With Attorney General William Barr at the helm, there’s no doubt that he will investigate allegations of wrongdoing concerning whatever Obama’s DOJ was up to during the 2016 election with regards to spying on the Trump campaign. Sorry, sorry—covertly placing the campaign under surveillance whilst also using informants to infiltrate the campaign under false pretense with the goal of collecting information for the FBI (or CIA), but don’t call that spying, right? I could not roll my eyes hard enough at the folks trying to say that this isn’t such an operation. Yeah, looking at you James Comey and FBI Director Chris Wray. Even Obama’s former czar, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said what the Obama administration did fit the dictionary definition of spying. And with The New York Times story about some woman named Azra Turk, if that’s her real name, being sent to oversee the spy operation involving informant Stefan Halper, who tried to infiltrate the campaign, that’s pretty much an admission that Spygate is grounded in reality, not psycho-babble talk—the latter of which was the media’s reaction to all of this. Once again, Donald Trump turned out to be right. Turk was reportedly acting as a "honeypot" towards Trump official George Papadopoulos, who had no issue with the Times piece other than noting that he felt Turk was CIA, not FBI. Ms. Turk also posed as a research assistant and not a government investigator. Why all the leaks now? Well, again, Barr is AG. He’s already looking at whether the Steele Dossier was part of a Russian misinformation campaign. You don’t think he’ll also look into whether this document was used to obtain a spy warrant against an American citizen? You bet. And we have a DOJ inspector general report on alleged FISA abuses that’s about to drop in June. It’s said to be “scorching” towards the Obama administration, so better get ahead of all of this to minimize the impact towards Democrats, right?
John Solomon of The Hill has been closely covering the FBI’s warrant to spy on Carter Page, who briefly served as a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. It’s been alleged that the FBI used the Trump dossier (aka Steele dossier), which was a Democrat-funded opposition research project aimed at finding dirt on Donald Trump using a former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, who used sources within the Kremlin to compile this document. The DNC and the Clinton campaign backed this effort. If anything, going by the liberal media’s rules on the Russian collusion myth, there was Clinton-DNC-Russia collusion, but that’s for another time.
The document is largely unverified. It’s most salacious parts are probably garbage. In fact, the entire document is total trash, especially with the release of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller who investigated Trump-Russia collusion for two years and found zero evidence to back up this Democrat-media complex manufactured claim. I mean a great many of us knew this when after months of these allegations were spewed into the news cycle and no evidence was found, the writing was on the wall. If a conspiracy of this magnitude were true, there would have been mountains of evidence. There was none. There was nothing but a lot of hot air from the liberal media.
So, if unverified, was this used as the main piece of evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant on Page in 2016, who by the way, was never charged with a crime throughout this whole circus. That FISA warrant was then reauthorized three times up until 2017. The DOJ IG Michael Horowitz, an Obama appointee, is asking the FBI why did they cite Steele as a credible source when the dossier was total garbage. Maybe because it wasn’t verified, which we got whiff of when fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe refused to answer whether the bureau had vetted the document. And it’s not like there was no one at the DOJ who raised the issue about the document’s integrity either. Now, he has defended using the dossier for his book tour of course. To make things even shadier, DNC lawyers met with the FBI prior to that FISA warrant being issued against Carter Page. And now, uncovered in the drawers of the State Department, we find that Steele admitted that he wanted to spread the contents of the dossier to impact the 2016 election (via The Hill):
Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written accountof her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.
And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.
Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.
Kavalec’s notes do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). "They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it," Nunes told me. Senate and House Judiciary investigators told me they did not know about them, even though they investigated Steele’s behavior in 2017-18.
Yeah, you can see why Comey and company are nervous. Also, it seems the State Department is going to be dragged into this. The document was not verified.
And now, with Turk being alleged to be CIA, will Obama CIA Director John Brennan be dragged back to the Hill for questions about this overall spygate fiasco? Alas, the deep state has reared its ugly head. We all knew it existed, but this is quite the development. It shows that there was an apparent politically motivated anti-Trump operation being carried out within the DOJ and larger Intelligence Community. And we’re all going to just sit here and think that Obama had no clue what was going on here? Please. The first inklings of the dossier being weaponized were laid out in the text messages between fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, bureau lawyer Lisa Page. Page has since resigned from the FBI.
Page and Strzok exchanged tens of thousands of texts during their affair, most of which were anti-Trump. It embarrassed the FBI and brought legitimate allegations of bias, especially since Strzok was once a top counterintelligence agent who reportedly signed off on the probe that eventually became the Mueller investigation after James Comey was fired in May of 2017. He was also a point person in the Clinton email investigation, where the two lamented that the FBI might be going too hard on Clinton. Oh, and Strzok said that they were going to stop Trump, whatever that means. That one is bad enough, but the one where Strzok mentions an “insurance policy” concerning their meeting with “Andy” (McCabe) is where many thought they were referring to the dossier.
Drip. Drip. Drip. June is coming.
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Editor's Note: Apologies, folks. I meant to say drawers of the State Dept., not the DOJ. My mistake. The post has been updated to reflect the changes.