The Case for Indicting..

The American Spectator

The Case for Indicting 

John Brennan 

Former CIA director John Brennan calls the Justice Department’s widening probe into Spygate’s origins “bizarre.” It has no “legal basis,” he bleats.

What’s bizarre is that the expanding inquiry didn’t happen earlier. Brennan’s responsibility for criminal leaks during the Obama administration’s investigation of Trump has been obvious for at least two years. Even Trump hater Peter Strzok, the FBI liaison to John Brennan, couldn’t believe the leaks coming out of his shop. Referring to Brennan’s agents as “sisters,” Strzok said to his mistress Lisa Page, “our sisters have begun leaking like mad. Scorned and worried and political, they’re kicking in to overdrive.”

The “leaking like mad” began in the thick of the 2016 campaign, as the feverishly partisan John Brennan sought to sabotage Donald Trump before Election Day. Has John Durham, the U.S. attorney assigned to the probe of the Obama administration’s spying on Trump, talked to Harry Reid about Brennan’s leaking? He should. Recall Brennan’s blatant disclosure of classified information about the investigation to the former Nevada senator in the late summer/early fall of 2016. Reid has told reporters that Brennan used him as the conduit for that leak against Trump during the campaign: “Why do you think he called me?”

In other words, Brennan knew damn well that he was criminally leaking to a fellow anti-Trump partisan. That’s enough to indict him right there. Reid, of course, was happy to broadcast the leak to the media, but even he found Brennan’s “ulterior motive” for a senatorial briefing a little odd, as he explained to David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their book Russian Roulette. Corn and Isikoff write that Reid “had concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.”

Brennan has said that the widening probe “concerns” him. It should. He is guilty as hell. The news that his subordinates are lawyering up suggests that he is perhaps hoping that one of those saps takes the fall for him. But the fact remains that he conducted the briefing with Reid in the hopes of dirtying up Trump before election day.

Durham could also nail Brennan for perjury — his most obvious whopper being his denial before Congress of knowledge of the Hillary-financed Christopher Steele dossier. Reid had told Brennan about the Steele dossier in the summer of 2016. So, too, did Steele’s old colleagues in British intelligence, whose well-publicized role in feeding Brennan information about alleged Trump–Russia ties depended at least in part on Steele’s recycled yarns. Peter Strzok, to whom Brennan gave a special CIA award, would have also alerted him to Steele’s role in Crossfire Hurricane.

The same demented political animus driving Brennan now drove him before the election. Through leaks to the press, he made it clear to Hillary Clinton that he wanted to remain as CIA director under her. In the last months of the campaign, Brennan was in effect auditioning for her. He had hoped his October surprise with Harry Reid would win him her enduring affection.

The problem was that he didn’t have much to give Reid, apart from the existence of the investigation itself and the half-baked “intelligence” he had picked up from foreign counterparts in Britain, Estonia, and elsewhere. That’s why Brennan and Comey had to concoct the harebrained scheme of using a Cambridge intellectual on the make, Stefan Halper, to try and entrap George Papadopoulos. With Election Day bearing down on them in September 2016, they ran Halper in again to the Trump campaign, who came up empty. (Halper had also been trying to entrap Carter Page.)

Spygate is an immensely complicated tale. It would take a special counsel to unravel it all and indict all the bad guys. But Republicans don’t have the stomach for a special counsel. And so we are left with the hope that John Durham will at least hook a few big fish like Brennan.

That the media is freaking out over the news of Durham hiring more lawyers and receiving more resources from Bill Barr can be taken as a promising sign. The more noise they make, the closer Durham gets to the truth — a truth future historians will prize for its rich irony: that the government that tried the hardest to throw the election was our own.

Clapper’s Nuremberg Defense

The American Spectator

Clapper’s Nuremberg Defense 

Last week, Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the illegal FBI–CIA spy operation against President Trump’s 2016 campaign was formally shifted to a criminal investigation. The means the investigative team, under the direction of John Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, can subpoena witnesses, convene grand juries, and obtain indictments.

One of the principal perpetrators, former FBI director James Comey, insists he’s not worried at all. He and his co-conspirators have undoubtedly talked often and coordinated their stories. All voice communications, emails, text messages, and other communications have been erased or otherwise destroyed to the extent they can be.

