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Posts Tagged ‘Michael Horowitz’

Comey’s Amnesia Makes Senate Session Unforgettable – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2020

Flawed process? Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz pinpointed no few than 17 “serious performance failures” related to the four FISA warrant applications on Page. Left unsaid is the fact that Horowitz’s investigation was tightly circumscribed. Basically, he asked the major players “Were you biased?” And they said “No.”

https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012341079

by Ray McGovern

Former FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress last Wednesday that he did not remember much about what was going on when the FBI deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court into approving four warrants for surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Few outsiders are aware that those warrants covered not only Page but also anyone Page was in contact with as well as anyone Page’s contacts were in contact with – under the so-called two-hop surveillance procedure. In other words, the warrants extend coverage two hops from the target – that is, anyone Page talks to and anyone they, in turn, talk to.

At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsay Graham reviewed the facts (most of them confirmed by the Department of Justice inspector general) showing that none of the four FISA warrants were warranted.

Graham gave a chronological rundown of the evidence that Comey and his “folks” either knew, or should have known, that by signing fraudulent FISA warrant applications they were perpetrating a fraud on the court.

The “evidence” used by Comey and his “folks” to “justify” warrants included Page’s contacts with Russian officials (CIA had already told the FBI those contacts had been approved) and the phony as a three-dollar bill “Steele dossier” paid for by the Democrats.

Two Hops to the World

But let’s not hop over the implications of two-hop surveillance, which apparently remains in effect today. Few understand the significance of what is known in the trade as “two-hop” coverage. According to a former NSA technical director, Bill Binney, when President Barack Obama approved the current version of “two hops,” the NSA was ecstatic – and it is easy to see why.

Let’s say Page was in touch with Donald Trump (as candidate or president); Trump’s communications could then be surveilled, as well. Or, let’s say Page was in touch with Google. That would enable NSA to cover pretty much the entire world. A thorough read of the transcript of Wednesday’s hearing, particularly the Q-and-A, shows that this crucial two-hop dimension never came up – or that those aware of it, were too afraid to mention it. It was as if Page were the only one being surveilled.

Here is a sample of The New York Times’s typical coverage of such a hearing:

“Senate Republicans sought on Wednesday to promote their efforts to rewrite the narrative of the Trump-Russia investigation before Election Day, using a hearing with the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey to cast doubt on the entire inquiry by highlighting problems with a narrower aspect of it.

“Led by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent hours burrowing into mistakes and omissions made by the FBI when it applied for court permission to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 and 2017. Republicans drew on that flawed process to renew their claims that Mr. Comey and his agents had acted with political bias, ignoring an independent review that debunked the notion of a plot against President Trump.”

Flawed process? Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz pinpointed no few than 17 “serious performance failures” related to the four FISA warrant applications on Page. Left unsaid is the fact that Horowitz’s investigation was tightly circumscribed. Basically, he asked the major players “Were you biased?” And they said “No.”

Chutzpah-full Disingenuousness

Does the NYT believe we were all born yesterday? When the Horowitz report was released in early December 2019, Fox News’ Chris Wallace found those serious performance failures “pretty shocking.” He quoted an earlier remark by Rep. Will Hurd (R,TX) a CIA alumnus:

“Why is it when you have 17 mistakes — 17 things that are misrepresented or lapses — and every one of them goes against the president and for investigating him, you have to say, ‘Is that a coincidence’? … it is either gross incompetence or intentionality.”

Throughout the four-hour hearing on Wednesday, Comey was politely smug – a hair short of condescending.

There was not the slightest sign he thought he would ever be held accountable for what happened under his watch. You see, four years ago, Comey “knew” Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in; that explains how he, together with CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, felt free to take vast liberties with the Constitution and the law before the election, and then launched a determined effort to hide their tracks post election.

Trump had been forewarned. On Jan. 3, 2017, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), with an assist from Rachel Maddow, warned Trump not to get crosswise with the “intelligence community,” noting the IC has six ways to Sunday to get back at you.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fotKK5kcMOg

Three days later, Comey told President-elect Trump, in a one-on-one conversation, what the FBI had on him – namely, the “Steele Dossier.” The media already had the dossier, but were reluctant (for a host of obvious reasons) to publish it. When it leaked that Comey had briefed Trump on it, they finally had the needed peg.

