‘We intend to find out how deep the Deep State roots go in their effort to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump…’
Victoria Nuland / IMAGE: RT America via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The aftermath of the Mueller investigation has led to a flurry of activity for government-accountability guardians Judicial Watch.
On Friday, Judicial Watch said in a press release that it was examining another piece of the puzzle: The sources that ex-British spy Christopher Steele used to compile and disseminate fraudulent accusations in his infamous dossier for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
While some believe the Kremlin itself may have been behind the misinformation, others point to the even more sinister possibility that it was generated by partisans within the U.S.’s own intelligence apparatus.
“We intend to find out how deep the Deep State roots go in their effort to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It currently appears to be an Obama administration no-holds-barred attempt to clear the path for Hillary Clinton.”
The latest lawsuit seeks correspondence between Obama-era Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and a long list of likely role-players in the anti-Trump smear campaign that was driven by left-wing opposition-research firm Fusion GPS.
Steele’s reports for Fusion were subsequently funneled through back channels to the FBI, which used them as the basis to launch an investigation into Trump and eavesdrop on his campaign under false pretenses.
“Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine,” said a 2018 Washington Examiner column by Byron York. “These were written for a private client but shared widely within the State Department and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis.”
Nuland acknowledged that she shared Steele’s information with the FBI and green-lighted their initial meetings.
Former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tells that Christopher Steele, author of the Russia dossier, shared similar information with the State Department: pic.twitter.com/4QS32hAlQq
Judicial Watch seemed to suggest that Nuland’s vouching for Steele, despite his many conflicts of interest, helped lead the FBI to determine that he was a credible source of information.
A previous FOIA lawsuit revealed that the Obama administration passed on classified documents in the “Russiagate” conspiracy to several anti-Trump senators.
“Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits have already shown the Obama State Department was corrupted to target President Trump,” Fitton said.
The nonprofit watchdog also released 339 pages of redacted correspondence involving Bruce and Nellie Ohr, who served as intermediaries between Fusion and the FBI after Steele was terminated by the agency for leaking classified information.
‘Don’t just see me as some wealthy guy, defending the free market. Instead see me as the son of a mother who dropped out of school in eighth grade…’
Foster Friess / IMAGE: Horatio Alger Association via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Conservative investor Foster Friess and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, may have a lot to discuss if the congresswoman accepts Friess’s dinner invitation.
In an opinion piece published Thursday in USA Today, Friess said he wrote to the 29-year-old former bartender to invite her to be a guest at Friday’s Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans induction ceremony.
It honors those who came from humble beginnings and were able to translate it, through their own efforts, into a degree of eminence or success—i.e., the “American Dream.”
Among the nonpartisan association’s past member–honorees, Friess noted, were television personality Oprah Winfrey, former President Ronald Reagan, poet Maya Angelou and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Friess managed to transcend his own lot coming from a high-school-educated father who worked as a cattle-dealer and a mother with an seventh-grade education who helped her family pick cotton, according to his online biography. But he overcame early adversity to found an investment firm managing billions in assets.
While noting the association’s efforts to provide scholarships for disadvantaged youths, Friess called out AOC’s recent attacks on a free market economy, both with her policies—like the Green New Deal—and in her rhetoric.
In a March speech at the South by Southwest festival, she said capitalism was “irredeemable,” according to The Hill.
“Capitalism is an ideology of capital—the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” she said, adding that the success of one came at considerable expense to other people and to the environment.
But in his op-ed, Friess countered that it was simply the vehicle for opportunity through which individuals determined their own outcome.
“In achieving the American dream, ‘Income Inequality’ is an unavoidable result,” he said. “It’s created by the stunning success of companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and their wealth creation should be applauded, not cursed. Why scorn their success?”
But the alternative, Friess said, was to punish success and de-incentivize the work needed to attain it.
“Socialism is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior,” he said. “It has one critical defect: it ignores incentives. The ‘free’ stuff government offers comes with a price.”
Friess said affluent people, rather than stepping on the backs of the poor, were in the best position to elevate others: “The spectacular American economy derives from a government which encourages private initiatives that achieve the wealth.”
By contrast, government-managed wealth-redistribution only created greater bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption—as was evident in existing healthcare programs.
“In every other sector of the economy, when you allow the free market to work, prices drop and access improves,” Friess said.
Although some have questioned whether Ocasio–Cortez’s background was as humble as she claims—having grown up in the middle-class, suburban neighborhood of Yorktown Heights and attended the costly, private Boston College—Friess appealed to their common connection as individuals who knew the extremes of poverty and success.
