Archive for the ‘Jim Comey’ Category
Anyone explaining how the unmasking of Gen. Flynn was routine isn’t trustworthy. To believe that the Flynn unmasking was innocent, I’d have to believe that the same people who spent $40,000,000 investigating the fake Trump-Russia collusion, appropriated 40 FBI agents and hired 19 corrupt attorneys just wanted better understanding of who was talking to the then-Russian ambassador to the US. That’s spin. This was a vendetta led by Jim Clapper, Jim Comey, Robert Mueller, Peter Strzok, Andrew Weissman et al.
The cabal that didn’t hesitate in using the Steele Dossier to obtain a FISA warrant against Carter Page suddenly developed integrity? (Let’s remember that they didn’t get their warrant the first time when they filed their application without the discredited dossier.) I don’t think so. The definition of a cabal is “a small group of secret plotters, as against a government or person in authority.” That definition fits Clapper, Comey, Mueller, Strzok and Weissman perfectly.
Again, to the Weissman/Strzok/Clapper/Comey cabal, this was a vendetta. They hated President-Elect Trump. Strzok told Lisa Page that he went to Walmart once and that he could smell the Trump supporters. Suddenly, this cabal of Trump haters are doing things purely out of civic pride? Shame on them for thinking that we’re that stupid.
We know the stories. Jim Clapper insisted in public that President Trump was a Russian asset but testified under oath that he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Susan Rice testified to this:
Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser, testified in September 2017 that she hadn’t seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion during questioning by former Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.
Rice certainly didn’t tell viewers that when being interviewed on TV. Why should we think that she’s a person of integrity? Peter Strzok found out that field officers wanted to shut down Crossfire Razor, the investigation into Gen. Flynn. Immediately, he ordered that Crossfire Razor not be stopped. A day later, there was a meeting in the Oval office about unmasking. Three weeks later, FBI agents entrapped Gen. Flynn.
Why shouldn’t people think that these different groups weren’t working together? They definitely had common purposes. They definitely weren’t people of integrity. They all hated the thought of a Trump administration. This interview is worth watching:
The FBI agent who foolishly asked on paper what the goal was is Bill Priestap. Here’s Priestap’s ‘contribution’ to the unmasking fiasco:
Priestap’s memo reflected his own thoughts on the FBI’S internal debate about interviewing Flynn. “What’s our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Priestap wrote, adding: “Protect our institution by not playing games.” His notes also show the FBI “softened its interview strategy” with Flynn, giving him hints to refresh his memory of his conversations, the Times reports. Nevertheless, Flynn “lied repeatedly, and prosecutors have said that agents gave him ‘multiple opportunities to correct his false statements by revisiting key questions.'”
This isn’t going away anytime soon. That’s why it’s important to realize that the Democrats’ spin will intensify. The simple fix for the Democrats’ spin is to ask this simple question: Is it likely that the cabal that wanted to prevent a Trump administration, the cabal that impeached President Trump and tried to remove him from office, suddenly become public servants with integrity? Of course, they didn’t.
The keys to this election, at least in terms of themes, will be trust and performance over the past 2 years. That’s the headwind working against the Democrats this year, both here in Minnesota and nationwide. Let’s start with what’s happening in Minnesota.
Gov. Walz has grudgingly started reopening Minnesota’s economy. That’s happening only because of multiple protests and the threat from some business owners who simply started threatening to open with or without Gov. Walz’s permission. Even then, Gov. Walz has been pathetically slow. LFR was told that protecting the most vulnerable in LTC facilities were a high priority for this administration. Despite that prioritization, 81% of Minnesota’s COVID deaths have happened in LTC facilities.
In terms of Minnesota’s economy, it’s in the crapper. Rep. Anne Neu debated House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler on Friday night’s Almanac. It didn’t turn out well for Winkler:
When Cathy Wurzer asked about the possibility of laying off or furloughing state workers, things got interesting fast.
WINKLER: I think that should be one of the last resorts that we should consider. State workers are providing essential services throughout Minnesota, from people who are processing unemployment insurance checks to epidemiologists at the Department of Health to correction officers engaged at the Department of Corrections to making sure that that doesn’t become a hotspot. We have people working to protect the meatpacking industry. We have people working to make sure our state parks are able to operate. … I also think that layoffs or wage cuts doesn’t help the economy, doesn’t help any of us if some people are making less money and so that’s why I hope that’s one of the last things we would look at.
