It is not clear exactly what Nunes is asking for, and what DoJ is refusing to provide

However, there was similar language used when Trey Gowdy recently got to read the 2 page EC that initiated the FBI counterintelligence investigation in July 2016. This was the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded w the Russians to influence the 2016 election.

Here is a previous report that may shine some light

from 11 April 2018

http://thehill.com/policy/nati...that-prompted-russia

The Justice Department has provided House lawmakers with access to a two-page document that the FBI used as the basis for initiating its original counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

All members of the House Intelligence Committee received access to the document, a Justice Department official confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) had requested access to the unredacted document, complaining that previous "heavily" redacted versions were not adequate for committee Republicans' investigation into alleged abuses at the Justice Department.

“During the meeting, we were finally given access to a version of the [electronic communication] that contained the information necessary to advance the Committee’s ongoing investigation of the Department of Justice and FBI,” Nunes said in a statement.

According to a Justice Department official, the remaining redactions in the document are "narrowly tailored to protect the name of a foreign country and the name of a foreign agent." Specifics have been replaced with identifiers like "foreign official" and "foreign government," the official said.

"These words must remain redacted after determining that revealing the words could harm the national security of the American people by undermining the trust we have with this foreign nation," the official continued, adding that they appear "only a limited number of times, and do not obstruct the underlying meaning of the document."

A memo authored by staff for Nunes that was declassified in February affirmed that the bureau opened the probe after receiving the tip regarding Papadopoulos.

The revelation about Papadopoulos's role ran counter to claims by some Republicans that the FBI used information from an unverified dossier of opposition research into President Trump that was partially funded by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to open the probe.

*****************

So one possibility is that Nunes is trying to nail down exactly what triggered the initial investigation that Mueller has now taken charge of.

Perhaps the name that is being hidden is Christopher Steele, or it could be the Australian diplomat Downer, or someone else.

Downer was identified in a NYT article

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...ge-papadopoulos.html

From Politico.com:

quote:

The Department of Justice on Friday dismissed Rep. Devin Nunes‘ demand for an unredacted copy of the document that initiated the FBI’s investigation of links between Russia and President Donald Trump’s campaign.

In a letter released Friday, the Justice Department reaffirmed its and the FBI’s response to the House Intelligence Committee‘s inquiries regarding the document.


Nunes, who is the House Intelligence Committee chairman, on Thursday sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding an unredacted copy of that document.

The Justice Department, however, said it accommodated the committee in a “manner consistent with relevant legal precedents“ by providing members of the department and the FBI to review the FISA applications and renewals in camera.

“The Department considers this an extraordinary accommodation based on unique facts and circumstances,” according to the letter, which was signed by Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd. “We are also extending this review opportunity to the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Department will be in contact to arrange the appropriate review sessions in the near future.“

Link

None of thier previous claims of "National Security Concerns" have been substantiated.

quote:

None of thier previous claims of "National Security Concerns" have been substantiated.

Absolutely. It's just a delaying tactic. Tic toc run out the clock. Hope the dems take the house and all these inquiries will stop.

IG report due soon. We'll see.

JALLEN posted on previous page about the case coming up next week against the Russian "trolls"

This is where Mueller's team wanted to delay the proceedings.

Here is the defendants lawyer response to the Mueller team and the court.

Sure sounds like Mueller's people are one arrogant "full of themselves" bunch of operators.


http://redirect.viglink.com/?f...ower%20Line&txt=here


part of the letter which captures an email from Eric Dubelier to Jeannie Rhee (a Mueller prosecutor)




Jeannie Rhee - Mueller prosecutor

- she represented Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes during the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack

- and she represented the Clinton Foundation in 2015 against a racketeering lawsuit brought by conservative legal activist group Freedom Watch in 2015

- and she represented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a lawsuit seeking access to her private emails.

Don’t get too excited, sd, if I can call you by your first initials.

This is part of Big Time Law, which is to take every deviation from “normal” (what you want), have an army of law clerks research it and every variation all the way back to the Magna Carta, then fashion it into a complicated argument to keep the judge from thinking too much about the main issues.

The young lawyers and clerks come in at 8:00 to find these molehills on the desk in their cubicle, and they are to turn each into a mountain before they leave, hopefully in ~20 billable hours or more, each.

The best are finding ambiguities in statutes and key authorities, especially in matters of punctuation. The pinnacle of these is to argue that the language means one thing as punctuated, but if the legislature or jurist had used alternative punctuation, such as a comma instead of a semi-colon, the meaning would be closer to what the opponent wanted. If you can explain this in 20 pages, you are partnership material for sure!

You would never suspect the complexities lurking in the straight forward appearing language of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. One man’s exception is another man’s loophole!

