This all begins at the head of the rotten fish, aka, barack obama.
Worth reblogging across the known universe as well. I have.
Every time Mr. Nunes says he cannot get documents from the FBI I wonder where is the President? We have a unitary executive. Every employee in the national government works for the President. The President is the official in charge of security classification of documents. One phone call and one letter from him would declassify the documents and release them to Congress and to the public.
Why does Trump not do that? Something does not smell right here. Is this whole thing an elaborate kabuki dance?
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the President has deep state advisors who have convinced him that the RINOs in Congress will throw him out of office if does declassify them. If so, I wish he would throw down the gauntlet and force them into the open. The President has a highly successful life outside of his office. He would do the country a great favor by opening the eyes of those who would see to the utter corruption in Washington DC.
My thinking is similar to skeptic’s. I believe the answer to his question is that the DOJ/FBI is an independent branch of the Executive, therefore it would be inappropriate for Pres. Trump to insert politics into that branch. Historically, that’s incorrect, but I think the media thinks it’s correct.
My variation on skeptic’s line is, where is AG Jeff Sessions?? And do the FISA judges have any meaningful authorities other than signing warrants? If someone commits perjury in front of the FISC and gets caught, then what?
What are the range of possibilities that could explain Sessions lack of actions? Are we beyond the possibilities laziness, inertia, cowardice, or blind faith in process and the system?
TommyJay says:
” I believe the answer to his question is that the DOJ/FBI is an independent branch of the Executive, therefore it would be inappropriate for Pres. Trump to insert politics into that branch. Historically, that’s incorrect, but I think the media thinks it’s correct.”
There is no such thing as an “independent branch of the executive.” Everyone in the executive branch including DOJ works at the pleasure of the president. I know there are civil service laws but I think they are unconstitutional. The Founders debated this very issue and decided to set up the unitary executive where every action is directed by the President so blame could be directed if/when things go wrong.
Per Bloomberg:
“The Justice Department agreed to show congressional Republicans “highly classified” information they have demanded from the Russia probe, the White House said after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray met Monday with President Donald Trump.
The outcome of the meeting averted — at least for the moment — a potential showdown after Trump demanded in a tweet on Sunday that Justice investigate whether the FBI had an informant inside his 2016 presidential campaign.”
The leaking and spinning started immediately. The article continues:
“But the session at the White House mostly succeeded in buying more time with no accord on what would be handed over, according to one person familiar with the meeting. Rosenstein is going to work with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to see what — if anything — can be handed over or declassified, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing the closed-door session.”
It is NOT up to Rosenstein. The President can classify AND declassify any document he wishes to.
So sick and tired of all this.
When will the rolling of heads commence?
Francesca rightly asks, “When will the rolling of heads commence?”
Yes and where are the pikes on which to mount their heads?
I always thought that practice barbaric but over the past 8 years I’ve begun to see the upside to that practice.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the President has deep state advisors who have convinced him that t A few Democrats are warning themhe RINOs in Congress will throw him out of office if does declassify them.
No, I think he will let this boil along until the fall when the election is looming. A few Democrats are warning that they have to have something other than Trump hate to run on.
Tonight I was watching a California Congressman named Swalwell, who has been on TV a lot. He was trying to argue that the Russia thing is real and there s real proof that we will see someday. I say let them do it. Let them fight this election on this issue.
It took Republicans a generation to recover from Isolationism.
This might be as devastating.
Swalwell, another lib who could not answer the question(s) asked, but instead deflected with talking points.
Because he had no answer to the question that didn’t embarrass him or concede the point.
“It is NOT up to Rosenstein. The President can classify AND declassify any document he wishes to.” skeptic
True. It would however provide ammunition for the dems and RINOs salivating at the prospect of impeaching and convicting Trump. You know there’d be incessant claims that Trump had put intelligence agent’s lives in danger with his clumsy disregard for procedure.
IMO, Trump is being very cagey in not giving his enemies any actual ammunition with which to build up in making a case for impeachment.
I would love to be a fly on the wall, a spy on the wall, to Trump’s deliberations re: the Mueller probe.
I don’t know what he knows or what his plans are.
Either he has the nerves of a riverboat gambler or he’s blundering through like Mr. Magoo.
I don’t think he’s Magoo.
I’m not allowing myself to become too interested in the details of this situation, as it’s too hard to tell where any of this will lead. I don’t want to become overexcited about matters that are then swept under the rug and forgotten.
So much of the general public remains utterly indifferent to all of this — indifferent and unmoved.
