NSA has been ‘lying to the courts all along,’ says whistleblower, as judges give warrantless surveillance the thumbs-up
National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland © Reuters / Larry Downing
RT | December 21, 2019
The National Security Agency can gather the data of US citizens without a warrant – as long as it gathers this data by mistake, a court has ruled. However, this suits the agency just fine, whistleblower William Binney told RT.
The NSA is permitted to gather data on US citizens abroad, or “foreign connected” Americans at home. The dragnet surveillance operation necessary to gather this information also sucks up data on millions of Americans with no foreign contacts, a process critics say is unconstitutional.
On Wednesday, the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York declared this “incidental collection” of information permissible. The NSA has maintained that it is incapable of separating properly and improperly gathered data, but former NSA Technical Director William Binney told RT that this is simply untrue.
“They’ve been lying to the courts all along,” Binney said. “They’ve had the capability to sort that stuff out. It’s just that they don’t want to.”
“This gives them power over everyone, the ability to look into political opponents like they did with President Trump,” he continued.
While the court ruling gives the NSA free rein to suck up data on Americans’ phone and internet communications, it did not authorize the US’ other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to dig through this data. However, according to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling issued last year, the FBI accessed this data trove some 3.1 million times in 2017.
Trump Impeachment… Slapstick Diversion From Reality
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 20, 2019
Fittingly for the jolly season, the House of Representatives’ vote to impeach Trump was more pantomime than serious politics.
“Oh yes, he is!.. Oh no, he isn’t!..” and so it went on for nearly 10 hours of to-and-fro between Democrats and Republicans. Eventually, the finale came when black-clad Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hammered the gavel, announcing President had been impeached – only the third-ever in two-and-half centuries of 45 presidents.
It was a foregone conclusion given the Democrat majority in the House. The next step in the impeachment process goes to the Republican controlled Senate next month where Trump will almost certainly be acquitted.
For all the grandstanding drama and feverish media coverage, the storyline – like all pantos – is scant in credibility. The accusations against Trump of abusing his office in a phone call with the Ukrainian president and of obstructing subsequent Congressional inquiry are light on evidence while heavy on innuendo. For all his flaws, Trump and the Republicans are right in their call that the Democrats and anti-Trump media are hamming it up in a desperate bid to overturn the 2016 election. For the past three years, Washington has been fixated with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
With faux solemnity, Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi said the impeachment vote was a “sad and tragic day” for US democracy. Then she had to quickly check Democrats from bursting into cheers and applause when the impeachment vote was announced. So much for a “sad day”! The Democrats were elated that their three-year plan to oust Trump was at last happening – albeit for a short-lived period until the Senate takes up the matter.
What was truly sad, however, is how the impeachment fiasco dominated other news, thereby drawing the curtain on several far more significant events.
On the same day as the House brouhaha, over in the Senate Inspector General Michael Horowitz was continuing to give withering testimony from his report into FBI wiretapping of the Trump election campaign back in 2016. The misconduct by the FBI in carrying out surveillance on private American citizens is a shocking abuse of power by the intelligence agency. All the implications suggest that the Obama administration engaged with secret services to sabotage the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 with phony allegations about Russia collusion. The constitutional violations by the FBI are colossal.
Knowing the murky past of the FBI and its dirty tricks, we shouldn’t be surprised by Horowitz’s findings. A follow-up report by attorney John Durham promises to be even more damning. But what is so astounding is how the US media, by and large, had their focus on the impeachment debacle instead of this far bigger show of grave importance. Perhaps not really astounding given that major media outlets like CNN, New York Times, MSNBC and Washington Post have invested so much capital in whipping up the Russia claims. Their ignoring the FBI misconduct is vital for self-preservation by avoiding accountability for their “Russia collusion” fantasies.
Another blockbuster story roundly ignored was the unfolding scandal at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The number of whistleblowers from the UN body has grown to 20, according to Wikileaks. They allege that an OPCW report published in 2018 into a purported chemical weapon incident in Syria was “doctored” to wrongly incriminate the Assad government for carrying out an attack on civilians. As a result of the incident on April 7, 2018, the United States, Britain and France days later launched over 100 air strikes against Syria in apparent revenge. President Trump labeled Assad “an animal”. According to the whistleblowers, the OPCW report later in 2018 was deliberately suppressed by senior officials in the organization’s headquarters in The Hague under pressure from the American government. The implication is that the US, British and French air strikes against Syria were naked aggression based on false information. Indeed, the incident on April 7 has the hallmarks of a false-flag operation carried out by Western-backed anti-government militants.
Despite the urgent public interest of this scandal, the Western corporate media have largely ignored the matter, apart from notable exceptions, such as Tucker Carlson at Fox and Peter Hitchens in Britain’s Mail newspaper.
Surely on any objective scale, the OPCW scandal is worth far more media attention than the turgid proceedings in the House. But then again invoking objectivity is a naive request when the polarized politics in the US have become so hyper-subjective.
Other important stories that got sidelined this week include the appeal by 100 Australian doctors demanding the release of Julian Assange from prison in Britain. They reiterated similar concerns expressed by Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur, warning that Assange could die in prison if he is not given immediate medical care. The Wikileaks founder is awaiting extradition to the US where he faces 175 years in jail for “espionage”. As the leaks this week from Wikileaks regarding corruption at the OPCW demonstrate the real “offense” committed by Assange is his exposure of war crimes by the US and its Western allies. He is being tortured for telling the truth by Western governments that claim to be bastions of democracy and law. Why aren’t Western media covering this bombshell?
Still another huge story to be buried this week under the avalanche of impeachment popcorn was the report that over 90 US companies on the Fortune 500 list paid zero tax in the year 2018, despite having made combined profits of $100 billion. The companies include Amazon, Bank of American, Chevron, General Motors, Goodyear, Honeywell, JP Morgan Chase, Starbucks, and Verizon, to mention only a few. These companies were able to reduce their federal tax bill to zero because of corporate tax breaks and accounting loopholes introduced by President Trump in 2017.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition to Trump then it should be taking up issues that really matter to ordinary citizens. Issues like abuse of power by unelected state agencies that spy illegally on civilians. But the Democrats this month voted for the latest edition of the Patriot Act extending such powers. They also voted for a record $738 billion spend on the US military, instead of deploying some of that for public good in healthcare and education.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition, then it would be highlighting the crimes of illegal wars the US carries out on foreign countries with impunity. It would be defending the rights of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who have exposed systematic state crimes.
If the Democrat party was a genuine political opposition, it would be campaigning for US corporations to pay their fair share of taxes so that working families can benefit from a decent society. They would be going after Trump for aiding and abetting the corporate kleptocracy that America has become.
But they don’t. Because the Democrats – most of them anyway – are part of the same bipartisan corporate feeding trough and war machine that is Washington.
The obscenity is so disgraceful that’s why the need for an impeachment pantomime. And the corporate media dutifully obliges.
Democrats Target Own Population by Trump Impeachment – Paul Craig Roberts
Sputnik -December 20, 2019
WASHINGTON – The Democrats are targeting their own population by impeaching President Donald Trump, former US Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts said.
On Wednesday, Trump became the third president in US history to be impeached when the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to find him guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after investigations concluding he invited foreign meddling in the American electoral process.
