James Comey

[soonernvolved]

Any thoughts from our resident lawyers?

Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered Flynn’s former legal team to reappear as an interested party and they complied by filing a notice of appearance.

Via Law & Crime:

lawandcrime.com/high-profile/michael-flynns-fired-lawyers-just-filed-court-papers-to-reappear-in-his-case/

The federal judge overseeing Michael Flynn’s criminal prosecution has directed the legal team that Flynn fired to reappear as an interested party in the controversial proceeding. On Thursday, that former legal team complied by filing a notice of appearance.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia on Thursday ordered the clerk of the court to “add Covington & Burling LLP (‘Covington’) as an interested party in this matter and directed counsel for Covington to file a notice of appearance on behalf of Covington as an interested party.”

[soonernvolved]

[soonernvolved]

www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/14/transcripts_clinton_aides_joined_post-election_bid_to_re-push_anti-trump_dossier_123616.html

Transcripts: Clinton Aides Allied With Fusion GPS Pair After Election -- to Re-Push Anti-Trump Dossier

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
May 14, 2020

Top officials with the Hillary Clinton campaign re-engaged with the opposition researchers behind the Steele dossier just three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, newly declassified congressional witness transcripts reveal, indicating her campaign’s participation in an ongoing and well-funded effort to undermine the president by casting him as a tool of the Kremlin.


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan in 2009. Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration, Sullivan accompanied John Podesta to a meeting with Fusion GPS principals to start a new anti-Trump venture.
AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File
Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta testified that he met on Feb. 10, 2017, with Daniel Jones, a former aide to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Glenn Simpson and his partner Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS. In separate testimony, Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan revealed he also participated in the meeting. The Clinton campaign had funneled money through a law firm, Perkins Coie, to pay Fusion to compile the now-discredited dossier which was a prime driver of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories – and FBI investigations -- that have shadowed his administration.

“They were interested in trying to raise money to continue their efforts to investigate the Russian interference in the campaign,” Podesta told the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017. The transcripts of his and Sullivan's testimony were among the dozens of Russiagate interviews that had been withheld from the public for more than two years before being released last week.

Podesta said he agreed to help the trio open doors to big Democratic fund-raisers and sit down for press interviews and documentaries regarding any “new developments” uncovered by dossier author and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Sullivan accompanied Podesta to the meeting, which he said lasted about an hour and was held in an office building in Washington.

“Was the conversation about the then-dossier?” a House panel staffer asked Sullivan, who had previously worked in the Obama administration as Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.


Daniel Jones: Mimicking the Clinton campaign, his Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to conduct new opposition research, paying them millions of dollars.
McCain Institute/YouTube
"I mean not specifically about the dossier,” Sullivan replied. "lt was sort of about the effort that they had put in to finding out ties between Trump and Russia and what their belief was based on the accumulation on that."

Sullivan testified behind closed doors in a separate hearing held about two weeks after Podesta's testimony.

Neither man was asked whether their efforts were known by Clinton, who has publicly suggested that Russia has compromising information. Podesta’s testimony did confirm earlier reporting by RealClearInvestigations that Clinton knew her campaign was paying opposition researchers to examine Trump’s ties to Russia.

Just 10 days before the February 2017 meeting, Jones had incorporated a nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project (known internally as TDIP) after huddling with Simpson. The goal of their ongoing project is to “prove” the allegations in the dossier, while digging up new dirt on Trump and feeding it to media outlets, congressional investigators and the FBI to derail his presidency.

The work of such opposition research outfits has become a mainstay of Washington journalism. In their book, “Crime in Progress,” Simpson and Fritsch detail their access to top journalists at The New York Times and other influential publications.

Mimicking the Clinton campaign, TDIP hired Fusion GPS and Steele to conduct the new opposition research, paying them millions of dollars. Podesta steered his repurposed partners to donors at a time when the Clinton campaign had not yet closed its books; the campaign was still open. In 2017 alone, TDIP raised more than $7 million with his help.


Mark Warner: TDIP's Daniel Jones has regularly communicated with investigators for the senator, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, hoping to spread more Trump-Russia theories.
(AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
The well-funded project’s work – which dwarfs the original work done for the Clinton campaign, both in budget and scope -- has been largely shrouded in mystery. But a months-long examination by RealClearInvestigations, drawn from documents and more than a dozen interviews, found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia “collusion" theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin. For instance, TDIP was behind stories keeping alive the dossier's discredited claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met during the 2016 campaign with Kremlin officials in Prague, a rumor that has now been thoroughly debunked by inspector general and special counsel reports.

The group also feeds information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then tells reporters that authorities are investigating those leads. The tactic adds credibility to TDIP’s pitches, luring big media outlets to bite on stories. It mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media to bolster their wiretap requests.

Until recently, TDIP emailed a newsletter to influential Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading “TDIP Research” – which summarized the latest “collusion” news, and offered “points of interest” to inspire fresh stories regarding Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow. The bulletin is now being distributed by an affiliated nonprofit, Advance Democracy Inc., which lists the same mailing address as TDIP.


Glenn Simpson: He and his Fusion co-founder Peter Fritsch met with Clinton aides Podesta and Sullivan in February 2017 to launch a new anti-Trump venture with Daniel Jones.
Neil King/randomhousebooks.com
Recipients of the TDIP bulletins have included journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post and investigative reporters at BuzzFeed, ProPublica and McClatchy, as well as news producers at CNN and MSNBC, according to the project's email distribution list. Democratic aides on Capitol Hill have also subscribed to the newsletter.

TDIP has also pitched leads to the FBI and congressional investigators. In fact, a month after meeting with Podesta and Sullivan, Jones hired a team of computer scientists to analyze web traffic between the Alfa Bank and Trump Organization servers, and shared the findings with his former colleagues at the FBI (Jones joined the FBI as an analyst after working in a national service program launched by the Clinton administration). This was a second attempt at convincing the FBI there was a nefarious backchannel between the Russia-based bank and Trump. An attorney for the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign had already provided former FBI General Counsel James Baker with a thumb drive outlining the tip during the 2016 campaign.

That same month, March 2017, agents nonetheless visited the offices of the Pennsylvania company that housed the Trump server. But their second investigation proved to be another dead end. The sinister communications Jones claimed were flowing between the Trump server and Alfa Bank were found to be innocuous marketing emails. In other words, spam.

Jones also hired as a project partner the Austin, Texas-based cyber research firm New Knowledge to identify fake social media accounts allegedly controlled by Russia to support Republicans and Trump policies ahead of the 2018 congressional elections. But New Knowledge was busted doing the same thing – creating fake Facebook profiles of conservative voters to draw divisions among the GOP to throw chaos into a Senate race in Alabama. It’s not clear if Podesta or Sullivan were aware of this “false flag” operation.


Hillary Clinton with campaign manager Robby Mook, left: Within hours of her concession speech, Mook and Podesta "assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up,” according to the book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.”
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Jones has also regularly communicated with investigators for Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, hoping to spread more Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. Last month the Republican-led panel affirmed American intelligence officials’ finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The panel is preparing to release a separate bipartisan report examining claims Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia. It is said to exonerate Trump.

During the 2016 campaign, Jones had worked for Democratic lobbyist Tom Daschle, who endorsed Clinton and was close to Podesta. Merging forces with Jones and Simpson fit a plan hatched by Podesta right after Clinton’s surprise defeat in November 2016.

“Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report in their book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.”

"For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public,” wrote Allen, who works for NBC News Digital, and Parnes, who reports for The Hill. "Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign,” and it clearly succeeded. After the election, coverage of the Russian “collusion” story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel. TDIP's dossier reboot put the influence operation into overdrive.

A month after TDIP was formed in 2017, former Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri summed up the post-election strategy in a Washington Post column comparing “Russiagate” to Watergate and encouraging the press and other Democrats to “turn the Russia story against Trump.”

“If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us,” she advised. “Polls show that voters are now concerned about the Russia story and overwhelmingly support an independent investigation.”

Though the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory was officially debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report in March 2019, it has tied up the Trump presidency. A separate report released late last year by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also debunked many of the theories propagated by the dossier, while uncovering misconduct by the FBI in using the dossier to obtain warrants to electronically eavesdrop on a Trump campaign adviser.

Podesta’s and Sullivan's recently released testimony provides evidence that the Clinton team and other Democrats never stopped campaigning against Trump. Hillary Clinton didn’t just pay for the Russian-sourced opposition research on candidate Trump before the election; her top aides helped bankroll continuing efforts to cast the now sitting president as a Russian agent.

[Dotard 19]

[redrex]

Barack would never hit anyone----He is too much of a pussy

[Dotard 19]

May 14, 2020 20:13:42 GMT -6 redrex said:

Barack would never hit anyone----He is too much of a pussy

Trump is the biggest snowflake pussy in the country. He can't even handle female reporters asking him questions. He gets all pissy and walks out... thin skinned pussy

[Dotard 19]

Also Obama could kick Trump's big fat, orange doughy ass

[soonernvolved]

A source familiar with the closed-door testimony confirmed to FOX News that Nellie Ohr told House investigators that she was tasked with doing opposition research during the 2016 campaign on Melania Trump as well as the president’s children.

But Nellie Ohr was not the only one targeting the Trump children.

Trey Gowdy revealed on Thursday the Obama administration was spying on the Trump children.

Conservative Treehouse today reported on the unmasking of Trump family members on Inauguration Day back in 2017.

The Obama Deep State operatives were still working to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Trump Campaign, the Trump Transition Team and the Trump family even on Inauguration Day.

They never found ANYTHING!

