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As Another Perjury Trap is Exposed the FBI’s Case Against Trump Collapses

By Scott Ritter – Consortium News – May 14, 2020

It is one of the hottest conversations making the rounds on the internet — Shawn Henry, the retired FBI cyber-sleuth-turned private cyber security consultant, speaking with Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, recorded in transcripts of executive session testimony conducted on December 5, 2017, and only recently released to the public.

Schiff: Do you know the date in which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC?

Henry:  I do. I have to just think about it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s in our report that I think the Committee has.

Schiff:  And, to the best of your recollection, when would that have been?

Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We do not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated.

Schiff: And the indicators that it was exfiltrated, when does it indicate that would have taken place?

Henry: Again, it’s in the report. I believe — I believe it was April of 2016. I’m confused on the date. I think it was April, but it’s in the report.

Schiff: It provides in the report on 2016, April 22nd, data staged for exfiltration by the Fancy Bear actor. [Note: Fancy Bear is an attribution label used by Henry’s parent firm, CrowdStrike, to identify specific hacking methods and tools which are collectively referred to as an “advanced persistent threat”, or APT. Fancy Bear is also known by other cyber security organizations as APT-28, and is assessed by the U.S. government as being affiliated with Russian Military Intelligence, or GRU.]

Henry:  Yes, sir. So that, again, staged for, which means there’s not — the analogy I used with Mr. Stewart [Congressman Chris Stewart, R-Utah] earlier was we don’t have a video of it happening, but there are indicators that it happened. There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.

Henry’s testimony has been used by many detractors of the “Russia-did-it” narrative promulgated by many congressional Democrats (including Schiff), the U.S. Intelligence Community (including the FBI), and former Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller as clear cut evidence that CrowdStrike had no direct evidence that any data or emails had been stolen from the DNC, and as such the entire narrative used to sustain the allegations that Russia was behind the thefts was, in fact, baseless.

Such a sweeping conclusion, however, is not sustained by either Shawn Henry’s testimony, or the available evidence. While there remain serious questions about the efficacy of the official narrative laying the alleged cyber attacks on the DNC at the feet of Russian intelligence, Henry’s testimony in and of itself does not make that case. Indeed, information subsequently released by the FBI suggests that, Henry’s assertions notwithstanding, data transfers did, in fact, occur on April 22.

“On or about April 22,” an indictment charging Russian military intelligence officers with the hacking of the DNC server alleges, “the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research. The conspirators later moved the compressed DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.” Based on an analysis of the Illinois computer and another in Arizona, Mueller likewise asserts, in his report, that “[T]he GRU also stole documents from the DNC network shortly after gaining access. On April 22, 2016, the GRU copied files from the DNC network to GRU-controlled computers.”  

[In a footnote to his report, Mueller uses the qualifier “appear” to say that GRU “officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016.” He was never able to establish how the emails got to GRU headquarters.]

What Henry’s testimony does do, however, is dismantle the official predicate used by the FBI to initiate its counterintelligence investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into alleged collusion between persons affiliated with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election in favor of Trump.

The date of the alleged “staging” of data for “exfiltration” — April 22, 2016 — is highlighted by Schiff, during his questioning of Henry.

Schiff:  In your report, when you stated the data was staged for exfiltration on April 22ndof last year, that would have been the first time that you found evidence that the data was staged for exfiltration?

Henry:  I believe that is correct.

Schiff: Did you have a chance to read the information that was filed in conjunction with the George Papadopolous plea? [Note: George Papadopolous was a one-time foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who pled guilty to lying to FBI agents.]

Henry:  I did not.

Schiff:  In that information, it states that Mr. Papadopolous was informed at the end of April that the Russians were in possession of stolen DNC or Clinton emails. If that information is correct, that would only be days after that data was staged for exfiltration?

Henry:  Yes.

Crossfire Hurricane

Recently declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications submitted by the Department of Justice to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a unique judicial body that approves requests for secret warrants used by law enforcement to conduct covert electronic and physical surveillance of U.S. citizens, reveal that the predicate for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Russian collusion by the Trump campaign was triggered by a May 10, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer (who at the time was the Australian Ambassador to the United Kingdom) in a London bar.

According to Downer, Papadopolous revealed that, based upon an April 26 conversation with a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud, “he [Papadopolous] thought that the Russians may release information, might release information, that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign at some stage before the election.”

Downer and a fellow Australian diplomat who was also at the meeting and witnessed Papadopolous’ statement, drafted a cable back to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Canberra recording the gist of the conversation. “There was no suggestion from Papadopoulos nor in the record of the meeting that we sent back to Canberra, there was no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians,” Downer said. “All we did is report what Papadopoulos said.”

After the release by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, of thousands of emails allegedly sourced from the DNC, Downer, concerned that there might be a link between Papadopolous and the DNC emails, provided a copy of his cable to the U.S. Embassy in London, which forwarded it onto the FBI. This cable was used by the FBI to initiate its Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign; a derivative investigation into Papadopolous was given the codename “Crossfire Typhoon.”

As far as predicates for sensitive counterintelligence investigations of presidential campaigns go, the Papadopolous conversation with Misfud is transparently weak. A cursory examination of the emails released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, shows that no in-time reference pre-dates May 25, 2016, more than a month after the alleged “data staging” event that Schiff highlighted as the link between the DNC hack and Papadopolous.

In short, regardless of the content of Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud, as relayed by Downer, there was no linkage between any emails alleged to be in the possession of Russia at the time of the April 26, 2016, Papadopolous-Misfud meeting and the actual data released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, that the FBI used to justify the opening of both the Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Typhoon investigations. As Mueller notes in his report, the information released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, coincides with a separate, alleged cyber attack on the DNC Microsoft Exchange Service between May 25 and June 1, 2016 — an attack that Mifsud could not have known about when he met with Papadopolous in April.

