Intelligence Agencies Join FBI in Push Against Plans to Release FISA Abuse Memo

Why aren't the Democrats horrified by the corruption at the FBI and DOJ?
It is becoming clearer by the day, after over a year of investigations, that the Obama administration did indeed weaponize the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the IRS and the NSA. Over those eight years, each of the above agencies was transformed into an arm of the Democratic Party tasked with crippling the opposition and abrogating the Constitution.

Since all of the mainstream media already were arms of the DNC, it is well and truly a miracle that Donald Trump prevailed throughout his campaign to win the election, as the entire DC bureaucracy and media were aligned against him. Most of them still are.

Those law enforcement institutions in which Americans have put their trust and faith for many decades have been thoroughly compromised by a group of bad actors at the top, self-appointed arbiters of electoral politics. Besides sullying the reputations of their institutions, this "secret society" of persons who believe themselves to be above the law has lethally betrayed the rank and file employees of those agencies.

The public has seen only a fraction of the material that, according to those who have seen it, proves higher-ups at the DOJ and FBI colluded to clear Hillary Clinton of any responsibility for her many crimes. These operatives knew she had ignored all the rules regarding classified material by having her own private server. They likely all knew the Clinton Foundation was nothing but a pay-to-play outfit to enrich the Clintons (only 6% of its funds went to charity). And this bunch still thought she was qualified to be President, this woman with a forty-year history of lying, cheating and scheming!

Are there no essential values among these persons privileged to wield power over the rest of us? In collusion with the Clinton campaign, the DNC, the FBI and DOJ worked together to produce and then use fabricated opposition research to obtain FISA warrants to spy on possibly hundreds of people connected to the Trump family and campaign. They did this to bring him down by any means necessary. As many people have observed, this is the stuff of the former Soviet Union and third-world dictatorships.

Information is being released in dribs and drabs, but enough has been made public for all to know that this is the biggest political scandal in American history. The Republicans want to release a memo that is a summary of what the House Intelligence Committee has seen so far. This memo is based solely on documents provided to the committee by the FBI and the DOJ. The Democrats are fighting the release of said memo.


direct

The ever-obsessed Adam Schiff is determined that no member of the public be allowed to see what our elected representatives have already seen. We are apparently too stupid to grasp the complexities of this summary. Schiff still believes the fabricated Trump/Russia collusion narrative, even though he has seen the documents and texts from Strzok saying there is "no there there" ten months into this scam investigation. Schiff has invested so many television hours in pushing his version of events, the one he so fervently wants to be true, that he can't let go of it even as it is revealed to be a malicious plan by a group of arrogant civil servants, all of them Democrats.


What is so distressing is that no elected Democrat, not one, has expressed shock or concern that these agencies have been so corrupted. Given what we know so far, every member of Congress and every member of the press should be equally horrified. This level of criminality should offend everyone, every citizen and every elected official. But to the left, it's just another dust-up created by those rascally Republicans. Use our law enforcement agencies to destroy a campaign and/or to bring about the impeachment of a President? "So what" seems to be the attitude on the left. The Constitution be damned.

Among these culprits, who include Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, there is no honor, no respect for the law, the truth or the American people.

Shouldn't the Democrats be as angry about this as Republicans? Has their hatred for Trump so impaired their judgment that they have sacrificed their integrity, their respect for ethics and the law? How else to explain their full engagement in the cover-up, fueled by their wholesale denial of the facts?

Once DOJ IG Michael Horowitz's report is released, and if the FISA memo is made public, much more will be clear to everyone. One has to wonder how the Democrats will recover their lost dignity. Their many months-long defense of the indefensible will have done significant damage to their brand unless Democrat voters are as unscrupulous, as unconcerned about honor and ethics as their elected representatives have proven to be.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog...ied_by_the_corruption_at_the_fbi_and_doj.html
 
Memo Reading For Nonpartisans
Ignore the spin. When the document goes public, here’s what to look for.


By
Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 1, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET

The White House looks set to release the House Intelligence Committee memo on 2016 government surveillance abuses, which means the attacks on the document by Democrats, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media are going to get wilder. To help navigate through the spin, here’s a handy guide for what to look for, and what to ignore:

• Rationale. Did the FBI have cause to open a full-blown counterintelligence probe into an active presidential campaign? That’s a breathtakingly consequential and unprecedented action and surely could not be justified without much more than an overheard drunken conversation or an unsourced dossier. What hard evidence did the FBI have?

• Tools and evidence. Government possesses few counterintelligence tools more powerful or frightening than the ability to spy on American citizens. If the FBI obtained permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump aide Carter Page based on information from the Christopher Steele dossier, that in itself is a monumental scandal. It means the FBI used a document commissioned by one presidential campaign as a justification to spy on another. Ignore any arguments that the dossier was not a “basis” for the warrant or only used “in part.” If the FBI had to use it in its application, it means it didn’t have enough other evidence to justify surveillance.

