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Who’s Next on the Indictment List After Comey

By: Kevin Jackson | October 10, 2025

Step right up to the most crooked game Washington ever played: FISA fraud checkers by the heart of the Obama-era Department of Justice and FBI.

Every player tossed aside the rulebook and signed their names to one of America’s largest surveillance scams. Little did Obama and his operatives know, they were playing checkers as Trump played chess.

I hope Lisa Page and Peter Strzok saved up that money Biden gave them from the bogus lawsuit, because they may need it to pay their attorneys.

What do we know?

For starters, all four Carter Page warrants according to the new and improved DOJ reports were illegal. Intentional signatures from the “best and brightest” of Obama’s hit squads who knew exactly what they were doing.

The Fatally Flawed FISA Warrants

The Department of Justice admitted all four FISA warrants on Carter Page were obtained illegally. That means every renewal was knowingly pushed through without proper foundation. And every name on those applications stamped their approval—fully aware the infamous dossier was the real catalyst. Andrew McCabe, fiction-writer-in-chief, summed it up best:

“No dossier, no FISA warrants.”

In other words, if Hillary’s paid opposition research wasn’t there, none of this would have happened.

DOJ/FBI: Signing Their Own Failure

Let’s roll out the red carpet for the DOJ and FBI officials who put pen to paper:

Sally Yates: As Obama’s Deputy Attorney General, Yates helped kick off the circus by signing the first (January 2017) warrant—despite doubts about its validity. Her actions brought partisan fire to federal law enforcement.
Dana Boente: Acting Deputy AG and chief FISA rubber-stamper, Boente signed renewals knowing the underlying claims were questionable at best, actively ignoring evidence refuting the narrative. Afterward, Boente transitioned into other top legal counsel roles—just in time to advise the Mueller operation.
James Comey: The man already under indictment spotlight, Comey authorized the original and renewed warrants, brushing aside internal warnings about credibility.
Andrew McCabe: FBI Deputy Director, and perhaps the most candid bureaucrat in D.C.—even admitting publicly the entire surveillance scheme rested on the now-debunked Steele Dossier.
Rod Rosenstein: The supposed grown-up in the room, Rosenstein signed off on later renewals (May and June 2017) with full knowledge that the original application was fraudulent. In a plot twist, Rosenstein later appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel—setting off the “Trump-Russia Collusion” chase.

Each of these DOJ and FBI figures not only approved illegal applications but also continued pushing renewals as new evidence emerged that debunked their original predicates, according to sources tracking FISA scandal timelines.

Judges Shuffling the Deck

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) exists to protect citizens from overreaching government snooping. In the Page fiasco, its gatekeepers did the opposite:

Judge Rosemary Collyer: As the court’s presiding judge, Collyer signed off despite significant holes in the application materials.
Judge Raymond Dearie: Approving extensions and reviewed filings without proper skepticism.
Judge James Conway: Also counted among FISC rubber-stampers on renewals.
Judge Michael Mosman: Approved multiple warrants even after controversy mounted.

The judges could have questioned the logic, demanded further documentation, or refused signatures, but instead, their acquiescence gave the DOJ carte blanche to continue illegal surveillance. Disclosures since have shown the court itself was misled about the integrity of the facts presented—a chilling reminder that judicial oversight failed spectacularly.

How the Dossier Tied It Together

At the heart of it all: the infamous Steele Dossier, funded by Clinton allies and pumped into the system via Fusion GPS. Without it, said McCabe, “there would have been no FISA warrant.” The Page v. Comey appellate saga revealed that FISA-based surveillance continued with barely a fig leaf of probable cause.

The DOJ and FBI players all knew about the Dossier’s dubious provenance, yet raced to secure wiretaps on a Trump associate. The underlying information was driven by political desperation, not legitimate intelligence. Instead of halting the process, these agencies doubled down—renewing warrants and hiding key facts from other government components and the public.

Interlocking Careers and Complicity

If this checkers game seems rigged, that’s because it was. The main characters moved in and out of top posts, ensuring self-preservation:

Boente shifts from acting DAG to Mueller probe lead, then becomes FBI chief legal counsel.
Rosenstein leaves DOJ after his FISA role, but not before enabling Mueller’s endless witch hunt.
Yates, lauded as a “principled resister,” was in fact an early enabler of anti-Trump abuses.
McCabe’s leaked memos and admissions are still reverberating, confirming the central role of the dossier.
Judges who approved the warrants are still on the bench—few consequences, even after admissions of error.

Each officeholder played their part to enable, extend, and obscure illegal wiretapping—in violation of the Fourth Amendment, as later court reviews noted. Meanwhile, conservatives and Trump supporters battling to expose this corruption were smeared as conspiracy theorists by the very same media that now admits the surveillance was baseless.

The Endgame: Admission and Accountability

For years, the DOJ, FBI, and the FISC shielded their own from any consequences, allowing these power players to slide into other influential jobs. Only under relentless pressure did the DOJ finally admit what millions already knew: all four FISA warrants issued were illegal. Yet, as exposure grows, true accountability still stalls.

The classic playbook: spray the media with leaks, politicize the findings, and when cornered, admit “mistakes were made”—but never apologize or offer restitution. The saga remains a blistering indictment of Deep State arrogance, and of a court system that failed to do its job when it mattered most.

Bankrupt them

Washington’s crooked checkers game didn’t just bend the rules—it threw out ethics for expediency and politics. Every signature was a move toward more surveillance, less transparency, and manufactured “Russia collusion” drama. While Comey now most likely faces a day in court, the rest of the cast should start stocking up their nuts for winter.

Frankly, part of me doesn’t care about guilt or innocence, and here’s why. First, I know enough by now to know they are all guilty. Second, I want them all bankrupted, just as they tried to do to Trump, General Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and many others.

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House Intel Chair: Declassified Docs Show Obama-Directed Psyop

By: M.D. Kittle | July 30, 2025

Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., on Fox News to talk about the Russian collusion hoax. — Rep. Rick Crawford says the report his committee put together in 2020 exposes the people behind the Russia collusion hoax.

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Rep. Rick Crawford joined the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in early 2017, just as the Obama administration was putting the Russia collusion hoax into motion. The Arkansas Republican and his fellow committee members would soon be up to their necks in one of the darkest chapters in U.S. intelligence history.

On Jan. 6, 2017, documents suggest, the deep state was setting up its own brand of insurrection, pushing an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) filled with dubious information and sourcing that Crawford believes was designed to topple President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office.

“Forgive me for being coarse, but these [intelligence] analysts, for lack of a better term, crapped all over ICD [Intelligence Community Directive] 203. They did not follow it in the slightest,” Crawford said on the latest episode of The Federalist Radio Hour. He was referring to the analytic standards that CIA agents and analysts must follow. They didn’t.

“It was ignored and they went forward with their own narrative that was done simply to discredit President Trump and to spin a narrative that was false: That he was involved with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin in helping to change the outcome of the election,” he added.

‘It Didn’t Matter If It Was True’

Crawford, who in January took over as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has, like his Republican colleagues, been waiting a long time for the public to know what he has known for years. The recent declassification and release of the committee’s 2020 majority staff report lays to waste the lie that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election and exposes the likes of then-CIA Director John Brennan for driving a deeply flawed intelligence assessment. The report, released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, found that one “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win.”

