Category: MuellerGate

When the ‘Investigation’ Is a Cover-Up

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First, the news:

In a dramatic shift, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss was being upgraded to a special counsel to investigate the Biden family finances.
The decision means the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes and his father’s potential dealings with his foreign clients will carry into the 2024 election at the same time the president’s chief rival Donald Trump faces two federal indictments brought by the same department. The tax case is likely to be moved to Washington and Los Angeles, officials said.
Republicans, however, gave the announcement a cold reaction, saying Weiss was the wrong person for the job after offering Hunter Biden a prison-sparing plea deal that fell apart.
“This move by AG Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family coverup in light of [House Oversight Committee’s] mounting evidence of President Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote.
Added House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan: “David Weiss can’t be trusted, and this is just a new way to whitewash the Biden family’s corruption. Weiss has already signed off on a sweetheart plea deal that was so awful and unfair that a federal judge rejected it.”
Garland said the appointment of Weiss to an independent prosecutor was in the “public interest,” required by department rules and requested earlier in the week by Weiss.

Ace of Spades points out that part of what’s going on here is that conferring Special Counsel status on Weiss is a way to block House investigators looking into the “sweetheart deal” plea bargain for Hunter Biden that Weiss himself orchestrated (likely under orders from, but certainly with the approval of, Attorney General Merrick Garland). More importantly, however, it’s a way for Garland to put a lid on the whole Biden family corruption saga until after next year’s election.

What Democrats are doing here, of course, is a variation of the Mueller “investigation,” altered to suit their new purposes. Remember what happened in 2017: Trump discovered after becoming president that the FBI had been doing surveillance on his campaign on the false pretext of “Russian collusion” (which pretext, of course, was manufactured by the Clinton campaign using the phony Steele dossier). So, Trump fires FBI Director James Comey and, when this provokes an outcry from Democrats, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions recuses himself from the matter, and appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate. OK, but . . . investigate what?

The real scandal in this was the “Russian collusion” hoax perpetrated against Trump by the Clinton campaign, in which the FBI played a crucial role (“Operation Crossfire Hurricane”), which was why Trump fired Comey. Instead of investigating that, however, Mueller’s investigation instead focused on trying to confirm the existence of “Russian collusion” — which proved impossible because, of course, there was no “collusion” — and also trying to prove that Trump’s firing of Comey somehow constituted “obstruction of justice.” But Trump was not the perpetrator of wrongdoing, he was the victim of wrongdoing, and the purpose of Mueller’s investigation was to conceal this truth.

In other words, the “investigation” was really a cover-up, and months passed while talking heads on MSNBC and CNN kept up their wild-eyed speculation about how “the walls are closing in” on Trump — speculation fed by leaks from Mueller’s team — keeping alive the myth of “Russian collusion” until after the 2018 midterm elections.

Mission accomplished.

Then, in March 2019, with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer now in control of Congress, Mueller releases his report, which disappointed all the cable-news talking heads by failing to confirm “Russian collusion.” The walls had signally failed to “close in,” but the Mueller had achieved his political purpose, namely to promote suspicion of Trump as a Kremlin dupe while concealing the Democratic Party dirty campaign trick behind that suspicion (and the FBI’s own role in that campaign trick).

Fast-forward to the present, and now we have a Special Counsel appointed in the Hunter Biden case who has a similar mission, namely to obstruct the House Oversight Committee’s investigation and deflect attention from the very real scandal by which the Biden family collected $20 million from Hunter’s foreign “clients.” Biden and his administration now have an excuse not to comment on anything related to Hunter because it’s “under investigation” and, the reader may be assured, there will be no leaks from Weiss’s office to the media to give fuel to speculation about the “walls closing in” on Joe Biden.

Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see what’s happening, but the media won’t tell the truth. And they wonder why we don’t trust them.



