Tag: STEELE DOSSIER

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR RECORDS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CLAPPER, BRENNAN, CNN

Judicial Watch Sues for Records of Communication Between Clapper, Brennan, CNN

Watchdog files FOIA to unearth truth about Steele dossier

Judicial Watch – 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.”

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Breaking: Rep. Doug Collins Releases Nellie Ohr Testimony Transcript Before House Judiciary Committee — Contributing ‘Author’ of Phony Dossier

by Jim Hoft March 28, 2019

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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:

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.

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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.

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On Thursday Rep. Doug Collins released the Nellie Ohr testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

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With Mueller done, is it time to investigate the FBI? (DEBATE)

THE FBI IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE

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With the Mueller report finished and President Trump cleared of colluding with Russia, the spotlight is now on the FBI leadership that opened the investigation. RT’s Crosstalk guests think the agency has a lot to answer for.

After a two year media circus, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report cleared President Trump of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election, a conclusion that Trump says brings him “complete and total exoneration.”

However, constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued that Mueller should have never been appointed in the first place. “It was a mistake to appoint a special counsel because there was no evidence of a crime,” Dershowitz said. Rather, he argued, Mueller’s appointment by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was a knee-jerk reaction to the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

Mueller’s probe was launched just over a week after Comey was unceremoniously fired in May 2017. Before then, the FBI had been conducting its own investigation into the supposed collusion. That investigation, Dershowitz continued, was based on lies.

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A dossier of salacious gossip – gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign – was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as evidence to authorize the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, even though Comey later admitted he knew the dossier was unverifiable.

“I think the FISA court was defrauded,” the lawyer told RT. “You can show information to the FISA court which isn’t particularly compelling, as long as you tell the court what the source is, and alert it to the… conflicts of interest. You cannot provide material to the court, claiming it’s credible, when you yourself know that it lacks credibility.”

Troublingly, former National Security Agency leader William Binney added,

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Among Republicans, talk of investigating the FBI and Department of Justice has risen above a chatter in recent days. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told reporters on Monday that he will investigate the FBI’s alleged FISA abuse and subsequent investigation, an investigation that Trump called “an illegal takedown that failed.”

“What makes no sense to me is that all of the abuse by the Department of Justice and the FBI – the unprofessional conduct, the shady behavior – nobody seems to think that’s much important. Well that’s going to change, I hope,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) gave Graham his blessing on Tuesday, saying the issue of whether the FBI conspired to hinder Trump’s election is “a legitimate question.”

“We’re headed that way,”presidential historian Doug Wead noted.

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Washington told Ukraine to end probe into George Soros-funded group during 2016 US election – report

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An NGO co-funded by George Soros was spared prosecution in 2016 after the US urged Ukraine to drop a corruption probe targeting the group, the Hill reported, pointing to potential shenanigans during the US presidential election.

Bankrolled by the Obama administration and Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) was under investigation as part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into the misallocation of $4.4 million in US funds to fight corruption in the eastern European country.

As the 2016 presidential race heated up back in the United States, the US Embassy in Kiev gave Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko “a list of people whom we should not prosecute” as part of the probe, the Hill reported. Ultimately, no action was taken against AntAC.

Lutsenko told the paper that he believes the embassy wanted the probe nixed because it could have exposed the Democrats to a potential scandal during the 2016 election.

A State Department official who spoke with the Hill said that while the request to nix the probe was unusual, Washington feared that AntAC was being targeted as retribution for the group’s advocacy for anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine.

AntAC wasn’t just the benefactor of well-connected patrons – at the time it was also collaborating with FBI agents to uncover then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine. Manafort later became a high-profile target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian collusion, and was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for tax fraud and other financial crimes.

Lutsenko divulged in an interview with the Hill last week that he has opened an investigation into whether Ukrainian officials leaked financial records during the 2016 US presidential campaign in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

While AntAC may have failed to help the FBI find the Russia collusion smoking gun, the group’s activities constitute yet another link between the anti-climactic Russiagate probe and Soros, a Democrat mega-donor who bet big on Hillary Clinton taking the White House in 2016.

In 2017, the billionaire philanthropist siphoned money into a new group, the Democracy Integrity Project, which later partnered with Fusion GPS to create the now-infamous Steele dossier.

