Corruptocrat given a graceful exit

Sundance in the Conservative Treehouse explains why Dana Boente was fired from the FBI today. Sundance does another one of his now-famous analyses and concludes,

At the heart of the matter, in the real activity that took place, there was a multi-branch seditious effort to remove President Donald J Trump. Within that effort was a necessary group of embeds specifically assigned to conceal the activity. Dana Boente was one of those embeds.

Dana Boente has now been removed.

Last point – this would not be happening right now if Durham was not coming toward the end of his investigation. Generally speaking, DC provides identified corruptocrats with an opportunity for a graceful exit before the evidence against them surfaces publicly.

Read much more here.

Will they be held accountable?

"A new report released Wednesday documents how the feds missed opportunities to stop at least six lethal terror attacks on American soil."

Robert Spencer reports in PJ Media,

As if participating in the failed deep state coup against President Trump weren’t enough, the FBI has covered itself in glory once again. A new report released Wednesday documents how the feds missed opportunities to stop at least six lethal terror attacks on American soil. The report focuses on failures of “oversight” and “procedure,” but itself becomes part of the problem, in failing to note that the Bureau’s troubles go much deeper.

According to the Washington Times, those six attacks killed 70 people, and each of their perpetrators “had been on the FBI’s radar.” Nonetheless, “agents quickly closed the cases after concluding they were not national security threats, Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said in the report.”

The attackers, according to the Times, included these jihad terrorists:

⦁ Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
⦁ Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who killed three people at the Boston Marathon in 2013.

⦁ Nidal Hasan, who massacred 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

⦁ Esteban Santiago, who killed five people in a 2017 attack at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Santiago was a convert to Islam who said that he committed his murders in the service of the Islamic State (ISIS).

Horowitz observed that “the FBI has acknowledged that various weaknesses related to its assessment process may have impacted its ability to fully investigate certain counterterrorism assessment subjects, who later committed terrorist acts in the United States.”

Of course, it did, because the FBI is still institutionally committed to ignoring, downplaying, or denying the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism. Failing to investigate suspected jihadis is all part of the same willful ignorance. The bureau doesn’t want to appear “Islamophobic” by scrutinizing these people too closely; such scrutiny would abet the impression that there is something about Islam that incites some believers to violence, and the feds have already ruled out that possibility.

The Horowitz report won’t lead to the fixing of the problem, either. It makes scant mention of Islam and jihad, and makes no attempt whatsoever either to identify or explain the importance of the motivating ideology behind jihad terror attacks. This problem goes back to the early years of the Obama administration, and is the result of Obama’s deliberately chosen policy. On October 19, 2011, Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates wrote a letter to John Brennan, who was then the assistant to the president on national security for Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism. The letter was signed not just by Khera, but by the leaders of virtually all the significant Islamic groups in the United States: 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Islamic Relief USA; and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The letter denounced what it characterized as U.S. government agencies’ “use of biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam,” as well as supposedly biased trainers (including me), and demanded that all such materials be removed, although the letter didn’t even attempt to prove that any of the objectionable material was actually inaccurate.

Brennan assured Khera that all her demands would be met. He detailed other specific actions being undertaken, including “collecting all training materials that contain cultural or religious content, including information related to Islam or Muslims.” In reality, this material wouldn’t just be “collected”; it would be purged of anything that Farhana Khera and others like her found offensive—that is, any honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use Islamic teachings to justify violence. And so it has been in the FBI and other agencies ever since.

This is what has led to the failure of the intelligence community, and a great many of the procedural errors upon which the report does focus: agents in all too many cases simply didn’t know what to look for, or how to understand the significance of the information they did have. Unless and until this is corrected, these failures of oversight and procedure will continue, no matter what safeguards are put into place.

..."national security against foreign powers is not a fit responsibility for police agencies and courts."

In the Washington Examiner, Andrew McCarthy writes,

...The immense powers wielded by our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus are essential to protecting the United States. The agencies that wield them, as currently constructed, are not.

