Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey, Breitbart, Daniel Nussbaum, May 9, 2017
AP Photo
President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, according to a statement from the White House.
In a statement from the press office, the White House said Trump acted on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Borenstein.
Report: House Investigation of Susan Rice Scandal Expanding, PJ Media, Debra Heine, April 12, 2017
(Please see also, A Shoe Drops: Obama Administration Spied on Carter Page [Updated] — DM)
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Fox News reported Tuesday night that members of the House Intelligence Committee have expanded their investigation into the Susan Rice surveillance controversy.
Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, investigative reporter Adam Housley said the following:
They’re looking into allegations where Americans including politicians have possibly been unmasked and had their information collected into the files, similar to what they did to the Trump team.
Housley also said that both the House and Senate investigations are being stonewalled:
They say the FBI is being very difficult. We’re told [investigators] just want to know about the unmasking. How frequent was this? Who was doing it? Why were they being unmasked?
Housley added:
[A Committee member says the FBI is] going to have to turn everything over or we’re not going to authorize the congressionally approved 702 program which allows them to do this in the first place. This investigation is full-blown.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is up for reauthorization in 2017. The program surveils non-U.S. persons believed to be located outside the United States, incidentally sweeping up the communications of Americans as well, in order to acquire foreign intelligence.
O’Reilly asked Malia Zimmerman, an investigative reporter working with Housley, if the FBI was investigating the case. Zimmerman answered:
There’s a big question about the FBI’s role in this and there’s concern in the House about generally how the FBI is handling this case.
She added that FBI Director James Comey has yet to come back to the Hill to answer the 100 questions the House Intelligence Committee wants answered:
The FBI claims to be “preparing the information,” but it’s been four weeks, Bill.
O’Reilly suggested getting Attorney General Jeff Sessions involved, “because he’s Comey’s boss.”
Housley said they were making progress on the story, but because of the sensitive and classified nature of the information, it’s been difficult work.
Zimmerman added that some of the whistleblowers who have been talking to them may come forward and provide testimony to the House Intelligence Committee:
That would really start to expand this investigation even further.
Unmasking Susan Rice and her NSC dead-enders, American Thinker, Monica Showalter, April 3, 2017
It’s time to start investigating this arrogant abuse of power now. Comey has not stated whether he is investigating these people or not, and this is proper. But with these dead-enders clearly threatening the Trump presidency, it’s time to see a hard hand come out against these deep-staters who don’t know when to leave office, and who subscribe to the leftist situational ethics of ‘by any means necessary.’ They are poison for our republic and if they are not removed, they will destroy the Trump presidency
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Journalist/activist Mike Cernovich reports that former White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice obtained intelligence reports showing the identities of innocent Americans who incidentally spoke to foreign officials under security sweeps for spying or intelligence activities. Under U.S. law, U.S. persons are protected from such disclosure, which could be dry-cleaners asking envoys to pick up their laundry or wrong number phone messages spilling their guts about their mothers-in-law. If such U.S. persons get swept up in surveillance, they are protected. But only if they remain ‘masked,’ which is the law of the land.
Cernovich says the White House Counsel’s office has confirmed that Rice was one of the few officials with the authority to make the requests to unmask the innocent Americans caught up in surveillance dragnets. There was no national security reason to do so, but she did. It makes a lot of sense if the aim is political, however, and White House spokesman Sean Spicer has pointed out that their goal was ‘to leak stuff.’ Based on White House logs, she did, during the transition back when angry miserable Obama White House officials frowned in a group photo for the cameras.
The White House counsel’s office disclosed these logs to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who has been as responsible a steward of America’s secrets as anyone (and said nothing). But it would mean that Rice had to have been responsible for the illegal leaking to the press of the legitimate activities of people like her NSC successor Mike Flynn, for political rather than national security purposes. This would be true whether she did it herself or dispatched a flunky like fellow NSC official Ben Rhodes or Joe Biden’s NSC man Colin Kahl to execute the dirty-tricks skullduggery.
It’s par for the course. Rice was the speaker of the infamous phony White House talking points on why four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were slaughtered in Benghazi on 9/11/12, repeatedly stating for the press that the attack on the U.S. compound was the act of a spontaneous crowd that got out of control over a video, and not the pre-planned, lethally executed al-Qaida terrorist attack it was. After that, she went onto support the admittedly phony narratives about the Iran Deal, which her buddy Ben Rhodes, a creative writing major, cooked up out of thin air, just as he did the Benghazi talking points.
Cernovich reports that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (caught on Wikileaks for being in the tank with Obama) had the information, and chose to sit on it to protect the former president.
