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EXPOSED: Biggest FBI Spy Scandal of the Year

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2023

But will Congress finally stop the federal spying spree on Americans? As I tweeted on December 27, 2012, “FISA Renewal: Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about his rights and liberties.” Without radical reform, FISA should be renamed the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/exposed-biggest-fbi-spy-scandal-of-the-year/

by Jim Bovard

jpb photo mass anti spying demonstration dsc 0867 scaled

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion released last week revealed that the FBI violated the constitutional rights of 278,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 with warrantless searches of their email and other electronic data. For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. This is only the latest federal surveillance scandal stretching back to the years after 9/11.

The FISA law was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Richard Nixon administration. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided that the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other data without a warrant. After The New York Times exposed the surveillance scheme in late 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales apparently forgot the congressional impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution Congress passed entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually allowed the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the homefront, Americans had been living under martial law.

Federal judges disagreed with Bush’s prerogative to obliterate American privacy. The result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data. But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.   

President Barack Obama responded to the new law by sharply expanding the NSA’s seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” Obama’s Justice Department thwarted court challenges to the surveillance, thereby permitting the White House to claim that it was respecting Americans’ rights and privacy.

Edward Snowden blew the roof off the surveillance state with his disclosures starting in June 2013. But there was no reason to presume that federal crime sprees were not occurring before Snowden blew the whistle. Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how FISA’s Section 702 worked:

“What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry…they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order…sometime, unbeknownst to you.”

The 2008 FISA amendments and Section 702 snared vast numbers of hapless Americans in federal surveillance nets. The Washington Post analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were U.S. citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and  disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

Snowden also leaked secret court rulings that proved that the FISA Court had “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013. FISA judges rubberstamped massive seizures of Americans’ personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times noted that the FISA court had “become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues,” and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought.

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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.

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Look Ye, Shipmates — He Breaches! | Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2021

Mr. Garland will be left having to explain why the DOJ and the FBI were never self-accountable for the illegal acts of their employees, including Robert Mueller’s fishy special counsel team, which now looks like a cover-up operation, not to mention current and continuing matters such as the DOJ sitting on the laptop of President “Joe Biden’s” son, Hunter, and its bales of incriminating memoranda detailing payoffs to the Biden family from companies run by the CCP. Really, the fate of the Democratic Party is on the line with what might potentially develop if Mr. Durham’s actions go beyond Michael Sussman’s little caper.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/look-ye-shipmates-he-breaches/

James Howard Kunstler

Like the white whale of legend surfacing close to the mainland, special counsel John Durham popped up this week with one Michael Sussmann in his jaws, a smallish fish among the squamous and tentacled monsters hiding in the depths of the Deep State below the raging political seas. Who he, anyway?

Among the now well-known cast of creatures involved in the panoramic episode of perfidious sedition known as RussiaGate, Mr. Sussmann was a bit-player, an errand boy for the Perkins Coie law firm that did much of Hillary Clinton’s dirty work in the 2016 campaign and for the Democratic Party beyond. Mr. Sussmann is charged with lying to the FBI in conveying campaign dirt paid-for by Mrs. Clinton to the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, Mr. Sussmann’s old colleague from the days when he worked as a cyber-security expert at the bureau. He also peddled-around the same material, cooked up by Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS company and man-of-mystery Christopher Steele, to The New York Times and other news media, who ran with it like kids with a kite.

I have a theory about the case. It is a shot across the bow of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s ship, testing whether main DOJ will attempt to interfere with Mr. Durham’s mission to uncover the predicates of RussiaGate and the vast web of dishonest and illegal acts carried out subsequently by figures in the FBI, the DOJ, and other dark corners of a government gone rogue against its own citizens. Mr. Baker has long been suspected of acting as a cooperating witness in the RussiaGate matter, perhaps realizing early-on that he’d been played by old pal Mr. Sussmann and set up for prosecution.

