Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out....Much more detail at the link.
Republicans in Congress have vowed to investigate. The Justice Department’s inspector general is considering whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly relied on the dossier in applying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump adviser. The inspector general wants to know what the F.B.I. learned about Mr. Steele’s sources and whether it disclosed any doubts about their veracity to the court....
[It] could be Russian disinformation. That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump’s presidency as well....
But Mr. Mueller, after a two-year investigation involving roughly 40 F.B.I. agents and other specialists, provided no evidence to support the claim[s]....
April 20, 2019
"Now the dossier — financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries."
Says the NYT.
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So Comey and the FISA Court were the useful, willing idiots all along.
Mueller The FBI Whitewasher didn't see what he and his partisan band of investigators didn't want to know.
Could this indeed be the beginning of the end of those who began this charade? One can hope...The Audacity Of Hope as it were.
Now they tell us:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/the-week-in-pictures-mueller-encore-edition.php
The Mueller report is itself opposition research so they're loathe to mention Hillary's.
If you come at the King, you best kill the King. Paybacks at this level should be a Royal Bitch.
As we all knew from the start of this quixotic charade, Hillary was the colluder with a foreign and occasionally hostile power, not Trump.
I know it is hard to keep up and be sceptical enough but you have to keep trying.
Remember the James Rosen case?
There is still no firm evidence presented that it was a Russian entity that concocted this "dossier."
This is an action to protect the rear flank as the Left's forces (supported by LLR counterparts) retreat. The Left advanced beyond where they could be efficiently resupplied. The rumor and innuendo supply lines were too easily attacked by the truth.
Yeah, this is just more lies to protect past lies.
Well, duh.
It's sad when Sean Hannity was right for 2 years and the rest of the Professional Journalists, Academics, Law Experts, and Media Starlings were wrong. It's beyond sad. It's the end of Professional Journalism. What the hell are J-Schools doing anyway?
Still looking forward to seeing John Brennan and James Clapper get hauled in for an actual accounting.
Nunes is already on their trail. He is the hero in all this, which is why Democrats will move heaven and earth to try to beat him next year,
They don't have much influence with heaven, though.
Trump has a very small army with Nunes and Rogers and he should pardon Flynn and bring him in to run the retribution operation.
Barr might one of a very few in DC that are clean. Pompeo might be a post Trump possible.
I can’t watch cable news anymore but is anyone on msnbc or CNN covering this? As it refutes their self-celebration I kinda doubt it.
The spin machine is still admitting a few facts to cover up the Shall Be Hidden facts. Those are that the Dossier is British disinformation ordered up personally by Obama directly from MI6 and approved by the Queen of England. And The Podesta and DNC e-mails leaked by Assange are not hacks but are hand offs of DNC employee Seth Rich's thumb drive downloads.
NB: that Russia is not involved at all, except as a false flag cover story for an Act of War by a foreign power on the United States of America, making it pure Treason.
Normally, you determine the validity of a source BEFORE spending two years accepting it as true.
Times laying down the “maybe this whole thing was Russian disinformation” mattress to fall on and try to avoid the “this was Dem and media disinformation” conclusion.
Russians; is there anything they can’t do?
Why is it sad hannity like Walter winchell, something drudge himself is no longer like.
The smoking gun of Russian collusion, hiding in plain sight in the Mueller Report. The HRC campaign and the DNC paid foreign spies (Steele and his Russian contacts) hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the dossier used to get FISA warrants to spy on the Trump Campaign.
But no indictments, no finding of Russian collusion or interference there!
Christopher Steele worked as an MI-6 officer in the Soviet Union during 1990-1993. During that period, he was about 26-29 years old.
He was exposed as an MI-6 officer while stationed in France in 2002, after which he has not been in Russia. He retired from the MI-6 in 2009.
In the international investigation of corruption in the FIFA soccer organization, Steele provided to the FBI information alleging that Russia Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin was involved in the corruption. However, neither Sechin nor any other Russian ever was charged in the scandal. The information that Steele provided did not have any apparent affect on the investigation.
In recent years, Steele has earned his living by collecting or concocting negative information about people and then spreading that information around secretly in order to cause trouble for those people. Steele does this work in exchange for money from very rich people.
Steele's work on the famous dossier for Hillary Clinton is only one example of Steele's work. This is the kind of work he does all the time -- week after week, month after month, year after year.
The fact NYT is acknowledging it at all is certainly interesting. While they're spinning, the sober absence of lickspittle spin is interesting, as if the goal line is in retreat. It gives me the feeling people NYT will be called upon and some of their allies in deep state might actually be in trouble. I'll believe it when I see it, however.
The Dossier was fabricated by Trump's opponents to blunt Trump's effective political attacks on Hillary's e-mail/private server shenanigans.
Trump's opponents seeded the Dossier throughout the media (Buzzfeed) and key politicians (McCain) to damage Trump politically, with the goal to get the FBI to bite and use it to start an FBI criminal investigation against Trump, not just a counter-intelligence investigation.
In essence, "Mr. Trump, you have been critical of Ms. Clinton e-mail investigation throughout the campaign, but aren't YOU now the subject of an FBI investigation into your campaign's contacts with a hostile foreign government?"
The coup plotters held back though, because they mistakenly thought Hillary would win. When Hillary lost, they unleashed all this nonsense. I hope AG Barr has the cojones to nail them.
If you read the Steele Dossier, you can see that it is double-anonymous, unverified hearsay, written in phony pseudo spy jargon. The few contentions that can be verified, particularly Michael Cohen as the ring-leader and his visit to Prague, have been proven false.
A competent FBI would have blown that document out of the water - instead they used the "salacious and unverified" document to try and nail Trump.
Didn't work. The day of reckoning is coming.
Republicans and Trump would be fools not to investigate. At a minimum they could use it to neuter the anti-Trump efforts of Nadler, Schiff, and the Impeach Him crowd. And if it is true there was serious breach of long held standards, or especially if criminal wrong doing is established, Trump's approval level would reach unseen of levels.
Christopher Steele wrote in his dossier that he obtained his information from Russian Intelligence insiders, whom he identified as:
* Source A
* Source B
* Source C
* Source D
* Source E
Based on this information, the FBI declared to FISA court that two advisers on Donald Trump's campaign staff -- George Papadopoulos and Carter Page -- were witting agents of Russian Intelligence.
The FBI declared to the FISA court that Steele was credible because he provided information about Russians during the FBI investigation of corruption in FIFA. However, no Russians ever were charged, so Steele's information had no apparent effect on the FBI's investigation FIFA.
Based on Steele's dossier, the FBI obtained a FISA warrant that enabled the FBI to collect and study much of the communications within Trump's campaign staff and further within Trump's personal sphere of relatives and associates.
Yeah, bring it on. The more you go after Hillary, the easier it will be for Democrats to shitcan the cunt. Also, it gives credibility to Mueller.
What cant they do?
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/19/cnn-cant-do-the-mueller-report-math/?utm_campaign=ACTENGAGE
The FBI that dropped the ball in San Bernardino, Boston Orlando Las vegas and parkland?
I saw somewhere that Horowitz has been probing how helpful and reliable Steele was in the FIFA investigation. As you may recall, the FBI offered up Steele's assistance in the FIFA matter as a reason that he should be viewed initially as credible when he showed up with his dossier. That was before he was fired for talking to the press (but then brought back through the side door via Bruce and Nellie Ohr).
By the way, can you believe that Team Mueller didn't mention Fusion GPS in their 488 page effusion? I'm sure they are all over that on CNN and MSNBC.
Now the US Intelligence Community will bitch and moan about its sources and methods being exposed.
Let this be a lesson to the US Intelligence Community.
If you do not want your sources and methods to be exposed, then do not meddle in US elections and do not conspire to remove elected US officials from office.
"Blogger dustbunny said..."I can’t watch cable news anymore but is anyone on msnbc or CNN covering this?"
I watch for a few minutes at a time (all I can stand). A couple of days ago I heard Mica Brzezinski, reading off a teleprompter I assume, refer to MI6 as "M-sixteen". That demonstrates their level of knowledge of the issue.
Willful ignorance.
Remember:
There were more than a dozen FISA warrants issued against Trump associates. I believe the count is 17. And the NSA database was violated, repeatedly. Americans 4th Amendment rights were repeatedly violated.
Taken together there is significant exposure for multiple criminal violations. And RICO comes into play.
