Posted on 07/28/2017 9:23:25 AM PDT by pgkdan
From a press release that hit on Thursday…
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Judiciary Committee Republicans today sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate unaddressed matters, some connected to the 2016 election and others, including many actions taken by Obama Administration officials like Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The letter follows yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee approval of H. Res. 446, as amended, to request documents pertaining to the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary Clinton.
In their letter, the Judiciary Committee members express concern that the directive given to Special Counsel Robert Mueller is narrow in scope and many concerns arising out of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath are not being investigated. The members call for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate grave concerns such as former Attorney General Lynch’s directive to former FBI Director Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the investigation into former Secretary Clinton; the FBI and Justice Department’s investigative decisions related to the Clinton email investigation, including the immunity deals given to potential co-conspirators; selected leaks of classified information that unmasked U.S. persons incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community; and the FBI’s reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, among many others issues.
If you’re sick and tired of the never-ending “Trump And The Russians” scandal, which for all its hype has produced scant little actual evidence of anything other than desultory cooperation on the part of the president’s camp with an investigation it quite reasonably believes is a kangaroo court, this letter from Goodlatte’s committee might just be what the doctor ordered.
Because as Washington scandals go, Trump And The Russians doesn’t even make it out of Double-A ball. What Goodlatte and the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee want is a special counsel to take us up to the Triple-A or major league scandal level, because there are opportunities for playing time available.
The unmasking issue still has a lot of undiscovered meat on its bones; we’ve already seen a little evidence of that. The Lynch-Comey-Phoenix Airport nexus deserves a lot more scrutiny than it’s received, as do those immunity grants. And the leaks without a doubt deserve a full investigation, and some smug SOB’s from the Deep State surely deserve lengthy prison terms.
But the Fusion GPS business — and the long-simmering and now-burgeoning Awan brothers scandal — are monsters hiding in D.C.’s closet. Here’s to both those scandals continuing to crackle and spark over the next several months, on the way to full explosions the legacy media can no longer contain.
Readers of this column already have an understanding of the Awan brothers scandal, as this space covered a substantial amount of the background of it back in February when things first started happening. Click here to see that background; we’ll give a very short summary of it now. he central figure in this scandal is a Pakistani national named Imran Awan, who appears to be connected in some way to his country’s intelligence service. Awan is an IT professional who was hired in 2004 to handle computer equipment for Florida Democrat congressman Robert Wexler, and he then picked up a job as a shared staffer to work for Wexler’s colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Awan rode along with Wasserman Schultz as she ascended to the top of the Democratic Party structure, and soon not only was his boss the chair of the Democratic National Committee but Awan’s relationship with her led to his building a client list of some 80 Democrat House members who were using either Imran or other members of his family (a pair of brothers, one of their wives, his own wife) in a sizable little empire he’d built.
And in the meantime, the Awan family was engaging in a pattern of financial activities that looked a whole lot like a mafia operation — questionable real estate deals, bank fraud, kidnapping and extortion, a used-car dealership that might well have been a front for moving stolen cars to Pakistan for sale, and so on. Awan was arrested at Dulles International Airport on Monday as he tried to flee the country while the FBI and Capitol Hill Police were closing in on a bank fraud indictment. In January he had wired some $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to two individuals in Pakistan; he was trying to board a flight to Lahore when he had the cuffs put on him.
But the real juice with the Awans isn’t the bank fraud or the possible stolen cars. The real scandal here is the stolen computers — and the stolen information. It’s alleged that the Awans illegally downloaded documents from their clients, some of whom were on the House Intelligence Committee and other sensitive committees, and even walked off with congressional computers. The FBI, in fact, seized a number of CPU’s and hard drives found at a house owned by Imran that he was renting to a military couple after the tenants had found the equipment partially destroyed in the garage and called the authorities. We don’t know what was on those hard drives.
There are even allegations the Awans were blackmailing their clients with information they’d found in their e-mails. Your imagination can likely conjure up all kinds of entertaining scenarios around that theme.
But the piece de resistance with the Awan brothers scandal is the revelation that Imran Awan, with his foreign intelligence connections, his criminal appearance and his persistent financial problems despite apparently not lacking in the ability to make a buck, had the password to Wasserman Schultz’ iPad from which she answered her e-mail… as DNC chair.
Forget about the Russians and their supposed hacking of the DNC e-mails. If you’re really curious about who got to that information and would have been in a position to shop it to the highest bidder, Imran Awan is the most likely culprit in the room.