 

IG Report Confirms Comey’s ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against Trump

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Everybody was jumping up and down about this today, while I was working on something else. Aaron Klein at Breitbart reports:

A report released on Thursday by the Justice Department’s inspector general provides new context to disgraced former FBI Director James Comey’s infamous classified briefing to then President-elect Donald Trump about “salacious” material inside the anti-Trump dossier.
The IG report relates that prior to the briefing, FBI members on Comey’s team discussed the need to memorialize the exchanges between Comey and Trump during the private January 6, 2017 briefing in Trump Tower just in case Trump made statements relevant to the agency’s Russia probe. In other words, they plotted to stealthily use statements Trump said to Comey in a private briefing to inform their Russia collusion investigation.
The IG further relates that Comey went on to do just that. He had a laptop waiting for him in the car, where he immediately began memorializing the private talk. He also immediately provided a “quick download” of the Trump briefing to members of the FBI’s Russia collusion team via a secured video conference.
Until now, Comey and other former Obama administration officials presented the unusual briefing as a courtesy to Trump to warn him about the news media possibly publically releasing embarrassing claims about the newly elected president.  Questions have been raised on the need to include the dossier’s wild and unsubstantiated charges in the classified briefings. It is not the usual job of the intelligence community to warn politicians about possible pending negative publicity.
The IG report, based on interviews with Comey and other FBI “witnesses”, documents that prior to Comey’s briefing the FBI discussed utilizing Comey’s classified private talk with Trump to inform the controversial Russia collusion probe.

In other words, Comey treated the President-elect as a criminal suspect. And some people act like it was an outrage that Trump fired him?



 

The Mifsud Mystery

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Who is Joseph Mifsud? That question got a lot of attention Wednesday after Republican Rep. Jim Jordan pinned down Robert Mueller in the House Judiciary Committee hearing, asking the former Special Counsel why Mifsud wasn’t charged with lying to investigators. Mueller’s report mentions Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat and now a London-based academic, 87 times. It was Mifsud who first told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos later repeated this to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who then reported it to the FBI, thus creating the pretext for opening an investigation into the Trump campaign. Misfud’s role in all this is, according to a report in The Hill by John Solomon, a key question being investigated by John Durham, appointed by Attorney General William Barr to explore the origins of the RussiaGate story.

Jordan’s questioning of Mueller in Wednesday’s hearing was brutal:

JORDAN: You gave us the answer. Page 192 of the report you tell us who told him. Joseph Mifsud. Joseph Mifsud is the guy who told Papadopoulos. The mysterious professor who lives in Rome and London. Works and teaches at two different universities. This is the guy who told Papadopoulos. He’s the guy who starts it all. And when the FBI interviews him, he lies three times and yet you don’t charge him with a crime. You charge Rick Gates for false statements. You charge Paul Manafort for false statements. You charge Michael Cohen with false statements. You charge Michael Flynn, a three star general with false statements. But the guy who puts the country through this whole saga starts it all for three years we’ve lived this now–he lies and you guys don’t charge him. And I’m curious as to why.
MUELLER: Well, I can’t get into it and — and it’s obvious, I think that we can’t get into charging decisions.
JORDAN: When the FBI interviewed him in February — FBI interviews him in February. When the special counsel’s interviews Mifsud, did he lie to you guys too?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: Did you interview Mifsud?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: Is Mifsud western intelligence or Russian intelligence?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: A lot of things you can’t get into. What’s interesting — you can charge 13 Russians no one has ever heard of, no one has ever seen, no one is ever going to hear of them, no one is every going to see them — you can charge them–you can charge all kinds of people who are around the president with false statements but the guy who launches every — the guy who puts this whole story in motion you can’t charge him. I think that’s amazing.
MUELLER: (INAUDIBLE) I’m not certain I–I agree with your characterization.
JORDAN: Well, I’m reading from your report. Mifsud told Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos tells the diplomat. The diplomat tells the FBI. The FBI opens the investigation July 31st, 2016 and here we are three years later, July of 2019. The country’s been put through this and this central figure who launches it all — lies to us and you guys don’t hunt him down and interview him again and you don’t charge him with a crime.

