Donald Trump’s order on Twitter Tuesday night to declassify documents related to the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign suggests that he’s lost faith in Attorney General William Barr and John Durham, the prosecutor tapped to investigate the origins of Crossfire Hurricane.
Previously, the rationale for Barr’s failure to declassify Crossfire Hurricane documents en masse was that Durham needed to keep a close hold on them to build his case. But with less than a month to go before the 2020 election, the U.S. Attorney’s 18 month-long investigation has only secured one plea deal from an FBI lawyer. In the meantime, corrupt U.S. officials who spied on the Trump campaign and framed him as a Russian agent are basking in the sun. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former CIA Director John Brennan are on book tours; Showtime made a mini-series about former FBI Director James Comey; and the Democratic candidate for president is Joe Biden, an avatar for a potential third Barack Obama term.
A subsequent presidential retweet featuring a photo-shopped image of the late comedian Chris Farley shouting at a complacent-seeming Barr confirms that the commander-in-chief has lost his patience—“For the love of God,” the caption reads, “ΑRREST SOMEBODY.”
Trump knows that at least one of his senior officials is fighting him. CIA Director Gina Haspel reportedly is refusing to turn over documents that may further illuminate the Agency’s role in the anti-Trump plot. Haspel was London station chief in 2016 as Crossfire Hurricane agents and their confidential sources moved in and out of the British capital to target Trump campaign officials visiting the United Kingdom.
A senior U.S. intelligence official tells me she would have known what the FBI was up to in London. “There’s very little in terms of intelligence and law enforcement matters the station chief is not aware of.”
Haspel appears to be protecting herself as well as her former boss. “She had an unusually close relationship with Brennan,” says the intelligence official. “He handpicked her for the London station chief job, which is a plumb position. It’s regarded as the best job a career CIA official can get.”
Brennan’s Role in the Plot Uncovered
Documents declassified over the last several days have shed light on the role Brennan played in the anti-Trump plot. Last week Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released a letter about information U.S. spy agencies obtained in late July 2016 regarding an assessment made by Russian intelligence. Brennan briefed Obama and other senior officials on the finding: Moscow had assessed that Hillary Clinton approved “of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.”
That is, Obama and his top aides knew about the anti-Trump plot before the election. Big deal, says Brennan in TV appearances to push his new book. It’s just politics. The problem is that as CIA director he spent his time running a political operation targeting one party to assist another. That’s against the law.
In August, weeks after the CIA received the Russian analysis, Brennan pushed what he knew was the Clinton campaign’s disinformation operation to former Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Days later, the then-Senate Minority leader wrote a public letter to Comey demanding he investigate the suspicious ties between Trump associates and Russian officials about which Brennan briefed him. Those false allegations were drawn from reporting attributed to Clinton campaign contractor Christopher Steele.
In December 2016, Obama ordered Brennan to conduct the Intelligence Community Assessment finding that Putin had helped Trump to victory. By institutionalizing Hillary Clinton’s anti-Trump operation, the former president and CIA director chose to undermine the peaceful transfer of authority and legitimize an attempted coup.
Since then, Brennan has spent his time on TV and social media, issuing dark and wordy judgments of Trump like the leader of a cult of morose bureaucrats. He’s pretty sure he’s safe. On Tuesday, Ratcliffe released Brennan’s handwritten notes of the 2016 briefing. They show that he’s been covering his tracks, and setting out traps, from the beginning.
According to Ratcliffe’s letter last week, the Russian intelligence analysis cited the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton July 26 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” The release of Brennan’s original notes shows that the DNI may have mistaken the date. It appears to have been July 28 rather than July 26.
In any case, Brennan’s handwritten memo shows that the date was later inserted, which serves to highlight the misdirection. Clinton did not sanction the Trump-Russia smear campaign in late July. The Clinton team signed off on the operation no later than March 2016, when it hired Fusion GPS to produce the Trump-Russia dossier. At that point, Glenn Simpson’s company had been producing opposition research on Trump and Russia for nearly half a year, starting in October 2015.
Further, documentary evidence suggests the proposal did not come from one of Clinton’s foreign policy advisors. Fusion GPS’s early Trump-Russia opposition research, documents that I’ve referred to as proto-dossiers, focused on the Trump circle’s relations to Russian businessmen and alleged Russian criminals. The subject matter changed abruptly in the May-June period after the Clinton campaign hired Steele and his reporting shifted to the Trump team’s alleged ties to Russian state actors.