Media cover will not be enough to escape determined law enforcement efforts. Will those efforts be determined? If the past is any guide, perhaps not. But is Trump - the greatest counterpuncher in American political history - likely to allow a half-assed investigation?
"Also, it gives credibility to Mueller."
-- How?
Why do they stop the trail with Christopher Steele? Who did his information come from? That's right, Russian agents.
So the Clinton campaign colluded with Russian agents using a former British spy as a go between. Note that (a) this is undeniable and (b) none of the people who claimed for two years foreign influence in our elections is outrageous and illegal have any interest at all in these facts.
Blogger Hagar said..."There is still no firm evidence presented that it was a Russian entity that concocted this "dossier.""
I strongly suspect the Russians had nothing to do with it. It was made up out of whole cloth.
The more you go after Hillary, the easier it will be for Democrats to shitcan the cunt. Also, it gives credibility to Mueller.
Mueller has credibility ? Try to remember that Andy Weissman has the sole distinction to have his conviction reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court. He should have been disbarred for that.
Hillary is old news but the Democrats (you) have no sane candidate.
stevew, its the very fear on the part of the dems/left/MSM/LLR's that they will be exposed which will force the dems/left/MSM/LLR's to push ahead rapidly on impeachment and continue with their Full Court Press that "Trump Is Still Guilty Eleventy!!!!" because, in for a penny, in for a pound.
If they don't get rid of Barr and Trump now, things will come out.
The few reporters, actual journalists, who had this right for years now, and for whom every actual information release supported their reporting, are now telling us that within the treasonous echelons in the DOJ/FBI/et al that some rats are already turning on each other.
Are these reporters, who have been right about everything for over 2 years still right?
The reactions of the usual suspects tells me they are.
So, bottom line:
1) The media has to do what they have been doing: continue pushing the lies at an even high volume
2) The dems HAVE TO move forward on impeachment before even more comes out exposing this hoax (because they can barely keep up with new info exposed each day)
3) All the republicans who were fully happy to vote for impeachment based on these lies(yes, the republican leadership in the House and Senate from 2016 thru 2019 really are just that gullible, incompetent and easily misled by the Democrats) need to have it happen quickly before they are exposed further as well
3a) The ONLY reason Mitt Romney ran for Senate was so he could be part of the "NOBLE Republican Senate Class of 2019" who would go to Trump and tell him he had to resign or be impeached and thus, be "heroes" forever celebrated in the History books.
Why, by this single act, Mitt would go from being "Theocratic Hitler" in 2012 to "What a Fantastic Guy!!" in 2019 in Lefty World.
If you want to know why McCain was so angry near his own death its because he knew he would not get the chance to go to Trump and then, face to face, tell Trump to leave.
Oh, the fever dreams of wall to wall adoration and ticker-tape parade visions that must have been floating through McCain's mind!! And Romney as well.
If I had to guess, I would guess Romney is STILL, despite all that we know, still on board with lefty/dem/MSM/LLR Plan A.
I suspect however that there are some republicans who thought they would be on board with Plan A in 2017/2018 who look around now and say: Nope. Count me out.
We are fully into the 3rd Act of "Seven Days in May" with John Houseman about to be interviewed by the President's right hand man...........
....(and yes, John Houseman as a US Navy Admiral always was a hilariously miscast assignment!)
You'd like to think the day of reckoning is coming, but, like the horizon, it constantly recedes before us. Take Philby and his crowd. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming were friends with Philby and, even after his defection, remained sympathetic. The BBC produced a series about Philby that was contemptuous of anti Communists but nuanced when it came to Philby......A while back I read a profile of Steele in The New Yorker. From what I remember, it was a positive appraisal. The writer did not feel in any way manipulated by Steele and was not in any way cynical about his fraudulent dossier......Those who go after Steele will be Joe McCarthy and Steele will become as cuddly as Ethel Rosenberg.
I don't get how Mueller et al "know" the Russians hacked the DNC server if the DNC never let them look at it. And didn't Hillary destroy her own server? The "evidence" in the report is the evidence for the indictments of the Russian hackers.
I can't keep up.
I think Howard’s on to something, and it’s not just Hillary but also the DNC. The rise of Trump lead many on the Right to denigrate the Republican Party and “mainstream” Republican (i.e. LLR).
You can see a similar movement on the Left. I don’t believe the far Left really care about the Russia-Mueller business. They’re much more into environmentalism, intersectionality and socialism.
This may all turn out to be the “90 degree” shift in politics ( new coalitions, new issues that a different than Boomer Left/Right perspectives) that I thought the Trump populism would lead to.
It will be harder to maintain a solid two party system in a world with so much social media, new media.
Blogger Howard said..."Yeah, bring it on....it gives credibility to Mueller."
LOL. It exposes him as the fraud he is. If his investigation had been legitimate there should have been a serious analysis of the dossier included. Instead he treated it like a vampire treats garlic.
You'd like to think the day of reckoning is coming, but, like the horizon, it constantly recedes before us. Take Philby and his crowd. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming were friends with Philby and, even after his defection, remained sympathetic. The BBC produced a series about Philby that was contemptuous of anti Communists but nuanced when it came to Philby......A while back I read a profile of Steele in The New Yorker. From what I remember, it was a positive appraisal. The writer did not feel in any way manipulated by Steele and was not in any way cynical about his fraudulent dossier......Those who go after Steele will be Joe McCarthy and Steele will become as cuddly as Ethel Rosenberg.
I honestly don’t think we need these so-called journalists any more. With some exceptions, they were more obsessed with getting the eyeballs and clicks than simply communicating who what when where and how. Could they actually have believed that Russia tried to influence our election via a few Facebook ads.... and that this was so egregious that a gasp possible collusion spawned a two year witch hunt. Seriously? Facebook ads?
Elites gotta elite. Fine, do so in your own room and leave us the hell alone.
Carol: "I can't keep up."
Sure you can, and you just did.
Asking even the simplest of questions about the premises spoonfed to us over the last 3 years by the dems/Left/MSM/LLR liars causes their entire house of cards to collapse.
You are spot on...because you are willing to ask the simplest of questions, questions like:
If Trump were a cultivated Agent of Russia for years now, why would the Trump campaign have to be scrambling to set up "back channels" for communications late in 2016? Why would a years long "Agent" Trump and his campaign folks be asking Roger Stone to go find out from Wikileaks what Wikileaks got from the....Russians!!!
It's all so astonishingly stupid, so amazingly inept, so incredibly self-defeating, that only the Dems with 99.9997 Media Support along with the New Standard Of Stupidity Republican GOPe leadership could deliver it.
And it was all exposed by the one guy this entire army of establishment morons said wasn't smart enough to be President.
Just think about that for a quiet moment or 2...and let it sink in.
Peggy Noonan was correct long ago when she wrote "We are being patronized by our inferiors"
The United States of America, right here and right now, has the worst set of self-styled "elites" than at any other time in our nations history.
And they have learned nothing. Nothing. Not. A. Single. Thing.
Final observation: The Russians are sitting back in wonder and staring at the "elites" and "leadership" of the United States and you wanna know what they are thinking?
How did we ever lose to those guys?!
Drago takes it one, wild, angry idea too far. Yes, Mitt Romney will lead a coup, Chuck will become Head of the new National Thought Police and you, Drago will be incarcerated, probably tortured by having to listen to Chuck dissertations on true Republican ideals. (Don’t worry madam Althouse, you will be spared; Meade, not so much)
Drago, If I were you I’d go into hiding now. Why, they’re probably listening to your every conversation right now!
"new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries."
Why, pray tell, did it not face harsh scrutiny from the NYT itself?
I know, sorry.
Also, it gives credibility to Mueller.
Mueller will never have credibility again, except among the overly credulous.
I strongly suspect the Russians had nothing to do with it. It was made up out of whole cloth.
Yes. They needed a theater prop to get the FISA warrants, so they made one. Built a file full of stuff we were never supposed to see...
Yet Steele was a tool of Russia, well certainly deripasha who contracted him.
Who Nellie ohr is really loyal to is up for debate, brennan was a communists now hes a full fledged salafi playing for zur and the Koran armada, I mean Qatar iran and Turkey)
No Romney is the loyal opposition like triana is in the phillipines against Duterte, McCain used to be but he joined the choir invisible.