The ICA “ignored strong indicators supporting the alternative hypothesis that, at a minimum, Putin didn’t care who won and even had reasons to prefer a Clinton victory,” and that by “adopting a single-track explanation for Putin’s actions — that he ‘preferred’ candidate Trump and ‘aspired’ to help him win — the ICA authors had little choice but to ignore contrary evidence and attempt to force-fit weak evidence to make their case.”

And there was a plethora of contrary evidence. Career intelligence officials warned Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that they were barking up the wrong tree. The Trump-hating deep staters didn’t listen. Forcing their collusion narrative, Brennan and crew relied on the Steele dossier to the disgust of intelligence analysts who saw it for the garbage political opposition research that it was. According to the committee report, a CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan “refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, [Brennan] responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”

Crawford found the old CIA director’s comment particularly troubling.

“It didn’t matter if it was true, as far as he was concerned. It rang true so it was going to be central to their assessment,” the committee chairman said. “The analytic integrity was completely lacking.”

Never mind that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for the Steele dossier, littered with salacious and unverifiable opposition research.

‘Willing Accomplices’

Crawford said there’s a reason why the damning documents have been sealed for so long. Former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who chaired the Intelligence Committee in the thick of the Russia collusion hoax and who was viciously attacked by Democrats and the media for combatting the lies, tried unsuccessfully to get the 2020 report released. Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican who served as chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the previous session of Congress, tried as well but ran into a brick wall, Crawford said. That changed with Trump’s return to the White House in January. The administration returned the documents to the House Intelligence Committee, and they are now open to public inspection.

“So, what we see here is a fraud, a hoax perpetrated on the American people at the expense of President Trump,” the congressman said. “And this was nothing more than a Psyop, a psychological operation against the American people, really under the direction of President Obama and conducted by the IC leadership team.”

And the hoax was greatly assisted by a Trump-hating corporate media that gladly gobbled up all of the false “tips” the Intelligence Community and like-minded political operatives fed them, Crawford said.

“It’s not as though the media were just reporting facts that were being put out there in the public sphere. They were willing accomplices,” the chairman said. So much so, he added, that the Steele dossier was leaked to Yahoo News, and the leak was used as a predicate to go after Trump and launch the FBI’s politically-driven Crossfire Hurricane sham probe. Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, the partisan player behind the investigation, suggested as much in a Sept. 23, 2016 text, boasting that the Steele dossier was able to “influence” media.

“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” the disgraced former agent, fired from the FBI in August 2018, wrote in the declassified communications.

Now that same accomplice media is ignoring or dismissing the bombshell documents.

“So, the media essentially becomes not an unwitting player in this whole thing but a witting accomplice, like, ‘Yes, give us this information. We’ll help spin this. We’ll help sell it to the American people, we’ll help take down President Trump,’” Crawford said. “And they’re not about to admit that they made that mistake or that they were involved in that because that would be a huge revelation. It would discredit them all.”

‘An Absolute Travesty’

Like corporate media, the Intelligence Community has had plenty of struggles with the truth over the years. Crawford and the Subcommittee on Central Intelligence Agency have investigated more recent suspect ICAs.

“The Intelligence Community (IC) has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn. Despite this, the Subcommittee has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release,” Crawford wrote in the subcommittee’s interim report in December on “the Intelligence Community’s Conclusions on Anomalous Health Incidents.” The report asked, “Is the Intelligence Community Hiding the Real Reason for This Phenomenon?”

Crawford said he wants to believe that the perpetrators of the Russia collusion hoax will ultimately be held accountable, but he worries about legal “loopholes.” The major players have gone on to very lucrative post-IC careers, serving as “credible experts” to the same news outlets that ran with their twisted intelligence.

“That’s an absolute travesty because what they have done, they really, in my opinion, perpetrated the largest, deepest, widest hoax we’ve ever seen in American history, and they seem to be proud of it. And that’s the thing that bothers me the most.”

Listen to The Federalist Radio Hour podcast interview with Rep. Rick Crawford here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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Declassified Records Show Obama Lied to Americans, Sabotaged Transition of Power

By: Joy Pullmann | July 21, 2025

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released 114 pages of newly declassified Obama administration records Friday.

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President Barack Obama was among the U.S. leaders directing intelligence agencies to lie about Russians tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump, reaffirm newly declassified U.S. intelligence records.

The Obama administration’s use of U.S. intelligence to back false claims about Trump and Russia sabotaged the peaceful transition of power necessary for democratic self-government. It denied the American majority the policies they voted for by consuming the first Trump administration with fabricated scandals, including a massive special counsel investigation. These also wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and damaged U.S. foreign policy, likely feeding the still-raging Russia-Ukraine war.

An unclassified memorandum to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat member of Congress, was released Friday. It quotes newly declassified federal records that demonstrate U.S. intelligence agencies in 2016 believed Russia could not manipulate vote counts in favor of Trump or any other candidate.

It also reproduces formerly classified documents showing that Obama and his top intelligence officials — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey — tossed aside such evidence to rush out a doctored “intelligence assessment” that falsely claimed the opposite. Under U.S. intelligence branding, that assessment relied on fabricated information funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign to falsely claim Trump was a Russian stooge.

The New York Times has run articles just in the last few months still promoting the conclusions of the doctored Jan. 6. 2017 “intelligence community assessment,” or ICA. A Rasmussen poll conducted just two weeks ago found 60 percent of Democrat voters and 45 percent of “moderates” still believe “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.” Fifty-seven percent of those polled agreed officials who manipulated evidence to “get Trump” should be prosecuted.

Obama Called for Packaging Smears As an Intelligence Assessment

Numerous email communications contained in a 114-page accompanying packet of declassified records also released Friday confirm that it was Obama who directed the rushed creation of an ICA outside normal protocols that lied to Americans about Russian interference in U.S. elections and smeared Trump as a treasonous colluder with Russia.

A Dec. 7, 2016 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) email to CIA, DHS, and ODNI recipients wrote of “discuss[ing] a NIC [intelligence community] product in response to POTUS” that “would mirror” an intelligence assessment produced in September. The September assessment said Russians couldn’t change U.S. vote totals. Later emails agreed the CIA, then led by Brennan, would lead the construction of this Obama-requested ICA.

A Dec. 9, 2016, email from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) tells 13 other ODNI and one CIA recipient, “The IC [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”

The email set a date target for delivering the assessment to Obama on Jan. 9, 2017. That date was later moved up to Jan. 6, 2017, with top security state officials working through the holidays to release the intelligence-branded packet of smear tinder before Obama left office.

A Dec. 22, 2016 ODNI email about the Democrat disinformation-riddled ICA tells other ODNI recipients, “The only real direction we got was 1) POTUS wants a comprehensive assessment, drawing from all available sources, and 2) it has to be before the end of his administration.”

Another Dec. 22, 2016, email between top-level DNI officials concerns “the IC [intelligence community] report on Russian election meddling that POTUS tasked us to do.”

In addition to the disinformation ICA he directed at Congress and the public, Obama directly lied to Americans in speeches about Russian election interference. For example, on Dec. 16, 2016, Obama stated he was “concerned about … potential hacking that could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself. And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that, that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly. And tell him to cut it out.”

