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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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
Why are we debating this because the facts are we are losing money on illegal immigrants.
Introduction
A continually growing population of illegal aliens, along with the federal government’s ineffective efforts to secure our borders, present significant national security and public safety threats to the United States. They also have a severely negative impact on the nation’s taxpayers at the local, state, and national levels. Illegal immigration costs Americans billions of dollars each year. Illegal aliens are net consumers of taxpayer-funded services and the limited taxes paid by some segments of the illegal alien population are, in no way, significant enough to offset the growing financial burdens imposed on U.S. taxpayers by massive numbers of uninvited guests. This study examines the fiscal impact of illegal aliens as reflected in both federal and state budgets.
The Number of Illegal Immigrants in the US
Estimating the fiscal burden of illegal immigration on the U.S. taxpayer depends on the size and characteristics of the illegal alien population. FAIR defines “illegal alien” as anyone who entered the United States without authorization and anyone who unlawfully remains once his/her authorization has expired. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has no central database containing information on the citizenship status of everyone lawfully present in the United States. The overall problem of estimating the illegal alien population is further complicated by the fact that the majority of available sources on immigration status rely on self-reported data. Given that illegal aliens have a motive to lie about their immigration status, in order to avoid discovery, the accuracy of these statistics is dubious, at best. All of the foregoing issues make it very difficult to assess the current illegal alien population of the United States.
However, FAIR now estimates that there are approximately 12.5 million illegal alien residents. This number uses FAIR’s previous estimates but adjusts for suspected changes in levels of unlawful migration, based on information available from the Department of Homeland Security, data available from other federal and state government agencies, and other research studies completed by reliable think tanks, universities, and other research organizations.
The Cost of Illegal Immigration to the United States
At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens. That amounts to a tax burden of approximately $8,075 per illegal alien family member and a total of $115,894,597,664. The total cost of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers is both staggering and crippling. In 2013, FAIR estimated the total cost to be approximately $113 billion. So, in under four years, the cost has risen nearly $3 billion. This is a disturbing and unsustainable trend. The sections below will break down and further explain these numbers at the federal, state, and local levels.
Total Governmental Expenditures on Illegal Aliens
Total Tax Contributions by Illegal Aliens
Total Economic Impact of Illegal Immigration
Federal
The Federal government spends a net amount of $45.8 billion on illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children. This amount includes expenditures for public education, medical care, justice enforcement initiatives, welfare programs and other miscellaneous costs. It also factors in the meager amount illegal aliens pay to the federal government in income, social security, Medicare and excise taxes.
FEDERAL SPENDING
The approximately $46 billion in federal expenditures attributable to illegal aliens is staggering. Assuming an illegal alien population of approximately 12.5 million illegal aliens and 4.2 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, that amounts to roughly $2,746 per illegal alien, per year. For the sake of comparison, the average American college student receives only $4,800 in federal student loans each year.
FAIR maintains that every concerned American citizen should be asking our government why, in a time of increasing costs and shrinking resources, is it spending such large amounts of money on individuals who have no right, nor authorization, to be in the United States? This is an especially important question in view of the fact that the illegal alien beneficiaries of American taxpayer largess offset very little of the enormous costs of their presence by the payment of taxes. Meanwhile, average Americans pay approximately 30% of their income in taxes.
Taxes collected from illegal aliens offset fiscal outlays and, therefore must be included in any examination of the cost of illegal immigration. However, illegal alien apologists frequently cite the allegedly large tax payments made by illegal aliens as a justification for their unlawful presence, and as a basis for offering them permanent legal status through a new amnesty, similar to the one enacted in 1986. That argument is nothing more than a red herring.
FAIR believes that most studies grossly overestimate both the taxes actually collected from illegal aliens and, more importantly, the amount of taxes actually paid by illegal aliens (i.e., the amount of money collected from illegal aliens and actually kept by the federal government). This belief is based on a number of factors: Since the 1990’s, the United States has focused on apprehending and removing criminal aliens. The majority of illegal aliens seeking employment in the United States have lived in an environment where they have little fear of deportation, even if discovered. This has created an environment where most illegal aliens are both able and willing to file tax returns. Because the vast majority of illegal aliens hold low-paying jobs, those who are subject to wage deductions actually wind up receiving a complete refund of all taxes paid, plus net payments made on the basis of tax credits.
As a result, illegal aliens actually profit from filing a tax return and, therefore, have a strong interest in doing so.
