I wrote there is a eerie vibe
and you just discovered this now?
eerie has always been a staple of the environment around here
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:11 am
I wrote there is a eerie vibe
by Karmamatterz » Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:17 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:30 am
by Elvis » Tue Jan 24, 2017 3:56 am
by Elvis » Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:42 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:41 am
Trump and the Return of Private Military Contractors
by David Isenberg
In 2005 the Marine Corps University published a paper entitled “The Professional Military Services Industry: Have We Created a New Military-Industrial Complex?”
To consider that question now, more than a decade later, is the equivalent of asking if the Pope is Catholic. The United States has not only created such a new complex, but it has also systematized, legalized, normalized, and, in all important aspects, accepted it. Yet, with the advantage of hindsight, America has never really had a deliberate, thoughtful debate over whether this was a good thing. Frankenstein’s monster was created with more forethought than the contemporary private military and security contracting (PMSC) industry.
Yet, when it comes to PMSC the train left the station decades ago. It just took the passage of many years, and multiple wars, starting with the U.S. involvement in the Balkan wars in the 1990s and then, much more prominently, with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, for the public to begin to understand just how far the neoliberal phenomenon of outsourcing and privatizing functions that once upon a time were considered “inherently governmental” had gone.
Military Adjuncts
The PMSC sector is the U.S. military’s American Express card; it dare not deploy without it. Or, to use a more morbid pop culture reference, consider the first Alien movie, when they try to remove the facehugger from a crewman’s face, only to realize that trying to do so would kill the patient. The PMSC sector is now so intertwined with the service and support components of the U.S. military that the U.S. military would have to be rebuilt from scratch in order to do without it.
As the MCU report put it:
For the foreseeable future, the continued worldwide growth of contracted military services is a forgone conclusion. Military and political considerations such as the increased complexity and specialization of modern weapon systems, self-imposed and host country troop limitations and the high-technology battlefield, will require even greater reliance on contracted military services in the future.8 The issue however, is that the U.S. unintentionally developed the military services industry out of practical necessity due to a shortage of available troops and inhouse technical skills and capabilities. The infrastructure was created ad hoc in response to short-term imperatives, rather than long-term national strategic intent. Absent from the debate were the long-term consequences and national security implications of the professional military services industry as it continues to grow globally and disperse beyond the reach of U.S. control
If Eisenhower were giving his famous Farewell Address today, he would have to revise it and call it the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Contracting complex, to be accurate.
Looked at another way, private contractors are an increasingly powerful part of what Mike Lofgren characterized in his excellent book as the “Deep State.” As he wrote, contractors “now have such impunity that they can threaten and intimidate their own paymaster, the very government that created them. And they get away with it!…there is literally nothing that the Deep State does not contract out to the corporations that provide campaign donations to the political figureheads nominally in charge of the whole enterprise.”
A recent report by the Center for a New American Security noted that today “DoD employs 1.4 million military personnel and 770,000 civilian employees plus more than 800,000 part-time reserve personnel. DoD employees are augmented by a large number of contractors. Estimates put the number of private-sector contractors providing services to DoD at around 750,000.”
Especially interesting, given the presumed cost-effectiveness of using private contractors, the report’s author, Robert Hale, former Pentagon comptroller and chief financial officer, wrote that “In my experience, DoD sometimes uses contractors in order to satisfy political pressure to limit the number of federal civilians even though contractors can cost more than federal civilians.”
Yet “professional services contractors,” which is the preferred euphemism, are present in every major U.S. combatant command.
Although U.S. forces pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011 contractors are hardly gone from there. Although many are aware that both U.S. military forces and, concomitantly, contractors, have returned to Iraq to fight the Islamic State (ISIS or IS), they are not aware of just how many that involves.
According to the Government Accountability Office, “As of mid-2016, U.S. Central Command reported that there were 2,485 DOD contractor personnel in Iraq, as compared with a force management level of 4,087 U.S. troops in Iraq.” Of course, that was just Iraq. Add in Afghanistan and other CENTCOM locations and total DoD CENTCOM contractors totaled 42,694. Needless to say, contractors in Afghanistan far outnumber U.S. forces there. And such numbers exclude contractors working for the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and various intelligence agencies.
In Africa, the U.S. military is heavily dependent on private contractors to support Special Operations Forces as well as conventional U.S. military forces in various counterinsurgency campaigns.
Beyond the Pentagon
But, in fact, contracting presence in the U.S. government is far larger than just supporting the U.S. military or protecting State Department personnel. There are very few, if any, U.S. departments of the government that are not heavily dependent on private contractors. The intelligence community has used private airlines for the purpose of rendition, transporting prisoners from their home countries to CIA “black site” prisons and other locations. The CIA has used private psychologists to devise torture techniques and issued contracts to companies to help carry them out.
According to a 2015 analysis by journalist Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, about 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is spent on private contractors. In September he reported that five corporations together employ nearly 80 percent of the private-sector employees contracted to work for US spy and surveillance agencies.
Unlike U.S. military personnel, if a contractor, even those working for the U.S. government, gets wounded, killed or kidnapped, most people don’t care.
Contractors are also heavily involved on the homeland security front. In fact, Lora Ries, who was hired by the Trump transition team to help remake the Department of Homeland Security, has a long history of lobbying for homeland security contractors.
The U.S. government is enormously dependent on contractors in the realm of cyber operations. If the National Security Agency, for example, had to do without contractors it would have to shut its doors. Whatever the truth of the alleged Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential elections, such cyber operations represent a future bonanza for cyber contractors. Thomas Bossert, Trump’s designee to serve as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said that “We must work toward cyber doctrine that reflects the wisdom of free markets, private competition and the important but limited role of government in establishing and enforcing the rule of law, honoring the rights of personal property, the benefits of free and fair trade and the fundamental principles of liberty.”
The U.S. Agency for International Development is particularly dependent on contractors to do its work. In FY 2015 its obligated contract funding reached $4.8 billion—a $1 billion increase, or 26 percent increase, from the previous year. USAID projects have long been an inviting target for various kinds of fraud and abuse. It was far from a rare exception when in 2015 the former president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of USAID contractor Louis Berger Group Inc. (LBG) was sentenced to 12 months of home confinement and fined $4.5 million for conspiring to defraud USAID of billions of dollars in contracts over a nearly 20-year period
The Trump Era
Nobody knows for certain at this point about how a Trump presidency feels about the PMSC sector, but so far the omens are good. You can be sure industry cheered when Politico reported that Trump, who had hired his own private security and intelligence teams to work alongside the Secret Service during the campaign, will be keeping “at least some members” of those teams. Moreover, the new administration plans to increase and upgrade the military in various ways.
Trump may reject the idea of nation-building” in the Middle East and elsewhere. But if the United States wants to continue being a player in the region it will have to be involved in the reconstruction of Syria, which would be a future bonanza for the private sector.
More interestingly, a president who campaigned on the basis of having a secret plan to beat IS may find that he has no alternative to using contractors even more heavily. After all, Trump made fighting terrorism a pillar of his election platform.
The likelihood of Trump having some thoughtful, well-crafted strategy to fight IS, al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups is unlikely, to say the least. That means he may lean heavily on advisors such as National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Pentagon chief James Mattis. Flynn was former intelligence director for the Joint Special Operations Command, which turned into a highly efficient killing machine in the Bush administration and continues as such to this day.
As Bloomberg reported, Flynn has extensive dealings with various private contractors through his own consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, which in recent months has competed for federal contracts to supply overseas military bases, fly diplomats in and out of conflict zones, and provide cybersecurity and technology for defense and intelligence agencies. As for Mattis, he should be well aware of the problems PMSC can cause. He played a key role in combat operations in Iraq during the First Battle of Fallujah, aka Operation Vigilant Resolve, in April 2004, which was caused, in part, by the highly publicized killing and mutilation of four Blackwater USA private military contractors.
Still, the PMSC sector will be cheering. With Special Forces stretched to the breaking point, private contracts will be in high demand.
The Prince of Contractors
Warzone adventurer and author Robert Young Pelton was among the earliest people to write about PMSC in his book Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in The War On Terror. He knows PMSC companies, like the former Blackwater, particularly well, being in litigation with its cofounder Erik Prince. He said:
I predict that there will be a dramatic escalation in using the private sector to perform logistics, security, intelligence and training. With the men Trump has selected we will be ramping up quickly in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Mali, Niger, Uganda, Kenya, and many other spots. All will require the revolving door of ex-military contractors for support.
Despite denials, Erik Prince has appeared to have kept busy in working on third party logistics and security contracts (South Sudan), aviation (Malta), logistics (East and Central Africa) and other private and military/intel projects in North Africa, Somalia and the Middle East (some exposed in embarrassing detail by The Intercept, New York Times and the court cases.) His successful support of some candidates and with his sister, Betsy DeVos being selected for a cabinet position in the new administration, I am sure his eight years of quiet patience will soon be rewarded. Now he can pitch his “relief with teeth” private brigades as part of the global solution rather than the problem. Prince just announced that he is expanding to Asia to support China’s “One Belt One Road” which will put him in business smack in the middle of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
According to Pelton, who keeps in touch with many of Prince’s ex-employees, Prince still appears to be involved in something that mimics deep-cover activities, hiring ex-military and former Blackwater employees to support projects in areas of interest from Abu Dhabi and Juba to Mombasa and Djibouti and western China. These projects now include security operations, rough and ready air support in “difficult environments,” forward-operating bases, and medevacs in hostile environments. This is a major change from Prince’s original plan of investing in emerging markets. To be fair, Prince was investigated by over seven federal agencies and lambasted for his ideas of forming small violent groups of mercenaries to solve difficult international security problems.
Media outlets have continually exposed his rogue military projects in embarrassing detail. A recent document dump from a disgruntled employee to the Intercept revealed numerous proposals to fight Boko Haram, support Libyan General Haftar, and deliver Close Air Support and armed patrol planes to numerous foreign governments, all with an eye towards avoiding controls on the export of defense-related products. According to the Intercept, Prince is again under federal investigation, which may quietly disappear as the new administration takes over. Another hallmark of Prince’s relationship with the U.S. government is his ability to pay millions in legal fines rather than be prosecuted for federal crimes.
With the disappearance of a hostile Democratic administration, the stars may be realigning for Prince. The man in charge of the new improved version of Blackwater—now called Constellis, a merger of Triple Canopy, Blackwater, and other security companies—is none other than Jason DeYonkers. An old college friend from Michigan who managed Prince’s financial portfolio from 1998 to 2002, DeYonkers helped during the early days of creating Blackwater and led the 2010 buyout of Xe Services when Prince left the country for the UAE. Prince’s original army for hire became a division of Constellis Holdings in 2014 along with his major competitor Triple Canopy. DeYonkers is a member of both Academi’s and Constellis’s board of directors. It is not hard to imagine that new business opportunities under the Trump administration are just one phone call away.
Quite conveniently, as the administration changes, Constellis is up for sale as a far larger and more capable company than Blackwater. With more than 8,000 staff, most of whom are former military or law enforcement officials operating in 25 countries across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, it will be well-placed to assist a new aggressive “gloves off” foreign policy. True, Prince may stick to serving his Chinese government patrons and pursuing developing markets in Africa, where he is rapidly building air mobility assets exactly where JSOC aims to fight transnational terrorist groups. As Pelton points out, Prince could continue to provide convenient cutouts for various military and civilian clients under what looks like a version of the CIA’s National Resources division. It’s a good bet that the man who insisted he would become a school teacher will find a receptive audience for his many military ideas in Trump Tower.
Although all of this is great for Erik Prince and the PMSC industry more generally, it’s not likely to make America great again. The 2005 MCU report concluded thusly:
President Eisenhower’s warnings of 1961 remain true today. We must “guard against unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power.” The revolving door between government and industry is swinging freely and billions of taxpayer dollars are involved. Like sovereign nation-states, for profit corporations will pursue their own self-interests. The self-interest of this industry requires conflict to succeed. U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy is too important to outsource. It is the ultimate Inherently Governmental Function.
http://lobelog.com/trump-and-the-return ... ntractors/
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 2:14 pm
CBS Confirms Trump Brought His Own Studio Audience To Clap For Him At CIA Speech
By Sarah Jones on Mon, Jan 23rd, 2017 at 12:20 pm
CBS News confirmed reports that President Donald Trump brought a studio audience to his visit with the CIA on Saturday. The news agency reports that an official said the visit left a wake of "unease," “made relations with the intelligence community worse," and was “uncomfortable.”