Back to Nunes.....

quote:

In rather stunning news this morning, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes informs the listening audience he plans to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena. According to comments within a Fox News interview (see below) there is something important to Chairman Nunes the FBI and DOJ are intentionally withholding.

The issue is a little clouded because Chairman Nunes sent a classified letter to the DOJ requesting a specific response about the status of a specific person, and their engagement within issues of the DOJ and FBI conducting a counterintelligence operation. No-one knows who this “individual” might be. However the DOJ did write back to Chairman Nunes last Thursday and said they would not comply.

From Conservative Treehouse. Link

none of this has anything to do with National Security

it has EVERYTHING to do with Job Security

quote:

How are we supposed to grapple with whether the president should be compelled to testify when we don’t know what Mueller is alleging? What crime does Mueller want to ask the president about? And if there isn’t one, why are we even talking about an interview, let alone a subpoena?

From the Andrew McCarthy article, isn't this everything?

Just what in the F is Meuller alleging? Why does he need his BS questions answered? What crime is he investigating?

Normally, I'd also forcefully oppose any creepy Russian election-interfering corporations...but they sure called your bluff didn't they?

A fascinating interview of Rudy Guliani by George Stephanopoulos.




Link to original video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=REEUbagPn-k

You may grit your teeth a bit in places with Stephanopoulos, but Rudy is pretty slick, real slick.

quote:

Originally posted by Strambo:
Just what in the F is Meuller alleging? Why does he need his BS questions answered? What crime is he investigating?

ROE for a Trump interview:
1. All associates of Trump get immunity with no requirements for testimony or evidence..
2. Exoneration of Trump to be written two weeks before interview.
3. Interview not under oath.
4. Trump gets to answer, "I don't know." to every question.
5. Interview to be conducted by a long time supporter of Trump.

Judges in Virginia and Washington have the special counsel reeling.

National Review
Andrew McCarthy

Well sure, we filed an indictment. And yeah, we took a victory lap in the big bells-n-whistles Main Justice press conference. But that doesn’t mean we, like, intended to have a trial . . .

That seems to be the Justice Department’s position on its mid-February publicity stunt, the indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian businesses for interfering in the 2016 election.

Let’s back up.

The courts were not kind last week to the Justice Department’s gamesmanship on the Russia probe, also known as the Mueller investigation, an investigation in which the cases prosecutors want to try are not about Russia, and the case about Russia prosecutors don’t want to try.

First, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Paul Manafort is facing one of the two indictments against him, Judge T. S. Ellis hammered Mueller’s prosecutors over the issues we have been hammering for a year:

(a) In appointing Mueller on May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein failed to comply with federal regulations that control special-counsel investigations; and

(b) The secret August 2 memo, by which Rosenstein attempted to paper over this dereliction, is so facially uninformative and heavily redacted that the subjects of the investigation, the courts, and the public are still in the dark. The factual basis for a criminal investigation is still unknown, as are the boundaries of Mueller’s jurisdiction — with Mueller’s prosecutors paying lip service to the notion of limits, even as they argue that, essentially, there are none.

Judge Ellis was ornery with prosecutors at Friday’s hearing (Power Line’s Scott Johnson has posted the transcript here). He was particularly blunt about two other issues we’ve repeatedly highlighted:

(1) The two Manafort indictments (the one in Virginia and the other in Washington, D.C.) have nothing to do with the special counsel’s mandate to probe Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, so one can only conclude that Mueller is squeezing Manafort, the former campaign manager, to get him to cooperate against President Trump; and

(2) Mueller’s investigation is really about seeking a basis to impeach Trump.

We’ve been asking the hard questions for a long time. Now, however, the special counsel and the Justice Department are dealing with a federal judge — i.e., a skeptic they can’t afford to ignore. And for those (myself included) who are inclined to believe Manafort is a sleazeball, it bears mention that he is unlikely to benefit from Judge Ellis’s doubts about Mueller’s authority. In the end, Mueller will probably be able to keep his case on track even if he is bruised along the way.

It could be that the Justice Department relied on the unverified Steele dossier in describing the factual basis for the special counsel’s investigation. That’s something we should know.
Even if the original appointment of Mueller is infirm, Rosenstein’s August 2 memo clearly authorized him to prosecute Manafort on the offenses involving Ukraine. The judge may not like it, but the court has no business telling the Justice Department what prosecutor to assign to a case. And even if the judge is right (he is) about why Mueller is so aggressively pursuing Manafort, there is nothing illegal or unusual about that: Prosecutors pressure suspects to help roll up other suspects all the time.

