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Hillary Clinton, thanks to James Comey, escaped criminal prosecution for violating the Espionage Act. Now it is Comey who may have violated that same law. If he did, will Comey escape prosecution, courtesy of his good friend, Robert Mueller? The fired FBI Director’s legal predicament comes as The Hill reports that Comey authored seven memorandums reflecting the contents of his conversations with President Trump and that four of the memos “have been determined to contain classified information.” If this is true and Comey kept these documents in his personal possession upon leaving government service and conveyed some of them to...

More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents. This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election. Comey testified last month he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University...

BREAKING - Sources in FBI tell me they are unable to locate James Comey's memos on their servers.

Fired FBI Director James Comey is now in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify about his interactions with President Trump as they relate to the federal government's Russia probe — and there's been some significant revelations thus far. A big thing: Comey refused to state whether he believed that President Trump's request to shut down the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn amounted to obstruction of justice — saying it was a question for the investigation's special counsel Bob Mueller — but he called it "a very disturbing thing, very concerning." Another big thing: After his...

To quote Wilford Brimley in Absence of Malice: “Wonderful thing, subpoenas.” Don’t set your DVR just yet, as this subpoena will serve as an “invitation” to a closed-door but transcribed hearing. Still, the move to collar longtime Clintonista Sid Blumenthal qualifies as a major development for the Benghazi Select Committee investigation: Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who is leading the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, plans to subpoena Mr. Blumenthal, 66, for a private transcribed interview.Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that...

Executive orders are numbered; memoranda are not. Memoranda are always published in the Federal Register after proclamations and executive orders. And under Executive Order 11030, signed by President Kennedy in 1962, an executive order must contain a "citation of authority," saying what law it's based on. Memoranda have no such requirement.http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/16/obama-presidential-memoranda-executive-orders/20191805/

Great 3:23 minute video interview at link. President Obama reportedly is using a unique form of executive action known as the “presidential memorandum” at a historic pace – a tactic that allows him to, technically, claim he’s not over-using executive orders while still pursuing high-level policy changes without involvement from Congress. A review by USA Today, published Wednesday, shows that, in fact, Obama has issued more memoranda than any U.S. president in history. He’s issued 198 – more than the 195 executive orders from his White House. The executive action is strikingly similar to an executive order, with only slight...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

Signaling that it intends to conduct an aggressive investigation into how the Internal Revenue Service targeted certain conservative-leaning groups, the Senate Finance Committee has asked the agency’s outgoing acting commissioner to document any communications with top Obama administration officials about the unfolding scandal. Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who lead the Finance Committee, wrote to Steven T. Miller on Monday making 41 specific requests for information. They include documentation of all attempts to elicit information from groups seeking tax-exempt status; a list of all the words and phrases used to target applicants for additional scrutiny; how...

In e-mail blasts this weekend, “Guccifer” sent documents stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide to congressional aides, political figures, and journalists. Armed with confidential memos to Hillary Clinton that were stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide, a hacker has distributed some of the documents to a wide array of congressional aides, political figures, and journalists worldwide. In a series of weekend e-mail blasts, the hacker known as “Guccifer” disseminated four recent memos to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of the former Secretary of State.

Justice Department officials have stopped short of recommending criminal charges against Bush administration lawyers who wrote secret memos approving harsh interrogation techniques of terror suspects. A person familiar with the inquiry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says investigators recommended referring two of the three lawyers to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. The person was not authorized to discuss the inquiry. The person noted that the investigative report was still in draft form and subject to revisions. Attorney General Eric Holder also may make his own determination about what steps to take once the report has been finalized....

Some people just can’t let go and Dan Rather is a case in point. Almost six years after he questioned George Bush’s National Guard service Rather is still defending the report that led to his eventual departure from the network. Give it a rest Dan. From TVNewser Rather, of course, famously parted ways with CBS after a story about Former President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard was found to be based on faulty documents. Rather sued CBS over his ouster, and most of the charges have since been dismissed. Still, Rather continues to defend the report to...

Investigators have found concrete evidence on computers used by Pfc. Bradley Manning that link him with the leak of classified Afghanistan war reports, a U.S. defense official said. The disclosure came as Defense Secretary Robert Gates pledged Thursday to "aggressively investigate the leak" and find ways to prevent further breaches, and told reporters that he had invited the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist the probe. Defense officials said the FBI was investigating whether civilians aided Pfc. Manning in providing the information to WikiLeaks, a Web-based group that this week released 76,000 secret reports from Afghanistan. Pfc. Manning already was...

John Yoo and Jay Baybee, the two Justice Department officials most responsible for the memos that guided the Bush Administration's policy on harsh interrogations, were cleared by the Obama/Holder Justice Department of professional misconduct. It also cleared Stephen Bradbury, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel. The conclusion resulted from a decision by top career Justice Department executive David Margolis to reverse a recommendation of investigators that found the two lawyers' legal memos did constitute professional misconduct. That tentative conclusion, which was overruled by Margolis, said the lawyers should be referred to their state bar associations for potential disbarment. But...

Senate Democrats have mapped a political battle plan for the March congressional recess that calls on lawmakers to stage press events with active duty military personnel, veterans and emergency responders to bash President Bush on virtually every one of his national security policies. The game plan, devised by the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, is contained in a six-page memo distributed to Democratic senators on Thursday at a closed-door meeting at the Capitol and provided to The Washington Times by a congressional staffer. Titled "Real Security," the political document calls for staged town hall events at...

Could Nancy Pelosi eventually lose her job as Speaker of the House over her incendiary allegation that the CIA lied to her and misled Congress? It's possible and here's why: 1. Her shifting explanations about what she knew about water-boarding and when she knew it indicate at the very least inconsistency and economy with the truth. Check out some of her differing statements here. 2. CIA briefers are professionals - being a briefer is a specialism for fast-track career analysts within the Agency's Directorate of Intelligence. A CIA briefing given to two senior members of Congress without their staffs present...

If there is an independent truth commission into the use of alleged torture, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, could find herself in the dock. After a series of incomplete, belated and apparently contradictory Pelosi accounts of CIA briefings to her and her staff, the big question in Washington today is: What did she know about waterboarding and when did she know it? Former Bush consigliere Karl Rove lays out the charges against her here. Fighting fire with fire today, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying to Congress as a diversionary tactic to cover up lies about Iraq...

The US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has accused the Bush-era CIA of misleading her about alleged torture of suspected terrorists and denied her failure to object to such tactics made her complicit. "At every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue. And that is why we need a 'truth commission,'" to look into controversial "war on terror" tactics, said the top Democrat. Ms Pelosi, a key ally of President Barack Obama, has drawn fierce Republican charges that she knew years ago about harsh techniques such as the controlled drowning known as waterboarding...

The CIA has released a devastating document detailing the dates and explicit details of secret Congressional briefings in which members of Congress were told of the Bush administration’s torture techniques and when they had been used. The document is explicit (PDF here). Most damning, perhaps, is its description of a meeting held between CIA staff and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which shows that Pelosi was briefed on the Bush Administration’s torture techniques in 2002 — even though she’s publicly said she was never told about the use of waterboarding. Equally striking, however, is...

IF President Obama were as crafty as, say, Osama bin Laden, you might wonder if his decision last week to release new "torture" photos this month was part of some clever psych-ops scheme. After all, the decision came only a week after Obama & Co. let loose key memos on "brutal" US interrogation techniques. CIA operatives, the memos showed, had "tortured" prisoners and used sinister tactics designed to exploit fears. Now the Obama folks will hand out scores of new photos from investigations at US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. So is this some new publicity campaign meant to deter...