Critical – Critical – Critical

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the ongoing FISA abuse investigation; the use of Michael Sussmann to act as a go-between for the DNC and FBI; the status of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and his upcoming (10/11) testimony; current visible activity within the DOJ that points to their ongoing corruption; and how all of that relates to the Robert Mueller investigation.

This is a very important interview segment because it dovetails with the much larger issue CTH outlined about: “How Deep Is This Swamp“?  Believe me, you’re going to want to watch this several times to absorb the bigger-big picture that Nunes is careful to explain.

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Working backwards from the interview content is perhaps the best way to discuss.  Nunes cannot say it out loud, but when he outlines what the Mueller investigation *is not* doing, he is highlighting the purpose of Special Counsel placement.

Robert Mueller (the entire team) was put into place, carefully selected by James Baker and Andrew McCabe, specifically to cover for the DOJ and FBI activity that preceded the firing of James Comey.   Mueller’s role has two essential aspects:

♦(1) Create an investigation – Just by creating the investigation it is then used as a shield by any corrupt FBI/DOJ official who would find himself/herself under downstream congressional investigation.  Former officials being deposed/questioned by IG Horowitz or Congress could then say they are unable to answer those questions due to the ongoing special counsel investigation.  In this way Mueller provides cover.

♦(2)  Use the investigation to keep any and all inquiry focused away from the corrupt DOJ and FBI activity that took place in 2016, 2016, 2017.  Keep the media narrative looking somewhere, anywhere, other than directly at the epicenter of the issues.

In both of these objectives the Mueller special counsel has been stunningly effective.

That leads to the second aspect of Nunes discussion, the role of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.  All of the visible activity being conducted by Rosenstein has been an intentional effort to keep as much of the evidence hidden from public review.  When Nunes points out that Rosenstein’s motives are to keep the documentary evidence classified he is speaking directly to this aspect.

But the current corrupt DOJ activity is not isolated to FISA abuse and documents the usurping officials want to keep hidden.  The corrupt activity also flows outward and can be found in the DOJ behavior surrounding James Wolfe; the busted Senate Intelligence Security Official who was caught leaking the classified FISA application to the media.

The reason Wolfe was not indicted for the more serious charges of leaking classified intelligence is because the *CURRENT* DOJ needs to hide what was taking place.  Wolfe is simply a benefactor of current DOJ officials who need to hide their fingerprints and activity in 2016 and 2017.

Those currently corrupt DOJ and FBI officials are not protecting Wolfe as much as they are protecting themselves.  This includes Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Deputy FBI Director David Bowditch and current FBI general counsel Dana Boente; as well as all the second level and third level carry-over career officials.  The failure to accept this currently corrupt DOJ and FBI is where most of the “Stealth Jeff” and “Q” believers are entirely wrong.

The efforts of Rosenstein, Wray, Bowditch, Boente et al, to cover-up the institutional corruption extends far beyond their blocking activity of the declassification requests; and shows up in the lack of substance behind the Wolfe indictment and the ability of the external Lawfare group, former officials, to influence current activity.

Part of that current influence is keeping the most severe elements of investigative sunlight away from review.  These officials have done this in many visible ways.  Three of them are inarguable:

(1) By redacting innocuous, albeit highly damaging information, within the Lisa Page and Peter Strzok text messages and emails.  Officials within the agencies are hiding information and even eliminating the most damaging material.

(2) By controlling what records IG Horowitz has access to; in addition to who he is interviewing. The IG is only as effective as the material he has to review.

(3) By shaping the executive summaries of the two previous IG reports to ensure the specific material within the report is diluted as much as possible in the summary and conclusions.

The collaborative efforts of the current group of corrupt officials is also evident in the hit job against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  Those corrupt former DOJ/FBI officials (Bromwich, McLean, Laufman, etc.), who are part of the Blasey-Ford construct, were clearly working with a set of current officials. [This collaborative interest extends to people within government (the legislative branch) and those outside government (media allies).]

The appearance of former DOJ lawyer Michael Sussmann working with Perkins Coie and on behalf of the DNC, to feed information to former FBI legal counsel James Baker, only highlights this systemic collaboration and corruption within the DOJ and FBI.   That corruption has not been addressed; it is currently being protected from sunlight.

AG Jeff Sessions is recused; he is useless.  As a specific outcome, Rod Rosenstein, Christopher Wray, David Bowditch, Dana Boente, Robert Mueller and the affiliated network of political operatives within the DOJ and FBI held free reign to shape everything in the past two years.

This is the current state of the challenge; refusing to accept it doesn’t make anything improve.

On March 28th, 2018, the DOJ Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz formerly announced an additional investigation of how the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in matters relating to the FISA Title-1 application filed against U.S. person Carter Page.  However, one part of the OIG notification was generously overlooked by a defensive and IC compliant media:

As part of this examination, the OIG also will review information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source. Additionally, the OIG will review the DOJ’s and FBI’s relationship and communications with the alleged source as they relate to the FISC applications.  (pdf link)

Two months later on Monday May 21st, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein added a significant DOJ mandate to the Inspector General review.  Rosenstein expanded the original FISA review to include looking at whether officials within the intelligence community may have unlawfully used human intelligence assets to “spy” or “surveil” the Trump campaign:

“The Department has asked the Inspector General to expand the ongoing review of the FISA application process to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation of persons suspected of involvement with the Russian agents who interfered in the 2016 presidential election.” (link)

The IG process for the FISA report is structural.  Once the interviews and investigation is complete the “IG referencer” phase takes several weeks.  The referencer could be a person or a group of people depending on the size of the report.

The referencer has the responsibility for going through every statement of fact and providing the citation or footnote for the assertion. The person(s) doing the reference review has/have the most arduous of tasks.

