Yeah, you really cannot make this stuff up. After the DOJ, FBI, CIA and US Intelligence Apparatus writ large, went to extraordinary lengths to influence both the 2016 presidential election (Yates/Comey) against Donald Trump; and the 2018 mid-term election (Rosenstein/Mueller) against President Trump; with no accountability despite the overwhelming evidence…. Now the DOJ Office of Inspector General wants to investigate political pressure on the 2020 election.
Earlier this year Dirty Cop Rod Rosenstein made the decision to turn over the Michael Cohen case to attorneys in the Southern District of New York. Rosenstein did this to ensure that the witch hunt against President Trump continued if President Trump shut down the junk Mueller investigation.Rosenstein signed the 4th FISA court request to spy on President Trump despite knowing the request was based on a the Fusion-GPS dossier, a Democrat-funded oppo research project that was NEVER fact-checked.Trump appointed attorney Geoffrey Berman recused himself from the investigation into Michael Cohen.
Tucked inside the inspector general’s report on former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the story of an August 2016 phone call from a high-ranking Justice Department official who Mr. McCabe thought was trying to shut down the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was running for president.The official was “very pissed off” at the FBI, the report says, and demanded to know why the FBI was still pursuing the Clinton Foundation when the Justice Department considered the case dormant.Former FBI officials said the fact that a call was made is even more stunning than its content....Although the inspector general’s report did not identify the caller, former FBI and Justice Department officials said it was Matthew Axelrod, who was the principal associate deputy attorney general — the title the IG report did use.Those familiar with Justice Department operations said they don’t believe the principal associate deputy attorney general would have made the McCabe call without consulting with his supervisor, which would have been Ms. Yates.“In my experience these calls are rarely made in a vacuum,” said Bradley Schlozman, who worked as counsel to the PADAG during the Bush administration. “The notion that the principle deputy would have made such a decision and issued a directive without the knowledge and consent of the deputy attorney general is highly unlikely.”Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who is now a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the proper chain of command for the Justice Department to follow up on an investigation would involve the head of the Criminal Division, not the PADAG, calling the FBI.“There is no way I would have ever called the FBI on my own unless I raised concerns with my boss or my boss told me to do so,” he said. “I have a hard time believing this guy did this without consulting with Sally Yates unless he was a complete lone ranger and off the reservation.”The inspector general is examining the way the FBI and Justice Department handled investigations into Mrs. Clinton during the election.
... while the Russians attempted mass chaos. The more serious scandal appears to have covered up criminal behavior, illicit manipulation of the FISA process, and an attempt to undo the quite serious results of an election.
Is there anything more sacred in our representative republic?
The scandal that goes mostly unmentioned began before the election had even occurred but appears to have continued well past the final results of election night, with one candidate winning 30 of 50 states, and racking up a 304 to 227 victory in the electoral college.
A victory that looks increasingly historic in light of what increasingly appears to be the collusion of the then current administration with one campaign, and in instance after instance attempting to push their thumb on the scale of the outcome.
The Democrats’ illicit partnership with the Obama Justice Department and what appears to be an increasingly corrupted leadership at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was yet one more logistical hurdle that President Trump would have to overcome in his surprising and transformational win.
Few remember, though my radio show discussed at length, the reports that surfaced in October of 2016. In reaction to the bizarre July 5th announcement by then FBI director James Comey, FBI officials revealed that members of the DOJ and FBI investigative teams that had worked the Hillary email case were “angered & disgusted” that the co-opted DOJ and FBI leadership ignored the very real analysis of evidence and decided against bringing criminal indictment against Hillary Clinton for the handling of top secret information. More than 100 FBI agents that worked the case, and more than 6 DOJ attorneys expressed their disgust, according to a source within the group.
...The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well. These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire....I think the Democratic fallback position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as punishment enough.Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.Indeed, absent accountability and punishment, the new modus operandi would be for any lame- duck incumbent administration to use federal agencies to enhance the campaign of its own party’s nominee. It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded under the victor’s tenure.
Attorney General Sessions must find muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.Only another prosecutorial investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too will be held to account.
... lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.Nine months later, with Comey gone and special counsel Robert Mueller in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI in that Jan. 24 questioning....In any event, much happened after the FBI director's March briefings of Congress. In May, the president fired Comey. The Justice Department, under Trump-appointed deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, chose Robert Mueller to be the Trump-Russia special counsel. Mueller gathered a number of prosecutors known for tough, take-no-prisoners tactics. And on Dec. 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.Yates went on to become a heroine of the Trump resistance (and at least one of Mueller's prosecutors) after she refused to enforce the president's travel ban executive order, and Trump summarily fired her. Her legacy lives on in United States v. Michael T. Flynn.But to outside observers, mystery still surrounds the case. To some Republicans, it appears the Justice Department used a never-enforced law and a convoluted theory as a pretext to question Flynn — and then, when FBI questioners came away believing Flynn had not lied to them, forged ahead with a false-statements prosecution anyway. The Flynn matter is at the very heart of the Trump-Russia affair, and there is still a lot to learn about it.
There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.The Justice Department has identified about 50,000 Strzok-Page texts. But that is apart from the texts between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 that were declared missing a week ago but are now being recovered. So, the total is apparently 50,000 plus the currently unknown number of formerly missing texts.But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn't discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress.How many texts have been turned over? Both Justice Department and Capitol Hill sources say the total number is in the 7,000 range, which includes all the texts handed over on two separate occasions.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew well in advance of FBI Director James Comey's 2016 press conference that he would recommend against charging Hillary Clinton, according to information turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Friday.The revelation was included in 384 pages of text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and it significantly diminishes the credibility of Lynch's earlier commitment to accept Comey's recommendation — a commitment she made under the pretense that the two were not coordinating with each other.And it gets worse. Comey and Lynch reportedly knew that Clinton would never face charges even before the FBI conducted its three-hour interview with Clinton, which was supposedly meant to gather more information into her mishandling of classified information.On July 1, 2016, as the Lynch announcement became public, Page texted Strzok:Page: And yeah, it’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.
A group of House Republicans has gathered secretly for weeks in the Capitol in an effort to build a case that senior leaders of the Justice Department and FBI improperly — and perhaps criminally — mishandled the contents of a dossier that describes alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, according to four people familiar with their plans.[snip]The people familiar with Nunes' plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence.
Fourteen days before President Trump took the oath of office, the Obama administration’s intelligence chiefs made public a unanimous assessment claiming Russian operatives, under orders from President Vladimir Putin, had orchestrated an influence campaign to help Mr. Trump win the presidential contest.It was a watershed moment: the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI challenging the legitimacy of a U.S. presidential victory.The conclusions in the Jan. 6 document were sharp, but the findings unraveled 10 months later, raising questions about the basis for the evidence and the motives of the Obama appointees leading the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.“It left me scratching my head,” said one intelligence source with personal access to former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former CIA Director John O. Brennan, two of the men who had signed off on the assessment.
Many years ago I worked with a man who before taking up a graduate degree in math at a German university had been a martial arts enthusiast. He had a very slight limp and one day told me the story behind it. While walking along a beach in Honduras with his wife and a British couple the foursome were attacked by a huge man armed with a machete. My friend had a "little camping machete" for defense and seeing the fight would soon go against his shorter weapon stepped inside his assailant's blade arc and took out his assailant's arm while receiving in exchange the blow which produced the limp. The Honduran police later congratulated him for subduing a notorious local criminal and took both him and the seriously injured suspect to the hospital.The story illustrates how in a sword fight, as in politics, the combatants often attack each other's extremities (sword hand, extended foot, arm) first before venturing into body strike range. To get into killing range you must often risk being killed yourself. So sword fighters usually wait for their foes to weaken or an opening to develop.The most singular thing about Donald Trump's wiretap accusation against Barack Obama is how he's refusing to play the game of extremities — losing a Flynn here and getting a Sessions paralyzed there — and getting right into lethal range. Trump's gone right past Schumer, ignored the surrogates and gone straight for the former president himself.The Sunday Guardian writes some believe Trump's key mistake was believing "in mid-November ... that it would be a statesmanlike gesture to (in effect) pardon Hillary Clinton." He must have expected a reciprocal courtesy. The next thing he felt were his digits being sheared away.Acting through their contacts in the incoming administration, the Clinton machine ... 'dismissed National Security Advisor Michael Flynn ... [and] ensured that the green light got flashed to launch an attack on another known foe of Hillary Clinton', Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose sought after resignation would energize the Clinton machine to move on to their next targets, Counsellors Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon.Trump's response to the finger-lopping campaign was not to respond proportionately but to attack Obama himself. CBS News writes: "The White House ... is calling for an investigation into the previous administration’s surveillance activities."This escalation represents a real threat to Obama. Suddenly everything is out of control. Nobody would have minded much if Trump had gone after one of Obama's henchmen — which is probably what was expected — but none can foresee how an exchange of blades between principals will end. It is safe to say, however, that unless the combatants disengage, someone will get hurt. It will be a terrible moment for American political civility when a king lies on the political floor. The whole point of a peaceful transition of power is to prevent a clash between kings. Yet the very tragedy the electoral process is intended to prevent is happening before our eyes.
