James Comey

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Alan Dershowitz: Look, the most important development happened TODAY. The Supreme Court of the United States absolutely pulled the rug out of part two of the impeachment referral by granting certiorari, by granting review in a case where Trump challenged a congressional subpoena! And the Supreme Court said we’re going to hear this case!… Think of what that message is – It’s Trump was right!

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www.zerohedge.com/political/impeachment-drama-doomed-fail-bad-casting

The Democratic leaders in Congress really should have checked with Central Casting before picking the stars of their passion play: “The Impeachment and Destruction of Donald Trump.”



Former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill was supposed to appear as a principled and dignified heroine. Instead, her virulent hate, ignorance and contempt for Russia were apparent to all. And she looked uncannily identical to the late Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.


Congressman Adam Schiff chaired the House Intelligence Committee hearing and was supposed to be the wise, fearless and incorruptible chairman. Instead, the camera’s cruel, unblinking eye revealed him as a buffoon – and a sinister one at that.

Schiff’s round bald dome was identical to Mussolini’s and his ridiculous bulging eyes are those of Christopher Lloyd’s evil cartoon villain Judge Doom in the Hollywood movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

The supposedly heroic Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council was even worse – Presented as an all-American Patriot, instead he resembled the thick, hulking brutal thug that Hollywood Central Casting always chooses to play endless Russian intelligence service or criminal villains in thousands of bad primetime TV shows.

Kurt Volker was almost as bad. He was the quiet cool, calm, bespectacled villain – always a CIA bureaucrat and usually played by Ronnie Cox – who wants to feed Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to the villains.

And of course – the Real Hero could not appear at all. The Whistleblower’s identity is being jealously guarded – though as Senator Rand Paul has pointed out, everyone knows who he is and – far from being a Disinterested Pure Hero, he was a CIA veteran and former senior National Security Council official outspoken in his contempt for the President of the United States: In other words, yet another anonymous Deep State manipulator and apparatchik.

No doubt he will be revealed as the winner on the Fox Television Channel’s popular show, “The Masked Singer.”

Or perhaps he will reveal himself in an exclusive interview with a fawning Rachel Maddow, still masked and identified as “The Lone Ranger.”

(Is this The Whistleblower?)

Now Rand Paul does have the looks, the bearing, the moral fervor and the dramatic character to play the hero in this botched fiasco of a drama. But there is only one small problem. He is on the other side. He has forcefully publicly defended President Donald Trump.

Gravity – Albert Einstein assures us – “bends” light (A dubious assertion at best but at least Einstein, unlike Schiff and Company Looked the Part he always played – Lovable, Child-Like Jewish Genius Who Never Gets a Hair Cut) And Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has bent the brains of movie directors Nancy Pelosi and Schiff.

Trump Derangement Syndrome: a fearful, incurable affliction more terrible and humiliating than Alzheimer’s: Better to forget who you are than remember you are a hate-crazed, foaming at the mouth, credulous idiot who will believe anything.

Like all policy wonks of their aging generation of corrupt and complacent Baby Boomers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Schiff have salivated at the thought of inflicting a “Watergate 2” impeachment drama comeuppance on Donald Trump.

But the Villain of Watergate, Richard Nixon, was indeed an inept and more than slightly sinister creep (and lifelong liberal). He looked the part and he exuded pious bogus ineptitude on camera his entire career. (Nixon’s inspiration for how he projected himself on television was clearly Jack Webb playing Sergeant Joe Friday in the wonderfully badly acted “Dragnet” police series on US television in the 1950s.)

By contrast, Donald Trump channels John Wayne, the most popular and enduring movie star in American history:

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Trump is a physically big and fearless New York construction businessman turned immensely successful popular entertainer. He, like Wayne is a natural athlete. It is a matter of public record ignored by all fearful liberal wimps that Trump really was offered a contract after college to be Major League Baseball player for the Phillies, but he turned it down to focus on his business career.

Working class American Heartland men and women over 40 instinctively loved Wayne and therefore they love Trump too. Aging American feminists like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren – and the further they are over 50, the more rabid and rage crazed and insane they become – hated Wayne and are traumatized by his resurrection as a defining national culture hero nearly four decades after his physical death echoing in the figure of Trump.

It was Trump’s genius at silent reaction shots that ridiculed 17 Republican Congress members, Senators and Governors in the 2015-16 campaign before he even began to turn his wit and video skills on Hillary Clinton – a creepy Richard Nixon clone if there was one.

Trump was crafted by Fate and his brilliant media career from The Apprentice to Worldwide Wrestling Central Casting to be the Hero of Impeachment. Making him the villain reverses the entire emotional dynamic of the drama. It is like casting James Stewart as Nixon. (At worst, Trump is classic King Kong eternally plagued by those pesky biplanes: And everybody roots for Kong)

Liberals who loved Watergate went into emotional frenzies over Nixon’s imagined humiliation at the hands of such ludicrous pompous and overpaid fools as Dan Rather of CBS.

Pelosi and her laughably misnamed “advisers” have learned nothing from all this. This week, we are seeing yet more interminable biased show-trial hearings and the even more ludicrous Jerrold Nadler has taken center stage. He looks like Frankenstein’s dwarf –servant Igor in Mel Brooks’ classic 1973 comic horror movie “Young Frankenstein.”

The bottom line on why Impeachment has failed so miserably to whip up a storm or convince anyone beyond the already committed “Trump Must Go”, babies-throwing-tantrums across Liberal America lies in the childishness and elemental incompetence of its cast and directors. Being repulsive and ridiculous human beings themselves, they have no clue how obvious it would be that they would appear that way to everyone else.

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www.zerohedge.com/political/rudy-giuliani-can-barely-contain-himself-over-his-ukraine-findings

Rudy Giuliani is grinning like the Cheshire cat. His standard smile.

For the past several weeks, the personal attorney to President Trump has been in Ukraine, interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence to shed light on what the Bidens were up to during the Obama years, and get to the bottom of claims that Kiev interfered in the 2016 US election in favor of Hillary Clinton. He has enlisted the help of former Ukrainian diplomat, Andriy Telizhenko, to gather information from politicians and ask them to participate in a documentary series in partnership with One America News Network (OANN) - which will make the case for investigating the Bidens as well as Burisma Holdings - the natural gas firm which employed the son of a sitting US Vice President in a case which reeks of textbook corruption.



According to the Journal, Giuliani will present findings from his self-described "secret assignment" in a 20-page report.

Trump and Giuliani say then-Vice President Biden engaged in corruption when he called for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor who had investigated a Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board. The Bidens deny wrongdoing, and ousting the prosecutor was a goal at the time of the U.S. and several European countries. -Wall Street Journal

(Note the Wall Street Journal's use of a straw man when they write: "The allegations of Ukrainian election interference are at odds with findings by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was behind the election interference."

Apparently the three journalists who collaborated on the article didn't get the memo that two countries can meddle at the same time, nor did any of them read the January, 2017 Politico article: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire - which outlines how Ukrainian government officials conspired with a DNC operative to hurt the Trump campaign during the 2016 election - a move which led to the disruptive ouster of campaign chairman Paul Manafort).


Rudy Giuliani’s trip to Kyiv this month, which he described as a “secret assignment,” included a meeting with Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. PHOTO: PRESS OFFICE OF ANDRIY DERKACH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Telizhenko, the former diplomat, tells the Journal that the plan for the series was conceived during the impeachment hearings as a way for Giuliani to tell his side of the story. The former Ukrainian diplomat flew to Washington on November 20 to film with Giuliani, while in early December he accompanied America's Mayor on the Kiev trip - stopping in Budapest, Vienna and Rome.

Rudy comes home

Upon his return to New York on Saturday, Giuliani says he took a call from President Trump while his plane was still taxiing down the runway, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"What did you get?" Trump asked. "More than you can imagine," answered the former New York mayor who gained notoriety in the 1980s for taking down the mob as a then-federal prosecutor.



According to the 77-year-old Giuliani, Trump instructed him to brief Attorney General William Barr and GOP lawmakers on his findings. Soon after, the president then told reporters at the White House, "I hear he has found plenty."

Rudy has been working on this project for a while. In late January, he conducted phone interviews with former Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yiury Lutsenko. On the call was George Boyle - Giuliani's Chief Operating Officer and Director of Investigations. Boyle started as a NYPD beat cop in 1987, and was promoted to detective - eventually joining the Special Victims Squad. In short, the ever-grinning Giuliani has some serious professionals working on this.

"When he believes he’s right, he loves taking on fights," said longtime Giuliani friend, Tony Carbonetti.

That said, Giuliani's efforts have not gone off without a hitch. In October, two associates - Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both of whom assisted with his Ukraine investigation, were related in October on campaign-finance charges. Both men have pleaded not guilty, while Giuliani denies wrongdoing and says they did not lobby him. Parnas, notably, was also on the January call with Shokin and Lutsenko as a translator.



In pressing ahead on Ukraine, Mr. Giuliani has replaced the translation skills of Messrs. Parnas and Fruman with an app he downloaded that allows him to read Russian documents by holding his phone over them. But on his recent trip, he said, “despite whatever else you can say, I missed them.” -Wall Street Journal

Trump opponents insist Giuliani is conducting shadow foreign policy and orchestrated the ouster of former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch - who Ukraine's new president Volodomyr Zelensky complained on a now-famous July 25 phone call accused of not recognizing his authority.

In the impeachment hearings, witnesses accused Mr. Giuliani of conducting a shadow foreign policy and orchestrating the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. He was described as “problematic” and “disruptive” and, in testimony that cited former national security adviser John Bolton, likened to a “hand grenade that’s going to blow everybody up.” Mr. Giuliani has said he kept the State Department apprised of his efforts and that he was working at the president’s behest. -Wall Street Journal

"Just having fun while Dems and friends try to destroy my brilliant career," Giuliani wrote in a text message while conducting his investigation overseas.

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www.politico.com/news/2019/12/14/jeff-van-drew-change-parties-085036

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a moderate Democrat who is strongly opposed to impeaching President Donald Trump, is expected to switch parties and become a Republican, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

Van Drew is one of two Democrats who voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Trump and has remained against the effort, even as the House prepares to vote to impeach the president next week. Van Drew’s decision comes after a meeting with Trump on Friday.

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www.zerohedge.com/political/ig-report-fbi-spying-exposes-scandal-historic-magnitude-us-media

Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday’s issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.



Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.


If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.



Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that “the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016 election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be held.

About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.'” Specifically, “we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”

It’s vital to reiterate this because of its gravity: we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.



The specifics cited by the IG Report are even more damning. Specifically, “based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained [] seven significant inaccuracies and omissions.” Among those “significant inaccuracies and omissions”: the FBI concealed that Page had been working with the CIA in connection with his dealings with Russia and had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts after he was “approved as an ‘operational contact'” with Russia; the FBI lied about both the timing and substance of Page’s relationship with the CIA; vastly overstated the value and corroboration of Steele’s prior work for the U.S. Government to make him appear more credible than he was; and concealed from the court serious reasons to doubt the reliability of Steele’s key source.

