John McCain is a damn fraud and everyone with a brain knows it.
TEL AVIV — Last week’s release of a four-page House Intelligence Committee memo alleging abuse of surveillance authority provides details that raise new questions about Sen. John McCain’s role in delivering the infamous, largely discredited 35-page dossier on President Donald Trump and Russia to the U.S. intelligence community under Barack Obama’s administration.
The memo, crafted by House Republicans, reveals, among other things, that former FBI Director James Comey personally signed FISA court applications utilizing the dossier to obtain FISA court warrants to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Comey allegedly utilized the dossier, produced by the controversial Fusion GPS opposition research firm, to seek and receive the first warrant against Page on October 21, 2016. Federal agencies sought the renewal of the order every 90 days in accordance with court requirements. According to the memo, Comey “signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one.”
Comey allegedly utilized the dossier to seek the initial warrant even though he would label the same dossier “salacious and unverified” eight months later during sworn testimony.
Comey also utilized the dossier, according to the memo, even though senior FBI officials were aware at the time that the document, authored by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, was produced by the controversial Fusion GPS firm and was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.
The questions about McCain’s involvement follow an admission last month by the founders of Fusion GPS that they helped Steele share the document with the Arizona senator utilizing a surrogate after the November 2016 presidential election. McCain in turn reportedly provided the dossier to the FBI in December 2016.
The timeline revealed in the memo shows that by the time McCain delivered the dossier to the FBI leadership in December 2016, the agency had not only already launched an investigation into Trump’s campaign partially utilizing the dossier but Comey himself had two months earlier signed an application using the dossier to obtain a FISA warrant on Page.
It is therefore not clear why Fusion GPS would seek out McCain to deliver to the FBI a document already being utilized by the agency to launch a probe into Trump’s campaign and obtain a FISA warrant after Steele himself provided the dossier to the FBI in July 2016.
It is also not clear whether, at the time he delivered the dossier to the FBI, McCain was aware of the origins of the information, primarily that Fusion GPS compiled the charges and that they were paid to do so by Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.
McCain has not responded to multiple Breitbart News requests for comment.
Necessity of McCain delivering dossier
In August 22 testimony released last month, Fusion GPS Co-Founder Glenn R. Simpson stated that Steele’s outreach to the FBI was “something that Chris took on on his own.” Simpson stated that as far as he knew Fusion GPS did not fund Steele’s July 2016 trip to Rome to meet with the FBI. He said he believes that the trip expenses may have been reimbursed by the FBI.
In a New York Times oped last month, Simpson and fellow GPS Co-Founder Peter Fritch relate that they helped McCain share their anti-Trump dossier with the Obama-era intelligence community via an “emissary.”
“After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary,” the Fusion GPS founders related. “We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.”
It was not clear from their statement whether McCain knew Fusion GPS was behind the dossier.
While the Fusion GPS oped sheds some light on the manner in which McCain obtained the dossier, the Fusion founders did not name the “emissary” who delivered the document to McCain.
A January 11, 2017 statement from McCain attempted to explain why he provided the documents to the FBI but did not mention how he came to possess the dossier or whether he knew who funded it.
“Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI,” McCain said at the time. “That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue.”
Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, said McCain first consulted him about the claims inside the dossier at a security conference in Canada shortly after last November’s presidential election.
Wood stated that McCain had obtained the documents from the senator’s own sources. “I told him I was aware of what was in the report but I had not read it myself, that it might be true, it might be untrue. I had no means of judging really,” Wood further told BBC Radio 4 in January.
Last December, Wood related that he served as a “go-between” to inform McCain about the dossier contents. “My mission was essentially to be a go-between and a messenger, to tell the senator and assistants that such a dossier existed,” Wood told Fox News.
In March, Vanity Fair raised questions about the alleged involvement of longtime McCain associate David J. Kramer, a former State Department official, in helping to obtain the dossier directly from Steele. The issue was also raised in a lawsuit filed against Steele by one of the individuals named in the dossier.
Kramer was reportedly questioned by the House Intelligence Committee about his involvement in the dossier affair.
