Given his dismal track record, it’s stunning that Christopher Steele has again surfaced, just before the U.K. election that will decide Brexit, to claim that Johnson is a Russian asset.

Readers will remember that Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit hired by a law firm called Perkins Coie, to manufacture ties between Trump and Russia. Meanwhile, Perkins Coie was hired by, and working closely with, the Clinton campaign and other Clinton operatives.

Steele paid a British national with ties to Russia—Edward Baumgartner—to create a “dossier” tying Trump to Russia via wild and unsubstantiated claims, which Baumgartner created using unknown russRussian sources. Once the dossier was created, Steele and other Clinton operatives, including the infamous Sid Blumenthal, injected the allegations of the dossier into the Obama administration. This included getting the dossier circulated at high levels within the State Department, and within the Department of Justice and FBI.

Eventually, using the dossier, the FBI secretly spied on the Trump campaign. And the Clinton campaign tried to use the FBI’s investigation to smear Trump, which amounted to interference in the 2016 election by the Clinton campaign, using Russians to assist her efforts. Using Steele, the Clinton campaign planted media stories smearing Trump as a Russian agent, then responded to them as if they had appeared organically.

In the U.K., which has stricter libel laws than does America, Steele wouldn’t even back up his dossier in court. Instead, he emphasized that he never wrote it, which is of course true, because Baumgartner and unknown Russians wrote it.

Read the whole thing. The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is not just an American, it's a worldwide Liberal conspiracy meme.

DOJ Attorney Says Russian Government Had Nothing To Do With Troll Farms

There are a lot of things we thought we knew that just are not true.

“Russia interfered in the election” became such an established truth of the mainstream press that expressing skepticism would be labeled a “conspiracy theory.” But now, in open court, an attorney representing the Department of Justice has admitted that the Russian government had nothing to do with the internet troll farm case.

Mueller and Barr’s reckless publicity of unproven “Russian interference” allegations as “established” confronted federal Judge Dabney L. Freidrich with a challenge to her authority to preside over a trial to determine whether Concord is guilty of anything. Again, the Mueller report publicly pronounced that the Mueller team “established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the ‘active measures’ social media campaign.” Really? So why are we even bothering to have a trial if the government has already “established” that Concord is guilty?

Jazz Shaw: "How do we define who’s “meddling” in elections?"

This is a question we’ve addressed here before, but recent events make it more applicable than ever. A 44-year-old Russian woman named Elena Khusyaynova has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. ...

Okay. That all sounds good so far. But what did she actually do? Saying that she attempted to “sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions” is still a bit on the vague side. ...

Her responsibilities included:

• Paying expenditures for activists
• Purchasing advertisements on social media platforms
• Registration of domain names
• Purchasing proxy servers
• Promoting news postings on social networks

So they were attempting to blend in with American political activists and basically fire up the crowd, probably creating or promoting fake news. But there’s no mention of making campaign contributions (which is illegal for foreigners to do), tampering with voting machines or anything else that would qualify for a violation of most of the laws we usually associate with campaign rules. She’s pretty much doing all the same things American political activists do on a daily basis, aside from not being a citizen of the United States... The closest the Justice Department comes to specifying anything which sounds like criminal conduct is to say that she attempted to, “defraud the United States by impeding the lawful functions of government agencies in administering relevant federal requirements.” I’m not even sure what that means.

But:

But don’t people do these things all the time if they are interested in political activism? And I don’t just mean Americans or in this case the sneaky Russians. Just this morning, during the six o’clock hour, CNN did a glowing review of a singer and actor named Troye Sivan. It turns out that Troye is a big favorite of Taylor Swift and some other famous people I don’t follow on Twitter. And he’s out there joining in with Taylor to push people to register to vote and, quite specifically to #RESIST Trump and support some Democrats. He’s been quite clear which side he’s on, describing his reaction to the GOP victories in the 2016 elections by saying, “I’ve been pretty heartbroken about the whole thing and I don’t even live here.”

It’s the “I don’t even live here” part you should pay attention to. Sivan is a native of South Africa and a citizen of Australia. He lives in Los Angeles now, but he’s not a citizen. So by taking this message forward, not only on television but to his considerable army of social media followers, isn’t Troye Sivan “meddling in our election” too? Or doesn’t it count if you’re supporting the Democrats? And let’s be clear, I could run down a sizable list of non-citizen celebrities who are doing the same.

and what about Americans who blog or post about foreign leaders?

