continue funding Steele’s work afer the Trump inauguration.

Attorney Adam Waldman was also the lawyer representing Oleg Deripaska (pictured above on right); who we now know was paying Christopher Steele for research in 2016 while Steele was writing the dossier.

It’s one big convoluted network of allied interests, mixed with current and former DOJ and FBI officials who have a self-interest in hiding their illicit behavior.  Almost all of the people within this network have ideological allies in the media, and depending on the subject issue at hand they are described in relative terms:

“Beach friends” (Christine Blasey Ford); “Lawfare Alliance” (Benjamin Wittes et al); FBI Washington Field Office and Main Justice officials are all part of this group and were also the officials within the Mueller probe.   This network is all the same people, running in the same circles, meeting at the same parties, vacationing in the same areas and leaking to the same primary media contacts to project their narrative and defend their interests.

The article in Politico by Natasha Bertrand is a singular example. Quite simply this entire network is confident in their outlook that all of their behavior operates above the law.

Unfortunately, if the tone of the article is generally their position, it would appear they feel remarkably confident the investigation by IG Horowitz is nothing to fear.  This overall outlook is bolstered by the historic track record of the OIG with regard to the two most recent investigative summaries: (1) Andrew McCabe leaking to media, and (2) DOJ and FBI conduct in the Hillary Clinton investigation.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 7/09/2019)

Michael Flynn (Credit: The New Yorker)

The DOJ has released the FBI agent report (FD-302) written after their interview of Michael Flynn on Jan 24th, 2017. (Full pdf below)  From prior testimony, we know that FBI Agent Peter Strzok did the questioning and FBI Agent Joe Pientka took notes.

However, for some reason, within the DOJ release of the report, they are continuing to redact the name Joe Pientka. [Could be due to ongoing employment]

It’s worth noting according to Mark Meadows the Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz has interviewed Joe Pientka extensively; prior attempts by congress to gain testimony from Pientka were blocked by the FBI and Rod Rosenstein.

FBI Agent Joseph Pientka was never interviewed by the joint House Judiciary and Oversight committees (Goodlatte and Gowdy).   The reason, as explained by Meadows, was simple; Pientka was on Weissmann and Mueller’s special counsel team. Congress was not allowed to interfere in the Mueller probe.  In hindsight, this looks like Weissmann, Mueller & Rosenstein strategically using the investigation as a shield from sunlight.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/06/2019)  (Archive)

Byron York has put down the crustless triangle sandwich and white wine spritzer long enough to finally discover the October 20th, 2017, scope memo written by Rod Rosenstein that authorized Weissman and Mueller to target Michael Flynn Jr.

(…)  The Justice Department has recently allowed members of some congressional committees to view the scope memos, and out of that has come the news that there was a third scope memo to Mueller. Dated Oct. 20, 2017, its contents remain a secret. But its very existence suggests something was going on behind the scenes in the relationship of Mueller and his supervisors at the Justice Department. (read more)

York continues… “At the moment, the third scope memo, like most of the second scope memo, remains a secret.“…  Good grief, seriously?  Funny how AG Barr is now letting congress look at the scope memos, meanwhile -despite the authorization to release provided by President Trump- the public is blocked from them.  I digress.

The October 20th, 2017, Rosenstein scope memo was specifically so that Weissmann and Mueller could target specific people for maximum political damage; including the targeting of Michael Flynn Jr. to generate leverage so that Flynn Sr. would have to accept a plea or see his family crushed under the weight of the weaponized special counsel.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The original authorization for the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller was May 17th, 2017. However, the released Weissmann/Mueller report shows there were two additional scope memos authorizing specific targeting of the Mueller probe. The second  scope memo was August 2nd, 2017, (outlined here), and is an important part of the puzzle that helps explain the corrupt original purpose of the special counsel.

The third scope memo was issued by Rod Rosenstein to Robert Mueller on October 20th, 2017. The transparent intent of the third scope memo was to provide Weissmann and Mueller with ammunition and authority to investigate specific targets, for specific purposes. One of those targets was General Michael Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr.

As you review the highlighted portion below, found on pages 12 and 13 of the Weissmann report, read slowly and fully absorb the intent; the corruption is blood-boiling:

This third scope memo allowed Weissmann and Mueller to target tangentially related persons and entities bringing in Michael Cohen, Richard Gates, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn Jr. Additionally and strategically (you’ll see why), this memo established the authority to pursue “jointly undertaken activity“.

With Paul Manafort outlined as an investigative target in the original authorization and the second scope memo, the third scope memo authorizes expansion to his business partner Richard Gates and their joint businesses. This memo also permits the investigation of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and all of his interests; and in ultimate weasel sunlight, Rosenstein authorizes an investigation of his boss, AG Jeff Sessions.

Before getting to more targets, notice the underlined passage about starting with a lot of investigative material because the special counsel was picking up a Russian interference investigation that had been ongoing for “nearly 10 months.”

I would also note that our CTH research indicates all of the illegally extracted FISA-702(16)(17) database search results would be part of this pre-existing investigative file available immediately to Weissmann and Mueller. However, in order to use the search-query evidence, Weissmann and Mueller would need to backfill some alternate justification; or find another way to “rediscover” the preexisting results….. I digress

The four identified targets within the original July 2016 investigation, “Operation Crossfire Hurricane”, were George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Carter Page. (See HPSCI report):

General Flynn was under investigation from the outset in mid-2016. The fraudulent FBI counterintelligence operation, established by CIA Director John Brennan, had Flynn as one of the early targets when Brennan handed the originating electronic communication“EC” to FBI Director James Comey.” (Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 6/20/2019)

“When General Michael Flynn entered into the seemingly coerced plea agreement with the special counsel team and prosecutor Brandon Van Grack (November 30, 2017), he gave up the right to defense discovery in his case.  In hindsight this will likely be viewed a mistake.

Lt. General Michael Flynn and his new attorney, Sidney Powell. (Credit: Megan Meneiro/Courthouse News)

(h/t Techno Fog) During a court appearance today by new attorney Ms. Sidney Powell, the topic of needing a classified security clearance -to review documents- was raised.  The DOJ responded to the assertion by saying no classified information was provided to the prior Flynn defense team, therefore Ms. Powell doesn’t need not carry that concern.

However, by admitting the DOJ provided no classified information to the defense, the prosecution is simultaneously admitting they never provided Flynn with a copy of the phone call transcript (December 29, 2016) between President-elect Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.  The content of that phone call lies at the heart of the FBI interview that took place on January 24th, 2017.

Judge Emmet Sullivan originally asked for the Flynn/Kislyak transcript; however, the prosecution said it was irrelevant to their case.  The judge accepted the non-production.

TechnoFog/Twitter

It is suspected Flynn may have been under a FISA surveillance warrant which seems confirmed by the Weissmann/Mueller report. The FBI intercepted, recorded, and later transcribed the December 29, 2016, conversation.

This is why the issue of how the FBI agents write the 302 summary of the Flynn January 24, 2017, interview becomes such an important facet.

On June 6, 2019, the DOJ released the FBI agent report (FD-302) written after their interview of Michael Flynn on Jan 24th, 2017. (Full pdf below) From prior testimony we know that FBI Agent Peter Strzok did the questioning and FBI Agent Joe Pientka took notes.

Lt. General Michael Flynn (Credit: public domain)

For some reason, within the DOJ release of the report they are continuing to redact the name Joe Pientka. [Could be due to ongoing employment]

It’s worth noting according to Mark Meadows the Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz has interviewed Joe Pientka extensively; prior attempts by congress to gain testimony from Pientka were blocked by the FBI and Rod Rosenstein.

FBI Agent Joseph Pientka was never interviewed by the joint House judiciary and oversight committees (Goodlatte and Gowdy). The reason, as explained by Meadows, was simple; Pientka was on Weissmann and Mueller’s special counsel team. Congress was not allowed to interfere in the Mueller probe. In hindsight this looks like Weissmann, Mueller & Rosenstein strategically using the investigation as a shield from sunlight.

The interview took place on January 24, 2017. The report was written Jan 24th, 2017. The wording was then deliberated by the small group, approved by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and entered into the record on February 15th, 2017. (Read much more: Conservative Treehouse, 6/24/2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The FOIA fight shifted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(pdf link)

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

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

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

Robert Mueller testifies to congress on July 24, 2019. (Credit: Saul Loeb/Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

“Robert Mueller’s two-year, $25.2 million investigation was supposed to provide the definitive account of Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election. Yet even after he issued a 448-page report and testified for five hours before Congress, critical aspects remain unexplained, calling into question the basis for the probe and the decisions of those who conducted it.

Time and again in his report and his testimony, Mueller refused to address a wide range of fundamental issues, claiming they were beyond his purview. Some of the issues Mueller and his team did not clarify include whether the FBI had a sound predicate for opening a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign; whether the FBI knowingly relied on false material; and the links between U.S. government agencies and key figures who fueled the most explosive claims of an illicit Trump-Russia relationship. Mueller claimed that he was prevented from answering critical questions due to ongoing Justice Department reviews, one by Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham and the other by Inspector General Michael Horowitz. In the meantime, here are some of the biggest mysteries that Mueller’s team left hanging in the air.

Who Is Joseph Mifsud, and Was He the Actual Predicate for the Russia Investigation?

Mueller’s pointed refusal to answer questions about Mifsud underscored that his team did not provide a plausible explanation for the incident that supposedly sparked the Russia investigation in July 2016. Mifsud is the mysterious Maltese professor who reportedly informed Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Their conversation took place in , before the alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails was publicly known. (cont.)

What Was the Role of the Steele Dossier?

Christopher Steele: described as “Source #1” and “credible.”
(Credit: Victoria Jones/The Associated Press)

Mueller also refused to address another key driver of the Trump-Russia probe – the series of unverified and salacious opposition research memos against Trump secretly financed by the Clinton campaign and the DNC and  compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Some Republicans believe the dossier was the real trigger of the FBI probe and that Mifsud was later used as an excuse by the FBI to cover that up once the dossier’s partisan origins were revealed. As he did with Mifsud, Mueller, who was FBI Director between 2001 and 2013, stonewalled the many Republican efforts to press him on this topic. (more)

Why Did the Mueller Team Invent the Polling Data Theory About Konstantin Kilimnik, and Omit His U.S. Ties?

Konstantin Kilimnik
(Credit: The Associated Press)

Mueller also refused to answer critical questions about his report’s portrayal of Konstantin Kilimnik. The longtime business associate of Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, became central to the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory as a result of the Mueller team’s own innuendo. In January 2019, Mueller accused Manafort of lying about sharing Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller, the FBI had assessed that Kilimnik has an unspecified “relationship with Russian intelligence.” In court, Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann repeated that ambiguous claim and tacked on a piece of tantalizing flourish: “This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here. This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” Weissmann’s comments fueled widespread speculation – and even confident assertions – that Kilimnik had passed on the polling data to the Russian government, which then put it to use for its supposed social media interference campaign targeting malleable swing-state voters. (cont.)

Why Did the Mueller Team Falsely Suggest That Trump Tower Moscow Was a Viable Project – and What Was the Role of FBI Informant Felix Sater?

Along with the discredited polling-data theory, House Democrats repeatedly played up the Mueller team’s indictment of Michael Cohen for lying to Congress about the failed effort to build a Trump Tower Moscow. In court filings, the Mueller team insinuated that the project was a viable and lucrative one. Because Cohen had lied to Congress and Trump had denied having business dealings in Russia, Rep. Joaquin Castro asked Mueller if he had assessed whether “President Trump could be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians.” (cont.)

Was Specious Info Leaked to Justify the Absence of Trump-Kremlin Links?

In the absence of evidence tying the Trump campaign to the Kremlin – and a preponderance of leads involving key figures actually tied to the West – U.S. intelligence officials helped cast a pall of suspicion through misleading, and sometimes false, media leaks. In January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the Steele Dossier’s most explosive allegation: that the Russians had a tape of him with prostitutes in a Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel room. Comey’s briefing to Trump was leaked to the press, leading to the dossier’s publication by BuzzFeed and cementing the story atop the news cycle for the more than two years since.” (cont.)

(Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 8/01/2019) 

(…) “Maria Bartiromo segued into a discussion of George Papadopoulos and the secret informant transcripts; from recordings that were part of the FBI sting operation using U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper; and are now being held in evidence by U.S. Attorney John Durham and Inspector General Michael Horowitz. [Background] Keep in mind Gowdy has seen these transcripts.

According to Bartiromo those transcripts include FBI wire-taps of Halper attempting to get Papadopulos to accept assistance from Russia (delivering Clinton emails), and George Papadopoulos absolutely refusing to accept any engagement therein.  Confirming that outline, Gowdy notes there are more recordings (and transcripts) of a similar nature, where the FBI was attempting to bait other Trump campaign officials.” (Read much more: Conservative Treehouse,  8/04/2019)

“I won’t give a general summary of the lawsuit. If you want, you can read that here:

Or read the entire filing here:

Strzok’s legal team decide to lead off with the discredited claim that the FBI’s investigation into Trump wasn’t known until AFTER the 2016 election. While it wasn’t publicly *acknowledged* by the FBI, it was *known* to the public before the vote:

“Management” in the FBI counterintelligence division (CD) gave a character reference to Strzok to try & avoid him being fired, calling him “gifted” who they “believe[d]” would “never again engage in misconduct.”

This likely refers to *Bill Priestap*, as Strzok was No.2 in CD.

Candice Will (Credit: Facebook)

As late as Aug 8 2018 the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) wasn’t prepared to fire Strzok – only suggesting a 60 day suspension and a demotion.

The decision was made by OPR Assistant Director Candice Will.

Will was a Mueller appointee heavily involved in FISA🤔

Strzok’s lawyers give his “explanation” for the infamous Aug 8, 2016, text message Strzok sent to Lisa Page saying “we’ll stop [Trump]” from becoming President.

Of course when testifying to Congress at the same time as his “explanation” to the FBI, Strzok said he **couldn’t even remember** writing this “stop Trump” message but he still knows exactly what he meant and it wasn’t anything to do with him stopping Trump. Sure 👌

Reminder: that “we’ll stop [Trump]” message was mysteriously “lost” from Strzok’s FBI issued phone AND lost from the FBI’s text message archiving system, despite every other message between Page & Strzok being recorded from that day. 🤔

Undercover Huber@JohnWHuber

The now FBI Deputy Director David Bowditch apparently *reassured* Strzok that his incredibly biased and offensive messages would not “significantly affect Strzok’s career at the FBI”. 🚨(Bowditch eventually countermands OPR’s decision to go lenient on Strzok & fires him)

David Bowdich (Credit: Wikipedia)

IMPORTANT: If it is true that Deputy Director Bowditch only eventually decided to fire Strzok because the FBI was getting bad press as late as Aug 2018 that’s a major problem. It suggests an institutional inability of FBI leadership to identify staff bias absent external pressure.

Finally & just for lefty blue ticks, some fun!

In the formal written firing notice to Strozk, Deputy FBI Director Bowditch refers to Strzok & “the Russia collusion investigation.”

Remember how the FBI and Mueller never looked at **Collusion**, just “conspiracy”? Good times… 👍

(Read more: Undercover Huber@JohnWHuber/Twitter, 8/06/2019)  (Archive)

Admiral Joseph Maguire (Credit: Tom Williams/Getty Images)

It’s interesting that Joseph Maguire (pictured above), comes from his current position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The NCTC was first organized by John Brennan, and we have suspected this part of the intelligence apparatus ties directly into the 2015/2016 use of the FBI and NSA database search issue.

All of that is laid out inside a 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“:

This specific footnote, if declassified, would be key.  Note the phrase: “([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])”, this sentence has the potential to expose an internal decision; withheld from congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; that outlines a process for access and distribution of surveillance data.

Note: “no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016“, that is important.

Here’s the list of material possible for declassification, and the intelligence offices who hold custodial authority over the compartmented documents. This was the original list as outlined in 2018: (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/08/2019)

Andrew McCabe (Credit: CBS News)

“Today former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe files a federal civil lawsuit (full pdf below) claiming wrongful termination by the DOJ and FBI.  Exactly the same parameters are used by McCabe as were asserted by FBI Agent Peter Strzok in a very similar lawsuitearlier this week…. Only McCabe claims a conspiracy carried out by President Trump.

Again, as with the earlier Strzok lawsuit, both are not going through the process within the Department of Labor for a wrongful termination complaint.  Instead both are using federal courts in an effort to construct a narrative of sorts.

The motive here is 100% political obfuscation, and the same Lawfare team is involved in the construct.

Both Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok are claiming their first amendment (speech) and fifth amendment (due process) rights were violated.  Both have filed civil suits under the same pretext.  However, McCabe’s Lawfare lawyers construct an argument that goes one step further.

According to Andrew McCabe, President Donald Trump constructed a master conspiracy of influence upon the DOJ and FBI; thereby usurping the powers of the constitution in a sketchy legal theory they cannot define.  Thus the McCabe lawyers define the action by President Trump under “legal nullity” – An operation that theoretically is, or might be, of some legal significance, but in fact lacks any identity or distinct structure of its own. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/08/2019)

“Bruce Ohr is a DOJ official who was interviewed by the FBI during the DOJ/FBI collaborative effort to target president-elect Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

Mr. Ohr was interviewed on 12 different occasions between November 22nd 2016 and May 15th 2017.  Judicial Watch has finally received the copies of the FBI investigative notes, aka “302 reports.”

The last interview of Bruce Ohr (May 15th, 2017) took place two days prior to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.  Throughout the interviews (full pdf below) Bruce Ohr was acting as the go-between delivering information from his wife Nellie Ohr at Fusion GPS and one of Fusion’s contract investigators, Christopher Steele.

The 302 reports are heavily redacted (sources and methods); however, we already know the majority of names underneath the redactions.  Here are the *302 investigative notes:

(Conservative Treehouse, 8/08/2019)

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (Credit: The Associated Press)

(…) “With more reporting by John Solomon, cited and attributed to on-the-record officials in the State Department and Ukraine, a much more clear picture emerges. In reality, and unfortunately as expected, the fulsome picture is 180° divergent from the media narrative.

The government of Ukraine under both Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and now President Volodymyr Zelensky, had been trying to deliver information about Obama officials and Democrat party officials (DNC on behalf of Hillary Clinton) requesting the government of Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 election.

Both Poroshenko and Zelensky administrations had tried, unsuccessfully, to get information to current U.S. officials. U.S. State Department officials in Ukraine were refusing to give visas to Ukrainian emissaries because they did not want the damaging information sent to the President Trump administration.

Failing to get help from the U.S. State Department, the Ukrainians tried a workaround and hired a respected U.S. lawyer to hand deliver the documentary evidence directly to the U.S. Department of Justice. The contracted American lawyer hand-delivered the information to the U.S. Department of Justice in New York.

However, after delivering the information and not hearing back from the U.S. government, the Ukrainian government, now led by President Zelensky, interpreted the silence as the Trump administration and U.S. government (writ large) being upset about the Ukraine involvement overall. Out of concern for a serious diplomatic breakdown, the Zelensky administration made a personal request to the U.S. State Department for assistance.

The U.S. State Department then reached out to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani; and asked him if he would meet with Zelensky’s top lawyer, Andrei Yermak.

Rudy Giuliani agreed to act as a diplomatic intermediary and met with Yermak in Spain. After the meeting, Mr. Giuliani then contacted the State Department Officials in charge of Ukraine and Europe and debriefed them on the totality of the subject matter as relayed by Andrei Yermak.

All of this activity preceded the phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

President Trump and President Zelensky discussed the issues, and this phone call is the one now referenced by the concerned “whistleblower”. The “whistleblower” obviously had no knowledge of the background and why the subject matter discussed in the phone call was framed as it was.

Apparently, in the phone call, President Zelensky was explaining what action the Ukranian government had already taken to try and get the information about corrupt U.S. officials, including former VP Joe Biden, to the U.S. government.

It was from this clarification of information that President Trump is reported to have told Zelensky it was OK to proceed with an internal investigation of corruption in Ukraine that might also encompass former U.S. officials.  Yes, that would include Joe Biden.

From this context, we can see how the “whistle-blower”, knowing only half of the information – might incorrectly perceive the conversation. Additionally, there’s a possibility the “whistle-blower” may be ideologically aligned with the same government entities that were trying to block the Ukrainian government from delivering the information in the first place.

Beyond the media, pundits and democrat politicians making fools of themselves, four very significant questions/issues become obvious:

1. Who in the U.S. State Department Ukraine embassy was blocking the visas of Ukrainian officials, and why?
2. Who was the official at the New York office of the DOJ who took custody of the records hand-delivered by the American lawyer working on behalf of Ukraine? and…
3. Why were those records never turned over to Main Justice?…. Or
4. If they were turned over to main Justice, why didn’t they inform the Trump administration they had received them?

At the end of this fake news narrative parade, these will be the questions that remain. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/21/2019)

A U.S. District Judge has rejected the DOJ and FBI motion to block the release of the Archey Declarations (descriptions of Comey memos). [Background Here]

In a strongly worded ruling (full pdf below) released moments ago, Federal Judge James Boasberg blasted the DOJ and FBI for attempting to change their filings, claim national security “sources and methods”, and block his prior court ruling – which instructed the DOJ to release the “Archey Declarations”.  The judge is obviously angry:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/12/2019)

“Last week the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, testified behind closed doors to congress. Atkinson testified about his role in bringing the ‘whistle-blower’ complaint forward.  The details of that testimony are now starting to surface and thankfully congress is taking a closer look at the sketchy background of Michael Atkinson.

Michael Atkinson (Credit: public domain)

There are numerous aspects to the whistle-blower (likely CIA operative Michael Barry), and the complaint, that just don’t add up. One of the areas of focus is the backdating of changes made to the ‘whistle-blower’ complaint form.  As Sean Davis notes:

[…] Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general, told HPSCI lawmakers during a committee oversight hearing on Friday that the whistleblower forms and rules changes were made in, even though the new forms and guidance, which were not uploaded to the ICIG’s website until September 24, state that they were changed in August.

Despite having a full week to come up with explanations for his office’s decisions to secretly change its forms to eliminate the requirement for first-hand evidence and to backdate those changes to August, Atkinson refused to provide any explanation to lawmakers baffled by his behavior. (read more)

The CIA ‘whistle-blower’ had no first-hand knowledge; everything was based on hearsay.  The CIA operative never informed the ICIG about prior contact and coordination with the House Intelligence Committee (Adam Schiff).  The CIA operative never disclosed congressional contact on the complaint form, and the complaint forms were changed specifically to accommodate this CIA operative.