“When we meet, I hope you will sense that I love this country as much as you do,” he said. “Don’t just see me as some wealthy guy, defending the free market. Instead see me as the son of a mother who dropped out of school in eighth grade or the $800 I had when I started my career.”
‘How sad is it that base politics and hatred have been allowed to creep into even this sphere of our national activity?’
Mike Pompeo / IMAGE: CBS This Morning via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The foundation honoring a journalist beheaded by ISIS was taken hostage this week by deranged left-wing media–activist, who demanded retraction of a reward to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation was set to commit a heinous act of bipartisanship by recognizing the achievements of America’s top diplomat in freeing political prisoners.
Most notably, that included the release of three hostages last May from North Korea—an accomplishment that Pompeo cited last September as his greatest highlight to date after taking over for Rex Tillerson in April 2018.
In October, Pompeo also helped secure the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson from Turkey after threatening Ankara with sanctions.
In addition to the Trump State Department’s global hostage-freeing efforts, the foundation noted its appointment of a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, the Washington Examiner reported.
But after pressure from media partners—among whom CNN figured prominently—it rescinded Pompeo’s award and gave it instead to Brett McGurk, the Obama-appointed former special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition.
In his December resignation, McGurk made a flashy point of criticizing President Donald Trump after Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from Syria, citing the near eradication of ISIS.
The president announced last month that the terrorist group was “100 percent” defeated with the last of its caliphates captured or dispersed.
The foundation said McGurk had assisted with the release of prisoners from Iran, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, another of the night’s honorees.
The move to withdraw Pompeo’s award and dis-invite him from the event followed boycott threats from the media, reportedly including notoriously biased CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour, who was set to be the keynote speaker.
Tables for the fundraising banquet cost between $5,000 and $50,000. The foundation’s main functions are providing grants and education programs in journalism schools, as well as publishing a journalism safety guide and advocating for release of hostages.
In a letter to Diane Foley, the mother of slain journalist Jim Foley, Pompeo detailed his successes in freeing hostages and lamented the partisan culture consuming mainstream media that would pit them against recognizing those achievements.
“How sad is it that base politics and hatred have been allowed to creep into even this sphere of our national activity?” Pompeo wrote.
“The safe recovery of Americans held hostage overseas should be beyond politics and must enjoy the support of all Americans. I regret that pressure of such a cynical and abominable nature was brought to bear,” he added.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The controversy over Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam‘s use of blackface and likely public deception—along with scandals by his top two successors, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring—has ended.
Or so decreed The New York Times.
In a recent postmortem analysis, a Times article puzzled over the fact that the defiant governor seemed to have outlasted any semblance of political resistance.
“It just went poof,” said the article, quoting a librarian that the journalist found sitting in a Richmond coffeehouse last week. “It’s like it never happened.”
The public Instagram feed of said librarian, Natalie Draper, leaves little mystery, though, about her own left-skewing political biases.
In fact, the shoddy reporting in the Times article may help to explain perfectly why the repulsive conduct of Virginia Democrats, antithetical to many of the Left’s self-declared core values, has fallen off the national radar.
It’s because the media tasked with reporting on it has willed it to vanish, with the guilty party more than happy to acquiesce.
The article quoted Democratic strategist Ben Tribbet, who said Northam’s refusal to accept accountability was the new normal in his party’s mindset.
“Don’t apologize, move on and everybody will talk about something else next week,” Tribbett said. “Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong over the last 100 years.”
Contrary to Tribbet’s claims, his party has been deploying the same strategy for at least half a century, since it helped Sen. Edward Kennedy ride out the negligent manslaughter of his young, female associate, Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kopechne’s 1969 drowning death at Chappaquiddick didn’t hinder the liberal Massachusetts icon from a lengthy Senate career and a bid for the presidency 11 years later.
The partisan double-standard again surfaced in the late 1990s, during the Bill Clinton impeachment, when the president’s sexual misconduct—and subsequent perjury—proved more of a political liability for Republicans.
But according to the Times version of events, it was President Donald Trump who initiated the political strategy of deflecting and stonewalling with his adamant insistence that he had not colluded with Russia.
Although Trump’s account was subsequently validated by the independent Mueller Report and congressional investigations, it flew counter to two years’ worth of Pulitzer-winning coverage from the leftist newspaper.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post also shilled for Northam and his stooges. Early in the developing scandal, it released a dubiously lopsided public opinion poll that disproportionately sampled Democrats, concluding that many voters—including a majority of blacks in the state—supported the embattled executives.