Trey Gowdy: It’s not just Michael Flynn. There was an unmasking request made the morning of the Inauguration, the morning of the Inauguration! President Trump’s family members’ names were unmasked. So that needs to be reformed. But you also have a real nice witness list to start investigating the leak of classified information. And I’d be curious how many people on this unmasking list have been interviewed by the FBI.



theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/05/14/gowdy-trump-family-unmasked-during-inauguration-day-surveillance-reports-wait-wha/

Unsurprisingly when Trey Gowdy said “the Trump family was unmasked on inauguration day”… interviewer Sandra Smith never paused to say: “wait, unmasked in what”?

During his tenure as House Oversight Committee Chair, apparently Trey Gowdy has seen intelligence reports showing the Trump family was unmasked on inauguration day. The logical follow-up question would be: who was generating intelligence reports on the Trump family?

Alas, the dangling participle never had the opportunity to dangle… go figure.


Follow the bouncing ball. If Gowdy is correct, and he has no vested interest in just making it up, then there was FBI domestic surveillance of the Trump family on inauguration day; which generated an intelligence report. Yet, apparently, no-one seems surprised by that… I digress.

[soonernvolved]

May 14, 2020 19:56:59 GMT -6 Dotard 19 said:

To bad actual facts, evidence, etc say otherwise. All this is, is further proof that those who are aligned leftward are doing everything in their power to shield the failure that was Obama.

Especially after President Trump has repeatedly proven at how wrong and inept former President Obama was.

[Dems in Nov]

Oh, shut up you ignorant, racist fucking moron. Racist rubes like you need to go extinct

[soonernvolved]

May 15, 2020 6:58:53 GMT -6 Dems in Nov said:

Oh, shut up you ignorant, racist fucking moron. Racist rubes like you need to go extinct

[soonernvolved]

At around the 20:00 minute mark, diGenova says this about the Durham investigation:

I definitely think, by the way, that Mr. Durham is looking into this [FISA abuse and spying on the Trump team]. Because, oh let me tell you something. Full throttle is my phrase for what John Durham is doing. He’s full throttle. Here’s the thing. There are four FISA Court opinions from two Chief Justices of the FISA Court saying that the Obama Administration, FBI and DOJ, committed, violated the law and the Constitution by allowing databases at NSA about US persons to be searched. No one knows what happened to that information.

[soonernvolved]

thefederalist.com/2020/05/14/the-constitution-requires-judge-emmet-sullivans-lawless-amicus-order-against-michael-flynn-be-overturned/

The Constitution Requires Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Lawless Amicus Order Against Michael Flynn Be Overturned
The U.S. Constitution makes clear that the judiciary has no business second-guessing prosecutorial decisions. That’s what Michael Flynn judge Emmet Sullivan decided to do.
Margot Cleveland
By Margot Cleveland
MAY 14, 2020
On May 13, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued a blatantly biased and unconstitutional order in the long-lasting Michael Flynn criminal case. To preserve the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers, the Department of Justice has no choice now but to seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit Court ordering the criminal charge against Flynn dismissed and reassigning the case to another judge.

On Tuesday, Judge Sullivan shocked court watchers when he entered an order stating that, “at the appropriate time,” he intended to enter a scheduling order permitting “amicus curiae” or friend of the court briefs to be filed in Flynn case. Flynn, who more than a year ago pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, was seeking to withdraw his guilty plea when the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the criminal charge against Flynn.


The government’s motion to dismiss highlighted new evidence uncovered by an outside U.S. attorney, Jeff Jensen, and detailed the government’s position that even if Flynn had made false statements to FBI agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, as a matter of law there was no crime because the false statements were not “material” to a legitimate investigation.

Another Jaw-Dropping Order
Soon after Judge Sullivan announced he would accept amicus briefs, a group of lawyers operating under the moniker Watergate Prosecutors filed a notice of its intent to file an amicus brief. That a group of left-leaning lawyers intended to relitigate Obamagate via the Flynn case wasn’t surprising. What was surprising—no, unbelievable—is what Judge Sullivan did on Wednesday: He entered an order “appoint[ing] The Honorable John Gleeson (Ret.) as amicus curiae to present arguments in opposition to the government’s Motion to Dismiss.”

This order was jaw-dropping for two reasons. First, the U.S. Constitution makes clear that the judiciary has no business second-guessing prosecutorial decisions. In fact, the very case Judge Sullivan cited for the proposition that he had the inherent authority to appoint an amicus curiae—United States v. Fokker—made clear Sullivan’s order was lawless.



In that case, the government had criminally charged Fokker Services with violations of export control laws. The government and defendant entered a deferred prosecution agreement, under which the government would dismiss the charges in exchange for Fokker Services agreeing to several compliance provisions. But when the parties went before a federal district court judge to formalize the arrangement and a waiver of the Speedy Trial Act, the presiding judge refused to accept the waiver—which in essence doomed the agreement—because he believed the agreement was too lenient on the business owners.

The government filed a “writ of mandamus” with the D.C. Circuit Court. A writ of mandamus is a procedural machination that allows a party to seek to force a lower court to act as required by law. The Fokker court explained that while mandamus is an extraordinary remedy, it is appropriate where the petitioner: (i) has “no other adequate means to attain the relief he desires”; (ii) “show that his right to the writ is ‘clear and indisputable’”; and then “(iii) the court ‘in the exercise of its discretion, must be satisfied that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.’”

‘The Executive’s Primacy Is Long Settled’
In analyzing the propriety of the district court’s refusal to approve the agreement, the appellate court summarized controlling principles of constitutional law: “The Executive’s primacy in criminal charging decisions is long settled. That authority stems from the Constitution’s delegation of ‘take Care’ duties, U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, and the pardon power, id. § 2, to the Executive Branch. Decisions to initiate charges, or to dismiss charges once brought, ‘lie[] at the core of the Executive’s duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws.’”

Indeed, “[f]ew subjects are less adapted to judicial review than the exercise by the Executive of his discretion in deciding when and whether to institute criminal proceedings, or what precise charge shall be made, or whether to dismiss a proceeding once brought.’”


“Those settled principles,” the court explained “counsel against interpreting statutes and rules in a manner that would impinge on the Executive’s constitutionally rooted primacy over criminal charging decisions.” The Fokker court then specifically addressed Rule 48(a) that “requires a prosecutor to obtain ‘leave of court’ before dismissing charges against a criminal defendant.”

The court explained that “that language could conceivably be read to allow for considerable judicial involvement in the determination to dismiss criminal charges.” However, and significantly, the court then stressed that “decisions to dismiss pending criminal charges—no less than decisions to initiate charges and to identify which charges to bring—lie squarely within the ken of prosecutorial discretion.”

The “leave of court” requirement, the court stressed, “has been understood to be a narrow one—’to protect a defendant against prosecutorial harassment . . . when the [g]overnment moves to dismiss an indictment over the defendant’s objection.’” Such review in that case is to guard against “a scheme of ‘prosecutorial harassment’ of the defendant through repeated efforts to bring—and then dismiss—charges.”

Fokker then concluded: “So understood, the ‘leave of court’ authority gives no power to a district court to deny a prosecutor’s Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss charges based on a disagreement with the prosecution’s exercise of charging authority. For instance, a court cannot deny leave of court because of a view that the defendant should stand trial notwithstanding the prosecution’s desire to dismiss the charges, or a view that any remaining charges fail adequately to redress the gravity of the defendant’s alleged conduct. The authority to make such determinations remains with the Executive.”

This Is Mandatory Precedent

The Fokker decision was a 2016 decision from the D.C. Circuit Court and, as such, establishes “mandatory precedent,” i.e., precedent that must be followed, by all D.C. district court judges—including Judge Sullivan. Thus, Judge Sullivan’s directive that Judge Gleeson, as amicus curiae, should “present arguments in opposition to the government’s Motion to Dismiss,” cannot stand: It conflicts with controlling circuit court precedent, and more significantly with the U.S. Constitution.

While Judge Sullivan has not yet ruled on the government’s Motion to Dismiss, his mere attempt to usurp the executive branch’s authority must be addressed, and now. The government should, as it did in Fokker, seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit, directing the charge against Flynn be dismissed.

The government should also seek reassignment of the case on remand, meaning that when the case returns to the lower court for dismissal of the charge, it goes to a different judge. While “reassignment is warranted only in the ‘exceedingly rare circumstance,’” such as where a judge’s conduct is “so extreme as to display clear inability to render fair judgment,” Judge Sullivan’s selection of Judge Gleeson as his “friend of the court” reveals Judge Sullivan’s irretractable bias.

The same day Judge Sullivan named Judge Gleeson to serve in the amicus curiae role, the Washington Post ran an op-ed co-authored by Gleeson, entitled, “The Flynn case isn’t over until the judge says it’s over.” “The Justice Department’s move to dismiss the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn does not need to be the end of the case—and it shouldn’t be,” he opened. Then, after misrepresenting the Rule 48(b)’s “leave of court” requirement, Gleeson suggests dismissal of the Flynn case would be inappropriate because “the record reeks of improper political influence.”

No, what reeks is Judge Sullivan’s selection of a clearly biased “friend of the court” who appears to have already pre-judged the prosecutor’s motive and found it improper. Judge Sullivan surely knew of Gleeson’s bent and just as surely shares it.

