Barr names Durham

Panic Strikes Fear

The actions of the FBI working for the Party have the dems a quivering. They put a meaningless member at point so no voting members will face the voters after fighting for a fascist state.



Now they are trying to cause endless disruptions....

Wyoming steps up.

After Liz Cheney embarrassed the state with her nonsense, she was replaced as soon as Constitutionally possible. Her replacement is getting to work-

'I Will Name Names': Congresswoman Calls Out 'Corrupt' Christopher Wray, Merrick Garland

In an at-times chaotic House Judiciary Committee hearing on the weaponization of the federal government, U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) was not afraid to "name names" when it comes to the corrupt leaders within the administration of President Joe Biden.

"To be blunt, the leadership of the FBI and DOJ are corrupt," Hageman said. "I will name names: Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland are corrupt. They know it, we know it, and the American people know it," she added.

Citing "fundamental changes" made to the culture of the FBI and DOJ, Hageman explained how those changes have "led to the political capture of our flagship law enforcement agencies" and allowed Democrats to use them as their "personal political hacks."

"As the DOJ and FBI have become more political, they have amassed more power," Hageman continued. "And as they have amassed more power they have become more political." That "vicious cycle," she argued, "must be stopped."

Addressing the FBI whistleblowers seated before her to testify about what they say is political and ideological targeting that amounts to retaliation, Hageman said that "Congress needs whistleblowers like you so that we can conduct oversight and correct course."

Presciently, Hageman warned the whistleblowers that Democrats would "not focus on the substance" of their testimony or "engage in a discussion about how to protect our constitutional rights and institutions from the tyrants who are running these agencies."

"Instead what we will see is that they will deflect, they will call the witnesses names, they will scream 'MAGA' and 'extremist' at the tops of their lungs," Hageman continued. Democrats, she predicted, would simply try "to cover up the unforgivable and the indefensible which is the creation of a two-tiered justice system based on political beliefs and the corruption of our political elites."

Sure enough, Democrats through every diversion tactic and insult they had at Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and the witnesses in attempts to derail and distract from the hearing's intended purpose.

Despite the fact that House Democrats never attacked Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee for withholding information on accusers from SJC Republicans, they suddenly decided that Thursday's hearing was a farce because, allegedly, some of the whistleblowers protected disclosures were not made available. But, as Jordan explained, protected disclosures from whistleblowers are not treated the same as other witness testimony.

townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/05/18/rep-hageman-slams-corrupt-doj-and-fbi-n2623427

Classy.

Durham on Comey’s Culpability
The report shows FBI headquarters ignored all the rules in the Trump-Russia probe.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation received some shocking intelligence in 2018, suggesting the Russians might have compromised Christopher Steele’s sources even before the opposition researcher began feeding his infamous dossier to the FBI. Just as shocking was the edict that came next.

According to special counsel John Durham’s report, the team reviewing the intelligence was told in a meeting with a top member of the Trump-Russia collusion probe to “be careful” because “issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny.” Dina Corsi, the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, then ordered that findings be reported only “orally.” One FBI lawyer told the Durham team it was “the most inappropriate operational or professional statement” he’d ever heard at the FBI and that he was so “appalled,” he walked off the review. The lawyer didn’t know exactly who’d given the order but said Ms. Corsi was “speaking for FBI leadership.”

Readers won’t find many direct quotes in the report from former Director James Comey or former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both refused to cooperate with Mr. Durham. Mr. Comey has publicly distanced himself from events, honing his mastery of “I don’t recall.” The Durham report gives the lie to this claim, which in turn explains what went wrong. The Trump probe was run by the “seventh floor”—by two men who were thrilled to be playing political kingmakers, and who broke all the rules.

The roots of the collusion investigation were planted in early April 2016, when Mr. Comey requested from underlings “relevant information pertaining to any Presidential candidate.” (He was already deep in the Hillary Clinton email probe.) The report says that he was then briefed that the New York field office was looking at recently named Trump adviser Carter Page. It wasn’t “concerned about Page” so much as the “Russians reaching out” to him. Yet the Page case and “ones like it” became a “top priority for Director Comey.”

When the FBI got wind in July 2016 of a conversation between another Trump adviser and an Australian diplomat, Mr. McCabe ordered FBI agent Peter Strzok to skip all preliminary steps and launch a full counterintelligence investigation. Similarly, when the FBI received separate information from a Clinton attorney claiming a secret Trump server communicating with Russia, FBI leadership intervened to order a full probe, even though both cyber agents and Chicago-based agents were skeptical. One agent explained: “people on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.” McCabe would tell an inspector general that Mr. Comey “was getting daily briefings on this stuff.” Compare this with Mr. Comey’s later interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier in which he suggested he was only vaguely aware of details.

