Archive for the ‘Deep State’ Category

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times. Yeah, that politician is crooked but they’re all crooks. That’s disheartening. What’s worst is that it’s a defeatist attitude. I’m planting a stake in the ground and saying ‘No more!’ If our president is willing to fight against the Swamp, and he’s definitely willing, then it’s time for people of integrity from all political persuasions to join him in saying No More!

There’s nothing more Swamp-like than the upper echelon (singular, not plural) of the FBI. Republicans Jim Jordan and Michael Johnson have put FBI Director Christopher Wray on notice that they intend to interview “a mysterious FBI agent, Joe Pientka” in connection with the perjury trap crafted against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Expect Democrats to attack Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson for impugning the reputation of the FBI. Spare me the dramatics.

Democrats, starting with Adam Schiff, (D-Calif.), have launched one defense of the FBI after another. The infamous Schiff Memo was demolished by the Horowitz Report. The Schiff Memo said that “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.”

The Horowitz Report determined the exact opposite. In fact, the Horowitz Report went further than that:

The Justice Department inspector general’s report contradicted Schiff’s defense. It listed 17 significant omissions and errors that the FBI made in the Carter Page surveillance warrants, including derogatory information about Steele and at least one of his sources.

Then there’s this:

The key claim in the Nunes memo, that the Steele dossier “formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application”, is backed up by the inspector general’s report. The inspector general also faulted the FBI for failing to tell the surveillance court that Steele told a Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, that he was “desperate” in September 2016 to see Donald Trump lose the election.

Don’t expect Mssrs. Jordan and Johnson to relent. Here’s why:

Pientka was conspicuously removed from the FBI’s website after Fox News contacted the FBI about his extensive role in Crossfire Hurricane Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) matters, a change first noticed by Twitter user Techno Fog, but sources say Pientka remains in a senior role at the agency’s San Francisco field office.

This is what the Democrats’ pushback will look like:

The Horowitz Report utterly demolished the Schiff Memo. I’ve listed some of the specifics. The fact is that Pientka, Wray, Comey, McCabe and Strzok all need to testify. Further, it’s worth noting that field agents wanted to close Crossfire Razor, the name for the operation against Gen. Flynn. Strzok ordered it to stay open.

Here’s a question that hasn’t been posed to Strzok, Comey or Wray: why would field officers who interviewed Gen. Flynn want to shut the operation down but a suit from the 7th Floor overrule the field officers? The Swamp must be drained. The Swamp’s defenders must be defeated ASAP. Keeping gavels in Pelosi’s and Schiff’s hands is protecting the Comey/Strzok/Wray of the FBI Building. That isn’t acceptable.

It isn’t overstatement to say that Adam Schiff is the most prolific leaker in Congress. Just when you thought he couldn’t stoop to lower lows, Schiff proves that theory wrong. This time, Chairman Schiff criticized Acting Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell for rearranging the ODNI without the Intel Committees’ permission.

Specifically, Chairman Schiff said “Grenell was ‘pursuing organizational and personnel changes’ in ODNI ‘without consulting and seeking authorization from Congress and in a manner that undermines critical intelligence functions.'” It’s awful that Schiff would say that. It’s worse, though, that he’d leak the letter before sending it to its official recipient.

Before moving on though, it’s important to tell Schiff that Ambassador Grenell has the authority he needs to make changes because President Trump named him as the Acting DNI. He doesn’t need Schiff’s permission because he doesn’t take orders from Schiff.

Grenell shot back with his reply:

His letter was sent to the press before it was sent to me. These press leaks politicizing the intelligence community must stop. https://t.co/hdWIzGWvZr

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) April 7, 2020

Schiff is a partisan hatchetman. He should be stripped of his security clearance forthwith. Further, he shouldn’t be part of any oversight committee from this point forward. Thankfully, President Trump is draining the Swamp:

Good riddance.

This NY Times article starts by saying that Rick Grenell isn’t wasting time draining the Swamp. Shortly after that, the Times’ bias is exposed. The Times wrote “Mr. Patel was best known as the lead author of a politically charged memo two years ago that accused F.B.I. and Justice Department leaders of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. The memo was widely criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found other problems with aspects of the surveillance.”

