At least nine people are reported to have died after a plane crashed into a two-storey building near an airport in Kazakhstan.
The Bek Air plane, a a Fokker-100, was carrying 95 passengers and five crew members.
It crashed at 7.22am local time after losing height while taking off from the airport in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city.
A statement from Almaty International Airport said the plane then hit a concrete fence and collided with the building.
There was no fire, they added.
The number of people killed was confirmed by the government's Emergency Situations Committee.
The flight had been bound for the country's capital Nur-Sultan.
A number of people have survived the crash and emergency services are at the scene.
The Fokker-100 is a medium-sized plane which ceased production in 1997.
Kazakhstan's aviation committee has suspended all flights of the aircraft type pending an investigation into the crash. More follows...
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UPDATED 4:15 PM PT — Thursday, December 26, 2019
Church officials are saying there is a 50 percent chance the Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris may not be saved. This week, representatives
said recovery teams will attempt to remove scaffolding from the fragile
structure in February, which could lead to further collapse.
The scaffolding, which was constructed during the ongoing
renovations, was still inside the building when the cathedral caught
fire in April.
Due to the fire damage, the church was unable to hold Christmas services for the first time in 200 years.
“There is a heartache because we are used to Notre Dame,” said Rector
Patrick Chauvet. “The mass there is extraordinary and in the same time
it is Christmas, the celebration of hope.”
Officials said full reconstruction work isn’t likely to begin until 2021.
Article by Holly Otterbein and David Siders in "Politico":
Suddenly, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is being taken seriously.
For months, the Vermont senator was
written off by Democratic Party insiders as a candidate with a committed
but narrow base who was too far left to win the primary. Elizabeth
Warren had skyrocketed in the polls and seemed to be leaving him behind
in the race to be progressive voters’ standard-bearer in 2020.
“It may have been inevitable that
eventually you would have two candidates representing each side of the
ideological divide in the party. A lot of smart people I’ve talked to
lately think there’s a very good chance those two end up being Biden and
Sanders,” said David Brock, a longtime Hillary Clinton ally who founded
a pro-Clinton super PAC in the 2016 campaign. “They’ve both proven to
be very resilient.”
Democratic insiders said they are
rethinking Sanders’ bid for a few reasons: First, Warren has recently
fallen in national and early state surveys. Second, Sanders has
withstood the ups and downs of the primary, including a heart attack. At
the same time, other candidates with once-high expectations, such as
Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, have dropped out or
languished in single digits in the polls.
“I believe people should take him very
seriously. He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of
winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of
winning Nevada,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as an adviser to former
President Barack Obama. “He could build a real head of steam heading
into South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”
The durability of Sanders’ candidacy
has come as a surprise even in some states where he performed strongly
in 2016 and where he is attempting to improve his standing ahead of the
2020 election.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener,
who defeated a Sanders-backed Democrat for his seat in the liberal-heavy
San Francisco area in 2016, said Sanders has been “more resilient than I
anticipated.”
“But in retrospect,” he added, “he has a very, very loyal following, and people have really stuck with him.”
Sanders is in second place in national
polls, nearly 9 percentage points behind Biden, according to the most
recent RealClearPolitics average. He is second in Iowa and first in New
Hampshire. The latest CNN poll found he has the highest net favorability rating of any Democratic presidential candidate.
While Sanders’ supporters complain
relentlessly that he has received less attention from the media than
other candidates, he has also avoided sustained criticism that some of
his rivals have suffered. That could be helping him, especially compared
with Warren, who has recently come under fire from the left and center
for her health care plan.
“If you really think about it, Bernie
hasn’t been hit a lot with anything. It’s not like he’s getting hit by
other campaigns,” said Michael Ceraso, a former New Hampshire director
for Pete Buttigieg’s campaign who worked for Sanders in 2016.
“You sort of take for granted that he,
like Biden, are institutional figures for very different reasons,”
Ceraso said. “Early in the campaign, Bernie’s people said, ‘Look, this
guy in these early states has a nice hold, and there’s a percentage of
supporters, a quarter of the electorate will potentially go for him.'”