“The impeachment circus is a political act by the House Democrats. It is a political orchestration without any evidence or credible testimony,” Roberts said. “What is disturbing about the impeachment… is that these orchestrated actions are an attempt to overturn a democratic election. The US now engages in actions against its own population like the actions Washington recently engaged in against Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, and Ukraine.”
The Democratic Party, Roberts added, decided to fabricate a scandal with Ukraine after Russiagate fell apart.
“The Democrats are after power. They were frustrated by the Russiagate failure, and orchestrated a hoax that, even if it were true, would not be an impeachable event,” he said.
Roberts continued to say that the House Democrats are able to “get away with this hoax” because the American media is against Trump.
“It is disturbing also because it demonstrates that there is no integrity in the media or the security agencies,” he explained. “Without the support of the media and security agencies, the Democrats would not be able to orchestrate such obvious hoaxes.”
Roberts believes that the impeachment proceedings are not hurting Trump’s election chances, and even help him.
“As the impeachment proceedings unfolded, the public turned against the proceedings, recognizing them as a purely political action,” Roberts said. “The Democrats hoped that some of the mud would stick to Trump and reduce his reelection chances, but it seems the impeachment is helping Trump.”
The president will have to face trial in the US Senate but is unlikely to be removed from power as the higher legislative decision-making body is controlled by members of his Republican party, who have made it clear that they viewed his impeachment as a sham.
“The Senate will not convict Trump of the charges, unless enough Republican senators can be blackmailed by the FBI, CIA, and NSA, police state institutions that have spy folders on everyone, or unless the military/security complex can bribe the Republicans with large sums of money to vote against Trump,” Roberts said. “I think this is unlikely as it would be too obvious even for insouciant Americans not to notice.”
Roberts also said that Russiagate and the impeachment “have radicalized” and divided the United States.
“The population is now split in a new way. On the one hand we have the people who elected Trump, ordinary traditional Americans now demonized as “racists” and “white supremacists,” Roberts said. “On the other hand we have the Democrats, no longer the party of the working people.”
House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry in September to probe whether Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden, the current Democratic front-runner in the presidential primaries. Lawmakers initiated the inquiry after a whistleblower sent a complaint to the Congress claiming that Trump threatened to withdraw military aid for Ukraine if Kiev failed to investigate Biden and his son Hunter over the latter’s business dealings in the country.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing, repeatedly dismissing the impeachment inquiry as a witch hunt aimed at reversing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Commenting on Wednesday’s vote, the president said that “this lawless, partisan impeachment” was “political suicide” for the Democratic Party. He also expressed confidence that he would be fully exonerated by the Senate, pledging to “continue to work tirelessly to address the needs and priorities of the American people.”
You Can’t Fool All the People All the Time
By Daniel Lazare | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 18, 2019
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So said Abraham Lincoln – maybe. But whoever it was forgot to mention an important corollary: fun as it may be to pull the wool over people’s eyes, you’ll writhe in agony for an equal period once the truth emerges and the fraud is exposed.
This is the significance of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s devastating report on the FBI investigation of Russiagate suspect Carter Page.
For years, the FBI and its allies in the Democratic Party have had a grand time pillorying Page as the centerpiece of a gigantic Kremlin conspiracy to help Trump win the White House and bend America to its will. Thousands of headlines about this or that bombshell revelation, scores of talking heads proclaiming that “the walls are closing in” – it was all so much fun that revelers barely paused when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller announced last March that he was unable to “establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Sure, a few Democrats perked up. But they quickly decided that even though Mueller didn’t come up with enough evidence to prove collusion, that didn’t mean that he came up with no evidence at all. So the myth continued unabated.
But payback time is now upon us. The Horowitz report is not some ordinary rebuke, but an epic assault that has left the FBI reeling. After fawning over the bureau for years, the New York Times tried to salvage a shred of self-respect by declaring that even though it “painted a bleak portrait of the FBI as a dysfunctional agency,” all was not lost because the inspector general uncovered “no evidence that the mistakes were intentional or undertaken out of political bias.”
This was incorrect. Horowitz made it clear in his Dec. 11 appearance before the Senate judiciary committee that while there was “no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias,” the question gets “murkier” when it comes to subsequent FBI actions like withholding or doctoring evidence. Considering that FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, the man who allegedly falsified evidence against Page, is a never-Trumper who once texted “viva le resistance,” it’s hard to see how bias could not have been a factor.
The inspector general lists seventeen “significant errors” the bureau made in applying for a secret surveillance warrant. It failed to inform the court that Page had been a CIA informant for years and had been found to have been truthful throughout; that he told an undercover agent that he “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, his alleged co-conspirator, and that Manafort had never responded to any of his emails; that a source for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s famous “golden showers” dossier was known to be a “boaster” and an “egoist” who may “engage in some embellishment”; and that professional associates of Steele said he “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness [and] poor judgment” and “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”
Steele, the man who turned US politics upside down, was a flake in other words while Page was more likely on the up and up. Yet the FBI assumed the opposite. Perhaps the most amazing section in Horowitz’s report concerns a Steele informant who confessed that reports of Trump’s sexual escapades in the Moscow Ritz Carlton were “just talk,” conversations he or she “had with friends over beers,” and statements made in “jest.” Yet the Steele dossier reported them as a real, and a credulous press lapped them all up. Steele’s supposed high-level Kremlin contacts, the source added, were individuals “who may have had access” – and, then again, may not have. Corroboration of Steele’s findings was meanwhile “zero.”
Yet this is the document that the FBI continued using to pursue Page and Trump and convince the public that collusion was genuine.
As devastating as all this is, US Attorney John Durham’s long-awaited report on the origins of Russiagate promises to be broader and even harder-hitting. On Dec. 9, he issued an unusual statement saying that he disagreed with Horowitz’s finding that the FBI was legally warranted in launching an investigation. This implies that maybe – just maybe – he’s come up with evidence that the intelligence agencies concocted the whole episode from the outset as skeptics have long suspected.
If so, the agony of those responsible for the Russiagate fiasco can only intensify while, for the rest of us, the fun has just begun. So lean back and enjoy the show. It going to be a doozy.
The Carter Page/Ukraine Lie That Kept On Lying for Mueller and the FBI
By Paul Sperry – RealClearInvestigations – December 12, 2019
The FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller repeatedly kept alive a damning narrative that investigators knew to be false: namely, that a junior Trump campaign aide as a favor to the Kremlin had “gutted” an anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine plank in the Republican Party platform at the GOP’s 2016 convention.
Federal authorities used this claim to help secure spy warrants on the aide in question, Carter Page, suggesting to the court that he was “an agent of Russia” – even though investigators knew that Page was working for U.S., not Russian, intelligence, and that they had learned from witnesses, emails and other evidence that Page had no role in drafting the Ukraine platform plank.
The revelation is buried in the Justice Department watchdog’s just-released report on FISA surveillance abuses. RealClearInvestigations fleshed out this unreported story with footnotes from the Mueller report and exclusive interviews with Trump campaign officials who worked on the convention platform.
