New evidence shows the FBI knew General Flynn was not ‘agent of Russia’ but prosecuted him anyway
RT | July 10, 2020
President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn was “not acting as an agent of Russia” by the FBI’s own determination, yet the Mueller probe was based on that claim and his legal odyssey still continues.
New evidence provided by the Justice Department to Flynn’s legal team this week, and made public on Friday as part of a court filing, shows that the FBI determined Flynn wasn’t a Russian agent, and believed he did not deliberately lie to agents during his January 2017 interview.
A handwritten document shows the officials believed there were no reasonable grounds for prosecution under the Logan Act, an arcane old law prohibiting US citizens from engaging in foreign policy.
After the Washington Post published fragments of leaked information from the FBI suggesting the opposite, however, Flynn was forced to resign in February 2017, and later that year faced perjury charges from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ‘Russian collusion’ by the Trump campaign.
What makes these revelations particularly egregious is the fact that the scope memo for Mueller’s probe, written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 and kept classified for years, cited the Logan Act as one of the predicates for going after Flynn.
The fourteen pages of additional evidence provided by the government on July 7 demonstrate Flynn’s innocence, the “absence of any crime,” as well as “government misconduct” in investigating Flynn and “prosecutorial misconduct in the suppression of evidence favorable to the defense,” his legal team said in a statement.
Flynn initially pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, but later changed legal counsel and claimed prosecutorial misconduct. A steady drip of evidence from the DOJ ever since has revealed the plot to catch him in a perjury trap, the role of disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok in keeping the case improperly open, and that Flynn did nothing wrong in his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – among other things.
Despite the overwhelming evidence against the prosecutors, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan has refused to approve the DOJ motion to drop the case. Instead, he appointed a retired judge who had just denounced the DOJ in the Washington Post to help him challenge it as amicus curiae.
Flynn’s lawyers took their case to the appeals court, which ruled on June 24 that Sullivan had to dismiss the charges. He refused, asking for a full-bench (en banc) review, with Flynn and the government now given ten days to respond.
The entire process is without precedent in Washington, but is hardly surprising given the political implications of the trial. Mueller’s probe was supposed to get Trump impeached and invalidate the 2016 presidential election, and though it failed the mainstream media and Democrats continue to insist on ‘Russiagate collusion.’ As the new documents show, all of it rests on the prosecution of Flynn, and falls apart entirely if he walks.
Are the Democrats a Political Party or a CIA-Backed Fifth Column?
By Mike Whitney • Unz Review • July 5, 2020
How do the Democrats benefit from the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests?
While the protests are being used to paint Trump as a race-bating white supremacist, that is not their primary objective. The main goal is to suppress and demonize Trump’s political base which is comprised of mainly white working class people who have been adversely impacted by the Democrats disastrous free trade and immigration policies. These are the people– liberal and conservative– who voted for Trump in 2016 after abandoning all hope that the Democrats would amend their platform and throw a lifeline to workers who are now struggling to make ends meet in America’s de-industrialized heartland.
The protests are largely a diversion aimed at shifting the public’s attention to a racialized narrative that obfuscates the widening inequality chasm (created by the Democrats biggest donors, the Giant Corporations and Wall Street) to historic antagonisms that have clearly diminished over time. (Racism ain’t what it used to be.) The Democrats are resolved to set the agenda by deciding what issues “will and will not” be covered over the course of the campaign. And– since race is an issue on which they feel they can energize their base by propping-up outdated stereotypes of conservatives as ignorant bigots incapable of rational thought– the Dems are using their media clout to make race the main topic of debate. In short, the Democrats have settled on a strategy for quashing the emerging populist revolt that swept Trump into the White House in 2016 and derailed Hillary’s ambitious grab for presidential power.
The plan, however, does have its shortcomings, for example, Democrats have offered nearly blanket support for protests that have inflicted massive damage on cities and towns across the country. In the eyes of many Americans, the Dems support looks like a tacit endorsement of the arson, looting and violence that has taken place under the banner of “racial justice”. The Dems have not seriously addressed this matter, choosing instead to let the media minimize the issue by simply scrubbing the destruction from their coverage. This “sweep it under the rug” strategy appears to be working as the majority of people surveyed believe that the protests were “mostly peaceful”, which is a term that’s designed to downplay the effects of the most ferocious rioting since the 1970s.
Let’s be clear, the Democrats do not support Black Lives Matter nor have they made any attempt to insert their demands into their list of police reforms. BLM merely fits into the Dems overall campaign strategy which is to use race to deflect attention from the gross imbalance of wealth that is the unavoidable consequence of the Dems neoliberal policies including outsourcing, off-shoring, de-industrialization, free trade and trickle down economics. These policies were aggressively promoted by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as they will be by Joe Biden if he is elected. They are the policies that have gutted the country, shrunk the middle class, and transformed the American dream into a dystopian nightmare.
