https://abcnews.go.com/Politic...fe/story?id=57291802

Papadopoulos' wife says that he will decide today whether to withdraw his plea agreement w Mueller.

If he backs away now, she said, he could face a raft of new charges.

In an interview Monday, Mangiante Papadopoulos said her husband never saw the evidence amassed against him when he agreed to the plea agreement. Some of that material has recently been turned over to his attorney, and Papadopoulos expects to review it ahead of his decision, she said.

She said her husband has grown suspicious of government allegations that the professor was a Russian intelligence asset at all.

“He could be nobody,” she said. “He could be a charlatan.”

The government’s sentencing recommendation includes signs the Mueller team felt betrayed by Papadopoulos after he struck a plea agreement and pledged his full cooperation.

Papadopoulos’s legal team will file their own sentencing assessment to the court in two weeks, and is expected to ask for probation.

Since her husband’s guilty plea in exchange for cooperation with the Mueller probe, Papadopoulos has been living in Chicago. Federal investigators have imposed restrictions on his travel until his sentencing, which is now scheduled for September 7.

update to who is Charles Tawil

http://dailycaller.com/2018/08...oreign-agent-israel/

In an email sent on Monday afternoon, Tawil denied that he is a foreign agent. He also said that his business arrangement with Papadopoulos fell apart because the former Trump aide acted “unprofessionally and unethically.”

Tawil told TheDCNF that he is “sure the FBI have the means to know very well who [I am], and that I am not an foreign agent.”

“I am a pro Trump citizen mainly because I correctly predicted that he would stand up against Chinese future hegemony,” he said through email.

Tawil said that he “tried to help” Papadopoulos by bringing him in on a new consulting business he had created for the petroleum services industry.

“Unfortunately he very fast disappointed me and the potential first customer (a private company). He acted very unprofessionally and unethically. That was it,” Tawil told TheDCNF.

Tawil did not respond to follow up questions about his work with Papadopoulos and why he believes the Trump adviser behaved unethically.

David Ha’ivri, an Israeli activist and author, told TheDCNF said that he introduced Tawil and Papadopoulos “at my own initiative” to facilitate a business deal involving an oil and gas project in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.

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I am less suspicious that Tawil is a foreign agent, than that he supports the FBI

a significant report

from Cohen's new spokesman, Lanny Davis (Clinton stooge)

1. It got "mixed up" that Cohen has info on President Trump and the Trump Tower mtg

2. Cohen was never in Prague like the dossier says

http://dailycaller.com/2018/08...e-trump-tower-cohen/

LANNY DAVIS OBLITERATED CNN’S ‘BOMBSHELL’ REPORT ABOUT MICHAEL COHEN AND TRUMP TOWER

A CNN report in July that Michael Cohen has information that President Donald Trump was aware of the infamous Trump Tower meeting before it occurred got “mixed up” and was inaccurate, Cohen attorney Lanny Davis said Wednesday night.

“So Michael Cohen does not have information that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians beforehand or even after?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Davis.

“No, he does not,” replied Davis, a longtime Clinton insider who started representing Cohen earlier this summer.

Davis’s bombshell statement severely undercuts a July 27 CNN report that Cohen was willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that he was in a meeting when Donald Trump Jr. told his father about an offer to meet with a group of Russians who wanted to provide dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

According to CNN’s anonymous sources , Trump approved the meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016. Democrats seized on the CNN report as evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

The report also opened up the possibility that Trump and Trump Jr. publicly lied about the Trump Tower meeting. Trump has said publicly that he did not know about the meeting until a year after it occurred. Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 that his father did not know about the meeting.

“Well, I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the source of the story. And the question of a criminal investigation, the advice we were given, those of us dealing with the media is that we could not do anything other than stay silent,” Davis told Cooper.

how convenient

Davis was asked about the Trump Tower report because of a statement issued on Tuesday by North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr and Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The senators said in the statement that Cohen told the committee in October 2017 that he was not aware of the Trump Tower meeting until it was reported in July 2017. Burr and Warner said Cohen’s legal team confirmed that the testimony was accurate.

Davis dealt another major blow to the allegations of Trump campaign collusion when he said in an interview with Bloomberg News that the Steele dossier’s allegations about Cohen are “false.”

“Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life,” Davis said.

The dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, alleged that Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 as part of a “clandestine” operation to collude with Kremlin insiders to influence the 2016 election. Dossier author Christopher Steele claimed that Cohen arranged payments to hackers to carry out the scheme.

“Never, ever, ever in Prague,” Davis reiterated in an interview on MSNBC later Wednesday.

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video of Anderson Cooper getting the bad news from Lanny Davis at link


Chuck Ross tweet:

The July 27 CNN report was massive. Dems hailed it at the most compelling evidence of collusion so far. But now Lanny Davis says that the reporting (from @jimsciutto, @MarshallCohen, and Carl Bernstein) got "mixed up."

Unreal. Cohen's stock for Team Mueller seems to be on a significantly downward trajectory.

I saw this on a Powerline post by Scott Johnson:

“The investigation has been taken over by Robert Mueller with what seems to be a charter without limits.

It will not come to rest until President Trump has been removed from office or succeeded in defeating the forces arrayed against him.”

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



Watching the reaction of DEMs, never Trumpers, media (NYT, Wash Post, Yahoo News, NBC, CNN, etc) over the last 8 months or so, it is looking like they will never give up. Even w all the corruption that has been exposed in the FBI and DoJ, they collectively pretend that the sky is not blue and the clouds are not white. Truth is irrelevant to them. Lies and distortions are routine and they almost never ever admit they were wrong.

One example of this defiance of facts and logic just happened w Michael Cohen. He was named in the Steele dossier as being the lead on the “secret liaison relationship” between the campaign and the Russian leadership. Cohen was said to have traveled to Prague with “3 colleagues” for secret discussions w Kremlin representatives.

Cohen publicly denied this.

In April 2017, McClatchy reporters wrote that unnamed sources had told them that Mueller had evidence that Cohen had indeed traveled to Prague. The story ran like wildfire through numerous media. But only McClatchy claimed to have sources on this.

Now Lanny Davis representing Cohen has emphatically denied Cohen did any of the things in the dossier.

Even more important, Mueller never charged Cohen w the things in the dossier. Mueller handed Cohen off to the New York prosecutors on matters unrelated to Russia. For dossier claimed activities by Carter Page, the FBI identified Page as a Russian foreign agent. If the dossier were true, Cohen would also be a Russian foreign agent.

So at this point now, w both logic and facts, the dossier material on Cohen not only looks “unverified”, it looks completely false.

(Were Mueller, the CIA, and the NSA so inept that they couldn’t track Cohen and 3 colleagues to a meeting in Prague ?)

What does McClatchy have to say ?


https://twitter.com/ChuckRossD.../1032703241841192960

Update: McClatchy says in the wake of Lanny Davis statements, it is standing by its April 13 report that Mueller has been provided evidence that Michael Cohen went to Prague.

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maybe the "evidence" was a phone call from McClatchy or Fusion GPS

Because the FBI and DoJ have kept so much hidden, even from congress, we have limited insight into what happened in the Russian/Trump campaign collusion counterintelligence investigation.

So we can either sit back and wait until more gets revealed, or we can try to piece together possible scenarios that match what is known.

Here is an ABC story that came out yesterday:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politic...es/story?id=57367588

"He went around his DOJ bosses, but Bruce Ohr offered little to Russia probe, sources say"

I am going to walk thru this piece of propaganda and share my thoughts why this is a good example of the FBI/DoJ using the media to lie to us. Fair warning: maybe I am wrong. But I don't think so.

Quotes are straight from the ABC story.

"A veteran Justice Department prosecutor was operating outside his chain of command when he engaged senior FBI officials on a series of salacious and startling allegations tying Donald Trump to Russian operatives, but those interactions had little impact on the FBI’s growing probe into Trump and his associates, according to interviews with multiple sources and an ABC News review of public testimony and documents."

right off the bat, ABC says Ohr was a) operating outside the chain of command and b) his interactions had little impact
this story is to protect people like Rosenstein and Sally Yates

"By the time Ohr provided the so-called “dossier” to the FBI in late 2016, counterintelligence agents had already received a copy of it"

very misleading. Ohr's FBI 302s started in Dec 2016 and went through May 2017.

Ohr and Steele kept communicating until late Nov 2017 as Steele tried to get on the Mueller team.