The problem for Merrick Garland is that Mr. Sussmann’s activities amounted to a mere preface for the graver development of the Crossfire Hurricane operation, which involved a shoal of much-bigger fish across several agencies including Directors John Brennan of the CIA and James Comey of the FBI and many others. The Sussmann indictment also provides a window into the FISA Court fakery that federal law enforcement used to go after people connected to candidate and then President Donald Trump.

Mr. Garland will be left having to explain why the DOJ and the FBI were never self-accountable for the illegal acts of their employees, including Robert Mueller’s fishy special counsel team, which now looks like a cover-up operation, not to mention current and continuing matters such as the DOJ sitting on the laptop of President “Joe Biden’s” son, Hunter, and its bales of incriminating memoranda detailing payoffs to the Biden family from companies run by the CCP. Really, the fate of the Democratic Party is on the line with what might potentially develop if Mr. Durham’s actions go beyond Michael Sussman’s little caper.

The overwhelming body of opinion for more than a year is that John Durham is a phantom doing next-to-nothing about the greatest political scandal in US history. If his efforts end with Mr. Sussmann, he will disgrace himself, of course, and that’s a possibility. But I would venture to suppose that it won’t end there. The insult to the nation of all the epic dishonesty is too grave, even potentially fatal — since it has enabled a depraved skein of additional seditious activities afterward, including the 2020 election subterfuge, the lawlessness of BLM and Antifa, the psychotic race-and-gender “Woke” mind-fuckery infecting the US military, the ongoing invasion across the US-Mexican border, all the coercion around Covid-19, especially “mandated” shots of a dangerous so-called “vaccine,” and the destruction of small business from sea to shining sea. All of that has left the American public demoralized and economically savaged, and with the country’s standing in the world dangerously reduced.

I hope you are ready for a month of shocks to the system. The deceit of the CDC and the FDA in gaming and cooking their Covid-19 data is now emerging from the fog of pandemic hysteria. I will also dare to conjecture that the number of recent and current Covid-19 “cases” turns out to be actually and overwhelmingly adverse reactions to the mRNA experiment, not the disease itself, and that holy hell will erupt among the public as it becomes understood that their livelihoods — and their health — are being stolen as part of this fraud. A week from today, the Arizona election audit results are now scheduled to be released. Expect trauma. Tomorrow, a demonstration in support of the 1/6 political prisoners is on-board for Washington, DC. The potential for Deep State manipulation of the event is high, so stay away from it. There are enough other forces in motion now to throw a spanner in the engine of malice our government has become. Let Karma do its thing and hold on tight for a rough ride.

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All Spying, All the Time – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 20, 2020

The FISA Court meets in secret in Washington, D.C., and even the judges on the court do not have access to its records. So, the court was hugely embarrassed a few years ago when one of its orders was leaked to the press. It was an order to Verizon directing it to furnish a year’s worth of telephone records to the National Security Agency — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spy agency — of all 113 million Verizon customers! This was done without the NSA showing probable cause of crime and without identifying a single customer.

Stated differently, the federal government was not warning Americans about foreign spies or the depth of its own spying. It was warning government employees about the depth of sophisticated Americans spying on them. The failure to abide this warning is surely one of the reasons the feds largely departed Portland’s streets as the demonstrators knew when and where the troops would arrive.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/andrew-p-napolitano/all-spying-all-the-time/

By

During this summer of madness in Portland, Oregon, and sadness over COVID-19, two below-the-radar events occurred implicating the insatiable appetite of the United States government to spy on everyone in America. Regular readers of this column know that the feds have been wearing away at our privacy rights using a multitude of means. Yet, these two below-the-fold events this summer have caught the feds flatfooted.

Here is the backstory.

After the calamity of Watergate, Congress investigated the nature and extent of FBI and CIA spying on Americans as ordered by President Richard Nixon. A Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, in 1975 made such startling revelations of warrantless and unlawful spying on Americans pursuant to presidential whims — going back to FDR — that it offered legislation to provide judicial oversight.

