posted May 22, 2018 11:34 AM            

There are people, some former high level employees and some present high level employees, in addition to Obama White House staff who better "lawyer up", if they haven't already done so.

This is just (1) one such example of what went on in the Obama executive branch to frame Donald Trump. But, shoes are falling all over the former Obama Administration.

It's going to get very, very ugly over the next days, weeks and months.

Anyone who thinks conspirators who attempted to take out a Presidential candidate, a President Elect and a sitting US President are going to get away with it, have sawdust between their ears.

John Brennan’s Plot to Infiltrate the Trump Campaign
George Neumayr
May 22, 2018

It came out of his “inter-agency taskforce” at Langley.

As Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish.

Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the Trump campaign, which he was running right out of CIA headquarters.

The CIA was furious about the leak, but never denied the BBC’s story. To Congress earlier this year, Brennan acknowledged the existence of the group, but cast his role in it as the mere conduit of tips about Trump-Russia collusion: “It was well beyond my mandate as director of CIA to follow on any of those leads that involved U.S. persons. But I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the bureau.”

But if his role had truly been passive, the “inter-agency taskforce” wouldn’t have been meeting at CIA headquarters. By keeping its discussions at Langley, Brennan could keep his finger wedged in the pie. Both before and after the FBI’s official probe began in late July 2016, Brennan was bringing together into the same room at CIA headquarters a cast of Trump haters across the Obama administration whose activities he could direct — from Peter Strzok, the FBI liaison to Brennan, to the doltish Jim Clapper, Brennan’s errand boy, to an assortment of Brennan’s buddies at the Treasury Department, Justice Department, and White House.

The bogus tip from Estonia led the group into its first **** -up: sending FBI agents to sniff around the computer server connected to Trump Tower. After that effort flopped, Brennan’s group had to go back to the drawing board (on the electronic intelligence front, it had already hatched plans for national security letters and FISA warrants). Someone in the group must have proposed blasting a swampy old CIA source and Hillary supporter, Stefan Halper, into the Trump campaign orbit to see if he could catch a couple of minor campaign volunteers out in collusion.

Halper had entered the Deep State through a door opened by his father-in-law, Ray Cline, whose work for the CIA was legendary. Behind that door Halper found a treasure trove of jobs and government contracts, making his life as a transatlantic jet-setting academic possible. Brennan’s Langley group had access to Halper’s file and sized him up as the perfect embed: a Republican-oriented foreign policy scholar who could plausibly interact with Trump officials while serving as a nexus between the CIA and Brennan’s friends in British intelligence. Halper’s ties to Richard Dearlove, a former head of British intelligence, are well known, and Halper knows Alexander Downer, the pub-crawling Aussie diplomat, through a mutual association with Cambridge University.

That Halper came out of the brainstorming of Brennan’s group is clear from the fact that his first known meeting with Carter Page preceded the formal opening of the FBI’s probe. The Washington Post hinted at the role of Brennan’s group in hatching Halper:

Many questions about the informant’s role in the Russia investigation remain unanswered. It is unclear how he first became involved in the case, the extent of the information he provided and the actions he took to obtain intelligence for the FBI. It is also unknown whether his July 2016 interaction with [Carter] Page was brokered by the FBI or another intelligence agency [italics added].

The FBI commonly uses sources and informants to gather evidence and its regulations allow for use of informants even before a formal investigation has been opened. In many law enforcement investigations, the use of sources and informants precedes more invasive techniques such as electronic surveillance.

A veteran of the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s CIA was full of Hillary supporters, some of whom decorated their desks with her campaign paraphernalia. Brennan, whom the press noted would walk the halls of the CIA in an LGBT rainbow lanyard, encouraged this open political atmosphere. While Brennan knew his spying operation on the Trump campaign was an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive” matter (as reported by journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff), he assumed its machinations would never come to light.

The members of Brennan’s working group at Langley “were just a bunch of out-of-control idiots,” says a former high-ranking CIA official to TAS. He finds it flabbergasting that Brennan would bring CIA officials and FBI officials into the same room to cook up schemes to send a spy into the Trump campaign’s ranks. One of those schemes involved money (Halper paid George Papadopoulos $3,000 for a phony research paper as a way of luring him into a London meeting); another involved sex (Halper’s assistant, with a name out of a bad spy novel, Azra Turk, tried to coax information from Papadopoulos at flirty bar outings, according to the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross).

Like Brennan, Halper didn’t bother to hide his support for Hillary even as he conducted this infiltration. He told the press that he feared a Trump presidency, as it could harm the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. That rationale must have figured into Alexander Downer’s motivation for working with Brennan’s Langley group too. Downer traveled in the same elitist circles as Christopher Steele, Halper, and John Kerry. It appears he sent word of his boozy evening with Papadopoulos back to Brennan’s group through these circles — either through Hillary partisans at the State Department or through Clinton Foundation channels, for whom he had worked as a kind of bag man.

