sdy,

I get the first 2 letters of your username:
Steele Dossier

But what does the y stand for?

I hesitate to post this, because it is in the category "I really want this to be true",

https://www.washingtonexaminer...ks-joe-digenova-says

A "bombshell" report on former FBI Director James Comey is coming out in two weeks, attorney Joe diGenova said on Wednesday.

we need another word for "bombshell" since we have had some duds in the past

He made the declaration during a Fox News panel discussion on alleged government surveillance abuse.

"The Horowitz report is coming out in May or possibly early June," Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said. He was referring to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation.

"There’s another report that everyone has forgotten about involving James Comey alone," diGenova said. "That will be out in two weeks. That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and there are going to be criminal referrals in it."

He did not elaborate on what report he expects out in two weeks and how he came to find out about the timeline for its release.

diGenova also spoke about a "scheme" to harm Trump. He singled out former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI General Counsel James Baker, and Comey.

"The problem for Brennan and Clapper and Comey and Baker and all of them now is the FISA Court has already communicated with the Justice Department about its findings," diGenova said, noting how the unverified dossier written by British spy Christopher Steele is a main factor

"And their findings are that for more than four years before the election of Donald Trump there was an illegal spying operation going on by FBI contractors, four of them, to steal information — electronic information — on Americans and to use it against the Republican Party," he added. "There are going to be indictments. There are going to be grand juries. John Brennan is not going to need one lawyer. He’s going to need five."

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If the FISA court got pissed about being lied to, and started working with the new DoJ, this would be one of the best things to get to the truth

there have been many reports that Mueller was holding other investigations up because anything they did would "interfere" w his SC investigation. Perhaps the logjam has broken.

quote:

But what does the y stand for?

nice try, but sdy has been around for 17 years

I know what lbj stands for, sdy is very similar

it keeps some old friends fresh in my memories

quote:

Originally posted by lbj:
sdy,

I get the first 2 letters of your username:
Steele Dossier

But what does the y stand for?

All this exciting news makes the Mueller Report a little dull, but I thought getting Mueller's obstruction items posted would help us all understand the developing DEM game plan to attempt impeachment. Hopefully these other promising reports will take the wind out of the impeachment sail.

3 more to go

#9



more Mueller leaks ?

While in hindsight it was best not to fire Mueller, I would argue that Donald Trump had legitimate reasons to fire the man who was orchestrating and setting the stage for the DEMs to impeach. All based on lies and fabrications. A huge political hit job was the Mueller investigation. Donald Trump knew it.

Possible synonyms for "bombshell": revelation, stunner, thunderbolt.

flashguy

Start the indictments already.
It's frog march time.

#10



I feel really bad for Flynn. He got screwed royally. But that was by Sally Yates, Comey and Mueller.

Manafort got destroyed by Mueller's team. They had over 600,000 pieces of documents against him. Manafort was not an honest man, but he was trapped as Mueller squeezed him and he didn't have anything on Trump. At least, as Dershowitz says, he didn't "compose".

So Mueller wants to use Flynn and Manafort as obstruction examples where in both cases Mueller unleashed the full power of his prosecutors

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
for more than four years before the election of Donald Trump there was an illegal spying operation going on by FBI contractors, four of them, to steal information — electronic information — on Americans and to use it against the Republican Party,"

The Unmaskings? There might be something bigger here than just the attempted Coup. How about this all goes back to obama- Presidential Daily Briefings anyone??

#11 the last one



Right here Mueller says Cohen discussed a pardon. Cohen testified he never asked for one.

The President called him a "rat". What do you call a lawyer who secretly records and stores all your phone conversations ?

A lot of smoke about a project that never happened (Trump hotel in Moscow)



xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

so that is it. Mueller's 11 items he has handed off to the DEMs.

Mueller didn't make a recommendation about obstruction. Why not ?

Mueller's own words:

A federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would ... "potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct"

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:

Mueller's own words:

A federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would ... "potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct"

All I know is that if the Dems attempt an impeachment, it will be time to storm the Halls of Congress, place Pelosi, Nads, et al under citizen's arrest and frog march them out of the building.



.

quote:

Originally posted by TigerDore:
....frog march them out of the building.

OR like Cersei Lannister's atonement walk in Game of Thrones. Except clothed, of course. I could get behind that.

Right down Pennsylvania Avenue...

SHAME!
[ding ding]

SHAME!
[ding ding]

SHAME!
[ding ding]

Johnson: Special Counsel Mueller - Disingenuous And Dishonest

"While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice. A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team."