The referencer checks every sentence, every assertion, and ensures only provable facts with citations are part of the report. Every assertion of fact must be cited (or footnoted) to include the investigative material that proves the fact.  After the footnotes, citations and all fact assemblies are reconciled a draft report is written. The Draft Report encompasses the findings.

The Draft Report is then sent to the principals to review.  The Draft Report review allows the principals to provide input on the facts identified and outlined within the draft.  This part of the process takes at least two weeks.  Responses from the principals about the facts outlined in the draft report are then reviewed, cleared for addition if appropriate, and included in the final report.  Then the final report goes to print.

The election is 30 days away from today.  There is almost no way the IG report on FISA abuse and “spygate” will be completed prior to the mid-term election.

John Solomon writing for The Hill, presents an important article highlighting the current corruption within the DOJ and FBI that began under the Obama administration (Lynch/Comey) and continues today within the Trump administration (Sessions/Wray).

After breaking the story that in 2016 DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann was providing information to former FBI General Counsel James Baker for exploitative use against the Trump campaign, Solomon goes back to the HPSCI report on Russian Active Measures in the 2016 election [pdf here] and connects the Sussmann/Baker dots to an FBI redaction in the HPSCI report.

What Solomon shows is how the redaction, made by current DOJ/FBI officials under the ruse of national security, was nothing more than a current year effort to protect the activity and interests of the former politically motivated DOJ and FBI officials.

(Via The Hill) […] It was the same DNC, along with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, that funded the unverified, salacious dossier by a British intel operative, Christopher Steele, that became a central piece of evidence used to justify the FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign in the final days of the election.

And it was the same law firm that made the payments for the dossier research so those could be disguised in campaign spending reports to avoid the disclosure of the actual beneficiaries of the research, which were Clinton and the DNC.

And it was, in turns out, the same meeting that was so heavily censored by the intel agencies from Footnote 43 in the House report — treated, in other words, as some big national security secret.

What makes this so extraordinary is that the FBI and the DOJ would have Americans believe that a contact with a lawyer for a political party during the middle of the election is somehow a matter of national security that should be hidden from the public.

Well, that argument was proven to be a lie by the very way the interview with Baker played out last Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Baker was not interviewed in a “SCIF” — a “sensitive compartmented information facility” routinely used to discuss super-secret, highly sensitive information. There was no claim of classification over any information he provided Congress that day.  (read more)

The big picture behind this specific point of irrefutable evidence is that current DOJ and FBI officials are redacting information to protect former DOJ and FBI officials.  This is the essential point CTH has been pointing out in recent days, weeks and months.

Current officials within the DOJ (Sessions/Rosenstein), and current FBI (Wray/Bowditch/Boente), are protecting Obama administration officials and manipulating, redacting, hiding and controlling evidence to block full public review of prior events.

Solomon goes on to connect the redactions within the Page/Strzok messages to the issue of redacting the name and contact of Michael Sussmann within the HPSCI report.  None of it has anything to do with national security; all of it is directly related to hiding the corrupt behavior that took place in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

These examples highlight the ongoing problem and specifically cast sunlight upon Trump administration officials who are continuing the institutional corruption.

There is no reason for current FBI Director Christopher Wray to continue these efforts to hide information except for his intentional decisions to participate in covering up the historic abuse.  The only other option is that he is completely clueless about the activity of the officials under his authority and is blind to their ongoing efforts under his nose.  Neither of those two possibilities is good.

As Solomon ends his discovery article:

The Founding Fathers intended government to be open and transparent except when national security was at risk. They never intended national security to be used to hide old-fashioned politics.

So, Mr. President, when you weigh those DOJ/FBI arguments against declassification, please don’t forget the ruse of the redaction that was Footnote 43.  (link)

So how did we get here?

Start with how Rod Rosenstein was hired:

03:15 “[Rosenstein] was hired by Jeff Sessions. I was not involved in that process because, you know, they go out and they get their own deputies, and the people that work in that department and Jeff Sessions hired him.”

~ President Donald Trump

I post this recent interview with President Trump because so many people keep claiming some complex strategy surrounding President Trump hiring/nominating Rosenstein etc.

President Trump brought the CEO perspective to the White House. Part of that perspective is to let Department Executive Officers (ie. cabinet members) select their own deputies. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanted Rod Rosenstein as Deputy AG. That’s why President Trump nominated Rosenstein. Nothing more. Not strategic Machiavellian deep state chess nonsense. Sessions wanted him, so Trump nominated him.

This is not difficult to ascertain. It is not complex. It is quite simple.

So the question becomes why did President Trump select Jeff Sessions as Attorney General?

Again, not a difficult question to answer. President Trump has repeatedly said why he selected Jeff Sessions. (His biggest mistake).

(SOURCE)

Senator Jeff Sessions told President-elect Trump he wanted to be the Attorney General. Senator Sessions lobbied P-E Trump for the job. Trump gave Sessions the position out of appreciation for his campaign support.

There wasn’t a political strategy behind selecting Senator Jeff Sessions, other than thinking he would likely do a good job. President-elect Trump did not know Sessions was going to recuse himself from the biggest drain on his term in office, and create two-years of DOJ chaos.

Senator Jeff Sessions wanted to be the U.S. Attorney General, President-elect Trump gave the position to him. AG Jeff Sessions wanted Rod Rosenstein as his Deputy AG; President Trump gave Rosenstein to him.

These are not complex multidimensional strategic decisions. These are straightforward reasons for what transpired. Not complex. That’s why we are here, where it all stands today.

DAG Rosenstein then hired former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. In part due to the recommendation of FBI Legal Counsel Jim Baker and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

All current DOJ and FBI officials need to be removed and replaced because evidence clearly shows they are participating in the cover-up; either directly, or through acts of willful blindness.

FUBAR.