He added, “It waned a little bit because people were looking at other
options … and now they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, this guy has been the
most consistent of anyone.'”
At the beginning of the year — another
high point for Sanders’ campaign, before Warren surged — some
establishment Democrats talked about how to stop his momentum. Brock,
who has a close relationship with many Democratic donors, said he has
not heard anything like that in recent weeks: “That doesn’t mean it
won’t happen. This is more of an analysis in the political world than in
the donor world.”
Many moderate Democrats still dismiss
Sanders’ candidacy. They believe his so-called ceiling remains intact
and that Warren will depress any room for growth he might otherwise
have.
“He can’t win the nomination,” said
Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way, adding that
Sanders’ uptick is simply him “bouncing around between his ceiling and
his floor a little bit more than people had thought he would.”
On the other hand, he acknowledged his
staying power. “Not until the very end will people say to Bernie
Sanders, ‘When are you dropping out?’”
A series of TV segments around last
week’s Democratic debate illustrate the shift in how Sanders is being
perceived. “We never talk about Bernie Sanders. He is actually doing
pretty well in this polling,” former senior Obama adviser David Axelrod
said on CNN after the event. “He’s actually picked up. And the fact is
Bernie Sanders is as consistent as consistent can be.”
The same day on MSNBC, national
political correspondent Steve Kornacki said, “Democratic voters like
him, and if he starts winning, there could be a bandwagon effect.” GOP
pollster Frank Luntz, who conducted a California focus group that found
most participants thought Sanders had won the debate, said on CNBC, “I
think you’re going to see continued movement. Sanders has been gaining
in California over the past two months.”
Larry Cohen, chairman of the
pro-Sanders group Our Revolution, said Warren’s candidacy is not a
problem for Sanders if both of them can — together — amass a plurality
of delegates heading into the convention.
“The math is that if you think of the
voters for Warren and the voters for Sanders as two circles, yes, there
is overlap, [but] most of the circles are separate,” Cohen said. “I
think between them, we can get to a majority.”
If Sanders’ candidacy continues to be
taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to the scrutiny that
Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an
examination of his electability. “That conversation has never worked
well for anyone,” Pfeiffer said.
Former California Gov. Gray Davis
stopped short of saying firm support for "Medicare for All" would be an
impediment for Democrats in the primary but suggested the risk for the
nominee is significant.
“Californians and Americans, in general, like options — not mandates,” he said.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign
manager, said political insiders and pundits are rethinking his chances
“not out of the goodness of their heart,” but because “it is harder and
harder to ignore him when he’s rising in every average that you see.”
And he welcomes a conversation about Sanders’ electability, he said.
“We want that,” he said. “I’d love to be able to argue why he stands a better chance to beat Donald Trump than Joe Biden.”
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday’s issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.
Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.
Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that “the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016 election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be held.
About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.'” Specifically, “we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”
It’s vital to reiterate this because of its gravity: we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.
The specifics cited by the IG Report are even more damning. Specifically, “based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained [] seven significant inaccuracies and omissions.” Among those “significant inaccuracies and omissions”: the FBI concealed that Page had been working with the CIA in connection with his dealings with Russia and had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts after he was “approved as an ‘operational contact'” with Russia; the FBI lied about both the timing and substance of Page’s relationship with the CIA; vastly overstated the value and corroboration of Steele’s prior work for the U.S. Government to make him appear more credible than he was; and concealed from the court serious reasons to doubt the reliability of Steele’s key source.
Moreover, the FBI’s heavy reliance on the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant – a fact that many leading national security reporters spent two years denying occurred – was particularly concerning because, as the IG Report put it, “we found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications.”
To spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of an election, one who had just been working with one of the two major presidential campaigns, the FBI touted a gossipy, unverified, unreliable rag that it had no reason to believe and every reason to distrust, but it hid all of that from the FISA court, which it knew needed to believe that the Steele Dossier was something it was not if it were to give the FBI the spying authorization it wanted.
