Nunes response is well done.

If this was poker, Nunes would be holding one awesome hand.

I noticed on page 3 of the memo, near the top, they blacked out a small word and followed by what I assume is a list of names based upon the last part of the sentence. Now, the size of the small word and the length of the blacked out list make me think the word is the number six, which makes the length of the blacked out list about the right length. We already know about Page, and probably Papdapolous and Flynn are probably another two. So, it begs the question, who are the other three?

Ken

This Dem memo was submitted to the WH which declined to release it as is, but recommended a number of redactions, which if made would be approved. The Dem’s reacted to these constraints like someone was poisoning their grandkids.

May we now assume that these redactions are what the WH required and the Dems are now having to live with?

What about the FISA application that was rejected in the summer?

If Page and Papadopolous were colliding with the Ruskies, why the Special Counsel Mueller allege no Americans wittingly did so in the campaign?

quote:

May we now assume that these redactions are what the WH required and the Dems are now having to live with?

Did I miss something? I thought the FBI and DOJ actually made the redactions.

Tomorrow will Schiff day on ALL of the Sunday blabber shows...

"I thought the FBI and DOJ actually made the redactions"

I think that is true.

long interview w Nunes at CPAC on this topic:

https://youtu.be/A8Y3Ygu2tF8

using this thread to post a few miscellaneous items

#1
Carter Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016 to give a speech. Christopher Steele would subsequently claim in one of his dossier reports that Page met w a Putin ally named Igor Sechin.

This became the basis of the FISA warrant. "Proof" that Page was a Russian agent.

In March 2016, Donald Trump identified Page as one of his foreign policy advisors.

Shortly after Page returned from Moscow to the U.S., a Wall Street Journal reporter sent Page a text message asking if he had met w Igor Sechin. Similar questions from other reporters soon followed. Page told them he had not met Sechin.

This smells like a Glenn Simpson set up. Simpson (Fusion GPS) came from WSJ.

#2
Carter Page was interviewed by the FBI during five meetings in March 2017. (This was before Mueller was made special counsel).

Page said the FBI agents “acknowledged that I’m a loyal American veteran but indicated that their management was concerned that I did not believe the conclusions” of a Jan 6. U.S. intelligence report describing Russian government interference in the U.S. election.

“Our frank and open conversations gave me confidence that there are still logical, honest individuals at the bureau who respect civil rights and the Constitution,’’

Page said he met w the FBI w/o an attorney w him.

I doubt the FBI agents told Page he was under FISA warrant surveillance at that time.

Their acknowledgment of Page being a "loyal American" (who happens to be under surveillance as a Russian foreign agent) sounds like an interview trick to get Page talking.

one more update

When the Grassley memo came out about the FISA warrants against Carter Page, a new name emerged : Jonathan Winer

Winer is a decades long DEM operative with close ties to John Kerry and the Clintons. He has ties to Uranium One. He now has ties to passing info directly to Christopher Steele.

1985-1994 : Jonathan Winer was chief counsel and legislative assistant to John Kerry

1994-2000 : Winer was in the Bill Clinton State Dept

2000-2008 : Winer was at Aslton & Bird law firm

2008-2013 : Winer was senior vice president at APCO Worldwide (global public affairs and strategic consultancy firm)

In a 2008 press release, APCO announced its commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative .

“Helping to promote the good works of CGI and its members not only benefits the companies, organizations and individuals who have made a Commitment to Action, but also brings much needed attention to pressing issues that these commitments address,”

APCO Worldwide recently faced controversy when The Hill reported that paid FBI informant Douglas Campbell, who infiltrated the Russian nuclear business world, claimed to three separate congressional committees in a written statement that Russian firms had hired APCO to influence the Obama administration and specifically Hillary Clinton.


Campbell claimed he was told by Russian nuclear executives that there was a connection between APCO’s volunteer efforts for the Clintons’ charity and work that APCO did for Tenex, the U.S. affiliate of Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company.