From a variety of reports we know that despite President Trump’s order that all federal agencies cooperate with the Durham investigation, the CIA is stonewalling and trying to deny Durham access to documents, electronically stored information, and probably witnesses.

The CIA’s conduct is not surprising. CIA Director Gina Haspel is the protégé of Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan. Her interest is more in protecting Brennan and other current and former CIA people than in obeying the president’s order.

As I wrote in June, Haspel was CIA station chief in London when the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and his campaign operated from there. She had to have known and approved of the op, and she must have taken an active part in it. She’s a major problem that Trump doesn’t recognize.

But some of the principal perps, such as James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, are not descendants of Wernher von Braun. They will want to retract statements they’ve made to their media pals, such as the one Clapper made to CNN three weeks ago.

On October 7, Clapper made it clear that he was following Obama’s orders in conducting the spy op on Trump and his campaign. Asked if he was concerned that Durham’s investigation would uncover wrongdoing by intelligence officials such as himself, Clapper offered a response that is worth quoting at length:

The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us, and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us and put it in one report that the president could pass on to the Congress and to the next administration. And while we’re at it, declassify as much as we possibly could to make it public, and that’s what we did.

Clearly, unmistakably, Clapper said that he and the other intelligence officials — meaning at least Comey and Brennan — were following Obama’s orders to spy on the Trump campaign and probably Trump himself.

The only possible basis for those orders was the “Steele dossier,” the opposition research document bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Clapper, Comey, or Brennan — or any combination of the three — used it as the basis to get orders from Obama to conduct the operation.

In all probability, they coordinated with Obama and kept him posted on the spy op through his national security adviser, Susan Rice, who is another probable target for Durham’s investigation. Her conversations with Obama — on which she (and Obama) will claim executive privilege — would prove very enlightening if he can get her testimony about them.

This wasn’t a matter of Obama only having knowledge and acquiescing in what they did. It was — according to Clapper’s statement — a decision Obama made to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to jointly conduct an operation spying on the Trump campaign to prove Trump was collaborating with Russia to cause his own election.

Now Clapper is asserting the Nuremberg Defense: “I was only following orders.” May it do him as much good as it did those who first asserted it.

Both the decision to turn the Durham investigation into a criminal proceeding and Clapper’s admission that Obama gave the order to spy on Trump based on the Steele dossier will have an enormous effect on the 2020 election.

The election campaign is already running in the shadow of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff’s impeachment proceedings against President Trump. The media follow it breathlessly, cramming as much news of it as they can speak or print on any given day.

The only other matter they pay attention to is the Democrats’ primaries.

But now, with the acceleration of Durham’s investigation, even the most liberal media outlets will have to take time to report Durham’s coming interviews and indictments. That time will have to be taken away from coverage of the impeachment or of the Dems’ primaries.

Clapper’s admission raises the question: What did Joe Biden know and when did he know it?

Biden continually brags about what he and Obama did and how close they were in thinking and acting. It’s possible that as vice president he wasn’t privy to the Obama’s orders to the intelligence community to spy on Trump, but he must have been aware of what they were doing.

Biden has a choice: he can either can deny that he knew what the intelligence community was doing against Trump (and appear the fool), or admit he knew and try to deny the illegality of Obama’s orders. He would thus implicate himself in the intelligence community’s crimes.

Ol’ Joe is toast. And so should be the other participants in the spy op on Trump’s campaign. People such as Comey, Brennan, and Clapper may never go to jail, but many — perhaps most of them — may be indicted for the host of crimes they evidently committed.

We’ll (finally) get a small taste of what’s to come in the report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. His report supposedly is almost ready for publication. It covers only the abuse of the FBI’s powers in obtaining surveillance warrants for Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.

Thanks to the investigation that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) conducted while he was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — and the famous “Nunes Memo” published in February 2018 — we know that the FISA warrants were obtained fraudulently. The FISA court wasn’t told that the allegations in the warrant applications were based only on the Steele dossier and unverified by the FBI. That, at least, is a false official statement under 18 US Code 1001 punishable by a year in jail.