CBS Confirms Trump Brought His Own Studio Audience To Clap For Him At CIA Speech
CBS News confirmed reports that President Donald Trump brought a studio audience to his visit with the CIA on Saturday. The news agency reports that an official said the visit left a wake of “unease,” “made relations with the intelligence community worse,” and was “uncomfortable.”
Intelligence people were “stunned” and “offended by the president’s tone,” CBS reported U.S. government sources tell CBS News that there is a sense of unease in the intelligence community after President Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters on Saturday.”
Also, Trump did bring cheering props, which fits with how he has operated previously in requiring a cheering section – a sort of laugh track of supportive extras like those his campaign hired for his announcement event. It has been confirmed by Trump insiders that the President loves props.
“Authorities are also pushing back against the perception that the CIA workforce was cheering for the president. They say the first three rows in front of the president were largely made up of supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign,” CBS continued.
The crowd was filled out with about 40 Trump invites and also, the front rows were senior CIA who were not cheering (on the video you can see their heads pivot to the cheers and laughter while not joining in), “An official with knowledge of the make-up of the crowd says that there were about 40 people who’d been invited by the Trump, Mike Pence and Rep. Mike Pompeo teams. The Trump team expected Rep. Pompeo, R-Kansas, to be sworn in during the event as the next CIA director, but the vote to confirm him was delayed on Friday by Senate Democrats. Also sitting in the first several rows in front of the president was the CIA’s senior leadership, which was not cheering the remarks.”
They told CBS that Trump certainly does have supporters in the CIA workforce, and they were standing off to the right, which I observe was the direction Trump directed his most needy remarks.
Out of thousands invited, 400 RSVP’d, and “Officials dismiss White House claims that there were people waiting to get into the event.” No, there were not people waiting to get in. That’s a line Trump loves to use, fitting in with his difficulty accepting the reality of the relatively low attendance numbers for his inauguration. All the world’s a stage to Trump.
While Trump supporters have used his Saturday visit to the CIA as proof that everyone who matters loves the new President, in reality his visit did more damage than good.
Trump needed to repair relations with the CIA after spending his time on the trail undermining the intelligence community, but instead he offended them in numerous ways to the degree that they are now confirming to the press that he brought his own cheering audience.
The real point here isn’t just that Donald Trump is very insecure, but more importantly that he tried to mislead the public into seeing the CIA as a partisan agency that wholly supported his very divisive campaign and now presidency. By doing that, Trump is working toward his larger goal of undermining the American voters’ trust in our government and media.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/23/ ... visit.html
by Karmamatterz » Tue Jan 24, 2017 2:26 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 24, 2017 2:26 pm
by semper occultus » Tue Jan 24, 2017 3:59 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:15 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:22 pm
by semper occultus » Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:57 pm
by Morty » Tue Jan 24, 2017 6:06 pm
seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 25, 2017 6:22 am wrote:hopefully put in jail for his part in slipping the FBI false info that lead to the Comey statement on the 11th
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 24, 2017 6:38 pm
Morty » Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:06 pm wrote:seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 25, 2017 6:22 am wrote:hopefully put in jail for his part in slipping the FBI false info that lead to the Comey statement on the 11th
What false info? (Honest question. I thought his crime was that he knew the FBI was coming out with something when he shouldn't have known, and that perhaps this might indicate he had some role in arranging the whole thing. And the FBI's crime was delaying coming out with what they came out with until a time in the campaign when maximum hurt was caused to Clinton.)
seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:39 pm wrote:The attorney told the Jewish Journal this week that it was reasonable to believe a Trump ally — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — might have provided the false information to the FBI.Was Rudy Giuliani At The Center Of An FBI-Trump Campaign Conspiracy To Steal The Election?
12/21/2016 04:45 pm ET | Updated 1 day ago
Seth Abramson
Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.
Publicly Available Information Appears to Put Giuliani at the Center of a Watergate-Level Conspiracy
It’s surprising that Rudy Giuliani has been out of the news lately, given that, as recently as November 7, Donald Trump was planning on offering him a cabinet position.
A little over a month later, the president-elect ruled out Giuliani having any role in his administration whatsoever.
So what happened between November 7 and December 9?
Accounts are murky, and suspiciously so. A few days ago, Giuliani, who’s never held a political position higher than mayor, told the press that being Secretary of State of the United States and fourth in the line of presidential succession was “the only challenge left for me”—so that when that particular job offer went elsewhere, he had no difficulty rejecting all other offers of a cabinet position.
Other reports say Trump—who’d relied on Giuliani as his most tireless media surrogate and advisor for the entirety of his general election campaign—suddenly decided, post-election, that Giuliani was in poor health and suffered from narcoleptic episodes.
Additional reports that the famously ambitious, 9/11-citing Giuliani was offered and rejected multiple cabinet positions—including Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security—make perfect sense to no one.
Other reports to the effect that Trump was worried about Giuliani’s business ties—and possible conflicts of interest abroad—are of course laughable on their face, as nearly every cabinet member Trump has nominated, and indeed especially his Secretary of State pick, will face exactly these sorts of questions at their confirmation hearings. There is no evidence that Giuliani’s potential conflicts of interest are in the same realm as Rex Tillerson’s—let alone Trump’s.
So it’s reasonable to ask whether anything about Giuliani’s role in the Trump campaign might have caused Trump some concerns. Specifically, the operative question is whether there was anything damaging that might have come up had Giuliani been put under oath during his Senate confirmation hearings. (Given that Giuliani made a run for president in 2008, at which point he faced, at most, difficult questions about his lack of marital fidelity—an issue now fully aired—there’s no reason to believe he holds as-yet unvetted policy positions that would be a hindrance to Senate confirmation.)
So it behooves us to see whether Giuliani was at the center of any controversies during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign.
As it happens, he was.
Indeed, he was at the center of the most controversial sequence of events in the 2016 election: James Comey’s “October Surprise,” a letter the Director of the FBI “chose” to write to Congress on October 28th. That letter, immediately leaked to the press by House Republicans, intimated that the FBI had found new evidence in its criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s basement email server.
Comey himself had only discovered this information on October 27—though his agents had been holding onto it since October 3.
I wrote above that Comey “chose” to write his now-infamous letter. But did he?
According to The New York Times, in fact Comey did not “choose” to write the letter that the nation’s top political statistician, Nate Silver, now says swung the election to Trump.
No—Comey’s hand was forced.
As The New York Times has reported, “although Mr. Comey told Congress this summer that the Clinton investigation was complete, he believed that if word of the new emails leaked out—and it was sure to leak out, he concluded—he risked being accused of misleading Congress and the public ahead of an election” (emphasis supplied).
So why was Comey so certain that his own organization would violate the Hatch Act? (The Hatch Act is a federal statute prohibiting certain federal employees, including FBI agents, from engaging in partisan political behavior by, among other things, issuing targeted leaks to the press.) And why was Comey’s certainty at such a fevered pitch on October 28th that it prompted him to violate longstanding FBI protocol prohibiting administrative actions that could influence an election in the 60 days before Election Day? In this respect the “Comey Letter” certainly seemed out of character for the FBI director, who had not only previously declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton but was also universally known as a “straight shooter.”
The most likely answer for Comey’s uncharacteristic behavior? Again, Rudy Giuliani.
Per a CNN report, on October 28 Rudy Giuliani went on the Lars Larson radio program and confessed that current agents in the FBI had committed Hatch Act violations to get him information about the ongoing Clinton investigation. Specifically, wrote CNN, “the former mayor said he was in contact with former agents ‘and a few active agents, who obviously don’t want to identify themselves.’” Giuliani wasn’t even being especially coy; he was quite clearly indicating that the reason the current FBI agents who’d spoken to him didn’t want to identify themselves was because their contact with him had been illegal.
The next day, Giuliani tried to walk back this very explicit claim of being the recipient of Hatch Act-violative leaks. He’d only been speaking with former FBI agents, he now maintained to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. His reference to “a few active agents who obviously don’t want to identify themselves,” and his careful distinction of those agents from the former agents he’d also been speaking to, was just a slip-up, he said. In fact—exhibiting, suddenly, a remarkably clear memory as to whom he’d spoken to and when—he said he hadn’t spoken to a current FBI agent in “ten months.”
Unfortunately, no one was buying it.
Indeed, multiple Congressmen almost immediately called for a Congressional investigation into what Giuliani knew and when he knew it. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign proposed that the Inspector General of the FBI should investigate the matter.
Yet even if you believe Giuliani merely slipped up, and that in fact he’d only been speaking with retired FBI agents, it wouldn’t matter. Why? Because if current FBI agents issued targeted leaks to retired FBI agents known to be “close, personal friends” of Giuliani—per Giuliani’s own description of the latter men—it would still be the case that rank-and-file FBI agents delivering confidential information to the Trump campaign through known Giuliani intermediaries was illegal.
So did the rank-and-file FBI agents in the New York field office of the FBI have a motive to use Giuliani’s friends as an intermediary to illegally feed confidential information to the Trump campaign? Absolutely, says Giuliani. Asked on November 4, on Fox & Friends, about whether he had heard about the “reopening” of the Clinton investigation prior to James Comey announcing it publicly, Giuliani replied, “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it. And I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.” And Giuliani has had much more to say on this point since then, conceding to having inside information about the “tremendous anger within the FBI about...Comey’s conclusion [to not recommend criminal charges against Clinton in July] and...the way they [the FBI rank-and-file] believed they were being obstructed by what they regard as a pretty corrupt Obama Justice Department.”
If this seems to you like something Giuliani maybe shouldn’t have said publicly, you’re right. But in fact he’d slipped up far worse in his conversation with Fox & Friends on November 4.
Speaking of Comey’s announcement that “new” evidence had been found in the Clinton investigation, Giuliani told Fox News, “I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago” (emphasis supplied).
“Three or four weeks ago”—of course. Because “three or four weeks ago” is when the New York field office of the FBI had found the “new” Clinton emails on Anthony Wiener’s server. It was “three or four weeks ago” that these same agents had begun a widely reported 24-day campaign to hide this information from Director Comey—the better to ensure that any leak of the information would cause maximum pre-election damage to the Clinton campaign. Had the “new” information held by these rank-and-file agents leaked to the media in the first week of October, it would have had little to no impact on the election. Instead, the agents’ deliberate delay in sending this information up the chain of command forced Comey to reveal the information at the very end of October—thereby creating a story that exploded like a political hand grenade over the entire first week of November.
Giuliani’s slip on Fox News thus helps us establish the timeline for a possible conspiracy between the FBI and the Trump campaign to illegally leak FBI evidence and swing the presidential election to Trump:
October 3rd: Agents investigating Anthony Wiener out of the New York field office of the FBI receive a computer Wiener previously shared with his estranged wife Huma Abedin. The agents immediately discover emails from Clinton on the computer. They tell no one else within the FBI. Indeed, instead of asking Director Comey to get a warrant to view the emails, or asking Wiener or Abedin directly for permission to read the emails—as both Wiener and Abedin were cooperative FBI witnesses at that point—they spend weeks searching through the emails’ “meta-data” (that is, “to” and “from” fields within individual emails). No one knows why they do this. The emails aren’t relevant to their investigation, and, even if they were, they’d have multiple avenues—including all three of Comey and Wiener and Abedin—to get full access to the email archive on Wiener’s computer.
