Free Republic

Attorney General William Barr’s comment that he thinks “spying did occur” by intelligence agencies on the Trump campaign quickly reverberated outside the Senate committee hearing room, raising the hackles of top Democrats. “The top law enforcement officer of the country should not casually suggest that those under his purview engaged in ‘spying’ on a political campaign,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said in a statement. “This type of partisan talking point may please Donald Trump, who rails against a ‘deep state coup,’ but it also strikes another destructive blow to our democratic institutions.” Schiff’s fellow chairman Jerry Nadler...

Not a Tick-Tock All day long, even before the Mueller news broke, Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge has really been leaning-forward, giving insight into the pending Inspector General report by OIG Michael Horowitz. Herridge is one of those reporters who is careful not to get out in front of her skis. Ms. Herridge is not a book-selling member of the tick-tock community of pundits. We noted earlier how the specific emphasis of Ms. Herridge seemed to indicate the Horowitz report was closer to the surface of completion than previously thought. Immediately after the Mueller news broke (around 5pm EST), Herridge...

One of the interesting aspects of the IG report is the documented use of personal email by participants within the FBI “small group” Mid-Year-Exam (MYE) team. [pg 424] One of those documented examples involves FBI Agent Peter Strzok downloading the content of the sealed Anthony Weiner Indictment, October 29, 2016, to his personal email address. Unauthorized extraction of a ‘sealed SDNY indictment‘, and transmission to a non-secure system, is a felony.

David Kramer, an associate of Senator John McCain, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not testify to Congress in connection to his role in distribution of the fake Russia dossier to the FBI. Kramer was briefed by the Russian dossier author Christopher Steele in London in 2016. The Russian dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The junk dossier was used as evidence in a FISA court hearing as evidence to spy on Trump volunteer Carter Page — in October 2016. Kramer then returned back to the US and delivered the phony dossier...

The single most damning text between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page reads like this: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok. “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded. If that doesn't scream bias and conspiracy, nothing does. But you probably know these two. There are a few more you might not know. There might be a few more things you might not know.  The Trump Russia investigation was basically a seamless continuation of the Hillary email investigation. Among the people who worked on the Clinton email investigation, er, "matter" were Agent 2 and...

Just before Thanksgiving, House Republicans amended the list of documents they’d like President Trump to declassify in the Russia investigation. With little fanfare or explanation, the lawmakers led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) added a string of emails between the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to their wish list. Sources tell me the targeted documents may provide the most damning evidence to date of potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), evidence that has been kept from the majority of members of Congress for more than two years. The email exchanges included then-FBI...

Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to Corsi and another person with knowledge of the talks. The talks with Corsi — an associate of both President Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry. Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone’s...

"Let the record show at 4:01pm on October 7th, this election ended – when this Washington Post story broke." ---Donny Deutsch, 2016. As we have seen, Donny Deutsch has had a somewhat less than spectacular record when predicting on the subject of President Donald Trump. In fact, his predictions have often been spectacularly wrong.Deutsch's latest prediction on Trump was delivered on Monday's Morning Joe. In response to co-host Joe Scarborough's observation that Trump must already know he is going to lose re-election in 2020, Deutsch upped the ante on silliness by suggesting that if Trump does lose, he will stage...

Obama Had a Secret Plan in Case Trump Rejected 2016 Election Results By Mattathias Schwartz In October 2016, senior staff in the Obama White House discussed what they should do if Hillary Clinton won the November election and Donald Trump refused to accept the result as legitimate. They had cause to be worried. At that time, Trump had openly speculated that the election might be “rigged.” During his final debate with Clinton on October 19, he said that his opponent “should never have been allowed to run” and declined to answer the question of whether he would concede. “I’ll keep...

A new report shows a Democrat senator contacted a former Feinstein staffer back in 2017, in hopes of continuing an investigation so-called "collusion" between Trump and Russia. The former Feinstein staffer operates a group called "Democracy Integrity Project" which is heavily funded by Soros and has connections with Fusion GPS, as well as dossier author Christopher Steele. The one thing that's still not confirmed is the identity of the senator that reached out to the former Feinstein staffer. Daily Caller A Democratic senator outsourced parts of the investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion to a former Senate staffer with links to...

The Justice Department’s inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first...

When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning the 2016 election, liberals clung to the idea that his victory was illegitimate because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. According to a psychologist who supported Clinton in 2016, however, Google's bias in Clinton's favor may remove even that symbolic victory from her. Almost all of Clinton's popular vote margin could be attributed to Google bias, making her win "negligible." Dr. Robert Epstein, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, actually reported this finding last year, but he explains how it works in the upcoming film "The Creepy Line." Epstein made...

In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities. While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy. In an official...

A Pentagon analyst was stripped of his security clearance by Obama holdovers after he complained of suspicious government contracts with Stefan Halper, the FBI informant who spied on the Trump presidential campaign in 2016, the Washington Times reported. The pro-Trump analyst also apparently ruffled feathers when he blew the whistle on an alleged sweetheart deal with a woman Chelsea Clinton referred to as her “best friend.” Adam Lovinger, a senior official of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), had his security clearance yanked on May 1, 2017, and has been relegated to performing clerical chores ever since. ONA...

A memory stick quietly exchanged in a coffee shop. An admission of a “Hail Mary” leak. An unmistakable effort to push the Russia investigation closer to Donald Trump’s inner circle with uncorroborated tales. Those are just some of the highlights from the day that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson — paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on her GOP rival — met secretly with a top Justice Department official, right after Trump won the 2016 election. And all of it was captured in the official’s handwritten notes — a contemporaneous record that intelligence professionals tell me exposes the...

Hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails and memos provide the clearest evidence yet that a research firm, hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find dirt on and defeat Donald Trump, worked early and often with the FBI, a Department of Justice (DOJ) official and the intelligence community during the 2016 presidential election and the early days of Trump's presidency. Fusion GPS's work and its involvement with several FBI officials have been well reported. But a close review of these new documents shows just how closely Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who reported...

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has disclosed a previously top-secret set of documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser who was at the center of highly contentious accusations by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that the F.B.I. had abused its surveillance powers. [Read the documents here.]

RELEASE: The Podesta Emails Part 17 October 24th E-mail Drop

**SNIP** Today’s indictment confirms every aspect of the DNC’s and Crowdstrike’s account, with one exception. Both the DNC and Crowdstrike have said repeatedly that they went public only after expelling all the Russian hackers. But buried in the new indictment is language suggesting that Crowdstrike missed a spot, and one computer infected with the GRU’s malware “remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016.” If Mueller’s right, it raises the possibility that the Russians gathered months and months of additional intelligence on the DNC—right as the campaign was in its final, most important stretch. The hackers may...

Multiple reviews of whether FBI agents’ political bias affected the Russia-Trump collusion case remain in their infancy, but investigators already have unearthed troubling internal communications long withheld from public view. We already know from FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok’s now-infamous text messages with his fellow agent and reported lover, Lisa Page, that Strzok — the man driving that Russia collusion investigation — disdained Donald Trump and expressed willingness to use his law enforcement powers to “stop” the Republican from becoming president. The question that lingers, unanswered: Did those sentiments affect official actions? Memos the FBI is now producing to the...