The premier intelligence and investigative agencies in the world picked up a piece of trash generated by the Clinton Gang and ran with it without verifying its sources and allegations, all with the encouragement of Jarrett and Rice and Podesta. Simple. Corrupt. Devious. And hopefully indictable.
Phil: "The rise of Trump lead many on the Right to denigrate the Republican Party and “mainstream” Republican (i.e. LLR).
You can see a similar movement on the Left."
Quite so.
They are few on the far left/left/liberal, but they matter. These are some lefties (NONE of whom like Trump in any way and they want to beat him) who called it right from the beginning that this entire establishment hoax was just that, a hoax.
Some of these lefty journalists and personalities, again, ALL of whom don't like Trump, got it right and should be named:
Stephen Cohen
Glenn Greenwald
Michael Tracey
Aaron Mate'
Seth Ackerman
Jimmy Dore
...amongst others.
These guys (and other Russia Skeptic gals on the left as well) have called this for what it is from day one. They know its a lie fully manufactured by the Hillary/Romney/Paul Ryan/obama etc establishment.
BTW, we aren't the only ones coming to this realization: The upcoming EU elections in Europe are going to deliver the largest bloc of populist members from across all EU nations shortly.
What we are seeing is the entirety of the western world populations coming to realize that the elites in all of these nations are more loyal to each other then to their own nations populations and needs.
Hence, the Brexit debacle, Merkel on her way out in Germany, May on her way out for backstabbing the British voters, new populist governments in Poland, Hungaray, The Czech republic, Austria, Italy, Spain, etc etc etc.
Which is why the "elites" in Europe and the US are moving so quickly to replace as many of their own voters as possible.
In other words: the elites have taken a vote amongst themselves, and they have decided to "fire" their own people.
The more you go after Hillary, the easier it will be for Democrats to shitcan the cunt.
Have a care, Howard. That kind of talk can get you dead.
The NYT, after years of suckworthy reporting on "Russian collusion", decides to get in front of this one right away.
That's how you know Russian collusion is dead.
Phil 3:14: "Drago takes it one, wild, angry idea too far. Yes, Mitt Romney will lead a coup,"
Nonsense.
I do hold open the possibility that what is emerging will cause Romney to no longer side with the dems given what he knows now vs when he announced for the Senate in 2018. Romney, we have seen, is no leader of anything.
Variable change after all.
But ask yourself this Phil: How is it that Mitch McConnell was so very very very good at getting conservative judges through the Senate in 2017/18 but somehow, could not find a way to get more than 1 or 2 key people Trump needed in each of the Agencies and departments confirmed during that same period?
It's because why would you allow Trump to populate agencies with his nominees if he wasn't expected to be there very long?
Nope: the republican leadership, never that courageous to begin with (they didn't get the nickname "The Stupid Party" for nothing) was unwilling to brave the heat the dems were bringing.
But go ahead Phil, mock the idea of a conspiracy to oust Trump, at the very moment the conspiracy has been exposed for precisely what it is.
Our only saving grace: the conspirators were not exactly competent...but they were successful in STEALING 2 years of a republican Presidency where the President had a Republican House and Senate.
Just think about the lost opportunity with that.
And then laugh to yourself about how silly it is to believe there could possibly be a conspiracy to let Hillary off the hook and get rid of Trump should he be elected!!
Yeah, who could believe that would ever happen?
Seriously Phil, you are exhibiting a real Pre-9/11 mentality with this already exposed coup attempt.
Milo Minderbinder: "The premier intelligence and investigative agencies in the world picked up a piece of trash generated by the Clinton Gang and ran with it without verifying its sources and allegations, all with the encouragement of Jarrett and Rice and Podesta. Simple. Corrupt. Devious. And hopefully indictable."
Shhhhhh!
Not so loud.
You'll upset Phil.
Phil still thinks Brennan and Comey and Clapper and Andrew Weissman are all on the up and up!
The Russians gave Steele phony intel to make it look like they were colluding with Trump in the 2016 election.
Knowing deep state democrats would use the dossier as a basis for a bungling, ill-fated coup attempt, thus insuring Trump's re-election in 2020...
Turns out Schiff was right all along. Collusion to help Trump win. They just weren't keen enough to figure out which election.
We all owe Inga an apology.
I can't wait for Phil to explain how it is the dems just knew they could get McCain to send his right hand man over to Europe to pick up the dossier and help spread it around?
I mean, McCain would never be that much of a dupe, would he?
LOL
Of course he would, except in the case of McCain, you wouldn't even have to lie to him about it. As long as it hurts Trump and helps Dems, he would be fully onboard....and, in fact, he was. And, in fact, he did.
And even after the facts of the dossier hoax-iness was exposed, what did McCain do? Did he get angry at the dems for suckering him again? (Keating 4 needed a dumb republican to be a bi-partisan scandal, so they sucked McCain in...voila! "Keating 5"!)
No, McCain did not. He, in fact, angrily doubled down and said he would be happy to spread a hoax dossier around AGAIN if he had to do it over again.
Sorry Phil. Lots of Republicans bought the obvious, transparent, ludicrous lefty lies. Hook, line and sinker. Look at NC Senator Burr: Instead of leading the Senate Intel committee he let Senator Warner walk all over him and use the committee to advance every lefty narrative.
That's no accident.
Add Scott Horton to the mix, who Barry eisler so admires he named a character after him.
Q: How many Russia-colluders can dance on a pinhead?
A: You mean IN a pinhead.
Q: Right.
A: An infinite number of Russia-colluders can dance in a pinhead.
Narr
Except when the Russia-colluders wear the magic 'D'. Then they don't exist at all.
Drago, you forgot to mention the strawberries.
BTW, what the republican establishment let happen for almost 3 years now is reflected in how other events transpired as well.
Recall the Kavanaugh hearings.
Ask yourself this: Did the fact that so many republicans in the Senate clearly bought the obvious and transparent lefty/MSM/LLR lies regarding collusion, that the dems thought, hey, if they are that gullible and stupid and weak, why can't we mount ANOTHER across-the-board disinformation campaign and get those idiot republicans to vote against Kavanaugh?!!
I'll bet it just might work!!
And so the dems launch the most outrageous, over-the-top attack on a Supreme Court nominee in history, going so far as to call him a multi-year leader of serial gang-rape crew patrolling Maryland.
And that's when the lightbulb really went off in Lindsay Graham's mind. Lindsay was willing to look at and accept what he was seeing from the dems/left/LLR as fact, and then rationally came to the conclusion that these insane lefties were capable of ANYTHING.
Which is why Lindsay had that famous "I hope you never get power again" moment. He understood fully at that moment what was going on.
But I shouldn't write about Lindsay recognizing the danger confronting us.
It just might trigger Phil 3:14.
Howard calls Hillary a cunt. He also spews hatred at anyone who voted against her. Go figure.
PHil: "Drago, you forgot to mention the strawberries."
That's right Phil. It's all made up.
The dossier is legit.
The spying on Trump never happened.
Trump really did hang out in a Moscow hotel with russian hookers.
McCain did not really send his right hand man across the pond to pick up and distribute the hoax dossier.
The leadership in Europe is not being upended left and right.
The Brits did not vote to get out of the EU.
None of this has happened. None of it ever happened.
Unbelievable.
"We all owe Inga an apology."
I don't think we're going to be seeing Inga for awhile.
Breezy, 9:23:
"Could they actually have believed that...?"
Sure. Look at the "Edelweiss" mini-flap a few days ago. I'm still amazed at what they can convince themselves of, and I thought I was getting jaded.
I failed to avoid the insanity and turned on cable news. Liz Warren breathlessly promoting impeachment, and panels of Trump haters defending their own delusions. Paging Scott Adams.
Drago, you got me pegged.
Phil, how do you think the conspiracy types got Bill Barr to buy into the "spying on Trump" thing?
Maybe now would be a good time for you to send him your "strawberries" joke to, you know, clue him in that its not good to be conspiracy type.
I'm quite sure he'd be grateful.
Very, in fact.
Phil 3:14: "Drago, you got me pegged."
No more than you me.
"Drago, you got me pegged."
Whenever I hear the word "pegged" used I can't help but hear the theme to "Frasier".
@William,
"You'd like to think the day of reckoning is coming, but, like the horizon, it constantly recedes before us."
You are correct, this may be wishful thinking that occasionally vexes us, when we get immersed too far into politics.
I'd love to see Brennan nailed. I believed he orchestrated the Russisn Hoax with his help from British Intelligence. But I'm not optimistic.
