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Recent Appearances...

Government Corruption

Convicted FBI lawyer spared from prison by Boasberg far more involved in Russia probe than known

2025-04-18

Long and detailed. A taste:

[JustTheNews] The judge who has emerged as a top foe of Trump's deportation efforts previously let a well-known Trump-Russia collusion hoax proponent off the hook. But newly-declassified Crossfire Hurricane records show the FBI's Kevin Clinesmith was deeply involved in in the bogus Russiagate saga.

Convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith — whom Judge James Boasberg gave a slap on the wrist for his crimes years before becoming a public foe of President Donald Trump’s deportation policies — was more deeply involved in the deeply flawed Crossfire Hurricane investigation than previously known.

Clinesmith, who worked on both the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation and on the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry, pleaded guilty to falsifying a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew FISA authority to wiretap Carter Page, who was an adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign.

Newly-declassified details about Clinesmith’s involvement include a wide swath of information about his role in the case. He was a key go-to for former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok throughout the debunked collusion saga and a main driver in obtaining a FISA warrant against Page based on the infamous Steele dossier.

Clinesmith also granted his seal of approval on a document describing the FBI’s pretextual briefing of then-candidate Trump, was deeply involved in the investigation into retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, played a role in going after former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, and more. He also helped the FBI push its “Cross Wind” investigation, which Just the News can confirm related to the targeting of security expert Walid Phares, which resulted in no accusations of wrongdoing and no charges.

KNEE-DEEP IN THE MUD
Clinesmith confessed in August 2020 that he had manipulated a CIA email in 2017 to state that Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA when that agency had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was in fact an “operational contact” for the CIA.

Boasberg, the federal judge who is blocking Trump’s efforts to deport Venezuelan gang members, also played a key and controversial role in the aftermath of the Trump-Russia collusion saga as the leader of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The judge, nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by then-President Barack Obama in 2011, is currently engaged in an all-out legal battle with the Trump Justice Department.

But in his role as the head of the FISA Court he made a number of divisive decisions, including a slap on the wrist for a member of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, the appointment of officials who had defended the FBI’s actions during the Russiagate saga, the renewal of the FBI’s FISA powers, and more.

BOASBERG DEFENDS CLINESMITH
Boasberg ruled this week that “probable cause exists” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt after they violated his orders by continuing deportation flights. But his ruling follows the Supreme Court holding that Boasberg's court was in an improper venue for the case altogether.

Boasberg, in his role as a federal judge, denied the Justice Department’s efforts to seek up to six months behind bars for Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty in Special Counsel John Durham’s Trump-Russia investigation — instead giving Clinesmith a year of probation, 400 hours of community service, and no fine.

The remaining subheds:

Collaboration on the Carter Page FISA
Clinesmith altered docs, hid information from FISA court
Sign off on doc detailing pretextual briefing of Trump
Clinesmith Targets Flynn
Leaks and unmasking
"Out to get Trump"
Steele Dossier dissemination
Clinesmith and Papadopoulos
Strzok establishes a pattern of untruths
“Cross Wind”
Clinesmith: "Viva le resistance"
Comey arranges leaks to media
The Crossfire docs a profitable venture

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Government Corruption

Newly declassified Crossfire Hurricane docs shine light on Steele, Clinton, and more

2025-04-13

Long and detailed. Herewith, a taste:

[JTN] Trump's first attempt at declassifying Crossfire Hurricane documents in January 2021 was thwarted. But now, the FBI records have been released, revealing in part new details on the FBI's problematic Trump-Russia probe.

Newly-declassified FBI documents shine new light on the FBI’s mishandling of its relationship with anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele, on the FBI’s double standards on defensive briefings given to Trump and Hillary Clinton, and other key elements of the debunked collusion saga.

Just the News already revealed on Thursday that declassified documents show that Stefan Halper, a key FBI informant in the widely-debunked Russia collusion case, was paid nearly $1.2 million over three decades and was motivated in part by "monetary compensation" — and that he continued snitching for the bureau even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

And Just the News also revealed on Friday that the newly-released documents showed that then-NSA director Mike Rogers shot down a Pultizer Prize award-winning Washington Post article about the baseless Russian collusion investigation.

And a new review of hundreds of pages of declassified documents provides new information about the politicized Russiagate scandal — although significant redactions still remain.

This week, FBI Director Kash Patel transmitted to Congress hundreds of pages of declassified documents from the bureau’s "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation related to false claims about Trump-Russia collusion, following a declassification executive order from President Donald Trump last month. Just the News made all 700 pages from the declassified binder available to the public on Thursday.

An investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller “did not establish” any criminal Trump-Russia collusion. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found huge flaws with the FBI’s investigation, criticizing the“central and essential” role of the dossier in the FBI’s politicized surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Special counsel John Durham’s report concluded that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

ADMIRAL MIKE ROGERS AND THE STEELE DOSSIER
Admiral Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as National Security Agency chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, previously expressed a certain level of skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 assessment of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and a newly declassified interview Rogers gave to the FBI later in 2017 shines light on the dim view Rogers had of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier.

“ADM Rogers decided that he would make the final analytic call on the NSA’s input to the ICA as he knew there would be a lot of pressure and attention on the final draft and he felt strongly his career analysts shouldn’t have to be responsible for something under such political pressure. In one draft of the ICA, ADM Rogers noted the contents of the ‘Steele dossier’ in the body of the product, which he did not recall seeing in previous drafts,” FBI notes dated June 17, 2017 state.

“In early January, the four principals met and ADM Rogers told the group he was unclear why the ICA needed to focus on the dossier as it was considered largely uncorroborated. Comey responded that the information was relevant and ADM Rogers suggested the information be included in an annex or appendix rather than prominently in the nearly one-page summary he had seen.”

Rogers and Comey, along with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, briefed President-elect Trump about their election meddling findings at Trump Tower in January 2017. Comey stayed behind to tell Trump about some of the dossier’s more salacious allegations.