I, a YUGE skeptic of djt throughout the primaries, have come to appreciate this flawed (who isn’t) bombastic man. He is far more clever than I gave him credit for. “Rope a dope” is his Art of the Deal. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
This is a nice piece of snark by Eric Felten, which I link without quoting because it exactly addresses this paragraph in Justin Sink’s Bloomberg article linked by skeptic:
“There’s no evidence that the FBI installed an informant or spy in Trump’s campaign, though the bureau did rely on an informant who was in contact with Trump associates, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
I cannot see a difference between “spy in Trump’s campaign” and “informant in contact with Trump associates” — all of whom were, in fact, part of his campaign personnel.
Unless of course Bloomberg means the stories by NYT and WaPo about the spy — excuse me, “secret informant for the FBI,” (Felten) — do not constitute evidence.
They do NOT, in fact, constitute evidence, but the rest of the MSM always treats the anonymous leaks as Rock-solid Truth (TM), so this would be considerable back-sliding by Sink.
(Since we started with Penn’s post, is it too cliche to say that “it depends on what the meaning of spy is”?
One of the things that struck me about Nunes’s tirade is that the NYT/WaPo stories leaked information about something that might have been on the agenda for a meeting that he and Gowdy were to attend, but declined when they found out no documents were going to be provided.
Essentially, he claims that the information about Halper would have been given to them at that time, and THEY would be then accused of outing him (replay of Armitage/Libby/Plame?).
If that is indeed the case, then the stories would have been leaked to NYT/WaPo before the meeting was to have taken place, and they should have pulled them when it didn’t happen.
Oopsies.
“When Donald Trump was running for president, establishment Republicans and Democrats alike ran around thumping their chests feigning outrage that Mr. Trump would not be capable of respecting the Constitution.
At that time, the Obama administration was spying on Mr. Trump and his campaign and carrying out the most extensive and brazen undercover espionage-war campaign against political opponents that we have ever seen.
All the while nary a peep from these same smarmy swamp creatures as Mr. Obama rolled the constitution into joints so he and his political Choom Gang could smoke bales of weed.”
Harsanyi wonders why, if the initial generation of the Trump campaign was so necessary and above-board, why are the Agencies fighting so hard to keep the information undisclosed?
“If the Justice Department and FBI are, as we’ve been told incessantly over the past year, not merely patriots but consummate professionals incapable of being distracted by partisanship or petty Washington intrigues, why are Donald Trump’s antagonists freaking out over the fact that an inspector general will assess whether political motivation tainted an investigation into the president’s campaign? The American people should get a full accounting of what transpired during 2016. Isn’t that what we’ve been hearing since the election?
BTW, anyone remember Judge Ellis’s demand to see Mueller’s warrant for his investigations? This dropped a few days ago but I haven’t seen it discussed.
“U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Thursday gave a federal court a classified memo describing the extent of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and other related crimes.
The memo was filed in response to questions raised in the court in Virginia two weeks ago by Judge T.S. Ellis that Mueller should not have “unfettered powers.”
Ellis demanded to see an unredacted copy of the August 2017 memo written by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that defined Mueller’s investigative mandate.
Ellis will review the memo before deciding whether or not to dismiss charges against President Donald Trump’s former election campaign manager, Paul Manafort.”
“As the narrative has it, Steele turned to the media in September 2016 — leading to the articles by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones’s David Corn — to get the story out, because of his impatience with the FBI and DOJ for apparently sitting on it.)
Factor one
But however we read that aspect of it, here is the first factor that makes Halper look like a deployed asset. He initiated contact with each of the Trump team targets.
Not only did he initiate contact; he unerringly chose the two seemingly peripheral, short-resume’d individuals on whom other actors in the drama — like the FBI, Joseph Mifsud, and Christopher Steele — had focused their attention during exactly the same timeframe.
…
Papadopoulos and Page were not big wheels in the campaign, and they didn’t have high-level access. Nor were they established as “connected” movers and shakers in Halper’s world. It is very unlikely that either Page or Papadopoulos would have been of interest to Halper, outside of a commission to Halper from someone to cultivate them.
Factor two
The second factor suggesting Halper was a deployed asset is his longstanding, if somewhat vague and open-ended, contractual relationship with U.S. government agencies.
…
Payments for direct labor are not suspicious in themselves. But a payment for direct labor that falls at just exactly the time Halper is contacting members of the Trump campaign — indeed, falls two weeks after Halper’s first contact with a Trump campaign aide; within a day or two of when Alexander Downer’s information about Papadopoulos is supposed to have reached the FBI; and five days before we are told the FBI’s “Russia” investigation officially started — requires explanation.
Factor three
The third factor is Halper’s curious excursion into the banking industry, for which nothing in his larger resume appears to have really suited him.
