[NY Post] During the financial crisis, the federal government bailed out banks it declared "too big to fail." Fearing their bankruptcy might trigger economic Armageddon, the feds propped them up with taxpayer cash.
Something similar is happening now at the FBI, with the Washington wagons circling the agency to protect it from charges of corruption. This time, the appropriate tag line is "too big to believe."
Yet each day brings credible reports suggesting there is a massive scandal involving the top ranks of America’s premier law enforcement agency. The reports, which feature talk among agents of a "secret society" and suddenly missing text messages, point to the existence both of a cabal dedicated to defeating Donald Trump in 2016 and of a plan to let Hillary Clinton skate free in the classified email probe.
If either one is true ‐ and I believe both probably are ‐ it would mean FBI leaders betrayed the nation by abusing their powers in a bid to pick the president. Emphasis added.
#5
OPM let those appointees burrow down for a reason.
Obama had it figured that with Trump out of the way and Clinton tainted, after impeachment, one of the dem sycophants would offer up a motion to have Zero reinstalled as president.
#6
DOJ should send in the US Marshals to FBI 7th floor and confiscate everything nailed down or otherwise.
It doesn't take a genius to file charges of obvious obstruction of justice. Wray include. But that would require a living brain. Something I'm afraid Season's lost 12 months ago.
#7
No one particularly liked Hillary. They didn't like her when she was first lady and they didn't like her as SOS. She is rude, mean-spirited and foul-mouthed. You don't want to cross her.
Given the above, why did so many people in the higher-ups of the FBI, as well as others, hook their wagon to her star? Was it all about money and power?
#8
Their crime labs been faking evidence for 20 years - including in capital cases. They been letting Jihadis run free. They hassle, and even kill, law abiding citizens. They can put you in jail for "lying" to FBI. And you wonder why they feel they can get away with anything?
#10
JohnQC, nobody liked Hillary but many did like Obama and as soon as he started accepting emails from her private server without making a fuss he became enrolled in the scandal which is what ensured Hillary would walk.
Starts with, "I’m hearing from a source that Lisa Page was involved in approving Peter Strzok’s warrant requests to the FISC and possibly elsewhere. Can you confirm or deny if this was the case? And please tell me what her job title and function are in your office. Thanks."
Ends with, "I’ll decline to comment further."
Posted by: C. Elmomoger7737 ||
01/24/2018 18:35 Comments ||
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#15
Ends with, "I’ll decline to comment further."
Posted by C. Elmomoger
[National Review] From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton‐emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call ‐ not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The divinity of our first Kenyan master shall not be questioned.
The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account. These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton‐Obama emails.
If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges. If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton‐Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen. The latest jaw-dropping disclosures of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, illustrate this point. For the moment, I want to put aside the latest controversy ‐ the FBI’s failure to retain five months of text messages between Strzok and Page, those chattiest of star-crossed lovers.
Yes, this "glitch" closes our window on a critical time in the Trump-Russia investigation: mid December 2016 through mid May 2017. That is when the bureau and Justice Department were reportedly conducting and renewing (in 90-day intervals) court-approved FISA surveillance that may well have focused on the newly sworn-in president of the United States. (Remember: The bureau’s then-director, James Comey, testified at a March 20 House Intelligence Committee hearing that the investigation was probing possible coordination with Trump’s campaign and Kremlin interference in the election.)
Skipping down to the bottom line:
All cleaned up: no indictment, meaning no prosecution, meaning no disclosure of Clinton–Obama emails. It all worked like a charm . . . except the part where Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency and the problem is never spoken of again.
[American Thinker] J. Edgar Hoover must be turning in his grave at what is happening to his venerable FBI. Then again, given Hoover's own proclivities to abuse his powers as the director of that agency, perhaps the predicament in which the bureau finds itself is a natural stage of evolution on an arc of governmental hubris.