Whoever directed that transition, from Russian criminals to Russian officials, is less likely to be a foreign policy advisor than an intelligence official who understood what it would take to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Thus, it appears to be sometime in the May-June period when Obama’s spy chiefs first joined the Clinton campaign’s operation. Nonetheless, the July 26/28 date is part of an important time frame, to which I’ll return shortly.
The press and other Democratic Party surrogates have contended that the Russian assessment was disinformation, a possibility Ratcliffe quickly dispelled. It is unlikely that Brennan believed it was disinformation, or he would not have wasted the commander in chief’s time with spy games. Moreover, the Russian assessment is correct—the purpose of Clinton’s smear campaign was to distract “the public from her use of a private email server,” in particular the more than 30,000 emails she deleted from her server.
Hillary’s Private Server and Missing Emails Inspired the Plot
Trump has also called for declassifying documents related to the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s email server. It seems that he knows the two investigations are linked.
Department of Justice documents show that Clinton’s problems with her unsecure private server set Crossfire Hurricane in motion, as the FBI was tasked to find out if the Trump campaign was going to drop an October Surprise drawn from her deleted emails. The Justice Department’s December 2019 Inspector General’s report documents FBI confidential informant Stefan Halper’s visit with Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page on August 20, 2016.
Halper recorded their conversation as part of the Bureau’s sting operation and kept steering the conversation to Clinton’s emails and Russia. He asked Page “if the Trump campaign could access information that might have been obtained by the Russians from the DNC files.” Regarding Clinton’s more than 30,000 deleted emails, Halper asked Page, “[w]ell the Russians have all that don’t they?” Page said he didn’t know. The FBI nonetheless obtained a FISA warrant to collect the electronic communications of Page, and through him other Trump team members, to defend against an October Surprise.
As the Russian assessment surmised, the purpose of the Clinton plan was to prepare a defense against whatever those emails might reveal in the event they were dropped before the election. Accordingly, Clinton deputies lined up the FBI, as well as the press, to shift attention to the Republican candidate. If there was no way to change the message, they could still dirty the messenger: Forget about the content of Hillary’s emails and however she might have compromised U.S. national security to enrich herself, the real issue is that Russia stole them and for the purpose of helping Trump.
It All Comes Back to Obama
But why would Clinton’s email problems matter to Obama? For one thing, he communicated with her on her private server. And now that we know Brennan told him about the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump operation before the election, it’s worth revisiting some of the previously released Crossfire Hurricane documents—starting with the electronic communication that opened the investigation July 31, 2016.
Four days earlier, on July 27, the Australian envoy to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, shared information with the U.S. embassy’s number two official, Elizabeth Dibble. He alleged that in his meeting with George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign volunteer adviser indicated that the Russians “could assist the Trump campaign with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.” The next paragraph of the FBI document added an interesting and typically overlooked data point. The Russians told Papadopoulos, Downer claimed, that the anonymous release of information “would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama).”
Papadopoulos has repeatedly denied that he ever said anything to Downer about Russia or Clinton—Obama has never come up. In subsequent press statements, Downer has never claimed that Papadopoulos said anything about Obama. The focus has always been on information damaging to Clinton. And yet the FBI entered the president’s name as well.
The information appears again in a recently declassified document regarding the investigation of former Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn during the February-March 2017 period. The memo describes the alleged Papadopoulos claim that the Russians “could assist the Trump campaign with an anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.”
Was the Obama White House, like the Clinton campaign, worried about the release of damaging information—damaging not just to the Democratic candidate but also the sitting president? Brennan kept Obama abreast of developments.
In a recent article for the Washington Post, Brennan claimed that he briefed Obama shortly before the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane.
“On the afternoon of July 28, 2016,” wrote Brennan, “I informed him in a hurriedly scheduled meeting that Russian President Vladimir Putin had authorized his intelligence services to carry out activities to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and boost the election prospects of Donald Trump.”
There’s that July 28 date again.
According to Brennan, his report of Putin’s intentions “riveted the president’s attention.” Chief of Staff Denis McDonough asked Brennan, “What are you planning to do on the congressional front?” Brennan wrote that he said he was worried that the intelligence might be misused for partisan purposes but the president allayed his fears. “Obama understood my concerns, but he said he wanted Congress briefed as appropriate and as required.”
