In the Day #2 transcript released today FBI chief legal counsel James Baker was asked about a specific series of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok text messages on the evening President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
Comey was fired on May 9th, 2017. Later that night Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had the following text conversation:
5/9/17 8:14pm And we need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting. 5/10/17 05:29am We need to lock in [REDACTED] in a formal chargeable way. Soon. 5/10/17 05:30am I agree. I’ve been pushing and will reemphasize with Bill [Priestap].
FBI chief legal counsel James Baker’s response to questions about this text message exchange indicates that President Trump (‘Trump’ or ‘POTUS’) was the name under the redaction. (more…)
With the Mueller probe complete; with AG Barr announcing a focus to review the intelligence operation in 2016; with Devin Nunes submitting criminal referrals; with Lindsey Graham probing CIA, DOJ and FBI conduct; with Doug Collins releasing ‘Spygate’ transcripts; with Inspector General Michael Horowitz closing in on the final stages of his FISA abuse investigation; and with President Trump contemplating declassification of documents applying sunlight on the Russia collusion/conspiracy hoax; there is an outrage trap which must be avoided….
The issue(s) surround President Obama and high-ranking Obama intelligence officials, notably: John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper and Sally Yates intentionally lying and/or misrepresenting issues to president-elect Donald Trump and the transition team in/around the transition period and shortly after the January 20, 2017, inauguration.
Some of the misinformation stems from intelligence officials telling direct lies (ex. telling President-elect, and President Trump he was not under investigation). Other aspects were lies of omission surrounding the Steele Dossier during the January 6th, 2017, intelligence briefing session with the President-elect in Trump Tower.
In essence, there were many misleading and false statements, with varying scales of severity, during the period from November 9th, 2016, through mid-May 2017 when President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. (more…)
Attorney General William Barr delivered stunning, albeit obviously honest, remarks during congressional testimony today in response to Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen about his intent to review prior intelligence activities in targeting the Trump campaign.
Before getting to the video and transcript, it is important to note how this line of questioning surfaces. The professional political apparatus, primarily Democrats – but also Republicans, who participated in the ‘soft coup’ effort are attempting to gauge the landscape of their risk by identifying AG Barr’s intention. This line of questioning is NOT organic or random; it is deeply purposeful and scripted. You can smell the fear.
Shaheen is being asked by allies within the Administrative state, including interests no longer holding political office, to do advanced query…. this is political reconnaissance intended to give corrupt officials and media allies the background to: (a) scale their risk; and (b) plan their defense narrative. They are nervous now. Very nervous.
Here’s the important transcript, (all emphasis mine):
Senator Shaheen: News just broke, today, that you have a special team looking into why the FBI opened an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. I wonder if you can share with this committee: who is on that team; why you felt the need to form that kind of a team; and what you intend to be the scope of their investigation?
Attorney General William Barr was questioned today by republican lawmaker Robert Aderholt about potentially fraudulent DOJ and FBI submissions to the FISA court – to gain a Title-One surveillance warrant against U.S. Person Carter Page.
In a deliberate response AG Barr stated: “The Office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russia investigation. I expect that will be complete in probably May or June, I am told. More generally,I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016.”
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The response would indicate AG Barr is taking personal interest in the events behind the July 31st, 2016, origination of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence operation. Additionally, this approach indicates AG Barr’s review is going much further than Inspector General Horowitz; taking the review all the way to the origin of the intelligence community operation.
UPDATE:Bloomberg Reports: Attorney General William Barr has assembled a team to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by Justice Department and FBI officials, including actions taken during the probe of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, according to a person familiar with the matter.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins writes a letter to Chairman Jerry Nadler smartly using transparency to call his bluff. First the letter:
Every narrative needs a foundation; every investigation, false or genuine, needs a predicate upon which to launch. Remove the predicate and everything is exposed. The predicate is the reason why so much effort was put forth by the conspiring Obama administration; and corrupt intelligence officials; and all political operatives; and the entirety of the mainstream media; to drumbeat that “Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election.”
Without that predicate forming the motive for all subsequent action, the house-of-cards collapses; everything is exposed.