All this was then centralized in FBI headquarters. Line agents early on wanted to interview Mr. Page—a step agents said made only “too much sense” and the Durham report says would likely have put the whole issue to rest. They were “prohibited” by Messrs. Comey and McCabe, who remained fixated on getting a secret surveillance warrant on Mr. Page. The attorney prepping that application recalled “being constantly pressured” by “management” to push it through—being told that Mr. Comey “wants to know what’s going on,” while Mr. McCabe exhorted to “get this going.” When a deputy assistant attorney general raised concerns with the application’s reliance on Mr. Steele—given his work as a Clinton oppo researcher—supporters of the warrant went straight to Messrs. Comey and McCabe, who said to move ahead “despite his concerns.”

The Durham report is littered with agents recalling their frustration that they were “excluded from the flow of information and decision-making process” and steamrolled when they objected to unjustified inquiries. One agent was told in 2017 that his primary job was renewing the Page surveillance application. Yet his team didn’t believe Mr. Page to be a “threat” and thought the investigation a “dry hole.” When he told his superior, he was “ignored and directed to continue.”

That supervisor told the Durham team it wasn’t “normal” and she “did not know why the 7th floor was so involved,” but felt her boss, counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, was “not in charge and had to get approvals” from the brass. Mr. Priestap told Durham investigators that it drove him “insane” that his own underlings—Mr. Strzok and Lisa Page—went “around him to the 7th floor” whenever he disagreed with their approach. In 2018, as mistakes began to come to light, that seventh floor ordered a review team to stop writing things on paper.

Some are responding to the Durham report with calls to dismantle the FBI. But the report shows the rank and file doing exactly what the FBI is supposed to do—question, verify. The fault rests with an arrogant leadership that discarded the usual layers of oversight—a seventh floor that took charge with no regard for rules, little care for the truth, and no accountability from above.

www.wsj.com/articles/durham-on-comeys-culpability-fbi-russia-trump-dossier-intelligence-c4db4462?st=g3g694dw3u6degq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Wait! Washington Post’s Bump Makes the Last Pitch for Russian Collusion

Shortly before the release of the Durham report, I wrote about the concern that we have a de facto state media in the United States. The column explored the pattern of false claims replicated across media platforms in the last four years. Then the Report was released and the media seemed intent to prove the point. However, even in this determined group, the Washington Post (which won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Russian collusion) set a new level of denial with a column by Philip Bump.

Bump has long been controversial for his role in pushing some of the false claims discussed in prior columns. Some of those are worth noting briefly because they share common elements to his most recent column.

For example, Bump was one of those who made the false claims that Attorney General Bill Barr cleared Lafayette Park for a photo op for Trump. He also claimed that Barr lied in his denial of the use of tear gas by federal agents. Bump wrote the Washington Post column titled “Attorney General Bill Barr’s Dishonest Defense of Clearing of Lafayette Square.” Not only did the Post refer to the “debunked claim” that no tear gas was used by the federal government, but goes on to state:



“It is the job of the media to tell the truth. The truth is that Barr’s arguments about the events of last Monday collapse under scrutiny and that his flat assertion that there was no link between clearing the square and Trump’s photo op should be treated with the same skepticism that his claims about the use of tear gas earns.”

It turns out that both assertions were true. Bump and others were pushing a conspiracy theory and exhibited little interested in confirming the facts. (I testified in Congress not long after the clearing of the area and stated that the conspiracy theory was already contradicted by the available evidence).

Indeed, the falsity of the photo op claim was evident within a day of the clearing. When various investigations disproved his earlier allegations, Bump wrote a rather bizarre spin on the controversy where he grudgingly acknowledged the evidence supporting Barr on the park clearing while entirely ignoring his prior accusations on the the tear gas controversy.

Bump also slammed Trump for claiming that his campaign was spied on by the FBI under the Obama Administration. (Trump used the term “wiretapping” which is a rather dated term for surveillance). Bump again guffawed at the suggestion. Later it was shown that the surveillance did target both the campaign and campaign associates.

Bump also pushed the Russian collusion story and slammed the New York Post for its now proven Hunter Biden laptop story. He was also there for the Democrats when he wrote a column titled “Why the Trump Tower meeting may have violated the law — and the Steele dossier likely didn’t.” Of course, nothing came from the Trump Tower meeting because there was no cognizable crime.

In 2021, when media organizations were finally admitting that the laptop was authentic, Bump was still declaring that it was a “conspiracy theory.” Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bump continued to suggest that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”

Bump often seems content that most readers will not go much beyond the headline. For example, when Trump slammed the top 20 most dangerous cities as being Democratic-run, Bump announced it was false in a column titled “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.” However, his statistics showed that on a per capita data, none of the 20 most violent cities were run by Republicans. On a straight crime rate comparison, only one city was run by a Republican (Jacksonville, Fla.). Seventeen of the 20 cities were run by Democrats (two had independent mayors).

