The Cabal; the Weaponization of Government - deel V

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Focus on the Leaking, Not Just the Spying

Ask not only how the FBI got interested in the Trump campaign, but also how its investigation became public.

Attorney General William Barr thinks that U.S. intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. And as Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, he has assembled a team to review the matter.

He does not know if the spying was improper, Barr emphasized. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he said. He later clarified that he does not think the FBI itself is corrupt. Nonetheless, Barr said, “spying on a political campaign is a big deal.”

Barr is correct on both counts — that there was snooping on the Trump campaign, and that the question of whether it was justified deserves further scrutiny. What also deserves scrutiny is how an ongoing intelligence investigation into that campaign became public.

As far as the spying is concerned, none of this should be a surprise. It has already been reported, for example, that in the summer and fall of 2016 the FBI sent an informant to meet with three Trump advisers and report back. The bureau also received a warrant in October 2016 to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser (notably, the warrant allowed the FBI to read Page’s past texts, emails and phone logs). The head of the U.K.’s signal intelligence agency briefed former CIA director John Brennan that fall on intercepts that showed communications between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

And just because special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the spies and FBI officers probing those claims violated any laws. What’s more, many of these kinds of investigations are predicated on suspicion that a U.S. person has been targeted by a foreign power — even if that individual did not knowingly engage in espionage.

The abuse of power here is what happened after Trump won the election. This is when the investigations themselves and other kinds of surveillance were disclosed to the press. Details about incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition leaked. So did the FBI’s probe of Trump associates and their contacts with Russia, along with the existence of the surveillance warrant on Page himself.

It’s hard to say whether these leaks were coordinated, but there have been some suggestive clues. The New York Times reported in early 2017 that, in the days and weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, intelligence and White House officials distributed intelligence on contacts between Russia and Trump associates far and wide. Senator Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, actually received a packet of material marked “secret” from the State Department. The wider such intelligence is circulated, the easier it is to leak it.

Then there is the role of Brennan himself. The Times has reported that in August 2016 Brennan began briefing Congressional leaders that Russia was working to elect Trump and that some of his advisers could be working with the Kremlin on this effort. Among those Brennan briefed was then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who a few days later released a letter to then-FBI director James Comey, urging him to make public intelligence about the Trump campaign and Russia. After the election, Brennan became a TV pundit and used his platform to accuse Trump of treason and claim the Russian government was blackmailing him.

Finally, there is the FBI’s own relationship with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who helped an opposition research firm produce a series of “dossiers” on Trump and his associates that alleged a wide conspiracy. The bureau used these products in its surveillance warrant on Page. Because those dossiers were intended to place negative stories in the press about Trump, it’s understandable that aspects of the FBI investigation would leak to reporters.

Most Washington leaks are neither good nor bad; they can be used to expose official abuse or as cudgels in a bureaucratic turf war. Leaks of ongoing counterintelligence investigations, however, are a different matter. They risk undermining the probes themselves, by making adversaries aware of them. They are also deeply unfair to the targets of such investigations, by tarnishing their reputations without a full airing of the evidence.

“Leaking information about an ongoing intelligence investigation is a classic example of surveillance abuse,” says Tim Edgar, who served as the director of privacy and civil liberties for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. “It’s what J. Edgar Hoover did.” What happened in early 2017, he says, “clearly appeared to be politically motivated leaking.”

Leaks set the narrative for the first two years of the Trump presidency. Granted, Trump did not help his cause with his haphazard firing of Comey or his frequent and hyperbolic attacks on the intelligence community. But given that Mueller did not find the conspiracy alleged by people such as Brennan, those leaks now deserve scrutiny.

Edgar says he does not think Barr is the best person to conduct that investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general or the White House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, he said, would be more credible. Nonetheless, he says, “These are serious questions that need to be answered in a serious way.”

