Barr's Valedictory Interview

 

The tragedy is William Barr is that his view of what was needed from him was too constricted.  Retired FBI agent Mark Wauck's excellent assessment of William Barr's "valedictory interview," credits outgoing AG and rightly faults him for failing to deliver on the most important part of his job—getting to the bottom of Spygate.

It's a worthwhile read and concludes with this:

In many ways Barr proved to be an exemplary Attorney General. In ordinary times he might have ended his tenure regarded as one of the greatest AGs we've had. Unfortunately, in this time of constitutional crisis he will be judged to have suffered from a too constricted vision of doing justice. He talks of going beyond the limited view of setting the bar for acceptable conduct as criminal prosecution, but in practice he has done little to alter that view. To change public perception is a difficult task, one that cannot be achieved quickly--something like changing the course of a supertanker. Rather than attempting to educate the public, Barr has been content--or so it seems to me--to speak to other lawyers like himself rather than taking on the role of being an educator of the American public. I realize that's asking a lot, but it would have been easier had he exemplified his principles more clearly in the conduct of his high office when the demands of justice required a more expansive view.

With regard to the CIA's role:

 Barr's words of exoneration regarding the CIA--while understandable with regard to the institution, and in particular with regard to the analysts who worked on the ICA--falls short of his own standards when we consider the conduct of the CIA's Director, who is, after all, the public face of the institution. The CIA analysts who worked on the ICA may well have been honorable, but it was Brennan's biased and "mistaken" overriding of their honorable work that ended up being embodied in the ICA and was presented to the world has a highly reliable view based on sound intelligence. In light of that, to say that "The CIA stayed in its lane" really doesn't cover the case. That statement will be used and misused by the same persons whose tactics--as Barr so aptly said in his resignation letter--were "abusive and deceitful", knowing no bounds of decency. Barr knows this as well as anyone in Washington, so to make such an unqualified statement regarding "the CIA", without drawing any distinctions, is a distinct disservice to President Trump--as surely as Barr's premature dismissal of election fraud was also a disservice.

Persecuting Flynn

Mark Steyn:

The latest revelations in the Deep State entrapment of Michael Flynn (Trump's first National Security Advisor, for about twenty minutes) confirm what most sentient creatures have known for three years - that there was never any good-faith basis for the FBI's investigation, only (in the now released words of Assistant Counterintelligence Division Director Bill Priestap) the object "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired".

The official pretext was that there might have been "a violation of the Logan Act". Oooooooh! The Logan Act of 1799 refers to a Dr George Logan, physician, farmer and Pennsylvania state legislator, who, at a time of tension in Franco-American relations, engaged in his own negotiations with the government in Paris. In the two and a quarter centuries since, there have been no convictions under the Act, and, in the event anyone were ever to be the first so convicted, it would undoubtedly be struck down as unconstitutional. John Kerry, one notes, has not been prosecuted for his recent meetings with his pal Zarif, "foreign minister" of Iran, about how to save Obama's deal with the mullahs.

In the case of Flynn, any hypothetical Logan prosecution would have been more ridiculous still - because he was not a freelance Pennsylvania doctor but the duly designated National Security Advisor of the incoming president. Peter Strzok went over to Flynn's office to (as they say of bent British coppers) fit him up - and indeed they did fit him up.

So one conversation, with disgraced corrupt rogue agent Strzok, without counsel present and without the defendant being aware that this was an interrogation of him as opposed to just a friendly intragovernmental chit-chat, has consumed three years of Flynn's life and all his savings.

Steele Dossier Peddled Insane Conspiracy Theory That American Jews Were Secret Russian Spies

On page five in the third paragraph of the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele wrote that agents of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, were approaching Russian-Jewish-Americans who worked in the IT industry to conduct covert operations.

It's hard not to feel sorry for the chumps who believed this.

Adam Schiff Has Crossed a Line: He’s Obtained Phone Records of Devin Nunes, Nunes’ Aide, Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon

If this doesn't cause blowback, I don't know what will.

The Walls are Closing In — but Not on Trump

Then there are Joe Biden’s numerous pay-to-play scandals involving China, Ukraine, and Romania. As these occurred while Biden was vice-president in the Obama administration, this begs the question of what Obama knew and when did he know it.

Lastly in an interesting coincidence, at the same time AG Barr announced the pivot to a criminal investigation, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe dropped his wrongful termination case against the DoJ. Has he turned whistleblower? Is he about to be indicted for his role in Spygate? This is all to be determined but the walls seem to be closing in on him too.

It’s clear that Team Trump is now on offense. Grand juries hand out indictments like candy. Impeachment talk is just that, a lame attempt to discredit Barr and Durham before they unleash the hounds of hell on those conspiring to thwart and then overturn a presidential election.

