Archive for the ‘John Solomon’ Category

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 FBI management then ordered the closure to be rescinded and pivoted toward trying lure Flynn into an interview.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.

Apparently, Adam Schiff is in panic mode now that transcripts of the House Intel Committee are about to be released. What’s supposedly getting under Schiff’s skin is that he’s about to be exposed:

Another source familiar with the transcripts told Fox News that the people interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe were asked whether they had evidence that Trump, himself, or the Trump campaign conspired, colluded or coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election.

Two sources familiar with the transcripts told Fox News that not one of the 53 witnesses could provide evidence of collusion. “The transcripts show a total lack of evidence, despite Schiff personally going out saying he had more than circumstantial evidence that there was collusion,” one source involved in House Russia investigations told Fox News.

Mueller, similarly, at the conclusion of his nearly two-year-long investigation, said he and his team found no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, but did not reach a conclusion on obstruction of justice, which current Attorney General Bill Barr ultimately decided not to pursue.

Then there’s this:

While law enforcement officials have long maintained that there was clear intelligence Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, to date, there have been no charges concerning actual conspiracy against people associated with the Trump campaign, which was at the core of the Russia investigation.

There isn’t any dispute that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. The question was whether people from the Trump campaign assisted in that meddling. It isn’t that Mueller couldn’t find enough evidence to recommend impeachment of President Trump. It’s that the official Mueller Report didn’t find any evidence that anyone in the United States worked with the Russians.

This should make Schiff nervous:

This won’t help Schiff’s credibility, either:

“According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft,” Schiff declared at a March 20, 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“Sechin is reported to be a former KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s. According to Steele’s Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company,” the California Democrat added.

Later, Schiff added this:

For instance, Schiff claimed this about the Steele dossier in a Nov. 15, 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal: “The bigger factor is how much of it can you corroborate and how much of it is true. A lot of it has turned out to be true.”

Adam Schiff is a guttersnipe and a Democrat partisan hack. If Nancy Pelosi cared about integrity, which she doesn’t, she should’ve thrown Schiff out of the House.

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.

If Adam Schiff isn’t worried, he isn’t getting good legal advice. Kim Strassel’s article highlights a multitude of crimes that Mr. Schiff might be prosecuted for. That’s the subject for others, though, so let’s unpack Ms. Strassel’s article.

In her article, she wrote “Mr. Schiff divulged the phone logs this week in his Ukraine report, thereby revealing details about the communications of Trump attorneys Jay Sekulow and Mr. Giuliani, ranking Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes, reporter John Solomon and others.” A paragraph later, she continued, saying “If we’ve never had a scandal like this before, it’s in part because it is legally dubious. Federal law bars phone carriers from handing over records without an individual’s agreement. The statute makes some exceptions, including for federal and state law-enforcement agencies. But not for lawmakers. ‘There does not appear to be any basis to believe that a congressional committee is authorized to subpoena telephone records directly from a provider—as opposed to an individual,’ former Attorney General Michael Mukasey tells me.”

Members of Congress can’t access these phone logs because they fall outside the purview of their legislative responsibilities. For those saying that Schiff had additional authority thanks to impeachment, the reality is that Schiff requested these records a month before the House voted to initiate the impeachment inquiry. It was after Nancy Pelosi declared that they were starting the inquiry but that’s insignificant in the court’s eyes.

That’s because the Constitution gives the authority to “the House of Representatives.” Literally for decades, courts have ruled that the House hasn’t acted until it votes. Though Ms. Pelosi has frequently acted like a queen, it isn’t likely that a court will grant her queen status. It isn’t likely that a court will rule that a legislator, even a Speaker of the House, can unilaterally declare the start of impeachment.

The question is whether Mr. Schiff, in his zeal to bring down Mr. Trump, has made himself legally vulnerable. In Kilbourn v. Thompson (1881), the U.S. Supreme Court held that “a congressional investigation into individual affairs is invalid if unrelated to any legislative purpose.” Mr. Schiff might argue he has wider powers in an impeachment inquiry. But the House didn’t approve the inquiry until Oct. 31, a month after he issued his main AT&T subpoena.

Rep. Jim Banks wrote “It doesn’t take a constitutional lawyer to recognize that subpoenaing these call records violates the spirit of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unlawful searches and seizures.”

Schiff didn’t go to court to get these records. He submitted the request directly to AT&T. The reason why legitimate requests go through the courts is to have the courts supervise the process.

“The subpoenas aren’t related to legitimate congressional oversight,” says constitutional lawyer David Rivkin. Because there’s “no conceivable legislative purpose to obtaining these call logs and publicly disclosing this information, Mr. Schiff would not be able to benefit from the Speech and Debate Clause immunity that otherwise protects members of Congress from civil and criminal liability.” Mr. Rivkin adds that any of the targets could sue Mr. Schiff under state law for invasion of privacy or intentional infliction of emotional distress, and potentially even compel Mr. Schiff to turn over documents in discovery.

The other thing that should be considered is throwing Schiff out of the House for violating another congressman’s Fourth Amendment rights. Nobody is above the law, especially the chairmen of powerful committees.

Schiff’s actions are reprehensible. Ethics charges should be filed with the House Ethics Committee immediately against Chairman Schiff. If Democrats protect him against those charges, highlight which Democrats protected Schiff for his disgusting behavior in campaign ads. Let Democrats know that they’ll pay a steep price for protecting corrupt members of their party.

Adam Schiff hasn’t displayed the proper caution for his high-ranking position. He hasn’t been accurate with his statements or findings of facts. His accusations aren’t based on verified information. Simply put, he’s been reckless. That’s why he needs to be stopped permanently.

John Solomon’s reporting in this article should worry Andrew Weissmann, Robert Mueller’s lead prosecutor.

According to Solomon’s article, “an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit” that “[t]he April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger.'” Then Solomon wrote “There are two glaring problems with that assertion. First, the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.”

Then there’s this:

Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show.

It gets worse:

Liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz said FBI affidavits almost never cite news articles as evidence. “They are supposed to cite the primary evidence and not secondary evidence,” he said. “It sounds to me like a fraud on the court, possibly a willful and deliberate fraud that should have consequences for both the court and the attorneys’ bar,” he added.

The operational premise likely is that the FBI should have firsthand information because of its investigation. The other premise is that ‘news’ articles aren’t exactly reliable these days. News articles, furthermore, should be considered hearsay. That’s the most important reason why judges shouldn’t trust news articles. The other important reason not to trust news articles is because, lately, political operatives have weaponized information in a way to sabotage their opponent’s campaign.

Why wouldn’t Weissmann worry about the inaccuracy of this information? Is it because he’s that unethical? Is it because he’s that much of a partisan hack? Is it because he isn’t as worried about accuracy as he is about convictions whatever the cost? Is it all of the above? I’m betting it’s the last one.

John Solomon and Sarah Carter are the Woodward and Bernstein of 2019. They aren’t alone, though. It’d be improper to not recognize the work of Devin Nunes and Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch. In this video, Mr. Fitton goes into detail on the multiple dossiers in play:

If Weissmann isn’t worried, he’s stupid. The Judicial Watch video is fascinating because it highlights the connections between Steele and the State Department and/or Obama administration officials. That sounds pretty shady. I don’t know if it’s illegal but it’s worth looking into.

What I know is that the US attorney that’s assigned to “investigate the investigators” isn’t a prosecutor to be trifled with. John Durham took over a 30-year-old cold case and turned it into a conviction. If laws were broken, Mr. Durham will get a conviction. With all of the documents admitting what various people were doing, I can’t imagine Durham not getting to the bottom of these cases.