Domestic Terrorism Goes Transnational: The war on Dissidents Picks Up Momentum
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 11, 2021
The claim is often made that President George W. Bush’s war on terror, which produced legislation that was employed to attack Iraq in 2003, eventually morphed into the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history when that conflict destabilized the entire region and led to an American multifront military engagement that now appears permanent. Few of those in the policymaking business appreciated that by turning “terrorism” into an especially invidious form of evil allowing governments to arrest or even assassinate without due process and bomb civilians if they fit a profile, Pandora’s box was being opened to expand that authority to commit other heinous abuses of authority.
Jim Bovard has described how post 9/11 there were hundreds of arrests for no good reason, in some cases only because someone had a name or countenance that appeared to be “Arabic.” Congressman Ron Paul and a handful of others observed at the time that the legislation would inevitably be used against domestic enemies of the state as well as against foreign or foreign-linked groups, meaning that the real damage done by the Patriot Act, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) and the Military Commissions Act would be felt somewhere down the road, possibly at a point where the original objective of the legislation would be more or less forgotten.
Now that we have an identified “domestic terror” problem one should expect at a minimum a massive increase in surveillance of innocent citizens coupled with arbitrary arrests and incarcerations. Indeed, the process is already well underway with FBI Director Christopher Wray announcing that there are several thousand terror “cases” under development. There will also be increasing calls to take away guns and to control what is allowed to appear on the internet. Soon Americans will have nothing to measure their remaining liberties by and will be less free to exercise rights including free speech, possibly dramatically so.
So now we have reached a point where we have a government that is committed to further reducing one’s rights in order to “keep us safe” from a domestic threat and congress critters are openly speaking of bringing in “war on terror” type expedients to make sure that they have the tools available to do just that. The Joe Biden White House has made clear that it has embraced fighting domestic terrorists as a top priority. Last week, the Administration sought authorization from the Pentagon to keep thousands of national guard troops in the District of Columbia for 60 days more, presumably to protect the government buildings and staff. The pretext for the continued presence was a vaguely described plot constituting a “potential threat” to overrun the Capitol building on March 4th, a day when it was apparently anticipated that Donald Trump would miraculously be returned to office. The House of Representatives even canceled a session over concerns that they were about to be invaded by a hostile “militia.” Just how “real” the threat was has not been made clear beyond suggestions of “chatter” over the internet, nor has there been any explanation of why the 2,200 strong Capitol Police force is unable to deal with the problem.
Be that as it may, the Biden Administration thinks it knows exactly who the enemy is. The government already has a working definition of a domestic terrorist, i.e. “If you advocate violence as a tool to further political ends, and take concrete steps to do that, you’re a terrorist.” But if you thought that included groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) you would be wrong. For the Biden Administration it is the stereotyped right-wing extremist, who, among other attributes, is represented by the media and government as coming from the class that Hillary Clinton once described as “deplorables.”
The accepted definition of the enemy defies logic as the rioting, arson, and killing that has taken place over the past year has generally been inspired by Antifa and BLM, resulting in major damage and destruction in various cities and states. But the mobs who wrecked and looted have been mostly set free by the courts in the Democratic Party dominated cities. In Portland Oregon 90% of the [arrested] rioters were not prosecuted, presumably because the local judicial system believed that their “cause was just.” Against that is the trauma of the January 6th incident at the Capitol, much smaller in scope and damages but obviously terrifying to the media and Congress. Also what did occur bore a more comfortable theme for the Democrats which they have been beating to death ever since – “insurrection caused by right wing extremists who were overwhelmingly white and support Donald Trump.” That’s apparently all one needs to initiate a campaign to get rid of such dissidents.
For some suggestions about the direction the Biden Administration will be going in to eliminate domestic terrorism, one only has to review the comments of Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland at his Senate confirmation hearing on February 22nd, where he declared that going after domestic terrorists would be a top administration priority. When asked if he regards the numerous attempts by Antifa and BLM rioters to destroy federal courthouses in Portland and Seattle as acts of domestic extremism or terrorism, he hedged on the issue and replied:
“So an attack on a courthouse while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is, uhm, domestic extremism, uhm, domestic terrorism. An attack simply on a government property at night… or any other kind of circumstances, is a clear crime and a serious one and should be punished. I don’t mean… I don’t know enough about the facts of the example you’re talking about, but that’s where I draw the line. One is… both are criminal, but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions.”
