Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Fisa Court Lied To. Russians Not trump Informed By FBI. Yet, Horowitz Sees No Motivated Bias.


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Obama seeks to protect Jewish students subject to growing incidents of anti-Semitism on college and university campuses.

Much of this is because more radical Muslim students are receiving an American education and there is an enormous growth in funding of Islamic Studies Departments funded by the radical element of The Saudi Family. I also believe, it is because Jewish students are ill prepared to defend themselves because they lack  knowledge, remain silent and, understandably, are physically frightened by intimidation.  Sadly but true, in today's climate, one has to decide they will not take crap from provocateurs. (See 1 below.)
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Turley responds to Horowitz's comment he was unable to find evidence/motivation of political bias.

Barr reminds us, Horowitz' investigation was limited exclusively to FBI personnel but still believes Horowitz should have seen enough from his investigation to conclude, using common sense,  politically motivated  bias was present.

Like with Mueller, Horowitz has given such a narrow interpretation, deduced from his investigation, that it undercuts their credibility. After Sen. Graham's tough questioning, Horowitz still pretty much stuck to his view.

The Dunham investigation has no limits and will ultimately become the authoritative report of which the Horowitz Report covers a more narrow aspect further limited by the scope of those he only could interview. (See 2 below.)

What we do know is Hillary and a law firm paid for a report on which the FBI relied upon and which they eventually knew was false and then used this report to obtain warrants from FISA Courts that allowed them to investigate Trump on charges they also new were false.

We also know from Horowitz,exculpatory information was denied the FISA Courts and the Comey crowd subsequently lied when they dealt with these courts. Furthermore, the FBI spoke with Russia and warned them they knew what was happening yet, never told Trump?  Why?  Political Bias? You decide.

Comment from a friend and fellow memo reader:

"Dick

Imagine you head the FBI.  The presumed winner of the 2016 election (Clinton) has bungled classified emails and you think she will be your next boss.  You give her a pass.  The presumed winner has paid a consultant to dig up dirt on the presumed loser (Trump.)  The presumed winner loses despite the predictions of almost the entire media that she could not possibly lose.  The presumed winner and the media howl that there must be interference for the presumed loser to win.  You MUST investigate because if it turns out there was interference the FBI will get the blame for not stopping it.  You use every means to find something.  You find nothing.  Then the presumed loser fires you for undertaking what appears to him to have been a partisan investigation since nothing was found. That is just plain Washington politics.  If you guess wrong, you get fired.

T--"

Other comments. (See 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d below.)

And:

William Barr: FBI Falsified Documents to Continue Spying on Trump & Co. After Election Read More


Finally:

Sen. Feinstein and other committee Democrats  bent over backwards to prove there was no political bias and Horowitz repeated there was no evidence or documents to indicate political bias.

Obviously, those who had political bias were careful not to do anything that would reveal their bias other than what they did and said by way of known e mails to each other. 

 Again, to any rational walking and breathing human, regardless of their sexual preference, common sense indicates there was plenty of political bias but it is important for Feinstein, as a representative of the Democrats,  to white wash any evident political bias. 

For Horowitz to conclude bias would require a leap he remains unwilling to make because he found no physical evidence. He seems to have placed blinders on himself. Consequently, that is something everyone must conclude for themselves.

Personally,  I believe Horowitz needs to visit an optometrist and then go The library of Congress and withdraw a book on "Common Sense." I find Horowitz' inability to find political bias incomprehensible because even a blind person could conclude there was a litany of bias.

 You decide.
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You gotta love the California Legislature. (See 3 below.)
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Radical Democrats love to throw dirt. This begs the question where do they get all this dirt? I believe they get it from digging graves for others which generally turn out to be for themselves.