Steele told the FBI in October 2017 that he was “frustrated” by his dossier’s inclusion in an annex to the ICA. The FBI agent who recounted the interview with Steele wrote, “They brought up the inclusion of their material in the ICA annex multiple times – almost to the point that it felt like fishing for information about how the ICA was constructed. In the end, I made the point that I wasn’t going to get into how the ICA was put together, how the annex came about, etc.”

The Steele dossier annexed to the ICA was largely declassified in 2020, and it relayed some of Steele’s baseless collusion claims: “The most politically-sensitive claims by the FBI source [Steele] alleged a close relationship between the President-elect and the Kremlin. The source also claimed that the President-elect and his top campaign advisers knowingly worked with Russian officials to bolster his chances of beating Secretary Clinton; were fully knowledgeable of Russia’s direction of leaked Democratic emails; and were offered financial compensation from Moscow.”

VARYING ASSESSMENTS FROM INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
The 2017 intelligence assessment concluded with “high confidence” that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The NSA diverged on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump’s election chances and harm those of Clinton.

“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy. I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations,” Rogers told the Senate in 2017. “It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.”

A 2018 report from the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”

Link

Government Corruption

Newly declassified FBI memos detail concerns, payments to Russia collusion informant

2025-04-11

Very long, excruciatingly detailed, link to the newly released 700 pages.

[JustTheNews] Newly declassified documents show informant Stefan Halper was motivated in part by "monetary compensation", was paid nearly $1.2 million from FBI over three decades, and continued snitching even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

The nearly 700 pages of once-secret documents, obtained by Just the News, were recently turned over by FBI Director Kash Patel to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan after President Donald Trump ordered them declassified at the start of his second administration.

They provide the most extensive portrait yet of former FBI informant Stefan Halper, a Pentagon consultant and academic who, along with retired British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, was used by bureau agents to build the Crossfire Hurricane case against Trump and his advisers during the end of the 2016 election and the beginning of Trump's first term in office.

The memos confirm Halper was the source of one of the most sensational bogus claims to land in the FBI's probe in summer 2016: that Flynn had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with Russia scholar Svetlana Lokhova when he was a three-star general leading the Defense Intelligence Agency.

FBI agents ultimately deemed Halper's account to be "not plausible" and "not accurate", but the bureau proceeded to investigate Flynn, kept paying Halper and continued to vouch for his veracity as a confidential human source codenamed "Mitch," the memos show.

The Defense Department inspector general also previously revealed that the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment paid Halper $1.05 million for projects he allegedly did for them between May 2012 and September 2016. The Pentagon under Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in March that it was disestablishing the office.

Despite the efforts by the FBI and Halper, a two-year investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller “did not establish” any criminal Trump-Russia collusion. In addition, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found huge flaws with the FBI’s investigation, including criticizing the “central and essential” role of a dossier in the FBI’s politicized surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

HALPER — AND THE FBI — TARGET MIKE FLYNN
At Cambridge University, Halper worked alongside MI6’s Sir Richard Dearlove and MI5 historian Christopher Andrew. Together, they founded and organized Cambridge Intelligence Seminars, including one in 2014 attended by Flynn.

CHS reports show Halper, an academic who long worked for the bureau as a trusted informant, was the original source of a story that Flynn had left a 2014 event in Cambridge, England, with the Russia scholar Svetlana Lokhova while he was still the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was also listed in FBI documents as part of the reason the bureau opened a counterintelligence probe of Flynn. The story was later leaked to the news media and became the focal point of a defamation lawsuit by Lokhova that was dismissed and affirmed by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Link

Government Corruption

More Background on Judge James Boasberg – The Fight Continues

2025-03-20

Masterful.

[ConservativeTreehouse] When you understand how Washington DC Judges view their role and responsibility, then you understand the scale of opposition that President Trump is facing. The false media framework of our "government" only makes the issues worse. So, here’s an explanation of Boasberg v Trump.

In 2016 the DOJ-NSD headed by Mary McCord filed a FISA application seeking a Title-1 search (full and unlimited) surveillance warrant against the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The method to gain the surveillance authority was to use CIA informant Carter Page who had met with the Trump campaign and call Page an "agent of a foreign power."

The FISA Court knowingly and with specific intent approved the Title-1 surveillance warrant which was filed using false evidence (Clinesmith) and sketchy supporting documents (Steele Dossier), no Woods File was attached.

At the time of the application, Mary McCord was acting head of the DOJ National Security Division. McCord was responsible for filing the warrant application. The DOJ-NSD had no inspector general oversight. The targeting of candidate Donald Trump was entirely for political purposes and intents.

After President Trump won the 2016 election, he gave DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz authority to conduct oversight over the DOJ-NSD. IG Horowitz started investigating the FISA application. This is where things get interesting.

The FISA Court (FISC) was exposed by their willful blindness in allowing the Title-1 targeting of Donald Trump.

Justice John Roberts is in charge of the FISC.

The keystone point.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts then appointed Judge James Boasberg to the position of presiding judge over the FISA Court (FISC).

Judge Boasberg then selected Mary McCord to be an amicus or advisor to the court as Horowitz was investigating the fraudulent FISA application.

Boasberg put the person who was in charge of submitting the false FISA application in a position to filter the results of the Horowitz investigation of that same FISA application.

In essence, think of this as protecting the Judicial Branch. Justice Roberts appointed Boasberg to defend the FISC from scrutiny. Boasberg then moves Mary McCord into position to defend the FISC from scrutiny (McCord also protects herself).

At the time, Mary McCord’s husband Sheldon Snook was working within Justice Robert’s office.

That’s how John Roberts, James Boasberg and Mary McCord all connect. All the motives and intents go back to that original Title-1 FISA application.