Halper had come up empty, so Brennan’s group at Langley went with Downer’s tale, as feeble as it was. But it at least had the advantage of coming from a “diplomat.” Yet if Congressman Nunes is right and the originating document for the FBI probe doesn’t even contain a reference to an official intelligence product passed to Brennan from the Australian government, Downer’s hearsay must have been exceedingly flaky, so flaky no one would want to be on the record treating it as “evidence” for something as momentous as a probe into a presidential campaign.

posted May 22, 2018 11:47 AM            

A look at the latest leaks about the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign.

Deep in the New York Times’s account of “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI’s codename for spying on the Trump campaign, is a hilariously bland paragraph about John Brennan and James Comey teaming up to dig dirt on Trumpworld. If you blinked in the course of reading the lengthy article, you might have missed it:

The F.B.I.’s thinking crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey showing that the Russian government was behind an attack on the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation. The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently, three officials said.

Contained in that oh-so-nonchalant line — “Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation” — is one of Obamagate’s biggest ticking time bombs. When it blows, John Brennan, whose demented partisanship led him to run an anti-Trump spying operation straight out of CIA headquarters, will feel much of the blast.

The gathering winds for Crossfire Hurricane, after all, came largely from that blowhard. Panicking at the sight of Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday wins in March 2016, Brennan had by the following month formed the beginnings of a spying operation against him, and managed to enmesh a bunch of other agencies in it, thinking that would keep the outside of the CIA’s cup clean. How do we know this? Because a “senior” member of the intelligence community — back when such a figure thought talking out of school about such matters would serve the cause of delegitimizing Trump — leaked the existence of the operation to the BBCin January 2017:

Last April [2016], the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was – allegedly – a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.

It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence taskforce was created.

The taskforce included six agencies or departments of government. Dealing with the domestic, US, side of the inquiry, were the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Justice. For the foreign and intelligence aspects of the investigation, there were another three agencies: the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying.

David Corn and Michael Isikoff, authors of Russian Roulette, gingerly refer to this anti-Trump spying operation as the “working group at Langley,” an undertaking so outré that even Brennan called it an “exceptionally sensitive issue.”

Since they are engaged in propaganda and stenography rather than investigative journalism, Corn/Isikoff and the Times are content to leave this part of the story fuzzy. As the most crucial period in this debacle — the period that would bring out its unfounded, partisan origins the most clearly — they don’t want to look too closely at it. Better to dispatch it all quickly with the Times’s line, “Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation.”

But make no mistake about it: that the FBI and the CIA, on little more than the say-so of a virulent Trump hater like Brennan, were meeting to spy on the campaign of Hillary’s opponent makes Watergate look like a tenth-rate burglary. Nixon, at his most Machiavellian, wouldn’t have thought to form a “working group at Langley” against McGovern. But Obama, via Brennan, did the equivalent for Hillary.

For all intents and purposes, Crossfire Hurricane did not begin in July 2016 but at the moment Trump emerged as Hillary’s rival. Brennan, shortly thereafter, was bringing CIA agents, FBI agents, NSA agents, and an assortment of Obama’s political aides together in one room at CIA headquarters to bat around ideas on how to smoke out the campaign of Hillary’s opponent. Out of these meetings came the plot to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Notice the timing of all the grooming and entrapment of George Papadopoulos, a twentysomething Trump campaign volunteer in London whom the Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, suddenly wanted to meet in May 2016 for an evening of sozzled political chitchat. That timing corresponds perfectly with the brainstorming meetings of Brennan’s Langley group.

British intelligence, through various planted stories, has bragged about its role in helping Brennan spy on the Trump campaign. It must have served as the bridge between Brennan and Downer. Famous for greasing the wheels of the Clinton Foundation, Downer was looking for ways to ingratiate himself with what he presumed was the next administration. So he was happy to serve as a cog in Brennan’s dirty machine.

One can only laugh at the sheer brazenness of the propaganda in the Times’s opener about Downer:

Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.

Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I. interview to describe his meeting with the campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos.

First of all, Downer had no “evidence.” All he had was the memory of speculative remarks (the kind anybody following the news could have made) that he had pumped out of a minor campaign volunteer during a meeting he set up, according to the Daily Caller.

The threadbare character of this episode (not to mention the possibility that Papadopoulos might have simply been regurgitating speculation fed to him by a mole) is almost too stupid for words. But then Brennan’s Langley group needed something, anything, to get the dolts over at the FBI to open up a formal probe. Presumably, it was Brennan and other Obama political appointees who participated in the “tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra.” Or did Obama himself get on the phone with the Australian PM to discuss how to break through a diplomatic impasse touching on a matter as grave as the Downer-Papadopoulos pub crawl?

posted May 22, 2018 03:09 PM            

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” in a joint appearance with former Trump campaign national security adviser Carter Page, former Trump adviser Michael Caputo alleged that there was more than one informant that approached their campaign during the 2016 election cycle.