Rice, like Rhodes, has the farthest of far-left backgrounds, and the highest of malice against the incoming president. Rhodes never was able to pass a background check to obtain a security clearance and continues to mock and berate Trump & Co, as if he thinks he owned the job and now they took it. Another coeval at NSC, Colin Kahl, who was attached to Joe Biden, seems to have laid out the diabolical plans for picking off Trump’s lieutenants one by one. The tweets he issues are unbelievable, here is one:
The 2nd essential step is purging or marginalizing the “Axis of Ideologues” in the West Wing: Bannon, Miller, Anton, Gorka, KT McFarland.14/
6:21 AM – 11 Mar 2017
With a pattern of malice and mishandled security information centered around NSC dead-enders, the one thing we can see is that there is a coterie of illegal leakers who will compromise national security to enact their political aims.
Devin Nunes pointedly asked Comey whether he knew that illegally leaking national security secrets was a jailtime offense. The FBI director said yes.
It’s time to start investigating this arrogant abuse of power now. Comey has not stated whether he is investigating these people or not, and this is proper. But with these dead-enders clearly threatening the Trump presidency, it’s time to see a hard hand come out against these deep-staters who don’t know when to leave office, and who subscribe to the leftist situational ethics of ‘by any means necessary.’ They are poison for our republic and if they are not removed, they will destroy the Trump presidency.
Russia? No, the Pony in the Manure Is the Corruption of our Intelligence Officials, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, April 2, 2017
There’s so much in print and online about the House and Senate intelligence committees and Russian “collusion” with Trump that I can’t blame people with real lives to lead who just throw their hands up and garden or go hiking. Some will assume there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere, as Ronald Reagan used to joke about the kid digging through manure. I think there is, but it isn’t that Russia corrupted the 2016 election, it’s that Obama and his closest aides, including some at the highest level in the intelligence community, illegally intercepted one or more Republican candidates’ communications before the election, circulated them widely to their cohorts and then tried to use this information to defeat and later to hamstring Trump when Hillary — to their surprise — lost the election.
I also suspect that the attacks on Flynn have nothing to do with his Russian contacts which he disclosed, but, rather, to misdeeds respecting the Middle East, particularly Iran, the country he observed as Obama’s head of the DIA.
The Surveillance and “Unmasking” of Trump and his Associates
We learned this week that surveillance of Trump began long before he was the Republican nominee, and that the names in the intercepted communications were “unmasked” — that is, identified by name or context — by someone high up in the intelligence community.
In addition, citizens affiliated with Trump’s team who were unmasked were not associated with any intelligence about Russia or other foreign intelligence, sources confirmed. The initial unmasking led to other surveillance, which led to other private citizens being wrongly unmasked, sources said.
Nunes and Surveillance Reports
The best summation of this week’s distraction — respecting chairman of the House intelligence committee, Devin Nunes — is Victor Davis Hanson’s which I urge those of you interested to read in its entirety.
First, the central question remains who leaked what classified information for what reasons; second, since when is it improper or even unwise for an apprehensive intelligence official to bring information of some importance to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for external review — in a climate of endemic distrust of all intelligence agencies?[snip] Nunes also said that the surveillance shown to him “was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.” Further, he suggested that the surveillance may have involved high-level Obama officials. When a reporter at Nunes’ second March 22 press conference asked, “Can you rule out the possibility that senior Obama-administration officials were involved in this?” Nunes replied, “No, we cannot.” Ipso facto these are startling disclosures of historical proportions — if true, of an anti-constitutional magnitude comparable to Watergate. Given the stakes, we should expect hysteria to follow, and it has followed. [snip]
Some notion of such intrigue, or rather the former nexus between Congress, the Obama administration, the intelligence agencies, and the monitoring of incoming Trump officials, was inadvertently disclosed recently by former Obama-administration Department of Defense deputy assistant secretary and current MSNBC commentator Evelyn Farkas. In an interview that originally aired on March 2 and that was reported on this week by Fox, Farkas seemed to brag on air about her own efforts scrambling to release information on the incoming Trump team’s purported talks with the Russians. Farkas’s revelation might put into context the eleventh-hour Obama effort to more widely disseminate intelligence findings among officials, one that followed even earlier attempts to broaden access to Obama-administration surveillance.
In any event, the White House invited the highest ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to come view the documents themselves. Adam Schiff did, and reported he’d seen what Nunes had, after which he did not deny the intercepted communications contained nothing about Russia or Trump. They clearly were of no national intelligence significance, but rather, as Hanson noted, were evidence that the prior administration was snooping on political adversaries using the apparatus of the state to do so.