…
In conjunction with other aspects of his profile, Halper’s odd detour into banking in the 1980s is at least a dusty-brick-hued flag, if not a throbbing tomato-red one. It indicates there’s something to look for: a connection with friendly niche-customer banking of a specific kind, related to politics, government, and political people.
Then there’s the fourth factor.
Factor four
Halper has published books, monographs, and articles with co-author Jonathan Clarke, a veteran of the UK foreign service, and, through at least 2004 — as a British citizen residing in the United States — the U.S. representative for the secretive, high-powered intelligence company Hakluyt.
UK-based Hakluyt is staffed mostly by former MI-6 personnel, and maintains a close, current relationship with MI-6. We met Hakluyt a few weeks ago, in an investigation of the British links to the Russiagate phenomenon. (More on some of the relevant connections here.)
One of the links that stands out — one of them; there are many — is Richard Dearlove, former head of MI-6, longtime associate of Stefan Halper, continuing associate of Hakluyt’s top officers, and an informal mentor, according to the UK Telegraph, to Christopher Steele in the fateful “dossier summer” of 2016.
Without going exhaustively into every connection, we can say simply based on the Hakluyt link that the circle Halper runs in is the one we would expect FBI informants who contact surveillance targets and meet up with them in the UK to come from.
Nothing in any of this story suggests that Stefan Halper did anything untoward. There are signs, however, of his being a longtime, multipurpose asset on a loose retainer. Not a “spy,” by any means, or an informant by vocation or preponderance of working hours. But clearly, not a fellow who just happened to answer the phone when it rang either. If the FBI — or someone — was asking Halper to buddy up to the Trump campaign, it was a serious and targeted effort, not a pick-up game.
Always so encouraging when I anticipate PLB’s analysis.
“Nunes answers in clear and straightforward fashion the questions posed to him by Bartiromo. He mentions his narrow avoidance of a possible set-up by which he was to take the fall for Friday’s stories. ”
One of their commenters makes a good point:
Bill Margerum · Totally Relaxed at Retired
I think it would be interesting to peruse all the communications of CIA/FBI in the 2015/2016 time frame. I suspect that would expose not only the beginnings of the anti-Trump plot, but also the bare-bones outline of an overall campaign to disparage whichever Republican became the nominee for the 2016 election. I don’t think this started out as ‘get Trump’ so much as it started out as ‘get the Republican nominee.’ That is, the rot is even deeper than it now appears, and I’d guess the same Cast of Characters would appear.
Speaking of the NYT deciding just what news is fit to print:
We know the first part of this story, but I hadn’t caught the second part:
“Before his tip sparked a divisive witch hunt, former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer helped to secure $25 million for the Clinton Foundation.
…
Interestingly, The New York Times failed to disclose these details in a May 16 story entitled “A Secret Mission, a Code Name and Anxiety: Inside the Early Days of the F.B.I.’s Trump Investigation” in which they detailed Downer’s involvement in “Crossfire Hurricane,” the code name for the interview which led directly to an investigation into ties between Russia and then Presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
“The FBI informant who sought information about President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign was looking for a way to join the administration after Trump unexpectedly won.
Reporter Jonathan Swan of Axios revealed on Monday that University of Cambridge Research Professor Stefan Halper was on a list of recommended possible ambassador roles in Asia. Halper was recommended by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, according to Axios.
According to a White House official, Halper visited the White House complex in August 2017 for a meeting about China.
During the campaign, Halper reportedly met with Trump campaign contacts Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos and reported back to the FBI.”
“During the transition everyone involved in Trump’s presidential campaign were asked to submit resumes for administration positions. Halper, who already knew Navarro in the context of being a China scholar and interviewing for his anti-China book and film, pitched himself for an ambassadorship in Asia, according to a source briefed on their interactions.
Navarro says he submitted Halper’s name for the Asian ambassadorship – we have not been able to confirm the country – along with around a dozen other people for roles in the region. “
Seems from the most interesting observations above that Halper is merely a bone (if a fairly meaty one) tossed out there by the FBI/DOJ (or perhaps both) to try to satiate Nunes but also distract his investigation or send it off barking in the wrong discussion.
A pawn (or perhaps a bishop) to be sacrificed.
Simply because Halper, if one did NOT dig a bit deeper, would appear to have fairly plausible deniability due to his multiple roles and capabilities.
Which would lead the more discerning or inquiring (or paranoid?) to conclude that there’s someone else out there (or more than one person) being concealed from view.
That is, someone (or more) whom this gambit, if it is one, is meant to protect.
(Keeping in mind that the name of the DOJ/FBI game up until now has been “stonewall, stonewall and then stonewall some more”.)