In its eulogy of the Northam scandal, the Times wrote:
“Some say the whole mess was so exhausting and embarrassing that by the time the Legislature adjourned Feb. 24, the outrage had burned itself out. Others point to polls that showed Virginia voters were considerably less hungry for resignations than their representatives were. Some political observers mused about more fundamental changes to the life span of scandal, describing President Donald Trump’s approach to bad press as if it were a revolutionary medical breakthrough.”
A Political Change of Course
Mark Warner/Photo by New America (CC)
On Monday, sensing political fallout had been neutralized, Virginia’s most senior Democratic politician, Sen. Mark Warner, also hopped on the absolution bandwagon.
Warner, who firmly said in February that Northam should step down, has since qualified that demand and now expresses total confidence in the governor.
“He’s been very clear that he’s going to continue his term, and I hope he can do so successfully,” Warner told the RichmondTimes–Dispatch.
“I think he’s going to be more successful when he lays out how he’s going to try to bring about a healing process here in Virginia,” Warner added.
Quoting a Democratic state legislator, the Times asserted that voters were eager to “move on” from the scandal. “They want positive things to happen, they’re concerned about the elections,” Del. Betsy Carr said.
But another Democrat it interviewed—in order to get both sides of the story, naturally—said that there needs to be more of a public reckoning.
“Winning is important,” said Taikein Cooper, chairman of the Prince Edward County Democratic Party, “but we also have to have some morals.”
Pandering and Extortion
Ralph Northam / IMAGE: Face the Nation via Youtube
Rather than accepting personal responsibility, to Northam and the Democrats, penance for the blasphemously un-woke conduct likely means three years of pandering to a radical leftist agenda—despite the governor’s having run as a moderate while, ironically, painting Republican opponent Ed Gillespie as a racist.
Northam acknowledged that part of his rehabilitation involved reading black liberation literature such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.”
While some of the demands related directly to race-based issues—such as adding millions in funding to the state’s five historically black universities—others tied into things like environmental issues.
Another VBP demand was for the controversial ratification of the feminist/pro-abortionist-driven Equal Rights Amendment.
Prior to his racial controversy, Northam, a former pediatrician, already had generated negative headlines by embracing third-trimester, partial-birth abortions.
The governor shockingly said that even after birth it might be OK in some cases to kill an infant. However, Virginia Democrats’ infanticide bill was rejected by the Republican-led legislature.
Northam has made additional overtures pandering to some of the VBP radicals’ conditions, such as restoring voting rights of more than 10,000 convicted felons—which followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe.
He also acceded to the VBP’s demands by vetoing a bill to fund additional school resource officers—following in the footsteps of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who said school discipline disproportionately harmed students of color.
Should Northam, who is constitutionally limited to a single term as governor, pursue the more radical agenda items, there may be political fallout in this November’s elections of the Virginia General Assembly.
Currently, “Democrats have a chance to take back power in at least one chamber of the Legislature,” New York Times rosily said in its spin piece.
“That will be hard enough now, given the bales of fodder Republicans now have for attack ads,” said the Times. “But the idea of trying to raise money and hold rallies while spurning the three highest officeholders in the state came to be seen by many Democrats as just a needless handicap.”
Unless, of course, principles are a thing.
Hamstrung Opposition?
Justin Fairfax / IMAGE: WTVR CBS 6 via Youtube
Should the state’s top three Democrats all have been ousted by their scandals, the governorship would have fallen into the hands of Kirk Cox, the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.
However, some were quick to note Cox’s own tenuous grip on power. His GOP majority followed a contentious recount of one race that was solved by drawing a name randomly from a bowl.
In that race, Democrat Shelly Simonds had initially been declared the victor by a single vote prior to the challenge by Republican incumbent David Yancey.
Facing the transfer of the state’s top office into Republican hands under such extraordinary circumstances—not to mention the inevitable muckraking it would entail into his own background and that of other GOP legislators—Cox quickly ruled out a House effort to remove Northam from office over the blackface scandal.
“I think groups are struggling with, ‘What do we do?'” Cox told the Times. “‘What do we do about inviting him? Do we want him the centerpiece of an announcement?’”
Cox said a recent bipartisan bill-signing was the first time he had spoken with the governor since February. “It’s going to be pretty hard to say we’re just going to have a normal governorship for the next three years.”