Look to see what else the FBI presented to the court as a justification for monitoring, and whether it was manufactured. Mr. Steele and his client, Fusion GPS, ginned up breathless news stories about the dossier’s unverified accusations in September 2016 in order to influence the election. The FBI sometimes presents news articles to the court, but primarily for corroboration of other facts. If the FBI used the conspiracy stories Mr. Steele was spinning as actual justification—evidence—to the court, that’s out of bounds.

• Omissions and misdirection. What else did the FBI tell the court? One would presume the bureau did its due diligence and knew Mr. Steele ultimately worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The FISA court puts considerable emphasis on the credibility of sources. Did the FBI inform the court of the Clinton connection? Or did it lean on the claim that the Fusion project was originally funded by Republicans? Such a claim might diminish the partisan stench. But it would also be a falsehood, since the dossier portion of the project was purely funded by Clinton allies. And if the FBI didn’t bother to ask who hired Mr. Steele or Fusion, that’s a scandal all its own.


Also, look to see whether the FBI informed the court that Mr. Steele was blabbing to the press. When he first approached the bureau in July, he hadn’t yet briefed the media. But by September he and Fusion were publicly spinning the dossier for their Democratic client, and the FBI would have known who was generating the stories. Did the FBI continue to attest something that clearly was no longer true?

• Duration of surveillance. The FBI may argue it had good cause to look into Mr. Page. But if months of wiretaps didn’t turn up anything (and surely we’d have heard if they did), the FBI also had a duty to cease such a liberty-busting intrusion. Ask how long this probe went on and whether it was justified, or if the FBI was simply giving itself an open-ended license to spy on a campaign.

Expect Trump critics to renew their effort to turn Mr. Page into a Manchurian aide, seizing on his every action or word while ignoring the small role he played in the campaign, not to mention his obvious oddness. This will be designed to make people forget that for all the focus on Mr. Page, he was and remains a private citizen, who apparently was subject to months of government monitoring based on what may prove nothing more than the gossip of a rival campaign.

• Team Obama. Somewhat lost in this narrative is what role if any the broader Obama administration might have played with regard to the dossier. What actions were taken by former CIA Director John Brennan, or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper ? Also don’t forget Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, and who himself met with Fusion cofounder Glenn Simpson. Or the Justice Department officials who approved court filings. If there was surveillance abuse, accountability shouldn’t stop with the FBI.

Mostly, ignore what is certain to be a nonstop shriek that this memo is out of context, that it omits facts or cherry-picks data or makes unfair allegations. You know, sort of like what Democrats and the media did this past year in their “Russia investigation.” The difference here is that the memo only needs to provide a few facts for the country to understand if there was FISA abuse.

The rest is noise.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Appeared in the February 2, 2018, print edition.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/memo-r...48731de9fa29f34e8&reflink=article_email_share
 
Tom B said:
Memo Reading For Nonpartisans
Ignore the spin. When the document goes public, here’s what to look for.


By
Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 1, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET

The White House looks set to release the House Intelligence Committee memo on 2016 government surveillance abuses, which means the attacks on the document by Democrats, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media are going to get wilder. To help navigate through the spin, here’s a handy guide for what to look for, and what to ignore:

• Rationale. Did the FBI have cause to open a full-blown counterintelligence probe into an active presidential campaign? That’s a breathtakingly consequential and unprecedented action and surely could not be justified without much more than an overheard drunken conversation or an unsourced dossier. What hard evidence did the FBI have?

• Tools and evidence. Government possesses few counterintelligence tools more powerful or frightening than the ability to spy on American citizens. If the FBI obtained permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump aide Carter Page based on information from the Christopher Steele dossier, that in itself is a monumental scandal. It means the FBI used a document commissioned by one presidential campaign as a justification to spy on another. Ignore any arguments that the dossier was not a “basis” for the warrant or only used “in part.” If the FBI had to use it in its application, it means it didn’t have enough other evidence to justify surveillance.

Look to see what else the FBI presented to the court as a justification for monitoring, and whether it was manufactured. Mr. Steele and his client, Fusion GPS, ginned up breathless news stories about the dossier’s unverified accusations in September 2016 in order to influence the election. The FBI sometimes presents news articles to the court, but primarily for corroboration of other facts. If the FBI used the conspiracy stories Mr. Steele was spinning as actual justification—evidence—to the court, that’s out of bounds.