The judge will pressure Mueller to disclose the currently redacted four-fifths of the Rosenstein memo, which purportedly describe Mueller’s jurisdiction in a manner compliant with federal regulations. That’s understandable. There has been too much secrecy in this investigation. The FBI has been investigating for two years (i.e., for a year before Meuller took the helm), so by now we should be told what crimes, if any, the memo says the president may have committed. To be sure, there may be good-faith reasons related to investigative secrecy and protecting the reputations of uncharged people that justify some redactions. On the other hand, as I’ve previously hypothesized (here, last section), it could be that the Justice Department relied on the unverified Steele dossier in describing the factual basis for the special counsel’s investigation. That’s something we should know, even if Rosenstein and Mueller would rather not say.

Still, let’s say Mueller sticks to his guns, refusing to disclose the memo’s description of his jurisdiction and insisting that Judge Ellis is entitled to see only the thin Manafort paragraphs that have already been revealed. If Ellis reacts by dismissing the indictment, any appeal would go to the Fourth Circuit, which after eight years of Obama has turned sharply to the left.

In that forum, it is highly likely Mueller would win . . . at least if a prosecutor can call it “winning” when the prize for getting his indictment reinstated is a trip back to the lower court, where he gets to litigate the case before the same ornery district judge he just got reversed.

Judge Friedrich and the Russian-Troll-Farm Case in Washington

When Mueller brought the only case he’s charged that involves Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, we noted that it was more theater than prosecution. The Russian defendants are all beyond U.S. jurisdiction, so there would be no trial, and thus no possibility that the allegations would ever be tested in court. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for the special counsel to try to control the narrative: an indictment asserting something that, however highly probable, would be very difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial — namely, that the Russian regime meddled in the U.S. election.

Here’s how I put it at the time:

When prosecutors are serious about nabbing law-breakers who are at large, they do not file an indictment publicly. That would just induce the offenders to flee to or remain in their safe havens. Instead, prosecutors file their indictment under seal, ask the court to issue arrest warrants, and quietly go about the business of locating and apprehending the defendants charged. In the Russia case, however, the indictment was filed publicly even though the defendants are at large. That is because the Justice Department and the special counsel know the Russians will stay safely in Russia.

Mueller’s allegations will never be tested in court. That makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument. To the extent there are questions about whether Russia truly meddled in the election, the special counsel wants to end that discussion (although his indictment will not satisfy those skeptical about Russia’s responsibility for hacking Democratic accounts, or who wonder why the FBI and Justice Department never physically examined DNC servers).

Alas, figuring that he was playing with the house money, Mueller made a reckless bet: He charged not only Russian individuals but three Russian businesses. A business doesn’t have the same risks as a person. A business can’t be thrown in jail. And while members of Mueller’s prosecutorial stable have a history of putting real businesses out of business, a business that is run by a Putin crony and serves as a front for Kremlin operations is not too worried about that either.

So . . . guess what? One of those Russian businesses, Concord Management and Consulting, wants its day in court. It has retained the Washington law firm of Reed Smith, two of whose partners, Eric Dubelier and Katherine Seikaly, have told Mueller that Concord is ready to have its trial — and by the way, let’s see all the discovery the law requires you to disclose, including all the evidence you say supports the extravagant allegations in the indictment.

Needless to say, Mueller’s team is not happy about this development since this is not a case they figured on having to prosecute to anything more than a successful press conference. So, they have sought delay on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served — notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned.

Understand, service of process is simply the means by which a party seeks what Mueller has already got: the opposing party’s appearance in the lawsuit. But Mueller’s argument is so priceless we can’t let it go unstated: In order to serve the defendants in a criminal case in which Mueller alleges that Russia is an adversary government that conducted espionage operations against the American election, the Justice Department sought the assistance of . . . yes . . . the government of Russia. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but DOJ says Russia never got back to them.

Something tells me that Concord’s appearance in court is Russia’s way of getting back to them.

Mueller risked exactly what has happened: one of the businesses showing up to contest the case at no risk, in effect forcing Mueller to show this Kremlin-connected defendant what he’s got.
The federal court in the District of Columbia has scheduled Concord’s arraignment for Wednesday, so Mueller filed his papers late last Friday to try to get the matter postponed. But, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, on Saturday evening, Judge Dabney Friedrich curtly denied Mueller’s request. Mueller’s prosecutors had suggested that weeks of briefing were necessary to probe the question of whether Concord had been served properly. As Concord has voluntarily appeared, however, it is not apparent why that question needs examination — if he wants to stand on ceremony, Mueller could just hand the lawyers a copy of the indictment when they see each other in court this week.