We also learned this week that Hillary (despite her uncontested mishandling of classified information when she was Secretary of State), and her aides, including Farkas, were given access to classified information long after she left the Department of State which, with Farkas’ admission on MSNBC, underscores the apparent misuse of intelligence from her end.
FBI Director James Comey and former DNI James Clapper
As for Comey, Hanson notes:
There is no need to rehash the strange political career of FBI director James Comey during the 2016 election. As Andrew McCarthy has noted in his recent NRO analyses, news accounts alleged that Comey’s FBI investigations of supposed contacts between General Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador were shared with Obama-administration officials — but why and how we are not sure. Comey himself was quick to note that his agency is investigating supposed collusion between Team Trump and Russia, but he refused to comment on whether or not the FBI is investigating possibly inappropriate or illegal intercepts of Trump officials and the surely illegal dissemination of intercepted info through leaks to favorable media.
But there’s much more to be said about him and his “investigation” which seems to be continuing only to cover his own backside.
The FBI was concerned that the ill-secured DNC internet communications were being hacked and sought to examine them. The DNC refused and engaged an outfit called Crowd Strike to do the job. Crowd Strike reported the Russia had likely tapped their server. There’s no explanation of why Crowd Strike was chosen, why the FBI allowed this, and why it apparently relied on that outfit’s findings. Recently Crowd Strike has walked back many of its claims after a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank.
And then there’s the dossier compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. If you recall, this dossier was commissioned through a DC firm, Fusion GPS, by Hillary to dig up opposition research on her opponents, and when she dropped it, unnamed Republicans followed up on the contract. At some point (accounts vary about how this occurred), dog in the manger John McCain got it and widely distributed it to the press and political figures. These Republicans, too, dropped the service, at which time the FBI picked it up, though they claim not to have paid GPS. Comey apparently has based his still ongoing “investigation” on it. The dossier is utter bunk. Ironically, it is Fusion GPS that is tied to Russian intelligence.
“It is highly troubling that Fusion GPS appears to have been working with someone with ties to Russian intelligence — let alone someone alleged to have conducted political disinformation campaigns — as part of a pro-Russia lobbying effort while also simultaneously overseeing the creation of the Trump/Russia dossier,” writes [Senator] Grassley.
Akhmetshin hired Simpson and Fusion GPS last year to work on a campaign to roll back the Magnitsky Act, a law passed in 2012 which imposed sanctions against a handful of Russian criminals accused of human rights violations.
The law was named in honor of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was killed by jail guards in 2009. Magnitsky was working for Bill Browder, a London-based investor who once operated in Russia, when he uncovered a $230 million fraud being carried out by the Russian government.
After Magnitsky’s death, Browder began lobbying U.S. lawmakers to enact sanctions against Russian criminals engaged in human rights abuses.
In a FARA complaint submitted in July, Browder laid out the case that Akhmetshin conducted a covert lobbying campaign to hinder the Global Magnitsky Act, an expansion of the original law.
The report is not worthy of consideration, but the FBI and Rep. Adam Schiff did apparently rely on it, drawing into question the FBI’s “independence from politics” and Schiff’s credulity or venality:
Citing current and former government officials, the New Yorker reported the dossier prompted skepticism among intelligence community members, with the publication quoting one member as saying it was a “nutty” piece of evidence to submit to a U.S. president.
Steele’s work has been questioned by former acting CIA director Morell, who currently works at the Hillary Clinton-tied Beacon Global Strategies LLC. Beacon was founded by Phillippe Reines, who served as Communications Adviser to Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. From 2009-2013, Reines also served in Clinton’s State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications. Reines is the managing director of Beacon…
Morell, who was in line to become CIA director if Clinton won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians. He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former British intelligence officer, which alleged a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia…
Morell pointed out that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Meet the Press on March 5 that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office January 20.
“That’s a pretty strong statement by General Clapper,” Morell said.
Regarding Steele’s dossier, Morell stated, “Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t.”
Morell charged the dossier “doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think.”
“I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries.”
Morell continued:
And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, “Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,” because they want to get paid some more.
I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier.’
Maybe Comey is continuing the investigation to blur his own role in the Obama administration’s improper and illegal snooping on his party’s opponents. He has not closed the investigation despite its apparently flimsy basis, perhaps to protect himself. He was supposed to report this investigation in a timely manner to the Congressional and Senate intelligence committees and did not.