Don’t know where the links went —
AesopFan Says:
May 21st, 2018 at 10:55 pm
This is a nice piece of snark by Eric Felten, which I link without quoting because it exactly addresses this paragraph in Justin Sink’s Bloomberg article linked by skeptic:
Ha. Someone had already suggested Nunes “outed” the spy — although declining to say how, or to note that the NYT and WaPo had already done the deed; probably taking refuge in the fact that they didn’t give his name, just all the details needed to identify him.
Read it yesterday, but it didn’t “connect” until I saw the interview today.
“Finally, Greenwald takes issue with the assertion by Ben Wittes and others that it was President Trump and Rep. Devin Nunes who are responsible for “outing” the professor. “[Wittes] almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post,” says Greenwald. Rather than blaming the organs that made it easy to identify the professor – the New York Times and Washington Post – Wittes chose, apparently without basis, to blame the enemies of his friend Jim Comey.”
I had to look up Wittes (here’s his tweet, so arch and too-too precious).
@benjaminwittes
Follow Follow @benjaminwittes
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I have a whole lot to say about how the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the President of the United States teamed up to out an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power.
6:52 PM – 18 May 2018
Senior Fellow at Brookings. Editor in Chief: Lawfare (@lawfareblog).
“…TEAMED UP TO OUT [emphasis mine] an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power.”
Which further strengthens the belief that the leak to the NYT and WAPO were part of a carefully-crafted ploy to totally discredit Nunes and anyone who harbored any suspicion of DOJ/FBI—and Obama administration/Clinton campaign malfeasance.
Well-crafted…except that Nunes and his colleague decided not to attend what was to be a fateful meeting.
To be sure, the attempt to discredit them is all that counts, facts—or lack of attendance at meetings—be damned.
These guys certainly do play hardball. But that is nothing new.
(I hope that it won’t get to the point where bodies will start to be found all over the place….)
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to eventually find out that Benjamin Wittes was one of the sources who outed Halper in this past weekend’s stories in the NYTimes and WaPo. He literally works with people at Lawfare who would have known, not to mention his friendship with I-Am-Not-A-Leaky-Weasel Comey.
Interview with Mike Pence showing what a smarmy weasel he is. Fox News
He gets asked point blank at about 2:30 whether the President will declassify the documents and he does not answer. So the documents will not be declassified. He also accepts the Rosenstein dodge to let the Inspector General Horwitz handle the inquiry. Horwitz has been sitting on the email investigation for many months. My bet is that his vaunted report will be nothing.
I still do not undersand what is going on within the White House.
——-
Geoffrey Britain says:
“It would however provide ammunition for the dems and RINOs salivating at the prospect of impeaching and convicting Trump. ”
As they say on sports-talk radio, if the Dems take the House it is a sure-fire, gold trophy lock they will impeach. Trump will probably squeak through in the Senate but nothing will be done on his agenda or on the investigations of the deep state until perhaps 2021 if Trump wins or never if he loses.
Mad Dog Hussein: what did Americans expect when they elected a mad dog as President. The entire pack went mad afterwards.
skeptic,
I suspect Pence’s loyalty is to the GOPe. Like Bush with Reagan, after Trump is gone Pence is meant to guide the party back into the control of the Republican establishment. His overt religiosity ensures that he would be at most a one term President, so he would be a perfect foil to once again safely turn over the Presidency to the democrats.
I’m convinced that the GOPe prefers being the minority party.
He gives himself away in little ways such as you describe. But his greatest “tell” is his close friendship with Sen. Jeff Flake.
This is completely idle speculation and ouija-board psychology. Antonin Scalia and RBG were best friends on the Court. Did that affect his decisions one bit? Hers?
What people should suspect are the MSM dominated narratives concerning Nixon’s plumbers not working for Mark Felt or setup by Mark Felt.
In an age pre internet, it wouldn’t have been hard. After all, Felt wasn’t the one going to jail for illegal breakins.
Francesca Says:
May 21st, 2018 at 7:58 pm
So sick and tired of all this.
When will the rolling of heads commence?
Usually when they tell me it starts, it will commence.
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This all begins at the head of the rotten fish, aka, barack obama.
Worth reblogging across the known universe as well. I have.
Every time Mr. Nunes says he cannot get documents from the FBI I wonder where is the President? We have a unitary executive. Every employee in the national government works for the President. The President is the official in charge of security classification of documents. One phone call and one letter from him would declassify the documents and release them to Congress and to the public.
Why does Trump not do that? Something does not smell right here. Is this whole thing an elaborate kabuki dance?
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the President has deep state advisors who have convinced him that the RINOs in Congress will throw him out of office if does declassify them. If so, I wish he would throw down the gauntlet and force them into the open. The President has a highly successful life outside of his office. He would do the country a great favor by opening the eyes of those who would see to the utter corruption in Washington DC.
