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The Doctor of Common Sense
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According to a new report from The Hill, early drafts of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Hillary Clinton’s email case accused the former Secretary of State of “gross negligence” in her handling of classified information as opposed to the “extremely careless” phrase that made its way into the final statement.
As The Hill further points out, the change in language is significant since federal law states that “gross negligence” in handling the nation’s intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines whereas “extreme carelessness” has no such legal definition and/or ramifications.
An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former Secretary of State of having been ‘grossly negligent” in handling classified information, new memos to Congress show.
The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.
The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information,” reads the statement, one of Comey’s earliest drafts.
Those sources said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was “extremely careless.”
Of course, Comey’s final statement, while critical of Hillary’s email usage, alleged that no prosecutor would pursue charges against actions which he described only as “extremely careless.”
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Meanwhile, Section 793 of federal law states that “gross negligence” with respect to the handling of national defense documents is punishable by a fine and up to 10 years in prison…so you can see why that might present a problem for Hillary.
“Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
Unfortunately, The Hill’s sources couldn’t confirm the most important detail behind this bombshell new revelation, namely who made the call to the change the language…
The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the memos show that at least three top FBI officials were involved in helping Comey fashion and edit the statement, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker and Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki.
The documents turned over to Congress do not indicate who recommended the key wording changes, the sources said. The Senate Judiciary Committee is likely to demand the FBI identify who made the changes and why, the sources said.
…that said, we’re going to go out on a limb and question whether it just might have had something to do with that infamous meeting between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, that happened just 6 days before Comey made his statement?
The blockbuster report was revealed by Judicial Watch after they sued the State Department for failing to respond to a FOIA request.
Weiner’s laptop was the focus of the presidential race in 2016, after new emails from her aide Huma Abedin and Clinton were discovered on his computer.
FBI Director James Comey clarified that the investigation of Clinton was ongoing, despite previously exonerating her in a press conference and testifying to congress that the case was closed.
“This is a disturbing development. Our experience with Abedin’s emails suggest these Weiner laptop documents will include classified and other sensitive materials,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “When will the Justice Department do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law?”
The emails on Weiner’s computer are of interest as some of them may have not been turned over to the State Department by Clinton, despite her insistence that she only deleted 33,000 emails that were “private.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/18/judicial-watch-anthony-weiners-laptop-had-2800-government-documents-from-huma-abedin/
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said someone leaked information about his call this week with White House chief of staff John Kelly, possibly to undermine his ability to speak directly with President Trump about WikiLeaks.
The Republican congressman from California spoke with Kelly on Wednesday regarding his recent meeting with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in London, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday evening, and broached a possible trade.
Rohrabacher reportedly used the word “deal” in his conversation with Kelly and said Assange would get a pardon or “something like that” in exchange for information files on a data-storage device showing that Russia did not hack Democratic emails that WikiLeaks published last year during the 2016 campaign.
“He would get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was not proof,” Rohrabacher told Kelly, according to the Journal.
Rohrabacher said after his August meeting with Assange that WikiLeaks could disprove the conclusion of U.S. spy agencies that Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic emails, and that he would seek a meeting with Trump to discuss the information.
Rohrabacher told the Washington Examiner on Friday evening that he would not confirm quotes attributed to him, and said nobody in his office was responsible for disclosing the call.
“I have honored the confidentially of a very important business-related call,” he said, speculating that someone inside the White House or within U.S. intelligence agencies leaked the call.
“I don’t know who it is, all I know is I’m up against an array of very powerful forces, including the intelligence services and major newspapers that are basically allied with the liberal Left who have every reason to undermine communication on this issue,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“Look, there are very powerful forces at work,” he added. “We’ve got the NSA, the FBI and the CIA, all of whom confirmed a major lie that was being used for political purposes and a lie that was repeated and repeated in order to undercut our new president.”
Rohrabacher said White House leaks to the press are particularly bad during Republican presidencies, as staffers attempt to ingratiate themselves with reporters, and he’s not ruling that out as an explanation.
“You’ve got people who are obviously just trying to cover their ass for mistakes they have made,” he added, referring to the intelligence agency theory. “They will probably do their best to keep Trump from knowing about this and knowing about his options to expose this.”
Rohrabacher has for years been skeptical of U.S. policy toward Russia, defending its annexation of Crimea while former President Barack Obama was in office before refusing to accept that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump.
The congressman is celebrated by some groups for his maverick approach to politics, such as his leadership role pushing for marijuana reform legislation, but also is known for making sometimes head-turning remarks.
Rohrabacher was quoted earlier this week as saying he believed Confederate war re-enactors had been tricked into rallying in Charlottesville, Va., last month. He said he stood by those remarks.