I suspect Barr will now become the object of their hatred of Trump as we near the coming of the Durham report sometime in the spring of next year per Barr's own view.

https://youtu.be/LRKFo0JmuBc 
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DORIS
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++You gotta love California. (See 3 below.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Radical Democrats strike me as loving to throw dirt on those with whom they disagree. That raises the question where they get all this dirt.  I have concluded they love digging graves and generally they wind up burying themselve1)
EMET IS PROFOUNDLY GRATEFUL TO PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP FOR HIS RECOGNITION OF THE SEVERITY OF THE PROBLEM OF ANTI-SEMITISM ON AMERICAN COLLEGE CAMPUSES AND HIS ATTEMPT TO DO SOMETHING TO SOLVE IT
(Washington, DC, December 11, 2019) EMET has long been championing the passage of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which would give Jewish students the same Constitutional protections as black, Hispanic, handicapped, and almost any other minority students receive on college campuses.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, but on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

However, we have been witnessing a rising problem of anti-Semitism within the United States. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews in America rose by more than a third last year, and amounted to 58 percent of all religious based hate crimes. The Anti-Defamation League’s most recent audit recorded 1,879 acts in 2018, with a dramatic increase in physics assaults. What is most disturbing is the upward trend of anti-Semitic incidents occurring at K through 12 classrooms and on college campuses.

For far too long, American Jewish students have been subjected to harassment, intimidation, and bullying by not only some of their peers, but by many of their professors on college campuses throughout the United States. Much of this harassment has been cloaked under what some erroneously think is the first amendment.

We, at EMET, cherish our first amendment rights and believe that our constitution is the most sacred document in the world. Having said that, educational institutions have a higher responsibility: to create an educational climate that is conducive to learning, which means that it must be free from harassment, intimidation, and bullying.

Hate speech might be protected speech, according to the Constitution, however it is not welcome on the college campus. What has been deemed as free speech in the town square, is not necessarily permissible speech on the campus. Just as, according to our Constitution, one is allowed to use the disgraceful “N” word on the town’s square, that is not permissible within a university setting. Similarly, one should not be allowed to call a Jewish student an “’f’ing Zionist pig“ because he wears a yarmulke on his head or a star of David around her neck,  when they walk across the campus, although it is protected speech in the town’s square.

The problem is particularly pronounced in many university classrooms, particularly in our nation’s Middle Eastern Studies programs, where professors have silenced the debate about Israel and have promoted a decisively and exclusively one-sided, anti-Israel agenda. There are countless stories from students across the country about professors who would not allow any student to speak from a pro-Israel perspective, who have silenced them, and have even used their grading system to penalize them, irrespective of how well they have researched, backed up, or footnoted their arguments.

We are not suggesting that criticism of Israeli-policy is not permissible speech, just as it is permissible to criticize any other country’s policy, but when it crosses the line into saying that Israel should not be allowed to exists, as a nation, that is anti-Semitism.

The anti-Semitism Awareness Act, sponsored in the Senate by Senator Tim Scott (Republican, South Carolina), Senator Marco Rubio (Republican, Florida), Johnny Isakson (Republican, Georgia), and Senator Bob Casey (Democrat, Pennsylvania), and in the House by Representative Doug Collins (Republican, Georgia), clearly responds to this issue. It does this by incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

Although this language has stalled in Congress, President Trump has done a courageous thing by making it into an executive order.

Says Sarah Stern, Founder and President of EMET, “We, at EMET remain profoundly grateful to President Trump for righting a terrible wrong in this nation. Over the past several years, we have witnessed the most egregious incidents of discrimination against Jewish students throughout America’s college classrooms and campuses. We know that what begins in the classroom and the campus ends up in the boardroom and in the corridors of Congress. This is a necessary corrective to the rapidly metastasizing cancer of anti-Semitism in our society. It is not only good for the Jews, it is good for America, as a whole, because what starts with the Jews never ends with just the Jews.”