Moreover, the FBI’s heavy reliance on the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant – a fact that many leading national security reporters spent two years denying occurred – was particularly concerning because, as the IG Report put it, “we found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications.”

To spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of an election, one who had just been working with one of the two major presidential campaigns, the FBI touted a gossipy, unverified, unreliable rag that it had no reason to believe and every reason to distrust, but it hid all of that from the FISA court, which it knew needed to believe that the Steele Dossier was something it was not if it were to give the FBI the spying authorization it wanted.

In 2017, the FBI decided to seek reauthorization of the FISA warrant to continue to spy on Page, and sought and obtained it three times: in January, April and June, 2017. Not only, according to the IG Report, did the FBI repeat all of those “seven significant inaccuracies and omission,” but added ten additional major inaccuracies. As the Report put it: “In addition to repeating the seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application and outlined above, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the three renewal applications, based upon information known to the FBI after the first application and before one or more of the renewals.”

Among the most significant new acts of deceit was that the FBI “omitted the fact that Steele’s Primary Subsource, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was ‘nothing bad’ about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with Sechin.”

In other words, Steele’s own key source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the source said: an obviously critical fact that the FBI simply concealed from the FISA court because it knew how devastating that would be to being able to continue to spy on Page. As the Report put it, “among the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the renewal applications was the FBI’s failure to advise [DOJ] or the court of the inconsistences, described in detail in Chapter Six, between Steele and his Primary Sub-source on the reporting relied upon in the FISA applications.”

The IG Report also found that the FBI hid key information from the court about Steele’s motives: for instance, it “omitted information obtained from [Bruce] Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that (1) Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others, (2) [Fusion GPS’s Glenn] Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.”

If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?

* * * * *

But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.



Ever since Trump’s inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I’m included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico’s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio”:

In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows. . . .

[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren’t in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty—and this is no slam—is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.

In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don’t want to make news—they just want to talk about it.

It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.



But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.

Congrats to my friend @joshscampbell, CNN’s newest national Correspondent. His passion for going where the news is and covering important stories will continue to benefit viewers. pic.twitter.com/j49k0KOzNj

— Sam Vinograd (@sam_vinograd) November 19, 2019

The past three years of “Russiagate” reporting – for which U.S. journalists have lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat – has relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and yes, that’s a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false propaganda, as in this enduringly humiliating instance:

John Brennan has a lot to answer for—going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he’s got secret info, and repeatedly turning in performances like this. pic.twitter.com/EziCxy9FVQ

— Terry Moran (@terrymoran) March 25, 2019
All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective.

For years, we were told by the nation’s leading national security reporters something that was blatantly false: that the FBI’s warrants to spy on Carter Page were not based on the Steele Dossier. GOP Congressman Devin Nunes was widely vilified and mocked by the super-smart DC national security reporters for issuing a report claiming that this was the case. The Nunes memo in essence claimed what the IG Report has corroborated: that embedded within the FBI’s efforts to obtain FISA court authorization to spy on Carter Page was a series of misrepresentations, falsehoods and concealment of key evidence:



As the Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi – one of the few left/liberal journalists with the courage and integrity to dissent from the DNC/MSNBC script on these issues – put it in a detailed article:

“Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous ‘Nunes memo.’”

That the Page warrant was based on the Steele Dossier was something that the media servants of the FBI and CIA rushed to deny. Did they have any evidence for those denials? That would be hard to believe, given that the FISA warrant applications are highly classified. It seems far more likely that – as usual – they were just repeating what the FBI and CIA (and the pathologically dishonest Rep. Adam Schiff) told them to say, like the good and loyal puppets that they are. But either way, what they kept telling the public – in highly definitive tones – was completely false, as we now know from the IG Report:

Yes. I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) January 12, 2018


New: Two Democratic members of House Intel tell me McCabe did not say dossier was basis of FISA warrant, disputing central claim of #NunesMemo

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) February 2, 2018
Over and over, the IG Report makes clear that, contrary to these denials, the Steele Dossier was indeed crucial to the Page eavesdropping warrant. “We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,” the IG Report explained. A central and essential role.

Just compare the pompous denials from so many U.S. national security reporters at the nation’s leading news outlets – that the Page warrant was not based on the Steele Dossier – to the actual truth that we now know:

“in support of the fourth element in the FISA application-Carter Page’s alleged coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the application relied entirely on the following information from Steele Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102″ (emphasis added).

Indeed, it was the Steele Dossier that led FBI leadership, including Director James Comey and Deputy Diretor Andrew McCabe, to approve the warrant application in the first place despite concerns raised by other agents that the information was unreliable. Explains the IG Report:

FBI leadership supported relying on Steele’s reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then NSD’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over QI, that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC, and that the foreign intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would probably not be worth the ‘risk’ of being criticized later for collecting communications of someone (Carter Page) who was “politically sensitive.”

The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie. Yet again, U.S. discourse was subsumed by propaganda because the U.S. media and key parts of the security state have decided that subverting the Trump presidency is of such a high priority – that their political judgment outweighs the results of the election – that everything, including outright lying even to courts let alone the public, is justified because the ends are so noble.

As Taibbi put it:

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“No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.”

No matter how dangerous you believe the Trump presidency to be, this is a grave threat to the pillars of U.S. democracy, a free press, an informed citizenry and the rule of law.

* * * * *

Underlying all of this is another major lie spun over the last three years by the newly-minted media stars and liberal icons from the security state agencies. Ever since the Snowden reporting – indeed, prior to that, when the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Jim Risen (now with the Intercept) revealed in 2005 that the Bush-era NSA was illegally spying on U.S. citizens without the warrants required by law – it was widely understood that the FISA process was a rubber-stamping joke, an illusory safeguard that, in reality, offered no real limits on the ability of the U.S. Government to spy on its own citizens. Back in 2013 at the Guardian, I wrote a long article, based on Snowden documents, revealing what an empty sham this process was.



But over the last three years, the strategy of Democrats and liberals – particularly their cable outlets and news sites – has been to venerate and elevate security state agents as the noble truth-tellers of U.S. democracy. Once-reviled-by-liberal sites such as Lawfare – composed of little more than pro-NSA and pro-FBI apparatchiks – gained mainstream visibility for the first time on the strength of a whole new group of liberals who decided that the salvation of U.S. democracy lies not with the political process but with the dark arts of the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.



Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.

The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.

In an excellent article on the fallout from the IG Report, the New York Times’ Charlie Savage, long one of the leading journalistic experts on these debates, makes clear how devastating these revelations are to this concocted narrative designed to lead Americans to trust the FBI and NSA’s eavesdropping authorities:

At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”…

His exposé left some former officials who generally defend government surveillance practices aghast.

“These errors are bad,” said David Kris, an expert in FISA who oversaw the Justice Department’s National Security Division in the Obama administration. “If the broader audit of FISA applications reveals a systematic pattern of errors of this sort that plagued this one, then I would expect very serious consequences and reforms”….

Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.

Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request. . . .

But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.

This system of unlimited domestic spying was built by both parties, which only rouse themselves to object when the power lies in the other side’s hands. Just last year, the vast majority of the GOP caucus joined with a minority of Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to hand President Trump all-new domestic spying powers while blocking crucial reforms and safeguards to prevent abuse. The spying machinery that Edward Snowden risked his life and liberty to expose always has been, and still is, a bipartisan creation.

Perhaps these revelations will finally lead to a realization about how rogue, and dangerous, these police state agencies have become, and how urgently needed is serious reform. But if nothing else, it must serve as a tonic to the three years of unrelenting media propaganda that has deceived and misled millions of Americans into believing things that are simply untrue.

None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences. Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.

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www.zerohedge.com/political/can-we-impeach-fbi-now

Can We Impeach The FBI Now?
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by Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/14/2019 - 17:30
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Authored by Peter van Buren via TheAmericanConservative.com,

The release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, which shows that the Democrats, media, and FBI lied about not interfering in an election, will be a historian’s marker for how a decent nation fooled itself into self-harm. Forget about foreigners influencing our elections; it was us.

The Horowitz Report is being played by the media for its conclusion: that the FBI’s intel op run against the Trump campaign was not politically motivated and thus “legal.”




That covers one page of the 476-page document, but because it fits with the Democratic/mainstream media narrative that Trump is a liar, the rest has been ignored.

“The rest,” of course, is a detailed description of America’s domestic intelligence apparatus, aided by its overseas intelligence apparatus, and assisted by its Five Eyes allies’ intelligence apparatuses. And the conclusion is that they unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign against a presidential candidate in order to influence an election, and when that failed, they tried to delegitimize a president.



We learn from the Horowitz Report that it was an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his own nation’s intel services and the Clinton Foundation, who set up a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos, creating the necessary first bit of info to set the plan in motion. We find the FBI exaggerating, falsifying, and committing wicked sins of omission to buffalo the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts into approving electronic surveillance on Team Trump to overtly or inadvertently monitor the communications of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Rick Gates, Trump transition staffers, and likely Trump himself. Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ, the information shared with their NSA partners, a piece of all this still not fully public.

We learn that the FBI greedily consumed the Steele Dossier, opposition “research” bought by the Clinton campaign to smear Trump with allegations of sex parties and pee tapes. Most notoriously, the dossier claims he was a Russian plant, a Manchurian Candidate, owned by Kremlin intelligence through a combination of treats (land deals in Moscow) and threats (kompromat over Trump’s evil sexual appetites). The Horowitz Report makes clear the FBI knew the Dossier was bunk, hid that conclusion from the FISA court, and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming that the Dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the Dossier. The FBI knew Steele had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported his goals.

Horowitz contradicts media claims that the Dossier was a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was “central and essential.” And it was garbage: “factual assertions relied upon in the first [FISA] application targeting Carter Page were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.” One of Steele’s primary sources, tracked down by FBI, said Steele had misreported several of the most troubling allegations of potential Trump blackmail and campaign collusion.

We find human dangles, what Lisa Page referred to as “our OCONUS lures” (OCONUS is spook-speak for Outside CONtinental US) in the form of a shady Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud, who himself has deep ties to multiple U.S. intel agencies and the Pentagon, paying Trump staffers for nothing speeches to buy access to them. We find a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer (pillow talk is always a spy’s best friend). It becomes clear the FBI sought to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence threat as an excuse to unleash its surveillance tools against the Trump campaign.

We learn that Trump staffer Carter Page, while under FBI surveillance, was actually working for the CIA in Russia. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported it to the FISA court while seeking approval for its secret investigation of Page. An FBI lawyer even doctored an email to hide the fact that Page was working for the Agency and not the Russians; it was that weak a case. The Horowitz Report went on to find “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” concerning FBI efforts to obtain FISA warrants against Page alone. California Congressman Devin Nunes raised these points almost two years ago in a memo the MSM widely discredited, even though we now know it was basically true and profoundly prescient.

Page was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Horowitz explains that agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, largely due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug.

Carter Page was never charged with any crime. He was blown into a big deal only by the fictional Steele Dossier, an excuse for the FBI to electronically surveil the Trump campaign.