REP. NEU: Well, I certainly think that salary freezes are appropriate. … The reality is that we’re looking at a significant deficit. We’re at $2.4 billion right now. There’s a good chance that will go up by the November forecast. And frankly, we have asked our private sector businesses, our mom and pop shops, are devastated right now and it really is not fair to those businesses to take the hits that they have taken and then to say that, no, as a government, we are going to fund everything at the levels that we always have.
We shouldn’t trust the DFL, aka the party of big government. Walz’s campaign slogan was One Minnesota. The policy that Winkler defended sounded like one of the private sector getting tossed table scraps after the government has feasted and had seconds. That isn’t my definition of One Minnesota.
Nationally, Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer keep tightening the screws on Blue Collar Americans with arbitrary (and unilateral) executive orders. It’s apparent that Democrat governors don’t want to return to sharing power with GOP legislatures. They’d rather act unilaterally rather than work with Republicans.
Why trust Democrats who want to act unilaterally and without the consent of the governed? This isn’t a third-world dictatorship. This is the nation whose Declaration of Independence emphatically states that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Democrats have dragged their feet in terms of reopening the economy and restoring our God-given rights. Democrats have jailed patriots like Shelley Luther:
Democrats even tried jailing a 3-star general because Donald Trump had the audacity to win the 2016 presidential election. Listen to the condescension of this pundit:
He’s perplexed after reading the deposition transcripts? When Jim Clapper said that he hadn’t seen “any direct empirical evidence” of conspiracy between Russia and Trump or anyone in Trump’s campaign, does this idiot still think that there was justification for prosecuting Gen. Flynn? If he thinks that, the next question is why he’s that stupid.
None of this engenders trust for Democrats. Finally, if Biden is elected, why think that he wouldn’t return Clapper, Comey, Mueller, et al, to his national security team? Why trust any of these people in positions of power after what they’ve done?
John Solomon has worked overtime and then some to rip Adam Schiff’s mask off. So have Catherine Herridge, Sara Carter, Lee Smith, Gregg Jarrett, Kim Strassel, Mollie Hemmingway and Byron York. Solomon’s article highlights how utterly dishonest Adam Schiff is. Ditto with the upper echelon of the FBI. Strap yourself in. This isn’t a short ride.
The pursuit of the truth ended Thursday when the Justice Department formally asked a court to vacate Flynn’s conviction and end the criminal case, acknowledging the former general had indeed been cleared by FBI agents and that the bureau did not have a lawful purpose when it interviewed him in January 2017.
Attorney General William Barr put it more bluntly in an interview Thursday: “They kept it open for the express purpose of trying to catch, to lay a perjury trap for General Flynn.”
According to Solomon’s reporting, the FBI didn’t have a reason to investigate Gen. Flynn:
3. Case closed memo. FBI agents wrote a memo to close the investigation of Flynn on Jan. 4, 2017, writing they found “no derogatory” evidence that Flynn committed a crime or posed a national security threat. FBI management then ordered the closure to be rescinded and pivoted toward trying lure Flynn into an interview. https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-found-no-derogatory-russia-evidence-flynn-planned
Corrupt FBI agent Peter Strzok allegedly ordered Crossfire Razor, the codename for the Flynn investigation, to stay open. Later, in a text to his lover, said this:
“Our utter incompetence actually helps us.”
It’s fair to ask how this relate to Adam Schiff. Adam Schiff knew that the FBI line office wanted to shut down Crossfire Razor. Most importantly, he knew that the officers had found “no derogatory” evidence against Flynn. They found that out before President Trump’s inauguration. That meant that there wasn’t a legitimate predicate for the Flynn investigation. Solomon laid out his case in this interview:
Schiff is a sociopath. Solomon cites 10 different statements Schiff made in public that were contradicted by what was known by the intelligence community. This is disgusting:
Unequal treatment. James Comey bragged in a videotaped interview that he authorized the FBI to try to conduct a Flynn interview without the proper notifications and protocol, hoping to catch Flynn and the new Trump White House off guard. In other words, they didn’t follow procedure or treat Flynn like others when it came to due process. Comey said the tactic was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/comey-admits-decision-to-send-fbi-agents-to-interview-mike-flynn-was-not-standard
Comey and Schiff are the most reprehensible figures in this disgusting episode. They’re both narcissists and sociopaths.