...If the FBI and the courts are doing national security, they are necessarily practicing politics. Arms of government that make political determinations cannot properly be independent of political oversight and accountability.

...I’ve always believed the FBI could handle these related but different responsibilities. History proved me wrong. The bureau arrogantly insists on independence from political oversight not just in criminal cases but even when it is carrying out national security functions. It wants a free hand to act and even make policy judgments in the political realm, but it demands insulation from political accountability.

FISA was a well-meaning effort to give a modicum of due process to Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents. In point of fact, it does not provide meaningful due process because it cannot replicate the adversarial search for truth that is the hallmark of judicial proceedings. The FBI and Justice Department appear ex parte before the court; the surveillance subject cannot be effectively represented, and the proceedings are classified, so the expectation is that no one will ever check the executive’s representations. This is unlike criminal cases, which lead to prosecution, discovery, and significant legal consequences if government agents duped the judge into granting warrants.

...And now, with the Trump-Russia investigation, we’ve witnessed the abuse of power many FISA critics predicted for decades: the pretextual invocation of FISA surveillance powers to conduct a criminal investigation for which the investigators lack a criminal predicate — in this instance, the hunt for some crime that might render Donald Trump unelectable or removable. Worse, and quite naturally, the abuse has happened in a political context: the incumbent Democratic administration using the threat posed by a hostile power, Russia, to rationalize foreign counterintelligence surveillance of the opposition party’s political campaign, an abuse that continued for two years and impeded the Trump administration’s capacity to govern.

The FBI should be relegated to the investigation and prosecution of crime. The bureau excels in executing its law enforcement duties and can be trusted to operate with minimal political supervision because the criminal justice system features transparent judicial oversight. The foreign counterintelligence mission should be transferred to other intelligence community components and subjected to beefed-up congressional regulation and oversight. FISA should be repealed, with the courts returned to their judicial role of providing a forum for those injured by governmental overreach, rather than aiding and abetting in the overreach.

Much more rethinking of the intelligence community needs to be done. The Claremont Institute’s Angelo Codevilla, an insightful and provocative intelligence expert, argues the CIA is obsolete, politicized, and counterproductive. He would assign foreign intelligence responsibilities to the departments that carry out national defense and foreign relations missions — mainly, the Defense and State Departments — tailoring the gathering of intelligence to the practical needs of these missions. This would strip down the so-called “deep state,” a leviathan that warehouses mountains of intelligence to the detriment of our liberties and with dubious benefits to our security. Codevilla would also repeal FISA.

His ideas are worth exploring. What is already clear, however, is that national security against foreign powers is not a fit responsibility for police agencies and courts. Assigning it to them is a failed experiment: a temptation to intrusive surveillance of innocent citizens and politicized law enforcement. We should end the experiment before the public, in its frustration over the lack of accountability, clips the powers vital to our national defense.

Read more here.

Who should lead the effort to reform the FBI?

In American Greatness, Julie Kelly writes,

The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is in shambles. Following a series of internal investigations, in addition to extensive reporting on the misconduct of former top officials, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is suffering a crisis in confidence from the very people it has a sworn duty to protect: the American public.

Considering its behavior over the past four years, one could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI exists only to serve the interests of the political aristocracy. From the Clinton email server cover-up to the unfounded counterintelligence probe into four Americans working for the Trump presidential campaign and the corruption of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI has exploited its power to defend partisan allies and punish foes.

Texts revealed contempt for voters who make up roughly half the country. Rather than working to keep the country safe, the top tier of the FBI spent most of its time massaging their press contacts, accompanying reporters to baseball games and golf outings (in clear violation of company policy), and illegally leaking sensitive information then lying about it all when caught. The FBI’s former chief, James Comey, stole his own classified memos from the agency and hid them at home before he was busted.

Comey and his immediate underlings routinely vent their hatred of the elected president of the United States in a manner unprecedented in history. Their top-selling books and Twitter feeds are filled with self-righteous hubris; despite their culpability in torching the credibility of the agency America has been taught to trust, they instead play the victim.