On Sunday, October 6th, Ranking Member Devin Nunes also discussed his concerns with the testimony of Michael Atkinson.  Nunes noted the testimony “was a joke.”

Nunes told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday host Matt Boyle, “[The ICIG is] either totally incompetent or part of the deep state, and he’s got a lot of questions he needs to answer because he knowingly changed the form and the requirements in order to make sure that this whistleblower complaint got out publicly.”

“So he’s either incompetent or in on it, and he’s going to have more to answer for, I can promise you because we are not going to let him go; he is going to tell the truth about what happened,” Nunes added.  (read more)

ICIG Atkinson never reviewed the call transcript and facilitated the complaint processing despite numerous flaws.  Additionally, Atkinson ignored legal guidance from both the director of national intelligence (DNI) and the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that highlighted Atkinson’s poor decision-making.

President Trump announced Joseph Macguire as the Acting ODNI on August 8th, 2019. (link)  The CIA operative “whistle-blower” letter to Adam Schiff and Richard Burr was on August 12th (link).   Immediately following this letter, the ICIG rules and requirements for Urgent Concern “whistle-blowers” was modified, allowing hearsay complaints. On August 28th Adam Schiff begins tweeting about the construct of the complaint.

Given the nature of Atkinson’s background, it appears his prior work in 2016, during his tenure as the lead legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD, likely played a role in his decision.

Here’s Nunes Sunday Interview (audio):

The center of the 2016 Lawfare Alliance election influence was/is the Department of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016 operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.

Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who: (1) lied to the FISA court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.

Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 10/07/2019)

(Republished with permission)

Michael Atkinson at his nomination hearing in May 2018. (Credit: public domain)

(…) “It should be emphasized the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community; the guy who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay ‘whistle-blower‘ complaint, who was “blowing-the-whistle” based on second-hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, is Michael K. Atkinson.

Atkinson’s self-interest:  Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD). That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

Put another way, Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who: (1) lied to the FISA court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.

Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.

Immediately after the Carter Page FISA warrant is approved, in the period where DOJ-NSD head John Carlin has given his notice of intent to leave but not yet left, inside those specific two weeks, the National Security Division of the DOJ tells the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) they have been breaking the law.  The NSD specifically inform the court they are aware of contractors who have been using FISA 702(16)(17) database search queries to extract information on political candidates.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has looked into the FISA application used against U.S. Person Carter Page.  Additionally, U.S. Attorney John Durham is said to be looking at the intelligence communities’ use of systems for spying and surveillance.

If the DOJ-NSD exploitation of the NSA database, and/or DOJ-NSD FISA abuse, and/or DOJ-NSD FARA corruption were ever to reach sunlight, Atkinson -as the lawyer for the process- would be under a lot of scrutiny for his involvement.

Yes, that gives current ICIG Michael Atkinson a strong and corrupt motive to participate with the Schiff/Lawfare impeachment objective.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/22/2019)

Hat Tip Techno-Fog for noting some remarkable FBI activity.

“Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Pientka III was first identified by Senator Chuck Grassley in May of 2018 as the second FBI agent involved in the 2017 interview of Lt. General Michael Flynn.

Frustrated by the FBI stonewalling his Senate inquiry, Chairman Grassley dropped the revelation publicly on May 11th, 2018, in a letter to the FBI.

[…] the Committee’s oversight interest in the underlying documents requested more than a year ago now outweighs any legitimate executive branch interest in withholding it. So too does the Committee’s interest in learning the FBI agents’ actual assessments of their interview of Lt. Gen. Flynn, particularly given the apparent contradiction between what then Directory Comey told us in March 2017 and what he now claims.

[…] In addition, please make Special Agent Joe Pientka available for a transcribed interview with Committee staff no later than one week following the production of the requested documents… (link)

The FBI never produced Supervisory Special Agent (SSA-1) Joe Pientka for Chairman Grassley’s committee, and the conflict between the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI was never reconciled.  (The DOJ/FBI made it to the safety of the mid-term election.)

Additionally, every single document containing information about the investigative activity of FBI agent Pientka has kept his name redacted.  Not a single DOJ/FBI document has ever included his name.

However, around two months after Grassley outed his identity; we discover from the Inspector General that the DOJ-NSD (National Security Division) admitted to the FISA court that Agent Pientka was significantly less than forthcoming with “factual omissions” in the Title-1 surveillance application he assembled against Carter Page.

(IG FISA Report)

While the IG report doesn’t name SSA-1 as Joseph Pientka, all documentary evidence supported that Pientka was indeed SSA-1.  [This was also confirmed by Fox News reporter Gregg Jarrett writing an article about SSA-1 Pientka, and by Jarrett being contacted by the FBI as soon as he outed the agent.]

In addition to the Flynn interview, the Inspector General Report notes the importance of SSA-1 as he pertains to the FISA application.

FBI Supervisory Agent Pientka’s lies and omissions to the FISC were material – and made under penalty of perjury. He knew the dossier was fraudulent. He knew about witness denials. In short, Pientka lied about the FISA application’s accuracy.

After the FISA Court was notified about the issues (July 2018), and before the IG report outlining the conduct of SSA1 was complete (Dec. 9, 2019)… sometime in mid 2019 Joseph Pientka was promoted by FBI Director Christopher Wray and transferred to the San Francisco FBI Field Office where he showed up on their web page.

(Via Wayback Machine – August 20 – November 1, 2019 Search Capture)

(SIDEBAR – It is worth noting this is the same field office where current FBI Deputy Director David Bowditch came from.)

However, AFTER the IG report was published (Dec 9th, 2019); and after Pientka’s activity was outlined as directly involved in the corrupt activity; and after he was identified as having been transferred to the FBI Field Office in San Francisco (Dec 14th, 2019); the FBI mysteriously scrubbed agent Pientka from their website.

(Current FBI San Francisco Office Web Page)

That doesn’t mean that Asst. Special Agent Joseph Pientka III is no longer in San Francisco; it only means the San Francisco Field Office has removed him from the website…he could still be working there.

As Techno-Fog notes: “Putting this into context – the FBI/Christopher Wray has been keeping Pientka from the public spotlight and Congressional inquiry since 2018.“… and it would appear the FBI is adamant about keeping Joseph Pientka as far away from uncontrollable public questioning as possible.

Why?”

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 1/12/2020)  (Archive)

Former CEO Patrick Byrne has given four primary interviews where he outlines his knowledge of a 2015 and 2016 political espionage operation being run by the FBI.

Fox News, MacCallum – Fox Business #1 – Fox Business #2 – CNN, Cuomo

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

After a review of the interviews, and extracting specific points therein, here’s an overview.

The substance of Mr. Byrne’s claims does seem to align with what we already know about the DOJ and FBI activity during the 2016 election cycle, including the FBI operations.

First, Patrick Byrne claims he has spoken to the DOJ on April 5th, 2019, and again on April 30th, 2019.  Mr. Byrne states he told the DOJ all of the information he was aware of during those two interviews covering approximately seven hours of questioning.

The current public statements Mr. Byrne is making are not with the approval of the DOJ or any investigators therein.  His decision to go public with this information comes as a result of conversations with a life-long mentor and confidant, Warren Buffett.  Mr. Byrne states he has known Warren Buffett since Byrne was a teenager and Mr. Buffett was in his mid-forties.

According to his CNN interview Byrne talked to Buffett in about how he could be a witness in the DOJ investigation authorized by Attorney General Bill Barr and being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham.  After listening to the details, Buffett recommended Mr. Byrne go public with the story.

However, in order to go public Byrne would need to separate himself from his role as CEO of Overstock, the company Byrne founded.  Mr. Byrne resigned yesterday, August 22nd.

Byrne explains he told Buffett about his April conversations with the DOJ and Buffett said it didn’t matter… Byrne still needed to go public with the story. It sounds like there are several motives for going public; perhaps one is personal safety.

To verify his April DOJ discussion, Byrne points to two references:

♦First, the movement of Maria Butina from harsh isolation in prison on May 9th, ten days after he delivered his testimony to the DOJ.  According to Byrne Ms. Butina was moved to a very different White Collar facility based on his information.

♦The second reference point Byrne highlights is the May 13th DOJ appointment of John Durham to look into the origination of the Russia investigation events. Byrne says this too was a direct result of his two DOJ sessions April 5th and 30th.

If Byrne is accurate; and if his claims of him personally being an operative of the FBI with instructions to engage Ms. Butina inside the political espionage events structured by corrupt FBI officials are genuine; it would appear Special Counsel Robert Mueller facilitated throwing a bag over Ms Butina in an effort to keep the corrupt FBI intelligence operation hidden from the public. This would explain the Mueller demand for strict solitary isolation and confinement.  (The reports are indeed troubling)

Again, if Byrne is correct, it would appear that extremely significant and exculpatory Brady material -evidence that could easily prove an entrapment defense- was intentionally withheld from Ms. Butina’s defense team.   Alarmingly this points to ongoing corrupt officials that still remain inside the current DOJ.  Ms. Butina was collateral damage.

View on Scribd

A review of the time-frame details provided by Patrick Byrne in the four interviews shows his story told four times is consistent each time.

Here’s a brief review of the consistencies aspect:

After a cursory meeting in/around July 2015, Byrne claims in the period of September to December 2015 he reported contact with Russian national Ms. Maria Butina to the FBI as a precaution related to his security clearance.

Byrne claims he was asked to participate in an FBI intelligence operation and to introduce, and/or facilitate the introduction of, Ms. Butina to the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

In December of 2015 Mr. Byrne became suspicious of the FBI motives because he warned FBI officials of a potential that his efforts, his reputation and those who trust him, may result in Butina gaining entry into campaign confidences.  The FBI agents told Byrne that was exactly the intent; people high up in the FBI wanted Ms. Butina to gain deep access into the Trump campaign.  Mr. Byrne became suspicious of a corrupt political motive, but didn’t say anything at the time.

Additionally Byrne’s assistance was requested for an investigation of a high-level government official, he later named as Hillary Clinton.

In/around Feb or March 2016 Byrne was told to focus Ms. Butina’s attention to the campaign of Donald Trump and to diminish any attention toward Rubio or Cruz.

The assistance of the investigation of the federal official (Hillary Clinton) ended in late June and early July of 2016.  Immediately thereafter Ms. Clinton was publicly -and unusually- cleared by FBI Director James Comey on July 5th, 2016.

In/around this same June & July time-frame (2016), FBI agents requested Mr. Byrne to focus on developing a closer romantic relationship with Ms. Butina and to use his influence to target her to closer proximity with the Trump family and Trump campaign.

It was within these June and July 2016 engagements where FBI agents were apologetic about the requests and specifically mentioned their instructions were coming from three principle FBI officials Byrne described as “X, Y and Z”.   Later Byrne identified FBI Director James Comey as “Z”.

In the Fox MacCallum interview Byrne named James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, John Carlin (DOJ-NSD) and Peter Strzok.   Mr. Byrne said the specific instructions were coming to the agents from Special Agent Peter Strzok as he relayed the requests of those above him [X, Y and Z (Comey)].

This FBI contact structure highlights an arms-length operation; perhaps intentionally constructed to create plausible deniability for those above the directly instructing agents.

In essence, these rank-and-file FBI agents were asking Patrick Byrne to be a civilian handler of a Russian national, and instructing him to carry out a covert counterintelligence operation.  The FBI agents were apologetic about asking a civilian to take on such a role.

Maria Butina (Credit: Anton Novoderezhkin/ Zuma Press)

♦ Ms. Maria Butina is described as a young Russian idealist, who had strong connections to high powered Russian oligarchs.

The purpose of Butina coming to the U.S., as explained by Byrne, was for her to engage with influential Americans for contacts that could provide geopolitical value to the oligarchs.

Patrick Byrne was seen as important to Ms. Butina due to his connections to the emerging financial structures of crypto-currency and block-chain.  Byrne is a libertarian who believes in small government, and is somewhat of a disruptor in the business world. Ms. Butina wanted to introduce Byrne to her friends in Russia.

While it was not outlined in any of the four interviews, alternative currency options to the U.S. dollar have been an ongoing effort of Russian interests for a while.  Russia considers global trade attached to the dollar as geopolitical problem; and they have been working for years on alternative currencies for trade (and their own wealth) that can avoid U.S. sanctions and the reach of the U.S. treasury.

♦ As a Russian national with specific Russian interests that are not in alignment with U.S. national interests, Maria Butina would be defined by the U.S. intelligence community as an ‘agent of a foreign power’.   Her status would mean unrestricted monitoring by the U.S. intelligence community would be entirely legal.

However, because of this ‘foreign agent’ status Ms. Butina could also be valuable as a virus to infect anyone the U.S. intelligence apparatus would wish to target domestically.  This motive appears to be the reason for the FBI to tell Mr. Byrne where to send Ms. Butina.

Conducting FISA-702(16)(17) database searches and surveillance on U.S. persons who would meet with Butina would be justifiable and legal.

Extended contact with any U.S. person could likely lead to a Title-1 surveillance warrant through the FISA court.  However, even without the warrant, 702 searches would be valid just from brief contact.

As we have shown FISA-702(“16” to-from) and (“17” about) queries were off the charts during the time-frame of November 2015 through May 2016.  Per the FISA audit conducted by NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, after the flags noted by the database compliance officer, 85% of the search returns were unauthorized and unmasked.

The time-frames here are too coincidental to be accidental. [Judge Collyer Report]

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/22/2019)

Update: On August 23, 2019, CNN  includes James Comey and Andrew McCabe’s response to Mr. Byrne’s claims:

Byrne’s story, as told to CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on “Cuomo Prime Time,” and in earlier interviews broadcast on Fox Business News and Fox News, also includes allegations that top officials in the Obama administration, including James Comey, the former FBI director, approved of the bureau’s requests of him.

It has not been verified by the agencies, and spokespeople for the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment. Reached Thursday evening by CNN, Comey called Byrne’s claim “ridiculous.”

“The FBI doesn’t work that way,” Comey said.

Former FBI deputy director and CNN contributor Andrew McCabe said he hadn’t heard of Byrne until the former CEO revealed his relationship with Butina.

“His allegation that his potential cooperation with the FBI was somehow discussed at the highest levels certainly never happened when I was there,” McCabe, who held the No. 2 role at the agency beginning in 2016 until his firing in 2018, said Friday on CNN’s “New Day.”

McCabe said it was “certainly possible” that Byrne volunteered information about Butina to the FBI, but disputed the claim that agents would have told Byrne to “engage in a romantic relationship with a suspected Russian intelligence agent.”

“That is simply not the sort of thing that the FBI does,” McCabe said.”

(Read more: CNN, 8/23/2019)

(Credit: Lazaro Gamio/Axios)

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has released a report on former FBI Director James Comey’s leaking of personal memos to his attorneys, a personal friend, and the media.

Comey had told the IG that he believed the memos shared with his attorneys did not contain any classified information.

However, the IG noted that specifically: “Memos 1 and 3 contained information classified at the ‘SECRET’ level, and that Memos 2 and 7 contained small amounts of information classified at the ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ level—although Comey redacted all classified information in Memo 7 before sending to his attorneys.”

The IG report also noted that “Comey considered Memos 2 through 7 to be his personal documents.”

Comey maintained copies of Memos 2 through 7 at his personal residence—a fact that he failed to report to the FBI. Comey also provided James Rybicki, his chief of staff, with a copy of these same memos to maintain at FBI headquarters.

On May 14, 2017, Comey provided electronic copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 to one of his personal attorneys, who subsequently shared the memos with two additional attorneys several days later on May 17, 2017. Memo 2 contained six words, four of which were names of specific countries that the FBI later deemed to be classified.

Leak to the Media

On May 16, Comey provided a copy of Memo 4 to Daniel Richman who was a “close personal friend” in addition to being one of Comey’s attorneys. Comey directed Richman to “share the contents of Memo 4, but not the Memo itself, with a specific reporter for The New York Times.”

Richman did have a security clearance at this time, but there appears to be no demonstrable “need to know” that is also a requirement for gaining access to classified information.

This memo contained information that was deemed by the FBI to be “For Official Use Only” but did not contain any classified information. The IG noted: “We found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media.”

The same day that Comey’s two additional attorneys gained access to his memos—May 17, 2017—former FBI Agent Peter Strzok sent a text to former FBI lawyer Lisa Page noting, “F’in Pamela Brown knows there were two phone call memos.” Brown, a reporter for CNN, had reported on the existence of Comey Memos the night prior during a segment with Anderson Cooper but had yet to mention the phone call memos.

The Strzok text regarding Brown is notable for two reasons. One, Strzok was clearly familiar with the contents of Comey’s Memos, and two, Brown had to have learned of the “phone call Memos” from a source other than Richman—who had only received a copy of Memo 4, which detailed a physical meeting and did not mention any “phone call Memos.” It is not known who provided Brown with the additional information.

Notably, the FBI “first learned that Comey had shared Memo 4 with Richman while watching Comey’s public testimony before SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] on June 8, 2017.” Nor did Comey inform the FBI that he had shared Memos 2, 4, 6 and 7 with his personal attorneys. It was only after the FBI questioned Richman regarding Memo 4 that the FBI learned that Comey had also provided the additional memos to his attorneys.

Comey Kept Memos at His Home

The June 8, 2017, date is particularly notable because only the day before, on June 7, 2017, did Comey provide the copy of his memos that he kept in his home safe to the FBI at the request of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Although the existence of the Comey Memos were well-known by this time, it does not appear that FBI personnel knew that Comey kept his own memo copies at home—until he turned them over.

The IG report highlighted Comey’s retention of his memos at his personal residence, noting: “We found it particularly concerning that Comey did not tell anyone from the FBI that he had retained copies of the Memos in his personal safe at home, even when his Chief of Staff, the FBI’s Associate Deputy Director, and three SSAs [Supervisory Special Agents] came to Comey’s house on May 12, 2017, to inventory and remove all FBI property.” Why Comey chose to not disclose this information to the FBI remains unknown.

According to the IG report, “[O]n June 7, 2017, Comey provided the SSA who came to his home with Comey’s signed originals of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7, which were the only Memos that Comey said he had retained at his residence.” Notably, the “SSA said he had been advised ahead of time that Comey had Memos to give to him.” The report does not disclose who advised the SSA, but it may have been Special Counsel Mueller.

Comey told the IG that “he voluntarily gave his signed originals of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 to the SSA at his house that day, not because he had concerns that they contained classified information, but “because Special Counsel [Robert Mueller] asked for them.”

How the Special Counsel came to learn that Comey had a personal copy of his memos at his house remains unknown, particularly as it appears that no one else within the FBI was aware of this fact until Comey turned the memos over.

Comey had previously viewed the FBI copies of his memos that had already been officially classified by the FBI on June 7, 2017, in preparation for his June 8 testimony. As a result, Comey was now aware of what the FBI deemed “SECRET” or “CONFIDENTIAL.” As the IG report noted, “By not immediately reporting that he had provided Memo 2 to his attorneys when Comey first learned that the FBI had designated a small portion of Memo 2 as classified at the ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ level, Comey violated FBI policy.”

Lisa Page Obtains Memos Ostensibly for McCabe

Others within the FBI also had copies of Comey’s Memos. According to the IG’s report, “Page told the OIG that McCabe also allowed her to look at Memos 2, 3, and 4, but asked her not to share them with anybody. Page told the IG that “she decided to make and keep copies of these Memos because they were ‘just of the nature that [she] felt like there should be one other copy somewhere else.’” Page claimed not to know “if others in the FBI were keeping copies of the Memos.”

However, it appears that Page attempted to hide her possession of Comey’s Memos from other officials within the FBI. On May 10, 2017, Comey’s former chief of staff James Rybicki was contacted by Page who requested “a full set of the Memos.” Rybicki, who told the IG that Page said her request was made on behalf of Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, then made three copies of Comey’s Memos—one for himself, one for Page to pass along to McCabe, and one for FBI General Counsel James Baker. Notably, May 10, 2017, may have been the date that McCabe opened an investigation into President Donald J. Trump.

Page told the IG a somewhat different version of events, noting that “she did not think McCabe had asked her to assemble copies of the memos; she said she thought she did it on her own because she “knew that it needed to get done.” Additionally, Rybicki told the IG “that he was ‘surprised’ when he learned that Page already had copies of some of the Memos because he ‘didn’t think anybody maintained a copy’ other than him, and didn’t know how she got them.”

Comey told the IG that he considered “Memos 2 through 7 to be his personal documents,” but this assertion was roundly dismissed by other FBI officials. According to the IG report, “All of the FBI senior leaders interviewed by the OIG stated that the Memos were official government records.” McCabe told the IG that Comey’s Memos served as a “record of [Comey’s] official engagement with the President.” Baker said the memos were “related to official business” and that “they were discussed in the office in connection with [Comey’s] official responsibilities.” Rybicki said he had “treated the Memos as FBI records.” The FBI’s Director of Counterintelligence Bill Priestap characterized the memos as documents “produced by the Director in his capacity as Director … they’re FBI work product.”

Whistleblower Provided IG Memos

Interestingly, “shortly after Comey’s removal, a set of the seven Memos was provided to the OIG by a Department employee, who claimed whistleblower status,” the IG revealed in the report. The number of individuals within the FBI who had access to Comey’s Memos was comprised of a very small group. The IG noted that the whistleblower “viewed the Memos as extremely sensitive documents and was concerned that there should be a separate set deposited somewhere for safekeeping.” This means that the IG obtained possession of the Comey Memos very early on—since mid-May 2017.

Additionally, the IG revealed that it was then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who referred the matter of Comey’s Memos to the Office of the Inspector General for review in July 2017. McCabe may have been unaware that the IG already was in possession of Comey’s Memos via the unknown whistleblower.

Genesis of Comey’s Memos

In regards to the genesis of the Memos, Comey told the IG that it was his Jan. 27, 2017, dinner with President Trump that prompted him to begin the process of maintaining Memos detailing his interactions with the president. However, Comey had already written an earlier memo regarding a meeting with President Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, where Comey provided the president with details of the “salacious” information from the Steele dossier. Comey also told Congress a slightly different story, testifying on June 8, 2017, that he began creating memos from his very first interaction with President Trump, based on a “gut feeling.”