As a correspondent with some knowledge of these matters related to me:
“When push comes to shove, no investigation gets opened, no FISA order is applied for, without James Comey’s say-so. They can bluster, but it’s damned hard to get rid of an FBI Director without a very, very public stink. He could have said no, but he didn’t. That means the investigation is bound to focus on him. And count on it — the decision to short circuit Congressional oversight was probably pushed on him by those same people, but once again, it was ultimately his decision. He could’ve gone to the Committee, but he didn’t. His decision, his responsibility.”
His view is strengthened by Comey’s obfuscation at a Congressional hearing:
The counter-intel investigation, by his own admission, began in July 2016. Congress was not notified until March 2017. That’s an eight month period – Obviously obfuscating the quarterly claim moments earlier.
The uncomfortable aspect to this line of inquiry is Comey’s transparent knowledge of the politicized Office of the DNI James Clapper by President Obama.
The first and second questions from Stefanik were clear. Comey’s understanding of the questions was clear. However, Comey directly evaded truthful response to the second question. When you watch the video, you can see Comey quickly connecting the dots on where this inquiry was going.
There is only one reasonable explanation for FBI Director James Comey to be launching a counter-intel investigation in July 2016, notifying the White House and Clapper, and keeping it under wraps from congress. Comey was a participant in the intelligence gathering for political purposes — wittingly, or unwittingly.
As a direct consequence of this mid-thought-stream Comey obfuscation, it is now clear — at least to me — that Director Comey was using his office as a facilitating conduit for the political purposes of the Obama White House.
John Brennan
It’s possible that the tissue-thin, incredible Steele “dossier” was not the only disinformation source. At the Spectator there’s a plausible account of how Obama’s CIA director John Brennan worked with Hillary and certain Baltic figures to discredit Trump with the charge of collusion with Russia.
Brennan pushed for a multi-agency investigation of the Trump campaign, using as his pretext alleged intelligence from an unnamed Baltic state. That “intelligence” was supplied at the very moment Baltic officials had their own political motivation to smear Trump.
“Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was — allegedly — a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign. It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States,” reported the BBC’s Paul Wood.
Is it just a coincidence that Brennan got this tape recording from a Baltic State intelligence agency in April when officials in the Baltic States were up in arms over candidate Trump? Recall that in March of 2016 — the month before Brennan allegedly got the recording from Baltic spies — Trump made remarks about NATO that the press was hyping as hostile to the Baltic States. [snip]
Hillary and her allies in the media seized on these remarks and ripped Trump on the false claim that, if elected, he would “pull out of NATO,” leaving Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to fend for themselves against Russia.
Such fearmongering set off an anti-Trump panic in political circles within the Baltic States. Out of it came a steady stream of stories with headlines such as: “Baltic States Fearful of Trump’s Nato Views” and “Estonian Prez Appears to Push Back on Trump’s NATO Comments.”
[Snip]
Both Brennan and officials in the Baltic States had strong incentives to help Hillary and hurt Trump. That Brennan and some Baltic spies teamed up to inflate the significance of some half-baked intelligence from a recording isn’t surprising. Only in such a feverish partisan milieu would basic questions go unasked, such as: Is it really a good idea to investigate a political opponent on the basis of a lead provided by a country that wants to see him lose?
Flynn
Flynn was Obama’s head of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and served only days under Trump. Reports this week initially made it appear that he was under investigation for ties to Russia, but it is more obvious to me that he knows about skullduggery by the prior administration in the Middle East, most likely Iran, and wants protection against the sort of unwarranted prosecutions Ted Stevens and Lewis Libby suffered at the hands of vindictive Democrats and their minions. The charges against him are being leveled by former Obama aide Sally Yates, who has utterly discredited herself earlier by her demonstrably false claim that the White House blocked her from testifying to Congress when the documentation clearly shows she was not.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to just consider everything the Democrats say, directly or through the media, which just prints as truth handouts from the same Democratic sources, as a lie. You’d save a lot of time and most likely be right.
You can Smell Hillary’s Fear, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, November 4, 2016
Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.
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In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI.
The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI.
But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election.
The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI.
The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton.
The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public.
The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women.
James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch.
Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server.
Senator Harry Reid has sent Comey a letter accusing him of violating the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a nice idea that has as much relevance in the age of Obama as the Tenth Amendment. But the cable news spectrum quickly filled with media hacks glancing at the Wikipedia article on the Hatch Act under the table while accusing the FBI director of one of the most awkward conspiracies against Hillary ever.
If James Comey is really out to hurt Hillary, he picked one hell of a strange way to do it.
Not too long ago Democrats were breathing a sigh of relief when he gave Hillary Clinton a pass in a prominent public statement. If he really were out to elect Trump by keeping the email scandal going, why did he trash the investigation? Was he on the payroll of House Republicans and the KGB back then and playing it coy or was it a sudden development where Vladimir Putin and Paul Ryan talked him into taking a look at Anthony Weiner’s computer?