My thinking is similar to skeptic’s. I believe the answer to his question is that the DOJ/FBI is an independent branch of the Executive, therefore it would be inappropriate for Pres. Trump to insert politics into that branch. Historically, that’s incorrect, but I think the media thinks it’s correct.
My variation on skeptic’s line is, where is AG Jeff Sessions?? And do the FISA judges have any meaningful authorities other than signing warrants? If someone commits perjury in front of the FISC and gets caught, then what?
What are the range of possibilities that could explain Sessions lack of actions? Are we beyond the possibilities laziness, inertia, cowardice, or blind faith in process and the system?
TommyJay says:
” I believe the answer to his question is that the DOJ/FBI is an independent branch of the Executive, therefore it would be inappropriate for Pres. Trump to insert politics into that branch. Historically, that’s incorrect, but I think the media thinks it’s correct.”
There is no such thing as an “independent branch of the executive.” Everyone in the executive branch including DOJ works at the pleasure of the president. I know there are civil service laws but I think they are unconstitutional. The Founders debated this very issue and decided to set up the unitary executive where every action is directed by the President so blame could be directed if/when things go wrong.
Per Bloomberg:
“The Justice Department agreed to show congressional Republicans “highly classified” information they have demanded from the Russia probe, the White House said after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray met Monday with President Donald Trump.
The outcome of the meeting averted — at least for the moment — a potential showdown after Trump demanded in a tweet on Sunday that Justice investigate whether the FBI had an informant inside his 2016 presidential campaign.”
The leaking and spinning started immediately. The article continues:
“But the session at the White House mostly succeeded in buying more time with no accord on what would be handed over, according to one person familiar with the meeting. Rosenstein is going to work with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to see what — if anything — can be handed over or declassified, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing the closed-door session.”
It is NOT up to Rosenstein. The President can classify AND declassify any document he wishes to.
So sick and tired of all this.
When will the rolling of heads commence?
Francesca rightly asks, “When will the rolling of heads commence?”
Yes and where are the pikes on which to mount their heads?
I always thought that practice barbaric but over the past 8 years I’ve begun to see the upside to that practice.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the President has deep state advisors who have convinced him that t A few Democrats are warning themhe RINOs in Congress will throw him out of office if does declassify them.
No, I think he will let this boil along until the fall when the election is looming. A few Democrats are warning that they have to have something other than Trump hate to run on.
Tonight I was watching a California Congressman named Swalwell, who has been on TV a lot. He was trying to argue that the Russia thing is real and there s real proof that we will see someday. I say let them do it. Let them fight this election on this issue.
It took Republicans a generation to recover from Isolationism.
This might be as devastating.
Swalwell, another lib who could not answer the question(s) asked, but instead deflected with talking points.
Because he had no answer to the question that didn’t embarrass him or concede the point.
“It is NOT up to Rosenstein. The President can classify AND declassify any document he wishes to.” skeptic
True. It would however provide ammunition for the dems and RINOs salivating at the prospect of impeaching and convicting Trump. You know there’d be incessant claims that Trump had put intelligence agent’s lives in danger with his clumsy disregard for procedure.
IMO, Trump is being very cagey in not giving his enemies any actual ammunition with which to build up in making a case for impeachment.
I would love to be a fly on the wall, a spy on the wall, to Trump’s deliberations re: the Mueller probe.
I don’t know what he knows or what his plans are.
Either he has the nerves of a riverboat gambler or he’s blundering through like Mr. Magoo.
I don’t think he’s Magoo.
I’m not allowing myself to become too interested in the details of this situation, as it’s too hard to tell where any of this will lead. I don’t want to become overexcited about matters that are then swept under the rug and forgotten.
So much of the general public remains utterly indifferent to all of this — indifferent and unmoved.
I, a YUGE skeptic of djt throughout the primaries, have come to appreciate this flawed (who isn’t) bombastic man. He is far more clever than I gave him credit for. “Rope a dope” is his Art of the Deal. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
This is a nice piece of snark by Eric Felten, which I link without quoting because it exactly addresses this paragraph in Justin Sink’s Bloomberg article linked by skeptic:
“There’s no evidence that the FBI installed an informant or spy in Trump’s campaign, though the bureau did rely on an informant who was in contact with Trump associates, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.”
I cannot see a difference between “spy in Trump’s campaign” and “informant in contact with Trump associates” — all of whom were, in fact, part of his campaign personnel.
Unless of course Bloomberg means the stories by NYT and WaPo about the spy — excuse me, “secret informant for the FBI,” (Felten) — do not constitute evidence.