Of all the Trump-Russia rumors, insinuations and falsehoods – from secret payments for shadowy hackers, to videotaped prostitutes with active bladders, to a clandestine rendezvous with Kremlin figures in Prague – the supposedly pro-Russia Ukraine platform alteration stands out. It seemed to offer early, public, concrete evidence of an actual bending of prospective U.S. policy to suit Moscow. The false narrative is also significant because it was initially pushed not by Democrats, but by associates of Republican Sen. John McCain and other so-called Never Trumpers. As a bipartisan red flag, it helped build momentum around a narrative of Trump treachery with, then as now, Ukraine playing a central role. It also shows how the Russia and Ukraine controversies were linked from the beginning by Trump’s foes.
This episode loomed so large that the first person Mueller’s team interviewed after taking over the Russia investigation in May 2017 was Rachel Hoff, who was serving as McCain’s policy adviser on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like her boss, Hoff was no fan of President Trump. Agents sought to confirm with her reports that the Trump campaign had “gutted” the GOP’s platform plank on Ukraine to favor Russia during the party’s convention in Cleveland in early July 2016.
As a disgruntled convention delegate, Hoff got the story started by putting Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in touch with another Never Trump delegate, Diana Denman, who had lost her bid to amend the GOP plank to call for providing “lethal” weapons to Ukraine to help fend off Russian incursions, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Instead, the platform called for “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine.”
Denman was overruled because heavily arming Ukraine was out of step with the GOP consensus at the time – to say nothing of the Obama administration’s policy, which refused to arm the Ukrainians. And it was at odds with Trump’s stated position, which sought to avoid military escalation in the region, while encouraging the European Union to take a larger peacekeeping role.
On July 18, 2016, the Post ran Rogin’s sensational story under the misleading headline, “Trump Campaign Guts GOP’s Anti-Russia Stance on Ukraine.” Pushing the narrative that Trump was doing the Kremlin’s bidding, it quoted Hoff warning that Trump “would be dangerous for America and the world.” The story left out the key part of the final Trump-approved plank pledging aid “to the armed forces of Ukraine.” Reached by phone, Rogin declined comment.
This story was quickly amplified in the Steele dossier, the series of now-debunked opposition research memos alleging Trump-Russia collusion. Compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign, those memos became a foundation for the FBI and Mueller probes even though – as this week’s IG report established – bureau agents knew that the material in them included demonstrably false assertions and exaggerated gossip dismissed as nonsense by Steele’s own purported source.
Steele also embellished the GOP convention story by claiming that Carter Page had played a key role in drafting the Ukraine plank as part of a commitment he had allegedly made to his Kremlin handlers “to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”
None of this was true. And the FBI — and Mueller — knew it, the Justice inspector general reveals in his report.
Still, the FBI presented the Steele dossier’s smear, cataloged as “Steele Report 95,” as key evidence in all four of its warrant applications to obtain wiretaps to eavesdrop on Page, according to the IG report.
To keep renewing the spy warrants, the FBI had to produce fresh evidence for FISA judges to support suspicions Page was “an agent of Russia.” Just a few weeks before the FISA warrant was set to expire in June 2017, Mueller had his investigators interview Hoff, as his first witness, followed by Denman, hoping they could provide fresh details to keep building an espionage case against Page and the Trump campaign.
But Mueller struck out.
According to agents’ notes documenting their June 2017 interview, as revealed in the IG report, Denham told the FBI that Page was not involved in the drafting of the Ukraine plank. But Mueller’s team did not update its fourth and final FISA warrant application on Page with this exculpatory information. Instead, it recited the same baseless claim that he had shaped the Ukraine policy with guidance from Russia. And the court renewed the warrant that June to electronically monitor Page, allowing the government to continue vacuuming up all of his emails, phone calls, text messages and other communications for another 90 days.
“Although the FBI did not develop any information that Carter Page was involved in the Republican Platform Committee’s change, the FBI did not alter its assessment of Page’s involvement in the FISA applications,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted in his 476-page report released Monday.
Added Horowitz: “We found that, other than this information from Report 95 [of the Steele dossier], the FBI’s investigation did not reveal any information to demonstrate that Page had any involvement with the Republican Platform Committee.” Yet, “all four FISA applications relied upon information in the Steele reporting” alleging Page’s role in drafting the Republican plank on Ukraine and Russia.
A former U.S. Navy lieutenant, Page was never charged with espionage or any crime. He told RealClearInvestigations that he has received “numerous death threats that directly resulted from the false allegations” that he was a traitor.
The FBI and Mueller failed to correct the record about Page in their FISA warrant applications even after they identified the Trump campaign officials who actually had a hand in influencing the GOP plank, J.D. Gordon and Matt Miller. A July 14, 2016, email from Gordon confirmed what Page had personally told the FBI in an interview — that he had not taken part in the decision. The FBI knew about the email since at least March 2017, when agents sat down with Page. (Gordon and Page were chatting by email about the convention, and it’s clear from Page’s responses he had no idea what Gordon had done in the Ukraine-Russia platform drafting sessions. IG Horowitz published the relevant excerpt in his report and noted the FBI had the email in its possession.)
Still, Horowitz found, “The FBI never altered the assessment.”
Horowitz further concluded that the FBI should not have included the dossier’s rumor even in its original October 2016 application for a FISA warrant targeting Page, let alone its three renewals, because a confidential source the FBI assigned to spy on Page at the time found no basis for it. In the IG report, Horowitz noted that during that same month of October 2016, the FBI informant met with Page and tape-recorded him denying he was involved in the drafting of the Ukraine plank. Page told the informant, Stefan Halper, that he “stayed clear of that.”
Horowitz’s investigators established that the informant’s recorded statements were sent to the FBI agent assigned at the time to Page’s case, and were copied to a supporting team of other agents, supervisors and analysts. Yet the FBI also withheld that critical exculpatory evidence from the FISA court in the initial application for a warrant on Page (and then continued to deny the court the information in subsequent requests to monitor Page).
The lead case agent, unnamed in the report, told investigators the FBI was operating on a “belief” that Page was involved in the Ukraine and Russia platform, and that he and the FISA team were “hoping to find evidence of that” from the wiretaps. Despite all the snooping on Page, the FBI never collected the hoped-for proof.
The lead supervisor, also unidentified, told investigators “he did not recall why Page’s denial was not included.”
Horowitz reports that the exculpatory documents were also sent to a Justice Department attorney before the warrant was renewed for the first time in January 2017, “[y]et, the information remained unchanged in the renewal applications.”
Added Horowitz: “The attorney told us that he did not recall the circumstances surrounding this, but he acknowledged that he should have updated the descriptions in the renewal applications to include Page’s denials.”
The FBI also failed to inform surveillance court judges that Page was an “operational contact” for the CIA for several years, according to the Horowitz report. In 2013, Page also volunteered as a cooperating witness in an FBI espionage case, and helped put away a real Russian agent in 2016. This was additional exculpatory evidence the FBI kept from the FISA court, as RealClearInvestigations first reported last year.
Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s top counterintelligence official, rode herd on the Page wiretap requests and reported back to FBI attorney Lisa Page (no relation to Carter), who in turn, updated then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Text messages previously uncovered by Horowitz and shared with Mueller revealed that Strzok and Page, who were having an affair, rooted for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and held Trump in complete contempt. In one exchange, they discussed the need to “stop” Trump from winning the election. And the two of them had also huddled with McCabe in his office to devise an “insurance policy” in the “unlikely event” Trump ended up winning.
