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Trump's Spygate Claims; News Stories Proving POTUS Right!


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  • 3 weeks later...
 
 
Published 10 hours ago

Michael Flynn's defense team says new DOJ documents contain 'shocking exculpatory evidence'

FBI 'did not believe General Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia' the documents state

Can Michael Flynn sue for malicious prosecution?

Notes from Peter Stzrok show Obama and Biden weighed in on Flynn case as Comey appeared to downplay the former national security adviser's calls with the Russian ambassador; former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman reacts.

Newly released documents about the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn show additional “exculpatory evidence” linked to a Justice Department review of the case investigators built against him shortly after President Trump’s election, his lawyers argued in a court filing Friday.

“These documents establish that on January 25, 2017 – the day after the agents ambushed him at the White House – the agents and DOJ officials knew General Flynn’s statements were not material to any investigation, that he was ‘open and forthcoming’ with the agents, that he had no intent to deceive them, and that he believed he was fully truthful with them,” Flynn’s attorneys wrote. “In short, there was no crime for many reasons.”

Flynn’s lawyers said that top Justice Department officials and the special counsel’s office knew about the documents for three years before they were able to obtain them, following U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri Jeffrey Jensen’s review of the case.

JUDGE REFUSES TO DISMISS FLYNN CASE, PETITIONS FULL APPELLATE COURT

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That review was ordered by Attorney General Bill Barr and eventually led the DOJ to drop the charges that former special counsel Robert Mueller had filed against Flynn.

And the documents echo statements that former FBI Director James Comey made to lawmakers about Flynn’s FBI interview as early as 2017, Politico reported.

 

FILE - In this Feb. 1, 2017, file photo, then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn speaks during the daily news briefing at the White House, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 1, 2017, file photo, then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn speaks during the daily news briefing at the White House, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Portions of the documents are redacted, but one paragraph, pertaining to an early FBI interview of Flynn, states that “FBI advised that based on this interview, they did not believe General Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia.”

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The report acknowledged that some of what Flynn said during the interview was “inconsistent” with surveillance records of his calls – but that investigators “believed that Flynn believed what he was telling them.”

Another section of handwritten notes draws similar conclusions.

NEWLY UNCOVERED STRZOK NOTES TURNED OVER TO FLYNN'S LAWYER

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“These disclosures evince … even more reasons requiring dismissal of the case against General Flynn,” his legal team wrote.

Just two weeks ago, Flynn’s team received former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s notes as part of the review, which the defense lawyers also said provided evidence to “further exonerate” him.

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his communications with Russia's ambassador, but his legal team later sought to withdraw his plea. Earlier this year, the DOJ moved to drop its case against the general as part of the review Barr ordered.

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DOJ officials said they concluded that Flynn's interview by the FBI was "untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn" and that the interview was "conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

But the federal judge who has the authority to make the final decision over whether to dismiss the case refused to do so this week even after being ordered to by an appeals court.

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Instead, he filed a petition for the entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case – a move that could drag the proceedings on beyond Election Day.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Gregg Re contributed to this report.Read

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

 

Durham probe: Ex-FBI lawyer to plead guilty in first criminal case arising from review, sources say

Clinesmith was referred for potential prosecution by the Justice Department's inspector general's office

Brooke Singman

 By Brooke Singman, Bill Mears | Fox News

 

 

 

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham's review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, two sources close to the matter tell Fox News.

 

Clinesmith was referred for potential prosecution by the Justice Department's inspector general's office, which conducted its own review of the Russia investigation.

 

Specifically, the inspector general accused Clinesmith, though not by name, of altering an email about former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to say that he was "not a source" for another government agency. Page has said he was a source for the CIA. The DOJ relied on that assertion as it submitted a third and final renewal application in 2017 to eavesdrop on Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

 

Clinesmith is being charged in federal court in Washington and is expected to plead guilty to one count of making a false statement, his attorney Justin Shur told The Associated Press.

 

"Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email. It was never his intent to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information he relayed was accurate. But Kevin understands what he did was wrong and accepts responsibility," Shur later said in a statement.

 

President Trump, noting the case at the top of a Friday press conference, called the individual “corrupt” and predicted the charge is “just the beginning.”

 

“The fact is they spied on my campaign and they got caught. And you’ll be hearing more,” he said.

 

The Justice Department’s charging document stated that Clinesmith “did willfully and knowingly make and use a false writing and document, knowing the same to contain a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and entry in a matter before the jurisdiction of the executive branch and judicial branch of the Government of the United States.”

 

The document said he altered another official's June 2017 email to say Page (referred to as "Individual #1") was "not a source" when the original email did not contain those words.

 

The filing said another official took Clinesmith’s altered email, relied on it, and signed and submitted the renewed FISA application to the FISA Court.

“The application for FISA #4 did not include Individual #1’s history or status with the OGA [other government agency],” the document read.

Meanwhile, an FBI spokesperson told Fox News Friday that "under Director Wray's leadership, the FBI has been, and will continue to be, fully cooperative with Mr. Durham's review. This includes providing documents and assigning personnel to assist his team."

 

"While the FBI does not comment on ongoing legal matters, it is important to note the employee in this case no longer works at the FBI resigning before an internal disciplinary process was completed," the FBI spokesperson said.

 

Durham was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr last year to investigate the origins of the FBI’s original Russia probe, shortly after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller completed his years-long investigation into whether the campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election.

 

Durham’s timeline was focused on July 2016, when the FBI’s original Russia probe began, through the appointment of Mueller in May 2017.

 

Mueller’s investigation yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election, though the question of whether Trump obstructed justice was left open in the final report.

 

The development Friday comes amid much speculation, and even a tip-off by Barr, who said on Fox News’ “Hannity” that there would be a “development” in the investigation, teasing that it wouldn’t be “earth-shattering,” but would be “an indication that things are moving along at the proper pace as dictated by the facts in this investigation.”

 

“There are two different things going on,” Barr said. “I said the American people need to know what actually happened, we need to get the story of what happened in 2016 and ’17 out. That will be done.”

 

Barr also said that “if people crossed the line, if people involved in that activity violated criminal law, they will be charged.”