There were several earlier glimpses of Judge Sullivan’s bias, such as when he implied Flynn had committed treason and when he shrugged at the FBI losing the original 302 interview notes. But with his appointment of Judge Gleeson, Judge Sullivan has so far crossed the threshold of fairness, the case should be stripped from his courtroom.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

[soonernvolved]

The judge overseeing the General Flynn case, Judge Sullivan, has shown his disdain for the rule of law. He accused General Flynn of treason during one court hearing. He is clearly a Deep State hack. Now he wants to bring another judge into the case to determine if it is right for the DOJ to dismiss the case against Flynn.

The problem for Judge Sullivan is that the judge he invited into his kangaroo court has said previously that what Judge Sullivan is doing is lawless.

FOX News reports:

www.foxnews.com/politics/lawyer-appointed-judge-flynn-case-once-said-government-has-near-absolute-power-extinguish-case

Former prosecutor and federal judge John Gleeson, who was appointed by Judge Emmet Sullivan to submit a brief opposing the Justice Department’s (DOJ’s) motion to dismiss former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s case, recently went public defending Sullivan’s decision not to sign off on dropping the case — but his own judicial history undermines that position.

In a July 1, 2013, memo and order in the case of U.S. v. HSBC, then-U.S. District Court Judge Gleeson seemed to side with the idea that prosecutors have “near-absolute power” to drop a case.

“The government has absolute discretion to decide not to prosecute,” Gleeson wrote at the time. “Even a formal, written agreement to that effect, which is often referred to as a ‘non-prosecution agreement,’ is not the business of the courts.”

Gleeson went on to say that “the government has near-absolute power under [the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure] to extinguish a case that it has brought.” He cited Rule 48(a), which says: “The government may, with leave of court, dismiss an indictment, information or complaint.

[soonernvolved]

On Friday General Flynn Attorney Sidney Powell wrote an open letter to former President Obama.
This letter is devastating.
Via SidneyPowell.com.

sidneypowell.com/media/open-memorandum-to-barack-obama/

OPEN MEMORANDUM
To: Barack Hussein Obama
From: Sidney Powell
www.SidneyPowell.com

Date: May 13, 2020

Re: Your Failure to Find Precedent for Flynn Dismissal

Regarding the decision of the Department of Justice to dismiss charges against General Flynn, in your recent call with your alumni, you expressed great concern: “there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

Here is some help—if truth and precedent represent your true concern. Your statement is entirely false. However, it does explain the damage to the Rule of Law throughout your administration.

First, General Flynn was not charged with perjury—which requires a material false statement made under oath with intent to deceive.1 A perjury prosecution would have been appropriate and the Rule of Law applied if the Justice Department prosecuted your former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for his multiple lies under oath in an investigation of a leak only he knew he caused.

McCabe lied under oath in fully recorded and transcribed interviews with the Inspector General for the DOJ. He was informed of the purpose of the interview, and he had had the benefit of counsel. He knew he was the leaker. McCabe even lied about lying. He lied to his own agents—which sent them on a “wild-goose-chase”—thereby making his lies “material” and an obstruction of justice. Yet, remarkably, Attorney General Barr declined to prosecute McCabe for these offenses.

Applying the Rule of Law, after declining McCabe’s perjury prosecution, required the Justice Department to dismiss the prosecution of General Flynn who was not warned, not under oath, had no counsel, and whose statements were not only not recorded, but were created as false by FBI agents who falsified the 302.

Second, it would seem your “wingman” Eric Holder is missing a step these days at Covington & Burling LLP. Indelibly marked in his memory (and one might think, yours) should be his Motion to Dismiss the multi-count jury verdict of guilty and the entire case against former United States Senator Ted Stevens. Within weeks of Mr. Holder becoming Attorney General, he moved to dismiss the Stevens prosecution in the interest of justice for the same reasons the Justice Department did against General Flynn—egregious misconduct by prosecutors who hid exculpatory evidence and concocted purported crimes.

As horrifying as the facts of the Stevens case were, they pale in comparison to the targeted setup, framing, and prosecution of a newly elected President’s National Security Advisor and the shocking facts that surround it. This case was an assault on the heart of liberty— our cherished system of self-government, the right of citizens to choose their President, and the hallowed peaceful transition of power.

Third, the inability of anyone in your alumni association to find “anybody who has been charged [with anything] just getting off scot-free” would be laughable were it not so pathetic.

Many of your alum feature prominently in the non-fiction legal thriller published in 2014: Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. A national best- seller, it focusses on the egregious prosecutorial misconduct of your longest serving White House Counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler; your counter-terrorism advisor Lisa Monaco; Loretta Lynch’s DAG for the Criminal Division Leslie Caldwell; and Mueller protégé Andrew Weissmann. While they worked as federal prosecutors on the Enron Task Force—under the purported supervision of Christopher Wray—they destroyed Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs; sent four Merrill Lynch executives to prison on an indictment that criminalized an innocent business transaction while they hid the evidence that showed those defendants were innocent for six years. Both cases were reversed on appeal for their over-criminalization and misconduct. Indeed, Andersen was reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court.

Fourth, even if your many alumni don’t remember multiple cases that had to be reversed or dismissed for their own misconduct, Judge Emmet Sullivan should remember dismissing the corrupted case against Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan is the judicial hero of Licensed to Lie. It is that case that caused Judge Sullivan to enter the strong Brady order the Mueller and D.C. career prosecutors violated repeatedly in the Flynn prosecution.

Fifth, there is precedent for guilty pleas being vacated. Your alumni Weissmann and Ruemmler are no strangers to such reversals. At least two guilty pleas they coerced by threats against defendants in Houston had to be thrown out—again for reasons like those here. The defendants “got off scot-free” because—like General Flynn—your alumni had concocted the charges and terrorized the defendants into pleading guilty to “offenses” that were not crimes. Andersen partner David Duncan even testified for the government against Andersen in its trial, but his plea had to be vacated. Enron Broadband defendant Christopher Calger had his plea vacated. There are many others across the country.

Sixth, should further edification be necessary, see Why Innocent People Plead Guilty, written in 2014 by federal Judge Jed Rakoff (a Clinton appointee). Abusive prosecutors force innocent people to plead guilty with painful frequency. The Mueller special counsel operation led by Andrew Weissmann and Weissmann “wannabes” specializes in prosecutorial terrorist tactics repulsive to everything “justice” is supposed to mean. These tactics are designed to intimidate their targets into pleading guilty—while punishing them and their families with the process itself and financial ruin.

Most important, General Flynn was honest with the FBI agents. They knew he was—and briefed that to McCabe and others three different times. At McCabe’s directions, Agent Strzok and McCabe’s “Special Counsel” Lisa Page, altered the 302 to create statements Weissmann, Mueller, Van Grack, and Zainab Ahmad could assert were false. Only the FBI agents lied—and falsified documents. The crimes are theirs alone.

Seventh, the D.C. circuit in which you reside vacated a Section 1001 case for a legal failure much less egregious than those in General Flynn’s case. United States v. Safavian, 528 F.3d 957 (D.C. Cir. 2008). Safavian sought advice from his agency’s ethics board and did not give them all the relevant info. The jury convicted him on the theory it was a 1001 violation to conceal the information from the government ethics board. The court disagreed: “As Safavian argues and as the government agrees, there must be a legal duty to disclose in order for there to be a concealment offense in violation of § 1001(a)(1), yet the government failed to identify a legal disclosure duty except by reference to vague standards of conduct for government employees.” General Flynn did not even know he was the subject of an investigation—and in truth, he was not. The only crimes here were by your alumni in the FBI, White House, intelligence community, and Justice Department.

These are just a few obvious and well-known examples to those paying any attention to criminal justice issues.

Finally, the “leaked” comments from your alumni call further evinces your obsession with destroying a distinguished veteran of the United States Army who has defended the Constitution and this country “from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” with the highest honor for thirty-three years. He and many others will continue to do so.

1As a “constitutional lawyer,” surely you recall that perjury (or false statements) also requires intent to deceive. In Bronston v. United States, 409 U.S. 352 (1973), the Supreme Court reversed a conviction of perjury. In Bronston, the defendant’s answer was a truthful statement, but not directly responsive to the question and ultimately misled federal authorities. The Court determined: “A jury should not be permitted to engage in conjecture whether an unresponsive answer, true and complete on its face, was intended to mislead or divert the examiner; the state of mind of the witness is relevant only to the extent that it bears on whether “he does not believe [his answer] to be true.” To hold otherwise would be to inject a new and confusing element into the adversary testimonial system we know.” Id. at 359. The FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn specifically noted that his answers were true or he believed his answers to be true—completely defeating criminal intent. Furthermore, General Flynn knew and remarked they had transcripts of his conversations.

[soonernvolved]

[soonernvolved]

So, this Judge is now ignoring a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court:

www.forbes.com/sites/markchenoweth/2020/05/14/judge-sullivan-disregards-two-controlling-precedents-by-appointing-amicus-in-flynn-case/#112e5a8e6f0a

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan disregarded two controlling precedents from higher courts with his decision to appoint John Gleeson as amicus curiae in the U.S. v. Michael Flynn case this week. Judicial conduct similar to J. Sullivan’s in these prior, far less politically charged cases was roundly and unanimously condemned by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, and their colleagues across the ideological spectrum. So, whether or not one agrees with the Department of Justice’s call to drop its charges against President Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, there should be widespread agreement that J. Sullivan has veered way out of line.

One week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 9-0 decision, authored by Justice Ginsburg, that took judges to task for similar amicus antics. Her opinion for the Court in U.S. v. Sineneng-Smith upbraided the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for violating a basic aspect of legal proceedings called the “party presentation principle.” In a nutshell, this concept dictates that judges must decide the case as presented by the parties before them. They are not to go out questing for dragons to slay (or issues to tackle) that the parties have not brought before them. As J. Ginsburg put it: “[C]ourts are essentially passive instruments of government … They ‘do not, or should not, sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right. [They] wait for cases to come to [them], and when [cases arise, courts] normally decide only questions presented by the parties.”

