UPDATED: Dems Throw Wray And Rosenstein Under The Bus

Make no mistake about it--that's exactly what happened yesterday when the four Democrat members of the Congressional Gang of Eight sent their letter to the three Executive Branch officials who will be primarily responsible for acting on President Trump's declassification order regarding documents related to the Russia Hoax.

In the letter Senators Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner and Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff "request" DNI Dan Coats, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide them "an immediate briefing ... prior to any disclosure of the affected material ... to anyone at the White House." Note the essential outrageousness of the "request." The reasoning behind the "request" is based on the assertion that the Special Counsel investigation (i.e., the Russia Hoax) "implicates the President's own campaign and associates." In effect, the claim is that once a Special Counsel is appointed a President is no longer President--at least not for matters related to the Special Counsel's investigation--which we all know can be virtually unlimited. In other words, the Special Counsel act abrogates the US Constitution with its system of checks and balances: agencies of the Executive Branch that report to the President under the US Constitution should now report to Congress!

Key to this reasoning, however, is the assertion in the letter that these three officials--Coats, Rosenstein, and Wray--have already given verbal assurances that such information would not be provided to the White House:

One June 27, 2018, we wrote again to memorialize the verbal assurance you provided us that DoJ and FBI would not provide the White House or any of the President's attorneys with access to sensitive information briefed to a small group of designated Members.

That the letter may not actually accurately reflect the "verbal assurances" can be seen from DNI Coats' later (7/12/18) written response in which he agreed that "sources and methods" must be protected. That goes without saying, of course, but who thinks that sources and methods are what are really at issue in this declassification? The terms of the order itself expressly exclude large sections of the Carter Page FISA order--precisely those sections which reference sources and methods (for full details see Andy McCarthy's Reading the FISA Redactions). In any event, as McCarthy also makes abundantly clear, the redacting of the previously released FISA order leave precious little to the imagination--except, perhaps, for those who are deficient in that respect.

What's really at issue here is the release--unredacted--of texts relevant to the Russia Hoax that were sent by two fired former FBI officials: former Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andy McCabe. Anyone who thinks that Comey and McCabe spent their time texting about sources and methods simply hasn't thought this through. Clearly the Democrats are in a state of near panic, and that suggests that they know that Comey and McCabe were probably texting regarding matters relevant to the Russia Hoax, and those texts were going to members of Congress and/or officials in the Executive Branch--and to the virulently anti-Trump media.

Now He Tells Us

FORMER FUSION GPS EMPLOYEE SHREDS FIRM’S WORK ON PAUL MANAFORT

09/18/2018
Chuck Ross | Reporter

Please note: "Shreds" is used metaphorically, not literally. And the former employee waited until after Manafort's guilty plea to share this. How convenient--but not for Manafort.

Nevertheless:

Graham Stack, a freelance journalist hired by Fusion GPS, says the opposition research firm was “almost completely wrong” about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Stack says Fusion GPS provided most of the research cited by the media that suggested Manafort was a Kremlin stooge.

Stack says he “shares the blame” for pushing the research, which he now says is part of a false narrative.

And all this Russia Hoax was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

UPDATED: The Central Scandal of the Russia Hoax--and Our Constitutional Crisis

Scott Johnson at Powerline, The Biggest Scandal, offers some comments regarding two recent articles by Andy McCarthy. I certainly am in total agreement with Johnson's assessment that this whole Russia Hoax constitutes "the biggest scandal in American political history." Part of the scandal beyond the actions of the Obama Administration and officials at the DoJ/FBI/CIA/State--and including not only political appointees but also career professionals--is the complicity of the press and its continued silence. That complicity extends beyond biased reporting to complicity in the FISA process itself through the FBI's leak process and then reuse of the leaked material, laundered through the press, as "probable cause" for the FISA against Carter Page.