Moreover, the FBI knew before it interviewed Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017, that Papadopolous was not involved in any scheme to acquire purloined Russian emails on behalf of the Trump campaign. In September and October of 2016, the FBI made use of two confidential human sources (CHS) to engage Papadopoulos in conversations designed to elicit corroboration into its now-debunked theory.

In a Sept. 15, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an FBI-controlled CHS, Papadopolous was asked outright whether or not the Trump campaign could benefit from third-party intervention from the likes of WikiLeaks or Russia. Papadopolous made it clear in his response that no one in the campaign was advocating for this kind of intervention because it was “illegal,” “compromised national security,” and “set a bad precedent.”

“At the end of the day,” Papadopolous said, “it’s an illegal, it’s illegal activity. Espionage is treason. This is a form of treason.” And when asked by a second FBI-controlled CHS on Oct. 29, 2016, about who he thought was behind the hacking of the DNC, Papadopolous responded that it could be “the Chinese,” “the Iranians,” “Bernie supporters,” or “Anonymous” — but not the Russians. “Dude, Russia doesn’t have any interest in it anyways,” Papadopolous said. “They — dude, no one knows how a president is going to govern anyways. I mean… Congress is very hostile to Russia anyways.” It was a prescient, and telling, exchange — one the FBI chose to ignore.

No Connection

In the court filing detailing the facts sustaining Papadopolous’s guilty plea, Mueller declared that “defendant PAPADOPOULOS impeded the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the Campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

However, any careful examination of the data used by the FBI to link Papadopolous to the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails on July 22, 2016, clearly shows that there was absolutely no connection. As such, Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud had zero material bearing on the FBI’s investigation, a fact known to the FBI prior to its interview of Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017.

Indeed, the demonstrative lack of connection between Papadopolous and the hacking of the DNC should have been grounds for shutting down the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. There is only one explanation for the FBI’s actions in continuing to pursue Papadopolous — the interview was a perjury trap, plain and simple, designed to generate a conviction that would politically damage a sitting president and create the impression that the investigation into Russian collusion was more credible than it actually was.

The Papadopolous saga has been overshadowed by the ongoing controversy swirling around the Department of Justice decision to drop its charges against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who, like Papadopolous, pled guilty to lying to an FBI agent. The same kind of prosecutorial misconduct, perpetrated by many of the same individuals, that prompted dropping Flynn’s charges infects every aspect of the Papadopolous matter — even more so.

While Papadopolous cannot undo his sentence, or get back the time he served in prison, he can be exonerated by a much-deserved presidential pardon. Anything less would represent a victory by those who have corrupted American justice for political purposes, and a defeat for every American citizen who believes in the foundational principle of impartial justice.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

May 15, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Flynn ‘unmasking’ documents show involvement of senior Obama administration officials, including Joe Biden

RT | May 13, 2020

A newly published list of US officials who were interested in National Security Agency (NSA) records on Trump adviser Michael Flynn includes President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, as well as Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden is listed as requesting the unmasking on January 12, 2017, the same day the Washington Post published a story claiming that Flynn had misreported his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, based on leaked NSA information.

Flynn unmasking documents f… by RT America on Scribd

Yet on Tuesday, Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he “knew nothing” about the investigation of Flynn, and accused the Trump administration of using the former adviser’s case as a “diversion” from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The unmasking log was provided by the NSA to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, and sent by the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell to two senators who requested it, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who published it on Wednesday.

In addition to Biden, the document shows that then-DNI James Clapper made three unmasking requests about Flynn, CIA Director John Brennan made two, and FBI Director James Comey made one.

Biden’s campaign reacted at first by lashing out against the CBS reporter who published the documents, with his rapid response director Andrew Bates calling Catherine Herridge “a partisan, rightwing hack who is a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys.”

Bates later removed the tweet and issued a follow-up, calling the unmasking perfectly normal behavior by US officials concerned “over intelligence reports of Michael Flynn’s attempts to undermine ongoing American national security policy.”

The documents show Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff at the time, made an unmasking request on January 5 – the very day Obama met with all the intelligence principals, and a day after FBI agent Peter Strzok intervened to keep the case on Flynn open despite the lack of any “derogatory” evidence. Strzok would later be sent by Comey to interview Flynn and edit the notes of that interview (the “302”) to imply Flynn had lied to him, resulting in the former general’s prosecution by special counsel Robert Mueller.

What the documents also show is that the Obama administration’s interest in what the NSA might have on Flynn began soon after the November 2016 election, with then-US envoy to the UN Samantha Power filing an unmasking request on November 30. She filed six more after that, the last dated January 11, 2017.

Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak about US sanctions against Russia was on December 29, 2016, after Obama suddenly announced the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats and seizure of two diplomatic properties, citing Moscow’s alleged “meddling” in the presidential election.

Evidence that only recently emerged in the Flynn case showed that the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice sought to interview him using the pretext of the Logan Act, an 18th-century law which has never been used to prosecute anyone, and did not apply in this instance since Flynn was not a private citizen, but an official of the incoming administration conducting routine business during the presidential transition. This new evidence led the DOJ to announce last week it was dropping all charges against Flynn.

Between the manufactured pretext to go after Flynn and the prior revelation that four FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page had been entirely based on the discredited ‘Steele dossier’, the Trump administration has argued that they were unfairly targeted by its predecessor in what amounted to an illegal coup.

May 14, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

FBI Claims China Targeting US Organizations Engaged in Coronavirus Research

Sputnik – May 13, 2020

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a joint statement in which they accuse malicious Chinese actors of trying to steal US coronavirus vaccine research.

“The FBI is investigating the targeting and compromise of US organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by PRC-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors. These actors have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property (IP) and public health data related to vaccines, treatments and testing from networks and personnel affiliated with COVID-19-related research. The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options,” the statement, put out Wednesday, says.

