Tag: FUSION GPS

MAXINE MELTDOWN: ‘THIS IS NOT THE END OF ANYTHING!’

MAXINE MELTDOWN: ‘This is not the end of anything!’

“This is the— well, it’s the end of the report and the investigation by Mueller. But those of us who chair these committees have a responsibility to continue with our oversight.”

Maxine Waters still believes the “Kremlin Klan” won the White House for President Trump, despite the evidence indicating otherwise.

But no one can convince her that just because Special Counsel Robert Mueller found there was no collusion with Russia, that it’s over.

“This is not the end of anything!” Waters told MSNBC’s Joy Reid as they realized the report was a giant nothing burger for Democrats.

“This is the— well, it’s the end of the report and the investigation by Mueller. But those of us who chair these committees have a responsibility to continue with our oversight,” Waters said.

“There’s so much that, uh, needs to be, you know, taken a look at at this point,” she claimed,” and so it’s not the end of everything.”

Reuters reports:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election did not find that any U.S. or Trump campaign officials knowingly conspired with Russia, according to details released on Sunday.

Attorney General William Barr sent a summary of conclusions from the report to congressional leaders and the media on Sunday afternoon. Mueller concluded his investigation on Friday after nearly two years, turning in a report to the top U.S. law enforcement officer.

Barr wrote to congressional leaders that “the investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” according to the Daily Mail.

Democrats aren’t giving up.

House Intel Committee chairman Adam Schiff insisted on “This Week” that there is “significant evidence of collusion”.

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SCHIFF WILL ‘HAUL PEOPLE BEFORE CONGRESS’ IF NECESSARY; WON’T RULE OUT IMPEACHMENT

Schiff Will ‘Haul People Before Congress’ If Necessary; Won’t Rule Out Impeachment

“There’s a difference between compelling evidence of collusion and whether the special counsel concludes that he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal charge of conspiracy.”

By Susan Jones | March 25, 2019

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the head of the House intelligence committee, said on Sunday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller may not have had enough evidence to prosecute President Trump, “but that doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t compelling and incriminating evidence that should be shared with the American people.”

And he intends to “haul people before the Congress” to get answers.

https://www.mrctv.org/embed/538215

 

Schiff, a leading congressional critic of President Trump, told ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos that “there’s a difference between compelling evidence of collusion and whether the special counsel concludes that he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal charge of conspiracy.

“And as I’ve said before, George, I leave that decision to Bob Mueller, and I have full confidence in him. And I think, frankly, the country owes Bob Mueller a debt of gratitude for conducting the investigation as professionally as he has.

“So I — I have trust his prosecutorial judgment but that doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t compelling and incriminating evidence that should be shared with the American people.”

Schiff said that six people “close to the president” have been indicted: “That hardly looks like vindication to me. But again, let’s see what the report has to say. If they’re so confident that the report is going to exonerate them, they should fight to make that report and the underlying evidence public and available to Congress.

“But I suspect that we’ll find those words of transparency to prove hollow, that in fact they will fight to make sure that Congress doesn’t get this underlying evidence,” Schiff said.

“But we are going to take it as far as necessary to make sure that we do. We have an independent obligation to share the facts with the American people. We in the intelligence committee have a particular obligation to determine whether there is evidence, whether the president may be compromised in any way, whether that is criminal or not, and of course there are indications he was pursuing money in Russia through Trump Tower and other potential real estate that could be deeply compromising.”

Schiff said his committee will ask administration officials — presumably Attorney General William Barr and others– to appear before his committee. “If the request is denied, subpoena,” he said. “If subpoenas are denied, we will haul people before the Congress. And yes, we will prosecute in court as necessary to get this information.”

Schiff said it was a “mistake” to allow President Trump to respond in writing to the special counsel. “If you really do want the truth, you need to put people under oath. And that should is have been done, but the special counsel may have made the decision that, as he could not indict a sitting president on the obstruction issue, as it would draw out his investigation, that that didn’t make sense.”

(Notably, the FBI did not put Hillary Clinton under oath when agents questioned her about her “extremely careless” handling of emails, as former FBI Director James Comey put it.)

Schiff refused to rule out impeaching Trump, despite the fact that the Mueller report contained no bombshells, such as additional indictments.

He again pointed to the Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted: “That’s their policy,” Schiff said.

“And therefore, there could be overwhelming evidence on the obstruction issue. And I don’t know that that’s the case, but if this were overwhelming evidence of criminality on the president’s part, then the Congress would need to consider that remedy (impeachment) if indictment is foreclosed.

