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Trump and Barr go to War with the FBI and CIA
From Fox New interview with Joe diGenova, Former US Attorney for the District of Columbia:
According to Joe, after Trump had earlier requested that the Attorney “get to the bottom” of the Russian Collusion spying on the Trump campaign and other Americans, Attorney General Barr went to Trump on May 23rd and told him ” he couldn’t answer his question” because the FBI under Christopher Wray and CIA under Gina Haspel were not cooperating; essentially stonewalling with his investigation. The FBI and CIA were very strenuously resisting the requests of the AG, and the arguments got “very, very heated”. From Sara Carter, a day hours later:
“President Donald Trump directed the intelligence community Thursday to “quickly and fully cooperate” with Department of Justice Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 presidential election, said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.”
Following Trump’s Declassification order, the mainstream press circled the wagons and started attacking the declassification, with claims like “intelligence officials fear the full distribution of CIA and FBI searches.” yadda, yadda, yadda.
The problem for the Intelligence agencies according to diGenova is ” they can leak, but they do not have subpoena power and Bill Barr does.” The Intelligence community is in “full resistance” mode after the FISA Court under Chief FISA Court Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled on April 16, 2017 that the FBI had engaged in political spying going back to 2012 by allowing 4 unauthorized FBI contractors to illegally access the NSA database and get NSA “702” queries against political opponents. Allegedly, according to diGenova, the FBI and the CIA fear if the full story comes out, their powers will be restricted and people in the FBI and CIA could go to jail.
For clarity’s sake, this issue goes far beyond the fraudulent FISA warrants against Carter Page and others. This issue is about the thousands of “702 queries” into the NSA database against political opponents bt the Obama Administration. That is how Samantha Power was able to unmask 250 opponents of the Obama Administration. The NSA files of those individuals were illegally accessed by the four illegal FBI contractors, information thought to be damning was given to the Administration and Samantha Power then “unmasked” them.
Covering up this NSA “spying” effort is thought by several much more informed than I to be the principal concern for many involved in the Russian Collusion Hoax, including James Comey and Robert Mueller who both oversaw this spying effort by the Obama Administration as Directors of the FBI.
Published in General
I’ve been waiting for this. They need to move fast.
I wonder if that’s what happened to Sharyl Attkisson. It appears that they spied on her computers without a warrent.
I just wonder if Mueller took 22 months to not find any evidence of collusion so as to leave little time for these investigations before Trump’s term runs out. It seems plausible to me though I doubt any concrete evidence will ever emerge to prove such a thing. How can it take that long to determine there is no there there?
And the mid-term election delivered some needed power to Democrats. What we have here is a wakeup call for the American electorate, we’ll see what happens.
I think you missed some wording here. As written, this implies that the Court had engaged in spying. It was Judge Collyer’s report–after being made aware by Admiral Rogers of the FISA-702(17) “about” queries abuse, that revealed the extent of the spying problem. An audit of just six months, between Nov. 1, 2015 and May 1, 2016, showed 85% non-compliance with the process. The report identifies the contractors who engaged in the abuse, but the publicly available version has the names redacted.
Good, if this stuff is true, laws have been broken and people need to go to jail.
The FBI and the CIA are concerned that their powers will be restricted? I was under the impression that they already are.
My bad.
By the way, I think that the audit details should be made public. I would think that it had the names of the people that were “surveilled” by the contractors. I have speculated earlier that Trump, or Trump Campaign’s officials, were not the only ones under the microscope. I have stated my reasons to think that Carson’s campaign was also “surveilled.”
Wasn’t there a problem reported by the media re the San Bernardino catastrophe because the wife had declared her intentions all over her social media (and phone) , yet, the story was that the FBI (or whoever) “weren’t permitted to surveille her Facebook page”?
I don’t know. I’ve been , at times, almost overly trusting of those agencies as a whole, and I have known several very good-apples, but that story seemed weird, and my spidey-sense has been buzzing since the primaries. Do you remember the details of that case,please? et carter
Percival: “I was under the impression that they already are.” Restricted that is.