The FBI and CISA urge organizations carrying out research in these fields to “maintain dedicated cybersecurity and insider threat practices” to prevent such thefts, and calls on institutions to watch out for and report any “anomalous” and “unusual” activities and behaviour. The statement also warns that organizations should realize that talking to the press about their COVID-19-related research may result in “increased interest and cyber activity” by possible malicious actors.

The warning comes just days following Sunday’s report by The New York Times citing current and former US security officials indicating that US intelligence was planning to put out an alert about alleged efforts by Chinese spies to access US-based coronavirus research. Officials told the paper that the ‘non-traditional collectors’ involved may include Chinese researchers and students working in the United States who may be interested in ‘infiltrating’ US academic and private laboratories in search of a vaccine. Complementing them are China’s “state-run hacking teams,” the paper claimed.

CISA director Christopher Krebs has alleged that “China’s long history of bad behaviour in cyberspace is well documented, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone they are going after the critical organizations involved in the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Krebs promised that the US would “defend our interests aggressively,” without elaborating.

Strong Claims From ‘Empire of Hackers’

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian commented on the claims made by NYT on Monday, saying China already leads global research and development on coronavirus vaccines and therapies, and that the hacking claims were an “immoral” and baseless attempt to “smear” his country.

Chinese biotech companies reported recently that they have four different coronavirus vaccines already undergoing clinical trials, with three of them entering the second stage, with pilot production of an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine expected to begin in July. US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has previously said he expects the US to have a vaccine available by the end of the year.

An anonymous researcher told the Global Times newspaper Monday that in the US’s core research efforts would be of little value to China, because US efforts are DNA and RNA-based vaccines, while China has chosen to focus on inactivated vaccines (i.e. vaccines made from virulent virus by destroying its infectivity while retaining its immunogenicity). Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine is the most famous example of a major inactivated vaccine.

Earlier this year, China called out the United States for being an “empire of hackers” and “the largest state eavesdropper in international cyberspace” following revelations of the extent of the National Security Agency’s global intelligence-gathering operations going back to the Cold War.

May 13, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble

For two and a half years the House Intelligence Committee knew CrowdStrike didn’t have the goods on Russia. Now the public knows too.

By Ray McGovern – Consortium News – May 9, 2020

House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016.

The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protege of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber crime investigations unit.

Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.

The following excerpts from Henry’s testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:

Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? … when would that have been?

Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). … There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.

Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?

Mr. Henry: There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence … but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. …

Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?

Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.

Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you’ve indicated. …

Mr. Henry: “We didn’t have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.

In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic: “Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn’t see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.”

Inadvertently highlighting the tenuous underpinning for CrowdStrike’s “belief” that Russia hacked the DNC emails, Henry added: “There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the — what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what we’d seen associated with the Russian state.”

Not Transparent

Try as one may, some of the testimony remains opaque. Part of the problem is ambiguity in the word “exfiltration.”

The word can denote (1) transferring data from a computer via the Internet (hacking) or (2) copying data physically to an external storage device with intent to leak it.

As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has been reporting for more than three years, metadata and other hard forensic evidence indicate that the DNC emails were not hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

Rather, they were copied onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) by someone with access to DNC computers. Besides, any hack over the Internet would almost certainly have been discovered by the dragnet coverage of the National Security Agency and its cooperating foreign intelligence services.

Henry testifies that “it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”

This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers “set up” selected emails for transfer to an external storage device — a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any “exfiltration” over that network.

Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPS member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: “WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive.”

The So-Called Intelligence Community Assessment

There is not much good to be said about the embarrassingly evidence-impoverished Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017 accusing Russia of hacking the DNC.

But the ICA did include two passages that are highly relevant and demonstrably true:

(1) In introductory remarks on “cyber incident attribution”, the authors of the ICA made a highly germane point: “The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation — malicious or not — leaves a trail.”

(2) “When analysts use words such as ‘we assess’ or ‘we judge,’ [these] are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. … Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.” [And one might add that they commonly ARE wrong when analysts succumb to political pressure, as was the case with the ICA.]

The intelligence-friendly corporate media, nonetheless, immediately awarded the status of Holy Writ to the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” (it was a rump effort prepared by “handpicked analysts” from only CIA, FBI, and NSA), and chose to overlook the banal, full-disclosure-type caveats embedded in the assessment itself.

Then National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language on the key issue of how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks, in an apparent effort to cover his own derriere.

Obama: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

So we ended up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point. What Obama was saying is that U.S. intelligence did not know—or professed not to know—exactly how the alleged Russian transfer to WikiLeaks was supposedly made, whether through a third party, or cutout, and he muddied the waters by first saying it was a hack, and then a leak.

From the very outset, in the absence of any hard evidence, from NSA or from its foreign partners, of an Internet hack of the DNC emails, the claim that “the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks” rested on thin gruel.

In November 2018 at a public forum, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts in late Jan. 2017, less than two weeks after Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs had thoroughly briefed the outgoing president about their “high-confidence” findings.

Clapper replied: “I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.” Pretty sure?

Comey briefs Obama, June 2016 (Flickr)

Preferring CrowdStrike; ’Splaining to Congress

CrowdStrike already had a tarnished reputation for credibility when the DNC and Clinton campaign chose it to do work the FBI should have been doing to investigate how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. It had asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s struggle with separatists supported by Russia. A Voice of America report explained why CrowdStrike was forced to retract that claim.

Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were “multiple requests at different levels” for access to the DNC servers.

“Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw,” he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a “highly respected” cybersecurity company.

Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. “Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence,” he said.

Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:

BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate — did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, … we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.

BURR: But no content?

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks — the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

In June last year it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

By any normal standard, former FBI Director Comey would now be in serious legal trouble, as should Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. Additional evidence of FBI misconduct under Comey seems to surface every week — whether the abuses of FISA, misconduct in the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, or misleading everyone about Russian hacking of the DNC. If I were attorney general, I would declare Comey a flight risk and take his passport. And I would do the same with Clapper and Brennan.

