quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Please, God, please let this insufferable psychopath be charged.

No doubt Strzok is starting to feeling the heat, along with his co-conspirators.
I have a feeling he fears Durham. I bet he’s seeing him in his nightmares.


...

It's a real bitch when the tables get turned, isn't it Peter??

The way Durham handled Clinesmith is disappointing.

Clinesmith pled guilty to

18 U.S. Code § 1001 (a) (3)

"Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years."

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Durham writes that the guidelines for Clinesmith would indicate 0 to 6 months prison time.

Did Clinesmith reveal anything more to Durham ? We don't know.


But think of the impact of what Clinesmith did. It is huge .

He wrote the "not a source" comment about Page in the preparation of the application of the last extension of the FISA warrant in June 2017.

If Clinesmith hadn't doctored the CIA input, the DoJ may not have even submitted the last FISA extension. If they had, the FISA court may have had a big problem w a CIA source being declared to be a Russian agent.

Equally important, the FISA court might have (certainly should have) said - Wait a minute - you have submitted 3 prior applications for FISA warrants against Page and you never revealed this to us.

If Clinesmith had not doctored the CIA input, ALL 4 FISA warrants would have been immediately suspect and under any reasonable process, declared invalid.

Any information gathered from the Page FISA warrants was collected under invalid warrants.

This would have been been explosive in June 2017. Mueller had just started.

The consequences of what Clinesmith did w "not a source" are far more significant than 0 to 6 months prison time. But neither Durham nor the presiding judge of the FISC court (Boasberg) seem particularly interested in acknowledging that.

Durham has had a big build up. It is past time for him to earn that reputation.

I keep repeating this but you have to remember, the CIA told the FBI in August, 2016 that he was a source. They told the traitor Clinesmith as much in June, 2017.

They should never had gotten the original FISA.

They already knew!

The Washington Post - a propaganda rag w the intent to confuse and mislead the American people

https://www.washingtonpost.com...es-mainstream-media/

Senate report confirms flimsiness of the Steele dossier, but vindicates mainstream media

In January 2017, David Kramer, a longtime aide to Sen. John McCain, pressed two editors at the Wall Street Journal not to do something that the paper was planning to do: publish the name of the man behind the so-called Russian dossier

The lobbying initiative failed. On Jan. 11, 2017, one day after BuzzFeed published the dossier, the Journal identified its compiler: “Christopher Steele, Ex-British Intelligence Officer, Said to Have Prepared Dossier on Trump.”

the dossier enjoyed a sunny heyday in the public square, thanks in large part to credulous reporting coming out of MSNBC and CNN

credulous - showing too great a readiness to believe things.

Propaganda machine Wash Post blames MSNBC and CNN

Those who relied on these two outlets might well have concluded that the Steele memos were thoroughgoing examples of foreign intelligence — and that the Trump campaign’s conspiracy with the Russians was curdling into proven fact.

as if Wash Post didn't hammer Russia Russia Russia for 3 years. And serve as the FBI leak machine to damage the Trump administration

The Mueller report, released in April 2019, failed to corroborate key dossier contentions. The report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, released in December 2019, destroyed it with venomous bureaucratese.

Holes in the now-infamous dossier, however, don’t preoccupy the Senate report, which documents contacts between Trump aides and Russians. A damning takeaway relates to the activities of Paul Manafort

Manafort. Who was immediately fired by Donald Trump when Manafort was nailed w FARA charges that had been ignored for years


Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik

oh my. super secret polling data showing Trump guaranteed to win the election ?

and who was Kilimnik ? a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department


The New York Times and The Washington Post, for instance, received Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 for their investigative work in chasing down various strands of the Russia story

as they reported on dossier stuff that turned out to be a joke from Igor Danchenko's weird set of odd friends

The Senate Intelligence Committee report numbers nearly 1,000 pages of detail on all the ways that the so-called Russia collusion hoax was a bona fide story.