Right you are, but we live in the “Chevron Decision ” age where Federal Agencies always must be deferred to, and in an age where the Democrats believe there are no more binding restrictions in the Constitution that limit their abusive behavior. The two concepts together allow for almost limitless government abuse.
The good news about the way this is unfolding is that all these agency criminal culprits need to come clean or they can be charged with obstruction, ala Scooty Libby. No need too fully to prove beyond a reasonable doubt of their huge crime-a-doing, which while it would be nice to fully expose of course; all Barr and Friends need to prove is obstruction of which there clearly already was a mountain of.
Unfortunately the American people will not get enraged about this because it will not be reported by the liberal media. Nothing to see here.
“Unfortunately the American people will not get enraged about this because it will not be reported by the liberal media. Nothing to see here.”
You are right until the indictments start to happen, then the fit hits the shan. I am a guessing that there is a raft of agency people plus a bunch in the Obama Administration and even in Congress,including a few important Senators like Shumer, Feinstein and Warner that are sweating bullets now for I believe they knew a lot more than they divulged.
Some might be protected like Obama for official acts during office, but not for obstruction after. They have to come clean or risk Contempt or Obstruction. Kinda hard to plead the Fifth once you are in office regarding actions taken in office. Can be done, but not without a huge price.
At this point it is only speculation that the abuses by the NSA and FBI involved spying on political opponents. It is a question worth finding the answers to but we do not know if it is true yet.
I wonder if the Bulwark will come out against it.
Correct. Little has been established as true. What we have are opinions masquerading as facts. I’m not even sure there’s a bottom Barr et al can actually get too. There’s probably not one coherent narrative. Instead a series of bad actions that are only connected because the bosses were the same.
I think getting Admiral Rogers before a Grand Jury might be the key to answering these questions. He knows who the people are who engaged in acts that he thought were over the line, political or not. Then those people can be called to testify.
Thank you for decrypting this garbled sentence. Good work.
This has been my impression from the moment Trump told Barr to declassify the information. CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on and on, will very likely find some inconsequential faux pas by the President to fill their hours of broadcast and the pages of their broadsheets, respectively.
I find it hard to imagine the paper trail and digital records have not already been deleted. The agencies are playing for time to scrub the peripheries and organize their storytelling.
Percival is right. Boundaries and rules were already in place. This will determine how difficult it is to imprison violators and who is immune.
The apparent typographical error results in a sentence which appears to falsely implicate Judge Collyer in the very wrongdoing which she was instrumental in exposing.
The error has still not been corrected, and this is now a public article.
This is wrong, it is embarrassing to Ricochet, and I urge the editors or the author to address it.
Sundance has an article today,
The “Secret Research Project” – an IRS List, an NSA Database, and Resulting “Files” on Americans…
that digs into some of these details.
Maybe. Though from what I understand the FISA court, the President and everyone in the national security establishment who makes more than a dollar already knows what took place. I suspect the problem we’ve encountered is policies were violated but laws were not broken. To paraphrase David Frey’s version of Nixon’s Watergate testimony, “People who violate policy get fired. People who break the law go to prison.”
Mark, So fixed.
“At this point it is only speculation that the abuses by the NSA and FBI involved spying on political opponents. It is a question worth finding the answers to but we do not know if it is true yet.”
Let’s see. 85% of the 702 searches were found by audit to be illegal. Samantha Power unmasked approximately 250 individuals due to those searches. But I guess that wasn’t political. It must have been for “national security” right?
You are drawing a connection that is not made in the FISA court decision. If we can’t distinguish between what we know to be true and what might be true we are only fooling ourselves.
“You are drawing a connection that is not made in the FISA court decision.”
So? Just because our highly biased and highly politicized judicial system doesn’t rule one way or another does that make it true? Gummy, can’t you reach your own conclusions without a court telling you what is right or not?