At that time, however, Obama had to know U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that statement to be false, because his staff had prevented the publication of an earlier intelligence assessment saying so, the newly released documents show. This also means the same people and agencies that erected a totalitarian censorship edifice under the pretext of “misinformation” and “disinformation” were in fact the top sources of widely believed misinformation and disinformation that have now affected at least three U.S. presidential elections.

U.S. Intel Said Russians Couldn’t Change Votes

The memorandum gives a timeline showing that U.S. intelligence analysts, agencies, and reports leading up to the 2016 election had repeatedly concluded Russia couldn’t hack U.S. elections or change vote totals. Clapper received an intelligence analysis in August 2016 stating, “there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.”

Instead, U.S. intelligence believed Russian activity was more propagandistic, affecting public confidence in the election but not its outcome. Numerous other high-level intelligence officials and assessments made similar conclusions — until December 2016.

From the Gabbard memorandum released Friday.

On Dec. 8, there was a sudden switch. Multiple intelligence agencies were preparing to publish an assessment stating, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”

Yet on Dec. 8, 2016, Comey suddenly declared the FBI would withdraw its support for that cross-agency conclusion, and the FBI would instead be “drafting a dissent,” the newly declassified documents show. That report was ultimately never published.

Instead, on Dec. 9, the White House held a national security meeting that included Clapper, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA Director John Brennan, Andrew McCabe (Comey’s deputy), Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. After the meeting, Clapper’s assistant sent an email to ODNI leaders with the subject line, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” In the email, the assistant asks them to create an “assessment per the President’s request,” with input from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security. This meant sidelining several intelligence agencies that normally contribute to such publications.

Hollering Collusion Lies Into a Media Echo Chamber

“That same day,” Dec. 9, 2016, “Deep State officials in the IC begin leaking blatantly false intelligence to the Washington Post,” says the Gabbard memo released Friday, “… claiming that Russia used ‘cyber means’ to influence ‘the outcome of the election.’” The leaks seeded the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative throughout willing corporate media partners in advance of the publication of the disinformation ICA on Jan. 6, 2017.

The doctored ICA itself crystalized and legitimized myriad politicized false claims that went on to hamstring the first Trump presidency. For example, it smeared rising pro-democracy movements across the West of citizens against international oligarchs as authoritarian by linking them with Vladimir Putin, claiming “Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements.”

Rhodes, a top Obama foreign policy advisor, was in on the Dec. 9, 2016 meeting that appears to have planned the ICA switcheroo. Rhodes is infamous for telling The New York Times in 2016 that the Obama administration “created an echo chamber” in corporate media to sell Obama’s payout of American tax dollars to Iran and government takeover of formerly private health markets: “We created an echo chamber. They [corporate media reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes explained. “They literally know nothing.”

The documents released Friday further substantiate previous reporting by The Federalist going back to 2017 that: Obama was likely directly involved with his administration’s spying on the Trump campaign; the Obama administration spied on domestic political opponents; an email from Susan Rice implicated Obama in the Russia collusion smear against Trump; Obama intelligence officials likely lied to Congress; and that Obama himself was involved in ensnaring Trump’s first national security advisor in yet another fabricated scandal using spying, leaking, and manipulation of U.S. intelligence.

Steele Dossier Key to Potential Perjury, Conspiracy Prosecution

On Jan. 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration published the doctored ICA. The Friday memo says that ICA falsely claimed “Putin directed an effort to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton,” launching years of smears and investigations.

That falsified ICA at least partly relied on the infamous Steele dossier, according to a memorandum released two weeks ago by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe. That “dossier” was an opposition research packet fabricated by British spook Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign that has been roundly debunked since, including by a special counsel investigation.

In May 2023 (and at several other times), Brennan testified to Congress that the CIA opposed using the Steele dossier in the 2017 Russia collusion ICA he was heavily involved in creating. Yet a CIA internal review released earlier this month says Brennan included the Steele dossier in the ICA “over the objections of career intelligence officials.” The Federalist also reported that still-classified congressional reports show ICA-related Obama administration corruption is much deeper than what is currently publicly known.

FBI Director Kash Patel opened criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey earlier this month and is considering not just perjury but also conspiracy charges, according to Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW “300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult,” the bestselling “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Desperate Democrats Are Pushing Yet Another Version of the Russia Collusion Hoax

By: John Daniel Davidson | September 06, 2024

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The Biden administration’s announcement this week that the Justice Department is taking action against alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees as part of an effort to crack down on Russian “misinformation” ahead of the election should raise red flags — huge, obvious red flags.

The biggest red flag is the timing of the indictment and accompanying announcement, just as mail-in ballots in some states are sent out and two weeks before in-person voting begins in some states. The only possible reason for the DOJ to announce this now, and to frame it as a Russian election meddling scheme designed to boost former President Donald Trump, is to paint Trump and his supporters as agents of a hostile foreign power, or at the very least to imply that Trump’s support is fake, paid for by Moscow. In other words, the timing of the indictment itself represents an egregious form of election meddling by our own Justice Department, whose longstanding policy is not to file indictments that could potentially influence an election. Yet that’s the entire purpose of the indictment announced this week.

We’ve seen this playbook before from Democrats. Hand-waving about “Russian disinformation” and “election interference” by the DOJ and the U.S. intelligence community is of course a well-worn election interference tactic — and arguably a far more potent than anything that’s ever come from Moscow.

First it was the outlandish claim in 2016 that Donald Trump was actually a secret Russian agent and that he colluded with Moscow to win the White House. An entire FBI investigation was based on the discredited and patently ridiculous Steele dossier. The initial election meddling allegation was based on nothing more than $100,000 or so in Facebook ads purchased by Russian entities with the aim of sowing division among the American electorate. And from that thin reed, an entire narrative emerged that Russia not only meddled in our election, but that Trump colluded with Moscow in the effort.

The entire U.S. intelligence community was mobilized first against Trump’s campaign and then against his administration in what amounted to an Executive Branch rebellion against the duly elected president of the United States. For years, outlandish claims of Trump-Russia collusion hobbled the Trump White House before eventually fizzling out with the denouement of the Mueller investigation, which turned up zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

But Democrats and the deep state didn’t give up. Desperate to pry Trump out of office in 2020, the FBI and the intelligence community interfered in our elections yet again. First, they prepped social media companies like Facebook and Twitter that any negative stories about Hunter Biden in the runup to the election should be considered Russian disinformation or obtained via illegal hacking. When the New York Post broke the news of Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, the big social media companies did as they had been told and throttled the story.

Not only that, but dozens of “former” intelligence officials (coordinated and cajoled by none other than the current secretary of state, Anthony Blinken) issued an open letter claiming the Hunter Biden story had “all the hallmarks” of a Kremlin disinformation operation — even though the CIA and FBI knew at the time, and had known for over a year, that the laptop and its contents were authentic.

Now they’re back with a warmed-over version of the same tired tactic. Call it the Russia collusion hoax 3.0. According to the DOJ indictment, the so-called “malign influence operation” involved two Russian nationals who worked for RT, formerly known as Russia Today, a state-run media outlet. These RT employees allegedly ran a series of “covert projects” that included funneling $10 million to a Tennessee-based company called Tenet Media, which was founded in 2022 by founded by Liam Donovan and his wife, Lauren Chen.