• Omissions and misdirection. What else did the FBI tell the court? One would presume the bureau did its due diligence and knew Mr. Steele ultimately worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The FISA court puts considerable emphasis on the credibility of sources. Did the FBI inform the court of the Clinton connection? Or did it lean on the claim that the Fusion project was originally funded by Republicans? Such a claim might diminish the partisan stench. But it would also be a falsehood, since the dossier portion of the project was purely funded by Clinton allies. And if the FBI didn’t bother to ask who hired Mr. Steele or Fusion, that’s a scandal all its own.


Also, look to see whether the FBI informed the court that Mr. Steele was blabbing to the press. When he first approached the bureau in July, he hadn’t yet briefed the media. But by September he and Fusion were publicly spinning the dossier for their Democratic client, and the FBI would have known who was generating the stories. Did the FBI continue to attest something that clearly was no longer true?

• Duration of surveillance. The FBI may argue it had good cause to look into Mr. Page. But if months of wiretaps didn’t turn up anything (and surely we’d have heard if they did), the FBI also had a duty to cease such a liberty-busting intrusion. Ask how long this probe went on and whether it was justified, or if the FBI was simply giving itself an open-ended license to spy on a campaign.

Expect Trump critics to renew their effort to turn Mr. Page into a Manchurian aide, seizing on his every action or word while ignoring the small role he played in the campaign, not to mention his obvious oddness. This will be designed to make people forget that for all the focus on Mr. Page, he was and remains a private citizen, who apparently was subject to months of government monitoring based on what may prove nothing more than the gossip of a rival campaign.

• Team Obama. Somewhat lost in this narrative is what role if any the broader Obama administration might have played with regard to the dossier. What actions were taken by former CIA Director John Brennan, or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper ? Also don’t forget Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, and who himself met with Fusion cofounder Glenn Simpson. Or the Justice Department officials who approved court filings. If there was surveillance abuse, accountability shouldn’t stop with the FBI.

Mostly, ignore what is certain to be a nonstop shriek that this memo is out of context, that it omits facts or cherry-picks data or makes unfair allegations. You know, sort of like what Democrats and the media did this past year in their “Russia investigation.” The difference here is that the memo only needs to provide a few facts for the country to understand if there was FISA abuse.

The rest is noise.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Appeared in the February 2, 2018, print edition.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/memo-r...48731de9fa29f34e8&reflink=article_email_share
More...
The illustration of Ms Strassel is very generous.
 
Tom B said:
Report: Kelly warned Trump that the Memo isn't as compelling as it's cracked up to be


https://hotair.com/archives/2018/02/02/report-kelly-warned-trump-memo-isnt-compelling-cracked/
More...


Nothing is ever as yuge as trump hypes it up to be, but when you have Rosenstein sweating bullets, you know that something is there.

Regardless of whether the memo is a 4 or a 9 on the meter, it nevertheless gave those justice department and fbi clowns a nice little spanking. Next time the oversight committee requests documents and requests that your people show up to testify, produce it or we will go to court and get it and then release it to the public.

Also the lefties are in a bit of a bind because they want to argue that regardless of what is in the memo that there is lots of other stuff not being released that paints a different picture. That's a dangerous argument to make because it is basically an argument for an independent prosecutor so that all of this is not hashed out in public. That is also a scenario that might cause Rosenstein to commit hari kari out on the National Mall, especially since he is already in the crosshairs of the IG who is a semi-independent investigator.
 
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has authorized the release of a controversial Republican memo, and has sent word to the House Intelligence Committee the document may be made public, a White House official said.

There were no White House-initiated redactions to the memo, a House aide said.

The extraordinary decision to release the classified four-page memo with a never-before-used House Intelligence Committee rule would escalate the partisan fight over the investigations into Russian election meddling and possible collusion. This will likely have major repercussions for the relationship between the Justice Department and Capitol Hill.

The memo’s release would also threaten to further fracture the frayed relationship between the President and his Justice Department and intelligence community, both of which opposed the release of the document, which is based on classified intelligence. The FBI issued a rare public warning on Wednesday that the memo omits key information that could impact its veracity.

The memo, spearheaded by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, alleges that the FBI used the opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia written by ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to secure a FISA surveillance warrant on former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page without disclosing that the dossier was funded in part by Democratic sources.

In a statement earlier this week, Nunes said, “It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign.”
 
The libturd argument summed up quite nicely:

WASHINGTON—Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

https://politics.theonion.com/fbi-w...ium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Politics_twitter
 
The onion reports...

https://politics.theonion.com/fbi-warns-republican-memo-could-undermine-faith-in-mass-1822639681

FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies

WASHINGTON—Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

(I heard tucker carlson reading this on satellite radio yesterday. not sure what else he said... but he said the onion seemed to cover it best. (or something like that))
 
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elderado said:
The libturd argument summed up quite nicely:

WASHINGTON—Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

https://politics.theonion.com/fbi-w...ium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Politics_twitter
More...



Strzok-Page ticket - 2020

:cool:
 
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