The Washington Post – in an attempt to defend the FBI for spying on the Trump campaign – is claiming that for President Donald Trump to say that the FBI spied on his campaign is false because the FBI doesn’t call it spying. In fact, from reading one article, it appears The Washington Post believes the FBI is charged with defining words in the English language.
Trump is not required to use the jargon that the FBI uses. In fact, as president, Trump is far better off speaking the same language as the American people and not government-speak.
It is an indication of the level of insanity at The Washington Post that it would even consider rebuking Trump because the FBI doesn’t like the terms he is using.
What should be a concern to all Americans is that the FBI was using a spy, or a “personal asset,” in an attempt to get inside information about a presidential campaign when it had no credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
But imagine where we are now – The Washington Post and The New York Times are defending the right of the FBI to wiretap innocent citizens who are not even suspected of committing a crime and to send spies, informants, secret agents, personal assets, whatever you want to call them – people with the goal of spying – into the presidential campaign of the opposition party.
President Barack Obama was campaigning hard for the candidate from his own party. He was in no way an uninterested bystander and Obama was the ultimate boss of the FBI. They all worked for him.
According to former FBI Director James Comey’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton, she committed a whole bunch of felonies, but they were not going to prosecute her, either because she didn’t intend to break the law or because no prosecutor would take the case.
But the real reason seems to have been that Obama didn’t want her prosecuted because he wanted her to be the next president. He also didn’t want her prosecuted because, if Hillary Clinton were prosecuted, Obama himself would be implicated. He communicated with her through her homebrew server, albeit under an alias. If everything was on the up and up, why did Obama use an alias?
It is probably true that no prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department would prosecute Hillary Clinton for the crimes she committed concerning classified and government documents, but if the evidence that Comey detailed in his speech is true (and with Comey you never know), then she did commit numerous felonies.
So why wasn’t the FBI inserting spies into the Hillary Clinton campaign?
And what happened to the investigation of the Clinton Foundation? A lot of evidence is available to the public that countries and companies that paid exorbitant speaking fees to Bill Clinton and made enormous donations to the Clinton Foundation got preferential treatment from the State Department run by Hillary Clinton.
Now there is even more evidence that Bill Clinton was paid up to $750,000 for a speech in return for special favors from the State Department, and not because he is such an extraordinary speaker: Since Hillary Clinton is no longer secretary of state and will never be president, Bill Clinton has stopped receiving those huge speaking fees. If Bill Clinton was worth $750,000 as a speaker and it was not related to his wife’s job, why did the enormous speaking fees stop when she became just an everyday citizen again?
If the two are not related then Bill Clinton should be flying all over the world on private jets speaking for vast sums of money and the Clinton Foundation should be receiving donations of over $100 million from companies that are only interested in doing good for the world.
Since both the out-of-proportion speaking fees and the enormous donations have stopped, something must be different. Bill Clinton is still a former president and the Clinton Foundation continues to do whatever it does.
There appears to be more than enough evidence to launch an investigation.
But the FBI is too concerned with what Trump did or didn’t do with a porn actress over 10 years before he ran for president to be concerned with a former secretary of state selling influence.
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The mainstream media have a habit of using the FBI terms when writing about fired FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe. McCabe according to the FBI was fired for demonstrating a “lack of candor” when he was questioned by the FBI, and even when questioned under oath.
“Lack of candor” is a funny sounding term, and until you do a little research it seems like they were picking on McCabe by firing him for a lack of candor.
The term lack of candor is used for FBI agents because they are expected and required to go beyond simply telling the truth. An FBI agent being questioned is expected to provide all the relevant information known to him or her about the situation or incident.
What McCabe did was lie to FBI agents investigating a leak. He lied to the investigators, which is a felony, and lied under oath, which is a more serious felony.
It wasn’t that he didn’t provide all the relevant information but that he repeatedly gave false testimony and then lied about the false testimony he had given. It still fits under the same category, but to say that his answers had a lack of candor sounds far better than to say that he lied under oath.
But McCabe did lie under oath, repeatedly, so why hasn’t he been arrested?