October 7th-October 14th: This is ”three or four weeks” before Giuliani’s November 4th interview. During this period either current agents at the New York field office of the FBI or retired agents from that office known to be “close, personal” friends of Rudy Giuliani—legally, it doesn’t matter which, as even using go-betweens to leak FBI-held investigatory material would violate the Hatch Act—tell Rudy Giuliani that the FBI has “new” email evidence on Clinton. Whether Giuliani is given all the details of the “new” evidence is immaterial; Giuliani knows that the agents want this “new” information to re-open the Clinton investigation and also want that re-opening to become public, and knows the Trump campaign would benefit enormously if it did become public. But he doesn’t yet know whether the FBI will be able to convince Comey to make it public. Meanwhile, Comey still hasn’t been told of the “new” (in fact, duplicate) emails. Comey, had he known of the emails at this point, could have used meta-data to see that the emails were just “synched” versions of emails from Abedin accounts already held by the FBI.
October 25th: Giuliani tells Fox & Friends, in the context of a very lengthy discussion about the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server, that Trump still has some surprises in store for the Clinton campaign. When asked by host Brian Kilmeade if Trump has anything planned in the 14 days before the election other than “a series of inspiring rallies,” Giuliani replies, “Yes.” Then he laughs—it’s fair to say (watch the video for yourself) “deviously.” Asked to explain what the Trump campaign has planned, he grins and says, “You’ll see.” He laughs again and says, “We’ve got a couple of surprises left.” (If you watch this video, at 8:45, you’ll be certain that Giuliani is talking about new information on the FBI’s Clinton investigation—information we know he had at that point. His knowing smile when another host mentions the FBI in the final five seconds of the interview is also startling.)
Later—but only after he’s accused of receiving Hatch Act-violative leaks from the FBI—Giuliani tries to walk back his October 25th comments by saying that he was then referring to a new Trump ad campaign. Indeed, in the video from the 25th Giuliani does seem to imply—for a moment—that the surprise in question could be a new ad campaign, though perhaps one in which the Trump campaign would reveal for the first time that “new” Clinton emails had been found by the FBI. Specifically, Giuliani says to his Fox News interviewers that the Trump campaign is planning “surprises in the way that we’re going to campaign to get our message out there, maybe in a little of a different way, you’ll see, and I do think it’ll be enormously effective, and I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton—finally—are beginning to have an impact” (emphasis supplied). Yet the later walk-back doesn’t explain why Giuliani links the new ad campaign to the FBI’s investigation of Clinton.
In a November 4th interview with Megyn Kelly, Giuliani will explain his October 25th reference to a (supposed) “surprise” ad campaign this way: “I was talking [on October 25th] about Trump’s advertising this weekend [November 4th through November 6th]. Because we were having a big debate about whether he should do a big speech or a bunch of advertising. That’s what I was talking about. That he was going to go on television and talk directly to the American people. No reference at all to the emails.” Perhaps because the new ad campaign sounds no different from any other ad campaign Trump had ever run—far from an “October Surprise”—Kelly’s response to Giuliani drips with incredulity (as you can see for yourself on the above video): “That would’ve been kind of lame,” Kelly says to Giuliani wryly. “You should be glad that something bigger came out—to not make a liar out of you.”
During the October 25th Fox & Friends interview Giuliani had also had another telling exchange—this time, about allegations that the Clinton campaign had a political consulting firm hire “Donald Ducks” to appear at Trump rallies (the idea being that Trump was “ducking” releasing his tax returns). Host Steve Doocy asks, “Isn’t that illegal? When you’ve got an outside group coordinating with the campaign?” (Emphasis supplied.) Giuliani’s irony-free response is perfect: “Yes. Yeah, it’s what we would call unethical. Illegal. Dirty tricks.”
October 26th: Giuliani continues teasing an “October Surprise,” but begins ramping up his rhetoric. Unprompted—indeed, as Fox News host Martha McCallum is trying to end her interview with him—Giuliani says of Trump, “He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I’m talking about some pretty big surprises,“ he adds with a grin. (Recall that he will later claim to Megyn Kelly, remarkably, that “the next few days” actually meant “in nine to eleven days”—that is, the weekend before the election.) When pressed by McCallum for more information, Giuliani says, “You’ll see!” And then he laughs again. “We’ve got a couple things up our sleeve that should turn things around,” he adds with a big smile.
October 27th: The Wiener-investigating FBI agents in the New York field office of the FBI, who’ve been sitting on evidence in James Comey’s Clinton investigation—for no obvious purpose—for well over three weeks now, deign to tell their boss for the first time that they have “new” evidence. They demand that Comey publicly re-open the Clinton investigation before Election Day. These are the same agents Giuliani repeatedly describes, in multiple television interviews, as being livid at Clinton for escaping prosecution, and livid at Comey for not prosecuting her. It’s unclear whether at this point (a) Comey has himself seen Giuliani’s teasing of an “October Surprise” on Fox News, (b) the agents inform him that the Trump campaign somehow knows about the “new” emails and could leak it before the election, or (c) the agents imply to Comey that it is they who will leak the “new” information if Comey himself doesn’t go public with it. All we know is what happens the next day, October 28th.
October 28th: Comey issues the now-infamous “Comey Letter” to Congress, and it’s immediately leaked to the press by House Republicans. Media reports indicate that Comey wrote the letter because he’d become “sure” that news of the “new” emails would leak to the press before Election Day. How he’s developed this certainty he does not divulge, and we still don’t know. Readily excluded here is any theory that holds that it was Comey who wanted to release the new information—as he’d already decided, months earlier, not to prosecute Clinton, and the nature of the “new” evidence was such that it had no chance of being a different kind of evidence from that already seen (and, for prosecutorial purposes, ignored) by Comey.
October 30th: Comey, who tells Congress that his office has been reviewing the “new” emails “around the clock” since he found out about them on October 27th, finally applies for and receives a search warrant to read the emails—which he and/or his agents only could have done prior to this date illegally. It is later revealed that the warrant was defective on its face, as the FBI had no basis to believe the “new” emails were either new, evidence of a crime, or accompanied by the specific intent to violate federal law that Comey had already said (in July) would be necessary to prove a prosecutable crime.
November 6th: After rank-and-file FBI agents in the New York field office erroneously tell the press that there is “no way” that the “new” emails can be read and deemed material or immaterial prior to Election Day, they are overruled by Comey, who pushes his investigators to confirm that the emails are neither new nor evidence of a crime by November 6th—just 48 hours before the election. At this point, tens of millions of Americans have already voted. Many millions more never hear the updated news: that the “re-opening” of the Clinton investigation was a total “dud” surprise—a legal (and indeed factual) non-starter.
November 8th-December 9th: For the first month that he is President-elect, Trump leaks that Giuliani is being considered for Secretary of State—but appears to never interview him for the job or play him up as a potential candidate. On December 9th it is revealed (accompanied by a series of increasingly unlikely cover stories) that Giuliani has been excluded from the administration altogether. During this period, Democratic Congressmen and the Clinton campaign have kept up their insistence that Giuliani’s role in the election be investigated—all but ensuring that at his confirmation hearings for any post in the Trump administration he will be asked about FBI agents’ possible violations of the Hatch Act.
He will, in short, be asked by Democratic Senators—on national television—what he knew and when he knew it.
The “Watergate” question.
Yet none can doubt that this story is bigger than Watergate, as it begins with violation of a major federal statute (the Hatch Act), widens into a conspiracy between a nonpartisan and taxpayer-funded law enforcement agency and Donald Trump’s most loyal adviser and surrogate, and comes to fruition on an Election Day in which all available data shows the result of the conspiracy being a swing of millions of votes to Donald Trump. Indeed, in a poll taken just before the election by Politico, 33 percent of Americans say that the Comey Letter made them “much less likely” to vote for Clinton—including enough previously committed Clinton voters (enough, indeed, by a factor of 1200% to 1500%) to swing the ballot tallies in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Those three states ultimately gave Trump the Electoral College by a mere 77,000 votes.
All of the above draws from publicly available information. None of the above has yet been put together, however, by anyone in the mainstream media—as their singular focus on Russia and their self-consciousness about “not re-litigating the election” has permitted a Watergate-level conspiracy to go unreported and unpunished.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/was ... e7c72ed993As Trump Ally, Rudy Giuliani Boasts of Ties to F.B.I.
About New York
By JIM DWYER NOV. 3, 2016
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, seemed in a giddy mood when he was interviewed last week on the “Fox & Friends” morning television show.
Tireless if often wildly inaccurate in his attacks on Hillary Clinton’s ethics, health and work as a United States senator and as secretary of state, Mr. Giuliani has been spending every minute in the public spotlight as a surrogate for Donald J. Trump.
His most remarkable claim is that he has a pipeline into the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that agents tell him they are “outraged” that they have not been able to bring Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to justice.
But his television appearance on Tuesday of last week appeared, at the time, to be in a softer hue.
Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News host, asked Mr. Giuliani about the presidential campaign during its last two weeks.
“Does Donald Trump plan anything except a series of inspiring rallies?” Mr. Kilmeade asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Giuliani replied.
Another host, Ainsley Earhardt, jumped in.
“What?” she asked.
“Ha-ha-ha,” Mr. Giuliani laughed. “You’ll see.”
Appearing to enjoy his own coy reply, Mr. Giuliani resumed chuckling: “Ha-ha-ha.”
“When will this happen?” Ms. Earhardt asked.
“We got a couple of surprises left,” Mr. Giuliani said, smiling.
This enigmatic reply roused the show’s third host, Steve Doocy.
“October surprises?” he asked.
Mr. Giuliani expanded a bit.
“Well,” he said, “I call them early surprises in the way we’re going to campaign to get our message out, maybe in a little bit of a different way. You’ll see. And I think it’ll be enormously effective. And I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton finally are beginning to have an impact.”
Three days later, James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., said agents were reviewing emails “that appear to be pertinent” to a closed investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email server while secretary of state.
Mr. Comey said he did not know whether the material was significant but felt Congress should know because he had testified at hearings in July about the investigation.
Against the ceaseless droning buzz of the presidential campaign, Mr. Comey’s revelation boomed like a sudden, unexpected crack of thunder — though a poll by The New York Times and CBS News released on Thursday found that it had not changed people’s minds.
Did Mr. Giuliani have an inside track on the F.B.I.’s discovery of emails, apparently on a laptop belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of the Clinton aide Huma Abedin?
Oh, not at all, said Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.
“Rudy was just having fun,” Mr. Miller said. “To keep the other side on their toes.”
Since August, Mr. Giuliani has publicly claimed that F.B.I. agents were telling him that Mrs. Clinton should have been criminally charged for the email server.
“It perplexes numerous F.B.I. agents who talk to me all the time,” Mr. Giuliani said during an August interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN. “And it embarrasses some F.B.I. agents.”
Mr. Giuliani has not named the embarrassed or perplexed agents, and as Wayne Barrett noted in The Daily Beast on Thursday, it is a violation of F.B.I. policy for agents to share investigative information.
This week, Mr. Giuliani opened a new front. He attributed what might be seen as a commonplace difference of opinion about law and evidence to rampant corruption at the highest levels of the Justice Department, specifically naming the attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch, who began her career as a prosecutor in the New York area in 1990 and has obtained convictions of politically corrupt Republicans and Democrats.
Mr. Giuliani provided no substantiation of this grave accusation, but instead staked his claims on information that he said came from unnamed law enforcement sources.
“You have outraged F.B.I. agents that talk to me,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Wednesday with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. “They are outraged at the injustice. They are outraged at being turned down by the Justice Department to open a grand jury. They are convinced that Loretta Lynch has corrupted the Justice Department.”
Asked about Mr. Giuliani’s statements, Mr. Miller said that, in fact, the former mayor had not been speaking with any active F.B.I. agents. “He has only had conversations with retired F.B.I. agents who no longer work inside the building,” Mr. Miller said.
So Mr. Giuliani was apparently basing his charges on second- or thirdhand information when he declared, “This is worse than Watergate.”
A bit much? Maybe. But he is giving Joseph McCarthy a run for his money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/nyreg ... e-fbi.htmlRudy Giuliani Confirms FBI Insiders Leaked Information To The Trump Campaign
“Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it.”
11/04/2016 11:49 am ET | Updated 5 minutes ago
Mollie Reilly
Deputy Politics Editor, The Huffington Post
Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate has recently dropped a series of hints that he knew in advance that the FBI planned to look at emails potentially connected to Clinton’s private server. The agency discovered the messages while investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) for allegedly sexting with a minor. (Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide to Clinton.)