According to the man who almost became a Supreme Court Justice and now appears to be on his way to becoming Attorney General if you attack and seek to destroy a government building when there is no one in it is a different level of criminality than seeking to disrupt what is going on inside during business hours. It clearly is a fine line, or at least Garland sees it that way, but in either case you are making the building non-functional in terms of its intended use. Indeed, groups like BLM have regularly condemned the criminal justice system and if you burn the building down it will be unusable for a long, long time. So clearly what makes something “terrorism” as opposed to only “criminality” is the expectation based on the events of 1/6 that it will be right-wing whites who will be doing the disruption. They are the terrorists.
So, it seems pretty clear that the Biden Administration is now preparing to go after the people that it objects to and will create new laws as necessary to do so. Garland will certainly have a hand in that development. And if anyone is thinking of leaving all of this behind by fleeing to another country where there is an actual rule of law, it would be best to consider the matter again. On February 22nd, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that white supremacy right-wing nationalist movements have become a “transnational threat” that has exploited the fear of the coronavirus pandemic to gain support. He said that “White supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are more than domestic terror threats. They are becoming a transnational threat. Today, these extremist movements represent the number one internal security threat in several countries. Far too often, these hate groups are cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago. We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.”
It means you can run but you can’t hide. It looks like there will be a worldwide coalition to extirpate the evils that come automatically with whiteness and, as BLM is now de facto a major constituency of the U.S. Democratic Party, you know that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will be leading the charge.
Feds Indict Own Informant As Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Case Unravels
By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 11, 2021
Federal prosecutors are charging a key informant in the case against a group of Michigan militia members who the FBI claims were plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer last fall.
Stephen J. Robeson, a 58-year-old man from Wisconsin, was indicted on March 3rd by a grand jury for being a felon in possession of a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Robeson is known in political circles for his over the top violent rhetoric. He was recently exposed in court as a paid FBI asset that shows up to First and Second Amendment themed protests in the trademark “Boogaloo” Hawaiian shirt.
According to a report by Detroit News, Robeson was one of the main instigators behind the entrapment of members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia in a whimsical scheme to abduct Whitmer. The timing of the arrest was perceived in some circles to be a dirty political trick by federal agents wanting to create bad publicity for Donald Trump right before the 2020 election.
Court documents show that Robeson infiltrated the militia on orders of the FBI during a meeting of Second Amendment enthusiasts in Dublin, Ohio. It was at the Ohio meetup that, with heavy input from Robeson, more than a dozen men allegedly led by a mentally ill homeless man named Adam Fox began concocting their plan. Robeson then attended a subsequent tactical training camp in Northern Michigan that prosecutors say was in preparation for snatching Whitmer from her nearby vacation home.
Multiple informants and undercover agents were involved in pushing the defendants in the case to take part in the conspiracy as well as furthering it along. Robeson was singled out by Josh Blanchard, the defense attorney of Barry Croft, for using his material resources and heavy peer pressure to try and get the men to talk about storming Whitmer’s home and abducting her.
Generally speaking, FBI informants are given carte blanche to engage in crimes and dangerous activities. Most FBI informants are career criminals introduced into law-abiding political organizations in order to cause strife and gin up phony terror plots. Federal prosecutors are burning Robeson likely out of fear that he will burden their case at trial. While it may be a bit trickier, defense attorney’s can still call Robeson to the stand to undermine the Feds’ case even if they do not plan to use his testimony.
Last January, prosecutors were able to compel 25-year-old Ty Garbin to become a cooperating witness in exchange for a plea. This may be their best hope for salvaging the case.