The real insight will come if we ever see the Ohr 302s and the Carter Page FISA application. Then we will know if there was "little impact"

"Ohr was “a non-figure, a non-entity in all of this,” one source familiar with the investigation told ABC News. “I don’t find a real significance to him.”"

downplaying Ohr just like they downplayed the dossier once it became suspect

"Meanwhile, Ohr’s wife, a Russian linguist named Nellie, was hired by Simpson’s firm to help with its research"

Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion GPS to help w the opposition research against Donald Trump.

"In early 2016, as Trump was still vying for the Republican nomination to become president, a young campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, told an Australian diplomat he had reason to believe the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The diplomat alerted the FBI, which opened a counterintelligence investigation into the matter."

think on that. How absurd. A campaign lightweight says he heard the Russians have neg info on Clinton and the FBI launches a counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign illegally working w the Russians

"Around the same time, backed by money from Democratic operatives, Fusion GPS hired Steele"

not just any old DEM operatives. Hillary Clinton campaign paid to get Russian neg info on Donald Trump. That Clinton paid for the dossier was well hidden for a year or so before it was forced out due to subpoena of Fusion GPS bank records

'By July 2016, Steele had collected an assortment of wild and unverified allegations, connecting Trump and campaign advisers such as Carter Page to Russian intelligence services"

"wild and unverified" and yet in the FISA warrant, the dossier parts about Carter Page are the lead in the justification for the warrant

"And after Steele compiled his “dossier” of allegations, he gave his findings to the FBI official who had been Steele's “handler” for some time, according to sources familiar with the matter."

this is an aspect that is stunning. We know now that Christopher Steele was an FBI Confidential Human Source from Feb 2016 to 1 Nov 2016. During the time that Steele compiled the dossier, he was working for the FBI.

"According to sources familiar with the matter, in the summer and fall of 2016, Steele flooded Ohr with emails and messages, repeatedly looking to share what he was uncovering about Trump’s orbit."

yet the FBI told the FISA court the only Steele inputs to the warrant were from before Steele talked to the media. that was a lie, in all 4 FISA warrant applications

"In late 2016, Ohr visited senior officials inside FBI headquarters to relay what he was hearing from Steele, according to sources."

so Ohr is talking to senior FBI people, but he keeps it hidden from the DoJ. ???

The senior FBI people don't mention to the DoJ that the fourth highest person in the DoJ is providing inputs to one of the most important counterintelligence operations of modern times ? When the DoJ position is that Ohr had nothing to do w the counterintel op ?

I would expect that in a highly classified operation like this, there would be a name list maintained for all the people w access. If Ohr's name wasn't on the list that would set off huge red flags


"some of Strzok's superiors inside the FBI never even heard of Ohr until media reports began citing him late last year, sources told ABC News."

more CYA. Strzok is getting inputs from Bruce Ohr but doesn't tell his superiors ?


"Strzok insisted the true nature of what Ohr did – when it is eventually made public – will both "reassure" and "disappoint" concerned Republicans"

can't wait to see it be public

"while Ohr was engaging with Steele and meeting with FBI officials in 2016, then-deputy attorney general Sally Yates and Ohr's other superiors at the Justice Department were completely in the dark about what he was up to, sources said."

more CYA

"“Nobody knew. He didn’t tell anybody,” according to one former Justice Department official who worked with Ohr in the deputy attorney general’s office. “It was completely outside the scope of what he was asked to do. It wasn’t even close to his job.”"

"It's unclear why Ohr helped Steele, especially without the knowledge or approval of his bosses, though a source familiar with Ohr's efforts said Ohr was a natural point of contact for Steele because they knew each other and operated in the same professional circles."

If Ohr was passing info from Steele to the FBI, that was in direct conflict with what the FISA court was told, and in conflict with termination of Steele's CHS status .

"The following month, the FBI persuaded a federal judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to let agents secretly monitor Page’s personal communications"

We know the FBI lied in this "persuasion" multiple times.

"Many Republicans have claimed that surveillance powers would not have been sought in the first place without the "dossier." "

it has been stated that Andrew McCabe said that in closed testimony.

"The FBI did, however, note in the application that Steele and Fusion GPS were "likely looking for information that could be used to discredit" Trump"

very misleading. The FBI said in the FISA warrant: "The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia"

identified U.S. person = Simpson of Fusion GPS

BTW, this was another FBI lie in the warrants .

