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Posts tagged ‘Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)’

FISA Documents Released, Prove Fraudulent Dossier Report Was ‘Source 1’ for Page Wiretap


Reported By Cillian Zeal | July 22, 2018 at 9:55am

Christopher Steele, the ex-British intelligence agent who got paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to come up with dirt on Donald Trump was apparently “Source #1” in the FBI’s court application to surveil Trump campaign official Carter Page, documents released Saturday reveal. The full 412-page application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its subsequent renewals were made public after a Freedom of Information Act request by The New York Times and other outlets.

“‘The FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian Government,’ the surveillance application filed in October 2016 said,” The Times reported. “The documents released include applications and renewal warrants filed in 2017 after Trump took office. Page has denied being an agent of the Russian government and has not been charged with any crime.”

“The documents released said ‘the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with’ Trump’s campaign. It added Page ‘has established relationships with Russian Government officials, including Russian intelligence officers.’”

The Times’ story prominently mentions 12 apparently unrelated indictments of Russian figures and a quote by Nancy Pelosi that “these documents provide clear evidence of ‘Russia’s coordination with Carter Page,’ a high-ranking Trump campaign official, ‘to undermine and improperly and illegally influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.’”

As The Times points out, Page remains uncharged, so there’s still that — but thanks for stepping in for the jury, Rep. Pelosi.

Twelve angry men and women (and doubtless some non-binary individuals) are grateful that you’ve bestowed upon us the unequivocal truth about Carter Page before the criminal justice system has even seen fit to make him an indicted man.

I point this all out because it’s curiously unmentioned where the FBI got the idea “that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian Government.”

At the end of the story, there’s this profoundly weak-sauce coda that kind of explains it: “Republicans have claimed that the FBI used in part a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to justify the warrant, and failed to disclose to the court that Steele was employed by a firm funded by Democrats to do opposition research on Trump’s business dealings.”

Less widely mentioned in the story: Steele and his DNC/Hillary-funded dossier were pretty clearly “Source #1” in the document.

“Source #1,” in the application, claims he has knowledge of Page meeting with Kremlin insiders in Moscow during the campaign. These are charges that Page has vigorously denied and nobody in the American intelligence services seems able to prove, which makes the whole thing difficult to believe when the only source hawking it has been funded by the DNC and the Hillary campaign and was known to use third-hand sources and paid information.

The Daily Wire pointed out a few footnotes in the third FISA renewal application that might be of interest. In one, the FBI announces it has “suspended its relationship” with “Source #1” due to the fact the source had disclosed information to the media. Here’s how the Daily Wire presented it:

“Subsequently, the FBI closed (Steele) as an FBI source,” the application read. It still contended that his information had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and that the “incident that led the FBI to terminate its relationship with (Steele) occurred after (Steele) provided the reporting that is described herein.”

Another footnote contends that Steele had only shared information with a business associate and not with the media. Steele’s dossier had already been “the basis for a Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo! News article about Page’s surveillance,” the Daily Wire noted, and he would go to the media in October of 2016 because he was “frustrated” regarding James Comey’s decision to reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Neither Steele nor his dossier were reliable sources. The FBI knew at the time that the dossier was a paid political document and that Steele had expressed an animus toward Donald Trump. Very little in the dossier has been proved to be accurate and Steele’s actions with the media should have proved to all parties they were dealing with someone more concerned with a political outcome than the truth.

And he was “Source #1.”

Yet, all we get from The Times is one awkward sentence tacked on at the end of the story which states that “Republicans have claimed that the FBI used in part a dossier…” (oh, what delights William Safire would have taken in that gem) and a story beefed up with innuendoes and quotes directly from the House minority leader opining on the guilt of an individual who hasn’t even been charged with anything.

“I’m having trouble finding any small bit of this document that rises above completely ignorance and/or insanity,” Carter Page told The Daily Caller after the documents were released.

That may be an overstatement, but not by much.

Considering one of the main reasons for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court it created was to protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance by government iuntellitence agencies, the Page example should frighten every one of us who believes FISA warrants against campaign officials shouldn’t be given out based on the farcical claims of a paid political document.

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Ex-US Attorney: Obama CIA Chief Led Operation To Frame Trump


disclaimerReported By Ben Marquis | May 16, 2018 at 2:16pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/obama-cia-chief-led-frame-trump/

 

The Trump campaign/Russian collusion narrative — which led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — has been steadily unraveling in recent weeks. Despite a year long investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, “no credible evidence” of collusion with the Trump campaign has been found, and the “evidence” and intelligence that has been offered up appears to be false and manufactured.

Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova spoke about that and other recent developments during an appearance on Fox News with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night, and cast the blame on the operation, which he viewed as a set up to frame President Donald Trump, on former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan. 

“It was abundantly clear that there was no legitimate basis even for a counter intelligence investigation, let alone a criminal investigation,” DiGenova said.

“It is quite obvious that John Brennan was at the head of the group of people who were going to create a counter intelligence investigation against Trump by creating false information that was going to be fed through Carter Page, and fed through George Papadopoulos so that it would be picked up, reported back to Washington and provide the basis for a counter, a fake, counter intelligence investigation,” he continued.

“And it was all Brennan’s doing,” DiGenova stated emphatically. 

“And that is why the Justice Department is viciously fighting revealing everything they can about the source in London, who everybody knows the identity of.”

Ingraham asked the former U.S. attorney to further explain recent reports about an unnamed “source” in London who allegedly provided information that was used as a basis for the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign.