New Parvenu in Washington

After the tête-à-tête with Comey on Jan. 6, 2017, newcomer Trump didn’t know what hit him. Perhaps no one told him of Schumer’s warning; or maybe he dismissed it out of hand. Is that what Comey was up to on Jan. 6, 2017?

Was the former FBI director protesting too much in his June 2017 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee when he insisted he’d tried to make it clear to Trump that briefing him on the unverified but scurrilous information in the dossier wasn’t intended to be threatening?

It took Trump several months to figure out what was being done to him.

Trump to NYT: ‘Leverage’ (aka Blackmail)

In a long Oval Office interview with the Times on July 19, 2017, Trump said he thought Comey was trying to hold the dossier over his head.

“…Look what they did to me with Russia, and it was totally phony stuff. … the dossier … Now, that was totally made-up stuff,” Trump said. “I went there [to Moscow] for one day for the Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back. It was so disgraceful. It was so disgraceful.

“When he [Comey] brought it [the dossier] to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about anything. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal. … I said, this is – honestly, it was so wrong, and they didn’t know I was just there for a very short period of time. It was so wrong, and I was with groups of people. It was so wrong that I really didn’t, I didn’t think about motive. I didn’t know what to think other than, this is really phony stuff.”

The Steele dossier, paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, includes a tale of Trump cavorting with prostitutes, who supposedly urinated on each other before the same bed the Obamas had slept in at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Trump told the Times: “I think [Comey] shared it so that … I would think he had it out there. … As leverage.”

Still Anemic

Even with that lesson in hand, Trump still proved virtually powerless in dealing with the National Security State/intelligence community. The president has evidenced neither the skill nor the guts to even attempt to keep the National Security State in check.

Comey, no doubt doesn’t want to be seen as a “dirty cop,” With Trump in power and Attorney General William Barr his enforcer, there was always the latent threat that they would use the tools at their disposal to expose and even prosecute Comey and his National Security State colleagues for what the president now knows was done during his candidacy and presidency.

Despite their braggadocio about taking on the Deep State, and the continuing investigations, it seems doubtful that anything serious is likely to happen before Election Day, Nov. 3.

On Wednesday, Comey had the air of one who is equally sure, this time around, who will be the next president. No worries. Comey could afford to be politely vapid for five more weeks, and then be off the hook for any and all “serious performance failures” – some of them felonies.

Thus, a significant downside to a Biden victory is that the National Security State will escape accountability for unconscionable misbehavior, running from misdemeanors to insurrection. No small thing.

Sen. Graham concluded the hearing with a pious plea: “Somebody needs to be held accountable.” Yet, surely, he has been around long enough to know the odds.

Given his disastrous presidency, either way the prospects are bleak: no accountability for the National Security State, which is to be expected, or four more years of Trump.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This originally appeared at Consortium News.

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DOJ Says FBI Not Trustworthy – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2020

Your FIB

10 Classified FBI Secrets - YouTube

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/04/02/doj-says-fbi-not-trustworthy/

News Updates From CLG

02 April 2020 

All links are here:

https://www.legitgov.org

IG Horowitz Found ‘Apparent Errors or Inadequately Supported Facts’ in Every Single FBI FISA Application He Reviewed | 31 March 2020 | The Justice Department inspector general said it does “not have confidence” in the FBI’s FISA application process following an audit that found the Bureau was not sufficiently transparent with the court in 29 applications from 2014 to 2019, all of which included “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts.” Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in December which found that the FBI included “at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications and many errors in the Woods Procedures” during its Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign… Horowitz’s office said in a report released Tuesday that of the 29 applications — all of which involved U.S. citizens — that were pulled from “8 FBI field offices of varying sizes,” the FBI could not find Woods Files for four of the applications, while the other 25 all had “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts.” The Woods Procedure dictates that the Justice Department verify the accuracy and provide evidentiary support for all facts stated in its FISA application. The FBI is required to share with the FISA Court all relevant information compiled in the Woods File when applying for a surveillance warrant.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ig-horowitz-found-apparent-errors-or-inadequately-supported-facts-in-every-single-fbi-fisa-application-he-reviewed/

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How out of Control Is Our Surveillance State? | Cato Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2019

Americans deserve a stronger assurance than “hope” that their Fourth Amendment rights are being respected.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-out-control-our-surveillance-state

By Julian Sanchez

This article appeared on The New York Times on December 18, 2019.
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The F.B.I.’s investigation of the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, we can now say with assurance, was a train wreck. In his report, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz cataloged a damning list of egregious errors, omissions or misrepresentations in filings to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approved nearly a year’s worth of wiretaps on Mr. Page.