“I don’t think I was misquoted, [but] there should be no implication that I believe Civil War re-enactors are stupid,” he said. Rohrabacher said he can’t recall the source of that information, but that he believes he heard it in a news report.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rep-dana-rohrabacher-someone-leaked-very-important-call-with-john-kelly-concerning-wikileaks/article/2634632
Hillary Clinton’s case isn’t interesting enough to the public to justify releasing the FBI’s files on her, the bureau said this week in rejecting an open-records request by a lawyer seeking to have the former secretary of state punished for perjury.
Ty Clevenger, the lawyer, has been trying to get Mrs. Clinton and her personal lawyers disbarred for their handling of her official emails during her time as secretary of state. He’s met with resistance among lawyers, and now his request for information from the FBI’s files has been shot down.
“You have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” FBI records management section chief David M. Hardy told Mr. Clevenger in a letter Monday.
“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA,” Mr. Hardy wrote.
Mrs. Clinton, is the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, former chief diplomat, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of both the U.S. and Arkansas. Her use of a secret email account to conduct government business while leading the State Department was front-page news for much of 2015 and 2016, and was so striking that the then-FBI director broke with procedure and made both a public statement and appearances before Congress to talk about the bureau’s probe.
In the end, the FBI didn’t recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton, concluding that while she risked national security, she was too technologically inept to know the dangers she was running, so no case could be made against her.
Mr. Clevenger said he thought it would have been clear why Mrs. Clinton’s case was of public interest, but he sent documentation anyway, pointing to a request by members of Congress for an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton perjured herself in testimony to Capitol Hill.
“I’m just stunned. This is exactly what I would have expected had Mrs. Clinton won the election, but she didn’t. It looks like the Obama Administration is still running the FBI,” Mr. Clevenger told The Washington Times.
“How can a story receive national news coverage and not be a matter of public interest? If this is the new standard, then there’s no such thing as a public interest exception,” he said.
The FBI didn’t return a message seeking comment Tuesday on how it balances public interest versus privacy in open-records requests.
Seeking to clear up any confusion over the level of public interest, one person forwarded to The Washington Times a petition started on the White House website to demand release of the documents.
“The assumption made by Mr. Hardy that such a release is not in the public interest is invalid and the FBI should immediately release these documents,” said the petition, started by user “C.S.”
“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA,” Mr. Hardy wrote.
Mrs. Clinton, is the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, former chief diplomat, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of both the U.S. and Arkansas. Her use of a secret email account to conduct government business while leading the State Department was front-page news for much of 2015 and 2016, and was so striking that the then-FBI director broke with procedure and made both a public statement and appearances before Congress to talk about the bureau’s probe.
In the end, the FBI didn’t recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton, concluding that while she risked national security, she was too technologically inept to know the dangers she was running, so no case could be made against her.
The Times reported:
Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.
In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,” Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
The dossier in question was authored by former intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who was reportedly paid by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans to investigate Trump. Steele recently conceded in court documents that part of his work still needed to be verified.
According to information first leaked by CNN, Trump was briefed on the contents of the controversial dossier last January by Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.
There are questions about the veracity of Comey’s public explanations of why he briefed Trump, President Obama and other top Obama administration officials about the dossier contents. Comey claimed that he and other U.S. officials briefed Obama and Trump about the dossier two weeks prior to Trump’s inauguration because they wanted to alert the president and president-elect that the news media were about to release the material.
In June testimony, Comey specifically denied that he had briefed Trump about “salacious and unverified material” – referring to the dossier – in order to “hang it over him in some way.”
Comey stated:
I was briefing him about salacious and unverified material. It was in a context of that that he had a strong and defensive reaction about that not being true. My reading of it was it was important for me to assure him we were not personally investigating him. So the context then was actually narrower, focused on what I just talked to him about.
It was very important because it was, first, true, and second, I was worried very much about being in kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation. I didn’t want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way.
I was briefing him on it because we had been told by the media it was about to launch. We didn’t want to be keeping that from him. He needed to know this was being said. I was very keen not to leave him with an impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him. So that’s the context in which I said, sir, we’re not personally investigating you.
In his prepared remarks before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June, Comey also detailed why he claimed the intelligence community briefed Obama and Trump on the “salacious material” – again a clear reference to the dossier.
Comey wrote:
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
The U.S. intelligence community does not usually brief top officials about pending news media coverage.
Also, according to numerous reports, the media had been aware of the dossier claims for months. The dossier charges had been circulating among news media outlets, but the sensational claims were largely considered too risky to publish.
When it famously published the full dossier, BuzzFeed reported that the contents had circulated “for months” and were known to journalists.
The website reported, “The documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column.”
McClatchy reported this week that it was among “at least a dozen national media organizations” that “had a copy of the Steele dossier before it became public but hadn’t published details because much of the information had not been corroborated.”
Despite Comey’s claims about pending media stories on the dossier, it was actually Comey’s very briefings to Trump and Obama that gave the news media the opening to start publishing the dossier contents, as this reporter previously documented.