In 2017, the FBI decided to seek reauthorization of the FISA warrant to continue to spy on Page, and sought and obtained it three times: in January, April and June, 2017. Not only, according to the IG Report, did the FBI repeat all of those “seven significant inaccuracies and omission,” but added ten additional major inaccuracies. As the Report put it: “In addition to repeating the seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application and outlined above, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the three renewal applications, based upon information known to the FBI after the first application and before one or more of the renewals.”
Among the most significant new acts of deceit was that the FBI “omitted the fact that Steele’s Primary Subsource, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was ‘nothing bad’ about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with Sechin.”
In other words, Steele’s own key source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the source said: an obviously critical fact that the FBI simply concealed from the FISA court because it knew how devastating that would be to being able to continue to spy on Page. As the Report put it, “among the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the renewal applications was the FBI’s failure to advise [DOJ] or the court of the inconsistences, described in detail in Chapter Six, between Steele and his Primary Sub-source on the reporting relied upon in the FISA applications.”
The IG Report also found that the FBI hid key information from the court about Steele’s motives: for instance, it “omitted information obtained from [Bruce] Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that (1) Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others, (2) [Fusion GPS’s Glenn] Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.”
If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?
* * * * *
But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.
Ever since Trump’s inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I’m included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico’s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio”:
In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows. . . .
[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren’t in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty—and this is no slam—is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.
In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don’t want to make news—they just want to talk about it.
It’s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.
But now it’s all out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.
The past three years of “Russiagate” reporting – for which U.S. journalists have lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat – has relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and yes, that’s a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false propaganda, as in this enduringly humiliating instance:
All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective.
For years, we were told by the nation’s leading national security reporters something that was blatantly false: that the FBI’s warrants to spy on Carter Page were not based on the Steele Dossier. GOP Congressman Devin Nunes was widely vilified and mocked by the super-smart DC national security reporters for issuing a report claiming that this was the case. The Nunes memo in essence claimed what the IG Report has corroborated: that embedded within the FBI’s efforts to obtain FISA court authorization to spy on Carter Page was a series of misrepresentations, falsehoods and concealment of key evidence:
As the Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi – one of the few left/liberal journalists with the courage and integrity to dissent from the DNC/MSNBC script on these issues – put it in a detailed article: “Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous ‘Nunes memo.’”
That the Page warrant was based on the Steele Dossier was something that the media servants of the FBI and CIA rushed to deny. Did they have any evidence for those denials? That would be hard to believe, given that the FISA warrant applications are highly classified. It seems far more likely that – as usual – they were just repeating what the FBI and CIA (and the pathologically dishonest Rep. Adam Schiff) told them to say, like the good and loyal puppets that they are. But either way, what they kept telling the public – in highly definitive tones – was completely false, as we now know from the IG Report:
Over and over, the IG Report makes clear that, contrary to these denials, the Steele Dossier was indeed crucial to the Page eavesdropping warrant. “We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,” the IG Report explained. A central and essential role.
It added: “in support of the fourth element in the FISA application-Carter Page’s alleged coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the application relied entirely on the following information from Steele Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102.”
Just compare the pompous denials from so many U.S. national security reporters at the nation’s leading news outlets – that the Page warrant was not based on the Steele Dossier – to the actual truth that we now know: “in support of the fourth element in the FISA application-Carter Page’s alleged coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the application relied entirely on the following information from Steele Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102″ (emphasis added).
Indeed, it was the Steele Dossier that led FBI leadership, including Director James Comey and Deputy Diretor Andrew McCabe, to approve the warrant application in the first place despite concerns raised by other agents that the information was unreliable. Explains the IG Report:
FBI leadership supported relying on Steele’s reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then NSD’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over QI, that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC, and that the foreign intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would probably not be worth the ‘risk’ of being criticized later for collecting communications of someone (Carter Page) who was “politically sensitive.”
The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie. Yet again, U.S. discourse was subsumed by propaganda because the U.S. media and key parts of the security state have decided that subverting the Trump presidency is of such a high priority – that their political judgment outweighs the results of the election – that everything, including outright lying even to courts let alone the public, is justified because the ends are so noble.