Tenex reportedly paid some $3 million to Winer’s APCO from 2010 to 2011

APCO: “As clearly reported in APCO’s public filings from 2010 and 2011, available to anyone online, APCO’s work for Tenex focused entirely on the company’s interest in continuing sales of fuel to the U.S. energy market. At the time, Tenex provided half of the fuel used by U.S. nuclear energy producers under a Bush administration program. Any claim that APCO was involved in the Uranium One transaction or any related CIFIUS matter is completely false.”

Campbell claimed that Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clintons’ Global Initiative.”

“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.”

2013 : Winer goes to State Dept under John Kerry.

While he was at the State Department, he repeatedly passed documents from Christopher Steele related to Russia to State officials, including to Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who worked under the Clintons and served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under Kerry.

“Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful,”


Winer says that he met with Steele in September 2016 to discuss details that would later become known as the anti-Trump dossier.

Winer wrote that he prepared a two-page summary of Steele’s information and “shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”

Besides bringing Steele’s dossier information to the State Department, Winer conceded that he also passed information from Sidney Blumenthal to Steele, specifically charges about Trump that originated with Cody Shearer .

Jonathan Winer left his State Dept job as special envoy to Libya on 19 Jan 2017

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

as Devin Nunes swings attention to the State Dept, we may hear more of Jonathan Winer

a tangled web

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

a Breitbart article that sums up the same thing

http://www.breitbart.com/jerus...-bought-uranium-one/

Obama Admin Official Who Helped Anti-Trump Dossier Author Was Exec at Lobbying Firm for Russians Who Bought Uranium One