Either Comey is the most cunning FBI director that ever lived or he’s just awkwardly trying to navigate a political mess that has trapped him between a DOJ leadership whose political futures are tied to Hillary’s victory and his own bureau whose apolitical agents just want to be allowed to do their jobs.
The only truly mysterious thing is why Hillary and her associates decided to go to war with a respected Federal agency. Most Americans like the FBI while Hillary Clinton enjoys a 60% unfavorable rating.
And it’s an interesting question.
Hillary’s old strategy was to lie and deny that the FBI even had a criminal investigation underway. Instead her associates insisted that it was a security review. The FBI corrected her and she shrugged it off. But the old breezy denial approach has given way to a savage assault on the FBI.
Pretending that nothing was wrong was a bad strategy, but it was a better one that picking a fight with the FBI while lunatic Clinton associates try to claim that the FBI is really the KGB.
There are two possible explanations.
Hillary Clinton might be arrogant enough to lash out at the FBI now that she believes that victory is near. The same kind of hubris that led her to plan her victory fireworks display could lead her to declare a war on the FBI for irritating her during the final miles of her campaign.
But the other explanation is that her people panicked.
Going to war with the FBI is not the behavior of a smart and focused presidential campaign. It’s an act of desperation. When a presidential candidate decides that her only option is to try and destroy the credibility of the FBI, that’s not hubris, it’s fear of what the FBI might be about to reveal about her.
During the original FBI investigation, Hillary Clinton was confident that she could ride it out. And she had good reason for believing that. But that Hillary Clinton is gone. In her place is a paranoid wreck. Within a short space of time the “positive” Clinton campaign promising to unite the country has been replaced by a desperate and flailing operation that has focused all its energy on fighting the FBI.
There’s only one reason for such bizarre behavior.
The Clinton campaign has decided that an FBI investigation of the latest batch of emails poses a threat to its survival. And so it’s gone all in on fighting the FBI. It’s an unprecedented step born of fear. It’s hard to know whether that fear is justified. But the existence of that fear already tells us a whole lot.
Clinton loyalists rigged the old investigation. They knew the outcome ahead of time as well as they knew the debate questions. Now suddenly they are no longer in control. And they are afraid.
You can smell the fear.
The FBI has wiretaps from the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. It’s finding new emails all the time. And Clintonworld panicked. The spinmeisters of Clintonworld have claimed that the email scandal is just so much smoke without fire. All that’s here is the appearance of impropriety without any of the substance. But this isn’t how you react to smoke. It’s how you respond to a fire.
The misguided assault on the FBI tells us that Hillary Clinton and her allies are afraid of a revelation bigger than the fundamental illegality of her email setup. The email setup was a preemptive cover up. The Clinton campaign has panicked badly out of the belief, right or wrong, that whatever crime the illegal setup was meant to cover up is at risk of being exposed.
The Clintons have weathered countless scandals over the years. Whatever they are protecting this time around is bigger than the usual corruption, bribery, sexual assaults and abuses of power that have followed them around throughout the years. This is bigger and more damaging than any of the allegations that have already come out. And they don’t want FBI investigators anywhere near it.
The campaign against Comey is pure intimidation. It’s also a warning. Any senior FBI people who value their careers are being warned to stay away. The Democrats are closing ranks around their nominee against the FBI. It’s an ugly and unprecedented scene. It may also be their last stand.
Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.
Don’t Be Fooled: Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation, American Thinker, James G. Wiles, November 1, 2016
The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal both reported on Monday morning that an FBI warrant application to a federal judge over the weekend for permission to search Huma Abedin’s emails and laptop had been granted. The application was made on the basis of the Clinton email investigation. Necessarily, that application (as required by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment) would have been supported by FBI affidavits.
This new fact is a development of immense potential significance – both for Mrs. Clinton personally and for us as American citizens. It is also unprecedented in American history.
At a minimum, it enables us to pierce the thick cloud of black ink and disinformation released over the weekend by Team Hillary and which is being widely misreported in the current news cycle.
The FBI agents had to make this warrant application because their existing Fourth Amendment search authority was on the basis of Anthony Weiner’s (unrelated) suspected misconduct with an underage girl. That investigation was already a grand jury matter. However, that grand jury’s authority – which is supervised by a federal judge — did not authorize the Bureau to pursue information which might be pertinent to the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email server while she was Secretary of State. Making that application, under standard DOJ protocol, required approval from Main Justice. In this case, the assistant attorney in charge of the Criminal Division, if not the attorney general.