Remember, this was a huge scandal all by itself. The FISA Court permitted a full-throated surveillance warrant against the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The Judicial Branch was intentionally influencing the 2016 election. These are not stupid people; they were not duped, conned or fooled, they knew exactly what they were doing.

After appointing Mary McCord to take up a defensive position for herself and the FISA Court (cover), Judge Boasberg then becomes the presiding judge in the case against the FBI agent who falsified the FISA application, Kevin Clinesmith. Boasberg gives Clinesmith a slap on the wrist and a few months’ probation (more cover).

This is the same Judge Boasberg gave J6 FBI agent provocateur Ray Epps a sentence of probation. This is the same judge who, on his vacation, went to sit in the DC courtroom to observe defendant President Trump who was forced to appear in DC court. This is the same Boasberg who established a horrible precedent by forcing Vice-President Mike Pence to testify before a DC grand jury about his conversations with President Trump (breaking executive privilege).

♦ Now we go back to the John Durham investigation, because Bill Barr had to ask Presiding Judge Boasberg for guidance and direction as the Durham team looked at the FISA application (Title-1 surveillance warrant) against the backdrop of the Obama government targeting Donald Trump.

This is June of 2020, Bill Barr (who was running another cover-up angle) asked Judge Boasberg for guidance on five very specific issues centering around the Carter Page FISA application. Barr asked for legal guidance to assist John Durham in disclosing information in the FISA file & evidence attached to the FISA file.

The five issues all circle around the FBI/DOJ use of the Carter Page FISA application; and, more importantly, the underlying evidence that is attached to the FISA application. [source]

I. DOJ requests guidance for distribution of material due to FOIA demands. FISC gives legal opinion

II. DOJ requests guidance for distribution of material due to ongoing and anticipated civil litigation. The FISC gives legal opinion and expands to criminal litigation.

III. DOJ requests guidance for distribution of material to internal investigative units from the FBI inspectors division (INSD). FISC gives opinion and advice.

IV. DOJ requests guidance for distribution of non-minimized information, and/or, minimized information as part of the ongoing Office of Inspector General oversight. FISC gives opinion and guidance.

V. DOJ requests guidance for distribution of material to John Durham probe, both for criminal prosecution and possible evidence gathering attached to other ongoing investigative needs. FISC gives opinion and guidance.

Now, keep in mind, with hindsight we know the DOJ (Bill Barr) was essentially walking a fine line between uncovering information and trying to protect the DOJ as an institution. John Durham was never approved to investigate the government side of the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense.

At the same time, Judge Boasberg is trying to protect the FISC from their culpability and also protect the FISA Court as an institution. Everyone has an agenda here, and none of them are good.

That leads to Boasberg outlining a cautious approach toward distribution and/or sunlight on what took place. On this issue the court says allowing a target to escape prosecution is part of the penalty upon the DOJ for wrongful assembly; a nice way to cover the issue.

Judge Boasberg does not consider the DOJ is targeting the "assemblers" for their criminal conduct. Rather his response is general toward criminals who were targets of a FISA application assembled with corrupt intent. It seemed a little weird at the time, now notsomuch.

Pages #11 and #12 hit the topic of FOIA production. Boasberg says "some" FOIA requests might warrant document distribution, but not all. However, on the topic of Carter Page getting his FOIA fulfilled, the court supports expansive distribution to Mr. Page alone.

I find the arguments and issues in/around page #14 to be especially noteworthy. In this segment Judge Boasberg is responding to the underlying raw evidence that would normally be used to assemble a "woods file". The court notes the FBI Sentinel system would contain the minimized outcomes (redacted evidence) and this points to a bigger issue.

In response to this inquiry Judge Boasberg notes FBI investigators would have access to the minimized information within the Sentinel system; however, insofar as there was additional inquiry into the raw and non-minimized intelligence, a review and distribution would be permissible so long as there was a strong filter team in place to ensure statutes surrounding FISA securities (minimization requirements) were not violated.

Overall, Judge Boasberg gives permission and approval for all six aspects Bill Barr requested. However, he does so with several legal qualifiers and distinctions which the DOJ was told to observe. Those qualifiers were intended to protect the interests of both Main Justice and the FISA Court from sunlight upon their prior conduct in 2016.

SUMMARY — Judge Boasberg has been demonstrably political in all his determinations going all the way back to his position on the FISC when the FISA application was approved. Boasberg was then moved into position to protect the FISC from the outcome of their Title-1 search warrant approval.

Boasberg then used his position as Presiding FISC judge to protect the apparatus, while using his position as DC Circuit Court Judge to diminish, obfuscate and cloud the severe ramifications from all of the DC effort, including his rulings on the Kevin Clinesmith (FBI Agent) and Ray Epps (FBI Source) cases.

Judge Boasberg sits at the epicenter of a thoroughly corrupt and compromised DC court system.

I like this approach recommended by Hokkada:

..."It’s important to remind people that the inferior courts do not work for or report to the Supreme Court. CONGRESS creates the inferior courts and as such, Congress can eliminate courts, add courts, and control funding of the courts. Congress also can impeach. And a key element of impeachment is the hearings process.

A hearings process that subpoenas Federal district court judges to testify before Congress would cast a lot of sunlight on the corrupt Judicial-Lawfare-Complex. Could the end result be impeachment? Certainly.

But it could also lead to something better in the long run: descope of the Federal court system which has grown bloated, corrupt, and arrogant because it answers to nobody.

They’re the 3rd branch of government for a reason — they are not elected by anyone, and therefore hold the least amount of power when it comes to governance. SCOTUS doesn’t even control their own budget. They can’t levy taxes. They can’t declare war. They can’t decide what constitutes citizenship.

The answer to all of this is sunlight. Simply compel Biasberg to testify in open public hearings about his role in Lawfare and his interpretation of the Federal district court’s ability to direct the actions of the Commander in Chief, issue "nationwide injunctions" and so forth. Then let’s get into his direct role in Lawfare.