...Wray strenuously objected to the release of the February 2018 memo prepared by then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, which detailed how Comey’s FBI used the bogus Steele dossier as evidence in its application to the court and then withheld disclosing Steele’s Democratic funders.

...Wray refused to fire the disgraced Andrew McCabe—the acting FBI chief who served in between Comey and Wray—despite mounting evidence of McCabe’s misconduct. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe just hours before he could retire with full benefits.) Wray also has stonewalled requests for communications from McCabe.

Read more here.

I was very disappointed in the ending of this report. Julie wrote, McCord is now counsel for the Democrats’ impeachment legal team. McCord? I presume she meant McCabe, but I cannot find confirmation by a Google search, and American Greatness has not corrected the mistake. I was also not able to access Comments. Frustrating!

Update: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/01/12/mccord-is-the-key-devin-nunes-discusses-sketchy-issues-surrounding-icig-michael-atkinson-and-origination-of-the-whistle-blower-complaint/
Sundance tells us who McCord is!

Is it time to dissove both the FBI and the FISA courts?

Chuck Ross reports in part in the Daily Caller,

A former Justice Department official picked Friday to oversee the FBI’s reforms of its surveillance procedures in the wake of a damning inspector general’s report was one of the many pundits during the Russia probe to defend the bureau’s surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

David S. Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security, was also an outspoken critic of Rep. Devin Nunes and other congressional Republicans who accused the FBI of misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in applications to wiretap Page.

An inspector general’s (IG) report released Dec. 9, 2019, largely vindicated Republicans and Page. The report identified 17 errors and omissions the FBI made in its four applications to surveil Page. The IG also said the FBI was unable to corroborate allegations that Page was a Russian agent.

Judge James E. Boasberg, who presides over the FISC, tapped Kris serve as amicus curiae for a review of the FBI’s handling of the Page surveillance warrants. In that role, Kris will “assist” the FISC in assessing the FBI’s implementation of a series of reforms to address the problems uncovered in the IG report.

Nunes and Page both panned the choice of Kris given his past commentary defending the FBI.

“It’s hard to imagine a worse person the FISC could have chosen outside Comey, McCabe, or Schiff,” Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The choice is shocking and inexplicable.”

Page also weighed in on Kris’s selection to oversee the FBI’s reforms.

“If there were any hope for the system fixing this FISA mess, it extinguished with David Kris’ appointment,” he told The DCNF.

“Nobody trying to fix the rampant abuse and coverup plaguing the entire FISA process would have picked Kris,” continued Page, who called Kris a “longtime FISA apologist.”

“Instead, you appoint Kris for only one reason: you don’t want the system fixed. You just want it to look like you do.”

Read more here.

"Now what?"

Adam Mill writes in part in American Greatness,

One can imagine the unspoken question hanging in the darkness during the January 2017 ride back to the airport. A small gaggle1 of FBI agents had just concluded their long-overdue interview with Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source. The silence must have been deafening. Steele had tried to conceal2 his source from the FBI. But the FBI knew his identity and set up an interview behind Steele’s back, and the interview contradicted several Steele assertions. The downcast agents waited for somebody to ask the question on all of their minds: “Now what?”

The right answer would have been to admit to the court that Steele was an unreliable source who exaggerates and lies and put an end to spying on Americans in pursuit of the mirage of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.

When presented one last opportunity to do the right thing, the FBI instead pushed harder for their now-discredited hypothesis justifying the investigation. Peter Strzok had promised his lover, Lisa Page, he would “save” the country from Donald Trump. Given a choice between bringing the FBI back into the light of the Constitution or the darkness of blind hatred of Donald Trump, the conspirators choose darkness. It was at this precise moment that the FBI left behind any plausible deniability of “mistake” or “sloppiness.” From this point on, the FBI’s participation in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax became willful and intentional.

This is the FBI’s darkest hour. The next time the FBI prepared a warrant renewal application, it misrepresented the interview to make it appear as though the source confirmed Steele’s fairytale. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate defrauding of a court.