I was heartened to see Comey, McCabe and Strzok fired. But a reasonable "day of reckoning" would be for those 3 to go to jail and the FISA warrant to be discredited.
Probably, Brennan was reporting on this mischief to Obama, but I doubt Obsma will be hit.
An Egyptian intelligence officer once told his CIA counterpart, "We all do stupid things, but you do such complicated stupid things that we always wonder if we have missed something."
If this was an FSB operation, I fail to see what the benefit would be to the Russian Federation, and I do not understand why such highly regarded professionals would not cover their tracks better.
If you think of it as an excessively complicated stupid thing, it makes sense though.
Also the incessant drumbeat of "Russians, Russians, Russians."
And the Niger yellowcake/Valerie Plame assault on the Bush administration, masterfully spun up from moonshine and horse feathers by Joseph C. Wilson IV, retired State Dept. official.
Anyone who has had to deal with journalists, especially young journalists, learns pretty quickly not to expect them to be intelligent, well-informed, or well-intentioned.
That "Edelweiss" is controversial proves only that our professional educators are good at putting notions like "Past Bad" in their victims.
Narr
Retired from higher ed. I know of what I speak.
Where are the journalists? Two years of wasted time could have provided the public with some (cough, cough) facts.
BAG: "Probably, Brennan was reporting on this mischief to Obama, but I doubt Obsma will be hit."
Whoa!!
You'll want to clear such musings with Phil first, lest you be relegated to fruit-based analogies.
Which, given the season, makes sense. The Blackberries thus far are stellar...but I'm still willing to go without to shut the border if necessary to stop this astonishing flow.
Assuming Phil will agree that simply observing tens of thousands of migrants pouring across our border is not a conspiracy theory.
The best part is if they actually have to cover the fakeness of the dossier, why didn’t their reporters catch it?
If the special prosecutor and his team withheld evidence from the FISA court the would have undercut the credibility of the Steele Dossier (such as the fact that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign), we are in big trouble. A FISA warrant allows the government to surveil American citizens. And these are the guys with the guns who have the power to storm into your house at three in the morning and haul you off.
Seeing Red:"The best part is if they actually have to cover the fakeness of the dossier, why didn’t their reporters catch it?"
Best case? They are idiots.
Worst case? A select few, probably already with longstanding pay-to-publish relationships with FusionGPS (Sorry Phil, not a conspiracy, already documented) knew the shadyness of the dossier but ran with it anyway to advance the cause.
I put Isikoff in the "Best Case" column initially, and David Corn in the "Worst Case" column.
mtrobertslaw: "If the special prosecutor and his team withheld evidence from the FISA court the would have undercut the credibility of the Steele Dossier (such as the fact that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign), we are in big trouble."
I sure hope you cleared this comment with "Strawberry Phil" first.
Else, yikes!
The real question is where was all of this careful questioning of the Dossier in the NYTimes before Thursday? It isn't like you needed the Mueller Report to figure out that it likely was all dogshit. I mean, Carter Page was walking around a free man the entire time, and all the other people mentioned also were not being charged with crimes related to the allegations within the dossier. I thought it was all a tissue of lies when it published in January of 2017, but I knew it was all a fabrication by the end of that year.
I predicted a few weeks back that Mueller would basically pretend the dossier didn't exist because to do otherwise would have required the investigators to question hard at the grand jury and in FBI interviews people like John Brennan, Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein. The questions would have been on topics like- who first gave you this document, when did you know it was created at the behest of the Clinton Campaign, and what did you do to verify the allegations against Carter Page before declaring him to be a known Russian spy before the FISA court and signing those applications.
Steele made the whole thing up for Hillary. There were no Russian sources.
Mueller debunked the dossier. Cohen wasn’t in Prague. That was one of the main pieces of information. It was total bullshit. A competent FBI could have corroborated that basic fact very easily. Once an important basic fact is wrong, the whole report is unreliable.
The FBI faces two choices: admit the top leadership was corrupt or admit the top leadsership were total fucking morons. Or, most likely, they were corrupt and total fucking morons.
Comey, McCabe, Baker, Priestap, Strzok, and Page were all shitcanned. Strzok and Page put in texts in their government issued phones texts that showed they were sleazy anti-trumpers. Mueller had to fire them from The Team (though Bob staggered their firings and didn’t disclose that they were fired or why so as to help cover up the bullshit).
Comey was the head of this Shitshow. He’s a total disgrace.
It is a matter of public record that Carter Page was a cooperating witness and informant to the Obama DoJ in the prosecution of the Russian agents who attempted to recruit him prior to 2016. However, when you read the Mueller Report, it describes those episodes in a way that all but states that Page was an unindicted conspirator. This was just outright dishonesty, and the reason it was written that way is because to do otherwise would have highlighted the fact that the FISA applications against Page were improper all along- Mueller's treatment of Page in the report was just another smear against the man.
YW: "The real question is where was all of this careful questioning of the Dossier in the NYTimes before Thursday?"
The dems want to get off the Collusion Train as quickly as possible, hence the many many many lefty/LLR talking heads who, by Thursday afternoon, were saying "Collusion? Who's talking about collusion?? It's the obstruction that matters" (as choreographed over the last couple of years).
All in anticipation of impeachment.
The dems are counting on their army of lefties/LLR's/Media allies to run full speed with their latest History-Began-This-Morning tactical shift.
The dossier can now be "challenged" (albeit in a controlled way) in order to shift the conversation onto already prepped rhetorical ground for the coming offensive.
Of course, time is of the essence here, isn't it? What if that 9-lives Trump is successful at exposing EVERYTHING the team of lefties/dems/LLR's have been up to for 3+ years?
Well now, that's not going to make anyone happy inside the beltway, is it?
Mueller did his best to cover for his friend Comey.
But it wasn’t enough.
Comey is a shitheel.
The journalist Edward Epstein, noted for his books on the JFK assassination, has argued that the Russians knew that their contacts with Trump campaign officials would be monitored and tracked and exposed and that it was part of a deliberate plan by Putin to, in effect, trap Trump. The goal was not to help Trump - or hurt Clinton - but to delegitimize the election.
The former director of the CIA, Mike Morrell pointed this out about the source in the Steele dossier. "I had two questions when I first read [the dossier],” Morell said in an NBC interview. “One was, how did Chris [Steele] talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries. 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."
As Epstein argued, who allowed these current and former Russian agents to sell this information? And whoever did would surely know that it would be discovered by US intelligence. Why would they allow this?
It could be journolistic disinformation in the manner of diversity, sexism, genderism, etc., to cover-up the criminal actions of Obama, Clinton, DNC, et al. in Water Closet.
it was part of a deliberate plan by Putin to, in effect, trap Trump. The goal was not to help Trump - or hurt Clinton - but to delegitimize the election.
Yes, and Nadler and Schiff are working on round 2 of the Russian disinformation project. I wonder if they are being rewarded somehow?
The nytimes article is to distract attention from the deep state roots of the dossier including Clinton / Fusion / us, au, and uk intel agencies.
Amazing how successful the dossier was against Trump.
Question is what happens now?
Romney just released a statement on the dossier - basically orange man bad, just like David French.
Russians have been happy to feed/ help / create anything that hurts the us. Amazing how successful they have been going back almost 100 years.
“If the special prosecutor and his team withheld evidence from the FISA court the would have undercut the credibility of the Steele Dossier (such as the fact that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign), we are in big trouble. A FISA warrant allows the government to surveil American citizens. And these are the guys with the guns who have the power to storm into your house at three in the morning and haul you off.”
It has been awhile since anyone has publicly tried to justify the FISA warrants on Carter Page as completely legitimate with a straight face. Page, of course, never was arrested for even jay walking, despite four FISA warrants. Even ignoring the Steele Dossier, the FISA applications on him were fraudulent, since they are only available (against US Persons like Page) if the only way to gain the required intelligence, and Page had a history of cooperating with the FBI, probably as late as March or so of 2016, a half year before filing for a FISA warrant on him. And he claims to have reached out to the FBI three or so times during that 6-7 months to talk to them about his adventures. They had no interest in actually talking to him, since their goal was, instead, apparently, to use his involvement with supposed Russian actors as legal justification for spying on the Trump campaign (ultimately accomplished by leveraging the FISA warrants that apparently allow electronic surveillance two hops from the official target). We know that the FISA warrants were not legitimately obtained not just for not calling out the funding of the Steele Dossier by Trump’s opponent, but also from their exclusion in the Woods file of Page’s cooperation with the FBI, over a period of years, ending a scant half year earlier. This is the sort of information that, if presented to the FISC, would likely have been a big red light.
