Attorney General William Barr at the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention.

By Janita Kan | The Epoch Times | November 16, 2019

Barr Says Democrats, Courts Are Engaged in Efforts to Cripple Presidential Power

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said on Friday that the president’s ability to act in areas he has the power is being undermined by Congress and the courts, saying that they were engaging in efforts to “sabotage” the president’s administration.

During a speech at an annual gathering of conservative lawyers on Friday, Barr defended presidential power and accused opponents of President Donald Trump of “waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance” against him that involves the “systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law.”

He said since Trump was elected in 2016, his opponents had launched a “resistance” which has “rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver” in an effort to “sabotage the functioning of the executive branch and his administration.”

Barr pointed to Congress saying that the Democrat lawmakers are abdicating their role as legislators and engaging in actions that are effectively blocking the functions of the executive branch.

He said Democrats are pursuing multiple investigations that are designed to “incapacitate the executive branch” and are drowning the executive branch with oversight demands for information.

“Now, I do not deny that Congress has some implied authority to conduct oversight as an incident to its legislative power,” Barr said during his speech to the Federalist Society. “But the sheer volume of what we see today, the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations to an avalanche of subpoenas is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch.”

He also accused Senate Democrats of abusing the advice and consent process by systematically opposing and drawing out the approval process of Trump’s appointees, which the attorney general says then prevents the president from being able to build his government.

“That is precisely what the Senate Minority has done from President Trump’s very first day in office,” he said. “As of September of this year, the Senate has been forced to invoke cloture on 236 Trump nominees, each of those representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay the inevitable confirmation.”

“It is reasonable to wonder whether a future president will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the Senate.”

The attorney general was also critical of judges for encroaching on executive responsibilities and usurping its power, which has substantially undercut the functioning of the presidency.

He said the court has done it a number of ways by appointing itself as the arbiter in disputes between Congress and the executive, something he believes the framers of the Constitution did not intend, as well as expanding the scope and intensity of judicial review that allows them to “substitute their judgment for the president’s.”

He used the example of travel bans, saying that the courts placed a hold on the policy after second-guessing the president’s motive for the ban.

“Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an executive official’s real motive often after ordering invasive discovery into the executive branch’s privilege decision-making process, have no more foundation in law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge’s real motive and issuing a decision,” he said.

The president, Barr said, had “certainly thrown out the traditional beltway playbook and punctilio” but he had been upfront with what he was going to do and people still “decided they wanted him to serve as president.”

Barr, who has been repeatedly criticized for defending Trump, said he was actually worried about the presidency and the “steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority.”

“I’m concerned that the deck has become stacked against the executive,” he said.

Read the original article

The Real Story of the Impeachment Madness

By: Bill O’ReillyOctober 16, 2019 | NewsmaxTV | http://www.bor.com

Watch Full Video

Hey Bill O’Reilly here, this is the Talking Points Memo for Newsmax. The real story of the impeachment madness.

So Democrats believe that President Trump should not be president. That’s where we start. So for two years we had the Russian collusion situation and then the special counsel, Robert Mueller after spending 30 million dollars of taxpayer money came back and said, you know there really wasn’t any collusion. Obstruction of justice, I don’t know and on and on. It was a big nothing.

So Americans said, well all right let’s move ahead, President Trump has two more years but the zealots, the anti Trump forces said no way and now they’re trying to impeach the president over a phone call he made to the Ukrainian president. I’m not going to get into that because if you’re following the news, you know it’s just insane. All right.

But the real reason this is happening is about the U.S. Justice Department and a man named John Durham. That’s why impeachment is happening. So listen up. Attorney General William Barr appointed Mr. Durham, who is a respected U.S. attorney from Connecticut to investigate the origins and alleged crimes involved by federal agencies in the Russia collusion investigation. Mueller did not do that.

So Mr. Durham is now looking into FBI,CIA, State Department and Department of Defense, those four. The word is that John Durham is accumulating information at a rapid rate. The information says elements within the federal government were determined to ruin the Trump presidency by selective leaks to the press about stuff that may or may not be true.

Now, you know the head of the FBI, James Comey was fired, the assistant head of the FBI McCabe was fired and a whole bunch of other people are suspect. So if Durham comes back and he has the power to indict, so we think there’s a grand jury already in place. We don’t know for sure. This is ultra ultra secret.

