PrairiePundit

NY Post Editorial: Democrats — and their puppets in the media — are pooh-poohing news that anti-Trump ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to lying in Robert Mueller’s Russiagate probe. They want you to believe it was all “an innocent mistake.” Don’t buy it. This is an outrageous case of official abuse. Clinesmith, for starters, was not a bit player in Crossfire Hurricane — nor was he innocent. He changed an e-mail to delete the fact that Trump aide Carter Page had provided information to the CIA. His clear goal was to make Page’s interactions with foreigners look more suspicious — as if he was trying to hide information, rather than feeding intelligence to the United States. Clinesmith’s ultimate goal: further a dubious investigation of President Trump, whom he despised. If the roles were reversed and a pro-Trump lawyer lied to hide info and promote an unwarranted investigation, Democrats would be screaming bloody murder. Clinesmith also worked with another dis...

Margot Cleveland: 7 Devastating Revelations About Crossfire Hurricane In New Releases To a new Senate website, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s staff uploaded the four Carter Page FISA applications, which were recently further declassified. ... However, Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse later confirmed that, yes, “the FBI gathered substantial evidence of Page’s past electronic communications,” including multiple “emails between Page and members of the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign concerning campaign related matters.” The recent declassifications of the FISA applications now expose a further reality: The FBI didn’t just seek access to past electronic communications with campaign members, the FBI believed Page would continue to communicate with the Trump campaign and sought the FISA court order to intercept those conversations. While Page had announced he was “taking a leave of absence from his work with the campaign,” the first FISA application read, ...

PJ Media: In a Friday night, holiday weekend document dump, we're now learning that before the Mueller investigation began, the FBI knew that at least part of the ridiculous so-called Steele dossier was based upon planted Russian disinformation. Worse, according to Senator Ron Johnson in a Wall Street Journal op-ed released Friday night, the FBI continually lied about the provenance of the fake dossier information and only showed the FISA court and inspector general damning information about President Trump's election team. Exculpatory information was left out. Catherine Herridge ✔ @CBS_Herridge # FISA READ footnote 350 FBI effort to verify Steele Dossier “The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and ASSESSED that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations” 3,849 2:36 PM - Apr 10, 2020 Twitter Ads info a...

Washington Examiner: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court demanded answers about whether FISA applications were invalid after a new Justice Department inspector general report found pervasive issues with the FBI not following fact-checking procedures. Friday's ruling came days after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a memo showing FISA flaws were not just limited to the surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page. The findings of Horowitz’s audit released on Tuesday focused on the FBI’s requirement to maintain an accuracy subfile known as a “Woods file." Investigators found serious problems in each of the 29 FISA applications they examined. “We believe that a deficiency in the FBI’s efforts to support the factual statements in FISA applications through its Woods Procedures undermines the FBI’s ability to achieve its ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz concluded. The FISA court was harsher. “It would be an ...

David Harsanyi: The FISA Scandal Is about Corruption, Not ‘Sloppiness’ To consistently do something that is wrong usually involves intent and cannot be assigned to inadvertence.

Washington Post: Problems with FBI surveillance extended far beyond probe of Trump campaign, inspector general says The Justice Department inspector general has issued a new memorandum alerting officials of widespread problems in FISA applications. Will someone in the FBI ever be held accountable for these abuses?  The record of prosecution of illegal conduct by agents and others working for the DOJ is that such prosecutions are at best rare.  The agents who engage in criminal activity are rarely publicly punished. More on the problem here .

John Solomon: For much of the last three years, key law enforcement leaders have insisted they did nothing wrong in pursuing counterintelligence surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign starting during the 2016 election. And, they've added, if mistakes were made, they were unintentional process errors downstream from them and not an effort to deceive the judges. But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg , the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials. In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. "There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications," Boasberg wrote. The no-fault mantra has been spread by everyone from President Trump...

Power Line: I had reached  part 4  in my series  We now know: FISA court must go”  when events permitted a break. Today I return on the occasion of the March 4 Opinion and Order entered by FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg (embedded below). Under the terms of the order, as Catherine Herridge and Mellissa Quinn report in their CBS News story,  “Surveillance court judge bars some DOJ and FBI officials from warrant process.”  Here is the opening of their story: A federal judge on the government’s secretive surveillance court said Justice Department and FBI personnel who are under scrutiny for their conduct in a case involving a former Trump campaign aide are barred from participating in the surveillance warrant application process. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), issued an order Wednesday setting out an additional framework for the Justice Department and FBI to follow in...