Chen is a right-wing Turning Points USA provocateur of sorts who made videos for The Blaze (which has since cut ties with her) and proffered what were meant to be edgy conservative takes on social media. The scheme Chen and Donovan allegedly ran was to fund other right-wing(ish) commentators like Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson without disclosing that their company was “funded and directed” by RT. Rubin, Pool, and Johnson all released statements Wednesday insisting they were deceived by Tenet and are victims of this Russia propaganda plot.

In the end, it appears that the scheme wasn’t all that successful. According to the indictment, the RT employees running the project grew frustrated that the social media influencers they had paid through Tenet weren’t sharing Tenet’s videos or promoting the company enough. According to Johnson, the contract his lawyers negotiated last year with Tenet was “a standard, arms-length deal, which was later terminated.”

But the details of the indictment aren’t the big takeaway from this story, even if the allegations prove true. The big takeaway is the timing of all this. Biden’s DOJ is once again promoting a false narrative of Russian election meddling designed to benefit Trump, and doing so in the runup to the November election. They want to portray Trump support online as fake, funded and directed by foreign enemies in Moscow, and thereby paint Trump as a Putin lackey — yet again.

Sorry, but we’ve seen this movie before. Yes, Moscow might have hatched a half-baked scheme to fund right-wing social media influencers without their knowledge, just as Moscow spent $100,000 on Facebook ads in 2016 to sow division. Foreign powers trying to meddle in our elections is concerning, but it’s also not earth-shattering. A lot of nations do it. None of it has ever amounted to much and compared to what our own federal agencies have done, it doesn’t even rate.

What’s far more concerning is the way our own Justice Department and federal intelligence agencies are meddling in the election. The plain truth is that by announcing this indictment now, inserting it into the news cycle, and knowing the corporate media will do its part to portray online Trump support as inauthentic and funded by Russia, Biden’s DOJ is meddling in the election in a far more serious way than Tenet or RT or anyone in Moscow could ever hope to do.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Prosecutors Accuse Trump Of ‘Criminal Scheme’ To ‘Corrupt’ 2016 Election While Russia Hoaxers Walk Free

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 23, 2024

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In opening statements on Monday, Manhattan prosecutors sought to convince a jury that former President Donald Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the Russia-collusion hoax — the real criminal scheme that was orchestrated to meddle in that election — walk free.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims Trump broke the law after he classified payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels, as “legal fees” rather than campaign expenditures. (It is not illegal to purchase negative press about oneself, and Trump likely would have run afoul of campaign finance laws if he had classified such an expense, which benefitted him personally rather than just his campaign, as a campaign payment.)

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who formerly held a top post in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, alleged Monday during opening statements that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”

“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo continued, according to PBS News. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”

Manhattan prosecutors seek to put Trump in jail for up to four years. Meanwhile, the operatives who invented a hoax accusing Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016, commissioned a dossier of fake oppo research, and shopped it to the FBI — which then used the shoddy “research” as a basis to illegally spy on the Trump campaign — have received a light tap on the wrist, if any punishment at all.

Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer who commissioned the discredited dossier, received no punishment. The DNC and the Clinton campaign — which together provided funds for oppo research firm Fusion GPS to hire former British spy Christopher Steele, who put his name on the so-called “Steele dossier” — were fined $105,000 and $8,000, respectively, for labeling the payments as “legal and compliance consulting” and “legal services.” Clinton herself, who personally approved the decision to leak the false accusations to the press, was still suggesting the 2016 election was “stolen” from her as recently as 2022 and has never received any repercussions for the Russia hoax.

Russian national Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” whose testimony Steele relied on in creating the dossier, “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented.” Danchenko was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI about a 2016 phone call he claimed he received from an anonymous person who he thought was Sergei Millian. Danchenko claimed the anonymous caller revealed a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. These claims were added to the Steele dossier.

Evidence presented to the jury, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted at the time, indicated that “Danchenko did not know Millian and had not received any telephone calls during the relevant time frame that might fit the description of the call Danchenko claimed he received.”

Nevertheless, a jury in a deep-blue Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. acquitted Danchenko in 2022.

Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted, despite evidence suggesting he lied to then FBI-General Counsel James Baker in 2016. Sussman “presented Baker with data and whitepapers that supposedly showed the existence of a secret communications network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump organization,” Cleveland explained. “According to the indictment [from Special Counsel John Durham], Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe when he met with Baker, but falsely told his friend that he was coming on his own behalf to help the FBI.”

The only person who received any sentence was former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to forging an email to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith, according to Federalist CEO Sean Davis’ reporting on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s findings, “altered an email from a separate U.S. federal agency, believed to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to falsely state that [Trump campaign affiliate Carter] Page had never worked with the CIA to investigate suspected Russia agents operating within the U.S.”

“In fact,” Davis wrote, “as Clinesmith was told by the operative, Page had worked with the CIA previously, as well as with the FBI.”

Clinesmith was sentenced to 400 hours of community service and one year of probation.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Trump Refused To Prosecute Hillary Clinton. Democrats Have No Such Restraint

BY: JOY PULLMANN | APRIL 03, 2023

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — If it is indeed ending democracy to jail political opponents, let’s be clear about which party is dragging the nation down that route.

Author Joy Pullmann profile

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long, crooked political careers have been marked by multiple well-established high crimes and misdemeanors. Not the least of these was Hillary’s decision to commit what amounts to multiple felonies by using an insecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business while U.S. secretary of state under Barack Obama.

This criminal behavior that so-called U.S. justice systems openly and repeatedly refused to punish was undertaken to hide treasonous actions. Those include selling political access and favors to foreign adversaries, as journalist Peter Schweizer and others, including The Federalist and members of Congress, have repeatedly and thoroughly documented.

Selling political favors to foreign opponents, including communist China and authoritarian Russia, is clearly treason. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “treason” as: “The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts.” The Clintons got filthy rich from it.

Clinton then compounded that with more treasonous conduct when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

It is by now well-established that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid various actors to lie to U.S. intelligence agencies about Trump in an operation that eventually essentially negated the 2016 election — including encouraging federal employees’ treasonous behavior and two falsely predicated impeachments — and helped lose Republicans the 2020 election. Her campaign even tacitly confirmed this by paying a slap-on-the-wrist Federal Election Commission fine while still refusing to admit guilt for it a few weeks ago, seven years after the fact.

BREAKING: Last year Hillary Clinton quietly settled a campaign finance violation over reporting the *Steele Dossier* funding as legal services

She paid a fine and was never arrested pic.twitter.com/MoIoClVaQ8
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 30, 2023

Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous “documents dispute”? Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.

Hillary paid to have Trump falsely smeared as a traitor, laundering the slander through U.S. agencies that are supposed to provide equal justice under the law but now function as weapons to damage Democrats’ political opposition. In conjunction with others in the Obama administration that likely include Obama himself, she colluded with multiple security-state agencies to slander, undermine, hamper, and now threaten with jail time Democrats’ top political opponent.

That’s treason. It’s election erasure. It’s ongoing. And these traitors are all running about totally scot-free, while they jail their political opponents for what at best are misdemeanors, and for which they refuse to prosecute anyone on the left who perpetrates them — from street rioters all the way up to their presidential candidates.