 

Barr touted Durham as an “independent” and “highly experienced” man, and said his investigation is “pursuing apace,” despite delays he blamed in part on the coronavirus pandemic.

 

Trump has been invested in the outcome of the Durham investigation, saying this week that he hopes Durham is “not going to be politically correct,” and warning that Barr could go down as “the greatest attorney general” or just “an average guy” — depending on what comes out of the months-long probe.

 

“I hope he’s doing a great job, and I hope they’re not going to be politically correct,” Trump said. “Obama knew everything. Vice President Biden, as dumb as he may be, knew everything, and everybody else knew.”

 

“And [former FBI Director James] Comey, and [former CIA Director John] Brennan, and [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, they were all terrible, they lied to Congress,” the president added.

 

Democrats, though, have voiced concern that the probe is being used for political purposes.

 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a recent podcast that Barr “may be using the power of the Justice Department through Durham or others to go after the president's enemies.”

 

Meanwhile, last month, Fox News reported that a declassified document revealed that the FBI agent who delivered a defensive briefing on election interference to the Trump campaign in August 2016 “actively listened” for certain topics – using it as a “cover” to monitor then-candidate Donald Trump and Michael Flynn, a source familiar with the document said.

 

The agent delivering the briefing was Joe Pientka. Pientka's notes followed an Aug. 17, 2016 briefing to then-candidate Trump, Michael Flynn and Chris Christie, "in support of ODNI briefings provided to U.S. Presidential candidates and two of their advisors."

 

The document was dated Aug. 30, 2016, and filed under “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI’s code name for its investigation into whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians to influence the 2016 election; “Crossfire Razor,” the FBI’s code name for the investigation into Michael Flynn; "Russia Sensitive Investigative Matter," and FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

 

The document stated that Clinesmith and FBI official Peter Strzok "approved" Pientka's notes.

 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

*****/END OF THE ARTICLE\*****

 

"The Democrat Clown Car Is Broken And Only Steers, NO Veers LEFT!"

 

Indy

Edited by Indraman
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The low-hanging fruit is beginning to get plucked.

Are they just rubes to be thrown under the bus to protect the real master-minds of this...

or are the evil architects ALL going to fall...

all the way up to Ho'bummer & Jarrett..?

 

We don't care if the left screams bloody murder at Election time, 

it's high time EVERYONE who did this gets a rope neck tie.

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5 minutes ago, SgtFuryUSCZ said:

The low-hanging fruit is beginning to get plucked.

Are they just rubes to be thrown under the bus to protect the real master-minds of this...

or are the evil architects ALL going to fall...

all the way up to Ho'bummer & Jarrett..?

 

We don't care if the left screams bloody murder at Election time, 

it's high time EVERYONE who did this gets a rope neck tie.

I agree!! :salute:

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August 15, 2020 Updated: August 15, 2020
 
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is turning over information to U.S. Attorney John Durham regarding the potential criminal actions of a former FBI official involved in the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
 
Bill Priestap was one of five FBI employees who briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, Graham said Friday, accusing the briefers of “completely whitewashing the truth about the reliability of the dossier.”
 
Ex-British spy Christopher Steele compiled second- and third-hand information into a dossier that appears to have been used by intelligence officials to spy on Trump’s campaign. The dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillarious Clinton, Trump’s Democrat rival.
 
None of the explosive allegations against Trump in the dossier were proven, and many have been undercut in the following years.
 
Graham’s committee released a partially-classified FBI interview with Steele’s primary source last month, further undermining the dossier’s credibility.
 
Graham said the information about Priestap is headed to Durham.
 
“What I’m going to do with this is turn it over to Durham because I think the briefing in 2018, a year after the subsource told the FBI the dossier was a bunch of garbage, whitewashing that report to the Senate Intel Committee is potentially another crime,” Graham said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Sean Hannity.”
 
“So, I’m going to send all of this to Durham when I get it.”
 

Graham described Priestap as “one of the leaders of Crossfire Hurricane,” the Trump campaign investigation. He said he was told by FBI Director Christopher Wray that Priestap briefed senators on the dossier.

 

Durham, tasked last year with reviewing how the FBI handled its probe into Trump’s campaign, charged a former FBI attorney earlier Friday. Kevin Clinesmith is expected to plead guilty to willfully altering the content of an email. He allegedly changed an email from the CIA stating that Carter Page, a former Trump campaign associate, was a known CIA source to say Page was “not a source” for the CIA.

 

An FBI special agent who received the email used it to get permission from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Page.

 

“What this lawyer did is a really big deal. We have to trust the system. There’s got to be a certain amount of trust. This is a lawyer, a man of the law, a member of the bar, who took it upon himself to falsify a document to keep an investigation going that should have been stopped,” Graham said.

 

“Something tells me that Mr. Clinesmith knows where the bodies are buried, and if I were in the FBI working on Crossfire Hurricane, I’d be very worried about right now.”

 

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.

 

Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieber
 
*****/END OF THE ARTICLE\*****
 
"The Democrat Clown Car Is Broken And Only Steers, NO Veers LEFT!"
 
Indy
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Declassified FBI Documents Show Double Standard for Trump, Clinton Campaigns: Graham

August 23, 2020 Updated: August 23, 2020

 

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters on Sunday that he believes the FBI sought to give former presidential candidate Hillarious Clinton an advantage over then-candidate Donald Trump before it could pursue a FISA warrant against individuals who were working for Trump.

 

“The FBI did the right thing by briefing Clinton and failed to do the right thing by never specifically briefing President Trump about their concerns,” Graham said in a statement on Sunday. He noted that the federal law enforcement agency declassified documents in recent days that demonstrated a “clear double standard” to benefit Clinton and harm Trump.

 

The declassified documents, his office said, showed that the FBI’s leadership in 2015 “sought to give the Clinton campaign a defensive briefing before an FBI field office could pursue a FISA warrant related to a threat posed to the Clinton campaign by a foreign government.”

 

But a year later, when there was a similar threat to Trump’s campaign, the FBI didn’t provide him with a defensive briefing and instead opened the now much-derided Crossfire Hurricane investigation to pursue FISA, or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, warrants against Trump.