It's increasingly clear that the FBI is taking on water at an accelerating rate as new revelations come, fast and furious, in the political scandals engulfing Washington. This week, for example, we see two adolescent-minded senior FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, involved in virtually all aspects of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation and the Donald Trump "Russian collusion" (or is it "obstruction of justice" now?) investigation, acting like hormone-fueled high school lovers, discussing a "secret society" of Trump-haters one day after President Trump's remarkable election. We learned of this only because two patriotic congressmen, representatives Trey Gowdy and John Ratcliffe, former federal prosecutors both, revealed this stunning exchange to Fox News. Was the "secret society" a tongue-in-cheek reference? Given the mind-boggling behavior of the top echelons at the FBI and DOJ these days, one can't be too sure.
The keel of the USS Federal Bureau of Investigation is starting to rise out of the water, like the RMS Titanic about 30 minutes after striking the iceberg. One can almost hear the bodies of top law enforcement bureaucrats crashing against each other, like so much china on a dying vessel sinking under the waves, as the embattled organization faces exposure after exposure of truly outrageous and un-American, if not illegal, conduct.
This sad state of affairs represents the depressing collapse of a pillar of American culture for many of us who grew up revering it and the "G‑men" who populated it. It did a wonderful job of cultivating that aura through the media and entertainment industries, often providing technical assistance to the producers of movies like The Silence of the Lambs.
For those of us over 40, who can forget watching the tough, suave FBI agent Lewis Erskine played by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in the eponymous television show, The FBI? He was the epitome of cool and integrity.
This crafty self-promotion in popular culture has occurred over many decades, spawning countless such television series, movies, and books exalting the bureau. My youngest, college-aged daughter is a devotee of Criminal Minds, yet another slick Hollywood rendering of hip, brilliant FBI agents solving complex serial murders through cunning and derring-do ‐ all in the space of an hour, with commercial breaks, of course.
#1
...The bottom line:. the Bureau is compromised, in the worst possible sense of the word. Worse yet, their senior leadership may well have actually gone renegade.
Hyperbole? Not after the mounting revelations of the last few weeks.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
01/24/2018 8:29 Comments ||
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[American Thinker] Bradley Manning, who goes by "Chelsea" because he thinks he is a woman, could end up as the unlikeliest hero in history for Republicans. The soldier-traitor-"transgender" activist recently announced a bid for Senate in the deep blue state of Maryland, securing a place on the ballot in the Democratic primary. Manning is challenging incumbent Senator Ben Cardin, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wonder of wonders, Manning could end up handing a safe Senate seat for Democrats to the GOP, balancing out the loss in Alabama for the Grand Old Party.
#1
I don't count on it. Cardin's been there forever, a member in good standing of the Old Boy network.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/24/2018 10:27 Comments ||
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#2
The corrupt establishment wing of the Democrat party versus the activist wing of the Democrat party. A new front in the Democrat Civil war that should be entertaining.
[PJ] An FBI informant has apparently informed Congress that a secret society at the FBI was holding secret meetings off-site after the election of Donald Trump.
On Special Report with Bret Baier Tuesday evening, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) called it "corruption of the highest levels of the FBI."
"That secret society ‐ we have an informant that's talking about a group that were holding secret meetings off-site," Johnson said. "There is so much smoke here."
This comes after text messages between FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his paramour, revealed that a "secret society" of officials within the FBI met the day after the election of Donald J. Trump to plot against the president-elect.
"A secret society?" Baier asked. "Secret meetings off-site of the Justice Department? And you have an informant saying that?"
#1
Da Skullz, sitting in a bar within earshot, talking all their subversion.
A popular place mind you. I was in that bar myself.
Who knows what the other House Members know but I tell you this, there place was a "safe space" except they were not.
OPSEC day was yesterday
And you did no such thing in your subversive activities.
This ball of yarn is going to fall from a tall building in the end and many people are in it.
I cast a net, and cooperate with me fastly.
You have no Chewie in the garbage compactor to stop the walls from closing in.
#2
I believe after observing and reading this unfolding scandal that Trump's counterintelligence people are better than the CIA's or the FBI's.