The IG report provides some intriguing details surrounding the Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, and the manner in which that meeting was pre-determined to be fully documented by Comey.

“Witnesses interviewed by the OIG also said that they discussed Trump’s potential responses to being told about the ‘salacious’ information, including that Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to, the pending Russian interference investigation.

“Multiple FBI witnesses recalled agreeing ahead of time that Comey should memorialize his meeting with Trump immediately after it occurred. Comey told the OIG that, in his view, it was important for FBI executive managers to be ‘able to share in [Comey’s] recall of the … salient details of those conversations.’ Comey also said that an additional concern, shared by the members of his management team, was that if the briefing became ‘a source of controversy’ it would be important to have a clear, contemporaneous record because Trump might ‘misrepresent what happened in the encounter.’”

It appears from the IG’s report that President Trump had no knowledge that Comey was transcribing their interactions. The FBI’s General Counsel, James Baker, told the IG that “it was his understanding that the small group of people who had access to the Memos ‘really didn’t want anyone to know the Director … was recording at this level of detail his interactions with the President’ because any perception that Comey was ‘keeping … book’ on the President would upset any effort to have an effective and ongoing working relationship.”

It should also be noted that Comey failed to keep any memos of his meetings with Obama and other Obama-era officials.

Memo 3 was one of those deemed to contain information classified at the “SECRET” level. In regards to this particular memo, Comey told the IG that he gave one copy to Rybicki, with instructions for Rybicki to show it to McCabe and Baker, while keeping the other copy in his desk drawer—located in his secure office. On May 10, 2017, the day immediately following Comey’s firing, a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) was assigned to inventory the contents of Comey’s office. As noted in the IG report, “According to the inventory, no hard copies of any of the Memos were found in Comey’s office.”

Five days later, on May 15, 2017, following a conversation with Comey, Rybicki notified the SSA that there “were additional documents belonging to Comey stored in the reception area near the former Director’s office.” Among these documents were six of the original Comey Memos. According to the IG, this was the first time the SSA learned of the existence of the Comey Memos. Rybicki told the SSA that “he did not tell anyone about the Memos during the May 10 inventory because he understood that process to only include Comey’s office.”

Comey Violated FBI Policy

The IG found that “Comey’s actions violated Department or FBI policy, or the terms of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement” and concluded that “Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.”

The IG recognized that the “responsibility to protect sensitive law enforcement information falls in large part to the employees of the FBI who have access to it through their daily duties” and pointedly noted that “Comey failed to live up to this responsibility.”

The IG’s report also noted, “By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”

The IG provided a copy of his findings to the DOJ for a prosecutorial decision regarding Comey’s conduct. The DOJ declined prosecution. It is not known when the IG’s findings were first submitted to the DOJ. The IG then prepared this more comprehensive report that focused on whether Comey’s actions violated Department of FBI policy.

It was previously reported that the DOJ had declined prosecution of Comey. According to a source for Fox News, “Everyone at the DOJ involved in the decision said it wasn’t a close call,” one official said. “They all thought this could not be prosecuted.”

To underscore the difficulties the DOJ faced in pursuing a successful prosecution is the fact that Comey’s Memos were only classified by the FBI after Comey had leaked them. Additionally, the IG found no proof that “Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media.”

A failed prosecution at this juncture would prove problematic to the overall investigation of Spygate. The IG’s pending report on FISA abuse is far more important and potentially significantly more damning. (themarketswork.com, 8/30/2019)

(Republished with permission.)

“Having just completed a first review of the IG Report on James Comey, with numerous highlights for further overlay and research, here are my thoughts upon initial review.

First, there is absolutely no doubt James Comey used his memos akin to FD-302 investigative reports from an FBI agent. Meaning, from beginning-to-end he considered himself an investigative agent against the President-elect and then President Trump.

Note: The recording of his encounter with the target, President-elect Trump should be “treated like FISA derived information in a counterintelligence investigation.”  During this January 6th operation, Comey was the active FBI agent gathering evidence for later use.  The collected intelligence would be shared with the team via memo #1.

Remember the Lisa Page Texts from the same date?

The FBI redacted almost all of that text because it outlines the distribution of the evidence Comey was collecting.   Comey’s memos were essentially FD-302 reports, and the officials within the DOJ and FBI didn’t want that exposed.  Lisa Page text was heavily redacted because it would have shown the January 6th encounter was an operation against Trump.

Every encounter and every aspect of every action within that encounter was conducted in what Comey perceived as an official investigative capacity.

President Trump was the target of Comey’s operations and he wrote his memos as investigative notes therein. Example: Comey ran the, operation:

So the “small group”: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Baker, Priestap, Rybicki, et al, were running a counterintelligence operation against the incoming administration.

There are parts of the IG report highlighting a stunning amount of self-interest.

Example:  Who made the decision(s) about what “was” or what “was not” classified?  Or, put another way: who was making the internal decisions about Comey’s exposure to legal risk for sharing his investigative notes (memos) outside the department?

The answer is the same “small group” who were carrying out the operation:

James Baker, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, James Rybicki and Lisa Page were determining what parts of James Comey’s investigative notes needed to be classified.

The corrupt FBI was in position to police itself.   This is not a conflict of interest, it is better described as a profound conflict of self-interest.

The information the ‘small group‘ wanted to use to frame the target would be visible, not classified; however, any material that would outline the construct of their corruption in targeting the target would be hidden, classified.  You can’t make this stuff up folks.

The “small group” WAS the sources and methods they were protecting.

Everything needed to understand that level of corruption is outlined in the way the IG report discusses the handling of James Comey’s investigative notes (ie. memos).  AND the fact that James Comey kept them hidden, yes hidden.  Read this stuff!

First, “no hard copies of any of the memos were found in Comey’s FBI office.”:

So, if the memos were not held in Director James Comey’s official FBI office, the next logical question is where were they?

Well, when Special Agents went to James Comey’s house, he still kept them hidden and never informed the agents:

If Mr. Altruism, James Comey, was simply fulfilling the duty of a concerned and dedicated FBI Director, why not tell the FBI agents -picking up FBI records- that he had copies of FBI investigative notes in his “personal safe” while they were there?

What honorable justification exists for keeping them hidden from valid investigators?

Obviously me, you and God are not the only ones able to see the sketchy nature of this construct.  In fact, an internal FBI whistleblower came forward soon after that search of Comey’s home to request official “whistleblower status protection” from the IG.

Think logically…. What would prompt someone inside the FBI; who at some point gained access to the Comey memos; to request ‘whistleblower protected status’?

Doesn’t the “whistleblower request” indicate the requesting FBI official saw something nefarious in the way this was all going down?

Who was that ‘whistleblower’?

Well, first, Captain Obvious would tell you it has to be someone who actually gained possession of those memos right?…. this is not a big group.  Second, you only need to read a few more pages of the IG report to see who it was:

The “whistleblower” was the Supervisory Special Agent described in page 38 as above.

The memos were “stored” in a “reception area“, and in locked drawers in James Rybicki’s office.  [“Drawer safes” are silly FBI legal terms for fancy locked drawers]  Also note…

“Reception area“?  “May 15th“?

Well, (#1) apparently no-one wanted to be the one holding the hot potato of investigative evidence (Comey memos); that ownership would outline them as participatory members in carrying out the targeting of then President Trump.  Oh, yeah, those investigative notes were not in “the office of the FBI Director” on May 10th, when you were here searching the last time,… for some mysterious reason.. they, uh,… well, they were discovered…  in the “reception area“… yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket!   Right under the four month old copy of People Magazine, n’ stuff.

….ARE YOU FRIGGIN’ KIDDING ME WITH THIS?

…AND (#2) the very next morning, GUESS what happened?…

Now we see why the FBI Supervisory Special Agent in charge of inventorying Comey records asked the IG for official “whistleblower status.”

Sketchy warning flares surrounded the SSA agent right there in the FBI executive suites.

Of course the SSA gave the Inspector General the seven memos, asked for whistleblower protection, and likely told the IG the way they were produced stinks to high heaven.   Good grief. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/29/2019)

“In an explosive response filing today, which includes the phrase ”sunlight is the best disinfectant,” attorney Sidney Powell has outlined the soup-to-nuts construct of the malicious government action taken during their targeting her client Michael Flynn.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Clip from Attorney Sidney Powell’s filing on behalf of Lt. General Michael Flynn.

In the 19-pages (full pdf below), Ms. Powell walks through the history of the DOJ, FBI and intelligence apparatus weaponization against Mr. Flynn and lays out the background behind everything known to have happened in 2016, 2017 through today.

From the corrupt DOJ lawyers who were working with Fusion-GPS and Chris Steele, including Mr. Weissmann, Mr. Van Grack and Ms. Zainab Ahmad; to the 2015/2016 FISA database search abuses; to the CIA and FBI operation against Flynn including Nellie Ohr; to the schemes behind the use of DOJ official Bruce Ohr; to the corrupt construct of the special counsels office selections; to the specifics within the malicious conspiracy outlined by hiding FBI interview notes of Mike Flynn,… all of it…is a stunning filing that many CTH readers are well prepared to understand.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/30/2019)

“There are two sets of documents that outline a precise picture.  Robert Mueller’s lead FBI Agent David Archey made sworn declarations to the court, without knowledge of FBI “whistleblower” information provided to DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.

There is a distinct conflict within the IG report on James Comey (and memos) (Available Here) and the David Archey declarations (Available Here).  However, beyond the conflict, there’s an even more alarming picture of how Robert Mueller was deployed when all the information is overlaid on a timeline.   A very clear picture emerges; very clear.

In June 2017 CNN (and other media) filed a FOIA suit to gain the Comey memos.  As the lawsuit progressed through a lengthy battle -where the Mueller team did not want to turn over those memos- Mueller’s lead FBI agent, David Archey, made sworn declarations to the court.  Those statements became known as the “Archey Declarations.”  Inside those declarations, agent Archey provided a specific outline of the FBI and the memos.

Note the date – Agent Archey states the “investigative team” came into full possession of the Comey memos: “on or by May 12th, 2017.”

(Page #3 of Exhibit A – Archey Declarations)

The “investigative team” would be Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and then James Baker as lead counsel for the group.  The “Director’s staff” would be James Rybicki, who is identified by Archey as having “maintained” possession of the memos.

So this “small group”, particularly James Rybicki, is the center of the team.  This team is also confirmed by the IG Horowitz report. This team had the memos on May 12th, 2017.

Now we move into the aspect where the motives and ideology become clear when we look at the IG custodial record of the memos, as outlined by the Supervisory Special Agent in charge of Comey’s documents within the IG report, compared to the Archey declarations.

The FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in charge of Comey’s document retrieval is the “whistleblower” who eventually went to the IG.  I’ll explain why and how below; and to make understanding easier we shall use “SSA Whistleblower” to describe him.

♦ On May 10th, the Comey memos were not in Comey’s office [per IG report].  At the time of the search and review of Comey’s office, there were no hard copies found by SSA Whistleblower.

Now, keep in mind “by May 12th” James Rybicki had all the Comey memos in his possession, per Mueller team FBI Agent David Archey.

♦ On May 12th, SSA Whistleblower went to James Comey’s house along with James Rybicki and Deputy FBI Director David Bowditch.

(IG Report – Comey Memos – Page 34) 

During this May 12th visit, James Comey never told SSA Whistleblower he had the memos in his personal safe.  James Rybicki was also present for this retrieval visit and also never told SSA Whistleblower that he was holding the memos in his FBI HQ office.

♦ On May 15th, three days later, James Rybicki then tells SSA Whistleblower he knows the location of the Comey memos; and Rybicki informs SSA Whistleblower he has additional relevant material.

(IG Report – Comey Memos-Page 38) 

From the IG Report: “Rybicki told the SSA that he did not tell anyone about the Memos during the May 10 inventory because he understood that process to only include Comey’s office.”   Very sketchy.

At this point, SSA Whistleblower had to suspect something sketchy was happening.  Keep in mind the following day May 16th, 2017, Comey sent memo content to his friend Daniel Richman with instructions to leak to the New York Times. (Article published 5:00 pm May 16, 2017)

If Rybicki didn’t inform SSA Whistleblower on May 15 about the Comey memos, then SSA Whistleblower would have found out from leaked media reports the next day May 16.

If Rybicki didn’t tell SSA Whistleblower about the memos on May 15, then it would have looked like the ‘small group’ was hiding and leaking the memos.  An intellectually honest review of the timing, and considering Rybicki had indeed been hiding the memos, leads to the conclusion Rybicki knew the NYT leak was coming; Rybicki was coordinating with James Comey; Rybicki/Comey were trying to avoid team scrutiny. [Further evidence of this surfaces in the Mueller contact timeline.]

By May 16th, 2017, SSA Whistleblower, had to see the sketchy nature of how this was unfolding.   As a result this scenario from the IG report now makes sense:

If we overlay the FBI “small group” contact with Robert Mueller an even more clear picture emerges.

“Crossfire Hurricane” – During 2016, after the November election and throughout the transition period and into 2017, the FBI had a counterintelligence investigation ongoing against Donald Trump. FBI Director James Comey’s memos were part of this time period as the FBI small group was gathering evidence.  Then Comey was fired…

♦ Tuesday, May 9th – James Comey was fired at approximately 5:00 pm EST.  Later we discover Rod Rosenstein first contacted Robert Mueller about the special counsel appointment less than 15 hours after James Comey was fired.

♦ Wednesday, May 10th – From congressional testimony, we know DAG Rod Rosenstein called Robert Mueller to discuss the special counsel appointment on Wednesday, May 10th, 2017, at 7:45 am. [See Biggs questions to Mueller at 2:26 of video]

According to his own admissions (NBC and CBS), Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe immediately began a criminal ‘obstruction’ investigation. Wednesday, May 10th; and he immediately enlisted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

A few hours after the Rosenstein-Mueller phone call, James Comey’s office was being searched by the SSA Whistleblower per the IG report on Comey’s memos.

(IG Report – Comey Memos – Page 33) 

♦Thursday, May 11th – Andrew McCabe testified to congress. With the Comey firing fresh in the headlines.  McCabe testified there had been no effort to impede the FBI investigation.

Also on Thursday, May 11th, 2017, The New York Times printed an article, based on information seemingly leaked by James Comey, about a dinner conversation between the President and the FBI Director.   The “Loyalty” article [link].  The IG report shows: “[Daniel] Richman confirmed to the OIG that he was one of the sources for the May 11 article, although he said he was not the source of the information in the article about the Trump Tower briefing“.

♦Friday, May 12th –  Andrew McCabe met with DAG Rod Rosenstein to discuss the ongoing issues with the investigation and firing.  Referencing the criminal ‘obstruction’ case McCabe had opened just two days before.  According to McCabe:

“[Rosenstein] asked for my thoughts about whether we needed a special counsel to oversee the Russia case. I said I thought it would help the investigation’s credibility. Later that day, I went to see Rosenstein again. This is the gist of what I said: I feel strongly that the investigation would be best served by having a special counsel.” (link)

According to Andy Biggs questioning of Mueller, on this same day, May 12th, evidence shows Robert Mueller met “in person” with Rod Rosenstein.  This is the same day when SSA Whistleblower went to James Comey’s house to retrieve FBI material and both Rybicki and Comey never informed the agent about the memos:

(IG Report-Comey Memos-Page 34)

May 12th, is the date noted by David Archey when FBI investigators had assembled all of the Comey memos as evidence.  However, no-one in the FBI outside the “small group” knows about them.

♦ Saturday, May 13th, 2017, another meeting between Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, this time with AG Jeff Sessions also involved. [Per Andy Biggs]

♦ Sunday, May 14th –  Comey transmitted copies of Memos 2, 4, and 6, and a partially redacted copy of Memo 7 to Patrick Fitzgerald, who was one of Comey’s personal attorneys.  Fitzgerald received the email and PDF attachment from Comey at 2:27 p.m. on May 14, 2017, per the IG report.

♦ Monday, May 15th, McCabe states he and Rosenstein conferred again about the Special Counsel approach. McCabe: “I brought the matter up with him again after the weekend.”

On this same day was when James Rybicki called SSA Whistleblower to notify him of Comey’s memos. The memos were “stored” in a “reception area“, and in locked drawers in James Rybicki’s office.

(IG Report-Comey Memos-Page 38)

♦Tuesday May 16th – Per the IG report: “On the morning of May 16, Comey took digital photographs of both pages of Memo 4 with his personal cell phone. Comey then sent both photographs, via text message, to Richman”

On this same day, Rod Rosenstein takes Robert Mueller to the White House for a meeting in the oval office between President Trump, VP Pence, Robert Mueller, and Rod Rosenstein.    While they were meeting in the oval office, the following story was published by the New York Times (based on Comey memo leaks to Richman):

Also during the approximate time of this Oval Office meeting, Peter Strzok texts with Lisa Page about information relayed to him by Tashina Guahar (main justice) on behalf of Rod Rosenstein (who is at the White House).

Later that night, after the Oval Office meeting – According to the Mueller report, additional events on Tuesday May 16th, 2017:

Interesting that Tashina Gauhar was taking notes presumably involved in the May 16, 2017 meeting between, Lisa Page, Rod Rosenstein, and Andrew McCabe. 

This meeting at Main Justice appears to be happening in the evening (“later that night”) after the visit to the White House with Robert Mueller.  This meeting appears to be Lisa Page, Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe; along with Tashina Gauhar taking notes.

Why is Tuesday, May 16th, 2017, date of additional importance?

♦ Wednesday May 17th, 2017:  Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe go to brief the congressional “Gang-of-Eight”: Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes, Adam Schiff, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Richard Burr and Mark Warner.

(…) “On the afternoon of May 17, Rosenstein and I sat at the end of a long conference table in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol. We were there to brief the so-called Gang of Eight—the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Rosenstein had, I knew, made a decision to appoint a special counsel in the Russia case.”

(…) “After reminding the committee of how the investigation began, I told them of additional steps we had taken. Then Rod took over and announced that he had appointed a special counsel to pursue the Russia investigation and that the special counsel was Robert Mueller.” (link)

Immediately following this May 17, 2017, Go8 briefing, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein notified the public of the special counsel appointment.

What is clear from a review of all the related and released information is the FBI small group (McCabe, Page, Strzok, Rybicki, Baker) were hiding the ongoing FBI investigation from other FBI officials (including the SSA Whistleblower), inside the department after Comey was fired.

McCabe launched a “criminal investigation” (obstruction) on May 10th, and Rosenstein was in immediate contact with Robert Mueller about being a special counsel after conversations with the FBI small group. The small group was then releasing information to their media allies, and hiding the releases from FBI agents outside the small group; until they no longer needed to do so (May 15).

On May 15th, it appears the SSA was finally notified of the Comey memos because the small group already knew Robert Mueller was going to be appointed.

Comey, his lawyers and Lawfare allies, together with the small group, coordinated to leak and publish the NYT article (May 16th) the day Mueller was interviewing President Trump in the oval office. They knew Mueller was going to be appointed the following day, May 17th.  The NYT leak was cover and ammunition for Rod Rosenstein to fulfill his role.

This is the Special Counsel as the insurance policy deployed.

Everything was a set up by the small group; exclusively executed by the small group; kept hidden from other FBI agents and officials; Mueller’s visit with President Trump was part of that investigative effort.

This overall conspiracy/plan is why the SSA turned to the Inspector General and requested Whistleblower protection.  This is also why IG Horowitz was motivated to carve out the Comey memos in his report.  KEY POINT – OIG Michael Horowitz has outlined the Special Counsel appointment as fraudulently predicated.

(Conservative Treehouse, 8/31/2019)

(Republished with permission.)

“Today Michael Flynn and his attorney Sidney Powell returned to federal court for a status hearing before Judge Emmet Sullivan.  Generally status hearings are uneventful; however, this hearing falls on the heels of an explosive filing by Flynn’s defense outlining allegations of serious prosecutorial misconduct; and claims the DOJ is withholding Brady material.

Before getting into the heart of the proceedings, here is Ms. Sidney Powell appearing on Fox News to discuss the events today.  In this interview Ms. Powell confirms something we have previously presented; Rod Rosenstein authorized Robert Mueller to target Michael Flynn Jr. in order to provide leverage for a Flynn guilty plea.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/10/2019)

Eric Ciaramella

“If you have read any of the documents that came from Fusion-GPS, Nellie Ohr and Christopher Steele, you will likely find an amazing amount of similarity to the format and writing in this “whistleblower” complaint.

It was obviously written by a Lawfare member.

The complaint is the same structure as the Steele Dossier.  No direct knowledge; no direct evidence to the claims; second-hand gossip, rumors from people who might have known another person to have overheard something, mixed with prior media reports to narrate a story as told by the author. Here is the complaint:

The complaint is based on the July 25th phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.  Here’s the transcript of that call:

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson.  ICIG Atkinson is the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay ‘whistle-blower‘ complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was “blowing-the-whistle” based on second-hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie ‘hearsay‘.

Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

If the DOJ-NSD exploitation of the NSA database, and/or DOJ-NSD FISA abuse, and/or DOJ-NSD FARA corruption were ever to reach sunlight, current ICIG Atkinson -as the lawyer for the process- would be under a lot of scrutiny for his involvement.

Yes, that gives current ICIG Michael Atkinson a strong and corrupt motive to participate with the Schiff/Lawfare impeachment objective.

Atkinson’s conflict-of-self-interest, and/or possible blackmail upon him by deep state actors who most certainly know his compromise, likely influenced his approach to this whistleblower complaint.   That would explain why the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal Counsel so strongly rebuked Atkinson’s interpretation of his responsibility with the complaint.

In the Justice Department’s OLC opinion, they point out that Atkinson’s internal justification for accepting the whistleblower complaint was poor legal judgment.  [See Here]  I would say Atkinson’s decision is directly related to his own risk exposure:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/26/2019)

“…The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General has released a notification stating that a former U.S. Attorney within the DC Circuit was caught leaking grand jury information to an “unauthorized individual”:

(Link to pdf)

Unfortunately, “criminal prosecution” for leaking grand jury material “was declined”.

The Asst. U.S. Attorney (AUSA) is not identified by name, but the IG release notes the attorney is no longer working for the DOJ ; likely fired as an outcome of getting caught.

….with the name not being released, that leads to speculation. Also with the recipient not being named, that too leads to speculation.  Was the leak to the media, or was the leak for allied members of the ‘resistance’ in government (ie. congress).  Regardless, it is safe to accept the leaker and recipient are part of the Lawfare Alliance.