Giuliani has bragged about his close ties to the FBI for months, mentioning in interviews that “outraged FBI agents” have told him they’re frustrated by how the Clinton investigation was handled. And two days before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was reviewing the newly uncovered emails, Giuliani teased that Trump’s campaign had “a couple of surprises left.”
“You’ll see, and I think it will be enormously effective,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
All of this has led to suspicion that someone in the FBI is leaking information to Giuliani and the Trump campaign. The Daily Beast’s Wayne Barrett explored those suspicions on Thursday, detailing how Giuliani’s ties to the agency date back to his days as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s.
Giuliani confirmed that notion Friday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” he said. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”
Giuliani also said he expected Comey’s announcement to come weeks before it did.
“I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago, because way back in July this started, they kept getting stymied looking for subpoenas, looking for records,” he said.
FBI officials knew about the newly discovered emails weeks before Comey’s announcement, according to multiple reports.
Giuliani insisted he had nothing to do with Comey’s decision to announce the probe prior to Election Day ― a move that both Republicans and Democrats have condemned. He also insisted his information comes from “former FBI agents.”
“I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends,” he said. “All I heard were former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”
Trump press secretary Hope Hicks did not immediately return a request for comment.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rud ... 0b02c93d6b
seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 14, 2016 1:40 pm wrote:CONTRIBUTOR
Bigger Than Watergate? Legitimate Concerns That Anti-Clinton Faction Within FBI May Have Conspired To Hand Election To Trump
12/14/2016 01:45 am ET | Updated 28 minutes ago
Seth Abramson
Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.
This post is hosted on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
An Outline of What Increasingly Exhibits the Hallmarks of an Election Conspiracy
Unlike the effect of Russian interference on the 2016 presidential campaign, the effect—in votes—of the now-infamous “Comey Letter” is knowable.
While various media outlets downplayed the effect at the time, the hard data is unmistakable: according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken immediately after FBI Director Comey’s end-of-October announcement that the FBI would be reviewing additional evidence in the Clinton email-server case, one-third of likely voters reported that the revelation made them “much less likely” to vote for Clinton.
In an election Clinton lost by just 77,143 combined votes in three states—out of well over 136 million votes cast—this sort of polling data is one indication that Comey’s announcement could have cost Clinton millions of votes nationwide. But looking inside the Politico/Morning Consult data, we find much more evidence for that conclusion: specifically, the fact that while 26% of the poll’s 33% figure comes from Trump voters, the remaining 7% comes from those reporting to be Clinton voters.
Seven percent of the total electorate on November 8th was just under ten million voters (around 9,550,000 voters, to be exact).
Divided by state using voter distribution data, that’s an estimated (ceteris paribus) 206,100 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump won by less than 23,000 votes; 332,500 voters in Michigan, where Trump won by less than 11,000 votes; and 423,600 voters in Pennsylvania, where Trump won by less than 45,000 votes.
If even the smallest fraction of these “much less likely” Clinton voters were telling pollsters the truth about their intentions approximately a week before the election, their changed votes (or even their decision to abstain from voting) was more than enough to cost Clinton the election.
In Wisconsin, only an estimated 11.2% of newly disgruntled Clinton voters needed to be telling the truth about their new view of Clinton for their lost votes to have swung the state; in Michigan, that figure is 3.3%; in Pennsylvania, 10.6%. Professional pollsters can tell you what percentage of their data is reliable a week out from a general election—and it’s a much higher percentage than that. (And note that all of these figures measure the effect of a would-be Clinton voter deciding not to vote due to the Comey Letter; any prospective Clinton voters who voted for Trump instead of Clinton because of the reopening of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server of course count, if we reverse their decision, as a vote lost for Trump and one gained for Clinton. So the percentages above are likely high—indeed, as much as double the appropriate figures.)
Even accounting for a significantly uneven state-by-state distribution of newly disgruntled Clinton voters after Comey’s October Surprise—not that we’d expect one; there were clearly more voters on the fence and “still convincible” in Midwestern swing states in the days before the election than elsewhere—it would still be the case that that seemingly minute 7% figure was in fact more than enough to swing an election Trump won by 0.7% or less in the three states that ultimately decided the contest. And this fact remains even if we eliminate those Election-Day voters who became aware of (and were consequentially swayed by) the second, exculpatory letter Comey issued just prior to November 8th.
So it’s clear the Comey Letter was more than enough—as a matter of math—to put Trump in the White House.
So what we do if (as now seems possible) it turns out that the brouhaha over the “Abedin emails” less than two weeks before the presidential election was the result of collusion between FBI investigators trying to prosecute the husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, FBI investigators trying to prosecute Clinton herself (and prevented from doing so because of decisions made by their boss), and one of Trump’s closest confidants and (until four days ago) a shoo-in to join his Cabinet, Rudy Giuliani?
What should the electors of the Electoral College do on December 19th if it’s confirmed, in the coming 72 hours, that Clinton lost the White House because of a scandal so much more far-reaching than Watergate as to make that impeachment-level conspiracy pale in comparison?
Obviously, before we get there, we have to look at the facts.
The purpose of this article is to detail facts that have already been reported—but not properly connected—in the major media, and to then use these facts to issue a rational and reasoned call for further investigation of this matter prior to the Electoral College vote this coming Monday.
So here’s a recap of the bare minimum facts that suggest a bigger-than-Watergate scandal having turned the tide in the 2016 election:
On October 3rd of this year, just over five weeks before the presidential election, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents received a computer from Anthony Weiner and almost immediately determined that the computer contained emails by a person at the heart of the then-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home email server, that being Weiner’s estranged wife (and Clinton’s top aide) Huma Abedin.
For 24 days, these FBI agents kept their discovery a secret from their own boss, FBI Director James Comey. They only informed him of their potentially history-altering discovery on October 27th, less than two weeks before the general election.
Even today, nobody knows why these agents kept their critical discovery secret from the one man with the power to immediately direct them as to how to proceed with what they’d found.
The result of the agents’ decision not to inform their superior of information that he and only he could decide what to do with was the now-infamous “Comey Letter”: that is, Director Comey felt compelled to write a letter to Congress on October 28th informing them of the potentially explosive discovery of additional emails from Abedin on a computer Abedin had previously shared with Weiner.
It was a letter that would have been sent—if it would have been sent at all—several weeks earlier, had the agents in charge of the Weiner case sent their discovery up the chain of command in a timely and professional way. And had that letter been sent weeks earlier, the infamous “second Comey letter,” in which Comey conceded that the new Abedin emails were of no legal significance, would have been written before the early voting period in most states.
In fact, numerous reports in the mainstream media have concluded that Comey’s late-October intervention in the 2016 election, while unsettling to the Clinton campaign and unusual in the extreme, would have had no impact had it come at the very beginning of the month.
And yet, all this is just what everyone already knows. What has been reported but isn’t being talked about—yet—is much more interesting.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI agents who had been investigating the husband of Clinton’s closest aide for months failed to disclose their new evidence to Comey because “they were trying to better assess what they had.”
That’s an explanation that doesn’t pass the smell test, however, given that the agents were forbidden by law from looking at any emails written by Huma Abedin without a search warrant. And they were so precluded from the moment they saw the very first email by Abedin to anyone other than the subject of their investigation, Anthony Weiner.
And yet, an FBI official with knowledge of the Weiner case told The Washington Post, “this is not a team that sits on its hands.”
So this quick-moving team of FBI agents knew they had emails from Huma Abedin; they knew they couldn’t read them; they knew Director Comey was still heading up the investigation to which those emails were (on their face) relevant; they told him nothing about the emails (which they themselves couldn’t look at or do anything with) for weeks, even though they knew Comey had the authority and legal standing to immediately seek a search warrant to look at those emails and determine their relevance; and yet this was, per reports, “not a team that sits on its hands.”
Okay.
The only explanation ever given for the delay—a legally incoherent one—was that the Weiner investigators needed three weeks to review the “meta-data” from the Abedin emails (per an article in The Guardian, the material to be reviewed was simply the “to” and “from” fields in the Abedin emails). This despite the fact that the moment the agents on the Weiner case saw even one email from Abedin to anyone else involved in the Clinton investigation, they’d have known they needed Comey to get a search warrant.
Indeed, they merely needed to find one email from Abedin to anyone, as Abedin had been required during the Clinton investigation to divulge the identities of and produce all computers with any emails of hers on them—and therefore the discovery of any Abedin email on any Abedin-accessed/Abedin-accessible computer not presently held by the FBI was an immediate indication that Abedin had withheld evidence from the Clinton-case investigators.
Therefore, the Weiner investigators had all the information they needed to send urgent word to Director Comey on October 3rd—the day they received Weiner’s computer and found their first Abedin email to someone other than Weiner.
All of this is troubling, from the standpoint of a criminal attorney like myself, but it’s not enough to establish anything more than a sudden, inexplicable, catastrophic, and certainly inconveniently timed incompetence—with possibly some shoddy track-covering after the fact. (Put aside that we least expect incompetence in the most high-profile cases, and that this alone could lead a reasonable criminal attorney to at least suspect some systemic malfeasance here.)
But here, finally, are the twelve kickers—a dozen other data-points that make this whole narrative sound a lot more like a Watergate-level scandal.
(1) Abedin told people after the discovery that “she [was] unsure how her emails could have ended up” on the computer the FBI found them on (nor did the idea that she had deliberately withheld this information from the FBI make any sense, given the Bureau’s unwavering insistence that Abedin had always been cooperative with them, and the pointlessness of Abedin risking federal Obstruction of Justice charges and federal prison time to hide emails that were without any evidentiary value);
(2) consensus in the media and beyond, as summarized by The Washington Post, was that “an announcement from the FBI in early October, when the emails were discovered, might have been less politically damaging for Clinton than one coming less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election,” a fact no one in the FBI could have failed to appreciate, given its obviousness (even notwithstanding the agents’ enormous, day-to-day professional investment in the situation);
(3) a report in The New York Times indicated that, during the more than three weeks the Weiner investigators kept their discovery from Director Comey, they nevertheless shared their new information with the ”tremendously angry” (see #6, below) rank-and-file FBI investigators from the Clinton email-server case (the New York Times having reported on October 30th that the discovery of “new” Abedin emails in early October “prompted a renewed interest among agents who had investigated Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State” [emphasis supplied]; moreover, The New York Times reported that news of the emails at a minimum reached the Deputy Director of the FBI in Washington—who “helped in the investigation into Clinton’s email practices”—without reaching Comey, McCabe perhaps failing to pass on the information as an attempted assist to Clinton rather than the opposite, we cannot yet know);
(4) after the late-October revelation that the FBI had found new emails on Weiner’s computer on October 3rd, rank-and-file FBI agents told the media that “there was no chance the email review could be completed before Election Day” (thus ensuring it would disrupt the Clinton campaign through the casting of all ballots, early and in-person), only to be overruled by Director Comey within 24 hours, with Comey decreeing that the relevance of the new emails would be determined by Election Day (as it ultimately was, after many millions of Americans had voted early, and before many more millions could hear about the second, exculpatory Comey letter; nevertheless, the stark disparity between the rank-and-file’s comments to the media and Comey’s comments remains unexplained);
(5) a member of Trump’s inner circle, Rudy Giuliani, inadvertently confessed on national television that FBI agents working on the Clinton investigation had illegally leaked information to him about the Abedin emails “before it became public,” establishing a political motive among a faction of the FBI in the timing and dissemination of information about the emails (”Darn right I heard about it,” said Giuliani, “[and] I can’t even repeat the language I heard,” referring with this latter remark to the agents’ anger at not being able to indict Hillary Clinton for multiple federal felonies in July of 2016);
(6) Giuliani further disclosed that a faction within the FBI felt “tremendous anger” toward both Director Comey, Hillary Clinton (the subject of their investigation, who they believed should have been indicted in July), and “a pretty corrupt Obama Justice Department” (many of whose officials might have retained their posts if Clinton were to win election to the presidency);
(7) the Abedin emails turned out to have no evidentiary value, and indeed were in many instances duplicates of emails already held by the FBI, which fact Comey likely could have determined himself even from meta-data alone (had he been given the opportunity to do so during the first week of October);
(8) Giuliani mysteriously took himself out of the running for any position within the Trump administration on the very same day (December 9th) that The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories about Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, thereby beginning a period of heavy scrutiny for both the FBI and CIA’s actions before and during the election, with the stated reason for Giuliani’s demurral from a once-certain Cabinet position being his potential conflicts of interest abroad (which conflicts are reportedly far fewer in number than those of either the President-elect or the President-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State, and occur in the context of an administration that has thus far expressed no concern about foreign business entanglements);
(9) as reported by The Chicago Tribune, a Los Angeles attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, is now asking a New York City judge to release, on Thursday, the search warrant sought by the FBI for Huma Abedin’s emails on her husband’s computer, with the stated purpose of the request being to determine whether “someone in the Manhattan orbit of then-candidate Donald Trump may have provided a false lead to the FBI” regarding the emails (alternatively, The Gothamist observes, the search warrant could turn up “funny business by overly zealous conservative FBI agents”);
(10) the lawsuit in New York was made necessary by the FBI’s inexplicable refusal to turn over its FOIA-eligible investigatory materials to Attorney Schoenberg in the 20-day window mandated by law, or even to respond to Schoenberg’s request at all, which refusal would have assured, absent Schoenberg’s lawsuit, that this information would remain under wraps prior to the Electoral College vote;
(11) the judge in the New York lawsuit now says he may release the entirety of the search warrant prior to the meeting of the Electoral College on Monday, December 19th, acknowledging thereby the potential political relevance of the material; and
(12) if the search warrant is in any way irregular, or the FBI’s redactions from it suspicious, this could confirm some degree of political collusion at the FBI and thereby up the number of “Hamilton Electors” from their current reported 20 to the 38 needed to throw the 2016 presidential election to the House of Representatives—which temporary delay in Trump’s ascension to the presidency would allow ample time for investigations of both FBI collusion with the Trump campaign and multifaceted Russian interference with the presidential election.
