Tag Archives: Barack Obama

News

FBI and DOJ used Democrat-funded Steele dossier to justify wiretapping of Trump campaign

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Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe
Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe

Wow, so for some time, the mainstream media had been telling me that the FBI and DOJ, during the Obama administration, never did any surveillance of the Trump campaign at the request of the Democrats. But whenever anyone asked them to release information about the basis for their investigations of Trump, they wouldn’t reveal anything.

But Judicial Watch was on the case, and they finally managed to get heavily redacted copies of documents showing what the FBI and DOJ were doing during the election.

The basis of the FBI and DOJ surveillance of Trump campaign personnel was the Steele dossier, which was collected for Fusion GPS, a Democrat opposition research firm.

Fox News explains:

On four occasions, the FBI told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court that it “did not believe” former British spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating former Trump aide Carter Page in Russian collusion, newly released documents reveal.

Instead, the FBI suggested to the court, the September 2016 article by Michael Isikoff was independent corroboration of the salacious, unverified allegations against Trump in the infamous Steele Dossier. Federal authorities used both the Steele Dossier and Yahoo News article to convince the FISA court to authorize a surveillance warrant for Page.

But London court records show that contrary to the FBI’s assessments, Steele briefed Yahoo News and other reporters in the fall of 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS — the opposition research firm behind the dossier.

The revelations are contained in heavily-redacted documents released over the weekend after a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the organization Judicial Watch.

The materials released by the DOJ include an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Page as well as several renewal applications.

So, there was only one source used as the basis for the surveillance warrant request: Steele’s dossier. The articles that appeared in the mainstream media was all based on Steele himself.

Conservative Review has more on what was in the released FBI and DOJ memos:

Over 400 pages of documents related to the FISA court warrant applications to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page have been released. Now we know for certain: The unverified “Steele dossier” was used as evidence to get a warrant to spy on Page.

Though heavily redacted, the documents make clear that the FBI told the FISA court Page is a Russian agent who was betraying the United States. The dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, served as the first piece of evidence cited to allege Page coordinated with the Russians to influence the election. The FBI cited additional evidence, an article written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo news, but failed to disclose that Isikoff received his information from Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who authored the dossier.

What does that mean? It means that the FBI presented unverified campaign opposition research to FISA court judges to spy on Page, and the judges signed off on the applications.

So, who paid for the Steele dossier?

The far-left Washington Post explains:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

The FBI and DOJ didn’t tell the FISA court about who was funding the Steele dossier when they applied for the warrant. Because if they had, they would have been denied the warrant. No FISA court would approve surveillance of the Republican party if the sole basis for the warrant was uncorroborated opposition research funded by the Democrat party. In order to get the FISA warrant, the request had to be written in such a way that the funding of the Steele dossier was not revealed, and Steele was not declared to be the source of the news articles used as corroborating evidence.

News

Obama administration FBI on the possibility of a Trump election win: “We’ll Stop It”

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Barack Obama and his corrupt ally in the FBI
Barack Obama and his allies in the FBI

So, the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s political bias came out yesterday, and I’ve rounded up some of the most interesting findings from a variety of sources. It’s important that everyone finds out just what kind of administration we had under the Democrat Barack Obama.

Here’s an article from Fox News, which listed out 7 of the most important findings.

Let’s start with #1:

New texts between FBI lovers Strzok and Page were ‘disappointing’ and cast a shadow over the integrity of the entire Clinton email probe

A slew of anti-Trump text messages between special counsel Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok damaged the integrity of the entire Clinton email probe, Horowitz writes.

The report unearths striking new messages between the pair that were sent and received on government devices, including one in which Strzok vows to  “stop” Trump from being elected just months before the presidential election.

On August 8, 2016, the IG found, Page asked Strzok “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” and Strzok replied “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Trump won’t win, because the FBI will stop it (in their spare time, between adulterous affairs).

More:

Five unnamed FBI employees — including one lawyer who later worked on the Mueller probe — are under scrutiny for anti-Trump bias

Strzok and Page are not the only FBI officials who evidenced anti-Trump bias during the Clinton email probe, Horowitz noted in the report.

The watchdog identified five other unnamed individuals, including two agents and one FBI attorney who worked on the Muller Russia probe until earlier this year, who made “statements of hostility toward then-candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton,” and improperly mixed “political opinions” with case-related discussions.

The FBI fumbled the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s storage and transmission of classified data on an unsecured home-brew server, which allowed her to escape government record-keeping requirements.

The Daily Caller noted that the FBI slow-walked the investigation of Hillary Clinton:

When further Clinton emails were discovered on a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is married to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, the FBI agents overseeing her case took just under a month to take meaningful action, Horowitz’s report found.

No later than Sept. 29, 2016, FBI executives and the agents who oversaw the Clinton email investigation were informed that “that Weiner investigation agents had discovered 141,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop that were potentially relevant to the [Clinton email] investigation.” Comey didn’t authorize a search warrant until Oct. 27, after he was briefed on them that day, the IG report found.

But do you know what was a priority? The investigation of the Trump campaign because of the Democrat-funded Russia dossier.

The Daily Caller continues:

The FBI prioritized investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia over the discovered emails on Weiner’s laptop, possibly due to political bias, according to the report. Anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok was intimately involved with that decision.

So, who decided that the FBI should exonerate Clinton?