Lots of walls are closing in, but not on President Trump. The reckoning may now be underway as the Storm blows into Washington, D.C., heralded by Trump’s Lone Ranger and Tonto, Barr and Durham. Obama and his deep state players are on the Edmund Fitzgerald, when the gales of November come early.

All of Hillary Clinton's St. Dept. emails were being automatically copied & sent to a Chinese-related email account.

This is BIG!  Read the whole thing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has now released documents that contain information that verifies that yes indeed, then-Secretary of State Clinton was having all her emails copied and forwarded to a Chinese companies' email account.

and Comey knew it.

Will the Spygate perpetrators ever be held accountable?

That’s the trillion dollar question, isn’t it?

I used to think I was rather cynical. And I was. But in recent years I’ve become more so. I’ve seen people get away with much more than I had thought they’d be able to get away with (Lois Lerner, call your office). And what’s more, I’ve seen more of my friends wink at it because it suits their political ends.

So the question of whether anyone will pay for what we have come to call Spygate is a real one, and how you answer it depends on how cynical you have become...

From the comments:

... the damage done to the fabric of this country by outsiders is as nothing when compared to what has been wrought by the many falsehoods within the disinformation and the misinformation disseminated by CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, and the NYT over the same period.

The Swamp could not have done this without the press that spread the lie 24/7 at jet engine decibels.  The press must be punished as much as anyone in this disaster.

Read the whole thing.

‘No Way Obama Was Not Told’ - Former Intel Officer Tony Shaffer on Spying on Trump Campaign

Intelligence expert Tony Shaffer makes several BIG points:

1. Barr will focus on what authority the government had to spy on Team Trump
2. Who was involved?
3. How many agencies were involved? 
4. What was the predicate for surveillance?
5. Was the government involved in attempted entrapment?
6.  Which foreign governments were involved? 
7. The story changed from "we were not spying" to "Trump is crazy so we had to spy."
8. The media is no longer a legitimate source of facts.
9. Where did the Steele Report come from and why did Mueller not address this issue?
10. The Russians probably fed false information to Steele to create political turmoil in the US.
11. To do what the government did required approval from the White House. 
12. Trump is probably not the only candidate who was spied on.
13. The Inspector General report will only look at deviations from rules; it's going to be a disappointment.  
14. This will require a very large investigation and where do you find people who can be trusted.

Pursue those Indictments

Via Instapundit

ROGER KIMBALL: Pursue Those Indictments! “As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only. . . . Some people think that it would be best if we put this whole episode behind us, that we sharply limit any investigations into wrongdoing and that, especially, we refrain from punishing the highly placed actors who leaked, lied, and conspired against the president. I am not of their number. What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a ‘higher loyalty’—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a ‘higher’ law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed.”

Once, the FBI fought organized crime. Then the FBI became organized crime.

Washington Is Crawling with Foreign Influencers

Washington has become the capital of the world and the world is buying influence there.

Foreign entities seek entry at all levels. A 2016 New York Times article described how "as chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti ... despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. ... During Ms. Mills’s tenure at the department, Mr. Kim’s company, Sae-A, became a donor to the Clinton Foundation."

The real takeaway of the Mueller investigation is that Washington is honeycombed with foreign influencers not just in the Trump campaign or Hillary's, but pretty much everywhere. The Free Beacon points out, "China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management" with the end in view of subverting them.


This is conceivably the biggest headline that never was; quite a feat in a period when intelligence disasters included Snowden, WikiLeaks-Manning, the roll-up of the CIA network in China, missing the rise of ISIS and the burning of the U.S. diplomatic stations in Benghazi. When you combine the litany of disasters with what we now know about lobbying for foreign governments in Washington, it’s probable that collusion has been out of control for some time. It’s a design defect. D.C. was meant to be a national capital not the 'capital of the world' which it has now become. The federal bureaucracy, the press corps and its defensive agencies were designed for more homogenous national age. They seem unable to cope with the corrosion of the global world.

Washington's networks of trust are too weak to guarantee adequate integrity or competence by themselves. Katherine Archuleta, the director of OPM, may never have been up to the job. She "previously served as National Political Director for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration as chief of staff to the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Peña." None of this prepared her for Chinese hacking. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest noted she did not have the "particular expertise" for the position to which she had been appointed.

Before Washington became the political capital of the world, the political parties and the newspapers provided adequate levels of safety, issuance, and correctness. Now it needs an upgrade. The upheaval of 2016 and the inquiries into the origins of the failed collusion investigation show that while the political system can still resolve conflicts it can only do so at the cost of a crisis. Washington has to find ways of transparently logging foreign influence, securing data, and using better methods of verifying that political promises are kept. The politicians and media men can't do it any more without some system help.