The Times’ bias is obvious. First, they write that Kash Patel was the lead author of a document that “accused F.B.I. and Justice Department leaders of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser.” When the Times wrote that the “memo was widely criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found other problems with aspects of the surveillance”, it means that Adam Schiff criticized it, then the other Democrats on the Committee agreed with Schiff.

The fact that the Times article doesn’t use the name of the report is proof of the Times’ bias. The report is often referred to as the Horowitz Report. It’s considered to be the authoritative report on the FBI’s FISA warrant abuse. This should be one of the first things that Grenell looks into:

During the briefing, which was supposed to focus on coordination between government agencies to fight election interference, not the acts themselves, Republicans challenged the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Russians continue to favor Mr. Trump. Some officials said the briefing was not meant to be controversial and that intelligence officials intended to simply reiterate what they had told the Senate Intelligence Committee weeks earlier.

There’s no disputing that the Russians will attempt to interfere in our elections. What’s disputed is whether the Russians are trying to help President Trump.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has levied crippling sanctions on Russia, sold lethal military aid to Ukraine, started negotiating with Europe to import LNG while cutting Europe’s reliance on Russia’s energy. That pipeline hurt Russia’s economy bigtime. Why on God’s green Earth would Putin prefer Trump over Bernie Sanders?

Bernie wants to eliminate US fossil fuel production, which helps Russia economically while strengthening its geopolitical position. Bernie thinks that the US should model itself after Cuba and Russia. Again, why would anyone think that Russia would prefer Trump over Bernie? Bernie honeymooned in Moscow when the Soviet Union still existed.

Grenell should highlight this interview to expose the Democrats’ deceitfulness:

It was Devin Nunes, the man that Adam Schiff has continually attacked, who first talked about Russian election interference in 2014. During the interview, Nunes told Harris Faulkner that he’ll soon be filing a lawsuit against the Washington Post for publishing an article that is demonstrably false.

If Grenell starts cleaning house within the ODNI, he’ll quickly develop enemies. The Intel Community is as swampy as it gets. Ditto with the State Department. Adam Schiff is the personification of the Swamp, too, but that’s another post for another day.

I’ve never seen the type of firestorm that’s happening with USAG William Barr. There’s little doubt that Protect Democracy is targeting AG Barr because he isn’t a go-along-to-get-along type. Unlike previous AGs, Barr is a heavyweight.

When Barr didn’t show up for the House Judiciary Committee’s clown show, Steve Cohen Left a bucket of KFC at the table where Barr would’ve sat had he testified. According to the report, “Barr balked at the opportunity to testify for a second day after spending more than five hours on Wednesday defending his summary of the report’s findings.”

The reason AG Barr frightens the Deep State is because he didn’t hesitate in overruling the Deep State prosecutors’ excessive sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. After that shot against the Deep State prosecutors, Barr sent a shot across President Trump’s bow, too. Before departing for California, President Trump admitted that he’d made Barr’s life more difficult with his tweets.

Next, Deep State Democrats tried getting AG Barr to quit by circulating this gossip:

The Justice Department pushed back Tuesday night at multiple reports claiming Attorney General William Barr told people close to him he’s considering stepping down over President Trump’s tweets, days after Barr admitted that Trump’s tweeting made it “‘impossible for me to do my job.”

AG Barr knows how to fight the bureaucrats who think that they run the DOJ. They don’t run the DOJ. AG Barr does. He let them know that with his sentencing recommendation in the Stone case.

With Washington, DC all aflutter, AG Barr continues doing what he’s paid to do while ignoring DC’s drama:

Speaking before the Senate Wednesday, Barr referred to the letter as “snitty” and suggested a Mueller staffer had written it. Democrats, including a swath of 2020 presidential contenders, have since called for Barr to resign.

Democrats don’t like this guy because he doesn’t play the DC game. Democrats typically can’t get things done legislatively so they rely heavily on the courts. With Democrat corruption running rampant, they can’t afford a strong USAG in place.

The Deep State is legitimately frightened now that John Durham is questioning the FISA warrant process. Democrats don’t want the truth to come out about that. There’s tons of signs out there that the Obama administration weaponized the Intel Community, then used that weaponized IC to surveil the Trump campaign. The last thing that the Deep State wants is a legitimate change agent who won’t settle for the status quo.