“You have spent time in Russia — Carter and I both have,” Caputo said. “In Russia, they call this the Siloviki — the national security leadership that secretly spies on the citizenry of Russia and here we are in the United States with our own Siloviki underneath President Obama. Let me tell you something that I know for a fact: This informant, this person that they planted, try to plant into the campaign and even into the administration if you believe Axios — he’s not the only person that came at the campaign and the FBI is not the only Obama agency that came at the campaign.”

posted May 22, 2018 03:21 PM            

At the end of all the scandal and drama, all of the breathlessly reported lies and false accusations, at the end of all the money wasted on some zany kabuki swamp dance choreographed to the thrumming of giant bullfrogs and yipping of excited coyotes — at the end of all of this — it comes down to precisely what we said it was a year and a half ago.
The Obama administration — with or without the knowledge and direction of President Obama himself — perverted one of the most powerful, clandestine spying operations in the world and used it at the very height of a presidential campaign to spy on political opponents, punish them and, ultimately, silence them through extortion.

If this was orchestrated without the express knowledge of Mr. Obama, then it reveals just how blatantly he instructed by example the weaponizing of the entire federal government to carry out his low, dishonest and unjust ideology. By any means necessary, one might say. Only instead of being driven by visions of justice, these people were driven by visions of undying power.

If this conspiracy was carried out at the express direction of Mr. Obama or other high officials in his administration, then they belong in jail. From unmasking of political opponents to leaking their names to the press, to killing legitimate investigations, to launching politically motivated witch hunts, a racket of this scale could not have been carried out without some major juice and cover at the top levels of the Department of Justice, FBI, and the White House.

The rogue henchmen carrying out the dirty work, as always, presented as perfect, decent and most honest little Boy Scouts like former FBI Director James B. Comey.

Most of the FBI today must be horrified by the degree to which Mr. Comey and his goon squad handed over the entire mission of the FBI to political hacks inside the Obama administration. Still, there were far too many inside the bureau willing to junk their oath in the name of some kind of higher “justice.” Which is just another way of saying “selling their soul for partisan gain.

What the Obama administration did to infiltrate the Trump campaign, spy on political opponents and then launch a wicked vendetta against them is worse than anything J. Edgar Hoover ever did — at least that we know about.

It is worse than any of the domestic abuses by the CIA during the Cold War.

It is worse even than what the federal government did to undermine civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr.

As bad and corrupt as it is to harass innocent citizens under any circumstances, it is so much worse to weaponize the government to pursue and punish and eliminate domestic political opponents. That is the sort of thing that destroys a Republic.

And yes, it is even much worse than Watergate. At the end of the day, Watergate was a bungled break-in by low-level political hacks. And then it was about the political cover-up and how high it went.

What happened under Mr. Obama is the stuff of Third-World dictators.

When Donald Trump was running for president, establishment Republicans and Democrats alike ran around thumping their chests feigning outrage that Mr. Trump would not be capable of respecting the Constitution.

At that time, the Obama administration was spying on Mr. Trump and his campaign and carrying out the most extensive and brazen undercover espionage-war campaign against political opponents that we have ever seen.

posted May 23, 2018 12:45 PM            

In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said that he believed former President Barack Obama and some of his top officials — including Valerie Jarrett — were involved in spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House and 2012 presidential candidate, also said some people — like former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — were “in danger of going to jail.”

Gingrich was appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show after a busy week in terms of revelations regarding the surveillance done on the campaign, which was apparently carried out in an attempt to find out if there were contacts with Russian officials.

An article in Axios revealed that Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top economic advisers, recommended the hiring of suspected FBI informant Stefan Halper.

Meanwhile, the timeline regarding when an FBI informant met with a Trump campaign official began to shift and Clapper appeared on “The View” to defend the actions of American intelligence.

To Gingrich, however, the path led all the way back to Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett.

“Presently, someone will figure out to ask what did Valerie Jarrett know and when did she know it?” Gingrich said.”What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Because what you’re seeing happen is, on every single level — and this is what happens with really big scandals — they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding.

“So we’re now supposed to believe that the director of national intelligence was lying to us, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency was lying to us, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was lying to us, the number two person at the FBI was lying to us, the attorney general was lying to us — because she was meeting Bill Clinton on an airplane in private to talk about their grandchildren.”

“I mean, at what point do you just say, give me a break?” he continued. “All of this, I believe, was being coordinated by Obama and by Valerie Jarrett and by the White House. … Look, I don’t believe if you look at the total number of things going on, I don’t believe in an administration that was as tightly centralized as the Obama administration, you could have had as many different things going on — all of them illegal — without the president having been briefed.