pls explain what was bona fide. There was no Russia / Trump campaign collusion. The entire upper tiers of the FBI are gone because they attempted a coup w the full cooperation of these Pulitzer Prize liars

very interesting read at CTH

https://theconservativetreehou...denberg/#more-198229


If all this is confusing (and it is), stay focused on the big picture:

CTH (sundance) has been arguing for a long time that:

- The Top Secret original FISA warrant against Carter Page was delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee SCIF on 17 Mar 2017

- DEM Mark Warner read it (senator from Virginia)

- Senate Intel Comm Security Director (James Wolfe) texted photos of the FISA warrant to his girl friend Ali Watkins ( a reporter)

- CTH claims that the FISA warrant had been slightly altered from the true version. This was a leak trap

- When Ali Watkins published a story on 3 Apr 2017, it was seen that the document was leaked to her

- The FBI took a very unusual step. They got a court order to access reporter Watkins' phone records

- Wolfe lied to the FBI about sending info to reporters

- Now things get dicey. CTH believes Mueller as Special Counsel was interacting w Mark Warner. CTH believes that Mueller hid the fact that the TS document was
sent to Watkins. And they let Wolfe off w a minor charge of lying. Wolfe was sentenced to 2 months in jail.

- Sundance says he has presented his detailed analysis to the FBI investigator for Durham

We wait the next steps

CTH has done a lot of work on this. The MSM has been completely silent.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
He and his co-conspirators committed Federal crimes and used their government positions in an attempt to bring down a duly-elected Commander in Chief, and they are the ones who've been wronged??

From one act of procedural wrongdoing ("Flint is at least technically a liar!") to another ("You can't convict me; the process against me was motivated by bias!"). You think maybe Strzok is a one-trick pony, and that this was the one trick he ever came close to mastering?

https://www.foxnews.com/politi...rget-of-durham-probe

James Comey about Durham:


"I have had no contact with him and haven’t talked to him," Comey said about Durham, adding, “I can’t imagine that I’m a target.”

“Given that I know what happened during 2016, which is a bunch of people trying to do the right thing consistent with the law, I’m not worried at all about that investigation of the investigation," he said. "They just want to have an investigation to talk about."

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"a bunch of people trying to do the right thing"

Comey knows he is lying. This isn't about a difference of opinion or a different view of things.

Comey is on a mission to deceive the
American people. I hope Comey gets a taste of real justice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...-justice-department/

by James Comey

The Justice Department was damaged when the attorney general and the president lied to the American people about the work of the special counsel investigating the president.

They damaged it again when the attorney general intervened in a case involving the president’s friend Roger Stone to overrule the sentencing recommendation of career prosecutors.

And they damaged it again when the attorney general tried to drop a case in which the president’s ally Michael Flynn had already pleaded guilty, twice.

The justice system in the United States is built upon the idea that the truth is a real thing and it must be spoken, by everybody. And that we all play by the same rules. It matters that judges and prosecutors don’t treat you differently because of who you are, what you look like, or who you know. Lady Justice wears a blindfold so all Americans get fair treatment.

“The rule of law depends upon the evenhanded administration of justice,” says the department’s own manual.

“Evenhanded” means you get a fair shake whether you are a Republican or a Democrat or neither. That means it shouldn’t matter whether Trump likes you or not. That means the chief prosecutor in this country — the attorney general of the United States — is not the president’s personal attorney. He and his institution have obligations to all of us, equally.

If lying is rewarded, if the Justice Department starts deciding who to prosecute based on politics, all Americans are at risk, because eventually your party will be out of power, which means the people in power will be coming for you. That’s not America.

It is not America when the president calls people who cooperate with the Justice Department “rats” and praises those who obstruct justice and lie to protect him.

Nor when he routinely lies about the people of the FBI, and smears former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a true American patriot who literally bled for this nation in Vietnam and then devoted his life to serving our country.