But that offense is chicken feed compared to the illegality of what had to be a conspiracy to thwart Trump’s presidential ambitions and, after the election, to bring about his impeachment.

The perps have a lot to fear from Durham’s investigation. He was chosen by AG Barr because he has considerable experience in intelligence matters, so he will know how to extract information and possibly obtain plea bargains from people who are threatened with jail time.

It’s entirely possible — despite Clapper’s statement to CNN — that some will stonewall like Susan McDougal did in the Clinton impeachment. McDougal went to prison rather than testify against Clinton in the Whitewater scandal. Unlikely as it may be, people such as Clapper, Comey, and Brennan may try to protect Obama the same way.

But people such as former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI lawyer (and Strzok’s lover) Lisa Page won’t. They (and Comey) were directly involved in preparing and approving the surveillance warrants against Trump campaign officials. So were Obama’s acting deputy AG Sally Yates and former deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. They could plead out and testify against Brennan and his ilk.

Is it unthinkable that Durham would prosecute Obama? Unfortunately it is, but Durham shouldn’t hesitate to do so. Americas are fed up with crimes committed by Democrats — such as Hillary’s illegal trafficking of classified information in unsecured non-government emails — who aren’t held accountable for their crimes.

Whomever Durham prosecutes, the Dems won’t stop their campaigns against Trump. It’s almost certain that he will be impeached by the House. Who knows what will happen in the Senate trial when Trump enemies such as Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski vote?

If, despite the impeachment, Trump is reelected, the Dems will restart the “Russia collusion” campaign, claiming that his 2020 win was caused by collaboration with Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and any other bad actors they can think of. You can take that to the bank.

Limo-Left Turn to Buttigieg to Save Them

The clock is ticking faster now.  Beto crashed miserably; Kamala’s giggling high-school schtick is embarrassing herself and others; the DNC has run out of handlers for Biden’s frequent episodes; Bernie is still yelling at trees; and now Warren has outed her plan to tax everyone into oblivion to fund her $52 trillion, yes TRILLION, healthcare scheme.

Hence, the New York Times jumps into action…  Buttigieg is now their latest hope.  Quick dispatch all immediate narrative engineers to the typeset:

[…] Ms. Warren appears to have solidified her gains in the first voting state while Mr. Buttigieg has climbed quickly to catch up with Mr. Sanders and overtake Mr. Biden, the onetime front-runner. Ms. Warren is drawing support from 22 percent of likely caucusgoers, while Mr. Sanders is at 19 percent, followed by Mr. Buttigieg at 18 percent and Mr. Biden at 17 percent.

The survey is full of alarming signs for Mr. Biden, who entered the race in April at the top of the polls in Iowa and nationally. He is still in the lead in most national polls, but his comparatively weak position in the earliest primary and caucus states now presents a serious threat to his candidacy.

With the Iowa caucuses just three months away, Mr. Biden’s unsteadiness appears to have opened a path in the race for other Democrats closer to the political middle, particularly Mr. Buttigieg.  (read more)

Watch how this pro-Buttigieg narrative evolves.

The DNC relies on Wall Street/Hollywood donor funding.  Warren is a non-starter, and Sanders is ‘all-in’ for socialism.  Even Teh One, Obama, is warning about the political nonsense behind the woke movement from his new $15 million mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.

By the end of the month they’ll have a bumbling Biden eating baby food through a straw as he’s wheeled on stage with a lanyard full of acrylic reminder cards: “Joe, you’re in Iowa”…

The club is now moving to Buttigieg.

If famously horrible Amy Klobuchar can quit cursing and screaming at her staff over their forgetting to pre-open the 42.5° Perrier bottles, she might stand a chance next.

This ‘Impeachment’ Is a Cover-up

The American Spectator

This ‘Impeachment’ Is a Cover-Up 

Nancy Pelosi proclaimed Thursday that the party-line impeachment vote in the House of Representatives was about protecting “democracy.” Madame Speaker was actually close to speaking the truth for once, because what the impeachment circus is about is protecting Democrats, particularly the Obama administration officials who sought to sabotage President Trump both during the 2016 election campaign and after Trump won. The vote Thursday — 232 to 196, with all but two Democrats in favor and all Republicans voting “no” — followed several days of secret testimony in deranged California Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, conducted prior to any authorizing vote on the House floor. Now that Democrats have formally voted to climb aboard the “Ukrainegate” impeachment train, however, Pelosi and her party have signed a sort of suicide pact. They must destroy the president in a desperate effort to prevent Americans from learning what Obama, the Democratic Party, and “deep state” bureaucrats did to Trump.

It was perhaps symbolic that this House vote happened on Halloween, inspiring the president to remark on Twitter: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!”

Finding the truth about the “Russian collusion” hoax, which the Obama administration used as an excuse to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign, is a job that Attorney General William Barr has assigned to John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut. As our esteemed editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has noted, “The Bell Is About to Toll.” Durham’s investigation may soon begin indicting the people responsible for the Russia hoax. Meanwhile, we will soon see from Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Department of Justice, a report detailing who did what (and on whose orders) in the elaborate anti-Trump operation that indisputably involved the FBI and almost certainly also implicates the CIA. Speaking of which …

A protégé of former CIA Director John Brennan has been identified by Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations as the so-called “whistleblower” whose claims were the proximate cause of the Schiff–Pelosi impeachment proceeding against Trump. Eric Ciaramella, the son of a bank executive and a 2008 Yale graduate, was evidently handpicked by Brennan in 2015 for the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine policy. At the White House, Ciaramella worked closely with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, and also with Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden. Perhaps the most troubling revelation in Sperry’s article was that Ciaramella also worked closely with Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic National Committee operative who, in 2016, left her DNC job to pursue her own “investigation” of the Trump campaign (See “Former DNC Official Partnered With Convicted Bomb Maker To Investigate Trump,” Daily Caller, March 21, 2017). For weeks, Schiff and other Democrats have insisted that the identity of the “whistleblower” is a closely guarded secret, but sources told Sperry that Ciaramella’s identity was in fact widely known:

“Everyone knows who he is. CNN knows. The Washington Post knows. The New York Times knows. Congress knows. The White House knows. Even the president knows who he is,” said Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and national security adviser to Trump, who has fielded dozens of calls from the media.

Why was Ciaramella’s identity known to everyone in the media? Perhaps because, according to Sperry, Brennan’s hand-picked CIA agent inside the White House had been a source of leaks to reporters during the first six months of Trump’s presidency. It was conservative journalist Mike Cernovich who, in June 2017, blew the whistle on Ciaramella’s sabotage operation. “Ciaramella helped draft Susan Rice’s anti-Trump talking points before the Inauguration,” Cernovich reported:

In fall of 2016 as Obama’s director for Ukraine on the NSC, Ciaramella was the main force pushing Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

Some suspect Ciaramella was one of the original leakers who told the media about classified conversations Trump had with Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov.

Not long after that report, and perhaps because of it, Ciaramella was purged from the White House, reassigned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This explains why, if Ciaramella is indeed the “whistleblower” whose identity Democrats have sought to conceal, he had only secondhand knowledge of Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Because Trump did not hesitate to release the transcript of that call, however, why was it necessary for Schiff to hold secret hearings about this? Anyone could read the transcript and agree with what National Security Council official Tim Morrison told Schiff’s committee: “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed.” Yet Schiff apparently wished to create the impression that he is privy to scandalous secrets that justify an impeachment proceeding, and why?

We are scarcely a year away from the 2020 election, and if Democrats can win next November, Trump’s policies vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia would then become irrelevant. The field of Democratic presidential contenders, however, doesn’t seem likely to yield a winner — Trump’s poll numbers have actually improved since Schiff began his inquiry — and then there is the problem of the bells that are about to toll, as Bob Tyrrell has warned. If the soon-to-be-released Horowitz report is the bombshell we have been told to expect, and if Durham’s investigation turns up incontrovertible proof of anti-Trump skullduggery under Obama’s watch, Democrats are going to be in big trouble, and some former officials might even go to federal prison.