They are also the policies that have given rise to, what the pundits call, “right wing populism” which refers to the growing number of marginalized working people who despise Washington and career politicians, feel anxious about falling wages and dramatic demographic changes, and resent the prevailing liberal culture that scorns their religion and patriotism. This is Trump’s mainly-white base, the working people the Democrats threw under the bus 30 years ago and now want to annihilate completely by deepening political polarization, fueling social unrest, pitting one group against another, and viciously vilifying them in the media as ignorant racists whose traditions, culture, customs and even history must be obliterated to make room for the new diversity world order. Trump touched on this theme in a speech he delivered in Tulsa. He said:
“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Author Charles Burris expanded on this topic in an article at Lew Rockwell titled America’s Monumental Existential Problem:
“The wave of statue-toppling spreading across the Western world from the United States is not an aesthetic act, but a political one, the disfigured monuments in bronze and stone standing for the repudiation of an entire civilization. No longer limiting their rage to slave-owners, American mobs are pulling down and disfiguring statues of abolitionists, writers and saints in an act of revolt against the country’s European founding, now re-imagined as the nation’s original sin, a moral and symbolic shift with which we Europeans will soon be forced to reckon.”
The statue-toppling epidemic is vastly more disturbing than the the looting or arson, mainly because it reveals an ideological intensity aimed at symbols of state power. By tearing down the images of the men who created or contributed to our collective history, the vandals are challenging the legitimacy of the nation itself as well as its founding “enlightenment” principles. This is the nihilism of extremists whose only objective is destruction. It suggests that the Democrats might have aspirations that far exceed a mere presidential victory. Perhaps the protests and riots will be used to justify more sweeping changes, a major reset during which traditional laws and rules are indefinitely suspended until the crisis passes and order can be restored. Is that at all conceivable or should we dismiss these extraordinary events as merely young people “letting off a little steam”?
Here’s how General Michael Flynn summed up what’s going on on in a recent article:
“There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history… I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth…. The dark forces’ weapons formed against us serve one purpose: to promote radical social change through power and control.”
I agree. The toppling of statues, the rioting, the looting, the arson and, yes, the relentless attacks on Trump from the day he took office, to Russiagate, to the impeachment, to the insane claims about Russian “bounties”, to the manipulation of science and data to trigger a planned demolition of the US economy hastening a vast restructuring to the labor force and the imposition of authoritarian rule; all of these are cut from the same fabric, a tapestry of lies and deception concocted by the DNC, the Intel agencies, the elite media, and their behind-the-scenes paymasters. Now they have released their corporate-funded militia on the country to wreak havoc and spread terror among the population. Meanwhile, the New York Times and others continue to generate claims they know to be false in order to confuse the public even while the people are still shaking off months of disorienting quarantine and feelings of trepidation brought on by 3 weeks of nonstop social unrest and fractious racial conflict. Bottom line: Neither the Democrats nor their allies at the Intel agencies and media have ever accepted the “peaceful transition of power”. They reject the 2016 election results, they reject Donald Trump as the duly elected president of the United States, and they reject the representative American system of government “by the people.”
So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: Which political party is pursuing a radical-activist strategy that has set our cities ablaze and reduced Capitol Hill to a sprawling war zone? Which party pursued a 3 year-long investigation that was aimed at removing the president using a dossier that they knew was false (Opposition research), claiming emails were hacked from DNC computers when the cyber-security company that did the investigation said there was no proof of “exfiltration”? (In other words, there was no hack and the Dems knew it since 2017) Which party allied itself with senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA, NSA and elite media and worked together collaboratively to discredit, surveil, infiltrate, entrap and demonize the administration in order to torpedo Trumps “America First” political agenda, and remove him from office?
Which party?
No one disputes the Democrats right to challenge, criticize or vigorously oppose a bill or policy promoted by the president. What we take issue with is the devious and (possibly) illegal way the Democrats have joined powerful elements in the Intelligence Community and the major media to conduct a ruthless “dirty tricks” campaign that involved spying on members of the administration in order to establish the basis for impeachment proceedings. This is not the behavior of a respected political organization but the illicit conduct of a fifth column acting on behalf of a foreign (or corporate?) enemy. It’s worth noting that an insurrection against the nation’s lawful authority is sedition, a felony that is punishable by imprisonment or death. Perhaps, the junta leaders should consider the possible consequences of their actions before they make their next move.
What we need to know is whether the Democrat party operates independent of the Intel agencies with which it cooperated during its campaign against Trump? We’re hopeful that the Durham investigation will shed more light on this matter. Our fear is that what we’re seeing is an emerging Axis–the CIA, the DNC, and the elite media– all using their respective powers to terminate the Constitutional Republic and establish permanent, authoritarian one-party rule. As far-fetched as it might sound, the country appears to be slipping inexorably towards tyranny.
So it wasn’t ‘by the book’? Strzok notes reveal Obama & Biden were involved in FBI going after General Flynn
RT | June 24, 2020
New evidence shows that the decision to send the FBI after General Michael Flynn, president-elect Donald Trump’s top adviser, came from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and wasn’t “by the book” at all.
Biden was the one to raise the Logan Act, while Obama instructed FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to have “the right people” on the case during a White House meeting, according to a handwritten note from FBI Agent Peter Strzok.
The note was provided by the DOJ earlier this week to Flynn’s attorneys, who submitted it to the court as evidence on Wednesday.
While Strzok’s hard-to-read note does not mention names, it refers to people by letters – P for president, VP for vice-president, DAG for Yates, D for Director Comey, etc. – according to the court filing.
The Logan Act is an old law that bans private citizens from conducting foreign policy, but it did not apply to Flynn, since he was an incoming national security adviser to the president-elect. Even Comey admitted that his telephone conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak “appear legit[imate],” but was nonetheless told to pursue a case, according to Strzok’s note.
