Fusion GPS Archives - Bookworm Room

Helpful Links to Understand the Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative

February 16, 2018 by Wolf Howling 5 Comments

Recent commentary from Adam Schiff, Andrew McCarthy, Lee Smith and others illuminates important issues swirling around the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the four Congressional Democrats with the clearance to actually put eyes on all of the top secret documents made available to date by the FBI and others as part of the House Intelligence Committee investigation, made a jaw dropping admission in so many words while answering media questions. He admits he has seen no evidence to date to establish any sort of criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. In other words, more than a year into this politically-driven investigation, there is no Trump-Russia Collusion.

So, if there is no evidence to support any of the allegations, when are we going to start investigating to determine whether this was a criminal enterprise involving Christopher Steele, CIA Director John Brennan, Fusion GPS, the DNC and others to throw the election to Clinton, destroy Trump’s presidency, and protect corrupt government officials?

Lee Smith, writing at The Federalist, looks in detail at how senior figures in the media, namely New Yorker editor David Remnick, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, former New Republic editor Franklin Foer, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, coordinated with Fusion GPS and the DNC to create an echo chamber, driving the Trump Russia collusion narrative. It is a sordid story that needs to come out as well.

On a related note is a Ted Talk given by Sheryl Attkinson, where she not only puts in perspective “fake news,” but identifies the source of the fake news controversy, much of which involves the Trump-Russia narrative, with a starring role from a Google owner. The progressive left has used the mantra of “fake news” to justify their creep into censoring conservative voices. I’ve long believed that social media sites and the major search engines are so powerful that they need either to be subject to anti-trust litigation and / or they need to be required to adhere to the First Amendment as if they were a public institution. [Read more…]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump: the Russia collusion story needs to end soon

February 13, 2018 by Wolf Howling 13 Comments

Available facts indicate that the Progressives’ Russia Collusion narrative is fake — and time is running out to investigate the true Clinton/FBI collusion.

With questions swirling around the Trump-Russian collusion narrative, we seem to be living in a John le Carré novel. It is one full of spies where the truth is hidden deep beneath disinformation and, ironically enough, behind security protocols. And just like a le Carré novel, it seems that there are many people in this mix determined that the truth should never see the light of day.

Is Trump a Russian intelligence asset with a taste for Russian prostitutes and golden showers who stole the 2016 election with help from Russia? Perhaps. But given the dearth of evidence supporting that contention after twenty months of investigation, another, better question arises: Is the Trump Russia collusion narrative the single most dirty — and criminal — trick in the history of American politics? It would be intellectually dishonest in the extreme to say that only one of those questions deserves investigation.

Was the Russian collusion narrative started, then spoon fed to the FBI and the media, as a way to make Hillary seem less corrupt in comparison to Trump during the 2016 election campaign? Was the narrative then pushed as hard as possible after the election as a way to delegitimize the Trump presidency; to serve as a vehicle to overturn the 2016 election results, and to protect people in government who had acted unethically, and perhaps criminally, as regards all things Hillary — i.e., those responsible for the criminal travesty that was the FBI/DOJ investigation and exoneration of Hillary for her email scandal, those who allowed the Uranium One deal to be approved without notifying Congress of related Russian corruption, and those DOJ officials who defied the recommendations of FBI field agents to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

Let me note here, before you start measuring me for a tin-foil hat, I am not alleging some grand conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others. If this was a political dirty trick, then the truth is likely being held in a death-grip of secrecy among a handful of conspirators, they most likely being no more than one or two people in the leadership of the DNC and Clinton Campaigns, perhaps CIA Director John Brennan and/or Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, and/or Christopher Steele. As to everyone else who then picked up this narrative and ran with it, sometimes unlawfully, that was not a conspiracy. Far more likely it simply grew out of the partisan culture created throughout the government agencies by the Obama administration. That culture, as Ms. BWR has fairly described it, is one of bias, entitlement, arrogance, and corruption, at least to the extent that ideological ends have at times justified patently unlawful means. I believe Ms. BWR’s description also covers about 90% of the mainstream media as well.

Just to review, there are precious few factual allegations regarding the Trump Russia collusion narrative beyond the bald allegation that Trump was a Russian asset, a narrative Fusion’s Glen Simpson claims was known all over Moscow and was just there for the picking in June 2016. People were “talking about it freely.” (Sen. p87-88). Amazing that Simpson and Steele were able to uncover that in a week whereas the CIA and NSA were blissfully ignorant during the eight years that Trump is alleged to have acted as a Russian agent, eh?

