Free Republic

With the revelation by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the FBI not only relied entirely on the discredited dossier gathered by Christopher Steele for their FISA application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page but that the primary sub-source of that dossier cast doubt upon the claims that President Trump colluded with the Russians in the 2016 election, a liberal narrative has finally been buried. So will the many mainstream media outlets who were hyping the validity of the Steele dossier now apologize? If so, The New Yorker magazine should be at the front of the apology line since...

The FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller repeatedly kept alive a damning narrative that investigators knew to be false: namely, that a junior Trump campaign aide as a favor to the Kremlin had “gutted” an anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine plank in the Republican Party platform at the GOP’s 2016 convention. Federal authorities used this claim to help secure spy warrants on the aide in question, Carter Page, suggesting to the court that he was “an agent of Russia” – even though investigators knew that Page was working for U.S., not Russian, intelligence, and that they had learned from witnesses, emails and...

One section of the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) report that hasn’t gotten as much attention highlights how the FBI not only altered evidence against one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, but also ignored exculpatory evidence to continue obtaining FISA warrants against him. The FBI had believed Page was a foreign agent working with the Russians to help Donald Trump steal the 2016 election. In reality, Page had previously worked with an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency dealing with Russians for years at the beginning of the Obama administration. After the FBI started surveilling Page, he made several public statements about...

Fired FBI Director James Comey ought to be embarrassed. The Inspector General's long awaited report on FISA abuses is out, revealing a systematic pattern of abuses at the bureau on Comey's watch. Rules broken all over the place, nobody punished, nobody following procedures. Under Comey, 'hain't I got the power,' was pretty much the only recognizable modus operandi. That must have been some atmosphere of lawlessness in the once proud agency, and yes, the bureau has since lost public trust as a result of it. Bother him in the least? On the contrary, he's claiming the whole ethical shambles vindicates him. His deputy, Andrew...

It’s now official: Russia, Russia, Russia really was fake news from the start. There was no factual basis for the FBI to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign. That means there was no need for the appointment of a special counsel and that Robert Mueller should have stayed in retirement. It means the two years of rumors and accusations and the giant cloud of suspicions over the White House produced by Mueller’s headhunters were unfair and unjustified. It also means J. Edgar Hoover can finally rest in peace. James Comey is now revealed to be the dirtiest cop ever to run...

For two years, the president of the United States and his followers have loudly declared that the FBI acted unlawfully in conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. They repeatedly told the American people that the FBI had done all sorts of bad things, such as tapping Donald Trump’s wires during the campaign, opening an investigation without adequate cause, with the intent to damage Trump, and inserting secret informants into the Trump campaign.

The Justice Department’s inspector general (IG) report states fired FBI Director James Comey conceded that the Steele dossier was “not ripe enough, mature enough,” to be a complete “intelligence product,” yet it was still used by the bureau to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. “According to Corney, the inclusion of the Steele election reporting as an appendix to the ICA was not a value judgment about the quality of the information. Instead, it reflected the relatively uncorroborated and incomplete status of the FBI’s assessment. Corney told the OIG that the Steele election reporting...

Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy and author of the anti-Trump dossier, was reportedly told that the Justice Department will release information about him that was previously blacked out in the department’s internal watchdog report on the investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign due on Monday. The New York Times, citing two individuals with knowledge of the situation, reported that Attorney General William Barr approved the release of the previously redacted information in Michael Horowitz’s 400-page report. The report called Steele’s heads-up unusual and said he was not given any indication of whether the information would benefit or hurt him. An...

Law scholar Alan Dershowitz predicted the next Democrat elected president of the United States will be impeached as a result of the same "open-ended" criteria the party is currently using to impeach President Trump. "They have created open-ended criteria which bear no relationship to the word of the Constitution itself," Dershowitz said Sunday on Fox News. "If President Trump is impeached, it will set a terrible precedent, which will weaponize impeachment, and the next Democrat who gets elected will be impeached." How many foreign policy decisions have been made by presidents over the years in order to help them get...

The Justice DepartmentÂ’s internal watchdog will release a highly anticipated report Monday that is expected to reject President Donald TrumpÂ’s claims that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and tainted by political bias from FBI leaders. But it is also expected to document errors during the investigation that may animate Trump supporters. The report, as described by people familiar with its findings, is expected to conclude there was an adequate basis for opening one of the most politically sensitive investigations in FBI history and one that Trump has denounced as a witch hunt. It began in secret during TrumpÂ’s 2016 presidential...