What I'd like to do here is to expand a bit on a point that McCarthy makes in the first article, "Reading the FISA Redactions." The entire article is well worth a careful study for anyone who wants to understand what's going on with all the talk about the FISA application and, especially, the renewal applications. I have to say, I take my hat off to McCarthy--he goes through the applications step by step, demonstrating that, for all the redacting that was done, the bottom line is readily apparent: The FBI had precious little in the way of "probable cause" to offer the FISA Court (FISC), and yet their warrant was approved--and thrice renewed! This never fails to amaze me every time the subject comes up.

McCarthy gets to the heart of the matter--the first of many important points he makes--right up front:

Page has never been charged with any crime, much less with espionage. That is a salient fact because to get a FISA warrant on an American citizen, the FBI is required to show that the citizen’s activities on behalf of a foreign power violate federal criminal law. The FBI and Justice Department went to the FISA court four times over nine months, from October 2016 through June 2017, claiming to have grounds that Page was involved in heinous clandestine activity. Why isn’t he in handcuffs?

I believe it is because they never had a case. All they appear to have had were the 2013 attempt by Russian spies to recruit Page as an asset, and the Steele dossier.

Now here's what I want to make clear. The original FISA order, when the target is a US Person (USPER) such as Carter Page, lasts for 90 days. A FISA order can be renewed, but the renewal is NOT granted on an "if at first you don't succeed, try try again" basis. To get an extension on a FISA--and let me say here that I completely agree with McCarthy that the initial FISA was pure BS--the FBI has to either:

1) make a reasonable showing that it is making progress in its investigation as a result of its use of FISA, i.e., it is moving forward with additional evidence gained through FISA that tends to confirm the presentation of the case that was made in the initial application, or

2) in the absence of such progress, the FBI must make a reasonable showing that the extension is likely to produce progress.

UPDATED: Why Andrew Weissmann?

This past Tuesday, August 27th, Bruce Ohr, the demoted former Associate Deputy Attorney General testified before the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees. Among the newsworthy items that have emerged, a few stand out. One of course is that his wife Nellie began working for Glenn Simpson's opposition research outfit, Fusion GPS, back in 2015--adding fuel to the speculation that she was involved as an FBI contractor in illegally mining NSA databases for information on GOP presidential candidates. Another item, which Chuck Ross highlighted at The Daily Caller, was that Ohr kept a number of FBI and DoJ colleagues "in the loop" regarding his highly irregular contacts with Christopher Steele, the "former" MI6 spook. Specifically:

Sources familiar with Ohr’s testimony before the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Ohr informed Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page about his interactions with Steele and Simpson. He also informed Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann about his dossier-related work.

Weissmann is now serving as right-hand man to Robert Mueller at the special counsel’s office.

It seems to me that the question that needs to be asked is: Why Andrew Weissmann? Why was Ohr keeping Weissmann, who was at the time head of DoJ's Criminal Fraud Section, in the loop on what to all appearances was a Counterintelligence investigation? If Ohr kept Weissmann in the loop out of friendship, that still breaks the first rule of conspiratorial operations: need to know. Unless ... Weissmann was contributing or could potentially contribute something of value to the conspiracy.

UPDATED: Bergoglio and the Press

Since the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report regarding sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy the Catholic world has been in turmoil. That turmoil only intensified--exponentially--when retired Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò released what amounted to an affidavit accusing senior Catholic hierarchs of knowingly covering up and even enabling the abuse. Viganò's focused special focus was on the retired Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick: a prelate of vast influence in the American church, a reputed "kingmaker," one man fund raising juggernaut, close adviser to Pope Francis, and mentor to such progressive luminaries as cardinals Wuerl, Cupich, and Tobin--all among Francis' anointed. As if that weren't enough, Viganò called on Francis himself to resign for his knowing complicity in the coverup of McCarrick's crimes.

Viganò's release of his testimony was timed to coincide for maximum effect with Francis's controversial trip to Dublin--already a public relations disaster due to lack of attendance. That disaster was compounded when Francis issued his non-denial statement in response to press questions about the Viganò testimony: "I will not say a single word ..." followed by a tacit appeal to the press to basically ignore it all.