There is no amount of hindsight manipulation that can cover for a fraudulent basis of origination. This is one of the reasons why voices like Diana West are so important. Question the underlying assumption and the entire dynamic changes.
By now the intellectually honest reviewers of information all accept there was no effort from the Trump campaign to collude or conspire with ‘Russians’. That narrative was always false; even Robert Mueller’s team of lawyers and FBI investigators have conceded their inability to substantiate those Trump-Russia assertions. There never was any ‘there’ there. All effort was instead trying to set up the obstruction case.
But further back in the narrative construct, those Trump-Russia assertions are predicated on there actually being some grand conspiratorial attempt by Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Without a factual basis for that claim, none of the CIA, FBI and DOJ-NSD operations hold any validity. (more…)
As often stated, Democrats are not trying to use the ‘impeachment’ process in the technical sense of the word; in the words of House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler they want to use hearings to show President Trump guilty of “betrayals to the public interest“, a purely political construct.
While this interview is somewhat insufferable to watch, it is valuable from the sense of revealing the political scheme as the House plans to continue advancing the Russian collusion-conspiracy for maximum political value. Chairman Nadler is very forthcoming in the plan, watch:
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Nadler plans to use his committee throughout the summer for show-trials with witness testimony from the Mueller investigative group, starting with Robert Mueller. The Democrats will then extract testimony from some of the rehearsed 19 lawyers and 40 FBI investigators to advance their narrative. (more…)
Everything about last year’s headline story just two-weeks before the mid-term election was weird; including the refusal of the FBI to state what ‘specifically’ was the material suspect Cesar Sayoc was accused of using to create his Acme-looking pipe bombs. [Full Indictment Here]
You might remember: FBI Director Christopher Wray outlined during his remarks that the devices consisted of PVC pipe, clocks, batteries, wiring and “energetic material that can become combustible when subjected to heat or friction”.
The FBI director went out of his way to state: “these were not hoax devices.” The DOJ case, which has taken places in New York’s Southern District (SDNY) then moved to seal all court filings and the case against the nut continued behind the curtain of ‘national security’. Suspect Cesar Sayoc was scheduled to go on trial this summer on charges relating to the pipe bombs. However, on March 21st, he entered a guilty plea before a federal judge in New York.
In a new development Cesar Sayoc has written a letter to the judge (full pdf below) trying to walk-back the statements put before him by lawyers in his guilty plea. Obviously Mr. Sayoc is a person of unstable disposition, but his written statements speak to the nature of issues which have always seemed rather odd. (more…)
With a larger portion of the U.S. electorate now beginning to realize there never was a Trump Russia-Collusion-Conspiracy case to begin with; and with people now realizing almost all of Mueller investigative time was spent gathering evidence for an ‘obstruction case’; and with new revelations from Andrew McCabe, John Dowd and Mueller officials overlayed on the previous Strzok/Page texts; we can now clearly reconcile a previous issue:
..The May 16, 2017, Mueller meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office.
There has been a great deal of flawed interpretation of the May 16th meeting between President Trump, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller. Some people even mistakenly used that meeting as a cornerstone for a claim that Mueller and Rosenstein were working to the benefit of President Trump. However, if you overlay the new information, there is considerable evidence that interview was for the purpose of Mueller determining if he could achieve an ‘obstruction’ goal. Here’s how…
FBI Director James Comey was fired on Tuesday May 9th, 2017.
According to his own admissions (NBC and CBS), Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe immediately began a criminal ‘obstruction’ investigation the next day, Wednesday May 10th; and he immediately enlisted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
These McCabe statements line up with with text message conversations between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok – (same dates 5/9 and 5/10):
It now appears that important redaction is “POTUS” or “TRUMP”. [Yes, this is evidence that some unknown DOJ officials redacted information from these texts that would have pointed directly to the intents of the DOJ and FBI. WARNING: Don’t get hung on it.] (more…)
Amid Pelosi, Cummings, Schiff and Nadler’s coordinated effort to use material inside the special counsel investigation, President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani appears on Fox News to discuss their weaponized approach.