One possibility for the identity of the leaker is Asst. U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis who recently withdrew from cases involving: Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Concord LLC, all cases stemming from Mueller and the scheme team prosecutions.

To be clear, we don’t know who the leaker is.  Heck, it could be Andrew Weissmann for all we know… but the timing with Curtis is, well, very conspicuous.  However, regardless of the identity of the U.S. Attorney, the primary takeaway is several-fold.

First, we see a U.S. Attorney in DC is leaking grand jury information.  That is a big deal; it shows the scale of corruption with the DOJ in/around Washington DC.

Second, we see Main Justice declining to prosecute the attorney for leaking the grand jury information.  That too is a big deal.  No outsider would ever be permitted to escape that level of accountability.

Third, once again, we can see the scale and scope of total corruption within the system.

Lawfare is a very serious problem.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 10/02/2019)

“For two days the mainstream media were breathlessly reporting on an “urgent request” from the State Department Inspector General for a closed-door meeting.

Media sources whipped their left-wing audiences into an anticipatory frenzy with predictions of devastating information soon to come from an “explosive” and “highly unusual” request.  It must be connected to President Trump and Secretary Mike Pompeo hiding devastating information, they said…

Well, the super-anticipated ‘closed-door’ briefing was held today, and the IG handed out packets of information related to revelations of Democrats colluding with the Ukraine government.  The exact opposite of what the media and the professional left anticipated.

WASHINGTON –  The State Department’s Inspector General shared a packet of months-old news stories and other Ukraine-related documents during an “urgent” briefing with Congressional staffers on Wednesday, sources told the Daily Caller.

Sources familiar with the meeting said the IG handed over a packet containing, among other old materials, news articles written this past spring by The Hill’s John Solomon about Democratic ties to Ukraine.

[…]  The briefing was a huge blow to Democrats, who were expecting bombshell information regarding the Trump administration’s contact with Ukraine and investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden.

In fact, several news outlets reported earlier in the day that the briefing would be about State Department leadership retaliating against career employees who wanted to cooperate with the Democrats’ investigation into Trump. (read more)

Whether the briefing was a set-up to embarrass the media is now being debated.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 10/02/2019)

“There is a lot to unpack in a decision today by the Director of National Intelligence to declassify (with redactions) a 2018 FISA court ruling about ongoing unauthorized database search queries by FBI agents/”contractors” in the period covering 2017/2018.

BACKGROUND: In April 2017 the DNI released a FISA report written by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer that showed massive abuse, via unauthorized searches of the NSA database, in the period of November 2015 through May 2016. Judge Collyer’s report specifically identified search query increases tied to the 2016 presidential primary.  Two years of research identified this process as the DOJ/FBI and IC using the NSA database to query information related to political candidates, specifically Donald Trump.

Judge James Boasberg (Credit: public domain)

Now we fast-forward to Judge Boasberg in a similar review (full pdf below), looking at the time period of 2017 through March 2018.

The timing here is an important aspect.

It is within this time-period where ongoing DOJ and FBI activity transfers from the Obama administration (Collyer report) into the Trump administration (Boasberg report).

It cannot be overemphasized as you read the Boasberg opinion, or any reporting on the Boasberg opinion, that officials within DOJ and FBI are/were on a continuum.  Meaning the “small group” activity didn’t stop after the election but rather continued with the Mueller and Weissmann impeachment agenda.

Remember, the 2016 ‘insurance policy’ was to hand Mueller the 2016 FBI investigation so they could turn it into the 2017 special counsel investigation. Mueller, Weissmann and the group then used the ‘Steele Dossier’ as the cornerstone for the special counsel review.  The goal of the Mueller investigation was to construct impeachment via obstruction. The same players transferred from “crossfire hurricane” into the Mueller ‘obstruction‘ plan.

Within Judge Boasberg’s review of the 2017 activity, he outlines an identical set of FISA violations from within the FBI units and “contractors” as initially outlined by Judge Collyer a year earlier.  Judge Boasberg wrote his opinion in October 2018 and that opinion was declassified today (October 8th, 2019). Boasberg is reviewing 2017 through March 2018.  [Main link to all legal proceedings here]

(Via Wall Street Journal)  The intelligence community disclosed Tuesday that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year found that the FBI’s pursuit of data about Americans ensnared in a warrantless internet-surveillance program intended to target foreign suspects may have violated the law authorizing the program, as well as the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

The court concluded that the FBI had been improperly searching a database of raw intelligence for information on Americans—raising concerns about oversight of the program, which as a spy program operates in near-total secrecy.

(…)  The court ruling identifies tens of thousands of improper searches of raw intelligence databases by the bureau in 2017 and 2018 that it deemed improper in part because they involved data related to tens of thousands of emails or telephone numbers—in one case, suggesting that the FBI was using the intelligence information to vet its personnel and cooperating sources. Federal law requires that the database only be searched by the FBI as part of seeking evidence of a crime or for foreign intelligence information.

In other cases, the court ruling reveals improper use of the database by individuals. In one case, an FBI contractor ran a query of an intelligence database—searching information on himself, other FBI personnel and his relatives, the court revealed.  (more)

As with the Collyer report, I am going line-by-painstaking-line through the Boasberg report (yeah, swamped); and what is clear is that in 2017 the FBI ‘bad actors’ and ‘contractors’ were continuing to try and subvert the safeguards put into place by former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.   The 2017 non-compliance rate is similar to the 2016 review.

Judge Boasberg touches on the April 2017 Judge Collyer report.  Here is the carefully worded DNI explanation of the connective tissue (emphasis mine):

(…)  The FISC also concluded that the FBI’s querying and minimization procedures, as implemented, were inconsistent with Section 702 and the Fourth Amendment, in light of certain identified compliance incidents involving queries of Section 702 information.

These incidents involved instances in which personnel either misapplied or misunderstood the query standard, such that the queries were not reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime. Some of these instances involved queries concerning large numbers of individuals.

While stating that the Government had taken “constructive steps” to address the identified issues, the FISC held that these steps did not fully address the statutory and Fourth Amendment concerns raised by the compliance incidents.

(…) Additionally, the FISC considered the scope of certain new restrictions regarding “abouts” communications that were enacted in the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017. “Abouts” collection is the acquisition of communications that contain a reference to, but are not to or from, a Section 702 target. As the NSA explained in April 2017 (see NSA’s April 28, 2017 Statement), the NSA stopped acquiring any upstream internet communications that are solely “about” a foreign intelligence target and, instead, limited its Section 702 collection to only those communications that are directly “to” or “from” a foreign intelligence target.

NSA’s 2018 Targeting Procedures contained the same limitation. Although the Government did not seek to resume “abouts” collection, the FISC, with assistance from amici, reviewed whether the “abouts” restrictions applied to any other types of Section 702 acquisitions currently being conducted. While the FISC held that the “abouts” restrictions apply across Section 702 acquisitions, it found that current Section 702 acquisitions did not implicate the “abouts” restrictions. (read more)

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 10/09/2019) (Archive)

Here is the October 2018 Boasberg Opinion:

(…) Yovanovitch seems to have lied when she testified to Schiff’s underground double-secret hearings.

During her October deposition to the House Intelligence Committee,  Yovanovitch told U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) under oath, about the email she received from congressional staffer Laura Carey, adding that she never responded to it.

Per Tucker Carlson, she did respond, but she used her personal email account to respond to Laura Carey just two days after the “whistleblower” filed the complaint, and about a month before it became public and ignited the lastest Democratic Party effort to change the results of the 2016 election.

Tucker Carlson reports that it appears as though Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, perjured herself under oath, according to new email evidence pic.twitter.com/EBTh6GgXOZ

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 8, 2019

The “emails obtained by Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” showed that in fact, Yovanovitch had responded to Carey’s initial Aug. 14 email, adding that she “would love to reconnect and look forward to chatting with you.”

On Aug. 14, Carey reached out to Yovanovitch before noting that Carey had resigned from the State Department to join the House Foreign Affairs Committee staff performing oversight work. Aug. 14th was two days after the whistleblower complaint was filed and a month before that complaint became public. But we also know the whistleblower went to Adam Schiff’s team before filing the claim. The question is, did Schiff’s office tell other Democrats on Capitol Hill what was in the complaint? And was that the “quite delicate” and “time-sensitive”  matter that Ms. Carey wrote Yovanovitch.

“In fact, it turns out that she did respond.In fact, she said she ‘looked forward to chatting with you’ to that staffer. And as Congressman Zeldin pointed out, the ambassador’s original answer, which was dishonest, was given under oath.” And that, folks, is called, “perjury.”

Zeldin told Tucker Carlson on Thursday it was “greatly concerning” that Yovanovitch may have testified incorrectly that she did not personally respond to Carey’s email. Note: “Testifying incorrectly” is a nice way of saying she lied.

“I would highly suspect that this Democratic staffer’s work was connected in some way to the whistleblower’s effort, which has evolved into this impeachment charade,” Zeldin said. “We do know that the whistleblower was in contact with [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Adam Schiff’s team before the whistleblower had even hired an attorney or filed a whistleblower complaint even though Schiff had lied to the public originally claiming that there was no contact. Additionally, while the contents of the email from this staffer to Ambassador Yovanovitch clearly state what the conversation would be regarding, Yovanovitch, when I asked her specifically what the staffer was looking to speak about, did not provide these details.

(…) I specifically asked her whether the Democratic staffer was responded to by Yovanovitch or the State Department. It is greatly concerning that Ambassador Yovanovitch didn’t answer my question as honestly as she should have, especially while under oath.”

(Marie Yovanovitch Transcript, October 11, 2019)

It appears Ambassador Yovanovitch did not accurately answer this question I asked her during her “impeachment inquiry” deposition under oath. https://t.co/2Ju420Pkpb pic.twitter.com/WACsyksMzW

— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) November 8, 2019

(Read more: LidBlog, 11/14/2019)  (Archive)

“In the mind of Fiona Hill (lead image, right), the recently departed senior director for Russia at the National Security Council (NSC), everybody in Washington is vulnerable to Russian attacks of one kind or another, but not her.

Instead, she admitted in testimony to the Congressional committees investigating impeachment evidence against President Donald Trump,  that she’s on an attack operation of her own.  “I’m sorry to be very passionate but this is precisely…why I joined the [Trump] administration. I didn’t join it because I thought the Ukrainians had been going after the President.”  She says the reason she joined up was to fight the Russians.

“I thought it was very important to step up, as an expert, as somebody who’s been working on Russia for basically my whole entire adult 1ife, given what had happened in 2016 and given the peril that I actually thought that we were in as a democracy, given what the Russians I know to have done in the course of the 2016 elections… I’m extremely concerned that this is a rabbit hole that we’ re all going to go down in between now and the 2020 election, and it will be to all of our detriment.”

Hill testified that she’s certain that “what happened in 2016” was that the Kremlin intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. “We’re in peril as a democracy because of other people interfering here. And it doesn’t mean to say that other people haven’t also been trying to do things, but the Russians were [the ones] who attacked us in 2016, and they’re now writing the script for others to do the same. And if we don’t get our act together, they will continue to make fools of us internationally.”

“He’s [President Vladimir Putin] looking out there for every opening that he can find, basically, and somebody’s vulnerability to turn that against them. That’s exactly what a case officer does. They get a weakness, and they blackmail their assets. And Putin will target world leaders and other officials like this. He tries to target everybody.”

So, in the logic of Hill’s analysis of how the Russians operate against everybody, including herself, what evidence is there that Hill hasn’t, by concealment, calculation, corruption, or by mistake, succumbed to Putin’s attack,  too? Not once was Hill asked by either the Democrats or Republicans during the deposition, nor did she volunteer her own explanation, of how she managed to inoculate herself and is now telling the truth.

If Hill is telling the truth, and equally if she isn’t,  she has inflicted serious damage on her own colleagues and superiors,   the US Government’s Russia-hating professionals. In her testimony Hill depicts them as lying to each other and to the press; constantly scheming for and against the President; incapable of coordination among themselves, agreement with their allies, or negotiation with their enemies. Most valuable of all to the Kremlin, Hill reveals that the American warfighter is predictable in everything he or she understands, plans or does.

To reveal this much is precious intelligence for Moscow because the Russian secret services and Putin would be less willing to believe it if it had come from home-grown agents. Either Hill is a willing dupe, or she is the fool she is warning her colleagues to beware of.

On October 14, Hill gave ten hours of question-and-answer testimony before the Congressional committees on intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight. The record comprises 446 pages of verbatim transcript. This has just been released in unclassified, partially redacted form; click to read in full.

(…) Hill’s testimony reveals, though she doesn’t admit it, that Trump had come to distrust the intelligence analysis and policy advice he was getting from Hill as the coordinator of all the government agencies involved in Ukraine and Russia. She admitted to knowing little personally and directly of what Trump and his senior aides and advisors discussed and decided among themselves. What she knew was indirect, down the White House staff chain,  and by hearsay.

Her preoccupation, Hill emphasized repeatedly, was with Russian plotting in Washington, and in Hill’s assessment, the Russian successes. Christopher Steele, whom Hill had known as her counterpart intelligence officer for Russia at the British MI6 years before, had been lured, she testified, by the Russians into the “rabbit hole” Hill called the Golden Showers dossier.   Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State, was tricked by the Russians into promoting the Steele dossier to NSC officials. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, ex-Ambassador to Ukraine, was victimized by the Russians who eavesdropped on his telephone calls with Nuland when he and she were plotting the Kiev putsch of February 2014.

Left to right: Christopher Steele; Victoria Nuland; Geoffrey Pyatt. (Credit: John Helmer)

Hill swore on oath that she too was targeted by Russian agents when she was writing her last book on President Vladimir Putin in 2012.   “My phone was hacked repeatedly, and the Brookings system was hacked repeatedly,” she told the Congressmen. “And at one point, it was clearly obvious that someone had exfiltrated out my draft…And then, mysteriously, after this I started to get emails from people who purported to have met me at different points in my career, people I kind of vaguely remember. I’d look online, and there would be these, you know, Linkedln pages or there might be, you know, something I could find out some information for them. And they’d start offering me information, you know, that somehow purported to, strangely enough, some of the chapters that I was actually working on. And when I would go to meetings in Russia, people would basically, you know so that I was being played, or they were attempting to play me as well.”

Hill was not asked if she reported this to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the time.  That she didn’t report the alleged plot not only discredits her making the allegation now, seven years later; it also warns the Russian services to tell Putin that there is nothing US officials like Hill don’t imagine or won’t fabricate.

For Hill, those Americans who have been targeted the most are so obviously innocent, it’s a Russian operation to think, say, broadcast or publish otherwise. She is convinced, for example,  of the innocence of former Vice President Joseph Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in taking money from Ukrainians seeking to influence US policy, when they were in charge, or when Clinton was running for president. (Hill said she is just as certain Paul Manafort was guilty of taking Ukrainian money.)

As for the current allegation against the Bidens, father and son, that they were corruptly trading US Government favour for cash paid through the Ukrainian oil and gas exploration company Burisma, Hill revealed she had seen no intelligence report on the subject during her time in office. “From your knowledge of Burisma, are they a corrupt company? DR. HILL: I don’t know a lot about Burisma, I’ll be frank… And you never heard of any reason why anybody should be investigating Vice President Biden? A[nswer]. …correct… And are you aware of any evidence that Vice President Joe Biden in any way acted inappropriately while he was Vice President…A[nswer]. I’m not.”

For details of the Burisma case, and the involvement of Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, read this.

Hill also expressed the unqualified conclusion, after her professional assessment of the US intelligence, that the narrative of the anti-Trump forces in Congress and the press is accurate.  “Do you have any reason,” she was asked by Daniel Goldman, head of investigations for the intelligence committee, “to doubt either the facts alleged in the [Mueller] indictment or the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election? A[nswer]: I do not. Q. And do you have any reason to believe that Ukraine did interfere in the 2016 election? A[nswer]: I do not. We’re talking about the Ukrainian Government here when you say Ukraine, correct? A. Yes. Yes, I do not.”

Neither Goldman nor the Republican Congressmen asked Hill what she knew of Victor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian oligarch acting for the Ukrainian Government in sending large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation and Hill’s employer, Brookings.”  (Read more: John Helmer, 11/12/2019) (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“Inside an otherwise innocuous court filing (full pdf below), General Mike Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, files a motion to compel (MTC) in an effort to gain discovery of the content from two cell phones belonging to Joseph Mifsud.   [Hat Tip Techno Fog]

Apparently, according to the information within the filing, the DOJ has somehow gained custody of two cell phones belonging to Mr. Mifsud:

The filing notes that “Western intelligence” likely tasked Mr. Mifsud against General Flynn as early as  in order to set up “connections with certain Russians” for later use against him.  Essentially, an intelligence entrapment scheme.

Unfortunately, the filing only identifies the cell phones along with the request for the production of the content therein.  However, the fact the DOJ has two cell phones belonging to Joseph Mifsud opens up a whole bunch of questions:

#1)  How did the US Dept of Justice gain custody of Mr. Mifsud’s cell phones?

#2) Were these Blackberry cell phones issued by U.S. intelligence? (unknown agency)

#3) Why has the U.S. DOJ taken custody of those cell phones?

#4) If #2 is yes, wouldn’t that automatically destroy the “Mifsud as a Russian intelligence asset” narrative?

#5) [Less important] How the heck did Sidney Powell find out about them?

Something is certainly happening here. The cell phone models are from 2011 and 2014.

With U.S. Attorney John Durham and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr traveling to Italy to listen to the taped deposition of Joseph Mifsud last month…and now the discovery that the DOJ has his cell phones from a period of keen interest in the Russia collusion-conspiracy framework…it would appear Mr. Mifsud might just be the Maltese Fulcrum.

In response to the defense Motion to Compel, the U.S. Dept of Justice told Ms. Powell: “if they determine the information is discoverable or relevant to sentencing” they will produce them.

(View complete document on Scribd)

(Conservative Treehouse, 10/15/2019)

“The word “coup” shifted to a new level of formalized meaning last week when members of the political resistance showed up to remove President Trump wearing military uniforms.

Not only did U.S. military leadership remain silent to the optics and purpose, but in the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman he admits to giving instructions to ignore the instructions from a sitting United States President.

In the absence of push-back from the Joint Chiefs, from this moment forth, the impression is tacit U.S. military support for the Vindman objective.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official, testified before congressional committees conducting an impeachment inquiry on October 29, wearing a full military uniform.

To date, there has been no visible comment from U.S. military sanctioning Lt. Col. Vindman for his decision; or correcting the impression represented by Vindman’s military appearance.  The willful blindness is concerning, but it gets much worse.

Beyond the debate about the optics of the “coup“, within the testimony of Lt. Col Vindman, the witness readily admits to understanding the officially established policy of the President of The United States (an agreement between President Trump and President Zelenskyy), and stunningly admits that two weeks later he was giving countermanding instructions to his Ukrainian counterpart to ignore President Trump’s policies.

The coup against President Donald Trump went from soft, to hard.  Consider…

The testimony from Lt. Col. Vindman is available here.

Borrowing from Roscoe B Davis, here are some highlights:

Representative John Ratcliffe begins deconstructing Lt. Col Vindman, while his arrogant attorneys begin trying to interfere with the questioning.

(Vindman’s testimony with Congressman Ratcliffe continues on Conservative Treehouse linked here:)

This next section is very interesting and very important.

Congressman John Ratcliffe begins questioning Vindman from the perspective of an Article 92 violation, coupled with an Article 88 violation.  President Trump is Lt. Col Vindman’s superior.  President Trump sets foreign policy. 

Two weeks after President Trump has established an agreement with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, and established the policy direction therein, Lt. Col. Vindman is now giving contrary instructions to the Ukranian government.  Vindman’s lawyer recognizes where the questioning is going and goes absolutely bananas:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 11/09/2019)

Prosecutor Brandon Van Grack sends a letter to Flynn’s defense team today containing a stunning, almost impossible to comprehend, admission of a mistake central to the claims of the prosecution.  In March 2018 the FBI presented notes taken by agents Pientka and Strzok, now they say they made a ‘mistake’.

For almost two years the DOJ misidentified, misattributed, and never corrected that the authors of the Flynn interview notes were actually reversed.  All of the notes attributed to FBI Agent Peter Strzok actually were taken by FBI Agent Joseph Pientka, and vice-versa:

What kind of f**kery is this?  The DOJ never confirmed the authorship of the FBI notes that are central to the FD-302, upon which the entire prosecution claim of Flynn lying to investigators is based? …Seriously?

The entire FBI case against Flynn; meaning the central element that he lied to FBI investigators (he didn’t); is predicated on the FD-302 interview reports generated by the two FBI agents; later discovered to have been edited, shaped and approved by Andrew McCabe….  And for almost two years the entire outline of their documented evidence has been misattributed?

C’mon man.  This is sketchy as heck.

Obviously what triggered this re-review of the notes was a smart sur-surreply from the defense that highlighted how Peter Strzoks notes were far too neat, organized and well constructed to have been written during an actual interview. [SEE HERE]

For the prosecution to now reverse course and say the agent attribution was transposed, is either the biggest screw-up in a high profile case…. OR, the prosecution now needs to reverse the note-takers due to the exact, and common sense, reasons highlighted by the defense.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 11/05/2019)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

Michael Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, appears on Fox Late Night to discuss the stunning letter from the DOJ that for the past two years they have attributed the wrong notes to the wrong FBI agent. – Conservative Treehouse

Lawfare founder Benjamin Wittes sent a curious tweet appearing to defend former DOJ lawyer Lisa Page; who was previously assigned to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The tweet comes out of the blue; and there’s nothing currently in the public sphere or headlines about Ms. Page. It seems rather odd:

My hunch is Ms. Page may have spoken honestly to Horowitz or Durham about her experience as part of the ‘small group’.  If accurate, and considering McCabe threw Page under the bus to protect himself against an internal investigation about his media leaks, Ms. Page’s current disposition may very well be adverse to the interests of the coup plotters.   [Additionally, Ms. Page had no involvement with the FBI FISA construct.]

Michael Bromwich is Andrew McCabe’s attorney.  Bromwich is a Lawfare member.

Perhaps the former Deputy Director is being positioned as the ‘fall guy’. (Conservative Treehouse, 11/08/2019)

“Representative Elise Stefanik brought to light interesting information today surrounding how the Obama administration was concerned about issues surrounding Vice-President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his connection to a corrupt Ukraine company Burisma.