Roberts wants to pretend impeachment of Biasberg is about a "political disagreement". But it is not. This is a judicial coup d’etat we are witnessing. And the only way to stop it is to descope the judiciary and limit its ability to issue injunctions.

If crimes are discovered, such as aiding and abetting terrorist organizations, the judges should be removed. Judges can "obstruct justice" too. They are not Jesus in black robes. They are every bit as tempted by corruption — perhaps more so because they are deemed infallible by the Chief Justice — as any politician."...

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Government Corruption

They're Doing What They're Accusing Us Of Doing...

2024-11-02

[AmericanThinker] Earlier on, I argued why I think it's useful to debate Leftists online, knowing that it's unlikely they'' change their minds on anything.

It's good practice as it forces us to learn their arguments and how to counter them, and there are usually others silently following along who can be convinced.

But another Leftist tactic is psychological projection, which is ascribing to another person one's own feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.

Projection is used to relieve a sense of guilt or other unpleasant feeling. Blaming your own problems on someone else seems to be de rigueur in our society of late.

It's worth noting that there is a great deal of overlap between lying and projection.

In some cases the circles on the Venn diagram would exactly coincide.

Accusations of hypocrisy are also common and it’s worth pointing out the difference between it and projection.

In brief, hypocrisy reflects on one's own behavior while projection concerns oneself and one's behavior towards others.

It would be hypocritical for person (A) who frequently rolls past stop signs to say that person (B) should always observe stop signs. It would be projection for person (A) to silently assume person (B) rolls past stop signs. It would be both hypocritical and projection for person (A) to falsely accuse person (B) of rolling past stop signs.

In today’s heated socio-political climate I contend that we’re seeing both hypocrisy and projection being utilized on a daily basis. How many times have we heard a Leftist claim that Donald Trump is "a threat to our democracy"?

The better question to ask is, “Who on the Left has not made that claim?”

The people attesting to this have been noticeably silent on the case of the FBI lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in their quest for surveillance warrants on Carter Page.

How much of a threat to democracy was it to conduct what amounts to a coup to remove a sitting president in the final months of his campaign and replace him with someone who never earned a single primary vote? Has that ever happened before in America?

Practically every outlet in the Democrat Media Industrial Complex (DMIC) has accused Trump of being an authoritarian, a tyrant and a dictator. They cite examples such as President Trump is "tearing up trade deals and stepping back from global institutions." The Paris climate greement placed unfair restrictions on Americans, even while "U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018."

President Trump cancelled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran which enriched the regime while doing little to nothing to curb their nuclear ambitions.

The people who decried these decisions either cheered or were silent when President Biden transferred student loan obligations to the taxpayers despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional to do so.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris supported the impeachment of President Trump for his telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with "no one is above the law."

When the transcript of that phone call was released, it was found that President Trump did not, in fact threaten to withhold military aid in exchange for an investigation into Burisma Holdings. At the time, Burisma was paying Hunter Biden $85k/month for … what, his expertise in the extraction, processing, sale and distribution of petroleum products? Joe Biden is on video bragging about withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings.

Response from the Left? Crickets.

The same Leftists who pilloried President Trump for an innocent phone call to President Zelensky gave a pass to then Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton when she illegally used private electronic devices to send and receive classified information, and then destroyed both the messages and the devices after they were subpoenaed by Congress.

Snip.

In all of these examples the accusations against Republicans are false (lies) while Democrats have engaged in those or similar behaviors themselves.

So where do we go from here? Speaking for myself, whenever I come across a claim against conservatives or Republicans from Leftists or Democrats I immediately assume that not only is the opposite true, but that their accusation is probably more accurately applied to the Left. This means that to determine the truth I need to investigate the story and find out what isn’t being told. I spend a great deal of time every day sifting through news stories on various news sites. I no longer get my news from the television or print media. This is what I think we all need to do in order to be properly informed.

Link

Government Corruption

Key DC Power Player and the Sham Russia Hoax = People Finally Starting to Notice the Real DC Players Like Mary McCord, but It's Much, Much Bigger

2023-12-21

[ConservativeTreehouse] That GP article starts to scratch the surface, but if people ever decide to dig, I mean really dig, they will find McCord is a thread that unravels some of the biggest undiscovered background stories in DC media. Including: (1) The likely leaker of the Flynn conversation with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, and (2) the almost certain leaker of the Supreme Court “Dobbs Decision.” Hint: They eat dinner together nightly.

First, a context review, because so many are only just awakening.

If there is one corrupt DC player who has escaped scrutiny for her corrupt endeavors, it would be Mary McCord. More than any other Lawfare operative within Main Justice, Mary McCord sits at the center of every table in the manufacturing of cases against Donald Trump. {GO DEEP} Mary McCord’s husband is Sheldon Snook; he was the right hand to the legal counsel of Chief Justice John Roberts.

When the Carter Page FISA application was originally assembled by the FBI and DOJ, there was initial hesitancy from within the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) about submitting the application, because it did not have enough citations in evidence (the infamous ‘Woods File’). That’s why the Steele Dossier ultimately became important. It was the Steele Dossier that provided the push, the legal cover needed for the DOJ-NSD to submit the application for a Title-1 surveillance warrant against the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

When the application was finally assembled for submission to the FISA court, the head of the DOJ-NSD was John Carlin. Carlin quit working for the DOJ-NSD in late September 2016 just before the final application was submitted (October 21,2016). John Carlin was replaced by Deputy Asst. Attorney General, Mary McCord.

♦ When the FISA application was finally submitted (approved by Sally Yates and James Comey), it was Mary McCord who did the actual process of filing the application and gaining the Title-1 surveillance warrant.