While some corrupt Democrats insist that the released Flynn documents aren’t a smoking gun, fair-minded Democrats say the opposite. Norman Eisen, the apologist for corrupt Democrats, wrote that “A review of these internal FBI communications, however, shows none of the wrongdoing that Mr. Trump would like to see. But no matter: The mischaracterization of these documents as evidence of FBI misconduct, and by extension, absolution of Mr. Flynn, signals that the president will escalate his abuses of power in the run-up to the 2020 election.” That’s quite a trick. A hand-written note from Bill Priestap asked “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” The FBI should be in the business of investigating crimes, not manufacturing crimes that they hope to use to impeach and remove a president they don’t like.
Mr. Eisen, it’s sad that you don’t recognize corruption when you see it. Eisen wrote “The Michael Flynn scandal was one of the first to reveal the pattern of lawlessness that has characterized the Trump administration. In December 2016, Mr. Flynn, in a phone call, successfully implored Russia to moderate retaliation against the United States for sanctions imposed because of the attack on U.S. elections. The conduct raised serious questions under the Logan Act, which prohibits private parties from conducting U.S. foreign policy.”
Flynn wasn’t a private citizen at that point. He had already been named President-Elect Trump’s National Security Adviser. Calling foreign ambassadors is what NSAs do as part of their job. Mark Penn has a different opinion of what Priestap’s hand-written note represents:
The new documents are in effect the “smoking gun” proving that a cabal at the FBI acted above the law and with extreme political bias, targeting people for prosecution rather than investigating crimes.
Then Penn wrote this:
The principal evidence that prompted the FBI to open the overall investigation into Trump has been definitively determined to be the Steele dossier. We now know, based on recently disclosed footnotes in the Horowitz report, that the dossier was discredited by its own sources and may even have been deliberate Russian disinformation. After receiving this information, the FBI’s top brass, even after learning that the dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, opened a broad investigation into Trump and his campaign.
What was this “broad investigation” predicated on? The fact that the Steele Dossier was Russian disinformation? Was the FBI attracted to it because its authors discredited the report? Former federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy was visibly upset when what the Priestap note represented:
I’ll take the thoughts of a former federal prosecutor over the words of a Democrat political operative anytime. Eisen is a Democrat political hack. Trey Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor who never lost a case in his career.
Anyone thinking that the (Comey/McCabe/Strzok/Page) FBI-Flynn fight will be the final fight is kidding themselves. Chuck Grassley’s tweet sounds like he’s just warming up:
New DOJ/Flynn docs are stamped w SCO as in Special Counsels OfficeDid Mueller have these docs? Why did his team sit on them? What else is Mueller team that cost taxpayers $30+ million hiding? The ppl deserve answers 2restore faith in federal law enforcement agencies
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) April 30, 2020
Random thought: Sen. Grassley is a serious senator. Unlike some of the Democrat show horses, Sen. Grassley brings a lunch pail when he starts asking questions. He’s extremely thorough and he gets to the bottom of things. If I was Mueller, I’d start worrying.
Another person who shouldn’t be taken lightly is Kim Strassel. She’s as persistent as Sen. Grassley. This is the first tweet of a lengthy multi-tweet string:
1) To really understand how outrageous are these new Flynn docs, you have to add to everything we already know. And key is remembering that the FBI had no REASON to interview Flynn. It already had transcripts of his conversations with Kislyak.— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 30, 2020
Rather than embedding the other tweets in this chain, I’ll just post the texts of those tweets:
- The new docs show FBI had already cleared Flynn of ludicrous claims that he was agent of Russian power; it moved to close that investigation on Jan 4 2017. But then DOJ cooked up the absurd Logan Act claim, the notion Flynn had violated an obscure 1799 law.
- Again if they thought he violated Logan, all they had to do was prosecute. They had the transcript. Their problem? They knew such ridiculousness would never fly. So how else to nail Flynn? As the notes show, Logan just became the pretext for interview.
- The real goal was trap him into saying something at odds with transcript, to “get him to lie.” And the evidence of that strategy is everywhere. We have Comey bragging that they went around WH legal counsel, so Flynn would have no representation.
- We have a new email from Lisa Page asking how FBI can get around issuing to Flynn the standard admonition against lying, suggesting Strzok just “casually slip that in.”
- We have McCabe docs showing he discouraged him from getting lawyer. FBI decided to get rid of standard admonition altogether. Also did not tell Flynn he was being interviewed in an “investigatory” context, suggesting this was a chat between gov officials.