Michael Isikoff" "Obama cyber chief confirms 'stand down' order against Russian cyberattacks in summer 2016"

The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a “back burner” after he was ordered to “stand down” his efforts in the summer of 2016.

...

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, asked about a “Russian Roulette” passage in which one of Daniel’s staff members, Daniel Prieto, recounted a staff meeting shortly after the cyber coordinator was ordered by Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, to stop his efforts and “stand down.” This order was in part because Rice feared the options would leak and “box the president in.”

“I was incredulous and in disbelief,” Prieto is quoted as saying in the book. “It took me a moment to process. In my head, I was like, did I hear that correctly?” Prieto told the authors he then spoke up, asking Daniel: “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?”

It was all about the election that Hillary was destined to win.

Explaining Russian Meddling

The Russians did the bad things during the Obama era. Obama KNEW they were doing the bad stuff, and yet did nothing about it. Obama argued that we should put the past behind us and try to cooperate in the future…

The Democrats felt sorry for Bob Mueller so they found a job for him that he could really enjoy.

We Now Have Proof Susan Rice Gave the ‘Stand Down’ Order

You may recall Susan Rice’s pivotal role in lying about the Benghazi affair where Americans on the ground said they were given a stand down order, delaying them from rescuing the Americans who were under fire at the mission.

But now there’s new information that Rice figured prominently in another ‘stand down’ order of some weight.

Many have questioned why the Obama administration didn’t respond to the supposed Russian involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC and the leaking of John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 campaign.

As it turns out, it was Rice who prevented actions from being taken, according to a new book by Michael Isikoff and David Korn, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”

From Biz Pac Review:

The former National Security Adviser, who chaired a number of high-ranking intelligence principals, told an official to “stand down” on developing cyber-espionage countermeasures because they had not been approved by President Obama.

Botched Trump-Russia findings threaten intelligence chiefs’ motives

The Washington Times:

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.

The 15-page document presented to the president-elect at Trump Tower in Manhattan was mostly filler — a republication of a years-old CIA analysis of the Kremlin’s global television network Russia Today. A mere five pages were dedicated to charge that Moscow blended cyberhacking with state-backed propaganda and social media trolls to defeat Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

There was no supporting documentation of how America’s top spies arrived at the brazen conclusion that Russians had “gained access to” and “exfiltrated large volumes of data” from Democratic National Committee computers, an explosive claim that sent shock waves across the U.S. political and intelligence landscapes.

The five pages of the report have hung over Mr. Trump’s presidency ever since, hurting his credibility abroad and at home and shaping the narrative of five ongoing federal and congressional investigations into suspected Russian meddling, even though the document’s core conclusion looks increasingly weak in hindsight. Both Democrats and Republicans now say that Russian efforts were intended not to elect Mr. Trump but to sow chaos in American politics no matter who emerged as the victor.

Read the whole thing.

Update on the Russia News

The Hillary Clinton campaign – after a year of vehement denial –

•  Now admits it paid for the discredited Russia “dossier” on Trump,
• Used Fusion GPS to hire a British spy – Christopher Steele, once head of the Russia Desk for MI6 - to contact Russian officials to gather dirt on Trump and destabilize his administration,
• Induced the FBI to pay the Steele to continue spying,
• Who then used disinformation supplied by the Russians to get a FISA court order to spy on the Trump campaign.

This is worse than Watergate since Nixon's FBI was not a willing accomplice to the attempted bugging of the DNC. 

Even Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, John Podesta, has ties to Russia via the Podesta Group which did business with both Ukrainians and Russians.

At this point the evidence points to the fact that the only person in the last election who was not actively colluding with the Russians was President Trump. 

Meanwhile the American press, the media arm of the Democrat Party, has been wall-to-wall 24/7 accusing Trump of being a Russian agent.

This morning Senator Grassley called for a new Special Prosecutor to investigate the Uranium One deal which now implicates Robert Mueller, James Comey and Rod Rosenstein. 