Perhaps someone should point out that McCabe was working for Trump when he lied under oath and then special prosecutor Robert Mueller will perform a midnight, no-knock search of his home and haul him and his wife off in handcuffs.
Trump should call FBI Director Chris Steele back to the White House and find out why McCabe hasn’t been arrested. Trump might also want to ask why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, Comey and McCabe have not all been arrested and charged with lying on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application and the renewals. They all signed off on an application with false information and with information that they should have known was false.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If Mueller can investigate a reported affair between Trump and a porn actress that she says happened more than 10 years ago and Trump says never happened at all, then why can’t the FBI arrest people for crimes they committed against Trump?
It appears that in this case Trump knows exactly what he is doing and so far Mueller – by being overly partisan and hiring 13 Democrats and no Republicans on his team – is doing more harm than good for the Democrats.
If not for the Mueller investigation, would the congressional oversight committees have discovered that Hillary Clinton paid for the Steele dossier? Would McCabe have been fired? Would the text messages between FBI special agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page have been made public?
It looks like because of Mueller the entire conspiracy by the FBI to affect the outcome of the presidential election is coming to light, and that far outweighs the temporary problems that it is causing for Trump.
When this all comes to a conclusion and Trump can finally fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray, then the new attorney general and FBI director can clean house – and it is a house that is desperately in need of cleaning.
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It has been bizarre that a Republican-led Justice Department has been refusing to turn over documents to the Republican-led congressional oversight committees. They are supposed to be on the same team and yet the Republican oversight committees have had to resort to subpoenas and threats of impeachment to obtain records that they have every right to see.
We now know that the Republican-led Justice Department may have a Trump supporter at the top, Attorney General (in name only) Sessions, but once you go down one step to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, you are in Obama country.
If Sessions were acting like the attorney general, long ago he would have called Rosenstein and FBI Director Wray into his office and told them that if they didn’t turn over every document requested by the congressional oversight committees as quickly as possible, he would give the documents to them himself. But Sessions appears to be scared of his own shadow and is certainly terrified of Rosenstein.
Rosenstein and Wray have good reasons for not turning the documents over to the congressional oversight committees, because the documents prove that the FBI had an entire operation code named “Crossfire Hurricane” to infiltrate, spy on and surveil the Trump campaign.
Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the country. This is abuse of power on a scale that is unprecedented.
Take a look at Watergate. There was no evidence that President Richard Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in before it happened. It was, according to all the evidence, done by some overzealous, kind of nutty, extremely bumbling campaign workers. They were paid by the campaign, there is no doubt about that, but what got Nixon was that he tried to cover it up. “What did you know and when did you know it?”
Imagine if instead of some clumsy campaign workers breaking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters, Nixon had ordered the FBI to wiretap the DNC and had spies from the FBI trying to infiltrate the campaign.
The country was outraged that Nixon tried to cover up a third-rate burglary. Imagine the response if he had used the FBI and other intelligence services to spy on his opponent.
This is huge, and what is utterly amazing is that the mainstream media, led by The New York Times and The Washington Post, are in every edition of their papers justifying the improper surveillance.
There is no way that having a Democratic administration spy on a Republican campaign is acceptable. If the government doesn’t stay completely out of elections we no longer have a government by the people, of the people and for the people. What we have is a banana republic with fake elections where the government-backed candidate always wins.
Trump doesn’t get a free ride on this whole mess because he has handled it poorly – from allowing Sessions to become attorney general after he said he would recuse himself to allowing the Justice Department and the FBI to stonewall Congress and refuse to hand over documents.
The FBI has immense power and that power in unscrupulous hands is a danger to our very form of government.
The Constitution is designed to restrict the power of the federal government, but for the last 75 years Americans have allowed the federal government to expand into areas that were never even imagined by our founding fathers.
If the result of all of this is that the federal government is reduced significantly in size and scope then it all may be worth the trouble. If the result is business as usual then it won’t be long before the federal government interferes in another election, and the next time it may be successful. Once it is successful, free and fair elections end.
Imagine if all of the pundits in the country had been right and Hillary Clinton had won. The American people would know nothing about the abuse of power by the FBI. Trump would be hollering about how his campaign was infiltrated and spied on by the FBI and the mainstream media would say that he was a nut, which of course is what the mainstream media are saying today, but there is a huge difference when the nut is in the White House.