The legislation is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. It established the FISA Court, with a rotating membership of federal district court judges appointed to it by the chief justice.

FISA is profoundly unconstitutional because it authorizes the judges on the FISA Court to issue search warrants using a lesser standard of proof than what the Constitution requires. The Fourth Amendment requires proof of the likelihood of evidence of crimes in the place to be searched as a precondition for the issuance of search warrants, and it requires specification of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.

When James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment, his goal was to compel the government to focus its investigative resources on evidence of crimes, not spying on political adversaries, as the British had done to the colonists, and to establish that the natural right to be left alone by the government — privacy — is the default position.

FISA reverses all that. It presumes that the feds can obtain all the business and financial records they want about any person for any reason because they can define “business records” and “financial records” to include anything they want, such as mail from the Post Office or medical and legal records.

FISA also ignores the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime and substitutes in an amorphous and absurd standard of probable cause of speaking to any person who has spoken to any foreign person. FISA also ignores the specificity requirement of identifying the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The FISA Court meets in secret in Washington, D.C., and even the judges on the court do not have access to its records. So, the court was hugely embarrassed a few years ago when one of its orders was leaked to the press. It was an order to Verizon directing it to furnish a year’s worth of telephone records to the National Security Agency — America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spy agency — of all 113 million Verizon customers! This was done without the NSA showing probable cause of crime and without identifying a single customer.

The unconstitutional order was granted pursuant to section 215 of FISA. That section purports to permit bulk acquisition of electronic data — print and voice — without identifying whose data is being sought and without requiring any showing of probable cause of crime. Last February, section 215 expired, and Congress made fruitless attempts to revive it.

Last week, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when he adjourned the Senate for the summer, addressed the issues it will take up in the fall. FISA section 215 was not among them. McConnell’s silence is baffling as he and the intelligence community have been claiming loud and long, for nearly 20 years, that without section 215, the United States is ripe for subversion and invasion.

Was the pro-spying crowd in the government exaggerating all along about its need for section 215, or will the NSA continue to spy without even a tissue of statutory authorization? My friends formerly in the NSA tell me it doesn’t care about the law or the Constitution. Its goal is to spy on all persons all the time.

A few days before the mysterious McConnell silence came a rare public warning from the NSA. These master spies were concerned that military and Department of Homeland Security personnel in the streets of Portland were unwittingly exposing themselves to being spied upon, not by the feds, but by demonstrators in the streets using the same sophisticated spying tools the government uses.

Thus, the NSA warned that the demonstrators were using stingrays — fake cell towers that send signals that lock onto mobile phones permitting the user of the tower to follow the movements of the phones — as many local police departments unlawfully do.

Stated differently, the federal government was not warning Americans about foreign spies or the depth of its own spying. It was warning government employees about the depth of sophisticated Americans spying on them. The failure to abide this warning is surely one of the reasons the feds largely departed Portland’s streets as the demonstrators knew when and where the troops would arrive.

Government spying is a way of life for tens of thousands of government personnel, even outside the NSA. Yet, all of them have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy — privacy as a natural right, as the default position, with its invasion strictly limited to collect evidence of crimes from identified persons when authorized by a judge.

We have come full circle from Madison’s America. He was determined to craft a government that could not do to Americans what the British had done to the colonists. He failed.

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Like Freedom? Then You Won’t Like the FREEDOM Act

Posted by M. C. on March 24, 2020

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/23/like-freedom-then-you-won-t-like-the-freedom-act/

Written by Ron Paul

Last Monday, a bipartisan group of Senators and a coalition including libertarian and progressive activists thwarted a scheme to ram through the Senate legislation renewing three provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act). The bill had already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and most expected it to sail through the Senate. But, instead, Senate leadership had to settle for a 77-day extension.

Senate leadership was also forced to allow consideration of several amendments at a later date. Included is Sen. Rand Paul’s amendment that would forbid the FISA court from issuing warrants targeting American citizens.