“So, it’s really too early to make those judgments. We need to see the report. And then I think we’ll all have a factual basis to discuss what does this mean for the American people? What risks are we running with this president? What steps does Congress need to take to protect the country, but in the absence of those facts, those judgments are impossible to make.”

Schiff also said Congress’s responsibility is different from that of Robert Mueller:

“It’s our responsibility to tell the American people, these are the facts. This is what your president has done, this is what his key campaign and appointees have done, these are the issues that we need to take action on, this is potential compromise.

“There is evidence, for example, quite in the public realm, that the president sought to make money from the Russians, sought the Kremlin’s help to make money during the presidential campaign while denying business ties with the Russians.

“That is obviously deeply compromising,” Schiff said. “And if it’s this president’s view that he still wants to build that tower when he is out of office, that may further compromise his policy towards Putin, towards Russia and other things. It’s our duty to expose that and take corrective action.”

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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.”

CAP

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.

CAP

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!

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President Trump Bashes ‘Illegal Takedown That Failed,’ Hints That Republicans Will Investigate The Hoaxers

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President Donald Trump was magnanimous in victory as the Robert Mueller investigation formally cleared him of Russia collusion and obstruction of justice, according to attorney general William Barr. Trump hinted that investigators will now look into “the other side,” as Rep. Devin Nunes prepares to probe the Democrats who cooked up the media hoax in an effort to divert attention from their Uranium One dealings with the Russian government.

Trump told reporters that the idea of Russia collusion is “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” while White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump and his supporters are “vindicated” and Rudy Giuliani trolled Adam Schiff with a call for an apology.

“It’s a shame that the country had to go through this,” President Trump said.

The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who set up Don Trump Jr. for a meeting in Trump Tower as part of a Fusion GPS plot was operating out of the Washington offices of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm run by an anti-Trump former Obama administration official whose super PAC donated to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election.

Veselnitskaya’s work from the Cozen O’Connor office provides more evidence of a Democrat and establishment Republican effort to set up the Trump campaign for a future Russian collusion case. Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States by the Obama Department of Justice while the former Obama official who runs Cozen O’Connor publicly warned then-candidate Trump that if he became president he would be investigated by the DOJ for contacts with foreign leaders. Veselnitskaya reportedly had dinner meetings with Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson the day before she met in Trump Tower and also the day after she went inside Trump Tower.

Big League Politics has confirmed that a Cozen O’Connor partner who lives in the same apartment building as James Comey’s friend Daniel Richman — who leaked classified information to the press on Comey’s behalf — spoke with Richman during the period that Comey and the Fusion GPS team were trying to obtain FISA warrants on Trump Tower.

CAP

Let’s break down the facts of an Obama administration official’s involvement in the Trump Tower plot:

Russian and U.S. citizen Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military veteran, was present at Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower after leading a lobbying push supposedly to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Akhmestshin is believed by insiders to be linked to Russian government intelligence, a fact that the Washington Post seized on when reporting that he met with Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower. A nonprofit group focused on promoting Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya’s cause to lawmakers actually hired Cozen O’Connor, which the law firm confirms.

The Washington Post reported (emphasis added):

“In the spring of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, Akhmetshin and lobbyists he hired sought meetings on Capitol Hill to make their case against the sanctions law. Akhmetshin hired former Democratic congressman Ron Dellums, along with a team of lobbyists from the law firm of Cozen O’Connor.
Steve Pruitt, a business colleague speaking on Dellums’s behalf, said his involvement was brief and ended when he determined that Congress was unlikely to change the law.

In June, after visiting Trump Tower in New York, Veselnitskaya came to Washington to lend a hand in the lobbying effort.

She attended a meeting of the team at the downtown offices of Cozen O’Connor, where she spoke at length in Russian about the issues but confused many in the room, who had not been told previously about her involvement, according to several participants.”

Washington Post passage ends

Cozen O’Connor managing partner Howard Schweitzer is listed here on a DOJ form from an investigation into the breaking of lobbying laws by Russians trying to repeal the Magnitsky Act — which was just a front to get Russians in the room with Don Jr. We know now that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually operating out of the Cozen O’Connor offices.

CAP

Schweitzer worked as general counsel for the Export-Import Bank under George W. Bush and was chief operating officer of the TARP bailout program under both Bush and Obama from 2008-2009.

“In October 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appointed Howard as the first COO of TARP. In this position, Howard led program execution and built the TARP infrastructure. He served as a key point person regarding the financial crisis through the presidential transition and continued to serve as TARP COO under Secretary Timothy Geithner until August 2009,” reads Schweitzer’s Cozen O’Connor bio.