Many Republicans have taken this as proof that the investigation was hopelessly contaminated by anti-Trump political bias. That would be the optimistic scenario. Unfortunately, it’s probably much worse than that.

If the F.B.I. botched its applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Mr. Page because of political bias, after all, problems of the sort Mr. Horowitz identified are most likely unique to this case. The bureau obtains about 1,500 FISA warrants each year, and an overwhelming majority have no connection to domestic politics. The solution is also similarly simple: Toss out the bad apples who acted on political motives and add a few layers of safeguards for the tiny fraction of cases that are designated “sensitive investigative matters” because they do intersect with politics.

 

That might be a reasonable response if we were confident the Page investigation represented an outlier or aberration. The chilling reality, however, is that we have no idea whether that’s the case.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, zeroed in on this point. When she asked Mr. Horowitz whether finding mistakes in a FISA application was “a fairly unusual occurrence,” he responded, “I would hope so.”

Americans deserve a stronger assurance than “hope” that their Fourth Amendment rights are being respected. The sheer quantity of serious defects in the FISA applications targeting Mr. Page — which officials consistently told Mr. Horowitz received far more review than normal, because agents understood the applications would doubtless attract controversy and scrutiny — raises an obvious and disturbing question: If they’re this sloppy with a target involved in a presidential campaign, how bad is it in ordinary cases, which the public will never learn about and which are unlikely to ever be the topic of congressional hearings?

We needn’t worry so much about that, of course, if the defects of the Page warrants were products of political animus against the Trump campaign. But the report provides very little reason to think that’s the case. The case for supposing bias is the culprit here leans heavily on the former F.B.I. agent Peter Strzok, now notorious for a voluminous history of text messages denigrating Mr. Trump and suggesting that he would not become president because “we will stop it.” But while Mr. Strzok played a supervisory role in the earliest stage of the Page investigation, it’s hard to tie him to the specific problems Mr. Horowitz identifies. As the report notes, Mr. Strzok “was not the primary or sole decision maker on any investigative step” and at one point opposed FISA monitoring of another Trump campaign staff member that case agents proposed. Moreover, the problems Mr. Horowitz documented in the initial FISA application filed under Mr. Strzok’s watch were significantly less serious than the outrageous omissions and misrepresentations to the court that occurred in the subsequent applications to renew the wiretap, after Mr. Strzok’s role in the investigation had ended.

With one significant exception — an F.B.I. lawyer responsible for improperly altering an email related to the final renewal application — Mr. Horowitz didn’t find signs of Mr. Strzok’s intense animus among others who worked on the FISA warrants. The report notes that among the huge quantity of internal communications reviewed, the inspector general identified “a small number of text messages and instant messages” in which members of the investigation team “discussed political issues and candidates,” but that these “did not raise significant questions of potential bias or improper motivation.”

If there’s an explanation for the errors Mr. Horowitz documents suggested by his reports, it’s not political bias. It’s confirmation bias.

The F.B.I.’s interest in Mr. Page — and its suspicions that he might be a Russian intelligence asset — predated his involvement in presidential politics. He had reportedly been the target of a FISA warrant in 2014 and was the focus of yet another counterintelligence investigation opened in April 2016 by the F.B.I.’s notoriously Trump-friendly New York field office, months before the bureau started an inquiry into potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election interference operation. When investigators got wind of Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, which made Mr. Page a pivotal figure in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin, it would have seemed like confirmation of what they already suspected.

Having adopted this theory, investigators began to exhibit classic signs of confirmation bias, readily absorbing new information that fit the model they’d built, while overlooking or explaining away facts that didn’t fit. The worst misrepresentations to the court that Mr. Horowitz uncovered are sins of omission — new information the bureau obtained as the investigation progressed that should have led it to question previous representations it had made to the court.