When Trump was elected, the uber-lie that he was dirty with Russia was leaked to the press most likely by James Comey and John Brennan in January 2017 (not covered in the Horowitz Report), and a process, which is still ongoing, tying the president to a foreign power, began. “With Trump, All Roads Lead to Moscow,” writes the New York Times even today, long after both the Mueller Report and now the Horowitz Report say unambiguously otherwise. “Monday’s congressional hearing and the inspector general’s report tell a similar story,” bleats the Times, when in fact the long read of both says precisely the opposite.

Michael Horowitz, the author of this current report, should be a familiar name. In January 2017, he opened his probe into the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. In a damning passage, that 568-page report found it “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors…for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”

Horowitz’s Clinton report also criticizes FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email probe to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts “brought discredit” to the FBI and sowed public doubt. They included one exchange reading, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

If after reading the Horowitz Report you want to focus only on its page one statement that the FBI did not act illegally, you must in turn focus on what is “legal” in America. If you want to follow the headlines saying Trump was proven wrong when he claimed his campaign was spied upon, you really do need to look up that word in a dictionary and compare it to the tangle of surveillance, foreign government agents, undercover operatives, and payoffs that Horowitz details.

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You may accept the opening lines of the Horowitz Report that the FBI did not act with political bias over the course of its investigation. Or you can find a clearer understanding in Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Report: “that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions.” You will need to reconcile the grotesque use the information the FBI gathered was put to after Trump was elected, the fuel for the Mueller investigation, and years’ worth of media picking at the Russian scab.

The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt that the Bureau tried to influence the election of a president and then delegitimize him when he won. It wasn’t the Russians; it was us. And if you walk away concluding that the FBI fumbled things, acted amateurishly, failed to do what some claim they set out to do, well, just wait until next time.

On a personal note, if any of this is news to you, you may want to ask why you are only learning about it now. The American Conservative has been one of the few outlets that’s consistently exposed the Steele Dossier as part of an information op nearly since it was unveiled, and which has explained how the FISA court was manipulated, and which has steadily raised the question of political interference in our last election by American intelligence services. We claim no magical powers or inside information. To those of us who have been on the fringes of intelligence work, what was obvious just from the publicly available information was, well, obvious.

If you are reading any of this for the first time, or know people who are reading bastardized MSM versions of it for the first time, you might ask yourself why those outlets went along with Steele, et al. Their journalists are no dumber or smarter than ours. They do, however, write with a different agenda. Keep that in mind as we flip the calendar page to 2020.

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www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/12/14/jill-biden-hunter-did-nothing-wrong/

Jill Biden: ‘Hunter Did Nothing Wrong’

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Up,” former Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden defended her son, Hunter, by stating he “did nothing wrong, and that’s the bottom line.”

Biden said, “I know my son. I know my son’s character. Hunter did nothing wrong, and that’s the bottom line.”
.........................................................


Your son’s character is that of a drug addled, brother’s wife humping, stripper impregnator, fraudulent business man military wash out. He’s spent his entire life doing things wrong.

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amp.dailycaller.com/2019/12/15/comey-wrong-fisa-fbi-surveillance

Comey Says He Was ‘Wrong’ About FBI’s Surveillance Abuse, But Downplays His Own Role In Bungled Case

James Comey said Sunday that he was “wrong” about the FBI’s handling of surveillance warrants against Carter Page, who the former FBI director acknowledged was “treated unfairly” by having his name leaked to the press as a suspected Russian agent.

“He is right. I was wrong,” Comey said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” in reference to the findings of Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general.

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amp.dailycaller.com/2019/12/15/gowdy-comey-fisa-abuse

Former Rep. Trey Gowdy said Sunday that it is “too damn late” for James Comey to admit he was wrong about FBI abuse of the FISA process, as the former FBI director did in an interview on Fox News earlier in the day.

“I think this morning Comey admitted he was wrong. Sometimes, Maria, it’s better late than never, and sometimes it’s just too damn late,” Gowdy said in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo.

Comey acknowledged in an interview with Chris Wallace that he was “wrong” to deny in 2018 that the FBI properly followed procedures in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against former Trump aide Carter Page. (RELATED: Comey Says He Was ‘Wrong’ About FBI’s Surveillance Abuse)

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This makes it clear your rehabilitation will be a long, arduous process. As previously noted, this committee is responsible for overseeing the Intelligence Community and exposing abuses. Yet when the IG identified gross abuses in our jurisdiction, you expressed full faith in the agencies we’re supposed to be vigilantly monitoring, and you rejected any oversight whatsoever of their supposed clean-up efforts. If agencies with a documented, severe abuse problem should be trusted to police themselves, then it’s fair to ask why this committee even exists and what we’re supposed to be doing, if anything, aside from being exploited by you as a launching pad to impeach the president for issues that have no intelligence component at all.

As part of your rehabilitation, it’s crucial that you admit you have a problem—you are hijacking the Intelligence Committee for political purposes while excusing and covering up intelligence agency abuses. The next step will be to convene a hearing with IG Horowitz, as the Senate Judiciary Committee has done and the Senate Homeland Security Committee will do next week.

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www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-democrats-attack-traitor-rat-jeff-van-drew-for-leaving-party-staff-resigns

BREAKING: Democrats Attack ‘Traitor’ ‘Rat’ Jeff Van Drew For Leaving Party, Staff Resigns

Democrats began to attack New Jersey Democratic Representative Jeff Van Drew – whose staff has started to resign – on Sunday after reports surfaced over the weekend that Van Drew was leaving the party and joining the Republican Party.

“I think Jeff Van Drew is making a serious mistake. I understand that he feels if he votes against impeachment, he’ll lose in a Democratic primary [and] he could,” Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (TN) told CNN on Sunday. “But you know he got elected with Democratic votes under a Democratic banner which he ran under for 30 years or so. I think he was a senator and a mayor and a representative and all, and he got Democratic money including Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee money, and to turn and go to be a Republican, it’s kind of strange.”

“I’ve heard of rats jumping off a sinking ship, but very few of them jump onto a sinking ship,” Cohen continued. “The Republicans are in the minority, for his district. Instead of having a congressman who’s in the majority and he gets something done for his district, they’re gonna have a congressman in the minority who can’t get anything done. The lowest thing that there is in the Congress is somebody in the minority side who was a traitor to the majority.”


WATCH:

It was reported on Saturday that Van Drew was leaving the Democratic Party over impeachment, which he said was tearing the country apart, and that he was joining the Republican Party after meeting with President Donald Trump.


CNN’s Manu Raju reported late on Sunday that at least five members of Van Drew’s staff resigned in protest over his decision to leave the Democratic Party.

“We greatly appreciate the opportunities that the Congressman has given us, and we are proud of the work we’ve done together on behalf of the people of New Jersey’s Second Congressional District,” the letter said. “Sadly, Congressman Van Drew’s decision to join the ranks of the Republican Party led by Donald Trump does not align with the values we brought to this job when we joined his office.”

“We greatly respect Congressman Van Drew and are deeply saddened and disappointed by his decision,” the letter concluded. “As such, we can no longer in good conscience continue our service in this Congressman’s employ.”

After news broke that Van Drew was switching parties, many online noted how significant a blow it was to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Federalist co-founder Sean Davis tweeted: “Nancy Pelosi isn’t just hemorrhaging votes for her impeachment gambit, she’s now facing wholesale defections from the Democrat party because of its impeachment hysteria.”

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins wrote on Twitter: “Chairman Nadler told us to consult our consciences before voting on impeachment articles, then seemingly dismisses Jeff Van Drew for doing just that. When your own party rejects your sham impeachment, you’re probably on the wrong side of history.”

Trump responded to the news by writing on Twitter: “Thank you for your honesty Jeff. All of the Democrats know you are right, but unlike you, they don’t have the ‘guts’ to say so!”

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www.zerohedge.com/political/you-need-rehabilitation-nunes-letter-dismantles-schiff-over-fisa-lies-stroking-steele-and

As part of your rehabilitation, it's crucial that you admit you have a problem - you are hijacking the Intelligence Committee for political purposes while excusing and covering up intelligence agency abuses." -Devin Nunes to Adam Schiff



Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has written perhaps the most brutal 'I told ya so' letter in recent memory to Adam Schiff, his Democratic rival and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

After last week's Inspector General report on FBI FISA abuse revealed Schiff was peddling lies to the American public in a February, 2018 'counter-memo' to Nunes's now-proven claims, Schiff passed the buck - telling Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday that he was 'unaware' of certain things unccovered by the IG - while failing to admit he's been dead wrong on an ongoing basis about a number of things.


Nunes isn't letting this go. In a Sunday letter, he reminded Schiff that "The IG's findings of pervasive, major abuses by the FBI dramatically contradict the assertions of your memo released on February 24, 2018, in which you claimed, "FBI and DOJ officials did not 'abuse' the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump Campaign."

Schiff is in clear "need of rehabilitiation," continues Nunes, adding "I hope this letter will serve as the first step in that vital process."

"Outlining every false claim from your memo would require an extremely long letter," Nunes continues, who then lists several key claims made by Schiff which 'the IG report has exposed as false.'

FBI and DOJ officials did not omit material information from the FISA warrant.

The DOJ "made only narrow use of information from [Christopher] Steele's sources about Page's specific activities in 2016."

In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele's reporting.

The Page FISA warrant allowed the FBI to collect "valuable intelligence."

"Far from "omitting' material facts about Steele, as the Majority claims. DOJ repeatedly informed the Court about Steele's background, credibility, and potential bias."

The FI31 conducted a "rigorous process" to vet Steele's allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI's reasonable basis for finding Steele credible.

Steele's prior reporting was used in criminal proceedings.

Nunes goes on to dismantle Schiff's bullshit point by point using findings from the IG report, which include:

Information provided by Christopher Steele played a "central and essential role" in the decision to seek a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

There were seventeen "significant errors or omissions" in the FISA application and renewals, and the IG did not get satisfactory explanations for them.

The Crossfire Hurricane team failed to inform the DOJ of "significant information", and "much of that information was inconsistent with, or undercut" assertions in the FISA applications.

The FBI relied solely on Steele information for its assertions about Page's alleged coordination with Russians to hack the 2016 elections.

(See entire list below)

Nunes then calls out Schiff for defending former UK spy Christopher Steele, whose discredited dossier funed by the Clinton campaign was peddled to the media six weeks before the 2016 US election.

"As you know, your misguided validation of the FISA warrant was part of a years-long pattern in which you touted Christopher Steele's credentials and reliability," writes Nunes.

"For example, during this committee's March 20, 2017 open hearing, you claimed Steele "is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence." and proceeded to read into the congressional record numerous conspiracy theories proffered by Steele, all of which are false."

Next, Nunes accused Schiff of participating in a coverup:

As is clear from the 16 report, Carter Page was the victim of a smear campaign that was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and was implemented by Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS. The FBI used these false allegations to obtain a warrant to spy on Page, a gross violation of an American citizen's civil liberties. Your direct participation in the smear campaign against Page is extremely concerning. considering you are chairman of the committee responsible for uncovering precisely these sorts of abuses by the Intelligence Community. Instead of joining committee Republicans in exposing these abuses, however, you excused them. And by supporting the agencies' stonewalling of our attempts to gather information on this affair, you helped cover up this misconduct.