In Brennan’s account, July 28 was the day that Obama sanctioned the anti-Trump operation by telling the CIA director to push it to Harry Reid. It seems that at least part of the reason Brennan wrote the Post article was to remind former colleagues and employers that if anyone thinks about selling him out, they should remember he has stories to tell.
Obama and Democrats Weaponized Government for Political Objectives
Whether or not Durham can or will make a larger case that holds senior officials accountable, these recent declassifications illuminate his and Barr’s fundamental dilemma—the desire to avoid the appearance of a politicized investigation. Barr frequently has used the phrase “Third World” to categorize the nature of some of what he’s seen regarding the actions of the Crossfire Hurricane team. He doesn’t want to push our political system further in that direction. To preserve the rule of law, he is keen to ensure the investigation is beyond reproach.
The problem is that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was by its nature a political operation. The party in power used U.S. government resources and personnel to target and frame a political opponent in order to protect its leading members. The president of the United States greenlighted it. These facts alone signal that America has already taken a giant step away from rule of law and toward arbitrary rule and despotism. The only way back is through deterrence, which is in fact built into the design of our two-party political system. The party tempted to use its power unlawfully must understand that as the wheel turns its own leading personalities may in time be subject to unfathomable cruelties.
By wishing to avoid the appearance of a politicized investigation, Barr and Durham have paradoxically incentivized political operations. Career intelligence bureaucrats—“deep state” operatives—are fair game but the leadership that tasks them to spy on Americans are now shown to be untouchable, precisely because they are political appointments, elected officials, presidents and vice presidents.
It is Trump’s responsibility as commander-in-chief to declassify all the documents regarding what he rightly describes as the biggest political scandal in American history. In a matter of weeks, the citizens he is sworn to protect will be choosing between him and a candidate who carries the legacy of an administration that conducted a political operation against Americans and interfered with the peaceful transfer of power. Americans deserve to know it beforehand if they are choosing to move one step closer to despotism.
Very good analysis of the issue. I want to have faith in Durham and Barr, but my patience is wareing thin.
Barr is a member of the swamp. He’s just done a better job than others concealing his membership.
As all true Americans should be! We can never have confidence in our government unless justice is equally served! Barr and Durham must publish their reports NOW.
Have you ever stopped to consider that the reason nothing ever comes of these conspiracy theories isn’t because of Comey, or McCabe, or Sessions, or Horowitz, or Durham, or Barr, or the FBI, or the DoJ, or the DNI, or the ONI, or any other abstract covert “deep state,” .. that maybe what’s going on is that a large segment of the internet media has figured out that you’re addicted to fake conspiracy theories?
Ever stopped to consider that possibility?
No. Not at all. There’s evidence. Tons of it.
It’s mind-boggling that intelligent Democrats like Mr. Prague are still trying to peddle as “conspiracy theories” the systematic and detailed exposure of the worst political crime in American history.
However, these intellectually dishonest hacks aren’t trying to persuade any of us, they are attempting to prevent the dimwitted and poorly informed people in their own party from understanding the truth.
A majority of Democrats still believe that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary, but people like Prague are wasting their efforts trying to gaslight readers on sites like this into believing that maybe we really are just a bunch of wackos for believing Obama, Hillary and so many others belong in prison.
Willing dupe. Loyal idiot
Says another deep state operative.
Not when documentary evidence gets released by the DNI, including a batch this past week showing pretty incontrovertibly that everybody and his uncle in the Obama executive branch was keenly aware that RussiaGate was a Hillary campaign ploy and allowed themselves to be weaponized into the scheme — under the assumption that she couldn’t lose and they’d never be found out. So, no. It’s people like you who are invested in intellectual dishonesty and approve chicanery, evil and treason that worries me.
The full force of the US government was applied to investigating allegations made by one political campaign against another. Those allegations have been shown conclusively to be untrue. The only “conspiracy theory” at play here has been disproven. The information that is already public is more than enough to show malfeasance on the part of the DOJ/FBI. This information isnt coming in the form of speculative reporting from internet media. It is drawn from government documents and sworn testimony. It’s cute that you guys are now trying desperately to slip your tin foil hats onto the folks who exposed the conspiracy theory you bought into, but cute isn’t convincing.
