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One FBI text message in Russia probe that should alarm every American

By John Solomon | The Hill | July 19, 2018

Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the reported FBI lovebirds, are the poster children for the next “Don’t Text and Investigate” public service ads airing soon at an FBI office near you.

Their extraordinary texting affair on their government phones has given the FBI a black eye, laying bare a raw political bias brought into the workplace that agents are supposed to check at the door when they strap on their guns and badges.

It is no longer in dispute that they held animus for Donald Trump, who was a subject of their Russia probe, or that they openly discussed using the powers of their office to “stop” Trump from becoming president. The only question is whether any official acts they took in the Russia collusion probe were driven by those sentiments.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is endeavoring to answer that question.

For any American who wants an answer sooner, there are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read.

That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. “There’s no big there there,” Strzok texted.

The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.

Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.

This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say — but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.

The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was “there.”

By the time of the text and Mueller’s appointment, the FBI’s best counterintelligence agents had had plenty of time to dig. They knowingly used a dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — which contained uncorroborated allegations — to persuade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue a warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page).

They sat on Carter Page’s phones and emails for nearly six months without getting evidence that would warrant prosecuting him. The evidence they had gathered was deemed so weak that their boss, then-FBI Director James Comey, was forced to admit to Congress after being fired by Trump that the core allegation remained substantially uncorroborated.

In other words, they had a big nothing burger. And, based on that empty-calorie dish, Rosenstein authorized the buffet menu of a special prosecutor that has cost America millions of dollars and months of political strife.

The work product Strzok created to justify the collusion probe now has been shown to be inferior: A Clinton-hired contractor produced multiple documents accusing Trump of wrongdoing during the election; each was routed to the FBI through a different source or was used to seed news articles with similar allegations that further built an uncorroborated public narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. Most troubling, the FBI relied on at least one of those news stories to justify the FISA warrant against Carter Page.

That sort of multifaceted allegation machine, which can be traced back to a single source, is known in spy craft as “circular intelligence reporting,” and it’s the sort of bad product that professional spooks are trained to spot and reject.

But Team Strzok kept pushing it through the system, causing a major escalation of a probe for which, by his own words, he knew had “no big there there.”

The answer as to why a pro such as Strzok would take such action has become clearer, at least to congressional investigators. That clarity comes from the context of the other emails and text messages that surrounded the May 19, 2017, declaration.

It turns out that what Strzok and Lisa Page were really doing that day was debating whether they should stay with the FBI and try to rise through the ranks to the level of an assistant director (AD) or join Mueller’s special counsel team.

“Who gives a f*ck, one more AD like [redacted] or whoever?” Strzok wrote, weighing the merits of promotion, before apparently suggesting what would be a more attractive role: “An investigation leading to impeachment?”

Lisa Page apparently realized the conversation had gone too far and tried to reel it in. “We should stop having this conversation here,” she texted back, adding later it was important to examine “the different realistic outcomes of this case.”

A few minutes later Strzok texted his own handicap of the Russia evidence: “You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

So the FBI agents who helped drive the Russia collusion narrative — as well as Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller — apparently knew all along that the evidence was going to lead to “nothing” and, yet, they proceeded because they thought there was still a possibility of impeachment.

Impeachment is a political outcome. The only logical conclusion, then, that congressional investigators can make is that political bias led these agents to press an investigation forward to achieve the political outcome of impeachment, even though their professional training told them it had “no big there there.”

And that, by definition, is political bias in action.

How concerned you are by this conduct is almost certainly affected by your love or hatred for Trump. But put yourself for a second in the hot seat of an investigation by the same FBI cast of characters: You are under investigation for a crime the agents don’t think occurred, but the investigation still advances because the desired outcome is to get you fired from your job.

Is that an FBI you can live with?

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.

July 22, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

From ‘secret societies’ to flawed FBI probes, the Russiagate narrative is imploding

By Robert Bridge | RT | January 24, 2018

The anti-Russia narrative is collapsing under the growing weight of evidence pointing to a concerted internal effort on the part of the US establishment to sabotage the Trump presidency.

Russiagate – the ongoing American witch hunt that imagines the Kremlin behind everything, up to and including Donald Trump’s presence in the Oval Office – is starting to resemble a Russian matryoshka stacking doll.

On the outer shell of this multilayered plaything, the media has painted for us an ominous image of Russia, which, they would have us believe, is the bogeyman responsible for hacking Hillary Clinton’s computer, and hypnotizing US voters over their Facebook and Twitter accounts, thereby giving Trump a free ride into the White House.

Yet as we begin to pry open each layer of this extremely convoluted story we discover to our surprise that there is absolutely nothing inside even remotely connected to Russia. Nothing. A big nothing matryoska.

Memo madness

In the latest installment of this never-ending goose chase, Washington is now bracing itself for the release of a four-page memo by the House Intelligence Committee. Members of Congress say it reveals reported abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Obama administration, which approved surveillance against Trump’s team on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

That announcement emerged shortly before the release of another sensational story involving two lovebirds at the FBI, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Strzok, who served as Chief of the Counterespionage Section during the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email server, and Page, a lawyer with the agency, were found to have exchanged numerous email messages expressing their strong disdain for the Republican candidate.