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I heard a radio commercial reminding 18-year-old males that by law they have to register for the draft. No one has actually been drafted since 1973 – a fact that I am well aware of because I was in the first group that received lottery numbers but didn’t get called. My number was 11. The guys in my class who were a few months older and the guys in the class above me weren’t so fortunate.
How can feminists allow this blatant sexual discrimination against women? The federal government is saying to women, you aren’t good enough to be drafted. How can that be? We are constantly told by feminists that women are no different from men. In fact, if a woman has a sex change operation she is legally a man. The fact that she is not male in any way except outward appearance doesn’t matter. In some cases all a woman has to do is say that she feels like a man and legally she has to be treated like a man.
So how can the military say to women that they aren’t good enough to be drafted? Either the military should stop forcing young males to register or everyone, regardless of sex, sexual preference or gender identity should be forced to register.
Here is a question: Is an 18-year-old male who identifies as a female required to register? Or what about an 18-year-old person born as a female but who now identifies as male? Do they have to register?
It seems the federal government could avoid all of these pitfalls by requiring everyone to register.
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A lot of conservatives, myself included, have given Attorney General Sessions a hard time for not behaving like the attorney general. I do think that he has been a horrible attorney general for Trump.
Sessions needs to start acting like the attorney general but Trump needs to start acting like the president.
Trump is tweeting about things like he is still a candidate and can do nothing about them. Trump could blow the FBI and the toadies in the Justice Department like Rosenstein out of the water with one fell swoop of his pen. The mainstream media would choke on it, but they would have to support Trump’s actions or be such monumental hypocrites that even they would be embarrassed about their behavior.
Trump should make every document that has anything to do with the surveillance of his campaign, Crossfire Hurricane, public. The FISA warrant applications. The emails back and forth between agents. Every report, every memo, every intercepted telephone call, every unmasked American citizen. The whole kit and caboodle.
We now know that the FBI is using redactions to cover up misbehavior, not to protect people. Why on earth is it a state secret that fired FBI Deputy Director McCabe spent $70,000 on a conference table?
It’s embarrassing to McCabe and it doesn’t play well in the media where Health and Human Services Secretary Ben Carson and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt are being raked over the coals for spending money on their own offices, but what in the world is a deputy director of the FBI doing spending $70,000 on a conference table? And more importantly, why is that information so classified that even Congress can’t be told about it.
The FBI can’t be trusted to redact its own documents. The FBI can’t be trusted for much of anything right now. All you have to do is read some of the text messages between McCabe’s FBI attorney Page and her lover Special Agent Strzok to know that the FBI was working for Obama, not for the country. It was wrong and people need to be punished.
Trump is president. They cannot keep any secrets from Trump. All he has to do is demand all the documents and have them brought to his office.
Once Trump has all the documents then he should have the White House communications office scan everything and put it on the White House website – every single document about Crossfire Hurricane on the White House website for the American public to see.
People will say that this will destroy the FBI. The FBI has destroyed itself. The FBI tried to use its power to influence the outcome of a presidential election and when that failed it tried to bring down a duly elected president. In other countries the perpetrators would be lined up against a wall and shot. In our country the perpetrators write books and make millions of dollars off their misdeeds.
Trump also needs to launch and all out investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Any idiot can see that Hillary Clinton was granting favors to countries and corporations that paid her husband hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. It’s obvious that’s what happened. All the investigators have to do is prove it.
If they drop down a couple of levels from the folks in Washington, there are thousands of honest, smart, hardworking agents who could do the job, but first Trump has to remove the layer at the top that has done so much to discredit the FBI.
It is incredible that through all of this Strzok has not been fired. He reportedly is still working at FBI headquarters. It does make you wonder what you have to do to get fired from the FBI.
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Political journalists don’t know much about business. In fact, it’s almost a point of honor that they refuse to learn anything about the business world, as if it would make them dirty. I have met reporters who have worked for newspapers for years who didn’t know that the vast majority of the revenue that pays their salaries comes from selling advertising.