On the one hand, then, the “Ukrainegate” impeachment project is about distracting Americans from what we will soon learn about the origins of the “Russian collusion” hoax, and, on the other hand, it’s an attempt to derail Durham’s investigation of potential crimes committed by the perpetrators of that hoax. Many eyes have focused on former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (see Jed Babbin’s October 28 article “Clapper’s Nuremberg Defense”) as well as on Brennan (see George Neumayr’s October 24 article “The Case for Indicting John Brennan”). Given the role that Brennan’s protégé Ciaramella has reportedly played in Schiff’s probe, we have to ask: Is this “Ukrainegate” impeachment a continuation of the former CIA director’s effort to cover up what he did to sabotage Trump’s presidency?

Nearly 63 million Americans voted to elect Donald Trump, a result that Brennan and other “deep state” bureaucrats in Washington apparently did everything in their power to prevent. When Brennan & Co. failed to stop Trump from becoming president, however, it seems these soi-disant“public servants” tried to undo the results of the 2016 election, to undermine Trump’s authority and hinder his ability to conduct foreign policy. Nancy Pelosi says she’s defending “democracy,” but in fact she’s trying to defend the anti-democratic activities by which “deep state” operatives have sought to maintain their unelected power and continue the policies that Americans rejected three years ago when they voted against Hillary Clinton.

American Thinker

So much for a quickie impeachment: 

Now Nancy Pelosi wants to expand hearings beyond Ukraine

Up until now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had the goods on President Trump and impeachment would move expeditiously.

Until she didn't. Just the partisan lineup of her impeachment inquiry vote on Halloween signaled trouble, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

With that her hand of cards now, now she says she wants to expand the impeachment inquiry beyond Ukraine, raising the specter of mission creep as well as long, drawn out, impeachment hearings on every topic the Democrats can scare up.

According to the Hill:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday it's possible that controversies beyond Ukraine could be part of the impeachment case against President Trump.

House Democrats have recently sought to narrow their impeachment inquiry to the allegations stemming from an intelligence community whistleblower complaint that said Trump tried to pressure Ukraine to initiate politically charged investigations in return for the release of congressionally approved security aid.

In other words:

"Let us in! We want to see!" They're on their knees. They're slithering in the ooze. They're interviewing the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons...

as Tom Wolfe wrote. He's never hard to recall quotes from when the topic is jackasses.

In Pelosi's statement, she's saying, for sure, this time, hunt hither and yon, she'll find something that sticks.

In other words, she knows Ukraine is a loser, as Thomas Lifson noted here. But she's got the big impeachment machinery up in place and working, so with Ukraine not panning out like she said it would, she'll find some other grist for it.

Here's what's stupid about it:

Elections are just a year away. The Democratic nomination is just months away. Multiple Democrats running for the nomination also hold seats in the Senate, and as the nomination comes down to the wire, neither they, nor their party, are going to appreciate being drawn away from that activity to sit in on long, drawn-out, flimsy-evidence cooked-up-yesterday impeachment hearings. 

There's a reason the Democrats were desperate to wrap up their impeachment hearings by Christmas. They've gone full jackrabbit and want the whole thing done by the year's end.

Because, as this excellent piece from the Federalist notes, for Democrats, the clock is already running out. If these impeachment hearings drag on, the Democratic nominee will have to be in the Senate for more hearings and votes and that means time away from campaigning in the general election, a bad position to be in if every vote counts, and you know the media will report that the Senate is in the almost bag for impeachment, whether it is or not.

The specter of a long, drawn-out impeachment over this, that, and the other, topic, all of which must be mastered and researched, is Pelosi's and the Democratic Party's biggest nightmare. Voters aren't going to be paying attention to the Democrats' 2020 campaign, they are going to be glued to their screens, watching what happens to Trump. And at some point they are going to get sick of it and tune out, too. 

Yet Pelosi's announcement now suggests that these hearings are going to be longer and more involved than ever, cooking up new topics, with new witnesses, with new skulduggery planning to orchestrate the "narrative" as they did with this one, new media cooperator, new whistleblowers, new vettings, new schedulings... 

Maybe Pelosi wants these hearings to drag out forever instead of just get wrapped up quick according to the original plan. That may mean she's calculating that Trump is going to win in a landslide and the new impeachment topics would be better used to knock out Trump in a second term. (Which certainly isn't a vote of confidence for the 2020 Democratic nominee and won't make that nominee happy.)

