06/14/2018 by commonsense Leave a Comment

Foreign Bad Actors Looked At Hillary Clintons Emails And The FBI Knew It

Why Has No One Been Arrested Yet?

Inspector general’s report examines allegations of misconduct by the FBI and DOJ; Catherine Herridge has the details.

“Foreign actors” obtained access to some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified as “secret” — according to a new memo from two GOP-led House committees and an internal FBI email.

Fox News obtained the memo prepared by the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, which lays out key interim findings ahead of next week’s hearing with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The IG, separately, is expected to release his highly anticipated report on the Clinton email case later Thursday.

The House committees, which conducted a joint probe into decisions made by the DOJ in 2016 and 2017, addressed a range of issues in their memo including Clinton’s email security.

“Documents provided to the Committees show foreign actors obtained access to some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified ‘Secret,'” the memo says, adding that foreign actors also accessed the private accounts of some Clinton staffers.

The memo does not say who the foreign actors are, or what material was obtained, but it notes that secret information is defined as information that, if disclosed, could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”

The committees say that no one appears to have been held accountable either criminally or administratively.

Relatedly, Fox News has obtained a May 2016 email from FBI investigator Peter Strzok — who also is criticized in the House memo for his anti-Trump texts with colleague Lisa Page. The email says that “we know foreign actors obtained access” to some Clinton emails, including at least one “secret” message “via compromises of the private email accounts” of Clinton staffers.

Peter Strzok email about Clinton emails by Fox News on Scribd

The question of whether foreign actors penetrated the Clinton email system has been a significant one ever since the private server was revealed. Then-FBI Director James Comey, in his July 2016 statement on the Clinton case, did not go as far as Strzok in his assessment of that possibility. At the time, he said only that, “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.”

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton sounds off on new records that infer FBI decision was made before meeting with Hillary Clinton.

Fox News also reported in March that Strzok was advised of an irregularity in the metadata of Clinton’s server that suggested a possible breach, but there was no significant follow up, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

Clinton’s use of a private email server when she served as the nation’s top diplomat became a central issue of the 2016 campaign. After a lengthy investigation, Comey controversially announced in July 2016 that the agency would not recommend charges, but said that Clinton was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information.

He then announced he would revisit the probe just days before the election after the discovery of new emails, a move that the Clinton camp has blamed for her loss to President Trump.

Horowitz was due to release his long-awaited report into the FBI and DOJ’s actions on Thursday afternoon.

In the House memo, lawmakers questioned whether the DOJ and FBI properly analyzed and interpreted the law surrounding mishandling of classified information.

“Officials from both agencies have created a perception they misinterpreted the Espionage Act by stating Secretary Clinton lacked the requisite ‘intent’ for charges to be filed,” the memo says, before pointing to statements by Comey that indicated a belief that intent was required — which the memo says ignored “meaningful aspects” of the law.

The committees’ memo also says it appears the outcome of the investigation was “predetermined” in May, two months before Comey’s press conference and before multiple interviews had taken place.

It also accuses Comey of getting ahead of the DOJ on the final decision on whether to prosecute Clinton.

The report will detail FBI's handling of Clinton; Jim Hanson discusses.

“Mr. Comey, as the FBI Director, was the chief investigator, not the prosecutor. It was not up to him to determine what a ‘reasonable prosecutor’ would do with the evidence the FBI had collected,” the memo says.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/14/foreign-actors-accessed-hillary-clinton-emails-documents-show.html

05/03/2018 by commonsense

INSANE!!! 3 Military Exchange Services Banns Chinese Smartphones Banned Over Security Risks

Why Are We Allowing The Chinese To Build Smartphone That The Military Is Using?

The three military exchange services pulled all smartphones made by Chinese electronics manufacturers Huawei and ZTE from stores around the world and banned their sale because of the security risks the devices pose, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The Defense Department’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness issued a ban of “all Huawei and ZTE cellphones, personal mobile internet modems and related products from locations worldwide,” DOD spokesman Maj. Dave Eastburn said an email to Stars and Stripes.

“Given the security concerns associated with these devices, as expressed by senior U.S. intelligence officials, it was not prudent for the Department’s exchange services to continue selling these products to our personnel,” Eastburn said. He added that DOD is “evaluating the situation” to see if any additional security measures are needed, including an outright ban on use of the phones by servicemembers.

