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)