The many layers of review FISA applications go through — laid out in a set of rules known as the Woods Procedures — were ill equipped to detect this sort of problem, because the Woods Procedures focus on confirming that facts in the application match documents in the F.B.I.’s case file. But you can’t fact check a claim that doesn’t exist — which means the process is bad at detecting important information that has been left out. Officials who reviewed later applications also told Mr. Horowitz that they typically focused on the new information in each submission. That means assertions they’d made early on ended up effectively being taken for granted: Nobody was revisiting early assumptions to see whether they still held up in the face of new data.

If this explains why the Page investigation went increasingly off the rails, it’s an explanation that has little to do with partisan politics at its heart. But that would mean there’s little reason to think the Page investigation is special in this respect. There’s an urgent need, then, for the inspector general to do more such “deep dives” and figure out just how pervasive the problem really is.

Fortunately, the inspector general is already taking a first step in this direction, having begun a review that will “examine the F.B.I.’s compliance with the Woods Procedures in FISA applications that target U.S. persons.” But in itself, that’s not enough: While Mr. Horowitz found violations of the Woods Procedures in the Page case, they weren’t the most serious distortions. Those occurred precisely because the Woods Procedures aren’t well calibrated to catch material facts that get left out. To do that, you’d need to do the kind of intensive and comprehensive case-by-case review conducted in the Horowitz review, not just run Woods vetting a second time to see whether the results tally.

Doing this sort of deep dive for a representative sample of FISA applications will, of course, be both expensive and extremely time consuming. But it’s well worth it to find out just how badly our surveillance state is broken.

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JOHN KIRIAKOU: James Comey’s Interview on Fox News Screams Out for Correction – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on December 21, 2019

And the truth of the matter is that the FISA court isn’t really a court at all.  It meets in secret.  A “defendant” has no idea that the government is asking for a warrant against him.  The defendant has no attorney to represent his interests before the court. 

The FISA judges have to know they are being played. The truth is that if they make waves they loose their jobs.

The FISA court has become such an embarrassment to those who pay attention that it has to pretend they care.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/19/john-kiriakou-james-comeys-interview-on-fox-news-screams-out-for-correction/

By John Kiriakou

Former FBI Director James Comey gave an interview this week to journalist Chris Wallace on Fox News in which he made one of the most disingenuous and dissembling statements I’ve heard in years, one that screams out for correction and real Congressional oversight.

When asked about Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s report, which found “17 significant errors and omissions” by the FBI when it began investigating alleged Russian involvement with the 2016 Trump campaign and it applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, Comey said that he had been “overconfident” when he defended the FBI’s use of FISA.

Overconfident! Comey ignored the fact that the FBI repeatedly renewed the warrant against Page, whom the FBI suspected was working for Russian intelligence, even if it had no evidence to indicate that was the case.  He downplayed the fact that an FBI attorney illegally changed an FBI report to indicate that Page was not working for the CIA, when the FBI knew for a fact that he was.

Perhaps most disingenuously, Comey told Wallace that, “I thought the FBI had gone about this in a thoughtful and appropriate way.  He’s (Horowitz) right.  I was wrong.  I was overconfident as director in our procedures…It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA.”

Comey’s Lie About a FISA Warrant 

Even more importantly, at least for the American people as a whole, is Comey’s lie that “it’s incredibly hard to get a FISA.”  It’s actually incredibly easy to get a FISA.  Over its 33-year lifespan, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has issued 33,942 warrants.  It has denied 12.  In fact, between the court’s creation in 1986 and 2003, it didn’t deny a single request for a warrant.  Those numbers simply don’t support Comey’s odd contention that it’s “incredibly hard” to get a FISA.  He’s lying to us… Read the rest of this entry »

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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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Don’t Expect Any Truth From Washington – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on December 13, 2019

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/12/09/dont-expect-any-truth-from-washington/

Paul Craig Roberts

On November 25 I predicted that the DOJ would never rat on itself. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/11/25/washington-the-cesspool-of-the-world-will-never-rat-on-itself/

Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is part of the problem, has proven me correct with his whitewash of the politically orchestrated “investigation” of President Trump for collusion with Russia to steal the US presidential election. No one in his right mind could believe such a ridiculous accusation was worthy of investigation, especially when there was not a nano-gram of evidence, as the Mueller report confirmed. Horowitz even ruled that there was no FBI political bias despite the total proof of it in FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok’s emails with DOJ lawyer Lisa Page, showing the plot against Trump:

