Finally FBI agent Peter Strzok was fired. It was beginning to appear that Strzok could do anything he wanted and would always have a job at the FBI.
At least special prosecutor Robert Mueller had the decency to remove Strzok from his team when the text messages between Strzok and his lover FBI attorney Lisa Page were revealed to him.
But the FBI did what federal bureaucracies do, they moved Strzok out of the public eye and hid him in the human resources department. Everyone knows that federal jobs are supposed to be for life, so evidently the idea of firing an agent for his behavior wasn’t considered.
But it did seem like after the inspector general’s report was released to the public, and the American people had a much better idea of what Strzok had been doing, that for the sake of the agency he would have been terminated.
It appears that Strzok was the go to guy for former FBI Director James Comey. If something needed to be done that wasn’t entirely ethical, it seems to have fallen into Strzok’s lap. How else did he end up being the lead investigator on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and then the Trump investigation?
Trump may make sense because Strzok was in counter intelligence and they were investigating Trump for colluding with the Russians. But the investigation of Hillary Clinton using a homebrew email server for all her State Department business doesn’t appear to be counter intelligence.
When you consider that Comey needed someone in charge of the Clinton matter who understood that the key to that investigation was not to find anything, regardless of where the facts lay, it makes sense to put Strzok in charge. He was an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter and it doesn’t appear that in either investigation his goal was to find the truth.
In the Hillary Clinton investigation it was to find nothing, and in the Trump investigation it was to try and find any outrageous rumor or allegation that would stick.
Strzok’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee should have been enough to get him fired. You would think that someone in the corner offices who realized, one, that Congress created the FBI and, two, that Congress funded the FBI, would have been horrified at Strzok’s demeanor and obvious attitude that he was far better than anyone who had ever served in Congress. It seems that would have resulted in Strzok being fired to protect the agency.
Now Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Strzok have all been fired. Page had the good sense to resign before she was fired.
But those four can’t be the only ones involved in this attempt to overthrow the elected president of the United States, and an investigation by someone with more authority than the inspector general needs to take place before the American people are going to trust the FBI like they did before Comey turned it into a partisan attack dog.
It certainly doesn’t appear that the current FBI director, Chris Wray, is the man for the job. Maybe he is working behind the scenes, but it appears his goal is to contain the damage.
What the FBI needs is someone who will get in there and remove the damaged parts so that it can be rebuilt. As long as the FBI is perceived to be a political organization that makes decisions based on the political winds and not the facts, it is too severely compromised to be effective.
But as bad as the FBI is, the Justice Department is worse, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions clearly is not going to do anything about the political corruption in the Justice Department.
The real culprit in all of this is former President Barack Obama, who politicized federal agencies to a degree that is almost unthinkable.
Look at what the Internal Revenue Services was doing under Obama. It was targeting conservative groups for special treatment. Conservative groups were audited and denied nonprofit status, not because they didn’t meet the criteria but because they were of the wrong political affiliation.
If a Republican president had attempted the same thing, the mainstream media would have hounded the president out of office. But because it was Obama, and the mainstream media worshipped Obama, the abuse of power by the IRS was reported in the most favorable terms possible.
*****
The illegal collusion to affect the outcome of a presidential race was not between President Donald Trump and the Russians. Despite two years of investigations, no evidence of that has been found.
The fact that the news media is regurgitating the details of the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and some Russian attorney is evidence, not of collusion, but of the fact that, despite wiretapping numerous members of the Trump campaign and Trump associates, using informants to get information, hauling in everyone who they thought might have a connection and bringing charges against people for things like not remembering exactly what happened when, Mueller has found nothing more substantial than Russian dressing being served on a few salads eaten by Trump campaign staffers.
During the trial of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Russian collusion hasn’t been mentioned. It has mostly been about Manafort having foreign bank accounts and his financial maneuvers to spend the millions he was paid by a Ukrainian politician in the US without paying taxes.
The real illegal collusion was between the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the State Department, Fusion GPS, Chris Steele, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
As this story slowly unfolds, mostly as the result of the work of House oversight committees and Judicial Watch, it becomes more twisted and sinister with every new revelation.
When members of the House Intelligence Committee started saying that it appeared the Hillary Clinton campaign had paid for the Steele dossier, which is the document that led to the special prosecutor, it was written off as ravings from the far right. Then it turned out to be true.
When it was later said that the same Steele dossier was used to get Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to electronically surveil members of the Trump campaign, once it again was deemed partisan nonsense.
Now with the release of at least part of a FISA warrant application, thanks to Judicial Watch, we know that the Steele dossier was used and was likely the primary source. So much of the FISA warrant application was redacted, it’s difficult to be definitive on what else may have been used.
But those established facts pale in comparison to the actual conspiracy within the Obama administration to help Hillary Clinton get elected and damage the Trump campaign.