The inspector general’s report points out that it was McCabe who urged investigators to look at the Clinton-funded dossier. The previous year, his Democratic politician wife, Jill, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations arranged by Clinton ally and Virginia’s governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe.
Strzok remained central to the investigation well into 2017 – until Mueller was forced to kick him off his team when the anti-Trump bias was revealed. The bureau fired him in 2018, the same year Lisa Page resigned from the FBI. In spite of their anti-Trump political bias, Horowitz said he found “no evidence” their bias influenced their investigative decisions.
Lawyers for Strzok and McCabe did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI and a spokesman for Mueller declined comment.
Putting Carter Page under surveillance starting in October 2016 effectively let the FBI spy on the Trump campaign since its beginnings, because it allowed the bureau to scoop up all of Page’s prior communications. Former Trump officials who have reviewed Horowitz’s new findings confirmed their view that the bureau was trying to make it look like Page and the Trump campaign were doing something sinister to help Russia.
“Page actually had no role in the platform, whatsoever,” Gordon, the Trump campaign’s director of national security, told RCI. “Failing to include the exculpatory information in the FISA application is horrifying.”
While it’s true that Trump sought better relations with Russia, Gordon said, there was nothing nefarious about the drafting of the Ukraine platform. He said the FBI simply assumed it was watered down as a favor to Russia based on a false narrative driven by liberal media outlets like the Post and Never Trumpers such as Rachel Hoff. He said the FBI, under the direction of McCabe, Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey, also wanted to believe the worst about Trump, whom they simply did not like.
Gordon noted that, except for the two Never Trump delegates, nobody in the platform drafting sessions raised a fuss about the Ukraine plank — not even the press.
“The media was present in the room, yet not one person wrote about the Ukraine issue,” he said — until, that is, the Never Trumpers went to the Washington Post that July and helped launch the Trump-Russia “collusion” myth.
Moreover, the narrative was untrue even on its own terms – without the spurious inclusion of Carter Page. Internal platform committee documents show the Ukraine plank could not have been weakened as claimed, because the “lethal” weapons language was never part of the GOP platform in the first place. The final language actually strengthened the platform by pledging direct assistance not just to the country of Ukraine, but to its military in its struggle against Russian-backed forces.
Far from “gutting” assistance, the Trump administration approved the transfer of tank-busting Javelin missiles to Kiev — something the Obama administration refused to do. More than 200 of those weapons have been sold to Ukraine since Trump took office. And the sale and delivery of Javelins never stopped even during this year’s temporary suspension of military aid to Ukraine that is now the subject of the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings.
The final draft of the Ukraine plank also branded Russia a menace, and pledged to stand against “any territorial change imposed by force in Ukraine.” Yet Mueller and his prosecuting staff of mostly Democratic donors still suspected collusion, and they dispatched FBI agents to grill Gordon about the drafting of the platform three times between 2017 and 2019. They also got a grand jury to subpoena his phone records.
In the end, the Mueller report found no Russian influence in the platform.
But the false narrative – that the Ukraine plank stood as early proof of the “extensive conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Moscow that Steele alleged in his now-debunked dossier – has persisted.
Earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler demanded Gordon provide additional documents, and he has complied. Nadler is now marking up articles of impeachment against Trump over a request he lodged with Ukraine’s new president this summer to help investigate the former Clinton-friendly regime’s attempts to “sabotage” Trump’s election bid in 2016. Trump also asked Kiev to look into possible corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy oligarch.
Meanwhile, Nadler’s impeachment partner, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, continues to insist that the Trump team “softened” the GOP platform to accommodate “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
A retired Navy commander and former Pentagon spokesman, Gordon said he has run up a five-figure legal bill defending against what he calls a “hoax” perpetrated by Never Trumpers, the media, Comey, Mueller, and now congressional Democrats.
“In the vicious frenzy to destroy President Trump and his associates at all costs, they attempted to turn a routine foreign policy debate in conjunction with the four-year renewal of the GOP platform into a crime scene,” Gordon said in an interview with RCI.
“Incredibly,” he added, “the GOP platform change hoax [later] became the very first order of business in Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation.”
Can We Impeach the FBI Now?
By Peter Van Buren | The American Conservative | December 11, 2019
The release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, which shows that the Democrats, media, and FBI lied about not interfering in an election, will be a historian’s marker for how a decent nation fooled itself into self-harm. Forget about foreigners influencing our elections; it was us.
The Horowitz Report is being played by the media for its conclusion: that the FBI’s intel op run against the Trump campaign was not politically motivated and thus “legal.” That covers one page of the 476-page document, but because it fits with the Democratic/mainstream media narrative that Trump is a liar, the rest has been ignored. “The rest,” of course, is a detailed description of America’s domestic intelligence apparatus, aided by its overseas intelligence apparatus, and assisted by its Five Eyes allies’ intelligence apparatuses. And the conclusion is that they unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign against a presidential candidate in order to influence an election, and when that failed, they tried to delegitimize a president.
We learn from the Horowitz Report that it was an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his own nation’s intel services and the Clinton Foundation, who set up a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos, creating the necessary first bit of info to set the plan in motion. We find the FBI exaggerating, falsifying, and committing wicked sins of omission to buffalo the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts into approving electronic surveillance on Team Trump to overtly or inadvertently monitor the communications of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Rick Gates, Trump transition staffers, and likely Trump himself. Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ, the information shared with their NSA partners, a piece of all this still not fully public.
We learn that the FBI greedily consumed the Steele Dossier, opposition “research” bought by the Clinton campaign to smear Trump with allegations of sex parties and pee tapes. Most notoriously, the dossier claims he was a Russian plant, a Manchurian Candidate, owned by Kremlin intelligence through a combination of treats (land deals in Moscow) and threats (kompromat over Trump’s evil sexual appetites). The Horowitz Report makes clear the FBI knew the Dossier was bunk, hid that conclusion from the FISA court, and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming that the Dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the Dossier. The FBI knew Steele had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported his goals.
Horowitz contradicts media claims that the Dossier was a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was “central and essential.” And it was garbage: “factual assertions relied upon in the first [FISA] application targeting Carter Page were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.” One of Steele’s primary sources, tracked down by FBI, said Steele had misreported several of the most troubling allegations of potential Trump blackmail and campaign collusion.
We find human dangles, what Lisa Page referred to as “our OCONUS lures” (OCONUS is spook-speak for Outside CONtinental US) in the form of a shady Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud, who himself has deep ties to multiple U.S. intel agencies and the Pentagon, paying Trump staffers for nothing speeches to buy access to them. We find a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer (pillow talk is always a spy’s best friend). It becomes clear the FBI sought to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence threat as an excuse to unleash its surveillance tools against the Trump campaign. … continue reading
Barr Blasts Inspector General For Whitewashing FBI
By Ray McGovern – Consortium News – December 10, 2019
Attorney General William Barr on Monday disparaged the long-awaited findings of the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz into FBI conduct in the investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Barr, in effect, accused Horowitz of whitewashing a litany of proven misfeasance and malfeasance that created the “predicate,” or legal justification, for investigating candidate-and-then-president Donald Trump on suspicion of being in cahoots with the Russians.