“At the heart of GOP lawmakers’ complaints about Strzok were a series of texts from Aug. 8, 2016, between Strzok and Page, his alleged mistress, in which Strzok wrote to Page, ‘We’ll stop’ a Trump presidency. Trump is ‘not ever going to become president, right? Right?!’ Page wrote. ‘No. No he won’t,’ Strzok responded. ‘We’ll stop it.’”
https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/report-fbi-agent-peter-strzok-fired-for-anti-trump-texts

Horowitz, obviously a person very short on integrity or intelligence, declared this blatent bias to not be bias. So we have a DOJ Inspector General giving us Newspeak, the language in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Horowitz’s real assignment was not to investigate, but to cover up the crime, which he did by finding that the FBI made a large number of “mistakes” that the FBI director promises new controls in place to prevent in the future. Thus Horowitz did his job. He converted crimes into “mistakes.” That is the way Washington works.

Will John Durham’s criminal investigation of the Democrats, CIA, and FBI for their Russiagate hoax, an investigation that should include investigation of the complicit Presstitute Media who are without any doubt accessories to the crime, also prove me correct?

When has the United States government told the truth about anything?

President John F. Kennedy’s assassination?
Robert Kennedy’s assassination?
Martin Luther King’s assassination?
The Gulf of Tonkin?
The USS Liberty?
9/11?
Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction”?
Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons?
Iranian nukes?
The destruction of Libya and Gaddafi?
Russian invasion of Georgia?
Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Russiagate?
Impeachgate?

It is easy to add to this list.

America is ruled by lies. Truth is completely absent. And the American population tolerates it. Rule by lies is now the American Way.

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RAY McGOVERN: Barr Blasts Inspector General For Whitewashing FBI

Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2019

That was what Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy was wondering about, when he grilled the former CIA director, also on May 23, 2017, on what evidence he had provided to the FBI to catalyze its investigation of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

Brennan replied: “I don’t do evidence.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/10/ray-mcgovern-barr-blasts-inspector-general-for-whitewashing-fbi/

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

Attorney General William Barr on Monday disparaged the long-awaited findings of the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz into FBI conduct in the investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Barr, in effect, accused Horowitz of whitewashing a litany of proven misfeasance and malfeasance that created the “predicate,” or legal justification, for investigating candidate-and-then-president Donald Trump on suspicion of being in cahoots with the Russians.

In grammatical terms, there can be no sentence, so to speak, without a predicate. Trump was clearly the object of the sentence, and the sleuths led by then-FBI Director James Comey were the subjects in desperate search of a predicate. Horowitz candidly depicted the predicate the FBI requires for a counter-intelligence investigation as having to meet a very low bar. The public criticism from his boss was unusual. For the tenacious attorney general, doing a serious investigation of how the FBI handled the Trump-Russia inquiry has become a case of no-holds-Barr-ed, one might say.

Lindsey Smacking His Lips

Particularly damning in Horowitz’s report was the revelation that the FBI kept the “Russia investigation” going well after countervailing and exculpatory evidence clearly showed that, in the unforgettable words of one senior FBI official, Peter Strzok, there was “no there there.”

As Sen. Lindsey Graham put it yesterday, FBI investigators kept running through STOP signs in hot pursuit of a needed, but ever elusive, credible predicate. At a press conference, Graham pointed to page 186 of the Horowitz report to call attention to one of the most obvious STOP signs FBI sleuths should have heeded; namely, the fact that the FBI learned in January 2017 that the primary sub-source for Christopher Steele’s “dossier” disavowed it as misstated and exaggerated — basically rumor and speculation. No problem: the FBI investigation continued.

Mincing no words, Graham called the FBI investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties with Russia a “criminal enterprise” that got off the rails. (Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of such a conspiracy.) Sparks will fly on Wednesday as Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pursues the matter in more depth when Horowitz testifies before the committee. Graham emphasized yesterday that the general goal is to ensure that such a “criminal enterprise” does not happen again.

He added that one of the ways to prevent a recurrence is to make sure “those who took the law into their own hands need to pay a price.” Uh-oh. I cannot remember the last time leaders of the “national-security state” had to pay a price.