Schiff: Every Confidence
But No Evidence

Both pillars of Russiagate–collusion and a Russian hack–have now fairly crumbled.

Thursday’s disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin “collusion,” [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of “Russian hacking” of the DNC.

[See: “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate” republished today.]

Five days after Trump took office, I had an opportunity to confront Schiff personally about evidence that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta “think tank,” The Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: “You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right?” I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the few minutes needed to watch it.

Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barr’s dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come.

Given the timid way Trump has typically bowed to intelligence and law enforcement officials, including those who supposedly report to him, however, one might rather expect that, after a lot of bluster, he will let the too-big-to-imprison ones off the hook. The issues are now drawn; the evidence is copious; will the Deep State, nevertheless, be able to prevail this time?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former CIA analyst, his retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

May 11, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Now that Michael Flynn is free, Trump may be tempted to punish the Russiagate conspirators

By Robert Bridge | RT | May 8, 2020

As the Justice Department drops all charges against the former White House adviser, many are hoping the final chapter on Russiagate is closed. However, as the probe against Trump rivals wraps up, the saga is just beginning.

May 7 may go down in the American history books as the day when Donald Trump began to turn the tide against his Democrat opponents and their relentless efforts to have him removed from office. That was the day when the Justice Department declared there was no “legitimate investigative basis” for FBI agents to interview Gen. Michael Flynn over his contacts with Russian diplomats, coming as they did at a time when the lame-duck Obama administration was sabotaging US-Russia relations on its way out the door.

Incidentally, Thursday was notable for another bit of news as well. The House Intelligence Committee released its Russiagate interviews, in which the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign… was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

No wonder Intel chief Adam Schiff demanded absolute secrecy during his closed-door inquisition.

Among Trump’s circle of colleagues brought down in the Democrats’ big-game hunting expedition, such as former campaign adviser Roger Stone and businessman Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn was by far the most prized trophy. In hindsight, Trump may have believed that, by firing Flynn just days into his job, the Russia-collusion story would just magically disappear as the Democrats gave up the hunt. If that was the plan, it backfired in spectacular fashion: the Democrats sensed blood and doubled down on their impeachment efforts.

What came next was a three-year political witch hunt against Trump that was never seriously challenged by the predominantly left-leaning mainstream media – even after the US$30 million Mueller probe finally put the conspiracy theory to bed. Today, although the media headlines conceal it, the narrative is slowly beginning to swing in Trump’s favor, as Flynn’s release strongly suggests.

As I discussed in a recent column, many Americans are blissfully ignorant of the fact that, back in May 2019, Trump launched an investigation into the origins of Russiagate. Tracking the scandal leads one into a labyrinthine rabbit hole of intrigue, where it is believed that the Obama-led FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to spy on the Trump campaign. The potential list of individuals who may eventually be forced to testify for their actions extends to the highest echelons of the Democratic Party. And that would include even ‘untouchables,’ such as former president Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In fact, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that has-been politicians like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are still being considered as presidential material simply to escape prosecution.

Anyone who doubts the severity of the possible charges would do well to consider recent comments by Attorney General William Barr. In an interview last month with Fox News, Barr said the FBI counterintelligence against Trump served to “sabotage the presidency… without any basis.” That is about as close to the legal definition of sedition as one can get, and I am sure there are many powerful people who have arrived at the same conclusion.

It should be remembered that Donald Trump was voted into office largely because of his pledge to “drain the swamp.” In other words, the Manhattan real-estate developer turned rabble-rousing populist had a very negative attitude about the career politicians who make up Washington, DC long before he entered the Oval Office. Now, after being hounded and harassed for the entirety of his first term, while watching colleagues such as Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort have their lives and careers senselessly upended, Trump may be expected to take full advantage of Flynn’s exoneration to make those responsible pay a hefty legal penalty. If ever there were a time for such a move, now would certainly be it.

Exactly what the charges against the architects of Russiagate will be, if there are any, will probably be revealed in the next days and weeks, when William Barr and his assistant, John Durham, are expected to make the findings of their year-long investigation public.

I am guessing we have not heard the end of the Russiagate drama yet with the freeing of Michael Flynn, but, instead, are heading into Part II. Fasten your seatbelts – things could get interesting.

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of the book, ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge

May 8, 2020 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

The Justice Department Drops Flynn Case

By Jonathon Turley | May 7, 2020

Over a week ago, I wrote a column calling for the Justice Department to drop its case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. I have long been a critic of the case but the new evidence undermined not just the legitimacy of the prosecution but of the Justice Department itself. The Justice Department just moved to dismiss the case, a belated but commendable decision. The Flynn case represents one of the most ignoble chapters of the Special Counsel investigation. Notably, the motion itself could lay the foundation for suing on the basis of malicious prosecution.

While Judge Emmet Sullivan could dismiss the charges on the papers (an unopposed motion), I would expect a hearing to be called. There is a great irony here. Sullivan’s last hearing on sentencing led to controversial statements from the bench and a delay in sentencing that resulted in an easier path to dismissal.

James Comey tweeted that “DOJ has lost its way.” Given what this motion and the new evidence says about Comey’s own conduct, I would hope so if Comey is referring to his way of running the DOJ. Comey is implicated in this ignoble effort to bag a Trump official at any cost.

In the motion below, the Justice Department stresses that “the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who … seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches [the] task with humility.” It also establishes that there was never a satisfaction of the materiality element to the criminal allegation:

“In the case of Mr. Flynn, the evidence shows his statements were not “material” to any viable counterintelligence investigation—or any investigation for that matter—initiated by the FBI. Indeed, the FBI itself had recognized that it lacked sufficient basis to sustain its initial counterintelligence investigation by seeking to close that very investigation without even an interview of Mr. Flynn. See Ex. 1 at 4. Having repeatedly found “no derogatory information” on Mr. Flynn, id. at 2, the FBI’s draft “Closing Communication” made clear that the FBI had found no basis to “predicate further investigative efforts” into whether Mr. Flynn was being directed and controlled by a foreign power (Russia) in a manner that threatened U.S. national security or violated FARA or its related statutes, id. at 3.”

