quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
Fox just reported that Pres. Trump has sent a letter declining to declassify the Democrat produced memo, but offering to work woth Democrats to produce a memo that meets everyone’s requirements while preserving sources and methods.

Damn, I was hoping he'd declassify it along with the source documents in a "Fuck You! I am Millwall!" moment.

He's negotiating something.



.

Transparent trap by the dirty dems. Try again jerks.

They wanted it released redacted so the only thing left was the personal attacks on Gowdy and Nunes, then they could whine about being censored wink wink.

Here is the letter from the White House with the letter from DOJ.

There were several events that seemed bad at the time, but in retrospect helped us a lot.

1. Someone gave Buzzfeed the full dossier. Buzzfeed published it.

The only person known to have been given the full dossier is David Kramer. Fusion GPS gave it to him to take to John McCain. Simpson and McCain say they did not give it to Buzzfeed.

All of the briefs that Steele gave to the media in September and October 2016 were verbal.

Without Buzzfeed publishing it, we would not have known what the FBI was using to open an investigation and get the FISA warrant on Page.

We would be very much in the dark. Publishing the dossier was a big blow to the conspirators. Glenn Simpson was not happy to see it published.

2. Buzzfeed published most of the dossier and they blacked out 6 short sections. But they didn’t black out the company name Webzilla.

The dossier claims Webzilla transmitted viruses, planted bugs, stole data, and conducted “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership.

Webzilla sued Buzzfeed in Florida. Webzilla also sued Steele in London. These cases are ongoing. Some of the depositions from Steele’s lawyers have shown Steele to be not so certain of his dossier. Those depositions stated that Steele gave verbal briefs to NYT, WashPost, Yahoo News, New Yorker, and CNN in September 2016.

The Grassley memo cites that lawsuit material where Steele admits he released the contents of the dossier to some media in September 2016.

That is important because it shows the Isikoff memo is not an independent source of the dossier material.

Steele’s lawyers are fighting in London to keep Steele from being forced to give a deposition in person. Steele claims his sources would be in danger and UK national security would be weakened.


Sidenotes:
a. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has filed a $100 million lawsuit against Steele (Cohen is named in the dossier as being the chief interface to the Kremlin)

b. In the Grassley memo, footnote 7 says the FBI has not provided the 1023 forms documenting all of Steele’s testimony to the FBI

FBI is still playing games

If this report is correct, things will get very ugly for the FBI/DOJ pro-Hillary / anti-Trump conspirators...

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member Chris Stewart appeared on Fox News with Judge Jeanine Pirro, and didn’t want to “make news” or spill the beans, but the unstated, between-the-lines, discussion was as subtle as a brick through a window. Judge Jeannie has been on the cusp of this for a few weeks.

Listen carefully around 2:30, Judge Jeanine hits the bulls-eye; and listen to how Chris Stewart talks about not wanting to make news and is unsure what he can say on this…



Bill Priestap is cooperating.

When you understand how central E.W. “Bill” Priestap was to the entire 2016/2017 ‘Russian Conspiracy Operation‘, the absence of his name, amid all others, created a curiosity. I wrote a twitter thread about him last year and wrote about him extensively, because it seemed unfathomable his name has not been a part of any of the recent story-lines.

E.W. “Bill” Priestap is the head of the FBI Counterintelligence operation. He was FBI Agent Peter Strozk’s direct boss. If anyone in congress really wanted to know if the FBI paid for the Christopher Steele Dossier, Bill Priestap is the guy who would know everything about everything.

FBI Asst. Director in charge of Counterintelligence Bill Priestap was the immediate supervisor of FBI Counterintelligence Deputy Peter Strzok.

Bill Priestap is #1. Before getting demoted Peter Strzok was #2.

The investigation into candidate Donald Trump was a counterintelligence operation. That operation began in July 2016. Bill Priestap would have been in charge of that, along with all other, FBI counterintelligence operations.