During questioning, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch admitted the Obama White House spent time briefing her on how to respond to congress if questions about Hunter Biden and Burisma were raised.  This testimony highlights the concerns by the Obama administration about a clear issue with the Biden family and corrupt Ukraine interests.”

This admission by former Ambassador Yovanovitch directly contradicted her testimony that was made only minutes before the admission.  From her opening statement:

[Yovanovitch Opening Statement November 15th, Page #8]

(Conservative Treehouse, 11/15/2019)

John Solomon reports:

(…) “Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.

“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

The Q&A is consistent with other information flowing out of State. As I reported yesterday, when a Burisma representative contacted State in February 2016 to ask for the department’s help in quashing the corruption allegations, Hunter Biden’s role on the company’s board was prominently cited.

And a senior State Department official who testified recently in the impeachment proceedings reportedly told lawmakers he tried to warn the vice president’s office that Burisma posed a conflict for Joe Biden but was turned aside.” (Read more: John Solomon Reports, 11/05/2019)

Bill Taylor (Credit: Fox News)

“It was evident several weeks ago that U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is one of the current participants in the coup effort.  It was Taylor who engaged in carefully planned text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam Schiff’s political coup effort.

Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (’06-’09) and later helped the Obama administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.

Rudy Giuliani (Credit: Anthony Devlin/Shutterstock)

Today Rudy Giuliani has released a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor has blocked VISA’s for Ukrainian ‘whistle-blowers’ who are willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.   Unfortunately, Senator Graham, along with dozens of U.S. Senators currently serving, may very well have been a recipient for money through the aforementioned laundry process.  So, good luck with the visas.

U.S. senators write foreign aid policies, rules, and regulations thereby creating the financing mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds.  Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered funds back through their various “institutes” and business connections to the foreign government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]

The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money laundering by granting conflict waivers, approvals for financing (think Clinton Global Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money.   The officials within the State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of “indulgence fees”, junkets, gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.

If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the entire apparatus.  President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process.  Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup. The letter.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because, well, in reality, all of the U.S. Senators (both parties) on the Foreign Relations Committee [Members Here] are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and contributions from foreign governments.

Mitch McConnell (Credit: Getty Images)

A “Codel” is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payment terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing.  This is why Senators spend $20 million on a campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year.  The “institutes” is where the real foreign money comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc. etc.  There are trillions at stake.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds the power over these members (and the members of the Senate Intel Committee), because McConnell decides who sits on what committee.  As soon as a Senator starts taking the bribes lobbying funds, McConnell then has full control over that Senator.  This is how the system works.

The McCain Institute is one of the obvious examples of the financing network.  And that is the primary reason why Cindy McCain is such an outspoken critic of President Trump.  In essence, President Trump is standing between her and her next diamond necklace; a dangerous place to be.

So when we think about a Senate Impeachment Trial; and we consider which senators will vote to impeach President Trump, it’s not just a matter of Democrats -vs- Republican.  We need to look at the game of leverage, and the stand-off between those bribed Senators who would prefer President Trump did not interfere in their process.

McConnell has been advising President Trump which Senators are most likely to need their sensibilities eased.   As an example, President Trump met with Lisa Murkowski last week.  Senator Murkowski rakes in millions from the Oil and Gas industry, and she ain’t about to allow horrible Trump to lessen her bank account any more than Cindy McCain will give up her frequent shopper discounts at Tiffany’s.

WASHINGTON DC – Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is getting a high-profile perch as he joins the Senate during his latest clash with President Trump.

Romney was named on Thursday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving him an opening to wade into several looming foreign policy battles between Congress and the White House.  (link)

Now do you see how McConnell works?

Oh yeah, about those recess appointments…. Once you see the strings on the Marionettes you can never go back to a time when you did not see them. (Conservative Treehouse, 11/23/2019)

The following day, Giuliani tweets:

(Republished with permission.)

A curiously interesting development in the DOJ case against Michael Flynn.  Judge Emmet Sullivan is weighing the merits of the Flynn defense Motion to Compel (MTC), which requests a significant amount of information on DOJ/FBI conduct in the lead-up to Flynn’s prosecution. A decision and court briefing was anticipated soon.

However, today the DOJ files a joint motion with the defense asking Judge Sullivan to suspend scheduled briefing dates and sentencing deadlines until after the DOJ inspector general report is published on December 9th.   The implication is that some of the “Brady” material at issue; or tangential issues that touch upon the material; may be outlined in the upcoming IG report.

The joint motion asks for a delay to the briefing schedules, and a delay in the subsequent sentencing therein.  The full motion is here.

(Conservative Treehouse, 11/26/2019)

“As a member of Team Mueller, Van Grack was involved in improperly obtaining Trump Transition Team emails/comms from GSA – including privileged materials.

He hid the extent of the intrusion from Trump Transition Team lawyers.

Van Grack confirmed that the Special Counsel’s Office had “failed to use an ‘ethical wall’ or ‘taint team’ and instead simply reviewed the privileged communications contained in the [Transition Team] materials.”

Van Grack “failed to correct the record or disclose that” they were in possession of and had accessed “a significant volume of privileged materials.

The failure was intentional; they wanted the privileged communications.

Deceptive edits of Trump lawyer John Dowd’s voicemail, produced to Van Grack, made its way to the Mueller Report.

They omitted the section where Dowd asked Flynn’s lawyers not to disclose “confidential information.”

HT @lastrefuge2

We reached out to John Dowd about the Van Grack/Mueller deception.

He called it “unfair and despicable”

Van Grack used a corrupt reading of FARA laws (since rejected by 2 courts) to target Mike Flynn Jr.

Not to prosecute Flynn Jr., but to force General Flynn to plea.

Flynn Jr. became an official target on 10/20/17. Flynn signed the plea deal on 11/30/17.

HT @lastrefuge2

Flynn Intel Group (FARA) case – overseen by Van Grack.

DOJ tells Judge that “Flynn was not a member of the alleged conspiracy”

DOJ then tries to label Flynn a co-conspirator. This was rejected by the Judge.

corrected HT: @TheLastRefuge2

Van Grack’s FARA case (prosecuted by EDVA) against Flynn Intel Group member Rafiekian was a disaster from the start.

It was Soon before trial and the DOJ couldn’t figure out how to instruct the jury on the FARA violation.

As the Rafiekian (Flynn Intel Group) case unraveled, they designated Flynn Jr. as a witness to intimidate Flynn.

This was pure tactics – Flynn Jr. was never called as a witness.

Despite DOJ assertion that Flynn Intel Group member Rafiekian was acting as a foreign agent for Turkey…

Van Grack/EDVA never investigated whether the agreement was funded by the Turkish government.

The threat against Flynn – labeling him as a co-conspirator – came after he refused to agree to the false narrative set forth by Van Grack.

The Judge in the Rafiekian case disagreed: “Flynn has not disavowed what is in the statement of facts.”

The false charges claimed by Van Grack – that “Flynn had agreed to plead to a knowing and intentional false FARA filing” – was actually deleted from a draft of the Flynn Agreement.

This is important because Van Grack was telling Judge Sullivan in December 2018 that Flynn could be charged as a foreign agent under 18 USC 951.

Van Grack’s Section 951 theory was rejected by the Judge in the Rafiekian case.

“Such a reading is unwarranted . . . based on the plain language of Section 951.”

Judge Sullivan may have concerns about Van Grack’s Section 951 interpretation and VG’s claim Flynn could have been prosecuted.

If “there was no factual predicate for that FARA violation, then it should not have been mentioned at all as a potential ‘benefit’”

As to Van Grack’s conduct in the Flynn case…

They confused the FBI Agents’ notes (Strzok/Pientka)

As to the FARA charges, Van Grack would have known this likely created a non-consentable conflict of interest between Flynn and his prior counsel.

Conflicts disregarded; they needed the plea.

(Techno Fog, 11/29/2019)  (Archive)

Carter Page

“Carter William Page is a Naval Academy Trident Scholar and certain non-descript ‘US Person’ at the center of all things Crossfire Hurricane. From his FISA surveillance warrant which predated the Election to Trump’s “wiretap” claims, to James Wolfe indictment, to Nunes Memo, to unprecedented public release of FISA, to impending OIG Report, to Kevin Klinesmith impending indictment, and so much more to come, Carter Page is central to all.

This report highlights Carter Page’s life-long ties to the United States Intelligence Community as they concern his status as a target of FISA surveillance in 2016-2017. If Inspector Horowitz was moved to seek answers regarding allegations of Joseph Mifsud’s ties to Western Intelligence, then similar allegations regarding the Target of the FISA warrant itself surely deserve double such attention and scrutiny.

Unfortunately, Carter Page claims zero interest from the OIG or other relevant DOJ contacts to hear his side of the story. Carter has recently taken to the airways to again forcefully allege “a quarter-century of service” to the USG while threatening a court injunction if not given at least a review process afforded to other government-related actors that are being named and scrutinized in the same document.

It is in this vein that this Trident Scholar Report is presented. The report highlights a quarter-century of factual data concerning Carter Page and is partitioned into three parts which will examine:

• 1) 1989-1999: Background & Grooming as a US Naval Intelligence Officer
• 2) 2008-2020: ‘Innocent Citizen’ at Center of Multiple CI Investigations
• 3) 2016-2020: Contemporary & Continuing Displays of Intelligence Tradecraft & Assistance to USG

Taken alone, any single Part of the tripartite report would suffice as a package of exculpatory information serious enough to remit the existing FISA apps as “deficient for lack of exculpatory disclosure”. Taken together as a whole, the three Parts illustrate a FISA target that looks and behaves more like an active US Intelligence Agent than a SVR recruit.

It is against this backdrop that any self-referential audit of the FISA process, subject to zero outside scrutiny, is to be read and critiqued. ” (Read more: Monsieur America, 12/8/2019)  (Archive)

In a fantastic display of true investigative journalism, One America News journalist Chanel Rion tracked down Ukrainian witnesses as part of an exclusive OAN investigative series. The evidence being discovered dismantles the baseless Adam Schiff impeachment hoax and highlights many corrupt motives for U.S. politicians.

Ms. Rion spoke with Ukrainian former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko who outlines how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch perjured herself before Congress.

What is outlined in this interview is a  problem for all DC politicians across both parties.  The obviously corrupt influence efforts by U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch as outlined by Lutsenko were not done independently.

Senators from both parties participated in the influence process and part of those influence priorities was exploiting the financial opportunities within Ukraine while simultaneously protecting Joe Biden and his family.  This is where Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were working with Marie Yovanovitch.

Imagine what would happen if all of the background information was to reach the general public?  Thus the motive for Lindsey Graham currently working to bury it.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

You might remember George Kent and Bill Taylor testified together.

It was evident months ago that U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was one of the current participants in the coup effort against President Trump.  It was Taylor who engaged in carefully planned text messages with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland to set-up a narrative helpful to Adam Schiff’s political coup effort.

Bill Taylor was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (’06-’09) and later helped the Obama administration to design the laundry operation providing taxpayer financing to Ukraine in exchange for back-channel payments to U.S. politicians and their families.

In November Rudy Giuliani released a letter he sent to Senator Lindsey Graham outlining how Bill Taylor blocked VISA’s for Ukrainian ‘whistle-blowers’ who are willing to testify to the corrupt financial scheme.

Unfortunately, as we are now witnessing, Senator Lindsey Graham, along with dozens of U.S. Senators currently serving, may very well have been recipients for money through the aforementioned laundry process.  The VISA’s are unlikely to get approval for congressional testimony, or Senate impeachment trial witness testimony.

U.S. senators write foreign aid policy, rules and regulations thereby creating the financing mechanisms to transmit U.S. funds.  Those same senators then received a portion of the laundered funds back through their various “institutes” and business connections to the foreign government offices; in this example Ukraine. [ex. Burisma to Biden]

The U.S. State Dept. serves as a distribution network for the authorization of the money laundering by granting conflict waivers, approvals for financing (think Clinton Global Initiative), and permission slips for the payment of foreign money.   The officials within the State Dept. take a cut of the overall payments through a system of “indulgence fees”, junkets, gifts and expense payments to those with political oversight.

If anyone gets too close to revealing the process, writ large, they become a target of the entire apparatus.  President Trump was considered an existential threat to this entire process.  Hence our current political status with the ongoing coup.

Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain meeting with corrupt Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko in December 2016.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because, well, in reality, all of the U.S. Senators (both parties) are participating in the process for receiving taxpayer money and contributions from foreign governments.

A “Codel” is a congressional delegation that takes trips to work out the payment terms/conditions of any changes in graft financing.  This is why Senators spend $20 million on a campaign to earn a job paying $350k/year.  The “institutes” is where the real foreign money comes in; billions paid by governments like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc. etc.  There are trillions at stake.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 12/08/2019)

“There was a major discrepancy in the Inspector General report on FISA abuse, that appears to have been overlooked and casts a considerable cloud upon the DOJ Office of Inspector General and Michael Horowitz.

In chapter ten of the report, on page #312 you will find the following information.  The claim is that no-one in the FBI initiated any use of “Confidential Human Sources” into the campaign prior to opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  Read Carefully:

(Page #312 – pdf link)

However, in the very next chapter (#11, page #400), in the original IG report as released on December 9th, 2019, you will find the following statement:

The two statements are completely contradictory.

Carter Page and George Papadopoulos started working for the Trump campaign in early March 2016.  The Crossfire Hurricane investigation began on July 28th, 2016.

If the FBI tasked CHS’s before and after they were affiliated with the Trump campaign, that was certainly before the opening of Crossfire Hurricane.   That statement was also included in the original Executive Summary (page xvi) as below:

The IG report was modified after publication to change this paragraph to:

“We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team tasked several CHSs and UCEs during the 2016 presidential campaign, which resulted in multiple interactions with Carter Page and Papadopoulos, both during and after the time they were affiliated with the Trump campaign”…

However, that still presents an issue with this statement:

“In our review, we did not find any evidence that the FBI used CHSs or UCEs to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  All of the members of the Crossfire Hurricane team told the OIG that no investigative steps of any type were taken prior to receipt of the predicating information for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 28, 2016, and we found no evidence to the contrary.

If no investigative steps “of any type” were taken prior to July 28th, 2016, then how does George Papadopoulos run afoul of meeting(s) being monitored in March 2016 with the “overseas professor” Joseph Mifsud (DOJ Statement of Offense – Papadopoulos):

Indeed the original IG report text would indicate that George Papadopoulos was subject to Confidential Human Sources (CHS’s) and/or Undercover Employees (UCE’s) during the earliest part of his activity with the Trump campaign (literally within a week), and would refute the claim “we did not find any evidence that the FBI used CHSs or UCEs to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” (July 31st, 2016).

That revelation and conflict is likely why the IG had to modify the text of the report after publishing it.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 1/15/2020)  (Archive)

“CTH was always curious why one specific member of the Trump campaign and transition team was abruptly departed (Nov 15, 2016) immediately after the visit by NSA Director Mike Rogers was scheduled, and two-days prior to their meeting.  It’s a weedy question, likely only considered by those who were watching closely at the time…

However, perhaps Inspector General Michael Horowitz has provided some background on the move. [Page 336, 337, fn #474]

Based on the arc of the post-election timeline described in the segment of the report that touches upon “non-tasked” Confidential Human Sources (CHSs), beginning page 336; and based on other information in/around the specific CHS described; there’s a very strong likelihood we can identify this one.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (l) and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (r), on October 8, 2012. (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press)

From Politico, November 15, 2016:

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has resigned from Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

“It was a privilege to prepare and advise the policy, personnel and agency action teams on all aspects of the national security portfolio during the initial pre-election planning phase,” Rogers said in a statement Tuesday. “Our work will provide a strong foundation for the new transition team leadership as they move into the post-election phase, which naturally is incorporating the campaign team in New York who drove President-elect Trump to an incredible victory last Tuesday.” (Politico, 11/15/2016)

As more Americans are now aware of how deep the intelligence community operates in/around DC politicians, it is worth remembering exactly how this happens.

The modern intelligence apparatus has a history of leveraging/turning compromised politicians into assets for an agenda most Americans are only now starting to grasp. Former HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers was in place during the 2012 joint CIA/State Department Benghazi operation controlled by Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, code name: Operation Zero Footprint.

Congressman Rogers was part of the group who covered for Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta in the outcome of Benghazi. Rogers motives on both fronts (cover Benghazi and surveillance of Trump) are part of the old fashioned motive, money.  Mike Rogers’ wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was the president and CEO of Aegis LLC a “security” defense contractor – and her connections delivered a $10 billion contract with the State Dept.

In the height of the scrutiny over Benghazi HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger authored a quick, and widely rebuked, intelligence committee report that provided the first line of defense for Clinton, Obama and Panetta.  The media seized on the Rogers/Ruppersberger report to set the narrative.

Immediately following their efforts, Mike Rogers and Dennis Ruppersberger resigned from congress.  Mike and his wife Kristi riding off into the sunset with multi-millions of wealth from the secured Aegis contract. [Oh yeah, and Kristi retired too]

This is how the deep state operates and the Rogers example is a typical highlight for how enmeshed interests of the intelligence community, politicians and the individual can resurface when needed.  With the background explained, you can easily see how the Deep State 2016 presidential election interests would merge with the interests of Mike and Kristi Rogers influence/affluence.

Oh yes, at the time…. the Deep State media was also fully engaged: (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 12/24/2019)  (Archive)

“During a stunning interview last Sunday Devin Nunes called for the FISA court to be deconstructed.  In my opinion it was that statement, not the IG report, that spurred FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer to make a public order today.

Today, hours after Judge Collyer released her order, Devin Nunes responded to the review of the FISC by stating, accurately, Judge Collyer doth protest too much.

In this interview Devin Nunes outlines his February 2018 notification to the FISC about the specific fraud upon the court; and as a result of that (and a follow-up) notification, Nunes again takes the FISC to task for saying they were not aware.  Collyer was aware because Nunes told her.

Accepting the totality of the FISC obfuscation, HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes again calls for the dismantling of the FISA court process. WATCH:

Despite the media ignoring the scale of Nunes prior statements, this is not some just some arbitrary representatives’ opinion.  Nunes was Chairman of the HPSCI when he informed the court of the abuse; and he is currently the ranking member of the same committee.

It is not a signal flare from the ranking member of the HPSCI to call for a structural removal of FISC authority.  This is a nuclear blast from the primary person who previously guided the FISA re-authorization that permits the court’s existence.

Here’s the February 2018 letter from Nunes to Judge Collyer:

It is arbitrary and capricious for FISC Presiding Judge Collyer to say today she has concerns about fraud upon the court after being notified two years ago about the issue.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 12/17/2019)  (Archive)

Amidst the media spin about the recent Department of Justice IG report, what is the real bottom line? What does it mean for the FBI and its future?

Did Inspector General Horowitz really find that there was no bias in the opening of the Russia probe?

And, doing a deep dive into the Horowitz report and Horowitz’s testimony in the Senate hearing that followed, what’s the most important information that was revealed?

This is American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

In this episode, we’ll sit down with Epoch Times columnist Jeff Carlson, a key contributor to The Epoch Times who was instrumental in our coverage of the Spygate scandal, and creation of The Epoch Times’ iconic Spygate poster. He is a CFA® Charterholder who worked for 20 years as an analyst and portfolio manager in the high-yield bond market.

CORRECTION: During a discussion (beginning at the 37:35 mark) of the two separate trips to Italy in August and late September 2019, that were made by AG Barr and US Attorney Durham, I mistakenly stated the year as being 2016. Both trips, along with AG Barr’s communications with officials in the UK and Australia, all occurred during 2019.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

One America News produced a three-part series on the Biden family financial attachment to the corruption in Ukraine.   Each segment in the series is nearly an hour-long; they are presented below for viewer/reader reference and review.

One America News Investigates – Chanel Rion interviews several witnesses who destroy Adam Schiff’s baseless impeachment case against President Trump. In a three-part EXCLUSIVE report, Rudy Giuliani debunks the impeachment hoax and exposes Biden family corruption in Ukraine. (Conservative Treehouse, 12/28/2019)

Part One:

Part Two

Part Three

Rod Rosenstein (l) Sharyl Attkisson (c) and Shawn Henry (Credit: public domain)

“A very interesting development in the ongoing effort of former CBS investigative journalist, Sharyl Attkisson, to resolve the issue of who spied on her, planted spyware and infiltrated her computer systems for illegal surveillance.  [Attkisson website here]

According to a recent court filing [Source Here] a person who was engaged in the “wrongful activity” has come forward to provide Ms. Attkisson with details about the operation.  As a result of those whistle-blower revelations Attkisson is able to name specific individuals who were running the operation:

Former DOJ Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is named as the person who was in charge of the operation; and the former head of the FBI DC field office, Shawn Henry is also outlined.

Mr. Henry is the head of Crowdstrike, a contractor for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic company.  Those who have followed the aspects related to the FBI use of the NSA database to illegally monitor U.S. persons; and those who followed the DNC cover story of Russia “hacking”; will be familiar with Crowdstrike.

According to the updated lawsuit (full pdf below) Rod Rosenstein, as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, was in charge of the Obama 2011 and 2012 operation to monitor journalists specific to Ms. Attkissons reporting on Fast-n-Furious and Benghazi.

What I find additionally interesting is the overall timeline in the bigger picture.

In the April 2017 release from FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer outlining the abuses of the FISA-702 process by FBI “contractors”, where the NSA database was being used for unlawful surveillance of U.S. persons, Collyer specifically noted the findings of her review of the period from November ’16 to May ’17 (85% non compliant rate) was likely to have been happening since 2012. [Go Deep]

The “IRS Scandal” where the DOJ was creating a list of U.S. persons for political targeting, and requested CD ROM’s of tax filings, was the lead-up to the 2012 exploitation of the NSA database. [The Secret Research Project] So there’s a larger picture of government surveillance under the Obama administration that becomes more clear.

Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:

The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)

Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.

This is the same time-frame when DNI James Clapper falsely denied to congress about the U.S. government -through the NSA- collecting metadata on all U.S. electronic communication.  This is the same time-frame where CIA Director John Brennan was monitoring the computer networks of congressional intelligence oversight staff.

