INVESTIGATE THIS (4)

Doing the work that the mainstream media won’t do, the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has compiled a useful timeline bearing on what I have been calling the Trump Dossier. Our friendly former FBI Special Agent with two decades of experience in counterintelligence provides related background on the Attorney General Guidelines for National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection. “Without an understanding of them,” he says, “it is impossible to understand the import of what happened and what the investigators are looking at and for.” He explains:

The basic distinction in the AG Guidelines is between Preliminary Inquiry (PI) and Full Investigation (FI). There are some other distinctions, but PI/FI governs pretty much everything. The importance of the distinction is twofold:

1. The predication for each is different–there’s a lower threshold for a PI and a higher threshold for an FI, or perhaps it would be better to say that the predication for a FI requires more specificity.

2. The Guidelines specify what investigative techniques can be used for PI/FI. They are different.

The significance is that FISA techniques can only be used under a FI. Therefore, it’s not possible to take advantage of the low threshold for PI in order to abuse FISA–you must satisfy the requirements for a FI.

The point is that it’s not so easy to invent specific and articulable facts of this sort–especially when you’re talking about a presidential candidate. If you put that in the context here, you’ll see how troubling all this “dossier” stuff is. You’ll also see why I keep saying that they “needed” a FI. Nothing else would give them what they really wanted: putatively legal access to Trump communications.

From all this you can see why I say that the FISA applications are a sort of Holy Grail. Only by reading those can we see how the FIs were justified, and whether they relied on material provided by Steele, whether directly to the FBI or through Fusion GPS. And at that point we can also judge the truthfulness of the representations that were sworn to in those applications. I don’t say it’s a slam dunk, but that’s another reason to haul the people below Comey before Congressional committees–to find out how those things were evaluated, formulated, etc.

All this that we’ve been discussing explains why the Department of Justice and the FBI simply ignored oversight reporting requirements. Comey admitted that he’d been running a FI investigation for nine months without notifying Congress — which is supposed to be done on a quarterly basis. Right, because neither he nor Lynch nor anyone else in the Obama administration would want GOP Congressmen reading what passed for predication for FIs and FISAs targeting Trump (no matter who the named subject might be). That might have led to awkward questions! Like, Waitaminute, how do you know Trump’s a Russian agent, and who told you that?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/investigate-this-4.php

INVESTIGATE THIS (3)

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, FBI, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
Now we know that the Trump Dossier was not just a product funded by Democrats, but was commissioned by the general counsel of the Clinton presidential campaign. After the Trump campaign collusion hysteria fomented by Democrats and their media friends roughly since the election, we learn that Russian disinformation (as it seems to me) disseminated by the friends of Vladimir Putin (i.e., the Russian officials identified by alphabetic descriptors in the dossier) has come to us courtesy of Hillary Clinton herself. Yet John Podesta, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and campaign general counsel Marc Elias have all denied knowledge, either now or in the past. Whole lotta lyin’ goin’ on. As for Hillary herself, well, “she may or may not have been aware.”

But there is more. Rowan Scarborough has reported that the first of the dossier memos was circulated last year in late June. The first dossier memo is dated June 20, 2016, and cites Sources A (“a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure”) and B (“a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin”). Sources A and B tout the collusion scenario. Sources A and B were not out to help Donald Trump, were they? They were out to throw sand in our gears or to help Hillary Clinton.

Former CIA Director John Brennan was a key player in the collusion scenario, but he has left much to implication in his congressional testimony. Brennan has acknowledged, however, that “that there were efforts made by the [FBI] to try to understand whether or not any of the information in that [dossier] was valid.”

Following up on his comments yesterday, our friend with two decades of experience in counterintelligence as an FBI Special Agent writes to add “some additional context that may be be useful.” He writes:

Why was the “dossier” ultimately so important for the anti-Trump conspiracy (if you think of a better way of putting it, let me know)? The reason, I think, is that the use of standard political smears against Trump had proven ineffective. Therefore it became necessary to take it all a step further and to attempt to make some superficially credible allegations of action against the national interest (again, the vague allegations of Mafia ties had fallen flat).

We know that that effort began some time in the late Spring or early Summer of 2016 because an application was made to the FISC in June/July. That application mentioned Trump by name–and was rejected. Why FISA? Because a Title III “wiretap” would have required an actual investigation based on a violation of a real US criminal law and a quite high and specific standard in the application for a court order.

Why, you might ask, was that application even made? Why not rely on the flow of info coming from NSA, which notoriously scoops up virtually all electronic communications? The answer is that Trump and all those close to him were US Persons (USPERs). The NSA targets foreign powers and individuals. If those foreign powers and individuals of concern are in contact with USPERs and, in the judgment of NSA, US counterintelligence (basically, FBI) should know about those USPERs, then NSA informs the FBI.