More from Andrew McCarthy on the FISA memo mess.

~~~~~
With undiminished esteem for my friend David French’s legal acumen, I confess to being underwhelmed by his defense of the Schiff memo. I am going to explain why, but I first want to apologize for the length of this column, which owes to the fact that David’s observations provide an opportunity to address the political context of the congressional investigation, which I have not done much of. I appreciate David’s kind words about my analysis of the memo, and that his lukewarm approval of Representative Adam Schiff’s handiwork comes with a healthy dose of concern about government misconduct.

I also appreciate that we do not yet know everything we should know, and may never, which makes it impossible to draw definitive conclusions. But that hardly means we cannot draw any conclusions. The Justice Department sharply departed from its practice of providing courts with corroboration of serious allegations, and from its tradition of candor in dealings with the federal courts. It eludes me why it is so hard to acknowledge this just because we are at an information deficit and must navigate through a political maelstrom.

There is no point complaining about the partisanship unavoidably attendant to this controversy. This is not, say, the financial meltdown or the Iraq War — disputed issues that were politicized unnecessarily, if predictably. This is an inherently political dispute: A situation in which the incumbent Democratic administration used its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to monitor the Republican presidential campaign, and did so making significant use of what David charitably calls “opposition research” from the Democratic presidential campaign.

With due respect, this is not a situation in which, out of the blue, “a congressional majority [has made] substantial charges of Department of Justice wrongdoing.” Against the backdrop of its blatant tanking of the criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential nominee, the Democratic administration’s Department of Justice went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign to seek monitoring of a former adviser of the Republican presidential campaign — monitoring that would inevitably have revealed campaign communications in stored email and texts, and quite possibly in real-time conversations — based on a stated suspicion that there was a traitorous confederation between the Republican campaign (quite possibly including the Republican nominee) and the Putin regime.

That was a very “substantial charge” for the Justice Department to make. It is completely reasonable, then, to demand of it what David demands of the House Intelligence Committee’s allegations: a carefully researched presentation (in this instance, in a FISA warrant application) “that provide[d] supporting evidence for each and every inflammatory charge.” Certainly, it is fair to expect that of the Justice Department since (a) that is the standard to which the DOJ proudly holds itself, and (b) the DOJ and FBI typically work as a harmonious unit, unlike a congressional committee composed of sharply divided partisans in the throes of a highly charged political rift.

Like David, I would prefer to see congressional committees write well-crafted, competing majority and minority reports. In the normal situation, however, this follows the amassing of evidence. Here, to the contrary, the FBI and Justice Department stonewalled the committee for months, grudgingly producing evidence only on pain of their top officials’ being held in contempt. When they did produce it, their claims of dire national-security consequences were exposed as overwrought. What they most wanted kept under wraps was the fact — and it is a fact — that they had obtained a surveillance warrant by relying on an unverified partisan screed, which proffered sensational, sinister claims, made by unidentified sources multiple levels of hearsay removed from the “fact” matters they were alleging.

The Nunes memo, for all the complaints about it, is not a mere “political instrument.” It is a part of an effort to pry information out of statutorily created agencies that oppose providing it to the body constitutionally empowered to check their work. The memo, inevitably, prompted a Democratic response. If not for the dueling memos, there would be no public evidence, and therefore nothing on which to base committee reports.

Unlike fervent Trump supporters, I do not condemn the investigation of a presidential campaign in principle. To the contrary, I have repeatedly said that, if there was strong evidence on which to base suspicions of Trump–Russia collusion, the Obama administration would have been derelict not to investigate. I also do not see this as a pro- or anti-Trump issue.

Let’s assume for argument’s sake that it turns out that there was no actionable Trump–Russia collusion, and that the FBI and Justice Department were overzealous in their investigation — the dubious FISA warrants, the Logan Act investigation of Michael Flynn, the predawn raid on Paul Manafort’s residence, etc. It would still be Donald Trump who brought into his campaign the likes of Carter Page, a jackass Kremlin apologist, and the duo of Manafort and Rick Gates, crooked collaborators with Kremlin agents. They were not planted by Barack Obama, Sally Yates, Jim Comey, Peter Strzok, et al. No matter how this turns out, we can already confidently say it is a disgrace that these characters were allowed anywhere near a presidential campaign.

That said, this was a presidential campaign, and one in which the Democratic candidate was given every break in the book to escape criminal liability despite daunting evidence. If major investigative actions were to be taken against Trump-campaign figures, there should first have been compelling, corroborated evidence (which is redundant, I know). If you want to gripe that this gives politicians a degree of immunity that others do not enjoy, that is fair — but in this system, they get it nonetheless.