But if Durham comes back with indictments against Comey, McCabe, people in the CIA, people in the State Department under Barack Obama, Department of Defense. If he says they did illegal things, the government’s gonna prosecute them. That’ll take a while and it’ll overlap the presidential election. President Trump can rightly say the government of the United States has indicted former Obama administration officials for trying to upend his administration and his campaign.

Donald Trump can make that a huge campaign theme.

So the anti Trump forces in the media and the Democratic Party cannot allow that to happen without something to balance it. Therefore, you have impeachment. Now I’ve said from the very beginning there’s no crime here. There’s no reason that a sitting president, no matter who he was or she was would be removed for trying to dig up dirt on a political opponent.

It’s not going to happen. Everybody tries to dig up dirt on their opponents. Now you don’t inject a foreign government but President Trump can rightly say, I was looking into corruption attached to the Ukrainian government that influenced the United States. And we know Joe Biden, we know that story.

So there is a legitimacy to the president’s position. I can’t read his mind. I don’t know what his intent was, but certainly what he says his intent was has to be taken seriously.

Now, the other thing about this impeachment thing this week is that all of the testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee is secret. The reason the Democrats are doing that, is they can leak little parts of the testimony out to the press to make it look like President Trump is being hammered in those hearings, when that might not be true.

You’re not supposed to leak and that’s what Durham is investigating but the congresspeople leak all the time. It’s different by the way, with a congressional leak than a FBI CIA leak. It is a different thing. Although you can get trouble if your congressperson leaking in the Ethics Committee, whatever that is.

So summing up, impeachment is being used to blunt the State Department investigation into massive corruption. Trying to undermine the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency. That will be the big story of 2020, in addition to the presidential race and it could help President Trump very much.

That’s the Talking Points Memo. I’m Bill O’Reilly for Newsmax. We’ll see you soon.

The Madness of Progressive Projection

By Victor Davis Hanson | AMERICAN Greatness | Oct. 6, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/06/the-madness-of-progressive-projection/

The only Trump “crime” was in his winning an election he was not supposed to win. So after the election, prior illegal acts were redefined as legal, and legal ones as illegal.

Strangest among all the many melodramas of the last two weeks were the blaring headlines that President Trump had dared to talk with the Australian Prime Minister—and referenced the role of foreign governments and in particular Australia in U.S. electoral politics in 2016.

Given the hue and cry of Democrats in the last three years, they should have been delighted that the president was peremptorily warning foreign nations to cease to currying favor with presidential candidates and asking them to hand over what information, if any, they had of past “collusion.” In fact, they were outraged and once again returned to “collusion” charges, as if Trump were subverting the 2020 election.

I Accuse You of Doing What I Did!

Unfortunately, projection is now an encompassing explanation for almost everything the Left alleges. After all, the Australian government’s own connection with U.S. elections is only on the American political radar because in 2016 its former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who had steered a large Australian donation to the Clinton Foundation, may have colluded with intelligence agencies to entrap George Papadopoulos, a minor and transient Trump campaign employee, to find dirt on the Trump campaign. Bringing up Australia is like the Left leaving a scented trail to its own past miscreant behavior.

Take the Ukraine. It would be hard for any Democrat politico to argue that Ukraine was not involved in 2016 to feed faux-charges of “collusion” to Hillary Clinton—a fact even the liberal press once repeatedly conceded. Ukrainians were only too happy to meet and consult with U.S. intelligence officials when they assumed Hillary Clinton was to be elected, and their yeoman service in frying the sure loser Trump would somehow be appreciated and awarded.

When Joe Biden makes the accusation that Trump was colluding with the new Ukrainian president to reopen investigation of the Biden influence-peddling conglomerate, naturally we knew that Ukraine in general had been leveraged in the past to help the Clinton campaign, and by Biden himself in particular to enrich his own son. Poor contorted Ukraine now backpedals as fast as it can—from trying to help destroy Trump in 2016 to suggesting in 2019 that it regrets having done so. And soon it will hedge its cooperation in 2020—unsure whether the Democrat colluders of 2016 will return to power and it can expect to be punished for renouncing them in 2019.


In surreal fashion, every charge that Biden levels against Trump’s supposed thought crimes amounts to more evidence of his own real wrongdoing in using threats to cut off aid to a foreign nation in exchange for dropping investigation of his wayward son. The latter’s only apparent qualifications for employment are shameless readiness to play on his father’s position.

Projection as a Leftist symptom came to the fore during the Mueller investigation when Mueller’s dream team of progressive attorneys began pressuring a number of minor Trump former campaign officials, and eventually his national security advisor, on trumped up charges—from leaking sensitive documents, to obstruction of justice, to lying to federal officials, to collusion (whatever that non-legal term denotes) with foreign governments and in particular Russia. In each case, Mueller ended up hunting down possible misdemeanors while ignoring likely felonies.

Leaking? By James Comey’s own admissions he had leaked confidential presidential memos he composed for the expressed purpose of later using them as insurance policies against Trump, some of which material was classified as secret.

As far as lying to federal officials, Mueller simply ignored that Andrew McCabe was under federal referrals for lying to investigators about his own strategic leaking of FBI investigatory material. Both McCabe and Comey likely lied to a FISA court by not apprising judges that their prime evidence, the Steele dossier, was not verified, its foreign author severed from FBI contractual employment, and many of its assertions known to be demonstrably untrue.

The Left has accused critics of Biden of indulging in supposition and hearsay and using unnamed sources—despite the fired Ukrainian prosecutor’s insistence that he was dismissed due to Biden’s interference and demands to end the investigation into the likely criminality of Biden’s own son Hunter. Yet, the so-called “whistleblower” complaint admittedly is without any firsthand evidence, and rests entirely on two nothings—second and third-hand information the complainant claims he heard, and sources within the White House for such rumors that remain anonymous, in other words accusers of the president who refuse to identify themselves.


In truth, the “whistleblower” is no such thing. He or she is a disgruntled and partisan intelligence bureaucrat, who violated the whistleblower statutes by first going to Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D.-Calif.) staff on the House Intelligence Committee to get help in translating his narrative into Mueller/Steele dossier legalese, and in strategizing the timing of his accusations. Expect a series of John Brennan-surrogate intelligence agency whistleblowers to follow once it is established that now hearsay is admissible and there is no downside to violating the statutes by first conferring with Adam Schiff’s staff.

Conflict of What?

Conflict of Interest? We are hearing allegations that Attorney General Barr cannot investigate any of the whistleblower’s accusations because he is mentioned as interested in learning from the Ukraine any information available concerning 2016 interference into the U.S. election—this coming at a time when a nondescript, mostly unethical and quite disturbed Hunter Biden parlayed his ignorance about foreign affairs, the oil business, and Ukraine into a lucrative “consultantship,” predicated on the wink and nod reality that his dad, who knew quite well what his heretofore miscreant son had landed upon, was overseeing U.S.-Ukrainian aid.

But conflict of interest is in fact the entire basis of the last three years of endless investigations of the 2016 election and purported Trump “collusion.” Do we remember the contortions taken by Andrew McCabe to ignore the fact that he was “investigating” Hillary Clinton emails, shortly after Clinton-related funds were given to his own wife, a candidate for the state legislature in Virginia?

A blatant conflict of interest was the intertwine of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, two of Mueller’s investigators and previously at the nexus of investigating almost every alleged wrongdoing of Trump. Neither disclosed that they were conducting FBI business as supposed independent investigators while conducting an affair.

Neither disclosed that they were investigating supposed Trump crimes while communicating daily their disgust for Trump, their disdain for his supporters, and their boasts about stopping the Trump candidacy and later his presidency. Neither disclosed why and when they were fired from the Mueller team, perhaps in deference to Robert Mueller’s unethical gambit of staggering their departures, claiming each was merely “reassigned,” and not disclosing their absences until weeks after they left.

Their conflicts of interest turned to farce when we learned that the two helped reclassify their former boss James Comey’s secret memos of presidential conversations as non-felonious “confidential”—a sort of replay of Strzok’s earlier rewording of the Comey assessment of the Clinton email scandal to ensure she would not be charged with a felony.