FBI Deputy Peter Strzok was specifically in charge of the Trump counterintel op. However, Strzok would be reporting to Bill Priestap on every detail and couldn’t (according to structure anyway) make a move without Priestap approval.

https://theconservativetreehou...stewart/#more-145720

Townhall.com
Bruce Bialosky
February 11, 2018

I am no Shakespearean scholar, but I do know the line from Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.“ That is what came to mind leading up to the release of the Intelligence Committee “FISA memo.” There were many who did not want us to see it, but there is a lot they still are not telling us.

When the memo was released I devoured it. After all, the buildup was monumental. The head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, had spent a reported hour and a half reading it. Then he sent over to two more people to review the memo – one each from the Bureau’s counterintelligence and legal divisions. I read it. It took seven minutes.

Any person who has been following the developments of the Russian Saga learned virtually nothing new. The players had become as familiar as my local baseball team. There were maybe two revelations in here:

1. A positive confirmation that the Steele Dossier was submitted to a judge as if it were not a work of fiction.

2. That Andrew McCabe, then the second in command at the FBI, told a Congressional committee there would have been no FISA submittal without the dossier.

There were no “sources and methods” as maliciously stated by Adam Schiff (D-CA) who is the minority leader on the Intelligence committee. There was little that had not been leaked by both sides.

What are they not telling you:

1. We are not grown up enough to know basic facts about what is a major investigation hanging over a presidential administration from Day One. Only the insiders and their favored members of the press are deemed worthy of knowing the facts.

2. Because the press must protect the establishment they are supposed to investigate, they will not point out the obvious: if the establishment is hyperventilating over the public reading a memo crafted by members of a congressional committee responsible for oversight, then what are they really hiding?

3. The establishment is more interested in protecting itself than protecting us. The FBI and Justice Department wanted the names (ones we already know) redacted. If they did something wrong, they must be shielded from exposure to the public they are hired to protect. They will leak names about citizens charged with crimes of which they may never be convicted, but never ever leak the name of a department employee implicated.

4. They convulse about this memo destroying the reputation of the FBI and DOJ. Contrary to that thinking, it is the people named in this memo and their cohorts who are destructive to the reputation. This is very akin to Lois Lerner and her gang of criminals at the IRS who illegally thwarted organizations from forming nonprofits. The poor IRS people in the field suffered because of budget cutbacks. These good people at the IRS had their reputations impugned and their careers harmed.

Just like that, the FBI agent in Fargo chasing bank criminals will be harmed by the damage done by the people in the memo. So will the U.S. Attorney in Denver. It is not the people who wrote the memo and released the info.

5. The only people talking about firing Bob Mueller are the Democrats trying to whip up a controversy over nothing. Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) caused this recently with a false report of Trump considering firing Mueller: the purpose of which was to create a discussion over nothingness, and many Dems fell in line with a talking point about nothing. The New York Times whipped it up again to defer from the focus on the President at Davos – a story about nothing from seven months ago that had not been acted upon and to the contrary Trump had cooperated for seven months after that with Mueller. At this point, President Trump has expressed nothing about firing Mueller or Rosenstein.

One of the big revelations supposedly is that the investigation did not begin with the dossier; it began with George Papadopoulos. Even David French of the National Review wrote a column about this.

What they are not telling you:

1. The dossier was supposedly started by a Republican (Paul Singer) during the primaries as he hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump. Here is the lie there – whatever was paid for by Singer was his work product not part of the Steele dossier. Once Trump won the nomination and the Democrats in their devious way (through a couple of layers to hide who was the actual customer) engaged Fusion GPS, it would have been highly unethical for the company to turn over the work product of one customer to another. That would have been Singer’s to do. This dossier started all over and that is why they engaged Steele to gin up this Russian story.

2. We better hope that the Russian investigation did not start with Papadopoulos. Let us get what is being asserted here: a third-rate, 30-year-old who had no creditability and no assigned authority with the Trump campaign had a conversation with the Australian ambassador. In a world-class act of puffery, he asserts some story to the ambassador who then takes that to the FBI.

