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McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

The Justice Department will no longer seek the death penalty for two alleged MS-13 gang members accused of brutally killing several teenagers in Long Island, New York. In a letter to a federal judge, Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Attorney General Merrick Garland directed prosecutors to withdraw notices of intention to seek the death penalty against brothers, Alexi Saenz and Jairo Saenz. "We write on behalf of the Government in the above-captioned matter, to provide an update to the Court with respect to the status of the death penalty deauthorization requests of...

Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests. But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned...

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda. His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking. Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in...

THE ALAVI FOUNDATION REGULARLY SENT FIVE-FIGURE DONATIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION. An Iranian foundation recently convicted as a front organization for the theocratic regime in Tehran donated five-figure sums to the infamous Clinton Foundation. Last week, a New York grand jury ruled that the government can seize a building majority-owned by the Alavi Foundation, agreeing with prosecutors that it is a front group for the mullahs in Tehran. The foundation used the Manhattan skyscraper to garner hundreds of millions in revenue so it could supply cash for its “charitable” endeavors inside the United States. The Alavi Foundation rarely donated to...

Andrew Weissmann, who served as one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies on the Russia probe, offered a Ukrainian oligarch a sweetheart deal in 2017 in exchange for information on President Donald Trump, according to a new report. In July 2017, Weissmann, who has been labeled Mueller’s “pit bull” because of his aggressive prosecutorial style, met with attorneys representing Dmitry Firtash, an energy magnate who was indicted on bribery charges in 2014, reports The Hill. The story cites sources familiar with Weissmann’s offer and defense memos written in meetings with the prosecutor. One of the defense memos said that Weissmann claimed...

An official who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation wrote in a recently released email that he or she was in possession of an iPhone belonging to Lisa Page three days after the former FBI lawyer’s last day on the job and at a time when the device was thought to have been lost. The special counsel’s office (SCO) and the Justice Department previously claimed to have no documents to show who handled Page’s iPhone after she turned it in on July 14, 2017, or who improperly wiped it two weeks later, before it could be checked for...

A former State Department official destroyed reports he received from former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a Senate report released on Tuesday. Jonathan Winer, who was Steele’s point of contact at the State Department, said that Steele asked him to destroy the records in January 2017, the same month that the Trump dossier became public. The Senate report also says that Winer initially denied that he arranged a meeting in October 2016 for Steele at the State Department. Winer corrected his statement in a follow-up interview after he was shown State Department visitor logs. A former State Department official...

One of Venezuela’s most powerful leaders may have put out an order to kill Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a fervent critic of the South American country’s government, according to intelligence obtained by the U.S. last month. Though federal authorities couldn’t be sure at the time if the uncorroborated threat was real, they took it seriously enough that Rubio has been guarded by a security detail for several weeks in both Washington and Miami. Believed to be behind the order: Diosdado Cabello, the influential former military chief and lawmaker from the ruling socialist party who has publicly feuded with Rubio. At...

Full title: Sean Hannity was laughed at when he said he was spied on. The proof just came out. He was. For years Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that the Obama administration was spying on him. The public release Friday of a text-message exchange between him and President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort suggests he was perhaps at least partially correct. Unsealed by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the far-left Obama appointee with a suspiciously Democrat-friendly history, the text messages date from July 14, 2017 to June 5, 2018, and show Hannity speaking sympathetically to Manafort...

Mark Zaid, the attorney for the Ukraine call whistleblower, on Thursday defended a series of tweets from 2017 in which he predicted a "coup" against President Trump and promised to “get rid of him” -- saying in a statement the tweets referred to “a completely lawful process.” Shortly after the publication of a Fox News article Wednesday highlighting the stream of anti-Trump tweets, Trump himself lambasted Zaid during a rally in Louisiana, calling the attorney “disgraceful.” After tweeting lightheartedly about the controversy Wednesday night, Zaid sent Fox News a formal statement Thursday in which he said the social media posts...

Mark Zaid, one of the attorneys representing the whistleblower at the center of the Democrats' ongoing impeachment inquiry, tweeted conspicuously in January 2017 that a "coup has started" and that "impeachment will follow ultimately." Then, in July 2017, Zaid remarked, "I predict @CNN will play a key role in @realDonaldTrump not finishing out his full term as president."

A few people have started looking at the connections behind Mark Zaid, the attorney for CIA “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella. What is starting to emerge is evidence of what CTH outlined yesterday; the current impeachment process is part of a coup continuum, and everything around the whistleblower is part of a long-ago planned and pre-constructed operation. Two strong examples are very poignant: Mark S. Zaid @MarkSZaidEsq "It's very scary. We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters. We have to" 9:45 PM · Jul 1, 2017 AND Mark S. Zaid...

A protester shouted and threw what appeared to be Russian flags at Mr. Trump, screaming “Trump is treason!” and “We should be talking about treason not tax cuts!” CBS News’ Nancy Cordes reports that the man has been identified as Ryan Clayton of the Americans Take Action group. Clayton made a similar disturbance at the Capitol when he threw a large Russian flag in the way of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, back in July when he met with Senate Intelligence investigators as part of their ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. This was Ryan Clayton from...

.. At a security conference this week, the director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, criticized The New York Times for a recent article about an officer who was tapped to run the agency’s Iran operations, a newsworthy promotion because it was an indication of the hard line against Iran that President Trump promised during his campaign. Mr. Pompeo said that the publication of the official’s name, Michael D’Andrea, was “unconscionable” and put his covert status in jeopardy. Mr. Pompeo’s comments led to a wider discussion about the publication of Mr. D’Andrea’s name, and some readers wrote to us to express...

CALIFORNIA DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL ARRESTED ON CHILD PORN CHARGES JULY 27, 2017 CRIMELIBERALPOLITICS126 COMMENTS2 MIN READ California Deputy Attorney General Raymond Liddy has been charged with possessing child pornography following an extensive, months-long investigation. According to Reuters, Liddy, the 53-year-old son of Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, was arrested at his home in Coronado, California on Tuesday. He stands accused of possessing images depicting minors under the age of 12 in sexual situations. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, the investigation began when an electronic service provider tipped the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children off in January about...

he investigation of Michael Cohen began in the summer of 2017, nearly a year before federal agents raided the home and office of President Donald Trump's former lawyer and fixer, according to search warrants made public Tuesday. The newly-released documents show that the first FBI warrant was executed on July 19, 2017, targeting Cohen's Gmail account and seeking messages from all of 2016 up to July 2017. The FBI raided Cohen's office and hotel suite on April 9, 2018, seeking evidence of bank fraud and hush money payments to two women, porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal,...

**SNIP** In March 2016, the House Inspector General’s Office revealed that Awan bought almost $38,000 in equipment, paid for in installments below $500, apparently to avoid having the equipment logged in the House of Representatives’ inventory. Many of the items were delivered directly to his home. (This itself is not an unusual practice because deliveries to the Capitol building require extra security screenings.) This behavior led the House Sergeant-at-Arms to tell Representatives five months later that they believed this was a case of possible procurement fraud. By October, the Inspector General’s Office had discovered Awan and his family logged into...

A secret memo marked “URGENT” detailed how the House Democratic Caucus’s server went “missing” soon after it became evidence in a cybersecurity probe. The secret memo also said more than “40 House offices may have been victims of IT security violations.” In the memo, Congress’s top law enforcement official, Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, along with Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, wrote, “We have concluded that the employees [Democratic systems administrator Imran Awan and his family] are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems ... shortly after an IG report came...