FBI violated own rulebook by taking steps to recruit, use Trump campaign ‘spy’: Experts

One of the best summaries yet of the way the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign.

The FBI’s own guidelines restrict the deployment of informants to spy on Americans, such as the bureau’s decision to plant a human source among Donald Trump’s presidential campaign aides.

The cautionary regulation is contained in the FBI’s nearly 700-page Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. The restrictions are prompting national security analysts to say the FBI should have heeded its own rulebook, which encourages alternatives to human spies in any investigation, much less one into a presidential political campaign.

The FBI should have focused, they say, on Russian agents who were meddling in the election by hacking computers and by spewing false information on social media.

Instead, the bureau, during President Obama’s administration, took the momentous step of recruiting a national security academic, Stefan Halper, to spy on Trump associates by striking up what seemed to be innocent professional contacts.

Mr. Halper was a “confidential human source,” an official category of spy that is regulated by the FBI’s domestic investigations directive. The FBI completed an updated document in 2013 and posted online a redacted version in 2016.

Human sources are regulated under a program called “Otherwise Illegal Activity,” or OIA. It is called “otherwise illegal” because spying on Americans would be against the law if, as the policy says, the spying is “engaged in by a person acting without authorization.”

Thus, the protocol says the confidential informant must be approved by the Justice Department, meaning an Obama political appointee might have given the go-ahead in summer 2016.

The guideline says a human source should be used only in limited circumstances, which includes “when that information or evidence is not reasonably available without participation in the OIA.”

The rules also say that “otherwise illegal activity” should be “limited or minimized in scope to only that which is reasonably necessary.”

A U.S. official told The Washington Times that the bureau should have targeted Russian intelligence officials first to determine whether there was evidence that they were contacting or colluding with Trump people before authorizing domestic spying by what the source called an “agent provocateur.”

John Dowd, President Trump’s former defense counsel, said the FBI had a duty to notify, not spy on, Trump people.

“If you are concerned that the Russians are trying to penetrate a campaign or meddle with the election campaign process, you include the candidates and their top security professionals in that effort,” Mr. Dowd told The Times.

Obama Justice Department officials considered informing the Trump campaign that it was the target of Russian intelligence but opted not to, according to the final majority Republican report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The committee report recommended: “When consistent with national security, the intelligence community should immediately inform U.S. presidential candidates when it discovers a legitimate counter-intelligence threat to the campaign, and promptly notify Congress.”

J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon spokesman and Trump campaign national security adviser, rejected Democrats’ arguments that the FBI informant was protecting the Republican candidate.

“Obama associates are misleading Americans about FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign,” he said. “If the FBI merely wanted to ‘protect’ the campaign and avoid tipping off the Russians, as we’re being told, they should have informed Mr. Trump of specific allegations about suspected individuals before the surveillance began. Failing that, it looks like one large sting-and-smear operation against the entire campaign, including Mr. Trump.”

Mr. Halper is a longtime Republican-connected scholar who has performed classified work for the U.S. intelligence community and is tied to Britain’s spy service, MI6, through former director Richard Dearlove. They are partners in the intelligence consultancy Cambridge Security Initiative.

Another MI6 link to the Trump-Russia investigation is former spy Christopher Steele. With funding from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, Mr. Steele wrote an anti-Trump dossier and fed his Kremlin-sourced information to the British government and the FBI.

Mr. Halper, who opposed Mr. Trump’s election and endorsed Mrs. Clinton, targeted at least two Trump volunteers: Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

He first encountered Mr. Page at a conference in Cambridge, England, after the volunteer spent a few days in Moscow in early July 2016 during which he delivered a public commencement speech.

Mr. Halper also made a number of contacts with Papadopoulos and paid him for a research paper, according to reporting by The Daily Caller.

Papadopoulos was under FBI scrutiny for making contacts with Russian-connected people in an effort to arrange a Trump-Kremlin meeting, which never happened. He has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about when he joined the Trump campaign and his meeting with a Moscow-linked professor from Malta.

The professor told him he heard that the Kremlin owned thousands of Clinton emails, an apparent reference to the 33,000 messages she ordered destroyed by her law firm before investigators could acquire them.