Trump’s presidency represents a continuing frontal assault on the truth — on the very idea that “truth” exists

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This really is scary. When Comey writes like this, it shows how fundamentally dishonest and untrustworthy he is. Scary that he was in charge of the FBI.

We know many of the Comey attempts to set up Donald Trump. Comey didn't assist the incoming Trump administration to efficiently take over the reigns of power. Comey plotted before and after the election to destroy Donald Trump. What a total disgrace Comey has become. Comey lies nonstop and we know he is lying.

It is all about getting the truth out to as many Americans as possible.

We need a massive cleansing of the FBI.

I'm about at the point that I don't care if this swamp creature wins reelection or not.

Lindsay Graham Kept GOP Judiciary Committee Senators In The Dark About Interview Of FBI Agent Joe Pientka

Graham and his staff kept Republican members of the Judiciary Committee in the dark about an interview of key Russiagate figure Joe Pientka on Thursday, multiple sources told The Federalist.

https://thefederalist.com/2020...i-agent-joe-pientka/

This guy is lucky I'm voting in NC and not SC because the spot for US Senator would probably be left blank. It's bad enough I'm going to have to hold my nose for Tillis. He is part of the coverup now.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: mbinky,

https://dailycaller.com/2020/0...am-russia-declasify/

John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, has been coordinating with U.S. Attorney John Durham and plans to soon declassify more documents related to the Trump-Russia probe, he said Sunday.

“The question now is did the FBI have a proper predicate to begin a counterintelligence investigation at all, and that’s the issue that John Durham is looking at, and also the issue that I’m continuing to look at,” Ratcliffe said in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Ratcliffe said that he is not privy to Durham’s findings, but that he has provided the prosecutor access to intelligence documents needed for the investigation.

“I’m coordinating with him to make sure that he has the intelligence documents that he needs to do his work, and what I don’t want to do is declassify something that might prejudice his work so we’re going to have to coordinate as we go forward,” said Ratcliffe, a former U.S. congressman from Texas.

Ratcliffe said he has tried to avoid declassifying documents that would “prejudice” Durham’s investigation, though he said he’s “optimistic that I’ll be declassifying additional documents soon.”

Ratcliffe and his predecessor, Amb. Richard Grenell, have declassified documents related to the Steele dossier, unmasking requests related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and the intelligence community assessment of Russia’s election interference.

Grenell declassified information in footnotes from the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s Trump investigation, which showed that the bureau had evidence that the Steele dossier may have contained disinformation planted by Russian intelligence officers.

Ratcliffe declassified an FBI memo of interviews with Igor Danchenko, the primary source for dossier author Christopher Steele. Danchenko’s statements to the FBI called into question the reliability of the dossier, which the FBI used to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page.


xxxxxxxxxxx

adding

mbinky - that is very concerning that Graham hid Pientka from other Republicans. don't understand it.

Releasing info, declassifying docs... This is getting old. "End of summer" is 3 weeks away.

Michael Flynn screwed again

Techno Fog:

Flynn update - here is the order denying the mandamus.

The case goes back to Judge Sullivan.

The opinion ends with these words:

"we expect the District Court to proceed with appropriate dispatch."

https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog

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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...e-dismissal-n2575378

The Washington D.C. Circuit Court of appeals has ruled 8-2 General Michael Flynn will not have his case dismissed as the Department of Justice has requested and must move forward with yet another hearing.

The decision comes three weeks after the full court conducted a hearing on August 11 about whether the case should be dismissed or sent back to Judge Sullivan for a decison. During that hearing Flynn's attorney, Sidney Powell, called for the case to be dismissed. Previously a panel of the judges ruled 2-1 his case should be dismissed. That decision was vacated when it was decided the full court should hear the argument for dismissal.

"Gen. Flynn is a defendant without a prosecutor,” Powell told the judges. "A court can't continue a prosecution on its own."

Griffith had a hardon for Rule48. I'm not surprised.

The decision can be found here.

This was a sideshow battle. As I read the decision, the question was a limited one if whether Judge Sullivan had the legal right to request friend of the court assistance. There's precedent, abundantly so, for that authority.