Because of Schiff's misdeeds, and his blind faith in the US intelligence communities which the House Intelligence Committee is supposed to monitor, Nunes says "This makes it clear your rehabilitation will be a long, arduous process."

"this committee is responsible for overseeing the Intelligence Community and exposing abuses. Yet when the IG identified gross abuses in our jurisdiction, you expressed full faith in the agencies we're supposed to be vigilantly monitoring. and you rejected any oversight whatsoever of their supposed clean-up efforts," writes Nunes.

Read the entire letter below:

***

Dear Chairman Schiff:

As you are aware, on December 9, 2019, U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz published the results of his investigation of the FISA warrant and renewals obtained by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page. The IG's findings of pervasive, major abuses by the FBI dramatically contradict the assertions of your memo released on February 24, 2018, in which you claimed, "FBI and DOJ officials did not 'abuse' the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump Campaign."

After publishing false conclusions of such enormity on a topic directly within this committee's oversight responsibilities, it is clear you are in need of rehabilitation, and I hope this letter will serve as the first step in that vital process.

Outlining every false claim from your memo would require an extremely long letter, so I will limit my summary to a few highlights. In your memo you made the following assertions:

FBI and DOJ officials did not omit material information from the FISA warrant.

The DOJ "made only narrow use of information from [Christopher] Steele's sources about Page's specific activities in 2016."

In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele's reporting.

The Page FISA warrant allowed the FBI to collect "valuable intelligence."

"Far from "omitting' material facts about Steele, as the Majority claims. DOJ repeatedly informed the Court about Steele's background, credibility, and potential bias."

The FI31 conducted a "rigorous process" to vet Steele's allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI's reasonable basis for finding Steele credible.

Steele's prior reporting was used in criminal proceedings.

The IG report has exposed all these declarations as false. Despite your denial of any problems with the FISA warrant, the 16 found:

Information provided by Christopher Steele played a "central and essential role" in the decision to seek a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

There were seventeen "significant errors or omissions" in the FISA application and renewals, and the IG did not get satisfactory explanations for them.

The Crossfire Hurricane team failed to inform the DOJ of "significant information", and "much of that information was inconsistent with, or undercut" assertions in the FISA applications.

The FBI relied solely on Steele information for its assertions about Page's alleged coordination with Russians to hack the 2016 elections.

The applications omitted information provided to the FBI about Page's operational contact with another U.S. government agency and the agency's positive assessment of him. In fact, an FBI official altered an email stating that Page was a source for another government agency in order to have it read the opposite—that he was "not a source."

FBI Director James Conley and Deputy Director Andy McCabe sought to include Steele's reporting in the Intelligence Community Assessment even though the CIA dismissed the Steele information as `Internet rumor."

In FBI interviews, Steele's own sources contradicted information from Steele that was used in the FISA applications.

The significance of Steele's prior reporting was '-overstated."

None of the Steele reporting on Caner Page used in the FISA applications could be corroborated, and some of it contradicted other information in the FBI's possession.

The FBI omitted information about Steele's bias provided by DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

The applications omitted exculpatory statements by Page and others.

The FBI failed to reveal in the applications that the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary' Clinton campaign were receiving and/or funding Steele's work through Fusion UPS.

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Overall, the Inspector General found, "That so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI, and that FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command's management and supervision of the FISA process... In our view, this was a failure of not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command." Indeed, the problems are so severe that the Inspector General has initiated an audit to further investigate FBI's compliance with Woods Procedures in FISA applications.

As you know, your misguided validation of the FISA warrant was part of a years-long pattern in which you touted Christopher Steele's credentials and reliability. For example, during this committee's March 20, 2017 open hearing, you claimed Steele "is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence." and proceeded to read into the congressional record numerous conspiracy theories proffered by Steele, all of which are false. These included:

Carter Page had a secret meeting with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin.

Sechin offered Page a brokerage fee involving the sale of 19 percent of Rosneft.

Russians offered the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for the Trump administration adopting policies favorable to Russia

Paul Manafort chose Page to act as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russia.

As is clear from the 16 report, Carter Page was the victim of a smear campaign that was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and was implemented by Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS. The FBI used these false allegations to obtain a warrant to spy on Page, a gross violation of an American citizen's civil liberties. Your direct participation in the smear campaign against Page is extremely concerning. considering you are chairman of the committee responsible for uncovering precisely these sorts of abuses by the Intelligence Community. Instead of joining committee Republicans in exposing these abuses, however, you excused them. And by supporting the agencies' stonewalling of our attempts to gather information on this affair, you helped cover up this misconduct.

I am particularly concerned by the press release you issued after the release of the IG report. I applaud you for acknowledging that the report identified "issues and errors" and "potential misconduct" connected to the FISA warrant. This acknowledgement, though dramatically downplaying the scale of the abuse the IG uncovered, could be a valuable first step - a baby step, but a step nonetheless - in your rehabilitation. Nevertheless, in your statement you expressed full faith in FBI Director Christopher Wray's promise to address the problem: demanded that the implementation of reforms be confined to "career officials, away from the political arena;" and denounced Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham for expressing concerns about these matters.

This makes it clear your rehabilitation will be a long, arduous process. As previously noted, this committee is responsible for overseeing the Intelligence Community and exposing abuses. Yet when the IG identified gross abuses in our jurisdiction, you expressed full faith in the agencies we're supposed to be vigilantly monitoring. and you rejected any oversight whatsoever of their supposed clean-up efforts. If agencies with a documented, severe abuse problem should be trusted to police themselves, then it's fair to ask why this committee even exists and what we're supposed to be doing, if anything, aside from being exploited by you as a launching pad to impeach the president for issues that have no intelligence component at all.

As part of your rehabilitation, it's crucial that you admit you have a problem - you are hijacking the Intelligence Committee for political purposes while excusing and covering up intelligence agency abuses. The next step will be to convene a hearing with IG Horowitz, as the Senate Judiciary Committee has done and the Senate Homeland Security Committee will do next week.

I understand taking action on this issue will be difficult for you, as it will be an implicit acknowledgment that you were wrong to deny these abuses and that you were complicit in the violation of an American's civil liberties. I also understand such an acknowledgement is made even more difficult by the fact that you've already been discredited by your years-long false claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to hack the 2016 presidential election.

Nevertheless, I refuse to believe you are beyond redemption. I invite you to work closely with me on your rehabilitation program, and look forward to your scheduling a committee hearing with IG Horowitz at the nearest opportunity.

[soonernvolved]

www.zerohedge.com/political/second-damning-fbi-lie-about-carter-page-revealed-ig-report-sperry

Second Damning FBI Lie About Carter Page Revealed In IG Report: Sperry

Thanks to the DOJ Inspector General report on FBI surveillance abuses, we now know that the agency didn't just lie about former Trump campaign aide Carter Page - they fabricated evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant, excluding the fact that he had worked with the CIA.

But wait, there's more!

Thanks to a deep dive into the IG report, the Mueller report, and interviews with Trump campaign officials, RealClearInvestigations' Paul Sperry has found another fraud on the American public perpetrated by James Comey's FBI: The agency, as well as Special Counsel Robert Mueller, knew full well that Page wasn't "an agent of Russia," and that he had no role in gutting a pro-Russia / anti-Ukraine GOP platform plank at the 2016 convention.

Strap in, Sperry goes deep on this one.




***

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours)

The FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller repeatedly kept alive a damning narrative that investigators knew to be false: namely, that a junior Trump campaign aide as a favor to the Kremlin had “gutted” an anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine plank in the Republican Party platform at the GOP’s 2016 convention.

Federal authorities used this claim to help secure spy warrants on the aide in question, Carter Page, suggesting to the court that he was “an agent of Russia” – even though investigators knew that Page was working for U.S., not Russian, intelligence, and that they had learned from witnesses, emails and other evidence that Page had no role in drafting the Ukraine platform plank.

The revelation is buried in the Justice Department watchdog’s just-released report on FISA surveillance abuses. RealClearInvestigations fleshed out this unreported story with footnotes from the Mueller report and exclusive interviews with Trump campaign officials who worked on the convention platform.

Of all the Trump-Russia rumors, insinuations and falsehoods – from secret payments for shadowy hackers, to videotaped prostitutes with active bladders, to a clandestine rendezvous with Kremlin figures in Prague – the supposedly pro-Russia Ukraine platform alteration stands out. It seemed to offer early, public, concrete evidence of an actual bending of prospective U.S. policy to suit Moscow. The false narrative is also significant because it was initially pushed not by Democrats, but by associates of Republican Sen. John McCain and other so-called Never Trumpers. As a bipartisan red flag, it helped build momentum around a narrative of Trump treachery with, then as now, Ukraine playing a central role. It also shows how the Russia and Ukraine controversies were linked from the beginning by Trump’s foes.

This episode loomed so large that the first person Mueller’s team interviewed after taking over the Russia investigation in May 2017 was Rachel Hoff, who was serving as McCain’s policy adviser on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like her boss, Hoff was no fan of President Trump. Agents sought to confirm with her reports that the Trump campaign had “gutted” the GOP’s platform plank on Ukraine to favor Russia during the party's convention in Cleveland in early July 2016.

As a disgruntled convention delegate, Hoff got the story started by putting Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in touch with another Never Trump delegate, Diana Denman, who had lost her bid to amend the GOP plank to call for providing “lethal” weapons to Ukraine to help fend off Russian incursions, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Instead, the platform called for “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine.”

Denman was overruled because heavily arming Ukraine was out of step with the GOP consensus at the time – to say nothing of the Obama administration’s policy, which refused to arm the Ukrainians. And it was at odds with Trump’s stated position, which sought to avoid military escalation in the region, while encouraging the European Union to take a larger peacekeeping role.

On July 18, 2016, the Post ran Rogin’s sensational story under the misleading headline, “Trump Campaign Guts GOP’s Anti-Russia Stance on Ukraine.” Pushing the narrative that Trump was doing the Kremlin’s bidding, it quoted Hoff warning that Trump “would be dangerous for America and the world.” The story left out the key part of the final Trump-approved plank pledging aid “to the armed forces of Ukraine.” Reached by phone, Rogin declined comment.

This story was quickly amplified in the Steele dossier, the series of now-debunked opposition research memos alleging Trump-Russia collusion. Compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign, those memos became a foundation for the FBI and Mueller probes even though – as this week’s IG report established – bureau agents knew that the material in them included demonstrably false assertions and exaggerated gossip dismissed as nonsense by Steele’s own purported source.

Steele also embellished the GOP convention story by claiming that Carter Page had played a key role in drafting the Ukraine plank as part of a commitment he had allegedly made to his Kremlin handlers "to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”

None of this was true. And the FBI — and Mueller — knew it, the Justice inspector general reveals in his report.

Still, the FBI presented the Steele dossier's smear, cataloged as “Steele Report 95,” as key evidence in all four of its warrant applications to obtain wiretaps to eavesdrop on Page, according to the IG report.