If our FBI started an investigation into a presidential campaign based on this then we have more serious problems than we thought. If our professional staff responsible for protecting us from evil actors has no more common sense than to investigate this we are in serious, serious trouble. At least the dossier was used to investigate Carter Page (who has some legitimate ties to Russia) instead of someone who is a child trying to act like an adult.

What the Trump campaign is guilty of is working with some possibly questionable characters like Page, Manafort and Papadopoulos. That does not mean they did anything improper. It just means when you mount an insurgent campaign against the establishment, the standard establishment figures may not want to be or may not be wanted as part of that campaign.

What the establishment and the press will not tell you about this whole memo episode is:

1. It appears our system is at such odds because the separation between the parties has become so deep, it is not reconcilable soon.

2. It is not Trump who caused this; he has just brought it to a head. That members of an opposing political party would behave so demonstrably negative in front of the 45 million Americans (at the State of the Union address) means they don’t even care to put on a reasonable face. Watching the Democrats sit in the House Chamber like they did should sadden any American. To think that is what we have come to is tragic.

Charges and countercharges. Lies and more lies. Our government is out of control (not irredeemably). If Putin wanted to think of a scheme to disrupt our country, he could have never dreamt of something so nefarious. Of course, this would not even be a discussion if she would have won.

Can we please get back to running this government for the people?

Link

I’m reading the transcript of the Simpson interview by the HPSCI. Simpson is the head of Fusion GPS which produced the dossier based on “intel” from Christopher Steele.

Starting at page 78, Simpson is questioned about getting a contact from the FBI. He says Steele had given the dossier to the FBI in the summer. He didn't hear anything until he had contact with Bruce Ohr, “someone that Chris knows” after the election, around Thanksgiving. He met with Ohr at a coffee shop. In the discussion about Ohr and the meeting, there is no mention whatsoever that Ohr’s wife worked, was working, or had worked, for Fusion GPS, which Simpson owned.

Simpson leaves the impression that Ohr is someone Steele knew, not known to Simpson prior.

Interesting that the Congressmen and FBI officials cannot discuss or remove documents outside a SCIF, but these guys meet and talk about the info, presumably, at a coffee shop.

NY Post
Michael Goodwin


For law enforcement, Congress and even journalists, exposing misdeeds is like peeling an onion. Each layer you remove gets you closer to the truth.

So it is with the scandalous behavior of the FBI during its probe into whether President Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia in 2016. One layer at a time, we’re learning how flawed and dirty that probe was.

A top layer involves the texts between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and her married lover, Peter Strzok, the lead agent on the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe. They casually mention an “insurance policy” in the event Trump won the election and a plan for Strzok to go easy on Clinton because she probably would be their next boss.

Those exchanges, seen in the light of subsequent events, lead to a reasonable conclusion that the fix was in among then-Director James Comey’s team to hurt Trump and help Clinton.

Another layer involves the declassified House memo, which indicates the FBI and Justice Department depended heavily on the unverified Russian dossier about Trump to get a warrant to spy on Carter Page, an American citizen and briefly a Trump adviser.

The House memo also reveals that Comey and others withheld from the secret surveillance court key partisan facts that would have cast doubt on the dossier. Officials never revealed to the judges that the document was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee or that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, said he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.”

A third layer of the onion involves the revelations in the letter GOP Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham wrote to the Justice Department. They urge a criminal investigation into whether Steele lied to the FBI about how much and when he fed the dossier to the anti-Trump media.

The letter is compelling in showing that Steele said one thing under oath to a British court and something different to the FBI. The contradictions matter because the agency relied on Steele’s credibility in both the FISA applications and its actual investigation. Strangely, even after it fired him for breaking its rule forbidding media contact, the FBI continued to praise his credibility in court.

If that were all the senators’ letter accomplished, it would be enough. But it does much more.