Why yes, we’ve considered it. And because we have determined conclusively that Democrats like you lie compulsively and incessantly, we dismiss such arguments out of hand as attempts to distract from justice.
David Prague: Your problem with THIS set of conspiracy theories, unlike most others, is that as more and more information comes out, it consistently supports the “theories”. Books and articles are written, authors are interviewed, documents are unclassified and released, lies and dirty tricks and illegalities are revealed >>> and does ANY of this undermine the theories? Nope. You should just be quiet, look away, and hope the hurricane passes through quickly before it does any MORE damage to your unholy cause..
Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!! Right!!!! “Don’t run away — we mean you no harm.” —- ZAAAAPPPP!!!
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HI DP–would you still think that this debacle is just a “conspiracy theory” if it occurred in late 2008 and the name Candidate Barack Obama were substituted for Candidate Trump and it was done by the R party instead of the donk friendly Deep State?
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I thought not. You would be screaming for their indictments, convictions, and prison time instead.
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Rocketman
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Probably the smartest thing anyone has said for awhile. Only 25 more days until the most corrupt, compulsive lying, race baiting president in American history is booted out of office.
Bravo bravo!!!
Did idiots like you stop to consider that President Trump never conspired with Russia to defeat the odious and unlikable Hillary Clinton?
I always wonder why when people can see the evidence that disproves something as a “conspiracy theory” because of truthful evidence in black and white. That those people seem to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear onto the facts cause they’re too pompous to admit they were wrong. Yet still support it being a conspiracy as you do as a form of denial of the truth! Very sad that hate causes someone to avoid the truth.
Truth is not a conspiracy that you hand wring your diaper about. A real conspiracy which has deadened the fiber of the supposed intellectuals to paralysis by analysis is clear. The hew and cry is where IS my backbone”?!
The patience of many people is wearing thin. Talk about election interference! This is hiding evidence of a crime from the American people.
We have traitors among us, and they all should be arrested, tried and hanged on the steps of congress.
Outstanding, fact based analysis, Mr. Smith! Let’s hope that justice is indeed served upon these dirty politicians.
It is so frustrating that the DOJ hasn’t exposed some of the deep criminality it has discovered. Not informing the voters of what has been discovered is political in itself!
If this information would affect the election, then this is further proof that it’s disclosure would be proper! Or am I missing something?
The problem with this bizarre propaganda narrative is that it completely ignores the fact that it was Hillary Clinton, not Trump, whose e-mails were stolen and leaked to the media by Russian intelligence.
It also ignores the fact that the Moscow Deutsche Bank’s 2013 bailout of Donald Trump to the tune of half a billion dollars was common knowledge in financial and law enforcement circles long before Trump ever got into politics.
It also ignores the fact that both of Trump’s campaign managers in their guilty pleas have admitted that they worked for groups affiliated with Russian intelligence as recently as 2014.
Funny how this never gets mentioned.
Is that Moscow Germany?
LOL
Moscow, Idaho…
Wow David, talk about misinformation!
Your first sentence has no basis in fact, Wikileaks said the emails didn’t come from the Russians, and Wkileaks is not Russian intelligence.
Second, Deutsche bank is not a Moscow bank, it’s based in Germany. And what does that have to do with any of this?
Your third is complete BS. Manafort plead guilty to not registering as a foreign agent, something his partner Podesta got a free pass on.
Your BS never gets mentioned, because its BS!
OK. I assume one of the campaign managers to whom you refer was Paul Manafort, regarding whom the sentencing judge said, “”Any conspiracy, collusion was not presented in this case, therefore it was not resolved by this case.” Source: https://www.axios.com/paul-manafort-sentenced-years-prison-russia-mueller-investigation-23a5a107-a065-47be-90e3-3a01e593ea45.
Who was the other campaign manager to whom you are refer?
They clearly violated the law and perp walks are required or we are no longer a nation of laws.
Oh that? Just an inconvenient truth.
His name was Seth Rich.
David P. – Is it not a little interesting to you that the FBI was denied access to the server with the “stolen” emails? That CrowdStrike did the analysis that Russian’s were involved?
