Uh, Jimbo, you gotta back up a bit. A little more. There, don’t you see it? It’s not just trees, it’s a forest!
JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR RECORDS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CLAPPER, BRENNAN, CNN
Watchdog files FOIA to unearth truth about Steele dossier
MARCH 28, 2019
Dossier-Related Communications Between Clapper and ex-CIA Director John Brennan also Sought
(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking records of communications between former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and CNN around the time the Clinton-Democrat National Committee Trump dossier was being pitched to key media outlets.
A House report detailed that Clapper leaked information regarding the dossier to CNN in January 2017. The former ODNI chief signed on as an analyst for CNN in August 2017.
Judicial Watch is also seeking records of communications between Clapper and Obama CIA Director John Brennan regarding the dossier , which was authored by former British spy and FBI payee Christopher Steele.
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:19-cv-00776)) after the agencies failed to respond to an April 23, 2018 FOIA request seeking:
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, including but not limited to James Clapper, and employees, representatives and contractors of CNN.
The time frame for the records request is May 2016 through May 2017.
All records of communications between the office of the Director of Central Intelligence and representatives of CNN; DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier:” and between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding CNN.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between officials in the office of the Director of Central Intelligence, including but not limited to DCI John Brennan, and employees, representatives and contractors of CNN. The time frame for the requested records is May 2016 through May 2017.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier”. The time frame for records requested in this bullet item is May 2016 through January 2017.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the news network CNN. The time frame for records requested in this bullet item is May 2016 through January 2017.
In a March 2018, report, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said, “Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN national security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.” And, “when questioned by the Committee … Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence of the dossier to the media.
Clapper later admitted he had discussed the Steele dossier with CNN’s Jake Tapper and other journalists in early 2017, shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
In a January 10, 2017 report with bylines from Tapper, Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto and Carl Bernstein, CNN first revealed that then-FBI Director James Comey had briefed then-President-elect Trump on the dossier’s allegations.
The Intelligence Committee’s report said that “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic. Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in ‘early January 2017,’ around the time [intelligence officials] briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information.’”
Shortly after CNN’s January 10, 2017 report, BuzzFeed News published the dossier in full.
The four CNN reporters were awarded the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Merriman Smith Award for their coverage of the dossier story.
Brennan, in an interview with NBC News on February 4, 2018 insisted that the Steele dossier “did not play any role whatsoever” in early intelligence assessments on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Several subsequent reports strongly contradict Brennan’s claim.
In a June 4, 2018 report for National Review, Victor Davis Hanson noted that Brennan “served as a stealthy conduit” to ensure the dossier was “disseminated widely.”
Hanson wrote: “Brennan, in May 2017, as an ex-CIA director, again almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Rep. Tray Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action. Yet both the retired National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, and the former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, have conceded that the Steele dossier — along with the knowledge that it was a Clinton-campaign-funded project — most certainly did help shape the Obama intelligence communality interagency assessments and actions, often under the urging of Brennan himself.”
“Judicial Watch is again in court trying to get the truth about the Obama gang illegal leaks and conspiracy targeting President Trump,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians. Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
Breaking: Rep. Doug Collins Releases Nellie Ohr Testimony Transcript Before House Judiciary Committee — Contributing ‘Author’ of Phony Dossier
March 28, 2019
In December 2017 the head of opposition research firm Fusion GPS admitted in a court filing that his firm paid Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, to help dig up damaging information on then-candidate Donald Trump.
The connections between Nellie Ohr and the ‘Spygate’ scandal were hidden at a distance for months.
As noted previously at TGP, Nellie Ohr is a Communist sympathizer connected to Russia as well as a corrupt Never-Trumper.
Author Diana West at the American Spectator posted an article on Nellie Ohr last year. Nellie Ohr is “the “dossier” spying scandal’s woman in the middle.”
To one side of Ohr, there is the Fusion GPS team, including fellow contractor Christopher Steele. To the other, there is husband Bruce Ohr, who, until his “dossier”-related demotion, was No. 4 man at the Department of Justice, and a key contact there for Steele.
What’s more revealing about Nellie Ohr is the men in her life are protecting her involvement in the Russia scandal:
Notably, the “dossier” men in her life have tried to shield Ohr from public scrutiny, even at professional risk. Her husband, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reports, failed to disclose his wife’s employment with Fusion GPS and seek the appropriate conflict-of-interest waiver, which may have been an important factor in his demotion from associate deputy attorney general late last year.
Under Senate and House questioning, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson consistently failed to disclose Nellie Ohr’s existence as one of his firm’s paid Russian experts, let alone that he hired her for the red-hot DNC/Clinton campaign Trump-Russia project.
