Was it worth it, Bro?

In Military Times, Todd South reports,

A former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst has pleaded guilty to sharing top secret information with two reporters and now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

Henry Kyle Frese, 31, of Alexandria, Virginia, pleaded guilty to willful transmission of top secret materials to the two journalists in 2018. One of the two journalists his then-girlfriend, who he lived with at the time.

“By disseminating the same classified information, he had pledged to protect, Henry Kyle Frese put the US and our national defense equities in danger,” said Timothy R. Slater, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office.

Read more here.

"The leaks start with a whopper!"

From the Conservative Treehouse:

Horowitz Leaks Begin – FBI Official Caught Altering FISA Documents, Now Under Criminal Investigation…
Posted on November 21, 2019 by Sundance in the Conservative Treehouse
Here we go. Today is the day the inspector general closed the “Principal Review” phase of the upcoming IG report. Now is when the small group of corrupt DOJ and FBI officials -spotlighted by the IG investigation- begin trying to shape the narrative; and the leaks start with a whopper:

….An FBI official was caught altering documents within the 2016 surveillance operation against President Trump…

Keep in mind which FBI officials are now working for the media outlet, CNN, that is providing the leaks; ie. former FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe; the spokesman for James Comey, Josh Campbell; a former FBI agent, Asha Rangappa; or the former FBI chief legal counsel, James Baker. All now work for CNN.

It’s important to note the media source aspect because normally this type of leak would go to the Washington Post or New York Times first; ergo, it likely stems as a personal leak to one of the former allied FBI officials now working for CNN.

Washington (CNN) – An FBI official is under criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document related to 2016 surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser, several people briefed on the matter told CNN.

The possibility of a substantive change to an investigative document is likely to fuel accusations from President Donald Trump and his allies that the FBI committed wrongdoing in its investigation of connections between Russian election meddling and the Trump campaign.

[…] Horowitz turned over evidence on the allegedly altered document to John Durham.


[…] It’s unknown how significant a role the altered document played in the FBI’s investigation of Page and whether the FISA warrant would have been approved without the document. The alterations were significant enough to have shifted the document’s meaning and came up during a part of Horowitz’s FISA review where details were classified, according to the sources.

[…] The identity or rank of the FBI employee under investigation isn’t yet known, and it’s not clear whether the employee still works in the federal government. No charges that could reflect the situation have been filed publicly in court.

The Justice Department and inspector general’s office declined to comment.

Read more here.

Lies, leaks, obstruction of justice. Unraveling the lying, distortion, and unethical and illegal conduct.

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes.

Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal email use before he had even interviewed Clinton, an assertion contradicted by his own written report. I guess his credo and modus operandi are reflected in the subtitle of his recent autobiography A Higher Loyalty: “Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”

After writing about Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Samantha Power, and Rod Rosenstein, VDH has this to say about Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice.

Susan Rice, the former Obama national security advisor, could have made a number of unmasking requests in Power’s name, although she initially denied making any requests in her own name—a lie she immediately amended. Rice, remember, repeatedly lied on national television about the cause and origins of the Benghazi attack, denied there were cash payments for hostages in the Iran deal, misled about the conduct of Beau Bergdahl, and prevaricated over the existence and destruction of weapons of mass destruction in Syria.

...It is likely that to disguise American intelligence agencies’ efforts to besmirch, surveille, and leak to the press damaging unfounded rumors about the Trump campaign that John Brennan enlisted an entire cadre of foreign nationals. And it is likely to be the most egregious example of using non-U.S. citizens to affect the outcome of an election in our history. If there is a crime of foreign collusion—a conspiracy of U.S. officials to use foreigners to interfere with an American election—then Brennan’s efforts are the textbook example.

A number of FBI and Department of Justice high ranking employees such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates all signed off on FISA warrants to surveille Carter Page without apprising the courts that they knew that their chief evidence, the Steele Dossier, was unverified, was paid for by Hillary Clinton, and was used in circular fashion as the basis for news accounts presented to the court. Nor did the Justice Department and FBI officials apprise the FISA justices that Christopher Steele had been terminated as a FBI source.

...Andrew McCabe never should have been in charge of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton, given that just months earlier his wife had been the recipient of $675,000 in campaign cash donated by Clinton and Democratic Party-affiliated political action committees. And the apology of a “time line” that suggests conflicts of interest like McCabe’s expired after an arbitrary date is specious. McCabe knew his spouse had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related money, knew that he had substantial influence on the fate of her email investigation, and hoped and assumed that she was likely to be the next president of the United States quite soon.

