John Solomon of The Hill has written some very important articles about the Mueller investigation and its problems.
Here’s a new article outlining what he knows about the origin of the FBI probe, and what is being done to find out how politically motivated it was, including whether the Obama WH was running the show:

[QUOTE] Ten post-Mueller questions that could turn the tables on Russia collusion investigators
Soon, the dust will settle from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and Americans will have a fuller understanding of why prosecutors concluded there wasn’t evidence to establish that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election.

At that point, many voters exhausted by the fizzling of a two-year scandal, once billed as the next Watergate, will want to move on like a foodie from an empty-calorie shake.

But a very important second phase of this drama is about to begin, as Attorney General William Barr, Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put the Russia collusion investigators under investigation.

Their work will be, and must be, far more than just a political boomerang.

It must answer, in balanced terms, whether the FBI was warranted in using the most awesome powers in the U.S. intelligence arsenal to spy on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign at the end of the 2016 election.

Investigators must determine, with neutrality, whether the bureau improperly colluded with paid agents of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign — Fusion GPS and its British operative, Christopher Steele — and then tried to hide those political ties and other evidence from the nation’s secret intelligence court.

For the likes of FBI castoffs James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, or Obama-era intelligence bosses John Brennan and James Clapper, there will be the additional uncomfortable reality that the Russia collusion narrative that they so publicly weaved through testimony, TV appearances, for-profit books and leaks, turned out to be as unsubstantiated as the Loch Ness monster.

The process of meting out accountability has begun.

Horowitz, my sources tell me, has interviewed between 50 and 100 witnesses in his exhaustive probe. Graham and his predecessor as Judiciary chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), laid out the most important investigative issues they saw in a letter last year. This month, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DOJ identifying eight potential criminal referrals. His committee last year also released a memo on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that may have occurred during the Russia probe.

And President Trump reportedly is readying an order to declassify five key buckets of documents on alleged FBI abuses.

My sources agree these 10 questions are the most important to be answered in the forthcoming probes:

1.) When did the FBI first learn that Steele’s dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party and written by a partisan who, by his own admission, was desperate to defeat Trump? Documents and testimony I reviewed show senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr first told his colleagues about Steele’s bias and connections to Clinton in late summer 2016. Likewise, sources tell me a string of FBI emails — some before the bureau secured its first surveillance warrant — raised concerns about Steele’s motive, employer and credibility.

2.) How much evidence of innocence did the FBI possess against two of its early targets, Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page? My sources tell me that agents secured evidence of the innocence of both men from informants, intercepts and other techniques that was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges in the case. I'm told learning exactly the sort of surveillance used on Page also may surprise some people.

3.) Why was the Steele dossier used as primary evidence in the FISA warrant against Page when it had not been corroborated? FBI testimony I reviewed shows agents had just begun checking out the dossier when its elements were used as supporting evidence, and that spreadsheets kept by the bureau during the verification process validated only small pieces of the dossier while concluding other parts were false or unprovable. And, of course, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted that, after nine months of investigation, the dossier’s core allegation of Trump-Russia collusion could not be substantiated.

4.) Why were Steele’s biases and his ties to the Clinton campaign — as well as evidence of innocence and flaws in the FISA evidence — never disclosed to the FISA court, as required by law and court practice?

5.) Why did FBI and U.S. intelligence officials leak stories about evidence in the emerging Russia probe before they corroborated collusion, and were any of those leaks designed to “create” evidence that could be cited in the courts of law and public opinion to justify the continuation of a flawed investigation?

6.) Did Comey improperly handle classified information when he distributed memos of his private conversations with Trump to his lawyers and a friend and ordered a leak that he hoped would cause the appointment of a special counsel after his firing as FBI director?

7.) Did the CIA, FBI or Obama White House engage in activities — such as the activation of intelligence sources or electronic surveillance — before the opening of an official counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016?

8.) Did U.S. intelligence, the FBI or the Obama administration use or encourage friendly spy agencies in Great Britain, Australia, Ukraine, Italy or elsewhere to gather evidence on the Trump campaign, leak evidence, or get around U.S. restrictions on spying on Americans?

9.) Did the CIA or Obama intelligence apparatus try to lure or pressure the FBI into opening a Trump collusion probe or acknowledge its existence before the election? Text messages between alleged FBI lovebirds Strzok and Page raised concerns about “pressure” from the White House, the “Agency BS game,” DOJ leaks and the need for an FBI “insurance policy.” And, as Strzok texted at one point in August 2016, quoting a colleague: “The White House is running this.”

10.) Did any FBI agents, intelligence officials or other key players in the probe provide false testimony to Congress? McCabe already has been singled out by the inspector general for lying about a media leak to an internal DOJ probe, and evidence emerged this year that calls into question Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony about his contacts with Ohr.

If Barr, Horowitz and Graham can answer these questions and release the still-secret evidence underlying their conclusions, Americans finally will have the wherewithal to answer the most troubling of all the questions raised about the Russia collusion narrative:

Was this a case of bureaucratic bungling, or an intentional effort to use the U.S. intelligence community for a political dirty trick aimed at defeating Trump at the polls and, later, delegitimizing his election?

It’s a question we all should want to be answered.

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. [QUOTE]

I don't think I can embed this little video at the end, but this guy showing that CNN CLOWN Brian Stelter's tweets before and after the report was released is pretty hilarious:


Ladies and gentleman, I give you @CNN’s @brianstelter around 7am this morning. Then, three hours later...



Then look at the clip of Trump dealing with CNN:

Trump vs CNN

Just a few miscellaneous comments as I am slowly reading the Mueller report.

1
Clapper said, “I think, if there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion, where, in some cases, unwittingly — to include candidate Trump himself, who retweeted messages that had been planted by the Russians in social media, and so, that’s a small, but important example of how members of the campaign were used and manipulated by the Russians.”

