Russia wanted Hillary to win.

In PJ Media, Matt Margolis brings us up-to-date on Spygate.

In a new twist in SpyGate, Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, suppressed intelligence that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, according to information being declassified by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.

Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry revealed this bombshell Tuesday evening while appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

A lot of faith has been put into the intelligence community’s assessment that Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin wanted Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. This assessment gave credence to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative that launched an investigation into Trump’s campaign. Last week declassified testimony proved that top Obama officials never had any empirical evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

BREAKING: List of Obama Officials Who Sought To ‘Unmask’ Flynn Released
“There’s other intel that may have been more serious suggesting that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win, rather than balancing that out in the assessment they put out there in that assessment and set the narrative that Russia wanted Trump to win,” Henry told Tucker Carlson.

Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst, claimed last month the U.S. intelligence community knew in 2017 that Russia wanted Hillary to win, and that then-CIA Director Brennan suppressed that information. According to Fleitz, House Intelligence Committee staff told him “there was conflicting intelligence evidence on Russian motivations for meddling in the 2016 election,” and that Brennan “suppressed facts or analysis that showed why it was not in Russia’s interests to support Trump and why Putin stood to benefit from Hillary Clinton’s election.”

“They also told me that Brennan suppressed that intelligence over the objections of CIA analysts,” Fleitz added.

It looks like evidence of this suppression will soon see the light of day, raising even more questions about the efforts the Obama administration took to undermine the incoming Trump administration. Let’s recap the key details that have become clear in the past several weeks.

The Obama administration:

never had any empirical evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia
sought a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign base on the Steele dossier, which the FBI knew was Russian disinformation

suppressed intelligence showing that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election

set up a perjury trap for incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Obama knew Flynn was being wiretapped.

We also know that Barack Obama was directly involved in the investigation and knew Flynn was wiretapped. What more will come out as Grenell declassifies more information? How deep does the Obama administration’s criminal activity go?

Trump's tweet today

Spygate: What did Obama know and when did he know it?

"If those responsible are not held to account, this will happen again."

In the American Thinker blog, Frank Watt, who served for over 22 years as an FBI special agent, supervisory special agent, and FBI SWAT team leader, writes in part,

Whichever explanation seems more likely, the end result should be infuriating to every American. Either your nation's premiere law enforcement agency was breathtakingly incompetent when the stakes were the highest, or select officials in that organization made deliberate decisions to break the law, undermine the Constitution, and illegally spy on a fellow American. Either possibility has deeply damaged the reputation of the FBI and DOJ in addition to the reputations of thousands of honest FBI Agents and DOJ attorneys. Despite the legitimate concerns of civil libertarians, the FISA process has indisputably proved an invaluable resource in safeguarding the country from terrorism. If the heinous abuses documented in the I.G.s report result in a weakening or loss of FISA, we will all be the worse for it. If those responsible are not held to account, this will happen again. There is no happy face to put on this episode.

Read more here.

Searching for truth

Robert Zimmerman writes in part in Beyond the Black,

...To understand how damning the IG’s report is, we must note how much Horowitz bent over backwards to be objective, almost to the point of absurdity. For example, despite documenting extensively how all the lies, evidence tampering, and disinformation exclusively served to attack the Trump campaign and later the administration, while aiding the Clinton campaign and the Democrats, Horowitz still insisted that he could find no evidence of political bias in these actions.

Based on this IG report, it is now clear that a significant number of FBI and Justice Department officials participated in the past three years in an illegal scandal aimed at overthrowing a legal election. Based on the information we now have, the prosecution and conviction of those individuals should proceed as quickly as possible.

Truth and lies

It is often said that the problem with lying is that it soon becomes difficult to keep your story straight. Soon the inconsistencies between each lie pile up, and the whole fabrication collapses in a heap of manure.

Tell the truth however and you never have a problem with consistency. There is only one truth, and to tell it is easy and reliable.

For the past few years the Republicans have told a consistent and reliable story. At the same time the story from the Democrats has repeatedly changed, often found to be false, and time after time contradicted itself. First they accused Trump of Russian collusion. That was shown to be false, by their own hand-picked investigator. Then they said Trump used his power as president to bully the leader of the Ukraine for political purposes. Very quickly we found this accusation to be false, proven by the quick release of the phonecall transcript by Trump.