To me, it makes no sense to simultaneously (a) condemn the House Intelligence Committee for not having slam-dunk evidence for its allegations, under circumstances where the agencies under investigation are custodians of the evidence and place severe limitations on what may be accessed and disclosed publicly; and (b) soft-pedal the facts that those same agencies, which operated under no such constraints, presented a federal court with allegations of traitorous conduct that were supported by patently suspect evidence, and failed to be transparent with the tribunal regarding the provenance of that evidence — especially under circumstances where they were before a secret court in a highly classified setting, and therefore had no valid reason to conceal from the tribunal information that was manifestly relevant.



Contested Facts

David bases his analysis on the flawed premise that the dueling memos establish five “uncontested” facts. But only one of his five assertions — the least important one — is uncontested. The others, as he states them, are either not facts or convey a woefully incomplete portrait of the facts. I’ll take them in the order he lists them:

1) The so-called Steele dossier formed at least part of the Carter Page FISA application. No, the point is not that the Steele dossier formed “at least part of the Carter Page FISA application.” The point is that it formed the most significant part. The fact that we have not seen the whole application does not mean I am speculating. The FBI’s then-deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that there would have been no warrant application absent the Steele dossier’s allegations. (That is reported in the Nunes memo and is unrebutted by the Schiff memo. It is also elucidated in the Grassley-Graham memo, which details the lack of corroboration).

2) The DOJ informed the court that the Steele dossier was commissioned by a person “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” Donald Trump’s campaign. No, the DOJ did not inform the court that the Steele dossier was “commissioned” (David’s word) by a person described in the FISA application as “likely looking for information to discredit” Donald Trump’s campaign. The DOJ informed the court that Glenn Simpson (“the identified U.S. person”) was a researcher who the FBI “speculated” was “likely” looking for information to discredit Trump’s campaign. The DOJ studiously avoided mentioning who “commissioned” the dossier, which would have revealed that Simpson was working for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, whose lawyers had retained him. The DOJ similarly failed to disclose that Steele (“Source #1”), the person Simpson hired to find the discrediting information, had expressed contempt for Trump and a commitment to prevent his election.

3) The DOJ ultimately terminated Steele as a source and disclosed that termination to the FISA court. No, the DOJ did not terminate Steele. The FBI terminated Steele. I am not tendentiously quibbling with a harmless misstatement here — the distinction David has missed matters. Far from ceasing contact with Steele after the FBI terminated him, the DOJ, through one of its top officials, Bruce Ohr, continued to have contact with Steele — both person-to-person and through his wife, Nellie Ohr, a Fusion GPS contractor who collaborated with Steele on the dossier. The FISA court was not informed that the termination of Steele as an informant was not a termination of the receipt of his information. More importantly, the court was told only half the story about the reason for Steele’s termination — viz., that he had violated the media-contacts prohibition in his informant agreement. The court was not told that Steele had lied to the FBI about his contact with Yahoo News, notwithstanding that the FBI had previously represented to the court that Steele was not the source of a Yahoo News story — a story that had been pressed on the court as independent corroboration of Steele’s allegations despite the fact that Steele was the story’s main source. The Schiff memo implausibly denies that the DOJ offered the Yahoo News story as corroboration for Steele, but the Grassley-Graham memo demonstrates, by quoting from the FISA warrant application, that this is indeed what the DOJ did. (See memo p. 3, “the information contained in the September 23rd news article generally matches the information about Page that [Steele] discovered doing [his] research.”) This revelation that Steele lied to the investigators spurred Senators Grassley and Graham to refer him to the DOJ and FBI for a possible false-statements prosecution.

4) Four GOP-nominated judges approved or renewed the FISA warrant. That is an uncontested fact.

5) The investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia began months before the Page FISA application. Well, the investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was opened in July 2016, about four months before the Page FISA application. The fact that an investigation was opened on the FBI’s books does not necessarily mean the Bureau took any meaningful investigative steps upon receiving information that George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat that Russians might be peddling Hillary Clinton emails. (Papadopoulos was not interviewed by the FBI until late January 2017. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was unfamiliar with Papadopoulos’s name when he left office at the end of the Obama administration.) It is clear that the FBI began receiving Steele’s explosive allegations in July, soon after Carter Page’s trip to Moscow, and obviously close to the time when the investigation was opened. The Schiff memo claims that the FBI’s “closely held investigative team” at headquarters did not learn about Steele’s allegations until mid September 2016. Clearly, in the weeks immediately following that, the FBI and DOJ prepared a FISA application for a warrant alleging that Page was an agent of Russia. By law, that would have required showing probable cause that he was knowingly engaged in clandestine activities that probably violated federal criminal law. Other than the unverified Steele-dossier allegations, there is no publicly known information about Page that would have supported such a finding. (See point 1, above.)