At this point, trust nobody.  The Russians may well have accomplished their objectives thanks to Hillary, the FBI, the CIA and the MSM.  The time has come for a thorough airing to renew the trust of the citizenry. That means a special investigator, but one with a wide berth to look into the entire DOJ and FBI, its patterns and practices, and, let’s be honest, our intelligence agencies as well. We’re living in a bureaucratic nightmare.

Democrats, Russians and the FBI

From the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

It turns out that Russia has sown distrust in the U.S. political system—aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, and perhaps the FBI. This is an about-face from the dominant media narrative of the last year, and it requires a full investigation.

The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee jointly paid for that infamous “dossier” full of Russian disinformation against Donald Trump. They filtered the payments through a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie), which hired the opposition-research hit men at Fusion GPS. Fusion in turn tapped a former British spook, Christopher Steele, to compile the allegations, which are based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.

Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say “collusion”?

This news is all the more explosive because the DNC and Clinton campaign hid their role, even amid the media furor after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January. Reporters are now saying that Clinton campaign officials lied to them about their role in the dossier. Current DNC Chair Tom Perez and former Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz deny knowing about the dossier arrangement, but someone must have known.

Perhaps this explains why Congressional Democrats have been keen to protect Fusion from answering dossier questions—disrupting hearings, protesting subpoenas and deriding Republican investigators. Two of Fusion’s cofounders invoked their Fifth Amendment rights last week rather than answer House Intelligence Committee questions, and Fusion filed a federal lawsuit on Friday to block committee subpoenas of its bank records.

The more troubling question is whether the FBI played a role, even if inadvertently, in assisting a Russian disinformation campaign. We know the agency possessed the dossier in 2016, and according to media reports it debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work in the runup to the election. This occurred while former FBI Director James Comey was ramping up his probe into supposed ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.

Two pertinent questions: Did the dossier trigger the FBI probe of the Trump campaign, and did Mr. Comey or his agents use it as evidence to seek wiretapping approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Trump campaign aides?

Congressional investigators need to focus on the FBI’s role, and House Speaker Paul Ryan was correct Wednesday to insist that the bureau comply with Congress’s document demands “immediately.” Mr. Sessions has recused himself from the Justice Department’s Russia probe, but he and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein can still insist on transparency. Mr. Ryan should also reinstall Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes as lead on the Russia investigation, since it appears the Democratic accusations against him were aimed in part at throwing him off the Fusion trail.

All of this also raises questions about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The Fusion news means the FBI’s role in Russia’s election interference must now be investigated—even as the FBI and Justice insist that Mr. Mueller’s probe prevents them from cooperating with Congressional investigators.

Mr. Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he worked closely with Mr. Comey. It is no slur against Mr. Mueller’s integrity to say that he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the bureau he ran for a dozen years. He could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.

The American public deserves a full accounting of the scope and nature of Russian meddling in American democracy, and that means following the trail of the Steele dossier as much as it does the meetings of Trump campaign officials.

Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

Glenn Greenwald begins with the fake news that the Russians hacked 21 state electoral systems ...

So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers

and then goes on.

That’s how the Russia narrative is constantly “reported,” and it’s the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It’s because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.

No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to see evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and persuasiveness of the evidence that is proffered, are accusations that impugn one’s patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence for official claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or at least adores Putin – just as wanting to see evidence in 2002, or questioning the evidence presented for claims about Saddam, was viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).

Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?

Read the whole thing.

The Russians Were Coming!

Scott Shane of the Charity Case NY Times covers the breaking news from Twin Falls Idaho, where Russian interference led to a four person rally in a state Trump won by 31%. Mr. Shane omits the "four person" detail, which admittedly is based on a Facebook guess, not crowd photographs or even a photo of a picnic bench with four bridge players.

Weird how, since the connection to Democratic dirty-tricks firm Fusion GPS came up, the press stopped talking about the Russia “collusion” story overnight.

Imran Awan Scandal Shows Just How Much Dirt Dems Wanted to Hide By Focusing on Trump-Russia

When U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection teamed up to arrest Imran Awan, an IT staffer for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and other congressional Democrats, Americans began to realize just how broken and corrupt the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, such scandals beg the question of whether the Trump-Russia hype has not been a desperate attempt to distract the country from a long train of scandals on the Left.

Awan was arrested Monday night on charges of bank fraud, to which he has pled not guilty. As Forbes' Frank Miniter argued, however, his strange case "has all the feeling of the opening scene of a movie that might soon include political corruption and so much more."