About The Endowment for Middle East Truth
Founded in 2005, EMET’s mission is to educate policymakers in Washington and the general public about the importance of Israel to the United States in their common struggle against radical Islam. For more information, please visit www.emetonline.org. Follow EMET on Twitter and Facebook.
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2)

THE FBI AS THE TITANIC

Jonathan Turley responds as follows to Michael Horowitz’s finding that the Justice Department had enough evidence to meet the low threshold for beginning its investigation of the Trump campaign:
This is akin to reviewing the Titanic and saying that the captain was not unreasonable in starting the voyage. The question is what occurred when the icebergs began appearing. Horowitz says that investigative icebergs appeared rather early on, and the Justice Department not only failed to report that to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court but removed evidence that its investigation was on a collision course with the facts.
The analogy to the Titanic is clever. However, I’m sure that its captain had much better reason for starting his voyage than the Obama FBI did for undertaking its. Indeed, it may become clear from the work of John Durham that the FBI had insufficient reason, even judged by low “articulable facts” standard.
Turley is right, however, in saying that the most important issue is whether the Justice Department engaged in egregious misconduct as it carried out the investigation. If so, the other important issue is why it so egregiously misbehaved.
Turley lays out the misconduct Horowitz found:
From the outset, the Justice Department failed to interview several key individuals or vet critical information and sources in the Steele dossier. Justice Department officials insisted to Horowitz that they choose not to interview campaign officials because they were unsure if the campaign was compromised and did not want to tip off the Russians. However, the inspector general report says the Russians were directly told about the allegations repeatedly by then CIA Director John Brennan and, ultimately, President Obama. So the Russians were informed, but no one contacted the Trump campaign so as not to inform the Russians?
Meanwhile, the allegations quickly fell apart. Horowitz details how all of the evidence proved exculpatory of any collusion or conspiracy with the Russians.
Even worse, another agency that appears to be the CIA told the FBI that [Carter] Page was actually working for the agency in Russia as an “operational contact” gathering intelligence. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported it to the FISA court approving the secret investigation of Page. His claim to have worked with the federal government was widely dismissed.
Worse yet, Horowitz found that investigators and the Justice Department concluded there was no probable cause on Page to support its FISA investigation. That is when there was an intervention from the top of the FBI, ordering investigators to look at the Steele dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign instead.
Who told investigators to turn to the dossier? Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired over his conduct in the investigation after earlier internal investigations.
There’s more:
Horowitz also finds no sharing of information with FISA judges that undermined the credibility of the dossier or Christopher Steele himself. Surprisingly little effort was made to fully investigate the dossier when McCabe directed investigators to it, yet investigators soon learned that critical facts reported to the FISA court were false. FISA judges were told that a Yahoo News article was an independent corroboration of the Steele dossier, but Horowitz confirms that Steele was the source of that article. Therefore, Steele was used to corroborate Steele on allegations that were later deemed unfounded. . . .
The source relied on by Steele was presented as conveying damaging information on Trump. When this source was interviewed, he said he had no direct information and was conveying bar talk. He denied telling other details to Steele. This was all known to the Justice Department, but it still asked for warrant renewals from the FISA court without correcting the record or revealing exculpatory information discovered by investigators. That included the failure to tell the court that Page was working with the CIA. Finally, Horowitz found that an FBI lawyer doctored a critical email to hide the fact that Page was really working for us and not the Russians.
In litigation over whether the individuals who engaged in this course of conduct did so out of bias, the mere recitation of Horowitz’s facts would present a prima facie case that bias against the Trump campaign was at play. The burden would then shift to anyone claiming the absence of bias to explain what, if not bias, explains the behavior.
Clearly, the explanation can’t be simple incompetence. Withholding information from the FISA court and, indeed, making false statements to that body, isn’t incompetence. It’s lying and deceit.
A better explanation might be general overzealousness, as opposed to overzealousness motivated by a desire to derail Donald Trump, his campaign, and his presidency. General overzealousness is a common explanation for prosecutorial misconduct. Thus, this explanation passes the straight face test.
However, it fails to persuade in any instance where a highly improper act, or failure to act, was committed by a person who displayed animosity towards Trump or expressed fear of a Trump presidency. Except in unusual cases, egregious misconduct and direct evidence of bias or animosity towards the victim add up to the conclusion that the misconduct was motivated by bias or animosity.
Whatever his virtues, Michael Horowitz has no special expertise in exploring souls. Thus, while there is good reason to accept his findings as to what happened, there is no good reason to accept his conclusions as to motive — and certainly not when his conclusions are at odds with common sense.

