Members of the House on Thursday said they viewed a “shocking” classified memo allegedly detailing abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by senior Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigations officials in relation to the investigation of the Trump campaign and called for it to be declassified and available to the public immediately.
“It’s troubling. It is shocking,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Fox News. “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.”
Lock These Bastards Up Also.
“The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy,” saidRep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the DOJ and the FBI.
Go to Jail’ Over Intel Memo
Another Judiciary Committee member, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), called what he saw in the memo “sickening” and said it was “worse than Watergate.”
I have read the memo. The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen. I have long said it is worse than Watergate. It was #neverTrump & #alwaysHillary. #releasethememo
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), another Judiciary Committee member, called the memo “deeply troubling” and said it raises questions about the “Obama DOJ and Comey FBI.”
“The classified report compiled by House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation,” he tweeted.
The classified report compiled by House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation.
“You think about, ‘is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) told Fox News.
No Damn get out of jail free cards.
“It is so alarming the American people have to see this,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, also said to network.
The viewing of the memo came after all Republican members of the House intelligence committee, whose investigators compiled the classified memo, voted Thursday to make it available to all House members. Every Democrat on the committee voted against it.
According to Gaetz, the memo’s contents could lead to the firing — and perhaps even jailing — of senior DOJ and FBI officials.
“I think that this will not end just with firings. I believe there are people who will go to jail,” he said on Fox News’ Hannity.
He said what he saw in the memo also explains why Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently referred the Fusion GPS dossier author Christopher Steele for a criminal investigation.
“I think there will be criminal implications here,” Gaetz added.
The memo also reportedly contains information about the dossier put together by Fusion GPS that alleged Trump and members of his team colluded with Russians in the 2016 election, according to a report by investigative journalist Sara Carter.
It was revealed in October that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Despite being a political document, the dossier was reportedly part of the evidence FBI officials used to apply for and obtain a warrant through a secret FISA court to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Page told Breitbart News in a statement: “After over a year of inciting discord and threats of violence across America, it’s encouraging that the individuals in Washington responsible for these efforts to undermine our great democracy may be held accountable soon.”
Breitbart News reported on March 3, 2017, that the Obama administration took steps to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign using “police state” tactics, including spying on the Trump campaign. That report is widely believed to have led to President Trump’s tweet that later accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower.
Members of the public and Congress are now calling for the document to be declassified and released to the public.
Immediately #ReleaseTheMemo#FISAMemo & ALL relevant material sourced in it. Every American needs to know the truth! We wouldn’t be revealing any sources & methods that we shouldn’t; only feds’ reliance on bad sources & methods.
DeSantis said the House intelligence committee, pursuant to House rules, should vote to make the report publicly available as soon as possible.
“While the report is classified as Top Secret, I believe the select committee should, pursuant to House rules, vote to make the report publicly available as soon as possible. This is a matter of national significance and the American people deserve the truth,” he said.
“Rule X of the House Rules allows the select committee to publicly disclose any information in its possession after a determination by the select committee that the public interest would be served by such disclosure.”
According to House Rules, if the House intelligence committee votes to make the report public, President Trump would have five days to issue an objection. If he objected, it would take a vote on the House floor.
These are 2 of the most corrupt mofo’s we have ever seen. But no one has been indicted.
Republicans on key congressional committees say they have uncovered new irregularities and contradictions inside the FBI’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email server.
For the first time, investigators say they have secured written evidence that the FBI believed there was evidence that some laws were broken when the former secretary of State and her top aides transmitted classified information through her insecure private email server, lawmakers and investigators told The Hill.
That evidence includes passages in FBI documents stating the “sheer volume” of classified information that flowed through Clinton’s insecure emails was proof of criminality as well as an admission of false statements by one key witness in the case, the investigators said.
The name of the witness is redacted from the FBI documents but lawmakers said he was an employee of a computer firm that helped maintain her personal server after she left office as America’s top diplomat and who belatedly admitted he had permanently erased an archive of her messages in 2015 after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.
The investigators also confirmed that the FBI began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton of any crimes while evidence responsive to subpoenas was still outstanding and before agents had interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses.
Those witnesses included Clinton and the computer firm employee who permanently erased her email archives just days after the emails were subpoenaed by Congress, the investigators said.
Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee who attended a Dec. 21 closed-door briefing by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe say the bureau official confirmed that the investigation and charging decisions were controlled by a small group in Washington headquarters rather the normal process of allowing field offices to investigate possible criminality in their localities. The Clinton email server in question was based in New York.
In normal FBI cases, field offices where crimes are believed to have been committed investigate the evidence and then recommend to bureau hierarchy whether to pursue charges with prosecutors. In this case, the bureau hierarchy controlled both the investigation and the charging decision from Washington, a scenario known in FBI parlance as a “special,” the lawmakers said.
