The main suspect in an investigation with no crime.

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...The FBI and the Obama Justice Department launched an investigation of the Democrats’ political adversaries, and they used Clinton-campaign-generated, foreign-provided innuendo to do it. They strained to make a case on Donald Trump even as they were burying a daunting criminal case on Mrs. Clinton. As I have previously explained, moreover, the president was misled about his status: not only was he a suspect in the investigation, he was the main suspect.

The main suspect in an investigation with no crime.

...We’ve had a lot to say about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to comply with federal regulations that require showing a factual basis for a criminal investigation — i.e., reason to believe that a crime was committed — before appointing a special counsel, Robert Mueller. But Rosenstein was just riding the tide. The FISA warrants show that this practice of launching a criminal investigation in the absence of a crime long predated Rosenstein and Mueller. It was the modus operandi of the Trump-Russia investigation from Day One, when Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI first targeted the Trump campaign.

...FISA authorities are not criminal-law authorities. It is not just that FISA is not designed to ferret out evidence of crime; it is not permitted to be used for that purpose. FISA’s objective is the collection of foreign intelligence, the gathering of information about the actions and intentions of foreign powers that may threaten American interests.

...For Mueller, the Russia counterintelligence probe was cover to conduct a criminal investigation of Trump in the absence of grounds to believe a crime had occurred.

...After 9/11, The Wall came down. Its razing was endorsed by such experienced hands as your humble correspondent. We argued that it was ridiculous to believe the FBI would pretextually use FISA to conduct a criminal investigation. Many times I posited that, even if we assume a rogue agent, it would be far easier for the rogue to fabricate the evidence needed to get a criminal wiretap than to fabricate a national-security angle so he could use FISA. I insisted that if the rogue tried to go the FISA route, he’d never get away with it. FISA requires too many levels of scrutiny in the upper ranks of the FBI and the Justice Department — responsible superiors who would stop the rogue in his tracks.

I was wrong.

...But in the Trump investigation, headquarters became the investigator. And just as an investigator is tempted to keep his supervisors in the dark when he is doing something he shouldn’t do, the Obama Justice Department and FBI withheld information about the Trump investigation from Congress — even though the “Gang of Eight” was supposed to receive quarterly briefings on sensitive matters. They withheld essential information from the FISA court about the source of their information (the Clinton campaign), and about the apparent dishonesty and deep bias of their main witness (Christopher Steele), even as they presented unverified allegations to the FISA court, flouting FBI guidelines. Headquarters exists to prevent investigators, who sometimes get too invested in their cases, from cutting such corners. But here, headquarters was its own supervisor. Such arrangements tend not to end well.

...The FBI has been investigating for well over two years, and for nine months of that time it expressly told the FISA court it believed the Trump campaign was engaged in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia. No one, though, has ever been charged with such a heinous offense. Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein persists in his refusal to identify any crime for which there was such a strong basis to believe Trump could be guilty that a special counsel had to be appointed.

If there were such a crime, we would have been told about it by now. The “factual” basis for suspecting Trump of an espionage conspiracy with Russia was the uncorroborated, unverifiable Steele dossier. The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the dossier to get FISA warrants, and in so doing told the court that “prosecutive authorities” would “evaluate” the “foreign intelligence” in a hunt for crimes.

The Justice Department and the FBI know they are not permitted to use FISA as a pretext. If I were a member of Congress, I’d be asking them whether this promise of “prosecutive” review in the Page warrant application (a) was unique to the Trump investigation or (b) is invoked whenever the FBI seeks a FISA warrant.

Either way, it’s a problem. Either way, it harms the country. If the public becomes convinced that national-security powers, such as those in FISA, are being employed to monitor Americans when there is insufficient evidence to justify a criminal investigation, there will be demands to strip these powers. And those of us who have insisted through the years that, with responsible supervision by the top tiers of the Justice Department and the Bureau, the government can be trusted not to abuse these powers, will have nothing to say.

Read more here.

Hearings, Schmearings! (Is there no end to the corruption?)

Judicial Watch has learned that the FISA court did not even hold hearings on the warrants to spy on Carter Page!

Judicial Watch today announced that in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court filing last night that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants.