Deep state supporters claim the expiring business records provision (which authorizes the collection of our communications and was at the center of Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations), lone wolf provision (which allows government to subject an individual with no known ties to terrorists to warrantless surveillance), and roving wiretaps provision (which allows government to monitor communications on any device that may be used by a targeted individual) are necessary to keep Americans safe. But, since Congress first passed the PATRIOT Act almost 20 years ago, mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and bulk data collection have not stopped a single terrorist attack.

The legislation does have “reforms” aimed at protecting civil liberties, but these new protections contain loopholes that render the protections meaningless. For example, the bill requires those targeted for surveillance to be notified that the government spied on them. However, this requirement can be waived if the government simply claims — not proves but just clams — that notifying the target would harm “national security.”

The notice provision also only applies to the target of an investigations. So, if you were caught up in a federal investigation because a coworker is being targeted and you shared an office computer, or if a store clerk reported to the government you and others bought pressure cookers, the government could collect your phone records, texts, and social media posts without giving you the chance to challenge the government’s actions.

The bill also makes some reforms to the special FISA court, which serves as a rubber stamp for the intelligence community. These reforms are mainly aimed at protecting political campaigns and candidates. They would not stop the FISA court from rubber-stamping surveillance on organizations that oppose the welfare-warfare-surveillance-fiat money status quo.

Anything limiting warrantless wiretapping and mass surveillance should be supported. However, nothing short of repeal of the USA FREEDOM Act will restore respect for our right to live our lives free of the fear that Big Brother is watching. The path to liberty, peace, and prosperity starts with eliminating all unconstitutional laws and returning to a system of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, sound money, and a foreign policy that seeks peaceful commerce and friendship with all instead of seeking new monsters to destroy.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Rand Paul rails against ‘weak sauce’ surveillance deal: ‘Big disappointment’ | TheHill

Posted by M. C. on March 11, 2020

There is Paul and Lee. The rest are war whores.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/486930-rand-paul-rails-against-weak-sauce-surveillance-deal-big

By Jordain Carney

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) knocked a last-minute deal in the House to reauthorize expiring intelligence programs, saying its reforms to the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) fall short.

“The ‘Deal’ on FISA is weak sauce diluted [and] made impotent by A.G. Barr. None of the reforms prevent secret FISA court from abusing the rights of Americans. None of the reforms prevent a President of either party from a politically motivated investigation. Big Disappointment!” Paul tweeted early Tuesday evening.

His comments come after House lawmakers announced on Tuesday that they had struck an agreement ahead of the March 15 deadline for expiring provisions in the USA Freedom Act, a 2015 law that overhauled the country’s intelligence programs.

The agreement includes more privacy protections and transparency in the FISA court process, including requiring legal representation for an individual targeted if the government’s application “presents exceptional concerns about the First Amendment rights of U.S. persons.”

It also bolsters penalties for those who abuse the FISA court.
But Paul, a long-time critic of the FISA court, wants language that would prohibit a FISA warrant being used against an American citizen, and prohibit FISA information from being used against an American in domestic court.
The House deal was largely negotiated without the input of senators, a potential curveball in its chances of passing the Senate this week. It is expected to go to the House floor for a vote Wednesday.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has also advocated for changes to FISA, told reporters shortly after the deal was announced that he was still reviewing it.

“Based on earlier drafts of it I don’t like it at all,” he said.

Because of the tight time frame to get legislation through Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is going to need consent from every senator to speed up consideration of the bill.
That could give leverage to senators like Paul and Lee to try to push through changes or force a lapse of the expiring USA Freedom provisions.
Paul previously used the Senate’s procedural tools to force a brief lapse of the post-9/11 Patriot Act.
A spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a question on Tuesday night about what his tweet means for his willingness to let the House deal move quickly through the Senate.
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The Justice Department Is Devoid of Justice – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2020

The Horowitz report of the Justice (sic) Department’s lies to the FISA court did not recommend a six-month prision sentence for those Justice (sic) Deplartment officials who lied to the government.  Horowitz covered up the crimes by converting them into “mistakes.”