Stars and Stripes first reported last week that an Army and Air Force Exchange Service concession at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, had been selling the mobile electronic devices on base. The products were also found for sale at U.S. bases in other overseas locations.

In February, the director of national intelligence, along with the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency all testified before a Senate committee that Americans should not use Huawei or ZTE products because of security concerns.

Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, is a private company started by a former People’s Liberation Army officer. U.S. intelligence officials say the company has very close ties to China’s government.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that Huawei products give the Chinese government the ability to gather or alter sensitive corporate and military information undetected.

The concern about Huawei first focused on routers, switches and other high-bandwidth commercial products; it later expanded to consumer mobile phones. They are already banned for official government use in most cases.

Huawei has been the target of numerous U.S. regulations and laws meant to address national security concerns, such as a 2013 law that required federal law enforcement agencies to sign off on certain purchases of its products by government agencies.

Huawei spokesmen have repeatedly denied claims the company’s devices pose any security risks. Huawei phones are used commonly throughout Europe, and the company is in the middle of a worldwide promotional campaign for its latest phone series, the P20, released last month.

Still, the Chinese devices “may pose an unacceptable risk to (the) department’s personnel, information and mission,” Eastburn said.

New rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission would bar U.S. telecommunications companies that receive FCC subsidies from buying products from foreign companies with security concerns. Companies have yet to be named, but Huawei and ZTE are both expected to make the list of banned manufacturers. A bill introduced in January by Rep. Michael Conway, a Republican from Texas, would make it illegal for U.S. government contractors to use any Huawei equipment.

Huawei also makes personal mobile Internet modems, called “pucks,” which in recent years have been sold to U.S. troops at a coalition base near Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region. Some soldiers may have purchased similar devices made by ZTE.

ZTE was sanctioned by the U.S. government for violating trade embargoes by sending U.S.-made components to Iran inside its devices. Huawei is currently the subject of a similar investigation by the Justice Department.

Eastburn said the Pentagon deferred to command officials for additional guidance on operational security matters, but he said troops should watch out for news of potentially compromised electronics.

“Servicemembers should be mindful of the media coverage about the security risks posed by the use of these devices, regardless of where they were purchased,” he said.

https://www.stripes.com/news/exchanges-ordered-to-pull-chinese-smartphones-over-security-risks-1.525026

02/23/2018 by commonsense

John McCain Associate Takes The 5th To Hide Dossier Source, and Asks Judge To Seal Deposition

Lock these bastard up now.

An associate of Arizona Sen. John McCain is invoking his Fifth Amendment rights in order to avoid revealing information to Congress about the Steele dossier.

David J. Kramer, a former State Department official, pleaded the fifth in response to a subpoena issued in December by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Fox News reported.

In a Dec. 19 interview with the committee, Kramer said that he had information about some of the sources of information in the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Kramer learned the information in Nov. 2016, after traveling to London to meet with Steele. Kramer and McCain, a Republican, first learned of the dossier earlier that month after meeting with an associate of Steele’s.

After the London meeting, Steele provided a copy of the dossier to Kramer with instructions to share it with McCain. The senator then provided a copy of the document to then-FBI Director James Comey during a Dec. 9, 2016, meeting.

The House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena on Dec. 27 to compel Kramer to discuss the dossier’s sources.

Kramer, who was a director at the McCain Institute and now works for Florida International University, has avoided speaking publicly about his handling of the dossier. There has also been widespread speculation that he is BuzzFeed’s source for the document. The website published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

In addition to his interview with the Intelligence Committee, Kramer was deposed in December as part of a lawsuit filed against BuzzFeed for publishing the dossier. Kramer’s lawyers have requested that his deposition in that case be sealed.

Steele, McCain and Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele to write the dossier, have all denied being BuzzFeed’s source. Kramer is the only person known to have handled the completed dossier who has not denied providing it to BuzzFeed.

Kramer and his attorney have not responded to numerous requests for comment.

Report: McCain Associate Invokes The Fifth To Avoid Revealing Dossier Sources

McCain Associate Who Handled Dossier Asks Judge To Seal Deposition

An associate of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s who handled the dossier is asking a federal judge to block the release of a videotape and transcript of a deposition he recently gave in a lawsuit related to the salacious document.