Even Christopher Steele may have tried to keep Nellie Ohr “under cover.” Steele, put forth as the “dossier” author ever since its January 2017 publication in BuzzFeed, does not appear to have let on to his many media and political contacts that he had “dossier”-assistance from at least two fellow Fusion GPS Russian experts, Nellie Ohr and Edward Baumgartner. Baumgartner, interestingly, was a Russian history major at Vassar in the 1990s when Nellie Ohr taught Russian history there.
It appears that the men in Nellie’s life did all they could to prevent Nellie Ohr from being outed for being involved in the dossier because she also has links to the CIA and therefore to John Brennan.
Now this…
New evidence suggests Nellie Ohr was working for the CIA and Fusion GPS when she passed on the junk Trump-Russia dossier and information on the Trump Children to the DOJ-FBI.
Via The Last Refuge – Conservative Treehouse:
1) Having thread the @JudicialWatch docs, one thing is flippin’ certain, Nellie Ohr was always working for the U.S.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) March 08, 2019
The latest FOIA requests indicate Nellie Ohr was working for the DOJ in 2015-2016.
This means Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS AND the DOJ at the same time.
On Wednesday night during his interview with Sean Hannity – President Trump called Nellie Ohr the author of the phony dossier.
Nellie Ohr has deep involvement with the creation of this fraudulent document.
On Thursday Rep. Doug Collins released the Nellie Ohr testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
It Was All A Fraud: ‘No More Indictments’ Coming From Mueller Probe, Multiple Outlets Report
By Chris Menahan
Fox News, ABC News, CNN and others are reporting Department of Justice sources told them there will be “no more indictments” coming from Robert Mueller‘s Russia probe.
The lying media is not taking the news well:
Tucker Carlson had an excellent rundown of this colossal fraud:
For the record, I said this was a fraud and an attempted deep state coup on day one.
It couldn’t have been more obvious. I remember back in 2016 watching hacks on CNN cite Trump publicly telling Russia to try and release Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing” as though that was evidence enough.
They never had anything, but that doesn’t mean they can’t just make “crimes” up out of thin air.
Just a few months ago, former FBI director James Comey went on MSNBC and laughed about “getting away with” entrapping Michael Flynn:
Look at what they’re doing to Roger Stone and what they did to George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Cohen.
The main question I have is whether Mueller chose not to indict Trump simply because he has fallen in line with the establishment and scrapped the whole “America First” agenda he ran on. There’s no reason to indict him if he no longer poses a threat to the establishment.
Liberals Turn On Mueller, Accuse Him Of Being Too Stupid To Find Trump Guilty Of Everything
By Joseph Curl
Special Counsel Robert Mueller was the darling of the liberal intelligentsia for the past two years, but as soon as he released his long-awaited report that ended up clearing President Trump of all charges that he colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election, liberals turned on him. Hard.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who has made a career of appearing on liberal cable stations alleging all kinds of criminal activity by Trump and his campaign team, quickly said Mueller was wrong.
“It was a mistake to rely on written responses by the president,” Schiff said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “That’s generally more what the lawyer has to say than what the individual has to say.” Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, said Mueller should have interviewed Trump under oath.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews, the guy who always got a thrill up his leg whenever he saw former president Barack Obama, also thought Mueller must be kinda dumb.
“Maybe he missed the boat here,” Matthews said of Mueller. “Why was there never an interrogation of this president? We were told for weeks by experts, ‘You cannot deal with an obstruction-of-justice charge or investigation without getting the motive.’ … How could they let Trump off the hook?”
Well, Chris, a few days ago you were singing the praises of the special counsel, now he’s “missing boats”?
Uber liberal Cenk Uygur, host of online news show The Young Turks, wasn’t going to let some stinkin’ report color his world. “Let me be clear, I CONCEDE NOTHING!” he wrote on Twitter. “If #MuellerReport didn’t look into Trump’s business ties with the Russians before the elections and didn’t look into his secret meetings with them after the election, then this is an epic debacle that looked into the exact wrong things.”
HBO talk show host Bill Maher agreed. “Did the Democrats put too much trust in the Mueller report? Because I don’t need the Mueller report to know he’s a traitor. I have a TV,” Maher told his panel of guests on his show — apparently referring to Trump (although by now, liberals are beginning to consider Mueller a traitor to their cause).
“Comedian” Chelsea Handler said: “I will admit my feelings for Mueller are conflicted now and my sexual attraction to him is in peril, but I still believe there is a lot more to come, and we must all march in the streets if we don’t see that report.”