In my own career, outside FBI headquarters, I only saw a handful of NSA referrals of that sort. They were mostly general in nature. They could perhaps be used to initiate a Preliminary Inquiry (PI) to gain a bit more insight into the nature of the relationship between the USPER and the foreign power or individual — if we judged that advisable based on our own knowledge and experience — meaning that typically the NSA info would not rise to the level needed in order to say that there was “reason to believe” (i.e., for practical purposes, probable cause) that the USPER was an actual agent of a foreign power. That means: no Full Investigation (FI), therefore no FISA.

But in the anti-Trump conspiracy that’s exactly what was needed: FISA coverage, “wiretaps.” There was no time to do the painstaking research on Trump and his associates–they needed FISA and they needed it NOW. They’d already been turned down at least once. The NSA info was essentially useless, because what they really wanted was to get conversations between Trump and his associates here in the US–all USPERs–not international conversations (those were either lacking or harmless). Yes, NSA probably scoops up internal US communications of USPERs, too, but to use it without a FI and without a FISA order would be illegal. Therefore, the “dossier.”

For the conspirators the significance of the “dossier” was that it provided supposed “reason to believe” that Trump or those close to him were “agents of a foreign power,” subject to blackmail or pressure by a foreign power, already cooperating with a foreign power. The ability to claim that most of this “information” was coming via friendly foreign intel services with contacts in Russia added a bit of verisimilitude.

A “dossier” that could provide that sort of “reason to believe” would justify a FI and then FISA coverage. And therefore access to Trump campaign related communications (the extent would be dependent on the nature of the FISA order, who were the USPERs listed as targets–Page for sure, Flynn maybe, etc.). NB: Although they were claiming Trump collusion with Russia, what they were really targeting was campaign communications. By claiming that key people were foreign agents they could collect ALL their domestic communications with anybody.

This is why I believe that the dossier took on added importance after the initial denial of a FISA order. We know, or think we do, that the FBI wanted Steele to do additional research. The focus of that research, however, would have to be to establish “reason to believe” that Trump or persons close to his campaign were “agents of a foreign power.” Only that would get them the FISA coverage they wanted. Lacking those, FISA was the quick route, but it required “reason to believe” that Trump or persons close to his campaign were “agents of a foreign power.” Voila the “dossier” as it apparently featured in the successful FISA application in October, the height of the campaign. And then it came to be used in the attempt to nullify the election (the attempted “coup”?).

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/investigate-this-3.php

HOW SORE LOSER HILLARY CREATED A NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH RUSSIA

HOW SORE LOSER HILLARY CREATED A NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH RUSSIA

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, HILLARY CLINTON, MEDIA, MEDIA BIAS, RUSSIA

Scott has linked to an article by Paul Sperry in the New York Post called “How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia.” Sperry’s article is also one of our “Power Line picks.”

Many of our readers will come across Sperry’s article, either via Power Line or in some other way. However, I think portions of it are worth quoting here, just in case.

Sperry writes:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign didn’t just pay for the Kremlin-aided smear job on Donald Trump before the election; she continued to use the dirt after the election to frame her humiliating loss as a Russian conspiracy to steal the election.

Bitter to the core, she and her campaign aides hatched a scheme, just 24 hours after conceding the race, to spoon-feed the dirty rumors to an eager liberal media and manufacture the narrative that Russia secretly colluded with her neophyte foe to sabotage her coronation.

The hatching of this scheme is documented by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their book“Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” They reported:

Within 24 hours of [Clinton’s] concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

The plan succeeded. As Sperry reminds us: “After the election, coverage of the Russian ‘collusion’ story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage”

How relentless was that coverage? Sperry tells us:

A new Media Research Center study finds that, since the inauguration, major TV news networks have devoted an astonishing 1,000 minutes out of a total 5,015 minutes of Trump administration coverage discussing speculation that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Moscow in hacking Clinton campaign emails, “which means the Russia story alone has comprised almost one-fifth of all Trump news this year.”

In contrast, they so far have devoted just 20 seconds to the more substantive scandal of Hillary and her husband possibly trading US uranium rights for Russian cash.

Who fuels the nonstop coverage?

MRC analysts also found that more than a third of the networks’ Russia “scandal” coverage was based on anonymous sources who worked in the Obama administration, including Hillary’s State Department.