“He served as chief operating officer of the TARP in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations,” reads Schweitzer’s bio for a Politico piece he wrote in August 2016 headlined “7 Reasons Why Trump Would Hate Being President.”

Schweitzer’s virulently anti-Trump piece for Politico tries to make the case that Trump was “sabotaging his own bid for the White House.” Schweitzer said that if Trump became president then “He’ll be investigated to death” by Congress and the Justice Department for his business dealings and “relationships with foreign leaders.”

The narrative was being set.

The Philadelphia-based Cozen O’Connor law firm also has a political action committee that donated to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, in addition to Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Martin O’Malley. In the 2018 election cycle, the Cozen O’Connor PAC donated more money to Hillary Clinton’s dormant campaign.

Here is Veselnitskaya seated behind Obama ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul at a June 2016 congressional hearing focused on Russia.

Cozen O’Connor’s connections to the anti-Trump “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot are wide-ranging, and show up in unexpected places.

James Comey’s friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, leaked classified information that Comey gave him. During this leaking period, Richman was apartment-building neighbors with a partner at the Cozen O’Connor law firm that strategized with Fusion GPS operative Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian plant who set up Don Jr. in Trump Tower.

Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, led by Glenn Simpson, were part of John Brennan and Peter Strzok’s CIA-led “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot aimed at President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign.

“Yes, he is my neighbor,” Amy Wenzel, a partner at Cozen O’Connor, confirmed in a phone conversation with Big League Politics, confirming that they spoke. They live near each other in a Brooklyn high-rise.

The Washington Post’s release of Trump Tower documents shows the crowd surrounding non-sexual honeypot Natalia Veselnitskaya. The crowd of conspirators knew they were damaging Trump by setting up the meeting.

The Post confirms British-citizen music promoter Rob Goldstone’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he described the conspirators’ push to get the meeting despite the fact that they knew it would create trouble for the Trump campaign.

The Post reports:

“Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea.

“He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,’ ” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified.

The intensity with which Agalarov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of congressional testimony and exhibits released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.”

Washington Post passage ends

Natalia Veselnitskaya is also inextricably linked to the case against Paul Manafort.

The Russian attorney partner of Paul Manafort who was named as a defendant in new Robert Mueller charges is also linked to the Russian spy Natalia Vesenilskaya, who attended a meeting with Don Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower.

According to Mueller’s new charges, Manafort’s Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik tried to intimidate or coerce witnesses in Manafort’s upcoming money laundering trial. That puts Konstantin Kilimnik at the center of the Mueller effort to find obstruction of justice in Trump-World (Mueller is giving himself until September 1 to try to find obstruction of justice, after finding no Russian collusion involving Trump).
So who is Konstantine Kilimnik? It turns out that Kilimnik is linked to Veselnitskaya, the Fusion GPS agent, according to Senate documents.

Here is how ProPublica described Kilimnik: “Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort, who worked for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine before running Trump’s campaign, had an employee in Kiev named Konstantin Kilimnik who U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, according to Politico. Kilimnik served in the Russian army and learned English at a school that experts say often trains spies. Kilimnik denied being a spy to The Washington Post. Manafort had dinner with Kilimnik last August in New York, just before he was forced out of the Trump campaign amid growing questions about his work in the Ukraine, the Post reported.”

Documents reveal Kilimnik’s ties to Veselniskaya. Let’s take a look at United States Senate Judiciary Committee documents questioning Veselniskaya in October. Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Veselniskaya if she knew a handful of characters believed to be conspirators in the case.

Grassley and Feinstein specifically asked Veselnitskaya if she knew Konstantin Kilimnik.

Here is page 4 of the documents, naming Kilimnik:

Current Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as senator from Alabama.

Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower provided some of the basis for warrants to surveil Trump Tower and for other FBI surveillance measures on the Trump campaign.

The fact that Veselnitskaya, a lawyer herself, was in the meeting with Trump Jr. and Kushner opened the president’s son and son-in-law up to being qualified as “target associations” for law enforcement under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed during the Bush administration.

Veselniskaya’s link to suspected conspirator Kilimnik is now coming under scrutiny.

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GOP Congressman Releasing Transcripts From Closed-Door Testimonies Of Russia Probe Investigators

By ASHE SCHOW

U.S. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) speaks during a House Rules Committee meeting at the U.S. Capitol February 25, 2019 in Washington, DC.