 

“When it came to the Trump campaign, there were four counterintelligence investigations opened against Trump campaign associates. Not one time was President Trump defensively briefed about the FBI’s concerns,” Graham remarked. “Even more egregious, when the FBI gave a generic briefing to the Trump campaign about foreign influence, not only did they fail to mention the specific concerns about Trump associates, they sent an FBI agent into the briefing to monitor President Trump and General [Michael] Flynn.”

 

Graham noted in a video interview on Fox News Sunday that foreign governments will always attempt to interfere with and influence U.S. elections.

 

But there were “four counterintelligence investigations opened by the FBI against the Trump campaign” in 2016, he said. “They never tell him about it so he can fix it. … They never told Trump ‘oh, by the way, you’ve got a Carter Page problem, you’ve got a George Papadopoulos problem.’ As a matter of fact not only did they not tell Trump, they used a generic briefing to spy on Trump.”

 

Moving forward, Graham said there needs to be better safeguards for candidates to determine whether there are foreign governments trying to interfere with their respective campaigns.

 

If not, there is a “double standard” and “political bias” at play, he said. “I cannot tell you how inappropriate it is to do what they did to Trump. They never told him about the problem, they used the problem as a way to spy on him,” he said.

 

In July, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center reported China, Russia, and Iran are attempting to undermine the 2020 election.

 

However, the agency placed special emphasis on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), saying that Beijing is ramping up its efforts to shape American policy and is pressuring political figures while countering criticism of the regime ahead of the 2020 election and poses a more severe threat to American democracy than Russia or Iran.

 

*****/END OF THE ARTICLE\*****

 

"The Democrat Clown Car Is Broken And Only Steers, NO Veers LEFT!"

 

Indy

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  • 4 weeks later...

Mueller Team Had Lisa Page’s Phone It Claimed Was Lost, Email Shows

 

Special counsel team wiped at least 21 other phones, prompting congressional scrutiny
 
September 15, 2020 Updated: September 15, 2020
 

An official who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation wrote in a recently released email that he or she was in possession of an iPhone belonging to Lisa Page three days after the former FBI lawyer’s last day on the job and at a time when the device was thought to have been lost.

 

The special counsel’s office (SCO) and the Justice Department previously claimed to have no documents to show who handled Page’s iPhone after she turned it in on July 14, 2017, or who improperly wiped it two weeks later, before it could be checked for records, in violation of SCO policy.

But documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sept. 11 tell a different story, with three officials certifying that Page turned over her phone and one claiming to have been in possession of it.

 

“I have her phone and laptop,” an administrative officer with the initials LFW wrote in a July 17, 2017, email to Christopher Greer, an assistant director at the DOJ Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO).

Beth McGarry, the executive officer at the special counsel’s office, told Greer in an email sent earlier in the day that Page “returned her mobile phone and laptop.”

 

On the same day, a property custodian officer, whose name is redacted in the documents, signed a form on which Page certified that she turned in her phone and the officer certified that “all government property has been returned or otherwise properly accounted for.”

 

The July 17 timing of the two statements and the signature is significant. The DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) previously concluded that there were no records of who had the phone after July 14.

The records about Page’s phone are part of a DOJ disclosure that revealed that members of the Mueller team improperly wiped at least 22 iPhones before they could be checked for records.

 

“These irregularities with the phones of Mueller investigators are either sloppiness or the deliberate destruction of evidence—and it’s probably not sloppiness,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Epoch Times in an email.

 

On July 14, Page’s last day at the SCO, McGarry met Page to fill out her exit clearance form. Page checked a box on the form to certify that she “surrendered all government-owned property, including … cellular telephones.” McGarry signed the same form but later told the OIG that “that she did not physically receive Page’s issued iPhone.”

 

Page told the inspector general that she “had left her assigned cell phone and laptop on a bookshelf at the office on her final day there.”

McGarry left the special counsel’s office for the private sector in March 2019, according to her LinkedIn profile.

 

“The DOJ OIG investigated the circumstances of the mobile phone issued to Lisa Page by the Special Counsel’s Office,” McGarry told The Epoch Times in an email, referring to the December 2018 OIG report. She didn’t immediately respond to a follow-up query about how to reconcile differences between the findings of the report and the new documents.

 

The OIG, which interviewed the records officer, McGarry, Page, and LFW for the report, told The Epoch Times that the new documents aren’t at odds with its findings.

 

“We stand by the information in our text message report about Page turning in the device on July 14,” Stephanie Logan, a senior public affairs specialist at the OIG, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times.

The report concluded that neither Mueller’s office nor the DOJ “had records reflecting who handled the device or who reset it after Page turned in her iPhone on July 14, 2017.”

Page’s phone notably never made it into the hands of the special counsel’s records officer, who told the OIG that she never received the phone to examine it for any government records that would need to be retained.

 

“Phone not found,” the records officer noted in a log she kept about the records on the phones assigned to the special counsel’s office staff.

The DOJ found the device more than a year later and turned it over to the OIG, which determined that all of the data was deleted from the device on July 31, 2017.

Wiped iPhones

The records officer’s log shows that Page’s iPhone wasn’t the only device to elude an examination for government records. A total of at least 22 iPhones with unique asset tags used by the Mueller team were wiped before the records officer could review the contents, according to an Epoch Times review of four inventory logs and various forms released on Sept. 11.

 

The Mueller team offered a number of excuses for the deletions. Two people claimed the phones wiped themselves. Others said they erased all the data by accident or had to do so because they forgot their passwords. Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor, wiped his iPhone twice.

Mueller’s team used a total of 92 iPhones, according to the documents. Four of the phones appear in the inventory logs, but not on the records officer’s log, suggesting they were either recorded without their unique asset tag or evaded the officer entirely. One of the four phones belonged to deputy special counsel Aaron Zebley. Another belonged to Zainab Ahmad, a special counsel attorney.

 

One phone was partially wiped. Four phones were improperly handed over to the OCIO and wiped before the records officer’s review. As many as seven phones with no asset tags noted by the records officer were either reassigned or wiped before the officer could assess the device for records.

 

The pattern of questionable deletions has drawn the attention of lawmakers. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairmen of the finance and oversight committees, respectively, sent a letter to the DOJ and the FBI last week asking for more information about what happened with the phones.

