[Daily Caller] New details are emerging about a Justice Department official who was demoted last week after it was discovered that he met during the presidential campaign with the author of the anti-Trump dossier.
The wife of Bruce Ohr, the demoted DOJ official, worked during the campaign for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier as part of a project financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Fox News broke the news on Monday. A source familiar with the matter confirmed the discovery to The Daily Caller.
Bruce Ohr held two positions at the Justice Department until last week, when Fox News inquired about his encounters last year with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson.
Steele is the former British spy who wrote the dossier. Simpson is a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Ohr met Steele at some point during the presidential campaign and met Simpson several weeks after the election. He was stripped of his title as deputy assistant attorney general, a job that put him directly under Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Russia investigation.
According to Fox, Ohr’s bosses at the Justice Department were not aware of his meetings with Steele and Simpson.
Ohr still holds his position as director of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.
#3
Bruce Ohr held two positions at the Justice Department until last week, when Fox News inquired about his encounters last year with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson.
So if Fox News hadn't said something, the SOB would still be in those positions? Difficult for me to believe no one at DoJ was aware of this fellow's activities, or those of his wife. Could we have a bit more on the Fox News discovery please ?
Interesting micro-fact:
FCC granted Nellie an amateur radio operator's license in May of 2016. Ham radio is of course open channel voice but may also be used to pass an encrypted digital bit stream as analog. As such it is generally unmonitored and OCONUS receivers are not regulated by the FCC.
#11
Or neither Grom. From Easter: "In this way the diffusion of power along informal lines was a precondition of state collapse. From this perspective it can be argued that the Soviet state eventually fell apart along the same lines upon which it had been built six decades earlier"
and Thurston: "it was not necessary to use terror to gain cooperation, nor did the regime exercise rigid and total control over the population; citizens had some room to criticize aspects of the system. Indeed, even if it had intended to impose order through terror, the regime failed miserably: low officials spent more time covering their rears than doing good work, people resisted being promoted to vulnerable positions of responsibility in the first place, and, as Thurston sums it up, "The Terror was not a logical system, and it did not systematically produce desirable behavior from the standpoint of the regime."
I see a glimpse this woman's engagement in the long con strategy built upon analyses of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
#18
Seems to me that someone is beginning to collect the dots on all of the stuff surrounding the dossier and who sponsored it and why.
The why part is deeper and more troubling than the who. Because, someone or some group knew pretty early on that Hillary was toxic and would not be elected and decided to find a way to defang and eventually impeach whoever was elected.
#24
......Wife of DOJ Deputy Was Fusion GPS Employee, CIA Research Aid, and Applied for HAM Radio License Month After Contracting MI6 Agent Christopher Steele…
What? No one believes in a simple coincidence? How many words per minute could she send ?
#26
This whole operation seems like chemotherapy. Let the deep state attack and hope its corruption is completely exposed and can be rooted out before it can kill the host.
[TOWNHALL] A Louisiana private investigator pleaded guilty on Monday to misusing Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... 's Social Security number in repeated attempts to access the president's federal tax information before his election last year.
Jordan Hamlett, 32, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine following his guilty plea in federal court.
Authorities have said Hamlett failed in his attempts to get Trump's tax information through a U.S. Department of Education financial aid website.
Trump has refused to release his tax returns, bucking an American tradition honored by every president since Jimmy Carter ...only the second worst president ever... .
A court document accompanying Hamlett's plea agreement says he used Trump's Social Security number and other personal information to open an online application for federal student aid on Sept. 13, 2016. After obtaining a username and password, he tried to use an Internal Revenue Service data retrieval tool to obtain Trump's tax information, the document says.
"The defendant made six separate attempts to obtain the federal tax information from IRS ...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies... servers, but he was unsuccessful," says the document. It doesn't specify how much of Trump's tax information could have been retrieved with the online tool.