Much more at the link.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Adam Schiff dodges bullet: House votes against bill censuring him for Trump-Russia 'lies'

2023-06-15

[FoxNews] The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted against the idea of censuring and condemning Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., for insisting that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

In a 225-196 vote, lawmakers decided to set aside the censure resolution against Schiff, effectively killing it and preventing a vote on passage. The resolution, introduced by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., was opposed by 20 Republicans as two other GOP lawmakers voted "present" along with five Democrats.

The resolution was known to be on shaky ground with some Republicans. One expected "no" vote, Rep. Tom Massie, R-Ky., said he opposed the idea of a fine against Schiff — the resolution up Wednesday recommended a $16 million fine but did not require it.

"Adam Schiff acted unethically but if a resolution to fine him $16 million comes to the floor I will vote to table it. (vote against it)," he tweeted Wednesday.

"The Constitution says the House may make its own rules but we can’t violate other (later) provisions of the Constitution," he added. "A $16 million fine is a violation of the 27th and 8th amendments."

Along with Massie, the 19 other Republicans voting with Democrats to kill the resolution were Reps. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, Lori Chavez-DeRemer or Oregon, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Kay Granger of Texas, Garret Graves of Louisiana, Thomas Kean of New Jersey, Kevin Kiley of California, Young Kim of California, Michael Lawler of New York, Tom McClintock of California, Marcus Molinaro of New York, Jay Obernolte of California, Michael Simpson of Idaho, Michael Turner of Ohio, David Valadao of California and Steve Womack of Arkansas.

It wasn’t clear late Wednesday whether House Republicans might try again with a resolution against Schiff that leaves out all mentions of possible fines.

The resolution that failed on the House floor Wednesday said claims of Trump-Russia collusion were cooked up by Trump’s political opponents and pursued by the Department of Justice despite the lack of any solid foundation for suspecting collusion.

The resolution says the Democrats’ claims of collusion were "revealed as false" by "numerous" investigations, including Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into how the investigation into Trump was launched. It says that report, and reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, show that collusion "does not exist" despite Schiff’s public claims to the contrary.

"By repeatedly telling these falsehoods, Representative Schiff purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people," the resolution says.

"Representative Schiff lent credibility to the Steele dossier — a collection of debunked collusion accusations funded by President Trump’s political rivals — by reading false Steele allegations into the Congressional Record," it says.

"Representative Schiff composed a false memo justifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application on Trump associate Carter Page, which Inspector General Horowitz later found was riddled with 17 major mistakes and omissions, provoking FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer to state unequivocally that the Federal Bureau of Investigation '[misled] the FISC,'" it adds.

"Representative Schiff used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars," it says. "The American taxpayers paid $32 million to fund the investigation into collusion that was launched as a result of Representative Schiff’s lies, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information."

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Government Corruption

Revelation of FBI Informants Shakes Proud Boys' January 6 Trial, Congress pondering adding protections to surveillance law

2023-03-28

[Breitbart] Revelations of the sheer number of FBI informants involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot have shaken a trial of members of the Proud Boys in Washington, DC, as one FBI informant had infiltrated the defense team.

As Julie Kelly, who has covered the January 6 trials extensively, reports, there are at least ten informants now known to have been involved in the Proud Boys — more than twice the five defendants who are on trial.

One shocking revelation last week was that one FBI informant, Jen Loh, a member of Latinos for Trump, had been in close contact with the defendants and their legal team throughout the trial, potentially compromising their constitutional rights.

If the government had spied on discussions among the defendants and their lawyers by using an informant, that would violate the attorney-client privilege and the Sixth Amendment.

CNN reported:

Over the past year, Texas woman Jen Loh has been in touch with several Proud Boys now on trial for seditious conspiracy, talking with the members of the far-right group and their defense counsel about the case and suggesting possible witnesses and attorneys who could help.

All the while, Loh was also a paid FBI informant.

That revelation threw a wrench into the ongoing trial this week in federal court in Washington, DC, when defense counsel learned of her relationship with the government.

The defense objected to the continuation of the trial until the prosecution told Judge Timothy Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, that Loh had not informed them about the defense in the trial.

Defense attorneys are scheduled to question Loh on Monday. But questions are growing about the extent to which FBI informants knew about the Capitol riot, and may have encouraged the crowd during the riot.

Many of the defendants in January 6-related prosecutions who have pleaded guilty have acknowledged that they alone decided to trespass or to commit other crimes. However, the role of informants remains unclear.

Some Trump supporters have claimed, incorrectly, that the riot was fomented by left-wing groups, or that it was entirely orchestrated by the FBI. But the shroud of secrecy surrounding FBI informants has fueled such claims.

Trump himself has argued that he urged Congress to accept National Guard help in the days leading up to Jan. 6, but that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declined.

Confronted by FBI abuses, Congress ready to add civil liberty protections to key surveillance law

[JustTheNews] New guardrails likely to protect Americans under FISA Section 702, House Intelligence Committee members say.

After years of evidence that the FBI has abused its spy authorities, Congress is embarking on a bipartisan effort to revamp a key surveillance law to better protect civil liberties, including appointing special lawyers to advocate on behalf of Americans secretly targeted by the government.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 powers allow the government to rummage through phone records in terrorism and counterintelligence probes without a warrant and have long raised deep concerns, starting with ACLU litigation years ago and continuing through the bungled FISA warrant that unlawfully targeted the Trump campaign and adviser Carter Page during the Russia collusion probe.

But lawmakers continued to renew the law to ensure the government had the powers it needed to fight terror threats. But since its last renewal, the FISA Court and the U.S. intelligence community released devastating reports in 2020 and 2022 chronicling years of FISA abuses that went far beyond the Russia probe and even included targeting of a sitting member of Congress.

Those revelations have increased the resolve of lawmakers to make substantive changes this year when the law expires, including inside the House Intelligence Committee, where a bipartisan group was selected last week to craft suggested changes.

"I think that you will see changes made to it," Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), one of the newest members of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News, adding there was clear evidence that the law's past safeguards have been breached by the FBI and intel agencies.