It is important to remember that the Watergate investigation began with the media getting reports of the involvement of minor political figures in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. At first, the media as a whole didn’t take the story seriously, and indeed it took some time for the involvement of more powerful figures in Washington—including President Nixon—to be confirmed by well-placed sources.
Here, we have the president-elect’s close confidant having already (a) confessed on national television that the FBI illegally leaked information to him on a topic that may have swung a national election to his friend, Donald Trump, and (b) established that a core group of disgruntled agents within the FBI had a motive to act unprofessionally in a manner directly detrimental to Clinton’s White House ambitions.
We then have unprofessional actions by this same group of FBI agents with no valid legal or law enforcement explanation, which actions demonstrably affected the presidential race, per hard data and innumerable media accounts of the Comey Letter and its after-effects.
We then have what very much looks like a cover-up: rank-and-file FBI agents wrongly trying to set up the narrative in the press that the “new” Abedin emails couldn’t be fully reviewed before the election, and getting immediately overruled by their superiors; Giuliani changing his tune (in a way none, it must be said, have credited) on the source of his information about the Weiner and Clinton investigations; the FBI refusing to turn over its search warrant in the Clinton case in the face of a valid FOIA request; Giuliani mysteriously excusing himself from any further involvement in the Trump administration, despite prior promises from the President-elect that he could have a Cabinet-level position; and continued recalcitrance on the part of the FBI in the matter of Russian interference in the presidential election, with the agency being one of the only U.S. intelligence agencies to not yet—prior to the Electoral College vote—confirm that the Russians sought to hand Donald Trump the U.S. presidency. Many others besides me have noted that this is consistent with an anti-Clinton atmosphere among the FBI’s rank-and-file—an observation that of course is no longer controversial, given how often it’s been made by Trump’s closest advisers and even Trump himself.
Through it all, we have Huma Abedin at once being termed a fully cooperative witness by the FBI but also telling everyone who’ll listen that she did not have any emails on the computer that Weiner gave the FBI. And yet, by October 29th, nearly four weeks after the “new” emails were discovered, the FBI still had not contacted Abedin—not even once—about her emails being on Weiner’s work computer. This was an exceedingly odd investigatory decision for a law enforcement agency that (given what they knew at the time) could have seriously considered charging Abedin with a federal crime for withholding evidence from them. Indeed, it’s a strange enough decision that it begs the question of whether the FBI didn’t want to give Abedin a public or even private platform to deny knowledge of how her emails came to be on her estranged husband’s work computer. Whatever the final explanation for this bizarre happenstance turned out to be, why was the FBI not at all interested in getting answers from Abedin herself in the four weeks after such an critical discovery? Why did they not use those four weeks to interview Abedin at least once, the better to brief their boss when they finally deigned to tell him that his old, nationally important case had reams of new evidence?
Given that Weiner was estranged from Abedin at the time he voluntarily gave his computer to the FBI (various initial reports said it had been “seized,” but it’s since been clarified that Weiner is cooperating with the FBI), and had access to the computer at all times before giving it to the FBI, is it possible that he put the harmless but politically explosive emails on his computer as a bargaining chip in his own criminal case? Is it possible that the Weiner investigators, who we now know were in communication with the Clinton investigators and detested Clinton, received an external drive from their peers and used it to load duplicate Abedin emails onto Weiner’s computer? Less dramatically, is it possible that the email meta-data captured by the Weiner investigators on October 3rd made it clear that the “new” Abedin emails had no evidentiary value, and thus their decision to keep secret their find until just a few days before the election was entirely political?
Most importantly, why is no one asking these questions in the face of confirmed anti-Clinton bias at the FBI; anti-Clinton leaks—to the Trump campaign—at the FBI; confirmed unprofessional conduct by the anti-Clinton forces by the FBI; and, moreover, clear polling evidence that this unprofessional conduct did in fact cost Clinton the White House?
Again, the purpose here is to note that publicly available information paints a picture of illicit collusion between the Trump campaign and the FBI to swing a presidential election. We cannot know why, for all the hours of senseless television punditry we’re assaulted by daily, the media have made no effort to connect the dots they themselves have drawn with such care. We cannot know whether there’s fire where there’s an exceedingly large volume of smoke, but we do know that the nation can’t afford to confirm a President-elect on Monday without us getting some answers about how and why the FBI and certain members of the Trump campaign acted as they did before and during the election.
At a minimum, we’ll get some answers we already know the FBI doesn’t want America to get if new materials are released—as seems very likely—by a New York judge on Thursday. But more than this is owed to the American electorate. Must the nation really wait until after Trump is inaugurated to discover the truth behind what, at the moment, looks like another Watergate—or worse?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/big ... 62c2fddebcVICE News sues FBI
Our FOIA suit demands info on Trump, the Clintons, and Breitbart News
VICE News sues FBI for info on Trump, the Clintons, and Breitbart News
By Jason Leopold on Dec 13, 2016
VICE News is suing the FBI, demanding the bureau release records related to its curious disclosures, behind-the-scenes actions, and apparent leaks in the days leading up to the U.S. presidential election.
The wide-ranging Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in conjunction with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at MIT and research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Earlier this month, VICE News and Shapiro filed more than 50 FOIA requests with the FBI seeking documents about the bureau’s discussions regarding Donald Trump, along with other documents that would shed light on the FBI’s decision a week before the election to tweet newly posted records from a long-dormant Twitter account about Bill Clinton’s 2000 pardon of financier Marc Rich.
The pardon, a controversial decision by the former president, was investigated at the time by current FBI director James Comey while he was U.S. attorney.
Our FOIA lawsuit also seeks to compel the FBI to disclose records about:
• Allegations of the FBI violating the Hatch Act by allegedly using its authority to influence the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Internal discontent at the FBI regarding the bureau’s Hillary Clinton investigations
• All leaks of information by the FBI to the media and political operatives about FBI investigations of Clinton
• All FBI communications with Breitbart News; Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who Trump named his chief strategist and White House counselor after Bannon served as his campaign CEO; former Trump campaign manager Corey R. Lewandowski, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani; and Republican strategist and Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone
• White nationalist Richard Spencer, his National Policy Institute, and the “alt-right.”
According to an Oct. 30 report in the Wall Street Journal, “Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up.”
Our lawsuit “seeks public disclosure of specified government records to make sense of the pivotal role of the FBI, as well as of other agencies, in perhaps the most controversial presidential election in modern U.S. history,” says our complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by FOIA attorney Jeffrey Light.
“Despite subsequent disclosures of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, since its inception, the FBI staunchly maintained it was a purely apolitical entity,” the complaint notes. “However, numerous leading political and news media figures from across the political spectrum explicitly assert the FBI repeatedly and with significant impact affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.”
This is the fourth Trump-related FOIA lawsuit VICE News and Shapiro have filed since September. We sued the FBI, Secret Service, and IRS for information concerning a pair of incendiary comments Trump made on the campaign trail last summer — including one in which he called on Russia to track down 30,000 “missing” Clinton emails — as well as audits of Trump’s tax returns spanning more than a decade.
In November, we sued the FBI for documents about various Trump business entities, including Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc.; the Trump Organization; Trump University; and the Trump Foundation, and any documents about their role in potential violations of federal law.
Two weeks ago, the FBI, in a letter disclosed to us 10 days after the election, revealed that the bureau may very well have been investigating Trump when Comey disclosed to Congress prior to the election that the agency had found additional emails that “appear to be pertinent” to its investigation of Clinton’s private email server.
“The nature of your request implicates investigative records the FBI may or may not compile pursuant to its broad criminal and national security investigative missions and functions,” the FBI letter said. “Accordingly, the FBI cannot confirm or deny the existence of any such records about your subject as the mere acknowledgment of such records existence or nonexistence would in and of itself trigger foreseeable harm to agency interests.”
https://news.vice.com/story/vice-news-s ... tbart-newsFederal judge wants to see Clinton emails search warrant
James Comey
FBI Director James Comey speaks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on July 7, 2016. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg)
Tribune news servicesContact Reporter
A federal judge directed the U.S. government Tuesday to show him any search warrant application used to gain access to a new batch of Hillary Clinton's emails just before the election.
Judge P. Kevin Castel asked a government lawyer to turn over any pertinent documents by late Thursday in case he decides any portion of the materials must be made public. He also recommended the government advise what redactions are necessary should he rule that portions of documents must be disclosed publicly.
E. Randol Schoenberg, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who specializes in recovering works of art stolen by the Nazis, sued to obtain any search warrant and related papers used by the FBI to obtain the emails from a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton's top aides. Schoenberg's lawsuit followed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents.
Weiner, a Democrat, resigned his seat in Congress after sexually explicit texts and social media posts to various women. He is under investigation by federal authorities for online communications he had with a 15-year-old girl.
Justice Department lawyer Jennie Kneedler told Castel that the government opposes Schoenberg's request and noted that Schoenberg had not demonstrated that a need for secrecy that existed before was no longer relevant. She said the government wants to show why the unrelated ongoing criminal investigation is relevant to whether the public has a right to access any search warrant application materials related to Clinton.
"There are things we would like to make your honor aware of," Kneedler said.
FBI obtains warrant to review newly found emails that may be tied to Clinton investigation
FBI obtains warrant to review newly found emails that may be tied to Clinton investigation
The judge said the case is different, in part, because FBI Director James Comey announced Oct. 28 that the FBI had learned about the emails and that they appeared relevant to its already-completed investigation of Clinton's personal email server. He noted that Comey two days before the election updated Congress by saying the FBI's review of the new emails had not changed its conclusions that she should not face charges.
Castel said he plans to rule quickly. He rejected a government request to delay its submission of materials by a day. He also told Schoenberg's lawyer to notify attorneys for Clinton, Abedin and Weiner about the request to make documents public.
Since losing to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Clinton has blamed her loss in the presidential election in part on the FBI's decision to revive its examination of her email accounts after Comey in July chastised Clinton for her use of a private mail server but said the bureau would not recommend criminal charges.
Schoenberg's lawsuit called any search warrant and related materials "of the utmost public importance."