During the impeachment hearings in the House the past two weeks we’ve seen more of the same. The accusations against Trump kept changing, until the final two impeachment charges (obstruction of Congress and abuse of power) are so vague as to be meaningless.

The Enlightenment in the 1700s earned that name because it was at that moment in human history that our western civilization put the unemotional and forthright search for the truth above all else. Or as Francis Bacon noted

Truth is to be sought for, not in the felicity of any age which is an unstable thing, but in the light of nature and experience, which is eternal. . . . Let every student of nature take this as a rule — that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is be held in suspicion. [Novum Organum, sections 56 and 58]

It is very clear that the only thing the Democrats have consistently “seized and dwelt upon” these last three years is an outright and irrational hatred of Donald Trump and those who support him. Along the way this hatred has had them repeatedly fabricate lies and slanders against Trump as well as anyone they think is allied with him. The inspector general report merely confirms this impression.

It is impossible for a free and open society to flourish when such people are in a position of power. It is now the responsibility of the American citizenry, the true rulers of this country, to step forward and fire these people.

If they do not, it is unlikely our free democracy can survive.

Read more here.

Setting up the spying

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,

The New York Times is confirming that Kevin Clinesmith is the “low-level lawyer” within the FBI who doctored evidence within the Carter Page FISA application.

As anticipated, the DOJ and FBI ‘small group’ leaks are from their individual review of a heavily compartmented IG report; and now they are being selectively shaped by the favorite ‘small group’ media network: NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Politico et al.

...they didn’t just get a ‘wiretap’, they got a Title-1 FISA authorized surveillance warrant; the most extensive and intrusive form of surveillance warrant possible. A Title-1 warrant allows any and all surveillance. Wiretaps, bugs, electronic surveillance, physical surveillance, the works. A Title-1 warrant is used against suspected terrorists in the U.S.

He and his commenters write much more here.

Now from Sundance's commenters:
southernsue says, wonder if this guy thinks it was worth it now that he will serve time
he just threw his life away for the puppet masters
he will go down
and the puppet masters are still walking around free
sad for this guy’s family
he threw his life away for nothing
he sold his soul to satan
sad sad sad

David A said, “Mr. Clinesmith took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding.”

Sounds just like the impeachment fraud. Only instead of an email it was a phone call and all the deep staters inserted their own desired and creative spin, including Schiff and the lies he read into the congressional record. This is clearly willful fraud, not confirmation bias.

hawkins6 said, ...Only a naive fool would believe that personal bias had no effect on these conspirators but it’s hard to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The numerous interviews of Comey, Brennan, McCabe etc over the last few years were filled with intense disrespect, vitriolic hate and repugnance of PT. It’s not reasonable to believe these powerful emotions had no affect on their actions. Brennan’s toxic message to President Trump, ‘May Your Downfall Be Swift’ is the latest indication that sourpuss Brennan didn’t suddenly develop his mind altering toxic biases after he was replaced. His words reveal a personal vendetta against an elected President and a total lack of respect for PT’s voters.

"the biggest political scandal in American political history."

In PowerLine, Scott Johnson writes about Andrew McCarthy's new book entitled,

Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. What we have here is the biggest political scandal in American political history.

...McCarthy mostly lets the facts speak for themselves and allows the reader to draw his own conclusions, although he states upfront: “[I]n 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic Party, and the progressive Beltway establishment.”

A few pages later McCarthy puts it this way: “This book contends that the Obama administration, abetted by Washington’s politically progressive order, exploited its control of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to help Clinton and undermine Trump. This was a scandalous abuse of power.”

...In addition, when Trump improbably won the election, Obama and his men turned the investigation into an ongoing effort to undo it. McCarthy shows how, after Trump’s inauguration, the effort continued secretly under Trump’s nose. It represents, you might say, the audacity of nope.

In this book, McCarthy provides the evidence and a host of lucidly developed arguments. The exposition is masterful. Although the style is breezy, almost conversational, and the book is easy reading, McCarthy hands up a stinging indictment that calls for a day of reckoning.