Here is what know as fact (i.e., support):
i) Hillary paid Chris Steel for the Golden Dossier the FBI used to spy on Trump (source: Congressional Subpoena of Hillary’s law firm’s bank records)
(ii) FBI interviewed Chris Steeles main Russian resource Jan 2017 before the Mueller investigation. Source denied everything but the investigation was launched anyways.
(iii) I could on and on
You on the other hand only have what the Democrats fed into the mainstream media……even the stolen emails and server were not given to the FBI but instead done “inhouse” – how convenient given what we know now
It never gets mentioned because its BS conspiracy theory nonsense.
Have you forgotten how it came to be that Hillary’s emails were stolen and leaked? It was because she hosted an insecure and illegal server (illegal because she trafficked in classified documents on that server).
Four years of witch hunts, only to discover that Donald Trump and his campaign were apparently the ONLY ones in DC who weren’t “colluding with Russians.”
The first of the Russia hoax / failed coup conspirators has plead guilty in Federal court, and is supplying evidence and testimony to convict the rest in exchange for a reduced sentence. After Trump’s re-election, many more will go to jail – and gullible idiots like you will still be claiming that it was Trump who “colluded with Russians.”
Stupid can’t be fixed.
25 more days buddy and your lot can get back under a rock
It always get mentioned. It also has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Several smoking guns, you lying Dem halfwit.
Your facts are wrong. Hillary Clinton’s e-mails were never stolen and leaked to the media by Russian intelligence. (You’re confusing the scandal about her private email server and 30,000 deleted emails, which she deleted; those were not hacked.) It was the DNC’s emails that were hacked (purportedly by “Guccifer 2”) and leaked. Hillary’s DNC hired Crowdstrike to look at the DNC servers and they said it must’ve been a Russian hack, all the while ignoring the fact that the data transmission from the hacked DNC server showed it had to have been hacked locally, not remotely. (The DNC never allowed the FBI to look at its server.) Since the leaked emails had to do with the DNC’s pronounced favoritism of Hillary over Bernie in the 2016 primaries, and were hacked locally, an Occam’s Razor analysis posits that the stolen emails from the DNC came from some insider, presumably a Bernie supporter, frustrated at how the party had supported Hillary over Bernie. Hillary’s quick-thinking plan to blame Russia (and Trump! a Two-fer!) got her out of the “WTF?” cries of the Bernie Bros, and deflected any more attention from her own server problems (remember, she’d just been cleared by Comey in early July 2016), and served to paper over her intra-party problems that were leaving Dems dis-united after the DNC leak. What better way to move past it than “blame the Russians!” and what the hell, let’s throw Trump in there too. Then Trump won, and after a few hours of more “WTF?!”, they realized they had an edifice already constructed, however rickety, that they then plastered into the whole Russia hoax/Mueller probe/blah blah blah. They never believed it for a second. But hey, it’s politics, right?
It’s okay, we all ignore you because you spout Leftist propaganda
Yeah yeah yeah…..25 more days and you idiots can go back under the rock you crawled out from.
The leaked emails belonged to John Podesta and the DNC, not Hillary. And there are lines of evidence indicating that it was not the Russians who hacked them. It is now well documented that the illegal use of government power to spy on Trump happened, and that Russian disinformation was used to justify it.
The simple answer is that there is no actual evidence of the “Russian intelligence” hack. Naturally that would never occur to you.
You know Durham is investigating the Russian Bank faux hoax, right? Fusion GPS/Simpson and the USSC/Congreescritters are being investigated for framing the Trump campaign/Trump ties with a Russian Bank.
Funny how Muller found ANY link to Russia but you keep espousing a link, when there is clear evidence Of DNC/Obama/Biden/Clinton Russia/Ukraine ME links up one side and down the other, BUT TRUMP! LOL
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/10/08/evidence-surfaces-of-john-durham-grand-jury-team-following-deep-state-rabbit-hole-leading-to-senate-intel-committee-corruption/
What’s funny is the fact that all what you say has been debunked, yet you still spout the lie.
The evidence for Russian hacking of the DNC and Hillary’s e-mails are based solely on Crowdstrike’s analysis, since the DNC refused to allow the FBI to examine the server at any time. As you know if you have more than two neurons, it is far more likely that the DNC information was removed internally by someone like Seth Rich rather than a Russian hack. Moscow DeutscheBank’s relations with Mr. Trump in 2013 are of course totally irrelevant. Campaign member Manafort was sentenced for false tax returns, bank fraud, and not reporting a foreign bank account, while Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days for a minor process crime. None of these convictions were related to Russian collusion, just unsuccessful attempts by the Mueller team to enrage President Trump into acts of obstruction of justice.