David Kramer, a former State Department official and former director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, filed a motion in federal court in Florida asking a judge for a protective order to block the public release of his deposition.

Kramer was deposed last month by lawyers for a Russian businessman suing BuzzFeed News for publishing the dossier. The lawyers for the businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, are interested in Kramer because he is one of just a few people known to have handled the dossier after it was completed by former British spy Christopher Steele and before its Jan. 10, 2017 publication.

Gubarev’s attorneys want to find out whether BuzzFeed’s source gave any warnings about the veracity of the dossier and whether it was verified or unverified.

Steele, McCain and Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of Democrats, have all denied being BuzzFeed’s source.

Kramer has not commented publicly on the issue.

Kramer’s lawyer, Marcos Jiminez, argued in a motion to seal that the release of the deposition would jeopardize his personal safety, make him subject to hounding from the press, and conflict with congressional investigations looking into the dossier.

Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee last month and has also met with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Mr. Kramer seeks to prevent the Plaintiffs from sharing his videotaped deposition and accompanying transcript beyond the instant litigation,” wrote Jiminez.

He asserted that Kramer’s deposition in the BuzzFeed lawsuit “would reveal the extent of the Congressional Committees’ knowledge regarding the information provided by Mr. Kramer in closed-door sessions.”

Jimenez also argues that should Kramer’s deposition be released to the public, he “will be hounded by the press.”

Kramer and McCain first learned of the dossier shortly after the 2016 election while attending the Halifax International Security Forum. On the sidelines of that event, Kramer and McCain had a conversation with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia and associate of Steele’s.

Kramer then traveled to London to meet with Steele. While there, the pair made arrangements for Kramer to obtain the dossier back in the U.S. and to provide a copy to McCain.

McCain shared an incomplete version of the dossier with then-FBI Director James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. The Republican was unaware at the time that Comey and the FBI were already aware of Steele’s report. FBI agents met with the ex-spy multiple times prior to the election.

Steele published his final dossier memo on Dec. 13, 2016. It is that document which alleges that Gubarev used two of his web-hosting companies to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems prior to the election. The dossier also alleges that Gubarev was recruited under duress by Russia’s spy services. He denies all of the allegations. In addition to suing BuzzFeed, he is suing Steele in London, where the former spy is based.

In court filings there, Steele has acknowledged that the Dec. 13 memo contained unverified information.

As of the beginning of this month, Steele and Fusion GPS have dodged requests for depositions from Gubarev’s lawyers.

David Kramer Motion to Seal deposition in BuzzFeed lawsuit by Chuck Ross on Scribd

http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/18/mccain-associate-dossier-judge-deposition/

02/10/2018 by commonsense

All The Obama Admin. And Anti-Trump People Who Helped The Russians and Sabotaged Trump

Here is 3 of Obama’s corrupt team.

For months and months, our fake news media have been freaking out over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again and again, we have been told that this is the smoking gun of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Of course, that is nonsense. Moreover, Don Jr. and the others in attendance caught on to the scheme within a few minutes, and as far as we now know, that was the end of that.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others, who actually have colluded with the Russians as a means to dig up dirt on Trump.

Here are seven American politicians and institutions who have or are at least suspected of colluding with the Russians as a means to destroy President Trump.

The CIA

This former CIA Director lied under oath about unmasking.

Although the far-left New York Times is desperately hoping to control the explosion of this bombshell by shrouding it in a laughable story about the CIA trying to retrieve stolen National Security Agency cyber-weapons, the anti-Trump outlet is still forced to report that after “months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.”

And that $100,000 was only supposed to be the first down payment towards a cool million.

The CIA was hoping for images of Trump urinating on hookers in Moscow hotel rooms. All they got was a 15-second clip of some guy in a hotel room talking to some women.

The payoff happened in September of last year.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)

Tell me that this pervert and liar should not be investigated.

In early 2017, Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (so you would think he would know better), thought he was colluding with Ukrainian officials to get compromising materials against Trump. The Ukrainian officials ended up being Russian pranksters. The best you can say about Schiff is that he colluded with Russians to make a horse’s ass of himself.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

The horse man was working with the Russians to bring Trump down. Look at those damn horse teeth.

In March of last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, colluded with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to dig up dirt on Trump.