Washington’s thirst for white terrorists has compelled the FBI and DoJ to lower their professional standards to an almost untenable degree. Representative Jamie Raskin, who is a Jewish activist, is ordering FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide a briefing on “white supremacists” in the police and military by this Tuesday, suggesting that government persecution of patriotic militia groups is about to intensify even further.
The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 12th.
As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever
Pelosi: We Need to Protect the Capitol from ‘All the President’s Men out There’
By Glenn Greenwald | March 5, 2021
Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.
First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”
The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.”
But none of that happened — not even close. The Washington Post acknowledged three weeks later:
Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses. In Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement — a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading for civil war — showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly ignored them.
All over the country it was the same story. “But at the moment that Biden was taking the oath of office in Washington, the total number of protesters on the Capitol grounds in Topeka stood at five — two men supporting Trump and two men and a boy ridin’ with Biden,” reported The Wichita Eagle (“With Kansas Capitol in lockdown mode, Inauguration Day protest fizzles). “The protests fizzled out after not many people showed up,” reported the local Florida affiliate in Tallahassee. “The large security efforts dwarfed the protests that materialized by Wednesday evening,” said CNN, as “state capitols and other cities remained largely calm.”
Indeed, the only politically-motivated violence on Inauguration Day was carried out by Antifa and anarchist groups in Portland and Seattle, which caused some minor property damage as part of anti-Biden protests while they “scuffled with police.” CNN, which spent a full week excitedly hyping the likely violence coming to state capitols by right-wing Trump supporters, was forced to acknowledge in its article about their non-existence that “one exception was Portland, where left-wing protesters damaged the Democratic Party of Oregon building during one of several planned demonstrations.”
Completely undeterred by that debacle, Democrats and their media spokespeople returned with a new set of frightening warnings for this week. The date of March 4 has taken on a virtually religious significance for the Q-Anon movement, announced NBC News’ Ben Collins, who was heard on NPR on Thursday speaking through actual, literal journalistic tears as he recounted all the times he called Facebook to plead with them to remove dangerous right-wing extremists on their platform (tears commence at roughly 7:00 minutes in). Valiantly holding back full-on sobbing, Collins explained that he proved to be so right but it pains and sorrows him to admit this. With his self-proclaimed oracle status fully in place, he prophesized that March 4 had taken on special dangers because Q-Anon followers concluded that this is when Trump would be inaugurated.
This is how apocalyptic cult leaders always function. When the end of the world did not materialize on January 6, Collins insisted that January 20 was the day of the violent reckoning. When nothing happened on that day, he moved the Doomsday Date to March 4. The flock cannot remain in a state of confusion for too long about why the world has not ended as promised by the prophet, so a new date must quickly be provided with an explanation for why this is serious business this time.
This March 4 paranoia was not confined to NBC’s resident millennial hall monitor and censorship advocate. On March 3, The New York Times warned that “the Capitol Police force is preparing for another assault on the Capitol building on Thursday after obtaining intelligence of a potential plot by a militia group.” All this, said the Paper of Record, because “intelligence analysts had spent weeks tracking online chatter by some QAnon adherents who have latched on to March 4 — the original inauguration date set in the Constitution — as the day Donald J. Trump would be restored to the presidency and renew his crusade against America’s enemies.”
These dire warnings also, quite predictably, generated serious reactions. “House leaders on Wednesday abruptly moved a vote on policing legislation from Thursday to Wednesday night, so lawmakers could leave town,” said the Times. We learned that there would be further militarization of the Capitol and troop deployment in Washington indefinitely due to so-called “chatter.” NPR announced: “The House of Representatives has canceled its Thursday session after the U.S. Capitol Police said it is aware of a threat by an identified militia group to breach the Capitol complex that day.”
Do you know what happened on March 4 when it came to violence from right-wing extremists? The same thing that happened on January 20: absolutely nothing. There were no attempted attacks on the Capitol, state capitols, or any other government institution. There was violent crime registered that day in Washington D.C. but none of it was political violence by those whom media outlets warned posed such a grave danger that Congress has to be closed and militarization of Washington extended indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone.
(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:
(The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City court bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.
The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.