As Taibbi put it: “No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.” No matter how dangerous you believe the Trump presidency to be, this is a grave threat to the pillars of U.S. democracy, a free press, an informed citizenry and the rule of law.
* * * * *
Underlying all of this is another major lie spun over the last three years by the newly-minted media stars and liberal icons from the security state agencies. Ever since the Snowden reporting – indeed, prior to that, when the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Jim Risen (now with the Intercept) revealed in 2005that the Bush-era NSA was illegally spying on U.S. citizens without the warrants required by law – it was widely understood that the FISA process was a rubber-stamping joke, an illusory safeguard that, in reality, offered no real limits on the ability of the U.S. Government to spy on its own citizens. Back in 2013 at the Guardian, I wrote a long article, based on Snowden documents, revealing what an empty sham this process was.
But over the last three years, the strategy of Democrats and liberals – particularly their cable outlets and news sites – has been to venerate and elevate security state agents as the noble truth-tellers of U.S. democracy. Once-reviled-by-liberal sites such as Lawfare – composed of little more than pro-NSA and pro-FBI apparatchiks – gained mainstream visibility for the first time on the strength of a whole new group of liberals who decided that the salvation of U.S. democracy lies not with the political process but with the dark arts of the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.
Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.
The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.
In an excellent article on the fallout from the IG Report, the New York Times’ Charlie Savage, long one of the leading journalistic experts on these debates, makes clear how devastating these revelations are to this concocted narrative designed to lead Americans to trust the FBI and NSA’s eavesdropping authorities:
At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.
The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.
“The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government’s one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary.”…
His exposé left some former officials who generally defend government surveillance practices aghast.
“These errors are bad,” said David Kris, an expert in FISA who oversaw the Justice Department’s National Security Division in the Obama administration. “If the broader audit of FISA applications reveals a systematic pattern of errors of this sort that plagued this one, then I would expect very serious consequences and reforms”….
Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.
Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request. . . .
But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.
This system of unlimited domestic spying was built by both parties, which only rouse themselves to object when the power lies in the other side’s hands. Just last year, the vast majority of the GOP caucus joined with a minority of Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to hand President Trump all-new domestic spying powers while blocking crucial reforms and safeguards to prevent abuse. The spying machinery that Edward Snowden risked his life and liberty to expose always has been, and still is, a bipartisan creation.
Perhaps these revelations will finally lead to a realization about how rogue, and dangerous, these police state agencies have become, and how urgently needed is serious reform. But if nothing else, it must serve as a tonic to the three years of unrelenting media propaganda that has deceived and misled millions of Americans into believing things that are simply untrue.
None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences. Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.
Roger L. Simon at The Epoch Times Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
It’s darkly ironic that roughly the same time Attorney General William Barr called out George Soros for the billionaire’s financing of the campaigns of “progressive” (in his view anyway) district attorneys throughout the country, we had yet another blood bath in Chicago.
“Thirteen people were shot and wounded, four of them critically, in a mass shooting at a large memorial gathering early Sunday in Chicago’s South Side.”
“The event was to honor the birthday of gunshot victim Lonell Irvin, a 22-year-old man who was killed in April during a carjacking attempt.”
“There’s this recent development [where] George Soros has been coming in, in largely Democratic primaries where there has not been much voter turnout and putting in a lot of money to elect people who are not very supportive of law enforcement and don’t view the office as bringing to trial and prosecuting criminals but pursuing other social agendas. They have started to win in a number of cities and they have, in my view, not given the proper support to the police.”
Barr went on to note that such elections have led police to believe the municipalities don’t “have their backs.”
The attorney general—in many ways Soros’ opposite—has just launched a crime-reduction operation in major cities from Detroit to Baltimore with respect for law enforcement as a given.
Soros, for his part, may be playing out a personal psychodrama that stems from a teenage role in the Holocaust—he helped his lawyer father confiscate the goods of his fellow Jews for the Nazis—for which, as he declared on Sixty Minutes, he insists he has no guilt or shame.
