Archive for the ‘John Brennan’ Category

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.

Last week, the nation found out that Jonathan Turley a) voted for Hillary Clinton and b) is a man of integrity. This morning, it’s worth examining Prof. Turley’s op-ed about the Horowitz Report.

For instance, Prof. Turley wrote “Justice Department officials insisted to Horowitz that they choose not to interview campaign officials because they were unsure if the campaign was compromised and did not want to tip off the Russians. However, the inspector general report says the Russians were directly told about the allegations repeatedly by then CIA Director John Brennan and, ultimately, President Obama.”

Prof. Turley continued, saying “In the meantime, the allegations quickly fell apart. Horowitz details how all of the evidence proved exculpatory of any collusion or conspiracy with the Russians.” How can that be? Jim Comey insists that the FBI did nothing wrong. Comey saying that the FBI did nothing wrong ranks right up there with Adam Schiff saying that he’d seen evidence that was “stronger than circumstantial.”

Then there’s this:

Horowitz also finds no sharing of information with FISA judges that undermined the credibility of the dossier or Christopher Steele himself.

This won’t turn out well for Adam Schiff, who put out a report in February, 2018. In that report, which was published after Devin Nunes published “a memo with these explosive revelations that the FBI had targeted [former Trump campaign adviser] Carter Page with surveillance warrants that the dossier from a rival campaign had been the basis for that, and that the FBI had not been straight up with the FISA court.”

If there’s anything that’s predictable, it’s that the Swamp protects its own. Nowhere is that more visible today than with the faux whistleblower, whose name (allegedly Eric Ciaramella) was disclosed by Donald Trump Jr. today. According to this article, “current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News” that “pressure is building on the spy agency’s director, Gina Haspel, to take a stand on the matter.”

Fine. Here’s a stand that these Swamp critters won’t like. Haspel should side with the Constitution. Specifically, Haspel should side with the Sixth Amendment, which says “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”

TRANSLATION: Anyone accused of a crime has the right to cross-examine his accusers, just like he has a right to accuse those accusers. The standard is that defendants shall have the right to confront their accusers. It doesn’t say that defendants might have that right if the wind is out of the west and if we’ve just had a full moon. It says that, in all situations, the defendant shall have that right. Predictably, the faux whistleblower’s attorney isn’t fond of the idea of his client’s name getting outed:

Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s lead lawyer, has said that disclosure of his client’s name would deter future whistleblowers and he has threatened legal action against anyone who reveals the name. In a statement Wednesday, the whistleblower’s lawyers said “identifying any suspected name … will place that individual and their family at risk of serious harm.”

First, it isn’t known if this person qualifies as a whistleblower. Just because his/her attorney says the person is a whistleblower doesn’t make it Gospel fact. Next, if the alleged whistleblower has a partisan political agenda that includes removing the president from office, then exposing the alleged whistleblower’s identity is a patriotic thing. I want people who gossip about things that they heard to not be protected. If this person didn’t abide by the laws of integrity, they don’t deserve protection.

The inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, found the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign on Ukraine to be credible. The description of events in the complaint, which has been public for weeks, has largely been confirmed by the transcript of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president and by the publicly available testimony of other witnesses in recent weeks.

Michael Atkinson should testify when the House Impeachment Committee, chaired by hyperpartisan Democrat Adam Schiff, conducts public hearings. What made the whistleblower’s testimony credible? Was it the fact that none of it was first-hand information? Was it the fact that no court in the nation would’ve admitted this information into a court because it’s hearsay, which is inadmissible except in a few exceptions?

“Since the affiliation of the whistleblower is unacknowledged, it is up to the Acting DNI Joe McGuire to take a firm public and private stance against any effort to expose the whistleblower,” Brennan told NBC News. “Other leaders of the Intelligence Community should privately oppose any attempt to name the whistleblower. Senator Paul’s appalling call for the naming of the whistleblower by the media should be denounced in the strongest terms possible; a statement signed by the heads of all the intelligence agencies would be most appropriate.”

Based on what, Mr. Brennan? Why should partisan snitches peddling gossip get protection? This isn’t the case of a patriot saving the nation from a madman. This is the case of a renegade madman trying to save a nation from a patriot.

It isn’t often that Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul agree so I’d better record this for history’s sake:

This article highlights the things that the leftists want us to ignore.