There is, relatedly, a massive political benefit from convincing the population that the opponents and critics of those in power do not merely hold a different ideology but are coup plotters, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. That is the same political benefit that accrued from trying to persuade the population that adversaries of the Democratic Party were treasonous Kremlin agents. The more you can demonize your opponents as something monstrous, the more political power you can acquire.
And as Democrats and liberals now gear up to demand a new War on Terror, this one domestic in nature, it should be no surprise that the rhetorical leaders of their effort now are the same lowlife neocon and Rovian slanderers — Bill Kristol, David Frum, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Rick Wilson — who demonized everyone who questioned them as part of the first War on Terror as traitors and terrorist-lovers and subversives. It is not a coincidence that neocons are leading the way now as liberals’ favorite propagandists: they are the most skilled and experienced in weaponizing and exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain and authoritarian power.
Ultimately, if this “armed insurrection” and threat of domestic terrorism are so grave, why do media figures and politicians in both parties — from Adam Schiff to Liz Cheney — keep lying about it and peddling fictions? Politicians and media figures do that only when they know that the threat, in reality, is not nearly as menacing as they need it to be to fulfill their objectives of political gain and coercive power.
In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says
By Aaron Maté | RealClearInvestigations | February 25, 2021
After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to US intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.
Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth US intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does not know why Trump did not force the release of documents that would expose further wrongdoing. But he said senior intelligence officials “continuously impeded” their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material. Patel said Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents, he said.
Patel, who has seen the Russia probe’s underlying intelligence and co-wrote critical reports that have yet to be declassified, said new disclosures would expose additional misconduct and evidentiary holes in the CIA and FBI’s work.
“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel told RealClearInvestigations in his first in-depth interview since leaving government at the end of Trump’s term last month, having served in several intelligence and defense roles (full interview here).
Trump did not respond to requests seeking comment sent to intermediaries.
Although a Department of Justice inspector general’s report in December 2019 exposed significant intelligence failings and malpractice, Patel said more damning information is still being kept under wraps. And despite an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the conduct of the officials who carried out the Trump-Russia inquiry, it is unclear if key documents will ever see the light of day.
Patel did not suggest that a game-changing smoking gun is being kept from the public. Core intelligence failures have been exposed – especially regarding the FBI’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s now debunked dossier to secure FISA warrants used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But he said the withheld material would reveal more misconduct as well as major problems with the CIA’s assessment that Russia, on Vladimir Putin’s orders, ordered a sweeping and systematic interference 2016 campaign to elect Trump. Patel was cautious about going into detail on any sensitive information that has not yet been declassified.
‘Continuously Impeded’ in Public Disclosure
Patel’s work on the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of its former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is widely credited with exposing the FBI’s reliance on Steele and misrepresentations to the FISA court. Yet congressional Democrats and major media outlets portrayed him as a behind-the-scenes saboteur who sought to “discredit” the Russia investigation.
The media vitriol unnerved Patel, who had previously served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon – a tenure that exceeds his time working under Trump. Patel says that ensuring public disclosure of critical information in such a consequential national security investigation motivated him to take the job in the first place.
“The agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to the Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure,” Patel said. “Everything we find, I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever, from your political perspective, we put it out.’ So the American public can just read it themselves, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures, but those are minimal redactions.”
That task proved difficult. The House Intelligence Committee’s disclosure efforts, Patel said, “were continuously impeded by members of the intelligence community themselves, with the same singular epithets that you’re going to harm sources and methods. … And I just highlight that because, we didn’t lose a single source. We didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.”
“But each time we forced them to produce [documents],” Patel added, “it only showed their coverup and embarrassment.” These key revelations he helped expose include Justice official Bruce Ohr’s admission that he acted as a liaison to Steele even after the FBI officially terminated him; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s false statements about leaks related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier to spy on Page. “There is actually a law that prevents the FBI and DOJ from failing to disclose material to a court just to hide an embarrassment or mistake, and it came up during our investigation. It helped us compel disclosure.”
Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’
For Patel, a key document that remains hidden from the public is the full report he helped prepare and which Trump chose not to declassify after pressure from the intelligence community: The House Intelligence Committee report about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
The ICA is a foundational Russiagate document. Released just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, it asserted that Russia waged an interference campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread media accounts that the ICA reflected the consensus view of all 17 US intelligence agencies, it was a rushed job completed in a few weeks by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who merely consulted with FBI and NSA counterparts. The NSA even dissented from a key judgment that Russia and Putin specifically aimed to help install Trump, expressing only “moderate confidence.”
The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”
Along with that March 2018 report, Patel and his intelligence committee colleagues produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA’s “tradecraft failings” in greater detail.
“We went and looked at it [the ICA], and looked at the underlying evidence and cables, and talked to the people who did it,” Patel says. According to Patel, the ICA’s flaws begin with the unprecedentedly short window of time in which it was produced during the final days of the Obama White House. “In two to three weeks, you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything, in terms of interference and cybersecurity matters.”
Patel said that still classified information undermines another key claim – that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking campaign to help Trump. The March 2018 House report noted that the ICA’s judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” but those were drowned out by partisan insistence that Russia was the culprit.
Constrained from discussing the material, Patel said its release “would lend a lot of credence to” skepticism about the Mueller report’s claim that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to install Trump.
That skepticism was bolstered in July 2019 when the Mueller team was reprimanded by a US District judge for falsely suggesting in its final report that a Russian social media firm acted in concert with the Kremlin. (Mueller’s prosecutors later dropped the case against the outfit.)
“We had multiple versions, with redactions, at different levels of classifications we were willing to release,” Patel said. “But that was unfortunately the one report, which speaks directly to [an absence of concrete evidence] that’s still sitting in a safe, classified. And unfortunately, the American public – unless Biden acts – won’t see it.”
Confirming earlier media reports from late last year, Patel says it was Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel who personally thwarted the House report’s release. The report sits in a safe at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The CIA has possession of it, and POTUS chose not to put it out,” Patel says. He does not know why.
‘Outrageous’ Reliance on CrowdStrike
Another key set of documents that the public has yet to see are reports by Democratic National Committee cyber-contractor CrowdStrike – reports the FBI relied on to accuse Russia of hacking the DNC. The FBI bowed to the DNC’s refusal to hand over its servers for analysis, a decision that Patel finds “outrageous.”
“The FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the intelligence community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety,” Patel said. “For some outrageous reason the FBI agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what it could and could not exploit, and could and could not look at.”
According Patel, Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry, a former top FBI official under Mueller, “totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcoming of the American public.”
CrowdStrike’s credibility suffered a major blow in May 2020 with the disclosure of an explosive admission from Henry that had been kept under wraps for nearly three years. In December 2017 testimony before the House Intel Committee showed he had acknowledged that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers removed any data, including private emails, from the DNC servers.
“We wanted those depositions declassified immediately after we took them,” Patel recalled. But the committee was “thwarted,” he says, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats, and later by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff once Democrats took control of Congress in January 2018. According to Patel, Schiff “didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating.” Working with Coats’ successor, Richard Grenell, Patel ultimately forced the release of the Henry transcript and dozens of others last year.
Still classified, however, are the full CrowdStrike reports relied on by the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Patel said their release would underscore Henry’s admission while raising new questions about why the government used reports from DNC contractors – the other being Fusion GPS’ Steele dossier – for a consequential national security case involving a rival Republican campaign.
Doubting Reliability of CIA’s Kremlin Mole
The CIA relied on another questionable source for its assertion that Putin personally ordered and orchestrated an interference campaign to elect Trump: a purported mole inside the Kremlin. The mole has been outed as Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Kremlin official who fled Russia in 2017 for the United States where he lives under his own name. According to the New York Times, some CIA officials harbored doubts about Smolenkov’s “trustworthiness.”
Patel said he could not comment on whether he believes Smolenkov relayed credible information to the CIA. “I’m sort of in a bind on this one, still, with all the classified information I looked at, and the declassifications we’ve requested, but have not yet been granted.”