Naturally, because he has no spine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately ran to Warner’s defense. “Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago,” the jellyfish tweeted. There is just one problem… If you look at the timeline, that “full disclosure” came a full seven months after the collusion occurred.

Rubio fired off another non-sequitur in Warner’s defense. “Has had zero impact on our work,” Rubio wrote, as though that means anything when it comes to the fact that Warner colluded with Russians to harm a sitting president and hid that information from the committee for more than a half-year.

Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele

Steele is the former British spy hired by the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put together the phony Russian dossier that even disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey declared “salacious and unverified.”

To compile these lies, Steele reportedly worked directly with Kremlin officials:

How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.

In other words, Steele and Fusion GPS colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump. Steele then leaked those lies to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Fusion GPS also “spearheaded the campaign to undo the Magnitsky Act, American legislation imposing sanctions on Russian officials and other figures close to Vladimir Putin. Their work featured a smear campaign against the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, financier William Browder.”

If successful, this Fusion GPS campaign would have been of great benefit to the Russian government and countless oligarchs who want the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions lifted.

The Hillary Clinton Campaign

This woman should me handed after being shot.

Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the Clinton campaign’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The Democrat National Committee (DNC)

Why is Little Debbie and Simpson not been indicted?

The DNC hired the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the DNC’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI

You can trust the honest sex symbol James Comey right?

Our own FBI not only put Steele on the payroll, a guy who colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump, the FBI used lies and the dossier — including Kremlin lies — to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/10/7-anti-trump-politicians-institutions-actually-guilty-colluding-russians/

DOJ’s Rosenstein OK’d Surveillance of Ex-Trump Adviser

This corrupt looking child molester.

A controversial and classified memo shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein okayed an application shortly after taking office last year to monitor a former Trump campaign associate, according to a report.

The Department of Justice under President Trump extended surveillance on Carter Page, believing that he was acting as a Russian agent, the New York Times reported late Sunday, citing people familiar with the memo’s contents.

The document faulted the FBI and the DOJ for failing to completely explain to the intelligence court judge in seeking the warrant that they were relying on information supplied by Christopher Steele, who compiled the disputed dossier that contains unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, the newspaper said.

Research for the dossier had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

A number of top DOJ officials can approve such surveillance but the responsibility usually falls to the deputy attorney general, the newspaper said.

The report also said the FBI and the DOJ did nothing improper in seeking the surveillance warrant against Page, who was part of the campaign until September 2016.

A White House spokesman said Trump wants “transparency throughout this process.”

“Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton,” Hogan Gidley told the Times.

“While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”

The FBI had been keeping an eye on Page for years and an investigation in 2013 showed that a Russian spy tried to recruit him.

But a visit to Russia in July 2016 when he was working with the Trump campaign renewed the bureau’s interest and they began monitoring him again that fall, the Times said.

That surveillance led the FBI and DOJ to seek to renew the application in the spring of 2017, shortly after Rosenstein was confirmed in April, the newspaper said.

Trump has had Rosenstein in his crosshairs, venting to staff his frustration with the DOJ’s No. 2 and mulling whether he should fire him, according to reports.

Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in May 2017 after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been heading up the probe.

Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, the Times reported last Friday.

The White House and some Republican lawmakers are calling for the memo to be declassified and released to the public to show how the agencies are biased against the president.

But Democrats who have seen the four-page memo — written by House Republicans — say they carefully selected information that is intended to discredit the investigation into Russian involvement in the election and any collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.

The DOJ called efforts to release the memo “reckless” without the department and the FBI first being able to review the document to see if it harms national security.

https://nypost.com/2018/01/29/team-trump-thought-carter-page-might-be-a-russian-spy/

So-Called Conservative Free Beacon Paid Fusion GPS For Anti-Trump Research

Fake republican and Anti-Trump fraud Paul Singer of Free Beacon.

The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon triggered the research into then-candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS that eventually led to the now-infamous Trump “dossier,” the publication’s editor-in-chief and chairman acknowledged in a statement Friday night.

The research effort was known to have been supported by Republican allies before the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign picked up the tab for the research, but the original funder of the research was unknown until now. The resulting dossier was compiled by former British spy Michael Steele and contained unsubstantiated allegations about then-candidate Trump’s connections to Russia. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.

The Free Beacon’s connection to the dossier was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York Friday night.