Papadopoulos has not been charged in any conspiracy. Mr. Page has denied under oath any wrongdoing and has not been charged.

What role the Steele dossier played in the FBI’s decision to activate Mr. Halper is unclear. Mr. Steele began feeding dossier charges to the bureau in July 2016.

The FBI planned to pay Mr. Steele $50,000 to continue investigating Mr. Trump, but the agency fired him after he went to Mother Jones magazine with his story of Trump-Russia collusion.

Before Mr. Steele’s firing, the FBI embraced his reporting and used it as the bulk of its evidence to obtain a court order for wiretapping and surveillance of Mr. Page, an energy investor who once lived in Moscow.

The bureau relied heavily on the dossier to obtain three warrant renewals from a judge, taking the surveillance into the fall last year, long after Mr. Page had left the campaign in which he played a minor role and never spoke with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Steele reported an “extensive conspiracy.” To date, none of his collusion charges has been proved publicly. Trump people named in the dossier have called it a work of fiction.

The Long March: Reckoning With 1968's 'Cultural Revolution,' 50 Years On

Long, but a good read.  The Right lost the culture war and what we have is the result.

Liege 'terror' attack: Three people shot dead including two cops by gunman 'shouting Allahu Akbar'

Religion of Peace update.

A short history of Democrat-spy collusion

Recall that the NY Times and Washington Post "reported" quite a number of time lines explaining the Genesis of the "Trump colluded with the Russians" investigation. First here was the belief that the obscure Carter Page was recruited by the Russians, until that fable fell apart. No, no we were told. In the beginning it was the 20-something and even more obscure George Papadopoulous who got drunk and told an Australian diplomat - who had arranged for a $25 million gift to the Clintons - that the Russian had dirt on Hillary.

There are details yet to come, but here is the bottom line, the irreducible minimum. A cabal of CIA and FBI operatives, including the Director of the CIA, John Brennan, along with other members of the intelligence “community,” prominently including James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and various members of the Obama administration, colluded to undermine Donald Trump’s campaign.

Like almost everyone else, they assumed that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, so they were careless about covering their tracks. If Hillary had won, the department of Justice would have been her Department of Justice, John Brennan would still be head of the CIA, and the public would never have known about the spies, the set-ups, the skulduggery.

But Hillary did not win. For the last 16 months, we’ve watched as that exiled cabal shifted its efforts from stopping Trump from winning to a desperate effort to destroy his Presidency. Thanks to the patient work of Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and a handful of GOP Senators, that effort is now disintegrating. What is being exposed is the biggest political scandal in the history of the United States: the effort by highly placed—exactly how highly placed we still do not know—members of one administration to mobilise the intelligence services and police power of the state to spy upon and destroy first the candidacy and then, when that didn’t work, the administration of a political rival.

It is banana republic behaviour, but it looks now as if those responsible for this effort to undermine American democracy and repeal the results of a free, open, and democratic election will be exposed. Let’s hope that they are also held to account.

They are all becoming unhinged in front of our eyes.  They have lost control and are terrified that prison awaits.  Recall what happened to leading members of the Nixon administration after Watergate.  Also recall that Watergate was a botched attempt to spy.  Spygate was a successful spying operation.  Much worse.   People are already asking what did Obama know and when did he know it.

The Tactic of Floating Outrageous BS

A couple of days ago, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had this to say about his former bailiwick, the Department of Justice, and how it should operate in relation to the President of the United States.

Trump demand for DOJ investigation is dangerous/democracy threatening. DOJ response is disappointing.There is no basis/no predicate for an https://t.co/UZn0rCUpcK’s time to stand for time honored DOJ independence.That separation from White House is a critical part of our system.

— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) May 21, 2018

Twitter king Thomas Wictor ... pointed out the obvious. Well it's obvious to those who read the U.S. Constitution every now and then.

HOLY CRAP.

The Department of Justice is part of the EXECUTIVE BRANCH.

It's not separate from the White House.https://t.co/daVEE8ffQB https://t.co/ocWKMfUA7j

— Thomas Wictor (@ThomasWictor) May 22, 2018

Baldilocks replied:

He knows. He's just counting on rallying those who don't know. And they are legion.