It also reveals that two former journalists linked to Clinton, separately identified as the odious Sidney Blumenthal and a man named Cody Shearer, created and gave a State Department official additional unverified allegations against Trump.

The official passed those documents to Steele, who passed them to the FBI, which reportedly saw them as further evidence that Trump worked with Russians. But as Grassley, head of the Judiciary Committee, and Graham write, “It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.”


The State Department official involved in the episode, Jonathan Winer, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post Friday in which he confessed to the senators’ chronology while offering a benign description of his motives. Winer also admitted he shared all the unverified allegations from the Clinton hitmen with other State Department officials.

There are many more layers of the onion to peel, but here’s where we are now: It increasingly appears that the Clinton machine was the secret, original source of virtually all the allegations about Trump and Russia that led to the FBI investigation.

In addition, the campaign and its associates, including Steele, were behind the explosion of anonymously sourced media reports during the fall of 2016 about that investigation.

Thus, the Democratic nominee paid for and created allegations against her Republican opponent, gave them to law enforcement, then tipped friendly media to the investigation. And it is almost certain FBI agents supporting Clinton were among the anonymous sources.

In fact, the Clinton connections are so fundamental that there probably would not have been an FBI investigation without her involvement.

That makes hers a brazen work of political genius — and perhaps the dirtiest dirty trick ever played in presidential history. Following her manipulation of the party operation to thwart Bernie Sanders in the primary, Clinton is revealed as relentlessly ruthless in her quest to be president.

The only thing that went wrong is that she lost the election. And based on what we know now, her claims about Trump were false.

Of the charges against four men brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, none involves helping Russia interfere with the election.

And neither the FBI nor Mueller has vouched for the truthfulness of the Blumenthal and Shearer claims or the Steele dossier. ­Instead, the dossier faces defamation lawsuits in the US and England from several people named in it.

In fairness, one person besides Steele has been cited as justification for the FBI probe. George Papadopoulos, a bit but ambitious player in the Trump orbit, met with a professor in Europe early in 2016 who told him the Kremlin had Clinton’s private e-mails.

In May 2016, Papadopoulos told the story to an Australian diplomat and two months later, in July, the Australian government alerted the FBI.

However, a full timeline convincingly points to Steele as the initial spark. He was hired by a Clinton contractor in June of 2016, and filed his first allegations against Trump on June 20. Two weeks later, on July 5, he met with an FBI agent in London, The Washington Post reported, and filed three more allegations that month, including one about Carter Page.

At any rate, it is certain that Steele and other Clinton operators provided all the allegations about Trump himself that the FBI started with and that Mueller inherited.

For Clinton, creating a cloud over Trump’s presidency and helping to put the nation through continuing turmoil is a victory of sorts. America is fortunate it’s her only victory.

Link

There were many things that Simpson to congress that sounded very odd.

Simpson said he was never contacted by the FBI.

Imagine that -- the FBI is going all out in an investigation including FISA warrants, all based on the dossier, but they never talked to the company that funded Steele.

Grassley needs to get the 1023 forms that document Steele's inputs to the FBI.

When are those news media that Steele briefed, going to write about what he told them in Sept/Oct 2016 ?

Steele's story was so unverified, that they sat on this block buster story except for Isikoff.

of course if any of them had published the full dossier, that would have made convincing the FISA court a lot harder.

We are watching a first class conspiracy becoming revealed.

Like Adam Schiff is trying to get out a memo that attacks the Nunes memo, Diane Feinstein put out a memo that attacked Grassley’s memo.

House Intel Comm: Nunes chair, Schiff ranking member (leading DEM)
Senate Judiciary Comm: Grassley chair, Feinstein ranking member

Some comments on Feinstein’s memo:

She says the Grassley memo makes a criminal referral of Steele, but the memo is “clearly” just to undermine the FBI special counsel Mueller.

Truth: Grassley points out a factual lie to the FISA court, and asks DoJ if the court was lied to by Steele or the FBI.