 

Here’s the big secret that Jim Jordan was driving at: Joseph Mifsud may have been working for U.S. intelligence — perhaps indirectly, on the payroll of a CIA front — and in his contact with Papadopoulos, may have been acting as an agent provocateur. In other words, the CIA may have been using Mifsud to test whether Papadopoulos was vulnerable to exploitation, and this “Russia has dirt on Hillary” business was part of the test. When Mueller says he “can’t get into that,” what he’s saying is that he’s forbidden by law from discussing “sources and methods” of U.S. intelligence, and this is a huge clue that the CIA was somehow involved in RussiaGate — a phony hoax that Hillary Clinton used during the 2016 campaign to smear Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”

Who was calling the shots behind the scenes in 2016, when all this shadowy stuff was going on around Papadopoulos and Trump aide Carter Page? What was the role of Fusion GPS in this? As Ace of Spades remarked yesterday, it seems that dossier compiler “Christopher Steele provided cover as a front man for conspiracy theories first adduced by [Clinton supporters] Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.” This would mean that the true origin of the RussiaGate hoax was the Clinton campaign itself, and if it is true that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC emails — well, how and why did that happen? Were the Russians doing this to help the Trump campaign? Or was there some ulterior motive?

We should soon start getting answers to some of these questions, and I don’t think the Democrats will be pleased by what we learn.



 

Mueller Hearing a Democrat Debacle

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Whoever was responsible for the decision to hold today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing — and I suppose that must be the committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) — is an idiot. If the goal of Democrats in having former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testify was to gin up support for impeaching President Trump, they failed. Badly.

As the New York Post said, the hearing “was a total waste of time”:

Mueller made it clear long in advance that he didn’t want to testify, and wouldn’t talk about anything except what was in his report. He even got the Justice Department to issue a guidance instructing him to keep to his preferred limits.
That left committee Democrats using their time to read bits of the report, then ask the witness, That’s in the report, right?
Mueller would then say Yes or Let me check or Can you repeat the question?
Though he is a hugely accomplished public servant, he was a spectacularly unimpressive witness, often coming off as unfamiliar with his own report or otherwise confused.

Many observers were left with the impression that Mueller must have only been a figurehead in the two-year investigation of Russian “collusion,” and that the report issued under his name was entirely the work of the Democrat attorneys on the Special Counsel’s staff. Attempts by Republican committee members to get Mueller to address evidence related to Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier went nowhere, as Mueller either disclaimed any knowledge of this evidence — despite it being included in his report — or asserted that he could not comment because he didn’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations.

Mueller’s befuddled demeanor seemed to confirm the suspicions of a “senior Democrat” — a former Obama administration official — that, at age 74, the former Special Counsel has become senile.

Democrats need to take a long, hard look at the man whose idea it was to stage this embarrassing spectacle. Who is Jerrold Nadler and is he competent enough to chair the Judiciary Committee?

 

Nadler, 72, has been in Congress since 1992 without accomplishing anything other than occupying a safe seat from a district that has not been represented by a Republican in more than 100 years. He is a short, fat, elderly symbol of the political decline of New York. The stagnating state lost two congressional districts after the 2010 Census, and the subsequent redistricting illustrated the priorities of the Democrats who control New York’s corrupt legislature. They screwed over Rep. Ed Towns, a black Democrat who had previously represented the Brooklyn-based 10th District, in a gerrymander that redrew the district to include the heavily Jewish West Side of Manhattan, which is only connected to a random blob of Brooklyn by the I-478 tunnel under the East River. Towns was forced into retirement to ensure a seat for Nadler, who had previously represented the 8th District. If the so-called “Justice Democrats” need a target for their next left-wing primary challenge, they should aim at Nadler’s old fat ass. Considering how much anti-Semitism now motivates the Left, it shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to recruit a Jew-hating “woman of color” to take out Nadler.



 

The Fake Ukrainian Ledger Angle: How the Media Colluded With the ‘Deep State’

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Look at the date on that New York Times story — how did it happen that, in August 2016, Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau” took an interest in Donald Trump’s campaign manager and these reporters had no trouble finding sources in Kiev telling them all about these “ledgers”? What that just a coincidence? Or does it seem to you more likely, as Ace of Spades suggests, that this story was about protecting the interests of the U.S. political establishment?

Remember, it was critical to Hillary Clinton that the FBI have active investigations opened into the Trump campaign, because she had a high profile investigation into her own actions, and she desperately needed to be able to play the They Do It Too Card.