Hamlett, a Lafayette resident, was indicted in November 2016. His trial had been scheduled to start this week, but the judge originally assigned to the case died on Saturday after a brief illness. U.S. District Court Judge John deGravelles, who inherited the case, didn't immediately schedule Hamlett's sentencing hearing.
Defense attorney Michael Fiser had argued Hamlett didn't have any "intent to deceive" and simply tried "out of sheer curiosity" to discover whether Trump's tax information could be accessed through the government website.
After Hamlett's guilty plea, Fiser said his client "still has a long road ahead" as he awaits sentencing.
"We felt like, under the circumstances, it was time to accept full responsibility and move forward to get closure," Fiser said.
Federal agents confronted Hamlett two weeks before last November's election and questioned him in a Baton Rouge hotel lobby. At the time, the agents didn't know if Hamlett had been successful, and they feared a public release of Trump's tax returns could influence the election, according to a transcript of court testimony earlier this year.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/12/2017 00:00 ||
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[DailyCaller] A top Republican senator is expanding an investigation into the Uranium One deal, demanding documents from the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on the Uranium One deal.
Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso wants to know whether or not former President Barack Obama’s administration intentionally misled him about Uranium One being able to export its product out of the U.S. after it was acquired by Russia.
[Right Scoop] The Middle East has been blowing up since President Trump last week changed US policy to recognize Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel.
There has been much strife in Jerusalem and the West Bank with Palestinians violently protesting against the move. And, of course, Israel has had to use violence at times to keep order.
Erdogan himself has been using dangerous rhetoric to keep the situation as hot as possible, calling Israel a terrorist state that kills Palestinian children:
"Israel is a perfect invader state," Erdogan said. He also called Israel "a terrorist state." "We won’t leave Jerusalem to the mercy of a child-murdering country."
Netanyahu hit right back, saying:
"I’m not used to receiving lectures about morality from a leader who bombs Kurdish villages in his native Turkey, who jails journalists, helps Iran go around international sanctions and who helps terrorists, including in Gaza, kill innocent people..."
As usual, Netanyahu nailed it.
This morning Erdogan was at it again, this time attacking the US and making ominous threats against the ’owners of Jerusalem’:
DAILY SABAH ‐ President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that the U.S. is responsible for the bloodshed in Jerusalem after clashes erupted in the city following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize it as the capital of Israel.
"Those who turn Jerusalem into a prison for Muslims and members of other religions will never be able to clear the blood off their hands," Erdogan said at an event held in the capital Ankara.
Stressing that Washington is also responsible for the bloodshed in the area, the president said of Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem: "The U.S. has become a partner in bloodshed by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. We definitely do not recognize this decision, we will not recognize it. President Trump’s statement does not bind us, nor the world of Islam."
h/t Instapundit
Special prosecutors, investigators, and counsels are usually a bad idea. They are admissions that constitutionally mandated institutions don’t work ‐ and can be rescued only by supposed superhuman moralists, who are without the innate biases inherent in human nature.
The record from Lawrence Walsh to Ken Starr to Patrick Fitzgerald suggests otherwise. Originally narrow mandates inevitably expand ‐ on the cynical theory that everyone has something embarrassing to hide. Promised "short" timelines and limited budgets are quickly forgotten. Prosecutors search for ever new crimes to justify the expense and public expectations of the special-counsel appointment.
Soon the investigators need to be investigated for their own conflicts of interest, as if we need special-special or really, really special prosecutors. Special investigations often quickly turn Soviet, in the sense of "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led what seems to be an exemplary life of public service. No doubt he believes that as a disinterested investigator he can get to the bottom of the once contentious charge of "Russian collusion" in the 2016 election. But can he?
A Mandate Gone Wild
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Mueller investigation.
The investigation is venturing well beyond the original mandate of rooting out evidence of Russian collusion. Indeed, the word "collusion" is now rarely invoked at all. It has given way to its successor, "obstruction." The latter likely will soon beget yet another catchphrase to justify the next iteration of the investigations.