Spokespersons for AntAC and the Soros umbrella group Open Society Foundations declined to comment on the Hill’s scoop.

Ironically, the prosecutor general who had preceded Lutsenko, Viktor Shokin, resigned under pressure from Washington – which accused Shokin of corruption.

Virtuous US officials continue to make similar demands of Ukraine’s justice system. Earlier this month, Washington urged the Ukrainian government to fire its special anti-corruption prosecutor, again over accusations of administrative abuse.

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VIDEO: GIULIANI DEMANDS APOLOGY FROM CNN HOST LIVE ON AIR OVER RUSSIAGATE

Video: Giuliani Demands Apology From CNN Host Live On Air Over Russiagate

“You guys have tortured this man for two years with collusion and nobody has apologized for it.”

Steve Watson | Infowars.com – MARCH 26, 2019

In a must see segment Monday night, Rudy Giuliani demanded an apology from CNN anchor Chris Cuomo regarding two plus years of misinformation broadcast by the network regarding the Russia collusion hoax.

“It’s not very clever. You guys have tortured this man for two years with collusion and nobody has apologized for it. Before we talk about obstruction, apologize!” Giuliani, one of Trump’s most trusted legal advisors, demanded.

Cuomo refused to apologize saying “Not a chance.”

“Of course you’re not because you’re not being fair,” Giuliani shot back, adding “I’m outraged by the behavior of these networks. Collusion, collusion, collusion… No collusion, Chris.”

Giuliani would not back down, adding “How about this network should apologize? I ask you to apologize,” he further demanded.

“The Washington Post should apologize and Adam Schiff should apologize.” Giuliani continued.

“Before we start jamming him up in obstruction, couldn’t we take a day off and say the man was falsely accused?” Giuliani said of the President.

Cuomo attempted to argue that the report doesn’t totally exonerate Trump and that ‘attempts to obstruct’ should be looked into.

Later on during the appearance, Giuliani described the infamous Steele dossier, upon which the investigation was founded, as “a cheap National Enquirer story”.

“Christopher Steele had been fired by the FBI, was paid $1.1 million by Hillary Clinton. Certain things they corroborate. If you read that dossier, you get past the second page and you think it’s an intelligence report you’re reading and it is a National Enquirer story. It is a cheap National Enquirer story. I’ve had four or five retired CIA agents read it,” Giuliani exclaimed.

After two plus years of crying ‘collusion’, CNN cannot back down, and is now parroting the mantra that the Mueller report ‘does not exonerate’ Trump, when that is EXACTLY what it does.

The Attorney General determined that the President was not guilty of collusion based on the Mueller report. The report exonerated Trump.

How much more fake can this fake news get? We’re at the point now where CNN is saying the exact opposite of the truth in a desperate attempt to save face.

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CNN Zucker: No Regrets… (THE MEDIA IS THE ENEMY)

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 15: President of CNN Jeff Zucker attends the grand opening of phase one of the Hudson Yards development on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, March 15, 2019 in New York City. Four towers, including residential, commercial, and retail space, and a large public art …

By Joshua Caplan

CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is pushing back against critics accusing the news network of being one of the chief propagators of a debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller cleared the president’s 2016 campaign of alleged collusion with the Kremlin.

In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s Trump-Russia coverage and suggested it was entirely appropriate to give near around-the-clock-coverage due to the story’s magnitude. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” the CNN chief wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”

According to a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings written by the Justice Department, investigators found no evidence President Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the election.

Zucker neglected to mention CNN’s steady stream of conspiracy-theory punditry and several stories which proved demonstrably false.

Last December, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. access to information nearly two weeks prior to their public release. However, the network failed to verify the email’s date — September 14th, 2016 — by which time the emails had already been released. In June, CNN reported former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated for meeting with a Russian banker ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Scaramucci denied the claim and CNN eventually apologized for its inaccurate report. CNN Executive editor Lex Haris, editor Eric Lichtblau, and journalist Thomas Frank resigned in shame over the story.

Further, CNN claimed in July that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, was prepared to tell special counsel investigators that the president possesses advanced knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting between his son, Donald Trump Jr. and a Russia lawyer, and others. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, later told CNN had “mixed up” its facts and denied claims that Cohen had any such knowledge about the meeting.