The locus classicus of conflict of interest was the Loretta Lynch/James Comey investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton. Comey has admitted he handled the Clinton examination in expectation she would win the presidency (and thus become his new boss). Lynch has confessed (but only after being caught by the media) that she met secretly with Bill Clinton at a time when the Justice Department was supposedly investigating his wife. We are asked to believe that their respective private jets actually bumped into each other on the Phoenix tarmac (someone should count the nation’s average daily landings of private jets and compute the possibility of such a happenstance meeting) and that they suddenly decided to have a chat about their grandchildren and other mutual family gossip.

The Collusion Boomerang

Collusion? Mueller found no proof that Trump colluded with Russian officials. But to come to such a conclusion, by needs he had to ignore all the evidence leading to an open and shut case, that Hillary Clinton used three firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS opposition research team—to hide her payments to British national Christopher Steele, an admitted Trump-hater, who hired Russian fabricators to find dirt on Trump, and then created a mostly mythical “dossier” on Clinton’s opponent.

In turn, the dossier was seeded among fellow traveler Trump haters in the DOJ, FBI, DNI, and CIA like Bruce Ohr, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. These partisan allies of the Democrats working in government made sure that it was leaked to the media before the 2016 election.

Obstruction? Trump was not referred for wrongdoing on obstruction, because even the partisan Mueller team believed that they could never indict him after his tenure was over, given the paucity of actionable evidence. After all, it is hard to obstruct justice if a crime did not take place. But given that a FISA court was deluded, classified documents leaked, government officials caught lying, and foreign governments found to have compiled dirt on a presidential candidate, and no one yet has been charged—the question arises, “Why?”

Who made the decision to quash the investigation of Hillary Clinton after she destroyed over 30,000 emails under subpoena? Who excused Obama officials after they knowingly misled federal FISA court justices? Who leaked information about a surveilled phone call between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador? Who decided that it was acceptable for Samantha Power to request over 260 times the unmasking of names of American citizens swept up in government surveillance, many of which were illegally leaked to the press and most of which Power denied requesting and alleged others had used her name to do so? Somewhere, somehow there was a great deal of obstruction and distortion of justice that so far has prevented the pursuit of these criminal acts.

Destruction of evidence? House Democrats are demanding that the supposed transcript of the Trump phone call to the Ukrainian president be kept safe, as if it might “disappear.” This in the aftermath of revelations that Hillary Clinton bleach-bitted over 30,000 of her emails under subpoena, and had her mobile devices crushed. This in the aftermath of the Mueller teams and FBI sheepishly conceding that hundreds of text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok simply “disappeared.” This in the aftermath of the hard drives of the supposed hacked DNC computer never being turned over to the FBI but instead to the Ukrainian connected Crowdstrike, and whose current whereabouts are not really known to this day.

Recently David Gergen warned that if the “whistleblower” were injured, it would be Trump’s fault. I am assuming Gergen knows that three presidential candidates have boasted of their desires to beat up the president or see him disappear for good in an elevator. Rhetorically killing the president is a favorite pastime of Hollywood celebrities. Does Gergen remember the fate of Rep. Steve Scalise (R.-La.) and the attempted take-out of the many Republican congressional leadership by an unhinged Bernie Sanders zealot? Or the threats issued by Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.) to hound and harass Trump officials throughout their daily routines?

The Nature of Projection

A cynic might conclude that the last past wasted three years were really not about Trump at all. He was entirely irrelevant, and was referenced largely as a means to preempt investigation of massive Obama-era illegality in 2016, which centered on warping the law to destroy his supposed widely detestable and dangerous campaign that threatened Democratic control of the government. As a result, in almost every instance of alleged Trump wrongdoing the accusers only bring attention to themselves and their own actual wrongdoing.

What is behind this strange collective psychological condition of projecting one’s own guilt on to another? In part, out of embarrassment that Hillary Clinton blew an election despite having the edge in money, the media, and the popular culture, Trump was recalibrated as a cheater. Otherwise it was impossible to accept that the Manhattan wheeler-dealer had outsmarted, out-campaigned, and out-hustled the progressives’ best and brightest—and worse yet might have every intention of keeping his campaign promises to undo the entire Obama agenda.

For tens of thousands of government careerists, by and large political partisans of the Democrats, using any means necessary was justified by the supposedly noble ends of ending the coarse Trump. Groupthink ensued that led to mass hysteria, as the fantasies needed to invoke the 25th Amendment, the Logan Act, and the emoluments clause, meant that their own “collusion” and “obstruction” simply no longer mattered. One would have thought Trump got caught on a hot mic offering a quid pro quo to Vladimir Putin or monitoring the communications of Associated Press reporters.

Instead the zeal and loudness with which one advanced Trump collusion narratives brought both careerist and psychological rewards. The old scandals like Uranium One, the shenanigans around the Iran Deal, the hot mic Obama quid pro quos, and the Hillary email fix were shrugged off, as proof of progressive zeal put to a good cause. To raise the question of  unequal application of the law is now dismissed as “whataboutism.”

In sum, had Trump just lost the election, the illegal use of the intelligence agencies by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s administration would have been an insider topic of pride. A now defeated and humiliated Trump would never have been charged with collusion and obstruction during the 2016 campaign. Instead, he would be written off a naïf who never understood leftwing warnings analogous to Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D.-N.Y.) later admonition, that Trump was being “really dumb,” given that, “You take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Or Samantha Power’s postelection smirk, “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

The only Trump “crime” was in his winning an election he was not supposed to win, which then “pissed” off the wrong people and of course amounted to acting “dumb” with the intelligence agencies. So after the election, prior illegal acts were redefined as legal, and legal ones as illegal.

https://amgreatness.com/author/victor-davis-hanson/

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California…

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Trump slams ‘thoroughly disgraced’ Comey over inspector general findings

Trump slams ‘thoroughly disgraced’ Comey over inspector general findings

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-rip-comey-release-of-inspector-general-report

Explore the Fox News apps that are right for you at http://www.foxnews.com/apps-products/index.html.

August 29, 2019 | Andrew O’Rilly | Fox News

DOJ Inspector General says Comey violated policies with memos documenting private conversations with Trump

President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress slammed former FBI director James Comey on Thursday following the release of a highly anticipated report by the Justice Department’s inspector general on his handling of memos documenting private conversations with the president.

“Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!” Trump tweeted.

Focus in Spygate Scandal Shifts to CIA, Former Director Brennan

The Epoch Times | INVESTIGATION | Jeff Carlson

August 22-28, 2019 | USA Edition

View full article

More than 2 1/2 years after President Donald Trump assumed office, focus on actions taken during the 2016 presidential campaign is starting to shift toward the CIA and its former director, John Brennan.

While some observers, including this publication, have pointed out for more than a year that Brennan appears to have played a key role in the scandal that’s become known as Spygate, actions taken by Brennan and the CIA now appear to have become a central focus of investigators.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz was “doing a very in-depth dive about the FISA warrant application” and “the behavior regarding the counterintelligence operation.”

Graham noted that he believed Horowitz’s report would be com ing out in “weeks—not days, not months” and would prove to be “ugly and damning regarding the Department of Justice’s handling of the Russian probe.” Graham noted that the IG’s report has been delayed because “every time you turn around, you find something new.”

Graham said he wants the IG’s report to be as declassified as possible in order for the “American public to hear the story.”

Graham said that prosecutor John Durham “will be looking at criminality, did somebody violate the law,” while Horowitz “will be telling us about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what should be done internally.” He went so far as to mention exploring a possible restructuring of the Department of Justice.

Toward the end of the segment, Bartiromo asked Graham: “Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald Trump into Russia meddling?”

Graham responded: “You know, I really am very curious about the role the CIA played here. We know that the FISA warrant application was based on a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was biased against Trump, that was unverified. That’s one problem. But this whole intelligence operation— what role did the CIA play?”

Graham then went a step further, asking: “Who knew about this in the White House? Here’s a question: Was President Obama briefed on the fact that they were opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign? I’d like to know that.”

Bartiromo, who noted that Brennan was running the CIA at that time and would have likely provided the Obama briefing, asked Graham if he was going to call Brennan to testify before Congress. Graham responded somewhat cryptically, saying only, “We’ll see.”

Brennan’s Role

Brennan appears to have played a key role in establishing the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign—including making repeated use of questionable foreign intelligence.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper personally confirmed foreign intelligence involvement during congressional testimony in May 2017: Sen. Dianne Feinstein: “Over the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. Is this accurate?”

James Clapper: “Yes, it is, and it’s also quite sensitive. The specifics are quite sensitive.”

Brennan has testified to Congress that any information, specifically “anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the bureau [FBI].” Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped establish the FBI investigation: “I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred.”

Focus on Intelligence Role Prior to FBI Probe

John Solomon of The Hill, who has extensively covered the Spygate scandal, told Bartiromo in an interview that he was hearing that “John Durham and Bill Barr are focused on the part before the FBI officially got started on July 31, 2016, the period of March to July, and whether intelligence assets—Western, private, or U.S.—were deployed in an earlier effort to start probing the Trump campaign and its Russia ties—maybe lay the breadcrumb trail of evidence that Christopher Steele then collected up and gave to the FBI.”

Solomon noted that when Attorney General Barr said, “I believe there was political surveillance going on,” this was likely what he was referring to.

This focus on the spring of 2016 is particularly interesting given that during this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of reverse targeting on members of the Trump campaign. Reverse targeting refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen. During an Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Brennan said: “We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA’s foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there—so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here.”

As this foreign intelligence—unofficial in nature and outside of traditional channels— was gathered on members of the Trump campaign, Brennan began his process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director helped push the FBI toward establishing a formal counterintelligence investigation.

Role of Joseph Mifsud

Solomon also discussed the role of Joseph Mifsud, the individual who told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March 2016 that Russia had Hillary Clinton emails. Solomon noted that he had recently interviewed Stefan Roe, Mifsud’s lawyer, who told him that Mifsud “had long worked with Western intelligence” and that he was “asked to connect George Papadopoulos to Russia— meaning it was an operation, some form of an intelligence operation.”

As Solomon noted, this would mean that the “flashpoint that started the whole investigation was, in fact, manufactured from the beginning.” Solomon also noted that “both John Durham and two different committees in Congress have recently reached out to get this evidence from the lawyer, which includes an audiotaped deposition that Mr. Mifsud gave his lawyer before he went into hiding.”

Bartiromo closed by asking Solomon the same question she put to Graham, “Who do you think is the mastermind?” Solomon responded in a similar fashion to Graham, noting: “I think the CIA. We have to take a closer look at them. We’re starting to see some sign of it.”

Role of UK Intelligence

Luke Harding, a journalist for The Guardian, had previously reported on the early involvement of UK intelligence and their interaction with the U.S. intelligence community, noting that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was engaged in collecting information on the Trump campaign and transmitting it to the United States beginning in late 2015: “In late 2015, the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ was carrying out standard ‘collection’ against Moscow targets. … The intelligence was handed to the U.S. as part of a routine sharing of information,” Harding wrote in an article on Nov. 15, 2017.

Additionally, in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then-head of GCHQ, traveled to Washington to personally meet with Brennan: “That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the U.S. to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at ‘director level,’ face-to-face between the two agency chiefs,” Harding reported.

Around the same time, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and government departments. Brennan appeared to describe the task force formation during the Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC’s Maddow: Maddow: “So, it’s an intelligence-sharing operation between …”

Brennan: “Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected.”

FBI’s ‘Mid-Year Exam’ Team Shifts to Trump Probe

By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, had decided to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she wouldn’t be charged.

In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the department required the FBI to establish evidence of intent—even though the gross negligence statute explicitly doesn’t require that.

It was at this same time that Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos had his April 26, 2016, meeting with Mifsud, followed a few weeks later with his ill-fated meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in

Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped establish the

FBI investigation.

Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald

Trump into Russia meddling?

Maria Bartiromo, journalist

Then-President Barack Obama (L) nominates chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan (R) to be CIA director during an event in the East Room at the White House on Jan. 7, 2013.

Copyright (c) 2019 The Epoch Times Edition Aug.22, 2019

Mi conclusión después de Muller

R Sánchez R | Julio 24, 2019 | Edinburg, Tx

Realmente yo pensé que Robert Muller nos daría una cátedra de profesionalismo en la procuración de justicia. Realmente supuse que escucharlo sería una experiencia. Independientemente de lo que dijo, yo me equivoque, no solo no nos enseno nada, el fue una decepción total.

La impresión que nos queda es:

  • El súper héroe(según J Comey) no llego preparado.
  • Estoy seguro que el 90% de los que lo vieron concluyen que no escribió ni ha leído el “reporte Muller”.
  • Muller ya no quiere saber nada del asunto.
  • Ademas, físicamente ya esta anciano, no puede. Pero bueno la lana que le dieron era muy buena.

Resulta que el sicario, Andrew Weissman, es el que realmente llevo a cabo la investigación y preparo todo el reporte.

Yo me siento muy contento de volver a ver que se les devuelve a los demócratas su mala intención.

Mi predicción, para las elecciones 2020, es de que si los demócratas cooperaran con el esfuerzo de Trump para sacar adelante todas las broncas que hay, ganarían mas posiciones en 2020 de las que finalmente van a ganar.

Ya veremos, tratare de incluir marco de referencia para medir si tengo razón.

R Sánchez R

.

CNN “I am not going to respond to that”

N

Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam

by Staff Report June 24, 2019 in News Posts / Press Releases / Top Stories / Veritas Leaks / Tech / Google

  • Insider: Google “is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”
  • Google Head of Responsible Innovation Says Elizabeth Warren “misguided” on “breaking up Google”
  • Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
  • Insider Says PragerU And Dave Rubin Content Suppressed, Targeted As “Right-Wing”
  • LEAKED Documents Highlight “Machine Learning Fairness” and Google’s Practices to Make Search Results “fair and equitable”
  • Document Appear to Show “Editorial” Policies That Determine How Google Publishes News

(New York City) — Project Veritas has released a new report on Google which includes undercover video of a Senior Google Executive, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider.  The report appears to show Google’s plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections and “prevent” the next “Trump situation.”

The report includes undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai saying:

“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.”

Jen Gennal, Head of Responsible Innovation, Google.

Said Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe:

“This is the third tech insider who has bravely stepped forward to expose the secrets of Silicon Valley.  These new documents, supported by undercover video, raise questions of Google’s neutrality and the role they see themselves fulfilling in the 2020 elections.

Jen Gennai is the head of “Responsible Innovation” for Google, a sector that monitors and evaluates the responsible implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.  In the video, Gennai says Google has been working diligently to “prevent” the results of the 2016 election from repeating in 2020:

“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.”

“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”

Google: Artificial Intelligence Is For A “fair and equitable” State

According to the insider, Machine Learning Fairness is one of the many tools Google uses to promote a political agenda.  Documents leaked by a Google informant elaborate on Machine Learning Fairness and the “algorithmic unfairness” that AI product intervention aims to solve:

The insider showed Google search examples that show Machine Learning Fairness in action.

“The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it.” – Jen Gennai, Head Of Responsible Innovation, Google

The Google insider explained the impact of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Fairness:

“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda.”

Determining credible news and an editorial agenda. . .

Additional leaked documents detail how Google defines and prioritizes content from different news publishers and how its products feature that content.  One document, called the “Fake News-letter” explains Google’s goal to have a “single point of truth” across their products.

Another document received by Project Veritas explains the “News Ecosystem” which mentions “editorial guidelines” that appear to be determined and administered internally by Google.  These guidelines control how content is distributed and displayed on their site.

The leaked documents appear to show that Google makes news decisions about what news they promote and distribute on their site.

Comments made by Gennai raise similar questions.  In a conversation with Veritas journalists, Gennai explains that “conservative sources” and “credible sources” don’t always coincide according to Google’s editorial practices.

“We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources …”

Jen Gennai

The insider shed additional light on how YouTube demotes content from influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool:

“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”

Whisleblower, insider
Internal Google Document: “People Like Us Are Programmed”

An additional document Project Veritas obtained, titled “Fair is Not the Default” says “People (like us) are programmed” after the results of machine learning fairness.  The document describes how “unconscious bias” and algorithms interact.

Veritas is the “Only Way”

Said the insider:

“The reason why I came to Project Veritas is that you’re the only one I trust to be able to be a real investigative journalist.  Investigative journalist is a dead career option, but somehow, you’ve been able to make it work.  And because of that I came to Project Veritas because I knew that this was the only way that this story would be able to get out to the public.”

“I mean, this is a behemoth, this is a Goliath, I am but a David trying to say that the emperor has no clothes. And, um, being a small little ant I can be crushed, and I am aware of that. But, this is something that is bigger than me, this is something that needs to be said to the American public.”

Insider, whisleblower

Project Veritas intends to continue investigating abuses in big tech companies and encourages more Silicon Valley insiders to share their stories through their Be Brave campaign.

As of publishing, Google did not respond to Project Veritas’ request for comment.  Additional leaked Google documents can be viewed HERE.

Other insider investigations can be viewed here:

 (Big tech insiders can reach out to Project Veritas here to help expose similar newsworthy wrongdoing.)

Trump, All About Winning, Sees Losses in Court Pile Up

President Donald Trump pictured speaking to supporters at a March 2019 rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
https://www.propublica.org/article/president-donald-trump-losses-fred-barbash-washington-post-q-and-a

The drumbeat of defeats grew hard to ignore.

A federal judge struck down the Donald Trump administration’s plan to require some people to work for their Medicaid benefits. Another judge halted Trump’s plan to open Arctic waters to drilling. Yet another ordered an end to what critics said was the administration’s efforts to encourage an end run around the Affordable Care Act. All in the span of about a week.

I spent some time exploring whether I could create a more formal list only to discover that The Washington Post had basically done that.

Here’s how the article by Fred Barbash and Deanna Paul started:

Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.

In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance for shifting policy, including providing legitimate explanations supported by facts and, where required, public input.

Many of the cases are in early stages and subject to reversal. For example, the Supreme Court permitted a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from certain predominantly Muslim nations to take effect after lower-court judges blocked the travel ban as discriminatory.

But regardless of whether the administration ultimately prevails, the rulings so far paint a remarkable portrait of a government rushing to implement far-reaching changes in policy without regard for long-standing rules against arbitrary and capricious behavior.

It only got more startling.

Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

I decided to reach out to the reporters and hear how their project came together and what they made of it. It seemed all the more timely in that the Trump administration is likely looking at a challenging legal road as it seeks to enforce the president’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.

Barbash agreed to a modest Q&A:

What prompted you to undertake the review?

I watch the federal courts closely and became aware over time that the administration was being challenged in court on almost every important policy and deregulatory decision and that U.S. district court judges, who ordinarily defer to the government in most of these challenges, were no longer doing so. Deanna Paul and I began keeping track of the adverse rulings. I’ve been watching regulation and courts for a very long time, and the numbers of defeats were well beyond anything I had seen.

Was it hard to capture all the possible cases?

I’m not sure we did capture all the possible cases. The highly publicized cases, like DACA and the travel ban, are obvious. Nobody seems to keep some sort of master list of everything else. So Deanna and I began to track them down using a variety of sources. We wound up with the number 63, which even since we wrote the piece has increased to about 68.

What finding surprised you most?

As we interviewed experts on the subject, including former Justice Department officials who keep track of these things, we realized that these numbers were extraordinary. No one had an exact count comparing, say, the Obama administration’s record in court after two years with the Trump administration. But as we researched the subject, we found studies estimating the average “win rate” for administrations in the courts was somewhere around 70% whereas the Trump administration appeared to be losing at least 70% of the time.

Were you able to say the losses in nature or volume were different than prior administrations?

It would have taken six or seven months to get exact numbers. But every expert we talked to agreed that the volume was much higher for the Trump administration. The question then became why. As I wrote in an earlier story, when the losing streak started, it’s kind of like relationships. When one or two don’t work out, you can plausibly blame the other people. When the numbers mount, you have to think, maybe the problem is me, that is, maybe I’m doing something wrong.

Some experts you cited said the government had failed to do basic legal homework. You think that was really true? Seems kind of crazy.

It does seem crazy, but when you read the cases and the opinions of the judges, including Republican judges, that’s what they found in so many instances. It’s hard to tell whether the agencies knew that they were out on a limb with so many of these decisions and went ahead anyway, or didn’t have competent legal advice. Some experts, as the article said, thought that the failure of some agencies to “do their homework” as they suspended or delayed regulations, for example, showed that they were more interested in making announcements of deregulatory change than in the change itself, so the risk of a judge blocking their actions didn’t concern them all that much. Of course, the agency spokespeople deny that. But lawyers know, for example, that the law sometimes requires public notice and comment when making regulatory change. It’s not hard. It just slows things down. But if they fail to do it, it’s almost a certainty that a judge will object. These are not close calls. Now some of the cases, like the census case (the Commerce Department’s decision to add a citizenship question to the census), are much more complex than what I’m describing and raise deeper issues, which we continue to pursue.