Comey and Mueller

In his case in N.Virg, Manafort is seeking a hearing on all the leaks, claiming they have damaged his ability of a fair trial
Mueller does not want any part of any hearing on leaks

I am just speculating here -- but since the leaks might be a crime, it is possible that, if there are hearings, someone on Team Mueller might (have to) take the 5th. And, if so, this would/should get Manafort a dismissal on these charges

http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...ral-judge-to-turn-down-request-for-hearing-on
 
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:lmao:
 
Do they never tire of this?

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You may want to be sure you are sitting down for this one
I found an honest Democrat
You read that right

This is Mark Penn who is an ex-Microsoft guy who became Bill Clinton's pollster, then "advisor" to Hillary for Senate then "chief strategist" for Hillary for President 2008.
I had to read it twice to allow the shock to wear off

"Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all"
http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/388549-stopping-robert-mueller-to-protect-us-all

"The “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start ...."​
 
Manafort is back in the N,Virg court demanding a hearing on the prosecutor’s alleged meeting with AP

As part of his request that a federal judge in Virginia hold a hearing on alleged leaks to the media from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, Paul Manafort is pointing to a meeting that Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann allegedly had with Associated Press reporters in April 2017, before the special counsel was appointed.

Weissmann, then the head of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, met with four AP reporters on April 11, according to the court filing by Manafort Monday evening. A day later, the AP published its bombshell report that $1.2 million in payments listed for Manafort in a notorious black ledger found in Ukraine had made it to his U.S. consulting firm.

“It has been reported that a complaint was made to the Justice Department by the FBI with respect to the meeting with the AP reporters, which suggests that normal procedures were not followed in this case,” Manafort’s court filing said. “The thrust of this motion requests that the Court hold a hearing on these unauthorized government leaks, and if there has been an internal investigation (or investigations) regarding such leaks, or if emails, notes or memoranda exist regarding the same, the Court and the defendant—whose Constitutional rights are actually at issue—are entitled to review the same.”​


https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/manafort-leaks-hearing-weissmann-meeting
 
Seems like the walls are beginning to crumble from the inside

OANN has reported that FBI Agent Joe Pientka, who is one of the people who interviewed General Flynn, plans to testify against Comey and McCabe, adding “It was all Comey.”

There are supposed to be other FBI agents lining up as well
 
Here is an argument that the Mueller appointment violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution written by a law prof at Northwestern

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So let's get this straight. Comey and Obama spied on the Trump campaign in an effort to help Hillary get elected? Then I have a few basic questions:

1. Did they use any "intelligence" to actually, you know, help get HRC elected?
2. Did they hide that they were investigating HRC? No. They came out vociferously with the validation that HRC was being investigated 11 days before the election?
3. Did they announce that they were investigating Trump's team's connections with Russia? They finally came out and said "we're looking into stuff". However, within 30 minutes the "grab them by the *****" tape was released and then, 30 minutes later, Russia released the Podesta emails about the underground child sex ring [not].

I can concur that some of this could smell fishy. However, since they did none of those three things the most reasonable explanation makes the most sense. They were acutely aware of Russia/Trump team collusion (small c) due to foreign intelligence provided to them and various red flags. They took the measures that you would take. They had whistle blowers providing them with information. Some actually theorized at the time that the FBI was in the bag for Trump.

Look at this as compared to how Gore's campaign handled receiving Bush's debate prep book. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-campaigns-hot-potato/?utm_term=.9ae80ce3f17c
 
OUBubba said:
They were acutely aware of Russia/Trump team collusion (small c) due to foreign intelligence provided to them and various red flags.
Click to expand...

Most if not all of which, it turns out, was being funneled by Clinton people to Steel before going into the dossier.

Again... once you assume that collusion was a fact and the feds knew it was going on, all the messy stuff goes away. So just as soon as you actually prove that, I'll be more than happy to accept that hypothesis.

The bad news for you is that Mueller likely won't be able to threaten Trump's family members in order to coerce a confession out of him, like he's done with other parties. And hey, when can we expect that Carter Page indictment?
 
ProdigalHorn said:
Most if not all of which, it turns out, was being funneled by Clinton people to Steel before going into the dossier.
Click to expand...
I think the key information was coming from foreign intelligence agencies who were very concerned. We'll see. I saw the complaint on the twitter today that Mueller's team was too secretive. LOL.
 
OUBubba said:
I think the key information was coming from foreign intelligence agencies who were very concerned. We'll see. I saw the complaint on the twitter today that Mueller's team was too secretive. LOL.
Click to expand...
This guy was anti Clinton. http://observer.com/2018/05/what-did-the-fbi-do-in-2016-about-russian-connections-to-donald-trump/

This is a former CIA operative in Russia. https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/john-sipher

I listened to an extended interview with him and he even spoke about "the dossier". He said the "pee tape" sounded exactly like the kind of blackmail that the Russians he knew would try to trap unwitting people into. He said this after living in Russia for years with the knowledge that EVERYTHING that he did in his home at the time was likely being recorded.
 
Sangre Naranjada said:
Joseph Mifsud.
Click to expand...

Here is a good piece on him
"The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate"
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/26/the_maltese_phantom_of_russiagate_.html

"In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities.

While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy.

In an official report, Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence asserted that “in their approach to Papadopoulos, the Russians used common tradecraft and employed a cut-out,” a “Kremlin-linked…Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud.”

No one in the American intelligence community has publicly challenged this description.

But there is one major problem with this story: No evidence has been presented to support the claim. Although Mifsud has traveled many times to Russia and has contacts with Russian academics, his closest public ties are to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI and British intelligence services. One of Mifsud’s jobs has been to train diplomats, police officers, and intelligence officers at schools in London and Rome, where he lived and worked over the last dozen years.