— baldilocks (@JulietteAkinyi) May 22, 2018

DOJ Employee Donations Overwhelmingly Favor Democrats

This is why the Democrats get away with weaponizing government agencies.  It's the top reason to reduce the number of government employees.  Saving money is a distant second if we want to preserve the Republic.

DOJ workers handed out nearly $950,000 in total political donations in 2016. Of this amount, $818,985 went to Democrats, or 87 percent of the total donations. Republicans garnered $108,882 in donations from those at the agency in 2016, or 12 percent of all the money given.

Venezuela is now a dictatorship

Looting the country is the entire point of stealing elections

2 Shot At Louie's On Lake Hefner; Suspect Killed By Armed Citizen

Good shooting.

He was suspended for wearing a Trump shirt. Now, he’s suing his Oregon school district

Punch back twice as hard.

Mueller Rejects Speedy Trial Law To Delay Russian Collusion Trial

The Show Trial that blew up in Mueller's face.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller asked a federal judge Tuesday to reject the four-decade-old speedy trial law in the case against 13 Russians and three Russian companies and has asked for an indefinite delay to the Russian collusion trial.

It is the second time Mueller tried to delay the trial. Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, a Trump appointee, rejected the earlier request without comment and ordered the case to go forward....

Former federal prosecutor and National Review Contributing Editor Andrew C. McCarthy told TheDCNF it was too late for Mueller to claim that the complexity of the case warranted a delay.

“Speedy trial rights belong to the defendant, and if the defendant pushes for a trial within the 70 days, the government has little cause to complain,” McCarthy said. “If the case was too complex, the government had the option of holding off on seeking an indictment until it was ready to proceed to trial. When a prosecutor files an indictment, it is tantamount to saying, ‘We are ready to go.'”

Not only is Mueller a partisan hack, he's incompetent because he didn't see this coming.

Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy

Another great Mark Styen article relates how the Obama spooks and spies set up the Trump campaign.

...  Brennan and Clapper and Comey and McCabe. They took tools designed to combat America's foreign enemies and used them against their own citizens and their political opposition. It was an intentional subversion of the electoral process conducted at the highest level by agencies with almost unlimited power. And, if they get away with it, they will do it again, and again and again. That's what Brennan's telling us on Twitter, and Clapper on "The View":

Yeah? So what? Whatcha gonna do about it?

Good question.

Did the Obama Administration Spy on Michael Flynn?

Yes, next question.

The Niceness Effect

Popularity and the desire to be liked are at the center of our contemporary political disasters. One of the general rules of rhetoric I’ve observed is a tendency for the nicest opinion to be preferred to the not-nice, all other things being equal. If, for instance, I were to say that most poor people in America are poor due to bad choices, and another were to say that most people in America were poor due to no fault of their own, the latter is more palatable. It is nicer. And since it is nicer, it is generally preferred by popular opinion irrespective of whether or not it is actually correct.

...

For example, it is easier to blame white racism for the problems of the black community than to blame the black community itself, irrespective of which explanation (if either) is true. So when a debate breaks out, those who want to stick white racism with the blame have the home field advantage, so to speak. An opponent will have to win by enough to outweigh the rhetorical preference for nice....

There’s a fallacy buried in all this. Good is not necessarily nice. What is moral may not appear nice, and what appears nice may, in fact, be quite evil. Niceness has little – if any – correlation with goodness. It is good to defend your family from a murderer. It is not nice to the murderer, obviously. This is one of the reasons modern pacifism is rooted in moral cowardice disguising itself as moral superiority.

Social Justice elevates niceness above goodness, and tries to claim the moral high ground in any debate as a result. They are taking advantage of a cheap rhetorical trick. Fortunately, there is an easy defense. Invariably, SJWs will get ugly. Their not-niceness will be exposed. If they sling it at you, you are permitted to sling it right back. Quid pro quo may be the most effective means of combating SJWs. ...

MORE EVIDENCE OF DEEP STATE COLLABORATION WITH CNN ON THE STEELE DOSSIER

This is old news, but for those who have not heard:

It was Clapper who told Comey to brief Trump on the dossier. And it might well have been Clapper who passed the word to CNN that Trump had been briefed — and thus that CNN had the hook it needed to publish the unverified, salacious information from which the deep state supposedly was protecting Trump.