The site began as a non-profit entity before becoming a for-profit enterprise several years ago. It has never disclosed its owners or financial backers, but the New York Times reports hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer provides a large amount of its funding. The site covers national security issues, politics, culture and media criticism, among other topics.

The Free Beacon says Steele was not involved in the research at the time of its involvement, and “none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.” The Free Beacon also said it had no knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the DNC or Clinton campaign. The Free Beacon has retained third-party firms since its launch in 2012, the statement says.

In the statement, editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said that the publication retained Fusion GPS “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” The statement said representatives of his publication approached the House Intelligence Committee Friday and offered to answer questions.

“But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods,” Continetti and Goldfarb wrote.

Here is the full statement from the Free Beacon:

Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.

Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier. But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods. We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce. The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in news-gathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-free-beacon-funded-initial-fusion-gps-anti-trump-research-dossier/

CNN Lied About WikiLeaks Email Story

Network corrected exclusive story involving Trump and hacked documents
Trump: ‘Their slogan should be CNN – the least trusted name in news’

Donald Trump, in his first tweet on Saturday, said: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump on Saturday fired more shots in his offensive against CNN, after the network was forced to correct an exclusive report that had seemed to implicate his administration in a scandal involving the release of leaked documents.

“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday,” the president tweeted. “They were caught red handed.”

He added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”

The CNN report said Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, received an email offering him access to hacked Democratic party emails from WikiLeaks before the documents had been made publicly available.

But in fact, the email was sent on 14 September 2016, after the material was made publicly available – and not 4 September as CNN first reported.

In a statement, CNN said its “initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email.”

It was the second major correction in a CNN story involving Trump and Russia. Russia is believed to have been behind the original hacking of the documents.

In June, three CNN journalists resigned after the network retracted a report on alleged ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted then. The network said the three journalists who reported that story failed to follow editorial procedures.

In his first tweet on Saturday, Trump added: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”

CNN said it would not fire the reportersbehind the Friday story, as editorial procedures had been followed.

The president also attacked “fake news” on Friday night in Florida, at a rally endorsing Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. In particular, Trump zeroed in on an error made last week by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, over the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.

ABC suspended Ross but did not fire him. The president suggested that attendees at his rally should sue the news outlet for the stock market losses that resulted from the original story.

“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”

Trump also said CNN had “apologised” for its corrected story. It has not.

Play Video

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‘We want Roy Moore’: Trump endorses controversial candidate at rally – video

Also on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used Twitter to highlight CNN’s use of a picture of the wrong Raj Shah in a report on her deputy. “CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews,” she wrote.

Donald Jr added his thoughts in a tweet Saturday morning, writing: “Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.”

There is no evidence that reporting errors and corrections have become any more frequent during the Trump presidency. Trump’s embrace of the concept of “fake news”, though, has allowed him to make substantial political hay from every corrected story.

According to an October Politico poll, 46% of Americans said they believed the media was guilty of wholesale fabrications about the Trump administration. More than three-quarters of Republican voters thought so.

David Frum, a former George W Bush speech writer who is now senior editor at the Atlantic, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He addressed the issue on Saturday morning on Twitter.

While reporters “slip in their work”, Frum wrote, “the work itself is trying to inform the public about the doings of the most systematical untruthful administration in American history”.

Frum continued: “Never forget, though, that the media are not the protagonist in the drama. The protagonists are the officials engaged in the deception, headed by the president himself.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/09/donald-trump-cnn-story-email-russia

SAMANTHA POWER UNMASKING 260 People In 2016

Plus 10 points for creativity. Minus 1,000 points for a stupid lie with inevitable consequences.

While the media rushes frantically from one manufactured Trump scandal to another, the examination of the deeply troubling lenghts to which Obama Inc. went to sabotage his political opponent and successor using eavesdropping continues. One of the most striking revelations has been the number of ‘unmasking’ requests filed by Samantha Power.

Not only did Power file a whole lot of them, 260 requests to unmask the identities of Americans being spied on is a whole lot, but why would an ambassador to the UN even need such classified info?

And to that, Samantha Power had a simple and incoherent response. “It wasn’t me.”

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was “emphatic” on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.

Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests — a rate of one per business day — in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama’s term.