Since the application was made, it’s safe to conclude that the Criminal Division at Main Justice authorized the warrant application. Thus, at a minimum, the senior leadership of the Justice Department is not as unanimously condemnatory of FBI director Comey’s letter to Congress on Friday as media reports would lead us to believe.
It also explains why Director Comey issued his letter to Congress. The reporting tells us that the FBI’s decision to make a warrant application to the supervising judge of the Weiner grand jury triggered Mr. Comey’s decision to notify Congress. Having promised Congressional leaders (perhaps unwisely, since he was not required to do so) that, if the Bureau uncovered new evidence relating to Hillarygate which required further inquiry, he would so notify them, he proceeded on Friday to keep his word and do so.
Now he’s being condemned by the Democrats and the MSM for not saying why. We’ll get to the reason why he’s not in a minute. But, first, the granting of the warrant application means several important and new things:
1) A federal judge supervising a grand jury has now made a finding, based on FBI affidavits which present evidence gathered during the preliminary Hillary inquiry (the one which the FBI director stated had been closed back in July), that there’s probable cause to believe that a federal crime was committed in connection with Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server.
We still, however, don’t know what crime(s) are suspected to have been committed. Or by whom.
2) The FBI can use this new grant of grand jury authority to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server for the first time to issues subpoenaes to obtain testimony from witnesses and compel the production of documents and things. The Bureau and DOJ can, furthermore, use the judge’s probable cause finding to support further warrant applications.
This means that, if DOJ authorizes it, a United States attorney now has the ability for the first time to put subpoenaed witnesses before a grand jury. There, without their lawyer in the room, they may be questioned under oath by a federal prosecutor. If the witnesses take the Fifth – and the witness’s lawyer is allowed to sit outside the grand jury room and be consulted by the witness before answering a question, they can be immunized and, if they still refuse to testify, a judge can jail them indefinitely until they change their mind.
Huma Abedin, according to prior reporting, received a grant of immunity during the FBI’s preliminary investigation. During the first Clinton presidency, Clinton allies chose jail over cooperating with the federal grand jury investigating both Clintons.
We may get to see if a new generation of Clinton allies are willing to do the same.
3) The liberal media’s reporting that the Hillarygate email server investigation has not, in fact, been “reopened” is totally false.
Why?
Because, not only is the probe reopened, it has been upgraded and expanded. It has been upgraded from a preliminary inquiry to a formal criminal investigation with grand jury power. That also means that, at least at the level of the federal grand jury itself, assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to that grand jury are now for the first time formally involved.
In other words: the Beast is now fully awake.
4) This weekend’s development potentially escalates the threat to Mrs. Clinton. While several other procedural steps and processes are necessary, it is a federal grand jury, not the FBI, which issues indictments. The FBI — using the the grand jury to obtain testimony, conduct searches and compel the production of documents and things – investigates crimes. The U.S. Attorneys, acting though the grand jury, charge and prosecute those persons whom the grand jury finds probable cause to believe have committed those crimes.
5) This weekend’s development also means that, for the first time in American history, a candidate for President of the United States is likely now a subject/target of a federal grand jury investigation.
These facts now enable us to analyze and dispel Team Clinton’s attempts to lay down a thick fog of misdirection over the scene.
Here it is: Mrs. Clinton’s demand that the FBI be “transparent” is pure posturing — spinning to the max (which Mrs. Clinton, as the most criminally investigated presidential candidate in U.S. history, well knows). Younger readers, please take note: this is not, to put it mildly, Hillary Clinton’s first rodeo.
Not for the first time, Mrs. Clinton is being totally disingenuous with the voters (and the media). She is also making FBI director Comey into her personal punching bag. And she’s doing it because she knows that the director can’t fight back.
In this, Mrs. Clinton is simply repeating a tactic which she and her catspaw Sidney Blumenthal used to good effect during the Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky investigations in the 1990s. And that tactic worked.
It’s called grand jury secrecy. Now that Hillarygate is, for the first time, a grand jury investigation, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) prohibits the FBI and prosecutors from saying anything about “matters occurring before the grand jury.” Their lips are sealed.
Team Hillary’s lips, however, are not. They are neither federal prosecutors nor “agents of the grand jury.” So, Mrs. Clinton and her spokesmen — unlike the federal law enforcement officials they’ve been targeting all weekend — are free to tell us everything they know.
Let’s see if they do. A reporter should ask them.
And, in the meantime, let’s not bother to hold our breaths.
