Leaving Monday for visit with friends then Thursday off to Highlands for granddaughter's wedding. Another memo reprieve. Have a great week. Know we will.
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OHR rowed in a leaky boat to the shores of The FBI.(See 1 below.)
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As Ben Franklin said:
"In wine there is wisdom,
In beer there is freedom,
In water there is bacteria.
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Everyone is getting so exercised over Trump ending security clearance for those who are no longer in government, and/or have no reason to be in government, have no need for a security clearance and/or have proven they are not trustworthy.
I guess anything Trump does will be attacked and so it goes. (See 2 below.)
And:
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Milton Friedman is turning over in his grave as Bernie and Pocahontas spin their magical web from socialism's fibers.
Thank goodness for video tape and Milton Friedman. This should be required viewing in all high schools. And we should all watch it every couple of years. The first is with Phil Donahue but if you have the time watch the others
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Southern California hot bed of radicalism. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++1) What Was Bruce Ohr Doing?
Justice releases some damning documents, but much of the truth is still classified.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.
Mr. Ohr was, until last year, associate deputy attorney general. He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016—after the FBI had terminated Mr. Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.
All the while, Mr. Ohr failed to disclose on financial forms that his wife, Nellie, worked alongside Mr. Steele in 2016, getting paid by Mr. Simpson for anti-Trump research. The Justice Department has now turned over Ohr documents to Congress that show how deeply tied up he was with the Clinton crew—with dozens of emails, calls, meetings and notes that describe his interactions and what he collected.
Mr. Ohr’s conduct is itself deeply troubling. He was acting as a witness (via FBI interviews) in a case being overseen by a Justice Department in which he held a very senior position. He appears to have concealed this role from at least some superiors, since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified that he’d been unaware of Mr. Ohr’s intermediary status.
Lawyers meanwhile note that it is a crime for a federal official to participate in any government matter in which he has a financial interest. Fusion’s bank records presumably show Nellie Ohr, and by extension her husband, benefiting from the Trump opposition research that Mr. Ohr continued to pass to the FBI.The Justice Department declined to comment.
But for all Mr. Ohr’s misdeeds, the worse misconduct is by the FBI and Justice Department. It’s bad enough that the bureau relied on a dossier crafted by a man in the employ of the rival presidential campaign. Bad enough that it never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of that dossier’s provenance. And bad enough that the FBI didn’t fire Mr. Steele as a confidential human source in September 2016 when it should have been obvious he was leaking FBI details to the press to harm Donald Trump’s electoral chances. It terminated him only when it was absolutely forced to, after Mr. Steele gave an on-the-record interview on Oct. 31, 2016.
But now we discover the FBI continued to go to this discredited informant in its investigation after the firing—by funneling his information via a Justice Department cutout. The FBI has an entire manual governing the use of confidential sources, with elaborate rules on validations, standards and documentation. Mr. Steele failed these standards. The FBI then evaded its own program to get at his info anyway.
And it did so even though we have evidence that lead FBI investigators may have suspected Mr. Ohr was a problem. An Oct. 7, 2016, text message from now-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok to his colleague Lisa Page reads: “Jesus. More BO leaks in the NYT,” which could be a reference to Mr. Ohr.
The FBI may also have been obtaining, via Mr. Ohr, information that came from a man the FBI had never even vetted as a source—Mr. Simpson. Mr. Steele had at least worked with the FBI before; Mr. Simpson was a paid political operative. And the Ohr notes raise further doubts about Mr. Simpson’s forthrightness. In House testimony in November 2017, Mr. Simpson said only that he reached out to Mr. Ohr after the election, and at Mr. Steele’s suggestion. But Mr. Ohr’s inbox shows an email from Mr. Simpson dated Aug. 22, 2016 that reads, in full: “Can u ring.”
The Justice Department hasn’t tried to justify any of this; in fact, last year it quietly demoted Mr. Ohr. In what smells of a further admission of impropriety, it didn’t initially turn over the Ohr documents; Congress had to fight to get them.
But it raises at least two further crucial questions. First, who authorized or knew about this improper procedure? Mr. Strzok seems to be in the thick of it, having admitted to Congress interactions with Mr. Ohr at the end of 2016. While Mr. Rosenstein disclaims knowledge, Mr. Ohr’s direct supervisor at the time was the previous deputy attorney general, Sally Yates. Who else in former FBI Director Jim Comey’s inner circle and at the Obama Justice Department nodded at the FBI’s back-door interaction with a sacked source and a Clinton operative?