There seems far less special investigatory concern with the far more likely Russian collusion in the matters of the origins and dissemination of the Fusion GPS/Steele dossier, and its possible role in the Obama-administration gambit of improper or illegal surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of American citizens.
Leaks from the Mueller investigation so far abound. They have seemed calibrated to create a public consensus that particular individuals are currently under investigation, likely to be indicted ‐ or indeed likely guilty.
These public worries are not groundless. They are deeply rooted in the nature and liberal composition of the Mueller investigative team ‐ whose left-leaning appointments just months ago had understandably made the liberal media giddy with anticipation from the outset. Wired, for instance, published this headline on June 14: "Robert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team." Vox, on August 22, wrote: "Meet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump." The Daily Beast, two day later, chimed in: "Inside Robert Mueller’s Army."
...By now there are simply too many coincidental conflicts of interest and too much improper investigatory behavior to continue to give the Mueller investigation the benefit of doubt. Each is a light straw; together, they now have broken the back of the probe’s reputation.
In inexplicable fashion, Mueller seems to have made almost no effort to select attorneys from outside Washington, from diverse private law firms across the country, who were without personal involvement with the Clinton machine, and who were politically astute or disinterested enough to keep their politics to themselves.
...Yet Donald Trump at this point would be unhinged if he were to fire Special Counsel Mueller ‐ given that the investigators seem intent on digging their own graves through conflicts of interest, partisan politicking, leaking, improper amorous liaisons, indiscreet communications, and stonewalling the release of congressionally requested information.
Indeed, the only remaining trajectory by which Mueller and his investigators can escape with their reputations intact is to dismiss those staff attorneys who have exhibited clear anti-Trump political sympathies, reboot the investigation, and then focus on what now seems the most likely criminal conduct: Russian and Clinton-campaign collusion in the creation of the anti-Trump Fusion GPS dossier and later possible U.S. government participation in the dissemination of it. If such a fraudulent document was used to gain court approval to surveil Trump associates, and under such cover to unmask and leak names of private U.S. citizens ‐ at first to warp a U.S. election, and then later to thwart the work of an incoming elected administration ‐ then Mueller will be tasked with getting to the bottom of one of the greatest political scandals in recent U.S. history. Indeed, his legacy may not be that he welcomed in known pro-Clinton, anti-Trump attorneys to investigate the Trump 2016 campaign where there was little likelihood of criminality, but that he ignored the most egregious case of government wrongdoing in the last half-century.
h/t Instapundit
It now looks as if Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Alabama, will win his race, despite the publicity about his alleged improper behavior with a 14-year-old girl 38 years ago, and maybe others young girls as well.
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was reportedly scheduled to testify behind closed doors in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, will instead meet next week due to a "scheduling error," Department of Justice officials told Fox News.
McCabe's testimony was likely to, at least in part, focus on Peter Strzok's role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Strzok is a former deputy to the assistant director at the FBI who was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff after Mueller learned Strzok had exchanged anti-Trump texts with a colleague.
House investigators previously told Fox News they have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump "dossier," which launched a counterintelligence investigation into possible Russian meddling in the election.
"This was a routine scheduling error after the dates were switched on an internal email that we are happy to provide the committee,"
Oh really, Routine 'eh.
"This was a routine scheduling error after the dates were switched on an internal email that we are happy to provide the committee,"a Justice Department official told Fox News. "The FBI regrets the error, and we look forward to making both witnesses (the alleged FBI handler for Christopher Steele and McCabe) available prior to the Christmas recess."
Posted by: Seeking cure for ignorance ||
12/12/2017 02:02 ||
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#1
I suspect Goudy and Jordan have somebody within the Bureau, or recently retired, who is putting the pieces together for them. Interestingly, the congressional investigations appear to be running parallel those of the Mueller team, but not a great deal is coming out of the Mueller investigation.
Then there is Jeff Sessions. Warm milk? Some crackers? What to do, what to do. Could someone build a fire under his arse, or send him to an extended care facility? We deserve much better.