This is the man, remember, who began his road to riches by shorting the British pound, irrespective of the consequences for millions of citizens of that country.
Whether expiating his guilt or not, Soros did begin his political activity in a laudable direction, using his copious funds to help with the democratization of Eastern Europe. But soon enough he was turning left, far left, to the extent that he is now using that bankroll to turn social justice warriors into district attorneys. (If you want a sense of where that will lead, take a look at today’s college campuses where the social justice warriors rule.)
Lately, those criticizing Soros have been accused of anti-Semitism. As a Jew, and the author of two Holocaust-related films, I find that, to put it mildly, offensive.
But Soros is only tangentially the point here. The real problem is what to do about events like the one that just happened in Chicago and that seem to occur in that city and some others on a regular basis.
The flag of racial justice is always waved, but we have to ask—who are the actual racists here? The ones handcuffing the police and enabling violence in those communities or the police themselves? (A new peer-reviewed study shows police are not more likely to shoot and kill minority suspects.)
Sure, there are bad cops—from the precinct level to, we now learn, the executive offices of the FBI. And they should be rooted out and punished to the full extent of the law.
But the average cop is not that way. He or she is a working-class person devoting his or her life at mediocre pay to keep their community safe, often at great risk to themselves. To oppose them is to be in essence reactionary while telling yourself in some self-congratulatory manner that you are progressive.
When I see the anti-cop fever today, I am reminded of my youth at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, hearing the ad infinitum shouts of “Off the pig!” Of course it was middle-class, even upper-middle and upper-class, kids that were yelling that.
Sometimes, in honest moments, we asked ourselves what we’d do if we were being robbed or attacked? “Call a hippie!” we exclaimed in unison. We all knew that was a joke.
Christopher Steele has little credibility left after the inspector general’s report.
Fusion is the opposition-research firm the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign hired in 2016 to kneecap Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired Mr. Steele, a British former spy, to compile the infamous “dossier” that the FBI used to obtain surveillance warrants against former Trump aide Carter Page. Mr. Simpson, a onetime Wall Street Journal reporter, tapped a network of media buddies to provide the operation cover.
For years, Mr. Simpson spun a tale of how his firm—a team of “professionals”—had hired the “extremely well-regarded” former “lead Russianist at MI6.” Mr. Simpson told the Senate in August 2017 that he wanted Mr. Steele to look into Mr. Trump’s Russia business dealings. So it was “alarming” when Mr. Steele instead found a “political conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Especially because Mr. Steele had “a sterling reputation as a person who doesn’t exaggerate, doesn’t make things up, doesn’t sell baloney.” The duo felt “obligated” to report this “national-security threat” to the FBI. The media would later assert that Mr. Steele had proved a valuable source to the FBI in the past; many claimed the FBI corroborated the dossier.
Now Mr. Horowitz has exposed the many fictions. His report notes that Mr. Steele was hired from the start to find Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Steele told the inspector general that Mr. Simpson asked him in May 2016 to determine “whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump and his campaign” and “whether Russia was trying to achieve a particular election outcome.” The timing is notable: Mr. Simpson was talking about collusion months before the FBI was—and even before Mr. Steele reported it to him.
The report notes that the FBI didn’t bother to confirm any of Mr. Steele’s explosive claims before presenting them to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 as a reason to surveil Mr. Page. The bureau also assured the court that Mr. Steele was a “reliable” source, whose prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.”
Yet even as the FBI prepared the warrant application, its “reliable” source was working with Mr. Simpson to turn their FBI plant into political gold—briefing reporters, trying to gin up an October surprise against Mr. Trump. The inspector general’s report says Mr. Steele grew frustrated that “the U.S. government had not announced that the FBI was investigating” the candidate. So on Oct. 31 he outed himself and the FBI’s “substantial inquiry” in a Mother Jones interview. The inspector general’s report says Mr. Simpson described this as his “Hail Mary attempt.”