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Kayleigh McEnany: “For three years you all talked about collusion and there was none. It was a huge injustice, not just to this administration but to the American people who deserve truth, not the alleging of absolutely false allegations against the president.”

[soonernvolved]

justthenews.com/video/6-times-adam-schiff-insistent-there-was-russian-collusion

6 times Adam Schiff insisted that there was Russian collusion

The House Intelligence Committee led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last week released 57 transcripts of interviews it conducted in its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

The documents revealed top Obama officials were questioned over whether they had or had seen evidence of such collusion, coordination or conspiracy -- the issue that drove the FBI's initial case and later the special counsel probe. They generally said they had not.

In the Wall Street Journal said for three years Schiff "spread falsehoods shamelessly" about Russia and Donald Trump, even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.

Many of those falsehoods were spread on political talk shows in major newspapers. Check out the video above to see what Schiff said to media outlets when insisting that there was Russian collusion.

[soonernvolved]

www.wsj.com/articles/barr-vs-the-beltway-11589498654?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Barr vs. the Beltway
Swamp creatures heap abuse on him for exposing abuse at the Justice Department.

In the Bible, we are told that the truth will set us free. In the Beltway, we find that the truth-tellers get hammered.

Take William Barr. The attorney general in recent weeks has made good on his pledge to be transparent about the Justice Department’s actions in the 2016 election and to right wrongs. The department’s decision to withdraw its false-statements case against former national security adviser Mike Flynn was its first public acknowledgment that past leaders sullied their mission.

...

[Dotard is done]

The truth, whether you idiot's want to believe it or not. I don't give a frack.

[soonernvolved]

May 16, 2020 10:23:27 GMT -6 Dotard is done said:

The truth, whether you idiot's want to believe it or not. I don't give a frack.

[soonernvolved]

dailycaller.com/2020/05/16/john-brennan-john-durham-unmasking-russia-probe/

Former CIA Director John Brennan Says He Is Willing To Meet With Prosecutor Investigating Origins Of Russia Probe

Former CIA Director John Brennan said Friday that he has yet to be interviewed by the federal prosecutor investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, but that he is willing to do so and has “nothing to hide.”

“I feel very good that my tenure at CIA and my time at the White House during the Obama administration was not — that was not engaged in any type of wrongdoing or activities that caused me to worry about what this investigation may uncover,” Brennan said in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.


“I have not yet been interviewed by any of those individuals involved in this matter, but I’m willing to do so because I do believe that for too long, the American public have been misled by Donald Trump, by William Barr and others.”

John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, has been investigating several aspects of the FBI, CIA and other agencies’ investigations and intelligence-gathering activities related to associates of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2017. (RELATED: Here Is Everything You Need To Know About Unmasking And Michael Flynn)

Durham is reportedly scrutinizing Brennan’s activities, though there is no indication that the prosecutor has uncovered any wrongdoing on the former spy chief’s part.

The New York Times has reported that Durham has requested Brennan’s CIA communications to find out what role he played in developing an Intelligence Community Assessment that said the Russian government intervened in the 2016 election specifically to help Trump.


WATCH:



On Wednesday, two Republican senators released a list of Obama administration officials who made requests for intelligence reports that that led to the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn.

The list, which was declassified by Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, showed that Brennan made a request for a report that identified Flynn on Dec. 15, 2016. Former Vice President Joe Biden also made a so-called “unmasking” request on Jan. 12, 2017. Former FBI Director James Comey also made a request on Dec. 15, 2016.


Brennan defended the so-called “unmasking” requests, saying that he and other Obama administration officials were “carrying out our responsibilities correctly” when they requested intelligence reports that discussed Flynn.

Brennan asserted that he is in Trump’s “crosshairs” because he has “spoken out against the corruption, the incompetence, the mischaracterizations that he and individuals around him have made to the American public.”

Durham is also reportedly investigating some of the same areas detailed in a Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe. The IG found that the FBI made 17 “significant” errors and omissions in applications for surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Many of the omissions centered on the Steele dossier, the unverified report that the FBI used to obtain authorization to wiretap Page.

The IG report said that FBI investigators withheld exculpatory information that undercut the theory that Page and other Trump aides were working with the Kremlin. FBI and Justice Department officials also failed to disclose information that called dossier author Christopher Steele’s reliability into question.

The FBI also received evidence throughout 2017 that Russian intelligence operatives fed disinformation to Steele, a former MI6 officer.

[soonernvolved]

And, another investigation of President Trump by Democrats:

www.breitbart.com/news/trump-fires-state-dept-watchdog-critical-of-admin-moves/

Democrats Investigating Trump Firing of Obama-Appointed State Dept. IG

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats demanded on Saturday that the White House hand over all records related to President Donald Trump’s latest firing of a federal watchdog, this time at the State Department, and they suggested Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was responsible, in what “may be an illegal act of retaliation.”

“We unalterably oppose the politically-motivated firing of inspectors general and the President’s gutting of these critical positions,” the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter to the administration announcing their investigation.



Trump announced late Friday that he was firing the inspector general, Steve Linick, an Obama administration appointee whose office was critical of what it saw as political bias in the State Department’s management. The ouster was one more move by the president against independent executive branch watchdogs who have found fault with his administration.
New York Rep. Eliot Engel and New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez sent letters to the White House, the State Department and the inspector general’s office asking that administration officials preserve all records related to Linick’s dismissal and provide them to the committees by this coming Friday. They promised to “look deeply into this matter” and said they would seek to interview White House officials. They said they “trust that the White House will cooperate fully with our investigation.”
A senior department official said Trump removed Linick from his job on Friday but gave no reason for the action. In a letter to Congress, Trump said Linick, who had held the job since 2013, no longer had his full confidence and that his removal would take effect in 30 days. Trump did not mention Linick by name in his letter.

Democrats soon cried foul. Engel suggested Linick was fired in part in retaliation for opening an unspecified investigation into Pompeo.
Engel offered no details. Two congressional aides said it involved allegations that Pompeo may have improperly treated staff. Linick’s office has issued several reports critical of the department’s handling of personnel matters during the Trump administration, including accusing some political appointees of retaliating against career officials.
Engel and Menendez said it was ”their understanding” that Pompeo recommended that Linick be fired because the watchdog was investigating “wrongdoing” by the Cabinet officer. They gave no specifics, but said such a move “may be an illegal act of retaliation.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Linick was “punished for honorably performing his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security.” She said Trump ”must cease his pattern of reprisal and retaliation against the public servants who are working to keep Americans safe, particularly during this time of global emergency.”


Linick, whose office also took issue with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as America’s top diplomat, played a minor role in the Ukraine impeachment investigation into Trump.

In October, Linick turned over documents to House investigators that he had received from State Department Counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a close Pompeo associate, which contained information from debunked conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election.
In the Senate, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Saturday defended the role of the inspector general in the federal government and noted that Congress requires written reasons to justify removal. “A general lack of confidence simply is not sufficient detail to satisfy Congress,” Grassley said in a statement that did not mention Trump or Pompeo.
Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, cited both the president and a possible investigation of the secretary of state in his broadside against the firing. “I hope Republicans will join us in standing up for taxpayers and getting to the bottom of this. There must be a bipartisan commitment to upholding our system of checks and balances and ensuring accountability and oversight at the highest levels,” Reed said in a statement.
Linick will replaced by Stephen Akard, a former career foreign service officer who has close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Akard currently runs the department’s Office of Foreign Missions. He had been nominated to be the director general of the foreign service but withdrew after objections he wasn’t experienced enough.
The lawmakers’ request for information from the White House includes any evaluations of Linick’s job performance and any assessment of Akard’s job qualifications.



Linick, a former assistant U.S. attorney in California and Virginia, had overseen inspector general reports that were highly critical of the department’s management policies during the Trump administration. His office had criticized several Trump appointees for their treatment of career staff for apparently being insufficiently supportive of Trump and his policies.
Under Linick, the State Department’s inspector general office was also critical of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s hiring freeze and attempts to streamline the agency by slashing its funding and personnel.
Trump has been taking aim lately at inspectors general.
In April, he fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, for his role in the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment.
Then Trump removed Glenn Fine as acting inspector general at the Defense Department. The move stripped him of his post as chairman of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which is among those overseeing the vast economic relief law pass in response to the coronavirus.
During a White House briefing on COVID-19, Trump questioned the independence of an inspector general of the over a report that said there was a shortage of supplies and testing at hospitals. Trump has since moved to replace the HHS official, Christi A. Grimm. She is a career person who has held the position in an acting capacity, but now Trump has nominated a permanent replacement.

[soonernvolved]

www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/michael-flynn-unmasking-real-story-is-when-he-was-not-masked-in-the-first-place/

Unmasking? The Real Story Is When Flynn Was Not Masked in the First Place
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 16, 2020 6:30 AM

Was his call with Kislyak recorded by a different agency than the FBI?
Despite Wednesday’s blockbuster news about the dozens of Obama-administration officials who “unmasked” then-incoming Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, there remains a gaping hole in the story: Where is the record showing who unmasked Flynn in connection with his fateful conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak?

There isn’t one.

There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.

Intelligence Collection Under FISA
“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.

The first is “traditional” FISA — the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.