Interesting - looks like its more about what Mueller chose to not include in the report than actually include. That in and of itself is worth grilling Mueller as to why he chose not to include pertinent, relevant items that were obviously left out and why - this HUGE report and significant details just poof, left out of a 448 page report

WSJ Kim Strassel has a similar report to the one posted above


https://www.wsj.com/articles/t...-dossier-11556232721

The Russians and the Dossier

by Kim Strassel

Politicians keep reminding us not to lose sight of special counsel Robert Mueller’s broader assignment: to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. If only someone had reminded Mr. Mueller.

One of the biggest failures of the Mueller probe concerns not what was in the final report, but what was not.

Close readers will search in vain for any analysis of the central document in this affair: the infamous “dossier.”

It’s a stunning omission, given the possibility that the Russians used that collection of reports to feed disinformation to U.S. intelligence agencies , sparking years of political maelstrom.

The dossier—compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee—fed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media the principal allegations of the “collusion” narrative. It claimed Paul Manafort was at the center of a “well-developed” Trump-Russia “conspiracy”; that Carter Page served as his intermediary, conducting secret meetings with a Kremlin official and the head of a state energy company; that Michael Cohen held a clandestine meeting in Prague with Vladimir Putin cronies; and that the Russians had compromising material on Donald Trump, making him vulnerable to blackmail. The dossier was clearly important to the FBI probe. Its wild claims made up a significant section of the FBI’s application for a secret surveillance warrant on Mr. Page.

The Mueller report exposes the dossier claims as pure fiction . Yet in describing the actions of the Trump campaign figures the FBI accused, the report assiduously avoids any mention of the dossier or its allegations. Mr. Mueller refers to Mr. Steele and his work largely in passing, as part of the report’s description of how former FBI Director James Comey informed Mr. Trump of the dossier’s existence. The dossier is blandly described several times as “unverified allegations compiled” by Mr. Steele.

Once Mr. Mueller established that the dossier was a pack of lies, he should have investigated how it gained such currency at the highest levels of the FBI. Yet his report makes clear he had no interest in plumbing the antics of the bureau, which he led from 2001-13. Instead, he went out of his way to avoid the dossier and give cover to the FBI.

The special counsel had another, more pressing reason to look at the dossier: It fell within his core mission. Since its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017, we’ve learned enough about Mr. Steele and Fusion GPS to wonder if the Russians used the dossier for their own malign purposes.

In the first telling, Mr. Steele was described by friendly media as simply a “former Western intelligence official” with a history at Britain’s overseas intelligence service. It turns out he worked in Russia. Mr. Steele spent his first years of service under diplomatic cover in Moscow, later in Paris. And in 1999 he was among 117 British spies whose covers were publicly blown by a disgruntled ex-MI6 officer.

The former spy, known to the public and therefore to Russia, also became known for sending reports to the U.S. government. Last year former Obama State Department official Jonathan Winer explained that in 2009 he became friendly with the self-employed Mr. Steele, and starting as early as 2013 ensured that “more than 100 of Steele’s reports” on Russia topics were shared with the State Department. Given that the dossier is largely based on Russian sources, some supposedly connected to the Kremlin, did the Kremlin know about this arrangement and see an opportunity to spoon-feed the U.S. government disinformation?

We’ve also learned more about Mr. Steele’s and Fusion’s connections to Russians. Mr. Steele sent a series of emails to Justice Department employee Bruce Ohr in 2016 inquiring about the status of a visa for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch with Kremlin ties. Fusion GPS was working alongside Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016. Fusion was hired as part of a team to help Ms. Veselnitskaya undermine Bill Browder, the man behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that imposes sanctions on Russians for corruption and human-rights violations.

How did Mr. Mueller spend two years investigating every aspect of Russian interference—cyberhacking, social-media trolling, meetings with Trump officials—and not consider the possibility that the dossier was part of the Russian interference effort?

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Attorney General William Barr may answer some of the questions Mr. Mueller refused to touch. Thanks to the special counsel we know Republicans weren’t playing footsie with Russians. But thanks to BuzzFeed, we know that Democrats were. America deserves to know how far that interaction extended.

The plot thickens.

https://thehill.com/opinion/wh...yTYRWjvnCFzFnvAjyEoY


------------------------------

How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost


As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia’s most critical neighbor.

The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), the FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).

The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long — during the meetings and afterward — to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump.

U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, then a political officer in the Ukraine embassy in Washington tasked with organizing the meeting.

Telizhenko, who no longer works for the Ukraine embassy, said U.S. officials volunteered during the meetings — one of which was held in the White House’s Old Executive Office Building — that they had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions.

That 2014 investigation was led by the FBI and focused heavily on GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort, whose firm long had been tied to Trump through his partner and Trump pal, Roger Stone.

Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about whether he received undeclared payments from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying.

The FBI shut down the case without charging Manafort.

Telizhenko said he couldn’t remember whether Manafort was mentioned during the January 2016 meeting. But he and other attendees recalled DOJ officials asking investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they could help locate new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments and its dealings with Americans.