Newsweek reported on an alleged McCain-directed meeting between Kramer and Steele involving the dossier:
Kramer was reportedly directed to meet with Steele in London by McCain, who then received copies of the Trump-Russia dossier and delivered them to the Arizona senator upon returning home. McCain then gave the dossier to the FBI in December 2016.
Briefing to Trump leaked to media, contents of dossier publically disclosed
One issue that could be relevant in Fusion GPS’s admitted decision to turn to McCain is a revelation in the House memo that dossier author Steele was terminated as an FBI source “for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations – an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016 Mother Jones article by David Corn.”
Another issue here is the timing. McCain reportedly delivered the dossier to FBI leadership in December 2016. The memo relates that in early January 2017, prior to Trump’s inauguration, Comey briefed then President-Elect Trump and President Obama on the dossier.
As Breitbart News documented, Comey’s dossier briefing to Trump was subsequently leaked to the news media, setting in motion a flurry of news media attention on the dossier, including the release of the document to the public. The briefing also may have provided the veneer of respectability to a document circulated within the news media but widely considered too unverified to publicize.
On January 10, 2017, CNN was first to report the leaked information that the controversial contents of the dossier were presented during classified briefings on classified documents presented one week earlier to Obama and Trump.
The news network cited “multiple U.S. 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.
Prior to CNN’s report leaking the Comey briefing to Trump, which was picked up by news agencies worldwide, the contents of the dossier had been circulating among news media outlets, but the sensational claims were largely considered too risky to publish.
All that changed when the dossier contents were presented to Obama and Trump during the classified briefings. In other words, Comey’s briefings themselves and the subsequent leak to CNN about those briefings by “multiple US officials with direct knowledge,” seem to have given the news media the opening to report on the dossier’s existence as well as allude to some of the document’s unproven claims.
Just after CNN’s January 10 report on Comey’s classified briefings about the dossier, BuzzFeed famously published the dossier’s full unverified contents. When it published the dossier text, BuzzFeed reported that the contents had circulated “for months” and were known to journalists.
The New York Times used CNN’s story on Comey’s briefing 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.
It seems the news media utilized the leak about Comey’s dossier briefings to finally publicize the dossier’s existence and some of its contents even though many news media outlets reportedly possessed some of the dossier information for months.
Yet in his testimony, the FBI’s Comey claimed the opposite was the case. He stated that he and other U.S. officials briefed Obama and Trump about the dossier contents because they wanted to alert the president and president-elect that the news media were about to release the material. It is not the usual job of the U.S. intelligence community to brief top officials about pending news media coverage.
In his prepared remarks before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on June 8, 2017, Comey detailed why he claimed the Intelligence Community briefed Obama and Trump on the “salacious material” – 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.
Bob Mueller is a self-righteous POS that should be investigated.
Special counsel Robert Mueller may have helped cover up connections between a Saudi family and the 9/11 terror attacks, according to Tuesday report from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Court documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that as FBI director, Mueller was “likely involved” in releasing deceptive agency statements to cover up a connection between a Saudi Arabian family living in Florida and the 9/11 hijackers. The statements were tailored to discredit a 2011 story exposing an FBI investigation into the family, who lived in Sarasota, Fla. The investigation was also withheld from Congress, according to Judicial Watch.
The FBI investigation into the Saudis came when news stories found that they had abruptly left the country two weeks before 9/11, reportedly leaving behind their cars, furniture, clothes, and other personal items.
“Though the recently filed court documents reveal Mueller received a briefing about the Sarasota Saudi investigation, the FBI continued to publicly deny it existed and it appears that the lies were approved by Mueller,” Judicial Watch wrote. “Not surprisingly, he didn’t respond to questions about this new discovery emailed to his office by the news organization that uncovered it.”
Some republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have been clamoring for him to fire Mueller in recent months as they perceive his credibility to be waning. They cite that more than half of Mueller’s team has worked for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation or have a history of donating to Democrats.
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in early December demanding that Mueller release hundreds of anti-Trump text messages exchanged by FBI agent Peter Strzok – who was on Mueller’s Russia investigation team – and FBI lawyer Lisa Page throughout 2017. Now, with some of the messages released, it’s become clearthat Strzok may have thought the investigation was a dead end.