Women’s March defends rapists…

It does when rapists are MS-13.

John Brennan’s Plot to Infiltrate the Trump Campaign

It's starting to come to light.

As Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish.

Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the Trump campaign, which he was running right out of CIA headquarters....

A veteran of the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s CIA was full of Hillary supporters, some of whom decorated their desks with her campaign paraphernalia. Brennan, whom the press noted would walk the halls of the CIA in an LGBT rainbow lanyard, encouraged this open political atmosphere. While Brennan knew his spying operation on the Trump campaign was an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive” matter (as reported by journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff), he assumed its machinations would never come to light.

The members of Brennan’s working group at Langley “were just a bunch of out-of-control idiots,” says a former high-ranking CIA official to TAS. He finds it flabbergasting that Brennan would bring CIA officials and FBI officials into the same room to cook up schemes to send a spy into the Trump campaign’s ranks. One of those schemes involved money (Halper paid George Papadopoulos $3,000 for a phony research paper as a way of luring him into a London meeting); another involved sex (Halper’s assistant, with a name out of a bad spy novel, Azra Turk, tried to coax information from Papadopoulos at flirty bar outings, according to the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross).

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn gives us a little insight into the royal Wedding that we didn't know

To be honest, when a Prince of the Blood Royal marries in the presence of Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney a half-black American actress who's dated a porn star and divorced her Jewish husband by mailing back the wedding ring and has a violent alcoholic brother who's held a gun to his girlfriend's head and sent his soon-to-be brother-in-law an open letter warning that this will be "the biggest mistake in royal wedding history"...

RUSSIAN COLLUSION Moves to a New Level. The Hunters Become the Hunted.

The Russian Collusion scenario is now moving to a new level. What happens when government leaders use the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries?

The underbrush is being cleared away and - while the MSM will not mention the name of Barack Obama when discussing these issues – it will soon become obvious where this is heading. The hunters have become the hunted.

A quick peek at the Wall Street Journal from somewhere in the not too distant future: the following people are indicted and convicted of illegally spying on the Trump campaign: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton … and others yet to be named. Some do time for the crime, others for the cover-up.

Trump pardons Obama; can’t have a former President in prison. Underlings are a different matter.

Mark Steyn interviews the man who interrogated KSM

Bush kept the country safe.

The Mark Steyn Show with James E Mitchell

Dr. Mitchell commented on John McCain. The following a a partial stranscript of his comments.

John McCain is well known as an opponent of torture and to him that includes water boarding. McCain says that’s illegal, it should always be illegal. When somebody asked him what if there’s a ticking time bomb scenario – another potential catastrophe like 9/11? He replied that he would expect the CIA interrogators to do what was necessary and at their trial, if they had actually saved lives, we would try to take that into consideration.

Let me paraphrase Mark Steyn on his follow-up:

That’s our John McCain. If a CIA interrogator water boards someone and thousands of people are not killed, the people who prevented this disaster should be subjected to years of prosecution and when the judge sentences them for war crimes, instead of death they get to spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. And John McCain burnishes his halo.

Spitzer, Weiner, Schneiderman: a bunch of power-hungry perverts

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Blame hubris. Blame hormones. Blame the New York way — which attracts and rewards uncommonly arrogant, power-mongering overachievers who lack both boundaries and simple common sense.

• Eliot Spitzer, as attorney general, stretched law and custom to terrorize Wall Street; he rode that overreach into Albany’s executive chamber — then hid bank transactions to pay a hooker, got caught and left public life in disgrace.
• Anthony Weiner was a congressman, a job he meant only to pave the way to an inevitable arrival at Gracie Mansion. But he began exposing himself on the internet, sometimes to children, and today he’s in prison.
• Eric Schneiderman, the now-former attorney general, transformed that office into a hyperactive, extra-official ideological enforcement agency, earning unbounded progressive applause along the way — even as he was beating women in private. Schneiderman denies the charges — leveled in The New Yorker — but they are credible, and he is now a private citizen for the first time since 2003.

Glenn Reynolds:  AS USUAL, EVERYBODY KNEW  (but they were too valuable to Democrats to tell the truth)

Global Cooling Update

Coldest April in 20 years across the United States, feds say

DRUDGE on Schneiderman

FIFTY SHADES OF SCHNEIDERMAN...