“It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election,” he said.

That makes the January 2016 meeting one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration’s intervention.

Spokespeople for the NSC, DOJ and FBI declined to comment. A representative for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice did not return emails seeking comment.

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn’t remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed.

But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort — a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions — was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman: “Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious.”

Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share the ledger with the media. “Look, Manafort’s case is one of the cases that hurt me a lot,” he said.

“I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort.

“For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial,” he added.

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions case.

“Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public,” he recalled.

Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”

Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.

NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.

A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And a member of Ukraine’s parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, he said, involved Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15, bank records show.

Telizhenko said U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down.

The Ukrainian embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.

"Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings," it said. It said it had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the meetings it did attend.

Ukraine is riddled with corruption, Russian meddling and intense political conflicts, so one must carefully consider any Ukrainian accounts.

But Telizhenko’s claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ’s own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ through her husband during the election.

DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the “black ledger” documents that led to Manafort’s prosecution.

“Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ Black Cashbox,” Nellie Ohr wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching a news article on the announcement of NABU’s release of the documents.

Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured business relationship with him. Deripaska was “almost ready to talk” to U.S. government officials regarding the money that “Manafort stole,” Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele.

The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous.

Previously, Politico reported that the Ukraine Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton’s campaign through a DNC contractor. The Ukraine Embassy acknowledges it got requests for assistance from the DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort but denies it provided any improper assistance.

Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled.

But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports



.

Michael Horowitz is DoJ IG

He has a large team (500 or so), but he also does a lot of investigations.

There is a website of his ongoing work:

https://oig.justice.gov/ongoing/all.htm

A few that may turn out to be especially interesting:



"certain U.S. person" is believed to be Carter Page

"FBI confidential source" is believed to be Christopher Steele

Christopher Steele declined to meet with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General on the grounds that it would be improper for him to take part “in an internal Justice Department investigation as a foreign national and former British intelligence agent,”

(from Politico and DailyCaller)

but Steele thought it was "proper" to take part in a conspiracy to provide lies to influence a U.S. Presidential election





Steele was definitely an FBI CHS

"determining reliability" hmmmm

Stefan Halper is suspected of being an FBI CHS

Geo Papadopoulos suspects that Joseph Mifsud was an FBI CHS.




xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

diff topic

TigerDore's post above is quite a story from John Solomon.

In describing FBI/DoJ interest in Paul Manafort in Jan 2016, does that tie in to Nunes recent statement that the spying on the Trump campaign began late 2015/early 2016 ?

and the second part of the story is that it appears Joe Biden influenced a Ukrainian investigation into Biden's son.

I'm sharing this video post from Twitter because I just found it so very satisfying. Buck Sexton from Hill TV telling it how it is to some silly, clueless democrat.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hil.../1121482089373863937

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Balzé Halzé,

Balze,

That DEM in the video is more than a complete idiot. He is a liar flat out saying absurdities to the audience. Sexton had exactly the proper reaction to that clown.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

diff topic

I thought I was done w the Mueller Report after noting the 11 items that Mueller called out as obstruction "items".

but I had stopped at page 218.


I thought it best to read the whole report. Especially since the focus has swung so hard to "obstruction".

There will be more posts on Vol II of the report. Even though I have only gone thru another 15 pages, it is clear there are some important points to bring out.

On page 221 Mueller explains why he had jurisdiction to address obstruction.

Mueller references the appointment letter and "Special Counsel regulations" 28 CFR 600.4(a)

That regulation is called out in the May 2017 appointment letter.





From the regulation:

§ 600.4 Jurisdiction.

(a)Original jurisdiction. The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall be established by the Attorney General. The Special Counsel will be provided with a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated. The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall also include the authority to investigate and prosecute federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel's investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice , destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; and to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

so after finding nothing about the main topic of the appointment letter, Mueller fell back on the jurisdiction provided by the SC regulation that covers the General Powers of Special Counsel. But he was indeed empowered to do so.

One of the new things in Vol II that really leaped out was this on page 228:



The footnote "16" is a Politico article "Who is Carter Page?" from Sep 23, 2016

Sep 23, 2016. That hit me like a brick. The same day that Yahoo put out the story about Carter Page with false smear info directly from Christopher Steele.

Certainly there wouldn't be any of that in the Mueller referenced Politico article ? It was .

From:

https://www.politico.com/magaz...man-in-moscow-214283

23 Sep 2016

a real hit job on Carter Page. From the Politico article:













Mueller used as a reference in his arguments for obstruction an article that was full of Steele dossier claims that have been disproven.

So in a way, Mueller didn't completely ignore the dossier, he referenced the wild claims as if they were true.