It’s a pity that more Democrats do not see it that way. Many howled in protest at Barr’s comment about spying. As Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it: “This type of partisan talking point may please Donald Trump, who rails against a ‘deep state coup,’ but it also strikes another destructive blow to our democratic institutions.”

Schiff should recalibrate his umbrage. Trump will be president until at least 2021. If Democrats see no problem with the anonymous disclosure of elements of ongoing counterintelligence investigations, or the fruits of surveillance, what is to stop Trump from doing it too? To borrow a popular slogan of the moment: This is not normal.

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Behind the Obama administration’s shady plan to spy on the Trump campaign

In Senate testimony last week, Attorney General William Barr used the word “spying” to refer to the Obama administration, um, spying on the Trump campaign. Of course, fainting spells ensued, with the media-Democrat complex in meltdown. Former FBI Director Jim Comey tut-tutted that he was confused by Barr’s comments, since the FBI’s “surveillance” had been authorized by a court.

(Needless to say, the former director neglected to mention that the court was not informed that the bureau’s “evidence” for the warrants was unverified hearsay paid for by the Clinton campaign.)

The pearl-clutching was predictable. Less than a year ago, we learned the Obama administration had used a confidential informant — a spy — to approach at least three Trump campaign officials in the months leading up to the 2016 election, straining to find proof that the campaign was complicit in the Kremlin’s hacking of Democratic emails.

As night follows day, we were treated to the same Beltway hysteria we got this week: Silly semantic carping over the word “spying” — which, regardless of whether a judge authorizes it, is merely the covert gathering of intelligence about a suspected wrongdoer, organization or foreign power.

There is no doubt that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. As Barr made clear, the real question is: What predicated the spying? Was there a valid reason for it, strong enough to overcome our norm against political spying? Or was it done rashly? Was a politically motivated decision made to use highly intrusive investigative tactics when a more measured response would have sufficed, such as a “defensive briefing” that would have warned the Trump campaign of possible Russian infiltration?

Last year, when the “spy” games got underway, James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, conceded that, yes, the FBI did run an informant — “spy” is such an icky word — at Trump campaign officials; but, we were told, this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross Clapper’s heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, the Obama administration only used an informant because — bet you didn’t know this — doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation.

Me? I’m thinking the tens of thousands of convicts serving lengthy sentences due to the penetration of their schemes by informants would beg to differ. (Gee, Mr. Gambino, I assure you, this was just for you own good . . .) And imagine the Democrats’ response if, say, the Bush administration had run a covert intelligence operative against Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign’s co-chairman. Surely David Axelrod, Chuck Schumer, The New York Times and Rachel Maddow would chirp that “all is forgiven” once they heard Republicans punctiliously parse the nuances between “spying” and “surveillance”; between “spies” and “informants”; and between investigating campaign officials versus investigating the campaign proper — and the candidate.

The “spying” question arose last spring, when we learned that Stefan Halper, a longtime source for the CIA and British intelligence, had been tasked during the FBI’s Russia investigation to chat up three Trump campaign advisers: Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis. This was in addition to earlier revelations that the Obama Justice Department and FBI had obtained warrants to eavesdrop on Page’s communications, beginning about three weeks before the 2016 election.

The fact that spying had occurred was too clear for credible denial. The retort, then, was misdirection: There had been no spying on Donald Trump or his campaign; just on a few potential bad actors in the campaign’s orbit.

It was nonsense then, and it is nonsense now.

The pols making these claims about what the FBI was doing might have been well served by listening to what the FBI said it was doing.

There was, for example, then-Director Comey’s breathtaking public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017. Comey did not just confirm the existence of a counterintelligence probe of Russian espionage to influence the 2016 election — notwithstanding that the government customarily refuses to confirm the existence of any investigation, let alone a classified counterintelligence investigation. The director further identified the Trump campaign as a subject of the probe, even though, to avoid smearing people, the Justice Department never identifies uncharged persons or organizations that are under investigation. As Comey put it:

“I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts . . .”

