Posted on 05/15/2019 11:23:10 AM PDT by a little elbow grease
(snip) -- I’ve seen the spreadsheet, Martha, I have seen each factual assertion listed in that dossier, and then I’ve seen the FBI’s justification. And when you’re citing newspaper articles as corroboration for a factual assertion that you have made, you don’t need an FBI agent to go do a Google search,” said Gowdy, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and is a Fox News contributor.
“When the name Sidney Blumenthal is included as part of your corroboration, and when you’re the world’s leading law enforcement agency, you have a problem.”
Gowdy did not further explain how the FBI used information from Blumenthal, but his claim could be a potential bombshell as investigators probe the FBI’s use of the dossier in its investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Blumenthal, who is one of the Clintons’ closest political allies, was involved in shopping around a report that contained some of the same allegations about Donald Trump that were included in Steele’s document. That eight-page report was authored by Cody Shearer, another longtime Clinton insider who is close friends with Blumenthal.
Both Shearer and Blumenthal are considered controversial figures. Shearer first came to prominence in the early 1990s after he peddled false allegations that then-Vice President Dan Quayle bought marijuana from a man who was in prison at the time. Blumenthal helped stoke false rumors in the 2008 campaign that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at citizenfreepress.com ...
__________
Yes.
Lots of this is mystifying to me.
Trey Gowdy has a new job.
https://youtu.be/I_X0TKL3bqk
Blumenthal is Hillary's handmaiden......read on.
........one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails........released by the State Department under judicial order....... was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the then-Secy of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton.
This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.
To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.
NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”
We can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports. There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position.
<><> How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question.
<><> Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question.
<><> So is: How did not one aide to Secy Clinton notice the highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?
<><> Last, why did Hillary's State Department see fit to release this email, unredacted, to the public?
Lots of this is mystifying to me.
Actually, it’s not mystifying at all. The GOP has been unsupportive of POTUS simply because they don’t want to put their criminal Democrat friends in jail to the benefit of Donald J. Trump and the MAGA agenda. They’d rather have POTUS distracted and hamstrung by a Coup. First Mueller and now Dems in Congress.
Damn Right! I feel exactly the same.
Unfortunately Trey has never retracted his displaced respect, regard and appreciation for some nasty characters, so long as they made lofty claims about Justice and apple pie. Comey for one.
Trey took his own loft a little too far. Articulate and rather a legal oracle himself, his kind words for the wrong guy were not misunderstood.
Otherwise, Gowdy is a profoundly respected master of the Art of legal argument, whip quick to knock out anybody, anywhere, in a verbal match up.
His oratory is all over Youtube and often deservedly inspires no small degree of awe.
Sidney Blumenthal?
Does he still beat women up?
Yes. That’s a fact. And another fact is that Blumenthal and Shear generated a dossier that looked strikingly similar to the GPS dossier just from doing Google searches of the internet. When confronted with it, Steele said something to the effect that it is just more confirmatory info.
Hardly. What it shows is that whoever wrote the dossier got the info from the internet, not from top secret Russian sources.
On the other hand, I am willing to concede the point that it came from the Russians. That makes their case even more indefensible.
The ever-vigilant Judicial Watch has tracked this unpleasant man – “Sid Vicious” — over the years:
<><>(A) how Hillary Clinton relied on him in defiance of President Obama;
<><>(B) how he and Hillary emailed obsessively during her State Dept tenure;
<><>(C) how she originally wanted him to be a high-ranking adviser; Obama said no.
<><> (D) how he availed himself of State Dept slush funds; made a bundle with a bogus African program;
<><> (E) all the while Sid was an employee of the Clinton Foundation at a salary of $350,000 per annum.
<><> (F) Blumenthal was employed by the C/F to ...wait for it....record Bill's (cough) "presidential legacy."
<><> (G) Blumenhal had private business interests salivating after govt contracts by goading Hillary into declaring war on Libya.
AND THERE'S MORE---MUCH MORE---ABOUT THIS INDIVIDUAL'S MARAUDING ACTIVITIES
Wow Liz. This is serious stuff and the first I have heard this story. But we’ve had 6 years of Obama and 2 years of Trump to sort it out.
The leak from NSA should be known by now. The fact that Hillary is not behind bars is tragic but not surprising. The facts seem quite clear in her case. But the NSA leaker appears to have escaped judgement.
I also think Obama’s so-called animosity to Blumenthal was a Big Act.....to separate Obama from all the heinous crimes going on.
“... you don’t rely on news reports ...”
Particularly news reports that the FBI helped Steele shop around to the media in order to create something to base their warrant application on.
And looks to be as queer as a 3 dollar bill!
Also file under: Bombshell
“Gowdy was defending the spying six months ago.”
Yeh, I’m guessing we don’t know as yet the “rest of the story” on ole country boy Trey. He may turn up as a above the fold head liner before all this is over. We shall see....
Good lord... Come on. Try a little harder. Please.
It is not a blog, it is a summary of links to different articles, one of the many alternatives to Drudge.
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