Unmasking has become an issue because someone inside the Obama administration unmasked the identities of Trump associates identified in classified intelligence reports collected by the intelligence community during surveillance of foreign targets. Some of those details were illegally leaked to the media.

Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence committee, said that Power “was pretty emphatic” last week in disputing that she made 260 unmasking requests.

“She would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy told Fox’s Bret Baier.

“Her perspective, her testimony is, ‘they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”

It’s a really bizarre defense that relies on either challenging the relevant paperwork or suggesting that someone else using her name made those requests. The latter defense is rather crazy. If true, it would constitute a major crime. If untrue, then Power has hung herself. Susan Rice repeatedly lied about her unmasking requests, but what Power is doing here is Hillaryesque. And we know how that worked out for her.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/268166/samantha-power-blames-mysterious-masked-man-daniel-greenfield

Obama administration knew about Russian bribery plot before uranium deal

The Obama administration knew that Russia had used bribery, kickbacks and extortion to get a stake in the US atomic energy industry — but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the US uranium supply anyway, according to a report Tuesday.

The FBI used a confidential US witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company, The Hill reported.

Executives at the company, Transport Logistics International, kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts — a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the report said.

The feds also learned that Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the US designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering operation was conducted “with the consent of higher-level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, an agent later stated in an affidavit.

But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.

At the time, President Barack Obama and Clinton’s State Department were trying to “reset” relations between the two nuclear rivals — an effort that largely failed.

The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010 when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and elsewhere, to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.

The move gave the Russians control over roughly 20 percent of the US uranium supply — and gave Russian strongman Vladimir Putin a large and profitable stake in the US atomic power industry.

When Donald Trump slammed Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 over the sale, her spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and that the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened . . . on any [committee] matter.”

In the second deal, in 2011, Obama gave the OK for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell the Canadian company’s uranium to American nuclear power plants.

Before, Tenex could only sell reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons to power plants in the US.

“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a source told the paper.

Instead of disclosing the racket in 2010, Justice continued investigating for nearly four more years, so Americans and Congress didn’t know about Russian nuclear corruption at the time the deals were completed.

Obama and the Clintons defended their actions in 2015, declaring that there was no evidence that Russians had done anything wrong and there was no national security reason to oppose the Uranium One deal.

The decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015, when author Peter Schweizer documented how Bill Clinton pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian entities.

But FBI, Energy Department and court documents showed that the feds had gathered a mountain of evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the top Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the US — was engaged in crooked behavior starting in 2009.

Holder was also on the foreign investments committee at the time the Uranium One deal was approved — but multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever told other committee members about the crimes they had uncovered.

Evidence of the illegal conduct was gathered with the help of an American businessman who acted as a confidential witness and who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI.

The first kickback recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.

In affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to help the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money-laundering and kickbacks that were directed by Russia and provided kickbacks to top Russian energy officials with ties to the Kremlin, according to the report.

The case exposed a serious national security breach, The Hill reported, as Mikerin had given a no-bid contract to Transport Logistics Intern

https://nypost.com/2017/10/17/fbi-uncovered-russian-bribery-plot-before-controversial-nuclear-deal/

02/08/2018 by commonsense

Obamacare Could Be Contributing to the Opioid Epidemic By Expanding Medicaid

I’m not addicted to opioids, I can stop anytime I want to but I just don’t want to.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report in mid-January that received surprisingly little media attention despite its provocative assertion that Obamacare, and particularly its enormous expansion of Medicaid, is a driving force behind the opioid epidemic.

The case laid out by the report is straightforward, logical, and politically unspeakable. It’s an argument generally made in hushed tones until now, and it’s easy to see why. Even the Senate Homeland Security report was swiftly denounced as a “partisan fantasy” peddled by chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) in what little mainstream media coverage it received. Thou shalt not speak ill of Medicaid.

Older people are becoming addicted to opioids also.

And yet, the critics could find no way to refute the actual data in the report. They denounced it with thunderous virtue-signaling outrage, attacked those involved in preparing it, criticized arguments it did not make – such as pretending the report claims the opioid epidemic was caused by Medicaid expansion, rather than exacerbated by it – or simply assumed that all critiques of Medicaid and Obamacare must be partisan hit jobs, Q.E.D.

This validates one of the core concerns about politicizing medicine, or any other scientific field, by putting Big Government in charge of it. Rational discussion becomes impossible. Every analysis quickly devolves into a partisan brawl.