Likewise, although Cox and others in the House have called for public hearings on the lieutenant governor over a pair of credible rape allegations, Fairfax has defiantly pushed back.
Despite the obvious parallels between his case and last year’s hearing for then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Fairfax, who is black, invoked racial rhetoric by likening the accusations to a public lynching.
Rather, Fairfax has insisted that any investigation happen on his exclusive terms, recently releasing a polygraph test through his attorney that he claimed proved he was telling the truth.
But regardless of whether state officials attempt to hold the leaders to account, Republicans can rest assured that the scandals will resurface in next year’s presidential election.
A few days into the scandal President Donald Trump tweeted his condemnation, expressing confidence that the corruption would help put the once-conservative state back into the red category.
Democrat Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia just stated, “I believe that I am not either of the people in that photo.” This was 24 hours after apologizing for appearing in the picture and after making the most horrible statement on “super” late term abortion. Unforgivable!
‘We have turned over every stone we could find, and we’ve found much more that will keep us busy that’s unrelated to a campaign in the 2016 election…’
Richard Burr/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Richard Burr, R-NC, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday that he hopes his committee’s investigation will help the recently submitted Mueller Report to conclusively resolve any lingering questions of Russian collusion with the Donald Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, he hinted that the investigation might raise even more new questions about Russian meddling.
“We have turned over every stone we could find, and we’ve found much more that will keep us busy that’s unrelated to a campaign in the 2016 election,” Burr said in a speech at Duke University, reported WRAL.
The Senate Intelligence probe is expected to conclude in August. Burr said it had already interviewed more than 200 people on three continents, producing 30,000 pages of notes, and had reviewed more than 400,000 documents.
“We’re not going to allow anything in our report that doesn’t have facts to back it up,” he said.
Burr said that a comparison between the two separate reports should help ensure there isn’t “any room for anybody to make these wild accusations about collusion.”
The comments come shortly after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, pledged last week to dig deeper into the “other side” of the story: whether the FBI and other Obama-era intelligence agencies may have colluded with the campaign of Hillary Clinton to absolve her of a criminal investigation while helping to spread false innuendo about Trump and Russia.
Meanwhile, Burr’s and Graham’s House counterparts—Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, have continued to cling to the Trump collusion myth despite indications that the Mueller Report said otherwise.
After Attorney General William Barr rejected a Tuesday deadline for providing them with a full, unredacted copy of the report, they hinted that they might issue subpoenas to get it. Barr has offered to release the full report—after legally mandated redactions are made—later this month and to discuss it before Congress in early May.
On both sides of the political schism, one thing is undisputed: Russians did indeed attempt to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, whether to back a particular candidate or simply to sow discord and division.
Burr said the Senate Intelligence investigation was focused on ensuring that “Russia doesn’t have its hooks in anybody.”
Surprisingly, he also seemed to side with recent comments from Facebook and Twitter about the need to more thoroughly regulate free speech online in order to protect it.
As the social-media juggernauts have ratcheted up their censorship efforts, citing the need to safeguard the public against fake news and “hate speech,” they often have been criticized for their political bias and targeting of legitimate conservative opinions or organizations.
But Burr suggested that Vladimir Putin’s government may have weaponized our constitutionally protected cornerstone of democracy against us in order to undermine the electoral process.
“What Russia proved to us is that the First Amendment is a valuable tool to have,” he said, “and that it’s very dangerous if, in fact, people don’t police it and understand fact from fiction.”
He ‘is now thinking who is our best chance in this environment to win, and I think he believes, in his mind, it’s him…’
Terry McAuliffe/Photo by sharedferret (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Very few Democrats have been clamoring for another white, male candidate with close ties to the Clintons.
Very few centrists and conservatives have lamented the lack of demonstrably corrupt, deep-state partisans masquerading as moderates.
Nonetheless, Terry McAuliffe—the bundler known for renting the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom to Chinese donors during the Bill Clinton era, who went on to become chair of the Democratic National Committee and governor of Virginia—sees his return to Pennsylvania Avenue in the tea leaves.
CNN reported that McAuliffe has been telling political allies he planned to make a decision by late March and potentially announce a run in April.
“I get the sense that he is moving closer,” John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor and McAuliffe friend, told CNN.
McAuliffe spokesperson Crystal Carson said he was “seriously considering” a run.
