When Will Obama Be Questioned On His Corrupt Administration?
A former top lawyer at the FBI provided “explosive” testimony to Congress on Wednesday regarding the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, lawmakers said.
James Baker, who served as the FBI’s general counsel until May, told Congress that a previously unidentified source provided information to the FBI for its investigation, which began on July 31, 2016.
“During the time that the FBI was putting — that [the Department of Justice] and FBI were putting together the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surveillance warrant] during the time prior to the election — there was another source giving information directly to the FBI, which we found the source to be pretty explosive,” Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said after a hearing, according to Fox News.
As the FBI’s top attorney, Baker was directly involved in handling applications for the FISA warrants granted against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Baker was interviewed behind closed doors as part of a congressional task force’s investigation into the FBI’s possible abuse of the FISA process. Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns that the Page FISAs relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier.
The document, which was funded by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was cited extensively in the FBI’s applications to spy on Page.
“Some of the things that were shared were explosive in nature,” North Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Meadows told Fox regarding Baker’s interview. “This witness confirmed that things were done in an abnormal fashion. That’s extremely troubling.”
Jordan and Meadows did not provide additional details about what information Baker shared or who the FBI’s source was. They said that congressional investigators were not aware of the source until Baker’s testimony.
Meadows said earlier on Wednesday that he has seen evidence that “confidential human sources” used by the FBI “actually taped members within the Trump campaign.” (RELATED: Undercover FBI Sources Taped Trump Campaign)
“There is strong suggestions in that some of the text messages, emails, and so forth who was involved, that extraordinary measures were used to surveil,” Meadows told Hill.TV.
DOJ attorney George Toscas will be deposed Thursday as part of a congressional investigation into possible FISA abuse.
Staffers with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees will quiz Toscas about DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
Ohr will be interviewed on Aug. 28.
House Republicans will resume an investigation of the FBI and DOJ’s handling of the Russia investigation on Thursday with a deposition of George Z. Toscas, a national security attorney at the Department of Justice.
Toscas, who handles counterterrorism and counterespionage cases, will appear for a deposition at 10 a.m. before staffers with the House Judiciary and House Government & Oversight Committees, a source familiar with the matter tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Toscas was one of 17 current and former FBI and Justice Department officials included on a list submitted to the two House committees by California Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Nunes suggested interviewing Toscas and the other officials regarding an investigation into the FBI and Justice Department’s possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Congressional Republicans have probed whether the agencies misled federal surveillance judges by relying on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Toscas is mentioned throughout text messages exchanged between former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page. Strzok and Page, neither of which work for the FBI (Strzok was fired on Aug. 10), mentioned Toscas most often during the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The Washington Post has reported that Toscas was the Justice Department official who reminded then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. McCabe had been informed about the emails weeks earlier but failed to take action on them until late-October 2016.
Strzok and Page, who have already been interviewed by the House panels, also mention Toscas in text messages sent at key points in the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Strzok sent one message to Page on July 30, 2016, the day before the FBI opened the Russia probe, that appears to reference Toscas and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“Do you know if Andy got concurrence back from George about the preamble? No need to ask Andy right now, I think we can in very good faith date the [letterhead memorandum] July 2016,” Strzok wrote.
TheDCNF’s source says that Republicans will ask Toscas about the origins of the government’s Russia probe as well as about Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official who served as a back channel between the FBI and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Ohr was also in contact with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele as part of an anti-Trump project financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Ohr’s wife, a Russia expert named Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS on the Trump project.
Ohr, who was demoted in December from his position as assistant deputy attorney general, will be interviewed by the two House committees on Aug. 28.
Republicans want to know who at the Justice Department, if anyone, directed Ohr to maintain contact with Steele. The relationship has raised questions because the FBI cut ties with Steele on Nov. 1, 2016 because of the former spy’s unauthorized contacts with the media.
Lawmakers have also questioned why Ohr was meeting with Steele despite claims from top DOJ officials that he was not on the team leading the Russia investigation.
“To my knowledge he wasn’t working on the Russian matter,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified on June 28.
Ohr was interviewed a dozen times by the FBI after the election about his interactions with Steele. Text messages and emails recently provided to Congress also show that Ohr and Steele were in contact throughout 2016 and 2017.
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.
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
She’s also facing three counts for fraudulent use of an application for ballot by mail. These are state jail felonies. That can include up to four years in state prison and a fine of $10,000.