Was harsh critic of abusive men...

'Kink community' angry at comments...

Woman details nightmare date...

Cuomo announces special prosecutor...

Polanski calls #MeToo movement 'mass hysteria'...

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

Great read. Then buy an AR15 if you don't already have one.

Russia investigation isn’t really about Trump, but giving cover to Obama and Hillary

Now here's an intersting view.  He could be right.

Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, and the rest of their merry band of brothers know one thing all too clearly. They are not there to prosecute Trump; that is only a tactic to achieve the real goal. This entire drama has been played out, not to indict Trump, but to prevent the country from understanding how truly depraved, traitorous, and duplicitous the regime of Barack Hussein Obama really was. They cannot stop this investigation because if they do, Hillary, Obama, Kerry, Jarrett, all of them, go directly to jail without passing go.

Mueller is not a special prosecutor, he is a goalie, meant only to protect the truth from coming out.

In Russia, when Boris Yeltsin’s health was failing and it was obvious it was time for a new leader, good old Boris chose Vladimir Putin. Why? Because he was assured Putin would not prosecute his family for the billions and billions they had stolen by raping the country they were supposed to lead.

When Hillary lost the election, the Left in America was shocked. Hillary was supposed to play Putin’s role, to prevent anyone from finding out how deep the Hussein rabbit hole of treason really went. This is why Hillary famously apologized to Barack when she lost. “I’m sorry, Barack,” she said.

When it was obvious Trump was going to win, they had to come up with another plan. I have to admit, the plan was created with evil genius. They decided to try and bring down Trump with an orchestrated campaign to find, or create, some type of Russia collusion, to stop his agenda, delegitimize his presidency, and buy time to install another goalie in The White House.

Barack and his merry band of traitors weakened America on purpose. They moved hundreds of billions of dollars to their fat cat bosses in the union sector, they almost destroyed our military, they betrayed us to our enemies, they betrayed our allies, the divided us by race. In short, they did their best to destroy this great country, and get rich at the same time. As his preacher famously said, “God Damn America!” (And those white people too).

No, Mueller can’t stop. If he does, the entire house of cards comes crashing down. The Left will be finished in America for a generation. Barack, Valerie, Hillary and the rest of them go to the big house. Then we find out the real extent of their crimes against the people.

Judge Ellis Wants to See Mueller's Hunting License Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/judge_ellis_wants_to_see_muellers_hunting_license.html#ixzz5EocfxmfO Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

"I don't see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate," U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in the Eastern District of Virginia said.

At a tense hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the judge said Mueller should not have "unfettered power" in his Russia probe and that the charges against Manafort did not arise from the investigation into Moscow's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

"It's unlikely you're going to persuade me the special counsel has unfettered power to do whatever he wants[.]" ... "Our investigative scope does cover the activity in the indictment," Dreeben [the Department's deputy solicitor general] told the judge.

"Cover bank fraud in 2005 and 2007? Tell me how!" Ellis retorted. ...

Read the whole thing.

The Rape Culture of Politics by Investigation

Former Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo condemned the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday following his closed-door testimony. His words, no doubt, resonated with every Trump aide, associate, and family member ensnared in the bogus Trump-Russia election collusion scam.

“God damn you to Hell,” Caputo told the committee—an impassioned conclusion to an emotional statement explaining the personal and financial strain the investigations have caused his family.

Caputo called out a former staffer to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is orchestrating the ongoing smear campaign against anyone in Trump’s orbit thanks to deep-pocketed Democratic activists in New York and California. And he implored the committee to “investigate the investigators.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team interviewed Caputo the following day, nearly one year after Mueller got his marching orders from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. So, why has Caputo now been interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the special counsel? What makes this longtime GOP consultant who worked on the Trump campaign for less than a year (and not in any central role) possibly complicit in, or a witness to, the yet-unproven crime that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election?