I think the FBI suddenly realized this and that is why they went after Flynn. Flynn by the way, knew all about the Zerobama machinations with the FISA, the phony baloney investigation of Hillary's emails (thank you Carlos Danger), and all about Uranium One and how it all goes in a straight line (if you follow the dots as Joe has) all the way back to Obama. Obama, the single most corrupt, evil, and thoroughly turned POTUS in history. It is a mystery to me WHY a man with no pedigree, no experience, and no history, hell no one knows where he came from, who he really is, or why his entire life story is a fabrication or shrouded in court orders and mystery. So Zero was the Manchurian Candidate as we all suspected. If they is foreign government collusion, it is in the election of the least qualified POTUS in history, who made some of the most monumentally damaging foreign policy and military decisions, fomented racial division and violence, tried to disarm the American public, and weaponized the Executive branch with SWAT teams, armored cars, snipers (explain to me why BLM had snipers???), how did he get elected and how did he beat the best politician in the party, Bill Clinton? If there is collusion, it had to be something to do with getting Obama elected. I personally do not know anyone that voted for him. Even all of my black neighbors, none of them voted for him.
Trump KNEW the dossier was hogwash and he KNEW its origins. So his team, along with the Republicans loyal to him in Congress started these investigations knowing that the longer the Dims continued to play the dossier collusion card, they were setting themselves up. And Flynn and Rogers (who is starting to look like the man who saved the Republic) turned Trump on to the text messages and email and even the offsite meetings. It doesn't take a fool to realize something was amiss in the FBI after the McCabe meltdown with key staff in which he essentially admitted they had tried to rig the election and couldn't understand why they lost.
#4
Sock Puppet of Doom, I live in California and I know a lot of people that voted for Obama. They might have faked votes to try to pull Hillary over the line but Obama won California fairly easily.
#6
Obama looked good in a suit and he sounded good reading a teleprompter. It didn't matter what he said because the media would not report it accurately and because he was running against McCain. We had two Manchurian candidates, the young black man against the decrepit old white man. Of course people voted for him. It was a no win situation.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/24/2018 14:04 Comments ||
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#8
And Flynn and Rogers (who is starting to look like the man who saved the Republic) turned Trump on to the text messages and email and even the offsite meetings. SPOD
Flynn had long been on the outs with the Klingon nation. Rogers, Kieth Alexander (whom we seldom hear from), and Mike Flynn are essentially cut from the same cloth.
[Townhall] "I know that inside the FBI there is a revolt," Joseph diGenova tells The American Spectator. "There is a revolt against the director. The people inside the bureau believe the director is a dirty cop. They believe that he threw the [Hillary Clinton email] case. They do not know what he was promised in return. But the people inside the bureau who were involved in the case and who knew about the case are talking to former FBI people expressing their disgust at the conduct of the director."
The loss of faith in the bureau chief stems in part from a dishonest rendering of the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton as unanimous rather than unilateral and in part from the bureau’s decision to destroy evidence in the case and grant blanket immunity to Clinton underlings for no possible prosecutorial purpose.
"There is a consensus among the employees that the director has lost all credibility and that he cannot lead the bureau," diGenova explains. "They are comparing him to L. Patrick Gray, the disgraced former FBI director who threw Watergate papers into the Potomac River. The resistance to the director has made the agency incapable of action. It has been described to me as a depression within the agency unlike anything that anyone has ever seen within the bureau. The director’s public explanation for the unorthodox investigation are viewed by people in the bureau as sophomoric and embarrassing.
#3
I still don't know why McCabe has not been fired.
I also don't know why DoJ fell for the Comey ploy and appointed a special prosecutor, oops there I go with the naivety, DoJ has key staff up to their eyeballs in this thing and of course they would appoint a prosecutor. If you dig long enough and deep enough, the appointment of Mueller was a setup and prearranged. Perchance that was the "insurance policy?"
[CNS] We almost lost our country last fall. America was unwittingly on the precipice of becoming a nation whose government was willing to go to illegal and devious lengths to maintain the status quo.
I believe that the information that will be forthcoming in the next few weeks will be both astonishing and frightening to the American public, information that was never meant to see the light of day, much less the scrutiny of the American people.
I believe there will be irrefutable evidence of collusion among the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, actually denying any candidate except Hillary Clinton a chance to be their presidential candidate.
I believe there will be evidence of the same people and their Democrat puppets in Congress to foist a false dossier, undocumented, totally unsubstantiated and paid for by the Democrats, on the American public aided by their serfs in the media that would falsely tie Donald Trump, his associates and members of his inner circle with the Russian government.