#3
Gotta schedule what's called 'choir practice'.
Everybody has to sing the same song, words and tune.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
12/12/2017 8:36 Comments ||
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#4
"This was a routine scheduling error after the dates were switched on an internal email that we are happy to provide the committee,"a Justice Department official told Fox News
CNN knows all about that "problem"
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/12/2017 9:10 Comments ||
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#5
So errors are now routine in the FBI.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/12/2017 10:09 Comments ||
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#6
Please will someone in Congress demand firings of Wray & McCabe. Not holding my breath.
[Daily Caller] Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell thinks that intelligence agencies were too harsh to Trump during the campaign and presidential transition, according to an interview released Monday.
Morell, who left the CIA in 2013 after serving as its acting director twice, endorsed Hillary Clinton in an August 2016 New York Times op-ed.
Politico’s Susan Glassner asked Morell if getting involved was a mistake and the former CIA official said that it wasn’t, but that "there were downsides to it that I didn’t think about at the time."
"I was concerned about what is the impact it would have on the agency, right? Very concerned about that, thought that through. But I don’t think I fully thought through the implications," Morell said.
"So, let’s put ourselves here in Donald Trump’s shoes. So, what does he see? Right? He sees a former director of CIA and a former director of NSA, Mike Hayden, who I have the greatest respect for, criticizing him and his policies. Right? And he could rightfully have said, ’Huh, what’s going on with these intelligence guys?’ Right?"
#2
’Huh, what’s going on with these intelligence guys?’ Right?"
Well, backing the corrupt communists in the democrat party could have been a clue if any of you klingons had any intelligence.
As far as I AM concerned, I do not have a government right now.
Just corrupt democrat party members.
Democrat national socialists without swastikas weaponizing the government against the opposition and regular Americans who just want to go about their lives.
It would be one thing if you were any good at your jobs at all, but you are the opposite of that because your ideology always corrupts correct thinking.
False doctrine is just that and I will always remember your misfeasance / malfeasance, lack of character, and lack of Faith past the day of your passing.
This goes for all of you federal goons who used your positions to support the nastiest people on earth - the democrat party - in land where my feet are planted.
#3
"there were downsides to it that I didn’t think about at the time."
Downsides like what if your coup attempt failed and your side lost the election? Was he perhaps one of the guys threatening not to brief Trump during the transition? "Didn't think things through" is a pretty damning and shameful admission for the head of an intelligence agency.
IMAO, the damage Obama did to America was not the international bowing and scraping, the mom jeans or the school lunch kale. It was the destruction of trust in government agencies like the IRS, the EPA, the DOJ, the FBI and the CIA. All of them have been turned into partisan political weapons that were (and are) being used against the Democrat's opponents. So much for that whole "nation of laws" thing.
#5
’Huh, what’s going on with these intelligence guys?’ Right?"
They are (or were) the 'deep state' puppet masters, the 'shadow government' behind the indolent Soetoro, Bush, and arse-bandit Clinton. The Hildebeest was to be the continuing chapter. Morell was a career analyst. As Brennan's #2, Morell knew precisely what was taking place and what he and others were doing. It all went tragically wrong for them with outsider Donald Trump.
Now he feints ignorance, regret. Nice try Mr. Morell, but it looks like another 'air ball.'
Examine the power structure of any of history's totalitarian regimes and you will oftentimes find the intelligence apparatus neatly woven into, or in the seat of the senior political structure. Vladimir Putin is a contemporary example.
#6
I still wonder about all of the weapons, ammo, armored vehicles, bullet proof vests, and helmets that the BLM, IRS, and EPA bought under Obama's watch.
Not only were those agencies politicized, but they were armed and dangerous. I would hope at some point Trump would have these non-law enforcement agencies divest themselves of all of that paramilitary paraphernalia...
#9
Maxine "Aunt Esther" Waters has said they were behind the Crack epidemic in the black community in the 90's. Truckload of salt required
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/12/2017 13:19 Comments ||
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#10
If the Libertarian party can't manage to put some candidates into local or state office after these examples of government overreach they should just give up as a party.