Dan Bongino Presentation of “Spygate”…

Ace of Spades: Did the FBI really fire Christopher Steele, or was it all eyewash?

Because Steele kept in regular, close contact with Bruce Ohr - a TOP FBI offical well after President Trump took office and long after the FBI "fired" Steele for leaking ot the press.

ACE:

Remember, the FBI had fake-fired Christopher Steele in November, 2016 by breaching, allegedly, the requirements that he not speak to the press about his alleged research. He was also told that he was to no longer gather alleged information for the FBI.

The reason I say "alleged" so many times is that now I'm not sure the FBI really fired him. Steele continued working with the DOJ after his firing for cause/for his lack of integrity, in a system probably set up by Sally Yates whereby Bruce Ohr would act as a cut-out to pass Steele's continuing bullshit to the Obama Administration. Despite his alleged "firing" and bar from continuing his operation on behalf of the government.

I begin to wonder if Steele actually talked to reporters with the tacit or explicit approval of Obama Administration officials, and then was only fake-fired because they knew what he'd done violated government policy, and that even though they'd authorized that violation of government policy, they would have to fake-fire him to make it look, as they say, "by the book."

Also remember: The Hillary camp was desperate to get this bullshit narrative talked about in the press, and so of course would want Steele to try to do just that; one can imagine Obama Administration partisans joining her in such a project.

And there's this to support the theory ...

Hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed FBI emails and memos show that the Democrat opposition research firm Fusion GPS, through former British spy Christopher Steele, worked closely with the FBI, and DOJ official Bruce Ohr, to take down Donald Trump before, during, and after the 2016 presidential election.

And even after the FBI officially stopped using the "dirty dossier" author as a confidential source (because he leaked to the media), they turned to then-associate deputy attorney general Ohr as a back channel to Steele.

...

In a new report at The Hill, John Solomon details how Ohr was working with Steele well into the early days of Trump's presidency, even after the FBI terminated its relationship with him.

Ohr, who reported to Obama-era Deputy AG Sally Yates, was demoted last December, but remains employed at the DOJ. Yates was fired by President Trump because of her insubordination over his travel ban.

"We’ll stop it"

The Department of Justice’s inspector general said Monday that his investigators went to extensive lengths to obtain a text message in which former FBI official Peter Strzok suggested that he planned to help prevent President Donald Trump from becoming president.

Michael Horowitz, the head of the DOJ’s office of inspector general (OIG), said that his cyber forensics team took four separate investigative steps before discovering a controversial Aug. 8, 2016 text message that Strzok sent to former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

The forensic team went as far as contacting the Pentagon for help in extracting text messages that were missing from Strzok and Page’s FBI-issued cell phones.

The text message in question was recovered early last month and first publicized on Friday in a report that the OIG released on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices.

“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page, the FBI lawyer, wrote to Strzok.

“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” replied Strzok, who served as the FBI’s top investigator on “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

A Guide to Spygate

What you should know about the FBI is that it's a huge bureaucracy.  It keeps voluminous records, just like the Nazis did.  That's what's going to hang them.

The FBI is many things to many people, but seen from the inside where I spent my career as an FBI agent, most of all it is a bureaucracy. The evident abuses of the vast investigatory powers of the Bureau to surveil the campaign of Donald Trump has left a paper and electronic trail as it jumped through the many procedural hoops required for Spygate to unfold.

Read the whole thing.

PANDORA’S BOX: Trump/Russia May Expose Extent of “Five Eyes” Allied Spying

Highlights

• New evidence contradicts the DOJ/FBI timeline leaked to the media

• Sources say the Trump investigation initiated overseas in Great Britain, not the United States

• John Brennan, James Clapper, Samantha Power, Loretta Lynch were all briefed by James Comey on the alleged Russian interference into the Trump campaign, yet the Trump campaign was left in the dark

• According to reports, Germany, Poland and Estonia also shared communications related to members of the Trump campaign with the United States

Investigations conducted by Congressional and Senate committees are entering the second year and what has been pieced together by investigators – battling for documents every step of the way – challenges the information the FBI and former senior Obama administration have revealed about the investigation.

Their evidence is at odds with the DOJ/FBI timeline leaked to various news outlets indicating the investigation began in late summer of 2016. These discrepancies make it all the more important that the DOJ and FBI turn over documents to the Congressional oversight committees who are investigating what looks like an abuse and weaponization of the tools used by U.S. federal law enforcement and the intelligence community.

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.