If Hillary really wants “transparency,” let her release the FBI’s warrant application for permission to search Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner’s emails for evidence relating to whether Hillary’s use of a private server violated federal law. Huma’s lawyers likely have it. If not, they can certainly get it.
Huma, of course, is also free to release the emails too.
That’s why Hillary’s demand for “transparency” by the FBI is moonshine. She damn well knows the feds can’t do it.
She also now knows that the threat level against her has just been upgraded to ORANGE.
William Safire and Christopher Hitchens, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
Former AG Under Contempt Of Congress: “Deeply Concerned” Over Comey’s Actions, Hot Air, Ed Morrissey, October 31, 2016
Nothing will start a morning off with a good laugh more than an op-ed from Eric Holder touting his record of fighting public corruption. The former Attorney General, who earned a contempt citation from Congress and who participated in one of the most corrupt presidential pardons in US history, took time out from his retirement to wag his finger at James Comey because the FBI director kept Congress informed. Why, Holder writes, that goes against everything I did as AG!
That may actually be one good argument in favor of Comey:
I began my career in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section 40 years ago, investigating cases of official corruption. In the years since, I have seen America’s justice system firsthand from nearly every angle — as a prosecutor, judge, attorney in private practice, and attorney general of the United States. I understand the gravity of the work our Justice Department performs every day to defend the security of our nation, protect the American people, uphold the rule of law and be fair.
That is why I am deeply concerned about FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to write a vague letter to Congress about emails potentially connected to a matter of public, and political, interest. That decision was incorrect. It violated long-standing Justice Department policies and tradition. And it ran counter to guidance that I put in place four years ago laying out the proper way to conduct investigations during an election season. That guidance, which reinforced established policy, is still in effect and applies to the entire Justice Department — including the FBI.
Let’s take a moment to recall the career of the man who issued this scolding. Holder most famously stonewalled Congress over the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious program, which ran guns into Mexico in an attempt to make political hay over allegedly widespread “straw man” purchases of firearms in the US. Instead, the ATF thoroughly botched the operation and dumped thousands of guns into the hands of the drug cartels south of the border; the weapons were later traced to hundreds of murders, including those of two Border Patrol agents. When Congress demanded records and communications from the ATF and the Department of Justice, Holder refused to comply, offering a specious claim of “executive privilege” that only applies to the President. Congress approved a contempt citation that the DoJ refused to enforce, and a later court rejected Holder’s claims of executive privilege.
But Holder cites his earlier work on “public integrity,” too. What did that look like? Well, Holder’s approach to public integrity was to promote pardons for tax fugitives whose friends and family kicked in a lot of dough to the Clintons. Slate’s Justin Peters recalled the case of Marc Rich after his demise, the multibillionaire who got off scot-free thanks to Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon while on the run for tax evasion:
Eric Holder was the key man. As deputy AG, Holder was in charge of advising the president on the merits of various petitions for pardon. Jack Quinn, a lawyer for Rich, approached Holder about clemency for his client. Quinn was a confidant of Al Gore, then a candidate for president; Holder had ambitions of being named attorney general in a Gore administration. A report from the House Committee on Government Reform on the Rich debacle later concluded that Holder must have decided that cooperating in the Rich matter could pay dividends later on.
Rich was an active fugitive, a man who had used his money to evade the law, and presidents do not generally pardon people like that. What’s more, the Justice Department opposed the pardon—or would’ve, if it had known about it. But Holder and Quinn did an end-around, bringing the pardon to Clinton directly and avoiding any chance that Justice colleagues might give negative input. As the House Government Reform Committee report later put it, “Holder failed to inform the prosecutors under him that the Rich pardon was under consideration, despite the fact that he was aware of the pardon effort for almost two months before it was granted.” …
Since then, Bill Clinton hasn’t stopped apologizing for the pardons of Marc Rich and Pincus Green. “It was terrible politics. It wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation,” he told Newsweek in 2002—and, indeed, speculation was rampant that Rich (and his ex-wife) had bought the pardon by, in part, donating $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library. Clinton denied that the donations had anything to do with the pardon, instead claiming that he took Holder’s advice on the matter. Holder, for his part, has distanced himself from the pardons as well. As the House Government Reform Committee report put it, he claimed that his support for the pardon “was the result of poor judgment, initially not recognizing the seriousness of the Rich case, and then, by the time that he recognized that the pardon was being considered, being distracted by other matters.”
The excuses are weak. In the words of the committee report, “it is difficult to believe that Holder’s judgment would be so monumentally poor that he could not understand how he was being manipulated by Jack Quinn.”