Thus, Team Hillary’s plan is working. Sure, stories it planted have been retracted and reporters fired. But that’s just collateral damage. Sperry is right: “Trump’s approval ratings have suffered, and the Russia investigation has distracted the administration.”

This is just what Team Clinton intended, as former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri made clear to the Washington Post in March.

There is no doubt, then, that Team Clinton played the press. In my view, many in the press were happy to be played.

It’s worth noting, however, that even our gullible, left-leaning mainstream media didn’t take the bait when the Trump dossier, put together with Russian collusion for the Clinton campaign, was dangled before it. The mainstream media refused to run with the dossier because its assertions couldn’t be corroborated and, perhaps, because some of them seemed ridiculous.

It was our intelligence community that ran with with the dossier, though I doubt it was duped. The full extent of its reliance on the dossier is not clear. However, James Comey certainly put it to use, and by sharing it with the president, helped make it news.

“In short,” Sperry concludes, “Hillary couldn’t beat Trump with the political dirt she secretly purchased during the campaign, so she tried to cripple his presidency with help from an overwhelmingly anti-Trump media.” And, it appears, from elements of the U.S. government

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/how-sore-loser-hillary-created-a-national-obsessions-with-russia.php

GREEN WEENIES ALL AROUND

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN GREEN WEENIE AWARD

So you know how environmentalists like to tell us endlessly to “reduce our carbon footprint” and such? And how you’ve long suspected that you don’t even have to be a Hollywood star (like Leo di Caprio) to be a hypocrite about it? Now we have science to prove the matter.

Biological Conservation has an article just out that reports the results of a survey of consumption patterns of conservationists, economists, and medics. Don’t ask me why they chose economists and medics—I’m just here to report. Anyway, enjoy the results:

The environmental footprints of conservationists, economists and medics compared

Andrew Balmford, LizzyCole, ChrisSandbrook, BrendanFisher

Abstract

Many conservationists undertake environmentally harmful activities in their private lives such as flying and eating meat, while calling for people as a whole to reduce such behaviors. To quantify the extent of our hypocrisy and put our actions into context, we conducted a questionnaire-based survey of 300 conservationists and compared their personal (rather than professional) behavior, across 10 domains, with that of 207 economists and 227 medics. We also explored two related issues: the role of environmental knowledge in promoting pro-environmental behavior, and the extent to which different elements of people’s footprint co-vary across behavioral domains. The conservationists we sampled have a slightly lower overall environmental footprint than economists or medics, but this varies across behaviors. Conservationists take fewer personal flights, do more to lower domestic energy use, recycle more, and eat less meat – but don’t differ in how they travel to work, and own more pets than do economists or medics. Interestingly, conservationists also score no better than economists on environmental knowledge and knowledge of pro-environmental actions. Overall footprint scores are higher for males, US nationals, economists, and people with higher degrees and larger incomes, but (as has been reported in other studies) are unrelated to environmental knowledge. Last, we found different elements of individuals’ footprints are generally not intercorrelated, and show divergent demographic patterns. These findings suggest three conclusions. First, lowering people’s footprints may be most effectively achieved via tailored interventions targeting higher-impact behaviors (such as meat consumption, flying and family size). Second, as in health matters, education about environmental issues or pro-environmental actions may have little impact on behavior. Last, while conservationists perform better on certain measures than other groups, we could (and we would argue, must) do far more to reduce our footprint.

That last bit—that hectoring people endlessly about their “footprint” does little to change behavior—totally misses the point. Hectoring people is the whole point. I think we need some social science research on the environmental footprint of virtue signaling.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/green-weenies-all-around-2.php

UZBEK NYC TERROR SUSPECT ENTERED U.S. UNDER DIVERSITY VISA PROGRAM

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IMMIGRATION, TERRORISM

ABC-7 in New York reports that Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the truck driving, ISIS supporting terrorist who killed at least eight people in New York City today, came to the U.S. seven years ago from Uzbekistan under what is called the Diversity Visa Program. The program offers a lottery for people from countries with few immigrants in America.

This program, of which I don’t think I had ever heard, strikes me as badly misguided. The U.S. doesn’t need lots of immigrants from every country, and certainly not extra immigrants from Uzbekistan whose population is 80 percent Muslim, and thus is more likely than most countries to produce terrorists and future terrorists in the current environment.

According to Newsweek, an Uzbek citizen was arrested in Sweden in April when he ran a truck into a crowd in Stockholm and killed four people. He had expressed sympathy for the ISIS. Two Uzbeks and a Kazakh were arrested in Brooklyn in 2015 and charged with conspiring to support ISIS.