Read more here.

The leaked questions Mueller wants to ask Trump

Ace of Spades reports that someone from the special Counsel's office has leaked to the New York Times a list of questions Mueller wants to ask Trump.

New York Times Publishes Lists of Mueller's Questions for Trump, Presumably Leaked by Member of Office of the Special Counsel
This list of questions seems to have two obvious purposes and one sneaky one.

The obvious purposes:

To get Trump to provide evidence against himself which Mueller's team has failed to gather from other sources. Obviously, Trump should not answer questions with this purpose.

To get Trump in a perjury trap in which his answer disagrees, if only slightly and arguably, from an answer of another interviewee, in which case Mueller will proclaim the other interviewee to be obviously telling the truth (even if that "truth" was obtained in exchange for immunity or a light plea deal) and claim Trump has committed perjury. Obviously, Trump should not answer questions with this purpose.

Alan Derschowitz proposes a sneaky angle to the questions: That they have been constructed to not be answered by "Yes" or "No," but have been constructed to invite open-ended answers and digressions, to encourage Trump to ramble on and wind up talking about things not even asked about or even much thought about, for which they can then charge him with perjury.

Trump is a rambler, and his mouth often seems to be an independently-acting organism with full autonomy of action and little guidance from his brain.

Given that this is obviously a set-up, and that the Special Counsel's office is acting unethically even by leaking these questions to its partner-in-crime the media, Trump should just invoke any privilege not to answer, from the Article 2 separation of powers to executive privilege to "any other privileges I may enjoy" (a method of invoking the 5th Amendment without saying "I invoke the 5th," which Democrats employed during previous investigations), and tell Mueller to go spit.

Derschowitz himself argues Trump should answer the questions in written form (with full vetting by his lawyers, one presumes), or, if that is rejected, then he should negotiate for a certain number of questions or a certain time limit for questioning. He also allows that Trump can/should invoke Executive Privilege, but not the 5th Amendment.

I disagree. Others have been permitted to allude to the 5th Amendment without specifically invoking it, just generally asserting "any other rights I might have under the Constitution." If it works for Democrats, it works for Trump.

...the Deep State has declared war on a duly elected president chosen by the people in open defiance of their demands, how dare they!, and Trump should not refrain from declaring war right back.

Read more here.
The Daily Caller has the 48 questions here.

Now that the Justice Department has had an opportunity to preview the Nunes memo content, we begin seeing leaks about it in the New York Times.

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse gives us an understanding about leaks coming from the FBI or DOJ to the New York times.

it is not coincidental that now the Justice Department has had an opportunity to preview the Nunes memo content, we begin seeing leaks about it in the New York Times.

The Black Hat operatives within the DOJ and FBI are desperate to get out ahead of the stories.

Think about it. The Nunes memo was available to congress for over a week, and not a single -substantive- material leak came out. Yet, within HOURS of the Justice Department having access to the memo, the New York Times is writing about specific details contained within the memo.

Read more here.

"Who was unmasked? Were they targeted rather than incidentally monitored? Was there any correlation between unmaskings and leaks to the media?"

I have been wondering what is going to happen to the four Obama administration persons who unmasked American citizens. Andrew McCarthy writes about that today at National Review. Here are some excerpts:

The president is in charge of the executive branch, including its intelligence agencies. He has the authority to decide what intelligence information, and intelligence abuses, can be declassified and made public.

I am perfectly prepared to believe that the real story of the 2016 election was collusion between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration — particularly, the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies. On that score, the unmasking allegations are alarming.

It is not a crime to unmask the identity of an American. It is a discretionary call, even if we would think it bad judgment under the circumstances. Thus, the question here is almost certainly not whether criminal offenses were committed. It is whether power was abused.

...Who did the unmasking? Were these officials in jobs that generally do not involve unmasking decisions? If yes, was there anything unusual going on that would justify the sudden change? Who was unmasked? Were unmasked Americans in the opposition party’s campaign? Was there a supporting rationale for the unmaskings that related to national security? Was there an unusually high number of unmaskings? Were there unmaskings of people related to each other in some way, such that we should suspect they were targeted rather than incidentally monitored? Was there any correlation between unmaskings and leaks to the media?