It further notes that key figures like Andrew McCabe “cut off” objections to the overly aggressive pursuit of Flynn. It describes an effort of former Director James Comey, McCabe, and others to skip common protocols to bag Flynn at any cost on any grounds.

While malicious prosecution cases are notoriously difficult to prove (particularly in a case with a voluntary plea), the motion reinforces the view of many of us that the Justice Department was engaged in a campaign to incriminate Flynn — a campaign that now appears entirely detached from both the evidence and legal standards supporting a criminal charge. Such a lawsuit could allow Flynn to pursue discovery into the motivations and actions of figures like McCabe.

The motion relieves President Donald Trump of the necessity of a pardon for Flynn.  However, it hardly ends the matter. Congress has expressed an interest in investigating new and troubling evidence. It has every reason to do so. The new evidence obviously does not comport with the standard narrative of the media from the outset of the Russian investigation. Many will defend this case and its underlying abuses as “standard” practices. I have certainly seen abuses in my career as a criminal defense attorney, but I have never seen a record as troubling as this one in prosecutors seeking the creation rather than the investigation of criminal conduct. Even if such abuse is deemed standard by apologists for Mueller, it is neither an excuse nor a license for such misconduct.

May 8, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

End of Russiagate? DOJ drops case against Trump adviser Flynn that started ‘witch hunt’

RT | May 7, 2020

Charges against US President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, have been dropped due to new evidence showing they were baseless. Flynn was the first to be targeted in the ‘Russiagate’ probe.

The FBI’s interview of Flynn in January 2017 was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation” into the former head of military intelligence, and conducted “without any legitimate investigative basis,” the US Department of Justice said in a court filing on Thursday.

Attorney Jeffrey Jensen, who was charged by Attorney General William Barr to review the case, recommended this course of action in a document last week, the AP reported – presumably after Flynn’s attorneys made public FBI documents that unequivocally showed that the general had been targeted for entrapment by a group of Bureau officials who had privately discussed an “insurance policy” in case of a Trump victory.

Asked about the news on Thursday afternoon, Trump called Flynn “an innocent man.”

He also called the Obama administration holdovers in the FBI and the Justice Department who orchestrated Flynn’s prosecution, “human scum” and their conduct “treason.”

“What they’ve done is a disgrace, and I hope a big price is going to be paid,” the president added.

It was disgraced agent Peter Strzok who intervened to keep Flynn’s case open, and who later interviewed Flynn and apparently heavily edited the notes from that interview, with the help of Bureau lawyer – and his extramarital partner – Lisa Page. The interview was ordered by then-FBI Director Jim Comey, by his own admission.

The news of the charges being dropped comes just hours after the DOJ notified US District Judge Emmet Sullivan that prosecutor Brandon Van Grack was withdrawing from the Flynn case – as well as others linked to the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into allegations that Trump’s campaign had “colluded” with Russia in the 2016 election.

More documents showed that Van Grack, Mueller’s handpicked prosecutor, apparently coerced Flynn into pleading guilty by threatening to indict his son, then allegedly conspired with Flynn’s attorneys to keep that secret. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the content of his conversations with Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition period between the election and Trump’s inauguration.

The former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was the first feather in the cap of the ‘resistance’ to the Trump administration. Flynn was forced to resign less than a month into the job, after the Washington Post accused him of lying about his conversations with Kislyak, apparently based on FBI leaks. His prosecution has long been held up as proof there was something rotten within the Trump campaign, and the fact he pleaded guilty has been repeatedly used in political and media attacks on the administration, and even the impeachment hearings.

May 7, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

New Bombshell Documents Raise the Question Why Obama Feared Michael Flynn So Much

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 07.05.2020

As a result of AG William Barr’s decision to review Michael Flynn’s case new bombshell documents were unearthed and unsealed on 29 April shedding light on a potential FBI plot against the general. The exposure has triggered new questions about the anti-Trump “spygate” effort by FBI and DOJ officials, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.

The newly unveiled written notes openly ask whether the bureau’s goal was “to get” General Michael Flynn “to lie”, so that the FBI could “prosecute him or get him fired”. The files also indicate that the FBI’s operation Crossfire Razor targeting Flynn had found nothing implicating the general in the “collusion” with Russia and would have been closed if then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok not intervened to keep the case open.

​On 24 January 2017, Strzok and FBI Special Agent Joe Pietka conducted an interview with Flynn, who at that time was Trump’s national security adviser, about his December phone talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The interview played out ugly as in February 2017 Flynn resigned while several months later he pleaded guilty to making “false statements” to FBI agents over his conversation with the ambassador.

Seeking Truth & Connecting the Dots

Having taken the job of Flynn’s defence lawyer in 2019, Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, pushed for the revision of the case despite DOJ prosecutors considering the general’s sentencing a done deal. The lawyer argued more dots needed to be connected and requested all the material that could potentially vindicate her client.

Powell argued that the prosecutors intentionally hid the exculpatory information stressing that the purported egregious misconduct by the government would justify the dismissal of Flynn’s case by the court. For their part, Justice Department attorneys have repeatedly rebutted Powell’s requests as “irrelevant” and even dubbed the defence’s supposition that Flynn was targeted by the FBI as part of a broader plot against Trump a “conspiracy theory”.

Nevertheless, Flynn’s legal team managed to expose a set of inconsistencies in the bureau’s handling of the case including edits in the general’s FD-302s – forms used by FBI personnel to report or summarise the interviews that they conduct. The newly discovered documents apparently indicate that the bureau intentionally set a perjury trap for Flynn.