Read more here.

Joe DiGenova brings us his opinion on what is happening in the Spygate investigations

Ratcliffe: "The FISA Court was at the mercy of the people who verified this information!"

At the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance comments

Fusion GPS was not hired to research Trump, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations.

Fusion-GPS gave them the justification they needed for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier. Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier is so important; without it, the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse as outlined by John Ratcliffe.

This comment from Sundance comes after he gives us another of his brilliant analyses of the Spygate story. He is so clearly the person on the web who has given the best analysis of the whole sordid affair. I frankly don't understand why other brilliant blogs like Instapundit and Maggie's Farm don't link to him regularly.

"The rats are scampering from their once safe refuge—biting and piling on each other in vain efforts to avoid drowning."

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Mueller’s failure to find collusion prompts an important question. If the Steele dossier—the basis for unfounded charges that Trump colluded with Russia—was fraudulent, then how and why did the Clinton campaign, hand in glove with top Obama administration officials, use such silly trash and smears to unleash the powers of government against Trump’s campaign, transition team and early presidency?

...There may well have occurred a near coup attempt by high-ranking officials to destroy a campaign and then to remove an elected president. Likewise, top officials may have engaged in serial lying to federal investigators, perjury, the misleading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the illegal insertion of informants into a political campaign, the leaking of classified documents and the obstruction of justice.

So, how can we tell that the former accusers are now terrified of becoming the accused? Because suddenly the usual band of former Obama officials and Trump accusers have largely given up on their allegations that Trump was or is a Russian asset.

Instead, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein are now beginning to accuse each other of wrongdoing.

...Comey, the former FBI director, has hit the lecture and television circuit with his now-tired moralistic shtick that he alone had a “soul” while others allowed theirs to be eaten away by Trump. Translated, that means Comey is terrified that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whom Comey attacked as a Trump enabler, knows that Comey himself may have broken the law—and may direct prosecutors on how to prove it.

Comey is also in a tiff with his former deputy, Andrew McCabe. Both know that the FBI under Comey illegally leaked classified information to the media. But Comey says McCabe went rogue and did it. Of course, McCabe’s attorney shot back that Comey had authorized it. Comey also claims the Steele dossier was not the chief evidence for a FISA warrant. McCabe insists that it was. It’s possible that one might work with prosecutors against the other to finagle a lesser charge.

Former CIA Director John Brennan has on two occasions lied under oath to Congress and gotten away with it. He may not get away with lying again if it’s determined that he distorted the truth about his efforts to spread the Steele dossier smears. A former CIA official claims that Comey put the unverified Steele dossier into an intelligence community report on alleged Russian interference. Comey has contended that Brennan was the one who did.

It’s possible that both did. Doing so would have been unethical if not illegal, given that neither official told President Obama (if he didn’t already know) that the silly Steele dossier was a product of Hillary Clinton’s amateurish efforts to subvert the 2016 Trump campaign.

In sum, the old leaky vessel of collusion is sinking.

The rats are scampering from their once safe refuge—biting and piling on each other in vain efforts to avoid drowning.

As the walls close in...

So who put the fake Steele dossier into the Official Intelligence Assessment? Comey says it was Brennan. Brennan says it was Comey. Read more here.

"It’s yet another case of the deep state deciding that the will of the American people must be overridden and an election nullified with the help of their domesticated lackeys in the media."

What is Spygate all about? Sebastian Gorka thinks he knows. He writes in American Greatness,

This is about one thing and one thing alone. It’s yet another case of the deep state deciding that the will of the American people must be overridden and an election nullified with the help of their domesticated lackeys in the media.

Richard Nixon was never supposed to be president. And the billionaire from Queens most certainly wasn’t. Donald Trump is a threat to the Comeys, the Brennans, the Nadlers, the Schiffs, the Pelosis, and the Mark Felts of the world. Just who do the American people think they are to threaten the power and control of people who have made up the modern professional political class since the 1960s?

These are the stakes involved and this is why 2020 will be even more important than 2016. The Republic hangs by a thread. Remember that when next you hear the Speaker of the House laugh like a despot about jailing those who support the president.