In the filing the Justice Department finally revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Page FISA spy warrants, first issued in 2016 and subsequently renewed three times:...“It is disturbing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance courts rubber-stamped the Carter Page spy warrants and held not one hearing on these extraordinary requests to spy on the Trump team,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Perhaps the court can now hold hearings on how justice was corrupted by material omissions that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, a conflicted Bruce Ohr, a compromised Christopher Steele, and anti-Trumper Peter Strzok were all behind the ‘intelligence’ used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.”

Read more here.

Are they sitting on the unredacted FISA documents?

According to The Conservative Treehouse, the New York Times, Washington Post and Buzzfeed have all been sitting on the unredacted FISA Court document(s) since March of last year! But, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch says he doesn't know if that report is true because the New Yok Times is suing for the FISA documents. He asks, why aren't the media being questioned and held to account for the leaks of classified information they reported on?

Tom Fitton says the firing of Strzok was necessary but insufficient. There needs to be a criminal investigation of Strzok's actions.

Spying on their own Commander in Chief!

Intel operatives in the Trump administration spent $100,000 trying to get salacious information on their Commander in Chief, according to a New York Times piece published late yesterday.

Tucker: "In the vacuum created by ignorance, conspiracy theories grow!"



hat tip The Conservative Treehouse

Were the FISA judges appointees of Bill Clinton?

Former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles tells us that the FISA court has received 35,529 warrant requests over the years of its existence, from 1978 to 2013, and in that period only 12 were denied! One of the denials was in June of 2016, asking to spy on an individual associated with the Trump campaign. In October 2016 they reversed themselves and granted a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. The three judges may all have been appointees of Bill Clinton!

What is probable cause before the FISA court? 1. You have to be targeting a foreign intelligence agent. 2. You have to be looking for either espionage or terrorism. 3. You have to think that a crime has been committed.



hat tip The Conservative Treehouse

This was the U.S. government conducting political opposition research through a weaponized intelligence apparatus (DOJ and FBI)

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains,

Unlike some, we will not get ahead of the primary focus. For over a year CTH has focused on the demonstrable and provable foundation of the fraud; because the foundation brings down the entire apparatus.

Following that investigative path we have found ourselves paralleling a strategic plan as outlined by actions of congressional officials (Nunes, Grassley, Goodlatte, Horowitz), and the Trump intelligence community [Mike Rogers (NSA), Dan Coats (ODNI), Chris Wray (FBI) and Rod Rosenstein (DOJ)].

Four Corners of the demonstrable justice dept. conspiracy:

Exonerate Clinton
Investigate/execute, IC surveillance of Trump.
Collect and redistribute opposition research of Trump.
The Insurance Policy.

Following the exoneration of Hillary Clinton, the next phase, the “Trump Operation”, was the need for the DOJ/FBI “small group” to have access to surveillance of Hillary Clinton’s political opposition, Donald Trump. This was the U.S. government conducting political opposition research through a weaponized intelligence apparatus (DOJ and FBI).

...Within the context of #2 and #3 you’ll note the entry and exit timeline of people connected to the same task is identical. Christopher Steele, hired by Fusion-GPS, enters the timeline at the same time Nellie Ohr is hired by Fusion-GPS (May 2016). Both Christopher Steele and Nellie Ohr exit the activity timeline at the same time as the FBI gets FISA Court “Title 1” surveillance authority over Carter Page, October 21st, 2016.

Everything after October 21st, 2016, when the FBI has “Title 1” surveillance authority over Carter Page and the Trump Campaign, is part of the “insurance policy”. The Title 1 surveillance authority gave the “small group” the tools needed to execute #4, which included the 2017 “Russian Narrative” and the appointment of SC Robert Mueller.

...Another example post-election use of the FISA surveillance was how the Intelligence Community positioned the story of Carter Page in April of 2017 to gain the Special Counsel appointment, ie. the Mueller investigation (another false construct.)

Expose the fraudulent construct of the “FISA Title I” surveillance and the tenuously sketchy narrative built upon it collapses. So, what is the weakest part of the FISA Title I construct? Answer: The Clinton-Steele dossier.

Expose the fraud behind the FISA “Title I” application and the entire scheme is revealed. Investigators expose the FISA application to disinfecting sunlight by going through the ‘Dossier’ it is built upon.