Caputo made the egregious error of having once worked for the Russians. In the 1990s. He told New York magazine in an interview this week that he “studied Russia in college and became a big admirer of Russian literature and ballet. I worked hard in the Cold War to defeat Russia, and after the Wall fell I grew curious about the Russian people. I wanted to see the results.” Of course, this all sounds very fishy now. It’s obvious that Caputo developed an interest in Russia in the 1980s so he could earn the coveted post of Donald Trump’s New York primary election coordinator in 2015 and then work with the Rooskies to strip Hillary Clinton of enough votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan to cost her the election in November 2016 (even though he left the campaign in June 2016.)

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

While it’s tempting to joke about the ridiculousness of federal investigators and lawmakers continuing to sniff out a crime that did not happen, it’s no laughing matter. Caputo said he has incurred about $125,000 in legal fees and he’s not done yet. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) brought up Caputo’s Ukrainian-born wife during a House hearing with former FBI Director James Comey last year. Caputo claims he and his family have been the target of death threats, all due to a “fishing expedition” into his alleged role in Trump-Russia election collusion. “If you drink vodka, you have Russian dressing in your refrigerator, you’re game for these people,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson....

“This is a punishment strategy. I think they want to destroy the president, they want to destroy his family, they want to destroy his businesses, they want to destroy his friends,” Caputo told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night. “Clearly these lawsuits after the fact are the new Democratic strategy. When you lose, you still win. I don’t think anyone should work on a Republican campaign again unless you’re legally indemnified. If you do, you’re crazy.”

530 Sure Looks Like Facebook’s Lead Attorney Colin Stretch Lied to Congress While Under Oath

Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch may have not been completely truthful while under oath when taking questions in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017.

Stretch was being grilled by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) about the extent of Facebook’s ability to profile users on the social media website. Stretch told Kennedy that Facebook had done away with the ability of employees to compile or access profiles on individual users. Here’s a transcript of their relevant remarks:

Sen. Kennedy: Do you have a profile on me?

Stretch: Senator, if you’re a Facebook user, we would permit you to be targeted with an advertisement based on your characteristics and your likes along with other people who share similar characteristics and your likes along with other people who share–

Sen. Kennedy: Well, let’s do another one. Let’s suppose your CEO came to you, or not you, somebody who could do it in your company, maybe you could, and said, “I want to know everything we can know about Senator Graham. I want to know the movies he likes. I want to know the bars he goes to. I want to know who his friends are. I want to know what schools he went to.” You could do that, couldn’t you?

Stretch: So, I want to be—it is a very good question—the answer is absolutely not. We have limitations in place on our ability to review the person’s—

Sen. Kennedy: I’m not asking about your rules. I’m saying, you have the ability to do that, don’t you?

Stretch: Again, Senator, the answer is no. We’re not able—

Sen. Kennedy: You can’t put a name to a face to a piece of data? You’re telling me that?

Stretch: So we have designed our systems to prevent exactly that, to protect the privacy of our users.

Sen. Kennedy: I understand, but you can get around that to find that identity, can’t you?

Stretch: No senator, I cannot.

Sen. Kennedy: That’s your testimony under oath?

Stretch: Yes, it is.

Here's why his testimony is a lie (from the WSJ):

A small group of Facebook Inc. FB 1.49% employees have permission to access users’ profiles without the users finding out.

Yet any time a Facebook employee accesses a colleague’s personal profile, the colleague is notified through what is often referred to within the company as a Sauron alert—a reference to the all-seeing eye in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, people familiar with the matter say.

Similar protections don’t exist for the two billion-plus Facebook users who don’t work for the company, the people said.

The dual standard for employees versus regular users is a window on Facebook’s struggle over how much to disclose to users about how their data is handled—an issue Facebook has recently tried to address with a raft of changes to the platform.

Kennedy specifically asked about the ablity to access user data, not the rules governing it.

Berkeley task force blames conservatives for leftist violence.

Kanye West interviewed by Charlemagne

If you're like me you may have vaguely heard of Kanye West but didn't really know much about him. He's all over then "culture" today because he came out in support of Donald Trump. And he apparently has huge influence in the Black community.

So here he is for roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes

The process is the punishment. (Mark Steyn)

An addendum to my recent post here: this deserves more everyone's attention.

In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far better quality of life. That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can't possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up.

Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 – and making a visceral impact on my children.

How many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.

Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting — until months after it was deployed — that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.

In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found...