Politico reported that Awan is "at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of lawmakers." He was arrested after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, The Daily Caller reported.

PJ Media's Debra Heine has been on the story since it broke in February of this year. Imran Awan and his Pakistani-born brothers, Abid and Jamal Awan, are under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on suspicion that they accessed congressional computers without permission and stole equipment.

The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who only fired Imran Awan on Tuesday after his arrest. News of the investigation broke in February, but Schultz kept Awan on staff for five months before firing him. Schultz even threatened Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa about the investigation in May.

The family had repeated long-term financial struggles, despite extraordinarily high salaries for congressional IT aides. Jamal, who public records suggest is only 22 years old, was paid nearly $160,000 annually, three times the average House IT staff salary. Abid was paid $161,000 and Amran $165,000. Even so, the family has a history of massive debts and bankruptcy.

Abid Awan had more than $1 million in debts following a failed business called Cars International that he ran in Falls Church, Va., from November 2009 to September 2010. Business associates said in court documents that Abid had stolen money and vehicles from them.

Just this past weekend, The Daily Caller reported that FBI agents seized damaged computer hard drives from the Awan family last February. According to sources, it looked like someone had "tried to destroy" the hard drives. Sound familiar?

Other House IT aides wondered whether the Awans were blackmailing the Democrats who waited so long to fire them. "I don't know what they have, but they have something on someone. It's been months at this point" with no arrests, Pat Sowers, a 12-year House IT aide told The Daily Caller.

"There's no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they'd take me out in handcuffs that same day, and I'd never work again," said a manager at a tech-services company that works with Democratic House offices. He also reported offering his company's services to Democrat offices for one-fourth the price of Awan and his brothers, but the Democrats declined.

After WikiLeaks published emails hacked from the DNC server, evidence suggested the Democratic Party had favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. An email to DNC staff actually discussed "pay to play letters." Other emails revealed the blatant disregard and contempt with which Hillary Clinton and her staff viewed traditional Christianity.

This scandal also followed Hillary Clinton's email scandal, in which it was discovered that the former secretary of State sent classified information on her private email server. Even former FBI Director James Comey, in declining to prosecute Clinton, called her actions "extremely careless," and noted that her emails might have been accessed by foreign actors.

Democrats have jumped headlong into claims that Donald Trump "colluded" with Russia in order to win the 2016 election. While Donald Trump Jr. did take a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on the pretext that she would give him opposition material against Hillary Clinton, that meeting bore no fruit. While Trump did suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin hack into Clinton's email to reveal the missing emails, that also led to nothing.

Earlier on Thursday, however, it was revealed that Fusion GPS, the same Left-wing group that defended Planned Parenthood, attacked Mitt Romney donors, and compiled the Trump dossier, was hired by none other than Veselnitskaya to destroy the good name of a whistleblower murdered by Putin's regime. Oh, and Fusion GPS did not register as representing a foreign agent.

Clinton and the Left seemingly have clearer ties to Russia than Trump ever did (remember Uranium One?), but the Left and the Democratic Party have squeezed the Trump-Russia narrative dry.

Could it be that they were trying to distract Americans from yet more brewing scandals? Could they be trying to hide just how divided the Democratic Party still is, in the wake of 2016? Could they be hiding their lack of a message?

How the Russians Interfered With the Election

Here's the real Russia story.

The Russians objective is to destabilize America. They probably believed - like the pollsters and the media - that Hillary would be elected. They saw an opportunity to exacerbate the Left/Right divide without respect to who won the election. The revelations regarding Hillary's corruption were intended to create a the belief that she was not fit to be President when she won.

If Hillary had won, the Right would have grumbled, like they did after Obama's victory. The surprise Trump win completely unhinged the Left and supercharged the Russians attempt at political destabilization.

The press has willingly played into their hands. Lots of people now believe that elections, especially the last election was stolen. Facts don't matter to people's beliefs, especially when so many people share that belief.

I would say that the Russians succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Congratulations MSM and Leftist. You played your parts perfectly. But then, the Left have always been Russian dupes.

Virginian Pilot atrocity 6/24/2017 edition

Virginian Pilot lies about Vice President Pence.  

Why are they colluding with the Russians to undermine democracy?