Trials take time and provide a test of often unreliable police and prosecutorial evidence.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/08/the-justice-department-is-devoid-of-justice/

Paul Craig Roberts

In the United States the criminal justice (sic) system is itself not subject to law.  We see immunity to law continually as police commit felonies against citizens and even murder children and walk away free.  We see it all the time when prosecutors conduct political prosecutions and when they prosecute the innocent in order to build their conviction record.  We see it when judges fail to prevent prosecutors from withholding exculpatory evidence and bribing witnesses and when judges accept coerced plea deals that deprive the defendant of a jury trial.

We just saw it again when federal prosecutors recommended a six month prison sentence for Lt. Gen. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency accused of lying to the FBI about nothing of any importance, for being uncooperative in the Justice (sic) Department’s effort to frame President Trump with false “Russiagate” charges.  The Justice (sic) Department prosecutor said: “The sentence should adequately deter the defendant from violating the law, and to promote respect for the law. It is clear that the defendant has not learned his lesson. He has behaved as though the law does not apply to him, and as if there are no consequences for his actions.”

That is precisely what the Justice (sic) Department itself did for years in their orchestration of the fake Russiagate charges against Trump.

The prosecutor’s hypocrisy is overwhelming.

The Justice (sic) Department is a criminal organization.  It has no sense of justice.  Convicting the innocent builds the conviction rate of the prosecutor as effectively as convicting the guilty. The Horowitz report of the Justice (sic) Department’s lies to the FISA court did not recommend a six-month prision sentence for those Justice (sic) Deplartment officials who lied to the government.  Horowitz covered up the crimes by converting them into “mistakes.”  Yes, they are embarrassing “mistakes,” but mistakes don’t bring prison sentences.

Gen. Flynn, who was President Trump’s National Security Advisor for a couple of weeks before Mueller and Flynn’s attorneys manuevered him into a plea bargain, allegedly lied to the FBI about whether he met with a Russian.  Flynn and his attorneys should never have accepted the proposition that a National Security Advisor shouldn’t meet with Russians.  Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski met with Russians all the the time.  It was part of their job.  Trump originally intended to normalize the strained relations with Russia.  Flynn should have been meeting with Russians. It was his job.

Ninety-seven percent of felony cases are resolved with plea bargains.  In other words, there is no trial.  The defendant admits to guilt for a lighter sentence, and if he throws in “cooperation,” which generally means giving false evidence against someone else in the prosecutor’s net, no sentence at all.  Flynn was expected to help frame Trump and Flynn’s former business partner, Bijan Rafiekian, on an unrelated matter.  He didn’t, which means he is “uncooperative” and deserving of a prison sentence.

Plea bargains have replaced trials for three main reasons.  One is that the defense attorney doesn’t want the hard work of defending his client.  One is that the majority of defendants cannot afford to pay the cost of defense.  One is that refusing to plea guilty and demanding a trial angers both the prosecutor and judge.  Trials take time and provide a test of often unreliable police and prosecutorial evidence.  They mean work for the prosecutor.  Even if he secures a conviction, during the same time he could have obtained many more plea bargain convictions.  For the judge, trials back up his case docket.  Consequently, a trial means for the defendant very high risks of a much longer and more severe sentence than he would get in exchange for saving prosecutor and judge time and energy.  All of this is explained to the defendant by his attorney.

It was explained to Gen. Flynn.  He agreed to a plea, most likely advised that his “offense” was so minor, no sentence would be forthcoming.  Flynn later tried to revoke his plea, saying it was coerced, but the Clinton-appointed  judge refused to let him out of the trap.

Now that we know the only Russiagate scandal was its orchestration by the CIA, Justice (sic) Department, and Democrats, failing to cooperate with the special counsel investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election is nonsensical as we  know for a definite fact that there was no such interference.