​Following the disclosure the general’s defence ramped up calls to throw the case out.

​”More concerning than the perjury trap is that the FBI launched an investigation into a person – Michael Flynn – rather than a crime, under President Obama’s watch, and that this evidently unlawful investigation continues to this day”, opines Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel.

He recollects that former President Barack Obama warned Trump against hiring Mike Flynn as his national security adviser.

“Why does Barack Obama fear Michael Flynn so much? Why do so many people still in the Trump administration obstruct the process of terminating the Flynn prosecution? Let us hope US Attorney John Durham asks and answers these questions”, the analyst notes referring to the special investigator appointed by AG William Barr to look into the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane targeting Donald Trump’s aides over their alleged ties with Russian officials.

A year ago Barr clearly articulated his concern that the US intelligence community spied on the Trump campaign during the previous election cycle adding that “spying on a political campaign is a big deal”. The newly released documents appear to back Barr’s concerns, according to the analyst.

“I suspect Barr’s focus has much to do with these and looming revelations”, Ortel presumes. “But I question why Barr and the president have not yet replaced FBI Director Christopher Wray and all who had anything to do with the Flynn prosecution and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. The FBI has a stunning array of resources that should be trained on investigating crimes, rather than instigating potential crimes to exact political retribution”.

Trump ‘Should Consider Full Pardon’ of All Deep State Victims

One might hope that FBI agents involved in the alleged framing of General Flynn as well as their backers will be held responsible, according to Ortel.

“Across the political spectrum, most thoughtful people must demand full disclosure of the extent to which FBI and other ‘public servants’ crossed a key line to become political hit men and women”, he highlights. “The FBI is supposed to investigate objectively and apolitically, while the Department of Justice is supposed to uphold the law, neutrally”.

According to him, “under Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Christopher Wray at the FBI, and under Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department, corrupt political motives seem to have overwhelmed obligations to support and defend the US Constitution”.

In the aftermath of the recent disclosure Donald Trump suggested that the newly unveiled documents “essentially exonerated” Michael Flynn.

“They tormented him – dirty cops tormented Gen. Flynn”, Trump told reporters on 30 April. “If you look at those notes from yesterday, that was total exoneration”.

The president earlier signalled that he was “strongly considering pardoning” former national security adviser Michael Flynn. One might wonder whether it’s time for the president to pick up this option. According to Ortel, Trump “should consider full pardons for all targets of any Mueller instigated prosecutions as these seem to have started in the absence of solid predicates of criminal activity”.

As for Flynn, the analyst hopes that Barr “would direct prosecuting attorneys to cease their efforts, while referring any evidence of criminal behaviour by prosecutors in the Flynn case to new teams of prosecutors who then should seek indictments”. He believes that such a path might be deemed a form of exoneration.

“General Flynn and many others have suffered too much for too long”, Ortel says. “President Trump and Attorney General Barr must unequivocally prove that government employees will suffer grievous punishment when they subvert the rule of law to serve corrupt political masters”.

May 7, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

FBI beats the corpse of Russiagate horse, listing what Russia could ‘possibly’ do to 2020 US elections

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 6, 2020

Even as its own unprecedented wrongdoing since 2016 is ever-so-slowly coming to light, the FBI is peddling warnings about what Russia might possibly do in the 2020 US elections. Buckle up, here we go again.

This time it’s a memo compiled by the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) way back in February, but published Monday by the Associated Press, which sounds all sorts of warning about hypothetical Russian meddling. It is literally titled “Possible Russian Tactics Ahead of 2020 US Election” – not likely, or observed, or documented. Possible.

The novel claim pushed to the forefront by AP is that the Kremlin might advise some candidates and campaigns directly, based on claims that Russia did so in Africa last year. This appears to be based on a report by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) from October 2019, describing a “social media operation in multiple African countries,” attributed to entities “linked” to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.

As AP helpfully points out, Prigozhin “was among the Russians indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation for his role in a furtive social media campaign aimed at sowing discord among Americans ahead of the 2016 US election.”

Left unsaid in this assertion masquerading as fact, however, is that charges against Prigozhin and his company were dropped in March, because his company actually contested them in US court. This caused federal judges to repeatedly rebuke prosecutors who apparently thought they could get away with assertions instead of evidence. Oops.

So the sensational AP claim about a new Russian menace is based on a FBI memo, citing a Stanford report, about what someone “linked” to a Russian businessman may have done in Africa, and therefore the 2020 US elections are in danger?

Things become a lot clearer when one looks into who is involved with SIO – namely one Renee DiResta, who proudly boasts of past work advising the Senate Intelligence Committee and working at New Knowledge.

If that latter name sounds familiar, it’s the company that got outed – by the New York Times, no less – for literally organizing a social media false flag operation during the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama. Funded by big tech Democrat donors, NK created fake Russian accounts that pretended to support the Republican candidate, then got the media to cover the story, eventually contributing to having a Democrat elected there for the first time in decades.

With how much wailing and gnashing of the teeth there has been about social media threats to “our democracy,” one would think that this revelation would have resulted in New Knowledge alums becoming unemployable pariahs and all their product considered tainted garbage. Not so, as DiResta’s failing upward to Stanford clearly demonstrates.

New Knowledge has since quietly rebranded and stayed in the same exact line of work. The Senate Intelligence committee never renounced their reports, but instead doubled down on its Russiagate claims, even as its chair apparently did some insider trading to profit from the pandemic. That’s another rabbit hole, though, for another time.

The reason I bring this all up is that all these cries about ‘Russian menace’ tend to come from the same group of people, and are amplified by the same media outlets, who were behind the original ‘Russiagate’ story that spectacularly disintegrated before everyone’s eyes just last year. The fabled Mueller report failed to substantiate any actual Russian meddling, simply asserting it as fact based on their indictments, and moreover failed to find any “collusion” with President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Meanwhile, a veritable mountain of evidence has emerged that the FBI leadership actually conspired to stop Trump from getting elected, then implemented an “insurance policy” to frame his national security adviser and former top military spy General Michael Flynn, to cover up their efforts after they failed. The Bureau also spied on the Trump campaign using the fraudulent, Democrat-funded dossier invented from whole cloth by a British spy and connecting Trump to Russia.