"In the months after Trump won the 2016 election, Ohr met with FBI officials at least twice, the congressional documents show."

Ohr met w the FBI 12 times thru May 2017

"But according to a source familiar with her work, Ohr's wife was not directly involved in the "dossier" project."

do you believe that ?

"Ohr continued to keep his bosses at the Justice Department in the dark about his links to Steele"

but Ohr was talking about Steele w high level FBI people

"But once Rosenstein’s office learned of those links in late 2017, “we arranged to transfer Mr. Ohr to a different office,” Rosenstein recently said. It's unclear how Rosenstein's office learned of the contacts."

"Trump and several of his Republican allies are now accusing Ohr of tainting the entire federal government’s probe into whether Trump or his associated worked with Russians to influence the 2016 election."

with good reason. But there is much more "taint" than just Bruce Ohr

quote:

The diplomat alerted the FBI, which opened a counterintelligence investigation into the matter."

That Didn't Happen- Nunes said "There's No Intelligence in the Intelligence Report". It would of been a 5-Eyes report if the Australian Guy submitted anything. The real collusion is the deep state and the msm.


This stuff is like the flurry of reports stating as Fact the stock markets won't crash if Trump is impeached.

The original Carter Page FISA warrant was on 21 Oct 2016.

22 months ago the FBI swore in a “Verified Application” that Carter Page was a Russian foreign agent.

Carter Page has not been charged.

In the original warrant, the FBI provided 54 pages of justification and then an FBI agent declared “under penalty of perjury” that the warrant information was true and correct.

For each of the following extensions, more justification was added. The third extension had 89 pages of justification.

Because of redactions, it is not known if there was just one Special Agent who signed all 4 warrants, or if there were different agents who signed the 4 warrants.

We know right now that each of those warrants contained lies.

So why aren’t the Special Agents, who signed under penalty of perjury, being prosecuted ?

Our major news media such as NYT and Wash Post are saturating us with propaganda to attack Donald Trump and protect the FBI / DoJ / Intel agency deep state actors.

The deep state actors are people in official govt positions who have been trying to overturn the 2016 election of President Trump. This started initially to stop Donald Trump from being elected.

Now the goal is impeachment. This effort has sometimes been referred to as a "silent coup"

Here is a NYT article that came out yesterday.

The article claims the Kremlin informants close to Putin have gone silent. NYT claims this because we have fewer intel officers in Russia now, and "officials also raised the possibility that the outing of an F.B.I. informant under scrutiny by the House intelligence committee — an examination encouraged by President Trump — has had a chilling effect on intelligence collection.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...ps://t.co/rvqVTMttxm

Kremlin Sources Go Quiet, Leaving C.I.A. in the Dark About Putin’s Plans for Midterms

In 2016, American intelligence officials began to realize the scope of Russia’s efforts when they gathered intelligence suggesting that Moscow wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help sow chaos. John O. Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., testified before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 about a tense period a year earlier when he came to believe that Mr. Putin was trying to steer the outcome toward a victory for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Brennan described the broad outlines of the intelligence in his congressional testimony, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials. “I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election. And they were very aggressive,” Mr. Brennan told lawmakers.

cheerleading for Brennan

Informants close to Putin are very rare, according to current and former officials. The United States, in recent years, has had only a few, and at times been reliant on only one or two for the most important insights on Mr. Putin, according to former officials. If those people go silent for their own protection, it can make it very hard for the agency to look inside Moscow.

they should hire Christopher Steele. He did it in about 3 weeks (extreme sarc)

This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.

look how casually NYT writes that the Obama FBI used Stefan Halper to spy on the Trump campaign and set the stage for the phony counterintel operation that led to the Mueller investigation

Current American officials said there is no direct evidence that the exposure of Mr. Halper has been cited by overseas informants as a source of concern.

But the officials said that some allies have cited the exposure of the informant and other intelligence leaks in curbing some of the intelligence they share. And former spies believe that, long-term, the exposure will hurt overseas collection.

what a steaming pile of BS. Exposing people who tried to falsely frame Donald Trump, sabotage his campaign, and now get him impeached will hurt our "overseas collection". How terrible.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

and here comes Comey's friend Ben Wittes of Lawfare:

"Hard to imagine why our sources don’t trust us anymore. Any thoughts @DevinNunes?"