At one point, Strzok referred to Trump as an “utter idiot,” and told Page that Clinton “just had to win” the election. No bias there.

Although the story broke in December, it grabbed headlines last week when the Justice Department said it had no records of Strzok-Page messages between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017. This represents a critical period in the investigation, encompassing Michael Flynn’s resignation and FBI Director James Comey’s firing.

The surprises did not end there. Strzok and Page also dropped mention of a “secret society” that was supposedly meeting behind closed doors to work against the Trump administration, an explosive claim if proven to be true.

“We learned today from information that in the immediate aftermath of his election that there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI to include Page and Strzok to be working against him,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) told Fox News.

However, like so many things related to the Trump investigation, when you touch the FISA question, or claims of anti-Trump bias inside of the FBI, you get a reaction much like the mythical Hydra that quickly grows back a pair of heads for every one that is severed.

In the case of the memo that is causing fireworks in Washington, the Republicans allege that the FISA judge who signed off on surveillance warrants against individuals aligned with the Trump campaign “was not given full information about the Trump-Russia dossier,” according to a report by Manu Raju, CNN senior congressional correspondent

Indeed, there were some glaring problems with the dossier, which was carried out by Fusion GPS. As it has been revealed, the American research firm got its funding from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. To say that represents a conflict of interest is a serious understatement.

As Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, a reporter with little love lost for Moscow, admitted, “private operative Steele couldn’t even offer his informants the thin protection that comes with working for a foreign intelligence agency, which might help a valuable agent if push came to shove.”

If the DOJ really made the decision to allow surveillance on any member of the Trump team on the basis of such a flimsy report, the Republicans certainly seem justified in demanding the release of this memo. Indeed, calls for the release of the memo are growing daily.

“The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla, said. “The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who has even denied a request by the FBI to review the memo, said it would take over two weeks to process its release.

Meanwhile, the Democrats – none of whom, incidentally, voted to have the memo released – are in full damage control, blaming the hype over the memo not on its allegedly explosive contents, but rather on the ‘fact’ that – yes – the Russians are behind this latest development as well, manipulating social media to wreak havoc in Washington.

They are also betraying a high level of hypocrisy by fighting against the memo’s release. After all, the Democrats expressed no dismay when BuzzFeed made the unethical decision to publish a wholly unverified document. Nor did they rise up in protest when Senator Dianne Feinstein made the unilateral decision to release a 312-page transcript of a congressional interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson.

Feinstein said she released the transcript because “the American people deserve the opportunity to see what he said and judge for themselves.”

But where is Feinstein’s commitment to transparency now when it comes to releasing the memo from the House Intelligence Committee? We’ll answer that question in a moment.

Blame Russia

Responding to the sudden surge in popularity of the trending hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo, Democratic congressman Adam Schiff (D-California) placed the blame squarely on Moscow’s doorstep.

The Republicans have “made common cause once again with Russian bots because Russian bots are pushing their narrative out there,” he told CNN. “We have Assange and WikiLeaks and Russian trolls and bots saying, you know, hashtag whatever the GOP narrative is. That ought to tell you a lot about what’s driving this.”

On Tuesday, Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey imploring their assistance. The lawmakers said that Russia-linked social media accounts are “again exploiting Twitter and Facebook platforms in an effort to manipulate public opinion.”

We’ve seen such diversionary tactics before.

Last year, when questions began to surface over Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified government data on her personal computer – a federal offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison – the Democrats deflected public attention away from that primary question, alleging without evidence that Russia had “hacked” Clinton’s email.

The mainstream media took to that unsubstantiated story like fish to water, while everybody seemed to forget the main question: Why was Clinton using her personal server?

Before long, the media was engaged in a contest with itself to come up with the most outrageous claims against Russia – which ran the gamut from hacking the US power grid to posing as Black activists on Facebook to sow discord in the home of the brave. No story involving Russia could be considered too outlandish.

The circumstances involving the FBI’s Clinton probe become even more preposterous when it is remembered that the FBI never got close to the DNC computers. Instead, the FBI relied upon the findings of the security firm CrowdStrike as the basis for its probe.

Would it surprise anyone to know that the co-founder of CrowdStrike is Dmitri Alperovitch, who also serves as a nonresident senior fellow on the Atlantic Council, a think tank that would never be accused of being pro-Russia.

In other words, from the beginning of this virulently anti-Russia campaign, the Democrats have been granted carte blanche to organize and fund the very probes that have done so much to damage US-Russia relations.

With that in mind, it will be very interesting to see the content of the much-anticipated memo. That is, if it really does get released.

@Robert_Bridge

Read more:

Top Democrats peg #ReleaseTheMemo on Russia, demand Twitter & Facebook investigate — again

January 25, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment