How The CIA Used The Media to Ensnare Michael Flynn


A GUEST CONTRIBUTION: Authored By Jack Cashill

If Vladimir Putin was willing to help President Barack Obama seal the misbegotten Iranian nuclear deal, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),was not. His resistance made him a target, especially once he started advising candidate Donald Trump. As to who launched the disinformation campaign against Flynn, the jury is still out. Best evidence, however, suggests forces within the CIA working in tandem with its friends in the media.

The co-conspirators started publicly setting the trap with a February 2016 Reuters article teasingly titled, “Trump being advised by ex-U.S. Lieutenant General who favors closer Russia ties.” https://reut.rs/2EwzoEL This was a bold gambit. As recently as July 2015 Obama was telling Tom Friedman of the New York Times, “We would have not achieved this [Iran nuclear] agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.” https://nyti.ms/3jaDTnz 

Obama praised Putin a year after Putin annexed the Crimea. That invasion was so much water under the bridge for Obama but apparently not for Flynn. Just months later, it was considered newsworthy that Flynn would advise Trump to “work more closely with Russia to resolve global security issues.”

“Flynn raised eyebrows among some U.S. foreign policy veterans,” wrote Steve Holland and Mark Hosenball of Reuters, “when he was pictured sitting at the head table with Putin at a banquet in Moscow late last year celebrating Russia Today, an international broadcasting network funded by the Russian government.” The reporters’ “three sources,” all said to be “former foreign policy officials,” failed to mention that Flynn had been briefed by the DIA before the dinner and debriefed afterwards.

What made me suspicious about this article was the Mark Hosenball byline. Hosenball appears to have been carrying water for the intelligence community (IC) for at least twenty years, maybe twice that long. To say the least, he has a curious background.

Hosenball moved to England when he was 17 to attend school. After spending a year in England and three in Ireland, he moved back to England to become a reporter. This information comes from a 1977 British appeals court document explaining why the United Kingdom chose to deport the 25-year-old Hosenball “in the interests of national security.”

“The Secretary of State believes that Mr. Hosenball is a danger to this country. So much so that his presence here is unwelcome and he can no longer be permitted to stay,” reads the document. Reportedly, Hosenball was one of a group of people who were “trying to obtain information of a very sensitive character about our security arrangements.” The document does not identify on whose behalf Hosenball was allegedly spying, but it affirms the government’s decision to deport him nonetheless.

The American intelligence community did not appear troubled by Hosenball’s actions. As the New York Times reported at the time, “A United States Embassy spokesman said that he knew of no United States pressure on Britain to discipline Mr. Hosenball.” https://nyti.ms/3jeLgdO Nor did the deportation seem to hurt Hosenball’s career. By 1993, he was working for Newsweek. By 1997, he was using Newsweek to spread CIA disinformation.

In 2003, I met Hosenball at the Newsweek office. At the time, I was promoting First Strike, a book I co-authored with James Sanders on TWA Flight 800, the 747 that mysteriously exploded off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996.

In that pivotal election year, surely with a nod from the Clinton White House, the CIA quietly masterminded the disinformation campaign that followed TWA 800’s destruction. After sixteen months of behind-the-scenes chicanery, the CIA assured America that what the eyewitnesses actually saw was not a missile streaking toward the 747, but the fuselage of the burning, climbing 747 rocketing upwards some three-thousand-plus feet after its fuel tank had blown up spontaneously. As would happen again in 2016, the FBI publicly fronted for the CIA. In a presidential election year, the media, of course, played along.

At the time, no reporter endorsed the CIA’s fraudulent scenario more enthusiastically than did Hosenball. His Newsweek article on the subject began with a dig at “conspiracy theories” and went nowhere positive from there. https://bit.ly/3lk50OM CIA analysts had convinced Hosenball that “infrared images captured by spy satellites” proved its theory of the plane’s demise. This revelation came as news to the FBI. Its comprehensive summary issued just a week before Hosenball’s November 1997 article did not once mention the word “satellite.”

The NTSB’s final report made only vague mention of “infrared sensor information from a U.S. satellite” and that in reference to the CIA’s video recreation. The New York Times avoided the subject altogether. Yet here was Hosenball saying that the CIA had “spy satellites designed to monitor unfriendly foreign countries pointed at the Eastern Seaboard.”

This was bunk. If the satellites showed what Hosenball claimed, federal officials would not have needed the CIA’s trumped up zoom climb animation. Surely, too, the FBI and NTSB would have used the data to buttress their shaky, inconclusive summaries. In a letter to then congressman John Kasich two months after the press conference, the CIA quietly buried the subject: “No satellite imagery of the disaster exists.” This translates, “No satellite imagery exists that would help us make our case.”

Hosenball uncritically embraced the CIA video. Under his byline, Newsweek ran a fully affirmative, nine-frame, full-color recreation captioned with the unlikely boast, “CIA Photos.” For Hosenball, the video provided a necessary rebuttal to “speculation about a mystery missile.” As he told the story, “some” of the “244” FBI witnesses claimed to have seen a streak of light arcing across the sky. In reality, 258 of the 736 official FBI witnesses claimed to have seen a missile or missiles attacking the plane, several of whom were pilots.

Had Hosenball been sporting a CIA nametag he could not have done more to legitimize the agency’s crude rewrite of history. As it happens, his Newsweek writing partner at the time was Michael Isikoff. I met with both of them. Neither had any interest in seeing the information Sanders and I had gathered.

Oh, yes, that was the same Michael Isikoff who in September 2016 first revealed that intelligence officials were investigating Trump adviser Carter Page’s “private communications with senior Russian officials.” Christopher Steele was Isikoff’s direct source. A few weeks after the article’s publication in Yahoo News, the DOJ and the FBI packaged the Isikoff article along with the Steele dossier in their application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), specifically to monitor Carter Page.

Renegade Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi was the only journalist on his side of the barricades to say what should have been obvious to everyone in the media: “Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump.”

To check out Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama, or his previous book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-up, The Conspiracy, please see cashill.com.

Igor Danchenko and a 34 Month Long DOJ/FBI Cover-Up Operation….


CTH friend, researcher and producer John Spiropoulos helps connect the dots within the operation to cover-up corrupt activity by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Christopher Wray, Dana Boente and the entire special counsel group.

In this video John walks us through the internal evidence showing how the FBI intentionally hid the statements by Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source Igor Danchenko.  The result…. a 34 month cover-up operation.

.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham released the declassified documents on July 17th. [Thank You John Ratcliffe] The documents relate to how the intelligence apparatus conducted surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign in 2016; and ultimately the Trump administration after the inauguration.

 

The first document [Direct pdf here] is the Washington Field Office (WFO) FBI briefing summary of a three day interview with Chris Steele’s primary sub-source. The document is highly redacted, but we already know from the IG release what the total content of the briefing revealed. The first interview was conducted on January 12, 2017, during the transition period between administrations. The classification term “SIA” stands for Source Identifying Attribute.

Per Senator Lindsey Graham:

♦ This document not only demonstrates how unsubstantiated and unreliable the Steele dossier was, it shows that the FBI was on notice of the dossier’s credibility problems and sought two more FISA application renewals after gaining this awareness.

♦ The document reveals that the primary “source” of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele’s primary source provided him was second and third-hand information and rumor at best.

♦ Critically, the document shows that Steele’s “Primary Sub-source” disagreed with and was surprised by how information he gave Steele was then conveyed by Steele in the Steele dossier. For instance, the “Primary Sub-source”: did not recall or did not know where some of the information attributed to him or his sources came from; was never told about or never mentioned to Steele certain information attributed to him or his sources; he said that Steele re-characterized some of the information to make it more substantiated and less attenuated than it really was; that he would have described his sources differently; and, that Steele implied direct access to information where the access to information was indirect.

In total, this document demonstrates that information from the Steele dossier, which “played a central and essential role” in the FISA warrants on Carter Page, should never have been presented to the FISA court. (Senate Link)

Here’s the FBI Briefing Summary: [Direct pdf Link]

.

The inspector general already reviewed this briefing material and explained the content in the IG report on FISA Abuse in December 2019. Here’s the nub of that full review:

The aspect of the primary sub-source deconstructing and undermining the underlying material within the Steele Dossier is critical because ultimately the dossier underpinned the FISA application.

When you recognize the FISA application itself was based on a fraudulent premise; and you recognize the intentional ignoring of the underlying evidence; then the motive behind the FISA becomes clear. The FISA against Carter Page was used as a justification for surveillance of Donald Trump that had been ongoing by Obama intelligence officials.

This context becomes stunningly more important when you look at how the FISA was used by the Mueller investigation to continue its weaponization throughout 2017 and even into 2018. Remember, in July of 2018 long after the source material was debunked, the special counsel office was still telling the FISA court the predication for the FISA application and renewals was valid.

Drive this point home.

This is a key to understanding the scope of how weaponized the Mueller team was.

In July of 2018 the special counsel resistance group was lying to the FISA court in order to protect the cornerstone document that permitted them to weaponize the intelligence apparatus.

This letter was written July 12, 2018. It is NOT accidental that only a week later, July 21st, the special counsel released the FISA application under the guise of FOIA fulfillment.

Aside from the date the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The Mueller team running the DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application. The resistance unit running the DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

On page #8 [Source Document Here] when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, the special counsel group notes the FBI found him to be truthful and cooperative.

This is an incredibly misleading statement to the FISA court because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier the sub-source, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk.

By July 2018 the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?

It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive.

In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

This letter justifying the application and claiming the current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant…. My research suspicion is that the DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA authority. That’s the motive.

In July 2018 if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.

If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.

♦ The FISA was also released in July 2018 in order to retain the false premise behind it. The copy that was released by the special counsel, through Rod Rosenstein, contained redacted dates because the special counsel needed to hide the fact the FBI (Washington Field Office) had actually used the FISA to catch a leaker of classified intelligence, James Wolfe.

Again, Wolfe’s story is the fulcrum…. tell that story and the House of Cards collapses like the Potemkin village it is. {GO DEEP}

The resistance lawyers in the Mueller team released the same initial FISA application (and first renewal) used to catch Wolfe; they had to release that specific March 17, 2017, copy. However, they had to redact the dates on the document they released because the dates were changed by SSA Brian Dugan to catch Wolfe.

The March 17, 2017, copy of the FISA, an FBI investigative equity, went into Main Justice with the leak trap visible. When the special counsel released the FISA application to Rosenstein for public FOIA fulfillment they had to redact the dates or people would ask questions about why this specific version had different dates than the original.

The March 17, 2017, copy of the FISA application is the only one to date that has been in the public sphere; including reviewed by OIG Michael Horowitz. That’s why when Horowitz originally released his FISA report, the OIG kept the dates redacted and only revealed them after the irrelevance of classification was pointed out.

The March 17th Wolfe copy of the first half of the full FISA application (original and first renewal), is the only copy that has ever been made public. If we were to ever see the modified and unredacted copy the FBI gave to Wolfe, the dates would not match with the actual dates of the application(s). The dates were used as part of the leak trace.

The Mueller team knew the explosive nature of the FBI investigation to catch the SSCI leaker. The Mueller team, with full control over Main Justice, was the group that buried FBI Supervisor Special Agent Brian Dugan’s explosive investigative findings.

Expose the conduct of this group and everything about the insurance policy falls into place:

Lou Dobbs Interviews Sidney Powell on Today’s Oral Arguments….


Sidney Powell did an excellent job today representing the interests of her client Michael Flynn at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  Every client should be so fortunate. Following the hearing, Ms. Powell appears with Lou Dobbs to discuss the overall issues.

The Great Lou Dobbs represents the voices of millions in this interview as he shares his own perspective of outrage at the ongoing case.  Terrific interview:

 

Full Audio – Oral Arguments in U.S. DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Petition For Writ of Mandamus…


Today the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held a full panel hearing to decide the outcome of the unopposed DOJ and defense motion to drop the case against Michael Flynn.

Panel Judges include Judge Srinivasan, Judge Henderson, Judge Rogers, Judge Tatel, Judge Garland, Judge Griffith, Judge Millett, Judge Pillard, Judge Wilkins and Judge Rao.

The arguments spanned approximately four hours. Margot Cleveland has a solid breakdown of the arguments – SEE HERE – Full audio below:

 

Simple Questions With Massive Ramifications….


If you ever read the indictment of SSCI Security Director James Wolfe [pdf HERE] you would notice how FBI Washington Field Office Supervisory Special Agent Brian Dugan conducted his leak investigation that ultimately led to James Wolfe.

As SSA Dugan explains his investigative process, he goes to great lengths to describe how he went to the FISA court to pick up a copy of the Carter Page FISA application on March 17, 2017.  Agent Dugan then takes it to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where he gave it to SSCI Security Director James Wolfe.

Simple Questions: Why did SSA Dugan go to the FISC to pick up a copy?

Why didn’t Agent Dugan just go to Main Justice and pick up a copy from the DOJ-NSD file that contained the FISA application? Why go to the FISA Court for a copy?

This is not supposition; this is the process described and outlined in court records. So, why go to the FISC and not the DOJ?

♦ Secondly, SSA Dugan goes to extreme lengths to draw attention to his copy; he calls the top secret FISA application an “FBI equity” in numerous documents. It’s his equity, his document, because he was the original equity holder of the document.

Agent Dugan was responsible for generating it. Dugan repeats that provenance again, and again in court records throughout 2018: “FBI Equity“.

 

[Document Link – page #3]

[Document Link – Page #13]

The March 17, 2017, copy of the FISA application -as stamped by the FISA Court- was FBI Agent Brian Dugan’s equity. It was inside his investigative file.

This March 17, 2017, copy is his investigative work product.

So riddle me this… QUESTION:

When Main Justice DOJ (think special counsel) released the FISA application, under the auspices of a FOIA fulfillment, on July 21, 2018, why did they release FBI Agent Brian Dugan’s copy?

Why didn’t the DOJ release their clean copy of the FISA application?

Why did the DOJ find it necessary to release WFO FBI agent Brian Dugan’s equity?

Additionally, how did Main Justice get SSA Brian Dugan’s copy of the FISA?…. But more importantly, when the DOJ decided to release the FISA application to the public, why did they release FBI Agent Dugan’s copy?

The answers to these questions tell a big story.

Isn’t it curious how no-one has ever asked those questions?

.

♦ Why did Dugan go to the FISA Court for his original copy?

♦ Sixteen months later, why did the DOJ want to release Dugan’s copy?

Trump Heroically Defies a Lawless Supreme Court


The court’s ruling on young illegals is an abomination that must not stand

Matthew Vadum image

Re-posted from the Canada Free Press By  — Front Page Mag—— Bio and ArchivesAugust 10, 2020

Trump Heroically Defies a Lawless Supreme Court

President Donald Trump is quietly turning a stinging defeat at the Supreme Court over an illegal amnesty for hundreds of thousands of young illegal aliens into what could end up being a victory for the Constitution and the rule of law.

The Supreme Court, of course, has no authority to tell the president of the United States that he cannot rescind an illegal executive amnesty ordered by his predecessor in the same manner it was instituted.

Normally, presidents of both parties rush to raise their arms in surrender whenever the black-robed life-tenured politicians on the high court demand it.

The president appears to be taking a stand against rampant judicial supremacism by drawing inspiration from President Andrew Jackson

Not Trump.

The president appears to be taking a stand against rampant judicial supremacism by drawing inspiration from President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait proudly hangs in the Oval Office.

After the chief justice of the day overreached in Jackson’s opinion, the 7th president allegedly uttered the following immortal words: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Now the Trump administration is taking heat over its failure to immediately resume processing of illegal aliens under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after the Supreme Court, headed by the ever-weaselly John Roberts, found in a particularly bizarre ruling June 18 that it failed to properly rescind the Obama-era program that was created with the mere stroke of a pen.

Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm, an Obama appointee, criticized the Trump administration July 24 for not yet complying with the high court’s order, including not yet updating informational pages on government websites.

“That is a problem,” Grimm said. “As for the inaccuracy on the website, that has to change and that should be able to change very quickly. … It creates a feeling and a belief that the agency is disregarding binding decisions by appellate and the Supreme Court.”

U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Stephen Pezzi told Grimm that new DACA applications were being “held” and “placed into a bucket” while DHS officials figured out what to do with the program.

“It is a distinction without a difference to say that this application has not been denied, it has been received and it has been put in a bucket,” the judge said.

“The courts are defying the law, the Constitution, and 130 years of their own settled case law that illegal aliens have no standing to sue for a right to remain”

The Trump administration is sending out mixed messages and “that puts applicants in doubt,” whined John Freedman, attorney for the DACA recipients.

“It puts immigration lawyers in doubt. Nobody knows what’s going on,” Freedman said. “It reinforces impressions that … the administration, the defendants are not complying with the rule of law.”

But Freedman has it backwards.

The federal judiciary, not President Trump, is violating the law, commentator Daniel Horowitz argues.

“The courts are defying the law, the Constitution, and 130 years of their own settled case law that illegal aliens have no standing to sue for a right to remain in the country against the will of the political branches of government. It is they who are defying the law. Moreover, as Hamilton noted in Federalist #78, the courts ‘must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm for the efficacy of its judgments.’ Thus, Trump declining to actively use his powers to violate immigration laws duly passed by Congress is not defying the courts; it’s following the law being defied by the judiciary.”

“You see,” Horowitz writes, “this case is different from almost every case that comes before the courts.”