And that explains some of the difficulty the mainstream media have covering Trump, who sees the world from a businessman’s perspective. But that is minor compared to the main reason they have difficulty covering Trump, which is that they hate him with a passion usually reserved for rattlesnakes and ex-lovers.
There is an often-used expression in business, “If you’re not willing to walk away, you’re just begging.” Trump was not going to beg Kim Jong Un, so he walked away. It happens all the time in business. If one party is making outrageous demands, the other party walks away.
And in this case for Trump it worked. Kim Jong Un got the message that he was going to have to behave and asked for a second chance. It’s not a bad way for Trump to get started on negotiations. Kim Jong Un knows that Trump is serious and he expects Kim Jong Un to be serious also.
The idea that this was in any way a failure on Trump’s part is simply an indication that the mainstream media know nothing about business and go out of their way to interpret every event in the light that is most detrimental to Trump.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has caught the FBI trying to cover up its misbehavior again.
In politics, they always say it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that gets you. That certainly proved true with former Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The country was evidently fine with Clinton having an affair with a White House intern and using the Oval Office for their rendezvous, but lying about it under oath was going too far.
Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate break-in, which cost him his presidency although there was no evidence that he knew about it before the buffoons who broke in were caught.
The FBI is doing its best not to provide the information about the investigation of the Trump campaign to the congressional oversight committees.
What Grassley discovered is that the FBI redacted the cost of the $70,000 conference table in fired FBI Deputy Director McCabe’s office. Grassley is right – there are no national security issues involved in a $70,000 conference table. And, as he said, “embarrassment” is not a sufficient reason to redact information from the text messages turned over to Congress.
Now Grassley is demanding either unredacted text messages or, if there are any redactions, a key to give the reason why that portion of the text message was redacted.
Grassley has a pretty high security clearance. It’s hard to understand why the FBI would need to redact old text messages between lovers, except, as in the case of the $70,000 table, where the FBI did it to prevent embarrassment.
What the FBI has proven is that it can’t be trusted to redact the messages in a proper legal fashion. If the FBI won’t turn over an unredacted version to Grassley, it seems he should insist that an uninterested third party review the redactions by the FBI to ascertain whether they are necessary or not.
Or Grassley could get Trump to request unredacted text messages and then Trump could give them to Grassley.
It’s clear the FBI continues to work for Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump has to wait for Mueller to finish his investigation before he can clean house, but that doesn’t mean he has to put up with the FBI acting like they operate with no oversight from anyone.
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Here’s an interesting thought. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t come into existence until the 1930s, which means for the first 140 or so years of this country there was no FBI and the country survived. The FBI isn’t in the Constitution. Is it absolutely necessary for the country to have a law enforcement agency so incredibly rich that the deputy director has a $70,000 conference table in his office?
Maybe the country would be better off with a smaller, more agile and less intrusive, less arrogant national law enforcement agency.
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It’s incredible. The New York Times is still reporting that when Trump said that Trump Tower, where his campaign headquarters was located, was being “wiretapped,” he was wrong.
But we know that the FBI had Trump Tower under electronic surveillance. So “wiretap” is an old fashioned word, but everyone knows what Trump meant, and he was right not wrong. The FBI was listening to telephone calls, intercepting emails and all that stuff. It is not a matter under dispute except by the mainstream media.
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In any other situation it would be unbelievable, but the mainstream media are still writing about the meeting that Donald Trump Jr. had with some Russian lawyer and presenting it as if it was wrong simply because he was looking for dirt on Hillary Clinton.
But the mainstream media also see nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton hiring a former British spy to pay Russian informants for dirt on Trump.
According to the mainstream media, for anyone involved in the Trump campaign to meet with or talk to a Russian was wrong.
It is not illegal for someone involved with a presidential campaign to meet with or talk to a foreign national, regardless of what country they are from. It is not even illegal for a campaign worker to go to Russia, visit the Kremlin and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They can even talk with Putin about the campaign. None of that is illegal or improper. The only thing that would make it illegal would be if they asked Putin for help or talked to Putin about what he could do to help the campaign. But you would never know that from reading the mainstream media.