It’s because guilt by association is merely circumstantial. The documents released show FISA abuse took many people to pull off and they coordinated with each other. Those docs and explanations are available by simple internet search, which makes you not just a partisan hack, it shows you are intellectually lazy and to simply be ignored.
It really amazes me that all of this information is being patched together and the true story is known but there has not been (to date) any large scale arrests of these corrupt officials. Surely Barr & Durham have enough to prosecute based on what the story above tells us – or are we being duped? I just dont get it. Is the swamp so large that it can bury even these crimes?
18 U.S.C. § 371, creates an offense “[i]f two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose. (emphasis added). See Project, Tenth Annual Survey of White Collar Crime, 32 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 137, 379-406 (1995)(generally discussing § 371).
The five year statute of limitations is running out. Time to appoint a special prosecutor. I suggest Tom Fitton at Judicial Watch and Andrew Mccarthy at NR.
Amazing that even with tons of proof having been uncovered there are STILL no arrests or indictments! Barr is as corrupt as the insurrectionists. I never thought that, in America, there would be so many people who are too big to be prosecuted.
The timeline means that it is possible that Mifsud was collecting information for Clinton rather than trying to set Papadopoulos up and Downer marked the beginning of her plot once she pulled the trigger.
In my life I have managed several companies small and large.
If an employee, (that is a person who WORKS FOR ME, was purposely attempting to subvert or damage the company or management I FIRED THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Who do these a-holes like Haspell work for? Who is their boss?
That’s right. They work at the pleasure of the President of The United States.
FIRE HER. FIRE BARR. FIRE DURHAM, Fire every seditious, treasonous one of them and then, hire a REAL top cop and prosecute these goons.
Trump’s campaign team, his family, and over a dozen associates had hundreds of contacts with Russian operatives during 2016 and right through the election. Then they LIED to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement about these physical meetings and telephone and electronic contacts. What did they expect to have happen except surveillance to find out what was going on? What do you think would happen if you or I began to have such contacts with operatives from countries which are considered enemies? This entire narrative that the Trump team is innocent and did not deserve scrutiny is beyond ridiculous and the only reason it continues to have any credence four years later is that the DNC is horrible at messaging. The fact that Barr hasn’t been able to follow his client’s (Trump) directives in securing indictments is that what Trump’s people did is indefensible. Wake up already.
Yes, what about Hillary’s emails!? I’m hearing this is a priority for millions of unemployed Americans teaching their children from home. Dead Americans are especially are intrigued by how deep it all goes and where it stops. All those not loyal to the gameshow host president will have citizenship revoked!
“Was the Obama White House, like the Clinton campaign, worried about the release of damaging information—damaging not just to the Democratic candidate but also the sitting president?” This likely explains why the hacked DNC server was never submitted to the FBI, which would’ve made Obama AND Clinton subject to Comey’s discretion and mercy.
Haspel was a known Brennan protégé, and teacher’s pet favored with plum, career-enhancing assignments (e.g., London station chief)? Well, then Trump’s galactic naïveté (&/or gullibility) in naming her as Brennan’s successor must’ve had Deep State members convulsing in paroxysms of laughter! These saboteurs and coup-plotters have successfully run out the clock, and even IF there’re any indictments, these prosecutions will (in a Biden administration) become derelicts — assigned to departmental bottom-feeders, whose managers will steer them into legal ditches.
Just goes to prove President Trump has no chance of winning the Election.The left and the Democrats do whatever they want and no one ever pays any sort of price for it it’s quite remarkable and quite sad. It makes the average citizens blood boil but there is absolutely no stopping it.
Nothing ever comes out of such Republican narratives. Obama ran a squeaky clean administration. Doesn’t everyone yearn for the halcyon years when the president was not featured in the daily news?
AG Barr is now saying that he needs to be able to prove that each conspirator had an ‘intent’ to engage in criminal actions in order to proceed with his case(s) against individuals. This is the same concept that, supposedly, prevented James Comey from recommending legal action against Hillary Clinton. Could someone please clarify if there is a need to prove ‘intent’? I thought not. Could someone also clarify if POTUS has the power to insist on appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate these matters, whether or not he is reelected? I thought so. If so, for what is he waiting?