That’s why Chairman Devin Nunes, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Chairman Bob Goodlatte are focused on exposing the Dossier (Grassley), and FISA application (Nunes and Goodlatte); each complements the other.

Read more here.

Breaking down the Grassley/Graham memo

Mollie Hemingway writes at The Federalist,

A criminal referral from top Senate investigators confirms explosive charges in last week’s House Intelligence Committee memo regarding abuse of surveillance authorities at the FBI and Department of Justice. It also reveals a host of problems arising from the bureau’s cooperation with foreign investigator Christopher Steele, who was working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The eight-page memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) includes underlying evidence to support the claims.

“It appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information. But there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility,” Sens. Graham and Grassley wrote.

Here are Mollie's headings under which she explains in detail.

Comey On Dossier’s Lack Of Meaningful Corroboration

Dossier Formed ‘Bulk’ Of FISA Application

Isikoff’s Yahoo Article Cited In Place Of Corroboration

Political Basis Mentioned Only ‘To A Vaguely Limited Extent’

Application Claimed Steele Had Nothing To Do With Yahoo Article

Even After Terminating Steele For Unauthorized Contacts With Media, FBI Claimed He Hadn’t Talked To Yahoo

Steele Was So Political He Flagrantly Violated His FBI Agreement Over Reopening Of Clinton Investigation

Even After Steele Publicly Admitted In Court To His Media Operation, The FBI Hid It

Court Wasn’t Told Steele Was ‘Desperate’ To Keep Trump From Being Elected

Why Steele’s Alleged Lies Matter

The More Steele Blabbed, The More The Kremlin And Others Could Manipulate Him

Steele Took Info From Clinton Pals (Reported Elsewhere To Be Close To Sidney Blumenthal)

Steele’s Known Behavior Contradicts The FBI’s Assertions To The Court

FISA Application Relied More On Steele’s Supposed Credibility Than Independent Verification Or Corroboration

Read more here.

Why officers of the court sometimes perpetrate frauds on the court.

Ace brings our attention to an article in the Federalist by Mollie Hemingway which Ace headlines: The Grassley/Graham Memo is Even More Damaging Than the Nunes Memo, and Obliterates Many of the Progressives' and NeverTrumpers' Key Wishcasting Defenses of the FISA Application

But first, let's hear what Ace thinks:

The FISA application represented to the court that the Yahoo article was independent corroboration, claiming Steele hadn't spoken to the press, and therefore Isikoff's article must come through some separate, independent channel of information.

This was a lie all along. But at first, it was only Steele's lie.

However, when Yates, Rosenstein, etc., singed the renewal applications, they did not update their application to inform the court that their previous representation had been false, that Steele had lied to them about when he spoke to the press, and in fact that Steele's association with the FBI had been terminated due to this misconduct.

They had a duty as officers of the court to tell the judge that.

Yet, they concealed it, once again.

Now if you're thinking, "Well, I can sure see why they concealed that, because that would destroy not only their renewal application but the original application too" -- yes, you can now see why officers of the court sometimes perpetrate frauds on the court.

It's the same reason any unethical litigant conceals material information from the court:

Because they know the truth would hurt them.

So they lie.

Sweating

Having trouble understanding the FISAgate revelations? Sundance explains here, and then give us a baseball analogy. Surely all Americans understand baseball?

After a few feeble attempts at brush back pitches… with the release of the lesser redacted memo, Senator Chuck Grassley took a 3-1 pitch and rocked a solid double off the wall, putting him on Second Base and Devin Nunes confidently standing on Third.

With no-one out, and first base open, the Democrats are stressed.

Adam Schiff calls for a pitching change as House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte steps up to the plate.

However, they can’t pitch around Goodlatte because clean-up hitter Horowitz is on deck. Schiff needs to bring the infield in close and hope for a double-play. They’re down to their last pitcher and he doesn’t look good.

More sweating.

The death of journalism

Derek Hunter writes at Town Hall,

This week we saw a perfect example of how corrupt journalism has become. There was an opportunity to report the news and journalists and their fellow travelers in the pundit class balked. While that wasn’t unusual, what was is how they did it in the lead up to the news, not bothering to wait until they’d seen what they were attempting to discredit. There was an unprecedented attempt to make the release of the FISA memo NOT NEWS before anyone knew what was in it.