The FBI declined comment on McCabe’s closed-door testimony and the evidence being shared with Congress.
Some Republicans on the committee say the findings and revelations have left them more convinced than ever that FBI leadership rigged the outcome to clear Clinton.
“This was an effort to pre-bake the cake, pre-bake the outcome,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a House Judiciary Committee member who attended the McCabe briefing before the holidays. “Hillary Clinton obviously benefited from people taking actions to ensure she wasn’t held accountable.”
Gaetz said he could not divulge the specifics of what McCabe told lawmakers, but that he left the Dec. 21 session believing the FBI had deviated from its “normal objective practices” while investigating Clinton.
The top Democrat on the panel acknowledged the FBI’s handling of the case was unique, but argued Republicans are politicizing their own panel’s work.
“To the extent that the Assistant Director of the FBI was involved in that investigation, and recognizing that the investigation itself presented a unique set of circumstances, his testimony did not raise any concerns that would justify the Republicans’ outsized obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails two years after the fact,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y) who recently took over as the top Democrat on House Judiciary after former Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) stepped aside after sexual misconduct allegations were made against him.
Trump wants ‘Deep State Justice Dept’ to probe Huma Abedin
President Trump on Tuesday suggested the Department of Justice “must finally act?” to investigate longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department last week released emails belonging to her, including some marked classified that were found on her husband’s laptop.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols,” he wrote on Twitter. “She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”
The State Department last Friday released parts of 2,800 emails that belonged to Abedin but were recovered by the FBI on the laptop of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, during an investigation into his sexting with a female high school student.
The discovery of the emails, some marked as classified, prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, that he would reopen the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
He reversed himself two days before the vote, saying nothing of significance had been found in her emails.
Trump fired Comey, who had been heading the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, in May.
The president was also referring to a report on the Daily Caller website on Sunday that said Abedin forwarded sensitive work emails to her private Yahoo account – and some of the messages contained passwords for her government laptop.
The report noted that 500 million Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2014.
Among those indicted by the Department of Justice in March 2017 for the hack was Igor Suschin, a former Russian intelligence agent.
He Is Completely Right! Investigate All Of The Bastards.
“At this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves,” Nunes wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Breitbart News.
Nunes said in the letter that several weeks ago the Justice Department informed the committee that basic investigatory documents (FBI Form FD-302s) subpoenaed on August 24 “did not exist.”
“However,” Nunes wrote, “shortly before my meeting with you in early December, DOJ subsequently located and produced numerous FD-302s pertaining to the Steele dossier, thereby rendering the initial response disingenuous at best.”
“As it turns out, not only did documents exist that were directly responsive to the Committee’s subpoenas, but they involved senior DOJ and FBI officials who were swiftly reassigned when their roles in matters under the Committee’s investigation were brought to light,” he said.
Nunes did not reference who those officials were, but it has been widely reported that senior FBI official Peter Strzok was removed from the special counsel and reassigned to human resources after Robert Mueller found he sent anti-Trump texts. Strzok had also played key roles in the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s initial Russia probe.
Senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr was also removed from his position as associate deputy attorney general after it came to light that he had met with the author of the dossier as well as a co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind it. His wife, Nellie Ohr, was also found to have worked for Fusion GPS.
FBI General Counsel James Baker is also being reassigned at the FBI.
Nunes said, given the content and impact of these “supposedly newly-discovered” documents, the committee was no longer able to accept the Justice Department’s refusal to provide other requested documents — FBI Form FD-1023s that document meetings between FBI officials and FBI confidential human sources.
Nunes is now demanding that the DOJ and FBI hand over all requested documents no later than January 3, 2018.
Those documents, he said, include but are not limited to:
• All responsive FD-1023s, including all reports that summarize meetings between FBI confidential human sources and FBI officials pertaining to the Steele dossier;
• All responsive FD-302s not previously provided to the Committee; and
•In addition to the FD-302s and FD-1023s, certain responsive analytical and reference documents that were specifically identified and requested by the Committee, and supposedly subject to imminent production, as of December 15.
If DOJ withholds any relevant documents, it must provide a written legal justification from Rosenstein personally, Nunes wrote. He also requested dates in January 2018 for interviews with:
• Former DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr;
• FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Peter Strzok;
• FBI Attorney James Baker;
• FBI Attorney Lisa Page;
• FBI Attorney Sally Moyer; and
• FBI Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs Greg Brower.
Nunes also noted other outstanding requests:
The Committee further reminds you of these other outstanding requests for information:
• Details concerning an apparent April 2017 meeting with the media involving DOJ/FBI personnel, including DOJ Attorney Andrew Weissman (due December 13) and
• The remaining text messages between SSA Strzok and Ms. Page (due December 15).
“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” Nunes wrote.
Nunes has threatened to begin drawing up a resolution to hold Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.