"Unfortunately, there have been some people that have leaped those guardrails, for lack of better terminology, and there have got to be consequences for those people who were entrusted," Scott said in an interview with the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "If you were entrusted with the ability to query that information, and you abused that, then there have to be consequences."

Scott said lawmakers on the committee want to address who in government can query the database, who can be targeted and who must sign off on such warrantless surveillance. He also suggested there is some support for adding lawyers to the secretive process to help defend the rights of Americans who are being surveilled without their knowledge.

"Absolutely," Scott said when asked whether adding legal advocates was on the table for the FISA process. "I think you will see a broad bipartisan agreement on this. I'm not saying everybody's going to agree on it, you know, but I think you'll see broad bipartisan agreement on what we come up with."

Scott said one of the dynamics that could help inform the reform process is Americans affected by abuses "personally talking about what has been done to them in the past."

That process started earlier this month, when Rep. Darrin LaHood (R-Ill.), a member of the intelligence panel, disclosed he was the lawmaker targeted for surveillance who was referenced in a declassified intelligence community report on FISA abuses released in December.

"I have had the opportunity to review the classified summary of this violation, and it is my opinion that the member of Congress who was wrongfully queried multiple times solely by his name was, in fact, me," LaHood said during a hearing in early March.

Since then, Intelligence Committee Chairman Jim Turner (R-Ohio) and Vice Chairman Jim Himes (D-Conn.) created a panel of lawmakers to craft meaningful reform and bring it to the House. It's one of several areas of unexpected bipartisan consensus on national security matters that has broken out since Kevin McCarthy took over as Speaker in January.

The House has an obligation "to ensure that these authorities do not violate Americans' constitutionally protected rights and to look at further reforms to protect those rights," Himes said in announcing the initiative this week.

The evidence of FBI abuses of Section 702 and FISA in general have mounted over the last years, starting in 2019 when the Justice Department inspector general released a devastating report concluding the FBI warrant targeting Page was riddled with errors, violated policies and involved misconduct that included withholding required information from the court and even doctoring a piece of evidence.

That was followed a year later by the release of a declassified opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that chronicled how the FBI had been "seriously and systematically abusing its warrantless electronic surveillance authority" for years outside the Russia collusion case.

And then in December, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of a 2021 report that found additional abuses, including the targeting of Americans with clear constitutional protections such as the member of Congress and a political organization.

The FBI said it has been working on its own internal Section 702 reforms and wants to constructively engage with Congress to add better protections and ensure all Americans have confidence in the bureau's work.

But the newly released audit report said the FBI continues to abuse the Section 702 system despite its internal reforms and training.

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Cyber

Spooks in Silicon Valley: Flow of U.S. intelligence analysts into Big Tech jobs raises alarm

2023-01-25

[JustTheNews] Those who once served to protect the nation are now using their intel smarts to regulate speech in America.

As Congress and the courts delve deeper into federally sanctioned censorship by Big Tech, a troubling revolving door has emerged between the U.S. intelligence community and the Big Tech giants on the front lines of one of the fiercest battles over free speech in modern American history.

A Just the News review of LinkedIn employment histories of senior Big Tech executives found that at least 200 former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, National Security Council and Homeland Security Department have landed Silicon Valley jobs, many within content moderation units regulating supposed "disinformation" and disproportionately throttling news and opinion deviating from approved, left-tilting norms.

These individuals range from Aaron Berman, who spent a decade and a half as a CIA analyst before joining Facebook parent Meta as product policy manager for disinformation, to James Baker, the former FBI general counsel recently fired by Elon Musk as Twitter's chief lawyer over a spat about prior review of "Twitter Files" releases exposing past censorship by the platform. Baker was one of the key FBI figures involved in obtaining a FISA warrant based on the now-debunked Steele dossier to surveil onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The spooks-to-Silicon-Valley pipeline has sent an army of federal agents, intel analysts and even psychological operations experts once trained with taxpayer money to fight foreign enemies or capture big criminals into higher-paying private sector jobs where those same skills now target Americans' opinions in the name of fighting "disinformation."

None of the former intel world employees contacted by Just the News returned phone or email requests for comment. But in videos posted online, some acknowledged they are part of a new vanguard of Big Tech censors operating in a world where there is little consensus about what should be done and what is legal.

"There is very little agreement whether we should be leaving more content up or taking more content down," Berman said in a video posted on Meta's site. "With any particular rule or issue that we're looking at where something has come up, where the rules are not 100 percent clear, we're not going to make everybody happy."

Berman, whose LinkedIn biography boasts he used to prepare the presidential daily brief at the CIA, acknowledged there is some discomfort in the power he now wields in his new role in Big Tech to decide the difference between "harmful content" and free speech.

"It's a balance," he said in the video. "I think it should make me uncomfortable, and all of us who do this work."

Some of the federal intel veterans are less inhibited about expressing biases. For example, Nick Rossmann, former CIA analyst and current senior manager of Trust & Safety at Google, overtly supported defeated 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner should be strangled and declared, "Anti-vaxxers are like Nazis."

During the COVID-19 outbreak, Rossmann even seemed to wish death on elderly Trump voters, tweeting, "I hope they cough on their grandparents, who voted for Trump, & get to rot."

Jacqueline Lopour, another Hillary Clinton supporter and former CIA analyst — she served for 10 years in the agency — is currently Google Senior Manager, Intel Collection, Trust & Safety. In that capacity, she manages "Intel operations spanning multiple threat verticals, including violent extremism, cyber threats, misinformation, hate speech, spam, fraud, security and privacy, and more," according to her LinkedIn bio.

In a 2017 Canadian Broadcasting Company interview, Lopour invoked her CIA experience to uncritically vouch for the agency's assessment that Russia meddled in U.S. politics to tip the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump, saying, "They [Russia] deliberately released the DNC information to @wikileaks ... with the specific motivation of helping Trump get elected."