The Washington Post detailed the back-biting in a piece headlined, “For Democrats, the Mueller report turns their politics upside down.”
Democrats put their faith in Mueller. Now they are questioning how and why he did what he did. Should he have forced the president to answer questions in person, rather than in writing? Why didn’t he make a judgment on obstruction, rather than turning it over to the attorney general to make perhaps the most important call of the investigation? Did he interpret his mandate too narrowly? The second-guessing, still at a low level, reflects the frustration among Democrats and opponents of the president who already had connected dots that Mueller found not conclusive.
Soon, the charges will emerge that Mueller, who was once appointed head of the FBI by (gasp) George W. Bush, was in the bag for Trump all along. And of course, after the Mueller report was released, exonerating Trump of all those collusion allegations, Democrats simply moved on, joining together to collectively demand the full release of the report and all evidence gathered.
Which is what made the tweet by former FBI director James Comey‘s tweet so fantastic.
Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan Threatens Trump: Mueller Will Soon Likely Put Your Political and Financial Future in Jeopardy
March 20, 201
Former CIA Chief-turned-Twitter-troll John Brennan warned the President on Wednesday that Special Counsel Mueller will soon put Trump’s political and financial future in jeopardy.
The President fired off an incendiary tweet directed towards Kellyanne Conway’s cruel, Trump-hating “husband from hell,” George Conway on Wednesday.
“George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!” Trump said in a tweet Wednesday after a nasty exchange between the two took place on Tuesday.
In response to Trump’s tweets to George Conway, John Brennan, one of the architects of Russiagate, accused President Trump of throwing temper tantrums because he is panicking over Mueller’s impending report.
What does John Brennan know about Mueller’s report?
Brennan is admitting Mueller’s report will complicate Trump’s life and cripple him financially and politically in the future.
BRENNAN: Hmmm…your bizarre tweets and recent temper tantrums reveal your panic over the likelihood the Special Counsel will soon further complicate your life, putting your political & financial future in jeopardy. Fortunately, Lady Justice does not do NDAs.
Brennan often issues President Trump thinly veiled threats from his Twitter account.
Last year, John Brennan warned President Trump about Mueller’s investigation. “Stay tuned,” Brennan said in an ominous Twitter post.
A few months later, President Trump pulled John Brennan’s security clearance.
Gabbard says calling Trump a Putin puppet is dangerous & stupid, Twitter calls her a Putin puppet
Democratic candidate for president and establishment-punching bag Tulsi Gabbard is taking heat on Twitter for daring to suggest that the Russiagate scandal could be pushing the US and Russia toward a dangerous new Cold War.
Gabbard tweeted that “short-sighted” politicians and media pundits who spend their time accusing Donald Trump of being in cahoots with Russia were helping bring about a new arms race because the accusations have led Trump to do“everything he can to prove he’s not [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s puppet — even if it brings us closer to nuclear war.”
In a sane world, journalists, pundits and even Gabbard’s fellow Democrats all understood exactly what she meant and took her point on board. Except, this is Twitter we’re talking about, so of course, she was eviscerated.
One of the first to pop in with a response was former CIA agent John Sipher who accused the Hawaii congresswoman of helping Russia and “playing their game.” Sipher himself once had his own moment of Twitter fame, back when he tweeted the classic question: “How can one not be a Russophobe?
Some media folk got in on the action, too. CNN National Security analyst Susan Hennessey bravely stepped up with the bold take that Gabbard’s call for calm and better relations was “absurd.”
Washington Post columnist and fellow CNN analyst Josh Rogin accused Gabbard of blaming only Democrats and journalists for bad relations with Russia, while Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake had an interesting spin on things, suggesting Trump was playing “seven dimensional collusion.”
Then there were those that questioned Gabbard’s status as a Democrat, because she “doesn’t sound like” one. Presumably, in the age of Russiagate, Democrats are all supposed to be advocating for nuclear war?
Some were interested in the candidate’s contact with Russian nationals, asking the all-important questions like, how many Russians has she met on her trips abroad — and crucially, how many does she “still maintain contact” with today?
Some tweeters did take Gabbard’s side, however. Journalist Glenn Greenwald took aim at the likes of Hennessey who“mock” those who want to avoid heightening tensions with Russia as “treasonous weaklings.”
Independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone tweeted that the negative reaction to Gabbard’s tweet was a good example of how “narrative supersedes fact” and that while it was “undeniable” that Trump has escalated Russia tensions, pundits and Democrats who cling to the collusion story are still unwilling to believe it.