This is how corrupt American law has become.  A man is being put in prison for 6 months for not cooperating with an investigation of an event that did not happen!

If Trump doesn’t pardon Flynn (and Manafort and Stone), and fire the corrupt prosecutors who falsely prosecuted Flynn, Trump deserves no one’s support.  A president who will not defend his own people from unwarranted prosecution is not worthy of support.

In Flynn’s case, we cannot dismiss the suspicion that revenge against Flynn was the driving factor. Gen. Flynn is the official who revealed on television that Obama made the willful decision to send ISIS or whatever we want to call them into Syria.  Of course, the Obama regime pretended that the jihadists were moderates seeking to overthrow the alleged dictator Assad and bring democracy to Syria.  Washington then pretended that it was fighting the mercenaries it had sent into Syria.  Even though the presstitutes did their best to ignore Flynn’s information, Flynn gave extreme offense by letting this information out. That bit of truth-telling was Flynn’s real offense.

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Report: FISA Court Has Not Ordered FBI to Check FISA Applications Beyond One Lawyer

Posted by M. C. on December 26, 2019

Just in case you had a senior moment and thought the FISA court was a victim.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/25/report-fisa-court-has-not-ordered-fbi-to-check-fisa-applications-beyond-one-lawyer/

by Kristina Wong

The court that granted the FBI surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has only ordered that the FBI review all warrant applications related to one FBI attorney and not all FBI agents involved in misconduct, according to a report.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) earlier this month ordered the FBI to re-verify all previous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications involving Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI attorney who falsified evidence in the FBI’s efforts to seek a renewed surveillance warrant against Page.

But according to a report by Fox News’s Gregg Re, the FISC did not order the FBI to recheck warrant applications involving other officials who made significant omissions and errors in warrant applications to surveil Page.

Fox News reports:

The FISC’s failure to request a comprehensive evaluation of previous submissions has stunned court-watchers who have questioned whether enough is being done to deter future misconduct by the FBI. In the past, the FISC has gone so far as to prohibit some FBI agents from appearing before the court after finding impropriety.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that Clinesmith had doctored an email that said Page was a source for the CIA to say that Page was “not” a source for the CIA.

However, Horowitz found many more examples of what the FISC itself has called “misconduct.”

In one example cited by Fox News, Horowitz found that an FBI supervisory special agent (SSA) responsible for ensuring that the bureau’s “Woods Procedures” were followed in this case — in that all factual assertions be independently verified and information contradicting those assertions be presented to the court — did not follow those procedures.

The SSA created a digital sub-file where reports by Christopher Steele, ex-British spy working for Fusion GPS, would be uploaded. Those reports were uncorroborated yet used to support the argument that Page was a foreign agent.

The SSA also suspected that Steele was a source for a news report that was included in warrant applications on Page, but he downplayed it in FISA applications. The SSA was also told by a State Department official that Steele was wrong about a claim but that information was not put in any FISA applications.

The SSA also failed to put in other information that was exculpatory for Page, such as Page denying to an FBI confidential human source (CHS) that he knew Russian officials Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin, which Steele had alleged.

The SSA was also aware that Steele had provided his reports to the State Department, but the FISC was told that Steele “only provided this information to the business associate and the FBI.”

Despite this, the FISC’s Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer only ordered the FBI to identify and review all matters that involved the participation of Clinesmith, and advise whether his conduct has been “referred to the appropriate bar association(s) for investigation or possible disciplinary action,” according to Fox News…

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Is Impeachment Backfiring on the Dems? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 20, 2019

Beneath Article I, there is not a single crime listed — no treason, no bribery, no extortion, no high crimes.

What kind of impeachment is this, with not one crime from the list the Founding Fathers designated as impeachable acts?

Carter Page, once considered a dupe of the Russians, is now seen as a patriot who assisted his country’s intelligence services only to be made a victim of injustice who saw his civil rights be trampled upon by his own government.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/patrick-j-buchanan/is-impeachment-backfiring-on-the-dems/

By

“We’re gonna impeach the (expletive deleted).”