It opens by saying “President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his administration is the ‘most transparent in history,’ and that it has ‘cooperated totally’ with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or words to that effect. But the truth is quite the opposite. No prior administration has pushed the envelope of the law to deflect outside scrutiny to the same degree as this one. In a recent letter from the White House to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the president, in effect, rejected the entire notion of congressional oversight as illegitimately political: ‘Congressional investigations are intended to obtain information to aid in evaluating potential legislation, not to harass political opponents or to pursue an unauthorized ‘do-over’ of exhaustive law enforcement investigations conducted by the Department of Justice.'”

This Democrat apparently thinks that whatever House Democrats do in investigating is fine even if the Mueller Report was supposed to be the be-all-end-all of investigations. When the report didn’t deliver the impeachment goods that Democrats were looking for, House Democrats launched a full frontal assault on the Trump administration, issuing 81 subpoenas for documents from people who either haven’t been in office ever or who aren’t in office anymore.

That’s the definition of a fishing expedition. Feel free to call it a witch hunt instead if that’s your preference.

By contrast, prior presidents understood that respect for the rule of law means, in the end, complying with the law, no matter what the cost. That was true even of those under investigation, such as President Bill Clinton. And I should know—I was a member of the team led by Independent Counsel Ken Starr that investigated him.

President Trump didn’t utilize executive privilege while the Mueller investigation was happening. The Clinton administration invoked executive privilege frequently. President Trump made his personal staff available for interviews. President Clinton didn’t allow his personal staff to meet with Mr. Starr’s investigators.

Mr. Rosenzweig should stop trying to rewrite history.

Consider, by way of example and comparison, Clinton’s use of executive privilege—a privilege that Trump has also invoked in recent days to frustrate the House’s effort to get the unredacted version of the Mueller report. Just what is executive privilege, and why do we have it?

Notice the subtlety. President Clinton invoked executive privilege while the grand jury was seated. President Trump invoked executive privilege after Mueller had wrapped up its investigation.

That’s a significant difference. President Clinton protected his high-ranking staff from grand jury exposure. President Trump didn’t protect his senior staff in that way.

It isn’t a matter of if in terms of whether Mueller, Clapper, Comey and Brennan testify. Mueller will testify before Congress. Comey, Clapper and Brennan will testify before a grand jury. Sen. Graham and Mr. Durham will have them sweating bullets.

Democrats know that they’re sort of fine if they stick to their talking points. Democrats know that they’re in trouble the minute they’re pushed off their talking points.

Now that AG William Barr is investigating whether President Obama’s political appointees acted improperly in starting the surveillance into Carter Page, the same suspects (literally) are resurfacing with the same discredited excuses. Byron York’s article asks all the right pointed questions.

The article, though, starts by saying “In February 2018, the House Intelligence Committee released the so-called Nunes memo. In four pages, the document, from the committee’s then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, revealed much of what the public knows today about the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier in pursuing since-discredited allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election. Specifically, it revealed that the FBI included unverified material from the dossier in applications to a secret spy court to win a warrant to wiretap Trump foreign policy volunteer adviser Carter Page. All that was classified. To release it, the committee appealed to President Trump, who made a declassification order. That is the only way Americans know about the Page warrant. From that knowledge came later revelations about the FBI’s use of confidential informants and undercover agents to get information on Trump campaign figures.”

Now the same doomsayers are back predicting more gloom:

Now, some of the same people are issuing somber warnings of the damage that will be done if Attorney General William Barr declassifies documents showing what else the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies did in the 2016 Trump investigation.

I’m shocked to hear Brennan, Clapper and Comey are using alarmist tones about exposing national security secrets. Coming from them, it rings hollow. Byron York explains in this interview:

We’ve heard this refrain before. Yes, we should handle this information with the greatest of care. No, we shouldn’t trust the most untrustable trio of partisan hacks in US intelligence history.

Earlier tonight, President Trump “ordered U.S. intelligence officials to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into ‘surveillance activities’ directed at the president’s 2016 campaign.”

Let the finger-pointing begin. Comey, Clapper and Brennan are already attempting to incriminate each other. In the end, I suspect that they’ll each be ‘successful’, with each of them getting prosecuted and convicted or getting prosecuted and flipping on the other 2. Either way, the chances of this turning out well for that trio isn’t high.

Let’s get serious about this for a minute. Democrat spinmeisters point to the DOJ’s IG report and insist that it’s a comprehensive report on the origins of the faux investigation. It isn’t because it isn’t exhaustive. It can’t reach the places that the AG’s investigation can get to. First, the IG can’t call in people from all of the IC agencies. It’s limited by statute to the agency it’s assigned to.

Next, the IG can’t interview people who worked inside the DOJ but have since left. That means the IG can’t interview the central figures in the investigation. Specifically, it prohibits the IG from interviewing Comey, Lynch, McCabe, Strzok and Page. Ditto with Clapper and Brennan.