NOW WATCH: 'Biden Named in List of Obama Officials Who Requested to ‘Unmask’ Flynn'


Biden Named in List of Obama Officials Who Requested to ‘Unmask’ Flynn

The second kind of FISA collection occurs under Section 702 of the statute. It brings under FISC jurisdiction various intelligence-collection programs that target categories of non-Americans outside the United States. These foreigners also communicate with Americans, so the latter are incidentally intercepted.

Under federal law, both kinds of FISA collection are subject to so-called minimization procedures. These aim to safeguard the privacy of Americans who have been incidentally monitored. When raw intelligence is refined into intelligence reports (including transcripts of recorded conversations) that are disseminated to U.S. officials, the identities of these Americans do not appear. Rather, a designation such as “U.S. Person” is substituted — the “mask,” as it were.

If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests. This underscores that unmasking — because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans — is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.

The Flynn–Kislyak Narrative
With that as background, let’s get back to Flynn.

For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored. (Kislyak was replaced as ambassador in 2017.) That is, Kislyak was an overt agent of Russia, stationed at its embassy in Washington, so the FBI kept tabs on him. Indeed, the “routine”-surveillance story line was repeated by the New York Times just this week.

The implication is that Kislyak was probably subjected to traditional FISA surveillance by the FBI; or, since he lived in Russia and traveled to other places when not in America, perhaps he was also a FISA Section 702 target. In either event (or both), Kislyak was interacting with Americans, who were thus incidentally intercepted.

That, the story goes, is what must have happened to Flynn. Trump’s designated national security advisor was unmasked because, once intelligence agents intercepted the December 29 phone call, they decided it was essential to identify the person with whom the Russian ambassador was discussing sanctions that President Obama had just imposed against Moscow.

I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call.

The Chronology
Grenell’s list notes an unmasking request for Flynn on December 28, 2016 — weirdly, by the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. There are no unmasking requests on December 29, the date of the Kislyak call. Nor is there one during the week after that. In fact, the next listed unmasking occurred on January 5, 2017. That one is attributed to President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough. This highlights how central that day is to the anatomy of the Democrat-crafted “collusion” narrative. It was on the morning of January 5 when Obama, Vice President Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice discussed Flynn and the Trump–Russia investigation with FBI director James Comey and acting attorney general Sally Yates.

Yet we know that participants in that meeting already knew about Flynn’s identity as Kislyak’s interlocutor. The exhibits attached to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case relate that Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, knew about it no later than January 3, the day he briefed Mary McCord, who ran the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Plus, Yates recalled being surprised that Obama already knew about the Flynn–Kislyak call (and, in fact, is the one who told Yates about it). Clearly, the news had been percolating at the highest levels of the Obama administration for at least a couple of days, although it may not yet have made its way down to Joe Pientka, the FBI case agent on Trump–Russia, who on January 4 signed off on a memo closing the FBI’s Flynn counterintelligence investigation (“Crossfire Razor”).

To summarize, the list provided by Grenell indicates no unmasking of Flynn between December 28 (the day before the call) and January 5, even though news of Flynn’s identification was already circulating on January 3 (when McCabe briefed McCord about it).

Beware the ‘Incorrect Narrative’
There is another significant fact that has long been highlighted by the blogger known as “Sundance” at the Conservative Treehouse site. It comes from the infamous Strzok–Page text messages. On May 8, 2017, Strzok texted Page while watching Senate testimony by former acting AG Yates and former DNI James Clapper. As Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) questioned the two former Obama officials, Strzok wrote to Page (my italics):

F*CK! Clapper and Yates through Graham questions are all playing into the “there should be an unmasking request/record” for incidental collection incorrect narrative.

If we review the transcript of that Senate testimony, we find that Strzok’s observation related specifically to the December 29 Flynn–Kislyak call:

GRAHAM: So there should be a record somewhere in our system whether or not an unmasking request was made for the conversation between Mr. Flynn and the Russian ambassador. We should be able to determine if it did — if it was made, who made it. Then we can ask, what did they do with the information? Is that a fair statement, Mr. Clapper?

CLAPPER: Yes.

Now, to put it mildly, General Clapper is not a notoriously reliable witness. To be fair, though, he was responding here to a line of questioning about what generally should happen in an unmasking situation. He was not claiming specific knowledge that there existed a record of Flynn’s unmasking in connection with the December 29 Kislyak conversation.

Agent Strzok, by contrast, was deeply involved in the nuts and bolts of the Flynn investigation — and was speaking to Page, the FBI lawyer Page then serving as counsel to the bureau’s deputy director, McCabe. As we’ve seen, McCabe was deeply involved in the Flynn investigation and knowledgeable about how the Flynn–Kislyak call came to the bureau’s attention. Though Strzok, who was fired for misconduct, has significant credibility issues, there is no reason to believe he was misstating facts to Page. When he described Clapper’s claim that there should be an unmasking record as an “incorrect narrative,” we must assume that Strzok was right — especially since Grenell’s list contains no such record.

That has to mean Flynn was not unmasked in connection with the crucial December 29 call. Why not?

The CIA and Non-FISA Intel Ops
Well, the possibility that first leaps to mind is: Maybe Flynn was a FISA surveillance target. That is, his interception was not incidental. Rather, the FBI was monitoring him under FISA because he was a suspected agent of a foreign power — the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that can’t be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBI’s abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI “requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.” (IG Report’s “Executive Summary,” p. vi.)

It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.

The CIA collects intelligence not under FISA but under Executive Order 12,333. The CIA is not governed by FISA because its intelligence operations are conducted outside the United States; the FBI is under FISA because its foreign counterintelligence mission is principally domestic.

Interesting thing about that: Flynn was not in the United States on December 29, 2016. He was taking a short vacation in the Dominican Republic. Where was Kislyak when they spoke? I don’t know. There is plenty of media reporting about Flynn being overseas, and about Flynn speaking with Kislyak. But if there is Western media reporting about Kislyak’s whereabouts, I haven’t found it. Obviously, though, this was the holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — if the Russian ambassador was in the U.S. capital, he was the only pol or diplomat who hadn’t skipped town for a respite after the heated 2016 election. Moreover, New Year’s is an important holiday in Russia, where most of those who observe Christmas do so on January 7, in the tradition of the Orthodox Church. It is reasonable to suppose that the ambassador may have been home in Russia, or otherwise outside the United States, in late December. I do not know that for a fact, but I’d be surprised if it weren’t true.

Readers of my book Ball of Collusion know I have argued that the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBI’s July 2016 opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what former CIA director John Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee:

I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion — cooperation occurred.

Brennan elaborated that, with respect to “leads that involved U.S. persons” that came to the CIA’s attention, he “made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the bureau.”

I hypothesize, then, that Flynn was not unmasked in connection with the December 29 Kislyak call. Either the CIA monitored the call directly or a friendly foreign intelligence service — whether subtly tasked by U.S. intelligence or knowing that U.S. intelligence would be very interested — intercepted the call and passed it along, probably to the CIA. At the time, Kislyak was likely outside the United States, where the CIA would not have needed FISA authorization to monitor him. And while Flynn is an American citizen, he was not only outside the country, he was already regarded by the Obama-era intelligence community as a clandestine agent of Russia — i.e., not an innocent American citizen whose surveillance was merely incidental.

229
Don’t get me wrong. This week’s revelations about unmasking are important and intriguing. They should be thoroughly examined. In fact, they are only a snapshot of the unmasking issue — involving just one U.S. person (Flynn) over a period of less than three months. It is highly irregular for government officials on the political side of the national-security realm to seek the unmasking of Americans. It is eye-opening to learn that Vice President Biden and President Obama’s chief-of-staff (McDonough) unmasked the incoming Trump administration’s national security advisor. It is downright scandalous that Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had little reason to seek unmasking, reportedly requested 260 unmaskings . . . and then told Congress that she did not make the vast majority of requests attributed to her — though it remains unclear, years later, who did make them.

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.

[soonernvolved]

Interesting is it not? The more we pull back the curtain on the illegal unmasking of Flynn and the whole sham that was Russian Collusion, how the same circle of names/figures keep popping up over & over.

The attorney for a star witness of the Mueller sham just happens to be a colleague of former Mueller gang leader Andrew Weissmann. Who would have thought?
A week ago, the transcripts from House hearings a couple years ago, involving the fraudulent Trump – Russia collusion sham, were finally released. One individual who spoke before the House Committee was Matt Tait.

Tait wrote a post at the notoriously far left entity Lawfare on June 30, 2017. This was at the same time the media was all over the Trump – Russia fraudulent sham and so Tait’s post received some notice from the MSM. Tait wrote: “The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians“. In his piece Tait shared the following:

www.lawfareblog.com/time-i-got-recruited-collude-russians

… right around the time the DNC emails were dumped by Wikileaks—and curiously, around the same time Trump called for the Russians to get Hillary Clinton’s missing emails—I was contacted out the blue by a man named Peter Smith, who had seen my work going through these emails. Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative.

Initially, I assumed the query must have been about my work on the DNC hack; after all, few people followed my account prior to the DNC breach, whereas my analysis of the break-in at the DNC had received considerably more coverage. I assumed his query about the “Clinton emails” was therefore a mistake and that he meant instead to talk to me about the emails stolen from the DNC. So I agreed to talk to him, thinking that, whatever my views on then-candidate Trump, if a national campaign wanted an independent non-partisan view on the facts surrounding the case, I should provide it to the best of my ability.

Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked—in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too—and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

Peter Smith died in May 2017 in an apparent suicide.