Second, did the FBI continue to submit Steele- or Simpson-sourced information to the FISA court? Having informed the court in later applications that it had fired Mr. Steele, the FBI would have had no business continuing to use any Steele information laundered through an intermediary.
We could have these answers pronto; they rest in part in those Ohr 302 forms. And so once again: a call for President Trump to declassify.
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2)John Brennan’s Security Clearance
Scarier than former CIA chief John Brennan losing his security clearance is the idea that he ever had one in the first place.
Perhaps to avoid the appearance of partisanship in pulling the security clearances of former intelligence chiefs, the Trump administration should now abide by some sort of universal nonpartisan standard. I suggest that the following sort of improper conduct, either during or after one’s tenure, might result in the loss of a security clearance:
1) Lying to Congress.
Brennan lied to Congress on at least two occasions (cf. his denial of CIA surveillance of Senate staffer computers and the claim of an absence of collateral damage in drone attacks), and perhaps three (his absurd denial of knowledge of the seeding of the Steele dossier among government agencies). Democrats used to be outraged by Brennan’s deceit, and a few in the past had called for his resignation. Note that James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, has also misled Congress, concerning NSA surveillance of American citizens. Clapper has admitted such (e.g., “the least untruthful” answer). Not lying to Congress is a pretty low bar to meet.
2) Accusations of Treason against a Sitting President.
Brennan believes his denial of continued access to intelligence is an infringement on free speech. But it is really another low bar to ask a former CIA director to refrain from leveling unproven charges of treason against the current president of the United States (“nothing short of treasonous”; “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history”).
Such invective in theory could have foreign-policy consequences by branding the slander of presidential disloyalty with an imprimatur of a CIA security clearance.
Note again that James Clapper similarly flat-out accused the president of the United States of treason, in being a spy for the Russians (“I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president”). Clapper, of course, has no proof of that low charge. Nor has he produced any after his on-air accusation.
If he is suggesting that his security clearance has allowed him access to incriminating evidence, then he should say so.
3) Hired Political Commentary.
Former intelligence chiefs certainly have a perfect right to offer their expertise, even enhanced by their current security clearances, against or in support of a current administration, on both foreign-policy and intelligence challenges, and as guest experts on television, radio, social media, and in print.
That said, hiring oneself out as a political partisan to a network should be a different matter.
Had Brennan and Clapper now and then visited the networks to voice their concern about Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal or moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, it would be one thing. But going on salary with MSNBC and CNN to profit from one’s emeritus status and security clearances to libel the president of the United States removes all appearances of disinterested commentary. As private citizens, they can do all that on their own time without any vestigial connections to the U.S. government.
An added note. When an intelligence official finds himself in a self-created mess, Washington agencies often have a tendency to rush to support of one of their own. But Brennan has long had a dubious record.
He dramatically reinvented himself after the 2008 election from Bush point man on terror alerts (cf. the “Orange Terror alert” of 2003), renditions, and enhanced interrogations — to Obama aficionado, now shocked, in Casablanca-style, by such supposedly clumsy and less nuanced methods that he once had endorsed.
When one collates Brennan’s politicized and often incoherent explanations on a number of key intelligence matters in various capacities between 2009 and 2016 (on the circumstances surrounding Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the “underwear bomber,” his confusing and changing narratives surrounding the bin Laden raid, and his bizarre and careerist-inspired description of jihad: “Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”), the portrait of a political contortionist rather than a professional and disinterested intelligence officer is confirmed.
All that can be said in condolence to John Brennan about losing his security clearance might be something along the lines of, “Try not to lie repeatedly to the U.S. Congress. Please do not allege that the current president of the United States is a traitor. And do not hire yourself out to partisans to issue near daily unproven invective, supposedly sanctified and monetized by your past tenure and present access to the highest level of covert U.S. intelligence.”
That was not too much to ask.
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3)
Roots of the New Mexico Islamist Cult
the father of the arrested jihadi cultist Siraj Ibn Wahhaj. We explore his influence in the
following infographic.
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