My colleague Elle Purnell pointed out that when Trump countenanced chants of “lock her up” at his rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.

“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,” said Spygate intelligence official Michael McFaul. “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” said top Spygate propagandist Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.

“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” Obama said in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.” “In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,” tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.

REMINDER In 2016 Trump got huge laughs for telling Hillary Clinton she'd be in jail if he was in charge of the law Then there was four years of agitprop about how this proved that Trump was "a dictator who wanted to imprison his political opponents."https://t.co/jJADWmsMSj pic.twitter.com/hNgTVnmI5W
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) October 21, 2022

The Clintons are clearly traitors willing to endanger their nation for profit, and it would be fully just to prosecute them as such. Yet as president when he had the chance, Trump decided not to pursue it. According to Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s recently published memoir, “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.

“‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, “for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’”

Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.

So, if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.

The no-holds-barred legal shutdown and prosecution of leftist insurrectionists filling state capitols in support of a transgender child murderer would be one such proportionate response.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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The Russian Twitter Bots Story is a Study in Media’s ‘Lie, set the Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook

BY: ELLE PURNELL | JANUARY 12, 2023

Woman reading newspaper — **The three-step process is regime media’s MO: spread a false claim, crush dissent, then admit the truth once the news cycle achieves its purpose.**

ELLE PURNELL

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.

How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook

In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.

One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”

Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:

The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.

The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.

31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.

In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”

Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023

Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”

While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.

Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.

Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.

5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy

The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.

Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.

Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.

Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”

“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”

Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”

The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.

After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”

Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.

Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“

Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.

“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.

A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.

Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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Disgraced FBI No. 2 Andrew McCabe Calls for Feds to Treat ‘Mainstream’ Conservatives Like Domestic Terrorists

Reported BY: EVITA DUFFY | JANUARY 10, 2022

Have you ever wondered what disgraced former deputy FBI directors do after trying to stage a coup and lying under oath? Apparently, they give talks about “protecting democracy” at top-rated institutions of higher learning. Indeed, this last Thursday the University of Chicago invited former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to join a panel of partisans to discuss the Jan 6 “insurrection.”

McCabe was fired as the deputy FBI director for leaking sensitive information about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation and then lying about it under oath. He also took part in spying on the Donald Trump campaign through a secret warrant granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The dossier he used to obtain the surveillance warrant was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, in an ironic twist, was itself the product of Russian disinformation. McCabe and his allies in corporate media justified all sorts of similar illegal and undemocratic tactics to discredit and attempt to unseat President Trump.

Of course, neither the University of Chicago nor McCabe acknowledged the irony in him discussing the integrity of “democracy” in America on Thursday evening. In fact, what McCabe said at the University of Chicago event on Jan. 6, 2022 is even more shocking than his invitation to speak in the first place. Below are four of the most appalling assertions and policy proposals McCabe made at the public event.

1. Conservatives Are in The Same Category As Islamic Terrorists

McCabe likened conservatives to members of the Islamic Caliphate: “I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes… is that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines,” he said.

McCabe went on to describe the rise of the Islamic caliphate in Syria and how Islamic extremists were radicalized across socioeconomic, educational, and racial lines, likening it to the “mass radicalization” of the political right across demographics. That’s right, according to McCabe a grandma who shares a Federalist article on Facebook and your uncle with a “Let’s Go Brandon” coffee mug are in the same category as a jihadist who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.

2. Parents at School Board Meetings Pose A ‘Threat To National Security’

“Political violence [is] not just confined to the Capitol,” McCabe asserted. “It’s going on in school boards around the country. It’s going on in local elections. It’s happening, you know, even to health-care workers.” According to this politically protected former FBI no. 2, the “political violence” occurring recently at school board meetings and during local elections is a “very diverse and challenging threat picture.”

If you haven’t heard already, Democrats are branding parents who oppose child mask mandates and racist critical race theory indoctrination as “domestic terrorists.”

McCabe said moms and dads who stand up for their children’s health and education at school board meetings in ways Democrats disagree with are very dangerous. So dangerous that it is actually “essential” we have a “rapid and complete response by law enforcement at the state, local and federal level to this sort of political violence…”

Holding America’s parents “accountable” is not enough for McCabe. He wants to make sure that federal agencies also put “out that message that this sort of conduct that both horribly victimizes individuals, but also serves to undermine our democratic process” is “considered a threat to national security [that is] not tolerated.”

3. McCabe Wants More Surveillance of ‘Mainstream’ Conservatives

“I’m fairly confident,” McCabe said, “[that] the FBI [and other agencies] have reallocated resources and repositioned some of their counterterrorism focus to increase their focus on right-wing extremism and domestic violent extremists. And I think that’s obviously a good idea.”

But McCabe wants more. McCabe asserted that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI need to stop merely focusing on the “fringes of the right-wing movement,” in order to “catch this threat” of the “right.”

“Are you going to catch this threat if your focus is only on the traditional, right-wing extremist, those groups that we know about, the quote-unquote, fringes of the right-wing movement?” asked McCabe. “And I think the answer to that is no.”
“It’s entirely possible that when the intelligence community and the law enforcement community looks out across this mainstream,” McCabe continued, “they didn’t assume [on January 6] that that group of people — business owners, white people from the suburbs, educated, employed — presented a threat of violence, and now we know very clearly that they do.”

McCabe wants to get around constitutional obstacles that restrict the abuses of federal agencies. He explained that the path to granting the feds more power to spy on and punish “extremists,” a.k.a. conservatives, is by implementing federal penalties against “domestic terrorism.”

A measure like this would grant domestic agencies the intelligence capabilities of the international terrorism-focused National Counterterrorism Center. It would, McCabe says, “give investigators the ability to begin investigating when folks are plotting or planning or organizing to use violence for the purpose of coercing the population or influencing government…”

Joshua Geltzer, President Joe Biden’s advisor on “countering domestic violent extremism,” made the same proposal in a 2019 hearing before a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee. In his proposal, Geltzer suggested that we need to “polic[e] [tech company] platforms to remove not just incitement to violence, but also, the ideological foundations that spawn such violence.”

McCabe claims these proposed federal laws against domestic terrorism can be implemented without infringing on Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech. That seems quite impossible, however, given Geltzer is proposing government oversight of social media, for example. It is even more difficult to believe when you consider that Democrats are not going after real domestic terrorists and have literally defined parents speaking out at school board meetings as national security threats. As McCabe said himself, to Democrats, the extreme right is the mainstream right.

4. McCabe Believes No One Is Above The Law (Except Himself)

Ironically, one of McCabe’s last remarks was a proclamation of equality under the law. “Whether you are a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter, right, left, or otherwise, we should all be able to agree on the principle that no one is above the law,” stated McCabe.

“… [F]rom the lowliest trespasser on January 6, up to the highest-ranking government officials who may have been aware of a plan that would ultimately lead to violence in the Capitol––those people should be held accountable, period,” he announced. “And if we can’t do that, that is just another sign that we are becoming a non-functioning democracy.”

Ironically, McCabe’s firing for repeatedly breaking the law was expunged from the record only because he settled with a partisan Biden Department of Justice. If no one is above the law, as McCabe claims to support, then he would be in jail. Of course, McCabe is above the law. Only dissenting conservatives, in his view, deserve the suspicion and wrath of unelected federal agencies.