They do NOT, in fact, constitute evidence, but the rest of the MSM always treats the anonymous leaks as Rock-solid Truth (TM), so this would be considerable back-sliding by Sink.
(Since we started with Penn’s post, is it too cliche to say that “it depends on what the meaning of spy is”?
One of the things that struck me about Nunes’s tirade is that the NYT/WaPo stories leaked information about something that might have been on the agenda for a meeting that he and Gowdy were to attend, but declined when they found out no documents were going to be provided.
Essentially, he claims that the information about Halper would have been given to them at that time, and THEY would be then accused of outing him (replay of Armitage/Libby/Plame?).
If that is indeed the case, then the stories would have been leaked to NYT/WaPo before the meeting was to have taken place, and they should have pulled them when it didn’t happen.
Oopsies.
More snark, but I really like the mic drop line.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/20/barack-obama-and-his-political-choom-gang/
“When Donald Trump was running for president, establishment Republicans and Democrats alike ran around thumping their chests feigning outrage that Mr. Trump would not be capable of respecting the Constitution.
At that time, the Obama administration was spying on Mr. Trump and his campaign and carrying out the most extensive and brazen undercover espionage-war campaign against political opponents that we have ever seen.
All the while nary a peep from these same smarmy swamp creatures as Mr. Obama rolled the constitution into joints so he and his political Choom Gang could smoke bales of weed.”
Harsanyi wonders why, if the initial generation of the Trump campaign was so necessary and above-board, why are the Agencies fighting so hard to keep the information undisclosed?
http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/21/obama-administration-spy-trump-using-flimsy-evidence-lets-find/
“If the Justice Department and FBI are, as we’ve been told incessantly over the past year, not merely patriots but consummate professionals incapable of being distracted by partisanship or petty Washington intrigues, why are Donald Trump’s antagonists freaking out over the fact that an inspector general will assess whether political motivation tainted an investigation into the president’s campaign? The American people should get a full accounting of what transpired during 2016. Isn’t that what we’ve been hearing since the election?
BTW, anyone remember Judge Ellis’s demand to see Mueller’s warrant for his investigations? This dropped a few days ago but I haven’t seen it discussed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-memo/muellers-office-files-unredacted-memo-outlining-scope-of-russia-probe-filing-idUSKCN1II2EN
“U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Thursday gave a federal court a classified memo describing the extent of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and other related crimes.
The memo was filed in response to questions raised in the court in Virginia two weeks ago by Judge T.S. Ellis that Mueller should not have “unfettered powers.”
Ellis demanded to see an unredacted copy of the August 2017 memo written by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that defined Mueller’s investigative mandate.
Ellis will review the memo before deciding whether or not to dismiss charges against President Donald Trump’s former election campaign manager, Paul Manafort.”
J. E. Dyer on the spy:
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/05/20/stefan-halper-planted-not-merely-opportune-if-he-was-an-fbi-informant-but-not-an-insider/
“As the narrative has it, Steele turned to the media in September 2016 — leading to the articles by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones’s David Corn — to get the story out, because of his impatience with the FBI and DOJ for apparently sitting on it.)
Factor one
But however we read that aspect of it, here is the first factor that makes Halper look like a deployed asset. He initiated contact with each of the Trump team targets.
Not only did he initiate contact; he unerringly chose the two seemingly peripheral, short-resume’d individuals on whom other actors in the drama — like the FBI, Joseph Mifsud, and Christopher Steele — had focused their attention during exactly the same timeframe.
…
Papadopoulos and Page were not big wheels in the campaign, and they didn’t have high-level access. Nor were they established as “connected” movers and shakers in Halper’s world. It is very unlikely that either Page or Papadopoulos would have been of interest to Halper, outside of a commission to Halper from someone to cultivate them.
Factor two
The second factor suggesting Halper was a deployed asset is his longstanding, if somewhat vague and open-ended, contractual relationship with U.S. government agencies.
…
Payments for direct labor are not suspicious in themselves. But a payment for direct labor that falls at just exactly the time Halper is contacting members of the Trump campaign — indeed, falls two weeks after Halper’s first contact with a Trump campaign aide; within a day or two of when Alexander Downer’s information about Papadopoulos is supposed to have reached the FBI; and five days before we are told the FBI’s “Russia” investigation officially started — requires explanation.
Factor three
The third factor is Halper’s curious excursion into the banking industry, for which nothing in his larger resume appears to have really suited him.
…
In conjunction with other aspects of his profile, Halper’s odd detour into banking in the 1980s is at least a dusty-brick-hued flag, if not a throbbing tomato-red one. It indicates there’s something to look for: a connection with friendly niche-customer banking of a specific kind, related to politics, government, and political people.
Then there’s the fourth factor.