It added: "Transparency and accountability are most important in cases such as this one, where the investigation in question is heavily politicized, dominated and continues to dominate national media and the national sphere of conversation, and may have significantly influenced the outcome of the election."
Associated Press
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... story.htmlseemslikeadream » Thu Dec 08, 2016 8:06 pm wrote:“This is potentially very serious, something that if traced back to Donald Trump might even lead to impeachment,” Schoenberg wrote on his blog. “It deserves to be investigated fully and openly, and quickly, because if a crime was committed in the course of the FBI investigation, it is the crime of the century.”
E. Randol Schoenberg's legal fight with the Austrian government on behalf of a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, seeking the return of paintings by Gustav Kilmt, was the basis of the 2015 movie Woman in Gold. (Tommaso Boddi/Getty)Holocaust attorney sues FBI over election interference that could ‘lead to impeachment’ of Trump
David Edwards
08 DEC 2016 AT 10:18 ET
E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney renowned for recovering artworks stolen by Nazis during the Holocaust, filed a lawsuit against the FBI this week to get answers about why Director James Comey falsely suggested that Hillary Clinton committed a crime just days before the 2016 election.
“I filed a lawsuit today against the US Department of Justice seeking immediate disclosure of the FBI search warrant for the e-mails of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner’s laptop,” Schoenberg wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. “I think we need to see what ‘probable cause’ was shown for obtaining the search warrant, because whoever thought there was going to be evidence of a crime was obviously mistaken. And that mistake probably changed the outcome of the election.”
In a blog post late last month, Schoenberg explained that it would be very unusual for a judge to grant the FBI a search warrant “[s]imply because someone has the ability to commit the crime of intentionally violating laws governing the handling of classified information.”
“To obtain a warrant it had to establish probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found. Since we now know that no such evidence was found on the laptop, it is time to investigate why the FBI believed it had probable cause.”
One possible theory, Schoenberg said, is that “the new allegations came from people associated with the Trump campaign.”
He continued on his blog:
What if the allegations were intentionally false? During the nine days when the investigation was underway, Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani made public statements suggesting he was in communication with the FBI about the ongoing investigation. It does not seem too far-fetched to believe that politically-motivated individuals might have tried to get the FBI to re-open the investigation of Clinton by making false allegations. Finding Huma Abedin’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop might have been just an opportunity to carry out their wishes.
Schoenberg’s lawsuit calls on the court to force the FBI to honor a Freedom of Information Act request to turn over the warrant to search Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner was the husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin.
“Many members of the public have doubts about the propriety and legality of re-opening of the investigation,” the lawsuit notes. “Access to the search warrant is critical for the public to learn the basis for there-opening of the investigation to ensure that the FBI acted in a manner consistent with its constitutional obligations under the Fourth Amendment.”
“This is potentially very serious, something that if traced back to Donald Trump might even lead to impeachment,” Schoenberg wrote on his blog. “It deserves to be investigated fully and openly, and quickly, because if a crime was committed in the course of the FBI investigation, it is the crime of the century.”
The attorney told the Jewish Journal this week that it was reasonable to believe a Trump ally — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — might have provided the false information to the FBI.
“It’s more likely something criminal happened in the obtaining of the search warrant than… Hillary Clinton did something wrong,” Schoenberg pointed out.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/holocau ... -of-trump/Nazi Loot Lawyer Sues FBI To Release Clinton Investigation Documents
BY NATHAN TEMPEY IN NEWS ON DEC 8, 2016 9:35 AM
A Los Angeles lawyer is suing the Justice Department to obtain the documents supporting FBI director James Comey's late-October investigation into Hillary Clinton, which Comey publicized in a dramatic breach of protocol 11 days before the presidential election. The lawsuit, filed today in New York federal court, follows up on a November 12th Freedom of Information Act request by E. Randol Schoenberg, an attorney who specializes in the recovery of property looted by the Nazis. The records request and lawsuit seek the search warrant and supporting documents that the FBI and Justice Department used to review the Clinton-related emails of Huma Abedin that were found on Anthony Weiner's computer, during a separate investigation into his reported sexual online messages to a teenage girl in North Carolina.
"The American public has a strong interest in the disclosure of the search warrant and related application, affidavits, and receipts," the lawsuit reads. "The FBI is the nation's premier law enforcement agency. Access to the records that underlie criminal investigations is crucial to ensuring that the FBI is accountable for following the legal standards it is required to uphold."
On October 28th, Comey sent a letter to Congress explaining that he was revisiting the investigation into Clinton's use of a secret, insecure email server while secretary of state, because of new emails discovered in an unrelated investigation, which turned out to be the Weiner probe. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the FBI had obtained the search warrant it needed to proceed.
Over the summer, Comey had announced he was essentially closing the investigation into Clinton despite his misgivings over Clinton's behavior, also a breach of federal protocol regarding the discussion of investigations. His announcement that he was again investigating emails related to Clinton dominated headlines for nine of the 11 days leading up to the election—the fervor subsided when he announced, on November 6th, that the FBI would stand by its original determination on Clinton. Following her stunning upset loss by what now looks like about 80,000 votes in three key states, Clinton herself blamed Comey for the outcome, and Democratic Senator Harry Reid and others suggested that Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits certain federal employees from engaging in political activity.
161207ERandolSchoenberg1.jpg
E. Randol Schoenberg's legal fight with the Austrian government on behalf of a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, seeking the return of paintings by Gustav Kilmt, was the basis of the 2015 movie Woman in Gold. (Tommaso Boddi/Getty)
The crux of the issue, according to Schoenberg, is contained in documents showing how the FBI got the warrant signed off on by a judge. To do so, law enforcement agents need to show the judge that there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Schoenberg speculates that either conservative-leaning federal officials made a case as if Clinton was an organized crime boss, i.e. "She's always up to no good, we're just not sure what she's doing," which wouldn't meet the bar of probable cause and could get the judge in trouble. On the flip-side, he said, it's possible that someone acting as an informant or witness provided false information to the FBI, possibly for political purposes, which should prompt its own investigation, given that lying to federal agents is a crime.
"How did that [warrant] get issued, and did someone do something wrong in getting that issued?" Schoenberg said. "Especially given the fact that many people believe, including me, that it changed the outcome of the election."
Ahead of Comey's October announcement, Donald Trump surrogates including Rudy Giuliani boasted of their ties to the FBI, claiming insider knowledge of a revolt against Comey's decision not to prosecute Clinton, and of coming revelations. Schoenberg said that he did not have any specific evidence to support the hypothesis that Trump allies planted the investigation, but that he has personal experience lobbying federal law enforcement via his work on returning Nazi-stolen art, and that it's very possible someone did something similar to make this happen.
Pressuring the authorities to look into something can be legitimate, he said. The difference, he said, is "Here there was never going to be any crime...especially after they had already investigated it, so why was a warrant issued?"
Schoenberg's lawsuit demands an injunction requiring the feds to depart from their usual timetable and process the FOIA request immediately. This, he said, is because in his experience FOIA requests can take years. He hopes that the documents enter the public record before Trump takes office in January.
"I think this one is a little bit more urgent," he said. "If—and this is obviously a huge leap—if there was some illegal activity that led to this failed search warrant and that traces back to the Trump campaign, that could have huge ramifications with Congress and the electoral college."
There is also, he acknowledged, the possibility that the basis of the warrant could point to some malfeasance by the Clinton camp, which he said would also be in the public interest to know about.
Schoenberg is best known for his long-shot legal victory in recovering five famous paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen by the Nazis in Austria, for Maria Altmann, a Jewish refugee who resettled in the U.S. The battle over the paintings inspired the 2015 movie Woman in Gold. Ryan Reynolds starred as Schoenberg.
Schoenberg noted that he would rather prominent, well-resourced publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post had tackled the search warrant issue. However, he said he is happy to take it on, and that the task has some connection, however tenuous, with his work chasing Nazi bounty.
"I like tilting at windmills, and sometimes it turns out not to be as crazy as everybody thinks," he said. "[Maybe] I’m right that there’s some big story behind this, maybe i’m wrong...Sticking to your convictions, trying to think differently from everyone else is what I like to do."
The Justice Department has 30 days to formally respond, according to Schoenberg's attorney, David Rankin.
http://gothamist.com/2016/12/08/comey_c ... awsuit.php
seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 20, 2016 2:20 pm wrote:It remains unknown "why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant," he said. "I am appalled."
Schoenberg said more information needs to be made public before the matter is put to rest. "The FBI agent’s name has not been disclosed, but I think that it may be appropriate to find out his/her name and determine what the motivations were, since it must have been obvious to the FBI that there was no real probable cause to believe they would find evidence of a crime," he said in a follow-up email. "It was very wrong for Director Comey to give that impression."Lawyer: 'Appalled' by FBI warrant that shook Clinton
Heidi M. Przybyla , USA TODAY 2:06 p.m. EST December 20, 2016
AP CLINTON EMAILS SEARCH WARRANT A FILE USA DC
WASHINGTON — The FBI warrant that shook Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in its final two weeks has been unsealed, and the lawyer who requested it says it offers "nothing at all" to merit the agency's actions leading up to the Nov. 8 election.
The warrant was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Los Angeles lawyer Randy Schoenberg, who wants to determine what probable cause the agency provided to suspect material on disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer might be incriminating to Clinton. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure can only be granted when proof of probable cause of criminal findings has been documented.
The letter confirms news reports in late October that the FBI had detected “non-content header information” suggesting correspondence with accounts involved in its already-completed investigation of Clinton's private email server. The FBI request concludes there is “probable cause to believe” that the laptop contained “evidence, contraband, fruits and/or items illegally possessed,” without providing specifics.
"I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between" Clinton and Abedin, Schoenberg said in an email to USA TODAY. It remains unknown "why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant," he said. "I am appalled."
The FBI concluded in July that there was no “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws” and that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Then, two weeks before the election, Comey sent a three-paragraph letter to Congress that said in the course of an unrelated investigation investigators found emails that “appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s private email server. Comey also wrote that he could not assess whether the material was “significant.”
The letter was so vague that Clinton’s opponents seized on it to shift the narrative from a damaging drumbeat of news stories about Trump, including his past treatment of women. Trump called it “bigger than Watergate” and predicted that the FBI would "right the ship" after previously deciding against criminal charges.
Comey’s investigation was the primary cudgel for Trump and his supporters, who claimed — falsely — that Clinton was guilty of “criminal” activity. His large rallies regularly chanted “Lock her up!” and Clinton’s motorcade was greeted in city after city with angry crowds waving signs.
Abedin’s lawyers have also been requesting permission to review the warrant, which they say their client never saw and hadn’t or even been alerted to, preventing them from responding publicly in the final days of the campaign. Two days before the election, Comey confirmed there was no new information.
At the same time, Comey was in possession of evidence showing Russia was hacking into the Democratic Party apparatus, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused him of holding back “explosive” information about Russian interference. The retiring senator said Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits “activity directed towards the success or failure” of a candidate.
On Monday, former president Bill Clinton said his wife “fought through everything, and she prevailed against it all.” But she couldn’t endure the combination of the FBI’s interference and Russian meddling. At the end, “we had the Russians and the FBI deal. But she couldn’t prevail against that,” Clinton told reporters in Albany.
Republicans have mocked the Clintons’ contention and said it’s an excuse for some of the strategic mistakes the campaign made.
Yet the election was decided by the smallest of margins in a handful of Rust Belt states. Nate Silver, a leading elections statistician and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, says “Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race" and that she “would almost certainly be president-elect if the election had been held” the day before the letter. He cited late-deciding voters breaking strongly against her enough to cost her Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Schoenberg said more information needs to be made public before the matter is put to rest. "The FBI agent’s name has not been disclosed, but I think that it may be appropriate to find out his/her name and determine what the motivations were, since it must have been obvious to the FBI that there was no real probable cause to believe they would find evidence of a crime," he said in a follow-up email. "It was very wrong for Director Comey to give that impression."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /95651778/The attorney told the Jewish Journal this week that it was reasonable to believe a Trump ally — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — might have provided the false information to the FBI.
seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 19, 2016 1:58 pm wrote:BREAKING: FBI Ordered to Unseal Warrant Used to Get Clinton Emails During Weiner Probe
by Chris White | 12:57 pm, December 19th, 2016 33
Hillary Clinton via Krista Kennell and ShutterstockA federal judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to unseal at least a portion of search warrant it obtained after finding emails pertinent to the Hillary Clinton investigation during the Bureau’s Anthony Weiner probe.
