Attorney General Bill Barr made two important evidentiary decisions that delivered body blows to both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden. First, Barr declared that the Justice Department has not found evidence of systemic fraud in the election. Second, he declared that there was sufficient evidence to appoint United States Attorney John Durham as a Special Counsel on the origins of the Russia probe. The move confirmed that in the political chaos of 2020, Bill Barr remains the one fixed and an immovable object.
By appointing Durham as a Special Counsel, Barr contradicted news reports before the election that Durham was frustrated and found nothing of significance despite Barr’s pressure. Some expressed doubts over those reports since Durham asked for this investigation to be upgraded to a criminal matter, then secured the criminal plea of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, and asked recently for over a thousand pages of classified intelligence material.
Under the Justice Department regulations, Barr had to find (and Durham apparently agreed) that there is a need for additional criminal investigation and “that investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances.” He must also find the appointment in the public interest.
As a kid, I loved nothing more than Saturday morning hurrying to eat my bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios while watching cartoons. And they were the best in the 60s! Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, The Green Lantern, and every once in a while I’d watch The Jetsons.
By the time I hit junior high, I stopped the cartoon stuff: too “mature” for those anymore. But as our kids came along I’d find myself peeking at a cartoon or two with them occasionally. There was something special about falling into a place to escape just for an hour or two a week.
Today, it’s no real issue for this adult to take a daily break to watch cartoons. Grab the remote and scan the news with a cup of coffee before going to work. The cartoons are still around. They’ve changed a bit: today they’re called CNN, MSNBC, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. Why? Almost daily they bring Democrat politicians to their sets to discuss the latest and the greatest conspiracy that always has as its central character the comic villain, Donald Trump. “What has that evil man done today?”
There has been a “Trump Conspiracy Epic” weekly since even before his inauguration in 2017. And not a single one has turned out to be true! But that doesn’t stop the “Pelosi Posse” from marching out a new one just when the final episode of the previous one airs.
You can pretty much bank on the Democrats and the Left moving from one conspiracy theory to the next. . . to the next, desperately hoping that somehow that can make a conspiracy theory real. They’ve gone from Russian collusion to Ukrainian Quid Pro Quo to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) hoax. At some point, one expects them to solemnly intone that in reality, Donald Trump is an alien. If we had a real media interested in truth and accountability, these hoaxes and conspiracy theories would be laughed out of the building by serious, thoughtful people – but they aren’t.
Now Democrats have taken it to the next level, fundraising off their most recent wild conspiracy theory about the U.S. Postal Service. On Monday, House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) sent a fundraising email during a hearing with the Postmaster General Luis DeJoy with wild claims of “sabotage” and the allegation that President Donald J. Trump is trying to “steal the presidential election.”
Democrats really have no shame.
And they are emboldened by knowing that their liberal allies in the media will never fact check them on these baseless claims.
On Saturday, the House passed Rep. Maloney’s bill to bailout the post office with $25 billion, and to stop reforms being contemplated by the new Postmaster General to turn around an organization that has lost tens of billions of taxpayer dollars due to mismanagement. Democrats held a hearing on the bill on Monday, two days after they passed the bill because they wanted to use Saturday to promote their conspiracy theory just before the start of this week’s Republican National Convention (RNC).
The Maloney fundraising email read: “After being appointed by Trump as a major donor to his campaign, PMG DeJoy has implemented detrimental changes to the quality and services that so many Americans rely on the U.S. Postal Service to provide. It’s all part of Trump’s scheme to sabotage the USPS and steal the presidential election.” The same political party that embraces a theory that all police are part of a racist cabal has now pushed a new theory that the President is manipulating the post office to fix the fall election for Republicans up and down the ticket.
The Wall Street Journal on Saturday hit the nail on the head when they pointed out that the actions of Congress were hampering reforms needed at the USPS. The Journal reported, “new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified last week that the post office has enough money to deliver mail-in ballots, and his operation can’t possibly spend $25 billion that quickly in any case.” In other words, the $25 billion bailout was unnecessary.
Maloney’s fundraising email continued: “The need to protect the USPS is more pressing than ever, which is why House Speaker Pelosi called us back early from August recess for an emergency vote this weekend on my Delivering for America Act — the legislation will not only block further efforts to dismantle the Postal Service through drastic changes, but it was also REVERSE the harmful new policies and operations that PMG DeJoy has put in place.” The only thing that the new Postmaster is trying to reverse is the policies that have led to billions in losses.
The Journal pointed out that “the Postal Service has lost $78 billion since 2007” and they have “been taking out underutilized equipment for years.” The removal of old sorters and underused mailboxes has been the policy for years and happened under. . . the Obama Administration.
Postmaster General DeJoy, not Congress, promised to “prioritize ballots over other kinds of first-class mail.” This would seem to remove any argument the Democrats have, yet that didn’t stop Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who asked during the Oversight hearing that DeJoy’s calendar be subpoenaed with no explanation, creating the false impression that the Postmaster-General has something to hide.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) took the Democrats to task, correctly stating that “the facts are not anything they are close to what they have been saying the last three weeks.” Democrats, Rep. Jordan said, were “not interested in a bipartisan solution,” but instead wanted to play politics.
Ultimately, the hearing was an embarrassment for Democrats because they were exposed to be promoting another hoax. But don’t expect that to stop them – or for the media to hold them to account. Instead, we can expect more fear-mongering about the U.S. Post Office until Election Day, when voters will hopefully send them into the political wilderness.
The “Hoped-For End”
Think about the lunacy of the demands from the Democrats for two specific things in Pelosi’s latest COVID-19 Stimulus plan: one is a multi-billion dollar bailout of all those wealthy homeowners from her home state of California along with those from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey who in the 2017 tax cuts saw their multi-million dollar local and state real estate tax deductions evaporate. (That has much to do with Coronavirus, doesn’t it?) The second was the Pelosi demand for the federal government to rip control of ALL elections from the states to be forever controlled solely by the federal government. Her demand for that election control is to be implemented immediately, beginning with November 3rd’s election, and to be one of total mail-in voting!
Pelosi’s plan is massive yet includes tedious details with comprehensive steps to put in place the necessary infrastructure for it’s operation. Her ”roadmap”contains recommendations of hundreds of experts from each of the 50 states to craft this program using years of experience to side-step potential roadblocks. The states were elated to hear that their task to handle elections will finally be eliminated.
Of course, no such plan exists. Yet the Pelosi demands for mail-in voting conducted by the federal government for this and every upcoming election DOES EXIST!
This is just an example of one more Democrat Party conspiracy theory: “President Trump is doing everything within his power to stop voters who fear for their lives from COVID-19 so much they will not leave their homes to go vote! He is suppressing voters’ rights!”
Summary
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and others in her party will NOT stop with the Trump conspiracies even if he wins the election in November. Why do they do this? Why will they continue? The answer is simple: there is apparently a bundle of wrongdoing during the eight-years of the Obama Administration on the part of many who still serve in government. Attorney General William Barr and Federal Attorney John Durham have nearly completed a massive investigation into this wrongdoing of which much appears to be criminal in nature.
If these conspiracies into Donald Trump would be sufficient for the American voters to turn their back on this President, not a single detail of any findings of criminality by those that are certainly implicated will ever be brought forward for the purpose of giving Americans the truth. Instead, a President Biden will immediately replace Barr and Durham, those in the Department of Justice who have so diligently worked on these investigations, and all case details will be sealed forever, never to be seen by the American people.
Call it a conspiracy theory. But with the first criminal indictment and the subsequent guilty plea of an Obama Department of Justice attorney for altering court documents during the fake Russia Collusion investigation, it is obvious there are far more indictments of many more Obama minions about to happen.
“Evil in the Obama Administration?” Remember that President Obama famously bragged, saying “There’s never been ONE indictment in my administration.” He was wrong: there has now been one. How many more are there to come? To me, the number is not significant. What IS significant is that we finally have a president who has surrounded himself in his DOJ NOT with sycophants who exist merely to benignly approve everything that happens on his watch, but to assure Americans that the Rule of Law is once again the backbone of the United States presidency. And to quote former President Obama: “No one is above the Law,” not even him.
Have you heard any recent information about the status of the John Durham investigation? Durham is the Connecticut Federal Prosecutor named by Attorney General William Barr to delve into any wrongdoing during the Russian Investigation of purported collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia operatives. The Mueller Report failed to offer any confirmations of any such wrongdoing. But formerly classified documents and phone call transcripts have shown some officials from the Obama Administration Intelligence operations were implicated in potential criminal actions.
While much speculation inside the Beltway says U.S. Attorney John Durham will punt the results of his so-called Spygate investigation past the election to avoid charges of political interference, sources who have worked with Durham on past public corruption cases doubt he’ll bend to political pressure — and they expect him to drop bombshells before Labor Day.
Att. General BarrFed. Att. John Durham
Durham’s boss, Attorney General Bill Barr, also pushed back on the notion his hand-picked investigator would defer action. Under Democratic questioning on Capitol Hill two week ago, he refused to rule out a pre-election release.
“Under oath, do you commit to not releasing any report by Mr. Durham before the November election?” Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL) asked Barr, citing the longstanding Justice Department policy not to announce new developments in politically sensitive cases before an election.
“No,” the attorney general curtly replied.
Justice Department policy prohibits prosecutors from taking overt steps in politically charged cases typically within 60 days of an election. Accordingly, Durham would have to make a move by the Friday before Labor Day, or Sept. 4.