When you overlay the new information from the Attkisson lawsuit, what emerges is the picture of an intentional effort by the Obama administration to weaponize the ability to collect electronic information on domestic political opposition.  It’s one long continuum.” (Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 1/10/2020)  (Archive)

“House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss two very important issues.  The first is the origination of the “whistle-blower” complaint and new issues surrounding Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.  The second important subject is the background of newly installed FISA Court monitor, David Kris, to oversee the FBI reform promises.

CTH has some explosive new information that has been shared with Mr. Nunes on both issues, but we start with the interview and ICIG Michael Atkinson.

Since our original research into Atkinson, there have been some rather interesting additional discoveries.

The key to understanding the corrupt endeavor behind the fraudulent “whistle-blower” complaint, doesn’t actually originate with ICIG Atkinson. The key person is the former head of the DOJ National Security Division, Mary McCord.

Mary McCord (Credit: public domain)

Prior to becoming IC Inspector General, Michael Atkinson was the Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division, Mary McCord.

It is very safe to say Mary McCord and Michael Atkinson have a working relationship from their time together in 2016 and 2017 at the DOJ-NSD. Atkinson was Mary McCord’s senior legal counsel; essentially her lawyer.

McCord was the senior intelligence officer who accompanied Sally Yates to the White House in 2017 to confront then White House Counsel Don McGahn about the issues with Michael Flynn and the drummed up controversy over the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak phone call.

Additionally, Mary McCord, Sally Yates, and Michael Atkinson worked together to promote the narrative around the incoming Trump administration “Logan Act” violations. This silly claim (undermining Obama policy during the transition) was the heavily promoted, albeit manufactured, reason why Yates and McCord were presumably concerned about Flynn’s contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It was nonsense.

However, McCord didn’t just disappear in 2017 when she retired from the DOJ-NSD. She resurfaced as part of the Lawfare group assembly after the mid-term election in 2018.

THIS IS THE KEY.

Mary McCord joined the House effort to impeach President Trump; as noted in this article from Politico:

“I think people do see that this is a critical time in our history,” said Mary McCord, a former DOJ official who helped oversee the FBI’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and now is listed as a top outside counsel for the House in key legal fights tied to impeachment. “We see the breakdown of the whole rule of law. We see the breakdown in adherence to the Constitution and also constitutional values.”

“That’s why you’re seeing lawyers come out and being very willing to put in extraordinary amounts of time and effort to litigate these cases,” she added. (link)

Former DOJ-NSD Head Mary McCord is currently working for the House Committee (Adam Schiff) who created the impeachment scheme.

Now it becomes critical to overlay that detail with how the “whistle-blower” complaint was organized.  Mary McCord’s former NSD attorney, Michael Atkinson, is the intelligence community inspector general who brings forth the complaint.

The “whistle-blower” had prior contact with the staff of the committee.  This is admitted.  So essentially the “whistle-blower” almost certainly had contact with Mary McCord, and then ICIG Michael Atkinson modified the whistle-blower rules to facilitate the outcome.

There is the origination.   That’s where the fraud starts.

The coordination between Mary McCord, the Whistle-blower, and Michael Atkinson is why HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff will not release the transcript from Atkinson’s testimony.

It now looks like the Lawfare network constructed the ‘whistle-blower’ complaint aka a Schiff Dossier and handed it to allied CIA operative Eric Ciaramella to file as a formal IC complaint.  This process is almost identical to the Fusion-GPS/Lawfare network handing the Steele Dossier to the FBI to use as the evidence for the 2016/2017 Russia conspiracy.

Atkinson’s conflict-of-self-interest, and/or possible blackmail upon him by deep state actors who most certainly know his compromise, likely influenced his approach to this whistleblower complaint.   That would explain why the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal Counsel so strongly rebuked Atkinson’s interpretation of his responsibility with the complaint.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 1/12/2020)  (Archive)

“Yesterday’s ridiculous, albeit proactive, New York Times narrative about Russians hacking Burisma now makes sense.  Today the Lawfare team (Mary McCord et al) within Adam Schiff’s impeachment crew sends additional files of evidence (pdf below) to be included in the impeachment articles constructed by HJC Chairman Jerry Nadler.

It is all coordinated. The “new evidence” relates to information turned over by Lev Parnas, an SDNY indicted former associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.  The Lawfare purpose is to bolster their premise that President Trump was trying to force Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s corrupt activity around the Ukrainian company Burisma.

The Lawfare crew behind Schiff waited until the last minute to push the new “evidence” because they didn’t want republicans to deconstruct it during the impeachment evidence-gathering phase. Additionally, the Lawfare crew anticipates a Trump impeachment defense surrounding actual evidence of the Biden corruption, which makes the Trump request to Zelensky valid.

So the proactive democrat strategy was/is to use the New York Times presentation of Russia hacking Burisma to negate the provenance of the evidence against the Bidens.  In essence, to cast doubt upon any documents that would show Joe and Hunter Biden participating in an actual influence and money-laundering scheme.

The SDNY created legal leverage upon Lev Parnas using the familiar strategy of charging “FARA violations”, as noted in the background of the House explanation.

The purpose was/is to extract anything from Parnas that could be twisted or construed to show evidence that Rudy Giuliani was working on behalf of President Trump to pressure Ukraine into investigating Burisma, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

To counter any evidence that would highlight the truth that Hunter and Joe Biden were indeed participating in a pay-to-play influence and money laundering scheme for personal financial benefit, the same democrat operatives created a 2020 Russian ‘hacking claim’ using former Crowdstrike employee Blake Darché and his colleague Oren Falkowitz.

NYT – […] The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.

“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers. (link)

Blake Darche’ and Oren Falkowitz formed a new cyber-security company named “Area-1 Security”.  It is an analysis from this group that the New York Times uses to push the Russian hacking of Burisma narrative.  It’s all the same players, just switching around the subject.

• The 2016 Lawfare group is now 2020’s Just Security;
• the 2016 CrowdStrike group is now 2020’s Area-1 Security;
• and the 2016 Russia DNC hack is now the 2020 Russia Burisma hack… 

It’s the same players, the same story, the same approach.

Go deep on Oleg Falkowitz and Oren Falkowitz HERE

In February 2008, Oleg Falkowitz was hired as the Iran Mission Manager and Special Assistant For Policy and Cybersecurity at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In February 2009, Oleg Falkowitz left his position at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In August 2010, Oleg Falkowitz was hired as Director of Technology and Data Science Program (J2 — Intelligence) at the United States Cyber Command.

In July 2012, Oleg Falkowitz left his position at both the United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

The same month, Oren Falkowitz co-founded the organisation sqrrl and became the Chief Executive Officer.

In January 2013, Falkowitz left his position at sqrrl.

In November 2013, Oren Falkowitz, Blake Darché and Phil Syme founded the organisation Area 1 Security.

Blake Darché published the article “Once a Target, Always a Target” in Medium, which was about “Cozy Bear”.

Between July 17–19, 2017, Oren Falkowitz, John Brennan, Andrea Mitchell and David Sanger attended the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen, CO.

LINK to Background

(Conservative Treehouse, 1/14/2020)  (Archive)

“Remarkable interview between the attorney for Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, on WMAL radio with Larry O’Conner.  Ms. Powell describes the current status of the case and the filings to withdraw the guilty plea.  Additionally, Ms. Powell drops a bombshell in that they have a witness to the original Flynn-302 the government says doesn’t exist.

O’Conner does a great interview because he understands the background and details of the case.  His probing questions allow Ms. Powell to share valuable insight.

The original FBI report is reported to have statements to the effect that Michael Flynn was not lying.  The prosecution says no such FBI FD-302 report exists; however, Ms. Powell now shares that they have a witness to it.   Audio Below  Just hit play on the toolbar:”

(Conservative Treehouse, 1/17/2020)  (Archive)

**********

The Epoch Times adds, “Powell said in the WMAL radio interview that if Sullivan allows the plea withdrawal and the case goes to trial, she will call witnesses including former FBI Director James Comey, his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, and the “agent who cannot be named,” referring to Special Agent Joe Pientka.

It was Strzok and Pientka who interviewed Flynn, while Comey and McCabe were involved in planning the interview. Powell previously requested Clapper’s phone records to “confirm” whether he communicated with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, “especially on January 10, 2017, when Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of ‘take the kill shot on Flynn,’” she said.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 1/20/2020)   (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

“The “House Bolton Maneuver” was a pre-planned operation to use a timed NSC ‘resistance’ leak to frame a new demand for testimony in the Senate. From the beginning the House intentionally constructed an impeachment process to avoid the judicial branch because the construction of the articles was dependent on an unconstitutional creation: impeachment by decree of the Speaker.

As a result of their approach, the House fully intended to usurp their lack of judicial subpoena authority by placing political pressure on the Senate to call the trial witnesses they knew were unattainable due to separation of powers within the constitutional process.  By design the House plan puts the burden of compulsory witness testimony upon the Senate because the House refused to create their own authority with a vote to initiate the impeachment process.

The House effort was, and is, an end-run around the constitutional outline for impeachment.  This was not a flaw; it was a feature of the House creation.

(Conservative Treehouse, 1/27/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Corey’s Dig)

“Well over a hundred billion dollars has siphoned through the hands of individuals with scandalous histories, with over $90 billion from the U.S. Government (taxpayers) alone, via PEPFAR.

• The U.S. Government’s PEPFAR is the largest funder of any nation to a single disease in the world, and the largest donor to the Global Fund, to the tune of over $90 billion to date. Despite this, due to the fact that the Global Fund is located in Geneva, Switzerland, it is not subject to U.S. taxation, jurisdiction, or law. George W. Bush’s 2006 executive order afforded the Global Fund additional exemptions, privileges, and immunities.

• Three U.S. Presidents, over 35 governments, the UNDP, the Global Fund, GAVI, and over two dozen major non-profits along with countless smaller ones, have been cashing in for nearly two decades.

• Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Kofi Annan, and Amir Attaran are listed as the founders of The Global Fund, but who really strategized and implemented its structure, its funding, and its “immunity” status?

• In 2015 USAID awarded Chemonics $9.5 billion to fund these supply chain programs. Only 7% of the drug shipments were delivered on time and in full. This is just one example. There are countless scandals throughout this book.

• There are allegedly 23.3 million people on HIV treatment. The new three-in-one pill runs $75/year per person in developing countries. The Clintons, among others, are cashing in on this new drug. An almost identical therapy in the U.S. runs $39,000 per person, per year. The global HIV drugs market exceeded a value of $24.7 billion in 2018.

This is potentially one of the biggest, ongoing slush funds of our time, perpetrated by over 35 governments, “philanthropists,” politicians, so-called elites, and celebrities, while preying on the weak at heart to donate their hard-earned money to the “Global Fund” that helps children and adults beat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. But does it really? How much of the money is going toward this and how many people are the meds really reaching? Reports raise serious concerns. We are talking about BILLIONS of dollars changing hands among governments and the wealthy, in addition to “Acts”, “Bills”, and “Executive Orders” all strategically aligning for this operation to function full throttle – across three former U.S. presidencies. Scandal after scandal has rocked this “cause” – a cause that should most definitely be under investigation, but with all of its immunities and safeguards in place, who will investigate?

The Global Fund is an octopus with many arms, including the UNDP receiving funds and acting as an implementing partner in numerous countries. Once a few “elites” and governments orchestrated the structure, everyone joined in. Scores of NGOs lined up, and celebrities quickly jumped aboard in their “ambassador roles” and organized their foundations, including Bono’s ‘RED’ and ‘ONE’ campaigns which beg and shame the public into purchasing their products because the funds allegedly “help save lives.”

Just think what $90 billion dollars could have done to save the homeless, the sick, veterans, single parents, and those in need in the U.S. Just think how many people in developing countries have been exploited.

In order to disclose all of this “open sourced” information and show how it all connects, it is pertinent to understand the timeline before getting into the multitude of actors and the scandal itself. Why? There are many reasons that will become obvious as you read, such as the involvement of three US presidents, and a particular couple that has been very involved with AIDS since the 70’s, and not by way of humanitarianism. Quite the opposite.

Due to how expansive this network is, this book has been broken down into numerous chapters which will be available for download in PDF format in The Bookshop. It begins with the timeline, which will give a very brief breakdown of events and some of the actors involved, just to establish their strategy and the basis for subsequent chapters, which will be rolled out over time. The timeline acts much like a road map and is absolutely mandatory reading to see the strategy involved.” (Read more: Corey’s Digs, 1/29/2020)  (Archive)

Lawyers representing Lt. General Michael Flynn have filed a motion to dismiss [pdf here] citing “government misconduct”.  Additionally, Mr. Flynn has filed a declaration [pdf here] requesting to remove his prior guilty plea and take the case to trial.  Hours later the DOJ revised their sentencing memo, dropped their request for jail time and offered probation.

Within the motion to dismiss (full pdf embed below) Flynn’s legal team points out several issues with the prosecution of Mr. Flynn and highlights the recent findings, admissions and briefs amid the IG report, DOJ notifications to the FISA Court, and FISC orders therein.

NOTE: FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Pientka III, the FBI agent with his finger in the majority of the corrupt FBI activity, has an ongoing protective court order upon his personage requiring the redaction and/or removal of his name from any government or case document.   No-one has publicly stated the reason for the protective order.

Complete Motion for Dismissal

Additionally, for the first time, in a declaration to the court, we get to hear from Lt. General Michael Flynn himself about the situation and legal status.  Mr. Flynn explains the reason why he accepted a guilty plea on December 1st, 2017.

Full Flynn Declaration

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 1/29/2020)  (Archive)

“Senator Rand Paul appears on Fox News with Martha MacCallum to discuss how the impeachment process originated. One of Senator Paul’s concerns centers around the staff of Adam Schiff and the HPSCI plotting the impeachment process.

Former NSC member Sean Misko (currently on Schiff’s staff), and former DOJ-NSD head, Mary McCord, may have participated in constructing a whistle-blower complaint eventually presented by CIA operative Eric Ciaramella; using false evidence provided by current NSC member Alexander Vindman.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

(Conservative Treehouse, 1/30/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Senate Television clipping)

(…) “The contacts between members of Schiff’s staff and the whistleblower are shrouded in secrecy to this day,” deputy Trump counsel Patrick Philbin said responding to a question asked at Wednesday’s trial by senators about RCI’s reporting earlier this month. “Obviously to get to the bottom of motivations, bias, how this inquiry was all created, [it] could be relevant.”

Schiff claimed he cannot talk about who among his staff met with the “whistleblower,” because they have received “threats” online. He says he must “protect” them, along with the whistleblower’s identity, which he insists he does not know. Schiff also suggested RCI was “circulating smears on my staff,” though he did not deny the story.

On an official question card, GOP Sen. Rand Paul Thursday submitted a direct question for Schiff based on  story: “Are you aware that House Intelligence Committee staffer Sean Misko has a close relationship with Eric Ciaramella when at the National Security Council together? Are you aware and how do you respond to a report that Ciaramella and Misko may have worked together to plot impeaching the president before there were formal House impeachment proceedings?”

However, the question was never asked. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the trial, blocked it after screening the card, ostensibly because it included the name of the official believed to be the whistleblower. “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted,” Roberts declared in rejecting Paul’s query.

Earlier, Roberts had signaled to Senate leaders behind the scenes that he would not read aloud the alleged whistleblower’s name or otherwise publicly relay questions that might out the official.

Constitutional scholars say the disputed question was an unprecedented situation.

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who testified as an expert in the House impeachment hearings, said Roberts had no legal reason to quash the senator’s question since it did not violate federal whistleblower laws.

“This is relatively uncharted because the reading of the name does not directly violate federal law,” Turley said.

He speculated Roberts simply claimed an inherent authority to block the question under “decorum and restraint.”

It remains unclear how Roberts knew Eric Ciaramella was the whistleblower when Paul did not outright say he was the whistleblower in the question card that was handed Roberts to read. “My question made no reference to any whistleblower,” Paul affirmed. Did the presiding justice consult with Schiff or other House managers prior to the 16-hour question period? If so, did Roberts violate his own impartiality oath?

Paul said he was given no explanation for the rejection of a question that could have drawn out exculpatory information for the president. He blamed Roberts and the Senate for “selective belief in protecting the whistleblower statute … Nobody says they know who the person is. But anybody you say might be [the whistleblower] all of a sudden is protected from being part of the debate.”

The Kentucky senator said he considered requesting a roll call vote to overrule Roberts’ “incorrect finding,” but decided Friday’s debate over witnesses would generate too many motions and votes to make it feasible.

Effectively silenced, Paul held a press conference Thursday afternoon in which he explained the significance of asking such questions: “It’s very important whether or not a group of Democratic activists, part of the Obama-Biden administration, were working together for years looking for an opportunity to impeach the president.”

He compared Eric Ciaramella and Sean Misko to disgraced FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page plotting to prevent Trump from being president.

With a paucity of information about the whistleblower forthcoming from both government and media, only one side has been allowed to do any real fact-finding during the impeachment process. And that’s left the defendant — Donald J. Trump — still unable to cross-examine his main accuser.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 1/31/2020)  (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)

“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)

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)

(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)

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)

“…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)

(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)

A federal judge has ruled that Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills must sit for a deposition within 75 days.   Judicial Watch won the court ruling despite the ongoing efforts by the DOJ to block their inquiry. (JW Link)  (PDF)

Cheryl Mills (l), walks with Hillary Clinton as they arrive at Caracol, Haiti, October 22, 2012. (Credit: Getty Images)

From the Ruling – “The Court has considered the numerous times in which Secretary Clinton said she could not recall or remember certain details in her prior interrogatory answers. In a deposition, it is more likely that plaintiff’s counsel could use documents and other testimony to attempt to refresh her recollection. And so, to avoid the unsatisfying and inefficient outcome of multiple rounds of fruitless interrogatories and move this almost six-year-old case closer to its conclusion, Judicial Watch will be permitted to clarify and further explore Secretary Clinton’s answers in person and immediately after she gives them. The Court agrees with Judicial Watch – it is time to hear directly from Secretary Clinton.”

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/02/2020)  (Archive)

Greg Jarret writes:

“It’s not over yet, Hillary. The Clintons have become accustomed to the mainstream media and bureaucracies forgiving their misdoings. Not this time. Judicial Watch, the conservative activist group issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the United States District Court for D.C. regarding Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State.

Thus far, Mrs. Clinton has skated through the serious issue that she used her personal email account surely compromised national security. She did not even face consequences while running for the President of the United States. Democrats were more than thrilled to put corrupt Clinton in the White House over Donald Trump.

Revenge is sweet, particularly when a Clinton has evaded consequences for far too long. The Federal court ruled today that the former Secretary of State must “sit for a deposition where she will be questioned on matters relating to her use of a private server during her time at the State Department” reports Fox News.

With each passing round of discovery, the Court is left with more questions than answers…

Previously, the court had ordered, “discovery into three main areas: whether Clinton’s use of a private email server was an intentional attempt to evade FOIA; whether the State Department had previously attempted to settle the case in ‘bad faith’; whether the State Department had ‘adequately searched’ for records pertinent to Judicial Watch’s request.”

Not surprisingly for those who are not under the spell of the Clinton cult, further discovery was required. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth stated, “Although discovery in FOIA cases is rare, the Court again reminds the government that it was State’s mishandling of this case – which was either the result of bureaucratic incompetence or motivated by bad faith – that opened discovery in the first place.” (Read more: Gregg Jarrett, 3/02/2020) (Archive)

(Illustration on examining the FISA court by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times)

“Justice Department and FBI officials under review for their role in the flawed wiretaps of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page are banned from having any involvement in the pursuit of electronic monitoring through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Judge James Boasberg issued a 19-page opinion on Wednesday, ordering that “no DOJ or FBI personnel under disciplinary or criminal review relating to their work on FISA applications shall participate in drafting, verifying, reviewing, or submitting such applications to the Court.”

“Any finding of misconduct relating to the handling of FISA applications shall be promptly reported to the Court,” the U.S. District Court judge added.

Boasberg said, “The frequency and seriousness” of the errors found by the DOJ independent watchdog “called into question the reliability of the information proffered in other FBI applications.” The judge said the government has been “acknowledging its deficiencies” and “undertaking multiple remedial measures” in response to Horowitz’s report and to court orders but also noted that “the errors the OIG pointed out cannot be solved through procedures alone” and that everyone at the DOJ and FBI “must fully understand and embrace the heightened duties of probity and transparency” in the secret court proceedings.

Boasberg touched on three main areas of the FBI’s internal FISA reforms: improvements to procedures for preparing FISA applications, improvements to training and other efforts to institutionalize the importance of accuracy and completeness, and oversight more broadly.

“While more rigorous procedures for preparing FISA applications should prove helpful, the Court is also mindful that changes in culture will require more than checklists,” Boasberg said.” (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 4/04/2020)  (Archive)

******

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

The Conservative Treehouse writes:

(…) The issues of what evidence the FBI/DOJ gathered from the exploitation of the fraudulent warrant is not addressed.  Nor does the court deal with the downstream issues of what cases may have been enhanced with illegally obtained surveillance authority.  Additionally, how the DOJ and FBI are attempting to round-up (“sequester”) any evidence that was gathered as a result of the fraudulent and unlawful FISA application is also not addressed.

Instead, within his opinion & order Judge Boasberg focuses exclusively on the recommendations from Amici Curiae David Kris, the appointed arbiter and liaison between the court and the DOJ, along with the changes proposed by FBI Director Christopher Wray and U.S. AG Bill Barr to the FISA application process.

The FISC opinion and order is embedded below and available in pdf form here.  I would strongly urge everyone to read it and make up your own mind.  From my perspective the 19-page outline is ridiculous.

The only FISC reform proposed, that could dissuade corrupt exploitation of the court, is simply a ruling that no DOJ or FBI official is allowed to participate in the FISA process if they are caught -and under review- for engaging in illicit conduct.   There are no legal consequences upon any DOJ or FBI member for any fraud upon the court in the past, present or future; they just get put in time-out. (Read more)

Almost everyone who researched the substance behind Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller’s heavily promoted Russian indictments knew the underlying claims were centered on the thinnest of evidence.

A few Facebook memes were used to accuse Russian company Concord LLC of violating FARA and FEC election laws.

In July 2018, Robert Mueller asked a federal judge in Washington for an order that would protect the handover of voluminous evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February 2018 indictment. They are accused of producing propaganda, posing as U.S. activists and posting political content on social media as so-called trolls to encourage strife in the U.S.