An example in the Mueller Report (page 42) was that Donald Trump responded to a tweet from an IRA controlled account. The tweet he responded to was “We love you, Mr. President!”

Hard hitting stuff 
"passive collusion"

2
The report emphasizes how big the Russian social media effort was in the 2016 election. It says “according to Facebook” the posts may have reached an estimated 126 million people.

A Washington Post article from May 2018

https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.1d47d4453c8a

About 60 % of the clicks on the Russian Facebook ads occurred after the election. After the election.


“The most popular ad campaign was the one below, encouraging people to support the police. It was targeted generally to American adults with an interest in supporting law enforcement”

3

Think about how many times protesters interrupted the Trump rallies. How about the Trump rally in Chicago where the protesters were so violent and in such large numbers that the rally was canceled due to safety concerns.

A little perspective

4
On page 110 the report says Carter Page got media attention in the summer of 2016, and the Trump campaign then “distanced” itself from Page.

The specific example of “media attention” in the report is the September 23, 2016 Yahoo story written by Isikoff.




The report doesn’t mention that this is the article that Christopher Steele fed to Isikoff . That 23 Sept 2016 article was straight from the dossier material but before the dossier was even known to the public.

This is the same article that is in the FISA warrants against Carter Page where the FBI states that the article is “independent” of Steele’s work. It was not independent. Not only not independent, it was sourced by Steele directly to Isikoff. The report didn’t mention that.

Granted it's an opinion piece, but surprised to see in on CNN....

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/0...-jennings/index.html

quote:

Mueller's report looks bad for Obama
By Scott Jennings
Updated 1:06 PM EDT, Fri April 19, 2019


Editor's Note: (Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.)

(CNN) The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.

Scott Jennings
Scott Jennings
The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump".

Why did Obama go soft on Russia? My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.


Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

The Mueller report is shocking
The Mueller report is shocking
But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

A legitimate question Republicans are asking is whether the potential "collusion" narrative was invented to cover up the Obama administration's failures. Two years have been spent fomenting the idea that Russia only interfered because it had a willing, colluding partner: Trump. Now that Mueller has popped that balloon, we must ask why this collusion narrative was invented in the first place.

Given Obama's record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They've blamed Trump. They've even blamed Mitch McConnell, in some twisted attempt to deflect blame to another branch of government. Joe Biden once claimed McConnell refused to sign a letter condemning the Russians during the 2016 election. But McConnell's office counters that the White House asked him to sign a letter urging state electors to accept federal help in securing local elections -- and he did. You can read it here.

I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.

But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama's alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis-à-vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.

If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama's White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.

I found this very interesting, if you are short on time you can skip to th 7:30 mark for the most interesting part.

This jerk. I'm ashamed that he is my Senator.

Romney: ‘I am sickened’ at revelations from Mueller report
POSTED 2:38 PM, APRIL 19, 2019, BY DAVID WELLS

SALT LAKE CITY — U.S. Senator Mitt Romney on Friday released a statement with his reaction to the findings outlined in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.


“I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia—including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.”

Romney also said “it is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice.”

Read Sen. Romney’s full statement:

It is good news that there was insufficient evidence to charge the President of the United States with having conspired with a foreign adversary or with having obstructed justice. The alternative would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis.

Even so, I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia—including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.

Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.

http://via.fox13now.com/DJeBv

I think Romney should run in the 2020 primary against the President—-I think it would show that he is popular only in Utah.

I tried to think of something clever to say about what a satchel of richards he is, but theres no point. No opinion Romney has matters to anyone but him. Its just more verbal diarrhea from a washed up Rhino.

A gang of Democrats and RINOs are attacking the president, so Mittens joins in to stick a knife in his back. What a cowardly little loser.

Hard to believe I was so excited by Romney/Ryan in 2012. They would have been far better than Obama, but they have both been real drags on the Donald Trump Presidency. Elites who can't get out of the way of a down-to-earth street fighter who is intent on getting the job done.

and

that list of 10 questions in sjtill's post above is a great set of questions. It would be quite a kick to go on full attack offense.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
This jerk. I'm ashamed that he is my Senator.

Romney: ‘I am sickened’ at revelations from Mueller report
POSTED 2:38 PM, APRIL 19, 2019, BY DAVID WELLS

I wonder how he would feel had he one the presidency then be accused treason by 1/2 of America, 90% of the media, and sections of Congress that should have had access to intelligence and misused their position of authority. Then further imagine being under my one of the largest investigations in history.

I bet you he'd be pissed as hell and try to get the BS investigation ended.

The examples of obstruction in the report are stupid. He told Christy to tell Comey he likes him. Are you kidding me? Weird and pointless, but not an example of obstruction. He was mad as hell, I would.

I don't think Romeney would have survived the attempted coup.

quote:

I don't think Romeney would have survived the attempted coup.

I don't think Romney could survive a hangnail.

If it were Romney instead of Trump enduring all the collusion allegations, endless investigations and other criticism, he would have folded like origami. Bet on it.

Mittens needs to sit down and STFU. If Uncle Trump wants his opinion, he will beat it out of him. Regards 18DAI

No clue who this guy is, but it worth a long watch.




Link to original video: https://youtu.be/gn9q7JEscqY

^^^ If that's the first you've heard of VDH you need to read his columns too. Brilliant.

Skins, your comment would have warranted at the very least a “rolleyes” emoji from JAllen, who used to post VDH’s columns frequently, as did I.

E-mail incoming!

I am sure I read them all, just didn't pay attention to authors names. I am pretty sure I read every single post he made, and a large majority of yours.

Either way, I enjoyed the video a lot, I think you might too.