Ordinarily that type of stonewalling by a super high profile public figure would be met with a storm of protest and accusation in the media. Just such a storm did in fact ensue, but mainly in the world of Catholic blogging and tweeting. The mainstream media, on the other hand, seemed strangely (or maybe not) indifferent.

Where to begin? In the past Catholic sex scandals involving the clergy have been widely characterized as pedophilia. Knowledge that this characterization was, in fact, inaccurate, that the problem was overwhelmingly one of homosexual priests preying upon adolescents and young men, had been carefully kept in the background. With this fresh outbreak of scandal, however, the Catholic blogosphere, fueled by Viganò's testimony regarding McCarrick's abuse of seminarians, quickly galvanized around the accusation of a powerful "lavender mafia" of homosexual prelates dominating the post Vatican II Church.

UPDATED: Regarding the Cohen Plea Deal

Lots will be said in the coming days about the Michael Cohen plea deal, in which--against all the evidence--Cohen claims to have committed a crime in coordination with Donald Trump. The plea deal was engineered by a non-trial lawyer: Clinton consigliere Lanny Davis. To understand what's going on here I can do no better than recommend the latest article by another (former) Clinton insider, pollster Mark Penn: Cohen's plea deal is prosecutor's attempt to set up Trump. Here are two excerpt that speak volumes about the Establishment and about the entire Mueller operation:

Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form — despite crystal-clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do oppo research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, and yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. Reason: It does not “get” Trump.

...

These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down. That’s why so many of his aides, lawyers, and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour-by-hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the FEC — and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts.

UPDATES:

Some things you just really can't make up. Lanny Davis, the Clinton consigliere leading the latest charge to overturn the election of Donald Trump--the alleged Putin puppet--is himself the registered foreign agent for Dmytro Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the US government. Further, Davis is also saying that 13 of the dossier claims about Michael Cohen are "false" and that Cohen "has never been to Prague in his life." (via Daily Caller)

And Jeff Carlson at themarketswork.com has pulled up an February 17, 2012 article in The Guardian, Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship: the 2012 Data Election. The article describes what appears to be an "in kind" campaign contribution from Facebook to the Obama Campaign:

Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".

As Carlson points out:

At the time, this news was greeted with glowing acclaim over the sophistication of Obama’s digital campaign. Obama’s Election Team apparently had full access to Facebook’s data. Republicans did not.

Yes, that really does look like an "in kind" campaign contribution, unlike the Trump hush money. Would anyone like to guesstimate the value of Facebook's in kind contribution? Or when a prosecutor will be looking into this?

Just How Reliable Is Christopher Steele?

PLEASE NOTE: In what follows I adopt a narrow focus. I focus closely on the FBI's claims for Christopher Steele's reliability, rather than on the reliability of what was contained in the "dossier"--which all FBI officials who have spoken on the matter have characterized as "unverified."

The famous "Dossier" on Donald Trump--supposedly compiled by British ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele acting as a contractor for Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, themselves contractors for the Hillary Clinton Campaign--"salacious and unverified" though it might have been, was "crucial" to the FBI's efforts to obtain the original FISA on Carter Page as well as the three renewals of that FISA. That the "dossier" was "salacious and unverified" we have on the authority of disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, and that it was "crucial" to the Carter Page FISA is attested by the equally disgraced former Deputy Director and later Acting Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe.

In the Carter Page FISA application the FBI presents material from the "dossier" without referencing it as an actual document. Rather, it presents material from the "dossier" as reporting provided by Christopher Steele as "Source #1." The concealing of source identities is usual in FISA applications. To make up for this secrecy in the interests of security, at least in theory, the FBI provides characterizations of their sources as well as specific facts that vouch for the reliability of the sources in question, to provide the FISC judge with a factual basis upon which to assess the case for granting a FISA order.