Things are moving very quickly on this case, and it’s somewhat telling that Awan was released on bond after being caught trying to flee the country. He has a tracking bracelet on his ankle, but what makes more sense is that he may have turned states’ evidence in exchange for being let out of jail. Awan’s attorney is former Bill Clinton go-fer Chris Gowen, and the lawyer’s statement after he’d been arrested reads like a press release from a campaign operative rather than a criminal attorney; bizarrely so, one might say. It might be that Awan is rolling on Wasserman Schultz and the Clintons have decided to hang her out to dry in order to insulate themselves from whatever blowback the DNC e-mails might generate for them.
Or maybe that isn’t possible anymore. Former Washington police detective Rod Wheeler, who you’ve probably seen on Fox News from time to time and who most recently was in the news as having done some private snooping in the Seth Rich case, has intimated there is a connection between that case and that of the Awan brothers. We’re not going to try to connect those dots without more information, but one’s imagination might run riot with those.
Meanwhile, Republicans in both the House and the Senate are exceptionally curious about Fusion GPS, and with good reason. In case you’re not familiar with this outfit, it’s the “opposition research and strategic communications” firm co-founded by former Wall Street Journal reporters Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson which played a significant role in the 2016 election. It was Fusion GPS which commissioned the infamous and debunked “pee pee dossier,” written by former British spy Christopher Steele, sourced largely from Steele’s Russian contacts and containing a mountain of scurrilous and implausible allegations about Donald Trump’s misbehaviors. Fusion GPS was initially contracted by anti-Trump Republican donors, but after Trump got the GOP nomination it was Democrats paying the freight for their work product… and before it was over it looks like James Comey’s FBI, amazingly, was picking up the tab.
That last part is of special interest to Sen. Charles Grassley and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has made a priority out of Fusion GPS, and had called Simpson to testify. He did, but only in private, and only after threatening to take the Fifth. That’s his right, but what does an oppo researcher need the Fifth Amendment for?
But there’s more with Fusion GPS. On Wednesday Tucker Carlson had as a guest on his show one Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan native of Norwegian descent who runs a watchdog outfit called the Human Rights Foundation, and Halvorssen told a harrowing story of Fusion GPS attempting to destroy his life with a smear campaign because he’d blown the whistle on a crooked contract one of Fusion’s clients had with the Venezuelan government to build power plants. That story also got told in a letter Halvorssen sent to Grassley’s committee. And then there is Fusion’s other client, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the “Russian lawyer” whose meeting with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Paul Manafort has been bandied about as some sort of smoking gun proving collusion with the Russians. It turns out that Veselnitskaya had hired Fusion to help her push to overturn the Magnitsky Act, a sanctions bill targeting crooked Russian oligarchs and human rights abusers. In none of these cases did Fusion bother to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registry Act, which would put them on the wrong side of the law.
Grassley’s committee, and Goodlatte’s committee, would like to know if this entire Russian business was a setup cooked-up by Fusion’s dirty-tricks shop with the collusion of a few actors in the Obama administration. It’s hard to blame them.
There’s a lot of debate about Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra these days, but nobody is really denying the swamp exists. And nobody can — not with Fusion GPS and the Awan brothers skulking around in the muck.
Tell Mueller and his team they are immediately transferred to the Awan Brothers and DNC.
Thanks - we need to see every one of them - and ignore those who might bitch about re-posts, they’ll get over it and they also seem to think everyone spends 20 hours a day on FR so we all see everything posted the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk4asQ_ztjg
It’d be funny if the Awan brothers scandal engulfed Mueler.
Come on JEFF SESSIONS, name a pit-bull special prosecutor. Hell, here there were actual crimes, likely of enormous consequence -— unlike Russia, Russia, Russia.
Mueller was FBI Director when disgraced Congressman Robert Wexler and DWS set up the Awans’ spy ring.
RussiaRussiaRussia is a smokescreen for all of the Democrats dirty deeds.
“Who Killed Seth Rich For Leaking The DNC E-Mails?”
Answer that question and you’ll unravel the truth.
The only problem with about 99% of such Congressional investigations run by Republicans is they never go anywhere. They drag on in between elections, usually ignored by the MSM, and produce no worthwhile results. So color me skeptical that anything will come of this story.
They could arrest and waterboard the guy in charge of Fusion GPS and get to the bottom of whatever anyone thinks about the 2016 elections in one day.