A low-profile prosecutor, Durham has kept a tight lid on his investigation into the origins of the misleading RussiaGate investigation of Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign, leading to rampant speculation about who he might prosecute and whether he would take action ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
That could well be of historic consequence, since Durham’s probe involves both the Trump administration and high-level officials in the previous administration, including Trump’s presumptive Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Recently declassified FBI notes show Biden offered input into the investigation of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in early January 2017. Another declassified document reveals that Biden was among those who requested Flynn’s identity be “unmasked” in foreign intelligence intercepts around that same time.
If Durham announces criminal indictments or plea agreements involving former officials operating under the Obama-Biden administration or releases a report documenting widespread corruption, independent voters could sour on Biden and sympathize with Trump. On the other hand, kicking the ball past the election would certainly dishearten Trump’s base.
“I would find it hard to believe that he punts under any circumstances,” said former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker, who knows Durham personally and has worked with the hard-nosed prosecutor on prior investigations.
He pointed out that Durham would risk throwing away 16 months of investigative work if he delayed action beyond the election.
“There’s no question that if Biden is elected, everything Durham has done at that point will be canceled out,” Swecker explained, adding that Biden would replace Barr and possibly even Durham. But by putting indictments and reports “into the public arena” before the election, Durham would put a Biden administration in the position of either taking further action or closing down his probe.
“It would make it very difficult for Biden’s appointees to undo his charges or bury the results of his probe,” he said. “John knows this, and I fully expect he will take action before the election.”
Swecker, who’s also a former prosecutor, anticipates Durham will deliver criminal charges, a written report, or some combination of the two around the first week in September, if not sooner. “He must get his work done and out to the public by Labor Day,” he said. “That way he avoids any accusations that he was trying to impact the election.”
Democracy 21, which is a liberal Washington watchdog group, has already cited the department policy in recent complaints to Barr demanding he suspend Durham’s investigation and place on hold any further actions or public comments about it until after the election.
“If Barr allows indictments from the Durham investigation to come out during the presidential election campaign, he would be abandoning longstanding DOJ policy by misusing the department’s prosecutorial power to support Trump’s reelection campaign,” Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer argued.
Swecker, who served 24 years with the FBI before retiring as assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, said he expects Durham to take more action “than just issuing a report” similar to the 500-page document issued in December by Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz. The IG made criminal referrals to Durham, including against an FBI attorney accused of altering evidence used to support a surveillance warrant on a former Trump adviser.
“I know John Durham. I worked under him on the Whitey Bulger case, which resulted in indictments of corrupt FBI agents,” Swecker said. “I don’t think he’s the least bit squeamish about bringing indictments if there is criminal exposure.”
Swecker says he’s confident Durham has uncovered crimes. “He’s onto something, I’m convinced of it, otherwise he would have folded up his tent by now,” he asserted in a RealClearInvestigations interview.
The lack of media leaks coming from Durham’s office is another sign he is building a serious corruption case. Targets and witnesses have largely been kept in the dark about the scope and direction of his investigation, encouraging cooperation and possible plea deals. And the secrecy of grand jury proceedings has been fiercely protected.
“I’m impressed with the discipline his team has shown,” Swecker said. “There’s been no leaks. Details of the investigation have been very closely-held.”
Durham, a Republican, has been known to threaten to polygraph investigators whenever he suspected a leak.
His team is led by his deputy, Nora Dannehy, who specializes in the prosecution of complex white-collar and public corruption cases. Dannehy is a Democrat with a reputation for integrity. She left a high-paying corporate job to rejoin Durham’s office in March 2019, the month after Barr was confirmed.
Barr officially announced in May 2019 that he had put Durham in charge of looking into what he called the government’s “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016. Was that surveillance justified? Or was it done to smear Trump and sink his campaign — and when that failed, his presidency?
Durham is exploring a host of other questions, including: What role did the CIA play? Did it monitor Trump advisers overseas? Were U.S. laws restricting spying on U.S. citizens broken? Did the spy agency slant U.S. intelligence on Russian election interference to justify the anti-Trump operation?
“As a former CIA analyst, Barr recognized that this is the biggest thing since Watergate in terms of the abuse of the intelligence community,” Swecker said. “This is a huge intelligence scandal.”
Swecker named former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith among officials most vulnerable to possible criminal charges in Durham’s investigation of the investigators. Justice’s watchdog made a criminal referral pertaining to his conduct – specifically, that Clinesmith forged an email in a way that hid the fact that former Trump adviser Carter Page had been a cooperating CIA source on Russia. The information, if disclosed to the FISA court, would have weakened the FBI’s case that Page was a “Russian agent.”
Comey Clapper Brennan
On the other hand, Swecker does not expect Durham to indict former FBI Director James Comey, nor former CIA Director John Brennan or Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. None of these central figures in the scandal has been interviewed by Durham’s office, according to recently published reports, though Durham reportedly is working out details with Brennan’s lawyer for a pending interview. Durham’s investigators have already reviewed Brennan’s emails, call logs and other records.
“It’s hard to prove criminal intent at their level, and unless there’s a smoking gun, like an email or text, they’ll probably get off with a damning report about their activities,” Swecker said.
Durham’s portfolio also includes exploring the extent to which Ukraine played a role in the counterintelligence operation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Officials from Kyiv, the Democratic National Committee, and the Obama administration reportedly coordinated efforts to dig up dirt on Trump – and Biden was Obama’s point man in Ukraine at the time.
Though Biden may factor into Durham’s probe, don’t expect him to appear in any pre-election report. Another longtime Durham colleague noted that political candidates cannot be part of indictments or any report on investigative findings, according to Barr’s own rules.
“The policy says you can’t indict political candidates or use overt investigative methods targeting them in the weeks before an election,” said the former federal prosecutor, who requested anonymity.
Barr has publicly acknowledged the policy. “The idea is you don’t go after candidates,” he said in an April radio interview. “You don’t indict candidates or perhaps someone that’s sufficiently close to a candidate within a certain number of days before an election.”
The former prosecutor, who’s worked with Durham, said his old colleague may start revealing developments from his case weeks in advance of the 60-day cut-off, or ideally right after the political conventions. The GOP convention, which follows the Democrats’ gathering, ends Aug. 27.
“They are nervous about affecting the election, so timing is everything,” he said. “It will be tricky.”
At the same time, the former Justice official said Durham could exploit a loophole in the department rule, memorialized in memos dating to 2008, that allows for action closer to the election. It states that “law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party. Such a purpose is inconsistent with the Department’s mission.
The operative phrase – “for the purpose of” – leaves leeway for actions close to an election that aren’t taken “for the purpose” of affecting the election. In other words, Durham wouldn’t necessarily have to lie low for the two months in the run-up to the election.
Testing that loophole with an “October surprise” would almost certainly send Democrats and the Washington media into a high panic. Can you fathom the media insanity that would occur? Democrats would probably storm the Department of Justice!
Some are skeptical Durham will deliver at all, regardless of the deadline, while others question his reputation as a fierce prosecutor. They point to his nearly three-year investigation of CIA officials who destroyed videos of terrorist detainees allegedly being “tortured.” Congress had sought the evidence, but Durham closed the case in 2012 without filing any criminal charges. And his final report about what he found remains classified. In a 2018 criminal case, moreover, he cleared Comey’s general counsel, James Baker, of unauthorized leaks to the media.
The Senate’s top FBI watchdog, Chuck Grassley, has grown frustrated with Durham’s lack of progress. “Durham should be producing some fruit of his labor,” the Iowa Senator stated in a recent tweet.
Swecker attributes the sluggish pace of Durham’s sprawling probe to the COVID-19 health scare, which has restricted travel and grand jury meetings in the D.C. area. Durham’s team of investigators, who include retired FBI agents, has been operating out of his New Haven, Connecticut offices. Besides Washington, they have taken trips abroad. Before the coronavirus outbreak, they interviewed authorities and other sources in Italy, Britain, and Australia.
In addition, Durham’s agents have been slowed by an avalanche of subpoenaed electronic media, including emails, texts, and direct messages, “which are incredibly difficult and time-consuming to sort through,” Swecker said. Such evidence is not limited to FBI, Justice, and CIA officials. Durham also has reportedly obtained, for instance, data and meta-data contained on two BlackBerry cellphones used by Joseph Mifsud, a shadowy Maltese professor who some believe was used by the FBI to create a predicate to open the original case against the Trump campaign.
During that recent House hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), asked Barr if he would be able to “right this wrong” against Trump before the election.
“I really can’t predict that,” the attorney general answered. “John Durham is looking at all these matters. COVID-19 did delay that action for a while. But he’s working very diligently.”
Added Barr: “Justice is not something you can order up on a schedule like you’re ordering a pizza.”
McClintock warned Barr that if he is succeeded by a Biden appointee, Durham’s investigation will simply go away.
“I understand your concern,” Barr sighed.
Summary
This summary is easy to put together: 2 + 2 + 2 = 6. That’s NOT claiming there will be six indictments, six people indicted, or six anything. It’s simply stating that whatever John Durham found in this criminal investigation will be put in a template of political crime indictments. And if the numbers he finds add up, he’ll tell American what, if anything, the equation shows criminal prosecution found to be indicated. Durham’s past shows he’s that kind of “cut-and-dry” prosecutor.
Any prediction? Just my gut feeling, but I’m reasonably certain there will be indictments of several individuals. But for the reasons listed above, I am certain there will be damning details confirmed in the Durham Report of wrongdoing by those from the Obama Administration. Which (if any) cry for prosecution in cases like this are always a crap-shoot. But even if Comey, Clapper, and Brennan do not face indictments, it is likely their intelligence and/or political opportunities in U.S. government work are in the past.