Since we know the person who is supposed to have been behind the Carter Page FISA application, it seems reasonable to inquire: just how reliable was Christopher Steele? After all, if verification of the dossier was still "in its infancy"--i.e., it basically hadn't been verified at all--at the time the FISA application was submitted to the FISC, according to the FBI's top Counterintelligence official, Bill Priestap, then it would follow that the reliability of the material presented in the application would stand or fall with the reliability of the source. So, what does the FBI say in the application about Steele's reliability as a source?

Rudy's Shot Across Mueller's Bow

On Monday, 8/5/17, during an appearance on the Sean Hannity Show, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes put the world on notice to pay close attention to disgraced Department of Justice attorney Bruce Ohr, formerly the #4 in the DoJ chain of command, reporting to Sally Yates: “Bruce Ohr is going to become more and more important in this investigation ..." Since then, thanks to the reporting of John Solomon, Byron York, and Sara Carter, we've had a glimpse of a few emails in an extensive e-correspondence between Ohr and the British ex-spook and "dossier" author, Christopher Steele. Included in those emails are tantalizing references to telephone calls and face to face meetings, the contents of which we can only guess at.

Now, President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in an appearance on the Sean Hannity Show, has fired a clear warning shot across the bow of Special Prosecutor (SC) Robert Mueller. Giuliani warned that Mueller's case against the President

"isn’t going to fizzle. It's going to blow up on them. ... there's a lot more to what they [the Mueller team] did that nobody knows about yet. A lot more to the obstruction of justice, to the collusion, to the fake dossier." And Giuliani added: "... when this plays out over the next year or two, it's not going to be about President Trump. ... It’s going to be about all the things they [the Mueller team] did." ... It’s a different kind of Watergate. It’s on the side of the investigator."

With Paul Sperry stating that President Trump is about to begin declassifying some key documents, we may soon have a better picture of what's been going on in the Mueller "probe." But we may already be getting a preview, based on the handful of Steele/Ohr emails that we've already seen. Let's focus on some of those emails beginning immediately before the appointment of Mueller as Special Counsel, on 5/17/17. (In what follows, I've preserved the original spelling and punctuation as they appear in the emails.)

What The Carter Page Case Tells Us About The Flaws In FISA

Since the release this past Saturday of the (highly redacted) FISA application that targeted Carter Page, with the subsequent three renewal applications, there has been no lack of analysis of the unredacted details (Mark Penn's analysis is, for my money, one of the most cogent). In what follows I intend to take more of a "big picture" approach, as well as focusing on issues that haven't received a great deal of attention but may in the future.

One aspect of the application that came as no surprise to all who have followed this FISAGATE affair is that the role of the "dossier"--the collaborative effort produced by the British ex-spook Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS (Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, and possibly others), and the Hillary campaign--is everywhere apparent. While the central role of the dossier comes as no surprise--after all, Andrew McCabe, the FBI's disgraced former Deputy Director and (during the Comey - Wray interregnum) Acting Director testified to the House that the dossier was "crucial" to the FISA--the overall audacity exhibited in the application is breathtaking.

The dossier itself is in the nature of a Big Lie--sensational, lacking in documented sourcing, utterly unverified and unverifiable. To present the contents of such a document (really a collection of memos) to any court as fact is audacious enough in itself. However, the authors of the application took two remarkable steps to support the Big Lie of the dossier.

Who's Afraid of Lisa Page?

In his testimony before the House, embattled former FBI Counterintelligence official Peter Strzok maintained that, contrary to all logical inference, any statements in text messages between himself and FBI attorney Lisa Page that appeared to exhibit bias against Donald Trump could never have affected his investigative actions. However, John Solomon, in his brilliant article (One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American), has shown that Strzok's texts actually demonstrate FBI bias at the very inception of the Special Counsel investigation. In a series of texts dated 5/19/17 (two days after Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel) Strzok stated to Page: "you and I both know ... there's no big there there." Page, in testimony to the House that followed on that of Strzok, has confirmed that the sense of this text referred to the allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. In fact, the texts show that Strzok explicitly viewed the Special Counsel investigation not as an investigation into criminal wrongdoing--as required by the Special Counsel statute--but as "an investigation leading to impeachment." In other words, he viewed the Mueller "probe" as an essentially political use of the Special Counsel statute to rid the Washington establishment of a president they didn't want. A goal he was heartily in favor of. This abuse of the Special Counsel statute constitutes, as Solomon points out, "political bias in action."