Last fall, the buzz was that impeachment was a way to prevent the Barr DOJ from shining a light on the DOJ/FBI corruption.

Whenever Democrats need to distract attention away from their vulnerable members for their questionable votes, people can count on Nancy Pelosi providing that distraction. When Pelosi ripped up her copy of President Trump’s SOTU Address, she did it to distract attention away from her vulnerable freshmen.

Her freshmen promised to fix health care. Freshman Democrats failed that test miserably. Democrat freshmen promised to lower prescription drug prices. Democrats failed on that, too. Democrat freshmen told voters that they didn’t Pelosi for Speaker. Some of those freshmen voted for Pelosi to be Speaker. Freshmen Democrats that didn’t vote for Pelosi for Speaker voted to initiate the impeachment inquiry. These freshmen Democrats voted for both articles of impeachment, too.

Now, Pelosi has written a dishonest op-ed that the Washington Post has published. In the op-ed, Pelosi wrote “President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election.” It’s impossible to know whether President Trump pressured “a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election” since that election is 9+ months away. Is Pelosi clairvoyant? Or is she just lying again? I suspect it’s the latter.

Further, it’s virtually impossible for presidents to abuse their power in setting foreign policy. Since we’ve proven that President Trump didn’t “pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election”, then the only matter on the table is setting US foreign policy. The first sentence in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution emphatically states that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” This is important to note because of something Jeff Dunetz wrote in this post explaining why Lt. Col. Vindman was reassigned out of the NSC. (Make sure you read Jeff’s entire article. It’s the type of information you won’t get from CNN, MSDNC or other MSM outlets.) Here’s Lt. Col. Vindman’s opening statement to the HPSCI:

Jeff’s article highlights a briefing Sen. Ron Johnson had in Ukraine. Here’s what Jeff quoted from Johnson’s letter:

I had just finished making the point that supporting Ukraine was essential because it was ground zero in our geopolitical competition with Russia. I was surprised when Vindman responded to my point. He stated that it was the position of the NSC that our relationship with Ukraine should be kept separate from our geopolitical competition with Russia. My blunt response was, “How in the world is that even possible?“

It’s clear that Lt. Col. Vindman thought that the NSC, not President Trump, was in charge of setting foreign policy. It’s apparent because of testimony he gave to the House Intel Committee:

Vindman testified that an “alternative narrative” pushed by the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was “inconsistent with the consensus views of the” relevant federal agencies and was “undermining the consensus policy.”

Like Pelosi, Lt. Col. Vindman thinks that President Trump doesn’t set US foreign policy. The Constitution that Pelosi intermittently expresses praise for disagrees. The Lt. Col. Vindmans of the world serve the president to implement his foreign policy. But I digress.

I admit that I paid a ton of attention to Pelosi’s stunt. I don’t regret it, though, because there’s plenty of time to punish freshmen Democrats for voting “to initiate the impeachment inquiry and voting for both articles of impeachment.” We have 9+ months left to make the case for firing Pelosi’s Democrats. Let’s make the most of that time.

This GAO opinion reeks of Deep State intervention into the Democrats’ impeachment of President Trump. Today, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog office, issued an opinion stating that the Trump administration had broken the law by temporarily withholding lethal military aid to Ukraine. The GAO specifically stated that the Trump administration had violated the “Impoundment Control Act.

Anyone who knows the Constitution knows that Article II gives the Executive Branch sole authority on foreign policy. Further, as James Freeman points out, the GAO’s boss is the Legislative Branch. Quoting from Freeman’s article, “For people who aren’t students of the Washington bureaucracy, it should be noted that few people consider GAO the authoritative word on legal issues. The Justice Department and ultimately of course the federal courts make the big calls.”