Washington Examiner: A ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Wednesday mistakenly said Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm which hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele in 2016, was looking for dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rather than on then-candidate Donald Trump. The court fixed the glaring error only after the Washington Examiner brought it to its attention. Judge James Boasberg, the court’s presiding judge, cited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page in a Wednesday opinion and, in the midst of pointing out the multitude of flaws, omissions, and factual errors in the electronic surveillance filings uncovered by the Justice Department’s watchdog, he made a mistake himself. “Although from the outset the applications acknowledged the likely political bias of the person who had hired Steele … information that confirmed the political origins of the Steele reporting w...

NY Times: Trump Meets With Key Republicans Amid Stalemate Over Surveillance Laws The legal authority for some F.B.I. surveillance tools expires next week, and law enforcement officials and lawmakers are divided. After the revelations of the FISA abuses which targeted his campaign, Trump should insist on changes to avoid that happening again.  The decision to pursue FISA warrants should not be based on some officials' paranoia about a candidate.  It also should not be based on faulty opposition research by an opposing candidate's campaign. For those looking for reauthorization, they would be better served if they were prosecuting those responsible for the FISA abuses.  It is more than passing strange that people like Papadopoulos were targetted and his with a process crime over basically nothing and those who abused the process to spy on Carter Page and thus the Trump campaign have not been brought to justice.

Sharyl Attkisson: Was President Trump spied on as part of Carter Page wiretapping? I suspect that he was.  There is some indication that the then director of the NSA warned Trump about the spying shortly after he was elected. There is also the fact that Carter Page communications showed no illegal contact with the Russians, but were just an excuse to use the "one hop and two hop" rule to spy on any contacts he had with the Trump campaign.  That was the whole purpose of the FISA warrant.  It was an excuse to peek under the skirt of the Trump campaign.

Federalist: Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, a ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, criticized Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York Thursday for canceling this week’s hearing on reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and charged Democrats with refusing to “acknowledge the problems” with the Watergate-era law. The Judiciary Committee was slated to consider a FISA reauthorization bill crafted by Nadler’s staff along with Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s plans for a full-chamber vote by the March 15 deadline, when certain provisions of the act are set to expire. A recent report from the Justice Department inspector general unearthed “at least 17” glaring omissions from FISA warrant applications in the FBI’s deep-state “Crossfire Hurricane” operation, complicating the 1978 law’s reauthorization efforts as Republicans call for broader constraints of government surveillance. On Wednesday, Nadler postponed the Judiciary Committee’s hearing...

PJ Media: Investigative reporter Sara Carter, whose stories have exposed some of the early efforts to undermine Donald Trump, said that unless the investigation of prosecutor John Durham into the origins of the Russian investigation brings indictments, it will open the door to "future coups." Carter appeared with Sean Hannity to discuss some of Attorney General William Barr's new rules regarding government surveillance of political campaigns. Fox News: "The important thing to remember here is that even though Attorney General William Barr is going to have all of these new rules in place in an effort to avoid this happening in the future, I talked to sources today: Former senior FBI officials that say if there aren't indictments -- if people don't actually pay the price for what happened here -- which was an attempted coup, basically, on the president of the United States, and also just destroying the civil liberties of an American citizen, Carter Page, the...

Mollie @MZHemingway Devin Nunes is an *actual* profile in courage. This man took on nearly everyone in DC, including many powerful people in his own party, to fight to bring Americans the truth about the Russia collusion hoax and FISA abuse. Completely vindicated and our media LOATHE him for it. Quote Tweet Svetlana @RealSLokhova · Feb 6 . @DevinNunes “was the first guy. He came out of nowhere. He was saying, these people are corrupt. He’s still saying it. He was unbelievable. He would come in and say -I didn’t even know him. I heard there was this congressman who kept going into a basement Show this thread Watch again 509.5K views 1:40 / 1:40 8:15 AM · Feb 7, 2020 · Twitter Web App 12.8K Retweets 37.7K Likes He deserves a Medal of Freedom for his work in exposing the illegal spying on teh Trump ...