Before the Washington Post offered its pages to Holder for this scolding on law-enforcement ethics, perhaps they should have consulted their own Richard Cohen. Not exactly a conservative activist, Cohen argued vehemently that Holder’s participation in the Rich pardon should have disqualified him for the AG position:
Holder was not just an integral part of the pardon process, he provided the White House with cover by offering his go-ahead recommendation. No alarm seemed to sound for him. Not only had strings been pulled, but it was rare to pardon a fugitive — someone who had avoided possible conviction by avoiding the inconvenience of a trial. The U.S. attorney’s office in New York — which, Holder had told the White House, would oppose any pardon — was kept ignorant of what was going on. Afterward, it was furious. …
But the pardon cannot be excepted. It suggests that Holder, whatever his other qualifications, could not say no to power. The Rich pardon request had power written all over it — the patronage of important Democratic fundraisers, for instance. Holder also said he was “really struck” by the backing of Rich by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the possibility of “foreign policy benefits that would be reaped by granting the pardon.” This is an odd standard for American justice, but more than that, what was Holder thinking? That U.S.-Israeli relations would suffer? Holder does not sound naive. He sounds disingenuous.
And he sounds just as disingenuous here, too. Perhaps Holder feels that he has the moral standing to argue that Congress should be kept in the dark about executive-branch operations, especially when they have a potentially large impact on the body politic; Holder himself certainly exemplified that in Operation Fast and Furious. Or perhaps Holder’s convinced that the Department of Justice should direct all its efforts to get potential felons off the hook, especially in cases where it benefits the Clintons, and Holder has definitely made that part of his life’s work. But Eric Holder lecturing James Comey for not following the examples he set at the DoJ qualifies as farce, and would get gales of laughter had the political parties been swapped.
An argument might be made that shows Comey misstepped, but this isn’t it — and Eric Holder is near the bottom of any list of former officials with the moral authority for public lectures on clean government.
PS: The Marc Rich pardon continues to pay dividends for the Clintons, too. They did big business with former Rich partner Gilbert Chagoury, even while the FBI looked into his connections to terror groups. We can thank Holder for that, too — a dividend of his 2000 efforts for “public integrity” that paid off for the Clintons over and over again.
David Sirota offers another reason to doubt Holder’s moral standing on questions of public integrity:
Comey may or may not be screwing up. But Eric Holder is an unconvincing voice on how law enforcement should act https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/792926441755127809 …
Anthony Weiner cooperating with FBI on email probe, Washington Examiner,
The news that Anthony Weiner is cooperating would help law enforcement with the investigation. (AP Photo/Jin Lee)
Former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner is cooperating with authorities in the FBI investigation of his laptop that contains emails that prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to reopen its probe into Hillary Clinton‘s use of an unauthorized email server.
The news that Weiner is cooperating, reported by Fox News’ Bret Baier on Sunday, would help law enforcement with the investigation, since officials didn’t yet have a warrant to read through the material found on the device.
Though FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Friday his agency found emails related to Hillary Clinton‘s private email server, he didn’t yet have a warrant to read them.
As of Saturday night, the FBI had not received a search warrant from the Justice Department, an unnamed agency official told Yahoo News, but the agency was in talks to get one. When Comey wrote the letter, “he had no idea what was in the content of the emails,” said one official.
Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI immediately returned a request for comment.
Comey has begun participating in briefings with the Republican chairman and Democratic ranking members of congressional committees, according to Bill House, a congressional correspondent for Bloomberg News, citing unnamed sources.
Comey wrote a letter to eight lawmakers Friday to inform them that he was reopening the FBI case into Clinton’s unauthorized email server after the agency found emails in a laptop obtained from Weiner as part of a separate investigation into a sexting scandal. Weiner is the estranged husband to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
In his letter, Comey admitted he did not yet have the authority to assess the emails, but said the material “may be significant.”
Reports came out Saturday that Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s department disapproved of Comey’s decision to inform the lawmakers, as it deviated from agency policy not to comment on ongoing investigations.
Officials told CNN that the Justice Department could do little to stop Comey after the controversy that resulted from Lynch’s private meeting with former President Bill Clinton during the summer.
Comey has been hit by backlash for sending the letter to lawmakers just under two weeks before the Nov. 8 election. Democrats in particular have lashed out, adopting Republican nominee Donald Trump‘s refrain that the election is “rigged.”
The Clinton campaign, including the candidate herself, has called on the FBI to release all “relevant facts” they have on the emails.
In an internal memo obtained by Fox News on Friday, Comey explained to staffers he chose to break with normal procedure because he felt “an obligation” to tell Congress because he recently testified that the investigation had ended and that he recommended no charges be brought against the former secretary of state.
WarSclerotic 
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