According to the affidavits, Barron signed up a felon to receive a ballot by mail due to a disability.
Investigators say the felon denied being disabled as he was a cowboy. He also claimed raising the concern to Barron before being signed up.
Yes Democrats would like every dead vote.
Two other affidavits have similar accounts of two separate voters. The voters denied filling out the form stating that they had a disability.
The investigation is under the Starr County District Attorney’s Office.
District attorney Omar Escobar says they seek to ensure the sanctity of voting especially when the ballot is outside of a polling site.
“It’s too easy to exert influence and pressure on somebody at home. An assistant, a worker, an election worker to go and ask them, ‘did you already receive your ballot by mail?’ ‘Yes. I got it here’. And then to hover over the ballot and to vote a particular way,” said Escobar.
The affidavits also state another woman was seen with Barron. There is a potential for other arrests.
Barron is an employee of Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District. She has been put on administrative leave.
An internal investigation is also being carried out.
The school district’s attorney says the terms of her leave are still being worked on, this includes whether or not she will be paid during her leave.
Rod Rosenstein needs to be investigated also. He looks like a child molester.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page shortly after taking office last spring, according to the New York Times.
That is one of the revelations in a memo compiled by House Intelligence Committee staffers that is set to be released within weeks, according to “three people familiar with it” who spoke to the Times.
The memo is expected to detail abuses by senior FBI officials in their investigation of the Trump campaign, which began the summer of 2016.
The House Intelligence Committee could vote to release the memo as early as Monday. It would give President Trump five days to object; otherwise, the memo will be released.
Democrats, as well as the Justice Department, have warned that releasing the memo to the public would be “extraordinarily reckless,” although the leaks of the memo to the Times makes those claims dubious.
Democrats have also claimed that the memo, which summarizes classified information held by the Justice Department, is misleading and paints a “distorted” picture, and they have prepared their own counter memo they want to release.
The people who spoke to the Times argued that Rosenstein’s renewal of a spy warrant on Carter Page, Trump’s former campaign foreign policy adviser, “shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent.”
The memo, however, is expected to detail how the surveillance warrant was initially obtained inappropriately using the Trump dossier — a political document funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It is expected to show that FBI and DOJ officials did not explain to the secret court granting spy warrants that the dossier was politically fueled opposition research. To obtain the warrant, the officials needed to show “probable cause” that Page was acting as an agent of Russia.
Page joined the campaign in March 2016, around the time the team was under pressure to release names of foreign policy advisers.
The former investment banker and Navy officer took a personal trip to Moscow to deliver a speech at a graduation ceremony in July 2016, which fueled nascent allegations that Trump was somehow colluding with Russia. Page left the campaign in September.
The Trump dossier claimed he met with two high-level Russian officials on that trip, despite no evidence of it and Page’s testimony under oath that he never met with them. Page has sued BuzzFeed for publishing the dossier.
The FBI had been tracking Page, who was previously based in Moscow, since 2013, but was never charged with any wrongdoing. The FBI reportedly received the surveillance warrant on him in fall of 2016, but Page had left the campaign by then.
Rosenstein, after he was confirmed as the deputy attorney general in late April 2017, approved renewing the surveillance warrant, according to the Times. When Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to lead a special counsel.
Rosenstein has been in charge of the Russia investigation since Attorney General Jeff Session recused himself.
Why in the hell is this so-called smart man sealing all his great achievements?
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe claims in his new book that Donald Trump asked him in 2013 to get his hands on President Obama’s sealed Columbia records.
In the introduction of his book “American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News,” O’Keefe recalls meeting Trump back in 2013. O’Keefe said that he didn’t get the idea that Trump was a “birther,” but Trump did seem to believe that Obama might have misled people about being a foreign national.
“He was confident Obama was born in the United States, but he suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York’s Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way,” O’Keefe explains. “Trump had reason to believe Obama was capable of this kind of mischief.”
This fraud was Barry Soetoro in college so why in the hell did he start going by Barack Obama?
In the hopes of figuring out if Obama was participating in any misconduct, Trump allegedly asked O’Keefe to uncover Obama’s sealed records from Columbia University.
“Nobody else can get this information,” Trump reportedly told O’Keefe. “Do you think you could get inside Columbia?”
“As I explained, that was not exactly our line of work. We were journalists, not private eyes,” O’Keefe writes about the request. “At the end of our discussion, Trump shook my hand, encouraged me to keep up the good work, and half-whispered, ‘Do Columbia.’”