This directly contradicts the narrative about the meeting put forth by Obama’s security adviser Susan Rice, who wrote a strange memo to herself on the eve of Trump’s inauguration repeatedly saying that Obama wanted the investigation to be “by the book.”
Strzok’s note is undated, but the filing says it appears to be referring to a meeting on January 4, 2017 – the same date Strzok intervened to keep the FBI background case against Flynn open, though it had been scheduled to close due to lack of evidence of any wrongdoing. Strzok would later be one of the agents to interview Flynn, and admitted in texts to heavily editing the memorandum of that interview – which has not been made available as evidence.
Earlier in the day, the Washington, DC Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the federal judge in charge of Flynn’s case to immediately agree to the government motion to drop the charges. Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan responded to the DOJ motion to dismiss charges – in light of evidence revealing the prosecution of Flynn was improperly predicated – by appointing a hostile ex-judge to evaluate the motion and hiring a private attorney to represent himself, at taxpayers’ expense. Flynn’s team reacted by seeking a writ of mandamus from the appeals court.
Flynn was the first casualty of the ‘Russiagate’ probe targeting Trump for alleged “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election. The adviser was forced to resign after less than two weeks on the job, after the Washington Post accused him of lying to the FBI based on yet-unidentified leaks. He was charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in late 2017, and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI under pressure, but has been fighting the charges after getting a new legal counsel in 2018.
President Trump reacted to the news by wondering if Comey and the FBI, or Mueller and his prosecutors, or Obama and Biden, will apologize to Flynn and others caught up in the probe.
Mueller’s investigation ended in May 2019 finding no evidence of any collusion anywhere, forcing Democrats to claim Trump had abused power by withholding aid from Ukraine as a pretext to impeach him.
‘Russiagate’ case against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn effectively OVER, as DC appeals court orders to close it
RT | June 24, 2020
An appeals court in Washington, DC, ruled that the case against President Trump’s one-time national security adviser, Michael Flynn, must end. The Justice Department had dropped charges against Flynn, but his case remained open.
In a ruling issued on Wednesday, the Washington DC Circuit Court of Appeals effectively ended the case against Flynn, ordering federal judge Emmet Sullivan to heed the Justice Department’s advice and close the case. Sullivan had attempted to keep the case active, even though the Justice Department dropped its charges against Flynn last month.
The appeals battle was a last-ditch showdown between Flynn and the Justice Department on one side, and Sullivan on the other. Though reporters as recently as last week reckoned the appeals court would side with Sullivan, they were proven wrong on Wednesday morning.
Of course, Sullivan may appeal again, but with the government and prosecution in agreement, his chances of breathing life into the Flynn case – ongoing for more than two years – is slim.
Appointed national security advisor following Trump’s election win in 2016, Flynn quickly became the first and most prominent White House official caught up in the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation. He was fired in early 2017 and later pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
However, the case was dropped last month, after it emerged that the charges against him were baseless.
Before he was interviewed by FBI agents in January 2017, FBI brass knew they had “no derogatory information” on the retired General, yet then-FBI Director James Comey ordered the interview to proceed regardless, breaching agency protocol. Disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok urged his superiors to keep the case against Flynn open, and plotted with other agents to “get him to lie” during the interview. Furthermore, Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page edited the transcript of the interview to incriminate Flynn.
All of this information was revealed last month, when acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell declassified a trove of ‘Russiagate’ documents. According to the document dump, a host of Obama administration officials dug into Flynn’s intelligence records as the FBI were attempting to entrap him in the interview.
President Trump, who has long accused the FBI and Obama administration of orchestrating a plot to take down his presidency, retweeted a call from his son last week for Flynn to “sue the FBI and it’s corrupt actors for all they’re worth.”
The Spirit of Hoover’s FBI is Revived under New Cyber-Warfare Protocols
By Matthew Ehret | American Herald Tribune | June 11, 2020
This week, the Grayzone’s Gareth Porter exposed an important strategy led by the FBI to purge the internet of alternative media outlets who question the mainstream narratives being used to shepherd society into an Orwellian post-COVID world order.
Although FBI propagandists strewn throughout mainstream media have attempted to project the idea that the corrupt days of America’s internal Gestapo operation led by J. Edgar Hoover are a thing of the past, the reality is that its days of COINTEL PRO, MK Ultra, assassinations and media manipulation of the 1960s and 1970s not only didn’t go away but only amplified their influence during the modern age of cyberwarfare.
Porter’s Insight into the FBI’s Censorship Agenda
In his June 5, 2020 article entitled ‘FBI Launches Open Attack on ‘Foreign’ Alternative Media Outlets Challenging US Foreign Policy’, Porter exposed the FBI’s recent counter-intelligence strategy which was launched in the wake of the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Knowing that alternative media was a decisive factor in the downfall of Hillary (and her neocon backers), a vast operation was put into motion designed to convince Americans that the elections were never really legitimate in the first place because… Russia.
Four years of Russiagate contaminated the American political landscape ultimately producing both a multi-million dollar nothing burger and also one of the most dangerous reforms in counter-intelligence operations that currently threatens to render what little remains of the first amendment forever obsolete.
Countering Malign Foreign Influences in the Media
In his article, Porter begins by describing the creation of the October 2017 creation of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Counter-Intelligence Task Force which generated a new procedure for extending internet censorship to any media outlet that could be labelled a “malign foreign influence” if connected in any way to America’s major adversaries of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Porter describes how Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram promptly interfaced with the Task Force and began deleting accounts and pages of alternative media outlets who were labelled puppets of foreign actors. The biggest purge occurred in 2018 as Facebook deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts including Anti-media, the Free Thought Project and Naked Empire due to their supposed “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” tied to shadowy “malign foreign influences”.