I’m confident we’ll know all these answers by Labor Day.
Little has been heard about any legal actions of any kind being levied against two top FBI officials: Andrew McCabe and James Comey. Many think that criminal indictments for the pair will be included in the release of details of the criminal investigation of FBI wrongdoing during 2016 and 2017. But, this is the FBI! Politics usually dictates who in the FBI accused of (and later found guilty of) criminality will actually be charged and forced to face prosecution.
I thought it was odd for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to tweet several days ago, that there are two tiers of justice in the United States: one for everyday Americans and one for Donald Trump’s friends and confidants. Why is that odd? Two reasons: Adam Schiff is a pathological liar who is recorded consistently lying before Congress, in television interviews, and even in his own tweets! Schiff seems to have forgotten how much criminal activity occurred before Trump even got to Washington. And that criminal activity not only occurred under President Obama, but it has also been confirmed Mr. Obama played a role in it. If he didn’t initiate it, he knew it was happening on his watch.
Rep. Schiff invoked U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal inquiry of the federal Russia investigation, as he discussed his dread that “more serious abuse” of federal law enforcement will happen in the coming days.
Schiff Does Not Like Attorney General William Barr
“One of the concerns I have with Bill Barr is that the worst is yet to come. I mean, he’s got a terrible, destructive track record as it is, and it may get worse in the coming days,” Schiff said. “But what we have seen largely is Barr’s intervention to protect the president.”
As examples, Schiff mentioned Barr’s rollout of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and “intervention” in cases spun off from the Russia investigation to “help Trump cronies” such as Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“What we have not yet had full visibility on is not Barr’s use of the shield to protect corruption writ large of his boss, Donald Trump, but the sword,” Schiff continued. “How he may be using the power of the Justice Department through Durham or others to go after the president’s enemies. And in many respects, that is a far greater, more serious abuse of the power of the Justice Department than his use of the shield.”
It’s a well-worn line of criticism for Schiff, who has complained since last year that the Justice Department has kept the Democratic-led House in the dark about its inquiries into whether there was inappropriate “spying” on Trump’s 2016 campaign and other misconduct. But more recently, that anxiety has deepened as Trump accused former President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, of committing crimes as part of the “Obamagate” scandal.
“And so I continue to be concerned with the president, who is tweeting about how Obama and Biden should go to prison, that Bill Barr may be preparing the use of the sword in a politicized and dangerous and desperate way,” Schiff said.
Barr has repeatedly said he does not expect Obama or Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to be targets of Durham’s investigation. He also has dismissed the inquiry as being a partisan hit job, even as some critics fear an “October surprise.”
“This cannot be, and it will not be a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower our standards to achieve a particular result,” the attorney general said in May. Barr said last month that he anticipates “developments” in Durham’s criminal investigation by the end of the summer.
Whereas Schiff is spooked by being kept in the dark about Durham’s work, his Republican counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee views that as a “good sign.”
“The one good thing so far that we’ve learned about this Durham investigation is that Durham isn’t talking. People on his team aren’t talking,” California Rep. Devin Nunes said last month. “I think that’s a good sign that this is a real, legitimate investigation that’s occurring.”
What About Comey and McCabe?
While we’ve been totally wrapped in the COVID-19 fears, may others have been captured by nightly stories of violence — disguised as “peaceful protesting,” a few more layers of the “Intelligence Community Onion of Ill Repute” have been peeled away. John Solomon — an investigative reporter who in my opinion is one of the most diligent and concise of today’s investigative reporters — uncovered some bad news for James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
The FBI agent who ran the FBI warrantless spying program said he warned ex-FBI Director Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe that the program was a useless waste of taxpayer money that needlessly infringed Americans’ civil liberties, but his bosses refused to take action. Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014. He told John Solomon he fears the deeply flawed program, which was started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was allowed to keep going to give Americans a false sense of security in the war on terror and possibly to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was used for political spying or political espionage,” Youssef said during a lengthy interview.
Youssef confirmed that the FBI performed an audit of the highly classified program (also known as the NSA program because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden leaked its existence. The audit showed that while the program had generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing tens of millions of dollars per year. In fact, the program was generating large numbers of “false negatives and positives,” Youssef said. The audit, he added, also showed “there was collateral damage in terms of civil liberties” of Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily searched or who were falsely identified as connected to terrorism.
Youssef said he discussed the concerns with McCabe both when McCabe served as assistant director for counterterrorism and then when he was promoted to acting executive assistant director, the No. 3 job in the bureau. But his efforts to pause the program and reform it so it could work better, cost less, and infringe less on American privacy fell on deaf ears, he said.
When McCabe was acting executive assistant director, “I explained to him again, the model that I was looking to establish and to let him know that we were not really getting good support from this program and that maybe we should reconsider this whole thing, unless we can re-tweak it,” Youssef recalled. “And I remember, he was so adamant about, we need this program. We’re keeping it like this, even though we’re not getting anything out of it.”
Asked why the FBI would keep a program that was not producing any terrorism leads, Youssef said: “It was a way to say, you know, it’s an insurance policyto show that we’re doing everything we can, when in fact it wasn’t giving us anything of what we hoped it would get.”
FBI and DOJ declined to comment. Lawyers for Comey and McCabe also did not respond to requests for comment.
Youssef said that in September 2014, shortly before he retired, he was invited to brief Comey privately about his concerns in the director’s office. “It was a very lengthy briefing,” Youssef recalled. “He was very interactive. He asked very good questions. And after I explained everything to him, his only concern was not that we should shut it down, or that we should change it so that we can protect civil liberties … his concern was, do you have a problem or concerns with the statutory authority?”
Youssef recalls explaining that while he had no reservations about the legal authority of the surveillance, which had to be approved by FISA court judges, he had serious concerns about both the “waste of human resources” inherent in the “hundreds of thousands of agent hours in the field” lost to the labor-intensive program and the threat the program posed to civil liberties.
“Unless we change it to a different model,” Youssef recalls telling Comey, “we’re going to continue to get many false positives and false negatives. And you can imagine with a false positive, we would be knocking on people’s doors who have nothing to do with any kind of terrorism act.” Youssef said he had “no doubt whatsoever” that McCabe and Comey understood the severity of the problems. “I gave them the full monty brief,” he said. “I explained everything to them. They were fully briefed on the program.”
The New York Times reported that even after the Obama-era audit flagged serious concerns, the FBI kept operating the program until President Trump shut it down in 2019. Between 2015 and 2019 the program only generated two more leads, the newspaper reported, citing the White House report.
“That’s probably what grieves me more than anything,” Youssef said. “Here we have a program that was not doing what it should. It was leaked. And the Obama administration very quickly appointed a privacy and civil liberties board to look into this. And we were mandated to give, we called it the options paper. And so my option was really the one that would give us the best intelligence at the lowest cost while minimizing the false positive and false negative intelligence. And so it makes perfect sense that this would be adopted. And yet, the director basically didn’t do anything with it.”
Youssef said he has developed deep concerns since his retirement that the NSA program may have been abused, like the FISA warrants, during the Russia collusion probe of the Trump campaign that included a highly flawed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“There is no doubt in my mind now, looking at the backdrop and the information that has come up since 2016 in the media, that the abuses were rampant,” he said, “and not just for the FISA process, the FISA program, but for other programs that were used to spy on the Trump campaign. That to me is almost the obvious conclusion of what I’ve seen.
There is “a high probability that that program was used to handpick selected targeted numbers for purposes other than fighting terrorism,” Youssef believes. “It’s kind of a mirror image of the FISA abuses on Carter Page. As you know, it came out much later that the FISA process was for counterintelligence and counterterrorism purposes only. That was not what they used it for on Carter Page. And so it’s sort of the same type of situation with this other program. I have no doubt or very little doubt that it was used for political spying or political espionage.”
Summary
“Same Song, Second Verse.”
Is it at all doubtful, based on what we ALREADY know as fact, that at least Comey is up to his eyeballs in corruption and a certain criminal indictment or two? And McCabe dug a deep hole for himself, if for no other reason than his “looking the other way” while Comey and others in the Obama Administration if not destroyed the intelligence agencies’ operational guidelines then at least blurred the lines between legal and illegal so as to be able to say, “I’m sorry. I simply did not know that doing exactly this one thing, I was violating criminal statutes. Can’t we all ‘just get along?'”
The onion has just begun to shed layers of illegalities. But here’s what is petrifying all Americans who have seen and understood at least a small part of how egregious were the actions of Comey’s FBI and former Attorney General Lynch during this time: what if Trump is not re-elected?
Every American can be assured that if Trump leaves the White House, the multiple dozens of Obama Administration wrong-doers will walk without ANY prosecution for their criminal actions. And James Comey will be the biggest winner.
All that average Americans can do is plan to vote and make certain we do. But there’s one more thing: share the facts of this story with all those you know. In fact, you may want to not just forward the story link to this story; you may want to copy and paste this story and send it around.
Is it worth the trouble?
Forget about your own life for a moment. Think of your children, grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren.
This issue is a totally unique political travesty played out on Americans on the watch of a sitting President! Our government owes us not just an explanation, but a prosecution for every wrongdoer in ObamaGate.
Adam Schiff, I’m certain Attorney General Bar is just the man who can make this happen. With the added factual foundation being provided by Federal Attorney John Durham, when completed I’ll volunteer to write the book!
