The Office of the Special Counsel deleted text messages from the iPhone of fired FBI agent Peter Strzok before turning it over to the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), according to a report released by the federal watchdog.
On Thursday, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report stating thousands of text messages exchanged between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page could not be recovered after Mueller’s team wiped clean the phones it had issued them.
So Mueller’s team wiped ALL of the data off of Peter Strzok’s iPhone after determining “it contained no substantive text messages.” Given what we know about Strzok, this smells like quite the coverup. Time for Congress to step in?
“SCO’s Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages,” the watchdog report reads. As Conservative Review national security reporter Jordan Schachtel first discovered, the OIG said Strzok’s cell phone was “reset to factory settings,” deleting all data stored on the device.
The federal watchdog said in the report it found “no discernible patterns” about the content of thousands of messages the FBI was able to recover between Strzok and Page. Both have been part of Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Strzok and Page testified before Congress this summer, and the former FBI agent admitted that he had not turned over all of his communications with Page to the Inspector General from his personal phone, even though their recovered conversations showed the two suggesting they move to apps like iMessage or Gmail. Strzok told outgoing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that it is a “safe assumption” that he sent messages to Page from his personal phone that were similar in nature to the widely-publicized messages attacking Trump supporters. He told House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that he himself determined which messages on that phone were “relevant to FBI business” that the Inspector General could review.
At that time of their exchanges, the FBI was investigating whether former secretary of state and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton improperly used a private email account while she was Secretary of State. Strzok, a senior counterintelligence agent, was assigned to the case, as was Page. Reports claimed the two were romantically involved during this time. Strzok was ultimately fired after anti-Trump text messages between him and Page were discovered by the special counsel.
Thursday’s report said the FBI used special software to collect more than 20,000 text messages from the pair’s phones, but not all were sent between Strzok and Page. Investigators have already released some of the controversial texts, including a message from Strzok saying he would “stop” President Donald Trump from winning the election.
Missing text messages from the pair’s iPhones, though, continue to elude the FBI.
Early this year, the Office of the Inspector General contacted Verizon Wireless to determine if the carrier retains old text messages. Verizon said messages are retained for up to seven days after they are sent, and then erased. The missing messages in question were much older than a week by that time and Verizon no longer had them.
Trump should have investigated Hillary and all the corrupt Democrats. Don’t play nice with demons is my motto.
0:55
Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the likely next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said President Donald Trump might “face the real prospect of jail time” in light of charges against his personal attorney, Michael Cohen for illegal payments during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Schiff said, “There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time. We have been discussing the issue of pardons the president may offer to people or dangle in front of people. The bigger pardon question may come down the road, as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump.”
Why doesn’t the Media and the criminal elected officials ever talk about China being America’s enemy?
BOEING CANCELS CONTROVERSIAL SATELLITE ORDER FUNDED BY CHINA
Two Americans wanted to create a satellite in an effort to increase internet access in Africa, but their project quickly turned over into the hands of the Chinese government.
Boeing, who was hired to build the satellite and knew of the Chinese government’s involvement in the project, reportedly announced Thursday it was cancelling the order.
Boeing cited default for nonpayment, calling it a business decision.
Boeing decided to cancel an order for a satellite that uses sensitive technology used by the U.S. military and was reportedly being funded by a state-owned Chinese financial firm.
A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Tuesday the troubling web of financial transactions that skirted around U.S. export laws, which would ban Boeing from selling satellites to China, and resulted in the Chinese government funneling nearly $200 million to the project and obtaining a large stake of the company responsible for the satellite.
Boeing told WSJ Thursday it cancelled the project, which was near completion at a Boeing facility in Los Angeles, citing default for nonpayment. A source familiar with the project said the cancellation was a business decision, and the company may attempt to resell the satellite. (RELATED: US Satellite May Now Be Controlled By China)
Emil Youssefzadeh and Umar Javed, two Americans who founded the startup Global IP in 2008 with the goal of improving internet accessibility in Africa, were Boeing’s original customers of the satellite. A few foreign financial transactions made in an attempt to sidestep U.S. export laws almost potentially resulted in the Chinese government repurposing the satellite’s sensitive technology for its own use.