Over the course of the Mueller probe, CNN gave a platform to Trump-Russia collusion pushers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Washington Post opinion writer Max Boot. For example, appearing February 19th on CNN’s State of the Union, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that there is “compelling” evidence in “plain sight” of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence. Now, there’s a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt,” Schiff told host Dana Bash.

In 2017, an undercover investigator for Project Veritas filmed CNN Supervising Producer John Bonifield saying that the Russia conspiracy theory was “mostly bullshit” and the network was promoting it so heavily — without real evidence — “because it’s ratings.”

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19 Politicians, Hollywood Stars, Media Elites Who Fantasized for Years About Mueller Indicting Trump Repeatedly Claimed Mueller ‘Closing In’

By Alana Mastrangelo

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Politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites spent roughly two years echoing the words “Mueller is closing in” as they fantasized about President Donald Trump and his family being indicted over so-called Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. But on Sunday, the Department of Justice announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find evidence that the president’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government, “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

“To my fellow Trump critics: Do not despair. Do not give up. Do not reduce your outrage,” tweeted actor Tony Schwartz reacting to the president’s 2017 tax bill, “Tax cuts are a fake victory that will come back to haunt him & Republicans. Mueller is closing in on Trump, I promise!”

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“If true, the Buzzfeed story is a political earthquake. Caution: we really know little; Mueller knows much. Time to be steady, let facts lead us to truth — The walls do appear to be closing in.” tweeted journalist Dan Rather in reference to an anti-Trump BuzzFeed report from January, which turned out to be fake news.

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Check out a few more of the politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites who fantasized about “Mueller closing in” on the president and his family over the Russia collusion hoax.

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First son Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Sunday that Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress on the Mueller report has finally proven “what those of us with sane minds have known all along.”

As for everybody else, their focus appears to be shifting onto the Attorney General and even the Special Counsel, as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) calls on William Barr to testify before Congress, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) floats the idea of subpoenaing Robert Mueller.

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SHAME OF THE NATION: 533,074 articles have been published about Russia and Trump… Networks Gave Whopping 2,284 Minutes to Probe… CNN STILL sitting outside Mueller’s office…

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By Rich Noyes | March 25, 2019

The amount of time and energy that the media elite — cable news, big newspapers, etc. — have spent talking and writing about the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is incalculable, but here’s one calculable slice: From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (the last night before special counsel Robert Mueller sent his report to the Attorney General), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage, most of it (1,909 minutes) following Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017.

That’s an average of roughly three minutes a night, every night, for an astonishing 791 days — a level of coverage normally associated only with a major war or a presidential election. In fact, TV reporters devoted more airtime to the Russia investigation than any of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives — immigration, tax reform, trade, North Korea, ISIS, the economy, veterans’ affairs, the opioid epidemic, to name but a few. Since his presidency began, nearly one-fifth (18.8%) of all of Trump’s evening news coverage has been about this one investigation.

The networks’ fixation on scandal over substance is one reason their coverage of the President has been so preposterously lopsided. From January 1 through March 21 of this year, the spin of Trump coverage on the evening newscasts has been 92% negative vs. just eight percent positive — even worse than the 90% negative coverage we calculated in 2017 and 2018.

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[To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about the President or his administration from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.]

For those who spend all of their time on their phones or glued to 24-hour cable news, note that these shows still matter: despite today’s fractured media environment, the Big Three evening newscasts still have a larger audience than either their morning show counterparts or even the biggest cable news shows — a combined 24 million people, according to ratings compiled the week of February 25.

Back on March 10, two weeks before the Mueller report was delivered, ABC’s Terry Moran publicly warned that there would be “a reckoning for the media” if there report failed to deliver evidence to validate journalists’ years-long suspicion that the “current President of the United States assist[ed] the Kremlin in an attack on our democracy.” According to the summary delivered Sunday afternoon, “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Even before that conclusion was made public, anti-Trump journalist Matt Taibbi argued that the “news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”

As much as any of their hyperbolic spin, the massive onslaught of coverage during the past two years starkly reveals the media’s mindset. Now that the investigation they relentlessly touted has ended with an outcome favorable to the President they despise, it does seem a good time for that “reckoning.”

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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.

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The lying media is not taking the news well:

Tucker Carlson had an excellent rundown of this colossal fraud:

 

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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