While the American Herald Tribune was not officially listed as one of the targets during this operation, it’s de-platforming over Facebook, Instagram and Google was later admitted to have been part of the purge (more to be said on that below).
Shadowy Enemies and New Protocols
In an April 26, 2019 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, FBI director Christopher Wray described “malign foreign influence” to be “the fairly aggressive campaign we saw in 2016 and that has continued pretty much unabated, is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas etc… to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine America’s faith in democracy”.
According to Wray (and echoed in recent days by former Obama advisor Susan Rice), such divisiveness and discord as we see across America’s protests now have less to do with the systemic corruption, economic injustice (or even George Soros’ moneybags fueling the fires of chaos)… but rather Russia, China and Iranian fake news campaigns.
Gareth Porter cites the important February 2020 remarks by the FBI’s Assistant Section for the Foreign Influence Task Force David Porter, who described the foreign operations which “seek to weaken an adversary from within” using “information confrontation to target the perceptions of their adversaries’ population”. These methods then “erode confidence in democratic values and institutions, encourage negative sentiment, apathy and mistrust of government.” One of the most dangerous by-products for agent David Porter is that the public loses confidence in the “credibility of an established, free and independent news media” pushing “consumers towards alternative news sources of news media where of course it is much easier to introduce false narratives.”
David Porter focuses his discourse on Russia and China explaining that the two nations differ in their methods of information warfare in the following manner: Where China “confines its manipulation to its geostrategic economic goals” and “wants to manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations”, Russia is more vicious and just “wants to see us tear ourselves apart”.
How does the FBI decide who is guilty of “malign foreign influence”? Not by wasting their time “chasing content” or looking at what websites actually say, but rather by “attribution”. In laymen’s terms, “attribution” merely implies using behavioral pattern recognition logarithms to de-platform and censor alt media accounts. Evidence of actual funding by a foreign government or even systemic lying need not be considered under this sort of attribution. Merely having shared a server with a company that “at some point may have” hosted a website affiliated with a foreign government, or publishing narratives that are critical of the western establishment are sufficient proof to remove and blacklist you under this new digital McCarthyism.
The Targeting of the American Herald Tribune
Gareth Porter takes the time to showcase the important case study of American Herald Tribune as an example of the FBI’s brazen abuse of this loosely defined standard of “attribution”. Just days after the August 2018 takedown of the Tribune’s pages on Facebook (and Google’s cancellation of the site’s ad service which act as a vital revenue stream for any alternative media agency), Christopher Wray admitted to have provided social media companies with the “specific threat indicators” used to justify censorship… although they did not openly admit to targeting the American Herald Tribune at this time.
It was only on January 24, 2020 that Facebook finally confirmed publicly in the form of a CNN report) that American Herald Tribune was taken down due to Wray’s counter-intelligence program. The January 24 CNN article cited by Porter asserted that a Facebook spokesperson asserted that the Cybersecurity company FireEye (which is highly enmeshed in all branches of American intelligence agencies) found the AHT’s links to the Iran government’s larger influence operation “with moderate confidence”.
For anyone familiar with the modern newspeak of the FBI’s lexicon, “moderate confidence” means little more than “we feel that there may be some connection but have no actual evidence.”
Illustrating the Tribune’s great sin, the CNN article in question stated that “The articles posted to American Herald Tribune are largely in line with the views of Iran’s ruling establishment. It publishes stories criticizing American foreign policy and attacking President Donald Trump and Israel. Often the criticism is not unlike viewpoints expressed on authentic US-based independent websites, especially ones with an anti-establishment perspective.”
Here we have the essence of what the FBI considers the Tribune’s great crime: Permitting anti-establishment views to be published critical of American foreign policy. It’s really that simple.
The Strategic Reality of the Fight: A Word from Anthony Hall
Grayzone’s expose should be studied in tandem with a powerful report written by American Herald Tribune Editor in Chief Anthony Hall published on June 8 entitled COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet. In this important article, Hall explains that the current convergent of major global developments has come to a historic head.
As we move into and through this turbulent phase of history, the speed of world events has accelerated to unprecedented levels exemplified from the quick change of focus from one controlled fallacious narrative featuring Gates as the star performer Global Pandemic show to a new Soros-managed narrative of controlled chaos across America under the Black Lives Matter/Antifa show.
In his article, Hall points out: “In recent days the focus suddenly shifted from COVID-19 and compulsory vaccines to insurrection and anarchy from within. Suddenly the vaccine czar, Bill Gates, has been swept from the center stage of current events. Suddenly multi-billionaire Gates has been upstaged by multi-billionaire George Soros.”
In both cases of COVID-19 and Soros-financed mass anarchy, the target is the same thing: The free access to information on the internet which has become a focal point for the battle ground for the future of the human race. As Hall points out, “the drama of these cataclysmic times is serving to highlight the importance of the Internet not only as a medium for reporting events but as a vehicle that is instrumental in the shaping of events; in determining what actually happens or not.”