We’ve just seen the surface of how bad things can be at the FBI. Comey was probably not the beginning of the evil. Remember: his mentor and predecessor there was Robert Mueller. Mueller himself has a speckled past that TruthNewsNetwork has published multiple stories documenting some of his shadowy professional work. (See our four-part expose’ of Mueller published 7/27, 28, 29, and 30th of 2018)
Comey’s evil may have been eclipsed. However, Comey did not try to hide his nastiness. He simply walked through a situation with guns blazing: “Take no prisoners!” His replacement, on the other hand, has been persistent, structured, and out of the public eye for three years now. And in his invisibility, most Americans have assumed that he’s straightened things out at the FBI. Nothing could be further from the truth!
FBI Director Christopher Wray: “Director Disaster”
Two senior Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a stinging letter Monday to FBI Director Chris Wray, suggesting he has failed to lead his agency past the abuses uncovered in the Russian scandal and demanding new access to witnesses and documents. The letter, largely symbolic since Republicans are in the House minority, is nonetheless the latest signal that Wray’s hold on his job may be in jeopardy after a series of devastating revelations about misconduct inside the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
Let’s be honest: Director Chris Wray has been disappointing in his role as Director since assuming the role played by James Comey. Expectations by all were that Wray would right the ship that Comey had unilaterally sunk – at least in the way of intelligence agency credibility. Wray was hopefully to be a breath of fresh air, a wisp of hope for the resurrection of what has for decades been known as the most outstanding intelligence agency on Earth. Instead, Wray seems to have sat idly by watching as truth-seekers have exposed example after example of wrongdoing by many from the FBI. Yet Wray has not one time stepped in to correct the course of the agency.
Oh, Wray benignly responded to the reprimand issued by the FISA Court for FBI “mistakes” made by the dozens in applications for surveillance warrants that gave FBI agents Carte Blanche to spy on Trump Campaign members. He was warned by the Court to provide proof of systemic changes at the Bureau to make the Court feel comfortable to work with and confident that future such warrants would be legitimate and not just fodder for fuel to “get” a political opponent. The book is still out regarding such changes being implemented.
But why has this well-qualified intelligence agency prodigy been so lackluster in stepping up to lead? Are there things that the American people don’t know, don’t see, and simply have not heard the Director has done to rectify the mistakes of the past that instigated a massive drop in the trust of the nation of the FBI? We’d love to give Mr. Wray the benefit of the doubt. But matters of late prove the hopes of the country are unfulfilled.
In a recent letter to Wray from Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Johnson (R-LA) regarding disappointment in Wray’s job, Wray was confronted with some pretty harsh criticism:
“The American people continue to learn troubling details about the politicization and misconduct at the highest levels of the FBI during the Obama-Biden Administration,” they wrote. “Even more concerning, we continue to learn these new details from litigation and investigations—not from you,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is well past time that you show the leadership necessary to bring the FBI past the abuses of the Obama-Biden era.”
Much of the lawmakers’ demands of the Director are based on the plethora of evidence recently released regarding the spectacle of FBI process exposed during the investigation and subsequent charges against former National Security Advisor Lt. General Michael Flynn. It took three years for that evidence to be revealed! During that sham investigation and federal process charges against Flynn destroyed his storied military career and devastated him and his family. Flynn lost his home and pretty much every dime he had. And the Comey FBI purposely entrapped Flynn to simply get back at Donald Trump for winning in 2016.
Wray was in the DOJ at the time. For three years, Wray has known there was something fishy going on in the Bureau. And he has done nothing to rid the FBI of the stench.
Christopher Wray was the wrong choice to clean up the troubled agency, or so says former federal prosecutor Larry Klayman.
“Christopher Wray is not the person to turn the bureau around,” Klayman, founder of the government watchdog Freedom Watch. “He doesn’t have the gravitas. He’s like a kid. He’s trying to do what he needs to do to be friendly with the rest of the powers that be and the FBI. But he’s not a strong individual, and consequently, the real movement here has to be from the president himself.”
Asked why Trump selected Wray, Klayman said he believed the commander in chief “got bad advice.”
“The president has excellent instincts. The president is a fighter. The president wants to clean house and clean out all of the deadwood in this government. But someone convinced him to put Wray in there, and that was a mistake.”
Most in the shadows of the current muck being released would agree with Klayman’s assertion.
During his nearly three-year tenure at the helm of the FBI, Wray has consistently defied Congress by refusing to produce documents exposing the dishonest acts of his predecessor, James Comey, and his cadre of corrupt confederates. Even worse, Wray is to blame for suppressing evidence of innocence in the criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Under Wray, promises of transparency and reform proved to be nothing more than an illusion, replaced by a deliberate cover-up of FBI malfeasance in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Explosive new documents emerged last week showing how Comey, together with then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, conjured up a pretense to interview Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, in a plot to invent a crime they knew he did not commit.
There was no legitimate reason for agents to talk with Flynn. He had done nothing wrong in speaking with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. Yet, armed with the conversations that had been secretly recorded, the FBI fabricated a reason to meet with Flynn, deceived him about their true intent, and set a trap to “get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” This was unconscionable and, quite likely, illegal.
Getting rid of Flynn would achieve a dual purpose. First, it would eliminate the threat of an experienced intelligence official in the White House who would undoubtedly uncover the FBI’s scheme to falsely implicate Trump in a nonexistent “collusion” conspiracy with Russia. Second, it would badly damage the president a mere four days into his brand new administration.
The new documents show that Comey, McCabe and Strzok were desperate to eliminate Flynn. He had been investigated and surveilled by the FBI, which, at one point, deployed a confidential human source (CHS) who was unable to dig up any dirt on the retired lieutenant general. Flynn was a patriot, not a Russian agent. “No derogatory information was identified,” stated one memorandum dated Jan. 4, 2017.
The bureau’s Washington field office decided to close its covert case against Flynn. But Strzok, at the behest of Comey and McCabe, put a stop to that. They resurrected an ancient 1799 law — the Logan Act — as an excuse to legitimize their pursuit of Flynn even though they well knew that the act had no application to Flynn’s case.
All of this information was contained in documents hidden for years by Wray’s FBI but made public only last week after a suspicious Attorney General William Barr ordered a review of the Flynn matter. Under the law, such evidence is required to be turned over to the defendant. A judicial order in the Flynn case also mandated it.
Instead, the material was hidden from Flynn and the American public. Both deserved the truth. The retired three-star general had been ruined financially and his reputation shattered. Under threat, he was coerced by special counsel Robert Mueller’s pack of partisan prosecutors into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit — making a false statement. Mueller’s team knew all about the exculpatory documents, but they chose to bury them and persecute Flynn.
To make matters worse, records also show that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24 concluded that he did not lie. However, Strzok and his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, substantially rewrote the original report in violation of agency protocols.
Director Wray bears direct responsibility for failing to produce long ago all of this evidence of the FBI’s gross misconduct. If he did not know about it, as he claims, then he’s incompetent. More likely, he knew but refused to do what his duty demanded. In either case, he is not the person who should be leading the FBI. The bureau’s reputation was left in tatters by Comey, and Wray has done little if anything to give Americans any confidence that the FBI can be trusted.
Wray’s gotta go. And he’s got to go now.
America and its people deserve better. We deserve honesty in FBI leadership — for a change.
IMPORTANT NOTICE!!!!
Today (Wednesday) on our live show “TNN Live” that airs from 9-11 AM Central Monday through Friday, we are publishing a 26-minute interview with THE doctor who can and does shine the light of truth on ALL the things that have captured our attention for seven weeks now: Coronavirus, infections and mortality numbers, the virus itself, and the medical players at the top of all this: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.
This is without question the most important story we can give to you and all those in your lives most vital to you!
Here’s how today’s structure during the live show will work: from 9-10 AM, we will bring all up to date with the status on the most important details of our lives: statistics, headlines, latest news, etc. From 10 AM until 10:26, you will hear an interview with a doctor who for years worked with and for Dr. Fauci, who was and is squarely in the middle of everything to do with viruses today and for the past 35 years. The facts and truths she will bring to you are priceless and astonishing. But more important than these is that she will bring you a sense of peace with just knowing the truth!
I encourage you to not only make sure you’re tuned in to the live show but make certain everyone important to you does at well. Here’s how you and they can join: at the top of this story on the right side of the page, there is a blue horizontal banner that says, “LIVE NOW.” Click on that banner (at 9:00 to join the show or at 10:00 to listen to the interview) and join the show: no cost at all to you. Remember: It’s a live show! Don’t miss it.
I never say what I’m about to say, but it’s true: What you hear in this interview will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
Seldom do we get two such compelling stories at the same time — especially involving a former Secretary of State and presidential candidate, but the Senate Minority Leader. But they’re both here in the TruthNewsNetwork bullseye.
Hillary in Trouble
This goes all the way back to the FBI’s “investigation,” if you can call it that, into the misuse of her private email server in transmitting and receiving classified emails from a host of government officials. And we thought the “Hillary 2016 Madness” was over!
It stems from alleged security breaches involving a former foreign policy adviser to former President Barack Obama. They will be revisited in court after a judge agreed to allow further questioning on March 2.
D.C. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth has granted a request from conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch to order Hillary Clinton to deliver a sworn deposition about allegations the former secretary of state used a private email address to handle official government matters.
The approval came despite Clinton’s claim that she should not be required to answer the allegations since she had already done so, and no charges were made against the Democratic presidential candidate for the 2016 general election.