Thus did the member from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, declare last January to be the goal of the 2019 House Democratic Caucus.

Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the goods.

The House impeached President Donald Trump on a straight party-line vote. Not one Republican signed on to the most partisan impeachment in U.S. history.

Yet, as we head for trial in the Senate, Democrats seem to be having nervous second thoughts over what they have done.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the Senate to subpoena four new witnesses the House never heard. Nancy Pelosi signaled Wednesday night that she might not send over to the Senate the articles of impeachment the House had just approved.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor both Wednesday night and Thursday morning. To have the Senate, which is judge and jury of the impeachment charges, to start calling witnesses whom House prosecutors failed to pursue “could set a nightmarish precedent.”

Said McConnell, Schumer “would apparently like our chamber to do House Democrats’ homework for them.”

Schumer’s plea for new witnesses is an admission that the House’s case for impeaching Trump is inadequate and deficient and could prove wholly noncredible to the American people. After all, if you need more witnesses, you probably do not have the smoking gun.

The message sent by Pelosi’s call for more time before the trial, and Schumer’s call for more witnesses, is one of fear that not only could the House’s case for impeachment fail, it could be laughed out of the Senate. And the American people might be fine with that.

The Democratic Party has bet the ranch on the impeachment and removal of Trump for imperiling our “national security.” But are Schumer and Pelosi behaving as though the republic is in mortal peril?

Schumer’s call for new witnesses also underscores the thinness of Article I of the impeachment, Trump’s alleged “Abuse of Power.”

Beneath Article I, there is not a single crime listed — no treason, no bribery, no extortion, no high crimes.

What kind of impeachment is this, with not one crime from the list the Founding Fathers designated as impeachable acts?

Why did the Democratic House not impeach Trump for conspiring with Russia to steal the 2016 election? Answer: The House could no more prove this charge than could Robert Mueller after two years.

Other events are breaking Trump’s way.

The James Comey-FBI investigation Mueller inherited has begun to take on the aspect of a “deep state” conspiracy.

According to the Justice Department’s IG Michael Horowitz, the FISA court warrants used to justify FBI spying were the products not only of incompetence but also of mendacity and possible criminality.

The “essential” evidence use by the FBI to get the FISA judge to approve warrants for surveillance was the Steele dossier.

An ex-British spy, Christopher Steele was working in mid-2016 for a dirt-diving operation hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to go after Trump. His altarpiece, the dossier, we learn from Horowitz, was a farrago of fabrications, rumors and lies fed to Steele by a Russian “sub-source.”

In the four FBI submissions to the FISA courts for warrants to spy on Carter Page, there were “at least 17 significant errors or omissions.”

And all 17 went against Team Trump.

Moreover, the discrediting of the Comey investigation has just begun. U.S. Attorney John Durham will report this spring or summer on his deeper and wider investigation into its roots.

As IG of Justice, Horowitz’s investigation was confined to his department and the FBI. But Durham is looking into the involvement of U.S. and foreign intelligence in the first days of the FBI investigation.

Attorney General Bill Barr and Durham have both said that they do not share Horowitz’s view that there was no political bias at the beginning of the investigation of the Trump campaign. Durham’s writ is far wider than Horowitz’s and he has the power to impanel grand juries and bring criminal indictments.

Among the fields Durham is plowing are reports that agents and assets of the FBI and CIA may have “set up” Trump foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos. Possible purpose: to feed him intel about Russia having dirt on Hillary Clinton, and then entrap him, put him in legal jeopardy, and turn him into an investigative instrument to be used against Trump.

With the Horowitz report confirming what the Trumpers have been reporting and saying about Comey’s investigation for years, and the newly proven manipulation of the FISA courts, the media hooting about “right-wing conspiracy theories” seems to have been toned down.