That’s not based on hearsay,  assessments, linkages, assertions, or fanciful attributions – but on actual facts, hard evidence provided to a federal judge and actually examined by the Justice Department in what amounts to much-belated oversight of a rogue agency. In short, nothing like the Russiagate nonsense we’ve been hearing nonstop for years, from the mainstream media and social media conspiracists alike.

Attempts to blame Russia for Hillary Clinton’s failure to win in 2016 have actually proven to be more destructive to American democracy and trust in US institutions – media, politicians, law enforcement, take your pick – than anything Moscow’s been baselessly accused of. Much like the calls in that movie trope, the real threats to US elections have been coming from inside the house all along.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

May 6, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

White House efforts to exonerate Michael Flynn could see America explode

By Robert Bridge | RT | May 1, 2020

As new information indicates the FBI set a ‘perjury trap’ for Trump’s former national security adviser, the gloves have come off between the Democrats and Republicans. The epic showdown could lead to a national existential crisis.

For much of the world – transfixed as it is with the Covid-19 pandemic and a crumbling global economy – Russiagate sounds like ancient history. From the perspective of the Trump administration, however, it is a lingering, festering wound that points to corruption and possibly even treason at the highest levels of the US political and intelligence circles. That is why Michael Flynn’s possible exoneration is, or should be, a very serious news story.

Yet for Americans searching for information on the subject, they will be greeted by the cacophony of crickets. The Drudge Report, for example, devoted just one short article to the controversy since the news broke on Thursday. And in the event that one of the Big Six media corporations reports on it, they can be trusted to do so without any modicum of objectivity. CNN, for example, fired up its snark machine to produce this whopper of an article-opener: “Trump went on a Twitter rampage Thursday about his former adviser Michael Flynn, flooding the zone with conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations that crooked FBI investigators entrapped Flynn as part of a ‘deep state’ plot.”

Conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations? Even for CNN, that is quite a stretch. Not even the dullest tool in the box could fail to see what appears to be a clear attempt to ensnare the 33-year military veteran in a perjury trap. “What is our goal,” an FBI agent reportedly asked in a memo shortly before Flynn was subjected to an ‘ambush interview’ inside of the White House. “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

As it turned out, Flynn was fired for providing misleading information with regards to his conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; the perfectly legal conversations took place as the outgoing Obama administration was deliberately torpedoing US-Russia relations.

Now that there is an opportunity to set the historical record straight with regards to Michael Flynn, as well as the three-year political drama known as Russiagate, the media has decided once again to take a pass. That is both unfortunate and dangerous because, before long, it seems, these sorts of stories will blow up in America’s lap.

An approaching storm?

Since the media never discusses it, few people seem to know that back in May 2019 Trump launched an investigation into the origins of the Russiagate debacle. And unlike the notorious nothingburgers served up cold by the Democrats ever since the mogul from Manhattan entered the Oval Office, the Republicans actually have something that Joe Public can sink his teeth into.

It is no secret that the Obama-era FBI was responsible for organizing an extremely shady investigation into members of the Trump campaign. The operation, dubbed ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ relied on the investigative work of former British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on the Manhattan real estate developer turned political maverick. However, what the FBI failed to mention was that Steele had been funded by a firm doing political opposition research for the Democratic Party and for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Had the FISA Court been made aware of such gross conflicts of interest, the FBI would never have been granted a warrant to investigate the Trump campaign on suspicion of ‘colluding with the Russians,’ and the country could have been spared a four-year witch hunt.

Now, Donald Trump, a one-time Washington outsider who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ on the campaign trail, looks very determined to avenge himself for those past wrongs. And judging by recent comments from Attorney General William Barr, his chances of success appear better than average.

“I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in an interview last month with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.

Barr went on to say that the FBI counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia served to “sabotage the presidency… without any basis.”

The implication here is that a lot of high-ranking people involved in the Russiagate scam – up to and including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – could be expected to testify in a court of law to defend their behavior. The problem, however, is that so few Americans seem to understand that such a scenario could actually transpire.

America’s parallel reality

It has become a bit of a cliche, but the American people really are experiencing a parallel reality from inside the echo chambers of two camps that absolutely loathe each other. In fact, it is difficult to believe that the two groups are comprised of fellow American citizens. This deep fissure that now exists between America’s two predominant parties precludes any ‘meeting of the middle ground,’ as it were, a dilemma that harks back to the realities of the Civil War days (1861-1865) when members of the same family found themselves pitted against each other on the battlefield.

On the left, the corporate-owned media has created an image of Donald Trump as some sort of banana republic caricature who has placed the nation on the express lane to ruin. On the right, meanwhile, a handful of pro-Trump outlets comprised of Fox News and some alt-right sources, which largely owe their feudalistic existence to the overlords in Silicon Valley, are desperate to project a more sympathetic image of the US leader. Meanwhile, the cherished middle ground, where the Democrat and Republican camps could meet and civilly discuss and work out their differences, continues to be no-man’s land. Unless that changes, that vacant piece of real estate could eventually turn into a very real battleground.

If and when the other shoe drops, and Trump decides to seek justice for the past sins of Russiagate in a court of law, the streets of America may explode in pent-up political passions, which are already severely strained with presidential elections just months away. The American mainstream media would have to accept a large portion of the blame in the event of such a scenario considering how hard they have worked to keep the American people in the dark about the political realities, even if it goes against their political tendencies. It’s still not too late to bring the two sides together in some kind of mutual agreement, but the clock is ticking.