According to the recent inspector general’s report on the conduct of the FBI’s collusion investigation, several agents met with Steele’s primary source in early 2017 in order finally to get to the bottom of the Russia collusion claims Steele initiated. It would be another four months before then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would launch the reign of terror known as the “Mueller investigation.” Countless Americans would have their privacy invaded by 500 search warrants, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 FBI interrogations.

...In December 2016, shortly before the electors formally cast their votes to make Trump the president-elect, the Clinton campaign manager made an appeal to the Intelligence Community to provide an “intelligence briefing” to the electors. He meant the Steele dossier which Clinton allies knew to be in the hands of the FBI.

Of course they knew. The Clinton campaign bought the dossier and paid Steele to give it to the FBI. Without any way for the Trump campaign effectively to rebut the smears, it’s hard to see how the electors could have resisted officials peddling Steele’s smears as official intelligence.

The hoax conspirators might have started as unwitting patsies to Steele. But their participation soon became intentional and criminal.

...Rosenstein’s signature on the last Carter Page warrant extension application sealed his fate as a co-conspirator. No wonder he threatened congressional staffers to keep his secret safe.

It’s the greatest scandal in U.S. legal history. Most chilling of all is that the current FBI chief, Christopher Wray, recently shrugged-off FBI agents lying to the FISA court. He said of the damning Horowitz report that, in his mind, what was “important that the inspector general found that, in this particular instance, the investigation was opened with appropriate predication and authorization.”

If that’s what he believes and thinks is important, then the FBI is truly constitutionally bankrupt. Russia is ruled by an alumnus of the FBI’s Russian counterpart. Our Constitution won’t protect us unless our own cops with guns respect it. After 2016, one wonders whether the FBI looks upon Vladimir Putin with fear—or envy.

Read more here.

How the CIA let the FBI out to dry

In Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds points out that the CIA let the FBI out to dry regarding Carter Page, but he expects the FBI will have an incentive to point out John Brennan’s involvement.

In the comments section of Glenn's blog, Raymond Jelli writes, "We need Clint Eastwood to make a sequel to Jewell about Carter Page. That would get Page his reputation and some money back.

Read more here.

The sorry state of the FBI and CIA

In American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla writes in part,

During my years on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff, CIA officials’ preference for their personal and corporate interests over professional standards continued to get worse. It turned out that every last one of the Cubans they thought were our agents were actually working for Cuban intelligence. In East Germany, the United States had not a single “good” agent. Not only had CIA never recruited even one high-level Soviet agent, but for a decade, Aldrich Ames, CIA’s own chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union/Russia, the man who validated the Russians who offered their services and oversaw our operations in that country, worked for the KGB.

So congenial did the agency find the disinformation coming its way that it was reluctant to investigate. Finally, when it did suspect that the dispatches coming from our agents had been crafted by the KGB, it sent them on to the president anyway because, according to the inspector general, “they contained thoughts they believed the President should consider.”

In short, CIA officials—and not just a few people at the top—have so valued their own opinions, have so wanted to influence U.S. policy, that they have mistaken their own opinions and desires for the truth.

...Robert Mueller’s directorship (2001-2013), followed by his friend James Comey’s, made the FBI into the domestic danger it is today.

The investigation into the letters containing weapons-grade Anthrax, which killed five and injured 17 Americans, defined Mueller’s directorship and today’s FBI. No one was ever charged with the crime. From the beginning, the FBI’s “profiling” process concluded that no foreign government or entity had been responsible, but rather that the attacks had been the work of a lone, white, conservative scientist. Thus the bureau pursued and nearly broke Steven Hatfill, whose lawsuit the government settled for $ 5.8 million.

The FBI then turned its attention to someone else who fit its profile, Bruce Edward Ivins. He was never charged. The bureau ruined his reputation and hounded Ivans into suicide. After which the bureau declared him guilty, but refused to make public the evidence on which it had reached its conclusion. Reassuring, isn’t it?