Read more here.

"Totally normal" to plant undercover sources in a political campaign

.@Comey: "Reasonable," "totally normal step" to plant undercover sources in a political campaign pic.twitter.com/IAL4iso2O6

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 10, 2019

"Attorney General Barr is about to join the handful of patriot heroes in this long-running sleazy saga."

In the American Thinker, Clarice Feldman tells us the latest on Spygate. She concludes,

...Many unsavory practices and unlawful acts are going to be revealed. I believe this utterly. Attorney General Barr is about to join the handful of patriot heroes in this long-running sleazy saga.

Read the whole thing here.

Exiting the fight against the Deep State

Sundance shows us how people like Lindsey Graham are exiting the fight against the Deep State.

Those who participated in the 2015/2016 surveillance and spy operations, which evolved into the 2017 (through today) soft-coup effort, are relying on a defense that Russia ‘hacked’ the 2016 election. This false narrative is how the corrupt administrative state will defend themselves.

Pay close attention to this interview and note how Senator Graham supports that narrative saying: “the Russians hacked into John Podesta’s e-mails, the campaign manager for the Democratic candidate for President. The Russians hacked into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, the candidate for the Democratic Party.”

This ‘Russia-hacking narrative’ is the DC ‘chaff and countermeasures‘; when combined with their ‘by-the-book‘ justifications, it becomes their unified defense. Once you accept their baseline, it becomes much more difficult to expose their unlawful conduct.

Read more and watch the video here.

A few heroes and many villains

Sundance in the Conservative Treehouse continues to do amazing work in uncovering the illegal activities of the intelligence communities under the Obama administration. Here are just a few paragraphs from his latest top-notch reporting.

Early in 2016 NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) “About” queries using the FBI/NSA database that holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.

The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.

While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option, and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016 (keep these dates in mind).

...The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results. Later on, the FBI said all of the exported material was deleted.

Read the whole thing here.

"Battle is joined!"

JJ Sefton writes in part about Spygate in his Morning Report at Ace of Spades,

Cynics in the audience, and that includes me, think the perpetrators are going to get away with it, especially Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama+Valerie Jarret. I am convinced they were behind it or at a minimum knew from the outset and approved of what their underlings were doing. That said, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and all the rest have got to somehow be held accountable. The fight now is not so much to get Trump as it is to protect the Deep State conspirators and keep their positions safe. Even if one or more of them go down, to whatever extent or manner that manifests itself, the 4-8 years of Trump must not be allowed to be the beachhead that could potentially (please G-d) dismantle the globalist entity that has hijacked America for the past 50 years or longer. Battle is joined.

Read more here.

"And we the people will learn yet again that our best and brightest just may be among our worst and dumbest."

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

A Higher Ego
Fired FBI Director James Comey wrote a book called A Higher Loyalty, with the theme that Comey had always put allegiance to “the Truth” over all careerist and partisan concerns.

Yet Comey signed off on a FISA warrant request without apprising the court that the chief evidence for such a writ was paid for by losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Comey’s own sworn testimony about the dossier to a Senate Judiciary Committee was not consistent with the actual evidence in the dossier presented to the court. Comey also claimed he needed to brief Trump on the dossier because the media was going to publish its contents, when, in fact, it was only Comey’s staged meeting with Trump about the dossier that offered enough official sanction for the dossier to convince Buzzfeed finally to release it.

Yet Comey on FBI time and machines wrote memos memorializing his confidential meetings with President Trump, and then leaked seven of them to the media in order to create enough fury to lead to the appointment of a special counsel.

Despite Comey’s denials, four of the seven memos may well have contained some classified information and thus were probably illegally leaked by Comey, who succeeded in prompting the appointment of a special counsel—his longtime friend Robert Mueller. Yet Comey in his December 2018 congressional testimony, admitted under oath over 200 times that he did not know the answer to the questions asked or did not remember.

Yet Comey’s testimony cannot be reconciled with sworn statements of his own deputy Andrew McCabe. Comey’s real message is not about a higher loyalty, but rather that when one does not tell the truth, one must apparently continue not to tell the truth—at least until the edifice of the aggregate untruth collapses by its own weight.