Over the past two weeks, Democrats scrambled to “warn” the public that the release of the FISA memo would “damage national security” were it released. Journalists picked up the mantra and ran with it, unquestioningly parroting it in badgering Republicans about why they would support its release considering this charge. There was virtually no discussion as to whether or not this allegation was true or an attempted partisan distraction, it was simply accepted and repeated as if it had been carved into stone tablets by a burning bush and sent directly to the teleprompter in their TV studios.

The memo, of course, was nothing of the sort. There was nothing that was a threat in any way to national security, no remote mention of sources or methods. It was all a Democratic Party lie immediately adopted by journalists. As with past false stories that needed to be retracted or corrected, there was no comeuppance for those who spread the lie to the media, nor the media figures who regurgitated it. It happened, and when it was proven to be a lie, it was memory-holed.

The lying by Democrats in the lead up to the memo’s release wasn’t surprising, nor was the complicity of journalists in spreading that lie. What was is how there was virtually no curiosity or interest in the memo and its contents in the days leading to its release from the people whose job it is supposed to be to convey information to the public. All journalists did was attempt to taint it’s release so as to foster disinterest in it in their audience when they could finally see it.

Once it was released to the public, the discussion shifted to anything but its contents or the fact that unverified Clinton campaign opposition research was used as justification to spy on an American citizen without disclosing that’s what it was.

Now, I don’t know anything about Carter Page, the subject of that spying, beyond the fact that he’s an American citizen. He could be a Russian robot, for all I know. But he’s apparently been the subject of constant government surveillance since 2013 and hasn’t been arrested. That means he’s either the world’s greatest spy who doesn’t leave a fingerprint anywhere, or he’s just some weird guy who, once the government started watching him, they couldn’t stop. I suspect it the latter since the Clinton oppo file had to be used, at least in part, to justify the continued spying.

...CNN and MSNBC had panels exclusively of liberals denouncing the memo without discussing its implications or content. If the government can award itself the power to spy on Americans simply because someone got drunk and talked themselves up in front of others (George Papadopoulos) and someone else made allegations about that person (Page), there is virtually no one in the country who couldn’t be subjected to government spying.

...They don’t care. Journalism is dead. It didn’t die of natural causes, it was murdered by its practitioners in the name of attacking Republicans, in particular Donald Trump.

Read more here.

James Comey is the link between FBI FISA abuse and the Mueller investigation

Daniel Sobieski writes at The American Thinker,

President Trump was mocked when he said that Trump Tower was wiretapped and he and his team were being spied on by their own government. Now we know, confirmed by the FISA memo, that it not only happened, but also that it happened at the behest of the opposition DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign colluding with a corrupt DOJ and FBI that used FISA warrant requests based on a Russian-linked dossier they paid for.

What does this FISA abuse have to do with the Russia collusion probe? Consider that the corruption of the FBI regarding the Hillary email probe, the Russia-Uranium One investigations, the FISA abuses occurred largely under FBI directors named Robert Mueller and James Comey. Comey had the fix in for Hillary Clinton and when Trump fired him for usurping the role of attorney general and publicly exonerating her, Comey, by criminally leaking memos on a private conversation in the Oval Office, arranged for the appointment of a special counsel, his good friend Robert Mueller.

While putting the fix in for Hillary to keep her out of prison, Comey was also part of the cabal trying to keep Trump out of the White House. His deputy was Andrew McCabe, forced out of his post as a result of the FISA memo’s description of his corrupt activities. Peter Strzok, a leader of the FBI resistance to Trump, as well as McCabe and his paramour Lisa Page, worked for Comey. Strzok, the lead investigator in the Hillary probe, went on to work for Mueller in the Russia collusion probe. A few dots for Trey Gowdy to connect.

Consider that Comey, in testimony given under oath in June 2017, said the Steele dossier was “salacious and unverified”. Yet Comey signed off on at least one, if not four, FISA warrant applications based on that “salacious and unverified” dossier. Either he was lying to Congress or he was lying to the FISA court judge. In any event, he was out to get Trump and the FISA abuse and his plot to set up Robert Mueller as a special counsel without a crime to investigate or any evidence of collusion were both parts of his conspiracy to get Trump.

Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., says that McCabe testified that if it weren’t for material from British spy Christopher Steele’s fraudulent dossier, there would have been no FISA requests and no surveillance of Team Trump.