2a)

The IG, Nunes and Schiff

The Horowitz report reveals the Democrat’s many distortions.

The Editorial Board

Monday’s Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s Trump -Russia probe is illuminating in many ways, not least the light it casts on the previous claims by politicians when they were telling the public about what they saw in classified documents. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff in particular has been exposed for distortions and falsehoods.

Americans first learned about the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process in a February 2018 memo from then House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes. The memo disclosed that the FBI had obtained surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court against former Trump aide Carter Page ; that the dossier written by ex-British spook Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign had formed an “essential” part of that application; and that the FBI failed to tell the FISA court about Mr. Steele’s political and media ties.

This was news, but Mr. Schiff and Democrats called the Nunes memo false and weeks later released a rival summary of the classified FISA evidence. Now the IG has settled the debate by confirming the details in the Nunes memo and exposing Mr. Schiff’s untruths.

The third line of the Schiff memo reads: “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the [FISA] process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” False. IG Michael Horowitz’s report lists the many and varied ways the FBI did all of those.

This includes overstating Mr. Steele’s credibility, omitting concerns about his sources, hiding exculpatory information, and even doctoring a document. The IG is concerned enough by “the extensive compliance failures” that he says he has begun “oversight” to assess FBI compliance “with policies that seek to protect the civil liberties of U.S. persons.”

The Schiff memo also claimed that “DOJ cited multiple sources to support the case for surveilling Page—but made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016 . . .” False again.

The Horowitz report says the FBI considered surveilling Mr. Page in August 2016 but decided it lacked probable cause. The bureau moved ahead with its FISA application after it received the Steele dossier on September 19, and the report says the dossier “played a central and essential role” in that decision. Mr. Horowitz says the part of the application detailing Mr. Page’s 2016 activities “relied entirely” on “information from Steele Reports.”

Mr. Schiff also claimed in 2018 that the Justice Department was straight with the FISA court about “Steele’s prior relationship with the FBI.” In fact, the IG says that the FBI “overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting.” And in three later applications the FBI did not tell the court that it had talked to professional contacts of Mr. Steele who said he had a “lack of self-awareness, poor judgment,” and that he “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”

Mr. Schiff claimed DOJ “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet” FISA court standards. But Mr. Horowitz makes clear that FBI officials didn’t even tell senior Justice officials about the concerns and irregularities of its Page application. Would the court have granted warrants if it knew the whole story? We don’t know. But the IG report makes clear that about the only thing the FBI ever corroborated in the Steele report was publicly available information.

Mr. Schiff had access to the same documents as Mr. Nunes. His decision to misrepresent the FBI’s actions shows he is willing to distort the truth for political purposes. He gets away with this because he has a willing echo chamber in the Washington press corps.


2b) Why Does This Impeachment Not Feel Like a Defeat for Trump? 

By Jim Geraghty
Posted By Ruth King
On paper, the speaker of the House and chairmen of the relevant committees announcing they will impeach the president should feel like a historic moment and a rarely equaled disgrace for the presidency. This day should feel momentous, grim, and solemn. In this presidency, it feels like “Tuesday.”

On paper, the impeachment hearings did everything House Democrats wanted them to do. While some of the key testimony was second-hand, the witnesses painted an ugly picture of the administration and president, focused on far fetched tales of a lost server and obsessed with the Bidens and not seeming to give a fig about what the military aid meant to Ukraine. The major television networks covered the hearings live. The objections of House Republicans were largely ridiculed by the media. The GOP was unable to introduce witnesses to interrupt the Democrats’ narrative or divert attention to the Bidens or other topics.