I believe there will be proof of the weaponizing of federal agencies and personnel and collusion between the Obama justice department and the FBI.
#1
Mrs. JohnQC and I drove to Rutledge last summer to see a free Charley Daniel's concert. A great concert by a great American.
Charley is right about nearly losing our country. At one time I thought the dangers to the U.S. were from enenmies outside the U.S., not from enemies within. How wrong I was. The country was nearly stolen by a bunch of unbelievably corrupt and evil, greedy scoundrels.
#4
Since the 1992 election I've felt that the Clintons and their ilk were more like the Borgia popes than democrats. I thought that the danger was past in 2000 but I was wrong for several reasons: 1) The Bushes turned out to be cousins in the wink wink sense 2) Obama was their protege who was to maintain the line 3) Hillary is the bitter dowager who always felt she didn't get her due.
Maybe the Czars are a better match but the evil inherent in that whole collection of pustules is truly vomit inducing.
#7
Gave my father a copy of whatever tap contained Devil Went Down to Georgia. My father wasn't a music fan but he played that song (and only that song) until the tape was worn out. Not a fan of country but I do like that song.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Throughout the Cold War, Pakistain has been an instrumental US ally in south and central Asia. And the close relationship has continued in the years after. Pakistain has been key to the US efforts in Afghanistan since 2001, as the only reliable staging post in a region squeezed between Iran and China.
In the service of this alliance, the US has supported Pakistain through thick and thin, through military dictatorships, through developing their own nuclear arsenal and through successive scandals involving Pakistain’s notorious ISI intelligence agency, and their dubious activities.
But in recent months, the ISI’s indiscretions and the tacit support they seem to have received from the military and politicianship of the country appear to have led the US to threaten to more or less cut ties with Pakistain. The transgressions which are motivating this move are Pakistain’s support for terrorist groups, and its duplicitous game of friend or foe it alternatively plays with the US and the Taliban
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
01/24/2018 00:00 ||
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[Verge] We usually think of surveillance cameras as digital eyes, watching over us or watching out for us, depending on your view. But really, they’re more like portholes: useful only when someone is looking through them. Sometimes that means a human watching live footage, usually from multiple video feeds. Most surveillance cameras are passive, however. They’re there as a deterrence, or to provide evidence if something goes wrong. Your car got stolen? Check the CCTV.
But this is changing ‐ and fast. Artificial intelligence is giving surveillance cameras digital brains to match their eyes, letting them analyze live video with no humans necessary. This could be good news for public safety, helping police and first responders more easily spot crimes and accidents and have a range of scientific and industrial applications. But it also raises serious questions about the future of privacy and poses novel risks to social justice.
What happens when governments can track huge numbers of people using CCTV? When police can digitally tail you around a city just by uploading your mugshot into a database? Or when a biased algorithm is running on the cameras in your local mall, pinging the cops because it doesn’t like the look of a particular group of teens?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[NY Post] During the financial crisis, the federal government bailed out banks it declared "too big to fail." Fearing their bankruptcy might trigger economic Armageddon, the feds propped them up with taxpayer cash.
[American Thinker] J. Edgar Hoover must be turning in his grave at what is happening to his venerable FBI. Then again, given Hoover's own proclivities to abuse his powers as the director of that agency, perhaps the predicament in which the bureau finds itself is a natural stage of evolution on an arc of governmental hubris.
[American Thinker] Bradley Manning, who goes by "Chelsea" because he thinks he is a woman, could end up as the unlikeliest hero in history for Republicans. The soldier-traitor-"transgender" activist recently announced a bid for Senate in the deep blue state of Maryland, securing a place on the ballot in the Democratic primary. Manning is challenging incumbent Senator Ben Cardin, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wonder of wonders, Manning could end up handing a safe Senate seat for Democrats to the GOP, balancing out the loss in Alabama for the Grand Old Party.
[Townhall] "I know that inside the FBI there is a revolt," Joseph diGenova tells The American Spectator. "There is a revolt against the director. The people inside the bureau believe the director is a dirty cop. They believe that he threw the [Hillary Clinton email] case. They do not know what he was promised in return. But the people inside the bureau who were involved in the case and who knew about the case are talking to former FBI people expressing their disgust at the conduct of the director."