“As extensive as the existing record is, it did not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct [U.S.] State Department business,” Lamberth said. “Those responses were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best. , put her responses left many more questions than answers.”
The main point of contention is there is no way to confirm exactly how the former secretary of state came to the understanding the State Department would protect her private emails. She “assumed” record management employees working for the department knew her private email server. They had no such knowledge and had not (as was required) tested and approved that private server.
It was also unclear how Clinton could argue that using a private server to perform State Department business was not against the law. Think about it: not only was the Secretary’s emails sent and received with NO internet security at all, President Obama using a private Gmail address communicated with her on that same server. That means his emails were “up for grabs” by anyone who could grab them. And numerous 14-year-old U.S. computer hackers could do so with NO difficulty. Imagine what the Chinese and Russians were able to do.
The judge was also not in favor of allowing Clinton to answer questions in writing because there was no guarantee the method would not “muddle any understanding of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind.”
“It would also fail to capture the full picture, thus delaying the final disposition of this case even further,” he said.
The court has also allowed Judicial Watch to subpoena Google for documents and records that might shed light on Clinton’s email activity. At the same time, she was secretary of state between the years 2009 and 2013.
The judge dismissed the Department of Justice’s earlier explanation that the court has enough evidence to decide whether the state performed an “adequate search.”
“This claim is preposterous, especially when considering state’s deficient representations regarding the existence of additional Clinton emails,” Lamberth said according to a statement. “Even though many important questions remain unanswered, the Justice Department inexplicably still takes the position that the court should close discovery and rule on dispositive motions. The court is especially troubled by this.”
Judicial Watch welcomed the judge’s decision and hopes revisiting the case will provide answers in the public interest.
“Judicial Watch uncovered the Clinton email scandal, and we are pleased that the court authorized us to depose Mrs. Clinton directly on her email conduct and how it impacted the people’s ‘right to know’ under Freedom of Information Act,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in the statement.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): A Felony?
Wednesday, as the Supreme Court heard arguments about a Louisiana case, Sen. Schumer in front of the Court ranted, raved, and threatened Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. You make a determination for yourself if his words are actual threats:
It was so disturbing, it prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to respond to Schumer saying,
“This morning, Senator Schumer spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court while a case was being argued inside. Senator Schumer referred to two Members of the Court by name and said he wanted to tell them that “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”
It quickly became apparent that Schumer committed a “boo-boo.” His office released a response to Justice Roberts in the form of a memo:
“Sen. Schumer’s comments were a reference to the political price Senate Republicans will pay for putting these justices on the court, and a warning that the justices will unleash a major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights against the decision,” Goodman claimed. “For Justice Roberts to follow the right wing’s deliberate misinterpretation of what Sen. Schumer said, while remaining silent when President Trump attacked Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg last week, shows Justice Roberts does not just call balls and strikes.”
What does the Law Say?
Threatening government officials of the United States is a felony under federal law. According to the federal statutes, there are three elements of the offense of making an illegal threat: (i) there must be a transmission in interstate commerce; (ii) there must be a communication containing the threat; (iii) and the threat must be a threat to injure the person of another. Schumer’s rant was definitely made in public and seen on television and online, (“transmission in interstate commerce”) He definitely threatened both justices, (“a communication containing the threat”). The only question is about section iii, “must be a threat to injure the person of another.” This statement may add clarity to this: “In determining what constitutes a true threat, the courts hold that what must be proved is that a reasonable recipient of the communication would consider it a threat under the circumstances.”
The bottom line is that a court would be the true arbiter of whether Schumer actually broke the law. His staff rushed to issue a response to the Chief Justice to prevent any legal action being instigated. But their statement is riddled with lies. He did not refer to the Republican Party or Congress. He waved over his head at the Supreme Court building!
Summary
We have two serious incidents we are looking at today: committed by former Senator, former Secretary of State, and two-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader. Hillary is facing a judge (for the first time) for her gross mishandling of classified top secret communications with dozens of senior government officials, one of whom was President of the United States. Schumer actually threatened what could only be physical action against Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Both indeed deny any wrongdoing. But who would expect less than that from the pair? Both surely knew when conducting their business in such a fashion that they were in the wrong. Hillary used the secret server to prevent her electronic communications from being part of the trove of official State Department documents. Schumer was being Schumer: a proud, arrogant elitist who acts out daily his role as being above the Law. Neither feels any responsibility for their actions being wrong. They both made horribly egregious actions on their part ordinary in each situation.
And these were and are two of the most influential people in Washington!
I love communications today — especially the ability for us to see and hear items of importance as they happen 24/7. “Swamp People” who feel they own Washington are almost daily exposed for their actions that are at least disgraceful and possibly illegal — over and over and over. And they don’t care how it impacts all Americans.
You can bet we are just scratching the surface of the evil in Washington. I’m confident that President Trump knew of wrongdoing in D.C. before his inauguration. I bet he had NO idea how deep was the Swamp and evil are the “Swamp People!” As critters who live in the Swamp are prone to do, these are daily fighting the guy who is committed to rid the Swamp of all the critters who live there. Their methods so far have failed. And he keeps peeling back the layers of the onion, revealing more and more of the horrors lying beneath.
Will Hillary survive this trip to the Judge’s whipping chamber? Will Schumer skate from his not-so-subtle veiled threats against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh?
Answer: If you did any of the things alleged of Hillary or if you on a bullhorn standing in front of the Supreme Court said what Schumer said, you’d awaken in jail tomorrow and every other tomorrow for years to come. Hillary and Chuck are bureaucratic and liberal stars in the Swamp. If anything happens to them, it will be the first such REAL legal action to be taken against any “Swamp People” in my recent memory.
Clinton and Schumer should be held accountable for breaking federal laws and committing felonies. Clinton and Schumer MUST be held accountable: “Equal Justice under the Law.”
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz appeared before Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) Intelligence Committee Wednesday to answer questions about his report on the FBI investigation’s basis and inception. The 434-page report, Horowitz penned one point and one only that gave the Lame-Stream Media and Democrats a possible out for the rampant corruption in the Trump investigation. He stated there was no provable partisan political bias that startedthe FBI investigation. He did not indicate there was no political partisanship among those who investigated.
The Media danced; Democrats threw victory parties; fired FBI Director James Comey and Obama former CIA director John Brennan decided to excoriate the President via Twitter for their exoneration they perceive from the Horowitz Report. Those thoughts are far from the truth.
First, Horowitz did not say there was NO political bias that started the investigation. He said his team could not PROVE it was the basis for its beginning. There’s a big difference. Why do I say that? Throughout the report, Horowitz detailed dozens and dozens of examples of the political bias of members of the F.B.I. and DOJ that certainly played into a one-sided investigation.
Further, he identified seventeen specific examples of what he termed severe “errors” by the FBI. He used errors instead of labeling those instances “criminal acts” because the job of his team was not to investigate criminal matters but to find facts to prepare a report. If there are exposed criminal acts — and there are positively egregious criminal acts — Federal Attorney John Durham, who is now conducting a separate and criminal investigation, will handle those.
Is the Horowitz report a slam-dunk for President Trump? It depends on which media source to which you read, listen, or watch to get the “truth” of the report. No matter which source you use for your information, be confident of this one thing: there will be indictments, and people will be prosecuted for grave crimes before this is complete. “This is complete…” is not going to be for some time. I can picture a scenario in which we are still dealing with F.B.I.wrongdoing during the 2016 election cycle and beyond for several years to come. The fishing net has caught-up a bunch of fish.
Let’s dig in.
There were serious errors in the applications for secret eavesdropping warrants.
Mr. Horowitz found that F.B.I. Officials appeared to discount evidence that did not support probable cause to wiretap Carter Page while playing up information that seemed to justify one. “That so many fundamental errors were made by three separate, handpicked teams on one of the most sensitive F.B.I. Investigators briefed to the highest levels, and that F.B.I. Officials expected it would eventually be subjected to scrutiny, raised important questions regarding the F.B.I. chain of command’s management and supervision of the FISA process,” the report said.
The Inspector-General did not speculate whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would have granted the application — renewed three times — to wiretap Mr. Page anyway. But he said the F.B.I. should review the actions of everyone who had a hand in drafting the applications. And he identified in each form where information verifying a fact was not included.
Relying on the F.B.I.’s information, the Justice Department first obtained court approval to wiretap Mr. Page in October 2016. The wiretap application portrayed Mr. Page, who had recently stepped down as a Trump campaign aide and had close ties to Russia, as a suspected unregistered agent of a foreign power. Mr. Horowitz found dozens of examples of missing or flawed documentation in the applications to wiretap Mr. Page. By the way, while the FBI intimated in all of the FISA warrant applications that Carter Page was a known Russian operative, Page was NOT working for Russia, but was a C.I.A. operative working directly with the CIA! Guess what: then CIA Director John Brennan knew that and hid it from all.
The applications relied heavily on information provided by Christopher Steele, a British former intelligence agent whose research was funded first by Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals, then by Democratic organizations. Mr. Steele told the F.B.I. that he based much of his information on a confidential source. But when the F.B.I. Interviewed that person, the source failed to back up some of Mr. Steele’s assertions, the report said. For instance, according to the F.B.I. Interview, the source saw “nothing bad” about communications between the Trump team and the Kremlin, and never discussed WikiLeaks with Mr. Steele, according to the report. The F.B.I.’s failure to inform the court of those discrepancies was a severe error, Mr. Horowitz said. “Despite the inconsistencies between Steele’s reporting and the information his primary sub-source provided to the F.B.I., the subsequent FISA renewal applications continued to rely on the Steele information, without any revisions or notice to the court,” the report stated.