The FBI’s planned disclosure is directly related to an effort by well-known attorney Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice that sought the “immediate disclosure of the FBI search warrant for the e-mails of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.”
In Monday’s order, the judge concluded:
The search warrant, the application for the search warrant, the affidavit in support of the application for the search warrant, and the search warrant return will be unsealed and posted on the Court’s electronic case filing system under the docket number listed above, subject to the redactions discussed above, at noon on December 20, 2016, unless an order is issued before then by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit staying or modifying this Order.
LawNewz.com obtained a copy of the order and is in the process of reviewing it.
READ the Order:
FBI Partial Unseal Hillary Email by LawNewz on Scribd
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/breakin ... ner-probe/The attorney told the Jewish Journal this week that it was reasonable to believe a Trump ally — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — might have provided the false information to the FBI.
seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 14, 2016 1:40 pm wrote:CONTRIBUTOR
Bigger Than Watergate? Legitimate Concerns That Anti-Clinton Faction Within FBI May Have Conspired To Hand Election To Trump
12/14/2016 01:45 am ET | Updated 28 minutes ago
Seth Abramson
Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.
This post is hosted on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
An Outline of What Increasingly Exhibits the Hallmarks of an Election Conspiracy
Unlike the effect of Russian interference on the 2016 presidential campaign, the effect—in votes—of the now-infamous “Comey Letter” is knowable.
While various media outlets downplayed the effect at the time, the hard data is unmistakable: according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken immediately after FBI Director Comey’s end-of-October announcement that the FBI would be reviewing additional evidence in the Clinton email-server case, one-third of likely voters reported that the revelation made them “much less likely” to vote for Clinton.
In an election Clinton lost by just 77,143 combined votes in three states—out of well over 136 million votes cast—this sort of polling data is one indication that Comey’s announcement could have cost Clinton millions of votes nationwide. But looking inside the Politico/Morning Consult data, we find much more evidence for that conclusion: specifically, the fact that while 26% of the poll’s 33% figure comes from Trump voters, the remaining 7% comes from those reporting to be Clinton voters.
Seven percent of the total electorate on November 8th was just under ten million voters (around 9,550,000 voters, to be exact).
Divided by state using voter distribution data, that’s an estimated (ceteris paribus) 206,100 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump won by less than 23,000 votes; 332,500 voters in Michigan, where Trump won by less than 11,000 votes; and 423,600 voters in Pennsylvania, where Trump won by less than 45,000 votes.
If even the smallest fraction of these “much less likely” Clinton voters were telling pollsters the truth about their intentions approximately a week before the election, their changed votes (or even their decision to abstain from voting) was more than enough to cost Clinton the election.
In Wisconsin, only an estimated 11.2% of newly disgruntled Clinton voters needed to be telling the truth about their new view of Clinton for their lost votes to have swung the state; in Michigan, that figure is 3.3%; in Pennsylvania, 10.6%. Professional pollsters can tell you what percentage of their data is reliable a week out from a general election—and it’s a much higher percentage than that. (And note that all of these figures measure the effect of a would-be Clinton voter deciding not to vote due to the Comey Letter; any prospective Clinton voters who voted for Trump instead of Clinton because of the reopening of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server of course count, if we reverse their decision, as a vote lost for Trump and one gained for Clinton. So the percentages above are likely high—indeed, as much as double the appropriate figures.)
Even accounting for a significantly uneven state-by-state distribution of newly disgruntled Clinton voters after Comey’s October Surprise—not that we’d expect one; there were clearly more voters on the fence and “still convincible” in Midwestern swing states in the days before the election than elsewhere—it would still be the case that that seemingly minute 7% figure was in fact more than enough to swing an election Trump won by 0.7% or less in the three states that ultimately decided the contest. And this fact remains even if we eliminate those Election-Day voters who became aware of (and were consequentially swayed by) the second, exculpatory letter Comey issued just prior to November 8th.
So it’s clear the Comey Letter was more than enough—as a matter of math—to put Trump in the White House.
So what we do if (as now seems possible) it turns out that the brouhaha over the “Abedin emails” less than two weeks before the presidential election was the result of collusion between FBI investigators trying to prosecute the husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, FBI investigators trying to prosecute Clinton herself (and prevented from doing so because of decisions made by their boss), and one of Trump’s closest confidants and (until four days ago) a shoo-in to join his Cabinet, Rudy Giuliani?
What should the electors of the Electoral College do on December 19th if it’s confirmed, in the coming 72 hours, that Clinton lost the White House because of a scandal so much more far-reaching than Watergate as to make that impeachment-level conspiracy pale in comparison?
Obviously, before we get there, we have to look at the facts.
The purpose of this article is to detail facts that have already been reported—but not properly connected—in the major media, and to then use these facts to issue a rational and reasoned call for further investigation of this matter prior to the Electoral College vote this coming Monday.
So here’s a recap of the bare minimum facts that suggest a bigger-than-Watergate scandal having turned the tide in the 2016 election:
On October 3rd of this year, just over five weeks before the presidential election, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents received a computer from Anthony Weiner and almost immediately determined that the computer contained emails by a person at the heart of the then-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home email server, that being Weiner’s estranged wife (and Clinton’s top aide) Huma Abedin.
For 24 days, these FBI agents kept their discovery a secret from their own boss, FBI Director James Comey. They only informed him of their potentially history-altering discovery on October 27th, less than two weeks before the general election.
Even today, nobody knows why these agents kept their critical discovery secret from the one man with the power to immediately direct them as to how to proceed with what they’d found.
The result of the agents’ decision not to inform their superior of information that he and only he could decide what to do with was the now-infamous “Comey Letter”: that is, Director Comey felt compelled to write a letter to Congress on October 28th informing them of the potentially explosive discovery of additional emails from Abedin on a computer Abedin had previously shared with Weiner.
It was a letter that would have been sent—if it would have been sent at all—several weeks earlier, had the agents in charge of the Weiner case sent their discovery up the chain of command in a timely and professional way. And had that letter been sent weeks earlier, the infamous “second Comey letter,” in which Comey conceded that the new Abedin emails were of no legal significance, would have been written before the early voting period in most states.
In fact, numerous reports in the mainstream media have concluded that Comey’s late-October intervention in the 2016 election, while unsettling to the Clinton campaign and unusual in the extreme, would have had no impact had it come at the very beginning of the month.
And yet, all this is just what everyone already knows. What has been reported but isn’t being talked about—yet—is much more interesting.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI agents who had been investigating the husband of Clinton’s closest aide for months failed to disclose their new evidence to Comey because “they were trying to better assess what they had.”
That’s an explanation that doesn’t pass the smell test, however, given that the agents were forbidden by law from looking at any emails written by Huma Abedin without a search warrant. And they were so precluded from the moment they saw the very first email by Abedin to anyone other than the subject of their investigation, Anthony Weiner.
And yet, an FBI official with knowledge of the Weiner case told The Washington Post, “this is not a team that sits on its hands.”
So this quick-moving team of FBI agents knew they had emails from Huma Abedin; they knew they couldn’t read them; they knew Director Comey was still heading up the investigation to which those emails were (on their face) relevant; they told him nothing about the emails (which they themselves couldn’t look at or do anything with) for weeks, even though they knew Comey had the authority and legal standing to immediately seek a search warrant to look at those emails and determine their relevance; and yet this was, per reports, “not a team that sits on its hands.”
Okay.
The only explanation ever given for the delay—a legally incoherent one—was that the Weiner investigators needed three weeks to review the “meta-data” from the Abedin emails (per an article in The Guardian, the material to be reviewed was simply the “to” and “from” fields in the Abedin emails). This despite the fact that the moment the agents on the Weiner case saw even one email from Abedin to anyone else involved in the Clinton investigation, they’d have known they needed Comey to get a search warrant.
Indeed, they merely needed to find one email from Abedin to anyone, as Abedin had been required during the Clinton investigation to divulge the identities of and produce all computers with any emails of hers on them—and therefore the discovery of any Abedin email on any Abedin-accessed/Abedin-accessible computer not presently held by the FBI was an immediate indication that Abedin had withheld evidence from the Clinton-case investigators.
Therefore, the Weiner investigators had all the information they needed to send urgent word to Director Comey on October 3rd—the day they received Weiner’s computer and found their first Abedin email to someone other than Weiner.
All of this is troubling, from the standpoint of a criminal attorney like myself, but it’s not enough to establish anything more than a sudden, inexplicable, catastrophic, and certainly inconveniently timed incompetence—with possibly some shoddy track-covering after the fact. (Put aside that we least expect incompetence in the most high-profile cases, and that this alone could lead a reasonable criminal attorney to at least suspect some systemic malfeasance here.)
But here, finally, are the twelve kickers—a dozen other data-points that make this whole narrative sound a lot more like a Watergate-level scandal.
(1) Abedin told people after the discovery that “she [was] unsure how her emails could have ended up” on the computer the FBI found them on (nor did the idea that she had deliberately withheld this information from the FBI make any sense, given the Bureau’s unwavering insistence that Abedin had always been cooperative with them, and the pointlessness of Abedin risking federal Obstruction of Justice charges and federal prison time to hide emails that were without any evidentiary value);
(2) consensus in the media and beyond, as summarized by The Washington Post, was that “an announcement from the FBI in early October, when the emails were discovered, might have been less politically damaging for Clinton than one coming less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election,” a fact no one in the FBI could have failed to appreciate, given its obviousness (even notwithstanding the agents’ enormous, day-to-day professional investment in the situation);
(3) a report in The New York Times indicated that, during the more than three weeks the Weiner investigators kept their discovery from Director Comey, they nevertheless shared their new information with the ”tremendously angry” (see #6, below) rank-and-file FBI investigators from the Clinton email-server case (the New York Times having reported on October 30th that the discovery of “new” Abedin emails in early October “prompted a renewed interest among agents who had investigated Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State” [emphasis supplied]; moreover, The New York Times reported that news of the emails at a minimum reached the Deputy Director of the FBI in Washington—who “helped in the investigation into Clinton’s email practices”—without reaching Comey, McCabe perhaps failing to pass on the information as an attempted assist to Clinton rather than the opposite, we cannot yet know);
(4) after the late-October revelation that the FBI had found new emails on Weiner’s computer on October 3rd, rank-and-file FBI agents told the media that “there was no chance the email review could be completed before Election Day” (thus ensuring it would disrupt the Clinton campaign through the casting of all ballots, early and in-person), only to be overruled by Director Comey within 24 hours, with Comey decreeing that the relevance of the new emails would be determined by Election Day (as it ultimately was, after many millions of Americans had voted early, and before many more millions could hear about the second, exculpatory Comey letter; nevertheless, the stark disparity between the rank-and-file’s comments to the media and Comey’s comments remains unexplained);
(5) a member of Trump’s inner circle, Rudy Giuliani, inadvertently confessed on national television that FBI agents working on the Clinton investigation had illegally leaked information to him about the Abedin emails “before it became public,” establishing a political motive among a faction of the FBI in the timing and dissemination of information about the emails (”Darn right I heard about it,” said Giuliani, “[and] I can’t even repeat the language I heard,” referring with this latter remark to the agents’ anger at not being able to indict Hillary Clinton for multiple federal felonies in July of 2016);
(6) Giuliani further disclosed that a faction within the FBI felt “tremendous anger” toward both Director Comey, Hillary Clinton (the subject of their investigation, who they believed should have been indicted in July), and “a pretty corrupt Obama Justice Department” (many of whose officials might have retained their posts if Clinton were to win election to the presidency);
(7) the Abedin emails turned out to have no evidentiary value, and indeed were in many instances duplicates of emails already held by the FBI, which fact Comey likely could have determined himself even from meta-data alone (had he been given the opportunity to do so during the first week of October);
(8) Giuliani mysteriously took himself out of the running for any position within the Trump administration on the very same day (December 9th) that The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories about Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, thereby beginning a period of heavy scrutiny for both the FBI and CIA’s actions before and during the election, with the stated reason for Giuliani’s demurral from a once-certain Cabinet position being his potential conflicts of interest abroad (which conflicts are reportedly far fewer in number than those of either the President-elect or the President-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State, and occur in the context of an administration that has thus far expressed no concern about foreign business entanglements);
(9) as reported by The Chicago Tribune, a Los Angeles attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, is now asking a New York City judge to release, on Thursday, the search warrant sought by the FBI for Huma Abedin’s emails on her husband’s computer, with the stated purpose of the request being to determine whether “someone in the Manhattan orbit of then-candidate Donald Trump may have provided a false lead to the FBI” regarding the emails (alternatively, The Gothamist observes, the search warrant could turn up “funny business by overly zealous conservative FBI agents”);
(10) the lawsuit in New York was made necessary by the FBI’s inexplicable refusal to turn over its FOIA-eligible investigatory materials to Attorney Schoenberg in the 20-day window mandated by law, or even to respond to Schoenberg’s request at all, which refusal would have assured, absent Schoenberg’s lawsuit, that this information would remain under wraps prior to the Electoral College vote;
(11) the judge in the New York lawsuit now says he may release the entirety of the search warrant prior to the meeting of the Electoral College on Monday, December 19th, acknowledging thereby the potential political relevance of the material; and
(12) if the search warrant is in any way irregular, or the FBI’s redactions from it suspicious, this could confirm some degree of political collusion at the FBI and thereby up the number of “Hamilton Electors” from their current reported 20 to the 38 needed to throw the 2016 presidential election to the House of Representatives—which temporary delay in Trump’s ascension to the presidency would allow ample time for investigations of both FBI collusion with the Trump campaign and multifaceted Russian interference with the presidential election.