Youssefzadeh and Javed were contacted in 2015 by executives at China Orient Asset Management Co., a financial firm owned by China’s Ministry of Finance, expressing interest in the satellite.
Javed was in Beijing days later meeting with the president of the company and Geng Zhiyuan, a man whose father was a leader in China’s military in 1979 and employed Xi Jinping as his personal secretary. Xi is now the president of Communist China.
Due to certain U.S. laws involving satellite technology, China Orient isn’t allowed to hold a large stake in the company or satellite, so Global IP planned to receive China Orient’s money through a separate shell company, according to WSJ.
A subsidiary of China Orient, Dong Yin Development, lent $175 million to Bronzelink, the company set up in the British Virgin Islands. Bronzelink then bought 75 percent of Global IP.
Global IP used the investment to pay Boeing to build the satellite.
After relations with China Orient soured, Youssefzadeh and Javed resigned in 2017 from Global IP and sued Dong Yin the following year, alleging the subsidiary was illegally trying to usurp the satellite project.
China’s involvement in the project has worried U.S. officials, who warn that the country often engages in illicit activities in an attempt to gain access to highly sought after technologies.
“It’s a multi-pronged, multi-faceted kind of attack,” Eric Hirschhorn, who served as an undersecretary at the Commerce Department during the Obama administration, told WSJ. “They’ve [China] got their hand in every pocket they can find, their nose in every crack, their eye in every keyhole.”
Right before Global IP was to sign its contract with Boeing in August 2016, Youssefzadeh and Javed received unexpected visitors in Los Angeles.
Multiple new Global IP board members, led by a Chinese lawyer who represents China Orient, demanded access to the Boeing contract and requested to see Boeing’s satellite designs, WSJ reported.
Youssefzadeh and Javed told the crew that they were already given authorization from the board to move forward with production and were confused why this team was sent to obtain more information.
The two Americans refused the multiple requests to look over the contract, which they knew contained hundreds of detailed pages on how Boeing’s technology and programs work. China is blocked from seeing this type of information under export control laws.
Executives at Bronzelink, which owned 75 percent of Global IP at the time of the visit, eventually began to make similar requests, Youssefzadeh and Javed said.
Boeing’s cancellation comes as China was moving to take tighter control of the satellite project, and in doing so obtain access to the sensitive and advanced technology.
Brenda Snipes, the supervisor of elections for Broward County, Florida, will receive nearly $130,000 a year in pensions when she resigns from her position in January.
Snipes, who resigned after receiving intense scrutiny for her office’s handling of the midterm elections earlier this month, is already receiving $58,560 in state pensions from her earlier career as an educator, and is set to add almost $71,000 a year for her time in elected office, the Sun Sentinelreported Tuesday.
When Snipes walks away from her $178,865-a-year job, she’ll be eligible to collect almost $130,000 a year in state pensions for her combined 50 years as a public school educator and elected official.
She already earns $4,880 a month for her time as a teacher and school administrator. She has been receiving that pension in addition to her supervisor’s salary ever since she was appointed by former Gov. Jeb Bush to the position in 2003. She has won election to the office four times since then.
Based on salary information and state retirement rules, the South Florida Sun Sentinel determined Snipes, 75, stands to add another $5,909 a month for her 15 years as supervisor, roughly $71,000 a year. State officials said they could not provide information on Snipes’ new pension because they had not calculated it and would not do so until requested by Snipes.
[…]
[Florida TaxWatch CEO Dominic] Calabro said Snipes will also benefit from annual cost-of-living increases, averaging between 2 percent and 3 percent, that will add thousands of dollars to her pensions each year.
Calabro, whose organization is a nonprofit, nonpartisan government watchdog group, said Snipes’ pension pay “really raises the question, on top of everything else, why she’s being excessively compensated for doing a poor job. That’s the added insult to injury.”
“It just leaves additional salt in the wound,” he added.
The average annual pension for elected officials in Florida’s state retirement plan in 2017 was $53,223, the Sentinel noted.