In grammatical terms, there can be no sentence, so to speak, without a predicate. Trump was clearly the object of the sentence, and the sleuths led by then-FBI Director James Comey were the subjects in desperate search of a predicate. Horowitz candidly depicted the predicate the FBI requires for a counter-intelligence investigation as having to meet a very low bar. The public criticism from his boss was unusual. For the tenacious attorney general, doing a serious investigation of how the FBI handled the Trump-Russia inquiry has become a case of no-holds-Barr-ed, one might say.
Lindsey Smacking His Lips
Particularly damning in Horowitz’s report was the revelation that the FBI kept the “Russia investigation” going well after countervailing and exculpatory evidence clearly showed that, in the unforgettable words of one senior FBI official, Peter Strzok, there was “no there there.”
As Sen. Lindsey Graham put it yesterday, FBI investigators kept running through STOP signs in hot pursuit of a needed, but ever elusive, credible predicate. At a press conference, Graham pointed to page 186 of the Horowitz report to call attention to one of the most obvious STOP signs FBI sleuths should have heeded; namely, the fact that the FBI learned in January 2017 that the primary sub-source for Christopher Steele’s “dossier” disavowed it as misstated and exaggerated — basically rumor and speculation. No problem: the FBI investigation continued.
Mincing no words, Graham called the FBI investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties with Russia a “criminal enterprise” that got off the rails. (Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of such a conspiracy.) Sparks will fly on Wednesday as Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pursues the matter in more depth when Horowitz testifies before the committee. Graham emphasized yesterday that the general goal is to ensure that such a “criminal enterprise” does not happen again.
He added that one of the ways to prevent a recurrence is to make sure “those who took the law into their own hands need to pay a price.” Uh-oh. I cannot remember the last time leaders of the “national-security state” had to pay a price.
Barr: ‘Thinnest of Suspicions’
Barr took unusually strong public issue with Horowitz’s conclusion that there was adequate reason to mount an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign and suspected ties to Russia. Barr issued a formal statement asserting that the Horowitz report “now makes it clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”
U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr picked to lead what has now become a criminal investigation regarding how that FBI’s “intrusive investigation” was launched, issued his own formal statement of criticism, expressing disagreement with the IG’s findings as to the predication of the investigation and “how the FBI case opened.” Durham added that he had told the IG last month of this disagreement. In his statement yesterday, Durham spoke not of suspicions, but of evidence his ongoing investigation has already gathered “from other persons and entities both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”
Evidence, Not Just Suspicions
Both Barr and Durham chose their words carefully, and so did former CIA Director John Brennan in his May 2017 congressional testimony about his suspicions that Trump’s campaign might have been colluding with the Russians. Soon the spotlight is likely to turn onto Brennan and his carefully parsed testimony, which fell considerably short of qualifying as a predicate for investigation (but played a key role anyway).
On May 23, 2017, Brennan told Congress:
“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
CNN’s coverage of Brennan’s testimony is even more revealing (of CNN’s bias) in retrospect.
Moreover, Brennan famously told Congress, he doesn’t deal with evidence. That was what Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy was wondering about, when he grilled the former CIA director, also on May 23, 2017, on what evidence he had provided to the FBI to catalyze its investigation of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
Brennan replied: “I don’t do evidence.”
The best Brennan could do was start out by repeating his well-rehearsed statement, later contradicted by Mueller’s report: “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign,” adding that “that required further investigation by the Bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”
Media Treatment
Referring to the Horowitz report yesterday, Law Professor John Turley noted:
“Despite this shockingly damning report, much of the media is reporting only that Horowitz did not find it unreasonable to start the investigation, and ignoring a litany of false representations and falsifications of evidence to keep the secret investigation going. Nothing was found to support any of those allegations, and special counsel Robert Mueller also confirmed there was no support for collusion and conspiracy allegations repeated continuously for two years by many experts and members of Congress.”
And yet “debunking” is the name of the game. A New York Times headline this morning read, “Report on F.B.I. Russia Inquiry Finds Serious Errors but Debunks Anti-Trump Plot.” And an “analysis” article by Mark Mazzetti was titled: “Another Inquiry Doesn’t Back Up Trump’s Charges. So, on to the Next.”
Mazzetti writes:
“Engage in a choreographed campaign of presidential tweets, Fox News appearances and fiery congressional testimony to create expectations about finding proof of a “deep state” campaign against Mr. Trump. And then, when the proof does not emerge, skew the results and prepare for the next opportunity to execute the playbook.
“That opportunity has arrived in the form of an investigation by a Connecticut prosecutor [Durham] ordered this year by Attorney General William P. Barr — and the president and his allies are now predicting it will be the one to deliver damning evidence that the F.B.I., C.I.A. and even close American allies conspired against Mr. Trump in the 2016 election.”
Horowitz Report an ‘Appetizer?’
Mazzetti goes on to express doubt “that Mr. Durham will exhume any information that will fundamentally change the understanding of what happened in 2016.” Maybe, maybe not. It is a safe bet, though, that President Trump has better insight into this. According to Mazzetti, Trump recently had been playing down expectations about the Horowitz inquiry — indicating it was only an appetizer for what’s to come. “I do think the big report to wait for is going to be the Durham report,” he said. “That’s the one that people are really waiting for.”
The president may be expecting Mueller-inquiry-type vindication once Durham’s investigation is complete. If that proves to be the case and Trump receives post-impeachment acquittal from the Senate, as expected, he may be able to parlay that into four more years, a sobering thought.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer, then a CIA analyst for 27 years. He prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and in retirement co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Just how bad was the FBI’s Russia FISA? 51 violations and 9 false statements
John Solomon Reports | December 9, 2019
To understand just how shoddy the FBI’s work was in securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting the Trump campaign, you only need to read an obscure attachment to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report.
Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.
The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page starting in October 2016.
A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: “Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is
inaccurate.”
For those who don’t speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.
To put that in perspective, former Trump aides Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos were convicted of making single false statements to the bureau. One went to jail already, and the other awaits sentencing.
The FBI made nine false statements to the court.
And the appendix shows the FBI made another nine factual assertions that did not match the supporting evidence in the file. In another words, the bureau was misleading on nine other occasions.
The vast majority of remaining Woods violations — 33 in total — involved failing to provide any evidence in the Woods procedure backing up assertion in the FISA warrant application.
That’s serious too since the sole purpose of the Wood procedures is to ensure all evidence cited in a FISA application is documented as accurate and reliable so it can be trusted by the courts.
‘Trump’s demeaning me!’ Lisa Page’s new victim narrative is just a media-backed PR move ahead of FBI misconduct report
By Michael Rectenwald | RT | December 3, 2019
Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s interview isn’t about clawing back the dignity Donald Trump’s insults have denied her – it’s damage control before a likely damning DOJ report about the agency’s Russian collusion investigation.
In an interview published late Sunday in the Daily Beast, Page claimed that Trump’s “demeaning fake orgasm” enacted during an October rally in Minneapolis – and not Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FBI misconduct investigation, to be made public in a week – prompted her to break a two-year silence.