In the case of the current controlled chaos agenda, this battle is playing out over President Trump’s recent Executive Order invoking Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996 in defense of a free and uncensored internet. On this point, Hall writes: “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has recently moved forward with the most significant anti-censorship initiative in the history of the Internet. Trump is seeking to stop the takeover of humanity’s most vital infrastructure of communications by a cabal of extremists.”
Trump’s Executive Order stands in direct opposition to those forces of the Anglo-American Five Eyes empire which seeks nothing less than to turn humanity into a society of sheepish zombies as pliable as the mobs of Ancient Rome who would as soon cheer for Pompei one day as they would Julius Caesar, Brutus or Marc Antony the next… as long as blood and wine continued to flow in the gladiator arenas.
It is important to emphasize here that no one is safe from this new age of post-2016 cyberwarfare.
Whether you place yourself on the “left” or on the “right” of America’s political spectrum, the chances are that if your conscience is intact, then you don’t want your nation to become a dictatorship, you prefer the constitution not be shredded and you certainly don’t want the American Military Industrial Complex to blow up the world. If this is the case, then you would do well to pay attention to any FBI-run protocols which demand that the population be kept fearful and confused enough to willingly renounce their liberties, free speech and very constitution upon which so many people gave their lives, in exchange for a Deep State bureaucrat’s definition of “security”.
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.
FBI launches open attack on ‘foreign’ alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy
By Gareth Porter | Grayzone Project | June 5, 2020
The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Google and other social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.
In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to ban the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale, however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.
The FBI’s first step toward intervening against dissenting views on social media took place in October 2017 with the creation of a Foreign Influence Task Force (FTIF) in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. Next, the FBI defined any effort by states designated by the Department of Defense as major adversaries (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) to influence American public opinion as a threat to US national security.
In February 2020, the FBI defined that threat in much more specific terms and implied that it would act against any online media outlet that was found to fall within its ambit. At a conference on election security on February 24, David K. Porter, who identified himself as Assistant Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, defined what the FBI described as “malign foreign influence activity” as “actions by a foreign power to influence US policy, distort political sentiment and public discourse.”
Porter described “information confrontation” as a force “designed to undermine public confidence in the credibility of free and independent news media.” Those who practice this dark craft, he said, seek to “push consumers to alternative news sources,” where “it’s much easier to introduce false narratives” and thus “sow doubt and confusion about the true narratives by exploiting the media landscape to introduce conflicting story lines.”
“Information confrontation”, however, is simply the literal Russian translation of the term “information warfare.” Its use by the FTIF appears to be aimed merely at justifying an FBI role in seeking to suppress what it calls “alternative news sources” under any set of circumstances it can justify.
While expressing his intention to target alternative media, Porter simultaneously denied that the FBI was concerned about censoring media. The FITF, he said “doesn’t go around chasing content. We don’t focus on what the actors say.” Instead, he insisted that “attribution is key,” suggesting that the FTIF was only interested in finding hidden foreign government actors at work.
Thus the question of “attribution” has become the FBI’s key lever for censoring alternative media that publishes critical content on US foreign policy, or which attacks mainstream and corporate media narratives. If an outlet can be somehow linked to a foreign adversary, removing it from online platforms is fair game for the feds.
The strange disappearance of American Herald Tribune
In 2018, Facebook deleted the Facebook page of the American Herald Tribune, a website that publishes commentary from an array of notable authors who are harshly critical of US foreign policy. Gmail, which is run by Google, quickly followed suit, along with the Facebook-owned Instagram.
Tribune editor Anthony Hall reported at the time that the removals occurred at the end of August 2018, but there was no announcement of the move by Facebook. Nor was it reported by the corporate news media until January 2020, when CNN elicited a confirmation from a Facebook spokesman that it had indeed done so in 2018. Furthermore, the FBI was advising Facebook on both Iranian and Russian sites that were banned during that same period of a few days. As Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos noted on July 21, 2018, “We have proactively reported our technical findings to US law enforcement, because they have much more information than we do, and may in time be in a position to provide public attribution.”
On August 2, a few days following the removal of AHT and two weeks after hundreds of Russian and Iranian Pages had been removed by Facebook, FBI Director Christopher Wray told reporters at a White House briefing that FBI officials had “met with top social media and technology companies several times” during the year, “providing actionable intelligence to better enable them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors.” He remarked that FBI officials had “shared specific threat indicators and account information so they can better monitor their own platforms.”
Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which boasts that it has contracts to support “nearly every department in the United States government,” and which has been used by Department of Homeland Security as a primary source of “threat intelligence,” also influenced Facebook’s crackdown on the Tribune. CNN cited an unnamed official of FireEye stating that the company had “assessed” with “moderate confidence” that the AHT’s website was founded in Iran and was “part of a larger influence operation.”
The CNN author was evidently unaware that in US intelligence parlance “moderate confidence” suggests a near-total absence of genuine conviction. As the 2011 official “consumer’s guide” to US intelligence explained, the term “moderate confidence” generally indicates that either there are still differences of view in the intelligence community on the issue or that the judgment ”is credible and plausible but not sufficiently corroborated to warrant higher level of confidence.”
CNN also quoted FireEye official Lee Foster’s claim that “indicators, both technical and behavioral” showed that American Herald Tribune was part of the larger influence operation. The CNN story linked to a study published by FireEye featuring a “map” showing how Iranian-related media were allegedly linked to one another, primarily by similarities in content. But CNN apparently hadn’t bothered to read the study, which did not once mention the American Herald Tribune.