Snipes became the subject of national scrutiny after a series of mishaps concerning the recount of the Senate race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.) and his Republican challenger, current Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who eventually was declared the winner.
She favors Don King.
Broward County failed to submit the results of the recount by the state’s deadline; lost thousands of ballots that were initially counted but did not make it to the recount; and her office, according to the Sentinel, opened 205 provisional early-voting ballots before Broward’s Canvassing Board determined their validity.
Snipes—who was also found to have destroyed ballots earlier than allowed in a previous election and regularly lost absentee ballots, among other issues—submitted her resignation last week.
This is Brenda with no Make-up.
“Although I have enjoyed this work tremendously over these many election cycles, both large and small, I am ready to pass the torch,” Snipes wrote in her resignation letter to Scott. “Therefore, I request that you accept my letter of resignation effective January 4, 2019.”
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan called President Donald Trump’s decision Wednesday to revoke his security clearance an “attempt to suppress freedom of speech” and to “punish critics.”
John O. Brennan
✔@JohnBrennan
This action is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics. It should gravely worry all Americans, including intelligence professionals, about the cost of speaking out. My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.
NBC News
✔@NBCNews
BREAKING: President Trump is revoking former CIA Director and high-profile Trump critic John Brennan’s security clearance, White House says. https://nbcnews.to/2w9hobN
Brennan was a controversial figure during the Obama administration
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders read a statement earlier Wednesday from the president that explained his decision, citing his constitutional authority and duty to protect the nation’s secrets:
Mr. Brennan has a history that calls in to question his objectivity and credibility. In 2014, for example, he denied to Congress that CIA officials under his supervision had improperly accessed the computer files of congressional staffers. He told the Council on Foreign Relations that the CIA would never do such a thing. The CIA’s Inspector General however contradicted Mr. Brennan directly, concluding unequivocally that agency officials had indeed improperly accessed congressional staffers files. More recently, Mr. Brennan told Congress that the intelligence community did not make use of the so-called Steele dossier in an assessment regarding the 2016 election, an assertion contradicted by at least two other senior officials in the intelligence community, and all of the facts.
Additionally, Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration. Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets and facilities, the very aim of our adversaries which is to sow division and chaos.
The president also said that the clearances of several other former Obama administration officials — “James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr” — was also under review. Yates was briefly acting Attorney General under Trump before she was fired for refusing to enforce the travel ban, a revised version of which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. Ohr still works at the Department of Justice.
Brennan, who describes himself in his Twitter profile as “Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future,” has emerged as a vociferous, even alarmist, critic of President Trump. Last month, he accused the president of treason for his press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and hinted that Republicans should help impeach him.
John O. Brennan
✔@JohnBrennan
Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???
The left has argued in recent weeks that conservatives who are banned from social media platforms or targeted by boycotts do not have a “free speech” argument — yet that is the same argument Brennan invokes in defense of his former privilege to access the nation’s secrets.
Who Did The SOB Work For? Obama Needs To Be In Prison With His Whole Administration.
President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani announced on Monday evening that he believes former CIA Director John Brennan is the person responsible for the entire Mueller investigation. Giuliani made the claim during a segment of “Hannity” on Fox News.
“She got off because of that fixed investigation. A totally phony fixed investigation run by Peter Strzok who then turns around, the dossier is obtained on the day that they dropped the case against Trump — against Hillary. So that case gets dropped and they had to even up the score,” Giuliani stated.
“The reality is I’m going to tell you. We don’t have the time to go into it, we can do it later, I’m going to tell you who was the quarterback for all of this. It isn’t just Strzok. Strzok is a bit of a puppet. Then there’s Mueller, he’s a puppet. The people working for him, some of them are,” he continued.
Hannity cut of Giuliani saying, “I have a funny feeling you are about to drop a bomb on me.”
“Well the guy running it is [John] Brennan and he should be in front of a grand jury. Brennan took an affidavit – a dossier, unless he’s the biggest idiot intelligence agent that ever existed, although he never did much intelligence work, it’s false. You could look at it and laugh,” Giuliani stated.