Page tweeted the link to her Daily Beast interview Sunday night with a warning: “I’m done being quiet.” The interview cast Page as another victim of Trump’s “bullying,” which she described as “very intimidating” – the exact same phrase uttered by former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in her testimony during the congressional impeachment hearings.
“It’s like being punched in the gut,” Page said. “My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”
Page’s remarks also echoed Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings: “I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” Page lamented.
The word-for-word refrains are the trademarks of a concerted PR campaign choreographed by the anti-Trump establishment. The tired script features Trump as an unrestrained monster, who in every scene tries to intimidate his opponents, especially women. Trump is a misogynist, who therefore must also be a criminal and a traitor.
Page complained of the toll that Trump’s endless ridicule has taken on her:
“Like, when somebody makes eye contact with me on the Metro, I kind of wince, wondering if it’s because they recognize me, or are they just scanning the train like people do? It’s immediately a question of friend or foe? Or if I’m walking down the street or shopping and there’s somebody wearing Trump gear or a MAGA hat, I’ll walk the other way or try to put some distance between us because I’m not looking for conflict. Really, what I wanted most in this world is my life back.”
As if anyone would dare to wear a MAGA hat anywhere in urban America – other than among thousands of Trump fans attending a rally. As if Page is likely to meet a real “foe” of the permanent bureaucracy in the heart of Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, if Page sought to hide from attention, she sure picked a strange way to do it. News of her interview, in which she complained about getting way too much exposure, was carried by all the major media. It remained at the top of the Google News listings all day on Monday.
The purpose of Page’s timely interview was – as Page herself admitted in the interview – to “control the narrative.”
Page has been at the heart of controversy surrounding the Trump presidency ever since scandalous text messages between her and former FBI head of counterintelligence Peter Strzok exposed the couple’s extramarital affair and their mutual disdain for Trump and support for Hillary Clinton. The emails were reportedly sent to an FBI official by Strzok’s two-timed wife.
In one exchange concerning the presidential race, an apparently alarmed Page texted Strzok and asked if Trump had any chance of becoming president. Strzok answered: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” In another, Strzok alludes to an “insurance policy” against the unlikelihood of a Trump victory. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has claimed the insurance policy was the potential for the FBI to hack into the Trump campaign’s emails.
Page and Strzok worked on the FBI’s initial investigation into ‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 election. At the same time, Strzok led a botched investigation, on which Page also worked, into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hacked private email server. Page and Strzok later worked together on the Special Counsel Robert Mueller team investigating unsubstantiated Trump ‘collusion’ with Russia. Page resigned and Strzok was fired when their partisan rancor and intimate relationship were revealed.
Will the public swallow this couple of smug plotters in their new role as stoic patriots? The Democratic establishment already has. Expect the furious media spinning to continue when the report is released next week.
Michael Rectenwald is the author of nine books, including the most recent, Google Archipelago. He was Professor of Liberal Arts at NYU from 2008 through 2019.
Here is What the Horowitz Report Should Conclude
By Larry C Johnson – Sic Semper Tyrannis – November 24, 2019
You do not have to wait for the Horowitz report. I can give you a preview of what he should have found if he conducted an honest audit. The following is not my opinion. It is based on the flood of information that has come out over the past two and a half-years surrounding the plot to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump. When you read these facts it is easy to understand how dishonest and corrupt the FBI were in presenting a FISA application to spy on Carter Page. Helen Keller could see this is wrong.
Let me take you through this piece-by-piece (except where noted I am quoting from the first FISA application).
Let’s start with the FBI claim that Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign government.”
The target of this application is Carter Page, a US person, and an agent of a foreign power, described in detail below. The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the US Department of State.
What information did State supply? Information provided by the notorious Christopher Steele. The Washington Examiner’s Daniel Chaitin reported on this in May 2019:
Steele met Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016, 10 days before the first warrant application was submitted, and admitted he was encouraged by a client, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to get his research out before the 2016 election on Nov. 8, signaling a possible political motivation. The meeting was described in notes taken by Kavalec that were obtained by conservative group Citizens United through open-records litigation. The notes show that Kavalec believed at least some of Steele’s allegations to be false.
Government officials told the Hill that Kavalec informed FBI Special Agent Stephen Laycock about the meeting in an email eight days before the FISA warrant application was filed. Laycock, then the FBI’s section chief for Eurasian counterintelligence, quickly forwarded what he learned to Peter Strzok, the special agent who was leading the Trump-Russia investigation.
There it is. Not an assumption. A fact. State passed a false report from Christopher Steele to the FBI and the FBI ran with it. A competent FBI Agent would have asked about the identity of the source of the information. Either the FBI failed to do this or it lied in the FISA application. The FBI had a responsibility to note that Steele was the sole source for the claim that Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”
The application reiterates its basis for this assertion:
This application targets Carter Page. The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government to undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election in violation of US criminal law.
This is based on the false report from Christopher Steele as well as “cooked” intelligence provided by CIA Director Brennan. Brennan was passing off a low level Russian bureaucrat as a high level source with direct access to Putin. That was a lie.
The application then tries to bolster the lie by attributing the FBI’s credulity by citing the US intelligence community (an ironic oxymoron).
In addition, according to an October 7, 2016 Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security (Election Security Joint Statement), the USIC is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The Election Security Joint Statement states that the recent disclosures of e-mails on; among others, sites like WikiLeaks are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. According to the Election Security Joint Statement, these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process; activity that is not new to Moscow – the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. The Election Security Joint Statement states that, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
This was a lie. The US Intelligence Community aka USIC had made no such formal determination. If they had there would have been a written document. There was no written document and no evidence that “all 17 intelligence agencies” had coordinated and approved such a document. The Intelligence Community Assessment would not be published until January 2017 and only the FBI, the CIA and the NSA signed off on that piece of fantasy.
After stating that Carter was a Trump foreign policy advisor the FBI insists in the application:
The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #l’s campaign (i.e. Trump).
That belief was based on the bogus information passed to State Department by Christopher Steele. It was a lie. They had no evidence and, more importantly, obtained no validation as a result of spying authorized by this outrageous application.
The FBI continues with this charade by outlining Page’s previous cooperation in helping gather evidence that led to the indictment of two Russian intel officers in January 2015. Worth noting that Bill Priestrap, who was now running FBI’s Counter Intelligence operations from FBI Headquarters, was the supervising agent in that operation and knew all about the role Page played in helping get the Russians. But the FBI put this into the application merely to foster the perception that Carter had an in with the Russians.
The FBI then disingenuously introduces Christopher Steele (i.e., Confidential Human Source #1) as the source for evidence about Page’s supposedly nefarious activities:
According to open source information, in July 2016, Page traveled to Russia and delivered the commencement address at the New Economic School.7 In addition to giving this address, the FBI has learned that Page met with at least two Russian officials during this trip. First, according to information provided by an FBI confidential-human source (Source #1), reported that Page had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, who is the President of Rosneft [a Russian energy company] and a close associate to Russian President Putin. [Steele] reported that, during the meeting, Page and Sechin discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and the prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia.
This was a lie designed to bamboozle the FISA court Judge. When you look at the footnote for Christopher Steele, we catch the FBI in another monster lie:
and the FBI is unaware of any derogatory information pertaining to Source #1.