Collusion Delusion
Robert Mueller investigated a supposed crime of Trump-Russian collusion that early on in his investigation was discovered to hinge on the Christopher Steele dossier, which to this day has had none of its contents verified but lots of its assertions proved impossible or inaccurate.

...The No Stars
Robert Mueller had to assemble an independent and unbiased special counsel’s legal team, ostensibly to avoid the partisanship of an all-Republican Department of Justice hierarchy investigating the Republican Trump. But Mueller, a Republican, appointed almost all non-Republican lawyers; among them many donors to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign; among them lawyers of the former Obama Justice Department who had been briefed by Bruce Ohr on the contents of the Steele dossier at a time when Fusion GPS and members of Obama Administration were doing their best to seed the gossip mill among the media; and among them a few lawyers who variously had either represented the Clinton Foundation or former Clinton aides or former Obama Administration officials; and among them Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who earlier had sent each other hundreds of text messages, many of them expressing not just loathing of the object of their investigation, but also vows to ensure that Trump would not become president.

In the end, the “dream team” and “all stars” spent $34 million and 22 months, and wrote over 400 pages to confirm what was self-evident from the outset of this ill-starred inquest: Donald Trump did not “collude” with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton; Trump did not impede the nonsensical investigation of absurd charges; and the horde of lawyers who found no crimes were frustrated to the point of including anything in their report they could to embarrass Trump—except the proof of collusion for which they were tasked to find.

Legacies
The Mueller fiasco likely will end any talk of any special counsel investigation for a generation. Eventually, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe, along with others, will feel what it is like to have a federal prosecutor leveraging them, but this time about real, not made-up, crimes.

The liberal television media and their administrative state partisan “experts” likely will not gain back their former audiences, who were duped with two years of fabrications dressed up as “the walls are closing in” psychodramatic news. The hard Left, “Impeach Trump!” Democratic presidential field will no longer have an excuse to avoid explaining to the American people their weird agenda: a fundamental transformation of the country antithetical to the visions of the American Founders and likely on every issue opposed by a majority of Americans. And we the people will learn yet again that our best and brightest just may be among our worst and dumbest.

Read more here.

"Mindless partisans"

"For two years our capital city became a kind of massive CNN panel, a living monument to ignorance and dishonesty, where the loudest and the dumbest invariably got the most attention!

These are hysterical children. In fact, they should not be in journalism, but they have no plans to give up their power.

What about Brennan and Clapper? Will they get to keep their cable television jobs? Probably. In decadent societies, only the unpopular are punished."

Please watch this Tucker Carlson video, which might be his best ever.

"Connecting dots that were not there"

In the Washington Examiner, Siraj Hashmi writes,

...During the fallout from the 2016 election, Democrats were quick to point the finger at Russia for the reason why their nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lost in historic fashion. While trying to rationalize what we all witnessed, people like Brennan, Clapper, and Schiff capitalized on their moment, using their status to spread misinformation about collusion with a foreign power, a topic that people would believe them on. However, even for the special counsel, there wasn’t enough evidence to support it.

...people like Brennan, Clapper, and Schiff misled the public and elevated themselves in the process. This sowed discord and distrust in our institutions, which was exactly the aim of the Russians meddling in the election.

Read more here.

"It was a daily compounded disinformation campaign by senior members of a former administration leaking lies, half-truths and malicious rumors about Trump."

Sara Carter writes,

...Think about it. Trump was being accused of being a spy for Russia. It was a daily compounded disinformation campaign by senior members of a former administration leaking lies, half-truths and malicious rumors about Trump. Those who aided the lies were MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, and many more, who all had stories that the U.S. president was compromised by Russia and worked with the Russians against the American people.

...How can you be accused of obstruction of a crime you never committed? However, how can you not be appalled at the lies being directed at you, your family, your coworkers and those who support you when you know for a fact that is all they are – lies.

America needs to heal first and foremost.

But in order to heal the American justice system, that is revered around the world, must act swiftly and with strength to hold those accountable for these actions and bring those who broke the law to justice.

Transparency and justice is the only way we can regain the trust in the institutions that make our great nation the envy of those around the world.

Read more here.