To keep renewing the spy warrants, the FBI had to produce fresh evidence for FISA judges to support suspicions Page was “an agent of Russia.” Just a few weeks before the FISA warrant was set to expire in June 2017, Mueller had his investigators interview Hoff, as his first witness, followed by Denman, hoping they could provide fresh details to keep building an espionage case against Page and the Trump campaign.

But Mueller struck out.

According to agents’ notes documenting their June 2017 interview, as revealed in the IG report, Denham told the FBI that Page was not involved in the drafting of the Ukraine plank. But Mueller’s team did not update its fourth and final FISA warrant application on Page with this exculpatory information. Instead, it recited the same baseless claim that he had shaped the Ukraine policy with guidance from Russia. And the court renewed the warrant that June to electronically monitor Page, allowing the government to continue vacuuming up all of his emails, phone calls, text messages and other communications for another 90 days.

“Although the FBI did not develop any information that Carter Page was involved in the Republican Platform Committee’s change, the FBI did not alter its assessment of Page’s involvement in the FISA applications,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted in his 476-page report released Monday.

Added Horowitz: “We found that, other than this information from Report 95 [of the Steele dossier], the FBI’s investigation did not reveal any information to demonstrate that Page had any involvement with the Republican Platform Committee.” Yet, “all four FISA applications relied upon information in the Steele reporting” alleging Page’s role in drafting the Republican plank on Ukraine and Russia.

A former U.S. Navy lieutenant, Page was never charged with espionage or any crime. He told RealClearInvestigations that he has received “numerous death threats that directly resulted from the false allegations” that he was a traitor.

The FBI and Mueller failed to correct the record about Page in their FISA warrant applications even after they identified the Trump campaign officials who actually had a hand in influencing the GOP plank, J.D. Gordon and Matt Miller. A July 14, 2016, email from Gordon confirmed what Page had personally told the FBI in an interview — that he had not taken part in the decision. The FBI knew about the email since at least March 2017, when agents sat down with Page. (Gordon and Page were chatting by email about the convention, and it’s clear from Page’s responses he had no idea what Gordon had done in the Ukraine-Russia platform drafting sessions. IG Horowitz published the relevant excerpt in his report and noted the FBI had the email in its possession.)

Still, Horowitz found, “The FBI never altered the assessment.”

Horowitz further concluded that the FBI should not have included the dossier’s rumor even in its original October 2016 application for a FISA warrant targeting Page, let alone its three renewals, because a confidential source the FBI assigned to spy on Page at the time found no basis for it. In the IG report, Horowitz noted that during that same month of October 2016, the FBI informant met with Page and tape-recorded him denying he was involved in the drafting of the Ukraine plank. Page told the informant, Stefan Halper, that he “stayed clear of that.”

Horowitz’s investigators established that the informant’s recorded statements were sent to the FBI agent assigned at the time to Page’s case, and were copied to a supporting team of other agents, supervisors and analysts. Yet the FBI also withheld that critical exculpatory evidence from the FISA court in the initial application for a warrant on Page (and then continued to deny the court the information in subsequent requests to monitor Page).

The lead case agent, unnamed in the report, told investigators the FBI was operating on a “belief” that Page was involved in the Ukraine and Russia platform, and that he and the FISA team were “hoping to find evidence of that” from the wiretaps. Despite all the snooping on Page, the FBI never collected the hoped-for proof.

The lead supervisor, also unidentified, told investigators “he did not recall why Page’s denial was not included."

Horowitz reports that the exculpatory documents were also sent to a Justice Department attorney before the warrant was renewed for the first time in January 2017, “[y]et, the information remained unchanged in the renewal applications.”

Added Horowitz: “The attorney told us that he did not recall the circumstances surrounding this, but he acknowledged that he should have updated the descriptions in the renewal applications to include Page’s denials.”

The FBI also failed to inform surveillance court judges that Page was an “operational contact” for the CIA for several years, according to the Horowitz report. In 2013, Page also volunteered as a cooperating witness in an FBI espionage case, and helped put away a real Russian agent in 2016. This was additional exculpatory evidence the FBI kept from the FISA court, as RealClearInvestigations first reported last year.

Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s top counterintelligence official, rode herd on the Page wiretap requests and reported back to FBI attorney Lisa Page (no relation to Carter), who in turn, updated then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

Text messages previously uncovered by Horowitz and shared with Mueller revealed that Strzok and Page, who were having an affair, rooted for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and held Trump in complete contempt. In one exchange, they discussed the need to “stop” Trump from winning the election. And the two of them had also huddled with McCabe in his office to devise an “insurance policy” in the “unlikely event" Trump ended up winning.

The inspector general’s report points out that it was McCabe who urged investigators to look at the Clinton-funded dossier. The previous year, his Democratic politician wife, Jill, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations arranged by Clinton ally and Virginia’s governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe.

Strzok remained central to the investigation well into 2017 – until Mueller was forced to kick him off his team when the anti-Trump bias was revealed. The bureau fired him in 2018, the same year Lisa Page resigned from the FBI. In spite of their anti-Trump political bias, Horowitz said he found “no evidence” their bias influenced their investigative decisions.

Lawyers for Strzok and McCabe did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI and a spokesman for Mueller declined comment.

Putting Carter Page under surveillance starting in October 2016 effectively let the FBI spy on the Trump campaign since its beginnings, because it allowed the bureau to scoop up all of Page’s prior communications. Former Trump officials who have reviewed Horowitz’s new findings confirmed their view that the bureau was trying to make it look like Page and the Trump campaign were doing something sinister to help Russia.

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“Page actually had no role in the platform, whatsoever,” Gordon, the Trump campaign’s director of national security, told RCI. “Failing to include the exculpatory information in the FISA application is horrifying."

While it’s true that Trump sought better relations with Russia, Gordon said, there was nothing nefarious about the drafting of the Ukraine platform. He said the FBI simply assumed it was watered down as a favor to Russia based on a false narrative driven by liberal media outlets like the Post and Never Trumpers such as Rachel Hoff. He said the FBI, under the direction of McCabe, Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey, also wanted to believe the worst about Trump, whom they simply did not like.

Gordon noted that, except for the two Never Trump delegates, nobody in the platform drafting sessions raised a fuss about the Ukraine plank — not even the press.

“The media was present in the room, yet not one person wrote about the Ukraine issue,” he said — until, that is, the Never Trumpers went to the Washington Post that July and helped launch the Trump-Russia “collusion” myth.

Moreover, the narrative was untrue even on its own terms – without the spurious inclusion of Carter Page. Internal platform committee documents show the Ukraine plank could not have been weakened as claimed, because the “lethal” weapons language was never part of the GOP platform in the first place. The final language actually strengthened the platform by pledging direct assistance not just to the country of Ukraine, but to its military in its struggle against Russian-backed forces.

Far from “gutting” assistance, the Trump administration approved the transfer of tank-busting Javelin missiles to Kiev — something the Obama administration refused to do. More than 200 of those weapons have been sold to Ukraine since Trump took office. And the sale and delivery of Javelins never stopped even during this year's temporary suspension of military aid to Ukraine that is now the subject of the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings.

The final draft of the Ukraine plank also branded Russia a menace, and pledged to stand against “any territorial change imposed by force in Ukraine.” Yet Mueller and his prosecuting staff of mostly Democratic donors still suspected collusion, and they dispatched FBI agents to grill Gordon about the drafting of the platform three times between 2017 and 2019. They also got a grand jury to subpoena his phone records.

In the end, the Mueller report found no Russian influence in the platform.

But the false narrative – that the Ukraine plank stood as early proof of the “extensive conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Moscow that Steele alleged in his now-debunked dossier – has persisted.

Earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler demanded Gordon provide additional documents, and he has complied. Nadler is now marking up articles of impeachment against Trump over a request he lodged with Ukraine’s new president this summer to help investigate the former Clinton-friendly regime’s attempts to “sabotage" Trump's election bid in 2016. Trump also asked Kiev to look into possible corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy oligarch.

Meanwhile, Nadler's impeachment partner, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, continues to insist that the Trump team “softened" the GOP platform to accommodate “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine."

A retired Navy commander and former Pentagon spokesman, Gordon said he has run up a five-figure legal bill defending against what he calls a “hoax” perpetrated by Never Trumpers, the media, Comey, Mueller, and now congressional Democrats.

"In the vicious frenzy to destroy President Trump and his associates at all costs, they attempted to turn a routine foreign policy debate in conjunction with the four-year renewal of the GOP platform into a crime scene,” Gordon said in an interview with RCI.

“Incredibly,” he added, "the GOP platform change hoax [later] became the very first order of business in Mueller's nearly two-year investigation."

[soonernvolved]

www.zerohedge.com/political/schiff-i-had-no-idea-fbi-was-committing-serious-abuses-when-i-said-all-stuff

Schiff: 'I Had No Idea FBI Was Committing Serious Abuses When I Said All That Stuff'
Profile picture for user Tyler Durden
by Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/15/2019 - 17:40
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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can't admit when he's wrong.

After last week's DOJ Inspector General report revealed that the FBI committed serious abuses while obtaining a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page - including fabricating evidence, Schiff was asked on Sunday by Fox News host Christ Wallace:

"Given what you know now … are you willing to admit that you were wrong in your defense of the FBI’s FISA process?"

To which Schiff replied: "I’m certainly willing to admit that the inspector general found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of."


That's an odd way of admitting your entire thesis has been dead wrong for three years.

Watch (via the Daily Caller)



In short:

Schiff’s correcting the record memo has turned out to be totally wrong (based on the I.G. Report)! A very big lie. @mariabartiromo And @devinnunes has turned out to be completely right. Congratulations to Devin. The Fake News Media should apologize to all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) December 15, 2019

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/15/buying-impeachment-nancy-pelosi-aligned-pac-spends-millions-help-swing-district-democrats/

Buying Impeachment: Nancy Pelosi-Aligned PAC Spends Millions to Help Swing District Democrats

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s rush to impeachment is receiving an assist from the millions of dollars at least one PAC aligned with her has already spent on House Democrats who currently represent swing districts.

Those financial incentives appear to be increasingly relevant as the final vote on the two articles of impeachment is scheduled to come to the House floor this week.




Pelosi needs 216 ‘yes’ votes to pass each article (there are currently four vacancies in the 435 member House), and at least two Democrats have already announced they will vote no, barring any unknown developments, leaving Pelosi with a potential 232 yes votes (231 Democrats and one independent, Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI)), 16 more than the majority she needs.

But when Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN-7) told the Globe, a newspaper in his district, on Saturday that he would be a ‘no’ vote “barring new developments,” he also said that four to five other Democrats might join him.

“This is dividing the country for no good reason because he’s not going to be thrown out of office. Why are we doing this?” he told the Globe.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ-2), who announced earlier he would be a no vote amid reports he would then switch parties to the GOP, is presumably one of those five.



If Peterson is right, and the four additional Democrats who he believes are ‘no’ votes join Van Drew and Peterson, the tally would drop to 228 ‘yes’ votes and 203 ‘no’ votes, just 12 more than the 216 needed to reach a majority.