“Typically, the courts will invent a contrived right and demand that the other branches take an action they need not take. In this case, the court is jumping two steps by demanding Trump not only refrain from deporting illegal aliens, but affirmatively use the tools of government to grant resident documents to people whom our law explicitly prohibits from having them. [italics original]

“If separation of powers means anything at all and we are to preserve a country of checks and balances, Trump must not issue these visas.”

Not processing DACA applications has the effect of upholding the rule of law

Horowitz has it exactly right: not processing DACA applications has the effect of upholding the rule of law, as opposed to upholding the perverse version of the rule of law proffered by Chief Justice John Roberts and the other four liberals on the Supreme Court.

Trump’s patriotic stalling buys him time to decide what to do about the much-mythologized 700,000 to 800,000 individuals eligible under the DACA program.

These people are a subset of about 4 million “DREAMers,” many of whom failed to apply for relief under DACA, but who could qualify under a further amnesty were one to be granted. Law-abiding Americans, including Trump’s political base, are adamantly opposed to the lawless program and amnesties in general.

The current dispute between the open-borders left and Trump grows out of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling earlier this summer in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. Regents of the University of California that the administration did not follow every jot and tittle of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), when it rescinded the program that temporarily prevented young people who came to the United States illegally from being deported.

The APA requires the government to fully explain the reasons for certain decisions, though few before the infamous ruling believed it applied to Barack Obama’s kingly fiats.

“The dispute before the Court is not whether DHS may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may. The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts, who has been deservedly ridiculed by conservatives for this and a series of grotesquely absurd recent rulings.

“The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS, so that it may consider the problem anew.”

Like so many Supreme Court decisions nowadays, the court opinion is a pseudo-legal essay brimming with lawyerly codswallop

Like so many Supreme Court decisions nowadays, the court opinion is a pseudo-legal essay brimming with lawyerly codswallop, an after-the-fact rationalization written to justify a preordained result. The goal was not to do justice but to frustrate Donald Trump.

The court, under pressure from the illegal-alien left, invented an elaborate excuse to keep the program in place, reasoning in effect that because the decision to rescind DACA affects many people and would disrupt the lives that these illegal aliens have unlawfully been living in the U.S., the cancelation of the program needed to be stopped.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh wisely dissented from the main finding in the majority opinion.

“Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision,” Thomas wrote.

Thomas accused the members of the court’s majority of creating their own extra-legal solution to the DACA problem out of whole cloth.

“The Court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the Legislative Branch. Instead, the majority has decided to prolong DHS’ initial overreach by providing a stopgap measure of its own. In doing so, it has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this Court rather than where they rightfully belong—the political branches. Such timidity forsakes the Court’s duty to apply the law according to neutral principles, and the ripple effects of the majority’s error will be felt throughout our system of self-government.”

If President Trump continues to work to counteract those ripple effects, America will be better off.

* * *

Photo credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen

 

Devin Nunes Discusses Latest Information About Politically Weaponized Intelligence and Fraud…


HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes appears with Shannon Bream to discuss the latest information about DOJ and FBI fraud.

 

Nuts ! – Senator Lindsay Graham Still Doesn’t Know Who Delivered Feb 14, 2018, FBI Briefing to SSCI…


This is theatrically absurd now.  Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsay Graham appears with Sean Hannity to say he’s going to ask Chris Wray who was the FBI official who falsely briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 14, 2018.

First, it was Scott Schools (Main Justice) and Andrew McCabe from FBI.  According to their own records that’s who did the briefing – what the hell is Graham trying to figure out?

Second, presume there were no records…. why the heck doesn’t Graham just walk down the hall and ask his senate friends who it was?  This is not a complex puzzle to solve. And Sean Hannity is just clapping and nodding along… Ridiculous kabuki.  This is what we are up against.  Nuts.

.Seriously, this is Pravda-esque controlled media at this point.

 

 

 

Senator Ron Johnson Subpoenas FBI Records From Director Wray…


Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson has issued a subpoena for records from FBI Director Christopher Wray.  [pdf here] The subpoena is a demand for documents, not testimony. Specifically, Johnson is asking for “all documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

[More Details]

Unfortunately, given what CTH knows of this specific committee, this approach seems a little like loading the horse into the starting gate after the race is over.   They are all good people, but it’s the system that keeps everything compartmentalized by design.

 

President Trump Names Coup Plotters During Press Conference…


This is interesting…. During the final question of his press conference President Trump forcefully outlined the names of key former administration officials who participated in the effort to remove him.