If Judge Collyer had covered all the violations would we have had in a better world the Mueller Special Counsel at all? Probably not. Remember the Carter Page FISA Warrant was renewed by the FISA Court several times after Judge Collyer had been informed by NSA Director Rogers that it was based on fraudulent information. How was that possible if the FISA Court was doing it’s job?
Back to the comment.
Point A: The NSA Audit revealed that during the time period audited, 85% of the 702 queries were illegal. Why was that? Is that not true? Give me a reason why 85%, not 1 or 2% were illegal? That is rampant abuse of the system that was not supposed to happen under the watch of FBI Directors Mueller then Comey. What was the reason behind the rampant abuse of the system and why did not the FBI stop it?
Point B: Samantha Power “unmasked” 250 American citizens for political reasons which was illegal in and of itself, from information gleaned from 702 queries, which we now learn were 85% illegal. Why was Samantha Power allowed to abuse that information? Why did not the FBI stop her? Why hasn’t the FBI come clean on these abuses before now? Why does it take an investigation that the FBI is strongly resisting to uncover these truths? These queries were performed by four outside independent FBI “contractors”, of which two were suspected to be Fusion GPS who put together initial work on the Steele Dossier and Crowdstrike who reviewed the supposedly “hacked” DNC computers. Why were outside contractors allowed to access data on American citizens?
Point C: Previous to the 702 query abuse, the FBI under Mueller illegally asked for and received information on millions of American Taxpayers from the IRS that was used to target conservative groups, many of which were related to the Tea Party. Gee Gumby, almost immediately after the IRS targeting scam was shut down by Congress, the NSA 702 queries fiasco starts. Is that just a coincidence?
Now sure, it would be nice if our government was more transparent and revealed all this damning information to the public, but going back to the original point of the post, both the FBI and CIA are now fighting like crazy to withhold from the American Public what went on, which kinda destroys your point. Why would anyone with a brain wait until our ‘official, authorized government agency “” draws connections” officially as you put it before believing it one way or another when we know for a fact that the agency in question is withholding information illegally and resisting divulging that information?
If 85% of the search queries were deemed ‘illegal’, then it does make sense that one should examine why. Some number may have been simply ‘mistakes’, probably small. Then that leaves the ‘illegitimate’ remainder and it leads me, at least, to think a most likely reason would be something political. What other reasons can be thought of? Sincere question.
I think that both @gumbymark and @unsk are right. We do not know for sure what names were in the audit cited in the Judge Collyer’s report; they may have been members of the Tea Party or Republican campaigns’ officials, or there may have been no names at all. The report in the version available to the public is not the proof of illegal political spying; it is, however, another piece that needs to be un-redacted to know what has exactly had been done. Taken with all the other available information, it does confirm a pattern of illegal behavior.
BTW, I am less than impressed by what we publicly know about the Court reaction to the likely FISA warrant abuse. Judge Collyer seems to be just one judge that did something right. Her silence since the report is puzzling though. If someone tried to abuse the system that I am supposed to uphold, I would have been mad as hell. Let’s do not forget another curious name in this whole sordid affair: Judge Rudolph Contreras, one of three FISA judges in D.C. He who recused himself, or was recused, from handling General Flynn case, a friend of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. He may be a stellar character, but something strange is going on in there.
The Power unmasking requests were made after the 702 database abuses were stopped by Adm Rogers so aren’t connected.
Millions of communications are intercepted by NSA so there are many Americans picked up indirectly. We simply don’t know yet who the ones improperly searched for are.
I agree both questions need to be answered. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a long Ricochet post with a list of questions that need answering and it included both the 702 database and the Power unmasking.
Speculation and suspicion under these circumstances is appropriate but I’m just trying to draw a distinction between that and the things we know. Otherwise we’re just MSNBC or Gateway Pundit.
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but is it possible that some of those 250 were genuine security risks having nothing to do with being political opponents?