The report postulates Medicaid expansion is a contributing factor to the epidemic of opioid abuse – not the sole or original cause, as the report itself and Sen. Johnson took pains to point out, despite mischaracterizations by critics. Much of the opioid crisis involves prescription drugs, which can become addictive even when legitimately prescribed, and are often stolen through fraud and resold on the street. Medicaid expansion greatly increased access to prescription drugs. Medicaid also includes programs to fight drug abuse, but some of those programs involve pharmaceutical treatments that can themselves become addictive, especially when they fall into the hands of street pushers.

It requires no great leap of logic to see the connection between a dramatic increase in access to drugs and a problem driven by easy access to drugs, and yet it is evidently heretical to state that relationship out loud. That’s even more remarkable when the increased use and abuse of painkillers is universally acknowledged as a major element of the opioid crisis.

No one seems to have trouble acknowledging that fact when blaming pharmaceutical companies for creating and pushing drugs, doctors for over-prescribing them, or Americans for reporting remarkably high levels of pain and demanding truckloads of pills to deal with it. The Senate report itself states at the very beginning that the opioid epidemic is complicated, and “most agree that development, marketing, and medical training regarding drug usage – and the resulting over-prescription of opioids – have played a key role.”

Ask if a massive government program that makes it much easier for over one-fifth of the population to get drugs could be part of the problem, however, and you’re a hyper-partisan monster who really just wants to kill poor people by taking away their Obamacare. The Senate committee demonstrated its understanding of just how hot this political potato is by filling the early pages of the report with lavish praise for Medicaid and its good intentions, and repeatedly stating that government spending on drugs is but one factor in a complex crisis that deserves careful analysis.

The report studied hundreds of cases in which Medicaid was abused and defrauded to obtain opioids that were often resold on the streets. The report quotes Sam Quinones’ award-winning book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic to explain why this outcome was entirely predictable: “We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”

Some of the fraud cases detailed in the report go far beyond individual beneficiaries making the sort of calculation Quinones described. Some of them were organized conspiracies involving large numbers of Medicaid beneficiaries recruited to provide inventory to drug dealers. The largest scheme chronicled in the report saw over a billion dollars change hands.

A police officer quoted in the report observed that pharmacists are more likely to fill dubious prescriptions when Medicaid is involved. The Justice Department launched a program over the summer to study the role played real and fraudulent prescriptions for opioids in the drug crisis.

The Senate Homeland Security report further notes that Medicaid fraud is rampant and has not been handled effectively by the government, a fact known to any serious student of the waste, fraud, and abuse that politicians of both parties vow to crack down upon during every election.

Other fraud-susceptible programs such as Medicare, the VA, and the food stamp program are duly cited by the report as sources of opioids.

(Yes, the food stamp program. Among other things, it is well-known to investigators that some SNAP card holders engage in “trafficking” of their benefits, and often purchase drugs with the money they receive. This has been specifically cited as a contributing factor to the opioid crisis. Also, shop owners have been prosecuted for allowing customers to use SNAP benefits to pay directly for forbidden items. One such case documented in the Senate report involved a small grocery store with a back-room stash of “Medicaid-funded OxyContin pills.”)

“The research suggests, however, that Medicaid is the federal program most prone to abuse, and the primary government funding source for the epidemic,” the authors point out.

“There appears to be no limit to the types of schemes used to scam the Medicaid program, from large drug rings that employ beneficiaries as ‘runners’ to fill oxycodone prescriptions, to nurses working the night shift who steal hydrocodone pills from patients. Illicit painkillers obtained with Medicaid cards are being resold at handsome profits nationwide, in places ranging from the streets of Milwaukee to a Native American reservation in upstate New York,” says the report.

Another problem is the illicit use of drugs intended to treat drug addiction, notably suboxone. The attorney general of Kentucky is quoted declaring that “wrongful prescribing of suboxone is flooding our communities with yet another drug that is killing our children.”

It’s not just illicit street purchases increasing in tandem with Medicaid expansion. National Review points to Centers for Disease Control data that “opioid prescribing rates among Medicaid enrollees are at least twofold higher than rates for persons with private insurance.” In Washington State, the CDC found that Medicaid beneficiaries were 5.7 times more likely to die of opioid-related causes.