Tait, the former GCHQ staffer, spoke with the Mueller gang and he also testified in front of Congress. The attorney at Tait’s side happened to be David M. Bitkower.

www.dni.gov/index.php/features/2753-53-hpsci-transcripts



Mr. Bitkower worked alongside Mueller gang leader Andrew Weissmann in New York:



It’s really no surprise that Bitkower worked with Weissmann. The entire story that Tait shared at Lawfare was full of holes. Tait was also the source for a Wall Street Journal report the day before Tait’s post at Lawfare. In the WSJ report, Tait and Shane Harris from the Wall Street Journal tried to tie Peter Smith with General Michael Flynn. The entire story was based on a man who had died by suicide a month prior.

www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851

However, under oath, with Weissman’s colleague at his side, Tait shared an entirely different story:

Tait has zero evidence for this phony story:

The more you dig into the Mueller gang and its many crimes, the more sick you get and shocked that Obama could corrupt the US DOJ and FBI as badly as he did.
Rest in peace Peter Smith.

[soonernvolved]

Last November fired Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch testified before the Adam Schiff Ukrainian impeachment show trial in Washington DC.

Yovanovitch attacked President Trump for firing her but ADDED NOTHING to the conversation. The fired ambassador even admitted that President Trump did nothing illegal in his call with the Ukrainian president.
Former Ambassador Yovanovitch did her best to damage Trump and prop herself up.

But now evidence came out this week that proves Yovanovitch lied during her testimony.

During her opening statement under oath before Congress Yovanovitch said the Obama administration never raised the issue of Burisma or Hunter Biden with her.

Advertisement - story continues below


Now there is information that former Ambassador Yovanovitch lied under oath about Burisma Holdings and Hunter Biden.

New documents show Ambassador Yovanovitch perjured herself in her impeachment testimony. The fired ambassador left out mention of Burisma meetings, numerous letters on Burisma. Fox News contributor John Solomon and Rep. Lee Zeldin joined Laura Ingraham for the discussion.

Now there are calls for charges to be filed against the fired ambassador for lying under oath during an impeachment investigation!
Just The News reported:

justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/david-bossie-calls-criminal-referral-perjury-marie

David Bossie, president of the influential conservative group Citizens United, says former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch should face criminal referrals for perjury in connection with her testimony during last fall’s impeachment hearings.

“She should be made to answer for what she has done here,” Bossie, the deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, said on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

Bossie pointed out that records recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal Yovanovitch’s knowledge of issues pertaining to Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings may have been more extensive than she admitted while testifying before the House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry chaired by California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

“In a normal, serious world,” said Bossie, “there should be a criminal referral from both the House Judiciary Committee or the House Intelligence committee as well as the Senate committees that oversee this because those are the ones that heard testimony, and there should be a criminal referral on perjury for Ambassador Yovanovitch, and she should be held accountable.”

................................................

Links to perjury:



justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/impeachment-boomerang-contacts-exposed-between-us

Impeachment Boomerang: Contacts exposed between US embassy, Hunter Biden-connected Ukraine firm
Ambassador’s impeachment testimony omitted mention of Burisma meetings, letters.

uring President Trump’s impeachment, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch testified to Congress that she knew little beyond an initial briefing and “press reports” about Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that had hired Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was dogged by a corruption investigation.

“It just wasn’t a big deal,” she declared under oath on Oct. 11, 2019.

But newly unearthed State Department memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Yovanovitch’s embassy in Kiev, including the ambassador herself, was engaged in several discussions and meetings about Burisma as the gas firm scrambled during the 2016 election and transition to settle a long-running corruption investigation and polish its image before President Trump took office.

Read more
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Yovanovitch, for instance, was specifically warned in an email by her top deputy in September 2016 — three years before her testimony — that Burisma had hired an American firm with deep Democratic connections called Blue Star Strategies to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the Ukrainian gas firm and that it had placed “Hunter Biden on its board,” the memos show.

She also met directly with a representative for Burisma in her embassy office, less than 45 days before Trump took office, a contact she did not mention during her impeachment deposition.

The discussions about Burisma inside Yovanovitch’s embassy were so extensive, in fact, that they filled more than 160 pages of emails, memos and correspondence in fall 2016 alone, according to the State Department records obtained under FOIA by the conservative group Citizens United.

The contacts included a detailed private letter hand-delivered to Yovanovitch by one of Burisma’s lawyers in September 2016, a briefing later that month from her staff on Burisma’s issues, and a meeting scheduled between the ambassador and a Burisma representative shortly before Christmas 2016 as the Obama administration was preparing to leave office.

Yovanovitch, who recently retired from State, did not respond Tuesday to a message sent to her private email seeking comment. Her lawyer during the impeachment proceedings, Lawrence S. Robbins, also did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

State officials declined comment.

David Bossie, a former congressional investigator and current outside adviser to Trump who runs Citizen United, said the documents his group obtained raise questions about Yovanovitch’s testimony last fall and what else Congress may not know about the embassy’s involvement with the Hunter Biden-connected Burisma firm.

"These new records clearly don't support Ambassador Yovanovitch's testimony under oath during [Rep. Adam] Schiff's sham impeachment. Her sworn testimony must be investigated and scrutinized just like in the case of General [Michael] Flynn,” he said. “You can't have two sets of rules."

The impeachment hearings last fall, which focused on efforts by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Guiliani to find evidence inside Ukraine on the Bidens and Burisma and to remove Yovanovitch from her job as U.S. ambassador, included testimony from Yovanovitch herself.

During that deposition in October 2019 she made no mention of direct contact with Burisma representatives and instead suggested her knowledge about the company and its legal travails was limited mostly to a briefing she received in preparation for Senate confirmation as ambassador in summer 2016 and subsequent news media reports.

Hunter Biden’s work for one of Ukraine’s largest energy companies, which generated more than $3 million in payments to his American firm over two years, stirred controversy in both Ukraine and the United States because his father oversaw U.S. policy for Ukraine while Burisma was long a focus of a criminal corruption probe in Ukraine. State Department officials have said they believed the relationship created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“What do you know about the investigation of Burisma?” Yovanovitch was asked at one point during her October testimony.

“Not very much. And, again, that happened before I arrived,” she testified. “… Burisma wasn’t a big issue in the fall of 2018 — 2016 when I arrived.”

“Were you aware at that time of Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma?” she was asked at another point.

“Yes. As I mentioned, I became aware during the Q&A in the prep for my testimony,” she answered.

Yovanovitch said she believed she learned from press reports that Burisma’s criminal case had been dormant by the time she arrived in Kiev in late summer 2016.

“I’m trying to understand your testimony, because earlier in the day you said that, based on press reports, your understanding was that it was dormant. You may have had additional information it was dormant, or you don’t know?” Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., inquired at one point.

“Yes. And all I can tell you is it was a long time ago and it just wasn’t a big issue,” she said.

“So I just want to understand your position. Obviously, you knew that Burisma was dormant, based on press reports. That was what you stated earlier,” Zeldin pressed.

“Uh-huh,” she answered.

“But you’re saying that you may have had other information, but you don’t recall that now?” the lawmaker followed.

“I may have had other information, but I don’t recall how I had that impression …” she answered.

During a nationally televised impeachment hearing a month later in the House, Yovanovitch doubled down on her testimony that Burisma and Hunter Biden weren't on her radar when she took over as ambassador. "It was not a focus of what I was doing in that six-month period," she testified anew.

But the memos show Yovanovitch was informed that the criminal cases were actively being settled in fall 2016 and that Burisma and its founder Mykola Zlochevsky were trying to repair the company’s reputation with the U.S. Embassy.

For instance, a briefing memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s 30-minute meeting Dec. 8, 2016 inside the U.S. Embassy with Burisma representative Karen Tramontano noted that Tramantano worked for the lobbying and strategy firm Blue Star Strategies.

“An Atlantic Council member and Washington veteran, Tramontano informally represents Mykola Zlochevsky, the Burisma CEO, who has long been the target of law enforcement proceedings in Ukraine,” the memo stated.

The memo added that “his [Zlochevsky’s] official US representatives sent a letter in September (attached) asking that the embassy reconsider its position on him.”

Read the memos by clicking on the "Dig In" button above.

The new memos aren't the first to raise questions about Yovanovitch's testimony. Last November, Fox News challenged another portion of her testimony denying she had contact with a Democratic House staffer after the network said it obtained emails showing Yovanovitch did in fact have the contact on her private email, and not her official State email.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has been trying to subpoena documents about Blue Star Strategies and its work for Burisma for weeks but has been blocked by opposition from Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, whose friend serves on the Burisma board. Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, are now seeking to interview witnesses who previously served at the embassy.

The memos show that both Blue Star Strategies and the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit policy organization, played a role in fall 2016 pressing the U.S. embassy in Kiev to change its position on Burisma and Zlochevsky, whom the embassy viewed as corrupt. Zlochevsky has long denied any wrongdoing.

For instance, after the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department foreign funding arm, was told by the embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission George Kent not to accept a $7,500 donation for Burisma for a clean energy event in Ukraine in late summer 2016, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine named John Herbst working for the Atlantic Council reached out.

Herbst asked to meet with Yovanovitch in September 2016 and secured a private dinner date instead with Kent in Ukraine, the memos show. “I will factor into our conversation the Zlochevsky Affair,” Herbst wrote to Kent as he prepared for their dinner.

Kent, long a critic of Burisma, is one of the witnesses Johnson and Grassley are seeking to interview. He went out of his way to mention the Burisma-Hunter Biden connection during one of his pre-dinner email exchanges with Herbst in which he decried alleged “payoffs” to Ukrainian officials “to do nothing” about the Burisma investigation.

“I have no doubt such arrangements were made, apart from Mr. Zlochevsky (who also put Hunter Biden on the board of his Burisma Energy company),” Kent wrote.