It is important to remember that the Watergate investigation began with the media getting reports of the involvement of minor political figures in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. At first, the media as a whole didn’t take the story seriously, and indeed it took some time for the involvement of more powerful figures in Washington—including President Nixon—to be confirmed by well-placed sources.
Here, we have the president-elect’s close confidant having already (a) confessed on national television that the FBI illegally leaked information to him on a topic that may have swung a national election to his friend, Donald Trump, and (b) established that a core group of disgruntled agents within the FBI had a motive to act unprofessionally in a manner directly detrimental to Clinton’s White House ambitions.
We then have unprofessional actions by this same group of FBI agents with no valid legal or law enforcement explanation, which actions demonstrably affected the presidential race, per hard data and innumerable media accounts of the Comey Letter and its after-effects.
We then have what very much looks like a cover-up: rank-and-file FBI agents wrongly trying to set up the narrative in the press that the “new” Abedin emails couldn’t be fully reviewed before the election, and getting immediately overruled by their superiors; Giuliani changing his tune (in a way none, it must be said, have credited) on the source of his information about the Weiner and Clinton investigations; the FBI refusing to turn over its search warrant in the Clinton case in the face of a valid FOIA request; Giuliani mysteriously excusing himself from any further involvement in the Trump administration, despite prior promises from the President-elect that he could have a Cabinet-level position; and continued recalcitrance on the part of the FBI in the matter of Russian interference in the presidential election, with the agency being one of the only U.S. intelligence agencies to not yet—prior to the Electoral College vote—confirm that the Russians sought to hand Donald Trump the U.S. presidency. Many others besides me have noted that this is consistent with an anti-Clinton atmosphere among the FBI’s rank-and-file—an observation that of course is no longer controversial, given how often it’s been made by Trump’s closest advisers and even Trump himself.
Through it all, we have Huma Abedin at once being termed a fully cooperative witness by the FBI but also telling everyone who’ll listen that she did not have any emails on the computer that Weiner gave the FBI. And yet, by October 29th, nearly four weeks after the “new” emails were discovered, the FBI still had not contacted Abedin—not even once—about her emails being on Weiner’s work computer. This was an exceedingly odd investigatory decision for a law enforcement agency that (given what they knew at the time) could have seriously considered charging Abedin with a federal crime for withholding evidence from them. Indeed, it’s a strange enough decision that it begs the question of whether the FBI didn’t want to give Abedin a public or even private platform to deny knowledge of how her emails came to be on her estranged husband’s work computer. Whatever the final explanation for this bizarre happenstance turned out to be, why was the FBI not at all interested in getting answers from Abedin herself in the four weeks after such an critical discovery? Why did they not use those four weeks to interview Abedin at least once, the better to brief their boss when they finally deigned to tell him that his old, nationally important case had reams of new evidence?
Given that Weiner was estranged from Abedin at the time he voluntarily gave his computer to the FBI (various initial reports said it had been “seized,” but it’s since been clarified that Weiner is cooperating with the FBI), and had access to the computer at all times before giving it to the FBI, is it possible that he put the harmless but politically explosive emails on his computer as a bargaining chip in his own criminal case? Is it possible that the Weiner investigators, who we now know were in communication with the Clinton investigators and detested Clinton, received an external drive from their peers and used it to load duplicate Abedin emails onto Weiner’s computer? Less dramatically, is it possible that the email meta-data captured by the Weiner investigators on October 3rd made it clear that the “new” Abedin emails had no evidentiary value, and thus their decision to keep secret their find until just a few days before the election was entirely political?
Most importantly, why is no one asking these questions in the face of confirmed anti-Clinton bias at the FBI; anti-Clinton leaks—to the Trump campaign—at the FBI; confirmed unprofessional conduct by the anti-Clinton forces by the FBI; and, moreover, clear polling evidence that this unprofessional conduct did in fact cost Clinton the White House?
Again, the purpose here is to note that publicly available information paints a picture of illicit collusion between the Trump campaign and the FBI to swing a presidential election. We cannot know why, for all the hours of senseless television punditry we’re assaulted by daily, the media have made no effort to connect the dots they themselves have drawn with such care. We cannot know whether there’s fire where there’s an exceedingly large volume of smoke, but we do know that the nation can’t afford to confirm a President-elect on Monday without us getting some answers about how and why the FBI and certain members of the Trump campaign acted as they did before and during the election.
At a minimum, we’ll get some answers we already know the FBI doesn’t want America to get if new materials are released—as seems very likely—by a New York judge on Thursday. But more than this is owed to the American electorate. Must the nation really wait until after Trump is inaugurated to discover the truth behind what, at the moment, looks like another Watergate—or worse?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/big ... 62c2fddebcVICE News sues FBI
Our FOIA suit demands info on Trump, the Clintons, and Breitbart News
VICE News sues FBI for info on Trump, the Clintons, and Breitbart News
By Jason Leopold on Dec 13, 2016
VICE News is suing the FBI, demanding the bureau release records related to its curious disclosures, behind-the-scenes actions, and apparent leaks in the days leading up to the U.S. presidential election.
The wide-ranging Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in conjunction with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at MIT and research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Earlier this month, VICE News and Shapiro filed more than 50 FOIA requests with the FBI seeking documents about the bureau’s discussions regarding Donald Trump, along with other documents that would shed light on the FBI’s decision a week before the election to tweet newly posted records from a long-dormant Twitter account about Bill Clinton’s 2000 pardon of financier Marc Rich.
The pardon, a controversial decision by the former president, was investigated at the time by current FBI director James Comey while he was U.S. attorney.
Our FOIA lawsuit also seeks to compel the FBI to disclose records about:
• Allegations of the FBI violating the Hatch Act by allegedly using its authority to influence the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Internal discontent at the FBI regarding the bureau’s Hillary Clinton investigations
• All leaks of information by the FBI to the media and political operatives about FBI investigations of Clinton
• All FBI communications with Breitbart News; Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who Trump named his chief strategist and White House counselor after Bannon served as his campaign CEO; former Trump campaign manager Corey R. Lewandowski, Fox News, and Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; former New York City mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani; and Republican strategist and Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone
• White nationalist Richard Spencer, his National Policy Institute, and the “alt-right.”
According to an Oct. 30 report in the Wall Street Journal, “Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up.”
Our lawsuit “seeks public disclosure of specified government records to make sense of the pivotal role of the FBI, as well as of other agencies, in perhaps the most controversial presidential election in modern U.S. history,” says our complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by FOIA attorney Jeffrey Light.
“Despite subsequent disclosures of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, since its inception, the FBI staunchly maintained it was a purely apolitical entity,” the complaint notes. “However, numerous leading political and news media figures from across the political spectrum explicitly assert the FBI repeatedly and with significant impact affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.”
This is the fourth Trump-related FOIA lawsuit VICE News and Shapiro have filed since September. We sued the FBI, Secret Service, and IRS for information concerning a pair of incendiary comments Trump made on the campaign trail last summer — including one in which he called on Russia to track down 30,000 “missing” Clinton emails — as well as audits of Trump’s tax returns spanning more than a decade.
In November, we sued the FBI for documents about various Trump business entities, including Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc.; the Trump Organization; Trump University; and the Trump Foundation, and any documents about their role in potential violations of federal law.
Two weeks ago, the FBI, in a letter disclosed to us 10 days after the election, revealed that the bureau may very well have been investigating Trump when Comey disclosed to Congress prior to the election that the agency had found additional emails that “appear to be pertinent” to its investigation of Clinton’s private email server.
“The nature of your request implicates investigative records the FBI may or may not compile pursuant to its broad criminal and national security investigative missions and functions,” the FBI letter said. “Accordingly, the FBI cannot confirm or deny the existence of any such records about your subject as the mere acknowledgment of such records existence or nonexistence would in and of itself trigger foreseeable harm to agency interests.”
https://news.vice.com/story/vice-news-s ... tbart-newsFederal judge wants to see Clinton emails search warrant
James Comey
FBI Director James Comey speaks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on July 7, 2016. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg)
Tribune news servicesContact Reporter
A federal judge directed the U.S. government Tuesday to show him any search warrant application used to gain access to a new batch of Hillary Clinton's emails just before the election.
Judge P. Kevin Castel asked a government lawyer to turn over any pertinent documents by late Thursday in case he decides any portion of the materials must be made public. He also recommended the government advise what redactions are necessary should he rule that portions of documents must be disclosed publicly.
E. Randol Schoenberg, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who specializes in recovering works of art stolen by the Nazis, sued to obtain any search warrant and related papers used by the FBI to obtain the emails from a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton's top aides. Schoenberg's lawsuit followed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents.
Weiner, a Democrat, resigned his seat in Congress after sexually explicit texts and social media posts to various women. He is under investigation by federal authorities for online communications he had with a 15-year-old girl.
Justice Department lawyer Jennie Kneedler told Castel that the government opposes Schoenberg's request and noted that Schoenberg had not demonstrated that a need for secrecy that existed before was no longer relevant. She said the government wants to show why the unrelated ongoing criminal investigation is relevant to whether the public has a right to access any search warrant application materials related to Clinton.
"There are things we would like to make your honor aware of," Kneedler said.
FBI obtains warrant to review newly found emails that may be tied to Clinton investigation
FBI obtains warrant to review newly found emails that may be tied to Clinton investigation
The judge said the case is different, in part, because FBI Director James Comey announced Oct. 28 that the FBI had learned about the emails and that they appeared relevant to its already-completed investigation of Clinton's personal email server. He noted that Comey two days before the election updated Congress by saying the FBI's review of the new emails had not changed its conclusions that she should not face charges.
Castel said he plans to rule quickly. He rejected a government request to delay its submission of materials by a day. He also told Schoenberg's lawyer to notify attorneys for Clinton, Abedin and Weiner about the request to make documents public.
Since losing to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Clinton has blamed her loss in the presidential election in part on the FBI's decision to revive its examination of her email accounts after Comey in July chastised Clinton for her use of a private mail server but said the bureau would not recommend criminal charges.
Schoenberg's lawsuit called any search warrant and related materials "of the utmost public importance."
It added: "Transparency and accountability are most important in cases such as this one, where the investigation in question is heavily politicized, dominated and continues to dominate national media and the national sphere of conversation, and may have significantly influenced the outcome of the election."
Associated Press
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... story.html
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