10 Feb 2018 12:35 pm
In fact, that was quite common in the Clinton administration, letting classified material be handled by criminals, not relatives or trusted, known confidants.Misty » 09 Feb 2018 4:19 pm » wrote:One little mistake?
How about the LITTLE mistake of allowing a man without a security clearance to handle the most highly classified material?
Bill Clinton and Obama both corrupted agencies of government, putting dishonest individuals into key positions of power in the FBI, Justice and intelligence agencies.
Now it's blowing up in their faces.
Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote some time back that he absolutely did not believe the claims made by people like Sean Hannity of gross abuses of power and felonies. As a former prosecutor he had confidence in the system.
He admitted very recently that his confidence in the system was naive; that he was wrong. Hannity and those individuals making the strongest claims were correct.
Grassley-Graham Memo Affirms Nunes Memo — Media Yawns
We need a full-blown investigation of how the FISA court came to grant warrants to spy on Carter Page.
By Andrew C. McCarthy — February 10, 2018
In a word, the Grassley-Graham memo is shocking. Yet, the press barely notices.
Rest assured: If a Republican administration had used unverifiable hearsay from a patently suspect agent of the Republican presidential candidate to gull the FISA court into granting a warrant to spy on an associate of the Democratic nominee’s campaign, it would be covered as the greatest political scandal in a half-century.
Instead, it was the other way around. The Grassley-Graham memo corroborates the claims in the Nunes memo: The Obama Justice Department and FBI used anonymously sourced, Clinton-campaign generated innuendo to convince the FISA court to issue surveillance warrants against Carter Page, and in doing so, they concealed the Clinton campaign’s role. Though the Trump campaign had cut ties with Page shortly before the first warrant was issued in October 2016, the warrant application was based on wild allegations of a corrupt conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Moreover, the warrant meant the FBI could seize not only Page’s forward-going communications but any past emails and texts he may have stored — i.e., his Trump campaign communications.
With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.
What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge — or perhaps as many as four judges — rationalized signing the warrants.
We need full disclosure — the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games....
Grassley and Graham quote directly from the warrant applications: “Based on [Steele’s] previous reporting history with the FBI whereby [Steele] provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes [Steele’s] reporting to be credible.” (Emphasis added.)
I cannot stress enough how irregular this is. It is why there is abundant reason to demand that the judge explain his or her rationale for granting the warrant.
As I outlined at greater length last week (here, in section C), in applying for a warrant, the government must establish the reliability of the informants who witnessed the alleged facts claimed to support a probable-cause finding. Steele was not one of those witnesses. He is not the source of the facts. He is the purveyor of the sources — anonymous Russians, much of whose alleged information is based on hearsay, sometimes multiple steps removed from direct knowledge. Steele has not been in Russia since his cover as a British spy was blown nearly 20 years ago. He has sources, who have sources, who have sources . . . and so on. None of his information is better than third-hand; most of it is more attenuated than that....
Let that sink in, then think about this contrast: No actual FBI agent, no matter how renowned, would be able to get a judicial warrant based solely on his own reliability as an investigator. Jim Comey, despite having a résumé geometrically more impressive than Steele’s, including Senate confirmations to some of federal law-enforcement’s loftiest positions, would not be given a warrant based on representations to the court that the FBI, the Justice Department, the president, and the Senate all attested to his impeccable reliability.
The only reliability that counts is the reliability of the factual informants, not of the investigator who purports to channel the informants. ...
This is not esoterica. In the investigations biz, this is so basic that to call it “Warrants 101” doesn’t do it justice. If you don’t have witnesses with verifiable, first-hand knowledge, you don’t have anything. Without them, to borrow Director Comey’s notorious dictum, no reasonable prosecutor would bring a warrant application to a federal judge, and no reasonable judge would issue a warrant....
The Clinton campaign’s sponsorship was not publicly disclosed until October 2017. Before then, it is virtually certain that, to the extent the FISA court and Congress were told of the “political origins” of the dossier, these were benignly presented as bipartisan concerns about Donald Trump. That is, the Steele dossier phase of Fusion’s anti-Trump project was conflated with the earlier phase, when — as Simpson has testified — Fusion did documentary research on Trump during the Republican primaries for a conservative media outlet. It was not disclosed that, by the time Steele was hired to do the dossier, the project was backed exclusively by the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.
Manifestly, that was a material fact. If a prosecutor withheld an arguably exculpatory fact of this degree of significance, it could get a conviction reversed. As some have observed, a public company would likely face a stock fraud prosecution for concealing a fact so patently material from its required SEC reports.
The Clinton-campaign tie should have been disclosed from the beginning....
I spent many months assuring people that nothing like this could ever happen — that the FBI and Justice Department would not countenance the provision to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations of heinous misconduct. When Trump enthusiasts accused them of rigging the process, I countered that they probably had not even used the Steele dossier. If the Justice Department had used it in writing a FISA warrant application, I insisted that the FBI would independently verify any important facts presented to the court, make any disclosures that ought in fairness be made so the judge could evaluate the credibility of the sources, and compellingly demonstrate probable cause before alleging that an American was a foreign agent.
I was wrong.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... le-dossier