Disturbingly, the University of Chicago does not care about national introspection post-January 6, 2021. If it did, it would not have invited McCabe, of all people, to speak about “protecting democracy.”

UChicago allowed McCabe to spin lies about what truly happened one year ago and filtered student questions via Zoom, refusing to ask him any tough questions. Consequently, McCabe was given a platform to teach young, impressionable college students without question that the federal government should be weaponized against fellow Americans whom leftists brand as “extremists.”

To the elites in America — Democrats like McCabe, university administrators, and professors – January 6 is the key to labeling their political opponents as dangerous, “white supremacist extremists” and enacting new policy accordingly. America’s universities are now indoctrination machines that shape the minds of the next generation. Academia openly exploits its power and rewrite history to serve their illiberal agenda.

Sadly, McCabe’s dishonest version of January 6 is happily accepted by the academic elites who invited him Thursday night. His frighteningly despotic views and policy prescriptions will likely be accepted and implemented by his young listeners.

This story was originally published in the Chicago Thinker.

Evita Duffy is a senior contributor to The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evitapduffy@uchicago.edu

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Igor Danchenko arrested, charged with lying to FBI about information in Steele dossier

Reported By Devlin Barrett and Tom Jackman November 4, 2021 at 9:34 p.m. EDT

An analyst who was a primary source for a 2016 dossier of allegations against Donald Trump has been arrested on charges that he repeatedly lied to the FBI about where and how he got his information, officials said Thursday.

Igor Danchenko’s role in providing information to British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the accusations about Trump in a series of reports, has long been a subject of scrutiny from internal Justice Department investigators and special counsel John Durham, according to people familiar with the investigations. Steele presented the dossier to the FBI, and it was part of the basis for secret surveillance court orders targeting former Trump adviser Carter Page as the FBI investigated possible ties between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia.

A 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general found major problems with the accuracy of Danchenko’s information. But the 39-page indictment unveiled Thursday paints a more detailed picture of claims that were allegedly built on exaggerations, rumors and outright lies. The indictment is likely to buttress Republican charges that Democrats and FBI agents intentionally or accidentally turned cheap partisan smears into a high-stakes national security investigation of a sitting president.

The indictment also suggests Danchenko may have lied to Steele and others about where he was getting his information. Some of the material came from a Democratic Party operative with long-standing ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the charges, rather than well-connected Russians with insight into the Kremlin.

The allegations cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including The Washington Post.

Danchenko appeared briefly Thursday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., where his lawyer tried to enter a plea of not guilty on his behalf for five counts of making false statements. The judge did not accept the plea because the hearing was not an arraignment, and Danchenko was released.

His lawyer declined to speak to reporters outside the courtroom.

Durham’s probe into the FBI’s Russia investigation has also led to the indictment of a lawyer connected to Democrats, on a charge that he lied to the FBI. In addition, a former FBI lawyer who worked on the Page surveillance application later pleaded guilty to altering an email related to that case.

Former FBI officials have said the dossier did not launch their Trump campaign investigation, nor was it a factor in the conclusions reached by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But the dossier did play a critical role both in how the FBI sought court-approved surveillance and, after it was published by BuzzFeed News in 2017, the public debate about Trump and Russia.

Trump and his supporters have accused FBI officials of trying to discredit or defeat him through an unfair investigation premised on false accusations. The FBI’s defenders, however, say the agency was obligated to examine allegations of Russian interference and possible collusion with the Trump campaign during the election.

Then-Attorney General William P. Barr appointed Durham in 2019 to investigate the origins and handling of the Russia investigation.

Steele’s reports on Trump were based in large part on a person he called his “primary sub-source,” which was Danchenko, according to people familiar with the matter. Danchenko, a 43-year-old Virginia resident and Washington-based researcher, was hired by Steele to talk to people he knew in Russia about any possible ties Trump may have had to the Kremlin.

Steele, in turn, was paid by a research firm, Fusion GPS, that had been hired by a law firm that represented Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer for Fusion GPS declined to comment on the indictment on Thursday.

Lawyers for Steele did not immediately reply to requests for comment, though ABC News recently aired an interview with him in which he insisted much of the dossier was accurate and would be proved so eventually.

The indictment charges that Danchenko repeatedly lied to the FBI in interviews in 2017 as agents sought to get to the bottom of claims made in the dossier. It also notes that the FBI “was ultimately not able to confirm or corroborate” most of the dossier’s substantive claims.

An FBI spokeswoman referred questions about the indictment to Durham’s office.

Danchenko allegedly lied to agents when he said he had never communicated about the dossier allegations with a U.S.-based public relations executive “who was a longtime participant in Democratic Party politics.”

The indictment does not identify that individual, but it is Charles Dolan Jr., according to Ralph Martin, a lawyer representing Dolan. Martin said in an email Thursday that his client was a witness in the case; he declined to comment further, and a spokesman for Durham declined to comment on the claim that Dolan is a witness.

The indictment charges that in fact, Danchenko used Dolan as a source for some of the dossier’s allegations.

Dolan had served as a state chairman of Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and a volunteer on her 2016 campaign. While in the White House, Bill Clinton appointed Dolan to two four-year terms on a State Department advisory committee, according to the legal filing.

Dolan’s ties to the Democratic Party were so extensive that they bore upon his “reliability, motivations, and potential bias as a source of information” about Trump, the indictment says. Danchenko “gathered some of the information . . . at events in Moscow” organized by Dolan, who invited him to attend, the indictment charges. The indictment also suggests — but does not say outright — that Danchenko may have relied on information provided by Dolan to fuel the most salacious accusation to come out of the dossier: that Trump supposedly had a liaison with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel and that a video existed of the encounter that could be used to compromise the presidential candidate.

The indictment notes that in June of 2016, the executive received a tour of the Moscow hotel, including a presidential suite in which Trump had once stayed. According to another person who was on the tour, the indictment said, the hotel employee who led the tour never suggested anything sexual or untoward about Trump’s stay. Trump has always denied the allegations.

The indictment suggests that while Danchenko allegedly misled people about his conversations with Dolan, the executive also misled Danchenko. Dolan allegedly told Danchenko in 2016 that a Republican friend described internal Trump campaign discussions surrounding the ouster of a senior campaign official. That allegation became part of the dossier. But when the FBI spoke to Dolan, he claimed the anecdote was just supposition on his part and there was no Republican friend who had said that to him, according to the indictment.

Dolan also wrote an email in early 2017 that suggested he knew that Danchenko was assembling allegations for the dossier, according to the indictment.

“I’ve been interviewed by the Washington Post and the London Times — three times over the last two days over the Dossier on Trump and I know the Russian agent who made the report (He used to work for me),” Dolan allegedly wrote. It was not immediately clear to what conversations the executive was referring.

The indictment also accuses Danchenko of lying to the FBI about interactions he claimed to have had with the then-president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA. The indictment doesn’t identify that person, but people familiar with the case have previously said it is Sergei Millian.

Danchenko falsely claimed to have had a phone conversation with a person he thought was Millian as part of his information-gathering for the dossier, according to the indictment, which says the two agreed to meet later in New York. “Danchenko fabricated these facts,” it alleges.