<p>There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats’ supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the “dream team,” “all-stars,” and “hunter-killer” legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion — and they likewise proved a complete dud.</p>

One day after Republicans issued a 110-page report arguing that President Trump did not commit an impeachable offense, Democrats doubled down Tuesday with a roughly 300-page report claiming that he did. **SNIP** However, unlike previous presidential impeachments, not a single member of the president’s own party has yielded on the matter. It also reflects the sentiment of most Americans who are split along party lines. This alone should give Democrats pause to reconsider the dangerous path they have undertaken. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., presided over five days of impeachment hearings involving a dozen witnesses. Contemporaneous with the...

The third most senior House Democrat wants a vote on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump - and the charges against him to include obstruction of justice related to the findings of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. **SNIP** Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top lieutenants have, until this point, been circumspect about their intentions, even as the party’s impeachment inquiry heads into its final stages. And many members of the House Democratic Caucus have been operating on an assumption the California Democrat could deny efforts to incorporate the Mueller report into impeachment articles. Publicly, Pelosi has repeatedly insisted no decisions...

FBI and two of its former directors — Robert Mueller and James Comey — look increasingly incompetent ... It is now widely known that bureau officials who were directly tied to the “collusion” investigation against Donald Trump and the email security inquiry against Hillary Clinton had strong political bias against the current president. ... that anti-Trump bias is just the tip of the iceberg. Evidence such as the discredited Russian dossier and the bombshell wiretapping memo make it clear that Comey and the entire agency began with an agenda and then worked backwards, doing whatever was necessary to make their...

The House of Representatives can enforce subpoenasseeking eight years of President Trump’s financial records, an appeals court ruled Tuesday. The majority decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals clears the way for the Democrat-controlled House to seek documents, including tax returns, for Trump and other third-party individuals and entities. The House previously served subpoenas on Deutsche Bank and Capital One for the records, yet Trump immediately sued to block their release. Deutsche Bank previously revealed that, while it has tax returns for some of Trump’s children, it is not in possession of the president’s.

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly said that he discussed the firing of former FBI Director James Comey with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in late 2016 or early 2017, according to a new batch of documents released in relation to former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into election interference. The documents, released due to a CNN and BuzzFeed lawsuit, totaled 295 pages of witness memoranda and notes from FBI interviews that were part of the special counsel's probe. President Trump fired Comey in 2017, saying that he was acting on recommendations from Sessions and Rosenstein. Mueller's probe began...

An illustrated version of the Mueller report has hit number one on Amazon’s pre-release list for educational and nonfiction graphic novels, according to the website. The book entitled “The Mueller Report Illustrated: The Obstruction Investigation” was produced by the staff of The Washington Post and illustrated by artist Jan Feindt. It features a comic book-style version of the events detailed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report released earlier this year. It is set to be released Tuesday and “brings to life the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in an engaging and illuminating presentation,” according to the Amazon...

It’s a little like the proverbial child killing its parents and throwing itself on the mercy of the court because he's now an orphan, but, with the wheels of Barr-Durham-Horowitz justice inexorably turning on them, there are Fusion GPS founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, on a media book tour claiming they are the victims of right-wing vengeance for their role in orchestrating a criminal fraud upon the FISA court and a coup against a sitting president of the United States. Holy Michael Avenatti!

HUGE: Strzok-Page Texts Were Not Unearthed by Sharp FBI Investigative Work – Strzok’s Angry and Scorned Wife Turned Him In After Finding Texts on His Phone! ... the reason corrupt FBI agent Peter Strzok was caught texting his lover in the FBI, Lisa Page, was not due to incredible investigative work. The reason was the oldest explanation in the book – his jealous and scorned wife! We are only now finding out how Peter Strzok got caught texting his mistress Lisa Page at the FBI. He was outed by his wife – ... Sidney Powell summed it up – “There...

Hillary Clinton has a new theory for why former FBI Director James Comey re-opened an investigation into her emails just before the presidential election. “He was under pressure from Rudy Giuliani, others, both former and current FBI officials,” Clinton said in an interview with Charlie Rose on Monday. Since losing the election to Trump, Clinton has railed against Comey over his Oct. 28 decision to re-open the email probe. The decision was made after FBI agents discovered some of Clinton’s emails on a computer shared by her aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner. Weiner was under investigation at...