To be sure, the current inspector general’s general reprimand of the FBI “ineffective management and oversight of confidential sources,” for the lack of “adequate controls” in its validation of human sources,” for “jeopardizing FBI operations, and placing FBI agents, sources, subjects of investigation, and the public in harm’s way,” refers primarily to the bureau’s massive political malfeasance since 2016. But that malfeasance results from a disease that goes beyond politics, a disease that has sapped the moral and professional character of a class of people for at least a half-century.

Alas, in the current political environment, only political reactions are possible.

Read more here.

..."an American citizen should be duly worried about his constitutional rights any time he is approached by such senior FBI officials."

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

After decades in the FBI, the top brass came to believe they could flout the law and pursue their own political agendas.

...in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.

We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion hoax were not recent career appointees. Rather, many came up through the ranks of the FBI. And that raises the question, for example, of where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

...In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself? Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators, or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?

...Fairly or not, the current FBI tragedy is that an American citizen should be duly worried about his constitutional rights any time he is approached by such senior FBI officials. That is not a slur on the rank and file, but the legacy of the supposed best and brightest of the agency and their distortions of the bureau’s once professional creed.

Read more here.

Contemplating treason

Don Surber clarifies,

Let me make this clear: President Donald John Trump is not answerable to the FBI. The FBI is answerable to him.

It is not an independent agency but rather a government bureaucracy under command of the nation's chief executive. He in turn is accountable to Congress and the America people.

McCabe and his co-conspirators contemplated treason.

Read more here

"The Democrats have become a party of the elites, and journalism has become a practice of the elite!"

"The FBI, taking the government of America into its own hands, while the New York Times cheers them on! Preparing for the release of the Mueller investigation report, the FBI people are framing their deep state coup attempt as an heroic investigation. They were getting back at him for his firing of Comey. They saw Trump coming on strong and he was not one of them! We have to protect the public! They panicked when Trump won the election and fired Comey.

The New York Times is printing the story as if it were a good thing that the FBI was engaging in a coverup. It's a duel scandal; one, that the FBI took this power unto itself and second, that the New York Times abetted the coverup scandal.

The Democrats have become a party of the elites, and journalism has become a practice of the elite!

He got no protection from the Whistleblower Act and the FBI knowingly bypassed the lawyer of a represented client

Richard Pollock has this report at The Daily Caller that has me fuming.

FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a government watchdog, according to the whistleblower’s attorney.

The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.

The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

“The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One,” the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF, noting that he considered the FBI’s raid to be an “outrageous disregard” of whistleblower protections.

Sixteen agents arrived at the home of Dennis Nathan Cain, a former FBI contractor, on the morning of Nov. 19 and raided his Union Bridge, Maryland, home, Socarras told TheDCNF.

The raid was permitted by a court order signed on Nov. 15 by federal magistrate Stephanie A. Gallagher in the U.S. District Court for Baltimore and obtained by TheDCNF.

A special agent from the FBI’s Baltimore division, who led the raid, charged that Cain possessed stolen federal property and demanded entry to his private residence, Socarras told TheDCNF.

“On Nov. 19, the FBI conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity in the Union Bridge, Maryland area,” bureau spokesman Dave Fitz told TheDCNF. “At this time, we have no further comment.”

Cain informed the agent while he was still at the door that he was a recognized protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz recognized his whistleblower status, according to Socarras.

Cain further told the FBI agent the potentially damaging classified information had been properly transmitted to the Senate and House Intelligence committees as permitted under the act, Socarras said. The agent immediately directed his agents to begin a sweep of the suburban home, anyway.

Frightened and intimidated, Cain promptly handed over the documents, Socarras told TheDCNF. Yet even after surrendering the information to the FBI, the agents continued to rummage through the home for six hours.

“After asking and getting my approval to do so, DOJ IG Michael Horowitz had a member of his staff physically take Mr. Cain’s classified document disclosure to the House and Senate Intelligence committees,” Socarras told TheDCNF.

“For the bureau to show up at Mr. Cain’s home suggesting that those same documents are stolen federal property, and then proceed to seize copies of the same documents after being told at the house door that he is a legally protected whistleblower who gave them to Congress, is an outrageous disregard of the law,” he continued.