 

“It appears that Special Counsel Mueller’s team may have deleted federal records that could be key to better understanding their decision-making process as they pursued their investigation and wrote their report,” Grassley wrote. “Indeed, many officials apparently deleted the records after the DOJ Inspector General began his inquiry into how the Department mishandled Crossfire Hurricane.”

 

Crossfire Hurricane is the FBI codename for the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign; Mueller took over the probe in May 2017.

 

Five months after Page left the special counsel’s office, the DOJ authorized a leak of 375 text messages between Page and Strzok, triggering a media firestorm over what the pair discussed. The initial and the subsequent releases of the texts showed that they expressed hatred for Trump and had a clear preference for his rival, former Secretary of State Hillarious Clinton. Strzok told Page that “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, discussed an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election, and mused about impeachment around the time he joined the Mueller team.

 

Page’s attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

 

The OIG discovered the biased Page-Strzok texts during an inquiry into the handling of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. After the inspector general informed Mueller of the texts in late July, Mueller removed Strzok from the Russia investigation. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told lawmakers that he learned of the text messages on July 27 and made the decision to remove Strzok the same day. Someone wiped Page’s phone four days later.

 

Strzok and Page played key roles in the FBI’s investigations of both the Trump campaign and Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email server. The OIG concluded that their bias cast a cloud over the email probe but didn’t ultimately influence the outcome of the investigation.

 

The OIG began looking for the phones belonging to Page and Strzok after being informed of a six-month gap in the text messages it had recovered. The inspector general received the pair’s four FBI Samsung phones in late January 2018.

 

On Jan. 26, 2018, Greer reached out to LFW to ask where Page’s SCO iPhone was, because the OIG wanted to speak to the official about the device.

 

“Yes. I know it is missing. We discovered that first,” LFW wrote back.

 

The DOJ tracked down the phone eight months later, in early September 2018 and handed it over to the OIG. The records officer later contacted the inspector general to find out if the phone was wiped.

“Yes that’s correct, the device had been reset to factory settings,” the OIG official wrote back.

 

Three months later, in December 2018, the OIG released the report on its hunt to recover additional text messages Page and Strzok sent on six phones they used, four of which were assigned by the FBI. The effort resulted in the discovery of hundreds of text messages, but none came from the special counsel’s office phones, both of which were wiped before investigators recovered them.

The following January, DOJ officials reached out to Verizon with a request for billing statements to check how many messages Page and Strzok sent on their special counsel’s office phones. Verizon responded by saying no text messages were sent, with a caveat that data did leave the device. Verizon’s report didn’t cover the most common way to send a message on an iPhone—the iMessage app—which uses an internet connection rather than the carrier’s text service.

“Both numbers did have data usage so it could mean that if any messages were sent, it could have been through some type of app but we would not know for sure from our end,” a message from Verizon stated.

Mueller concluded his 22-month investigation having found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

 

Follow Ivan on Twitter: @ivanpentchoukov
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Isn’t it ironic that The Mueller Investigation was to discovery the truth about The Russian Collusion Story and Obstruction by Trump.  

It appears they were really nothing more than a Deep State Cover Up Operation designed to hide the dirty truth.  Criminals, Traitors!!!!

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In addition to 22 wiped devices, at least 44 iPhones contained zero records, DOJ documents show
September 17, 2020 Updated: September 17, 2020

 

Forty-four iPhones used by members of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation contained no records when they were examined by an officer assigned to the team, according to internal documents.

 

Five more Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) phones contained only one record each, and four others contained fewer than 10 records per device, according to a log kept by a records officer over the course of more than 20 months.

The lack of records on the phones is extraordinary given the immense scope of the probe. It is also suspicious considering that at least 22 phones belonging to members of the Mueller team were wiped, with employees offering questionable explanations for the erasures.

 

Under U.S. law, government records are defined as “all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a federal agency under federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business  and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the United States government or because of the informational value of data in them.”

 

Of the 92 unique iPhones used by the Mueller team, only 12 contained a significant number of records, an Epoch Times review of available records determined.

 

Two well-known members of the Mueller team, FBI attorney Lisa Page and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok mentioned sending and clearing iMessages from their SCO iPhones on more than one occasion.

 

“Clear imsg …” Strzok wrote to Page on June 5, 2017, and again on June 8.

 

Apple’s iMessage service utilizes the internet data network to send messages that bypass the cellular carrier’s text message service. As a result, when the SCO asked Verizon to check how many text messages Strzok and Page sent during their tenure on the Mueller team, Verizon said that none were sent, but noted that data did leave the device.

 

The records officer, who isn’t identified in the documents, noted that Strzok’s phone contained “no substantive texts, notes or reminders.” Page’s phone went missing under questionable circumstances after she left the Mueller team. When it was recovered more than a year later, the device was already wiped.

 

The Department of Justice (DOJ), of which the SCO was a part, is bound by laws and regulations to preserve records and prevent them from being destroyed.

The DOJ’s “Records Management” page notably contains a statutory definition of what a record is that has been outdated since late 2014, when the relevant legislation was amended by Congress. The page also incorrectly attributes the definition to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The outdated language came from Congress.

 

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

The iPhones that had no records belonged to some of the key members of the special counsel team, including Mueller himself, deputy special counsel Aaron Zebley, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, and Andrew Weissman.

 

Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August to one false statement charge in connection to an email he forged while serving as the primary FBI attorney assigned to the SCO. He edited the email as part of the process for preparing a secret-court application for a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser.

Clinesmith, Page, and Strzok were among a group of officials who worked on the investigation of the Trump campaign and expressed intense bias against Trump. Strzok, who maintained an extramarital relationship with Page, spoke of stopping Trump from becoming president, mentioned an “insurance policy” in the unlikely case Trump won the election, and mused about impeachment around the time he joined Mueller’s team.

 

“I am so stressed about what I could have done differently,” Clinesmith wrote to his FBI colleague Sally Moyer on the day after Trump’s victory in November 2016. “I’m just devastated.”

 

“Plus, my [expletive] name is all over the legal documents investigating his staff,” he wrote a few messages later.

Messages from the trio offered the public an extraordinary glimpse into the nature of the investigation and now raise questions about why more than dozens of other Mueller team phones turned up with no records.