Keep in mind anytime that you hear that the FBI couldn’t have “spied” on Carter, and therefore much of the Trump campaign, transition, and early Administration, because their electronic surveillance was pursuant to FISA warrants issued by the FISA Court (FISC). This is no different than cops lying to courts to get wiretap or other search warrants. The difference is that once the fraud on the court has been detected, everything gained as a result of the search warrant, even indirectly, is suppressable in criminal trials. Of course, the goal here was never to use the information as evidence in a criminal trial (where it likely would have been inadmissible), but passed on to Trump’s enemies to use against him.
Ray-SoCal: "Romney just released a statement on the dossier - basically orange man bad, just like David French.
Russians have been happy to feed/ help / create anything that hurts the us. Amazing how successful they have been going back almost 100 years."
Strawberry Phil is NOT going to like that comment, let me tell you.
Ray - SoCal said...
Romney just released a statement on the dossier - basically orange man bad, just like David French.
Russians have been happy to feed/ help / create anything that hurts the us. Amazing how successful they have been going back almost 100 years.
Mitt Romney has made it clear he is just a repulsive person.
Every republican voter is aware he is on the same team as Obama at this point.
Obama and Hillary are more honest human beings then Mitt Romney.
Let that sink in a bit.
Let me add to my FISA warrant rant, that the way that most of the signers on the warrant applications are going to try to avoid responsibility is to claim that the underlying paperwork was in order. That is not going to work with DDir Andrew McCabe and DAG Sally Yates. There is testimony that they had preapproved the first warrant application to rush it through, very likely to beat NSA Dir Rogers who filed information with the FISC a day or so later laying out rampant FISA 702 abuse by esp the FBI, which had been allowing contractors unsupervised access to NSA databases up until he discovered the abuse and shut it down in May of that year (many suspect that the Steele Dossier mistake about Cohen going to Prague was a result of an illegal 702 “about” search of NSA databases, likely resulting from the FBI illegally granting contractors access). The problem is that preapproval of the original FISA application apparently worked to have their subordinates, who were putting together the underlying warrant application package, to cut corners. But maybe more importantly, they had actual knowledge of the source of the Steele Dossier. AAG Bruce Ohr was a direct report to DAG Yates, and had introduced Steele to DD McCabe in August. In short, they both personally knew that the original FISA warrant application contained material omissions, and had been rushed by their preapprovals, but signed for their respective organizations any way.
Bruce: "The problem is that preapproval of the original FISA application apparently worked to have their subordinates, who were putting together the underlying warrant application package, to cut corners. But maybe more importantly, they had actual knowledge of the source of the Steele Dossier."
Not a single bit of that can possibly be true, according to Strawberry Phil.
"NSA Dir Rogers who filed information with the FISC a day or so later laying out rampant FISA 702 abuse by esp the FBI, which had been allowing contractors unsupervised access to NSA databases"
I sure hope Barr talks to Rogers.
You people high level of emotion is your weak spot that the Dems will exploit in 2020. So keep it up boys The whining the crying the conspiracy theories it's exactly the kind of behavior that we expect and depend on out of the so-called conservative Patriot bowel movement
I am eagerly awaiting the last act of this drama. I anticipate that the main actors—Brennan, Clapper, Rice, Comey, Lynch, McCabe, Yates—will be fully exposed for engaging in improper and illegal (in violation of DOJ rules and regulations) operations to spy improperly on an American political campaign. Whether they will be merely admonished or dragged into criminal proceedings will be interesting. I expect the Mother of all Go Fund Me campaigns if they are brought to justice. See Andrew McCabe. But Barr may merely expose and admonish them.
The roles played by in-between characters like Rosenstein and Mueller will probably stay in the shadows. Trump probably threw a whale of an explosion when, having rejected the idea that Mueller replace Comey as head of the FBI, he heard that Rosenstein had appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate something. I don’t think I would have kept my composure as well as Trump did. Sessions had let him down and Rosenstein had double-crossed him.
I think that was Trump’s testing time. He surrounded himself with good people—Dowd, Guiliani, McGann, etc. Who engineered an approach that kept Trump out of obstruction land. Mueller’s report on obstruction is hilarious! Every time Trump started down the road to obstruction, his team gave him good advice that he followed. Then they told Mueller all about it and Mueller was left with nothing. How can you say he was obstructing the investigation when he never did anything?
So, I come out of this renewed respect for Trump and his team. They outsmarted Mueller and his attack dogs. Trump took their advice when it counted. He appointed Bill Barr, who may well restore things at the DOJ after 8 years of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
The best is yet to come.
The whining the crying the conspiracy theories it's exactly the kind of behavior that we expect and depend on out of the so-called conservative Patriot bowel movement
Says the Nadler/Schiff voter. Hilarious.
Keep at it Howard. You are funnier than AOC, if possible.
Howard. You are concerned about conspiracy theories and excessive emotionalism? That’s rich.
Your team got outsmarted. Live with it.
This story is a random act of journalism by the New York Times.
Surely they knew all of this for at least two years. I did and I wasn't even thinking about it all that much.
“Blogger Howard said...
Yeah, bring it on. The more you go after Hillary, the easier it will be for Democrats to shitcan the cunt. Also, it gives credibility to Mueller.”
Alas, any going after Hillary is going to mean, at least peripherally, going after Obama and a bunch of other Donk luminaries. And the Democrats aren’t going to like that one little bit.
Howard: "You people high level of emotion is your weak spot..."
Dude who thinks people can change their biological sex just by thinking it sez wut?
Howard: "You people high level of emotion is your weak spot...."
I'm just glad that Howard got this comment in before we all died from Climate Change!
Way to be on the ball Howard!!
Just in under the wire!!
One followup question though: Since we are all going to die in 10 years, what difference, at this point, does your observation make?
rightguy: "This story is a random act of journalism by the New York Times.
Surely they knew all of this for at least two years. I did and I wasn't even thinking about it all that much."
Not possible according to Strawberry Phil. Apparently, what you think you knew 2 years ago wasn't true then and isn't true now.
I too was surprised to learn that this morning from Phil.
or the tax cut or even net neutrality,
“Comey, McCabe, Baker, Priestap, Strzok, and Page were all shitcanned.”
If I had to pick one of those who wasn’t like the others, it would be Bill Priestap. He stuck around longer, and appears to have retired on his own volition. He was Strzok’s immediate boss, and, from his text messages with Lisa Page, spent a lot of effort working around Priestap. Instead, Strzok appears to have preferred working directly with DD McCabe, several levels above him officially. When Strzok was returning from London in triumph (presumably after getting the evidence used as a predicate to open the CH investigation through official channels) Priestap thought that Strzok should debrief him first, while his bosses apparently believed otherwise. The way that I envision things is that Strzok was the out of control employee that Priestap couldn’t control because he had the ear of Priestap’s bosses, notably DD McCabe.
I also don’t see (fired) Dir Comey as having been deep in the conspiracy, but rather the useful dunce who was run around in circles by his subordinates, led, of course, by DD McCabe, whose fingers were in almost as many pies as Strzok’s were (Strzok appears to have also had the support of DNI Clapper and CIA Dir Brennan, and some have claimed that he actually worked for the CIA, and his FBI post was just cover).
"How can you say he was obstructing the investigation when he never did anything?"
Thought crime.
Sohrab Ahmari has an interesting piece out today in the NY Post: Top 10 things the media got wrong about "collusion" and "obstruction".
Needless to say I sent them a note explaining Strawberry Phil will be along shortly to correct this article.
"Let this be a lesson to the US Intelligence Community.
"If you do not want your sources and methods to be exposed, then do not meddle in US elections and do not conspire to remove elected US officials from office."
Yeah, the sources and methods exist to protect our country, not vice versa.
Remember all those news stories about how McGann had spent days with Team Mueller and how he must have been setting up Trump for a fall? Now it is clear that he was inoculating Trump against obstruction charges. If you tell all about the ins and outs, and the conclusion is that the target didn’t do anything, where do you go from there? There isn’t even any story to go after— you have already been told.