To McAuliffe’s credit, in the crowded field of Democrats packed with socialist-sympathizing radicals—among them, six senators who co-sponsored the recently defeated Green New Deal bill—he might, in fact, be one of the more moderate options.
Likewise, despite having played a central role in the trading of nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign funds—what some call the biggest scandal in modern history (ever to be completely ignored and forgotten by the liberal media)—McAuliffe’s uncanny ability to slime his way through unscathed makes him, technically speaking, one of the more “ethical” DNC chairs and Virginia Democrats in recent memory.
Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook
Both may be a testament to just how low the bar is on the Left.
Biden, who currently leads the pack of prospective candidates, has more name recognition and would be likely to overshadow McAuliffe by appealing to the same demographic for support.
But McAuliffe’s surrogates downplayed the similarities between the two.
“It is still going to be on his mind,” Morgan said, “but I got the impression that he has moved past that objection and is now thinking who is our best chance in this environment to win—and I think he believes, in his mind, it’s him, a pro-business Democrat.”
Like Biden, McAuliffe’s extensive public record as a career swamp-dweller may be a blessing and a curse.
Among the past business experiences he so highly touts was a failed auto-making endeavor with Hillary Clinton‘s brother, Tony Rodham.
The pair attempted to exploit Obama-era tax subsidies for green enterprises by launching the electric car company GreenTech.
However, the number of investigations into the company may well have eclipsed the number of cars it produced, with the group Watchdog.org leading the way.
Central among the charges was that GreenTech was a shell organization being used to grant permanent-residency visas to Chinese investors.
McAuliffe bailed on the company in late 2012 while gearing up for his gubernatorial run. GreenTech filed for bankruptcy last year, having already bilked its investors of millions of dollars.
McAuliffe also was instrumental in promoting voter fraud in Virginia—calling on precincts to refuse to allow watchdog groups to audit the voter rolls where suspected illegal immigrants were present.
He also defied the state legislature and supreme court to unilaterally restore voting rights to 200,000 felons in the state, and he was instrumental in establishing the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Eric Holder, which has pushed courts to reverse red-state legislative maps and gerrymander in favor of Democrats.
‘It’s a young, diverse class, stocked with a bunch of my campaign and administration alums…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In merely three months, new Democratic members of Congress have made the dialogue on Capitol Hill more hostile, wedge-based and radical.
They have encouraged profanity and threatened removal of the president with no evidentiary basis.
They have taken identity politics to a new level, launching anti-Semitic attacks into the Twittersphere and then claiming those who criticize them are Islamophobic.
They have forced mainstream Democrats—many from vulnerable, conservative districts—to take a position on a vastly unrealistic, irresponsible and widely mocked proposal to spend $93 trillion on socialism-friendly environmental initiatives.
Now, their Papa Bear, former President Barack Obama, has acknowledged he couldn’t be happier.
Obama met with the more than 60 freshman Democrats on March 25 at an event organized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, reported Newsweek.
According to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.—whose outrageous conduct included her widely condemned vow to “impeach the motherf***er” in reference to President Donald Trump—Obama made a point of expressing his approval.
.@BarackObama met with us new members of Congress and we had a thoughtful discussion about serving our country. The best part was when he looked straight at me and said, “I’m proud of you.” pic.twitter.com/cPDOth0B5i
Meanwhile, Obama tweeted about the meetup: “It’s a young, diverse class, stocked with a bunch of my campaign and administration alums who’ve taken the torch. This group is going to be driving progress for a long time to come.”
But he also cautioned the rookie representatives about passing radical proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All without a logistical support plan.
“He said we shouldn’t be afraid of big, bold ideas—but also need to think in the nitty-gritty about how those big, bold ideas will work and how you pay for them,” said an unnamed source who was present.
Obama’s own rollout of the massive Affordable Care Act, despite easy passage by the Democrat-led Congress in 2009, proved to be an unmitigated disaster, forcing him to violate the law itself through executive fiat by refusing to enforce many of the required deadlines.
It also proved politically costly as a red wave swept the 2010 midterms.
Campaigning on repeal of the radical policy, the GOP netted 63 new congressional seats—the biggest turnover in modern political history—giving them control of the House until Democrats retook it last year.
‘I’m all about protecting your privacy, but this is not about privacy…’
Nellie Ohr / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The release of congressional testimony from former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr confirmed that she actively courted the company’s founder, Glenn Simpson, to hire her for work “analyzing”—and perhaps inventing—ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In admitting to Congress that she reached out to Simpson in late 2015, Ohr opened the door to speculation that Obama’s intelligence agencies at the very least sought secret access to biased opposition-research commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Some even suggest that the CIA, under disgraced ex-Director John Brennan, may have planted the phony Trump innuendo through Ohr and used Fusion to launder the information before spreading it to the FBI and national media outlets.