Finally, the CNN piece cited a 2018 tweet by Daily Beast contributor Josh Russell which it said provided “further evidence supporting American Herald Tribune’s alleged links to Iran.” In fact, his tweet merely documented the AHT’s sharing of an internet hosting service with another pro-Iran site “at some point in time.” Investigators familiar with the problem know that two websites using the same hosting service, especially over a period of years, is not a reliable indicator of a coherent organizational connection.
CNN did find evidence of deception over the registration of the AHT. The outlet’s editor, Anthony Hall, continues to give the false impression that a large number of journalists and others (including this writer), are contributors, despite the fact that their articles have been republished from other sources without permission.
However, AHT has one characteristic that differentiates it from the others that have been kicked off Facebook: The American and European authors who have appeared in its pages are all real and are advancing their own authentic views. Some are sympathetic to the Islamic Republic, but others are simply angry about US policies: Some are Libertarian anti-interventionists; others are supporters of the 9/11 Truth movement or other conspiracy theories.
One notable independent contributor to AHT is Philip Giraldi, an 18-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service and and an articulate critic of US wars in the Middle East and of Israeli influence on American policy and politics. From its inception in 2015, the AHT has been edited by Anthony Hall, Professor Emeritus at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.
In announcing yet another takedown of Iranian Pages in October 2018, Facebook’s Gleicher declared that “coordinated inauthentic behavior” occurs when “people or organizations create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are what they’re doing.” That certainly doesn’t apply to those who provided the content for the American Herald Tribune.
Thus the takedown of the publication by Facebook, with FBI and FireEye encouragement represents a disturbing precedent for future actions against individuals who criticize US foreign policy and outlets that attack corporate media narratives.
Shelby Pierson, the CIA official appointed by then director of national intelligence in July 2019 to chair the inter-agency “Election Executive and Leadership Board,” appeared to hint at differences in the criteria employed by his agency and the FBI on foreign and alternative media.
In an interview with former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell in February, Pierson said, “[P]articularly on the [foreign] influence side of the house, when you’re talking about blended content with First Amendment-protected speech… against the backdrop of a political paradigm and you’re involving yourself in those activities, I think that makes it more complicated” (emphasis added).
Further emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding the FBI’s methods of online media suppression, she added that the position in question “doesn’t have the same unanimity that we have in the counterterrorism context.”
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
MSNBC hires former FBI attorney Lisa Page as legal analyst
RT | June 6, 2020
Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer whose leaked anti-Trump text messages with another federal agent indicated deep-seated bias in the Russiagate probe, has been hired as an analyst at MSNBC, drawing jeers and praise alike.
Announcing the move on Friday, MSNBC said Page had been brought on as a national security and legal analyst after making her debut on the channel’s ‘Deadline: White House’ program. Wasting little time before weighing in on the decision, President Donald Trump deemed it a “total disgrace!”
Page rose to fame in 2017 after a series of text messages with FBI agent Peter Strzok – with whom she was then having an affair – were leaked, showing the two bureau employees disparaging Donald Trump, who had not yet won the Oval Office at the time. In one of the messages, Strzok told Page that “we can’t… risk” a Trump presidency, describing an “insurance policy” that was apparently meant either to guarantee he never got elected or to have a back-up plan in case he did. Due to his apparent bias, Strzok was removed from the special counsel probe into Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow following the leaks, while Page later left the bureau on her own accord.
Much like the president, critics online have also castigated MSNBC for the hiring decision, with some poking fun at her credentials as a “non-partisan” and “impartial” analyst.
Page is not the first MSNBC hiree to feature prominently in the Trump-Russia probe following the 2016 election, with jobs also handed to Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and Andrew Weissmann – who the New York Times described as former special counsel Robert Mueller’s “pit bull.”
US Appeals Court Contemplates Hillary Clinton Testifying on Email Scandal
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – June 3, 2020
Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered Hillary Clinton to provide a sworn deposition in person about her using a private email server for government business while serving as US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
During an online hearing on Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dealt with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s efforts to avoid testifying under oath about her involvement in the email scandal.
The hearing was first reported by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, which said that Clinton’s former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills is also seeking to shun providing testimony on the matter.
The watchdog added that the appeals court was looking into Clinton’s and Mills’ extraordinary request, also known as “petition for writ of mandamus,” aimed at overturning an order earlier issued by US District Court Judge Royce Lamberth that would require them to testify.
According to Judicial Watch, the appeals court ruled that the case had been adjourned until 9 September, when Clinton’s testimony is slated to take place. She insists that she is not obliged to testify because she is a former senior government official and that the FBI already conducted a probe into the matter.
Judge Orders Hillary Clinton to Give Depostion on Her Private Email Server
The Tuesday hearing comes after Lamberth ordered the former US Secretary of State in March to provide a sworn deposition in person about her private email server. The order granted Judicial Watch’s request to depose Clinton about her correspondence and documents related to the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
At the time, Republican officials and members of Congress accused then-Secretary of State Clinton of failing to prevent the attack, which left four Americans dead, while she defended her handling of the incident.
The court also ordered the deposition of Mills and two other State Department officials, additionally allowing Judicial Watch to subpoena Google for documents and records related to Clinton’s emails during her time at the State Department from 2009 to 2013.
The watchdog’s lawsuit seeking Benghazi-related records led to a scandal in 2015 when it helped discover that Clinton had repeatedly used her own private email server, rather than a government-issued one, when she served as US Secretary of State.