If Mueller was looking to build an obstruction charge against Trump—and he was—McGann and Dowd played him like a fiddle. The key is that Trump never did anything. He talked everything over and then took his lawyers’ advice and stayed out of trouble. Mueller was left with thoughtcrime, which isn’t a chargeable offence.
This is some of the slickest lawyering I have seen in 45 years, but the key is that Trump was innocent. He got good advice and he took it. The only way he could get into trouble would be a process crime, and everyone made sure he didn’t commit one. The over-disclosure was brilliant. Mueller couldn’t even make a plausible case to interview Trump.
So, claiming that Putin conspired with Trump to hurt Clinton and steal the election is fine? That's a good conspiracy theory. But suggesting that Putin conspired to delegitimize the entire election and wasn't favoring either candidate is out of bounds? Conspiracy thinking for me but not for thee?
Everyone agrees that Putin tried to disrupt the election. The question is how and for what purpose did he go about this? The Trump critics can only think one way: that he helped Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump...this obsession with all things Trump.
Others suggest - I don't know with any certainty - that he wanted to hurt the entire process. Tried to think about this without being fixated on Trump.
Thank the gods for CSPAN. I just switched off, after authoress Anna Something began her talk about her book about conspiracy theories (4/6/2019) with wry appreciation that so much is happening to make her book relevant . . . like, there's a CONSPIRACY NUT in the White House.
She's a tatted, wide-eyed, little vamp. Went to the best schools I'm sure.
Narr
NTTAWWT
Howard: "You people high level of emotion is your weak spot..."
Next time calming down before post, Kemosabe
If this were Russian disinformation, then the facts that would be easy to corroborate — like that Vohen was in Orague on a certain date — would be true.
This wasn’t Russian disinformation and these jagoffs know it. They know Steele just made up shit and handed it to the FBI and the FBI knew it was bullshit because confirming that Cohen was not in Prague is child’s play.
The warrant was bullshit. The claim now by Comey and his circle of incompetent and corrupt jagoffs that this was Russian disinformation is bullshit.
But let’s take note what weasels these guys are. They are now saying that They Were So Fucking Stuoid They Fell For Russian Disinformation.
Sorry. We Are Just Dumbfucks Who Don’t Do Basic Investigative Work So The Russians Fooled Us is the worst defense of all.
“We Are Lazy and Stupid” — signed The Deep State
"They know Steele just made up shit and handed it to the FBI and the FBI knew it was bullshit because confirming that Cohen was not in Prague is child’s play."
Can't imagine why Steele won't talk to Barr.
@mcc: "Steele made the whole thing up for Hillary. There were no Russian sources."
Quite possibly. That we do not know yet. If he did make it up, did he do so on his own?
The Cohen in Prague fuck up was because an illegal NSA database search showed a different Michael Cohen was in Prague. That shows the sort of access they had and the incompetence. Not overall incompetence, but the sort of carelessness that springs from overconfidence.
Who makes that sort of mistake? Such an easy thing to correct. Only a person with no fear would be so lazy. They thought the game was rigged for good.
Agree. They were lazy because this was all about ingratiating themselves with Hillary. Hillary was kissed at the FBI for the email server investigation, even though they tanked it for her.
This was their chance to make up for it. Sure, we’ll use your oppo research to get FISA warrants and help spread that to the media.
They figured she was a cinch to win so what’s the harm.
They are now all fired.
Make an example of Comey. Let McCabe and Strzok roll on Comey and Sally Yates.
"Only a person with no fear would be so lazy. They thought the game was rigged for good."
That confidence has yet to be proven wrong.
And the Niger yellowcake/Valerie Plame assault on the Bush administration, masterfully spun up from moonshine and horse feathers by Joseph C. Wilson IV, retired State Dept. official.
Don't overlook Comey's role in all that -- appointing Fitzgerald as special counsel for another baseless investigation into the leak knowing all the time who had leaked it.
If Brennan and Clapper avoid prison time, AG Barr has failed.
If Yates and Lynch are not disbarred, AG Barr has failed.
I do not grade on a curve.
Original Mike:
Trump is vindictive.
That's the only reason I have hope.
Comey ratted on McCabe about whether the media leak was authorized. Comey wanted to undermine McCabe’s credibility so that McCabe couldn’t be an effective witness against Comey when this FISA stuff hit.
McCabe is really a stupid man. He should have seen that one coming.
Why wouldn't Putin try to penetrate the Trump campaign? And disseminate blackmail/damaging information about him? And use Steele as a conduit for this information?
It makes sense to me.
mccullough--I hope you are sitting down.
McClatchy News-- which went deep with Cohen in Prague-- is keeping hope alive. They ran a story yesterday to the effect that just because Cohen wasn't in Prague does not mean that his PHONE was not in Prague. Geddit?
As Teddy (the Dunkster) Kennedy so famously said, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
You go, McClatchy.
Obama had nothing to do with this. He checked out long before this.
I doubt Lynch was in on it. She’s too stupid even for these guys. She got caught meeting with Bill Clinton.
This was Deep State bullshit. Comey and McCabe and Strzok trying to protect their jobs. Comey got a little help from Brennan and Clapper but this was his op and his fuckup. No CNN or MSNBC gig for Jim.
The only ones stupider than the Comey Coven are the media.
mccullough--I agree with you about Comey and Yates. Somebody needs to go to the gallows for this. Let it be them. They should have known better. Their underlings were just trying to please them.
Aristos! To Dr. Guillotine!
If Putin wanted to give disinformation to Steele, he wouldn’t have lied about easily provable facts. Disinformation, like all lies, are only effective if the stuff that’s proveable is true.
This was sloppy. The Russians aren’t sloppy. MI-6 and the FBI are sloppy. Not the Russians.
Mueller wasted everyone's time writing a 450 Bullshit report on Obstruction. Go read Volume II. 80% of it is Mueller quoting Comey's Memos, People's public testimony, and Trump's Tweets and talks to the media OR Mueller's endless and meaningless "Legal analysis".
As far as I can tell, other than doing a few interviews of White House lawyers he did ZERO investigation work on Obstruction. And he discovered nothing new. Trump is only President who had a Special Prosecutor take 2 years to determine whether Trump's PUBLIC actions and PUBLIC statements, constituted the obstruction of a investigation that found NO crime. Incredible!
And MItt Romney is a piece of shit. Drago has it right, Mitt wanted to get on-board for the Trump impeachment and now all he can do is usual fake moralistic, backstabbing little bitch act for 2 years.
Never vote for a Republican Mormon. Flake, Romney, etc.
Comey is smarter than McCabe. He already got him fired for dishonesty. “Gee, Andy is a great guy and I have no idea why he’d say such a thing but I didn’t authorize him to discuss the Clinton Foundation with the Wall Street Journal and this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
Comey will get charged for lying to Congress.
McCabe and Strzok will get charged for the FISA lies.
Yates will probably skate. “Just relies on the FBI. Had no idea that Andy and Pete we’re lying to me.”
Yeah. Mueller's obstruction fact findings have been in the public eye for a couple of years. Nothing new.
Bottom line: if he could have recommended charging Trump, he would have. Because he couldn't he didn't. Because he didn't, he couldn't.
Case over.
Romney attacking Trump again is helpful to Trump.
Mitt was The Man Who Will Stop Trump in 2016.
Then Mitt went to grovel for a job. Because that’s the weasel he is.
Now Mitt the Statesman is back.
Total fucking loser
The claims in the Steele dossier have served their purpose. We've spent two plus years in an uproar over the matter. Large numbers of people believe the election was stolen; that Trump was compromised and that's why he's been "easy" on Putin; and we've been at each other's throats since the election.
It worked.
Mitt is yesterday's man. His job was to shine a light on Obama's incompetence, and he couldn't do it. Now he is in the Senate from (yawn) Utah.
Did you hear about the time he put that dog on top of his car? Or the time he gave that gay kid a haircut in high school? Or when he gave that lady cancer? The bastard.
Probably the only good thing about the Mueller Report is it shows what a bunch weak-kneed weasels poor Ol’Trump had as advisers.
You got Sessions who couldn’t’ take the heat, and bailed out and let Rosenstein crucify Trump. Jeff was willing to do only two things. Resign and not help Trump. The same is true of McGrath. His primary concerns seems to have been (1) his post Trump employability and (2) protecting Mueller and Rosenstein. Helping Trump get rid of a needless investigation wasn’t on his list. And then we have Rosenstein, the true villain of the piece. What’s chutzpah! The man is DAG for three weeks and out-of-the-blue he appoints Comey’s friend as special counsel, gives him a blank cheque, and then sits back and laughs for 22 months.