According to the gospel of Schoolhouse Rock, the Legislative Branch isn’t equipped to render verdicts. At best, the Legislative Branch might be authorized to offer an opinion on legal matters but that opinion is purely advisory. It isn’t the type of thing that has legal weight behind it. It shouldn’t be surprising to find out that the Deep State is attempting to tip the Senate’s trial of President Trump’s impeachment in the Democrats’ favor. This is how we know that’s what’s happening:

At the urging of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, (D-MD), GAO now says that Trump administration delays in sending aid to Ukraine were illegal. In a new letter GAO’s general counsel argues that even though the Trump administration made aid for Ukraine available last September 12—before the Sept. 30 deadline for obligating funds—it still should have happened earlier. It’s not entirely clear which date would have made GAO happy but in the agency’s view the White House did not have an unavoidable “programmatic delay” which prevented funds from going to Ukraine.

Again, the Executive Branch doesn’t obey the Legislative Branch. If that were reality, then we wouldn’t have a constitutional republic. We’d have a parliamentary system in which the president would serve the Parliament. That isn’t the system we have. Our system is one that insists upon co-equal branches of government.

The GAO counsel didn’t have the authority to say this:

“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act. The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”

That isn’t the GAO’s decision to make. The appropriation was spent with time to spare. The GAO admitted that. This was done to give Democrats a fresh talking point. Even if the GAO is right about this potential infraction, at best, this wouldn’t be a high crime, which the Constitution requires to impeach.

Despite this declaration, we haven’t seen proof that this isn’t a president exercising his authority in setting foreign policy. That constitutional question is something that a federal court would need to sort through. It isn’t something that the GAO can unilaterally decide.

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.”

Democrats are hell-bent on impeaching President Trump, even if it means ignoring what the key witness said. This morning in Ukraine, President Zelenskiy told the AP “We didn’t speak about this. There was no blackmail.” Further, in responding “to questions from The Associated Press, Zelenskiy said he only learned after their July 25 phone call that the U.S. had blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine.”

I’m predicting right now that this exculpatory information won’t matter to Schiff and Pelosi. This won’t break their stride. As Newt Gingrich writes in this article, “This coup attempt, which is exactly what it is, has nothing to do with evidence or any single accusation. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said when asked what she would do if the whistleblower accusation involving Ukraine collapsed, ‘We have many other, shall we say, candidates for impeachable offense in terms of the Constitution of the United States, but this one is the most understandable by the public.'”

Pelosi and Schiff aren’t interested in releasing the testimony transcripts because those transcripts will show that the Democrats’ impeachment attempt is a purely partisan activity. Democrats have started with this coup attempt literally the morning after Election Day, 2016:

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, a left-wing group announced emergency protests against Donald Trump in six cities that day. Within 24 hours of Trump being declared president, left-wing activists were gathering in Chicago, Los Angeles, Sacramento, New York City, San Francisco, and Albuquerque. As the organizers at Act Now to Stop and End Racism (ANSWER) announced:

In a shock result, Donald Trump has been elected president - but the people can rise up and defeat his bigoted, extreme right-wing agenda! The ANSWER Coalition is mobilizing across the country to organize and take part in emergency actions.

Democrats don’t just hate President Trump. Democrats hate him so thoroughly that they’re willing to throw the rules of evidence aside if that’s what’s required to get rid of President Trump. This isn’t a goal with Democrats. It’s an obsession with Democrats.

This video was shot on Nov. 9, 2016, the night of Trump’s election. That means that Democrats have literally been trying to impeach President Trump since he got elected. For Democrats, this isn’t about just removing President Trump from office. For Democrats, it’s about telling President Trump’s supporters that they made a major mistake and that they’d better repent immediately.

Anyone that thinks that the so-called whistleblower isn’t a Deep State operative hasn’t read this article. The article starts by saying “CBS News has learned the full contents of what appears to be a memo written by the whistleblower one day after President Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July. The memo, dated July 26, is based on a conversation the whistleblower had with an unnamed White House official who listened to the call.”

Those opening words instill legitimacy, thanks in large part to a pair of unnamed people talking about a classified call. Why wouldn’t the people immediately trust the ensuing document? Speaking of the document, it starts like this:

The president’s call with Zelensky was held on the morning of July 25. The whistleblower wrote the memo the next day after speaking with the official in the afternoon. The whistleblower wrote that he or she spoke with the White House official for “a few minutes,” and summarized their conversation.

According to the memo, the White House official described the contents of the call as “crazy,” “frightening” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The whistleblower said the official was “visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call.”

Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that an unnamed White House official was frightened to the point of spilling their guts to the unnamed Deep State snitch. We’re being asked to trust the people who insisted that they have proof that was “more than circumstantial” W-A-A-Y back in March of 2017. That’s the proof that we still haven’t seen. Sign me up. I’ll trust Shiffty Schiff. Later in the document:

The official described the call as “crazy,” “frightening” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The official asserted that the President used the call to persuade Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter. The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official’s view, the President had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own reelection bid in 2020.

I’ve read the transcript of the phone call. There’s nothing in that transcript that I’d call crazy or frightening. What I’d find frightening, though, is a snitch whose identity is being protected by corrupt politicians like Adam Schiff.

The point that needs to be made constantly is that this snitch/whistleblower/Democrat operative can’t be trusted. This document doesn’t match up with the transcript whatsoever. Since it isn’t difficult to find out who did the transcription but it’s virtually impossible to find out who these snitches are, it isn’t difficult to decide that Deep State snitches shouldn’t be trusted.

According to Sean Davis’ article, the snitch’s complaint (my word, not Sean’s) put together by the snitch’s legal team has some frightening similarities to the Steele Dossier. In Sean’s article, he highlights the fact that Steele’s dossier didn’t use people’s names:

Steele hadn’t gathered or witnessed any of this evidence first-hand. Rather, he relied on anonymous sources, many of them third-hand. “Source B asserted that the Trump operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Steele wrote. “Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents,” including Hillary Clinton, Steele claimed.

Let’s compare this with the snitch’s complaint:

“I was told that a State Department official” did this or that. “I heard from multiple US officials” that such and such. “Officials have informed me. …” And so on. Much like Steele, the Ukraine informant lacked first-hand access to evidence he claimed proved Trump’s guilt. It must have been hard to blow an accurate whistle when the whistleblower wasn’t even in the same room.

Why are we protecting a snitch that doesn’t rely on their own observations? That isn’t a whistleblower. That’s a Page 6 wannabe. House Republicans should create a firestorm that highlights the similarities between Steele’s discredited dossier and this snitch’s questionable second-hand allegations. This should be raised as a point of order or point of parliamentary procedure or some such thing. The point should be highlighted that the allegation-maker doesn’t have first-hand information for the committee. Though the Agenda Media, aka the MSM, won’t run it, real journalists like Katie Pavlich, Ed Morrissey, Guy Benson, etc. will push this story out to their readers, where it will gain a life of its own.

The snitch’s story is amplified through a compliant media that accepts everything as Gospel fact:

The questionable use of media sources to buttress hearsay claims is also consistent across both documents. After Steele compiled his dossier, he peddled the allegations to numerous reporters, who then dutifully reported them as fact. The Obama administration then cited those articles, which were sourced directly to Steele and his dossier, as proof of the validity of the allegations. One article was given to a federal intelligence court to justify wiretaps on a Trump campaign affiliate. The information it alleged was false.

Likewise, the Ukraine whistleblower repeatedly cited articles from The New York Times, Politico and even a report from former Clinton flack-turned-ABC-newsman George Stephanopoulos as evidence of the alleged conspiracy. It isn’t known whether he or his sources provided information used in any of the cited articles.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the same people who tried to sabotage President Trump with Russiagate are attempting to impeach President Trump with Snitchgate. The tactics are the same. In both cases, the names have been either withheld or made up to protect the snitch.

I just finished reading the transcript of President Trump’s phone call with President Zelenskiy. There’s no question that President Trump brought up Biden’s son late in the conversation. I still don’t see the quid pro quo, though. The fact that it wasn’t one of the first things they spoke about speaks to President Trump’s priorities.

The other thing that’s noteworthy is what wasn’t said. At no point did President Trump use US military aid as a tool to insure Ukraine’s investigation of Hunter Biden. It simply isn’t there, not even in a dog whistle.

Republicans should highlight that fact frequently. If Republicans take out that leg of the Democrats’ impeachment stool, Democrats will be screwed for 2020. Democrats haven’t passed anything that’s improved the economy, fought the opioid epidemic, fixed our immigration and asylum laws or helped eliminate MS-13 here in the United States. Without question, Democrats have morphed into the Impeachment Party.