The FBI fired Steele as a compensated human source within days of this FISA application. Getting fired for leaking information to the press without the approval of the FBI is “DEROGATORY INFORMATION. Why did the FBI lie on this critical detail? Let us hope Horowitz addresses this.
The footnote related to Steele also contains this disingenuous whopper:
Source #1, who now owns a foreign business/financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified US person, who indicated to Source #1 that a US-based law firm had hired the identified US person to conduct research regarding Candidate #l’s ties to Russia (the identified US person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified US person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified US person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #l’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified US person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.
The FBI knew that Glenn Simpson was working for Hillary Clinton. They failed to mention this. Instead, the FBI opted for the white lie of pretending that Steele, under Simpson’s guidance, was just doing opposition research. The FBI can pretend they were just incompetent, but we now know that they were fully aware of Simpson’s ties to the Clinton effort using the law firm as a cut-out.
The FBI continued feed out the lies of the Steele Dossier pretending they were verified facts:
Divyekin [who is assessed to be Igor Nikolayevich Divyekin] had met secretly with Page and that their agenda for the meeting included Divyekin raising a dossier or “kompromat” that the Kremlin possessed on Candidate #2 [i.e., Clinton] and the possibility of it being released to Candidate #l’s campaign.
This is an unverified claim. Regular Americans know it simply as another damn lie.
Then the FBI turns its attention to creating the propaganda meme that Donald Trump had cut a deal with Putin to lift all sanctions and hurt Ukraine. This is breathtaking in light of what we now know about real Ukrainian efforts to hurt Trump:
July 2016 article in an identified news organization reported that Candidate #1’s campaign worked behind the scenes to make sure Political Party #1’s platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Political Party #l’s foreign policy leaders in Washington. The article stated that Candidate #l’s campaign sought “to make sure that [Political Party #1] would ot pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.” Further, an August 2016 article published by an identified news organization characterized Candidate #1 as sounding like a supporter of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in September (2015], adopted a “milder” tone regarding Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The August 2016 article further reported that Candidate #1 said Candidate #1 might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift punitive US sanctions against Russia. The article opined that while the reason for Candidate #l’s shift was not clear, Candidate #l’s more conciliatory words, which contradict Political Party #1’s official platform, follow Candidate #l’s recent association with several people sympathetic to Russian influence in Ukraine, including foreign policy advisor Carter Page.
This was false information (i.e., A LIE) being fed to a pliant media by Clinton campaign officials and supporters. And the FBI buys it hook line and sinker.
The FBI then brings Michael Isikoff into the act, who also is passing along information obtained from Christopher Steele. This is nothing but chutzpah by the Bureau. Shameful:
About September 23, 2016, an identified news organization published an article (September 23rd News Article), which was written by the news organization’s Chief Investigative Correspondent, alleging that US intelligence officials are investigating Page with respect to suspected efforts by the Russian Government to influence the US Presidential election.· According to the September 23rd News Article, US officials received intelligence reports that when Page was in Moscow in July 2016 to deliver the above-noted commencement address at the New Economic School, he met with two senior Russian officials. The September 23rd News Article stated that a “well-placed Western intelligence source” told the news organization that Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft. At their alleged meeting, Sechin raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page.
According to the September 23rd News Article, the Western intellig nce source also reported that US intelligence agencies received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide – Igor Divyekm,, a former Russian security official who now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by US officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the US election.
The FBI is pretending that this is another source to corroborate Steele. It is not. It is Christopher Steele talking to Isikoff.
The FBI at least made the pretense of giving Carter Page a chance to deny the allegations and he did in the strongest terms possible:
On or about September 25, 2016, Page sent a letter to the FBI Director. In this letter, Page made reference to the accusations in the September 23rd News Article and denied them. Page stated thatthe source of the accusations is nothing more than completely false media reports and that he did not meet this year with any sanctioned official in Russia. Page also stated that he would be willing to discuss any “final” questions the FBI may have.
The rest of the application is blacked out and presumably contains the FBI’s explanation of why they believed Carter Page was lying. But it was the FBI who was lying. If those blacked out portions are declassified then we will almost certainly see that the FBI was claiming it had multiple sources contradicting Page when in fact, it only had one–Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence officer.
I draw this conclusion based on the FBI’s stated conclusion in the application:
(U) As discussed above, the FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian Government . . .Based on the foregoing facts and circumstances the FBI submits that there is probable cause to believe that Page [and others whose names are blacked out, probably Michael Flynn] knowingly engage in clandestine intelligence activities (other than intelligence gathering activities) for or on behalf of such foreign power, or knowingly conspires with other persons to engage in such activities and, therefore, is an agent of a foreign power as defined by 50 USC. § 1801(b)(2)(E).
The American people must wake up and understand how dishonest and stupid the FBI was in writing and submitting this baseless application to the FISA court. And we are not talking about low level flunkies who changed an email. Jim Comey signed off on these lies. Andrew McCabe signed off on this lies.
I will reiterate, if Inspector General Horowitz fails to highlight these clear and pervasive lies then it will be up to Attorney General Barr and Prosecutor John Durham to set things right.
The Civilian Government Doesn’t Owe Deference to Military Officers
By Ryan McMaken – Mises Institute – 11/20/2019
On Tuesday, Congressional impeachment hearings exposed an interesting facet of the current battle between Donald Trump and the so-called deep state: namely, that many government bureaucrats now fancy themselves as superior to the elected civilian government.
In an exchange between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Alexander Vindman, a US Army Lt. Colonel, Vindman insisted that Nunes address him by his rank.
After being addressed as “Mr. Vindman,” Vindman retorted “Ranking Member, it’s Lt. Col. Vindman, please.”
Throughout social media, anti-Trump forces, who have apparently now become pro-military partisans, sang Vindman’s praises, applauding him for putting Nunes in his place.
In a properly functioning government — with a proper view of military power — however, no one would tolerate a military officer lecturing a civilian on how to address him “correctly.”
It is not even clear that Nunes was trying to “dis” Vindman, given that junior officers have historically been referred to as “Mister” in a wide variety of times and place. It is true that higher-ranking officers like Vindman are rarely referred to as “Mister,” but even if Nunes was trying to insult Vindman, the question remains: so what?
Military modes of address are for the use of military personnel, and no one else. Indeed, Vindman was forced to retreat on this point when later asked by Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) if he always insists on civilians calling him by his rank. Vindman blubbered that since he was wearing his uniform (for no good reason, mind you) he figured civilians ought to refer to him by his rank.
Of course, my position on this should not be construed as a demand that people give greater respect to members of Congress. If a private citizen wants to go before Congress and refer to Nunes or any other member as “hey you,” that’s perfectly fine with me. But the important issue here is we’re talking about private citizens — i.e., the people who pay the bills — and not military officers who must be held as subordinate to the civilian government at all times.