You forgot to mention the help Hillary got from the Martians. That wouldn’t have made this tale any less credible, but it would have made it more entertaining!
I’ll repeat it here for the umpteenth time. When this whole Bob Barr / Durham investigation started, I vowed to eat my hat if *one single* person involved in the worst political scandal in US history were indicted–let alone saw the inside of a jail-cell. My limited-edition Stetson Stratoliner Fedora remains uneaten, and will remain so indefinitely.
It has been more than clear to me that at the highest level, justice, far from being blind, has a high-power telescope–and one, at that, permanently pointed towards the political enemies of the deep state. Period. This is why Flynn remains in jail, after his life has been utterly destroyed, while those guilty of fabricating the constitutional travesty known as the Russia scam breathe free and are actually celebrated in our media. This is why Julian Assange has been treated like an escapee from the Nuremberg trials. This is why that poor sod who made an anti-Islam video that had only 100 views was slammed in jail after Benghazi, while the criminally-negligent secretary of state wasn’t even forced to step aside. And this is also why few if any BLM/Antifa agitators are rotting in jail.
In this country, Justice works–at least as well as any manmade (and therefore imperfect) institution is supposed to work. But only at the everyday-person level. But when political interests come into play, “justice” means war on the enemies of the deep state (which largely coincide with the enemies of the Left), and permanent indulgence on the latter.
God damn John Durham. I stopped believing in this clown 1/2 a year ago. He had had more than enough time.
Compare the treatment of the coup plotters vs Roger Stone and General Flynn.
God damn John Durham.
People need to hang for this. It has been long been apparent the only justice in America is the justice you take by your own hands
Sure, boy genius, you try that and let us know how it works out, OK?
The Left and their propaganda arm would never let a Republican of any stripe hide behind “can’t use the DOJ to go after political opponents” I’ve been saying since the start that a corrupt campaign or candidate cannot be allowed to use the fact that it is the opposition party to hide from corruption. Democrats do what they want knowing another Democrat won’t prosecute and that the media will scream “they’re using the Justice Department to get revenge” if any Republican tries.
Hillary is the single most corrupt politician in American history. She makes Nixon look like Mother Theresa. If no one pays, the rule of law is over in America.
Relax. There is a solution. Article 5 provides us with the ability to assemble a Convention of the States and redefine or fire the federal government.
It Started along time ago this time it got sunlight and the Roaches are running
Hillary Clinton’s emails were not hacked or leaked AT ALL. The Russians hacked the DNC and ALSO the RNC servers (that’s according to the CIA, FBI, and NSA), yet ONLY leaked DNC material through WikiLeaks, whose founder and principle driver, Julian Assange, despised Hillary Clinton. The go-between for Wiki-L and the Trumpies was convicted felon and all around gross sapient hominid Roger Stone.
And of course, Robert Mueller testified he and his team never addressed “collusion”, a non-legal term, but instead only looked at whether the Russian hacking and propaganda efforts were instigated or coordinated with the Trump campaign, for which he did not find sufficient evidence. What WAS found was over a hundred contacts with Trump campaign officials and figures connected to the Putin oligarchy/crime cartel, including Little Donnie (AKA Orange Junior) meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on the Clinton campaign (and Bigly Orange, AKA Individual-1, later concocted a cover story for the media about the meeting). In fact, Robert Mueller testified under oath the Trumpies were very happy to receive Russian help with their efforts (you know, just like all patriotic Americans would do).
Now, let’s all play a little logic game, shall we? If the “Deep State” actually wanted to tank the Trumpies, why didn’t they they leak word of the investigation to the press? Why deny it when pressed by the NY Times? Getting the word out of an investigation into a fake “billionaire” who owes hundreds of millions reaching out to Mother Russia while running for Prez would have been pretty damaging, da? Yet Comey droppped on an October bombshell on Clinton, not Orange Julius. Why, he didn’t even let the mink out of the sink about the First Family of Grifters pursuing Trump Tower Moscow up to the time of the GOP Convention.
Who advised Trump to hire Haspel and why is it Trump’s worst mistakes in his first term were personnel choices? You’d think one of his strengths as a businessman would be choosing good people to surround himself with.