 

The records officer assigned to the Mueller team reviewed some of the phones more than once. As a result, some of the phones were recorded as having no records at one point and as having been wiped on another occasion. For purposes of clarity, such phones were counted toward the 22 which were wiped and not part of the 42 which had no records.

Some of the phones, such as the one belonging to Strzok, were reviewed for records as part of the exit procedure, wiped, and reassigned to another SCO member. Four of these reassigned phones also had no records when they were checked after being used by a new employee. One of the reassigned phones had one record.

Thirteen of the phones that were logged as having three or fewer records were each also wiped on separate occasions.

For example, the phone belonging to Weissmann, who has been described as the architect of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, contained no records when it was reviewed on March 28, 2019. Prior to that, Weissmann wiped his phone twice, in March and September 2018, claiming he erased it by accident on one occasion and by entering the wrong password too many times on another.

Members of Mueller’s team offered similar explanations to Weissmann’s for wiping their phones. At least two told the records officer that their phones wiped themselves.

In addition to the 22 wiped iPhones, five phones were improperly handed to the DOJ Office of Chief Information Officer and wiped before the SCO records officer could review them for records, according to the documents.

Mueller took over the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in May 2017. The special counsel operated with Trump in the White House and with the near-certain prospect that each employee’s actions would eventually be reviewed either by the Congress or the DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG was in regular contact with the SCO beginning less than a month after Mueller’s appointment and throughout 2018, documents show.

The IG interviewed SCO staff in 2018 as it searched for Page’s missing iPhone. With the exception of Strzok’s phone, all of the phones that were logged as having no records were reviewed after the IG contacted the SCO about Page’s phone in late January 2018.

Trump, who has repeatedly denounced the Mueller investigation as a hoax, responded to news of the wiped phones on Twitter.

“It has now been determined that the Mueller Scam should never have been set up in the first place, there were no grounds,” the president wrote. “It was all an illegitimate Witch Hunt, & a big price must be paid. How different my life would have been if this fraud on America was never committed!!!”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote letters to the FBI and DOJ requesting more information on the deleted phones. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) asked the IG to open a probe into the matter.

Follow Ivan on Twitter: @ivanpentchoukov
 
*****/END OF ARTICLE\*****

 

Indy

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FBI had information Steele dossier was part of 'Russian disinformation campaign,' declassified footnotes show

 

The FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team investigating the Trump 2016 campaign received multiple indications that former British spy Christopher Steele -- one of their key informants in their investigation -- was part of an elaborate "Russian disinformation campaign," according to several newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on FBI misconduct.

 

 

The FBI heavily relied on Steele's now-discredited dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on former Donald Trump aide Carter Page, in which FBI officials asserted that Page was an "agent" of Russia. However, the FBI did not share the information about the Russian disinformation campaign with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) when it moved to obtain the warrant, just as it did not tell the court that another Trump aide had denied collusion during a recorded conversation with an FBI informant.

 

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation," Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who had pushed for the declassification, said in a statement to Fox News on Friday. "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.”

 

At the same time, Grassley's office added that "the senators expect a fuller declassification in the coming days," including a version of the footnotes that does not redact the names of those who raised the alarm about Steele. Some in Grassley's office, including Grassley himself, have seen the fully declassified footnotes, and want them publicly released immediately, Fox News is told.

 

One of the footnotes, which was previously redacted in its entirety, read: “The [REDACTED] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations." That subset referred to the activities of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, whom Steele's dossier claimed had traveled to Prague to meet with Russian agents. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was unable to substantiate that claim, and Cohen has denied it.

 

The footnote goes on to state that a 2017 report “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.”

 

Another footnote stated: "According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1[Sergei Millian] had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS [Russian intelligence]. The document described reporting [REDACTED] that Person 1 'was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.' In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 [FBI Agent Joe Pietnka] that he had met with Glenn Simpson and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia."

 

 

Pientka was conspicuously removed from the FBI's website after Fox News contacted the FBI about his extensive role in Crossfire Hurricane FISA matters, but sources say he remains in the agency's field office in San Francisco in a senior role. Republicans have sought to question him repeatedly.

 

Millian contacted Fox News after this article was published, and strongly denied any links to illicit activities or intelligence services, saying there was an attempt to "frame" him that had backfired.

 

The newly released footnotes gave other reasons to doubt the knowledge and credibility of Steele's main sources, as well as the accuracy of Horowitz's own report.

 

 

"When interviewed by the FBI, the Primary Sub-source stated that he/she did not view his/her contacts as a network of sources, [REDACTED] with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations," one of the previously hidden footnotes reads.

 

That statement directly contradicted the executive summary of Horowitz's IG report, which asserted that Steele's Primary Sub-source "used his/her network of sub-sources to gather information that was then passed to Steele."

 

While Friday's disclosure was significant, the partial declassification of the footnotes didn't fully comply with previous requests to the DOJ from Grassley and Johnson, whose letter to Barr sought the full and complete declassification of the four footnotes in the IG report in January.

 

Grassley and Johnson wanted the DOJ to declassify footnotes 302, 334, 342 and 350; all were only partially unredacted, and 342 remains fully redacted.

 

The fully redacted footnote "refers to information received by a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team regarding possible previous attempts by a foreign government to penetrate and research a company or indiviudals associated with Christopher Steele," the DOJ said, adding that it would continue to "review" the footnote's classification for possible release. It was unclear which foreign government was implicated; the DOJ IG report refers to Russia numerous times without any redaction.

 

In a letter to Barr in January seeking the full declassification of four footnotes in Horowitz's report, Grassley and Johnson had written: "We are concerned that certain sections of the public version of the [IG] report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes within the classified report."

 

Friday's partial declassification, which suggested Steele's sources were part of a Russian interference effort, was immediately highlighted by Trump allies and Republicans, who have long pushed the administration to publicize more details of the FBI's flawed investigation, even as U.S. Attorney John Durham is pursuing a criminal probe into the conduct of U.S. intelligence agencies.

 

The FBI's legal counsel later described the warrant to surveil Page as "essentially a single source FISA" wholly dependent on the dossier, which also made numerous other unsubstantiated claims about Russian hackers in a nonexistent consulate in Miami, Cohen's purported trips to Prague, and lurid blackmail tapes.