...There is a link between the FISA abuse by the FBI and the Mueller investigation – the man who had it in for Trump after obstructing Justice n the Hillary Clinton email probe. That link is James Comey.

Read more here.

Secret Police

"Obama and Clinton were tied up with this illegal activity every step of the way. There are a lot of very weird, sinister, and malodorous aspects."

Malicious intent

The headline at The Conservative Treehouse lets us know how Sundance is feeling:

This is Madness – The Media are Just as Complicit In The DOJ Corruption and FISA Abuse…

We shared a discussion thread a few weeks ago about how the media are enmeshed within the entire story of the DOJ and FBI corruption. The media engagements with the parties swirling around the Clinton-Steele Dossier and DOJ corruption are so pervasive they cannot currently report on the story without exposing their own duplicity. Michael Isikoff found that reality yesterday when he discovered his reporting was being used by the FBI.

FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page have been shown in their text messages to be leaking stories from the Clinton Investigation, the Trump investigation and the Mueller investigation to journalists at Politico, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.


Additionally, Christopher Steele has stated in U.K. court records the person in charge of the Clinton Campaign’s opposition research firm, Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, arranged and coordinated for Mr. Steele to talk to several journalists (CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News and Mother Jones) while Mr. Steele was also the primary source of information for the FBI investigators (including Strzok and Page):

As more evidence surfaces the relationship between journalists, Fusion-GPS, Chris Steele and the media’s DOJ/FBI sources begins blending together. The FBI was using media reports, which were based on Fusion-GPS pitches, to bolster its investigative documents to the FISA court.

..So Christopher Steele was meeting with journalists, the journalists were writing articles; the FBI was leaking to media and simultaneously citing those same articles as underlying evidence to support their counterintelligence investigations; and all of this was used to validate the investigative documents the FBI was receiving from Christopher Steele; who, along with the leaking FBI officials, was also the source of the media articles.

So Christopher Steele was meeting with journalists, the journalists were writing articles; the FBI was leaking to media and simultaneously citing those same articles as underlying evidence to support their counterintelligence investigations; and all of this was used to validate the investigative documents the FBI was receiving from Christopher Steele; who, along with the leaking FBI officials, was also the source of the media articles.

...We’re talking about thousands of hours of media TV pundits, thousands more columns written, and almost every scintilla of it based on originating intelligence sources -from the larger intelligence system- that are now being exposed as duplicitous and conspiratorial in the scale of their malicious intent.

This larger story-line has traveled in one direction. The narrative has only traveled in one direction. Each thread converging on codependent trails for collective stories all going in one direction. One big engineered narrative endlessly pushed. Think about how far the collective media have traveled with this story over the past eighteen months.

Now, in a period of a few weeks, it has become increasingly obvious the collective journey, using all that expended effort, was going in the wrong direction.

The media have fully invested themselves in eighteen months of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks or false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story.

Nothing within their collective need to will-an-outcome will change the media’s proximity to facts when the truthful story behind the DOJ and FBI corruption is finally exposed. The media are so far away from the place where this story ends, they have no inherent capability to even begin to travel in the opposite direction, toward the truth.

The only way they could align with the truth is to admit that virtually every scintilla of their reportage over the past 18 months was inherently false. There’s not a single media outlet capable of doing that.

Think about a New York Times, CNN, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Yahoo News or Washington Post journalist now having to write an article deconstructing an entire foundation of lies they participated in creating.

Do we really think such a catastrophic level of corrupted journalism could reconstitute into genuine reporting of fact-based information?

Impossible.

Members of the press anxiously awaiting Hillary Clinton to stumble on to her plane

Read much more by Sundance here, including images from the memo to back up what he has written.

What the FBI never told the FISA court

Rachel Stoltzfoos writes at The Federalist about

five things the FBI and DOJ never told the court when asking for multiple warrants, according to the memo.

1. The dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton and The Democratic National Committee.

2. The FBI terminated Steele as a source for “what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations.”

3. The dossier had not been independently verified.

4. A news story purporting to corroborate the dossier actually came directly from the dossier.

5. Some of the information provided to the court came from a senior DOJ official’s wife, who was getting paid by Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm.

Read more here, as she fills in the facts supporting each point.