Further LinkedIn profile checks revealed several other key members of Big Tech teams who served in either the Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, NSA, or DHS. The growing pipeline of intelligence and law enforcement officials was previously documented in detail by an anonymous Twitter account posted by the user @NameRedacted247 in a 30-part Twitter thread.

Former President Donald Trump weighed in on the issue with a video message, touting his proposal to end the revolving door between the Deep State" and the "tech tyrants" by imposing "a 7-year cooling off period, before any employee of these powerful agencies is allowed to take a job at a major platform."

Recent reporting "shows the FBI and other rogue agencies have been systematically colluding with former national security officials placed in high positions at Twitter and very likely other companies to advance their censorship regime," said Trump.

"This anti-American effort," he went on, has been "working to silence dissenting opinions on COVID and crucial issues in public health and on the [2020] election." The suppression of dissenting doctors and health experts "had nothing to do with science" or "saving lives," he alleged. "This was about government working with powerful corporations to seize power over you, the American people."

Twitter currently employs at least 10 former FBI agents, according to LinkedIn profile checks performed by Just The News.

Just the News reached out to several former members of the intelligence community now employed by Big Tech for comment but has received no replies.

Just the News also reached out to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, along with the FBI, NSA, and DOD, but only received a brief response from the CIA which read, "CIA's intelligence mission is foreign focused, and the Agency at all times abides by US laws, regulations, and executive orders that prohibit unlawful collection related to US persons."

The FBI field office in Washington, D.C. refused to comment directly, while the NSA recommended reaching out and questioning each Big Tech firm individually.

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Government Corruption

Former FBI Russian collusion investigator charged with Russian collusion.

2023-01-23

See also here. [WashingtonFreeBeacon] Charles McGonigal is accused of conspiring to lift sanctions off Russian businessman with ties to Vladimir Putin.

A former FBI official involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia was charged Monday for violating sanctions on behalf of a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Charles McGonigal, who led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York, is accused of violating U.S. sanctions on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Vladimir Putin. According to prosecutors, McGonigal and a former Russian diplomat conspired to have sanctions removed from Deripaska in 2021. They also investigated another Russian oligarch "in return for concealed payments" from Deripaska. Their effort was unsuccessful as Deripaska remains under sanctions. McGonigal, who was arrested on Monday, allegedly received $225,000 from a former Russian intelligence officer while he was still employed by the FBI.

The indictment marks a surprising twist given McGonigal’s involvement with the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. As a top counterintelligence official, McGonigal was one of the first individuals at the FBI to learn that a Trump campaign adviser had discussed Hillary Clinton’s emails with a foreign diplomat. The FBI opened its investigation of the Trump campaign based on that conversation, but later found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

McGonigal, who left the FBI in 2018, was involved in the bureau’s probe of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, according to text messages released by Senate Republicans. "Our Team is currently talking to [Carter Page] re Russia," he wrote on March 16, 2017, to an FBI colleague.

It is unclear what other involvement McGonigal had in the Trump-Russia probe. But that investigation also scrutinized Deripaska’s relationship with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort and Deripaska had business dealings in Ukraine and maintained contact during the 2016 campaign.

Deripaska also has ties to former British spy Christopher Steele, who alleged in an infamous dossier that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s dossier for its investigation, but failed to verify the collusion allegations. Deripaska once hired Steele to work on a "research project" on his behalf.

Link

Government Corruption

FBI recruited and 'PAID' Twitter sources with US Taxpayer money..... as suspected

2022-12-20

[Daily Caller] The FBI paid Twitter millions as a reimbursement for the time the company spent processing the FBI’s requests, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Monday, in the most recent installment of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing "Twitter Files."
Wait until it is discovered that these embedded 'former' intelligence agency Twitter employees were still on the FBI payroll and simply.... 'detailed' to Twitter.
In an email with the subject line "Run the business — we made money!" an employee, whose name was redacted, reports to then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million dollars between October 2019 and February 2021, Shellenberger reported. Baker, a former FBI agent, was the agency’s general counsel during Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page via improper use of the Steele dossier, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The FBI and Twitter enjoyed a close relationship in the run-up to the 2020 elections, with the FBI promising "no impediments to information sharing" between the two groups in a Sept. 16, 2020 meeting between social media executives and intelligence community staff. In a previous installment of the "Twitter Files," journalist Matt Taibbi said he had not found evidence that the FBI or intelligence community was involved in Twitter’s decision to suppress access to a New York Post story about a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, but new documents from Shellenberger indicated that the FBI was, in fact, involved.

The Post’s original October 14, 2020, story was based on a laptop, apparently belonging to Biden, containing a 2015 email linking then-Vice President Joe Biden to his son Hunter’s business dealings with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Prior to the story’s release, the FBI issued warnings to social media platforms that there was likely to be a Russian "hack-and-leak" operation prior to the election — Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth testified that he had been explicitly warned of a leak targeting Hunter Biden — despite not having any evidence of such an operation being underway, Shellenberger reported, citing the testimony of FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan.

"Everybody works for somebody."
~ John Kiriakou 'Doing Time Like A Spy', page 80.

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Government Corruption

John Durham unmistakably puts FBI on trial alongside its Russian collusion informant

2022-10-19

See here for Mr. Danchenko’s acquittal.

[JustTheNews] With probing questions and relentless redirects, prosecutor exposes FBI for omissions, deletions, peculiar lack of curiosity and a $1 million bounty to pursue Trump.

Igor Danchenko is the named defendant at this week's trial, charged with lying as an informant in the now discredited Russia collusion investigation. But with probing questions and searing redirects, Special Counsel John Durham has turned the Russian researcher's trial in the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria, Va., into an expose of stunning FBI failures and omissions in its now-infamous pursuit of Donald Trump for crimes that turned out to be nonexistent.