Investors Business Daily explains:

The report also, whether intentionally or not, makes it clear why the FBI had concluded early on that there wasn’t a case against Clinton: President Obama had already cleared Hillary of any wrongdoing.

The IG report recalls how, during a 60 Minutes interview on October 11, 2015, Obama “characterized former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server as a ‘mistake,’ but stated that it did not ‘pose a national security problem’ and was ‘not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.’ Obama also stated that the issue had been ‘ginned up’ because of the presidential race.”

It goes on to say that “Obama’s comments caused concern among FBI officials about the potential impact on the investigation.”

Former EAD John Giacalone told the IG, “We open up criminal investigations. And you have the President of the United States saying this is just a mistake … That’s a problem, right?”

Obama repeated his absolution in April 2016 — right around the time Comey was starting to draft his statement dropping the case against Clinton.

“Obama stated that while former Secretary Clinton had been ‘careless’ in managing her emails while she was Secretary of State, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the security of the United States with her emails.”

[…]From Obama on down, no one ever wanted or intended to do what should have been done: Prosecute Clinton for gross negligence in her handling of highly classified material. The entire investigation was just for show.

Should we be surprised at any of this? Not at all. We already knew that the Obama administration used the IRS to persecute conservatives. These are not people who make a it a priority to do the right thing. Being secularists, they lack an objective foundation for morality. For them, morality is just customs and conventions, not an objective design for how we ought to live. Whenever morality interferes with their desire to serve their own interests, the question they ask is “will I get caught?”. Instead of listening to their consciences, they think of their own feelings and how they will be perceived.

It turns out that you can’t expect a man who votes in favor of infanticide multiple times (as a state senator) to take morality seriously. It doesn’t matter if a man’s skin color is the color you like. If he has no capacity for put moral duties above self-interest, then you should expect corruption and abuse of power. He ruined everything he touched, from religious liberty to Iran to Syria to Libya to the cost of health care to the $20 trillion national debt, and beyond. An absolute disaster of incompetence and immorality.

News

There is evidence of collusion to get a presidential candidate elected

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Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe
Left to right: Comey, Lynch, Clinton, McCabe

Nobody knows American politics better than Michael Barone. In this article for Real Clear Politics, he explains what we now know about collusion during the 2016 presidential election. This piece was tweeted by Brit Hume AND Hugh Hewitt (of MSNBC) so you know it’s fair and balanced.

First, here’s the status of the Russia collusion investigation:

The Russia collusion charge had some initial credibility because of businessman Donald Trump’s dealings in Russia and candidate Trump’s off-putting praise of Vladimir Putin.

It was fueled by breathless media coverage of such trivial events as Jeff Sessions’ conversation with the Russian ambassador at a Washington reception — and, of course, by the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. But Mueller’s prosecutions of Trump campaign operatives were for misdeeds long before the campaign, and his indictment of 13 Russians specified that no American was a “knowing participant” in their work.

Now there’s talk that Mueller is winding up his investigation. It seems unlikely that whatever he reports will fulfill the daydreams so many liberals have of making Trump go the way of Richard Nixon.

So much for that story. Just think of how much the mainstream media talked about a story that turned out to be a big nothingburger.

But here’s another collusion story that’s emerging:

Meanwhile, the evidence builds of collusion by Obama administration law enforcement and intelligence personnel in trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat and delegitimize Trump in and after the 2016 election.

The investigation of Clinton’s illegal email system was conducted with kid gloves. FBI Director James Comey accepted Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s order to call it a “matter” rather than an “investigation.” Clinton aides were allowed to keep her emails and destroy 30,000 of them, plus cellphones. They were not subject to grand jury subpoenas, and a potential co-defendant was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.

On June 27, 2016, Lynch clandestinely met with Bill Clinton on his plane at the Phoenix airport — a meeting that became known only thanks to an alert local TV reporter. Lynch supposedly left the decision on prosecution to Comey, who on July 5 announced publicly that Clinton had been “extremely careless” but lacked intent to violate the law, even though the statute punishes such violations whether they are intentional or not.

Contrast that with the collusion of Obama officials with the Clinton campaign-financed Christophe Steele/Fusion GPS dossier alleging Trump ties with Russians. Comey and the Justice Department used it, without divulging who paid for it, to get a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page’s future and past communications — the “wiretap” Trump was derided for mentioning.

Similarly, when Comey informed Trump in January 2017 of the contents of the then-unpublished Steele dossier, he didn’t reveal that the Clinton campaign had paid for it. Asked on his iatrogenic book tour why not, he blandly said he didn’t know. And maybe he doesn’t actually realize he was employing J. Edgar Hoover-like tactics to keep his job. Maybe.

In any case, after he was fired, he immediately sent four of his internal memos, at least one of them classified, to a law professor friend to leak them to the press, with the intent of getting a special counsel appointed — who turned out to be his longtime friend and ally Robert Mueller. Collusion, anyone?

I wonder if the mainstream media will be as excited about reporting on this one? The mainstream media seems intent on presenting Comey as some kind of superstar public servant. But the truth is very different.

Trump needs to appoint people to these law enforcement agencies who will investigate actual crimes that were committed by the previous administration and their allies in the media. I’d like to see people who use government as a weapon put behind bars. We have to know for certain that using the government as a weapon to influence elections has consequences.