Patel did suggest, however, that those who have raised skepticism about the CIA’s reliance on Smolenkov are “rightly” trying to “get to the bottom” of the story. “But until that ICA product that we created, and some of the other documents are finally revealed – if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door.”
Will Key Documents Be Released?
On his last full day in office, President Trump ordered the declassification of an additional binder of material from the FBI’s initial Trump-Russia probe, Crossfire Hurricane. A source familiar with the documents covered under the declassification order confirmed to RealClearInvestigations that it does not contain the House committee’s assessment of the January 2017 that Patel wants released. Nor does it contain any of the CrowdStrike reports used by the FBI.
In addition to those closely guarded documents, Patel thinks that there is even more to learn about the fraudulent surveillance warrants on Carter Page. The public should see “the entire subject portion” of the final Carter Page FISA warrant, Patel said, as well as “the underlying source verification reporting” in which the FBI tried to justify it, despite relying on the Steele dossier. By reading what the FBI “used to prop up that FISA, the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on,” Patel added. “The American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen. Knowingly.
“And that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok [the FBI agent dismissed, in part, because of anti-Trump bias] and his crew of miscreants. Same thing goes for the intelligence community. If they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.”
Email Reveals FBI Chief Comey Approved Trump Surveillance Despite Inability to Verify Russia Claims
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 16.02.2021
US officials spent over three years and tens of millions of dollars investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election. At the heart of it all was the so-called ‘Steele Dossier’, the since-discredited report which made fantastical allegations on the extent of Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.
In January 2017, Obama-era FBI director James Comey emailed then-Director of National intelligence James Clapper to inform him that his agency could not “sufficiently corroborate the reporting” of the Steele Dossier, before signing off on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on the business mogul’s campaign the very same day, a newly released email obtained by Just the News shows.
“Jim, I just had a chance to review the proposed talking points on this for today. Perhaps it is a nit, but I worry that it may not be best to say ‘The [Intelligence Community] has not made any judgement that the information in the document is reliable.’ I say that because we HAVE concluded that the source is reliable and has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some visibility into his source network… and much of what he reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of other reporting included in the body of the IC report. That said, we are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting to include it in the body of the report,” Comey wrote.
The email is dated 12 January 2017, just over a week before Trump’s inauguration, and the same day that Comey signed a FISA warrant to renew surveillance of Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. By the end of that month, in addition to the FBI, Page was being probed by the CIA, the NSA, the Clapper’s office and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, despite not being accused of any specific crime. The advisor was cleared of any wrongdoing following the April 2019 release of the Mueller Report.
Speaking to Fox News about the newly unearthed email, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz accused Comey and the FBI of engaging in a “premeditated effort to dislodge the duly-elected president of the United States.”
“Not only did our Justice Department set up the president on the Russia hoax, they did it with rotten information and they knew the information was rotten when they did it,” the lawmaker suggested. The Florida politician suggested that he doesn’t expect the new information to lead to any “accountability” in the Trump-Russia saga, “because none of the career people there think the way to move up in the Biden Justice Department is to expose the Russia hoax.”
Russiagate
The FBI first launched a counterintelligence investigation into (then candidate) Trump in July 2016. The so-called ‘Steele Dossier’ was created by former MI6 agent-turned private investigator Christopher Steele, who was asked to probe the Trump campaign on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign by Fusion GPS, a commercial intelligence firm. The dossier was then passed on to the FBI, which used it in their own probe, known as Crossfire Hurricane.
The Steele Dossier’s claims ranged from allegations of contacts between Trump’s team and Russian nationals, to alleged attempts by the Kremlin to meddle in the campaign, to the now infamous supposition that the business mogul was compromised in a Moscow hotel in 2013 by watching prostitutes urinate on a bed. The allegations have been almost completely discredited, but did lasting damage to Trump, distracting his administration for much of its four years in office to respond to claims that he was a ‘Russian agent’.
The Steele Dossier featured prominently in an 1800+ page haul of declassified transcripts of closed-door interviews of FBI agents released by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham last month. The records of the conversations showed that many agents expressed concerns about the lack of verification of the Trump-Russia claims, or felt that the probe was clearly “political” in nature.
In spite of the revelations, no one from the Obama administration or the US intelligence community have been charged with any crimes related to their involvement in starting Russiagate.
Don’t Impeach Trump. Impeach the Deep State for Its Conspiracy to Kill the Constitution
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute| February 8, 2021
Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.
Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today.
While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.
Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).
These are dangerous times.
These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.
No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.
The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.
This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.
This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.
This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.
This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.
Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Americans have no protection against police abuse.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
Americans no longer have a right to self-defense.
Americans no longer have a right to private property.
Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
Americans no longer have a representative government.
We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.
Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.
From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.
Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
FBI lawyer who altered evidence to enable spying on Trump gets PROBATION instead of jail
RT | January 29, 2021
The only FBI official charged in the improper use of FISA warrants to spy on President Donald Trump via campaign aide Carter Page got a slap on the wrist. Kevin Clinesmith’s sentence was a year of probation, and community service.
Clinesmith worked at the FBI General Counsel’s Office (GCO) and was assigned to Crossfire Hurricane, the probe of Trump’s alleged ties with Russia during the 2016 election. In that capacity, he altered an email from the CIA that described Page as a source for the spy agency, to say he was “not” a source – enabling the FBI to request a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Page as a “Russian agent” – and, through him, spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency.
Boasberg was reportedly swayed by Clinesmith’s insistence that he’d acted in good faith and that his wife has a baby on the way, while shrugging-off Page’s testimony that his life had been ruined as the result of false claims he was a “Russian agent.” On Friday, federal judge James Boasberg – who also sits on the FISA court – sentenced Clinesmith to 12 months’ probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $100 fine.
The Republicans sitting on the House Judiciary Committee called the sentence “insanity” and “outrageous.”
Led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California), the Judiciary GOP first exposed the FISA abuse and published a memo about it in February 2018, revealing that the FBI had relied on the “Steele Dossier” – a collection of spurious claims compiled by a British spy and paid-for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – in the initial spying request.
Others pointed out that Clinesmith’s transgression was far greater than almost anyone who ended up going to jail as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ probe. Campaign aide George Papadopoulos spent two weeks in jail for allegedly lying to the FBI – the same process crime Clinesmith pled guilty to last August – and General Michael Flynn spent four years trying to beat the same charge.
Clinesmith is also the only FBI official to face any scrutiny over the bureau’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Former director James Comey, his deputy Andy McCabe, lead agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page – all of whom were involved in the probe – have landed lucrative book contracts or cable news jobs, or become heroes of the Democrat “resistance” instead.
“The entire game is rigged,” said Federalist editor Sean Davis. “The rule of law is dead.”
The lenient sentence for a FBI lawyer altering evidence was seen as especially egregious, as, earlier this week, a Trump supporter going by the handle ‘Ricky Vaughn’ on Twitter was arrested and charged by the Biden administration for “conspiracy to deprive people of their voting rights” by posting memes that allegedly misled Clinton voters in 2016.
“As outrageous as this is, it’s also useful. It’s in our faces now,” wrote lawyer and filmmaker Mike Cernovich. “When they come for more Trump supporters… Remember today.”
Democrats, who spent the past four years insisting that “no one is above the law” and that Trump must be investigated for an array of suspected crimes, did not comment.
Proud Boys Leader Was ‘Prolific’ FBI Snitch: Court Docs
Enrique Tarrio (left)
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 27, 2021
While US officials claim that ‘far-right extremism’ is one of the largest threats facing America, the leader of the group most commonly singled out as an example – the Proud Boys – was a ‘prolific’ informant for federal and local law enforcement, according to Reuters, citing a 2014 federal court proceeding.
Enrique Tarrio repeatedly worked undercover for investigators following a 2012 arrest, court documents reveal.
Curiously, Tarrio was ordered to stay away from Washington D.C. one day before the January 6 Capitol riot after he was arrested on vandalism and weapons charges – upon a request by government prosecutors that he be prohibited from attending. At least five Proud Boys members were charged as part of the riot.
In the 2014 hearing, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Tarrio’s attorney describe his undercover work – noting that the Proud Boys leader helped authorities prosecute over a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling, according to Reuters.
In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Tarrio denied working undercover or cooperating in cases.
“I don’t know any of this,” he said, adding “I don’t recall any of this.”
Law-enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes.”
Tarrio, 36, is a high-profile figure who organizes and leads the right-wing Proud Boys in their confrontations with those they believe to be Antifa, short for “anti-fascism,” an amorphous and often violent leftist movement. The Proud Boys were involved in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol January 6.
The records uncovered by Reuters are startling because they show that a leader of a far-right group now under intense scrutiny by law enforcement was previously an active collaborator with criminal investigators. – Reuters
During Tarrio’s 2014 hearing, both the prosecutor and Tarrio’s defense attorney asked for a reduced prison sentence after pleading guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. In requesting leniency for Tarrio and two co-defendants, the prosecutor noted that Tarrio’s information had resulted in the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.
Tarrio’s former attorney, Jeffrey Feiler, noted that his client worked undercover several times – one involving “wholesale prescription narcotics,” another involving the sale of anabolic steroids, and a third involving human smuggling. Tarrio also helped police uncover three marijuana grow houses, and was a “prolific” cooperator, according to the report.
In the smuggling case, Tarrio, “at his own risk, in an undercover role met and negotiated to pay $11,000 to members of that ring to bring in fictitious family members of his from another country,” the lawyer said in court.
In an interview, Feiler said he did not recall details about the case but added, “The information I provided to the court was based on information provided to me by law enforcement and the prosecutor.”
An FBI agent at the hearing called Tarrio a “key component” in local police investigations involving marijuana, cocaine and MDMA, or ecstasy. The Miami FBI office declined comment. –Reuters
Reuters notes that there is no evidence Tarrio has cooperated with authorities since his previous involvement, however he admitted to notifying local law enforcement prior to Proud Boys rallies in various cities – letting police know of the group’s plans. Tarrio said he stopped this coordination after December 12 due to the DC police cracking down on the group.
Tarrio’s involvement with law enforcement will no doubt fuel speculation over just how ‘organic’ the threat of ‘far-right extremism’ is, particularly when the vast majority of violence observed over 2020 was committed by far-left groups rioting in the name of racial justice.
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The Biggest Threat to Peace in Middle East
By Dr. Elias Akleh* | Sabbah Report | May 24, 2010
A build up of heightened tension in the Middle East is escalating in the last few weeks. American and Israeli postures towards Lebanon, Syria, and Iran have become more threatening. Listening to speeches of political leaders one hears talks only about war not peace. Iranians and Israelis are continuously training hard for a possible showdown. Both sides are conducting extensive war games every month. This led Syrians to claim that Israel is preparing for a soon-to-come another war. The Jordanians also are warning that current stalemate of the peace process is an indication of a war breaking out this summer. The Russian President and his army chief hinted, a few months ago, that the US and Israel were planning for an attack on Iran.
Indeed Iran is, as it has been for last few years, the target of most of the threats and accusations of supporting terrorism. Escalating incitement against Iran the American Defense Department sent last month (April) to Congress a report on Iran’s military claiming Iran could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US by 2015.
Ignoring the fact that N. Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel are proven to have nuclear weapons while Iran does not, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose in her speech, to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the UN, to focus on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions putting the whole world at risk as she put it. According to Clinton Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, rather than Israel’s more than 200 nuclear bombs, is destabilizing the Middle East. She called on the world’s nations to rally around US efforts to hold Iran, not other nuclear countries, to account.
The accusation that Usama Bin Laden is living comfortably in Iran had received a boost after the broadcast of a documentary called “Feathered Cocaine”. This echoed the June 2003 claims of the Italian newspaper Corre de la Sierra that Bin Laden was in Iran according to some intelligence report, and according to Richard Miniter’s book “Shadow War”. … continue
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