Whatever the case, the transcripts recently released by ranking House Judiciary member Doug Collins, R-Ga., reveal a need for deeper investigation and declassification to expose a network of corruption that exploited public trust in government and law-enforcement for political purposes, while leveraging the sacred institution of marriage to help conceal its crimes.
Both Ohr and her husband, Bruce—at the time a top Department of Justice official—ultimately became conduits in the smear effort to link Russia with President Donald Trump using the Fusion-compiled Steele Dossier.
The salacious, questionably-sourced information supplied by the dossier triggered several costly and protracted investigations of Trump, both in the lead-up to and aftermath of the November 2016 presidential election.
Disregarding the recent conclusions of the Mueller Report, powerful House Democrats even now have signaled that they intend to continue probing the debunked claims of collusion between the U.S. president and the Kremlin.
Conflicts of Interest
Together, the Ohrs ensured that the unvetted slander from British ex-spy Christopher Steele had a direct pipeline into the hands of anti-Trump operatives working in the highest reaches of the FBI.
Bruce Ohr, Fox News screen shot (YouTube)
The agency then used Steele’s dubious research to justify an investigation into the Trump campaign and as the basis for warrant applications to the secretive FISA court, which authorized it to wiretap and covertly monitor the Trump campaign.
The Ohrs—despite the obvious, and potentially illegal, conflicts of interest in their overlapping Russia work—were able to use their marriage as legal cover when testifying at separate congressional hearings last year.
In his congressional testimony, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr insinuated that it was the nature of the research—i.e. the shocking claims against Trump—that compelled the couple to breach protocol in delivering thumb drives of Fusion files to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
However, Nellie Ohr’s testimony cast doubt on that and painted a different picture of the motives behind the exchange.
She claimed that she had reached out to Fusion around September 2015, likely touting her inside track to the Justice Department to secure the lucrative position. Both Simpson and Steele had previously worked with her husband in his capacity as a DOJ prosecutor.
“I read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name,” Nellie Ohr said. “I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities.”
Ohr said her Fusion projects involved working about 30 hours a week from home, using open online sources to compile her research. She was paid $55 an hour for her efforts—which if extended to a full 40-hour work week would have put her compensation in the six-figure range.
Unusual Ties
While Ohr confirmed her husband’s testimony that he was professionally acquainted with Simpson, and that Simpson was aware when she applied of her ties to the Justice Department, Ohr downplayed the prior relationship when directly asked by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Glenn Simpson & Christopher Steele (screen shot: PBS NewsHour/Youtube)
She said she didn’t know if Simpson even made the connection initially.
“I had been at a conference that he was at,” Ohr said. “I don’t recall directly talking with him at that conference, and I don’t know whether he knew who, you know, who I was other than the fact that I attended that conference.”
If he didn’t realize who Nellie Ohr was, though, hiring her for her Russian expertise at the time would have been a strange investment.
Simpson already had been making ripples with Fusion GPS at the time of Ohr’s hiring—but not on matters remotely related to Russia.
A month earlier, his firm had led Planned Parenthood’s spin campaign to defuse damaging undercover sting videos by the conservative Center for Medical Progress, which allegedly showed abortionists conducting partial-birth abortions and attempting to sell aborted fetuses.
Even Simpson’s former newspaper, the Wall Street Journal viewed Fusion as more of a leftist lobbying and public-relations venture than as the “independent research firm” that some claimed.
Marital Privilege
Similar to her husband’s testimony and Simpson’s, Nellie Ohr’s account to Congress offered little clarity about the “off and on” collaborations between the Ohrs, Simpson and Steele prior to and during the 2016 campaign.
Jim Jordan & Mark Meadows/IMAGE: Fox News via YouTube
Nellie Ohr said under questioning she was unaware of her husband’s role in an intelligence investigation of Trump’s alleged Russia ties.
Bizarrely, she also claimed to have no curiosity in their overlapping efforts even once they became obvious.
At a breakfast meeting that both Ohrs attended with Steele and a British associate of his, whom Nellie claimed to know nothing about, she excused herself from the table for a lengthy period of time while Trump was being discussed.