Barr: ‘Thinnest of Suspicions’

Barr took unusually strong public issue with Horowitz’s conclusion that there was adequate reason to mount an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign and suspected ties to Russia. Read the rest of this entry »

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Why the NYT’s Fulsome Praise for Felons? – Ray McGovern

Posted by M. C. on October 19, 2019

https://raymcgovern.com/2019/10/13/why-the-nyts-fulsome-praise-for-felons/

Ray McGovern

“James Comey Would Like to Help [get rid of Trump]”.  This may not seem newsworthy, yet it is the title atop an instructive article today by Matt Flegenheimer of the NY Times.  His article makes it clear that, for its part, the Times remains determined to support former FBI Director James Comey and sustain the discredited Russia-gate narrative they share — to the point of helping Comey and his partners-in-crime avoid prison. (See:  https://nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/politics/james-comey-trump.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_191013?campaign_id=2&instance_id=12939&segment_id=17841&user_id=e69a6cb2bbba5cd47ffe27ec9fb45fbe&regi_id=695407011013  .)

In late August, the Department of Justice decided to let Comey off with a slap on the wrist for leaking to the NY Times, through an intermediary, highly sensitive information from his talks with President Donald Trump. At that juncture, it was already a no-brainer to warn that the victory lap Comey chose to run was clearly premature. (See, for example: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jim-comeys-higher-virtue-11567121926?shareToken=st5be6bf7326284ff38bf74cdc8a6e9c13&reflink=article_email_share .)

Consequential leaks to the media by a former FBI director are serious enough.  Now, however, we are talking about felonies.  And this time Comey is standing in such deep kimchi that he may drown, despite how tall he is, and despite NYT preemptive puff pieces protesting purity of the caliber of Caesar’s wife.  This time, even with the Establishment media and Comey’s accomplices offering fulsome praise for him, there is some serious doubt as to whether or not he will be able to wangle a Stay-Out-Of-Jail Card.  Why are they running scared?

In Horror of Horowitz

Over the last year and a half, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating how Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, and three Deputy Attorneys General (Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, and Dana Boente) thought they could get away with signing applications for surveillance of former Trump associate Carter Page without disclosing that, as McCabe later testified, the application was based largely on a the shabby, unverified “Steele dossier” paid for by the Democrats.  Providing incomplete, misleading information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a felony.

No problem, these top law enforcement officials thought at the time.  Who would find out about their misconduct after Mrs. Clinton — the odds-on favorite — became president?  There would be encomia and promotions for help rendered, not indictments.

Oops.  Now all of the above are squirming, and there is a paper trail.  Only one of the FISA application signers is still in a key position to help from the inside — Dana Boente.  No, he was not demoted to working in the file room.  He is the FBI General Counsel.

Is It About to Hit the Proverbial Fan?

According to Inspector General Horowitz, Attorney General William Barr has had his draft IG report for over a month.  Horowitz has said that his team “reviewed over one million records and conducted over 100 interviews, including several of witnesses who only recently agreed to be interviewed.” The team is “finalizing” the report prior to releasing it publicly. ( See: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-inspector-general-submits-report-on-alleged-fisa-abuses-to-attorney-general .)

Some pundits are now suggesting that the DOJ IG report may be published as early as next Friday.

Hold onto your hats.

Be seeing you

Lies

 

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Are the Investigations the Cover-Up?

Posted by M. C. on December 27, 2018

Mueller’s key role is to have nearly absolute control over what information is released to investigators or the public.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/are_the_investigations_the_coverup.html

By Bryce Buchanan

Those of us who have been paying attention know that serious crimes were committed at the highest levels of government in an attempt to exonerate Hillary Clinton and frame Donald Trump.  There was collusion between government agencies, including collusion with foreign agents, to illegally influence the 2016 Presidential election.  There is enough evidence on the table to be confident of these claims.

And those of us who care about rule of law, who want to see justice done to the criminals in this conspiracy, have been waiting for years to see that happen.  We hear that these serious matters are being investigated.  We hear that there are whistleblowers inside the government who want to come forward and expose the corruption.  We hear that there are many, many more documents which will substantiate our worst fears about one of the greatest scandals in the history of our country.

We have been assured that there are several investigations looking into the various aspect of this abuse of power.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz, prosecutor John Huber, and others are looking into the corruption.  Mueller is supposedly tasked with exposing foreign influence on the Presidential election.

But what if the ‘investigations’ are really the cover-up? Read the rest of this entry »

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