While leading others to believe he was in contact with Millian, Danchenko had allegedly been unsuccessful in trying to speak with him, according to messages that Danchenko sent at the time that were cited in the indictment.

Early in the Russia investigation, law enforcement officials were told Millian was the source of a key claim in the dossier that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russia. But the indictment charges that Danchenko didn’t speak to Millian. It notes that Danchenko sent an email to a Russian journalist in late August 2016 asking for help connecting with Millian because he “doesn’t respond.”

For his part, Steele told the FBI that Millian was one of Danchenko’s sources, according to the indictment. Danchenko told the FBI that he knew Steele believed that he had direct contact with Millian and that he “never corrected” Steele about that “erroneous belief.”

Efforts to reach Millian on Thursday were unsuccessful, but a Twitter account bearing his name posted a message calling on news organizations to correct their past reporting about him.

The Post and other news organizations reported in 2017 that Millian was a source of key information in the dossier, including the anecdote about the Moscow hotel room. The Post reported that Millian had shared the information with an associate, who passed it on to Steele.

“The indictment raises new questions about whether Sergei Millian was a source for the Steele dossier, as The Post reported in 2017,” Post executive editor Sally Buzbee said in a statement Thursday. “We are continuing to report on the origins and ramifications of the dossier.”

Danchenko’s alleged lies were material to the Russia investigation because chasing them down consumed a significant amount of the FBI’s time and resources, the indictment says. It adds that Danchenko’s claims “played a role in the FBI’s investigative decisions and in sworn representations that the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

A Justice Department inspector general report issued in late 2019 was highly critical of how the FBI used Steele’s allegations. The report found that when the FBI later questioned Danchenko about the allegations contained in Steele’s dossier, Danchenko tried to distance himself from some of the claims, saying the dossier overstated the information he had originally provided to Steele.

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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BREAKING: DOJ Declassifies 3 Footnotes From Horowitz’s Report Revealing FBI Assessed Steele Dossier Was ‘Russian Disinformation’ – Used it Anyway

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published April 10, 2020 at 4:33pm

URL of the originating web site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/breaking-doj-declassifies-3-footnotes-horowitzs-report-revealing-fbi-assessed-steele-dossier-russian-disinformation-used-anyway/

CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge obtained an April 2 letter responding to Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley over four key footnotes in IG Horowitz’s report.

The Senators stated that the classified footnotes contradict what is publicly available in Horowitz’s report related to Crossfire Hurricane, the CI investigation opened into Trump’s campaign in July of 2016.

Grassley and Johnson wrote, “The American people have a right to know what is contained within these four footnotes and, without that knowledge, they will not have a full picture as to what happened during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

The DOJ declassified 3 footnotes with minimal redactions and kept the fourth footnote completely blacked out citing, “unique and significant concerns. The redacted information refers to information received by a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team regarding possible previous attempts by a foreign government to penetrate and research a company or individuals associated with Christopher Steele,” Herridge reported.

One declassified footnote revealed Comey’s FBI knew the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was bogus Russian disinformation — but they used it anyway to spy on Trump’s campaign.

“The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and ASSESSED that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations” — Catherine Herridge said.

Herridge: READ FULL footnote 302 Steele dossier sub-source “According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS (Russian Intel)

Enter Bruce Ohr (who STILL has a job at the DOJ):

In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS) and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS (Russian intel) officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.”

Attorney General Bill Barr told Fox News host Laura Ingraham there was ‘no basis’ for the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump.

Barr said what happened to Trump was one of the greatest travesties in American history.

Even more alarming was the pattern of events after the campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency.

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Alleged ‘Whistleblower’ Eric Ciaramella Worked Closely with Anti-Trump Dossier Hoaxer

Reported by Aaron Klein | 6 Nov 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/06/alleged-whistleblower-eric-ciaramella-worked-closely-with-anti-trump-dossier-hoaxers/

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 20: Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies during a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee June 20, 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee held a hearing on “Policy Response to Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. … Alex Wong/Getty Images

Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, was part of an Obama administration email chain celebrating the eventual signing of a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to Ukraine.

That and other emails show Ciaramella interfaced about Ukraine with individuals who played key roles in facilitating the infamous anti-Trump dossier produced by Fusion GPS and reportedly financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. One of those individuals, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (pictured), received updates on Ukraine issues from dossier author Christopher Steele in addition to Nuland’s direct role in the dossier controversy.

Also part of the email chains was Christopher J. Anderson, who was a special adviser to former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker. Anderson testified to the Democrat-led House committees running the impeachment inquiry.

Ciaramella’s name comes up in six Obama-era government emails that were released by the State Department as part of two previous Freedom of Information Act requests. At the time of the exchanges, Ciaramella served as the Director for Baltic and Eastern European Affairs for the Obama-era National Security Council, where he worked on Ukraine policy. He is now an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

One email, titled, “Loan Guarantee,” involved Nuland, who was reportedly a key champion of the Ukraine loan guarantee policy.

“Hurray,” a celebratory Nuland wrote in response to a translated Ukrainian government announcement about the signing of the $1 billion loan guarantee. The announcement singles out Joe Biden as being present for the conclusion of an agreement leading to the loan guarantee.

Ciaramella was one of several people CC’d in the email, which was sent from the U.S. ambassador at the time, Geoffrey Pyatt, who was another key champion of the loan guarantee to Ukraine along with Nuland.

The email is one of several that shows Ciaramella in the loop with top officials such as Nuland working on Ukraine policy under the Obama administration.

The loan guarantee was pushed through after Ukraine agreed to several reforms, especially the firing of the nation’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. This at a time that Shokin was reportedly investigating Burisma, the Ukranian natural gas company paying Hunter Biden. Joe Biden infamously boasted on video about personally threatening to withhold loan guarantees from Ukraine unless Shokin was removed.

Another released email shows Ciaramella himself sending a message to Nuland and others. Most of the contents are blocked out, including the email’s subject line. One non-classified section of that email shows a reply stating, “Embassy Kyiv — coordinated with our USAID mission folks — will have detailed input tomorrow.”

One email involving Nuland was sent two days before the loan guarantee was signed on June 3, 2016. “Can you confirm who will be doing the actual signing for each side?” the exchange asked.

Nuland has come under repeated fire for her various roles in the anti-Trump dossier controversy.

FBI notes also cite career Justice Department official Bruce Ohr as saying that Nuland was in touch with Fusion GPS co-founder and dossier producer Glenn Simpson.

Sen. John McCain, who infamously delivered the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey, reportedly first dispatched an aide, David J. Kramer, to inquire with Nuland about the dossier claims.

In their book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, authors and reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier’s claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.

Meanwhile, looped into email chains with Ciaramella was then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer.

An extensive New Yorker profile of Steele named Finer as obtaining the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually deciding to share the questionable document with Kerry.

Finer reportedly received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with Nuland.

After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Post oped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele.

Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.

In testimony last year, Nuland made statements about a meeting at the State Department in October 2016 between State officials and Steele, but said that she didn’t participate.

At a June 2018 hearing, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) revealed contents of the State Department’s visitor logs while he was grilling Nuland.