She also said that after seeing an email from an account she and her husband shared, in which Glenn Simpson had asked one of the recipients to call him, she automatically assumed it was for her husband.
In response to grilling by Rep. Mark Meadows, Nellie Ohr refused to definitively answer how she would have known whom the email was for, claiming that her conversations with her husband were privileged.
“I’m all about protecting your privacy, but this is not about privacy,” Meadows replied. “This is about a relationship between Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, and the knowledge that Ms. Ohr had of that when, indeed, there was a third party involved in that communication.”
An Inside Job?
But some have looked past her claims of willful ignorance to speculate that Nellie Ohr’s role in the operation may have been much greater.
Based on her having reached out to Simpson initially about the Fusion position, a recent piece posted on The Conservative Tree House mused that Nellie might have been working with the CIA to feed information to Fusion under the guise of her “open-source” research.
It then would be passed on to Steele and presented as part of his own dossier, which Simpson delivered to Bruce Ohr to give to the FBI.
“Our research has always indicated that Nellie’s work product was transmitted to Christopher Steele as part of an intelligence laundry process,” the site said.
“Chris Steele laundered Nellie’s information, provided second verification where possible, formatted into an official intelligence file, and returned that file—now named the Steele Dossier—to the FBI.”
John Brennan (screen shot MRC TV/MSNBC)
If classified documents were to link Nellie Ohr with the CIA, it said, “this revelation would imply that an inside government effort from the CIA was likely the origination of material that Nellie would ‘discover’ while working for Fusion. Under this possibility the laundry process would have two washes.”
The article notes Nellie Ohr’s use of a HAM radio, which coincided with the time period when the Clinton campaign contracted with Fusion for the Steele research.
In her congressional testimony, Nellie Ohr admitted to being a Hillary Clinton supporter but denied ever having communicated about her work with the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee or the law firm Perkins Coie, which commissioned the dossier.
The Conservative Tree House went on to say that Fusion, long believed to be the source of the phony research, may have been relegated to a bit role in the information-laundering scheme.
“Whether Glenn Simpson knew of Nellie’s intent, or was likely willfully blind, is another question,” wrote the author. “I tend to think it didn’t really matter. Simpson hired Nellie to get valuable oppo-research he could turn into a commodity.”
It also mattered little in the grand scheme of things whether the research came from the Brennan CIA, from the Kremlin or from Nellie Ohr’s own imagination.
More important was that the chain leading to the FBI—and ultimately the national media—lent it credibility enough to damage Trump, while the true conspiracy would be nearly impossible for investigators to unravel.
“Simpson wouldn’t necessarily care how Nellie found the information, and he knew her background in the intelligence research community,” said the article. “The commodity was always the Trump-research file; which was then sold to the Clinton campaign after the contract with the DNC was made through Perkins Coie.”
‘Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic…’
John Brennan and James Clapper (screen shot: CNN/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With the Mueller Report‘s debunked allegations of Russian collusion behind us, conservatives increasingly have sounded a drumbeat to hold accountable those responsible enough for the real misinformation campaign.
Once again, Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from the transparency/accountability guardians at Judicial Watch may be the catalyst that helps set it in motion.
The salacious and since-discredited Steele Dossier lies at the center of a massive web of collusion, which likely enmeshed the Hillary Clinton campaign, intelligence community, White House, media outlets and the opposition research firm FusionGPS in a plot that itself may have been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
And yet, all were willing participants due to the partisan, anti-Trump elements who were willing to cash in all ethical scruples in service of a higher mission: undermining the GOP president while deflecting from Clinton’s potentially criminal conduct.
Judicial Watch announced a FOIA lawsuit on Wednesday seeking records of communication between the liberal CNN network and two Obama-era intelligence officials: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan.
The two men, both of whom later became CNN analysts, are believed to have had a hand in leaking Steele Dossier to the network, it said in a press release.
“Judicial Watch is again in court trying to get the truth about the Obama gang illegal leaks and conspiracy targeting President Trump,” said its president, Tom Fitton.
The organization’s previous FOIA lawsuits on Clinton’s role in covering up the 2012 embassy attacks in Benghazi, Libya—just prior to President Barack Obama’s re-election—uncovered perhaps an even greater conspiracy with the revelation in early 2015 that Clinton had maintained a private email server to dodge transparency laws.
The hunt for the missing emails triggered a cursory FBI investigation that turned up little before being dismissed with no charges, but it also led Russian-backed agents to hack the servers of the Clinton campaign and DNC, where the published emails revealed a number of shady dealings.