We know from the news that he's been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.

I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13?

'The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump's personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.'

That's your pal Dan, isn't it?

I mean, you're all in this together. You're the swamp.

What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies' work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress.

Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election.

I want to know because God damn you to Hell.

STEYN:

To reprise my old line: The process is the punishment. That's particularly true at the federal level, where as a matter of policy they first wipe you out - drain your savings, empty your retirement account, nuke the kids' college fund ...and then dangle a deal in front of you in exchange for you pleading guilty "only" to a process crime, like lying to the lyin' liars who run the FBI. It is an awesome thing to behold - particularly by comparison with, say, military justice, where the US has been holding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for almost four times as long as the First World War and still can't manage to bring him to trial....

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can't try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan ...and has confessed to all this and more.

It's all a joke: civilian, military; federal, state; criminal, civil; family, probate. As my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, the United States has as many lawyers as the rest of the world combined. One entirely inevitable consequence of that malign distortion in the labor market is that far more aspects of life are litigated, and, when they are, the natural tendency of the system is for everything to take far longer than it would anywhere else. So what counts is not plaintiff or defendant, but which party is in the position to inflict the most pain on the other ...

And yet despite this being the most litigious society on earth huge numbers of Americans remain oblivious to the vast amount of human wreckage piled up: Every day on cable news, I hear some Democrat telling the host that, if these former minor Trump aides have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear from investigation-without-end: We need to let the law do its job, and let the process play itself out.

I heard the same thing six years ago, when Michael Mann, the hockey-stick huckster and climate mullah, sued me for defamation: "Well, if Steyn's innocent, he'll get his day in court and the process will play itself out." That was 2012, and my day in court is no nearer than it was, and a First Amendment that protects my right to a 270-word blog post only after a decade of my life and an eight-figure sum isn't, as a practical matter, in terribly good health, is it?

When the process plays itself out as lethargically and ruinously as this, the process itself is the problem - as Michael Caputo has discovered.

I wish him well, and I wish those toying with him as they've toyed with Carter Page and others are indeed damned to Hell.

Bill Whittle: Kaynes West ... racist ....

'God damn you to hell!': Former Trump campaign consultant explodes at Democratic Senate aides after he loses his house to legal fees in 'witch hunt' congressional Russia probe

The Real Criminals

A former campaign communications adviser to Donald Trump blew up at Democratic U.S. Senate aides on Tuesday at the end of a behind-the-scenes grilling connected to their wide-ranging Russia investigation.

New York-based political consultant Michael Caputo said he has spent $125,000 on attorneys to help him navigate the committee's demands for documents and testimony, ruining his children's economic future and forcing him to sell his family home.

Calling the probe a 'witch hunt,' Caputo demanded to know who is funding a secretive effort to continue digging into unsubstantiated allegations that Trump has ties with the Kremlin.

'What America needs is an investigation of the investigators,' he said. 'I want to know: Who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump?'

'I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election. I want to know because God Damn you to Hell.'

Worth a read. In today's American judicial system thye process is the punishment.

Is Trump right about judges' leanings? Maybe, review shows

That's the AP headline.  The real answer is YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY ARE!

Dear Liberal Media FYI We Hate You Too

As everyone in the known Universe is well aware, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held on Saturday night in Washington, D.C.. The President of the United States elected not to attend. Proving, once again, that he is smarter than the formerly “ink stained wretches” that cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association proved, once again, that they hate the average American. That’s okey dokey because we hate them too.

I will not rehash the unholy mess that the alleged journalists presented to the world. Nina Bookout covered the dumpster fire aspect here and Lisa Carr covered the Nasty Women performance art here.

No, I am going to focus on the reciprocal hatred between the “Average American” and the “Elite Journalist”. When it comes to elite, it doesn’t get any more elite than the White House beat. These reporters of all things newsworthy call their dinner the “Nerd Prom”, which just goes to show how smart they think they are. If I were to think of a “Nerd Prom”, I would think of programmers, aerospace engineers or biochemical researchers. Journalists? It makes one laugh that they think they are that smart. So, um, climb down from your high horse, people.

Read the whole thing.

THE OBAMA DISASTER, AND THE TWEET OF THE DAY