Indeed, to an incurious media, a Russian catering company posting Facebook memes might sound like a good justification for a vast Russian election interference prosecution; however, when Concord & the accused Russians show up in court and request to see the evidence against them, well, the prosecutors might just have a problem.  It’s that problem that dogged the Mueller prosecution since 2018.   Today, predictably and finally, the DOJ dropped the nonsense case (full pdf below):

The prosecution was always just a farce.  The ridiculous Russian indictments were only created to give some sense of validity to a premise that did not exist and to allow the Robert Mueller investigation to continue operating when there was never a valid justification for doing so.

This was perhaps the biggest shell game operation, with a non-existent pea, using the DOJ and FBI to give the impression that something nefarious had happened; when factually the ‘Russian Conspiracy Narrative’ was all just one big hoax upon the American people.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/16/2020)  (Archive)

“After the DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG), Michael Horowitz presented his December 2019 findings of the FISA application used against U.S person Carter Page, the gross deficiencies and intentional fraud were so extensive the IG said he was going to review a sample of FISA applications to identify if the fraud and abuse were widespread.

The OIG began reviewing FISA applications from eight field offices (the proverbial “rank and file”).  The OIG selected 29 FISA applications from those field offices over the period of October 2014 to September 2019.  Additionally, every field office and the DOJ-NSD generate internal “Accuracy Reviews”, or self-checks on FISA applications; so the OIG inspected 42 of the accuracy review FISA files to determine if they were compliant.

The results were so bad the IG produced an interim memorandum to the DOJ and FBI [pdf link here].  Within the 17-page-memo the IG notifies Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray that all of the claimed FISA processes, in every field office, are grossly deficient, and in most cases, there is zero compliance with FISA standards.  The IG memorandum is presented before the IG even looks at the specifics of the non-compliance.

Below is the report/memorandum.  Additionally, I am summarizing the stunning top-lines identified by the IG memo:

• The IG reviewed 29 FISA applications, surveillance warrants, used against U.S. persons.
• The 29 FISA applications were from eight different field offices.
• The FISA applications were from Oct/2014 through Sept/2019.
• All of the FISA applications reviewed were approved by the FISA court.

The ‘Woods File’ is the mandatory FBI evidence file that contains the documentary proof to verify all statements against U.S. persons that are contained in the FISA application.  Remember, this is a secret court, the FISA applications result in secret surveillance and wiretaps against U.S. persons outside the fourth amendment.

♦ Within the 29 FISA applications reviewed, four were completely missing the Woods File.  Meaning there was zero supportive evidence for any of the FBI claims against U.S. persons underpinning the FISA application.  [ie. The FBI just made stuff up]

♦ Of the remaining 25 FISA applications, 100% of them, all of them, were materially deficient on the Woods File requirement; and the average number of deficiencies per file was 20.  Meaning an average of twenty direct statements against the target, supporting the purpose of the FISA application, sworn by the FBI affiant, were unsubstantiated.  [The low was 5, the high was 63, the average per file was 20]

♦ Half of the FISA applications reviewed used Confidential Human Sources (CHS’s).  The memo outlines that “many” of applications containing CHS claims had no supportive documentation attesting to the dependability of the CHS.

♦ Two of the 25 FISA applications reviewed had renewals; meaning the FISA applications were renewed to extended surveillance, wiretaps, etc. beyond the initial 90-days.  None of the renewals had any re-verification.  Both FISAs that used renewals were not compliant.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

But wait… it gets worse.

The DOJ and FBI have an internal self-check mechanism.  The DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) chief counsel and the chief counsel for every FBI field office are required to conduct an “Accuracy Review” of selected FISA applications.  One per field office (25 to 30 field offices), which are also sent to DOJ-NSD (main justice) for general counsel inspection.

Keep in mind, these “accuracy reviews” are known in advance, so the FBI has all the time in the world to select the best FISA file for review.  Additionally, I surmise the OIG wanted to inspect the “accuracy review” FISA’s because they would show the best light on the overall system itself.  The OIG was looking for the best, most compliant, product to report on.

However, when the OIG inspected 42 of these Accuracy Reviews, the IG identified that only three of them had accurately assembled documents (Woods File) supporting the application.  The error rate within the files self-checked was over 93%.

So the best FBI files are selected to undergo the FBI and DOJ-NSD accuracy review.  The accuracy review takes place by FBI legal counsel and DOJ-NSD legal counsel.  However, the IG finds that only three FBI applications in the accuracy reviews were compliant.

The error rate in the files undertaken by the internal accuracy review was over 93% (3 compliant out of 42 reviewed).  These were the FISA files with the greatest possibility of being accurate.  Let that sink in…” (Read more: The Conservative Treehouse, 3/31/2020)  (Archive)

…The recent IG report outlining Atkinson’s gross incompetence in the FISA scandal, vis-a-vis the 42 DOJ-NSD Accuracy Reviews, is the atomic shield against the political narrative….

President Trump has sent a letter to congress giving them 30-days advance notice and informing them of the removal of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson:

The necessary, albeit politically controversial, move comes about two months after President Trump assigned Ric Grenell to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Grenell is ultimately the acting boss of the overall intelligence community. It is likely DNI Grenell provided some key insight into the sketchy background activity in/around Atkinson’s office, and the overall intelligence apparatus writ large.

Additionally, former congressman Mark Meadows is now President Trump’s Chief-of-Staff; and Meadows has been a critic of those within the intelligence apparatus who attempted a soft-coup twice: Once by special counsel (Russia investigation) Robert Mueller; and once by impeachment (Ukraine investigation) using CIA operative Eric Ciaramella and NSC operative Alexander Vindman.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Also, in the recent FISA review by the OIG the DOJ inspector general specifically identified issues with the “accuracy reviews” conducted by DOJ-NSD chief legal counsel.  Who was that former DOJ-NSD chief legal counsel?  That would be current ICIG Michael Atkinson…

Currently, former CIA Director John Brennan is under investigation for his role in the FBI spy operations against the Trump campaign and administration.  Brennan is being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham, an assignment from AG Bill Barr.

Few people have asked why it would take a U.S. attorney to conduct a review of the CIA considering ICIG Atkinson should have been doing that oversight already.  The answer within that non-discussed dynamic points to the reason why Ric Grenell as ODNI was needed.

Intelligence Committee member John Ratcliffe has been nominated for the permanent ODNI role, but his nomination has not been taken up by corrupt Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Chairman Richard Burr.   Ironically, Senator Burr is now under investigation for insider trading related to his selling of Wall Street stocks prior to the financial collapse due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since our original research into ICIG Atkinson revealed he was part of a corrupt effort to cover-up his own involvement in the FBI operation against candidate Trump, there have been some rather interesting discoveries.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/03/2020)  (Archive)

“Everything anyone needed to know about the motives and intents of fired Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson is evidenced by his releasing a political statement tonight protesting his termination.

Atkinson doesn’t write a “letter”, his diatribe is not addressed to anyone, it is just a political “statement” designed to be exploited by the same people, for the same intents, as his prior ICIG work product.  This transparently political effort is ridiculous.

Just as pathetic and political as Atkinson’s statement is the statement expressed by current DOJ IG Michael Horowitz on behalf of Atkinson:

…“Inspector General Atkinson is known throughout the Inspector General community for his integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law and independent oversight.”…

What makes this Horowitz statement so ridiculous, political and hypocritical, is that only four days earlier IG Horowitz was so alarmed at the gross incompetence of Atkinson that he submitted an interim memorandum noting extreme deficiencies in the FISA work product of Michael Atkinson as legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/05/2020)  (Archive)

It has been so long since the original 2018 congressional request that many people have forgotten what was included in the “Bucket Five” declassification request.

George Papadopoulos is released from prison, December 7, 2018. (Credit: Fox News)

Bucket Five – Intelligence documents that were presented to the Gang of Eight in 2016 that pertain to the FISA application used against U.S. person Carter Page; including all exculpatory intelligence documents that may not have been presented to the FISA Court.

Bucket Five includes transcripts of the FBI wiretap operations using confidential human sources that were run against members of the Trump campaign; including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

One of those transcripts, from the operation against Papadopoulos was declassified on April 1st, and released last night and today.

(…) ♦ A note of caution…the declassification of documents in/around the core issues of Spygate may indicate a more political approach to sunlight, and not any criminal investigation, at least in part, of the overall IC schemes.  Whatever U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into (seems targeted to John Brennan) does not appear to be related to a criminal finding of wrongdoing by the FBI actors.   However, don’t be alarmed by that nuance because it has long been visible that the FBI position would boil down to a claim they were hoodwinked by an unknown political agenda within the CIA.

Former FBI Director James Comey has leaned into the “we were duped” approach; but the “we” in that deflection doesn’t necessarily apply to the reality of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s participation.   Comey may have been willfully blind, and incompetent toward his responsibilities, thereby holding plausible deniability as his exit strategy; thus Comey kept all those notes and memos to cover his ass. However, McCabe was not a mere bystander, subject to the manipulation of bad actors within the schemes. McCabe was an active participant, that’s the essential difference between the two.

OK, now on to the transcript as released…

In May 2016 George Papadopoulos was contacted by two members of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Terrence Dudley and Greg Baker, working out of the U.S. embassy in London. Two American spies working in London put Papadopoulos in contact with their ally/counterpart in the Australian Embassy, Erika Thompson. [ie. ‘unofficial channels’] After meeting with Downer’s aide, Erika Thompson on May 6th, she sets up a meeting between George Papadopoulos and her boss for May 10th.

On May 10th, 2016, Ms Erika Thompson and Mr. Alexander Downer then meet with George Papadopoulos.  After the meeting, Ambassador Downer reports back to the Australian government on his conversation with Papadopoulos. [document release]. It is from this May 10th, 2016, meeting where communication from Downer, July 26th, 2016, is referenced as the origin of Crossfire Hurricane July 31st.

On August 2, 2016, Special Agent Peter Strzok and another agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Alexander Downer in London to discuss his conversation with Papadopoulos further. Strzok then received reading materials, which he texted about to Lisa Page.

A month later September 2016, the FBI used a longtime informant, Stefan Halper, to make contact with George Papadopoulos, pay him $3k and fly him to London for consulting work and a policy paper on Mediterranean energy issues.  As part of the spy operation, the FBI sent a female intelligence operative (a spy) under the alias Azra Turk to pose as Halper’s assistant and engage Papadopoulos.

A month later, October 21, 2016, the FBI used Papadopoulos as a supplemental basis for a FISA warrant against Carter Page.

(Carter Page FISA Application)

A few weeks after the FBI received the FISA warrant against Carter Page, they ran another operation against George Papadopoulos using a friend as an asset; a wired asset.

The FBI labeled Papadopoulos as “crossfire typhoon”, and ran a confidential human source (CHS #3) recently identified as Jeffrey Wiseman.

Former Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, told Maria Bartiromo in May 2019 that he had seen the transcripts of the FBI’s Jeffrey Wiseman operation and those transcripts exonerate Papadopoulos.  WATCH:

(Transcript Video 01:10) Bartiromo: I’m really glad you brought that up; the FBI agents’ discussion with George Papadopoulos. Because when the FBI sends in informants to someone they’re looking at, typically those conversations are recorded right? Those people are wired?

Gowdy: Yeah, I mean if the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired; and if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls there’s going to be a transcript of that.

And some of us have been fortunate enough to know whether or not those transcripts exist; but they haven’t been made public and I think one in-particular is going – it has the potential to actually persuade people.  Very little in this Russia probe I’m afraid is going to persuade people who hate Trump, or who love Trump, but there is some information in these transcripts that I think has the potential to be a game-changer if it’s ever made public.

Bartiromo: You say that’s exculpatory evidence and when people see that they’re going to say: wait, why wasn’t this presented to the court earlier?

Gowdy: Yeah, you know, Johnny Ratcliffe is rightfully exercised over the obligations that the government has to tell the whole truth to the court when you are seeking permission to spy, or do surveillance, on an American.  And part of that includes the responsibility of providing exculpatory information, or information that tends to show the person did not do something wrong.  If you have exculpatory information, and you don’t share it with the court, that ain’t good.  I’ve seen it, Johnny’s seen it, I’d love for your viewers to see it.

Today the transcript of the Wiseman operation was released.  This is the transcript where Papadopoulos’s friend Jeffrey Wiseman is wired by the FBI for a meeting in Chicago.

Papadopoulos told Wiseman that he knew “for a fact” that nobody on the Trump campaign was involved in hacking the DNC.

The IG report said the FBI tapped Wiseman, referred to as “Source 3” in the report, due to a previous “connection” with Papadopoulos. The report said Wiseman indicated years earlier during an interview for a separate investigation he would be willing to work with the FBI.

After lunch, Wiseman and Papadopoulos traveled to a casino, where they played blackjack. According to the transcript, in addition to discussing Russia and the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos said he had worked for Israeli businesses, “to lobby for them in Washington.”  This conversation appears to be taking place in late October or early November 2016, prior to the election.

Despite all of the surveillance operations against Papadopoulos, the target was not interviewed by the FBI until January 2017. None of the exculpatory information was included in the January FISA renewal or the two subsequent renewals.

It’s likely the FBI will justify not including the exculpatory evidence based on the fact that Carter Page and not Papadopoulos was the primary target of the FISA application.

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

With the release of the Papadopoulos transcript, this interview from May 2019 also takes on new context.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/09/2020)  (Archive)

“Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson asked that four footnotes be unredacted in the IG FISA abuse report. The footnotes at issue are: Footnotes 302, 334, 342* and 350. The letter states that the classified footnotes contradict information in Horowitz’s report that appears to have misled the public.

The contradiction can be found in footnote 334 recently unredacted. @JohnWHuber highlights it here:

(Twitter)

All but one of the footnotes (342*), were mostly unredacted and released by the DOJ on April 10, 2020.  Senator Grassley’s office then responds with a letter:

“The “central and essential” evidence used to justify invasive surveillance of an American citizen in the FBI’s probe into Russian interference was, itself, an example of Russian interference, according to once-secret footnotes declassified at the urging of two U.S. Senators. The footnotes, part of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed operation to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, were released just hours after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) renewed their push for transparency. The senators expect a fuller declassification in the coming days.

The footnotes reveal that beginning early on and continuing throughout the FBI’s Russia investigation, FBI officials learned critical information streams that flowed to the dossier were likely tainted with Russian Intelligence disinformation. But the FBI aggressively advanced the probe anyway, ignoring internal oversight mechanisms and neglecting to flag the material credibility concerns for a secret court. Despite later intelligence reports that key elements of the FBI’s evidence were the result of Russian infiltration to undermine U.S. foreign relations, the FBI still pushed forward with its probe. It would eventually spill over into the years-long special counsel operation, costing taxpayers more than $30 million and increasing partisan divisions – all based on faulty evidence. In the end, the special counsel concluded that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia.

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation. The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative. The mounting evidence undercutting this narrative should have stopped the investigation early in its tracks. Instead, it took several years and millions in taxpayer dollars to conclude that the allegations were baseless,” Grassley and Johnson said.

“Had FBI leadership heeded the numerous warnings of Russian disinformation, paid attention to the glaring contradictions in the pool of evidence and followed long-standing procedures to ensure accuracy, everyone would have been better off. Carter Page’s civil liberties wouldn’t have been shredded, taxpayer dollars wouldn’t have been wasted, the country wouldn’t be as divided and the FBI’s reputation wouldn’t be in shambles.

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation. These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”

The IG report detailed how the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. According to Footnote 302, in October 2016, FBI investigators learned that one of Steele’s main sources was linked to the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS), and was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.  However, the FBI neglected to include this information in its application, which the FISA Court approved that same month. Two months later, investigators learned that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, told a Justice Department attorney that he assessed the same source “was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” In January, the FISA warrant was renewed.

Footnote 302 – Redacted

Footnote 302 – Unredacted

Footnote 334 – Redacted

Footnote 334 – Unredacted

Footnote 350 states that, in 2017, the FBI learned that intelligence reports “assessed that the referenced subset [of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen] was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”

That same footnote states that a separate report, dated 2017, “contained information … that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”

Footnote 350 – Redacted

Footnote 350 – Unredacted

Twitter user/deep diver Undercover Huber reviews some of the more interesting footnotes declassified and released today by ODNI and DOJ.  His Twitter thread carries the before and after footnotes, we are just posting the unredacted copy. Starting with footnote 17:

17. Steele said MI6 gave consent to him working with IG

21. IG did not review all material collected under FISA

63. CHS operations were NatSec extraterritorial (needs higher approval per FBI manuals)

164. USG agency not running Mifsud as asset, but no derogatory info either

166. A “senior intelligence official” was present at a meeting on July 27 2016, providing the FFG information on Papadopoulos (likely in London)

205. Evidence Chris Steele lied by denying he thought he was an official CHS, as payments to him had CHS’s “Payment Name”

208. A 2015 report written by FBI’s TOCI Unit on 10 Russian oligarchs noted between Jan-May 2015 “5 of these had their intermediaries contact Steele”. These were “outreach efforts” by Steele with the Oligarchs. Gaeta was AWARE of these efforts and Oligarch contacts!

211. “Sensitive source” reporting from June 2017 indicated that a “person affiliated” with Russian Oligarch 1 (Oleg Deripaska) was “possibly aware” of Steele’s election investigation as of early July 2016

214. Confirmation none of Steele’s sources from his time at MI6

244. Info about Person 1 (assessed as being Sergei Millian), still heavily redacted

253. A number of these reports do not appear in the BuzzFeed published dossier – e.g. 132, 137 and 139.

253. Steele report “139” (not published by BuzzFeed), says that “Person 1 [Sergei Millian] was forced to lie low abroad following his/her exposure in the western media and was currently in [redacted]”….

253. …Report 139 being about Person 1 (Sergei Millian) suggests Steele kept giving reports to FBI/Gaeta AFTER being terminated by an FBI CHS as Millian was only identified in the WSJ in early 2017. Also, Steele appears to know Person 1’s location

276. The FBI wanted FISA surveillance in place on Page before Mon Oct 17 due to his upcoming travel to the U.K and South Africa.

293. Sally Yates authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page.

296. MI6 said Steele was only in a “moderately senior” position, which contradicted the “high ranking” position suggested by Steele to the FBI.

301. Person 1 info still redacted 🤔

302. Person 1 had contact with suspected Russian intelligence persons and entities

328. During a London meeting with MI6, Bill Priestap (who authorized opening the CH probe) “may have made a commitment to MI6 not to document [MI6s] views on Steele as a condition for obtaining the information”

The FBI DID NOT WANT anything derogatory in writing🚨

334. Steele’s Primary Sub Source did NOT view his/her contacts as a “network of sources, but rather as FRIENDS with whom he/she has conversations about current events & government relations”

339. Page/Sechin meeting allegation came from a source linked to RUS intel 🚨

342. In late Jan 2017, FBI aware that Russian intel may have targeted Steele’s company Orbis [redacted] and research all publicly available information about it [redacted].

342. By early June 2017 US Intel Community report indicated two persons affiliated with Russian intelligence were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016 [Note: one of these may be the same person linked to Oleg Deripaska mentioned in FN211]

347. FBI received info in early June 2017 that revealed there were [long redaction] “personal and business ties between the sub-source and Primary Sub Source; contacts between the sub-source and an individual in the Russian Prez Admin in June/July 2016….” 🚨 [Note: Smolenkov?]

350. FBI received a report on Jan 12 2017 giving inaccuracies in Steele’s reporting. Nothing else new unredacted from the previous release.

Note: Wording and timing strongly suggests this came from the British government and was given to then NSA Michael Flynn’s office.

368/377. Like Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein authorized overseas surveillance of Page.

372. This is first direct evidence that FISA material collected after the 3rd improper FISA (renewal 2) has been sequestered as ordered by the FISA court.

379. FBI conducted PHYSICAL searches under the Page FISA (which appear to have taken place on July 13 and July 29 2017, after the final FISA was authorized). The FBI did not meet minimization procedures, which it disclosed to the FISC nearly two years later 🚨

389. The ODNI/DOJ are *still* redacting the words “Russian-based” for some reason. Someone really doesn’t want people to know whether the “Primary Sub Source” was really Russian-based or not 🤔

464 & 484. Appears to repeat the similar new info on Mifsud as FN164

526. More details on the National Security nature of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the use of extraterritorial CHS’s

(Credit: Undercover Huber @JohnWHuber with before/after footnotes, 4/15/2020)  (Archive) (Footnotes PDF)

John Brennan is nominated for the CIA director’s position and appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a hearing in 2013. (Credit: Jason Reed/Reuters)

By: Jeff Carlson @themarketswork

A John Brennan thread touching on some of his 2016 actions – mostly in his own words.

Brennan used unofficial intelligence from unofficial channels and then fed this information repeatedly into the FBI as a tactic to push the FBI into starting a Counterintelligence Investigation.

Brennan Testimony:

“Sometime this summer, there was information that the CIA had that was shared with the Bureau. But it wasn’t the only period of time where such information was shared with the Bureau.”

February 4, 2018 on Meet the Press:

“The CIA and the Intelligence Community had collected a fair amount of information in the summer of 2016 about what the Russians were doing on multiple fronts. And we wanted to make sure that the FBI had full access to that.”

Brennan Testimony:

“We were uncovering information intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.”

Brennan Testimony (Responding to Gowdy):

“I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper personally confirmed foreign intelligence involvement during congressional testimony in May 2017:

Brennan Testimony:

“I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the bureau [FBI].”

Brennan on Maddow:

“Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI…we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there…”

Brennan established a Task Force to investigate:

Maddow: “So, it’s an intelligence-sharing operation…”

Brennan: “Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected.”

February 4, 2018 on Meet the Press:

Brennan: “The FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals…”

Brennan’s “intelligence” served as the basis for the FBI Counterintelligence Investigation:

“I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons…and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”

Brennan stated that he briefed the Gang of Eight. Brennan had already informed the Obama WH:

“Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept congress apprised of these issues…In consultation with the White House, I personally briefed the full details.”

But there’s a problem. Devin Nunes told us on April 22, 2018:

“There was no intelligence that passed through the Five Eyes channels to our government…We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation.”

Brennan on his knowledge of the Steele Dossier:

Brennan: “I know that there were efforts made by the Bureau to try to understand whether or not any of the information in that was valid, but I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of it.”

Todd: “When did you first learn of the so-called Steele dossier and what Christopher Steele was doing?”