Pelosi and her allies appear to be taking no chances. “NEW … HOUSE MAJORITY FORWARD — an arm of House Majority PAC, which supports House Democrats — is spending $2.5 MILLION thanking HOUSE DEMOCRATS for voting for the Democrats’ most recent bill aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs for Americans,” Politico reported on Friday:

THE 30-SECOND SPOT differs region by region. The spot for Rep. MAX ROSE , whose district is anchored in Staten Island, is called “Like Hell,” and the narrator says, “Max Rose knows you need to fight like hell to make things better. Thank him for fighting to lower drug prices.” The ad they cut for Rep. ABIGAIL SPANBERGER of Virginia is called “And You” — it says if Medicare could negotiate lower drug prices, it should be good for seniors, “for you, and you, and you.” The spot for Iowa Rep. ABBY FINKENAUER urges her to “keep taking names and lowering costs,” and highlights the bill’s benefits for rural Americans.

HOUSE MAJORITY FORWARD is also airing ads on behalf of Iowa Rep. CINDY AXNE, Maine Rep. JARED GOLDEN, Michigan Reps. ELISSA SLOTKIN and HALEY STEVENS, Nevada Rep. SUSIE LEE, New Jersey Rep. ANDY KIM, New Mexico Rep. XOCHITL TORRES SMALL, New York Reps. ANTONIO DELGADO and ANTHONY BRINDISI, Oklahoma Rep. KENDRA HORN, South Carolina Rep. JOE CUNNINGHAM, Utah Rep. BEN MCADAMS and Virginia Rep. ELAINE LURIA.

Ballotpedia reported on the origins of the House Majority PAC:

House Majority PAC was founded in 2011 to answer what its organizers saw as “the barrage of GOP outside spending and ensure that never again would groups funded by Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and the like be able to drown out Democratic candidates.” The super PAC is associated with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who raised funds for the group in its early stages. It is also, according to Politico, seen as a sister group to the Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC associated with former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid (D).

All sixteen Democrat House members identified in the Politico report as beneficiaries of this current largesse from House Majority Forward are among the 31 House Democrats who represent districts President Trump won in 2016.

As of Sunday afternoon, two of them: Rep. Max Rose (D-NY) and Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV) have announced they will vote ‘yes’ on the articles of impeachment on the floor of the House this week.



But as of Sunday afternoon, the remaining 14 have not publicly stated how they will vote on the articles of impeachment.

Sources tell Breitbart News the recent House Majority Forward ad buy represents just a small percentage of the amount of financial support being promised to swing district Democrats by groups aligned with Speaker Pelosi and other Democrat leaders.

Speaker Pelosi is also trying to get undecided Democrats in swing districts to vote ‘yes’ by giving them legislative wins that are important to their districts, as the Washington Post reported:

Pelosi has also tried to give moderates political cover with a series of legislative victories they can tout back home. Among them are a major trade deal and passage of a sweeping defense bill with paid leave for federal workers, as well as votes on key campaign promises to lower the cost of prescription drugs and bolster voting rights.

Some moderates are getting even more. Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a Democratic centrist who is agonizing about how to vote, secured a major win in the defense bill that the House passed Wednesday — a provision designed to boost a local manufacturing plant in his district that Trump carried by more than 15 points.

Brindisi, who represents the conservative, Trump-supporting 22nd Congressional District in upstate New York, narrowly defeated Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY-22) in 2018, and she is mounting a vigorous campaign to win the seat back in 2020.

Speaker Pelosi and her Democrat allies appear to be using these classic legislative “quid pro quo” tactics to secure the impeachment of President Trump who, they claim, used “quid pro quo” tactics when dealing with the president of Ukraine.

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/15/democrat-xochitl-torres-small-impeaching-trump-will-protect-national-security-constitution/

Freshman swing district Democrat Rep. Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM) said Sunday that impeaching President Donald Trump will protect America’s national security, the Constitution, and American democracy.

Rep. Torres Small said that President Trump jeopardized national security through his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.




The New Mexico Democrat said in a statement Sunday:

We cannot allow any President of either party to abuse the power of the highest office, jeopardizing our country’s national security in the process, to pressure foreign leaders to conduct investigations against political rivals. We also cannot allow any President to obstruct Congress’ power to investigate impeachable offenses by prohibiting White House and other administration officials from testifying or providing evidence. I must act to protect our national security, our Constitution, and the integrity of our elections.

The New Mexico Democrat represents one of the 31 congressional districts that President Trump won during the 2016 presidential election, and House Democrats flipped during the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans need to retake roughly 20 House seats to retake the House majority.

Then-candidate Torres Small beat Republican candidate Yvette Herrell by 1.8 percentage points.



In response to the report that Rep. Torres Small will vote for both articles of impeachment against Trump, Herrell said that “it’s time to vote out” the New Mexico Democrat.

It’s official: Xochitl Torres Small will vote to impeach President Trump. Time to vote her out and take back our district! t.co/IEPwJYbgkr #nmpol #nm02

— Yvette Herrell (@yvette4congress) December 16, 2019

Herrell told Breitbart News Saturday that the House Democrats impeachment “charade” is wearing “thin” for Americans and New Mexicans.

She told Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle:

She [Rep. Torres Small] ran in the midterm as a moderate Democrat, that she would work or the people of New Mexico protect our industries, our culture, our way of life. She’s anything but a moderate, her voting record is 93 percent of the time with Nancy Pelosi, truly not conducive to the people of New Mexico. People want to secure the border, that border wall is very important.

“We sent her to Washington, she voted against the wall, she voted against the Second Amendment, she voted for the Equality Act, that is a direct hit on our values and principles, we are a pro-life district,” she added.

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/15/donald-trump-demands-apology-after-james-comey-admits-i-was-wrong/

President Donald Trump again challenged James Comey on Sunday, demanding an apology from the former FBI Director after he admitted he “was wrong” to defend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for the surveillance of former Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page.

“Sure, I’m responsible, that’s why I’m telling you, I was wrong,” Comey told Fox News host Chris Wallace in an interview. “I was overconfident as the director in our procedures. And it’s important that a leader be accountable and transparent.”




“So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red-handed. He was actually caught a long time ago.”

Breitbart TV



Play Video
CLICK TO PLAY

Jill Biden: 'Hunter Did Nothing Wrong'

Trump hinted that Comey should end up in jail for the deeply flawed investigation into his campaign.

So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong. Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?

— Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) December 15, 2019

“So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail?” Trump asked. “Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?”

Comey struggled throughout the interview to defend the FISA abuse by the FBI during the investigation of the president’s campaign.



He admitted that there was “real sloppiness” in the FISA applications and that it was “concerning,” but continued to defend the investigation overall.

“I hope people will stare at that and learn about what the FBI is like, human and flawed, but deeply committed to trying to do the right thing,” he concluded.

[soonernvolved]

thefederalist.com/2019/12/15/fox-newss-chris-wallace-grills-james-comey-you-were-the-head-of-the-fbi/

Chris Wallace Grills James Comey On FISA Abuse: ‘You Were The Head Of The FBI’
DECEMBER 15, 2019 By Chrissy Clark
Following the release of the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on federal agencies’ abuse of secret surveillance of American citizens, former FBI Director James Comey has finally backtracked on some of his assertions about Spygate. During a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Comey conceded he was overconfident in the FBI’s internal systems.

“Significant errors in the FISA process, and you said it was handled in a thoughtful and appropriate way,” Wallace said.


Backed into a corner, Comey admitted he’d been telling Americans an untruth for the past three years about the reliability and integrity of the federal investigation agency he led.

[Horowitz is] right, I was wrong. I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and the Justice [Department] had built up over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those, and he’s right. There was real sloppiness—17 things that either should’ve been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable, and so he’s right, and I was wrong.

“But, you make it sound like you were a bystander, an eyewitness. You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on, sir,” Wallace responded.

Comey responded by conceding that he was responsible.

“Sure. I’m responsible. That’s why I’m telling you, I was wrong. I was overconfident as director of our procedures, and it’s important that a leader be accountable and transparent,” Comey asserted.

After years of covering up for the inaccuracies and lies of the FBI, the IG report has finally compelled Comey to admit he was responsible for the newly exposed errors.

[soonernvolved]

www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/fisa-reform-ball-of-collusion-excerpt/

Ball of Collusion and FISA Reform
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
December 14, 2019 6:30 AM

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz arrives to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, December 11, 2019. (Erin Scott/Reuters)
The participation of the court allows executive officials to evade accountability.
[Author’s Note: This week’s release of the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on FISA abuse (among other investigative irregularities) in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation has spawned a welcome public discussion of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What follows is an excerpt from my recently released book, Ball of Collusion, which undertakes to explain why I have long been a naysayer of FISA, which I first encountered in the early 1990s as a prosecutor handling terrorism cases — one of rare contexts in which FISA surveillance evidence sometimes seeps into criminal prosecutions. The discussion that follows is a prelude to book’s account of Obama-era FISA surveillance abuses that have received little public attention (in contrast to FISA surveillance in the Trump-Russia investigation, currently in the spotlight). These abuses prompted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in October 2016, to castigate the intelligence community for its institutional “lack of candor.”]


NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
Alittle background on surveillance. Non-Americans situated outside our country do not have Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Consequently, the overseas collection of intelligence about them, including their communications, occurs with no judicial supervision. It is carried out under Executive Order 12333, which has been amended several times since being issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Other foreign intelligence collection implicates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At its inception over forty years ago, FISA was chiefly designed to shield Americans inside the United States from such surveillance unless a court could be shown probable cause to believe they were complicit in clandestine activities on behalf of a foreign power. With congressional expansion of FISA over the last decade, the law is now also geared to mitigate the invasive consequences of sweeping global surveillance, made possible by the revolution in telecommunications technology.

This latter protection is not very effective. In part, this is because the underlying concept is dubious: Namely, the notion that people who interact with foreigners who are outside U.S. jurisdiction have a reasonable expectation of privacy despite being well-aware that the latter could be under surveillance — whether by U.S. or other intelligence services. There is also the problem that technological capabilities are advancing more rapidly than government’s capacity to apply privacy principles rooted in the Constitution and other federal law, in particular, the tenet that there must be grounds for suspicion before communications are seized and searched.

Prior to 1978, foreign intelligence collection was strictly a political responsibility: part of the national security duties the Constitution assigns to the political branches, with the executive carrying it out, subject to congressional oversight. It was not a judicial process. In the realm of foreign threats to American interests and security, the judiciary — the non-political branch — had neither constitutional responsibility nor institutional competence.

I continue to believe this was the right way to look at the matter, and have thus always been a FISA naysayer. The best articulation of this position was posited by the legendary Robert Jackson — an icon in both the political and legal arenas, who served as FDR’s attorney general, Truman’s chief prosecutor at Nuremburg, and a justice of the Supreme Court. Writing for the Court thirty years before FISA’s enactment, Jackson opined:

The President, both as Commander-in-Chief and as the Nation’s organ for foreign affairs, has available intelligence services whose reports are not and ought not to be published to the world. It would be intolerable that courts, without the relevant information, should review and perhaps nullify actions of the Executive taken on information properly held secret. Nor can courts sit in camera in order to be taken into executive confidences. But even if courts could require full disclosure, the very nature of executive decisions as to foreign policy is political, not judicial. Such decisions are wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative. They are delicate, complex, and involve large elements of prophecy. They are and should be undertaken only by those directly responsible to the people whose welfare they advance or imperil. They are decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and which has long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry.