This **IS** the story. The use of the Awan bros over however many years during which they directly leaked Congressional information of every description from many Congressional staffs to the Pakis is a major story. Of minimally, ultra careless handling of classified and confidential documents; of treason at worst.
The production of the famous hooker-hotel-pissing dossier is the linchpin item in the entire Democrat story. Nothing Trump is even imagined doing is as vile as that. And that document, McCain sent his own personal staff member to hand carry back to the US where he gave it to the FBI. Where Comey held it over Trump’s head. Where Brennan, a skunk of the very first order believed with all his heart this was the truth. Who paid for the production of that dossier?
Arrest and waterboard the head of Fusion GPS. Today.
The Awan brothers were not hired in spite of the fact they were scumbags they were hired **because** they are scumbags.
their very high pay was because fixing computers and maintaining routers were their side jobs, their main job was to work as partisan spies against the very narrow enemies of Hillary and the DNC.
this is a return to Watergate and the dirty tricks team and the committee to reelect the president but this time the liberal version.
The Awan brothers are the Watergate burglars basically.
You can also tell Muller there was no crime, ever. ..to pack up his tax-paid and expensive lawyers and and get the heck out of Dodge on the horses they rode in on.
It is amazing and infuriating how the major media outlets completely goose step to the commands of the DNC. They are in perfect obedient alignment, and willfully spike stories that are detrimental to the Democrats and the left. They do this despite the atrocity of the scandal and the potential exposure and jeopardy to our national security.
They silently cooperate with the DNC by not reporting on this story, until it gets too big, and the MSM itself will be exposed as too much of a lackey press.
It is the story that never goes away, and why they are merely Fake News.
The Podesta emails were a case in point, demonstrating the hideous fusion of one political party and the Fifth Estate, to the detriment of the democratic process, and America.
The media’s arrogance blinds them to the destruction they wreak, but the offspring of such unnatural congress is the angry distrust of the media that is now sown into the consciousness of millions of voters. Citizens are turning to other sources they can trust, and continually repeat the mantra of “fake news” at almost every political mainstream report.
Trump didn’t turn people from the media, he just spoke about the phenomenon publicly.
There is a Pulitzer Prize just hanging there like low hanging fruit for the first Lefty journalist who wants to run with it.
Of course they won’t be able to attend the Lefty cocktail circuit anymore but, hey, they will have enough book royalties to throw their own parties.
Nah, they will just sit there like a good little Lefty with their thumbs up their asses repeating the Lefty talking points, too afraid to go against the Left Media Cartel.
Hat tip to Lorianne
Gateway Pundit ^ | 27 July 2017 | Jim Hoft
Posted on 7/27/2017, 8:48:45 AM by Lorianne
Democrats are scrambling over the recent activity surrounding the Muslim Band of Brothers who worked for the DNC over the past few years as IT Specialists. This story must be really big due to the fact that the liberal mainstream media has not reported on it.
A search of guests at the White House show that Imran’s younger brother Abid was a guest at the White House on Thursday, November 21, 2013. He arrived at 5pm and didn’t depart for 7 hours. He attended with another 17 individuals.
What was the IT Specialist doing at the White House for 7 hours after 5pm in 2013, why was he there, who was with him and where was Obama?
“ Why did Obama’s staff hold a 7 hr. meeting at the White House with #ImranAwan‘s brother Abid Awan? Who are the 17 people? For what purpose? pic.twitter.com/uG0wOU5I2N
How about Joseph Rago..about a week ago......
Joseph Rago, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for challenging President Obama’s health-care reform efforts, was found dead at his Manhattan apartment on Thursday, the Journal reports. He was 34.
He was reportedly investigating Hillary's involvement in the purchase of Russian drug company Veropharm by Abbot Labs at a time in 2014 when sanctions against Russia would have prevented the sale.
The purchase was accomplished by a US shell company named Kew Garden Hills, LLC (registered in Delaware –and- Hillary Clinton’s home State of New York) acquiring approximately 98% of Veropharm shares—and then their being bought by Abbott Laboratories. Hillary has ties to both Abbot Labs and Kew Garden Hills LLC.
....more crickets.
Hopefully McCain will be sucked into this as well, considering that it was one of his “aides” that delivered
the dossier to the US.
Bump
The OFA (Organizing For Action) the Marxist group that trains community organizers for Obama before his second election and now I bet helping to smear the Trump administration....
Has NYPD reported a cause of death for Rago yet?
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