“The source in London was another person who was feeding false information to George Papadopoulos and others about collusion which did not exist,” DiGenova replied.

Another guest on the program, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, spoke about another aspect of the creation of the Trump/Russia collusion narrative and the anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele on behalf of Democrat-funded political opposition research firm Fusion GPS.

She noted how the FBI had granted access to a handful of private contractors, likely to include Fusion GPS, to sift through raw intelligence gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This was then passed on to Steele and others and recycled back to the U.S. intelligence community with a false air of legitimacy to help form the narrative used as the basis for the investigation into Trump. 

DiGenova picked up on what Powell had mentioned and pointed out that there had been two opinions issued by the FISA court in opposition to that illegal practice of allowing private contractors access to the sensitive raw intelligence data.

“All of that was designed for the unmasking and the leaking of the names, and that was all done by private contractors,” DiGenova said. “The FISA court objected to it and it never stopped.”

The supposition that Brennan was the ringleader of an attempt to “frame” Trump is little more than DiGenova’s opinion, informed however well it might be by experience and information obtained through public and private sources.

That said, it increasingly appears as though the entire Trump/Russia collusion narrative was indeed created wholly out of false, manufactured or misconstrued information in order to provide justification for the investigation that was likely intended to prevent Trump from winning the election, or at least hamstring his agenda and lead to his impeachment once he took office. 

On top of that, Brennan has made it blatantly obvious that he loathes Trump, so it isn’t too much of a stretch to think he may have used the powerful intelligence tools at his disposal in order to “frame” an innocent man and destroy him politically. Hopefully we will find out the truth soon when the DOJ inspector general’s report is released.

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Rep. Adam Schiff Confirms Trump Statement That Dem Memo Contains ‘Sources and Methods’


Authored By Richard Pollock | February 14, 2018 at 1:35pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/rep-adam-schiff-confirms-trump-statement-dem-memo-contains-sources-methods/

White House problems with the Democrat’s “rebuttal memo” on the surveillance of Trump associates are genuine and the document could disclose “sources and methods,” California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, confirmed.

“We need to go through that and identify that which remains classified and would implicate sources and methods or investigative interests,” he said at a newsmaker’s breakfast meeting on Wednesday sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

His comments constituted a direct rebuke to his party’s top boss in the House of Representatives, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

White House counsel Don McGahn said in a statement Friday that Trump was “inclined” but “unable” to declassify the Democrat’s 10-page memo because it “contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages,” according to Politico.

Schiff’s conciliatory statement could embarrass Pelosi. In a stinging comment following the McGahn statement, Pelosi said, “President Trump’s refusal to release Intelligence Committee Democrats’ memo is a stunningly brazen attempt to cover up the truth about the Trump-Russia scandal from the American people.”

The Democratic memo is an attempt to counter a four-page memo released by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican. The Nunes memo asserts the FBI relied on the use of the salacious and unverified Trump dossier in an application before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Based on the document, the FISA court issued a warrant to spy on Carter Page, an unpaid advisor to the Trump campaign.

Schiff said “we hope to resolve this soon” and noted the Democrats were working with the FBI.

He also somewhat backtracked on the Trump-Russia collusion issue, saying the Democrats’ definition of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was much lower than potential criminal acts being reviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Collusion is not a crime under the federal statutes.

“I’ve never said there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt” about collusion, the California Democrat told reporters. “Our responsibility is not determining what can be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Our responsibility is to tell the country as much as we’ve been able to learn.”

Schiff also broadly criticized former President Barack Obama for his failure to impose a ‘deterrent’ against hostile nations whose intent was to launch cyber attacks against the private sector and during the 2016 elections.

“I think the Obama administration should have done more to establish a deterrent when it had the opportunity,” he said.

“I was urging back when the North Koreans hacked Sony that we establish a deterrent then. I feared if we didn’t, not only would the North Koreans be back, but others would take a lesson from this that cyber-hacking and attacking is a freebie. There’s no consequence,” he said.

In the 2014 Sony hack, a North Korean group that called itself “Guardians of Peace” hacked Sony Pictures and eventually released Sony staff emails, personal information about Sony employees, executive salaries and even copies of several unreleased Sony films.

“In the North Korean situation, what I had urged was not necessarily a cyber-response to a cyber-attack, but to respond in a way that gets the North Korean’s attention.” He said the lack of deterrence encouraged other countries to launch cyber attacks, culminating with Russian cyber attacks. 

“In the case of Russia, I think we should have named them a lot earlier, call them out on it. It’s not enough for members of Congress to do so. We need an administration to do it. The administration did it through a written statement in October, which I don’t think was enough,” he said.

“Of course the biggest way to get the attention of Russia is through sanctions. I had urged that the administration, before the election, begin negotiations with our European allies over sanctions that ought to be imposed over Russia’s interference,” Schiff said.

He also confirmed the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee were authentic. “As far as we can tell, the documents that they dumped were largely or completely authentic. That is, they weren’t fakes.”

He said his “deepest concern” was that in the future a foreign power might add fabricated information in legitimate documents. 

“I was concerned when that was happening in real-time was that among the real documents, they would dump fake documents. Or even more pernicious, they would take a real document, they would add a paragraph to it suggesting illegality and dump that,” Schiff said.

“So you would have a document where let’s say, two-thirds were accurate, one-third was document. You would have no way for the campaign in the final weeks to demonstrate that the document had been altered,” the Democrat said.

A version of this story appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website.

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