Only after Mr. Steele exposed the FBI’s investigation did the bureau fire him and begin its overdue diligence. In November and December 2016, the FBI sent teams to talk with people who’d worked with Mr. Steele professionally. They were told he’d held only a “moderately senior” position at MI6 and that he “demonstrates lack of self-awareness,” was “prone to rash judgments,” and “didn’t always exercise great judgment.” Former FBI agent Peter Strzok acknowledged that Mr. Steele was the type to “follow the shiny object.” Just the sort of guy you’d trust to dig up accusations of treason against a presidential nominee.
A source-validation review found that Mr. Steele’s prior work had only ever been “minimally corroborated” and never used in a criminal proceeding. The FBI discovered its guy worked for an attorney who represented a Russian oligarch. It tracked down the supersleuth’s sources, in particular his primary source who provided the allegations against Mr. Page in the FISA application. This primary source said “he/she never expected” Mr. Steele to present their discussions as “facts” since there was “no proof” and it was “hearsay,” the kind of “conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers.” The source said that Mr. Steele had in any event “misstated or exaggerated” statements and the source’s access to Russian officials.
The Justice Department was similarly unimpressed with Fusion’s work product. Official Bruce Ohr told the inspector general that Mr. Simpson over the years would call with tips on Russian crime figures, but since most of it didn’t prove “actionable,” he “did not do anything with it and did not try to introduce Simpson to the FBI.” Ouch.
With quality like this, it’s no wonder the FBI’s strenuous efforts to corroborate the dossier proved a bust—as the inspector general has confirmed. None of the allegations provided to the FISA court were validated. Others—such as Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague—were proved “not true.” Overall, “the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.” The dossier did at least get Carter Page’s job description right.
The findings overall are a warning to a red-faced press corps and FBI: Beware oppo researchers who offer noble intentions and fantastical claims. Sometimes they’re just oppo researchers. And poor ones at that.
(Another reason The Left hadda grasp onto the nothingburger phone call is because they knew they were running outta time before this stuff all came out. they needed a distraction.)
Now that the Horowitz report is out, revealing all those lies told by the FBI as it worked to hamstring a presidency with a debunked Russia collusion theory, here’s a question:
Where do U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff — the Inspector Javert of Trump Impeachment Theater — and Schiff’s eager handmaidens of the Washington Democratic Media Complex go now to get their reputations back?
Nowhere. There is no place for them to go.
It really doesn’t matter where Schiff goes. The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be blamed when impeachment boomerangs on the Democrats.
Schiff’s Washington Beltway establishment media enablers, those who’ve carried his water for years, may ignore the impact the Horowitz report has on Schiff’s reputation.
They might just spin it all away. And the more witless among them have already reverted to their default positions: tribal hooting, while comparing anyone who disagrees with them to Hitler. If you want the short version, just scroll through Twitter for the angry disembodied cartoon heads.
But there are many intelligent, thoughtful liberal members of the press who, when it comes to Schiff, must be thinking, “My God, what have I done?”
Because if there’s one thing that comes through in the report from Obama-appointed Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, and from his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it is this:
Schiff is a dissembler, a prevaricator, a distortionist, a spreader of falsehoods. In Chicago we use the short word: liar.
It was Schiff who insisted all along that FBI and Department of Justice officials did not abuse the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts or hide information from judges.
But according to Horowitz, that’s what the FBI did.
The “DOJ met the rigor, transparency and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA's probable cause requirement,” insisted Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a 2018 memo that should be carved in marble.
But the FBI didn’t meet those rigorous standards. It didn’t offer transparency. Officials hid evidence from the court, or fabricated evidence to get what it wanted.
It was Schiff who insisted that the FBI didn’t heavily rely on the so-called Steele dossier, the salacious Democratic Party-paid-for oppo research against Trump.
But Horowitz shows that the FBI relied heavily relied on the salacious dossier — and even made up evidence to keep the dossier useful before the courts, though key officials knew that what was in it wasn’t true.
We now know from the Horowitz report that the dossier played a “central and essential role” in obtaining warrants to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign.
We also know that Schiff lied to the public about what had happened, as his media handmaidens protected him and trashed his fellow House Intelligence Committee member, U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, who tried to warn the country of the FISA abuse.
Why is FISA abuse relevant beyond whether Trump wins reelection or not?
Because faking evidence and lying about it to the courts to continue receiving surveillance warrants on Americans is a threat to all our liberty.
If they can do this to a presidential campaign, they can do it to you.
The FISA abuse also weakens Congressional support for the FISA court, which has been used in terrorism investigations. I don’t like secret courts. And I don’t like putting courts in an oversight role over the executive branch, a job that properly belongs to Congress.
But there are bad actors out there who want to kill Americans, and such courts can be necessary. And for the FBI to create a climate where these law enforcement tools could be thrown out is unconscionable.
When the Horowitz report was released a few days ago, some media and Democrats claimed it was a vindication for the FBI, because he did not find that the Russia-Trump investigation was a political hit job ordered from on high.
Some of the headlines I read as the report was about to be released were quite ecstatic, almost giddy.
So was former FBI boss James Comey. He prattled on in an emotionally turgid Washington Post op-ed bragging that he’d been vindicated.
Yet in an exchange Wednesday with Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C., Horowitz said his report vindicated no one.
“The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said.
Did Comey touch it? Or is he such a Washington silkie that he would know how to avoid direct responsibility, but be able to smile the moment an underling else slips in the knife?
Horowitz could only interview current FBI and DOJ employees. Determining who slipped in the knife wasn’t Horowitz’s job. That is the job of respected U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation as to how this all began.
Durham was asked to do that job by Attorney General William Barr, who doesn’t agree with Horowitz that there wasn’t any political motive in the FBI for what happened.
“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press,” Barr told NBC. “I think there were gross abuses … and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”
And Schiff preens, makes speeches about virtue and shows no shame.
Former FBI Director James Comey claimed he was vindicated in the wake of the release of the IG report on Monday.
So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America. https://t.co/9nurCaIBq2
He claimed last year the thought there was any FISA abuse was “nonsense.”
FLASHBACK: James Comey, December 2018
"I have total confidence that the FISA process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful, responsible way... I think the notion that FISA was abused here is nonsense." pic.twitter.com/ct2eoyLVbu
But the IG report showed there really was a horror show of abuse under his command and the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz finished Comey off in his testimony today, saying no one who touched the case was vindicated.
Graham: “The former FBI director James @Comey said this week that your report vindicates him. Is that a fair assessment of your report?”
Horowitz: “The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this.” pic.twitter.com/EaQGCgjHbv
Attorney General Bill Barr pointed out how Horowitz was limited in getting at the truth.
One reason was the nature of IG which was limited to investigating internal matters. He doesn’t have subpoena powers or the ability to call a grand jury, he’s not able to prosecute crimes.
Barr pointed out one of the big problems was due to James Comey and some of the others who refused to renew their security clearances, so they were unable to be questioned about certain aspects of what they did, since they could no longer hear or be asked about classified information.
AG Bill Bar takes issue with the IG finding that political bias didn't play a role in the FBI investigation. He takes particular issue with how the IG determined whether or not there was improper motive. Barr is waiting for a full investigation, which can compel testimony. pic.twitter.com/s1RUMIPwsF
But in Barr’s view, Comey’s decision, which limited what he could be asked, meant a full account of the FBI’s actions still had not been discovered.
Barr explained his divergence with the DOJ watchdog by pointing out Horowitz, as inspector general, “starts with limited information” and “can only talk to people who are essentially there as employees” and “he’s limited to the information generally in the FBI.”
Barr said Horowitz’s approach was “a very deferential standard” of accepting people at their word “as long as there’s not contradictory testimonial or documentary evidence,” and so, therefore, in his view, Horowitz hadn’t fully decided the issue of whether there were any improper motivations.
But there’s a silver lining.
U.S. Attorney John Durham doesn’t have that limitation, he’s looking beyond the FBI, he can prosecute and he can subpoena people.