Don't believe anything out of Lawfare

Baghdad Bob looks like an amateur compared to what propaganda is being massively fed to the American public

Conservative Treehouse (CT) has a report up that addresses something I have been thinking about for some time.

The Steele dossier is mostly two years old. The media such as Wash Post and NYT have argued the dossier is credible and that Donald Trump did work w Russia to influence the 2016 election.

But here we are in late August 2018. Nothing major in the dossier has been proven. We have seen some of the FISA warrant and it looks damning for the FBI. (They lied to the FISC)

Bruce Ohr is about to testify. President Trump can force the declassification of documents that probably show the Russian collusion charges were an FBI/DoJ fabrication.

How will Wash Post and NYT handle this ?

CT argues that the "insurance policy" was to impeach Donald Trump if he got elected.

Now the Russia collusion is falling apart, and the DEMs need to have a new line of attack. CT argues that a shift is occurring to switch to campaign finance law violations, the payoffs to porn stars, and financial violations as the new line of attack.

https://theconservativetreehou...n-event/#more-153306


Retreat We Much: Attorney for Michael Cohen Now Reverses Claims on Trump Knowledge of any Russian Event

cut and paste:

After the Michael Cohen guilty plea, his attorney Lanny Davis began pitching a claim that the longtime Trump loyalist/lawyer had information Trump knew of the Russian hacking of Democratic emails ahead of time

Davis said: “I believe that Mr. Cohen has direct knowledge that would be of interest to Mr. Mueller that suggests -I’m not sure it proves- that Mr. Trump was aware of Russian government agents hacking illegally, committing computer crimes, to the detriment of the candidate who he was running against, Hillary Clinton.” And the media ate it up, and put Davis on just about every possible TV show imaginable.

However, in an interview with the Washington Post this weekend, Mr Davis not only walked back that claim, he entirely retreated from it:

asked Saturday how confident he was that Trump knew about the hacking before it became public, Davis said: “I am not sure. There’s a possibility that is the case. But I am not sure.” […] “I was giving an instinct that he might have something to say of interest to the special counsel” about hacking, Davis said. In retrospect, he said, “I am just not sure"

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.9daa84d8c6b2

This follows on the heels of Mr. Davis also walking back his prior claim that candidate Trump knew of the Trump Tower meeting. During a CNN interview Lanny Davis told Anderson Cooper, per his client, candidate Donald Trump had no knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya.

And Davis has also stated that all of the claims within the Clinton-Steele dossier about Michael Cohen are also 100% false

Lanny Davis is saying the dossier is false; Trump never knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lobbyists; and his client, Michael Cohen, has no knowledge of anything to do with Donald Trump and Russians.

But why is uber-partisan Democrat Lanny Davis now deconstructing the entire ‘Muh Russia’ conspiracy theory? Why is Clinton acolyte Lanny Davis now single-handily dismantling two years of narratives promoted by the left-wing media?

Well, the answer to those questions is likely found in the outlet now helping to systematically retreat from years of false-reporting; The Washington Post.

There never has been any truth to the vast ‘Muh Russia’ conspiracy, you know that; all research proves that; it is a fundamentally made-up narrative initiated to support the deployment of the scheme team insurance policy

the Washington Post is also the outlet for the aggregate U.S. intelligence apparatus, and particularly the CIA, FBI and DOJ-NSD. Essentially WaPo is their PR and Narrative Engineering firm.

Impeachment was the end-objective of the insurance policy. Lanny Davis is now the pivot man to take the impeachment ball from Robert Mueller (Muh Russia) and pass-it-off to the Southern District of New York under the auspices of ‘campaign finance violations‘.

With the DOJ Inspector General FISA and Spygate investigation ongoing -likely nearing completion, and quite possibly bringing unwanted sunlight upon the entire scheme architecture- the impeachment crowd need a way to draw focus away from the risky IG sunlight outcome and still maintain morale amid the resistance movement.

The sun is setting on the ‘Muh Russia’ narrative. There was no obstruction. Both failing narratives no longer provide any benefit for the 2018 mid-term elections. Democrats need a valid reason to keep impeachment hopes alive; hence the visible shift toward campaign finance laws…. and terribly immoral Trump etc.