But then came the Vietnam-era political spying scandals and the Watergate abuses of intelligence authority. There followed an outcry for curbs on executive surveillance powers even in the realm of foreign intelligence. As usual, the Washington cure was worse than the disease: the insertion of judicial oversight, notwithstanding the issues of institutional competence and political accountability outlined by Justice Jackson.

This prescription, FISA, had been adumbrated by the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in what’s known as the Keith case. The justices invalidated a warrantless search carried out by the executive branch for purely domestic national security purposes — targeting three domestic terrorists who were plotting to bomb government facilities. Of course, internal threats to security — in America, by Americans — are entangled with dissent against government policy; they thus implicate fundamental liberties vouchsafed by the Constitution. That makes them saliently different from threats by foreign powers — even if those foreign powers are acting through agents situated inside the United States.

NOW WATCH: 'Trump Signs Executive Order To Fight Anti-Semitism'

The Keith Court recognized this distinction. So had Congress a few years earlier, when lawmakers enacted the statute that governs electronic surveillance in the context of domestic criminal investigations. Nevertheless, in the post-Watergate fervor against executive power, over both proven and hypothetical abuses, a heavily Democratic Congress enacted FISA in 1978. President Jimmy Carter signed it, even though it ostensibly transferred to the judiciary significant executive authority over the monitoring of foreign threats to national security.


FISA has now been the law for over forty years. It is a bad idea not just in theory, but in practice. In the post-9/11 years, for example, the FISC went rogue, attempting — until beaten back by FISA’s appellate court — to re-erect the infamous Justice Department regulatory “wall” that impeded cooperation between intelligence and law-enforcement agents. Nevertheless, FISA is not going away; it is expanding: The judiciary is now ensconced in national security matters. This well-meaning arrangement is counterproductive. It undermines accountability: dragging the judiciary into non-judicial matters (the execution of security policy), giving executive excesses the veneer of judicial approval, and making the abuse of surveillance authority more likely, not less.


–– ADVERTISEMENT ––


If the executive’s national security agents represent that they believe a foreign power is threatening the United States through the activities of a clandestine agent, it is only natural that a judge would be disposed to grant surveillance authority. Again, national security is principally an executive function: The courts are not responsible for it, have no expertise in it, and do not answer to the people whose lives are at stake. Would you want to be the judge who tells the FBI and the Justice Department that they lack sufficient evidence to monitor a suspected terrorist mass-murder plot? That they may not monitor a Russian cabal suspected on thin proof of undermining American elections? Of course not.

It is no surprise, then, that the FISC approves government surveillance applications at an extraordinarily high rate. That does not make the FISC a rubber stamp, as ill-informed critiques deduce. The approval rate should be very high. The court is reviewing assessments by professional intelligence analysts working for the president elected by the People to protect the nation.

Executive officials know, then, that it is highly likely the FISC will approve its applications. They also know that, unlike in criminal cases, there is never going to be a public proceeding at which their work and their representations to judges are going to be checked — counterintelligence is top secret.

Naturally, this creates the temptation to present applications that are weak or even disingenuous. In the unlikely event a judge does not approve a deficient application, it is no big deal because the surveillance would not have happened anyway. But if a court does authorize surveillance, no one will ever know; and if the surveillance somehow becomes public, the agents can claim that it was legitimate because a judge approved it — even if the agents did a shoddy job or otherwise failed to comply with their own procedures. Recall, for example, former FBI director James Comey’s amusingly circular claim that the FBI does not engage in anything as underhanded as “spying” because its “electronic surveillance” is “court ordered.”

I believe we would get more diligent performance out of the executive branch if officials were held responsible for their own investigative judgments, subject to aggressive oversight by Congress. The participation of the court allows executive officials to evade accountability. Indeed, this is exactly what has happened with the Carter Page FISA warrants.

To be sure, mine is a minority view.

26
Most intelligence officials and FISC judges would tell you that the FISA system is a worthy innovation that has encouraged executive intelligence officials to be more solicitous of American privacy rights. Of course, no one, myself least of all, is saying the Justice Department, FBI, and other intelligence agencies should have no one checking their work. Quite the opposite. The question is who should check their work, and the answer is Congress — the branch politically accountable to the self-governing people who must balance their interests in security and privacy. Note that the same FBI that told the FISA court about its Trump–Russia investigation took pains to conceal the probe’s existence from the congressional Gang of Eight — which would likely have been much quicker to spot and object to political spying, and to ask hard questions about the flimsiness of the stated probable cause.

It is, nevertheless, a fair counter to say that Congress’s dysfunction — its oversight muscles atrophied from decades of delegating its functions to courts and the administrative state — renders it, practically speaking, an impotent check on the executive. While lawmakers should be doing the job, courts are at least trying to do it and, many would argue, are doing it better than Congress would. Count me skeptical nonetheless. In the episode we are about to study, judicial oversight, along with conscientious fretting about it by some intelligence officials, brought Obama administration abuses to light. But of course, that was only after allowing the abuses to go on for years

[soonernvolved]

dailycaller.com/2019/12/14/fbi-counterintelligence-dossier-source/

An updated version of the Justice Department inspector general’s report revealed the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation in October 2016 on an alleged source for the Steele dossier.
The IG faulted the FBI for failing to disclose details about the source, who Christopher Steele said unwittingly provided information that ended up in the dossier.
Steele also told the FBI that he believed the source to be a “boaster” and “embellisher.”
The FBI opened up a counterintelligence investigation in October 2016 against a Belarusian-American businessman who Christopher Steele said was an unwitting source for his infamous anti-Trump dossier, according to a newly unredacted version of a Justice Department inspector general’s report.

The FBI failed to disclose the investigation against the alleged source — called Person 1 in the report — to Justice Department attorney and in applications submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.


The report also said the FBI failed to tell the surveillance court that Steele told investigators during a meeting on Oct. 3, 2016 that he considered Person 1 to be a “boaster” and “embellisher” who “may engage in some embellishment.”

Despite those red flags, the FBI relied on information that Steele attributed to Person 1 to represent in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications that there was probable cause to believe that Page was a Russian agent. (RELATED: DOJ Watchdog Finds ‘Significant Inaccuracies’ In FBI’s Surveillance Applications)

Investigators also failed to tell the FISC in applications to renew surveillance against Page that Steele’s primary source disputed some of the information in the dossier that was attributed to Person 1.

Steele’s main source, who is called “Primary Sub-Source” in the report, told FBI agents in January 2017 that he shared unverified “rumors” and bar-room talk with Steele, who in turn reported the information as confirmed.

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The sub-source said he spoke by phone once to someone he believed to be Person 1. Steele has disputed his chief source’s claims and said in a statement Tuesday that he “meticulously” documented and recorded conversations with the person.

Sergei Millian, who is Person 1, has vehemently denied being a source for Steele’s dossier ever since news outlets reported him as such on Jan. 24, 2017, two weeks after BuzzFeed News published the salacious dossier.


Christopher Steele is pictured in London. (VICTORIA JONES/GETTY IMAGES)

Whether or not Millian did provide information that ended up in the dossier, Steele represented to the FBI that Millian was an unwitting source for several bombshell claims in the document.

It is unclear whether Steele’s information about Millian is what sparked the FBI’s decision to investigate him. Nine days after Steele’s meeting, the bureau’s New York Field Office opened up a counterintelligence investigation on Millian. Nine days after that, the FBI applied for its first FISA warrant against Page. The inspector general (IG) said the Steele dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s decision to apply for FISAs on Page.


The information about the investigation of Millian was redacted in a version of the IG report released Monday. But the information was unmasked in a version of the report released Wednesday. The report said the FBI and Justice Department declassified the information.

Steele, a former British spy, attributed claims in four of his memos to Millian, who has worked in real estate and as an interpreter.

Steele pinned some of the dossier’s most salacious allegations on Millian. Steele said Millian was one of two sources for the salacious claim that President Donald Trump was with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013, according to the IG report. Millian was also alleged to be a source for the claim that Page and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort were part of a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” with the Kremlin.

The IG report said the FBI was unable to corroborate any of the information.

Unexplained in the IG report is why Steele identified Millian with differing code names and alternative descriptions in the dossier.

Steele referred to Millian as “Source D” in a memo dated June 20, 2016, while Millian was called “Source E” in a memo dated July 28, 2016, according to the report. In a memo from July 30, 2016, Steele calls Millian a “Russian émigré figure” close to the Trump campaign. In a memo dated Aug. 10, 2016, Millian is an “ethnic Russian associate” of Trump.

The IG report blasts the FBI for withholding information about Steele and his sources from its FISA applications against Page.

“We believe the FBI should have specifically and explicitly advised [Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence] about the FBI’s assessment that this particular sub-source relied upon in the FISA application was Person 1, that Steele had provided derogatory information regarding Person 1, and that the FBI had an open counterintelligence investigation on Person 1,” the report says.

The report said that witnesses interviewed in the IG investigation said that the Justice Department typically informs the FISC when sources are themselves subjects of investigations.

“Those facts were relevant to [Office of Intelligence’s] assessment of the strength of the information in the FISA application and, based on what we were told was the Department’s practice, likely would have been included by OI in the application so that the FISC could consider the information in deciding whether to grant the requested FISA authority,” the report says.

After the IG report was released, Millian appeared to acknowledge on Twitter that he was Person 1, but he disputed ever saying what the dossier says he told Steele’s primary source. Millian, who has locked down his Twitter account, also lamented the revelation that he was the target of a counterintelligence investigation.

Millian has been one of the more mysterious figures to emerge from the saga surrounding the dossier.

He gave an interview to ABC News on July 27, 2016 in which he suggested that he had close ties to the Trump campaign, as well as to the Kremlin. Days before the interview, Millian had reached out to former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos to arrange an introductory meeting. They first met on July 30, 2016 and remained in contact through January 2017.

Millian has also said in the past to have brokered real estate deals for the Trump Organization. Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for Trump, told news outlets in 2017 that Millian misrepresented his ties to Trumpworld.

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/12/15/durbin-u-s-government-certainly-owes-carter-page-an-apology/

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) on Sunday said the United States government owes former Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page an apology regarding the federal surveillance application that enabled the investigation into Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Durbin about Page being treated “unfairly.”


“Does the U.S. government owe Carter Page an apology?” she quizzed.

“I can certainly tell you based on what we saw, they do,” Durbin replied. “And here’s the bottom line: many of us have been looking at this … secret FISA court for years saying this isn’t first and won’t be the last time the FBI misrepresents evidence before this court and proceeds. We have tried to reform the proceedings. Senator Lee, Republican, Senator Leahy, Democrat, myself, and others have been pushing for FISA reform. We couldn’t get the Republicans to join us in that effort. Maybe now they will. This should be a bipartisan effort to clean up the FISA court. What happened in this situation was inexcusable.”