I am late to this, but I find it hard to believe that the NYT admits: 1. That the Steele Dossier was financed by Hillary; 2. That the dossier claims were impossible to prove;3. that FBI agents did not believe the one Steele source that they were able to track down; 4. that the claims made about Carter Page were false; 5. that Michael Cohen never went to Prague. Is this an indication that the NYT is aware that the shit is about to hit the fan for some of its favorite "sources"? Is the NYT trying to prepare all those gullible folks on the upper west side that the Steele Dossier and all that followed was a steaming pile of horse shit and to not be surprised if someone goes to jail for this mess?
If nothing else, the following people were fired:
Yates, Comey, McCabe, Priestap, Baker, Strzok, and Page.
Always good when the people who should be fired are fired.
The Times are stenographers of The Narrative.
The Narrative is now Russian Disinfornation.
Take Philby and his crowd. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming were friends with Philby and, even after his defection, remained sympathetic.
That's because the liberal/left NEVER Give up. They never forget and they never forgive. They use their control of the publishing houses, entertainment industry and MSM to just keep pounding away, year and year after year.
Meanwhile, the Center-Right doesn't care - or can't remember - what happened Thursday. Mitt Romney been a flip flopping, backstabbing RINO for 12 years - but I'm sure a lot of Conservatives are puzzled why anyone would criticize Good Ol' Mitt.
“And the Niger yellowcake/Valerie Plame assault on the Bush administration, masterfully spun up from moonshine and horse feathers by Joseph C. Wilson IV, retired State Dept. official.”
Apparently Plame is running for the Senate (or some such) in NM, having divorced Wilson.
"Large numbers of people believe the election was stolen; that Trump was compromised and that's why he's been "easy" on Putin;"
I'm not sure how much this matters. Ingas don't hate Trump because they believe the collusion hoax, Ingas believe the collusion hoax because they hate Trump.
The only thing Trump obstructed, period, was Hillary getting elected. And that was an unforgivable sin to the Democrats.
Sorry, Romney is 100% absolutely correct. Trump lied repeatedly - read the report, the same report people are waving around as being the truth - about this matter. And his people lied repeatedly about this matter. And that is unacceptable.
Two things can be true: the collusion claim was nonsense and a hostile press gleefully and recklessly promoted it.
And Trump has been disgracing himself with his behavior. This is not a morality tale between the good guys and the bad.
Just because Trump was unfairly targeted by this nonsense doesn't excuse his response.
The lefty trolls are really coming out. Do you speak Russian ?
She got caught meeting with Bill Clinton.
A couple of random TV reporters caught them. They were acting on a tip. From where did the tip come??
She was supposed to be caught. She needed a recusal.
Take Philby and his crowd. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming were friends with Philby and, even after his defection, remained sympathetic.
Even Angleton stayed a friend and had been completely fooled.
That is part of the Venona story,
Yes oligarchs lost billions of dollars, prigizhins crack outfit was shattered at deir we zour and Ukrainians are armed with javelin lissiles instead of food rations.
And the Soviets found out about venona from wiesband in 1946.
Missiles, their chief proxies in Cuba and Venezuela are under threat.
“Obama had nothing to do with this. He checked out long before this.
I doubt Lynch was in on it. She’s too stupid even for these guys. She got caught meeting with Bill Clinton.
This was Deep State bullshit. Comey and McCabe and Strzok trying to protect their jobs. Comey got a little help from Brennan and Clapper but this was his op and his fuckup. No CNN or MSNBC gig for Jim.”
No way were Strzok and McCabe merely USA trying to save their jobs. McCabe’s wife had taken a large bribe (In the form of campaign contributions) from long time Clinton bag man Terry McAwful (the VA gov, and possible Dem nominee for President if Crooked Hillary sits it out). I would suggest that his failure to report the bribe to the FBI probably indicates knowledge of guilt. And Strzok went out of his way, to aggressively get his fingers in every major action for Crooked Hillary or against Trump, between at least June 2016 through his transfer to the Mueller investigation. As noted above, not only was he tight (possibly through Lisa Page) with McCabe, 3-4 levels above him, but was also tight with DNI Clapper and CIA Dir Brennan. DNI Clapper hand picked Strzok to lead the FBI team that miraculously determined that the DNC server had been hacked by the Russians, despite never having had physical access to the server, but rather based on the mere say so of DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Not only was he the lead investigator in both Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane, he was also the one who tried to run the clock out with the Weiner laptop, then first told Comey (after belatedly finding out about the laptop from the SDNY DoJ, instead of from his own people) that they couldn’t forensically determine in the remaining time before the election whether there were new classified documents on that laptop (after earlier having accepted the 30,000 emails from Clinton in paper, not electronic form, making deduplication very arduous), then lying to Comey that they had deduplicated emails over a pizza powered weekend, when all they had done was a small sample. And, yes, the lead agent on the team dispatched by DD McCabe to the Trump White House to catch newly installed NSA Flynn in a perjury trap. With 35,000 agents and employees in the FBI, Peter Strzok was the one guy, along with DD McCabe, who had his fingers in every political pie for better than a year.
I should also note that the disclosure of the Strzok/Page text messages within days of NSA Flynn having been forced out is suspicious. This forced Strzok off of the Mueller team, and ultimately resulted in his firing. One theory is that this was tit for tat, by Military Intellgence for Civilian Intelligence (principally CIA and FBI) having taken out their golden boy. Civilian Intelligence took out a high ranking Military Intelligence asset and Military Intelligence took out an equally high ranking piece of theirs. As I noted earlier, I think it unlikely that Peter Strzok was merely a mid level FBI bureaucrat, give his involvement in so many different things, and esp for having been hand picked by DNI Clapper to investigate the hacked DNC server, and come to the preordained determination that the Russians had done it.
What Bruce Hayden said.
The MI piece is particularly interesting; the attempted frame-up is the sort of thing that happens when the DSers start infighting (which they always do)--or rather the exposure of the frame up is what happens.
Yuge failure on their part, and the show is only now really beginning . . .
Narr
No egg on my face
Clapper is a drunk. So is Brennan. These guys couldn’t run a fantasy football league. They are exactly the type of people you get in the last years of an administration.
I don’t give a fuck about the immorality or lying of Donald Trump.
I care about results. Mitt Romney doesn’t deliver results. He’s a fucking rich quisling who would fuck over the country to save $5 a year on his lawn services.
Romney has zero problem with Trump supportingnhim for President. He had zero problem begging Trump for a job.
Romney is a scumbag who would flood the country with third world people because he’s a private schoool kid who sends his kids and grandkids to private school.
Send 100 asylum seekers to each of his many houses.
“Obama had nothing to do with this. He checked out long before this.
I doubt Lynch was in on it. She’s too stupid even for these guys. She got caught meeting with Bill Clinton.
This was Deep State bullshit. Comey and McCabe and Strzok trying to protect their jobs. Comey got a little help from Brennan and Clapper but this was his op and his fuckup. No CNN or MSNBC gig for Jim.”
Someone in the White House was involved. Too much evidence pointing that direction, including repeated Strzok/Page text messages indicating such. My question is whether or not the trail will go cold with NSA Susan Rice, who, along with DAG Sally Yates were the ones who seem to have figured out how to militarize FISA, first 702 database searching of electronic information about US Persons (using not just “from” and “to”searching, but also “about” searching), then whe that was curtailed by NSA Dir Rogers, they moved to Title I electronic surveillance of at least Carter Page (and anyone w/I two hops of him). NSA Rice sees to also have been the one who discovered how to get around FISA minimization requirements by putting search results in Obama’s PDBs, and then greatly expanding the list receiving PDBs to include the political side of the Obama Administration, including his head speech writer (yes, Ben Rhodes was seeing unmasked results fom 702 searches in the PDBs he was receiving). This was apparently dutifully approved as legal by DAG Yates. The actual person who unmasked hundreds of 702 search results using the credentials of UN Ambassador Powers (neither NSA nor UN Ambassador had unmasking request power in previous Administrations) is unknown. Powers denies that it was she. One suggestion is that it might have been NSA Rice, who had been UN Ambassador before becoming NSA, opening the UN post up for Powers
I think tat there is a decent chance that Obama was involved. I see this as being the sort of thing that he would be interested in. Moreover, there was a political risk that only he should have been able to authorize. But, since it was done while he was President, I don’t see any legal vulnerability there on his part. Since then, sure. But not for actions taken as President. Now, if he had been nearly as smart as his supporters believed him to have been, he pardoned everyone involved before leaving office. I don’t think anyone has seen signs of this yet, but the investigation is just turning to tracking down and prosecuting those involved in all the spying going on targeting political opponents throughout much of 2016.