And yet the polling is about where it was at the start of October. As of this writing, in the FiveThirtyEight aggregation, 47.1 percent support removing the president, and 44 percent don’t support removal. That’s not good for the White House, but that’s nowhere near where Democrats wanted it to be. There’s nothing resembling the bipartisan consensus that Democrats had previously called a prerequisite for moving forward with the removal of a president. In fact, impeachment could well be hurting Democrats’ chances in key swing states. A recent survey found removal is opposed by 50.8 percent of voters in Michigan, 52.2 percent of voters in Pennsylvania, and 57.9 percent of voters in Wisconsin. Whether or not you think the hearings were persuasive, the evidence suggests they didn’t persuade many people who didn’t already support impeachment.

The hearings didn’t seem to change minds in the House of Representatives, either. So far there is no indication that any House Republican is considering voting to impeach. There are murmurs of frustration and discontent among moderate House Democrats. Most House Democrats will fall in line, probably. But at the end of October, 232 House Democrats voted to start the inquiry. The articles are unlikely to get that many votes, in part because of the death of Elijah Cummings and the resignation of Katie Hill. The House currently has only 233 Democrats. The only drama in the upcoming House vote will be if any Democrats join the two who voted against starting the inquiry — Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — or if either man changes his mind.

Also, what happened to all of those charges against Trump? For the past few weeks, we’ve heard many Democrats insist that Trump’s actions constituted bribery, extortion, violation of campaign finance laws, and witness intimidation. All of that got dropped, and the articles of impeachment cover the umbrella term “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.”

After all of this, there’s nothing referring to Trump’s actions in the Mueller report. Apparently the evidence of obstruction of justice laid out by the special counsel just didn’t warrant impeachment.

Finally, apparently President Trump is such an anti-Constitutional menace that the freedom and fairness of future elections cannot be guaranteed unless he is removed . . . and he is also the kind of man that House Democrats can reach a deal with on trade deals and family leave. Both of those agreements are much bigger surprises than the decision on the impeachment articles.
Impeachment is turning into a historic blip.

2c) The ‘Vindication’ of James Comey

The former FBI director should be apologizing to Carter Page.

By William McGurn

Will James Comey demand another apology?
The former Federal Bureau of Investigation director has always been at his most natural when most aggrieved. Within hours of the release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report Monday, Mr. Comey had an op-ed up at the the Washington Post.
In a tweet touting his piece, Mr. Comey put it this way: “So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America.”
This comes as no surprise to anyone who remembers when an earlier inspector general report called him “insubordinate” for having “intentionally concealed” from his Justice Department bosses his plans for a press conference exonerating Hillary Clinton of criminal wrongdoing over her use of a private email server to send classified material.
Mr. Comey’s answer that time? An op-ed in the New York Times under the headline, “This Report Says I Was Wrong. But That’s Good for the F.B.I.”
Then, in August 2019, Mr. Horowitz’s office released still another report, this one dealing with Mr. Comey’s leaking of memos detailing confidential conversations he’d had with President Trump. In addition to highlighting Mr. Comey’s dishonesty toward the FBI agents dispatched to his home to retrieve the memos, the inspector general scored Mr. Comey for setting “a dangerous example” for the bureau. Later Mr. Horowitz testified that he’d recommended Mr. Comey be prosecuted.
How did Mr. Comey respond? By ignoring the larger indictment of his FBI leadership and focusing only on Mr. Horowitz’s finding that they’d unearthed no evidence Mr. Comey had leaked classified information. “I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a ‘sorry we lied about you’ would be nice,” Mr. Comey tweeted.
So another Comey tweet demanding yet another apology is entirely likely. And it points to the low bar Mr. Comey has now set for America’s most prestigious law enforcement agency: Unless the conduct is criminal, anything goes.
In practice this means overlooking a great deal of ugly behavior. The following, culled from Mr. Horowitz’s new report, is long but by no means exhaustive:
• Even though Christopher Steele’s dossier was full of material Mr. Comey himself characterized as “salacious and unverified,” it played a “central and essential role” in the bureau’s decision to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.• The FBI failed to inform Justice of “significant information that was available” but “was inconsistent with, or undercut,” claims in the FISA applications that Mr. Page was “an agent of a foreign power.”
• The FBI ignored various warnings about Mr. Steele’s political bias, and it took him at his word when he falsely told agents he wasn’t the source for a Yahoo News article the FBI would cite in its application to the court.
• Overall, the report identifies “at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications”—for which investigators received no “satisfactory answers.”
• The FBI also didn’t inform the FISA court that Mr. Page had served as a Central Intelligence Agency source and received a “positive assessment” for candor from the agency.
• Mr. Comey pushed to include Mr. Steele’s dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment even though the CIA “expressed concern about the lack of vetting.”
• An FBI lawyer altered an email he’d received confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source. After he changed it to read “not a source,” the email was then used to help renew the FISA warrant on Mr. Page.
Mr. Horowitz lays the blame at the top: “We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny. We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the [investigation’s] chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed.”
Mr. Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” relates how as FBI director he kept on his desk a copy of the October 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover asking for permission to wiretap Martin Luther King. He claims he did so to help ensure the bureau would never forget how a “legitimate counterintelligence mission . . . morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack.”
Mr. Horowitz’s findings about what was done under Mr. Comey’s leadership suggest there’s still a need for such a reminder. But maybe it should be a copy of the FISA applications for Carter Page the FBI sent to the court with false, misleading and incomplete information—and Mr. Comey’s signature.
2d)