The most provocative section of the report introduces facts and figures to buttress the argument that opioid abuse has grown worse in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.

“More than 80 percent of the 298 separate Medicaid-opioids cases identified were filed in Medicaid expansion states, led by New York, Michigan, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Ohio,” the report states. “The number of criminal cases increased 55 percent in the first four years after the Medicaid expansion, from 2014 to 2017, compared to the four-year period before expansion.”

It is further noted that drug overdose deaths are increasing almost twice as fast in expansion states, hospital stays for opioid-related issues “massively spiked” after expansion, and Medicaid spending for drug abuse treatment is rising faster in expansion states.

Conversely, as Investors Business Daily notes, eight of the 15 states with the lowest overdose rates did not expand Medicaid. All of these observations should be considered with the usual caveat that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation – there are almost certainly other factors common to expansion states that help to explain their rising addiction rates, although the dramatic increase immediately after the expansion is not easily dismissed.

These assertions are based on official figures that most analysts agree are significantly under-stating the depths of the opioid crisis. One specialist quoted in the Senate report said the opioid epidemic is “deadlier than the AIDS epidemic at its peak.”

Reviewing the Senate Homeland Security report for Forbes, Sally Pipes notes that state Medicaid expansion had the perverse effect of “enrolling able-bodied, childless adults in their Medicaid programs than it does for children and the destitute elderly.” Able-bodied childless adults are also the group experiencing an anomalous increase in mortality rates, which in turn is believed to be strongly influenced by opioid addiction.

“About 80 percent of heroin and fentanyl users spiraled into their addictions after first getting hooked on prescription painkillers. The Medicaid expansion made those painkillers widely and cheaply available,” Pipes notes, succinctly stating the point nobody is supposed to make.

She also tackles the bizarre argument that Medicaid is a net plus because it treats more drug addicts than it creates, which is the sort of argument that only makes sense to people whose capacity for reason has been eroded by decades of worshipping Big Government. (Try this argument for comparison purposes: “Tobacco companies are a net plus for public health because they provide so much funding to treat smoking-related illnesses.”)

Pipes suggests addressing the crisis by rolling back the Medicaid expansion and block-granting funds to states, which could help to drain the bureaucratic swamp that hides so much Medicaid corruption and strongly incentivize states to watch their health-care dollars more carefully.

Such suggestions run strongly against the current political tides, with Democrats pushing hard for even more centralized political control of medicine and ever-larger bureaucracies, with an eye toward midwifing the birth of the doomsday bureaucratic monstrosity known as single-payer socialized medicine. Imagine how bad the opioid crisis will get if everyone gets Medicaid.

But of course, you’re not supposed to imagine that, much less conduct hard research into any aspect of the absolutely forbidden notion that government makes problems worse by subsidizing them.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/02/07/senate-report-obamacare-medicaid-expansion-contributed-opioid-epidemic/

02/06/2018 by commonsense

Chris Matthews Thinks Nancy Pelosi Is An ‘Ethnic Sort Of Person’

These are the minorities of the Democrats Now.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews inexplicably referred to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as an “ethnic sort of person” during a “Hardball” segment Monday night.

During his earlier speech in Ohio, President Donald Trump attacked Pelosi for calling $1000 bonuses for workers “crumbs,” asserting that Pelosi is the GOP’s “secret weapon” to winning elections.

On top of mocking Speaker Paul Ryan for tweeting about a school secretary receiving $1.50 more in her weekly paycheck — which the woman said would allow her to cover her yearly Costco membership — Matthews suggested that Trump attacks Pelosi because she is “ethnic” and “from the coasts.”

“Picking on somebody from the coasts, usually ethnic, and making them the poster person of the Democratic Party is old business for the Republicans,” Matthews claimed. “They did that for Tip O’Neil, they did it after Teddy, and now they do it after Nancy Pelosi.”

“They take an ethnic sort of person from one of the coasts and make them the banner person,” he concluded.

Pelosi is white and was born in the United States, so it is unclear what Matthews meant when he referred to her as “ethnic.”

Matthews also alleged that Republicans like to attack Pelosi because she “looks well-off, she’s well-dressed, she seems like somebody who comes from pretty good circumstances.”

Chris Matthews: Pelosi Is An ‘Ethnic Sort Of Person’