The FBI was spying, and it was doing so in an investigation of the Trump campaign. That is why, for over two years, Washington has been entranced by the specter of “Trump collusion with Russia” — not Page or Papadopoulos collusion with Russia. Comey went to extraordinary lengths to tell the world that the FBI was not merely zeroing in on individuals of varying ranks in the campaign; the main question was whether the Trump campaign itself — the entity — had “coordinated” in Russia’s espionage operation.

In the months prior to the election, as its Trump-Russia investigation ensued, some of the overtly political, rabidly anti-Trump FBI agents running the probe discussed among themselves the prospect of stopping Trump, or of using the investigation as an “insurance policy” in the highly unlikely event that Trump won the election. After Trump’s stunning victory, the Obama administration had a dilemma: How could the investigation be maintained if Trump were told about it? After all, as president, he would have the power to shut it down.

On Jan. 6, 2017, Comey, Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and National Security Agency chief Michael Rogers visited President-elect Trump in New York to brief him on the Russia investigation.

Just one day earlier, at the White House, Comey and then–Acting Attorney General Sally Yates had met with the political leadership of the Obama administration — President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser Susan Rice — to discuss withholding information about the Russia investigation from the incoming Trump administration.

Rice put this sleight-of-hand a bit more delicately in the memo about the Oval Office meeting (written two weeks after the fact, as Rice was leaving her office minutes after Trump’s inauguration):

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. [Emphasis added.]”

It is easy to understand why Obama officials needed to discuss withholding information from Trump. They knew that the Trump campaign — not just some individuals tangentially connected to the campaign — was the subject of an ongoing FBI counterintelligence probe. An informant had been run at campaign officials. The FISA surveillance of Page was underway — in fact, right before Trump’s inauguration, the Obama administration obtained a new court warrant for 90 more days of spying.

In each Page surveillance warrant application, after describing Russia’s espionage operations, the Justice Department told the court, “The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Candidate #1’s campaign[.]” Candidate #1 was Donald Trump — now, the president-elect.

The fact that the Trump campaign was under investigation for collaborating with Russia was not just withheld from the incoming president; it had been withheld from the congressional “Gang of Eight.”

In his March 2017 House testimony, answering questions by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), then-director Comey acknowledged that congressional leadership was not told about the Trump-Russia probe during quarterly briefings from July 2016 through early March 2017, because “it was a matter of such sensitivity.” Let’s put aside that the need to alert Congress to sensitive matters is exactly why there is a Gang of Eight (comprised of bipartisan leaders of both chambers and their intelligence committees).

Manifestly, the matter was deemed too “sensitive” for disclosure because that would have involved telling Republican congressional leadership that the incumbent Democratic administration was using foreign counterintelligence powers to investigate the Republican presidential campaign, and the party’s nominee, as suspected clandestine agents of the Kremlin.

How to keep the investigation going when Trump took office? The plan called for Comey to put the new president at ease by telling him he was not a suspect. This would not have been a credible assurance if Comey had informed Trump that (a) his campaign had been under investigation for months, and (b) the FBI had told a federal court it suspected Trump campaign officials were complicit in Russia’s cyber-espionage operation.

So, consistent with President Obama’s instructions at the Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, information about the investigation would be withheld from the president-elect. The next day, the intelligence chiefs would tell Trump only about Russia’s espionage, not about the Trump campaign’s suspected “coordination” with the Kremlin. Then, Comey would apprise Trump about only a sliver of the Steele dossier — just the lurid story about peeing prostitutes, not the dossier’s principal allegations of a traitorous Trump-Russia conspiracy.

This strategy did not sit well with everyone at the FBI. Shortly before meeting with Trump on Jan. 6, Comey consulted his top advisers about the plan to tell Trump he was not a suspect. In later Senate testimony, Comey admitted that there was an objection from one FBI official:

“One of the members of the leadership team had a view that, although it was technically true [that] we did not have a counterintelligence file case open on then-President-elect Trump[,] . . . because we’re looking at the potential . . . coordination between the campaign and Russia, because it was . . . President-elect Trump’s campaign, this person’s view was, inevitably, [Trump’s] behavior, [Trump’s] conduct will fall within the scope of that work.”