Cain came across the potentially explosive information while working for an FBI contractor, Socarras told TheDCNF.

Cain met with a senior member of Horowitz’s office at a church close to the White House to deliver the documents to the IG, according to Socarras.

Cain sat in a pew with a hoodie and sunglasses, Socarras said. Cain held a double-sealed envelope containing a flash drive with the documents. The IG official met him and, without saying a word, took the pouch over Cain’s shoulder and left.

The law protects whistleblowers who are government contractors and requires the IG to share such potentially damaging information with the attorney general — who at the time was Jeff Sessions.

The two law enforcement officials directed the documents be sent to the Senate and House Intelligence committees for their examination, according to Socarras, who said that a high-level IG official hand-delivered the documents to the two intelligence committees.

“I cannot believe the Bureau informed the federal magistrate who approved the search warrant that they wanted to search the home of an FBI whistleblower to seize the information that he confidentially disclosed to the IG and Congress,” Socarras told TheDCNF.

The whistleblower act is intended to protect whistleblowers within the intelligence community, which includes the FBI.

“The [intelligence community] is committed to providing its personnel the means to report violations of law,” according to a 2016 intelligence community directive.

“The [whistleblower act] authorizes employees of contractors to take government property and give it to the two intelligence committees confidentially,” Socarras told TheDCNF.

The FBI has yet to talk to Cain’s attorney despite the raid, according to Socarras.

“After the raid, and having received my name and phone number from Mr. Cain as his lawyer, an FBI agent actually called my client directly to discuss his seized electronics,” Socarras told TheDCNF. “Knowingly bypassing the lawyer of a represented client is serious misconduct.”

The Justice Department and the IG both declined to comment.

Quick, turn the page!

How long have you been an FBI asset, Mr. Woodward?

Bob Woodward has been making the rounds on Leftist media. If he ever goes on Fox, someone should ask him how long he has been an "FBI asset."

Really, President Trump? Robert Wray is the man who will "proudly bring back the FBI"?

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media,

...Wray began his tenure as FBI director some eleven months ago. Since then the record of the organization has been — it's safe to say — atrocious. They have stonewalled, and continue to stonewall, virtually every oversight request from Senate and House committees in outright defiance of the separation of powers. And when they have relented and revealed documents and texts, they have almost always been redacted beyond recognition, raising more questions than they answered.

...Wray would explain, I suppose, that he reports to Rod Rosenstein but is that enough of an excuse for acquiescence to what has been going on for the last year?

The article he wrote in response to the IG's report is mostly mealy-mouthed pabulum. He seems to buy the IG's dubious conclusion that although Michael Horowitz and Co. found myriad examples of anti-Trump bias, that bias did not affect decision making in the investigation. That thinking is so meretricious your eyes roll at the basic prevarication of its premise. Who would leave evidence that their bias affected what they did? Not even Peter Stzrok is that dumb. (Well, almost.)

Horowitz's report was basically Comey lite because like the former FBI director, whom Horowitz rightly excoriates in the report, the inspector general details malfeasance after malfeasance and then lets the culprit off at the end — just as Comey did with Clinton.

I suspect Comey did this in part because he had a guilty conscience. He knew that Hillary was guilty — it was obvious — but he also knew he had to let her off. Obama had made that clear. So he spilled the beans, but then did what good Germans do and went along.

Horowitz has done something similar, although with more depth and intelligence. These actions, pseudo-reforms in essence, are sophisticated ways of maintaining the status quo. (Horowitz may redeem himself with his second report on FISA, etc.)

I hope I'm wrong, but keeping Christopher Wray as FBI director will do exactly the same thing — preserve this same status quo. If you to truly want to reform the FBI, chose someone as far as possible from the system, even from the Department of Justice — someone with completely clean hands who doesn't know any of them. Maybe a country lawyer.

Read more here.