The issue resurfaced amid the 2016 presidential election campaign as the FBI probed the former Secretary of State for misconduct.
Despite the use of a private server preventing her emails from being available via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the FBI advised against opening a criminal case against Clinton, merely describing her actions as “extremely careless”.
The results of the probe reportedly irked President Donald Trump as he complained that alleged attempts by Clinton to hide emails from the public must be further investigated.
Veteran FBI Lawyer Boente Resigns Over Role in Michael Flynn Case
Sputnik – 31.05.2020
Federal Bureau of Investigation lawyer Dana Boente has resigned after 38 years due to pressure from the Justice Department, after facing criticism for his role in the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“Few people have served so well in so many critical, high-level roles at the Department. Throughout his long and distinguished career as a public servant, Dana has demonstrated a selfless determination to ensure that justice is always served on behalf of our citizens. While it will be difficult to replace Dana, I am committed to ensuring that the next general counsel is experienced, objective, and prepared to lead the men and women who make up this vital part of the FBI’s mission,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
Boente, who had also been acting assistant attorney general of the National Security Division and US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has come under fire for his handling of the case against Flynn.
Flynn pleaded guilty December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding a United Nations resolution on Israel – Flynn has since rescinded his plea, and the Justice Department is seeking to drop the case.
In late April, a couple of right-leaning news outlets reported Boente had concealed exculpatory evidence related to Flynn. These reports were amplified by Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who said on his show, “Shocking new reports suggest FBI General Counsel Dana Boente was acting in coordination with FBI Director Christopher Wray to block the release of that evidence that would have cleared Gen. Flynn.”
Wray picked Boente to be the FBI’s general counsel in January 2018, and he went on to play a key role in the agency’s Trump-Russia investigation – Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the Judiciary Committee, named him as a possible target for subpoena as part of the panel’s probe of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
Boente is the last remaining active government official who signed off on a FISA warrant targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page – former FBI Director James Comey signed off on the second FISA renewal for the FBI April 2017 – which occurred during his brief stint as acting attorney general. He assumed the role after Sally Yates, deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, was fired in late January 2017 for refusing to defend President Trump’s travel ban. Boente was replaced by Jeff Sessions.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report into Crossfire Hurricane criticised the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to FISA warrants against Page in 2016 and 2017 and for the Bureau’s reliance on former MI6 operative Christopher Steele’s utterly discredited dossier. Recently declassified footnotes show the FBI was aware the document’s content may have been compromised by Russian intelligence and used it anyway..
The report noted Boente and other DOJ officials who signed off on the applications “did not have accurate and complete information at the time they approved them”.
EXPLOSIVE transcripts show Flynn wanted to work with Russia against ISIS, Kislyak warned Trump ‘Russiagate’ was targeting HIM
RT | May 29, 2020
Transcripts of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak show that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was looking out for US interests and sought Russian help against terrorists, while the FBI framed him.
Flynn and Kislyak spoke several times in December 2016 and January 2017, during the presidential transition. Within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI interviewed Flynn with an intent – as shown by recently published documents – to catch him in a perjury trap. After a description of his call with Kislyak was leaked to the Washington Post, Flynn was accused of misleading the White House about the calls and pressured to resign.
Those invested in the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory have claimed for years that Flynn discussed easing US sanctions against Moscow.
Actual transcripts of the calls, made public on Friday by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), paint a drastically different picture. They show Flynn asking Moscow to not play the game of “tit-for-tat” escalation triggered by outgoing President Barack Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats, that would have “boxed in” the incoming president – and seeking to work together with Russia against “a common threat in the Middle East,” which from the context appears to be a reference to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists.
“Do not allow this administration to box us in, right now, okay?” Flynn tells Kislyak in a call on December 29, 2016, asking Russia to make its response “reciprocal.” He doesn’t want to create a situation where “everybody’s got to go back and forth and everybody’s got to be the tough guy here, you know?”
“We don’t need that right now,” Flynn says. “We need cool heads to prevail, and uh, and we need to be very steady about what we’re going to do because we have absolutely a common uh. threat in the Middle East right now.”
Two days later, on December 31, Kislyak informs Flynn that their conversation “was taken into account” in Moscow. In fact, President Vladimir Putin decided not to retaliate at all, saying he didn’t want to ruin the holidays for American diplomats and their families.
Flynn called this decision “wise.” Kislyak then said something that would turn out to be prophetic – that Russia judged these actions by the Obama administration to be aimed not just against Moscow, but against Trump.
“And I just wanted to tell you that we found that these actions have targeted not only against Russia, but also against the president-elect… and with all our rights to respond we have decided not to act now because, it’s because people are dissatisfied with the loss of elections and, and it’s very deplorable,” the ambassador said.
The events that unfolded proved Kislyak correct. The pretext for the FBI and DOJ to go after Flynn was that he supposedly violated the Logan Act – an archaic law banning ordinary Americans from conducting foreign policy, but which did not apply to him as the incoming presidential adviser anyway. Instead, what the transcripts show is that the outgoing administration was seeking to sabotage the incoming one.
On January 4, 2017, FBI agent Peter Strzok – who had previously vowed to “stop” Trump from getting elected in texts with colleague and lover Lisa Page – improperly ordered the FBI background investigation of Flynn to stay open. The following day, FBI chief James Comey went to the White House and discussed investigating Flynn with Obama personally. On that same day, January 5, the president’s chief of staff sent a request to the NSA to “unmask” Flynn. All of this was revealed only a month ago, in documents presented as evidence in the trial of Flynn for allegedly lying about the calls.