Anticipating the obvious response, Bump wrote that “Trump would no doubt shrug at that detail… that his assertion was only slightly wrong.” Well, yeah. The effort of the column was to avoid the underlying point on criminal justice policies to show that the number might be off by a couple cities. It literally focuses on a single tree to avoid seeing (and addressing) the forest. It would still be roughly 95% but that slight difference is the focus of the column rather than the claimed connection of crime rates to criminal justice agendas.

Given that history, many of us were waiting for Bump’s spin after years of pushing these collusion claims. He did not disappoint.

Yesterday, the New York Post ran a column by me that was used as the theme for the cover.

Bump again declared two parts of the column to be false and again proceeded to prove that they were not.

Bump declares:



‘The report details how the Russian collusion conspiracy was invented by Clinton operatives and put into the now-infamous Steele dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign,’ Turley writes, incorrectly. At another point, he writes that “President Barack Obama and his national security team were briefed on how ‘a trusted foreign source’ revealed ‘a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.’ It then happened a few days later.” That is also incorrect.”

Let’s start with the second claim. Bump says that it is untrue that Obama was briefed on the Clinton campaign plan. Notably, in the long time line that follows, Bump never shows how the statement is false. Indeed, he admits that “Russian intelligence obtained by the U.S. government indicates that Clinton’s campaign decided to ‘vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.’”

Note Bump does not deny the briefing occurred. Indeed, the line is based on the Durham report and the briefing was previously reported by media. Rather, he later reveals that he is just objecting because the Clinton people would not confirm the intelligence report. He writes:

“That allegation remains unconfirmed to this day despite Durham questioning Clinton staffers about it. Clinton herself told Durham that the claim — sourced to Russia, which Durham describes as a “trusted foreign source” — “looked like Russian disinformation to me; they’re very good at it, you know.”

So Bump is citing Clinton whose campaign funded the dossier, hid the funding in its legal budget, denied its role to reporters, and actively pushed not one but two false claims with the FBI.

Bump then adds, bizarrely, that “it’s strange to argue both that the Clinton campaign explicitly sought to dig up dirt linking Trump to Russia, leading to Steele’s work in June, and that it wasn’t until late July that they decided to make this a core strategy. The latter undermines the former.” I will leave that to you to figure out.

Now on to the main event. Bump says it is false that “The report details how the Russian collusion conspiracy was invented by Clinton operatives and put into the now-infamous Steele dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign.”

Once again, when you get to his proof, it is not there. He does not defend the actual allegations in the dossier that Durham demolishes in his Report. He only suggests that others may have invented or pushed their own conspiracy theories a couple weeks earlier.

Bump curiously starts the relevant timeline in June 2016 and emphasizes that the Clinton campaign did not make the collusion effort a “core strategy” until July. That formal decision is used rather than the earlier dates when Fusion was hired and the research funded by the campaign. Durham details how Fusion approached Steele in May 2016 to do the work.

Bump details how figures like Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook were raising Russian concerns as proof that the Russian collusion allegations were not just the work of the campaign.

Citing the Clinton campaign manager as evidence that others were raising the concerns is hardly compelling. It also does not alter the fact that the campaign’s dossier manufactured false allegations that were then fed to the government and media.

In reality, there were earlier concerns by the government with regard to Carter Page being targeted by the Russians. However, Durham notes that those concerns in March 2016 over Page were not because they believed that he was an asset. Rather American intelligence “was concerned about the Russians reaching out to Page” and found that Page was not “receptive to the recruitment efforts.”

What Bump does not address are the findings in both the Inspector General and Durham reports that the Clinton campaign actively pushed the false claims into the FBI and into the media. The dossier would be used in the FISA court and former FBI Director James Comey would even continue to reference the false “tee-tape” claim from the report in 2018. The dossier would also be cited for years as “corroborated” and reliable by the media as well as Democratic members of Congress.

What is clear is that Clinton efforts were sufficiently pronounced by July 2016 that former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The Russian investigation was launched days after this briefing.

Pointing out that there were others raising Russian contacts in the weeks before does not alter the role of the Clinton campaign in fostering the false collusion and Alfa Bank allegations as a political hit job. Bump also does not address how the campaign hid the funding and lied to reporters about its role.

However, Bump saved the best for last. After telling readers that there was nothing to see here, he further assured them that

“there’s an alternative way to consider the Russia probe: that Russia hoped Trump would win, that Trump was happy to have their help and that federal counterintelligence officials saw that as problematic.

This appears to be what actually happened.”

Call it Russian Collusion 2.0. In other words, as with his take on the Hunter Biden laptop, Bump is still arguing that it was the Russians after all.

There is another possibility.

As Bump wrote when he was falsely accusing Barr, “it is the job of the media to tell the truth.” This would be a good time to start.

jonathanturley.org/2023/05/18/wait-washington-posts-bump-makes-the-last-case-for-russian-collusion/

I have often mocked Bump for being a paid hacktivist, but he gets paid to push dishonesty for a reason, the unsuspecting fall for his bullshit.

But there were barely any charges!!! To downplay this gross abuse of our most important law enforcement agency is just disgusting.