 

 

Aspects of the Page FISA that did not rely on the dossier have not fared well, either. For example, The Washington Post ended up in the Page FISA application as a key source alongside the dossier. A 2016 opinion piece by the Post's Josh Rogin entitled, "Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine," had overstated developments at the Republican National Convention in 2016. A single delegate had proposed a sweeping amendment to change the GOP platform to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, in a major shift from the Obama administration's policy; parts of that amendment were rejected.

 

But, the Post's opinion piece framed the development as nefarious, and a possible smoking gun. In a Page FISA application, the FBI went on to cite Rogin's article word-for-word – without quotation marks, but with a footnoted citation – as evidence that the Trump campaign could be working with the Russians in an illicit manner. The FBI apparently did not obtain independent verification of the article’s claims.

 

"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," Grassley's office said in a statement to Fox News on Friday.

 

"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," Grassley and Johnson said separately. "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."

 

The senators continued: “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.

 

The Justice Department IG, Michael Horowitz, has found that the FBI systematically violated rules designed to protect Americans from unauthorized surveillance, including Page, prompting the FISC to rebuke the FBI and demand changes.

 

“Why have all these details remained unnecessarily secret for so long?" Page asked Fox News on Friday. "In our dual system of Justice, the Mueller Witch Hunt crew falsely misrepresented my own 'historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS,' when I was actually serving my country in support of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The time has finally come for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and related agencies to release the full facts about the Obama-Biden Administration’s election interference campaign against candidate Trump and the illicit coup attempt against our President.”

 

In Page's case, an ex-FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, even falsified an email from the CIA to make Page's Russian contacts seem nefarious, when Page in fact had been an informant to the CIA about those contacts, according to Horowitz.

 

It emerged separately on Thursday that an FBI confidential human source secretly recorded George Papadopoulos in the final days of the 2016 presidential election and pressed him over whether the Trump campaign was involved in Russian election meddling -- something the campaign aide emphatically denied, according to a transcript of that conversation.

 

Fox News obtained the transcript of the recording, which spreads over 171 pages. Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, is referred to in the transcript as "Crossfire Typhoon" or "CT."

 

The recording covers a more than four-hour conversation on Oct. 31, 2016. According to the obtained transcripts, the confidential human source (CHS) met with Papadopoulos and asked whether he thought Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

 

“No,” Papadopoulos replied.

 

The comments made by Papadopoulos are noteworthy because, according to officials, they were never provided or included in evidence to the FISC when seeking warrants to surveil Page over suspicion of Trump campaign ties to Russia.

 

When asked whether he thought the Russians had “special interests” in the election, Papadopoulos replied: “That’s all bullsh--. No one knows who’s hacking them,” and added that it “could be the Chinese, could be the Iranians, it could be some Bernie, uh supporters. Could be anonymous.”

 

Papadopoulos was then asked whether he thought Russians “have interest in Trump.”

 

 

“They, dude, no one knows how a president’s going to govern anyway. You don’t just say, oh I like—,” he said before being cut off. “I don’t know. Even Putin said it himself. It’s all, it’s like conspiracy theories.”

 

The source went on to press Papadopoulos, saying: “I feel like there’s some heavy Trump supporters out there that kind of want to rig this f—king election in Trump’s favor and then at the same time, I don’t know.”

 

Papadopoulos quipped: “Dude, you, you..there is no rigging in his favor.”

 

Durham's criminal probe concerning the FBI's Russia probe remains ongoing. Speaking to Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Thursday, Barr said he has seen troubling signs from the investigation.

 

Former FBI Director James Comey, left; U.S. Attorney John Durham, right.

Former FBI Director James Comey, left; U.S. Attorney John Durham, right.

 

"My own view is that the evidence shows that we're not dealing with just the mistakes or sloppiness," Barr told host Laura Ingraham. "There was something far more troubling here. We're going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted."

 

 

It has emerged since former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea that the FBI officials who interviewed Flynn, anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok and "SSA [Supervisory Special Agent] 1," have each separately been implicated by Horowitz in apparent misconduct and mismanagement in both the Flynn case and the Carter Page matter.

 

Strzok's anti-Trump bias is well-documented. The identity of SSA 1 is protected in the Flynn legal proceedings by a court order, but Fox News has reported that documents point to Joe Pientka, who moved last year from the Washington, D.C., area to San Francisco. Pientka briefly appeared on the FBI's website as an "Assistant Special Agent in Charge" of the San Francisco field office late last year, according to the Internet archive Wayback Machine.

 

However, Pientka no longer appears on any FBI website after being removed shortly after Fox News identified him as the unnamed SSA in the IG report; Fox News is told Pientka received a promotion to a senior role in the bureau's San Francisco field office. Pientka's extensive role in handling the Page FISA has been outlined in Horowitz's report, and top Republican senators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have requested that Pientka sit for an interview to explain himself.

 

Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report. 

 

*****/END OF THE ARTICLE \*****

 

Indy

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FBI official on Mueller team said Flynn prosecution had 'get Trump' attitude, collusion probe was 'not there'

FBI official William Barnett was assigned to lead the bureau's original investigation into Michael Flynn

 

An FBI official who served on Robert Mueller’s team said he believed the special counsel’s prosecution of former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn was part of an attitude to “get Trump,” and that he did not wish to pursue a Trump-Russia collusion investigation as it was “not there" and considered it to be a "dead end."

 

FBI agent William J. Barnett made the comments during an interview on Sept. 17 at the Justice Department, before Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri Jeffrey Jensen, who was tapped by Attorney General Bill Barr to review the case against Flynn. Jensen has joined U.S. Attorney John Durham’s team in his review of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. Those comments have surfaced in new government documents.

 

Fox News reviewed Barnett’s FBI 302, which was filed by the U.S. government early Friday as part of the Flynn case.

 

Barnett, during his interview, detailed his work at the FBI, and his assignment to the bureau’s original cases against Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Barnett said the Flynn investigation was assigned the code name “Crossfire Razor,” which was part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation — the bureau’s code name for the original Trump-Russia probe.