One of the maneuvers Blue Star planned was to take the new Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, who held the fate of Burisma in his hands, to the United States for an event with the Atlantic Council, a move that would have created positive press for Lutsenko in both countries, the memos state.

Kent discouraged doing so and eventually sent a memo to Yovanovitch alerting her that “Lutsenko now likely not to go to DC with Blue Star.”

She followed up with a request to be briefed. “Thanks George. At some point appreciate discussing in more detail some of the folks referenced,” the ambassador wrote in a Sept. 4, 2016 email.

Within a few days, Yovanovitch received a direct letter from one of Burisma’s American lawyers, John Buretta of the Cravath, Swaine and Moore law firm in New York, alerting her that Lutsenko’s office was dropping a long-running corruption investigation of Burisma without filing charges based on a Ukrainian court ruling favorable to Zlochevsky.

Buretta’s letter to Yovanovitch said the allegations against Zlochevsky were “baseless,” and the lawyer asked the U.S. embassy to drop its long-running narrative that Burisma was somehow corrupt.

“We respectfully request that Your Excellency take into consideration these objective facts when considering the narrative promoted by some, and no doubt to be repeated again, in disregard of the facts and the law and the decisions by courts,” Buretta wrote the ambassador.

Yovanovitch immediately forwarded the letter to Kent. “What is this about?” she emailed.

Kent, the memos show, then arranged a special briefing for Yovanovitch later in September to get up to speed. The planned subject of the briefing, the memos show, was “Zlochevsky, Burisma, Cravath and image rehab campaigns.”

One of the topics for the briefing, Kent wrote colleagues on Sept. 16, 2016, was “Zlochevsky/Burisma – asset recovery and past crimes of the Yanu regime as they intersect U.S. corporate/individual interest,” an apparent reference to Hunter Biden’s role with the company.

In a separate email to Yovanovitch, Kent was more explicit about the Biden connection. “This is further to the Blue Star effort to rehabilitate the reputation of their non-client in the US, former ministry of ecologies Zlochevsky, who clearly has retained the services of a blue chip law firm (Cravath) and his energy company Burisma, which in turn has Hunter Biden on its board,” Kent emailed the ambassador.

By November 2016, with Trump now the president-elect, Burisma’s American emissaries were in full motion to get a second corruption case against Burisma — this one involving tax evasion — settled in Ukraine. They succeeded by early January, just days before Trump took office.

The American legal team for Burisma also wanted to improve relations between the gas firm, where Hunter Biden worked, and the U.S. embassy and USAID, the foreign aid arm, the memos show.

The Dec. 8, 2016 briefing memo prepared for Yovanovitch detailed the lobbying efforts by Blue Star.

“USAID spoke to Blue Star Strategies representative Sally Painter by phone and indicated that we would be open to discussing other forms of cooperation between USAID and Burisma, and agreed to meet with Burisma Government and Public Affairs representative Vadim Pozharskyi,” the memo to Yovanovitch explained. “In the November meeting, Pozharskyi briefed USAID on Burisma and the gas sector more broadly but did not propose specific ideas for cooperation.”

U.S. officials directly familiar with the Dec. 8, 2016 meeting confirmed it took place and that Yovanovich attended, but did not know whether the ambassador read the briefing memo beforehand.

After Yovanovitch met with Blue Star’s Tramantano, word surfaced in Ukraine that Zlochevsky had settled the second case against Burisma with a fine, and the Ukrainian news media was up in arms, critical that the owner and his company with Hunter Biden on its board had escaped more serious penalty.

One headline forwarded by email to the ambassador read, “Activists cry foul as courts, prosecutors clear Zlochevsky.”

“Lots of accusations/innuendo,” a State official wrote Yovanovitch and Kent on Dec. 29, 2016, forwarding another news article that alleged Burisma may have dumped natural gas into the market as a political payoff for getting off in the criminal case.

“Mentions Biden’s son and Kwasniewski are on board of Burisma, which allegedly had a subsidiary dump natural gas recently as a way to pay bribes” to Ukrainian officials, the State official wrote Yovanovitch.

A few hours later on that same day, the embassy’s deputy economic counselor followed up with Yovanovitch about the payoff allegations. “The dumping part is true,” the official wrote.

By early January 2017, as Vice President Joe Biden prepared to make a final visit to Ukraine before leaving office, officials around Yovanovitch worried the Burisma scandal might taint the visit. They forwarded news articles to the ambassador, some which were critical of the Bidens.

A Jan. 7, 2017 email from a State official to Yovanovitch, for instance, provided a summary of recent news reports about the impending Biden visit. “Ukrainian political scientists speculate on the purpose of the visit,” the email told Yovanovitch.

One of the speculations quoted in the memo was that Biden “has a business interest” in Ukraine because his son worked for Burisma. “Perhaps the behind the scenes part of the visit can be attributed to the fact that the Ukranian authorities guaranteed some business positions to the former Vice President and his family,” the memo quoted one Ukrainian figure as saying.

Kent had long feared the Bidens had created the appearance of a conflict of interest with the Burisma relationship and testified during impeachment he tried to warn the vice president about his concerns in 2015 but got rebuffed. As the media speculation about Biden’s last visit got more intense and nasty, Kent lamented to colleagues in a Jan. 17, 2017 email that copied Yovanovitch: “Burisma – gift that keeps on giving.”

For the Atlantic Council and Herbst, Kent’s line was prophetically, and literally, true.

On Jan. 13, 2017, Herbst emailed Kent that the Atlantic Council had just accepted a donation from Burisma.

“I wanted you to know before it becomes public that the Atlantic Council decided to accept support for its program from Burisma,” Herbst wrote. “We looked at the matter closely and weighed it over for a month. Information provided by the Cravath lawyer for Burisma in the London case was an important factor, although some uneasiness remains.”
...........................................................................

And this:

justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/congressman-says-marie-yovanovitch-1000-misled-congress

Key lawmaker says Marie Yovanovitch ‘1000%’ misled Congress, DOJ should investigate
NY GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin calling for review of testimony of Yovanovitch and others.

he former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine "1000%" misled Congress during last year's impeachment hearings when she claimed she didn't know much about the controversial Burisma Holdings company and the Justice Department needs to investigate, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., says.

Zeldin reacted Thursday after documents published by Just the News earlier this week showed Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch met with a Burisma representative, received correspondence from the Ukraine gas company that hired Hunter Biden and received a detailed briefing on the matter during the 2016 election.

Yovanovitch, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment inquiry last fall, said that she knew little about the company, especially as it pertained to the Biden. She testified most of what she knew was from a briefing before she headed to run the U.S. embassy in Kiev and from news reports.

Read more
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“It just wasn’t a big deal,” she said under oath.

Hunter Biden is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. He served on the Burisma board, and his firm received roughly $3.4 million in fees from the company. Critics argue Biden had little expertise in that area and got the job because of his political connections.

Zeldin, an intelligence committee member who led the questioning during some of Yovanovitch's testimony, told the John Solomon Reports podcast that “It was unbelievable” that she and others “were acting as if they didn’t know anything about this.”

URL to Embed

Amid the now publicly available documentation — including letters, briefing materials, and emails for Yovanovitch pertaining to Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma and the gas firm's efforts to rehab its reputation for corruption — questions are being raised about whether she misled Congress when she claimed to have no more than slight, superficial knowledge of Burisma based largely on press accounts.

Zeldin emphatically believes she did, saying, “1000%, there’s no other way to cut it. ... It would be unbelievable to try to imagine that Ambassador Yovanovitch, Princeton-educated, well regarded for her intellect by many who speak out strongly on her behalf, that she would forget every single one of these meetings, discussions, emails, all of that traffic that is documented.”

“That she would not remember any of it," Zeldin said, "that’s just not possible.”

Yovanovitch and her lawyer Lawrence Robbins did not respond to emailed requests for comment this week.

When asked about what options Congress has for holding accountable Yovanovitch and others who might have given evasive testimony, Zeldin said that he’s viewing this “as part of a larger issue … of people lying to Congress.”

“There should be investigations and accountability,” he said, suggesting DOJ should investigate.

“If the tables were turned, and it was [former Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper lying and [former U.N. Ambassador Samantha] Power lying and these others lying, to take out a President Hillary Clinton or a President Barack Obama ... there would undoubtedly be perjury investigations,” he said. “There need to be consequences about double standards.”

For Yovanovitch specifically, Zeldin said that an investigation would require figuring out if the ambassador had reviewed any of the documents that she claimed to have no recollection of receiving. If it can be determined that she did review them, it becomes easier to prove that she lied to Congress.

Zeldin said “it’s illegal for someone to come testify before Congress and lie, but there’s no consequences if Congress itself lies.”

Zeldin was referring to California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

“We know what should happen right now between now and November as far as accountability for Adam Schiff,” Zeldin said. “There should be a censure, there should be a resignation. He should lose his gavel … But Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to do that. The reason why Adam Schiff is the chair of this committee is to do exactly what he’s done ... He’s such a good liar.”

[soonernvolved]

www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/05/16/schumer-trump-using-conspiracy-theories-of-russian-origin-against-obama-and-biden/

Schumer: Trump Using ‘Conspiracy Theories’ of ‘Russian Origin’ Against Obama and Biden

On Saturday’s “MSNBC Live,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stated that President Trump is using “conspiracy theories, many of which had Russian origin,” against President Obama and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Schumer said, “Right now, at the White House — at the Camp David, instead of the president sitting down and talking with experts on COVID and how to get the testing out, or how to follow up on getting a vaccine, instead of doing what he usually does, makes a grandiose announcement and then forgets about it, he’s talking to a group of hard-right Republican congressmen to talk about more conspiracy theories. How do we go after Joe Biden? How do we go after Barack Obama? Mr. President, there’s a crisis in America. Stop these conspiracy theories, many of which had Russian origin, and start rolling up your sleeves and helping us solve the problem here.”