Note that Comey did not refer to “potential coordination” between, say, Carter Page or Paul Manafort and Russia. The director was unambiguous: The FBI was investigating “potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

Perspicaciously, Comey’s unidentified adviser connected the dots: (a) because the FBI’s investigation focused on the campaign, and (b) since the campaign was Trump’s campaign, it was necessarily true that (c) Trump’s own conduct was under FBI scrutiny.

Then-director Comey’s reliance on the trivial administrative fact that the FBI had not written Trump’s name on the investigative file did not change the reality that Trump, manifestly, was the main subject of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.

Remember last year’s hullabaloo over special counsel Robert Mueller’s demand to interview the president? What need would there have been to conduct such an interview if Trump were not a subject of the investigation? Why would Trump’s political opponents have spent the last two years demanding that Mueller be permitted to complete his probe of collusion and obstruction if it were not understood that the investigation — including the spying, or, if you prefer, the electronic surveillance, the informant sorties, and the information gathered by national-security letter demands — was centrally about Donald Trump?

That brings us to a final point. Congressional investigations have established that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain FISA court warrants against Page.

The dossier, a Clinton campaign opposition research project (again, a fact withheld from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the dossier there would have been no warrant.

So . . . what did the dossier say? The lion’s share of it alleged that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to corrupt the election, including by hacking and publicizing Democratic Party e-mails. This allegation was based on unidentified Russian sources whom the FBI could not corroborate; then-director Comey told Senate leaders that the FBI used the information because the bureau judged former British spy Christopher Steele to be credible, even though (a) Steele did not make any of the observations the court was being asked to rely on, and (b) Steele had misled the FBI about his contacts with the media — with whom Steele and his Clinton campaign allies were sharing the same information he was giving the bureau.

It is a major investigative step to seek surveillance warrants from the FISA court. Unlike using an informant (a human spy), for which no court authorization is necessary, applications for FISA surveillance require approvals at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI. After going through that elaborate process, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI presented to the court the dossier’s allegations that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to undermine the 2016 election.

To be sure, no sensible person argues that the government should refrain from investigating if, based on compelling evidence, the FBI suspects individuals — even campaign officials, even a party’s nominee — of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is: What should trigger such an investigation in a democratic republic whose norms strongly discourage an incumbent administration’s use of the government’s spying powers against political opponents?

The Obama administration decided that this norm did not apply to the Trump campaign. If all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few bad apples with suspicious Russia ties, the FBI could easily have alerted any of a number of Trump campaign officials with solid national-security credentials — Rudy Giuliani, Jeff Sessions, Chris Christie. The agents could have asked for the campaign’s help. Instead, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.

That only makes sense if the Obama administration’s premise was that Donald Trump himself was a Russian agent.

Obstruction of Justice without regard and not based on OLC guidelines

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Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes
What’s in the special counsel’s findings is almost as revealing as what’s left out.

President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out. What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in Trump World on something Russia- or obstruction-of-justice-related. And how—even with all its overweening power and aggressive tactics—it still struck out.

Volume I of the Mueller report, which deals with collusion, spends tens of thousands of words describing trivial interactions between Trump officials and various Russians. While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke.

Yet jump to the section where the Mueller team lists its “prosecution and declination” decisions with regards the Russia question. And try not to picture Mueller “pit bull” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann collapsed under mountains of federal statutes after his two-year hunt to find one that applied. . . .