Schiff Threatens Press Freedom

When the surveillance state exposes a journalist and his sources, there’s an instant chilling effect.

By 
John Solomon

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the bible for agents, has long recognized that journalists, the clergy and lawyers deserve special protections because of the constitutional implications of investigating their work. Penitents who confess to a priest, sources who provide confidential information to a reporter, and clients who seek advice from counsel are assumed to be protected by a high bar of privacy, which must be weighed against the state’s interests in investigating matters or subpoenaing records. Judges and members of Congress also fall into a special FBI category because of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
The FBI and Justice Department have therefore created specific rules governing agents’ actions involving special-circumstances professionals, which include high-level approval and review. There are also special rules for subpoenaing journalists.
If the executive branch, and by extension the courts that enforce these privacy protections, observe the need for such sensitivity, it seems reasonable that Congress should have similar guardrails ensuring that the powers of the state are equally and fairly applied.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff apparently doesn’t see things that way. His committee secretly authorized subpoenas to AT&T earlier this year for the phone records of President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and an associate. He then arbitrarily extracted information about certain private calls and made them public.
Many of the calls Mr. Schiff chose to publicize fell into the special-circumstances categories: a fellow member of Congress ( Rep. Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican), two lawyers (Mr. Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow ) and a journalist (me).
More alarming, the released call records involve figures who have sometimes criticized or clashed with Mr. Schiff. I wrote a story raising questions about his contacts with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a key figure in the Russia probe, that brought the California Democrat unwelcome scrutiny. Mr. Nunes has been one of Mr. Schiff’s main Republican antagonists, helping to prove that the exaggerated claims of Trump-Russia election collusion were unsubstantiated. Messrs. Sekulow and Giuliani represent Mr. Trump, who is Mr. Schiff’s impeachment target.
Mr. Schiff’s actions in obtaining and publicizing private phone records trampled the attorney-client privilege of Mr. Trump and his lawyers. It intruded on my First Amendment rights to interview and contact figures like Mr. Giuliani and the Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas without fear of having the dates, times and length of private conversation disclosed to the public.
Contrary to Mr. Schiff’s defense that he was simply serving the investigative interest of Congress, the release of the phone records served much more to punish people whose work Mr. Schiff found antagonistic than to fulfill an oversight purpose. And it served Congress poorly because it spread false insinuations. Mr. Schiff’s report suggested, for instance, that Mr. Giuliani called the White House to talk to the Office of Management and Budget, implying he might have been trying to help Mr. Trump withhold aid to Ukraine as Democrats allege. The White House says that claim is wrong; the number was a generic phone entry point and no one in OMB talked to Mr. Giuliani.
Likewise, Mr. Schiff published call records between Mr. Giuliani and me and suggested they involved my Ukraine stories. Many contacts I had with Mr. Giuliani involved interviews on the Mueller report and its aftermath or efforts to invite the president’s lawyer on the Hill’s TV show, which I supervised.