James The Corrupt Comey and Peter S. Needs to be investigated NOW.
The FBI didn’t flag that some emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were marked classified with a “(C)” when they were sent — something that seemingly would have been one of the first and most obvious checks in an investigation, and one that FBI agents instantly recognized put the facts at odds with Clinton’s public statements.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General noticed it after the FBI missed it, texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, reveal. “Holy cow,” Strzok wrote, “if the FBI missed this, what else was missed?”
“Remind me to tell you to flag for Andy [redacted] emails we (actually ICIG) found that have portion marks (C) on a couple of paras. DoJ was Very Concerned about this,” he wrote.
“Found on the 30k [emails] provided to State originally. No one noticed. It cuts against ‘I never sent or received anything marked classified,’” he wrote, referring to statements by Clinton downplaying the danger of her email practices.
Much of the more in-depth investigation considered whether Clinton and her aides emailed materials that were classified but were not marked as such, a harder determination to make.
The exchange occurred on June 12, 2016. FBI Director Jim Comey disclosed the findings of marked-classified emails to the House on July 7.
On May 10, 2016, Strzok had suggested that in his mind, the investigation was closer to being finished than to just getting started — suggesting that if it weren’t for the inspector general, it might have closed down and cleared her despite missing the most obvious first step.
“I cannot overstate to you the sense of urgency about wanting to logically and effectively conclude this investigation,” he said.
The ommission allowed Clinton to repeatedly and prominently state that she had “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified” on her private email server while secretary of state.
She even said so at major debates, and because the FBI hadn’t caught the letter (C), and therefore never stated its findings, PolitiFact rated the claim “Half True.”
When the FBI belatedly noticed and relayed the truth, the fact-checking site said “Now we know it’s just plain wrong.”
Clinton decided to print out 55,000 pages instead of providing the State Department with her emails in their digital format, a technique sometimes used by lawyers to make searches harder for their opponents. A CTRL-F search for “(C)” could have missed the markings because State had to re-digitize the forms with Optical Character Recognition, which can get tripped up on symbols, perhaps interpreting it as something like “[C]” or a copyright symbol. Nonetheless, the classified marker always appears at the beginning of a paragraph and is visually distinct.
The comments come from 500 pages of texts released Wednesday by Senate investigators.
Markings denoting the different levels of classified information include (C) for confidential, (S) for secret, and (TS) for top secret.
Congressional investigators are puzzling over a December 2016 text message that suggests the Justice Department sought to grant immunity to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
In a Dec. 13, 2016 text exchange, FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok sent his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, a text message referring to a conversation he had with the Justice Department discussing immunity and potential grand jury testimony.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released the text message along with 384 pages of additional records on Wednesday.
“Talked with DoJ about HA interview,” Strzok wrote to Page.
“Told them we had to interview, no immunity. They said they thought that would get counsel to the point of saying she’s either taking the 5th in the Gj or you need to give her immunity. I said that’s fine, please have discussions to get the decision to that point and I would run it up the chain.”
Peter Strzok text message to Lisa Page, Dec. 13, 2016.
The initials “HA,” the gender reference and other text messages that Strzok sent in that time frame strongly suggest that he was referring to Abedin.
A day before the text about immunity, Strzok said that a top FBI official had offered to meet with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall.
Peter Strzok text message to Lisa Page, Dec. 12, 2016.
Kendall did not represent Abedin in the email case so it is unclear why the FBI sought to meet with him. A lawyer who represented Abedin on the email matter did not respond to a request for comment.
It is unclear what case Strzok was investigating at the time, and there have been no reports that Abedin was granted immunity or that she pleaded the Fifth.
The Hillary Clinton email investigation was closed for good on Nov. 6, 2016, just two days before the election. The FBI re-opened its investigation in late Oct. 2016 after Clinton emails were discovered on a laptop shared by Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
The FBI was still investigating Weiner for sending lewd messages to an underage girl.
Join Our Show on tomorrow were we will give the BSET report on what President Trump had to say at the State of The Union address. Liberals showed up just to have long faces because they truly hate when America does well. We will also discuss those hero’s that the President invited as special guest.
Just some of the points we will be covering below:
He should talk about MAGA not MAD which is Make America DACA or MAD.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump stressed the need for “unity” Tuesday afternoon, hours before delivering a State of the Union address that White House officials have previewed as “bright and optimistic.”