Or maybe she just knows that Ukraine is a loser and she doesn't want to lose face. Her claim to expand Ukraine sure doesn't give confidence to anyone that the Democrats finally have the goods on Trump, Maybe that's because they finally realize they've misfired on Trump, yet again.

The Scale and Scope of the DOJ Control Agents – DOJ FISA Official Quietly Removed After IG Draft Report Sent to Bill Barr

Rumor in the DC grapevine is that a few weeks ago Tashina Guahar was quietly removed from her position as lawyer for the DOJ National Security Division (in charge of FISA applications).  This removal happened immediately after IG Michael Horowitz submitted his first draft report to Attorney General Bill Barr for classification review.   Ms. Gauhar now reportedly works for Boeing.

If confirmed, Guahar’s exit in advance of the IG report could indicate helpful participation, or DOJ Main Justice may be providing cover to protect Tash Guahar as they did with SSCI Security Director James Wolfe.  Keep eyes on a swivel, here’s why:

♦ On March 2nd, 2017, Tashina “Tash” Guahar was one of a small group of DOJ officials who participated in a conversation that led to the recusal of Jeff Sessions from anything related to the 2016 election.  This recusal included the ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, later picked up (May 17th) by Robert Mueller.

Immediately following this meeting, AG Jeff Sessions announced his recusal.

The attendees for the recusal decision-making meeting (see above schedule) included Sessions’ chief of staff Jody Hunt; Criminal Chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, Jim Crowell; Acting Deputy AG, ¹Dana Boente; Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) in the Department of Justice National Security Division Tash Gauhar (FISA lawyer); and Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools.

[Note: Tash Gauhar was lawyer for FBI Clinton case; and Scott Schools was part of drafting Clinton exoneration letter.]

This was the Main Justice group who influenced Jeff Sessions to recuse.

Now, fast-forward to May, 2017:

Tuesday May 16th, 2017 –  In Main Justice at 12:30pm Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, Jim Crowell and Tashina Guahar are again part of another meeting.   I should note that alternate documentary evidence, gathered over the past two years, supports the content of this McCabe memo.  Including texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok:

[Sidebar: pay attention to the *current* redactions; they appear to be placed by existing DOJ officials in an effort to protect Rod Rosenstein for his duplicity in: (A) running the Mueller sting operation at the white house on the same day; (B) the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel, which was pre-determined before the Oval Office meeting.]

While McCabe was writing this afternoon memo, still May 16th, Rod Rosenstein took Robert Mueller to the White House for a meeting in the oval office with President Trump and VP Mike Pence.

After six days of phone calls, emails and in person meetings, this visit to the White House was clearly Rod Rosenstein introducing Robert Mueller to the target of the investigation.  Rosenstein already knew he was going to appoint Mueller; and Mueller, along with the small group in the DOJ and FBI, already knew Mueller was going to be appointed.

Later that night (May 16th), following the Rosenstein-Mueller WH sting operation, there was a debriefing session back at Main Justice.  This evening meeting appears to be Lisa Page, Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe; along with Tashina Gauhar taking notes.

[Mueller Report]

Considering the 2016 operation against candidate and president-elect Trump, as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) in the Department of Justice National Security Division, FISA lawyer Tash Gauhar would have a specific, material and self-interested alignment with the ongoing DOJ/FBI effort to remove President Trump.

Either Tashing Guahar has cooperated with the Horowitz, Durham and Barr probes and left the DOJ prior to the IG report on FISA abuse (and her role therein) being made public, as part of an internal dynamic; -OR- the IG discoveries about direct and affiliated activity that surrounded Ms. Gauhar led to her pre-report exit as a Main Justice coverup.

Hope for the former; but keep an eye open for the latter.

With hindsight it is now clear the various players inside Main Justice and the FBI had a vested interest in maintaining the assault against Trump. In late 2019 everyone can see the bigger goal was against the office of POTUS. [“obstruction” etc.] All of the personnel moves should be reviewed with hindsight of the larger anti-Trump objective in mind.

Important Point – Against the known fraud that was the Trump-Russia Collusion-Conspiracy narrative, there are no visible 2016 and 2017 top-level DOJ/FBI people who didn’t participate in one form or another.

