MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘crossfire hurricane’

End the FBI | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2023

In a 2020 essay, Angelo Codevilla examined the rot at the core of the FBI. He goes far too easy on the FBI in early decades, but he was right enough when it came to the present state of the agency. He wrote:

Thus FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.

https://mises.org/wire/end-fbi

Ryan McMaken

Special counsel John Durham on Monday released his report on the FBI’s role in investigating the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” had been—according to Durham’s report—”swiftly” opened as a full-blown investigation in response to “unevaluated intelligence information” by FBI personnel “without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.”

Durham shows that the investigation had been pushed forward largely by FBI agent Peter Strzok, a man known to be politically hostile to candidate Trump. Durham also notes a curious difference between the FBI’s enthusiasm for investigating Trump, and the agency’s more cautious procedures used in investigating the Hillary Clinton campaign:

The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.

Durham went on to conclude that

An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.

Rather, the FBI engaged in a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents.”

All in all, the Durham report paints a picture of a highly unprofessional FBI that apparently greenlights investigations based on agents’ political agendas and on politically convenient rumors. Durham sums it up: The FBI and Justice Department “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”

The report was so damning that even CNN’s Jake Tapper admitted it is “devastating to the FBI,” and that the report’s conclusions serve as additional reminders that FBI agents—including many in leadership—played key roles in promoting the “Russiagate” myth. 

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The Tool of Tools – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022

“The DNC and Biden Team knew they had friends at Twitter who would do their bidding during the election. And Twitter lied to the FEC about that influence…. But that’s just at the surface….” —TechnoFog on Substack

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-tool-of-tools/

James A. Baker

      At what point in his arduous take-over of Twitter did Elon Musk realize that the package came with a joker in the deck: James A. Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI? Did he wonder: what is this guy doing here? Were there any conversations between the two? Or did Mr. Musk just quietly observe his presence at a remove in nervous wonder, as one might, say, upon discovering a scorpion in the corner of his hotel room?

    Mr. Baker, you understand, was notoriously at the center of the FBI’s FISA court fuckery that got the ball rolling in the Crossfire Hurricane operation, Act One of RussiaGate, as well as the Alfa Bank caper concocted by Hillary Clinton (disclosed this year by special counsel John Durham), and probably every other sedition pie the FBI cooked in its oven in those years, considering Mr. Baker’s position as chief legal advisor to Director Chris Wray. When the alt-news media caught onto Mr. Baker’s nefarious activities, he became inconvenient to the agency, was re-assigned to some nebulous task (polishing Mr. Wray’s cuff links?), and quit in May, 2018. He landed temporarily — or was he, rather, parked out-of-sight? — at the shadowy R Street Institute, an Intel Community cut-out, one of its countless PR channels in the DC Swamp.

    But then, mysteriously, Mr. Baker got hired by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in June of 2020 — the heat of a presidential election — to work under Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel (and chief of “legal, policy, and trust” [ha!]), where he remained until just the other day. Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter to help “moderate” the national conversation in the central forum that public debate had moved to in our time?

     If so, he apparently did a crackerjack job, and just at the right time, too, after the FBI discovered, in emails they ripped off Rudolph Giuliani’s purloined cloud account, that Donald Trump’s attorney possessed of a copy of the laptop hard-drive of one Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden — said computer (the FBI knew full-well by then) being stuffed not just with pornographic photos of crack orgies and other personal infelicities, but also a trove of emails and deal memos laying out a bribery and money-laundering scheme that the younger Biden was running all over Eurasia as a family business.

     Of course, the FBI had that selfsame computer in its possession for the better part of a year when The New York Post broke the news of its existence days before the election of 2020. In fact, the Bureau had had possession at the very time that Mr. Trump was busy getting impeached for daring to suggest to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Bidens were involved in some shady business worth investigating with the Kiev-based Burisma gas company. Evidence of that and much much more — including way-bigger shady deals with CCP cut-outs — lay moldering in the laptop the FBI just silently sat on. Isn’t it a little strange that during the dragged-out impeachment ordeal neither Attorney General William Barr nor FBI chief Chris Wray volunteered to Mr. Trump’s legal defense that they held exculpatory evidence on that laptop for the very thing he was impeached on?

     That was January, 2020, many months before The New York Post took the laptop’s existence public. And whaddaya know… by June of that year, James A. Baker was in place at Twitter, ready to serve! As election day approached, he apparently succeeded in stifling transmission of the Post’s laptop story plus any-and-all conversation about it in the Twitterverse, and was careful not to leave a memo trail of his heroic interventions. Do you suppose he might have had some conversations about all that with his old colleagues at the FBI? At the same time, you understand, the FBI was leaning successfully on that other social network giant, Facebook, to likewise smother the laptop story. And Google, too, having become an Intel Community tool, was avid to tailor its search algorithms to steer the curious away from Hunter’s laptop. And so was fortune’s fool Joe Biden inserted into history….

     Amazingly, after all that huggermugger, James A. Baker still remained in place last week at Twitter — even as his putative boss, censor-in-chief, Vijaya Gadde, got drop-kicked out the door — just as Elon Musk prepared to release a trove of information detailing Twitter’s censorship activities of recent years. Yes! And, evidently, Mr. Baker functioned as a sort of one-man clearing house for all the documents getting shoveled to independent reporter Matt Taibbi, whom Mr. Musk had designated to be the news conduit for these awaited revelations. And, yes, there is every reason to suspect that Mr. Baker censored, or perhaps even tried to destroy, the very documents that Mr. Musk ordered released.