“I want to see our country united,” Trump told network news correspondents during a traditional, and otherwise off-the-record, lunch at the White House where he made the case that the same national divisions encountered by his administration had plagued his predecessors as well.
The United States “was divided, not just under President Obama or President Bush. I remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Tremendous divisiveness, not just over the past year,” he said, adding that he would consider uniting the country “a tremendous success.”
“I would love to be able to bring back our country in a great form of unity, without a major event — very tough to do. I would like to do it without a major event, because that major event is usually a bad thing. Unity is really what I’m striving for, to bring the country together,” he said.
Aside from the traditional correspondent lunch, Trump spent Tuesday much as he’d spent the previous day: making impromptu changes to his first official State of the Union address as he practiced the speech, which is slated to include bipartisan overtures on big items like immigration, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday.
The president did several “dry runs” of the speech Monday afternoon in the Map Room of the White House, said a White House official, who told NBC that Trump’s handwritten notes and edits on each draft have been transcribed into its more current versions.
The process of writing and re-writing the address began in December, this official said, with a “pretty meaningful” edit on the plane ride to Davos, Switzerland, last week.
“He’s been going through the speech meticulously,” Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told Fox News on Tuesday afternoon, describing Trump as using a “black felt-tipped pen” to edit the remarks before sending it back to staff, and calling him a “master messenger.”
Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn weighed in on policy in the speech, while staff secretary Rob Porter, policy advisor Stephen Miller, and speechwriters Vince Haley and Ross Worthington crafted the text
However, “the speech begins and ends with POTUS,” the same official told NBC, looking to stress Trump’s level of involvement in his remarks.
The address will cover “a lot of territory,” Trump himself told reporters Monday as he finished swearing in his new Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar. The president said he would tout the “great success” of the stock market and the tax cuts passed at the close of the year, but will also make a push on immigration policies, including DACA.
“For many years,” Trump said, lawmakers have “been talking about immigration” but “never get anything done.” Now, with him at the helm, he said he’s hopeful for action that unites Democrats and Republicans.
“We’re going to get something done, we hope bipartisan,” Trump said, noting that the reality in Congress for Republicans makes bipartisanship an essential factor, not a wishful one. “The Republicans really don’t have the votes to get it done in any other way. So it has to be bipartisan.”
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Trump offers preview to State of the Union address 1:05
The White House released its immigration plan last week, in a bid to re-start stalled negotiations on the topic. Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Monday the president’s actions and negotiations on this topic were a sign of his “openness” to getting a deal done — especially for “Dreamers” who were brought to the U.S. as children and protected from deportation under an Obama-era policy, DACA.
Bipartisanship, she said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday afternoon, is “the only way to function in this town,” but she knocked Democrats for a strategy she described as “obstruct, resist, hold up a stop sign” to Trump.
Despite her own jabs across the aisle, Conway promised a State of the Union address that’s “positive in tone and content” and one in which Trump will be “forward looking” — seeking the nexus between his accomplishments over the past year and how those achievements have bettered the lives of Americans.
To support the president’s push for his agenda on issues such as immigration and border security are guests like Elizabeth Alvarado, Robert Mickens, Evelyn Rodriguez, and Freddy Cuevas: parents who lost daughters to violence from the gang MS-13.
Veterans who have battled ISIS, law enforcement officers on the front lines of the opioid crisis, and American workers who benefit from Trump’s tax cuts will also be seated with first lady Melania Trump for the address.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders: American people ‘sick and tired of Russia fever’ 6:00
And though senior administration officials previewed what they called an “optimistic speech,” it won’t be without the brand of tough talk that helped propel Trump to the office in the first place.
Noting once again his belief that “the world has taken advantage of us on trade for many years,” Trump promised Monday that his administration would bring any unfair practices to an end. But Tuesday’s speech will be light on specifics as to how that might be accomplished, senior administration officials told reporters over the weekend.
The speech, the officials said, would touch on the “broad themes of U.S. engagement in the world” — encompassing trade and global economic systems in the remarks, but not getting into specifics or naming names of countries that Trump feels are abusing their trade relationship with the United States.
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The state of the union is always ‘strong.’ But why? 1:11
More than anything, the White House has indicated that the president’s remarks will likely seek to strike a tone of command and stability against the backdrop of a political system that has been reeling since his arrival one year ago. Trump’s address will come as investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russia remain ongoing, and a three-day government shutdown is still only barely in the administration’s rear-view mirror.