The Duran reported back in October that one Trump hating Republican was a driving force behind the fake Trump dossier…that RINO, Anti-Trumper was and is Senator John McCain.
It has since been confirmed that McCain did deliver the infamous Trump Dossier to the FBI.
John McCain has never hidden his hatred for Donald Trump, going to outrageous lengths to derail Trump’s presidency.
It seems that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign took over in April 2016 from a previous unnamed Republican the funding of the ‘research’ which resulted in the Trump Dossier (the Washington rumour mill says this Republican was Senator McCain).
According to The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris, it certainly look like the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign circulated the Trump Dossier to their friends in the media and in the US intelligence community, triggering the start of the FBI investigation in July 2016 and the decision in August 2016 by the CIA to report its contents to President Obama. It was those two actions taken together which were the starting point of the Russiagate scandal.
It appears that the US Congress is starting to catch on to McCain’s treasonous antics to sabotage Trump’s presidency, and flame the war fires against Russia. Via Zerohedge…
Several months ago it emerged that the Republican sponsor behind the Fusion GPS Trump project was hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a fact which surprised many who expected that John McCain would be the GOP mastermind looking for dirt in Trump’s past. However, a new and credible McCain trail has emerged in the annals of the “Trump Dossier” after the Washington Examiner reported that the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to an associate of John McCain over his connection with the salacious dossier containing unverified allegations about Trump and his ties to Russia, which many speculate served as the illegitimate basis for FISA warrants against the Trump campaign – permitting the NSA to listen in on Trump’s phone calls – and which the president yesterday slammed as “bogus” and a “crooked Hillary pile of garbage.”
In the latest twist, committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wants to talk to David Kramer, a former State Department official and current senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, about his visit to London in November 2016. During his trip, at McCain’s request Kramer met with the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, to view “the pre-election memoranda on a confidential basis,” according to court filings and to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to McCain. McCain then took a copy of the dossier to the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. But the FBI already had the document; Steele himself gave the dossier to the bureau in installments, reportedly beginning in early July 2016.
While McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier, his associate Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview. In the session, the Washington Examiner reports, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele’s dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.
Now, he is under subpoena which was issued Wednesday afternoon, and directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.
As the ongoing government probe slowly turns away from Trump’s “collusion” with the Russians and toward the FBI “insurance policy” to allegedly prevent Trump from becoming president by fabricating a narrative of Russian cooperation with the Trump, knowing Steele’s sources will be a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation:
“If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical.”
According to Zerohedge, there is another reason to know Steele’s sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair.
As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators’ views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.
Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: “It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheing, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?”
On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now… and as the Examiner’s Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek Steele’s sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.
GOP preps contempt resolution for top FBI, DOJ officials after missed Monday deadline
The House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday will begin writing a resolution holding top FBI officials in contempt of Congress after the agency missed a Monday deadline to turn over key evidence the committee has been seeking for months.
“We are moving forward with the contempt resolution,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner Tuesday morning. He added that the panel is still negotiating with FBI and Justice Department officials to get the requested documents.
Nunes has accused the FBI and Department of Justice of a “months-long pattern … of stonewalling and obstructing this committee’s oversight work.”
Those accusations boiled over during the weekend, after stories were leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post saying that FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key investigator in the Trump-Russian probe, was removed from the Russia probe after exchanging text messages critical of Trump to another FBI agent he was involved with romantically. Republicans had been seeking information about why he was removed, but were never told anything by FBI or Justice Department directly.
Nunes had also been seeking information about the FBI and Justice Department’s use of the Steele dossier, which contains damning but unverified information about President Trump.
But the Strzok leak was the last straw, and Nunes announced Saturday he has ordered committee staff to begin drafting a contempt of Congress citation for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and for FBI Director Christopher Wray unless they complied with the panels’ requests for information by the close of business on Monday.
After the story broke, Nunes said, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to make some of the witnesses available, but are still withholding many documents and other evidence the Intelligence panel is seeking, an aide said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the department has given the panel hundreds of pages of classified documents and multiple briefings, and has now allowed Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to meet with the panel.
While committee aides will start writing the contempt resolution Tuesday, Nunes has not set a date for the panel to consider the contempt charges.
If approved by the committee, the resolutions of contempt would be sent to the House floor for consideration, but only if Speaker Paul Ryan chooses to bring them up. One GOP source said Ryan supports the contempt resolution.
Contempt of Congress resolutions approved by the House are referred to the the Justice Department, but they are relatively rare.
The House voted in 2012 to hold then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents sought by the House Oversight Committee on the DOJ’s “Fast and Furious” operation that resulted in thousands of U.S. guns ending up in the hands of Mexican drug dealers.
These resolutions also are not always effective. For example, the Justice Department elected not to prosecute Holder over the contempt charge.