While the Hillary Clinton-spawned Russian collusion narrative has been the subject of a half dozen exhaustive investigations in the House, Senate and Justice Department, Durham has managed to use his third and widely assumed last trial to drop bombshell after bombshell that other inquiries failed to uncover. Even the most versed in the case have been stunned.

The effort began during pretrial motions.

Danchenko, the primary source for the now-debunked Steele dossier, was someone who had both lied to FBI agents and had troubling ties to Russian intelligence. But Durham revealed he was inexplicably hired by the bureau, despite that record, to be a paid confidential human source for three years.

Durham followed that with a stunner on day 1 of the trial, getting FBI senior analyst Brian Auten to reveal that the FBI had been unable to confirm a single fact in the Steele dossier by mid-October 2016 but nonetheless grabbed some of its most sensational claims about Trump and stuck them into a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant marked "verified" that authorized spying on the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page.

"On October 21, 2016, did you have any information to corroborate that information?" Durham asked, referring to the Carter Page FISA application submitted on that date.

"No," Auten replied.

The bureau was so desperate to find corroboration to justify Steele's allegations that it offered up to $1 million to former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, a paid researcher for Hillary Clinton's campaign, if he could corroborate his dossier. Steele did not, Auten told the jury.

That revelation even shocked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who conducted the first exhaustive probe that debunked the dossier and exposed FBI wrongdoing. Nunes told Just the News on Thursday he was never told about the $1 million payment despite subpoenaing the FBI.

"I hate to say this, but like a new shoe drops every day," Nunes told the John Solomon Reports podcast in referring to Durham's work. "And it's like every day we find out something new. And I mean, look, I don't know how you describe this $1 million payment or potential payment to Steele as anything other than what it is. It was a bounty program to get Donald Trump."

Kevin Brock, retired FBI chief of intelligence, told Just the News that the $1 million dangle was completely out of the norm for the bureau.

"The Crossfire Hurricane investigative team, managed by James Comey's headquarters executives, offered a truly outrageous sum of money to Christopher Steele as an 'incentive' to corroborate his own information," Brock said. "Paying money to incentivize a source risks a corrupt outcome. Paying a lot of money risks a lot of corruption. Incentive payments are not normal FBI policy.

"The FBI has specific required procedures for corroborating or vetting a source, especially when that source's information is going to be used in any kind of affidavit. Having a source corroborate his own information is not one of those procedures. That's the job of the investigator."

But Brock said Auten's admission that the bureau submitted evidence to the FISA court that wasn't at all corroborated was even more damning under the bureau's own rules.

"If uncorroborated information is going to be used like this, FBI policy explicitly requires the swearing agent to clearly state that it is not known if the information is accurate or not," he said. "This wasn't done, and it can't be considered a mere oversight. Too many eyes all the way up the chain were laid on this affidavit. We're left with the disappointing conclusion that it was omitted on purpose."

Such revelations have even changed the minds of experts like former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy who, while critical, have tried to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt that its failures in the probe were mistakes but not corrupt behavior. Durham has now delivered "utter proof the FBI framed Trump and shielded Hunter Biden," McCarthy declared this week.

"The trial is highlighting the FBI's shocking malfeasance in the Trump-Russia 'collusion' probe," he wrote in a New York Post column this week.

The revelations of FBI failures kept coming. On day 3 of the trial, Durham used a redirect Q&A to press FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson regarding bringing on Danchenko as a confidential human source.

Durham noted that when Helson was writing a report to bring Danchenko on as a source, he had reported that there was no derogatory information about Danchenko, which wasn't accurate, since there had been a previous espionage case against him that was closed.

When Durham asked if Helson ever corrected that report, the FBI agent answered, "No."

On Wednesday, Durham got Auten to reveal he has been recommended for suspension for his role in the FBI's failure to tell the FISA court the whole truth during the probe code-named Crossfire Hurricane. Durham grilled Auten for failing to do the sort of digging an FBI analyst is assumed to do in a high-profile counterintelligence case.

"While working on Crossfire Hurricane, you were questioned as a witness in the Mueller investigation — you were in the middle of it," he said. "Did you guys even bother to pull phone records? Travel records? You did none of these things."

"Any particular reason why experienced FBI personnel could not request phone records?" Durham asked. "Ever run that number down to see phone records?"

Auten said he couldn't recall.

Durham took a mocking tone at one point on why the FBI did not challenge more aggressively the claims from Danchenko that Belarusian-born businessman Sergei Millian, who was president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, was a source of dirt against Trump, something that proved untrue.

"Millian was a vocal Trump supporter," Durham noted. "Would you find it peculiar that someone who was an avid Trump supporter would provide negative information about the Trump campaign? That is very peculiar, right? Almost unbelievable, wouldn't you say?"

Auten quietly agreed.

Durham signaled his intention to treat the FBI team with suspicion in one of his last pretrial motions, declaring that in "any investigation of potential collusion between the Russian Government and a political campaign, it is appropriate and necessary for the FBI to consider whether information it receives via foreign nationals may be a product of Russian intelligence efforts or disinformation."

In the end, the FBI did not seriously consider that possibility, even after the CIA warned of such possibilities and revealed Hillary Clinton's team was behind the planting of the narrative during the height of the 2016 election.

Brock said Durham has used the trial to tell a story of the FBI’s egregious failures.

“The FBI has been traditionally successful because of a simple formula: uncover facts that lead to evidence that determines an outcome,” the former FBI executive said. “Crossfire Hurricane was a debacle because it started with a desired outcome and tried to create facts to fit that outcome. Durham is methodically revealing just how desperate the politically biased Crossfire Hurricane team was.”

Nunes said the evidence Durham has now put into the public realm raises serious questions about why FBI personnel have not been prosecuted except, for one single lawyer who altered evidence submitted to the court.

“It's just so confusing to me as to why these FBI and DOJ characters and some of the Clinton cabal have not been brought up on a conspiracy charge because clearly they were conspiring to defraud the United States government to lie and mislead Congress,” he said.

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