David says the five facts, as he understands them, “don’t show the existence of a scandal.” I respectfully counter that the facts as they have been more fully developed — including as laid out in the Grassley-Graham memo — clearly call for follow-up investigation. They are suggestive of the three things that David says would be scandalous: use of the Steele dossier by the DOJ in bad faith; material lack of candor with the court; and violation of the governing statutes.



Lack of Corroboration

A few observations about David’s remaining points.

I agree with David that it is foolhardy to contend “that use of the Steele memo in any capacity is scandalous.” I’ve noted any number of times that, in close to 20 years as a Justice Department prosecutor, I used information from numerous sources that were far, far more nefarious than political opposition research. But what makes such use appropriate is that, upon getting information from, say, a terrorist, a mafia murderer, a swindler, a jilted lover, or a political opponent with a powerful motive to smear the suspect, the prosecutor does not use it to seek court process until the FBI has independently verified it.

David stumbles over this fault line in admonishing that we must “never forget that ‘unverified’ is not the same thing as ‘false.’” Well, yes: It is forbidden to use false information. That does not mean using unverified information is proper — it is irresponsible. And the more distant the information is from being verified, the more it is in the nature of rank hearsay, and the more reckless it is to use it. Here, Steele, who has not been in Russia for 20 years, has sources, who have sources, who have sources. Everything is anonymous and third-hand — or even more attenuated. David says, “The question is whether it was reasonable for the DOJ to rely in part on the Steele dossier in its FISA application” (emphasis in original). Answer: It was unreasonable to rely on any part of the dossier that was unverified.

Here, David’s reliance on Orin Kerr’s learned column on informant credibility (which I, too, recently discussed, here) is unavailing. Yes, it is a familiar doctrine of Fourth Amendment law that the use of improper information to obtain a warrant is harmless if the application contains other information that establishes probable cause. But, to repeat, the FBI’s deputy director conceded that the Steele-dossier allegations were needed for probable cause.

Relying on our mutual friend Buck Sexton, David points to a tantalizing Schiff-memo section that suggests that there was indeed independent corroboration. I agree with both David and Buck that Schiff’s three redacted bullet points in this regard should be disclosed unless it would cause some dire intelligence problem. Nevertheless, as I observed in my column, Representative Schiff has a warped conception of “corroboration,” so there is great reason to doubt him sight unseen. Further, Schiff’s claims must be weighed against the concession of the FBI’s former director, James Comey, that the dossier was not corroborated. From the Grassley-Graham memo (p. 2):

[I]n June 2017, former FBI Director Comey testified publicly before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he had briefed President-Elect Trump on the dossier allegations in Janauary 2017, which Mr. Comey described as “salacious” and “unverified.” . . . When asked at the March 2017 briefing [of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chairman and ranking member] why the FBI relied on the dossier in FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration — and in light of the highly political motives surrounding its creation — then-Director Comey stated that the FBI included the dossier allegations about Carter Page in the FISA applications because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work.

Indeed, the documents we have reviewed show that the FBI took important investigative steps largely based on Mr. Steele’s information — and relying heavily on his credibility. Specifically, on October 21, 2016, the FBI filed its first warrant application under FISA for Carter Page. [There follows about line-and-a-half redaction.] The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier. The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page, although it does cite to a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele’s dossier as well.

There is every reason to believe that Steele’s information was not meaningfully corroborated.



Steele Was Not the Source

David principally cited Professor Kerr’s essay on the issue of Steele’s credibility. For the reasons I’ve addressed repeatedly, Steele’s credibility should have been irrelevant. The assumption in David’s argument is that Steele was the “source” in the sense we use that term in warrants. But he was not the source. He was the aggregator of information from the real sources. He stood in the position usually occupied by the FBI case agent, who is typically the affiant in a warrant application, relating information from and about the actual sources: the factual allegations they make based on first-hand observations, and the reason(s) why the court should find their allegations trustworthy. With a warrant application, what matters to a court is the credibility of these sources — the informant-witnesses.

The DOJ’s failure to make full disclosure of Steele’s biases against Trump is a completely separate problem (and one of the DOJ’s gratuitous making). The main dereliction was the failure to provide the FISA court with grounds to believe the actual sources were real, had a reliable basis to know the things they reported observing, and were credible.

Bias and Candor