Brennan: “I had heard just snippets about it…I did not see it until later in that year. I think it was in December…it did not play any role whatsoever in the [ICA]”

But during a CNN Interview with Clapper a slightly different story was told:

Clapper: “Some of the substantive content of the dossier we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community assessment from other sources in which we had very high confidence.”

And Meadows indicated that Brennan knew of the dossier in Aug ’16 during Q&A of Lisa Page:

Meadows: “We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid…Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [dossier]?”

Brennan’s ICA was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Trump.

Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.

Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama on the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in early Jan 2017.

Gowdy asked Brennan about unmasking:

Gowdy: Have you ever requested that a U.S. person’s name be unmasked?

Brennan: Yes I have.

***

Gowdy: Do you recall any U.S. ambassadors asking that names be unmasked?

Brennan: I don’t know. Maybe it’s ringing a vague bell…

Gowdy: On either Jan 19th or up to noon on Jan 20th did you make any unmasking requests?

Brennan: I do not believe I did.

Gowdy: You did not make any requests on the last day that you were employed?

Brennan: No, I was not in the agency on the last day I was employed.

(Read more: Jeff Carlson, themarketswork/Twitter, 4/18/2020)  (Archive)  (The Epoch Times, 4/21/2020)

“In a supplement to the defense motion to dismiss [pdf here] we discover some of the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct turned over by the DOJ to the Flynn defense. Specifically Lt. General Michael Flynn’s plea was based on a threat against Michael Flynn Jr. if his father didn’t sign the plea.  This will very likely get the plea dismissed.

Because the exhibits had to be filed under seal, they are heavily redacted; however, Flynn’s defense counsel, Sidney Powell, has asked the court to release & unredact the full content of the exhibits so the world can see the coercion behind the corrupt plea agreement.

The Mueller prosecution team lead by Brandon Van Grack put the agreement and threat in writing, but they also made a deal with the former defense team to hide the terms in an effort to cover-up their misconduct.  Coercion to force a plea is unethical and unlawful.

The full filing is here.

Today’s filing by Sidney Powell proves what Conservative Treehouse originally outlined in April 2019.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/24/2020)  (Archive)

“Interesting timing all things considered…. Michael Flynn removed and replaced his prior legal defense counsel, Covington & Burling, after asserting their ineffective and legally conflicted representation. (NOTE: former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is a partner at Covington & Burling.)  As a result of Sidney Powell taking over the Flynn defense, his prior counsel was supposed to turn over all client materials and evidence in the case.

After some recent jaw-dropping revelations in the case; which may include evidence highlighting how the FBI participated in framing Michael Flynn; and certainly contains evidence of an unethical prosecutorial agreement with the former defense counsel, to coerce a guilty plea by threatening to arrest Michael Flynn Jr; suddenly today Covington & Burling discover an additional 6,800 pages of evidence they conspicuously omitted.

The timing is very sketchy and Judge Sullivan does not appear amused.  After receiving the supplemental notice of case material transfer (full pdf below) Judge Sullivan issues an order to the Covington law firm to re-re-review all of their case files and file a notice of compliance by Monday May 4th.

Judge Sullivan has been very favorable to the position of the justice department throughout the case, but it appears even he is starting to question all of these “unintentional” miscommunications and material coincidences that paint a very challenging picture for the prosecution to explain.

Here’s the filing from the Covington law firm where they attempt to explain their new discovery and why they failed to present this material over the past ten months.

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/28/2020)  (Archive)

“The first of the sealed documents provided to the Flynn defense have been unsealed.  The documents include emails between FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, his FBI counsel Lisa Page, as well as FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka in the lead-up to the January 24, 2017 interview of Michael Flynn.

This specific release is the court filing of five pages that were initially turned-over to the Flynn defense team last Friday. [The pdf is here]  (There are an additional 11 pages of documents from another production earlier today; those are not in this release.)

The documents today also include handwritten notes taken by FBI counterintelligence chief William “Bill” Priestap; which show him both questioning and outlining the purpose of the interview: to remove National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

(Above written notes transcribed)

According to the Priestap notes it appears the position of the FBI on January 23, 2017, was that Michael Flynn had violated the Logan Act by having a conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016, prior to the inauguration.

This was a ridiculous position, there was no violation of the Logan Act; however, it was this position from which the questioning the next day, January 24 2017, would be based.

The next page of notes discusses the “Afterwards”:

The redactions are likely “the transcript“; where the FBI has the transcript of the call between Michael Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak.   The redaction would be continued to protect the source of the material (“sources and methods”).

Interestingly, on the second day, the actual day of the interview, it appears Bill Priestap had second thoughts and was questioning the goal of the interview: “I thought about it last night and I believe we should rethink this”…

FBI Asst. Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap then asks the question: “what is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

The premise of “wrongdoing” vis-a-vis a Logan Act violation was ridiculous.  As the incoming National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn would be talking to many counterparts throughout the globe.   Even Priestap started to realize what they were doing was “playing games.”

Here’s the full release.

[…] Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe.

[…]  A special prosecutor is reviewing DOJ’s and the FBI’s handling of the Flynn prosecution, which led to the former Trump adviser and retired general pleading guilty to lying to the FBI under a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia case.

Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell filed a court motion last week saying new evidence has emerged showing Flynn was “framed” and his conviction should be dismissed. The officials said the notes are part of that new evidence and had been withheld from Flynn’s defense team for years even though they were potential evidence of innocence.

More evidence is being produced in the next few days that will further illuminate the FBI’s conduct in the case that is now at the center of the DOJ investigation, officials said.  (more)

Keep in mind, the Mueller special counsel knew this all along…

Keep in mind, former DAG Rod Rosenstein knew this all along…

Also, keep in mind, current FBI Director Chris Wray and current FBI Legal Counsel Dana Boente knew this all along…

These documents have been inside the DOJ and FBI for more than three years; while they prosecuted him and drove his family into bankruptcy.” (Conservative Treehouse, 4/29/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)

Chris Wray (Credit: public domain)

An interesting article from Fox News asks the question of whether Mueller’s special counsel attorney Brandon Van Grack misled Judge Sullivan in the Flynn case by not being forthcoming about the background documents under the DOJ Brady obligation.

Additionally, as a consequence of the Flynn evidence discoveries, people are now asking why the FBI and DOJ did not produce these documents earlier.  Representative Jim Jordan is specifically asking these questions of current FBI Director Chris Wray.

In response to the Fox News article, the FBI has released a statement which itself is very interesting.  Apparently the FBI Director is trying to dig himself and his institution out of a hole, but it is only getting worse.  First, here’s the follow-up from the FBI:

After this article was published, the FBI provided a statement to Fox News saying that under Wray’s leadership, the bureau had turned over relevant Flynn materials to the U.S. attorney probing possible FBI criminal misconduct during the Trump probe, John Durham — but the FBI didn’t say when exactly the handoff happened.

“Under Director Wray’s leadership, the FBI has fully cooperated and been transparent with the review being conducted by U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, just as it has been with U.S. Attorney John Durham and was with Inspector General Michael Horowitz,” the statement read.

The FBI continued: “With regard to certain documents in the Michael Flynn matter from the 2016-2017 time period that are now the subject of reporting by the press, the FBI previously produced those materials to the Inspector General and U.S. Attorney Durham. The Flynn investigation was initiated and conducted during this time period, under prior FBI leadership.

Since taking office, Director Wray has stressed the importance of strictly abiding by established processes, without exception. Director Wray remains firmly committed to addressing the failures under prior FBI leadership while maintaining the foundational principles of rigor, objectivity, accountability, and ownership in fulfilling the Bureau’s mission to protect the American people and defend the Constitution.” (link)

The FBI statement is factually flawed on many levels and substantively false on the specifics.

“With regard to certain documents in the Michael Flynn matter from the 2016-2017 time period that are now the subject of reporting by the press, the FBI previously produced those materials to the Inspector General and U.S. Attorney Durham.

Notice how this part of the statement does not say the exculpatory documents were turned over to the Special Counsel (they were).  Also notice how Wray is attempting to deflect the timing by saying they were produced to the IG and Durham.

U.S. Attorney John Durham didn’t enter the picture until May 2019, as instructed by newly confirmed AG Bill Barr.  So what was the FBI doing with those documents prior to Durham in 2017 and 2018?

The prosecution of Flynn started mid-2017; and Chris Wray knew of the specific misconduct within the FBI at the same time.  Remember, Wray removed James Baker from official duty as FBI legal counsel in December 2017 [LINK] approximately three weeks after the corrupt and coerced Flynn guilty plea on November 30th.

FBI Director Wray allowed James Baker to remain in the FBI, in some unknown capacity, through May 4, 2018, when Baker officially resigned [LINK]  By late December 2017 Wray clearly knew several FBI officials were participants in a multitude of corrupt schemes, including the prosecution of Michael Flynn.

The sheer volume of removals from the FBI outlines the extent of Chris Wray’s knowledge. Think about it….

FBI Agent Peter Strzok was removed; FBI lawyer Lisa Page was removed; FBI counsel James Baker was removed; FBI public relations officer Michael Kortan was removed; and eventually FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was removed.  All of these removals surrounded discovery of their corrupt and political activity in 2016, 2017, and early 2018….

…But the evidence was not provided to the Flynn defense until April 2020?

Let’s not forget in July 2018, a full year after FBI Director Chris Wray took over leadership, the FBI lied to the FISA court about the Carter Page FISA application; and the DOJ/FBI made the ridiculous claim the FISA application was still adequately predicated.

So it seems more than a little ridiculous for FBI Director Chris Wray to justify the hidden documents by saying the FBI did turn them over to John Durham (2019) and/or AUSO Jeff Jensen in 2020; when he held back the evidence in 2017, 2018, while the underlying activity was being discovered.

Also don’t forget the original purpose of U.S. Attorney John Lausch (Chicago), yeah, remember him?  In 2018 John Lausch’s entire function was to produce documents.

Additionally, if the FBI did factually turn over all of these documents to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while three distinct IG investigations were ongoing, then how did the IG claim they could find “no evidence of political bias”, when the explosive documents – specifically the Bill Priestap notes – show direct evidence of biased intent?  What does that say about the fidelity of the Inspector General?

Lastly, again the construct of the Mueller investigation being used as a shield surfaces.  Not only did the corrupt Mueller probe control various elements within the DOJ and FBI, but the Mueller probe as an “ongoing investigation”, shielded those documents from sunlight and discovery.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/05/2020)  (Archive)

The DOJ has finally released a less redacted version of the second special counsel scope memo, written August 2, 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The second scope memo (full pdf here) authorized Robert Mueller to target Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and an unknown entity (Richard Gates, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn Jr. likely possibilities).

The DOJ has been hiding the second scope memo behind redactions for almost three years.  A heavily redacted version was released in April 2018.  They are finally releasing a less redaction version today (see below).  Don’t forget, the DOJ has never released or discussed the third (super secret) scope memo written on October 20, 2017.

The scope memos are important because when contrast against known evidence of investigative corruption the scope memos show how targets were selected by the Mueller team and approved by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.  Additionally, the scope memos show what actions Mueller’s corrupt investigative authorities were looking into.

On a personal note CTH has been like a dog with a bone on these scope memos for almost three years because it was clear the FBI investigative unit was fully aware the Russian involvement was total nonsense in early 2017.  So all of these expanded scopes were based on a false premise.  DAG Rosenstein was authorizing the special counsel to target people with clear knowledge the primary basis for the targeting was false. These were investigations in search of a crime.

When the 2nd scope was previously released (April 2nd 2018), page two was almost entirely redacted.  Everyone knew Carter Page was primary, and now we can officially see who three additional targets were, and based on what claims: (page 2)

The strongest possibility for the remaining redaction is Richard Gates (Manafort’s partner who was never charged).  However, it could be Michael Cohen, President Trump’s attorney; or it could be Michael G Flynn Jr (Mike Flynn Jr) who was also never charged.

The fifth redaction will likely be claimed as justified by the DOJ, because the person outlined was not charged with a crime. Hence the possibility of Mike G Flynn or Richard “Rick” Gates…. [It could also be Jeff Sessions]

However, with public trust in the DOJ/FBI at nil, I will not trust that traditional justification….

There is a possibility the Fifth name is redacted because it would be damaging or embarrassing to the DOJ and/or would highlight the corrupt intents of the Mueller investigation.  My gut tells me this is the reason.

♦Regarding Papadopoulos:  Notice how the Mueller team was claiming the possibility of “lobbying for the Israeli government”.  Another FARA violation.  It was non-existent because Papadopoulos wasn’t lobbying, however, it now makes more sense why the corrupt Mueller team tried to set-up Papadopoulos with the $10,000 sting operation.

Papadopoulos was lured to Israel under the pretense of a contract for consultation on energy development.  That’s where CIA operative George Tawil gave Papadopoulos $10,000 in cash under sketchy circumstances.   The FBI was waiting for Papadopoulos at Dulles airport upon his return, and they searched for the cash without a warrant using the authority of customs, duties and a legal airport search.  [More Here]

#1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges.

(A “laundering” charge applies if the money is illegally obtained. The FARA violation would be the *illegal* aspect making the treasury charges heavier. Note: the use of the airport baggage-check avoids the need for a search warrant (the agents didn’t have one).)

Andrew Weissmann and Brandon Van Grack (special counsel 951/FARA expert) were conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering…. All they needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S.

The key aspect is the FARA violation.  As we have seen in the EDVA case against Flynn’s partner Bijan Rafiekian, the DOJ-NSD bizarre interpretation of FARA laws creates a violation from any unregistered purposeful business contact with a foreign entity.

What Weissmann wanted for Papadopoulos was to create the same FARA scenario that previously trapped Manafort, Flynn, and Rafiekian.  They intercepted Papadopoulos in Washington DC because it was the customs port of entry.  Papadopoulos was ticketed to Chicago with a transfer flight at Dulles.

However, because Papadopoulos suspected something, and left the money in Greece with his lawyers, upon arrival at the DC airport the sting operation collapsed in reverse.

No money means no treasury violation, no laundering and no evidence of the consultancy agreement; which would have been repurposed in the DOJ filing to mean lobbying for Israel via Mr. Tawil (FARA 951 violation) and Tawil would have become a confidential informant and witness (though Tawil would likely never be used to testilie because the special counsel would force a plea).

That operational collapse is why the FBI agents were “scrambling” at the airport and why they had no pre-existing criminal complaint.  The DOJ couldn’t get a warrant because they couldn’t tell a judge their suspect was traveling with $10k from Israel because the judge would ask how they knew that.

The entrapment’s success was contingent upon the cash as a pre-existing condition; and arriving at a Federal airport means they didn’t need a search warrant.

Note how even if Papadopoulos didn’t have the full $10k, the DOJ-NSD would only have lost the treasury violation…. they could still have used any substantial amount of money to charge the FARA part of the business arrangement by questioning Papadopoulos about where he gained the cash from.  [Full Backstory Here]

♦Regarding Michael Flynn – Notice the first ridiculous point: “Committed a crime or crimes by engaging in conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition.”   That’s Rod Rosenstein authorizing the Mueller special counsel to investigate a Logan Act violation…. authorizing that IN AUGUST 2017?  Total nonsense.

The fourth bullet point on Flynn was the claim they used against Mike G Flynn Jr. to get Lt. General Flynn to plea.   This argument was later made in court against Flynn’s business partner Bijan Rafiekian (Flynn Intel Group), only to have the case totally thrown out of court by a Virginia judge; in a blistering and extremely rare judicial move.

All four points against Flynn were fabrications; but seeing them written down as to justify the fraudulent investigations is blood-boiling.

Page #3 of the August 2, 2017, scope memo:

But wait… The release of the second scope memo is not good enough…

We know there is a third scope memo dated October 20, 2017, because it was outlined in the Mueller report:

This third scope memo is perhaps the most damaging of all because it was written so long after the DOJ and FBI knew the underlying claims of the Trump-Russia investigation were totally and completely untrue.  Yet DAG Rosenstein authorized another expanded scope.

The October 20, 2017, scope memo will be guaranteed to show Robert Mueller asking Rod Rosenstein to authorize the targeting of Mike G Flynn and at least one other person.

If anyone from the DOJ, FBI or ODNI is reading this, please don’t think we will be satisfied with only one expanded scope memo….

….We also need to see the October 20th scope!

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/06/2020)  (Archive)

Q: Does the new evidence show that the counterintelligence case against General Flynn was simply left open to lay a trap for lying?

BARR: Yes. Essentially.

As customary CBS only broadcast a small snippet of the interview between CBS reporter Catherine Herridge and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.   The full interview is much longer and much more interesting than the edited narrative broadcast by CBS.

When you read the conversation you will immediately notice why CBS refused to broadcast it, and why the segment that did air was so brutally edited.Here is the transcript.

The video can be seen in its entirety, here.

(Copy also pasted at Conservative Treehouse, 5/07/2020)  (Archive)

Ric Grenell enters the DOJ with the satchel. (Credit: public domain)

Earlier this afternoon Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard “Ric” Grenell delivered a satchel of declassified documents to Attorney General Bill Barr.  According to DC sources the content could possibly be released tomorrow in an explosive Friday document dump.  Stay tuned…

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/07/2020) (Archive)

“The good news is former President Obama is panicked by recent sunlight; the slight possibility of a U.S. DOJ that may soon have him in the cross-hairs; and the more obvious possibility the American people will discover the scale of his corrupt weaponization of intelligence to target his political opposition.

The better news is former President Obama is so heavily concerned about the looming possibilities; rather than relying on intermediary instructions through Media Matters; he is giving political operatives and national media his instructions directly.  LISTEN:

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/08/2020)  (Archive)

“In its pursuit of establishing surveillance on the Trump campaign, the FBI turned its attention to Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the spring of 2016, culminating in the issuance of a FISA warrant—which allows for some of the most intrusive spying methods on an American citizen.

As part of this process, the FBI relied extensively on the flawed Steele dossier, leading an FBI legal counsel to note that this was “essentially a single source FISA.”

(The Epoch Times, 5/11/2020)  (Archive)

“Senator Grassley sends a letter (pdf here) thanking AG Bill Barr and DNI Richard Grenell for the declassified documents produced so far.  With the DOJ deciding to drop the Flynn prosecution Grassley notes there are three more buckets of classified documents he would like to see declassified and presented soon:

(1) The Flynn/Kislyak transcript. (2) The Susan Rice Memo to file. (3) The original and mysteriously missing Flynn 302 authored by FBI agent Joe Pientka. [Grassley Press]

Within the letter, Senator Grassley notes he previously requested the release of these documents from former DAG Rod Rosenstein; who refused to submit them and made excuses to congressional oversight.

(Grassley Press Release, 5/12/2020)

Additionally, Senator Grassley appeared on Fox Business for an interview with Liz MacDonald.  Interestingly Ms. MacDonald went into a deep dive on the 2016 FISA Court ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer today…. and, even more interestingly, MacDonald connected the FBI searches of the NSA database to the recent activities of the DNI.

Here she is interviewing Senator Grassley about his letter and other interesting developments… listen carefully at 02:20:

(Conservative Treehouse, 5/12/2020)  (Archive)

“Judge Sullivan is requesting retired judge John Gleeson to file an amicus brief outlining why: (a) the charge against Flynn should not be dropped, and (b) frame the argument about how to prosecute Flynn for perjury.

Former Judge John Gleeson (U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of New York) recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that Flynn should continue to be prosecuted.

John Gleeson (Credit: Wikipedia)

May 11, 2020 – (…)  There has been nothing regular about the department’s effort to dismiss the Flynn case. The record reeks of improper political influence. Hours after the career prosecutor abruptly withdrew, the department moved to dismiss the indictment in a filing signed only by an interim U.S. attorney, a former aide to Attorney General William P. Barr whom Barr had installed in the position months before.

The department now says it cannot prove its case. But Flynn had already admitted his guilt to lying to the FBI, and the court had accepted his plea. The purported reasons for the dismissal clash not only with the department’s previous arguments in Flynn’s case — where it assured the court of an important federal interest in punishing Flynn’s dishonesty, an interest it now dismisses as insubstantial — but also with arguments it has routinely made for years in similar cases not involving defendants close to the president.  ~ John Gleeson

There are now questions being raised about whether Judge Emmett Sullivan is having ex-parte communication about the case; with outside interests helping to steer the decision-making. It would not come as a surprise to discover this is happening, albeit unethically.

Now the purpose of the leaked conference call, aka instructions, from former President Barack Obama comes into play; especially considering that Obama specifically mentioned “perjury” which is now part of what Judge Sullivan is attempting to accomplish.” (Conservative Treehouse, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)

Ironically, it appears Judge Gleeson will be arguing against a precedent that was set in a case he oversaw in October 2014.

(StephenMcIntyre@ClimateAudit/Twitter)

(Hasbajrami v US* (October 2014) Gleeson J)

On May 11, 2020, John Gleeson penned this Washington Post article, “The Flynn case isn’t over until the judge says it’s over.“

The attorneys for the Mueller team withheld Brady evidence from General Flynn for over a year.

Just a reminder, the last time the Lawfare types filed an outraged amicus brief with a court…

…it was with the FISA Court, trying to claim that @DevinNunes memo was false for claiming FISA abuse 🤦🏻‍♂️

— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) May 13, 2020

First things first: ♦Understand Obama’s Surveillance Operation.  ♦Michael Flynn was not under a FISA Title-1 Warrant …. that’s the background.

Devin Nunes appears on Lou Dobbs to discuss the recent list of Obama-era officials who unmasked NSA intercepts of Michael Flynn talking to foreign government officials.  Rep. Nunes reminds the audience that Flynn is only one person within a much larger group of Trump transition team members who were under surveillance by Team Obama.

March 27, 2017, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Devin Nunes, held a brief press conference and stated he was provided intelligence reports brought to him by unnamed sources including ‘significant information’ about President-Elect Trump and his transition team.

These reports included unmaskings of President Trump campaign officials; and included Donald Trump himself…. You know what that means:

1.) …”On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

2.) “Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

3.) “Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition members were unmasked.”

4.) “Fourth and finally, I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.

“The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination, to determine a few things here that I want to read off:”

• “Who was aware of it?”
• “Why it was not disclosed to congress?”
• “Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking?”
• “Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates?”
• “And whether any laws, regulations or procedures were violated?”

“I have asked the Directors of the FBI, NSA and CIA to expeditiously comply with my March 15th letter -that you all received a couple of weeks ago- and to provide a full account of these surveillance activities.”

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/13/2020)  (Archive)