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/12/15/dem-rep-lofgren-on-impeachment-looks-like-lindsey-graham-mitch-mcconnell-plan-to-rig-the-trial/

Sunday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) predicted some U.S. Senators would “rig” the impeachment trial should impeachment reach the Senate.

Lofgren said on MSNBC’s “Kasie DC” that based on what she is hearing, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “plan to rig the trial” to “protect” President Donald Trump, which she warned would be a “serious problem for the country.”


“Some of the things I’m hearing from [Graham and McConnell], looks like they plan to rig the trial,” Lofgren claimed. “That’s a serious problem for the country, but I think it’s a problem for Trump as well. President Trump is hoping to be exonerated. He will not be exonerated if everyone knows he rigged the trial.”
“If they’re not going to hear any evidence, if senators announce that they’ve already made up their minds, they don’t need to look at the facts, that doesn’t clear the president if he’s not convicted in the Senate. That’s just a political endeavor to protect a man who is guilty of abusing his power,” she added.

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/12/15/schiff-impeachment-not-a-failure-if-trump-is-acquitted-by-senate/

On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the impeachment of President Donald Trump would not be a failure if the Senate acquits him.

Partial transcript as follows:

STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s Chairman — that’s Chairman Nadler’s position, Chairman Schiff. But, apparently, right now, you haven’t persuaded a majority of Republicans that it’s worthy of impeachment. And back in March, you also warned against that. You said: “The only thing worse than putting the country through the trauma of impeachment is putting the country through the trauma of a failed impeachment.” If President Trump is overwhelmingly acquitted in the Senate, is that a failure?

SCHIFF: No, it isn’t a failure. At least, it’s not a failure in the sense of our constitutional duty in the House. And I will tell you what changed my mind, George, because you’re right. I resisted going down this road towards impeachment. But it was two things. It was the discovery of the most egregious conduct to date. It was one thing with the president invited foreign interference as a candidate, when he couldn’t use the power of his office to make it so.

It was another when, as president of the United States, he withheld hundreds of millions of dollars to coerce an ally, betray our national security, and try to cheat in the next election. That was not something we could turn away from.

But it was one more fact, George, that I think made it inexorable. And that is the fact that it was the day after Bob Mueller testified, the day after Donald Trump felt that he was beyond accountability for his first misconduct, that he was back on the phone, this time with President Zelensky, trying to get that country to help him cheat in the next election.

That told me, this president believes he is above the law and accountable to no one, and that this road was necessary. And I think it very much is.

[soonernvolved]

disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2019%2F12%2Fits_not_a_coup_its_a_civil_war.html%3A1l6bZreF1q-89q3jH2_CuUx4PWE&cuid=1290197

It's not a coup. It's a civil war.
By Phil D'Agostino
Lately, it's been convenient — and self-serving to some — to call what is going on with the Trump administration a coup. It's a "soft coup" or a "silent coup" or a wish-it-were-a-coup.

Let's take a look at what that means. According to all definitions I can find, a coup is a sudden, often violent overthrow of a government. Every time I look up the definition of a coup, I get something like this from Merriam-Webster: "a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics." But there is nothing sudden about this.

Have you ever thought, "What would a modern civil war look like?" Tanks rolling down the streets of Washington, D.C.? Missiles targeting the Congress? Armed forces storming the White House or Capitol Building? None of these would accomplish anything. So what would a modern-day civil war look like?

At least since the 1960s, a faction of people have been looking for a chance to make our government conform to what they think it should be. This faction has identified itself in many ways, and its members always embrace Marxist ideals with a top-down government run by a few. A "law-based" government, on the other hand, would have a constitution to protect the rights of the minority from the "tyranny" of the majority. That is what the United States of America is: a law-based government founded on the belief that those working in government are employees of the people, and not that the people are subservient to them. And all decisions are to be based on our agreement to form such a government — that is, as spelled out in our Constitution.

When a group, no matter how large or small, decides it wants to step beyond the constitutional means for changing the government and change it to fit their own ideals of government, and superimpose those ideals on everybody else, we have a true conflict. If that conflict cannot be resolved to their satisfaction through the instrumentalities of the provisions to do so, and so they decide to overthrow it and replace it with their own views or ideas, we have a war. We have those circumstances playing out before our eyes (and ears).

We can define a civil war as a conflict or competition between political factions or regions within the same country to take over the reins of governance without due process. A careful look at what some call the "Deep State" would tell us we have that here in the USA. Further, we have had that state of conflict for many years.

As evidenced by the statements of many current players behind the scenes who have been actively trying to fundamentally transform America, it would seem that in the 20th century, it was determined by those committed to this transformation that the people of the USA would never willfully throw away their own freedoms and embrace some form of Marxian socialism. Therefore, in order to effect this change, there needed to be an internal use of the system itself to subvert it through legislation and regulations to become a de facto state of Marxian socialism without ever calling it such, nor voting for such.

Ever since, there have been bureaucrats and presidents who have worked against the will of the majority in order to "overthrow" the duly elected government and replace it with their own view of what the USA government "should" look like. It is a war, not a coup. They are relentless. Indefatigable. They will never stop. What we are seeing with Mr. Trump is an "Antietam" or a "Gettysburg — a bloody battlefield, but just another battlefield.

It isn't a coup. Not soft. Not silent. And if we don't see it as a war, we lose. Why? Because we then think it's about Mr. Trump or his administration. It isn't.

Any conservative or any Republican who embraces the ideals of small government, personal freedom of choice, personal property rights, and the ability to defend our ownership of what we've created or accumulated will be the next target. A relative handful of people would superimpose their views as a minority onto the will of the majority because they believe themselves to be smarter, better, and more correct.

Note that the purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government and the tyranny of the majority. But it also makes us a nation of laws, not votes alone. A majority cannot vote to expel all people who are from a certain nation or of a certain religion. Majority alone does not rule. A majority must first conform to the rule of law. These civil warriors seek to negate that premise and foist upon us their own view, whether we like it or not.

Tyrants, dictators, and their minions are very clever when it comes to using the rules you agree to play with against those playing by the rules. This is war. When Trump leaves office, the war shall continue.

This is about who will run our government. Will it be those duly elected by the people and states, or will it be by the fiat and caprice of those who see themselves as smarter and more relevant than the rest of us?

Again, think of what a modern civil war would look like. There is no way a modern civil war would ever be fought against the most powerful military force in the history of mankind. No, it will come from within. As Khrushchev said, our nation will fall from within ("Your own working class will bury you," 1963), and communists will prevail as a result. That is what we are witnessing: a civil war, not a coup.

Image: Donkey Hotey via Flickr.


Lately, it's been convenient — and self-serving to some — to call what is going on with the Trump administration a coup. It's a "soft coup" or a "silent coup" or a wish-it-were-a-coup.

Let's take a look at what that means. According to all definitions I can find, a coup is a sudden, often violent overthrow of a government. Every time I look up the definition of a coup, I get something like this from Merriam-Webster: "a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics." But there is nothing sudden about this.

Have you ever thought, "What would a modern civil war look like?" Tanks rolling down the streets of Washington, D.C.? Missiles targeting the Congress? Armed forces storming the White House or Capitol Building? None of these would accomplish anything. So what would a modern-day civil war look like?

At least since the 1960s, a faction of people have been looking for a chance to make our government conform to what they think it should be. This faction has identified itself in many ways, and its members always embrace Marxist ideals with a top-down government run by a few. A "law-based" government, on the other hand, would have a constitution to protect the rights of the minority from the "tyranny" of the majority. That is what the United States of America is: a law-based government founded on the belief that those working in government are employees of the people, and not that the people are subservient to them. And all decisions are to be based on our agreement to form such a government — that is, as spelled out in our Constitution.

When a group, no matter how large or small, decides it wants to step beyond the constitutional means for changing the government and change it to fit their own ideals of government, and superimpose those ideals on everybody else, we have a true conflict. If that conflict cannot be resolved to their satisfaction through the instrumentalities of the provisions to do so, and so they decide to overthrow it and replace it with their own views or ideas, we have a war. We have those circumstances playing out before our eyes (and ears).


We can define a civil war as a conflict or competition between political factions or regions within the same country to take over the reins of governance without due process. A careful look at what some call the "Deep State" would tell us we have that here in the USA. Further, we have had that state of conflict for many years.

As evidenced by the statements of many current players behind the scenes who have been actively trying to fundamentally transform America, it would seem that in the 20th century, it was determined by those committed to this transformation that the people of the USA would never willfully throw away their own freedoms and embrace some form of Marxian socialism. Therefore, in order to effect this change, there needed to be an internal use of the system itself to subvert it through legislation and regulations to become a de facto state of Marxian socialism without ever calling it such, nor voting for such.

Ever since, there have been bureaucrats and presidents who have worked against the will of the majority in order to "overthrow" the duly elected government and replace it with their own view of what the USA government "should" look like. It is a war, not a coup. They are relentless. Indefatigable. They will never stop. What we are seeing with Mr. Trump is an "Antietam" or a "Gettysburg — a bloody battlefield, but just another battlefield.

It isn't a coup. Not soft. Not silent. And if we don't see it as a war, we lose. Why? Because we then think it's about Mr. Trump or his administration. It isn't.

Any conservative or any Republican who embraces the ideals of small government, personal freedom of choice, personal property rights, and the ability to defend our ownership of what we've created or accumulated will be the next target. A relative handful of people would superimpose their views as a minority onto the will of the majority because they believe themselves to be smarter, better, and more correct.

Note that the purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government and the tyranny of the majority. But it also makes us a nation of laws, not votes alone. A majority cannot vote to expel all people who are from a certain nation or of a certain religion. Majority alone does not rule. A majority must first conform to the rule of law. These civil warriors seek to negate that premise and foist upon us their own view, whether we like it or not.

Tyrants, dictators, and their minions are very clever when it comes to using the rules you agree to play with against those playing by the rules. This is war. When Trump leaves office, the war shall continue.

This is about who will run our government. Will it be those duly elected by the people and states, or will it be by the fiat and caprice of those who see themselves as smarter and more relevant than the rest of us?

Again, think of what a modern civil war would look like. There is no way a modern civil war would ever be fought against the most powerful military force in the history of mankind. No, it will come from within. As Khrushchev said, our nation will fall from within ("Your own working class will bury you," 1963), and communists will prevail as a result. That is what we are witnessing: a civil war, not a coup.

[kcrufnek]

Dec 13, 2019 23:25:33 GMT -6 soonernvolved said:

Alan Dershowitz: Look, the most important development happened TODAY. The Supreme Court of the United States absolutely pulled the rug out of part two of the impeachment referral by granting certiorari, by granting review in a case where Trump challenged a congressional subpoena! And the Supreme Court said we’re going to hear this case!… Think of what that message is – It’s Trump was right!

He was on Levin's Fox show last week. Worth the watch. He's far from a right wing conspiracy nut.