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The [new IG Report] reveals that Comey told Obama and other officials at a White House Situation Room meeting...that "the FBI was trying to determine whether any U.S. person had worked with the Russians" and that they were looking into "four individuals with some association or connection to the Trump campaign." Others present at the meeting [were Rice, Clapper, and Brennan], none of whom were interviewed for [the new IG Report]. Incredibly, Comey claimed that no one at the meeting "responded or followed up with any questions" (p. 110).

The newly released report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, along with his groundbreaking testimony before Congress, noted the material failures of the FBI—“not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command”—with regard to the FISA warrant application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The inspector general’s findings were so significant that he recommended the FBI’s “entire chain of command” outlined in his report to the DOJ for “consideration of how to assess and address their performance failures.” According to Horowitz, these failures prevented the Office of...

Regardless of whether you would support or not support the vigorous defense of Michael Flynn, I would hope we would all agree a fulsome discovery of all relevant background material is a cornerstone of justice appropriately applied. With that in mind it is concerning how Attorney General Bill Barr would prefer to keep DOJ conduct against Flynn hidden from public review. Consider… ♦Would it be valuable for Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to know the FBI was discussing how to “lock in” charges against [Flynn] in a “formal chargeable way”? Would it be valuable for Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to consider...

In an order released moments ago, Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has denied all of the Brady requests by the Flynn defense lawyer and summarily rejected the position of defense counsel. Flynn sentencing is scheduled for January 28th, 2020. Judge Sullivan relies heavily on the Mueller report and finds: the case was adequately predicated and authorized by Rod Rosenstein; the original guilty plea to Judge Contreras was appropriately informed; the government followed all appropriate notifications for brady material; the evidence of Flynn’s guilt is accurately demonstrable to the guilty plea Mr. Flynn accepted; and there was no prosecutorial misconduct.

President Donald Trump again challenged James Comey on Sunday, demanding an apology from the former FBI Director after he admitted he “was wrong” to defend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for the surveillance of former Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong. Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15,...

For more than two years, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told us President Donald Trump has done something wrong. He didn't know exactly what but he just knew Trump was involved in some sort of wrong doing. First, it was Russia! Russia! Russia! Once Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia, he latched onto Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And that's how we're currently at the impeachment fiasco that the Democrats are ramming through the House. What's interesting, however, is Schiff is suddenly changing his tune. During a Sunday morning interview with...

On Tuesday, attorneys for Michael Flynn filed a sentencing memorandum and letters of support for the former Army lieutenant general in federal court. The sentencing memorandum reveals for the first time concrete evidence that the FBI created multiple 302 interview summaries of Flynn’s questioning by now-former FBI agent Peter Strzok and a second unnamed agent, reported to be FBI Special Agent Joe Pientka. Further revelations may be forthcoming soon following an order entered late yesterday by presiding judge Emmet Sullivan, directing the special counsel’s office to file with the court any 302s or memorandum relevant to Flynn’s interview. Flynn, who...

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...

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the bureau and the Justice Department, alleging privacy violations. In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Page alleges the agencies unlawfully provided text messages between her and former FBI agent Peter Strzok to members of the media in December 2017.

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>

The alternative to a purely domestic intelligence operation targeting a major political party's candidate for the presidency (and later, president) was to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence (FCI) "threat" that could then be "imported" back into the United States. Plausible deniability, the Holy Grail of covert activities, was in reach for the plotters if they could develop an FCI operation outside the continental United States (OCONUS) involving FBI confidential human sources (Halper, Mifsud, others?) that would act as "lures" (intelligence jargon associated with double agent operations) to ensnare Trump associates. We have evidence of these machinations from December 2015 when FBI...

 A fascinating article, written by Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell, a former counterintelligence case officer, recently appeared on the Gatestone Institute’s website. Just when we thought we could recite every text message ever exchanged between Page and Strzok, along comes a new one. In December 2015, Page wrote to Strzok, “You get all our oconus lures approved? ;).”Because, believe it or not, the FBI is prohibited from such activities as investigating a major political party’s candidate for the presidency, they needed to find an alternative. Farrell explains that their alternative was to “manufacture a foreign counterintelligence (FCI) “threat” that could then be “imported” back into the United States.”...

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...

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...

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.