Trump also gave Barr “full and complete authority” to declassify information related to the investigation, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. The notice comes as Barr is conducting a review of what he has described as “spying” on members of the Trump campaign during the investigation into Russian interference.

Sanders said Trump had directed the intelligence community to “quickly and fully” cooperate with the investigation at Barr’s own request. “Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” Sanders said.

This gives Attorney General Barr wide latitude to investigate the investigators. Last Sunday, Trey Gowdy made a rather interesting prediction during Maria Bartiromo’s show:

Considering the fact that Trey Gowdy a) has seen these documents and b) is one of the most honest people to ever serve in Congress, I’m betting that there’s some former employees of the FBI and the IC who should be exceptionally worried.

John Solomon’s article on Christopher Steele’s dossier asks the question of who knew what and when:

Multiple sources confirm to me that the recipient of the State Department email was Special Agent Stephen Laycock, then the FBI’s section chief for Eurasian counterintelligence and now one of the bureau’s top executives as the assistant director for intelligence under Director Christopher Wray. The email to Laycock from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec arrived eight days before the FBI swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.

Officials tell me that Laycock immediately forwarded the information he received about Steele on Oct. 13, 2016, to the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then-fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok. Laycock was the normal point of contact for Kavalec on Eurasian counterintelligence matters, and he simply acted as a conduit to get the information to his colleagues supervising the Russia probe, the officials added.

This information on Steele was known well before Jim Comey signed off on the first FISA warrant application against Carter Page.

At the time, Comey “swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.” That’s a lie. John Solomon’s reporting, including the email from Kathleen Kavalec to Stephen Laycock, shows that the FBI knew that Steele wasn’t reliable. Comey testified the opposite. He testified that Steele was totally reliable. That testimony is discredited, to put it nicely.

If Solomon’s reporting is accurate, and thus far, it has been, Comey’s in big trouble. Lying on a FISA warrant application is bad enough. Lying on a FISA warrant application to spy on a presidential campaign is a total no-no. What’s most frightening is that, if they can do this to the president of the United States, they can do this to anyone.

Kevin Brock, the former FBI assistant director for intelligence, said the State Department’s email in October 2016 ordinarily should have triggered the FBI to reevaluate Steele as a source. “This is quite important,” Brock said. “Under normal circumstances, when you get information about the conduct of your source that gives rise to questions about their reliability or truthfulness, you usually go back and reevaluate their dependability and credibility.”

This isn’t unravelling the way Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings or Jerry Nadler hoped it would. They didn’t think that Barr would go on the offensive. They thought wrong. Finding out if the Obama administration cut corners to help Hillary get elected is the right thing to do. Now, Nadler, Cummings and Schiff are put in the position of defending the indefensible. They deserve that fate.

When it comes to legal matters, Trey Gowdy doesn’t mince words. He’s one of the most honest people to have recently served in Congress. If he says that someone is in legal jeopardy, bet on that person to start hiring attorneys. This afternoon, Mr. Gowdy stated that former CIA Director John Brennan was in hotter legal hot water than former FBI Director Jim Comey. It isn’t a secret that Jim Comey is in trouble. That’s what’s behind his constant blabfests on CNN and on speaking tours.

What’s known is that the FBI didn’t attempt to verify the Steele Dossier until after the election, which is well after Jim Comey attested to the FISA Court that it had been verified and that Christopher Steele was a trustworthy informant. Those aren’t accurate statements, which means, I suspect, that he’ll be one of the first people dragged before U.S. Attorney John Durham’s grand jury to get squeezed by Mr. Durham into turning state’s evidence against Brennan and other bad actors from the Obama administration. (Jim Clapper and Loretta Lynch pop to mind. Imagine that.)

“That’s a pretty easy thing to sort out, who insisted that the dossier or the unverified material from Chris Steele be included,” he said. “But … sometimes when you have two people, I can tell from you having been in the courtroom, sometimes when people are blaming each other, they are both right. It’s both of them. And I think it’s interesting Brennan and Comey right now, the only thing they seem to share is a hatred for Donald Trump. It’s going to be interesting if they begin to turn on one another. I’ve seen the document. I’m not going to describe it any more than that, Comey’s got a better argument than Brennan based on what I have seen.”

I wouldn’t want to be either of those gentlemen at this point. Yes, I use the term gentlemen loosely in that sentence. If I wasn’t such a gentleman, I’d probably call Comey, Clapper and Brennan losers. But I digress.

Even Rod Rosenstein is upset with Comey:

Here’s why Mr. Rosenstein is upset: