Imagine if These Dirty MF's Had Had Today's Surveillance Technology at Their Disposal

commondreams |  After the FBI took to Twitter Monday with a message that allegedly aimed to honor "the life and work" of Martin Luther King Jr., a chorus of critics promptly urged the bureau to "sit this one out," pointing to its history of spying on King and trying to convince the civil rights leader to kill himself.

Each year on the national holiday dedicated to King, progressives criticize and work to counter the whitewashed public narrative of a man who, particularly in the years leading up to his April 1968 assassination, passionately condemned the "evils" of capitalism, militarism, and racism.

The FBI, during both the Obama and Trump administrations, has provoked a wave of criticism for posting shoutouts to King on social media, given the bureau's past treatment of him. Monday was no different.

Some critics expressed anger and disbelief. Rewire.News senior legal analyst Imani Gandy wrote in response to the FBI, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Journalist David Corn posed "a sincere question," asking: "Has the FBI ever apologized to King's family for wiretapping King, blackmailing him, and trying to get him to commit suicide?"

Crawford also noted that "the FBI's surveillance of black Americans isn't just history. [In 2018], we learned the FBI has been spying on black activists, labeling them 'Black Identity Extremists.' The feds also use powers obtained through national security laws like the Patriot Act to target people in the racially biased drug war."

"More disturbing: The FBI that spied on King and today classifies Black civil rights activists as 'extremists,'" Crockford continued, "is now partnering with Big Tech to amass unprecedented surveillance powers that history has taught us will be used to target communities of color, religious minorities, dissidents, and immigrants."

FBI director Christopher Wray testified before Congress in July 2019 that the bureau has stopped using the term "black identity extremism." However, some groups and individuals on Monday shared critiques of the FBI's current practices alongside denunciations of the bureau's past behavior.

The London-based advocacy group CAGE, which works to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror, tweeted Monday that the FBI still tries "to suppress dissent" and uses "dirty tactics that would make Edgar Hoover proud. But [is] happy now to co-opt MLK to try to cover up the above."

Patsy In Hand, Mueller Scripting Collusion Same Way He Scripted Terror Attacks...,

Not a fan of the FBI.  Outside the anti-Russian neoconservative deep state cabal and its flunky political #MeToo Dindu Amen Chorus that wants to take down Trump by any means necessary, what moderately well-informed, self-respecting Black Man American citizen could be? A few examples of the numerous instances in which the FBI has shown itself to be the tainted spawn of what ran down JEdgar Hoover's leg should make the case.

 Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch....,

Counterpunch |  There’s more about Mueller that people should know, too, like the fact that he was the architect of an FBI entrapment program that lured simple-minded gangbangers into terrorist scams and then threw them in the slammer for the rest of their lives.  Check out this blurb from an article at Electronic Intifada titled “The FBI’s penchant for “manufacturing terrorists”:

Does the FBI Organize Almost All Terror Plots in the U.S.?

RT | The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes. 

Fuggedabout CoIntelpro - I Want To Know About That Ubiquitous Bee Dee or "Black Desk"

slate | The FBI has a lead. A prominent religious leader and community advocate is in contact with a suspected sleeper agent of foreign radicals. The attorney general is briefed and personally approves wiretaps of his home and offices. The man was born in the United States, the son of a popular cleric. Even though he’s an American citizen, he’s placed on a watchlist to be summarily detained in the event of a national emergency. Of all similar suspects, the head of FBI domestic intelligence thinks he’s “the most dangerous,” at least “from the standpoint of … national security.”

Is this a lone wolf in league with foreign sponsors of terrorism? No: This was the life of Martin Luther King Jr. That FBI assessment was dated Aug. 30, 1963—two days after King told our country that he had a dream.

Comes now Robert Mueller performing and up-to-the-minute cover of all the FBI's greatest hits on none other than the sitting preznit of the U.S. 

theburningplatform |   Baby George’s carelessness about the exact dates and sequences of utterly irrelevant and inconsequential events is enough to get him time in one of Uncle Sam’s hospitality suites:

Defendant PAPADOPOULOS acknowledged that the professor had told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the forms of ‘thousands of emails,’ but stated multiple times that he learned the information prior to joining the Campaign. In truth and fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS learned he would be an advisor to the campaign in early March, and met the professor on or about March 14, 2016……

That’s all she wrote. This damning nugget appears on page  2 of the “Statement of Offense” and the balance of the 14 pages are a complete farcical joke. Papadopoulos’ failure to get anywhere with the Russians in his digging for dirt on Hillary would make for a good episode for the rascals of South Park, but that’s about all.

Anyone not involved in the campaign to reverse the 2106 election and remove the Donald from office should be forgiven for splitting a gut laughing when reading this hideous and utterly bogus case against Baby George Papadopoulos.

Every single player in the cast of characters — mostly unnamed by the prosecutors but already sussed out by the press — identified by Team Mueller had no ability to influence anything, let alone 165 million voters in a US election bombarded with upwards of $20 billion worth of reported and unreported campaign expenses, and the mainstream media’s free nonstop campaign in behalf of Hillary.

Yet the document and Monday mornings announcement are also cause for alarm. The “crime”, if there was any, was the $10 million that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the Trump Dossier. Those scurrilous documents were actually purchased for real money on the back streets of Moscow and do cite actual, live Russian MFA sources, not allegedly “MFA-connected” people, who apparently weren’t.

But, of course, that’s not what’s coming down. The self-righteous Mueller who turned a blind eye to the massive stench of corruption coming out of the Uranium One deal in 2009/2010 when he was FBI director has only one mission in mind: To mug the American electorate for its audacity in electing Donald Trump President, thereby disturbing the equanimity of the Deep State’s untethered rule.

The truth of the matter, however, is nearly the opposite. Prosecuting anyone — one either side of the partisan aisle — for marginal and tangential contacts with a Russian government purportedly wishing to influence the US election amounts to the height of hypocrisy.

What Will it Take to Bring Hillary Clinton to Justice?

RT |  Last July, the DOJ – under Clinton/Obama asset Loretta Lynch - decided not to prosecute anyone on Emailgate. And yet FBI director Comey – who nonetheless stressed Hillary’s “extreme carelessness” – turbo-charged his no-denial mode on another investigation, as in the FBI “sought to refocus the Clinton Foundation probe.” 

Soon we had Clinton Foundation FBI investigators trying to get access to all the emails turned over in the Emailgate investigation. The East District of New York refused it. Very important point; up to 2015, guess who was the US attorney at the East District; Clinton/Obama asset Lynch. 

Enter an extra layer of legalese. Less than two months ago, the Clinton Foundation FBI investigators discovered they could not have access to any Emailgate material that was connected to immunity agreements. 

But then, roughly a month ago, another FBI team captured the by now famous laptop shared by Huma and Wiener - using a warrant allowing only a probe on Weiner’s sexting of a 15-year-old girl. Subsequently they found Huma Abedin emails at all her accounts – from Humaabedin@yahoo.com to the crucial huma@clintonemail.com.  This meant not only that Huma was forwarding State Dept. emails to her private accounts, but also that Hillary was sending emails from the “secret” clintonemail.com to Huma at yahoo.com. 

No one knew for sure, but some of these emails might be duplicates of those the Clinton Foundation FBI investigators could not access because of the pesky immunity agreements. 

What’s established by now is that the metadata in the Huma/Wiener laptop was duly examined. Now picture both teams of FBI investigators – Clinton Foundation and pervert Wiener – comparing notes. And then they decide Huma’s emails are “relevant”.  

Key questions apply; and the most pressing is how the emails were deemed “relevant” if the investigators could only examine the metadata. What matters is that Comey certainly was made aware of the content of the emails – a potential game-changer. That’s why one of my sources insists his decision to go public came from above. 

The other key question now is whether the DOJ – via Kadzik? - will once again thwart another investigation, this time on the Clinton Foundation. Senior, serious FBI agents won’t take that – massive euphemism – kindly.

The FBI has been on the Clinton Foundation for over a year. Now, arguably, they are loaded with evidence – and they won’t quit. Winning the presidency now seems to be the least of Hillary Clinton’s Bonfire of Scandals’ problems.

FBI Was Too Busy Policing Politics To "Protect and Serve" Citizens...,

WaPo |  FBI officials declined to say what precise searches were used to try to identify the owner of the account or to possibly link it with other social media profiles. Cruz had two Instagram accounts that also contain his name: cruz_nikolas and nikolascruzmakarov.

A law enforcement official said the FBI will review the steps it took in responding to the tip to determine whether anything could have been done differently or if practices should be changed for the future.

A search of the public records database Nexis for people with the name “Nikolas Cruz” returns 22 results, three of which use different spellings. It was not immediately clear if the FBI attempted to contact any of those people.

Without more to go on, officials felt there wasn’t enough legal justification to issue a subpoena to YouTube for the underlying information about the “nikolas cruz” who had threatened a school shooting, a law enforcement official said.

Google, which owns YouTube, has a policy of not turning over user information to the government without a subpoena, search warrant or other court order forcing it to do so. Google representatives did not return messages seeking comment.

Limited resources

Hosko, the former FBI assistant director, said the FBI gets more than 100 threat reports each day, in addition to other reports of mental health and other issues. That leaves supervisors in the difficult position of deciding how many resources should be devoted to each case and for how long. Even in terrorism cases, Hosko said, the bureau sometimes has to leave suspects unmonitored because the FBI lacks personnel to follow each of them all the time.

“The FBI has terrorism subjects that they’re looking at — they’re not all under 24-7 surveillance, and if they prioritize that wrong, yes, something bad can happen,” Hosko said. “These are the hard resource-allocation decisions you’re making if you don’t have unlimited resources.”

Hosko said in most cases of possible threats, an early question supervisors ask is, “At the end of the day, would we even have a federal crime if we proved a person sent this or posted this?” And in Cruz’s case — where the comment is a not a specific threat — the answer was probably no, he said.

Bennight said that after agents interviewed him about the comment in September, he didn’t hear anything more from the FBI — until Wednesday. Agents called him to say that there had been an incident and that they wanted to follow up on his earlier complaint.

Bennight said he did not know how it was connected to the shooting in Florida until agents informed him that the comment he’d flagged had been posted under a username matching the name of suspected shooter Nikolas Cruz.

Get Sara Carter A Little Cosmetic Dentistry And Jeanine Piro's Timeslot On Fox

saracarter |  Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham hinted more than a week ago that more bombshell information regarding the FBI’s handling of its probe into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia was about to be public. He was right because it was Graham’s committee that discovered the information., 

In a bombshell letter released a letter Thursday night by Graham’s committee from Justice Department Attorney General William Barr revealed a declassified summary from the bureau indicating that former British spy Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source in his debunked dossier was believed to be a Russian spy. Not only was the sub source believed to be a spy but the FBI knew about it and had conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the individual. 

“In light of this newly declassified information, I will be sending the FISA Court the information provided to inform them how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information regarding the Carter Page warrant application was in 2016 and 2017,” said Graham. “A small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court.  I do not believe they represent the overwhelming majority of patriotic men and women who work at the Department of Justice and FBI.”

One of those individuals being investigated by Connecticut Prosecutor John Durham is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for lying to the Inspector General on multiple occasions. He is now in Durham’s crosshairs, along with multiple other former senior FBI officials that were involved in the investigation, according to a source with direct knowledge. 

McCabe, along with other FBI officials, withheld that information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as some of the FBI special agents investigating Trump’s campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, according to the source.

“McCabe and others were suppressing information, misrepresenting it or lying about the information that they had in order to purposefully undermine the Trump candidacy and that turned into the predication for undermining the Trump presidency,” said a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Comey and Mueller: Pretty Much Just Head Snowflakes in Charge

Counterpunch |  Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective.

Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.

Long before he became FBI Director, serious questions existed about Mueller’s role as Acting U.S. Attorney in Boston in effectively enabling decades of corruption and covering up of the FBI’s illicit deals with mobster Whitey Bulger and other “top echelon” informants who committed numerous murders and crimes. When the truth was finally uncovered through intrepid investigative reporting and persistent, honest judges, U.S. taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for murders committed by (the FBI-operated) Bulger gang.

Current media applause omits the fact that former FBI Director Mueller was the top official in charge of the Anthrax terror fiasco investigation into those 2001 murders, which targeted an innocent man (Steven Hatfill) whose lawsuit eventually forced the FBI to pay $5 million in compensation. Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”

For his part, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, too, went along with the abuses of Bush and Cheney after 9/11 and signed off on a number of highly illegal programs including warrantless surveillance of Americans and torture of captives. Comey also defended the Bush Administration’s three-year-long detention of an American citizen without charges or right to counsel.

kids, this is why you cannot beat the state - umm-kayyy...?

NYTimes | The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.

The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.

In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”

Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.”

He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.

Mr. Ostroumow said in response to e-mailed questions that it was not clear if the issues would be resolved by Wednesday.

A government official who declined to be named said earlier in the day that the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group and any affiliated hackers. The official said the F.B.I. had teamed up with other agencies in this effort, including the Central Intelligence Agency and cybercrime bureaus in Europe.

Mr. Ostroumow declined to name the company targeted by the F.B.I. and said that he did not know why it had drawn their interest. It was also unclear why the agents took more servers with them than they sought, he said.

in 2011 the fbi allowed informants to commit 5600 crimes

usatoday | The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.

"It sounds like a lot, but you have to keep it in context," said Shawn Henry, who supervised criminal investigations for the FBI until he retired last year. "This is not done in a vacuum. It's not done randomly. It's not taken lightly." 

USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI's 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau's sources were known to have committed without the government's permission.

Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.

"The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?" said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. "I'm sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked." Fist tap Arnach.

what the fbi doesn't want you to know about its "secret" surveillance methods...,

eff | The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones, a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to Jones — and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS trackers — you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is “private and confidential.”

Yes, now that the Supreme Court ruled the government must get a warrant to use its previous go-to surveillance technique, it has now apparently decided that it’s easier to just keep everything secret. The ACLU requested the memos under the Freedom of Information Act — which you can see FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann waving around in public here — and the FBI redacted them almost entirely.

Though the FBI won’t release the memos, we do have some information from other sources on the surveillance techniques federal agents are already using. And for the most part the FBI contends they do not need a warrant, and one wonders, given the public nature of this information, why they are officially claiming its "secret." Fist tap Arnach.

FBI: protect and serve corporations - citizens: served with no regard...,

RT | Only one month into the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last year, plans were formulated to identify key figures in the movement and execute them with a coordinated assault using sniper rifles, new documents reveal.

The revelation — discussed in a heavily redacted FBI memo unearthed late last month through a Freedom of Information Act request — reveals that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of plans for a violent assault on the peaceful protest movement but stayed silent on rumors of an assassination attempt only until now.

Information on the alleged plot to kill off protesters appears on page 61 of the trove of documents obtained recently by a FOIA request filed by the Partnership For Civil Justice Fund. On the page in question, marked “SECRET,” the FBI acknowledges:

An identified [redacted] of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary. An identified [redacted] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.

In the rest of the material obtained by the PFCJF, the FBI declines to mention any follow-up attempts to investigate the rumored assassination plot. Page 61, where the plot is discussed, was redacted heavily before it was handed over to the PFCJF.

“This correlation between the FBI, the Department of Homeland security and corporations in the New York stock exchange really showed who they are serving. It’s not the government in this case, it’s these corporations and a financial sector, and it’s certainly not the people,” independent journalist and activist Anna Lekas Miller told RT.

“The FBI is really just targeting ordinary people going about their daily lives as potential terrorists, and now people, who are participating in peaceful protests, are also characterized as domestic terrorists. So, I think the FBI is really picking and choosing who it categorizes as the type of civilians it wants to protect,” added Miller.

As RT reported when the documents were first published just before Christmas, other material released through the FOIA request showed the FBI and other law enforcement agencies labeling Occupy activists as criminal and domestic terrorists. This was the case from the beginning of their anti-capitalism and anti-corporate greed protests that started in September 2011.

“These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity,” PFCJF Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard says. “These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

But while police agencies were working to expose protesters for alleged crimes against the country, the demonstrators themselves were being faced with very real death threats.

Comey's Personal Assistant Josh Resigned (Serving Agents Can't Plead the 5th..,)

NYTimes  |  When the F.B.I. knocks on someone’s door or appeals to the public for assistance in solving crime, the willingness of people to help is directly correlated to their opinion of the agency. When an agent working to stop a terrorist plot attempts to recruit an informant, the agent’s success in gathering critical intelligence depends on the informant’s belief that the agent is credible and trustworthy. And, as the former director, James Comey, would frequently say in underscoring the importance of high standards, whether a jury believes an agent’s testimony depends on whether it has faith in the bureau’s honesty and independence. To be effective, the F.B.I. must be believed and must maintain the support of the public it serves.

Do F.B.I. agents make mistakes? You bet. They are human beings. Because they are not infallible, the bureau is subject to a robust system of checks and balances, including its internal affairs division, the Department of Justice inspector general, congressional committees and the courts. These watchdogs ensure that personal opinions regarding politics, causes and candidates do not affect investigations. The system also provides an outlet for any investigator who suspects malfeasance on the part of the agency’s leadership to make those concerns known.

What, then, are we to make of the recent allegations of political bias at the F.B.I., particularly those involving two employees whose cringe-worthy text messages continue to threaten the agency’s reputation? While it would be disingenuous to claim that those two are not at least guilty of exercising incredibly poor judgment, it would be equally disingenuous for anyone who really knows the modern-day bureau to insinuate that the organization is plotting from within.

Furthermore, a congressional memo released on Friday accuses the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. But every statement of fact included in an affidavit for foreign intelligence collection must withstand the scrutiny of at least 10 people in the Department of Justice hierarchy before it is reviewed by an independent court.

There is, however, a difference between oversight by those in charge of holding the F.B.I. accountable and criticism by politicians seeking partisan gain. Political operatives are weaponizing their disagreement with a particular investigation in a bid to undermine the credibility of the entire institution. “The system is rigged” is their slogan, and they are now politicizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process used to collect critical intelligence about our adversaries.

The assumption among confused and dismayed F.B.I. employees is that the attacks are meant to soften the blow should the investigation by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, lead to additional charges. However, these kinds of attacks by powerful people go beyond mere criticism — they could destroy the institution. Although those critics’ revisionist supporters claim their ire is reserved for institutional leadership and not the rank and file, it is the F.B.I. agent on the street who will be most severely affected as public support for federal law enforcement is sacrificed for partisan gain.

These political attacks on the bureau must stop. If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.

McCabe, Ohr, Ohr's wife, and Strzok Fall While Clintons and Obamas Stay Free, Fat, and Sassy??

nationalreview |  Did the FBI and Justice Department use Steele’s information to get the FISA warrant? One certainly hopes not, for two salient reasons. 

First, the dossier, particularly as it relates to Page, is incredibly far-fetched. I am assuming that, at the time it began receiving the dossier reports, the FBI did not know that Steele was working for the Clinton campaign — indeed, we do not yet know whether Steele himself knew who, ultimately, was paying for his work. If the bureau were aware of the Clinton campaign’s role, using the dossier would be indefensible. We should assume for now, though, that if investigators were scrupulous enough to resist seeking a warrant for Page while he was officially connected to the Trump campaign, they would doubly have avoided using one campaign’s information as a basis for spying on its opposition. 

Nevertheless, the explosive information was unverified. There were abundant reasons to doubt its veracity when it came to Page. And the FBI could easily have taken measures less drastic than seeking court-ordered surveillance; it could, for example, have interviewed Page, who had cooperated with the FBI in the past. 

The second reason to hope the dossier was not used is more alarming. If the FBI and Justice Department relied on it, this would very likely mean that they fell victim to an influence operation, based on false information, by Russian intelligence services. Steele’s sources are unidentified Russians, at least some of whom knew Steele to be a spy for hire. It is possible, if not likely, that these Russians fed Steele false information in order to see if Western intelligence services would bite and, if the Kremlin got lucky, to sow discord and chaos into the American political system. 

I hope they did not succeed, but we need to find out. One more disturbing fact: Because Page is a U.S. citizen, the Justice Department and FBI would have had to show the FISA court not only that he was acting as a foreign agent for Russia but that his activities involved or may have involved violations of federal criminal statutes. (See Section 1801(b)(2) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) I don’t know of any basis for attributing criminal activity to Page other than the Steele dossier — but, of course, I don’t know everything the FBI knows. 

Was the August 2016 decision to spy on a Trump associate based on a Clinton campaign screed’s claim of a corrupt Trump-Russia deal? Did FBI and Justice Department officials lose their professional objectivity because Steele’s information fit their anti-Trump bias? Was the Steele dossier, in effect, the “insurance policy” Agent Strzok had in mind? President Trump can provide the answers to these questions: He just needs to order the FBI and Justice Department, led by his appointees, to cooperate with Congress’s investigations.

Cautionary Submission In The Context Of The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Predictive Panopticon Proposal

I don't believe it's controversial to state that President Donald John Trump is one of THE WHYTEST WHYDTE MEN IN AMERICA. He's like an exemplar. Whatever else one might opine about the man, he's also a low-level baller, something at least approaching billionaire, and not a No Lives Matter, Left Behind, Little Man like you and I.  That said, these 9% muhuggahs here done put DJT through the ringer and then some, seriously.  The level of sustained, public ni****ization to which he has been subject is unprecedented in U.S. history. If what has been done to Trump is any indication of what the panopticon is willing to do to a political adversary, then TRUST and BELIEVE that you and I don't have even the barest iota of a prayer.

Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey and everyone who signed the Carter Page FISA application also be indicted for perjury? They signed a FISA application and made representations to the secret FISC on the basis of false information. Shouldn't representations to FISC need double verification since the accused has no opportunity to defend themselves or confront their accuser?

An average American doesn't get the option of saying I signed under penalty of perjury but I didn't know what I was signing.

What about James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress? The same crime for which Roger Stone was indicted and convicted.

And the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had no idea that they were involved in anything out of the ordinary? As long as they crossed the i's and dotted the t's this was just a routine case like hundreds of others and how could they have known the thing was a fix? Poor trusting souls, misled so badly by such bad people. 

Utter bullshit. They were only dealing with what must have been the most explosively sensitive issue ever to come before them. We're expected to believe they were innocents misled? 

Sometimes not asking the right questions, and searching questions too in such a high profile case as this, shows complicity just as much as if they'd been assisting.

McCabe's wife was an out-of-the-blue candidate who ran for public office (VA State Senator) in 2015, during which she reportedly received over $650,000 in support from Clinton crony, then VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Her candidacy was suspicious in that she had no previous political experience (she's a physician who was on record as having voted in a Republican primary!) and it was promoted over the local VA Democratic Party's recommended candidate, a well-known retired Army colonel, attorney and party activist.

And yet McCabe, during this same time, was rapidly promoted to #3 in the FBI and didn't recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email scandal investigation until one week before the 2016 election (and months after the infamous Comey press briefing in July when he declared Clinton would not be prosecuted), after the $650,000 donation came to light.

It's obvious why there are some who would think the very generous political contribution to McCabe's wife was in fact a backdoor bribe to her husband.

turcopelier |  I will be very clear up front--I have no inside information about what John Durham is going to do. But if he is simply following the facts and the evidence, Andrew McCabe will be one of the first to fall in the probe into the failed coup to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump. The record on this is indisputable. He lied in three separate instances--1) He lied to FBI investigators, according to Michael Horowitz, 2) He lied to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and 3) He lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

McCabe's record of lying starts with questions put to him by FBI investigators about leaks of sensitive FBI evidence to the media in the fall of 2016:

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe faced scorching criticism and potential criminal prosecution for changing his story about a conversation he had with a Wall Street Journal reporter. Now newly released interview transcripts show McCabe expressed remorse to internal FBI investigators when they pressed him on the about-face. 

In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal broke news about an FBI investigation involving then-candidate Hillary Clinton, describing internal discussions among senior FBI officials.

The apparent leak drew scrutiny from the bureau’s internal investigation team, which interviewed McCabe on May 9, 2017, the day President Donald Trump fired James Comey from his post as FBI director. The agents interviewed him as part of an investigation regarding a different media leak to the online publication Circa, and also asked him about the Journal story. 

In that interview, McCabe said he did not know how the Journal story came to be. But a few months later, his story changed after he reviewed his answer. 

McCabe's actions as an Artful Liar did not result in a prosecution. The Trump Justice Department reportedly decided to take a pass on that front, conceding that McCabe might prevail by insisting he just misremembered.

But subsequent statements by McCabe before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expose him as a terminal liar.

Great Britain Interfere In the 2016 Presidential Election?

sic-semper-tyrannis |  The Grassley/Graham memo is devastating for Jim Comey. We can entertain only two possibilities--Jim Comey is a monumental dunce or he is a liar. One need only read the Michael Isikoff piece from 23 September 2016 to realize that Christopher Steele was a primary source for Isikoff. We are asked to believe that Comey is a naive, trusting soul bereft of curiosity, who refused to entertain the possibility that Steele was double dealing intel.

One of the most surprising revelations from the Grassley/Graham memo is in footnote 7. I'm surprised this was not redacted because it is drawn from a redacted/blacked out paragraph. Here is a critical bit of intel:

• The FBI has failed to provide the Committee the 1023s documenting all of Mr. Steele's statements to the FBI, so the Committee is relying on the accuracy of the FBI's representation to the FISC regarding those statements.

This means Steele was a signed up intelligence asset for the FBI. He was our spy. A FD-1023 is an FBI form used to document meetings between FBI and sources. It is also called a CHS Report--CHS aka Confidential Human Source.

With this confirmation the next move is in the hands of the Brits. If Steele became an FBI asset without the knowledge of his former colleagues and chain of command, he faces legal risk. But two development in the last two days suggest that British intelligence officials, at least some key officials, were witting of Steele's activities in gathering information for the FBI.

First, Steele is resisting efforts to face a deposition in a lawsuit over his infamous dossier. Steele’s lawyers argued in a court in London this week that a deposition would endanger the former spy’s dossier sources as well as harm U.K. national security interests. If the Judge buys this claim then we will not have to speculate anymore about whether or not Steele was acting on his own or had a "wink-and-a-nod" from his MI-6 bosses.

Second, in my mind more telling, were the comments made this week by former MI-6 Chief, Richard Dearlove, on behalf of his former protege:

Among those who have continued to seek his expertise is Steele’s former boss Richard Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004. In an interview, Dearlove said Steele became the “go-to person on Russia in the commercial sector” following his retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service. He described the reputations of Steele and his business partner, fellow intelligence veteran Christopher Burrows, as “superb.”

But we do not have to rely solely on Dearlove's glowing remarks about Steele. There is other information indicating that the Brits played a substantial, if not leading, role in spying on Trump and building the Russian meddling meme.

Just As I Start Raking In Clintonian Loot - YOU PULL ME BACK!!!!

thehill |  Although Barack Obama is no longer president, the abuses that occurred within the FBI and Justice Department under his watch already have the potential to eclipse the Watergate scandal in their historic significance and damage done to American government.

​A Beltway adage ​has it that “it’s always the cover-up that’ll get you, not the original transgression.” Often, this proves to be true, especially in the case of Nixon, but even more recently, given the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, which were over perjury and obstruction of justice, not actual abuse of power with a 22-year-old intern.

However, with the recent declassification of the Nunes and Grassley memos from the House and Senate, in this case the putative crimes are far more serious than a failed attempt to bug the private office of a political party. These crimes have the potential to shake American confidence in otherwise prestigious institutions like the FBI, and the sanctity of our constitutional rights as citizens, especially those afforded by the Fourth Amendment, specifically protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures” or warrants being issued without “probable cause.”

Despite the months it has taken for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the matters before them and declassify their initial findings, we are still just at the beginning of knowing how broad and deep a scandal we face. Nevertheless, the facts already laid out by the memos are shocking enough by themselves and, specifically, in the consequences they may have for all Americans.

We already know that during the 2016 presidential election, the FBI and Justice Department acquired a secret warrant to spy on U.S. citizen Carter Page, a volunteer adviser to the Trump campaign. The warrant application was based on an “opposition research” file paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton through her lawyer. This fact, that the file was paid for by the candidate and party running against Donald Trump, was not disclosed by the FBI or Justice Department to the secret FISA court judge to whom that warrant application was made.

It was also never disclosed that the author of the file was a former British intelligence officer with close ties to Moscow, who had been deemed by the FBI to be “unreliable” and who was known — at the highest levels of the Justice Department — to be “desperate” to ensure that Trump never became president. In other words, the FBI and Justice Department knowingly hid exculpatory evidence from the surveillance court in order to be able to start spying on a member of the Trump team.

Add to this what we now know about the contents of the file compiled by Christopher Steele, that its salacious accusations came from Russian officials and, in part, as Trey Gowdy has intimated, from none other than Sidney Blumenthal, the closest of Clinton’s confidantes, and the full scenario appears undeniable. One candidate for president managed to leverage elements of the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities to illegally spy on the campaign running against her.

If we add to this the countless anti-Trump text messages that have been released between key members of the FBI team investigating both the Clinton “servergate” case and the accusations of “Russia collusion” by Trump associates, and it is easy to understand why half a dozen senior FBI agents and Justice Department officials have been “relieved” or reassigned in recent weeks.

Just How Much Damage Will One Ignorant Old Criminal Joe Biden Be Allowed To Do?

kunstler  |  Reality has become so elastic in America now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money laundering and racketeering operations.

     In fact, the committee outlined a shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank accounts it landed in. Thus: No evidence of wrongdoing.

      Meanwhile, another whistleblower from the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme. Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah….

     Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration:

I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source.
They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter
was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger,
the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.
This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer
is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.

It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stefan ‘Hamburger’ Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive intelligence, methods and foreign sources.

  Would they dare pull this one with Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him. The people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes. Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.

    Does the Party of Chaos actually suppose they can keep pretending “Joe Biden” will run for a second term? Articles of impeachment await for bribery, at least, and perhaps treason. At this point, the case couldn’t be more clear-cut. The House is solely in-charge of the impeachment process. The hearings will be brutal. A bill of impeachment would then go to the Senate for trial, as we’ve seen twice before recently. Do you think the mainstream media can avoid covering that?

      You must conclude that there is no way that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. He may resign rather than face impeachment. And then what? I’ll tell you what: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. starts making-over the Democratic Party the way that Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party in 2016. Bobby Kennedy has the tremendous advantage of standing completely outside the matrix of corruption, lying, and Woke mental illness that the Dems have made of themselves, and the voters are going to notice, even if The New York Times doesn’t.

Discredited FBI Unit That Led Trump Russiagate Is Leading Mar-a-Lago Fishing Expedition

realclearpolitics |  The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump's handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham's investigation of the bureau's alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

The FBI's nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president's Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau's counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia "collusion" investigation of Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane."

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau's disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden's son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian "disinformation," an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

 

sigurdur thordarson: greazy grima wormtongue serving the all seeing eye...,

slate | When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder’s attitude and quickly signed up to the cause. But little more than a year later, Thordarson was working as an informant spying on WikiLeaks for the U.S. government—embroiling himself as a teenager in one of the most complicated international events in recent history.

In a series of interviews with Slate, Thordarson has detailed the full story behind how, in an extraordinary sequence of events, he went from accompanying Assange to court hearings in London to secretly passing troves of data on WikiLeaks staff and affiliated activists to the FBI. The 20-year-old Icelandic citizen’s account is partly corroborated by authorities in Iceland, who have confirmed that he was at the center of a diplomatic row in 2011 when a handful of FBI agents flew in to the country to meet with him—but were subsequently asked to leave after a government minister suspected they were trying to “frame” Assange.

Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a Wired story in June, provided me with access to a pseudonymous email account that he says was created for him by the FBI. He also produced documents and travel records for trips to Denmark and the United States that he says were organized and paid for by the bureau.

The FBI declined to comment on Thordarson’s role as an informant or the content of the emails its agents are alleged to have sent him. In a statement, it said that it was “not able to discuss investigative tools and techniques, nor comment on ongoing investigations.” But emails sent by alleged FBI agents to Thordarson, which left a digital trail leading back to computers located within the United States, appear to shine a light on the extent of the bureau’s efforts to aggressively investigate WikiLeaks following the whistle-blower website’s publication of classified U.S. military and State Department files in 2010.

Late last month, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was convicted on counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud for passing the group the secrets.  During the Manning trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist,” and now it seems increasingly possible that the U.S. government may next go after the 42-year-old Australian for his role in obtaining and publishing the documents. For the past 14 months, Assange has been living in Ecuador’s London Embassy after being granted political asylum by the country over fears that, if he is sent to Sweden to face sexual offense allegations, he will be detained and subsequently extradited to the United States.

Meanwhile, for more than two years, prosecutors have been quietly conducting a sweeping investigation into WikiLeaks that remains active today. The FBI’s files in the Manning case number more than 42,000 pages, according to statements made during the soldier’s pretrial hearings, and that stack of proverbial paper likely continues to grow. Thordarson’s story offers a unique insight into the politically-charged probe: Information he has provided appears to show that there was internal tension within the FBI over a controversial attempt to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the whistle-blower group. Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization. Thordarson alleges that the bureau even asked him to covertly record conversations with Assange in a bid to tie him to a criminal hacking conspiracy. The feds pulled back only after becoming concerned that the Australian was close to discovering the spy effort.

The FBI Found No Evidence Of January 6th Planning Or Coordination Outside Of Its Own

reuters  |  The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

Kash Patel calls on Tucker Carlson to release footage of undercover feds:

"Ray Epps was on FBI's most wanted list one day, and the next day he was off. There are only two ways that happens: you die, or you are an informant. Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI counterintelligence… https://t.co/RALaXMKxX3 pic.twitter.com/8DJXX5JN1z

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023

"Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. "Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."

Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster", and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.

Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.

They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.

But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.

The FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by whom.

Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said.

The chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.

 

FBI Data On Active Shootings Is Inaccurate And Political

realclearwire  | Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.

Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.

Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.

The FBI is also susceptible to political pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher.

The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit. 

To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.

It isn’t surprising that people will miss cases or occasionally misidentify them when using news stories, but the FBI was unwilling to fix its errors when I pointed them out. My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. Back in 2015, I published a list of missed cases in a criminology publication.