Carter Page, once considered a dupe of the Russians, is now seen as a patriot who assisted his country’s intelligence services only to be made a victim of injustice who saw his civil rights be trampled upon by his own government.

The cards appear to be falling Trump’s way.

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James Comey Insists the FBI Isn’t Evil, It’s Only “Grossly Incompetent” | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 19, 2019

…the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

https://mises.org/power-market/james-comey-insists-fbi-isnt-evil-its-only-grossly-incompetent?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=92700c4c7d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-92700c4c7d-228343965

Ryan McMaken

According to Inspector General Michael Horowitz, we have two options in explaining how the FBI conducted itself in relation to the FISA court and its clearly illegal and immoral efforts to spy on at least one American citizen involved in the 2016 presidential campaigns:

1. Gross incompetence/negligence

2. Intent to do harm.

When asked about it, former FBI Director James Comey, who headed the FBI during the agency’s repeated use of invented “facts” to justify its interventions in the 2016 elections, Comey insisted the lies and abuse of power were not intended. Which means Comey is admitting multiple FBI agents — and the leadership — practiced “gross incompetence.”

That is apparently the best the FBI can hope for in determining why the has so little regard to the law and for basic decency: “hey America, we’re not evil, we’re just grossly incompetent!”

Unfortuantely, however, many Americans aren’t paying very close attention, or the details are too arcane for many people to make sense of them. Certainly, the American mainstream media has no interest in covering these abuses of power.

But last week, Glen Greenwald summarized where we are with the FBI and its utter disregard for due process, privacy, and the Bill of Rights:

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.

In order to get this authorization from the FISA court, FBIS agents simply lied to the court, asserting as facts information from the Steele Dossier, and thus

the FBI touted a gossipy, unverified, unreliable rag that it had no reason to believe and every reason to distrust, but it hid all of that from the FISA court, which it knew needed to believe that the Steele Dossier was something it was not if it were to give the FBI the spying authorization it wanted.

FBI agents did this not once, but repeatedly, employing, what the IG report calls “significant inaccuracies and omission” to get spying authorization.

But this should hardly be shocking. This is the same FBI that was headed by James Comey. This is a man who while Deputy Attorney General publicly claimed to oppose the US government’s use of torture , but privately signed off on 13 different barbaric methods of torture. That is, it wasn’t enough for Comey to approve of torture, he also lied about it.

When it came time for Comey to offer help to the Mueller investigation — which ended up indicting no one for any actual collusion with the Russians, we were told repeatedly by pundits and supporters about what a “boy scout” Comey is.

This sort of fawning over DC police-state politicos is par for the course at this point, though. As Greenwald notes on the media’s complicity:

But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

Ever since Trump’s inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I’m included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico’s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio” :

In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs . One ran for president . Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows. . . .

[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren’t in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty—and this is no slam—is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.

In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don’t want to make news—they just want to talk about it.

It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.

But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.

When these lifelong “intelligence” bureaucrats — who have spent virtually their entire adult lives sucking the taxpayers dry — go on TV to comment on their fellow spies, it’s no wonder we hear relentlessly about what principled heroes they all are. Indeed, this week intelligence agencies trotted  out former CIA and FBI director William Webster to come ot the agencies’s defense. Webster rebuked both Donald Trump and William Barr for criticizing the the FBI, repeating old bromides such as the claim the FBI is brimming with “people who risk their lives to keep us safe,” and that any attack on these well-paid bureaucrats in suits known as FBI agents is “dangerous.”

But as Shafer and Barstow have shown, spooks and former spooks look out for each other.

Beltway politicos will insist they’re all heroes, but at best,  it looks like they are incompetent heroes. Comey swears up and down he meant no harm when he signed all that paperwork riddled with lies, and designed to manipulate the FISA court into approving FBI spying on an American citizen without cause. Comey didn’t mean to throw the Bill of Rights in the garbage. No, he was merely — to use the IG’s words — “grossly incompetent.”

 

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