While necessarily needing to continue the gamesmanship, and publicly exhibit positive reception therein, I doubt seriously President Trump is fooled by this familiar Chinese ploy. Actions speak louder than words:
BOAO/BEIJING, China (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping promised on Tuesday to open the country’s economy further and lower import tariffs on products like cars, in a speech seen as an attempt to defuse an escalating trade dispute with the United States.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be appearing before a joint hearing with the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The structural reasoning -as sold by media- surrounds social media privacy, and the use and abuse of user data. However, Democrats are also planning to use this testimony to prove that Facebook allowed Russian operatives to elect Donald Trump. Anticipated start time 2:15pm EST.
You can call it a soft-coup, or you can call it politicization of the DOJ and FBI, but the end result is the same – the intentional effort to manipulate, influence, and ultimately subvert an election for the presidency of the United States. ~SD
Moments ago a righteously angered President Trump responded to the FBI raids on the office and home of his personal attorney Michael Cohen. In addition to expressing outrage at Robert Mueller and his team of “small group” political allies, President Trump expressed his disappointment in Attorney General Jeff Sessions for authorizing the ongoing action.
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[Transcript] THE PRESIDENT: So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys — a good man. And it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages’ worth of documents to the Special Counsel.
They continue to just go forward. And here we are talking about Syria and we’re talking about a lot of serious things. We’re the greatest fighting force ever. And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now — and actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started.
And it’s a disgrace. It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.
You can call it a soft-coup, or you can call it politicization of the DOJ and FBI, but the end result is the same – the intentional effort to manipulate, influence, and ultimately subvert an election for the presidency of the United States. ~SD
It is being reported today that Special Counsel Robert Mueller instructed the FBI field office from the Southern District of New York to raid the home and office of President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen.
[Via New York Times] The F.B.I. on Monday raided the office of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, seizing records related to several topics including payments to a pornographic-film actress.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.
Tomorrow Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce the assignment of U.S. Attorney John Lausch to facilitate the production of documents from the DOJ (Horowitz/Huber) to the House Judiciary Committee, and Chairman Bob Goodlatte.
Mr. Lausch is a Trump appointed U.S. Attorney from outside Washington DC. John Lausch currently heads the Northern District of Illinois which includes Chicago, and this specific U.S. Attorney has extensive experience in complex cases of conspiracy and political corruption; a key skill-set given the issues within the Horowitz/Huber investigation of potential politicization of the FBI and DOJ offices.
Accepting the OIG report is almost certainly the most complex undertaking of IG Horowitz career; and accepting the multitude of possible angles within each section of the investigative inquiry are so consequential; there’s a strong likelihood the report could come out in stages.
A few hours ago President Trump tweeted a curiously specific pair of tweets targeting the FBI, DOJ and FISA investigations as it relates to the House Judiciary Committee and Chairman Bob Goodlatte. Something’s up:
Against the backdrop of the DOJ notifying the House Intelligence and House Senate committees last night of their ability to review the DOJ/FBI submission of the FISA Court application used to target U.S. person Carter Page, the specificity of POTUS Trump’s direction is curious.
As we previously discussed the DOJ allowing expanded congressional oversight over the FISA application, against the backdrop of a previously announced IG reviewof this specific FISA application, would indicate Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Federal Prosecutor John Huber signed-off on, or perhaps directed, last night’s approval.
President Trump delivers the weekly address on April 7th, 2018, on the subject of border security and the latest laws passed by the state of California that undermine U.S. federal immigration laws.
Until today the only people allowed to review the full Title-1 FISA application were Trey Gowdy, Adam Schiff, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Rep John Ratcliffe.
In an interesting development, the Department of Justice has responded to HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes notifying him the DOJ will allow all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees full access to review the unredacted FBI/DOJ FISA application used to gain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against U.S. citizen Carter Page.
According to CNN: ‘Separately, Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the department on Monday will supplement its document production to the House Judiciary Committee by producing another 1,000 pages of materials in response to a subpoena issued by committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.’
This is an interesting development for several reasons:
Most of the ‘vast-Russian-conspiracy‘ media presentations seem to start with a discussion of intelligence gathering beginning in July of 2016. The GOP convention to nominate Donald Trump was July 18-21st of 2016.
Adding to the July 2016 origination narrative FBI Director James Comey stated the counterintelligence operation against candidate Trump began in July 2016. However, not a single MSM entity has looked at the FISA-702(16)(17) abuses by the FBI and DOJ-NSD outlined by the FISA court and NSA well before July 2016.
It is a matter of unclassified public record the FBI and DOJ-NSD were allowing “contractors” to conduct searches of the FBI and NSA databases, and extract raw intelligence, throughout 2015 until April 28th 2016 when NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers shut down all access and initiated a compliance review.
Any objective review of that time period indicates (strongest likelihood) the search activity was political ‘opposition research’ for the 2016 presidential election. With hindsight of the FBI and DOJ’s political intents, ‘opposition research’ was almost certainly the motive.
Surrounding the nomination that stunned the geo-political world almost every foreign government was trying to figure out who and what Donald J Trump was all about; and more specifically: how would his run for the presidency impact their specific interests.
2017- WASHINGTON NYT — American spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald J. Trump through his advisers, according to three current and former American officials familiar with the intelligence.
Fox News Catherine Herridge reports today, per her FBI investigative sources, it was an investigative interview with FBI Attorney Lisa Page, in July 2017, that contradicted FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and ultimately led to his firing.
That revelation is exactly what we anticipated was the origin to Inspector General Michael Horowitz gaining the text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. The issue is actually more stunning than presented. However, first here’s the report from Herridge (emphasis mine):
Fox News – Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired last month for committing three violations of the bureau’s ethics code, an investigative source told Fox News on Thursday.
The violations initially were uncovered by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and confirmed by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. They included lack of candor under oath, lack of candor when not under oath, and the improper disclosure of non-public information to the media about the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