Factor four
Halper has published books, monographs, and articles with co-author Jonathan Clarke, a veteran of the UK foreign service, and, through at least 2004 — as a British citizen residing in the United States — the U.S. representative for the secretive, high-powered intelligence company Hakluyt.
UK-based Hakluyt is staffed mostly by former MI-6 personnel, and maintains a close, current relationship with MI-6. We met Hakluyt a few weeks ago, in an investigation of the British links to the Russiagate phenomenon. (More on some of the relevant connections here.)
One of the links that stands out — one of them; there are many — is Richard Dearlove, former head of MI-6, longtime associate of Stefan Halper, continuing associate of Hakluyt’s top officers, and an informal mentor, according to the UK Telegraph, to Christopher Steele in the fateful “dossier summer” of 2016.
Without going exhaustively into every connection, we can say simply based on the Hakluyt link that the circle Halper runs in is the one we would expect FBI informants who contact surveillance targets and meet up with them in the UK to come from.
Nothing in any of this story suggests that Stefan Halper did anything untoward. There are signs, however, of his being a longtime, multipurpose asset on a loose retainer. Not a “spy,” by any means, or an informant by vocation or preponderance of working hours. But clearly, not a fellow who just happened to answer the phone when it rang either. If the FBI — or someone — was asking Halper to buddy up to the Trump campaign, it was a serious and targeted effort, not a pick-up game.
Always so encouraging when I anticipate PLB’s analysis.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/nunes-approaches-the-target-2.php
“Nunes answers in clear and straightforward fashion the questions posed to him by Bartiromo. He mentions his narrow avoidance of a possible set-up by which he was to take the fall for Friday’s stories. ”
One of their commenters makes a good point:
Bill Margerum · Totally Relaxed at Retired
I think it would be interesting to peruse all the communications of CIA/FBI in the 2015/2016 time frame. I suspect that would expose not only the beginnings of the anti-Trump plot, but also the bare-bones outline of an overall campaign to disparage whichever Republican became the nominee for the 2016 election. I don’t think this started out as ‘get Trump’ so much as it started out as ‘get the Republican nominee.’ That is, the rot is even deeper than it now appears, and I’d guess the same Cast of Characters would appear.
Speaking of the NYT deciding just what news is fit to print:
We know the first part of this story, but I hadn’t caught the second part:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/21/diplomat-who-prompted-fbi-trump-spying-helped-raise-25m-for-clinton-foundation/
“Before his tip sparked a divisive witch hunt, former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer helped to secure $25 million for the Clinton Foundation.
…
Interestingly, The New York Times failed to disclose these details in a May 16 story entitled “A Secret Mission, a Code Name and Anxiety: Inside the Early Days of the F.B.I.’s Trump Investigation” in which they detailed Downer’s involvement in “Crossfire Hurricane,” the code name for the interview which led directly to an investigation into ties between Russia and then Presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/21/fbi-spy-stefan-halper-wanted-a-job-in-donald-trumps-administration/
“The FBI informant who sought information about President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign was looking for a way to join the administration after Trump unexpectedly won.
Reporter Jonathan Swan of Axios revealed on Monday that University of Cambridge Research Professor Stefan Halper was on a list of recommended possible ambassador roles in Asia. Halper was recommended by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, according to Axios.
According to a White House official, Halper visited the White House complex in August 2017 for a meeting about China.
During the campaign, Halper reportedly met with Trump campaign contacts Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos and reported back to the FBI.”
https://www.axios.com/peter-navarro-trump-stefan-halper-fbi-informant-cc8a2601-dfe1-45a0-8899-62bfb7578599.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic
“During the transition everyone involved in Trump’s presidential campaign were asked to submit resumes for administration positions. Halper, who already knew Navarro in the context of being a China scholar and interviewing for his anti-China book and film, pitched himself for an ambassadorship in Asia, according to a source briefed on their interactions.
Navarro says he submitted Halper’s name for the Asian ambassadorship – we have not been able to confirm the country – along with around a dozen other people for roles in the region. “
Seems from the most interesting observations above that Halper is merely a bone (if a fairly meaty one) tossed out there by the FBI/DOJ (or perhaps both) to try to satiate Nunes but also distract his investigation or send it off barking in the wrong discussion.
A pawn (or perhaps a bishop) to be sacrificed.
Simply because Halper, if one did NOT dig a bit deeper, would appear to have fairly plausible deniability due to his multiple roles and capabilities.
Which would lead the more discerning or inquiring (or paranoid?) to conclude that there’s someone else out there (or more than one person) being concealed from view.
That is, someone (or more) whom this gambit, if it is one, is meant to protect.
(Keeping in mind that the name of the DOJ/FBI game up until now has been “stonewall, stonewall and then stonewall some more”.)