For the past two weeks, one GOP congressman has been on a mission to release transcripts of government officials who testified to Congress behind closed doors regarding the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, began releasing transcripts into the congressional record on March 8, starting with the closed-door testimony of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. Collins took to the House floor to explain his decision to release the transcripts, asking, is “the only ‘collusion’ among agency personnel who hated the president and started this investigation?”

See the source image

Collins said that the transcripts were “pertinent to a congressional investigation,” but the investigation was ended after Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. Collins said further that the committee had given the DOJ time to review and redact information related to national security, but received little response from the department, so they made minor redactions and released the transcripts.

The 268-page transcript from Ohr’s testimony revealed that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British Spy Christopher Steele used Ohr to get their salacious claims about Russia collusion into the federal government. Ohr also revealed that, contrary to what House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff has said, the FBI had received reports from Steele as early as July 2016, not September 2016, as Schiff claimed.

Further, Ohr testified that Steele continued to feed him information after the ex-spy was no longer a credible source for the FBI. The FBI would interview Ohr as a backdoor to Steele’s intel.

Four days after releasing Ohr’s testimony, Collins returned to the House floor to publicly release former FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s testimony.

“The American people deserve to know what transpired in the highest echelons of the FBI during that tumultuous time for the bureau,” Collins said at the time.

The Page testimony was explosive, as she had not been publicly interviewed by the committee or anyone else after her text messages with then-fellow FBI agent Peter Strzok, with whom she was having an affair, were revealed.

In her testimony, Page revealed that the FBI’s Russia investigation really was an “insurance policy” in the unlikely event that Donald Trump was elected president, and that investigators had only a “paucity” of evidence in the beginning, which they still used to launch investigations into the president. Page also suggested that it was President Barack Obama’s Justice Department that essentially told the FBI not to find Hillary Clinton responsible for “gross negligence” in regard to classified information being sent over her unsecured, private email server.

See the source image

Two days after releasing Page’s testimony, Collins released Strzok’s. In his testimony, Strzok revealed that he deleted communications between himself and his mistress, Page, prior to being removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but did so for “personal” reasons. He claimed to have deleted personal communications regarding his affair, but some of those messages showed anti-Trump sentiments and discussed the “insurance policy” of investigating “collusion” if Trump won the election.

On Sunday, Collins told Fox News host Maria Baritomo that he was planning to release more transcripts. Baritomo asked if Jim Baker, the former FBI lawyer who is now under criminal investigation for leaking to the media, was on the list for future transcript releases.

“There will be more transcripts released. Baker will be one that we’re looking at releasing,” Collins responded.

 

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DOCUMENTS: Investigators Were Told DOJ ‘Not Willing to Charge’ Clinton in Email Probe

Justice was never going to be served in the Clinton email scandal.

By

Fox News obtained documents late Wednesday showing that the Department of Justice told investigators in the Clinton email scandal that they were “not willing to charge” the twice-failed presidential candidate, despite obvious violations of the law.

“An internal chart prepared by federal investigators working on the so-called “Midyear Exam” probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, exclusively reviewed by Fox News, contained the words ‘NOTE: DOJ not willing to charge this’ next to a key statute on the mishandling of classified information,” the Fox report said. “The notation appeared to contradict former FBI Director James Comey’s repeated claims that his team made its decision that Clinton should not face criminal charges independently.”

What exactly was the DOJ “not willing to charge” Clinton with?

Three particular statutes were mentioned in the Fox report – crimes related to willfully retaining national defense information that could harm the United States, crimes related to gross negligence in handling classified material, and crimes related to “retaining classified materials at an ‘unauthorized location.’”

Trending: Lisa Page Testimony Reveals The Strzok Plot To Trap Trump’s Political Amateur Son-In-Law Jared Kushner

The document was called “Espionage Act Charges – Retention/Mishandling,” according to the report.

Wednesday, it was widely reported that disgraced former FBI lawyer Lisa Page revealed to the House Judiciary Committee that the Obama DOJ told the FBI not to charge Clinton in the email scandal in 2018 closed-door testimony.

BLP reported:

Disgraced former FBI agent Lisa Page sang like a canary when questioned under oath last summer, according to the the social media account of one of the members of the House Judiciary Committee who took part in her hearing before Congress.

“Lisa Page confirmed to me under oath that the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information,” said Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) on Twitter, attaching a transcript of the hearing.

“So let me if I can, I know I’m testing your memory,” the transcript said. “But when you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —”

Page interrupted him and said “That is correct.”

Selective justice is a hallmark of any authoritarian state.

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