[soonernvolved]

Ten days ago Acting DNI Richard Grenell walked a “satchel of documents” over to the Department of Justice to hand over to AG Bill Barr. The documents inside the satchel are the cause of much speculation.

Some believe the documents relate to the company John Brennan served as CEO for before joining the Obama Administration.

J. E. Dyer wrote a piece at Liberty Unyielding and discussed the recent actions related to spying, leaking and unmasking of the Trump campaign and administration. There is speculation that the firm that corrupt John Brennan was the CEO of, before working as CIA Head for Obama, was somehow connected to the leaks and illegal data sharing going on with the Obama administration. Dyer writes:

libertyunyielding.com

The NSC staff isn’t the only physical place it [spying] was done. The notorious dust-up at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March 2016 is a strong data point indicating that the FBI was involved in it, with contractors – people who weren’t government employees – being able to view USPI material. The unauthorized viewing by contractors was a major issue, exposed to the public in Judge Rosemary Collyer’s orders after the FISA court review was released in 2017.

There are other opinions on this, but I believe there is a strong argument that there were two agencies involved in that particular case: the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The exposed contractors were very likely to be individuals from the same company who worked government contracts that that company held with both agencies.

The company is the one John Brennan was president of from 2005 to 2009: The Analysis Corporation. A major reason this hypothesis resonates is that the TAC contract with both agencies is for database maintenance and analysis. (The contracts are still active. They were very long ones, obtained in 2008 and 2009, running into hundreds of millions of dollars.)

The other major reason is that in 2012, Brennan set up the close collaboration of the FBI and NCTC on precisely the data we’re concerned about – USPI – when he was Obama’s counterterrorism czar.

But, again, the NSC staff as the nexus for Obamagate is the key to divining the architecture of what was essentially a syndicate enterprise. The NSC staff has desks and computers manned by most of the major agencies of the U.S. government. A CIA representative working there is “CIA,” in every meaningful sense, but is available for activities that can only be performed from the physical location of the White House complex. The same is true for the DOJ, FBI, State, Treasury, and so forth. Then there are the employees of the Executive Office of the President itself, the core of the NSC staff.

The sheer number of persons said to be on Grenell’s list informs us that the “black book” of this enterprise has been pried out and assembled, computer keystroke by computer keystroke.

CNN reported in 2008 that the Analysis Corporation was busted for improperly looking at passports of presidential candidates:

edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/22/passport.files/index.html

The CEO of a company [John Brennan] whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.

John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp., advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues, the source said.

It’s not a stretch to believe that Brennan’s company, the Analysis Corp., was one of the companies that was obtaining data from the government’s database as was mentioned in the FISA report noted above. Unfortunately, to date the names of these companies have been redacted.

[soonernvolved]

Pelosi with another investigation of President Trump:

www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/05/17/pelosi-congress-will-investigate-trump-firing-state-department-ig-it-could-be-unlawful/

Pelosi: Congress Will Investigate Trump Firing State Department IG, It ‘Could be Unlawful’

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Congress would look into President Donald Trump’s firing of Steve Linick, the State Department’s inspector general

She said the removal of Linick “could be unlawful.”


Partial transcript as follows:

BRENNAN: Madam Speaker, late Friday, President Trump sent you a letter saying that he was going to remove the inspector general of the State Department, Steve Linick. There’s the fourth IG to be removed in six weeks. Why was Linick removed? What’s behind this?

PELOSI: Well, this is new to us and typical of the White House announcing something that is very unsavory. They would do it late on a Friday night. The fact is, as you indicated, it’s the fourth inspector general- inspectors general, that office was created after Watergate to make sure that there was integrity in the departments, the agencies of government. They’re supposed to show cause. Even Republicans in Congress are concerned about and have spoken out.



BRENNAN: Was he investigating the secretary of state? When you say unsavory, is that what you mean?

PELOSI: Well, I mean, unsavory when you take out someone who is there to enforce the- to stop waste, fraud, abuse or other violations of the law that are- they believed to be happening. So, again, let’s take a look and see. The president has the right to fire any federal employee. But the fact is, if it looks like it’s in retaliation for something that the attorney- the IG, the inspector general is doing, that could be unlawful.

BRENNAN: Was he investigating the secretary of state as Elliot Engel has said?

PELOSI: I trust the word of my chairman. Again, I just passed a big bill and I only got this letter from the president that night. But he didn’t say in his letter any reason except that he lost confidence. Well, he’s lost confidence in other IG’s because they had been investigating or looking- have reason to believe that something should be investigated that he is doing. I really do think that presidents should not have the ability to do investigations into their own actions.
..............................................

Fun flashback for comparision sake:

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/17/obama-had-no-state-department-inspector-general-for-more-than-four-years/

Obama Had No State Department Inspector General for More than Four Years

President Donald Trump is being criticized by his opponents after firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick on Friday night. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called it a “threat to accountable democracy.” However, President Barack Obama did not nominate an inspector general for the State Department during his entire first term.

In fact, the post was vacant for nearly four years. The last inspector general under President George W. Bush, Howard J. Krongard, resigned in December 2007. The position was vacant for nearly six years until the Senate confirmed Linick in September 2013. There was little public outcry or media criticism about the vacancy at the time.




Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) noted the Democrats’ hypocrisy in a statement Saturday, while still calling upon President Trump to submit a written explanation of the firing to Congress:

“Here again, inspectors general are crucial in correcting government failures and promoting the accountability that the American people deserve. Mr. Linick led the State Dept. IG’s office after the position had been intentionally left vacant for the first four years of the Obama Administration. Although he failed to fully evaluate the State Department’s role in advancing the debunked Russian collusion investigation, those shortcomings do not waive the President’s responsibility to provide details to Congress when removing an IG. As I’ve said before, Congress requires written reasons justifying an IG’s removal. A general lack of confidence simply is not sufficient detail to satisfy Congress,” Grassley said.
Curiously, the four-year vacancy under Obama coincided with Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State, which was marred by controversy — including her use of a private email server as the Clinton Foundation continued to collect donations from abroad.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 — two years later:

www.wsj.com/articles/state-department-lacked-top-watchdog-during-hillary-clinton-tenure-1427239813

The State Department had no permanent inspector general—the lead watchdog charged with uncovering misconduct and waste—during Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure as secretary, leaving in place an acting inspector who had close ties to State Department leadership.

President Barack Obama didn’t put forward a nominee to lead the inspector general’s office while Mrs. Clinton led the State Department, making it the only agency with a presidentially appointed inspector general that had neither a confirmed nor nominated head watchdog during that full time period.

Five months after Mrs. Clinton left office, Mr. Obama nominated a permanent inspector general, who was confirmed by the Senate three months later.

When Republicans raised questions about the vacancy, their concerns were dismissed. The Obama administration and Clinton herself defended the performance of the acting inspector general.
......................................................

And President Obama fired an IG who was investigating a friend of the President:

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/17/flashback-obama-fired-inspector-general-who-pursued-ally-kevin-johnson/

Flashback: Obama Fired Inspector General Who Pursued Ally Kevin Johnson

Democrats are outraged that President Donald Trump has fired several inspectors general in recent weeks. President Barack Obama came under more muted criticism — most of it from Republicans — in 2009 when he fired AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, who had pursued an investigation of Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star and mayor of Sacramento, California. Johnson was a supporter of President Obama, suggesting the possibility of political interference.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2009:

www.wsj.com/articles/SB124511811033017539

A George W. Bush appointee, Mr. Walpin has since 2007 been the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that oversees such subsidized volunteer programs as AmeriCorps. In April 2008 the Corporation asked Mr. Walpin to investigate reports of irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson. St. HOPE had received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant, which was supposed to go for three purposes: tutoring for Sacramento-area students; the redevelopment of several buildings; and theater and art programs.

Mr. Walpin’s investigators discovered that the money had been used instead to pad staff salaries, meddle politically in a school-board election, and have AmeriCorps members perform personal services for Mr. Johnson, including washing his car.



At the end of May, Mr. Walpin’s office recommended that Mr. Johnson, an assistant and St. HOPE itself be “suspended” from receiving federal funds. The Corporation’s official charged with suspensions agreed, and in September the suspension letters went out. Mr. Walpin’s office also sent a civil and/or criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California.

So far, so normal. But that all changed last fall, when Mr. Johnson was elected mayor of Sacramento. News of the suspension had become public, and President Obama began to discuss his federal stimulus spending. A city-hired attorney pronounced in March that Sacramento might be barred from receiving stimulus funds because of Mr. Johnson’s suspension.

Pressure began to build on Walpin, and he was eventually fired, with the call allegedly coming from Obama White House ethics “czar” Norm Eisen. (Eisen was, more recently, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump; he used a deceptively edited video in his questioning.)

The Journal reported that Eisen told Walpin that the president “felt it was time for Mr. Walpin to ‘move on,’ and that it was ‘pure coincidence’ he was asked to leave during the St. HOPE controversy.” However, the Obama administration had to change its explanation because of a law requiring a written explanation for such firings be sent to Congress.

Worse, the Obama White House later claimed that Walpin had been “confused” and “disoriented” at a meeting.

Some Democrats protested. But nothing was done, and the media — now following Trump’s firings closely — moved on.