The F.B.I. also failed to notify the court after it learned that Mr. Steele was “desperate” to undercut Mr. Trump, the report said. Kevin Clinesmith, a low-level F.B.I. lawyer, altered an email from the C.I.A. to incorrectly state that Mr. Page was not a source for the intelligence agency. That error was then repeated in an application to renew the warrant. Mr. Horowitz has referred his findings of Mr. Clinesmith to possible criminal investigation for making a false statement.
The Attorney General said the F.B.I. failed to justify the steps it took to investigate the Trump campaign.
John Brennan
Attorney General William Barr praised one element of the Inspector General’s findings, saying the report showed “malfeasance and misfeasance” and “clear abuse” of the wiretap application process by the F.B.I. But Mr. Barr also suggested that he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusion that the F.B.I. had sufficient reason to open an investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia.
“The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Mr. Barr said in a statement.
John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor whom Mr. Barr appointed to run a separate criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, backed Mr. Barr’s findings in his own highly unusual statement. “Last month, we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the F.B.I. case was opened,” Mr. Durham said.
Were there problems with the use of informants?
Mr. Horowitz concluded that the F.B.I. did not attempt to place informants or undercover agents inside the Trump campaign, but he found that the current policy for using informants should include more oversight.
As part of the Russia investigation, F.B.I. Agents authorized the use of at least one informant to determine whether Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos were working with the Russians. The informant met with the two men while they were still associated with the campaign.
The use of the informant, Stefan A. Halper, a Cambridge professor, has led Mr. Trump and his allies to accuse the F.B.I. of spying on his campaign. The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, has defended the bureau against accusations of spying. On two separate occasions, A.G. Barr in interviews (one in testimony before a Congressional committee) stated that it is clear the F.B.I. DID spy on the Trump Campaign. When asked that question in Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Horowitz also stated the F.B.I. spied on Mr. Trump.
Mr. Horowitz’s team scrutinized the F.B.I.’s roster of informants for any work they might have done in connection with the Russia investigation. He found that the F.B.I. did not try to infiltrate the campaign itself. And the inspector general found no evidence that the F.B.I. used informants to interact with anyone on the Trump campaign before the official opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
The inspector general said Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who met with Mr. Papadopoulos and offered him dirt on Hillary Clinton, was not an F.B.I. informant.
How Bad Was It?
In a partial example of just how vile was this investigation by the F.B.I., watch this snippet between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and I.G. Horowitz:
Put in perspective, Horowitz made it clear in Wednesday’s testimony that the Steele Dossier WAS part of the initial FISA warrant application and each FISA renewal. He also stated an F.B.I. attorney in dramatic fashion edited an email to prove that Carter Page was indeed working with Russia. The actual email said precisely the opposite.
Fired F.B.I. Director James Comey immediately after the Horowitz Report release ran to Twitter to say this:
So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America.
— James Comey (@Comey)
In the Horowitz hearing, the Inspector General stated this: “No one was vindicated in this report.” Further, Horowitz noted that Comey violated numerous guidelines and broke federal statutes. Regardless of what Comey claimed, you can bet the John Durham investigation will result in Comey indictments with at least one trial to follow.
Peter Strozk
Who else was tagged for wrongdoing in the Horowitz Report? Andrew McCabe, Peter Strozk, John Brennan, James Clapper, that unnamed F.B.I. attorney who forged a FISA application, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, and that list is just getting started. Many more will face the Grim Reaper when the dust settles on all this.
Summary
What this has exposed is what many have believed not only existed but has thrived in Washington for years: a Deep State. What precisely does that mean?
James Comey is likely going to be remembered as the most corrupt F.B.I Director in U.S. history.
John Brennan lied multiple times before Congress, and this report reveals he hid many facts from the DOJ attorneys, investigators, and conned the FISA courts to gain illegal access to surveillance of the Trump Campaign.
There was deep political bias through numerous levels of employees in several Intelligence agencies. While it was first thought that corruption was specifically within senior management members of several of those agencies, it now appears it made its way through numerous levels in the F.B.I., C.I.A., D.N.I., and other agencies. It is certain that even though F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray has stated he has already taken suggested “corrective actions” within the F.B.I. contained in the Horowitz Report. If he has done so, it is apparent that he had to have at least known about the wrongdoing that occurred under Comey if not personally complicit.
It is expected that in the Durham criminal investigation that members of the Obama F.B.I. and DOJ and probably even some from the White House staff will be implicated.
The Deep State is real. But the above government employees did not act alone. There were those in Congress that at least knew much of what was happening. If evidence confirms that, here’s what that means: some workers in the three Constitutional branches of government — Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches — will be implicated. But there’s one more:
Though not Constitutional, today’s Media took an active role in this fake collusion investigation into Donald Trump. The Media are guilty of suborning perjury, falsifying information used in news reports, and knowingly presented through corrupt government officials defaming information about Trump officials while publicly supporting the lies of those active in this coup d’état.
In the committee hearing in his opening remarks, Sen. Lindsey Graham finished with this advice to us all: “Don’t judge the personnel of our Intelligence Agencies based on this. This does not tell the story of those agencies. We’re better than this.”
I like Mr. Graham, who I consider a great conservative lawmaker. But, in this case, I am now inclined to disagree with the Senator. I feel that far more than have previously been thought to be “great Americans committed to the Rule of Law” that work within these agencies have been, and probably are, driven by gross political bias. And I’m not referring to political ideals which every American has the right to hold. For decades, members of the Government were undoubtedly encouraged to support and vote for their political preferences. But they were instructed to leave their political perspectives at home — no partisanship was allowed on the job in which they work for ALL Americans.
That’s changed: the Deep State has a much bigger choke-hold than I suspected on the heart that beats to keep our nation alive.
Conservatives for months have been waiting breathlessly for the release of the Horowitz report on the sources and the basis for the inception of the FBI investigation into collusion with the Russians by the Donald Trump campaign. Horowitz is the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. His report was expected for release in the late Spring of 2019. It will be released to the public Monday, December 9.
Supposedly the delays are the result of witnesses who, for whatever reasons, did not cooperate with Horowitz regarding testimony early in the investigation but decided to come forward late. Their doing so is rumored to be because of fear of Federal Prosecutor John Durham, who was tasked by Attorney General William Barr to investigate all the 2016-2017 matters in the election. These matters include the Clinton Foundation, FISA warrant applications and all details about the warrants, and who the players were in the surveillance of members of the Trump campaign by the FBI. Durham, unlike Horowitz, has subpoena power. He can convene grand juries (and probably already has), interrogate witnesses, and has wide latitude to obtain evidence of wrongdoing. It is expected many who are included in the Horowitz report are subjects of Durham’s investigation. They are choosing to cooperate with Horowitz so as to not make themselves Durham’s targets for their lack of cooperation.
President Trump with U.S. Attorney General William Barr
Just a week after Justice Department Inspector General Horowitz’s report on the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign in 2016 was published, The Washington Post released another supposed leak.
Attorney General Barr apparently disagrees with the Inspector General that Obama officials and agents were justified in spying on Trump’s campaign and Trump’s transition team, according to the Washington Post report.
Barr may include a formal letter in the report or may publicly state his concern.
According to leaks, behind the scenes at the Department of Justice, there appears to be a disagreement over one of Horowitz’s central conclusions about the origins of the Russian investigation. The conflict could be the beginning of a significant rift within the federal agency over the controversial issue of investigating a presidential campaign.
Barr has not been influenced by Horowitz’s “logic” to conclude that the FBI had a sufficient basis to open their investigation on July 31, 2016. Horowitz will testify in the Senate on Dec. 11 about the findings of the investigation into possible FISA abuses.
For more than a year and a half, Horowitz has been investigating an alleged abuse of FISA by the Obama Justice Department and FBI during the 2016 elections against President Trump.
But the report is more than just a FISA abuse; it is a whole conspiracy campaign against President Trump orchestrated by the Democratic Party in cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies. The IG report will also likely result in the declassification of documents requested by high-ranking Republican legislators for several years.
Republicans and President Trump had argued that the FBI’s alleged FISA abuses, which occurred when the federal agency sought criminal links between Trump’s campaign team and Russia during the 2016 campaign, were politically motivated.
In fact, in recent months, several documents have been uncovered that corroborate those claims, for example:
Text messages obtained by Fox News showed that before the FISA application was approved, FBI agents were dealing with a senior Justice Department official who had “continued concerns” about “possible bias” of a source pivotal to the application.
The 2016 messages, sent between Lisa Page and then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, also revealed that members of the intelligence bureau circulated at least two ‘anti-Trump’ blog articles.
These text messages were based in part on information from former British spy Christopher Steele who cited Page’s alleged links to Russia. The FBI assured the FISA court that the media independently corroborated Steele’s claims, but it later came to light that Steele had previously leaked those data to the press.
The FBI did not clearly state that Steele worked for a company hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Much of the Steele dossier has been discredited or unfounded. In fact, the extensive report by special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign members and the Kremlin.
The “Disagreement”
Reports are beginning to float to the surface that Barr is basically saying that Horowitz, confined as he is to examine issues related to the DOJ, doesn’t have the information he and Durham have uncovered as to what other agencies (such as the CIA) and entities may have been doing during the investigation.
He doesn’t have all the information, Barr says, so his conclusion might be appropriate within the limited parameters he had to work with, but there’s more to the story.