Finally, I’m confused by David’s description of the second of his five facts, and his follow-on discussion of bias. As noted above, David uses the word “commissioned” to describe the role in the generation of the dossier performed by the “person” alluded to in the warrant. But that “person” is Glenn Simpson, who hired Steele; it is not Hillary Clinton (and her campaign and the DNC), who commissioned the Simpson/Steele dossier project. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were neither mentioned nor otherwise alluded to in the warrant application.

David contends that what the DOJ said — viz., that Simpson hired Steele to “conduct research regarding Candidate [Trump’s] ties to Russia,” and that the “FBI speculates that [Simpson] was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign — was sufficient to “communicate bias” to the court.

To be candid with a court, it is not adequate to communicate “bias” as a concept that connotes some generalized notion of hostility. Obviously, there are degrees of bias — you do not have the same animus for the guy who snores in the seat next to you on the plane, the guy you’re competing with for a promotion, and the boss who fired you. To evaluate the credibility of information, one must grasp the quantum of bias to impute to it under the circumstances. Here, the DOJ referred only to the bias of Simpson, the researcher hired by the identified U.S. law firm (Perkins-Coie). Not only was there concealment of the participation and deep bias of Trump’s rivals, Hillary Clinton and the DNC. The DOJ also concealed the professed animosity of Steele — the “source” of the unverified information — toward Trump. Moreover, the court was told that the FBI was merely “speculating” about Simpson’s “likely” bias, rather than that the FBI well knew of the deep-seated biases of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Steele.

I am at a loss to understand how that could be thought a sufficient description of bias. Bear in mind that, unlike an ordinary federal criminal case, in which the judge knows that counsel for the defendant will eventually be able to examine and challenge the government’s warrant application, this was a counterintelligence case, meaning: The FISA court knows its searching review of the DOJ’s warrant application is the only due process an American alleged to be a foreign agent will ever get. The FISA judge thus justifiably expects the Justice Department to be appropriately transparent. It is, after all, a top-secret proceeding. Why would the DOJ restrict its disclosure of bias from a tribunal with which it is sharing the nation’s most closely guarded defense secrets?

So, I guess the question I’d ask David is this: If you were the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department unit that presents surveillance warrants to the FISA court, and you were thus responsible for maintaining the Justice Department’s reputation for integrity with the FISA court, would you have approved the decision not to disclose the role of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, as well as Steele’s profession that he was “desperate” that Trump not become president?

Link

^^^ (Sigh) I know he's affecting to have a public conversation with a fellow lawyer, but is there anything in this world that has a more comprehensively murderous effect on someone's ability to write in a clear, concise and direct fashion than three years of law school? I'm glad to have read the argument, but I felt like I needed a machete to clear a path to all the relevant points and a trail of bread crumbs to put them all together.

I am beginning to think that law is less about right and wrong than it is about obfuscation

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I am beginning to think that law is less about right and wrong than it is about obfuscation

Nahhh. The law can be as plain and simple as people make it. It’s people who are complicated, who confuse and are confused, and seek redress.

Describing these antics takes details.

quote:

“The question is whether it was reasonable for the DOJ to rely in part on the Steele dossier in its FISA application” (emphasis in original). Answer: It was unreasonable to rely on any part of the dossier that was unverified.

Out of all the word-wall, I got 2 very important points: the one quoted above and;

Steele's reliability and reputation are irrelevant, he isn't the source of any info at all. We kinda forget that since it's referred to as the "Steele Dossier". He just collected info from people who talked to people who talked to other people. So, the 1st hand source's reliabilty is relevant...then that info has to be independently verified as in the point quoted above.

quote:

Originally posted by Strambo:

quote:

“The question is whether it was reasonable for the DOJ to rely in part on the Steele dossier in its FISA application” (emphasis in original). Answer: It was unreasonable to rely on any part of the dossier that was unverified.

Out of all the word-wall, I got 2 very important points: the one quoted above and;

Steele's reliability and reputation are irrelevant, he isn't the source of any info at all. We kinda forget that since it's referred to as the "Steele Dossier". He just collected info from people who talked to people who talked to other people. So, the 1st hand source's reliabilty is relevant...then that info has to be independently verified as in the point quoted above.

The dossier is little more than low grade gossip. A source told me that this guy says he was told that some other guy said this and such.

No surprise there. Why did it take so long to come out?


Australian diplomat whose tip prompted FBI’s Russia-probe has tie to Clintons


The Australian diplomat whose tip in 2016 prompted the Russia-Trump investigation previously arranged one of the largest foreign donations to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable efforts, documents show.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS is chronicled in decade-old government memos archived on the Australian foreign ministry’s website.

Downer and former President Clinton jointly signed a Memorandum of Understanding in February 2006 that spread out the grant money over four years for a project to provide screening and drug treatment to AIDS patients in Asia.