Mr. Schiff’s team has tried to minimize the conduct because he never subpoenaed my phone records directly but extracted them from others’ call records. That defense is laughable. Once a journalist and his calls are made public through the powers of the surveillance state, there is an instant chilling effect on press freedom.
I know this firsthand. In 2001 and 2002, when I was a reporter for the Associated Press, the Justice Department obtained my home phone records and the FBI illegally seized my mail without a warrant in an effort to unmask my sources on federal corruption and stop publication of a story about the government’s counterterrorism failures before 9/11. In the end the FBI returned my reporting records, apologized to me privately, and announced new rules to avoid a repeat for other journalists.
Yet by that time many of my longtime sources had told me they had chosen not to contact me for fear of being detected. Others would only meet in person, concerned that my phones were wiretapped.
Similarly, in the days since Mr. Schiff’s phone-record release, I have had people who openly talked to me on the phone this year suddenly ask to communicate only by encrypted apps. They don’t want their names splashed in the next congressional report. And they fear a bipartisan open season on phone records of political opponents in the future.
Rep. Mike Turner (R., Ohio), a member of the Intelligence Committee, tells me he’s drafting legislation to put guardrails on future congressional subpoenas for phone records. That’s a good start, but more needs to be done sooner.
Mr. Schiff appears to assume that Congress enjoys unlimited investigative powers under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause. He does not. I recommend the chairman examine the record in McSurely v. McClellan, a two-decade legal battle that began in 1967 and pitted a powerful committee chairman against a liberal activist couple in Kentucky. It is widely regarded—along with the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s—as one of most egregious episodes of misconduct in the modern history of congressional oversight.
The judges wrote that their decision “can only stand as a small reaffirmation of the proposition that there are bounds to the interference that citizens must tolerate from the agents of their government—even when such agents invoke the mighty shield of the Constitution and claim official purpose to their conduct.” That principle is due for another affirmation.
Mr. Solomon is an investigative journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Washington Post, “60 Minutes” and the Hill, among others
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3) CALIFORNIA'S Legislative Year  (Which Closed on Friday)
Here are some of the highlights of the session - get ready!!
Passed Cap-n-Trade Tax which will increase gas $0.63 to $0.93 cents a 
gallon and the taxes that go with it.
Proposed increase on a new tax every residence will pay for tap water.
Law to release any lifer (murder, rape , child molestation, etc.) who is 60 
years old and has already spent 25 years in prison!  Charles Manson would 
have qualified if he just waited a few months before dying; and the Melendez 
brothers that murdered their parents could be released in about 12 years.
* A new $ 50 charge on all residents living in a mobile home parks to 
address “living condition enforcement” in those parks.
Requires Tesla to either unionize with the United Auto Workers Union, or 
forfeit State incentives to buy their electric cars. (Watch out solar companies...
You may be  next.)
*  Reduce from a felony to a misdemeanor  the purposeful intent to transmit 
the AIDS virus to a unknowing partner
Give preferential treatment to prisoners convicted of serious crimes that 
are less than 25 years old because their brains are not mature enough to 
understand right from wrong. 
A bill to require our true sex be omitted from drivers licenses? 
Free legal services for illegal immigrants.
Establish safe "injection zones" run by government to oversee people injecting heroin
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