In fact, though, Concord’s lawyers have been scrutinizing the indictment very carefully, and making demands for discovery that they say Mueller has ignored for weeks. To put it mildly, this is not a case the special counsel is anxious to try; he is even less thrilled at the prospect of disclosing his evidence and investigative files to a business controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Apart from being close to Putin, Prigozhin is personally charged as a defendant in the case — he controls not just Concord but all three businesses charged in the indictment.

By indicting Russian businesses that belong to a Kremlin-connected defendant who cannot be forced to leave Russia, Mueller risked exactly what has happened: one of the businesses showing up to contest the case at no risk, in effect forcing Mueller to show this Kremlin-connected defendant what he’s got, even though he has no chance of getting the Kremlin-connected defendant convicted and sentenced to prison.

The surest way to put an end to this unwelcome turn of events would be to dismiss the indictment — or at least drop the charges against the three businesses so Prigozhin and the Kremlin can’t use them to force Mueller’s hand. Of course, that would be very embarrassing. But as all prosecutors are taught from their first day on the job: Never indict a case unless you are prepared to try the case.

Link

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
A fascinating interview of Rudy Guliani by George Stephanopoulos...

...You may grit your teeth a bit in places with Stephanopoulos, but Rudy is pretty slick, real slick.

What is Stephy's and the MSM's fascination with Stormy Daniel? She's a porn actress right? Can't they just rent her videos and do whatever it is they want to do where she is concerned?



.

quote:

Originally posted by TigerDore:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
A fascinating interview of Rudy Guliani by George Stephanopoulos...

...You may grit your teeth a bit in places with Stephanopoulos, but Rudy is pretty slick, real slick.

What is Stephy's and the MSM's fascination with Stormy Daniel? She's a porn actress right? Can't they just rent her videos and do whatever it is they want to do where she is concerned?



.

They think that is one way to either bring down this President or hobble him to ineffectiveness. Nothing else matters to them.

It worked for Obama, and countless others, tie the opponent to tawdry behavior, maybe catch a lie about it, a la Clinton, and down they go.

I have long thought this would be an issue for Trump. He had more ex-wives than everyone else in the race put together. He is attractive, can be quite charming and is really, really rich. He is bound to get offers he can’t refuse. If he doesn’t, what’s the point of being rich and attractive?

Anyway, he needs to do what no one else has, or can, show no shame. “Hey, I get these gold diggers bouncing off me all the time. Most I refuse, some I have paid to shut up, a few I’ve taken up, and paid them to leave and shut up.” He may have an even better explanation than that.

“In 1982, Reagan began a series of Saturday radio addresses. During these addresses, he would informally address the nation on current events. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats had an incumbent President spoken to his constituents over the radio. Initially conceived for only nine talks, the addresses’ popularity ensured that he would stay on the air for the rest of his Presidency.”

I’d like to see President Trump doing this, on radio or TV. He, too, is a good communicator.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
“In 1982, Reagan began a series of Saturday radio addresses. During these addresses, he would informally address the nation on current events. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats had an incumbent President spoken to his constituents over the radio. Initially conceived for only nine talks, the addresses’ popularity ensured that he would stay on the air for the rest of his Presidency.”

I’d like to see President Trump doing this, on radio or TV. He, too, is a good communicator.

Almost nobody listened to those things. Trump tweets, whenever the spirit moves him and everybody gets the word.

what does it mean to "contest the case at no risk" ?


****************

piggy backing,

DJT : I will be announcing my decision on the Iran Deal tomorrow from the White House at 2:00pm.

For Trump it's Tweets. Is Trump the first President to use current technology to connect with America?

I don't even have a twitter account But I hear about every one of Trumps Tweets.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
“In 1982, Reagan began a series of Saturday radio addresses. During these addresses, he would informally address the nation on current events. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats had an incumbent President spoken to his constituents over the radio. Initially conceived for only nine talks, the addresses’ popularity ensured that he would stay on the air for the rest of his Presidency.”

I’d like to see President Trump doing this, on radio or TV. He, too, is a good communicator.

Yup twitter. And he also hosts videos on there of him speaking. He has more subscribers then all the "news channels" that offer subscription news.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
“In 1982, Reagan began a series of Saturday radio addresses. During these addresses, he would informally address the nation on current events. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats had an incumbent President spoken to his constituents over the radio. Initially conceived for only nine talks, the addresses’ popularity ensured that he would stay on the air for the rest of his Presidency.”

I’d like to see President Trump doing this, on radio or TV. He, too, is a good communicator.

Almost nobody listened to those things. Trump tweets, whenever the spirit moves him and everybody gets the word.

Not everyone. I don't tweet. I do see some of them on Fox News, though.

flashguy