 

Barnett told investigators that he thought the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was “opaque” and “with little detail concerning specific evidence of criminal events.”

 

“Barnett thought the case theory was ‘supposition on supposition,’” the 302 stated, and added that the “predication” of the Flynn investigation was “not great,” and that it “was not clear” what the “persons opening the case wanted to ‘look for or at.’”

 

After six weeks of investigating, Barnett said he was “still unsure of the basis of the investigation concerning Russia and the Trump campaign working together, without a specific criminal allegation.”

 

Barnett began asking agents what they thought “the end game” was in the Flynn investigation, and suggested that they interview Flynn “and the case be closed unless derogatory information was obtained," but said he was “cautioned against” an interview of Flynn, due to concerns that it would “alert Flynn as to the investigation.”

 

Barnett, though, told investigators that he believed that Flynn’s position as White House national security adviser in the incoming Trump administration “offered an opportunity for the FBI to conduct the interview without alerting any suspicion and Flynn would see such an interview as being standard procedure.”

 

The 302 stated that Barnett ran the request to interview Flynn “up the chain,” but said the request was denied, and described the FBI’s investigation into Flynn as “top down”--meaning that “direction concerning the investigation was coming from senior officials," specifically then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who Barnett believed was “directing” the Flynn investigation.

 

Barnett, at the time, said that he believed the investigation was “problematic and could result in an inspector general investigation.”

 

“Barnett still did not see any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” the 302 stated. “Barnett was willing to follow any instructions being given by the deputy director as long as it was not a violation of the law.”

 

Barnett told investigators he believed the investigation into Flynn was a “check the box exercise, making sure all bases were covered, before the case was closed,” and said he “did not” think the case “was leading or headed toward prosecution.”

 

Nevertheless, Barnett said that he believed there were grounds to investigate “the other three subjects in Crossfire Hurricane, however, he thought Flynn was the ‘outlier.’” But Barnett, in the spring of 2017, gave a briefing on the Flynn investigation to a group of attorneys from the Special Counsel’s Office, including Jeanne Rhee.

 

“Barnett said he briefly went over the investigation, including the assessment that there was no evidence of a crime, and then discussed [REDACTED], which he thought was the more significant investigation,” the 302 stated.

 

Barnett told investigators that he thought “Rhee was obsessed with Flynn and Russia and she had an agenda.”

 

A day following the briefing, Barnett said he was contacted by former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who said “he really wanted Barnett to work with the special counsel’s office.”

 

According to the 302, Barnett told Strzok that he “did not wish to pursue the collusion investigation as it was ‘not there,'"  Ultimately, though, Barnett decided to work with Mueller’s team, “hoping his perspective would keep them from ‘group think.’”

 

Barnett added that he believed the appointment of Mueller in May 2017 “changed everything," and described the situation pertaining to the special counsel's office as "‘upside down’ with attorneys drafting search warrants and getting agents to simply act as affiants,” the 302 stated.

 

“Barnett thought there was a ‘get Trump’ attitude by some at the SCO,” the 302 continued.

 

One example Barnett shared was comments made by the president, saying investigators “needed to ‘get to the bottom’ of a matter. One of the SCO attorneys said Trump wanted to ‘cover it up.’”

 

Barnett “corrected it saying, ‘no, he said get to the bottom of it.’”

 

Barnett also said that “another example,” was when the president fired FBI Director James Comey, which he said was interpreted as “obstruction when it could just as easily have been done because Trump did not like Comey and wanted him replaced.”

 

But Barnett went on to tell investigators that it seemed that the attorneys on Mueller’s team “wanted to be part of something ‘big,’ a successful prosecution.”

 

“There was a lack of letting the evidence lead the investigation and more the attitude of ‘the evidence is there we just have to find it,’” Barnett’s 302 stated.

 

Meanwhile, Barnett said that in May 2017, former Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were interviewed several times. Barnett said “both investigations seemed to be nearing an end with nothing left to pursue.”

 

Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with making false statements to investigators as part of Mueller’s investigation.

 

Barnett also described the special counsel’s interview of former deputy White House national security adviser KT McFarland, who Mueller, according to Barnett, described as “the key to everything.”

 

“Barnett said it seems there was always someone at SCO who claimed to have a lead on information that would prove collusion, only to have the information be a dead end,” the 302 stated.

 

Flynn pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI regarding his communications with the Russian ambassador. Barnett said "some individuals" in Mueller's office "assumed Flynn was lying to cover up collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia."

 

"Barnett believed Flynn lied in his interview to save his job, as that was the most plausible explanation and there was no evidence to contradict it," the 302 stated. "Barnett believed the prosecution of Flynn by Mueller's office was used as a means to ‘get Trump.'"

 

The government’s filing of Barnett’s 302 in the Flynn docket comes just days before Flynn’s team and Justice Department attorneys will present arguments before Judge Emmet Sullivan with the hopes that he will dismiss the case.

 

Federal prosecutors, earlier this year, moved to dismiss Flynn's case — in which he had previously pleaded guilty to providing false statements to the FBI — after FBI records called into question the circumstances surrounding Flynn's interview with investigators. The Justice Department maintained that the FBI’s interview of Flynn was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

 

Flynn is set to be in federal court in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

 

Mueller’s investigation yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the election, although it did find that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systemic fashion." The question of whether Trump obstructed justice was not answered, but it did state that the final report "does not exonerate [Trump]" on this matter.

 

Meanwhile, Barnett’s interview with Jensen appears to be part of Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

 

Durham was appointed by Attorney General Barr last year to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe shortly after Mueller completed his yearslong investigation into whether the campaign colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election.

 

Durham’s timeline has been focused on July 2016, when the FBI’s original Russia probe began, through the appointment of Mueller in May 2017.

 

Durham’s investigation has been slowed by the coronavirus pandemic, but that has not blunted the level of anticipation from President Trump, his Republican allies on Capitol Hill and his supporters, some of whom have called for findings to be released before November's presidential election.

 

*****/END OF THE ARTICLE\*****

 

Indy

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5 minutes ago, Johnny Dinar said:

But we can't believe anything the FBI says... They are part of the Deep State... Or maybe just the ones who disagree, like his appointee Mr. Wray...