The people Steele names as active in the Russia Trump collusion are Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Steele mentions Michael Flynn, but only in passing as someone the Kremlin was cultivating. Steele alludes to two others, someone in the Trump campaign who “admitt[ed that the] Kremlin [was] behind [the] recent appearance of DNC emails on Wikileaks,” later claimed to be George Papadopoulos, and someone “close” to Trump who knew of his intelligence relationship with Russia, later asserted to be Sergei Millian.

As to specific acts alleged by Steele, there are only four that directly relate to Trump (at least by my count, ten by count of the Washington Times). The first specific act alleged is that Trump engaged Russian hookers to do a golden shower in his Moscow hotel room in 2013. The second is that Carter Page traveled to Russia in order to meet Igor Sechin, President of Rosneft, and a Russian political official, Diveykin. The third is that George Papadopoulos admitted to knowing that Russia was behind the DNC Wikileaks affair. And the fourth is that Michael Cohen met in Prague with Russian officials in the last week of August or first week of September. [Read more…]

Critically important: FISA, the NSA, and the 4th Amendment

January 29, 2018 by Wolf Howling 20 Comments

With FISA and the NSA in the news, learn why abusing them isn’t arcane procedural stuff but is, instead, critically important to American freedom.

Did the Obama administration illegally use its power in multiple ways to access NSA intercepts so that it could gain intelligence on – and kneecap – Trump’s administration? If so, then this is a scandal that dwarfs everything that happened during Watergate and highlights the real danger to our republic flowing from government abuse of NSA’s capabilities.

With luck, we’ll very soon read the House Intelligence Committee’s four-page document summarizing its investigation into alleged FISA abuses and the Trump-Russia collusion. If we’re very lucky, that document will have attached to it the declassified intelligence and court documents supporting its contentions. And just today, Rep. Trey Gowdy teased the contents of the House memo:

If you think your viewers want to know whether or not the dossier was used in [FISA] court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used, whether or not it’s ever been vetted — if you are interested in who paid for the dossier, if you are interested in Christopher Steele’s relationship with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, then, yes, you will want the memo to come out.”

“Do you want to know that the Democratic National Committee paid for material that was never vetted, that was included in a court proceeding?” . . . . “Do you want to know whether or not the primary source in these court proceedings had a bias against one candidate? Do you want to know whether or not he said he’d do anything to keep that candidate from becoming president?”

Much of what Rep. Gowdy is referring to centers around NSA intercepts and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA. To understand just how the NSA, FISA, and the 4th Amendment fit together in the drama playing out before us, read on.

Fourth Amendment

To fully appreciate the meaning and purpose behind the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution, one needs to travel back to the American colonies, around 1760. That was when the colonists, who considered themselves staunch British subjects, began to understand that the British government in London was not treating them well at all.

One of the government’s unfair acts was to impose such high taxes on certain commodities that the taxes threatened the entire colonial economy (and made life far more expensive for the British on the mainland). Some American colonists began smuggling those commodities, just as Brits themselves were extensively doing in England of the time.

The government in London responded in 1760 with “writs of assistance.” There will not be a test, but it will help you interpret contemporary events if you understand “writs of assistance.” These writs were open-ended search warrants authorizing a government agent to search private property — anywhere, at anytime — for contraband without ever having to show to a Court that the agent reasonably believed the search would actually yield contraband. Such a “general warrant” was both a threat to British citizens and a profit source for those British agents who used the writs to line their own pockets in what was an incredibly abusive system.

In the 20th century, Director of Stalin’s Secret Police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.” He could easily have said the same about the mid-18th century British Crown’s systematic abuse of general warrants such as writs of assistance.

This abuse came to a head in London (and was, at the time, a cause célèbre throughout the colonies) when King George III authorized a general warrant against a political opponent, John Wilkes, in the hope that searching Wilkes’ home would produce evidence of something — anything — the Crown could use to pin a crime on Wilkes. ” British agents, having rooted through Wilkes’ private writings, found nothing worse than a truly bawdy poem. They seized the poem and proceeded to create a crime by surreptitiously publishing it as if Wilkes had done so himself – that being a necessary element of the crime of blasphemy in the U.K. of 1760 – and then charging Wilkes with the crime. Wilkes was then expelled from Parliament and fled to France.

When it came to drafting the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers remembered well the abuses to which the British government put general warrants and writs of assistance. For over two centuries, the 4th Amendment has protected American citizens from officials seeking to settle scores or obtain power by wrongfully imposing themselves into and onto private property despite having no having probable cause to believe any crime has been committed.

Not only are these searches illegal, but if our society is to remain free, government can never be allowed the power to conduct such unfounded searches. Nor can government be allowed to leverage these illegal searches into weaponizing FISA for political intelligence or political hits. In this regard, I am specifically referring to the successful political hit the FBI conducted on Michael Flynn using FISA intercepts, an outrage of its own that I will address at the end of this post. [Read more…]