To deflect, Clinton sought help from the FBI and other intelligence bureaus in disseminating to the press a phony narrative that Trump was working with the Russians. Some, such as FBI Director James Comey, may have seen an ongoing investigation as the leverage needed to hold their position in the new administration.
Others, like Clapper and Brennan, may have had more subversive, partisan motives.
“Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians,” Fitton said. “Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
Brennan, whose attacks on Trump resulted last year in the revocation of his security clearance, is known to have lied previously to Congress about the collateral damage involved in drone warfare.
Although he claimed that the dossier had little bearing on investigations into Trump, subsequent reporting undercut his denials. Following the release of Mueller’s conclusions, he issued a mea culpa, declaring he must have been the recipient of bad intelligence.
Reporting by the National Review in June 2018 revealed that not only was he a conduit for spreading the fake news to the media, but he also likely urged others to use it in their intelligence assessments, even while knowing that it had originated with the Clinton campaign.
According to the National Review‘s Victor Davis Hanson, Brennan “almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action.”
During a lecture sponsored by Queens University, in Charlotte, NC, on Tuesday, Comey also hinted at the deeper motives of the intelligence heads when he recounted a story about an intelligence briefing with President Barack Obama shortly before the dossier rumors hit the press.
He said the discussion—at which Brennan was also present—included deliberations on whether to notify the new president–elect about the sexual innuendo contained in the dossier. Ultimately, Comey said, they decided to do so because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it.”
‘It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke…’
Mike Lee / IMAGE: TheDC Shorts via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Amid concerns over whether the Democrat-supported Green New Deal could end commercial air flight as we know it, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, offered some bold replacements for travel: dinosaurs, tauntauns and giant seahorses.
The Senate voted by party line to defeat the Green New Deal measure, which was introduced in the upper chamber by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and cosponsored by about a dozen radical liberals—half of whom have announced presidential runs.
The House counterpart, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, was unlikely to come to a vote in the foreseeable future.
“There isn’t a single serious idea here—not one,” Lee said in his speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Referring to an iconic—but not historically accurate—portrait of former President Ronald Reagan toting a machine gun while riding a velociraptor, Lee said, “This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st.”
Lee’s speech directly lampooned some of the more absurd suggestions that appeared in the GND’s initial framework, which Ocasio–Cortez later deleted, claiming it was a draft version.
Among the radical measures necessary for its goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions within 10 years were some that would have drastically changed American lifestyles.
Regarding the notion of eliminating air travel, the Utah senator criticized the main sponsors and other Democrat supporters from the heavily liberal, historically elitist New England states for failing to recognize the needs of all constituents.
“This might seem merely ambitious for politicians who represent the densely populated northeastern United States,” Lee said, “but how’s it supposed to work for our fellow citizens who don’t live somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Boston?”
In what was at least the second recent example of the Star Wars universe intersecting with the realm of climate policy, Lee said tauntauns might offer a suitably viable solution.
“These hairy bipedal species of space lizards offer their own unique benefits,” he said. “Not only are tauntauns carbon-neutral, but according to a report a long time ago and issued far, far away, they may even be fully recyclable.”
The GND proposal also targeted “cow farts”—recognized to be one of the leading sources of methane released into the atmosphere—with the implication being that the socialist overhaul would remove beef from our diets, with bantha poodoo likely to follow in short succession.
But Lee warned, “If they think the cows smell bad, just wait till they get a whiff of the seahorses.”
Mike Lee / IMAGE: TheDC Shorts via Youtube
Barring air travel would leave the transport option favored by Aquaman of the kingdom of Atlantis as the best bet for Hawaiians trying to reach the mainland, he said.
However, even though Lee conceded that “a massive fleet of giant, highly-trained seahorses … would be really, really awesome,” he saw several red flags in the plan.
“The last thing we want is to ban all airplanes and only then find out that China or Russia may have already established strategic hippocampus programs,” Lee said.
Lee concluded his speech on a more serious note, taking Ocasio–Cortez to task for her efforts to backpedal on the proposals, which actually hurt its credibility even more.
“Supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society … and they couldn’t even figure out how to send out the right press release,” he said.
Lee said the plan, with an estimated cost of $93 trillion if all of its demands were met, amounted to little more than an expensive ploy for the Left to virtue-signal and campaign on while distracting from real issues.
“The resolution is not an agenda of solutions,” he said. “It’s a token of elite tribal identity—and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke.”