Steve M. Galbraith said...
"Sorry, Romney is 100% absolutely correct."
I will put you in the too rigid to bother with argument.
For any others still reading:
What we have is a one-sided bull shit story from which no indictments came for lying to investigators. So all of the claims of lies are alleged to have happened from government officials? Next we'll be learning that there was fucking gambling at fucking Rick's!! Imagine my surprise.
Politics is full of liars. That's why we don't trust the sons of bitches who want power. And that's why the policies that have reduced federal power (fewer regs and fewer federal employees) are so important. Trump is doing that. Nobody else has done that in living memory.
So take all your moralizing and kiss Romney's ass with your puckered stupid face.
Rice is probably stupid enough to do the unmasking requests. But prosecute Powers for doing it. It’s in her name.
Its enough to make an example of any of them. Indict them both for conspiracy.
It’s Trump’s turn at bat now. Just pick Rice and Power. Let them defend themselves like Flynn did.
Trump should stay out of the legal process.
But some process as punishment would be useful.
Trump was compromised and that's why he's been "easy" on Putin;"
What would have been “easy” on Putin was keeping Keystone good and dead, the way Obama did, and Hillary promised to continue, and to end fracking, as Hillary promised to do, so that Putin could get high prices for his energy to fund his military.
Oh yeah, and what would have been “easy” on Putin was to respect his monopoly on natural gas supplies to Europe, not break his monopoly as has been happening under Trump. All of that natural gas we have due to fracking.
Steve M. Galbraith: "Sorry, Romney is 100% absolutely correct."
We have just witnessed, for the first time in our history, the entirety of our federal govt law enforcement and intelligence agencies conspiring with foreign agents and governments to frame an opposition candidate for crimes that he did not commit and then try to execute a coup to remove him from power in an illicit and criminal way all the while breaking every rule in the book to allow their candidate to break the law with impunity.
You can go screw yourself.
And, mind you, this was after years of weaponizing the federal govt and its agencies to attack conservative groups and spy on journalists and members of congress.
In case you hadn't noticed, we are in a war with the left/dems/LLR's, and many want to simply surrender to them.
Politely of course. One must always be very very polite when surrendering. Otherwise its not cricket.
I'm just glad that Howard got this comment in before we all died from Climate Change!.
+1
Blogger rhhardin said...
The Mueller report is itself opposition research so they're loathe to mention Hillary's.
--
That.
Lead investi-gator was Weissman, Clinton "victory party" attendee.
Good choice Bob!
NYT finally catches up with conservative comment sections, which have been right about this whole smear campaign by Hillary and her machine for the past two years.
This has been a zombie set loose by her. There is nobody to shut down the Clinton machine, so it mindlessly moves forward, eating the brains of liberals. Maybe the NYT is finally seeing the light, but no, I don’t think so.
The whining the crying the conspiracy theories
That is funny coming from a guy whose party just tied up the whole national conversation for two years with a phony conspiracy theory. Oh yeah, and actual crying, actual tears of their “thought leaders” like Rachael “Cash Cow” Maddow on TV.
You can tell that the Russians wrote the dossier just by reading it aloud. You could drop “Moose and Squirrel” anywhere in it and it would not sound out of place.
Well, the new and improved NYT promises to do better next time after each exposure.
Investigate away! I have no desire to see the Clintons protected!
But "the dossier" won't have a damn thing to do with whether or not Trump committed FEC violations, bank fraud and mail fraud in relation to payments made to his mistresses in return for silence during his presidential campaign. And it won't stop an investigation into the Trump Organization's insurance fraud. Nor will it stop an investigation into whether laundered Russian money was used to purchase Trump Turnberry in Scotland.
The rumors that Smear Merchant Chuck, fopdoodle extraordinaire, has diddled small children continue to swirl. Many questions remain unanswered.
"But "the dossier" won't have a damn thing to do with whether or not Trump committed FEC violations, bank fraud and mail fraud in relation to payments made to his mistresses in return for silence during his presidential campaign."
Mail fraud? Who gives a fuck?
You are a deeply unserious person.
Yeah. Mueller's obstruction fact findings have been in the public eye for a couple of years. Nothing new.
Bottom line: if he could have recommended charging Trump, he would have. Because he couldn't he didn't. Because he didn't, he couldn't.
I have been lectured about obstruction of justice by the left. I say, "you can't obstruct justice by exercising your constitutional power" I get lectured about 'corrupt intent'.
So here is President Trump exercising 'corrupt intent.' Over a 2 year investigation into the entirety of his administration, President Trump never once use his constitutional power of executive privilege, to protect his communications with all of his staff. Never refused their ability to be interviewed, and after being interviewed, never redacted those parts of the Mueller report that have become political ammunition for Democrats. Executive privilege is an enumerated constitutional power.
For a guy that want's to obstruct justice, he's doing a terrible job of it.
President Trump actions prove his intent. Refusing to exercise Executive Privilege, is the antithesis of obstruction of justice.
I'm just asking questions.
"I'm just asking questions."
And what about Schiff?
It is unclear whether Chuck, fopdoodle smear guy, or Adam Schiff has diddled more small children recently.
The economy, foreign adversaries, illegal immigration, etc, etc, and Chuck is talking mail fraud and mistresses. What a child.
We should look for answers.
One can only hope, Chuck.
It just might give 2020 to one of the Dems you "have no interest in"...and make things tough for the R congress-critters.
But it will be the right thing to do to conserve conservatism.
Jerry Nadler "republican" Chuck: "Investigate away! I have no desire to see the Clintons protected!"
LOL
Funniest thing I've read all day.
Original Mike: "The economy, foreign adversaries, illegal immigration, etc, etc, and Chuck is talking mail fraud and mistresses. What a child."
Nope.
Just a partisan leftist doing his part for Team Dem.
Just because I am feeling cranky tonight and can't tell Mitt to his face that he is an asshole of major proportions I will say it here: "Mitt Romney is an asshole of major proportion!" There.
As far as Trumps behavior outlined in part two by Weissman I don't see a damn thing wrong with getting good and pissed about being framed by a bunch of idiots and lashing out a bit because of that. The problem with Republicans is that they don't know how to do "pissed" and as a result they spend most of their time bent over taking it. Trump knows how to do "pissed" and I admire him for it. As far as Stormy and the rest that Chuck so gleefully drags out I, and several million others, don't give a damn!
Trump does pissed on Romney! Marvelous!
Magic rightball suggests so:
https://m.theepochtimes.com/is-the-mueller-report-the-son-of-the-steele-dossier_2887555.html
What Am I, Chopped Liver? -
Meaning:
A rhetorical question used by a person who feels they are being given less attention or consideration than someone else.
Mueller reports: after years long investigation as prosecutor I can say ...
Trump is NOT ham sandwich.
Mueller may be a jelly donut though.
I think more people should regard this as a training exercise than anything else. Next time they’ll have their ducks in a row. Every election after this where the “wrong” candidate wins will be subjected to this sort of reaction. Lefties are very poor at seeing the cons, they only see the pros of any action.
Until they win, then as in 2006 2008 2012 it's all right.
Greg Craig is going before judge berman Jackson in August, you think he will get the same 3rd degree.
Starting to detect wiff of concern here.
“Whiff of concern”? Clueless.
readering is none too bright.
Readering with nose stuck firmly in his own ass, as always.
Summing up the news
https://www.americanthinker.com/
Lets face it. Chuck won't be happy untill Trump and his family are are drawn and quartered in the public square. Their intestines and body parts displayed to the crowd and thier bady parts hung in every corner of the country. Chuck and the left will hound him till it's done. And after its done they will make pilgamages to shit on his grave. In short Chuck is the mob. The unreasoning hateful mob who just want to see someone humiliated and die. If not Trump and his family then some other free thinking classic liberal. Chuck is in line with every other leftist on the webs.
UK collusion with Remington Steele, a known operative of a foreign intelligence service.
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