- As for liberal commentators/legal scholars saying all this is “routine,” well, let’s sure as hell hope not. The FBI exists to investigate cries-not create them.
Actually, it isn’t routine. Thank God for old-fashioned liberals who fight for civil rights:
I have been a criminal defense attorney for decades. I have seen abusive tactics. However this is one of the most thuggish records I have seen. Most concerning is that they were trying to create a crime, not investigating a crime. The use of Logan only highlights that bias.— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 30, 2020
There was a time when networks like MSNBC and CNN argued for civil liberties and against such abuses. Now, because such principles would benefit Trump, there is just a shrug with a common mantra “everyone does it.” Yes, abuses occur but that is not license for their commission..— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 30, 2020
When Flynn is either exonerated or pardoned, expect Sidney Powell or some other high-powered attorney to file a lawsuit against Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Page. Expect Gen. Flynn’s wealth to be restored — and then some.
After reading this statement, I’d argue that it’s time for Republicans to go on the offensive against the Democrats’ corruption. Specifically, it’s time Senate Republicans exposed just how corrupt the Obama administration was.
The key part of the statement said “According to Andrii Telizhenko, a political officer in the Ukraine Embassy in Washington, D.C. who participated in a January 2016 meeting, ‘U.S. officials volunteered … that they had an interest in reviving a closed investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions,’ which refers to the investigation that involved Paul Manafort.” It doesn’t stop there. Here’s what it says when it continues:
“During that same meeting, U.S. officials also reportedly brought up investigations relating to Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, to serve as a board member. According to Telizhenko, ‘U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over.”
Doesn’t that sound like “U.S. officials” saying that they planned on making the Burisma-Biden scandal disappear? What better way to make it disappear than to give it to Jim Comey’s FBI? Why did “U.S. officials” want to restart the Manafort investigation, too? Schiff said that the Ukraine election interference story had been debunked. With official WH records showing these meetings happened, that takes this from being a conspiracy theory to being investigation-worthy.
This isn’t surprising. Democrats, starting with Schiff, have said that the Biden fiasco has been debunked. They’ve never said who debunked the story or who conducted the investigation that exonerated Hunter. This will give the Democrats some indigestion:
According to Telizhenko:
[Chalupa] said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election.
Democrats pretend to care about Russian interference in our elections. Democrats did this while they cultivated foreign contacts with the goal of getting President Trump kicked off the ballot. Apparently, Democrats don’t want the American people to decide who their president is. Apparently, Democrats are happy to spread propaganda on hide the truth about their corrupt intentions with Ukraine through Ms. Chalupa.
The upper echelons of the FBI better prepared their lives turned upside-down. The Justice Department announced that “at least two of the FBI’s surveillance applications to secretly monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page lacked probable cause.”
One of the people who should be worried about this news is Chairman Schiff. He should be worried because “Schiff had previously insisted the Page FISA warrants met ‘rigorous’ standards for probable cause, and mocked Republicans for suggesting otherwise.” Then there’s this:
The June 2017 Page FISA warrant renewal, which was among the two deemed invalid by the DOJ, was approved by then-Acting FBI Director (and now CNN contributor) Andrew McCabe, as well as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The April 2017 warrant renewal was approved by then-FBI Director James Comey.
This doesn’t mean that the first 2 FISA warrants met the FISA Court’s standards. It simply means that a determination hasn’t been reached on those applications yet.
At minimum, Rosenstein, McCabe and Comey should be very worried. Lying to the FISC should be accompanied by a lengthy stint of gathering striped sunlight. Their actions should result in the DOJ and FBI reaching a large, quick settlement with Carter Page. Clearly, Carter Page was hurt reputationally. When a person is hurt as a result of corruption, the corrupt people need to write checks with a half-dozen zeros to the left of the decimal point.
The Justice Department said the FBI should have discontinued its secret surveillance of Page far earlier than it did because “there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” The DOJ’s letter was revealed in a January 7 court filing unsealed on Thursday.
“Thanks in large part to the work of the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, the Court has received notice of material misstatements and omissions in the applications filed by the government in the above-captioned dockets,” the letter states. “DOJ assesses that with respect to the applications in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 17-679, ‘if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.'”
At this point, it’s indisputable that corruption was pervasive throughout the top echelon (singular, not plural) of the Obama-Comey FBI. It’s clear, too, that Rod Rosenstein wasn’t the boy scout he claimed to be.