There's no resolution from today's decision on whether Sullivan must dismiss. That question was not before the court but even if they ruled the other way, the case would still be remanded back to Sullivan. The appeal from Sullivan's decision would not have resulted in a dismissal.

Opinion piece from The Wall Street Journal:

=====================================

More Torture for Michael Flynn
The D.C. Circuit goes to great lengths to keep his prosecution going.


One test of a judicial ruling in a controversial case is whether it would have come out the same way if the defendant’s name were John Doe.

On that measure, among others, it’s hard to credit as legally justified Monday’s appellate court ruling against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In an en banc appeal of a lower-court ruling, the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a writ of mandamus issued by a lower-court panel on behalf of Mr. Flynn. The writ had ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the prosecution of Mr. Flynn on grounds that the original case had no legal basis. Mr. Flynn sought the writ after Judge Sullivan refused to grant the motion to dismiss, The en banc appeal of a writ is all but unheard of, but then the D.C. Circuit these days is stacked with liberals appointed by Barack Obama. In an unsigned opinion, the en banc court ducked the essence of the lower-court ruling, which concerned judicial meddling in the executive branch’s prosecution power. Instead the en banc judges made a procedural case that the harm to the separation of powers was “speculative” because Judge Sullivan hadn’t yet issued a formal ruling in the case.

But as Judge Karen Henderson noted in dissent, there is no case on record in which a judge sought a Rule 35 en banc appeal of a mandamus ruling that essentially makes himself a party to the case. She also pointed out that, “From early on in this case, the trial judge [Judge Sullivan] has demonstrated a pattern of conduct that, taken together, raises serious concerns about the appearance of impartiality.” At a plea hearing, he mused without evidence that Mr. Flynn might have committed treason and asserted his “disdain” and “disgust” for Mr. Flynn’s actions. A former judge whom Judge Sullivan hired for advice on the motion to dismiss had written an anti Flynn op-ed. Judge Sullivan has even suggested he could secondguess the Justice Department’s dismissal motion by investigating if career prosecutors disagreed with political appointees in the case. This is an unconstitutional judicial intrusion into executive authority. If Judge Sullivan takes this course now that he’s won on appeal, we hope Attorney General William Barr tells him to pound sand. Judge Sullivan might hold Mr. Barr in contempt but then the case would go directly back on appeal.

All of this continues the ordeal of Mr. Flynn, who has had his life turned upside down for nearly four years. Judge Sullivan could now choose to hold his dismissal ruling until the November election. If Joe Biden wins, the judge might figure that the Biden Justice Department would reinstate the prosecution and torture Mr. Flynn further. As Judge Neomi Rao put it in her fine dissent: “By allowing the district court to scrutinize ‘the reasoning and motives’ of the Department of Justice, the majority ducks our obligation to correct judicial usurpations of executive power and leaves Flynn to twist in the wind while the district court pursues a prosecution without a prosecutor. The Constitution’s separation of powers and its protections of individual liberty require a different result.”

What a dispiriting, politicized performance by the judiciary. Time for a pardon.

LINK

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

Enemies list? State Department monitored 13 Americans' social media in possible legal violation

https://justthenews.com/accoun...iling-illegal-social

Memos detail effort to monitor social media of Fox News personalities Hannity, Ingraham and Dobbs, as well as president's son Don. Jr. and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani.



Officials at the U.S. embassy in Kiev ordered the monitoring of 13 prominent Americans' social media accounts during the early days of the Ukraine scandal in spring 2019 and later were informed their activities potentially violated the Privacy Act, according to State Department memos made public on Tuesday.

The memos, released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, show those targeted for monitoring included President Trump's eldest son, Don Jr., the president's personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs. This reporter was one of the 13 individuals on the list targeted.

The U.S. ambassador at the time, Marie Yovanovitch, and one of her top deputies, former deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent, were apprised of the social media monitoring, emails show.