Robert Bridge, an American writer and journalist, is the author of the book, ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge

May 2, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

‘It’s Bull****’: Trump Aide Reveals Extent of ‘Russian Meddling’ in 2016 Race to Secret FBI Source

Sputnik – April 9, 2020

Instead of challenging him on policy, Donald Trump’s opponents spent nearly three years accusing the president of being a Russian agent, and claiming that the Kremlin meddled in the US in 2016. Trump was exonerated in April 2019 with the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which found no evidence of collusion whatsoever.

George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign advisor who found himself at the center of US intelligence agencies’ massive probe into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russians, revealed to an FBI informant in a secretly recorded conversation in 2016 what has since become clear to everyone – that there was no cooperation of any kind between Trump and Russia to hack or release the emails stolen from Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee.

In the conversation between Papadopoulos and a friend whom the FBI secretly asked to query the Trump advisor regarding possible Russian meddling, several weeks before the November 2016 election, Papadopoulos repeatedly denied that any meddling was taking place.

“You think Russia’s playing a big game in this election?” Papadopoulos was asked by the ‘friend’ in a recently declassified transcript of the exchange obtained by the Daily Caller Foundation. “No,” he responded. “Why not?” he was asked. “Why would they?” he replied.“

Don’t you think they have special interests?” the FBI informant continued. “Something like that. I don’t think so. That’s all bull****. No one knows who’s hacking them [Clinton and the DNC],” Papadopoulos said.

“You don’t think that they, that they hacked the DNC? Who hacked the f***ing DNC then?” the undercover source asked. “Could be the Chinese, could be the Iranians, it could be some Bernie, uh supporters. Could be Anonymous,” Papadopoulos answered, referring to the online hacking collective. “Dude, Russia doesn’t have any interest in it anyways… They, dude, no one knows how a president’s going to govern anyway. You don’t just say, oh I like… I mean the Congress is very hostile with Russia anyways, so… I don’t know, I don’t know. And even Putin said it himself. It’s all, its like conspiracy theories,” the aide said.

In the conversation, Papadopoulos also insisted that he knew “for a fact” that no one in the Trump campaign was involved in hacking the DNC.

The exchange, said to have taken place in a Greek restaurant and on a ride to a casino, featured the unnamed FBI source repeatedly prodding Papadopoulos on possible Trump-Russia collusion, to no avail. Along with this topic, the pair discussed mutual friendships, their love lives, Papadopoulos’s lobbying work for Israeli businesses in Washington, and other subjects.

Papadopoulos, who was arrested by the FBI in July 2017 and accused of making false statements to federal investigators, served two weeks in federal prison and was subjected to a 12 month supervised release and 200 hours of community service for the crime. After being released, he penned a book in which he accused intelligence agencies of entrapping him.

In December 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz revealed that the FBI had failed to include the above-mentioned exchange between Papadopoulos and the FBI source in its case on the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, with the conversation’s omission being one of over a dozen inaccuracies and omissions documented by the inspector general’s office. It’s important to note that the conversations between Papadopoulos and FBI informants helped serve as the initial catalyst for the entire Russiagate investigation.

Papadopoulos himself took to Twitter late Wednesday to discuss the transcript, saying he knew “exactly who” was behind what he called “this frame job.”

April 9, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

International Solidarity Movement statement on reported FBI probe

International Solidarity Movement | April 7, 2020

Recently, the Intercept published a report of a surveillance investigation conducted by the FBI on the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The highly invasive investigation targeted ISM activists, their associates, and other organizations ISM worked with, from 2004 – 2006, using informants as well as physical and telecommunications surveillance.

We, at the International Solidarity Movement, denounce this shameless abuse of power and misuse of public funds in an attempt to criminalize Palestinian solidarity and anti-occupation activism, as well as the current ongoing campaign in some American states to criminalize the BDS movement. ISM activists have been secretly spied on and targeted by various intelligence services, including British, Israeli, and U.S.,  for over 19 years, merely for standing up for the rights of Palestinians.

We call on those who believe that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity to take action and raise awareness about local, state, and national attempts to criminalize nonviolent resistance such as BDS and Palestinian advocacy, and boycott those profiting off the Occupation of Palestine.

According to the Intercept report, an FBI investigation was launched after an American volunteer with ISM was shot and wounded by Israeli forces at a protest in Occupied Palestine. Instead of investigating the foreign army that injured an American citizen exercising his First Amendment-protected right to peaceful protest, the FBI’s response was to probe the survivor. While the 2 primary investigations were launched by the Los Angeles and St. Louis FBI Field Offices, agents from at least 11 cities were involved in spying on various ISM activists and related organizations. Using far right and extremist news sources, the investigation attempted to link ISM to international terrorism.

After two years of investigation, multiple rights and privacy violations, hundreds of pages of reports and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars wasted, the investigation only proved what we have always maintained: ISM is a non-violent movement committed to ending the Occupation of Palestine through non-violent means.

Notably, the investigation began in March 2004, shortly after the murder of American Rachel Corrie and Briton Tom Hurndall (2003) by the Israeli army. The probe coincided with an Israeli government campaign to de-legitimize ISM and discredit Palestinian rights activists. It also reflects the increase in recent years of FBI investigations into non-violent activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antiwar.com. Today, lobby groups, politicians, and leaders in the United States continue to violate First Amendment-protected rights to free speech through criminalizing non-violent Palestinian activism, such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“The fact that ISM was under this kind of extensive investigation is ridiculous and a complete waste of taxpayer money. ISM has always been open and transparent about who we are, what we do, and what we stand for, which is purportedly what this country stands for — freedom and human rights.” — ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf

“In Dr. King’s time, surveillance was justified in terms of alleged Communist influence; in recent years, surveillance has been justified by alleged association with terrorists. In both cases, U.S. citizens were employing nonviolent action to confront injustice and oppression.” — ISM activist spied on by the FBI, Mark Chmiel

April 8, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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