That’s it.
It’s not a slam against Horowitz, nor is it a slam against the report. Only an acknowledgment — and a necessary one, given the spin-doctoring that’s been happening in the lead up to the report’s release next week — that Horowitz was limited in the scope of his investigation.
This is actually how governing is supposed to work, with the players showing respect for each other’s roles and taking care not to step on toes. The Obama administration had a different view of how the intelligence agencies were supposed to function, and Barr seems to be thinking back to a time before super-sharing between agencies was a thing.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham warned that if you believe Horowitz and Barr are at odds with each other in their upcoming reports, you’re buying into the spin.
“Be wary of the Washington Post and the New York Times reporting on what is coming up with Horowitz. They have been trying overtime to spin this thing to diminish its effect, to downplay it,” Graham said Monday.
“I can tell you without any hesitation Attorney General Barr has every confidence in the world in Mr. Horowitz,” Graham added. “He believes that he has done a good job, a professional job, and he appreciates the work and the effort he has put into disclosing abuse at the Department of Justice.”
Summary
Uncharacteristically, Radio Host Rush Limbaugh has been skeptical of any blockbuster revelations of DOJ and FBI wrongdoing in the Russia collusion probe being included in the Horowitz report. Conservatives have been nervously anticipating the story, hoping that there will be certain damning information added that will result in criminal referrals to the DOJ for the prosecution of those who allegedly illegally created and maintained the allegations of Russia collusion by the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Many Conservatives will be sorely disappointed if no action is recommended by Horowitz.
On the other hand, Federal Attorney John Durham has all the power necessary to do exactly what Horowitz cannot do: grand juries, subpoena witnesses, issue indictments, even conduct arrests. And Durham made an announcement recently that his investigation is now considered a criminal investigation as compared to that of Horowitz.
All this means, Folks, is that we are set for waiting again for any definitive information about alleged wrongdoing by those in the Obama White House, the FBI under James Comey, the Department of Justice under Attorneys General Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, and by management at several of the intelligence community departments: specifically John Brennan and James Clapper.
Yes, this is a convoluted and intricate period of digging for the truth. What bothers many Americans is that no one seems to know for certain who are the “guys wearing the black hats” and who “wear the white hats.” Are the investigators in all this clean and objective, or are they “in the tank” for the perpetrators? In other words, millions have queasy stomachs when thinking through it all.
It’s sad to know that any people who work for the American people in government are evil. But there’s one thing that is indisputable: there are plenty of people in our government who are evil. Corruption runs amuck. We must discover who they are, identify their specific wrongdoing, and hold them accountable.
We all thought the U.S. was kept safe by our military, our intelligence agencies, our federal and state law enforcement agents and officers, and by the best judicial system on Earth. Since America’s establishment using the U.S. Constitution as the template for all legal actions, our political leaders have consistently worked with federal and state courts to make sure those small things in U.K. law from which our forefathers fled were guaranteed to never creep into U.S. law. And until now, they haven’t. But it appears it just might be happening now — though quietly and stealthily.
It was common in the United Kingdom for those of different social and economic statuses to be treated differently under the 1600s U.K. law. Theirs was a very “top-down” legal system that favored the wealthy and politically connected. Their laws were well planned and fair in their implementation, but enforcement became lax and unilateral. That atmosphere was a significant contributor to our founders’ decision to leave the British Empire for the New World.
In America, the Constitution very demonstrably guaranteed such arbitrary law enforcement as in Britain would not happen here. For 200+ years, it seemed to work well. It began to quietly change as the American populace began to withdraw from activism in government as social systems changed over the last few decades and we all just got too busy in our private lives. Where citizen involvement in government diminished, political control increased to fill the gaps. With that came extreme partisanship and arbitrary treatment in our justice system. That has evolved into similar treatment in the U.S. as in the British Empire in the 17th Century. And today, we see its results: almost unilateral law enforcement based on social, political, and economic class. That system is now front-and-center every day.
In the past two decades, we have recognized inequality in the Criminal Justice system. Court decisions regarding guilt and innocence and sentencing were (and in some cases still are) racially unfair. For example, in most drug arrests for possession of narcotics and distribution, statistics show African American offenders experience a much higher conviction rate and stiffer sentences than do White Americans. Why does that happen? After all, guilt or innocence and sentencing determined in the Justice system are to be racially blind. That’s a question that criminal justice experts and sociologists have investigated for decades. Study after study shows that racial bias permeates federal, state, and local law enforcement arrests, trials, and sentencing.
The purpose of pointing this out is to remind you that “Equal Justice under the Law” has been since 1776 an integral part of the protection for all Americans from inconsistent adjudication of penalties for crimes. Defendants’ rights are guaranteed Constitutionally. But that promise has been watered down year after year, in court after court, and now has found a foothold in civil proceedings just as in criminal cases. Politicians have watched as it happened and have slipped it into government operations at every level. It’s being used secretly in cases today where no crime has even been committed — like in impeachment.
I know, I know: impeachment is not a criminal matter. It’s a political matter. That fact has been stated over and over in the media during the last three years. Why not until now? Donald Trump wasn’t President. He is now, and most of the politicians who sit on the left side of the aisle don’t like his being President and want to find “a” way or “some” ways to drive him from office.
So why is the impeachment process, not a criminal operation? Because of the “Virginia Plan.”
The Virginia Plan
The Constitutional Convention in 1787 was full of heated debate over many issues of the Constitution. Those settlers had just escaped from the ruthless government of England’s King George III. Three Virginians together worked diligently to find a fair and equitable method to remove an American president (and other members of government) for specific wrongdoing. This was to guarantee Americans no monarch are despot could assume control of the government just because of being the nation’s leader. After considerable debate, those three Virginians agreed that a president should be impeached for “abuses of power that subvert the Constitution, the integrity of government, or the rule of law.” Those three were James Madison, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph. Members had already determined the necessity of including “acts of treason and bribery” that have since been considered as “High crimes and misdemeanors.”
Purposely our forefathers drew a line between criminal and civil actions for removal through impeachment. Their purpose was to keep despots and factions in politics from usurping control of the American government. Impeachment was designed so that between presidential elections, a president who used his or her office to take advantage of citizens and institutions could be removed from office without waiting for the next election. This method worked effectively for more than 250 years primarily as a deterrent for those in office who might be tempted. But it’s no longer working in the Trump Administration
Presumption of Innocence
“Innocent until proven guilty” has been a staple of criminal justice since the beginning of America. Because of non-royals’ arbitrary treatment as “guilty until proven innocent” in Britain, America’s settlers demanded that to flip in criminal cases. It has always been a staple in U.S. criminal justice and has even found its way into many civil proceedings. But there’s a catch to that.
The presumption of innocence seems forgotten in the so-called “court of public opinion.” When high profile criminal cases capture media attention, the public opinion seems to sway towards presuming the person is guilty – before he even steps foot inside a courtroom to have a judge or jury determine whether or not he is guilty. This ‘presumption of guilt’ in the public’s opinion can be devastating to reputations; careers; families, and almost every other aspect of life. Even if eventually found “not guilty” in a court of law, recovering from a public smearing of one’s name and reputation may prove impossible.
The problem we face in this run up to what is now almost certain to be the impeachment of Donald Trump as Leftist politicians with glee point to the standard set by our forefathers that differentiate between civil and criminal treatment in impeachment. Impeachment is NOT a criminal process — it’s strictly a political matter only. That means a President facing impeachment cannot claim ownership of the presumption of innocence. And so this group of Democrats are foaming at the mouth to go after Mr. Trump. Ultimately their unified purpose is to not only impeach the President but to drive him out of office. They view this issue of criminal vs. political as the straw which they have grasped to move the needle in their favor. They are universally giddy that they feel certain this is their “AHA” moment. They do not have to give President Trump the presumption of innocence. They can destroy him politically with impunity!
Summary
The Left have gone crazy with their newfound power. Their quest to find small tidbits of allegation of wrongdoing by Mr. Trump adds fuel to the fire of hatred that drives their every move. Speaker Pelosi handed the keys of impeachment to her bulldog, Rep. Adam Schiff who in his political career has never waited for facts but mounts attacks against those he identifies as his foes with whatever he can use to denigrate them politically while demeaning them personally. He’s basking in his current quest to destroy the Trump presidency.
But here’s what is happening: Mob Rule. Various hate groups from the left like Antifa and other disguised hard-left political groups have joined Schiff and his gang to in organized fashion to foment hatred of not just the President, but of all those who have and still do support him. Truth no longer matters. The loophole our founding fathers left in their roadmap for impeachment that the presumption of innocence is not a necessary element are driving all of these to whip the mob into a frenzy that will only grow stronger as their lust for destruction seems to be within their grasp.
It does not matter if their ploy achieves success or not. The horse of insurrection is already out of the barn and is ripping at the fiber of the foundation of our nation. It’s now OK to ignore laws, promote lawbreaking, wink selectively at those who break the “appropriate” laws, and teach our children and grandchildren that federal law is old, unfair, arbitrary and outdated. Therefore, we have every right to simply ignore it.
Sadly, it appears we just a few days ahead of the complete abolition of our Constitutional structure that will be termed to “be in the best interest of the majority of Americans” when it happens. And many Americans are and will be fine with that process.
Regardless of outcome, be certain that if this insurrection is allowed to succeed with the impeachment of the President and the Media in tandem with the Democrat Party assume government power for the next 4 or 8 years, American social, political, and economic structures and social interactions have paved the way for this destructive White House issue.