Bipartisan support is growing for tearing down the FISC as it’s currently constructed. The judges that sit on the FISC were warned by Devin Nunes while he still chaired the House Intel Committee about these abuses:
“The way that the court has conducted themselves is totally inappropriate, they ignored clear evidence that we’d presented to them … they did absolutely nothing about it,” Nunes told Fox News host Martha McCallum late Tuesday. “They’ve left Congress no choice but to have to step in and fix this process.”
Finally, there’s this:
My response to FISC court letter. Republicans warned court 2X in 2018… pic.twitter.com/oNODqy61hc— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) December 18, 2019
During his interview with Maria Bartiromo this morning, Devin Nunes talked about the corruption within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISC. House Intelligence Committee Republicans have been questioning the FISC’s integrity. Thus far, the FISC’s replies suggest a cover-up. Rather than answering Republicans’ questions, the FISC has stonewalled and given platitudes for answers. At this point, there’s a strong chance that FISA won’t be renewed when it expires this year.
Rep. Nunes expressed his frustration with the FISC during his interview with Bartiromo:
“It’s hard to imagine a worse person the FISC could have chosen outside [James] Comey, [Andy] McCabe, or [Adam] Schiff,” Nunes said. Speaking to Fox News contributor Sara Carter, Nunes added: “It’s a ridiculous choice. The FBI lied to the FISC, and to help make sure that doesn’t happen again, the FISC chose an FBI apologist who denied and defended those lies. The FISC is setting its own credibility on fire.”
It’s important to fill in the details:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has stunned court-watchers by selecting David Kris, a former Obama administration lawyer who has appeared on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and written extensively in support of the FBI’s surveillance practices on the left-wing blog Lawfare, to oversee the FBI’s implementation of reforms in the wake of a damning Department of Justice inspector general report last year.
The development on Friday, first reported by independent journalist Mike Cernovich, has roiled Republicans who have demanded accountability at the FBI. House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told The Daily Caller that Kris’ appointment was “shocking” and “inexplicable.”
Quite frankly, this is what’s meant by the fox meeting the henhouse. By all accounts, Kris is the personification of the Swamp. Putting the Swamp in charge of reforming the Swamp is something that only the Swamp would think is reasonable. The truth is that this truly jeopardizes FISA.
If this is how unserious the FISC is, then they shouldn’t expect support from either side of the political aisle. There’s too much trust invested in the FISC to let it be untrustworthy. In fact, a total overhaul of that institution is warranted:
Earlier this month, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ordered the FBI to re-verify all previous warrant applications involving the FBI attorney who falsified evidence against the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. However, Fox News has learned the court did not order the FBI to double-check warrant applications involving other officials who made key omissions and errors in warrant applications as the bureau sought to surveil Page.
The FISC’s failure to request a comprehensive evaluation of previous submissions has stunned court-watchers who have questioned whether enough is being done to deter future misconduct by the FBI. In the past, the FISC has gone so far as to prohibit some FBI agents from appearing before the court after finding impropriety.
What’s needed is a reform-minded person to fix the FISC. In fact, I’d argue for hiring someone from outside the FISC to help with the reformation. Andy McCarthy or Trey Gowdy would be at the top of that short list, as would Michael Mukasey. This isn’t the type of thing that I’d entrust to leftists. They aren’t trustworthy. Before reforming the FISC, I’d put together a commission to determine what reforms and safeguards were needed. Mssrs. McCarthy, Gowdy and Mukasey need to serve on that commission. Ditto with Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh.
Eliminating the FISA Court likely isn’t a legitimate option. That being said, keeping it in its current structure isn’t a legitimate option, either. This needs to get fixed immediately. And I mean fixed, not tampered with.
Having Susan Rice lecture people about integrity is insulting. During her interview with Rachel Maddow, she said that the risks of killing Soleimani probably outweighed the benefits. She also said “The Obama administration was not presented with an opportunity by our intelligence community or by the U.S. military to strike Qassem Soleimani.” If they had been given that information, Rice said that what they “would have done is weigh very carefully and very deliberately the risks versus the potential rewards.”
That’s probably the only truthful thing she said in this interview:
“So, if in fact the administration can be believed that there was indeed strong intelligence of an imminent threat against the United States that’s being carried out by Soleimani and related militia then the question becomes [was] there more than one way to address that threat?” she asked Maddow. “Was the only way to deal with it to kill Soleimani? Certainly, given his history and track record, he deserves his just rewards but the question is does that serve our interests? Does that make us more secure?”