As for Clapper’s appearance on “The View” — in which he confirmed the operations but refused to call them spying — Gingrich was unimpressed.

“I am astounded how bad he looks now. I’m astounded how dishonest and incompetent he looks,” Gingrich told Ingraham.

“I think what happened was people like Clapper and the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency — all these guys thought they could get away with this because Hillary was going to win. And when Hillary won, the fix would be in, everything would be covered up.”

“Around 10 o’clock on election night, they all began to realize this could get really bad,” Gingrich added. “And they were shifting gears from protecting Hillary — which had been their job for two years — to trying to destroy Trump. Now you’re watching people who, I think, in every case are in danger of going to jail.

“If the system works and people are actually tested on, ‘Did you tell the truth under oath?’ Clapper’s a perfect example,” he said.

Will this all happen? We’ll certainly see.

posted May 24, 2018 01:00 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Catalina:
See this is where you go blind. The justice dept, the Intel agencies, don't work for the president but for the Govt. The very fact that Don Wan thinks they should work for him gives him away.. and the fact that they suspected him of being too crooked to run the country..not a party issue.

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Government...according to whom? I don't understand how you consistently get it all wrong.

Everyone in the Executive Branch works for the President of the United States...EVERYONE

It's not that they suspect Trump of being crooked. It's that they...upper echelons of the FBI, Justice Dept, State Dept and National Intelligence attempted to make sure Hillary The Corrupt got elected. When that failed, they attempted to frame Trump with a phony Russia collusion narrative.

Now, those people are being rooted out, investigated, fired or cooperating with investigators and lawyering up ahead of federal prosecutions on a variety of charges.

posted May 24, 2018 01:06 PM            

Senator Chuck Grassley Demands Page/Strzok Text Message Redactions Be Removed….
May 23, 2018
sundance

This is an interesting development. Until now, for some mysterious reason, no-one in congress has ever asked for the redactions of the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page text messages to be removed. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is the first politician to ask for all of the text messages without redactions.

In a letter today to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (full pdf below), Chairman Grassley cites examples of unnecessary redactions that are in place simply to avoid the embarrassment upon the DOJ and FBI. Accordingly this is not an acceptable reason for hiding information from congress and the American people.

Based on the details within the approximately 400 pages of text messages, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that points directly to the motives and intents of the DOJ and FBI group who were conducting the operation to exonerate Hillary Clinton; and the group who was working on the surveillance operation against the Trump campaign.

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/

posted June 04, 2018 03:01 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Randall:
Obama's hands are all over this.

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posted September 07, 2018 12:42 PM            

Report: Federal Prosecutors Impanel Grand Jury in Andrew McCabe Probe
JOSHUA CAPLAN
6 Sep 2018

posted September 18, 2018 01:01 PM            

Like that old hippie thing … how did it go? … what if they gave a war and no one showed up

posted September 18, 2018 09:04 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Catalina:
Now why would anyone think he would obstruct the investigation? Nothing to do with the fact that he is doing just that, huh?

Caligula and Canut had nothing on this guy.

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Now why..exactly, would anyone accuse Trump of obstruction when he's opening up the investigative files for America to take a good look at?

That's SUNSHINE, not obstruction.

It's the FBI and DOJ which have been obstructing House and Senate investigations in the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense. We know why the FBI and DOJ have been obstructing. There was never any basis for an investigation of Trump and/or his campaign to begin with.

posted October 21, 2019 04:34 PM            

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) review into the origins of the Russian collusion hoax probe has reportedly prompted some CIA analysts in the crosshairs of investigators to lawyer up.

NBC News made the revelation on Monday, adding that DOJ “has found something significant” and expanded the review.

The news outlet also found:

[Connecticut U.S. Attorney John] Durham has also requested to talk to CIA analysts involved in the intelligence assessment of Russia’s activities, prompting some of them to hire lawyers, according to three former CIA officials familiar with the matter. And there is tension between the CIA and the Justice Department over what classified documents Durham can examine, two people familiar with the matter said.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr has tapped Durham to conduct the investigation.

DOJ would not say whether the investigation has morphed into a criminal probe, NBC News acknowledged.

The U.S. attorney leading the review has hired more staff and expanded the timeframe under investigation, NBC News learned from a law enforcement official directly familiar with the matter.

Durham is now probing the Obama administration’s conduct before President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, an unnamed official from the sitting administration told NBC News.

Under former President Obama, the FBI began its probe into alleged Russian election interference on behalf of Trump in July 2016. The Trump administration appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel in May 2017.

Mueller concluded that the Trump campaign did not coordinate with the Kremlin’s election interference effort, sounding the death knell for the Russian collusion hoax.

http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/21/report-cia-de ep-state-actors-linked-to-origin-of-russia-hoax-lawyer-up/