¹When Jeff Sessions became AG, Dana Boente became Acting Deputy AG, a role he would retain until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed on April 25th, 2017. [Mary McCord remained head of the DOJ-National Security Division] In 2019 Dana Boente is currently FBI chief legal counsel.

Tashina Guahar, Jim Crowell and Dana Boente all advised Jeff Sessions to recuse himself.

With AG Jeff Sessions recused on March 2, 2017, FBI Director James Comey reported to Acting Deputy AG Dana Boente.  [Technically, Boente was still EDVA U.S. Attorney and was only ‘acting’ as Deputy AG]  Additionally, on March 31st, 2017, President Trump signs executive order 13787 making the U.S. EDVA Attorney the 3rd in line for DOJ succession.

In the period between March 2nd and April 25th – With AG Sessions recused, and without a Deputy AG confirmed, Dana Boente is simultaneously:

• U.S. Attorney for EDVA
• Acting Deputy AG.
• Acting AG for all issues related to Sessions recusal.

James Comey & Dana Boente sign the April 2017 FISA renewal against Carter Page.

(Page #271 – Carter Page FISA Application)

This dynamic would later become important as notes Boente took from conversations with James Comey became evidence for Mueller’s expanded obstruction investigation.  [3/2/17 Mary McCord is still head of DOJ-NSD]

Dana Boente was head of DOJ-NSD from May 11th, 2017 through end of October 2017 when he officially announced his intent to retire.  However, the timeline gets cloudy here because Boente said he was staying on until an official replacement was announced. There’s no indication of when he actually left the DOJ-NSD or the EDVA role.

On January 23rd, 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray announced Boente has shifted over to the FBI to be Chief Legal Counsel (replacing James Baker).  This decision is made while Weissmann and Mueller are using 19 lawyers, and 40 FBI investigators to continue their investigation of President Trump.

As FBI legal counsel Dana Boente now becomes a legal adviser to Christopher Wray while the Mueller probe is ongoing.  From the Mueller Report:

As we discovered earlier this year, Mueller’s lead FBI agent for the corrupt Russia collusion-conspiracy investigation, was David W. Archey.  Archey was selected by Robert Mueller when FBI Agent Peter Strzok was removed.  The Mueller probe took over the counterintelligence investigation May 17, 2017, a few months later Special Agent Peter Strzok was removed (July) and David W. Archey was brought in:

As David Archey arrives in August 2017, Mueller is getting the new scope memo from Rod Rosenstein.  The August scope memo authorizes the Mueller team to investigate the Steele Dossier.  There’s little doubt the entire FBI group would have known the Trump-Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative was false.  So David Archey status as lead agent has to be considered *corrupt/sketchy*; FBI activity was likely focused on the obstruction angle.

Interestingly at the conclusion of the Mueller investigation Archey was promoted by Christopher Wray to head of the Richmond, Virginia FBI field office on March 4, 2019.  This FBI field office overlaps with another FBI/DOJ filing from the EDVA.

A little more than a month after Archey takes over the Virginia FBI field office, on April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment  was unsealed in the EDVA.  From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018:

(Link to pdf)

On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates:

Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to….

The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the EDVA where Dana Boente was still, presumably, U.S. Attorney.  The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019.

Why the delay?  Here’s where it gets interesting….

This FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.”

(August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon) Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.

Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.

“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump. (read more)

It would appear the FBI took keen interest after this August 2017 meeting and gathered specific evidence for a grand jury by December 2017.  Then the DOJ sat on the indictment (sealed in March 2018) while the Mueller probe was ongoing; until April 11th, 2019, when a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was launched. Assange was arrested, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (link).

To me, as a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, JAR report (needed for Obama in December ’16), and political ICA (January ’17); this looked like a Deep State move to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes…. AND that entire narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview.

There is the corrupt DOJ/FBI motive to shut Assange down.

There are no “good guys” in this. There are no “white hats” here. Certainly not Mueller, Rosenstein, Wray, Bowditch, Boente or Tashina Guahar. Instead, this is a matrix of broad interests positioned only to benefit and sustain the status quo of the administrative state; and protect the larger DC community from the Trump disruption.