Embassy officials used search terms indicating they were interested in social media posts involving the ambassador, liberal megadonor George Soros, and the controversy around Joe Biden and Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company engulfed in a corruption controversy that hired the vice president's son Hunter in 2014. State officials testified during last year's impeachment proceedings that the Bidens' role in Ukraine created an uncomfortable appearance of a conflict of interest that undercut U.S. efforts to fight corruption inside Ukraine.

“Key thing is to get up to ramming speed from the get go," Kent wrote in a March 27, 2019 email that discussed the social media monitoring efforts, which appear to have been prompted by early stories about the embassy's activities with Ukrainian prosecutors and the Bidens at The Hill newspaper (written by this reporter) and on Fox News.

The same day, Yovanovitch received an email updating her on the social media monitoring. "Thanks Ambassador- I just wanted you to be aware as we are really trying to help them and recognize how hard everyone is working in this especially trying time," an official whose name was redacted wrote Yovanovitch. "The good news is our social media team back here is now helping to provide them with the reports they want when Kyiv is asleep/offline - through existing PD tools- so this should greatly help."

You can read the memos here.
File
JW-v-State-Journalist-Monitoring-00124.pdf

By April 1, 2019, the embassy appears to have been instructed to cease the social media monitoring by officials in Washington. "Thank you so very much for alerting everyone to this issue. We appreciate you shutting down the automated report," an email entitled "Ukraine Twitter report" read.

By May 15, 2019, a redacted Digital Media Associate for EUR/PD Keniya-Trusant Group the State Department of legal issues of monitoring social media, suggesting the automated targeting of Americans violated federal law.

"Going to chime in here – so regarding the influencers, there are some legal implications of making a list of Facebook influencers of Twitter influencers since they are technically private citizens (even though they’re publicly on the internet) and we cannot compile them into a list and monitor what they are saying using a third-party application without their knowledge," the email read. "To see what they’re saying, you unfortunately need to use the old school way and manually go to their feeds and view that way. Cumbersome but it’s in compliance with the Privacy Act of 1974."

Current and former officials familiar with the memos say some of the redactions involved additional analysis of the legal issues surrounding the monitoring that occurred. "Congress may be entitled to see more about the nature of the concerns than was publicly released," one current official said.

Amanda Milius, a former senior adviser and deputy assistant secretary in the early Trump State Department, told Just the News she was alerted by State Department leadership about the embassy's social media monitoring early on and was assured the embassy was instructed to stop the activity targeting Americans because it violated federal law.

"Personally I find it hard to believe that senior communication officials at post were not aware of the limitations of the Privacy Act because all communications employees and contractors are very well versed on what they are allowed and not allowed to do in regards to the Privacy Act and the Smith-Mund law," Milius said in an interview Tuesday.

The memos show the embassy sought to use a Facebook-related product called Crowd Tangle to handle automated social media monitoring. A deck about the product's capabilities was included in the FOIA release.

In addition to the Fox hosts, this reporter and the president's son and personal lawyer, the other figures whose social media were targeted include Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, radio host and former Trump White House adviser Seb Gorka, One America News personality Jack Posobiec, and Fox News personalities Sara Carter and Dan Bongino.

Fitton, who first raised concerns about possible social media monitoring last year, said Tuesday he was deeply troubled by what was revealed in the memos.

“These new documents confirm Deep State officials at the Ukraine Embassy seemed to set up an enemies list to help illicitly monitor and report on the social media postings of President Trump’s family and lawyer, as well as journalists,” he said. “The State Department hid these smoking gun documents for months.”

And Judge Sullivan continues to play his political games. What a disgrace he is

https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog.../1300840672736444417

Judge Sullivan has effectively pushed back the resolution of the Flynn case until after the election.

Ordered a status report (with briefing schedule) by September 21. This will include a proposed oral argument date.

Time for a pardon is right. Sullivan has shown his true color. A maggot, just like the rest of them.