In the summer of 2016, two different FBI agents met with Steele about the information he was compiling on Trump and possible collusion with the Russians.
It was July 31, 2016 that the FBI opened its investigation into the Trump campaign.
As the Justice Department and the FBI are being forced to release information, it is beginning to appear that Bruce Ohr, who at the time was the number four man in the Justice Department, may be the key.
When the FBI was forced to dismiss Steele as a source because he leaked information to the media, the FBI investigators found another way to get Steele’s information, and that was Ohr.
In fact, Ohr appears to be at the center of everything. His wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which had hired Steele to do the opposition research on Trump. In effect, Nellie Ohr was working for the Clinton campaign – at least it was Clinton campaign money that was paying her salary. That in itself appears to be a huge conflict of interest. The wife of the fourth highest ranking attorney in the Justice Department was doing opposition research for the Clinton campaign.
But Ohr himself appears to have been feeding information from Steele to the FBI. Ohr met with Steele. They emailed back and forth. They talked on Skype. The two were in regular contact throughout the period that Steele was amassing the information for the Steele dossier and then shopping it around to newspapers and news outlets until finally BuzzFeed published it.
Bruce Ohr also met with the head of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, despite the fact that when asked by House Intelligence Committee investigators if he had contact with anyone in the FBI or Justice Department Simpson said no.
But according to Bruce Ohr’s emails and logs, the two did have contact.
So Ohr’s wife was working for Fusion GPS doing opposition research for the Clinton campaign. He was meeting with the head of Fusion GPS and with the man doing the research for Fusion GPS, Steele.
Perhaps the most amazing fact is that Ohr still has a job working at the Justice Department. He was demoted, but not fired. It appears that he was in all of this up to his eyeballs. It is even possible he was the mastermind behind the whole thing. Certainly it appears that he was involved enough to know exactly what was happening.
At the time, Bruce Ohr was doing all of this meeting with Steele, meeting with Simpson and feeding information to the FBI, just about everyone in the country was convinced that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. If Hillary Clinton had been elected there would have been no investigation of any of this.
Also, Ohr may in his mind have been setting the stage to be appointed attorney general.
It’s hard to believe that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch didn’t get a promise when she met with Bill Clinton that if the Hillary Clinton investigation came out right that she would get to keep her job. But Lynch was not the kind of attorney general Hillary Clinton would want, so another job in the administration would have been found for her. Perhaps Ohr was plotting five or six moves ahead and had his sights set on that top spot.
*****
Trump is being investigated by Mueller, who is interviewing everyone who has ever met Trump and charging some of them with crimes unrelated to the campaign in an attempt to get them to turn over on Trump.
So far that hasn’t worked. Mueller has ruined a number of people’s lives, but so far he hasn’t been able to produce any evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians.
But who is investigating the political collusion that went on in the federal government to attempt to keep Trump out of office? It is an extremely complicated affair. Doesn’t it seem like there should be an investigation just to sort out all the facts of the case?
This is a time when the mainstream media are really falling down on the job. If this were anyone but Trump, The New York Times and The Washington Post would both have teams of reporters looking at all the evidence, interviewing people and turning up their own evidence. There would be long articles with charts and graphs trying to explain to the American people what happened and what was wrong with what happened.
But the mainstream media have been ignoring the story as much as possible. They report the breaking news, but they don’t have the kind of multi-page coverage that one would expect.
A team of reporters and editors would be needed to take all the information that has come out in dribs and drabs and in huge, heavily redacted, hard to understand federal documents. But no one is doing it.
One story comes out but it isn’t connected to the other information that has come out previously.
The fact that the FBI laundered the information from the Steele dossier through the State Department seems huge, but where does it fit in with everything else?
The recent revelations about Bruce Ohr appeared that they might be able to tie some of the loose ends together, but someone has to do the tying and come up with a coherent story.
People on conservative websites are outraged about the information, but it’s just information until someone puts together a narrative that normal people who work every day and don’t have time to pore over documents can understand.
It appears the story might start with the Hillary Clinton team recruiting FBI Deputy Director McCabe’s wife to run for the Virginia state Senate and then providing her with an obscene amount of money for a losing state Senate race. But maybe it started earlier.
Obama reportedly kept a tight rein on his administration. It is not possible that all of this went on without Obama at least knowing about it. How much did Obama know and when did he know it?
Trump has a tendency to exaggerate, but in this case it appears he isn’t and the conspiracy against him represents the biggest untold scandal in US history. But then again, maybe it was all just a big coincidence, like the mainstream media want the American people to believe.
*****
I have no idea if Congressman Chris Collins is guilty or not. One of his crimes, though, is lying to the FBI, which evidently in today’s world is a crime for Trump supporters and not a crime for supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Collins may be guilty as sin of whatever else he is charged with, but then who in Congress isn’t?