At the hearing, Burr asked: “I know you talked extensively with our staff relative to Mr. Steele. Based upon our review of the visitor logs of the State Department, Mr. Steele visited the State Department briefing officials on the dossier in October of 2016. Did you have any role in that briefing?”

“I did not,” Nuland replied. “I actively chose not to be part of that briefing.”

“But were you aware of that briefing?” Burr asked.

“I was not aware of it until afterwards,” Nuland retorted.

Nuland did not explain how she can actively chose not to be part of Steele’s briefing, as she claimed, yet say she was unaware of the briefing until after it occurred. Nuland was not asked about the discrepancy during the public section of the testimony, which was reviewed in full by Breitbart News.

Nuland previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott under Bill Clinton’s administration, and then served as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

Nuland faced confirmation questions prior to her most recent appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her reported changes sought to protect Hillary Clinton’s State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.

Likely ‘whistleblower’

A RealClearInvestigations report by investigative journalist and author Paul Sperry named Ciaramella as best fitting the description of the so-called whistleblower. Officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings say Ciaramella’s name has been raised in private in impeachment depositions and during at least one House open hearing that was not part of the formal impeachment proceedings.

Federal documents show Ciaramella also worked closely with Joe Biden and worked under Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser. He also worked with former CIA Director John Brennan, an anti-Trump advocate who has faced controversy for his role in fueling the questionable Russia collusion investigation. Rice participated in Russia collusion probe meetings and reportedly unmasked senior members of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Sperry cites former White House officials saying Ciaramella worked for Biden on Ukrainian policy issues in 2015 and 2016, encompassing the time period for which Biden has been facing possible conflict questions for leading Ukraine policy in light of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma.

Mark Zaid and Andrew Bakaj, the activist attorneys representing the so-called whistleblower, refused to confirm on deny that their secretive client is indeed Ciaramella.

“We neither confirm nor deny the identity of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower,” the lawyers told the Washington Examiner in response to an inquiry about Ciaramella.

Zaid and Bakaj added, “Our client is legally entitled to anonymity. Disclosure of the name of any person who may be suspected to be the whistleblower places that individual and their family in great physical danger. Any physical harm the individual and/or their family suffers as a result of disclosure means that the individuals and publications reporting such names will be personally liable for that harm. Such behavior is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless.”

On Sunday, Trump responded to press reports naming Ciaramella, calling him a “radical” known for his close ties to Brennan and Rice.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. There have been stories written about a certain individual, a male, and they say he’s the whistleblower,” Trump told reporters. “If he’s the whistleblower, he has no credibility because he’s a Brennan guy, he’s a Susan Rice guy, he’s an Obama guy.”

Trump added, “And he hates Trump. And he’s a radical. Now, maybe it’s not him. But if it’s him, you guys ought to release the information.”

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.

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FBI Bruce Ohr TESTIFIES: FBI Tried to Bring Down Trump

Reported by Kevin Jackson | January 18, 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://theblacksphere.net/2019/01/fbi-bruce-ohr-testifies-fbi-tried-to-bring-down-trump/

Rep. Adam Schiff

What happens when the reason you gave for investigating Trump falls apart?

We are about to find out. Because according to The Daily Caller,

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s testimony about his meetings with FBI officials regarding dossier author Christopher Steele severely undercuts claims made in 2018 by California Rep. Adam Schiff and his fellow Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. Ohr told lawmakers Aug. 28, 2018, he briefed top FBI officials Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page in early August 2016, just days after he met with Steele, a former British spy who was investigating then-candidate Donald Trump. Ohr testified he told McCabe and Page about his interactions with Steele, who was working at the time for Fusion GPS, a Democrat-funded opposition research firm.

The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s unverified dossier to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

But there is more to the dossier, based on Steele’s admission to Ohr.

The article continues,

In a memo dated Feb. 2, 2018, House Intelligence Republicans, led by then-Chairman Devin Nunes, asserted the FBI filed to disclose in their FISA applications Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS. They also noted in the so-called Nunes memo that the FISA applications do not reveal Steele’s anti-Trump bias. Ohr claimed Steele told him during a meeting Sept. 23, 2016, he was “desperate” that Trump not win election.

So we have a fake dossier, presented by a foreigner who hated Donald Trump. And the FBI knew this information. Yet, they still continued to pursue FISA warrants.

No longer can the FBI pretend they were unaware until later, because Ohr testified he had shared details of his contacts with Steele with the FBI prior to the election.

Let’s review the cast of characters and where they fit past and present.

In addition to the meeting in early August 2016, Ohr met in late September 2016 or early the next month with Page, FBI counterintelligence deputy chief Peter Strzok, and Justice Department officials Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad and Andrew Weissmann. Ahmad and Weissmann are currently working on the special counsel’s investigation.

Unbelievably, Mueller’s team remains comprised of people who undoubtedly were out to get Donald Trump, pre and post-election. Still, Democrats pretend that Mueller and team remain unbiased?

Although Mueller will eventually become the fall guy for the Democrats, let’s not forget what Democrats said of Ohr’s role in this, as well as their contention about the timeline.

The FBI obtained its first FISA against Page on Oct. 21, 2016, weeks after that meeting.

Ohr’s testimony conflicts with House Intelligence Democrats’ claim in a memo released Feb. 24, 2018, that served as a rebuttal to the Nunes memo.

That document sought to defend the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier and its applications for the first FISA warrant.

Democrats asserted Ohr did not meet with the FBI until after the 2016 election and thus had no opportunity to tell the FBI his wife worked for Fusion GPS. He was also unable to relay that Steele had communicated anti-Trump bias to him.

“[Republicans] mischaracterize[s] Bruce Ohr’s role, overstates the significance of his interactions with Steele, and misleads about the timeframe of Ohr’s communication with the FBI,” the so-called Schiff memo reads.

To put this simply, the FBI used the Steele dossier as evidence against Carter page. But when pressed, they claimed to have only been briefed on the dossier post-election.

I can’t wait to see bug-eyed Adam Schiff try to talk his way out of this one.

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Posts tagged ‘Steele dossier’

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Step right up to the most crooked game Washington ever played: FISA fraud checkers by the heart of the Obama-era Department of Justice and FBI.

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Bankrupt them

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Reported BY: EVITA DUFFY | JANUARY 10, 2022

1. Conservatives Are in The Same Category As Islamic Terrorists

2. Parents at School Board Meetings Pose A ‘Threat To National Security’

3. McCabe Wants More Surveillance of ‘Mainstream’ Conservatives

4. McCabe Believes No One Is Above The Law (Except Himself)

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Reported By Devlin Barrett and Tom Jackman November 4, 2021 at 9:34 p.m. EDT

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, was part of an Obama administration email chain celebrating the eventual signing of a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to Ukraine.

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What happens when the reason you gave for investigating Trump falls apart?

But there is more to the dossier, based on Steele’s admission to Ohr.

So we have a fake dossier, presented by a foreigner who hated Donald Trump. And the FBI knew this information. Yet, they still continued to pursue FISA warrants.

Although Mueller will eventually become the fall guy for the Democrats, let’s not forget what Democrats said of Ohr’s role in this, as well as their contention about the timeline.

To put this simply, the FBI used the Steele dossier as evidence against Carter page. But when pressed, they claimed to have only been briefed on the dossier post-election.

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