Tweet
Originally posted by Kidicious
View Post
-
For there is [another] kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions -- indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. - Bobby Kennedy (Mindless Menance of Violence) -
House Rebublicans now know of a second source to the FBI. They say that the identity of that second source is explosive. This is following the closed door testimony of James Baker who said that the FBI was abnormally biased. I expect the second source to be a political operative.I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
House republicans are full of ****. But hey I hope they enjoy losing the House just a month. Now we can investigate Devin Nunes for obstruction of justice.For there is [another] kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions -- indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. - Bobby Kennedy (Mindless Menance of Violence)Comment
-
it's aliens, isn't it?Originally posted by Kidicious View PostI wasn't born with enough middle fingers.
[Brandon Roderick? You mean Brock's Toadie?][Hanged from Yggdrasil]Comment
-
Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.
Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.
That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.
The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.
The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.
It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.
Baker was interviewed by lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday. Sources declined to divulge much about his testimony, other than to say it confirmed other evidence about the contact between the Perkins Coie law firm and the FBI.
The sources said Baker identified lawyer Michael Sussman, a former DOJ lawyer, as the Perkins Coie attorney who reached out to him and said the firm gave him documents and a thumb drive related to Russian interference in the election, hacking and possible Trump connections.
Information gathered separately by another congressional committee indicate the contact occurred in September, the month before the FISA warrant was approved.
A spokeswoman for the FBI declined comment. Spokespersons for Perkins Coie and the Justice Department did not return a message seeking comment.
The sources also said Baker’s interview broke new ground both about the FBI’s use of news media in 2016 and 2017 to further the Trump case and about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s conversations in spring 2017 regarding possible use of a body wireto record Trump.
“The interview was one of the most productive we had and it opened up many new investigative leads,” one source said.
Another said Baker could not answer some questions about FBI media contacts, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department inspector general into alleged illegal leaks, during and after the election, about the Trump collusion probe and other matters.
These revelations illustrate anew how much the FBI and Justice Department have withheld from the public about their collaboration and collusion with clearly partisan elements of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Fusion and Steele, that were trying to defeat Trump.
The growing body of evidence that the FBI used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion case.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep documents secret.
Ryan has said he believes the declassification will uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.
And Meadows told The Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump campaign.
“There’s a strong suggestion that confidential human sources actually taped members within the Trump campaign,” Meadows told Hill.TV hosts Krystal Ball and Ned Ryun.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
John Solomon again... The man who cites himself. What a ****ing moron.
Enjoy losing the house in a month!For there is [another] kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions -- indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. - Bobby Kennedy (Mindless Menance of Violence)Comment
-
When James Baker testified he said that Rosenstein and others literally planned to record the president to try to remove him from office, a soft coup.I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
I do get tired of that failed lie out of Trumptards.Try http://wordforge.net/index.php for discussion and debate.Comment
-
We have to assume that you and every other Democrat likes fake news, soft coups, and witch hunts at this point. It's not hyperbole when I say that you are total scum.Originally posted by Dinner View PostI drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
Rosenstein is still around and isn't being fired. Idiot.Originally posted by Kidicious View PostFor there is [another] kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions -- indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. - Bobby Kennedy (Mindless Menance of Violence)Comment
-
Former FBI lawyer: Plot to record, remove Trump not a joke
ANNA MONEYMAKERBY JOHN SOLOMONTWEET SHARE EMAIL
By John Solomon
Opinion Contributor
Don't tell former FBI general counsel James Baker that those now-infamous discussions about secretly recording President Trumpand using the tapes to remove him from office were a joke.
He apparently doesn't believe it. And he held quite the vantage point - he was on the inside of the bureau's leadership in May 2017, when the discussions occurred.
Baker told Congress last week that his boss - then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe - was dead serious about the idea of surreptitiously recording the 45th president and using the evidence to make the case that Trump should be removed from office, according to my sources.
Baker told lawmakers he wasn't in the meeting McCabe had with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which the subject came up. But he did have firsthand conversations with McCabe and the FBI lawyer assigned to McCabe, Lisa Page, about the issue.
"As far as Baker was concerned, this was a real plan being discussed," said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation. "It was no laughing matter for the FBI."
Word of Baker's testimony surfaced just days before Rosenstein was set to be interviewed in private on Thursday by House Judiciary Committee lawmakers.
Since The New York Times first reported the allegations, Rosenstein, the No. 2 Department of Justice (DOJ) official, has tried to downplay his role in them. His office has suggested that he thought the discussions were a joke, that Rosenstein never gave an order to carry out such a plot, and that he does not believe Trump should be removed from office.
But making those statements through a spokesperson is a bit different than having Rosenstein himself face Congress and answer the questions under penalty of felony if lawmakers think he is lying.
Baker's account to lawmakers this month clearly complicates an already complicated picture for Rosenstein before Congress, assuming he shows up for Thursday's interview.
But even more so, Baker's story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president's own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leadersof the administration to remove the president from power.
Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker's account, in the window around the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss's firing with a secret recording operation?
I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president's removal could be engineered.
This wasn't a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers - but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.
And that makes the FBI's involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political - even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.
Keep in mind, this is the same FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page - his lover and the top lawyer to McCabe - about using their official powers to "stop" Trump in the election and having an "insurance policy" against the GOP nominee. That insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele - a Trump hater himself - that was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign through their mutual law firm.
"You walk away from the Baker interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time frame saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a force to stop Trump's election before it happened and then maybe reversing it after the election was over," said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation.
Baker provided some other valuable insights in his congressional interview. As I reported last week, he revealed that he accepted information in the Russia investigation from a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee.
And my sources also confirm that Baker admitted he received a version of the Steele dossier from left-leaning reporter David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, and then forwarded it to Strzok's team. Corn says that occurred in November 2016, right after the election.
That transaction is significant for two reasons. First, at the time, Steele had just been fired from the FBI probe for leaking to the media and he wasn't supposed to be further assisting the probe. So Corn essentially acted as a back door to allow information to continue to flow.
Secondly, the FBI was using the news media as an investigative source outside the normal chain of evidence.
Whatever you think of Rosenstein or the Russia probe, the statements Baker made to Congress have implications for all Americans.
The FBI was created to investigate crimes and stop foreign intelligence and terrorism threats. It was never designed to be a broker in the political process of elections or the execution of the 25th Amendment.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill's executive vice president for video.I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
And its John Solomon... The guy who cites himself... Lol. Investigative journalist my ass. The Hill has been trying to get rid of him. He is nothing more than a partisan hack.For there is [another] kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions -- indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. - Bobby Kennedy (Mindless Menance of Violence)Comment
-
We now know the origin of the investigation, and the "corroborating sources." It was reported in the media that the Russian Alfa Bank's servers were communiting with the servers in Trump Tower. That was a fake story. The Alfa Bank server was communicating with a different server about discount offers for hotels and stuff like that. It was Michael Sussman (lawyer for Clinton connected Perkins Coie) that fed all of this to the FBI, according to Baker's testimony.
Instead of taking a loss on this after finding out this whole thing was bull**** the FBI doubled down to cover this up.
I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
-
You know it's sad when I have to even ask myself, "do I even care?" Nope.Scouse Git (2) La Fayette Adam Smith Solomwi and Loinburger will not be forgotten.
"Remember the night we broke the windows in this old house? This is what I wished for..."
2015 APOLYTON FANTASY FOOTBALL CHAMPION!Comment
-
FBI has now admitted to paying multiple informants.I drank beer. I like beer. I still like beer. ... Do you like beer Senator?
- Justice Brett KavanaughComment
Comment