Following today’s attack, Newsweek ran an article called “Why young men from [Uzbekistan] keep threatening the U.S. and Europe.” An expert on Central Asia addressed the question — one that doesn’t seem terribly mysterious.

Frankly, I don’t care why. We should not have a program that brings extra Uzbeks to the U.S. in the name of “diversity” or for any other purpose.

Daniel Horowitz reports that 1.83 million green cards were issued to nationals of predominantly Muslim countries from 2001-2015, including almost 60,000 to Uzbeks. The dates are significant because they reflect post-9/11 immigration policy. After 9/11, we should have known better.

In addition to the 1.83 million green card holders, we let in roughly 155,000 foreign students every year from predominantly Muslim countries, according to Horowitz. In effect, we are asking for more domestic terrorism.

Meanwhile, as Horowitz observes, when the president proposes a modest moratorium on just a few of the countries – not even the primary drivers of our immigration from the Middle East – a single leftist district judge blocks the moratorium. The “resistors in robes” on the Ninth Circuit will surely back that judge, as they have in the past on this issue, and we will have to wait for the Supreme Court to uphold common sense and a decent regard for the power of the president with regard to who can enter the U.S.

Even thereafter, we can count on more obstruction from lower courts whenever the administration continues its efforts to protect America from an influx of terrorists and future terrorists.

Horowitz concludes:

Congress must clamp down on immigration, weaken the jurisdiction of lower courts to get involved in immigration cases, and further bolster Homeland Security efforts to identify the thousands of threats we already have in our country as a result of masochistic immigration policies.

If, as seems certain, congressional Democrats resist, they need to be called out. In this regard, it’s worth noting that the Diversity Visa Program, through which the terrorist who slayed New Yorkers today came to America, was formulated by New York’s own Chuck Schumer when he was in the House.

By contrast, President Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton have called for an end to the program.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/uzbek-nyc-terror-suspect-entered-u-s-under-diversity-visa-program.php

INVESTIGATE THIS

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

One of our most knowledgeable law enforcement readers writes to emphasize a point bearing on our coverage of the Trump Dossier. He adds valuable context to our commentary:

As a retired FBI Special Agent with over two decades of experience in counterintelligence, I’d like to make a point that Scott and Paul are surely aware of, but which it’s useful to keep at the front of your mind.

Scott regularly refers to the Trump dossier as the “Rosetta Stone” of the “muh Russia” narrative. That’s true, but it’s helpful to go one step further. The real importance of the Trump dossier from a criminal law standpoint lies in the use it was put to for official government purposes. To understand that we need to know whether the dossier was used to justify the initiation of Full Investigations (FIs), according to the relevant AG Guidelines for National Security investigations.

We can take it as given that such FIs were opened that broadly targeted the overall Trump political organization–campaign staffers, advisers, etc. We know this because we know that FISA orders were sought and (eventually) approved. We also know that the real target was Trump himself, since the initial FISA application in June or July 2016 specifically named Trump.

FISA coverage can only be used if a FI has been previously authorized. In this circumstance I believe (I’ll skip my reasoning) that the real goal of opening a FI was precisely to obtain FISA coverage. For that reason the likelihood is that the substantially same justification that was used to obtain an order from the FISC had already been used internally (at the FBI and DoJ) to justify opening a FI. How many FIs were opened relating to the overall Trump organization? Who were the subjects? What was the predication (and, especially, did that include the dossier)?

The full relevance of these considerations can be seen from Scott and Paul’s review of just how threadbare the dossier really was in terms of authentication. If it was used in applications to the FISC with the knowledge that it was “oppo research” and likely not credible, and if that knowledge was withheld from the FISC, I suspect we’re looking at the real possibility of criminal conduct. And bear in mind that such applications (for FISA coverage relating to a candidate for President or a President-elect) would have been approved only at the highest levels before submission to the FISC.

To put two names to that process: James Comey and Loretta Lynch. If they knowingly deceived the FISC–and that depends, as far as we can tell at this point, largely on how they may have used the “dossier”–they’re looking at serious criminal liability.

All of this explains the FBI and DoJ stonewalling. Comey and the rest are well aware of the implications for them. Bear in mind too that the stonewalling isn’t limited to document production–important as that may be. FBI and DoJ have been refusing to allow their personnel to testify to Congressional committees–that is, personnel below the top few officials.

Investigations of the magnitude we’re discussing necessarily include a fair number of people and the testimony of those other people would likely shed valuable light on the true nature of the process that was followed, who made the decisions, what was known about the credibility of information that was used to justify official actions, who really believed those justifications, the nature of coordination with other government agencies, etc. This is where the investigative rubber will hit the road.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/investigate-this.php