Don’t know where the links went —
AesopFan Says:
May 21st, 2018 at 10:55 pm
This is a nice piece of snark by Eric Felten, which I link without quoting because it exactly addresses this paragraph in Justin Sink’s Bloomberg article linked by skeptic:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/eric-felten/trump-complains-about-fbi-trying-to-put-spy-in-his-campaign-does-he-have-a-point
“It Depends on What Your Definition of ‘Spy’ Is
ERIC FELTEN”
skeptic Says:
May 21st, 2018 at 7:48 pm
Per Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-21/rosenstein-wray-said-to-meet-with-trump-after-he-demanded-probe
Ha. Someone had already suggested Nunes “outed” the spy — although declining to say how, or to note that the NYT and WaPo had already done the deed; probably taking refuge in the fact that they didn’t give his name, just all the details needed to identify him.
Read it yesterday, but it didn’t “connect” until I saw the interview today.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/perspectives-on-an-outing.php
“Finally, Greenwald takes issue with the assertion by Ben Wittes and others that it was President Trump and Rep. Devin Nunes who are responsible for “outing” the professor. “[Wittes] almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post,” says Greenwald. Rather than blaming the organs that made it easy to identify the professor – the New York Times and Washington Post – Wittes chose, apparently without basis, to blame the enemies of his friend Jim Comey.”
I had to look up Wittes (here’s his tweet, so arch and too-too precious).
@benjaminwittes
Follow Follow @benjaminwittes
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I have a whole lot to say about how the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the President of the United States teamed up to out an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power.
6:52 PM – 18 May 2018
Senior Fellow at Brookings. Editor in Chief: Lawfare (@lawfareblog).
“…TEAMED UP TO OUT [emphasis mine] an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power.”
Which further strengthens the belief that the leak to the NYT and WAPO were part of a carefully-crafted ploy to totally discredit Nunes and anyone who harbored any suspicion of DOJ/FBI—and Obama administration/Clinton campaign malfeasance.
Well-crafted…except that Nunes and his colleague decided not to attend what was to be a fateful meeting.
To be sure, the attempt to discredit them is all that counts, facts—or lack of attendance at meetings—be damned.
These guys certainly do play hardball. But that is nothing new.
(I hope that it won’t get to the point where bodies will start to be found all over the place….)
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to eventually find out that Benjamin Wittes was one of the sources who outed Halper in this past weekend’s stories in the NYTimes and WaPo. He literally works with people at Lawfare who would have known, not to mention his friendship with I-Am-Not-A-Leaky-Weasel Comey.
From Fox (FWIW):
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/22/another-informant-attempted-to-infiltrate-trump-campaign-under-obama-campaign-aide-says.html
Interview with Mike Pence showing what a smarmy weasel he is.
Fox News
He gets asked point blank at about 2:30 whether the President will declassify the documents and he does not answer. So the documents will not be declassified. He also accepts the Rosenstein dodge to let the Inspector General Horwitz handle the inquiry. Horwitz has been sitting on the email investigation for many months. My bet is that his vaunted report will be nothing.
I still do not undersand what is going on within the White House.
——-
Geoffrey Britain says:
“It would however provide ammunition for the dems and RINOs salivating at the prospect of impeaching and convicting Trump. ”
As they say on sports-talk radio, if the Dems take the House it is a sure-fire, gold trophy lock they will impeach. Trump will probably squeak through in the Senate but nothing will be done on his agenda or on the investigations of the deep state until perhaps 2021 if Trump wins or never if he loses.
Mad Dog Hussein: what did Americans expect when they elected a mad dog as President. The entire pack went mad afterwards.
skeptic,
I suspect Pence’s loyalty is to the GOPe. Like Bush with Reagan, after Trump is gone Pence is meant to guide the party back into the control of the Republican establishment. His overt religiosity ensures that he would be at most a one term President, so he would be a perfect foil to once again safely turn over the Presidency to the democrats.
I’m convinced that the GOPe prefers being the minority party.
He gives himself away in little ways such as you describe. But his greatest “tell” is his close friendship with Sen. Jeff Flake.
This is completely idle speculation and ouija-board psychology. Antonin Scalia and RBG were best friends on the Court. Did that affect his decisions one bit? Hers?
What people should suspect are the MSM dominated narratives concerning Nixon’s plumbers not working for Mark Felt or setup by Mark Felt.
In an age pre internet, it wouldn’t have been hard. After all, Felt wasn’t the one going to jail for illegal breakins.
Francesca Says:
May 21st, 2018 at 7:58 pm
So sick and tired of all this.
When will the rolling of heads commence?
Usually when they tell me it starts, it will commence.