 

@Johnny Dinar, you really are a dogmatic idealogue. It would be good for you to get used to the fact that the Democrat Party will be reduced to a "minority" party for the next 20 years.

 

Everything the Democrat Party did was refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election, and like sniveling, whining teenagers, throwing temper tantrums for all to see.

 

"The Democrat Clown Car Is Broken And Only Steers, NO Veers LEFT!"

 

Indy

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55 minutes ago, Indraman said:

 

@Johnny Dinar, you really are a dogmatic idealogue. It would be good for you to get used to the fact that the Democrat Party will be reduced to a "minority" party for the next 20 years.

 

Everything the Democrat Party did was refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election, and like sniveling, whining teenagers, throwing temper tantrums for all to see.

 

"The Democrat Clown Car Is Broken And Only Steers, NO Veers LEFT!"

 

Indy

 

It seems there is always whining after these elections... Remember Bush/Gore? That was insane.

 

As for minority, in 20 years white Americans, you and I, are going to be the minority...

 

JMHO

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1 hour ago, Johnny Dinar said:

But we can't believe anything the FBI says... They are part of the Deep State... Or maybe just the ones who disagree, like his appointee Mr. Wray...

 

Johnny your post shows your lack of knowledge on the FBI’s role in the Russian Collusion/Spygate Story.  You need to get out of the MSNBC mindset and seek the truth.  This story is the biggest SCANDAL in US History.  The Russian Collusion lie makes Watergate look like child’s play.  The rank and file employees of the FBI are not the Deep State.  Their story will be revealed and the entire truth will come out one day.  

 

James Comey, McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Paige, Bruce Ohr, and a few others have all lied to Congress and are probably going to get indicted.  Those people were the FBI leadership and are now gone, disgraced, caught up in the Dems stupid scheme to “get Trump”.  Christopher Wray will be fired for his continuing stance of covering up and his idiotic statement on Antifa. 

 

Go to Amazon and buy a few of John Solomon’s books on the “Deep State” to learn about the incredible corruption going on in DC.  He is an award winning journalist and his books are fully researched.  It’s ludicrous that the National Media won’t report the true story.  They are complicit in the Russian Collusion Lie and simply cannot be trusted since they have become an arm of the DNC, State Run Propaganda. 

 

 

Use a little common sense and a dose of critical thinking and ask yourself why would the Dems and some Reps be so afraid of a Trump win in 2016 that they were willing to break so many laws to frame him.  Could it be that Trump has the dirty details of the Epstein Island, or the Quid Pro Quo by many of our Political Elites.  It’s probably both and the stories are breaking almost daily if you bother to read them.  DC is corrupt and they are going down.  

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Pitcher said:

 

Johnny your post shows your lack of knowledge on the FBI’s role in the Russian Collusion/Spygate Story.  You need to get out of the MSNBC mindset and seek the truth.  This story is the biggest SCANDAL in US History.  The Russian Collusion lie makes Watergate look like child’s play.  The rank and file employees of the FBI are not the Deep State.  Their story will be revealed and the entire truth will come out one day.  

 

James Comey, McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Paige, Bruce Ohr, and a few others have all lied to Congress and are probably going to get indicted.  Those people were the FBI leadership and are now gone, disgraced, caught up in the Dems stupid scheme to “get Trump”.  Christopher Wray will be fired for his continuing stance of covering up and his idiotic statement on Antifa. 

 

Go to Amazon and buy a few of John Solomon’s books on the “Deep State” to learn about the incredible corruption going on in DC.  He is an award winning journalist and his books are fully researched.  It’s ludicrous that the National Media won’t report the true story.  They are complicit in the Russian Collusion Lie and simply cannot be trusted since they have become an arm of the DNC, State Run Propaganda. 

 

 

Use a little common sense and a dose of critical thinking and ask yourself why would the Dems and some Reps be so afraid of a Trump win in 2016 that they were willing to break so many laws to frame him.  Could it be that Trump has the dirty details of the Epstein Island, or the Quid Pro Quo by many of our Political Elites.  It’s probably both and the stories are breaking almost daily if you bother to read them.  DC is corrupt and they are going down.  

 

 

 

Thanks Pitcher.. I will check out Solomon's books..

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You won’t see a story like this from the National Media. This is John Brennan CIA Chief.  He’s probably the one who concocted the entire RC Lie.  

 

 

Secret Report: How CIA's Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillarious

Above, ex-CIA officer Julia Gurganus with former deputy Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Brennan allies who worked on the Trump-Russia intelligence community assessment.

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
September 24, 2020

Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.

The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillarious Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

John Durham: He is said to be using the long-hidden report on the drafting of the ICA as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence. 
Department of Justice via AP

The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”

The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

“They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.

He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment that Putin personally ordered "active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was “weak."

The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.

The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” which was the interagency analytical group Obama's top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.

Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.

The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.

A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal investigation and  “only a witness to events that are under review.”  Durham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden Victory Fund.

Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC, a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that  oversees the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.

It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined comment.

Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Russia’s election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case “based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it's based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence.”

But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.

It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.

“Some of the FBI source’s [Steele’s] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment,” stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists. “The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’ “

Steele's reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department’s inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele’s own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department’s watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the “Crown material,” was incorporated with the ICA because it was “corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment “The IC analysts found it credible on its face,” Comey said.

The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.

“The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election,” said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.

Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence. “To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous,” she recently told NBC News.

Her boss during the ICA’s drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.

They, in turn, worked closely with NIC’s cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike’s president has testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)

Durham’s investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports. 

No Input From CIA's 'Russia House'

The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.

“It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. "It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.”

The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.

The official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe.

The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.

“It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment," as has been widely reported in the media, he said. "It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”

Brennan's tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.

In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found "no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

"The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump,” argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.

“Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported,” Warner added. "There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared.”

Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen Instutute event.

However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled “Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election.” Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with “varying substantiation” and with “differing confidence levels.” It also notes “concerns about the use of specific sources.”

Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his "fusion team" at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco’s role in the ICA is unclear.

Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.

Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.

“It’s dynamite,” said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.

"There are things in there that people don’t know,” he told RCI. “It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election.”

However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.

He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.

Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan’s questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.

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