As for obstruction—Volume II—Attorney General Bill Barr noted Thursday that he disagreed with “some of the special counsel’s legal theories.” Maybe he had in mind Mr. Mueller’s proposition that he was entitled to pursue obstruction questions, even though that was not part of his initial mandate from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Or maybe it was Mr. Mueller’s long description of what a prosecution of the sitting president might look like—even though he acknowledged its legal impossibility. Or it could be Mr. Mueller’s theory that while “fairness” dictates that someone accused of crimes get a “speedy and public trial” to “clear his name,” Mr. Trump deserves no such courtesy with regard to the 200 pages of accusations Mr. Mueller lodges against him.

That was Mr. Mueller’s James Comey moment. Remember the July 2016 press conference in which the FBI director berated Hillary Clinton even as he didn’t bring charges? It was a firing offense. Here’s Mr. Mueller engaging in the same practice—only on a more inappropriate scale. At least this time the attorney general tried to clean up the mess by declaring he would not bring obstruction charges. Mr. Barr noted Thursday that we do not engage in grand-jury proceedings and probes with the purpose of generating innuendo.

Mr. Mueller may not care. His report suggests the actual goal of the obstruction volume is impeachment: “We concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority.”

Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?

The report instead mostly reads as a lengthy defense of the FBI.

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Op donderdag 25 april 2019 14:39 schreef EdvandeBerg het volgende:
Dellipder post veel details voor degenen die goed ingevoerd zijn, ik kan het me ook voorstellen dat dit voor veel users te gedetailleerd is. Hier wordt door Victor Davis Hansen het hele Russia Collusion verhaal wat we tot nu toe kennen uitgelegd:

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Op vrijdag 26 april 2019 16:47 schreef dellipder het volgende:

[..]

Mijn bedoeling was nu juist om veel details te posten voor mezelf -en voor anderen die het onderwerp boeit- om beter ingevoerd te raken.
Details die niet aan bod komen in de journaals, reportages van bijvoorbeeld Erik Mouthaan en de rest van deze forumsite. Ik wil overigens hiermee niet pretenderen dat ik alle details heb, want dit Spygate schandaal is van epische proporties, het strekt zich uit over meerdere jaren en er zijn tientallen personen en meerdere landen bij betrokken.

Wanneer je dit topic volgt zou je moeten kunnen waarnemen dat veel dezelfde details aan bod komen, vanwege nieuwe onthullingen van getuigenverklaringen of rapporten.
Veel zaken herhaal ik, omdat als er bijvoorbeeld worden verkondigd dat de Republikeinen aan de basis hebben gestaan van het Steele dossier of dat de special counsel rekening heeft gehouden met de OLC in zijn beoordeling.

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Judicial Watch: FBI Admits Hillary Clinton Emails Found in Obama White House

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.

E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue.

U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as Priestap, to be deposed or answer writer questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

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Op vrijdag 26 april 2019 17:18 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Artikel met de onthulling over de mol in het Witte Huis.
Het gaat om de stafchef van vice-president Mike Pence Joshua Pitcock, wiens vrouw werkte als een analist voor Peter Strzok bij het onderzoek van de FBI naar de e-mail controverse van Hillary Clinton.

BREAKING: FBI Texts Show Agents Discussed Recruiting White House Sources To Spy For Bureau

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Op zondag 28 april 2019 17:44 schreef MrRatio het volgende:
Ik ben benieuwd of Obama en Biden buiten beeld gaan blijven. Er zal een moment komen van straffen opleggen en dan gaat er gepraat worden voor strafvermindering. De positie van de Clintons kalft steeds meer af, het is onvermijdelijk dat er een vervolging ingesteld gaat worden.

Eindelijk.

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Op zondag 28 april 2019 17:44 schreef MrRatio het volgende:
Ik ben benieuwd of Obama en Biden buiten beeld gaan blijven. Er zal een moment komen van straffen opleggen en dan gaat er gepraat worden voor strafvermindering. De positie van de Clintons kalft steeds meer af, het is onvermijdelijk dat er een vervolging ingesteld gaat worden.

Eindelijk.