     Was that not like leaving a wolverine in Twitter’s henhouse? How could Mr. Musk not know how absurd it was for Mr. Baker to moderate that release? Well, the chatter is that Mr. Musk was seeking a way to encourage Mr. Baker to inculpate himself, so as to foreclose any lawsuits he might think to bring against Twitter for wrongful termination. I have to say, Mr. Musk would be an idiot if he did not have copies of the server that James Baker had access to and had the opportunity to delete stuff from. I guess we’ll find out.

See the rest here

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The Resistance Digs Their Hole Deeper – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on November 26, 2019

This was another obvious attempt to deflect attention from the actual story, which is how the company named Crowdstrike, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Alperovitch, cooked up the Russian hacking story in the first place. Crowdstrike, you see, had been hired by the Democratic National Committee, and their nominee, Hillary Clinton, to interfere in the 2016 election.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-resistance-digs-their-hole-deeper/

James Howard Kunstler

“No, you don’t understand. It was the Russians, I tell you, the Russians!” And so, with a holiday recess for Adam Schiff’s impeachment soap opera, and news that DOJ Inspector General Horowitz will unload in early December, the media vassals of the Deep State are giving you their own turkey gristle to chew on: “The Russians did it! Yes, really, they did! Believe us!”

Perhaps The New York Times has hooked up to a direct line of Burisma’s product as they flood the darkened arena with eerie blue gaslight. Friday, they featured a story — Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts — geared to make readers think that the entire FBI FISA warrant hair-ball came down to one lowly lawyer chump named Kevin Clinesmith messing with an email. Later, Times reporter Adam Goldman, posted this howler on Twitter.

These truthless assertions are meant to let both the CIA and the FBI off-the-hook for opening the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation on bogus evidence they furnished to the FISA judges. Both Goldman’s news story and his tweet omit the name of the company that packaged and retailed the Russia Collusion narrative: Fusion GPS — the company that Robert Mueller testified to having no knowledge of in his July House appearance.

That oafish attempt to get out ahead of the IG’s report was followed by, whaddaya know, a Times op-ed penned by none other than Glenn Simpson, the impresario of Fusion GPS (and his partner Peter Fritsch), The Double-Barreled Dream World of Trump and His Enablers, aimed at re-selling their shopworn Russia collusion story to distract from any attention that voters might be paying to Ukraine’s collusion in the scheme to overthrow the 2016 US election and the Bidens’ grifting operation following the 2014 CIA / State Department sponsored overthrow of Ukraine’s government.

CBS 60-Minutes joined the gaslighting rotation Sunday night with a reality-optional Russia Hacked Our Election story. This was another obvious attempt to deflect attention from the actual story, which is how the company named Crowdstrike, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Alperovitch, cooked up the Russian hacking story in the first place. Crowdstrike, you see, had been hired by the Democratic National Committee, and their nominee, Hillary Clinton, to interfere in the 2016 election. Crowdstrike later became the sole entity that was allowed to perform a forensic inquiry on the DNC’s server. Somehow, they persuaded the FBI to not look into the matter. In other words, the DNC’s contractor investigated its own mischief. Does anyone wonder how that worked?

NBC joined the gaslighting brigade Sunday, hauling Fusion GPS’s Simpson & Fritsch on Meet the Press, with talking cockatoo Chuck Todd, to pimp their new “book” extolling the most excellent British spy Christopher Steele, the designated patsy for the notorious dossier composed by Simpson himself, with help from others, including Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, wife of former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, who funneled all the Fusion GPS “product” into the RussiaGate coup-stream. Two notes here: 1) the dauntless Mr. Steele has by now fessed up to federal attorney John Durham and flipped on his former associates, who made him the bag-holder for their deeds. And 2) during the Meet the Press interview, no one on-screen (Todd, Simpson, Fritsch) mentioned that Fusion GPS had been hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to compile said dossier, a curious omission.

Yes, I know this sounds complex and convoluted. Part of the media campaign this week is to absolutely confound the American public as to what happened the past three years. Obfuscation has also been, in part, the mission of Mr. Schiff in his impeachment hearings…

The CIA, the FBI, the State Department have all been players in the coup to overthrow Mr. Trump and the news media played along the whole way. They doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their dishonest narrative and now they are trapped in it…

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Barr Forms Team To Investigate FBI Malfeasance During 2016 Election | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2019

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-09/barr-forms-team-investigate-fbi-malfeasance-during-2016-election

by Tyler Durden

Attorney General William Barr has assembled an internal team at the Justice Department to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by DOJ and FBI officials – including actions taken in the summer of 2016, according to Bloomberg, which cites a person familiar with the matter.

Barr seemingly confirmed the Bloomberg report earlier Tuesday, when he told a House panel “I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016.

For starters, Barr’s team may want to investigate exactly how information flowed from a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation – Joseph Mifsud – to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March of 2016, who learned during the encounter that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos would later tell Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about the so-called Clinton dirt, which resulted in the launch of “operation crossfire hurricane,” the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.

In September 2016, the FBI would send spy Stefan Halper to further probe Papadopoulos on the Clinton email allegation, and – according to an interview with pundit Dan Bongino, Papadopoulos says Halper angrily accused him of working with Russia before storming out of a meeting. ..

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