The money was initially allocated to the Clinton Foundation but later was routed through an affiliate of the charity known as the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), officials said. Australia was one of four foreign governments to donate more than $25 million to CHAI, records show.

In the years that followed, the project won praise for helping thousands of HIV-infected patients in Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, China and Indonesia, but also garnered criticism from auditors about “management weaknesses” and inadequate budget oversight, the memos show.

Downer, now Australia’s ambassador to London, provided the account of a conversation with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a London bar in 2016 that became the official reason the FBI opened the Russia counterintelligence probe.

But lawmakers say the FBI didn’t tell Congress about Downer’s prior connection to the Clinton Foundation. Republicans say they are concerned the new information means nearly all of the early evidence the FBI used to justify its election-year probe of Trump came from sources supportive of the Clintons, including the controversial Steele dossier.

“The Clintons’ tentacles go everywhere. So, that’s why it’s important,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chairman of a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that has been taking an increasingly visible role defending the Trump administration in the Russia probe. “We continue to get new information every week it seems that sort of underscores the fact that the FBI hasn’t been square with us.”

Spokesman for the FBI and Russia special counsel Robert Mueller declined comment.

The Australian Foreign Ministry says the Clinton grant was handled like all its other $2 billion annual foreign aid awards, and it ultimately helped thousands in Asia gain access to antiretroviral AIDS medications.

http://thehill.com/376858-aust...-has-tie-to-clintons

BREAKING: House Oversight Committee Calls For Special Counsel To Investigate Crimes At Obama's DOJ

On Tuesday, House Oversight Committee members called for a new special counsel to be appointed to investigate crimes involving bias and FISA abuse at the Obama Department of Justice.

Making the official request to the DOJ were Republican Reps. Trey Gowdy (SC) and Bob Goodlatte (VA), the chairmen of the oversight and judiciary committees respectively.

"Matters have arisen — both recently and otherwise — which necessitate the appointment of a Special Counsel. We do not make this observation and attendant lightly," the letter addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein begins.

"We believe that, in the case of certain decisions made and not made by the Department of Justice and FBI in 2016 and 2017, both an actual conflict of interest exists and separately, but equally significant, the public interest requires the appointment of a special counsel," the letter continues.

The letter cites the anti-Trump dossier, paid for by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton, as being strong evidence of bias at the FBI and DOJ, considering the fact that the dossier was never vetted and was a politically-motivated document which was used in court filings.

“There is evidence of bias, trending toward animus, among those charged with investigating serious cases,” they wrote. “There is evidence political opposition research was used in court filings. There is evidence this political opposition research was neither vetted before it was used nor fully revealed to the relevant tribunal.”

Gowdy told Fox News that a special counsel is needed because “Congress doesn’t have the tools to investigate this. ... We leak like the Gossip Girls.”

The letter also made mention of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is expected to be releasing a new report at any time over the next several weeks.

“While we have confidence in the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, the DOJ IG does not have the authority to investigate other governmental entities or former employees of the Department, the Bureau, or other agencies,” the letter states.

https://www.dailywire.com/news...pecial-ryan-saavedra

I'm sure it's just a co-inky-dink.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/...-michael-flynn-case/

REVEALED: Peter Strzok Had Personal Relationship With Recused Judge In Michael Flynn Case
Text messages obtained by The Federalist show that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page conspired to collude with Judge Rudolph Contreras, a FISA judge who presided over Michael Flynn's guilty plea and was later removed from the case.

Newly discovered text messages obtained by The Federalist reveal two key federal law enforcement officials conspired to meet with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge who presided over the federal case against Michael Flynn. The judge, Rudolph Contreras, was recused from handling the case just days after accepting the guilty plea of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser who was charged with making false statements to federal investigators.

The text messages about Contreras between controversial Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lawyer Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the senior FBI counterintelligence official who was kicked off Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, were deliberately hidden from Congress, multiple congressional investigators told The Federalist. In the messages, Page and Strzok, who are rumored to have been engaged in an illicit romantic affair, discussed Strzok’s personal friendship with Contreras and how to leverage that relationship in ongoing counterintelligence matters.

“Rudy is on the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]!” Page excitedly texted Strzok on July 25, 2016. “Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.”

“I did,” Strzok responded. “I need to get together with him.”

“[He] said he’d gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at.”

Contreras was appointed to the top surveillance court on May 19, 2016, federal records show.