It’s Time To Stop The Bullshit and Tear Up The Iran Deal! So Go To Hell UN Assembly!
President Donald Trump criticized the Iranian government and questioned the fortitude of the Iran nuclear deal during his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
Trump called for the world to confront Iran, and painted a picture of the “reckless regime” whose chief exports he described as “violence, bloodshed, and chaos.”
“The longest suffering victims of Iran’s leaders are, in fact, its own people,” Trump said. “Rather than use its resources to improve Iranian lives, its oil profits go to fund Hezbollah and other terrorists that kill innocent Muslims and attack their peaceful Arab and Israeli neighbors.”
Trump specifically condemned Iran for “undermining peace” in the Middle East by sending support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
With widespread speculation as to whether the Trump administration would keep the Iran nuclear deal, which the Obama administration entered into, the president called the agreement an “embarrassment” and spoke out strongly against it.
“We cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program,” Trump said.
“The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” Trump said. “Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it, believe me.”
Trump called on Iran to free Americans and other foreigners being “unjustly detained” by the Iranian government, and said the Iranian regime is more frightened by its citizens than almost anything else in the world. Trump identified the “vast military power of the United States” as the one exception.
“This [the power of the people] is what causes the regime to restrict Internet access, tear down satellite dishes, shoot unarmed student protesters, and imprison political reformers,” Trump said. “Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the people will face a choice. Will they continue down the path of poverty, bloodshed, and terror? Or will the Iranian people return to the nation’s proud roots as a center of civilization, culture and wealth where their people can be healthy and prosperous once again?”
A-list actor Matthew McConaughey sent a sobering message to celebrities and the cultural elites protesting Donald Trump’s election and his new administration: get over it.
Fellow Texan Got It Right, Damit!
During an interview with ChannelFi to promote his new film, Gold, McConaughey was asked if he thinks Hollywood had given Trump a chance to govern.
“Well, they don’t have a choice now. He’s our president,” the Oscar winner said. “And, it’s very dynamic and as divisive of an Inauguration and time as we’ve had. At the same time, it’s time for us to embrace and shake hands with this fact. And be constructive with him over the next four years.”
Even if you have strong disagreements with Trump, McConaughey says, it’s worth waiting to see what he actually does in his first term in office.
“So anyone, even those who may strongly disagree with his principles or things he’s said and done — and that’s another thing, we’ll see what he does compares to what he has said — no matter how much you even disagreed along the way, it’s time to think about how constructive can you be,” he said.
Some of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars have spent months protesting Trump’s stunning Election Night victory over Hillary Clinton, and have caused outrage over his Cabinet appointments, his executive orders, and even his pick for the Supreme Court.
Celebrities have even gone so far as to launch personal attacks against Trump’s 10-year-old son.
But McConaughey says it’s past time Trump’s detractors stop protesting Trump for the sake of protesting.
“‘Cause he’s our president for the next four years, at least,” McConaughey said, “the President of the United States.”
McConaughey’s new thriller Gold, in which he plays a prospector in Indonesia, opened in theaters on Jan. 27 and is directed by Stephen Gaghan.
Iraq Votes to Ban Americans in Response to Trump’s Immigration Order
We’re not welcome now?
Iraq’s lawmakers have voted in favor of a reciprocal travel ban on U.S. citizens if President Donald Trump’s administration does not rescind its decision to prohibit the entry of Iraqis.
When Barack Obama blocked Iraqi refugees from entering the United States for six months in 2011, the Baghdad-based parliament took no action.
On Monday, Iraqi lawmakers voted to call on the Shiite-led Baghdad government to “respond in kind to the American decision in the event that the American side does not to withdraw its decision,” reports Agence France-Presse (AFP), citing Iraqi member of parliament (MP) Hakim al-Zamili, who quoted the text of the decision that was read during the parliamentary session.
“Parliament voted by majority on calling on the Iraqi government and the foreign ministry to respond in kind,” declared MP Zamili.
Iraqi MP Sadiq al-Laban reportedly confirmed that “the vote was for a call on the government” to enact a reciprocal ban.