Is It Time To Rethink Some Things?

The Obamagate "community" is buzzing this morning over newly unredacted Strzok/Page texts that have been made public through the Senate. One of the texts features Strzok asking

"Did you get all our OCONUS lures approved?"

In the original public release "lures" was redacted. It has now been unredacted.

Translation: "OCONUS" = Outside the Continental US; "lures" = sting op, trap.

So, this means that Strzok was seeking authorization for informants of one sort or another--or possibly undercover (UC) agents--to approach a target OCONUS.

Now here's the kicker: this text was from 12/31/15! The FBI was already targeting someone close to Trump way back then! Since this is months before Papadopoulos and Page got near the Trump campaign, the betting is that it was Michael Flynn they were targeting. Which makes sense, because we know that the Obama Administration had it in for Flynn from his days with Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), when he wrote a paper blaming the US for the rise of ISIS.

Once again, the question arises: Was there a case opened on Flynn at that time, to provide an administrative basis for these types of investigative techniques? What kind of an investigation was this: Assessment, Preliminary Investigation, Full Investigation? Could there have been a FISA on Flynn at any time? Does this speculation have any bearing on what we know about Sally Yates and the framing of Flynn in January, 2017:

A Guide To Spygate, Informants, FISA

What follows is a reworked version of So, What's A "Threat To National Security"? which contains a difference in emphasis.


Kim Strassel raised an interesting question, Friday, in her regular weekly column--The Curious Case of Mr. Downer: His story about the Papadopoulos meeting calls the FBI’s into question. Alexander Downer was the Australian ambassador to the UK in 2016. As the title indicates, Strassel finds the FBI's claim that their probe of the Trump campaign was based on Downer's contact with George Papadopoulos to be ... less than credible. Strassel concludes by raising some very pointed questions:

For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May, before they became public in June. But according to the tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI instead received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?

Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to act, and when? The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.

Indeed--since when does ​"something that might be 'damaging' to Hillary ... justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?"

The fact is, there is an answer to Strassel's question, and I think we'll find--in fact, recent talking points floated by James Clapper and others point in this direction--that the justification will rely on provisions of the Attorney General Guidelines. To understand ​and evaluate ​this​ defense​, however, and to avoid the pitfalls of speculating with a firm grasp of the controlling guidelines and statutes, we'll need to explore the nature of FBI investigations, because the type of investigation controls, to some extent, the type of investigative techniques that are authorized. All this is set out in detail in the Attorney General Guidelines For Domestic FBI Operations (AGG) and the FBI Domestic Investigations And Operations Guide (DIOG).

Basically, there are three types of FBI investigations that involve opening a​n investigative​ case file: 1) Assessments, 2) Preliminary Investigations, and 3) Full Investigations. The latter two are grouped as "Predicated Investigations" because, unlike in the case of an Assessent, an agent will need to present some degree of factual predication before he can open one of these types of investigation. The type of investigation that is opened will depend upon the factual situation, and if additional facts are developed in the course of the investigation the type of investigation may be upgraded.

As far as investigative techniques go, the Assessment ​serves as a baseline--any technique that can be used in an Assessment can ​also ​be used in a Preliminary or Full ​I​nvestigation. For our purposes, the important point is that the use of existing informants (Confidential Human Sources/CHS) or the recruitment of new informants is authorized for ALL three types of investigations. There has been some confusion recently regarding the use of informants before a "formal" case has been opened. The confusion arises because Assessments are sometimes confused with​ the​ informal initial checking of investigative leads conducted to determine whether or not to open an investigative case file. That type of informal checking can only be conducted using public information, not through the use of informants.