Lanny Davis is the pivot-man.

from above:

"the Washington Post is also the outlet for the aggregate U.S. intelligence apparatus, and particularly the CIA, FBI and DOJ-NSD. Essentially WaPo is their PR and Narrative Engineering firm"

more examples in posts above where ABC and NYT try to downplay the bad news coming out about the FBI/DoJ.

Tomorrow Bruce Ohr is scheduled for closed door congressional testimony.

Right on cue, here is a NYT article making Ohr into an American hero

in this article NYT lays out a strategy that Ohr may take.

Congressional Republicans who have seen the unredacted versions of some material have implied that after the FBI fired Christopher Steele as a human source, Ohr stepped in to act as middle man for Steele to continue to provide inputs to the FBI

This NYT article writes that this is perfectly normal for Ohr to do

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...tice-department.html

Bruce Ohr Fought Russian Organized Crime. Now He’s a Target of Trump.

In 2007, Mr. Ohr met Mr. Steele, who was still with MI-6

He stayed in touch with Mr. Steele

For the F.B.I., their relationship would come in handy. A longtime informant who provided valuable tips on corruption, Mr. Steele violated his confidentiality agreement with the F.B.I. when he disclosed to a reporter in the months before the 2016 election that he had been working with the bureau.

He had expressed frustration that his information about Mr. Trump, gathered for Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired him on behalf of Democrats to research the candidate, had gone seemingly nowhere in the F.B.I.

In early November 2016, the agent handling Mr. Steele told him not to obtain intelligence “on behalf of the F.B.I.”

That did not stop F.B.I. agents from collecting coveted information from Mr. Steele .

???

While the F.B.I. could no longer considered him a confidential informant, former officials said, agents eager to assess the dossier as part of their counterintelligence investigation into links between Trump associates and Russia’s election interference could still document what he was telling a third party — Mr. Ohr.

you know, the dossier that wasn't that important according to Comey and Clapper

And when Mr. Ohr approached the F.B.I. about his relationship with Mr. Steele, bureau officials saw an opportunity

Mr. Ohr met with Mr. Steele almost a dozen times beginning in late 2016 through May 2017, according to congressional officials. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Ohr after the meetings and documented the information.

something they never told the FISC court

and something no one mentioned to Rod Rosenstein, according to Rosenstein

Republicans have seized on the meetings. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the Justice Department to declassify the F.B.I.’s reports on them. “It seems like he is a key player,” Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a staunch supporter of the president, told Fox News this month.

But the arrangement was not unusual, former law enforcement officials said .

Senior F.B.I. officials were aware of the Steele meetings and those involved followed internal guidelines , a former official said.

Kenneth Lowrie (long time Ohr Deputy, but retired in 2008):

“It seems that Bruce had two sins: He met with Chris Steele and his wife worked for Fusion GPS. None of that seems wrong to me,”

“Bruce is a straight arrow. He was totally nonpartisan, as we all were expected” to be.

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The stench of this FBI and DoJ are nauseating

It's the "slow march to hell in hand basket" sort of thing.
They are all going down, eventually.

I think it was Bill Shakespeare who said:
The Truth will out!

edited to add an important update

the FBI disputed the report below and there has been a modification of Mark Meadows statement

Meadows new statement:





https://dailycaller.com/2018/0...tories-spy-warrants/

An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in August that the bureau has used leaked news stories as justifications to obtain surveillance warrants against American citizens, a source familiar with the testimony tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Friday, Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told congressional investigators that the FBI and Justice Department have leaked stories to the press and then used them to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

why not just use the info from the FBI ? The danger would be if the FBI leaked their info, then used the press report as an independent source verification to the FISC court. That would be very bad.

“He more or less admitted that the FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press and then used stories from the press as justifications for FISA warrants,” a source who took part in Moffa’s interview told TheDCNF.

North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows referred to Moffa’s comments in a tweet on Monday night.

“We’ve learned NEW information suggesting our suspicions are true: FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press, and then used those same press stories as a separate source to justify FISA’s Unreal,” wrote Meadows, a member of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee.