[MSNBC] Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has earned a reputation for divisive ...politicians call things divisive when when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never divisive, they're principled... , racially provocative rhetoric. Even John It is not pronounced 'Boner!' Boehner ... the occasionally weepy former establishmentarian leader of House Republicans... (R-Ohio), before he stepped down as House Speaker, reportedly dismissed the far-right Iowan as an "a**hole."
But the controversies have done little to deter King from using insulting language. Late last week, the GOP congressman added to his greatest-hits collection.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has again flirted with being an open white nationalist. In a tweet Friday, the congressman lashed out at multiculturalism.
"Diversity is not our strength," the congressman wrote, linking to an article on a deeply dubious anti-immigration website called Voice of Europe, which quotes Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, as saying that "mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one."
As the HuffPost’s piece added, "diversity is not our strength" is a popular phrase on the right-wing fringe.
The nation’s founding creed may be "E pluribus unum," but it appears there are some who take issue with the principle.
My question, however, is less about Steve King and more about what Republican leaders intend to do about Steve King.
For example, the House GOP leadership has put King in charge of the House Judiciary Committee’s panel on "the Constitution & Civil Justice."
Posted by: Fred ||
12/12/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
My question, however, is less about Steve King and more about what Republican leaders intend to do about Steve King.
Keep him chained and release him every time a SJW passes by?
#9
Funny how liberals often use the most non-diverse European nations when they state examples of working socialism and also fail to note as those nations let in more immigrants from other cultures they had to roll-back that socialism to avoid collapse.
#10
IF we were all ants it would be one thing, but there are a lot of grasshoppers out there hoping to live off the hard work of others and there are kids with magnifying glasses gleefully attacking the ants as they try to keep the whole thing together.
h/t Instapundit
[USAToday] The "Cheesehead Stasi." That’s what Twitter humorist IowaHawk called a long-running and politicized investigation organized by Democratic politicians in Wisconsin, targeting supporters of Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The mechanism for this investigation was an allegedly nonpolitical, but in fact entirely partisan, "Government Accountability Board."
In the course of its secretive "John Doe" investigation, the GAB hoovered up millions of personal emails from Republican donors and supporters, and even raided people’s homes, while forbidding them to talk about it:
...Now an investigation by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel on behalf of the overseeing court has spelled out a long list of misdeeds by the investigators, and has called for punishments including contempt-of-court holdings and possible disbarment. And the stuff that it has uncovered is pretty awful.
In short, it was a partisan witch hunt masquerading as an inquiry into campaign irregularities. And confidential information gathered during that investigation was deliberately leaked in an effort (unsuccessful) to influence a pending United States Supreme Court decision.
...It’s too early to say, as one account does, that the Wisconsin debacle prefigured the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation into Trump’s campaign, though there are certainly similarities between the attitudes of "The Resistance" in Washington and the Wisconsin establishment’s response to Walker. Writing in The Washington Post last week, Ed Rogers wrote that, though he’d supported Mueller in the past, Mueller needed to get a handle on the overwhelming partisan slant of his prosecutors or he’d be discredited.
It’s good advice. Mueller and his investigators should take care not to get wrapped up in partisan politics while conducting a criminal investigation. Because that seldom ends well.
With the Dems, you get politics coupled with corruption. They are indeed like Stasi; everyone and everything is monitored and surveilled. Democrats = statist tyranny
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.
[Daily Caller] New details are emerging about a Justice Department official who was demoted last week after it was discovered that he met during the presidential campaign with the author of the anti-Trump dossier.
Jimmy Carter
[Right Scoop] The Middle East has been blowing up since President Trump last week changed US policy to recognize Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel.
[Daily Caller] Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell thinks that intelligence agencies were too harsh to Trump during the campaign and presidential transition, according to an interview released Monday.
[MSNBC] Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has earned a reputation for 