After all, there’s a reason that the framers of the US Constitution went to great pains to ensure the military powers remained subject to the will of the civilian government. Eighteenth and nineteenth century Americans regarded a standing army as a threat to their freedoms. Federal military personnel were treated accordingly.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress shall have the power “to raise and support Armies …” and “to provide and maintain a Navy.” Article II, Section 2 states, “The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States when called into the actual Service of the United States.” The authors of the constitution were careful to divide up civilian power of the military, and one thing was clear: the military was to have no autonomy in policymaking. Unfortunately, early Americans did not anticipate the rise of America’s secret police in the form of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other “intelligence” agencies. Had they, it is likely the anti-federalists would have written more into the Bill of Rights to prevent organizations like the NSA from shredding the fourth amendment, as has been the case.
The inversion of the civilian-military relationship that is increasingly on display in Washington is just another symptom of the growing power of often-secret and unaccountable branches of military agencies and intelligence agencies that exercise so much power both in Washington and around the world.
Rethinking National Security: CIA and FBI Are Corrupt, but What About Congress?
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 21, 2019
The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there has been considerable introspection among former and current officials who have worked in those and related government positions, many of whom would agree that there is an urgent need for considerable restructuring and reining in of the 17 government agencies that have some intelligence or law enforcement function. Most would also agree that much of the real damage that has been done has been the result of the unending global war on terror launched by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, which has showered the agencies with resources and money while also politicizing their leadership and freeing them from restraints on their behavior.
If the tens of billions of dollars lavished on the intelligence community together with a “gloves off” approach towards oversight that allowed them to run wild had produced good results, it might be possible to argue that it was all worth it. But the fact is that intelligence gathering has always been a bad investment even if it is demonstrably worse at the present. One might argue that the CIA’s notorious Soviet Estimate prolonged the Cold War and that the failure to connect dots and pay attention to what junior officers were observing allowed 9/11 to happen. And then there was the empowerment of al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war followed by failure to penetrate the group once it began to carry out operations.
More recently there have been Guantanamo, torture in black prisons, renditions of terror suspects to be tortured elsewhere, killing of US citizens by drone, turning Libya into a failed state and terrorist haven, arming militants in Syria, and, of course, the Iraqi alleged WMDs, the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. And the bad stuff happened in bipartisan fashion, under Democrats and Republicans, with both neocons and liberal interventionists all playing leading roles. The only one punished for the war crimes was former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed some of what was going on.
Colonel Pat Lang, a colleague and friend who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency HUMINT (human intelligence) program after years spent on the ground in special ops and foreign liaison, thinks that strong medicine is needed and has initiated a discussion based on the premise that the FBI and CIA are dysfunctional relics that should be dismantled, as he puts it “burned to the ground,” so that the federal government can start over again and come up with something better.
Lang cites numerous examples of “incompetence and malfeasance in the leadership of the 17 agencies of the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” to include the examples cited above plus the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he cites his personal observation of efforts by the Department of Justice and the FBI to corruptly “frame” people tried in federal courts on national security issues as well as the intelligence/law enforcement community conspiracy to “get Trump.”
Colonel Lang asks “Tell me, pilgrims, why should we put up with such nonsense? Why should we pay the leaders of these agencies for the privilege of having them abuse us? We are free men and women. Let us send these swine to their just deserts in a world where they have to work hard for whatever money they earn.” He then recommends stripping CIA of its responsibility for being the lead agency in spying as well as in covert action, which is a legacy of the Cold War and the area in which it has demonstrated a particular incompetence. As for the FBI, it was created by J. Edgar Hoover to maintain dossiers on politicians and it is time that it be replaced by a body that operates in a fashion “more reflective of our collective nation[al] values.”
Others in the intelligence community understandably have different views. Many believe that the FBI and CIA have grown too large and have been asked to do too many things unrelated to national security, so there should be a major reduction-in-force (RIF) followed by the compulsory retirement of senior officers who have become too cozy with and obligated to politicians. The new-CIA should collect information, period, what it was founded to do in 1947, and not meddle in foreign elections or engage in regime change. The FBI should provide only police services that are national in nature and that are not covered by the state and local jurisdictions. And it should operate in as transparent a fashion as possible, not as a national secret police force.
But the fundamental problem may not be with the police and intelligence services themselves. There are a lot of idiots running around loose in Washington. Witness for example the impeachment hearings ludicrous fact free opening statement by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (with my emphasis) “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire.”
And the press is no better, note the following excerpt from The New York Times lead editorial on the hearings, including remarks of the two State Department officers who testified, on the following day: “They came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country, and for whom defending Ukraine against Russian aggression is more important to the national interest than any partisan jockeying…
“At another point, Mr. Taylor said he had been critical of the Obama administration’s reluctance to supply Ukraine with anti-tank missiles and other lethal defensive weapons in its fight with Russia, and that he was pleased when the Trump administration agreed to do so…
“What clearly concerned both witnesses wasn’t simply the abuse of power by the president, but the harm it inflicted on Ukraine, a critical ally under constant assault by Russian forces. ‘Even as we sit here today, the Russians are attacking Ukrainian soldiers in their own country and have been for the last four years…’ Mr. Taylor said.”
Schiff and the Times should get their facts straight. And so should the two American foreign service officers who were clearly seeing the situation only from the Ukrainian perspective, a malady prevalent among US diplomats often described as “going native.” They were pushing a particular agenda, i.e. possible war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, in furtherance of a US national interest that they fail to define. One of them, George Kent, eulogized the Ukrainian militiamen fighting the Russians as the modern day equivalent of the Massachusetts Minutemen in 1776, not exactly a neutral assessment, and also euphemized Washington-provided lethal offensive weapons as “security assistance.”
Another former intelligence community friend Ray McGovern has constructed a time line of developments in Ukraine which demolishes the establishment view on display in Congress relating to the alleged Russian threat. First of all, Ukraine was no American ally in 2014 and is no “critical ally” today. Also, the Russian reaction to western supported rioting in Kiev, a vital interest, only came about after the United States spent $5 billion destabilizing and then replacing the pro-Kremlin government. Since that time Moscow has resumed control of the Crimea, which is historically part of Russia, and is active in the Donbas region which has a largely Russian population.
It should really be quite simple. The national security state should actually be engaged in national security. Its size and budget should be commensurate with what it actually does, nothing more. It should not be roaming the world looking for trouble and should instead only respond to actual threats. And it should operate with oversight. If Congress is afraid to do it, set up a separate body that is non-partisan and actually has the teeth to do the job. If the United States of America comes out of the process as something like a normal nation the entire world will be a much happier place.
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Book Summary
Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs (2022)
Book summary by Lies are Unbekoming | June 1, 2026
Psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death in the developed world, after heart disease and cancer. The estimate comes from Peter Gøtzsche’s 2022 book Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs, and it is built from regulatory data the drug companies tried to keep buried. One drug alone — Zyprexa — was estimated to have killed 200,000 patients up to 2007. In a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials covering 5,000 elderly demented patients, one in 100 was dead within ten weeks on a psychosis pill; when Gøtzsche checked the underlying FDA data, the rate doubled, because around half of all deaths in psychiatric drug trials never reach publication. The TIPS study followed 281 first-episode psychosis patients with an average age of 29; within ten years, 12% of them were dead, and the authors mentioned the deaths only in a flowchart of patients lost to follow-up.
Gøtzsche is a specialist in internal medicine, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993, and author of more than 75 papers in the BMJ, the Lancet, JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine. His scientific work has been cited over 150,000 times. … continue
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