The house-of-mirrors nature of the claim that Mifsud is a spy is reflected in the guilty plea Papadopoulos signed on Oct. 5, 2017 for making several material false statements to the FBI. It reads, in part: “Defendant PAPADOPOULOS further told the investigating agents that the professor was ‘a nothing’ and ‘just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something.’ In truth and in fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS understood that the professor had substantial connections to Russian government officials (and had met with some of those officials in Moscow immediately prior to telling defendant PAPADOPOULOS about the ‘thousands of emails’) and, over a period of months, defendant PAPADOPOULOS repeatedly sought to use the professor's Russian connections in an effort to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and Russian government officials.

If Mifsud truly is a Russian agent – which is key to the collusion narrative – he could prove to be one of the most promiscuous spies in modern history. Western intelligence agencies and European politicians would have to spend the next few decades repairing the damage he did to global security by infiltrating key institutions and personnel. As of yet, however, there is no indication that any intelligence service has begun the embarrassing, but highly important, assessment of how it was penetrated and how it can re-fortify the vulnerabilities that Mifsud may have exposed. There has been no public effort to arrest him.

While most media accounts have simply repeated official claims that Mifsud is a sketchy character whose visits to Russia and academic contacts suggest he is working for Russian intelligence, a look at the available evidence challenges that narrative. It also raises the possibility that Mifsud, whose circles are tied to the Clintons, may, like another professor recently in the news, Stefan Halper, have actually been working for Western intelligence agencies.

Disappearance

Painting a full picture of Mifsud is difficult because after the 58-year-old professor was first identified by name in a Washington Post article in the weeks following Papadopoulos’ confession, he gave a few interviews to the international press, and then disappeared.
”......"​

Much more at the link
 
Grassley still after the 302s in the Flynn case
FBI/DOJ still want release
In latest letter, Grassley indirectly suggests the possibility the underlying facts in the case do not match the plea

".... "Simply disclosing facts to the committee could not possibly 'interfere' with the case at this late date," Grassley continued, "assuming those facts are consistent with the representations that prosecutors arranged for Lt. General Flynn to swear to in federal court."

That was the little bomb in Grassley's letter: The chairman raised the possibility that the facts of the case — the evidence in the phone conversation transcript and the FBI 302 — might somehow be at odds with the particulars of Flynn's plea. And in case anyone missed the reference, in the next sentence, Grassley wrote: "If the facts are inconsistent with the plea agreement, that would be an entirely different kettle of fish."...."​

Another possibility is that the Chairman already knows someone at the FBI altered/doctored the 302s

Good article, worth the read -- https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...-see-the-michael-flynn-302?platform=hootsuite
 
Bold strategy. Will it work?

"Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein threatened to "subpoena" emails, phone records and other documents from lawmakers and staff on a Republican-led House committee during a tense meeting earlier this year, according to emails reviewed by Fox News documenting the encounter and reflecting what aides described as a "personal attack."

The emails memorialized a January 2018 closed-door meeting involving senior FBI and Justice Department officials as well as members of the House Intelligence Committee. The account claimed Rosenstein threatened to turn the tables on the committee's inquiries regarding the Russia probe.

"The DAG [Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] criticized the Committee for sending our requests in writing and was further critical of the Committee’s request to have DOJ/FBI do the same when responding," the committee's then-senior counsel for counterterrorism Kash Patel wrote to the House Office of General Counsel. "Going so far as to say that if the Committee likes being litigators, then 'we [DOJ] too [are] litigators, and we will subpoena your records and your emails,' referring to HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] and Congress overall."

A second House committee staffer at the meeting backed up Patel's account, writing: "Let me just add that watching the Deputy Attorney General launch a sustained personal attack against a congressional staffer in retaliation for vigorous oversight was astonishing and disheartening. ... Also, having the nation’s #1 (for these matters) law enforcement officer threaten to 'subpoena your calls and emails' was downright chilling."​

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-chilling-clash-over-records-emails-show.html
 
Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz further claimed that he's heard about "threats" from Rosenstein as well, saying “the DOJ’s intimidation and stone-walling tactics have gone too far.”

“I’ve heard first-hand from congressional staff following threats delivered by Rod Rosenstein,” he said in a statement. “Staff has literally been scared to the point of physically shaking in my congressional office out of concern for their family.”

Gaetz went on to say that Rosenstein was “intractably conflicted” and should recuse himself from investigations into the Trump campaign and the behavior of FBI and DOJ officials.

“Now, from refusing to produce documents, to improperly redacting documents, to threatening our staff, it is clear that Rod Rosenstein will use every tool at his disposal to frustrate congressional oversight,” he said.
Click to expand...

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...n-say-staff-shaking-in-fear-over-threats.html
 
Somebody needs to clean house over there
I promise you every single one of us knew well the limitations the Hatch Act put on us. It's something that was discussed with some frequency every election cycle.

 
Joe Fan said:
Somebody needs to clean house over there
I promise you every single one of us knew well the limitations the Hatch Act put on us. It's something that was discussed with some frequency every election cycle.

Click to expand...

Kind of like how Comey swung the election to Trump? The talk before Comey became the patriot was that the FBI was composed of old school conservatives at the core who were trying to keep HRC out of there. So, Comey and Mueller are probably like any good radio talk show guy in a multi team town. If both sides don't think you favor their rival then you're not doing a good job. It's an easy analogy here in OK as the choices are binary.
 
Joe Fan said:
Somebody needs to clean house over there
I promise you every single one of us knew well the limitations the Hatch Act put on us. It's something that was discussed with some frequency every election cycle.

Click to expand...


Everything I have read is that the IG report one big whitewash. We'll see.
 
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