First, killing a man that’s destabilized an entire region of the world for a generation is always in our best interests. Gen. Soleimani isn’t just a high-ranking military guy. He’s the man who put together the military strategy to inflame an entire region. He’s the reason why Iran is the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism. Iran wasn’t like that before Soleimani.
Next, the US got information of an attack that would have hit multiple cities throughout the region. It isn’t that taking out Soleimani doesn’t come without risks. It’s that taking out a man with his list of accomplishments and skills is worth the risks. The trick, I suspect, is take the proper precautions to protect US interests.
Finally, if I’m going to get lectured about integrity, that lecture won’t come from Susan Rice. She’s as untrustworthy as Jim Comey and John Brennan. You can’t sink lower than that. If I’m going to get lectured about integrity, I’ll enthusiastically accept it from Mark Geist. In an interview with Pete Hegseth, Geist said this:
“First off, I mean, when has a protest ever occurred at night and, I mean, most protests they don’t typically bring AK-47s, belt-fed machine guns, and RPGs. That’s somebody planning an attack and they knew it,” Geist told Hegseth.
“They knew it when she went out on the speaking circuit on Sunday,” he continued. “But, instead of telling the truth she wanted to tell lies because she had to say what the administration — at the time — wanted.”
This part must’ve stung the most:
“If President Trump had been in office during Benghazi, we wouldn’t have lost four Americans,” he concluded.
That’s true. Unlike President Obama, President Trump wouldn’t order troops to stand down during a terrorist attack.
It’s understatement to say that Devin Nunes has taken more ill-deserved grief than any other congressman in recent history. In her latest article, Kim Strassel highlights then-Chairman Nunes’ efforts to root out FISC corruption and Judge Rosemary Collyer’s inaction.
It all started with a letter from then-Chairman Nunes to Judge Collyer. In that letter, Nunes wrote “‘the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information’ that went to the court, “misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information,” and ‘failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.'” That letter was dated Feb. 7, 2018.
According to the article, “Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.” What he got for his troubles is “a dismissive letter [from Judge Collyer] that addressed only the last request. The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn’t maintain a ‘systematic record’ of proceedings and that, given ‘separation of power considerations,’ Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department. The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.”
Being the persistent fact-finder that he is, Nunes “tried again in a June 13, 2018, follow-up letter.” In that letter, Nunes wrote that Congress “uncovered evidence that DOJ and FBI provided incomplete and potentially incorrect information to the Court” and that “significant relevant information was not disclosed to the Court.”
It’s worth remembering that then-Ranking Member Schiff published a competing ‘everything-is-fine’ memo. That memo has now been discredited. Here are some of the main claims from the Schiff Memo:
FBI and DOJ officials did not “abuse” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.
In fact, the DOJ and FBI would have been remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page, someone the FBI assessed to be an agent of the Russian government. DOJ met the rigor, transparency and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirements.
Thanks to the DOJ IG report, we now know that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered the initial email from the CIA that said Carter Page was one of their sources to say that Page wasn’t a CIA source. IG Horowitz made a criminal referral on Clinesmith. Back to Ms. Strassel’s article:
Mr. Nunes asked Judge Collyer to “initiate a thorough investigation.” To assist her, the same month he separately sent FISC “a classified summary of Congress’s findings and facts” to that point. The letter was signed by all 13 Republican members of the Intelligence Committee.
Judge Collyer blew him off. Her letter on June 15, 2018, is four lines long. She informs Mr. Nunes she’s received his letter. She says she’s also received his classified information. She says she’s instructing staff to provide his info to “the judges who ruled on the referenced matters.” She thanks him for his “interest” in the court.
With Judge Collyer throwing the FBI under the bus and with the FBI feeling like it’s getting the short end of the stick from rubberstamp FISC judges, the odds of a major fight between the FISC and the FBI seems likely.
Frankly, the FISC judges seem disinterested. In fact, they don’t seem terribly interested in the details of their cases. That type of attitude is frightening to anyone who appreciates civil liberties. These FISC judges seem indifferent at best.
Finally, it’s apparent that the reputation that the Agenda Media attempted to give Devin Nunes is undeserved. Nunes, unlike Jim Comey and Adam Schiff, was vindicated.