What will our nation look like if this leftist project is allowed by American voters to prevail in its local establishment? No one knows for certain. But one thing that IS certain is that if the Left and their Media attack dogs successfully remove Donald Trump from office, America as the historical leader of freedom among all nations will immediately die. Any type of socialistic political process will fail miserably. The problem is those who could stop this debacle are those who have been brainwashed by our grade school and college professors and teachers.
Is it too late to stop it? The answer to that is way above my pay-grade. All we can do is continuously speak truths to the two generations behind us as often as we can. Be vocal about capitalism, a representative democracy, And the Rule of Law in all your interactions with those you know and love.
And we can pray: pray for “all those in leadership over us,” and pray that God will somehow regain their mental and emotional factors.
Monday morning, September 9th, 2019, conservative author, writer, and broadcaster Michele Malkin appeared on Fox and Friends to preview her upcoming book Open Borders, Inc. The fundamental premise of her book is that an amazingly large number of dollars that funded the open-borders debacle at the U.S. southern border came from hundreds of U.S. charities. That’s not really a bad thing in that charities exist so as to help poor and indigent people that for any number of reasons find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.
As you probably know, most donations made to any 501C-3 corporations are tax-deductible. That makes those donations federally tax-deductible and in many cases state tax-deductible as well. Congress made this possible years ago to encourage American citizens and commercial corporations to assist such charities to help less fortunate Americans. Individuals and corporations make donations to these charities and get to “write-off” the amounts donated.
However, as you will see here, the old adage “Show me a dollar and I’ll show you a way to cheat to get that dollar” is certainly applicable in a “Hush/Slush Fund” scam perpetrated by President Barack Obama and his Department of Justice.
The “Hush/Slush Fund” of which we reveal details today is the subject of Malkin’s new book. But her revelations are regarding non-profit organizations who receive some of these funds are specifically used to fund illegal immigration operations in egregious ways. Those we discuss below were used during the Obama Administration to — in many cases — help establish and/or prop-up left-leaning not-for-profits to fund other various liberal causes. You’ll cringe when you hear those disclosed below.
Later we will delve into Malkin’s information which is supposed to be exhaustive.
Let’s look at the Obama second term Hush/Slush fund story.
“Hush/Slush”
In a little-noticed November 2018 report, Bank of America announced that it had donated more than $60.1 million to various charitable funds and nonprofit groups.
The donations were a good deal for Bank of America. For every dollar the bank gives, an independent monitor for the deal credits the bank with $2 toward the record $16.6 billion settlement with the Justice Department on financial fraud charges it signed in August 2014. To date, the donations have reduced that penalty by $138 million. Ordinarily, this practice would be illegal. Not on the bank’s part, but on the government’s.
Federal law says that any funds obtained by a government official, such as a Justice Department prosecutor, must be deposited with the Treasury Department. Officials cannot instruct anybody making a payment to direct the funds anywhere else, much less offer them a deal if they do. Yet President Obama’s Justice Department found a legal workaround to do just that in two of the biggest financial fraud settlements the government has ever obtained. Left-leaning nonprofit groups who would be eligible for the donations lobbied for this, according to Republican critics.
Before Obama, any funds obtained from federal prosecutions that did go to the third party groups did so only after all matters relating to the people directly injured by the wrongdoing had been addressed. How does the Justice Department do this? By arguing that these are “voluntary” donations by the banks and therefore not funds that would otherwise go to the Treasury. Never mind that the banks would violate their plea agreements with the department if they did not make the payments.
Under the $7 billion settlement, Citigroup signed with the Justice Department in 2014 on financial fraud charges, the bank is obligated to pay at least $10 million in “community relief” to housing-related nonprofit groups from a list the government maintains, many of which are Democrat-friendly. It must also pay $15 million to legal aid funds and $25 million to public or private community development funds. Bank of America must pay at least $20 million to housing groups, $30 million to legal aid groups and $50 million to public or private community development funds. Not only do both banks get double credit toward their overall penalties for each donation, but there is also no explicit cap on the number of credits they can get. They could erase potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in federal penalties in this way. For every dollar Bank of America gives, an independent monitor for the deal credits the bank with $2 toward the record $16.6 billion settlement with the Justice Department. “The DOJ announces, ‘Oh, we have gotten these multibillion settlements,’ and then you look at the fine print and see the banks get more credit for giving to a slush fund than to the Treasury,” said Ted Frank, founder of the nonprofit Center for Class Action Fairness.
Republicans have fumed. “It appears that DOJ is systematically subverting Congress’s budget authority by using the settlements to funnel money to favored activist groups,” said House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, in a May letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Even the Justice Department has conceded that they are skirting the law on this. In February of 2018, while giving testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Geoffrey Graber said, “This kind of relief could not have been ordered by a court, even if the government had prevailed at trial.”
The Obama Justice Department wasn’t eager to discuss any of this despite having touted both settlements when they were announced in 2014. “We will decline your interview request on money from the financial settlements,” spokesman Patrick Rodenbush told the Washington Examiner.
Who gets that money that is directed from settlements by the DOJ. The DOJ provides a list of “qualified” recipients that can receive those funds. Who are they?
In the case of Citigroup, the list provided by the DOJ was several hundred names long and includes numerous nonpartisan groups like Catholic Charities as well as exclusively local nonprofits. Others are more liberal. Reports by the monitor for the Bank of America settlement show that National Council of La Raza received $1.5 million, the National Urban League received $1.2 million, and New Jersey Citizen Action, a labor-backed activist group received $100,000.
Countrywide Financial Corporation doled out $335 million to settle its discrimination lawsuit with the feds. Under this DOJ agreement, Countrywide’s money was supposed to be distributed to more than 200,000 minority victims who supposedly were charged higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers based on their race, not their credit. Instead, a chunk of the money went to Democrat-tied groups not connected to the lawsuit, including the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR).
Many of the same groups got more money from a record $16.65 billion settlement with Bank of America. It’s a “historic resolution,” according to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, “and the money will help make amends to borrowers and communities that were negatively affected by the bank’s conduct. Besides settling civil penalties at the state and federal level, the billions will bring relief to struggling homeowners and communities by, among other things, offering new loans and providing financing for affordable rental housing. Delinquent borrowers in Democrat strongholds like Chicago, Oakland and Detroit will also benefit from debt forgiveness.”
Leftover funds were to go to politically-connected community groups—like the NCLR, Operation Hope and National Community Reinvestment Coalition—that intimidate banks into qualifying more minorities for home loans, even if they really can’t afford it. This part of the deal is conveniently buried in an annex to the 37-page DOJ agreement, but a publication dedicated to covering business, finance, and economics draws attention to it in a scathing editorial that refers to the arrangement as extortion. (click on the link “editorial” to see that arrangement)
This was not only a federal tool and used not only by Democrats. As a U.S. attorney in 2005, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used a deferred prosecution agreement against drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb to get it to send funds to his alma mater, Seton Hall University School of Law. The funds were used to endow a professorship in ethics.
Summary
Have you wondered how ANTIFA has been funded? What about the “real” White Supremacist groups that have conducted protests that resulted in violence. Billionaire Trump-hater George Soros is known to have funded hundreds of small politically active leftist not-for-profits. It is certain that some of those millions of Soros dollars have ended up supporting these organizations.
Then there’s the Obama White House. Folks, BILLIONS of dollars in fines and penalties for major banks and other financial institutions, EPA violators caught and fined, and other major corporate offenders have been paid. If you thought the “pay-for-play” operations of the Clinton Foundation were bad, think about what Obama did and what people like Soros are doing today: billions of dollars that are supposed to be paid to the U.S. Treasury — taxpayer-owned — for the use of House of Representatives for the funding of various needs of the federal government were diverted by Obama to hand-picked not-for-profits to spend “as they saw fit.” Most if not all of those diverted funds have ended up in Democrat activist groups’ coffers.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama DOJ short-circuited the law to give those stupid discounts to offenders to entice the gifting to Democrat-aligned groups — sometimes 50 percent of the amount of fines and penalties they owe — to instead of those billions going to the U.S. Treasury to instead go as “donations” to Democrat non-profits!
House Democrats pontificate in outrage against any actions that are attempted by the White House to address Americans’ needs which the Democrat-led House of Representatives continually ignore therefore offering no funding for Americans’ issues like law-breaking at the southern border and the horrendous treatment of illegal immigrants because of the lack of authorized Congressional funding.
What’s going on? This process was put in place long ago. Its purpose is to allow powerful Congressional leaders to manipulate the system in coordination with Democrat “fellow law-breakers” to grow the Democrat Party!
The long-term goal: build and perpetuate a permanent Democrat voting majority. To achieve that goal requires a president that is complicit in signing bills that prop-up these Democrat tactics. A populist president like Donald Trump has totally obliterated the previous success of Leftist activists necessary to achieve this goal!
It’s happening, folks. And it has been doing well and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars away from the Treasury and to these leftist non-profits for more than a decade. Donald Trump may be the last great hope for Americans to preserve our nation of laws, freedoms, and certainly the balance of power between the three co-equal branches of government.
I’ll close by asking this question: If any issues like this were uncovered in the Donald Trump Administration, what would be happening right now? While you think of an answer to that, let me remind you, this story was uncovered and revealed to the general public in 2018. Where were CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post?
And they expect Americans to believe and respect what they report, what they say, and information they give us.
The Washington Examiner and Judicial Watch contributed to this story.