The pair even schemed about how to set up a cocktail or dinner party just so Contreras, Strzok, and Page could speak without arousing suspicion that they were colluding. Strzok expressed concern that a one-on-one meeting between the two men might require Contreras’ recusal from matters in which Strzok was involved.

“[REDACTED] suggested a social setting with others would probably be better than a one on one meeting,” Strzok told Page. “I’m sorry, I’m just going to have to invite you to that cocktail party.”

“Have to come up with some other work people cover for action,” Strzok added.

“Why more?” Page responded. “Six is a perfectly fine dinner party.”

It is not known whether the proposed party happened as planned.

While working as one of the top counterintelligence officials at the FBI, Strzok reportedly took part in the FBI’s interview of on January 24. Flynn later pleaded guilty to one charge of providing false information to federal investigators. Strzok later left the FBI to join Mueller’s special counsel team, which obtained the indictment of Flynn.

Flynn’s guilty plea was accepted in federal court by Contreras on December 1, 2017. The New York Times reported the next day that Strzok, who left the FBI to work for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, had been removed from the case by Mueller due to inappropriate text messages between Strzok and another federal official, now believed to be DOJ attorney Lisa Page. On December 5, 2017, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray demanding text messages from Strzok as well as any notes he took regarding his interviews with Flynn. Contreras was recused from the Flynn case on December 7, 2017, and the case was reassigned to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, according to federal court documents.

Neither Contreras nor federal judiciary officials have publicly indicated the reason for Contreras’ removal from the case. Contreras’ office declined to comment on inquiries asking about his relationship with Strzok, or why he was not recused from the Flynn case until after he had accepted Flynn’s guilty plea.

The pre-existing relationship between Strzok and Contreras and Contreras’ mysterious recusal from the Flynn case, forced or otherwise, raise serious questions about whether Flynn’s case, among others, was properly conducted.

The text messages that show Page and Strzok conspiring to meet with Contreras were originally hidden from Congress. In records provided by DOJ to Congress, the exchanges referencing Contreras, and plans to meet with him under the guise of a cocktail party, were completely redacted by federal law enforcement officials. The exchanges obtained by The Federalist include information that was never turned over to Congress.

Congressional investigators told The Federalist that only 3,162 of the more than 1.2 million documents retained by the DOJ Inspector General (IG) have been turned over to the committees specifically tasked with oversight of the Department of Justice and FBI.

Ongoing DOJ obstruction of congressional oversight has only increased the calls for a special counsel to investigate criminal leaks, federal surveillance abuses, and other alleged improprieties within the agencies. On Thursday, Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to name a special prosecutor to work independently with the IG to investigate the law enforcement agencies.

“They cannot be counted on to investigate themselves,” Grassley said in an interview. “If you do something wrong, you don’t have the fox guard the chicken house.”

Sessions has not yet publicly said how he plans to tackle the problems in his department.

amazing isn't it? If the DoJ IG hadn't asked for these texts and started the ball rolling, we may never have known about any of them.

Christopher Steele must appear for dossier deposition in British court

The man at the epicenter of the dodgy dossier, former British MI-6 officer Christopher Steele, was ordered by an English court Friday to appear for a videotaped deposition in London to be used as trial testimony in ongoing civil litigation against Buzzfeed for publishing the unverified dossier.

Evan Fray-Witzer, a Boston-based attorney representing Russian tech tycoon Aleksej Gubarev, told Fox News, “We’re thrilled that the English Court has ordered Mr. Steele to sit for his deposition. It was always amazing to us that he could talk as freely as he has to reporters around the world about the dossier, yet refuse to sit for a deposition about the same topics.”

Cyprus-based Gubarev is suing Steele’s British based company, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., because the dossier claims Gubarev’s companies, including XBT Holdings and Webzilla, used “botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs and steal data.”

The ruling from the Senior Master in the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court found: “In my judgement it is obvious that the author of the paragraph complained of in the Florida proceedings would be a relevant witness in defamation proceedings which are entirely based on the allegations in that paragraph, in a jurisdiction where the Plaintiffs have to prove that the allegations are false. “

A Senior Master in British courts is similar to a judicial magistrate in the U.S. The ruling made late Friday will be released on Monday.

Steele was paid $168,000 by Glenn Simpson’s company Fusion GPS.

Fray-Witzer also told Fox, “We learned recently that Buzzfeed has had a team of former FBI agents trying to verify the allegations against our clients for months.”

“It is our belief that Mr. Steele did nothing to verify any of the allegations made against our clients and this testimony will reflect that.”

Meanwhile, in Congress, a criminal referral has been issued for Steele by the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeking answers from him as to how the FBI used unverified information he provided.

Link

Ah the buss under buss throwing begins ^^^^

"shit I didnt know officer, this isnt my dossier"