Moffa worked closely on the Clinton email investigation with Peter Strzok, the former deputy chief of FBI’s counterintelligence division who was recently fired for sending anti-Trump text messages. Strzok and Moffa took part in the July 2, 2016 interview with Clinton about her use of a private email server to exchange classified emails

Strzok would go on to oversee the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Moffa did not work on the Trump-Russia probe

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

some initial feedback from Bruce Ohr testimony

https://www.politico.com/story...nal-interview-799031

Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official whose longtime relationship with former British spy Christopher Steele has drawn intense scrutiny from Capitol Hill Republicans, is facing questions Tuesday about the timing of his contacts with Fusion GPS, the firm that worked with Steele to create and disseminate his so-called dossier about President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.

At least seven GOP lawmakers — members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees — attended as well: Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy, John Ratcliffe, Darrell Issa, Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs.

No Democratic lawmakers were on hand , but staffers of both parties attended.

Gaetz, emerging from the interview after nearly two hours, said Ohr appeared to be answering questions forthrightly but that his testimony about the timing of his contacts with Fusion appeared to conflict with answers given to lawmakers by Fusion GPS cofounder Glenn Simpson and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.

“Either Bruce Ohr’s lying or Glenn Simpson’s lying,” Gaetz said, describing “a number of factual conflicts” between their testimony. He added that they could conceivably have competing recollections but that it will be important to bring both before the Judiciary Committee in a public hearing to sort out the facts.

Gaetz, Meadows and Issa told reporters that Ohr’s testimony revealed that the FBI had more significant doubts about the credibility of the Steele dossier than the bureau revealed when it applied for a court-ordered surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, in October 2016.

“Not only did the FBI know that the dossier was unverified, but they also knew that there were real credibility issues where it would never end up in a courtroom,” Meadows said.

Meadows added that lawmakers also learned who Ohr provided the dossier to inside the FBI when he first provided a version of it in 2016. But he declined to name the official, saying that the specifics of the interview are meant to remain confidential.

Ohr is expected to be in the closed-door interview most of the day

Ohr arriving to testify (far right in pic, not in politics)



some more updates on Ohr testimony:

Issa told reporters after Ohr had testified for nearly four hours that Ohr revealed he had multiple “handlers” at the FBI who received information he provided on Steele’s dossier, but Issa declined to name them.

“There’s quite a list of names,” he said.

Issa also said lawmakers had continuing questions about Ohr’s wife receiving “only $44,000” for her work at Fusion GPS and that Ohr himself didn’t seem familiar with all of the details of her work.

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

HAHA, great week this week. They never thought she would lose!

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
https://dailycaller.com/2018/0...tories-spy-warrants/

An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in August that the bureau has used leaked news stories as justifications to obtain surveillance warrants against American citizens, a source familiar with the testimony tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Friday, Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told congressional investigators that the FBI and Justice Department have leaked stories to the press and then used them to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
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That’s disturbing. Why isn’t Wray taking action against the perpetrators? He seems to be a swamp creature through and through.

this is extremely frustrating

Rep Ratcliffe (R) tweet:

In the four FISA applications I reviewed in their full, unreacted form , Bruce Ohr’s involvement with the Steele dossier was never disclosed.

Tonight I'll join @seanhannity on @FoxNews to discuss my questioning with Ohr about his connection to the Steele dossier.

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why isn't this being shared w the American people ? Multiple people in congress have seen the full 4 FISA applications unredacted.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
this is extremely frustrating

Rep Ratcliffe (R) tweet:

In the four FISA applications I reviewed in their full, unreacted form , Bruce Ohr’s involvement with the Steele dossier was never disclosed.

Tonight I'll join @seanhannity on @FoxNews to discuss my questioning with Ohr about his connection to the Steele dossier.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

why isn't this being shared w the American people ? Multiple people in congress have seen the full 4 FISA applications unredacted.

Congressmen have clearances and need to know. We have no clearances and mere want to know.... so far.

quote:

Congressmen have clearances and need to know. We have no clearances

That would be a very reasonable position in normal circumstances or where the FBI/DoJ were operating honestly and according to law.

We have seen repeatedly that the FBI hides their dirty tactics under a false cloak of "national security". Tactics such as spying on the Trump campaign with individuals who tried to entrap campaign workers.

Tactics such as Christopher Steele being an FBI Confidential Human Source while he complied the dossier.


We have seen part of the FISA warrants. We know right now the FBI lied multiple times to the FISC court.

Multiple Republicans who have seen the full unredacted warrants have recommended they be declassified. These folks have a good track record of being right on these matters.

So it is way beyond time to demand that the documents be made available.