Read more here.

"Undercutting our ability to do our job!"

How an anonymous leak to the New York Times undercut our military.

Security leaks now appearing in the press at least once every day!

Adam Kredo reports in the Washington Free Beacon,

The Trump administration is battling an unprecedented wave of national security leaks that are appearing in the press at least once a day, significantly more than either the former Obama or Bush administration experienced in the same time frame, according to a new Senate investigation that warns these leaks are endangering U.S. security operations and relations with allied nations.

Read more here.

"The DoJ should subpoena the journalists and demand they identify their sources."

At Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds writes,

THE UNENDING STREAM OF LEAKS FROM MUELLER’S OPERATION IS UNPROFESSIONAL AND — REMEMBER? — ILLEGAL. The DoJ should subpoena the journalists and demand they identify their sources. People within the prosecutor’s office who are committing felonies and breaches of ethics should be prosecuted and fired. And that includes Mueller himself if he’s doing the leaking.

Unpunished leakers

Excerpts of Roger L. Simon writing at PJ Media:

How are we supposed to take the myriad leaks coming from Robert Mueller's special investigation of what I guess we could call "The Russian Matter"?

You would think that on the day Rep. Steve Scalise was shot the lava-like flow of illegal and frequently inaccurate leaked information being promulgated ad infinitum by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN (among others) would stop for a moment's respectful pause, but no -- at least not at the Washington Post.

That very day they were "reporting" [scare quotes deliberate] that five, count 'em five, needless-to-say unnamed "officials" [scare quotes again deliberate] were saying Donald Trump is under investigation for obstruction of justice by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

In Thursday's WaPo"exclusive," it's son-in-law Jared Kushner under the leak-o-scope. This article, like the one before, is accompanied by the paper's typical boilerplate that they seem to have in macro. (Do they teach this in j-school now?):

The officials who described the financial focus of the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
I thought they weren't "authorized" to speak at all. I thought it was against the law to leak -- naive

...These leaks have appeared only days after this supposedly confidential investigation began. Where did they come from? Inside the FBI? If so, that organization (with five leakers!) is seriously corrupt and should be disbanded. Yes, you read that correctly. If serial leaks are coming from the FBI, our leading law enforcement agency is betraying the America people and is staffed with a number of criminals of the most despicable entitled sort. They think they know what's best for us hoi polloi, so they are allowed to break the law with impunity when the rest of us poor schmucks have to toe the line on a parking ticket. Over such things are civil wars and revolutions fought (taxation without representation, etc.) -- with justification.

That is a big story, bigger even than Trump/Russia (well, that wouldn't be hard). Whether or not Trump obstructed justice we have no way of knowing (though Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley are skeptical), but we do know that illegal leakers are all over our government from intelligence agencies to the FBI. This is quite simply totalitarianism on the march, the subversion of the rule of law in a democratic republic.

What we are witnessing is a cross between "Animal Farm" and Ugo Betti's "Corruption in the Palace of Justice" as produced by Jeff Bezos. It also resembles the techniques employed during Stalin's show trials when "information" was leaked to the reliable press to assure the discrediting of defendants in advance of their testimony. Considering what we have seen in recent days, I have no doubt that some of these leakers would love to see both Trump and Kushner sent to the Gulag, if only we had one.

Anyone looking at this investigation with even a tad of objectivity can see that it has been tainted before it has barely started. Leave aside the optics (apologies for the already tired cliché) of the close relationship with Comey and the three Democratic donors in key positions. This leaking is on another level altogether. It is obstruction of justice, in its pure Stalinist form. If I were Robert Mueller, I would be humiliated. If I were not able to find those leakers and prosecute immediately, I would recuse myself.

There is no other way. With the leakers unpunished, Mueller's decisions will not have convinced half the country of what has been referred to by others as their "fairness." They will only exacerbate an already bad situation. And that is -- given the dreadfully divided state of our nation at the moment -- a recipe for civil war.

"We are just the recipients of the leaks!"

Collusion? What about the collusion between Deep State intel officials and the media? I think it is a copout when Chris Wallace says it is the administration officials who take an oath and violate that oath by calling reporters at the Washington Post or New York Times. "We are just the recipients!" Recipients who hurry to put the story out without regard to security ramifications. It's all about clicks, isn't it Chris?