A few, but not many, actually live off their salaries. Some have their own money. But there is a large number who go to Congress with little more than the clothes on their back and a big mortgage on their principle residence back in their home district. They buy a fine place to live in or around Washington, DC, where prices are high. They have the cost of maintaining two residences and a salary of $174,000 a year. At the end of a couple of terms they are multimillionaires. How does that happen? How is it that without outside income they are able to move up the economic ladder?
Some don’t. The late 6th District Congressman Howard Coble was a great penny pincher as an elected official and as a private citizen. But look around at the members of both parties who spend 10 or 20 years in Congress and have somehow become wealthy.
Maybe instead of focusing on Collins, the whole crowd should be investigated.
*****
Sen. Kamala Harris would fit right in on the Greensboro City Council. When asked about her major accomplishment as senator, she responded that it was sitting on two committees. This is like asking a Major League Baseball player what his major accomplishment was and he answers, getting up to bat. Not hitting a homerun, not even getting a walk that won a game, but standing there at the plate.
They all do it. All 100 senators are on committees. It ain’t no big deal to be on a Senate committee if you happen to be a sitting US senator. It comes with the territory.
In Greensboro, appointing a committee is considered a huge accomplishment, worthy of joyous celebration. We have committees for everything, most of them do next to nothing, but the City Council spends countless hours making appointments and making certain that each committee has the proper amount of diversity.
Last week some new twists on diversity were added by City Councilmember Michelle Kennedy. It used to be mainly race and geographic diversity that was considered. Kennedy says they have to consider sexual preference and economic diversity.
*****
Isn’t it hypocritical for Gov. Roy Cooper and the merry band of Democrats to be trying to keep the constitutional amendments off the ballot? Don’t they believe in letting the people have a voice?
It makes perfect since for Cooper to do everything in his power to beat the amendments at the ballot box, but isn’t that the way to do it? If you believe in listening to the people – and Cooper says that he does – then he should welcome any amendment the Republicans want to throw on the ballot because the people will know to vote against it.
It indicates that Cooper knows that he won on a fluke.
Gov. Pat McCrory didn’t just shoot himself in the foot in the race, he emptied the gun into his foot, reloaded and started shooting again.
Look at the results at the top of the ticket: Trump won with a comfortable margin; Sen. Richard Burr had no trouble winning; Lt. Gov. Dan Forest won, as did Treasurer Dale Folwell and Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey; and Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler won again. Even Republican State Schools Superintendent Mark Johnson won.
The voters also elected veto-proof majorities in the state House and Senate.
Voters were voting for every Republican on the ballot, except McCrory.
Cooper can already see the handwriting on the wall and it reads “one-term governor.”
In 2020, it is likely that Forest will run against Cooper, and Forest, without McCrory’s baggage, should not have much trouble getting elected.
So from a political reality standpoint it makes sense to try and keep this stuff off the ballot. But how can Cooper hold his head high as a good Democrat and then try to keep constitutional amendments off the ballot?
*****
Lawyers call it the fruit of a poisonous tree. If a search was illegal, or a search warrant improperly executed, then any evidence from that search, or any evidence that search led to, is inadmissible.
It seems that if a special prosecutor was appointed based on illegal and false information, then anything the special prosecutor uncovers would fall in the same category, though clearly it does not because if it did then special prosecutor Mueller would have to be sent home.
Now that Strzok is finally a former FBI agent, it might be a good time to consider his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
Strzok repeatedly stated that his negative opinion of Trump and his desire and belief that Hillary Clinton would be the next president did not affect his investigation of Hillary Clinton or of Trump. He said that his actions were unbiased.
Despite what Strzok said, the inspector general said he couldn’t rule out bias as the reason for some of Strzok’s actions.
Anyone can claim that they are unbiased and even believe it, but it can be and usually is nearly impossible to prove.
Who knows how Strzok’s bias affected his actions? He might not even know. Did he make decisions in the Hillary Clinton investigation based on the belief that this woman was going to be the next president? He says no, but it certainly appears that he did.
The Hillary Clinton investigation was not run like a normal investigation. Look at how they treated Manafort and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. In the Hillary Clinton campaign, her top aides were given immunity in exchange for nothing. When did the FBI start doing that?
When it was discovered that 300,000 emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer likely included the erased Hillary Clinton emails, the Strzok team wouldn’t even bother to go to New York to look at them because they were too busy investigating Trump.
Strzok says that you can’t prove bias. It’s true there could be other explanations for not going to look at evidence in a case. For example, suppose Strzok liked to be able to take his lover Lisa Page with him on trips and she wasn’t available. Perhaps he was having trouble getting a train ticket. Maybe the day he planned to go he had a mani-pedi scheduled, and knowing how hard it was to get an appointment he didn’t want to miss it.
There are millions of possible explanations for a top FBI investigator not traveling a couple of hours to look at new evidence in a big case, but it’s hard to come up with one as good as the obvious, that he was scared he would find something he couldn’t hide.