One of the ways American political culture prevents such a fight is to have only one king at a time. Former presidents are expected to retire and vanish. Obama, however, decided to stay in DC and try to destroy Trump’s presidency. That was a choice that showed little concern for America, but then, the lack of such concern has been a hallmark of Obama’s career.Answer: the foolish people who just lost the last election.
And who was foolish enough to think that Trump would respond to attacks by playing small ball?
Senior Department of Justice official Peter J. Kadzik, newly exposed by WikiLeaks as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, is the same Obama appointee who helped cover up the Internal Revenue Service’s deliberate targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups. ...[Lois] Lerner refused to testify at congressional hearings, instead invoking her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid possible self-incrimination. Congressional investigators found that the IRS targeted right-of-center 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. They determined that Lerner organized an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation. ...At DOJ, Kadzik also put the kibosh a year ago on any possible criminal prosecution of Lois Lerner. ... Kadzik was dismissive. "Ineffective management is not a crime," he wrote. "The Department of Justice's exhaustive probe revealed no evidence that would support a criminal prosecution. What occurred is disquieting and may necessitate corrective action — but it does not warrant criminal prosecution."Kadzik wrote there was no proof of bad intent on Lerner's part and that she seemed to try to correct the inappropriately tough scrutiny on conservative and Tea Party nonprofits once she "recognized that it was wrong." "In fact, Ms. Lerner was the first IRS official to recognize the magnitude of the problem and to take concerted steps to fix it," he wrote. ...Kadzik is tied to the Democratic Party Establishment and is a donor to Democrat candidates. Using his private Gmail account, on May 19, 2015, Kadzik tipped off John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman and former White House chief of staff in Bill Clinton's administration, about an upcoming hearing, according to a WikiLeaks document dump. ...Earlier this year, WikiLeaks published a Sept. 8, 2008 email from Podesta, then serving on the Obama transition team, to Cassandra Butts of the Obama campaign. Podesta boasted in it that Kadzik — who represented him when he was accused of procuring a job for Bill Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky as a way to keep her quiet — was a "fantastic lawyer" who "kept me out of jail."
Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to investigate whether Mrs. Clinton, her lawyers or the specialist obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015.
In other Justice Department news, Attorney General Lynch announced that Bill Clinton has asked her to stay on as Attorney General, while also being the next nominee for the Supreme Court, and that she signed a ten year contract with the Clinton Foundation with unspecified duties and an unlimited expense account.
Her favorite niece will become ambassador to Monaco, her favorite nephew an astronaut, and Ms. Lynch will serve with Mrs. and Mr. Clinton on a new Semi-Unofficial Committee of Three that will oversee the FBI, NSA, and Navy Seals and choose targets of drone strikes (each member gets “one free one per year, no questions asked”).
Also, the highest priority legislation of the New Clinton Administration will be “Shoulders & Up Only” hate crime legislation making it illegal to tweet a full body photo of a clothed female federal official.
The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.
The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.
Judge Kethledge, however, said that turned the law on its head.
“Section 6103 was enacted to protect taxpayers from the IRS, not the IRS from taxpayers,” he wrote.
He said they suspect the IRS, aware that the inspector general was looking into the tax agency’s behavior, began adding in other groups to try to muddle the perception that only conservatives were being targeted.
Wondering what the FBI probe will conclude about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private account and server for all her State Department e-mails? Well, Obama already told CBS’s Steve Kroft that it didn’t make for a “national security problem. . . I can tell you that this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”If the Lois Lerner case is any precedent, the FBI might as well wrap up its Clinton probe right now.
In a letter Friday, Justice told Congress: “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”In other words, exactly what President Obama ordered up — er, predicted. Back when the “investigation” had barely started, Obama told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t “even a smidgen of corruption” in the case. On “The Daily Show,” he explained that the “real scandal” is that the IRS lacks the budget to do more audits.Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight Committee, notes: “Here’s a lady who systematically and for a sustained period of time targeted people for exercising their most fundamental rights, their First Amendment free-speech rights. … The chief investigator, the chief lawyer assigned to the Justice Department to evaluate this, was Barbara Bosserman — a maxed-out contributor to the president’s campaign.”“So it shouldn’t be any surprise the Justice Department said there’s nothing wrong here. But the American people know that there is.”
The newly obtained records include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI. The documents also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.