I think the swamp was a lot bigger than even he realized.
I would say that Trump keeps his friends close, but his enemies closer.
When playing the game of life, particularly in business, you can learn an incredible amount of knowledge
and build winning a strategy by hiring those who are your competition & would normally do you harm and treat them as if you are ignorant to their motivations. They will continue to go about the business of harming you because they always have. All the while, you closely watch the way they operate, who they talk to, what they’re saying, what they are doing, how they are doing it, etc. Evaluate their communications, pathways of operation, and learn everything you can from it. You gain the type of information that you could never obtain in any other way – insider information which will enable you to completely take them down and then out permanently – there is no better way to obtain that info. I believe this has been Trump’s strategy from the start.
If not, and Trump really has been ignorant, or has picked the people he has picked because he is in bed with all the corrupt entities of both parties, then this country is truly doomed.
I have reach your exact same conclusions. God help us all.
The biggest problem with these revelations is that they are far too complex for the ordinary guy holding down a job to understand. If each of the actors in the plot was named along with a paragraph of no more than 200 words explaining his role and possible guilt in the thing, the public at large would be able to get a handle on all the allegations and make a judgement as to whether they are the big problem that the Republicans say they are. The ordinary guy does not take anything to the bank on a thing like this until there are both prosecutions and convictions. So far all but one of the prosecutions and convictions have been on the Republican side. Not good for the Republicans from a public relations point of view.
A convincing, well written article, with some threads of truth. For a prosecutor like Barr, at the end of the day it’s not what you think, but what can you prove. Barr knows what Trump doesn’t. There is not irrefutable evidence. A nothing burger as Hannity would say.
I hope someone is making room at Leavenworth for the gangs that will be headed that way when Trump starts his second term.
This is one of the best summaries I’ve read. However, I think it still misses the foundational issue—that the Obama administration had begun spying on Republican presidential candidates (plural) beginning in late 2015—and so begins in media res: “The Clinton team signed off on the operation no later than March 2016, when it hired Fusion GPS . . . .” And why that timing? Because in March 2016 it came to light that the FBI had been disclosing raw FISA data to contractors. In April 2016 Admiral Michael Rogers shut down all outside government access to FBI/NSA database and raw FISA information. The Obama administration had to find another method of information gathering—so enter Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and the FBI informants. After Trump became the presumptive GOP Nominee (in May) is when informants began contacting newly announced Trump campaign officials.
In June 2016, the first FISA warrant application on Carter Page was rejected. That’s when the dossier work really got rolling. They needed the warrant because it allows past and present communications to be accessed; this was the cover for the previous spying. (The Clinton email leak was just a good cover story for it.) The Fusion/Steele team was racing against the NSA, who was preparing to tell the FISA court about abuses of surveillance—and they won: On October 21, 2016, the FISA court approved a Title-1 Surveillance Warrant against Carter Page, and three days later Admiral Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings about the violations.
In April 2017, the FISA court released a report: they had examined FISA queries from November 1, 2015 to May 1, 2016 using identifiers for U.S. persons and found that 85% were not compliant with the applicable minimization procedures. They also noted that since at least 2012, there were violations in query use. My guess, based on other research, is that this spying operation goes back to 2010 and involves Britain’s spy agency, GCHQ. I think the outside contractors, redacted in the report, may have been British, a tactic to circumvent U.S. laws.
Trump’s many first term personnel choice errors were largely shaped by who Mitch McConnell — himself a criminal hoping to remain untouched — told him he was willing to get confirmed. Add to that the natural desire of a new president to make peace with the RNC and other leading Republicans AND the fact that he was an outsider, not close to large numbers of insiders who could advise him and you have a recipe for exactly what we’ve seen.
The goal of Barr etc. isn’t so much to avoid the appearance of political payback as it is to avoid cleaning house because THAT IS HIS JOB. Look at the man’s history: He’s been brought in for this sort of work before and was successful.
What a pity we lost Disqus. The code sucks but the user interface is superior.
Go for it.
A more blatant example of projection of Trump’s malfeasance and criminality as well as your own I have never seen.
The corrupt Trump cult are the only ones still obsessed with Hillary Clinton. We are more worried about the psychopath wannabe Dear Leader who is super spreading disease around the nation.
Do you people even have a conscience?