On January 10, CNN cited “multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings” – in other words, officials leaking information about classified briefings – revealing the dossier contents were included in a two-page synopsis that served as an addendum to a larger report on Russia’s alleged attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Just after that CNN report, BuzzFeed published the dossier’s full unverified contents.
The New York Times used CNN’s story to report some contents of the dossier the same day as CNN’s January 10 report on the briefings.
After citing the CNN story, the Times reported:
The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Mr. Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel. The videos were supposedly prepared as “kompromat,” or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Mr. Trump in the future.
The memos also suggest that Russian officials proposed various lucrative deals, essentially as disguised bribes in order to win influence over Mr. Trump.
The memos describe several purported meetings during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump representatives and Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest, including the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta.
Immediately following CNN’s article, National Intelligence Director Clapper added fuel to the media fire around the dossier by releasing a statement that he spoke to Trump to express “my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press” – referring to the leaks to CNN about the classified briefing. He called the leaks “extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.”
Clapper’s statement generated fresh media coverage of the dossier briefings.
Largely discredited
Major questions have been raised as to the veracity of the dossier, large sections of which have been discredited.
Earlier this month, Breitbart News reported that information contained in a Washington Post article may disprove perhaps the most infamous claim made in the already discredited dossier.
One of the most widely reported claims in the document was that while Trump was staying in the presidential suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013, he hired “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.”
The dossier claims that Trump wanted to “defile” the bed because he learned that President Obama had used the same suite during a trip to Russia.
The document states that the hotel “was known to be under FSB control” and there were concealed cameras and microphones throughout the property, suggesting Russia possessed damaging photos or videos on the current U.S. president. The FSB is the principal Russian security agency.
Trump reportedly stayed at the Ritz Carlton when he was in Moscow to judge the Miss Universe contest, which he partially owned at the time.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that while he was in Russia, Trump spent time with Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire real estate tycoon, and Argalorov’s son, singer Emin. Trump was reportedly discussing the possibility of building a tower in Moscow with the elder Argalorov. The Argalorovs attended the Miss Universe contest.
Buried inside the article, the Post quoted “a person with knowledge” of Trump’s 2013 trip saying that Trump’s bodyguard rejected an offer from Emin Agalarov to send prostitutes to Trump’s hotel room.
Meanwhile, numerous other aspects of the dossier have been discredited. Citing a “Kremlin insider,” the dossier, which misspelled the name of a Russian diplomat, claimed that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen held “secret meetings” with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016.
That charge unraveled after Cohen revealed he had never traveled to Prague, calling the story “totally fake, totally inaccurate.” The Atlantic confirmed Cohen’s whereabouts in New York and California during the period the dossier claimed he was in Prague. Cohen reportedly produced his passport showing he had not traveled to Prague.
Citing current and former government officials, the New Yorker reported the dossier prompted skepticism among intelligence community members, with the publication quoting one member saying it was a “nutty” piece of evidence to submit to a U.S. president.
Steele’s work has been questioned by former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who currently works at the Hillary Clinton-tied Beacon Global Strategies LLC.
According to the BBC, the dossier served as a “roadmap” for the FBI’s investigation into claims of coordination between Moscow and members of Trump’s presidential campaign.
In April, CNN reported that the dossier served as part of the FBI’s justification for seeking a FISA court’s reported approval to clandestinely monitor the communications of Carter Page, the American oil industry consultant who was tangentially and briefly associated with Trump’s presidential campaign.
Senior Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have reportedly requested that the FBI and Department of Justice turn over applications for any warrants to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens associated with the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In testimony to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey admitted he pushed back against a request from Trump to possibly investigate the origins of “salacious material” that the agency possessed in the course of its investigation into alleged Russian interference.
Author and journalist Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post last week that the Senate Judiciary Committee threatened to subpoena Fusion GPS, the secretive firm that hired Steele to produce the dossier, because the firm reportedly refused to answer questions about who financed the dossier.
Sperry raised further questions regarding possible connections between Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton:
Fusion GPS was on the payroll of an unidentified Democratic ally of Clinton when it hired a long-retired British spy to dig up dirt on Trump. In 2012, Democrats hired Fusion GPS to uncover dirt on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And in 2015, Democratic ally Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to investigate pro-life activists protesting the abortion group.
Moreover, federal records show a key co-founder and partner in the firm was a Hillary Clinton donor and supporter of her presidential campaign.
In September 2016, while Fusion GPS was quietly shopping the dirty dossier on Trump around Washington, its co-founder and partner Peter R. Fritsch contributed at least $1,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary For America campaign, Federal Election Commission data show. His wife also donated money to Hillary’s campaign.
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/07/20/trump-accuses-comey-attempting-leverage-peeing-russia-prostitutes-dossier/