In an ironic twist, Trump himself retweeted a comment which seemed to be in support of Gabbard’s point, suggesting that Russiagate was designed to “bait” the US into taking a tougher line against Russia and created “a more dangerous world as a consequence.”
NSA kills phone spying program exposed by Snowden… to replace it with something better?
The National Security Agency has reportedly ended the intrusive spying program that combs through Americans’ calls and texts and won’t be seeking to renew it, begging the question – what are they doing now that’s more effective?
The secretive agency hasn’t used the controversial system – the descendant of the ‘Stellar Wind’ metadata collection program exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 – in months, according to Luke Murry, national security adviser to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who told the Lawfare podcast that the administration wouldn’t even bother renewing its congressional authority for the program when it expires at the end of the year.
The NSA program – which reportedly had never thwarted a single terrorist attack – was essentially mothballed last June, according to Murry. Which, many believe, would only indicate the agency has been busy with something else for the last eight months.
The Orwellian-sounding ‘USA Freedom Act’ replaced Stellar Wind in 2015, partially because of the fallout from Snowden’s exposure of that program, which was rammed through in the aftermath of 9/11 under the Patriot Act. It ended automatic bulk collection of metadata, leaving that treasure trove with the phone companies, but still permitted the NSA to access records of “surveillance targets” and anyone those targets had contacted, rubber-stamped by a judge to certify the target was “linked to terrorism.” Last year’s mass record deletion allegedlyoccurred because the NSA – which has billions of terabytes of data storage capacity secreted in a bunker in Utah to hold Americans’ metadata – received too much data from the phone companies and opted to delete it all rather than break the law.
Since the NSA has never before acknowledged –or cared about– breaking the law – indeed, the point of the outrage over Snowden’s leaks was that the intrusive practice flagrantly violated the Fourth Amendment, and NSA director James Clapper lied under oath to Congress about the existence of the program – their explanation rang false to many. The agency, unsurprisingly, had no comment in response to Murry’s statements.
Snowden himself cheered the news, as did Glenn Greenwald, who was the first to publish Snowden’s revelations. Others were more suspicious, given the NSA’s track record.
No intelligence agency has ever stopped invading citizens’ privacy just because its practices were exposed. There might be a Church Committee or two, and an agency director might even resign. But controversial practices like COINTELPRO, in which FBI agents infiltrated activist groups to sow discord and amplify internal tensions, and Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA planted and coopted journalists in prominent media outlets, are alive and well.
(THE FBI IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE) – DOCUMENTS SHOW CNN WAS TIPPED OFF on Roger Stone Arrest by 29 FBI Armed Agents – Leaked by Deep State!
by Jacob Engels February 4, 2019
Roger Stone Attorneys Provide Evidence of Justice Department Special Counsel Leak Ahead Of Conservative Author and Activist’s Arrest
Just over a week after his televised arrest was carried exclusively by CNN, attorneys for the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone have sent a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees detailing how some reporters may have received an early draft copy of the indictment.
Documents obtained exclusively by The Gateway Pundit show a copy of the draft indictment without the PACER filing number or official stamps of the court, with metadata on the document identifying it as being authored by “AAW”, who is suspected to be lead Special Counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
CNN’s camera crew allegedly arrived at Stone’s residence a whole hour before the raid and CNN’s Sara Murray provided Stone’s attorney with a draft copy of the indictment in an early morning communique to confirm the FBI raid and arrest.
CNN was the only camera crew on the scene of the FBI raid on Roger Stone’s home.
While CNN has spent an entire week claiming their presence at the FBI raid on Stone’s South Florida home was a combination of luck and hard work, this evidence proves that their “source” was indeed the Office of the Special Counsel, who colluded with the notoriously anti-Trump news network to produce a propaganda broadcast of the arrest that is reminiscent of the Nazi era tactics of the Gestapo and propaganda ministry lead by Joseph Goebbels.
Stone’s attorneys are asking both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to investigate these leaks and provide answers to the American people on how someone could have obtained sealed grand jury indictments.
VOTE: Should President Trump Pardon Roger Stone?
Here is a copy of the letter by Grant J. Smith.
Here is a copy of the Metadata that shows the copy CNN obtained came from the FBI and not the courts.
The DC judge in Mr. Stone’s case has claimed that the New York Times bestselling author and political commentator’s vigorous public defense against the sham charges being leveled against him could “taint the jury”, though she has failed to address CNN’s role in Stone’s arrest, or the illegal nature of CNN obtaining a sealed draft indictment.
** Roger Stone spent the past few days in DC for two court appearances and a media blitz to defend his honor. To help Roger fight back against this rogue prosecutor, patriots can visit StoneDefenseFund.com.
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