Multicultural London, Seven-eighths of the civilizational iceberg has melted away, Two Florida mass murders were both bungled by the FBI, Get the kids to front it!

Mark Steyn has written a column today that looks at the murder rates in London and New York. London has caught up with its American counterpart. The names of the murder victims in London? He publishes them, and finds,

At least eighty-five per cent of that grim toll would have been wholly unknown to pre-multicultural London, because neither perpetrators nor victims would have been residents of the United Kingdom.

Mark also looks at the two Florida mass murders and notes some lessons to be learned.

Read more here.

Next up: Charles Grassley: Was the FBI duped by Steele, or did they know and use the dossier anyway?

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse informs us that now that the Nunes memo is

in the rear-view mirror, and the content in the bloodstream of the U.S. electorate, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is next.

Toward the end of December, the FBI provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, with FBI investigative documents (likely FD-302’s) from their contacts with Christopher Steele. According to most reasonable timing we can discover Steele met with FBI officials sometime around October 1st, 2016.

From the U.K. lawsuit against Christopher Steele (pdf here), Steele admits to having shopped the Clinton-Steele dossier to U.S. media outlets “in person” in late September (New York Times, WaPo, New Yorker and CNN), and mid-October, 2016 (New York Times, WaPo, and Yahoo News), per instructions from Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS)

...The “late September” briefings with the New York Times, Washington Post, Yahoo News, New Yorker and CNN took place prior to Christopher Steele meeting with FBI officials early October. The implication therein is that the FBI had to know prior to their October 21st, 2016, court application that the information they were presenting to the FISA court was being heavily shopped to media outlets. This would be immediately disqualifying.

However, in yesterday’s released HPSCI memo, it is noted that Christopher Steele lied to the FBI about those media engagements taking place.

...The HPSCI memo notes the FBI relationship with Christopher Steele was terminated after the FISA application (Oct. 21st, 2016), as a result of the Mother Jones article from October 30th, 2016. Media contact by an FBI material witness is immediately disqualifying.

The question is: did the FBI submit the FISA application under false pretenses? Did the FBI actually know Christopher Steele was shopping the dossier to the media prior to their FISA court submission?
The HPSCI memo gives the FBI the benefit of doubt by presuming the FBI were unaware or “lied to“. The FD-302’s (FBI investigative interview notes), which appear to have been turned over to Senate Chairman Chuck Grassley, would contain the evidence to support the FBI being duped – OR – show the FBI knew, and proceeded in using the dossier despite disqualifying knowledge of media involvement.

The answers to those important questions appears to be the looming in the FBI classified documents behind the Grassley criminal referral.

...In his speech, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley lets us know that unlike Devin Nunes and the HPSCI he has to get agency approval (DOJ) to declassify his memo.

Chairman Nunes had the clearance and a process to release his memo to the Full House, Executive Branch and then to the public. Senator Grassley does not have that same process or clearance availability… Yet.

Read more here.

Jim Jordan questions head of FBI

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine, "Jordan acts like he knows something we don’t. If he is right, this is the biggest scandal in American political history!"

"Two cases, same crime, widely different outcomes!"

On 12-5-17 Tucker broadcasted his show from Las Vegas. He started off with a brilliant analysis of apparent corruption in the FBI. "This is exactly how the secret police start: when law enforcement officials start to do the bidding of politicians, rather than pursue impartial justice on the part of the public!" Hurrah for Tucker Carlson!

Dan Bongino says what we are seeing is the weaponization of our government. "Donald Trump's crime was winning this presidential election! Bongino is fabulous in pointing out that Congress is demanding answers but the FBI just shrugs them off!

Britt Hume explains why he does not like the idea of appointing Special Counsels or Special Prosecutors. Serious questions are arising about impartiality!

Questions about Stephen Paddock's shooting spree continue to pile up. Las Vegas has a 40 member Swat team. Where were they? The lawyers and corporate officials for MGM have hunkered down from day one, allowing no information to be released to the public. The homicide unit was pulled off the case and replaced by the unit that investigates officer-involved shootings! Nothing but questions!