Russia eventually retaliated only in July 2017, when a Republican-majority Congress overrode Trump and passed a toxic sanctions bill based entirely on unsubstantiated ‘Russiagate’ claims of meddling in the presidential election. Just as Flynn feared, this would trigger a chain of “tit for tat” expulsions and closures that left both countries short of diplomatic staff – and cut off all avenues of further cooperation against IS, for peace in Syria, or anything else.
The Case of General Michael Flynn: The Use of Law as a Political Weapon

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | May 20, 2020
The audacious corruption of the FBI and the US Department of Justice (sic) is demonstrated by their frame-up of the three-star general, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump.
US Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that the department was forced to turn over to General Michael Flynn’s attorney reveal that the FBI found no wrongdoing by Flynn in its investigation of him and recommended the investigation be closed. Corrupt FBI official Peter Strzok, a leader of the anti-Trump cabal in the FBI, intervened. Strzok convinced the official managing the investigation not to close the case as it was the wishes of the “7th floor” (top FBI officials) to keep the case open. In the absence of evidence against Flynn, released FBI documents prove that the FBI leadership decided to frame General Flynn. The documents reveal that the FBI’s plan is “to get him (Flynn) to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired. . . . we should try to frame them in a way we want.” General Flynn was forced to incriminate himself with a guilty plea. Otherwise, the corrupt DOJ prosecutors threatened to indict Flynn’s son.
When this proof of egregious government misconduct came to light, the DOJ had no choice but to drop the case against General Flynn. Otherwise it would be clear that law in the US is a weapon in the hands of government. This would mean that control of government would be a life and death matter for the two political parties as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia where incoming presidents arrest or attempt to arrest outgoing presidents.
But we didn’t hear a word about the frame-up of General Flynn from the corrupt presstitutes. On May 7 the editorial board of the New York Times published the largest and most egregious collection of lies in the entire history of the disreputable organization. The editorial— “Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guillty. Twice.” —claimed the lies coerced from Flynn proved Flynn’s guilt, and that Attorney General William Barr is a “personal fixer for the president” and used the Department of Justice to protect friends and to go after political enemies.
The New York Times has it backwards. Going after political enemies is precisely what the Obama Regime’s concocted case against General Flynn (and Trump) was all about. Remember, it was General Flynn who said on television that it was a “willful decision” of the Obama Regime to send the mercenary jihadists to attack Syria, a decision Obama made in the face of contrary advice by General Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. When Flynn revealed this, it blew up the fake news story spread by the Obama Regime and the presstitutes that the Obama-supported invasion of Syria by CIA mercenaries was an uprising by Syrian moderates fighting for democracy. Flynn’s blood is blood that the corrupt Obama Regime wanted very badly.
Obama’s role in the frame-up of Flynn and the orchestration of the Russiagate hoax is now coming to light, making the former president nervous. On May 10 the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked if Obama’s nerves are getting in the way of his judgment:
“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn. Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.”
The Democrats’ frame-up of General Flynn and their two attempted frame-ups of President Trump show an extraordinary audacity and a corruptly compliant FBI and DOJ. They thought that they could get away with it, and, of course, they had all the help possible from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the presstitute scum for whom lies are the currency of their fake news realm. The presstitutes have made clear that the US media is devoid of integrity.
After high officials such as James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samatha Power, and others repeatedly claimed evidence of Trump and Flynn’s guilt, when under oath their story changed 180 degrees. Here is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper:
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Susan Rice, Obama’s incompetent National Security Adviser, and Samatha Power, Obama’s Russia-baiting ambassador to the UN, along with the rest of the disreputable Obama cabal, have admitted that they saw no specific evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia. The entire thing was an orchestrated hoax that proves beyond all doubt that the Democrat Party and the US media are corrupt beyond redemption.
When the case against Flynn was dropped as a result of the damning evidence of egregious government misconduct in framing a senior official of the US government, the corrupt prosecutors who had prosecuted the innocent Flynn all resigned in a huff, pretending that it was Barr, not them, who used the Department of Justice for self-interested political purpose.
Two Georgetown University law professors, Kean K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer, totally discredited themselves and the Obama contingent in the DOJ, by alleging in the New York Times that the dropped charge against Flynn has resulted in the “utter demoralization” of “the law enforcement community.” In other words, for these law professors and “the law enforcement community” for which they claim to speak, dropping a case consisting entirely of an orchestrated frame-up, a contrived perjury trap, and threats against family members is demoralizing. The professors are so thoroughly dishonest that they use the lies coerced from Flynn—the price of his “cooperation with the investigation” in order that his son would not also be framed-up—as “evidence” of Flynn’s guilt and proof of the political use of the Justice Department by Trump and Barr in dropping the contrived case.
The frame-up of Flynn is not acknowledged by the law professors as political use of the Justice Department.
Instead the law professors describe the vindication of an innocent man on the basis of undeniable evidence as political use of the Justice Department.
If this is the kind of law Georgetown University teaches, the law school should be promptly shut down.
The question that demands an answer is how do people as corrupt and devoid of integrity as Comey, Mueller, and Strzok get into top FBI positions?