Al Jazeera points out, “The [Iraqi parliament] vote on Monday is not thought to be binding on the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, whose government has made no official comment on the order.”
Haider’s foreign ministry has urged the Trump administration to review the ban.
The recent vote by Iraqi lawmakers came in response to President Trump’s executive orderto ban citizens traveling on passports from seven Muslim-majority nations — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen — from entering the United States for at least 90 days in an effort to strengthen America’s refugee vetting process.
“Importantly, however, Lawful Permanent Residents of the United States [green card holders]… will be allowed to board U.S. bound aircraft and will be assessed for exceptions at arrival ports of entry, as appropriate. The entry of these individuals, subject to national security checks, is in the national interest,” notes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in explaining the executive order, which President Trump signed on Friday.
The executive order also allows the U.S. government to “prioritize refugee claims” from members of persecuted religious minorities in the predominantly Muslim countries covered under the ban, such as Christians and Yazidis.
In 2011, then-President Obama instituted a similar ban, although it is unclear if it included the religious minority exception.
There were neither protests nor backlash from the mainstream media in response to Obama’s measure.
A 2013 article by ABC News, titled “Exclusive: US May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees,” revealed:
As a result of the Kentucky case, the [Obama] State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News — even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets. One Iraqi who had aided American troops was assassinated before his refugee application could be processed, because of the immigration delays, two U.S. officials said. In 2011, fewer than 10,000 Iraqis were resettled as refugees in the U.S., half the number from the year before, State Department statistics show.
The Kentucky case refers to the discovery in 2009 of two al-Qaeda Iraqi terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green who ultimately admitted in court that they had attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
One of those terrorists, Waad Ramadan Alwan, entered the United States through Syria.
Moreover, the seven nations covered by the order, including Iraq, had been previously identified as “countries of concern” under the Obama administration.
“These seven countries were designated by Congress and the Obama Administration as posing a significant enough security risk to warrant additional scrutiny in the visa waiver context,” notes DHS.
Unlike President Trump, Obama failed to announce his temporary ban on Iraqi refugees, which the leftist mainstream media has interpreted as meaning that it was not the former president’s policy to temporarily halt the entry of Iraqi refugees because he never took ownership of the measure.
The recent Iraqi parliament vote echoes calls from Iran for a reciprocal travel ban on American citizens.
According to the Independent, the Iran-backed Shiite militia coalition dubbed the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), also known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and Hashd al-Shaabi, has also been critical of Trump’s national security policy, “calling for a ban on issuing visas to Americans visiting the country and for those already in Iraq to be expelled.”
Shiite powerhouse Iran has also vowed to implement legal, political, and reciprocal measures in response to the U.S. policy, announced the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Affairs Ministry on Saturday.
The Shiite-led Baghdad government is close to Iran.
“We are against this stance from the new administration,” said Iraqi MP Laban, referring to Trump’s national security order, adding, “We hope that the American administration will rethink… this decision.”
Rasmussen: President Trump’s Approval Index Booms Up Since Inauguration
While the media may be continuing their attacks on him, President Donald Trump is off to a strong start with the American people, according to his approval rating index from Rasmussen Reports.
In the four days since his inauguration on Jan. 20, President Trump’s approval index has boomed upward a whopping seven points. Back on January 20—Inauguration Day—Trump’s approval index was plus two points. Now, four days later, it’s plus nine points—after being plus four points on Monday.
At this time, 42 percent of the nation strongly approves of what President Trump is doing, while only 33 percent strongly disapprove—and overall, 57 percent approve of the president, while just 43 percent disapprove.
Trump’s approval rating boom comes after a series of executive actions including one that killed the highly unpopular multinational Pacific Rim trade deal the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), one that reinstated the Mexico City policy of international organizations that receive federal funding being prevented from conducting abortions, and a hiring freeze on federal workers except for in the military.
All of that is in addition to other executive actions targeting the individual mandate in Obamacare and another that puts a freeze on new federal regulations—as well as new ones opening up the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline, along with plans to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Trump’s efforts have earned him early crucial praise from labor union leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka and the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa.