Feinstein: “The criminal referral is not based on any allegation that Steele lied or misrepresented facts …”

Truth: note how clever those words are. Grassley didn’t say Steele lied to the FBI. He said either Steele lied or the FBI lied


Feinstein: “The criminal referral omits key facts”

Her example is that Grassley says a friend of Clinton gave Steele inputs regarding an Oct 2016 report, but 14 of the 17 Steele reports had already been written by Oct 2016

Truth: This is an incredible distortion and lie. The input that Grassley mentioned as occurring in October 2016 included information on events that were indeed reported by Steele back in June 2016 . It is just that Steele wasn’t given that additional input by the Clinton friend until October. Why isn’t the press tearing Feinstein apart ? ok, we know why


Feinstein: “The criminal referral fails to make a case that Steele lied to the FBI”

She adds : the criminal referral fails to identify when Steele lied

And this : “Tellingly, it also fails to explain any circumstances which would have required Steele to seek FBI permission to speak to the press”

And : “the criminal referral provides no evidence that Steele was ever asked about the Isikoff article…”

Truth: hard to know where to start. All of the above comments are true. But they have no relevance at all to what Grassley said.

Grassley proved “someone” lied and asked DoJ to figure out who it was.

An utter complete smoke screen by Feinstein to obscure the issue

Feinstein: “Steele is a respected and reliable expert on Russia”

Truth: How much value does that add? Consider this :
Robert Hanssen is a former FBI agent who spied for Russia for 22 years. He is now serving 15 life sentences in federal prison.

So how much value should we place on reputation alone ?

There is more nonsense in Feinstein’s rebuttal, but the bottom line is that her memo attacks Grassley with absolutely zero ammunition. She doesn’t lay a glove on him.

One of my hopes regarding this entire affair is that someday the FISA court will be disbanded as being antithetical to the tenets of the Constitution.

Stupid question of the day, but how can Steele, a British citizen, be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, Congress, etc? What makes him subject to US Code XYZ?

If the crime was committed on US soil, by why wouldn’t Steele tell the FBI to pound sand and refuse to talk to them?

quote:

Originally posted by Jimineer:
Stupid question of the day, but how can Steele, a British citizen, be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, Congress, etc? What makes him subject to US Code XYZ?

If the crime was committed on US soil, by why wouldn’t Steele tell the FBI to pound sand and refuse to talk to them?

According to Simpson, Steele sought out the FBI to tell them. It was his duty as someone in the Intel community to tell what he knew! It may have occurred on US soil. Non-US citizens can commit US crimes in the US, not sure about overseas. When in Rome and all that!

Has it ever been revealed why Steele was so desperate to keep Trump from becoming president?
Why would he a British citizen be so desperate that he would involve himself in something fraught with this much risk.

It sounds as if he would have created the dossier free of charge he was so desperate to keep Trump from sitting in the White House.

quote:

Has it ever been revealed why Steele was so desperate to keep Trump from becoming president?

As the conspiracy unfolded, Steele kept sharing the dossier contents w major news media. No one would publish it except Yahoo News.

Maybe Simpson and Steele were not going to get big pay day unless the story got widely published.

As the election approached, Steele may have been thinking "What if Trump wins?" , and all this gets out to the public ?

What would have been Steele's nightmare scenario ?

Exactly the one that is playing out now

Dossier fully exposed
Clinton funding fully exposed
multiple lawsuits targeting him
multiple REP led oversight committees after him
recommendation to investigate him to DoJ
No more cover from FBI/DoJ
FBI went off and used his unverified pile of crap to 4 FISA warrants
A full blown Mueller investigation that hasn't found a single piece of Trump collusion w Russia

anything else to ruin his day ?

^^ You know, when he clenches his jaw like that, he looks just like some old cowboy with a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek. I bet he loves that photographer.

Bill Priestap May Be to Obamagate what James McCord was to Watergate

http://www.wbdaily.com/conspir...rd-was-to-watergate/