Do you believe in coincidences like that? A powerful politician needs to smear her opponent and — oh, what a coincidence! — sources direct reporters for the New York Times to the Ukraine, where investigators cite a “secret ledger” that appears to prove wrongdoing by the opponent’s campaign manager. Well, guess what? Three years later, we discover that (a) the “ledger” was probably a forgery, and (b) the FBI was actively engaged in feeding this stuff to the media:

In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources. . . .
Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016. . . .
[T]he FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger — which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence — and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia == including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort — Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign,” the July 25, 2017, FBI agent’s affidavit stated.
Three months later, the FBI went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.
“The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger,’ ” an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit.
There are two glaring problems with that assertion.
First, the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.
An FBI record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine.
So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.
Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show.

So, Manafort was forced to resign from the campaign after someone fed this fake “secret ledger” story to the New York Times and then, in order to justify search warrants for Manafort’s bank records, the FBI leaks more “secret ledger” stories to the media, then cites those stories as “evidence” to claim probably cause on the warrant application. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me the people responsible for this need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of “Deep State” stuff — government bureaucrats acting improperly to exercise a corrupt political infleunce, and exploiting the news media in the process — is why every American should be glad Hillary lost. If she had won, we never would have learned what kind of shenanigans were going on at the FBI.



 

How Much Do I Love Bill Barr?

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Let me put it this way: Although I strongly disapprove of homosexuality, our Attorney General makes me feel like a Log Cabin Republican, because gosh, I just love this guy that much. If loving Bill Barr is wrong, I don’t want to be right. The reason for my deep man-crush, of course, is the interview The Love-God of Justice™ did with Jan Crawford of CBS News. How good is it? Obscenely good. Pornographically good. So good, you’ll feel guilty for how much you enjoy it. Ace of Spades provides an annotated transcript, which should be narrated by Barry White with the Love Unlimited Orchestra doing the background music.

™

 

Disgraced FBI Agent Peter Strzok Didn’t Tell Trump Campaign About Investigation

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Catherine Herridge of Fox News reports:

A mid-August 2016 counterintelligence briefing for the Trump campaign did not specifically warn officials about Russian outreach to the Trump team, nor did it warn that two campaign aides, Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos, were already under FBI investigation, Fox News has learned.
The new details about the so-called “defensive briefing” have emerged from congressional letters, text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, and sources familiar with the matter. Such briefings are designed to warn the candidate and his team about national security threats.
“There was a defensive briefing of candidate Trump on Aug. 17 of 2016,” Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “And I can tell you what he wasn’t told: He wasn’t warned about a Russia investigation that Peter Strzok had opened 18 days earlier.”
Strzok, who was later removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team for sending anti-Trump texts, was a central coordinator for the FBI on the defensive briefing, which included multiple agencies. Three weeks earlier, Strzok opened an FBI counterintelligence investigation into campaign aide George Papadopoulos.

(Hat-tip: Jeff Dunetz.)

People who get their news from CNN and MSNBC have no idea about any of the shady stuff relating to the origins of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Fox is the only network that is covering this story, and the average Democrat doesn’t have any inkling of what was going on with the Steele dossier and the various ways that people like Carter Page, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos were targeted by what looks very much like entrapment — an effort to manufacture the appearance of “collusion” in order to justify surveillance of the Trump campaign. U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement officials at the highest levels must have approved this operation, and therefore the real scandal is not what Trump did, but rather what the Obama administration did. CNN and MSNBC are attempting to conceal this scandal from their viewers, and thus damaging their own credibility as news organizations.



 

Good-Bye, Bob

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If you watched Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s weird valedictory appearance today, you know that he made a point of saying that he couldn’t testify to anything that wasn’t in the report of his investigation. So plans by Democrats to have Mueller dragged in front of a committee as a witness against President Trump (or against Attorney General William Barr) will evidently have to be scrapped. The headline at Ace of Spades — “Mueller Tries to Jumpstart Impeachment Effort, Throw the Deep State a Life-Line” — is an accurate assessment of Mueller’s intention. He basically said, “I’ve done my job, now Congress should do its job and impeach this guy, but don’t ask me for any more help.”

What does this mean going forward? It’s up to Nancy Pelosi, really. We can expect the media and the Democratic presidential candidates to beat the drums for impeachment, but are there really enough votes in Pelosi’s caucus to make that happen? Or is it more likely — as I think — that Democrats will just keep issuing subpoenas, holding committee hearings and talk, talk, talking about “obstruction of justice”?